A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  SEVEN

  LATE ONE EVENING, not long after Bob Reid watched his life float off in the smoke and haze above the little muddy creek outside Mechanicsville, Rawls returned to Beauvais and entered the study. He found Levallois with a pipe going and a single candle illuminating the week-old copy of a northern paper from which his master looked up at him. “What is it?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking Mr. Reid’s place is ’bout to go bust and he ain’t here to do nothing about it.”

  “Hmm.” Levallois chewed on the end of his pipe for a moment before snapping at the newspaper with the backs of the first two fingers of his right hand. “It says here that the British have annexed an island in Africa. And France has absorbed three provinces in the Orient. What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All their talk of freedom, all their sanctimony. Man doesn’t return to the jungle without a reason.”

  “I suppose you’re right, sir.”

  “And what of Reid?”

  “Hardly any freight to tote down to the docks.”

  Levallois stood and stretched and paced over to a mirror hanging above the fireplace mantel. “Hardly any freight,” he repeated quietly. “And you have a theory as to why?”

  “No theory. Fact as fact can be.”

  “Well, let loose with it.” Levallois saw Rawls in the mirror eyeing the club chair opposite the one from which he had risen. Between the chairs stood a small marble table and a decanter of brandy. He looked down in the reflected darkness to where Rawls shifted his weight from one foot to the other in a predictable rhythm of habit and discomfort. He thought of the ignorant soybean peddler who had tried to ruin such a valuable asset. But he then considered the fact that he really owed Rawls’s former owner a debt, that so much of what Levallois had been given had come his way through the inability of other men to find value in unexpected places, or to realize that desire, unlike pain, was something that no one, black or white, would ever develop a resistance to while the sun still sat as center of the heavens. He saw Rawls grimace ever so slightly in the mirror, a look that Rawls deftly and comfortably converted to a sly smile. He almost felt sorry for the boy but did not. Levallois gave his gifts rarely, and never without calculation. “Sit and talk with me like a freeman would,” he said, keeping his gaze into the mirror’s silver waves.

  Rawls moved toward the chair, then paused only long enough for it to be perceptible to Levallois. He smiled and returned to his chair. He then poured out two snifters and motioned for Rawls to continue.

  “Time was folks could only get their goods down the docks on the narrow gauge. As you know, that time’s many years gone. No one has to go as far to load up. And once they get loaded, the new line will get your freight farther for a lot less money. For a good long while after, folks would find cause to gripe about the new rail lines, costs and such, and how much they preferred the old ways.”

  “I see,” he said. He poured Rawls another drink, which he tipped back as quickly as he had the first. “Slowly,” Levallois said.

  “No one gripes about the old ways anymore,” Rawls said. “The new ways just became the old ways without anyone seeming to notice but me.”

  Levallois put his glass down on the tabletop and nearly ran over to a standing desk above which hung a framed Mercator map. Rawls did not immediately recognize what it depicted, as he had never seen a map encompassing the entirety of the globe. He listened to the scratch of pen on paper in the low light and poured himself another drink. Levallois stood over Rawls a moment later. The dull glow of the fire and the spitting candle reduced the library to its essential elements: the room, the two men, the table and chairs, all inside an abyss of competing shadows. Rawls felt dizzy and warm and a little nauseated. Levallois handed him an envelope. “Take this to my bank tomorrow. Get the lawyer on your way back.” He poured Rawls another drink. “You’re one of the good ones, Rawls. I knew it when I first saw you in that field.”

  Rawls felt as though all his troubles had ended. The brandy coursed through his veins in a now-uncomplicated world. He could not remember pain or heartache. He did not miss Nurse the way he always did. “I don’t understand, Mr. Levallois,” he said, beginning to slur his words.

  Levallois smiled. “People can be relied upon so well to show you the right course if only you want to see it.”

  Rawls’s eyes fluttered. He soon would sleep. The following morning, he would forget to say that it would be a hard day, and tomorrow even harder. But the world would remember on his behalf. “Sir?” he muttered.

  “I’ve been looking for a sign, Rawls. Waiting for one. I did not know what to do, but you have shown me. So I now must relieve another man of the burden of that which he is not equal to,” said Levallois.

  He fetched a quilt from another downstairs room and laid it over Rawls. Levallois occasionally allowed for acts like these to be mistaken for kindness. He hoped that Rawls would come to love him for them. But he did not believe in kindness. He believed in fulfilling destinies, and that his was to be among the rare men who clearly saw the earth and everyone who walked on it stripped of their ridiculous pretensions. He rolled his head around his neck and felt the bones pop methodically. I am a mechanism in a great machine, he thought. I am truly a servant to those who cannot serve themselves.

  The following day Rawls staggered through a hangover, out from the shade of Beauvais’s veranda, and into the bright sun. There had been no word at all from Reid at that point, and Rawls agreed with his master that Reid was likely dead. The war had picked up its pace, and the killing had picked up as a consequence. On most nights nowadays Rawls went to sleep to the boom of cannon fire to the north and east. He woke to it as well, with the tumult closer each morning than it had been the night before. Beyond that, it was not his place to question. Rawls heard the lawyer tell Levallois that it was only a matter of time until everything would be settled as he wished. To Rawls, his master only said that there was no reason to wait for the inevitable, and then gave him his instructions.

  He got the rig together and rode toward the Reid place with a team of men bouncing in the back as the cart slalomed between the drive’s deep ruts. Rawls slowed as they passed the overseer’s house. He removed his hat when he saw Emily standing on the porch watching them as they headed toward the road. She studied them intensely, and without prompting Rawls called out to her, saying, “Mr. Levallois had him a deal go through. Got us doing some sorting out on it.”

  Emily took the steps down to the drive. She had been alone since she had moved into the overseer’s house after her mother fell ill, excepting the occasional visit from Mr. Levallois. Emily had taken to solitude and self-sufficiency, such as it was, and was starting to become accustomed to it. While she liked the idea of company from time to time, Mr. Levallois bringing her cut white roses, or watching Rawls tending to her chores while she sat alone in the parlor, another part of her considered it an intrusion into the world she had been building for herself.

  “Well, you must go do as he says,” said Emily. When Rawls had the cart nearly out of sight he turned back toward the overseer’s house and saw that Emily remained fixed to the same spot at the edge of the drive, watching yet. Her stillness gave him a chill, and he recalled her old game when they were younger. Standing on a fence post while the birder circled below. The younger Emily laughing and shouting out commands. Rawls feeling like danger had no boundary. She was aloof and distant now. And while he had never thought of Emily’s presence as something to celebrate, he now found the depth of the girl’s recession into herself even more alarming. Rawls did not think she’d ever play that old game again, but he had started to worry that one far worse might take its place. He pressed the soles of his moccasins firmly on the floorboard of the cart. For a while he’d felt a kind of equilibrium. Not safety, not that at all, but that perhaps he’d found himself at the still center of a storm swirling beyond the boundaries of Beauvais. The look on the girl’s face made him wonder. What kind
of fence post might she make him stand on soon?

  By day’s end he and the other men had pulled off the clapboard of the Reids’ house. In the evening they went at the barn and the mule stable for the good cedar. By the fifth day they had everything stripped to the foundation. Rawls had fixed up a buyer for most of the scrap, and Levallois let him set aside 10 percent of what he got for it, and he got a good price. Rainy-day money, Levallois called it, though Rawls didn’t think much of Confederate dollars. As the sun set and the sky dropped kind of pinkly over top of them, he surveyed the week’s work. “Like it was never there, Rawls,” Levallois had said. Something about not wanting someone else’s history to intrude on his future. “What you think, boys?” he asked his crew. They nodded, though none of them understood why a man would pay to have a perfectly good house torn down and sold off for scrap. White folk’s crazy, some of them surely thought. They even put down seed to cover the erased house’s footprint. Nothing could be done about the pebblestone road, however, so the road led to nowhere. To an empty meadow in the pinewoods and a circle around a sycamore.

  * * *

  Nurse gave birth to George in an amputation tent at Chimborazo Hospital on the second day of April 1863. She had been doubled over in pain since the previous evening, and the surgeons left her moaning on the blood-soaked floor while they went about their work. The grind of saw on bone. A probe, a finger, or a pair of tongs digging for a minié ball in the flesh of a young man’s arm or leg that lay torn open like the entrance to a mine. The firm but quiet voices as the doctors and assistants gave instructions and replies. A limb tossed to the wooden floor with a thump and a small spatter of blood. And Nurse, in the corner of the tent, ignored while she writhed back and forth in pain in ever-decreasing intervals like a wounded metronome.

  But late at night the surgeons left, and some of the other nurses came to her as the contractions became a steady, searing pain. The noises of the wounded and delimbed had returned already, the ether and the chloroform having worn off long before, and George entered the world to a chorus of anguished voices, in a room lit by a single sputtering candle that sent its light weakly toward the canvas walls. And in that room Nurse quietly wept, and the bawling child she tightly held added his new voice to the chorus as the sun breached the treetops to the east.

  An enlisted man from the quartermaster’s office came to see her that afternoon. “Can’t take care of no babies here,” he said. “Got a message out to your master to collect you both.”

  Bob Reid heard the news of the child’s birth and made his slow mechanical way into the slave quarters not long after Nurse returned to her tent. Those he passed on his way to her either stopped and stared in shock or turned away out of habit. A woman beat a cloth on a washboard in front of Nurse’s small tent, which she shared with six others. “Nurse about?” Bob asked.

  The woman kept at her washing. “She’s inside,” she said.

  “Is it decent for a man in there?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Just her and the little one.”

  Bob reached for the flap of the tent and paused before opening it. He looked at the woman and she waited for whatever it was he seemed about to say. But he only looked at her for a moment longer, pulled the tent open, and went inside. Nurse slept with the baby in her arms, but the child was awake, his eyes moving across the dimness of the tent and pausing at the shadow Bob made in the doorway’s light. Bob sat on a cot next to hers, laid his crutch across his knees, and looked at the newborn. Nurse woke and looked at him and clutched her child tighter to her.

  “What’ll happen to you?” asked Bob.

  “Going to master’s,” she answered.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Beauvais.”

  “Hmm,” Bob grumbled. “That right?”

  “It is.”

  “He’s a queer one, that Levallois.”

  “I can’t say, Mr. Reid.”

  “He’s a queer one, I say. You don’t need to say.”

  Nurse regarded him carefully. The baby dozed now in her arms. “You’ll be nearby, won’t you, Mr. Reid?” she asked.

  “I will. My place is very near to it. My daughter has been at Beauvais while I recovered.”

  “I expect you’ll be back about your business soon, Mr. Reid.”

  “Don’t humor me, Nurse. I’m as useless as tits on a bull.” He thought of the boy with the broken glasses, the butt of the weapon coming down hard on that poor Pennsylvanian’s skull. “If it weren’t for my Emily, I’d have liked to died right in that meadow. Shit,” he said. “I ain’t much better than a nigger now.”

  Nurse remained quiet.

  “You hold on to that little one, Nurse,” he said. He did not tell her that his daughter’s letters had stopped coming. He did not say that the last one had arrived late in January and was composed of a few formalities and the following lines:

  Mother passed last night. She will be buried in the yard near the sycamore tree when there is a warm stretch. Rawls says the ground is too hard right now to dig a proper grave for her. Aurelia died a month ago. She was kept in the root cellar for a while but I don’t know what has been done with her. Mr. Levallois is a great comfort to me.

  * * *

  A week after the hospital quartermaster notified Levallois that his contract had been canceled, Rawls readied a carriage to retrieve some property from Chimborazo for his master. Levallois had taken much more interest than normal in Rawls’s preparations that morning. For a full hour of the receding darkness, Levallois watched him prepare the rig and the mules for the journey. He waved at Rawls as the carriage rolled off down the drive and toward the city through the coming eastern light. Midmorning Rawls stopped to rest on the high south bank of the James. He listened for the sounds of the ten thousand Federal prisoners on Belle Isle but heard nothing except the wind coursing over the water and its gray-green splash against the stone piers of the railroad bridge. Around noon he crossed over the James, entering the city proper, and he hung his head as he traveled north up Wall and past the hell of Lumpkin’s Jail. Rawls steered the rig east again at Broad Street, and slowly the mules dragged the cart over the cobbles and up the steep hill. When he passed over the rickety wooden bridge that spanned the ravine called Bloody Run, the once-green field at the top of Chimborazo Hill sprawled out before him as if it had been occupied by a blaze of white. The low wards of whitewashed wood stretched to the slope of the hill until they seemed to extend to the edge of the world. Tents, too, ringed the acreage, and the blue sky above the camp was veined with cook smoke and plumes of dust roused from the beaten paths between the rows into which the hospital had been arranged. Rawls found the scope of the grounds nearly unbelievable. More people were gathered there on the easternmost of Richmond’s seven hills than he had ever seen at one time in his life. Nurses and orderlies darted in and out of tents, their smocks stained with blood as brown as tilled bottomland dirt. The green grass that had previously been the sole occupant of the hilltop had long since been trampled into memory. The dust rose up in swirls again in the warming air, and the white of the scrubbed tents in the bright clear noon stayed with him when he looked away as if he had stared too long at the sun.

  He handed a message to the gate guard, still bound with Levallois’s seal. He did not know what was written there, only that he was to return to Beauvais promptly with his master’s property. Rawls waited at the edge of the hospital for a while. Then, as if in a dream, he saw Nurse walking toward him. He had been leaning against the carriage, and when he saw her he slumped down until he was very nearly sitting in the dirt. He felt as though his breath would flood out of his body entirely, the way water from a spring will tumble out of the earth, clear and fragile as glass. He let his breath out and with it tears streamed over his high cheekbones. He pulled his hat from his head and allowed the tears to proceed soundlessly and without interruption. He caught his breath again, slowly and deliberately, and stood up. He returned his hat to his head as she approached. She car
ried an infant swaddled in her arm. Nurse’s dark face against the background of the hospital remained buried in shadow, and Rawls felt as though an essential part of him was being returned, as dear to him as if his own shadow had come back after being severed for so long. He had not seen her in more than two years. Before the war started. Before Reid sold him and his mother to Levallois. Before his mother joined Reid’s wife in fever and death. Rawls recalled Levallois waving as he left that morning, though he did not linger on the thought. His hope that a day like this might come had carried him a great distance, but in the midst of his present joy a very small part of him did wonder if a hope come to fruition would have the strength to carry him farther or if it would now be exhausted.

  Beside Nurse walked a white man thin as a switch, iron and leather fixed to his leg and the right sleeve of his coat pinned at the shoulder. Rawls noticed Nurse’s hand at the man’s elbow. The gentle pressure applied in such a way as to let the man feel his balance might someday return naturally, that her help was useful, but not necessary. “Let them have their pride for now,” she would tell him later. “Soon enough it will be gone as well.”

  The man whom Nurse led toward the carriage resembled Rawls’s former owner only a little. The sleeve pinned up at his right shoulder flapped in the breeze. His legs moved stiffly. They reminded Rawls of a scythe without a cutting blade swinging above the dirt.