“Maybe,” said Sam, not liking the idea that his thoughts had somehow become transparent, “but there is nothing to be done for it now.” He found himself almost whispering the words. Something about the stillness of the dead town, the vast emptiness of it, seemed to demand that reverence. Not even birds flew overhead. As the business district gave way, they entered an area where houses had been reduced to frames, the wood deeply scored and still stinking of fire.
“They burned all the secessionitis out of
this
town,” said Ben. Sam didn’t answer, his eyes slowly searching the ruined landscape.
“Look there,” he said, pointing. It stood on the next block, the one house among dozens that was more intact than not. The front of it had been smashed, probably by a shell, and was collapsing in on itself like a drunkard. But the rest of the house was untouched. Even the paint looked fresh.
“You think maybe they some shoes in there?” asked Ben.
“There is only one way to find out,” said Sam, starting forward so abruptly that Ben had to hurry to keep up.
The front door was impassable. Sam walked slowly around. The windows were open. From the rear, it looked as if the owners had simply been called away and might return at any moment. Sam paused, fighting himself, wrestling down his own intuition.
The two men mounted the steps to the rear porch. Sam pushed at the door. It swung inward easily and without sound.
They found themselves in a parlor that smelled of smoke and shadows, of air that had known neither light nor movement in a very long time. The shades were drawn. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but the walls looked to be a sunny, incongruous yellow. The furniture was sturdy and serious. Decorative vases lined the shelves. Framed photographs watched the darkness. Sam took one down. He found himself staring into the face of a white woman, her eyes kindly above the hint of a smile, as if something unseen by the camera amused her greatly. She was seated. Towering behind her was a man, heavily bearded and with piercing eyes, one large hand resting proprietarily on the woman’s shoulder.
In her lap was a baby. It had moved before the exposure time lapsed, rendering its face an indistinguishable blur. You could not even tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child looked like a ghost of its own self, like a presentiment of death.
Ben was on the stairs. “Come on,” he said. “They gon’ have any shoes, they most likely be up yonder.”
His voice was unusually taut and Sam knew he felt it, too, the whisper of wrongness stirring the hairs in his ear at every step. Someone—someone
white
, even worse—had lived here not so long ago. The furnishings the two men walked among, the things they handled, the very air they breathed,
belonged
to someone. And though it was unlikely those people would choose this precise moment to return to their ruined home, there was, nevertheless, a sense of invasion in walking in their places, touching their things, being here when they were not.
Sam nodded, replacing the photograph on the buttery yellow shelf and following Ben. The stairs did not creak at the weight of them. The silence felt unnatural. It made you want to speak, want to snap your fingers or knock on wood just to hear the noise it made, just to assure yourself you still were there, still real.
“Don’t like this,” said Ben.
“Nor do I,” said Sam.
“We find you some shoes, you better hold on to ’em this time.”
It was a feeble joke and Sam knew it for what it really was. A need to throw words against the silence.
“I will,” he said. “You may depend on it.”
The stairwell gave onto a hallway that crossed it at a perpendicular angle. There were windows at either end. Someone had pulled the shades here, as well.
There were five doors, three lined up on the opposite side of the hall, two flanking the stairwell. Ben moved to his right, toward the first door. Sam followed.
Ben turned the knob, pushed the door open. This was a bedroom, a boy’s bedroom, to judge from the troop of painted wooden soldiers encamped on the gleaming wooden floor at the foot of an unmade bed. Clothes littered the room, spilled from the open top drawer of a dresser. There would be no men’s shoes in here. Sam and Ben backed out of the room, Ben pulling the door closed behind him.
“Look like they had to leave in a rush,” said Ben.
“Perhaps,” said Sam and his voice felt loud. “However, it could be the boy just isn’t very tidy.”
He tried the door across the hall. The handle was slimy in his sweaty fist. The door swung open into the cool darkness of what had apparently been a reading room. Books crowded the shelves. The rocking chair next to the oil lamp was inviting. Despite himself, Sam stepped forward, intending to read just a title or two. Ben caught his arm. “Can’t wear no books on your feet,” he said.
Sam looked at him. Sweat beaded his bald scalp. Ben’s mouth was a line strung taut between his cheeks. Sam nodded and they left this room, too. There were three more doors to check. Sam led them down the hall to the middle door. He tried it, it opened.
This was where the shell had hit. Most of the far wall was gone. Half the floor had collapsed into the porch below. A bed and a dresser lay strewn on their sides like the contents of a pocket dropped onto a table at the end of a wearying day. Ben pressed him from behind, but Sam warded him off with an arm and closed the door. “There is nothing in there,” he said. “The room was destroyed by the same explosion that destroyed the porch down below.”
Ben released a sigh that was almost a groan. “Two more,” he said.
They moved down the hallway to where the last two doors faced one another. “You take that one,” said Sam. “I will take this one.” Ben nodded, stepped into the other room. Sam tried his door. It swung open easily. Then his throat constricted and for a moment, he could not speak. His hand came automatically to his face to cover the smell.
She was there, the woman from the picture. She lay on the bed, fully dressed, staring at him with eyes that had been dead so long they had retreated into their sockets like some beast into its cave. There was a hole in her chest and her blouse was stiff with blood that had dried brown. The man lay on his back across her legs, his arms flung out from the great mass of him, as if to shrug at eternity. A black pistol lay on the floor where it had fallen from his left hand. The gunshot wound was in the temple. You could see chunks of desiccated tissue in the dried spatter on the wall.
“Oh, my God,” said Sam.
“Lord Jesus,” said Ben, suddenly at his side.
Sam had seen violent death before. He had seen it take men in midstride so that suddenly they flew backwards as if they had struck something human eyes could not see. He had seen it corkscrew men down to the ground, spurting blood and crying for their mothers. He had seen shells explode and men fall to the earth in pieces and chunks, like bloody confetti from some devil’s parade. But that was the battlefield—that was men contesting with other men and every man holding onto his life against other men trying to take it.
He had never seen death where a man brought it into the ordinariness of his very bedroom and inflicted it upon his wife and then himself. It was a species of horror he had never imagined.
“They seen the end comin’ and knowed they was gon’ lose,” said Ben. “They couldn’t stand it.”
“Yes,” said Sam, “but to take their own lives…?”
“Guess they rather that than live under ‘nigger domination,’ as they say.” Ben had moved past him and now flung open the closet. It was as empty as the dead woman’s eyes. “Somebody already been here,” he said. “Cleaned everything out.”
He went around the side of the bed, knelt near the dead man’s feet. Sam noticed for the first time that they were bare. “Ain’t gon’ find no shoes in here.”
“What do you suppose happened to the little boy?” asked Sam.
Ben shrugged. “Hell would I know? If he smart, he a long way from here. Just like we need to be. Come on.”
And that was when they heard the pop. It was a flat, distant sound, but it was unmistakable. Gunfire. Sam got to the window just as the second pop reached his ears.
He saw it immediately, a puff of smoke lifting above the fragment of brick wall where they had left Brother and Sister. Six meanly dressed white men in identical gray slouch hats sat their horses opposite the opening of the makeshift courtyard. The one in front was holstering a long-barreled revolver.
Brother staggered into view, hands clenched around the rifle he had shown them so proudly. The white men did not react. Brother went down on one knee, looking for all the world like a supplicant before a monarch. Sister rushed forward, her mouth contorted around a shriek Ben and Sam could not hear. As she knelt next to Brother, he pitched forward, the rifle spilling from his hand. The white man with the pistol climbed down from his horse to claim it. He said something to Sister. Whatever it was, it was lost on her. She was bent low over Brother, whispering something in his ear. But even at this distance, Sam could see that Brother did not hear her and never would again.
“Why in the world would they shoot him?” Sam said.
“For being a Negro with a gun, I expect. Maybe for stealing from that master of theirs. They don’t need no reason.”
The white man was back on his horse. With a last glance down at the body in the mud, he swung the beast’s great head around and the whole group of patterollers ambled slowly toward the river. Behind them, Sister had collapsed into the dirt next to the corpse that had been her brother just moments ago. The two little boys were crying.
“We should go back there,” said Sam.
“Why?” hissed Ben. “What we gon’ do? We gon’ go after them patterollers, the two of us? We gon’ cry with that woman or find some way to bring that man back to life?”
The hostility of it took Sam by surprise. “They fed us,” he said. “They were good people.”
“I know that,” said Ben. “But what that got to do with it? What we gon’ do for them people? Ain’t nothin’ we can say, nothin’ we can do. Can barely do for our ownselfs.”
“It does not seem right just to leave them.”
“What ‘right’ got to do with any of this?” demanded Ben. His voice was a lacerating whisper. “When the last time you seen ‘right?’”
The two men stared at one another for a long, airless moment. Then Ben gave a sigh and it seemed to take something more out of him than just air. His shoulders rounded, his eyes softened. “Look,” he said, “you want to go back down there, you do it. I can’t stop you. But I’m out here trying to get back to Hannah and my little girl. That’s what matter to me.”
With that, he spun on his heel and left the room. Sam heard his feet knocking on the stairs, and then the bang of the back door. Back at the encampment, the little boys tried to help their mother to her feet. They couldn’t. She sagged between them like a sack of flour.
From the bed, the dead white woman watched him with her shrunken eyes and her blouse brittle with brown blood and her dead husband lying across her legs, arms flung wide.
Sam backed out of the room slowly. Then he trotted the stairs, running to catch up.
For most of her 26 years, her days had been filled with nothing more strenuous than piano lessons, walks in the Common, recitals, and teas. While Prudence had chafed under the decorous conventions that framed their lives as young women of means, while Prudence had hidden under the stairs when it was time for piano lessons and preferred the company of the maids to that of the maidens who sipped tea in the parlor, Bonnie had relished every second of their privilege.
Oh, there was the sense sometimes of being too much on display—the living embodiment of the Caffertys’ eccentric insistence upon the social equality of Negroes. There was the annoyance of having to smile graciously and express gratitude on behalf of the entire colored race whenever some smitten young white man felt the need to express with too-forceful earnestness his abhorrence of slavery. But always, that pinprick of irritation was counterbalanced by the remembrance of how extraordinarily blessed she was to be in a drawing room in Boston and not a cotton field in Buford.
Sometimes, though, it nagged her heart when she glanced up from conversation with some heiress or lawyer and it struck her that she and some stooped and wrinkled maid, moving about soundlessly, invisibly, while filling tea cups and taking up empty plates, were the only colored people in the room. It gave her an odd feeling, like looking at another self. In the color of their skin, the cast of their hair, the shape of their noses and lips, they were so much alike, and yet at the same time, they were nothing alike at all.
Once, the maid caught her looking and Bonnie snatched her eyes away, feeling like a picklock caught at the window. But not before the maid had given her a smile that unsettled her, that made her feel as if she were a fraud and only the maid was aware, as if they alone were in possession of a great and damning secret the others could not begin to guess.