A Tidewater Morning (4 page)

Suddenly he came to a halt. Knowing my father as well as I did, I sensed there was no way he could long sustain this harsh, aggressive mood. And indeed at that very moment he turned away from my mother and looked straight ahead down the highway, at the same time raising his hand to touch consoling fingers against her shoulder. I saw her relax again; the perplexity and momentary shock softened, faded into a pale calm, and I relaxed too, feeling the hunched-up muscles in my arms and legs go limp with relief.

“Oh, Lord, forgive me, Addy,” he said at last, in a distant grieving voice. “I’m sorry to raise my voice like that. But I can’t help thinking”—again he hesitated, as if searching for words, and for what seemed a long while the only sound in the car was that of our breathing, a trio of different rhythms—“I can’t help thinking of the
generations
—as I once told you, I think: every direct ancestor hurt or mutilated or dead in nearly all the wars this country has fought. The great-grandfathers in the Revolution and in 1812. Both of them scarred. My grandfather in that despicable war with Mexico, dead at Buena Vista. My own father at the age of seventeen half-blinded and mutilated so badly at Chancellorsville that he hobbled and jerked like a spastic for the rest of his life. I alone got away during the Great War because of that friendly heart murmur, but somehow compensated for this by serving my apprenticeship in the shipyard, building heavy cruisers.” He turned to her briefly. “I suppose you could say that it was your poor brother David who, in a distant and indirect sense, kept it in the family, became my substitute, his mind blown away at Château-Thierry, so that even now, wandering around that veterans hospital at Perry Point—”

“Don’t,” she whispered, and slowly let her head fall against the back of the seat. She was not yet fifty. Years before, beyond the limit of my earliest memory, her hair had turned gray, and now most of it was white, though remarkably soft and lustrous because of her determination to keep a trace of her former beauty. It reminded me of the white of gardenias, and now the glossy strands of it next to her brow had become damp and darkened with tears. “Don’t say any more, please,” she said.

It was plain that he was ravaged inside by what he had caused himself to spill forth. He had also (I think unwittingly) allowed a meditation on war to flow to the edge of an unspoken thought—a prophecy concerning his only son and heir. As always, as much as I adored him, I was embarrassed by the emotionalism that impelled him, with passion at once fierce and clumsy, to twist around and with both arms embrace my head and my mother’s as if trying to merge them into one, murmuring: “Dearly beloved … dearly beloved.”

Even as Halloran’s words broke through the cloak of memory, broke through my whiskey haze, I was aware that he had neared the end of a story he had told us before. Stiles and I gazed patiently at the colonel, who drifted back to stage center. He was poised delightedly at the edge of his denouement. The teeth flashed beneath the vaudeville mustache and the laughter heaving up from his chest had made him very nearly incoherent. “So Willie,” he gasped, “so Willie was lying there with this broad Ludmilla. They still had their clothes on, you see, but he knew for sure he was going to score. And then he got his hand down there—you know where—and she was moaning and groaning and suddenly he felt”—another gasp—“and suddenly he felt what was obviously this big, stiff … Russian .. .
gazoo!”

Counterfeiting laughter with convincing heartiness is another of my social skills, and I joined with Stiles in the general explosion of merriment. “Oh, wow!” I cried.

“It wasn’t a
she,
this Ludmilla, you see, but a
he.
He was a White Russian fruitcake, I mean one of those whattayoucallems—”

“A drag queen,” Stiles put in, “a transvestite?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Boy, did Willie make tracks out of that joint!”

Our laughter died away but amid the residue of chuckles Halloran fell into thought. “Willie almost never got over that, but it was quite a story.” A tone of gravity crept in. “Jesus, though, imagine what he must have felt like afterwards. I mean, think of
kissing.
Having your tongue inside the mouth of this Igor or Boris or whatever the fuck his name must have been.” He gave a shudder. “Murder!”

“Make you sick to your stomach just thinking about it,” Stiles said accommodatingly.

“What in the goddamned hell are you crying for, Paul?” I suddenly heard Halloran say, shocking me back into present time. On one’s face the borderline between hilarity and grief may be, of course, ill-defined; thus I was able to press one hand against my brow, concealing my eyes while I murmured, “So funny, so funny,” and let the tears of sorrow continue to course down my cheeks. In reality the homesickness that had first seized me when I awoke on deck had now engulfed my spirit, and I felt as helpless and as vulnerable as I had at any time since I had gone to war. I’m sure the remembrance of my father’s desolation had made me sense the power of history to utterly victimize humanity, composed of forgettable ciphers like myself. What am I doing in this strange fucking horrible war? I thought, dumbfounded by the virginal freshness of the question I posed to myself. I rose from the bunk and quickly mumbled an excuse, saying that I had to go to the head, but once clear of the cabin I plunged down the putrid-smelling passageway in the opposite direction and burst out again onto the deck. I hung over the rail for a while, and let the cathartic tears drip, windblown, into the sea. After the unnumbered hours and days I had trained for warfare, I perceived the first small chink in the armor of my bravado; I accepted the sweet logic of the inner voice telling me:
You are really grateful that you won’t be invading that island tomorrow; you will be overjoyed to go back to Saipan
Then I banished the treacherous advocate from my mind, wiped my eyes, and stalked back to the cabin through clots and clumps of Marines who were oiling their rifles and making their unsheathed bayonets glitter like spears. “Is it true, sir,” I heard one kid say, “that they’re goin’ to pull the plug on us? Is it true that we’re not ever going to make a landing?”

“Sir, is what we hear true?” called another. “That we’re goin’ to head back to Saipan without seein’ any action?”

“I honestly can’t say,” I called back. “If it’s true, then, boys, we’re getting a royal screwing.”

I actually shivered at the insincerity that gripped me as I spoke these words: their falseness was shameful. I was sure my coolness would return. I’d just been caught with my guard down. But at the moment I was in shambles. Walking along the deck (adopting my old casual swagger), I jollied up the troops with small talk, put on a frozen grin, and kept murmuring to myself with rhythmic fatuity:
You love the Marine Corps, it’s a terrific war, you love the Marine Corps, it’s a terrific war
...

SHADRACH

M
y tenth summer on earth, in the year 1935, will never leave my mind because of Shadrach and the way he brightened and darkened my life then and thereafter. He turned up as if from nowhere, arriving at high noon in the village where I grew up in Tidewater Virginia. He was a black apparition of unbelievable antiquity, palsied and feeble, blue-gummed and grinning, a caricature of a caricature at a time when every creaky, superannuated Negro grandsire was (in the eyes of society, not alone the eyes of a small southern white boy) a combination of Stepin Fetchit and Uncle Remus. On that day when he seemed to materialize before us, almost out of the ether, we were playing marbles. Little boys rarely play marbles nowadays but marbles were an obsession in 1935, somewhat predating the yo-yo as a kids’ craze. One could admire these elegant many-colored spheres as potentates admire rubies and emeralds; they had a sound yet slippery substantiality, evoking the tactile delight—the same aesthetic yet opulent pleasure—of small precious globes of jade. Thus, among other things, my memory of Shadrach is bound up with the lapidary feel of marbles in my fingers and the odor of cool bare earth on a smoldering hot day beneath a sycamore tree, and still another odor (ineffably a part of the moment): a basic fetor which that squeamish decade christened B.O., and which radiated from a child named Little Mole Dabney, my opponent at marbles. He was ten years old, too, and had never been known to use Lifebuoy soap, or any other cleansing agent.

Which brings me soon enough to the Dabneys. For I realize I must deal with the Dabneys in order to try to explain the encompassing mystery of Shadrach—who after a fashion was a Dabney himself. The Dabneys were not close neighbors; they lived nearby down the road in a rambling weatherworn house that lacked a lawn. On the grassless, graceless terrain of the front yard was a random litter of eviscerated Frigidaires, electric generators, stoves, and the remains of two or three ancient automobiles, whose scavenged carcasses lay abandoned beneath the sycamores like huge rusted insects. Poking up through these husks were masses of weeds and hollyhocks, dandelions gone to seed, sunflowers. Junk and auto parts were a sideline of Mr. Dabney’s . He also did odd jobs, but his primary pursuit was bootlegging.

Like such noble Virginia family names as Randolph and Peyton and Tucker and Harrison and Lee and Fitzhugh and a score of others, the patronym Dabney is an illustrious one, but with the present Dabney, christened Vernon, the name had lost almost all of its luster. He should have gone to the University of Virginia; instead, he dropped out of school in the fifth grade. It was not his fault; nor was it his fault that the family had so declined in status. It was said that his father (a true scion of the distinguished old tree but a man with a character defect and a weakness for the bottle) had long ago slid down the social ladder, forfeiting his F.F.V. status by marrying a half-breed Mattaponi or Pamunkey Indian girl from the York River, which accounted perhaps for the black hair and sallowish muddy complexion of the son.

Mr. Dabney—at this time, I imagine he was in his forties—was a runty, hyperactive entrepreneur with a sourly intense, purse-lipped, preoccupied air and a sometimes rampaging temper. He also had a ridiculously foul mouth, from which I learned my first dirty words. It was with delectation, with the same sickishly delighted apprehension of evil that beset me about eight years later when I was accosted by my first prostitute, that I heard Mr. Dabney in his frequent transports of rage use those words forbidden to me in my own home. His blasphemies and obscenities, far from scaring me, caused me to shiver with their splendor. I practiced his words in secret, deriving from their amalgamated filth what, in a dim pediatric way, I could perceive was erotic inflammation. “Son of a bitch whorehouse bat shit Jesus Christ pisspot asshole!” I would screech into an empty closet, and feel my little ten-year-old pecker rise. Yet as ugly and threatening as Mr. Dabney might sometimes appear, I was never really daunted by him, for he had a humane and gentle side. Although he might curse like a stevedore at his wife and children, at the assorted mutts and cats that thronged the place, at the pet billy goat, which he once caught in the act of devouring his new three-dollar Thorn McAn shoes, I soon saw that even his most murderous fits were largely bluster. This would include his loud and eccentric dislike of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most down-and-out people of the Tidewater revered F.D.R., like poor people everywhere; not Mr. Dabney. Much later I surmised that his tantrums probably derived from a pining to return to his aristocratic origins.

Oh, how I loved the Dabneys! I actually wanted to
be
a Dabney—wanted to change my name from Paul Whitehurst to Paul Dabney. I visited the Dabney homestead as often as I could, basking in its casual squalor. I must avoid giving the impression of Tobacco Road; the Dabneys were of better quality. Yet there were similarities. The mother, named Trixie, was a huge sweaty generous sugarloaf of a woman, often drunk. It was she, I am sure, who propagated the domestic sloppiness. But I loved her passionately, just as I loved and envied the whole Dabney tribe and that total absence in them of the bourgeois aspirations and gentility which were my own inheritance. I envied the sheer teeming multitude of the Dabneys—there were seven children—which made my status as an only child seem so effete, spoiled, and lonesome. Only illicit whiskey kept the family from complete destitution, and I envied their near poverty. Also their religion. They were Baptists: as a Presbyterian I envied that. To be totally immersed—how wet and natural! They lived in a house devoid of books or any reading matter except funny papers—more envy. I envied their abandoned slovenliness, their sour unmade beds, their roaches, the cracked linoleum on the floor, the homely cur dogs leprous with mange that foraged at will through house and yard. My perverse longings were—to turn around a phrase unknown at the time—downwardly mobile. Afflicted at the age of ten by
nostalgie de la boue,
I felt deprived of a certain depravity. I was too young to know, of course, that one of the countless things of which the Dabneys were victims was the Great Depression.

Yet beneath this scruffy façade, the Dabneys were a family of some property. Although their ramshackle house was rented, as were most of the dwellings in our village, they owned a place elsewhere, and there was occasionally chatter in the household about “the Farm,” far upriver in King and Queen County. Mr. Dabney had inherited the place from his dissolute father and it had been in the family for generations. It could not have been much of a holding, or else it would have been sold years before, and when, long afterward, I came to absorb the history of the Virginia Tidewater—that primordial American demesne where the land was sucked dry by tobacco, laid waste and destroyed a whole century before golden California became an idea, much less a hope or a westward dream—I realized that the Dabney farm must have been as nondescript and as pathetic a relic as any of the scores of shrunken, abandoned “plantations” scattered for a hundred miles across the tidelands between the Potomac and the James. The chrysalis, unpainted, of a dinky, thrice-rebuilt farmhouse with a few mean acres in corn and second-growth timber—that was all. Nonetheless it was to this ancestral dwelling that the nine Dabneys, packed like squirming eels into a fifteen-year-old Model T Ford pockmarked with the ulcers of terminal decay, would go forth for a month’s sojourn each August, as seemingly bland and blasè about their customary estivation as Rockefellers decamping to Pocantico Hills. But they were not entirely vacationing. I did not know then but discovered later that the woodland glens and lost glades of the depopulated land of King and Queen were every moonshiner’s dream for hideaways in which to decoct white lightning, and the exodus to “the Farm” served a purpose beyond the purely recreative: each Dabney, of whatever age and sex, had at least a hand in the operation of the still, even if it was simply shucking corn.

All of the three Dabney boys bore the nickname Mole, being differentiated from each other by a logical nomenclature—Little, Middle, and Big Mole; I don’t think I ever knew their real names. It was the youngest of the three Moles I was playing marbles with when Shadrach made his appearance. Little Mole was a child of stunning ugliness, sharing with his brothers an inherited mixture of bulging thyroid eyes, mashed-in spoonlike nose, and jutting jaw that (I say in retrospect) might have nicely corresponded to Cesare Lombroso’s description of the criminal physiognomy. Something more remarkable—accounting surely for their collective nickname—was the fact that save for their graduated sizes they were nearly exact replicas of each other, appearing related less as brothers than as monotonous clones, as if Big Mole had reproduced Middle, who in turn had created Little, my evil-smelling playmate. None of the Moles ever wished or was ever required to bathe, and this accounted for another phenomenon. At the vast and dismal consolidated rural school we attended, one could mark the presence of any of the three Dabney brothers in a classroom by the ring of empty desks isolating each Mole from his classmates, who, edging away without apology from the effluvium, would leave the poor Mole abandoned in his aloneness, like some species of bacterium on a microscope slide whose noxious discharge has destroyed all life in a circle around it.

By contrast—the absurdity of genetics!—the four Dabney girls were fair, fragrant in their Woolworth perfumes, buxom, lusciously ripe of hindquarter, at least two of them knocked up and wed before attaining full growth. Oh, those lost beauties …

That day Little Mole took aim with a glittering taw of surreal chalcedony; he had warts on his fingers, his odor in my nostrils was quintessential Mole. He sent my agate spinning into the weeds.

Shadrach appeared then. We somehow sensed his presence, looked up, and found him there. We had not heard him approach; he had come as silently and portentously as if he had been lowered on some celestial apparatus operated by unseen hands. He was astoundingly black. I had never seen a Negro of that impenetrable hue: it was blackness of such intensity that it reflected no light at all, achieving a virtual obliteration of facial features and taking on a mysterious undertone that had the blue-gray of ashes. Perched on a fender, he was grinning at us from the rusted frame of a demolished Pierce-Arrow. It was a blissful grin, which revealed deathly purple gums, the yellowish stumps of two teeth, and a wet mobile tongue. For a long while he said nothing but, continuing to grin, contentedly rooted at his crotch with a hand warped and wrinkled with age: the bones moved beneath the black skin in clear skeletal outline. With his other hand he firmly grasped a walking stick.

It was then that I felt myself draw a breath in wonder at his age, which was surely unfathomable. He looked older than all the patriarchs of Genesis whose names flooded my mind in a Sunday school litany: Lamech, Noah, Enoch, and that perdurable old Jewish fossil Methuselah. Little Mole and I drew closer, and I saw then that the old man had to be at least partially blind; cataracts clouded his eyes like milky cauls, the corneas swam with rheum. Yet he was not entirely without sight. I sensed the way he observed our approach; above the implacable sweet grin there were flickers of wise recognition. His presence remained worrisomely biblical; I felt myself drawn to him with an almost devout compulsion, as if he were the prophet Elijah sent to bring truth, light, the Word. The shiny black mohair mail-order suit he wore was baggy and frayed, streaked with dust; the cuffs hung loose, and from one of the ripped ankle-high clodhoppers protruded a naked black toe. Even so, the presence was thrillingly ecclesiastical and fed my piety.

It was midsummer. The very trees seemed to hover on the edge of combustion; a mockingbird began to chant nearby in notes rippling and clear. I walked closer to the granddaddy through a swarm of fat green flies supping hungrily on the assorted offal carpeting the Dabney yard. Streams of sweat were pouring off the ancient black face. Finally I heard him speak, in a senescent voice so faint and garbled that it took moments for it to penetrate my understanding. But I understood: “Praise de Lawd. Praise his sweet name! Ise arrived in Ole Virginny!”

He beckoned to me with one of his elongated, bony, bituminous fingers; at first it alarmed me but then the finger seemed to move appealingly, like a small harmless snake. “Climb up on ole Shad’s knee,” he said. I was beginning to get the hang of his gluey diction, realized that it was a matter of listening to certain internal rhythms; even so, with the throaty gulping sound of Africa in it, it was nigger talk I had never heard before. “Jes climb up,” he commanded. I obeyed. I obeyed with love and eagerness; it was like creeping up against the bosom of Abraham. In the collapsed old lap I sat happily, fingering a brass chain which wound across the grease-shiny vest; at the end of the chain, dangling, was a nickel-plated watch upon the face of which the black mitts of Mickey Mouse marked the noontime hour. Giggling now, snuggled against the ministerial breast, I inhaled the odor of great age—indefinable, not exactly unpleasant but stale, like a long-unopened cupboard—mingled with the smell of unlaundered fabric and dust. Only inches away the tongue quivered like a pink clapper in the dark gorge of a cavernous bell. “You jes a sweetie,” he crooned. “Is you a Dabney?” I replied with regret, “No,” and pointed to Little Mole. “That’s a Dabney,” I said.

“You a sweetie, too,” he said, summoning Little Mole with the outstretched forefinger, black, palsied, wiggling. “Oh, you jes de sweetest thing!” The voice rose joyfully. Little Mole looked perplexed. I felt Shadrach’s entire body quiver; to my mystification he was overcome with emotion at beholding a flesh-and-blood Dabney, and as he reached toward the boy I heard him breathe again: “Praise de Lawd! Ise arrived in Ole Virginny!”

Then at that instant Shadrach suffered a cataclysmic crisis—one that plainly had to do with the fearful heat. He could not, of course, grow pallid, but something enormous and vital did dissolve within the black eternity of his face; the wrinkled old skin of his cheeks sagged, his milky eyes rolled blindly upward, and uttering a soft moan, he fell back across the car’s ruptured seat with its naked springs and its holes disgorging horsehair.