“You ain’t gettin’ tired now, boy, are you?”
“No.”
“Hardly started, we are. You go and look at Pastor Mitchell’s church in Nellysford, boy, and you’ll see a wide heart-pine floor that me and my pa whipsawed in a single day. Pull on, boy, pull on!”
Starbuck had never known work like it. Sometimes, in the winter, he went to his Uncle Matthew’s home in Lowell and they would saw ice from the frozen lake to fill the family ice house, but those excursions had been playful occasions, interspersed with snowball fights or bouts of wild skating along the lake banks beneath the icicle-hung trees. This plank sawing was relentless, cruel, remorseless, yet he dared not give up for he felt that his whole being, his future, his character, indeed his very soul were being weighed in the furious balance of Thomas Truslow’s scorn.
“Hold there, boy, time for another wedge.”
Starbuck let go of the pit saw’s handle, staggered, tripped and half fell against the pit’s wall. His hands were too painful to uncurl. His breath hurt. He had been half aware that a second man had come to the saw pit and had been chatting to Truslow these last few painful minutes, but he did not want to look up and see whoever else was witnessing this humiliation.
“You ever see anything to match it, Roper?” Truslow’s voice was mocking.
Starbuck still did not look up.
“This is Roper, boy,” Truslow said. “Say your greeting.”
“Good day, Mister Roper,” Starbuck managed to say.
“He calls you mister!” Truslow found that amusing. “He thinks you niggers are his fellow creatures, Roper. Says you’ve got the same equal rights before God as he has. You reckon that’s how God sees it, Roper?”
Roper paused to inspect the exhausted Starbuck. “I reckon God would want me in his bosom long before he ever took that,” Roper finally answered, and Starbuck looked unwillingly upward to see that Roper was a tall black man who was clearly amused by Starbuck’s predicament. “He don’t look good for nothing, does he now?” Roper said.
“He ain’t a bad worker,” Truslow, astonishingly, came to Starbuck’s defense, and Starbuck, hearing it, felt as though he had never in all his life received a compliment half so valuable. Truslow, the compliment delivered, jumped down into the pit. “Now I’ll show you how it’s done, boy.” Truslow took hold of the pit saw’s handle, nodded up at Roper, and suddenly the great blade of steel blurred as the two men went into an instant and much practiced rhythm. “This is how you do it!” Truslow shouted over the saw’s ringing noise to the dazed Starbuck. “Let the steel do the work! You don’t fight it, you let it slice the wood for you. Roper and me could cut half the forests in America without catching breath.” Truslow was using one hand only, and standing to one side of the work so that the flood of dust and chips did not stream onto his face. “So what brings you here, boy?”
“I told you, a letter from—”
“I mean what’s a Yankee doing in Virginia. You are a Yankee, aren’t you?”
Starbuck, remembering Washington Faulconer’s assertion of how much this man hated Yankees, decided to brazen it out. “And proud of it, yes.”
Truslow jetted a stream of tobacco juice into a corner of the pit. “So what are you doing here?”
Starbuck decided this was not the time to talk of Mademoiselle Demarest, nor of the Tom company, so offered an abbreviated and less-anguished version of his story. “I’ve fallen out with my family and taken shelter with Mister Faulconer.”
“Why him?”
“I am a close friend of Adam Faulconer.”
“Are you now?” Truslow actually seemed to approve. “Where is Adam?”
“The last we heard he was in Chicago.”
“Doing what?”
“He works with the Christian Peace Commission. They hold prayer meetings and distribute tracts.”
Truslow laughed. “Tracts and prayers won’t help, because America don’t want peace, boy. You Yankees want to tell us how to live our lives, just like the British did last century, but we ain’t any better listeners now than we were then. Nor is it their business. Who owns the house uses the best broom, boy. I’ll tell you what the North wants, boy.” Truslow, while talking, was whipping the saw up and down in his slicing, tireless rhythm. “The North wants to give us more government, that’s what they want. It’s these Prussians, that’s what I reckon. They keep telling the Yankees how to make better government, and you Yankees is fool enough to listen, but I tell you it’s too late now.”
“Too late?”
“You can’t mend a broken egg, boy. America’s in two pieces, and the North will sell herself to the Prussians and we’ll mess through as we are.”
Starbuck was far too tired to care about the extraordinary theories that Truslow had about Prussia. “And the war?”
“We just have to win it. See the Yankees off. I don’t want to tell them how to live, so long as they don’t tell me.”
“So you’ll fight?” Starbuck asked, sensing some hope for the success of his errand.
“Of course I’ll fight. But not for fifty dollars.”
Truslow paused as Roper hammered a wedge into the new cut.
Starbuck, whose breath was slowly coming back, frowned. “I’m not empowered to offer more, Mister Truslow.”
“I don’t want more. I’ll fight because I want to fight, and if I weren’t wanting to fight then fifty times fifty dollars wouldn’t buy me, though Faulconer would never understood that.” Truslow paused to spit a stream of viscous tobacco juice. “His father now, he knew that a fed hound never hunts, but Washington? He’s a milksop, and he always pays to get what he wants, but I ain’t for sale. I’ll fight to keep America the way she is, boy, because the way she is makes her the best goddamned country in the whole goddamned world, and if that means killing a passel of you chicken-shit northerners to keep her that way, then so be it. Are you ready, Roper?”
The saw slashed down again, leaving Starbuck to wonder why Washington Faulconer had been willing to pay so dearly for Truslow’s enlistment. Was it just because this man could bring other hard men from the mountains? In which case, Starbuck thought, it would be money well spent, for a regiment of hardscrabble demons like Truslow would surely be invincible.
“So what are you trained to be, boy?” Truslow kept sawing as he asked the question.
Starbuck was tempted to lie, but he had neither the energy nor the will to sustain a fiction. “A preacher,” he answered wearily.
The sawing abruptly stopped, causing Roper to protest as his rhythm was broken. Truslow ignored the protest. “You’re a preacher?”
“I was training to be a minister.” Starbuck offered a more exact definition.
“A man of God?”
“I hope so, yes. Indeed I do.” Except he knew he was not worthy and the knowledge of his backsliding was bitter.
Truslow stared incredulously at Starbuck and then, astonishingly, he wiped his hands down his filthy clothes as though trying to smarten himself up for his visitor. “I’ve got work for you,” he announced grimly.
Starbuck glanced at the wicked-toothed saw. “But…”
“Preacher’s work,” Truslow said curtly. “Roper! Ladder.”
Roper dropped a homemade ladder into the pit and Starbuck, flinching from the pain in his hands, let himself be chivied up its crude rungs.
“Did you bring your book?” Truslow demanded as he followed Starbuck up the ladder.
“Book?”
“All preachers have books. Never mind, there’s one in the house. Roper! You want to ride down to the Decker house? Tell Sally and Robert to come here fast. Take the man’s horse. What’s your name, mister?”
“Starbuck. Nathaniel Starbuck.”
The name evidently meant nothing to Truslow. “Take Mister Starbuck’s mare,” he called to Roper, “and tell Sally I won’t take no for an answer!” All these instructions had been hurled over Truslow’s shoulders as he hurried to his log house. The dog scurried a
side as its master stalked past, then lay staring malevolently at Starbuck, growling deep in its throat.
“You don’t mind if I take the horse?” Roper asked. “Not to worry. I know her. I used to work for Mister Faulconer. I know this mare, Pocahontas, isn’t she?”
Starbuck waved a feeble hand in assent. “Who is Sally?”
“Truslow’s daughter.” Roper chuckled as he untied the mare’s bridle and adjusted the saddle. “She’s a wild one, but you know what they say of women. They’re the devil’s nets, and young Sally will snare a few souls before she’s through. She don’t live here now. When her mother was dying she took herself off to Missus Decker, who can’t abide Truslow.” Roper seemed amused by the human tangle. He swung himself into Pocahontas’s saddle. “I’ll be off, Mister Truslow!” He called toward the cabin.
“Go on, Roper! Go!” Truslow emerged from the house carrying an enormous Bible that had lost its back cover and had a broken spine. “Hold it, mister.” He thrust the dilapidated Bible at Starbuck, then bent over a water butt and scooped handfuls of rainwater over his scalp. He tried to pat the matted filthy hair into some semblance of order, then crammed his greasy hat back into place before beckoning to Starbuck. “Come on, mister.”
Starbuck followed Truslow across the clearing. Flies buzzed in the warm evening air. Starbuck, cradling the Bible in his forearms to spare his skinned palms, tried to explain the misunderstanding to Thomas Truslow. “I’m not an ordained minister, Mister Truslow.”
“What’s ordained mean?” Truslow had stopped at the edge of the clearing and was unbuttoning his filthy jeans. He stared at Starbuck, evidently expecting an answer, then began to urinate. “It keeps the deer off the crop,” he explained. “So what’s ordained mean?”
“It means that I have not been called by a congregation to be their pastor.”
“But you’ve got the book learning?”
“Yes, most of it.”
“And you could be ordained?”
Starbuck was immediately assailed with guilt about Mademoiselle Dominique Demarest. “I’m not sure I want to be, anymore.”
“But you could be?” Truslow insisted.
“I suppose so, yes.”
“Then you’re good enough for me. Come on.” He buttoned his trousers and beckoned Starbuck under the trees to where, in a tended patch of grass and beneath a tree that was brilliant with red blossom, a single grave lay. The grave marker was a broad piece of wood, rammed into the earth and marked with the one word Emly. The grave did not look old, for its blossom-littered earth ridge was still sparse with grass. “She was my wife,” Truslow said in a surprisingly meek and almost shy voice.
“I’m sorry.”
“Died Christmas Day.” Truslow blinked, and suddenly Starbuck felt a wave of sorrow come from the small, urgent man, a wave every bit as forceful and overwhelming as Truslow’s more habitual emanation of violence. Truslow seemed unable to speak, as though there were no words to express what he felt. “Emily was a good wife,” he finally said, “and I was a good husband to her. She made me that. A good woman can do that to a man. She can make a man good.”
“Was she sick?” Starbuck asked uneasily.
Truslow nodded. He had taken off his greasy hat, which he now held awkwardly in his strong hands. “Congestion of the brain. It weren’t an easy death.”
“I’m sorry,” Starbuck said inadequately.
“There was a man might have saved her. A Yankee.” Truslow spoke the last word with a sour hatred that made Starbuck shiver. “He was a fancy doctor from up north. He was visiting relatives in the valley last Thanksgiving.” He jerked his head westward, indicating the Shenandoah Valley beyond the intervening mountains. “Doctor Danson told me of him, said he could work miracles, so I rode over and begged him to come up and see my Emily. She couldn’t be moved, see. I went on bended knee.” Truslow fell silent, remembering the humiliation, then shook his head. “The man refused to move. Said there was nothing he could do, but the truth was he didn’t want to stir off his fat ass and mount a horse in that rain. They ran me off the property.”
Starbuck had never heard of anyone being cured of congestion of the brain and suspected the Yankee doctor had known all along that anything he tried would be a waste of time, but how was anyone to persuade a man like Thomas Truslow of that truth?
“She died on Christmas Day,” Truslow went on softly. “The snow was thick up here then, like a blanket. Just me and her, the girl had run off, damn her skin.”
“Sally?”
“Hell, yes.” Truslow was standing to attention now with his hands crossed awkwardly over his breast, almost as if he was imitating the death stance of his beloved Emily. “Emily and me weren’t married proper,” he confessed to Starbuck. “She ran off with me the year before I went to be a soldier. I was just sixteen, she weren’t a day older, but she was already married. We were wrong, and we both knew it, but it was like we couldn’t help ourselves.” There were tears in his eyes, and Starbuck suddenly felt glad to know that this tough man had once behaved as stupidly and foolishly as Starbuck had himself just behaved. “I loved her,” Truslow went on, “and that’s the truth of it, though Pastor Mitchell wouldn’t wed us because he said we were sinners.”
“I’m sure he should have made no such judgment,” Starbuck said gravely.
“I reckon he should. It was his job to judge us. What else is a preacher for except to teach us conduct? I ain’t complaining, but God gave us his punishment, Mister Starbuck. Only one of our children lived, and she broke our hearts, and now Emily’s dead and I’m left alone. God is not mocked, Mister Starbuck.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, Starbuck felt an immense surge of sympathy for this awkward, hard, difficult man who stood so clumsily beside the grave he must have dug himself. Or perhaps Roper had helped him, or one of the other fugitive men who lived in this high valley out of sight of the magistrates and the taxmen who infested the plains. At Christmastime, too, and Starbuck imagined them carrying the limp body out into the snow and hacking down into the cold ground.
“We weren’t married proper, and she were never buried proper, not with a man of God to see her home, and that’s what I want you to do for her. You’re to say the right words, Mister Starbuck. Say them for Emily, because if you say the right words then God will take her in.”
“I’m sure he will.” Starbuck felt entirely inadequate to the moment.
“So say them.” There was no violence in Thomas Truslow now, just a terrible vulnerability.
There was silence in the small glade. The evening shadows stretched long. Oh dear God, Starbuck thought, but I am not worthy, not nearly worthy. God will not listen to me, a sinner, yet are we not all sinners? And the truth, surely, was that God had already heard Thomas Truslow’s prayer, for Truslow’s anguish was more eloquent than any litany that Starbuck’s education could provide. Yet Thomas Truslow needed the comfort of ritual, of old words lovingly said, and Starbuck gripped the book tight, closed his eyes and raised his face toward the dusk-shadowed blossoms, but suddenly he felt a fool and an imposter and no words would come. He opened his mouth, but he could not speak.
“That’s right,” Truslow said, “take your time.”
Starbuck tried to think of a passage of scripture that would give him a start. His throat was dry. He opened his eyes and suddenly a verse came to him. “Man that is born of a woman,” he began, but his voice was scratchy and uncertain so he began again, “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.”
“Amen,” Thomas Truslow said, “amen to that.”
“He cometh forth like a flower…”
“She was, she was, praise God, she was.”
“And is cut down.”
“The Lord took her, the Lord took her.” Truslow, his eyes closed, rocked back and forth as he tried to summon all his intensity.
“He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.”
“God help us sinners,” Truslow said, “God help us
.”
Starbuck was suddenly dumb. He had quoted the first two verses of the fourteenth chapter of Job, and suddenly he was remembering the fourth verse, which asked who can bring a clean thing from an unclean? Then gave its hard answer, no one. And surely Truslow’s unsanctified household had been unclean?
“Pray, Mister, pray,” Truslow pleaded.
“Oh Lord God”—Starbuck clenched his eyes against the sun’s dying light—“remember Emily who was thy servant, thy handmaid, and who was snatched from this world into thy greater glory.”
“She was, she was!” Truslow almost wailed the confirmation.
“Remember Emily Truslow—” Starbuck went on lamely.
“Mallory,” Truslow interrupted, “that was her proper name, Emily Marjory Mallory. And shouldn’t we kneel?” He snatched off his hat and dropped onto the soft loamy soil.
Starbuck also dropped to his knees. “Oh, Lord,” he began again, and for a moment he was speechless, but then, from nowhere it seemed, the words began to flow. He felt Truslow’s grief fill him, and in turn he tried to lay that grief upon the Lord. Truslow moaned as he listened to the prayer, while Starbuck raised his face to the green leaves as though he could project his words on strong hard wings out beyond the trees, out beyond the darkening sky, out beyond the first pale stars, out to where God reigned in all his terrible brooding majesty. The prayer was good, and Starbuck felt its power and wondered why he could not pray for himself as he prayed for this unknown woman. “Oh God,” he finished, and there were tears on his face as his prayer came to an end, “oh dear God, hear our prayer, hear us, hear us.”
And then there was silence again, except for the wind in the leaves and the sound of the birds and from somewhere in the valley a lone dog’s barking. Starbuck opened his eyes to see that Truslow’s dirty face was streaked with tears, yet the small man looked oddly happy. He was leaning forward to hold his stubby, strong fingers into the dirt of the grave as if, by thus holding the earth above his Emily’s corpse, he could talk with her.
“I’ll be going to war, Emily,” he said, without any embarrassment at so addressing his dead woman in Starbuck’s presence. “Faulconer’s a fool, and I won’t be going for his sake, but we’ve got kin in his ranks, and I’ll go for them. Your brother’s joined this so-called Legion, and cousin Tom is there, and you’d want me to look after them both, girl, so I will. And Sally’s going to be just dandy. She’s got her man now and she’s going to be looked after, and you can just wait for me, my darling, and I’ll be with you in God’s time. This is Mister Starbuck who prayed for you. He did it well, didn’t he?” Truslow was weeping, but now he pulled his fingers free of the soil and wiped them against his jeans before cuffing at his cheeks. “You pray well,” he said to Starbuck.