Marl
Cary Holladay
Mount Folly
James City County, Virginia
September 1842
The road to Lower Plantation is covered in walnuts, their lumpy green hulls as big as a child’s fist. Molly rides in the first of five wagons, led by Symes Hawley on horseback. When the wagon rolls over the walnuts, Molly feels she’s jolting over bodies. She has worked so long at Mount Folly’s dyehouse that she sees the world in terms of roots, bark, and berries. Walnut hulls can be boiled to make a deep brown dye. The rock- hard shells underneath have to be busted and the meats picked out with a knife.
Molly is to cook for Symes – older son of Edward and Mary Haw-ley – and for the men in his charge who will work the next few weeks at Lower Plantation, a stretch of wilderness and small farms at the southern part of the Hawleys’ thousands of acres. Symes wanted to take Rachel with him, his Rachel to be the cook, but his mother said, No, you’re taking Molly.
Molly knows this because Symes told Rachel, and Rachel told her.
Molly believes herself to be about seventy. She has known Symes all his life. He’s both weak and strong. One day, he’ll inherit Mount Folly and a hundred slave people, Molly and Rachel among them. Molly was kin to Rachel’s mother, who died, and Molly took over Rachel’s raising. Symes chose Rachel when he was fourteen and Rachel fifteen or sixteen, and now they have three children: sevenyear- old Zeke, riding in Molly’s wagon, and Matthias, five, and Bertha, three, at home. Symes is out of college, and everybody but the children knows it’s time for him to get married. To a white woman.
“Get some of these nuts,” Symes calls out.
Tim, Harris, Wilson, Lew, and Joseph jump out of the wagons and stuff walnuts into sacks. Dogs bark and caper, half a dozen of Mount Folly’s pets and hunting dogs making the trip. Zeke grabs walnuts too, his eyes as light as his father’s. When he hops back into the wagon, Molly slaps a peach into his palm, and he eats it in three bites. She loves this child.
* * *
The marl pits are marked in blue on maps Symes carries in his saddlebags. Marl is a form of lime, pulverized shells, and sand, a remnant of oceans that swept this land many times over millions of years. Symes loves to picture the seas surging and receding. Fossil shells accreted on the banks and compacted with clay and silica, mostly coquina shells, the tiny pastels that sparkle on Atlantic beaches. The Indians farmed economically, slashing and burning small plots for their tobacco and corn. Then came Europeans with their subsoil plows. When they’d depleted the land, they went west. The soil’s fine texture belies a sterility even dung can’t cure. Marl is the answer. Its calcium carbonate neutralizes the acid in earth deadened by two centuries of wheat farming. Even swamps can become productive after the removal of pines and sheep sorrel and an application of shelly earth. Edmund Ruffin, a friend of Symes’s father and a genius of agronomy, has written a book about marl. Symes admires the man.
There will come a time, Symes believes, when the nation’s population will exceed the land’s capacity to feed it, an imbalance subject to the Malthusian curbs of famine, pestilence, and war. The certainty brings him perverse comfort, and though they may come, he doubts his family will starve or suffer. Herbert Symes Hawley, he wrote on the flyleaves of his childhood books. He was called Herbert until he was five, when he told his parents, I want to be Symes.
This morning, he awakened with a piano composition in his mind, whole and entire, a sonata such as he hadn’t written since he was a child, when melodies coursed like rivers through his brain. Symes Hawley, prodigy, wrote polonaises, waltzes, nocturnes, mazurkas. His parents hired a Mr. Travis to coach and instruct him. Symes’s pieces were as fine, Mr. Travis said, as any by Liszt or Beethoven or Chopin, all of which Symes mastered and performed for neighbors who sat awed in the parlor chairs. Slave children clustered outside the bay windows, Rachel among them, though back then he paid her no mind.
Mr. Travis arranged for him to perform in Williamsburg, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. In May 1833, when Symes was thirteen, his parents left his one- year- old brother Burroughs in the care of his mother’s sister in Surry County, placed Mount Folly under the direction of an overseer, and took Symes, Mr. Travis, and two servants, and sailed to Europe. In Liverpool, England, they rode a new invention called a train, a steam engine that pulled cars so swiftly Symes felt he was flying. Manchester seemed an unlikely place to embark on his tour, but the prosperous owners of cotton and steel mills emerged from grimy industrial fog to squire their wives to the town hall. Symes played in London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, Warsaw. He looks like a Dane, people said of his white- blond hair and big forehead. By stagecoach and ferry, sail and steam, the Hawleys hurried from nation to nation. They had to be home by February, when daffodils budded, the daffodils that provided much of their wealth. To spare the horses hauling their hired rig, they got out and walked across a mountain pass, their eyes tearing from alpine wind. Symes loved it.
He grew. People clapped for him, and he got used to being hugged to women’s bosoms – corseted chests like armor, or breasts that were loose and pillowy, much better. In his ruffled shirt, fawn- colored trousers, and embroidered waistcoat, he was a ruddy pearl, he was fat blond candy, a date stuffed with cheese and rolled in sugar, irresistible to the fondling, patting hands of those who endeavored to get him alone. Mother, help! he cried when two English girls dragged him backstage. Mama! An orchestra was playing by then, and his mother didn’t hear him. Mummy, help me! the maidens mocked, licking and probing his ears, his neck, with their soft hot tongues. He batted them away, and they fell back laughing, but it kept happening, and during those months in Europe, he started to feel it too, and there were hands he didn’t swat and mouths he welcomed. He played pianos in drafty palaces for kings and queens who looked weak and sick, like they were molting or about to puke. The Hawleys’ manservant slipped away in Dublin; his mother’s maid vanished in Marseille. After all we’ve done for them! his mother said. Mr. Travis became baggage handler as well as impresario.
Now, as Symes leads the way to Lower Plantation, he recalls ice cream in France, flavored with lavender, passionflower, and mirabelles; a mule on a towpath tugging his family’s barge down the Garonne; a young German couple who took turns with him until stars burst out of his head – but the musical score that came out of his dreams this morning, the first in years, original and exquisite, has completely left his mind. He allows the realization to pierce him.
He looks down from the height of his horse and asks Zeke, “Do you know how long mankind has had the wheel?”
“No, sir.”
“Take a guess,” exasperated. Symes has taken history books to Rachel’s cabin and read to the children. “I bet your sister would know.”
“A hundred years?”
“Five thousand. Which is not a long time. At all.”
“Yes, sir.”
Zeke’s profile is mild, remote, perhaps defiant. A father is allowed to have his favorites. Bertha, the little girl: We’ll call her Berthe, Symes said when she was born, and Rachel said, Bear? Bairt? He laughed and said, It’s French for Bertha. Call her Bertha if you want. A dear child, age three and smartest of all.
“Zeke,” Symes says, and the boy’s head snaps up. “Picture the history of Time as the face of a clock. Mankind got here one- seventh of a second ago.”
Zeke’s eyes flick away. Symes rides ahead.
* * *
If there are squatters, Symes’s father said and gave him a look. Invite them to leave. Take five or six hands with you, and two guards.
Symes chose men with families. Wife and children make a man less likely to run. Hopefully, Harris, Lew, Joseph, Wilson, and Tim are thus anchored. The guards are white swampers and will be paid. Bucky and Hite Powell, brothers and trappers, eke out a living in the marshes along Upper Plantation, somehow keeping their children fed and their wives in snuff. The Powells take turns watching the hands at night, the enmity between the races so thick Symes could cut it with a butter knife.
With surveyor’s tools, Symes measures fields he deems of particular interest. He directs the hands to clear weeds and brambles, harrow the earth, and work marl into the ground with rakes and froes. On hot dry days, powdery blue dust rises from the turned earth.
Symes discovers ruined houses and sheds and orders them dismantled, the nails prized out and saved. A new roof, a new floor, can save a structure. A chimney can be rebuilt with its salvaged bricks. He loves bricks because they were made from the earth, clay slapped into molds and sunbaked a century ago on the very spot where he stands.
“Come here, Zeke. Hold out your arms.” The boy obeys. Symes piles bricks into Zeke’s hands until the boy’s arms give way and the bricks fall to the ground. “There’s a hundred years.”
* * *
Molly sweeps ashes from old hearths. Sometimes a cooking pot remains, or a spit with grease on it. She cooks in fireplaces or on a sheet metal stove Symes brought or over an open fire. They brought hams, meal, flour, sugar, coffee, lard, potatoes, beans. The abandoned homesteads have fruit trees. The Powells go out with their guns and bring back deer and turkey and quail, and Molly roasts the game, but everybody knows the Powells aren’t here to hunt.
Symes takes a shine to a sagging dogtrot house and orders the men to fix it up. A breezeway runs down the middle between two closedoff rooms. Symes takes one and gives the other to the Powells. Molly and Zeke sleep in the breezeway, the black men in the yard and in tents if it rains. Nights come earlier now.
Let me go with you, Symes’s brother Burroughs begged as the wagons rolled out of Mount Folly’s yard. Be good, buddy, Symes called. Burroughs raced after them, knees pumping, until the wagons swept away. Burroughs is ten. Frances, their sister, about eight, likes to climb. She’ll come into the dyehouse and smile like a little cat. One time she climbed a cabinet, and it fell over. I’m a phoenix, Frances said, rubbing her head. I rise from the ashes.
* * *
The dogtrot house sits on an old tobacco field bordered by a stream that feeds the Chickahominy. Symes locates the marl pit. The men’s shovels chuff into the ground; their shoulders mound up like boulders. The Powells lean against pines and smoke their pipes.
“I want to dig,” Zeke says, running up.
“All right.” Symes stands above the pit, his boots on the slick earth.
When they strike blue clay, Symes smells it, salty and marine. This pit includes whole mollusk shells. Lew finds a big serrated bone of some kind.
“A whale vertebra.” Symes holds it in his palm. “Zeke, do you know what a whale is?”
“It ate Jonah,” Zeke says. He tugs something out of the mud. “This is a funny rock.” He hands it up.
Shiny and pitted, small but oddly heavy: Some instinct prompts Symes to take out his compass, and the needle swings toward it. He has read about these. He hides his excitement.
“This may be a piece of meteorite.”
“A what?” Hite Powell says through a cloud of smoke.
“A falling star.” Symes holds it up. He reads skepticism in the eyes of the men in the pit.
“It don’t shine,” Bucky Powell says, from his tree.
“Their fire goes out when they hit the ground.” Symes slips it into his pocket. He looks toward the dogtrot house and hears his father’s voice in his mind: Be generous.
“One of you,” he tells the Powells, “can lease this place, if you’d like.”
“Me!” they say together.
“Coin toss,” Symes says. The brothers call heads, tails. Symes flips a penny and slaps it on his palm. “Tails.”
Hite grins into his smoke.
* * *
He’ll drop you, Molly told Rachel. Don’t keep yourself so nice. Make him quit you. Then you won’t feel so bad when he gets married.
He loves me, Rachel said. He says so – with a shine in her eyes that meant it’s her most precious secret.
Then get him to take you- all somewhere and be free, Molly said.
He’s a dreamer. I let him dream, Rachel said.
* * *
It feels strange, this going from place to place, but Molly likes it. How can one family own so much land? Why is it so empty, but for birds and critters? The soil’s worn out, Symes says, and the people went west. Molly tends the men’s bruises, rashes, cuts, and sprains. She keeps thinking about Rachel and the children. What if I could pick one child to make free? Zeke, Matthias, Bertha. Pick one. I couldn’t. But her heart says, Zeke.
“Don’t let Zeke work so hard,” she tells Symes. She can say it because Rachel’s practically her daughter.
He lets her keep the boy with her. Zeke hauls water and wood and helps serve the meals. Symes eats with the Powells at a card table or by himself in his tent if there’s no house to shelter in. The blacks sit apart, in the wagons or on the ground. Zeke plays with the dogs and gives them scraps.
One night, wild dogs come out of the woods and creep near the roasting meat. A shape darts toward Zeke. Molly’s back tingles. Before she can yell a warning, Zeke sees and leaps aside, and Hite Powell hollers, his cup flying from his hand. He takes up his gun and fires, but the dog is gone, a shadow racing for the woods.
It got his leg. Molly washes the bite. Hearing Hite groan when she pours turpentine on it, she can’t hate him. She puts a bandage on his leg and offers the bottle of turpentine: “Might help to drink a little. Worst of it is, your pee’ll smell like violets,” but he won’t.
He finds Zeke and gives him a kick that sends him sprawling. “That’s for feeding dogs while we eat.”
* * *
In the evenings, Symes and the Powells debate the north, the south. The Powells want battle. He reminds them the nation is young; it would be foolish to tear it apart. There are older worlds, he says, knowing they’ll never see them.
His memories of his first trip to Europe are so keen, he can summon them in detail.
A Spanish lord hosted the Hawleys at his hilltop castle. His daughter beckoned Symes into her bedchamber, and together they looked out at the village of Avila below, chimney pots red in the sunset, storks flying. The girl led him to a divan. Her touch felt like an honor; he didn’t have to do anything. Symes, Symes! Mr. Travis called from the corridor and burst into the room. His eyes bugged out. He dragged Symes out and said, If you do those things too soon, you’ll lose your talent. I’ve seen it before. He wept, and Symes scorned his tears, but the truth was, Symes felt the music leaving him. Its origin had always been enigmatic – no one else in the family had such talent – and now it was evaporating like a vernal pool. He didn’t wake up so often with a new piece in mind, nor did the keys sing as readily. He was having to stop and think. By the time they returned to Virginia, he would be fourteen, the music a mystery of his childhood. Mr. Travis kept crying, and Symes understood: without a prodigy, what was the man to do?
Now, inspecting a field, Symes feels he is falling through time, through his own life; he has always been falling through layers of time.
The night before he set out for Lower Plantation, his mother said, I lie awake praying you’ll find a suitable bride. All the women you’ve met, the girls at dances – isn’t there one who strikes your fancy?
As he directs the marling, he considers his mother. His sense of time began with her prized hourglass. Even in adulthood, he is mesmerized by the running sand. She has never acknowledged his relationship with Rachel, nor the children Rachel has borne him. Skilled obedience: that is what Rachel is to his mother. One of Rachel’s tasks is to keep track of daffodils that go blind, meaning they no longer flower. The compacted bulbs must be divided in the fall. Up at Mount Folly, Rachel is surely plunging her hands into the soil just as he is sifting marl through his fingers. The poor man’s rose has made the Hawleys richer than ever, and their wealth dates back centuries, to a land grant from a king.
Isn’t there a girl you’d like to marry? his mother asked.
No, not one, he said, and watched her proud face fall.
* * *
Molly pulls her shawl against the chill as they reach a shack surrounded by heaps of refuse. A stink wafts from an outhouse. A garden patch holds a few pumpkins.
“Anybody home?” Symes calls and climbs down from his horse.
A white man emerges. Behind him, a woman and three or four children peep from the doorway, their faces like buttons in a jar. Symes gives his name and asks the man for his.
“Gulleck. Been here a long time.”
“You’re trespassing,” Symes says, “but I’ll make fair terms. Either you work on shares, or you go.”
“I planted tobacco, but it won’t grow,” Gulleck says.
“Tobacco wears out the soil. If you stay, you have to marl it. Clear the fi elds and keep the fences in repair. I’ll pay three cents a bushel for wheat and oats.”
“I’m staying, but I won’t work for you.”
Molly is aware of Zeke on the wagon seat beside her. He keeps his face turned away. The slave men, in the other wagons or riding mules, stay still. Molly has never seen anybody tell Symes no. Gulleck spits.
Hite Powell rises in his saddle and fires his gun into the air. “Gulleck, you got to git!”
Another blast sounds, and Molly’s gaze skews to the woman in the doorway – she’s holding a rifle. Symes leaps into his saddle and pounds past Molly. The wagons wheel after him. They make camp two miles away beneath a stand of pines. That night, Molly hears Symes and the Powells fussing. The Powells want to do something, and Symes is saying no. The Powells’ horses’ hooves break twigs and move away: she hears that too. Symes is still in his tent, unhurt by the shot, his big shape outlined by the light of his lamp. Soon, Molly smells smoke, and the sky glows in the direction of the Gulleck place. Zeke finds her, and they watch but don’t talk.
She knows Symes didn’t give the order. The Powells went on their own. She finds Symes outside his tent, feeding sticks into the fire. Whippoorwills are calling in the woods.
You could’ve sent for the sheriff, she says.
He doesn’t say anything.
What are they doing to them? she asks.
Making them go, he says. And he looks away.
* * *
The world, Symes told Rachel and the children shortly before this journey, the world is round. Molly listened in a corner of the cabin she shares with Rachel and the children, trimming the wick of the lamp. People used to think it was flat, Symes said. Now only the ignorant believe it’s flat. Repeat after me, the world is round.
The world is round! said Zeke, Matthias, and Bertha.
But how does the river stay on? Rachel said.
A force called gravity, Symes said. He took her hands in his, and they looked at each other. Molly knew what the look meant. That time it was Rachel who said:
Aunt Molly, would you take the children out for a while?
Molly herded the youngsters into the yard. In an hour, Molly knew, Symes would come out, and she could take the sleepy children back inside. Symes would cross the yard to his own house with its three stories and galleries. On many a clear night, Molly’d seen him up on the roof looking at the stars.
* * *
In Europe, he learned new languages as easily as he breathed, and love was easiest of all. Women’s mouths, painted dark red, were monstrous unless he wanted them. Afterwards, he was hungry for meat and bread and cheese. Cherries. Sandwiches of goose liver paste and pickles.
Mr. Travis dashed ahead to rent halls. City officials sent carriages to convey the Hawleys to private homes or hotels, where servants polished their boots and drew their baths. Mr. Travis would show up disheveled, splattered with glue. The urchins he hired to post advertisements invariably ran off, and he himself had to plaster the bills on walls and fences. Symes Hawley, Boy Wonder – Opera House – Tonight. Symes leaned out of windows above cobblestoned streets and smelled bakery bread and coal smoke. He kept a slingshot in his pocket and pinged the occasional top hat or peddler. Farther and farther the family traveled, despite his mother’s protests – Let’s not get so far away we can’t get back! Hundreds, thousands of miles they covered. Symes performed in Oslo and Stockholm. The Gulf of Finland smelled of ice, sharp as needles in his lungs. Ice rimed the docks, and snow fell over the tops of his fur- lined boots, the gift of a Polish earl, as he stepped onto Russian soil. In St. Petersburg’s cavernous, glittering theater, he felt scared for the first time. Snowbanks packed the street outside, yet the great hall was hot, sconces flaring on the high walls. His fingers were thick and clumsy, the keyboard a long shining sneer. When he lost his place in a scherzo and started over not once but twice, a strange sibilance arose from his audience. They bared their teeth and hissed, rattlesnakes clad in silks and feathers and brocade. Symes sat frozen on the piano bench, heart racing, until anger swept in. He stomped to the edge of the proscenium and cussed them out at the top of his lungs. Young dandies stood up to hoot and heckle. A man hurled a shoe, and Symes ducked. He whipped out his slingshot, loaded it with a pebble, and with deadly aim put out his tormentor’s eye. The theater erupted. People shrieked and stampeded, falling and trampling, and Symes ran pell- mell for the back door.
Now, in the black Virginia night, his ears ringing with a sound only whippoorwills can make, a repetition emanating from throats fashioned by a God he believes in and chanted so desperately he can only imagine they feel as cornered as he does, he brings himself back to the present. To the facts at hand, the situation that is tormenting him. He thinks it through – Gulleck and his family; the Powells. He admits to himself he doesn’t know what to do. The slaves, his own son, saw him spat upon and made to run. In private, he argued with the Powells and forbade the burning, and the Powells defied him. That’s the wrong of it, more than whatever else they might have done. Yet haven’t they solved a problem? Squatters, gone. But everybody knows how, because of the smoke. The whatever else – Gulleck’s woman and children – he won’t think about. But it seems to be what the whippoorwills are shouting about.
* * *
Always something left behind. Might be a broken cup, a child’s stocking, the helve of an axe. Molly wonders if she’ll glimpse the Gullecks on a road somewhere. She doesn’t think she will.
Way back in her mind is the smoke from the guns at Yorktown like a shawl along the river, the booms echoing off the cliffs. She was a child, and her father and uncles were in Washington’s army. She baked bread and mended their clothes when they showed up. British soldiers hid in the caves along the river. Watching from Mount Folly’s bluffs, she saw a man buckle into the shallows, his coat a red spot on the water. Her cousin Chester, a drummer boy, kept his drum after the war. They played it until the master took it away – Oliver Hawley, that was, Symes’s granddaddy, gone now. He gave Chester a coin. It seems to her that memory is an extra sky she carries in her head.
* * *
Symes nudges a weak tobacco plant with his boot. Tobacco: a limeleacher, a soil- sapper, never mind he likes his pipes and cigars. Edmund Ruffin, marl champion, visited Mount Folly just before the Hawleys left for that first trip to Europe. Ruffin laid his hand on thirteen- year- old Symes’s head and said, When I was his age, I could recite every Shakespeare play, but this boy’s talent is greater. He creates. You’re a child for only a little while. Now I remember only a few lines. But I reinvented myself, Ruffin said. I studied barren land and learned how to restore it. Agriculture is my great calling, and war, I believe, if I’m ever called to fight.
Insufferable, that man, Symes’s mother said when Ruffin departed.
Now, Mary, Symes’s father said. Among friends, a man can describe himself as he likes.
A braggart, a liar. Nobody could memorize all of Shakespeare’s plays.
Hasn’t he become an author himself?
A pamphlet about fertilizer!
A book, Mary.
Symes was charmed by the idea of reinvention. The moment he boarded a train in England, he fell in love with railways. If St. Petersburg tolled the end of his musical career, it also spurred new ambitions. At fifteen, he patented a bell to warn of a train’s arrival. No one else had thought of it. He sells his inventions to railway companies. Shining tracks lead to cities; rails traverse the countryside hauling coal, sand, rock, timber, the riches of Virginia. Passenger cars arrow across land that stagecoaches take days to cover.
Yet his music, he admits, his compositions and performances, sprang from an extraordinary realm now closed to him. Twenty- two and long exiled from childhood, he almost resents the vaunted tyke who brought mobs to tears and led a chase through the streets of Budapest, admirers hot on his heels, the frenzy jarring pigeons from belfries in great flapping waves. His hands were insured by Lloyd’s of London, his portrait painted: a towheaded cherub. Child of the sun, a duchess said, kissing her fingertips to his cheek, her gigot sleeves and bustle casting a sinister shadow. That was in Austria, where his voice started to crack.
He is rich in his own right, thanks to his mother’s banking the earnings of her golden imp, and each tweak he makes to a locomotive means a tidy check arrives by mail. He could take Rachel and the children and move to Europe. Ships are better now, luxurious almost; he has traveled twice on the Black Ball Line out of New York, once with Burroughs and once by himself. City life: he imagines Rachel and the children in a park, cathedrals, galleries . . . He has taught her to speak properly. His memory, he insists to himself, is as much a gift as his music, and less transient. He loves the stillness in Rachel’s face when she looks at him. He doesn’t want her in flounces. And he could never give up Mount Folly, and why should he? He loves it more than anything. Frances loves it as much, he believes, eight- yearold Frances spending her time with birds and animals and teaching Zeke to read. Better the boy learns his trade. Blacksmithing, and be careful, a burned hand will wither, and you’ll be Ol’ One- Arm, is that what you want? No, sir, the boy said. When Symes was Zeke’s age, he could flip his mother’s hourglass and write a new score before the sand ran out.
Brilliant boy! Ruffin crowed to his parents. Look at that brow. Manhood is upon him.
* * *
Hite Powell hunches over and vomits on the grass. Molly lays her hand on his cheek: burning up. He crawls under a wagon and lies panting in the shade, an arm thrown over his eyes.
“Where does it hurt?” she asks.
“My guts, my head, all over.”
“How’s your leg?”
“It’s numb.”
Molly bathes his face and brings cool water. He sips, but it comes back up. Symes puts Hite in a tent by himself and sends Bucky for a doctor. Hite claws at his hair. One sheet is all he can stand, though the nights are getting cold. Over and over, it plays through Molly’s mind: the dog flashing out of the woods and into the firelight, Zeke jumping aside, the dog going for Hite’s leg. In her mind, she looks close, and there it is, a wobble in the dog’s gait, a shine of spit on its mouth. But madness in dogs doesn’t always mean that. It can come from a white worm under the dog’s tongue, and if you flick the worm out with a needle, the dog’ll be all right.
By the time Bucky Powell shows up with a man who says he’s a doctor but looks too young to be, Hite’s up and walking again. He’s all excited, talking with the doctor and Symes and Bucky, but he doesn’t eat or drink.
* * *
Have we not all been counting? Each one of us, the hands, the Powells, your Aunt Molly, counting the days since it happened. Someday, Rachel, Symes writes, there may be a cure.
He has written her every night of this journey, letters he hasn’t mailed and which she is unable to read, thickly stacked in his traveling bag. He will read them to her when he is home again: descriptions of work accomplished, of migratory warblers and flycatchers, recollections of that first trip to Europe when he was a princeling.
Incubation may be as brief as days, as long as years. Hite Powell cannot sleep nor bear light in his eyes or drafts in his face. His pupils have become different sizes. At times he is calm and conversant, at others he shakes and contorts. The doctor, learned despite his youth, has explained what I must do. You may recall Hite, Rachel. He came to Mount Folly last spring to buy a hog from Father. Only days ago, he and his brother tossed a coin to decide the leasing of a property. Hite won. He spoke to me of this matter only this morning in a period of lucidity. I have described to you his misfortune, but not yet the trouble he and his brother have caused me. It began with my discovery that an impoverished family, headed by a slovenly and impudent fellow, had taken unlawful possession of a property . . .
Symes lays down his pen, further recollection too discomfiting. A breeze stirs the branches of an oak. He breathes the scent of acorns and dry leaves and finds comfort in the fact that Rachel understands the periodic depression of his spirit. Always it lifts.
My essence, Rachel, is marl.
There is nothing, he decides, to keep him from the life he wants. He need not marry, no matter how many pearl- skinned heiresses his mother trots out. Unencumbered, he will breakfast on shad, coffee, and milk toast in Mount Folly’s dining room, its ceiling soaring fourteen feet. He’ll savor his hours in the library with maps and botanical specimens; his hunts and parties; dinners of terrapin and champagne with friends who are themselves sons of planters, and their lovely brides. He’ll travel, and bring his children gifts from lands he’ll show them on a globe he spins in Rachel’s cabin, Berthe’s eyes shining. The drafting table in his workshop holds precisely scaled designs: a compressor to enhance steam power; a coupling system to lessen shocks between cars; a self- oiling axle. He has plans in mind for refrigerated railcars.
Yet Ruffin ranked artistic creativity as the highest achievement. Symes seethes. He has devolved; he is a servant to a machine. His gaze roves through the fading light and finds Zeke tending the supper fi res. At the next settlement, he will put the child to a test.
He is homesick for the light fluttering on Mount Folly’s walls. There are so many rooms in the mansion that some are closed up, retaining the smell of old fires. He likes to wander into those rooms, lie down on the beds, and remember guests who have stayed there, and his early sensuality. Once he started with Rachel, he never wanted anybody else.
There is always a path in life, he writes her. A way forward, albeit as perilous as the road to Golgotha.
During this trip he has stepped back from his life even as he is in the midst of it. Useful, this stepping back. A new seeing.
Rachel, do you remember a friend of Father’s who visited Mount Folly, a Westerner who showed off his roping skills? From a distance he threw a noose around the neck of a horse or a cow. A lasso, he called it.
* * *
Symes’s rope only flicks Hite’s shoulders. Hite turns slowly, then charges as fast as a bull, drives his head into Symes’s stomach, lifts him off the ground, and hurls him down. Symes staggers to his feet, and Hite lunges with open mouth. They grapple, surrounded by Molly, Zeke, Wilson, Lew, Tim, Joseph, and Harris. Hite juts out his jaw while Symes struggles to hold him off, Hite pulling Symes closer as if for a kiss, their arms trembling, their faces inches apart.
“Don’t let him bite you!” Harris yells.
All of the onlookers are yelling, Molly too, her ears ringing. Symes breaks loose and runs, Hite rushing after him. Molly and the others leap aside – except Zeke, who sticks out his leg. Hite trips and sprawls.
* * *
Symes writes to Rachel all night. She’d be proud to know their son probably saved his life, the little trickster, but Symes doesn’t write about that. He hopes the child will forget. Wilson and Lew dove in, tackled the fallen Hite, and dragged him to a tree, and Symes lashed him to the trunk. It’s too close to camp. Now, out in the dark, Hite is making the most awful, pitiful sounds Symes has ever heard, guttural incoherent wails, demonic and helpless, so loud he might be just outside the tent and ready to recommence what felt to Symes like a dance with death.
Honor forbade me to order any servant to risk his life. Nor did I ask assistance from Bucky Powell but sent him off on a day- long hunt when it became clear his brother’s end is near. It cannot come soon enough.
Absently Symes scoops a handful of salted walnuts into his mouth. In three days, he’ll be home to Rachel. Her father was light- skinned, almost white, a West Indian with long knotty curls and songs in his mouth. He influenced me: the connection strikes Symes like a hammerblow, the realization coming as he writes the words. Your father: as a child I heard him singing and was entranced, and thus my music diverged from that of the European masters. A certain syncopation, a way he had, I admired.
By candlelight, his pen scratches across the page. Hite’s screams rise and fall with the shifting wind. Where is the coma the doctor promised? Symes folds the letter and lies down on his cot. He wakes to a thick yellow sunrise and silence, except for birdsong. He walks out into light so brilliant it hurts his eyes. A shadow races above, wheeling over the marled field.
* * *
Anything he gives you, take it, Zeke’s mother said. The funny rock Zeke found, the star, hangs heavy in his pocket, a present from his father, and he accepts the shoes his father buys him from a cobbler in a village they come to in the morning, narrow tight shoes, but maybe they’ll stretch. It’s just the two of them, Zeke and his father, gone ahead from Aunt Molly and them. At a store, his father buys him candy and cheese and a new shirt. His father leads him up the steps of a house, knocks on the door, and talks with a man and a lady who live there. He seems to know them. The people look at Zeke and back at his father the way people do when they’re fi guring things out. The lady takes them down a hallway. A girl jumps up from a sofa.
“Symes, do you remember Lily?” the lady says, holding the girl around the shoulders like she’s a present. “All grown up now.”
“Indeed I do.” Zeke’s father bows. “Now sit down at the piano, Zeke, and try to play it.”
“Has he seen one before?” the older lady asks.
“Yes, at church,” his father says.
Zeke slides onto the bench. His father and the others sit down and watch as he runs his fingers across the keys. The piano bleats like a lamb.
“Hold your elbows up,” his father says. “Put a tune together.”
At dawn this morning, his father spotted him and pointed to a bird flying low enough to cast a shadow, and said, Tell me what kind of bird that is.
A crow, Zeke said.
No, his father said.
Hawk. Buzzard.
It’s an eagle, his father said. There aren’t many left. Stupid people shoot them.
Then they buried Hite Powell. The men had a pine coffin ready, and Aunt Molly’d wrapped him in a sheet. Bucky Powell was back, his head hanging down. Everybody stood around Hite’s grave, and Zeke’s father read from a Bible.
Zeke’s mother will ask about this trip. His father will tell her about it, too, and it’ll sound different coming from him, and Zeke will never know who she believes. And when his mother and father aren’t around, Zeke will act it out for Matthias and Bertha – how he stuck out his leg so Hite fell. They’ll laugh, and he’ll have to make them understand it wasn’t funny.
He wobbles his hands back and forth, and the piano chimes.
“You won’t be able to tell anything from this, Symes,” the older lady says. “When you were his age, of course . . .”
“Put your feet on the pedals, Zeke,” his father says.
“Are his legs long enough?” the lady says.
They are, but the new shoes are making painful creases on the bottoms of Zeke’s feet. The shoes and the star mean thank you, even though his father won’t say it. But what does the piano mean, why is he getting to do this? He draws his fingers up and down the keys in a rippling sound makes him think of a hat blowing off somebody’s head and bobbing down a river, but the sound won’t drive out the memory of Hite’s screams.
It was so bad last night, Zeke couldn’t bear it. He wanted to untie Hite and let him go. Maybe if Hite could go off in the woods, he’d be all right, but Aunt Molly said, Stay right here. Stick your fingers in your ears and pray. Somebody ought to shoot him. It’d be a kindness. Zeke said, Can’t I take him some water? And Aunt Molly said, He don’t want water ever again.
When she was asleep, Zeke crept out to the sycamore where Hite Powell strained and bellowed, his hands tied. Zeke crawled over the stony roots as close as he dared. Hite looked up and saw him, and he knew who Zeke was, Zeke could tell. Hite opened his mouth and howled, and Zeke joined in, raggedy roars that hurt his throat and filled up the night, and whenever Hite roared, Zeke did too, on and on, the only way he could think of to help.
He woke up at dawn feeling like he’d swallowed a knife. Hite Powell was slumped over, his mouth a ball of blood and blood all down his shirt. Zeke touched Hite’s nose, and it was cold, and flies were walking on his eyes. Zeke went away from the tree and didn’t look back, and when he was out in the clearing, his father saw him and pointed at the sky and said, What kind of bird? Zeke looked up, and it felt like a game they were playing, hawk buzzard crow, except his throat hurt and he couldn’t get Hite Powell out of his mind. I don’t hear Mr. Powell anymore, his father said. Must be time to lay him to rest. They looked up at the bird wheeling and flying, and Zeke felt the long night crowded into the back of his mouth, and his father said, Every sunlit field invites a shadow.
Cary Holladay is the author of the nonfiction book Images of America: Glen Allen (Arcadia Publishing, 2022), and eight volumes of fiction, including Horse People (Louisiana State University Press, 2013); The Deer in the Mirror (Ohio State University Press, 2013); and Brides in the Sky: Stories and a Novella (Swallow Press, 2019). Her stories have appeared widely, including in the O. Henry Prize Stories, featuring a short story she initially published in Alaska Quarterly Review