The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  The night smelled late when the tavern door opened and threw its rectangle of light into the yard. A soldier stood silhouetted in the open door, turned to say something, then closed the door behind him. He lingered unsteadily on the narrow gallery a moment, then carefully negotiated the steps, muttering to himself. Once in the yard, he stopped and raised his face to the moon. “Annie!” he cried, waving his arm across the sky. He stood a moment more, as if listening for a reply, then crossed to the road and staggered off toward the square. He had gone only a little way when a man glided out of the cedars across the road and followed him.

  Molochi left his own watching-place then. Under the three-quarters moon, he followed the drunken soldier and the stalking man. The soldier went unsteadily up the road, stopping now and then to talk to himself; the other moved boldly in the moonlight a little way behind. Molochi stayed in the shadows, the knife still in his hand. Overhead, the dark birds circled against the stars.

  The hour was late, and of a silence and emptiness that was almost tangible. When they neared the Shipwright house, the stalking man moved off the road and into the shadows, while Molochi passed down the creekbed behind.

  A fog lay in the creek bottom, pale in the moon and thin as pulled cotton. Molochi felt it on his face, watched it swirl around his feet as he moved. He had to be careful on the slick bank lest his feet betray him; pale branches reached for him, and in places the brush was thick, and he had to move slowly. Passing behind the Shipwright house, he could see the sentry by the back porch standing motionless in a pool of moonlight. He was almost past when his foot slipped and broke away a chunk of the muddy clay bank. The splash was loud in the stillness.

  “Who comes there?” said the sentry.

  The moment that followed was like a glass dome lowered over Molochi Fish and the foggy creek bank and the soldier in the yard. Molochi saw the man lower his rifle, peer into the dark. “Who comes there?” the man said again, his voice taut with fear and with the loneliness that visits in the deep ruin of night. Molochi stood absolutely still, wrapped in the shadow of a sycamore tree. A dark bird lit in the branches and watched him in silence. Time passed, and there was no sound but the creak of frogs and insects and the whisper of the moving water. Molochi did not believe the sentry would move out into the dark, not by himself anyway. Sure enough, after a little while, the man relaxed. He searched the darkness for a moment more, then moved up onto the porch out of the moonlight. Molochi saw him lower his musket and put his hand against the boards, as if to reassure himself that he was not alone.

  When it was safe then, Molochi moved on through the cool breath of the fog. He had no hope of catching the soldier and the stalking man, but he went on just the same, following the night birds now. They flew from branch to branch before him, still voiceless, making only a little flutter with their wings. He followed them into the ruins of the south side of the square, through the hollow shells of buildings, over rubble and ashes. Molochi had never entered these buildings when they were whole, and he moved through them now without any brush of memory.

  Then he was in the fog again, once more moving slowly along the bank of the creek. He could see the bridge where the Oxford road crossed. The bridge was an indefinite shape against the stars, and under it was a deep pool of shadow in which something moved. Molochi passed into a stand of willows and stopped, kneeling, the knife blade lying across his thigh. He heard a sound, a sighing rush of air that came from the shadows under the bridge, and no sooner had it passed than he heard one of the night birds shriek: a high, piercing sound that drove across the darkness like a spear of light, then gone. The insects and frogs fell silent, and through the silence came another sound, a man breathing hard, in quick gasps, as if there were not enough air for him to breathe. In an instant, the man himself emerged from the shadows under the bridge, slipping in the mud, moving fast, bent over like a man running under fire. His moon shadow ran beside him, the legs scissoring. Molochi saw the gleam of the knife in his hand, saw him stop and look back once, then kneel and thrust the blade of the knife into the mud, and again, and again. Then the man rose and came running, breathing hard, and Molochi saw his face in the moonlight as he passed.

  In a little while, it was quiet again. Molochi moved out of the willows and approached the bridge, watching the shadows beneath it. As he drew closer, he saw that it was not all shadow; the moonlight fell in dim ribbons through the planking and touched something there, a point of light, a reflection that winked with movement. Then he heard a low and sighing sound, like air moving through a bellows. Molochi knew then what he would find, and he crossed the threshold of shadow with the image already in his mind.

  The soldier lay on his back, his eyes wide open, the air rushing through the glistening slash at his throat. Molochi squatted beside him and saw that he was very young, just a boy. The soldier turned his eyes on him, and Molochi saw the wetness of them, and as quick saw the light pass out of them. With his free hand, Molochi touched the boy’s throat and felt the warm blood coursing. He could smell it, too, heavy and rank and mingling with the smell of raw whiskey and mud and dead fish in the shadows under the bridge.

  IX

  Aunt Vassar Bishop made her nephew a good supper of biscuits and greens and the tiny breasts of robins old Priam had snared that morning. Afterward they went into the parlor where, in a little while, Priam appeared with a silver tray and a pot of English tea Aunt Vassar had saved for this moment, which she had never doubted would come.

  The room was dressed for summer, with rush mats on the floor and linen covers on all the uncomfortable parlor chairs, and cheesecloth over the pictures on the walls (still lifes, mostly, and one of a lady playing a harpsichord, and a framed wreath fashioned from Gawain’s mother’s hair) and wispy linen curtains where, in winter, the heavy drapes hung. Gawain was surprised to see this old seasonal arrangement, and even more surprised to find that he had expected it.

  “My lands, Aunt,” he said, laughing. “The whole town burnt, and the war lost, and yankees everywhere, and you have put the parlor in summer dress.”

  “Well, it’s summer, ain’t it?” she said.

  She did not press him on the war. In fact, she hardly spoke at all, sitting in her chair by the cold hearth with the teacup balanced on its saucer, and on the table beside her the glass of clear corn whiskey that she took every night since she weaned herself of laudanum. She let Gawain talk, and listened as he spoke a little of his travels—not much, and not of battles or marches, but of towns he had seen, and rivers, and high mountains, and of lads he had known who were gone. He asked after his sisters, whose faces and voices he could hardly remember, and Aunt Vassar told him what she knew of their lives and fortunes: of childbirths and of deaths, of scenes played out among people Gawain would never know. When he questioned her about his father, she answered plainly: he was incontinent, mad, and not likely to live long, and he had nothing left but the house and the ground it sat on. Before his sickness, Frank Harper had been vice president of the Mississippi Central Railroad and so was entitled to a pension. In the war years, the pension had been issued in Confederate notes, worthless now, and since the yankees came, the money had stopped altogether. The yankees had managed with great difficulty to keep the railroad intact, but they were not in the pension business. Gawain Harper heard these things, acknowledged them, and put them away.

  Aunt Vassar reminded him that his own prospects, as a professor with no one to profess to, were not much better. Did he have any ideas?

  “Sure, darlin,” said Gawain. “I will turn to crime.”

  “Excellent,” said Aunt Vassar. “Only, who are you goin to steal from? And to whom would you sell it if you did?”

  “Mere details,” said Gawain. He rose from his chair and paced before the mantel, the smoke curling from his pipe. He had finished the tea and now he, too, was sipping at a glass of corn liquor. It was imported stuff, brought across the hills from Tippah County by King Solomon Gault, who had also run the tea throug
h the lines from God knew where. A little of the whiskey made Gawain dizzy. He hoped it would take the edge off his restlessness, but it didn’t.

  “Well,” said Aunt Vassar at length, “I suppose we will make out.”

  “I do not intend to be idle,” said Gawain. “I will do for you and Papa and”—he stopped, his hand poised in the air—“and any other orphans we might pick up.”

  “Hmmm,” said Aunt Vassar. She rocked awhile, studying the whiskey in her glass. Gawain paced around the room—it was dimly lit by a pair of candles on the mantel—looking at the books and plaster fruit and statuettes of unlikely shepherds and maidens, picking up this one and that one as if seeing them for the first time. He came back to the mantel then and regarded the face of the curlicued porcelain clock that sat there, which Aunt Vassar brought from her trip to France long ago.

  “Have you seen Morgan?” asked Aunt Vassar then.

  “I have not,” said Gawain, tapping his pipe stem on the clock’s face. “Have I ever mentioned how much I hate this thing?” he said.

  “So you have not made any attempt to—”

  “Aunt Vassar Bishop,” said Gawain, “this day was long before it even got started. I have not the energy to face the Judge, and I am too tired to go slippin about in the rose bushes right now.”

  “I see,” said Aunt Vassar. She stirred a little sugar in her whiskey, the spoon tinkling in the glass. When she was done, she licked the spoon and set it carefully on the table and looked at Gawain. “I suppose you are right to be circumspect,” she said, “given Nathaniel’s temper, though most of that is put-on.”

  Gawain laughed. “I never heard that said of him.”

  “Never you mind,” said Aunt Vassar. “I know him better than you, by twenty years. Truth to tell, his honor the Judge is scared to death right now that the yankees will haul him off to jail. Not this bunch, maybe—they are about as wore out as we are. But the vultures and the politicians will follow soon, now the fighting’s over and the danger’s gone. Having read the papers, they’ll be jealous, and therefore less tolerant of the Judge’s reputation. He was quite outspoken about all that secession foolishness, you remember.”

  “My God,” said Gawain. “They already burned his house. How much does he have to pay before they let him alone.”

  Aunt Vassar shook her head and laughed. “You have a good deal to learn about the passions of them who have never been shot at. The Judge himself used to be a prime illustration, for the one year out of four it looked like we might win the thing. In victory, his kind ain’t so quick to let bygones be bygones. You will see.”

  “Well, let it be amongst em,” said Gawain. “You won’t find me linin up to register for the vote.”

  “That’s all right to say, when it don’t touch you.”

  “Well, it don’t.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Aunt Vassar.

  Gawain looked at his aunt then. The candlelight lay soft on her face, and he could see, in the light’s illusion, the ghost of the girl in the portrait. Gawain turned away and spoke to the clock on the mantel. “No,” he said. “I insist that it doesn’t.”

  “You may insist all you want, and I with you, but that don’t change what is.”

  “Then tell me what is,” Gawain said testily.

  “The Judge is going to Brazil and taking his folks with him,” said his aunt. From her seat, Aunt Vassar could see the muscles tighten in her nephew’s jaws. She went on. “The king down there has promised full citizenship, land—niggers too, for all I know—to anybody who wants to come. Nathaniel has said he will get up a party to go. He is trying to talk other malcontents into the thing before it gets too warm around here. All their families, too. It is madness, but I suppose we ought to be used to that by now.”

  Again Gawain made no reply, but stared hard into the clock’s face, as if he might will it to stop, or vanish, or merely cease being what it was.

  Aunt Vassar watched him a moment, then slammed her glass down on the table by her chair. He jumped at the sound, turned to find her glaring at him, the candle flame flickering in her spectacles. “I just thought you might be interested to know,” she said.

  “What would you have me do about it?” he asked.

  “Do? Oh, I would have you do nothin atall. I am sure Morgan will flourish in the valley of the Nile.”

  “Aunt, the Nile is in—”

  “I know where it is, sir,” said Aunt Vassar. “Never mind. I won’t mention it again.”

  Gawain knocked out his pipe in the hearth. “Aunt, I am told it was Solomon Gault who killed Lily. Has the Judge taken any action in the matter?”

  “You mean, has he shot him down in the street?”

  “Yes! That is just what I mean!” said Gawain. His voice was loud in the silent house. He reached up, snatched the clock in both hands.

  “Don’t you break that clock,” said Aunt Vassar.

  He put the clock down gently, but kept his back to her. In the mirror over the mantel, he could see his face.

  “That burns you up, doesn’t it?” she said. “Even worse than that other thing I said I wouldn’t mention.”

  “It is none of my business,” said Gawain.

  “Just what exactly is your business, sir?”

  “Aunt—”

  “Don’t ‘Aunt’ me. Point of honor: Nathaniel should avenge his daughter. Do you think it would change anything if he did? Would it make you less afraid of him—or more?”

  “I am not afraid of him,” said Gawain. “And anyhow, that is not the question.”

  “Oh, I thought it was,” she said. “But you must not feel yourself ashamed. Morgan or the Judge—it is a point of honor either way, and you will do the right thing by both.”

  He turned from the mantel, hesitated an instant, then bent down and kissed her on the forehead. He had never done that before, not even at the depot on the day he left for the war. Aunt Vassar flinched away. “Quit that,” she said.

  “Point of honor,” said Gawain. “I will see to it.”

  “Go to bed,” she said.

  So he bade her good night and took a candle and made his way up the shadowed stairs to his room. He stopped by his father’s door, listened, heard nothing, passed on. In a moment he was standing at the window of his old room, looking out at the murmurous dark. The bed he had slept all his life in, covered by the same counterpane, lay waiting, but he had no interest in it. Tired as he was, he suddenly had no desire to sleep. He could smell the sweet-shrub and the damp oak leaves. “‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,’” he said aloud, wishing he had thought to say it at sundown when it would have made more sense.

  A mirror hung over this mantel as well, and once more he considered the reflected image of his face, ghostly in the candlelight. He thought of the other face hidden behind the glass and wished he could draw it out somehow, bring it into the light again just so he could assure himself that he’d been here once. Again he was surrounded by the shapes and the artifacts of his old life, left just as they were on the day he turned from this room and closed the door behind him—forever, he had thought then. Maybe forever. Now he had returned, and all of it should have been familiar to him: the curtains, the bed, the fowling piece propped in a corner, the books slanted on their shelves—but in the wavering light of the candle he could find no corner of memory to accommodate these things. Then, moving restlessly about the room, he spied the carpet bag and hat and canteen, and the brushed frock coat that Priam had hung from the coat tree. These were his, he knew. Of all that had lain waiting for him in this room, these things alone could he touch and know they were still his own.

  He sat on the bed and drew the carpet bag up beside him, and from it he took the ambrotype of Morgan Rhea. He opened the case and ran his finger across the crack in the glass. Her face was barely visible in the candlelight, but there she was, staring out at him with that same thoughtful expression, as solemn and remote as any of the portraits in the hall below. Brazil, he thought, and another
line of old Tom Gray’s ponderous “Elegy” came to him. ‘“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air,’” quoth Gawain Harper, embarrassing himself.

  He closed the case and laid it beside him on the bed, then rooted in the carpet bag and found his rosary. Father Denby Garrison, that old high-churchman, had sent the beads to Gawain while the regiment was still at Corinth, and he had carried them in his haversack throughout the war. Not once had Gawain Harper gone into a fight without the beads around his neck. When he searched for Sir Niles at Franklin, he had them in his hand. He held them now in his palm and studied the yellowed ivory beads, the medallion of Our Lady, the crucifix with its head-bent figure. All at once, he closed his hand around them, feeling the shape of the beads in his palm. “Point of honor,” he said. He rose, quickly, and slipped on his frock coat. He put the beads in one inside pocket, the portrait of Morgan in the other, and left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

  In the hall, Gawain stopped to consider. Since arriving in Cumberland, his only contact with the Federal authorities had been at the tavern when he had spoken with the pipe-smoking sergeant. He supposed there was some protocol for returning orphans of the defeated Confederacy; he also supposed that someone would tell him if there was. Certainly no one had officially informed him of the curfew. Aunt Vassar had mentioned it in passing, but Gawain did not consider her remarks on the subject official. And anyhow, for three years Gawain had been testing the limits of his luck; he saw no reason to end the experiment now. “All right, then,” he said aloud.

  He found he remembered which stair treads creaked, and he avoided them on his way down. The parlor was dark, his aunt gone to her room in the back of the house. The pictures in the hall were dark rectangles shrouded in cheesecloth. He stopped under the portrait of himself, peered at it, believed he could see in the ambient light the outline of the composed, solemn face looking down at him. Then he went on down the hall. The front door clicked softly behind him and he stood for a moment in the soft night, listening. Then he set out across the yard.