The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  MEANWHILE, OLD HUNDRED-AND-ELEVEN, weeping from his broken nose, had crawled to the place where Dauncy and Jack lay. Dauncy was still alive, the blood bubbling from the hole in his shirtfront. But he was peaceful, his fingers moving lightly over his breast, his eyes glazed with shock.

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven rolled Jack’s body over and saw that the boy was dead. Then he got to his knees and bent over Dauncy, pressing his hand to the wound. “Oh, they ain’t no good in that,” said Dauncy, and the old man knew that it was true. So he sat back, one hand holding his nose, the other on Dauncy’s shoulder. “I tole you to run,” he said. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Wisht we had,” said Dauncy. He coughed blood over his chin, and Old Hundred-and-Eleven wiped it away. In the silence that followed, the old man thought the boy had gone, but in a moment, he opened his eyes and raised his head a little. “Jack?” he said.

  “He is waitin for you,” said Old Hundred-and-Eleven, patting the boy’s shoulder. Dauncy’s head dropped back again, and he looked at the old man. “You was always decent,” he said.

  “Well, well,” said Old Hundred-and-Eleven. “We had a nice time.”

  “You gon’ bury us, ain’t you?” said Dauncy.

  “Surely,” said the old man. “I’ll see you’re put outside the fence yonder, with them nigger soldiers—would you like that?”

  “With the soldiers?”

  “Yep.”

  Dauncy nodded, gasping for breath. His hand closed on the old man’s wrist, and in a moment, he was gone.

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven sat by the brothers for a while, waving the flies away. At length, he rose unsteadily and lay them side by side and crossed their hands on their breasts. Then he looked for his Bible, and found it in the bottom of the open grave in the water and mud, wedged between the coffin and the wall of earth. Old Hundred-and-Eleven knelt at the edge of the grave for a moment, then lowered himself into the hole. He lifted the book, soaked and wrinkled, and sat cross-legged on the mud-covered lid of the coffin and began to turn the thin pages one by one, careful not to tear them, though the blood from his nose dripped on them. He was halfway through Genesis when a shadow fell across him. He looked up, red eyes blinking in the brightness, into the peeling, rheumy face of Molochi Fish.

  “In the New Bible,” Old Hundred-and-Eleven said, “we ere called to love and forgiveness.” Molochi watched the old man from under the brim of his hat. Old Hundred-and-Eleven lowered his eyes and went on, as though speaking to himself. “So I forgive Solomon Gault. I forgive him for murderin these boys, that never did harm to nobody, and I promise to love him like a brother and pray for his immortal soul, amen.”

  Molochi Fish nodded. He spat once, then turned and looked back toward the camp. “Some of them soldiers might come over here,” he said.

  “But they’s the Old Bible, too,” said Old Hundred-and-Eleven, and tapped the book with a horny nail. “It ere stained with blood, and the blood calls out.”

  “Somebody gon’ have to bury these niggers,” said Molochi. “Otherwise, they gon’ be out roamin around.”

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven struggled to his feet and pulled himself out of the grave, shoving the open book before him through the trampled grass. Molochi moved back to make room, and watched as the other rose to his knees. “They’s blood all over it,” the old man said, “and water, and earth, and all of em’s cryin out.”

  “We could put em in this hole,” said Molochi. “It’s already dug.”

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven rose again, more swiftly now, and steady. His skin, painted and smeared with blood, was almost translucent in the sunlight. His pink, browless eyes were wide, and his white hair tangled and matted. He lunged at Molochi and wrapped his claws in the other’s shirt and pulled him close so that their faces were almost touching. “No!” he said, his voice and his breath hot on Molochi’s face. “We got to bury em outside, with them nigger soldiers, like I said I would.”

  Molochi grasped the old man’s wrists but couldn’t break his hold. “I ain’t buryin nobody,” he said.

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven shook Molochi, pushed him and shook him. “Oh, yes!” cried the old man. “Yes! And that ain’t all you gon’ do!”

  Molochi drew his knife, held the blade up where Old Hundred-and-Eleven could see it. The old man laughed and closed his hand over the knife blade. “Shit,” he said. “Go ahead, jerk it out. See can you make me bleed.” Molochi’s eyes began to bulge, and a strand of drool dripped from the corner of his open mouth. Old Hundred-and-Eleven laughed again. Still grasping the blade, he drew it through his hand. The blood dripped from his closed fist then, and when he opened his hand, it was cut deep through the palm. “I know you, Molochi Fish,” he said. “I ken how the spirits hunt you of a night, how you see the dead. Well, you go ahead and cut my th’oat now if you want—maybe you’d be doin me a favor. But I’ll tell you—if ye do that, you ain’t seen no spirits yet. If you got a soul, I’ll find it, and gnaw a hole in it like one of them birds yonder, and I’ll fill it up with dreams even you ain’t thought of yet!”

  Molochi stared at the old man’s bloody hand open before him. He let the knife fall into the grass. “What you want with me?” he said.

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven showed his yellow teeth. “You he’p me get these boys in their grave—then you swear by this blood that you’ll he’p me put Solomon Gault in one of his own before tomorrow sundown.”

  “I ain’t got nothin against him,” said Molochi.

  “That ain’t ever stopped you before,” said the other. “You want me to turn these boys’ spirits loose on you? Nigger ghosts is way worse than any, you ought to know that.”

  Molochi brought out the bag with the dead frog. “I got this—,” he began, but the old man snatched the bag and worked it open and peered inside. Again he laughed. “Aw, delusion,” he said, “you call this a conjure?” He lifted the frog by a withered hind leg and popped it in his mouth, chewed once, and swallowed. “Now, by God, you swear,” said Old Hundred-and-Eleven, and raised his hand again. Molochi backed up a step. “Swear!” roared the old man. “Put your hand to it!”

  So Molochi Fish pressed the palm of his hand against that of Old Hundred-and-Eleven, sealing himself in a bargain to which, for the first time in his life, he addressed a question he hardly knew how to frame. “Why?” he said.

  Old Hundred-and-Eleven grinned and picked at his front teeth with a fingernail. He spat. “To save you,” he said. Then he bent and picked up the twenty-dollar gold piece. It lay in his bloody palm like a fragment of the sun.

  XXI

  When Professor Brown’s studio wagon arrived in the yard of the Shipwright house, it was met by Colonel Burduck and Lieutenant von Arnim and a dozen infantrymen with fixed bayonets. Getting out of the carriage was easier than getting in; when the prisoners were on the ground, they were told by a corporal to fall in on the tall one, meaning Stribling. Gawain, in spite of everything, took secret pride in knowing what the corporal meant. However, the sight of the officers was enough to make Gawain’s dawning hope blink out again, and the riflemen were almost more than he could bear. They watched as Thomas was carried into the house, followed by Wooster and Brown. Then von Arnim approached, while the Colonel stood silent, his hand on his sword hilt.

  “Now, look here,” said the provost. “I am goin to have these bonds taken off, and you will all get some rations. If you try to run, I will truss you up like a runaway nigger. Any questions?”

  “I want my mama,” said Craddock.

  Von Arnim ignored him and turned to the corporal. In a moment their hands were loosed, and the corporal led them around to the back yard where a contraband, smoking a corncob pipe and wearing an old surgeon’s apron (Gawain tried not to look at the dark stains down the apron’s front), was squatting by a fire. In his hand was a wooden ladle; on the coals were blackened pots and a tin coffee boiler.

  Gawain had just begun to believe that they were really to be given breakfast when shouts arose in the front yard. Me
n ran in that direction. In a moment, one returned, and another hailed him. The man shook his head. “Feller just charged the camp,” he said. “Went right down the company street. That was him goin by just now, and milord’s household cavalry all hell after him.” The man made a little limp-wristed pirouette in the yard, and the soldiers laughed.

  Gawain looked at Stribling. The other shrugged. “Told you,” he said.

  They ate from tin plates—bacon and bread and a concoction of white beans and onions—and drank coffee from tin cups. They squatted in a circle around the cooking fire, the smoke stinging their eyes, and around them were the old familiar sounds of an infantry camp, and the smells of damp wool and canvas and rancid grease they knew so well. The guard (doubled now) was drawn up for inspection by a bespectacled officer, who moved from man to man with the sergeant of the guard a step behind. A wood detail was coming in, a musician was drying the head of his drum over the coals, an awkward squad drilled at the manual of arms. Just to the south, in the open side yard, a farrier had set up his portable forge, and his hammer rang across the morning air like old Miss Chastain’s school bell used to do.

  Gawain, his stomach full for the first time in recent memory, poured his third cup of coffee and marveled at the perversity of his heart. The war had brought him to this sorry pass, yet Gawain Harper, kneeling by the smoky fire, found himself longing for the war again, for the things he had found there that he knew could be found nowhere else, not ever again. He looked at the faces of the men around him, listened to their talk, watched the movements of their hands and the way they stood or sat or stretched themselves, and he understood once more the singularity of what he’d been given, and that he wouldn’t trade it for any memory of peace.

  Gawain smiled, and chided himself a little. Just a while ago, he had hated his comrades in their humiliation, and despised himself even more. Now he wished that somehow they could be borne back together to some arduous field, and rise to the long roll of the drum, and fall in, jostling and complaining under the old whisking flags, and ahead the long march, and the striving, and the eerie cry awakening in the smoke as they lowered their bayonets and charged. Madness, he knew. And he knew as well that he would not go back, even if he could. But he was glad to have done it once, even for all the ruin and sorrow and violence—glad it was over now, so that it could be his forever. In that moment, he missed Sir Niles terribly, and all the other lads with whom he had walked in the valley of dry bones.

  And it all had to mean something. He insisted on that. He wanted badly to live past this moment, this day, and swore to live and die insisting that the process had meaning, though what it was, he supposed he would never discern. But no matter. He thought of old Uncle Priam, who asked so little of the world in which he lived and suffered and found gladness. Old Priam would agree that the faith was enough, even if the answers never came. It had to be that way, else Sir Niles, and young Fitter, and Bushrod Carter, and Tom Kelly, and Rafe Deaton—even Wall Stutts, in his way—had striven in vain, and the lives they offered had been lifted up to nothing. He would not believe that, would never accept that. All men dreamed their lives, and even the small ones, the defeated ones, the lost and ruined ones whom chance never visited and never would—even these refused the notion that a journey so complex, so filled with light and noise and movement, would come to nothing. It was not vanity or delusion, Gawain thought: it was a simple lesson in astronomy. No sun, no galaxy nor constellation stood at the center of the universe; rather, every man’s soul burned there like a cloudy spray of stars, and offered a light no meanness, not evil itself, could extinguish. Thus did every man have his dignity, and every one a portion of immortality.

  “What are you thinkin about so hard?” asked Stribling.

  “I was just wishin I had some more of that good possum,” Gawain replied.

  “My God,” said Stribling.

  “Harry, you saved my worthless ass again, back yonder by the church. I was fixin to run. I couldn’t stand bein trussed up like that.”

  “Oh, they prob’ly wouldn’t have shot you much,” replied Stribling.

  “Well, anyhow,” said Gawain, and let the subject slide away into that place where dwelt the things men didn’t talk about.

  All this time, a youth of about seventeen stood guard over them, more or less. The sleeves of his coat, too long, were rolled back over his bony wrists, and he gripped his musket with slender fingers, the nails bitten to the quick. Gawain couldn’t look at him; the boy was too much like the one at Stones River. For his part, the young soldier stared at Gawain and his comrades in wonder. Marcus Peck, who was seated on an ammunition box and swabbing his plate with a hunk of bread, noticed him.

  “See here, young fellow,” said the gunner. “What’re you lookin at?”

  The boy swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his long neck. “Why, nothin, sir,” he said.

  Peck jabbed a finger at Carl Nobles. “You wasn’t lookin at him, was you?” Nobles scowled at the boy and scratched his beard.

  “Oh, n-no, sir,” said the boy.

  “Oh, well, then,” said Peck. “Maybe you don’t know who he is. Maybe you ain’t been informed. Maybe you think he is just some ordinary hairy-assed, uncouth, ugly—”

  “Here, now,” protested Carl Nobles. “You leave that boy alone.”

  “Just don’t get him riled,” said Peck. “God, I hate to think of it.”

  “Tell him how you lost your leg, Marcus,” said Stuart Bloodworth.

  “Oh, I can’t. The memory’s too bitter.”

  “How did you?” asked the boy, keeping his eye on Nobles.

  Peck gobbled up the sopping wad of bread and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Oh, my Lord,” he said, pressing his fingers to his forehead.

  Craddock knelt beside the one-legged gunner and lay a hand on his stump. “There, there,” he said. “I know it’s painful for you.”

  “You tell it,” said Peck, his voice breaking.

  Craddock rose and walked around the fire and draped an arm over the youth’s shoulder. The boy shifted uncomfortably and tightened his grip on the musket. “I suppose you were at Franklin?” said Craddock. The boy shook his head.

  “Well, no matter,” Craddock went on. “There we was, in the hottest part of the fight—”

  “The very hottest,” said Peck.

  “Quiet,” said Nobles. “I am all a-tremble to hear this.”

  “Thank you,” said Craddock. “There we was, the Minié balls so thick you could catch em by the bucketful, if you had a bucket, and it was desperate—desperate, sir—and at the moment of crisis, who should appear but our gallant General there—”

  The boy looked at Peck in astonishment.

  “Oh,” said Craddock, “you didn’t know Marcus was a General? Well, he ain’t now, but he was then, and the heat of battle was on him. Oh, granted, he don’t look like much now, but he was solid inspiration then, and he leapt from his great warhorse, and I’ll never forget his words, heard through the din of the fray. He said … he said—”

  “Over you go, boys!” shouted Peck. “Cap’n Stribling and me are right here behind you!”

  “They was his very words,” said Stribling.

  “Jesus, what a fight,” said Craddock. He was about to go on when he noticed three Federal soldiers who had gathered to listen to the story. They stood loosely, one smoking a pipe, all with hands in their pockets, watching. Craddock looked at them, his mouth open, hand upraised, his left arm around the boy’s shoulder. The yankees studied the ground at their feet. Of a sudden, beads of sweat appeared on Craddock’s brow and began to roll down his face. His hand began to tremble; he lowered it, and stared as if something unspeakable lay in the palm.

  A silence lay upon them all. Beyond the fire, the sounds of the camp—the drill, the guard mount, the ring of the smith’s hammer—went on, and beyond that the world busy at making or unmaking itself, as if there were no memory, no old dreams to twine like smoke around the lives of men. At last,
Craddock found his handkerchief and mopped his face. He patted the boy’s shoulder, then let his arm fall away. The boy looked at him, puzzled. Craddock smiled and shook his head. “It was a hell of a fight,” he said, and the silence passed, and they were all right again.

  The three yankees came and knelt by the fire. One borrowed a cup from Bloodworth and poured some coffee from the tin boiler. “What regiment was you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-first Mississippi,” said Bloodworth.

  “Don’t remember it.”

  “You would if you’d ever met us,” said Craddock.

  “How about you all?” asked Bloodworth quickly. “Ain’t you Regulars?”

  “Fourteenth U.S., one of Uncle Billy’s own,” said the drummer. He thumped the head of his drum to test its tightness.

  The Twenty-first had indeed met the Fourteenth, at Stones River and again on the Atlanta campaign. Gawain remembered the acorn corps badges on the dead.

  “What you boys doin here?” asked another soldier, a piece of bacon dangling from his hand. “Come to enlist?”

  “Oh, no,” said Peck. “I think they mean to hang us for treason.”

  “Don’t say?” said the soldier.

  The boy with the musket shifted his feet impatiently. “Well,” he said, “ain’t you gon’ tell me how the Gin’ral lost his leg?”

  Craddock rocked on his heels. “Well, to continue,” he said. “It was in this wise. You see, a big cannonball come and landed so far behind that it found the General and mangled his leg somethin awful; it was all a-welter with blood and the bones stickin out everywhere.”

  “My!” said the boy.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Craddock. “He was squallin and carryin on so, and makin such a big thing of it, and causin such havoc with the boys’ spirits, as it were, that somethin had to be done, and of course it was.”