Robley felt the sickness and the tears coming again. He stood up quick from his wing chair, paced vigorously for a few moments. The letter said nothing of the sort, just that the boys’ whereabouts were not known. No reason to give in to more grief. Certainly no reason to tell Katherine, who had just that morning emerged from their bedchamber, dressed in black, sallow and sunken-eyed, but nonetheless up.
He crumpled the ambiguous note, tossed it into the wastebasket. He would give no thought to the younger boys until he had some definite news, something irrefutable.
Two days later it arrived, in an envelope wrinkled, smudged, battered from hard use. The handwritten address said only “Robley and Katherine Paine, Yazoo, Mississippi,” but it had found them. The return address read “Headquarters, 1st Brigade, Army of the Shenandoah.”
Robley took the envelope, carried it into his library, staring at it the whole time, as if trying to divine something from the terse address. Army of the Shenandoah? He did not see how this could have anything to do with his boys. But any correspondence from any army was cause for dread.
At last he tore it open and extracted a piece of paper more wrinkled and dirty than the envelope, and splotched with the chocolate brown of dried blood. It was written in pencil on lined paper imperfectly torn from a notebook. It was in Jonathan’s hand.
Nathaniel James Paine, Company D, 18th Mississippi, 3rd Brigade, son of Robley and Katherine Paine, Yazoo, Mississippi. Please God send me home to be buried in my native earth.
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…” Robley stammered the words as if gasping for breath. Dumbly he stared at the other paper enclosed in the envelope.
Dear Sir:
The enclosed note was found on the remains of a private soldier from Mississippi who had apparently joined with our brigade in the great battle at Manassas. I regret that the exigencies of our current military situation make it impossible for us to comply with the request herein. Please be assured that Private Paine fought nobly and was given a Christian burial.
Regretfully,
Colonel A. Cummings
33rd Virginia
Robley’s head fell back. The letters slipped from his fingers, fell fluttering to the floor. There it was. His boys had gone off with another regiment, thrown themselves into the hottest fighting, had died for their enthusiasm.
That was his Nathaniel, his Jonathan. Not deserters, quite the opposite. They had joined with another regiment, another army, had died unrecognized among strangers. If Jonathan had not lived long enough to scribble that note, then they would have simply disappeared, tumbled into unmarked graves.
A great deadness spread over Robley Paine, Sr., spread from his chest to his arms and legs and his head. A deadness that was more than death, because in death, he knew, his spirit would take flight, would join his beloved boys in Paradise. But now his soul was trapped on earth, trapped in this aching mortal coil, on this horrible, wretched earth, where Yankees could come down from their filthy cities and kill his beautiful boys.
He heard the swish of silk and his eyes shifted to the door of the library and he wanted to stand, to do something, to hide this from his wife, who could not take another of these hammer blows, but once again he could not move.
She stepped into the doorway, stood there in her black dress, stared at him with sunken eyes, and he stared back, silent. Robley wondered if this was how it had been for their Savior, Jesus, staring down from the cross into his mother’s eyes. Such unspoken grief passing between them, grief far beyond words.
Katherine Paine’s eyes shifted down to the letters on the floor, then back up to her husband’s. She stood there, unmoving, and Robley could see that she understood, even without reading the letters that lay on the rich carpet at his feet, she knew. She probably knew all along. Without a word she turned and glided away.
After a while, Robley stood and wandered out of the library. He had no notion of how long he had been sitting there, whether that time could be measured in minutes or days. His feet took him down the hallway and out the front door, onto the wide porch and its view of the Yazoo River.
He stepped down off the porch and walked the green lawn, down, down to the water. For a moment he thought he might throw himself in, let the water envelop him, sweep him away. He thought he might let himself sink down into the river’s warm embrace, but he was not certain. He seemed to have no power one way or another, as if it was not his decision to make. He would just have to wait and see what happened.
He stopped at the edge of the stream and stared into it and realized that he was not going to throw himself in, though he was not sure why not. Perhaps there was something else he was supposed to do.
Robley turned, as he always did, looked back at the house, the great oak tree with its spreading limbs. He squinted at the tree, cocked his head. There was something not right with it. He could see nothing different about the tree, but still there was something not right.
And then it occurred to him: the spreading branches, the welcoming arms. Who was it that the tree would welcome? The arms of the tree were open to the northward, which was why Robley had envisioned them welcoming back his boys, come home from the fight. But his boys would not come home. So who was the tree to welcome?
“Damn that thing…” Robley said. He was breathing hard. He could not endure the sight of it, the great billow of green leaves, the limbs like spread arms. There was nothing, and no one, whom he would welcome now. Just the opposite. His boys had left the sanctuary of Paine Plantation and now they were dead. It was up to him, Robley Paine, to keep the rest of the world at bay. The tree was no longer a reflection of Robley’s heart.
He walked quickly back up the lawn, calling for the overseer. “Mr. Holling! Mr. Holling! Holling!” He stamped up the lawn, stopped twenty feet in front of the hateful tree.
“Holling!”
Four minutes later, Holling came from around the house, walking fast. He was a stout, greasy man with dirty clothes and ugly habits, and Robley did not like him. But he was of that breed who became overseers on plantations and excelled at the work. Robley had never met a good overseer who was also a decent human being. The two traits did not naturally coexist in a man.
Holling approached fast, laboring for breath. “You called, Mr. Paine?” he asked, stopping short, and Robley could see the man’s visible reaction to his employer’s appearance. “Sir?”
“I’m going to do some cutting on this tree,” Paine said, nodding toward the oak. “I need ten of the field hands with axes and saws, boys who can climb. I need ladders and a team to drag the brush away.”
Holling’s eyes shifted from Paine to the oak and back again. “Cutting…on the tree…sir?”
“Yes, damn you.”
“Ah…the niggers is all out in the fields, Mr. Paine, gettin’ in the cotton.”
“Damn the…goddamned cotton, Holling, let it rot! I don’t give a tinker’s damn about cotton. Get the hands and get them now!”
“Yassuh!” said Holling, who knew when to shut up and act. He turned and ran off.
Why did he not go to war? Paine thought. Why did that mean bastard live while my boys did not?
Overseers were too valuable to send off to fight. The meanest, vilest, most violent of men, but they were needed in the South to keep the Negroes in line and could not be spared to march off and fight the Yankees. So the best of the South had to go in their place.