Richmond Noir (22 page)
That was a proud moment in my life. After years of being everybody else’s apprentice, I finally had an apprentice of my own.
Eddie wasn’t happy about it, though. I still had Ted, the bulldozer operator, to watch, and a bulldozer is a pretty interesting piece of equipment. But all Eddie had to look at was me, and I can tell you I’m not that interesting. I tend not to move much, because watching something closely takes a lot of concentration. That’s what makes me a good apprentice. So Eddie had a pretty dull time of it. At first he complained a lot. He said nobody could treat him like that and get away with it. But after a few days he calmed down, and took on a whole new attitude. He told me dirty jokes and offered me chewing gum and sometimes he’d put his arm around my shoulder like we were golfing buddies. He asked me a lot of questions about my accident—which is not a proper thing for an apprentice to do, but I didn’t correct him. It was kind of nice having somebody take an interest in me. In just a week’s time, I had more conversation with Eddie than I’d had with anybody else in all the years I could remember. And Eddie listened to everything I said, almost like Dr. Myles. Sometimes he even took notes like Dr. Myles, which was certainly flattering. Eddie said he disagreed with most of Dr. Myles’s diagnosis. He didn’t think I was paranoid at all. And he thought it was unfair that Uncle Morty wouldn’t let me run any of the heavy machinery, especially since I’d studied how to operate every type of excavator we had.
One day we took a walk around the old part of the cemetery on a break—sometimes you just need to stretch your legs—and we walked by the black wrought-iron dog near the top of the first hill inside the main entryway. I told him that dog had been made in my family’s ironworks factory before the war. It’s a cute dog, life-sized, and it stands watch over the grave of a little child. Sometimes people leave toys there at the dog’s feet, which is sweet I guess, though not very practical. Anyway, that got me talking about my family’s history. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I was telling Eddie about the loss of my family’s fortune after the war. I thought he’d just tell me to get over it, like everybody else, but he didn’t. He took a genuine interest in my pain, and promised to look into the matter for me. I didn’t know at first what he meant by that. But the next day, which was Sunday, he called me up and told me to meet him right away out at the cemetery. He said he’d be waiting at the Jefferson Davis gravesite. He said he had the answers I was looking for.
It took me awhile to get there because I had to take the bus, and then I still had to walk a good ways after that. By the time I got there, Eddie had already put up construction tape across the car paths at that end of the cemetery. I asked him what the tape was for, and he said we needed privacy to sort everything out.
“Sort what out?” I asked him, and he explained it all. He said he’d got on the Internet and found out that Jefferson Davis had spent all the years after his presidency collecting evidence that certain prominent families of Virginia had been swindled out of their fortunes by carpetbaggers, and that my family was among them. He said that President Grant had been obsessed with preventing the Davis papers from ever coming to light.
“The Grant administration was the most corrupt in history,” I told him.
“Well, there you go,” he said, obviously pleased that I’d know such a thing.
The problem, Eddie explained, was that all the incriminating documents had disappeared when Davis died. But if somebody could find those documents, the government would have to pay restitution to the victims’ families.
“And here’s the interesting thing,” Eddie said, smiling. “Jefferson Davis died in New Orleans, and that’s where they had his funeral.”
“But he’s right here,” I told him, and I pointed to the life-sized stone likeness of the president of the Confederacy standing atop the gravesite.
“That’s what they want you to think,” Eddie said.
“But they shipped his body here and reburied it,” I said.
Eddie shook his head. “Not his body. A coffin. And nobody every looked inside.”
Then he laid it all out for me, and it made perfect sense. The government had used President Davis’s death as a cover to hide all the evidence that would have brought down so many of those who had prospered illegally after the war. All the papers that would restore my family’s fortune were stashed away inside the president’s casket—the last place anyone would ever think to look.
“And here’s the clincher,” Eddie told me. He put his arm around my shoulder again and led me over to the Davis grave. I looked down at the broad, flat stone that claimed to be covering the remains of President Davis and his wife, Va-rina Howell Davis. Then Eddie pointed to an adjoining plot directly in front of the stone statue of the former president. Not ten steps from the foot of the Davis grave, a more modest tombstone rested on a well-trimmed patch of ground, and it had a single word carved into its face:
GRANT
.
I was dumbfounded. There’s no way the president of the Confederacy would be placed in a spot where his statue had to stare forever at the name of the man who brought about his ruin, the man responsible for the fall of Richmond itself, the man who forced Lee’s surrender a few weeks later at Appomattox Courthouse. I felt a chill run up my spine.
“But what can I do?” I asked Eddie. He frowned and scratched his chin like he was thinking, but I figure maybe he had his answer ready all along.
“If it was me,” he said, “I reckon I’d dig up those papers and set everything right again.” He took a slow breath and shook his head. “’Course, that would take a mighty big piece of equipment.”
I’d never been more excited in my life. “I can run the bulldozer,” I told him. “It’ll scrape these marble slabs right out of the way. The statue too.”
“Say, that’s a smart idea,” he said, and he patted my shoulder.
“You wait here,” I said.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he answered. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
I hustled back to the chapel area where we stored the heavy equipment and climbed onto the bulldozer. I’d never really run the machine before, but that didn’t matter. The point of being a good apprentice is to be ready when the time comes, and so I’d always watched carefully when Ted operated the controls. I knew exactly what to do.
It took me a minute to get the hang of steering. I don’t even have a driver’s license—the state of Virginia won’t issue me one, I think because of my headaches. And I do feel bad about all the gravestones I knocked over on my way back to the Davis family plot. Collateral damage, I think it’s called.
When I got there, I wasted no time. First, I positioned the bulldozer in front of the memorial, raised the blade, and plowed ahead into the stone base of the statue. It cracked loudly, and the statue broke off at the ankles, toppling backward onto the ground. Then I backed up a bit, lowered the blade to scraping level, shifted the bulldozer into a more powerful setting, and rammed into the covering of the so-called graves. The bulldozer barely slowed as it scooped the shattering marble away, shoving the ragged pieces onto the broken remains of the fallen statue.
I backed away again and shut off the engine. Eddie walked up beside me as I climbed down from the seat and we both stepped to the edge of the grave to see what I’d uncovered.
Nothing. Just the next layer of ground.
“You’ll need the backhoe,” Eddie said. “You’ve got to dig deeper.”
I could see he was right. So I trotted back to the chapel and climbed onto the excavator I liked the best, the Cat 312CL, the one with the mechanical thumb. It was easier to drive than the bulldozer, and in a matter of minutes I was back at the Davis gravesite, lowering the opened jaw into the soft earth. I was careful to keep to the left side of the pair of graves, because I didn’t want to disturb Mrs. Davis, since she might really be down there. The sky was starting to spit rain now, and Eddie stepped away to the protection of the nearby doorway of the tomb of General Fitzhugh Lee. Rain didn’t bother me, of course, because I was safe inside the Plexiglas walls of the cab.
After about fifteen minutes, I pulled up a few splintered board fragments, and I knew I was almost there. I dipped the jaws back into the hole and bit off another chunk of ground. I had hoped to fish up a strongbox, watertight and ready to have its lock broken.
But of course that isn’t what came up at all.
There, dangling like a hanged criminal from the end of the Cat 312CL, was the great man himself. Or, rather, the remnants of the great man, for he was now just a decomposed corpse draped in dark rags. His bright finger bones hung from the ragged sleeves, and I could see parts of his rib cage through the disintegrated jacket and shirt. I couldn’t see the face, because the skull was clamped tight inside the jaws of the excavator. In a panic, I swung the arm away from the hole, which was a mistake, because that popped off the skull and flung the remains of the former president onto the macadam pathway. I looked over at Eddie in horror, and this time he was talking on his cell phone. He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.
So there were no documents about the Confederacy. There never had been, I realized. The only thing in that hole was the long-dead leader of my long-dead country. And I had defiled his remains.
The rain was coming down harder now, and the wind shifted so the Fitzhugh tomb wasn’t keeping Eddie dry anymore. He trotted over to one of the broad, stately trees by the opened grave and sheltered himself against the trunk. I just sat there in the cab of the Cat 312CL, watching rain slide down the Plexiglas.
“I can’t wait to read about this in the papers,” Eddie shouted.
I opened the cab door so I wouldn’t have to raise my voice. “You lied to me,” I said.
My calm demeanor may have misled him.
“Blame your Uncle Morty. I told him, nobody treats me like he did and gets away with it.”
Sirens started up in the distance.
“You hear that, moron? That’s the cops.” He held up his cell phone and grinned. It was as evil a grin as I ever hope to see.
At that point there was only one thing I could do. I stepped down from the Cat 312CL and climbed back onto the bulldozer. Eddie just stood there with his arms crossed, gloating, while I cranked up the engine. I guess he figured I was going to try to move Uncle Morty’s equipment back to the chapel before the police arrived. But that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. In fact, because of my peculiar medical syndrome—the one that makes me talk too much—I said right out loud what I was about to do. But I guess he didn’t hear me over the racket of the bulldozer. If he had, he wouldn’t have just stood there looking so smug.
I raised the blade a couple of feet, swung the bulldozer around toward him, and hit the throttle. He barely had time to stop smiling. I think he hollered something, because his mouth flew open and his eyes got very wide. But I rammed him anyway. The concave blade covered up his torso completely, so that when it pinned him against the trunk, his head popped off just like Jefferson Davis’s. One of his legs got pinched off too. Naturally, those were the details they played up in the newspaper—which I found annoying, if you want to know the truth. It cast me in a ghoulish light, as if the dismemberment had been intentional. But I swear on the Holy Bible, I only meant to kill him.
I feel bad for the trouble I’ve caused Uncle Morty. He’s family, and I see now that I should have been more concerned with protecting him than with connecting myself to relatives I never even met. It’s good to respect one’s ancestors. But the living deserve some consideration too. That’s a new perspective for me. I imagine Dr. Myles will be pleased with my progress.
I’m not especially worried about going to jail. Since everything I did was justified, I can’t see myself as guilty. So even if they do lock me up, I wouldn’t really be a criminal. I’d be more like a prisoner of war. Not a full-fledged prisoner of war, of course, because the war ended a long time ago. I guess I’d be more like an apprentice.
Yeah, that’s it: a prisoner’s apprentice. The best they’ve ever seen.
Believe it or not, the following volumes were consulted during the research and conceptualization of this book:
Poe’s Richmond
by Agnes Meredith Bondurant;
Richmond: The Story of a City
by Virginius Dabney;
The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James
by Bob Deans;
The American Scene
by Henry James;
True Richmond Stories: Historic Tales from Virginia’s Capital
by Harry Kollatz Jr.;
James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia
by Edgar MacDonald;
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
by Henry Miller;
The Book of Numbers
by Robert Deane Pharr;
Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation
by David A. Price; and the 2008 edition of the
Richmond Magazine Complete Source Book
.
Thanks are owed to the following for their help and advice: Ray Bonis and the staff of Special Collections and Archives at the James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University; Katherine Wilkins and the staff of the Virginia Historical Society; and the staff of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum.
For support, patience, and brainstorming, we are grateful to Rachel Albright, Liz Canfield, Crystal Castleberry, Santa De Haven, Mandy Dunn, Steve Dunn, Jamie Fueglein, Jonathan Heinen, Jeff Lodge, Cynthia Lotze, Lauren Maas, Ryan McLennan, Ann Mc-Millan, Peter Orner, Faye Prichard, Patty Smith, Ward Tefft, Kelsey Trom, Adam Wayland, and the good people at the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of English.
We’d especially like to thank Johnny Temple and the staff of Akashic Books for their enthusiasm about the project, and for their support during some extremely rough patches.
We owe special thanks to Tom Robbins, whose praises we shall sing until time eternal.
Lastly, we are greatly indebted to David L. Robbins, whose wonderful story “Homework” can be found in this collection. David was the first writer who signed on to the book, and he has been its tireless promoter ever since. Without his efforts,
Richmond Noir
would not exist.