“Why dont you just scratch her name off the list?” Martin said. “Couldn’t nobody prove it on you.”
“I could give you a mortgage on my house,” Blount said. “My grandmother holds the title to it, but I am sure—”
“No,” Martin said. “You’re wasting your money. Take her name off the list. You can do that. Wont nobody be the wiser. Cant prove nothing on you. Not with your word against mine.”
Blount took up from the table a carved paper-weight of jade. He examined it and put it down and stood for a time, looking down at his hand. He moved, toward the door, with a vague air, as though he had suddenly found himself moving. His face was strained, vague, though quiet. “Nice place you have here,” he said.
“Hit suits us,” Martin said, motionless, shabby, in his gray socks, watching him. Blount’s hat still lay on the chair where he had put it. “You done forgot something,” Martin said. “Your bonds.” Blount returned to the table and took up the bonds. He put them carefully into his breast, his face lowered. Then he moved again.
“Well,” he said, “if I could have done any good by coming, you would not be you. Or I would not be I, and it wouldn’t matter anyway.”
He was half way to his car when the pock-marked negro overtook him. “Here’s your hat,” the negro said. “You forgot it.”
IX
At the corner of Main Street and Madison Avenue the next day the people, the Mississippi and Arkansas farmers, the clerks and stenographers, read the four-inch headlines CLUBMAN SUICIDE Prominent Memphian Shoots Self in Garage. Scion of old Memphis family takes own life; leaves grandmother and unmarried aunt … Dr Gavin Blount … member of old family … prominent in city’s social life; president of Nonconnah Guards, premier social organization … family well-to-do … can give no reason for.…
It was a three-day sensation, talked of among one another by the sporting- and gambling-house touts, the stenographers and clerks, the bankers and lawyers and their wives who lived in the fine houses on Sandeman and Blount Avenue; then it was gone, displaced by a state election or something. That was in August. In November the envelope came to Martin’s house number: the embossed card, the crest: the bolled cotton-stalk crossed by sabres, the lettering: The Nonconnah Guards. December 2, 1930. 10:00 P.M.; and in a neat clerkly hand: Miss Laverne Martin and escort.
As Dr Blount had said, she didn’t have a good time. She returned home before midnight, in a black dress a little too smart, sophisticated, in cut, and found her father, his sock feet propped against the mantel, reading a late edition which carried the names and a blurred flash-light picture of the girls, the debutantes. She entered crying, running, her heels brittle and hard. He took her onto his lap, she still crying with a passionate abjectness; he patted her back. “There now,” he said, patting her back and it jerking and shuddering under the new dress, the sophisticated and costly black lace which had been for those two hours isolated out of and by the white and pastel dresses of the girls from the old houses on Sandeman and Belvedere as though it had clothed a spectre and which would be seen perhaps twice more, glittering, savage and belligerent, at the balls at the Grottoes and the Pete’s Places about the equivocal purlieus and environs of the town. “There now. The fool. The durn fool. We could have done something with this town, me and him.”
A Return
I
On the day the carriage would be due, from daylight on the negro boy would squat beside the hitched droop-eared mule, shivering over the smoldering fire in the December rain beside the road which came up from Mississippi, with wrapped in an oil cloth cape a bouquet the size of a yard broom, and perhaps a hundred yards further up the road Charles Gordon himself sitting his horse in the rain too beneath a bare tree, watching the boy and the road. Then the muddy carriage would come in sight and Gordon would see the bouquet delivered and then he would ride out, bareheaded in the rain, and bow from his saddle before the carriage window, above the fleet soft hand, the soft eyes above the mass of red roses.
This was in 1861, the third time Lewis Randolph had come up from Mississippi in the muddy carriage paved with hot bricks which a footman would remove every few miles and build a fire with the pine knots fetched along for that purpose and reheat, accompanied on the first two occasions by her mother and father both, to receive Gordon’s bouquet on the streaming road and to enter that evening the Nonconnah Guards Armory in Memphis on Gordon’s arm and there to dance schottische and reel and even the new waltz while the starred and striped flag hung unwinded from the balcony where the negro musicians with fiddles and triangles sat. But this time, this December of 1861, only her mother accompanied her because her father was down in Mississippi organising a company of infantry, and the flag now hanging from the musicians’ balcony was the new one, the starred Saint Andrew’s cross, as strange and new as the unsullied gray which the young men now wore in place of the old blue.
The battalion had been organised to go to Mexico—all young men and all bachelors; a man lost his membership automatically by marriage. It was a National Guard unit, but there was also a hierarchate of hereditary and elective social officers, and the Chairman of the Committee, in west Tennessee and north Mississippi at least, ranked any major or captain, Washington, the United States and all, to the contrary notwithstanding. It was formed too late to go to Mexico however so its first deployment at strength took place, not in field equipment on a dusty Texas plain but in the blue-and-gold of full dress in the ball room of a Memphis hotel just before Christmas, with the United States flag hanging from the musicians’ balcony, and repeated itself each year after that, presently in its own armory, until soon the young girls of north Mississippi and west Tennessee were being presented formally to society at those balls and an invitation (or summons) to one of them was a social cachet no less irrevocable than one from Saint James’s or the Vatican.
But at the one in ’61 the men wore gray instead of blue and the new flag hung where the old one had used to hang and a troop train waited in the station to depart at midnight for the East. Lewis Randolph would tell about that ball, to her single listener who in a sense had missed being present himself by only twenty-four hours. She told him about it more than once, though the first time the listener could remember was when he was about six years old—the young men (there were a hundred and four of them) in their new pristine gray beneath the new flag, the gray coats and the hooped gowns turning and swirling while the rain which had turned to snow at dusk whispered and murmured at the high windows—how at half past eleven the music stopped at a signal from Gavin Blount, who was both Chairman of the Committee and major of the battalion, and the floor was cleared—the broad floor beneath the harsh military chandeliers, the battalion drawn up in parade front beneath the flag above which the faces of the negro musicians peered, the girls in their hoops and flowers at the opposite end of the room, the guests—the chaperones, the mothers and aunts and fathers and uncles, and the young men who did not belong to the Guards—in gilded chairs along the walls. She even made the speech to the six-year-old listener, word for word as Gavin Blount had made it as he leaned easily on his propped sabre in front of the gray battalion, she (Lewis Randolph) standing in the center of the kitchen in the Mississippi house which was already beginning to fall down about their heads, in a calico dress and sunbonnet, leaning on the Yankee musket barrel which they used to poke fires with as Gavin Blount had leaned on his sabre. And as she spoke it seemed to the six-year-old listener that he could see the scene itself, that it was not his mother’s voice but the voice of that young man who was already dead when the listener was born—the words full of bombast and courage and ignorance of that man who had very likely seen powder flash toward his own body and heard the bullet but who had not yet seen war:
“A lot of you have already gone. I’m not talking to them. A lot of you have made your plans to go. I’m not talking to them either. But there are some of you that could go and would go, only you believe it will be over before you could get into a fight, s
ee a Yankee’s coat tail. It’s them I’m talking to.” The listener could see them: the rigid gray line beneath the new flag and the white eyeballs of the negroes in the balcony, the man in the crimson sash and negligent propped sabre who would be dead in seven months, the young girls in spread skirts like a cluster of butterflies, the ranked gilded chairs beneath the high windows where the snow murmured. “You have all heard of Virginia since Bull Run. But you haven’t seen it. Washington, New York. But haven’t seen it.” Then he drew from his coat the stamped and sealed paper and opened it and read it aloud: … empowered by the President of the Confederate States of America.…
They shouted then, the women too. They yelled. Possibly some of them had not seen the gray uniform before, but probably none of them had ever heard that sound before; the first time it fell on their ears it came from their own throats, not invented by any one individual but springing simultaneously from a race, invented (if invented) not by man but by his doom. And it outlived even the doom. The listener, the boy of six, grew to manhood and became trusted, trustworthy, and successful, with a place higher in the social and economic fabric of his chosen milieu than most others. In his forty-fifth year he made a business trip to New York, where he met the father of the man he had come to see, an old man who had been in Shields’ Corps in the Valley ’62. He knew it, remembered it. “Sometimes I hear it even yet,” he told the southerner. “Even after fifty years. And I wake up sweating.” And there was another whom the boy was to know later, a man named Mullen who had been in Forrest’s cavalry command, who went West and returned on a visit and told about a youth who rode down a Kansas street in ’78 yelling “Yaaaiiihhh! Yaaaiiihhh!” and firing his pistol into the saloon doors until a deputy marshal behind a garbage heap shot him off the horse with a sawed-off shotgun loaded with slugs, and how they gathered about the youth bleeding to death on the ground and Mullen said, “Son, whar was it your pappy fit?” and the youth said, “Wharever there was Yankees, same as me. Yaaaiiihhh!”
Thus the listener heard it: how at another signal from Blount the music struck up again and the girls formed single file behind Blount’s partner and so passed along the battalion front, kissing the men one after another, Lewis Randolph among them, kissing a hundred and four men, a hundred and three men that is because she gave Charles Gordon a red rose from his own bouquet and even thirty years afterward the listener heard from an eye-witness that the kiss which went with it was no fleet passage of laughing lips like the touch of a flying foot on the pebble of a ford. And when the troop train departed she was in it, hoisted through a window in the blind side while on the platform itself the faces of the other girls, centered by the petal-like spread of their skirts, seemed to float like severed flowers on a dark stream, while her mother gossipped placidly and waited for her in the armory a mile away. She travelled to Nashville in a day coach full of soldiers, with Charles Gordon’s cloak over her ball gown and they were married by a private (who happened to be a minister) in a battalion waiting there to entrain, on the snow-bound platform with a whole regiment for witnesses while the ice-caked telegraph wires looping overhead crackled and hummed with the outraged commands of her mother addressed to every station between Memphis and Bristol; she was married in the ball gown and the officer’s cloak in the snow, with not a hair turned though she had not slept in thirty hours, in a hollow square of youthful faces none of which had heard a bullet yet all of whom believed they were going to die. Four hours later the troop train went on and fifteen hours later she was back in Memphis, with a letter written by Gordon on the back of a fly-specked menu from the station eating-room to the mother who was no longer frantic but just grimly and coldly outraged. “Married?” the mother cried. “Married?”
“Yes! And I’m going to have a baby too!”
“Nonsense! Nonsense!”
“I am! I am! I tried hard enough.”
They returned home to Mississippi. It was a big square house twenty-five miles from any town. It had a park, flower beds, a rose garden. During that winter the two women knitted socks and mufflers and made shirts and first aid packs for the men of the steadily growing company and they embroidered the colors for it, with negro girls from the quarters to pick and iron the bright fragmentary silk. The lot, the stable, was full of strange horses and mules, the lawns and park dotted with tents and littered with refuse; from the high room where they worked the two women heard all day long heavy boots in the hall and the loud voices about the punch bowl in the diningroom while the melting frost and sleet of the departing winter gathered in the prints of heavy heels among the broken and ruined roses. In the evenings there would be a bonfire and oratory, the glare of the fire red and fierce upon the successive speakers, the motionless heads of slaves in silhouette along the fence between the fire and the portico where the women white and black, mistress daughter and slave, huddled in shawls and listened to the voices orotund and sonorous and meaningless above the gestures of flung and senseless pantomime.
At last the company departed. The talking, the boots in the hall were gone and after a while even the rubbish and litter; the scarred lawn healed gradually under the rains of spring, leaving only the ruined flower beds and boxwood hedges, the house quiet again with only the two women and the negroes in the quarters, their voices, the measured sound of axe-strokes and the smell of woodsmoke coming peacefully up through the long spring twilights. Now the old monotonous unoriginal tale began. It was not new. It was just one of the thousand repetitions through the South during that year and the next two, not of actual suffering yet but merely that attenuation of hardship, that unceasing demand upon endurance without hope or even despair—that excruciating repetition which is Tragedy’s tragedy, as if Tragedy had a childlike faith in the efficacy of the plot simply because it had worked once—an economic system which had outlived its place in time, a land empty of men who rode out of it not to engage a mortal enemy as they believed but to batter themselves to pieces against a force with which they were unequipped by both heredity and inclination to cope and of which those whom they charged and counter-charged were not champions so much as victims too; armed with convictions and beliefs a thousand years out of date they galloped gallantly behind the bright bunting of a day and vanished, not in battle-smoke but beyond the irrevocable curtain-fall of an era, an age, where, fleshless and immolated, they might bang themselves forever against no foe and without pain or hurt in elysian fields beneath a halted sun; behind them proscenium and footlights died. Some of them returned to be sure, but they were shadows, dazed bewildered and impotent, creeping back onto the darkened stage where the old tale had had its way and surfeited: a woman or women who after the trampling and flags and trumpets were gone looked about and found themselves alone in remote houses about a sparsely-settled land populated in overwhelming proportion by a race dark and, even in normal times, unpredictable, half child and half savage, a land, a way of living, to be held together by hands trained only for needlework, the very holding together of which offered but one certainty: that next year there would be even less food and security than this year, and into which reports of far-away battles came like momentary and soundless lightning-glares, unreal and dreamlike, brought by word-of-mouth months after the slain had begun to rot (these dead nameless too, whether father brother husband son or not report would not know)—then the beginning and growing rumor of violence and pillage nearer and nearer and the woman or women sitting in unlighted rooms waiting for the quarters to settle down for the night in order to bury in secret a little silver in garden or orchard (with hands not quite so soft now) and not knowing even then what ears might be listening from what shadow. Then the watching and waiting, the unflagging petty struggle for existence, sustenance—ditch-bank and woods-edge combed for weeds and acorns to support life in bodies denied even the ultimate of starvation, denied not life but merely hope, as if the sole aim of the debacle were clinical: merely to ascertain just how much will and flesh could endure.
They—the two women—serve
d it. When the house was quiet again they began to prepare for the child which would come in the fall. The older woman did that is, because the daughter was superintending the planting of the year’s crop, the cotton and the feed—the mother in the high room where they had made the flags, with a negro woman to help her with the ironing and the infinitesimal stitching and running of ribbons while the daughter followed the plows to the field, on a horse until the mother forced her to desist, then in a battered buckboard, the plowhands throwing down gaps in the rail fences so she could pass through and sit in the buckboard and watch the gathering of the cotton in the bright hot days of September as her father had done before her—a crop which was ginned and sent to the county seat to be sold and vanished there, disappeared, where to they did not know and had no time to try to discover for in the last week of September the child was born, a boy, they named him Randolph; there was a negro midwife but no doctor and a week later a neighbor from ten miles away rode up, a man too old for fighting: “There was a big battle up beyond Corinth. General Johnston was killed, and They are in Memphis now. You had better come to us. At least there will be a man in the house.”
“Thank you,” the mother said. “Mr. Randolph (he had gone into that battle without coming out of it, along with Gavin Blount, though Blount’s body was later found.) will expect to find us here when he returns.”
The equinoctial rains began that day. By nightfall it had turned cold and that night the daughter waked suddenly, knowing that her mother was not in the house and knowing also where the older woman would be. The child’s negro nurse was asleep on a pallet in the hall but the daughter did not call, she just rose from the bed, covering the child snugly and holding to the bedpost until the waves of weakness and dizziness subsided. Then in the pair of her father’s heavy shoes which she wore to the fields and with a shawl clutched about her head and shoulders and holding to the stair rail for support, she descended and entered the rain itself, the strong steady black wind full of icy rain particles which actually supported her, held her erect as she leaned into it, clutching the streaming shawl but making no sound until she reached the orchard and even then not loud but merely peremptory and urgent: “Mother! Mother!” the older woman’s reply calm too, even a little irritable, from somewhere about her feet: