BOOK TWO
The malevolent and terrifying thing shall of itself strike such terror into men that almost like madmen, while thinking to escape from it, they will rush in swift course upon its boundless forces.
A Bazaar of Enticement Albany, Summer 1864
WE WILL NOW TALK of events that take place in fact and memory after Daniel Quinn, that orphan of life, now twenty-nine years of age, arrives by train at Albany from the mudholes of hell. Quinn, for more than two years, has been traveling with the Union Army, interviewing generals, captains, and soldiers of the line, writing about their exploits at Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Monocacy and elsewhere, describing their casualties, camp life, army food, the weather, incompetent surgeons, Southern women.
The day in Albany is intermittently sunny and overcast, and the clerk of the weather says no rain is expected, that Albany’s long drought will continue, and that passing rain clouds are merely illusory elements in a dry world. Quinn has already bought a horse and saddle, the mode of travel that has become part of his being, and is riding, at an ambling gait suited to the slowness of his mind, toward the Staats mansion of revered history. The waters of the Staatskill course toward him as he ascends the hill, arousing in him thoughts of time spent near other water. .
He was then riding with the Forty-fourth out of Albany, camped on one bank of the Rappahannock, with rebel troops camped on the other. For two days men of both camps swam in the river under an unspoken truce. Jim Lynch from Saratoga broke the silence when he swam to the rebel shore and yelled to the nearest reb, “You got a newspaper we can read?” The reb waved one at him and Lynch waded to shore, naked, took the paper and thanked the reb, swam back with one hand high, and gave the paper to Quinn. It was from Richmond, only days old.
In a day’s time the swimmers were killing each other. In three days’ time Quinn, walking the battlefield seeking survivors among the dead thousands, heard a wounded reb ask for water. Quinn gave him his canteen and let the reb drink his fill. Then he wet the reb’s leg wounds with the remaining water. Quinn considered this a fair exchange for the Richmond newspaper. The reb could not move, but he would not die of his leg wounds. The water will cool, it will loosen, it will cleanse. It will be interesting, important to the reb. But do not touch him.
The reb thanked Quinn by telling him of his optimism before battle. Such optimism was an inversion. It was based upon the vision of his wife beckoning him into the barn with their secret love gesture. The reb knew this was a temptation sent to him by the devil. He knew the barn was death and that his wife would never invite him into death’s hayloft.
The reb was of North Carolina stock, strong of face and form, and Quinn knew he had farmed all his life. He revered Longstreet and grieved over the outcome of the battle. He had not known defeat in two years of war. Quinn covered the reb’s legs with a blanket taken from a dead reb’s bedroll, then found a rebel canteen and filled it for the reb in the river. He filled his own canteen and rinsed the taste and touch of the reb from its neck. He walked across the darkening field, where the broken artillery was strewn, but found no other survivors. Six horses stood hitched to a limber, all with limp necks, all erect in harness: twenty-four legs in an upright position, dead.
Quinn patted the neck of his new horse of the Albany instant, thankful for its life, trustful of its strength. It may be that I am coming out of death, he thought, though he sensed this was untrue, or at least a confusion. Probably he was still in death’s center and losing ground. But even the possibility of leaving death behind cheered him, and always there was the banal reality: he had survived and others had not. Such a thought made him as optimistic as the wounded reb before battle. Rubbing elbows with optimism calmed Quinn and he rode on toward the mansion.
At first glimpse he knew the mansion had grown. More rooves and towers rose up from it, more porches spanned its new girth. A Chinese roof topped one new wing and on another rococo carvings spun and curled upward and around new doors and archways, new pillars and dormers. Hillegond and Dirck are manic builders. Lost in a house suited for multitudes, they create yet more space for their solitary comings and goings.
Quinn circled the mansion to see what had become of the structures and gardens of his memory. Amos’s tomb and the pump and boat houses were as he remembered. A small, elegant structure was new (this was the shooting villa), but the gazebos and trellises looked as they always had, and today were brilliant with flowers, though the lawns that surrounded them were brown from the drought. All buildings were newly painted in the uniform colors of yore — a rich brown with beige trim — and all the brickwork was that same pale, rusty red.
In replenishing his vision of it all, Quinn sought not what was new but what was not: the elusive thing that endured unchanged in spite of growth. He tethered his horse in the front carriageway and knocked at the portal of first entrance, the carved wooden door looming before him with the same majesty it owned on the night he arrived a fugitive from the wild river. He stood on the same spot where he had stood then, feeling the strength of ritual rise in him. Repetition of past gestures suddenly seemed to hold the secret of his restoration to. . to what? He could not say. He would not repeat a single day of the known past, would he? Would he willingly relive the days in which Maud was revealed to him, full knowing that the brink of that ecstasy gave onto a chasm of loss and waste? He had kissed Maud and known love, and then descended from beauty into the valley of putrefaction, where lay a generation of blasted sons: seven thousand dead in a single battle, dead in a great wedge of slaughter, their brains and bowels blown out of them, and they then left to rot on a field consecrated by national treachery and endemic madness. And the killing moved on to greener pastures.
The front door opened and Quinn recognized Capricorn, hair gone to white, skin gone to leather, eyes waning. The old man did not recognize the long, lean Quinn in his soldier’s shirt (he was not a soldier), his riding breeches and boots, and the wide-brimmed slouch hat beneath which he had lived so long. But when Quinn took off the hat to reveal dense waves of hair the color of earth, then the old man’s eyes remembered history.
“You’re Mist’ Quinn.”
“Cappy, you’ve kept your wits intact, unlike most of us.”
Quinn entered a house refurnished: gone the cherrywood sofa on which the widow Ryan and her terrified children had sat, replaced by a resplendently huge oval settee; gone the music-room portraits of Petrus and Hillegond, the walls covered now with huge tapestries; gone, too, the foyer’s Dutch colonial chandelier, and pendulous now in its place one of crystal, twice the size of the old one and exuding thrice the former elegance. This place does not shrink in memory. It waxes in breadth, and its opulence thickens.
“Is Dirck home?” Quinn asked.
“No more. He marry that singer and he move to Sweden. That’s where he live now.”
“Sweden. I remember his wife always wanted to go back there.”
“Said he didn’t wanna be here no more. Sold the house to Mr. Fitzgibbon and went away.”
“Sold the house? What about Hillegond?”
“Mist’ Quinn, Miss Hilly’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Gone. Killed. They strangle her. Wire her neck. They say she musta died right off.”