The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  “Hey, boy!” she said, hopping away, laughing. “Get up! Turn out!” The boy curled himself, pulled the quilt over his head. She prodded him with her foot. “Hey!”

  The boy snatched the quilt down and glared at her. “What’s the matter with you, can’t you let a feller—it ain’t a school day—it ain’t—”

  But she was gone, out the door and into the hall and at last out onto the upper gallery where the morning wrapped itself around her like soft cotton. A carpenter bee was drilling under the balustrade, wasps were building overhead, a sparrow flitted past with a straw in its mouth. She gripped the railing with her hands and felt her face grow hot again. Shame indeed!

  “Morgan, what are you doing, child?”

  She whirled at the sound of her name. Judge Nathan Rhea stood in the hall, the sun from the east window cutting across the white of his shirt. “Papa?” she said, and crossed her arms over her breasts, realizing all at once how naked she was.

  “You seem to be standing on Mister Carter’s gallery in your nightclothes,” said the Judge, coming into the doorway. “Unaccountable behavior.” He looked at her bare feet, as if he had never seen them before. “My lands,” he said.

  “All right, Papa,” she said. “I’ll come in.”

  But the Judge didn’t move. He stood in the doorway a moment, looking past her, fumbling with the key that dangled from his watch chain. Then he came out on the gallery and stood beside her at the balustrade. Morgan felt the strangeness of it; since the burning of the house, she had spoken to her father hardly at all, nor stood this close to him with no one about. Now he was so near she could touch him, and she found herself wanting to, if only to test whether he were really alive. He seemed suddenly frail, as if something had gone out of him since the last time she had really looked at him, that afternoon on the lawn with the smoke rolling by. She wondered what he saw out there in the bright morning, if it was the same world she saw. She touched his sleeve, felt the living flesh beneath it. “What do you see, Papa?” she asked.

  “I was only thinking,” said the Judge. He turned then, and again Morgan understood how long it had been since she’d looked at him. “Then what were you thinkin about?” she asked.

  “Freedom,” said the Judge. Then, without looking at her again, he passed through the door. She could hear his footsteps in the hall, then descending the stairs, then the closing of a door somewhere in the house.

  Morgan turned back to the morning. She felt the breeze move through the thin cotton of her gown, felt the grit of the gallery floor under her feet. She leaned out and turned her face eastward toward the sun; there, through the trees, she could see the musing stones and monuments of Holy Cross cemetery. She caught a glimpse of movement: a woman, all in black, passing up the rise toward the circle of cedars on the crest. Someone calling on the dead, moving slowly, remembering. Squinting her eyes, Morgan could see that the woman carried a basket over her arm, and in the basket a white blur—daisies, Morgan thought, such as grow by the roadside in the early summertime. Now came the old, familiar tingle under the bridge of her nose, and in a moment Morgan Rhea was crying, but easily, without pain. “Long remember,” she said to the woman yonder on the hill. “Long remember.” Then she turned away, and passed into the cool hall where the sunlight slanted.

  WHEN THE SUN had warmed him, but before it got too high, Molochi Fish left the burying ground. The night birds were gone now, and he was glad of it. At the iron gate, he met a woman entering. She was all in black, and carried a basket of white flowers. When she saw Molochi, she made a wide path around him, never looking at him. Molochi passed through the gate and made his way down the road.

  He had gone just a little way when he saw the house among the oaks. Molochi knew the place—he had sold firewood here in past winters—and he stopped for a moment to observe it. The white houses of the town had been a mystery to Molochi all his life. Though he had never entered, he would often visit one or more of them on his nocturnal scouts and peer through the windows. Save for chairs and tables, he had no name for anything he saw, nor could he imagine what use any of it would be. He watched the people move among the rooms, and sometimes he could hear them talk. What they said was as meaningless to him as the chatter of birds.

  Now he looked toward the house—it seemed not so white now, he thought—and saw a woman on the gallery. For an instant he thought it was the woman from the cemetery, the stone maiden by whom he had slept, only alive again, the breeze moving in her gown. He knelt in the roadside weeds and watched carefully. He hoped it was not her. He could not have her following him, did not want to see her among the others who moved about his cabin in the dark. Then another person came out: a man, white-haired, in a black frock coat that reminded Molochi of some of the night birds. They stood together, looking out over the yard. Molochi knew the man, and now he knew who the woman was. He had seen her in the town, the daughter of old Judge Rhea, the man who’d sat on the high seat in the courtroom and looked down on Molochi after the killing of old Harper’s nigger boy. Molochi remembered that. He remembered how the words he could not understand flowed over him as he stood beneath the Judge’s seat, and the people looking at him, murmuring. He remembered the month in a cell in the county’s jail where he’d nearly gone mad with pacing, pacing, and the barred window too high for him to see anything but the sky—light and dark, light and dark, to mark the slow passage of time—and the voices of other men, and the howling of dogs in the night, and the night birds perched on the sill of the high window, watching him as he slept curled on the stone floor. He watched now until the old Judge went away. He saw the woman look off toward the cemetery and speak words he could not hear, then she, too, was gone.

  Molochi carried the vision of her in his head as the Mover drove him through the morning, down to the soldiers’ burying ground to see if they were digging the grave.

  GAWAIN HARPER HAD been awake a long time when daylight came. He watched it from the back gallery, watched the light diffusing out of darkness, the shapes of trees and the well-house and the old kitchen taking their places in the world again. The morning smelled of cedars and oaks and wood smoke, and of the mist that hung above the grass. Squirrels were busy. Out of the wood beyond the yard a buck emerged, and after him a pair of does, and they grazed calmly in the grass, the mist moving around their feet. The hollow place in his stomach spun a thought: he would find a rifle, borrow one if he had to, and tomorrow—but he shook it away. He would not kill that deer. The squirrels maybe; though, as Stribling had said, you shouldn’t take squirrels in the summertime. He watched the buck lift his head. “Hey!” Gawain said, and marveled at the swiftness of them, how they disappeared into the brush without even the quiver of a leaf.

  He had slept in his clothes a little while, but rose while it was still dark, and crept once more down the stairs, this time with the tin cup and boiler and sack of coffee from his carpet bag. He had built a little fire in the back yard and boiled his coffee, and now he had it with him on the back gallery, watching the morning come. He had his pipe, too, though it always made him cough when he smoked it so early. He had a thought and smiled at it: for years he had dreamed of being home in his old bed, of sleeping the clock around with no sergeant to come and roust him, no drums beating reveille, none of the farting and belching and loud talk men indulged in when they woke in camp. Now here he was, sleepless, his bed not even turned down, awake at daylight even though he was free. Ah, he thought. Freedom, freedom, freedom. It was all right. He was awake because he wanted to be.

  He remembered the night, and how he found Morgan in the yard of the Carter house. Now it was morning. Gawain sipped the last of his coffee and lay the blackened, dented cup beside him on the paintless boards of the gallery. He filled his pipe, struck a lucifer and touched it to the bowl and sent up a plume of smoke. He thought of the way Morgan had felt against him, and the remembrance caused a stirring in him, a movement that pleased and embarrassed him all at once. He shook his head and was blushing p
ink as the day’s beginning when Harry Stribling came around the corner of the house.

  “Good God,” said Gawain, rising to his feet.

  Stribling was startled as well. He turned a little dance in the wet grass, his hand against his breast. “Dammit, boy,” he said. “What you doin out here, ambushin me again?”

  “Dammit yourself,” said Gawain. “Sneakin around here, and the day just breaking. I thought you was hauled off to the guardhouse.”

  “I was,” said Stribling. He took off his hat and fanned himself with it. “When they changed the watch this morning, that provost—von Arnim?”

  “I don’t know him,” said Gawain.

  “Well, of course you wouldn’t. Anyhow, he told us to skedaddle, told us we would get no more free meals off the national government. I think it was his way of being kind.”

  “Well, did you eat last night?”

  Stribling laughed. “I should say. ’Bout dark, that man from the tavern came down—Thomas? but you don’t know him either—with a boy pullin a handcart with a pot of stew in it and some bread and coffee. The stew had chunks of—”

  “Hush,” said Gawain. “My stomach is rubbin my backbone this mornin.”

  “Well, mine too, but at least I am a free man. Did you spend a good night?”

  “Hah,” said Gawain. “Let me poke up this fire—I got some coffee left. Then I will tell you of my adventures, and you can tell of yours.” He looked at Stribling. “You got a noble black eye,” he said.

  Stribling nodded. He knelt by the fire, began to rearrange the unburnt sticks and twigs that lay around the white scattering of ashes. “A soldierly fire,” he mused, almost to himself. Then he said, “The bluebellies are restless as ants this mornin—somethin happened in the night to stir em up, I think.”

  Gawain looked up sharply. Again he saw the soldier on the square, saw the vague suggestion of movement among the hollow walls. The image, he realized, had been fluttering in his mind like a bird trying to light. Now it had found its place.

  “What?” said Stribling. “What’s the matter?”

  Gawain shook his head. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but for God’s sake let’s boil the coffee first.”

  AS GAWAIN AND Harry Stribling boiled their coffee, Colonel Michael Burduck was balancing himself in the greasy mud under the Town Creek bridge. He ignored the flies that hummed around his head, ignored the citizens clustered on the bank behind him, ignored the voice of the creek and the fresh morning that had come after the rain, ignored the officers who stood beside him with their hands on their swords. His attention admitted nothing but the thing that lay before him in the barred sunlight under the bridge.

  Private Tom Kelly lay on his back, forearms lifted, hands knotted into fists. His mouth was open, and beneath it another, darker, mouth gaped where his throat lay open to the backbone. The mud around him was murky with his blood.

  Burduck stood in a pale cone of fury, completely isolate and out of time, as if the earth and all in it were the business of a remote and alien star. He felt the air against his skin, felt the blood bulging in the veins of his temples, heard the mechanical pumping of his heart as it maintained the illusion of life. But he was gone deep into the core of himself, where nothing lived but the white-hot furnace of his anger. He was in a place where there was no room for logic or humanity, no capacity for regret or sorrow or desire or anything but vengeance, where even the voice of his own reason was muted and distant, like a lost child calling in a fog. Still, the voice was there, and he knew he must heed it, else he would be lost in time again, and useless. He closed his eyes and followed the voice, and as he listened, it became that of Rafe Deaton shouting, “Give way! Give way, goddammit!”

  Burduck opened his eyes, turned and saw Deaton—hatless, in his shirtsleeves, suspenders dangling—shoving through the crowd of civilians by the creek bank. He got clear of them, slipped and sank to one knee in the mud, made to rise and slipped again. He raised his face; his eyes focused on the officers who were all watching him now. “Colonel?” he said.

  Captain Bloom began to speak: “Deaton, where’s your—” but Burduck gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, and the officer stopped.

  “Colonel?” Deaton said again, as he rose carefully to his feet. His hair, shot with gray, was ruffled with sleep; his eyes moved quickly, darting from Burduck’s face to the shadows behind him. Rafe Deaton had been first sergeant of Burduck’s first company, way back when the regiment was at Jefferson Barracks before the war.

  “What is it, Deaton?” asked Burduck.

  The sergeant, suddenly embarrassed, drew himself up and nodded at the officers. “Beg pardon, sirs,” he said. Then, to Burduck: “Colonel, is it really Tom Kelly?”

  “I am told it is,” said Burduck. “Tom Kelly was the boy’s name.”

  “Ah,” said Deaton. “Of course it would be him, of course it would.”

  “He was one of yours?” said the Colonel.

  “He was,” said Deaton. “He ain’t ever hurt anybody.”

  Burduck looked at his shoes; the others stood quietly, waiting. A kingfisher planed down the creek, chattering, and disappeared into the willows. After a moment, Burduck looked up again and spoke quietly. “Sergeant Deaton, you know better than to walk out like that. Go back and fetch your blouse and your kit. Assemble a detail, five men. Bring a litter.” Then, as an afterthought: “Roust out some musicians. They can play this boy back to camp.”

  “I will, sir,” said the sergeant. Out of uniform, he did not salute, but bowed slightly from the waist and turned.

  “Deaton!”

  The sergeant stopped. Burduck moved closer, almost touching the man. “Steady, Rafe,” he said, so low that only the sergeant could hear. “We will have the son of a bitch. We will put him against a wall.”

  “I will hold you to it, Colonel,” said Deaton, and moved away. Burduck watched until he was gone, then stood a moment longer, staring at the crowd. They began to shift uncomfortably under his gaze, and Burduck had to struggle against the urge to speak to them. Finally, he turned back to his officers. “Mister von Arnim,” he said.

  “Sir.”

  “Cover this boy. Clear away these citizens, post a strong guard on the bridge until Deaton returns. Then fetch me that fellow from the tavern. Mister Bloom?”

  “Sir.”

  “Parade your company, sir. Inform them that until further notice, no one is to leave camp unless his duty requires it, and any man leaving camp after retreat will be bucked and gagged. Have a negro dig a grave in the cemetery. Mister Osgood?”

  “Sir,” said a fresh Second Lieutenant of infantry, West Point class of ’65.

  “Stay with the body. When Sergeant Deaton comes with his party, you must bear it to the color line. Inform me when this is done, I’ll be in my quarters. Keep these goddamned citizens away, too.”

  “Sir,” said the Lieutenant, throwing a nervous glance at the body of Tom Kelly.

  “Be about it then,” said Burduck.

  When the two officers had gone, Burduck lingered a moment. He knelt by the body for the first time and examined it, waving the flies away. The boy’s legs, in their sky-blue trousers, were stretched full length, the shoes caked with drying mud. He wore his fatigue blouse open, and a striped shirt buttoned to the throat. The skirt of the blouse was twisted under him, the shirt pulled out of the waistband. Such was the way of dying men; they seemed to always tear at their clothes, as though they might shuck off the dark thing that was enveloping them. Burduck looked at the boy’s face. The eyes were half open, the irises dry and fixed on the bridge timbers overhead. Burduck tried to close them, but they were stiff with rigor. He was about to turn away when he noticed a sliver of white under the flap of the boy’s blouse. He moved the garment aside and, with two fingers, removed a square of folded paper. It was good paper, not the pulpy stuff soldiers usually wrote on, and it was free of blood. Even before he opened it, Burduck knew that the paper was not Tom Kelly’s, that he
would find in it a message from out there in the night country where he had been himself and where he did not wish to go again. He looked at the paper in his hand and knew that, when he opened it, the easy times would be over and nothing would be the same again. He had thought it would be the women, that somehow their intractable hatred, which transcended all suffering and even defeat itself, would set the sky aflame once more and bring the horsemen galloping in the dark. But the women’s hatred, he saw now, was more tragic than that, and had nothing to do with this boy under the bridge, nor himself, nor the uniforms they wore, nor even the victory of which they were avatar and reminder. The women, he thought, hated the night country itself, and would always hate it and never forgive it, and might even vanquish it as the soldiers had not, could not, by the mere exercise of force. But that was something for another day, Burduck thought, as he unfolded the paper and read.

  Deo vindice, it said.

  Burduck lifted his eyes. Beyond the bridge, he saw the light falling through the leaves, glazing the creek with silver. Near the bend, a heron stood motionless in the shallows; as Burduck watched, the bird speared the water with its beak and brought up a wriggling fish that shook droplets clear and bright as ice into the sunlight. Burduck rose to his feet, his knees popping, and the heron flapped away with its prize. “Mister Osgood!” Burduck said.

  The Lieutenant had been watching from the creek bank. “Yessir,” he said, springing to attention.

  “Come over here, Osgood,” said Burduck. “This boy won’t hurt you.”

  The young officer approached, his mouth a thin line, his eyes straight ahead.

  “You were never in battle, Mister Osgood,” Burduck said.

  “No, sir.”

  “This is worse,” Burduck said. “You are not going to be sick, are you.” It was not a question.

  The Lieutenant swallowed. “No, sir,” he said. “I won’t be sick, sir.”