Chickamauga (18 page)

Delilah was dancing up to the front with a message; that was how she happened to be the one to see. A horse was coming in the house, by the front door. The door had been shoved wide open. And all behind the horse, a crowd with a long tail of dust was coming after, all the way up their road from the gate between the cedar trees.

She ran on into the parlor, where they were. They were standing up before the fireplace, their white sewing dropped over their feet, their backs turned, both ladies. Miss Theo had eyes in the back of her head.

“Back you go, Delilah,” she said.

“It ain’t me, it’s them,” cried Delilah, and now there were running feet to answer all over the downstairs; Ophelia and all had heard. Outside the dogs were thundering. Miss Theo and Miss Myra, keeping their backs turned to whatever shape or ghost Commotion would take when it came—as long as it was still in the yard, mounting the steps, crossing the porch, or even, with a smell of animal sudden as the smell of snake, planting itself in the front hall—they still had to see it if it came in the parlor, the white horse. It drew up just over the ledge of the double doors Delilah had pushed open, and the ladies lifted their heads together and looked in the mirror over the fireplace, the one called the Venetian mirror, and there it was.

It was a white silhouette, like something cut out of the room’s dark. July was so bright outside, and the
parlor so dark for coolness, that at first nobody but Delilah could see. Then Miss Myra’s racing speech interrupted everything.

“Will you take me on the horse? Please take me first.”

It was a towering, sweating, grimacing, uneasy white horse. It had brought in two soldiers with red eyes and clawed, mosquito-racked faces—one a rider, hang-jawed and head-hanging, and the other walking by its side, all breathing in here now as loud as trumpets.

Miss Theo with shut eyes spoke just behind Miss Myra. “Delilah, what is it you came in your dirty apron to tell me?”

The sisters turned with linked hands and faced the room.

“Come to tell you we got the eggs away from black broody hen and sure enough, they’s addled,” said Delilah.

She saw the blue rider drop his jaw still lower. That was his laugh. But the other soldier set his boot on the carpet and heard the creak in the floor. As if reminded by tell-tale, he took another step, and with his red eyes sticking out he went as far as Miss Myra and took her around that little bending waist. Before he knew it, he had her lifted as high as a child, she was so light. The other soldier with a grunt came down from the horse’s back and went toward Miss Theo.

“Step back. Delilah, out of harm’s way,” said Miss Theo, in such a company-voice that Delilah thought harm was one of two men.

“Hold my horse, nigger,” said the man it was.

Delilah took the bridle as if she’d always done that, and held the horse that loomed there in the mirror—she could see it there now, herself—while more blurred and
blind-like in the room between it and the door the first soldier shoved the tables and chairs out of the way behind Miss Myra, who flitted when she ran, and pushed her down where she stood and dropped on top of her. There in the mirror the parlor remained, filled up with dusted pictures, and shuttered since six o’clock against the heat and that smell of smoke they were all so tired of, still glimmering with precious, breakable things white ladies were never tired of and never broke, unless they were mad at each other. Behind
her,
the bare yawn of the hall was at her back, and the front stair’s shadow, big as a tree and empty. Nobody went up there without being seen, and nobody was supposed to come down. Only if a cup or a silver spoon or a little string of spools on a blue ribbon came hopping down the steps like a frog, sometimes Delilah was the one to pick it up and run back up with it. Outside the mirror’s frame, the flat of Miss Theo’s hand came down on mankind with a boisterous sound.

Then Miss Theo lifted Miss Myra without speaking to her; Miss Myra closed her eyes but was not asleep. Her bands of black hair awry, her clothes rustling stiffly as clothes through winter quiet, Miss Theo strode half-carrying Miss Myra to the chair in the mirror, and put her down. It was the red, rubbed velvet, pretty chair like Miss Myra’s ringbox. Miss Myra threw her head back, face up to the little plaster flowers going around the ceiling. She was asleep somewhere, if not in her eyes.

One of the men’s voices spoke out, all gone with righteousness. “We just come in to inspect.”

“You presume, you dare,” said Miss Theo. Her hand came down to stroke Miss Myra’s back-flung head in a strong, forbidding rhythm. From upstairs, Phinny threw down his breakfast plate, but Delilah did not
move. Miss Myra’s hair streamed loose behind her, bright gold, with the combs caught like leaves in it. Maybe it was to keep her like this, asleep in the heart, that Miss Theo stroked her on and on, too hard.

“It’s orders to inspect beforehand,” said the soldier.

“Then inspect,” said Miss Theo. “No one in the house to prevent it. Brother—no word. Father—dead. Mercifully so—” She spoke in an almost rough-and-rumble kind of way used by ladies who didn’t like company—never did like company, for anybody.

Phinny threw down his cup. The horse, shivering, nudged Delilah who was holding him there, a good obedient slave in her fresh-ironed candy-stripe dress beneath her black apron. She would have had her turban tied on, had she known all this ahead, like Miss Theo. “Never is Phinny away. Phinny here. He a he,” she said.

Miss Myra’s face was turned up as if she were dead, or as if she were a fierce and hungry little bird. Miss Theo rested her hand for a moment in the air above her head.

“Is it shame that’s stopping your inspection?” Miss Theo asked. “I’m afraid you found the ladies of this house a trifle out of your element. My sister’s the more delicate one, as you see. May I offer you this young kitchen Negro, as I’ve always understood—”

That Northerner gave Miss Theo a serious, recording look as though she had given away what day the mail came in.

“My poor little sister,” Miss Theo went on to Miss Myra, “don’t mind what you hear. Don’t mind this old world.” But Miss Myra knocked back the stroking hand. Kitty came picking her way into the room and sat between the horse’s front feet; Friendly was her name.

One soldier rolled his head toward the other. “What was you saying to me when we come in, Virge?”

“I was saying I opined they wasn’t gone yet.”

“Wasn’t
they?”

Suddenly both of them laughed, jolting each other so hard that for a second it looked like a fight. Then one said with straight face, “We come with orders to set the house afire, ma’am,” and the other one said, “General Sherman.”

“I hear you.”

“Don’t you think we’re going to do it? We done just burnt up Jackson twice,” said the first soldier with his eye on Miss Myra. His voice made a man’s big echo in the hall, like a long time ago. The horse whinnied and moved his head and feet.

“Like I was telling you, you ladies ought to been out. You didn’t get no word here we was coming?” The other soldier pointed one finger at Miss Theo. She shut her eyes.

“Lady, they told you.” Miss Myra’s soldier looked hard at Miss Myra there. “And when your own people tell you something’s coming to burn your house down, the business-like thing to do is get out of the way. And the right thing. I ain’t beholden to tell you no more times now.”

“Then go.”

“Burning up
people’s
further’n I go yet.”

Miss Theo stared him down. “I see no degree.”

So it was Miss Myra’s soldier that jerked Delilah’s hand from the bridle and turned her around, and cursed the Bedlam-like horse which began to beat the hall floor behind. Delilah listened, but Phinny did not throw anything more down; maybe he had crept to the landing, and now looked over. He was scared, if not of horses, then of men. He didn’t know anything about
them. The horse did get loose; he took a clattering trip through the hall and dining room and library, until at last his rider caught him. Then Delilah was set on his back.

She looked back over her shoulder through the doorway, and saw Miss Theo shake Miss Myra and catch the peaked face with its purple eyes and slap it.

“Myra,” she said, “collect your senses. We have to go out in front of them.”

Miss Myra slowly lifted her white arm, like a lady who has been asked to dance, and called, “Delilah!” Because that was the one she saw being lifted onto the horse’s hilly back and ridden off through the front door. Skittering among the iron shoes, Kitty came after, trotting fast as a little horse herself, and ran ahead to the woods, where she was never seen again; but Delilah, from where she was set up on the horse and then dragged down on the grass, never called after her.

She might have been saving her breath for the screams that soon took over the outdoors and circled that house they were going to finish for sure now. She screamed, young and strong, for them all—for everybody that wanted her to scream for them, for everybody that didn’t; and sometimes it seemed to her that she was screaming her loudest for Delilah, who was lost now—carried out of the house, not knowing how to get back.

Still inside, the ladies kept them waiting.

Miss Theo finally brought Miss Myra out through that wide-open front door and across the porch with the still perfect and motionless vine shadows. There were some catcalls and owl hoots from under the trees.

“Now hold back, boys. They’s too ladylike for you.”

“Ladies must needs take their time.”

“And then they’re no damn good at it!” came a clear, youthful voice, and under the branches somewhere a banjo was stroked to call up the campfires further on, later in the evening, when all this would be over and done.

The sisters showed no surprise to see soldiers and Negroes alike (old Ophelia in the way, talking, talking) strike into and out of the doors of the house, the front now the same as the back, to carry off beds, tables, candlesticks, washstands, cedar buckets, china pitchers, with their backs bent double; or the horses ready to go; or the food of the kitchen bolted down—and so much of it thrown away, this must be a second dinner; or the unsilenceable dogs, the old pack mixed with the strangers and fighting with all their hearts over bones. The last skinny sacks were thrown on the wagons—the last flour, the last scraping and clearing from Ophelia’s shelves, even her pepper-grinder. The silver Delilah could count was counted on strange blankets and then, knocking against the teapot, rolled together, tied up like a bag of bones. A drummer boy with his drum around his neck caught both Miss Theo’s peacocks, Marco and Polo, and wrung their necks in the yard. Nobody could look at those bird-corpses; nobody did.

The sisters left the porch like one, and in step, hands linked, came through the high grass in their crushed and only dresses, and walked under the trees. They came to a stop as if it was moonlight under the leafy frame of the big tree with the swing, without any despising left in their faces which were the same as one, as one face that didn’t belong to anybody. This one clarified face, looking both left and right, could make out every one of those men through the bushes and tree trunks, and mark every looting slave also, as all stood momently fixed like serenaders by the light of a moon.

Only old Ophelia was talking all the time, all the time, telling everybody in her own way about the trouble here, but of course nobody could understand a thing that day anywhere in the world.

“What are they fixing to do now, Theo?” asked Miss Myra, with a frown about to burn into her too-white forehead.

“What they want to,” Miss Theo said, folding her arms.

To Delilah that house they were carrying the torches to was like one just now coming into being—like the showboat that slowly came through the trees just once in her time, at the peak of high water—bursting with the unknown, sparking in ruddy light, with a minute to go before that ear-aching cry of the calliope.

When it came—but it was a bellowing like a bull, that came from inside—Delilah drew close, with Miss Theo’s skirt to peep around, and Miss Theo’s face looked down like death itself and said, “Remember this. You black monkeys,” as the blaze outdid them all.

A while after the burning, when everybody had gone away, Miss Theo and Miss Myra, finding and taking hold of Delilah, who was face-down in a ditch with her eyes scorched open, did at last go beyond the tramped-down gate and away through the grand worthless fields they themselves had had burned long before.

It was a hot afternoon, hot out here in the open, and it played a trick on them with a smell and prophecy of fall—it was the burning. The brown wet standing among the stumps in the cracked cup of the pond tasted as hot as coffee and as bitter. There was still and always smoke between them and the sun.

After all the July miles, there Jackson stood, burned
twice, or who knew if it was a hundred times, facing them in the road. Delilah could see through Jackson like a haunt, it was all chimneys, all scooped out. There were soldiers with guns among the ashes, but these ashes were cold. Soon even these two ladies, who had been everywhere and once knew their way, told each other they were lost. While some soldiers looked them over, they pointed at what they couldn’t see, traced gone-away spires, while a horse without his rider passed brushing his side against them and ran down a black alley softly, and did not return.

They walked here and there, sometimes over the same track, holding hands all three, like the timeless time it snowed, and white and black went to play together in hushed woods. They turned loose only to point and name.

“The State House.”—“The school.”

“The Blind School.”—“The penitentiary!”

“The big stable.”—“The Deaf-and-Dumb.”

“Oh! Remember when we passed three of
them
, sitting on a hill?” They went on matching each other, naming and claiming ruin for ruin.

“The lunatic asylum!”—“The State House.”

“No, I said that. Now where are we? That’s surely Captain Jack Calloway’s hitching post.”

“But why would the hitching post be standing and the rest not?”