A Shout in the Ruins Read online

  He saw her again the night he left Aurelia sleeping under the last quarter of the moon and on many nights after they would meet in that patch of pines, sitting off on their own a little apart from the prayer meeting. Some nights they would have the woods to themselves and it would seem the whole world had shrunk down to a few acres of loblolly beneath the breezy midnight stars. He learned they called her Nurse on account of her wet-nursing her master’s babies, all nine of which would go on to reach adulthood. “You don’t want to get a proper name?” he asked her. To which she replied that she had her letters and had come to read about other women with her name and that it suited her just fine. “And, Rawls,” she said, “where’d you get that name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Along with her letters she had learned a fair bit of doctoring. Not just midwifery, in which she was peerless even at that age, but also the mending of bones and cuts and the treatment of all manner of interior afflictions which she’d gathered by tending to her owner’s mules and horses. One night they took a walk together and before they’d gone far she pulled at Rawls’s elbow to stop him. “Why do you have a gait like a hobbled dog?”

  They were near a clearing then, and the clearing was dotted with cedar as it sloped toward a pond and creek that fed the river. They sat down in a spot of low grass and he took off his hand-me-down moccasins. Nurse looked down at his feet. The moon was out, but clouds passed beneath it, turning the gold grass white and the cedars into thin shadows. Rawls was missing the big toe on both of his feet. The soles were rough and calloused and reached up toward the uneven scarring where the toes had been. “Runner,” he said.

  “Who done this to you?”

  “Old man who owned us before.”

  “Does it still pain you?”

  Rawls whistled and smiled. “Not like it once did. I get sore a bit from walking hinky. The old man did it hisself. He caught me sneaking past the big house and knocked me on my backside. Dragged me to a snake fence, tied my feet to the top rail, stood on my shoulders, and gave ’em a whack with a hatchet.”

  Nurse sighed and shook her head. “What were you running for?”

  “You got to ask? I was running to get gone.”

  They had been still and quiet long enough that the common noises of the night returned. The nightjar’s solemn whistle. A fox scream in the distance. The world painted in shades of gray and lit solely by reflection.

  “It hurt like hell at the time,” said Rawls. “I was such a little feller he had to lift me off the ground partways to get my feet tied to the rail. Left me hanging upside down till the next day.”

  Nurse reached out and touched his ankle. Massaged up toward his calf and down again. “But you had your momma with you.”

  “Don’t preach.”

  “And now?” Nurse asked. “You ain’t never worried she’ll catch what’s meant for you?”

  “Not likely. Master Bob don’t have the stomach for it. He puts on like he does sometimes, just for show. But I see these white folks coming. They never see me, but I can figure ’em pretty good now. ’Sides, my momma knows my nature. And she knows any one of us might catch what’s meant for another.”

  “You wouldn’t miss her if something happened?” Nurse asked.

  “Course I would.” He paused, searching for what seemed like an impossible arrangement of words. He said, “I been with her my whole life and I already miss her. I missed her that whole time. I’m missing her right at this moment.”

  “I never had my momma with me that I recall. Don’t know her name. Don’t know if I favor her.”

  “I ain’t saying it’s the same, but I missed your momma before I heard you say that. Missed her like my own. Missed her like I’m missing you right now.”

  He lay out in the grass and propped himself up on his elbows. He heard the creek go by and followed it in his mind. Down into the James. Past the fall line. Past the docks and beyond the place of sighs at Lumpkin’s slave jail. Out into wide water. Brackish and flat and a mile across. Out into the bay until its blue chop became the ocean, where it left behind the cypresses and cattails, and the land remained only as a misremembered dream.

  “I understand, Rawls. I do. And I miss you, too.”

  Nurse kissed him. Pushed his body deep into the grass. The woods grew quiet again on their behalf. Rawls decided he loved Nurse. And that perhaps his love for her was the thing that could not be taken from him. But he would not see her again for a good long while.

  In the days and nights that followed his last meeting with Nurse, he waited for her in the loblolly stand. He waited every night for a month, but she did not come. He’d heard the prayer meetings were outlawed by Nurse’s master, that some incident at the soybean plantation caused the man to go mad. Talk that he had shut off his little kingdom from the rest of the world abounded. Rawls did not dare cross its border at first. Instead he spent his days working tirelessly for Mr. Bob, chopping at wood, mending far fences, only to again sneak out of his mother’s cabin at night. He fell into a fevered state. He moved through nights so dark he’d have sworn he’d been struck blind. On others he ran as best he could between degrees of deeper shadow cast by the bright moon. His mind trembled with exhaustion. Nurse filled his thoughts until the boundaries between dream and wakefulness dissolved. The noise of his strange gait through the understory became a regularity in the dark woods.

  He held out hope that she’d been sold nearby. He was rushed out of slave quarters on plantations from the river damn near down to Amelia County in his search for her, the whispers thrown behind him saying, “Get back where you belong before you get somebody dead!” And still he searched. He searched until he wondered if he himself might not be dead, if he had not fallen under some curse or conjuration through which Nurse had been but a spirit devised to torture him with her abandonment. He returned to places he had been before, now covered in snow, and again in spring as the dead nettle pushed its purple flowers out into the cool morning air.

  At last he broke. He gathered his strength against rumor and uncertainty and finally made his way west toward whatever might await him beyond the patch of pines. He snuck up on an old man curled in his blanket on the floor of a cabin just within the boundary of the soybean plantation. Torches bobbed at the edges of the wide fields. Rawls stuck his head through the unglazed window and saw white hair and a white beard and heard the steady breath of sleep. He went through the front door and knelt in the hard-packed dirt next to the old man. With one hand Rawls gently covered the old man’s mouth. The breath was warm and it filled his cupped palm. The old man’s hands were tucked up under his beard where they held the patchwork blanket beneath his chin. Rawls clasped his other hand around the old man’s knuckles and began to gently wake him, whispering, “Granddad. Old Granddad.”

  The old man woke with a start. He opened his rheumy eyes and rubbed at them, saying, “Who is this here? What do you want? My time come?” The old man sat up and looked Rawls over. “You ain’t no apparition. What are you doing in my cabin?”

  “I’ve been searching after Nurse, Granddad. You know her? Prettiest girl you ever seen. Most times wore a kind of blue calico wrap over her hair.”

  “I hardly know pretty these days, son,” he said. Granddad leaned over to a small cedar box, pulled out a tallow candle and a match, and lit it. “What you hunting her for anyhow?”

  Rawls could see up and down the old man’s arms. They were lined with mark after mark of whip and brine, a topography of the passage of time and pain one on top of the other, a map in miniature of ridgeline and ravine going up into his shirtsleeves in an uninterrupted pattern.

  “I need her,” Rawls said.

  “You aim to do her harm?”

  “Naw, Granddad,” he said. “I love her.”

  The old man looked disappointed. “No place for love in this world, son.”

  “I’ll make a place. Don’t you worry. Where is she?”

  “This world’s gonna break your damn heart, boy.”
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  “It’s been broke already.”

  The old man sighed. “I seen her sent off ’cross the river. I heard she gone to Lumpkin’s Jail. Gone straight to the Devil’s Half Acre.”

  The thought of the place knocked him back. “It ain’t true,” Rawls said angrily. He felt his pulse throbbing under his eyes, wanted to grab out for something to steady him, but there was just the old man’s shoulder, which flagged and trembled under his weight. “It ain’t true,” he said again.

  The old man reached out and grabbed both of Rawls’s hands, holding them gently but firmly as he told him how his mistress had been thrown from her horse the previous fall, just before the prayer meetings were shut down, and that she was found by Nurse laid out under a post oak with her arms and legs looking crooked as the tree’s tangle of limbs above her. The horse that threw her stamping nearby through the orange blaze of fallen leaves. Its snorting and the wind the only sounds besides Nurse hollering for help. Nurse tended to her night and day. Her master even kept the doctor away, so much did he trust Nurse with his wife’s care. But a week later mistress died, and master caught a hatred for Nurse on account of her not saving his wife, and he took to beating her for sport, day after day and week after week. It got so bad that the other slaves begged him to show Nurse mercy, till some of them started to get beatings of their own when they did. They did not see her anymore as winter came. They no longer heard her cry out at night. It was assumed that Nurse was dead. Not long after, in the depth of winter, the river froze solid. Their master took it as a bad omen and sold Nurse off to Robert Lumpkin, thinking her absence would rid him of his tribulations. But his hatred for her burned still. And while he had been unable to cleanse his thoughts of Nurse, his hatred had been transformed into a pleasurable speculation in which he would imagine Nurse’s life as it might be at Lumpkin’s Jail, where the fire of hatred and cruelty never so much as flagged to ember. The last the old man saw of Nurse was her lying motionless in the back of a cart as one of the drivers took the cart gingerly onto the ice, and the wheels of the cart rolled smoothly across. “Son,” he said to Rawls, “that girl is gone. If she ain’t sold down the river yet, I doubt she’d know you if you found her.”

  On that same night in the early spring of 1861, Emily Reid, now almost fourteen years old, was troubled by dreams. She’d tossed in her quilt since nightfall, but there had been nothing overtly terrifying in her visions that she could recall on waking. No monsters. No ghosts. Just one scene over and over, clearer than any vision her cloudy eyes would allow her during the day, a dream in which she stood in a sun-splashed upland field watching Champion’s ticked coat of brown and white dart in and out of the tall grass as the mechanical whir of what seemed to be a million cicadas drummed the air.

  When she woke she paced her room. She put a candle on her windowsill and looked out. Champion was awake under the big sycamore in the yard. The dog had her haunches up behind her and began to bark, first in a series of low and incomplete grumbles, then finally letting go full throated until Emily worried her agitation might break the glass in the windows. She blew out the candle, shuffled quietly downstairs, and went into the yard. “Hush, girl,” she said. The moon was on the wane but still bright and the dog bounded crazily at the end of the rope they leashed her with at night. “Hush, Champion. Please, girl. You’re gonna wake the dead out here.”

  By then her parents were roused by the commotion. Her mother hollered at Emily from her window to get inside while Bob sat on the porch and put his boots on.

  “You hear your mother calling you, girl? It’s past midnight.”

  “But Champion’s all riled up, Papa.”

  Bob looked to the edge of the woods that seemed to house the source of Champion’s discontentment. No lights to be seen from Aurelia’s cabin deeper in the trees behind the mule pen. He took the rope and lifted its loop off the post it had been tied to. He seemed to forget about Emily and let the dog off her leash.

  She bounded out into the woods. When they caught up to her a few minutes later she was stopped, almost pointing, but not quite, into a clearing where the Reids’ property abutted Beauvais Plantation. Aurelia came up behind them. Rawls did not know it, but whenever he left the cabin at night, Aurelia woke and nervously waited for his return.

  She hoped to intervene. “Please, Master Reid, he’s just a boy.”

  Bob looked at Emily. Her strange eyes luminous in the shadows cinched like baling twine around the woods. Bob had raised his daughter no different than if she’d been a son. She would be his only child, as the doctors said with certainty that Lucy’s womb was shot, and so his expectations of her were different than if she’d been some other man’s daughter. “Listen close,” he said to Emily. “Go get my pistol and shotgun.”

  Aurelia wailed feebly. “Master Reid, why do you need your guns? He probably just gone off to see this young thing he got an affinity for.”

  “Emily, go,” he said. And then to Aurelia, punctuating his annoyance with a jab at the tender flesh where Aurelia’s collarbones met, “I don’t give a dusty fuck why he ran off, Aurelia. And you can thank John Brown and the rest of abolitiondom for me taking my guns. Now go up to the house with Miss Lucy till I get this sorted.” He paused, and said begrudgingly as he turned away from her, “I don’t aim to harm him if he’ll let me not.”

  TWO

  ON THE LAST Monday morning of his life, George Seldom took a bath, shaved with a new razor bought from Levy’s store the day before, dressed in jeans, a denim shirt, and a ratty buckskin coat he’d had for as long as he could remember. By 9:00 a.m. he’d made a cup of coffee and found himself on his front porch staring into an abyss.

  A week earlier, on an unusually hot day in June of 1956, a crew of surveyors from the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike Authority joined a crew of workers from the State Highway Department at the intersection of St. Peter and Baker Streets in the Jackson Ward neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. A group of dignitaries and press walked north up St. Peter Street to join them. Their collective presence, it was noted by many of the local residents watching this spectacle take place, had increased the number of white folks in the neighborhood by a rather significant margin. When the men met at the intersection they shook hands and posed for pictures. A local assemblyman and member of Senator Harry Flood Byrd’s organization made a great show of swinging a ceremonial pickax into the dirt street where the excavations were to begin.

  Construction commenced on that section of the interstate highway through Richmond by pulling the old roads up, brick by brick where there was brick, one cobblestone at a time where there was cobble, and shovelful after shovelful of dirt everywhere else. And then they’d bring the houses down, houses that for a long time had kept the disappearing streets in shadow. Some of George’s neighbors lined the sidewalks, crossing their arms and grieving for the demolition of the last of those beautiful old Federal houses, which it seemed still stood only out of sheer orneriness until the cranes dropped heavily onto their metal roofs, collapsing them forever. From time to time he could see the rise and fall of the yellow jaws of the excavator when it appeared above the lip of the void to leave yet another piece of the past in a haphazard heap. Brick, wood, and cobble intermixed in a half-dozen piles. There had once been a row of houses opposite his own, a block to the east of where the excavations had begun, and now, in their place, only the air remained. His eyesight, not what it once was, could still make out a pattern on the far wall of the excavated earth: first soil, then clay, then down into the rotten rock into which they’d cut and dug, and farther down the sparkle of some firmer stone where the morning sun reached in and cast out the last of the early shadows.

  Beyond the scar, into which a mixer had begun depositing a steady stream of aggregate and water, George watched a group of children playing in the abandoned bed of a rusted-out Ford truck. He could hear their voices, shrill and joyful, as they called out to stake their claim to the prize, ownership of the view of the assembled workers that the ru
sted roofline of the truck provided, and finally one boy, about ten years old, his shirtless chest puffed out and black as iron, swept away his adversaries with a beat-up push broom, declared his victory and dominion over this small stretch of the world in words that lost their shape and form by the time they got to George, but not their meaning.

  He sat down on the bench in front of his parlor window and noticed that the newest of the patches on his coat had lost its stitching. It took a good long while for leather to wear out, he thought, this skin like any other, and he made a note to walk over to Levy’s store to get a needle and thread to mend it. As he surveyed the scene before him, the shuffle and hum of what he thought were the last of the changes he might see, he decided that today would be as good a day as any other. He’d had a long life, somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety years, he guessed, and full enough of the things he thought would qualify to make it good. He’d been married twice, in love once, and, though childless from both, could say with certainty that he had had a place in this world, despite the fact that the ground we use to mark those places always seems to shift beneath us.

  Around noon on that day in June, George walked the three blocks over to Mr. Levy’s store on Brook and Marshall. He was surprised to see that not much more than the counter remained inside. The balance of the inventory sat in orderly stacks on the herringbone brick of the sidewalk, through which a few yellow dandelions had made their way, though the bell still dinged reliably as George opened the door and went inside. Mr. Levy looked up from the counter at its sound and walked around to greet him.