“I’m sitting down.”
“Butlsheeit Follow mel” Fleece really meant it. “Run for them, cocksucker. We over the ground of General Pemberton’s Rebel boys. They ate rats, right heah! Right heah they finely threw up their hands. Mortified by the stomach, but never licked by the gun!”
Fleece knew the history of the battle, which irked me. I didn’t know beans. He ran up the hills like a goat. At the top there were cannon sitting in concrete, facing the Mississippi. A mile below was the dull old snake herself, with barges creeping along, sand bars streaking here and there, and the bank of mud and scratchy-looking trees on the Louisiana side, while Fleece was explaining to me about when cotton was king in 1850, and what we had here was the struggling remains of riverside Pharaohism — the restaurants advertising fresh river catfish, the plasticolored motels, the antique shops, the bait and snack stores, featuring a rubberoid worm which kaught fish kwik; the four-story whorehouse on Mulberry Street, whose parlor Jayne Mans-field had visited, thinking it was “cute,” who, in fact, bared her breasts there for the house artist, on her way to Biloxi; and Louisiana, in a low strut of trees and mud beach, calling to me like she had missed me, even though I didn’t give a damn for her. Fleece held my arm. He told about Grant finally dragging his gunboats out of the Yazoo River and into the Mississippi, told me how the Rebels just laughed and tried to sink the boats with mortars for a while.
I noticed you could see much of the town of Vicksburg. I spotted the white banistered house of my grandmother. She was dead and this house was no longer a part of her. But that was where my mother had grown up. I told him this.
“She was the most-adored piece either side of the river. That porch was where she and the old man fell in love. He was …” I just thought through the rest. He was the Louisiana State handsome, but running out of money, wearing a straw hat and widepants, my old man thinking of taking this soft sweetie, Donna, back to that lovely village with its lake and towering pines, so many pines that the streets and walks were quiet with the needles they dropped, and children and lovers could fall down pleasurably, that Dream of Pines, Louisiana; the old man thinking he would take any job if he could take her there with him. She had a high skirt and beads, but she was shy: a caution and skidoo. She’s thinking about going to college. She’s backwater, a know-nought, and she’s pretty as a doe. He wants her to a degree nature or luck couldn’t refuse. She comes to him.
Here I was seeing the house she left behind her. Here where my grandmother stayed and died. Died remembering the birthdays of such jerks as me and mailing dollar bills in cards which cost fifty cents. Died of receiving the hurried ballpoint pen thank-you’s from me. She lay near a church I could not see.
There was the Sprague, an old paddlewheel they had made into a floating theater, which showed a melodrama with a trailing cancan each year; harking back to the really good times, the 1850’s, before the war. Come aboard. Don’t be a stick in the mud. Eat it. Lick it. This is Old Man River.
Fleece began singing “Old Man River” emotedly. This was a rare surprise. I’d never heard him so much as whistle before. He sought the tones lustfully. No wonder he despised hymns and most all music, if this is what he heard. But he was joyful as a hunchback jumping up and down in a loft with the bellrope. ‘Tote dat barge! Lif dat bale! Gets a litl drunk and ya lans in jail O!” trying to be the operatic nigger, but puny, sorry, afflicting me like somebody was scratching my teeth with a piece of aluminum. I asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t hear me.
Jesus mercy, I was sad. We went and saw the last sight, a football-field-sized green full of white graveblocks no more than six inches apart, with a gravel path which separated the Union from the Confederate dead. By then I was drooling blue. Close to the cemetery, a family was having a picnic. They threw the wrappers and the paper plates meekly into a barrel. It was almost the centennial year of the fall of Vicksburg. The strange silence, then, is what got me — as if you walked in a dream of refracted defeat. The horror was, I could think of nothing to say. I couldn’t think of even anything to think. I could not get “Dixie” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to play in my mind.
Vicksburg simply weighed on my heart like lumber: all the old history, all the ravaged gun-toters, all of contemporary Vicksburg; Grandmother’s house, how it seemed like a boat rotting up in a bayou nobody would ever find.
We were walking back through a sparse line of trees. Fleece collapsed to the ground. I thought he was having a relapse. He was wrestling with something.
“Help me, Monroe! Let’s pull this boy out. Ufff!”
“What is it?”
The clod came up in his hands, shooting dust and grass. Fleece twisted his fingers around it. Something was showing through the turf.
“Mine, mine. You didn’t help. It’s all mine!”
It was an entire cavalry pistol. That lucky, needlessly lucky scoundrel. On any other given day he would have had his nose in the air, gabbling away. He was averse to pistols. Whereas for me, I’d love to put my hand around the dirty handle of it. I thought some feeling, some sense, might come to me if I did.
“Look. U.S.A. Sherman’s cavalry.”
“He was here?” I tried to grab the thing.
“Of course, Ruben. This is where he sharpened up for Georgia. Let me alone, it’s mine. It won’t shoot. You wouldn’t want it. On my soul, a whole gun!”
This pettiness — I hated the son of a bitch. I’d show him some petty. I took off running, for the car. I knew his lungs would kill him; I’d leave him.
“monroe!” “monroe!” came the tiny faroff shouts behind me. The last leg was a vertical slope. I got in the car dying for breath myself. Perhaps his heart would burst. In my own heart I felt the hard little tick of pettiness. Well, this was something, this feeling.
I thought of the organic chemistry lab, how I hated it, hated it even more than histology, or invertebrate anatomy, because Fleece was the instructor for it. Bet Henderson took the lab too. Fleece would drift into the big room, as if on some pompous unicycle, in his lab coat, his mental life so far beyond this room, with its cruddy stone canals and fumes; ignoring Monroe, who had expended so much of his imagination on excuses to the professor for Fleece’s absences; but deigning to hover around the shoulders of Bet to say the tritest, namby-pambyest words that ever came to my ears. “What are you doing, tee hee. Need some help, tee hee?” whispering, “Are you still my Bet-Bet? tee hee?” With me trying not to hear, but dragged up into it like some involuntary nauseated peeping Tom, since my set-up was right next to hers. Really he deserved to die of a rat bite.
As he appeared on the ridge, practically strangling, I began to ease the car away. Out in the road, I saw him limping after me in the rear-view mirror. How much can he take? I wondered, easing on faster. When will his heart burst? I suppose he gave a last effort. It must’ve been some-thing. I was shocked to see him holding to the door handle, being dragged along. He simply heaved over, face-first onto the seat. I stopped the car. I was outraged.
“Damn you! You know everything about Vicksburg, have it! Stay here and own it. Choke on the place. I didn’t want you to come over here. I had things to see.…”
“Marrrk!” he said.
“What?” Some sound, the beginning of some word.
“Maaarrrrrrrk!” He threw up all, all over the car — and me — trying as he was to wheel the spew around toward the road on his side. I suppose I sat there a minute in the vile after-puking calm. Then I ripped that towel off his neck. My life seemed so bleakly redundant, an amplifying farce. Here the boy had been wearing the towel, the exact thing you would carry if you knew your life was going to be a cycle of puke.