The Widow of the South (20 page)

The man had come from Nashville, John realized. He had heard they had gone on to Nashville after the Yankees, he just never thought they’d come back. The man was so thin it was easy for John to see that his chest was sunken, even through the mismatched layers of the man’s clothing. His head drooped upon his chest, and the hinge of his jaw, outlined in shadow, was plainly visible from across the street. Here was what was left of the Southern ideal, the Southern man: starvation, filth, confusion, exhaustion. The man rasped and spit over the rail of the porch. He was hungry and cold and weak. He was human. His appearance undermined any notion of a special Southern exception, a separate branch of humankind. He was as broke-down and anonymous as any man would have been, Southern or not, had he fled barefoot from Nashville to save his life. He was the end and the beginning. The rest of the army would be coming, too.

The man across the street had fallen asleep. The soles of his feet were black and scabbed over. A hand parted the sheets that passed for window curtains, and John could see a pair of night-black eyes staring down at the soldier, whose age was impossible to tell. John thought of Mariah. He was quickly overcome by desperation.

“Joe, where did you say Eloisa lives?”

Joe was busy gathering his things—various bottles and jars, his chairs, a bag of old rice—and tossing them inside his house. He pulled closed the shutters he’d made out of scrap boards and was entirely uninterested in what the white man on his porch had to say. He’d figured out what was happening just as quickly as John.

“What, Colonel John?”

“Eloisa’s. Where is it?”

“Down farther the way you was coming, turn left at the white chapel, look for the tin house on the right with all them whirligigs in the front yard.”

“All right.”

“You looking for that nigra of yours?”

“Mariah.”

“You best hurry on. And I’d take that horse with you quick, or it be et up soon enough.”

The whirligigs were preposterous. John marveled at how much junk and energy had gone into making them. Blades made of old rusted tin sheeting caught the wind and spun long wooden rods, hand-carved, which in turn moved the diminutive wooden figures at the other end in all manner of ways. There was the wooden man ceaselessly bending over with his bucket to scoop water, there was the preacher pounding his pulpit with the same fist, over and over and over again, and there were the two little men facing each other with shovels, each digging while the other tossed the imaginary dirt over his shoulder. There was a witch at her cauldron and a dog snapping at a runaway’s heels. Each whirligig faced into the wind, and at least a hundred of varying sizes—some small enough to fit in John’s palm, others bearing figures the size of midgets—cluttered the yard. There was no escaping the wind at Miss Eloisa’s house, John reckoned. Even if you had wanted to.

The house itself was like every other in Blood Bucket—improvised, improbable. It was tin, every square inch of it. Although John knew there must be wood beneath, the tin facade looked entirely unnatural, like something coughed out whole from one of those big, black-smoke factories he’d read about in
Harper’s Weekly.
It would not have surprised him if the house itself was attached to a spindle and spun around if the wind was strong enough. It did not seem the sort of place a person would live in; it was the sort of place one might store things.

John walked up to the door, which was also covered in tin but punched with small holes in the shape of a giant rooster. He knocked and heard only a murmur behind the door. He waited and knocked again. He thought he heard moaning.

He opened the door, and rows of jars winked at him from every wall. The beams that held the roof on were exposed, black from soot, and ran the length of the small room. There was a table in the slap dead center of the room, and a figure sat at each end of it. In all four corners of the room John saw piles of wild things, the reaching and weaving tendrils of roots taken whole out of the ground, redolent of damp Tennessee soil ground out by the slip of glaciers, the beating of the wind, the trodding of feet. Other roots hung from the ceiling joists. Under the room’s only window, on the left, stood a small table bearing a pile of chicken feathers upon it, neatly gathered. The next thing John noticed was the flash of two sets of eyes, black and white all at once, as they took him in.

“Hello, Mariah.”

He expected Mariah to be shocked, and maybe a little afraid of him discovering her, but neither emotion passed across her face. Nothing passed across her face. Both Mariah and Miss Eloisa looked at him, and he could see he was being assessed, not as a threat, but simply as a fact, as if he were one of the posts that supported the roof, so familiar that they were practically invisible. Miss Eloisa turned back to the mortar and pestle she had been using. The muscles in her forearm were stringy and long, and they flexed as she crushed and scraped a green root into powder. John tried again.

“Mariah, we’d best be getting on now. There are soldiers coming, and I think we’d all be safer back at the house.”

Mariah stood, and Eloisa watched her, amused.

“Safe from what, Mr. McGavock?” Eloisa asked.

He was now conscious of her standing there, looking him in the eye like he was her peer.

“Gather your things and let’s go.”

“I expect you’d best not be going anywhere, mister.” Miss Eloisa’s voice sounded distant and thin, like the whispering that tall trees make when their tops rub against each other in the wind. It was a voice so tremulous it was ever in danger of cutting out altogether, and every word floated out after great effort. She was still grinding at her root, but now she had half stood and was leaning down on it as if to push it through the table and back into the earth. She talked without looking away from her work. John spoke up again.

“And why would that be?”

“They already here.”

“I only saw one.”

“They already here. You ain’t a-making it out of town, not now. At least your horse ain’t, and maybe not Mariah, neither.”

“There’s nobody in town.”

“I seen them.”

“I don’t believe in your sight.”

“That don’t mean nothing. And if you don’t believe me, ask your
nigger
what
she
seen.”

Mariah was looking up toward the rafters, where cascading clumps of roots and leaves and herbs hung tied together. Her face had gone smooth, expressionless. The permanent wrinkles of a woman accustomed to squinting in the sun had disappeared.

“Mariah?”

“Mr. John, I think we better stay here for a time. It’s safe here. They won’t mess with this place.”

John was beginning to feel that he was the last man in Tennessee and that all its women had decided they could get on without him. He was becoming angry. He wished Eloisa would quit with the powder and look at him.

“There is only one, and he was as unthreatening as a clod of mud. Practically dead, and he might be dead right now by the look of him. There might be others, but I didn’t see them, and I think we’ve got time to go.”

“You didn’t see them.”

“No.”

“Look out the window, Mr. John.”

John looked over to the window where the feathers rested upon the little table, catching the dim, filtered light. He walked over and felt the things dangling from the rafters sway at the vibrations of his feet upon the boards. The tin exoskeleton of the house creaked and clanked as the house shifted under his weight. He leaned on the window jamb and peered out. He had to blink his eyes. He blinked and took refuge in the dark and then opened his eyes again to a scene he could not credit.

He was not confused by the fact that the entire Confederate army was now streaming back through Franklin. This he had expected. It seemed natural. No, it was what the army had become. Or, rather, what the men had become.

In his youth his tutor had taught him Latin, and he had read medieval poems and accounts of armies of the dead arrayed against the chivalrous forces of good, skeleton men with terrible sunken eyes and permanent grins wielding sharp spears. His tutor had been fired for bringing those books into the house. They were not the Bible, nor were they the work of the Athenians or the Romans, nor were they the work of the pious Dark Age papists like Bernard of Clairvaux. They were godless ghost stories, his father had said, and blasphemous. His father had said,
In life we are imperfect but reasonable approximations of the character of our souls. In death we become a crystal of ourselves, a perfectly condensed figure of our souls, of our character. We are not then rounded up and sent off to battle like a raggedy bunch of conscripts. Skeleton armies indeed. Our souls have no business with the earth. The state of our soul is all, it’s everything, it is eternal. Sow muddleheaded credulity in your soul now, and you will become a muddlehead evermore, a confused and misguided boy forever.
His father had allowed him to keep the Dante his tutor had given him, and he burned the rest.

But the men were nothing if not a collection of the skeletal and the empty-eyed, moving along as if under the command of someone unseen. They walked and hobbled down the street in front of the house and down every street John could see from the window, all headed generally south. They were an army, and yet not one of them seemed connected to the other by anything other than a common desire to move ahead. They scarcely spoke to each other, although occasionally one could be seen carrying another. There were no officers, no horses, no carts. Many had lost their rifles. Three men passed closely by the window without looking into it. The first had wrapped a bandage around his head, and John could see the impression of his ear perfectly represented in blood, as if someone had drawn it upon the white cloth. The second man was short, and moved with the help of a stick upon what appeared to be a smashed and useless foot. He sucked at his thick blond mustache, the only spot of color upon him, as it curled over his front lip. When he accidentally stepped upon his bad foot, he’d suck so hard at his mustache that the flesh of his face slipped down and his eyes deformed into permanent sadness. The third man, white as an albino, did not seem hurt at all. He walked slowly but without effort. His eyes roamed from side to side, and occasionally he’d stop to assess those around him. No one paid attention to him. He wore blue pants and a gray blouse and riding boots. He had no coat. John watched him overtake the short man with the bad foot, walking alongside for a while, before reaching over and lifting the man by his coat collar and removing it. He put it on, and his arms shot through the end of the sleeves by three inches. The little man never protested and began to shiver. The two men walked off together, and the taller one put his arm around the shorter one for a time before withdrawing it. They never spoke a word. As John watched, the short man fell farther and farther behind until he was alone, and then he disappeared over a rise in the road.

John turned to Eloisa.

“How did you know this?”

“I listen, Mr. John. It’s no big thing. I pay attention. Don’t need no roots to hear an army.” She laughed at him.

“Can we stay here?”

“Oh yes, Mr. John. That was what I was hoping for.”

“Just a little while.”

“A little while, sure enough.”

John walked over to Mariah and tried to say something to comfort her, but she needed no comforting. She had sat back down at the table and yawned. A piece of dried thistle floated down from the rafters and lit upon her shoulder. She looked at it and let it stay. John slid his back down the smooth paneling boards and rested on the floor, drawing his black coat around him and thinking that he would probably never see his horse again.

27

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

I
stayed with Zachariah long past sunrise. John had gone to town for one of his Temperance rallies, or in search of drink. If either one of us saw the irony in this, and silently we both did, neither one of us ever spoke of it. Mariah had gone to town earlier the day before and not returned. In the past I would have feared for her safety, but we no longer had the luxury to live in our past, so it was left to Theopolis to tend to me, to worry over me, to make me see reason.

I huddled against the side of the house and stroked Zachariah’s head and his thick hair made thicker by ages of sweat. I had stroked the heads of Winder and Hattie this way when they were hurt, and this thought made me wish I’d never sent them away. Lord, I pined for them all, the living and the dead, whom I had brought into the world. Who was comforting them now? They were my children, my loves, and yet they were gone, and instead, I had in my arms a soldier upon whom I had beaten the fact of my loneliness. All was twisted and wrong.

I knew he was alive, but didn’t tell Theopolis. He was breathing lightly, and so I piled another blanket on his chest to conceal its rise and fall. So long as he was dead he was mine alone, mine to reckon with and mine to make peace with. If it were commonly known that he was alive, I would not have been able to stop the others from spiriting him off and reviving him. I dreaded his awakening; in his sleep he could not accuse me.

Theopolis, unsuccessful in his various attempts to haul us both into the house, built a fire at my feet. I was watching the embers fade to white around midday when I saw the first of the soldiers rear up upon the rise at the edge of our property and stumble on toward us. The first was followed by two more, and eight more after that, and fairly soon I watched what remained of our army meander back down the pike and over our fields, never looking up and never stopping. I shivered and silently prayed that they would make it home.

“They came back. I knew they’d come back.”

Zachariah was awake. I was mesmerized by the army in retreat and did not at first think the sound of his voice anything extraordinary.

“Funny thing, though. I got no interest in going with them now. If I did, you beat that out of me anyway. I’m hungry.”

The sun was almost halfway through its arc across the sky when it disappeared and the snow began to fall. It fell slowly, and drifted this way and that like a soft curtain. The flakes disappeared on contact, sucked up into the fire and into the dark black dirt around it, until it had fallen long enough that it overcame resistance and turned the earth white.

Zachariah rose to his feet and fell.

“My head is spinning. I’m freezing.”

“I’ll get Theopolis.”

“You know the Yankees won’t be far behind. Those boys are running, and they don’t run for nothing. Look at them. They’re going as fast as they can. Maybe they can hear me.
Run, boys, run!
”

I got to my feet and began pounding on the side of the house and calling for Theopolis. The house seemed to angle out over me, as if it were watching, or as if it were about to fall upon us both.

“They’ll come for me, you know.”

I could only hear the shuffle of feet along the snow-dusted pike. It was loud, deafening. The men passing by the house looked at us but didn’t say a word, just walked on and into the woods. The blood had frozen black upon their faces. I looked down at Zachariah, who was holding his head in one hand and trying to blow on the cold fire.

“Who will come for you? No one seems to be stopping.”

“The Union troops. They’ve got me. They love a prisoner. They’ll be here soon, I’m sure. To take me away. I’ll go, too. I’ll go.”

I pounded harder and harder on the house until I’d cut the palm of my hand on a brick edge. Theopolis stuck his head around the corner of the porch and then vaulted the balustrade.