All Those Vanished Engines (4 page)

2. T
HE
F
IRST
H
INGE

In the moments of passive crisis that so far punctuated her life, Paulina had a habit of slipping away into an invented world over which she might pretend to have control. Lately this world was the one she had discovered in her diary, a future where these horrible women would persist not even in memory. Their foolish cruelty would have left no trace. In that world, the Yankees had broken through the Crater, and General Lee had surrendered his army at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

But what about Paulina herself? What would have become of her? In these instances she had found a way to reproduce herself. In the library ballroom, standing on the dais in the humid, Mardi Gras night, she had no access to her actual diary, stolen from her bedroom. She could not remember precisely where she'd left her story. So she rejoined it further on. And in her imagination she was unconstrained by the artificial lingo of the future, which previously she'd tried to re-create:

Wrapped in her coat, holding her mittened palms to the fire, it was hard for her to hide the exasperation in her voice. “Is that supposed to be me?”

“No, no. Just—like you, I guess. Physically like you. I thought you'd be pleased.”

“By what? You've hardly described her. Tall and skinny—is that what you think?”

I shrugged. “It's what I see in my mind. She is really cute. Blond hair. Pale. You know—she's beautiful. I think so.”

“Don't try and weasel out of it. ‘Passive crisis'—she's not doing anything. She's writing something down, she gets up, she changes her clothes. People lead her from place to place, and now they are arguing about how to kill her. She's not even listening.”

I threw on some more wood. “It's in the past. It's not like today. Women don't have the same kind of power.”

“I am not buying that. This whole story—the Yankee empire is run by women. After the South wins the war the entire government turns out to be a front for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Is that a real organization? Besides, I thought this was a love story. The only men—one is a traitor and the other is a crazy person.”

“Well, but that's how women used their power in the old days. Behind the scenes.”

Both of us were laughing. “Please,” she said, “a motorcar? In the 1880s?”

It's true—I had mixed up the time, pushing stories from my mother's childhood back into the nineteenth century. Now I tried to fudge it: “Thereabouts. But it's not what you think. The engine runs on steam. Everything was steam-powered in those days.”

Unimpressed, she frowned. “These women are supposed to be the daughters of Confederate veterans. How could they be so old?”

“That shows how much you know about U.S. history.”

“I know the world is not controlled by Southern ladies with samurai fans. I don't care about behind the scenes. I want some action.”

“Fine, fine.”

All of this, I thought, was beside the point, a way of talking about something without talking about it. It wasn't just Paulina. We also needed a story to distract us. Dark had come, and we crouched out of the wind three miles from town, behind the crest of Christmas Hill. White pine trees stood in a circle, the stump of an old oak in the center—this was a place where we sometimes gathered to smoke hemp-weed cigarets. An altar of fallen stones occupied the center of the dell, and we could only hope if any of our friends had escaped, perhaps they knew to find us there. If my parents and my sisters had escaped, or else Paulina's sister Lizzie. They would see the fire through the trees. But we could not wait much longer. We would take shelter in the high school south of town, where we'd hope the soldiers would not find us. Until then, the more absurd my story, the more it was a parody of our own, the better. So I continued:

She found herself playing a game. She moved her attention in a circle around the room, staring at each of the UDC delegates. She tried to catch their eyes and they avoided her, looked down, looked away. Even the ones who at that moment held the floor, arguing her fate and future, refused to look at her, except for one. Halfway down the center aisle a girl watched her through her silver domino as if through a lorgnette, while her right hand made crisp, metronomic gestures with a silver fan. Paulina stared at her and she did not relent, but instead lowered the mask.

Paulina did not gasp or make any sudden movements. For reasons she was not able to articulate, she was prepared for this. The face she looked at was her own, or close enough: high cheekbones, hollow cheeks, narrow chin, wide dark eyes. The girl had twisted her hair on top of her head and fastened it with an elaborate rhinestone hairpin, whose wicked barb protruded down the side of her long neck.

Paulina felt a shiver of apprehension, as if the barb were pricking her own flesh. She bowed her head, studying for a moment the girl's long silver gloves and metallic bodice. She carried looped around her powerful bare shoulders three heavy strands of purple, green, and gold Mardi Gras beads. Her legs were clad not in a long skirt or gown, but alone among the delegates she wore loose silken breeches gathered at the ankle, like those of a courtesan in an African seraglio. Scarlet leather boots completed the ensemble.

“… So in the spirit of mercy and generosity, as befits our beau ideal, we have decided on the Blanford gallows,” droned Mrs. McKenney. “The secretary will so indicate…”—Paulina scarcely listened. She felt a prickling between her shoulder blades as if some unseen hand were moving up her vertebrae, pinching each in turn. At the same time she watched the stranger, her unknown twin, pull the mask from the steel handle of the domino, revealing a curved, hidden blade. Then she snapped closed the long fan, and with its sharpened edge she slashed at the wattled neck of the old lady in front of her, a delegate from Charleston who had advocated some kind of water torture during which, she had confidently predicted, the culprit's belly would distend like a enormous frog's.

She screamed. She put her hands up to arrest the scattering of beads from her own necklace, cut with a stroke. And then she screamed again to see the blood soaking the fingers of her gloves, spurting from a severed artery. The stranger in the seraglio pants and scarlet boots spun in a circle, kicking at the knees of the surprised Louisiana delegation (boiling oil), while her arms flashed like a pinwheel, the fan in one hand, her hooked blade in another. Down went a distinguished (tar and feathers) gentlewoman from Mobile, cut through the nose.

As the stranger spun and flipped and hacked her way down the aisle toward the dais, the grand ballroom of the William R. McKenney Library came quickly to resemble one of the battlefields of the Yankee war, Sharpsburg or Spotsylvania or Shiloh. The polished parquet ran with blood. And as their gallant forebears—“daughters” was somewhat of an umbrella term in the context of the UDC—had re-formed their ranks on those sanguinary fields, so also the ladies of the South recommitted themselves to their continued cause. Eager hands pulled down the sabers and bayonets that adorned one wall, part of a decorative display. And Mrs. McKenney hiked up her glittering gown above the knee, revealing Adophus Claiborne's revolver stashed in a wide, elaborate garter, embroidered with the stars and bars.

A withered heroine from Loudon County clawed away the sharpened domino, though she paid quickly for her bravery, pierced with the armored hatpin, like King Harold at Hastings, through the eye. Freed from its restraint, the yellow hair of the invader swung in a circle; she had dropped her fan, but instead had knotted the iron beads of her Mardi Gras necklaces around her fist, the sharpened medallions of Rex, Comus, and Momus protruding from between her fingers.

Mrs. McKenney rearranged her gown. One eye closed, she stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth and pulled back the hammer of her gun. But at that moment, as if responding to a distant signal, Paulina roused herself from stupefaction and attacked her from behind, clubbed her to the floor, seized the gun, and turned its long barrel not toward the dervish-spinning stranger in her silken trousers, but toward Andrew in his striped waistcoat. He'd flung open the double doors at the top of the aisle and now was rushing toward her, bearing in his hands the tattered battle flag of A. P. Hill's Light Division, wrested from the wall. The gun kicked back, Paulina's shot went wide. But even so, incredulous, eyes staring, Andrew sank to his knees. His banner, never allowed to droop or waver during four long years of bloodshed, now spread across the floor. A moaning cry penetrated the chamber, and the massed ranks of the UDC broke in confusion around the door, the delegates trampling each other in their eagerness to get away.

On the other side of the ballroom, the stranger pounded through the window with her mailed fist. Shattered glass flew in all directions as she flung up the sash and vaulted through.

Behind Paulina, Mrs. McKenney rose to her knees. She extended her withered finger. Helmets gleaming, truncheons in their hands, six policemen managed to clear their way toward the window, kicking through tiaras and discarded feathers with their steel-toed boots. But Paulina was there first. A rope ladder hung from the windowsill, down into the alleyway off Marshall Street, adjacent to where Adolphus Claiborne had kept his horses earlier that evening. Paulina's dress caught on the shards of glass and hung her up, legs protruding into the humid night. She turned onto her stomach over the sill, kicking her skirt free; she heard the fabric rip. She felt a sharp pain along her belly and her upper thigh. A policeman swung his truncheon at her head. But she had found the first of the wooden rungs, and, panicked and bloody, she slipped into the alley where her cousin waited, a dog whistle in his mouth.

All this time she'd kept the big revolver in her hand; he snatched it, fired it once above his head. And whether by luck or else by magic skill, the bullet severed one of the ladder's cords so that the rungs collapsed just as the first policeman poked his boots out of the rectangle of light; he groped and found nothing. “Here!” said Colonel Claiborne, his voice high and piercing.

The stranger had already disappeared up the alleyway. The other way, on the Sycamore Street side, a mob had formed in the gap between the buildings, men with torches, soldiers, and even some musicians from the band. Someone played “Dixie” on the trombone. As if in reply, a score of mongrel pit bull terriers came loping down the alleyway out of the dark, the same black, hairless beasts that had savaged Pickett's men at Gettysburg. They kept to the brick walls. They did not bark or growl or snarl. They were almost past before Paulina was aware of them, so astonished she was at what came next: Yankee soldiers in their blue-black uniforms; she'd read her history books. And even though she understood that they were there to protect her, even though she was relieved to see them take their places between her and the mob, still it seemed wrong for them to be here in the heart of the Virginia Commonwealth in 1881, them and their dogs, creatures from the hellish past.

Someone shot at her out of the library window. She looked up and saw a rifle barrel swing down at her and then away, while at the same time Colonel Claiborne pulled her from the patch of light and up the alley where the stranger had disappeared. He led her over the fence to Mrs. Stephens's backyard, and then between the houses to Tulip Alleyway and Jefferson Street. There the stranger waited with the horses under the gas lantern, and there also Paulina realized how much she was bleeding from the cuts on her legs where she had gashed herself on broken glass. She bent down and tore a strip of silk from her hem, and used it to wipe her hands and face; the stranger had no time for that. She sat astride a black mare, one of the “night-mares” of the Yankee cavalry in the Wilderness campaign—a giant brute with foaming cheeks and bloodshot eyes.

She pulled the horse around in a stamping circle. All this time she had said nothing, though now she moved her lips and signaled with her left hand, a language of gesticulation that the colonel seemed to understand. Without asking and without ceremony he placed his hands around Paulina's waist and lifted her up into the saddle, her dress ripped and bunched around her thighs.

The stranger slid forward to accommodate her. She kicked her heels and the mare lurched down the street so suddenly that Paulina grabbed hold of her metal belt to keep from falling. She didn't like this. Already she was wondering if she'd have been better off at Blanford Park. But they seemed to be headed there anyway; the colonel had mounted his own horse, and they followed him south and east until they saw the brick wall of the military cemetery, the tower of the church. There, on a raised wooden scaffold lit with guttering torches, the gallows stretched up thin and pale into the purple sky. The neighborhood authority was preparing an event, and a crowd of buskers and Negro minstrels had already gathered; Paulina had always hated these celebrations when Mrs. McKenney had insisted on taking her. For an instant she thought the colonel might draw rein, but instead he pulled out his revolver and shot it once into the air as he galloped past. Atop the scaffold the men turned toward them, the ropes in their hands. One pointed; now they were headed, Paulina guessed, toward the old siege lines and the battlefield. They left the road and cantered into the darkness of the park, a quieter rhythm. Dogs were waiting under the trees, but the horses didn't shy away. Paulina knew where they were going, the demarcation line, breached now, the treaty broken—that's what Gram had said. But she mustn't have been talking about this. She didn't know about this. There were no policemen here, no Commonwealth militia. How could she have predicted that the enemy would be so bold?

In the past ten minutes her cuts had begun to ache, especially her hands and on her stomach where she'd rolled over the sill. Mixed with the strangeness of the evening and the hard, jolting ride, the pain made her drunk. Light-headed, she swayed in the saddle. Sounds and voices seemed muffled, while objects took on a hallucinatory clarity. The world seemed painted in colors that were not yet dry.