The Widow of the South (19 page)

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do you let me, a woman and a stranger, talk to you like this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why do you talk back? Why do you listen?”

I knew, I knew. I knew the answer to that. I was there because of her, because I had not ever been so close to a woman who seemed also possessed of that black thread that wound down through time and the fabric of my life, fraying here and there but never leaving me, always growing longer and stronger, pulling me toward God only knows what, nothing good. It surprised me that a woman of means, with such fine things and a family and a beautiful face like polished china, that she would also have been bound by this thread, which could spin and weave around a person until there was nothing left to see of this person, only the black cocoon. I could pull that thread, tie it onto my own, and I knew that I could be at some peace with myself if I did exactly that, spinning her away from the tangles of time.

Time, twisting on and on, always taking away and never bringing anything back, could kill people years before they extricated themselves from their bodies and flew off to God. I had heard her float through the hallways of the house, whispering the names of her children as she blew out the lamps.
John Randal, Mary Elizabeth, Martha.
It sounded like prayer, like some sort of invocation. I’d been in a Catholic church once, down on toward Natchez, and I’d heard the same sound when the priests approached the altar, muttering the sounds that would bring Christ back to them. I didn’t much care for that sort of thing, and I had no faith that a priest could work such magic, but I found myself praying that someday, maybe, Carrie McGavock would perform that miracle, that time would get all wrapped up on itself and confused, and that those children would walk the hallways with their mother again. There was beauty in that woman. Not in her pain, but in the part of her obscured by the pain and the black crinkly dress and the black thread of time. I saw a young and beautiful woman, a woman who could lift burdens and redeem men. I wanted to be redeemed, I wanted to be absolved. And I wanted that woman, the angel who walked in the cemetery among her dead children and kissed their gravestones when she thought no one was looking, to be the one doing the redeeming. I had no name for that, no word. Just a feeling.

I answered her question.

“I don’t know.”

“No, you don’t. So perhaps you might consider being polite and listening to me try to answer your question, rather than interrupting me?”

She smiled sweetly, but behind the sweetness I could see her thinking that she had won.

“John McGavock was a kind man. That was all the reason I needed.”

“That’s it? That’s all a man had to be?”

“Yes. Now that I’m trying to remember, I believe that was it. But I hardly think of such things anymore.”

25

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

T
shat night I told Zachariah everything, everything I could remember. I had never talked to anyone like that. He was captive, and he irritated me in a way that made me want to talk to him even more, to make him see, to make him understand me. I thought I could talk to him like this because he would go away eventually and take with him what I’d said. But that wasn’t it entirely. He was so strange, and he was unafraid of me. He was a sinful, flawed man, and those sins lay upon his heroics as accents of color on a plain quilt. He was not like the rest of the men in gray. His sins were what emboldened me, because I knew I could not be judged by him. His sins drew me in.

He lay there like a fidgeting child while I talked, constantly brushing the hair from his eyes and running his fingers through it while trying to look at anything but me. His eyes drifted to the ceiling and then out the window and then to the dresser. He smelled tart and sour, like old vinegar. It was the smell of the Negroes who worked on my father’s plantation. He reminded me of them, only he talked back to me. He
challenged
me. Who had ever taken the time to challenge me, to argue with me? This man, who I had presumed was illiterate, paid attention. If as a girl I had loved John because he was a mystery and didn’t interrupt me, I became obsessed with the one-legged man in the bed because he was a mystery and he
did
interrupt. I had grown old, and I knew the pain of being left alone with my thoughts. The silence John had given me was no gift, as well intentioned as he was.

I had finished telling Zachariah about my decision to marry John when he abruptly swung himself to the other side of his bed, grabbed the crutches that leaned against the headboard on that side, and drew himself up to his full, now diminished height. I thought he was just fidgeting still, but when I looked at him, he was looking at me sadly.

“I don’t want to hear any more. I’m going for a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Do you know where you’re going? In the dark?”

“I’ll find my way.”

He hobbled over to the far corner where his clothes were piled and awkwardly pulled an old coat over his shoulders. He didn’t look back at me when he passed out the door and turned down the passage. I sat for a moment, deciding whether to follow him. I laughed a little. Of course, I’d follow him.

The moon was hidden behind the clouds, but it was bright enough to cast a weak gray light onto the grounds. I watched him turn a slow circle in the yard, always looking outward. I suppose he had been drifting in and out of sleep that day, because he seemed confused by the absence of men. There were no men in the yard anymore. They had all disappeared in the previous day or so, as if they’d sensed something they could not tolerate. Some had even volunteered for the prison wagon. They had escaped this place, one way or another.

He looked over to where we had piled the dead and the leavings of the surgeons, and they were gone, too. He was alone except for me. My hands looked odd in the light, hard to distinguish from the ground or anything around me. I felt my own self falling into the depth of an empty night. I felt light-headed, as if the boundaries that described my body and my head—the neat lines between here and there—were dissipating to gray, losing their definition and precision, and that I was becoming indistinguishable from the air and the colorless clouds of breath rising from each of us. If I looked at Zachariah just right, he seemed a ghost, too.

“Where the hell is everybody?”

“They’re gone. Not everyone, but almost everyone.”

“I’ve been left behind, then.”

I walked over to him, where he stood between the house and the old cemetery. His eyes were narrowed, and he frightened me.

“Left behind is a matter of interpretation, I guess. It depends on knowing where you had wanted to go and where you are, and the difference between the two. Where had you wanted to go?”

He was frantic, and he began hobbling quickly toward the corner of the house by the garden, to see if the side yard was empty, too.

“Shut the hell up. Just shut the
hell
up. You talk too damned much. That little bastard Jerrod left me, too.”

I shut up and followed behind him slowly. When I caught up to him, he was leaning against the side of the house and breathing heavily, looking out at the empty side yard and the empty drive. Flecks of paint fell onto his shoulders as he rocked against the side of the house, scraping his back against it like he was trying to push it down.
We must get the house painted,
I thought, and immediately realized that I wasn’t all there, like I was floating above events. There was no sound except for the crunch of the ground beneath my shoes, and the hiss of air as he breathed through his teeth.

“The bastards left me. Almighty. How the hell am I going to get out of here?”

His voice broke a little, but he coughed and covered it up. The coughing became a hacking, and he had to bend over for a moment before straightening up and holding his hand to his head.

“My head hurts. Dammit.”

“Come inside.”

“I’m fine right here. You’ll tell me where the hell everyone went, and then you will send me on that way, too.”

“You’re in no condition to go anywhere.”

He moved quicker than I imagined possible for someone on crutches. His hand shot out and took hold of my hair, and he yanked my head back. My throat was cold and indecently exposed, I remember thinking, before the pain hit me and I gasped. He wound the hair tighter in his hand, and he pulled my face right to his, as if it were weightless and not attached to my body. His breath smelled like rotting hay.

“I’ll kill you. Don’t want to, but I’ll kill you. I’ve killed many less deserving than you. I don’t love you enough not to kill you. Did you think I did? You’re a strange woman, and you don’t know a thing about me and you don’t care. I ain’t your toy, your pet. You will save me, do you hear me? You will make sure I am not left behind, or I will kill you and your husband and your niggers, and then I will steal what I need and I will make my own way. Do you understand me?
Where the hell is Jerrod? What did you do with him?”

When he slipped, he fell quickly and hard. His good leg went out from under him as he pulled back on my hair. He had forgotten his limitations. I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks and the burn at the back of my head, and then I was released and he was lying on the ground.

He’d said he loved me.

I picked up one of his crutches and swung it as hard as I could at his head, and I felt it strike him square in the face. He screamed. Some blood flowed dark down his mouth to his chin. I swung it again and hit his stomach. He’d said he loved me. I swung it again and again like I’d seen men do when they were chopping wood, and again and again he yelled. I would be doing the killing now. I would not let him leave. I couldn’t stop. He was vulnerable to me.
He loved me
.

I aimed at his head over and over and over, and his shouts became whispers and then silence. I would never stop. He would stay here.

There was pleasure, intense pleasure. I thought I could see every blade of grass in the dark and every frayed thread in his coat and every single drop of blood. I could see it all, so clearly, more clearly than anything I’d ever seen in my life. His arms flopped out from his sides, like a scarecrow.

Not since I was a child had I thought I could order the world to my liking, in the way I imagined it should be. It was the ordering that was important, not the beating of Cashwell. The killing and the beating and the violence were allowable because they were mine to dole out, they came from me. I was their bearer, no one else. He would not leave, not ever. I began to cry from joy, or from relief.

The hands that grabbed my shoulders and lifted me up were strong and black and callused. I thought they were God’s.

“Miss Carrie! Miss Carrie! No, Miss Carrie. You ain’t to do this, not this. No, ma’am. No, ma’am.”

It was Theopolis, and when he spun me around and I looked up at him, he was as frightened and determined as I’d ever seen a man. I sobbed up at him, hard, like I was hacking something awful up. I looked into his face and hated him, too. He was the child who had complicated everything by his birth. His face was almost as white as mine, and I hated him even more for that. How dare he not be black as night? What right did he have to glow in the faltering moonlight, to hold me, to keep me from doing
anything
? I would have him whipped—yes, I would. I beat his chest, and he gripped me tighter. He had smiled at me once that night he was born, and I had known he was innocent. He was innocent, and so he was more monstrous for the havoc he caused. I cursed him and cried and leaned against him.

“Who is that, Miss Carrie? Who is this? What he done?”

I knew I couldn’t tell him. This was an impossible situation. The Negro son of Mariah had his hands on me, and a Confederate soldier lay at our feet, possibly dead.
Someone’s going to die for this,
I thought. Whatever had driven me to violence flowed out of me. I saw things clear again. I looked up at Theopolis again.
What a beautiful face, what a beautiful man,
I thought. He must not suffer. I looked down at Zachariah.
What a beautiful face, what a beautiful man
.

“Did he hurt you, Miss Carrie?”

“No.”

“Then why you beat him like that?”

“I don’t know.”

I knew what to do then, right then. My mind was so clear I heard the beetles crawling through the dead leaves at my feet; I felt every tremor in Theopolis’s hand, every contraction of muscle and sinew. I knew exactly what I would do and how I would handle this. No one would be hurt. Everything that had happened here would be analyzed and categorized according to my wishes, and all I had to do was remain silent.

Theopolis looked down at me and drew his lips tight, as if he thought he understood.
They’ll believe I’m crazy, they’ve always believed I’m crazy
.
That will save us all.

“You ain’t all right, are you, Miss Carrie?”

I just smiled and smiled. I began planning Zachariah’s funeral. We would bury him in the north corner of the cemetery, away from all the McGavocks. There would be no headstone, and after a time only I would remember where he was.

I cried. Who was the monster now? I told Theopolis to go away, that I would stay with the body until daylight, when we could see properly and could move it. He said I must not do any such thing, that I had to come into the house, that he could carry the dead man anywhere in the blackest night. I told him to bring me a blanket and leave me be. I told him I wanted to watch the sun rise. He shook his head and fetched a blanket, and I sat down next to Zachariah, who breathed shallowly next to me as I leaned against the house and waited for the day to begin.

26

F
RANKLIN

J
ohn walked his horse through the town. The street was torn up, and the trees and houses on either side of the road were pocked with bullet holes or shredded by artillery fire. Articles of clothing lay in the road next to the sidewalks—shoes, hats, shirts—as if their owners had been snatched and lifted up out of their corporeal misery and made to disappear, leaving behind the things they’d no longer need.

Carrie had sent the children off, and since then she had not once noticed his coming or going. For all she knew, he’d been gone for a week. He had time. He had been coming to town for supplies he rarely found, and now he was in search of mercy from a man who would not possess it. Another wasted trip perhaps, but so what? He had time.

It was a few minutes before he noticed that the dead were gone. Elsewhere he had become accustomed to the sight of men lugging off the bodies, but here in its center the town seemed emptied of everyone, the living and the dead. He was looking down the road, straight down the center, and knew he was looking into the heart of the whole mess, the place where the violations of human decency had been the most common, and it was almost deserted. Denuded, like a field after a grass fire. The houses were still there, bearing their wounds, but there was no life about them. No one walking around.
Maybe they’re still hiding in their basements, waiting. Waiting for what? For something to end? What would that be? How long had it been since everything happened? A day? Three days? I’ve lost track of the time.
He began to wander, his purpose forgotten.

His path took him generally in the direction of the poor side of town, called Blood Bucket by the locals because of their belief that much blood was spilled there every weekend after its inhabitants had drunk their fill. It had long been a white enclave for failed farmers, gamblers, and drifters. A few years before, though, free Negroes had begun settling there, and because their freedom was always an open question, they kept to themselves and stuck close to their homes. If there had to be free Negroes, the thinking went among the town’s leaders and its hotheads, it was best that they kept quiet and bottled up by themselves. No sense bringing them into contact with the other Negroes,
their
Negroes. No telling what kind of havoc might be caused by open communication.

John knew that most of his neighbors were still flummoxed by the notion of a free Negro, but it didn’t shock John much. There had always been free Negroes, freed for one reason or another, usually the magnanimity that occasionally came over old masters facing death, especially if they had no heirs. John himself had known a number of freed Negroes in New Orleans quite well, during that time in his life when he traveled to Louisiana on business, before he married Carrie. Some of them were as white as he was and twice as cultured. This had surprised him, and he had been forever on his guard against seeming less than refined in their presence, for fear of embarrassing himself in front of a Negro, however white their skin. The thing that had shocked John the most was that they were proud of being Negroes.

In Blood Bucket the houses were short and leaned this way and that. Porches sloped, and the piers they were built upon seemed to sag in toward each other, like drunks trying to catch their balance. Every manner of odd amendment had been made to the houses when it suited their occupants. A window tacked on here, an extra room there, maybe a fireplace. The houses may have once had a design, but they had grown and expanded like natural things, like things that bent and twisted toward the light.

There was a dry goods store in Blood Bucket. It was too much to call it a store, really. It was a house owned by an old black man who occasionally got his hands on some things—shoes one week, rolls of homespun the next, liquor every week—and didn’t mind selling them. John strolled over to see the man. He had all the time in the world, and he didn’t mind using it.

Joe was the man’s name, just Joe as far as John knew. Little Negro children stared out from between the weatherworn balusters of their front porches, while their mothers went about boiling clothes and hanging the laundry on lines. He noticed the women didn’t wear shoes and that their toes curled under themselves, conserving heat against the cold ground. They called to their children, but their children did not listen. Or they couldn’t hear while the wind whistled down the alleys and through the eaves of their porches. They watched John walk by, their eyes glistening and crusted at the edges. Their mothers hung laundry and cursed the wind. They were the lucky Negroes, they were free.
They still look like slaves,
John thought. He could imagine ten thousand slaves hanging laundry on ten thousand lines at that very moment. Barefoot. The difference, John noted, was that their children watched him walk down the middle of their street. They paid him close attention, as if he and his horse, walking slowly and warily behind him, were circus animals on parade. But they didn’t run away. Or, rather, they did not turn their backs on him. Maybe that was it, John thought.
They’re keeping watch
.

Old Joe was watching him, too. John had been selling bits and pieces of Carnton to Joe for two years. Joe knew people who knew people who would buy such things as ceramic cigar stands and silver pens. These were the little things John could sneak out of the house without Carrie noticing. John wondered how much of Joe’s apparent prosperity had been bought with McGavock heirlooms. He scuffed across the dirt yard and shrugged his shoulders. It didn’t matter.

Joe just rocked back and forth on the back legs of the chair he had set out in the front yard of neatly raked hard-packed ground. John watched him stop rocking, balance on the back legs that had dug deep holes in the ground, and then slowly allow the earth to draw him back down until he was firmly planted again. Joe had decent clothes, clean dungarees without a patch anywhere, a boiled cotton shirt, and a coat made out of an almost new blanket, altered to fit his long arms and narrow shoulders. He let his head stay bare, and John wondered if that was not for poverty’s sake, but because he had a fine, lustrous head of gray hair that looked like a collection of silver curlings. A manly head of hair.

John had never avoided Blood Bucket, as so many others in town did. After he’d sent his own slaves off, he’d found it necessary to come in and hire day labor occasionally, when he and Theopolis couldn’t handle a job themselves. He never brought Theopolis with him. Sometimes he’d drive in with Mariah, who knew women who would sell her sundries for much less than the white traders. He didn’t mind bringing Mariah because he knew her, and knew she loved Carrie, and knew that she would never get her head turned by the illusory promises of freedom. Mariah was smarter than that, he knew, but Theopolis was still too young.

He also knew that Mariah occasionally came into Blood Bucket on her own to visit an old root doctor. This was a side of her he chose not to know anything about. He just barely tolerated it.

“What say, Colonel John?”

“Just taking a walk, Joe. Making my rounds.”

John didn’t exactly know why he’d come to talk to Joe, and he had only a vague idea of what he wanted to ask him. He didn’t have the words to put it just right.

“You seen anything, Joe?”

“Now, Colonel John, I got eyes. I see a whole lot. A whole lot. That ain’t a question I can take good aim at. I
heard
things, too, yes, I have.”

“What have you heard?”

“I’m not sure I know.”

“Don’t play with me. You know better than that.”

“I’m not sure I do, Colonel John.”

“Do what?”

“Know better than that.”

The sun streaked through the clouds, and the light fell upon Joe’s face. Shadows hid part of him, but his eyes gave off a shine. He smiled and chuckled and looked past John toward the end of the street. John imagined he was standing at the center of the earth and that lines of disruption radiated out from where he stood, from where the old man sat on his chair, like the lines of violence that emanated from the center of an artillery crater, thick gashes in the ground that tapered many yards away into a filigree of delicate lines traced by pebbles momentarily blown about and then left to rest again, forever. It was vertiginous, the feeling that came over him. For a moment he wanted nothing more than to sit on the old man’s lap and have him whisper secrets into his ear, to tell him the things he needed to know, the things he might tell his grandchildren. He laughed out loud, and Joe narrowed his eyes at him.
Absurd, absurd! What could a Negro tell me? Children, all of them
.
What would a Negro be wise about that could ever concern me?
He had heard of people, white people, who claimed special wisdom for the Negro on account of their experience and closer proximity to man’s natural, primitive state. John knew better. John knew they were no more primitive than he was, nor were they any more wise. Had they not fallen from paradise along with everyone else? They had. Along with their knowledge of the world came the same complication, and with the same complication came the scheming and the struggle and the betrayals and the inexorable slide into sin and disappointment.
When did I start thinking like a theologian?
He was fascinated by the man sitting before him, who chewed on the inside of his cheek and rocked in his chair.

“I seen your nigra girl go down the road just a little while ago. Gone to see Miss Eloisa for some knowledge, I do believe.”

John was slowly emerging from his fog.

“Who?”

“That nigra girl. Mariah.”

It had begun to snow. The flakes were hard, or seemed hard on John’s bare neck. Joe looked up and let a few flakes strike him in the face before lifting himself up from his chair and dragging it back to his porch, which was protected by eaves. The legs of the chair left black tracks in the snow that already lay on the ground. John’s horse stamped and shook his head. John watched snowflakes disappear into Joe’s head—first they were sitting there upon the wiry gray, and then they were gone. John reached up and felt the wet upon his own head. Snowflakes were rare enough in Franklin to give pause, but not rare enough to bring joy. The flakes seemed to hurl themselves to the ground, white streaks shot directly to their appointed places and then, arriving softly, freezing the earth below them. Flake by flake, Franklin was freezing in place.
Good,
John thought.
Freeze it over. Freeze everything over. Stop this thing from growing.

“Why don’t you come out of the wet, Colonel John? Come on up here, it’s warmer. Got the stove going inside, and I can feel it out here.”

“Guess I will.”

John tied his horse to Joe’s fence, climbed the two wood steps, concave like saddles, and sat down on an old stool next to the door. Joe was right—the heat escaped under the door and through the chinks between the siding.

“You got whiskey, Joe?”

“Always got whiskey.”

Joe went inside and a moment later came out with an old brown jar made of glass, the kind a doctor might have had on his shelf. Joe saw John eyeing the jar.

“You ain’t the only one who sells his things to me.”

Joe poured a jigger’s worth into a tin cup and handed it to John. John sniffed. Flavored moonshine that smelled like rotted peaches. It smelled good.
Liquor changes everything, even the meaning of smells
. John threw it down like a practiced drinker.

“You said Mariah was down here? Where?”

“She gone down to see Miss Eloisa and her roots. Roots and powders and such.”

“Eloisa puts on curses?”

“I wouldn’t cross her, but don’t know nothing about curses, though.”

“No, you wouldn’t. But you’d go see her, wouldn’t you? You’d go see her if you hated someone enough, or wanted something badly enough, right?”

“I’ve been to see Miss Eloisa, yes, sir.”

John found himself rubbing the beams of the porch, admiring the rough craftsmanship that had created a house whose lineaments could not be named, whose shape could not be found in any book of architecture, but which was solid nevertheless. He knocked his knuckles against the tan weathered wood of the doorway and listened for the note.
Cedar posts, that sound is unmistakable.
He wished he could knock on the heads of people and suss out their characters by the ringing in his ears. He wondered what Mariah was doing. Thoughts of Baylor and his debt had left him entirely, piddling things next to the fears that were beginning to rise up in his head. He felt nervous and prickly and couldn’t immediately explain why.

Joe was staring down the road, toward the north end of town where the road met the pike and went on to Nashville. A figure appeared in the slackening snow shower. Shoeless and thin, thin like the ghost of one of the Confederate dead. He’d seen the body a thousand times before, only he’d seen it still and quiet, lying next to one of the holes that the gravediggers were still—
I can still hear them, the picks and the shovels!—
carving out of the frozen ground. This figure was not dead. It carried only a rifle. John stared with Joe, rapt. The man—it was obviously a man—came along a little farther before stopping at one of the houses across the street. He had an old blanket around his shoulders sewn with a boot lace into a cape, and he’d wrapped his head in a torn piece of shirt cloth as if he were a Mohammedan. He held his right hand high up on the porch rail and let his head sag down past his chest to his knees, retching. Nothing came out, which seemed to make him furious. He took his rifle and swung it like a club at the front door of the little shack, shouting for food.

“Give me your goddamn food, nigger. I see you in there with all your little bastards. I . . . can . . . see . . . you! Feed me, for God’s sake. Just a biscuit. I’ll protect you, I swear.”

He had only enough strength to strike the door three times before sinking to the floor and letting the rifle clatter down onto the porch. He didn’t move when it slipped down the steps and planted itself muzzle-first into the dirt. He didn’t seem to notice.