The Splendour Falls (21 page)

C
AHABA
F
IRST
S
TATE
C
APITAL
1818–1826

According to William S. Davis, Esq., my greattimes-six-grandfather had been a mover and a shaker in Cahawba/Cahaba. It seemed no one could decide whether there was a
w
or not. I looked back down the empty avenue, then turned in a slow circle, my eyes following a pitted dirt road that made a horseshoe around what must have once been the centre of town.

It was eerie, really, how a town substantial enough to be the capital could have disappeared so completely. Maybe that was the source of my unease as Gigi and I started walking across the flat, tree-dotted space between the monument and the river bluff. Across the field was a brick column, a forlorn remnant of some industrial space. This must have been the commercial district – at the end of the main street, near the river – the interstate of the eighteen hundreds.

The ground was slightly uneven, but that wasn't what made me pause as I reached the centre of the horseshoe road. It was cooler than the shade could account for. More than cool. Chilly. The humid morning had turned clammy, as if the sun were obscured by more than the towering oaks with their draping of moss.

Great. The power of suggestion was not my friend. The professor had mentioned cold and now my imagination ran away with me in every draughty, shady place.
Get it together, Sylvie.

I pushed forward just to prove that I wasn't affected, that I didn't believe this was anything other than a breeze from the river. Gigi had to pick up her feet as we trekked through grass and pine needles. She didn't look happy about it.

As I got closer I realized that the brick remnant wasn't a column, but a chimney. Stubbornness gave way to curiosity – a chimney without a house? – and I would have gone on, but Gigi sat down and refused to move. At the end of the leash, I stopped too, listening to Gigi's electric-motor growl, and the sudden sound of my heartbeat in my own ears.

The soft, subliminal rush of the river disappeared, and the sunshine seemed to dim, as if we'd stepped through a curtain. The chill I'd tried to ignore rushed in, moving with the currents of air to stroke my skin like fingers. The cold crawled up my legs and spread through my body, and I shuddered with a despairing ache.

Sorrow and hopelessness pressed in on me like a funeral crowd. I gasped, and my stomach cramped at a fetid smell. In that instant, I did believe I was mad, because no one in their right mind would imagine such thorough wretchedness.

Then came a completely pedestrian sound – the honk of a car horn. Gigi barked and ran for the dirt horseshoe road. The six-pound jolt was minor, but enough to shake me back into motion. The gripping strangeness fell away as I stumbled after the dog into the welcome sunshine.

There were picnic tables by the river bluff, on the other side of the dirt road. Numb and bewildered, but fully myself again, I walked to one, limping hard, and sat down. Gigi leaped into my lap. With a trembling hand, I wiped a line of sweat from my lip, and looked at the spot I'd just crossed.

What the hell was that? The moment had the intensity of a plunge into an icy, dark well, but there was nothing to mark it. No evocative old ruin, no shadow at a window, no military relics in an old man's study. Where could it have come from but my own mind?

There was no denying – though my returning reason floundered desperately in the attempt – that the echoes could have come from my psyche. The days when the pills were too tempting, when I could barely make myself get out of bed. The days when I didn't. There weren't many; I didn't like to admit there were any. I wanted to believe I'd never been that weak. But the cold had flooded me with those memories. I would swear I had felt grasping hands dragging me back to that painful, bleak time.

But what had prompted it? Yes, my leg hurt, but what else was new. Since coming to Alabama, I'd felt more connected to the world than I had in a long time. I didn't feel back to normal, because without dance I didn't know what normal was. But I didn't feel crazy. Even in those moments when there was no other explanation for what I was sensing.

Gigi gave a warning bark, and I heard the sound of an engine a moment later. A pickup truck bounced towards us, around the bend of the dirt road.

The disorienting fear of the past few moments solidified into something more specific. I was alone out here. Alone and at the mercy of faulty senses. My pulse trip-hammered in my neck as I scooped up Gigi and stood.

‘Hey there, little lady.' The truck stopped beside us
and a twinkling-eyed Santa Claus of a man hung a sunburned elbow out the window as he greeted me. He didn't look much like an axe murderer, and I was relieved to see the logo of the park stitched on the front of his polo shirt. ‘You doing OK?'

‘Yes,' I said warily. Did I look like I was about to do a header into the river? Anxiety and confusion sat on me like elephants on a circus trainer, but the cold and despair were gone.

Santa seemed to find my suspicion amusing. ‘You're limping quite a bit, and I was worried you might have twisted your ankle on the grass. It can be uneven after the spring rains.'

‘Oh!' Relief drained some of the tension from my shoulders. ‘No. I just— It's an old injury. And I've been walking a while. I didn't realize this place was so big.'

‘Lordy! Where did you walk from?'

‘Bluestone Hill.' I gestured vaguely in the direction I'd come. The man's practical warmth had pushed my worry into a corner, where I could ignore it until later. ‘I'm—'

A grin split his white beard. ‘I know exactly who you are, Miss Davis.' He reached across the wheel to stick his right hand out the window. I shook it automatically. ‘I'm Jim Young. I'm friends with Paula and Clara. And with your fellow houseguests.'

‘The Griffiths?' I felt a satisfying click of comprehension. This was the mutual friend, then.

Mr Young chuckled. ‘Don't I look like a world-travelling archaeologist-turned-folklorist in my retirement?'

‘You look like Kriss Kringle' The observation slipped out, surprising me. I didn't joke with strangers. Or anyone, really.

He laughed loudly, and didn't seem offended. ‘Are you looking for Rhys? He's over by the dig.' He made a vague and unhelpful gesture.

I shook my head. ‘I'm trying to find out more about my family's history. Which today, I guess, means finding out more about this place.'

Delight lit his jolly face. ‘My dear girl, you have made my day.' He put the truck back in gear and gestured for me to step back. ‘Let me move off the road.'

There was no way to avoid his joining me. If I'd wanted a tour guide, I could have taken Shawn up on his offer. But I'd wanted to explore alone. The wildness of the place made me want to poke into its corners and lift its figurative carpets.

Or it had, until the awful moment under the trees. Suddenly the distraction of company seemed a good thing.

When Mr Young rejoined us, Gigi sniffed excitedly at his trouser legs and he bent to pet her. ‘So, what do you want to know?'

‘What happened to the town?' It was good to focus on practical questions. And this way, I could find out some facts without having to go back to William the Boring.

He chuckled. ‘Which time? A lot has happened here.' He gestured for me to follow him to the gap in the trees at the river bluff. I stopped a few feet back: the bank was steep, and the water was a long way down. Paula's warning against swimming made a lot of sense.

‘The Native Americans had a community here first,' said Mr Young, deciding to start at the beginning, I guess. ‘Though it was gone by the time Cahaba was settled. It's a natural place for a settlement, of course, since it's the juncture of two rivers. Which means easy transportation and irrigation, and the land is very fertile.'

He pointed to where a smaller river joined the wide swath of the Alabama coming from the north. Maybe it was Dad's influence, but I found it interesting how the lay of the land affected civilization, before we started changing the terrain to suit us. However, that wasn't what I'd asked. ‘And this became the capital?' I prompted.

My attempt at subtlety failed, judging by Mr Young's grin. ‘Cahaba, at its peak, was a thriving community, and the home to three thousand people. Vine Street was lined with stores and businesses. There was a fancy hall for dances, a female academy, two churches, and, of course, the state house.'

My gaze ran over the empty roads he indicated, and I pictured them lined with buggies, the way New York streets are lined with cars. The contrast between my serene and rustic walk and the bustling city he described was disconcerting. ‘What happened to all of it?'

‘Things go in cycles, don't they? That's the funny thing about Cahaba. Things were booming, and then there was a yellow fever epidemic, then a flood, and finally the state voted to move the capital to Tuscaloosa.'

‘Well, who could blame them,' I said. ‘If disaster struck twice.' That would be the river's fault; the asset
was also a liability. I prodded him to get to the point. ‘So a flood wiped out the town?'

‘Oh no.' He was clearly enjoying the story too much to let me rush him. ‘It was a setback, but the pendulum swung back the other way. Cahaba was a major shipping point for the cotton plantations in the area. Which, of course, you know, as a Davis. Steamboats ran up and down the river, carried the crops out to Mobile, then on to textile plants in the North and in Europe.'

‘Then what?' I didn't bother to hide my impatience, but there wasn't much bite to it. Not in the face of Mr Young's humour. ‘Was there another flood?'

He grimaced ruefully. ‘Among other things – like the war. The railroad was torn up, its iron used for a more strategic line. That was the beginning of the end, in a way. In 1866, when the county seat moved to Selma, a lot of families did, too. Lock, stock and barrel.'

‘But not the Davises,' I said, rather unnecessarily, trying to fit the story together. ‘What about the Maddoxes? Were they here from the beginning too?'

‘Oh yes. Bluestone Hill weathered everything better than the town. The Maddox family established the new town downriver. In fact, they gave an incentive to families to move their houses there instead of Selma.'

‘The whole house?' The image – buildings taken apart like Lincoln Logs and put back together again – was startling. ‘That's why there are so few structures here?'

He nodded. ‘Even after the war, with all the manufacturing in the North, it was difficult and expensive to
get building materials down here. So what wasn't moved wholesale was cannibalized.' He grinned with enthusiasm. ‘But it left the underground stuff for us diggers to find.'

We'd walked as we talked, and now we were coming up on the spot where the chimney stood eerily alone under the trees. It gave no sense of warmth, only the impression of bitter cold.

‘What was this place?' I asked, nodding to the brick relic. ‘Where the chimney was?'

‘That was the Cahaba Federal Prison.' He cleared his throat delicately. ‘For prisoners of war. Union soldiers.'

I fought a shiver, even at a distance. The complete logic of it was a shock of confirmation. A Civil War prison would give anyone the horrors. But how could I have known that, even subconsciously? Had I read it in the Davis book? Would that explain my certainty that something
bad
had happened here, something that reverberated through my psyche?

‘Did it flood, too?' I asked.

‘Among other things.' Mr Young's Santa Claus face turned grim. ‘The conditions were very bad by the end of the war. Overcrowded, disease-ridden. Prison mortality was bad on both sides, but I can't pass this place without thinking this was a low mark in human nature.'

I looked at him fully, curious at his phrasing. Did he feel something too? Like me, he'd stopped walking rather than go any nearer.

Gigi pawed at my leg, asking to be picked up. I
obliged, cuddling her close. Was this the kind of haunting Professor Griffith had talked about? I still rejected the idea of ghosts, but there was – seemed to be– the imprint of something horrible here, like a stain that wouldn't come out in the wash.

‘Enough about that,' said Mr Young, determinedly steering us back into the metaphorical sunlight. Less figuratively, he took my arm and turned us both away from the prison's spectre, guiding me over the uneven ground, towards his truck. ‘What else can I show you while we're here, Miss Sylvie?'

Maybe it was asking for trouble, all things considered. But I wanted – needed – to know more about the past, and the people in it. ‘I'd like to see the cemetery, actually.'

He grinned like Christmas had come early. ‘You are truly a girl after my own heart.'

I could see how Mr Young and Professor Griffith were friends. They had the same love of imparting their knowledge. In Mr Young's case, it was the history of Cahaba, and the cemetery was the perfect place for it.