by Barry Hannah
“Finish that poor Christian off, soldier.”
My horse settled down and I blew the man over. Pardon Me reared at the shot and tore away in his own race down a vacant meadow—fortunate for me, since I never had to look at the carnage but only thought of holding on.
After McClellan placed himself back on the York, we slipped through Maryland and here we are in Pennsylvania. We go spying and cavorting and looting. I’m wearing out. Pardon Me, I think, feels the lunacy even in this smooth countryside. We’re too far from home. We are not defending our beloved Dixie anymore. We’re just bandits and maniacal. The gleam in the men’s eyes tells this. Everyone is getting crazier on the craziness of being simply too far from home for decent return. It is like Ruth in the alien corn, or a troop of men given wings over the terrain they cherished and taken by the wind to trees they do not know.
Jeb leads us. Some days he has the sneer of Satan himself.
Nothing but bad news comes up from home, when it comes.
Lee is valiant but always too few.
All the great bullies I used to see out front are dead or wounded past use.
The truth is, not a one of us except Jeb Stuart believes in anything any longer. The man himself the exception. There is nobody who does not believe in Jeb Stuart. Oh, the zany purposeful eyes, the haggard gleam, the feet of his lean horse high in the air, his rotting flannel shirt under the old soiled grays, and his heroic body odor! He makes one want to be a Christian. I wish I could be one. I’m afraid the only things I count on are chance and safety.
The other night I got my nerve up and asked for him in his tent. When I went in, he had his head on the field desk, dead asleep. The quill was still in his hand. I took up the letter. It was to his wife, Flora. A daguerreotype of her lay next to the paper. It was still wet from Jeb’s tears. At the beginning of the letter there was small talk about finding her the black silk she’d always wanted near Gettysburg. Then it continued: “After the shameful defeat at Gettysburg,” etc.
I was shocked. I always thought we won at Gettysburg. All the fellows I knew thought we had won. Further, he said:
“The only thing that keeps me going on my mission is the sacred inalienable right of the Confederacy to be the Confederacy, Christ Our Lord, and the memory of your hot hairy jumping nexus when I return.”
I placed the letter back on the table. This motion woke him.
I was incredulous that he knew my first name. He looked as if he had not slept a second.
The stories were true.
“Corporal Deed Ainsworth,” he said.
“Sorry to wake you, General.”
“Your grievance?” he said.
“No one is my friend,” I mumbled.
“Because the Creator made you strange, my man. I never met a chap more loyal in the saddle than you. God made us different and we should love His differences as well as His likenesses.”
“I’d like to kiss you, General,” I said.
“Oh, no. He made me abhor that. Take to your good sleep, my man. We surprise the railroad tomorrow.”
“Our raids still entertain you?” I asked.
“Not so much. But I believe our course has been written. We’ll kill ten and lose two. Our old Bobbie Lee will smile when we send the nigger back to him with the message. I’ll do hell for Lee’s smile.”
The nigger came in the tent about then. He was high-falutin, never hardly glanced at me. They had a magnificent bay waiting for the letters. Two soldiers came in and took an armload of missives from General Stuart’s trunk, pressing them into the saddlebags. The nigger, in civilian clothes, finally looked at me.
“Who dis?” he said.
“Corporal Deed Ainsworth; shake hands,” said General Stuart.
I have a glass shop in Biloxi. I never shook hands with any nigger. Yet the moment constrained me to. He was Jeb’s best minstrel. He played the guitar better than anything one might want to hear, and the banjo. His voice singing “All Hail the Power” was the only feeling I ever had to fall on my knees and pray. But now he was going back down South as a rider with the messages.
“Ain’t shaking hands with no nancy,” said the nigger. “They say he lay down with a Choctaw chief in Mississip, say he lick a heathen all over his feathers.”
“You’re getting opinions for a nigger, George,” said Jeb, standing. “I don’t believe Our Lord has room for another nigger’s thoughts. You are tiring God when you use your mouth, George.”
“Yessuh,” said George.
“Do you want to apologize to Corporal Ainsworth?”
“I real sorry. I don’t know what I say,” the nigger said to me. “General Jeb taught me how to talk and sometimes I justs go on talking to try it out.”
“Ah, my brother George,” Jeb suddenly erupted.
He rushed to the nigger and threw his arms around him. His eyes were full of tears. He embraced the black man in the manner of my dreams of how he might embrace me.
“My chap, my chum. Don’t get yourself killed,” said Jeb to George. “Try to look ignorant when you get near the road pickets, same as when I found you and saved you from drink.”
“I loves you too, General Jeb. I ain’t touched nothing since you saved me. Promise. I gon look ignorant like you say, tills I get to Richmond. Then I might have me a beer.”
“Even Christ wouldn’t deny you that. Ah, my George, there’s a heaven where we’ll all prosper together. Even this sissy, Corporal Ainsworth.”
They both looked at me benevolently. I felt below the nigger.
George got on the horse and took off South.
At five the next morning we came out of a stand of birches and all of us flew high over the railroad, shooting down the men. I had two stolen repeaters on my hip in the middle of the rout and let myself off Pardon Me. A poor torn Yank, driven out of the attack, with no arm but a kitchen fork, straggled up to me. We’d burned and killed almost everything else.
Stuart rode by me screaming in his rich bass to mount. The blue cavalry was coming across the fire toward us. The wounded man was stabbing me in the chest with his fork. Jeb took his saber out in the old grand style to cleave the man from me. I drew the pistol on my right hip and put it almost against Jeb’s nose when he leaned to me.
“You kill him, I kill you, General,” I said.
There was no time for a puzzled look, but he boomed out: “Are you happy, Corporal Ainsworth? Are you satisfied, my good man Deed?”
I nodded.
“Go with your nature and remember our Savior!” he shouted, last in the retreat.
I have seen it many times, but there is no glory like Jeb Stuart putting spurs in his sorrel and escaping the Minié balls.
They captured me and sent me to Albany prison, where I write this.
I am well fed and wretched.
A gleeful little floorwipe came in the other day to say they’d killed Jeb in Virginia. I don’t think there’s much reservoir of self left to me now.
This earth will never see his kind again.
That’s True
I’ll never forget the summer old Lardner went up to New York with forged credits as a psychiatrist. He’d been studying in med school with designs of becoming a psychiatrist. Then he got into the modern psychiatric scene, had enough of it, and having no other employment for the summer, he went up to New York all fit out with thick glasses and a mustache and an ailing gnarled hand, which he was of course putting on too. He said people in therapy got close to a shrink with an outstanding defect. He had a few contacts, and before you knew it, he was all set up in his office, five phony pieces of paper on the wall.
Old Lardner, I never knew what his real voice was, he had so many, though I knew he came from Louisiana like me. He loved Northerners—Jew, Navajo and nigger alike. He was a broad soul with no spleen in his back pocket for anybody. Except whiners who knew better. You ought to hear some of the tapes he brought back. He never taped anybody without their knowledge of it.
All of them liked
to be taped, Lardner said.
It was their creativity.
They went like this:
Patient: I feel ugly all the time. I can’t quit cigarettes. The two Great Danes I bought won’t mate. I’m starting to cry over sentimental things, songs on the radio. Is it basically wrong for a man to like macramé? I never feel intimate with anybody until we talk about Nixon, how awful he was. My kid looks away when I give him an order. I mean a gentle order. Let me take a breath.
Lardner: Jesus Damn Christ! What an interesting case! Your story takes the ticket. This is beyond trouble, Mr., ________________ this is art!
Patient: What? My story art?
Lardner: Yes. You are ugly. But so very important.
Patient: You think so?
And so on.
The next one might go:
Patient: I’m angry, angry, Doctor Lardner.
Lardner: Why?
Patient: Because I’m a woman. I’ve taken such evil crap over the years.
Lardner: Why?
Patient: I thought you’d want to know what.
Lardner: You got the wrong doctor. Down on Fifth Avenue, about a dozen doors away, there’s a good what doctor. A little more expensive.
Patient: I’m so angry at men everywhere. Nothing will ever cure me of this hatred.
Lardner: You’re wasting money on me. I’m a man.
Patient: But with time, you and I might produce a cure for me.
Lardner: Well, we can start with your basic remedy and work out from there. How about a glass of pure gin on the rocks and a hard dick? (Sounds of fistfight between Lardner and patient.) You hit my gnarled hand!
Patient: Oh, I’m so sorry! Christ! I didn’t want to.
Lardner: I think you did.
Patient: I . . . yes! I did! We’ve produced a cure together. You work so fast. (Sounds of slipped-off panties.) Have me, have! Let me make up for the hand!
And the only other one I recall:
Patient: It’s the end of the world. It’s the Big Fight. I read the Times on the subway, and think about my people, the Jews. I think of my good job and prosperity. The oil issue is going to wipe Israel out in ten years. There won’t be an Israel. My people will be raped and burned over. And I want to fight. I want to leave Westchester County and fight. I want to bear arms and defend Israel. How can I stand walking around the streets of this town, this loud confusing city, when there are issues so clear-cut?
Lardner: Shit, I don’t know. Why don’t you fly out tomorrow morning?
When Lardner came back home to the South, he invited me over for a drink in his backyard at Baton Rouge. There’d been a storm in the afternoon and it had made June seem like October all of a sudden when it left. Here he was asking me whether he should go on and finish med school or not, and then he played me the tape recordings.
“The only thing we’re sure about anymore is how much money we need,” said I. “That’s about as profound as I ever get. I’ve got a wife and two kids. Me and the wife drink a great deal in the evenings of Baton Rouge. We’re happy. The great questions seemed to have passed us by. I’m a radiologist. All day long I look for shadows. We’ve got two Chinese elm trees in our backyard and a fat calico named Sidney. Our children are beautiful and I’ve got stock in Shell.”
“You’re right,” said Lardner.
“Every man can be a king if he wants to,” I said. “That’s what my father said. He had harder times than me or you.”
“That’s true,” Lardner said.
The last thing I heard about Lardner, he was on a boat out of New Orleans headed for Rio. From there he took ship to Spain.
I don’t know another thing about him.
Escape to Newark
Carlos, please put me on the Significant Persons list, she said. We didn’t know you had any faith. You never acted like a Catholic. You swore and whored and were petty like the rest of us. Please, please let me and Robinson on your ship. Robinson is always religious when he has a hangover. I myself had a suspicion there were some old verities. We used to go down to the pond and throw bread at the ducks. They always reminded me of the old verities, so white and natural. Robinson even at his worst claimed he was wandering toward the ancient basics, but he was scared numb that he might have found them already. The point is, we always meant well, Carlos.
We loved kikes and niggers, she continued softly.
Perhaps we just had too much confidence, she sighed. The rest was almost inaudible.
We were a handsome couple and knew it, besides—she gasped—talented.
She had thick blond hair and soft-set eyes and had once been a female polo player of some note on the greenest and wealthiest fields of the Carolinas and New York State. Furthermore, she had a style of being stylish that was the envy of thousands of the envious. Carlos was one of those who had coveted her in years past. He quivered in his garage that she was here at last.
Tell me the story of your life, Carlos said sternly.
At heart he was jealous and nosy, and he bit himself inwardly for his poor motives. In her automobile’s windshield he caught a reflection of himself in shorts, bald head, hairy Catholic titties.
Carlos and this woman were the same age, had gone to the same prep school in Boston, both rubes together there. He was from Santa Fe and she was from Alaska. But she got rid of Alaska very early, homed in Florida for seven years, was fourteen and bored in Pennsylvania; over to Boston, thence to college and New York, where she found Robinson among the hundreds of New Yorkers who managed to make a great amount of money for doing almost nothing at all but was pretty as a god and possessed of a voice like a French horn, so that at crucial parties he could say practically nothing and leave the impression among the more musically eared that profundity of the eternal sort had passed near. She was caught.
Her dad was filthy rich from a corrupt deal on the Alaskan pipeline. Everything was guaranteed for a blast of manna and romance. So they married. Robinson was a very clean man and shocked by the filth of the assault she made on him. He developed hobbies to escape her. But when he got ready and had grown to her needs and pressed her, she turned into a sort of brilliant nag who deserted him and had developed her own expensive hobbies. So that one day a helicopter landed on the roof of the club and took her off to the Caribbean. He went to the bar and, among the kind, garrulous blacks in their livery, he became a dreamer on alcohol.
She was faithful to him except for one night with drugs in her, given to her by a friend she trusted in Rio. Oh, Rio, Rio, Rio. Women are patient and men are not. Women are softer and carouse like feathers against each other. She allowed herself to be taken by the featherly Vera and, as she recalled, reciprocated somewhat. Some days she blamed it on the drug and some days she blamed her past, other days she blamed her glands, and on horrible bright days she blamed herself entire.
While in the meantime Robinson drove a lonely, horny and faithful course around the main cities of the nation, sometimes visiting a library or an observatory, making money hand over fist. He did it with the only talent he had never cultivated, his honesty. They bought snowmobiles from his company in Kentucky, because by that time the weather had turned very weird. All the upper South was white and frigid.
She did not tell Carlos much of this. Her story was full of modest lies that proved she had not had an interesting life at all. The taste of Vera came into her mouth as she thinned her tale. She censored one after another the scenes of bliss that she had passed, sometimes in the company of Robinson and sometimes when not, feeling like a lone released atom of rapture in Key West, in Charleston, in New York, in the sky over Ontario in Winston’s glider: oh, the quiet, oh, the blue, Winston at the stick, handsome but not a lover, just the best friend she ever had. Oh, the thick green forest, the fierce rocks below, the eagle who sailed tandem six feet from their window and turned to look directly at her face, as much as saying he was their friend; she had never imagined birds smiled when they flew.
Say, she said, if I’m going on wit
h this, could I see the ship in the silo? Wouldn’t you let me?
Tell about your intimate life with Robinson, said Carlos, leading her around the garage.
The silo was about a hundred and fifty feet tall, about sixty feet around, bricks bright red from the rain and sleet, and there was something venerable about the thing even though it had been thrown up hastily around the ship only six months ago.
Perhaps because I want inside so much, she told herself. But there are limits to that too. Some things are worth perishing with as secrets.
I mean, the way you are together, this Carlos said, your spoiled little definition of love. It’s all been frightfully easy for you, hasn’t it? You copied my exam answers in prep school. I let you. You traded your beauty so openly I could kick myself, as if every one of your smiles were worth a dollar and a great deal of trouble. You used me as fodder for the ongoing of your beauty. But now we’re both forty-two, aren’t we?
Yes, Carlos. Would you let me see the ship?
Nobody can see the ship except the pilot and me. That is, of course, until we all get in it Saturday. But go on with your story. I’m amused by the trifling episodes you consider important. About your relationship with Robinson?
Wait. I’m not going to empty out myself for anybody about Robinson. That’s our secret, she said. If you want me to lower myself so I can get on the ship this way, I’m not going to. I’ll stay here and die with Robinson. Maybe we’ll screw each other to death on our bed. It has a brass bedstead and there’s a . . . the whole ceiling’s a mirror, Carlos. It’s like looking at your own happiness. There’s nothing sick about it. Robinson always said the only sure thing the gods gave us was each other, all our faces and armpits and little skin rashes, she said.
