The Orphan Mother (19 page)

August 1, 1867

Mariah kept thinking about a day she had once spent with Theopolis. She remembered wearing her favorite tattered linsey-woolsey dress that she wore for washing days. The coarse fabric had grown so soft from the years that it felt on her skin like the silks and velvets that Carrie McGavock hung in her own closet.

Mariah had been hanging out the laundry, feeling oddly like a queen in her stained and worn shift, and Theopolis, six or seven years old, maybe, had been playing down in the ravine with some of the other slave children—and, quite possibly, some of the McGavock children as well—and he'd come running up to her, laughing, out of breath, in the middle of some chase. He'd grabbed her skirts and pulled himself behind her, hiding. Distantly the children's shouts and calls floated out to them.

Her son's small hands gripped tight to the folds of her dress. She looked up, pointing into the sky. “You see that cloud there?” she asked Theopolis. “That's where your daddy went. That's where he lives now.” Theopolis followed her gaze up into the clouds, which glowed brighter than clouds should, as if lit by candles hidden inside them. He still held tight to her rough homespun dress, and his voice was clear: “I miss my daddy.”

“I miss him, too,” Mariah said absently and went to pull Theopolis close, but he'd released her and was running off again, down to the ravine, where his playmates shouted and called his name.

Now Mariah lay abed, thinking. She never saw her son's face in the dream—his head was bent, or his back was to her, or she didn't think to look down. He'd been right there, and she never thought to look down.
We never think to look down
, she thought.
We're always looking ahead or looking behind, but never see what's standing right beside us.

She wondered if it was true, her missing Bolen Reddick, her dead husband. He'd been dead for nine years; sometimes she had trouble remembering him. Colonel John had bought him in Montgomery, brought him back to help train the horses. He'd been kind, and the right age, and it seemed right to marry him when he'd asked. Had she loved him? She couldn't remember. Love often seemed like a luxury to her, something not quite essential, what with laundry always needing to be done and the washerwoman never reliable, and the cook who'd get into sulks if she wasn't complimented on her roasts, and the gardener boy who'd avoid weeding the patches in the corners of the flowerbeds if you didn't stand right behind him and make him do it properly. How could love blossom or even exist, confronted with weedy flowerbeds and dirty laundry?

She sat up. No tears, just a calm silence and the sounds of the outside wind blowing through an open window. She hadn't allowed herself to think much about Theopolis, but she did see him now, and there he was a ghost following her in her thoughts. It was time she stopped ignoring him.

After supper, she took the horse-drawn cart from Carnton down to Franklin, bumping over rocks and potholes and wishing she'd just walked. She tied up the cart near Theopolis's house. Mariah would put the house up for sale sometime—perhaps sell it to some young Negro couple from the country, perhaps with a baby of their own. She liked the idea of a family living there. Her shaking hand gripping the railing for support, she walked herself up the few steps to the front door. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stepped inside. It was empty and her shoes were heavy on the wooden floorboards.

There was no trace of Theopolis anywhere, but Mariah remembered the day he moved in, how proud he was to have his own house. She remembered he kept forgetting little things from home, shoes and cooking tools, and each time, he would have to come back. Mariah thought maybe he was forgetting on purpose, afraid to leave home. But he had not been afraid.

Carrie was right. The ghosts and the pain didn't lessen by confronting them, but they did grow more bearable—as if you yourself got bigger, able to hold more grief.

On the way back to the dogcart she paused. George Tole, she knew, lived somewhere nearby.
There, that
house. Just up the way. She marched up the three steps to the tiny porch and banged on his door. Immediately she hoped he wasn't home.

Footsteps sounded from inside, and a moment later the door opened. Tole stood there, one hand in his pocket.

“Mariah, you all right? Somethin' the matter?” Plainly he was startled to see her.

“I was visiting Theopolis's house, thought I'd say hello before heading back.”

“You want to come in?” He opened the door more fully.

“Thank you,” she said, and did.

“Coffee?”

“No thanks. Just being neighborly and saying hello.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Mariah saw the model town sprawled out before her, and she moved toward it, gasping, amazed.

Tole walked up behind her, shyly, as if embarrassed. “It's just something I do to pass the time, that's all.”

She'd heard talk of this tiny town, fashioned from carved wood and pieces of glass and bits of trash, but had no idea of its scale. All around her and hanging from the ceiling were tiny figurines carved from wood and twigs or molded from melted wax and glue; old pieces of tin and copper, some of them welded together and painted, sloppily, but there was a beauty to it. In the center of the room, square in the middle of the floor so it was impossible to walk directly from one side to the other, lay the entire town of Franklin, miniaturized and bastardized, splayed out as if seen from above, from a great distance, from God's own view.

She wondered how a man who barely knew the town at all could know it so well. She stepped closer, gazing down Church Street, studying the roof of the Thirsty Bird Saloon on a tiny, winding block of Almond Street, the colored grocery on Fourth Avenue, the small park where she had sat with Theopolis so many afternoons, handing him stale bread from Carrie's pantry to feed the birds. She could hear her younger self call out to him:
Careful, baby, don't get too close now!

In the courthouse square, a tiny stage no bigger than a playing card had been erected, and on that stage sat a tiny wax figure, painted black, maybe with tar; he was sitting beside another figure, this one painted much lighter.

Mariah wiped the sweat from her face. “How long this take you to build, Mr. Tole?”

“Oh, I don't know. Guess I been workin' on it some months now. Off and on. Started when I moved to town. Could be over six months now or so. Not too long.”

“It's a powerful thing.” Her eyes followed a miniature horse pulling a miniature cart down a miniature Main Street, where they'd just installed the miniature streetlights. The businessmen's bowler hats were constructed from what looked like tiny metal thimbles, melted down and polished. Almost unconsciously she looked for Army men, to see which uniform they would wear, blue or gray. She couldn't find one. She looked closer.

“I don't see any Army boys. You forget to put 'em in?”

“No ma'am. I didn't forget.”

“I wondered if you'd put them in blue or in gray.”

“I wouldn't put them in either. Wouldn't have an army here.”

She skirted the wall, surveying the—what was it, sculpture? art? a crazy unbelievable anomaly?—town from another angle. Miniature schools, barber's parlor, taverns. Miniature churches bristled with toothpick steeples.

Yet something was off. It took her a moment to realize what the issue was: miniature trees grew in places that should have held buildings. The police station. The jail. Both missing. Miniature trees grew there. Where the old jail should have been, Tole had carefully designed a garden park.

Perhaps Tole had simply forgotten to add them. Maybe, she thought, he was working from an old map, before the jail was built. In the corner, by the trees he'd built with wax and sticks, she saw a man painted black and a smaller man, most likely a boy, sitting beside him. A man and his son, perhaps.

And then, only then, it struck her. She realized what she was looking at. It wasn't a miniature. And then she realized this wasn't a replica of Franklin as it was; it was Franklin as it
could
be. In a better world, a more just world, maybe in a different time.

“It's beautiful, Mr. Tole.” Tears pricked at her eyes, old fool that she was. “Seems like such a happy place. Doesn't seem to matter how much killin' and sorrow goes on. I want to remember it just this way.”

“Good.”

“You think a place like this could ever exist, Mr. Tole?”

Tole nodded yes, as if he did believe it.

She noticed a man, made of twisted baling wire and with a tiny, bright red cork head, perched on Dr. Cliffe's house. He seemed to be holding a long stick—a wand or a staff, or a tiny rifle. Some initials seemed carved, infinitely small, into the staff, but they were too minute for her to see.

“Who's he supposed to be?” Mariah asked.

“Just somebody I added. I like to think of him as a guardian of the city.”

“A guardian? What's paradise need a guardian for?”

“Don't know. Maybe he don' trust it.”

“He a magician? That a wand he holding?”

“Maybe.”

“Or a rifle?”

“Maybe.”

“If it were my town,” Mariah said, “I'd take that rifle from his hands.”

August 2, 1867

A warm, windless Friday evening, and George Tole squatted at the edge of the roof of the Billard Saloon on Main Street. It had been a warm day, but the night was brisk, with a sky black with hostile gray swaths and an occasional grumble that seemed to threaten rain. Well after dark, Tole felt a cold drop land on the back of his hand, and another on the barrel of ol' GT. A flash of lightning cast a blue shadow along Main Street. Not a single person on the block.

The saloon was just a few blocks from West Margin Street, where James Mayberry lived with his mama. Some of the black folks around town said Mayberry usually drank himself half to death in this bar here. They said you'd be more likely to find him falling down in the saloon outhouse than you would in any church on Sunday mornings. And now, perched just a couple of stories above, kneeling on the thin shingled roof, Tole could hear the men laughing and getting on, a little rowdy and beer drunk.

Another rumble from the sky, a bellowing
barroom
of thunder. Tole threw an oilskin over himself and the rifle before it started to drizzle—a warm summer rain that quickly soaked the roof. Tole didn't mind the rain so long as his powder stayed dry. Miles, oddly, had learned to walk in the rain. He had taken his first steps in such weather, naked and unsteady, a chubby baby boy waddling, barely able to stand, and Tole on his knees with his arms stretched out wide, ready to catch him if he fell. The years passed and Tole could remember chasing Miles through thunderstorms, the same way his mama had chased after him and his younger brother—
You boys get back here now, before you go and catch yourselves a cold!
Tole had sounded just like his mama, calling after his son the same way. And when they'd return home, he would wrap Miles in the blanket his mama had knitted.

Tole never thought of those days now. Almost never.

A glass shattered below him and wooden doors swung open. He took a knee at the edge of the roof and saw two men stumble out. The man on the left was Mayberry, stumbling drunk, barely standing.
If a stiff wind comes rollin' down this street
, Tole thought,
this boy gone fall and break his neck, save me the trouble.
He didn't recognize the other man. He figured he wouldn't kill any man he didn't know for certain to be involved with Theopolis's death. He lifted the rifle butt to his shoulder and squinted through the sights. The rain came down a bit harder now, cold on his legs and feet, which were still exposed.

“You go on home, ya bastard!” Mayberry shouted and slurred. As he turned into the moonlight, Tole could see his cleft lip. “Tell the missus we're expecting her for Sunday dinner.”

The two men parted with Mayberry heading east, a few wobbly steps before he stumbled down, first to his knees, and then onto his back, laughing, his belly heaving, and talking nonsense to the clouds. The second man, tall and gangly, made his way around to the back of the saloon.

Mayberry mumbled and cursed, trying to reach his feet. Tole had him, sighted in on his forehead. He waited for Mayberry to make it up, watched him fumble with his belt buckle and piss right there on Main Street. Mayberry fell backward, stumbled straight, whistling something that sounded like a lullaby.

Tole thought of the man's mama. He thought of what he was taking from her. She would be changed forever, but her son was a killer and a cruel man. Maybe someday someone would tell her this.

He took his shot. Mayberry crumpled like burning paper. The boom from the rifle should've been enough to wake the whole damn town except for the thunder.

Tole climbed down and walked over to the body. The man lay still, facedown in a puddle. Tole reached into his pockets and found some coins and paper money, and a small yellowed bank check signed by Elijah Dixon for thirty-three dollars. He stuffed it all back in the pocket. He had no use for blood money.

Time to haul the body away. Tole was glad the river wasn't far.