by Kevin Powers
After Huggins was thumped stone dead by the big Atlantic white, just the kind of danger he had asked the boy to guard against, George began to spend his leisure hours sitting mournfully at the edge of Lake Drummond. It was not Huggins for whom he mourned, not exactly, for it seemed to him that his mourning was more general; a duller, faded version of the melancholy that had befallen him in the early days of that year. In the evenings he sat and watched the gaslights come on in the fishing shacks that ringed the water’s edge. As weak circles of golden light barely brushed back the darkness, he listened to the splash of oars entering water. At sunset he watched the failing light pour through the gaps in the forest that he’d helped make, rays coursing like a spreading flame. He thought he might see the girl in the white canoe, who, as Huggins told it around the fire one evening, paddled effortlessly at the fringes of the lake when the moon was new, searching for her lost love. One afternoon he stumbled on a pair of blue herons tangled in the discarded binding of a timber raft. He took out his elk-antler knife and cut them loose. He watched for a few minutes as their broken wings flailed pathetically and their raspy barks grew to such a fevered desperation that he could stomach them no longer. He turned his back on the crippled birds, on the lake, on the sun setting through the precisely cut gaps in the trees. He thought the knowledge of their agony would overtake all other thoughts and drive him insane, until he felt there was no escape from it but to beat their heads with a cedar branch until they fell soundlessly into the shallow black water.
When he was close to forty years old, and another spring loomed over the swamp, George left the logging camp at Great Dismal for good. Feeling an obligation to Huggins, and already having performed the labor of three lifetimes, he asked the foreman for his pay and if any of Huggins’s last effects had been collected that might be returned to his people if any of them could be found. The foreman shrugged and said, “C’mon, George. Don’t nobody end up out here in this swamp because we got people waiting on us. We’re our only people,” he added boldly, but without conviction. “But anyhow,” he said, “if a man makes up his mind, I won’t be the one to stand in his way. He had some kit we put outside the kitchen, not knowing what to do with it and all.”
The young marine’s voice brought George back almost to the present moment, in all its terrible certainty and completeness. The wheels ground and scraped their way around a bend in the rail line. Sparks stippled the darkness, then disappeared outside his window. He did not feel a longing for those days of falling timber in the swamp, but rather a yearning for all the unknown possibilities in his life that fell outside the dominion of memory. What choices might he have made that would have set his life on a different course? A thousand lives he’d never lived passed through his mind and were then immediately gone. Dizzy on the train that rolled through Roanoke Rapids and Rocky Mount, he smelled the brine of a cold Atlantic that conspired with gray sand and skies to almost breach a mostly vacant Provincetown hotel. Him inside of it, this other life, in which he’s wiping down a bar of bird’s-eye maple while others serve white men, their black hands in white gloves in mahogany smoke-swirled rooms, while one of the white men says to a servant, “All this and I still feel like a fraud.”
“…Back in Kansas,” Frank was saying, not noticing George’s drifting attention, “when I was just a kid, this old fella knows my folks, white guy, he gets me on part-time for Christmas at the post office. Well, I worked the swing shift at the warehouse by the airport, and all day I’d see planes taking off and landing, and nighttime I’d just watch the lights go up and down and listen to those Pratt and Whitneys like they were singing me a lullaby.” The marine smiled. He did not tell George that a few years after he fell in love with the DC-3s and Ford Tri-Motors he had watched from the windows of the Topeka Airport’s mail warehouse, he would also watch a hundred soldiers from the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army run down a hillside, all on fire, screaming like demons from the nightmares of a child, a whole stream of them like tiny burning ants from his perch in the cockpit of his Corsair. They stripped off their quilted napalm-covered uniforms in a wind so cold it seemed to move through the valley as though in a solid state, as though it had transformed into a previously unknown element. He did not tell George, nor would he tell anyone else, not ever, that he had never slept so well as he did that night, having guided his plane through the unassailable darkness to the scratch of dirt they called a runway near Yonpo, his flight suit on the floor of the Quonset hut that was his home in Korea, his body still reeling in the residue of flight.
“Lots changed since I was a young man,” said George. “You know, I knew a feller once said he seen the Wright brothers’ first flight.”
The marine was quiet. He thought of the cold stars above the Chosin Reservoir. “I guess that’s progress, sir.”
They parted ways in Fayetteville. George got on the evening bus and stepped off two hours later. A yellow moon hung low in the sky. Out of the darkness, the scattered one-story brick buildings that made up Pembroke, North Carolina, appeared. And George went into a diner he had not seen in almost seventy-five years.
THREE
ON THE NIGHT Rawls discovered what had happened to Nurse, a man named Antony Levallois watched a line of lanterns emerge from the woods behind Bob Reid’s house. The specks of light floated down the river road that formed the two-mile-long south boundary of Beauvais Plantation. He was tired, but at nearly forty years old had become accustomed to the peculiarities of his life and did not expect them to change. He sometimes attributed his uneasy disposition to loneliness, for though he felt little more than contempt for most of the people he met, he regretted their eventual absence at least as much.
Mr. Levallois went to the stable and knocked on his groom’s door. When he heard a shuffle he told the boy to have his horse saddled and brought to the porch. As he leaned against the stone balustrade and rail, it occurred to him that he had not touched another human being in a good long while. Mother and Father were long dead. He had a brother who had returned as a failure to their ancestral home in Nantes nearly twenty years before. He remembered touching a boy and the boy touching him back, in a large wardrobe at the school at number 5 Place du Bouffay where his father sent him to study as a boy, and the letters, seemingly hundreds of them, sent down the Loire and over the Atlantic, that begged his father to let him return to Virginia. He’d bedded a few of his slaves when he was in his twenties to dissipate a foul choleric humor, he told himself; first a beautiful quadroon boy he’d bought on a whim while attending to business near Suffolk, then the boy’s mother, then sister, and a few others that made little to no impression on him, for by the time he entered his early thirties he felt his humors had reached a kind of equilibrium and that those base desires were mostly gone. He had never been married. And he had never slept with a white woman.
Even when he considered the way he distributed justice among his slaves, he could not ignore the fact that it was always mediated by some instrument or another: a long pine sapling, a whip, or a pair of shears. Not that this caused him much distress. While he was not a religious man, he did make room for God when he provided the best explanation for a thing that perplexed him. Levallois did not think that his chattels were inherently different from him by constitution, or that they lacked intelligence. He had seen plenty of white men lazier and duller than his best slaves. But he also took it on faith that the state of things was an expression of God’s will. What he missed was something he had really never had. He had spent his life making such a production of earning the respect of other men that he now came to resent it if it came slowly, or if it seemed to be obligatory or performed. He felt with a deep disappointment that whatever he had built was not the same thing as who he was: a man named Levallois, thirty-nine years old, born near the intersection of four counties in central Virginia but raised largely in France, and now getting to a point where the absence of a woman in his life diminished him in the eyes of other men. He might have thought that this reflect
ed the ordained state of things as well, but here we have the contradictions of what we might call Mr. Levallois’s faith: it was only strong when it worked clearly in his favor.
He rode his horse across his property to catch up to the line of lanterns and the riders who carried them. The road curved off there toward the river on the western end of his property. After a few minutes of waiting in the road he saw the gray outlines of four riders emerge through the cold spring fog, a band of glowing light above the tree line to the east. He recognized Bob Reid first, and behind him Reid’s neighbor, the tavern keeper Wilson Baker. He knew both men in passing, Bob Reid perhaps a bit more than that, as a few acres of his place adjoined Beauvais and he usually hired him to take his tobacco down to market on the narrow gauge. The other men would have been unlikely to say the same about Levallois.
The third rider was Pete Rivers, who doubled as both deputy sheriff and town drunkard. It was common knowledge that Rivers’s family had been among the first to settle this area, back when it had been a refuge for Huguenots the British wanted to be rid of and a shield between the Indians and Byrd’s Virginia planters to the east. Pete could see a variation of his own name in a graveyard where the old Monacan village once stood, the place where these refugees intended to build a city of their own. Though Rivers’s people would survive those first hard years and go on to occupy an important position in the county, he and his father had managed to undo generations of hard work, and Pete now survived on a bitter mixture of the reputation of the dead and the pity of the living. Pete, when drunk, sometimes imagined that city: the permanence of brick, the noon sun a blinding reflection off white sandstone, but it had not been built. His family, like all of the other families that survived, eventually quit the village and burrowed into the solitude of their allotted land. A lonely wall of unblemished forest stretched unending to the west. And after a while they were Americans.
The last rider Levallois saw was Emily. She looked at him briefly, as if he were but one of many features in the land to fall under her appraisal. He was surprised by how competently she controlled her mount, a mottled gray Percheron stallion he thought would have been too large for most men to put under saddle. Though still very much a girl, Emily looked to Levallois like a woman who had once been beautiful. It seemed somehow difficult to see her clearly, as if a thin haze obscured that beauty, rather than the fact that what he really saw in her was more possibility than residue, though each could have diverged from his ideals by a matter of the same degree. The simple geometry of her face meant nothing to him, and neither did her unusual eyes, nor anything about her that he might learn through her companionship. But he felt drawn to her regardless of all that. And though he could not articulate it at that time, perhaps because this attraction was one that would never cross into the territory of thought even up until the day he died, he saw in her both a past and future that could be possessed. To Levallois, she could be anyone he might make her into, but more important she could be everyone. That morning, seeing her on that huge horse on the river road, he pushed against the part of himself that desired Emily Reid, a fourteen-year-old girl, beneath him in every way that could be measured, and detested it. And that is part of what made him who he was. He wanted a blank slate. To possess one girl was a satisfaction received already in a state of decomposition. But to possess them all was something else entirely.
Bob stopped his horse in the road. He took off his hat and offered a good morning to Levallois.
“Trouble, Mr. Reid?” said Levallois.
“My boy seems to have run off. Hope we ain’t disturb your sleep,” said Reid.
“No, sir. I seldom sleep the night through.”
“I had to fetch Mr. Baker and the deputy here to help me hunt for him.”
“Damn shame,” Levallois said. “World’s in a shameful state.”
“His momma said he’s after some young thing across the county line,” said Rivers. “We’re headed down to the landing to see if that old Melungeon caught a whiff.”
Without invitation Levallois nudged his horse to the front of the line and spurred it to a brisk trot. The men exchanged curious looks. Wilson Baker shrugged and said, “He’s a strange bird, ain’t he?” Bob and Pete agreed he was and that was as close as they were willing to get to a comprehensive assessment. They followed him down the road.
Emily hung back a bit as the men rode off. She was excited by their encounter with Mr. Levallois. He was a striking man. Quite tall and dark complected. He wore a neatly trimmed but full mustache. She thought that he might make a good figure for a statue. She had only known of him before through bits of overheard conversation while around adults. That queer Frenchman, they’d say. Or, He’s got the whole county all the way up under his boot. One man might tell another that they had seen him at a distance on a ride, and nothing more. It occurred to Emily that though these were the words they used to talk about him, the one they should have used was echoing through her head, repeated in the same way she’d learned it in her vocabulary lesson with her mother: deference, deference. She watched the four riders disappear into the woods as they rode toward the ferry crossing. She spurred her big stallion on, her mind reeling from lack of sleep, for the first time considering that the world might be a game no one knew the rules to, and someone who claimed otherwise was sure to be a liar. Her mind drifted as she rode to catch them. She barely held the reins. The dream came back, partway. A bright sun above the fields. Wings beating the air, terribly.
Rawls left the old man’s cabin on the soybean farm and headed toward the landing not quite two hours before Mr. Levallois encountered Bob’s party on the road. He knew he was taking a risk trying to use the bateau ferry as a runaway, but the river was still much too cold to swim across and he did not know where he might find a boat or how to use one if he did. He also knew that the ferryman, the Melungeon named Spanish Jim from up in the mountains, was viewed with a suspicion verging on contempt by most of the white folks he’d heard speak about him. Though this could sometimes cause a man to double down on his disdain for colored folks, it was also occasionally a sign of what passed for compassion in the white man’s world.
He stood in the tree line for a while and watched Spanish Jim and a boy lying on their bedrolls next to a sputtering fire. The firelight cast a glow around the meadow where the two figures slept and shimmered where its reflection broke up in the water near the shoreline and the small dock. He stepped out into the meadow, the ferryman’s camp about halfway between the woods and the road, and made his way toward where the old man snored noisily. As he stood over the two figures, it occurred to Rawls that he had not considered just exactly what he was going to say to get this man to take him across. He only knew that Nurse was somewhere on the other side. He could get to her. He knew he could, dammit. The dawn-to-dusk pass was still in his shirt pocket. If he could reach the city before another night fell, if he could get to Jackson Ward and slip into the crowd of free black faces, if he could get close enough to the Devil’s Half Acre…
“Howdy,” a small voice said to him.
Rawls turned and saw the sleeping boy was now sitting upright, looking at him blankly. He did not reply. His body precariously balanced between stillness and potential motion.
“Jim says we run the boat between sunup and sundown.” By way of emphasis the boy pointed one small hand upward and the other downward.
“You know if Jim here makes exceptions?” Rawls asked. He reached to the small of his back as if to stretch, feeling the handle of the tobacco knife tucked into his britches. Spanish Jim continued to snore contentedly.
“Ain’t studied that word,” the boy said, then casually circled the dying fire and nudged at Spanish Jim’s side with his bare foot.
The old man grumbled, stretched beneath his blanket, and yawned.
The boy grabbed at his ear and shouted into it, “Wake up, Jim! We got a customer!”
The old man sat up, looked Rawls over, and said, “There’s a rooster in them w
oods yonder. First boat goes across by his say-so.”
Rawls looked up the road into the darkness of the woods. “Well, you see, Mr. Jim, I was hoping to get a jump on things this morning…”
Jim put up his hand and stopped him.
It occurred to Rawls that Spanish Jim was the darkest white man he’d ever seen. And it was obvious why some might call him an Indian or a mustee on account of his color, but by studying his features Rawls didn’t see how he could be anything but white folks, especially with those blue eyes tucked into all them wrinkles.
The old man held his hand up until all three of them were still and quiet. “Now, young Master Talbot, you listen real good to what I’m about to tell this feller.”
“All right, then,” said the boy.
Rawls shifted from one foot to the other, readying himself to throw all his weight in either direction and run like hell if the need arose.
Jim went on, saying, “I don’t want you to tell me nothing, hear? I damn sure don’t want to be making no special trips across this river. The whole course of our conversating ought to go like so, ‘Ol’ Jim, I’d like to ride that bateau ’cross the river.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, surely, mister, if you got two bits, I’ll clear a space good enough for the Christ Child himself.’ You get my meaning?”
