Woe to Live On: A Novel (13 page)

Nothing was the same.

The chimney fire broke light across the dugout. It was a jagged illumination. The flames writhed and bounced and a deathly howl of wind blew down the chimney. It felt homey to me.

George Clyde was back. He was ruining Juanita Willard’s reputation. Often he stayed with her all night. Her family seemed to think nothing of it. If ever we won the war, it would take years to renovate our honor. Honor had come to be a frivolous virtue in practice, but it was also the one that urged us to battle.

Confusing.

“So, now,” Clyde said to Jack Bull. “You have become quite the young swain, I hear.”

“I can’t deny it.”

“You have been loose with your kisses, I hear.”

“Not as loose as I hope to be.”

“Hah, hah! I know that feeling.” Clyde, by dint of his regular berth at the Willards, seemed practically married. “What is she like?”

“Oh, she is fine. Just fine and dandy. A robust widow.”

“Those are by far the best kind,” Clyde said. “And there are getting to be plenty of them.”

This conversation seemed two-sided, so I threw in my own oar.

“She is coltish of attitude,” I said. “With an ungainly gallop of spirit.”

“Ho, ho,” went Clyde. “You are making me jealous!”

Jack Bull beamed. He chewed at a twig, his strong cheeks bulging around a smile. His skin seemed flushed to about the same degree as six chugs of popskull whiskey would do.

“Yes,” he said. “This gal is
some
proposition.”

“She is lowly born,” I said.

“Oh, she is. She is lowly born,” Jack Bull said happily, “but highly fascinating.”

Clyde went to giggling and said, “Leave off with it—you boys are making me
so
jealous.”

“I say again,” Jack Bull mused. “She is lowly born but highly fascinating.”

I felt wounded and left by the roadside.

Change was required of me.

I didn’t know if I was up to it.

Things got worse. George Clyde had Juanita Willard beg Sue Lee to come stay with her, and Clyde drug Jack Bull over there the next night. That left Holt and me in the dugout. The two of them set out like it was a lark. All kinds of backslapping and winking went on.

I hoped they were shot at, but not hit.

Maybe they could be hit just slightly.

It was kind of glum for me in the dugout. It was awful cold out. Winter is mostly melancholic. It is especially so underground.

Holt was barely more company than a rock. He had to be coaxed and goaded to say “Pass the taters.” I was not exactly windy of nature myself, but I wanted some conversation.

“Pick a topic,” I said.

He just looked at me, his black skin blacker in the poor-lighted corner.

“Pick a topic,” I chorused. “You are going to talk to me, Holt.”

His head shook, and his hands flinched and he said, “It’s not my habit.”

Everything he said he said fine enough, but he didn’t seem to believe it. Actually he said things as good as anybody. A lot of niggers I had known blathered hoodoo nonsense to where you wanted to gag them, but here I was, alone, with a well-spoken nigger who had a terrible case of silence. It is always something.

“I’ll pick the topic,” I finally said. I had to lure this fellow into conviviality. I tried to think of some topic we could both discuss. I didn’t want it one-sided. “Let’s talk about—dirt. Dirt is our topic.”

When he still failed to respond, I began to suspect that he was not bashful but ornery.

“Dirt, damn it, Holt. Tell me all you know about dirt.”

He looked at me. His eyes were shaded toward the oriental in shape. I don’t think I impressed him at all.

“Dirt is good,” he said. For no more exercise than it got, his tone was rich. “Everywhere is dirt. Dirt is good.”

“Well, now, that’s dandy,” I said. “It’s just you and me here, Holt. We need to talk or we’ll be crazed by the wind moans.”

There was some suspicion in me that Holt found my company comfortable. It was a slow thing with him, friendliness was. Somewhere in him I felt there was a great goo of warmth that he stored slyly.

“Is that all you know of dirt?” I asked. A long response would not have pained me.

“It is dark,” he said. You could parade his voice at a songfest and not get hooted. It was that pleasant. “Do you think George will marry?”

“Not in these times,” I said. “After this war is gone, he will. I reckon we’ll all have to.”

“Aha,” he hummed. “The trick is us passing through these times.”

Holt was a sensible creature with opinions that were succinct. I could not fail to note it.

“Just so,” I said.

Well, we stared at the shadows on the walls for a spell to regain our breath after such a spurt of chat. It looked like cities. The shadows peaked and valleyed all across the dugout and for flashes of time they designed out tall buildings and great avenues that resembled precisely no city I’d ever heard of, but they diverted nonetheless.

“There is something I like,” Holt said. His smart face straightened at me.

“Oh, what would that be?”

“You might not care for it, Roedel.”

“Try me. I can be generous when the cost is low.”

He studied me closely, then said, “You ain’t the same as some of the boys. I have watched you. It’s a thing I have seen.”

“How nice of you to like that,” I said.

“That ain’t it. Not what I like.” An expression very like that of an unfed puppy was on him. It had its endearing aspects. “I like it when you read.”

“Read what?”

“The mails. When you read them mails out loud it is something the likes I never heard before.”

The mail pouch was baggage I toted the same way others rub quartz rocks—it was part of my luck. I knew I’d had some to be yet nearly whole. But I had not read the letters. That might not be something that should be done.

“Oh, they might not be too amusing,” I said. “It might just be a bunch of boring thoughts one stranger sent to another.”

This comment made him look down. He brushed dust from his britches and stared away from me.

“The one you read from the mother was fine,” he said. “I heard that from you in the spring. Do you recall it?”

“Yes.”

“She said things I enjoy to hear.”

There was nothing for it but to read. Jagged flame and the shadows it throws can be amusing for only a while. A letter might almost be as fine as a conversation.

I pulled out the mail pouch. I opened the flap and held it toward Holt.

“Draw one, Holt.”

His fingers inched into the pouch and he felt around a bit, as if the feel of the note could sway him yea or nay. After some seconds of tactile scrutiny he drew one out.

“This one do,” he said.

I opened the letter. It was a Massachusetts scrawl of a thing. Half of rabid Kansas had come from there with the Emigrant Aid Society. They shipped abolitionists and Bibles and rifles out to our area to stir up trouble. It was hard to like them. This letter was addressed to Andrew Pritchard in Lawrence, Kansas, the most hated burg on the border, home of the Jayhawkers and their foam-mouthed ilk.

“You are some picker,” I said. I about did not read it, for I knew the author of it would insult me from a distance. “Okay, here goes….”

I belted out the contents of the Yankee thing. It developed that father Pritchard in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, was very proud of young Andrew for having the pluck to come out to our territory and try to force us into being more like them. It is war to the knife and knife to the hilt, he said, which is exactly the same way we saw it. God’s will must be done, he said, and rebels had sacrificed the right to the love of any known God, for he didn’t imagine that the God he prayed to in Massachusetts could possibly stomach Missouri men.

Well, I thought, this man follows a frail deity.

“I don’t want to read this,” I said. “It is making me forlorn, the stinginess of it. Draw out another.”

“I am with you,” Holt said, as he dipped his fingers into the pouch. “I want to hear nice things, and that man don’t say them.”

“You have got that right.” The new letter was folded into a tiny square. I opened it slowly. “Holt, where is your mother?”

“Aw, Kansas or Kingdom. I don’t know which.”

I could tell this was something he thought of often. Anybody would. Sad deeds were done in this land. I never owned a nigger or even bid on one.

“Well, my father is murdered,” I said, as I undid the tiny square.

“I know that,” he said. “George’s whole family is murdered. Even his momma, who was not too well anyhow.”

“Does Clyde own you?”

His head shook, his lips turned down.

“Not in greenbacks and coppers,” he said.

“I see,” I said, and I did.

The tiny square unfolded to reveal a big sloppy script. It, too, was from Massachusetts and en route to Lawrence. This one was from a brother to a brother. A real hardy tone was in it. The back-east brother had seen a theatrical in Boston where an Englishman played Othello with bootblack so effectively smeared on his face that he fully expected John Brown’s ghost to waft in and double the ticket price. These boys were named Fannin. The letter writer went on to say that so many niggers were now freed and in Boston that Irishmen could hardly get jobs on the docks. He allowed as how this was not a phenomenon that had been predicted by
the Black Republicans, but it was one he was having to live with. He then said he loved his brother and he often thought warmly of him and the times when they had missed the shape-up and gone rowing in the harbor, and the sweaty nights after they had humped on the docks all day only to dance too late at Parlan’s Beer Garden. Oh, Jesus, he said, life was not so rough when your favorite brother was with you and there were droves of single gals roaming about and beer was free if they were one of Parlan’s daughters. Here’s to you, he finished, and keep your head low out there.

“Is this a better one?” I asked Holt.

“A good deal nicer,” he said with a nod. “It could get to where you might like that man.”

“Yes,” I said. “In other times he would not be so bad.”

What we said was true. I had barely disliked anyone before woop and warp had come my way, and never hated. But I had learned all these emotions that some call necessary and noble. I would never apologize for it, yet I might have thrived without it.

“Holt, do you reckon this war will ever end?”

“No.”

“Me neither,” I said. “Not unless we are killed.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and patted his pistols. “That would do it. I left that out.”

“You reckon we’ll be killed?”

“Mmmmm,” he went, and I really liked him, for a nigger. “Old men is not a way I ever figure us to be.”

F
OR SEVERAL DAYS
Venus ruled. The dugout became a mere hotel for George and Jack Bull, and a dodderer’s home to Holt and me. The romance men preened themselves into oily specimens, and leaked out a roughhewn, mocking good cheer.

They had plumbed the savory well and we had not. It seemed to make all the difference.

Jack Bull now had private tunes that he whistled for his pleasure only, but he still slapped me like a brother and set aside extra time for talking to me. He was kinder in his comments than usual. That is, when he and George were not strutting their stallion facets.

It all made my cheeks blanch. He treated me like an idiot child and I was neither.

By the calendar it was well into January and not as cold as it should have been. I pointed this out.

“Since it is not so cold, we should go out on a scout of some sort. The snow is melted.”

The Venus-struck pair showed no interest.

“You are a fount of bad ideas,” George Clyde said. My,
how a little regular sin had changed
his
interests. “It could snap cold at any time.”

Later, Jack Bull Chiles and me sat alone, sharing tales of adventures we had taken together. We talked purple improbable patches of half-right details about the sultry summer day when we had swum in the Big Muddy, then rattled the fragile citizens by loping bare-assed to home, and of the gray, crisp September day when our first deer fell before us, and similarly unimportant days that loomed large in recollection. Everybody has them. A few things we did in the wrong came up, but we refashioned those deeds with our speech and came out of them now looking fine. We turned blunders inside out and wore them as victories.

“This thing with Sue Lee,” I said. “Will it go on?”

By his face and eyes I saw clear that he would not make a joke of my query.

“I would reckon,” he said.

Our hair had gotten so long that I was always aware of it. We had sworn not to cut it ’til the war was won. My hands went to my long pale locks and fingered them about.

“Well, now,” I said. “That is good for you.”