The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  There had been no more talk of hanging; apparently Judge Rhea’s girl had fixed it just as the stranger said she would. In the sunlight, in the sweet music, Old Hundred-and-Eleven thought of Morgan and felt a warm glow in his heart. Awkwardly, for he had to keep the umbrella aloft, he palmed his great Bible and turned to a place he remembered: a picture of some children sleeping in what appeared to be a hayrick, and over them, keeping watch, a winged angel in flowing robes, its hand raised in a graceful way. Old Hundred-and-Eleven believed the angel looked a good deal like Morgan Rhea, though it was blond-headed and Morgan was not, and it was bigger and hadn’t any pox scars. But no matter; the more he looked, the more he became convinced that here was a portrait of the girl who had saved him. “She’s right here,” he said to Dauncy and Jack. “Stamp my vitals if she ain’t!”

  “Who right where?” said Dauncy, reaching for the canteen that lay by the graveside. But the old man had already turned away, absorbed in the study of the picture.

  “That ol’ genneman give me the willies,” said Jack. “He smell like a goat, too.”

  “I knowed him for years,” said Dauncy. “Ain’t no harm in him when he ain’t conjurin. You ain’t no rosebud yourself, by the by.”

  Jack was about to reply when a shadow fell across them. They stopped and looked up toward the sun. A man in a broad hat was standing there. At first they thought the old white man had come around behind them somehow. The brothers shaded their eyes and looked, and the blood slowed in their veins. They moved their bare feet nervously in the earth, feeling the clammy coolness of it.

  It was a man all right, but not Old Hundred-and-Eleven. Later, Dauncy would tell how he believed for a moment it was a man risen from some other grave, for his skin seemed to be falling off him, and his eyes under the broad hat brim had no shine to them, and his mouth moved with his breathing as if he couldn’t breathe the air of this world. He had appeared without herald, without sound, out of the hot light of morning, and thrown his shadow over the new grave, and Dauncy thought maybe he wanted it for himself, and if that was the case then he—Dauncy, who wanted to live at least long enough to find himself a last name—would be glad to oblige. Then he thought He made a shadow, and knew by that it was a man, flesh and bone that once had sucked his mama’s paps, and in some ways this was worse.

  “What you lookin at?” said the man. His voice was flat and quiet, as if he had no lungs but only his mouth to make the sound with. Dauncy looked away. “Nothin, sah, just diggin. Gon’ dig right now, ain’t we, Jack?”

  Jack was frozen in place, his eyes wide, his hands wrapped tight about the mud-crusted shovel handle. A swirl of old stories rose like swamp gas in his memory, tales of a white man and his tracking dogs, how his skin peeled like sycamore bark. He saw his grandmother’s face in the firelight, shriveled and toothless, a snuff stick jutting from her gums: Ol’ Molochi gon’ get you, you don’t straighten up. “Ol’ Molochi,” breathed Jack. “Sweet Jesus.”

  The white man spat into the grave. “You best get to diggin, nigger,” he said.

  Dauncy nudged his brother, and they set to work again, watching each other from the corners of their eyes, understanding they were nearly done with the hole and once done—what? They dug. The man watched them. In a moment, Old Hundred-and-Eleven shambled up and peered over the rim of the grave.

  “Gah damn, you boys is fools for excavatin,” said the old man. He looked up at the stranger. “Here now, who are you to be tellin these boys anything? Don’t you reckon they know how to make a grave? Anybody they put under will want a pick and shovel if he’s to rise on time at jedgment day—who are you, anyhow, and good God but you are truly ugly, amen!”

  The stranger moved then, without sound. He rounded the grave. Dauncy, bent nearly double from the waist, shook the dirt loose from his shovel blade and gripped the shaft. A word appeared in his mind: Freedom. He tried to get hold of it, look at it in its separate parts. “Freedom,” he said softly to himself, as he had for months now. Did it mean he could whack a white man on the head with a shovel if he had to? He doubted it. Still, Old Hundred-and-Eleven, crazy as he was, had always been good to him, and if the stranger so much as lifted a hand against the old man, Dauncy would test the limits of his new condition. “Free-dom,” he crooned softly, and began to make a song of it, watching the stranger with the peeling skin. “Freedom brung the children out of Pharaoh’s land.”

  And Jack, picking up the line: “Sho’ brought Jonah from the belly of the fish.”

  “Ol’ Jonah,” said Dauncy.

  “Ol’ Pharaoh,” said Jack.

  Up above, the stranger was close to Old Hundred-and-Eleven now. He stopped, and cocked his foot up on the mound of dirt. “Who you buryin here?”

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven shifted his umbrella, bringing the shade across his face. “Gah damn,” he said, “if you ain’t the ugliest white man I ever see—uglier’n a fart in church, by God. I know you, don’t I? You Molochi Fish. Thought the ha’nts and demons had got you down in the Leaf River bottom long ago.”

  “Free-dom,” grunted Jack, thrusting his blade into the earth. “Freedom in the bosom of A-braham.” He flung the dirt out of the grave, careful not to hit the stranger.

  “Just never you mind,” said Molochi Fish.' “Who you buryin here? Is it that soldier what was cut last night?” He took a step closer, wrapped his hand in the lapel of the other’s frock coat. “Tell me who it is.”

  “Can’t say,” said Old Hundred-and-Eleven agreeably. “Might be the Prince of Wales, all I know.”

  The stranger let go, peered down into the hole. Jack and Dauncy froze. “They gon’ put him in a box, set him down in there,” the stranger said, as if to himself. “They gon’ cover his th’oat with a handkerchief.” Then his eyes fixed on Old Hundred-and-Eleven again. “You make sure this hole’s dug deep. Don’t want that boy to get out. They’s enough of em around as it is.”

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven snorted. “Done told you, these here boys is near ’bout to Chiny now. As for you”—he shook the Bible in the man’s face—“the dog returns to his vomit, the fool to his folly. Go on with ye!”

  “Lord Jesus,” whispered Dauncy.

  But the stranger was paying no attention to Old Hundred-and-Eleven. He seemed to have forgotten them all. He was looking past the grave toward the railroad, his mouth opening and closing with his breath. His gaze seemed fixed on something only he could see, as if some familiar shape were moving among the willows by Town Creek, or through the clumps of sumac along the right-of-way. “This ain’t the end,” he said. “This ain’t all of it.” Then, without another word, he began to move away, eyes still fixed on what he had seen. The three men at the grave watched until the man had crossed the railroad and was out of sight beyond the willows.

  “Whoosh,” said Jack. “That genneman warn’t right, what I say.”

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven sat down in the dirt and crossed his legs, holding the umbrella upright, the Bible in his lap. “I ever tell you boys ’bout the vision I had one time? They was a dark beast, it was wintertime—”

  As Old Hundred-and-Eleven began to tell his vision, making shapes in the air with his free hand, Jack and Dauncy resumed their digging. Just a little way now, and they would be done. Dauncy flicked the sweat from his eyes and thrust the shovel into the yielding earth.

  “Dauncy?” said Jack.

  “What?”

  “It’s good to be free, ain’t it?”

  “Shut up and dig,” said Dauncy. “Be dinnertime soon.”

  IN THE LEAN-TO room behind the Citadel of Djibouti, L. W. Thomas was thrashing in his sleep. He had kicked the sheets off; the bare mattress was soaked in sweat and suppuration. A fly was investigating his nostrils, and he brushed at it fitfully. Young Tom Kelly, barely visible in the dark, sat on a barrel in the corner of the room, one leg crossed over the other. The wound in his throat, barred by a slant of daylight, gleamed wetly. He had a tankard of beer, and when he drank, the beer leaked out of the wou
nd and onto his shirt front. He didn’t seem to mind.

  “Whoa!” said Thomas, jerking upright in the sodden bunk.

  “Sleepin in the daytime always give me bad dreams,” said Kelly. “You oughtn’t to do it.”

  Thomas shook his head. “Here lately, I been sleepin all the time,” he said. “What you mean, comin up in here botherin me?”

  “Oh, I’m a ghost,” said Kelly. “I come to ha’nt you. I won’t be no trouble, however.” Then he let out a cry that shook Thomas to his bones.

  “Well, you will damn sure have to quit that,” said Thomas. “Now, look here—if you think I had anything to do with your—”

  Kelly held up his hand. “Oh, not at all. No, you was always kind to me. If anybody’d asked me ‘Where’s a fellow you can trust, a fellow who won’t do you any harm,’ why, I would’ve sent him straight to you.”

  “No!” cried Thomas. “Don’t be sayin that!” He threw the covers off and made to sit up, but the wound in his side sent a lance of pain through him, and he fell back groaning. “Ah, Jesus. Don’t be sayin that to me.”

  Daylight flooded the room, except it wasn’t the room at all but a narrow, empty street in a great city—St. Louis, Thomas thought. The buildings cast long shadows; they were of red brick and sooted with coal dust, their windows like pools of dead water. Though Thomas had always liked St. Louis, he was not comfortable here—it felt too much like Sunday morning, early, before the church bells. A lonely time.

  Thomas stood in the street while dead leaves, golden and brittle, rattled across the sidewalks. Up ahead, the street curved away, and Thomas found himself watching there.

  Presently a hearse, drawn by a single black horse with a nodding plume, emerged from the shadows beyond the curve. No one was on the driver’s box, nor any mourners walking behind—just the hearse, its wheels silent, and the horse’s hooves silent. Overhead, a flock of blackbirds passed across the sky between the buildings, throwing swift shadows on the bricks. As the hearse grew near, Thomas peered into the glass oval in its side, saw nothing there but his own reflection, pale and disembodied. The sight chilled him so that he recoiled, backed away, feeling for the stone curb behind him. He couldn’t find it, and at last he turned, found himself still in the street. Before him was a store window festooned with spiderwebs. When he moved closer, the window disappeared, and he was looking into the hollow shell of a building all in shadow. He could hear birds in the rafters; they ruffled their feathers and murmured, but Thomas couldn’t see them. Then he was inside, and he could smell the damp and the ashes, and Solomon Gault sat regarding him across a wide table. “Hear the fife and drum?” said Solomon Gault. “You know the meaning of it, sir?”

  “I am not in this,” said Thomas.

  “Sure you are,” said Gault, only he was Colonel Burduck now, and he slid a knife across the smooth surface of the table. It fell over the edge, glinting in the light from somewhere, and rang like a bell when it landed at Thomas’ feet.

  When he woke, he was sitting on the edge of his cot, soaked in sweat, staring at the barrel in the dark corner. In the gloom, he heard a mouse scuffling among his papers, and he wondered vaguely where the cat was. Then he lay back for just a while longer, listening for Queenolia to come and set up for dinner.

  PART 3

  The Citadel

  XIII

  When a summer morning came, it drew the night out of houses where people lived. If a house were empty—or if it were drawn and shuttered against the coming day, as the houses of the sick often were, or the dying, or the frightened—then night would hold on, lurking in the corners of rooms, crouching at the end of dim halls and under furniture and in the folds of curtains. In such a house, the air went on smelling of the dead hours when the blood slowed in the veins, when the mind crept up dark avenues of memory and all the senses grew sharp to the creaking of a board, the flutter of a moth, the subtle movement of shadows. But stand in the yard of a house flung open, at the moment when day was established at last, and you could feel the night leave through the windows like an exhalation of breath. You could smell the night as it passed you, see it almost, as you might see a blackbird rising from the grass.

  Old man Tom Carter paused and listened as the night left his house. He was in the yard, in his nightshirt, barefoot, his long white hair still tangled from sleep. He was looking for the place he had buried a dog once. It was important that he find it. The thought had come to him deep in the night, how his boy would naturally want to know where the dog lay. The creature had been old, toothless, feeble, but she had followed the boy when he left, had stumbled blindly down the lane after him until the boy stopped and knelt, petted her, said “Go home, France—you can’t follow where I’m goin.” Then the boy had gone, quickly, not looking back, and the dog had sat in the road and nodded her head, swayed her gray muzzle back and forth trying to find him again, until Tom had lifted the old dog up and carried her home.

  Now he was searching for the place where France lay, and just as he thought he might be close, he smelled the night leaving his house. He stopped, looked up: there was the house, all the windows open and the curtains moving in the little breeze of morning, and he realized he was in the front. He had buried France in back, seemed like.

  He went around the east side where the sun was already warming the boards, where the volunteer morning glories had opened their blue bells among a tangle of vines. Old Tom Carter blinked in the sunlight; for a moment the house seemed strange to him, alien and unexpected, as if he had just stumbled upon it in the grove of oaks. He tugged on the lead rope of his horse, felt no resistance, looked around in puzzlement. His hand was empty.

  “Well, I’ll say,” he murmured, looking at his hand.

  In the rear of the house, a gallery ran around the ell. Old Tom sat on the steps and looked across the yard. His feet were cold from the dew, and he rubbed them together. The open door of the barn was a great black square. Maybe it is still night in there, he thought. “France!” he called out. “Here you, Scotland! Here now!” He could see the pen where the dogs lived, the old setters, brother and sister out of a dog—what was her name?—he got in Grand Junction once. France had a litter out of one of Sam Hook’s dogs—No, that ain’t right, he thought. France was dead when Sam Hook was breedin— The thought struck him: France was dead by then, and Scotland, too. Then who was it followed him down the lane? He looked around expectantly, as if he had spoken the question aloud and someone might be there to answer it. But there was no one. In the dog pen, the grass was high, and morning glories grew through the board fence.

  A spring morning, and the boy had gone to join his company on the square, and the dog went after him. Or was that the one who went to sea and was lost? Old Tom had not thought of that one for a long time, and he had to search the back rooms of his memory for the name. Owen, it was. So it was. No, Owen was up plenty early, gone before daylight, and it was wintertime when he left. He hadn’t said he was leaving. Old Tom remembered looking down the empty lane where the boy had gone, at the trees lacy with ice. He stood by the gate, telling himself he could catch the lad if he tried, but he hadn’t tried. A year later he got a letter from a man he’d never heard of, telling how the ship lost her masts and foundered in a typhoon and Owen Carter was swept over the side. That one was gone, then, no question about it. But not the other one, the young one. He would want to know where France was buried.

  Behind the place where old Tom sat, a door led onto the gallery from the dining room. Now he heard the door open, scraping as it always did in damp weather. Alex Rhea came out on the gallery, carrying a cat draped in his arms like an inverted U. No sooner had the door closed behind them than the cat twisted free and thumped on the boards of the gallery. “Well, go on, then,” said Alex, and the cat slipped past the old man and across the yard to the barn where he paused by the open door, looked back once, and disappeared.

  “Here, now,” said Tom Carter. “What you doin?”

  “Nothin, sir,” said the
boy. He looked at the place where the cat had gone, then slouched across the gallery and sat down on the steps. He wore a muslin shirt, muslin braces, and a pair of jeans pants. He, too, was barefoot; he arranged his small feet beside the larger ones of old Tom Carter. The boy’s were tan, calloused, pimpled with mosquito bites. The old man’s were like slabs of blue-veined marble. The boy sighed and looked up into the bright leaves of the oaks. “It’s mighty clear this morning,” he said. “You can look all you want, you won’t find no clouds.”

  “Be some after while,” the old man said.

  “Sister got me up,” said the boy. “She is actin peculiar, like it was her birthday or somethin. I wisht I had a dog. That cat ain’t much for company. Papa says we’ll get a dog in Brazil, says you got to have em down there. I’d just as soon stay here and have one, though.”

  The old man nodded, looking out across the yard. There was the barn, the privy, the silent cookhouse with moss growing on the chimney and over the shingles of the roof. In the wall of the cookhouse was a perfect hole where a stray round of solid shot had come calling during the fighting around the square last year. The cook had run away after that, never to return. As the old man watched, a spear of sunlight penetrated the oak canopy; it grew until it resembled a gossamer curtain falling among the trees. It illuminated a spot of ground just beyond the cookhouse, toward the pasture grown rank with grass and honeysuckle and bull thistles.

  “Don’t see why I can’t stay here and have one,” said the boy. “Other boys have dogs. How come I can’t stay with you, Cousin? We could have us some dogs, couldn’t we?”