The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  “Carry on, then. And Osgood?”

  “Sir?”

  “It will be all right if you stand down by the water.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the Lieutenant said.

  “IT WAS A white soldier, jes a boy,” old Priam was saying. “They found him under the Town Creek bridge with his th’oat cut year to year.”

  “God above,” said Aunt Vassar. She was in her chair by the hearth again, a plate of hoecakes on her lap. Gawain leaned on the mantel, and Harry Stribling, also with a plate of hoecakes and a three-tined fork and a tin cup of coffee, sat on the parlor organ stool. Priam stood with his back to the fireless hearth, his hands tucked under the tail of his frock coat as if he were warming himself. He had just come from town where Aunt Vassar had sent him to learn the news.

  Gawain had talked with Stribling before his aunt came down. He had told of his meeting with Morgan, and of the odd thing he had seen on the square. Now both men thought of this in the light of Priam’s report. They swapped a look, but said nothing.

  “It might have been one of their own that did it,” said Aunt Vassar. The men were silent. Stribling swabbed at the molasses in his plate. “Those yankees are not like ordinary people,” Aunt Vassar went on, as if no one in the room had ever seen a yankee. “They have peculiar ways.”

  “Surely,” said Gawain.

  “Still, it is a vicious thing,” said his aunt. “You say he was just a boy?”

  “Yes’m,” said Priam.

  “God above. Who would do such a thing?” Aunt Vassar said.

  Later, Gawain and Stribling were smoking on the gallery, where Zeke was tied to the balustrade. “You will stay around here for a little while, won’t you?” Gawain asked.

  Stribling shrugged. “I have no immediate prospects. Might hang about, marry a rich widow, run for the legislature.”

  “I thought you had principles now.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Stribling. “I forgot.”

  “Well, you can stay in my sisters’ room, if you can stand the frills and the wallpaper. I expect their diaries are still there; they make interesting readin, as I recall.”

  “I am obliged,” said Stribling. He went down the steps and gathered Zeke’s reins. “This boy ain’t had the saddle off him in two days. Is there a place I can put him up?”

  “We got a crib in back. Might be an old currycomb in there. We’ll shin around, get him some feed. Mister Audley Brummett will have some, I bet.”

  “Obliged,” said Stribling. “That would be good.”

  Gawain felt suddenly animated, as if he had drawn into himself the life of the new summer day. “Why, we can go to lodge,” he said. “Go fishin down on Leaf River. Maybe start us a business—a school maybe. I been thinkin—”

  “Gawain,” said Stribling.

  “What?”

  “Who you think cut that boy’s throat?”

  Gawain looked off into the yard. “What do you care?”

  “You don’t mean that,” said Stribling.

  “No, I do not,” said Gawain. “It grieves me. It is not like killin one in a fight.”

  “Do you think it was the fellow you saw on the square last night?”

  “I never really saw him,” said Gawain. “It was more like I saw where he’d been, if you know what I mean. Hell, it was spooky out there—might not’ve been anybody at all, just shadows, or imagination. I have a wondrous imagination. Besides, there was yankee cavalry all over the place.”

  “A lot of good they did,” said Stribling.

  Gawain tapped his pipe on the balustrade. “La, la, la,” he said, gazing out at the yard.

  “What?”

  Gawain looked around in surprise. “Why, Harry, I forgot you was here. I was just thinkin about the mounted arm and all the times they was so very useful in the war. You know, I once saw a cavalry man cut down a live Plymouth Rock with his saber, and that at full gallop—the hen, I mean. The cavalryman was standing still, or his horse was anyhow, and—”

  Stribling snorted. “You may kiss my leathery buttocks, sir, not having any of your own to speak of.”

  On the road, just visible through the trees, an army wagon creaked ponderously townward, a crowd of black children following in its wake. Their voices rose in a high, sweet gabble, like the calling of young birds. Stribling threw the near stirrup over Zeke’s saddle and loosened the cinch; the horse looked around curiously, as if such a thing had never happened to him before, then heaved a great sigh, like a woman coming out of her corset.

  “Harry,” said Gawain.

  “Now what?”

  “Harry, I have to go see the Judge today, there is no way around it. If I don’t go today, I might not go at all.”

  “All right, let us go then,” said Stribling.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it,” said Stribling. He dropped the reins and moved to the bottom of the steps, his eyes on a level with Gawain’s. “You ever feel like things are runnin off and leavin you?” he asked.

  “Yes sir, I have felt that way in my time,” said Gawain. He looked off into the yard again. “I feel that way now, if you must know.”

  “Me too,” said Stribling, “and I don’t know why. At least you have a reason. Maybe I am just wore out. Maybe—” He stopped, and cocked his head as if he were listening to something. “Gawain?” he said.

  Uh-oh, thought Gawain. “What?”

  “He crossed at the ford, by the gravel bar,” said Stribling.

  “Who did?”

  Stribling didn’t answer. Zeke stamped his foot and whisked his tail silkily at a fly. The morning was still, no breeze, nothing moving in the leaves above. Then a blackbird sailed through the yard like a fugitive thought, or a word someone had forgotten to speak.

  A STAND OF willows, delicate and lightly green, grew along the railroad. They were fed by a ditch that held water in the rainy times, and the ground beneath them was marshy and soft with leaves, and smelled of decay. Anyone passing among them was well-nigh invisible, so he might observe unseen the soldiers’ burying ground that lay just to the west. That was Molochi Fish’s intent as he eased across the weed-grown cut of the Mississippi Central and into the green shadows of the willow trees. He crossed the ditch on a fallen log, pausing long enough to let a water moccasin slide out of the way. In a moment he was squatting at the edge of the willow brake, peering through the morning haze at the melancholy wooden grave markers faded by the weather, and the paling fence that surrounded them.

  Molochi was glad to see that men were already working on the grave. He could see the heads and shoulders of the diggers above the hole, their shovels flinging up clumps of dark earth. On the edge of the grave stood a white man with an umbrella. No soldiers were anywhere around, except dead ones. Molochi remembered the dead man under the bridge and wondered where they were keeping him. He thought of the man he’d seen running: Wall Stutts, who lived on the Gault place a few miles from Molochi’s cabin. He remembered Wall Stutts very well.

  It was two summers ago, by Molochi’s calculation, before the yankees came who burned the town, and before the ones who whipped him. The weather had been dry for a month, and the woods were crackling, the leaves curling on the trees, the dust thick. The dry wind rattled in the leaves and brought the smell of a big woods fire somewhere to the west; the air was hazy with smoke, and when the sun set every day, it was round and coppery.

  Molochi had a woman that summer. He had bought her from a party of Choctaws passing through on their way to the south, had given a jug of liquor for her, and some clothes he had stolen from a yard in town. She was young, they said, and strong. They did not mention that she was insane; Molochi found that out for himself that very afternoon when he caught her squatting behind the cabin, eating a blacksnake alive. He watched her peel the skin back with her teeth, the snake writhing in her hands. He noticed then that her head was too big, swollen like a goatskin filled with water. But that was all right; Molochi did not give a goddamn ab
out that.

  She was strong, sure enough. She could haul firewood and run down rabbits in the field and carry water from Leaf River as long as Molochi wanted her to. She had a round moon face and brittle hair, and her feet were splayed and leathery, and her eyes were black and flat as river rocks and seemed never to move. Her one garment—a faded trade dress—had holes cut away for her breasts, and sometimes they hung out, and sometimes they didn’t. Molochi did not know that Indian women were modest by nature; he supposed they were all as careless as this one. Thinking back, he realized that her companions had been afraid of her, and it wasn’t long before he noticed that the dogs were, too. That was a good thing, for he could turn them loose at night, and they wouldn’t try to catch her when she went out to make water.

  One smoky afternoon in that summer, Molochi was sitting on the cedar bolt he used as a step to the cabin door, probing with a little shard of broken glass at a toenail that was bothering him. He had smashed the toe with a chunk of wood and was drilling the nail to let the blood out. He had the dogs tied under a blackjack oak; they sprawled in the shade with their tongues lolling out, the dirt around them boiling with fleas. Molochi had just broken through the nail and was squeezing out a little bead of black blood when he heard the dogs move. They were standing now, the two of them looking off to the east. Molochi looked that way too, just in time to see the horsemen emerge from the woods. He watched them pick their way among the stumps that littered the clearing: four of them, bearded, broad hats shading their eyes, dressed in the poor, shapeless garments of dirt farmers but carrying shotguns and wearing pistols. The two dogs made no sound, but strained at their tethers, their teeth bare. Molochi stood up, thinking to turn the dogs loose, but the leader jumped his horse ahead and pointed his shotgun. “You leave them goddamn dogs where they at,” said Wall Stutts. In a moment, the riders were arranged in a half circle before the cabin door.

  “What you want, Wall?” said Molochi.

  Stutts, his shotgun resting on his thigh, grinned down at Molochi. He was wearing a blue yankee blouse; beneath it, his shirt was yellow with sweat. “We heard about your squaw,” he said. “Injun told us all about it, thinkin maybe we wouldn’t hang him. He was misguided in that, poor feller. Where she at?”

  “Ain’t here,” said Molochi.

  Stutts grinned again, his teeth white behind his whiskers. “Tom,” he said without turning his head, “why’nt you look in the cabin yonder.”

  A tall man, his shotgun slung behind his back with a length of plow line, dismounted and dropped his reins and crossed the little way to the cedar bolt. He stepped up on it and disappeared into the black square of the cabin door. Then he was back again, and with a single quick movement flung the woman out the door into the yard. She landed in the gray, powdery dirt on her hands and knees, her breasts swaying heavily beneath her. The tall man jumped down and pulled the woman to her feet. She stood in the midst of them, her face empty.

  “Aye God, she ain’t much to look at,” said Wall Stutts. “Tom, see if they’s anything under there.”

  The tall man pulled up the woman’s dress and thrust his hand between her legs. She blinked once and turned her head and looked at Molochi. The tall man removed his hand and sniffed his fingers. “Well, it’s ripe,” he said, “but Gah damn if it ain’t dry as a corn shuck.”

  Wall Stutts laughed. “Look around, see can you find some lard,” he said, and dismounted.

  The tall man found a tin of lard in the cabin. Stutts went first, then the others took their turns while Stutts held a pistol under Molochi’s chin and whispered in his ear. It took two of them to pin the woman in the dirt. She fought them at first, and it was all they could do to hold her, but at last she gave it up and lay staring at the leaves rattling over her head. All the while, even in her fighting, she made no sound. Then Stutts gave the pistol to the tall man and went again. When he was finished, he rose, buttoning his trousers. “Well, Molochi,” he said, “that just might be the worst I ever had.” He turned to his men. “Boys, I’m like that monkey that was fuckin a skunk—you hear about that?”

  Naw, they said. Naw, tell it, Wall.

  “Was a monkey fuckin a skunk,” said Stutts as he swung into the saddle. “Monkey went back home, his pards says ‘What happened?’ Monkey says, ‘Boys, I ain’t had all I want, but I had all I could stand.’”

  They laughed at the joke. The man with Molochi slapped him on the back. “’At’s a good ’em, ain’t it, Molochi?” he said.

  “Come along, Junior,” said Stutts. “Molochi don’t think that’s funny.”

  They rode away then, crossing the clearing at a walk, not looking back. In a moment, they were into the woods and gone. Molochi Fish stood looking at the place where the trees had closed behind them; he could hear their horses moving in the dry leaves, heard the snap of a branch, a man laughing. When he was sure they were gone, he looked down at the woman.

  She lay on her back, her thighs streaked with blood and shiny with lard, the dress balled up at her waist. The black buttons of her eyes were almost hidden in her swollen face, and, though her cheeks were wet, she made no sound of crying. She was more silent even than the dogs, who were sitting on their haunches now, panting. Molochi watched her for a moment, then turned and. searched in the dirt until he found the sliver of broken glass. He knelt by the woman and held out the sliver. She sat up and looked curiously at the shining thing, then took it gently between her pudgy fingers. She turned it in the sun, making it glint, and tested the sharpness of it. Then, as Molochi watched, she drew it down her forearm from the heel of her hand almost to the elbow. The flesh sprang open, pink and white, then the severed veins erupted in blood that fountained over Molochi’s bare feet and in an instant soaked the woman’s legs and dress and breasts. When the dogs smelled the blood, they could be silent no longer; they leapt against their tethers, the tarred ropes jerking them off their feet again and again as they lunged and snapped and growled. The woman cradled her ruined arm in her lap and looked at Molochi and made the only sound he ever heard her make: a whimper, like a child. Molochi turned away and took up his cudgel from the feed bucket where he kept it and waded into the dogs, beating them until they lay senseless among their own droppings and foam. Then he walked to the edge of the clearing and sat down on a stump, his back to the cabin, his breath coming ragged and harsh and dry through his mouth.

  That was two summers gone, and now Molochi heard his own breathing in the bright morning, among the green of the willows. In the burying ground, the darkies were singing as they dug the grave where the dead boy would lie. Molochi did not know what singing was; he cocked his head and listened and felt the sound run deep inside him like strange blood coursing in his veins. He looked up through the delicate tracing of the willows and saw the blue sky. The sun would be high pretty soon, and Molochi did not want to be out in it, but he knew he would go and look at the grave. It did not occur to him to wonder why.

  XI

  The guards stood at support arms, their bayonets pointed toward the cloudless sky. Two of them were on the bridge itself, and four more down below: regular infantrymen in their dark frock coats and blue trousers and forage caps, their leather blacked, their belt- and box-plates polished. Six months ago, they would not have been so well turned out.

  Sergeant Rafe Deaton left his musicians and escort on the bridge and brought the litter bearers down through the grass, which by now was trodden and more slippery than ever. The soldiers, carrying the rolled litter, moved carefully, their leather-soled shoes slick and treacherous.

  “Stand here,” said Deaton when they had reached the bank. The men nodded and began to unroll the litter. They were silent, as the guards were silent. They did not look under the bridge.

  Lieutenant Osgood returned Deaton’s salute and inclined his head toward the body, covered now in an issue blanket of gray wool. “We are to take him to the color line. Colonel’s orders,” said the officer.

  “The color line, sir,” said Deaton
. He thought a moment, then leaned his musket against one of the muddy bridge pilings. He did not look at the Lieutenant again, but brushed past him and knelt by the body and gathered the hem of the blanket in his fingers. Then Rafe Deaton, who had seen many dead men in his years of soldiering, hesitated. He knelt a long while, still holding the blanket, the muscles in his jaw working. At last he dropped the blanket without pulling it back. Osgood spoke his name. Deaton stood and walked past the Lieutenant again, out into the sunlight. He looked at the men with the litter. “Take him up,” he said.

  They tried to lower Tom Kelly’s arms under the blanket, but he was stiff by now. Then they discovered that the boy was glued to the ground by his own congealed blood. They worked to free him; he came loose with a wet, tearing sound that sent Lieutenant Osgood to the creek at last.

  As the soldiers struggled to bring Tom Kelly up to the road, Rafe stood a little distance behind the Lieutenant and waited for him to finish. The officer wiped his mouth on his sleeve, turned to find Rafe watching him. “Goddammit, Sergeant,” he said.

  Rafe came to attention, saluted. “We are ready, sir,” he said. The Lieutenant straightened, searched Rafe Deaton’s face for some sign of irony or derision, found nothing there at all, not even pity, which would have been worse than either. “Very well,” said the Lieutenant.

  Thus they brought Tom Kelly back to camp. “Guide around the courthouse,” said Rafe to the musicians. “Let the goddamned citizens get a good look.” So they set out: first the drummer and fifer, the drum snare muffled with a rag, and the fifer playing “The Banks of Allan Water” and “MacPherson’s Lament” to the beat of the slow march. Even in these melancholy tunes, the notes of the fife leapt up into the morning air like birds, and it was fitting for a young life that they should. The musicians were followed by Sergeant Rafe Deaton, his musket at the shoulder, and Lieutenant Osgood, sword at the shoulder, bayonet and blade polished and glinting in the sun. Then the escort, arms reversed, and the body on its litter, stiff beneath the humble pall of the wool blanket. The detail passed once around the square where a good many townspeople had gathered. They watched in silence, most of them, their faces grave, telling nothing. One man spat into the road as the body passed; if the soldiers saw it, they gave no notice. Then they were gone, back across the bridge and up the road toward camp, the drum’s reverberation like the beating of an old heart.