Four Spirits (9 page)

“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” ALREADY, THEY WERE ALMOST
flying.

Pressing her hands tightly against his sides, Stella felt Darl's body contained between her palms. The wind of their speed rumpled her skirt, and she remembered the terrible wind buffeting the car on the way home from Helicon when the cyclone struck. She tried to stare over Darl's shoulder into the distance, but at the sides of her eyes the gray pavement slid by like an endless blade.

“To the cemetery,” he answered, turning his mouth so the airstream could fly his words to her turned ear.

Darl steered the Vespa north, toward Oak Hill, a vast cemetery deployed over several hills. In the distance, a large water tower topped the highest elevation. When Darl found the gates closed to traffic, he parked the scooter. They climbed over a low brick wall and pushed through a tall, thick hedge of holly.

Once inside, they walked the narrow, deserted streets winding among the communities of the dead. Humidity veiled the trees and graves, the slopes of grass, homogenizing all the features of the cemetery. Hosts of gauzy monuments, like solid ghosts, rose solemnly from the graves toward the faint moonlight and fainter starlight. Behind them, the holly hedge held the ordinary world at bay. As Darl and Stella walked deeper into the cemetery, the darkness increased. To Stella, the quiet seemed holy, as though the slight noise of their walking was a sacrilege.

But Stella's people were not here;they were all buried at Helicon.

“You're not afraid, are you?” Darl asked, and lightly put his arm over her shoulders while they walked. “I drove through here earlier today,” he went on. “I want to show you a special statue. It's deep in, over the next rise and down again.”

Hardly speaking to each other, they passed a grove of specimen holly trees and then walked on a footpath through an expanse of cedars. “The older graves are ahead, among the magnolias beyond the oaks,” Darl said.

Occasionally Stella saw a small grave marked with a lamb and assumed these were the graves of children. How quickly an aesthetic for monuments established itself. She disliked the heavy chunky monuments, especially if they were a dark, pretentious marble—the color of liver. She glanced up at the gibbous moon. The crowns of the elm trees spread like black lace against the deep blue satin sky.
Like fans,
she had said once to her cello teacher, Miss Ragrich, and the teacher had admired Stella's phrase.

But where were the right words to render what it is to be alive? To walk, to see? She wanted the words of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. She pitied the myriad dead who slept in their small houses underground. “Has death undone so many?” T. S. Eliot asked in a line from
The Waste Land.
She felt she shouldn't pass the graves so quickly.

When her foot crunched acorns underneath, the sound seemed wholesome. Occasionally she heard an unseen bird stirring on its night perch from within its shelter of thick oak leaves. Among the leaves, the bird made the sound of someone clearing his throat. While she walked, she closed her eyes and listened more intently.
What was an unseen world like? A world of the immaterial, of spirits?
Because they were walking rapidly, she could hear Darl's breathing and her own breathing like woodwinds sighing.

She imagined the feet of the birds sleeping in the trees, how the little hidden birds' feet were clasping their roosts, three toes curled in front, and from the back, one clamped over the twig. The birds were hot and restless.

“Let's slow down,” she said, and Darl immediately responded to her request.

Quickly, he turned and kissed her cheek, like a reward, but a kiss such as a friend might give.

She opened her eyes.

“Listen,” he said. “That's a horned owl.”

WHILE HE ADJUSTED HIS MAROON BOW TIE, TJ LISTENED
to the radio in the porters' room. He kept the volume low; all night it was something to come back to when he finished a porter duty. He stood still to listen: twenty-five hundred protestors had stormed the downtown business section. They replayed a recording of Shuttlesworth, on a different day: “We're making history in that we've literally filled the Birmingham jails. Bull Connor thought the jails were like hell to us, but you all have made a heaven out of the jail…. You are fighting for what your country is and what it will be.”

These were beautiful May days. All that colorful clothing on the children. Like confetti at a parade. Yes, TJ had marched down Twentieth Street after World War II. Hadn't seen much action in that war. But he'd never felt prouder before or after than marching down the middle of the street, home from France, paper bits drifting down from the open windows of the high-up floors of the Tutwiler. He hadn't
looked
up, but with his face steady and straight ahead, he'd
glanced
up, had seen the white hands tossing the paper out the open rectangles of the high windows. Before the parade, they had told the soldiers a five-star general would be on the reviewing balcony. TJ could feel the butt of his rifle cradled in his hand, the weight of the rifle, its stock and barrel leaning against his body. Blue and pink confetti drifting right in front of his nose and eyes.

Sitting in his porter's chair, TJ stooped down to polish the toes of his shoes with an old gray piece of terry cloth.

He'd fought hard in Korea. Cried there. More than once. Cried for a white
boy bleeding to death in his arms. Cried for himself, so cold and worn out. Not even after Korea, and he'd fought hard there, had he been so proud as when he came home from Europe, from World War II, marched Twentieth Street—a soldier-boy—no prouder day than that.

The all-night radio said Shuttlesworth had been injured in the demonstration today. Possibly his ribs were broken. Visitors to the hospital had been forbidden.

“THERE,” DARL SAID. HE STOPPED AND POINTED TOWARD A
crowd of tombstones.

Following the direction of his pale finger, Stella's gaze darted through a thicket of tall pointing columns, little Washington monuments, to the figure of an angel with flamboyant wings. As they walked along, Stella trailed her fingertips against the stones, some grainy, others smooth and cold. They were as different as the hands of strangers, but she must pay attention to Darl's angel.

With one knee down on a slab of marble, her wings stretched wide, as though she had landed only the moment before they arrived, the angel held a metal staff with a solid glass orb for its finial. The rusty rod passed through a neat hole in her marble hand. The figure's face was lifted upward and her eyes reviewed the night. A universe of energy and motion had come to a halt on the slab.

Darl said, “He's flown through a great distance, through a great darkness.”

“Or straight from the Renaissance,” she answered. “Traversed time instead of space?”

“Look at the eyes.”

They were angry, furious. The marble eyebrows were arched accusingly. The hair looked wild, like another set of wings still held open from the force of the long journey through space. The chin was set at a defiant tilt.

“He blames God,” Darl said. “He says, ‘Why must we be so small?' ”

“Who?”

“Angels and humans—why must we be so small?”

“Yes,” Stella answered, and she was afraid. When God's finger flipped over the car and his fist crushed her family, she should have been defiant. She should have been angry instead of weak and afraid. When she came home from the hospital to the aunts' house next door, she had hidden her face in the lap of her frail and crippled Aunt Pratt. But she had only been five years old.

“They shouldn't have all this clutter around him,” Darl said. “He ought to be in a public place so everybody could see him.”

“Clutter?”

“These conventional monuments.”

“These people have died, too.”

“Not gloriously,” he said, with contempt.

“How can you possibly tell?”

When Darl took her hand to lead her away, she felt annoyed with herself, letting him be so much in charge. The angel could have been deemed female as easily as male. She would think what she would think. She glanced back over her shoulder at the figure whose eyes were staring at the distant moon. That wild defiance—Darl had nothing in common with such a figure. Or had she misunderstood him?

“There's a pretty spot down this way,” he said. “Not so crowded. It's more natural.”

As soon as he said it, the night became peaceful. The unpleasant heat of her body dissipated. The air smelled good. Before her was the long graceful slope of the hill—just the natural earth, studded here and there with low rectangular monuments. These stones had the proportions of open books, wider than they were high, but their tops had a single graceful arch.

“This is more peaceful,” she said quietly. This was the right place for her to be—where death and its peace were acknowledged.
Let us be true to one another,
Matthew Arnold had written in “Dover Beach” as he listened to the sobbing of the sea. So might she say to Darl into the silence of this place.

But there was no place on earth as peaceful as the cemetery at Helicon where her family lay: one headstone bearing the word
Silver,
with each of their four names incised lower down. When her time came, would she want to be laid down beside them?

Darl gestured at the gravestones on the slope. “Which one would you choose to have?” he asked, and suddenly the night went spooky. He became opaque as stone.

“None,” she said angrily. “I choose to stay above ground for quite a while longer.”

They walked on silently. She felt outraged by his comment. She thought but did not say,
You're not much acquainted with death. You'd fight it, if you were.

“ ‘No man knoweth, the day or the hour,' ” she quoted.
But had she embraced life?

“I believe that's in reference to the Second Coming,” he said quietly.

She knew he was right. The statement was about Jesus, but it might as well be about human life and when it would end. She didn't know what to say to him anymore. She felt as though her face had been rubbed in death.

Finally he said, “You can hear the city. Even in here.”

And her attention focused on the sound of a car horn, then a sputtering motor baffled by acres of leafy trees and the prickly wall of evergreen holly leaves. Something gigantic settled in the night—a sound from the steel mills, muffled by the distance and the slopes of the cemetery but surely of deafening volume to anyone close by. She imagined men near the furnace; stripped to the waist, their bodies glistened with sweat in the red glow. They would mostly be black men, she knew. Then Stella noticed Darl and she were holding hands again, but she couldn't have said when he took her hand. She could love him; yes, she could.

Far away on the crest of a distant hill of the cemetery, she saw two people walking. They were dark figures silhouetted with clear edges, and they too were holding hands. It was a Negro couple, she could tell by the girl's hair, sticking up in pigtails. And she wore a much-too-large jacket, which ballooned around her body. His jacket probably. He was in short sleeves. She wouldn't have seen them except they were silhouetted by the backdrop of sky.

“Another couple,” Darl said.

Couple.
She loved the word, squeezed his hand, hoped he meant it. She craved the connection implicit in
couple.

Darl stopped at the lip of a drop-off. They stood near the crown of a magnolia tree that had its base far below. The air was perfumed with the redolence of the large blossoms, big as two hands cupped together.

“It's gorgeous,” she said.

“We can go down to it. Here's a dry creek bed.”

He stepped down onto some rocks. The descent was steep at first. Then the stepping-stone rocks gave way to a rocky creek bed, a tilted, grooved surface.

“Does it ever flow?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” he said. “But look at the sycamores. They may have their roots in underground moisture.”

Over their heads, the sycamores from both sides laced their thick arms into an arch. The creek bed bent toward the magnolia and gave way to grass. They crossed a grassy place with no graves, a small meadow lying in the redolence of the beautifully symmetrical, huge magnolia. Covered with large white blossoms, the tree luxuriated in itself. Each blossom glowed, as though the tree were bedecked with lamps. Low-hanging branches hemmed in a profound darkness in the tree's interior. Stella certainly didn't want to go in there. She knew the bare-earth dankness under magnolia trees. Because the roots would be partially exposed, one could no more lounge there than on a bone heap.

Darl led her to the lush grass a short distance beyond the tree.

“It's a perfect specimen of a tree,” Stella said.

“There's nothing big growing close enough to block its sun,” Darl answered. “It faces south. The north side isn't so perfect because of the hill. Let's sit down.”

Only then did Stella notice that he had brought a large, rolled-up towel along. Yes, she had seen him take it out of the side pocket of the Vespa. He spread the white towel on the grass.

“Do you want me to break you off a blossom?”

“I like them on the tree.” She drew the aroma through her nostrils. So soapy. Decadent.

He flared his hand at the waiting towel, and they sat side by side on the rectangle. Little sticks pressed against her through the terry cloth and through the fabric of her checked dress, through her nylon slip, her cotton panties.

Darl moved close to her and positioned his arm diagonally for her to lean her back against. He quickly kissed her on the cheek again.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“Yes.”