Jordan County (36 page)

“He’s a hero,” Isaac said. He had seen and known heroes before. “What did you expect?”

Clive mended fast, however, and soon after the first of the year he rode away. They heard of his raid into Kentucky that spring — ‘brilliant’ was the word that appeared most frequently in the newspaper accounts; the columns bristled with it, alongside ‘gallant’ — and in June he led his brigade in the attack that crumpled Grierson’s flank at Brice’s Crossroads and sent the invaders stumbling back to Memphis. The papers were full of it, prose and verse. His wife had left Solitaire by then, taking the three sons with her to the coastal resort where they spent the final year of the war being spoiled by guests and casual visitors. “What! these the gallant Jameson’s heirs? Stand up, boys, and let us look at you!”

Isaac and Mrs Jameson did not leave; they stayed on. When Clive’s wife left, and then all but a handful of the servants, Mrs Jameson closed the big house completely, boarding the windows, and sealed off the upper story of her own house. She and Isaac lived downstairs. She was fifty-six, an active, bustling woman who got things done. She still had the yellow hair and even the beautifully rounded arms, but she was subject to dizzy spells, which she called the Vapors, and during such an attack her mind would wander. She would imagine the war was over and her son was dead. A moment later, though, she would sigh and say, “I’m glad he’s doing well, but I wish they would let him come home for a while. I really do.”

She never thought of him the way he had been when he was there with his Chickamauga wound. In her mind she saw him as he had been when he rode away that first time, in the spring of ’61, with the soft voice and gentle eyes, or as he was in the daguerreotype which she kept on the night table beside her bed. It had been taken when he was a child; he wore button shoes and ribbed stockings and a jacket of watered silk, and there was a small-boy sweetness in his face. Sometimes in the night Isaac would wake to find the candle burning at the bedside and Mrs Jameson sitting bolt-upright, propped on three pillows, with the picture in her hands. There would be tears in her eyes, like the ones that followed the death of their
first child, and if he spoke to her at such a time she would turn and look at him with the face of a stranger.

On a hot July morning she was waxing the dining room table — a task she had always reserved for herself because it gave her a particular pleasure; the table had been her first purchase on the Memphis wedding trip — when suddenly she paused and a peculiar expression came over her face, the expression of someone about to sneeze. Then she did; she sneezed loudly. “God bless me,” she said, automatically, and went on with her work, applying the wax in long, even strokes. Presently she raised one hand to her forehead, palm outward, fingers relaxed. “I feel so dizzy,” she said. She looked frightened. Isaac reached her just as she fell. He carried her to a couch in the living room and knelt beside her, patting her wrists. Her breath came in harsh stertorous groans.

“Katy!” Isaac kept saying. “Katy, dont you know me?”

She did not know him; she did not know anything. Foam kept forming on her lips and Isaac wiped it away with his handkerchief. Two Negroes stood in the background. There was nothing they could do. All the doctors were off to war, but that was just as well since there was nothing they could have done either. It was a cerebral hemorrhage and she died within four hours.

Next day they buried her in the cedar grove, at the near end of the row of small, weathered crosses, beside the one she had cried hardest over. Isaac was dry-eyed at the burial; he did not seem to understand what had happened. He was bewildered at last by mortality, by a world in which a person could sneeze and say, “God bless me: I feel dizzy,” and then be dead. He was eighty-six years old.

All but three of the slaves had left by then, gone on their own or as dish-washers and ditch-diggers with the Union armies which had roamed the district at will and without real opposition since early ’64. There was Edward, the butler, who was almost seventy, the last of the original ten who had come with Isaac in the Conestoga north from Natchez. He was stone deaf, a tall, straight-backed Negro, part Choctaw — his full name was Edward Postoak — mute and inscrutable behind his wall of dignity and deafness. The other two were women; both were old, one lame (she did the cooking, what there was to cook) and the other half-witted. These three lived in one of the cabins that formed a double row, called the Quarters, half a mile behind the house. The other cabins were empty, beginning to dry rot from disuse, and the street between the rows, formerly grassless, polished by generations of bare feet until it was almost as smooth and shiny as a ballroom floor, was beginning to spring up in weeds. When Mrs Jameson died Edward moved into the house with Isaac. Five weeks later the two women joined them because a Federal platoon, out on patrol, burned the Quarters.

That was in August. Near sundown the platoon made bivouac in a pasture near the house. The cooks set up their kitchen and sent out a three-man detail for firewood. They were tearing up the floorboards in one of the cabins, the planks making sudden, ripping sounds like musketry, when one of the soldiers happened to glance up and see a tall yellow woman, her face pitted with old smallpox scars, standing in the doorway watching them. She clasped her wrists over her stomach and watched them gravely. It gave him a start, finding her there like that without having heard her approach.

“Yawl bed not be doing that,” she said when the soldier looked at her.

The others paused too, now. They stood leaning forward with half-ripped planks in their hands. Their uniforms were dusty, still sweaty from marching all that afternoon. “Why not, aunty?” the first said. His speech was Southern, though obviously from north of Mississippi.

“I’ll tell Mars Ike and he’ll tell his boy: thats why. And the genril he’ll come back and git you, too, what time he hears you messing with his belongings like you doing.”

They resumed their work, tearing up the floorboards with a splintering, ripping sound, and the sunlight slanting through the western window was filled with dust-motes. Then one of them said casually, “What general would that be, aunty?”

“Genril Cli Jameson, Mars Ike’s boy. You see if I dont.”

Again they paused, once more with the ends of half-ripped planks in their hands. But this time it was different. They looked at her, all three together, and something like joy was registered on their faces. “Does this belong to him, that house and all these shanties?”

“Does indeed, and you best quit or I’ll tell him. I’m a mind to tell him anyhow, the way yawl acting.”

“Well,” the first said, still not moving, still bent forward. “Well, well. What do you know.”

Then he moved. He finished prizing up the plank he had hold of, took a jackknife from his pocket, one of the big horn-handled ones the suttlers sold in such volume every payday, and began to peel shavings from the edge of the plank. It was cypress, long since cured, and the shavings came off straight and clean, a rich pink almost red. The other two watched him for a moment, puzzled. Then they understood and began to do the same, taking out their knives and peeling shavings from other planks. They worked in silence, all three together. They were from a Tennessee Union regiment — what their enemies called home-made Yankees. All three had week-old beards.

“That damned butcher,” the third said. He had not spoken until now. “Aint it funny what luck will sometimes throw your way?”

The woman watched them without understanding, still with her hands crossed on the bulge of her stomach, while one of the soldiers scraped the shavings into a small pile in one corner of the room. He laid planks across it, first the split ones and then whole ones, building a tepee of lumber. When he had finished this he took a tinder box from the pocket of his blouse,
then bent and struck it so that a shower of sparks fell into the heart of the little heaped-up pile of cypress shavings. At first it merely smoked and glowed. Suddenly a flame leaped up, bright yellow, then orange, then rose-colored, licking the wall of the cabin.

“Yawl bed not be doing that,” the woman said again, her voice as flat, as inflectionless as at the start.

The soldiers stood watching the fire. When it was burning nicely they gathered up the remainder of their ripped-up floorboards and started for the pasture where by now the cook had begun to beat with a big spoon against the bottom of a dishpan to hurry them along. One paused at the foot of the steps, turning with the bundle of planks on his shoulder. The others stopped beyond him, looking back and smiling as he spoke. “Tell him thats for Fort Pillow, aunty. Tell him it’s from the friend of a man who was there.”

Fifteen minutes later Isaac and Edward and the lame cook, and presently the half-witted woman too, stood on the back gallery and watched the Quarters burn. “I told um not to, plain as I’m standing here talking to you right now,” the woman said. There was no wind, not a breath; the flames went straight up with a sucking, roaring sound like the rush of something passing at great speed. Even deaf Edward, though he could not hear it, felt its deep murmuring whoosh against his face. He turned his head this way and that, as if he had recovered his hearing after all those years of silence.

The Federal platoon, the men in collarless fatigue blouses and galluses, many of them smoking pipes while they waited for supper, gathered at the back of the pasture to watch the progress of the fire. They leaned their elbows on the top rail of the fence, and as the dusk came on and the flames spread from cabin to cabin along the double row, flickering brighter and brighter on their faces, they made jokes at one another up and down the line. Soon the cook beat again on the dishpan with the spoon and they lined up with messkits in their hands. The fire burned on. It burned steadily into the night,
its red glow reflected against the underside of the pall of smoke hanging over the plantation. From time to time a roof fell in, occasionally two together, and a bright rush of sparks flew upward in a fiery column that stood steadily upright for a long moment, substantial as a glittering pillar of jeweled brass supporting the black overhang of smoke, before it paled and faded and was gone.

Next morning when Isaac came out of the house he found the pasture empty, the soldiers gone, with only an unclosed latrine and a few charred sticks of the cookfire to show they had been there at all. He walked down to where the quarters had been, and there were only the foundation stones and the toppled chimneys, the bricks still hot among the cooling ashes. The cabins had been built during the ten-year bachelor period between his arrival and his marriage (Memzy, who butted heads with bulls, had been chief carpenter; he was gone now, one of the first to leave) — sixteen cabins, two rows of eight, put up during the ten-year span by a five-man building team who snaked the big cypress out of a slough, split them with axes and crosscut saws for timbers and planks and shingles and even pegs to save the cost of nails. They had been good cabins, snug in winter, cool in summer, built to last; they had seen forty years of living and dying, laughing and weeping, arrival and departure. Now they were gone, burned overnight, casualties of the war.

As he turned at the end of the double row, starting back, a great weariness came over him. He stood there for a moment, arms loose at his sides, then returned to the house. He went up the steps and across the gallery. In the kitchen a strange thing happened to him.

The cook was boiling something on the stove, stirring it with a long-handled spoon, and as he came past he intended to ask her, ‘Is breakfast ready?’ But that was not what he said. He said, “Is breck us riding?”

“Sir?”

He tried again. “Has bread abiding?”

“Sir?” The cook looked at him. She had turned sideways, still bent forward over the pot, and the spoon dripped a thin white liquid. It was cornmeal mush; she would boil it to a thicker consistence, then cook it into cakes to be served with sorghum. With her crooked leg, bowed back, and lips collapsed about her toothless mouth so that her nose and chin were brought into near conjunction, she resembled a witch. “Sir?” she said.

Isaac made a gesture of impatience and went on toward the front of the house. His arms and legs were trembling; there was a pulsing sensation in his head, immediately behind his eyes, a throbbing produced by pressure. Something is happening to me! he thought. He could think the words clearly: ‘Is breakfast ready?’ but when he tried to say them they came out wrong. Words came out that were not even in his mind as he spoke. Something has happened to me! he thought.

These were the first signs of motor aphasia, the words coming wrong from his tongue. They were not always wrong; sometimes he could speak with no trouble at all. But sooner or later a word or a phrase, unconnected with what he intended to say, would substitute itself. Then the lame cook or the half-witted woman, who was supposed to be the housemaid but who actually did nothing, would look at him with puzzled eyes. “Sir?” they would say, feeling awkward. They did not know whether it was a mishap or a joke; they did not know whether to worry or to laugh. So Isaac avoided them, preferring the company of Edward, who did not hear him anyhow, whether the words were correct or wrong, accurate or garbled.