The Orphan Mother (4 page)

July 6, 1867

Tole wore a buttoned-down shirt he had pressed himself that morning, a vest, and a cotton cap pulled close to his ears. The fancy clothing felt restrictive and strange. He loitered near the midwife's tiny house on Cameron Street, passing time, smelling the breeze, feeling as if the world were better than it had been—the colors fiercer, sharper, darker. Far away a mockingbird shrilled in a tree, and another answered it, echoing.

Around him men were preparing for the rally. Colored Leaguers hurried past with their easy laughs and their drums. White men followed them with slower steps, glowering. Some Negroes shook their heads as they watched the Leaguers go by making the white men grumble and stomp their boots. They wanted no part of that and didn't appreciate the disturbance of the peace. Eventually everyone moved off toward the square, away from Tole. He stood and watched them go, in no hurry to go anywhere himself.

And then: there she was, sallying forth, skirt shining in the sun, carrying a basket under an arm. She didn't see him, or feigned not to, and turned in the other direction, marching out past the other clusters of houses along the high road. Her hips swayed as she walked.

“Missus Reddick,” he called to her. She didn't respond, so he called again. This time she turned.

Tole approached. “Thought I might say hello.”

“Hello,” she said. “Forgive me for not remembering your name. I never forget faces, but names are more difficult these days.”

“Tole. George Tole.”

“Mr. Tole.” Something about the way she said it sounded musical. He was George after his mama's brother who died as a child; and Tole after his father, who was dead of drink, or worse, these long years past. But now, here, hearing her speak it, the whole name sounded exotic and mysterious and worthy.

“You heading out of town?” he asked her.

“Carnton. The McGavock place.”

“Where you were—”
Where you were a slave.
He knew he didn't have to finish the sentence.

“Yes,” she said. “Heading back to return some things to Missus McGavock.”

“I ain't never been over that way. I'm still learning my way around here.”

“Well, I don't make a habit of walking these back roads with strangers, but since you know my son, you welcome to walk along with me if that's what you trying to say.”

“Thank you,” he said, falling into step with her. “But I want to carry your bag there.”

“I can carry my own bag,” Mariah said. “You just focus on walking.”

He felt an unfamiliar tightening around his lips: it took him a moment, as he fell into step next to her, to recognize that he was smiling.

There were certain simple pleasures, he reflected, that had been denied him—or that he had denied himself, more like. Simple easy graces that could fall upon you unexpectedly, if you had the good fortune to recognize them for what they were, like an unlooked-for gift from someone you loved once. Who would have thought it a gift, walking down a humid summer lane in Middle Tennessee with a beautiful woman swinging a basket next to you? But if you were a killer and sometimes con man, a drunk and washed-up soldier who could sit with a rifle in a tree and pick off defenseless men from a quarter of a mile away, it would seem a gift indeed.

She seemed different from other women he had known—a bringer of life, with a confidence and assuredness he envied and wanted to possess. But now, for this moment, it was enough just to walk beside her. Right then, with the dust of the road kicking up at each step, even with piles of horse dung and ruts to avoid, right then he wasn't a drunk and a killer. He was a better man.

“You say you not from around here,” Mariah said.

“Yes'm, New York's home for me. Was, anyhow. Came out here to Franklin just before this summer.”

“What a summer it's been,” Mariah said. “I don't think it'll ever end.”

“There'll be an Indian summer, surely,” Tole said. “Though I don't know what the Indians have to do with it. I guess they go ahead and blame them for everything they can, even the heat.”

Mariah smiled. “Why you come to Franklin, of all the places?”

“Oh, this and that reason,” Tole said.

Her eyes narrowed. “That ain't no kinda answer.”

“I guess I just needed some new scenery,” he said. “New faces to look at.”

“What was wrong with the faces in New York?”

“The problem wasn't so much with their faces,” he said. “The problem was with mine.”

“Ain't nothing wrong with your face as far as I can tell,” Mariah said.

Was she flattering or flirting with him? Surely neither. Or both?

Or she was just being kind. And was kindness such a bad thing? The war, after all, was over. This situation with Mr. Dixon would soon be resolved. Perhaps Dixon would be grateful for a job well done, help find him work. The man was a magistrate, after all, and very wealthy. Talk was that one of his children was sickly, and Dixon doted on her like a crazy man. The man had some charity in his heart. Perhaps this was the new beginning that Tole had sought. “Believe it or not, I had my looks when I was a younger man. I wasn't always this old fool.”

“Don't go talkin' about age, Mr. Tole.”

“You don't look a day over twenty years old, Missus Reddick.”

Tole could have sworn he saw the tinge of a blush in her cheeks, but he took the summer heat to be the cause and lowered his eyes to his feet.

“You're kind. A liar, but kind. You think you can charm your way out answering the question, though, you wrong.”

“Not trying to charm my way out of anything.”

“Sounds to me like you running from something,” Mariah countered, slowing their pace to a stop as she met his gaze. “Except you don't seem like the kinda man who's scared of much. Makes me think the thing you running from is more frightening than any war or anybody's face.”

He held her stare. “Maybe I'm running toward something now, not away.”

They began walking again along the dirt road, wide-open farmland on either side of them: to the left, acres of corn; and to the right, sunflowers breaking into bloom. Mariah adjusted the bag on her shoulder. Tole kept his head bowed, looking down at his shoes, only daring to glance over at Mariah when he knew she wouldn't catch him.

They let silence fall over them, the soft shuffle of boots against the dirt, and soon they were halfway to Carnton.

“You have any kind of family, Mr. Tole?”

“You need to call me Tole, ma'am.”

“Tole, then. Any kind of family?”

“Can't say I have much left anymore,” he said. “I believe I have a great-uncle still kickin' around in Albany, but he might as well be as dead as all the others.”

“No wife and children back in New York?”

And there it was, the question, so simple, one of the first questions people asked him, the one he had previously found impossible to answer. But now he found the words.

“I had a wife and a son, but they dead now.”

Mariah's stride shifted imperceptibly, like a stagger. She said, softer, “Lord. Sorry to hear that.”

“Happened a few years ago. It's all right.”

“Doubt any parent's ever ‘all right' once their child has passed on,” she said, looking over at him.

“You're probably right. But I get by.”

She didn't ask how it happened, as people usually did. Instead: “What was his name?” And Tole said, “My wife named him Miles, after her daddy,” and Mariah said, “Well that's a real nice name.”

The silence fell between them again—rough with unspoken questions, unanswered thoughts.

A few moments later he saw a pair of brick pillars, and a sign, damaged and weather-beaten:
Carnton
, painted in simple black script on a white board. She said, “This is Carnton, where I
was
, once. Like you said. Thank you for the walk.”

“Good to walk with you, Missus Reddick.”

“If I got to call you Tole, then you call me Mariah.”

“Mariah,” he repeated. And then, nervously, “If you want, I can wait a bit and walk you back to town.”

Mariah laughed. “No, I'll find my way. Must've made the walk a few thousand times on my own.”

And then Tole reached out his hand. Mariah placed hers inside his palm and they shared the warmth for a moment before Mariah turned and headed up the drive, around the bend. For a while Tole could see her shadow, and then not even that.

July 6, 1867

Up the steps of Carnton and in Mariah went. The house was massive, once—when Carrie and Mariah had moved there, upon Carrie's marriage to Colonel John—very stylish, with wallpapers from France and England and fine Brussels carpets on the floors. Books looked down regally from bookcases in Colonel John's fine Gothic office. But then the war had roared in upon them, and the house had been commandeered as a hospital, and the blood had soaked through the floorboards. Some of the walls themselves seemed gnawed upon: the officers' sabers carelessly ramming across the wallpaper and the plaster. Much had been repaired, of course, but the old house now seemed smaller to Mariah, and dim. Colonel John had eschewed the new gaslight, and candles were never where you needed them. So now the rooms were dark and close.

Mariah moved down the central passage and into the family parlor, where against the windows the dark silhouette of Carrie McGavock waited, dressed all in black, her mourning veil intact. Carrie dressed every day as if funerals were a regular though lamented fact of one's day, like rain.

“Miss Carrie, I got your note and I just want to say—”

Carrie would not let Mariah finish her sentence. She held her hands awkwardly out from her sides just a few inches, as if she had not yet decided whether an embrace would be in order. Finally she smiled very sweetly and placed a hand on Mariah's right arm in an approximation of an embrace.

“Thank you for coming, Mariah, and since you are in your work clothes, perhaps you would accompany me to the cemetery? So much more pleasant to converse there, don't you think?”

Mariah had not worn her
work clothes
; what she had on was her finest, though covered in the dust that had been kicked up off the road. Carrie didn't leave room for an answer and was already out the door before Mariah could reply. With resignation and familiarity, Mariah turned and followed. How easy that was. She hardly had to think in order to tread behind her former mistress, out and across the gallery, down the steps, and down paths that led to a cemetery that stretched far into the distance.

I ain't staying, I am decided.

Carrie marched down the path with the Book of the Dead under her arm, arms swinging and chin up.

Here, in this cemetery of Carrie's, a stone's throw from her house, the Book of the Dead recorded the final resting places of hundreds of Confederate dead, marked by even rows and columns of whitewashed cedar boards, arranged according to state, each board identified only by a number and initials, no names, no ranks. Every dead man and boy rested in equal relation to the other, laid out just so and blanketed by a thick, fine-leaved grass.

“I have your letter here, Miss Carrie.”

“Let us not talk about that yet, shall we? So much work to do.”

“It's why I come.”

“You need not have a reason to come see me, Mariah Reddick, not ever, and you needn't blame that little piece of paper. Now, I count forty-three rows from South Texas to the row missing its monument…”

Because of her constant patrolling of the cemetery, the hem of Carrie's dress was often faded with a light layer of cemetery dirt. Mariah's mother would have called this
goofer dust
. Goofer might be used in some bad work against enemies if they were known, but enemies were sneaky and often they weren't known.

“Texas forty-three!” Carrie called. “Who is that?”

Mariah ran her finger down the columns drawn in Carrie's crabbed blue script. “Jeremiah Carter.”

“Poor Jeremiah!”

As children they had explored the old place in Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana, owned and mastered by Carrie's father. Back then Mariah could think that the general principles of a slave's life did not apply to her, since she was companion of the
master's daughter
. She and Carrie braided hair and wrestled and climbed stunted oaks together, and Maude the cook would hand them both pieces of sugarcane, each piece no bigger than the other.

When Mariah went off with Carrie after her wedding, Mariah sat high up on the dowry cart, face forward, following the closed carriage that contained the newlyweds, and she had never been happier. It didn't occur to her until later that she was in the dowry cart because she was herself one of the gifts.

They had continued for almost twenty years, mistress and slave, companions who knew each other best in the world. And then came a disruption greater than the war: Mariah became a freewoman, and they had found no words to talk about that.

“You have a bed in town, in a house. Do you feel at home there?”

“Yes ma'am.”

The oaks here cast cool shadows, and the leaves rustled overhead. Sunlight dappled Carrie's black dress. “But you return here when I ask you.”

Because
, thought Mariah,
you are incapable of taking care of yourself, Widow of the South.
“Yes.”

“Does it feel like home here? I think it's starting to feel like home to me, after all these years. And do you know why?”

Mariah shook her head.

“The life of summer dresses and tea cakes was never for me. I've cast all that off. I need
nothing
from the outside world now.”

Carrie had not said so much to Mariah, and certainly nothing so personal, in years. This was an invitation offered to a greater intimacy by a lonely woman, Mariah knew. She knew Carrie that well, at least.

“Except,” Carrie said, “you are the only person who has ever run this household, and I wonder if it can possibly go on without you.”

Mariah understood this was Carrie's way of trying to take care of things. The lady of Carnton could not, for instance, go calling on the old Negress in her tiny house in Franklin. They could not meet for tea, could not sit beside each other in church. A woman such as Mariah Reddick, free she may be, was to be seen and not heard unless spoken to, like a child. She was not to assume she had a part in the rituals of civil society, which were open to her by invitation only. This was the truth of the world after the war, and Mariah knew all about it. But Carrie persisted in thinking that they were friends even so, and that left only employment as the means for acting out the gestures of friendship. In Carrie's world, they could have tea together so long as it was Mariah serving it. Had she herself, Mariah Reddick, ever been given the choice of rejecting Carrie McGavock's friendship? For almost forty years that had not been an option. Whether or not to serve Carrie McGavock had not been a question either.

Mariah leaned against the oak tree, a couple dozen feet from Carrie. She felt tiny slivers of bark fall down the neck of her dress.

“You come back, and we start again,” Carrie said. “No contracts either, not like John has with the tenants, just your own will to stay. I have work here for you, but perhaps it won't seem so much like work. The work of helping me with this cemetery is special, spiritual work. You know there is more to this life and the spirit. Your mother knew, certainly.”

Carrie had never spoken of Mariah's mother. Mariah wondered if she even knew the woman's name.

“Not sure what Mama knew.”

“Oh, that isn't true! She had the sight. She could talk to the dead! You know that. We all knew that.”

It was news to Mariah that this was something Carrie McGavock had known. “What you mean by that?”

“The dead! She had the power of the dead. She saw the dead, she communicated.”

Carrie stood closer, so close Mariah could feel her breath on her cheeks. Her eyes were wet, crinkled half-shut by one of Carrie's sweet, world-forgiving smiles. Mariah knew that her mama's use of the arts had been nothing so exciting as Carrie imagined it now.

Carrie put her hand on Mariah's shoulder as if to steer her toward the house. There were no sounds of birds. Mariah strained to hear them, but nothing. Then, in the distance, she heard the sound of a mockingbird, very faint, and she was glad. The world had not stopped. She felt the light tap of a fly at the top of her head.

She had once ruled this place. The kitchen ran according to her direction, as did the cleaning of the house and the maintenance of the yard and grounds. A dozen others curried her favor, hoping to someday be appointed out of the field and into the house. Others feared being sent out into those same fields, and when she passed them by in the parlor she noticed how hard they seemed to polish the silver tea set, or how persnickety they became about dust among the rows of Sir Walter Scott's volumes on Colonel McGavock's shelves.

She had once had power, yes, but it had been borrowed power, the power of a slave for the moment raised up among other slaves. She could feel the essential falsity, which was like playacting, but nonetheless it had been appealing. Her memories held lots of people in them, and not just any people but people who thought of Mariah and wanted her time and her attention. Most of these had fled Franklin at the first chance. There were not so many people in Mariah's life anymore.

Mariah had been given free will by her Maker, that's what the Methodist preachers said, yet she had never before then been able to
act
freely. The world of possibility had not been hers. Every slave had been separated from the entirety of God's creation. Every other slave was alone even when they worked and ate together.
That
was loneliness.

Mariah took a step away from the house and shook her head. “Not today, Miss Carrie. I come back another day, and maybe we talk then again, but I ain't staying now. Got business.”

“Business?”

“Theopolis is speaking this afternoon in town.” She tried to say it casually, but could feel the cool thrill on her lips: the thrill of pride—and of fear, too.

“He's one of the speakers?” And then, simply: “Oh, Mariah.” Sharing the pride as well as the trepidation. “You shouldn't be out here with me—when's the speech?”

“Not till this afternoon.”

“Let me get Lester to run you back to town, so you have plenty of time.”

“That would be very kind.”

Carrie had already taken a couple of steps toward the house, having assumed that Mariah would follow. She stopped and turned. “But don't think I won't stop trying.” She smiled, but down came the veil. Carrie turned back toward the house, floated across the grass again on the way to her fortress.