Jordan County (37 page)

Mostly, though, he kept to himself, avoiding any need for speech. His favorite pastime now was to walk eastward beyond the burnt-out quarters and on to where the Choctaw village had been, the pottery center with its clay deposit which he in his turn had used for making bricks. He remembered the Indians from fifty years ago, going north in their filthy blankets, braves and squaws, dispossessed by a race of men
who were not only more cunning but who backed their cunning with gunpowder and whiskey. They were gone now, casualties not of war but of progress, obsolete, and had left no sign of their passing except the shards of pottery and arrowheads turned up by plowmen, the Indian mounds scattered at random about the land for archeologists to guess at, and an occasional lift to the cheekbones in a Negro face and a cocoa tint to the skin.

Isaac had never been one for abstract thinking; but now, reft of his vocation by the war, of his wife by death, and of speech by whatever had gripped his brain and tongue, he asked himself certain questions. It was as if, now that he could no longer voice them, the words came to him with great clarity of mind. Remembering the Indian days, the exodus, he applied what he remembered to the present, to himself. Was it all for nothing, the distances, the ambition, and the labor? He and his kind, the pioneers, the land-grabbing hungry rough-shod men who had had, like the flatboat river bullies before them, that curious combination of bravado and deadly earnestness, loving a fight for the sake of the fight itself and not the outcome — were they to disappear, having served their purpose, and leave no more trace than the Choctaws? If so, where was the dignity of man, to be thrown aside like this, a worn-out tool? He remembered the land as it was when he first came, a great endless green expanse of trees, motionless under the press of summer or tossing and groaning in the winds of spring and fall. He ringed them, felled them, dragged them out; he fired the stumps so that the air was hazed with the blue smoke of their burning, and then he had made his lakeside dream a reality; the plowmen came, the cotton sprouted, and he prospered; until now. The earth, he thought, the earth endures. He groped for the answer, dealing with such abstract simplicities for the first time since childhood, back before memory. The earth, he thought, and the earth goes back to the sun; that was where it began. There is no law, no reason except the sun, and the sun doesnt care. Its only concern is its brightness;
we feed that brightness like straws dropped into its flame. Fire! he thought suddenly. It all goes back to fire!

At last he gave up the walks and spent his days in a big armchair in the parlor, keeping the curtains drawn. He had nothing to do with anyone but the deaf butler, with whom speech was not only unnecessary but impossible. Edward brought him food on a tray, such as it was—mostly the cakes of boiled-down gruel, with sorghum and an occasional piece of sidemeat — but Isaac scarcely touched it. He lost weight; the flesh hung loose on his big frame; his temples were concave, his eyes far back in their sockets. Sometimes, alone in the darkened parlor, he tried to form words aloud, listening to what came out when he spoke. But it was worse than ever. Often, now, the sounds were not even words. I’m talking in the tongues, he thought, remembering the revivals and sanctifyings he had attended around Natchez as a young man, a scoffer on the lookout for excitement. He had seen and heard whole creekbanks full of people writhing and speaking gibberish — ‘the tongues’ they called it; they claimed to understand each other in such fits. God had touched them, they said.

Maybe God had touched him too, he thought. He had never been religious, never having felt the need for it — not even now, when a general revival was spreading through the armies and the civilian population of the South — yet he knew nothing of aphasia, either by name or contact, and it seemed to him there must be some reason why he had been stricken like the fanatics on the creekbank; there must be some connection. But if it was God it was punishment, since it had not come through faith. He must be under judgment, just as maybe the whole nation was, having to suffer for the double sin of slavery and mistreatment of the land. Presently, however, this passed and he let it go; he stopped considering it at all, and he stopped trying to talk. He went back to his previous conviction. No, no, he thought, alone in the parlor with the curtains drawn. It’s the sun and we go back there, back to fire.

In late October, a time of heat — the long hot summer of
’64 had held; dust was everywhere over the empty fields — he was sitting in the armchair and he heard footsteps on the driveway. There was a chink of spurs, then boot-heels coming hard up the front steps. They crossed the veranda. For a moment there was silence, then a rapping of knuckles against the door jamb. A voice: “Hello!” Another silence, somehow more pregnant than the one before. And then: “Hello in there!”

To Isaac all this seemed so loud that even Edward must have heard it. But when he turned and looked at him he saw that the butler was still locked behind his wall of deafness; he stood beside Isaac’s chair, looking morosely at nothing at all. He had a toothache and the cook had put a wad of cotton soaked in camphor inside his cheek, binding the bulged jaw with a dinner napkin tied at the crown of his head. It was one of Mrs Jameson’s best pieces of linen, big and heavy, and the two corners of the folded napkin stood up stiffly from the knot.

While Isaac watched, the Negro turned his face toward the door, his eyes coming suddenly wide with surprise. Then Isaac heard the voice again, the crisp Northern accent: “Didnt you hear me out there?” Footsteps approached and the voice began again, repeating the question, but was cut off by a surprised intake of breath. Then Isaac saw him. A Federal officer, complete with sword and sash and buttons stamped US, stood on the hearth. They looked at one another.

Isaac saw that the officer was a young man — rather hard-looking, however, as if the face had been baked in the same crucible that had hardened and glazed the face of his son Clive — and he thought: It’s something the war does to them; North and South, they get this way after a time because nowdays the wars go on too long. Then as they looked at each other, one on the hearth and the other in the chair, Isaac knew why the officer was there. He steadied himself to speak, intending to say, ‘Have you come to burn my house?’ But it did not come out that way; he spoke again in the tongues.

The lieutenant, whose rank Isaac saw when he bent forward, listened to Edward’s explanation of the garbled language, then said carefully: “I have come to give you notice, notification.” He paused, cleared his throat, and continued. He spoke carefully, not as if he were choosing his words, however, but as if from a memorized speech. “In reprisal for sniping, by a party or parties unknown, against the gunboat
Starlight
at sundown yesterday, I inform you now, by order of Colonel Nathan Frisbie, United States Army, that this house has been selected to be burned. You have exactly twenty minutes.”

Isaac sat watching the hard young face, the moving lips, the bars on the shoulders. The lips stopped, stern-set, but he still watched. “Fire,” he said or intended to say. “It all began and ends in fire.”

Full in our faces the big low blood-red disk of the sun rested its rim on the levee, like a coin balanced lengthwise on a knife edge. We marched westward through a wilderness of briers and canebrakes, along a road that had been cleared by the planters in their palmy days to haul cotton to the steamboat landing for shipment to New Orleans. The column had rounded the head of the lake and turned toward the river where the gunboat waited. Four miles in our rear, beyond the lake, the reflection of the burning house was a rose-and-violet glow to match the sunset in our front.

I rode beside the colonel at the head and the troops plodded behind in a column of fours. They marched at ease, their boots stirring the dust so that those in the center were hidden from the waist down and those at the tail showed only their heads and shoulders. Their rifle barrels, canted in all directions, caught the ruddy, almost level rays of the sun; the bayonets, fixed, appeared to have been blooded. They kept their heads lowered, their mouths tight shut, breathing through their noses. The only sounds were the more or less steady clank of equipment, the soft clop clop of horses’ hoofs, and the shuffle of
shoes in the dust. It somehow had an air of unreality in the failing light.

While the upper half of the sun still showed above the dark knife edge of the levee we approached a live-oak spreading its limbs above a grassy space beside the road. Colonel Frisbie drew rein and raised one arm to signal a halt. The troops came to a jumbled stop, like freight cars. Then the sergeant advanced and stood beside the colonel’s horse, waiting. He was short and muscular, thick-chested and very black, with so little neck that his head seemed to rest directly on his shoulders. “Ten minutes,” the colonel told him.

The sergeant saluted, holding it stiffly until the colonel returned it, then faced about. The troops stood in the dust of the road. He drew himself up, taking a deep breath. “De-tail: ten
shut
!” He glared. “Ground — harms!” The rifle butts came down in a drawn-out series of thuds. The sergeant glared still harder, put his fists on his hips, then took them down again. “Now see can you do it right for a change. Right shoulder: shift! Make it pretty, now. Ground —
harms
!” The rifle butts came down in unison, sliding silently into the dust. “Yair,” the sergeant said quietly. Then, raising his voice once more, he said to the troops still standing at attention, ankle deep in the thick dust of the road: “When I say fall-out, keep ready to fall back in. Fall out!”

Dismounting, the colonel smiled. “Good man,” he said. “That comes of having trained him myself.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

The platoon fell out, coming apart almost unwillingly, like something coming unglued. Colonel Frisbie often declared that, properly trained and led, Negro troops made “the finest soldiers on the planet, bar none,” and when he was given command of the
Starlight
he set out to prove his contention by supplying the proper training and leadership. Now he was satisfied; it was no longer a theory, it was a fact. The corporal-orderly took our horses and we crossed the grass and sat with our backs against the trunk of the live-oak. I was glad to rest my knee.

High in the branches a blue jay shrilled and chattered. The colonel looked up, searching, and finally found him. “Isnt today Friday?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Thought so. Then here’s another case of these people not knowing what theyre talking about. They say you never see a jay on a Friday because thats the day theyre all in hell getting instructions from the devil. And they believe it, too — I dont exaggerate.” He nodded. Ever since he had heard the fable he had been spending a good part of every Friday watching for a blue jay. It bothered him for a while that he could not find one. But now he had, and he felt better; he could move on to something else, some other old wives’ tale to disprove. “I suppose while we’re whipping the rebelliousness out of them we’d do well to take out some of the superstition along with it. Hey?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

He went on talking and I went on saying Yes Sir every time I heard his voice rise to a question. But I was not listening; I could not have repeated a word he said just then. My mind was back on the other side of the lake, where the reflection of the burning house grew brighter against the darkling sky — remembering, then and now:

When I had finished my recitation — “selected to be burned. You have exactly twenty minutes” — the old man looked up at me out of a face that was older than time. He sank back into the chair. “Far,” he said; “It goes back far,” and gave no other sign that he had understood or even heard what I said. I left the house, went back down the driveway to where the troops crouched in loose circles, preparing to eat the bread and meat, the midday meal they had brought in their haversacks.

Colonel Frisbie was waiting. “What did they say in there?” he asked.

“It was an old man.…”

“Well?”

“Sir?”

“What did he say?”

“He didnt say anything. He just sat there.”

“Oh?” the colonel said, turning to accept a packet of sandwiches from the orderly. This was officers’ food. “Well. Maybe for once we’ve found one who admits he deserves what he’s going to get. Or maybe it’s not his.” He opened the packet, selected a sandwich, and extended the rest toward me. “Here.” I shook my head but he insisted. “Go on. Take one.” I took one — it was mutton — then sat with it untasted in my hand.

The colonel ate rapidly and efficiently, moving his jaw with a steady sidewise thrust and taking sips from his canteen between bites. When he had eaten a second sandwich he took out his watch, opened the heavy silver case, and laid it face-up on his knee. Soon afterwards he picked it up again; he rose, brushed crumbs from the breast of his uniform, looked hard at the watch for a few more seconds, then snapped it shut with a sharp, decisive click.

“All right, Mr Lundy,” he said. “Time’s up.”

I reentered the house with the sergeant and ten of the men. From the hall I saw the butler still standing in the parlor beside the fanback chair where the old man sat. At a sign from the sergeant, two of the soldiers took position on opposite sides of the chair, then lifted the old man, chair and all, and carried him through the hall, out of the door and across the porch, and set him down at the foot of the lawn, near the road and facing the front of the house. The butler walked alongside, his pink-palmed hands fluttering in time with the tails of his clawhammer coat, making gestures of caution. “Keerful, yawl,” he kept saying in the cracked, off-key voice of the deaf. “Be keerful, now.” The napkin-end rabbit ears had broken. One fell sideways, along his jaw, and the other down over his face. He slapped at it from time to time to get it out of his eyes as he stood watching the soldiers set the chair down.

What followed was familiar enough; we had done this at many points along the river between Vicksburg and Memphis, the Walnut Hills and the Lower Chickasaw Bluff, better than two dozen times in the course of a year. The soldiers went
from room to room, ripping curtains from the windows and splintering furniture and bed-slats for kindling. When the sergeant reported the preparations complete, I made a tour of inspection, upstairs and down — the upstairs had been closed off for some time now; dust was everywhere, except in one room which apparently was used by one of the servants. At his shouted command, soldiers in half a dozen rooms struck matches simultaneously. (A match was still a rarity but we received a special issue for our work, big sulphur ones that sputtered at first with a great deal of smoke and stench till they burned past the chemical tip.) Then one by one they returned and reported to the sergeant. The sergeant in turn reported to me, and I gave the order to retire. It was like combat, and all quite military; Colonel Frisbie had worked out the procedure in a company order a year ago, with subparagraphs under paragraphs and a time-schedule running down the margin.