A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  TWELVE

  BILLY RIVERS FOUND his wife in the tub on the second weekend of March 1985. On some evenings Lottie would take a bath after they ate their late dinner, then went to sit on their nylon chairs above the riprap where they’d watch the bay. If she had done a lot of work in her studio earlier in the day, she would often get quite dirty, and so Billy did not think much of the fact that she had been in the bathroom for nearly an hour. He did not worry until he heard the broadcast of the ball game end and another show begin. Lottie never had much use for television. She preferred music. And while there was always some old country song or another coming out of the garage while she was in there, Billy didn’t think he’d ever heard the TV on in the house unless a Georgetown game was on. She had a little RCA portable she’d bought from Mr. Mathew’s Electronorama out on 33 a few years back, with a black-and-white screen on one side and a radio on the other, and she’d tote it around to have the country station playing, but if there was a Georgetown game on you could bet she’d have the TV going. You’d hear the click of the knob and then a slow pulsing hum and then maybe a few straining bars of the fight song, all the voices singing “Lie down forever, lie down,” to which Lottie would hum along.

  Lottie would sit in the dark and watch the flicker of the Big East game of the week. She’d place the small RCA set on a shelf in her studio or out on the screened-in porch or rigged up with a hairbrush and a towel to support it on the bathroom sink. She appreciated the young men’s perseverance in the face of the impossibility of perfection: the squeak of sneakers on a wood floor, a ball hanging in the air against its backspin, the rough jostling toward life under the net. She had never lived in a place that had a top-tier basketball team, of course, but almost by accident she had developed an abiding affection for Georgetown, which seemed near enough to Deltaville for her to claim. And she had come to love the way the young men in gray never stooped for consolation, and never bawled or yawped when the victories they expected came.

  But on that night, after midnight had come and gone, Billy heard the theme song for Falcon Crest replace the sounds of the game after it ended and began to worry. He went to the door and knocked. She’d thrown a towel over the top of the door when she’d gone in, so the door was cracked open, and he heard the television going on the sink and nothing else. No splashing. No humming the way she sometimes would. “You all right in there, Lot?” he called from the other side of the door. He pushed it open when she didn’t answer. The only source of light was the TV set. Two aromatic candles she’d lit and set on the rim of the tub had burned down to almost nothing, the wax liquefied completely and then re-formed. The pale light from the TV fell smoothly over Lottie’s naked body in the tub.

  Billy knew she wasn’t dead. He’d lived for fifteen years with ghosts. Death is a white pall. Color runs from the body quickly when death comes to it, and Lottie still had the dark flush of life on her skin. But he did not hear her breath. He pulled her out of the tub. Water splashed all over him and all over the floor. The candles fell to the floor and cracked a tile. The television was still on. Billy pulled her out of the bathroom and laid her on the floor. His mind spun automatically through a checklist: responsiveness, breathing, bleeding…He slapped her cheeks lightly and called her name. “Lottie, girl. C’mon, girl, wake up, baby.” He slapped her cheeks harder. He leaned down and let his ear hover just above her mouth, listening for a whisper of breath, waiting to feel the air touch his skin. It took him less than a minute to get her wrapped in a blanket and into his truck. The motor fired right up. They kicked up so much dust on the gravel road that it obscured the moon.

  She regained consciousness as they crossed the White Stone Bridge over the Rappahannock River. Billy had the hammer down, and she looked at the speedometer as it waved above one hundred. “It’s all right, Billy. Ease it back some, hon,” she said.

  He looked over at her. His eyes were big as turning wheels behind his glasses and wet with tears. “We’ll be at the hospital soon,” he said.

  “I know how well you look after little things like this. It’s just a little thing.”

  He wondered how long she’d known. Some mornings he would get into the shower and see small spatters of blood around the drain. He thought it looked like rust at first. Hard water, maybe. He had not seen blood outside his dreams in a long time.

  “A little thing?” he asked.

  “It’ll be okay, Billy.”

  “Will it?”

  “Sure.” A little quiet passed between them. “You’re a good man, Billy,” she said.

  He did not tell her that he did not think it was true. It wasn’t a lie. She had never lied to him, and never would. But he thought that she was wrong. They crossed over the water and onto land again. The bridge and its tangle of iron trusses were far behind them in the dark. Billy beat his hand on the steering wheel and cursed the heavens.

  Billy left her bedside only once before she was officially diagnosed, when he went back to the little house on Pocahontas Avenue to get Lottie’s portable black-and-white television set. He set it up on a table in her hospital room. He wanted to be angry with her for keeping it from him, but she seemed so frail now that his anger made him feel cruel. She made an effort to watch the ball games, but sometimes the doctors intervened and insisted that she sleep. So Billy watched them while she slept, and when she woke up, he told her all about how well Ewing and Wingate played. The night before the championship game one of the doctors asked him to step into the hallway. A beat-up folding chair sat against the wall outside Lottie’s room in the oncology department of Rappahannock General. “You want to sit, Billy?” the doctor asked.

  “Sure,” he said, spreading the metal chair apart and sitting down. The doctor had Lottie’s chart in his hand, but he did not open it.

  “She’s a tough woman, Billy, but she’s about run her race.”

  Billy pushed his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose. “What’s she got, Doc?” he asked.

  “It’s called small cell carcinoma of the lung, Billy. Stage four.”

  “How many stages are there?” Billy asked.

  “Only four. I’m afraid it won’t be long now.”

  “How could I not know?”

  “It can come on quick. Spreads like wildfire. Does she smoke?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Well, maybe you thought it was just smoker’s cough. The honest answer is everyone reacts differently to it. She’s had it at least a month or two given how extensive it is.”

  Billy stared at the opposite wall. “What happens after?”

  The doctor grabbed a matching chair from down the hall and sat down next to him.

  “There’s a good place over Kilmarnock. They’ll take care of her. However she wants.”

  “She’s never said anything about it.”

  “The usual thing is okay, Billy, if she doesn’t want to think about it now. It’s a good way for folks to say goodbye.”

  “It’s just me needs to say it.”

  “Well, that’s okay, too.”

  Billy left his hat at home when he first drove Lottie up to the hospital and hadn’t thought to grab it when he went to get the television. He wore a maroon T-shirt. The case for his glasses was stuffed into a pocket on his chest. He ran his fingers over the closely cropped hair on the sides of his head. He was the kind of man most people don’t notice. The kind of man who tucks his T-shirts into his jeans. “Can I ask you something, Doc?”

  “Course, Billy, fire away.”

  “You ever in the service?”

  The doctor put his hand on Billy’s knee. “She’s had time to let the idea settle in. It won’t be like that for her.”

  “But you know what I mean? You know why I’m asking?”

  “The navy paid for me to go to Howard after I got back. They paid for MCV, too. I’m still trying to think of other stuff so they can get paid up on what I gave them.”

  They both smiled. “How’d you end up out here?” asked Bil
ly.

  “I grew up in the Northern Neck. Out Reedville way. Missed the water, I guess.”

  Billy laughed. “You still missed the water after being in the navy? I thought y’all would get enough of it out on those boats.”

  “No,” the doctor said. “I was a corpsman. First Battalion, Ninth Marines. I’ll tell you what, though, in July of ’67”—he paused to whistle theatrically—“I damn sure wished I was on a ship.”

  “You know,” said Billy, “when I was in Cambodia in ’70, we’d be going through these rubber plantations and just getting shot all to shit, and I’d think sometimes, Maybe if I catch one it’ll be just like I’m done being born. It won’t be nothing worse than that. Just done being born.”

  “Yeah. Could be like that.”

  “You don’t wonder? About after, I mean?”

  “Sure, I do. I mean, I must. Every time I punch that clock I have this feeling. Not even a feeling. Something else. There’s this voice that tells me one day I’m gonna punch that clock, and I’m gonna save all those nineteen-year-old jarheads I couldn’t save at Con Thien when I was just nineteen myself. And I wonder, if I’m a man of faith, which I try to be, I don’t do so well at it but I try to be, but if I am, then how come I worry after those boys still? They don’t have pain anymore. Or hunger. But I can’t help it. I always think they’d be better off here. Am I a bad man for wanting to drag them back? Is it a kind of selfishness? I guess I must be a little afraid of it, too. A place like this can fool you into thinking that you aren’t afraid of it, but it’s still there. I guess I can’t say for sure how I feel about it. It’s enough to make a man doubt.”

  They sat quietly for a while after that, but the conversation continued between them in the silence of their memories.

  “She seems like a good woman, Billy,” the doctor said.

  “Better than I deserve, I’d say.”

  “Most people don’t get half of what they deserve, good or bad. There’s a lot I don’t know about the world. And it’s a hard thing going out into a world when all you know about it is how much you don’t.”

  Billy leaned over the chair and cried. He was glad they were out in the hallway. He did not think Lottie would want to see him grieve this way, not because he ought to be ashamed of it, but because Lottie wanted Billy to be happy. He didn’t want to disappoint her with his grief.

  The doctor put his arm around his shoulders. He didn’t say anything, he simply held him, not tightly, but firmly enough so that Billy did not doubt that he was with him in the present moment, as if it might be the thing that made a difference. “Listen up now, Billy,” the doctor said, “when the time comes we’re going to let her go, okay? That’s what she wants. So you have to start letting go of her, too. It’s gonna be hard. I know it is. But I want you to promise me something.”

  Billy broke down out there in the hallway, in a way he never had before, in a way he did not think could be brought back together. “What’s that?” Billy said through his brokenness.

  “Don’t forget that you’ll be living still.”

  The following night Billy sat next to Lottie’s bed and turned the television on. The players on both sides hit their layup lines. The bands took turns playing. Lottie hummed the fight song. She knew the words by heart, but Billy could not make them out when the student section sang it. She rubbed one side of her face. “My eye keeps drooping here, Billy, look.” It did; the pupil looked disordered, too.

  “Let me turn the light down. The TV’s bright enough for you to watch the game.”

  He had not seen the doctor that day. Billy thought he must have missed him when he drifted off in the chair beside Lottie’s bed. There was something else he wanted to ask him, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Nurses had come to check on Lottie, but just to make her comfortable, for pillow fluffing and the like. At tip-off, he saw she was asleep. She woke up once, ten minutes in, and said her ribs hurt. “Billy, I’d give it back to Adam if I thought it’d ease the pain a little.”

  “Gonna be a close-run thing, this one, dear.”

  She was not paying attention to the game. She was quiet, in and out of sleep. He didn’t know if he was ready, but Lottie said she was. He decided to act the way a ready man would. Sometimes she chortled and twitched and sometimes she murmured.

  Late in the second half it occurred to him he had not heard her for a while. Her breathing became ragged and she breathed now only at more distant intervals. It sounded to Billy like she was drowning in air. He looked over at her. They had been holding hands for the better part of two weeks, but late that night the strength went out of Lottie’s grip. It had been a good strong grip. Lottie made things with those hands. Lottie made the world, Billy thought, and her leaving would unmake it. He prepared himself to fall apart again. To be unmade right along with the world. But he decided instead to live the way a good man would.

  The volume was low. Villanova up by five with a minute and a half left. He turned the TV off. The machines around her bed began to buzz and blink. A pinging bell. He put his hand on her cheek. Her mouth was open and her head tilted back a little. Billy squeezed her hand one last time and kissed her forehead and walked out the door. He rode the elevator down and went into the parking lot. He wanted to scream. Wanted to raise a noise that would put a dent in the heavens. But he didn’t. He got into his truck and started the motor, letting it idle a bit before throwing the shifter into drive. He turned down Route 3 and headed back to Deltaville, to the house on Pocahontas Avenue. He parked and got out and walked to the edge of the riprap and looked over the bay. He looked into the void for hours, until the horizon was a long thin flame between the water and sky. When the sun came up, he turned his back on it and went into the house.

  The nurses called the doctor in at 5:48 a.m. One of them opened Lottie’s eyes and the doctor shined his flashlight into each pupil looking for a response. “I think that’s it,” he said. “Check her pulse, will you?” The nurse felt Lottie’s wrist and shook her head. He scribbled in his chart. Lottie had long since left her silence in the room.

  THIRTEEN

  IN CHESTERFIELD COUNTY the summer of 1865 came and went. Autumn, too, took its harvest from the fields and departed. And winter returned without having to ask the way, and it spread out its blanket of snow over the endless now, as it had done always.

  Emily watched the days pass through eyes tinged with gray and little flecks of gold.

  Outwardly, she had become all sweetness and light. She no longer shuffled through the darkened hallways at night. When she went to sleep, she kept the curtains open, and in the mornings she rose when the first eastern light fell through the loblollies and onto her face. Her daughters blossomed, too. They had great big blue eyes and soft downy skin so pale that one might expect the winter light to pass right through it even after having traveled so far. She doted on them, and on little George as well, whom they all expected to speak soon. She made a great effort to leave Nurse with the impression that she now had a new, dutiful friend, saying, “Oh, I do wonder what he’ll call me, Nurse. There is such joy to be found when a child first starts saying names. They get them so wrong, don’t they, but you can’t shake them even so.” But her face fell immediately after, and she allowed Nurse to see the sadness once again. “Would it be too much to ask you for a favor? I know you owe me nothing.”

  And Nurse replied as was required of her still, “Just ask and I will try, Miss Emily. I will try.” George was laughing and the babies cooed in the dining room where the children sometimes played.

  “Will you keep the girls with you if I ask?” She wiped small, perfectly formed tears from her cold flushed cheeks.

  “Where will I keep them?”

  “Wherever you are, have them with you, if I ask,” said Emily.

  “Can you tell me why?” Nurse asked. “The girls will want their mother. Look at them now. Their eyes follow you round the room.”

  “You know why, Nurse. You know. He is dormant now, but he will not b
e that way forever.”

  “I don’t know what’s come over her,” said Nurse to Rawls one day that last December, “but I’ll take it.”

  Rawls interrupted her. “I’ve known that girl a long time. And I’ve seen what kind of games she likes to play. You better keep your eyes open.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that. But there’s some things about being a woman, about being a mother in this world, that you can’t understand. And to be married to that man, too? I think she’s afraid of him, Rawls. And she has a right to be.”

  They were on a walk through the stand of pines where they’d first met. It no longer abutted the old plantation from which she’d been sent across the ice during that terrible winter when the James froze solid. Beauvais had swallowed it up. It seemed to Rawls that one day the boundaries of Beauvais would swallow the whole world. Levallois seemed to have a mind for it. After a while, Rawls thought, there wouldn’t be a soul on earth who could recall a world different from the one Levallois was making for them.

  “First you say it’s the doldrums after a woman has a child. Now you say she’s born again and all the funny stuff is just her being scared of Levallois. Well, that may be true, but I say sometimes a snake’s afraid of other snakes.”

  Of course Nurse had seen all kinds over the years. Some lucky women place a child on their chest and it takes the latch right away, and life becomes a beautiful dream that both the child and the mother share. For others, the child is a great gift wrapped up in sadness; all they can see is the world the child has joined, how impenetrable its mysteries are and how permanent its pain. But these mothers seem to unwrap the sadness after a time, usually not longer than a month, or maybe two. And these mothers will see that the child is not afraid of the mystery, they have not yet learned that the pain is permanent, and the child will smile at the mother and she will look out on the world with a new faith, as if the child has told her that joy is not as infrequent a visitor as she thinks. And these mothers, like the first, will see the sun again, and in some deep fissure in their soul the idea takes root that their child may be the one who will unlock the world’s terrible mysteries, or bring an end to pain, or bring joy with them as a frequent guest, and that though the conditions of the world may be very much as permanent and endless as the land on which we work, even those conditions can be improved with every season if worked rightly.