The Last Ballad(63)

He’d always viewed Katherine this way. His earliest memories of her were rose colored with her easy nature, and he often caught himself remembering her as the fifteen-year-old girl who’d helped him and her distraught father load boxes of her dead brother’s books and clothes and belongings onto the train platform in Raleigh all those years ago. Richard and Katherine’s brother David had been college roommates at Chapel Hill, and Richard could still feel his throat where it had cinched tight with worry and uncertainty about what to say to David’s father, a man who at that time had been no older than Richard was now. Although they’d hardly spoken to one another, Katherine’s soft eyes had peered at him over boxes and stacks of her brother’s books as if to assure him that his sadness at her brother’s death was something that would pass, something that even so young a girl knew would not last forever.

Richard, on the other hand, had always felt constricted, confined, unsure of which way to step or how to hold his smile or where to look or what to read into the faces of the people before him. He’d been drawn to Katherine because she’d always been the one to lead him through their shared emotional territory. They’d never spoken of it, but both he and Katherine knew that he’d returned from the war even more cautious, guarded, and uncomfortable than he’d been before he left. Claire had only been seven years old at the start of the war, but she was almost eleven by the time he returned, and it had seemed that the two of them found themselves strangers to one another, as if their lives had continued in those four intervening years on separate trajectories that would never realign.

His difference upon returning wasn’t simply marked by an emotional distance. A physical bulwark had been set in place as well. In bed at night, it wasn’t uncommon for him to leap toward Katherine in his sleep if her toe were to graze his leg. His hands had even once found her neck before he opened his eyes and saw her terrified face in the soft predawn light coming through the curtains. Loud noises—bursts of laughter, a piece of silverware falling to the floor, music—often provoked the same terrified feeling as an invisible body touching his own in the darkness of his bedroom. The only thing he could control was his work at the mill, and his life disappeared into it. He often lost all awareness of time. Days, weeks, and months seemed to pass, their goings only marked by what kind of hat and coat he wore during his walk down the hill to the mill office. He found that the stiller he remained, the quieter the world around him became, and it wasn’t long before he recognized stasis as his favorite posture, no matter whether he were standing in the carding room at the mill or sitting at his desk or lying in bed beside Katherine, willing his eyes to remain closed and his hands to stay by his sides if and when something of her body touched his in the night.

He never knew for certain what terrified him so. In the beginning he explained his outbursts in terminology she might understand: “Bombs,” he’d say when she’d ask him what he was dreaming of when he screamed himself awake. But as the war receded into the distance and time lurched forward he found it more difficult to think of the war, much less talk of it, even in the smallest and shortest of terms, so he found other ways to explain his terrors. “I was dreaming that someone was in the house,” he’d say. “Someone was trying to hurt you and the baby.” And other times he would shrug his shoulders beneath the cloak of darkness and roll to his side and pretend to fall back asleep.

At the Lytles’ party, Richard had felt hemmed in by the number of people, especially the colored help: young, dark-skinned waiters who carried trays of champagne and wore neckcloths and long blue coats festooned with brass buttons; middle-aged mammies in frocks and headscarves who served food from great silver bowls; an old, shoeless bald man Mr. Lytle had introduced as “Uncle Peter,” who wore only a muslin shirt and tattered breeches stood in the parlor, a squeaky violin hoisted to his shoulder.

George Lytle had spent most of the evening with a drink in one hand, his other resting on the mantel, above which an oil portrait of his aged grandfather loomed. To anyone who would listen, Lytle told story after story of his grandfather’s bravery on the battlefield, his family’s stake in the history of the South, the duality of war that awards both honor and ruin to the survivors. Lytle spoke as one who’d been to war himself, but Richard had known better. The only war Lytle had ever known was the one he’d heard about and read about and talked about during dozens of parties just like this one.

Although Richard had been prepared not to like Lytle even before meeting him, he’d absolutely hated him after that evening at their plantation. Since then his heart had recoiled at the idea of handing over Claire and his future grandchildren to the family. He and Katherine had no illusions that the couple would do anything other than settle in Wilmington after the wedding in October. But “to lose a daughter is to gain a son,” they always say, and, after all, wasn’t a son what he had always wanted? Of course, he’d been proud to have a healthy child after what had happened earlier in their marriage, especially a child as wonderfully bright and kind as Claire had been from the moment she was born; however, memories of his own father and grandfather pulled at him, arriving with the realization that he lacked a son to carry on the family name and the family business, a business he was certain Paul would have little to no interest in inheriting and certainly no interest in managing. Even Richard’s grandfather, Yancey McAdam, hadn’t had that much interest in managing the very mill he’d founded. It was almost something he’d come by in the course of laying railroads across the state, beginning in Charlotte, where he’d opened a bank with local investors in 1867. He arrived in Gaston County a few years later and followed the branches of the Catawba River west, where he discovered that the river was making men rich by powering their whiskey stills and cotton mills. Yancey decided that the cotton mill had the best chance of running itself and creating passive income once he’d moved on, which he did in 1881 after the McAdam Mill was up and operating. Yancey continued to lay railroad tracks through the piedmont toward Asheville and beyond, where he literally tore down ridges and blew holes in stone to cut passages through the Blue Ridge Mountains, for Tennessee and the open country of the West waited on the other side. Richard had always pictured his grandfather as a man who only had to touch the earth for it to spring to life under the warmth of his open palm. In Richard’s imagining, railroad lines poured from the old man’s fingertips and snaked across the landscape. Eleven children sprang from his flesh with ease. One cotton mill and then another rose like mushrooms from the damp woods along the South Fork of the Catawba River. McAdamville grew into a fiefdom where Yancey McAdam was the too-often-absent king.