“She living?” Zelia asks.
“Ain’t dead.” Others snort. Evidence Anne asks, “Did Lady want that sheet so she could play Catacombs?”
“Something like that, baby. She in real deep hiding just now.”
BEYOND soldiers’ prancy foreground silhouettes, slaves see the barn become a dawn.
Soldiers don’t guess: somebody is listening from fifty foot up a eighty-foot magnolia not twelve foot from where their horses presently paw. Raiders are waiting till the mansion catches proper. Arsonists talk about recent letters from home, about what they plan doing out West onct this running-down war is won. (It’s the usual: Men intend to own everything for as far as the eye can see. America!)
They been being patriotic firebugs for so long, you’d think this chore would tire them. But, honey, fire ain’t ever routine. (Neither is land, water, or air—ask farmers, fishers, weather gals.) Hoping to get better at such house burning, being the type gents that do want to own clear to the horizon, they’re yet studying flames’ progress. Improving on the next plantation’s torching, fellows talk about their kids and hearths.
How soon, sugar, the terrible becomes routine. We’ve all got this dangerous built-in talent: for turning horrors into errands. You hear folks wonder how the Germans could’ve done it? I believe part of the answer is: They made extermination be a nine-to-five activity. You know, salaries? Lunch breaks? And the staff came and did their job and went home and ate supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job and went home and ate their supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job.—That’s partly how you get anything done, especially a chore what’s dreadful, dreadful.—Honey? we’ve all got to be real careful of what we can get used to.
ALONE, hid good, Mrs. M., my mother-in-law-to-be, saw nothing of her barn’s burning, was probably shaking from both fear and the sheet’s chill. I bet she tucked monogrammed percale around her. (Careless, Cas has brung her a guest-room cotton sheet, not the usual silk.) I imagine Lady tried and “toga” the cloth so that, if found here by Yanks or even by Fire, she’d look in charge, “at home.” She had lived forever from the outside in. Ethics started in her morning mirror. “What to do about one’s waning looks today?” Now, treed, she has time sufficient to fix the hairdo Z yanked loose. Who’ll see Lady’s toilette now? But Lady can’t. Improve herself. She’s never learned, she’s never had to. She picked a hairstyle that nowdays might be called “labor-intensive.” She can only fiddle with the braids that droop around her face. Now she uses one fine plait to bind the others. Odd to understand, her woven hairdo is semi-African.
Lady E. More Marsden hears the barn’s first roar, thinks about her dead husband, her son away at soldiering. She’s set up so high, the arms are crossed over her knees—she’s like a person in the privy, not exactly thinking, not exactly not, just there.
“Dear,” she says, quiet. “Oh dear my oh me.”
6
IN ASSIGNING us the paper, Teacher Beale forced her pupils to imagine War’s effect on everybody it grabbed. Bobo Kingston, class bad boy for so many held-back years that he’d become the class bad man, raised one knotty arm and spoke, a bass deep enough to rattle windowpanes. “Even … Sherman?”
We always tried to trip up Witch. It was a education how we never really could. Everything we considered a good trick question, she named a lapse of the moral imagination. Every trap we set for our beloved spinster, she gladly jumped right into—then she called up at us from the crude pit we’d dug. Witch kept hollering news of cave paintings down there, saying how all Pompeii’s citizens had been made perfect statues by the killing ash and how she could see them extra good from down inside. Grumbling some, we were all soon lowering ourselfs right into the hollow, ready for a tour, even a tour of the grave we’d laid for her.
“Especially Sherman. Tout comprendre, tout pardonner. Are you aware, for instance, gallant Bobo, that Sherman endured such dreadful asthma he was medically required to burn ‘niter papers’ in his tent of an evening just to permit himself to breathe properly? How many of you children personally suffer or know someone who suffers asthma? Fine. Then you’ll feel a bit more for a gentleman in a tent, deprived of oxygen, buffeted by workaday battle smoke. Doubtless you’ve heard, Bobo, how the surrender terms Sherman proffered General Joseph alias ‘Joe’ Johnston in Raleigh, not forty miles from where I now stand and you now slouch—sit up and learn, Monsieur Bobo—were so rife with toleration that Northern newspapers soon branded Sherman ‘Handmaiden to the South.’ Sherman was subsequently jeered during the victory review of Federals through Washington. Yes, history’s never black and white, nor even gray and blue, my intuitive one. There’s always more to know, especially about the villains. Perhaps you all have sensed this from your earliest fairy-tale reading. How bland those virtuous heroines, how riveting, heated, and familiar are the crones and gnomes and witches. No giggling, class. Is Sherman our enemy? You decide. Once we depreciate others as being wholly unlike ourselves, we’ve succumbed to the same flattening they’ve practiced on us. We cannot have enemies if we choose not to.
“I speak from experience as a person who grew up in a town superstitious as the Dark Ages and Old Salem conjoined. Your town. Quite early in my professional life here, a decision required making. Would I view Ignorance as the Enemy, or would I blame the practicing ignoramuses themselves? I hate no one. I hate only stupidity, imprecision. Had I blamed the stupid, the religious, the congenitally vague for their Disease, I daresay I should by now have worn myself into oblivion. The tendency to blame gnaws more readily into the Blamer than the Blamee.
“Concerning Sherman, Mr. Bobo, you, of all my favorite misunderstood people, should surely grasp that villains in the world’s eyes can actually be Lambs, albeit huge Lambs.”
Others chuckled. (Bobo Kingston had him a police record. Peeping Tomism, breaking/entering.)
“So, monsieur, if it is human—and it all is, up to and including a perfect saturated human evil—then it rests within our understanding. If it lies within the bounds of human understanding (and what that is human does not?), then it is, however painfully, forgivable. And should it prove even tangentially forgivable, then we must must must forgive it.”
“Ma’am? I sure as heck wish you’d been my last judge down to the Courthouse, but … Sherman? Miss Beale? He burned your people’s place. I fish out near the chimleys of it.”
“Chim-neys. That’s hardly unique to the family Beale. Children, how many of you lost family property to Sherman’s following orders?”
From a class of thirty, eighteen fists lifted. Eleven-year-old hands, knuckled—these thirty years after. “And how many of you, had chores been reversed, had you been given similar orders, had you hoped to end the war more quickly and save precious lives by sacrificing mere property, had you been dispatched into Northern regions among its finest homes all conveniently arrayed in a single riverside row, how many of you would have done precisely what Sherman did?”
Bobo’s huge hand shot up first. Then, for good measure, he whipped out the kitchen matches he used to light his home-rolt cigarettes, he struck one in plain sight. Any other Lower Normal School teacher would’ve got Bobo reexpelled just for “matches in class.” Witch Beale only waited for the thing to burn down, to singe Bo’s horny fingers, to make him cuss once then throw it toward our window ledge’s sprouting sweet potato.
“Attention, my War Crimes Tribunal. A confession has been rendered, a life, albeit a Northern one, now rests in your hands. How many choose to exonerate our volatile Goth of a young officer here? Search your hearts, young judges. Here’s one Bobo Kingston, Jr., admitted Yankee arsonist, throwing his life upon the mercy of this our Southern court. Our heritage is infinitely richer in culture and civilized graces than was the winning side’s. Alas, however, our refinement sprang from a feudal system basing the well-being of a few upon the ownership of many. Yet even now we remain a more literate lively culture than the child-hiring factories that vanquished us.
Having survived Tragedy’s wheel of fire, we are now ready for new health. This single hope has kept your Old Lady Beale (oh, I know you’ve given me various epithets) coming here to you day after day for these fifty years. I feel it. The Periclean Age is just about to crest, my pillars of the new Doric order. That stated, here languishes the apparent assassin of our riverside hilltop temples,” she gestured.
Bobo set scratching one ear, not able to follow how he’d just become the very guy he’d called the scummiest of lowlifes. Witch stepped over, placed a hand on Bo’s massive shoulder. (She touched us all and often—unlike other teachers.) Now, stroking sad Bobo’s gristle—with Bo half smiling, sleepy-acting—the Genius of Falls Lower Normal asked us, in a slow and glowing final curtain of a voice, “Can you forgive him?”
It carried.
7
IF SHE could teach me to cozy up to Sherman, seems I might feel more for poor Lady Marsden, treed. The house about to burn was one that I, by marriage, would have owned and occupied. Maybe just the way Bobo hated Sherman (jealous of the General’s pyromaniac free license), I shy away from Lady Marsden. Probably there’s more of Mrs. Priss in me than I feel easy with.
The Book says we’re all dead level in the eyes of God. Our Forefathers claimed everybody’s created equal (of course, by the time you get delivered nine months later, seems like social class, skin color, looks, and health have pretty much knocked the pins out from under Conception’s fair shake). A decent tale maker should—like the Constitution, God Almighty, or Witch Beale’s philosophy—offer what was once called Equal Opportunity Employment. Except for twists of fate, the villains could, along the way, have become the hero-saints, or vice versa. Versa vice. I want to know what, close to burning, Lady Marsden felt.
It’s our duty, imagining each other.
So, I admit, yeah, I partway know what Lady E. More Marsden, out on a literal limb—April 7, 1865, 3:45 p.m.—sat hoping.
SHE intended to be rescued. (It’s everybody plan.) Maybe she deserved it. (Probably we all do.)
THE HELPER Lady pictured wouldn’t look like Castalia’s darkling Linking Youth. Maybe Lady’s hero was some knight from Walter Scott or Dumas, the Daddy. Lady lived so accustomed to Service. She sure needed it now. Her saint would share with Cassie’s Christ’s haberdashers’ thorns and blood. But Lady’s feudal warlord would also enjoy her dead husband’s knowledge and surface wit. He’d have the strict Christian nobleness of Robert Edward Lee hisself. Lady’s Man would boast the flashiness of J. E. B. Stuart, the fierceness of Nathan Bedford Forrest (a future founder of the Klan), hybridized with General Mosby’s scholarship, bolstered by Beauregard’s manners—and on and on. Okay … so: Where is he?
Clinging to this trunk, one ear turned toward her Chinese bridge, ready for the tattoo of chivalry’s silver hooves, the mistress can’t help picturing all her nearby rooms. She must know: even He can’t save them now.
Lady Marsden imagines rooms so clear—they might be her own lungs’ brocaded linings, satiny-corridored intestine walls. “My interiors!”
In downstairs chambers, she understands: ain’t too much left but side tables, tacked carpet runners veering room to room and meant to guard her parquet between parties. But on The Lilacs’ second floor and third—everything rests just where it’s been since her dead mother’s time.
Now, holding on to this tree like it might save her (it is hers, after all)—forehead pressed to bark the way a lady in her childhood picture book leaned against back armor plates of a saddled knight galloping her off from danger, with the face well masked by Castalia’s wet sheet—Lady’s eyes close, eyes are tearing with first saw-toothed whiffs. Her tree starts rolling, a strange storm of wind currents sucking—scrolling—through the opened lower house. And she hears everything she ever owned start ending.
(When this lady turns in bed at night, when one of her fine bones crackles, she surely knows if it was her elbow or the third vertebra down. Like that, nested this close to furnishings nearly as dear to her as her own skeleton—Lady Marsden reads each pop. Child, her last moments of being so alive become near-miracles of hearing.) You know how lobsters make no sound till plunged—brightening from black to red—into their final boiling pot? Lady’s things become a martyrs’ choir.
Over sounds of edgy Yankee talk, over the un-noise of the awaited prince’s white blooded horse from Upperville or Lexington—Lady hears exactly how each lowboy takes to high flame, finds she’d really rather not know. What each hiss means. Lady finds she just can’t quit this farewell map making. Goodbye, four jasper Wedgwood compotes set into stairwell’s niches. See you, Priapus overdressed. Goodbye, Empire ormolu, ivory-colored Louis-the-umpty-umpth thus-and-so pulled from earlier fires at earlier castles and brung to safety here. So long, Delia Robbia choirboys belting out Latin hymns from the study’s frieze. Toodle-do, the Ter Borch oil picture of a lady wearing white come evening, cloth silk-pursing last light. So long beauty, order, swan life, god-and-goddessy clocks.
With this much carbon combing past her, Lady’s eyes are shut, but oh her head is so alive. It almost hurts, this final surge. Feels like it’s her blood’s own museum inventory. Lady’s ears already fill with blowing grit, her braids’ brush ends begin to coil—they smell metallic from the heat. Seems the kiln this home’s become is changing her into some semiprecious store-bought thing. She’s finally and truly turning “It.”
Lady hears Yankees gossip from close by—hears slaves mumble, awestruck, yards away. Her winding sheet crackles, suddenly unwet due west, seems to be browning like meringue in a low oven. Before smoke overcomes her, it teases, sharpens all sensations. She finds a strange new calm—and Lady wonders: “Perhaps this is what it’s like when one is close to dying. This is how one’s body comes to its own rescue, chemical toddies that hostess you through your own exit. Could I be thinking of last moments because these ones happen to be mine? Wouldn’t that be odd.”
Meanwhile, she knows exactly what’s become swan-song smoke in every room and with what sort of sigh, which tint of flame, and at what turncoat speed. Morocco-leather-bound books downstairs, her husband’s greatest joy, a lending library for Combustion now. (“Illiterate scamps, they spared the ladder but not the Gutenberg Bible!” She refused teaching slaves to read, claiming it’d interfere with their natural dignity.) Lady hears books—burning somewhat alphabetical from floor to ceiling—perish in a frying roar. Seems like world literature ain’t dry at all, but victual as bacon.
She knows when doilies quarter like dinner guests’ napkins folded after a final satisfying course. In ending, buckled veneer suddenly lies flat. And under carpet, a long-lost key finds itself at the very last second, glows molten orange, “So. Here I am! I never doubted it.”
One second-floor Dutch painting, a lady in white satin, burns bright blue, but its gold-leafed frame—on the job till the very end—puts off a yellow light, continuously framing blue damage. The owner, eyes shut like some Lady Oracle, knows what’s turned black, what’s whitening, which item curls purplish at its edges. (Myself, I own some family snapshots, a shawl, the cameo Momma give me, my husband’s scabbard and bugle, some sterling thimbles. Still, they’re mine. They make me guess: Hell for a collector must be hearing fire collecting on and under every item you love.)
Poor thing (are those my two favorite words, darling?) keeps breathing, coughing through cotton gone warm, hot, now singeing. She shivers—heat registers as one terrible chill. Lady believes she must now become choice butter smeared onto magnolia log, or maybe a cinder flying on to warn other gentlefolk downriver. She has time to recall one neighbor’s scolding, “You must use your conservatory’s white brocade lining to help bandage our South’s bleeding boys.” Lips now sound out, “Should have, should have.” Words you tend to utter whilst your house burns.
“At least my headache’s cured. Small blessings,” and it finally strikes her—if she does get through—she’ll wake in a landscape minus house, minus Bechstein grand, without a living son maybe, s
urely sans husband, without no clothes, all slaves gone. Dying loses some of its former sting.
Idly, idly, like she has all the time on earth, Lady E. More Marsden tells herself concerning death, “Well, something about it appeals to me.”
Tree’s roasty creak lets Mistress know: her magnolia has now gone over to the other side. Lost in smoke, she curls around the trunk. Worse heat tans her fingers, sets the pearls to sizzling. Last of all—hot in silk, slick with dew, renowned for perfect pallid skin—Mrs. Marsden hears it leave her ownership and this world’s: the concert grand, black painted white, probably charred darker than its starting ebony. She hears her signed masterpiece come plunging through three floors—riding a sound like Hell’s idea of Music.
8
YANKEES whoop at this sign of progress. Horses back off. Oh, honey, the heat! Third-floor roof begins to slack. Then it bows. Caves in. Sparks braid up two hundred yards. Nearby lilacs are already cooked but good. Soldiers clap. All but the boy whose single arm must hold the reins. He pats his Arabian’s flank. The horse bolts. Off go others. A yodeling gallop across the Chinese bridge. Troops turn right, towards Falls. Towards the next farm. Is The Lilacs’ punishment now over? Has Freedom started yet?
On the hedge’s cooler side, black people sure cling to each other. Through purple blooms, they see the familiar house offer a glut of smoke to the sky’s map. By stealing into the open, by turning to stare downriver, freed folks view a hundred miles of rich folks’ disasters.
Ownership of people as property has just ended. Long live un-ownership! Odd, but property itself has died somewhat like people do. In picture books, the souls of the departing go smearing up—birds—vertical into air. White houses have left the world in just this way, smudged black, straight up. A windless afternoon and these great stripes, each half a acre wide, rise far apart at the river’s finest bends. Like proud figures in pain, they keep to theirselves, columns of a single mammoth temple. And only when each pillar floats far up (we’re talking miles, child) does it begin to sidle over toward the others. That high, a mild gray roof forms—transparent, weightless—tipped on jet-black uprights.—This former home now sets its vertical in place.