A Shout in the Ruins Page 6

  Rawls stiffened as Levallois rose from the porch steps.

  “You can’t beat the pride out of a boy like this. It would be a sin. Think of what he could do when properly motivated.” He was talking to Bob, but it was not lost on Rawls that he was Levallois’s true intended audience. “I think we’ve gotten into a bad habit. And when I say ‘we’ I mean all of us southern men, myself included. We might turn course right here and now. Set things straight for a hundred years more.” He was pacing now, leaning into every word as if it came to him through a revelation. “The Yanks look down on us from amongst their tangle of machinery, thinking we treat the whole world like a barnyard, thinking we don’t know a thing about enterprise and progress. And maybe they’ve been right. Don’t you remember that Gabriel nigger plotting murder in Henrico? It wasn’t so long ago. And Nat Turner chopping up white women and babies down in Southampton?”

  “Come on now, Mr. Levallois,” Sheriff Rivers interrupted, “we can’t have rebellion without something being done about it.”

  “Too true, Pete,” Levallois said. “When I was ten years old I saw a piece of Turner hanging from a lamppost. Could have been a pork shoulder, way it was up there swinging. What I mean is that the Yanks don’t destroy a machine that malfunctions if it can be repaired, do they? Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve been to New York City, and I’ve never seen them chop up a cotton gin and hang bits of it from a lamppost.” He walked over to Rawls, grabbed him by the shoulders, and stood him up. Rawls did not falter. Levallois whispered in his ear, “How much starch you think I got, boy?”

  “Plenty. I know what you are,” said Rawls.

  “Good,” he said. Levallois turned to Bob and said, “I think this boy can be fixed. But we’ve got to figure out the source of his malfunction.”

  “That’d be a start, I guess,” said Bob.

  “Who taught you your manners, Bob?”

  “My manners?”

  “Yes, Bob. Your place, your way of being in the world. How about you, Sheriff? Mr. Baker?”

  “I’d say my momma,” said Wilson Baker.

  Rawls sat back down without asking permission. A breeze still blew through the clearing, cold and constant. He caught the sheriff’s scent. Bad breath and liquor sweat. The stink of soiled clothes. He felt the air touch every pore on his body. He knew what was coming. Thoughts of Nurse filled his head. His mother saying it would be a hard day today, and a hard one tomorrow. It was always going to end this way. An appointment was being kept that he had not known about, but it was being kept. His breath caught in his chest. His heart fluttered like a shot dove. Am I who I thought I was, or will I cower like the rest?

  “That’s what I would have said, Mr. Baker. Your mother made you the way you are. The way a machine might make an object useful to the world?”

  “I never thought of it like that, but I suppose that’s true.”

  “And if a machine is making defective objects, we might just say the damage could be irreparable.”

  “I suppose we might.”

  “Young Rawls here, he’s not an old machine. He’s got steam in his boiler for days. But his momma? Maybe there’s something wrong with her if he keeps acting like this. Maybe she just can’t raise a child up. And Bob, you got her tending to young Emily there. Rawls, you think your master’s going to let your momma tend to his daughter when she’s liable to malfunction? I think we ought to take her apart and see if we can figure the problem. One little bit at a time. Yes, sir, when an old machine breaks down you have got to take it apart. You might not get it back together properly, but you’ve got to try. Unless we’re wrong about her. Unless you mean to tell me she raised her child right.”

  Rawls began to cry noiselessly. He felt a rage unlike any he had ever felt. He figured he could get his hands on one, tied up or not. The sheriff. Maybe choke the life out of him before the others killed him. What was the point of all this? Each breath. Each bruise and cut. Each irreparable wound to his heart. His momma would understand if he went for one, he thought. If I see her in the by-and-by, she’d understand.

  None of the other men resisted Levallois’s escalation, not even the sheriff, who was as malleable in the face of real authority as a dog trained on beef liver.

  “Or maybe there’s another way,” said Levallois. The world is changing, he thought. And though he was willing to admit it more quickly than most, his real gift was in recognizing that people were not changing with it. Stone gave way to bronze. The wagon gives way to the railway car. But people are forever fixed in their desires. One way or another, we will all have to pay for what we want. “Bob,” he said, and then paused as if to indicate the intensity of his concentration, “I’ll give you double what you paid for the pair.”

  Later that day Levallois paid Bob Reid a little less than fourteen hundred dollars for the papers on Rawls, Aurelia, and the big Percheron Emily had ridden with them in the night. That sum was a thousand dollars more than Aurelia’s price, then pregnant with Rawls, when she was bought from Lumpkin’s almost twenty years before. When they arrived at Beauvais that evening, Levallois told Rawls what was expected of him and what he could expect in return. “I’m a businessman, after all, Rawls,” he said. “And life is a series of bargains.” This was a few weeks before April of 1861. War was coming. Levallois counted back the years in his mind, figuring out the interest and appreciation on his new assets. He was pleased. Accounting for inflation, he damn near got the horse for free.

  FOUR

  GEORGE STOOD IN a gravel parking lot in front of a diner waiting for the hostess to finish the fifth Pall Mall she’d smoked in the ten minutes before 6:00 a.m. arrived. She looked at her watch, tossed her smoke on the asphalt, rubbed it out with the toe of her baby-doll pump, and gave him a nod to follow her inside. The cooks had come in the back way, he guessed, and they oiled up and scraped the flattop, cracked a few eggs, and settled into their prep work. Two waitresses followed after them, one of whom was the girl’s mother, George would discover later, and they sat down at the counter rolling silverware in napkins.

  The girl with the Pall Malls sized him up for a minute, reached some kind of decision, and led him to a booth in the back. They passed a sign on their way to the table that read CROATAN. George looked around the restaurant when he sat down and saw another sign that read COLORED more or less on the other side of the diner from where he’d been seated by the girl. He saw no sign for whites. “What’s with the signs?” he asked the girl.

  “Law says we got to have separate sections for white folks, Indians, and black folks,” she said.

  “Where’s the white section?”

  “Well, it’s mostly Croatan around these parts. Black folks, too. But white folks?” She laughed. “They don’t come in here.” He might as well have asked where the pope of Rome sat.

  She walked over to a chromed-out Seabird jukebox in the corner. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and covered the record case. She dropped in three nickels, punched the keys, and three very fine country-and-western songs filled up the nearly empty diner. The oldest waitress brought him coffee. She had her gray hair tied in a long plait with a piece of ribbon. George asked her about the song that had just started playing. He couldn’t identify one of the instruments. She told him it was Webb Pierce singing “Slowly,” that the strange bending notes were made on a newfangled guitar called a pedal steel, and that she had developed this expert knowledge because the hostess, her daughter Lottie, had played it incessantly every time she’d had a shift since March. George was not much for Victrolas or radios. He didn’t dislike them, but throughout most of his time on earth music was a temporary interruption, an aspect of life in which choice remained a factor. Over the last twenty or thirty years he sometimes felt as though he’d entered into a new category of wilderness, in that the world continued to indifferently add to the list of things he could not control, until even a private thought had to fight for space against the noise and neon. For his seventieth birthday his wife had surprised
him with a Lincoln-Zephyr sedan that came with a Motorola radio, and their last argument before she died had been about him slapping her hand away from the dial because he would not let her turn it on.

  George pulled out The Negro Travelers’ Green Book from his small suitcase and set it on the Formica table under the window next to the salt and pepper shakers. He then took out the other book he’d brought with him. It was a copy of the diary of William Byrd II of Westover, which George found useful mostly for the way its weight functioned as a preservative for his oldest possession, the aforementioned note requesting that whoever might find the boy he had once been look after him. It was a fragile thing, the note, both as a physical object barely resisting the corrosive effect of time and in the desperation implicit in the fact of its having been written at all. With a shaking hand someone had scrawled out the following: 1866. My name is George. I’m nearly three years old. Look after me. I now belong to you. Unlike the book itself, George hoped to put the note to use, though he remained unsure of how he might do so.

  Henry Levy the second, who he had been quite friendly with, had given the book to him in the forties, after mistaking George’s ceaseless curiosity about his own past for a wider interest in the history of Virginia, and especially that concerning the linkage between it and North Carolina. George had thanked him very kindly for the gift, appreciating his friend’s gesture very much, but he had a deeply ingrained skepticism toward history, given that very little of it that he encountered reflected the singular experience of passing through it. He much preferred the adventures of Dumas, though he was far too much a gentleman to say so to Henry.

  Lottie moved to a seat at the end of the counter close to George. Her mother brought out a plate and set it next to the book. George ate slowly. He stared out the big plate windows into the sunny morning. His desire to recall his draw to the place was matched by his inability to do so. How do you begin to search for something lost when you don’t know what it is that’s missing? He now found himself in a roadside diner, another forlorn country song playing thinly in the air, uncertain of what, exactly, he was supposed to do next.

  “What’s that book?” asked Lottie.

  “Nothing much,” George said.

  “That’s a lot of book for nothing much,” she said, snubbing out her cigarette.

  “That’s why it’s useful. Holds this note down so I don’t lose it.”

  “What’s the note, then, if you don’t mind me asking?” She hopped down off the stool and slid into the bench opposite George.

  “Old-man stuff, I guess,” he said. He passed it over to her.

  She held it carefully. “Who’s George?” she asked.

  “That’d be me.”

  She looked incredulous. “Eighteen sixty-six? Can’t be. Can it?”

  “You never met an old man before?”

  “Well, sure I have. It’s just that, and I don’t mean to be rude, mister, but 1866 might as well be feudal England, it seems so long ago.”

  George laughed. “You ain’t wrong about how long ago it seems.”

  “So that’d make you, what, ninety-two or ninety-three years old?”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “Well, when’s your birthday?”

  “I don’t rightly know. That note you’re holding is all I know about where I come from, excepting I somehow ended up around these parts as a boy.”

  “You don’t recall your people?” Lottie asked.

  Those moments he was able to recall from his life were fleeting and episodic. They seemed unconnected, as if they had happened to someone else, though he sometimes imagined that by looking back he could impose some order on them. Know thyself, he’d heard a million times. Yes. Good luck with that.

  The diary of William Byrd II of Westover still sat open on the table between them, though they never acknowledged it, and it is doubtful either of them bothered to read the passage it lay open to, which was as follows:

  November 13, 1710. I rose at 7 o’clock and said a short prayer. Then I took a little walk about the plantation. Colonel Digges sent for a white negro for us to see who except the color was featured like other negroes. She told us that in her country, which is called Aboh near Calabar, there were many whites as well as blacks. Yesterday Mr. Ingles had a child burnt to death. We went to the capitol and stayed there about two hours and then I went and dined with the Governor where I ate roast mutton. I had a letter from home which told me all was well except a negro woman who ran away and was found dead. I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty.

  * * *

  He did remember voices in the woods, a noise like rolls of thunder coming sharply and in quick succession. There were cries of pain, too, and a man who only called him “friend” tucking him papooselike into a great gray overcoat against the cold. The whole world smelled like burned powder, a scent that would subsequently send him reeling into the past toward that obscure moment for the rest of his life, and he would have thought that the noise had somehow strangely struck him blind, were it not for the music of the horses’ hooves that led them into thin blue winter light and gave him back his vision, where he saw that he was among six riders emerging from a pall of morning fog and smoking guns, headed toward a world that seemed unfit for human habitation.

  They passed no cities and no towns. The southern coastal plains were deep in the bleakness of midwinter. The harvest had long since come and gone on all the farms. Stubs of corn and bare dirt were all that remained to break up the ocean of loblolly and longleaf pines through which they rode, noiseless now, without speech or celebration, and the glide of the horses’ hooves through the fallen needles sent the young George into a deep, untroubled sleep.

  When he woke he peered out of a gap between two of the many dull brass buttons on the man’s wool coat. Had he been old enough to know his letters, he might have seen that the buttons were embossed with CSA, though it is unlikely that such knowledge would have meant that much to him. George was cradled inside the coat, the man’s left arm supporting his back with his right hand on the reins. He rode tall in the saddle, proudly even, and did not seem bothered at all by the dark red stain on his shoulder that spread ever so slightly with each passing minute. A long time spent in this quiet. Day became night and the air grew colder. The man never looked at George, though from time to time he made a little hup sound and would lift him up a bit so as to make him more comfortable in his curious travel arrangements.

  To the child in his coat, it might have seemed as though they had ridden for a thousand years, but Edgar Seldom figured they’d made it more like fifty miles in the fifteen hours since they shot it out with a band of unreformed Confederates roaming the countryside around Great Dismal above the border in Virginia. Edgar shivered at the cold, and at the scene from which they’d plucked the terrified child the day before. The vision of the strange young man, the blood-spattered glasses that he wore, persisted in his mind. How they had found the whole band dancing and whooping over those poor souls. The savagery done to the bodies. When the young man turned a pistol toward him, he had said, “What kind of look is that you giving me, mister?”

  “War’s been over damn near a year, now,” Edgar replied. “You got no cause to do these folks like this.”

  The young man had laughed then, and Edgar nearly lost himself in the black void of the pistol’s barrel, like a traveler searching for Polaris on a night without stars. But Edgar was alive still, despite his wound, and that little bastard wasn’t.

  He whistled once, and the group of riders slowed, then stopped. That night they set up camp to ride out the rest of winter in the deep woods outside of Edenton. Years had passed since they had been in one spot for more than a week. But it was a new year and they now had a three-year-old boy to watch over, according to the note pinned to his britches when they’d found him. They lit no fire and made no sound at first. The warm blanket into which young George was wrapped and tucked away for sleep that night had been
removed from beneath his Confederate colonel’s saddle by Edgar at a place in Virginia called Cedar Mountain a few years earlier. As his cousin Charlie wrapped the wound left in his shoulder by the .36 Navy Colt he’d been shot with the day before, Edgar pondered the ways in which this little one’s presence might alter their admittedly haphazard undertaking. He, of course, knew by now that there was a price on each of their heads, and that his head, apparently, had the highest value; they’d seen the wanted posters, and had read the earnest editorials calling for the end, by any means, of what was by then being referred to as “the Seldom Brothers’ Rebellion,” “the Croatan Rampage,” or “Edgar’s Revenge.”

  It seemed to Edgar that they were bound to hang. Though he was in no hurry for that day to come, whenever he reached into his pocket and reread the letter he’d received from his young wife before the fight at Cedar Mountain, he could feel no reason for delay. A line here or a line there, reading We think we could not suffer more and then we do, they have herded all our hogs onto their land and called us thieves, torches circle the house at night. Dearest Edgar, fear has become the chief attribute of our lives.

  He’d shown the letter to his colonel, and after some platitudes on sacrifice the man said that Edgar was needed for the greater good, and that if he released every man missed by his family there would be no one left to fight the Yankees. Edgar replied that he didn’t much care about the Yankees, since they weren’t the ones causing trouble for his wife. The officer said, “I would advise you against doing anything rash.”

  When the fight started the next day, he shot the horse out from under his colonel, took the man’s saddle blanket and pair of LeMat pistols while he was still trapped under the dying horse, and walked down the mountain to begin his journey home. A month later he arrived at the house of ash that had replaced his own along the Lumber River in Robeson County. The fields burned. The hogpen posts ripped up out of the ground and used to make the fire in the house burn hotter. No one would say where his wife had gone, or if she’d made it out at all. Most of his kin settled in a wide orbit around his grief, the way one gives a shot buck time to either get up again or die. The last thing anyone wanted to do was walk up on him while he was making up his mind, knowing as they did that there’s no better way than that to get the antlers. Only his young brothers, barely teenage, and two cousins were bold enough to speak to him through the trembling silence he pushed out toward the world.