The Widow of the South (37 page)

“I will not. He is not my business.”

“Then I shall.”

He tried to get to his feet but only managed a few moments before slumping heavily back down, panting.

“Mr. Baylor, I want to remove the dead from your field and bury them properly on our land.”

He looked up at her, and she saw panic in his face.

“I am dying here, and you are talking about my field? You have no shame. You set this young boy upon me, who probably doesn’t know any better . . .”

“The hell I don’t,” Eli said.

“. . . so you could get those bones out of my
field
? And I’m supposed to just give up like that, bend to your crime? You would have me
shot
for those bones? You are insane.”

“You weren’t listening to the boy. His trouble with you is his own. You were listening, weren’t you?”

“Yes.” He went quiet for a moment. “Yes, I was. But I can’t bring that boy’s sister back, or her baby, or my boy. I can’t bring any damned one of them back. The only thing that can be done is to go forward, and that does
not
include getting misty-eyed over dead who died so foolishly.”

He called out to the house for his wife but received no response. We were the only people in the whole world right then.

“Just foolish, dead soldiers, that’s what you think?”

“You must get me help, Mrs. McGavock. Please have pity.”

“Those men in your field are no different from this boy here. Alone, without options, watching death come for them and those close to them.
Look at him!
”

Even Eli seemed to jump at her words.

“Do you see him? He’s the boy who’s dead in the field. Thousands of boys with no other option but, as you say,
to go forward,
straight into the fire. Do you think they marched themselves there on their own decision? Do you think they looked at your field and said to themselves,
This is a mighty fine place to die
?Your quarrel is with them? Is it?”

Baylor had propped himself up on his elbows again.

“I have learned, Mr. Baylor. I have learned from a man ten times more courageous than you that it was life and not death that those men, like this boy here, sought from this place. It’s a paradox, but it’s true nonetheless. I have learned from that man of the cruelty in the strategies of men, powerful men, men not unlike yourself. I have learned from him that there could have been no worse fate than to have died on your field, and yet there had been no choice.
Who would help them?
You were listening to the boy. Who? Who would help them, with their few choices, with no way out?”

Silence.

“No one. And it is alongside those men and boys that your own son fell, and surely you don’t
hate
your own son. A stupid battle, yes. A brutal and cruel war, yes. But are those the men you hate? Are those the men with whom you have a quarrel?”

More silence.

“They aren’t, no more than this boy. Any more than your own son.
Your own son!
”

Carrie could see she was running out of time. Baylor’s eyes drooped and popped open intermittently, flashing and then slowly dousing themselves.

“We will leave now. I’ve told you what I want from you, but I will not threaten you for it. Neither will this boy. I will send for help, and I will not say one more word to you about this.”

She bent over the old man with her hands on her hips and brought her face close to his. She could smell the tobacco in his hair.

“The bitterness will kill you quicker than that bullet, Mr. Baylor.”

Carrie stepped back from the man, breathed deep, and put her hand tenderly on the top of Eli’s head. She was relieved, and she relaxed and heard the cicadas buzzing in her ears for the first time. She tried to figure out how they were going to get the boy and make an escape, as that was the most immediate thing that boy was going to need.
He has greater concerns than my interest in that field
.
He needs to run
.

She prayed to God that if He let the lonely, abandoned, sad boy get away and become happy again, if he’d ever actually
been
happy, she would not let Him or Eli down. She would give the men in that field a proper place to spend eternity. She would not shy away from the task. She would be about God’s chores.

Eli pointed the pistol down at Baylor and set his thumb, ready to cock it. Carrie went toward him, and he waved her off with the pistol. The old man did not plead and cry for his life, as he had before. He stared straight into the barrel.

“I didn’t hear you give Mrs. McGavock an answer, old man.”

Baylor ignored the boy and turned his head toward Carrie. “Yes,” he said.

Eli kept the gun pointed at Baylor. “Yes what?”

Baylor turned back to his attacker. “You can put that gun down. I’ve already decided to let Mrs. McGavock have her way.”

“Or I’ll shoot you, understand?”

“No, go ahead and shoot me. I’m going to die anyway. You’ll learn someday, if you live long after this, that there are things about you, boy, that are more persuasive than that pistol of yours.”

Eli cocked the hammer. It seemed he had taken Carrie’s words to heart; he had his own business with the old man.

At that very moment Eli seemed to turn his scared and shining face straight toward Zachariah Cashwell. Cashwell could see the boy was begging for someone to relieve him of a burden he couldn’t remove himself, an obligation he would have to meet unless someone stopped him. He was scared but ready to pull that trigger. Zachariah had been listening to every word Carrie had said and watching every gesture she’d made, and in her words he had found something of what he had come to find—a vision of himself as a different, better man.
I have learned from a man ten times more courageous than you that it was life and not death that those men, like this boy here, sought from this place.
He was proud to think of himself as courageous, but her words stirred up something else in him. He had not saved a single boy that terrible day in that place, and yet he knew what she said was true: every one of them had wanted to live, and there had been no good deaths on that field.
He
had been saved that day, but he had done no saving. No boy left that battlefield intact because he, Zachariah Cashwell, had made it possible.

He had one more chance to tell Carrie that he had missed her terribly and that he could never love someone as he loved her. He knew he couldn’t have her ever, and her husband was sitting right there with a rifle, but he would have said it. He knew he had one more chance to thank her for saving his life when he didn’t know he wanted it saved. He knew he had one more chance to tell her he had never known a woman like her and that he might not have ended up as he had if he’d known earlier there were women like her who saved lives instead of taking them, who could take in stray boys and love them without making them feel dirty and an imposition. He almost spoke of these things, right in front of Eli and Baylor and John, but he kept his mouth shut. She had already given him his gift. They would have to wait for another day, if there ever was one, to talk about the rest of it.

Having already committed a hanging crime, the boy stood over the old man. Baylor sat there, steadfast and unmoved by the boy and his weapon, as if welcoming his death. He was bleeding a little below the tourniquet. He’d need the doctor right quick, Zachariah thought.

Zachariah saw a boy who, if he was ever to grow to be a man, would have to live on the run, maybe forever. He looked over at Carrie, who stood a few feet from Eli, frozen. Zachariah would not accept that there was to be no other future for Eli except a hanging. Especially not if the hanging was for the crime of shooting a goddamn meddling, rich old fool who deserved at least a bullet in the leg and probably much more. Zachariah had no doubt that the justice that would be done, as much as it would make Zachariah sick to see it, would be proper and right and legal and that Carrie and John would accept it, even if it destroyed them. This was part of what Zachariah loved about all of them.
Proper and right
. They were good at
proper and right,
and it was this that distinguished him from the McGavocks. That had not changed. Someday he hoped to be proper and right himself, but not quite yet.

He spurred his horse across the yard, snatched Eli up, and rode off past the house, around the new stable, down the hill, over a stream that seemed awfully familiar, and kept on going for years.

That best part of me has left again, and who knows when I will know it once more?
Carrie thought, riding slowly back to Carnton next to the other man she loved.
We had so little time.
The tears, she lied to John, were tears of joy.

49

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

T
he day I began retrieving the dead was impossibly, incongruously beautiful. It was a day that might have been held over from before the war, from my childhood back in Terrebonne when the sky was deep blue and cloudless and the wind carried the scent of the woods and fields. It was innocent.

The professor who had been excavating the Indian mound stood next to me, and we looked out across the field. He’d closed up the dig and resigned his position at whatever college had sent him. He had convinced five men to stay with him, including Jerrod, whom I remembered from his days with us at Carnton. The rest walked or rode off north somewhere. I was glad to have these six men who had so much experience handling remains. I’d decided on this course long before I’d ever considered what it actually meant.

Professor Stiles had warned me away. He told me the sight of the recently uncovered men would be too much for some of his men to take, let alone a woman. I told him that I was meant to be there and that if I fainted, then I was intended to faint. But I would not shy from the remains of these men or pretend that what I was doing wasn’t itself a horrible solution to a more horrible proposition. I would not pretend that their movement from abandonment to discovery to final rest was an unremarkable journey. They would be exposed, the professor told me, and the stench would billow up, and some of them would be reduced to bones, and others would have mummified faces like leather. There would be hair and clothing everywhere. Their teeth would be bared and snarling. He did not think I should see such things. I said I thought I must see such things, that such things were the wages of war and it was only our own weakness as sinners, including my own, that required these last near 1,500 men to make the sacrifice that left them alone under a couple feet of Tennessee topsoil.

I believe that the professor was a man of faith, although he did not say it, and that he had no more use for war than I did. He told me, reluctantly, that he had been at the Battle of Franklin and that many of the men he would be digging up would be men he had helped to kill. I told him it was good that he could be there to do penance for that, and he nodded his head and wiped the sweat from the rim under his big black hat.
Penance. Don’t know that I’ve made penance even once since then,
he said.
A man of faith,
I thought.

Mr. Baylor had not complained about giving us access to his field. He could not walk for a while after his encounter with Eli, but he kept his leg, and I suppose that was something he appreciated. He was a man of his word, and I suppose I should have never doubted that. He had been a schemer, but not ever a liar, and although I don’t think he was happy about my plan for his field, he did not complain about it. He didn’t give us much time, only three weeks, but he did not interfere.
Take on that nasty work if you must,
he told me
.
He watched us from the remains of his gin, sitting on a chair under the lean-to attached to the side of the ruin. He watched us every day, as if he were standing vigil over something. Once I looked up at him as his daughter tried to bring him back to the house toward suppertime, and he fended her off. He would not leave until we had left, and sometimes I think he stayed there until it was too dark to see.

Thanks to John’s few remaining acquaintances among veterans of the army, we’d been able to acquire the notes of many of the original gravediggers, enough so that we could map out the field with some accuracy.
Arkansas by that redbud, Mississippi by the old hedge, Missouri in the middle right there, along with Texas and Tennessee. Alabama at the edge of the pike . . .

We knew enough to begin digging, and that’s how I found myself on the prettiest day I could remember, waiting for the first man to put the first shovel in the ground. John had command of a line of five large oxen carts waiting behind us, which we would use to shuttle the dead back and forth to the old grove right next to our family cemetery, where I had once walked and admired the complexity of the trees and of creation.

“Are you ready, Mrs. McGavock?”

Professor Stiles was sweating under his hat and in his coat. I thought he looked every bit an undertaker, and I smiled at the thought. He took that as a sign I was ready.

As they dug, I pulled out a bound book of blank pages, in which I intended to record the names and final resting places of the men. I had not brought a chair and had nowhere to sit, so I knelt a few yards away from the diggers and propped the book upon my lap.

It wasn’t very long before they found the first grave, and as they scraped the dirt away, they exposed man after man, a dozen or more in a row, each facing up. They looked so much alike in death staring up at the sky out of sightless skulls. I cried out at the shame of it, that these men who had lived as individuals would be reduced to so many identical parts of some larger whole. The professor and John rushed over, thinking, I suppose, I’d been overcome by the gore of it all, but I waved them off.

Upon the chests of each of the men lay a piece of wood on which the gravediggers had done their best to scrawl a name and unit. Who knew how they’d discovered these names? I suppose they’d known many of the dead and that the others had something to identify them. A letter from home or enlistment papers or a name sewn in their uniform. I was grateful there were names, at least.

Each man was laid in a cart in the same order he was buried, and assigned a number, which was attached to the body and recorded in my book next to the name. Out of respect we did not pile the dead upon each other. This made John’s task that much more difficult, but he did not complain. He just mounted up and dragged cart after cart back across the fields toward Lewisburg Pike and down the pike to the tollhouse and then down our lane, where two of the professor’s men were waiting with fresh graves and wooden markers on which they scratched the initials and numbers I had assigned. John did not complain even when people began to line the road back to Carnton, watching him and craning their necks to get a good look at his cargo. I believe that he, too, had lost all interest in the good opinion of anyone around us and didn’t give a hoot what they did or thought or saw.

The professor’s description of the dead had been accurate. What I hadn’t imagined was the magnitude of the task, which became apparent after the first dozen men were laid bare of dirt, and I considered how many similar rows of men must stretch out in every direction under my feet.
Fifteen hundred
. The entire plot must be filled with these men, I thought. We would have to work all day, every day, and I wasn’t sure we would be able to rescue even half the men before Baylor’s time limit expired.

As the days wore on, I considered walking up to the gin and begging Baylor for an extension of time. I would have done it, but soon another group of strangers began to appear. They weren’t gawkers. These were the dirt farmers who lived perpetually in hock to the store, who worked much of what had been our land on behalf of Mr. Baylor himself. I’d forgotten them, and the fact that so many had been in the war themselves. They were stalk-thin and hollow-eyed, they had the yellow pallor of the perpetually undernourished, and they wore only threadbare clothes, but each brought with him a shovel and a cart and the promise of his time. Along with their labor, time was all they had to offer, I realized. I considered that it might be some kind of tribute to fallen comrades, but it was more likely the urge that some people have to pitch in and work when they see that work needs to be done. Every day a few more of these men showed up, until John had ten carts on the road to Carnton constantly. We would make our deadline.

On that first day, I soon realized I could do no good down in the field and that I would be better suited to directing the reburial. I asked the men doing the digging to attach the names and numbers themselves so I could record them up at the cemetery. The grasshoppers were out again, and I scooted my feet along the ground and swung them at the weeds, hoping to roust the funny little insects. Soon I was accompanied by a cloud of winged and buzzing creatures reflecting the light here and there, and I swear they followed me all the way to Carnton. It was such a fine day.

Mariah brought a stool out to this new cemetery after a while. I had been sitting on the ground as the men were laid out, state by state, in neat and long rows while I recorded number and name, number and name, number and name. Mariah had been working to keep the household running while I stayed to rule over my newest obsession, and she hadn’t fixed her hair in days. I’d forgotten how wiry it could become. Before she could speak, I reached my hand toward her and took it. She looked so tired.

She sat down heavily on the stool I had assumed had been meant for me, put her hands on her knees, and leaned her head back, as if she were trying to pick out stars in the blue sky. I thought she might have something important to say, but she was silent. She had been silent for days. It pained me to realize that she would have been able to imagine what I was feeling if I suffered as she had. She always knew. Always.

“I do appreciate your help, Mariah.”

I appreciated it
. It was something one might say to a business partner, or the mail clerk who’d saved a seed catalog for you. It was something a stranger said to another stranger. Were we strangers? Impossible, and yet what did I know of her, really? I knew she was with me, that she had always been with me, and that as far as I could tell she intended to be with me until she died. I knew that she had been
mine,
and I had no idea what that meant except that it meant that she stayed by my side. The rest of it I had let remain a mystery.

“Do you want to leave? Leave here? Carnton?”

Me,
is what I meant.

Silence.

“You can if you’d like. You always could have left, even when you weren’t allowed. I would have never stopped you.”

She nodded her head, as if considering this, and I was momentarily frightened she would accept what I had intended more as a gesture of love than anything else. I did not want her to leave; I could not stand the thought of her leaving. She blew more air out of her lungs, like a big sigh.

“Don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“That’s my fault.”

“It is. That true. But I also don’t want to leave, and that’s your fault, too. You too helpless, Miss Carrie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ain’t nothing to be done about it. I’m too old to be running away from crackers with ropes, and I reckon I prefer it all quiet and predictable out here at the house.”

I thought of the future and how we would return to the house and she would go to her part and I would go to my part, and we would meet again in the morning and discuss food and mending and the messes that children make, and then I would come out to the cemetery to spend the day with the dead. That’s how it would be. It was some kind of normal, at least for us.

At that moment I indulged the notion that perhaps the violence was finally ebbing. The war and that battle had opened a rift in what was acceptable and decent, I thought, but perhaps it had now closed again. Perhaps the appetite for punishment and vengeance had abated among the men capable of meting it out. Perhaps those incompetent, ineffectual, drunken men in town were all that was left, and Lord knows they looked as if they hadn’t the energy to continue. I wondered if Mariah shared my hope. I doubted it. And soon I doubted the notion itself. It would never end.

Without speaking I handed Mariah the book, the pen, the inkwell, and the little blotter, and I walked toward the house. She looked up at me curiously, squinting through the deep crimping at the corners of her eyes. When I looked back, she was busily at work at the book, paying me no mind.
Good,
I thought.

In the little room over the entryway there was a small chest. In that small chest was a drawer, and in that drawer was a mourning veil. I put it on and walked into Martha’s room to look in her mirror and make sure it fit. It looked old, but it would do.

The violence would not end, but I still had my role to play. Someone had to do it, to be that person. I was the woman they wrote the letters to; this house was the last address of the war. Now it was the final resting place of the dead, or at least almost 1,500 of them, and they could not be left alone. I had resolved to be the designated mourner, to be the woman who would remember so others could forget. In the forgetting, I prayed, would be some relief, some respite from the violence and bitterness and vengeance. Did I have hope? It did not really matter, but I had little. Still, there are things we are called to do that we cannot refuse, as futile as they seem, because to refuse them would mean to lose faith. Not just faith in God so much as faith in man, which I suppose amounted to the same thing.

When I returned to Mariah, I was carrying my own stool, and I sat down upon it and put my hands on my knees, just as she did. She looked up from the book and studied me.

“That veil need some work, Miss Carrie.”

“I’ve plenty of time to mend it.”

“I reckon you do. Yes, ma’am, you do.”

The two of us wore those stools out over the years, but John always made us new ones.