The Widow of the South

for

T
om
M
artin,
J
r.

Semper Fidelis

PROLOGUE

1894

D
own the rows of the dead they came. Neat, orderly rows of dead rebel boys who thirty years before had either dropped at the foot of earthen works a mile or so away or died on the floors of the big house overlooking the cemetery. Now there were stone markers, but for so many years there had been only wooden boards, weathered and warped, and tall posts proclaiming the numbers of the dead.

The two women knew the cemetery as they might have known the wrinkles on their faces or the pattern of repoussé on the coin silver. The white woman, dressed in worn black crinoline, carried a book tightly under her arm and periodically consulted it
just to make sure
. Her servant, a Creole, walked close by.

Over to their left, beyond the house, cedars and oaks sprouted, survivors of a once ancient grove. The Union had cut them down like a great whipping scythe. Carrie McGavock, the mistress of Carnton, keeper of the book of the dead, hardly thought of the grove anymore. The only grove that concerned her was the one beneath her feet, a grove of boys and men. She knew this was a ghastly thought, and yet it kept her from imagining bones and beetles and scraps of gray. It helped to think of her charges as constituting something monumental and not something in decay. She had seen enough of death and felt entitled to imagine herself as something other than an undertaker.

104 Killed at Franklin/Arkansas

A small boy ran along behind them at a distance, ducking between the grave markers and probably thinking he could elude her notice, but nothing eluded her in the graveyard, least of all clumsy, stumbling boys with Lord knows what jangling in their pockets.
Why must they always be following me?
she thought.
At least they’re living and breathing and walking around, even if they
are
grubby and presumptuous.

The boy was one of Carrie’s adopted children, one of near two dozen orphans she’d taken in during the years since the war. Paul was his name, and he was only ten. Since arriving at Carnton almost a year before, he had developed the bad habit of pretending he was a Confederate scout and tracking Carrie and Mariah as they made their daily walk through the cemetery. It was as if something had been bred into him, Carrie thought, and he couldn’t help acting out a role from a moment in time that had passed into memory decades before his birth. It was time to break him of that habit.

Carrie walked along slowly with Mariah eyeing her. Mariah knew she was up to something; she always knew. Mariah had been born knowing everything, Carrie reckoned, but she herself had needed to learn some things along the way.

When she had lulled Paul into thinking she wouldn’t turn around, she looked over her shoulder and locked onto his eyes as he peered over a Texas marker, his yellow hair peppered with the twigs and leaves he imagined would disguise him. She pointed at him and opened the small brown book with the words “McGavock Cemetery” embossed in gold on its cover that she carried under her arm, the book in which she had recorded the names of the dead and their exact place in the earth, the book she carried with her at all times.

“I suppose we’ll be needing to add another name to this book, Mariah.”

“Reckon so.”

“He spends so much time in the cemetery anyway.”

“That’s the truth, yes, ma’am.”

“How do you spell his name again?”

“You know I ain’t good with my letters, but I believe it’s
P-A-
. . .
”

Of course, this was too much for any little boy to stand, let alone a boy like Paul, whose desire to be around Carrie only barely exceeded his fear of the dead men in the ground.

“Please, ma’am, I ain’t meant nothing by it.”

“You
didn’t
mean
anything
by it.”

“Yes, ma’am. Not nothing.”

Not nothing.
Can’t fix everything,
she thought.

“But you spend so much time in here, Paul. I believe you’d like to spend more time if you could, and I can’t think of a better way.”

She took a pen out of her apron pocket and pretended to write in her book.

“You do, too,” he said.

“I do what?”

“Spend time in this place here. With the dead people.”

For a moment Carrie felt the urge to defend herself. She had not felt the need to defend or justify herself for years. She had seen too much to have to explain anything to anyone. And yet the boy had a point.

“Come here, Paul.”

The boy peeled his way around the grave marker slowly, expecting punishment, and walked heavy-footed up to Carrie’s skirts before looking up at her through his messy bangs. She put her hand on his head and brushed his hair out of his eyes.

“I promise you’ll never get your name in this book, if you promise to never come in here again.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, then.”

“Now, take my name out of the book. Please, ma’am.”

Mariah covered her mouth to keep from laughing, as she always did when she watched her mistress get sassed. Carrie would have laughed, too, but she couldn’t risk the boy not taking her seriously. She wanted him never to come into that cemetery again, and if she could, she’d have made it so that he never went into any cemetery again and never heard of or saw a dead person the rest of his life. She’d done plenty of time with the dead, more than enough time to exempt the people she loved from morbidity.

“I will take your name out of this book when I see you running into that house to finish up your lessons. And if I ever catch . . .”

But Paul was already gone, running so fast his muddy leather boots slapped his rear as he went, leaving little marks.

Carrie watched him go and then turned to Mariah, whom she had once owned, a gift to her from her father. She
was
a gift, whatever the meaning and implications of that word. Mariah had been her tether to the earth when things had spun away, when Carrie wasn’t sure if there remained a real and true life for her, and then when she wasn’t sure if she wanted that life even if it existed. Things had been different once. She couldn’t believe that she had ever been so . . .
what
? Weak? No, that wasn’t it. She’d never been weak. She’d been buffeted and knocked down, like grass bent to the ground by the wind preceding a thunderstorm. She’d been slow to get up. But she did get up, eventually. There had been no choice. She was not afraid of much, and she especially wasn’t afraid of God. Not anymore, not for a long time.

“Mariah, what do you see?”

A mockingbird chased a hawk across the width of the cemetery, diving and chattering at the black shadow until it was banished from whatever bit of territory the smaller bird claimed for its own.

“I see a mockingbird. And some of them yellow birds. Finches. Big old bird with claws, too.”

Mariah looked past her mistress, across the field of tall grass.

424 Killed at Franklin/Mississippi

“You know that isn’t what I mean.”

Carrie could see the markers and the grass, and the iron fence ringing the graveyard. She could turn and see the back of her house and remember the beards on the dead generals laid out on the porch below and the keening of the wounded on the balcony above. She could see just fine. But there was more to seeing than that, she thought. It was either a failure of imagination or a slight by the Lord Himself, but in any case she could not see the things Mariah could see. Mariah could tell her about things that gave her comfort, and Carrie cared not a whit about how she came upon the knowledge.

She pointed at a grave marker in the Tennessee section.
MJM,
it read. In places, twigs leaned against the stones. She made a mental note to tell the yard boy about them.

“What about him? That one.”

“Miss Carrie, please, ma’am. This ain’t right.”

Carrie stared hard at the seam of her dress, where the new thread of her latest mending stood out like a long dark cord against the faded black of her ankle-length dress. She hadn’t known how to sew before the war, and she still wasn’t very good at it. They would have to dye the whole thing soon.

“I would like to know about that man.”

Mariah wasn’t sure that what she saw in her mind was real, just the product of a fevered imagination, or maybe the work of the devil himself making her play games with the white woman whom she loved in a way she could not describe. Fragments of light and sound came to her when she let her mind drift, and the words Carrie craved formed on Mariah’s lips unbidden. It was a thoughtless exercise, a pastime to while away an afternoon. The thing she
did
know, the only thing she knew for sure, was that Carrie
believed
. Mariah could feel that on her.

“I don’t know what to say, ma’am.”

“Yes, you do. Don’t play. We’re too old for that. Tell me what you see when you stare into the earth right there. Don’t hold back. I know when you’re holding back.”

Mariah closed her eyes and went silent, hoping Carrie would forget her little obsession and keep walking. But Carrie stayed put, so Mariah began to speak.

“There a man and a boy. It sunny. They ain’t working, so maybe they just home from church.”

“How old?”

“The man, he a man. Got a beard. Dark, strong. He ain’t old or young. The boy, he just a little one, though he think he bigger. Maybe ten. He got a fishing pole in his hand. They going to catch fish.”

“Is there a woman?”

“She dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“’Cause they going out fishing in they church clothes.”

They walked past MJM and whatever he might have become. The air was thick, the grass was soft, and they moved so slowly they seemed to float. Another Tennessee summer, thick and grown over. Carrie was long used to the weather, but sometimes she missed the breezes of her home parish, the smell of wind off the water. There was nothing wet nearby but a little river, and that was almost a mile away. She’d learned to walk calmly and to look out for shade.

The mockingbird returned from the fight and perched nearby on a Missouri marker. The bird eyed them first from one eye and then the other, its long tail feathers pumping up and down. Carrie frowned. It was a ridiculous display coming from a bird so common and so obviously unfriendly. What if all the mockingbirds in the world just disappeared? Stranger things have happened, and she wouldn’t miss them.

She and Mariah moved so lightly the grave markers seemed to march toward them.

130 Killed at Franklin/Missouri

The cemetery contained the remains of almost 1,500 of the 6,000 Confederate soldiers dead or wounded under General Hood’s command in a few hours on November 30, 1864. On this very ground, men had formed up and marched off to fight. The men who remained now were the men who would never be returned home—men who were forgotten or from people too poor to fetch their remains or from people who were never told what became of their sons. Carrie had heard the nicknames: the Morgue of the South, the Temple of Dead Boys. Snide, she thought, but not unexpected. Cemeteries were rightly the province of governments and historical societies and ladies’ patriotic aid organizations. It was an odd thing to keep a private cemetery so large without assistance or official sanction. Carrie knew this. She didn’t much care. The war had come to her one day, suddenly and with an otherworldly insistence that wasn’t the work of the sovereign God she thought she had known. Who else could understand that, except perhaps the dead men in her cemetery? She would not give up her little part of the war; she would not let the war invade and then disappear without a trace, as if there were no need for a reckoning, no way to atone for the great crime. She had long before determined to hold on to it by the tail.

Since the war she hadn’t spent much time in the company of women other than Mariah. She rarely went into town for social engagements. Why would she want to attend any more commemorative tea parties thrown by ladies fighting over the legless officers who lent luster to their guest lists, ladies who ran when the Yankees came and lived off their poorer relatives while clutching their silver? She’d seen too much of them and of their endless reunions. They bored her.

No, she was inescapably the Widow of the South, the Keeper of the Book of the Dead. She would wear black until she died. This was who she was now. Let the gossips have their little parties and caress the folded sleeves of the armless. Let them blather on about the wisdom of the old ways and of the invincible resilience of the Southern people and of the glories of the war. She had more important things to do.

“We’re going to need to clean this place up today, Mariah. Sweeping and raking is what’s needed. We’ll have to start at the far end and work back. And I’m not happy with the way that old obelisk is leaning, the one in the section of the unknown boys. We need to get a man up here to straighten that old thing out. Won’t do for it to be looking like it was too old to stand up. And I’m not sure, but I think I’ve got some of the Texans misidentified in the book. You’d think I’d have it right by now, but nothing is ever done, not ever. And while we’re at it . . .”

She heard him before she saw him. A small cough, followed by a louder, deeper cough that he tried to swallow back. She turned toward the house and there, in the path between the gravestones, stood an old man. A surprisingly old man. He was thin and pepper-haired, and his eyes were too dark for her to see where he was looking. They were set back too far in his head to distinguish them from the shadows. He stood up tall and held his old bowler in his hand. She could see him nervously massaging his knuckles under the hat, which caused a little halo of dust to rise up off the felt. He wore a long coat that was slightly too short and scuffed boots. His mouth was twisted up in what appeared to be a smirk, but which she knew was not. He watched her closely and walked toward her with the faintest hint of a limp, enough to make her heart break. The twisted and dried-out parts of him still contained just the memory of his old beauty—all the parts of him were still there, they’d just been used up. He stood before her, so close she could hear the air whistling in and out of him. She knew him immediately, as if he’d left only the day before.