Silencing the Drums

By Tom Shipley

Filled with as much humor as heartache, Silencing the Drums by Tom Shipley is a stunning example of what historical fiction does when it is done well. Perfectly pitched and perfectly poised, this debut educates readers on life in Southern Virginia after the Second World War and proves the stomping ground for good old-fashioned storytelling.

Billy Grayson is a boy on the cusp of manhood. He has lost his father in World War II but, though reeling, is willing to make the best of a summer spent with relatives at the ancestral home in Virginia. What follows is not curative but a rousing journey as his fair cousin, Anna Wainwright, enlists his aid on a mission to bring a man down. As the two seek justice, they learn the path of the righteous takes courage and that honor comes with a price.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643349459

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Silencing the Drums

Tom Shipley

Copyright © 2022 Tom Shipley

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

Illustration by Colleen Comer

ISBN 978-1-64334-946-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64334-944-2 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-64334-945-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

For a special family—Kathy, Matt, Jenny, Abby, Avery, Luke, Mark, Bert, and Iris. Without you, well, it just wouldn’t mean as much.

She would have been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

—Flannery O’Connor,

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

One

If I had me a gun, I’d put a bullet in Henry Farnsworth’s brain, Anna Wainright said through clenched teeth. I swear to God, I would.

That’s when I knew I was in the thick of it, when my cousin said it then looked me straight in the eye. Until then, the summer had been one of healing and discovery. As we peered down from the barn’s loft upon the bruised and battered black man amidst a raucous cheering and cursing, the victor hovering above, I sensed being lead boldly into the darkness. Good or bad, I didn’t know which. Pickett’s men must have felt a lot like that.

The word on Henry Farnsworth was mixed. After the Civil War, his grandfather moved the family from Ohio to White Hollow, Virginia, some said to make his fortune by acquiring land, but most folks never finished the story. Officially, Henry Farnsworth, like his father and grandfather before him, was a landlord. But it was his other enterprises, the ones so few spoke of, that lined his pockets and defined him.

Aunt Sarah and others like her dismissed him as nothing but a carpetbagger and assailed his illicit activities, though most concluded that it was not his actions but the take from his plunder that so unnerved her; Farnsworth had it and she did not. Others chose only to see his benevolence, the tender he supplied to build a new library, the renovation of the old church, or the load of coal he’d have delivered to a poor colored family in the dead of winter. Yet everyone agreed that tragedy had visited the man on far too many occasions, but Anna would have none of it. She said he could scrub his soul by laying out every dollar that had ever been printed, and it wouldn’t change a damn thing.

The first time I saw Anna Wainright, she was coiled in a big pickle barrel, bouncing merrily down a steep dirt road and into the path of the bus, which swerved violently, dumping me and my fellow passengers into the aisle with a fit, and when it finally came to rest, the bus had its left front tire planted firmly in a ditch. After heaving an angry sigh, the driver exited the bus and made across the road to confront her. She stood up somewhat shaken, a bit dizzy, then laughed at him and disappeared into the woods.

Her lanky male companion, or so it appeared, slouched sheepishly down the dirt drive to survey the damage. The passengers slowly filed from the bus, speaking to one another, the first time I recalled anyone speaking since the stop in Richmond. A thick-jowled lady, her hat splattered with artificial daisies, teetered on the steps. The driver grabbed the boy by the crook of the arm.

What the hell are you kids doing, trying to kill somebody?

Me? I didn’t do nothing, the boy said.

That girl did, your little friend. You kids ought to have better sense.

I didn’t do nothing.

Don’t lie to me, the driver snapped. Who was she? I’ll have her reported.

I don’t know, the boy said. I don’t know her.

Well, we’ll just see what the law has to say. You best tell me, boy.

You ain’t got no proof, the boy told him.

I don’t need proof.

You got to have proof.

The driver released his arm abruptly, again with a frustrated sigh, then moved to inspect the tilting bus. He addressed the passengers and asked if everyone was okay. The boy looked over the group, then came to my side.

You must be Billy, he said. I nodded.

Harold?

Yup.

I might have known.

Get your bags. I’ll walk you partway to town. Daddy’s waiting.

What about her?

She’ll show up. We ain’t supposed to be here, but Anna don’t care.

Against the driver’s protests, I retrieved my bags, and Harold walked me to the edge of town, then pointed me to the bus stop.

The sun was dropping into dusk as I stepped along the cracked pavement. My uncle, a thin, almost gaunt man, stood at the stop with his hands in his pockets, a hat tilted atop his brow with the sweat climbing up inside the brim. He looked older than thirty-five, like life had worked a bit harder on him. Yet it wasn’t like he toiled in the fields every day; he was the school principal. He stretched out a hand and remarked how much I resembled my father.

Yes, sir, I said, haltingly.

I hear there was a bit of an accident. You okay? I nodded.

We walked toward the south end of town with his hand on my shoulder; people stared from the windows of shops, and others slowed their pace to look after us.

Things getting any easier, son? I nodded again.

Well, Anna and Harold are as anxious as bedbugs to see you. They’ve talked of nothing else for the past week. They begged to come meet you, but the school is readying for graduation, and they promised to help. But they’ll be home directly.

White Hollow was a typical Southern Virginia town. Like the others, it was born of necessity to support the sprawling farms, which cascaded through the countryside. The main street was long and narrow, featuring a small movie theater, a drugstore with a fountain, a feed and grain, a barbershop with its colored pole turning slowly, and other ordinary but charming establishments. Rather quaint but mostly well-kept homes lined the side streets.

At the town’s center, a perfectly trimmed hedgerow skirted a square. In its middle stood a massive, pigeon-splattered statue of Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the Gray Ghost. I found out later that my father had painted the colonel’s face black one Halloween night, and the shading on the bronze was still visible. Henry Farnsworth’s estate, a large white house with a pillared porch, spread its grandeur in a grove of oak and maple. Stretching to the distant woods, the manicured lawn seemed to fall into the curvature of the earth.

A white picket fence surrounded the manor like it surrounded all my father’s stories of the ancestral home. I recalled his tales of misty mornings when fish dimpled the rolling James, about hayride on endless Saturdays, about picking the buckshot from his ass on more than one occasion, but especially about the soundless moments one could call upon at any time. I’d once remarked that he must have loved that place and asked why we couldn’t live there. He said something about memories being the only things that were ever real anyway.

White Hollow was home to a prideful people, many whose roots traced to the Revolutionary War. By 1947, current inhabitants had survived the war to end all wars, the Great Depression, and World War II. Yet it was the other war, the Lost Cause, that sustained them. Although I was only fourteen at the time and had grown up in New York City, that war, coupled with my father’s recollections, held for me a certain fascination. I found that it held the same fascination for many of them, that they often looked euphorically over their shoulders for inspiration, for the way ahead. But I would learn about the past in time, about living there, about people almost dying there.

We resumed walking and came upon a dirt drive that disappeared into the woods. Foliage mushroomed from the sides to spill into the road, and I smiled when I thought of the many times my father traveled that way, probably running more than not.

The drive opened into a large yard that seemed more like a small field; the bare spots reminded me of the playground at home, and the grass needed cutting. I couldn’t focus on the house, for a magnificent white oak stretched above it, its limbs like trees all in themselves, spreading across the expanse of the lawn and deep into the sky. From the bottom limb hung a frayed rope that held the tire swing my father had told me about. It was an imposing piece of nature, and I had a silly sense the old homestead was a safe place to be, with the tree’s branches reaching to the heavens, its splendid stature a warning.

An old woman rocked gently on the porch. It was an aged house, like one you might see in a Huck Finn movie, with its white paint fading into gray and its top-floor windows shaped like hands in prayer. But no picket fence surrounded it.

I guess you know about Grandma, my uncle said.

I’ve heard.

She won’t pay you much attention. She doesn’t to anybody. Don’t be offended. Just try to understand.

She wasn’t really my grandmother; she was my great-great-grandmother. Charlotte Elizabeth Grayson was 101 years old and had been in that chair, or one like it, since Second Manassas in 1862. Prior to that famous battle, she married Jeremiah Grayson, the son of White Hollow’s mayor. A young man of sixteen, he went off to fight in the name of the Confederacy and died in his first campaign on the banks of Bull Run. Accounts had it a cannonball hit him dead center and so disfigured him that if a local boy hadn’t been there, no one would have ever known his fate. When they brought him home in a makeshift caisson, Charlotte refused to acknowledge his death and said it must be someone else in the casket and that a man wasn’t dead until he’s buried.

Jeremiah was laid to rest in the churchyard, with the whole town attending except Charlotte. She took a chair to the porch and rocked and wouldn’t leave, she said, until Jeremiah came walking up the drive just like he’d left. So there she sat, day after day, season after season, with her dog-eared Bible and faded daguerreotype of her departed husband.

Everyone thought she was crazy, except for me. She fascinated me. She was a living link to the best of times, a page from an old book, a preservation in flesh of old songs, old ways. My mother said Grandma was a nasty sort and wouldn’t really talk to anyone, but I knew that if I could talk to her, tell her I understood and believed in her, she’d open those rusty gates to the past.

I paused on the stoop and introduced myself. She grunted, or so it seemed, but kept staring straight at the drive, her rocking chair creaking in the warm evening silence. Gold-rimmed spectacles rested precariously on the end of her nose, her face recording a wrinkle for every empty season, like the rings in the core of the great white oak. Though I’d been told, I wouldn’t accept her indifference. We were blood, and I had three months to wind my way into her memory of all that had come before me.

My uncle set the bags inside the front door. The house smelled of old, but it was a pleasant odor, like the years had failed to capture its freshness. Furniture rested delicately on a worn rug. Paintings, some blemished, graced the walls, and a polished saber hung above a fireplace mantel, holding a cluttered score of photographs. A handsome fish arched its back above the saber, and I knew it was a smallmouth bass since angling was my uncle’s passion. Broken sunlight filtered through the shades, yet the room seemed dark and reminded me of a museum.

Wait here and I’ll fetch your aunt Sarah. She’s dying to see you.

My uncle ascended the winding stairs, and after a moment, I heard muffled voices.

At least you could get out of bed for your own brother’s son.

Don’t be silly, Daniel. He knows of my condition, and it’s yet even worse. I must keep my strength, or I’ll never make it through church or the children’s graduation.

He came to the head of the stairs with an apologetic smile and motioned me up.

Your aunt Sarah’s not feeling well, he said. Why don’t you come up here and visit with her.

I climbed the stairs and walked gingerly in. A lamp on her bed-stand cast an artificial light about the room. The evening sun was a fading hue outside her window, and the limbs of the great white oak were especially thick on that side of the house. White curtains quivered from a slight breeze, and my aunt was propped up against the headboard, a white blanket draped over her. My mother had told me she was anemic but had said it with no tone of sympathy or concern, and I guessed the milky paleness of her skin could have easily resulted from a lack of sunlight.

She put her hand to her mouth.

Lord, Daniel, he looks just like Ben. You look just like your father, Billy. Come sit on the bed.

I smiled weakly and then sat on the edge. She gave me a powerful hug, stronger than I expected from a woman of her frailty.

She clasped both of my hands.

You doing okay, son? You getting along all right?

Yes, ma’am, I said.

Well, don’t fret. You’re here where you belong. It’s a crying shame it took so long.

I glanced at my uncle, who stood impatiently, pulling at the brim of his hat.

Why don’t we get you settled, Billy. You can visit with your aunt at dinner.

I stood up and told her how excited I was at being there and thanked her for having me.

I’d expect you would be excited. White Hollow is as much a part of you as it is of me. You may never want to leave. And leaning for-ward, she said, And that would suit me just fine.

He escorted me up another flight of stairs and left me in a room at the very top of the house. I heard the screen door slam, Anna and Harold shouting back and forth as they entered the house. I tore off my shirt and bent to retrieve a fresh one but, in doing so, uncovered my baseball glove. I pulled it out and plunged my fist into the pocket again and again. The leather was soft from an oiling, and running my fingers gently across it, I felt a tinge of regret. I tossed the glove on the bed, then upon second thought, lifted the bedspread and shoved the glove along the floor, cutting a swath in the matted dust gathered in the darkness beneath the bed.

Anna and Harold awaited, Harold long and skinny, with his brown hair falling almost to his eyes, one ear turning slightly outward. Though he looked awkward and his plaid shirt didn’t quite fit, he seemed smart enough, almost bookish. Anna was something of a tomboy, her hair lighter than Harold’s, and blue eyes, like crystal balls, shone from her freckled face. I felt an instant affection for her.

Hi, I said, glancing down and shifting nervously.

Harold returned the greeting and assumed the same posture. Anna came closer and put a hand on each of my shoulders.

My, he does look like Uncle Ben, and handsome too!

I felt the blood rising in my face, shining through the skin like a ripe apple. Anna sensed my embarrassment and turned to Harold with a playful smile.

Won’t Rebecca Mayfield be envious? she said. Just as green as an old bullfrog.

God, Anna, do you always have to act like that? Swat her one, Billy, if she keeps acting so stupid.

Who’s Rebecca Mayfield? I asked.

Why, just the prettiest creature in White Hollow, she said. You’ll meet her tomorrow at graduation—that is, if I can wait that long to show you off.

Shut up, Anna.

That’s enough, Harold, Uncle Daniel said as he came into the hallway. You kids get washed for supper.

My first Southern supper wasn’t quite as I’d imagined. The meal wasn’t particularly exotic—meat loaf, corn bread, and black-eyed peas. There was no formality or occasion to the event; rather, it seemed a tedious phase one had to go through before retiring for the night. And it seemed odd that Harold took not only Grandma a plate but his mother as well, all accomplished without a fuss, like Anna had refused so many times that Harold didn’t bother to press it anymore. But the absence of pageantry and commonplace of the meal made no inroads into my fortress of perceptions. After all, as Aunt Sarah had said in her letters, the family was still recovering.

After supper, Anna and I leaned on the porch rail opposite Grandma while Harold retrieved the dishes. The evening was still, and the chirping crickets seemed part of the stillness, like they were singing in the faraway flicker of the stars. Even the desperate creak of Grandma’s rocker seemed finely woven into the evening lull.

Doesn’t Grandma just fascinate you, Anna?

What’s to be fascinated about?

She just sits there. For all these years, she’s just sat there. That old woman, my great-great-grandmother, is actually married to a Civil War soldier.

Was, Anna said.

Can you imagine all she’s seen in her day? If you could get in her mind, it’d be like turning the pages of a history book.

Not much history on that drive there. She couldn’t tell you who the president is. You’re about as dumb as Harold. She’s no more alive than Daddy’s fish above the mantel. A city boy like you ought to know better. Grandma’s crazy. It’s as simple as that.

If you think she’s crazy, you ought to live in New York City. Ever see a man get his dinner from a trash can? They’re all nuts, and none of them have any stories to tell.

I suspect they’re not as loony as you think. At least they hang their dirty wash on the line. It’s like those movie actresses. Most folks don’t know they stay drunked up most all the time.

I didn’t have the slightest idea what Anna was talking about, but before I could get her to explain, she said, Come on, and dragged me down the steps, then began running across the field toward the old barn on the other side.

Where we going? I yelled after her.

Just come on, she said with a laugh.

We stopped at the barn door and stood panting in the hazy cast of the moon. Anna reached behind a stack of boards that lay against the barn and came up with something I couldn’t discern in the shadows.

Want a Lucky Strike?

I froze for a moment, not knowing quite what to think, since I had never smoked or been around other kids who did.

You really smoke?

What does it look like? she said as she put one to her lips and struck a match that was tucked away in the cellophane wrapper. This is tobacco country, and I’m no hypocrite. We must all do our part for the local economy. That’s what Momma says.

The match pulsed in the darkness like a firefly, and I looked over my shoulder, expecting my uncle to seize us by the napes of the neck. Anna didn’t seem too concerned though.

Well? Do you want one?

I’m an athlete, Anna.

Yeah, and I’m a girl, and smoking this cigarette won’t make me any less a girl than it’ll make you any less an athlete. They can’t kick you out of the human race for that. That’s all that really matters. Just as long as you’re within the bounds of the human race, then anything’s all right, I guess.

Again I couldn’t follow her but was too nervous to wrestle it out. I took the pack from her hand and raised it to my nose. The sweet aroma was appealing, and I did have an image to keep, so I slid one from the pack and stuck it awkwardly in my mouth.

Don’t nigger lip it, she commanded. And don’t look so put off. If that’s the worst thing you hear this summer, you won’t have been listening.

Does Harold smoke?

Hell no. He just watches and lectures about the hazards. He thinks everything worth knowing’s in those encyclopedias Daddy bought him last year for Christmas. Maybe it is. But if I can’t find out for myself, then I don’t want to know.

She lit a match, throwing an orange glow about her face, and put it to the end of the cigarette.

Just pull hard on it, she said.

I drew down the flame to barely a flicker, feeling a rising burn in my lungs; my very soul was ablaze. The cigarette fell from my mouth, and I dropped to my knees, coughing until my eyes were watery red clouds. I knelt in the dirt until I could breathe again, then stood up, somewhat embarrassed, and saw the end of Anna’s cigarette dancing in the shadows.

It smells better than it tastes the first time, she said. But you’ll be sneaking out here by yourself ’fore summer’s over.

No more for me, I said, wiping my eyes.

Somehow I don’t believe you, Billy Grayson. At least you tried. Harold won’t even try.

After Anna finished her cigarette, we walked slowly to the house with the moon on our backs. The old house stood in the distance, its highest point rising above the wood line with little cubes of light formed in the windows. We didn’t speak, and I wondered about my cousin. Though she seemed to see no magic in Grandma or even the time passing over the fields we walked in, I sensed she was part of it all, another bud on an ageless branch of Graysons. I’d been there only a few short hours yet couldn’t imagine that place without her.

Daddy was disappointed in supper tonight, Anna said as she pulled open the screen door. But tomorrow we’ll have a feast. Graduation is not till two o’clock, so he’s sending us down to the river for catfish. You ever eat catfish?

I said I hadn’t.

Our entrance was uneventful. Everyone was in their rooms, except Harold, who was busy settling Grandma for the night. I climbed into bed, resting both elbows on the windowsill. The stars stood bold in the sky, and the sounds of night were sharp as they played one by one on my imagination. A warm breeze rippled through the blackened branches of the tree, which reached almost to the window, and I could have touched it if I leaned out far enough. I could see the meandering James snaking its way through the valley, like a ribbon around the land, glistening in the moonlight and disappearing in a bend where I could see it no more. I recalled my father speaking of the soundless moments and realized I had one. No sirens pierced the air of dusk, no breezes lost in an endless facade of walls, and no matter how cloudless the heavens, no maze of lights choked the summer sky.

Two

Lord God, another one.

I’m sorry, Essie, my uncle said. I’m so sorry.

My uncle held the old colored woman and had his hand on her shoulder. Tears spilled down her face, yet she made not a sound. Harold stood in the dining room, and she shuffled by him to the kitchen. My uncle pushed open the screen door and departed.

Harold recounted that Otis Burr’s body had washed up against a deadfall and, according to the bream fisherman who found him, so startled the man that he flipped his boat and surfaced just inches from the swollen young colored boy. The current held the body fast against the tree, with his arms hung in the limbs and stretched to the side like Jesus Christ himself, thousands of shooflies buzzing like a hot wire. The Burr boy’s throat was sliced from ear to ear, with a knot the size of a walnut protruding from his forehead. The fisherman finally gathered himself enough to summon the sheriff, who put a rope around the poor boy’s neck and tied him off to a hickory tree. An impetuous young man of twenty-four, he’d been missing for days, and most folks thought he’d run off drunk to Roanoke in search of a lady friend.

Where’s Anna? I asked him.

Outside, but she’ll be back.

Why, Billy Grayson, Essie said, emerging from the kitchen, it’s ’bout time you come to visit. Give Essie a hug.

I hugged her rather awkwardly, the path of tears still visible on her dark black face. She was a stout woman, with bright-green eyes and a subdued smile.

It’s nice to meet you, I said.

You look just like your daddy, Billy. When he was your age, he worked down to the newspaper on Saturdays, and I could never gets him up.

My mother gave me a photograph to give you, I said as Anna came through the door. You want me to get it?

You gives it to me later, she said as her voice lightened and she swatted me on the behind. Get on in to the table.

Esther Mapes, more warmly known as Essie, was the family’s longtime house-maid. My father had always spoken of her affectionately.

The yellowed curtains trembled before a breeze that sifted down the expanse of the table. It seemed much too large, like it meant to serve a grander gathering. Anna smirked across the way as I mouthed grits that tasted like buttered sand. Essie placed the fishing gear by the back door and hurried about preparing a plate for Aunt Sarah, who barked every few minutes for her breakfast. It seemed to aggravate Essie a bit, and she kept muttering, I’m coming, I’m coming, under her breath. Clanging utensils cluttered the air as Harold shoveled his meal.

Sound like a goddamned cow.

Go to hell, Anna.

You two quit bellyaching, Essie ordered. And you watch your mouth, young lady.

Yes, ma’am, Anna said.

There was little talk of Otis Burr, almost like it was a secret. My aunt shuffled impatiently into the kitchen to retrieve her plate, mumbling something about bootleg liquor and colored boys. While Essie let it pass, I sensed Anna had something to say but smartly held her tongue. It was subdued yet amazing how