The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Theopolis.”

  After a while I hopped out the door and into the sun on the porch. I had got damned sick of dark, low-ceilinged little rooms over the years and preferred to be out in the light. I didn’t know how anyone could live like that, although I had surely lived like that once. Put two people in a room like that, and you can’t avoid the other, you got to talk and carry on. I was happy not to have to talk and carry on for a little time.

  I leaned back into one of Theopolis’s wood porch chairs and rested my head against the unpainted shingles of the wall. They were warm in the sun, and I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, an old man with hard eyes and white hair was stomping his way toward the shop from the street, where he’d left his horse. He scratched his crotch and walked bowlegged for a few steps until he caught sight of me and straightened up. He looked at me like he thought it would be better for everyone if I would dry up and blow away.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “My name is the Reverend Thomas Jefferson Purefoy, mister.”

  Don’t know where I came up with that name. Never used it again.

  “What the hell you doing here?”

  I thought that was a mighty rude way of talking to a reverend. I thought he might have seen through my story, and I was fixing to give him an earful of Ecclesiastes just to keep him honest, when I caught him staring at my stump.

  “Where’s your leg?”

  “I don’t really know, sir. Reckon it’s somewhere around here.”

  I felt around for one of the Colts, but they weren’t there. I remembered they was in Jerrod’s saddlebags. I puffed myself up some anyway, to throw the old man off. I’d bite him until he screamed for his mama if he kept talking to me like I was shit.

  “Did you just cut off your leg for the hell of it, or did you get it blown off?”

  “It was cut off by surgeons because of an injury I got during the war. Right around here, matter of fact.”

  By this time Theopolis had heard me and had come out to investigate.

  “Theopolis, who is this man?”

  “He’s a customer, Mr. Baylor.”

  “You got customers? I’m your customer. This man could be any damned cracker. Get in there.”

  That man rubbed me raw, that’s the truth.

  43

  CARRIE MCGAVOCK

  We never used to go to those town parties, those of us who lived out on plantations and ran our households. I’m talking about the women, the mistresses, the plantation ladies. Town parties were for town men and, often, our husbands. We lived in an isolation that ensured that we, at least, would embody whatever it was that made Southerners different and purer and more correct than any other race upon the earth. That is, we were like creatures in a zoological garden, examples of our race, preserved and contained within the bars of the well-turned balustrades. Meanwhile, the rest of the Southern nation ran around as if unleashed, free from the very moral binds that we, the women, preserved and then tied around our wrists. Men drank in public and cavorted with certain other women who wore the latest from Paris. They all went to parties together, even our own men.

  The war changed much, not least the invitation lists for parties in town. This was my least favorite change, even if it meant I no longer stored myself away at Carnton like a keepsake. The women who had invited me to their houses in the daytime, the same women I had avoided these many years, now expected me to attend their nighttime bacchanals as part of the entity called Colonel McGavock. I attended out of sympathy for my husband, who felt obliged to attend as a matter of business strategy: he would strategize while the men around him became drunk, until they were no longer able to understand anything he suggested except that whatever it was would cost them money, and the easy and obvious answer to that was no. I loved to observe him from a corner in the hostess’s parlor and watch his shadow against the looming ceilings gesticulate madly while the corpulent and red-faced men of our town bobbed and swayed around him trying to stay upright. There is a kind of loveliness to be seen in a man who pursues a doomed cause not out of ignorance, which would be ugly, but in the full knowledge that he is bound to fail.

  The night after I found out about Mr. Baylor’s plans for his field, we were invited to attend a dance in celebration of the engagement of Judge and Mrs. McEwen’s daughter, the judge having returned from the war healthy and good-natured, as if he’d spent it on vacation. He had been out of touch with his wife for most of the time, and he had never been very clear about where he had fought. He simply returned one day, still fat, hung his gun back over the fireplace, and sat back down in his library chair to catch up on the old newspapers. If ever I regretted my time in the country, I had only to look at Mrs. McEwen to know that I was far better suited to country life than town life. The opium had turned her skin to rice paper, crinkled and white and about to disintegrate at any moment. It was a marvel that she was able to raise any child to marriageable age. When I saw her in her home that night, she looked oddly like a woman betrayed, like a woman who could not look at her husband without contempt. John had told me about encountering her in town just after the battle, standing on her porch with two friends and staring at nothing. They all wore thin dresses, too thin for the weather or for propriety. None of them seemed to be blinking, but their eyes glowed and were wet. Cecilia McEwen was smiling as if she’d just seen something naughty. I exchanged meaningless niceties, but I was as fascinated by those women as I had been as a boy when I’d gone to the carnival to see the bearded lady and a shrunken head from the Congo. They were human, only more so for being oddities that were both real and not real, embodying the difference. Ghosts really, and clearly insane. John steered far clear of her during the evening. Her dress was tasteful and well sewn, and it seemed to choke her.

  I was busy fending off the servant thrusting trays of canapés while I decided how I would approach Mr. Baylor when he arrived. I did not know what I would say to him, but I could not quit thinking about the idea of those dead men unearthed by sharp iron and exposed again to the light of day. What would I ask?

  He arrived flustered and angry, as he usually did, towing his dim-witted wife along behind him. She could not put a stop to his plans for the battlefield because she was surely unaware of them and, perhaps, even unaware that such a thing as a plow existed upon the earth. And even if she were able to understand her husband’s plans, what did she care for the bones of dead boys she didn’t know? I could not imagine her mustering any outrage for anything greater than a table improperly set or an untidy house. Bones in the field, if they meant anything to her, would mean untidiness. She would be of no use to me.

  Baylor took a whiskey, and I watched him stride into the parlor and steer toward the knot of men that John had gathered to hear of his plans for reviving the railroad. Baylor was no fool. He knew the men in that room had reason to be wary of him, and perhaps angry, because of what he planned for his field. But he also knew that men—many men—were weak and that they could be charmed into abeyance for the moment by a charismatic and powerful man like him. The face he typically displayed for women and his inferiors—children, Negroes, farmers—would not be welcome in such a gathering, and so I watched how, with every step across the room, the architecture of his face shifted and his skin re-formed itself until he was transformed into the image of the benevolent man of business, offensive to no one. This was the most awful face of all, I decided.

  After a few minutes, talking with his thumbs in the loops of his pants and shifting around like his suit afflicted him, like he was just plain folks, I could tell that he had easily outmaneuvered John and had taken control of the group. I leaned against the bookcase in my corner, my head resting on a long row of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels.

  I was thinking about what Zachariah Cashwell would say about what I was seeing, which was something I often wondered, when Mrs. McEwen grabbed me by the elbow and gently pulled me along with her toward
a little group of women who were watching their men and speaking inanities about the sorrowful state of their households and the intricacies and significance of a bustle’s angle. They were intelligent creatures, some of them, without a thing to talk about. I looked at Mrs. McEwen’s face, and she was rapt with fascination at their talk, as if it was in the language of alien invaders. She said nothing, and only stared at them in amusement until all of them, uncomfortable under her gaze, politely excused themselves. I wondered why she had found me. Perhaps she thought I would be as amused as she was. I knew that the laudanum had withered and finally killed whatever concern she might have had for them and their opinions, and I might have found a friend in her if she hadn’t been mad. She scared me, but I was happy to be guided along. After the women had drifted off, we posted ourselves on the other side of the mantel. We watched each other and didn’t speak. I stroked the glass on a bell jar encasing an old carving of a gnatcatcher.

  “Have you any medicine?”

  Her voice startled me. It was gravelly and soft.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Have you seen the doctor? Any doctor?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  We stared off at the group of men. John had detached himself to admire the books in the bookcases, and Baylor seemed to be wrapping up whatever business he had been conducting with the judge and his fellows. Mrs. McEwen spoke again.

  “This is all mine, you know.”

  “Of course.”

  “I am the heiress of all you see, and all that transpires within those borders. I have seen plenty that you have not seen, that you cannot see, but which explains everything and makes me quite happy with my little inheritance.”

  I wondered whether I would have said such things, whether my mind would have also melted, had I taken all that laudanum they gave me. I was desperate to leave her, and yet some latent sense of propriety bound me to the spot. I stared at the gnatcatcher as I listened, praying that John would come over and give me an excuse to leave. Even so, I felt something for Mrs. McEwen, some distant connection to something she had just said, and so I spoke.

  “What have you seen?”

  Her eyes grew wide, and she cocked her head at me, like the bird under the bell jar.

  “I have seen the war, oh yes, of course, but I have also seen other wars, and I have seen mad horses rushing from one war to another, carrying the same poor souls into the fray again and again until they are exhausted from the endless cycle of body and spirit, body and spirit, and they cry out for relief and they are given that relief. Please, have you any medicine? The cleverness of God’s plan to beat the will out of men amuses me. That is what’s needed in this world.”

  I decided not to wait any longer, and with a nod I turned my back on her and went to collect John before Baylor could leave. I’d had an idea, which Mrs. McEwen’s raving had reinforced. But she was not done with me and whispered loudly at my back, and I stopped briefly.

  “You, on the other hand, succumb to that will of men and fortify it with your ministrations upon their bodies, in living and in death. Yes, I know what you are thinking, I see you eyeing Mr. Baylor. All will love you for your sacrifice, but it will only postpone the inevitable.”

  I heard her sigh and slump down into a parlor chair. I didn’t turn around.

  “If I had the energy, I would stop you, but I suppose I will applaud you like the rest. Brava, St. Carrie!”

  I moved off quickly, wanting to never hear the woman’s voice again. Ladies brushed past me in their muslin and silk, moving from one seat to another, on the couches in the parlor and on the hard chairs in the library, and I couldn’t tell sometimes whether the whispers I heard were the sound of them talking or the sound of their skirts brushing against each other. It was time for us to leave, that was certain.

  I saw Mrs. Baylor, who had been stuffing her face with brittle over by the dining room doorway, look up and see Mr. Baylor marching across the room to retrieve her. She dusted off her hands like she’d been sanding wood, took his arm, and they swept out into the entranceway, out of sight. John had seen me looking frantic, I’m sure, so he came and collected me by the arm.

  “What’s the matter, Carrie? Should we go?”

  “Yes. But there’s a man outside I need to see.”

  I dragged John outside, and we caught up to Baylor and his wife just as he was putting the reins to his team.

  “Mr. Baylor?”

  He must have thought he would make an uninterrupted departure, but I had determined that he would not stir the hornets and let others take the stings.

  “Yes, Mrs. McGavock?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about your field.”

  “I am in a great hurry, Mrs. McGavock. Perhaps we could talk about your agricultural interests some other time? Please come call on us.”

  “I have no interest in agriculture.”

  He knew what I was talking about.

  “What could interest you about my field, then?”

  “The men who are buried there. They interest me.”

  When he crossed his arms and leaned toward me, his chest seemed to fill up my vision. John stood silent at my elbow. I suppose he knew it would be no good trying to interrupt me, that I would just keep talking. Perhaps he was glad of this.

  “Mrs. McGavock, they do not interest me in the slightest. People may think I’m rich, but even I can’t afford to let acres of good land lie fallow because it contains the bodies of men who fought an idiotic battle in an ill-considered, stupid war, whose souls have long departed, and whose fellows never bothered to come back for them. So much for the honor of the Confederacy.”

  I didn’t have an answer. If I had been someone like Baylor, if I’d owned land and had such intractable opinions about the worth of others, I might have found his argument persuasive. But I was not that kind of person.

  “It is already out of your hands, Mr. Baylor. It is already a graveyard. All it is missing are the headstones.”

  “By that standard, Mrs. McGavock, the whole earth is a graveyard of one sort or another. Perhaps we should never plow a field again. Perhaps we should starve for the sins of the deceased, for every unacknowledged and unmarked death.”

  “I am not asking that. I am asking only that you spare this field, in this place. I do not expect you to do this out of kindness or sentimentality. In exchange for sparing it, I expect we could raise money to compensate you.”

  The new moon was just breaking through the clouds low on the horizon, and Baylor’s face was momentarily lit in gray light, like a ghost. Everything about him and his cart gleamed, from the halters on his horses to the spokes on his wheels. His teeth gleamed when he smiled at me. He mustered a look that seemed almost kind at first, until it melted into righteous pity.

  “I’m sure, Mrs. McGavock, that there isn’t enough money in this town to compensate me for that field, what took place on it, and what is contained above and below it. Where would you find such money?”

  He was looking past me to John when he said this last bit, and his condescension cut me to the quick. My voice grew louder, shriller, and I didn’t seem able to control it.

  “There are other people in this town who won’t want to see that field plowed, Mister Baylor. And if they can’t come up with the money, they’ll come up with other means.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I am not. I am trying to prevent the threats. I am trying to get you to see reason, so that those who would threaten you will have no cause. I am appealing to your common decency.”

  “I have decency, Mrs. McGavock, but it is not the common sort to which you are referring. And I will not have you interfering with my business, and the fate of that field is surely my business.”

  John finally spoke, no doubt tongue-tied by my audacity and vehemence.

  “That’s enough, Baylor.”

  Baylor suddenly looked more comfortable, as if he’d been hoping for John to step in.

  “
Then take some control of your woman, McGavock. Explain to her about how business works and how she oughtn’t meddle in the business of others.”

  “Oh, but I don’t disagree with her. You’re being a fool, Baylor. That field isn’t worth the agitation, and you know it.”

  “Oh, let the petty sentimentalists bring their grievances against me. Let them try to threaten me. I am ready. My soul is rested and clean. I have nothing to fear.”

  He put the reins to his team and clucked his tongue.

  “And now I am going.”

  John and I stood and watched Mr. and Mrs. Baylor go, two black silhouettes against the brightening night sky. I took John’s arm, and we walked out to our own carriage. We rode in silence for some time, each caught in dark thoughts. Finally John spoke, and his words surprised me, for I thought he would chastise me for my discussion with Baylor.

  “You know, these streets are nothing like they were that day.”

  “That day?”

  “Well, in those days. The week after the battle. These streets are proper, normal. They’ve been graded and cleaned, and the trees that were shot through with lead have been removed. The men were like toys left out by children. There were soldiers left behind to bury them all, and a more miserable job I cannot imagine. This town and that battlefield looked like nothing human. I lost my mind for days, exploring that hellscape. Surely you knew I was not right in those days?”

  “I was busy, John.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry about. You were doing right.”

  Silence. It was a quiet ride toward the moon.

  “But these streets, they were paths through a different world, and all of those dead men created that world.”

  There was guilt in his voice. It was powerful, and it made his body tremble. I put my hand on his, and he allowed this for a moment and then shrugged me off. I thought of that night he’d appeared below my window when I was a girl and how wracked he had been then with some sort of misery that I had found irresistible. He was that man again. I understood why he felt this way. He had walked among the dead, unable to provide succor or to ease their passage. At Carnton the misery and the dying had been orderly, at least, and all those who did die were prepared. I saw to that as best I could.