A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  “I remember a little. But it was so long ago. I don’t even know if it would make a difference now.” He laughed.

  “Don’t that depend on what you’re hoping to find?”

  “Sure,” he said, “but it’s all stuff you just can’t put out in front of any old person.”

  “Come on now,” Lottie said, feigning an affront, “don’t go acting like I’m just anybody. If you came up down here it’s likely we’re some kind of kin. Most everybody around here is in one way or another. Who knows, my momma over there might know something. She’s always in everybody’s business.”

  “Well, that’s just it,” George began. “I was a foundling. Far as I can tell I ain’t been kin to anybody in a good long while.”

  “Let’s just say we’re long-lost cousins. Don’t know any different, do we? Maybe we can help.”

  “All right,” George started, shifting in his seat. “I’m looking for a little cabin way back in a cypress grove along the Lumber. Lived there as a youngster with the woman who took me in. I don’t know how to get there exactly, but I reckon it can’t be too far.”

  “Sounds like a lot of places around here,” Lottie said, “but it’s something.”

  George went on, “You’re too young to know it yet, and I don’t mean to patronize, but when you get to be my age you see how your life just starts to fade away. And I don’t mean at the edges, I mean right in the center of it. Sometimes seems like you wake up with no history, no connection to anything. Almost like amnesia, except you don’t forget your name and all, just where you fit into a world that changes too fast to keep up with. So I remember little things, but I don’t know why. And I remember big things, but I don’t know why. Mostly I don’t remember much of anything at all.”

  She reached over and picked up the rind of his unfinished toast but kept quiet.

  George folded his hands in his lap and looked at the girl. “See, I used to watch the log drivers on their way to the Pee Dee and the lumber mills down in Georgetown near the coast. And I remember thinking, Anywhere but here. I got looked after pretty well, all things considered. But one day I just figured, That’s where I’m going. And this woman, she treated me like her own, loved me like I was her own true son…”

  “But?” Lottie asked.

  “But I wasn’t. It sounds silly now. Back then I would’ve swore it was the only thing that mattered. So one day I put some clothes in a little bag, hoofed it upriver to the logging show, and never looked back.”

  “She didn’t want you to go.”

  George paused before answering. He rubbed his old beat-up hands inside each other. “I didn’t ask. Didn’t say a word of goodbye. Just up and left.”

  “I don’t know much, Mr. Seldom,” Lottie said. “But I’m sure you weren’t the first to say ‘Anywhere but here.’ I say it once a day, and I know I won’t be the last.”

  George smiled ruefully. They sat there together in silence for a while longer as he sank into memory. On the day he left he looked back from his perch on the log raft as the riverbanks disappeared into the cypress swamps. The breadth of black water covered in shadow even at midday. The sky blue and arcing above the clot of logs as the whole operation drifted downriver toward the Low Country. Rice extended beyond both banks of the river until there were two small green waves at each horizon. But for the stilted white winnowing barns, and the straw-hatted figures who came and went from them, hunched and stooping from their labor, George felt as though he was being carried through a vast, unexplored prairie. Beyond the prairie he imagined great cities walled up to heaven, but in truth he only found more wilderness. Soon enough, he could not even say where his home had been.

  FIVE

  BOB REID LOST his right arm in the Battle of Mechanicsville in June of ’62. He had been a soldier in the Virginia Volunteer Dragoons for less than a year when he found himself lying just above the swampy waterline of Beaverdam Creek conversing with an enemy soldier, a Pennsylvanian named Ernst Drahms, who had happened to fall close to, and soon after, Bob. He could not remember exactly what had happened to him, only that he had lost a shoe in deep mud somewhere between crossing the waist-high creek and running through tall grass toward the Federal lines and had awoken some hours later assuming that he had been killed.

  He mistook life for death on account of a curious illusion. The sun was still out when he opened his eyes. All around him the world buzzed and there was one tree standing by itself in the green meadow between the trenches, and the sound of the creek flowed in and out of the terrible hum in his head. It seemed to him that he had been deposited into Eden, or if not Eden, then he was getting a look at it before he got there. He could even see his body a few feet away from him, if we measure using distances occurring in the corporeal world, and he imagined passing away from it, not in ascension, but, still, a definite movement away, that he could be sure of.

  In actual fact, the out-of-body experience he thought he had was only Bob’s mind attempting to incorporate new information into its understanding of the world. The arm, which he had accurately identified as being the one to which his mind had always been married previously, was in reality no longer a part of his entire body. He had made the mistake of seeing his hand, the sleeve of his uniform, the unique arrangement of hair along the knuckles and above his wrist, and assuming, understandably, we might grant, that because it was oriented with the fingers pointing toward him and from several feet away, in a manner he would sometimes think of as accusatory later in his life, the rest of his body was still attached somewhere deeper into the grass beyond his ability to see, that his eyes ought to be looking out from and not into the wall of waving wild rye that hid whatever it was that existed beyond the elbow of his uniform.

  He fixated on that spot in the tangle of bunchgrass for a while. Sensation returned, though slowly. Nausea overtook him in the evening, and he spent a while vomiting onto his own shoulder, discovering that movement had become a difficult proposition. He almost choked on it, once or twice, and he found it necessary to spit with all his might to keep from having these acidic expulsions return to fill his mouth and nose. His throat burned. Thirst returned. The sun fell beyond the trees. The sky darkened, hiding smoke on the wind from the chimney fires of nearby farms. Before full dark, Bob thought he recognized a pattern on the blades of grass. Some specks in shadow. Some wet black dew. He heard voices. Moans. The buzzing of a million flies.

  Darkness on darkness. The night had a face. It knelt on his chest. Its weight pushed him deeper into the mud. Before it he felt only fear, as though his entire being had become a conduit for that one state. Distinctions fell away. He saw where he had been before his birth. The darkness there, too. A void broken only by spirals of color. A vastness so great as to be meaningless. The being he had not yet become spun through it helplessly.

  He sat bolt upright, spat from the paralyzed terror of the void back into a simple, remorseless summer night on earth. His breathing was out of control, shallow and quick. He tried to raise himself up out of the mud only to collapse back into it face-first. The world became pain. Pain became the world. He sang an irreproducible song.

  A voice spoke. It was close, near the tree line on the shoulder of ground above the creek bed where he had fallen that afternoon. “Friend,” the voice called. “Friend! Are you dying?”

  He tried to grab at the hand sticking out through the grass. He hung his head with exhaustion and looked down at the bloody mess below his right shoulder. He howled. “One of my arms is yonder in that grass,” Bob yelled. “Believe my legs are broke, too.”

  Bob would never be privy to the exact sequence of events that led him to be lying, on speaking terms with death, in the grassy bed of a forgettable little creek outside Mechanicsville, Virginia, barely more than twenty miles from his home. All he’d ever remember is that he’d gotten his foot stuck in the mud after wading through the creek and charging toward the enemy lines. Almost parallel in time, a seventeen-year-old from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, pulled
the string of his three-inch gun, which sent a projectile weighing approximately eight pounds toward the creek, across which streamed a line of whooping rebels that had until that moment included Sergeant Bob Reid of Chesterfield County. After successfully yanking his shoe out of the mud, he held it aloft with his right hand, and the projectile took his arm off somewhere between his elbow and shoulder. It would have been difficult to be more precise, due to the resulting damage. His legs were broken in multiple places over the next few minutes, trampled by a frantic mass of men and boys as they attacked and then retreated. He never saw the shoe again.

  He waited for a few minutes, expecting a response from the voice that had called out to him. The mud he found himself in was the color of new brick and had a curious sheen in the moonlight. With his left hand he packed more mud onto the ugly protuberance below his right shoulder. There was still something uncanny about his arm being so close. The idea that it yet belonged to another man hidden in the tall grass did not leave him entirely and, in fact, never would.

  “You still out there?” he called. He knew that he was not alone, for the little meadow was full of the sounds of suffering. Moans and grunts and calm, accepting sighs. Most of the screams had tapered off, the inevitable exhaustion of the human vocal cords being a thing toward which Bob began to feel a tremendous amount of gratitude. Soon he heard the noise of departure from the shoulder of the hill above him. Orders tersely barked. Wheels rolling over the rockier ground up there. Branches snapped and whipping in the dark.

  The other voice came back. “Hear that ruckus? That would be the sound of my abandonment.” The Federals were withdrawing.

  “How you fixed over there? You need anything?” The last question made Bob ashamed, having forgotten the obvious need in which the dead and nearly dead found themselves, and that he was in no position to provide redress to any of the grievances this particular man would certainly have.

  Bob heard the man emit a pitiful mixture of curses, moans, and laughter. “I’ve been stuck in my belly. Maybe shot, too. Hard to say. Got shit coming out where the blade went in. Can’t be good.” The man sighed. “I’ve cracked my glasses, too.”

  To his left, Bob heard the sound of two men grappling. Enemies that had fallen too close to each other and too alive to let things be. A cry of pain. A terrifying holler of triumph and relief. Daylight seemed to come no closer, as if the sun had the good sense not to shed its light on a scene so clearly belonging to the realm of night. He wished someone would light a fire, at least.

  They agreed that it was better to talk than to try to kill each other. “Besides,” the man said, “I think we will die soon either way.” He learned the man’s name in conversations long enough to require only a few breaths each. Ernst Drahms was a butcher in Lancaster, but he was originally from Hamburg. In 1842 his parents and siblings died in a fire that consumed much of the old city. He left for America with an overbearing, know-it-all uncle when he was seven. He did not remember much of his birthplace: a line of modest Lutheran spires painted in ash, the Elbe almost purple against the spits of sand and grasses at its estuary, a language left behind and then relearned in the hills and farms of central Pennsylvania.

  “Can I tell you something funny, Bob?”

  “Surely,” he said.

  “The man who owns the newspaper where I live paid me three hundred dollars to take his place. Maybe he’ll have them write something nice about me.” Bob didn’t say anything. “I guess it’s not really all that funny,” said Ernst.

  The night receded. Bob drifted in and out of consciousness. Before daybreak he heard a line of friendly skirmishers and litter bearers splash through the creek from the lines he’d left the day before. It was getting hot again already. No sign of rain. The air thick. He tried to call out to them, but his throat was so dry as to be sealed up. He heard them chattering around him. They lifted up a few groaning men and took them to the rear. He was almost stepped on by a boy who knelt down in the mud next to him and poked at his dirty face with his finger. “Shit fire!” the boy hollered. “Feller’s still breathing here.”

  Bob croaked, “Water.”

  “We gonna get you fixed right up, mister, don’t you worry.” He poured a splash of water from his canteen onto a soiled rag and with it wet Bob’s lips. Neither of them thought that he would live much longer. The boy then held his canteen up to Bob’s mouth, gave him a drink, and sat down next to him. The litter bearers seemed to have quite a bit of work. It occurred to Bob that the boy was likely less than twenty years old. He had spots under the dirt caked on his face. The boy rifled through Bob’s pockets. “Don’t think you’ll be needing all this, mister; you mind?” he asked. He took a tintype of Emily from inside Bob’s coat pocket, held it up in the morning light, and said, “Kind of pretty, I guess. Pretty enough for my needs.” He also took the last bit of Bob’s coffee and a letter from Emily that the illiterate boy would use to wipe himself with after shitting in a ditch as the battle cascaded eastward a few days later.

  The litter bearers finally arrived. They lifted him up and the howls he made were subhuman in nature, but didn’t seem to bother anyone all that much. He wanted to ask them to grab his ring off the hand that was still resting in the grass, but found himself weeping, overcome with pain. As they took him away he watched the scavengers pick the pockets of the dead. He looked for Ernst. A few Federals lay dead or dying in the meadow. Bob could not be sure which body owned the voice that he had spoken to all night, but he guessed it was the man he saw at the bottom of the hill a few yards away. He wore dirty spectacles. He looked dazed but alive. The scavengers got to him first. They took something from his pockets. The boy who had found Bob removed Ernst’s broken glasses and put them on his face. Blood speckled the lenses and painted the fractures in thin, dark lines of red. The German raised up his arms feebly. Bob watched from the unstable perch of his litter. Don’t do that, he said to himself. Don’t do that! he tried to call out louder. The boy looked back at Bob departing on the stretcher. “Don’t give me that goddamn look,” he said. The morning sun flashed in reflection. The scavengers then caved in Ernst’s face, taking turns with the butts of their rifles. The impacts made a dull, thumping sound. They whooped and yelped. They danced their dance.

  July was a dream. Visions and glimpses of visions. Bob was centered in the void most of the summer, though what he remembered of it when he woke in an airy ward of the Confederate hospital on Chimborazo Hill amounted to very little. Leaves dancing in the wind over the dusty roads of central Virginia. Maybe the noise of some river or another nearby. Heat unacquainted with the mercy of a breeze. Lucid for a two-day stretch in early August, he recalled waking with an itch on his right hand, but when he looked down the hand was still not there. Only a stump bandaged and covered over in plaster. But damn did it itch. When it did not itch, it hurt. Sometimes in the night he’d wake to clenched fists. He would let his left hand relax, but the ghost fist would not release, and the pain of it, seized up and indifferent to the direction of his mind, was a new torture.

  He remembered the attendants bringing in a boy wounded at Cedar Mountain. They placed him in a cot across from Bob. Both legs mangled by grapeshot. The boy had both legs, more or less, thought Bob, but as to his feet, their presence was inconclusive. They gave the boy chloroform right before the operation began so there was no screaming; instead, for the next twenty minutes Bob listened to the sound of the surgeon scraping down the cutoff ends of his thigh bones to a flat, regular surface to ensure they would not push back through the skin after he was stitched up. Bob wished they’d have let the boy scream. Couldn’t be worse than the noise that rasp made against the poor kid’s bones.

  In and out. Another run of unreliable consciousness. The stump began to stink. Out and in. The pain was almost gone by September, and Bob woke to mostly healed wounds. Soon he was well enough to send a letter. Though the hospital was less than a day’s ride from his home in Chesterfield County, it took two weeks to receive a reply. Fina
lly, Emily wrote to him:

  Dear Father,

  I am very sorry you were hurt. I want to come see you but Mr. Levallois says Richmond is too dangerous. Women riot in the streets for bread and the free negroes in Jackson Ward are telling every slave they meet that soon they, too, will be free. The lies. How can man undo what God himself has done? It is a terrible calamity and I pray for our people. Mr. Levallois came to see me often in early summer, some weeks he visited every day. I can scarcely believe it has been so long since you left. More than a year? You looked very smart in your gray uniform and yellow kepi. I did not think you would be gone as long as this. After June, I received no answer to my letters. I thought you dead and wept for days. Mr. Levallois said that sometimes war is too much for a man, and if you deserted, not to judge you too harshly.

  Mother is ill again and so is Aurelia. They are kept together in a sickroom at Beauvais. Mr. Levallois says it is best to keep me away from sickness. Another reason I cannot come to visit you, though I hope to see you again soon. He says the hospital is lousy with a thousand varieties of fever. Rawls looks after the mules and has kept some money coming in, minus what Mr. Levallois takes for renting him out to us. He is very generous.

  Father, I fear the world is falling apart. Not even Champion around to bark from her lead on the sycamore. Some nights I have terrible dreams. We had our first autumn chill though it is only September and tomorrow Mr. Levallois is sending Rawls to make me a cord of firewood. I went to see Mother in her sickroom but could only speak to her from behind the door. Her voice was very weak. I am so afraid for her. What will become of us after this terrible war? I so want things to go back to the way they were before. Do you think they will? Mr. Levallois offered me the use of his overseer’s house so I would not be so lonely. He says solitude and troubles do not mix. The overseer was killed at Seven Pines so his house is empty. When Mother and Aurelia are well again Mr. Levallois says I am to take a room in the big house.