Totentanz (4 page)

He was housed in blackness. The back of the
truck was closed off, the dull metal doors shut and the two cut-out
windows shuttered with black tape. He had done the taping himself.
When the truck stopped, he did not get up to relieve himself or to
eat or to stretch his legs. Occasionally he was jostled as the
truck ran over a pothole, but he merely set himself back on the
bunk and continued to dream.

There were other trucks, in front and in
back, and the noises of these only added to the roar, but he heard
none of this. There had been a time when trucks had amazed him,
when electric lights and gasoline and telephones and phonographs
had amazed him, but this time had long passed. Once you got past
the fact that these things existed, everything else was the same.
People, he had found, were always the same.

He closed his eyes, but sleep, or what
happened to him that was like sleep, would not come. The truck took
a long curve, and he felt the weight of his body shift with the
pull of it. Darkness eluded him. Finally something of the blackness
descended; then the truck stopped abruptly, started up again and
almost immediately bounced into a rut. This tossed him enough to
one side that he had to reposition himself on the stiff bunk.

Giving up, he lay back with his eyes open and
dreamed.

He was on a train. Someone was tapping him,
pushing at his shoulder to wake him up. He swam out of his sleep to
see an earnest face under a blue cap, bending over him. For a
moment he thought it was an officer, but then he saw that the man's
cap was of a different shade of blue and that the man's face was
florid and full and not wartime slack at all. The man had a short
mustache and looked at him urgently. "Your stop, soldier," the
conductor said, nudging him a final time to make sure he was awake.
"Your stop next.”

He sat up all the way, pushing his boots
against the seat in front of him as the conductor straightened and
moved on, announcing the station in the failed stage basso he knew
that all conductors of all times used.

He looked out the window, ignoring the
insistent ache in his leg where his wound had been pressed tight
against the seat. He saw that, indeed, they were coming slowly into
town. The sun was low, and it must be either sunset or sunrise, and
he wasn't sure which and didn't much care. He felt wearier than he
ever had before. He was a young man with a young face and curly
reddish hair, and he had never been quite old enough to grow a
mustache. His hands were large and his eyes were large and almost
blue, and his mouth had never been the smiling kind, although he
knew how to smile. He had smiled a long time ago, but he had not
smiled since.

With a sudden instinct, he wheeled up and out
of his seat, pulled his duffel from the overhead rack and moved
with clacking steps to the end of the car and down onto the exit
platform. The train was losing speed and he stood half-in, half-out
for a moment, feeling a stiff, artificial breeze across his face
before letting go of the safety rail to jump onto the steep grade
of the tracks. He landed on his feet, and then his right leg gave
out suddenly, sending him down into a roll, but he came up into a
sitting position unhurt, brushing the dust from his war-worn pants
and coat. He got to his feet, knocking his hat against his leg and
watching the train move off into the approaching station and then,
for all he knew, into infinity.

It was only after the train had made its
short stop, almost immediately grinding into motion once more, that
he turned his attention to the farm in the near distance.

As his eyes studied it, an ache began deep
within him, an ache that needed no encouragement and that he
couldn't stop even if he had wanted to. In a way, he savored it. It
was many aches in one: an ache for lost childhood; for the life
that this farm—if not prosperous, at least life-serving—had once
meant to him; an ache for the loss of his brother Tom; and above
all, an ache of dull anticipation about what he would find here. He
expected the worst. When the last few letters he had sent from the
army hospital had gone unanswered, the last one even being
returned, he knew that something had occurred, but he refused to
admit that he knew until he had seen it with his own eyes. His
father had always been a strong man, but there had been those times
when he had been taken with that strange pain in his joints and
been forced to go to his bed. Perhaps that had happened—but then,
why hadn't he at least heard from Lucius? Lucius could read and
write as well as any white man in Montvale, and for all intents and
purposes, he was a member of the family. Over the years, Lucius had
become almost an uncle.

Now that he approached the farm, he saw that
it looked abandoned. The whitewash was peeling from the fences and
the front of the house; the big oak out front was dead—it looked as
though it had been hit by lightning. No sign of animals or
equipment any-where. And there, to the side of the barn, stood the
small carousel his father had built with his own hands after seeing
a picture of a European carousel in a penny magazine; now it was
stripped and skeletal, the hand-carved horses and seats gone, the
shell tilted to the ground off its axis.

Wearily, his boots heavy on the groaning
boards of the steps, he entered the house. The inside was, if
anything, worse than the outside. The stove and furniture were
gone, prey to poachers. All that was left in his own room was a
thin shelf hanging over his rusting bed, his old Bible on it,
half-torn. Even the bed was only half there, the head and one side
canting precariously on the dirty floor.

He made his way back out to the yard. The sun
was sinking boldly now, a sharp ball of orange dropping in the
west behind the low hills. With a grunt, he adjusted his meager
pack and tramped across to the barn.

It was empty and damp, and he knew that it
would have to be pulled down and replaced if he hoped to make a new
start here. He didn't know if he wanted to do that. With a sigh, he
turned to leave when a sound from a far corner caught his
attention.

He called out in a loud, stern voice,
"Someone there?"

Reflexively his hand went to his rifle, but
he gradually lowered it.

"I said, anyone there?"

In the failing light he saw nothing in the
rear of the barn: a few overturned crates and a stack of yellowed
newspapers. Nothing to make a noise. He was about to dismiss the
sound when a sudden memory came to him. Cautiously he made his way
to the back of the barn, overturning the crates and moving the
newspapers aside. After clearing away a thick mat of dust, straw
and dirt, he uncovered a wooden door set evenly in the floor. With
the tip of his rifle he hooked the metal ring and slowly raised the
trap.

He shouted down into the darkness: "Come on
up."

There was silence. Tiny
fingers of fear began to climb his back because he
knew
there was someone
down there in that dark hole. Then suddenly a face filled the
opening, and a voice was calling his name in disbelief.

"My God, is that you? They told me you was
killed in Gettysburg with your brother."

``Lucius!"

He dropped the rifle and helped the black man
from the hole.

Lucius looked half-dead. There were circles
under his eyes, his always-thin frame was shrunken to painful
leanness, dark skin hung on tired bones. His hair had turned white,
and he had the unsleeping look of a hunted man.

"Thank God for that hole, that old railroad
hole, or I would have been hung six weeks ago."

"Where's your wife and boy?"

"They're safe, over in Potterville with the
Carsons, my wife's family," Lucius said, lowering his frail body to
the ground. "I sent them there after your daddy was murdered."

"Murdered!"

"Shot like a dog nearly two months ago. I'm
almost sure it was one of them Major boys. They had a big bonfire
and drew lots one night. Your daddy held out a long time. They
wanted this land bad, figured the town would expand like mad with
the war ended, and when he heard that both you and Tom was dead, he
nearly gave up and gave it to them. But he held out until they shot
him dead."

"What were you doing in the hole like
that'?"

"Couldn't get away. Stayed to take care of
your daddy's burial and then Petey Graham, that slow boy, he come
running out to tell me they've decided to hang me, made up some
story about me putting my hands on a little white girl. What they
really know is I saw your daddy killed." He dropped his head. "The
town's turned bad."

Seeing the hard look that had come into the
other's eyes, Lucius grabbed him by the arm, holding strong.

"Don't you think about that! It's all of
them. The whole town. They want this land, and it'd be best if you
just left. Let them have it. There's nothing any of us can do about
it now."

"I want you to leave here."

Lucius' eyes were pleading. "Please, don't do
anything! They'll kill you!"

"Can you get to your wife?"

Some of the fight went out of the old man.
"They looking for me everywhere."

"I want you to try to get away."

"Let me come with you," Lucius said abruptly,
raising himself painfully to a standing position.

"No. Get to the next county and tell the
sheriff what's happened here."

"Please don't do this,” Lucius said. When
there was no answer, Lucius took his arm. "Listen to me," he said
sternly. "When you was a boy, I watched you, and I knew that behind
the quiet there was a rage in you. You'd play with your brother,
and he'd take something from you and laugh, and a fire would burn
in you. But you never let it out. Now I fear you letting it out.
Once you give in to hate, you can't come back. Your own father
taught me that, when he saw what was building inside me 'cause of
the way white people treat black people."

There was still no response, and now Lucius
took him by both shoulders, staring straight into his eyes. "You
listen to me. While I was down in this hole, hiding like a dog, I
had dreams. I dreamed terrible things, worse even than your daddy
dying. I seen you come back from the war with the same hate in your
eyes I see now, and then I seen all Montvale go up in flames."

A faint smile touched the other's lips. "You
were always dreaming, Lucius." The smile drifted away. "Dreams
don't mean anything."

"Listen to me! In my dreams I seen a boy, a
black boy, and only he could save you. I seen him walking through
the flames."

Seeing that he was unmoved, Lucius let go of
him. "If dreams mean nothing, then save yourself. First you got to
fight your hate, though."

The returned soldier took in the desolation
around him. He thought of the long, slow pain that had come to
settle in his heart and now could never be moved out—the pain that
not Lucius, not anyone, could remove, that was even at this moment
turning from a soft thing to something rock-hard. His eyes settled
on the ruined carousel, one edge visible through the barn door. An
old red-and-white banner hung in limp shreds from an overhead
railing.

He touched Lucius' shoulder without looking
at him and then turned away.

"Good-bye," he said.

By the time he had made his slow way into the
middle of Main Street, the whole town of Montvale knew that he was
back from the war. People hid. He was not supposed to have come
back from the war; he was dead they had been told, and all the
damage had long since been done. But here he was, and no ghost.
Ghosts didn't wear dust and worn boots; ghosts didn't have dull
blue-gray eyes that had seen too much too soon. Ghosts didn't let
their swords tarnish and their rifle barrels clog with mud, and
rust with rainwater, or their knapsacks fall open, spilling
provisions all the way down the road into town. Those were not
ghost provisions that trailed like peas, waiting to be picked up
later by boys and girls out of school: a tin plate for one, a can
of old beans for another, a spoon and fork, attached by a button at
the handle, for a third. Ghosts didn't make real tears, long-dried;
didn't harden their real, beating hearts into lumps of smooth,
unbeating stone; didn't want to burnish their swords again and
clean those rifles to use in a new kind of war. Ghosts didn't stand
in the dead center of a hiding town and say, at first in a low
mutter and then in a rasp and then in a hard, loud, plank-shaking
demand:

"Who killed my father?"

His question hung like a storm cloud over the
street, slowly spreading into every cubbyhole, kitchen closet and
corner in Montvale. No one escaped his words; no one shut them out
of his ears, no matter how hard he clasped his hands over them. The
question pushed its way into every dry cellar, each pantry, each
bedroom and outhouse in all of Montvale, and when he repeated the
words, one at a time and in a voice no louder, each word somehow
took on a louder, sharper edge all by itself, as if the syllables
were beating one against the other, making mountain echoes that
came back louder than they had gone out.

"Who. Killed. My. Father?"

He looked up from the dusty street at a glint
of light. Somewhere in Montvale, in one of the tight cubbyholes,
the tightest of all, a crack appeared. Soon the crack turned into a
good-sized hole and then into a door. A man appeared behind the
door, tiny-seeming at first and as frail, it looked, as a deathbed
mouse, but in a matter of minutes the man achieved a remarkable
metamorphosis. In the shadows of the doorway, he grew teeth and
bones and flesh, filled out to room size. The new lion of a man
wore a pocket watch and a suit to go with it, gray-striped,
red-white-and-blue suspendered. He wore white shoes, so white and
daily polished they looked painted on fresh each morning. The man's
lapels were as big as his hands—the lapels wide for holding and the
hands large and moist for doing that chore. Babies would lodge
easily in those hands, and those hands could wave to crowds a mile
deep; the littlest boy in the back row would feel they were waving
right at him, turning over and reaching out right for him alone,
lifting his shirt to reach right into his very red heart and pluck
out the wishes there and then form those wishes into real clay.
Those hands could be everywhere at once—patting, nudging,
cajoling, punching lightly with the punch of a shared joke. They
were hands to be laid upon the head, hands to heal any wound of
mind or soul.