A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  Your dutiful child,

  Emily

  Weeks more would pass before he walked again, and even then he required the aid of a cane and a leg brace with no less than a dozen parts fully assembled. Such pity accompanied his afternoon constitutionals that he began to feel outwardly monstrous. Mothers on the sidewalks of Church Hill whisked their children out of sight. Even the slaves in the cookhouse averted their eyes when he neared, though Bob never realized that this was due to the lifelong understanding among them that nothing existed in God’s great wide world more dangerous than a white man feeling sorry for himself.

  A slave girl assisted him in his outings. Though Bob did not know it, she was rented to the hospital at such a generous rate that its commandant had given her master, Mr. Levallois of Beauvais Plantation, a silver-plated ceremonial pistol engraved with the words DEO VINDICE as a gesture of appreciation. Had Bob realized his strange connection to the girl, he might have succumbed much earlier to the paranoia that would eventually overtake him after his return to Chesterfield.

  Nurse did not speak to Bob when she was first assigned his convalescence. In fact, she rarely spoke at all unless out of absolute necessity. At the Devil’s Half Acre, she was taught a language beyond speech, one that existed when the ground on which all her torments occurred had been submerged below a channel sea, with a vocabulary that remained unchanged even with the unending forces of thrust and rift at work. From her cell she had seen the rending of the earth, mountains form and then subside and form again, the decay of all things made by God made permanent; animal, vegetable, mineral; the inner workings of the globe condensed down to one fixed point on its topography that she confused, forgivably, with a place outside of time. The tumult of the planet spoke to her in one sentence, said over and over again for a year and a half, the pitiless seasons passing outside on Wall Street, in a voice that took the form of a door creaking, boot heels on a stone floor, and a candle held aloft as it approached the darkness of the whipping room. No, she had learned the language of eternity, and she would not sully herself again with words white men had forced into her mouth if it could be helped.

  A man named Mr. Levallois bought her from Lumpkin for a song in the summer of 1862. She had not eaten in weeks. Lumpkin thought she would be dead soon, so when the dark-haired man offered him a reasonable price for her, she was sold immediately. Mr. Levallois did not say why he’d bought her, only that he had heard what happened to her from her former master and he wanted to offer her a bargain. “Go work at the hospital awhile,” he said, “and I will do something for you in return.” She did not answer him. “You would rather die here?” he asked. Nurse was silent. “I always try to be reasonable,” he said, “but sometimes you niggers don’t understand. You cannot even die unless I allow it. All that you have been and all that you will ever be, I own.” She did not want to work at the hospital. She had no desire to help those wounded men get back to a war that, if won, would bring down a plague on her people of such duration and intensity that even her visions in the whipping room at Lumpkin’s Jail could not have encompassed it. All hope of deliverance abandoned. Mr. Levallois came to see her every day the week after he bought her. She was still at the jail, but she had been moved from the pens into a plain, clean room. The trips to the whipping room ended. Sometimes he came during the day and he would ask her if she had changed her mind. Sometimes he came at night and did not ask anything. She did not understand why this man insisted on her assent when it was not required for him to do as he pleased, but she felt that giving it to him would mean giving away something she might not ever get back. Perhaps, she thought, that is what he was after in the first place. When three more nights passed in the same way she reached a new depth of numbness she had not known before. The next time he entered the room, she spoke. “I’ll go to the hospital. If you’ll leave me be, I’ll go.”

  When she arrived by carriage at Chimborazo that summer, she had very little hope. And though the hope she did have was small, every day it was slightly tended to and nourished as she walked through the pavilions listening to the men and boys bleating like filthy hogs on their way to the abattoir. She recalled the celebrations and send-offs at the beginning of the war so clearly, mere months after her imprisonment at Lumpkin’s Jail. The Devil’s Half Acre was right in the heart of Richmond. In fact, it was the very beating heart of Richmond. And from it Nurse heard a great variety of goings-on. Horns blaring in the squares. The robust youth that passed in disorderly formation that first spring following her imprisonment, their gray uniforms a slow stream that wound down Main Street toward the docks. And now here they were after just over a year of war, four thousand of them arranged in rows, shitting themselves, their gangrenous limbs stinking and useless, many of them dead already, some knowing and some not, as helpless as the firstborn of Egypt without a drop of blood above their doors.

  Nurse knew Bob Reid only by name when she saw him that September. But by overhearing the doctors’ talk, and listening to the man’s own fevered ramblings, she eventually concluded that this was the very same man who owned Rawls and his mother, who owned the mules Rawls worked, who owned the land from which he ran toward their meeting place among the loblolly, before her mistress fell off her horse and died, before she was sent to Lumpkin’s. The first day she arrived at his bedside she cleaned his face with a damp sponge. He passed into and out of delirium. She wanted to ask about Rawls, but since one never knew where trouble would come from she did not. Instead she hinted at deafness when he spoke to her so that she would not have to reply to his muttering. Day upon day. The man wept regularly, not out of pain, Nurse did not think, but from the now-undeniable nature of his enfeeblement.

  Nurse arrived at Bob’s bedside at nine o’clock each morning. It took her twenty minutes to affix the brace to his right leg, the one that had suffered the worst of his trampling. He regained something like lucidity by October; though it was accompanied by a bitterness that Nurse was sometimes afraid would reach out and grab her by the throat. He stared at her as she tightened screws and worked the wooden pieces of the leg brace into place. His green eyes followed her from his expressionless face. He had grown a beard during his time in the hospital that accentuated the gauntness of his wrecked body. She combed his hair and swung his legs off the side of the bed. Into his left hand she placed a cane after dressing him, and with much effort pulled him to his feet.

  Bob breathed deeply as the girl lifted him up. He tested the strength of the cane, letting his weight collect on it very slowly, until he felt it could bear all remaining 136 pounds of him. The testing had become a habit, a ritual, really, because he had already refused to be attended to by his previous nurse, a lovely enthusiastic volunteer from Fluvanna County, after she had seen him fall helplessly to the filthy wood floor of his forty-man ward. The fall had not been the girl’s fault, but Bob became so obsessed with his own shame that he started to hate her; her smiling freckled face, the genuine encouragement she tried to offer that seemed to Bob an unbearable form of condescension. The girl’s slender, youthful body, the outline of which was sometimes visible in the morning light under her bloody garments, tormented him, though it would be difficult to say whether Bob’s fixation was out of unconsummated lust or because of the wholeness and absence of injuries he knew her body to possess.

  Some mornings Bob would say to Nurse, “You mock me, girl?” and she would smile bashfully as if she did not understand until he let the question go. They walked circuits through and around the pavilions at first, until some of his strength returned. They widened their route in November, passing St. John’s Church on a blanket of yellow leaves above the cobblestones. Nurse had to steady him still, and often, and one day Bob looked at her with frustration, being in the curious position of needing her to remain upright while at the same time despising her necessity. “You mock me, girl. I can tell. You pity me like all the rest.”

  Nurse felt intense joy in that moment. For once it seemed as though she had permission from
the world to tell the truth, a condition so rare in her life she had nearly thought it impossible. “No, Mr. Reid,” she said softly, “I do not pity you. I do not pity any of you. And I swear I never will.”

  Bob looked at her briefly, trying to decide whether this was honesty or impertinence, and allowed her to steady him for the first time without resentment. “I thought you were deaf and dumb” was all he said. “All right, then. Let’s keep going.”

  The air was cold that day on the hills above the city. Clouds blackened the sky. The screams of patients barely reached them from the amputation tents, but reached them still. It began to rain. Before Nurse led Bob back to his ward, they passed a pile of discarded limbs, legs and arms, perhaps a hundred or more. Some of them still bled. Toes kicked at the sky above the mud, stupidly. The pile reached the angle of repose. If unmolested, it could have sat there like a monument until the bones were bleached white by the sun over a hundred thousand summers. Until they became nothing more than a white particulate streak in the sediment. Until this whole place sat forgotten again beneath the shallow channel sea she sometimes swam in in her dreams. Nurse saw Bob to his bed and returned to her quarters, passing by the amputation tent again. Agony, then quiet, but never silence. No, there would not be silence in this place for many years. An orderly came out of the tent and tossed a ruined leg onto the pile. The whole assemblage collapsed. Nurse shook her head at the scene. And here I am a child of God, she thought.

  By the time winter came Nurse knew how the war would end. In the evenings, after her duties ended, she would go out to the eastern edge of the hill and watch a line of crowded hearses roll slowly into darkness toward Oakwood Cemetery. As her breath froze on the air, and she pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders, she tallied up the dead. She knew how many might fit into one wagon, could count the wagons as they left the hospital, and could figure how many might have taken their loads in daylight while she attended to her duties. Soon others gathered with her there. One or two might come from the cookhouse and stand quietly as they watched torches flicker in the distance as the gravediggers went about their work.

  “What do you think will happen to us when they figure out they’ve lost?” asked one of the cooks. The question startled Nurse. She realized she had not yet allowed room in her heart for after. Another man explained to the assembled group that he had been rented out to the Confederate army just a few hours before Union cavalry overran his master’s house out on the Middle Peninsula. He told them that the last he’d seen of his master, he and the overseer were herding the unrented slaves into the barn. Eight of them had been deemed unable to contribute to the cause. Two men born in the last century, when the songs of the Mattaponi dances were heard by nearby slaves in the waving green oceans of tobacco, calmly led the remaining six­­­­—a five-year-old girl, twin boys not yet weaned from their mother, a pair of ageless women, and the mother of the children—into the barn. There was no need for the cook to explain that the fire came next, though it is what happened. His hands were so weighed down by his shackles that he could not raise them up to cover his eyes, which in that moment was his only desire. So he shut them tightly against the glow beyond the pines and listened to a single shot ring out.

  “Five thousand since I’ve been here,” she said.

  “Hmm,” the man grumbled in reply.

  “In this one place. Think of it. Soon enough there will be no one left to fight.”

  “How soon is soon enough is what I want to know. Lincoln says we free now, but you know what’ll happen if I go tell master I’m going back to my people out in Middlesex,” the man said.

  Of course Nurse knew. And she did not care what people said, except for the fact that new words being said can sometimes create a new record to measure deeds against. No, she cared what people did. Sadly, what they did was talk most of the time. But now Yanks were killing graybacks by the bushel. That’s doing. Nurse saw the gravediggers’ torches bobbing closer now. The burials ended for the moment. The men trudged along the path leading them back up the eastern slope of Chimborazo Hill and back to their quarters.

  “Someday I will join the free folks in Great Dismal,” the man said quietly. “Someday I will find those islands and live like God intended.”

  Nurse rubbed her belly. It was undeniable. It had been for a good long while. Soon enough she’d show no matter how heavy her clothes were. She wondered what kind of cursed life could have been conceived in that room with Levallois at the Devil’s Half Acre. She was no longer numb. The little one had started kicking. But sorrow had not yet made room for joy inside her heart. Maybe it would open the door someday, if not wide enough for joy then perhaps wide enough for light. She did not know but hoped. That night she dreamed outside of time again. She floated along the narrow avenues between the wards of canvas and clapboard. All empty. The earth was dry and the sun was warm. The tents had been rolled up and a pleasant breeze blew through the canvas, now clean and free of blood and grime. The whole world smelled of apple-cider vinegar and a good hard scrub. She found the last of her patients in a small tent and led them by their hands to a waiting hearse. Their graves waited for them, too. They lay down in the shallow voids, expressionless, as she took up a gleaming shovel and covered them. All the men in gray were dead, from Westmoreland on the Potomac to Glorieta Pass, from Tullahoma to Mobile, Alabama. She was overcome with a sense of finality and permanence. In the dream she thanked God for the great privilege of life. The next day Bob asked her half-a-dozen times why she would not stop smiling. She did not answer. But neither did she stop.

  SIX

  LATE MORNING. George slept in the booth in the diner, his head propped against the sunny window on a stack of folded aprons brought by Lottie not long after their talk subsided and he began to snore. He had joked earlier about the young woman’s lack of experience, but he knew she was old enough to have had her share, and if not, that did not mean she was too young to see what was coming. And though he had not come down here to be a burden in his passing, should it come to that, he surely understood that consequences care only a little for intention or desire.

  It seemed to Lottie that the man slept peacefully, and she began to feel an unexamined warmth toward him that is not uncommon among the young toward the old. And though he did not seem frail in any obvious way, she felt the need to ask her mother if they ought not ask a doctor to come check on him while he dozed.

  “He’s settling up with God, Lottie,” her mother said, “but that doesn’t mean anything’s coming due today.”

  Lottie did not reply, but continued watching the old man with a mixture of curiosity and care. “You think something’s wrong with him, though?” she asked.

  Her mother simply put her hand on Lottie’s dark unblemished cheek, said, “Sure there is. Same thing as everybody else, hon,” and turned away.

  Lottie leaned back against the window glass, warming her back and shoulder blades in the near-noon sun. She crossed her legs and let her feet dangle out over the edge of the booth and lit a cigarette, which she held in her left hand. With her right hand, she reached across the table toward Mr. Seldom, not to touch him, only so that she might be nearer should it somehow be the thing that made a difference. She closed his book and let her hand rest on its worn cover.

  With George asleep, the diner went on in its characteristic quiet. On most days, a dinner rush might consist of two people who had taken a wrong turn and stopped to ask for directions. The chatter of the cooks smoking out back on their upturned milk crates only reached them when a hot wind pushed open the broken door. The bell would ding, and Lottie and her mother would turn to see the door close again behind the retreating breeze.

  “Don’t you think we ought to help him?” Lottie said.

  “You mind your business, young lady,” her mother answered.

  Lottie smiled at her playfully. “Of all people to say such a thing…”

  “Very funny.” Her mother looked at the sleeping man and went on, “I don’t re
call hearing him ask us for help. Besides, what are you gonna do, give him a piggyback ride? You don’t know where he’s trying to go, and you don’t have a way to get there if you did. You want to know what I think?”

  “I bet you’re gonna tell me either way,” said Lottie.

  Her mother wagged her finger at her and said, “You’re just bored and want to cut out of work early. You think I don’t know my own daughter?”

  “I know, I know,” Lottie said a little too earnestly. “How are you gonna handle all these customers without me?”

  Her mother folded her arms and shot her a look of concern. “You trust too much, Lot. The world won’t always love you back.” Lottie started to object, but her mother continued, “You go on. I’ve got to get your daddy from work later, but I’ll bring the car back to the house in a few hours. You can take it if you don’t stay out too late. And don’t wander too far from home. Nothing good will ever come from that.”

  When George woke a short time later, Lottie’s hand was still near to him, her cigarette smoke reminded him of a fire in a hearth, and he smiled through a yawn.

  Whatever he meant to find down here, thought Lottie, he would not be going back to Virginia without it. Either it would be found or not, but here. Lottie told George what she’d come up with while he’d slept. She’d gotten an inkling of where they might start. Lottie knew of a few places along the river where old cabins still stood in the depths of the swamp. She told George they could drive east toward Lumberton to see if there was anything out there that matched his memories.

  To Lottie, the day was now endowed with possibility. As they left the diner and stood in the parking lot, she said excitedly, “You want to see a movie? I’ve seen it twice already, but I don’t mind seeing it again.” George could see how eager she was and said, “Sure. I can’t recall the last time I went to see a picture.”