The Man from Sandfort: A Fable of Eternity
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| Fort Morgan, Mobile Bay |
There are many communities like Sandfort: a log store that had been a trading post and barns and houses scattered like daffodils in a field, along a muddy highway and under yard trees on scrub-hedged lanes. And there are many men like me--born on the bottom end of the planter class, educated before Fort Sumpter in county academies, lieutenants under Lee in Virginia, returning home to farm scraps of inherited land spared by tax collectors. At cotton-picking time, black children fill my fields. I never married. Neighbors say I drink. I do, but no more than my father before the War, when the vice was an honorable badge of idleness. In late evenings, with whisky, I read the remains of his library saved before the house burned.
Since the War, I have lived as a human relic with more past than future, more rank than power, more education than use for it. In name a gentleman, I am a slave to the exhausted land like the blacks I sweat beside, freedmen re-enslaved by poverty. Fenced in by the horizon, lashed by the sun, we work for shares of a scant cotton crop. Only solitude distinguishes me--that and a larger share--but after taxes, tithes, Christmas gifts, and other obligations of noblesse, I am chief only of the poor.
But even as a boy I held in my mind's recesses the loud sea, the salt wind. And in my thirty-ninth year, I coughed blood. Not much. A clot smaller than a pea trailed by a hair-fine filament, it floated in phlegm like a fertilized egg in a skillet. I stared at the deadly crimson in my spittoon, and fear washed over me.
I lived cheaply after the War, first to pay the tax collector, then out of habit. I ate collards, black-eyed peas, fatback, and cornbread cooked by a tenant woman, shared with her children. My furniture and house (once an overseer's cottage) were inherited. Whisky was my only luxury. So, a dollar here, two bits there, I had saved a sum (it is ungentlemanly to specify numbers) which I counted on my writing table.
It was March when the deadly egg broke in my spittoon. As spring warmed, the signs remained rare, but I had seen consumption work and knew not to be hopeful. Springs blooming with promise of immortality are the natural course of dying. Still, I thanked God, or whatever invisible hand had given me respite, and planned a trip as soon as the chill left the air. My parting instructions to Lem, my chief tenant, were an empty ritual. I knew how little I would be missed.
There is a fort, I had heard, on a finger of land in Mobile Bay. On its beaches (a veteran passing through Sandfort said) waves curled and broke over white sand, so the Confederate garrison might have felt on holiday, not at war, until Farragut came with ironclads and mortars, and waves of fire and concussion washed the fort, crumbling the brick walls of the barracks within. Then, with yankees advancing over land, Fort Morgan raised a white flag over its rubble, so that Union troops were soon enjoying a holiday, not a war, on that finger of land in the bay where now only a lighthouse keeper is left to see the waves curl and break over white sand.
The weather was fair all the way down river, and from my chair on the upper deck, I watched the shoreline drift. I paid little attention to my fellow passengers, all strangers, but instead watched the passing land for changes in flora and fauna, flattening lines of distant hills when the banks shallowed. I studied the strata of riverbank, hungry for antediluvian sand.
Finally, the banks fell low, the water wide and sluggish, and there were fields (I will not call them forests) of spindly pines like bottle brushes, the stems unearthly slender, the high tufts of needles sparse gray-green. And below them, along the marshy edges, thickets of gray brush and flat evergreens flourished where the pines sickened. There was salt in the earth, deep around the taproots. The sea had been here, and I welcomed its touch.
At Mobile I was first on the ramp for the Pensacola boat. I coughed in the heat but waved off help and settled on a hard deck bench. I breathed thirstily, soothed by a pocket flask. On my lap, a carpet bag held a change of clothes, tins of food, and bottles of whisky.
My fellow passengers gathered at the rails, feeling the boat churn and pound, vast labors to set one man on the Fort Morgan wharf. It was not a popular place. They stared at me as the ramp grated back, as the steamboat shuddered and sloshed away from that dead place. I watched it smoke into deep waters, turn alongshore, and shrink behind the haze of its stacks.
Except for the lighthouse and the cottage under it, the land was all sand and gray scrub. A man with a long, black beard waited by the yard-gate, two more faces at second-story windows. They studied what the steamboat had disgorged, an inebriate farmer from Sandfort.
"Morning, sir," I smiled.
He stared a while before replying in a dark accent, "Morning."
I set down my bag, still smiling, but the keeper neither softened nor raised his hand from the gate. His black brows lowered.
"Sir," I said, "could you tell me where to find the fort. I've come to see it." I did not mention the sea.
His eyes cut inland.
Suddenly, like Ulysses knowing Ithica, I saw the flat-topped dune--larger, broader, more regular than natural--that rose and sprawled in all directions, the sand-banked counterscarp of Fort Morgan.
Beyond the sandy rise and below it spread a great pentagonal star of masonry, humanly geometric, a hard mind-shape hidden from the sea by sand embankments. General Floyd's sand fort and all the earth-and-plank emplacements of my Virginia campaigns had not prepared me for its size. Here was a bone indeed in the craw of time, a shape that wind and rain would not soon swallow.
I climbed into the dry moat around the fort. Gun ports stared empty from massive brickwork. Finally, rounding a diamond-shaped bastion, a corner of the great star, I saw ahead the main gate, its rotten doors ajar. Inside, a tunnel was flanked by vaulted chambers--beyond, the glare of the yard. All of this hugeness, these great arched rooms circling the yard with musical regularity, lay empty under the sun. My footsteps ground into sand, echoed off walls.
For hours I wandered through the domed crypts, the giant-tall steps to the battlements, and the gap-toothed yard until one bottle was empty. Finally, as long shadows joined to become twilight, I settled my carpetbag under my head in one catacomb-like room.
At first the sound might have been my own heart, but it clarified and congealed into the thunder of bombardment, a sound familiar from my months with Lee. In the first decade of peace, I had dreamed that sound, sitting up in darkness and sweat. But this was no dream. I was awake. I remembered where I lay and when. I felt the carpetbag under my neck.
Other sounds filled my waking ears: scraping footsteps, voices clarifying out of the din, shouts, mutterings, distant screams, rifle shots. Two yards from my shoulder, a marine stepped back from a smoking port, bit off a cartridge, and rammed it into his rifle as another took his place. He aimed into the dry moat around the fort as a shell burst like lightning. I saw their shapes, not as in a dream, but shaded and palpable: halos of two-day beards, fear-creased faces, wrinkled jackets, sagging belts, and scuffed boots--all the grained reality of their flesh. I breathed a battle-stench of sweat and sulfur.
But they did not see me with my carpet bag and in my Sunday suit, crawling out of their way as another shell flashed. A rain of mortar salted the room, shocked from the bricks overhead. The second marine leaned into the port but held his fire. From the parapets above us, Confederate cannon answered Farragut's gunboats. I was seeing the battle for Mobile. The past had fallen like a curtain around me. At first I was pleased that I might die in battle here, not of blood-streaked lungs, a body traitor to itself. With leaden detachment, I watched the violence around me. Vulnerable flesh still cloaked my soul, but I felt no fear.
My body's reality, I soon discovered, was an illusion. I do not mean my its materiality. I still wore everyday arms and legs, still breathed with diseased lungs. I felt the ache and weight of them. But raising my fingers to my face, I understood why the marines had not seen me. I was transparent. Even to my own eyes, the fingers were so vague that the shapes of battle showed through them. My clothes too, my carpet bag, were of the same smoky stuff. I was a ghost.
Not that I could sink through the floor or pass through walls. Nor did I feel safe from injury. Farragut's shells could as easily maim the smoke-body I stood in, my ephemeral living flesh, as the dark, eternal bodies of the dead marines at the rifle port.
I say dead even though, as I watched, they moved, loaded, fired. I knew what they were. They were the spirits of this place, real and palpable, fighting in the eternal flesh of death. And I, the thing dying of consumption, was visibly less real in my body of matter which the light of dying shown through. I was a ghost, an unreal body soon to dissolve into earth, and these changeless inhabitants of the place (or of every place if we only saw them) were realities. While my own life since the war had passed like water, they had remained here, never leaving their stations. And if the battle should end, the fort in ruins, it would be rebuilt again and again until its rebuildings were like grains of sand. Eternity chasmed at my feet, swallowing historic and geologic time, multiplying it, and then annihilating its multiples and their multiples until it swallowed itself and became nothing.
I woke, though I do not remember sleeping, to the roar of water. I had found the sea. It washed my feet. I sat up, coughing, and batted at damp sand on my clothes. The fort had vanished. Marines and arches of brick had melted before the crash of surf. The sky was cloudless, the sun hot. I hauled my carpetbag to a ridge of dry grains, folded my coat, and rolled up my trousers. Sea-wind breathed exhalation only.
I sat like a child on the last dry ridge, feet outstretched into quicksandishness, and scooped up a double handful of grains. I piled up sand and shaped it over the line where the sea had dropped small shells. I shaped a fort of towers, moats, and walls.
But soon the farthest edges of the waves touched and gleamed the outer walls, filling and abolishing the moat with sliding grains, and the walls slumped to dune-shapes that the waves soon crashed over, making a pool of the inner fort. Damp to the waist, I saw my fort dissolve to a blurred ring in the incoming tide. I still watched where it had been under the sliding foam.
If I had looked up, I might have seen the black shape, or heard him if it had not been for the surf. The dissolution of my fort filled me, so I started when he spoke.
"Morning." It was the keeper, his brows arched this time, amused at the sand-caked fool I must have seemed. "You find the fort alright?" he teased me, his beard blowing.
"Thank you, sir. I did."
I stood. My legs felt cold. I pressed my ribs and coughed.
His forehead creased.
"You spent the night in that damned place, didn't you?"
And a vast, flat dune resolved behind him. Fort Morgan was still there, of course. More years must pass before it melted.
"Yes, sir."
I still clutched my chest, lungs streaked with pain. Sea wind chilled my wet clothes. I coughed again.
Maybe charity was behind his frown, or maybe he saw my condition and wished to be spared the trouble of burying me. "Boat comes in about an hour."
I held my breath, holding back the tickle until he was down the beach, then coughed and spat as if turned inside out. It lay bright on the sand, a streak of red, a deadly egg that sea-foam touched and dissolved. My breathing settled, its rattle subsumed in an oceanic roar.
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