The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  The old man didn’t answer; he was watching the place where the curtain of sunlight fanned through the trees. He watched a fat robin land there and kick around in the leaves. In a moment, he put out his hand, fumbled, found the boy’s and held fast to it.

  “What, Cousin?” said Alex, but again the old man didn’t answer. He struggled to his feet, breathing hard with the effort, and pulled the boy up with him. For an instant he swayed on the step, gaining his balance. The boy’s hand felt hot and impossibly small, delicate, fragile as a leaf. His own encompassed it completely. Still grasping the boy’s hand, he moved down the steps and out into the yard, across it, past the cookhouse and into the oaks, the boy following behind. The curtain of light was gone now—it couldn’t last long, for the sun was climbing—but his eyes were fixed on the place where it had been. When they reached it, the old man fell to his knees, the boy standing beside him. The robin did not fly, but cocked his head and watched them from an arm’s length away. Old Tom Carter reached out with his free hand and cleared away the leaves. “Here,” he said.

  The boy looked a question at his old kinsman, then knelt, waiting.

  The old man was silent for a long while. At last he released the boy’s hand and leaned forward and spread his fingers out over the earth. His breathing was deep and steady; the only other sound was the robin flock talking to one another in the grove, and from the pasture the carol of a meadowlark. The boy settled himself, his hands on his knees.

  “It was right here, you see,” said old Tom. “This is where I put her. I should’ve made a mark, a rock or somethin, so you’d know.”

  “Who?” said Alex. “Put who?”

  The old man captured the boy’s hand again, guided it to the cleared patch of earth, cool and damp. The wet undersides of the turned leaves glistened, and the smell of them was strong in the boy’s nose. He had a vision of bird dogs moving in a field at morning, saw their feathery tails switching over the broomsage. And he smelled the dry, papery smell of the old man, and the sweat of his sleeping. Heard his breathing and knew, somehow, that he was searching for words—that he saw a picture too, and wanted the words to tell it. “What, Cousin?” the boy asked in a whisper. “What is it?”

  The old man shook his head, as if a fly were buzzing him. Then he looked at the boy. “I’ll get you another one,” he said. “We’ll go up to Tennessee, I promise—I know a fellow up there. Or maybe Sam Hook has one—I’ve not seen him in a while—” He turned his head, looking past the boy. “I wonder where he got to?”

  The boy knew the name—Sam Hook, lawyer, preacher, breeder of fast dogs and horses, a legendary wing shot, who went with the army as a chaplain—from stories the old men told, and a half-remembered image from early childhood, before the yankees came, of a man riding a sleek mare up the steps of the courthouse and into the main hall where Judge Rhea’s court was at recess, laughing at something his father said—no, laughing at his father, he remembered. And his father’s anger, tangible as a cold stone, and a pistol drawn, and the man on the horse laughing at the pistol in his father’s hand, but not his eyes laughing. “Sam Hook,” said the boy. “Why, I heard them say he was lost—”

  “No!” said the old man. He turned to the boy now, dragging around on his knees, grasping tightly the boy’s hand. “Never mind—you listen to what I say. They ain’t gone, none of em. It’s all right, it’s all the same as it was, just the same. I’ll get you another good dog, I promise. You don’t have to go, you are only a boy. Bushrod? You hear me?”

  “You mean I can stay?” said the boy. “Did you ask Papa?” Behind them, at the house, the door scraped open again. The boy heard it, looked and saw his sister on the gallery, her hand shading her eyes. “Can Morgan stay, too?” he asked.

  “It’s all right,” said old Tom Carter. “It’s all right now. We’ll get a new dog and raise him up, don’t worry.” He let go of the boy’s hand then, and struggled to his feet. He turned an awkward half circle. The robin flew at last and joined his mates in the trees overhead. “Bushrod?” said the old man. “I found her for you!”

  Morgan was there then. She wore a checked gingham dress, yellow and brown, and her hair was pulled back, and at her throat a silver locket on a chain. She came gliding over the yard and lifted her hands and fitted her long fingers to old Tom Carter’s face. “Oh, Cousin,” she said, and pulled him close to her. She stroked his long white hair. “Oh, Cousin,” she said again. “Hush, hush.” The old man tried to pull away but she held him fast.

  Alex rose and brushed the leaves from his breeches. “He said we might stay, Sister. He said—”

  “You, too,” said Morgan. “Hush.” She put out her hand and the boy came to her, puzzling. She pressed him against her, holding them both against their will, as if she would keep them from flying away like the robins.

  HARRY STRIBLING HAD not told Gawain of his meeting with Morgan the afternoon before, and apparently the woman had kept the secret too. Stribling thought that commendable. “I suppose you have got your speech lined out,” he said to Gawain now, as they stood in the road by the Episcopal church.

  “Not atall,” said Gawain. He was looking across the way at the Carter house in its grove of oaks. The house looked quiet, serene, not so lonesome as it had in the moonlight. Yet, even by day, it gave of something indefinable: a sense, pehaps, that it was only waiting now.

  “That’s all right,” said Stribling. “I remember my time at the bar—I leaned a good deal on Providence when it was time to sum up.”

  “The Holy Ghost descending,” said Gawain.

  “Speaking of that,” said Stribling, “I just had a thought. You know what day this is?”

  Gawain pondered a moment, counting up from the last time he had known what day it was. “Ah!” he said. “I calculate it is June the twenty-fourth, year of grace eighteen hundred and sixty-five. Saint John the Baptist Day.”

  “I thought so,” said Stribling. He smiled. “Old days, the lodge would’ve had a feast.”

  Gawain nodded. “Yes, well, there ain’t any lodge now, not here. Maybe next year.” Then he smiled as well, remembering. “We had a travelin lodge in the regiment, Harry. Thirty-eight members, I was senior warden. We hadn’t of surrendered, I’d of been master next year. This day last year we caught a chicken. It didn’t go far, but we had a good time.”

  “We will have a good time again,” said Stribling.

  “You reckon?”

  “Well, sooner or later anyhow.”

  They went up the road then and turned into the Carters’ lane. In a moment they were through the trees and standing by the bottom step of the portico. Gawain saw the irises he’d trampled last night and felt a pang of guilt; his mother would have skinned him for that.

  The paint was peeling from the house, and in places the gray cypress wood showed through. Woodbine covered nearly all the front, climbing to the rusted gutters, invading the upper windows. All the windows were open; in one of them, a spider had spun her web. Looking up, Gawain saw that the gallery door was open too, and he wondered if anyone had been watching them from there.

  “This house is dyin,” said Stribling. He had his pipe out, and was filling it from a silk pouch.

  “What?” said Gawain, startled.

  Stribling knelt and scratched a lucifer on the boot scraper by the steps. He lit his pipe deliberately, as a man will do when he is thinking. At last he shook the match out and stood up. “It is dyin,” he said.

  Gawain saw that it was. He looked up at the gray, paintless, bird-streaked facade, at the gutters sprouting with seedling oaks, at the shingles covered with moss, and he thought of the faces of some old people he had known, or of soldiers sometimes, waiting.

  Stribling gestured toward the front door with his pipe stem. “Go on,” he said. “Let’s get it over.”

  Gawain mounted the steps, crossed the porch to the front door. He looked back, saw that Stribling had moved a little into the yard, was smoking, his arms crossed. He was looking toward
the corner of the house.

  “Ain’t you comin?”

  Stribling waved him away, went on smoking. Gawain shrugged and rapped on the door. He waited, rapped again. Up above, some sparrows were fussing in the eaves. He knocked again, hard this time. When no one answered, he turned. “Harry—,” he began. But Stribling was gone.

  Gawain stood on the porch, thinking maybe he would run, maybe he would do this tomorrow, when the door opened behind him. He turned again, quickly, and in the turning expected all at once to see old Robert the Butler there, as if this were Judge Rhea’s house again and all the three years had been a dream and it was still that April evening when there was no Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Chattanooga; no Atlanta, no Franklin nor Nashville, no long retreat in the ice, no defeat—still that April, still Lent, and the moon fixing to rise—all that in the turning, the years folding in on themselves and Gawain Harper, in that instant, for the last time, a ghost of himself, already fading in the sunlight.

  But it was no house servant, no Robert with his fine old imperious face and woolly hair and gold half-spectacles. It was a white woman, handsome, her hair shot with gray, smelling faintly of lavender. She stood timidly in the open door, clutching her breast, seeming smaller than she really was, and as Gawain faced her, he felt time opening out again. Women opened doors for themselves now—he had seen it over and over in cabins and great houses along the journey, but he would never get used to it. This woman wouldn’t either, he knew. She had no idea how to answer a knock nor confront a stranger without someone in between.

  Gawain made his voice gentle and bowed slightly from the waist and was glad he had a hat to sweep off. “Miz Ida Rhea,” he said. “What a long time it’s been.”

  The sound of her name seemed to surprise her. “I don’t know you,” she said, looking curiously at him.

  “Gawain Harper,” he said. “You may remember me; I came to call on Morgan, a long time ago. May I say that you have changed not at all?”

  “Gawain—,” she began. Then her eyes grew wide. “My Lord, yes. That professor. Why, wherever did you go? I know—you went in the army, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You lived!” she said. “Through all that trouble! Well, bless God!”

  “Yes, ma’am. I prevailed, through much hardship and danger,” said Gawain. “And now I have come to ask—”

  “Ida, who is that?” came a voice from the dark hall.

  The woman started as if she’d been caught lifting hens. “Oh!” she said. “Why, Judge, it’s that boy who used to call on Morgan—”

  “I believe I know who it is,” said the voice, and Judge Nathan Rhea appeared in the door as his wife backed out of it.

  Judge Rhea was sixty years old now, by Gawain’s calculation. When last he’d seen the Judge, the man’s hair and chin whiskers had still been Indian-black, and the bones of his face were chiseled and the skin drawn tight. He’d had no wrinkles save at the corners of his eyes and deep-etched in the space between his bushy brows. The eyes themselves were black and sharp and glittering, and when he spoke, his voice seemed to resonate from somewhere deep inside him, filling a courtroom or parlor as if there could be no other voice in the world.

  Now Gawain hardly recognized the man, would not have known him if he’d passed him on the street by light of day. His hair was white and thin, and where the chin whiskers once flourished was only a gray stubble. The eyes were still black, but the lids drooped, the brows had thinned, the skin of his face seemed translucent and had no color at all. The Judge stood in the doorway, his shoulders sagging, the black frock coat hanging loosely, the front of it stained with food. He fidgeted with the key on his watch chain. His hands were thin and hairless; when they began to tremble, the old man thrust them into the pockets of his waistcoat.

  “Gawain Harper,” said the Judge.

  Gawain stood speechless. Here was the moment he had imagined over and over in his head, trying to think of what he would say, and what the Judge would say—and now he couldn’t say anything at all. He swallowed, cleared his throat, but still his voice failed him. Finally, he managed a single word: “Judge.”

  The old man shuffled out onto the porch and stood a hand’s-breadth away. He took out his spectacles, fumbled them on, and peered hard into Gawain’s face. Gawain could smell him, a smell like dust, like the leaves of old books. “You have changed some,” said the Judge.

  “Oh, well,” said Gawain, finding some remnant of his voice. “I have been a long way, sir.”

  “Yes,” said the Judge. “So you have. A long way. And now you are back again.” His voice trailed off, and he moved past Gawain to the edge of the porch. Gawain turned, still holding his hat like a schoolboy.

  “The last time you called at my house, I sent you off with a note as I recall. Is that right?”

  “You did, sir. I read it sitting on a bench on the square. Then I set a match to it.”

  The Judge chuckled, a strange sound. “Well, you couldn’t call at my house now—oh, you could I suppose, but you would find only ashes there, and a curious silence. I go there almost every day, and I am always puzzled by the silence.”

  “I know the kind you mean, sir,” said Gawain. “I have heard it myself.”

  The Judge looked at his hands for a moment, then tucked them back in his pockets. “I wonder if you really have,” he said.

  Gawain looked down at his hat. His sweat had stained it, and the rain yesterday had ruined the roll in the brim. “Judge Rhea,” he said, “I am sorry for your troubles, and I am not here to add to them. I have come—”

  “I never supposed you would make a soldier,” said the Judge, as if Gawain had not spoken at all. “Frankly, I thought you were a coward.”

  Gawain laughed. “Well, you had that part right,” he said.

  “On the contrary,” the Judge went on. “I was wrong in that. You acted well, against all my expectations, and now here you are again—your honor intact, I suppose?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Gawain.

  “But you agree it ought to mean something, eh?”

  “Maybe it’s easier to understand when you win,” said Gawain.

  The Judge turned and looked at Gawain over the tops of his spectacles. “No, sir,” he said. “I have discovered, in the eleventh hour, that victory and honor are best understood by them who lose. My grandfather was in Washington’s army. He always said that he despised the British for proud and arrogant soldiers, that he never saw anything noble in them until they marched out to surrender at Yorktown. Their fifers played a tune that day called ‘The World Turned Upside Down.’ It certainly had for them, eh? And for us, too, now. I wonder—how do you see the world, Mister Harper, after all your adventures?”

  Gawain shrugged. “I find it much the same, sir,” he said. “A little damaged perhaps, but in the essence, all the same. I want to think so, anyhow. It is what I’ve been counting on.”

  The Judge smiled, nodded. “You belonged to that English church, as I recall. And I know you are a Freemason, and therefore a freethinker. Still believe in God, do you? After all this?”

  “You are Presbyterian, as I recall,” said Gawain. “Do you mean God, or God’s will?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “I have seen nothing to lead me to doubt,” replied Gawain. He waved his hat toward the yard, and beyond it the memory of fire and smoke and ruin. “All that out yonder—we sowed it, and we reaped in turn. I do not believe any of it was His will, and I can’t imagine He approved of most of it. Anyway, it wasn’t Him burnt your house, it was the yankees. He didn’t kill—” He stopped then, just in time, biting the words off hard. If the Judge noticed, he didn’t show it.

  “I see,” said the Judge. “Still a freethinker, then. Well, forgive my catechism, but I am curious to discover how you perceive, as you put it, the essence.” The Judge rested his hand on one of the great square columns. “When my daughter told me you’d gone with the army
, I laughed in her face. When I discovered it was true, I considered apologizing but didn’t, for it is not—was not—in my nature, and I supposed you’d come crawling back by winter anyhow. But you didn’t, and again I was checked. I was forced to admit at last that you had done the honorable thing. But then, you see, circumstances took their turn. All was lost, the end was obvious even to me, and I began to believe we’d been betrayed—by you and your kind, the ones we had depended on to save us from shame. Oh, Mister Harper, betrayal is not too strong a word, though even it has a loftier connotation than what I had in mind.”

  Betrayal, Gawain thought, the anger rising in him. “And what do you believe now, sir?” he asked.

  The Judge held up his hand. It was steady now. With a deliberate movement, he hooked the first two fingers in Gawain’s waistcoat and drew him near, their faces almost touching. When the Judge spoke, his voice was almost a whisper. “You see? Honor means something to you after all, doesn’t it? You have come away with yours intact, you and the rest, and immortal myths will be fashioned about you, and great epics will be wrought. In the end, all that will remain is the honor, the sacrifice. It is the way of primitive peoples, sir, and we Southerners—but never mind. I have learned to accept that. I understand what you did now—made myself understand it, look it in the face, because I had to. I would even ask forgiveness, if it were yours to give—but it isn’t. Only the dead can offer that gift.”

  “Then why don’t you ask her for it,” said Gawain.

  The Judge’s face colored for an instant, then his hand tightened in the fabric of Gawain’s waistcoat. “You know about Lily?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Gawain.

  The Judge’s hand relaxed, but still he held on to Gawain. He looked away, and for an instant Gawain thought the old man might collapse. “Sir,” said Gawain. He grasped the Judge’s arm. “Sir, it was never my intention to—”

  The old man snapped his head around, eyes glittering. “I am sensible of your intentions, but we were talking about honor. Are they the same?”