The Widow of the South (33 page)

42

Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL

B
y the time we arrived in Franklin and I walked into that nigger’s shoe store looking for a new boot for my wood leg, I’d almost begun believing that I was traveling toward my true home.

The nigger was Mrs. McGavock’s, I knew that straightaway. He’d been the one to shove me down in that hole. I didn’t hold that against him, but I remember his mistrust of me, and
that
I held against him. But from the looks of the other boots lining the shelves of his workshop, it seemed like he made a good boot, so I was willing to forget all about the past.

Jerrod and I had got all turned around on our way to Franklin, and we’d ended up coming through town from the north. Our journey had taken us past fields that were just being reclaimed again, past old men clearing little cedars and hip-high poplars from old cotton fields, and past young women cradling new babies on their hips, maybe fathered by them same old men in the fields. I didn’t see no other men except for the niggers. I’d long since got used to the niggers running their own places. What did I care? But
they
hadn’t got used to it yet, and sometimes I could tell they didn’t know whether to doff their hats or shoot me in the head. The countryside had changed.

As we got closer to Franklin, though, some of the hills were familiar, rolling around into the distance or eaten up by a stand of trees. My eyes showed me other hills that seemed familiar, too, their curve and height and whatnot, even if I’d never seen them before. My mind was playing tricks on me, reckon, since it knew I was heading toward Franklin and that soon I would be up on a hill I knew all too well. Or maybe God was playing that trick with me. Same thing.

I didn’t know whether Tennessee was emptier and quieter than it had been those years before, but that’s just how it seemed. I reckon I’d changed, or my memories had grown and twisted and shifted over time. Tennessee had been filled with noise and smoke, and now it was getting back its fields, and all you could hear was the sparrows and the mockingbirds chasing crows. Sometimes you could hear one of them young brides calling to her husband. I saw signs of the war here and there—the stumps of felled and burned trees, bullet holes in the sides of barns—but it was also possible to look around and imagine that it had never happened, that it was 1860 again and people were just going on with they lives like always, only the Negroes were going on with their lives a little more openly than normal. The closer we came to Franklin, the more it shocked me that the war weren’t on the lips of every single man, woman, and child we met. It wasn’t, but it was all I could think about. The war, Carnton, and her.

So Jerrod and I rode into town, and before long we were standing in front of a tin-roofed cottage with a little porch from which swung a sign with a shoe on it. And inside this house was that Negro of hers. I could see him from the street because he was so light he almost shined in the dark of that little room. I turned to Jerrod.

“Reckon I need a boot.”

Jerrod leaned up against the porch post and spit into the dirt.

“I never understood why you need a boot for a foot that don’t exist.”

“I got my reasons.”

“I mean, you could have anything at the end of that thing. You could have a hoof, and we could take you over to the smith’s. Or you could have a paw or a ball or something. You ain’t creative, I’ll say that.”

“I got a foot, and it needs a boot. Let me go in here and talk to this nigger about a boot. Maybe you could find the animals some water, too.”

“Ought to sell your horse, if you settling down here.”

“I ain’t settling down.”

“You’ll stay.”

He gave me a look, as if he was wanting to say more, but he didn’t. He knew me well enough not to say her name to me.

“I ain’t staying.”

I walked into the cobbler’s shop and stood in the doorway, looking down at the man cutting leather from a pattern. He was big, but his fingers were thin, and they moved faster than I could track them. I didn’t remember delicate fingers.

“Howdy.”

He looked up quickly. He hadn’t noticed I’d come in. He was about to say something but choked it off. He looked at me some more, and I saw him recognize me. A man’s eyes set just so when they got you pegged, and he’d got me pegged. Didn’t know how to play it, though, I reckon, so he chose to act like we was strangers.

“May I help you, sir?”

“You may. I need a boot.”

“One pair of boots.”

“One boot.”

I stomped my wood leg on his floor, and the echo gave him the idea.

“I see.”

“For the wood leg, not the good one.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was thinking they ought to match, though. Same kind of leather and all. Got to keep up my appearances.”

I knew I looked like hell, and I could see him trying to reckon what appearances, exactly, I was trying to keep up. And why.

“How quick can you work?”

“I’ve got a week’s worth of work already.”

“How much to jump ahead of the line a little?”

“Well, I can’t—”

“What if it was Mrs. McGavock done bring you one of her husband John’s shoes?”

That wasn’t exactly the right thing to say right then. He and I both knew he’d do up Mr. John’s shoes right quick, but if he were to admit that, it’d make him seem like not much more than the McGavocks’ house nigger still. He was one of the other kind of Negro, the kind that couldn’t stand to be reminded of that past. The kind who would think about shooting your head off before doffing their hat.

“I thought I knew you, mister.”

“You can call me Mr. Cashwell.”

“Zachariah Cashwell.”

“Mr. Cashwell.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Cashwell.”

“So you ain’t answered my question. How much?”

He stood up, and I realized again how tall he was and how distinguished he looked for a Negro. This fellow never let a thread slip out of place, I could tell. I had been trash to him once before, and I reckoned I was still trash to him. White, but trash even so. He stretched the fingers of his hands and cracked them, and yanked down on his vest until it lined up with the bottom of his belt, just proper-like.

“For a cripple I’ll do it right away. Got to be right with the least of His creation, however they come. And to answer you other question, I would not have to fix John McGavock’s shoes.”

“Why is that?”

“Because he has someone to fix his shoes already in his employ.”

I’d heard Negroes try to talk like educated men before, but this one was one of the first that sounded natural about it.

“Would that be your mama?”

“Ain’t your business, is it, sir?”

It wasn’t, and I let his rudeness slide. I was suddenly interested in making peace because he was part of my memory of the McGavocks, a piece of the story that ran through my head about Carrie. And as I’d come closer to Franklin, that story had got so it didn’t let up. It was all I could think about.
Carrie McGavock, Carrie, Mrs. McGavock, Carrie.
I’d played around with him enough.

“I’d be very grateful to you if you’d fix me up a boot for my wood leg here. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He gestured to a chair against the wall of the cottage, next to the door, where he wanted me to sit down. I did, and took off my leg, which I held up to him.

“This is going to take an hour or so. Will you wait?”

“I can’t go anywhere else without that leg, so I reckon so.”

“All right.”

He swept his work aside and stood my leg up on his table. It was carved of cedar so it wouldn’t rot or get insects chewing at it. It looked sunburned, mostly red with some white stripes in it. I could smell it from across the room. It still smelled good.

The man who made it had been a railroad hand who liked to think hisself an artist, and so every useless little toe had also been carved into the leg, and there was even the rounds and lines of some muscles on the back side of the calf.
No sense in not being accurate,
he’d said. I hadn’t complained, but now—standing there where that Negro could stare at it—I felt self-conscious about it. It was foolish, and it looked naked. But this Negro, who had carried me into a hole and protected me, much against his will, and had every right to be amused by the sculpture, he didn’t laugh. He stroked the leg with his big hands, feeling the grooves between the toes, the line of ligament up the heel, those two muscles at the back, and the sharp ridge of the shin. He looked at me again, and the look in his eyes was curious and sad. He looked at my stump and up at my face and then back at the wood thing in his grip.

“Sorry about your leg.”

“So it was you cut it off back there at McGavock’s. Bastard.” I smiled.

“I just carried off them old legs, I didn’t cut ’em off. That was for those white men and their saws. Can’t blame me.”

“Even so, you stay the hell away from this other leg.”

Theopolis smiled. “All right, then.”

We settled into a comfortable silence for a long time after that. All I could hear was the snipping of shears and the pop of his long, thick needles pressing through leather. He traced the outline of that wood foot, took its measurements, and fit the leather around it with care, like he was making a boot for a regular foot that might blister and scrape.

“What’s your name again?”

“Theopolis.”

After a while I hopped out the door and into the sun on the porch. I had got damned sick of dark, low-ceilinged little rooms over the years and preferred to be out in the light. I didn’t know how anyone could live like that, although I had surely lived like that once. Put two people in a room like that, and you can’t avoid the other, you got to talk and carry on. I was happy not to have to talk and carry on for a little time.

I leaned back into one of Theopolis’s wood porch chairs and rested my head against the unpainted shingles of the wall. They were warm in the sun, and I fell asleep.

When I woke up, an old man with hard eyes and white hair was stomping his way toward the shop from the street, where he’d left his horse. He scratched his crotch and walked bowlegged for a few steps until he caught sight of me and straightened up. He looked at me like he thought it would be better for everyone if I would dry up and blow away.

“Who are you?” he said.

“My name is the Reverend Thomas Jefferson Purefoy, mister.”

Don’t know where I came up with that name. Never used it again.

“What the hell you doing here?”

I thought that was a mighty rude way of talking to a reverend. I thought he might have seen through my story, and I was fixing to give him an earful of Ecclesiastes just to keep him honest, when I caught him staring at my stump.

“Where’s your leg?”

“I don’t really know, sir. Reckon it’s somewhere around here.”

I felt around for one of the Colts, but they weren’t there. I remembered they was in Jerrod’s saddlebags. I puffed myself up some anyway, to throw the old man off. I’d bite him until he screamed for his mama if he kept talking to me like I was shit.

“Did you just cut off your leg for the hell of it, or did you get it blown off?”

“It was cut off by surgeons because of an injury I got during the war. Right around here, matter of fact.”

By this time Theopolis had heard me and had come out to investigate.

“Theopolis, who is this man?”

“He’s a customer, Mr. Baylor.”

“You got customers?
I’m
your customer. This man could be any damned cracker. Get in there.”

That man rubbed me raw, that’s the truth.

43

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

W
e never used to go to those town parties, those of us who lived out on plantations and ran our households. I’m talking about the women, the mistresses, the plantation ladies. Town parties were for town men and, often, our husbands. We lived in an isolation that ensured that we, at least, would embody whatever it was that made Southerners different and purer and more correct than any other race upon the earth. That is, we were like creatures in a zoological garden, examples of our race, preserved and contained within the bars of the well-turned balustrades. Meanwhile, the rest of the Southern nation ran around as if unleashed, free from the very moral binds that we, the women, preserved and then tied around our wrists. Men drank in public and cavorted with certain other women who wore the latest from Paris. They all went to parties together, even our own men.

The war changed much, not least the invitation lists for parties in town. This was my least favorite change, even if it meant I no longer stored myself away at Carnton like a keepsake. The women who had invited me to their houses in the daytime, the same women I had avoided these many years, now expected me to attend their nighttime bacchanals as part of the entity called
Colonel McGavock
. I attended out of sympathy for my husband, who felt obliged to attend as a matter of business strategy: he would strategize while the men around him became drunk, until they were no longer able to understand anything he suggested except that whatever it was would cost them money, and the easy and obvious answer to that was
no.
I loved to observe him from a corner in the hostess’s parlor and watch his shadow against the looming ceilings gesticulate madly while the corpulent and red-faced men of our town bobbed and swayed around him trying to stay upright. There is a kind of loveliness to be seen in a man who pursues a doomed cause not out of ignorance, which would be ugly, but in the full knowledge that he is bound to fail.

The night after I found out about Mr. Baylor’s plans for his field, we were invited to attend a dance in celebration of the engagement of Judge and Mrs. McEwen’s daughter, the judge having returned from the war healthy and good-natured, as if he’d spent it on vacation. He had been out of touch with his wife for most of the time, and he had never been very clear about where he had fought. He simply returned one day, still fat, hung his gun back over the fireplace, and sat back down in his library chair to catch up on the old newspapers. If ever I regretted my time in the country, I had only to look at Mrs. McEwen to know that I was far better suited to country life than town life. The opium had turned her skin to rice paper, crinkled and white and about to disintegrate at any moment. It was a marvel that she was able to raise any child to marriageable age. When I saw her in her home that night, she looked oddly like a woman betrayed, like a woman who could not look at her husband without contempt. John had told me about encountering her in town just after the battle, standing on her porch with two friends and staring at nothing.
They all wore thin dresses, too thin for the weather or for propriety. None of them seemed to be blinking, but their eyes glowed and were wet. Cecilia McEwen was smiling as if she’d just seen something naughty
.
I exchanged meaningless niceties, but I was as fascinated by those women as I had been as a boy when I’d gone to the carnival to see the bearded lady and a shrunken head from the Congo. They were human, only more so for being oddities that were both real and not real, embodying the difference.
Ghosts really, and clearly insane.
John steered far clear of her during the evening. Her dress was tasteful and well sewn, and it seemed to choke her.

I was busy fending off the servant thrusting trays of canapés while I decided how I would approach Mr. Baylor when he arrived. I did not know what I would say to him, but I could not quit thinking about the idea of those dead men unearthed by sharp iron and exposed again to the light of day. What would I ask?

He arrived flustered and angry, as he usually did, towing his dim-witted wife along behind him. She could not put a stop to his plans for the battlefield because
she
was surely unaware of them and, perhaps, even unaware that such a thing as a plow existed upon the earth. And even if she were able to understand her husband’s plans, what did she care for the bones of dead boys she didn’t know? I could not imagine her mustering any outrage for anything greater than a table improperly set or an untidy house. Bones in the field, if they meant anything to her, would mean
untidiness.
She would be of no use to me.

Baylor took a whiskey, and I watched him stride into the parlor and steer toward the knot of men that John had gathered to hear of his plans for reviving the railroad. Baylor was no fool. He knew the men in that room had reason to be wary of him, and perhaps angry, because of what he planned for his field. But he also knew that men—many men—were weak and that they could be charmed into abeyance for the moment by a charismatic and powerful man like him. The face he typically displayed for women and his inferiors—children, Negroes, farmers—would not be welcome in such a gathering, and so I watched how, with every step across the room, the architecture of his face shifted and his skin re-formed itself until he was transformed into the image of the benevolent man of business, offensive to no one. This was the most awful face of all, I decided.

After a few minutes, talking with his thumbs in the loops of his pants and shifting around like his suit afflicted him, like he was just plain folks, I could tell that he had easily outmaneuvered John and had taken control of the group. I leaned against the bookcase in my corner, my head resting on a long row of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels.

I was thinking about what Zachariah Cashwell would say about what I was seeing, which was something I often wondered, when Mrs. McEwen grabbed me by the elbow and gently pulled me along with her toward a little group of women who were watching their men and speaking inanities about the sorrowful state of their households and the intricacies and significance of a bustle’s angle. They were intelligent creatures, some of them, without a thing to talk about. I looked at Mrs. McEwen’s face, and she was rapt with fascination at their talk, as if it was in the language of alien invaders. She said nothing, and only stared at them in amusement until all of them, uncomfortable under her gaze, politely excused themselves. I wondered why she had found me. Perhaps she thought I would be as amused as she was. I knew that the laudanum had withered and finally killed whatever concern she might have had for them and their opinions, and I might have found a friend in her if she hadn’t been mad. She scared me, but I was happy to be guided along. After the women had drifted off, we posted ourselves on the other side of the mantel. We watched each other and didn’t speak. I stroked the glass on a bell jar encasing an old carving of a gnatcatcher.

“Have you any medicine?”

Her voice startled me. It was gravelly and soft.

“No, I don’t.”

“Have you seen the doctor? Any doctor?”

“No.”

“I see.”

We stared off at the group of men. John had detached himself to admire the books in the bookcases, and Baylor seemed to be wrapping up whatever business he had been conducting with the judge and his fellows. Mrs. McEwen spoke again.

“This is all mine, you know.”

“Of course.”

“I am the heiress of all you see, and all that transpires within those borders. I have seen plenty that you have not seen, that you
cannot
see, but which explains everything and makes me quite happy with my little inheritance.”

I wondered whether I would have said such things, whether my mind would have also melted, had I taken all that laudanum they gave me. I was desperate to leave her, and yet some latent sense of propriety bound me to the spot. I stared at the gnatcatcher as I listened, praying that John would come over and give me an excuse to leave. Even so, I felt something for Mrs. McEwen, some distant connection to something she had just said, and so I spoke.

“What have you seen?”

Her eyes grew wide, and she cocked her head at me, like the bird under the bell jar.

“I have seen the war, oh yes, of course, but I have also seen other wars, and I have seen mad horses rushing from one war to another, carrying the same poor souls into the fray again and again until they are exhausted from the endless cycle of body and spirit, body and spirit, and they cry out for relief and they are given that relief.
Please, have you any medicine?
The cleverness of God’s plan to beat the will out of men amuses me. That is what’s needed in this world.”

I decided not to wait any longer, and with a nod I turned my back on her and went to collect John before Baylor could leave. I’d had an idea, which Mrs. McEwen’s raving had reinforced. But she was not done with me and whispered loudly at my back, and I stopped briefly.

“You, on the other hand, succumb to that will of men and fortify it with your ministrations upon their bodies, in living and in death. Yes, I know what you are thinking, I see you eyeing Mr. Baylor. All will love you for your sacrifice, but it will only postpone the inevitable.”

I heard her sigh and slump down into a parlor chair. I didn’t turn around.

“If I had the energy, I would stop you, but I suppose I will applaud you like the rest. Brava, St. Carrie!”

I moved off quickly, wanting to never hear the woman’s voice again. Ladies brushed past me in their muslin and silk, moving from one seat to another, on the couches in the parlor and on the hard chairs in the library, and I couldn’t tell sometimes whether the whispers I heard were the sound of them talking or the sound of their skirts brushing against each other. It was time for us to leave, that was certain.

I saw Mrs. Baylor, who had been stuffing her face with brittle over by the dining room doorway, look up and see Mr. Baylor marching across the room to retrieve her. She dusted off her hands like she’d been sanding wood, took his arm, and they swept out into the entranceway, out of sight. John had seen me looking frantic, I’m sure, so he came and collected me by the arm.

“What’s the matter, Carrie? Should we go?”

“Yes. But there’s a man outside I need to see.”

I dragged John outside, and we caught up to Baylor and his wife just as he was putting the reins to his team.

“Mr. Baylor?”

He must have thought he would make an uninterrupted departure, but I had determined that he would not stir the hornets and let others take the stings.

“Yes, Mrs. McGavock?”

“I wanted to talk to you about your field.”

“I am in a great hurry, Mrs. McGavock. Perhaps we could talk about your agricultural interests some other time? Please come call on us.”

“I have no interest in agriculture.”

He knew what I was talking about.

“What could interest you about my field, then?”

“The men who are buried there. They interest me.”

When he crossed his arms and leaned toward me, his chest seemed to fill up my vision. John stood silent at my elbow. I suppose he knew it would be no good trying to interrupt me, that I would just keep talking. Perhaps he was glad of this.

“Mrs. McGavock, they do not interest me in the slightest. People may think I’m rich, but even I can’t afford to let acres of good land lie fallow because it contains the bodies of men who fought an idiotic battle in an ill-considered, stupid war, whose souls have long departed, and whose fellows never bothered to come back for them. So much for the honor of the Confederacy.”

I didn’t have an answer. If I had been someone like Baylor, if I’d owned land and had such intractable opinions about the worth of others, I might have found his argument persuasive. But I was not that kind of person.

“It is already out of your hands, Mr. Baylor. It is already a graveyard. All it is missing are the headstones.”

“By that standard, Mrs. McGavock, the whole earth is a graveyard of one sort or another. Perhaps we should never plow a field again. Perhaps we should starve for the sins of the deceased, for every unacknowledged and unmarked death.”

“I am not asking that. I am asking only that you spare
this
field, in
this
place. I do not expect you to do this out of kindness or sentimentality. In exchange for sparing it, I expect we could raise money to compensate you.”

The new moon was just breaking through the clouds low on the horizon, and Baylor’s face was momentarily lit in gray light, like a ghost. Everything about him and his cart gleamed, from the halters on his horses to the spokes on his wheels. His teeth gleamed when he smiled at me. He mustered a look that seemed almost kind at first, until it melted into righteous pity.

“I’m sure, Mrs. McGavock, that there isn’t enough money in this town to compensate me for that field, what took place on it, and what is contained above and below it. Where would
you
find such money?”

He was looking past me to John when he said this last bit, and his condescension cut me to the quick. My voice grew louder, shriller, and I didn’t seem able to control it.

“There are other people in this town who won’t want to see that field plowed,
Mister
Baylor. And if they can’t come up with the money, they’ll come up with other means.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I am not. I am trying to prevent the threats. I am trying to get you to see reason, so that those who would threaten you will have no cause. I am appealing to your common decency.”

“I have decency, Mrs. McGavock, but it is not the common sort to which you are referring. And I will not have you interfering with my business, and the fate of that field is surely my business.”

John finally spoke, no doubt tongue-tied by my audacity and vehemence.

“That’s enough, Baylor.”

Baylor suddenly looked more comfortable, as if he’d been hoping for John to step in.

“Then take some control of your woman, McGavock. Explain to her about how
business
works and how she oughtn’t meddle in the
business
of others.”