The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  Mariah’s own mother had uses for termite queens: dried up, pulverized, taken in a drink. Mariah was never told what these uses were. She was too young to know such things, her mother had said. She had noticed that it was the other men in the cabins who coveted the termite queen concoctions, but had been too young to understand why. That’s an old charm, older than black folk, her mother had said.

  Now, as they dug in the sun, backs brown and glistening, Mariah wondered what these new men would do when they found the queen. She shook her head. They ain’t termites. And those just dead bones.

  The professor walked over and peered down at her from under his brim. Then he doffed his hat, and she saw how white his head was. He was a man who hardly ever got outside, and he knew better than to tempt the sun.

  “Thank you, Mariah, for the coffee. You’ve been kind to me and my men.”

  “Just something Mrs. McGavock wanted me to do for you, Mr. Stiles.”

  This was a lie, but it was a lie she had to tell for propriety’s sake.

  “Well, tell your mistress thank you. And you don’t have to bring anything to come visit, either. I’ve seen how interested you are in our doings. You’re welcome to come and watch as my guest. We’re almost through here, anyway, so if you want a tour, you got to ask soon. We’ll be going to some of those other mounds north of here, along the river, before long.”

  He looked expectantly at her, and it made Mariah uncomfortable. She nodded and stood up.

  When a few days later Zachariah Cashwell arrived, she knew him in an instant, and he knew her, but they did not talk. He did not speak to her, and she knew better than to greet a white man first. She would have liked him to have spoken to her. It seemed that they had washed up at Franklin like piles of driftwood or seaweed set down by a particularly terrible wave; but the next wave had come, and the next, and the sticks and seaweed dispersed, each floating out into its own pool or patch of ocean—still visible to one another, but drifting in different directions. She watched him as he hobbled around the camp, carrying bones or tools or other items, and he soon faded in significance, paling beneath the bright intrigue of the objects he carried.

  So at first she was surprised when Carrie asked her, the next morning at breakfast, if Mariah would be taking luncheon to the excavation the following day—surprised at Carrie’s interest in such matters. Then she remembered Zachariah and was surprised no longer.

  47

  CARRIE MCGAVOCK

  Mariah led me down through the woods to the excavation. She had suggested we take the road, but since I had many reasons for keeping my visit secret, I declined. I told her to take me the way that she would go, and so we slowly picked our way through the underbrush and over creeks. I noticed there were plenty of fish in the creeks that Eli and Winder had claimed were so empty.

  Soon we were staring from the edge of the woods at a work site teeming with shirtless, brown, and sweaty men hauling loads on their backs and in barrows. They looked like ants, the way they worked without having to be told. They called to each other from time to time, but it was a remarkably silent place. I believed it was reverence, even for the long dead of a strange people. They did not look like naturally reverent men, but I suppose that reverence was the natural state of men in the presence of a grave, no matter how hard and unfeeling they were. We all die, we all have it in common. It is an awesome and fearsome thing.

  Just before I went marching into that camp with vague ideas of seeing Zachariah and somehow solving my problems at the same time, I pulled back into the woods and hid behind an old blackberry bush.

  “What you doing, Miss Carrie?”

  “I don’t know, exactly, why I’m here.”

  “I was wondering the same thing.”

  I could smell the biscuits in the basket I was carrying, and I knew they’d soon grow cold, and it was for that reason I plunged ahead into camp without a plan. Sometimes it’s just a little thing that’s needed to set things in motion.

  Of course, two women parading through a work site like that is bound to cause a little commotion, and soon enough, the head of the excavation, a little bald man with regal carriage, came out of his tent. Then he was followed by a man I recognized from Carnton, with a patch over his eye and two pistols stuck in his coat pockets. And then came Zachariah.

  He looked confused at first, like I was the last person he’d have expected. He walked smoothly on what I knew was a wood leg and a new boot that had all of Theopolis’s custom flourishes. He’d filled out some, and I noticed how thick his broad shoulders were. He’d been working some, during these years. He wore a pair of dungarees and a white shirt with buttons down the front, and he looked like he took pride in that white shirt. It was spotless. He was spotless. Everything about my first glimpse of him since he left Carnton was spotless, unblemished, perfect, and burned into my memory from that moment forward.

  He smiled, dug his hands into his pockets, and walked over to me. Mariah took my basket and walked it over to the head of the excavation, who called over some of his men. The man with the black eye patch grabbed two biscuits, like a child, and ducked back into the tent before anyone noticed.

  Zachariah stood before me, not a foot away, and it was all I could do not to reach out and hold on to his shirt, to pull myself closer. His eyes were still bright and clear, so lively he seemed almost to be laughing at me.

  “Meant to come see you up at the house, but we was right busy here, and I didn’t have nothing nice to wear anyway.”

  “You look just fine, Zachariah.”

  “You look more beautiful.”

  I blushed and turned my head. This was no accident, no coincidence. Zachariah had come here on purpose, I could tell by the way he looked at me. For what? I did not know what he wanted from me, but I suddenly knew what I had wanted to know all along, ever since he left me that day in the possession of those Union officers: I knew that he was alive, that he would not forget me, and that we were forever two people who could not be sundered by distance or time. Ours was not a romance that could be made holy or by official union, but it was nonetheless permanent. I remembered how we used to talk to each other, so direct and blunt.

  “Why did you come back, Zachariah?”

  “Needed a job.”

  “Why are you here, though? Here, with us? With me?”

  He didn’t know what to say to me, so he fidgeted. I watched his eyes, and behind them I could see his mind turning over any number of options, perhaps explanations he’d worked out, words he had wanted to say to me, and nothing seemed to be satisfying him. He shook his head.

  “Just happened.”

  “Nothing just happens.”

  He laughed and seemed to relax. He could see he knew the answer to my question now.

  “Things do just happen, Carrie. You ain’t learned a thing yet, have you?”

  My hands were trembling, and I grasped them behind my back to keep them hidden. I felt like I was talking to some other part of myself when I talked to Zachariah, some part of me that had been absent for a long time but had returned briefly, only to disappear again for years. I would lose this part of me again when he went away, and I prayed that would not happen for a long time. I had visions of him settling in Franklin, of him picking up a trade and living in town and always being around me. I knew immediately this was not fair. I began to cry, little tears that dried in the heat. Zachariah put his hand on my shoulder.

  “There’s never been someone like you, Carrie. No one like you or your kind of people ever once treated me like you treated me. Respectful, like I had something to say, like I was worth keeping in your house. Not even my own kin would have stuck up for me like you did. I’ve never known anyone like you. It’s hard to forget that feeling. You don’t get to have it again, but you can’t quit thinking you might.”

  “What was it, Zachariah? The feeling?”

  “Don’t know. Never had it before.”

  And neither had I.

  We stood in the heat, li
stening to the insects whirring in the trees and the men murmuring to each other over Mariah’s biscuits. What we had together was impossible and wonderful and fleeting, and so we both enjoyed standing close for as long as we could. I looked out over the camp, watched the men, and wondered if they could really help me. I knew there was one man in that camp who would do this thing I was going to ask of them, but I needed more.

  “I’ve come for help. For your help and for help from these men.”

  Zachariah stepped back from me for a moment, and I suddenly was terrified that he thought this was the reason I’d come to see him—to get something out of him. But he only looked puzzled and a little amused.

  “What could we possibly do for you? We ain’t farmhands, me least of all of ’em.”

  “I need some men who can dig and also be gentle while they’re digging.”

  “Well, they are sure enough diggers. What you need to dig?”

  “I need to show you.”

  For days after the confrontation John and I had with Baylor, nothing changed. The dead stayed in the ground, the townsfolk in Franklin muttered unkindly about Mr. Baylor and his plans for the field, and some of the men in town who had fought with some of the soldiers who now lay buried a few hundred feet away promised retribution the moment he put his plow to the soil. Still, it is one thing to be outraged and quite another to find a solution. Talk of purchasing the land was silly, for who had the kind of money in those years to turn Baylor’s head and soften his heart? One of our farmers, bless him forever, Lord, offered to trade his own land for the cemetery field. Baylor waived him off.

  Two thoughts, call them epiphanies or divine interventions, both arrived unbidden in those few days and made clear to me what I was meant to do. The first came as we rode back from Baylor’s house, and John told me more about the battlefield as he’d seen it during his days of roaming the town. The magnitude of it all was suddenly apparent to me. My mind darkened, his words having wormed their way inside me without my noticing, and in that moment I had a vision of that field and those streets, and what they must have been like.

  The second epiphany was much simpler. I simply remembered what Mariah had said about the dead in that field: They all alone. I see a lot of men. That was my sign from God. I am alone on this earth. How often had I thought that very same thing, rocking in my room above the entryway, imagining that I had been abandoned by my own children? On my knees in angry prayer I had said those words as both a statement of fact and an accusation. But I knew now I was not alone on this earth. It hadn’t come to me in a rush, there were no angels involved. I had just kept living, and living had shown me that there were other things in the world, like a one-legged sergeant who listened to me like I was the most exotic thing in the world, like a boy who could die on the floor of my house thinking only of how to get word to his mother, like a husband who would do anything for me even if it meant angering the man who held his debts, and so many other things I had observed just by sitting and living and keeping my eyes open.

  I was not alone. I was surrounded by the living and the dead. I had always been that way, and it was a relief to finally know it truly. I knew I had always inhabited that gray and foggy space between living and dying, perhaps more than most people. I could not see the dead, as perhaps Mariah had been able to do, but I could feel them. I knew there was no preserving them in Baylor’s field, that there would never be any rest for them as long as they lay outside my protection, and that there would be no rest for much of the living, either. Those men were the chains that bound the living. They were the missing whose absence shackled the survivors in place, people afraid to move on for fear of being gone for their sudden return. They drew the living back to the war, back to that batttlefield over and over and over again, reenacting its rituals and its skirmishes until they all would be dead. Baylor could not—he would not—act out his revenge with the casual desecration of those dead, whoever they were. He bore the broken heart of a man who loved his son, but he had allowed it to twist him into a monster. I would save him from that, too.

  When I realized this, I walked out to where the grove had once stood—a forest of ancient cedars and oaks, walnuts and tulip poplars the Union army had cut down a few years before. Set in the center of what had been that grove, the gravestones of my children stuck up out of the ground and seemed to glow. I stood there, looking first at the names of my children etched into the rock, and then behind me, where the ground sloped gently downward. We would need only to put a gate in at the far side of the wrought-iron fence that circled my children and my ancestors, and this small plot of sacred ground could be joined to a much larger one.

  They will have to come to Carnton. They’ll be safe there. I will mourn them if no one else will.

  The idea was so simple, and yet I could hardly breathe thinking about it. Could I bring the dead to me without losing my mind again, without sinking into the boggy depths? Yes, I could. They would not be alone, not as long as I was alive.

  Zachariah and I agreed that he would ride up to the house that evening after he had finished working so that he and I could ride the battlefield and I could tell him about my larger problem with Baylor. Perhaps he had a solution—I had learned not to doubt his resourcefulness. I thought that John had done all he could do but that Zachariah could somehow find a way to get through to the man in some way we hadn’t thought of. His companion appeared to be a gunfighter, after all.

  That was the plan, at least.

  Had I been paying attention to a certain young boy on the cusp of becoming a man, perhaps that’s how it would have happened.

  48

  FRANKLIN

  Eli always knew what was happening at Carnton, and when John and Carrie decided to ride off to see Mr. Baylor about something having to do with the battlefield, he knew all about it and was halfway to the Baylor house before they’d even finished hitching up their trap for the ride. He knew they would never take him, and so he didn’t bother to ask. He didn’t tell Winder about it, either, even though the boy followed Eli around like a loyal dog.

  Eli had been watching Baylor and his family for months, trying to puzzle out the story of the man and his brood from snatches of conversation heard through open windows, and by observing those who went to see Baylor and those who crossed the street to avoid him. He had even followed the man to his son Will’s grave, which was in a public cemetery but in a very fine spot, and he had watched him spill tears on the grass in front of the stone that read simply “Will Baylor, 1840-1864.” He knew he should have felt something for the man, but his mourning, something Eli felt that Baylor tried to hide from everyone, made him despise the man even more. Where are the tears for my sister’s grave? Even though they dead, you still running around like you don’t want no one to know you loved your son, all just because he was a rebel and you don’t like them. Well, hell, what would you think of my sister, then? I’m sure you would not have even shed a tear. He hated the man even more when the man was at his most vulnerable and pathetic.

  He had a hiding spot around the corner of the old smokehouse, which still had hundreds of bullet holes in it. While he was waiting to hear something from the Baylor house, he would count the holes, and almost always he’d be about done with the counting when someone would yell something or come out of the house, and he’d lose track.

  That’s where he was when he heard the tail end of the McGavocks’ conversation with Baylor, when he heard that bent-up old devil talk to the two people who had ever done anything for him, Eli, when he had been abandoned. How could he talk to Miss Carrie that way? He would not allow it. This was the woman who had come to their cabin to save his sister, dying while trying to bring into life another Baylor boy. She and Mariah had helped, they’d been kind, and they weren’t kin to him at all. And here was Baylor, the secret mourner, treating the McGavocks like they were dirt, or worse—like Miss Carrie was crazy—to be worrying about dead soldiers. It really didn’t matter what their conversation had been about;
it was the disdain Baylor had for people he loved, which for the first time Eli witnessed with his own eyes on that day, that gave him resolve. He knew what he had to do now. He would not allow a man to speak to Miss Carrie that way. Not any man, and especially not that man.

  His hate and obsession were the tinder, but it took an outrage against the living, someone he could defend before it was too late, to spark the fire. He had to bide his time, though. He couldn’t follow through with his plan right away. He needed to do it just right. He planned to do it at night, and in his head he made a checklist of all he would need. He already knew where to find the most important items, perhaps the only items he would need. He just needed all of the McGavocks and Mariah to be out of the house. And when Carrie and Mariah went off to visit the Indian mound, and Mr. McGavock went off to look at one of his raggedy fields, Eli had his chance.

  Eli knew one thing about Carnton that he shouldn’t have known, and that was where John McGavock kept a small set of dueling pistols. They were up high on a shelf in his wardrobe, pushed back behind his sets of braces and cuffs. They weren’t much to look at, rusted after not being used for years. They’d only been shot three times, each time by Eli himself. It was one of his most important secrets, the other being what he knew about his sister and her beau. These were secrets he shared with no one.

  On three occasions Eli had cleaned up the barrel and chamber and hammer of one, just enough so that it would fire without looking like it could fire. Each time he’d taken it deep into the woods loaded with one round from the case, and each time he’d put a hole in an old cedar stump from ten feet. He had no love of the gun or of firing it. It just seemed like something he ought to know how to do.