“Father? such is the nature of our times. Derangement passes, Lord, for what? for valor, Lord. We profess to admire those among us who fight best and kill fastest. We condemn the rest as weak. This boy walked among us, and we recognized him not. I’d met his father, charming man. That changed nothing for me. We might have stopped our Prothero here. I don’t quite know how. In such moments as ours, Holy Father, it is not simply hard to become good, Lord. It is so hard—O Father—to remain good. Let those parts of us that still are, stay. ‘A dark forest’—Lord, as are Thy ways. Keep us suffering for our misdeeds. Let our virtues stand separate from our madness, Father. Let us know which part is which.” The Chaplain ended: “Do not necessarily give us all perfect pitch, Lord. Only give us pitch. Some. A little pitch, Lord.”
IT WAS the funeral of a man nobody much liked. And yet some stranger passing on the road—seeing all these downcast eyes, men holding caps against their ribs, the one girl (his sweetheart?) with her instrument—might have taken this for the burial of a great favorite. It became, for many present (for Will, the groom), the single most upsetting funeral in a long war of those. Because of music? Because of a woman’s saving presence? Because Prothero had finally grown still and let people forgive him? Nobody quite understood the power of his ending—no more than they’d figured out his bright odd swerving presence.
Then men started filling in the grave. Bending closer, you still smelled his stubborn perfume rising. Will shoveled dirt, aware of Target over there wearing a Fraser’s plaid blanket, tied among mules, eating oats, not knowing—of course—what’d happened. (Soon many others would ride Target in turn and badly till he dropped.) Six shovels were used. Everybody helped but Unison. The boy’s grave had seeped half full of boggy tea-colored water. The young lady went on playing a German instrument. You saw fingers shifting on their pear-wood stops. Her face wet, upper body moving—sinuous and natural, comfortable rocking side to side. Whatever she wept for now (her brothers and father? a lost love?), how perfectly she piped hymn after hymn. Now she did a little country dance air, whatever came to mind, continuous. Her eyes weren’t lowered now. They bore into other mourners, hard requests. She’d found a strange fearless stance—ruined boots planted farther apart. Men looked away from her. Soldiers stared at their feet.
Done, men filed away to camp. They moved in small clumps. Will and the Chaplain waited last, they left the grave together hinting how Unison Randolph should follow. But the young lady stayed out there a while—her trim silhouette made the only vertical for acres. Her back was towards them. Her purse was yet strung over one arm, she kept playing in the middle of noplace, playing to the newly heaped mud. Wind toyed with her armbands: From camp, others watched her braided bun. They listened. Had to.
If this was not true story, it might perfectly well end right here, child. There would be decisions made, sweet resolve on all sides: to act better, to really learn from this.
But fact is, it’s a war and it’s not over and it’s always harder than you think. She’d soon kept at it for nearabout a hour. That’s a right long time as the day is ending and you want to get on with things and eat your dinner. The man who’d walked off to the woods came hiking back. But when he got some nine hundred yards from her, the others saw him pause, hear, then turn and stalk right back toward trees. Above those pines, the sun had lowered, gone a somber red.
The ranking major now left his tent, he settled in a canvas chair. He studied the young lady, listened to the start of her second straight hour’s music. Men slouched against cannon’s wheels and in wagons’ flatbeds. Men watched her. Miss Unison’s dress was black, the field brown, the late-day sky a rosy saturated gray. It made a right sad picture. Some soldiers started fidgeting, wishing she’d stop. Ten or twelve, though right eager for chow, retired to their tents. It wore on them, her style of music—the pure simple quality, tireless. Some serious brilliance ran straight through her ditties, now came hymns, now jigs. It was so true. Truth always leaves a pleasure asking questions.
First men told theirselves they worried for her health, her being too long out there in a marshy field behind enemy lines. Then guys had to admit they’d had enough, thank you. Her music changed from being a pleasing statement of one girl’s homey faith, it went moving on through asking and more towards a challenge. Now its perfect lightness weighed on them. Miss Unison’s music seemed a lesson: “Why have we lost these people? Who is making us do this?”
Finally, the Chaplain sent Will out with a cup of hot coffee. The blue willow mug sat steaming where the boy put it beside her feet. Will looked up, ventured a dim smile. Her face was swollen, wet. She saw him, nodded curt, but Miss Randolph never missed a note.
Now the sun had nearly set. She kept playing. The company doctor, known as See and Saw, went next. He stood where she could plainly view him. He bent closer, said, “It’s time. Thank you. Your own strength to think about. My advice …”
But with a shrill note she turned away from him. Seemed rude. Doc came back shaking his head, miffed, hating to look powerless before other men.
One corporal eager to do something, wanting to give her a sign, reached into his vest, pulled out a good-luck brass piece shaped like a horseshoe. Bashful, he straggled out, held it near her face—made the highborn lady know he gave this as a loan and not a gift and mostly as a bribe to shush her. He placed it near her small caked boots, he walked back, looking smug. But it didn’t work. Two others dragged out separately, put down a ring, a keepsake handkerchief.
They were hungry. What did this woman want?
She never stopped. She seemed to be mourning them while blaming them. Her tone grew wilder if more sweet. Two full hours into it—some listeners felt accused. Felt sick. Imagine this girl’s mother pacing their veranda, worried. Under Unison’s boots, in final light, the Lieutenant’s grave rose just a little higher than its field.
How could she go on? What would stop her? If a battle came out of the trees yonder, that’d pretty much shut her up, wouldn’t it? If she got hurt, she’d need them then—that’d quiet her! Soldiers felt they couldn’t go about their business. Music had them like a trance, a taunt. She was nagging them, that was it. The cook made no move to start the fire for supper. Darkness settling. You could barely see her—and then you only heard her out there. Nothing of the war could continue with her out here right in it. She’d probably planned this!
When the division had been camped on Randolph property, men had found Miss Unison a touching mascot, even her sadness: a inspiration. Here, out here, no. Men wanted to get on with things. They were hungry. Night had fallen and Prothero was buried. What next? Let’s get it the hell over with.
More fellows withdrew into tents, but the canvas proved porous. Her sharp music still reached them. One boy said just, “No.” Some men started cupping hands over their ears. She played anything that came to her. Southern fifes and bugles only dared “Yankee Doodle Dandy” during the firing-squad execution of traitors. Unison now chanced choruses of that alternated with holy “Dixie,” weird. Was like listening, privileged, to the sound of another person’s ransacking inside thoughts. Nursery jingles, little love songs, scales, anthems, everything. She seemed to play about promises. The pipe sang about something her listeners had all lost but could still perfectly remember. Her music would sometimes smear a bit, maybe from tiredness, but melody pushed on into another hour—even more urgent. It ran shriller. In the distance, munitions’ rumbling sounded worse with the sun gone.
“Unison?” The Chaplain called in his grand voice. “Thank you, Unison? You’ve done more than your part, that is enough. I ask you on behalf of your father and brothers … Unison.”
She didn’t stop. Now, only fifteen fellows waited in the open, all others were on cots in tents, staring noplace. Finally, one man (nobody but hisself later knew who) slipped around behind the others still turned towards her, seeming held here. Unnoticed in the blackness, this fellow lifted a single dirt clod. In Unison’s direction, he threw the thi
ng. He stood near the road out by her buggy. He tossed his pellet over the heads of other infantrymen yet facing her field. The Chaplain and the Major, sitting forward, pretended not to notice. In darkness, that was easy. A second and third toss. You could hear the man give a little grunt as he hurlt one after another, using all his strength.
Nobody stopped him.
Finally, one struck her back. You heard her pipe give off a extra squeal. Though the melody ran on—determined—a second pebble hit her, harder yet. Music held its own. Someone joined the stone tosser on the road, then a third did. Soon over the piping, a snapping sound out there like some hailstorm centered on one grave. Finally, her tune did falter, stop. You heard a whimper follow her each breath. Rock throwing ceased.
All the men wandered out of their tents, so glad for silence. There was a moment when anything might’ve happened. Some stone thrower could’ve run toward her—might’ve pushed her down on the mud of Prothero’s new grave, could’ve yanked her skirts up, pressed one hand over her mouth, and done whatever. Whatever, repeatedly. Men might have found a large rock and beat her head to paste. This didn’t happen. Instead, silence seemed Unison’s new kind of accusing. Felt almost worse than music that’d bravely kept this massive stillness back.
You heard bug noises, frogs croaking. Nothing else. In camp no lantern had been lit. Only now did soldiers hear the girl’s feet squishing mud, moving in rushes and halts, as she headed fearful back this way. They heard Miss Randolph walk right through their ranks. Somebody saw her holding one side of her head. Soldiers eased aside to let her pass. Once in her buggy, she clucked, “Effie? Good Effie,” probably to the horse. Unison turned her cart around in three bad tries, then trotted off—bound back, unescorted, those six miles to a fine riverside house that Sherman’s troops would burn in ’65.
Men stayed right where they had been. And for some minutes. They waited till something happened next. More music? enemy fire that’d give them a excuse to move? Then there came another dragging step from out there in the black black field. Two men ran for firearms. But, oh, it was just that fellow who’d trudged off to hide in the woods. Only when he returned did Cook stand, yawn loud, say, “So. We got us any willing fire builders?” He struck a match to his oil lamp. Tonight ten noisy volunteers came forward. Others stretched, feeling meaner maybe—but easier. Just them here, just men/boys/males, honor among thieves, all do-gooder outsiders gone.
Among the troops, nobody ever spoke of what’d happened way out here. They never mentioned Unison again. She’d lost their respect. She was dead to them.
This I’ve told is just a little incident of war.
It won’t show up in any of your more official histories, child.
I heard it from W. More Marsden, Falls, North Carolina, born in 18 and 49—my late husband—Will, the groom for Target, the horse of young Lieutenant Prothero from Charleston.
This happened March through May of 1863.
Poor men, poor boys. Understand, two more whole years of it were waiting for them up ahead.
RECORDS show us: Unison never married. Until 19 and 41, she was teaching piano to the children of the prominent in Richmond (Virginia).
8
—YESTERDAY, on a home outing, Taw and me rode the blue Chevy bus. Among others we sat, not hand in hand but at least pressed wheel-to-wheelchair. Bus stopped alongside a shiny hearse. In back, one tapered mahogany box. Taw looked down at it. He snorted for all to hear, “That’s what I need. A nice, dry, lined coffin.” Many laughed. At our age, the laugh of recognizing. We’d all thought that.
Still, it got me down a bit. I went back to quilt planning. It’s comforting, nights specially. I know what fabrics I would choose but guess Jerome can’t find them. Still, just telling makes them so.
Requested cloths so far?: a nosegay of dotted Swiss from Shirley’s pinafore so yellow it’d cause a citrus-grower to pucker. One pair of long Johns, cashmere—red/white/blue, knitted by a mother for her iceberg-bound soldier boy. A white snippet from Lady More Marsden’s stay-at-home silk wrapper charred the faintest ivory. Maybe one of Little Xerxes’ tuxedo tails—white satin fine as Lady’s silk or better, and as a tribute to her. Baby’s plaid organdy hairbow. The piping off one aunt-stitched honeymoon travel-outfit, seriously stained. One pink cotton blanket I wrapped naked Archie in and ran for help. A stiff plug from Maimie Beech’s starched uniform that broke like cardboard when she sat first time each day. Poppa’s blue serge postal outfit, worn but rarely. My granddad Angus McCloud’s hunting-plaid kilt. My own momma’s narrow batiste slip, hacked by garden shears whilst chopping off curls and wasps. One small square of gauze from my Ned’s eyes that day on the Men’s Ward. A swatch dyed with Momma’s people get-rich indigo. Maybe dingy lovely Belgian lace from a sad lady in transit on club cars. Gray worsted off the tunic of a child soldier that so unhappily outgrew it. Jerome’s best gold-lamé disco “top.” And surely samples from a homebred, home-fed, home-killed, hand-tanned real mink coat. Plus green velveteen off a costume shared by Bible Judith and my regretted Louisa. And stuff it with the down from Reba’s holy red birds.—That’ll do for one side, child.
What a counterpain to sleep under or die in. We all got to represent each other. Every color is a deed and suffering, a prize. Our quilt’ll be, oh, quite the winding cloth and glad rag.
—Pull it over me!
Enough
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.
—SONG OF SOLOMON 3:1–2
I’D ALWAYS been married to a old man but now I was onto oldening up myself. If I’d started aging, he seemed ancient as some minor pyramid and about that easy to pocket. For years now, he’d been mild, lost, furious, lost. He spent most days in one of his nightshirts. Slave-made things, they’d outlasted slavery and most that sewed them. Beautiful with monograms—frayed at cuffs and collar but irreplaceable, being 100 percent mortal cotton. You can’t beat the stuff.
His presence in the back bedroom became a demand every minute. I counted my distance from the brass bed (even whilst out shopping at Lucas’ Superette—big-time, Luke’d got). Cap kept usual relics hanging on our bedstead—the bugle, its blood-red cord faded all but purple now, the twig off a sycamore where something bad happened, the handsome heavy scabbard. If my man stayed quiet too long down that first-floor hall, I worried. Like with my children—ours—only silence meant you needed to go check, and quick.
Castalia helped. Over she’d come, bottom-heavier and slower-moving, with a countable number of silver hairs like watch mainsprings curling at each temple. In all seasons, she honored the homegrown masterpiece of mink, long about ankle length it struck her by now. Seemed more a crenellated fort she peeked over the top of. Only up close did you see how many tiny pelts had gone to make it, poor conscripts signed into some glue of a army.
She spoke less but, when she did, talked more about Back Then. You heard her make things up about a Africa now sprung almost wholly from her head. People I knew she’d known in Falls would turn up in some tale of long-lost tribal uncles. Did I stop her? You kidding? Me, child? I poured more coffee the color of her coat and her. I tried not to listen for my massy male baby down yonder hall, a genius at interrupting good parts.
Cas’s skin had lately lost some of its sheen. One of our pet beauty aids was olive oil and—while she talked—we’d rub some steady into our chapped knees and elbows. Though it helped considerable, it left us smelling like two portions of one salad.
At corners of Castalia’s generous mouth—the starter culture that’d taught my husband to kiss, and his daddy, and had even kissed my mother-in-law and had, I well remembered, seriously kissed me—excavations showed new sinkholes of wrinkles. Under eyes, new folds were working crisscross, tic-tac-toe-ing. Ashamed, I thought of a elephant’s skin seen onct at the county fair. Her clothes tamed dow
n to browner, golder tones—the hot pinks and yellows lost or given up. She was quieter around town and people got even more scared of her. Merchants now gave her merchandise at cost, and called it tithing. She’d sometimes laugh and you could still see maybe half a inch of the first beauty near her eyes, but here, too: a puzzle of boxy lines made the slightest mirth feel a little bitter. Even when she looked at me, I felt some edge—like “Is this shrimp all I can find to call best friend?” If I was that. Sure wouldn’t have minded hearing Cassie call me it. Never really did.
Her weight grew, the arms rarely lifted from her sides. Couldn’t, probably. She acted nicer to fewer and fewer loved ones (the list had never been long) but she behaved more neutral to old enemies.
Sometimes she’d shed her coat in our house (a honor), she’d kick her shoes off and pad down the hall and bellow at our patient, “Look, what ails you, High and Mighty? The fight gone out you carcass finally, you menace to womankind. Know who I am? Well say it then.”
I waited, clearing the table. She shrieked, “Luce? He say ‘Cassius’ … I believe he do know.”
Like me, she wanted him to be here. All here. We would rather take our chances with his wild side. We liked that better than this other drool and fade. That seemed a judgment on us both. Her and me won’t ready. Men lapse faster. We get some catch-up ball at the end—a little justice.
OF COURSE, I still knew folks around town. The checkout girls at Safeway sometimes called me by name. I didn’t have no idea who they were till they asked how one of my far-flung kids was doing. Louisa now headed her whole hospital’s nursing schedule assignments up in Newport News. She wrote regrets that her skills won’t more help to me here with her cranky pop. Ned taught boys at the Travis Methodist Home for the Blind, Plymouth, N.C. Only saw him on holidays. He’d come home by train, him with his cane and one leather satchel, the dark glasses, and a head balding early—under his mad-professor hair I’d see that perfect smile, the same. He was often the last off, helped by conductors who treated him like more a guest of honor than he ever made of hisself. Ned might bring home his latest prize pupil, some boy who’d lost his sight and his folks in one car wreck—and who was glad to be someplace real for Christmas. I always felt glad and nervous, having Ned home. Like he was a celebrity. We got many letters about how good he taught, how selfless and all. I would sit at my kitchen table (same one, naturally—“if it could talk”) and just read praise of him and feel so proud and yet I’d wonder what he might’ve done … Well, but, the truth is—this sounds bad, I’m sure—but times, thinking back, I can’t rightly remember him unblind. That’s how long it’s been. That’s how good he took to it. Times, I recalled how he once used his eyes as cover while he thought back in there mulling somewheres—eyesight a wall to hide in the shadow of. Here lately, too, the two names Ned have merged till it almost seems that our blind beautiful Ned’s father was not Captain but the first Ned, who’d someway managed to have a son through Marsden, so we got one Smythe instead. Let that pass. Confusions. You’ll hear more of them from me in time, I fear. Others here forget what hour our dinner’s served. My failure I’ll call overremembering. It gets a jumble sale and crazy quilt of this beside that, identical, but eighty years apart and never met. As I listened to our blind son chatter bright over some new listening machine at school, one bought with money he helped butter up the local rich to win—I found I was forgiving Captain Marsden more and more. For that, at least for that part. Seems we each have got some set shape to our lives. You can change degrees in that bend, but you never get to challenge the whole basic shape beneath it. Other times, the opposite seems true, so let that pass. What do I know?