The Orphan Mother (18 page)

July 29–30, 1867

The backwoods woman, Lizzie Crutcher, had mentioned sheds. So had one of the women who cleaned the lumber family Hayneses' house. Something about men, meeting in a backyard shed. Plotting.

It was enough for Mariah.

The Dixons had a shed, and Mariah decided she would discover the truth for herself. To hell with the white man's tribunals and circuses. She had faith she could do that much. She would discover those names.

She wouldn't rely on her spies and informants—Hooper and May and George Tole and all the rest. She wouldn't sit idly by, waiting for a name to roll into her ears and a great ringing bell to start its peal. She'd figure this out for herself. She'd ask, and hunt, and find those men, and she'd take their names like rare jewels to the tribunal, and the tribunal would smite the evildoers into everlasting darkness. Or they'd just hear her say the names, at least. She had given up predicting the actions of white men long before.

When she entered the Dixon house that morning, let in the back way by Margaret the cook, she noticed that Margaret averted her eyes as if she had something to hide.

Evangeline was in the parlor, her brood nowhere in sight or hearing. The mistress lay stretched upon the couch, propped up against pillows. Mariah looked at Margaret, recognizing Evangeline's symptoms, and Margaret nodded.
Yes
, Margaret's eyes said.
The lady been in the laudanum
.

Evangeline shifted and stood up on teetering legs, and without speaking began to putter around the house, straightening the tea service.

“Wanted to ask you something, missus,” Mariah began.

“Oh, Mariah, delighted to see you.” Evangeline didn't seem delighted at all. “The baby's doing fine. Just fine. Margaret will make you some nice lemonade and a snack. Would you like some nice lemonade and a snack?”

“No ma'am. Just came for more information.”

“Information? What are you talking about?”

Margaret disappeared into the depths of the house. Evangeline watched her go.

“You want to know more about my husband,” she said when Margaret had gone.

Mariah said nothing.

“They'll be out there tomorrow night, I think.” Evangeline waved her finger toward the window facing the shed. “That's where they'll be. Who knows?”

Mariah nodded, knowing who
they
were, just not knowing their names. Her husband and his cronies. The men who had murdered her son. The men who were trying desperately to keep the world the way it was, the way it had always been, the way one now-dead black cobbler would have understood and stood up against and would have said:
No more.

“How you know?”

“My husband said something about visitors coming by after dark. That's what he always means.”

“After dark they be there?” Mariah asked.

Evangeline didn't seem to hear her. “I have become resigned to the disappearance of my husband into something I don't want to understand. I take care of this home, but at times what I see fit to do with it is to burn it to the ground and salt the earth.”

What could Mariah say to that?

“And this is the last I'll ever speak to you about it, Mariah Reddick.”

The next evening, after dusk, they each arrived separately on horseback, all of them heavy with beard and wearing black. There were fewer than she'd expected. Elijah Dixon bustled around greeting everyone. Mariah watched from the kitchen, where she had commandeered from Margaret the food meant for the guests.
I'll do the delivering
, she'd told Margaret, taking her headscarf.
They never look close enough to recognize me.
She crossed the yard to the shed. Below one of the shed's high windows, an old bench faced west, and there she sat down with the basket of food. If she sat still with her back against the wall, it would be impossible to see her through the window. For a moment she was afraid that the smell of the biscuits, steamy and sweet, would give her away, so she draped her skirts across the top of the basket.

Pacing, shoes scraping and thumping on the bare floor. Their voices clarified out of the foggy murmur.

“—family out on Lyon Road. You so sure you need it?” This voice rattled and squeaked, like its owner had ages before lost his voice from shouting.

Voices chimed in.

And then she heard Elijah speaking. “Of course we need it. We have the two parcels adjacent, so it's not even a question. How much did you offer?”

“Eighty,” said Squeaky Voice.

“Eighty? Christ, you'll bankrupt me.”

“No I won't, because they turned it down.”

“They turned it down? Eighty?”

“Let's burn them out.” Deeper voice, gruff. One she recognized.

Dixon: “You threaten them?”

Squeaky: “Sure I threatened them. Then I offered the eighty.”

“What they say?” another voice, younger.

“I tell you they turned it down. They're homesteading and they're not wanting to leave, the husband said. Man by the name of Polk.”

Gruff Voice: “They got a barn?”

Squeaky: “Yeah.”

Mariah could tell that they all understood what that meant: that they didn't have to even say what that meant. Mariah knew, too.
If they have a barn, the barn can be burned down.
Several barns had gone up in flames recently—farmers bringing in their hay, packing it too closely, some people said.

“Aaron, you go out there later this week,” Dixon said. “Ask Mr. Polk one more time, nicely. Go up to eighty-five. Just ask them once.”

Aaron's was the higher voice. Aaron Haynes. “Ah hell,” he said.

“Just do it,” said Dixon. “You're good with a tinderbox. Just hang around that night and take care of the barn. Then stop by there in a couple of days and offer them sixty.” He guffawed.

The talk went on. Mariah didn't understand much of it, reference to land and stock and railroads wanting to be built, but she understood the gist of it: Dixon and his men were buying up great forested tracts of land, selling the lumber, and preparing to sell the land to the railroad as it expanded from Nashville south to Franklin.

Finally the shed went quiet, and Mariah could only hear the sound of a whiskey jar being slid across the table. A shuffling of feet, more creaking of the floorboards. They were getting up. She lunged from the bench and ran down the path just as she heard one of the men say, “So, I'll let you know what Mr. Polk has to say.”

And then Mariah remembered the basket on the bench. She saw it there in the dark under the yellow glowing window. She saw it steam, and the door begin to open. She could feel the tears beginning to form at the corner of her eyes as she ran—leapt!—back to the bench and snatched the basket into the crook of her arm. The door had opened but no one came out. She could no longer feel the cold air, she felt hot all over, and when finally one of the men had turned to go down the step from the door of the shed, she was there at the bottom waiting with their traveling food, breathing hard, her scarf pulled low to just above her eyes.

A skinny man was first down the steps, a limp in his right leg, face covered in black hair nearly up to the bottom of his eyes. He was saying something in his squeaky voice about feed and drought, something entirely innocuous and false, as if he knew she was listening. When he saw her there, smiling and bearing gifts, still catching her breath, he grabbed a biscuit as if it were all he ever expected, to have Negro women standing by handing out food.

July 31, 1867

On muggy days, the forests just outside of Franklin were rife with gnats and mosquitoes. Tole was used to the woodlands, to hiding in heavy brush or behind tall oaks wide as mud wagons. The smell of the dirt was made thick by the humid summer air. He had learned how to stalk quietly, how to keep his boots from crunching on leaves. He knew how to step, how to breathe, all without making a sound. That was the part about killing most sharpshooters didn't get: you have to learn how to be invisible, and nobody knew how to disappear like George Tole.

A few hundred feet ahead of him, Aaron Haynes was sawing a big white oak. A white boy from Hillsboro, a village just outside Franklin, Aaron, like his daddy, was a lumberman. He had a reddish, auburn beard like his daddy, too. Tole had heard that Dale Haynes was the best damn lumberman in the state. His wood had made the cannon wheels and the barracks for the Confederacy, had built towns where the boys in gray were raised, and when it came time for them to die, his wood had made their caskets, too.

Tole had also heard that Aaron wasn't the lumberman his daddy was. No head for business, he'd heard. And no head for the sawmill either—he had only two fingers on his left hand. He'd lopped the other three off in a sawmill accident.

Tole remembered Aaron's disfigured hand from the courthouse square, how the lumberman took his punches with his right hand. When he threw a bottle at Theopolis, he used his right hand, again—holding his left out awkwardly. The awkwardness marked him in Tole's rifle sights.

And Tole remembered this: bearded, friendly Aaron Haynes had kicked Theopolis in the ribs and in the mouth until the boy was spitting blood and tooth and flecks of bitten tongue onto the stage, clearly visible in the rifle's sights. Tole knew he'd never forget that auburn beard. That grin.

Today Haynes was working with a team of other lumbermen, but he'd gotten separated from them—they were behind him, down in the valley, and he'd gone on ahead to mark the next big stand of timber.

Around the two-mile mark Haynes's footsteps veered right, along a rougher track. A handsaw rasped, cutting deep.

Killing in the wild had a natural order to it. Tole crouched down behind a scrub oak, peering through the mess of twigs, his pistol held close. Ol' GT was strapped to his back, but he didn't think he'd need the big rifle.

Haynes was there, his back to him, twenty yards away, sawing on a tree, not looking around, not noticing Tole even when he stood just ten yards behind him, only half hidden by a little paw-paw. The tree swayed above Haynes, swaying more as the saw bit deeper; and then all the leaves trembled and there was a moment when everything stood still, Haynes stopped his saw and the tree stopped its trembling; and then like a gasp it was falling, collapsing forward into a roaring mass of leaves and branches and snapping boughs. At that exact moment, Tole took his shot, the pistol's echo lost in the tree's death roar.

Haynes let out a guttural scream and reached down to grab his leg.

The shot must've blown a hole straight through Haynes's right calf, Tole thought. Precisely where he'd intended. He looked around to make sure they were still alone, listened for yells and rushing footsteps, but heard none. In a moment he loomed over Haynes, who was bent over, scrabbling, looking at the wound. He probably didn't even realize he'd been shot.

Tole put the pistol up against the back of Haynes's head, the cock of the trigger suddenly loud and terrible. “Don't you move another inch, son.”

Haynes froze, blood slipping down his leg, pooling in the leaf mold.

“Mr. Haynes, here's how this gonna go. I'm gone to ask you a few questions and you gone help me understand a few things. I don't want to drag this out, hear?”

Haynes nodded vigorously.

“Just so's you and me understand each other, just want you to know that if you start shouting and carrying on, I will shoot you in the head. You understand me?”

Again, nodding.

“Sit down. Against the stump there.”

Haynes crawled to the newly made stump, put his back into it. He cupped his hands protectively around his calf.

“Listen now. You and I have a friend in common,” Tole said. “We're both in business with a man named Elijah Dixon. You know a man named Elijah Dixon, don't you?”

Haynes's lips trembled through the forest of his beard. His eyes darted back and forth but didn't meet Tole's. “No, no I don't.”

Tole lifted the butt of his gun and bashed him in the jaw. Haynes's head flew back. Tole carefully placed the tip of the pistol under his chin, where it disappeared into the beard, and raised his head for him. “I'll give you the one because we aren't acquainted, but you only get the one.”

“The one?”

“You lie to me again and you'll be dead before you finished talking.”

Sweat poured down Haynes's face. “I do know him,” he whispered. “Everybody knows him, so what?”

“You call him a friend?”

Haynes nodded yes. “He know my daddy since they was kids.”

“That's real nice,” Tole said. “Mr. Haynes, do you know the name Theopolis Reddick? Don't answer. I know you do. Theopolis was my neighbor. He was also that poor nigger you damn near beat to death in the courthouse square about a month back. You remember almost beating a poor nigger to death, Mr. Haynes?”

Haynes nodded. “I—I didn't kill him. I swear.”

“No, I know you didn't. See, I was there that day, too. I watched you beat on him. I remember you in particular. You hit him over the head with a bottle. Broke that bottle right over him. I saw that, son. You could've killed him fast, but that ain't no fun now, is it? Ain't no fun unless the nigger suffers.”

“That ain't how it was.”

“Yes that is how it was. That's exactly how it was. You beat a poor shoemaker so there weren't nothing left of him.” Tole paused, his voice and eyes full of Mariah. Then: “You need to tell me who your friends are. I want names. You tell me who else was there that day in the square.”

“I don't know nothing.”

Tole pushed the pistol up farther, bent Haynes's head back so all Tole could see was that beard, pointing up to the sky. Haynes struggled to stay upright, thrashing with his hands. Spots of blood sprayed in the leaves. “I told you not to lie to me.”

“Please, God, no!”

“You gonna tell me right now who else was there that day in the courthouse square. There was a whole gang of you boys with blood on your hands, and I wanna know every single one of their names.”

“I said I don't know!”

In a movement so quick that Tole didn't even see it himself, the pistol came off the chin and pointed down to Haynes's other foot. Tole pulled the trigger.

A mess of smoking leather and blood and flesh, and a hole appeared where his foot had been. Haynes wailed into the trees. “James!” he screamed. “He threw the first bottle! Not me!”

“What James's last name?”

Aaron's teeth chattered.

“Mayberry.”

“James Mayberry. Where can I find him?”

“West Margin Street. I hear he still lives with his mom. Beyond that, I don't know where. I swear on my life.”

Tole replaced the gun under Haynes's chin. “All right, all right. You done good. Sorry about your foot there.”

Aaron shook, holding each wound with each hand. “My goddamn legs!” He sobbed, spitting and crying and heaving. “How'm I going to get out of here?”

“First you gotta get through this. Then we'll figure out how to get you out. Who else? I want names. All of them.”

The names came:

Joshua Knight from out toward Garrison.

Samuel Shaw, who hung around the factory store.

Bill Crutcher out toward the grove.

Daniel Whitmore from Hen Peck Lane.

When the names had all rolled out and Tole had memorized them, he said, “Thank you. Just so you understand, Mr. Haynes, that boy's mama deserves justice. She thinks she's gonna get it from a court. Thinks those white men are gonna listen to the word of some nigger who spent more than half her life as a slave, polishing silver and waiting on the white folks.”

Blood was leaking steadily between Haynes's fingers, especially from the leg.
Probably hit an artery
, Tole thought. Haynes's pants leg wicked up more blood, red creeping upward into the homespun.

“Truth is, Mr. Haynes, justice ain't a thing you ask for, it's a thing you take.”

And then another deafening blast of Tole's pistol echoed through the rough Middle Tennessee forest that went on for miles and miles and miles. By the time the rest of the felling gang finally heard that last shot and went looking for Haynes, Tole was long gone.