A Tidewater Morning (6 page)

“Seagulls,” said Mr. Dabney. “Ain’t you never recognized seagulls before? I can’t believe such a question. Seagulls. Dumb greedy bastards.”

“Beautiful things,” she replied softly, “all big and white. Can you eat one?”

“So tough you’d like to choke to death.”

We were halfway across the river when Edmonia went to the car to get a ginger ale. When she came back she said hesitantly: “Mama, Shadrach has made a fantastic mess in his pants.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Trixie.

Mr. Dabney clutched the rail and raised his small, pinched, tormented face to heaven. “Ninety-nine years old! Christ almighty! He ain’t nothin’ but a ninety-nineyears-old
baby!“

“It smells just awful,” said Edmonia.

“Why in the goddamned hell didn’t he go to the bathroom before we left?” Mr. Dabney said. “Ain’t it bad enough we got to drive three hours to the Farm without—”

“Shoosh!”
Trixie interrupted, moving ponderously to the car. “Poor ol’ thing, he can’t help it. Vernon, you see how you manage your bowels fifty years from now.”

Once off the ferry we children giggled and squirmed in the backseat, pointedly squeezed our noses, and scuffled amid the oily rubbish of the floorboards. It
was
an awful smell. But a few miles up the road in the hamlet of Gloucester Court House, drowsing in eighteenth-century brick and ivy, Trixie brought relief to the situation by bidding Mr. Dabney to stop at an Amoco station. Shadrach had partly awakened from his slumbrous trance. He stirred restlessly in his pool of discomfort, and began to make little fretful sounds, so softly restrained as to barely give voice to what must have been his real and terrible distress. “There now, Shad,” Trixie said gently, “Trixie’ll look after you.” And this she did, half-coaxing, half-hoisting the old man from the car and into a standing position, then with the help of Mr. Dabney propelling his skinny scarecrow frame in a suspended tiptoe dance to the rest room marked colored, where to the muffled sound of rushing water she performed some careful rite of cleansing and diapering. Then they brought him back to the car. For the first time that morning Shadrach seemed really aroused from that stupor into which he had plunged so swiftly hours before. “Praise de Lawd!” we heard him say, feebly but with spirit, as the elder Dabneys maneuvered him back onto the seat, purified. He gazed about him with glints of recognition, responding with soft chuckles to our little pats of attention. Even Mr. Dabney seemed in sudden good humor. “You comin’ along all right now, Shad?” he howled over the rackety clattering sound of the motor. Shadrach nodded and grinned but remained silent. There was a mood in the car of joy and revival. “Slow down, Shoog,” Trixie murmured indolently, gulping at a beer, “there might be a speed cop.” I was filled with elation, and hope tugged at my heart as the flowering landscape rushed by, green and lush with summer and smelling of hay and honeysuckle.

The Dabney country retreat, as I have said, was dilapidated and rudimentary, a true downfall from bygone majesty. Where there once stood a plantation house of the Palladian stateliness required of its kind during the Tidewater dominion in its heyday, there now roosted a dwelling considerably grander than a shack yet modest by any reckoning. Boxlike, paintless, supported by naked concrete blocks, and crowned by a roof of glistening sheet metal, it would have been an eyesore almost anywhere except in King and Queen County, a bailiwick so distant and underpopulated that the house was scarcely ever viewed by human eyes. A tilted privy out back lent another homely note; junk littered the yard here too. But the soft green acres that surrounded the place were Elysian; the ancient fields and the wild woods rampant with sweet gum and oak and redbud had reverted to the primeval glory of the time of Pocahontas and Powhatan. Grapevines crowded the emerald-green thickets that bordered the house on every side, a delicious winey smell of cedar filled the air, and the forest at night echoed with the sound of whippoorwills. The house itself was relatively clean, thanks not to any effort on the part of the Dabneys but to the fact that it remained unlived in by Dabneys for most of the year.

That day after our fried chicken meal we placed Shadrach between clean sheets on a bed in one of the sparsely furnished rooms, then turned to our various recreations. Little Mole and I played marbles all afternoon just outside the house, seeking the shade of a majestic old beech tree; after an hour of crawling in the dirt our faces were streaked and filthy. Later we took a plunge in the millpond, which, among other things, purged Little Mole of his B.O. The other children went fishing for perch and bream in the brackish creek that ran through the woods. Mr. Dabney drove off to get provisions at the crossroads store, then vanished into the underbrush to tinker around his well-hidden still. Meanwhile Trixie tramped about with heavy footfalls in the kitchen and downed half a dozen Blue Ribbons, pausing occasionally to look in on Shadrach. Little Mole and I peered in, too, from time to time. Shadrach lay in a deep sleep and seemed to be at peace, even though now and then his breath came in a ragged gasp and his long black fingers plucked convulsively at the hem of the sheet, which covered him to his breast like a white shroud. Then the afternoon was over. After a dinner of fried perch and bream we all went to bed with the setting of the sun. Little Mole and I lay sprawled naked in the heat on the same mattress, separated by a paperthin wall from Shadrach’s breathing, which rose and fell in my ears against the other night sounds of this faraway and time-haunted place: katydids and crickets and hoot owls and the reassuring cheer—now near, now almost lost—of a whippoorwill.

Late the next morning the county sheriff paid a visit on Mr. Dabney. We were not at the house when he arrived, and so he had to wait for us; we were at the graveyard. Shadrach still slept, with the children standing watch by turns. After our watch Little Mole and I had spent an hour exploring the woods and swinging on the grapevines, and when we emerged from a grove of pine trees a quarter of a mile or so behind the house, we came upon Mr. Dabney and Trixie. They were poking about in a bramble-filled plot of land which was the old Dabney family burial ground. It was a sunny, peaceful place, where grasshoppers skittered in the tall grass. Choked with briars and nettles and weeds and littered with tumbledown stone markers, unfenced and untended for countless decades, it had been abandoned to the encroachments of summer after summer like this one, when even granite and marble had to give way against the stranglehold of spreading roots and voracious green growing things.

All of Mr. Dabney’s remote ancestors lay buried here, together with their slaves, who slept in a plot several feet off to the side—inseparable from their masters and mistresses, but steadfastly apart in death as in life. Mr. Dabney stood amid the tombstones of the slaves, glaring gloomily down at the tangle of vegetation and at the crumbling lopsided little markers. He held a shovel in his hand but had not begun to dig. I peered at the headstones, read the given names, which were as matter-of-fact in their lack of patronymic as the names of spaniels or cats:
Fauntleroy, Wakefield, Sweet Betty, Mary, Jupiter, Lulu. Requiescat in Pace. Anno Domini 1790..
.
1814 . .
.
1831.
All of these Dabneys, I thought, like Shadrach.

“I’ll be goddamned if I believe there’s a square inch of space left,” Mr. Dabney observed to Trixie, and spat a russet gob of tobacco juice into the weeds. “They just crowded all the old dead uncles and mammies they could into this piece of land here. They must be shoulder to shoulder down there.” He paused and made his characteristic sound of anguish—a choked dirgelike groan. “Christ Almighty! I hate to think of diggin’ about half a ton of dirt!”

“Shoog, why don’t you leave off diggin’ until this evenin’?” Trixie said. She was trying to fan herself with a soggy handkerchief, and her face—which I had witnessed before in this state of drastic summer discomfort—wore the washed-out bluish shade of skim milk. It usually preceded a fainting spell. “This sun would kill a mule.”

Mr. Dabney agreed, saying that he looked forward to a cool glass of iced tea, and we made our way back to the house along a little path of bare earth that wound through a field glistening with goldenrod. Then, just as we arrived at the back of the house we saw the sheriff waiting. He was standing with a foot on the running board of his Plymouth sedan; perched on its front fender was a hulkingly round, intimidating silver siren (in those days pronounced
si-reen).
He was a potbellied middle-aged man with a sun-scorched face fissured with delicate seams, and he wore steel-rimmed spectacles. A gold-plated star was pinned to his civilian shirt, which was soaked with sweat. He appeared hearty, made an informal salute and said: “Mornin’, Trixie. Mornin’, Vern.”

“Mornin’, Tazewell,” Mr. Dabney replied solemnly, though with an edge of suspicion. Without pause he continued to trudge toward the house. “You want some ice tea?”

“No, thank you,” he said. “Vern, hold on a minute. I’d like a word with you.”

I was knowledgeable enough to fear in a vague way some involvement with the distillery in the woods, and I held my breath, but then Mr. Dabney halted, turned, and said evenly: “What’s wrong?”

“Vern,” the sheriff said, “I hear you’re fixin’ to bury an elderly colored man on your property here. Joe Thornton down at the store said you told him that yesterday. Is that right?”

Mr. Dabney put his hands on his hips and glowered at the sheriff. Then he said: “Joe Thornton is a goddamned incurable blabbermouth. But that’s right. What’s wrong with that?”

“You can’t,” said the sheriff.

There was a pause. “Why not?” said Mr. Dabney.

“Because it’s against the law.”

I had seen rage, especially in matters involving the law, build up within Mr. Dabney in the past. A pulsing vein always appeared near his temple, along with a rising flush in cheeks and brow; both came now, the little vein began to wiggle and squirm like a worm. “What do you mean, it’s against the law?”

“Just that. It’s against the law to bury anybody on private property.”

“Why
is it against the law?” Mr. Dabney demanded.

“I don’t
know
why, Vera,” said the sheriff, with a touch of exasperation. “It just
is,
that’s all.”

Mr. Dabney flung his arm out—up and then down in a stiff, adamant, unrelenting gesture, like a railroad semaphore.

“Down in that field, Tazewell, there have been people buried for nearabout two hundred years. I got an old senile man on my hands. He was a slave and he was born on this place. Now he’s dyin’ and I’ve got to bury him here. And I am.”

“Vern, let me tell you something,” the sheriff said with an attempt at patience. “You will not be permitted to do any such a thing, so please don’t try to give me this argument. He will have to be buried in a place where it’s legally permitted, like any of the colored churchyards around here, and he will have to be attended to by a licensed colored undertaker. That’s the
law,
Commonwealth of Virginia, and there ain’t any which, whys, or wherefores about it.”

Trixie began to anticipate Mr. Dabney’s fury and resentment even before he erupted. “Shoog, keep yourself calm—”

“Bat shit!
It is an
outraged!”
he roared. “Since when did a taxpaying citizen have to answer to the gov’ment in order to bury a harmless sick old colored man on his own property! It goes against every bill of rights I ever heard of—”

“Shoog!” Trixie put in.
“Please
—” She began to wail.

The sheriff put out placating hands and loudly commanded:
“Quiet!“
Then when Mr. Dabney and Trixie fell silent he went on: “Vern, me an’ you have been acquainted for a long time, so please don’t give me no trouble. I’m tellin’ you for the last time, this. Namely, you have
got
to arrange to get that old man buried at one of the colored churches around here, and you will also have to have him taken care of by a licensed undertaker. You can have your choice. There’s a wellknown colored undertaker in Tappahannock and also I heard of one over in Middlesex, somewhere near Urbanna or Saluda. If you want, I’ll give them a telephone call from the courthouse.”

I watched as the red rage in Mr. Dabney’s face was overtaken by a paler, softer hue of resignation. After a brooding long silence, he said: “A11 right then.
All right!
How much you reckon it’ll cost?”

“I don’t know exactly, Vern, but there was an old washerwoman worked for me and Ruby died not long ago, and I heard they buried her for thirty-five dollars.”

“Thirty-five dollars!”
I heard Mr. Dabney breathe. “Christ have mercy!”

Perhaps it was only his rage that caused him to flee, but all afternoon Mr. Dabney was gone and we did not see him again until that evening. Meanwhile, Shadrach rallied for a time from his deep slumber, so taking us by surprise that we thought he might revive completely. Trixie was shelling peas and sipping beer while she watched Little Mole and me at our marbles game. Suddenly Edmonia, who had been assigned to tend to Shadrach for an hour, came running from the house. “Come here, you all, real quick!” she said in a voice out of breath. “Shadrach’s wide awake and talking!” And he was: when we rushed to his side we saw that he had hiked himself up in bed, and his face for the first time in many hours wore an alert and knowing expression, as if he were at least partially aware of his surroundings. He had even regained his appetite. Edmonia had put a daisy in the buttonhole of his shirt, and at some point during his amazing resurrection, she said, he had eaten part of it.

“You should have heard him just now,” Edmonia said, leaning over the bed. “He kept talking about going to the millpond. What do you think he meant?”

“Well, could be he just wants to go see the millpond,” Trixie replied. She had brought Shadrach a bottle of RC Cola from the kitchen and now she sat beside him, helping him to drink it through a paper straw. “Shad,” she asked in a soft voice, “is that what you want? You want to go see the millpond?”

A look of anticipation and pleasure spread over the black face and possessed those old rheumy eyes. And his voice was high-pitched but strong when he turned his head to Trixie and said: “Yes, ma’am, I does. I wants to see de millpond.”