The Year of Jubilo Page 4

  The engine had been halted at last and was backing. A brakeman had found the pin. Gawain took Morgan by the shoulders. “Understand me—,” he began, prepared to lie, but she stopped him.

  “I know you, have known all about you since I was in primer school. I know why you are going. So here’s the third thing.”

  “What?” he asked, as the couplers clashed behind them.

  She put the flat of her hand against his chest; he could feel something beneath it, pressing against him. He slid his hand beneath hers and closed it on the gutta-percha case—he knew what it was without having to look. “Now go on,” she said.

  The whistle blew again, petulantly. The coaches jerked forward. Gawain took her face in his hands and kissed her, feeling her tears on his cheekbone. She pushed him away then. “Go,” she said.

  Gawain cast around quickly, found Uncle Priam holding out his valise and umbrella. He swept them up. With his free hand, he swung up on the last coach as it rattled by, climbed the steps and leaned against the rail of the platform. He stood there until the white shape of her was gone, and Cumberland was gone, and nothing lay behind him but the bright morning woods and a haze of coal smoke.

  THEY TOOK THE Mississippi Central to Grand Junction, then changed to a Memphis & Charleston train crowded with soldiers and recruits bound for Corinth where the army lay. There they sought their regiment, which they found camped in a muddy field behind the railroad hotel. Gawain would never forget that first glimpse of his new life: the foul sinks, the mildewed tents, the pall of wood smoke from innumerable fires, the lean, bristly men who watched them in silence—who, most of them, were still glassy-eyed and half-mad from the Battle of Shiloh a few days before. He believed at that moment that he—Gawain Harper, standing in the mire, still clutching a valise and an umbrella—was unlikely ever to make a soldier, nor did he much want to be anymore, if he ever had.

  Mister Julian Bomar, once the high sheriff of Cumberland County and now the regimental sergeant major, materialized before them.

  “Well, well, well, well,” said Mister Bomar, and from that moment Gawain Harper knew that all he could do was follow the colors of this regiment into the dark.

  So follow them he did, under Bragg and Johnston and Hood. In the winter of ’63, Gawain nearly died of pneumonia and was in hospital for a month or so, but for most of his service he was always present at roll call, and enjoyed good health and counted himself lucky, unlike young Fitter who had not even learned the manual of arms before the measles got him. He died in a fever, muttering Bible verses and logarithms and apologizing over and over to someone—his mother, they supposed—for drowning the cat in the cistern. They buried him at Corinth, in the muddy field behind the railroad hotel.

  As time went on, Gawain discovered that the bourne of his endurance could be pushed far beyond anything he had ever imagined, and the knowledge gave him confidence and pride. He found to his surprise that he even enjoyed some of the life. He liked long marches in fair weather with the boys laughing and talking, or later, when they were tired, each man drawing into himself and plodding along in a comfortable, homey silence. He liked camp life when it wasn’t raining, and the satisfaction that came from a well-executed drill. He enjoyed seeing his regiment, brigade, division in line, with the flags opened out overhead and the bayonets shining and the field officers out front on their restless horses. He liked wandering idly over the fields with his pards and, coming back, seeing the dingy shelter halves and smoky fires of camp. Most of all, he found comfort in his comrades, and humility and mercy and strength, too, as he came to know them, and depend upon them, and love them.

  But there was the killing. One by one, the boys were left behind in the smoke while Gawain Harper went on. The last straw was at Franklin where so many were lost. Sir Niles Reddick disappeared there—simply vanished, as if he had never been at all. One minute he was at Gawain’s elbow, going into the charge against the cotton gin—the next instant he was gone. Gawain never found him, though he searched that awful field high and low once the battle was done. After that, Gawain himself was finished, going through the motions of soldiering until he, too, should vanish and be no more.

  Then, back in the first week of May, the remnant of the Twenty-first Mississippi allowed themselves to quit at last. They were down in the piney woods of south Alabama, on a futile march to join Uncle Joe Johnston (wherever he was; nobody seemed to know for sure), when a squadron of Federal cavalry swarmed down on them. The boys tried to form line of battle, but it was no use, and Gawain finally threw his musket down when he was nearly sabered by a zealous lad in an absurd, tight-fitting uniform with his cap affixed by its chin strap, riding the biggest horse Gawain had ever seen. At another courthouse, in a town he never knew the name of, Gawain Harper had signed his name again, to a parole this time—a document declaring that, though Gawain Harper was once an enemy of the United States, he was an enemy no longer. The parole now lay in his new carpet bag, which he’d bought as he passed homeward through the burned city of Meridian, Mississippi, along with a bottle-green frock coat (almost new) and a checkered waistcoat and breeches, and a broad hat of good Panama straw—all purchased with banknotes issued by the United States which, while he was still its enemy, Gawain had stolen from a waylaid Quartermaster’s wagon on the advance to Nashville.

  Gawain had kept his rusty bull’s-eye canteen, but, into his new carpet bag, along with his treasured parole, he had emptied the contents of his old tarred haversack, the accumulation of three years of active campaigning: a rosary, a deck of cards with the Jack of Hearts forever lost, his Book of Common Prayer, an almanac for 1862, a tin cup and plate and a clever device with fork and spoon and knife all together, a blackened coffee boiler, a physic for headaches, a notebook and pencil, the Senior Warden’s jewel from the traveling lodge of the Twenty-first Regiment of Mississippi Infantry, a pipe and pouch of tobacco and a dozen lucifer matches, a Soldier’s Song Book, seven dollars U.S.—and a cracked ambrotype of Morgan Rhea in its gutta-percha case. These things, together with the coffee and biscuits his folks had given him, and the handkerchief from Rena, and the clothes on his back, were all he could safely say he owned this fine June morning, so close to home, after so long journeying.

  Of course, he owned memory too, and one day this might prove to be his heaviest baggage. But not now. He had learned in these three years that sometimes it was all right to walk in the moment only, and that memory was merciful in this, at least: that now and then it gave way to music or to sunlight or to a little space when a man might walk along with nothing bad happening to him. Now he was forty, toiling up the southerly road, about to close the vast, complex circuit he had begun three years before. He walked along, thin of face, thin of hands, mostly bone now—gaunted, as his cousin Rena said. His mother, were she there to receive him, would not have known him at first, then would have set him down to a meal that most likely would have killed him; his sisters, could they see him, would have fluttered around him like doves, lamenting, but they were married and gone, one to New Orleans and one to Haiti, and only his father was left, and Aunt Vassar—and Morgan. Toward these, then, Gawain traveled, and whatever else awaited him. He walked along toward Cumberland, and for a little while he whistled a catchy French tune their fifer used to play, when they had a fifer.

  THE ROAD WAS bonny in all seasons, but never so much as in the first month of summer when the rains were still fresh on the earth and all was new and bright and delicate—in the time before the long hot days and the drought of August. In June the leaves did not curl or rattle; the wind made a soft sound among them, and their green was like the first green, as if these were the first leaves ever thought of. Alive with sap, the limbs and branches never creaked in their mournful winter way, nor broke themselves, nor seemed to mind the grapevines that looped among them. Along the road, in the ditches and fence rows, the rank grass, and Queen Anne’s lace, and the lyre-leaf sage, and sumac; pink buttercups—every one, it seemed, with a laden bee sidlin
g in and out—and wild morning glory, honeysuckle, trumpet vine (cow-itch, the old people called it), poke sallet gone to seed.

  The road made its way by houses brooding in the shadow of great oaks, that lay at the end of cedar-lined walks laid in the herringbone style. Around many of these were neglected gardens with pools of foul dark water where egrets stalked; in the yards of all were the bloomless greens of daffodils past their prime, that not long ago had turned their faces toward the sun, and ancient blue irises just coming into their glory. In all these houses, Gawain Harper would have been welcomed had he wanted to call, and sometimes people waved at him from their galleries and shouted his name, or the name of someone they took him for. Once a lady made him stop and take a cup of cool water. And from each of these houses, invariably, a crowd of dogs sortied—some to bark, and some to fawn and cringe, and some to follow him down the road in a friendly way.

  By cabins, too, the road passed—some of them, empty, watching through the vacant eyes of their windows, and some of them still full of life: half-naked children playing in the swept dirt yard, and laundry on the line, and tame buttercups planted, and moonvine.

  Gawain Harper took in all these things as he followed the southerly road. It all seemed familiar enough, seemed to fit neatly into the pattern of his memory—even in the changed places, as if some part of memory had adjusted itself, had already expected, say, those stark chimneys where a house used to stand. Yet, after a while, Gawain began to have the odd sense that he was walking through someone else’s memory—not his at all, but some other’s that had been told to him long ago, so often and so well that he had mistaken it for his own. The notion began to weigh on him—he did not want to feel like a stranger in his own land—and finally it aggravated him so much that he stopped in the road and lifted his voice.

  “Now, this is nonsense,” he said to the sky. “It’s what you get for thinkin too much. It don’t have to be so complicated, does it?”

  The sky had no answer, nor did anything in the fields or woods around.

  Gawain had a companion at that moment, a brown fyce the size of a possum, who had followed him from Mister Drew Whitfield’s house. The dog sat gravely on his haunches, looking at him, cocking his head. Gawain looked around; they were at the edge of an old cotton field bright with sun and bordered by deep woods. Gawain looked down at the dog. “You want to tarry by the road awhile, eat a little biscuit?”

  The dog stood and wagged his stump of a tail.

  “All right, then,” said Gawain.

  The dog followed him into the field; they moved through the long grass to the edge of the woods, and there Gawain built an economical fire of branches. Soon, the tin boiler was filled with water and boiling, and Gawain added a palmful of the coffee he’d gotten from his cousin’s people, and he thanked God for them, and for the coffee, and for the biscuits in the rag, and for all good things. Finally, when the coffee was boiled and poured into the tin cup, Gawain broke one of the biscuits and gave half to the fyce, who swallowed it in a single lunging bite. Gawain savored his own half, dipping it into the coffee, eating slowly.

  In a little while, he took off his hat, slipped out of his coat and shoes and socks and rolled up his breeches (his legs were skinny and pasty white, and there was the red welt of a scar where a ball had barked him once) and strolled out into the field again. He found a bare tract of clay ground in the sun, and there he sat down, and filled his pipe and lit it, and drew his knees up and clasped them with his arms like a boy fishing. The dog came and circled once and lay down and soon was snoring, and around them the tall grass buzzed with sound and smelled hot like summer. Gawain breathed deep of it. “That is freedom,” he told the dog.

  He closed his eyes and felt the sun go deep inside him. He tilted his head, opened his eyes again and saw a heron passing over, bound for the Leaf River bottoms most likely, his broad wings beating a steady cadence, long legs stretched out behind.

  On the ground were shards of flint and broken points—spearpoints and arrowheads and a knife that was almost perfect—a village site once upon a time, and here the pointmaker had squatted on his haunches, chipping away with a deer antler, muttering to himself. Gawain turned an arrowhead in his fingers and wondered what the fellow thought when he spoiled this one, wondered if the Indians had cuss words they could use on such an occasion, and if they didn’t, how they got along. He wondered where the man’s bones were now, or the dust of them, and what this place looked like back there at the first creak of time. Big timber for certain, and a complete, utter silence, and no sense of any place in the wide world but this one. People walked here then, believing the universe was in order—believing, no doubt, that they were the polished end of all creation and so would not be forgotten—unable to imagine the world without themselves in it. Well, that was all right, Gawain thought. That’s what people did, even when they knew better.

  A HALF HOUR later, Gawain and the dog found themselves at a place called Wagner’s Stretch, named for the family whose house had once stood impressively among the trees. The house had burned a decade before the war, set alight by discontented slaves. Old Wagner, who had discontented them, lasted most of that night sitting on the upper gallery in a rocking chair with a brace of pistols and a loyal boy to load and prime, until it finally occurred to the insurrectionists to burn the house down. The next day, a party of armed and mounted men hunted the Wagner negroes down with dogs, chasing them through the swamps and brakes like deer, and killed them every one, and burned their bodies among the ashes of the house. This was a haunted place ever since—Bad Ground, the Cumberland negroes called it—and men spoke of how chill the air was, passing here of a summer night, and of mysterious fogs that moved through the trees. The ruins of the house were hidden now among vines and creepers, among the dark cedars and the blackjack oaks, but every spring, a double row of daffodils appeared to mark the place where the front walk had been, the yellow trumpets pointing the way to nothing now.

  He had never felt the legendary chill nor seen the ghostly fogs, but now, alone in the clear light of day, Gawain felt uneasy passing here. The dog felt it too, and stayed close beside.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” said Gawain to the dog, in a voice that was a little too loud. “I think it is not good for a fellow to be alone all the time.”

  In the woods, the shadows lay watching. Gawain thought he could see the chimneys of the old Wagner house, heavy with vines.

  “No,” he said, “too much time alone and you get to thinkin too much. I’ve found it so; yes, indeed, I have.”

  Here the trees crowded right up to the road and closed over it like a tunnel; there were no fields to open out, and the distant bend seemed to draw no closer however fast they walked, and somewhere a solitary crow was talking. Haw, haw, he said, in the guttural tongue of crows. Haw, haw. The dog was panting now, and Gawain, for his part, found that he had no more to say. Though the mud dragged at his feet, he did not care to venture too close to the dark trees. This is stupid, Gawain told himself, yet he stayed in the middle of the road. He had never seen a ghost in his life, but no matter: in his view, dead people simply could not be trusted.

  Even before the war, Gawain had seen a great many dead people. They died in accidents or were kicked by mules. They shot one another, they hanged themselves in barn lofts and attics and bedrooms, they caught the measles or the consumption or the milk leg or any of a thousand other afflictions of the flesh. They died in myriads from the yellow jack and took blood poisoning from the prick of a thorn. They died giving birth, the two souls, mother and child, passing each other in the darkness. Some, having lived long enough, simply quit breathing. When he was a boy, Gawain was often dragged to shuttered parlors or the candle-smelling gloom of churches where he was compelled to stand on tiptoe and peer into the face of a rouged and powdered doll-like thing stuffed uncomfortably into its narrow box. Such artifacts never bothered him; they were too far removed from light and air, from voice and movement, remote even fro
m the grief that hung over them like the bitter smell of marigolds. They seemed to Gawain of no more substance than the dried cicada shells that clung to the bark of trees in August, empty and almost invisible, the living thing flown away.

  But not all the dead were so tidy, and even those who were could not always be depended upon to remain calm. Gawain had seen these, too, before the war. A man hauled from Leaf River after two days in the water, an apparition like a swollen sausage, lips gone to the fishes, fingers to the snapping turtles, eyes like green muscadines. An engine driver flayed by the steam of a boiler explosion. A fellow student at the university burned to a shrunken black mannequin in a house fire. His Uncle Tom, dead of apoplexy, who cleared the room when he sat upright in his coffin and belched.

  Then he went off to the war. In his first action, a minor skirmish on the retreat from Corinth, he was still wearing the clothes he’d left home in, but, in place of the umbrella, he carried a converted 1812 flintlock that sometimes fired and sometimes didn’t. He had seen no casualties yet, but he knew people were killed in these affairs and was so scared that he was sure his heart would explode. He was in the rear rank, trying to make himself as small as possible, hiding behind the broad shoulders of the man to his front, when that gentleman took a ball in the forehead, splashing his brains into Gawain’s face. Gawain dropped his musket and was wiping frantically at the mess, unbelieving, telling himself that such things simply did not happen, when the man turned and spoke to him. The sound was inarticulate, or of a language living men could not know, but it was speech, and Gawain sank to his knees as the man looked at him, his eyes bulging in their sockets but quick with outrage and accusation and surprise. Gawain could not have said how long the man stood there until he folded and fell to the ground like a bundle of rags, but it was long enough for Gawain to finally understand that sometimes the dead were a different kind of living thing. They could be aware somehow, and they could watch you—not from some distant place but from the cloudy eyes themselves. And somewhere deep in the cold lump of brain, or in the silent heart perhaps, a mysterious light burned on.