The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  The slaver’s crew was sent below to loose the shackles and draw out the chains, and the captives came tottering and blinking to the main deck where they bunched like cattle, save one man who flung himself overboard and swam with such unaccountable strength that the Nimble’s boat could not reach him before the sharks. The rest watched this melancholy drama in silence until an old woman with withered dugs began to hum, then to wail, and presently they all took it up, and the nervous sailors looked at one another in the keening, the groaning, of the voices. Then Captain Burduck fired his pistol in the air and in an instant there was only the creaking of the shrouds and the slapping of water against the motionless hull.

  A score of dead remained in the hold. To these Captain John Burduck chained the slaver’s crew, and secured the hatchway. Then, under steam, they towed the dead ship two days back to the coast and ran her aground at the foot of a nameless town. As the people came down to view the spectacle, and the slavers sat in irons (some of them gone mad, raving of old journeys or burning their eyes out watching the sun) and the blacks huddled bewildered on the beach, Captain Burduck himself set fire to the slave ship and its cargo of dead. A long time she burned, the smoke reeling skyward black and greasy as mortal sin.

  All so quick to hand it was, and so easy to make use of. But you had to be careful. His brother burned four ships in all, and drove a score of men insane, and killed that many more. A fever was on him, it seemed to Michael, and would have consumed him had he not been recalled. At Dakar, Captain John Burduck was relieved of command; the two brothers stood at the rail of the Commodore’s flagship and watched Nimble sail away until her masts sank below the horizon and she was gone. You had to be careful. You had to keep control of it, especially now, when there was sufficient madness for all.

  He turned back to the table, and all at once he remembered who’d been in the room just now: Captain Bloom’s first sergeant with the dead boy’s papers. They lay at hand on the table, the history of Tom Kelly’s life as a soldier. On top was a sealed envelope addressed in the boy’s scrawl to Annie Kelly of Louisville, Kentucky. To this person, Burduck must now address a letter of his own. He did not try to imagine her; he would not even acknowledge that Annie Kelly existed, was moving in the world this very moment unaware of what was about to descend upon her. She must remain a name only, abstract and bloodless, incapable of grief. It was a trick Burduck had learned only after writing many letters to the wives and mothers of men who had gone their violent ways: Dear Madam, I regret to inform you—

  But not right now. He would write no letters today. He even thought that he might have Captain Bloom write this one, knowing all the while that he would do it himself. But not right now. He took up the papers and shuffled through them, his glance touching the mundane details of the boy’s career. On the fifteenth of October 1864, Tom Kelly had been absent in hospital with a bad tooth. Three days later, he was issued a new canteen. Burduck riffled the pages. Absent, detached duty. Paid. Present for duty. A fatigue blouse issued. Request for furlough denied. Paid. Brass insignia, Infantry. Absent, sick. Request for furlough denied. Paid. Absent. Present. Paid—

  “You have to be careful with it,” said Burduck aloud, the papers trembling in his hand. At last he laid them down again and evened their edges, picked them up again and tapped them on the desk. “Careful, careful,” he said. Finally, he laid the papers gently on the tabletop and set the inkwell on top of them. For a while he sat with his elbows on the table, fingers pressed against his eyes, studying the little motes swimming in the dark. He could hear the watch ticking. Then, like a man waking from a troubled sleep, he sat up straight and looked about him. The walls of the room seemed to have moved closer in the interval, and he could hear his own breathing. The ticking of the watch was louder now, persistent and demanding, as if no other sound in the universe were so essential. Burduck imagined he could hear the gears and wheels making their infinitesimal movements, jerking in tiny increments toward tomorrow, and he knew the hands were moving under the closed case. He brought his fist down hard on the watch and heard the glass of the crystal break, and the watch stopped, and the only sound then was his breathing. He stared at the watch as if waiting for it to begin again. When it didn’t, he shifted his gaze to the pistol, and a thought brushed across his mind: Go ahead, it’s easy, take a good long furlough, one you won’t ever have to come back from—

  He stood up then, so quickly that the chair fell backward with a crash. “Orderly!” he shouted, and had to call again before the man put his head in the door.

  “Bring my horse around. Be quick now.”

  “Yes, Colonel,” said the man, and disappeared.

  A rest was all he needed. Just a little while by himself. He buttoned his coat and found his sword belt and buckled it on. He detached the sword but holstered the pistol. He knew the place he was going to.

  STRIBLING HAD JUST swung into the saddle when Aunt Vassar came out the front door. “Surely you are not leaving us?” she said.

  Gawain rose to his feet, and Stribling took off his hat. “No, ma’am,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Somebody needs to fix that porch.”

  She stood just outside the door, cradling in her arms a flat, rectangular box of polished mahogany that Gawain recognized at once. “Now, Aunt—,” he began.

  “Hush, Nephew,” she said. She crossed the porch and held the box out to Gawain. “Take it,” she said. “You will need it sooner or later.”

  “My God, Aunt,” said Gawain. “Papa will have a fit.”

  Aunt Vassar snorted. “Your papa, in case you haven’t noticed, has checked out of his hotel. Anyway, he left it to you in his will. Now, take it.”

  Gawain took the box then, cradling it in his arms just as his aunt had done. He stood awkwardly for a moment, balanced on the step, then moved his right hand across the smooth mahogany lid. “I’ll be,” he said.

  “Open it,” said Aunt Vassar. “Let Captain Stribling see.”

  Gawain moved the brass latch and opened the box. It was felt-lined and divided into compartments by narrow strips of felt-covered wood. In the largest of these lay a Colt’s Model 1851 Navy revolver, barrel and frame of blued steel, grips of oiled walnut. Like all Navy Colts, the cylinder was engraved with the scene of a naval battle and a date in 1843. Gawain had known dozens of men who carried Navy Colts in the war, and not one of them had been able to say what battle was represented. Other compartments held a bullet mold, a box of percussion caps, a powder flask, and a quantity of .36-caliber round balls clustered like gray spider’s eggs. The pistol gleamed in the sunlight, a perfect shape that begged to be handled and admired. Its beauty denied the purpose for which it had been created.

  Gawain stepped out into the yard and held the box up for Stribling’s inspection. Stribling leaned down and took the box and balanced it on the pommel of his saddle. “May I?” he asked.

  “By all means,” said Gawain.

  Stribling lifted the pistol from the box and held it with the muzzle pointing skyward. The thing seemed to fit itself naturally to his grip. “It is beautiful indeed,” said Stribling. “I used to have a Confederate copy—piece of trash, it was. When I got a Navy Colt, I thought I was in business. I wish I still had it.” Then his brows furrowed, and he looked down at Gawain. “I always wondered why Mister Colt made it for such a little ball.”

  Gawain shrugged. “Maybe sailors don’t take as much killin as we did.”

  “No,” said Stribling, “it always worked for me.” Then he remembered Aunt Vassar. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said. “I have a loose tongue.”

  “Nonsense,” said the old woman. Then, to Gawain: “It is yours now. So far as I know, it has never been discharged. Your father always preferred a weapon he could hide.”

  “Yes,” said Gawain. “Well, I will try to protect its maidenhood.”

  His aunt looked at him. Gawain could not decipher what was in her face and looked away. “It is yours now,” she said again. Then she tu
rned and passed back through the door and into the house. Gawain could hear her footsteps in the hall.

  Stribling latched the box and handed it down. Gawain took it, once again holding it awkwardly, as if he were afraid he might break it.

  “When I get back,” said Stribling, grinning, “I’ll show you how to load it.”

  “I know how to load it,” said Gawain. “Wish I could get some cartridges for it.”

  “We could steal some from the yankees, like in the old times.”

  “Or I could put it back in Papa’s desk and forget about it,” said Gawain.

  Stribling flexed his injured hand, watching his fingers as if he were inspecting a piece of machinery. Zeke stamped impatiently, tired of standing. Gawain spoke again. “I said I could put it back—”

  “I heard you,” said Stribling. “You was wantin to borrow mine this mornin. Now you got one of your own. Before you load it, make sure all the oil is out of the chambers. In fact, I’d boil that cylinder, I was you.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Gawain, grinning himself now. But the grin lasted only an instant. “I won’t put it back,” he said. He looked up at Stribling. “I will have to use it now.”

  “Maybe not,” said Stribling.

  Gawain shook his head. “No, Harry, you know yourself that ain’t so. Ever since we run into old Molochi at the river, it’s been all shit and no sugar. I was you, I’d pack my bags and light out for Alabama.”

  “I’ll pretend you never said that,” said Stribling. “I am fixin to go to the Citadel, see who’s around. Trouble is comin upon us, and if I can find out about it, maybe we can arrange to be fishin that day.” He grinned again and turned Zeke’s head and rode out of the yard at the canter.

  Gawain watched his friend until he was out of sight down the Cumberland road, then he sat on the steps again, the pistol case beside him. He opened it and withdrew the Navy Colt; it fit to his hand as it had to Stribling’s, and when he cocked it, the action was smooth. For a while he sat there, holding the Colt in the casual way of a man long familiar with firearms, looking out at the yard. The ground was littered with branches and with windrows of leaves where the water had stood in pools after the storm. Last night he had lain awake in his old bed listening to the hammering rain, the thunder that pealed and crashed and shook the windows, and he thought how it was in the old times. Back then, on nights when storms came prowling and threatening out of the west, his mother would call Gawain and his sisters to her bed. There she would surround them with all the down and feather pillows in the house, for, as everyone knew, geese and chickens were never struck by lightning. Secure behind that redoubt, they would tell stories and laugh and, in time, fall asleep, safe from all hurtful things, even in their dreams. They had believed in safety then; Gawain watched the light lie blue on the pistol barrel and wished he could believe in it now. In a little while he rose, took up the case, and moved into the shadows of the house.

  SOLOMON GAULT HAD always hated slavery, not because he found it morally repugnant, but because he could not bear to be around black people. When his father died, Solomon Gault inherited the farm and fifty slaves, and the word around the Quarters was that he might free the whole lot, and there was much jubilation. Instead, Gault sold them all as quickly as they could be brought to the block in Memphis. Even before the last one was gone, Gault dismantled the cabins in the Quarters and with the hewn logs and shingles erected four dogtrot houses, one in each corner of his thousand acres. In these he installed white families—only a notch above the blacks on the social scale, but free and white nevertheless—and provided them with cotton seed and harness and a pair of mules to work the ground. His neighbors viewed the change with outrage and scorn, but Gault had never cared much for his neighbors anyhow. He anticipated the sharecropping system in Cumberland County a generation before it would have a name, and he made it work, and if his neighbors could not quite forgive him for it, they could at least be envious.

  Now, on this Sunday afternoon, Gault sat on the overturned cookpot at the Wagner place and marveled, as he often did, that others had not seen things as clearly in the old days. The ruins around him were a perfect object lesson, there for all to see. They illustrated the evils of a system that enslaved the enslavers, that bound them to a primitive and unpredictable people whose capacity for violence was limitless. The damn fools, Gault thought. Without the niggers there would have been no war, no ruins, no Colonel Burduck swaggering among his well-drilled troops. And Solomon Gault would not have had to swing Simon Landers from a white oak tree nor split his woman’s head with a saber, and he would not be sitting in the ashes now, waiting for a man he despised. Well, it was all right. The details could be worked out, and anyhow, daring ventures were always messy.

  Damn the Harper boy, thought Solomon Gault. The old Judge was all talk—Gault had never feared him and wouldn’t now. But here was Gawain Harper bruiting threats in the churchyard, opening a line of discussion that Gault had no time for. If the man went to Burduck—but, no, Harper wouldn’t run to the yankees. He might be a schoolteacher (Gault had learned that much in the course of the afternoon), but he had been in the war, and he was of the same race as Gault himself, weaned on the old code of personal responsibility in matters of blood. So he was commissioned by the Judge, for whatever reason, and sooner or later he would come around with a pistol in his hand. That wouldn’t do. Gault could beat him, of course—there was no doubt of that in his mind—but he couldn’t afford that kind of attention right now. He was too close, too many things were falling into place. The time was fast approaching when Solomon Gault would make his bid for greatness.

  The rain had washed away the curious drawings that had been in the dirt, but Gault remembered them now: a moon and stars, heavenly signs that men sometimes looked to for guidance, for planting times, for success in love, for procreation. Gault did not believe in signs, any more than he believed in the God whom the new priest had evoked so eloquently this morning. Men lived and died by their own will, and what they made or broke around them was their only testimony.

  He heard the horse then, and rose, his eyes toward the road. He heard the creak of leather as the rider dismounted, and the crackle of brush as the man led the horse through the tangle left by the storm. In a moment, man and horse were in the clearing.

  “You sent for me,” said Wall Stutts. It was a statement, not a question. “I could have just as easy come to your place.”

  “This is the meeting place,” said Gault.

  Stutts nodded. He dropped the reins of the horse and squatted on his heels. From his pocket he took a plug of tobacco, bit off a chew, and offered the plug to the Captain. Gault only looked at him. Grinning, Stutts returned the plug and spat a preliminary stream of clear spit into the leaves. Wall Stutts had been the first white tenant on the Gault place and the only one remaining after the war. In all those years, he seemed to have never changed his clothes nor taken off his hat. “What about it, Cap’n?” he asked. “Time to make another statement?”

  “Yes,” the Captain said.

  Stutts snorted. “We kill em one at a time, hell, they’ll die of old age before we get shut of em. Why’nt we just take the whole lot?”

  “This is a … personal favor,” said the Captain.

  Stutts looked at the Captain for a long moment. Finally he grinned. “That kind of work comes high,” he said.

  “Twenty dollars,” said the Captain.

  Stutts spat into the mud. “Shit,” he said. “Who is it, anyhow?”

  When the Captain spoke the name, Stutts laughed out loud. “Aye God, Cap’n, what you scared of him for?”

  The Captain’s face burned. He looked off for a moment, studying the light where it lay on the leaves. When he could trust his voice, he said, “You know the man, then.”

  “Used to work for his daddy. Son bitch fired me off the line. It’ll cost you a hunnerd.”

  “Fifty,” said Gault.

  “You come up a little, I’ll come down a litt
le,” said Stutts.

  They settled on seventy-five dollars and the loan of the Henry rifle. “At that price,” said Stutts when the bargain was made, “I’ll even spook the yankees again, no extra charge.”

  Gault thought about that for a moment. At last he said, “Since you are feeling generous, allow me to make a suggestion. Select your target at the tavern again.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  Gault drew his boot across the place where the moon and stars had been. “Thomas has become a burden. He is … superfluous now, and can best serve as a diversion. Do you understand?”

  Stutts winked and grinned. “Sure, Cap’n,” he said. “But, aye God, you a hard man.” He spat again, crossed to the Captain’s horse, and drew the Henry out of the saddle scabbard that Gault had had special-made in Memphis. He checked it for loads, then he gathered up his own horse’s reins and, without another word, disappeared into the brush. The Captain listened until he heard the creak of leather again and the horse’s hooves trotting north toward Cumberland. Then he went to his mount and opened the near saddlebag and removed from it a sheaf of papers, the manuscript of his memoirs. Seated on the cookpot again, he. drew his reading glasses from his pocket, and a stub of pencil, and began to write.

  Wall Stutts, with the Henry rifle lying across his pommel, crossed Leaf River at the gravelly ford, then stayed in the woods out of sight of the road. Had he kept to the road, he would have found Colonel Burduck riding south.

  ON HIS WAY to the Wagner place, Burduck passed the Citadel of Djibouti. He gave it a glance, and for a moment he considered stopping. L. W. Thomas bothered him for reasons he could not name, and he wondered what would happen if he faced the man in his own territory. But at the last moment he rode on, deterred by the image of a Federal field-grade officer in such a place. Besides, Burduck thought, there was nothing to be gained by another interview. Not yet, anyway.