Chapter TWELVE
Buck trotted Gypsy down the familiar sandy road to St Paul’s, the family’s Episcopal Church. His head was reeling with images and recollections of the many hours he’d spent here as a young parishioner and later as an acolyte. In his mind he could see his smiling, animated mother, holding her prayer book, wearing a stylishly elegant wide-hoop skirt and beribboned bonnet, extending her white-gloved hand, palm-down as she greeted neighbors and friends. By her side stood his father, several inches taller, the epitome of the southern gentleman in a finely tailored frock coat and stovepipe hat, a boutonnière in his lapel, shiny black-lacquered walking stick in his gray, kid-gloved grip. He remembered particularly their gracious manners and genteel speech. Sunday services weren’t exclusively for praising the Lord but to celebrate life, a good life for members of the white aristocracy.
This had been part of the world Buck once called home.
The white clapboard church with its stained-glass crusader windows and single towering spire had been built in the 20s, after its predecessor had been destroyed by fire. It needed a fresh coat of whitewash now, but otherwise the provincial house of worship and the rectory a hundred yards to its right appeared to have been spared the ravages of war and foreign invasion. Buck saw no one around, for which he was grateful. He was in no mood for “visiting,” even with old friends. What, after all, would they talk about but casualties, the loss or maiming of brothers, fathers, husbands and other male relations and friends? He’d seen enough of death and mutilation and felt responsible for more than his share of both.
He dismounted and tied Gypsy’s reins to a hitching post, then strode self-consciously to the graveyard between the church and vicarage. He passed by old tombstones with all too familiar names carved into them. Many plots were weed-choked, yet there were several bare mounds scattered about the fenced-in cemetery. Fresh graves. He didn’t bother to read the names on the stakes that served as temporary markers until the ground settled enough for granite stones to be set.
He passed by the Lynch enclosure, noting the names of his mother’s parents, as well as several aunts and uncles and a few cousins who’d died young from whooping cough or measles, but mostly from yellow fever. Proud people who carried themselves with dignity and an inborn sense of noblesse oblige.
He trekked on to the Thomson family enclosure.
Here less pleasant associations crowded his mind . . . poisoned it. The long funeral cortege from Jasmine for his mother’s burial, the lines of black folks, mourning her passing, and crowding up into the gallery of the small church, the unaccustomed smell of whiskey on his father’s breath, eight-year-old Clay crying because his mommy wasn’t with them today.
Buck had no difficulty finding her grave. Her tall, stately tombstone was a kilter. Beside it a subsiding mound was crisscrossed with budding brambles. Only a crude wooden plank with a name and dates scratched inelegantly upon it marked his father’s final resting place. No grand monument. No loving verses or biblical references to eternal life beyond this fragile bar. Buck shook his head. Raleigh Buchanan Thomson had died six months ago. There’d been no one left to order him a tombstone. A detail to attend to later.
He stood over his mother’s grave. “You wouldn’t like the world as it is now, Mother. You left us too soon, but it’s better that you did. I’m afraid you wouldn’t think very highly of me either. I’ll do my best to make amends, if ever I can figure out how. I don’t regret the lives I’ve taken, only the ones I let slip away. As for the others, the ones I mutilated . . . I don’t know what I could have done differently, but I don’t want to do it anymore, ever.”
At last, reluctantly, he turned to his father’s grave. “I never intended to come back, Poppa. And now I wish I hadn’t. I would’ve liked to carry with me the memory of Jasmine as it was, with all its proud vanity and fatal flaws, rather than the blackened ruin it’s become. Like the South itself, Poppa. Proud vanity. Fatal flaws. A blackened ruin. We’ll rise above the ashes. Someday. But it’ll never be the same. We’ll never be the same. I won’t. ”
The lump in his throat burned.
“I’m leaving again, Father, this time for good, now that there’s nothing to come back to. And no one.” His nostrils clogged. He snuffled to clear them. “I failed, Poppa. I was supposed to protect my little brother, and I failed. Clay’s dead. The Cause is dead. Slavery’s dead. Jasmine is no more. It’s all gone, Father.”
Tears coursing down Buck’s face. He made no attempt to brush them away.
“You thought I didn’t love Jasmine, but I did. We just saw it differently, I guess. You saw it the way you thought it had to be, the way it should be. I saw it the way it could have been. Without slavery. Without people being beaten and scarred.” He wiped his cheeks. “It doesn’t matter now. That’s all in the past. You’re gone. Jasmine’s gone, and in a few minutes I’ll be gone too.”
From his coat pocket he removed the plume that had been on Clay’s cavalry hat. The yellow had faded. The blood stains had deepened to a dull brown.
“I have the watch you gave to Clay. If you don’t mind I’m going to keep it. After all it’s not a personal possession as much as a family heirloom. I have a lock of his hair too. The golden boy with the golden hair. A memento of the son who had what you called a reckless exuberance for life. But I’ll leave you this ornament, this last symbol of the boy you sent off to war. I think he might have become a man you could have been proud of, had he lived.”
Again Buck wiped his wet cheeks.
“I forgive you, Poppa, for whatever there is in my power to forgive. I hope before you died, you granted me pardon too for my many offenses.”
He knelt and wedged the damaged tussock into the ground up against the marker, where it might receive some protection from the wind and rain. “That’s all that’s left now, Poppa.” He rose, shook his head and bit his lips. “That’s all that’s left of the world we knew. A wooden board and the broken plumage of a lost cause. May you both rest in peace.”
He nearly ran out of the churchyard, untied Gypsy and sprang into the saddle. He cantered away from the place of his youth, trying to outrun its ghosts.
#
The return journey from Jasmine to Columbia afforded Buck another tour of the detritus of war—fallow fields that had once been rich with cotton, heaps of soot and cinder where proud mansions had stood, more modest piles of ash where slave quarters had clustered. The lower quarter of Richland County might one day recover, Buck ruminated, but that day was far off.
Everything and everyone he’d once held dear was gone. His brother, his father and mother, the plantation that had been his world—they were all faded memories. Only one old black woman, newly up from slavery remained, caring for an abandoned white child. There was nothing and nobody else left to hold Buck Thomson to this place. He renewed his vow to never return.
Summoning to mind what Emma had told him about Saul Snead, he began to appreciate the level of evil that had warped his son. Sadistic beatings that maimed bodies also twisted minds, and like Sherman’s neckties, the straight and narrow, once bent, could never be made functional again. Rufus Snead, the red-headed mankiller, was beyond compassion and pity. His one redeeming feature had been an attempt to protect his sister. But she was dead, and Rufus had abandoned her child. Was that when he became a mankiller? It didn’t matter. Like any rabid dog, the only cure for his malady was a bullet, delivered quickly and painlessly. Buck Thomson, surgeon and expert with firearms, was the man to perform this final amputation of a diseased member from the body social.