The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  I gathered my skirts before me, climbed quietly up the stairs, and entered the guest bedroom again. I stood staring at the men, most of whom had sunk into sleep or into the final retreat of consciousness before death. But the man with the green eyes watched me, and I turned to him. Zachariah Cashwell.

  “You’re next, sir. What do I tell the doctor is the matter with you?”

  He looked like I’d kicked him in the stomach. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. His voice came out scratchy and metallic, as if he hadn’t spoken in centuries.

  “I don’t think I should be next. I’m too far gone. I reckon there are other boys in here who got better chances. I been shot good in my right hip, I think, and I been bleeding for days, seems like. The fever’s coming, I can feel it, and my leg is starting to smell bad. It’s too late, I think. Just let me be. I should have been dead long before this anyhow.”

  This is the way a man is supposed to talk, I thought. I stepped out of the room into the hallway and summoned two orderlies, or guards, or whatever they were.

  “Come get this man here.”

  When the orderlies lifted him up on a makeshift stretcher formed from their crossed arms, he screamed and cursed me. I slapped him, and he stopped and stared up at me, disbelieving. If the men in the room weren’t aware of my presence before, they became aware of me quickly.

  “Get this man to the table and keep him quiet.”

  The orderlies were two boys too meek to be soldiers. They nodded their heads and carried the man out of the room. One of them kept his hand clamped over the screaming man’s mouth, and his curses reached me only as a low drone.

  He’ll thank me. He’ll thank me, I thought.

  I watched the doctors wrestle with the man until they had him fixed to the table. I stood in the doorway and watched as they calmed him with ether. His head lolled to the side, and his eyes fixed on me. Those eyes, intolerable and inescapable. The doctors debated over him. The short one, the bolder of the two, had proven to be a skilled surgeon even if he was an insufferable little rooster.

  “This leg’s got to come off, that’s clear, but how high up?”

  The older doctor was cautious. He seemed like a man who ought to be with his grandchildren. He never wanted to cut anything. He’d furrow his brow and scratch the back of his head and look at his patient with pleading in his face, as if the patient might solve the problem himself and take the guesswork out of it. He looked at Cashwell this way.

  “Do you reckon it’s gotten into that hip?”

  “If it’s in his hip, he’s dead. Nothing we can do about that.”

  “So we just take the whole leg, all the way up?”

  “Every bit of it, and see what happens.”

  Cashwell turned back to the doctors and spoke. “What makes you all think I’d prefer to be a cripple than to die?”

  The little rotund doctor, already disinfecting the saw, looked at him, startled. “You don’t get that choice, boy.”

  “I ain’t a boy.”

  “Sir.”

  “You goin’ to cut my leg, and you want me to call you sir? You want me to give you a kiss, too?”

  The old surgeon intervened. “Quit talking. Let’s go.”

  This was normally the point when I’d leave the room, when I would stick pieces of cotton in my ears and shut the doors to the sickrooms so those waiting their turns wouldn’t hear so clearly. The growing pile of limbs underneath the surgery window told me what had happened. It was necessary. These men were to live. Life of any kind was superior to the alternative. This I had learned from watching my own children pass, this was what I believed the Lord intended. The Lord needed me—and the doctors and Mariah and the little orderly boys—to keep His children alive. He could do it Himself, but His intent was clear to me.

  And yet I knew I had betrayed the green-eyed man, this Zachariah Cashwell. He had been ready to die, he had wanted to die, and I had not let him. He was deluded, I was sure, and yet this would be no defense against his accusations if he cared to lodge them against me. He was the poor child of God who would have to hobble around the rest of his life on a stiff, splintery post fashioned to look a little like a leg. I decided this fate for him, on behalf of the Lord. I would have to take responsibility. Why I felt more responsibility for this one act, this one small betrayal, than any of the other decisions I made in those few days, I do not know. I had never seen a man like him.

  So I stayed in that doorway, watching. I watched him sink deeper into the fuzzy warmth of the ether, but never so far that he didn’t know what was going on or that I was there. I saw the doctors cut his pant leg up along the seam, and I saw the mottling on his skin, the red patches and the dark blue patches, and the black along the edge of his wound. I saw them tie off his leg at his hip with a strap, and then I watched them press their sharp, impossibly clean knife to the flesh above his wound, cutting deep. I watched the thin lines of their incisions bead with bright blood, much less than I expected. I saw the green eyes roll up into his head and heard the short gasps and quick grunts of a man holding pain down, like he was afraid it would rise up and absorb him. I saw the short doctor pull out the saw and slip it into the incision, where I assume it rested against the man’s bone. I saw the older doctor look worried when he saw the man’s white and sweaty face; he reached to the ether bottle and filled another rag with it and placed it over Zachariah’s face, telling him softly to breathe deeply. He was whispering to his patient, as if there was something or someone in the room that he didn’t want to disturb. I watched the green-eyed man roll his head to the side again, his eyes pointed in my direction, but so unfocused that he couldn’t have possibly seen me or anything else. And yet those eyes never left my face. I found that I was gripping the door frame so tightly that my fingernails had dug into the wood. I held my hand to my face and saw that my fingernails had chipped and frayed, and then I was so horrified by the nonchalance of this gesture that I shoved my hands into the pockets of my apron and leaned against the door frame, resolving not to quit watching until it was finished.

  It was over faster than I had imagined. The saw bit into the bone, and the bone yielded. There was hardly any sound, not like the sawing of wood. The leg was there, and then it wasn’t, as if it had been released from the body and floated away. I was fixed on Zachariah’s face, which was still awake but unmoving, and so I didn’t pay much attention to what happened to the leg, although I knew it must have ended up in the pile below the window. He cried, and I shook my head and kept shaking it as if I could stop him. His tears were small, like beads of perspiration, but they were the worst thing I saw in that room that day. I walked away then and went looking for Hattie and Winder, whose tears dried easily. They had no reason to hate me.

  Those days were the most important of my life. It is possible to know yourself—every kindness, every urge to violence, every petty resentment—in chaos. I discovered that my mind sharpened as my surroundings grew more uncertain and unfamiliar. I would choose one thing of the many competing for my attention, and I would hold on to it. I moved the wounded around the rooms, organizing them, freeing up space so that the men shivering outside would have room. The men grabbed at me and handed me letters, and I took them. I didn’t know what I would do with these letters, but I knew without hesitation that I had to take them. It was puzzling to me, how I would know that. How I would know what was right in a catastrophe. And yet I did.

  After Cashwell I learned to stand by the surgeons as they did their work, when I wasn’t needed elsewhere. I learned to hand them their tools and to fetch the ether when they needed it. I watched men do things to other men that should not have been allowed on the earth. Saws cutting through bone. I held the hands of the men losing their limbs until they would begin to grip me too hard, and then I would try to stomach the pain as long as I could, figuring it was the least I could do, but I had very little tolerance for it, and I always pulled away. My hand slipped easily out of their sweaty palms, and I wasn’t sur
e they even noticed when I was gone.

  I watched my children bring water to the men and play jacks with the ones who could sit up. Some told them stories they remembered from their own childhoods, thinking Hattie and Winder needed respite and comfort and that they could provide this with a tale or two. But memory is so fragile, and very few of them could remember the stories all the way through. Their tales of magical backwoodsmen and beautiful belles trailed off, were never completed. I wonder sometimes if this—and not the actual presence of these men mangled by war—was the thing that Hattie and Winder most remembered of those days. I look back on that time and wonder if it was then when they learned that the story never comes to an end, that it goes on and on, and that people eventually forget how it began and where it was supposed to end. I was more afraid of them acquiring this knowledge than anything else, and yet I could not shield them from it. My dead children had been shielded from it, but it was impossible to keep Hattie and Winder from that knowledge any longer. Not during those days.

  The men moved in and out of the house. The living ones stumbled in, the dead ones were carried out. Soon a field of dead lay out in my garden and in the tall brown grass between the house and the small family cemetery. It was cold enough to lay them out like that, I was told, because they wouldn’t smell so very bad. There were very few to bury them, and it wasn’t clear where they were supposed to be buried. Once a day or so an officer would ride by the house and look around the grounds, see the field of dead, and ride off without saying a word. I took that to mean that they didn’t care much about what was happening out here, so long as everyone stayed put. A few escaped, I know, and once I watched a man hobble across our cornfield and into the woods, leaning heavily on a homemade cane. Where would he go? I thought. Did he even know where he was? I suppose that was the thing that kept most of the walking wounded close to the house: they had no place else to go. Out there across the field was freedom, yes, but also starvation and confusion and loneliness. Of these, I decided the last was the worst. Loneliness, I learned from one of the soldiers in my charge, could be more frightening than almost anything. Loneliness was what we feared about death, he said, and to embrace it in life seemed mad. I’d never thought of it that way.

  21

  FRANKLIN

  Nearly every day John rode into town looking for food and clothing for the men at his house, and a little whiskey for himself. Brandy, too, if he could find it. He drank alone, out of sight of Carrie and Mariah, who were always bustling about and saving people and having men thank them oh so sincerely. Thank you, ma’am, thank you kindly, Lord have mercy, thank you. Carrie looked better than she had in years.

  He watched her once from the other side of the slave cabins, where he leaned against a tree sucking from a bottle of old bourbon he’d found hidden in an abandoned hay cart. She was flushed, and her hair looked as thick as the day they’d married. She didn’t look like the wasted and stooped ghost, bent and tucked, that he’d lived with since the first of their children died. She stood up straight, and hair escaped her comb and blew in the breeze, and men who had killed and were maimed looked up to her standing there on the back steps and saw their rescuer. She brings salvation, he thought, taking another sweet pull at the bottle. Had I known this about her, I’d have invited the armies to fight it out here earlier. How was it that they waited until so late to decide Franklin was the best place to locate a bloody hell? I could have suggested it to them long ago, provided incentives. Taken another loan from the bank, paid off the generals. I could have built viewing stands and charged admission, and Carrie could have had a steady supply of the ravaged to ease off into the eternal beyond. Stupid McGavock, stupid McGavock. He was not a drunk, not yet anyway. He just needed something to do. There was so little for him to do anymore. He drank just enough to help him ignore the smell of the house and grounds.

  While John was overcome by the ugliness, it seemed to him that Carrie saw only beauty and sweetness. He watched her from his drinking tree and recalled the morning of the first day after the battle, when someone dragged the carcasses of four dead Confederate generals onto the back porch and laid them out like dolls on a shelf. He remembered thinking then, These were our generals? Almost every single one of them was ten years his junior. They looked like children even behind their fresh, strong beards. John and Theopolis had just arrived from hauling water to the cistern when they came upon the scene on the porch: some captains and lieutenants standing around the four bodies, their hats doffed. He himself was unmoved, although he understood the novelty of seeing four dead generals all at once, something like the feeling you might get seeing a thirty-pound catfish leap out of the Harpeth and fall dead before your feet. Not something you see every day.

  But then Carrie came out of the house, and she stood by watching, and then she pushed through the young officers, bent primly and slowly over each of the dead generals, and laid one of her handkerchiefs upon each of their faces. What’s that supposed to mean? he remembered thinking. The officers seemed to know, and when Carrie pushed back through them to return to her work in the house, they looked at her with awe. He thought, I don’t have any idea what that means! What is the significance of that? Who taught her to do that? Who is that woman?

  John had become used to being alone. It was his natural state, whether he was at home or riding alone on the pike to town. A great battle had been fought all around him, and he was no less alone than he would have been had he been standing on an ice floe in the ocean. He had never seen the ocean, but imagined that there was nothing more isolated than a chunk of ice in the middle of it, the ice being of water but still not part of it. John McGavock: of the world, but not part of it. This is what it felt like to be the husband of a woman who had no use for a husband. I should have known better, he thought. She wasn’t a normal child.

  He had known her as a child and then as an older girl orbiting her father when John came to visit their plantation in the winters, and then as a young woman—briefly, so very briefly—and then as his wife. What had he known of her before he married her? The one thing he’d known, and which was still true despite appearances, was that she was strong enough to live on the outskirts of the tiny town of Franklin, in Williamson County, Tennessee, which had been frontier when they were married. She wasn’t as fragile as the other girls.

  After watching her for a time McGavock mounted and rode the pike in silence, dipping out of sight of the house after a half mile or so. He had the vague notion to go to find Mr. Baylor, who controlled the bank, to plead for leniency on his debt. The carnage of the army had convinced him he had very little hope of ever recouping his contribution to the Confederates, which meant he would likely lose much of his land to the bank. Of course, Baylor would know this, too, and being a hard and unforgiving sort, would be unlikely to wipe the slate clean. But perhaps John could plead with him to put the slate aside for a while, to give him time. Time was his only remaining asset. He thought he ought to try, at least.

  He was wary of what he would discover on arriving in town. It wasn’t the mess of war that gave him pause. He reckoned the war was almost over. How much more could anyone take? The Unionists were already planning a convention in Nashville to set up a new government of loyalists and anti-Confederates, despite the fact that the Confederate army was still stumbling around in the vicinity. There were probably some who took joy at the slaughter visited upon Franklin, since it made their plans all the more timely. How any Southerner—for they were Southerners, these Unionists—could take joy in the death of another Southerner was beyond McGavock. But then, he thought, they probably didn’t even think of themselves as Southerners. At least that wouldn’t be the first word that sprang to their minds. Businessmen, politicians, victors. Those were the words. Somewhere down the line they’d get around to Southerner, but it probably wasn’t something they talked about a lot in their circles, not at the moment. That would be a word with flaws in it, connotations they’d just as soon leave behind.

  C
arnton was not the only hospital in or around the town. Now, with supplies dwindling—they hadn’t much ether left, and the little surgeon broke his saw on a thighbone only that morning—John had volunteered to canvass the other makeshift hospitals all over Franklin to scavenge what he could.

  He stopped the horse to drink in a creek running across and under the pike, but then thought better of it. No telling what’s in that water now. He rode on.

  Franklin had been transformed into a grotesque thing, as if the skies had opened and God had reached down and twisted and broken and snapped His creation—buildings, trees, people—just to see what would happen. Men sang, cried, and fought with each other as they dragged the dead here and there: to that waiting cart, to this gaping hole in the ground. As he was about to enter town, he stopped to watch one group of men pass around a bottle, not forgetting to give the corpse they were supposed to be burying a taste. A young soldier with a red cowlick and unfocused eyes giggled each time the liquor dribbled down the dead man’s chin.

  “Got to hold your liquor better than that, my friend.”

  “Aw, quit wasting it on him.”

  The redheaded man drew himself up to his full, unimpressive height against whoever it was who had spoken. John couldn’t tell which one of them it was; they were all red with mud and looked alike to him. Almost exactly alike.

  “He’s got need of it now, if he ever did.”

  “He didn’t even drink when he was alive. What are you talking about? Look at that Bible in his pocket. Those boys don’t drink.”

  The redheaded man considered it and took a swig of the bottle.

  “That’s what I mean. Look at all he missed for that book. He’s got one last chance to wet his lips before the dirt gets him, and I aim to help him.”