Against the Ruins Read online

  Three weeks after the civil-rights demonstration, the Asian flu roared into Columbia. Two Low Country high schools were closed, the Columbia College infirmary was full, and soldiers at Fort Jackson were confined to the base. Several young people in New England had died. By mid-October three students from Camp Fornance were sick, and then six more, eight students at Logan Grammar School, and then fifteen more. Soon sixty-five students from Laidlaw were sick and the school closed briefly. The seminary stayed open, it had only a few cases, and for once I was glad your father didn’t often touch you. This flu took particular aim at schoolchildren, and I felt frantic. I barely let you go outside. Hadn’t my mother died from a flu that took particular aim at her age group? Over two hundred Americans were now dead—twenty thousand would eventually succumb. I’d been so relieved to see you get the new polio vaccine. Now this?

  Sometimes I’d remember my childhood, remember the women moving silently through the house my father built for my mother, with its dormers and wrap-around porch, an aunt and a cousin who wear billowy white muslin dresses with high collars and look worried and speak in quiet voices. I’m sitting in a tiny wicker rocking chair, unnoticed, cradling a limp cloth doll with a china head that has a crack through the face where I dropped it on the brick hearth. No one has asked if I would like to have supper. Instead, white skirts float by and the aunt carries a pan of water, and a man in a suit comes to the front door and speaks with my daddy—my daddy picks me up all the time and says he intends to name a rose after me as soon as he has a chance to breed one. He and the man in the dark suit sit in the parlor and speak in whispery voices, and I know Daddy has forgotten the rose.

  The man in the suit goes to the bedroom where my mother is sleeping; he leans down and picks up her arm and holds her wrist. He speaks to the aunt who has been staying with us for a week—Daddy told her to go home, which is odd because he loves visitors. My brothers were sent to another aunt’s house a week ago, before my mother took sick. Now the man in the suit talks to Daddy again, and Daddy walks the man to the door. I’m hungry, I would like some milk. I slip into my mother’s room, tiptoe up to the bed and ask to have a biscuit, tell her my stomach hurts. I gaze at her stomach, which is Big. God has sent a baby in there—I’ve asked him to send a girl. Aren’t three brothers enough? My mother’s eyes are closed. Her skin has turned blue over the past two days, and sometimes there’s blood under her dark feathery eyelashes.

  Up and down our street crepe door sashes abound. I’ve not been allowed outdoors, but I’ve seen them from our windows. As I’ll learn later, white for the young, black for the middle-aged, gray for the old. There’s a war across the ocean and there’s another war at home, and it’s severe cyanosis, I’ll also learn later, that turns some victims nearly black. The Brantley undertaker has run short of coffins. Someone stole two newly made coffins from his shed during the night. Daddy, head in his hands, cried, “Where is the Almighty when a man has to steal a casket to bury his son?”

  After the doctor leaves, Daddy paces back and forth across the dining room, slams his fist down on the oak table. “She had to go out and nurse the neighbors who were sick. Why didn’t I stop her?” He stares at the forest-fire painting above the mantel, shakes his head as though angry with the picture.

  My aunt has told me not to go in my mother’s room, but I keep sneaking in anyway. My daddy comes in the room, tears in his eyes. When he turns my mother over, she crackles like grease on a hot griddle.

  It was really air leaking through damaged lungs.

  Above the bed is a painting of a girl with a long brown braid down her back, floating in a small wooden boat under a half-shadowed full moon. My favorite painting—well almost, I like the wild reds and blacks of the forest fire, and the one of the peaches, and the deer swimming in the ocean. My mother held me up to the deer while she was painting it so I could smell the woodsy paint. My mother said she hoped heaven smelled like oil paint.

  The aunt shoos me out of my mother’s room. I’m still hungry. No one brings food like they used to when somebody was sick. No one comes to visit on Sunday afternoons. The milkman wears a handkerchief over his mouth and leaves the milk at the gate, he won’t come on the porch. Daddy says it’s now illegal to shake hands in a place called Arizona where the Indians live. He takes my mother’s hand all the time. But he swears at God a lot, especially when the church bells ring, which they do often now, and not just on Sunday.

  Uta always said that there was one defining moment in everyone’s life that shaped and cemented the psyche forever. We’re nothing if not the hardened clay of our first date with chance—that was how she put it. We live there forever.

  Did you know that more people died in the Spanish flu epidemic than in all the wars of the twentieth century? Sudden, virulent, unpredictable death. It’s unkind that I almost felt better upon learning Margaret Mitchell’s mother had died of it too. I wasn’t the only one.

  One morning I sneaked out of our house and skipped down the street, a whirling dervish set free. Soon my father came running and grabbed me up. But not before I saw the corpses lying on a neighbor’s porch. Five of them wrapped in sheets. An entire family, including a playmate. Bloodstains on the white sheets—I can still see this in my mind. I was too young to even understand death, but no child sees that and doesn’t get an inkling. On some unconscious level, I knew the world had changed.

  Some experts, I once read, believe the epidemic started in a small Kansas town, moved to a military base, and traveled from there to other military bases, World War I soldiers taking it on to Europe. But there’s no army base near Brantley, and few people ever pass through there. How did we get so unlucky? Do you remember when we’d sleep together in the back bedroom in my parents’ house? We’re lying in that huge brass bed, you don’t know it’s the bed your real grandmother died in, and it’s a hot night so I push the silk-covered comforter onto the floor, where it always slides anyway, it’s slick like a grape. The moon—it’s so bright, a stark white moon—shines through the window and makes stripes on the sheets. We’re sticky, damp, there’s no breeze, only the fragrance of summer night, of warm earth and cape jasmine, and at midnight we’re awakened by the long low wail of the train.

  Brantley is where the Silver Star and the Silver Meteor railroad lines stopped to take on coal and water. Death rode south on iron tracks when three thousand soldiers were mustered onto passenger cars in Rockford, Illinois, for the 950-mile trip to Camp Hancock in Augusta, Georgia, passing through the western coastal plain of South Carolina. See those men crowded in a rail car, men coughing, one with blood pouring from his nose, another feverish and mumbling, others leaning out the windows to avoid breathing the same air? When the train stops to refuel, soldiers are forbidden to leave the cars—two thousand of those men will be hospitalized later—but men scramble outside anyway, to escape the fetid air, and not everyone returns.

  My hometown lay directly in the path of the invasion.

  January 1919 was unusually cold and it snows one morning, big bubbly white flakes. I’ve never seen snow and go from window to window exclaiming, then I run to Daddy and ask can we go outside. When he says we can’t, I slink off to the pantry and don’t come out for an hour, even when the aunt promises to make cookies. Finally I go and look at my mother but her eyes are closed and she doesn’t say anything. She isn’t coughing up blood now. She’s almost smiling for the first time in days, but she’s asleep too. I climb up onto the bed and nestle close to her, her long hair so dark against the white sheets. I tell her about the snow, curl my fingers into her curled fingers, for those fingers are special, like rabbits and chickens are special because they live and sleep outside and make noises people don’t. My mother’s fingers do what other people’s fingers don’t, she puts them on paintbrushes and pictures appear, and I don’t have a word for magic yet but I know what it is.

  I crawl down off the bed and walk around to look at her from
all angles, wishing she would open her eyes. She has deep gray eyes that seem to come from a long way off. I lean against the bed and do what she used to do—I sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She taught me to sing before real words came, and now I sing another—

  A loud cry, I’m jerked back from the bed, piercing voices of Daddy and the aunt. I’m shunted out of the room by the aunt, my linen shift ripping down the middle like a heart split in two.

  My mother disappeared without symbol or ceremony. There was no funeral; church services were rarely held then. My brothers and I weren’t taken to the burial. I was distracted by an aunt when the undertaker came for her body. I didn’t understand what had happened. How could my mother just be gone? And where was that baby in her stomach? I wanted her back. A year later I still wondered—why did she go away?

  When I turned four, Daddy said I was old enough and hand-in-hand we walked past the leaning old white houses of our neighbors and through the iron gates of the town cemetery. Daddy walked very quietly over to a grassy area with a low wall around it. I’d learned to read a little and I saw my mother’s name on a stone. That’s where she’d gone to live now. I clutched the roses I’d picked for her and sat down.

  Daddy said, “No, Louise. It’s not respectful to sit on a grave.”

  I asked where my baby sister went and Daddy said the baby had gone to heaven with my mother. Everything was so different now. I had a new mother; the new mother cooked and cleaned but she didn’t make pictures. I spent hours staring at my dead mother’s paintings. The sickness was gone, but my first mother did not come back. Before the new mother came, my daddy sat at the dining-room table smoking his pipe every evening. He didn’t look like himself, he wandered around the house as though lost, and he kept forgetting his hat when he went off to his job as town clerk. When he came home he just sat and smoked and stared and smoked and stroked my hair when I climbed into his lap to play with his gold watch chain, and now and then he yelled when the boys got into a scuffle. He smoked and stared at the paintings and mildly noticed that my oldest brother had a bloody nose, and he smoked and stared and told the colored woman who was keeping us not to dust the paintings. He wouldn’t let anyone touch them.

  I wanted him to be like he used to be, when he would laugh all the time and give me smoochy kisses. Sometimes I stood beside him and held his hand, sometimes we gazed at the paintings together, and inside my head I would hear my mother singing her favorite hymns. When I looked at those pictures, she came into the room again, smiling and humming as she took up a paintbrush. I was back in the cradle sleeping and my mother was sitting at a tall stand putting color on cloth, and Daddy would walk in and smile and take her hand and kiss her fingers, her magic fingers he called them, for who could make a likeness any better?

  Often after she was gone, I took my mother’s paint box out from under Daddy’s bed and opened it and breathed the smell of heaven. One day the paint box was gone; my new mother said she’d thrown it away, as there was no one to use it and the paints had dried up. I ran down the concrete back steps and found the wooden box in the trash can beside the privy. I looked inside and it was true, the paints had turned hard. I dragged the paint box across the backyard, found a garden hoe and dug a shallow grave near the rose bushes, where the soil was soft. I picked up the paintbrushes one by one, ran my fingers along the stiff bristles, and buried the dried-out brushes in the ground, covering them with inert tubes of magic color.

  I’ve spent a lot of my life wondering who my mother really was, what I might have learned about myself had I known her. We never talked about her when I was a child; that would have been disrespectful to my stepmother. Only recently has it occurred to me that my mother did what women have always done. In a disaster, she went out and nursed others, sacrificing her life rather than protecting herself and her own.

  Part III: Lyra

  2004

  Chapter Five

  One afternoon a nurse comes to my mother’s cubicle to say someone is looking for me. I pull my paisley shawl around my shoulders—the hospital’s air-conditioning must be set on fifty—and head toward the waiting room. There the harsh glare of fluorescent ceiling lights nearly blinds me, the wall-hung television perpetually on, but respectfully, quietly. I’d like to jerk it off its metal support and throw it, with substantive disrespect, onto the carpeted floor. Hospitals are not places where anyone should be watching Wheel of Fortune.

  Among the “regulars,” most looking wrinkled and sleep-deprived, is a man in a suit who stands when I walk in.

  “Lyra?” He holds out his hand. “I heard about your mother’s stroke, my mother asked me to come by and say how sorry we are.”

  He looks vaguely familiar, but I’m so tired nearly everyone does. Dark brown hair with silver edges, brown eyes, attractive in a nondescript way.

  “Well of course you wouldn’t recognize me. It’s only been, like, decades.” Something about his eyes is familiar. “John,” he says. “John Truesdale.”

  “Johnny Truesdale? From Lincoln Street?”

  The scar above his lip is gone.

  “That’d be me. I know it’s been a long time. How is your mother?”

  “She’s somewhere between here and there. How did you know?”

  “My mother knows someone who goes to your parents’ church. Your mother kept in touch over the years.”

  Rosa of the endless men? My mother kept in touch with her? “How is Rosa?”

  John Truesdale smiles, exposing the crooked teeth I remember, though many have been improved. “Old age has slowed her down a bit, but she’s still feisty. She got married about ten years ago. Your mother didn’t tell you?”

  “No—no she didn’t. What’s your story these days?”

  “Wife and three boys, one in college, the other two in high school. I’m a sales rep for a medical-supply company out of Charlotte.”

  Suddenly I see us in the backyard on Lincoln Street, behind a pecan tree playing the “doctor game.” He’s holding the plastic straw stethoscope—he always wants to heal me—but I’m sick and tired of being the patient. I push him onto his scrawny back and shout, “I’m the doctor now. You have a very bad case of TB. Take off your pants and I’ll fix it.”

  “Did you say medical supplies?”

  He nods, poker-faced, and adds, “Mom and I have always thought so much of your mother. I bet you don’t know she helped us way back.” His voice drops to a lower pitch. “A year or two after your family moved, Mom got arrested.”

  He looks away, then back. “Your mother got Mom out of jail. Posted bond.”

  My mother bailed Rosa out of the joint?

  “I know your parents didn’t have much money,” he adds. “I don’t know if Mom ever paid her back, but she’s been grateful to her all these years. It turned Mom around in a way.”

  Several people rush into the waiting room, excited voices, a new family whose son has just been brought in.

  John and I walk out into the hallway. He shifts, looks around as though nervous. “Lyra, I came here partially to see you. To apologize. For the way I acted after your father—after he got sick. It was mean that I dropped you, the way I made fun of you and him. My mother whipped the daylights out of me but I was stupid and cruel, and I know it’s late but I’m really sorry.”

  So long ago and still there. Weeks after my father’s breakdown and I’m sitting on our front steps; Johnny and two boys from Aiken Street are on his porch pointing at me and laughing. I can hear them: “Bet she’s crazy too. Whole family’s loony-tunes. Bet she rolls her eyes back in her stupid head like a dog.”

  Suddenly I understood the earth science lesson about islands, what it meant to be cut off from a mainland.

  John’s voice: “It was disgraceful. I don’t know why I acted that way.”

  “Everyone acted that way except your mother and Uta. I hated you for a
while, I admit it; you were my first real friend. But you had your own cross to bear. To tell you the truth, I always wished my mother was more like yours—Rosa had guts, daring. I’m sure that was a different experience for you.” I look my old playmate in the eye. “It’s too bad ostracism didn’t make us closer.” But it didn’t for my parents either.

  As white-uniformed nurses and doctors pass by, I wonder if Johnny knew about the encyclopedia salesman. A man in a white shirt and black tie is trying to sell my mother a set, but we don’t have the money; he asks about neighbors with school-age children and my mother points across the street to Johnny’s house. The man’s eyes narrow to a condescending gleam—“Oh I heard about them,” he says. “No point going over there, that boy’s from a broken home, his mother’s a divorcée, so that poor kid won’t amount to nothing. Shame on her.”

  As the salesman walks away, my mother whispers in a shocked voice, “It isn’t even what Rosa does, it’s the divorce.” She leans down to me. “People are never going to look down their nose at you, Lyra. I promise you that.”

  John gives me his business card and says to please let him know if there’s anything he can do. I ask him to tell Rosa the dancing lessons have stood me in good stead.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” he says. “I looked up your paintings on the Internet. I bought the one of Mom leaning over the balcony of our old house. She loves it—though of course she maintains she was thinner than that.”