At her instrument’s first tart note, everybody breathed a single “Ahhh,” then, looking around, laughed at their own simple delight. Though the harpsichord did at times sound somewhat sharp, after all this recent hardship you felt so pleased to sit, newly bathed, out in the air of a warm May evening without one duty beyond listening. Given such weather, considering the talent of the girl inside, given that group “Ahh” just now and the smell of narcissuses blooming near the porch, how could a war last even ten days longer?
Folks sat through two rollicking if prickly Italian pieces. Then the ranking major asked after some Stephen Foster. “For my men,” he smiled, nodding toward the nearest open French door where eager boys in gray sat clumped. Chaplain was about to protest this too rapid descent into the merely Popular when there come such a crashing from the cellar. The young lady quickly pitched into her sprightliest of French jigs.
At the parlor’s arched door, Lieutenant Prothero soon leaned, grinning. He wore his hat. On one shoulder, he carried a wooden cask just lugged upstairs. His uniform trailed cobwebs. You could see he was drunk. Young mothers in the room tugged youngest children closer. First it seemed like Prothero had fetched up a libation for others. But chalked on the barrel’s side you could read “Maple S.” and a date. The Lieutenant hoisted this here container. As the crowd watched—as the young lady continued to splash safely behind a thousand skillful notes—he stepped towards her, smirking. Prothero seemed fixed only on Miss Unison, hardly noticing dozens of strangers crowding each downstairs room.
The Chaplain rose. But the keyboard player, glancing his way, hinted that, no, she could most probably manage whatever the young man planned.
Prothero moved towards her, passing many officers and guests. He stopped directly before the player, his back blocking others’ view of her. Music came forth with greater and greater nervous spirit. Swells of it rose. Over the ivory and ash-wood keys, Unison’s fingers made two blurs like wings. For one second, it seemed a contest was shaping up betwixt the power of music and whatever mischief this war hero planned. Will, the groom—seated at an open window—tipped further into the chamber. He saw only how the posture of those indoors had suddenly improved in a way most locked and deadening. He leaned further: Prothero, oh. Now Willie understood.
Without ceremony or explanation—smiling, bitter—the Charlestonian opened a harpsichord’s lidlike soundboard to its fullest. Then, as if cracking a huge egg, he busted the barrel, staves splintering. Into the young lady’s instrument, across its fine workings, he dumped a gallon and a half of dark thick syrup.
Listeners inhaled one sucking hiss—the exact opposite of “Ahhh.” The Lieutenant threw cask’s slats and metal cinchings into the harpsichord’s casing. Some syrup had smeared onto his hand. This, he wiped onto decorative inlay. The surprise was: just how long music lasted. Child? The surprise always is!
Though the young lady kept on, her face had already blanked itself. You saw skin go older all at onct, her color draining noplace. Unison Randolph, age fifteen, leaned nearer and nearer the small keyboard. Her oval face was inches over ten palsied fingers yet working so. Her elbows lifted at determined awkward angles, but as you listened, syrup found and coated every wire and bolt and pick of it. Men/women/children—every person in this and other rooms slowly tipped towards the dying instrument: because they listened harder and because they seemed to think that this’d someway help it. The player—shuddering, head fighting to stay upright—resisted a minor spasm. But Unison stayed gray-faced at her post. Music lost some clarity, all edge, it soon glued over. Then just many finicky damp slappings, sticky separations.
The rooms now grew so still. For a second you could hear the river James sloshing at the bottom of the lawn, currents pushing and searching along the cliff below.
The girl pulled her fingers off the keys all at onct. Otherwise it seemed she might never find the strength to separate herself from this instrument where she’d sat daily since age nine.
Unison kept still for a second. Then she stared—not at the culprit. He had swollen to his fullest heroic size as if he’d just performed some right witty parlor prank. Instead Miss Randolph looked to other officers. And they’d just turned toward each other, trying to decide what to do next—when the Chaplain heaved forward. He lurched direct for Prothero’s throat. Others grabbed the old man, held him back. One little girl, snickering, not understanding, dodged behind a love seat, peeked above its edge.
Chaplain had prayed over hundreds of deaths, he’d witnessed the torture of many more amputees. He had seen the finest young men of his region maimed, burned, and dismembered. But through all these horrors his features showed little real outwards emotion beyond his thin lips moving in the act of rational prayer. Now two burly colonels could hardly hold him back. Enraged by the dying of this harpsichord, pointing to it, thrashing side to side, the Chaplain screamed, “Monster! Why, mon-ster? Why?”
Some children—feeling the strangeness, missing the music, bothered at being so near all these men after seeing so few lately—sniffled, then cried. It was only at this sound, only on hearing ladies’ rustling dresses that the governor’s son seemed to notice. He turned, looked, understood who’d sat watching him.
In other rooms, guests stood, craning around doorjambs to see why music had stopped. Prothero lifted his pince-nez, studied the assembled women. He seemed to find them suitable, even agreeable. And with an almost comic pleasure, the Lieutenant moved his scabbard aside, did a profound full bow their way. He clumsily removed his hat.
Meantime the ladies glanced elsewhere, everywhere, anyplace but him. Children wouldn’t meet the young man’s stare. Some hid eyes behind their mothers’ skirts. Other youngsters held their hands before their faces, screening him from view, dreading him without quite understanding.
But then, who here understood?
Children’s hiding from him seemed to stun this handsome boy. You saw something register. Standing at the center of a parlor alive with candlelight, banked with cut spring flowers, paved with pictures of privileged little boys and their ponies, the young officer broke into a strange fetching grin. It was not his recent leer. It seemed that something opened in his face. He panted. He’d suddenly noticed a chandelier ablaze directly overhead with pendant lead crystals, silent pink/gold light wavering on the features all about him. He smoothed back his blond hair. He gave off one closed giggle. He’d not seen so many dressed-up women and children in months, even years. He studied each woman with a shy respect, hands now laced together over his belt buckle, as if called upon to make a speech. As if he could think of nothing, but expected everyone would wait.
A one-shoed enlisted man—puzzled by the hush—flapped through a French door, squinted into this cramped parlor. There at the center stood Prothero. Two officers still held back the Chaplain. The player stayed at her instrument. Not one soul spoke. All at onct you smelled a rush of the perfume escaping from some person, like a body gas. Suddenly, great veins swelled at Prothero’s temples. He actually staggered, and, as others watched, he leaned for support against the harpsichord. Soon as his palm touched it, the young woman screeched, “His hand.” She leapt to hide herself behind a group of officers who’d gathered at her back. These men now advanced. Flattered, they drew nearer to the culprit.
Everybody watched this young lieutenant with a sort of medical interest, almost a horror. He seemed on the brink of some seizure that you couldn’t bear to witness, child, but dared not look away from. Everybody stared so. He knew this. It made things worse. His shoulders lowered, knees now met each other as if for the first time. He seemed to lose whole years and inches. It was like watching a real real good umbrella slowly shut.
His voice sounded higher than usual. “I see, of course,” he cleared his throat. “Only some vandal would do this. It must prove, what? How thoughtless one has become? Everybody cried the day I left Charleston. True tears. Even Uncle’s slaves, and a good deal more than they had to. My sister fainted. I was the one ev
erybody loved. Ask them. My own mother’s greatest joy is her piano.—Miss,” he turned but saw only the girl’s dark eyes half hid between tall officers. “I can’t say why anyone, myself especially, would choose to do such a thing. I will—pay, of course. It’s that … ‘The soul … is a dark forest.’ By degrees it must come upon one. I know what it means to be loved by people. And to offer that back. It’s by degrees this other happens … Do please excuse me, all of you.—Also, I want it known, I’ve never touched that girl there hiding from me, though oftentimes I’ve wanted to. Her, I do not blame.”
Then he started for the door but slowed, looked overhead, then whipped his silver sword from its scabbard. Several ladies jumped back whining against the wall. Prothero just used his saber’s point to touch the light overhead. “This is actually not a bad chandelier.” Even his barely tapping it caused the thing to sway so—the whole room rocked with swinging shadows. And, rushing, mumbling to hisself, Prothero tripped past rigid officers, past the openmouthed Chaplain, down marble steps mobbed with young Will and dozens of others. The Lieutenant left a room’s seasick faces going from shadow to not, shadow to not.
Prothero stayed away for two full days. Willie fed his blooded horse. He felt ashamed of all assigned duties that now connected him to the infamous gent from Charleston. Some claimed the man must be a Northern spy. Only this could explain his incivilities to women, such affronts to the joys of Southern standards.
When the Lieutenant did turn up, his uniform looked torn like he’d been wandering through swamps as punishment. Prothero appeared milder now. You could see his face more clear—it lacked earlier bloat and pride. He looked thinner. He acted so ashamed of himself you felt sorry for him despite everything he’d done. He avoided meals in the big house, kept clear of its owners. He ate alone in his tent. During the next day’s drill, he overpraised his men, which just upset them. Someplace he’d found extra oats and, by hand, fed these to his badly treated gelding.
The division received orders. It marched away from the fine house, the grounds in bloom. Two kind Randolph ladies waved further lace from their veranda. Many soldiers looked back. Three days later, when a flurry of fighting commenced, when it came clear that there must be a running charge across this contested field, others crouched low. They were waiting, waiting for Prothero’s famous forward lurch. Those officers who’d slacked their own charges when Prothero arrived now checked over their shoulders. Stooped, muskets at the ready, men braced to hear the terrible yell. But, silent, the Lieutenant held back. First Prothero looked around. Seemed that he, too, was waiting for some leader’s sound. Then—starting to understand what was needed, slowly finding others’ eyes all on him—the blond boy straightened his shoulders and, inhaling with greater and greater gasps, visibly steeled himself. Setting glasses on his nose, making the sign of the cross in air before him, he quietly said to those nearest, “Would now be good?”
The Rebel yell he gave that day sounded strangled by embarrassment at its own rooster crudeness. And when, on foot, he struggled up across breastwork and out into the sunny open spaces, Prothero’s gait seemed weighted. His slowness endangered others and—rushing by—they knocked the boy aside. Prothero’s face was set behind a terrible grin, apology. He was just struggling to catch up, was just calling others’ names, when a cannon volley struck him full across his chest and spun him clear back twenty feet into the woods.
7
THE CHAPLAIN, despite Christian principles and his breadth of learning, looked broken now. Despite a strong partiality to founding families, despite having onetime sipped bourbon with the boy’s important father, Reverend stayed unforgiving about that harpsichord’s ruination. “Why?” he kept asking—speaking of the instrument’s ending, not a certain young man’s.
Past the division’s new encampment, just beyond horses tied in rows, a former cotton field was presently sunk deep with mud. Here fellows were to bury Alfred Huger Fraser Prothero III.
They learned his full name off his papers.
Though the division had moved miles inland from the river James, the harpsichord’s owner someway learned about this death. She buggied six miles through a war zone and at real danger to herself. Miss Unison Randolph arrived just after the burial service commenced. From their field with a new hole in it, men watched her carriage advance. Men turned to see her high-stepping this way across the bog. She half smiled at her trouble in unsticking each foot from mud like gumbo. Her pursed mouth showed disgust at sloppy sounds each small boot made sucking loose. Clutching her handbag, she kept skirts’ hem wound against her shins. You saw she’d worn her best calfskin boots, ones far too good. Four black armbands had become five. The men here respected her long trip and the trouble she’d taken. But they remembered how she’d compromised herself with the dead man. They felt sure: If they’d got killed, she would not be present. Even so, Will and others nodded as this girl, sixteen now, took her place amongst them near the open grave.
“We all must fight,” the Chaplain had been saying, and he took up there again after a somber bow. “But, I fear, this young man enjoyed said activity too much. I believe, as he promised, he had been quite the decent boy before war changed him. Diatonic gone cacophonous. And I consider that he understood what dreadful things he’d done of late—especially toward objects worthy of veneration. Difficult it is to understand such wickedness. To approach the one beautiful thing: to end the one beautiful thing. I must tell you,” he smiled at the newly arrived young lady, “how every season in my Glee Club, one boy walks in who is plainly gifted with the most perfect ear. He is elected what we call ‘pitch pipe.’ Others—less skilled—place their voices near to his as possible. This makes them all more nearly correct. Our Saviour remains that for each of us. He is the variable bassoon that we—His orchestra—must tune to, if you will. No one is so unmusical that he cannot hear the perfect guiding Tone and—through it—find his own true voice. Though I do admit—this particular youth here proved as nearly pitch-deaf as any I’ve encountered.” Others stared into the open grave or at the tips of Unison’s spoilt boots. The Chaplain looked only at the sky. He could not bring himself to speak of Prothero’s finer traits. Instead, the sermon turned one boy’s killing into the topic of tone-deafness.
It was then, like acting out of mercy for the Chaplain’s stilted speech and lack of love, like she now meant to offer true music and not just its shop talk, one young lady opened her black reticule. She pulled forth a small blond recorder. How simply she began the Doxology. Unison’s face looked so white in the late-day sun. Her egg-blunt features’ main beauty: their discipline.
The field was mud eighteen inches deep, seven open acres of it. The western sky was piled with battle-gray clouds. Nearby horses chewed hay, they stupidly noisily relieved themselves. One mildly said, “Ah-her.” On this brown bog—trees at its edges splintered by yesterday’s shelling—the pull of a girl’s piping came at you so pure. It started by sounding clean then grew, while daylight faded, patient, nearbout unearthly.
She performed two hymns. Her elbows poked way out, the upper body slid subtly side to side tipping with the melody, her eyes were lowered as notes she piped fell into the open grave. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” “Sheep May Safely Graze.” “He was Despis-ed.” Loose ends of five black armbands shifted in the breeze. Men and boys felt embarrassed, they were so stirred by these direct songs. They felt ashamed of earlier dark thoughts about this strict young virgin. She had cut their silhouettes, she had written their letters, she had sketched their fallen comrades.
Here in tents, Will and others lived glumly alongside each other—always checking fore and aft—sure only of likely damage. To each other, they acted numb if semi-courteous. But every good personal feeling seemed lost way in the past or hidden far far up ahead. Even now beyond pinewoods, heavy shelling could be heard. Then came the random tenor snap of closer musket fire. But steadily threading above all this, much nearer—her reedy tone: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Notes c
ame out unornamented, simple as the breath they rode.
Something in her traveling this far, honoring the man who’d stolen her best music and last civilian pleasure—it upset and surprised the forty men gathered here clutching hats in hands. She reminded the division of almost too much. Maybe they worried at how like Prothero they’d each and all become. One fellow now trudged toward the woods—one acre of mud away. He just left—something in her tune upset him. Unison Randolph had been playing six full minutes.
Chaplain now turned and watched the young lady. He listened hard, some new amazement complicating his face.
Her piping worked on all the men and boys. They soon felt moved that any fellow should be dead, especially a gilded boy like Prothero at twenty-two. Soldiers naturally thought of theirselves, of their own ends. But what seemed even worse than war’s claiming a person was: its making you a brute before it got to do you in. Music—starting as a simple statement of the young lady’s faith—had twisted, had become a question. The more it shaped that question, the more men shifted weight from foot to foot. Some turned partly aside from its odd growing force. A wind came out of the east. The horses, soothed before, now tossed and snorted.
When the Chaplain spoke again, his lofty unyielding tone had deepened. He now stood looking not towards sky but down at the winding shroud. How small young Prothero appeared there in his personal hole! Somehow, the pince-nez had resisted wrapping and its black ribbon looped out between two twists of cloth, lenses catching round bright bits of sky.
“Lord, we never noticed,” the Chaplain began afresh. “That he was quite mad. He was, though. ‘By degrees,’ he told us. And here I have been holding him to blame. I’ve been asking ‘Why?’ as if this boy invented our circumstances and didn’t simply fall prey to them.