What is it about alcohol that we love? That it cuts us loose from reason, suspends the laws for a time, so that we can feel or say the truth? That it greases our emotions so that they can slip out rather than stick dryly in the hollow of the chest?
Or that it takes us outside of ourselves completely, lifts us for a moment out of the individual prison we walk around in?
Or maybe just that it dulls the everyday pain, the vicious rubbing away of ourselves day by ever-so-long day?
Times in my life, I would have said any or all of these, some of it sweet, some of it harsh, some of it in flames.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, THAT unseemly, unholy Saturday night that I first heard about Major Jack Rumbough, I bought a quart jar of pure white liquor from Uncle Bob Ramsey for one silver dollar and carried it cradled in my arms up the hill to the porch of Rutland, the high house that the Major had built for his wife, Mrs. Carrie, just after the Civil War. I sat on the porch in the old man’s own rocking chair and I addressed that jar. It did not take me long to get the lid off.
This porch was where he and I had sat together ever so many times, usually after supper when I came to report on the doings at the Mountain Park, and he stared off into the far mountains, chewing tobacco or drinking apple brandy, a tin cup of which he would pour for me as well. The very porch where he and I together drank ourselves into a stupor on the night my only child had died. The little boy who was taken off by infant cholera, and whose death had all but guaranteed that I would not live with Sarah. That night we had hurt ourselves with liquor, just as we had intended. Hurt ourselves for not being able to save him, the little boy that the Major loved as much as I.
So I took my jar of good Ramsey liquor up to the porch at Rutland and, in the old traditional way, hurt myself again, hurt but alone this time. I didn’t ease the door on my mind open the way you do with a glass of wine or a cold glass of beer on a hot day. No, I shot the door off its hinges. Drinking and singing. Just the way the Major would have liked, had he been there to share.
“Where are you, old man?” I kept asking him. Shouting from time to time, in case he wasn’t nearby. I knew what he would say if he could; I could even hear it in his Tennessee twang. “Halfway to hell,” he would say, “and slipping downhill.”
Wherever he was, he was beyond hurting, and I had to hurt for the both of us. In long, measured swallows that scalded my mouth and throat. The Ramseys knew how to put pure pain in a canning jar. The prescribed medicine for those of us who have been abandoned.
* * *
DORA HENDERSON GARNER found me the next morning. She was sitting there on the step beside my sprawled legs as I slowly groped my way up for air. Sitting on the step reading her Bible, whistling under her breath, occasionally reaching over to pinch my leg to bring me to the surface again. Reading and pinching and whistling.
“What are you doing here?” I said. Or tried to say.
“Watching after you,” she replied. “Says here in this Book I’m to watch after you.”
“I don’t know that I’m in that book,” I said. Perhaps came closer to actually pronouncing the words this time.
“Everbody in this Book,” she said. And patted my leg where she’d been pinching me.
“I’m sorry about your father,” I said, my mind beginning slowly to work again. Dora Garner, Prince’s wife, had skin the color of oak leaves in the fall, the result of her sweet African blood, but Major Jack was her father nonetheless.
“I know you are, Stephen. I’m sorry myself. I been prayin’ over him most of the night, while Prince has been out lookin’ for you.”
“Why’s he looking for me?”
“Keep you from doin’ yourself a harm. Keep you from drinkin’ yourself to death.”
I glanced around for my nice jar, but it was gone, and I knew if I ever saw it again, it would be holding pickles in Dora’s kitchen.
“You reckon Jack would want to go to heaven?” I asked, hoping to get a smile out of her. “I know he was your father and all, but he could be awful hard sometimes.”
“God a lot tougher than that man,” she said and patted her Bible. “Say so in here.”
* * *
BY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, we had the Asheville paper at the depot, and I knew that Jack’s funeral was set for ten o’clock the next morning. Ten o’clock meant I could take the early train. And given the responsibility of the camp, I would go and come in the same day; be back in Hot Springs on the evening train, for there was nothing for me in Asheville, after they were done at the cemetery.
I tried to talk Prince and Dora into going with me. But she would not leave home, even for her father, and Prince wouldn’t leave her behind, even to watch over me.
Dora’s mother, Mary Henderson, had been Mrs. Carrie’s maid, come up from South Carolina with her before the war, as a slave. And somehow, in the long tangle of their lives, she bore a daughter to the Major during the war, and yet stayed on after, living with Mrs. Carrie when she and the Major were apart.
Jack Rumbough had loved his black daughter, some say better than the white ones, who had scattered to Asheville and beyond. He had built her a house in Hot Springs and found Prince to marry her. Dora as quiet and shy as a spring morning. Prince as loud as a thunderstorm. And they’d been together ever since.
Thus, Prince became the closest thing to a brother I could ever have or want. Closest in understanding if not blood.
* * *
And so I missed him that Monday morning as I climbed aboard the southbound train, first upriver train of the day to Asheville. Called him a name or two as I walked the length of the dining car and into the passenger car, looking for a clean seat, as far away from other people as possible. I was wishing I had him to fuss at me, when, just as I was leaning to sit, I saw her.
Four seats away, she was sitting with her back to me, her head bowed over something in her lap. I could see the shoulders of a formal looking gray dress, buttoned up the back with small, black buttons. And a black velvet hat. There’s no rational reason I should have known her from this little evidence, and for a moment I doubted the instinct, but then I realized it was her neck that I knew. Thin, bare, bowed; Anna Ulmann, quite possibly the last person on earth I would have cared to see.
Before I could stop myself I walked the ten feet up the aisle, forming in my mouth the very words I had asked Dora Garner the morning before. What are you doing here? This time with a knife edge.
And standing beside her seat, I half said them. “What are you …?” And stalled as I realized that she was bent over some papers clutched in her lap—letters perhaps—and that she was crying.
She looked away, toward the window, shaking her head ever so slightly by way of response and lifted the letters in her hands, lifted them as if they were the answer to “What are you …?”
I walked back to where I had intended to sit, confused. Not confused—why was she there, on that train. Not confused—why was she crying, even. There could be a hundred reasons for either. But why did I feel so strongly against her? What did I care if she was weeping on a train?
And then the woman herself interrupted me. By sitting down opposite me, our knees almost touching.
“Mr. Robbins,” she said hoarsely, “I feel that I owe you an apology.” Her face was red and pinched. “I’m not sure why, but in some obscure way, I feel as though I’ve invaded your world and that you don’t like it.”
“That’s a pretty fair summary,” I said, and probably smiled, like a kid who’d been caught out.
“Is it that you don’t care for me personally?”
I shook my head slightly, not sure how to fend off her question. “No, I don’t think that’s it. There’s actually been a moment or two when I liked you well enough. When you fell down in Jane Gentry’s back yard …”
Her mask almost broke—whether to smile or cry it was impossible to say. “That was not my best moment.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was. I know I smile when I think about it.”
“Well, then, if it’s not me personally, is it the place where we find ourselves that makes you—?”
“On a train?” We were jerking into motion even as I said it.
“No, I mean the prison camp. The war. The—”
“It may just be me,” I said suddenly. “I’m pretty busted up in case you haven’t noticed.”
She leaned forward ever so slightly, staring at my face. “Physically?”
“No. Every other way, Mrs. Ulmann. Except that.”
“Anna,” she said. “Please.” And leaned back, again ever so slightly, still staring at my face.
“Are you leaving Hot Springs? Is that why you’re on this train?”
“I’m going to the funeral,” she admitted, and looked down at the letters, now folded into their envelopes, still in her hands. “You remember that I told you he was a friend of my father’s from many years ago.”
“Jack Rumbough?” I was incredulous.
She nodded. “Major James H. Rumbough. The man who—”
“Owned the Mountain Park?”
“I was going to say, adopted you.”
“He gave me a home,” I admitted.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she whispered. Again, she seemed on the verge of tears.
“But why are you crying? He didn’t take you in.”
“Not crying,” she whispered, and clenched her eyes tightly shut. “It’s just that his death reminded me of my father.” And then a hot tear did streak her face, that mask of self-control.
* * *
NOT KNOWING WHAT else to do, I reached over and patted her hands where they were clenched in her lap, and then she did the strangest thing. Perhaps because she thought I was reaching for them, she gave me the two envelopes, put them deliberately into my hands.
They were both from the Mountain Park, the standard green ink on thick, white paper that had been in use when I was a boy, herding cows and cleaning tables. They were addressed in a clear hand to Mister Reuben Ulmann of 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York City. And above the Park’s engraved emblem and return address was scrawled in the same ink “Rumbough.” I recognized Jack’s signature immediately as he had taught me to counterfeit it when I became manager, so I could sign the dozens of items a day he had no patience for.
I glanced up at her. She was swiping the tears away with the backs of her gloved hands, as unused to crying, I thought, as she was to touching. “Go ahead and open them,” she said. “You knew him …”
I held the envelopes to the shadowy light from the train window, angling them ’til I could make out the faded postmark. Hot Springs, North Carolina, and the dates. I opened the first one.
It held a single sheet of hotel stationary and was addressed to “Dear Reuben.” A short note thanking him for “the box of truly fine cigars” and for his kind words about the Mountain Park. Jack was glad that Reuben and his daughter had enjoyed their stay, and in his estimation, the place was “not the same without little Anna running furiously up and down the stars.” You old goat, I thought. Where did you learn a word like furiously?
“I think he misspelled stairs,” Anna whispered.
“He couldn’t spell worth a damn,” I said. “One of the reasons he didn’t write many letters.”
I handed her the first letter and opened the second. Still only a single sheet of stationary but this time the page was brim full.
I can apreciate much of what you say.
As you know, I have a mess of daghters myself but only a couple of them worth the trouble. The dark one, by the way, is one of good ones. The best perhaps.
And so I can apreciate how you fear for Anna now that her mother is gone. I have to tell you, thogh, I think she could do far worse than being raised up by a loving father. Just be kind, Reuben. I don’t believe that I was ever kind enough, except to Dora.
I believe every word you wrote about Anna by the way. She will be a beuty—hell, she is already. But more to the point, she has real, god-given talent. She should trust her talent—mare than any man. Her talent will be with her long after we are gone. Come on back down next summer
—and bring her with you.
He had signed it, not with a scrawled last name, as was his habit, but with his first name—Jack—what he had asked me to call him when I married one of his not-worth-the-trouble daughters.
It was my turn then, I confess. To fight back tears. I had known the man for nearly thirty years, seen him most every day that he was in Hot Springs, and now here was a side of him that I had never glimpsed, a friend that I had never known. And here was the evidence, handed to me on the way to his funeral.
“He must have loved you very much,” I finally managed to say. “Your father I mean.”
“I think that’s one of the reasons why I came down here,” she said. More in control of herself now than I was. “To find a way to trust my talent.”
I nodded. “And to find your father’s friend? Find Jack Rumbough?”
“He was not the main reason, but I assumed he would be here somewhere. Even after I learned that the Mountain Park was no longer a luxury hotel but a pri—”
“Internment camp. We try not to say prison.”
A bare smile. “Even after I found out the Mountain Park had been turned into an internment camp, I still thought I might find this kindly, old gentleman who had known my father. And instead I found fences and guards and … you.”
“That must have been a disappointment,” I said.
* * *
WE WERE QUIET for a long time then, or at least what felt like a long time. As the train labored upriver, past Stackhouse and Barnard, the river beside us going stone gray and then crystal again, as clouds came and went overhead. First warm, liquid light and then cool shade flooded in the window as we rounded the curves.
“Dora Garner,” I said finally.
“Hmmm?”
“Dora is the dark daughter he mentions in the letter … Prince’s wife.”
“Was Major Rumbough’s daughter? Is she—”
“African? Yes, she is. Half anyway. And you might as well call him Jack,” I said. “Since you’re getting to know him. Since he and your father were friends.”
“My father always talked about coming to the Mountain Park as if it was heaven on earth, trying to get me to remember it.”
“But you can’t?”
She shook her head. “Glimpses sometimes, but never anything solid.”
“Do you remember a short, stocky man? Little bit bowlegged. Scar on his forehead. With a long mustache that hung down on either side of his mouth?”
“Is that the … is that Jack?”
I nodded. “That’s him. Feisty as the devil, but charming when he wanted to be.”
“I wish I did remember him.” And with that one simple, forlorn statement, she became quite real to me for the second time, as in the day she fell in the garden.
We were silent again, for a space. The river kept its own peace, flowing north as we flowed south. We passed Alexander’s Station, where for years before the Civil War there had been an inn and drover’s station, with huge pens for cattle, horses, hogs, even geese and turkeys.
“The train track follows the old Buncombe Turnpike along the river,” I said to her. “Fifty years ago, there was an inn over there in the trees and yards for farmers driving their stock to market. Imagine a couple hundred half-wild turkeys being led up the road in the fall of the year, on their way to South Carolina to be sold at market. Some barefoot country girl with a sack of corn leading the old Tom out in front of the flock, and all the rest coming along, gobbling and pecking in the dirt.” She laughed quietly, whether at me or the turkeys I couldn’t say.
* * *
LATER, AS WE eased past the tobacco warehouses just north of Asheville, she in turn broke the silence. “Stephen, I know you don’t care for me. Ignorant city woman that I am. But I wonder if just for today you could put up with me. Help me find the church. Help me know who’s who.”
“I can walk along with you,” I said. “Jack would enjoy knowing you came all this way to sit beside his casket. Besides, you can be of help to me as well.”
“How?”
“Keep me from picking things up and throwing them. From cussing out stray family members. Keep me from hurting anybody.”
“Including yourself?”
“Including myself.”
She nodded grimly.
* * *
WE TOOK THE streetcar up to Pack Square from the station, noisy as it strained to climb the hill, but neither as crowded nor as dirty as I’d feared.
From the square, we walked down Church Street slowly, as I could feel her curiosity about the town radiate out around us. When we paused before crossing one street, she slipped her hand behind my elbow and, with the slightest pressure, brought me to a standstill. And I didn’t mind: either the pressure of her hand or being brought to heel. “Tell me where I am,” she requested. “What I’m seeing.”
And as we had fifteen minutes before the service, I pointed out the huge pile of dark bricks that passed for First Methodist down and across the street. A block farther at the foot of the long, sloping hill the Episcopal cathedral under construction.
“Cathedral?” she asked. “Really?”
I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, and she was smiling now in a faintly ironic, even playful way.
“Everybody calls it the high church,” I said. “Does that make it a cathedral?”
She looked at it critically. “I don’t think it’s high enough,” she said. “I was married in St. John’s Episcopal in New York with a ceiling so high that no one has ever seen it because of the smoke from the candles. Flocks of pigeons live their entire lives inside St. John’s.”
“That’s pretty damn high,” I admitted. “What was it like getting married in a cathedral?”
“I don’t remember,” she said after a moment. “All I remember is that the dress was so tight and the groom so serious and so scary that I almost fainted. I couldn’t breathe, which was surely a sign of things to come. Where did you get married?” And when I hesitated. “Good for the goose is good for the gander.”
“Right down there,” I said, with a painful constriction in my stomach. “Same place as the funeral. First Presbyterian. Serious and rich and very, very formal. I don’t think I ever saw the bride; she was wrapped up like a mummy.” I thought back. “A mummy dragging a sail. Which was probably also a sign of things to come. She did not like to take her clothes off under any circumstances.”
Anna leaned closer to whisper. “I’ll remember that when I see her today.”
Two elderly matrons frowned as they passed us, admonishing our laughter. You could tell they were on their way to the funeral.
* * *
THE INSIDE OF the First Presbyterian Church of Asheville, North Carolina was all dark wood and shadowy light filtered through somber stained glass. It had the feel of deep and straight-laced seriousness. It would have been fitting for a funeral except that I knew Jack Rumbough hated the place. His wife Carrie, whom he’d loved in his rough and off-hand way, had chosen this church for her daughters when they’d set up residence at the Hopewell Mansion in Asheville. The Episcopal bishop in Biltmore hadn’t suited Miss Carrie for some reason, and the old Scots minister here had paid court to her successfully. She had, in turn, used her own money to help fund the construction of this somber and high-minded edifice, in part so that her gaggle of daughters could bask in the social sun of a larger church. The daughters, chief among them Sarah Rumbough Robbins, had loved the fact that for years, First Presbyterian had been the home to Asheville’s richest and most affluent people, giving them the setting and audience they craved.
But Jack had hated it. Hated its sobriety and haughtiness. Hated its lack of humor. Once, after the church had refused to open its doors to the hoboes camped in the woods during a particularly bitter winter, Jack had taken a dozen of the weakest men out of the woods back to Hopewell in protest, as a way of thumbing his nose at the church fathers. Miss Carrie hadn’t minded; she herself immediately began making soup by the gallon. Three of the daughters, however, had refused to speak to their father until spring. Which was an unexpected blessing, or so he’d told me one day.
When Anna and I entered, we walked boldly halfway up the long center aisle and eased into a row opposite Craven Johnson, the Rumbough family attorney, who had taken on his portrait-in-oil aspect for the occasion. The portrait did turn its head ever so slightly toward me and wink one eye as Anna and I sat down on the hard bench.
“You didn’t tell me it was so … cold in here,” Anna whispered. And there was a chill in the air.
“Power of suffering.” I said back, enjoying leaning close to her hair to whisper. “Scots believe you can’t get to heaven without suffering.” And then we fell quiet as the family entered. Still, though, she did not remove her hand from my arm until the procession of the family had passed, and I retained the warmth of her touch as they marched on down the aisle.
They came in order, as the sons and daughters of a powerful man are like to do, conscious of their value and their place. J. Edwin Rumbough, the oldest son of course, came first, with his shadowy wife. My former brother-in-law, Ed, who somehow in the tangled skein of years had come so to despise me. Ed, whom I knew could not be trusted for a moment. Then Anna, or Nan, as her mother had taught us out of habit to call her, widowed and alone. Elizabeth, or Bessie, having married a sober man since the unexplained death of her first and famous husband, the son of a President. Then Henry the attorney, who had enough sense to stay away from Asheville and Ed’s long shadow; and whose sickly wife must have stayed home in Columbia even for her father-in-law’s funeral. Sarah, or Sadie, who’d picked me up out of the gutter for a few years, holding fast to the arm of a tall, beautifully dressed man whom I did not recognize. God help him, I thought to myself involuntarily. Then Caroline, blessed Caddie, the spiritual one, who could no doubt see her father safely now into heaven. She had the arm of Johnny, the youngest, whom I barely knew at all, but who seemed more supported by his sister than supportive of her. Taken together, they were an impressive and even intimidating crew. Pale, intelligent, over-bred, as alert as hawks, even in mourning.
As Sadie passed with her aristocratic giant, Anna stole a glance at me, and I nodded. She gave me the slightest and most secretive of smiles.
The funeral sermon was delivered by the Reverend Dr. Robert F. Campbell, the same stern Scotsman who had preached Miss Carrie’s funeral four years before and who had left Jack in a rage for using the occasion to threaten us all with hell fire. Campbell was a tall, balding man with impeccable black clothes and a superbly rational approach to eternity. So cold that I had always imagined that like Shakespeare’s Caesar, his piss froze before it hit the ground.
As you might expect of a Scots cleric, born and educated in the Highlands, he praised Jack’s industry. He praised his contributions to the community. He praised his gifts to his large family. But then Dr. Robert F. Campbell did something I never would have expected him to do. He told the truth.
“James Henry Rumbough had no affection for me,” he admitted suddenly, laying down his prepared notes and removing his glasses. “He once ordered me out of his house when I was visiting his dying wife.” I saw Ed look up suddenly, as if to head off the impropriety of what was coming. “He and I argued more than once about the very existence of God. Once …” Campbell actually smiled, something I’d never seen him do. “Once, he even spit tobacco juice all over my shoes for telling him he might roast in hell.”
“That’s the Major!” shouted a strong voice from the balcony.
“He was not a Christian man in the sense of church attendance and showy prayers and his name on a prominent pew. But every year without fail, he secretly gave me a thousand dollars to spend on the poor people of the town at Christmas. And every year, without fail, he told me that he’d drag my carcass through the streets if the money didn’t go straight where it was aimed.
“Six months ago, he told me one evening that he had never known his own father. That he knew him to see him, saw him often enough on the streets of Greenville, Tennessee where he grew up. Occasionally even at the dinner table. But the man had no time for him, had no time for his own son who passed him in the street. That his father was a tough man who could not speak without curses and who could not reach out without striking. And that his father had died suddenly and unexpectedly when James Henry Rumbough was still just a boy. More than anything in his whole life, he told me, he had wanted to know his own father. To talk with him man-to-man over a cup of coffee and to ask him simply how he did.”
Damn Dr. Robert F. Campbell, I thought. Damn him for knowing the truth and telling it. I shut my eyes to wall up the tears there. I knew I was close to bursting. And I confess that I groped in Anna Ulmann’s lap for her hand.
“Who then, I ask you, has known his own father?” Campbell had shifted his stance; his voice was rising in intensity if not in volume. “Who has seen his face in the moment of its nakedness? Who has heard his voice in the stillness of the night? And where, now, can we find the comfort of that strong arm, and the solace of that deep voice? … Where can we go that he will again lay his hand upon our troubled heads and bestow with strength the chance to rest, to lie down and to sleep? I only say to you now that James Henry Rumbough walks with his own father, who has waited for him along the ridge line. With his own father who had no time for him on this earth. With his own father whom he never knew until the old man greeted him at the gate and caught him in his arms.”
Campbell sat down. To the surprise of the family and the dismay of his congregation, many of whom had hoped to hear hot coals shoveled on the high and mighty Rumboughs.
So far as I know, everything Campbell said was true of Jack Rumbough; even as a gruff and grizzled man he had longed for his father’s voice. Even worse, everything Campbell had said was true for me as well. No man had ever replaced the father I had lost except, perhaps, Jack Rumbough. And so Campbell had said these things and sat down, leaving the church ringing with the sudden quiet.
* * *
STILL, THOUGH, I sat frozen, managing through the ferocity with which I gripped Anna’s hand and the companion pressure I now felt from Craven Johnson on the other side, to hold what felt like a river behind my eyelids.
“Are you all right, boy?” Craven whispered in my ear, his voice coarsened to sandpaper from years of cigars and his breath stinking from the same long habit.
I nodded. Not easily, I confess, feeling a sudden painful stiffness in my neck, but I nodded.
“You know where my office is. After the graveside service is over, you come down to my office. We’ve got something very important to see about. Come at …”
My eyes were still closed, but I could feel his body shift as he pulled out his pocket watch. “Come at three o’clock and come sober.” He must have looked across at Anna.
“He’ll be there,” she whispered.