by Jack Carneal
When he was just starting out working for the city of Richmond in the mid or late 50s, 1957 or ‘58 maybe—Eugenie and I were married in ’61, Ogden was born 1961, Cammie in ’64 and Fitz in ’66, he said to Sally— Tick was asked to teach one semester of a course up at the University of Virginia. When people claim surprise that Tick had once taught at such an august institution, and he not even a professor, he says This was back when all you had to do was be white and be able to sign your name and they’d let you in up there. He’d go on: God only knew how it became such a quote unquote great school because at that time it was almost like a community college, as evidenced by the fact that they asked a guy in his late 20s to teach a course in Urban Planning. One evening after class and before driving back down to Richmond he decided to go over to the Virginian and have a beer and a club sandwich. This was in the days where it wasn’t a capital crime to have a beer, maybe even three or four, before getting in your car and driving any distance, and oftentimes it was considered both a good idea to drink a beer while driving in order to remain alert and good form to offer someone a beer as they left your house. You did not want it to be three or four bourbons or gins but in those days there was a clear distinction between a beer drinker and a liquor drinker, the latter more likely to make one drunk. Both Tick and Euge knew drunks who sobered up by only drinking beer for a period of time. Sometimes it worked, too. Mostly it didn’t, of course, alcohol being the poison that it is.
Outside it was bitter cold and a wind blew down from the mountains. The air smelled of smoke and snow. Tick entered the moist heat that smelled of wool and sat at the bar and barely had his first sip of beer before the place went dead quiet for just a moment—literally, one second—before the din came back up, as if a mute button on a stereo had been hit, re-hit, just like that. A cold body smelling of pipe smoke and cold tweed sat next to him and he moved on his stool to give the man some room—it was a man of course because in those days no woman of any repute would come by herself to a bar and of course this was long before women were admitted to the University—well he turned and of course the tiny man in the tweed hunting coat was William Faulkner. He ordered a beer and peered over at Tick with his inky black eyes, holding the glass up towards him, nodding and then drinking from it.
Tick didn’t know much about him. He’d won the Nobel in ’49 or ’50 but truth be told not many people around Richmond or Charlottesville for that matter had read book one of his. Tick’d never been much of a reader, even at Hampden-Sydney. At the time it was still considered somewhat decadent to be much of a reader of new books, what with everyone having some relation who was still alive who could recall eating barn rats and boiled cornstalk stew after the war. Or had an uncle who’d lived on sileage and coon while sleeping out in the woods among the ferns, waiting for the Yankees to depart their family lands, having depleted said lands of all sustenance.
And everybody had re-joined Presbyterian churches so they could be like their joyless Scottish ancestors who read only dirt-stained copies of the Bible.
Faulkner was teaching at Virginia, everyone knew that. And that he was a celebrity. Tick read later about him being a smallish fellow, too small to be admitted to the army, and that night he found what would one day be written about Faulkner to be true. He was small and petite, not stocky but strong seeming, like a muscular little Jack Russell terrier or another kind of work dog, a corgi say.
They passed a beery hour or so there at the Virginian and mostly what Faulkner was interested in knowing was about Tick’s family. Later when Ticknor told other people this story many hoped that Faulkner would be more interested in football or politics or art but the truth is that all he wanted to know about the family, particularly when Tick told him that the family had been in Virginia forever. When he mentioned the name Tyndall Faulkner’s little beady eyes perked right up for a second. Tick found that Faulkner was obsessed with Virginia in kind of a prim and ladylike way. Family and names, estates, counties, cousins, relations. Tick told him that there were Tyndalls in Virginia since the beginning of time, true, and that for much of that time they were slave-owning dirt farmers who happened to still own one of the original James River plantation houses on which Rolfe’s Spanish tobacco had first been planted—not entirely true as far as the dirt-farming went but back then Tick felt that any connection to his landed gentry past was something still unresolved, tainted by not quite shame but instead the uncontrollable urge to white lie about it, because he, Ticknor Randolph Balfour Tyndall, was one of the young bucks who was going to remove Richmond from its past into the future and talking about how his forebears had made a fortune from leasing their land to Mancunian slave traders to use as a barracoom, then furthered that fortune by buying an enormous property along the York River which was used for the same purpose, well, that his family had made much of their long disappeared fortune from the slave trade was not the thing a young progressive Richmonder exactly wanted on his resume.
Even though Faulkner had a greater sense of his own family, formerly of South Carolina and now Mississippi and how they played into the much more dramatic chapters of the American upheaval that took place in the deepest parts of the South he had, Tick could tell, something of an attraction to the more Anglophiliac tendencies of the Upper Southerner and, more particularly, the Virginian. Aristocracy meant something to Faulkner, more than it did to Tick, or at least more than Tick would let on. Faulkner knew that the influx of Irish and Scottish and French and African immigrants filling up the crevices of the Deep South were diluting the illusory vision he had of the New World. The deep southern whites had ruined something that still, according to his imagination, existed up here in the state of Virginia, the idea of European societal structures and landed gentry. He was fascinated to learn, for example, that Tick’s forebears had leased land for a time from Shirley Plantation and later, Westover. He was interested to know that Tick’s girlfriend at the time, and just a few years later his wife, had as her middle name De La Warr, as her family had decided at some point in time that they would not be related to Pocahontas (as so many Virginians claim) or Robert E. Lee (ditto) but instead the wife of Sir Thomas West, an early Governor and one of the first large landowners in Virginia. The truth was that Eugenie was from waterman stock and the first of her family to attend college, her grandfather having owned a sail-powered buyboat that he used to run up to DC and Baltimore full of watermelons and tomatoes from the farms in Mathews County along the Chesapeake, and there was no aristocracy about her family, still spread out along the middle and lower parts of the Chesapeake Bay from Reedville to Hampton and all still having that weird Guinea accent that Tick found as incomprehensible as Cajun.
Faulkner said suddenly, “The Tyndalls built Dovecote, no?”
And Tick was able to answer that he’d grown up there. He’d just had Thanksgiving dinner at Dovecote.
“Ah,” Faulkner had said, taking a drink from his beer.
“We ate in the formal dining room,” Tick continued, “which when I was young seemed as long as a football field and which I could not see one end of due to my father’s habit of turning the electricity off every afternoon at five.” They’d eaten in the late afternoon by candlelight. Outside grey flakes drifted down through the oaks, veiling the river at the foot of the yard. A door at one end of the dining room was nailed shut. The roof over that wing of the house was almost totally rotten and rather than taking out a loan to get it fixed the General was willing to let nature have her way with it. Tick’s father, the stubborn old bastard, had nodded his head proudly when Tick had asked him if this was the best means of securing the future of the house.
Tick will tell anyone who asks that Faulkner knew just about everything there was to know about the great James River plantations like Shirley, Westover and Dovecote.
He knew, for example, that the main building at Dovecote was rebuilt in the 1760s by a cousin of Thomas West, for whom Westover, built by William Byrd III, the son of the founder of Richmond, was named, a distant cousin of Eugenie's forebears. Westover is twenty miles by road from Dovecote, which is closer to Williamsburg and the true Tidewater—Hampton, Newport News, Yorktown and Gloucester County across the York River—than it is to Richmond. Thomas Jefferson himself helped with the redesign in 1788 of the downstairs of Dovecote, advising that the doors be widened to allow for more air to flow through the house. Not long after Tick’s forebear took Jefferson’s advice, Washington named Jefferson Secretary of State. Faulkner also knew that the ballroom added in 1847 by was built for one purpose and one purpose only: so the Virginia Reel could be danced. It was a dance that required real estate, the partners spinning away from the center and circling the wide, broad room, the sound of fiddle music clear above the din of footsteps. Later McClellan’s forces came through Dovecote’s property during their Peninsula Campaign of 1862, ending up at Evelynton down the river, where Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson awaited the Yankee general, sent down to Tidewater by Lincoln in fear that the rebs were moving on DC and would soon cross the Potomac. In the type of coincidence that seemed all too regular in Richmond, Wallace Minge West, one of Eugenie’s forebears, was killed at Evelynton and his body brought back to Dovecote. A brown discoloration in the old wooden planks of the dining room floor is said to be his blood and of course being from Virginia Tick never had any reason to question this and not many reasons to think it strange that the woman he married was able to see the blood of her forebear smeared across her future husband’s floor.
“Ruffin fired the first shot,” Faulkner said absently, looking into his beer. He was right, of course. According to legend it was Edmund Ruffin, a Virginian, who fired that shot at Fort Sumter.
“A Tyndall was standing next to him,” Tick said. “But nobody talks about that.”
“Not much reason to, I suppose,” said Faulkner with a shrug.
Later, Ogden, Corbin and Fitz were in the same carpool for cotillion with the Ruffin children. For a very short period of time before she moved back in with Louis Corbin dated James Ewell Brown Stuart Fisher, a lawyer in Richmond who was, of course, a direct descendant of JEB Stuart, and Robert Edward Lee the something-or-other became a friend of Fitz’s when Fitz was teaching at Collegiate; the Lee taught at a prep school in Northern Virginia. Tick couldn’t tell Faulkner this—it hadn’t happened yet—but certainly Faulkner had, in his short time in Virginia, already met the forebears of these people in and around Charlottesville and Richmond, and it was being among this kind of living history that allowed him to recognize that what he said about the past not being dead, not even being past, was not as hyperbolic or phony as might’ve crossed his mind when saying it.
Dovecote was a barracoom for a time, was it not?
It wasn't mischief in Faulkner's eyes, no, something more like arrogance. How dare he know this?
Tick answered his question as the General always had when asked the same: with a conspiratorial smile that all white men of a certain class share, the Scot-Irish hearty fellow well met grin, and hand quickly upon Faulkner's tight little shoulder, Whatever money was made my friend is no longer in anyone's pocket.
Looking at his watch, Tick finished his beer and bought another round. Against my better judgment, he said to Mr Faulkner, whose face had hardened, Tick noted, his eyes blacker than they’d been and ridged by crow’s feet. Snow was falling more thickly now, hitting Main Street and disappearing, but below Charlottesville on Route 250 back towards Richmond there were only two lanes, and in and out of woods, Tick could imagine the black ice…Faulkner watched Tick glance at his wrist and held up his hand.
“Two short bourbons,” Faulkner said to the barkeep.
Tick thought later that this was not a gesture of kindness but Faulkner was instead offended by this young buck with unkempt hair deigning to look at his watch twice, to even suggest that he might want to leave the company of the esteemed writer. Tick didn’t mind, by this point. Later he’d find himself driving down 250 towards Richmond with a hand over one of his eyes to better aim the car the proper direction on the road, every now and again hearing the clutch slip as the wheels missed purchase in the slickened highway, but now he was full of chummy joy, lubricated by the beers and also by the notion that anytime anyone entered the Virginian they looked immediately to the bar and remarked that Faulkner sat there at the bar talking to the young professor of Urban Development.
Tick told Faulkner that he grew up at Dovecote but also in and around Richmond, that his parents also owned a house on Monument Avenue, and had therefore known people from when he was very young who had grandparents or great grandparents who knew (if they did not remember themselves) the period of reconstruction following the Civil War. You didn’t have to try too hard to find someone who’d heard a story told by someone whose mother piled kindling onto feather mattresses and set the bed afire as they left Richmond for the west. You didn’t have to scratch too deep into the history of a black somebody like Henry, Tick’s age exactly who worked for the Tyndall family forever and whose father worked for Tick’s father, to find that family member who was the first to try to set up a life as a free man or woman, Tick said. It wasn’t like Henry and Tick sat around jawing about his slave ancestors—I respected him too much for that, said Tick, besides there was too much work to do on the house and farm—but in a rural area like King James County was then it was also impossible not to hear stories about his family's own history that some days made Tick almost ill to his stomach, soul sick, unable hardly to get up from the couch. In fact Henry’s great grandfather and great grandmother were both owned by the descendants of the Byrd family, who originally founded Richmond, and while some of Henry’s ancestors moved to Richmond as so many people did in the early part of the century, black and white, the areas surrounding Richmond having been largely devastated by the Union troops, Henry’s immediate ancestors, his great grandfather and great grandmother, founded and ran a general store not far from Route 5 near Dovecote. Henry’s father fixed small engines before there was even a mechanic down there. And you knew that really not too far as the crow flies was the Nat Turner rebellion over on the Southside. Henry’s distaff uncle couldn’t find work in Richmond and went deeper into the part of Virginia south of the James, deep down in the Southside to pick the peanuts or to work on one of the pig farms down there and it was Henry who had to drive down to Suffolk later in the year to pick up his uncle’s body from the Suffolk County morgue where he’d been taken after being cut down from a tree, having been lynched for no reason save meanness—
Faulkner sipped from his whiskey and made a movement with his head that Tick took to mean he, the great writer, was interested in Tick’s stories, and why not?
North of the James one sensed, said Tick, that the civilizing effects of Richmond, said with only a small amount of irony, because of the cultural class, the educated classes whose families could afford to send them to the University here and to VMI, to MCV, and the fortunes of those families who wanted to build a great city and so funded museums and the like, where—mostly though that the inhabitants of the city were aware of not so much their shared past but instead that the rest of the world believed a stereotype about the South, about the capital of the South, and while many were still proud of this illusion—that’s what it was, said Tick to Faulkner, nothing more than an illusion, because of course the South never could’ve existed as we’ve invented it since then: there was never a unified cause to lose, and this idea that all Southerners were some social monolith made from the same base material was absurd, especially when one considers that many Virginians were still so strongly Anglophiliac that it wasn’t hard to imagine that a Tory strain of snobbery still ran through much of whatever aristocratic blood remained in Virginia. “Do you think Virginians cared about Alabamans?” Tick asked Faulkner. “About Georgians? About Louisianians or Mississipians? Do you honestly think they thought their ancestors fought for the same reasons?” Consider, he continued, the industrialists building pre Civil War Richmond, the train magnates and iron works at Tredegar, these new business owners did not care about slave labor—but then the inhabitants of Richmond were given a role to play, a role which suited so many so well, that is or the tragic and self-pitying losers of a way of life whatever that meant, what with the tarry mud of the Tidewater barely washed off their asses? Faulkner’s eyebrows shot up at Tick’s utterance of this plural noun.
“For years,” Tick said, “owning Dovecote was nothing more than a financial liability. Whatever economic gain my ancestors achieved from being landed had long since disappeared even though my grandfather did make a good living using whatever money was left to buy up urban parcels of land in Richmond for pennies on the dollar after the war. It was he who built the house on Monument Avenue after establishing the hardware store on Broad…and he whose lack of care allowed both houses to all but crumble. So when I grew up going down to Dovecote to visit my grandparents it was a shell of a place which I am now undertaking to consider to renovate… The point is that a city like Richmond was still finding its feet in the early part of the century, most of its industrial base having been burnt to the ground, even as it exploded growth-wise. So even in the 50s when I started working for the city it was collectively still trying to figure out how to meet the future having had such a catastrophic past—
Faulkner said he knew how Tick felt, that Rowan Oak was a similar burden as Dovecote and now only Estelle and his daughter Jill, plus his step-children Malcolm and Victoria, were the only ones living there in that ramshackle house and that when he was home he turned the heat off.
“It just doesn’t get that cold in Oxford,” he said. “Compared to here, anyhow.” Faulkner looked at the door.
“By the time I was hired,” Tick said, “it was common knowledge that the entire city of Richmond was falling apart. There was the old section that had been rebuilt after it was burned when Richmonders left en masse when MacClellan’s troops gathered at the Chickahominy—maps of Virginia at the time had the Chickahominy as a skinny little river wandering through the woods— Lincoln or MacClellan or someone got some smarty-pants Yankee engineer to build a portable bridge so the Union troops could easily ford this thing that the maps said was but a dinky river running to the East and South of Richmond, mostly a biggish creek draining into the James. In fact the river itself was rarely in its banks; more often than not it’s a swamp covering thousands of acres. There is a Chickahominy River that’s navigable but up where they were it’s nothing but a swamp. So the Union troops have marched up from Fort Monroe in hopes of capturing Richmond, of taking her by surprise…but because of their miscalculation with the floating bridge, built to ford a forty or fifty foot river, at most, MacClellan’s surprise attack on Richmond was not a surprise. Instead comes word into the city that hundreds of thousands of Union troops were camped at and slowly slogging through the Chickahominy swamp, giving the good citizens of Richmond plenty of time to pack their goods, get their families together and put everything worth more than a penny to the torch, as they moved to wherever they moved North to Hanover and Fredericksburg and Baltimore, west to Charlottesville, Roanoke, Staunton.
William Faulkner put his hand around the glass of whiskey but did not lift it to his lips, only looked at Tick and opened his mouth barely.
“The industrial area down in the Shockoe Bottom had been long ago rebuilt but much of the rest of the residential areas of the city were in disrepair. Church Hill was being taken over by slums—
“City Planning began in the 40s as part of a national, not just Southern, reform movement as cities got older and uglier. It espoused a so-called master plan for every city that would lay out future development. Excuse me as I switch into professor mode. A plan would be drawn and then public hearings and then city council would adopt the plan. Incident was zoning and other forms of regulation. There is a hint of elitism in all this as it is bureaucratic and regulatory—not free enterprise and laissez faire.
“Not too long ago some of Richmond's grande dames decided that the older ante bellum homes in Church Hill had to be preserved—
“’Negroes’ had moved in to these old parts of the city and you know what happens then. There soon developed the Historic District, a concept jammed through Council by these little old bluehaired ladies who were hanging onto smoke, and these attempts to establish an Historic District which basically regulated what you could do with a house within a district—all renovations had to be authentic, original architectural structures couldn't be removed (porches, eaves and cornices), and paint colors had to be approved in advance. Most of these regulations were adopted from those promulgated by the Secretary of Interior in DC as preservation guidelines. And of course later the Historic District was looked after by the Commission of Architectural Review, a group of citizens that approve or disapprove of changes in the District so, naturally, the little haired old blue ladies could keep the nigras and the poor whites the hell out of the crumbling city—
“And when the powers that be of Richmond got together to put together a master plan they looked around at other Southern cities like Charlotte and Atlanta and realized that they had to bring in a professional, made themselves feel better probably by joining the race of building a modern city by hiring a visionary from New York to come down to our little city—in fact, not long after the Civil War Richmond was the biggest and most populous city in the South, probably due to its proximity to Washington DC and relative proximity to the North—and to tell us what to do. He took a look at residential neighborhoods like the Fan District and Church Hill and said, imagining with a Rourkian sweep of the arm, that he recommended the city raze all of these ugly old houses and start building skyscrapers! Go up, young man!
“Well, Bill, one can only imagine a shocked silence from the grande dames and grandees. Many of these houses were no great shakes but compared to many other houses built in the late 1800s were actually very well built. Solid brick construction. Slate roofs. Tear them all down? Word is that the big shot urban planner from the Big Apple was on the first plane out of Richmond. The first bloody fucking one. Not long after he arrived back at his office in New York he got a call from Atlanta and offered them the same advice. That is, to tear down the old houses and to represent modernity. And of course the leaders of that shitpile—“ Sally rolling over, up and shaking, now circling and lying again, Eugenie out there readying the boat for a sail, pulling the sail up the mast, pulling hard on the sheet, out on the James, or the Piankatank, green waves beginning to curl up from the point, Euge bent now with her homemade basket of grapevines pulling ripe tomatoes which Tick can see peeking red and brick-red from the brown of the basket. Now he knows that the sailboat is only there on the slip of boat beach and Euge is not pulling up the sail, but the sail is loose in the wind. The boy out there is not Ogden, not Fitz, and the girl along the point in the white dress leaning down and looking for seashells is not Corbin or his wife.
"One need only take one look at that blighted and antiseptic city, Atlanta, to know that they swallowed his advice whole."
Tick excused himself and got up and wobbled to the bathroom.
When he came back Faulkner was gone.
Doctor Beazley then looking at Tick with what appeared to be concern in his eyes, his hand on Tick’s shoulder. It is because Tick has begun to cry. Nothing funny about any of this they say, and Tick wants to say back to this man he has known his whole life that mistakes have been made now and forever into the past and attempts to reconcile have been met by varying degrees of success. But that is what I am now. This is all what it is, and the doc is only able to nod and to offer to take Tick’s wine glass from his hand. To still be able to walk down the halls of Dovecote and to be that person who will forever have the burden of witness, the way she folded over like that as the lightning struck, the flash of light, the shriek that was not a shriek; the sequence of events since then that have some taint of curse–Ogden's eye, Corbin's rape–it is hard to consider that these things happen to every family, not least of whom have grown out of land which since its establishment has been stained by the blood of the slaves that built the country, the fortune, gone now, all blood money, the house, the hardware store, all owned by someone else. Tick has tried to make his own way clear of the history and in most ways has been a success. There is little doubt about that. The children, that he still loved his wife, that he’d made some of his own money. But the cumulative weight of that wave rising up is hard to reckon but you know it’ll fall, and the shadow the past casts is a long and dark one, and cold.
He put the brush and varnish down and sees his hand shaking. Sally is gone from her bed and he knows now that there are no lights on in the barn and he is standing in the dark. It is cold in the barn and for a moment Tick wonders what season it is. Out the window in the yard Eugenie is gone and a cold blue dusk has fallen, the bay beyond the pines black now, the sky invisible.