The Widow of the South (34 page)

“Oh, but I don’t disagree with her. You’re being a fool, Baylor. That field isn’t worth the agitation, and you know it.”

“Oh, let the petty sentimentalists bring their grievances against me. Let them try to threaten me. I am ready. My soul is rested and clean. I have nothing to fear.”

He put the reins to his team and clucked his tongue.

“And now I am going.”

John and I stood and watched Mr. and Mrs. Baylor go, two black silhouettes against the brightening night sky. I took John’s arm, and we walked out to our own carriage. We rode in silence for some time, each caught in dark thoughts. Finally John spoke, and his words surprised me, for I thought he would chastise me for my discussion with Baylor.

“You know, these streets are nothing like they were that day.”

“That day?”

“Well, in those days. The week after the battle. These streets are proper, normal. They’ve been graded and cleaned, and the trees that were shot through with lead have been removed. The men were like toys left out by children. There were soldiers left behind to bury them all, and a more miserable job I cannot imagine. This town and that battlefield looked like nothing human. I lost my mind for days, exploring that hellscape. Surely you knew I was not right in those days?”

“I was busy, John.”

“Yes, you were.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about. You were doing right.”

Silence. It was a quiet ride toward the moon.

“But these streets, they were paths through a different world, and all of those dead men created that world.”

There was guilt in his voice. It was powerful, and it made his body tremble. I put my hand on his, and he allowed this for a moment and then shrugged me off. I thought of that night he’d appeared below my window when I was a girl and how wracked he had been then with some sort of misery that I had found irresistible. He was that man again. I understood why he felt this way. He had walked among the dead, unable to provide succor or to ease their passage. At Carnton the misery and the dying had been orderly, at least, and all those who did die were prepared. I saw to that as best I could.

“All their faces, Carrie. I couldn’t look at them and not wonder what they had been thinking. So many looked as if they wanted to say one more thing. Now I imagine them under the weeds of Baylor’s field still with those damned looks on their faces, still trying to say whatever it was they had meant to say. Now I can’t help thinking that the only meaning of all that killing was that it made it possible for Theopolis to open a cobbler’s shop. Such a simple thing.”

“They wouldn’t have thought of it that way.”

“How do you know? That’s what we think, but how do we know? Forgive me, but these memories are almost too much for me. It was impossible for me to look out over that battlefield and the gray and blue backs and not wonder about God.”

In that moment I had a vision of that field, and these streets, and what they must have been like. Carnton had for so long been the center of everything that I hadn’t been able to see how insignificant my heroism had been. I had indeed begun to think of myself as a heroine, not least because of those letters that continued to come to me singing my praises. There had been a battle, yes, but most important, there had been the hospital, a place to heal, one way or another. I had not paid attention, really, when people spoke of the other hospitals in town, of the sacrifices of other women. There was only Carnton. I felt I was flying above the battlefield, and I could see the field and the town. I knew the magnitude of what had been lost. Baylor’s field looked like a quilt from up there, a patchwork of men in wool who had died before anyone could help them. Our great heroics at Carnton were as nothing to the thousands. Oh Lord, I hated John then, just for an instant.

What was John guilty of? What was I guilty of? We were alive, we’d survived. Was that not God’s wish for us? Certainly it must have been, and yet who could believe that any human had been intended by God to die so miserably and so suddenly? Had they gone down before God could attend to them? Was that blasphemy? Whatever carried me above the battlefield glided down and down and down until I was the size of an ant and riding a magic carpet over and around mountains of knees and elbows and backs, forests of mustaches and beards and matted hair, chasms of mouths frozen open in wonder, a whole wilderness now disappeared beneath the red soil of Baylor’s field. What would those men say if they could finish those sentences John had seen on their lips? I prayed they would not speak to me, that I would not hear them.

As we came around the bend in our driveway, the moon seemed to be sitting just on top of the house and threatening to crush it.

When we went up to our room, I found another bundle of mail at the foot of my bed. I was so keyed up and distracted I first didn’t notice it; and then when I did, I bent over to put it in with the others: so many other bundles lay in the bottom of my wardrobe, unopened.

I had never read more than a few of the letters that came from the families of the missing and the dead, and then usually only those that had been penned and addressed properly, on good stationery with good ink. I knew, I suppose, that by reading only the letters of women like me, I would be spared any loose revelation of pain or anger, as such sentiments would never slip into the letters of ladies raised as I had been, to be circumspect with strangers. The letters that came scrawled on packing paper in pencil, riddled with misspellings—these were objects of much greater mystery, and I feared what they contained. So many letters came to me, I told myself, I
had
to have a way to sift through them. This had been my way. A year and more had passed, and already the words
Carnton, Franklin, Tennessee
had come to mean something to those who heard of it. It was not the address of the warmongers and their plotters and strategists. Carnton was the address of the war itself. It was the place to send letters asking impossible questions.

I lay in bed next to John, staring out into a room that seemed, in the moonlight, mysterious and terrible. The wardrobe’s door gaped like an eye or a wound.

John at last fell asleep, but still I lay there as if listening. Finally I rose and pulled out the bundles and went into my little room above the stairs and piled the letters next to my chair. It took five trips to carry all of them.

I lit a candle and began to read.

All of them.

It was far worse than I had imagined. The courtly letters had only hinted at what I now discovered in the scrawlings and erasures of those letters written by, or for, the mothers and fathers who had never had much more than their children and didn’t realize how much they had needed them until they were gone. Anger and hope and grief and hatred and loneliness were not separate emotions, experienced in turn, but irrelevant names for the constituent parts of one inescapable experience of the world without pity or memory: no memory of the prayers, kindnesses, and promises that had been made to the Lord, or to their children, all of which had not been lies, but
had
been uttered with a hope that was revealed to them as ignorance by the deaths of their children. If they were to hope for anything again, and quite a few expressed versions of hope in their letters, it was tentative and qualified. It was simply the hope that the memory of their children would not also die.

These letters carried great weight, unbearable weight. Their children had not died so much as disappeared into a mist at the edges of the discernible world. They had no idea where Franklin was or what it was. Their memories had no place to rest except in those letters. They contained the intimate details of lives that might as well have been myth to me.

caught a fish

loved to make biscuits

had a pig named George

loved his daughter, who looks just like him, but that don’t mean nothing to her cause she don’t know what he looked like, never saw him not once not ever, and I got to put her out cause we don’t got the money for her no more, and I hope she don’t come out bad.

I absorbed all this. I wanted to send them the portrait across from my bed, the portrait of my three dead angels, to tell them that they weren’t the only ones who knew this weight and that they ought to leave me alone. And yet I took it in, and by the end I was seeing things and imagining a portrait of a thousand angels looking down on me in horror as I wept silently in my bed.

Well on toward dawn, Hattie came in, and she said nothing. She’d become such an unusual young woman. She was quiet. She made things grow, obsessively, and never bothered about the dirt beneath her fingernails. She was something of an eccentric, but a harmless one who could be adored for her oddity. She put her head in my lap, and I stroked seeds from her hair. We read the rest of the letters together, and she never said a word. I believe that she had already known what wouldf be found in those letters, and their mysteries were no surprise to her. I touched her brown face and smoothed the wrinkles in her nightgown. She looked up at me when we finished with the last, this one from a father in Greenville, Alabama, who had hoped his son would follow him in his law practice. Hattie looked at me as if to say,
What are you going to do now?

What would I do?

What could anyone, any one woman, do?

44

Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL

T
he boot Theopolis made me was just about as perfect a piece of leather as I’d ever seen. Coffee-colored, soft where it needed to be soft, stiff where it needed to be stiff, and at the back, just above the short heel, he’d stamped a simple
T,
his mark.

When Jerrod and I left the shop, there was still a couple of hours of daylight left, and I wanted to get out to the Indian dig as soon as possible, before all the jobs were gone. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was I could do out there, but I thought that maybe they might be able to use a clerk. Hell, I’d count them savage bones if they needed it. Jerrod said he’d dig or polish skulls. I just wanted to disappear into someplace where the railroad company weren’t likely to come looking for me. An Indian cemetery seemed pretty unlikely to me.

We rode through the town, which looked nothing like it did that night I’d spent there years before. There weren’t nobody running or bleeding or stealing tobacco off me. Just a little town again. I thought the town had no right to go back to normal, but I thought that about every town. New oaks had been planted, fences rebuilt, the road graded, the shutters on the windows repainted in black and green and blue. We rode east with the sun at our back, and I could understand why someone would build a town right there on that rise. The land east cooled to various shades of yellow and gold while we rode, and here and there the fields were cut through by creeks lined with sycamores and beeches, and from a distance it looked like the land had veins, like it were alive. Even atop the horse, I could see the killdeer flitting from haystack to haystack, and the sparrows picking among the leavings at the base of trees, and the red-tailed hawk gliding quick from one field to another, always landing high up in a tree that hid him good, until suddenly there was flapping and commotion and what all, and out of it came that hawk gliding smooth as anything again to another treetop in another field.

I didn’t recognize the battlefield until we had fairly well passed it by. It was overgrown with grass and hawthorn and wildflowers that bloomed gaudy and swayed in the slightest breeze.
Good soil down in there now,
I thought. My mama had always told me that blood made plants grow strong, and she had never let waste a single drop of chicken blood when she killed a hen for dinner. I looked down from my horse on a beautiful, wild field that seemed like it could never be tamed again. I tried to find the tree where my squad had formed up for the charge, but so much had grown in the years, including my own memories, that it was impossible for me to say for sure which tree was which.

“Why we stopping?” Jerrod said.

“Don’t you want to see this place again?”

“Not ever, if you don’t mind, Mr. Preacher Man.”

I gave a light heel to my horse, and we started walking again. I was afraid we weren’t going to make it to the site before they knocked off work, but it wasn’t as far as I thought, and soon I could see their fires over the next hill.

I tried to avoid looking, but I couldn’t help watching over on my right for the big house to appear between the trees, and soon it did. I recognized the porch on the back, and those big windows, and that old garden where we’d piled all of those who passed on. The place looked empty, but when I squinted, I could see a small person rooting around in that garden and tossing weeds over her shoulder in a shower of dirt clods.
They got white folk doing their work for ’em now
. I rode on, and quit watching the house. There wasn’t a place for me there no more. I wondered what would happen if I just appeared on their doorstep and knocked. What would I tell her? Would she take me in again? Did she still think of me? A part of me craved an answer, and another part didn’t want to risk hearing the wrong answer. Not yet. We rode on.

By the time we got down into the camp I was feeling, for no good reason, pretty good about my prospects. Who wouldn’t hire a one-legged man accompanied by a thug with a strong back? Don’t reckon I know why, but this sounded reasonable to me. The men looked beat-down tired, covered in red dirt and mud that they didn’t bother to wipe from their hands as they sat down to eat at a long table lined up outside their long tent. Suppertime, I decided, was a good time to introduce myself.

I got off my horse and tied him to a tent spike. I pulled out my Bible and walked with Jerrod toward the men. I held up my hand in greeting.

“Who’s in charge here?”

They were almost all bearded, and every one of them looked like he’d been digging his whole life. They were substantial men, and they didn’t talk much. One jerked his head toward the tent, and when I looked over toward it, I saw the flap moving, as if someone had been watching us a moment before. I looked back to the table and saw that they were eating well, better than I would have expected. Biscuits, country ham, and big jars of milk. I was going to get hired on to that outfit or die trying.

I went into the tent first. Jerrod backed into it behind me, his eyes still on those country ham steaks, so he didn’t notice that I stopped stock-still when I saw who was sitting at the trestle desk at the end of the tent. Jerrod kept backing up, no doubt drooling down his chin, until he knocked us both down into the damned dirt. I had to climb on top of him to get some purchase on the ground with my wood leg and raise myself to standing again.

The man sitting at the table at the end of the tent was that Union lieutenant who saved my life right there in Franklin. He was short and balding, and he looked nothing like a soldier, but everything like the kind of man who would fiddle with old bones for a living. He wore spectacles on the end of his nose, but they couldn’t hide his eyes. Those eyes still carried in them the contempt and anger and pity I’d remembered from what now seemed a lifetime ago, looking down at me in the Union ditch. It was true that we’d just entered his tent like two clowns, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew who I was and that the way he was staring was reserved only for
me
. This changed my plan entirely.

Did I owe that man something? There had been a time when I didn’t think I owed him a damned thing except a bullet in the head. He’d saved me for the surgeons’ torture table, and how could he be forgiven that? He was the enemy. He and his men had cut down the men in my squad without a care or a second thought, and that same goddamn field I’d just ridden past was the evidence of his butchering. What had sparing me done? Left me alive to think about those dead boys and to see the flowers sprouting on top of roots no doubt sunk deep into the bodies of my friends; to hobble along on the wooden sculpture of a half-assed artist who was more interested in making the thing look real than making it comfortable; to range across the territory without a single goddamn idea what I was supposed to do, without the luxury of, say, deciding to waste my time brushing off the bones of dead savages and examining them with one of the big magnifying glasses he had lined up on his desk. If I’d died on that battlefield, I wouldn’t have had to live all that shit, and there were times when living it was a burden. I noticed too much now, I saw too much. If I’d cared to, I could have hated the man sitting in front of me, and if I’d been of the right mind, I could have pulled out that .45 and shot him dead.

But, hell, I had long ago been convinced that I wanted to be alive. I’d changed my mind about that, or more truthfully, Carrie McGavock had changed it for me.

This man had saved me even when I didn’t know that I wanted to be saved. He would have been commended for stabbing me through the heart and letting me bleed to death in the bottom of his ditch, among the other dead boys, but he hadn’t done that. Now I was glad.

What do you say to a man like that? I began to hate him just because I didn’t know what to say to him. It was all too turned around and twisted just to introduce myself and say
thank you
. Those two words couldn’t say what I meant. The only way I could properly acknowledge what he’d done would be to recount it, and to tell him how I’d lived since, so he could know all of what he done for me, not just that little part in that one little moment at the top of that hill.

And so I began to talk without being asked to talk, and I told him all about that day of the battle and how we’d prepared and how I was sure I’d die going up that hill, so sure that I wasn’t frightened by it, and how I’d noticed the ants and the blades of grass each time I threw myself to the ground and how I’d taken the colors and rushed his position and how he’d looked down at me in his ditch and refused to kill me. I told him about being a prisoner and an invalid and a degenerate gambler. I confessed my sins to him, is what I did, and I think I even shocked Jerrod a little. I must have talked for the better part of an hour, and not once did the man interrupt me. He sat in his chair, still as a rock, with his elbows on the desk and his fingers drumming each other over and over again. Finally I begged him for forgiveness. Not for attacking him, which had been my duty, but for doing so little with what he’d spared for me.

I ran out of things to say. I stood quiet in front of him, aware that my days as a preacher were over but hoping that he would take me on anyway. He leaned back in his chair.

“I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about, sir.”

“The ditch. I was in the ditch. I had the colors. Right here in Franklin.”

“I remember the ditch. I remember the battle. I remember watching a number of color-bearers fall before our fusillade. I do not remember taking pity on one of them and sparing his life. You have me confused with someone else, this is most clear. I gave no quarter that day, and as much as I’ve prayed to God to show me something worthwhile I did that day, He’s seen fit to show me nothing. I am not the man you think I am.”

“You are. I don’t have you mixed up. I know who you are.”

“Then you have lost your proper memory of the battle, mister.”

“Call me Zachariah. Zachariah Cashwell.”

“Zachariah, then. In any case, I wish to hear no more about what you think I did during the war. In fact, I would like to hear no more about that war, or that battle. It is a trial to be here in this place, but my work at the college has brought me here, and so I must remain until I have completed this excavation. Perhaps it is my penance, an irony of God’s.”

I was mad now. Mad in every sense, including the crazy, foaming-at-the-mouth sense. Weren’t nobody going to tell me that I didn’t have my memories of that day crystal clear, because those memories had explained everything to me during the years since the war ended. How I came to be there, standing in that tent, could not be explained without that moment in the ditch when that man told me I was his prisoner and would not die that day. I knew that man’s face, and it was the face staring up at me now. I could not stand the idea that I didn’t remember everything perfectly; otherwise, what else had I gotten mixed up? I had memories of friends who had died. Had they existed? Did they look like I remembered? I did not want to spend the rest of my life wondering about such things. I would prove to this man that he had saved me, but I realized it couldn’t be done right away. I needed to lay low, work on him slowly. I also needed some ham steak.

“Well, I reckon that’s possible. God’s penance is blessed, but it can be terrible, too.”

“That, Mr. Cashwell, is the truest thing you’ve said since walking into my tent with your companion here.”

I’d forgotten about Jerrod. I looked down at him, and he was just staring at me all squinty, like he wasn’t sure who he was standing beside.

“We’d like jobs, mister.”

“Professor Stiles. You can call me Professor. We’ve got jobs, but only your man here . . .”

“You can call me Jerrod.”

“Only Jerrod has the qualifications, which are that he can walk on two real legs and lift heavy things. I’m not sure what to do with a one-legged man.”

“Well . . .”

“But I’ll find something for you. It’s the least I can do for someone whose life I held in my hands and didn’t crush out. Perhaps you can catalog bones. Can you write?”

He was confusing me.

“So you believe me now?”

“No, but it’s a fiction that I’d dearly like to believe. If I believe in it hard enough, perhaps it will come true.”

He raised his hat off his head, and I saw dust motes rise up off it in the last beams of dusk coming through a tear in the tent. He was bald and shiny under that old hat. He wasn’t as young as I remembered. Not as young, and not nearly as pure as I’d imagined him. He’d had a hard few years, too.

“Yes, I can write.”

Hours later only a few of us were left around the cook fire, none of us saying much. I wanted to know what the hell the man from the tent, who they called the professor, and his crew were doing here, but I didn’t know how to start the question without being insulting. I said to him:

“You got a nice operation going here.”

Professor Stiles puffed on a pipe and looked at me through the haze of smoke. Jerrod kept edging toward him, trying to catch a snort.

“I actually don’t really know what I’m doing. Not really.”

That wasn’t the kind of thing I expected to hear. I was more used to hearing men boast about things there weren’t no way they could have done. Men were bound to have done or said bigger and more impressive things now more than they ever had years ago, when the things we done and said had actually been impressive. Now it was just a way of talking. But the professor was a Yankee.

“You look like you know what you’re doing.”

“I got sent down here by the college to supervise this excavation only because I’m a professor of antiquities, and they decided that these burial mounds qualified as antiquities. But I’m a Greek and Roman scholar, I don’t know a thing about Indians, and I don’t recognize or understand much of what I’ve seen come out of this burial place. But I have to do it, or lose my job, so there you are.”

He might as well have come from across the ocean speaking gibberish for all I understood of what he said. I could not imagine this college, those antiquities. He came from a place I would never see, where he spent his time doing things I couldn’t see the use of doing. It impressed me some, to think that men like him could waste their time in uncountable ways, collecting and sorting things that were forgotten and thrown out long ago, and
still
they had time to come down here and whup our asses. Mighty impressive.