All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (4 page)

"Not you," he said. "Not here." Gaunt deliverer of sleep, his eyes half-closed.
Where do you think you're going to do it, if not here?
I thought. He cast around the altar, but Nancy was nowhere in sight. At least she was safe for now.

"Finished," Clipper said unexpectedly.

Instead of cutting my throat, he walked away through the mist from the fountain to the octagonal window at the rear of the altar. The glass was still intact. He looked out the window. I wept. He braced by the window, military-fashion, and tilted his head back until the tip of his chin was almost on a line with his long throat. He raised the saber. A drop of water from the tip fell into his open mouth. With a swift downward motion, Clipper sheathed the blade in his gullet.

For a few moments he stood on his toes; his hands fell away and I saw the gleam of steel between his teeth. Blood began to stain the crotch of his high white trousers. Still balanced in agony on his toes, he fell against the window and went through it in a sparkle of exploding glass.

I don't know how long my attention was focused on that window but it was like the crystal of a dropped watch and time is motionless in hell. Then Hackaliah fumbled in ruins and stood me on my feet. The air seethed with dust, but the chapel stood still.

"It stopped," I said.

There was a lump on Hackaliah's forehead; his eyes were dazed, the whites speckled with old bloodknots. "Come on," he insisted, "might fall down anyhow."

"Boss?" I said, attempting to turn back, but Hackaliah wouldn't let me go.

"Leave him," Hackaliah groaned. "You don't want to see him."

"But I saw him already. His head just fell off." Like a fantasy with ogres, a wicked cartoon, his bad eye closing in a spontaneous giggle as it sometimes did when he was peevishly drunk, putting on a bragging show:
Look at me, bet you can't do this!
Lost his head. But then what Clipper did—The dust in my throat gagged me and I vomited.

Next I was mindful of clean air, my face pillowed on grass. My midsection was knotting with spasms. I stood and, without Hackaliah to support me, fell right down, an electric shock traveling up my leg and spine to the base of my skull. Next I tried sitting, my back against a low wall.

The sloping lawn was filled with wedding guests, some as helpless as I. Women in rag finery were having hysterics under the trees. The compressed violence from within the chapel had flowed outdoors and was dissipating, but slowly, beneath a low sky. The sun was absent; yet the day burned almost invisibly, like a gas flame, its light turning the leaves to a shade of weathered bronze, turning faces soup-bone gray. Open wounds had the glitter of cheap spangles. Bodies were lifted out of the chapel while men watched for the collapse of a severely bowed brick wall on which vines dangled, mooringless. Despite the many men in uniform, no one seemed to have taken firm command. Doors slammed as limousines were loaded and raced each other madly across the pristine Parade, behaving like beetles in a tipped-over cracker box. I knew that some of the limousines would not stop until they had returned to Washington.

Tyrone, Hackaliah's youngest son, vaulted the wall I was sitting against and kneeled beside me, his priestly face nearly ultraviolet from exertion, his eyes nervous but inquisitive as he surveyed the grim scene. Distantly I heard the wail of the community's fire siren, calling together those volunteers who were not already occupied with the forest fire along the Blue Ridge.

"Captain," Ty said, "come with me." He put an arm around me. He was a tall thin man two years younger than I, and very tough.

"Where's Hackaliah?"

"Gone to the hospital with Miss Nancy. Where you need to be."

"I'm not hurt that badly," I protested. "Someone will have the good sense to set up emergency facilities in the cadet barracks. Help me over there."

"You need a doctor," Tyrone said, lifting me.

"What about Clipper? I can't just leave my own—"

Tyrone had white man's eyes the color of spit on a sidewalk, keen enough to light up a woods on a dark night; and those eyes, which at times seemed to express an undisguised resentment, had caused him a good deal of misery until he'd learned to veil or never show them at all, like the sort of downcast, turd-kicking nigger he could never be. He looked steadily at me and said without attempting to spare my feelings, "What's the use? Clipper is done for, captain. He rolled and rolled with that sword stuck inside him."

"At least we can cover him up, for God's—"

"Did that first thing. Now, you don't know what's best for you. Your mind is confused, captain. You just come along with me and I'll look after you."

A truck from the institute's motor pool came blaring up to the chapel, and more than a dozen cadets in grimy fatigues, their faces blackened after hours on the burning mountaintop, jumped off the tailgate and formed rank, waiting weary and bewildered to be told what to do. Timbers groaned in the chapel; part of the roof settled ominously. The tipped bell tolled once, a mournful sound. Tyrone turned and stared at the bell tower as if hypnotized. Men were spilling out of the chapel, but the roof didn't cave in. One of the men was Lt. General Jack T. ("Erie Jack") Bucknam, the school's superintendent and a long-time friend of the family. Undoubtedly Erie Jack was considered too old for active duty in the new war, but he looked alert and fit as he dusted himself off and surveyed the cadets available for the emergency.

"General Bucknam!" I called, rudely pushing Tyrone away.

Erie Jack changed direction and trotted up to me. "Well, Champ. Didn't know you were here. This is a hell of a thing. An appalling tragedy! I don't know what happened yet. We have to get organized. Thank God, I believe we have everyone out of there. You don't look good."

"I'll be all right."

The white-haired old soldier turned and called two cadets over. "Lieutenant Jenner, there's a scout car parked at my gate. Fetch it for the captain. See that he's comfortable in my house and has everything he needs."

"General Bucknam, I can't leave—"

Bucknam's eyes were smarting, from dust or grief. He seemed to be looking beyond me, at the wreckage of a long and satisfying career. In the last analysis, no matter what explanations were forthcoming, he would be held responsible. "What can you do now, Champ? What can any of us do but pick up the pieces? Chapel should've been repaired years ago. No one listened. Never enough money. Time to clear this area. Sort out the injured from the ambulatory. Go with these cadets, that's an order, captain."

"Yes, sir." I looked at Tyrone, who had backed slowly away from the military pecking order. He stood, long hands jammed into his jacket pockets, studying me with a frown.

"Ty," I said, pointing the way through the woods in the hollow of Rickett's Mill, which separated town and school, "the hospital's six blocks from here. Find out how Nancy is. Then get me a complete list of Boss's traveling party. We'll have people to account for and arrangements to make."

"Yes, captain," he said reluctantly, but he was on his way without urging. While the newly commissioned Jenner raced off for the general's scout car, the other cadet, whose name was Brakestone, gave me a shoulder to lean on and helped me toward the general's house, which dommated the terraced avenue just outside the west gate of the post.

Jenner met us halfway across the Parade and by then I had remembered Nhora, Boss's wife, confined to the train and surely unaware of the tragedy.

"The depot," I said to Jenner, as Brakestone eased me into the scout car. I was sweating coldly, and every move I made intensified the pain in my ankle. My mind flashed with chaotic images of madness; Clipper's tormented face became a black beetle crawling inside a hard, white skull.

"I know what the general said; damn it, I have family business to take care of! It won't wait."

The Southern Railroad's main line and Gaston freight yard were located in a mile-long valley a stone's throw from the playing fields of the institute. To the south the valley was steeply walled by one of the several finger ridges that culminated in the now charred and devastated Blue Ridge just a few miles away. From the widow's peak of Railroad Ridge, a favorite Sunday picnic ground for cadets and their dates, one had a clear view of school and town, on twin hills immediately to the north.

At the eastern end of the valley the Roanoke Highway crossed the tracks on a sooted iron bridge. The brownstone depot and passenger platforms were beneath this bridge. When we arrived, the famed Washington-New Orleans flyer, the Jean Lafitte, was standing in the station. Smoke lay thickly over the rail yard—a combination of wood and train smoke. Boss's long train had been parked on a southerly siding hard against Railroad Ridge. There was an impressive Missouri Pacific mountain-type engine at the head of the train (the railroad which we owned in Eastern Arkansas, the Delta, St. Francis and Dasharoons, had nothing to compare with this jumbo locomotive) and a total of ten cars, including two flatcars for the convenience of those wedding guests who had brought their own limousines along. Behind the flatcars were a baggage car, a Pullman and a diner for servants, a lounge car, a restaurant car, more deluxe stainless steel Pullmans with the best of drawing room accommodations, and Boss's own 90-foot car.

We crossed the bridge and bumped down a narrow bad road to the private train.

Somehow word of the disaster had already reached those servants who had not taken advantage of free time to have a few drinks and a game of cards in Foxtown, Gaston's colored section. They were milling on the tracks outside the train, their agitation clearly defined even from a distance. One of the maids had been encircled by others; she gestured toward the hilltop institute. I surmised that she had been waiting at the chapel for an elderly mistress, perhaps peeking through a vestibule door at the wedding. When the carnage began, she ran in a panic all the way back to the train.

Bull Pete was there, of course, the only colored man Boss ever trusted with a gun, the only man I knew large enough to carry a .45 automatic in his back pocket and scarcely show a bulge. As long as Bull Pete was in charge, the railroad's property would remain inviolate, and each and every nigra—there must have been fifty aboard, counting the New Orleans jazz band—would be the picture of decorum.

Bull Pete was alongside the scout car as soon as it stopped. Behind him some of the women were keening and crying, throwing themselves down in the filthy ballast between tracks.

"Lord, Mist' Champ!" Bull Pete said, eyes bulging in distress. "What's happened up there? Dubretta say Clipper went clean out his head! She say—"

"Bull Pete, has Nhora heard about it?"

He was slow to speak again as he struggled with the impact of the news. Murder, destruction, calamity. And Boss dead. The worst news of all. I could see it in his eyes. Day and night he had watched over Boss, for twenty years.

"Suh! Suh!" Tears were rolling down his cheeks. He held on to the scout car, quaking at the knees like a common drunk. I thought he would fall down too. "You gots tell me. It cain't be true. Aowwwww, suh! Not the Boss! Not the Bosssssss!"

"Boss is dead," I said sharply, tasting bile. "Clipper— Corrie Billings too. I can't explain, not yet. For God's sake get control of yourself. Quiet those women down. I have something to do. Bull Pete, will you listen to me?"

He sobbed once more, and was done with it, although I doubted the misery would ever leave his eyes. He hadn't been there. No thought that he was needed, not on Clipper's wedding day. Still, he would blame himself.

I ordered Jenner to back up to the private car. "Find something I can use for a crutch," I said to Jenner.

Brakestone helped me aboard. It was dim and cool in Boss's car. The butler's pantry was empty. I knocked and waited and knocked again, banging the door with my fist. No one answered. I had Brakestone wait and let myself in.

The long railroad car was divided, half parlor, half bedroom. The parlor, Boss's domain, was unoccupied. Fine paintings and books and gaming tables for the serious cardplayers Boss liked to have with him on a trip. The odors of humidors. I made my way from one piece of Victorian furniture to another, my left leg all but useless. The slightest pressure created extravagant pains. And my face hurt from the plaster dust.

I leaned against the bedroom door and pounded. "Nhora," I said, "it's Champ. Please let me in."

Again there was no answer.

Fumbling with the gold knob, I found the door unlocked. I went into the Venetian baroque bedroom. No tobacco allowed here. The air was cool but somewhat stale. Conflicting odors: woodsmoke, Ivory soap, a mild antiseptic, a sachet sweetness, the tantalizing cologne Nhora wore infrequently. In the gray, artificial twilight of this traveling palace, painted cherubs lolled on the ceiling. I saw silk sheets lying in a tangle on the carpet outside the absurd tented bower where Nhora and Boss made their bed, and a set of discarded ice bags. A lax bare leg protruded through the layers of diaphanous curtain. I was startled and felt ill, imagining for the moment some further disaster had occurred. She seemed so lifeless.

Then without warning Nhora sat up in alarm. "What is it? Who is that?"

"Champ," I said, my voice a croak. I cleared my throat. "Nhora, I have to tell you—there's been—" I was trying to move toward her, but I miscalculated the strength of a brocaded armchair and in leaning on it broke its back. I fell. Nhora gasped and scrambled from the bed and kneeled beside me. I put a hand on her and discovered she was completely naked. At my touch I felt a faint velvety tremor, but she didn't shy away.