A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  There are others, though. And for a flash after George’s birth Nurse feared she might become one, as she had dreamed outside of time and seen the world drowned, the mountains thrown into the air and ground to dust. The idea came and left like lightning. How easily she could free him from how hard a day it would be today, how hard tomorrow would be, too. But George took to the latch right off. It was strange to her how easily she slipped into that first group. She had feared she would hate the child. No one would have judged her if she did not love him, but she did. And she would have not blamed Rawls if he did not love the child, but he did, too.

  As for Emily, Nurse had watched her carefully, and as the children grew and smiled and crawled, and their mother got better and better at hiding the depths of her estrangement from the world, Nurse by instinct kept the children at her side. She had never seen it done herself, but she knew what the melancholy would sometimes tell a girl to do. “She’s crossed that bridge, Rawls,” she said. “I don’t doubt that. But the road goes on. I just wish I had a better notion of where it’s headed.”

  * * *

  On the first day of the New Year of 1866, Bob Reid supervised as John Talbot moved the entire contents of the overseer’s house out in the road: Bob’s bed, a small oval table, a workbench, two upholstered chairs, every rag, and every last stick of furniture. It wasn’t much, but it was all that remained for him to claim as his since returning from the war almost three years before. A dusting of snow covered the fields, and more fell on them as they worked. By noon they had everything loaded into two carts. They hitched a team of mules to each cart and Bob got into the first and John got into the second and they headed out toward the river road.

  Nurse and Rawls came out from under the eave of the kitchen house to watch them, and Bob put the reins under his good foot and raised his hat to them with his left hand. They saw him talking to himself, though they could not hear him, and he was wildly animated in the driver’s seat of the cart until he passed from view.

  John Talbot came up behind him on the second cart. Rawls stepped out into the road. “What’s all this now, John?”

  “Can’t say for certain. Mr. Reid says it’s moving day. He says we’re going to live at the old house. He spent the whole night talking bad on Mr. Levallois. Real bad. It was still dark when he woke me and said to put everything out for loading.”

  “What old house?” asked Rawls.

  “Where y’all used to live at, he said.”

  “That house ain’t even there no more. Nothing there but the train station now. Come on, John. Tell the truth, now.”

  John looked at Rawls and then at Nurse. His mouth hung open, a sign they both recognized as deep concentration. “Well, that’s where he said we’re going, so I guess we’ll have a surprise when we get there.”

  “What’d he say about Mr. Levallois?”

  “It’s a lot of words I ain’t supposed to say.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Well,” said John. “He said he’s gonna kill him.”

  Nurse and Rawls looked at each other. Rawls stepped toward the cart holding his hand out, as if to help him down, but John did not seem to notice. “No,” Rawls said. “You don’t need to be involved in this foolishness.”

  Nurse stepped into the road and gently pulled Rawls back under the eave. Rawls looked at her and she shook her head at him. He went and sat down on a bench. “We’ve got work yet here, John, but you ought not go,” Nurse said. “There’s a world of ugliness gonna meet you there.”

  John pondered for a bit. “I told him I would.” He finally said, “Besides, I’ve got half his things in the back of the cart. They’re just gonna keep getting snowed on sitting here.”

  The three of them watched the first cart pass out through the last pair of cedars and turn toward the station. John slapped the reins at the mules, and the cart rumbled off to close the gap.

  “What should we do?” Rawls asked.

  “You know that place I told you about?” she said.

  “You really want to go to look for a bunch of runaways on some islands in a swamp?”

  “We’re going,” said Nurse.

  “We don’t even know what’s out there. Could be just a story.”

  “It’s real, Rawls. I know it is. And we’re going. I don’t know what’s coming, but I don’t want to be here when it comes.”

  They walked quickly toward their cabin. As they passed the house, Nurse looked up toward its hundred windows. From one of them, Emily watched as they went.

  Bob and John Talbot pulled along the circle drive and halted their mules beneath the big sycamore tree. They began by carrying the upholstered items first, setting them up under the long roof of the waiting area behind the platform to get them out of the snow.

  The station agent came out and asked them what was going on.

  “It’s just Mr. Levallois. He put it all in motion,” said Bob.

  The agent tucked away his curiosity on hearing the Frenchman’s name and went inside. Trains came and went, but only a few, and the passengers’ disinterest in the affairs of the two men placing furniture in the station merely confirmed a well-established fact: that people will ignore almost any aberration as long as it does not inconvenience them directly.

  Bob did more directing than work, and his injuries were unforgiving nevertheless, and this made his hostility more general. By late afternoon they had a fair re-creation of the sitting room of the overseer’s house at Beauvais Plantation. They had to let the diorama spill into the station agent’s office a bit, at which fact John felt a great deal of consternation, but Bob slapped him on the shoulder when it was done and smiled and said, “We’re well on our way, boy.” He asked John to go back to the overseer’s house to wait for him, saying they all might be together again soon.

  John left the station. It was long after nightfall. His body ached from work and he was tired. He thought he’d like to go back to the overseer’s house and go to sleep, and he began to nod off here and there even before the mules had left the pebble drive. He heard gunshots in the distance a little while later. Too many to count. He arrived in front of the overseer’s house and went inside. He lit a fire and laid out his coat before it and went to sleep.

  By the time the last train that left Levallois Crossing that night finally sparked its brakes and slowed to its destination the next morning, the news had made its way to Beauvais. Talk is as reliable as a coming sunrise, and in this case was a little quicker. Bob had shot eighteen people. The station agent, two disposable-bottle-cap salesmen en route to Fredericksburg, and a young couple with an infant were all killed. They said he reloaded several times, and that sometimes he seemed to aim and sometimes not, but all the same a dozen more people were wounded. Reports and gossip both agreed that afterward, as the crowd of travelers shook on the floor, and the smoke cleared out and a heavy silence took its place, he went about his business, setting a fire on the floor where his remade home lacked a fireplace, then carefully unfolded that morning’s issue of the Daily Richmond Examiner and lit a pipe.

  Slowly the uninjured got up from the floor. They ran off in little heats of two or three. When one of the last, lying just on the other side of the growing fire, got to his knees, Bob folded the paper down and said, “Excuse me, sir, are you leaving?”

  The man quivered. He pissed himself. It spread in a little puddle from his left knee onto the floor. “Might I?” he asked.

  “Of course. I’ll see you later. But do tell everyone that Levallois’s cruelty killed my wife. He stole my land from me. And my daughter, too.”

  “Yes. I will.”

  Bob folded the paper up and began to read again. “Good night, then,” he said.

  “Good night,” the man answered politely, and got up from his knees and ran into the darkness.

  * * *

  Nurse and Rawls agreed to leave before first light. They had gone about their business so as not to attract attention to themselves and had gathered their t
hings for the journey after dark. She washed her face that night in the basin’s cold water and wrapped her hair in the same deep-blue-and-orange-blossom-flecked wrap she had worn when she’d first seen Rawls before the war, when her life was ordered by a more predictable cruelty. She looked down at him. He slept heavily, and her love for him stretched out on the bed alongside him. It was not so long ago. They were young yet. And though time has a weight that settles on one’s shoulders with no regard for the ticking of a clock, she felt a new hope that they would finally find a life beyond Beauvais. Rawls did not love it there, of course. And though Beauvais was only a name, its good earth wore that name like a shackle. He had no servile affection for Levallois. And Bob and John Talbot and the girl Emily disappeared from his mind as soon as they were no longer in his presence. But if one were to tear down the walls of the plantation, and uproot all the posts in all the long miles of snake fence, and crumble the very foundations of every man-made thing to dust, there might be a place worth loving here, he’d said. But she could never accept that the place would not still be stained with blood, as even a wild place is when man has walked through it, though a man might think his walking is merely a passing through. I don’t know nothing else but here, he’d said, when she’d brought up the idea of leaving before. I’m ashamed to say it, but I think I’d miss it some, he added. She replied that there was a whole world beyond the boundaries of Beauvais, beyond Virginia, beyond America, and she wanted to get a little of it before it was too late. And Rawls replied that her wants were his, that he would go anywhere with her as soon as she began to walk toward whatever that thing was, if only she would tell him what it was they were supposed to get a little of. Nurse smiled at the thought. They were on their way. The day had come. The people of Great Dismal would make a place for them as they had done for generations, and Nurse and Rawls would begin a new history for themselves along the dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia.

  George slept curled at the foot of the bed. His arms were wrapped around Rawls’s ankles and he used Rawls’s crossed legs like a pillow. She opened the door as quietly as she could so they would not wake.

  She saw Emily enter the wood line, making her way toward their cabin.

  “I need your help, Nurse.”

  Nurse felt a desperate urge to resist her. To say that they were leaving and she must now fend for herself. But she knew that her resistance would call too much attention to her and Rawls to get away. “What do you need?” she asked.

  “It’s the girls,” she said. “Something terrible has happened and I’m afraid Mr. Levallois will do something to me, or to them. Will you look after them here? You mustn’t let him stop you.”

  Nurse ran through her options in her mind and saw how limited they were. “I’ll get them,” she said. She decided she would bring the girls to the cabin and place them in their little wicker bassinet. And she would put blankets over the bassinet so they’d be as safe and warm as possible until Emily came to fetch them. She hoped the children would not be left alone for long, but she would not miss her chance to leave this place forever. She and Rawls and George. They owed nothing to this place. Let this last gesture remove all doubt.

  All his life, Levallois had been like a dog attuned to distant weather; his hackles up, his mood consumed with restlessness, always far enough ahead of the masses that they never thought to question how his desires became their reality. But Bob Reid had unleashed a terrible storm, and Levallois found himself caught out in it.

  Bob didn’t need to kill Levallois to ruin him, though it was clear he intended to draw him to the station to do just that. He only needed to diminish him. And if people began to question his authority, to wonder why they accepted his vision of the world as the only one possible, what would he have left? Mr. Levallois was a man, but he was also an idea. And he was an idea that no one in Chesterfield County had ever considered making an argument against. That is what he was truly afraid of; what would happen to him, to all his work, if they did? He shuffled through his desk and found a pistol. It was a gleaming, silver thing and he tucked it into his waistcoat. He sat at his desk, trying to figure his next move. He got up and slammed the door in frustration.

  Emily listened from the stairwell and heard the lock tumble shut. She knew her father was not coming. He had no plan beyond revenge, but she had taken the threads he’d laid out on all those days they’d sat together on the porch of the overseer’s house. She had worked and reworked them until they were woven into the fine cloth that would be finished that night. She had not known that her father would do what he had done, but she knew that he had given her an opportunity to put her plan in motion.

  She walked briskly toward the overseer’s house to find John Talbot. She looked through the front window and saw that he was sitting in the middle of the empty room, staring at the cold ashes in the fireplace.

  She opened the door and went to him and kissed him. “Do you remember what I said to you by the river last summer, John, when you said you loved me?”

  “You didn’t say it back.”

  “I said that love is not a word, it’s a demonstration.”

  He seemed to drift away, toward one thought or another. His mind was a small dark room, but it was a clean one, and Emily lost her patience with him before he found what he was looking for.

  “It means you have to do something for me.”

  John Talbot thought of the river. And in his thoughts there was blood on a knife and Emily caressed him, and high bluestem grasses waved in a low spring breeze that shook the green buds on their branches. He wanted to choose a part of that past and leave the rest behind. He felt a tinge of uncertainty and he wondered if maybe the past did not allow that kind of choosing. “Do you think Mr. Reid is okay?”

  “I would know it if something happened to him. He’s my father, isn’t he?”

  “We’ll go lay by the river again when it warms up?”

  “It’s all I want,” she said.

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “It’s very simple, John. We’re going to build a fire.”

  John Talbot watched from the porch of the overseer’s house as Emily left Beauvais. She rode the big gray horse down between the cedars. She said she would be back to see the fire. Through the moonlit night, he saw Nurse walking toward the house. He saw Levallois standing in front of her, blocking her path. She tried to move around him, but he countered each move so that Nurse could not pass. Levallois pulled off her headscarf, the one John often told Nurse she looked so pretty in, and struck her. When she was on the ground he kicked her in the stomach. John watched it through the window from far away and no sound reached him. Emily had not said anything about this. Before sunrise, build the fire, she’d said. He repeated it to her, and then to himself all throughout the day. Before sunrise, build the fire. He watched Levallois pick up Nurse by the back of her dress and pull her to her feet. He could see her crying in pain, but he could not hear any sound. He carried Nurse deeper into the boxwood maze that led to the bare tobacco fields covered over with snow. He lost sight of them and then saw them again at the edge of the tree line that blocked the row of cabins from view.

  She ought to be back, thought Rawls. How long did it take to scoop up those little ones and bring them here? He paced in the dooryard, kicking up little tufts of the carpet of pine needles and stomping down the miniature snowbanks that had reached the floor of the woods they lived in. He heard her coming first, wailing. He did not think he’d ever heard her make such a noise before. He heard her wail again. A crashing through branches. And then Rawls saw him. Levallois had her by the hair. She was tugging at his clothes. She had clawed his face and the blood ran down his cheeks. Levallois smiled. Rawls thought a devil would be no worse than him.

  “Let her go,” Rawls said.

  He did. She collapsed into the wet needles behind him, weeping. Her right eye was shut. Her dress was torn. She saw Levallois’s elk-handled knife in the needles just out of reach. He had not notic
ed it fall from its sheath as she struggled with him.

  “Get away from here, Rawls.”

  “I’m not leaving her with you.”

  Levallois took the unblemished pistol out from his waistcoat. He cocked the hammer and pointed the barrel at Rawls. “Go, I said. Get the hell off my property.”

  Nurse crawled toward the knife and then stood up behind Levallois. She wrapped the elk-antler handle with both hands and brought it down toward his shoulder. He turned around to face her and dropped the pistol, reaching up to the wound from which his blood had already begun to fall into the snow. She stabbed him again. And then again. Time has a weight. Carrying it had made Nurse strong. Her lip was swollen and she did not speak or back away when he lurched toward her. Instead she stabbed him. He dropped to one knee. His cheeks were red, like the devil’s, but he was only a man. Levallois did not talk. He breathed instead, hard and slow and steady as if he wanted to make sure he did not forget how to do it. Nurse stabbed him again and again until it seemed like little more than a nuisance to him. He tried to raise himself up, waving one arm behind him toward Nurse and the knife as if shooing a fly.

  Rawls went to her and wrapped her in his arms. “He can’t do nothing else to us,” he said, “but we’ve got to go right now.”

  She stood there with the knife still clutched in both her hands. She was bloody to the elbows of her dress, but the blood was his. Levallois managed to bring himself to his feet. His right arm hung limp at his side, and his left searched his body for wounds, but there were too many to address one handed. “I’ll go,” he said, waving his good hand out in front of him. “I’ll go. Just let me be.” His knees shook and he swayed and his blood left a dark red circle in front of the cabin as it left his body.