Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  Steel-meshed fans kept the air circulating and dehumidifiers wheezed in every grotto, but even so the atmosphere was tinged with the ticklish odor of book rot. Well, and it’d been the wettest spring in decades. The White Woman’s waters had risen almost a foot higher than normal (remember that line of moss on the Field’s foundation?) and the house had been islanded by ankle-deep water for more than two months. The Field had a high, solid foundation and no basement, so the damage was negligible. (“People built to the land a hundred years ago,” my mother said nonchalantly when the waters engulfed us, “not against it,” and handed me a pair of wellies.) What did bother her was the flood’s duration. It was a month past the time she usually started harvesting clay, and she’d long since used up her winter supply. But when I suggested she dig a little further from the streambed she rolled her eyes. “You don’t think I didn’t fry that? What? No, I meant ‘try.’ Sorry, I’m a little fried.” The clay behind the house was different, she insisted. Maybe because the filled brick bed was entirely silt, maybe because the plot had been tilled and compacted for so many decades. She only knew what she knew: that this clay was more viscid than any other she’d dug up, which gave her more control when she built her pots. There was an anxious note in her voice that I’d never heard when she spoke of her work. It seemed more than the inconvenience of the flood or the months since she’d last made a pot, but I didn’t fully understand until after she died, when I found dozens of cracked or crumbled misshapen pots hidden in boxes on the second floor and realized she must have dug up and down the creek during the fallow period of 1995 and 1996, and only the clay behind the house had worked. At the time I thought she was just jonesing. “You could order some,” I said, “like you used to.” I was trying to be sympathetic, but the look she gave me was enough to shatter glass.

  The top of Mt. Inverna wasn’t subject to flood but the damp had still set in, and you could tell it had gotten into the books. The odor was nowhere near as heavy as the stink at the rest stop, but just as insistent, as if the smell were as much a component of the books’ meaning as their words. It reminded me of my books, by which I mean my father’s, which, though they’d been sealed inside cardboard and packing tape for who knows how many years, still gave off the same nose-wrinkling whiff of dust and mold. If you put your face right in them you could imagine the smell intensifying as time passed, as the books aged, as the damp crept in, and the spores, as pages melted together and words congealed until the books came to be what they resembled: bricks, a wall, a barrier concealing information rather than boxes containing it. What was it my mother’d said so glibly? “You don’t keep books like these. They keep you.” Glib or not, the truth of her words was apparent as I contemplated the tens of thousands of volumes that defined the basement of Stammers Hall far more than the pillars and arches and bolts of gray-green Jesus light. Just standing among them reminded me of all the history I’d spent the past year escaping, or avoiding, and when I forced myself to venture deeper in I couldn’t help but think it wasn’t my will that pressed me forward but the Stammerers’, and their refusal to abandon a project until they’d seen it through, even if it destroyed them.

  A laugh emerged from the shadows, followed by a pair of small, dark-robed figures. They fell silent when they saw me, or, rather, stifled their laughter into giggles as they headed upstairs, arms draped across each other’s shoulders, faces bent together in gleeful conspiracy. But they couldn’t have been older than twelve, and I doubted they had the patience to plan a tryst in an alcove of Stammers Hall, let alone the foresight. Their presence was a reminder, though, that if the crypts weren’t exactly a thoroughfare, they weren’t nearly as deserted as the rest stop. The trash cans by the reading tables were littered with paper, a book truck held perhaps a dozen volumes waiting to be reshelved. People did come down here, and not just to fuck.

  The thought came to me out of the blue. Potter’s Field! I would look it up! I’d find out whether it had begun life as mill or barn, whether it had done time as inn or whorehouse. And I’d have the perfect excuse if someone asked me what I was looking for down here, just in case they weren’t looking for the same thing I was.

  Say what you will about the Academy, the masters could index like nobody’s business. I found no fewer than sixty-seven cards for our address, nearly all of which referenced the Current, the county weekly. The citations were unevenly divided between the letters section, where, once or twice a year, a building referred to as “Varnings Mill” or “Mrs. Varnings Rooms” was denounced as a “den of iniquity” and “house of ill fame”; and a series of articles that ran more or less monthly from 1866 to 1871. “Series” isn’t exactly the right word, or “article,” since, judging from the transcribed headlines (“Bedford Forrest to Grace Aug. 27 Lost Cause Picnic”; “Ladies Auxiliary Raises $143.23 for Vesture Fund”), the pieces seemed to be nothing more than the minutes of a fraternal organization that held its meetings in what was by then referred to as “the Chapterhouse,” which name was only settled on after the organization’s “Titan Emeritus” declined to lend his name to the building. “Stammers House crowns Inverna,” he was quoted as saying, “and I should pity the gentleman who rode three miles beyond town only to find that his destination lay at the hither end of High Street. And I never affix my name to something unless I own it.”

  Fredrick Varnings had been a foreman at Stammers Copper. He left the company in 1844, as the reserves were drying up, and with “the Master’s blessing” purchased a tract of land on the east side of the White Woman, where he built a sawmill that struggled along until 1866 (Marcus had his own mill, which dominated local business, and which calls into question the “blessing” he gave Varnings). The point was mooted, however, when the spring flood receded to reveal that the creek had jumped its banks and the main channel now flowed more than a half mile to the west. As it happens, Fredrick didn’t live to see this, having died three years earlier defending Vicksburg, along with both his sons, but his wife, an apparently resourceful matron named RoBertha, was able to transform the building into a boardinghouse, which, if the letters to the editor are to be believed, was in fact a brothel, and a busy one. One letter, written by a “Mrs. Col. Victor Maginnis CSA (widowed),” declared that no fewer than nine girls lived in a state of “godless degredation” in the building, though another, signed by someone who referred to herself only as “Dassy,” said that she and “her unmarried sisters” were employed by Stammers Coal at tasks that require “a feminine touch” (props to Dassy if the double entendre was intentional) and, further, that they spent more money on fabric—“and not just muslin!”—at Lyn’s Dry Goods than did most of “the wives on Stammers Hill.” There were no reports of either raids or arrests concerned with the building, which suggests that Mrs. Varnings’s boarders served the needs—read: the men—of Stammers Coal, if not Marcus himself, and also Henry, Seth, and William, his three sons, and Hugh, Chester, Wiley, Beau, and Broward, his five surviving grandsons, whose names all appear regularly in the minutes of the organization mentioned earlier. This group mustered between thirty and fifty members for its monthly meeting, but as I read through the articles it became clear that most of the members frequented Mrs. Varnings’s establishment far more often—so often that, in 1869, when RoBertha broke her hip and moved to Mobile to live with her sister’s family, a “Brotherhood” of five patrons purchased the property. The negotiations hit a hiccup when the prospective buyers discovered that “the girls were not included in the price,” but went ahead with the transaction, and after being gently rebuffed by Marcus, settled on “Chapterhouse” as the building’s new name. It’s unclear whether Dassy and her sisters stayed after RoBertha’s departure. On the one hand, there were no more letters to the editor after June 1869; on the other, there were accounts of a weeklong party to celebrate the purchase, and, a year later, an anniversary so well-attended and lasting so long that “the Slurry behind the house ran thick with Night Soil, such that a Boar fell in
and was drowned.”

  This is not my family, I told myself as I continued to read. And in fact the new owners’ names were never mentioned, neither in the Current nor in the property records or surveryors’ maps housed in the crypt’s collection, so for all I know Henry, Seth, William, Hugh, Chester, Wiley, Beau, and/or Broward weren’t among the “Brotherhood” who purchased the building. The denomination pointed up the fact that families are made as often as born. That, despite the tale told by skin, by the mine or by the masters and slaves of the antebellum South (or the masters and novices of the Academy), genes are as often the victims of heritage as its transmitter. Nor was the name of the organization to which the Brotherhood belonged ever mentioned. It was always the “Marcuse Chapter,” and its minutes were little more than a list of votes on the dates and times of various gatherings (“Dexys Hollow, after moonrise”), candidate endorsements (the Marcuse Chapter initially supported former South Carolina governor James Orr in the presidential campaign of 1868, and, after he was eliminated, begrudgingly switched its allegiance to embattled incumbent Andrew Johnson, whose most favorable quality was that he had said that individual states should be allowed to decide whether and how to amend their suffrage laws in the wake of reunification), and various pieces of legislation (the chapter supported the Anti-Vagrancy Act of 1866 and the Convict Lease Program the following year; it opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments). These are not my people, I told myself as I flipped through page after page of an ideology so pervasive that it didn’t need to be acknowledged, let alone named. But our bond ran deeper than blood. The “blessing” Marcus had given to Fredrick’s mill had extended to RoBertha’s brothel, and if his name didn’t hang above the Chapterhouse’s door, his money still paid the wages with which the Brotherhood had bought it, and his and his sons’ and grandsons’ names dominated the chapter’s rolls. If their individual yeas and nays weren’t recorded, it was only because the organization’s resolutions nearly always passed by acclamation.

  None of that mattered, I told myself. I was my own person. My last name didn’t make me a racist any more than my first made me a traitor, or (if you take my mother’s view) a savior, a sleeper agent in God’s secret employ. But no amount of denial could stave off the sense of familiarity—of kinship—as I read about a “Mr. Berry of Bayse Street (Wye)” who had, according to the Current’s Nov. 20, 1870 issue, demanded compensation for the destruction of a “well-grown beech” on his property. The tree had burned down when several “pots of tar” were tipped onto it during the course of a “picnic and shivaree,” depriving Berry and his family of the tree’s “nuts, shade, and eventual use in construction, cabinetry, and fuel.” The Marcuse Chapter didn’t dispute Berry’s account of the fire, but did question the condition of the tree, which was gleefully described as “withered,” “skeletal,” “all but dead,” “unfit for kindling,” “sicklier than a five-year-old pit pony,” and most certainly not worth the $500 Berry was asking in compensation. I told myself that there were any number of reasons why you might bring tar and goosedown and “thirty feet of coarse Manila rope” to a picnic, or why that picnic would be held under the light of the full moon. It was only when I read the words of someone named Franz Schole, who was quoted as saying that “the nigger hanging from Berry’s tree wasn’t worth $500,” that I could no longer deny which organization’s Marcuse Chapter, under the aegis of its Titan Emeritus and his sons and grandsons, was publishing its minutes in the local paper (which, as it happened, was owned by said Titan). Which organization’s local branch, thanks to the largesse of a Brotherhood that almost certainly included one or two or ten Stammerses among its extended clan, had met for five years in the house now occupied by me and my mother. Which organization’s members had raped black prostitutes and burned crosses and hung black men and women and dumped gallons of shit and piss into the slurry behind the house. It was their white supremacist bowels that had filled in the brick pit, not the creek, and it was from their white supremacist bowels that the dill and strawberries that had so enraptured my mother had sprung, and of course the fifty-two pots she’d made since we moved into the Field, by which I mean Varnings Mill, by which I mean Mrs. Varnings Rooms, by which I mean the Chapterhouse of the Marcuse Branch of the Ku Klux Klan. In their identicality my mother’s pots were as anonymous as Klan hoods, if for opposite reasons. The point of pulling a hood over your face isn’t to negate identity but to universalize it. A hood doesn’t say, “I am no one.” It says, “I am anyone.” It says, “I am everyone.” My mother’s pots were no more made of Klan shit than I was a member of the posse that had burned down Mr. Berry’s beech while lynching a black man whose name was nowhere mentioned in the Current’s pages. But if this wasn’t what made us, what was?

  “You’re late. Rush hour’s between four and six.”

  My mind was so absorbed by the image of my mother digging up blocks of shit and fashioning them into million-dollar vases that I didn’t turn the left side of my face away when I looked up, or pull my hair over it. The voice was male and youthful and I expected a novice, was surprised when a beige custodial uniform greeted me instead of a black robe, surprised again when I recognized the face atop the zipped-up collar as Lovett Reid. I knew nothing about Reid other than that he was in upper sixth like I was, but the uniform instantly told me he was a legacy: only townies were required to pay for their education, and at least part of their tuition had to come from wages they earned at tasks that, however else you defined them, would have once been performed by slaves.

  “Rush hour?”

  Reid glanced down the table. “I hope you’re not planning on leaving these papers out for some poor twobie to reshelve.”

  Eight leatherbound volumes, each containing half a year of the Current, lay on the table. Each volume measured two feet by three, was four inches thick and weighed thirty-five pounds, and would in fact be difficult for a nine-year-old to reshelve, especially since they’d come from the neglected upper tier of their crypt.

  Reid nodded at the volume in front of me. “Family history?”

  I looked down at the open page, a quarter of which was taken up with a single engraved photograph. I don’t know how to describe it. What I mean is, I don’t know whether to start with the horror and move on to the banality, or open with the bucolia, then blindside you with the brutality. The image depicted the “picnic and shivaree” on Mr. Berry’s farm. The picnic looked like a picnic, albeit a moonlit one—blankets and baskets, pitchers and plates—with perhaps fifty white faces turned toward the camera, men in flat caps, women in bonnets, children with ribbons in their hair, all staring not so much solemnly as fixedly, so their faces wouldn’t blur, but still managing to communicate the light-hearted nature of the gathering. The shivaree looked like a lynching. The face of the man hanging from the tree, which lay on its side on his feathered shoulder like an egg in its nest, was as sharp as that of the picnickers, but the laces of his boots, the only item of clothing he was wearing, were slightly blurry, suggesting that a light breeze had blown that night. “A photograph taken Nov. 12 appears to contradict Mr. Berry’s description of the Beech tree on his property,” was the full caption. The beech tree did in fact look rather past its prime.

  I looked up. The stiff collar of Reid’s uniform bit into his Adam’s apple, and I couldn’t help but think that it was the same color as “coarse Manila rope.” My eyes followed the zipper down to where it disappeared between his thighs. I know what you think I was thinking about, but what I was actually thinking about was the White Woman’s spring—its stops and starts, its water, soiled and scrubbed, the mystery of its disappearance and the capriciousness of its return. Which is maybe just another way of saying that I was thinking about what you think I was thinking about, but not in the way you think I was thinking about it.

  I looked back at the picture, tried to turn my head to parallel the face of the hanged man’s, but my neck wouldn’t bend that far. “I don’t think I�
�m related to him. I’m pretty sure that’s the quilt on my bed though,” I pointed, “which probably makes that woman my great-great-great-great grandma.”

  “Shit,” Reid breathed, like a kid who’s just jerked off to a faceless video only to realize that the anonymous penis and vagina are in fact connected to his father and mother’s bodies.

  “Hey!” I said then. “Is there a john down here?”

  A long pause. Then: “Shit,” Reid said again.

  It was only when he ran the fingernails of his left hand up and down his zipper like a nickel on a washboard that I realized he was wearing latex gloves. There was a broom in his other hand. He held it like a lazy hunter holds his rifle, at the bottom of his arm, its length balanced on two curled fingers, and as he led me deeper into the crypts I had to fight the urge to grab it, to make a lewd joke or gesture or just fall on my knees and start sucking. We passed through one crypt after another, turned right so many times I thought he was leading me in circles to fuck with me, but at last a closed door appeared at the end of a short hallway, or vestibule really, cut right into the foundation stone. Reid leaned his mop against a damp wall of polished graywacke, then pushed the door open and reached into the darkness and pulled light out of the ether. Even after I saw the pull chain swinging in the air I still couldn’t shake an image of Zeus atop Olympus, summoning a thunderbolt to smite mankind. I am his creation, I told myself. I exist to praise him.