Jordan County (15 page)

For one thing, there had been a war and a way of life that was lost when the war was lost. The men who had fought in it were veterans now. They sat on benches at the depot, sunning themselves and whittling while they watched the trains come in, but on holidays they donned uniforms and staged parades, the younger ones sucking their stomachs in and skipping to keep step, the older ones already hobbling on canes. It was hard to connect their rheumy eyes and empty faces with the shot-torn flags and the tumult, yet sometimes when the carriage was held up at the crossing he would hear them, and the names of the battles came through the drone of talk — Manassas, Shiloh, Gaines Mill, Malvern Hill, Sharpsburg, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, Murphreesboro, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, The Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, Brice’s Crossroads, Kennesaw Mountain, Big Shanty, Atlanta, Petersburg, Spring Hill, Franklin, Nashville, Five Forks, Appomattox: he heard them all — the Biblical, Indian, English names of cities and hamlets and creeks and crossroads throughout the South, for the most part unimportant in themselves until the day when the armies came together, more or less by accident, to give the scattered names a permanence and to settle what manner of life Hector Sturgis, for one, was to grow up under.

Three-fifths of the population of Jordan County, of which Bristol was the county seat, were Negro. Twenty years ago they were slaves. Ten years ago they had held the most important public offices, sheriffs, judges, senators; “Bottom rail on top!” they cried. But there had been some sort of revolution-in-reverse (something about night riders and smut ballots; nobody spoke of it now, however, not even in whispers; evidently there had been some necessary acts of shamefulness better left unmentioned) and now the bottom rail was back on bottom. They lived apart, in separate sections of the town, one called Lick Skillet, the other Ram Cat, and on weekdays that was where you saw them, the women in shifts or flour-sacking dresses and headrags, the men in ragged overalls, sitting on their porches in split-bottom chairs. But Saturdays they came downtown and that was a sight to see, the women in gored skirts and bright red shirtwaists, carrying india-rubber sponges to sop their faces, and the men in swallowtail coats and button shoes, sporting horseshoe tie pins and big-link watch chains. No matter where you saw them, though, blinking in the sunlight on their porches or standing on the boardwalk in their finery, their faces were dark masks. “We know a secret or two,” they seemed to say. “We know things that we wont tell.” Even when they laughed, which they frequently did, tilting their heads to show their golden teeth, their faces were inscrutable: “We know a secret—”

This was a brooding force, a fuliginous backdrop against which the town, mindful of Haiti and John Brown and Reconstruction, played out its life. But there was another, as dark, as brooding, and even more inscrutable. Bristol was a river town. Tawny, mile-wide, humped by boils and dimpled by eddies, the river came out of the north, gliding between Mississippi and Arkansas with a faint, insistent whisper against the bank. All afternoon the shadow of the levee, ragged along its rim because of the grass, edged eastward down the two main streets, moving from door to door: Bristol merchants told time by its progress until the sun was gone, then barred
and locked their doors and hurried home through the gathering twilight. In mid-spring, when the river was on the boom, people in the streets looked up and saw the cupolas of steamboats sliding against the sky above the levee with the smooth, unreal progress of floats at carnival, each with a pilot who stood with his hands on the big wheel like the master of a lottery.

The pilot in turn looked down and saw the town spread out beneath him, first the business district, directly below in the shadow of the levee, where the upturned faces were as pale and small as the petals of flowers, then the residential district, a crescent of overarching trees pierced at random by church steeples raising their spires and crosses to his level, and finally, half a mile to the east, the silver curve of the railroad drawing its arc about the limit of the town. Here at times the pilot saw — and sneered at, having nothing but contempt for this land-going, malodorous, railbound mechanism which was one day to replace him — a chuffing locomotive dragging a blanket of smoke from its funnel stack. Beyond the area thus circumscribed, thus ringed with steel and water, beyond this hive of humanity devoted to money and dedicated to Progress, the pilot saw the very heart of the delta, level as a table top as far as the eye could follow and resembling a tapestry laid flat, its pattern mainly one of cottonfields, ash-gray and corrugated, marbled with dark green fingers of woodland hugging the creekbanks and starred with scattered two-story whitewashed-brick plantation houses and the glinting metal roofs of barns and gins.

These four — the trees, the war, the Negroes, the river — rose out of the past and cast their shadows on the present. They were the dominants of the scene where Hector grew to manhood, as if life were indeed an action on a stage and these were the properties. No matter where he was, whether padding about the sleeping house or alone in the attic he called his kingdom or riding in the carriage with Mrs Wingate, these four were with him whether he knew it or not, and from
time to time, singly or in pairs or all together, they came forward and made their presence felt.

Manhood was still a long way off, however; he was yet in childhood, with boyhood and youth still to be passed through, and there was another remembered scene, one that was to stand out in his memory as if against the aureate glare of lightning. It was strange. This time his grandmother had left him in the carriage with Emma, saying she would only be gone a minute. Samuel walked the horses up to a watering trough, and Hector sat under the parasol, amusing himself by looking at the storefronts and spelling out the names printed across them in block letters. He would enter school that fall and Mrs Wingate had begun to prepare for this by giving him reading lessons; they sat on the veranda every morning, holding the primer between them, and at night after supper she took him on her lap and read fairy tales out of an illustrated book, pointing out the words with the tip of her finger so that he could follow the text as she read. He had made good headway, and that was why he was able to read the names on the storefront windows and over the doors.

The doorway opposite the watering trough was different from the others along the street. It had swinging half-doors, slatted like jalousies, and beneath them he saw a floor strewn with sawdust. Above these doors, in block letters whose gilt had tarnished and peeled, he spelled out:

PAL CE SALOON

He could discern the weathered outline of the missing A but he could not identify either word: not the first — though he had seen it often in the fairy tales — because it was mutilated, nor the second because he had never seen it before nor even heard it spoken.

Men entered and came out. When they paused in the doorway to adjust their ties or set their derbies straight, Hector would catch a glimpse of the dark interior. Then two men came out together. They stood there, talking, holding the doors ajar, and he saw what seemed to be a long box, narrower
than tall, extending the length of the opposite wall. It was covered with sheet marble and a polished rail ran along its base like a line of yellow light from a bull’s-eye lantern held just clear of the floor. Above this dark, oblong box an oil painting in an ornate frame was fastened to the wall. It showed a woman reclined on a couch. Her hair was as bright as the brass of the rail, and she wore no clothes. Beneath the painting, posed with both hands palm-down on the marble slab like an Olympian deity against a backdrop of glasses and bottles racked in rows, Hector saw a broad-shouldered old man in shirtsleeves, as motionless as the woman in the painting. He wore a high collar without a tie, and the point of the collar button was a tiny gleam of gold. He was looking at Hector, eyes narrowed, and Hector was looking at him. Then the two men separated (“So long” — “So long”); the doors flicked shut, then open, then shut, and Hector never saw him again.

Emma had seen him too, for when Hector turned his head he saw that she was watching him with something like a smile on her dark face. She leaned forward, still balancing the parasol, and whispered hoarsely: “Thats yo grandaddy!” Then he saw her face assume a blankness, the eyes as expressionless as a pair of musket balls, and he too heard his grandmother’s quick firm step on the boardwalk beside the carriage.

“I was longer than I thought,” she said.

Somehow he knew better than to ask Mrs Wingate what his nurse had meant, or even Emma herself as long as his grandmother was there. As it turned out, he never asked anyone. But he did not forget it; he simply let it move to the back of his mind.

In the fall following his sixth birthday Hector began to attend the Bristol public school. He still wore the serge knee-breeches,
the ribbed stockings, and even the satin tie; the coachman drove him there every morning and called for him every afternoon. It was a new world, peopled with Lilliputians. There was a bell for everything, one to begin and one to end and one each for the many things that came between. First they had a morning prayer, asking God to make them good and thankful, then a song as they stood in the aisles: “Good morning, dear teacher, good morning to you.” Then they sat, hands clasped on the desk tops, all eyes on the teacher who said solemnly, “Now we’ll put on our thin-king caps,” making a two-handed motion as if she were pulling a sack over her head, and all the children did the same; “Now we’ll put on our thin-king caps!” they chanted, more or less in unison, performing that same curious head-in-sack motion, groping at the air beside their ears.

As a result of the reading lessons Mrs Wingate had given him every morning out of the primer he would use in school, Hector was far ahead of the other pupils. He could read straight through whole pages, moving glibly down lines of type that caused the others to falter and sweat and tangle their tongues in their teeth. Whenever a particularly difficult passage came up, one that prompted a general squirming and a hiding of eyes out of fear of being called on, the teacher assigned it to Hector, who not only read the words correctly but read them with expression as well, pausing for commas and inflecting the exclamation points and question marks like an actor arrived at his most effective speech. The other pupils turned in their desks and watched him with a certain awe, for sometimes like an orator he made gestures as he read. The teacher always smiled when he had finished and gave a little series of nods of approval. “Very good,” she would say. “Very good, indeed. Why cant the rest of you do as well?”

At noon recess he sat apart and ate his lunch from a japanned box which the cook had packed according to his grandmother’s instructions; Mrs Wingate had definite opinions about diet. He had a particular place where he sat to eat, on the side steps leading up to the principal’s office, and a group of children
always collected to watch. For them it was like Christmas morning, watching what came out of the fancy box, one good thing after another and always a surprise for dessert, a cookie with colored icing, a strawberry tart, or a gingerbread man with raisins for eyes and three more raisins in a row for the buttons on his coat. They stood at the foot of the steps, their eyes growing larger, their mouths gaping wider with each good thing that emerged. For Hector there was something embarrassing about having them stand that way, gawking. He thought they were probably hungry; they looked it. But once when he offered a boiled egg to one of the watchers (there was always a boiled egg, with two twists of waxed paper, one for salt and one for pepper; “They build bone,” his grandmother said mysteriously) the boy put his hands quickly behind him, his eyes wide as he looked at the egg on Hector’s palm, and backed away. “Go on, take it,” Hector said. “I dont want it anyhow.” The boy turned and ran.

Presently his brother, a big fourth-grade boy with a shock of yellow hair high on his head and a saddle of freckles across his nose, approached the steps. He came striding, then stopped with his face thrust close to Hector’s and said in a gruff voice, “Keep your old done-up grub to yourself, Mister Fancy Pants.”

“Well, I will,” Hector told him.

“Well — all right,” the boy said. He paused. Then, considering that this was a note perhaps not forceful enough to end the exchange on, he thrust his face closer and added still more gruffly, “You want to make something
of
it?” The freckles stood out large and brown, and his younger brother peeped around his shoulder.

“Well, no,” Hector said. “I dont.”

“Well — all right,” the fourth-grader said. And deciding that this was probably forceful enough after all, he said no more. He just stood there, glowering and clenching his fists. All the watchers laughed and whooped until Miss Hobbs, the
principal, came to the door at the top of the steps and scattered them.

“Hush this hubbub!” she cried, and they ran, exploding outward as if a bomb had gone off in their midst. She held a sheaf of papers in one hand and brandished a ruler in the other, a tall gray-haired woman wearing an alpaca skirt, streaked and splotched with chalkdust, and a horn-rim pince-nez from which two strands of ribbon drooped to a gold pin at the breast of her shirtwaist. The ribbons fluttered in the breeze.