A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  They said the conscription officers had been causing hell for everyone. You couldn’t help nobody with nothing or they’d lock you up for associating and ship you off to hard labor in Wilmington. “Shit, Edgar,” his cousin Charlie said, “they running through so many goddamn crackers on the line they ain’t got none left to do the work. They’ve rounded up the black folks already. Don’t matter if you’re free or not. And they ain’t even paying the masters when they take them out the fields. They started taking Croatan folks a few months back. Your brother said they went through the Indian school outside Lumberton rounding up boys younger than him. Next day they were looking for the rest of us and set upon your house.” And here Edgar was a deserter to boot. If they were rounding up Croatan Indians, Edgar figured he was bound for special treatment and began to think of an appropriate response.

  He camped in the clearing next to the wreckage of his house. By day he sifted through the ash. By night he bathed in the river, and the soot came off him in blooms so wide and deep they dulled the moon as it reflected off the already dark water. Before the law came down again on the ruins of his house that warm September day in ’62, Edgar found a slim, fire-bleached finger bone in the ashes and took it down to the river. He did not know what to do or if there was any way to douse the fire the discovery of the bone had stoked inside his chest. He leaned against a tree along the water’s edge and sat there till the sun went down, until the lightning bugs arranged themselves like a minor constellation. They hovered over the murky water and pulsed and flashed as if by magic. He decided, deliberately and without regret, to make those responsible feel an amount of pain that would exactly equal in proportion the love he had felt for his wife. Soon enough he would see that there was no way to quantify the infinite and formless pulse that had filled him from the day he first saw her, a young girl bathing in a gingham dress in the Lumber River, the heat having taken physical form in a haze around her face and hair, which was dark and wet with amber water. And what they took from him could not be counted either, but he vowed to make an effort at the calculations anyway. They came around again a week later. The boys would be shipped off to dig trenches or labor on the docks. And Edgar to the gallows. Ten Seldom boys were there that day. Eight left Edgar’s camp when the shooting stopped. After all that had transpired in the almost four years since, the remaining six woke from a fitful rest in the woods just west of Edenton to watch the sun come up over the Albemarle Sound.

  George poked his fingers through the holes in the striped blanket. He looked over at the man who had carried him the night before. His hair was black and stringy and had no shine. He was filthy just about everywhere visible, as were the others.

  George asked something in a timid voice, barely out of babble.

  Edgar was startled. No one had spoken for almost twenty-four hours. He only heard the word “home” clearly. “Where’s home, friend?” he asked.

  The boy did not reply, but instead shrugged and toddled over and sat at Edgar’s leg, where Edgar fed him from his own bowl.

  “I don’t know either,” Edgar said. “We’re just gonna have to find you one.”

  The Seldom Gang left the winter camp they’d made along the Albemarle Sound as spring returned. They rode slowly south on thin strips of land above the marshes, sometimes close enough to open water that they could see the barrier islands in the distance. “They got ponies on them islands,” Edgar said to George one day, hoping to cheer the boy from the doldrums that seemed to make up the greater part of his disposition. It did not work. George instead imagined horses exiled from the land, their heads struggling through the low chop of gray water in the bay, cursed to swim ever farther out to sea.

  Thompson Seldom rode up next to his brother and pinched the boy on his cheeks. George adopted Edgar’s posture, but in miniature, sitting upright and holding on to the pommel as they rode, then slouching back into the folds of Edgar’s coat. “We got to do something with the feller, Ed. He already made it out of one scrape. He’s been all right holed up here with us, but with the whole world after us it’d be a sin to put him in the middle of what we got coming,” said Thompson.

  “I know it, Brother. But it ain’t like we can just set the feller by the side of the road. Only place I know to take him is back to Lumberton.”

  Thompson scoffed. “Dammit, Ed. We gonna get shot to shit if we go back there.”

  “You want to take him back to Virginia?” asked Edgar. “Look at him, Tommy. Where else in the world is this boy gonna get treated right? For two hundred years Croatan and black folks been living free in Robeson County, North Carolina. War’s been over since last April. If we can get him there without all hell coming down on us, he ought to be left alone. I’m tired of hiding, Brother. And besides, last I checked we were carrying guns, too.”

  “Edgar,” Thompson said, “just don’t forget that we ain’t all as eager to get to where we’re going as you.”

  They all eventually agreed. And though what was coming for them would find them in the mountains a few months later, they were gifted with a respite from all that for a little while, and they lived the last allotment of their time on earth fearlessly, in the realm of the possible, refusing to look over their shoulders as they slowly made their way home.

  They crossed the border into Robeson County in May. Thompson and Charlie both asked Edgar if they ought not keep to the woods, but Edgar felt that if they were going to ask the boy to let this place be his home, they should treat it like a place one need not be afraid of. He did make one concession, though, passing little George to Thompson and telling him to keep back a ways so they could make a break for it if there was trouble.

  Edgar guided the procession down the dusty road that led to town. It was oppressively hot, unseasonably so for May, and at first no one seemed the least bit interested in the presence of the riders. They had been on the run since well before the war ended, and though a large plurality of the people in that part of North Carolina had never been truly invested in the cause, it seemed that the effects of the defeat were indiscriminately contagious.

  Still, a group of men carefully watched them pass from the wood-plank walkway out front of Greene’s Provision and Supply. As the riders neared, Edgar heard a voice call out, “Is that you, Edgar Seldom?” The voice belonged to Mr. Greene, the proprietor and a man long known by Edgar and his people.

  “Best I can tell,” he replied.

  “Y’all back for good?”

  Edgar reached down to the scabbard beneath his right leg and quite conspicuously toyed with the stock of his side-by-side. He then halted his horse and rubbed his right hand through his long dark hair, which fell nearly level with the end of his full beard. The gesture exposed the two LeMat pistols he kept tucked into his belt. “Not just now, Mr. Greene. I don’t think so anyway,” he said.

  “People too wore out for trouble, Ed,” said Mr. Greene, though Edgar was not sure if that statement was meant to reassure him he’d be free from harm, or if it was an indirect way of Mr. Greene asking not to be included in his retribution.

  “Count me in that number,” said Edgar.

  “Most of them folks who gave you all that guff are dead…”

  “Shameful,” another man said.

  “Indeed. Sinners all,” Mr. Greene continued. “And the ones who lived, well, they went looking for wool and come back shorn.”

  “Guff, you say?” Edgar’s heart thrashed around inside his chest like a fox caught in a foot trap. His arms broke out in goose pimples despite the heat. “You know, I think I heard something about those fellers getting killed,” Edgar said. “Heard getting killed was catching for a good long while there.”

  Two of the men on the boardwalk slowly put a little distance between themselves and Mr. Greene. “You go on and ask anyone, Edgar,” Mr. Greene said. “No one’s causing trouble for any Croatan folks. Hell, we’re even letting the niggers be, even though they dragged us into that damn war.”

  Edgar laughed. “Well, I’m s
ure we all appreciate it very kindly,” he said, and spurred on his horse.

  After the cloud of dust subsided, and the riders were clear of town, the men gathered in front of Greene’s Provision and Supply simultaneously exhaled the collective breath they’d been holding. “Goddamn,” one of them exclaimed, “I thought it was about to jump off for sure.”

  “I ain’t waiting to give him another go,” said Mr. Greene, who then trotted across the road to the bank where the small telegraph office had a clerk.

  Edgar and his kin rode out toward the river under the light-shot curtains of moss that hung from the live oaks and cypresses. Edgar figured they had a whole day, maybe two if they were lucky.

  “So what’s the plan, Brother?” Thompson asked.

  “You remember Miss Dolores?”

  “Sure. She used to scare the ever-living shit out of me. Thought she was mixed up in all kinds of hoodoo.”

  “Naw,” said Edgar. “She’s just lived a long time alone.”

  “What’s she got to do with us?” asked Thompson.

  “Nothing. That’s the point. And I’m hoping she might want some company.”

  Thompson grabbed the boy up under his arms and tossed him in the air above his saddle, catching him and repeating the process until George laughed uncontrollably. He put his hand on the little boy’s shoulder and settled him back into his perch just behind the pommel, gave it a firm but gentle squeeze, and said to no one in particular, “I hope you have a good life, George.”

  It took them nearly an hour on the poorly tended roads through the swamps around the Lumber River to reach Miss Dolores’s cabin. They roped their horses a little ways back from the house, and Edgar approached the stairs that led up to her porch alone.

  He called her name and she came to the door. She was of an indeterminate age, and depending on the angle at which she stood, it was also impossible to say whether she was Croatan, mustee, white folks, or some other variety of person Edgar would not know what to call. This bothered people, and for a long time she had withdrawn from the world and its curious but predictable frustration with uncertainty.

  “Do you know me, ma’am?” asked Edgar.

  “I do,” she said.

  “I’ve come to ask you for a favor.”

  “Do I owe you one?” she asked.

  “No. I’ve been about settling my accounts and I’m sure you owe me nothing.”

  “I heard about your trouble.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Your wife was a pretty thing. A good, God-fearing girl.”

  “She was.”

  “She ain’t come back, has she?”

  “No, ma’am. Home Guard killed her when I was up in Virginia back in the war.”

  “Ah. I see,” the woman said. “What’s that favor, then?”

  “We got a foundling here.”

  Thompson set the boy down and whispered in his ear. George ran across a few yards of open ground to Edgar and wrapped himself around his leg, where he spun on it as though it were a maypole. The boy looked curiously at the woman.

  “So you know where you’re heading, then?”

  “We do.”

  “How long you think?”

  “We need to be gone soon. After that…I don’t know. It’s coming one way or another.”

  “It never works. But you know that now, I suspect?”

  Edgar hung his head. And though “shame” is the closest word we have for what he felt, it was not exactly that. “I do,” he answered her.

  She came down the steps and picked up the boy and held him tightly. “What’s his name?” she asked.

  “His name is George,” he said. A moment later he added, almost as an afterthought, “It’s George Seldom.” Edgar handed the woman the note they’d found pinned to the small boy’s clothes when they’d discovered him hiding under his dead mother’s skirts. He had been covered in her blood, awash in it, instinctively holding a small knife with a handle of elk antler. The blade had blood on it, though it was long dried by the time they pulled George from beneath that poor woman’s skirts. Blood stained the note as well. Edgar had insisted they stop to wash the child off, so they bathed him in some unnamed icy creek that straddled the dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia. The boy screamed until his tiny voice went hoarse. They wrapped the child in as many warm clothes as they could spare. They were all a little colder that January, but they didn’t mind as much as they might have. He asked Miss Dolores to hold the knife for the child until he was older. “It’s a fine knife. He ought to have a fine thing like that,” he said.

  Edgar put his hands on the child’s cheeks and looked at Miss Dolores in lieu of thanks. She reached up with her free hand and held his own cheek as if Edgar were a small child again himself. He dropped his head to his chest, and his shoulders slumped inward. His brothers saw Edgar racked and silent from where they stood with the horses, and they supposed that they were watching whatever fire that remained in him go out.

  “One good thing still counts,” she said. “Now go.”

  And so they did, their toes dipped already into the water of what awaits us all.

  In a photograph taken six months later, and subsequently printed widely in newspapers of the day, Edgar Seldom, his two younger brothers, and his cousin Charles Bride were seen arranged in a row of hastily built, plain pine coffins standing upright against the unpainted wooden walls that housed the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office in the town of Asheville. The eldest, Edgar, was twenty-two years old. The youngest, his brother Thompson Septimus Seldom, was fifteen. Each man had a noose fashioned around his neck, and the distress caused by their bodies being hung and left to swing for three days from a copse of tulip poplars on the east bank of the French Broad River was plain for all to see. Conspicuous, too, were the numerous bullet holes in their bloodstained shirts, about their faces and heads, and, in the case of young Thompson, in his hands and forearms, which in the photograph were exposed below the short sleeves of his undershirt, each of the men having been killed by the deputized posse that found them bathing unarmed in the river just below the copse of trees from which the corpses were then immediately hung. Further reports and editorials suggested that the grotesque nature of the picture was offensive to the sensibilities of the educated readership of several papers internationally, and that, while certainly a righteous blow had been struck for justice, it might have been more prudent to have communicated the cessation of the wild Croatan Indians’ violent spree in a less shocking way.

  Had he been asked about this discrepancy between the unaltered image captured by his camera and the great ruckus that resulted from its having been seen, the photographer most probably would have mentioned that he’d been forced to wait until that very moment to capture the picture, his sense of propriety (not to mention the technical impossibility of composing a coherent image with all the motion going on) preventing him from taking a picture with children being posed by their parents in front of the open coffins or, as had been the issue the previous day, of including in the frame the group of debutantes picnicking beneath the hanging men, their laughter surely causing him as much discomfort as anyone seeing the image while reading a paper in the front room of their New York townhouse might have felt.

  For many years after, that photograph represented the sum total of history’s interest in the exploits of Edgar Seldom. Copies of it were sold for fifteen cents throughout North Carolina, East Tennessee, and in some places in the southwestern region of the Commonwealth of Virginia. They sold well until the early twentieth century, when an abbreviated summary of the outlaws’ deeds printed on the back gave the pictures a small but temporary uptick in sales, though they were overtaken soon enough by other images of death: men in the long, winding graves of France, the light-pierced wrecks of bank robbers’ getaway vehicles, and the autopsy pictures of dismembered film stars.

  The summary on the back of the picture read as follows:

  Indian bandits kill four officials in Robeso
n County

  War against Confederates! 7 dead on border w/VA

  Two conscription officers murdered in Durham.

  Slaughter in Nansemond County: Injun Seldoms wipe out company of returning heroes!

  Here lie the dead outlaws, killed in a shoot-out with brave lawmen.

  Even as he rose up naked in the cool, waist-deep waters of the French Broad where he bathed, a ridiculous clump of suds clinging to his scarred shoulder and a fraction of a second before he was shot those fourteen times by the posse from the riverbank, Edgar thought of George. He breathed deeply of the free air, and readied himself to die with the certainty that he had done at least one good thing while on this poor, indifferent earth. Only a few of the posse members were ever willing to speak about the incident in the years that followed. One, Hank Jessup, swore that the ghost of Edgar Seldom visited him until the end of his days, which he spent as a greeter and volunteer at the Wonderland Hotel over in Sevier County, Tennessee, sometimes having to shake off a shudder when a vision of the young man’s last smile arrived unexpectedly.

  * * *

  “I got to tell you, Mr. Seldom, we don’t find too many folks looking for answers down here,” Lottie said to George as he finished his breakfast and set it to the side.

  He paused, wondering if he even knew the question he was hoping to find an answer to. “I just thought I might come down here and remember something,” he said.

  “Do you know where to look?”