The Scribe

by Matthew Guinn

  “Excellent. My driver and I will pick you up at Pace’s Inn in, say, half an hour?”

  “How did you know—?”

  But Billingsley was already stepping away. Canby walked back to the pavilion. The musicians were packing up their instruments, strapping down latches on their cases, but the platform was otherwise empty. He scanned the sphere of light around the pavilion, strained his eyes to see past it into the night. But Julia was gone.

  October 31

  UNDERWOOD COULD NOT SAY, EXACTLY, WHAT IT was that had drawn him to this mountain, miles outside of town, or what had compelled him to beg the loan of a horse from Vernon Thompson to get here. Could not say why two telegrams to Canby gone unanswered had raised in him a sense of foreboding. Or rather, would not have said. He trusted it was something beyond his knowing mind that set in when he left the telegraph office on Decatur Street and commenced on this errand.

  He sat his borrowed horse outside the little schoolhouse Canby had told him about. Its door was shut. The lady’s voice came from inside, running down a list of conjugations that the scholars repeated after her, point and counterpoint. She spoke in that half accent that was the voice of white Atlanta—quicker than the drawl of the other Georgians, but still far south of Yankee diction. Her voice was clear as she and her pupils worked through the verbs he guessed to be Latin. His own schooling, of course, lacked any such exotica and was truncated at the sixth grade, when the slate board and chalk stick were replaced with shovel, hoe, broom. Better than what his slave parents got, though, forbidden to learn to read. Progress, he supposed. He hoped the New South would do better. Here it seemed to be on its way, but he doubted if any of Miss Julia’s students had a face as dark as his own.

  He looked around at the little village. All the clapboard buildings whitewashed, all the roofs shingled in green. He looked up the mountain and saw a group of houses set apart from the village proper. These did not match the white and green buildings of the village but were made, he could tell even at a distance, of surplus materials too poor and motley to be worth painting. They dotted the north face of the mountain, most seeming ready to fall in and some looking as though they were barely still clinging to the steep slope. Above a few of the tarpaper roofs, leaning chimneys smoked in the October air. Inside the schoolhouse, the sounds of Latin continued. He tugged at the horse’s reins and set off north on the Pace’s Ferry Road.

  As he neared the settlement he saw little movement outside the houses. He figured that most of the inhabitants were inside, away from the chill and likely preparing their noontime dinner. Or at work elsewhere. On one of the porches an old man sat with a quilt on his lap, a shotgun resting atop it. His garden out front was coming up abundant in beets, peas, mustard greens. Underwood paused in the road and lifted his hat. He had begun to speak when the old man shook his head and raised the shotgun to port arms. Underwood moved on.

  The northernmost house in the settlement sat off on its own, surrounded by a rickety picket fence and its dirt yard adorned with a variety of flotsam such as he’d never seen. He had seen bottle trees, of course, but the yard of this house had a half dozen of them, and the biggest tree, a sycamore, had been festooned with shards of mirror hung from twine. From nearly every limb they glinted in the sunlight, and as they twisted in the breeze threw off hundreds of brilliant flashes. Beneath them, the yard was filled with all manner of artwork fashioned from unlikely sources, around which chickens pecked and strutted. He saw a wagon wheel painted scarlet and half embedded in the dirt, a torn umbrella with its handle stuck in the earth and its canopy scrawled over with drawings, a dented milk can likewise half sunk and sprouting a burst of pansies from its mouth. All of these objects painted with the kinds of bold colors Underwood had read about in Melville’s Polynesian novel, or in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tales. As if everything broken and cast off had made its way to this place and got itself a new life here.

  An old woman sat on the porch, singing low to herself and working on something in her lap. The house behind her was as strange as her yard: its front wall was covered with images painted right onto the boards—crudely drawn cats and crows, giant butterflies pinwheeling across azure patches of sky. Like her neighbor, she had pulled a quilt over her knees. He could see, below the quilt, the hem of a flowered dress, two spindly brown shins, and a broken-down pair of men’s brogans. She rocked gently as she worked, and after a moment Underwood realized she was singing to the thing in her hands. He pulled up his horse at her gate and bade her a good morning.

  “You the police?” she asked. She squinted down at him from the porch. Her eyes were milky white with cataracts. After a moment’s surprised silence he told her that he was.

  “Come on up to the porch. Horse got to stay in the yard, though.”

  He tried to hide his grin as he tied the horse to her fence. Before he had shut the gate behind him a flurry of chickens had gathered around his legs and he walked mincingly up to the house lest he trample one of them.

  “You ride down from the Smyrna constable’s?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, every one of the porch steps creaking beneath him. “Out of Atlanta.”

  The woman leaned forward in her chair, focused the milky eyes on his face. “You black,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. May I sit down?”

  “What kind of foolishness you bringing up in here? A black police man out of Atlanta? That’ll be the day.”

  He showed her his badge, though he doubted she could read its numerals and lettering. As she took it from him, he saw that what she had been working on was a doll. She was making it by stuffing raw cotton into a length of woman’s hosiery. She’d fashioned a head and arms, but cotton trailed out of the doll’s unformed bottom end. He saw that one of its hands had six fingers.

  “Thought you were here about the chickens,” she said.

  Underwood tucked the badge back into his jacket, thinking he was wasting good time on this crazy woman.

  “Old Titus down the hill’s been shooting every one of them that hops the fence. Say they’re eating up his garden.” She had picked up the doll and was stuffing the rest of the cotton into it. She pulled and twisted and knotted the hose until she had tied off legs.

  “Shoots them and throws them back over the fence.” She shrugged her bony shoulders. “But I can’t eat them fast as he been shooting them.”

  “No, ma’am, I rode up to see Julia Preston. I’m looking for a friend of hers.”

  “You got ties to Vinings? One your people worked the railroad crews?”

  “No, ma’am. My mother brought me up here to service at New Salem a few times. Saw a baptism here when I was twelve or thirteen.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Down in that creek on the other side of the village.”

  “Stillhouse Creek,” she said with a chuckle high in her throat. “Bet the ’shiners wasn’t running the still that day.”

  Underwood thought of what Canby had told him about white moonshiners, here and farther north, up to Ringgold and beyond. He couldn’t recall having seen a white face that morning; he remembered only the joyous shouting and the coldness of the water. Perhaps they were farther up the creek, deep in the trees. The real mountain men, Canby said, were Scots-Irish who never came out of the hills except to sell what they’d distilled up in them. Mountain crackers, tough characters who would either kill you or kill for you, Canby said. There was no middle ground with them.

  “No, ma’am, didn’t see any ’shiners that day. But I think I’d have remembered this place.”

  The old woman smiled. “You would have, if it looked like this then. My husband didn’t cotton to art. Said it was foolishness. Too much work to do to fool with pretty.” She pulled a threaded needle from a pocket of her dress and went to work on the doll with it. Underwood looked around the porch again, from the half dozen dolls scattered around her chair to the bright figures she had painted on the side of her house. Some were tracings of her hand, outlined and magnifie
d. Some were scenes interpreted from Bible verses. He saw one that he recognized as the Good Samaritan. Her Samaritan was black. Grace born out of poverty, Underwood thought.

  “Did your husband pass on?”

  “Mmmhmm,” she said. “Him and the one before him. Only man I live with now is Jesus. Suits me fine. One day I quit making supper and got busy making my playhouse.” She looked up quickly and saw that Underwood was staring at a golden sun painted on her house’s door. It had several other suns radiating out from it.

  “That ain’t no voodoo, if you’re wondering. Or heard stray talk down in the village. No hoodoo, no voodoo, no juju. Just Jesus.”

  She held out the finished doll to him. Its eyes were mismatched buttons, but it held a kind of humble beauty in its sewn-in smile. “That’s one of my playbabies.” She looked at it lovingly for a moment, then set it down next to her rocker.

  “And I’m Lettie Lee.” She held out a hand and he took it, shaking gently. Her hand was all angles, twisted arthritic bones.

  “Cyrus Underwood,” he said. “I’m looking for Miss Julia’s beau.”

  “Then why you asking me? You ride straight past the schoolhouse?”

  “She was teaching. Thought I’d wait until dinnertime.”

  The woman looked out over her yard, past the fence, at the dirt road that led from Pace’s ferry to points north. She stared as though she could see the ruts in the road, the dust furrowed by wagon wheels.

  “I was out here couple nights ago, trying to listen to that pretty music down in the village. You don’t think they’d let me set up on that fine pavilion, do you? Sometimes you can just hear a bit of it if the wind ain’t high. Was still out here when something went by down there in the road.”

  “Something?”

  “Two white men in a wagon, black man driving.”

  “You could see that? In the dark?” He looked from the old woman to the road, looked back at her, into the white-filmed eyes.

  “Course it was dark. Said it was nighttime. They making fools into detectives down in Atlanta now?”

  “Beg your pardon, ma’am.”

  “Some things don’t need sight to see. Shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Not if you’ve been to New Salem.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You could feel it going by, straining up the hill. Something left out of here that shouldn’t have.”

  “White men, you say?”

  She looked at him a moment, then began to slowly shake her head again. She pulled the quilt tighter in her lap. “You make sure Julia Preston knows whereabouts your friend is. You don’t want no part of that wagon.”

  Underwood pulled out his pocket watch and saw that it was not quite noon. Lettie Lee asked him if he would say something to Titus about the chickens and he told her, absently, that he would. As he put the watch back into his vest pocket he decided that he was going to have to interrupt Miss Julia’s lesson after all.

  November 1

  THE DOGS LIT OUT AHEAD OF THEM, TWO SPANIELS, eager to bound across the cut-over fields but constrained at intervals by the dog man’s sharp whistles. The dog man walked ahead of Canby and Billingsley, swinging a knotty snake stick alongside his calf, though Canby doubted that given the morning’s autumn chill he would have much use for it. Like Canby, he was dressed in Billingsley’s worn hunt clothing from a few seasons prior. On Canby, the cotton duck fit snugly at chest and thigh, but on the old black man the sleeves were rolled up against excess length and the cuffs of the pants pooled at his ankles.

  The borrowed shotgun, however, was another matter. It was a Purdey, of English manufacture, a .20-gauge side-by-side, the finest gun Canby had ever held. He had already dropped three quail with it, meeting the birds bursting from cover with the shotgun’s perfect alignment of shoulder and bead, eye and target. The birds rode now in the game pocket of his vest, their light weight there early assurance of a good day.

  Up ahead the dogs stopped, went rigid, their necks elongated and tails out straight behind them, their trembling bodies forming a level line from point of snout to tip of tail. Quietly, the dog man stepped aside for Canby and Billingsley to move ahead to the point. The brush they had come through had now given way to the cut-over cornfield. Canby felt one of the dropped cobs underneath his boot. Around them now were a scattering of the ears, gold and white kernels loosed from them by the pecking of the birds.

  “Bird!” Billingsley called as just in front of them the stalks and brush erupted in high-pitched bird cries and a panicked fury of wings lifting into the air. The quail shot straight upward and then canted left. Billingsley’s gun barked twice and the quail dropped, each of them leaving a quivering nimbus of feathers in the air behind it. The dog man whistled and the spaniels ran forward, noses to the ground, looking for the downed birds. Billingsley broke his shotgun and plucked the spent shells from the barrels and dropped them, reached into a vest pocket for fresh ones and pressed them into place and snapped the barrels shut again.

  “Nice shooting,” Canby said. Billingsley smiled and reached into the vest again and produced a silver flask covered with filigree. He handed it to Canby and squatted on his heels, shotgun across his knees, to wait on the dogs. Canby took a pull from the flask—the same Irish whiskey as before, smooth beyond belief—and sat himself down beside Billingsley. He took another sip and gave the flask back to Billingsley, looked over to the dog man. He was watching the brush where the dogs had disappeared. He seemed to be listening to their rustling there for some confirmation.

  “I know you, don’t I?” Canby asked.

  The dog man smiled faintly and looked down at the ground. He nudged one of the fallen ears of corn with the gnarled end of the snake stick. “Nossir, don’t believe so.”

  “I have a good memory for faces.”

  The black man whistled, apparently having heard what he’d been listening for from the dogs, and the spaniels trotted out of the stalks, each of them with a bird held gingerly in its mouth. They brought them to him and he reached out a hand to each dog, his hands more gray than brown, work-worn, and rung the birds’ necks. Billingsley nodded toward Canby and the man brought the birds to him and held them out. Still beautiful even in death, from the ringed faces above the sedge-colored wings to the speckled feathers of their breasts. One of them white-necked—a male—and the other with plumage the same shade of amber as good honey. Canby took them, the female still trembling, and reached behind him to drop them into his vest pocket. The black man never met his eyes.

  “You should have seen this place in its prime, Mister Canby,” Billingsley said. He was still nodding, but his eyes looked back out, over the land they had covered since starting just before dawn, at the big house. Canby saw that they had come to a slight rise on the place and that the distance they had traversed in the past hour made a great bowl between the white-columned house and the ridge on which they now rested.

  Billingsley’s eyes narrowed as he looked out over the fields. “A thousand acres of white cotton swaying in the wind, two hundred black faces in the rows, picking. We had our own blacksmith shop, commissary, slave quarters, and overseer lodgings. A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

  “It must have been grand.”

  “The war changed it all. That house yonder is a pale shadow of what once was. I came home to smoking ashes and fallow fields. All of my hands went away with Sherman, you see, then came back when they saw he had nothing for them.

  “We rebuilt it from the foundations as best we could. But in time I found myself negotiating with my own Negroes. A tenth share one year, a sixth the next. The bottom rail was on top.

  “We are experimenting with the ‘progressive’ agriculture now, building it back up with a variety of crops. The old cotton kingdom is gone. But if you could have seen it, Mister Canby!”

  Billingsley shook his head and rose, brushing off his pants. The dog man whistled and the spaniels took off in fr
ont again and the party resumed their walk, Canby and Billingsley spaced a half dozen yards to either side of the Negro.

  “You miss it.”

  “Very much. There was an order to it we’re not likely to achieve again. Bird!”

  The dogs, without Canby’s noticing, had frozen in their point stance. The stalks ahead of them seemed to explode with an upward burst of feathers. Canby quickly counted six, seven, as the quail darted and wheeled and he picked his birds and fired. He dropped one and winged another, which spun in narrowing circles until it hit the earth. Billingsley shot twice and his birds plummeted. The rest of the covey winged out over the field, out of range now, while the men reloaded.

  Canby felt a quickening to his pulse that the shooting could not account for. He breathed slowly, deeply, before he spoke again.

  “But you’ve done all right in Atlanta, if I may say so, haven’t you?”

  “With certain adjustments. One adapts. I suppose I will survive if I’ve made it this far.”

  The dogs returned with the first pair of birds, dropped them, and disappeared back into the stalks.

  “But what about you, Mister Canby? Are you on the lookout for other employ? Or will you go back to Ringgold?”

  “I think I have to go back. To Atlanta, I mean. Cyrus Underwood is still beating the bushes down in town.”

  “For whatever reason?”

  “He thinks Leon Greenberg was not the man.”

  “Underwood, the Negro detective?” Billingsley smiled. “Another first for Atlanta. Atlanta is all chaos. As it ever was.”

  “But doesn’t it trouble you, Colonel, about Greenberg?”

  “Why would it trouble me?”

  The spaniels trotted out of the brush with the second pair of quail and set them down. The bird Canby had winged made flailing motions in the dirt and the dog man shooed away the spaniel that was nipping at it and picked it up by the head and spun it in his hand. He bent and gathered up the other three and handed them to Canby. The dogs moved down the corn rows, tails wagging, noses down, and the men followed.