Against the Ruins Page 5
William and I were part of the first generation of Southerners—I should say of white Southerners, as many blacks fled the South decades before this—to seek our fortunes beyond our small hometowns and never return to them. But although I’ve spent my adult life in a city, my heart will always belong to the coastal plain northwest of Charleston. To Brantley. As often as I could, I took you to my native village of wide porches and tall tales, of summer afternoon naps and sultry evenings. Maybe you remember that the Brantley railroad tracks ran right behind the house my father built for his artistic bride. My grandfather lived down the street, and before my time the local conductor stopped at his house every morning to give him a ride to his office three miles away. That seems unbelievable now, given that no passenger train goes near Brantley.
Your father’s hometown was larger and more modern, closer to the Piedmont, a farming and commerce center. More businesslike, less summer-lazed, than Brantley. Hundreds like William left its railroad station to go to war—your father didn’t volunteer, but he was drafted in 1944. Just in time for the worst of it. Our two hometowns were but one county apart, a distance breached by crossing the dark, moody Salkehatchie River swamps. When we two joined hands, as all couples do, we set out across that dangerous water.
Now Columbia—not a whiff of live oak or Spanish moss—seems inevitable for us, as if an unseen force sent us there to be tested. To walk the plank of rootlessness in a city still insecure in those days, still psychologically and financially damaged by the Civil War. I like that Columbia’s a river city, that it sits at the confluence of the Saluda and Broad rivers, which join to form the mightier Congaree. This mirrors South Carolina’s sectionalist landscape—its three geographic and philosophical zones, Low Country and Up Country, with the Midlands, the narrow strip of Piedmont sand hills, in between. Your hometown never possessed the leisured style of Low Country aristocrats, or the be-up-and-doing of Upstate farmers. It’s middle ground, on the fall line, chosen to govern for that very fact. A mediator. But a fulcrum of balance can be a lonely place. Like we were, Columbia is defined by where it does not fit in.
Our city does have one famous characteristic, which would obsess your father: it was brutally and intentionally destroyed in 1865. On one February night, one-third of the city disappeared. Imagine over four hundred buildings in flames, the newly homeless wandering and wailing, graves opened and robbed, libraries and art collections ransacked. What child, in my generation or yours, was not told in the cradle of Sherman’s men, eyes fired by drink, wreaking vengeance on the secession state? Carolinians can go into spasms of Lost Cause mythology: When a people have been singled out for punishment, left in fiery ruin and abject poverty, this humiliation seeps into the earth and into the blood. You don’t hear many African Americans singing this tune. Yet for us, despite the terrible racial sins of generations, it does have the ring of prophecy—my grandfather and William’s both fought for the Confederacy, and each lost a son and his home and never fully recovered.
But to my mind, what Columbia lost in that fire was something more significant than its houses and prosperity. It lost the record of itself—a century of journals, diaries, letters, and civic records. I understand this loss because nothing written by my mother survives; when she died so young, I lost the family stories she might have told me and that I might have passed on to you. Our narrative chain was broken. Imagine the poetry someone in Columbia had hidden in a bureau drawer in 1865, the annotated family Bible, the drawings of an unknown artist. Thank heavens Mary Chestnut’s journal survived. Losing the words of the past is the death of particularity. Often I think of immigrants forced to flee their homes and history because of Hitler. How can we be sure who we are—especially in the traditional South—when we have few clues to who we were? To what can we aspire when the loss of our past is our claim to history?
I suspect this was how your father eventually felt, thanks in part to me.
Places matter. History matters. You threw our history into a backpack and took off. Checked that backpack in the lockers of a hundred airports. Where we come from—no matter where it is—silts under the fingernails, whether we notice it or not. Grains of earth scatter across the shoulders of the children and the grandchildren, whether they notice it or not. I’ll tell you, as your grandfather once told me: You cannot truly know yourself without understanding your relation to this earth and this history, without attending the whispers of the ground beneath your feet, without retelling the legends breathed over your cradle. Ours is not easy history, this is not an easy land, not a place for the faint of heart, not a homeland or a tale of simple answers. It’s easy to love a place that’s perfect, more courageous to love one that isn’t.
I’ve heard it said that passionate alienation is nothing if not a sign of attachment.
He became mean—I’ve never said that before, but it’s the truth. Mean and irresponsible. Abruptly that summer he quit his part-time registrar job at a small Columbia business school, which had helped pay his seminary tuition. Leaving us with only one income, which he didn’t tell me until a week later—
“I think they were planning to fire me,” he said, “so it was best I resign first.”
This seemed strange—William had never been fired from any job. He was smart and diligent. As we know now, though, abruptly leaving a job because he imagined someone had it in for him would become a pattern—a far more complex issue later on—that lasted for decades. One afternoon soon after this, I paused in the hallway beside his oak desk. The book Morality in Christian Life lay open on the blotter. Library books about the Civil War sat piled on the floor—he could read faster than anyone I knew. Often he didn’t sleep well and got up and read until morning. But these days he was reading more Southern history than theology. While I was still looking at his books, he came through the front door. I asked how his day was; he gave me a quick kiss and said it was fine.
“We’ll have liver and onions and green beans for supper,” I say as I go back to the kitchen. I’ve cheered up the dingy kitchen walls with French-blue dishtowels and curtains, and while I cook I sing silly ditties, then old hymns. Do you remember when—years later—you said my voice was as mellow as an old wine saved for years? I loved your saying that. Sometimes song flowed out of me like a trapped bird set free. That evening I thrilled to the majesty of “A Mighty Fortress,” and then to the quieter “Faith of Our Fathers.” Hymns are so beautifully sad, and suddenly I was beside my father again in the white clapboard church in Brantley and he’s singing his heart out, and nothing is dearer to me than his hearty off-key voice, and as I sing hymn after hymn in that Lincoln Street kitchen, everything I know I can never do and won’t ever do loses import in the shape of melody, in its rise and fall. When I sing, I am beautiful as I’ve never felt, and in song my husband is taking me in his arms—
William appears in the kitchen doorway and I smile, am about to say that supper’s almost ready.
“Louise, please stop singing. You’re not a real singer. It’s getting on my nerves.”
I freeze. His eyes are so remote. All through supper—I’m dieting and eat only Melba toast and green beans—a day from the past perches across the table. William and I are standing on the porch the evening of our first date, and after friends urge me into singing “What’ll I Do,” your father leans over in the wan, flower-scented moonlight and whispers, “Louise, I could listen to your sweet voice forever.”
It’s surprising that mostly I see pictures while I lie in this hospital bed. Somehow I’d imagined these hours would be accompanied by music. I’ve been waiting for that heavenly choir. Apparently no one showed up for rehearsal.
What a flood of images. Sometimes the past feels like it’s still happening, other times it’s way off in the distance. Time is a camera: long shots, close-ups, the long ago, the right now. Some memories are never really in the past. Mostly awful ones, but a minute ago I could see your father on our
first anniversary. We’re in the Summerville house, no baby yet, and I’ve saved up my grocery money and bought a roast for our anniversary. The house smells heavenly, I’ve filled it with greenery and holly berries, and I’ve bought William a silver stand for his pipe. Soon he waltzes in the door with a huge box and sets it on the kitchen table.
“Come over here,” he says, smiling. “Close your eyes.”
I hear him pull something out of the box—I admit I peeked—it’s a cage with a towel over it. “Okay, Louise, open your eyes.”
He stands very tall and with a flourish flips the towel off the cage. Two beautiful canaries, one yellow-green, one yellow-blue.
“Happy anniversary—meet our Bill and Coo.”
That was so like him then. I never told you how we met—after a while, it was hard to talk about. A teaching job landed me in his hometown, and shortly after the military funeral where I first saw him, I inveigled a friend to introduce us. At twenty-eight, I was haunted by the specter of spinsterhood—that death sentence of loneliness, embarrassment to the family, proof of one’s lack of grace and beauty. Sounds archaic to you, I know, but an unmarried woman in my day was dismissed as unwanted, doomed to flutter around other people’s hearths for lack of her own. Marriage was also the only legitimate path to the children I longed for.
I also wanted what we all want—to be loved.
It was raining that first day, a fuzzy drizzle casting its misty spell over streets and sidewalks. I dressed with care—a soft blue dress that brought out my eyes. Despite the weather I went hatless. I stared into the scratched mirror in my boardinghouse room. My father—hardly impartial—said my face was a picture-perfect oval, but I despised the slight gap between my two front teeth. A black woman—I know I should say African American now—once told me that a space between the front teeth is the passage through which God speaks. I thought it terribly unattractive, and in high school I tried not to smile much because of it; my oldest brother figured that out and told me that space was put there for good sense and laughter to slip out.
I saw William from the window first. He was leaning back against his 1930s Ford roadster, staring at the boardinghouse, a pipe cupped in his right hand. A tall and slender man in a suit, angular and wiry, a gazelle with thick sun-streaked hair. No hat to hide that lovely blond forelock falling into his eyes. And a mustache! He looked like a movie star. His left hand on the door handle, his left knee bent, he seemed relaxed, elegant. He reminded me of the photo I kept on my desk—my daddy in his thirties, wearing a three-piece pinstriped suit and white scarf, fedora pulled low, his right foot on the running board of a Model T. To the day he died, Daddy dressed like he was going to Washington to talk to FDR. When I came downstairs and William and I were introduced, he smiled at me, looked away, looked back and nodded a little, walked over to the porch railing and looked out, turned back and said something about the rain. Unlike that swell by the car, now he was shy—I loved that shyness, it was so familiar.
We walked to a nearby restaurant and ate fried chicken, butter beans, hot biscuits. William didn’t say much but when he crossed his legs, I noticed a worn argyle sock slipping down his ankle. His suit was new, his socks weren’t. I loved that too. Perfection unnerved me, still does. This handsome man held the door, walked on the outside, took my arm and looked carefully as we crossed near-empty streets and ambled toward the town square. In the early darkness I imagined us walking all night long, maybe into tomorrow, or to some place I’d never seen before, just walking, the two of us, and maybe sometime he would take my hand. I guess that sounds silly but it wasn’t then. As we strolled beneath the dogwoods and magnolias and sycamores, he talked about trees—his family owned a farm, now its crop was loblolly pines. Did I know what ring shake was? I didn’t of course, so your father stopped in the halo of a streetlight and told me about the hurricane he’d witnessed as a child, how it came inland and lopped off the tops of all the pines.
“Trees can survive a hurricane and look all right on the outside,” he said, “but when they’re taken to a sawmill to be cut, some will crumble into dust. Unseen damage makes the internal layers separate. It looks like a sound tree but on the inside everything’s broken down.”
I did like a smart man.
I’ve thought of that conversation so often over the years.
We walked along the boulevard beside the railroad tracks, past stately homes once owned by the town’s elite: several had never recovered from the Depression, peeling paint around a front door, a widow’s walk missing a railing. Eventually we reached the gabled Methodist church and your father said the bell would ring in a few minutes. When it did, he stood almost at attention. The bell had been paid for by his mother, he explained, in honor of his brother, Jake, who had been killed in the war. William paused, added, “It cost a thousand dollars to bury Jake in Arlington. We thought the army would pay all of it but they didn’t.”
Before I could respond, he added, “Jake died just two days before the war ended. His plane hit a mountain. Three months earlier my father died. Heart attack. My mother also last year.”
I wanted to throw my arms around him. No one deserved that many losses so close together. No one deserved to lose his entire family by age twenty-three.
The drizzle had stopped now and filmy moonlight dusted the sidewalk as we stood listening to the bell tolling.
“I always thought it would be nice to be a bell ringer,” he said. He smiled vaguely, as though remembering a distant place. “In large European cathedrals, where there are many bells, ringers are specially chosen and the bells are rung in mathematical order. Change-ringing. They use ropes or wheels to move the bells. But air currents can affect the way a bell sounds—air can curve and deflect sound waves.”
In that dreamy moonlight I noticed nothing except how interesting he was. And—he loved music. We returned to the boardinghouse and joined my friends on the porch, who talked me into a song. My voice that night—forgive my bragging—was a luminous cascade of stars. When afterward your father said, “It’s so beautiful, Louise,” well, I guess I was already in love by then. After he left, I raced upstairs and flopped on my bed and impulsively grabbed the book on my nightstand—happened to be Yeats’s poetry. I wrote on the flyleaf: “He said he could listen to me forever.”
So you see, the beginning for your father and me was truly lovely. I adored him. Sure, I wanted to get married and have a family, but I’d had other boyfriends. I’d been popular in college—I loved to hear people tell their stories and I had my father’s playfulness. Friends called me “Fannybelle” because before a date I once shook my rear end in the dorm and said, “I’m trying to get my Southern belle going.” Truth was, to achieve belle-dom, I’d have needed plastic surgery, a fatter wallet, and a lobotomy.
That’s not very nice, is it? For the first time in my life, I’m not all that concerned with being polite. What a relief.
William was different from other boys I’d known—even though he could be boyishly enthusiastic about one thing or another, he wasn’t a boy at all. An army sergeant who’d won a Bronze Star Medal was clearly a man. When a friend revealed that William had been pulled from the front lines twice suffering from shell shock, I understood why he rarely spoke of his combat experience. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I liked it that war hadn’t agreed with William. I was no Victory Girl: I’d lost three cousins I loved, and my brother had not returned the same man. The treatment for shell shock was only two days away from the screaming and bombing and dying, but even so, at the Battle of the Bulge your father saved the lives of several fellow soldiers. I admired him for that too, that even though war had literally made him sick, he’d still been brave. It was romantic that William was a decorated veteran; except for the terrible loss of life, the 1940s were romantic in many ways. Ironically, the war that stemmed the Depression made life at home better. Love, life, had an intoxicating intensity that was lost wh
en the 1940s we’re-all-in-this-together turned into the 1950s I’m-gonna-get-me-mine.
Little was known about wartime trauma in those days, and we were all so horrified by the discovery of the Nazi death camps and relieved that the war was over that few considered what that war had done to our own. It never occurred to me, even when he locked it up out of sight, that my husband might find his Bronze Star embarrassing, might find his valor—because of the killing no doubt—painful. That he might be suffering from terrible guilt.
But I saw your father’s war damage in July of our first summer on Lincoln Street. During a bad thunderstorm, lightning struck our chimney and coated the entire house—everything we owned—with black soot. That Saturday the weather had turned strangely chilly and dark in the afternoon. I’m washing dishes, listening to the radio; you’re lying on the threadbare living-room carpet looking at your dog-eared Littlest Angel book. Lightning slashes across the sky, lights up the sodden sidewalks. Angry white light, roaring thunder. Again, again. The radio goes dead. Suddenly the house shakes, as though elephants are jumping up and down on the roof. I run to the living room—books are flying off shelves, pictures crashing to the floor. Another roar of thunder. Then—whammm! Like the house has been shot. Furniture careens sideways, a table falls over, and the oil stove blasts into the middle of the room just as you scramble out of the way.
I’m screaming as I grab you into my arms. Soot rains down on us, my eyes sting, I taste dirt as clouds of dark smoke swirl through the house.