by Kevin Powers
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2018 by Kevin Powers
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Cover art by Daniel Grendon / Getty Images
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ISBN 978-0-316-55648-4
LCCN 2017952216
E3-20180417-NF-DA
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Kevin Powers
Discover More Kevin Powers
For Pauline and Louise
One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.
—Reinhold Niebuhr,
Beyond Tragedy
I will mourn for what fails here.
—Roger Reeves, “On Visiting the Site of a Slave Massacre in Opelousas”
ONE
BY 1870, NOT even four full years after the clerk of Chesterfield County, Virginia, officially recorded Emily Reid Levallois’s death, rumors of her survival and true whereabouts abounded. It was said by some that you could see her flitting among the Maroons of Great Dismal on their mesic islands, a white face among the black, as straight and slim a figure as the swamp’s ageless cypresses. Or that she was now a washerwoman at a boardinghouse in Baltimore. Still others hypothesized that she had escaped a lynch mob and had wound up passing through the two-bit cow towns along the western coast of Florida, until she spent her remaining days leaving tracks along the white sands where the Manatee River meets the blue-green stillness of the gulf. It is not so hard to imagine. The young Emily becomes older. Our certainty diminishes. Every day the same mismatched rows of least and royal terns look out toward a coming storm as small waves roll in and crash against the shore like the inevitable collapse of a trillion minor hills.
Most of these notions never advanced much further than a passing thought. When said out loud they rarely took the form of proposition, almost always of response. But the rumor that stuck was said with a confidence so unquestioned as to almost certainly be wrong: That she had fled south and west toward the hollows of the Blue Ridge while the fire still burned through the embers of the house at Beauvais Plantation. That you could have found her in the highlands there, up above the meadows in the fog, where the spruce and firs grew through the wreckage of the deadfall of the past.
It’s easy enough to understand why she tried to disappear. And if the places she was rumored to have gone were merely substitutes for the idea of flight in the scorched minds of those whom she’d abandoned, no matter. Error begets error. That much is clear.
It may well be that the balance of her life, once the flames had turned that old Adam-style house to ash, was lived only in the stories people told about her. And though there is little need to wonder how she eventually ended up, one might ask if, for her, it was a punishment or pardon. Either way, there’s no great tragedy for Emily anymore. If tragedy is what she meant to leave behind, she did so as surely as if it had been written in her will, in the delicate cursive her mother taught her, in an ink of blood and ash.
Her father often told her that she was lucky to have been born at all, considering she was conceived in illness as autumn began in ’46. The come-and-go heat signaling the end of another Virginia summer had left his wife feeling used up. By the time her mother was sure she was pregnant, the fever had flushed her face a mottled red and her joints felt like linens twisted up and wrung out to dry. Lying in her sickbed, attended by her girl, Aurelia, Lucy Reid passed three nights cursing her throat, the pain in her bones, and the itch. October rained on their tin roof and it shook the first still-green leaves from the sycamore outside her window. For her husband in the adjoining room, it became hard to separate the conditions that caused his beloved wife’s discomfort. And though he would always tell his daughter that he loved her, he often wondered whether those three long evenings had been imprinted in his mind and heart and left him with a permanent deficit in his capacity to show her real, meaningful affection.
When she was born the following summer, Aurelia’s hands, the palms of which were rough and pink, were the first to hold the newborn child. Bob stayed with Lucy in the bedroom, holding her hand and using his other to cradle his wife’s clammy face. The birth had not been as rough on Lucy as they had feared, yet they knew the danger for any child born to a mother who had been ill during the carriage.
Aurelia took a pair of shears she’d boiled in water and cut the cord. She held the baby up for the two of them to see. “Girl child,” she said.
Lucy smiled. Bob took a washcloth and wiped his wife’s forehead. “A girl,” he said, as though he wasn’t sure if she had been listening. To Aurelia he said, “Give her a look over and bring her back to us.”
Aurelia took the child to the basin on the porch. Night came in. She washed the film and blood from the infant’s body. She swaddled the child and held her up to look her over. The child, not yet named, had neither gasped nor cried but with a smack began to breathe. The baby’s skin had a pinkish-gray cast about it, but she was quiet and blinked with drowsy contentment in the darkness of Aurelia’s arms. The warm midsummer air surrounded them both. Aurelia’s young son, Rawls, stood watching his mother rock the child from the yard as marbled moonlight fell through the expanse of the sycamore tree’s darkening crown. Aurelia saw that the child’s eyes were cloudy with cataracts. The pupils a swirl of the lightest gray at the center of dark, gold-flecked irises. She was sure the child was blind, and at that moment she began to tell the girl in a voice, one that sounded very much like singing, that it would be a hard life, that tomorrow would be a hard day, as would the day after and the day after that. But as she cradled her she saw the girl’s strange eyes moving toward points of light; the lamp burning with a quiet hiss, lightning
bugs flickering in the yard, and what stars that could be seen from Chesterfield County assembled in the heavens.
The first years of her life, or the times from those years that held their shapes firmly enough to be recalled in later ones, were simple. Her father’s mule skinning made enough money to give them a comfortable life. Their home on the road between the coalfields and the river was modest but respectable. Aurelia attended to her dutifully. Emily became accustomed to Rawls’s presence even though she thought him peculiar. One summer he wove himself a hat out of green tobacco leaves and she told him he was silly for not wearing a proper hat. Sometimes she’d watch him brush the mules’ coats to such a sleekness that they seemed carved from polished stone. At dusk he’d often take a homemade cane pole and cast it toward the heavens until bats whooshed down like rain from the blue-black sky. She did not know how old he was except that he was leaving boyhood. When she asked him he said, “I’m old enough, Miss Emily,” and slinked away.
When she was five years old her father had let her keep a runt bird-dog whelp she’d found in a ditch. She named her Champion. Rawls did not care for the dog. He thought she was unruly and spoiled, though Master Reid had taught her some basic commands. Rawls’s meekness toward Champion gave Emily fits of laughter. By the time she was eight she’d invented a game for the three of them to play. She’d tie the birder to the sycamore and tease her mercilessly, pulling the bitch’s ears and rapping her snout with a folded fan until she yelped and spun herself into a knot. When the dog finally quivered submissively she’d unravel the rope and bark out a command she’d learned while watching her father train the dog. And Rawls would run as best he could to get away, sometimes climbing up a near tree or onto the roof of the mule pen or, when he was truly stricken by fear, toward the big house, calling for his mother all the way. One afternoon Bob returned home early and saw Emily at this game, the teenage Rawls balancing in terror on a tall fence post, and he beat her savagely with his belt right out in the yard. He kicked the dog away from its pacing under the fence and helped Rawls down. “Gosh dang it, Emily,” he said, “you’re gonna make this boy a runner again. Now leave him be so he can get about my business!”
Bob went in the house and slammed the door behind him. Emily wept a puddle under the tree. Rawls turned to see the dog looking at him with her brown head curiously cocked to one side. The frightened yellow eyes told him she had been running away, not toward, the whole time. Rawls looked over at the girl sprawled out and wailing in the grass and envied her. Her pain in that moment was real pain, no different in expression from his own. He knew the way one’s chest got bound up, how a strange heat came to the cheeks and boiled over into tears of rage and frustration. The difference, though, was in source and scope. While hers came from a rare remonstration by her father, his was inscrutable and vast. She would weep in the yard for an hour at most, then skulk back to her father’s forgiving kisses. His was forever married to all the memories he had and joined again to every new memory he made. Tomorrow she would leave the house, and pain would be as incomprehensible to the girl’s mind as the map of a foreign country in a schoolbook. He had found no boundary to his own.
When the girl recovered she straightened out her skirts and dusted them off. She looked at Rawls and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “It’s only a game,” she said. She turned toward a field waving golden in the white sun beyond the mule pen. He watched her go, silently. And he determined in that moment to find something that would not be subject to the strange laws of the borderless world in which he lived. Something he could claim that they could not. Anything they could not take from him. And he began to run in the nights again, as in his childhood, in search of it.
Several winters passed without incident for Rawls. Some snowless, others so bleak he could not distinguish between the earth and sky for all the snow that seemed to fall between the two. He ventured out at night and was not caught. He had no destination other than the one he circled unconsciously: a notion of being engaged in a desperate search. He had no respect for white folks anymore, and very rarely fear, but he sometimes pitied them, allowing himself pity only because he had once heard a traveling preacher say that pity was the cruelest feeling one could have toward another.
By 1860 he was in charge of most of the freight Bob Reid’s mules pulled down the narrow-gauge tracks toward Richmond. He might oversee the shipment of tons of bituminous coal out of the Midlothian mines, or great hogsheads of tobacco cropped from endless fields late in the summer, and he was trusted throughout the county to make sure every single cured leaf and every fat black lump of coal got to market in as good a state as when they were put onto his carts.
On account of his high standing in the community as both a reliable and efficient part of the local economy, Bob gave Rawls a pass, dawn to dusk, that was essentially without any other restrictions. When there was no harvest, and as that hard coal out of Pennsylvania slowly dropped the value of the dull local brittle, Rawls could be seen at leisure on one of Bob’s ponies, always the same one, a brindle named Dorothea, with a big cedar-handled tobacco knife tucked into his britches, and a dirty fur felt hat on his head tipped back to near upright.
He’d pass by people at Levallois Crossing, or farmers on the ferry road, and reach high up toward the crown of his hat, saying “Afternoon” to whomever he’d come across. A gentle ribbing would then ensue. A kind of inside joke that nobody got left out of. “You best be carrying that pass, Rawls,” they’d smilingly chide. And he’d pat his left breast and answer back, “Course you know I do.” And Rawls would then touch his hat again, spur on his pony, and check sometimes three and four times that the pass was truly there.
Near evening, when circumstances provided, he’d almost always end up near the ferry landing. The bateau man was a surly old dark-skinned hillbilly named Spanish Jim, and being equally ambivalent toward all, he never minded if Rawls stripped off his clothes and dove from the big bluestem grass into water as brown and still as a medicinal bottle. At that hour, with the sun going down in the break in the trees above the curling river, and the grasshopper sparrows’ trill song darting through the meadow, Rawls managed to fall into a state resembling contentment.
As the water ran over his body, he’d often recall his first trip down to the river as a boy. He’d been about six years old, not quite two years before he stood in the dooryard and watched his mother rock the strange girl who would so influence the rest of his life. At that time, they had just been sold to Bob Reid; his mother to tend to the ailing Lucy Reid, Rawls to become a muleteer, though he did not know what that was when he was told it was the thing he was going to become.
His previous owner had taken them on a long trip southwest down a road choked with dust and then across the river on the bateau. The ferryman looked at Rawls blankly as he pushed the long straight pole and shook his head ever so slightly. Rawls stared back, wondering if he was a black man or a white man. “No man steps into the same river twice, boy,” said Spanish Jim, surprising Rawls. “You think on that awhile. That’s old wisdom.” When they arrived at the far shore Rawls remembered standing sheepishly and unsteadily on his barely healed feet during the transaction. His first owner saying, “Dammit, Bob. You’re getting a hell of a deal here. Woman’s good in the house. Good with children. But the young one’s just all around impertinent. Too sharp for his own good.”
“He’s a runner, you say?”
“Was. Won’t be no more. Had to dock his toes. Boy couldn’t get out of sight in a day now. But between his bellyaching and Aurelia’s wailing over top, don’t neither of ’em get shit done. Almost feel bad making you pay.”
“But not that bad.”
“No. I reckon not. But if you can get ’em right you’re getting a hell of a deal.”
The years between then and now had pressed forward dully and relentlessly like a river downstream from a terrible storm. But Rawls’s nighttime wanderings were beginning to fill him with a curious joy despite
their inherent danger. He did not know if he would find the thing that could not be taken from him, but he felt that it was close. He sat waiting in their small cabin back in the woods behind the mule pen. Aurelia slept soundly in a bed he’d made for her out of rope and straw and pieces of driftwood for the posts. He stuck his head out the window. The moon waned to its last quarter. Rawls put on his moccasins and waited for his mother to begin snoring. He hoped that night to see a girl named Nurse again. She lived an hour’s walk west on a thousand-acre soybean farm that skirted the river just across the Chesterfield line into eastern Powhatan County. A week before, he had taken the mules to the soybean farm to retrieve a load of cargo bound for the river. The voices in the fields all sang “Steal Away to Jesus,” and the eyes in the field all looked toward a ribbon of loblolly pine that stood at the boundary between three plantations.
He found those same voices at their prayer meeting that night, gathered in a glade they’d cut into the dense pinewoods. Rawls never had much use for God, and as they sang he sat silently and his mind wandered. He thought of lightning he’d seen flashing in a recent storm. How little danger there was unless you were right out under it. And yet, like the mules under the stable roof that brayed at the thunderclaps, it caused everyone to tremble. Why fear that which would come or not regardless of your fear? he wondered. The brim of his hat tilted over his face like a veil, and in the deepest shadow of the night he closed his eyes. Like a blind man, he reconstructed the world as he imagined it could be. And it occurred to him that there were few things he was truly afraid of anymore.
He noticed the girl that night among the pines. She was about his age, he’d guessed, lingering motionless at the edge of the firelight. She wore a calico wrap fixed atop her head in an impossibly complex arrangement. Small orange petals spread across a field of the darkest blue one might find in the evening sky, which seemed to Rawls to put all the true colors of the world to shame. She was calm in her solitude but not withdrawn, as if her mere presence was equally participatory to the human sound and motion that swirled around her. He smiled at her. Put up his hand in a still wave of greeting.
