A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  The night before that warm day in December Billy sang his song again. When he woke, Lottie was clinging to him tightly. He had a vague memory of fear, but he forgot it as soon as he felt her body pressed tightly against him. The sheets were still wet with his sweat. He was embarrassed for a moment. He had pissed the bed when he was drunk sometimes, but then he remembered he did not have to do that anymore, or be embarrassed that he used to do it, because he would tell Lottie about that, too, if that was what she wanted to know about him. The morning was already warm. Neither of them minded the dampness much.

  Lottie said, “You all right, Billy?”

  By way of answering he turned toward her and held her, too, until the force of their holding each other reached an equilibrium so effortless they felt their purpose on earth was to stay that way forever. She decided she liked his potbelly quite a bit and giggled. “What?” he said. And so she told him and he smiled. They made love all day and when the sun started going down behind them they went outside and jumped into the great green waters of the Chesapeake. The water was frigid, though the air was warm. They were naked and as free as two people had ever been. They loved each other completely, though they did not bother to say so. It seemed unnecessary to say a thing so undeniable. When they ran their hands through the water, it lit up with a blue-green glow, and their bodies lit up when the water ran down their skin. That night they swam in winter stars.

  By the time the New Year came, Lottie was finished with her newest painting. They stayed at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond to celebrate. He got down on one knee at the top of the grand staircase. Lottie laughed and Billy was glad. By February they were married in the little clapboard chapel out by Stingray Point. They had no guests and they did not find the ceremony diminished for it. By March she was dying.

  NINE

  ALL BUT THE most desperate cases knew the war was over before it actually ended. After Gettysburg in July of ’63, sons from battlefields all over the South began to come home. At first it was in twos and threes spread out over days and weeks and months. And finally in those last days of the war their numbers grew until hardly a cold day at the end of ’64 went by when they wouldn’t be seen in a solitary retreat to the safety of their homes, or in some ragtag band surrendered to some new version of their former lives. Some came on foot, the top of a hat cresting a gray winter hill in the distance. Others came on the back of horse-drawn carts that spent the preceding days depositing their cargo at unnamed crossings, in front of the white chipped-paint walls of modest country churches, and, in a few cases, in places unmarked by human habitation. But that they came was undeniable, and the fact Bobby Lee still waved the Stars and Bars did not provide the same hope it once did. John Talbot made his way toward what home he had as well, but slowly. The war was surely over. His work was not.

  In early 1865 two weeks of rain pelted the earth between the James and Appomattox Rivers. Clouds the color of an old iron hammer hung so low in the sky he sometimes had to fight the urge to reach up and keep them from swinging down on him. He followed the sounds of battle as they traveled west, and he stopped in the aftermath of muddy fields to pick up what he could of value. For four years he’d sold watches, rings, and metal buttons to pawnbrokers from Petersburg to Winchester. He collected gold fillings from the teeth of still-stiff corpses. Shoes he sold to passing armies or traded them to runaways with bare and bloodied feet for the last precious things they could carry in their flight. After the Siege of Petersburg the previous summer, he took a cartful of bones he’d dug out of the crater to a Fredericksburg fertilizer manufacturer. The pile was so tall it seemed to John to cast a hundred-yard shadow beneath the August sun. “These is horse bones only, right, young feller?” the payment man had said. And John replied that he believed horses was what they had been once but now they was bones and bones was bones and did he want them or not?

  He kept a collection of tintypes and letters that he could not read in a pack he’d taken off a Yankee at Cold Harbor. Sometimes at night he would hold the pictures up to firelight and look for a resemblance to Spanish Jim, but he did not find him or anyone who favored him and he did not know what he would have done even if he did. The dog that kept him warm throughout those long nights after Spanish Jim was killed by that dark-haired man still followed him. She did not have a name anymore, though sometimes he would try out different ones to see if she would help him recall what her name had been when she sat at the edge of the river and watched him put the smooth round river stones he’d used to weight old Spanish Jim’s pockets so he would stay underneath the water at the ferry landing. Now she would disappear for a week, sometimes even two, and then he would see her emerge from a wild meadow at the edge of a country road a quarter mile out ahead of him, the stump of her tail wagging enthusiastically, her face the very picture of assured indifference.

  She rode with him when they crossed the swollen Appomattox on an abandoned pontoon bridge in March, her front paws sprawled out over the buckboard next to his feet. He did not think he had ever been this far south. He covered the dog with a spare waxed coat. He caught up with the destruction not long after crossing the Appomattox River, brown and formless in its rain-swelled width. He held back until the battle passed farther west, until the dead were still and the living marched off toward a different death and he could go about his scavenging in peace.

  A break in the weather. The sky gray with the memory of winter rains now passed. Songbirds darted among the pines. He tried to hit a squirrel with a rock to share something to eat with the dog, but he could not hit one. They chattered and squawked. Does and fawns bounded between the plumb-straight trees, and the dog sometimes bounded after them when she was bored and would return in inevitable shame to whimper at his feet.

  He woke to sunlight falling through needles. The ground damp and firm. The dog gone already in the early morning. He listened for the sounds of fighting but heard nothing. Fog rose up from the field beyond his hideout in the trees, and he put on his shoes and dressed and walked into the first warm air he could recall for many months. He looked down the road to the west and did not see movement, only the stillness and quiet of a Virginia spring day that the scavenged items on his cart would fill with the music of their shifting to and fro. He turned back to ready the cart. His mule’s ears twitched side to side as she ate the hay he’d set out for her and then pitched forward as a voice called out.

  “What you doing out here?”

  John turned around and saw a boy about his age wearing a Confederate uniform. The coat was open to a red gingham shirt that was also open to his bare smooth chest and he wore no hat over his blond curls. Round-lensed glasses perched atop his nose. As the boy approached, John could see a star-shaped crack in one of the lenses. “I’m fixing to move along here is all,” he said.

  “What outfit you with?”

  John continued getting the mule and the cart ready to travel. They were all the way out in the road. “I ain’t with no outfit. I’m just going down the road.”

  The boy came closer. He had a pistol on his right hip. A big curved knife dangled comfortably next to his leg in a loose grip in his left hand, as though he never found the need to sheathe it. “War’s been going a long time not to have picked no side yet,” the boy said.

  “They come signed me up a while back, but they sent me on after a couple weeks. Said I didn’t have no head for soldiery.”

  John, being somewhat immune to fear by disposition, was content to answer the boy’s questions as honestly as he knew how. This is not to say he was inclined to courage, more that he was unable to wrap his mind around the particulars of any given human interaction. So as he talked he looked the boy in the eyes and fixated on the cracked lenses of his glasses that sometimes appeared in the refracted sunlight like an earthbound star and sometimes seemed to take on the shape of a rose on account of a red spatter that had collected in the lenses’ fine fractures.

  “Why you giving me that look?” the boy asked.

 
“We talking is all,” answered John. “It ain’t no special look. It’s a talking look like folks told me I ought to.”

  The boy rubbed the tip of the blade up and down his pant leg as though scratching an itch. “Naw. That’s a look like you think I owe you something.”

  “We ain’t never had no business. It ain’t whatever kind of look you thinking.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” the boy said with disgust. “You better stop with that Yankee eyeballing, acting like I ain’t done what’s required of me. You as bad as these goddamn coons looking at me like a freeman would, like I owe somebody something.”

  John went back to rigging up the cart. Over his shoulder he said, “I’m gonna be on my way.” He felt the blade press into the skin on the back of his neck. He then felt the boy put more weight behind it. The wound burned as surely as if the boy had put a match to it. A warm trickle of blood ran down between his shoulder blades and he felt the boy’s breath hot in his ear.

  “You ain’t leaving yet, goddamn it!”

  The dog barked her deep throaty bark to his left. John felt the knife come off his neck. The quick swishing sound of leather relieved of metal followed by a bang and flash turned his dull mind into an equilibrium of high-pitched sound. The blood ran down the back of his neck and over his shoulders in narrow runnels where it dripped down his chest. He turned around and saw the boy mouthing at him angrily, but he could not hear anything except for that one unearthly note filling the entirety of his being. The boy pointed the pistol at him, but John looked all around him for the source of the sound. He saw the dog lying dead in front of the cart. It seemed she had lunged at the boy and took a ball in her lower jaw, which was missing now, and her tongue lolled down in the bloody dirt of the road where her jaw should have been. John looked up at the sky, and at first he thought the sound might be coming from the east, but then it seemed to come from the west and south and north and even up under his feet from the center of the earth, which is where someone had once told him hell was.

  The boy was still yelling at him when the sounds of the world began to creep into his head again. Telling him to get back where he belonged. To get the hell away from here and go back where he belonged. John did not know where that was. He had no map. He had never slept under a roof in his life, except for the two weeks he spent in the Virginia infantry before they told him he was not fit to be a soldier. He went to the dog and picked her up and put her on the buckboard and covered her disfigured muzzle with her paws. The dog would sometimes lie on him at night and kept him warm and would occasionally lick the dirt from his face when it collected there. He hopped onto the seat and flicked the reins until the mule walked off the way they’d come, away from the boy with the cracked glasses who had cut his neck and shot his dog and screamed himself hoarse about him not owing the world a thing.

  John Talbot steered his cart onto the northbound road toward Chesterfield. He wanted the gray-eyed girl to know her dog had not died alone. A low standard, any reasonable person would admit, perhaps ridiculously so, but to do one’s best means only that, and to be better than one was requires that we had once been worse. His cart was not empty, but it was nearly so, and after picking up the dog and placing her at his feet, he had no more interest in the things he’d collected from the war’s uncountable dead.

  He stopped after crossing the Appomattox over the same abandoned pontoon bridge he’d crossed a few days before on his way south. The dog’s eyes were queerly open. The left one remained disconcertingly wide, an aperture through which light passed pointlessly, as though the fundamental shock of her death had not occurred in the past but was instead elaborately fixed in an eternal present tense. The right eye, drooping some, appeared to John to flutter in the otherwise pleasant gusts of spring wind, and though perceptiveness was not a strength of his, he was quite sure he felt the fluttering eye whether he looked at it or not. But he no longer had the capacity to acknowledge the pitiful nature of her remaining injuries. Despite the fact that he sometimes still looked down at her while they rode, at the blood speckled in a pattern not dissimilar to the ticking of her coat, by some miracle his mind pardoned him from the greatest punishment of all: comprehension. He went to the back of the cart and looked for something more substantial than the waxed coat to cover her. After some digging, he managed to find a Union blanket underneath a collection of thirteen cavalry sabers he had taken some months before from a battlefield whose name he’d never know. A bright red ribbon was tied around the swords. He wrapped the birder in the blanket and tied the red ribbon in a bow around it. Some poor fool had once used that length of smooth cloth to hold his britches up, until he was killed in a field outside of Petersburg, if John recalled correctly. He put the dog, now bundled in her blanket, back on the buckboard at his feet. He flicked the reins, and they rolled on. Petersburg had been good picking, John might have said on a different day, if he had cause to think about it. But he would not have known why to tell it. The simple fact was this: it was hard to find a soul left anywhere on earth who believed that there was dignity in death.

  Two days later he passed the mines after crossing over the Chesterfield County line, still at least an hour away from the ferry landing or the road that led to it. He watched the miners emerge from a shaft, one after another, as if crawling out of a hastily dug grave. Most put their hands up to their brows for a few moments after stumbling into the clearing on legs stiff as rusted locks, for even the fast retreat of evening’s light was bright enough to blind them, emerging as they had from a dark so total as to make the occasional spark from pick on stone shine as brief and bright as a bolt of lightning. The men, coal dark and blending into the arriving night, kept their candles lit as they stretched and scooped water from pails. The light danced nimbly near the structures, around the hoist and sheave wheel and under the gallows frame. Some of the men began to douse their heads with water, but it was by then too dark to tell if anything was left of them after the dust was gone.

  John camped beneath his cart in another clearing, like the last in all respects except abandoned. It had been yanked out of the forest in exactly the same way as everything else: chop enough trees to get the hoist in, probe the ground, and sink the shaft. Stumps abounded. The good brown earth churned into striations of mud in red and black. Half-felled trees hung over half-planed logs. A creek flowed through and it ran with a black particulate sparkle and frothed a piss yellow. But John slept fine.

  In the morning he dipped and climbed through the small, denuded hills around the mines. He left the scattered woods not long after and looked out over the flat, charred tobacco fields, then toward the white mansion where the man lived who had stuck Spanish Jim with that fancy knife. John did not know where to find the gray-eyed girl, but he thought someone living on that much of the earth was liable to know what was happening on smaller, nearby portions of it.

  Rawls was out mending fences when he saw the boy on the mule cart in the distance approach the long drive between the cedars that led to Beauvais. He made his way toward the entrance, where another man was at the same job, arriving just after the boy on the cart.

  “What say?” Rawls said by way of greeting.

  The man rested an adze at his right shoulder, and with his left hand he held his hat and rubbed his forearm across his forehead as though the gesture might assist him in understanding the boy’s nonsensical talk. “I don’t know what he means, Rawls. He’s talking something about he got a girl dog for a girl from around these parts and he wants to bring it to her. But I don’t see no dog and he’s pointing at that blanket wrapped up like a birthday present. I tried to tell him Mr. Levallois don’t take to having no riffraff about.”

  The boy got down from his seat and began unwrapping the blanket. Rawls and the man looked at each other, neither having any idea what the boy was up to. A paw slipped out from the blanket’s folds, speckled brown and white. “Aw hell, Rawls,” the man hollered. “He’s trying to tote a dead dog up to Miss Emily!”

  Jo
hn had by then unfolded the blanket as carefully as he could. The dog lay out on the blood-soaked blanket with her eyes looking emptily toward Richmond.

  The man backed away until he tripped over the small collection of undressed cedar posts he had been working. He looked at Rawls and said, “No sir, no sir. I ain’t messing with this damn business no more.” Then he turned and jogged off up toward the other end of the fence that needed mending.

  Shit, thought Rawls. This boy’s got some fixation liable to get me in a hell of a mess. “All right now, feller,” he said. “I’m gonna tell you, and I want you to listen real good now, nobody wants to look at something in a state like this.”

  But there was something in the boy’s demeanor that he found pitiable. It was as if, despite whatever violent end had befallen this dog, with its mangled body slumping over the blanket like a house whose rotten beams had given up on standing, he was performing an act profound in both its sadness and its necessity, at least in the boy’s own eyes. As Rawls tried to figure out how to get rid of him, something about the boy began to feel familiar, perhaps the dog, too, which he likely would have recognized more quickly if not for its disfigurement. Dumber than a box of hammers, this one, Rawls thought. And then he recalled having seen that face before, looking like it was permanently on the precipice of discovering that the true nature of the world was one of sadness and isolation, even when surrounded by those we love. The dull, glazed-over eyes, the mouth open and askew. The boy’s breath continuing to pass over his tongue with a shallow regularity. The grass Rawls had hidden in at the ferry landing so long before. The firelight reflecting in the rippling James. Nurse gone out over the ice. Him desperate to find her but finding only further desperation. “I know you, boy?” asked Rawls.