Against the Ruins

by Linda Lightsey Rice

  She established herself in an armchair and poured the tea. “How are things at school, Louise? What’s the news on integration?”

  “Twelve Negro children will be admitted next year. I’ve been asked to teach one of the first desegregated classes. William doesn’t think I should. He’s afraid of—complications—you know, protests.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s high time this happened and I ought to do whatever I can to help.” I turned as I heard our car in the driveway outside Uta’s window. “We should be going, Mrs. Moazen. Thank you for letting me play the piano.” I began picking up the toy figures.

  Uta stared at the toy for a moment, then turned to me. “Louise dear, please come play the piano again. Music in the house is wonderful. I’ve been waiting for you and this little girl for a long time.” She studied me for a moment. “You must take care of yourselves.”

  William was sleeping less and less. Sometimes he got up two or three times a night and went to his desk to read, or paced the living room. One night I woke up at four a.m. and he had still not come back to bed. I parted the curtains, stared out at the moonlight; all it illuminated was the loneliness of this bed and this room. When did we last make love? What I’d believed was natural to all marriages—perhaps it wasn’t. I pulled the curtains and burrowed into the covers. I was so tired and school would come early. This wasn’t how we were in Summerville. Whenever he’d pass by me in that house, his fingers trailed briefly along my arm. Casual, lighthearted, wonderful. Our skins loved each other. Where did Summerville go?

  I couldn’t get back to sleep and at nearly five I pulled on my chenille bathrobe—it was almost time to get up anyway—and tiptoed into the kitchen to make coffee. William was nowhere to be found. I heard something outside and cracked open the back door—it was cold this morning. William—in his pajamas—was in the driveway raking leaves. Raking leaves in the dark? In his pajamas? I watched the rhythmic motion of the rake—was he sleepwalking?

  “William,” I whispered.

  He put a finger to his lips. “Listen.”

  Elmwood Cemetery’s carillon tolled five times. Everyone had been complaining about the hour, which marked the first shift at the Gervais Street textile mill.

  I walked down the back steps, pulling my bathrobe belt tighter. “Shouldn’t you try to get some sleep? You’ll be tired for your classes.”

  “In the European carillons—in the churches that didn’t get bombed—the music would come from way out in the distance, you never knew from where or who was playing it. Just suddenly it was there. Most players use broken chords, impulsive arpeggios.”

  William began raking again. “The tolling for the dead was always six tailors—I’ve forgotten why they use that expression—for a woman, nine for a man, afterward quick strokes to tell the age of the deceased, then slow tolling of single strokes at half-minute intervals. You never forget it.” He smiled suddenly. “Do you know what I was thinking about today? Our first anniversary, the canaries Bill and Coo.”

  I felt myself loosen, my limbs unfolding for the first time in months. He thinks about Summerville too.

  “I loved Bill and Coo.” The past becomes the present, my voice a caress. “There’s never been a better gift. Except for Lyra.”

  “I was trying to remember their sounds.” William is still raking, but haphazardly. “I was wondering if natural sound and man-made sound can be analogous. If the math of nature and the math of music are based on the same principles of melody and harmony. Take the concept of fifths. Fifths are five parts, and an isosceles triangle has four sides, and then there are minor fifths, and integral numbers and—”

  “Darling, do you feel all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Maybe you’re working too hard, maybe we need a little more bill and coo ourselves.”

  “I’m fine. I just don’t sleep well some nights.”

  A light breeze showers gold leaves onto the ground behind William. Fragrant wood smoke emanates from someone’s chimney. Why can’t we just enjoy this beautiful time together? “You seem worried a lot,” I say. “How are things at the seminary?”

  “Am I not taking good care of you?”

  Don’t mention his quitting the new job. “Of course you are. It’s just—sometimes you don’t seem very happy.”

  “Things are fine.”

  “Why don’t you come back to bed? Maybe you could sleep for an hour.”

  Abruptly he shakes the rake at me. “You don’t understand! I can’t sleep, how many times do I have to say that, Louise? Tell me, how many?”

  He hurls the rake onto the ground.

  He almost hit me.

  Nearly in tears, I head for the back door. At the steps I glance back: he’s raking in the dark again.

  The following Saturday, as was customary, I went to the farmer’s market. Not much to be had this time of year, so I’m soon driving back down Assembly Street, left onto Elmwood, right on Lincoln. Nearing our house, I see two men coming through our front door—William and Bill Faherty, the heavyset neighbor who never did an honest day’s work and let his children—teeth yellowed and decayed—suffer for it.

  I park in the driveway. William and Bill Faherty are carrying our dining-room table onto the porch. Neither has noticed me as they maneuver through the screen door.

  I call from the driveway, “William?”

  I hear him telling Bill Faherty, “I told you this table was a beauty, didn’t I? There’s not a finer one in the whole state of South Carolina.”

  Bill Faherty notices me and says, “We best git it down the street, I got something I gotta do. Come on now.”

  I stride to the porch as they jostle the oak table down the sidewalk. You’re sitting on the porch steps, staring. I’m yelling, my heart pounding—“William, I need to talk to you!”

  They ignore me. I turn to you. “Where are your father and Mr. Faherty taking the table?”

  You tell me your father has given our table to Mr. Faherty.

  “That’s impossible!” I run to the sidewalk. William has disappeared inside the Faherty house.

  Across the street Rosa is sweeping her sidewalk. She saunters over. “Not my business, Louise, but that worm Faherty’s been coming ’round your house in the daytime when you’re not home but your husband is. Did he weasel that table outta your old man? He’s gonna sell it.”

  “That can’t be.” William’s home during the day?

  I turn and run into the house, into the dining room. Only two chairs—the wobbly ones—remain. I’m so weak I have to sit down. This doesn’t make sense.

  When the porch door opens, I rush to William. “What have you done with our table? Why is it down there?”

  He brushes past me. “I don’t have time to talk about this right now. He needs a leveler and I’ve got some shims in the garage.”

  “Did you give that man my table?”

  William stops. “I had to. That family needs a table, there are lots more of them than us. He admired it.”

  “You gave a man you barely know our best piece of furniture?”

  “I had to give Mr. Faherty the table and that’s all there is to it. I don’t see what you’re so upset about. It wasn’t yours to begin with.”

  “Mrs. Moazen gave it to me. To me.”

  “Maybe you don’t remember the wedding vows, Louise. Yours is mine.”

  He stomps past me into the dining room, stops, stomps back. “That man is dangerous. He has a large knife collection, pays to stay on his good side. We didn’t use the table much, he liked the quality of it. That man was a soldier.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “You have no right to act this way,” he shouts. “You must be mad with somebody else and taking it out on me.”

  I no
tice you in the doorway, the frightened way you clutch your ragged teddy bear.

  William marches through the house, goes out the back door.

  I fall into a chair. How can he be so mean? I’m sobbing in front of my child. You walk over and kneel down and lay your head on my thigh. And suddenly I remember the lovely plastic women shredded on a bathroom floor.

  Chapter Seven

  I can’t seem to stay in this hospital bed—I keep floating across time and now it’s midday Saturday on Lincoln Street, dark circles around my eyes from sleeplessness as I sweep the front porch. Since the dining-room table disappeared, I’ve been profoundly dispirited—no, since William gave my table away. (He put a check for it in Uta’s mailbox, but Uta marched over and threw it back at him, said she’d rather him owe her, which made William so angry he left the room.) Listlessly I push dirt toward the screen door. You’re on the porch steps playing with the cat—talking to Fluffy, actually.

  William appears, says he’s going to the farm. You sing a chorus of “Oh please can I go, please please please?” William suggests we all go. I can tell he’s trying to make up for the table—it’ll have to be a whale of a trip for that to work. On the way, he drives by the new airport in West Columbia and parks beside a small hangar. You and he get out of the car—a weekly airport trip is his latest obsession. You sit on the taxicab fender and William leans against it, smoking his pipe, staring at small planes taking off or landing.

  “That’s a DC-3,” he tells you, pointing. “It has a top speed of two hundred miles per hour, has a tail-dragger landing gear, two propeller engines.”

  You listen eagerly. I suspect, disturbingly, that you think if you act interested in what interests your father, he may act interested in you. You say you want to ride in a plane one day.

  “Oh you can’t,” he says. “Planes are for businessmen and soldiers.”

  When you and William get back in the car, I tell you, “I bet you’ll ride in a plane someday. I bet you’ll do a lot of important things.”

  William gives me a sharp look, drives on toward Orangeburg. We follow the Bamberg Ehrhardt Road—my real mother grew up in Ehrhardt, you and I went to that abandoned old house to retrieve several paintings when you were a teenager. We turn onto the Barnwell Road and pass through Whetstone Crossroads with its railroad station. You’re impressed that we have our own railroad, until William explains the concept of right-of-way. He shows you the two ponds that are the far north and southwest boundaries of the farm. Listening to him give you information for the future, I warm up a little. The land was 683 acres, about six miles square, he says, when his grandmother owned it. You ask how come the farm keeps getting “littler.” I correct you with “smaller” and he adds, “That’s just the way it goes, I guess.”

  We stop at the cemetery and William gets out and inspects it before we drive on to the house ruins. I begin to feel better. The country’s loamy aromas—this is the scent of small towns too, of when I’d walk down Brantley streets in the summertime breathing the deep musk of ripening tomatoes in a neighbor’s garden. While you and William dig in the ruins, I take a long walk in the woods, dragging my hand along the scaly trunks of the loblolly pines that will one day be harvested to send you to college. The shade and shadow of the forest become Gilead’s balm. I pause on the pine-straw path, listen to the trees creaking in the breeze. I have to forgive William: holding a grudge is not going to make anything better. Pick your battles, isn’t that what people say?

  You, in patched overalls, come running through the trees, screaming, “The Yankees are coming!” You grab my arm and shake it. “Get the silver. Get the muskrat.”

  “I think you mean musket, sweetheart. You know that war is not really a good thing, don’t you?”

  “But they’re after us! They want to knock us down dead. Daddy says we gotta run from the Sherman flames.”

  “He’s just playing a game.”

  When you and I emerge from the forest, William is mowing around the perimeter of the house. My lighter mood evaporates—the two toppled chimneys seem more jagged than ever today. I gaze anew at the great mass of broken bricks and blackened timber, a tomb of a house. William had recently discovered a picture of it in its prime, all the 1840s family, including two dogs, posed on a portico of Doric columns and fanlighted windows. Reduced now to rubble by man’s inhumanity, by the most deadly war in American history. Abruptly I shiver as I stare at the sundered walls, two or three feet tall where once they had been thirty. I look out at the nearby fields: I can almost see bloodied bodies strewn in the grass.

  William continues mowing, sprucing up the ruined house he loves more than he loves—I can’t finish the thought.

  What if he came home one day to find someone had given his farm away?

  New York taxi, wandering in a cemetery, raking in the dark. Impulsively quitting one job after another. Giving away furniture I love. What does it all mean?

  While I was preparing supper the next night, someone knocked on the back door. I opened the door in surprise: Uta never came to the back door.

  She cried, “I have terrible news. I went to the store this morning and Flo had heard it from some people on Park Street.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Max Wells was killed yesterday. He’s dead.”

  “What?” I sat down in shock. “Oh my God.”

  “He was trimming trees—he fell off the ladder and broke his neck.”

  For no reason I got up and numbly walked over to the window. News of sudden, unexpected death is an emotional tornado; I looked outside as though checking for damage. “He was always smiling. I met him my first day at Laidlaw. The children love him.” He felt like an old friend. Someone who realized—

  “I never knew a finer man,” Uta said.

  Uta sat down at the table and I rejoined her. “Some mornings all the teachers would find flowers in our rooms,” I said. “It seems so unfair. Did you know about him helping poor families during the Depression?”

  “He told you about that?”

  “Just recently. I truly admired him.”

  Uta studied the rings on her right hand. “I did too, but not for that. That story’s not true. Max was never a collector for a furniture store.”

  “What do you mean? He made it up?”

  “Oh no. It happened—there was a man who saved some poor people from losing their possessions in the thirties, but it wasn’t Max Wells. Max appropriated the story. He read it in a book. He was a reading man, he was. He wanted a different past so he gave himself one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because one day I read it in a book too. A book of WPA interviews. There it was, pretty much like Max told it. Think about it, Louise—Max’s mother was a high-yellow Negro. What South Carolina store in the 1930s was going to let a half-colored man handle money?”

  I sat back in my chair. “You’re right. I never thought about that.”

  “That story doesn’t matter—Max was as fine as they come,” Uta said. “He aspired to what the world wouldn’t let him do. I think that’s pretty admirable. I’d be grateful if you’d go to the funeral, which is really a homecoming service, with me.”

  “Will we be welcome?”

  “I don’t give a flying fig. If I have to barge into a Holy Roller church to see Max off, I will.” Uta got up. “And you can’t wear black. It’s disrespectful.”

  I wore a blue dress to the funeral. Uta, in purple, gave me a that’ll-do-nicely look as I got in her huge white Cadillac, which she almost never took out of her garage. Although it had push-button gears on the dashboard, driving with one arm wasn’t easy. It was a dampish, cloudy day. As Uta headed north toward Camp Fornance, she explained that she bought the car with her husband’s insurance money. She said Max’s death felt like such a bad omen that she’d uncorked “that green jar” and left
it open all night. Perhaps it was all done now—all that bad soul gone.

  “At last I’m truly rid of him.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, but we’re all made slightly irrational by loss.

  I’d known lots of black people, but I’d never been in, as we put it then, a colored church. This one was red brick, set on a lot bordering the railroad tracks, with a white wooden steeple containing a single bell, now tolling. Some people told stories about the Mercy congregation “speaking in tongues,” but whenever I’d driven past the church all I’d heard was singing. Uta turned her white whale of a car into the gravel parking lot, and we headed inside. The chancel was all gardenias, huge arrangements of roses everywhere else, vases filled to overflowing, upright funeral sprays, a carpet of white roses across the burnished mahogany casket. The women who cooked in the Laidlaw cafeteria had on their best dresses. And tropical headdresses: red hats, blue, pink, even one a flaming orange. People were taking their seats, big Negro men slapping one another on the back, little boys in short pants running up and down the aisles, a handful of teachers from Laidlaw, including Ed Hindeman.

  Gathered in a semicircle below the simple wooden altar, a choir of thirty women rocked back and forth as one, heads back, eyes closed, humming in harmony, tears streaming down the faces of several. Various people walked up front and spoke about “Brother Max” and his smile and his gardens and his work in the church and his faith in Jesus. A handsome man in a pinstriped suit told us that Max had grown up on a farm and spent his early years picking cotton; that that was why he squinted sometimes, from those early years of staring into the sun to see if it was quitting time yet. Another man talked about Max’s kindness to the children in the Bottom, how he put a collection box in the white junior high and got teachers and students to donate old clothes.