The Year of Jubilo Page 8

  When he was three years old, Molochi Fish had been boiled alive. It was hog-killing time on the old Pershing place where his pap was overseer, and a great pot of water had been set on a fire and boiled to singe the bristles off the hogs. Into this pot Molochi’s mother had dropped him. He knew at the time that she did it on purpose, but never had he questioned why—not then, and not twelve years later when he pushed her into the machinery at the gristmill. It never occurred to him that people had to have reasons for doing things. However that may be, he remembered sinking in the boiling water, drawing it into his lungs. He remembered crawling out, remembered walking through the niggers who fled from him, remembered their wailing and their upflung hands. He was seeking his mother, walking with the skin looping down in ribbons from his outstretched arms, making sounds with his mouth though he couldn’t breathe, seeing though he couldn’t see—until he found her, praying, reaching up her hands toward the sweet blue sky. She often prayed, he remembered. She was praying when he dropped her down the shaft at the mill.

  Now, by the gravel bar, Molochi touched his face. His fingers came away wet. He wiped them on his breeches and squinted toward the bridge, where the one fellow, the one with the horse, was mounting up. In a moment, the bridge was empty. Molochi rose stiffly, and the dogs rose with him. At the movement, the old snake lifted its head, showing his dingy white mouth. But Molochi Fish and the dogs had already passed and vanished into the trees.

  VI

  Lieutenant Colonel Michael Burduck had not been in Cumberland long when he heard the story of old man Wagner and his rebellious slaves. As soon as duty permitted, the Colonel rode out to Wagner’s Stretch in company with Mister George Boswell, a citizen who knew every detail about life in Cumberland County since the dawn of time—about the Indians, the early settlers, the planters, the scofflaws—and who could recite the generations of families many residents had never known or long since forgotten. Mister Boswell was an older man, not much interested in the larger questions that had troubled the country for the past four years, and he was happy to find the Colonel so interested in local history. For his part, the Colonel found Mister Boswell congenial company and a mine of social information. The man’s one drawback, in the Colonel’s view, was his smoking. Mister Boswell smoked a pipe during all his waking hours, and for tobacco he used the leaves of certain woodland plants that he collected himself. He claimed that an old Chickasaw had taught him the blend; whatever its origin, the smoke from Boswell’s pipe had a reek that carried for miles, that could hardly be tolerated in the open air, and indoors not at all. Beyond this, Mister Boswell was a kind and accommodating man beloved by all.

  Mister. Boswell showed the Colonel around the site of the old Wagner place, pointed out the vine-grown ruins of the house, described in vivid detail the events of that terrible night when Wagner sat on his gallery and reaped what he had sown. The tale was instructive, Boswell said, because it illustrated the way a man could shape his destiny out of the choices he made. The Colonel agreed, though for him the incident worked on another level as well. Old Boswell told him how the blacks called this Bad Ground—as well they might, Burduck thought. The Colonel had crossed a lot of bad ground in latter years: places which, if there really were ghosts, would be restless to the world’s end. But in this place, Burduck thought, the ghosts were not just those of men, white or black, nor the violence only that of a night’s bloody deeds. The old Wagner place, he thought, was a grand metaphor.

  Colonel Burduck was a West Pointer, class of ’50, who ended the war commanding a battalion of regular United States Infantry. Months before the surrender, the Colonel brought his battalion, two batteries of regular artillery, and a company of Ohio cavalry down from Memphis to guard the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, the Federals having learned at last that they could claim no Southern ground unless a national soldier was actually standing on it with his bayonet fixed. They had fought no end of minor skirmishes with the rebels, and now, in this June of ’65, they were handily in place to enforce the mandates of a victorious government. Burduck had expected a great deal of trouble, but found to his surprise that the citizens of the neighborhood were by and large more preoccupied with trying to figure out what had happened to them than in brooding about their defeat. In fact, for Burduck and his men—all veterans, all weary—their duty had proven so far a welcome respite from the rigors of the long war. True, the country was in ruins and stank of ashes, but this sojourn along the railroad promised to be the best of their military lives. Rations were plentiful, Burduck and his staff were quartered in a fine house in Cumberland, the troops had spanking new Sibley tents with stoves and plank floors, and there were no generals.

  Still, Burduck could not forget that he was in the enemy’s country. He had been too long under arms to have any illusions about the nature of the people among whom he dwelt, and over whose conduct he had some measure of control. He was not surprised, for example, to find that the women were the most intractable of his subjects, and the least amenable to his presence. They would sniff haughtily at the Federal soldiers, and would cross the street to avoid contact, and, early on at least, were openly insulting. This behavior did not set well with Burduck’s Regulars, many of whom were rowdy Western lads whose return salvos were neither subtle nor genteel. Burduck himself was amused by the situation, and generally he allowed his soldiers to handle it themselves, as long as the skirmishing was verbal. Still, the women rankled, and Burduck suspected that, if there was a fuse anywhere, it might well be lit by the womenfolk.

  Colonel Burduck’s interest in the Wagner episode grew out of the fact that he had fought against, and now policed, a culture that had once championed human slavery. Burduck knew that slavery was not a paramount issue among his Western troops and colleagues; never had been, even in the fervent days of the war’s beginning. Burduck himself, a New Yorker and presumably in philosophical harmony with the powerful East, had never been an active abolitionist. He was, after all, an officer of the United States, and his first duty was to the Union.

  Nevertheless, the moral question of slavery had informed his conduct as a soldier in war and now captured his attention as a guardian of the peace. Beyond annihilation, no culture died easily, he knew. Indeed, much of this one might never die of its own accord. How could these rebels not see? he asked himself when, on idle afternoons, he would ride out to the old Wagner place. There he would tether his horse and stroll among the ruins, poking at the old ashes where fragments of bone still lay. He would sit and ponder the vines that grew over the chimneys and ask himself: How could they not see?

  ON HIS SIXTEENTH birthday, Michael Burduck signed as an ordinary seaman on the United States sloop Nimble, his elder brother John commanding. Two days later, they made sail for Africa, there to lurk for outbound slavers off the coast.

  They passed the Montauk light just at daybreak; young Burduck stood at the rail and saw the dark shape of the lighthouse against the thin pink line of the coming day, the beacon glimmering on a sea so calm it could hardly be distinguished from the sky. He watched the light until it was no more than a firefly, then gone beyond the edge of the waking earth. Beneath him the sea, still dark, churned in the ship’s passing, and Burduck heard in its whispering the promise of all his dreams.

  They made the crossing. The salt wind blew from the rim of the world and filled the sails, and the canvas groaned and swelled toward unimaginable places, driving them down the long passage. The taut lines vibrated, the deck rose and fell, the cries of men aloft floated down like the cries of gulls, and under the keel the deep water slid green and dark and full of mystery. Some nights the moon threw a ribbon on the water while the stars burned in their ancient constellations; they read the stars, and the stars told their place upon the sea, and by day the sun at meridian never failed them. By the sun, by the moon and stars, they passed over the waters.

  The Nimble took her station two days out from the Guinea coast, and for a fortnight tacked a long figure eight under the At
lantic sun. Then, on the fifteenth day, the lookouts cried a prospect, hull down and beating north under all her sails. The Nimble gave chase; it was no contest, and the capture was made within the watch.

  The prize turned out to be a sorry thing, a slatternly old bark of mildewed canvas and weathered boards, manned by Dutchmen and Frenchmen and strapping big blacks whose bodies glistened in the sun. When the Nimble bore down on her, she ran a British ensign the size of a courtyard up her mast, but no matter; the Americans took her anyway. A brave moment ensued then, like a vivid painting: the sleek and dangerous Nimble with her guns run out and Marines in the rigging; the guilty ship hove to, fat and wallowing in the swells; and between the two vessels a pair of fast cutters knifing the foam, their oars dipping and flashing, and Captain Burduck himself standing in the bow of the lead boat in frock coat and sword and pistol.

  Boarding was tricky, for a rope ladder was the only accommodation the bark would offer, and she was rolling badly. Nevertheless, young Burduck made the leap, catching the ladder at just the right moment and clambering up as the ship heeled away. When he arrived on deck, he found his brother and the boat crew, armed with pistols and carbines and cutlasses, facing a semi-circle of strange, whiskery men, the ship’s company. They were not armed, but they were sullen, not even talking among themselves, and watchful. Even young Burduck could discern that these men owned secrets they did not wish brought to light.

  “Which of you is Master here?” inquired Captain Burduck.

  A short man in an old-fashioned coat and absurd, piratical boots rolled forward. He began: “You are aware that this is Her Britannic Majesty’s—”

  Captain Burduck held up his hand. He said: “Quite right, sir—keenly aware, deeply aware. We salute Her Majesty, and all that, and invite you to please open that hatch yonder and let’s get on with it.”

  The bark’s Captain made a gesture. “Impossible,” he said.

  “Very well,” said Captain Burduck, and nodded, and two of his own men took hold of the hatchway and banged it open and stood aside.

  All the sailors who stood nearby moved away when the smell came. It was a palpable cloud rising from the hatch, extract of sweat and fear and excrement and the sweet reek of the lately dead, and the rust of chains, and the dripping of old wood, and vomit, and the rutting that will happen anywhere, even in hell. This foulness coiled out of the open hatch, and the sailors moved away, and the bark’s Captain snorted and stepped back among his crew.

  “Fetch a lantern,” said Captain Burduck.

  Someone brought a bull’s-eye lantern, lighted, and Captain Burduck took it and moved to the open hatchway and paused.

  “Go ahead,” said the bark’s Captain. “Have a peek, now that you’re here.”

  Burduck turned and looked at the man. He set the lantern down carefully and drew his pistol. He crossed the little way to where the bark’s Captain stood grinning and slammed the barrel of the pistol across the man’s cheek and laid it open to the glistening bone. The man sank to his knees and covered his face with his hands. Captain Burduck knelt beside him. “Oh, I have seen all this before,” he said. “However, I will improve the occasion by instructing the nation’s youth.” He stood, turning, searching the faces of the men. “Burduck!” he said.

  “Sir,” said young Michael Burduck, stepping forward.

  Throughout the trip, Captain Burduck had paid little attention to his younger brother, a fact for which Michael was grateful, for he had no desire to be treated any different from the rest of the crew. Now the two brothers stood only a few feet apart, and for the first time some old signal of their common blood passed between them. The Captain did not touch his brother, but his eyes betrayed him. At last he gestured with the pistol. “I want you to take that lantern and go below,” he said. “Go all the way down, lad.”

  Young Burduck looked toward the black square of the open hatch. Around him, the men were silent, even the slaver captain, who had pressed a filthy rag against his cheek. After a moment, he turned back to his brother the Captain. “Aye, sir,” he said.

  He took up the lantern in which a short taper burned fitfully; in the bright sunlight, he could hardly see the flame. At the hatch coaming, he stopped. In his right hand, he still carried his pistol—until that day he had never held one, and it felt awkward and heavy in his hand. He slipped it into his belt, then stepped over the hatch coaming and onto the ladder that slanted away into the dark, into the smell. He made a step down, and another. The smell grew stronger, and with it the feeling that he was not alone in the hold. Something waited, holding its breath, watching without sound. The ladder was slippery and wet, and he had to move slowly. Halfway down, the lantern began to gutter for want of air, and in a moment it went out entirely and only a shaft of sunlight remained to give shape to the regions below. Young Burduck stopped, struggled with the urge to turn back up the ladder into the light. Then he filled his lungs, shut his eyes, and moved slowly down, feeling his way. He counted five more steps, then opened his eyes.

  He saw a carpet of prone bodies, dark and glistening, chained together throughout the hold. He heard the shifting of iron links and the querying clicks of dry tongues and the rattle of pent breath, and the groans of men straining to rise who could not rise, and the popping of stiff joints as hands reached upward. And the eyes then, all turning toward him with the glossy brightness of boiled eggs, blinking in what, to them, was a flood of light. “My Christ,” said Burduck aloud, and dropped the lantern, and for answer rose a sudden gabble of voices: pleading, angry, afraid, or not even voices at all but the utterance of every dark thing that ever visited him in dreams. He cried out again. He felt he might pitch forward among them. Then he fled.

  In the sunlight again, he fell to his knees and retched. No one spoke, no one laughed. In a moment, his brother the Captain knelt beside him, touched him then, a hand in the small of his back. “Well done,” the Captain said. Then, in a voice almost a whisper: “’Tis a hard thing, lad, but you must bear it. You must not forget it. Not ever.”

  Young Burduck, in his shame, was silent. In that moment, he hated his brother for giving him the responsibility of remembering. He had witnessed a great sin—but he understood already that a greater sin lay in forgetting. He rose from the deck and moved unsteadily to the bulwark; he grasped it tightly to keep his hands from trembling. Behind him he heard the voices of men, the harsh voice of his brother giving orders, the protests of the slaver crew. Over these he heard the old ship’s groaning; she had not ceased, and Burduck knew she would not until her keel touched the bottom of the sea. Then, looking out, he saw the broad waters, endless and indifferent, stretching away toward tomorrow.

  THIS JUNE MORNING, not long after daybreak, Colonel Burduck had ridden alone to the Wagner place. His mind was restless, and he needed a place to hide for a time before the clerks and the orderlies and the petitioning citizens got to him. He tied his horse far back among the old outbuildings and, after checking for snakes, sat down in his usual place, on an overturned cookpot that, with its four stumpy legs, always reminded him of a dead hog. He had brought a lap desk with the idea of working up some correspondence, but he only sat quietly, listening, alone in the still morning. After a while, he found a stick he had whittled the day before, and with it began to scratch in the mud at his feet. He drew a star, a sun, a moon, and around these he drew a circle. He tapped his stick in the dirt. In the trees around, the birds sang; Burduck had never learned one bird from another, but he liked their singing. He could smell the damp leaves and a faint tinge of wood smoke.

  Burduck stood up, restless, and then he noticed an odd thing. He bent and picked up a Henry cartridge from the ground. It had not been here yesterday. He was pondering it when he heard someone in the road.

  From this place, the Colonel could observe the road with little chance of being seen himself. Often he watched people passing alone or in parties, afoot or mounted, sometimes driving a bony cow or a goat or a hog. This wayfarer was a lanky fellow in c
ivilian clothes, with a carpet bag and a little dog. They were stopped, and the man was lecturing the dog, who seemed to listen intently. Burduck was sure that the man, for all his dress and baggage, was an ex-soldier; he could not have said how he knew, only that he did. Most of these rebs traveled in their rags of uniform, their blanket-rolls and haversacks slung about them, sometimes barefoot, always hungry. The roads were full of them these days, now that some time had passed since the last of them had surrendered. Not many were outfitted like this one, and not many would be conversing with a dog. Peculiar behavior, even for a rebel, the most peculiar species Burduck had ever known.

  Burduck knew he ought to question the man, examine his parole and all that, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. For one thing, the fellow seemed harmless enough—most of them were—and Burduck trusted his own instincts. For another, he simply did not feel like busying himself at the moment. Besides, Burduck thought, the sight of a Federal Colonel popping out of the brush was likely to give the man apoplexy. Let him go home, then. The troops would examine him.

  Burduck tossed the Henry cartridge into the brush and thought no more about it. Instead, he considered the man in the road and tried to imagine what he was feeling, or trying not to feel. Behind that lad stretched a vast ruin to which he could not return; ahead, over the Leaf River bridge or farther along the road, a great mystery lay waiting, a world he would not know and in which he would have little say. Burduck shook his head. He could not imagine himself in such a circumstance. Well, the rebels had no one to blame but themselves; let them puzzle it out as best they could. Were it not so much trouble, Burduck would have liked to accost this fellow and drag him by the collar to the vine-choked scattering of ashes that had once been a house and say to him, Do you see? Do you see now?