The Black Flower Page 26

  Then September came and Remy entered Miss Chastain’s school, for the fever was still bad down south. The boy hoped that the cold waters of scholarship might shock Remy back to her old free ways, but in this, as in most things, he was mistaken. She actually seemed to enjoy school, and if anything was more distant and reserved than ever. Every morning and evening she walked the half-mile between home and schoolhouse with a cluster of whispering girls whose ranks (this was the boy’s own metaphor; his first) were tighter than a British square at Waterloo. At first the boy followed, schoolward then home again, until his cousin began giving him looks over her shoulder that made him feel like a curious insect scuttling in the leaves. Finally he gave it up and returned to the company of his graceless comrades, who slouched to school through backyards and garden patches and who understood completely when he declared that the stuck-up Remy Dangerfield could be blasted to hell for all it meant to him.

  Then, this morning, he had learned for the second time since June that the universe, which he had once assumed to be predictable, in fact made no sense at all. She ambushed him after breakfast. He was feeding the bird dogs, Scotland and France, when he looked up and found her watching him with her green eyes. She stood with her hands folded on the gate of the pen, her short hair pulled back in a ferocious little knot that stretched the skin over her cheekbones, in the black collarless dress that Miss Chastain demanded of her female scholars, as if the only lesson they needed was how to get ready to mourn. Surprised by this apparition, the boy waited awkwardly with the bucket of scraps in his hand and hoped this grim stranger would disappear—and, in a way, that is what happened. One moment there was the stranger, in the next there was Remy Dangerfield again, smiling for the first time that summer in her peculiar way—lips parted, teeth pressed together—that from time immemorial had meant trouble for somebody.

  She didn’t care to go to school with the other girls this morning, she told him. Not this morning, maybe not ever again. She had made up a lunch pail, she said, and would her cousin dare to meet her in a little while, at the pond down by the cowpens? The boy stammered a reply, his face burning like a stove lid, and when the girl laughed old Scotland the bird dog peed all over himself with joy.

  Later, when the boy came out of the willow brakes, he found the pond shining like a polished coin in the morning light. Remy was waiting, her school clothes folded and hidden in the grass, wearing the cotton shift that disguised, but could not hide, every new swell and curve of her young breasts, hips, legs. Her hair—which even this summer she had worn short, like a boy’s—was shook loose now, and fell in her eyes and curved around the delicate shells of her ears. The boy stood speechless, seeing in his mind the cicadas that burst out of their old skin and unfolded green and fresh and trembling on the branch.

  “Hey, Bushrod,” she said, flirting her hair.

  “Um, don’t the briars hurt your feet?” the boy replied. It was all he could think of to say.

  All morning they played in the old familiar woods, in the old purposeless way, Remy chattering on, laughing, causing the boy to take her hand now and then for no apparent reason, and if he thought of school at all it was only as some remote, mildly troublesome thing that had happened to him once. He followed her, watching as she moved through interstices of shadow and light like a creature just come to the world. Everything she touched seemed new all at once, distilled out of the first morning, out of the first sun that crept through the first garden. So it seemed to the boy, who could not know yet that he was no longer a boy at all, that she was leading him from one room to another without knowing it herself.

  In time they came to the hill, and she looked around and declared that, of all the many places in the world, this must be her favorite now. She found a patch of white yarrow, and knelt there and wove a chaplet for her hair, and among the small flowers they ate their cold chicken and biscuits and drank cider from a little jug. Then she lay in the grass and quoted poetry from memory in a voice that was drowsy and deep, and her voice and the words she spoke made a strange music that the boy had never heard before. She told him that, without poetry, a person’s heart was like an empty glass; to that moment the boy had never thought of the heart as any kind of glass, but as he listened to her voice he told himself he would never again see it in any other way. Strange music indeed.

  Then she stretched herself in the grass and slept, and the boy sat close beside and watched her, musing, and the day traveled into afternoon without them and the season spooled away. At last he nudged her again, and spoke her name, and this time she awoke.

  Remy stretched and yawned, then propped herself up on her thin elbows and regarded him with her cool, sleepy face. “I had a dream just now,” she said.

  The boy was silent. A hawk glided over the field, swift and quiet, so low the boy could see its head turning. Presently Remy touched his arm. “What’s the oddest dream you ever had?”

  It should have been an easy question, the boy had suffered dreams all his life, most of them odd, only now he couldn’t think of any. He felt suddenly foolish, searching for words he did not have, and the bright morning seemed all at once to have happened to another, braver, smarter, more worthy than he. He gazed in despair on the empty glass of his heart and felt time moving away like slow water—slow, but you couldn’t call it back no matter what—and Remy was moving along it and he was left behind. So he said nothing, and after a moment his cousin lay back again and crossed her arms and said: “Well, I would have told you mine, but now I won’t.”

  “I don’t care,” he said suddenly, sharper than he meant to, wishing he could make himself stop. “Dreams ain’t anything. Just dreams is all.” And thinking all the while Careful. Careful. You are about to lose somethin—

  Time moved away, he could feel it flowing past him. He was outside it now, in some hard, brittle place. He didn’t know how long it was before Remy spoke again.

  “I dreamed we were on this very hill,” she said, “and I woke up and you were watchin me.”

  “That wasn’t any dream,” said the boy, hearing his own voice as if it were another’s.

  “Oh, it must have been,” she said. Then, so soft the boy almost didn’t hear: “You wouldn’t do that but in a dream.”

  There was a little sound then, no more than a breath but it reached him in the place where he had gone. He stole a glance at his cousin and suddenly he was in time again, floundering in the stream. He had never seen Remy cry, but she was crying now, and not like girls or children cried—no furious rush of anger, no threats, only the first little sound and the quiet run of tears on his cousin’s face where it was turned from him, and a widening distance as if she were falling away from him like leaves on the current—

  “Oh, Remy,” he said, and was frightened by the grief in his voice: You are about to lose somethin and you didn’t even know you had it to lose—

  All at once he could not bear to let it go, whatever it was—he didn’t know, he didn’t much care, so long as it was saved from losing. “Remy!” he cried, and watched his own hand reach for her, circle her waist and pull her roughly toward him so that her head flew back and her thin, light body arched against him. She came to him with a shocking strength, and she pulled him after her down a long fall of sunlight and grass and the smell of the dying summer, and he knew, as if he’d known all his life, what to do—

  And after, for a long time, she would not let him go. She pressed herself to him, spoke fiercely into the hollow of his shoulder. “You will always have me with you now, always, always. You own me, in your soul you own me, no matter how far, how long, whether you want to or not—”

  He grasped her hair, pulled her face away and saw her green eyes burning, felt the stream no longer slow that bore them along. “Yes,” he said, and then again to the soft line of her mouth: “Yes, I know, always—”

  “A long time,” she said. She passed her hand over his face, light and hard like a blind person would. “I dreamed that, too. A long time, forever. D
o you know that? Do you know?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know. Yes.”

  And he did know. He knew it then, knew it as he watched her a week later standing by the starboard rail of the little steamer growing smaller and smaller until it was swallowed up in the mossy light, vanished around the river bend beyond which he had never been himself. Through all the long winter and spring that followed he knew it, kept it close to him in the shivering nights as he waited for the fever time to come again—

  Until one morning in June, the first hot morning when no wind moved in the curtains and he thought it was the blue jays quarreling outside that woke him until he saw his papa sitting on the edge of the bed where the old man had never sat before. “Bushrod, wake up son, and listen careful to what I have to tell you—”

  So much time, it seemed—he could not imagine where it all had gone, how the little stream could bear so much. And now he was falling, it was him this time, and there was Remy with her hand stretched toward him, reaching for him over the long distance that was really no distance at all, only a little time, a few days flown like birds—

  “Remy Dangerfield,” he said.

  “That is the second time you called me that,” said Anna, and caught him as he fell.

  “I am so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. I reckon I am give out.”

  “Well, I can’t imagine why,” said Anna with her sidewise glance.

  They were standing under the sweetgum tree, standing apart, shyly, like children at a country dance.

  “I mean—I didn’t mean to call you that. I don’t know what I was thinkin. I mean, I know who you are. Anna, I know who you are.”

  “Never mind,” said Anna. “Sometimes we remember things.”

  “Sometimes,” said Bushrod.

  He was facing away from the grave, but he knew very well what was happening back there. He could see it in Anna’s face, too: she could not stop her eyes from watching over his shoulder, watching and pulling back then watching again. Suddenly, from behind, Bushrod heard a sharp crack like a dry stick breaking, and Anna’s eyes grew wide and unbelieving and her hands moved to the silver cross.

  Oh, me, thought Bushrod—No more fiddle playin in this world, and before Nebo could break the second arm he turned the girl and led her around to the other side of the tree.

  She seemed to be having trouble breathing and had bitten her lip again. There were tears, too—she wasn’t crying exactly, the tears just came, as if they had nothing to do with her. Bushrod raised his finger to her lip, almost touched it.

  “You are goin to have a bad place there if you don’t quit bitin it.”

  “You must pardon me,” she said, and took the silk handkerchief from her sleeve and turned away, and Bushrod stood looking at the woods while she blew her nose in discreet little snorts and tapped her foot in the leaves. At last she spoke, as if to try out her voice: “He had to do that, I suppose. Break his—”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bushrod quickly. He put out his hand and touched her lightly, just at the base of the neck where the muscles were bunched and knotted like tight little fists. “Sometimes you have to do that, um, to get them to fit, you see. It ain’t really so mean as it looks.”

  She turned then, and all at once they were standing so close she had to tilt up her face to look at him. “Give me your hand,” she said. “Please.” So he put out his right hand, palm up, and Anna settled her own in it like a bird alighting. Bushrod thought of when he was a boy and sometimes a chimney swift would come in through the hearth; when that happened, he would always be the one to catch it, he loved to wrap his hand around it and feel the softness and the little hammer of the swift beating heart. Outside he would open his hand; for an instant the bird would lie blinking in his palm, then flicker away so fast he could never find it in the sky. He half-expected Anna’s hand to do the same, but it lay still, and he closed his own around it.

  They stood a moment, pondering their joined hands as they might a Chinese puzzle.

  “Well,” said Anna at last. “Here we are.”

  “Yes. Here we are.”

  “Um, I suppose polite conversation is out of the question?”

  “Well, it would be a challenge,” agreed Bushrod.

  Anna almost smiled, but her sore lip made her wince. “I suppose it would be,” she said, “given the mise-en-scene!’ Then she did smile.

  “The what?” asked Bushrod.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Still, I wonder what we might have talked about, in other circumstances, I mean. If you’d called on me, say, at home, before the troubles. That is to say—”

  She stopped, blushing, and smiled again. Bushrod laughed. “You mean you would let a peckerwood boy call on you?”

  “I didn’t say I would. I meant, if I had. Which is, come to think of it, unlikely.”

  “Well, if you had, no doubt we’d of talked on something you like. What do you like?”

  Anna thought a moment. “Well, books. You like books, don’t you?”

  “There you have it,” said Bushrod. “I am a deep well of literary wisdom.”

  “You might think, because I am a girl, that I am ignorant on the subject. The truth is, Papa made sure we all—”

  “You are a girl?” said Bushrod in astonishment. “Why the nation didn’t you tell me before? No wonder you been nothin but trouble since the minute I laid eyes on you. Why, if I’d known that—”

  “Bushrod Carter, you are mean and hateful and a damn peckerwood.”

  “Now you’re talkin like a old soldier,” said Bushrod.

  “No wonder,” said Anna. “Now I will tell you somethin. I have read Leaves of Grass.”

  This time Bushrod really was astonished. “You have read Leaves of Grass?” He almost blushed himself to think about it.

  “Oh, Papa was very progressive,” she said. “He read nearly the whole thing to sister Bonnie and me, though he would leave out the shockin parts of course—we had to look them up on our own.”

  “Well,” said Bushrod, “I am forevermore laid low. I loved that book, though I am not sure I understood a dern thing in it.”

  “I didn’t say I understood it. You don’t always have to understand a thing to love it, especially if it is beautiful.”

  “Oh, I agree,” said Bushrod. “I know a girl, she once said that without poetry a person’s heart is an empty glass.”

  “Indeed she was right,” said Anna. She tilted her head. “Is that Remy Dangerfield that you speak of?”

  “Oh,” said Bushrod. “Well, yes, I reckon it was Remy said that.”

  “I thought so,” said Anna. “No doubt, in the course of polite conversation, you would tell me about her. She is. …?”

  “Was,” said Bushrod. “My cousin Remy. The Yellow Jack took her, oh, a long time ago.”

  Anna looked away. A wind prowled through the grove, creaking a branch somewhere; it shifted and brought the smell of death from the field, shifted again and bore the odor of wood-smoke and damp leaves and, for a moment, the sound of a chopping axe. Anna looked down at their hands, still joined, and said: “You were favorin your arm out there, I saw you. Does it hurt much?”

  “Ah, well,” said Bushrod.

  “You may answer the question,” said Anna, tilting up her face.

  “Well, it hurts some,” he admitted.

  “Let me look at it. Maybe—”

  “No! I mean. …it is only sore a little. It will quit by tomorrow.”

  “You are a stubborn boy.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Bushrod. He raised his left arm to demonstrate that he could, and with the tip of his little finger touched the scar on Anna’s cheek. “How’d you get that?”

  “A pony kicked me once,” she said. “Don’t change the subject.”

  “All right, then. But what about you? You can’t quit cryin, can you?”

  Anna reddened, made to pull her hand away but Bushrod held her fast.

  “You can’t quit, can you?”

  “W
ell, so what if I can’t? So what?”

  “Well, so it is the same thing,” said Bushrod. “It is a hurt from the battle. I have seen it happen before, lots of times, to soldiers even. If you will show me that hurt, then I will show my arm to you. There ain’t any shame in it.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you? Do you really know it, or are you just sayin it?”

  She pulled her hand away, but gently this time, and this time Bushrod let it go. She half-turned, and when she spoke it did not seem to be to him. “I know all there is to know about shame. I would as soon not talk about it anymore.”

  Before Bushrod could reply, Nebo was there, silently, as if the smoke had shaped him. “I fixed him, Bushrod,” he said.

  “I know,” said Bushrod. “Um, why don’t you keep watch until we come. Will you do that, just for a minute?”

  “I’ll watch,” said Nebo, and he was gone like smoke.

  Bushrod took Anna’s hand again, and she turned to him and lay just the top of her head against the breast of his gray jacket. “I will tell you a thing,” she said.

  “All right.”

  “I came lookin for you. It’s what I was doin here when. …when that man—”

  “You came lookin for me?”

  “Yes. You see, I thought oh, it is stupid.”

  “You can tell it,” said Bushrod. “It is not stupid.”

  She looked up at him. “Part of it was, I thought maybe there was some explanation for all this, all that’s happened—some, I don’t know, some rule I’d missed, some proclamation, a plan everybody knew about but me—and I thought I thought maybe you’d be the one to explain it so I could understand. I’m sorry for thinkin it now—but Bushrod? I am not sorry I came lookin for you.”