The Widow of the South
A Novel
By Robert Hicks
WARNER BOOKS
Copyright © 2005
Robert Hicks
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-446-69743-5
Prologue
1894
Carrie watched him go and then turned to Mariah, whom she had once owned, a
gift to her from her father. She
was a gift, whatever the meaning and
implications of that word. Mariah had been her tether to the earth when things
had spun away, when Carrie wasn't sure if there remained a real and true life
for her, and then when she wasn't sure if she wanted that life even if it
existed. Things had been different once. She couldn't believe that she had ever
been so ...
what? Weak? No, that wasn't it. She'd never been weak.
She'd been buffeted and knocked down, like grass bent to the ground by the wind
preceding a thunderstorm. She'd been slow to get up. But she did get up,
eventually. There had been no choice. She was not afraid of much, and she
especially wasn't afraid of God. Not anymore, not for a long time.
"Mariah, what do you see?"
A mockingbird chased a hawk across the width of the cemetery, diving and
chattering at the black shadow until it was banished from whatever bit of
territory the smaller bird claimed for its own.
"I see a mockingbird. And some of them yellow birds. Finches. Big old bird
with claws, too."
Mariah looked past her mistress, across the field of tall grass.
424 Killed at Franklin/Mississippi
"You know that isn't what I mean."
Carrie could see the markers and the grass, and the iron fence ringing the
graveyard. She could turn and see the back of her house and remember the beards
on the dead generals laid out on the porch below and the keening of the wounded
on the balcony above. She could see just fine. But there was more to seeing
than that, she thought. It was either a failure of imagination or a slight by
the Lord Himself, but in any case she could not see the things Mariah could
see. Mariah could tell her about things that gave her comfort, and Carrie cared
not a whit about how she came upon the knowledge.
She pointed at a grave marker in the Tennessee section.
MJM, it
read. In places, twigs leaned against the stones. She made a mental note to
tell the yard boy about them.
"What about him? That one."
"Miss Carrie, please, ma'am. This ain't right."
Carrie stared hard at the seam of her dress, where the new thread of her
latest mending stood out like a long dark cord against the faded black of her
ankle-length dress. She hadn't known how to sew before the war, and she still
wasn't very good at it. They would have to dye the whole thing soon.
"I would like to know about that man."
Mariah wasn't sure that what she saw in her mind was real, just the product
of a fevered imagination, or maybe the work of the devil himself making her
play games with the white woman whom she loved in a way she could not describe.
Fragments of light and sound came to her when she let her mind drift, and the
words Carrie craved formed on Mariah's lips unbidden. It was a thoughtless
exercise, a pastime to while away an afternoon. The thing she
did know,
the only thing she knew for sure, was that Carrie
believed. Mariah
could feel that on her.
"I don't know what to say, ma'am."
"Yes, you do. Don't play. We're too old for that. Tell me what you see when
you stare into the earth right there. Don't hold back. I know when you're
holding back."
Mariah closed her eyes and went silent, hoping Carrie would forget her
little obsession and keep walking. But Carrie stayed put, so Mariah began to
speak.
"There a man and a boy. It sunny. They ain't working, so maybe they just
home from church."
"How old?"
"The man, he a man. Got a beard. Dark, strong. He ain't old or young. The
boy, he just a little one, though he think he bigger. Maybe ten. He got a
fishing pole in his hand. They going to catch fish."
"Is there a woman?"
"She dead."
"How do you know that?"
"'Cause they going out fishing in they church clothes."
* * *
She heard him before she saw him. A small cough, followed by a louder,
deeper cough that he tried to swallow back. She turned toward the house and
there, in the path between the gravestones, stood an old man. A surprisingly
old man. He was thin and pepper-haired, and his eyes were too dark for her to
see where he was looking. They were set back too far in his head to distinguish
them from the shadows. He stood up tall and held his old bowler in his hand.
She could see him nervously massaging his knuckles under the hat, which caused
a little halo of dust to rise up off the felt. He wore a long coat that was
slightly too short and scuffed boots. His mouth was twisted up in what appeared
to be a smirk, but which she knew was not. He watched her closely and walked
toward her with the faintest hint of a limp, enough to make her heart break.
The twisted and dried-out parts of him still contained just the memory of his
old beauty-all the parts of him were still there, they'd just been used up. He
stood before her, so close she could hear the air whistling in and out of him.
She knew him immediately, as if he'd left only the day before.
"Why'd you scare that boy, Mrs. McGavock?"
"I love that boy."
"He one of yours?"
"Do I look like he could be my child?"
"I meant, is he your grandson or something? That's possible, ain't it?"
"No, he's not my grandson, just a stray off the street."
"Just a stray," the man repeated.
They paused and looked at each other, and Carrie felt angry that he'd come
without warning. The feeling passed. She pushed a stray lock of hair behind her
ear and squinted hard at him.
"I didn't mean to insinuate anything," she said.
"I reckon I ain't had anyone insinuate anything about me in a long time. I
didn't take no offense."
"But none was meant."
The old man stopped and toed at the grass with his foot. He looked around
at the grave markers like he had misplaced something. He started to sway a
little, and Mariah moved quickly behind him, ready to steady him if she had to,
but not willing to speak or acknowledge him. He spoke again.
"I thought we decided a long time ago that folks don't always know what
they mean. Or what things mean, for that matter."
Carrie considered this. "I suppose we did."
The old man bent over in a fit of coughing, slapping at his breast pocket
until he found an old handkerchief to spit into. Mariah bent over him with her
hand on his back and looked up at Carrie like she'd just seen something she
wished she hadn't. He stared at his handkerchief, snorted dismissively, and put
it away, all the while bent over like he was catching his breath.
Carrie had the feeling that she was falling. How could he be like this?
This was not the man she'd known, not the man she remembered. The air spun and
hummed around her.
She walked to his side and took his chin in her hand, hard, and pulled
until he was looking her in the eye. Mariah cried out and tried to stop her,
but Carrie waved her off. She saw him fully for the first time and reached with
her other hand to wipe rheumy tears from the corners of his eyes and to feel
the loose drape of his skin over sharp cheekbones. He struggled to keep from
coughing in her face.
"What's the matter with you, soldier?"
She let him go, and he slowly stood up straight. He held his bowler near
his mouth, just in case.
"Well, I reckon I can guess, but I ain't seen anyone who could tell me
straight. Can't afford such a person. I've been thinking that, after all these
years, I might finally die and not know for sure what killed me. That makes me
laugh some."
Carrie said nothing, and then: "If I were to guess from your past history,
I would say you'll outlive us all."
"I once thought I was cursed that way, yes, ma'am. But no more. There ain't
no more curses out there. My history don't mean nothing. Not anymore, thank
God."
She could picture him as a younger man, lying bleeding on the floor of her
parlor and then sitting up in one of the chairs of her husband's study, staring
out the window. She remembered his nose and how sharp it was in profile, how
the light seemed changed after passing over it. He was like a cameo; at least
that's what her mind remembered. She'd become used to him quickly, and back
then she thought he'd be there forever. Then he was gone. She closed her eyes.
"If you're going to die, there's a place for you here."
"That's what I meant to ask you about."
3
Sergeant Zachariah Cashwell, 24th Arkansas
We were marching up that pike, and everywhere you looked there were things
cast off by the Yankees littering the sides of the road, and it was everything
our officers could do to keep the young ones from ducking out of formation and
snatching up something bright and useful-looking, like crows looking to
decorate their nests. The old ones, like me, we knew better than to pick up
anything, because you'd have to carry it, and we knew that our burden was heavy
enough. But, hell, the Yankees had thrown away more than we'd laid our eyes on
in months, maybe years. There were pocket Bibles and little writing desks,
poker chips and love letters, euchre decks and nightshirts, canteens and pots
of jam, and all kinds of fancy knives. It looked like a colossus had picked up
a train full of things, from New York or one of those kinds of places, and
dumped it all out to see what was what. And I'm just mentioning the things that
you might want to pick up and keep. There was a lot more, besides. There were
wagons left burning on the side of the road, crates of rotten and infested
meat, horses and mules shot in their traces. I reckon those animals weren't
moving fast enough, and you couldn't blame the Yankees for lightening their
loads if they could, but it was a sorry sight. Even so, all that gear gladdened
my heart because it seemed so desperate. They were
running, by God.
They were running from us, the 24th Arkansas, and all the rest of the brigades
ahead of us and behind us. The columns stretched far as I could see when I
wiped the sweat from my eyes and got a good look around. But mostly I just kept
my head down and put my feet down, one in front of the other, the way I'd
learned to do.
The officers rode up and down the column on their horses, saying all sorts
of things to keep our spirits up. I'd learned that if you needed an officer to
pick up your spirits, you were in sorry shape. But some of the younger boys
listened, and they were heartened by it. The officers talked about the glory of
the South and about how our women would be watching and how they would expect
us to fight like Southern men-hard and without quitting. I wanted to say,
Until that bullet come for you, but I didn't. Those officers were
getting a whole lot of the men riled up for a fight, and I figured that was
good no matter what else I had to say about it. Some of our boys had their
homes around there, and you could just tell they were itching to get going. You
had to hold them back, tell them to pace themselves, or else they'd start
running and whooping and getting all lathered.
One big hoss in the company ahead, a man with a full beard and a neck like
a hog's, started yelling for the band to give us a tune. He stomped his feet
and rattled the bayonet he had at his side, and then some other of the boys did
the same thing, and pretty soon we were all yelling at the band to play "The
Bonnie Blue Flag," to give us a tune and be useful for once. The band even got
a few notes off before one of the company commanders rode by, snatched up a
trumpet, and threatened to beat them with it if he heard another note. That was
funny to watch, and it was about as good a morale lifter as hearing "The Bonnie
Blue Flag" straight through, on account of our band wasn't very accomplished.
The thing I kept thinking about was the nightshirts and the pots of jam,
lying there on the roadside. They made me wonder whether we'd been fighting in
the same war.
And then the order went out to get on line. They just up and stopped us,
and I couldn't help running into the man ahead of me and getting a whiff of the
sweat and stink rising up off his homespun shirt. The men quit jabbering, and
then the thousands of us were moving to either side of the road, all bunched up
at first but then thinning out as the line got longer and longer, like a ball
of twine unwinding. There wasn't any stomping of the feet then, no bayonet
rattling. We picked our way across the hills, some units stopping at the edge
of a tree line, most of us out in the open. It took me a few moments to realize
we were going to stop and fight right here, rather than chase the Yanks all the
way to Nashville. It looked like a mighty long way to the Union lines, which
were up on a rise. I could see men way up there in town tossing dirt around.
The sunlight flashed off their shovels and picks, and sometimes it seemed like
you could actually pick out the sound of their work a few seconds after you'd
seen their tools go chunking into the dirt. It was so damn hot for late
November. What had General Hood said when we crossed the river into Tennessee?
No more fighting on the enemy's terms. I looked at those battlements up
ahead over a mile distant, and I thought,
We must be the greatest army in
the world if these are our terms.
I'd been fighting for three years by then. I'd been shot once, and my left
arm still didn't feel right. Sometimes I had a hard time lifting my rifle and
keeping it steady. I thought about this and began flexing my arm to get it
limbered up. We sat down in place and began the long wait.
It always seemed a long wait before the fight, no matter how long it took.
Officers rode here and there conferring with one another, and then they'd come
back and huddle with their sergeants, and word would come down about what was
happening, and then they'd do it all over again and the word would change. This
drove some of the men crazy every time.
Shit, let's just go, they'd
yell to no one in particular, and they'd jump up and pace around and kick a
tree or something. Sometimes you didn't know what they meant by "go": fighting
or running. I'm quite sure that both options crossed the minds of most men. It
crossed my mind every time, and I'd been in a lot of fights and hadn't run yet.
Well, I hadn't run until everyone else was running. I had that rule.
The thing I'm about to say, you might not understand unless you've been in
war. But in those moments before the fight, if you were a smart man, you'd
figure out a way to convince yourself that it didn't matter to you if you lived
or died. If you're safe in your house, with your children running around
underfoot and with fields that need to be worked, it's an impossible way of
thinking unless you're sick or touched in the head. Of course it mattered if
you lived or died. But if you went into a battle caring what happened to you,
you wouldn't be able to fight, even though you knew you were as likely to die
as the next man whether you cared or not. There wasn't any logic to who got
killed and who didn't, and it was better that your final thoughts not be of
cowardice and regret. It was better not to care, and to let yourself be swept
up in the rush of the men beside you, to drive forward into the smoke and fire
with the knowledge that you had already beaten death. When you let yourself go
like that, you could fight on and on.
Everyone had their own way of getting their mind right. We lingered there
on the outskirts of Franklin, and I could see each of the men in my company
going through their little rituals. There were two ways of getting ready. Most
of the new men, unless they were unusually wise or strong-minded, went about
tricking themselves into forgetting the possibility of death. One youngster in
an almost clean uniform took a couple pieces of straw, stuck it in his hat, and
began to loudly tell every joke he could remember to no one in particular, as
if everything would be all right if he could keep laughing right up until the
bullet got him. A few people were listening to him, but that wasn't really the
point.
Listen here, I got another one. Three old men come courting a young
lady, and she says, "What can I expect from a marriage to you?" And the first
old man, he says, "I've got a big ol' ..."
Other younger ones paced back and forth, hitting themselves in the chest,
shaking their heads like bulls, and cursing. These were the ones who were
trying to make themselves so angry and riled up that they'd run like they had
blinders on and rush wherever someone pointed them without thinking about
anything except throttling something or somebody. Some of these boys picked up
rocks and threw them as hard as they could at the confused rabbits, squirrels,
and coveys of quail flushed out of their hiding places by our noise. I caught
one mountain boy with stringy auburn hair and no shoes punching and kicking at
an old locust tree behind us, and I yanked him around and sat him down before
he hurt himself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Widow of the South
by Robert Hicks
Copyright © 2005 by Robert Hicks.
Excerpted by permission.
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