Who dwelt by a churchyar.., p.1
Who Dwelt by a Churchyard, page 1
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Who Dwelt by a Churchyard
Berry Fleming
New York
Hermione:
Pray you sit by us,
And tell’s a tale.…
Mamillius:
A sad tale’s best for winter.
Hermione:
Let’s have that, good sir.…
Mamillius:
There was a man
Dwelt by a churchyard—. I will tell it softly,
Yond’ crickets shall not hear it.
—The Winter’s Tale
A fire between the black andirons, sinking almost to ashes then flaring up with another handful of trash—letters, records, photographs—shedding the past, the pasts. Or meaning to. Easing the load of the movers coming on Thursday (“Eight-fifteen, Mr. Embry?” “Yes. All right”), easing the load of Mr. Embry transferring his new alonenes to simpler quarters; unless he changed his mind, tried to follow the example of delighted old remarried What’s-his-name who said, “She’s not only a superior cook and an excellent driver, Allen, she’s a registered nurse!”
In the meanwhile: Bare floors, windows without curtains, bookshelves without books like mouths without teeth. Bare walls with unfaded rectangles in the shapes of Father’s paintings, now stacked in a back room waiting to be stored at the movers’ (in a cubicle that I thought of as a sepulcher for his dreams). Brown cartons about the floor boards marked for shipment to “Mrs. Ada Embry Renlap” at her new address in catchall California (divorced daughter retaining married name because of child), the very act of spelling out the shipping labels bringing back her mother’s voice smiling, “If you like,” to my proposal of “Ada” as our baby’s name (“Ada” in my mind, no doubt, from the assonance to “Asa”—a great-uncle whose crumbling Civil War letters I had been reading, deciphering, in a search for telling bits I might use in a thesis I was writing).
And “Asa” on my mind today from the photograph I had almost burned with the rest; put aside to maybe take with me for old-time’s sake (I am sentimental)—a blackened “ambrotype” of a young man looking straight back at you, hair over ears like straw spilling out of a hayrack, jacket open on a white shirt, loosely spread bow tie; young Asa, not yet in uniform, not yet writing his “Esteemed Parents” (and “Dear Miss Mamie”) of “drilling, cutting paper fuses, filling cartridge bags, whittling wooden fuse plugs” at Fort Pulaski “impregnable” on the Georgia coast.
Putting it by for the moment; and stirring the fire to life with a toss of time-faded faces like words you can’t be sure of, have to check out in the dictionary: A man changing a tire on a road of bare French-looking trees (surely not myself, though how else could it remind me of wiping dirty hands on a wad of emergency toilet paper my new wife handed me?); Alice herself in a beret at a sidewalk table, eyes somehow focused more on her marriage than on the husband with the Leica she had bought him; an old man, maybe 70–75, in the flat-brimmed straw hat of the day, right forearm across his cotton jacket in a leather sling (that might well have been stenciled “Chiekamauga”—Grandfather Charles, Asa’s younger brother); a young woman in a floor-length skirt with a mandolin, Mother at my daughter’s age; a rigid group of four, one an old lady, “Aunt Mame” by the retractable eyeglasses pinned to her shirtwaist (no kin, but “Aunt Mame” in our Southern way on account of Asa); a black man in a chauffer’s cap at the crank of a museum-piece car of rods and running boards and brass canisters of fuel for the gas headlamps, spare tire by the driver’s seat like a buckler ready for his elbow—all into the flames with hardly a second glance, as you don’t look twice at the kittens marked for drowning.
Then fumbling behind me among the rest of the discards and chancing on a photograph that all but spoke; all but cried, “Gently, brother; gently, pray!” in the voice of the Doctor reciting FitzGerald from his boundless memory (Frank Avrett, DMD, but “the Doctor” to most of his old friends in town).
No date on it, front or back; no description. And yet a sort of date in the picture itself, in its bringing back the summer I was night-working at the College for my long-neglected Masters (in my forties by then—incredibly!), had gone down to the coast to see again the old fort in the river that I thought I might use in my thesis on the Federal blockade of Confederate (“Rebel”) ports. The date, if I bothered to look, would be the summer before the date on my M.A.—possibly two summers, allowing for some delay in getting it in shape after what happened. Anyway, close to 1962, centennial year of the bombardment.
A casual snapshot, 3×4 or close to it, black-and-white (not much color in those days); two men and a woman—an unstable setup to start with. All young; thirties, early forties. And all smiling, smiles maybe just past the peak as if I had waited an instant too long with the button: Gonzalez with his captain’s bars and his clipped moustache as if he had lined it on with a charcoal stick, the Doctor with his cheerful squint I have seen on his face of forgetting the patient to attend to what he was doing to the patient’s tooth, Jessica with the springing smile that I used to think of as half at her mouth and half at her eyes, watching to see if the smile was on target—had hit you—as a Civil War gunner with a spyglass might have tracked the course of a projectile (the Civil War on my mind that summer).
The Doctor and Jessica are sitting on the steps up to the porch of the Officers Quarters at the fort (not the old fort—“Asa’s Fort”—in the river, a newer post below it on the bank; Spanish-American War, I think). He is a Reserve Officer (six months in Korea) ordered out for his two-weeks summer “refresher.” I remember he said the orders crossed the date of his wedding anniversary and he solved the conflict, after a fashion, by bringing his wife—his new wife (two or three years “new,” I’ve forgotten, but the Doctor, in my view, as uxorious as on his wedding day—my wife used to say he touched Jessica’s hand, her wrist, as if that closed the switch on his flashlight). He doesn’t take military niceties very seriously, cap on the back of his head, lieutenant’s bar a little out of plumb on his collar.
His appearance and manner make quite a contrast with those of Captain Gonzalez standing at the newel post, smiling too but with a smile that reminds you of the centurion in the Bible accustomed to bidding a man come and he cometh, go and he goeth. The figure watching us from the door shadow is Sergeant Palef, detached from the Motor Pool for some sort of duty at the Quarters, not part of the picture; I hadn’t noticed he was there until the film was developed (or the other figure either, at an end of the porch in a swing, a “glider,” a young woman with a round Little-Red-Riding-Hood face whose name I can’t remember, kin to the housekeeper, spending a few weeks with “Aunt Vertice”—and, among so many men, maybe catching one? Millicent! Millie!). Jessica’s cotton skirt, pale blue, looks gray in the print. She holds her knees together as if remembering the cameraman.
An offhand photograph, coming to life in my hand as if lifted from a solution of memory-developer, filling as I studied it with the colors the camera missed, the yellow Quarters, the yellow barracks hemming the parade ground, white banisters down the porches like piano keys, the glint of brass that is the salute gun at the flagpole, the shaggy green fronds of the palm trees, the spot of red beyond the porch that is the nose of the Captain’s vintage Triumph (he keeps an apartment in town), the corner of blue sky over the ocean, or where the ocean would be.
And with sounds, too, coming up through the years: the slapping of the palms in the persistent winds, the slapping (if you were near) of the halyards against the flagpole, bugle notes like yellow shafts of sunlight—flashes of benign lightning you could set your watch by—trivial talk back and forth among the three of them, the four of us.
And with smells. Different smells in different winds; crabs, shrimps, oysters in a land wind sweeping the tidewater flats of marsh grass and creeks with low-country names, Freeborn Creek, Turtle River, Cabbage Cut; ocean smells in a sea wind from the waves bursting open on the beach by the lighthouse (Rainbow Light, from the stripes like a barber’s pole); an in-between smell in a north wind crossing the mouth of the big river, crossing the island in the channel and what was left of the great brick fort I had come to see—a dull rose-red line you could just make out from the steps on a clear day (not “Fort Pulaski” to us growing up but “Uncle Asa’s Fort,” from his letters, hearing about them and later reading them, or some of them; hard going with the faded ink, wrinkled paper):
… 2 24-pounder Blakely rifles and 8 10-inch columbiads added to our armament yesterday by the Princess Ida from Savannah.… 6 companies, 400 men at the fort. We can withstand the combined navy of the Godless Federal states.…
writing to his “esteemed father” by candlelight from his cartridge-box makeshift table in one of the casemates (no busybody censorship office evidently).—And eagerly,
… the General has promised us a prominent position in the first engagement.… Our reveille is answered by 3 encampments up and down the coast, men enough, with God’s continued help, to throw these Lincolnite invaders back in the sea if they attempt a landing.… Thanks to dear Miss Mamie for the wax tapers and candles. Thank Sister for the Christmas turkey. Howdy to the servants.…
(writing home a few years after the “ambrotype,” Great-uncle Asa manning the Fort with his gentleman friends of the Oglethorpe Light Infan
… digging ditches all day across the parade ground to trap the cannon balls, if they can bring their ships in close enough to fire on us, and we’ve got no intention to let that happen.… Hoisting rows of 4×12s slanting up over the powder magazine and the casemates where we live, cracks here and there you can squeeze through (if you pull in your belt).… Jake says there’s pirate gold at the old Spanish fort on Skidaway Bluff. We’ll dig it up as soon as we’re done with whipping Billy Yank.… Ice in our canteens this morning.…
And other bits of his letters in my mind that put him there in the photograph—“there” as if in one of the rocking chairs lining the porch—invisible to everyone but me and my wide-angle memory-lens that seemed as telescopic as wide; out-of-focus, of course (I never knew him—unless knowing his handwriting was knowing him).
And the old War out-of-focus too; out-of-sight, long-gone, buried like the pirate gold, forgotten I thought, unless you hoped to dig it up for gain, as I did (prestige, the status of an M.A. among my associates at the school—and in the eyes of my wife, to tell the truth). Then Gonzalez coming through with glances at the War from the other direction, changing my feelings toward him from a budding dislike to the hovering friendship you might have for a new member of your club.
Falling into talk about Fort Pulaski by the odd little incident on the beach that seemed to link the Now and the Then as my hit-or-miss snapshots did: on the hot sand one afternoon, the four of us, the barber’s-pole lighthouse throwing a rod of shade across the slope like a sundial, the Doctor and Jessica wading on ahead in the sliding foam, her shoes dangling from one hand (the hand he wasn’t holding), fingers in the heels, wet legs shining, Gonzalez and I standing a moment in the windy shade, divers holding back from the sun-plunge. Eyes on Jessica (or her wet legs), wading past the jetty rocks then springing back, returning to something in the sand, pulling the blue skirt tight round her out of the wet and squatting on her bare heels, the Doctor bending over to look, to scratch about the edges, say, “Crab shell, horseshoe crab,” other walkers gathering to see.
Then, digging with his strong fingers as if looping out the wadding round a patient’s back tooth, “A bowling ball?” And Jessica, “It’s a turtle!” everybody leaning over to look.
And Gonzalez calling, “Mortar shell,” from the shade, not troubling to investigate. Then going on to me as we walked out on the damp sand when the fringe of a wave slid back, “They still wash up sometimes. Unarmed. Ten-inch, twelve-inch. Lost off a landing scow.—Leave it there, Lieutenant; I’ll send somebody.—Along in here’s where they came ashore, we did,” smiling at us Rebels. “Brought in the ordnance at the siege of Pulaski in the Rebellion, pardon me, ‘The War Between the States.’ From New England mostly, the forces; 7th Connecticut, 8th Maine, 3rd Rhode Island. Can’t say why you made the New Englanders so mad …,” turning away from it as you might put away snapshots of your family, remembering the usual indifference of outsiders.
Which didn’t apply to me with my thesis hanging fire, wondering if I could have stumbled on a point of view that would round out Asa’s one-sided letters. I said (to keep him talking, see if he could add anything to what I knew), “Hard to understand our people watching the Federal build-up for three months without lifting a finger.”
He said, “Four,” and I said, “Yes, really four. I believe we thought the Fort was impregnable.”
“No fixed position can sustain a vigorous land attack,” in his centurion’s voice, and a few steps farther on (as if to remind me of an instance I was overlooking), “Ten 24-pounders breached the castle wall at Badajoz in eight hours,” the US shining on his collar. “But what could your people do? Contest the landing? With fifty-one vessels out there supporting it!” throwing out a north-south sweep of his arm at where the ships had been—and setting me to consider again the gaps in my information he might fill in for me.
I thought of telling him of Asa’s jubilant (and misinformed) letter to his “Very Dear Miss Mamie” in which he said that forty vessels of the fleet had been “swallowed up among the angry billows. Can even the heathen Lincolnites fail to perceive there is a God who rides upon the whirlwind and directs the storm?” but we were leaving the beach and it seemed hardly the right time.
I was also distracted by the amusing little instant there as we turned into the dunes and the waving grasses, Gonzalez showing the way, the Doctor and Jessica following (hand-in-hand, of course), Gonzalez—still with his “vigorous land attack”—saying, “The rifled Parrotts made the penetration,” and Jessica demurely lowering her eyes at “penetration” then raising them to the burned nape of his neck. Unless I was seeing things.
Which might have been, because his “Parrotts” had already lifted me back through many years to the parrot in a cage on the porch of the house where the Doctor had his first office, and his father before him, the house then occupied by his two maiden aunts; who loved the parrot, moved him in and out for sun and air, ignored his squawk at any footsteps passing on the sidewalk, “Come in! Come in and pay the doctor!” (trained before the days of cash on the barrelhead)—four or five of us, on tiptoe behind the Doctor climbing to his rooms on the top floor, fingers to lips, the aunts long abed, Jessica Sponce (soon to be divorced—or divorcing Sponce, I forget), Alice and I, just back in town, maybe others now and then (not Sponce, of course); white corn whisky and ginger ale on fast-melting ice, the Doctor soon reciting Don John of Austria or Cyrano of whatnot, and once, I remember, “Her father loved me, oft invited me,” and ending it with, “there sits the lady, let her witness it,” his muted phonograph mixing the Bolero into our chatter—into the sympathetic right-left movement of Jessica’s bare feet like pink puppies forseeing a romp, the Doctor starting two cigarettes and laying one between her pushed-out lips like a kiss.
And once, over his shoulder as he scrubbed his hands making ready to repair my broken tooth, “Faith is the big thing, Allen. Everything turns on faith. If I say you have a cavity in your left second molar you believe me on faith. You can get another opinion, but you still won’t know first hand.”
I said, “Can I have faith in that novocaine?” (which the nurse was good enough to snicker at but he ignored), going on with, “You pay me with a check and I am satisfied; I have faith in you, in your bank account. You have faith in the next man, in what he says, in his signature. If he’s tricking you—or she is—everything begins to break down” (that “or she is” seeming to slip out while he wasn’t looking; he going on as if to erase it), “Even if he pays you in cash you have faith in the dollar.”
I said, “Used to have,” but he wasn’t listening, and I went on, “What about ‘Come in and pay the doctor’? Your papa had too much faith, didn’t he?”
“He usually got paid,” smiling at his strong fingers (that he would lose one day in a moment I’ve never been able to explain); “smoked sausage, baskets of peaches, Christmas turkeys. That’s how he got the parrot.—How’d you break your tooth?”
Gonzalez bringing me back to “now” with, “Half the mortar shells dropped off-target,” over his shoulder to me, sensing I was the only one who cared, I suppose; “Paper fuses very inferior—captured from the Rebels at Port Royal.” And a few sandy strides farther on, “One shell smashed a tabby wall up-river at Skidaway Bluff,” Jessica laughing, “Tabby’s a cat, what do you mean, ‘tabby’?” the Doctor rushing in a back-up laugh like a team-mate.
But “tabby” whisking me off to the calico cat that prowled the lobby-foyer-living room of Mrs. Chisholm’s Tidewater Hotel, where I had a room at the weekly rate—Mr. Chisholm in a baseball cap, up before day, greeting you on the porch with, “Good morning, Mister. Feeling good? Feeling hundred per cent?” greasy wind fanning his cigarette smoke landward or seaward (Rebel-ward or Yankee-ward) according to the day, drying one side of your face like a blower. “Tell Olga you want your breakfast.” And one morning, “Tooth’s bothering her again. Ice cream gives her fits. Loves ice cream. Chocolate. Dr. Ed wants to pull it. Sergeant says no way,”—“tooth” flashing the idea through my head of saying there was a top-grade tooth man at the Fort, but changing it to a noncommittal mumble that a man didn’t like to have his wife lose a tooth. To which he said, “Wife’s in Texas. With the black eye he gave her,” closing one of his own in a sort of between-us-boys wink. “Go get your breakfast. Fried oysters this morning, if you hurry. Very fine.”
