Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 (14 page)

The serpent that wriggles at the tops of the trees, giggling, snickering while the eggs take their ease, the pig in the rig figures on the trigger as she gets bigger than any set of keys. The looming head, the booming dead, cries off with the moth in the boat. While the beautiful soup and contraband tarts soften damned hearts on the grounds, the winter abounds with uncertain hounds tracking the stops of the story’s great pet, the reflected, perfected, inflected girl. Girl! Churl! With nary a curl of the lips as she slips through the grey mist into the gardener’s train—for a queen again! Oh heartless, vain, and needless meme. The fawn is soon gone with fear drawing near and alarm at the child’s bright charm. And the boys in the fright of the night’s black-winged kite, the sheep in the shop and the wool by the wall before the big fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.

The trying lion in the might fight ate plum cake from the red right hand of the monster. It’s my own invention, he said, that two-tone convention, the dry bone and the golden crown. All around town, another queen, the mother dream, at the midnight feast with the right lease and an explosion of hankering hunger.

So she grabs the unfed dread red and shakes and shakes and shakes her—

and it was a kitten, it was all written, only a kitten after all that fall, only a kitten after all.

And life, all life, rife with strife and a-gleam with dreams, moves phantomwise in deep disguise, in saddened but still brilliant eyes.

1

So Bilbo gives Frodo this ring.

There’s a quest to destroy the damned thing.

At the lip of Mount Doom

there’s a question of whom

they should rescue, shove in, or fling.

2

The ancestral pile Gormenghast

is moldy and musty and vast.

Said the heir, Titus Groan,

as he came to his own,

“Screw it, I’m out of here fast!”

July 1850

He watched his brother drown. Saw his arms thrashing in the water, feared that someone would come when they heard the pathetic pleas for help. A cramp probably, though he sometimes thought of it as some beast beneath the lake holding his brother’s foot. He could have gone for help, maybe, or thrown something (a vine or branch) but he didn’t. He watched; and as he watched, he thought of the bruises on his stomach and the ones on his back he could see in the mirror. He thought too of the bruises he couldn’t see with any mirror.

January 1864

Caleb Simkins and the eight other men sat around the fire, holding dented metal plates with hardtack, greens and fresh-baked bread donated by the widows of Charleston. Through the windows of the deserted house, the city itself: rubble, fires, and men with buckets. The rain helped.

The wind bent the trees nearly double; the icy rain fell in intermittent heavy sheets. At a certain window that none ever looked through the white froth of the waves smashed against the sides of the blockading ships.

Dixon looked at each of his men. His voice was heavy with fatigue yet strong, and from his strength they gained theirs. “I have been hard on you. I’m proud to serve with each of you, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for any of your lot.”

Becker chuckled, said, “How ’bout a round of cards, Lieutenant? We could use a little fresh money. All we do is change the pot from one hand to another.”

Dixon smiled, shook his head. He was terrible at cards. “What would you spend it on?” None of them smoked, drank, or whored.

Around a piece of salted meat, Becker said, “Food.”

Dixon said, “I’ve requisitioned some more; we should have it be tomorrow. If you’ll excuse me.” He stood, left through the door into the rain-swept night. They could see his hand twisting inside a pocket, in all probability flipping the bent gold coin there.

Ridgeway said, “What do you suppose is with him?”

Dillingham, the supposed spy, said, “It’s obvious: he wants to sink a ship and all we’ve done is drive the boat out and back. How many times have we missed the tide? How many times have we beached ourselves?”

“Ain’t our fault,” Wicks said.

“No, it isn’t. Nor is it his fault. But he takes it as a personal failure. If we could sink just one boat then Beauregard would have to listen, and we would soon have the harbors full of submarines.”

The men said nothing, which is what men say when there is nothing to be said.

The men soon tired of the worn cards and the worn currency and retired beneath thick, scratchy wool blankets. Morning was only a few hours away. They had only just returned an hour ago.

November 1863

Only a few months ago (which seemed like years) Lieutenant Dixon boarded the C.S.S.
Indian Chief
following by Alexander.

The crew was assembled, the unshaven, barefoot sailors standing proud before a man they respected and feared.

Dixon said, “You’ve seen the
Hunley
dive beneath this ship how many times? More than any of you can count, I think. She drowned her last crew. She needs a new crew. Thirteen men,” he said, pacing, “have given their lives for the Confederacy. She even took her namesake and creator to the grave. Thirteen! A number that doesn’t sit right with any of us.”

The sailors glanced at one another uneasily.

“But men die. Sometimes futilely. Men have died there,” he said pointing to Fort Sumter. “And there!” That was Fort Moultrie. “And this very deck!” He stomped his boots, mud flakes scattered across the freshly swabbed boards. “But has anyone ever considered not manning Sumter or Moultrie or any ship for fear that they too would die? Of course not! We count the men who have died behind the stone walls or on the wooden decks as heroes and we count their replacements as heroes as well.

“No one hates the Yankees more than myself. No one hates the chokehold they have on our fine harbors. Those damned ironsides keep our munitions from us. We must break this blockade. You know that as well as I. You know this blockade will destroy the Confederacy. Do you wish that? I said, DO YOU WISH THAT?”

“NO!”

“They say this is the cradle of secession! Here, where the first shot was fired. They will say this is where the war was won! You’ve seen the dummy torpedo against your side; now imagine it against those ships! The explosion. The smoke. The ship sinking. The Yankees leap from the rigging. See them die. And see Charleston free and whole and without oppression! Your families are there, your children. See the ironsides sink like the stones they are and see yourself as the hero that does it! I need strong men, brave men, men who love the South and all that she means and together we will crush the North!” He slammed his fist into a palm, raised it, and then let out a wild rebel yell that could be heard echoing from the very ironsides of which he just spoke.

The sailors stepped forward as one thing, the sound of their feet a war drum against the deck. They too lifted their fist to the sky and whooped.

Five men were chosen: Wicks, Becker, Ridgeway, Collins, Simkins.

July 1850

He was only six when his brother died. (When he killed him.) His father put his arm around him saying, “Good boy. Men don’t cry.” No one knew he didn’t cry because he had no reason to.

Looking around at the women in black and the men wearing their white, starched shirts, he wondered how many cried not because they had reason to but because it was expected. It filled him with an anger so that his fists clenched; and when they did, one woman far from him pointed, saying, “How angry he must be. I don’t blame him in the least.” He almost laughed.

He realized, in a child’s way, that they mourned not for his brother’s qualities (good or bad) or deeds (good or bad) he had done. They mourned because a child had died, a generic child, who stood for their children. There but for the Grace of God … God was supposed to judge, on Judgment Day, an individual based on his actions alone. But man was also in the image of God; and so if man judged men based on some ideal version of man (at least when they were dead, ignoring that live men were judged daily and nearly always found wanting, especially by the gossips) then would not God judge based on the same reasoning? There would be no difference between his brother and any of the saints. If there was no sorting of men, then there could be neither Heaven nor Hell. There was no afterlife. But there must be power that gave the world order, and they must be the things that drove the winds and the waves and forced the corn to grow. There was still a morality, but it was a cold and harsh morality. Mercy was not something these gods knew or cared to know.

(Did he think these thoughts at that age? No; he knew that he couldn’t have articulated so well then, and probably not that well even now.)

November 1863

The
Hunley
sat on blocks on the dock. This was their first glimpse. Negroes swarmed around her like black flies. They carried buckets of lime and rough cloth and rope and material for the stuffing boxes.

She had just drowned a crew of eight with Horace Hunley commanding her. After weeks in the water she smelled of death, which was why there was so much lime.

“There she is,” Dixon said. “Thirty-four feet of three quarter inch iron.”

A man carrying a compass had to twist to get down the forward hatch.

Dixon took them below. He showed each how the compass worked, how to operate the ballast tanks with the bellows to clear the tanks; he showed them how the diving planes took her up or down and how he could tell by looking at the tube of mercury just how deep she went. “A half inch of quicksilver for every foot,” he said. “And if something fails that half-inch represents an eternity. There’s no escape. When she rolled, there were a lucky few, but that was because the hatches were already open. Imagine if they had been closed.” He put a hand on Simkins’ shoulder, the man with him now. “Look up, look down, look forward and aft. This may very well be your coffin.” He let the silence settle like snow.

“Here is where you will sit.” He showed him a small wooden seat. “Here’s the handle. It’s cold now now but after a night of hard cranking it’ll be warm and your hands’ll be bloody. That’s how we drive her, eight men to turn the crank and myself to steer her.”

“She stinks of death; can you smell it? If you’re afraid, say so. There’ll be no shame in saying so; no one will think any less of you.”

None had been chosen because they were cowards.

August 1850

It was difficult to escape the watchful eyes of his parents, for they were stuck to him like flies to shit whenever he went more than a shadow’s length beyond the house. But a six-year-old is resourceful and he soon made his way to the pond.

He had never learned to swim. His brother was supposed to have shown him, but all he ever did was swing out on the old rope, fall in and laugh. He would gesture to his little brother and when the boy pissed his pants he would only laugh harder.

Today he rolled up his legs and waded in. The water was cold, but quickly enough warmed around his ankles. He took another step noticing that the edge sloped gently. Another step, a fourth and suddenly he found himself in water much deeper than he was tall. He splashed and spluttered.

But something buoyed him, gave him the time to learn a few crude strokes and he made his way back to the shelf. He stood and looked out over the water where the wind caused gentle ripples. He patted the water as one would a dog; and he laughed when the current changed and lapped at his feet.

January 1864

Each morning, they knelt in a plain church with Reverend Johnson. Dixon had acceded, deciding that though he carried the bent gold coin it was ultimately God’s power that would save or kill them; and Reverend Johnson was as good as any other reverend.

Simkins knew that it was pointless to pray to something that did not exist. But still, he prayed with them knowing that most of the men believed and he found it a comfort to think that perhaps someone, if not the God they prayed to then at least a god who heard, might be watching over them. He could sense something in the church. They all could.

For the other men, whatever it was they felt sent shivers down the spine, but not the shivers that speaks to a man of comfort but the kind that tells him there is a vicious man or beast just behind him, just behind that tree or building or hidden in the deep shade there.

Entering the submarine was difficult at best: the holes were small so that Simkins had to shrug his shoulders towards. There was always a moment where he felt as if he might become stuck, and then he sucked in his chest and dropped to the floor with the heavy, hollow sound of boots on iron. He was one of the last in, seated next to Alexander.