Chickamauga (19 page)

“And ours not.”

“I think I should have told you, Myra—”

“Tell me now.”

“Word
was
sent to us to get out when it was sent to the rest on Vicksburg Road. Two days’ warning. I believe it was a message from General Pemberton.”

“Don’t worry about it now. Oh no, of course we
couldn’t leave,” said Miss Myra. A soldier watched her in the distance, and she recited:

She stopped, looking at the soldier.

“He sent word.” Miss Theo went on, “General Pemberton sent word, for us all to get out ahead of what was coming. You were in the summerhouse when it came. It was two days’ warning—but I couldn’t bring myself to call and tell you, Myra. I suppose I couldn’t convince myself—couldn’t quite
believe
that they meant to come and visit that destruction on us.”

“Poor Theo. I could have.”

“No you couldn’t. I couldn’t
understand
that message, any more than Delilah here could have. I can reproach myself now, of course, with everything.” And they began to walk boldly through and boldly out of the burnt town, single file.

“Not everything, Theo. Who had Phinny? Remember?” cried Miss Myra ardently.

“Hush.”

“If I hadn’t had Phinny, that would’ve made it all right. Then Phinny wouldn’t have—”

“Hush, dearest, that wasn’t
your
baby, you know. It was Brother Benton’s baby. I won’t have your nonsense now.” Miss Theo led the way through the ashes, marching in front. Delilah was in danger of getting left behind.

“—perished. Dear Benton. So good. Nobody else would have felt so
bound,”
Miss Myra said.

“Not after I told him what he owed a little life!

Each little life is a
mans
fault. I said that. Oh, who’ll ever forget that awful day?”

“Benton’s forgotten, if he’s dead. He was so good after that too, never married.”

“Stayed home, took care of his sisters. Only wanted to be forgiven.”

“There has to be somebody to take care of everybody.”

“I told him, he must never dream he was
inflicting
his sisters. That’s what we’re for.”

“And it never would have inflicted us. We could have lived and died. Until
they
came.”

“In at the front door on the back of a horse,” said Miss Theo. “If Benton had been there!”

“I’ll never know what possessed them, riding in like that,” said Miss Myra almost mischievously; and Miss Theo turned.

“And
you said—”

“I said something wrong,” said Miss Myra quickly. “I apologize, Theo.”

“No, I blame only myself. That I let you remain one hour in that house after it was doomed. I thought I was equal to it, and I proved I was, but not you.”

“Oh, to my shame you saw me, dear! Why do you say it wasn’t my baby?”

“Now don’t start that nonsense over again,” said Miss Theo, going around a hole.

“I had Phinny. When we were all at home and happy together. Are you going to take Phinny away from me now?”

Miss Theo pressed her cheeks with her palms and showed her pressed, pensive smile as she looked back over her shoulder.

Miss Myra said, “Oh, don’t I know who it really belonged to, who it loved the best, that baby?”

“I won’t have you misrepresenting yourself.”

“It’s never what I intended.”

“Then reason dictates you hush.”

Both ladies sighed, and so did Delilah; they were so tired of going on. Miss Theo still walked in front but she was looking behind her through the eyes in the back of her head.

“You hide him if you want to,” said Miss Myra. “Let Papa shut up all upstairs. I had him, dear. It was an officer, no, one of our beaux that used to come out and hunt with Benton. It’s because I was always the impetuous one, highstrung and so easily carried away.… And if Phinny
was
mine—”

“Don’t you know he’s black?” Miss Theo blocked the path.

“He
was
white.” Then, “He’s black
now
,” whispered Miss Myra, darting forward and taking her sister’s hands. Their shoulders were pressed together, as if they were laughing or waiting for something more to fall.

“If I only had something to eat!” sobbed Miss Myra, and once more let herself be embraced. One eye showed over the tall shoulder. “Oh, Delilah!”

“Could be he got out,” called Delilah in a high voice. “He strong, he.”

“Who?”

“Could be Phinny’s out loose. Don’t cry.”

“Look yonder. What do I see? I see the Dicksons’ perfectly good hammock still under the old pecan trees,” Miss Theo said to Miss Myra, and spread her hand.

There was some little round silver cup, familiar to the ladies, in the hammock when they came to it down
in the grove. Lying on its side with a few drops in it, it made them smile.

The yard was charged with butterflies. Miss Myra, as if she could wait no longer, climbed into the hammock and lay down with ankles crossed. She took up the cup like a story book she’d begun and left there yesterday, holding it before her eyes in those freckling fingers, slowly picking out the ants.

“So still out here and all,” Miss Myra said. “Such a big sky. Can you get used to that? And all the figs dried up. I wish it would rain.”

“Won’t rain till Saturday,” said Delilah.

“Delilah, don’t go ’way.”

“Don’t you try, Delilah,” said Miss Theo.

“No’m.”

Miss Theo sat down, rested a while, though she did not know how to sit on the ground and was afraid of grasshoppers, and then she stood up, shook out her skirt, and cried out to Delilah, who had backed off far to one side, where some chickens were running around loose with nobody to catch them.

“Come back here, Delilah! Too late for that!” She said to Miss Myra, “The Lord will provide. We’ve still got Delilah, and as long as we’ve got her we’ll use her, my dearie.”

Miss Myra “let the cat die” in the hammock. Then she gave her hand to climb out, Miss Theo helped her, and without needing any help for herself Miss Theo untied the hammock from the pecan trees. She was long bent over it, and Miss Myra studied the butterflies. She had left the cup sitting on the ground in the shade of the tree. At last Miss Theo held up two lengths of cotton rope, the red and the white strands untwisted from each other, bent like the hair of ladies taken out of plaits in the morning.

Delilah, given the signal, darted up the tree and hooking her toes made the ropes fast to the two branches a sociable distance apart, where Miss Theo pointed. When she slid down, she stood waiting while they settled it, until Miss Myra repeated enough times, in a spoiled sweet way, “I bid to be first.” It was what Miss Theo wanted all the time. Then Delilah had to squat and make a basket with her fingers, and Miss Myra tucked up her skirts and stepped her ashy shoe in the black hands.

“Tuck under, Delilah.”

Miss Myra, who had ordered that, stepped over Delilah’s head and stood on her back, and Delilah felt her presence tugging there as intimately as a fish’s on a line, each longing Miss Myra had to draw away from Miss Theo, draw away from Delilah, away from that tree.

Delilah rolled her eyes around. The noose was being tied by Miss Theo’s puckered hands like a bonnet on a windy day, and Miss Myra’s young, lifted face was looking out.

“I learned as a child how to tie, from a picture book in Papa’s library—not that I ever was called on,” Miss Theo said. “I guess I was always something of a tomboy.” She kissed Miss Myra’s hand and at almost the same instant Delilah was seized by the ribs and dragged giggling backward, out from under—not soon enough, for Miss Myra kicked her in the head—a bad kick, almost as if that were Miss Theo or a man up in the tree, who meant what he was doing.

Miss Theo stood holding Delilah and looking up—helping herself to grief. No wonder Miss Myra used to hide in the summerhouse with her reading, screaming sometimes when there was nothing but Delilah throwing the dishwater out on the ground.

“I’ve proved,” said Miss Theo to Delilah, dragging her by more than main force back to the tree, “what I’ve always suspicioned: that I’m brave as a lion. That’s right: look at me. If I ordered you back up that tree to help my sister down to the grass and shade, you’d turn and run: I know your minds. You’d desert me with your work half done. So I haven’t said a word about it. About mercy. As soon as you’re through, you can go, and leave us where you’ve put us, unspared, just alike. And that’s the way they’ll find us. The sight will be good for them for what they’ve done,” and she pushed Delilah down and walked up on her shoulders, weighting her down like a rock.

Miss Theo looped her own knot up there; there was no mirror or sister to guide her. Yet she was quicker this time than last time, but Delilah was quicker too. She rolled over in a ball, and then she was up running, looking backward, crying. Behind her Miss Theo came sailing down from the tree. She was always too powerful for a lady. Even those hens went flying up with a shriek, as if they felt her shadow on their backs. Now she reached in the grass.

There was nothing for Delilah to do but hide, down in the jungly grass choked with bitterweed and black-eyed susans, wild to the pricking skin, with many heads nodding, cauldrons of ants, with butterflies riding them, grasshoppers hopping them, mosquitoes making the air alive, down in the loud and lonesome grass that was rank enough almost to matt the sky over. Once, stung all over and wild to her hair’s ends, she ran back and asked Miss Theo, “What must I do now? Where must I go?” But Miss Theo, whose eyes from the ground were looking straight up at her, wouldn’t tell. Delilah danced away from her, back to her distance, and crouched down. She believed Miss Theo twisted in the grass like
a dead snake until the sun went down. She herself held still like a mantis until the grass had folded and spread apart at the falling of dew. This was after the chickens had gone to roost in a strange uneasy tree against the cloud where the guns still boomed and the way from Vicksburg was red. Then Delilah could find her feet.

She knew where Miss Theo was. She could see the last white of Miss Myra, the stockings. Later, down by the swamp, in a wading bird tucked in its wing for sleep, she saw Miss Myra’s ghost.

After being lost a day and a night or more, crouching awhile, stealing awhile through the solitudes of briar bushes, she came again to Rose Hill. She knew it by the chimneys and by the crape myrtle off to the side, where the bottom of the summerhouse stood empty as an egg basket. Some of the flowers looked tasty, like chicken legs fried a little black.

Going around the house, climbing over the barrier of the stepless back doorsill, and wading into ashes, she was lost still, inside that house. She found an iron pot and a man’s long boot, a doorknob and a little book fluttering, its leaves spotted and fluffed like guinea feathers. She took up the book and read out from it, “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba—trash.” She was being Miss Theo taking away Miss Myra’s reading. Then she saw the Venetian mirror down in the chimney’s craw, flat and face-up in the cinders.

Behind her the one standing wall of the house held notched and listening like the big ear of King Solomon into which poured the repeated asking of birds. The tree stood and flowered. What must she do? Crouching suddenly to the ground, she heard the solid cannon, the galloping, the low fast drum of burning. Crawling on her knees she went to the glass and rubbed it with spit
and leaned over it and saw a face all neck and ears, then gone. Before it she opened and spread her arms; she had seen Miss Myra do that, try that. But its gleam was addled.

Though the mirror did not know Delilah, Delilah would have known that mirror anywhere, because it was set between black men. Their arms were raised to hold up the mirror’s roof, which now the swollen mirror brimmed, among gold leaves and gold heads—black men dressed in gold, looking almost into the glass themselves, as if to look back through a door, men now half-split away, flattened with fire, bearded, noseless as the moss that hung from swamp trees.

Where the mirror did not cloud like the horse-trampled spring, gold gathered itself from the winding water, and honey under water started to flow, and then the gold fields were there, hardening gold. Through the water, gold and honey twisted up into houses, trembling. She saw people walking the bridges in early light with hives of houses on their heads, men in dresses, some with red birds; and monkeys in velvet; and ladies with masks laid over their faces looking from pointed windows. Delilah supposed that was Jackson before Sherman came. Then it was gone. In this noon quiet, here where all had passed by, unless indeed it had gone in, she waited on her knees.

The mirror’s cloudy bottom sent up minnows of light to the brim where now a face pure as a water-lily shadow was floating. Almost too small and deep down to see, they were quivering, leaping to life, fighting, aping old things Delilah had seen done in this world already, sometimes what men had done to Miss Theo and Miss Myra and the peacocks and to slaves, and sometimes what a slave had done and what anybody now could do to anybody. Under the flicker of the sun’s
licks, then under its whole blow and blare, like an unheard scream, like an act of mercy gone, as the wall-less light and July blaze struck through from the opened sky, the mirror felled her flat.

She put her arms over her head and waited, for they would all be coming again, gathering under her and above her, bees saddled like horses out of the air, butterflies harnessed to one another, bats with masks on, birds together, all with their weapons bared. She listened for the blows, and dreaded that whole army of wings—of flies, birds, serpents, their glowing enemy faces and bright kings’ dresses, that banner of colors forked out, all this world that was flying, striking, stricken, falling, gilded or blackened, mortally splitting and falling apart, proud turbans unwinding, turning like the spotted dying leaves of fall, spiraling down to bottomless ash; she dreaded the fury of all the butterflies and dragonflies in the world riding, blades unconcealed and at point—descending, and rising again from the waters below, down under, one whale made of his own grave, opening his mouth to swallow Jonah one more time.