The Orphan Mother (14 page)

July 20, 1867

The next morning, Tole carried his water jug out, chipped enamel cool and comforting in his hands. At his stoop, he poured some into his left hand and splashed it on his face. He rubbed his eyes and the water dripped down his open collar.

The opened letter on the table had been delivered in the night.

Tole read the letter twice, not wanting to miss anything. It amused him that Bliss thought he had to threaten him into helping, when in fact he could think of hardly anything better to do than to rattle Elijah Dixon and, as the man said,
bring him to heel
.

Unearthing a piece of paper and a pen, he sat down to write out a reply in his shaky, childish scrawl.

When he was done, Tole folded both the letter and his response and tucked them away in his back pocket. Just then, a neighbor passed him by, on her way to get fresh water at the pump they all shared out by the road. Her name was Bett, and from three houses behind him he would often hear her cry out late at night, cries of lust and sadness and love. It made him lonely just looking at her.

“They coming week after next I hear, Mr. Tole.” Bett stopped at his porch, dark-eyed and wild-haired above her properly pressed camellia-green dress and white apron, arranged and cinched. She wore old leather slippers Tole recognized as Theopolis's handiwork.

“Who they?”

“Some big men from Nashville, coming to have an investigation of them killings. Guess they ain't satisfied with all that questioning folks all over town. Guess they coming to look into it more. Everybody been talkin' about it. They gone be here in a couple weeks, they sayin'. Bringing the whole U.S. Army with them, I hear.”

He could guess what those
big men from Nashville
would want, and it wasn't necessarily the truth. They would want order. He wondered how this fit into Bliss's plans, or whether he knew about it.

He splashed more water on his face, until his collar was thoroughly wet. The birds laughed at him and gathered together. He wiped his face and neck and stood up straight. Before the sun came up, it split the sky with banners of purple and orange and yellow, as if it were sending out scouts to check, to give the all-clear. The rooftops lit up, some glowed, and then shadows appeared. He was surprised that Bett was still standing there.

“You gone be in the courtroom then?”

“Why you ask that?” He said it sharper than he'd meant, and that was sloppy. This was what came of talking to people. Secrets get revealed in a word.

“Just wondering.”

You are not a very good liar, Bett
. Tole knew he was a figure of great suspicion and curiosity among his neighbors. An outsider.

Bett went off to get her water, passing the ragman in his cart coming the other way. Tole was surprised when the ragman pulled up right at his porch.

“Morning.” Hooper stood up in his cart so he was almost eye level with Tole standing on the porch.

“Morning.” Tole waited.

“Mariah Reddick requested I see you 'cause you need work, and since I got nothing against a man who can work, I got some.”

“You friends with Mariah?”

“Ain't friends with no one. But she's tolerable enough for a house Negro.”

“That she is,” Tole agreed, eyeing Hooper. “What you need?”

“I got some house cleaning needs doing, and then some wood chopping, and plenty of work for a few weeks at least,” Hooper said.

“How much you paying?”

Hooper named a price well below what Tole would have wanted. He nodded and waved Hooper into the house.

When Hooper stepped inside, he stopped short like he'd walked into a wall. He whistled and removed his cloth cap, as if he'd just walked into church. Tole tried to see his creation through the eyes of this new man seeing it for the first time. He goggled at it a little himself. The thing he had made still had the power to surprise him. He looked at it and couldn't remember making half of it.

What had once been a town a week or two before had become a dense, sprawling version of a world constructed simultaneously in the physical (here are the buildings, here are the people, here is a man with a rifle in the attic of the doctor's house) and the metaphysical context (here are the angels watching over them, here are the demons leading them down primrose paths, here are the souls caught in their migration, uncertain of heaven above and hell below). Heaven had been hung from the low ceiling of the house by hundreds of pieces of twine and string, each supporting an angel or a soul.

There weren't many souls drifting upward toward the ceiling, which had recently been painted blue. Below the tables and platforms that bore up the model of the town, Tole had painted everything red in thick, sloppy strokes. On the legs of the tables, crossing here and there, he had attached a lattice of wood strips and platforms, which both stabilized the display and provided ample room to present the full horror of hell. Considerably more souls hung below, drifting past demons and devils, tortured by tiny grinning tommyknockers.

The display now spilled from the tables onto the floor, where Tole had been carving half-size animals that appeared to be stampeding out his back door and down into the small backyard. These had been made from scrap wood and old sewing spools for eyes—raccoons and possums, goggle-eyed wolves and rats. They looked to be fleeing.
It's the animals what always know what's happening first
, is what Tole had intended by this.
They know to save themselves.
At the end of the hallway he had built a small house on fire, and two tiny figures standing on its steep roof.

Tole looked over at Hooper, not at all surprised to find a man struck dumb by his creation. He crossed and recrossed his arms, and let slip a trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth before recovering his composure.

“It's always the damnedest people who get they hands on some part of the great truth, ain't it?” Hooper said.

“Sounds like an insult, ragman.”

“I mean, this thing is
true
.”

“No you don't.”

Hooper nodded and took a seat on a stool, still staring at it. “This is a day, right, Mr. Tole?”

“Part of a bunch of days, at least right there where the streets at. The rest, above and below it, that's time out of time. Time don't mean nothing above and below.”

“And that day is…”

“One part is they giving they speeches on the square that day, you know. Got black after that day, and nothing fit together after that.”

Tole tried to be patient, but he couldn't help being eager to get to work. He'd thought about what working with the ragman would mean, and it would mean being able to move around the town smooth and without causing a disturbance. It meant becoming one of the locals who faded into the background. This was what he needed to complete his plan, because now everywhere he went he felt the eyes of white men on him,
the strange Negro
, tracking his movements and taking down his activities. He felt white eyes on him always; they were more aware of him than they were of each other. They listened to him and watched him. He wanted to be invisible, not chased by their gaze.

Hooper had a question. “Who on top of this house here?” He pointed north and west of the town square, where a man made of twisted baling wire and cloth scraps, with a tiny, bright red cork head, lay prone on the roof of a two-story house just about where one might find Doc Cliffe's house, if this were all real and Doc Cliffe's house were made of scrap pieces of an old
Superior Grimes Golden Apples
crate.

Hooper's question made him feel dried out and shrunk. Exposed. He should never have put that man there. He wondered if the big man would do him harm if he ever found out who that was and what he had done.

“Don't know,” Tole said. “Just put him there.”

Hooper looked back at the house. “What's he got there?” He pointed at something thin and dark in the hands of the wire man.

“If you got work, let's get started,” Tole said.

“But it makes sense, don't it, Mr. Tole?”

“What?”

“That there was a fellow with a rifle. Make a lot of sense, that would.”

“Don't know nothing about that.”

Hooper looked queerly at Tole, his head cocked. “It do make sense,
Tole.
”

Tole slumped over and leaned his backside into one of the only empty corners in his house. He was about to kick the big man out of his house when Hooper looked over at him with kind eyes.

“Let's get us a drink, Mr. Tole. I got a jug in the cart.” And before Tole could say anything, Hooper was out the door and down the path to the cart, where he reached under the bench seat and pulled out a large jug. He hooked an index finger through the hemp loop that he'd made into a handle and draped it over his right shoulder. He walked light, the step of a man with a mission he was happy to have. He climbed the porch.

“Here we are, Tole,” he said, and handed it over.

There is a state of mind men can reach together, on porches and not entirely in possession of all their faculties, that approaches a sort of comfortable, warm telepathy, Tole thought after drinking a goodly amount. It became less necessary to speak aloud because each of them knew what the other was thinking. Nothing on the street escaped their attention because each of their sets of eyes reported the news to one mind. That's how it felt.

After an hour or so, Hooper stood up and beckoned for Tole to follow. “Let's get started on that job.”

“What we doing, then?”

And Hooper nodded in the direction of Theopolis's house. “His mama asked me to clear that out.”

Tole followed, dreading every step.

In Theopolis's small house, most of the shoes were gone, but the forms still hung on the wall. Feet of every imaginable size and shape had their double there on the wall in matched pairs strung through the heel with twine and looped over nails. Tole knew they were only the working tools of a working man, but they nonetheless seemed macabre to him, and he looked away. They were like a wall of headstones.

Hooper soon had him moving furniture. They carried out two workbenches, a table, a bed, two bent-oak chairs, several wooden stands on which the foot forms could be attached, several large, knee-high stacks of leather—cow and calf, pig—and five books, including one Bible.

They carried out the foot forms last, piling them atop the furniture and in all the empty spaces they could find. Hooper said a lot of it they'd be able to sell for Mariah, and that the rest would get scrapped or burned. “That woman deserves to know her boy's things been taken care of. Ain't good for her to think that he still got any other place in the world but that grave where she can go to see him,” he said. “We laying him to rest for good.”

Tole looked back at Hooper. “You know his mama pretty well, don'tcha?”

“We go back a ways. Why you ask?”

“No reason.”

“There's always a reason.”

“I just been getting to know her a little, is all. She ain't like nobody I ever met before.”

Hooper dragged a wooden table closer to the front door. “Mariah a special lady. She stronger than any living person I know. Too strong, you ask me.”

“What's that mean?”

“It mean, she don't know when she need help. She don't know when she in trouble. She don't know when it's time to give up.”

Tole helped Hooper lift the table and the two of them hoisted it, turned it to sneak it through the doorframe and out down the steps onto the street with the rest.

“She don't think of herself much, it's true.”

“What's it to you?” Hooper said, suspicious.

“Nothin'. Just seems odd that a woman like her, beautiful and smart and strong, spends her whole life helping other people.”

“She still think like a slave. You don't tell her I said that, or I'll pull your lungs out. But she like to think she fierce and independent, but she don't know how to be free.”

Tole became quiet. “Let's go get the rest of it,” he said, and Hooper followed him back in. The two men continued moving the rest of the furniture until Theopolis's house was near empty.