The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  His son would always return to the Cause, that thing he wrote so glibly about in the Rebel, disguising himself as Cotton Gin as if his father wouldn’t recognize the words. The words he spat in his father’s face. The Cause.

  There were no causes in the Baylor house, no such romantic notions. He held the world responsible for the boy’s death, but especially the charismatic criminals who had led him into battle. They would pay. He heard a man calling for water from the battlefield, and he cursed the voice in the dark.

  19

  ZACHARIAH CASHWELL

  It took a while to realize where I’d ended up after stepping away from those Union boys. There was a gap in time, I reckon, and I couldn’t fill it right off. My senses came back slow, one at a time. At first I could only feel things outside my body, like the vibrations of whatever I was resting on. I could feel footsteps. That’s a floor, I thought. That’s a wood floor. And so I spent some time just paying attention to the way the floor moved under me, and how I could almost feel its grain against my shoulder blades. Those are my shoulder blades. I could feel the dull rumbling of boots against the floor, and sometimes I thought I could hear a set of lady’s shoes walking quickly someplace. Her shoes were sharp and quick against the floor, that’s how I could tell the difference. I hadn’t heard a lady walk across a floor—hell, I hadn’t seen one walk across a floor—since before I could remember.

  Once you start in on your senses, they all come back eventually. Unless you got your eyes plucked out or your ears blown up. You only got two choices in this world—you’re either asleep or awake, and you’re never one or the other for long. After feeling the vibrations of people walking across the floor, I could soon hear them. And then I could hear voices, voices all around me, voices of men who seemed to be right there on the floor like me. I thought of my eyes, but I didn’t open them. Didn’t want to. I heard men groaning and crying and coughing and yelling and making the same jokes over and over again. The jokes was what made me finally understand where I was. They were the kind of jokes you tell when you’re thinking about dying, and so I knew I was in a hospital someplace.

  Why in God’s name would I be in a hospital? I’d made it out clean, like a proper sneaky razorback. I’d burned that barn to the ground, and they never saw me go. I was a free man again. I heard the woman walking across the floorboards again. I might have chosen, as a free man, to spend some time in a place where women walked, but not if it meant lying still on the floor among the criers and the yellers and the jokers. They smelled bad. They smelled of sweat and shit and that ammonia smell people get when they’s hungry for too many days in a row. My nose had come back. I opened my eyes and saw the stark white ceiling above me and saw men trembling and rocking all around me, and I thought, So what’s the matter with me?

  That’s when the pain came, and I knew all my senses were back. There was fire in my right leg and in my hip and up my back, and the fire burned so goddamn hot that I had to grit my teeth to keep from screaming for a bucket of water, but that scream must have snuck out because I could feel some of the men looking at me for a moment before turning back to their own troubles. I gritted my teeth and felt the pain get all around me until I was just a little thing within it, and then I must have fell asleep again.

  In my dreams I heard a voice: So the man gets to the pearly gates and sees his own Negro up on that there cloud with a big ring of keys, and the Negro says, “Guess da top rail on da bottom now. But you a fine-lookin’ buck, massa.” And I awoke again. The voices were everywhere around me, like the pain. I wanted someone to cut my spine out to relieve me of the hurt, but there was no relief. I listened to the other men to take my mind off things.

  It was hard to see the men around me because it meant I had to move my head, and moving around only made things hurt worse. So I looked out the corner of my eye at the men in gray lying around me, each blending into the other so that the whole room seemed infested with gray, and it crossed my mind that a floor covered in rats would look a whole lot like what I was seeing. I’m feverish, I thought. After a time I could pick out individual men and put them together with their voices and listen to their pleas.

  The two men on either side of me were dead, or else they didn’t have much to say. On the other side of the man on the left I could see a young blond man trying to sit up, over and over again, each time too tired to hold himself for very long before sinking back down to the floor. Finally he gave up and just talked to the ceiling.

  “Somebody help me get this letter out my pocket.”

  There wasn’t no one answering him, and I’d have helped him myself if I could. I was balancing myself, up on a high wire like they got at those carnivals, and on every side was hot white fire. If I moved to help him, I’d fall off, and I couldn’t do that.

  “I got a letter for my mother. She don’t know where I am, dammit. It’s just right here. Please, somebody.”

  Another man spoke up across the room. He had an old and gravelly voice.

  “Hold on, boy. Maybe that lady come back here in a minnit. You just hold on, now.”

  And that must have put the boy at ease, because I didn’t hear a peep from him again, and I didn’t see him move after that.

  Finally a Negress came into the room, and I could see her down the end of my nose, standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips and shaking her head. She was yellow-skinned, like you saw sometimes around towns. She wasn’t a country Negro, and she didn’t act it, either. We must have been a hell of a sight to her, and she was about the cleanest thing I’d seen in months. Years. Maybe ever. She had a wooden bucket in one hand and a ladle in the other, and she moved around the room pouring out water into our open mouths, like we was baby birds. We just open our mouths wide, and in come the water. I blessed her in my head, even though I didn’t think much of God then. I figured it wouldn’t hurt.

  The water made my pain go away for a little bit, and I sunk back almost to sleep again. I tried to remember what had happened to me. The Negress moved around the room, stepping in between our legs and occasionally stumbling over a boot here and there, and I could hear her cursing quietly under her breath. I wondered if she knew what had happened to me. I watched the dust roiling up off the men around me each time one of them coughed or spat or puked or laughed, and in the dust I finally seen what happened. The dust reminded me.

  I’d made it away, and I was headed out from the fire and those guards. I didn’t care where I went after that. Every place was a possibility. And I was running toward the creek, thinking I’d slip into it and hide against the bank until they moved off, and then make my way down the creek and away. But something slammed into my right side like a hammer, and I was knocked flat to the ground. I don’t remember the pain right then. That came later. I just remember being knocked down, and rolling over, and looking back up the hill to the crest where the other prisoners were standing with their heads down, and a man with a rifle was silhouetted against the flames and the smoke of the fire. What do you need me for? I remembered thinking. Why do you want me? Here is my body, take it if you want it so damned bad. But why? There was no answer. And then I got to my feet and began to run again, but the first time I came down on my right leg I fell. The pain came then, and it was such a heavy pain I could barely keep my eyes open. It was worse than the first time I was shot. As long as I could keep my eyes open, though, I could move. I crawled and crawled, and when I got to the creek, I slipped into it and felt my head go under the water, and I screamed and sucked water and coughed, and felt my body borne away down the stream, and that’s the last I saw of the war. Or, at least, that part of the war with the guns and the fire.

  That’s all I could remember. The Negress stepped lightly over me and looked down. I could see the freckles on her nose, and I noticed how she’d hitched her skirt up on one side so that she could move among us without getting dirty. I opened my mouth, and she poured the water in. I couldn’t swallow all of a sudden, and the water streamed out the sides of my mo
uth and pooled on the floor beside me. I looked up and felt tears coming up in my eyes. I hadn’t wanted to disappoint her, and I was making a mess. I looked after her as she walked out of the room, and I wondered if she’d ever come back. I slept then, and I don’t think I woke up for a few minutes. I have a hard time remembering.

  “Hey, friend.”

  I was woken up by a gray-haired fellow who was lying at my feet. Some of his hair was matted with blood at the back of his neck, but I couldn’t tell whether it came from him or someone else or me. I reckoned I was bleeding, but I hadn’t wanted to move around enough to check things out. Cranking his head back so I could hear him better, the man spoke again.

  “This here’s a prison, I reckon.”

  I thought about that. “Funny prison. No guards.”

  “Do you want to be here?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then it’s a prison, ain’t it? Whatever they want to call it.”

  The old man rolled over on his right side so he could look up at me better. I couldn’t figure why he wanted to talk to me so bad, since there were men lying all around him. But he got over and looked at me, and I could see that he was a foreigner. Or from down Louisiana someplace. He had dark skin, and his nose was hooked over like a fish hawk’s. He kept snuffling and hacking while he talked, like he had a cold, and every time he had a real bad coughing attack his bad eye scrunched down into his head and his whole face was cut through with dark lines and valleys of loose skin. I admired the stubble on his face, which was perfect white and reached up high on his cheekbones. He talked faster than I was used to, and I took him for a New Orleans man. We’d seen men like them running their flatboats down the river back in Arkansas, full of cotton and whiskey. Fast-talking men who’d speak in tongues when they didn’t want you to understand what they were saying to each other. But this one wanted me to understand.

  “I ain’t staying here. No, sir. This ain’t how I’m going out. Not like this. I got to get my ass up and walk it out of here, only I think my left leg ain’t going to work, so I need me some help. This leg is all smashed up, and the Lord knows what’s happened to this eye here. I keep trying to move it around, but I can’t tell if it’s there. I reckon I can pay you to help me out of here; I was a rich man once, you know, and you look like you’d take just about anything I could give you. Where you from?”

  When I didn’t answer, he went on.

  “Well, shit, I don’t really care where you from. I just need you to help me sit up, and maybe let me lean on you while we walk out of here and put the rest of these sorry cases behind us. I can’t stand being around all these dead boys, even the ones who’re still breathing. They’re dead, sure enough, and I ain’t.”

  The man yelled that last part as he yanked himself up to a sitting position and wobbled there. His little speech seemed not to sit well with the others. One man was standing in a corner over by the window, one of the only ones I could tell who could stand on his own. He was leaning on a piece of wood and kept pressing his hand to the wound in his stomach. He was tall. Maybe there hadn’t been room for him to lie down, maybe he didn’t fit among the rest of us, like a miscut piece of lumber. He was one of those fellows who looked a lot skinnier than they were, on account of being so long. You look close, you could see he had been a powerful man. His arms were thick. He had no beard, and this made him seem harder than the rest of us, like he had nothing to hide. Nothing to hide, or nothing he cared to hide.

  “Oh, shut the hell up, old man. I’d wager a week’s pay you got bullets in your back. You just don’t want us to see ’em. You don’t want that pretty little lady to come in here and roll you over like a damned baby and tend the holes in you. In fact, I’m going to write me a note right now and send it off to the newspaper, all about how I met a jawjacking Spaniard with holes in his back, and I wonder how they got there.”

  Voices came from all over the room.

  “A week’s pay? What week’s pay? What pay? Who’s getting pay?”

  “Might not be a Spaniard. Could be a nigger, you know.”

  “Somebody go get that little lady. I wouldn’t mind another look at her.”

  “She’d mind another look at you, that’s a fact. You missing an ear and half your nose.”

  “I still got the important parts.”

  “Hell yeah. I got them, too.”

  The old man at my feet just smiled, like he’d heard such insults before. Me, I started to get hot just thinking about what I’d do if someone had insulted me like that. But you can’t figure those boys from New Orleans. They think different. He ignored the biggun in the corner and kept talking to me.

  “What do you say? Let’s get out of here.”

  I sorely wanted to escape, just as bad as I’d wanted to escape from those Yank guards. But I couldn’t move. I told him so, and he looked down at my leg and his eyes turned up and the wrinkles in his head smoothed out.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t go anywheres. You’re right.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That leg of yours is going to come off, if it doesn’t fall off first. You can’t feel it?”

  “No.”

  “That ain’t a good sign, either. They need to get you on the table right quick.”

  He began to yell. “Hey. Hey! Help!”

  I didn’t want to get up on any table. I tried to kick at him to stop him from yelling, but the pain made my breath stop, and I almost went to sleep again. I kept my eyes open, and I tried to get him to keep quiet, but I could only whisper.

  “Please, no.”

  The man in the corner was watching all this, and he came stepping over the rows of men and stood above me and the old Spaniard. When I looked up, I could see a small drop of blood make its way down one of his big fingers where he kept them pressed against his gut, and fall to the floor.

  “I think the man wants you to be quiet, El Conquistador.”

  “Look at his leg. Dios mío!”

  “I see it. I don’t care. He wants you to be quiet, and I’ll make you quiet if that’s how it’s going to be.”

  “No need for that.”

  “I mean, you ain’t in much better shape. You look pale like a real white man.”

  “And you talk like you had your brains shot out. So what?”

  The big man stroked his chin, like he had hair there, and that’s when I noticed that he wasn’t clean shaven exactly. He had scars on his face where he must have been burned a long time ago, and where there were scars there was no beard. He looked like someone had taken an iron to his face, only they’d missed a few spots, and up underneath his chin I could see a sprout of red hair. I tried to catch his eye by staring at him. I wanted him to tell me what was wrong with me. He didn’t see me, or chose not to see me, I reckon. He kept talking to the Spaniard.

  “If you want out, let’s go.”

  “With you?”

  “Just play dead when I carry you out of here. No matter how bad you want to run your mouth, keep it shut. We can get you out of here if you’re dead. They let the dead go free, and I’m going with you.”

  Then he took his hands away from the hole in his stomach, which got redder and redder. He reached down and picked the old man up and slung him over his shoulder like a bag of flour, and the old man screamed a little before choking it back.

  “What did I say about keeping your mouth shut?”

  The old man closed his eyes, and that squeezed a couple of tears out, which fell to the floor at my feet. I wondered how anyone would credit a crying corpse.

  The big man walked toward the door and was almost through it when a white lady came into the room, pushing him back with the end of her finger. This must have been the lady with the sharp shoes.

  She was dark-haired and pale, and she was dressed all in black. This was the lady they’d been making jokes about, about wanting her to return, about how their important parts would react to her arrival. I thought then
that I could not be dying, because her arrival felt like a punch in my chest, which I reckoned to be a sign of life. I saw her and felt grateful and heated and afraid, all together.

  I had no power to do anything; I was pinned to the floor by nervousness and pain. Her eyes sat wide apart on her face, and her bottom lip was thick and swollen like a doll’s, and she might as well have been a picture on a wall in a castle a thousand miles away she was so beautiful. Right then I wished to God that He would show me no more of the world that I could never have or touch. No more beauty for this old boy. I felt the world receding from me every moment she stood in that room, glaring at that big piece of human kindling and the Spaniard playing possum on his shoulder. She reminded me of how much I had lost and how little I had and how far I’d gone down the road to the next life. I wanted her to leave the room only because I didn’t want to have such thoughts and so that I could sink into sleep. I hated that she made me think these things, and at first I thought this meant I ought to hate her, rather than the man who had aimed his rifle at my leg.

  “I don’t think you-all should be moving around.”

  She talked with a hard voice, but like she was trying to convince herself she was hard. Her voice wobbled in places, but you had to listen close.

  “This one’s dead, ma’am. Just clearing him out. Making us a little room.”

  “He doesn’t look that hurt to me.”

  “Bled out, I reckon. Got hit in the leg, lots of blood there, you know.”

  I watched her. From my angle, lying there on the floor, her head was framed between the carved door trim and the old wallpaper molding running around the ceiling, like she was a portrait. She looked past the big man and took us all in, the roiling and groaning floor of men dumb enough to let ourselves get shot up. Dumb enough. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but it was sure enough true. There was no sense in running into bullets, for whatever reason. Honorable maybe, but not smart. How many dumb things had been done for honor? I remembered watching two men gouge each other’s eyes out back in Arkansas because one had insulted the other’s fat wife. Blind but honorable they were. This was the wisdom of dying, I reckoned. Wisdom. Well, shit, that wasn’t something anyone had ever accused me of having before. I took some pleasure in thinking I’d become wise, I don’t mind saying now. A lot of pleasure. I sunk back and contemplated my new self and watched the lady out of the bottom of my eye. She said: