All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (6 page)

I shook my head irritably. Everett John Wilkes looked no better than I felt. There was blood in his sandy hair matching the freckles that pattered across his flat nose and cheeks. He was holding himself stiffly, one shoulder higher than the other. His Palm Beach suit was ripped and the remains of a red carnation drooped on his left lapel. A doctor had bound the knuckles of one big hand in tape.

He let go of me and stared at Nancy. "How's your little doll? Sleeping it off? Godalmighty, last thing I remember, boy, Clipper was swingin' that big old swift sword. I could've got there in time, maybe, but I tripped up, and then it felt like a hundred maniacs running over me. Worse than the Alabama game in '26, and buddy after that one they had to take my spleen out down there in Tuscaloosa. I'm one big bruise all over. Don't let me bore you with my troubles. I just came up here to tell you we're gettin' organized. Plenty of good people now to help out. I can sort of take over from here on, Champ. You go get yourself looked at. Save yourself for later, y'know? We'll talk when you're ready. Legally there are questions to be answered, but plenty time, Champ."

I readily forgave him for running on in a manner one could feel was insensitive; it was his nature to talk when there was nothing much to say. Evvy was middle partner in the law office that looked after the affairs of Dasharoons. He was a Harvard Law School graduate, third in his class, I believe. He had a great deal of lazy charm, but his brain never stopped working. Boss had thought he would make a fine governor of Arkansas after a few years of seasoning. He would've been Boss's third governor.

I was suddenly too weary, and too much in pain. There was no need for me to sit the rest of the day by Nancy's side.

"Don't leave Nancy," I said to Aunt Clary Gene. "As soon as she's conscious tell her I'm all right. Keep telling her until you're certain that she understands."

Downstairs a whiff of ammonium carbonate cleared my head, but I refused analgesics, afraid of the lull that was sure to follow. The doctor who examined my ankle was of the opinion there was no fracture, but undoubtedly I had torn ligaments. He recommended soaking in Epsom salts and told me to stay off my feet for several days.

Evvy Wilkes reported that Nhora, still badly shaken but in control of herself, had returned to the train, where she felt she would be most useful. Hackaliah drove me back to the superintendent's home. I borrowed a fresh tailored uniform from my old French instructor, Col. Ben Giles, which fit me almost perfectly; it was only a trifle snug across the shoulders. Then Hackaliah accompanied me to the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, where the bride's wedding party was staying.

I sought to express my sorrow to Corrie Billings's immediate family. I don't know what reaction I expected; I think I would have been relieved if they had spit on me. But for the most part they were subdued and as bewildered as I. Clipper's homicidal behavior they described as an "accident." Apparently not one of them had a clear picture of the tragedy. Corrie's father, for the most part quite lucid, could recall nothing of events subsequent to his arrival at the chapel. He rolled an empty shot glass between his hands the entire time I was there, and on several occasions referred to me as "commander." I don't know who he thought I was.

Memory is capricious at the best of times; the panic in which they participated had forced reality into grotesque images best encountered in the safety of our dreams. But to Clipper and me, Boss had always stressed the "quality of our observation." If we were going to be good soldiers, he said.

R
eturned to General Bucknam's at a quarter to six. Reporters had gathered in front of, indeed they blocked access to, the gate. Their behavior was outrageous. Unfortunate that the house is located outside the post, on a public street. We went in a back way so as not to be photographed. I refused supper. It was now 4 A.M. Almost dawn. Birds are singing. I have half-finched finished a second bottle of whiskey which Hackaliah brought to the room two hours ago. But my hand is steady I am cold staring

Monday, May 25 6:30 AM.

W
e would all do the perfect thing with an angel's indifference, but the primitive animal within each and every one of us demands appeasement for the shocks it is forced to bear, a total sacrifice of dignity, common sense and honor. And so it happened that I took my father's wife to bed little more than a day after his passing.

Sunday noon I awoke standing in the bathtub pissing myself sick from a minus blood potassium. A meal of dried apples is a slow but certain cure for the worst hangover, so by five o'clock I was in a condition that permitted me to attend special services with Nhora at the Episcopal church. Nhora was still experiencing occasional abdominal pain, but the doctor now thought it was a characteristic case of
Mittelschmerz
, or pain of ovulation, which she had suffered as a young girl. Nancy had come around in the hospital but was still too debilitated to leave her bed. Nhora and I managed a visit for a few minutes despite the ever-increasing annoyance of the reporters and photographers who had flocked to Gaston to cover a story that was claiming equal attention with the war news on the front pages of America's newspapers. I didn't know what was being written, and I didn't want to know. I couldn't bear to think about Clipper at all.

We also saw newsreel cameras grinding away as we were driven through a gentle rain from church to hospital and back to General Bucknam's house. Because the train and most of our wedding party had departed for Arkansas while I slept off the effects of my incredible consumption of sour mash whiskey, the press had concentrated its attention on Nhora and me. Everett John Wilkes thought it advisable to speak for us, and so he drafted brief statements which I approved.

But I knew the press would not be satisfied so easily. It was a story of sensational proportions, of lunacy and bloodshed even as sacred vows were recited, and no one yet had explained the mysterious tolling of the chapel bell. The clapper, we knew, was worn but intact. The bell rope had been removed some years ago to prevent mischief. Thus the bell would have had to have been manipulated by hand, by someone in the tower. Someone with the grotesque strength of a Quasimodo, which of course was nonsense. That left the supernatural hand of God—or the Devil, considering the results. More nonsense.

It was Evvy Wilkes who proposed a sensible answer as we sat picking at a modest candlelit supper while the rain continued and the reporters huddled doggedly beneath black umbrellas outside the house. Something strange, perhaps unique, had occurred in the atmosphere, a freak of nature caused by colliding air masses—thermal air from the burning Blue Ridge, colder air sliding past us from the North. The collision produced an extremely localized tempest, like a stationary tornado, that whipped the giant bell back and forth while scarcely disturbing the leaves on the trees around the church. And, because this tempest was occurring some fifty feet above the ground, it did not attract the attention of the many chauffeurs and servants loafing along the Parade.

"But there was no sound," I said.

"Because the clapper was muffled, years ago. General Bucknam can't recall, but they probably wrapped the clapper in burlap or something to retard rust. Once the bell tolled a few times the rotten burlap just fell away. That's why you finally heard it toll when the tower started to go and the bell tipped. Look hard enough and you'll find some rusted old sack wrappings up there on the floor of the bell tower.
You
might. I wouldn't go poking around with that tower ready to collapse."

"I just don't believe it," Nhora said quietly.

Evvy had a grin that came and went, often at inappropriate moments, like an affliction of mirth. "Stones and hoptoads and ice cubes have rained down from a clear sky. A little bitty bit of a meteorite, traveling who knows how many billion miles through space, hit a house in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and burned up a fat woman in her bed. So I have heard from my granddaddy, who collected such curiosities."

Nhora drew breath censoriously and it was then I knew, watching the downcast almond eye in the candled side of her face, that she didn't much like Everett John Wilkes. "What causes little boys to die screaming, when there's nothing wrong that anyone can see?" Plainly she was still brooding about the naked ten-year-old boy in the grimy bed sheet who had died before the doctor could be of any use to him, body warped in a back-breaking curve, lips pulled taut in a cur's grimace, coughing blood from his herniated throat.

Evvy shook his head politely. "I wouldn't know, Miss Nhora," he said, his politeness thereby made insulting but perhaps playfully so, as he invoked an image of old-fashioned darkie servitude. She was, after all, Boss's widow, an inheritor, although ownership of Dasharoons and other businesses had passed on to me.

Nhora drank from her wineglass and turned somberly to me. "I went to visit the boy's parents this morning, to tell them how sorry I was. Jimmy. His name was Jimmy. And do you remember the other boy, the older brother? That's Custis. We took a long walk together, up along the ridge where it happened—the back side of Railroad Ridge. Saturday, Custis was doing some plowing in the field that lies below the ridge on the other side of a little creek. He saw Jimmy before he heard him. When he got to Jimmy, he said, Jimmy was nearly hysterical, but not yet in such terrible pain that he couldn't speak. Jimmy tried to explain. He'd been up there picking wildflowers for his mother, who is bedfast, when something on top of the ridge came out of the woods at him."

"An animal?'

"No. Nothing animal or human. Just light, a brilliant ball of green light, and a wind. The wind was so powerful that it tore off all his clothes and blew him a dozen feet from. where he'd been standing. Custis found a few pieces of overall, some brass snaps. Nothing but rags."

"Probably he sampled some mushrooms that gave him such a burning bellyache he thought—"

"No, Sshamp, listen! Custis showed me the place where Jimmy liked to pick flowers for his mother. Everything is dead there, in an area nearly fifty feet across. Dead, ashen, leaves stripped from the trees, bushes withered and shrunken, the grass brown—not spring there but autumn, after cold comes, the killing frost."

"Not unusual to find a small area like that inside a healthy stand of trees," Evvy pointed out. "Lightning does it."

"But lightning causes burns, it blackens where it hits, even the skin of someone struck by lightning will turn black. Jimmy wasn't marked. I believe he was telling the truth about what happened to him. And it was nearly the same time as the wedding—"

Nhora shifted her gaze and bared her teeth, dropping the wineglass. She uttered a yowl that unnerved me. Evvy and I looked at the French doors that opened onto a small terrace. A tall man stood just outside the doors staring boldly in at us. He was wearing a slicker and a dark slouch hat that dripped rain. There was enough light from the glow of candles within to illuminate his deep eyes, cruel but intelligent. He looked at Nhora and looked at me with a crooked smile that ran up one side of his face like an emblem of self-torture.

When Evvy Wilkes's chair crashed backward to the floor, the intruder faded away. I got up more slowly. Evvy reached the doors in a couple of bounds and threw them open as General Bucknam came running from another part of the house. Both men went out into the rain. We heard voices and saw flashlights. Nhora sat very still, white in the face. I put a comforting hand on her arm.

"Just a yokel, I think. A curiosity seeker. Don't worry."

"But he looked as if—"

"What?"

"Sshamp. I know I've seen him before."

"Where?"

"Home. At Dasharoons. Yes. That's where. Just a glimpse."

"Then how can you be so sure?"

"How could I forget that smile?" she said dispiritedly. She looked at the mess on the tablecloth, which a maid was sponging up. "What a disgrace. My nerves—"

"Anyone would have been frightened."

Evvy came back inside with the general. "Damn," he said. "Nothing. I thought maybe it was one of the reporters, but—"

"How could any man have slipped past the sentries?" I asked the general. Cadets from the institute had been posted outside to prevent just this sort of intrusion.

Erie Jack didn't know. He apologized to Nhora. We all chatted for a few minutes longer about the indignities that thoughtless and ghoulish persons seemed intent on visiting upon us, then Nhora excused herself and went upstairs. I followed not long after with a stack of messages, for the most part telegrams of sympathy from some of our venerable national treasures, all of whom had known Boss well. There was an especially poignant note from FDR, hand-delivered. Boss had had a grudging admiration for the president, though in the early days of the New Deal he was fond of describing Roosevelt as "an enema of the people."

I soon found myself unable to concentrate and drifted into a reverie of home that hurt like puppy love. Quail hunting in rimed pastures at dawn, the three of us, gun-bearers, a dog handler or two, setters like barking silk, a weeping density of woods along the St. Francis River: the throat-catching spell of guns.

Boss, not much of a shooter anymore because of his eyesight, was an extraordinary companion—wise man, litterateur, cutup and rogue. He was superstitious rather than religious, revering all saints, ancestors of proven worth and gods of the past. He respected shrines, graven images and the power of the crystal ball. Why take chances? Boss said. He was a visionary; a pragmatist; a skeptic ("There are no great men. There are sometimes good men who play over their heads."). He liked loving, and loved war. Through no fault of his own he had missed the Great War, which only intensified his desire to be a hero to himself. He was forced to settle for much less, investing his hopes in his three sons, two of whom had betrayed him. One son had withdrawn his love; another, twenty years later, had killed Boss with a swifter stroke. And I—