The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  “Put him down. He doesn’t look dead yet.”

  A voice piped up from across the room. “Ah no, he’s dead, ma’am. Dead like a sack of potatoes.”

  Another voice, squeaky and giggly. “More like a bag of flour.”

  A chorus. All eyes on the lady and the soldier. Lots of chatter.

  “Dead as doornail.”

  “Dead like a smoked mullet.”

  “Them Spaniards do like their mullets, I heard that.”

  “Dead like Stonewall.”

  “He ain’t a thing like Stonewall.”

  “He dead, though.”

  “Dead like Lincoln.”

  “He ain’t dead.”

  “Shhhh.”

  You could tell the big man carrying the Spaniard was getting angry at the gabbing. He looked around and glared at everybody. His game wasn’t going as smooth as he’d wanted, and the yacking wasn’t helping. He’d wanted to slide out smooth and slippery, no one noticing a thing. Now he was the center of the attraction, and the lady wasn’t moving out of his way. He looked around and tried to look mean, but the skin on his face only let one side of his face get hard, and so he looked more like he was in pain than anything else, I reckoned. And maybe that was the truth anyway. He was still bleeding, I could see that.

  “Ma’am, this one’s dead, and I’m fixing to take him outside to the pile. I reckon you got a pile going out there, ain’t you? This one needs to join it, or no telling what rot he’ll bring in here. It ain’t sanitary.”

  “He’s crying, sir. I’ve seen dead people, but I’ve never seen one cry.”

  “Well, those are just the death tears. Like the death rattle. Rare, you only see it when a man dies a real painful death. But look, he ain’t moving.”

  At that point I guess he figured he might as well take a gamble to make his story go, so he hopped up and down to demonstrate that his corpse wouldn’t make a peep. I could have told him it wouldn’t work; I could see the Spaniard’s face, which was hidden from the lady on the other side of his rescuer’s broad back. He was gritting his teeth and biting his lip and rolling his eyes up in his head like he was trying to make eye contact with God, and when he got bounced like that, it just wasn’t anything but natural for him to scream like he’d been shot. It was a short, high scream that he choked off, but that was it. The game was up.

  The big man wasn’t giving in so easily, though, and he tried to get past the lady by faking one way and going the other, but she was quick on those lace-up boots of hers, and she kept in front of him, and I was waiting to see him knock her down, but he didn’t. He hadn’t lost that last shred of decency, I guess.

  “Dammit, just let me out. He wants out, too. We just want to go.”

  The corpse spoke up between gasps for breath.

  “Yes. Ma’am. Just. Want. To. Go.”

  I closed my eyes, figuring the show was over, that she’d call a guard or somebody to settle things with the two men and get them back down in their places where they belonged. I settled back into my daydreams about wisdom. It was our place to die here on the floor. That was our fate, for falling out on account of honor. I was feeling warm and proud of myself for seeing this, and it took me a few moments to realize that the lady hadn’t sent for no one, that she was just standing there. I opened my eyes and saw her looking up at the big burned man, right into his ugly face, like she was studying it. She crossed her arms and rested on first this hip, then that hip, and she pooched out her lip some like she was concentrating hard. So beautiful she was.

  “All right, go.”

  I don’t think the big man understood what she was saying, because he dropped his head and turned back around and made like he was going to put down the Spaniard and go back to his corner.

  “I said go. Get on. If you would like to go, with that hole in your stomach and that man with a leg that will never be right, then go. Go. You’re a man, you can take care of yourself. You don’t need any of us. Just get on.”

  She was looking up at him with an unusual look on her face. She wasn’t frowning or smiling or looking worried or afraid. Her face was smooth, and her mouth was relaxed and straight. Her big wide eyes were pointed in his direction, but she didn’t seem to see him anymore. It was as if she’d already forgot him.

  The big man seemed a little confused by her words. At first he looked like he was going to protest that he should stay, after all. He put the Spaniard down, who accidentally stepped on an arm and got cursed out by the young boy to whom it belonged. I could see him trying to figure her out. Her expression was so cold I didn’t blame him trying to get out from under it, to make it go away by giving in. But, finally, he wasn’t that worried about it.

  Once he’d seen she wasn’t joking, he yanked the Spaniard back up on his shoulder and marched right on out of there.

  She let him go. She looked around at all of us, and all of us looked right back at her.

  “You can go, too. No one’s keeping you here. Maybe you should go, go off and die in the woods somewhere. We only have but two doctors here and some bandages. We can’t do much for you, really.”

  She seemed not to be talking to us, but to something beyond us, out the window. And yet what she said made the room quiet. Men quit groaning and bitching.

  “Come on, get up, now. I’m not anyone’s jailer. Let’s go, get out.”

  Nobody moved. Nobody dared move. Every word she said about how little she could do for us, and how likely we were to die no matter where we were, and how easy it would be for us all to leave and find a more pleasant place to die—these were the words that kept us quiet and still. At least it kept me quiet and still. Any woman who could talk like that could save you, no matter what she said. To leave her would mean to leave one of the last people who cared to help you. You didn’t dare do that.

  Of course, moving wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t going anywhere, whether I wanted to or not.

  Having received no takers on her offer of freedom, she turned around quickly; her skirts brushed the faces of the men nearest the door, and she stomped smartly out of the room.

  20

  CARRIE MCGAVOCK

  The future lay out ahead of me as a daisy chain of days spent boiling water and tending wounds. One day after the other. There were so many men in so many different states of disrepair it didn’t appear possible that there would ever be an empty space in the house.

  Yet it was not long before I began to enjoy myself, although there was no joy in seeing men suffer. Their suffering visited me in dreams. I had very vivid dreams now that we were all—Mariah and the children and I—sleeping on hard pallets made up in the kitchen so that the soldiers could have the bedrooms. I wondered which I would remember when I was an old woman—the soldiers themselves or my dreams of them. I guessed it would be the dreams, which even in those first few days had come to insinuate themselves upon my waking hours, obscuring the line between what was real and what was not. This did not worry me as much as it could have, because Mariah admitted to me once as they were bedding down for the night that it was hard to see how the things around us were real, and that often she caught herself looking at a man and wondering if he was really there and how his wounds could be real. It don’t seem possible sometimes, she whispered to me, over the sleeping forms of Hattie and Winder.

  It was not the violence and the suffering that gave me my momentary feelings of joy. It was watching my linens be torn and cut into bandages. It was seeing some of my doors and moldings carried out the front door and smashed into kindling for fires. It was the stains upon the floors and the walls. It was realizing that I hadn’t seen John for two days while he was busy hauling water for our patients and not noticed. A break had come, and I took pleasure in imagining the consequences of it. Children can’t help but laugh when they’re spun in circles and made dizzy, and I felt something akin.

  One of the delights of my work with the men in the house was realizing that they liked me to boss them around and to dismiss the severit
y of their injuries. At first I had entered the rooms of the wounded and dying with fear and a desire to comfort, and so I would kneel next to the most gravely afflicted—a man shot in the stomach or one without a leg whose wound would not stop bleeding—and stroke their hands and tell them how sorry I was, and ask them whether there was anyone I could notify and whether they wanted me to pray with them. They all shook their heads and closed their eyes and did their best to ignore me, quietly. It took some time before I realized that there was nothing I could do for a dying man except ease his journey a little, and that wasn’t accomplished by staring sadly into their faces and making it clear to them that, indeed, they would be dying soon.

  When I realized that my gestures of comfort were only extinguishing hope, and therefore creating another agony, I began to bring the gravely injured men whiskey, which I poured down their throats with a smile. And when the other men in the room complained about not getting their dram, I’d stand up and declare that the whiskey was only for the handsomest among them and that the rest of them should count themselves lucky to get water. The other men would curse and laugh. The dying men with the taste of whiskey on their tongues knew the charade meant they would surely die, but I thought it possible I made them hopeful by swallowing my sadness. At least death was not something to fear, if a proper woman could treat it so cavalierly, and that was a form of hope. That’s what I thought, at least.

  None of those men ever saw me walk out of the house and down behind the slave cabins, where there was a tree I could sit against and cry. I was at the mercy of a host of passions in those first few days after the battle, and their buffeting was not unwelcome. I cried or laughed as I pleased. When Mariah called up the stairwell for more bandages, and if I felt pressed, I’d snap back that the bandages were coming in their own good time and that I didn’t need Mariah telling me anything. And then, if I felt moved, I’d catch Mariah out by the cistern and stroke her hair and tell her how dearly sorry I was. If others would have been shocked by me making an apology to a woman like Mariah, well, they could just leave me be. I sometimes felt the old paralyzing darkness draw around me, but it was always tempered by the inescapable fact of the men lying around my house and in my yard, and the suspicion that they were harbingers of something I had not known before. How horrible, I thought occasionally, to think that these men were welcome and not a burden.

  I was freer than I’d ever been. I felt obliged to the world, a world much larger than that contained between the four walls of Carnton, and although the burden seemed larger, I was similarly enlarged by the burden of shouldering it. I walked through my house and sat down in the chairs that were left, chairs I’d brought up from Louisiana when John had taken me here, and I looked at them as if they were new and saw details—scratches and stains and carving—I’d never seen before. Or noticed. That was the thing that was truly new: I noticed everything.

  It was in that state of mind that I first saw Zachariah Cashwell laid up on the floor of my upstairs guest room, his right leg stiff and still while the other trembled and fidgeted. His face was rough and scratched and smudged with red mud. He had a wispy beard on the end of his chin that made me want to laugh. He was thirty years old, I later learned, and that seemed too old to be having difficulty with chin whiskers. His eyes, though, were the thing that drew my attention. They were watery and green, and they were the only eyes in the room that I couldn’t feel on me when I walked in to confront the large, scarred man and his poor excuse for a corpse. I would have let one of the guards deal with the two men had it not been for the eyes of Zachariah Cashwell. He kept his chin in the air and stared up at the ceiling. Unlike most of the men, he looked ready to die. He looked as if he were welcoming it, urging it along. I wondered if I should go get the whiskey. I wanted his eyes on me. I didn’t understand why, not then. But I stayed.

  I made a scene and invited a giant man and his possum-playing friend—and anyone else so inclined—to leave, to crawl off and die elsewhere if they liked. I would not miss them, I said, all the while twiddling with my handkerchief in the front pocket of my apron and hoping the men would stay put. I watched Cashwell out of the corner of my eye and could see that my speech had produced the proper effect—he was watching me curiously and even moving around a little to get a better look. His right leg seemed attached to the ground and immobile, but he was able to adjust himself up on an elbow to get a better look. He grimaced as he did so, and I was flattered.

  Silly girl. Silly, silly, silly. What did I care for the opinion of a stranger, all broken and arrived from a world I would never understand or care to see? I did not care. I cared less now that he had acknowledged me. I was vain, that was all. Vanity was a new passion perhaps. When I left the room, I decided to let Mariah tend those men from that moment forward. No sense cultivating vanity, I thought. Later I asked Mariah to get his name.

  Every room and every foot of porch had been given over to the wounded. There was no logic to the arrangement; the little doctor had never realized his hope of triage. The first men to arrive took over the best rooms inside our house, whatever their wounds. As the first day wore on and new waves of the wounded—walking, riding, carried upon shoulders and in horse carts—crashed upon Carnton, they settled in ever-expanding rings that drifted out from the operating theater at the center, through the house, onto the porches, and into the yard. Every one of them would be a prisoner of the Union, property of the U.S. of A., but at first there was no one to claim the spoils. I guessed they would come sometime, when order returned to Franklin, but I had no earthly idea when that might be. But it was silly of me to think they’d wait for order. The first prison wagon appeared weeks later to take away the healthiest of our wounded.

  When I needed fresh air, I’d find Mariah and we’d walk out into the side yard near the garden, gently stepping over prostrate strangers in various stages of dress. There we could survey the entire scene. I remembered my father reading me little bits of that book about the war for Helen of Troy, the one with the Greeks, and the long descriptions of the Greeks encamped around what I believed as a child to be a very large house made of stone. Around us the soldiers sparked fires and boiled water, and the ones who could walk paced back and forth and told stories and danced away from the sparks when they flared up in the wind. I imagined that this was what the Greeks’ encampment looked like, although I decided the Greeks wore less clothing and weren’t so pale when they stripped off their shirts. Was there an Achilles among them? That was hard to imagine. They looked so tired, so incapable of rage anymore. I wondered where Helen had gone off to and what kind of woman Helen must have been to have inspired this, this scene that spread out around her and into her garden. No woman is that beautiful, I remember thinking. The men are fools.

  During one of these walks John rode up on his horse from Lord knows where.

  “I have found another spring, so we should be able to have more water up here soon.”

  I walked to his horse and put my hand upon the harness gently, while Mariah walked back to the house.

  “That’s good, John.”

  “I also have news from the town, if you can call it that now.”

  “It wasn’t much of a town to begin with.”

  John looked at me hard. He was losing patience with me every day, every hour. I didn’t care.

  “Whatever you want to call it, Carrie, it’s not anything you’d recognize anymore.”

  “Then I must go see it, John. Perhaps it’s been improved.”

  “I think not. I think you should stay here for a while.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard; I have had a lot of practice.”

  John pulled up on the reins of his horse and turned its head so that it moved away from me, and I stood back. He looked pained and confused and angry, like a man who’s just woken from a fall and isn’t sure where he is.

  “I have not kept you in this house. I’ve begged you to leave before now.”

  “And now I want to leave. For a couple hours, j
ust to see things.”

  “It’s not possible now. In a few weeks, perhaps things will have changed.”

  I looked over at one of the campfires, where a young man beat out the tiny flames in his trousers that flared from errant sparks. I should go help, I thought.

  “Things will change, that’s true. Thank you for finding the water.”

  “Send someone down to start running buckets when you have a moment, Carrie.”

  “I will.”

  “I have a man to see in town, as much as I dread going back there.”

  “Should I have Theopolis fetch your rifle?”

  John shook his head.

  “No need for that anymore.”

  John turned his bay all the way around and rode out around the house to the long driveway, picking his way carefully around the clusters of men camped out and burning what was left of the garden fence. If he cared about the destruction, he didn’t seem to show it. An old man drunk on a bottle that was being passed around got to his feet as John went by, and flipped him a snappy salute before losing his balance and falling to the ground. John rode on.

  I walked back into the house having decided to change my mind about something. I stepped around the men lounging on the back steps and went into the back hallway of the house, where the smell of men overpowered me. My nose had no experience with such a smell. It could not parse its elements. The smell was heavy and sour and musty, and I took it to be the smell of that world which had been kept at bay by my house and my husband these many years.