The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  At last he arose and moved out into the moonlit emptiness of the old glebe where Father Garrison’s milk cow used to graze. The far gate stood open, and Gawain went that way. At the gate, he stopped and listened. Just across the lane, beyond a grove of sentinel oaks, rose the pale flank of the Carter house, silent and dreaming. In one of the dark corner windows, a gauzy curtain trembled in the night breeze like a spirit beckoning. Gawain wondered if Morgan was sleeping in the darkness beyond it, and what she might be dreaming about up there.

  Gawain moved across the lane and into the yard, trampling a bed of irises along the way, until he reached the corner of the house, and there he stopped, listening. Something out front, a sound above the night sounds. A mosquito stabbed him in the cheek, and he crushed it. He waited, pressed to the side of the house, one hand gripping the wire that ran down from the lightning rod.

  He knew what he was hearing, and it scared him: a woman crying in the dark, alone in the deep midnight. For some reason, he thought of the stone maiden over his mother’s grave, weeping like this when no one was about. No, you don’t, he thought. He shook the image away and moved out of the shadows and into the moonlit yard.

  He found her sitting on the ground, her knees drawn up, face cradled in her arms. She had reached the place in her crying where she could not catch her breath; the sobs were torn from her, strangling and hoarse. As he approached, he whispered her name, but she did not respond, and now the intensity of her grief almost panicked him. She seemed to be at the unraveled end of some immediate terror, some violation that still shuddered in the cool evening, so close it still threatened. Gawain felt a tingle at the base of his skull and remembered the figure he had sensed, but never seen, in the ruins of the square. He looked back, half-expecting the man to be crouched in the shadows behind him. But there was no one, nor any other sound but the monotonous drone of the crickets. Then he thought No, I have seen this before and remembered how it was: how a man might be sitting by the fire, or cleaning his musket, or bending to tie his shoe, and all at once he would crack open, lift his face in terror as some dormant image burst unexpected out of his fragile heart. Gawain had seen men cry like this, had heard the sounds they made as they tried to push closed the door of memory. Most times they succeeded and would slink away abashed while their comrades pretended to be busy with the fire. But sometimes a man could not close the door again. Then he might cry out and wave his arms and run madly away, the demons pursuing like a cloud of hornets—or he might sit upon the ground, moaning, rocking slowly back and forth, gone to a place where no one could reach him. This was the worst, for when his comrades knelt before him, they could see their own fate in the dull mirror of his eyes.

  Gawain knew he had stumbled into a moment like that. He had no idea what demons had come, but he could feel them all around in the dark, and he held up the rosary so that the crucifix dangled from his fist, and he spoke her name again, not whispering now: “Morgan!”

  This time she lifted her face, eyes wide, and struggled to her feet, her hand outstretched as if to push him away. She backed up toward an oak, and Gawain saw that the tree was covered in cockroaches, a glistening encrustation curved about the trunk like a sheet of smoky glass. “Don’t!” he said. He spread his arms wide. “See? It’s me, Gawain Harper, plain as day.”

  She stopped then, pulled her fists up under her chin and looked at him, struggling for breath. He could see her face clearly now: it was the face in the ambrotype, with a shadow blading across it where the crack was. He took a step toward her. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Suddenly she came alive with an energy he would not have expected. “Hah!” she said, mocking him in a harsh whisper. “What’s the matter! The time to ask me that was—oh, I don’t know, about last winter”—she stopped to cough; Gawain took another step toward her, but she halted him with her lifted hand—“about last winter, with all those battles in Tennessee, and nothin from you, not a word—”

  “But I wrote you, Morgan! From Nashville and Tupelo and from ’way down in Alabama!” Gawain was a little pricked by the way things were developing, this clumsy arguing in the dark by a tree full of roaches, after he’d come all this way. But she wasn’t through with him yet.

  “Well, where have you been all the day?” she asked. “I had to find out from somebody else that you been in town since before dinner. Why didn’t you let me know? Why didn’t you!”

  “Why Morgan, I—” Then he stopped, for he had no answer.

  “Damn you, Gawain Harper,” she said.

  Gawain had a thought. He reached in his pocket, held up the guttapercha case. “Look, Morgan,” he said lamely. “I still have your picture.” He opened the case, held it out to her. “It’s broke, but I still have it.”

  She took a tentative step toward him. “I thought you were dead,” she said.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I wrote you. Good God, Morgan, why would I not write you?”

  She took another step, then another, her arms clasped over her breasts, until she was close enough for him to smell the sweat of her. She lifted one bare foot and scratched it. Then she reached out and took the ambrotype from his hand, and in that moment, Gawain understood that, whatever else happened, he had closed one circle at least.

  She looked at the picture, turned it into the moonlight so she could see it better, ran her finger down the crack. “It’s broken,” she said.

  “I told you it was,” he said.

  She closed the case but didn’t return it. “You know, I had nothing of yours,” she said. She laughed softly. “I never saw you in a uniform. I thought you’d come back in one.”

  “But you said you believed I was dead,” he reminded her.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I mean.”

  He understood then, and a chill touched him.

  “What’s that in your hand?” she asked, pointing.

  Gawain opened his hand; the beads slipped through his fingers and dangled in the moonlight.

  “Ah, Gawain Harper,” she said. “Of course you would have that, out here in the dark.” She put her hand out, touched the lapel of his coat. “Are you whole? I mean—”

  He captured her hand and held it. “Oh, yes. I been hungry, mostly. I suppose the fudge has had a hard time. What about your mother? Young Alex? Yourself?”

  “All well,” said Morgan, “though I suppose that don’t mean what it used to.” After a moment, she said, “Papa is changed a good deal, after all these troubles.”

  That’s real good, thought Gawain.

  “How did you know to find me here?” she asked.

  “My Cousin Rena,” said Gawain. “I stopped at their place last night. She told me about your house. About Lily.”

  “Ah,” said Morgan. “We have a lot to talk about, I reckon.”

  They were silent then, for a little while. Gawain heard the whippoorwill, and had the odd thought that perhaps it was the same one he’d heard in the fields last night, keeping watch. “It is grievous late,” he said finally. “I will come tomorrow, if I may.”

  She did not reply, but lifted her face, her lips parted a little, and he kissed her then, lightly. From the roof of the old Carter house, a mockingbird began to sing, as if Gawain had planned it himself.

  MOLOCHI FISH BELIEVED (though the notion had never taken any definite shape in his mind) that all men were guided by some elemental Mover, as a blown leaf, a night bird, a floating log are moved by air and water. Thus he was driven away from the bridge and through the town, through the bricks and ashes of the square. He moved silently behind tents where no lanterns glowed in this late hour, where people sometimes moaned in their sleep or their rutting, or talked in whispers about things he could not imagine. He shied away from these hushed voices, for whispers had a way of following him in the dark. He stopped once to wash the boy’s blood from his hands in a puddle in the road. Kneeling there, he smelled the rank mud of the creek on his boots, so he washed them too, scrubbing the mud away with his ha
nds.

  Later, he rested within the hollow shell of a building. The air was dead there, and it reeked of ashes and old pigeon droppings. An iron safe, its door yawning open, crouched in a corner. Molochi could see stars through the empty windows, and he saw the restless night birds perched around the roofless walls. They dipped their beaks at him. They swiveled their heads and nudged one another, and their eyes caught the moonlight like little jewels. Then, all at once, a stirring moved them, as if they’d caught some signal from among the stars, and, as Molochi watched, they all took flight, their wings beating the dead air without sound as they lifted from the wall. He followed them, and in a little while found himself in the burying ground that lay beyond the town on a hill all its own. He squatted in the deep shadow of a wall, breathing hard. Nothing stirred in this place, not even the wind, and the voices of the summer night were stilled. All around, the stones and monuments gleamed in the moonlight and threw black shadows over the rank grass. One of these was a tall shaft, and atop it stood a woman, arrested for eternity in an attitude of grief, her cold hand outstretched toward the sleeper below. A dark bird perched on her shoulder. In a little while, Molochi crept toward her and knelt at the base of the shaft. Even in the moonlight, he could discern the strange marks cut deep in the stone:

  _________________________________

  HARPER

  JANE ELLEN

  b. Herefordshire July 18, 1805

  d. Cumberland, Miss. July 18, 1855

  Seek him that maketh the seven stars

  and Orion, and turneth the shadow

  of death into the morning …

  _________________________________

  As he had done on other occasions, Molochi ran his fingers over the marks. He did not wonder what they meant, for he was not aware that they meant anything at all. Presently he looked up. The bird had flown away, and Molochi found himself looking at the woman’s face, at her eyes mysterious with shadow, her outstretched hand graceful and white against the stars. Her gown seemed to flow in liquid movement where the moon lay upon it. Molochi wanted more than anything else in the world to touch her face, to feel the smoothness of it under his hand and trace the eyes, the cheekbones, the lips, the curve of the throat. But she was too high, out of his reach, and all he could do was look up at her.

  He could not say how long he knelt there, but at last he curled himself against the cold marble and slept until the constellations dimmed and the sun began to rise. Then he rose himself, cold and stiff and bitten by mosquitoes, and looked at the woman again. The sun was just touching her face, and now he could see it with startling clarity against the pink sky. The life wreathed about the woman by the moon was gone, the face empty, the eyes become blank orbs and the hand mottled with mold. Molochi, standing now, found her within his reach after all; he touched her feet where they rested in stone sandals, and he found them cold, like his mother’s feet as she lay on the cooling board in the cabin by the mill. Molochi looked at the woman now without any feeling at all; he saw in her transformation evidence of the only truth he knew: that life was illusory, and when it passed, nothing was left but stone.

  X

  At the first break of day, the dog opened his eyes to discover a yellow tomcat sitting on the woodpile, not a dozen paces distant. A mockingbird perched overhead in the branches of a hackberry tree, flicking its tail and chipping irritably; now and then the bird would sortie, diving on the cat, actually brushing it with a wing. Then the bird would settle on the end of a log in the woodpile, hop nervously for a moment, and retreat to the tree again. The cat, meanwhile, stared straight ahead, only flinching a little at the touch of the bird, his eyes narrowed into slits. Just a little closer, you son of a bitch, the cat seemed to say.

  It was a morning ritual, and the dog, whose name was Beowulf, took no interest in it. He lapped out his tongue in a yawn, raised his hindquarters and stretched. He had his own ritual: yawning, stretching, scratching, licking. He champed with his teeth at the wakening fleas that swarmed on his belly; he inspected his privates and gnawed his tail. Then he was ready.

  Beowulf belonged to Mister L. W. Thomas, and his usual sleeping place was under the Citadel of Djibouti. It was dry under there, and comfortable, though there were a good many fleas and it tended to get noisy sometimes, what with all the stamping on the floor above. Last night the racket had driven him out, and he had slept in the muddy yard with mosquitoes whining about his ears. As a result, he was stiff, and damp from the heavy dew, and he seemed hungrier than ordinary, as if his fractious dreams had used him up. He knew his boss would not be astir so early in the day, but no matter: Beowulf had his morning rounds, and these would take him through the soldiers’ camp where he could always get a handout if he looked pitiful enough. That was easy for Beowulf, who was naturally pitiful with his ribbed flanks and rheumy eyes.

  He set out across the yard, ignoring the cat who bowed its back to him. The morning was fresh and full of smells, the light pink and soft, and all the shapes of things soft, too, as if the night had worn away the world’s hard edges and angles. Spiderwebs, silvered with dew, hung in the grass, and a delicate mist floated in the air. Beowulf flung his nose up and took it all in—too much, and he had to stop and sneeze. Then, as he was about to set out again, he smelled the dark thing.

  He had come to the cedars that squatted in a clump by the road. Daylight had not yet penetrated among them, and the smell was coming from the shadows there, so strong that his hackles raised. He knew the scent. It was there sometimes in the morning—in the grass or among the cedars—and always it seemed to make a black hole into which he might fall if he got too close. Beowulf circled the little cedar grove, his nose down among the leaves and needles and mud, and on his first circuit, he found the place where the dark thing had come out. He raised his head and looked up the road. He did not want to follow the smell; he wanted to go on up through the yards to the soldiers’ camp where they would be frying bacon and making corn cakes and coffee like they did. But this morning the scent seemed to draw him; it was a message he had to unravel. Beowulf could recognize Purpose, as when Mr. L. W. Thomas set him to find squirrels or rabbits in the wood. This time there was no man with a gun, no commands, but Purpose was there just the same. So he lowered his nose again and began to trot, tacking from side to side, his long hound’s ears dragging the ground.

  So many smells, but the one scent stood out among them all. Beowulf tracked through the weeds beside the road, ignoring the town coming to life around him. He was led behind things: behind a greasy wall tent where a man stood half naked, splashing himself with water while a woman built up her fire; behind the Shipwright house where some of the soldiers lived (here the smell took him on a wide circuit, down along the bank of Town Creek which flowed behind the house); then at last behind the rubble of the old buildings on the south side of the square. Here he had trouble, for the dark thing had moved in and out among the ruins, and the wet ashes were bad for the nose. But Beowulf straightened it out and found the trail again, and suddenly he was on the Oxford road, on the bridge over Town Creek, then down in the tall slippery grass of the bank, down to the water, under the bridge.

  He stopped, and his lips curled up over his yellow teeth. He moved back, legs stiff, feet sliding in the gray, slimy mud that smelled of dead fish and of the crusty droppings of swallows. He stopped again, quivering, then eased forward, his nose thrust out. Closer he came, and closer, the scent of the dark thing mingled now with the smell of the shape that lay before him. Flies rose from it, swarming angrily. Beowulf jerked back when a rat popped up; the creature watched him over its folded hands, then dropped to all fours and scuttled away. Beowulf sat down carefully in the mud. He began to howl, low at first, then rising to such a mournful note that men came querying. They peered down at him from the road. After a moment, one of them made the slippery descent and peered into the shadows under the Town Creek bridge.

  THE CARTER BOY’S room was on the southwest corner of the house, so it got no
sun by its windows in the morning. However, at a certain moment each day around the summer solstice, when the sun broke above the trees around the cemetery, a single bright ray pierced an eastern window. It slanted across the hall and through the open door and struck the mirror on the west wall, where it would flash against the eyes of a sleeper in the bed. So every morning this June, Morgan Rhea awoke to the notice of the sun.

  This morning she was laughing, and the sound made young Alex stir on his pallet. She heard herself laughing, then woke to it: a bright sound like a bubble bursting, like a bell or a fall of water. She loved the sound of her laughing and raised her arms out of the damp sheets and flexed her fingers, feeling the grin on her face. She felt light and airy, felt bright inside, and clean.

  She leapt out of bed and crossed to the open front window, leaned out into the cool air smelling of rain and oak leaves and smoke. There was the yard, the oaks, and beyond them the cemetery road. The sun streamed in golden banners down through the trees and through the mist that lay along the ground. “My God,” she said. Her hands flew to her hair, then down her face, over her breasts and down to her hips. “My God,” she said again, and her face burned with shame and unbelieving and delight.

  Alex stirred on his pallet beneath her; she realized she was straddling him, her nightgown over his head. “Lordy!” cried the boy. “Where am I!”