Gob's Grief (33 page)

Do you see how you have yellowed my mood with your tub? But for his feet, Private Vanderbilt is complete on my wall. May he guard me from sadness.

Maci’s father completed the Infant in the second week of September. “A big boy, Poppy,” she said, standing with him in the shed with Miss Suter. The Infant was a great box. The wood that had been in him was gone—that had only been scaffolding, her father said. Now, he was all glass and copper, silver filigree and iron. “Where is his mouth?” she asked. “How will he breathe?” Her father and Miss Suter laughed at her as if she were a five-year old asking why the ocean is blue.

“His true form is on the spiritual plane,” said her father. “You see, my dear, I have been constructing in both places. Why do you suppose it has taken so long?”

They had a feast to honor him, ham and baked corn, quahogs that Maci had dug herself from the mud of Potter’s Pond, and a lemon sponge cake. Miss Suter proclaimed it the last warm evening of the year, so they ate on the rickety porch. Maci fidgeted while the two of them said their odd grace: “We believe in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, a continuous existence, the communion of spirits and the ministrations of angels, compensation and retribution in the hereafter for good or ill done on earth, and we believe in a path of endless progression!” Listening to them, Maci rather wished she could join them in their belief, just as she had wanted to become a slave, when she was a little girl, because she’d been sure, back then, that if only she were a slave, her father would shower her with all the easy, warm enthusiasm he showered on his dear Negro friends, the fugitive strangers who passed through their house in Boston. It had seemed to her jealous little heart that her father had loved them all better than her, because they got presents of effusive affection, while she got more Vergil.

After dinner, Maci and her father pointed out constellations for Miss Suter’s edification. Boötes and Draco, Hercules and Cepheus, each was very bright in the sky over the black ocean. “That star is Arcturus,” Maci said.

“Where?” asked Miss Suter. “Where?” She waddled over to line up her eye with Maci’s pointing finger. “Ah!” she said. The great swell of her belly was nuzzled against Maci’s shoulder. Miss Suter gave another cry, and Maci thought this time she did feel something, a little kick.

Maci excused herself and took a walk along the cliff. The moon came up, washing out the stars. Low clouds rushed by, little floating islands that looked about the size of a big wagon. She could not help imagining riding one south to Maryland. If there were just room for one other on the cloud, would she take Rob or Private Vanderbilt flying? She was not sure. She wondered if that was the form her madness would take—fascination with a stranger. She had begun to rearrange Vanderbilt’s portrait—switching his hands or arms from side to side, balancing the lemonade on his head, setting his face in the middle of his chest. Rob had kindly sent enough faces to vary his mood—some angry, some sad, but most happy and peaceful-looking. Sometimes she put a peaceful-looking face on her pillow and woke in the morning with smudges on her cheek, and thought that he might have kissed her during the night. Standing by the cliff, she considered a future with him. They would live in Manhattan and manipulate railroad stock.

After a while, she returned to the house and went into the shed to look at the Infant. “Little Brother,” she said. “I ought to love you better.” She could think of nothing else to add, so she just stared at him for a long while. She could see her own face thrown back at her, twisted up along a silver tube, or shattered by the facets of a crystal panel. Then, she saw her father’s reflection. He had entered the shed and was walking towards her, but it looked like his image was rising from the crystalline depths of his machine. He stood next to her and put his arm around her. She closed her eyes, and put her face in his shoulder.

“It’s impossible, what you want to do,” she said.

“Difficult,” her father replied, “but not impossible. And is it any reason not to try a thing, because it is difficult? To the small mind, ending slavery seems as difficult and unlikely as changing the color of the sky. Yet that endeavor proceeds apace.”

“I hate him,” Maci said vehemently, pressing her face harder into her father’s shirt. “I hate all of this so much.”

“Oh Maci,” he said, stroking her hair. “Don’t be envious of him. It will make you ugly, inside and out. And anyhow, don’t you know that you are still my favorite?”

I know I risk your displeasure sending you these soldiers. It is not that I wish you to look at them and be saddened, but rather that I must send them away from me. Fold them into squares and sail them over the cliff—maybe they will find peace in the cold water. On the fifteenth, our regiment was ordered down from the westward slope of South Mountain, where we came upon the scene of the previous day’s heaviest fighting. The enemy’s dead were so numerous that a regiment who passed here before us had to remove them from the road to make way for the troops. They were piled up head high on either side, and made a gauntlet. Private Vanderbilt saw my distress—he is intimate with my moods—and offered to lead me through as I closed my eyes. I declined his kind offer. It seemed a fitting passageway from the land of the living to the land of the dead. I fear it is not the happy place where dwells our mad Poppy’s weakened mind. I thought as I walked of living hands grabbing up the bodies of the dead and stacking them like cordwood upon the road. In ten years, the wall might be made of bones, with only a blowing scrap of gray wool still attached to a wrist or a neck.

Sister, this wall is the work of men’s hands, and the whole war is the work of men’s hands—fingers tear cartridges and pull triggers. I would now that I had not sent you the Private’s hands, but here are his feet. I place them just beneath this letter, and the wall beneath that—all the work of my hand. Do not look at the wall.

Go to Boston. Pray for me.

She did look at the picture of the wall. It was an illustration of Hell. There were boys stacked high, their legs and arms intertwined in gross familiarity. Dead staring faces rested against each other, brow to brow. Motes of light danced in eyes that saw nothing, unless it was the moment of their death frozen before them. Try as she might, she could not imagine her brother’s face as he walked that gauntlet. But she could see Private Vanderbilt. His face was somehow both tender and stern as he put his hand on Rob’s shoulder, and tried to keep his wide back between Rob’s eyes and the wall. Maybe later Private Vanderbilt held him like a brother while he wept, trying to wash out the dead faces from his eyes.

She attached his feet, and at last he stood complete before her. She sat on her bed, watching him and listening to the noise of the surf. “Thank you,” she said to him.

I did look at the wall
, she wrote.
Such horror! Of course I prefer the Private’s feet to such atrocity, but whatever you must send I will gladly receive. How could it be any other way? Are you not my own Zu-Zu? Am I not your sister? You are in my prayers. I think Poppy and Miss Suter pray for you, too, in their way. Two apostles and an incipient spinster are pleading on your behalf—is this not cause for happiness?

The Infant is complete. Though I am not fond of him, I must admit that he is beautiful. You are not any longer the handsomest Trufant. Nor am I pretty, next to him. He has silver teeth and spun-glass hair and a golden face. He is jewelry, a brooch for a giant. We are waiting now only for Miss Suter to vomit a spirit from her womb. I fear the pall that will settle over this house when their bright hopes are dashed, when only a mundane babe comes into the world. Here is my prediction, I have it from my spirit guide, an Indian girl who inhabits the abandoned shell of a whelk. The baby will come and Miss Suter will flee from it, because it is not a spirit essence, because it reminds her of shame. She will be gone from our lives, and I will have a baby to raise. I shall have to learn to cook properly. We shall sell off the Infant in bits and pieces, and use the money to improve the house, to steady the porch and buy new stoves. Poppy’s folly will recede from him when his machine is a failure. We will wait for you here. This war will end. You will come and visit us with the Private in tow. It is a pleasure to dig for quahogs—I will show you. Do you see, then, how happy futures are born from the gray, despairing present? Brother, you have all my love.

*     *     *

“It’s a lazy baby that won’t be born,” said Miss Suter. She had an urge to go boating, so Maci had taken her out on the pond. Maci worried that the baby would come there in the middle of the water. She had been feeling anxious around Miss Suter because she seemed capable of giving birth quite at any moment. “I so wish it would come. These late battles might not have been, if only she had come last week.” She bent her neck forward to stare at her belly. “Why do you wait?” she asked it. It was September 25. News of the battle in Maryland had reached even here. Maci had checked casualty lists in a Providence paper and found Rob’s name absent from them.

A raft of yodeling old-squaws suddenly flapped their wings and took off inland. “Running from the storm,” said Miss Suter. The wind had been blowing hard for the past three days. Salt-encrusted fisherman types in the village were predicting “a great big blow.”

Her father had been into the village, to buy a lightning rod for the roof of the shed. He was installing it when Maci and Miss Suter walked up to the house. He waved to them and said to Maci, “You have a letter, my dear!” Miss Suter toddled over to shout encouragement up at him while Maci went inside. She was sure the letter would be from Rob, but it wasn’t. It was from Private Vanderbilt.

There were instances in her life upon which she would later reflect and hate herself. When she was five years old, she had eaten two pounds of chocolate cake, then crawled into a corner and gotten sick like a dog. In the weeks following her mother’s death, Maci had considered how she’d broken under no real strain—her children were healthy and she lived a life of privilege—and she had hated her mother for being weak. Later, she would appreciate how anything could break you, how we are all breakable, and she would hate superior, weakness-hating Maci as certainly as she hated five-year-old gluttonous Maci. In this way, she would hate blithe, carefree, stupid Maci, who thought Private Vanderbilt was writing to make love to her. She sat in front of his portrait and read.

Dear Friend
,

I know you will have heard by now of your brother Rob’s death on the 17th of September, before Antietam Creek. I thought I should write and tell you of his last days. He was my friend, though he was an officer and I am only an enlisted volunteer. It was my great honor to know him. He saved my life on the very day he died. Crossing Antietam Creek, I became mired in the mud and would have drowned had Rob not returned for me under heavy fire, taking a wound in his scalp as he fetched me. He bound it with a strip of cloth and would not go back. From the creek, we were ordered forward, and we lost men at every step. Our color guard was mowed down three times in succession, but at last we drove the Rebs over a stone wall, and they fled towards the town. We were ordered back not long after that, for we had used up all our ammunition and there was no relief for us—no one could support us in our far-flung position. This order did not sit well with the men of the Ninth, and some of them pursued the fleeing enemy. Your gentle brother was among those pursuers. I was with them, too. We ran into their strength. Just two of twenty-five men made it back to our lines. Those two were I and your brother, but his wounds were such that he did not last the night. I was with him when he died. He spoke no words—his wound was in his throat—but I do not doubt that his thoughts were with you at the last. He spoke of you so often, I feel I know you well. I hope you will call on me, after we soldiers bury our guns. I live in Manhattan, at Number 10 Washington Place.

It is a sorrow that men should find it necessary to take one another’s lives to establish a principle.

                                                   
Your friend
,
                                                  
George Washington Vanderbilt.

*     *     *

Maci kept the news to herself for hours because she could not articulate it. In the end, she walked up to her father and presented the letter to him. He read it with a stern face and said, “My darling. He has passed over into the Summerland. Let us celebrate for him.” Maci slapped him, striking his sweet, bewildered face with the strength of her whole arm, then fled to her room, where she would not open the door for him when he came knocking.

The next day, numb habit took her into the village. She stopped before the post office, sat down on the ground, and stared bleakly at the building, a small white house with a roof of cedar shakes. She wanted to weep, but did not. The postmaster saw her sitting there in the street and came out to ask what was the matter. She only said she was tired, and had to rest a little. He brought her inside, where he had mail for her. There was a letter from Rob, and a package that he could have sent up to the house if she wished. Though she ought not to go back up there, he said. Didn’t she know there was a storm coming? It seemed to Maci that the big blow was as lazy as Miss Suter’s unborn principle. It was waiting politely offshore, as if for an invitation to come in and ravage.