The Dying of the Light

by Robert Goolrick

  He could not accept that that was all.

  He drew the bloodred damask curtains and turned out the lights in the middle of the day and slept. If he could have slept forever, that would have suited him just fine.

  21

  THE STARS RAVISHED the night sky. The black pines and oaks reached high to caress the skin of night. Gathered by the river, they stood just letting everything go for this one moment, this one gift from the hand of God.

  It had been the custom, in the old days, the days of her grandfather and all her grandfathers and grandmothers before her, to give a picnic down by the river every Fourth of July for all the servants and field hands and stable boys and all their children. The custom had fallen into disuse during the long years when there were no servants and no money, but Diana revived it, and there they all were to watch the fireworks from across the river, the children in their best clothes, racing back and forth as though their own short fuses had been lit.

  The men and women stood around, their overalls and flowered cotton dresses scrubbed on washboards to a paper thinness and smelling of hand soap and river air, mostly awkward in the presence of their mistress, even though many of them had known her since she was a child, working for other people during her years of Saratoga’s desuetude. They shyly drank beer from bottles nestled in tin washtubs filled with shaved ice—Priscilla had made it clear to everybody that two beers was the limit, though many of the men had stashed Mason jars full of moonshine in the woods to which they frequently retired—and ate from the vast picnic she and Diana had worked days to prepare. Deviled eggs and ham biscuits and barbecue and griddle cakes and potato salad and tomato aspic and caramel cake, devilishly hard to make but child’s play for Priscilla—practically the entire history of southern cooking. Of course there was Priscilla’s secret fried chicken. Bernard had killed sixteen chickens, snapping their necks like matchsticks, and she had plucked them and fried them. She believed that good fried chicken started with a plain brown bag from the grocery store, half filled with flour and spices. “If it ain’t no paper bag,” she said, “it can’t make no fried chicken.” It was done to a brilliant gold; as each bite was taken there was a crunch, and flakes of the crispy coating would fall down onto the pristine starched dresses and be brushed away.

  There were big pots of steamed crabs from the river, bright red and dusted with a liberal coating of Old Bay spice. There was roast croaker and rockfish and sugar toads, a sweet fish all but unknown outside these few counties, all served on the best china, brought down in a wagon behind the tractor. Some of the men had spent days making crude picnic tables, and there they sat, on their best behavior, while Diana and the rest gathered around a bonfire, even though it was a warm night.

  Some of these people had only worked here two months. Some were the sons and daughters of men and women who had spent their whole lives on this farm.

  Rose was carried down, looking like a brilliant, sparkling Roman candle herself, all bangles and sequins, sitting regally in a velvet armchair that unfortunately kept sinking in the sand, tilting her dangerously forward, until some of the men put boards under the chair’s legs to put her on almost solid ground.

  The swimming pool was open and the children played and splashed in the sunset, their faces glowing with happiness as Gibby and Ash waded in and threw them up in the air to make cannonball splashes, coming up laughing with delight. The more daring stood on Gibby’s shoulders as he held their ankles, and then dove in, seeing how far they could travel underwater before breath ran out and they rose gasping into the rosy light that slanted across the river and the beach. Diana was touched almost to tears to see her lover and her son take such care of the young ones, many of whom, like so many river people, couldn’t swim.

  It hit her suddenly like a bolt of lightning, a pang in her heart—her lover, her son. Her lover and her son together, her son and her lover, playing with golden children in a rippling pool, the water slick on their broad brown backs, their hair throwing up a fountain of starlike droplets each time they emerged from under the aqua surface and tossed their hair back to shake off the water. Her lover. Her son. Haloed by the setting sun, they hardly seemed like separate beings to her anymore. Instead, they seemed to be a single continuum of youth and beauty and desire, and the sight was so unbearably beautiful, she turned her head away.

  She felt a grace fall over her, unearned but given, a peace and comfort falling like the roseate light from the setting sun. And she felt, although she tried to push it away, an enormous and deeply erotic longing for the single godlike creature her two men had become in her misted eyes. Her youth was fading, and she knew it. She stood on the precipice of whatever leap the next years would bring, but the boys would stay like that in her mind forever, beautiful, young, conjoined in their affections for each other and her need for them both.

  From the trees she and the boys had hung poles to hold the two flags she put up, both American and Confederate, the flag her grandfather had carried into the Battle of Fredericksburg, now worn and shredding but showing still the powder-singed bullet holes from that conflict.

  The house servants stood slightly apart from the farm workers, to whom they felt slightly superior, and made small talk as night fell, the men darting into the woods to take swigs of the moonshine they had hidden there.

  The black men and women stood back, silent, wary-looking. “Come and have some supper,” Diana called out to them, but still nobody moved.

  Priscilla walked up to her and asked quietly if she could speak to her, and Diana took her hand and rose, and they walked slightly apart from the others.

  “Why aren’t they eating?” Diana asked quietly.

  Priscilla looked at her in the eye and seemed not to know what to say until Diana prodded her.

  “Miss D., please don’t take this the wrong way.”

  “You’re like my mother, Miss Pricilla—tell me.”

  Priscilla said nothing, but instead averted her gaze over Diana’s shoulder, and stared for so long that Diana turned too, and then she saw it. The flag. For her, a flag of pride, for many, the flag of slavery, a long history of nothing but bad things, chains, intrusions in the night, terrible, grotesque scars that would not, could not, go away. Ever. Not in a century. Not in a hundred centuries.

  Diana turned back and buried her head in Priscilla’s bosom, as she had so often as a child.

  “Oh, Priscilla, how stupid. I hadn’t thought—”

  “No reason you should. But they do. Of course they do. How could they ever forget? How could their children’s children’s children forget? And it hurts their hearts. That’s why they ain’t eating.”

  Diana turned and called out to Ash, who was playing leapfrog with the little ones. He came running over.

  “What, Ma?”

  Diana stared at her grandfather’s flag, a whole history waving in the breeze, and then said to Ash, “Take it down. Take it down right away and bring it to me.”

  Everybody watched; even the children stopped playing and stared as Ash clambered up the tree and grabbed the flag and ripped it from its pole. Already fragile, it came away easily in his hands, and he ran to his mother with it. She took it, folded it carefully, and then walked to the bonfire, with everybody still silent and mute, and threw it in. She stood watching the banner go up in flames, the way everything had, remembering the sad, romantic tales her grandfather used to tell her as she sat on his lap, his eyes misted by a rheumy film. The cabins that lined the dirt road down to the fields empty, a muslin curtain here and there lifted by a breeze from the river. The linens unironed, the fields gone to seed. Then she turned to her workers and friends as her grandfather’s flag burned into ashes that blew up on the draft of the heat into the darkening sky. They looked sideways at each other, in hostility, alarm, and admiration.

  “Please,” she called out to them. “Tom? Edna?” She walked up and took the callused hand of an enormous black man who had shod her horses since her first pony. “Big Willy? Everybody—
you’re my family, my whole family, and I would be most grateful if you would join me now for supper. Priscilla and I made it for you. Please come.” And they did.

  Plates heaped full, they all sat down and ate heartily, as Priscilla walked among them, asking if they wanted more of this or that. “I’m telling you now,” she said to them all, “what you don’t eat now you’re taking home. We have baskets for every family. Miss Diana and I done worked for a week. I’m not carrying all this good food back up to the house, so don’t hold back. There’s plenty more.”

  Already, across the river, they could see occasional fireworks, Roman candles and skyrockets going off. Except for the clinking of forks and knives, the ancient, honorable silver brought from the house, polished until it gleamed in the sunset, they all sat silent while an eight-year-old boy played the fiddle and his uncle the banjo—Virginia reels and other old songs like “Devil’s Dream.” The child’s face was somber, the country custom, and the fiddle was lively. As the fireworks began in earnest, they played “Amazing Grace,” followed by President Wilson’s national anthem,

  Without warning, there was suddenly an enormous bang in the skies above the river. Some of the younger children screamed and hid in their mothers’ arms, but the retort was followed instantly by a gigantic purple flower in the sky, and then a green and a gold, and shimmering silver balls that fell into gentle branches like a silvery willow tree.

  Gibby delighted in sitting with the children and explaining each brilliant explosion, telling them how fireworks came all the way from China, and how nobody in Europe could figure out how to make them until two missionaries brought back the recipe, and afterward they took the world by storm. “There are only five colors,” he said. “Nobody has ever figured out how to make another one. Not even me.” He laughed as the children’s eyes widened.

  For half an hour nobody moved a muscle, just stared in wonder at the sky and the beautiful colors and shapes reflected in the dark river water, itself covered with summer phosphorescence, so that when a fish jumped, beautiful green sparkles fell from its arching back.

  Then, with a final loud bang, it was over. A fog of smoke, acrid but pleasant in a way, hung over the river as it began to drizzle very slightly, cooling the night air and bringing a rush of fresh cooling breeze. Then each family began to gather itself, calling out for the little ones, one of whom ran back and kissed Gibby on the cheek, and he hugged her back as if she were the last person he would see on this earth.

  Then the workers picked their way back into the darkness, carrying kerosene lanterns, and they were alone, rimmed in gold by the light of the bonfire. “Priscilla? Clarence? Did you get anything to eat? You never stopped moving.”

  “I got us some plates covered with wax paper in the truck. We’ll eat back at the house.”

  They all pitched in cleaning up, putting the scraps into a big trash can and the plates and the silver into baskets lined with towels. It took a long time, and everybody was tired, but happy, too. It had gone well.

  Diana herself felt an enormous exhaustion, having worked in the kitchen beside Priscilla for days, helping her with what little things Priscilla would entrust into her hands. “Ash? Gibby? We’re going back up to the house now. I’m so tired. Are you coming?”

  “I definitely am,” said Rose, waking from one of her little naps, only barely interrupted by the fireworks. Her only words during the picnic had been at the sight of the sugar toads. “You don’t seriously expect people to eat these things, do you? Are they rats or fish? Either way, remove them from my sight immediately.” She didn’t like being out among “the people.”

  Ash rose to kiss his mother good night. “We’re going to sit down on the beach for a while and talk, Ma,” he said.

  “And get drunk and be romantically mournful.” She laughed.

  “Very possibly,” Gibby called over his shoulder. “Thank you for a lovely evening, Miss Cooke, ma’am.”

  Slightly stung, she bowed slightly from the waist, and then went all out and did her famous curtsy. “The pleasure’s mine,” she called out. Clarence lifted Rose, still in her chair, onto the flatbed. Then Diana and Priscilla climbed onto the tailgate and Clarence began to slowly pull away toward the house, Rose screaming in agony at each jolt in the road. There were many jolts. Diana grabbed on to Priscilla as the truck hit the first of the deep ruts that furrowed the road.

  “Don’t be too late,” she called out. But the boys had already turned away, and she didn’t know if they had heard her.

  The truck rattled up the dirt road, Rose screaming as though she were being jabbed with spears, Priscilla and Diana sitting on the tailgate, singing “Aura Lee,” a song Diana had made Priscilla sing to her as a child, Priscilla hardly more than a child herself, in her rich voice, over and over, until it became their secret anthem. They would turn to it in times of special joy or trouble—sometimes just humming it was enough, but at this minute it seemed fitting and right to give full-throated cry for this star-spangled night.

  Take my golden ring;

  Love and light return with thee

  And swallows with the spring

  By the time Priscilla had finished singing, and more and more softly she sang, Diana was nodding on her shoulder. Behind her eyes, she still saw the magical Chinese lights in the sky, reflected in the water, and in the pupils of every wide-eyed watcher. All mixed in with Priscilla, from far, far away, she heard the miniature fiddler and his proud country choirboy, singing, “Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,” his hair plastered back, his voice screeching as he reached the high part, and everybody standing and cheering, drowning him out. Sweet-faced American boy. Sweet. Sweet. Sweet.

  Back at the house, Clarence and Priscilla lifted Rose, who mercifully had fallen asleep again, silver flask in hand, from the truck, and carried her up to her bedroom, and left her, still in her canopied chair. Then they unloaded the truck, the dishes, the silver, the detritus, into the sprawling kitchen. Diana tried to help Priscilla as Clarence brought basket after basket of dirty dishes in from the truck, but Priscilla shooed her away, saying, “You too tired, little lamb. Now you get upstairs and get into your bed.”

  “I’ll do that. Thank you both so much.”

  “Say your prayers, missy,” said Priscilla.

  “I always do.” Diana smiled and was gone.

  She walked through the quiet house, leaving the lights on for Priscilla to take care of. She thought of the waste, and felt again her father’s disapproval. And she thought of all the fathers, stretching back generations, the children growing up to have children of their own, to take on the burden of Saratoga, to carry on the line, and the vast house suddenly seemed heavy in her heart and on her shoulders, like a millstone around her neck, dragging her back through time and history.

  On her way up the stairs, she stopped and looked out the window at the river, that river that had flowed through her life and her heart since she first drew breath. The smoke had lifted; the night was clear, the water calm, a white three-quarter moon brightening even the darkest places, the tide flowing out toward the Chesapeake Bay and the sea, interrupted only by the occasional leap of fish, the summer phosphorescence throwing magical sparks of brilliant green into the night.

  The boys had added more wood to the bonfire, and it blazed high. They sat beside it, passing a flask back and forth, laughing in a way that filled her heart with tenderness and, again, longing.

  Suddenly they jumped up and quickly stripped out of their clothes. They stumbled naked and drunk into the river, wading into the shallow water near the shore and then diving, their bodies cutting through the water as smoothly as the moonbeams on the tide.

  When they surfaced, they seemed no longer human but piscine, fish without scales, the water running down their backs, slick and sparkling with that green that quickly disappeared. They were gods, they were the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, and she was suddenly wide awake, her eyes locked on her son and her lover, now unrecognizable, c
itizens no longer of the land but of the tides. Her twin Poseidons.

  She ran to get the binoculars on her father’s desk, the ones he had used to watch the blue herons nesting, to catch the flight of the bald eagles, so plentiful then, fewer now. She ran back up to the landing to see them glide through the water like green glistening dolphins, smooth, reckless. And drunk. She was scared they would drown; she couldn’t turn her eyes away until they were safe again on land.

  They swam toward each other, and in the shallows they embraced, holding gently on to each other as they stood quietly, water only to their waists, swaying slightly, dreamily.

  An electric current ran down her spine, from her brain to her vagina, and she gasped in shock. She trembled on the landing. Her light clothes suddenly seemed to be strangling her as she looked as if through a magnifying lens at something so illicit, so private.

  As she watched, Ash suddenly took Gibby’s face in his hands and turned his face up and kissed him full on the mouth. Tears began to run down her face as she stood, solid as stone, wanting to turn away but unable to, lacking in will and wish.

  She hadn’t thought. Not since they walked through the door that first night, now so long ago, all camel hair and laughter. She just had not thought. There was a sharp intake of breath as her knees trembled in fear.

  Gibby suddenly put his hands on Ash’s chest and violently pushed him away. Ash pulled him back, tried awkwardly to kiss him again. Gibby pulled back his arms and punched twice, a brutal left to the side of his head, then a killing right to his face, punched him so hard that Ash went down instantly, unconscious, under the water. He did not come up. Diana screamed. In seconds, the endless seconds Ash was under the water, Priscilla appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “Missy?” she called out softly.

  But Diana didn’t answer. Priscilla slowly, reluctantly, turned away. Diana frantically took up the glasses again, to see Gibby desperately trying to find Ash under the black water, scissoring his legs, fanning his arms, diving again and again, throwing green sparks into the black night each time he surfaced, the tide going out so swiftly now, he could be anywhere. The seconds, then minutes, passed, Gibby more and more frantic, diving again and again, finally finding him, already twenty yards downriver, pulling him up by his dark hair, his face streaming with black blood and green phosphorescence, glittering Poseidon dead.