Peachtree Road

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Let’s go on downstairs,” I said. “This stuff is making me choke.”

  “Just a minute,” Charlie said, and something in his voice made me turn and look at him. His face, in the dirty stipple of ice-light on the attic ceiling, was as luminous and white as a votive candle.

  I looked down at what he held in his hands. It was a gray woolen uniform, faded and stained and so stiffened by age that he could hardly unfold it, and even in the darkening afternoon you could tell that the bleached braid and the buttons, and the pitted buckle on the creaking old belt, had once been gilt. Below it in the trunk lay a flat-topped forage cap, and below that, wrapped in a length of yellow fringed silk that might have been a sash, was a dull, pitted saber.

  Charlie squatted before the trunk, perfectly still, the saber lying across his two outstretched hands like a sacrificial offering, and I saw in his transformed brown eyes that he had truly and forever lost his soul.

  “My great-grandfather’s,” he said in the kind of voice that should be kept for worship, or after love. “He died in the Wilderness. I’ve seen his picture. He didn’t look like any of us. I’m named for him, Charles Beauchamp. I didn’t know these were up here.”

  “Hey, let me see,” I said, reaching out to take the saber from him. He jerked it back, away from me.

  “Don’t,” he said, and his voice was so queer that I started at him. His face burned wax-white in the attic gloom, and tears shone in his dark eyes. The thick lenses of the glasses magnified them into a manic radiance. I dropped my hands.

  “It probably isn’t even your great-whatever’s,” I said perversely, for his refusal had stung me and the strange radiance alarmed me. “If it had been, looks to me like you’d have known it was up here. I bet it’s just some old uniform somebody left in the house before your folks bought it and they just never threw it out. I bet this old geezer died of dysentery or something somewhere like Macon.”

  Charlie turned his rapt, gilded face to me again, as if I were a bothersome gnat, his hands caressing the length of the saber, moving to stroke the corroded cloth of the folded coat, lightly tracing the bill of the ruined cap. He moved them as lovingly and delicately as a blind man tracing the face of his beloved.

  “They’re his,” he said in the same strange, faraway voice. “I can feel him. I can feel his blood running in there with mine.”

  In the fading pearled light I felt the hair prickle on the back of my neck, and the same cold I felt in Boris Karloff movies start on the backs of my shoulders. I was exquisitely conscious of the vast, dark, empty attic behind me. The door to the warm-lit downstairs looked miles away.

  “Jesus Christ, Charlie,” I whispered. “That’s not funny.”

  He did not answer. I don’t think he heard me. Slowly he pulled the stiff gray coat out of the trunk and laid it open on his knees, and held it up against his small, thin shoulders. Even in the dying light I could see the great, dark, fatal flower that bloomed across the left breast of the coat. A star-shaped tear rent its center. My breath seemed to slow and stop in my chest. Charlie looked down slowly, and touched the spot with a tender forefinger.

  “It’s his blood,” he said. “The shot went in here. It was a miniè ball. It must have stayed in him, because there isn’t a hole in the back.”

  All of a sudden he lifted the coat and buried his face in it, and his shoulders shook with silent sobs. The unearthly chill fled out of the air and I scuttled across the dusty floor on my buttocks and put my arms around him.

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t. It was a long time ago. Don’t be sad.”

  “I’m not sad,” Charlie said, lifting a wet, shining face to me. “I’m happy. This is…this is real glorious.”

  From that afternoon on, what Charlie and I did together was search for relics.

  There is a small army of them across the country, these relickers, a ridiculous and burning and somehow enormously appealing band of fanatics who spend their lives and often their fortunes walking the battlefields of the Civil War with metal detectors in their hands and shells both live and dead in the trunks of their cars. They are Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Midwesterners; they are anyone at all, as diverse and fragmented and unlikely a fraternity as can be imagined, held together only—but insolubly—by the grand and unquenchable passion that had leaped to life in Charlie Gentry’s eyes. They will, and do, willingly go to jail for trespassing on national battlefields and digging on government and private land, and they often lose wives and families to their mania. Some have lost limbs and even their lives, when a shell fired one hundred and thirty years ago finally finds its mark. Charlie had just joined them. And though one day he would become the head of one of the country’s great philanthropic foundations, administering literal millions of dollars and doing incalculable good, his first love save one would always be relics and relic hunting, and he would continue to do it until the day of his death.

  Many battlefields ring the city of Atlanta, sites of the age-blurred conflicts that most of us native Atlantans know far more thoroughly than our regular school studies, and they would come alive for me in the days of my late childhood, as I followed at Charlie’s muddy heels in the dreaming, sunstruck silence of Kennesaw Mountain or Ezra Church or the old park at Peachtree Battle Avenue. Excitement almost as white and absolute as his would jet up within me when we actually found a miniè ball or a belt buckle.

  “This stuff was from the Army of Tennessee,” he would say, reverently laying a filthy canteen or a shell fragment in his sack in a steaming cotton field near Big Shanty. “They were falling back from Dalton to get Sherman away from his base. Joe Johnston could see just what we’re seeing now.”

  His gestures took in the silent green back of Kennesaw Mountain behind us. Living fire consumed us then, the fire of battle and youth and glory, and of death in the sunlight.

  But in me, the fire of exhilaration would die when we left the battlefield and went home to supper. Charlie, I knew, carried that flame with him always, just under his stolid surface, and if I could not truly share it, still I felt proud that of all the boys coming to adolescence in Buckhead then, he chose to let only me know the warmth of his. Me, and Sarah Cameron.

  It was many years before Charlie, shy with the homely outsider’s boil-tender self-consciousness and crippled by his parents’ prudish Christian sanctions, would have anything to do with the diligent coquettes who made up our singular high school crowd, called the Pinks and the Jells. Dalliance and flirtation descended on them at puberty, these unprepossessing small girls we had known all our lives; popularity and conquest became their raisons d’être, and many of them never yielded up that priority all their lives. Consequently, a few of us—me, Pres Hubbard, and most of all, Charlie—had less to do with the fabled Pinks of Buckhead than any of the boys who came of age during that excessive and altogether hedonistic time. But to all of us, the single exception was Sarah Cameron.

  She was, from our earliest memory, included as naturally in our group activities, except for the four or so years that we all rode behind Lucy with the Buckhead Boys, as another small boy. Later, when Charlie and I began to go about in our oblivious twosome, it was only Sarah who was allowed to make a third.

  “Where’s Sarah?” I would say, as we set out on a morning’s jaunt to Peachtree Creek.

  “Oh, wait, Sarah’s not here yet,” Charlie would say, as we started for the woods behind the summerhouse.

  I think it was because nothing, not a single tendon, muscle or atom of small Sarah, threatened or puzzled us. She radiated simplicity and a kind of joyous empathy. She was as staunch and greathearted a companion as any boy could wish, and supremely comfortable to be with because there was nothing about her oblique or veiled or obscure. Her white grin was quick and open, her sherry eyes were warm and lit with absolute approval; her taut, supple brown body was even quicker than ours to master the thousand little athletic rituals in the dance of childhood, and her mind leaped along with and ahead of us like a dolph
in in a warm sea.

  Whatever we wanted to do at any given time, Sarah brimmed with enthusiasm and skill at it. She could keep up with us in any game or activity we might devise, and in some she so far excelled us that, toward anyone else so gifted, we would surely have felt disgruntled and envious. But Sarah had her mother’s quick sensitivity, and never pressed her advantage or showcased her expertise. In the water she was more than half mermaid, beautiful to watch, and on the diving board, at the top of one of her peregrine arcs, she was heartbreaking, fashioned of the air in which she hung. But in all the times Charlie and I swam with her, at the club or in the Camerons’ pool behind the Muscogee house, Sarah never went off the high dive. She did that only when she swam and dived alone or with other children.

  “I think the high dive’s show-offy,” she would say, when a jostling seal-brown flock of children urged her and Charlie and me toward the looming tower at the Driving Club pool. “The high dive’s for people who have to prove they’re hot stuff.”

  She and Charlie Gentry were the only two people in the world, for a long time, who knew of my total and paralytic terror of heights. They and Lucy. Lucy always knew.

  Sarah had a sort of light about her rather like Lucy’s, a warmth that drew people to her all her life, to bask at her flame. All her family had it; still do, those who remain. But it was not a light that burned or devoured. I came to think later that she was, in those early days, much like Lucy, with her grace and dark vividness and her physical agility and quick, quirky mind. Sarah was, perhaps, Lucy without the hungers and shadows, Lucy glowing instead of burning. In those short and sunlit days before high school, Sarah, like Charlie, was an abundance in my life, and I was comfortable and somehow filled when she was about, on our bikes or skates or in the haunted fields of Charlie’s lost, glorious war. I liked Sarah a lot.

  Charlie loved her.

  I don’t know when I became aware of that, when it dawned upon me with the force of revelation that the light in Charlie’s brown eyes on those afternoon forays into the battlefields around the city was not all for the memento mori that we found there. Once I saw, it was as if I had always known, and that he had always loved her. And I think he had, literally from babyhood, loved her through all the early years when I was lost in Lucy and the ones later when we followed in her wake on our bicycles, leaving Sarah and all the other little girls behind. I remember a day when we had ridden down to the memorial park at Peachtree Battle and sat in the showering greenness of late summer, dangling our bare feet in the exhausted September water of Peachtree Creek. Sarah was talking of her great-great-grandmother, who had been a bride of nineteen when the war broke out, and had stayed alone on her newly acquired plantation down in Bibb County with a hundred slaves, a thousand head of livestock and a baby due in three months while her young husband rode off at the head of the troop he had raised.

  “Sarah Tolliver Cameron,” Sarah said, her eyes alight. “I’m named for her. I hope I’ll be as brave when I’m grown up as she was. Her husband—my great-great-grandfather Beau—could have stayed with her till after the baby was born. Everybody wanted him to. She was the one who made him go. She said, ‘What would I tell your son when he asked me why his father had not gone with our brave General Lee, gone when the Confederacy needed the stout hearts of her men more than even their women did?’ Isn’t that beautiful? Don’t you think she was brave? I could never do that. I’d be scared to death.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Charlie said, and tears of pure exaltation swam behind his glasses. “You’d do the very same thing. You’re a true Southern lady, Sarah. There’s a poem my mother knows that goes, ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.’ That’s what your great-great-grandmama was talking about. You’d say that, too.”

  His face was so aflame that I could not look at it, and dropped my head to study my feet, green-white and misshapen in the tepid water. Sarah’s face flamed at the compliment, and she dropped her eyes, too. But before she did, I saw in them that she did not love Charlie, and that the love she could not feel pierced her like an arrow. I felt that I had trespassed on a scene of unbearable intimacy, embarrassed and somehow myself dishonorable.

  “What happened to your great-great-grandfather?” I asked briskly.

  “He died,” she said, still not looking up. “He never did come home.”

  “What battle?” Charlie breathed, ready at that moment to ascend into Heaven.

  Sarah paused, and then, in a small voice, said, “He didn’t die in any battle. He died of dysentery in some camp outside of Gettysburg.”

  I felt a great rush of affection for her. She could so easily have lied. It would have meant the world, the moon and stars and planets, to Charlie. But she did not. Something in me knew at that moment, and filed the knowing away, that with Sarah Cameron there was, as well as easiness, safety.

  Sarah would not come to the house on Peachtree Road. She would trot as easily into Charlie’s house as I did, and she would accompany us anywhere around Buckhead that was in walking or bicycling range, but she would, when the suggestion was made to go to my house and read my comics, or play in the summerhouse, simply disappear. I was nearly thirteen before I asked her why. She was then eleven, the same age as Lucy.

  “Because,” she said, looking at me levelly out of her great amber eyes, “I am afraid of Lucy.”

  I knew that she was not afraid of anything in the world, at least that Charlie and I could discover, so for a moment I simply stared at her, taken aback. Presently she flushed.

  “I can’t help it if you think I’m silly. I told you the truth. I really am scared of her.”

  “Well, that’s just dumb,” I said finally. “Why on earth would you be scared of Lucy? You never even see her. She can’t hurt you.”

  “That’s not the kind of scared I mean,” Sarah said, and she would say no more. It was years before she told me what she meant.

  Oddly, Dorothy Cameron said something similar, not long after her daughter had. I was sitting on the sun-warmed ground in the Camerons’ back garden on a deceptively mild day in February, the year before I began high school, watching her put in late daylily bulbs. She wore a big straw hat of Ben’s and dungarees, and sang lustily from under the brim that entirely shadowed her face, “I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down….” Her voice was rich and low, like warmed syrup, like Sarah’s would be one day.

  She stopped and pushed the brim of the hat off her face and looked at me.

  “I haven’t seen Lucy in months and months,” she said. “Your aunt Willa isn’t still punishing her, is she? I hope not. It’s far too long to keep a child like Lucy penned up. It’ll break something in her.”

  “No,” I said. Dorothy Cameron was the only grown woman in my entire experience to whom I did not say, “No, ma’am.”

  “That is, she’s not locked in her room or anything. But she goes to Miss Beauchamp’s every day until four, and then she just stays up in her room until dinnertime. She doesn’t talk to any of us, either, not even to me. I haven’t really seen her for any longer than it takes to eat for ages. I think it’s just awful, what Aunt Willa’s done to her.”

  Dorothy Cameron did not reply.

  “You don’t like her, do you?” I said, seeing it suddenly. The conversation was an extraordinary one for a woman of forty and a boy of twelve to be having, but it was a mark of my curious and nourishing relationship with Dorothy Cameron that it did not seem at all so to me.

  “It’s not that,” she said, sitting back cross-legged on the grass and wiping her face on her sleeve. “It’s more…that maybe I’m just a little afraid of her.”

  My ears pricked. What was this fear of small, ephemeral Lucy Bondurant that lay over the hearts of the Cameron women?

  “What on earth for?” I said.

  “Because she needs so much,” Dorothy Cameron said. “The poor child seems to be absolutely ravenous. She’s like…some kind of motor with the governor left off, like a little engine out o
f control. I think she could be dangerous.”

  I laughed aloud. Lucy dangerous? To whom? She was herself the most vulnerable human being I had ever known, or would know.

  “Oh, Shep.” She looked at me and there was pity in her eyes. “Listen to you. You’re already in thrall. Dangerous to you, maybe. To anybody she thinks might help her, have something she needs…”

  I was suddenly and clearly angry, I who could not even own my own anger at my mother. Though Lucy had pulled away from me and was not a figure of consequence in my life now, except by the sheer force of her absence, I felt the familiar stirrings of the saint-protector in my meager breast.

  “Well, she’s out of luck, then, because nobody’s going to help her,” I said sharply. “Nobody can, or will. They’ve got her cut off from everybody on earth but the Negroes. And how are they going to help her?”

  It was true. Lucy now spent all the time when she was not at school or in her room or eating her silent meals with ToTo in the kitchen or in the little rooms over the garage or, sometimes, over in the Camerons’ back garden, in the little house that Glenn Pickens shared with his parents. When she was there she never came around to the house or the pool where Sarah and Charlie, and Ben and I played. And she virtually never set foot in the back garden of our house, much less the summerhouse that she had so loved. Except for the lingering aura of Lucyness that lay in the air of all places where she was, I might not have known that she was still alive.