The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  “Meanness, I guess,” said Stribling.

  Gawain looked at the wall again (through the upper windows, he could see the blue sky and the feathering clouds), and beyond it to the hulls of other buildings already going green with vines and creepers. A silence lay upon them, deeper than the songs of birds and the morning voices in the grass—a silence like that in a room where strangers sat, each one waiting for another to speak. Once more he thought he ought to see them: the shapes of them who were gone, himself among them, walking the sward in clawhammer coats, heads bent to an opened text, smoke curling from their pipes—or blithe and gay, the young ones, the girls like young lambs dancing in the spring, their dresses white, their voices light as music. But once more there was nothing, only the empty air, as Stribling had said.

  They went on, out the gate again and down the road to the square, where they arrived in time to view the last journey of young Tom Kelly. The procession entered from the Oxford road and moved around the rubble of the courthouse; in a moment, it passed along the north side where Gawain and Stribling stood among the citizens.

  “Ah, Jesus,” said Gawain. The drums disturbed him, and the sight of armed Federals so close. “More dead people.”

  “Odd that you should use the plural,” said Stribling.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Never mind,” said Stribling. Then, almost to himself, “Mind the citizens; he is here somewhere, I’d guarantee it. Or at the grave.”

  “Who? Dad blame it, Harry—”

  But Stribling said no more. They watched until the procession rounded the square and disappeared up the Oxford road, over the same bridge where it had begun.

  “Well,” said Gawain, “it is a relief not to hear the drums anymore. I hope to never hear another one in my lifetime.”

  There were no clouds yet, but a little breeze sprung up and creaked a sign over their heads. Gawain turned to look at it.

  DR. STEPHAN E. TEICHMILLER

  Absolutely Painless Dentistry

  Practice Limited to Extractions Only

  “I wonder how the doc is faring,” mused Gawain. “I spent a couple of weeks up there one day.”

  “I do not believe any enterprise is absolutely painless,” said Stribling. “Especially the present one. Tell me about the Judge. You said he is bound to go to Brazil?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Gawain. “And if he goes, Morgan will go too.”

  “She ain’t exactly a child,” Stribling pointed out. “Maybe she can follow her own mind.”

  Gawain sat down in a splintered chair by the wall of the dentist’s office. “I will tell you about Morgan Rhea,” he said. “When she was sixteen, she got married off to a lawyer named Turban, Turpin, somethin or other—damn if I can remember. That was in ’forty-eight; I remember because the University opened that year, and I went up there. Next year, they had a child, a little girl, but it died after a week or so. In ’fifty, the lawyer got the gold fever and took off for California—he was half crazy by then anyway, so they said, because of the girl that was lost. Then one day Morgan got a package by the post. Inside was the lawyer’s pocket watch and wedding ring and a lock of his hair. The note said it was all the hair he had left after the injuns got their portion. After that day, she never called herself by his name again. She moved back in with the old folks in time to help raise Alex—he was a surprise to everybody, Miz Ida having gone beyond the usual years for such things—and she is froze to him now, as if he were her own, and in a way, he is. Yes, she will go to Brazil when the Judge goes.”

  “Well,” said Stribling, “when you talked to her last night—”

  “She never mentioned it, and I never let on that I knew.”

  “Well, good God,” said Stribling. “Then you don’t know how she feels about it.”

  “I just told you,” said Gawain.

  Stribling paced up and down, shaking his head, his arms crossed. At last he stopped, looked at Gawain. “You just gon’ sit there and let her go?” he asked.

  Gawain shifted uncomfortably. “Well, then there’s the Judge—”

  “I am tired of hearin about the Judge,” said Stribling. “Come on, boy. Let us go and see what develops over to Miss Morgan’s. The Judge might even have us for dinner.”

  Gawain pulled himself up from the chair. “You believe that?” he said.

  “No,” said Stribling.

  They went on then, through the bright morning, up the cemetery road toward the Carter house.

  WHEN L. W. Thomas left the Shipwright house, he nodded to the guard on the porch. He knew the man, of course. He knew them all, even Tom Kelly, who had drunk too much the night before and cried for his young wife and made an ass of himself, and now was dead. The guard, a squat, red-faced, bat-eared fellow from Illinois, looked like a troll in his oversized frock coat. He said something in the harsh twang of his tribe; Thomas missed the remark but acknowledged it with a wave of his hand and moved quickly across the porch. He almost stumbled going down the steps, and he winced when the dull pain thumped in his side. He pressed his hand to the wound, felt the gummy fluid penetrating his shirt. It will never quit, he thought.

  But the hurt was familiar at least, like an old regret, and it went almost unnoticed among the more immediate symptoms that followed L. W. Thomas across the yard of the Shipwright house. His hands were trembling, sweat beaded on his forehead, his heart was hammering like the clapper of a fire bell. Though he walked as fast as he was able, he seemed to be moving dreamlike through air thick as muscadine jelly, over ground that refused to pass beneath his feet, toward some indefinable point he would never gain. He listened for voices behind him, shouts, orders, the cocked lock of a musket leveled at his back.

  Then he was in the road. An army wagon was lumbering up from the south behind its four-mule team, and Thomas found himself standing square in the way of it, glued in the deep gumbo mud, the object of the driver’s curses. The jingling team came to a halt close enough for Thomas to count the nose hairs on the leader.

  “Outen the way, ye dodderned idjit,” snarled the driver. “Bless God if I ever get em started agin!” He slapped the lines over the mules’ backs, and the animals leaned into motion. Thomas hauled himself aside, almost stumbling again, and looked up at the driver and tried to speak, but too late. The mud-rimmed wheels of the wagon creaked past inches from his face. He could feel the compression of the great weight they bore, and smell the grease of the axles. He found the roadside and set off for the Citadel.

  He felt transparent, could imagine his nerves like glistening blue wires and the blood coursing red through the glass pipes of his veins, and in his breast the dark loaf of his heart beating, beating like the drum he’d heard through the open window. There it was: the dead boy, borne to the soldiers’ graveyard above the camp, who only last night was crying like a child. Thomas had told him to be gone, to get him hence, to quit his blubbering before he marked himself a fool—Go, boy, get your rest. And now he was resting sure in a far country, and the wife was shelling early peas perhaps, or strewing corn to the chickens in the yard, singing “Go Ye Lightly to the Well,” and soon—not today, but next week or the next—she would turn her eyes up the road to where the Post came riding with the Colonel’s letter in his bag.

  Well, he was an actor still. God! what a bluff to pull on von Arnim and the Colonel, not to mention an actual yankee newspaperman. But he had done all right, he told himself. Not too much help, not too little—just right. And what a splendid exit! But there was the boy—

  He looked fearfully at the few people he passed—a man with a bundle of sticks, a negro driving a cow, a woman and her child picking their way townward through the mud—and marveled that they did not turn from him in disgust, or point accusing fingers at his transparent soul where all his memory lived. It will never quit, he thought again, and pressed his hand, not over the wound this time, but against his heart.

  Another wagon came from behind; he heard the horses’ hooves sucking in the mud and the cr
eak of the wheels. He turned to watch it pass, and the heart beneath his hand nearly stopped when he saw that it was no wagon at all but a hearse, ancient and ungreased, wanting paint, the oval glass window cracked, and on the box a man bent like a vulture in his black coat and tall hat, a plug of tobacco swelling his blue jowls. And worse: no mourners or mutes, and no nodding plumes on the horses’ heads, only a negro with a shovel following behind. Through the cracked window, Thomas saw the cheap painted coffin like a slab of black stone. The whole collection seemed to repel the sunlight, as if it moved in its own shadow.

  Thomas found his voice. “Who … who is that?” he asked of the birdlike driver, the undertaker’s man. The fellow swiveled his head and looked down over the rims of his spectacles. “Sewer-cide,” he drawled, dragging the syllables out. He grinned, showing his big teeth. “Any more questions, brother?”

  “But who?” persisted Thomas, without knowing why. “Who is it?”

  The driver halted the team. Then he laughed, a low, phlegmy sound. “Oh, God knows, brother—him and the black demon that’s waitin to take delivery. Them’s all that matters, don’t you agree? Gon’ bury him tonight when the moon is dark, down at the Mount Zion church. Gon’ dig a good grave three-by-six and six foot perpendic’lar just outside the fence, put him down in it where he can’t contaminate the sanctified. Such is the way in a Christian country. Tomorrow daylight there’ll be naught but a mound of fresh dirt—ain’t that somethin? Le’s ponder that a while, think about the demon perched on the fence with his leathern wings folded, rubbin his little hands, while Jacob here opens up the ground, prowlin down through the roots and the worms—”

  “No,” said Thomas. “No—you get on away from me. You get on.”

  The man laughed again. “Some folks don’t like to think about it,” he said, and clucked to the team.

  Thomas stood and watched until the hearse went out. of sight over the rise to the south. Then he went on. It was not far, and in a moment he was climbing the steps of the tavern. In the cookshed behind, a plume of white smoke curled from the chimney where Queenolia Divine was making her fire for dinner. Beowulf was lying on the porch; he lifted his head and thumped his tail on the planks. Thomas knelt and stroked the hard pan of the dog’s head and spoke through his teeth: “What’d you have to do that for? Why’d you have to be the one?” Then he was through the door, and when the door closed behind him, L. W. Thomas was safe for the nonce in the cool, rank darkness of the Citadel of Djibouti.

  The interior of the place smelled variously of stale beer, mildew, cold cigars, wood smoke, and men—this last commodity a rich medley of odors in itself, as if there emerged from the anonymity of these men a single personality that could stand for them all. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, Thomas could discern fantastic shapes: a deer head, its glass eyes wide in perpetual astonishment; a stuffed alligator gar the size of a small canoe suspended from the rafters; a cuckoo clock that clung to the wall like some complicated beast, whose yellowed ivory hands kept good time, though no cuckoo ever appeared to announce what time it was. The bar was a tall door laid across two barrels; the door, like the rest of the collection, was pilfered from the same abandoned house that yielded the blue paint. Above the bar, dimly illuminated in the light that shown through the gaps in the weatherboards, hung a garishly framed portrait of a reclining nude. The portrait was lurid and cheap and improbable, but it had always moved Thomas in an unexpected way. At first, the more he looked at it, the more he found it vaguely familiar, and he had often searched back through his adventures for some corresponding shape. He had found several, but their names and faces, voices and desires, even the cities and hotels where they’d crossed his life—all these eluded him, shut away in rooms to which he had long ago lost the key. He wished he could remember just a single name, so that one of them at least might have the dignity of remembering. Ah, well, he had decided at length—maybe they didn’t have names. Maybe they never were at all.

  Thomas felt his way across the room to the curtained doorway of the lean-to. The stump of a candle still burned there, revealing his bunk among the boxes and barrels. One empty crate contained his worldly goods: a scattering of books, a tin plate and cup, a mandolin, a great sheaf of dogeared papers covered with his scrawl, a Remington pocket pistol with a tin of caps and a powder flask and a bag of conical balls. Above these hung the cloudy shard of a mirror, and by the candlelight Thomas examined his face. “Why did you do that?” he asked his image. Then his eyes moved to the tattered bill nailed to the wall by the mirror:

  ____________________

  MR. LAWRENCE THOMAS

  will appear on SATURDAY AFTERNOON in his

  Great Character of

  METACOMET!

  being most positively his last appearance

  in that character in Boston.

  . … .

  THE BEAUTIFUL CUBAS

  will appear.

  . … .

  THIS SATURDAY AFTERNOON, NOV. 16,

  will be performed the celebrated

  Indian Tragedy entitled

  METACOMET!!!

  or, King Philip at Bay!

  ____________________

  Thomas looked from the bill to the mirror and back again. He reached out his hand, touched the letters of his name. Then he undressed, climbed into his bunk, and blew out the candle. In the dark, riven only by a slant of sunlight through a crack in the wall, he pulled the covers over his head.

  BEN LUKER FOUND Captain Gault sitting on the portico of his burned house. He was in his shirtsleeves, his breeches tucked into his boots, skinning a rabbit he had shot in the yard. His fine, long-fingered hands were bloody. Beside him was a pail of water and, leaning against a smoke-blackened column, the Henry rifle. Luker, standing at the foot of the steps, told of the interview at Colonel Burduck’s headquarters. Gault listened without comment.

  “They wanted to know who it was led the rangers,” said Luker. “They asked me who it was, I told em it was somebody down in Yalobusha, but von Arnim said he would find out. What you gon’ do?”

  Gault had finished his skinning. He slit open the rabbit’s belly and scooped out the innards. They lay in a glistening red-and-blue pile at his feet. He picked them up and flung them past Luker into the yard, then dropped the carcass into the pail and rubbed water over his hands to wash off the blood. He dried his hands on a rag. “Tell me about Thomas again,” he said at last.

  Luker scratched the back of his neck. “Well, I guess he done all right—but it was him got em to thinkin about the rangers. He ought not to’ve said what he did when he didn’t have to. I don’t know, Cap’n. Looks to me like he could’ve kept his mouth shut.”

  “Well,” said Gault, “you keep an eye on him. He is not one of us, after all.”

  “What you gon’ do with them lookin for you?” said Luker.

  Gault folded the rag and rose from the cane-bottom chair he was sitting in. He looked out across the yard and the overgrown fields beyond, as though they contained a shape that only he could discern. “What do you think, Ben?” he said at last. “You think I had that boy killed?”

  The sheriff looked at the ground. “Well … well, naw, Cap’n, I never said—”

  “Don’t worry about it, Ben,” said Solomon Gault. Then he smiled. “I’d ask you to stay for dinner, but, as you can see, there is only the one rabbit.”

  XII

  The soldiers’ graveyard was just north of the camp, close enough to the railroad so that the ground trembled at the rare passage of trains. Around the cluster of wooden markers (thirty-six in all) the men had erected a soldierly fence of stolen palings, neat and plumb and whitewashed. Outside the fence stood three additional markers; under these rested a black teamster killed by a mule, and two black soldiers who had died in a skirmish with rebel cavalry in the early spring. Also beyond the fence was the grave of a Confederate deserter, marked only by a depression in the soggy ground.

  Of the thirty-six buried within the fence, mos
t had been taken by measles or dysentery. One was a suicide, one had broken his neck in a fall from a horse. A few had been killed in the same skirmish as the black riflemen over the fence. Their markers, save one, were identical wooden shingles, rounded on top, painted with the name, the regiment, and the date of departure of the sleeper beneath. The one odd marker was the Tuscan capital of a courthouse column; on the remnant of the shaft was written the name of a major of infantry whose life had ebbed away in a fever. His people were expected to come fetch him when the roads were dry.

  As the morning grew, the sky was still clear, though soon the white clouds would begin to pile toward the afternoon’s rain. The sun shone hot on the soldiers’ graveyard, and the two men digging the new grave were sheened with sweat. They were young men, and their black skin glistened with the sweat, and heavy drops beaded on their faces and dripped into the sour turned earth of the grave. With every thrust of the shovel, their muscles stood out like skeins of tarred rope. They sang to each other as they worked.

  On the lip of the grave stood a third man, Old Hundred-and-Eleven. He wore a broad straw hat and carried a spavined umbrella to protect him from the sun, and in his jaw he worked a great wad of tobacco. Under his right arm, he held his great ragged Bible, which he would unlimber now and then to shake at the gravediggers in silent benediction. The two men, brothers called Dauncy and Jack, ignored him and went on singing to the rhythmic plunge and toss of their shovels. Their voices were high and sweet, like boys’ voices, and they sang in a language they knew only through the song. The words meant nothing to them, so far had they traveled in their generations from the old tongue, but the sounds spoke of something peaceful and green and sad, of old lost ways and the end of life. It was a burying song, fit to carry down into the earth.

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven liked to hear the negroes singing. He liked the sound of the digging, and the smell of the ground and of the sunlight, though the sun hurt his eyes and would scald him if it touched his skin. Just a little while before, von Arnim the provost had sent him here with these contraband to dig in the earth, to prepare a place for one of the newly dead. He liked that, too: the idea that here was a life neatly rounded out, and he chosen above all others to preside over the temple of its end.