The Orphan Mother

by Robert Hicks

  “If I got to call you Tole, then you call me Mariah.”

  “Mariah,” he repeated. And then, nervously, “If you want, I can wait a bit and walk you back to town.”

  Mariah laughed. “No, I’ll find my way. Must’ve made the walk a few thousand times on my own.”

  And then Tole reached out his hand. Mariah placed hers inside his palm and they shared the warmth for a moment before Mariah turned and headed up the drive, around the bend. For a while Tole could see her shadow, and then not even that.

  Chapter 5

  Mariah

  July 6, 1867

  Up the steps of Carnton and in Mariah went. The house was massive, once—when Carrie and Mariah had moved there, upon Carrie’s marriage to Colonel John—very stylish, with wallpapers from France and England and fine Brussels carpets on the floors. Books looked down regally from bookcases in Colonel John’s fine Gothic office. But then the war had roared in upon them, and the house had been commandeered as a hospital, and the blood had soaked through the floorboards. Some of the walls themselves seemed gnawed upon: the officers’ sabers carelessly ramming across the wallpaper and the plaster. Much had been repaired, of course, but the old house now seemed smaller to Mariah, and dim. Colonel John had eschewed the new gaslight, and candles were never where you needed them. So now the rooms were dark and close.

  Mariah moved down the central passage and into the family parlor, where against the windows the dark silhouette of Carrie McGavock waited, dressed all in black, her mourning veil intact. Carrie dressed every day as if funerals were a regular though lamented fact of one’s day, like rain.

  “Miss Carrie, I got your note and I just want to say—”

  Carrie would not let Mariah finish her sentence. She held her hands awkwardly out from her sides just a few inches, as if she had not yet decided whether an embrace would be in order. Finally she smiled very sweetly and placed a hand on Mariah’s right arm in an approximation of an embrace.

  “Thank you for coming, Mariah, and since you are in your work clothes, perhaps you would accompany me to the cemetery? So much more pleasant to converse there, don’t you think?”

  Mariah had not worn her work clothes; what she had on was her finest, though covered in the dust that had been kicked up off the road. Carrie didn’t leave room for an answer and was already out the door before Mariah could reply. With resignation and familiarity, Mariah turned and followed. How easy that was. She hardly had to think in order to tread behind her former mistress, out and across the gallery, down the steps, and down paths that led to a cemetery that stretched far into the distance.

  I ain’t staying, I am decided.

  Carrie marched down the path with the Book of the Dead under her arm, arms swinging and chin up.

  Here, in this cemetery of Carrie’s, a stone’s throw from her house, the Book of the Dead recorded the final resting places of hundreds of Confederate dead, marked by even rows and columns of whitewashed cedar boards, arranged according to state, each board identified only by a number and initials, no names, no ranks. Every dead man and boy rested in equal relation to the other, laid out just so and blanketed by a thick, fine-leaved grass.

  “I have your letter here, Miss Carrie.”

  “Let us not talk about that yet, shall we? So much work to do.”

  “It’s why I come.”

  “You need not have a reason to come see me, Mariah Reddick, not ever, and you needn’t blame that little piece of paper. Now, I count forty-three rows from South Texas to the row missing its monument…”

  Because of her constant patrolling of the cemetery, the hem of Carrie’s dress was often faded with a light layer of cemetery dirt. Mariah’s mother would have called this goofer dust. Goofer might be used in some bad work against enemies if they were known, but enemies were sneaky and often they weren’t known.

  “Texas forty-three!” Carrie called. “Who is that?”

  Mariah ran her finger down the columns drawn in Carrie’s crabbed blue script. “Jeremiah Carter.”

  “Poor Jeremiah!”

  * * *

  As children they had explored the old place in Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana, owned and mastered by Carrie’s father. Back then Mariah could think that the general principles of a slave’s life did not apply to her, since she was companion of the master’s daughter. She and Carrie braided hair and wrestled and climbed stunted oaks together, and Maude the cook would hand them both pieces of sugarcane, each piece no bigger than the other.

  When Mariah went off with Carrie after her wedding, Mariah sat high up on the dowry cart, face forward, following the closed carriage that contained the newlyweds, and she had never been happier. It didn’t occur to her until later that she was in the dowry cart because she was herself one of the gifts.

  They had continued for almost twenty years, mistress and slave, companions who knew each other best in the world. And then came a disruption greater than the war: Mariah became a freewoman, and they had found no words to talk about that.

  “You have a bed in town, in a house. Do you feel at home there?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The oaks here cast cool shadows, and the leaves rustled overhead. Sunlight dappled Carrie’s black dress. “But you return here when I ask you.”

  Because, thought Mariah, you are incapable of taking care of yourself, Widow of the South. “Yes.”

  “Does it feel like home here? I think it’s starting to feel like home to me, after all these years. And do you know why?”

  Mariah shook her head.

  “The life of summer dresses and tea cakes was never for me. I’ve cast all that off. I need nothing from the outside world now.”

  Carrie had not said so much to Mariah, and certainly nothing so personal, in years. This was an invitation offered to a greater intimacy by a lonely woman, Mariah knew. She knew Carrie that well, at least.

  “Except,” Carrie said, “you are the only person who has ever run this household, and I wonder if it can possibly go on without you.”

  Mariah understood this was Carrie’s way of trying to take care of things. The lady of Carnton could not, for instance, go calling on the old Negress in her tiny house in Franklin. They could not meet for tea, could not sit beside each other in church. A woman such as Mariah Reddick, free she may be, was to be seen and not heard unless spoken to, like a child. She was not to assume she had a part in the rituals of civil society, which were open to her by invitation only. This was the truth of the world after the war, and Mariah knew all about it. But Carrie persisted in thinking that they were friends even so, and that left only employment as the means for acting out the gestures of friendship. In Carrie’s world, they could have tea together so long as it was Mariah serving it. Had she herself, Mariah Reddick, ever been given the choice of rejecting Carrie McGavock’s friendship? For almost forty years that had not been an option. Whether or not to serve Carrie McGavock had not been a question either.

  Mariah leaned against the oak tree, a couple dozen feet from Carrie. She felt tiny slivers of bark fall down the neck of her dress.

  “You come back, and we start again,” Carrie said. “No contracts either, not like John has with the tenants, just your own will to stay. I have work here for you, but perhaps it won’t seem so much like work. The work of helping me with this cemetery is special, spiritual work. You know there is more to this life and the spirit. Your mother knew, certainly.”

  Carrie had never spoken of Mariah’s mother. Mariah wondered if she even knew the woman’s name.

  “Not sure what Mama knew.”

  “Oh, that isn’t true! She had the sight. She could talk to the dead! You know that. We all knew that.”

  It was news to Mariah that this was something Carrie McGavock had known. “What you mean by that?”

  “The dead! She had the power of the dead. She saw the dead, she communicated.”

  Carrie stood closer, so close Mariah could feel her breath on her cheeks. Her eyes were wet, cri
nkled half-shut by one of Carrie’s sweet, world-forgiving smiles. Mariah knew that her mama’s use of the arts had been nothing so exciting as Carrie imagined it now.

  Carrie put her hand on Mariah’s shoulder as if to steer her toward the house. There were no sounds of birds. Mariah strained to hear them, but nothing. Then, in the distance, she heard the sound of a mockingbird, very faint, and she was glad. The world had not stopped. She felt the light tap of a fly at the top of her head.

  She had once ruled this place. The kitchen ran according to her direction, as did the cleaning of the house and the maintenance of the yard and grounds. A dozen others curried her favor, hoping to someday be appointed out of the field and into the house. Others feared being sent out into those same fields, and when she passed them by in the parlor she noticed how hard they seemed to polish the silver tea set, or how persnickety they became about dust among the rows of Sir Walter Scott’s volumes on Colonel McGavock’s shelves.

  She had once had power, yes, but it had been borrowed power, the power of a slave for the moment raised up among other slaves. She could feel the essential falsity, which was like playacting, but nonetheless it had been appealing. Her memories held lots of people in them, and not just any people but people who thought of Mariah and wanted her time and her attention. Most of these had fled Franklin at the first chance. There were not so many people in Mariah’s life anymore.

  Mariah had been given free will by her Maker, that’s what the Methodist preachers said, yet she had never before then been able to act freely. The world of possibility had not been hers. Every slave had been separated from the entirety of God’s creation. Every other slave was alone even when they worked and ate together. That was loneliness.

  Mariah took a step away from the house and shook her head. “Not today, Miss Carrie. I come back another day, and maybe we talk then again, but I ain’t staying now. Got business.”

  “Business?”

  “Theopolis is speaking this afternoon in town.” She tried to say it casually, but could feel the cool thrill on her lips: the thrill of pride—and of fear, too.

  “He’s one of the speakers?” And then, simply: “Oh, Mariah.” Sharing the pride as well as the trepidation. “You shouldn’t be out here with me—when’s the speech?”

  “Not till this afternoon.”

  “Let me get Lester to run you back to town, so you have plenty of time.”

  “That would be very kind.”

  Carrie had already taken a couple of steps toward the house, having assumed that Mariah would follow. She stopped and turned. “But don’t think I won’t stop trying.” She smiled, but down came the veil. Carrie turned back toward the house, floated across the grass again on the way to her fortress.

  Chapter 6

  Tole

  July 6, 1867

  On returning to town, Tole got to work on Dixon’s errand. He went by his little shack of a house and took his rifle, which he wrapped in a quilt and stuck in a kindling carrier, the kind one would not be surprised to see a Negro carrying through the town on bended back. He went scouting for a perch, but none of the first buildings were right, so Tole went farther, into the white section of town, stepping out of the way of the brand-new carriages that rolled and clattered over the streets. He wove between the proprietors out on the sidewalk offering free samples: molasses, cheese, swatches of cloth, printed cards. They didn’t offer any to him.

  Unimpressed by the possibilities, he continued into the residential streets, always keeping the courthouse in a direct line behind him. Here there were more interesting places, fewer flat roofs and more cupolas and pitched slopes and dormers and attics. An attic window in Dr. Cliffe’s house had a direct line of sight to the courthouse and the stage. That’s the spot, he thought.

  He put the kindling carrier down, under a pecan tree and concealed by a privet hedge, and pushed his way through the Cliffes’ picket gate and into their backyard. But he heard voices from the house. He withdrew to the shadows across the street, waiting.

  Up the hill, the white boys at the military institute marched across the drill yard keeping time, shouting at each other as if what they were doing was deadly serious and not some insignificant playacting, a pastime for fools and cowards. The Negroes hammered up the stage over in the square.

  Dr. Cliffe stepped out with his wife, down the steps, her arm in his, her skin a soft Scotch-Irish pale. As they headed west, away from the soaring sun, into the shadows cast by blooming trees, Tole noticed the way her strawberry hair fell down her back, and how it matched the freckles that dotted the backs of her arms.

  He waited a long ten minutes, worried that some routine slip of mind, something forgotten, would cause them to turn back. He waited, and when he felt they were good and gone, he crossed the street.

  The weight of his government rifle pulled against his shoulder. On the stock he’d once carved GT, so that he could keep the other men in the company from claiming it—they who didn’t spend near as much time polishing and cleaning theirs. They called his rifle ol’ GT, and teased him about it, but they didn’t ever pick it up as their own. Because of this he had known one thing at least, at all times: that his rifle would always fire. That had been no small achievement.

  Tole slipped into the doctor’s backyard as quietly as he could. The gate had been left unlatched. There, under the eaves, the attic window looked out across the street, above a few low buildings, and unobstructed into the square.

  He quietly stowed his kindling carrier under the hedge, pulled out the rifle in its cloth, and moved quickly across the yard to the back door. It was unlocked, these being overly trusting people. He walked quietly down a narrow central hallway, which was broken by only one doorway. He guessed, correctly, that this was the door to the attic. He went through and up.

  Hanging from one of the beams of the attic was a collection of men’s hats, bowlers and slouch hats, tall stovepipes hardly ever worn. In one corner stood a dressmaker’s dummy, a headless and legless curve of a monstrous half-woman.

  He had no attic in his shack down in the Bucket. His neighbors painted their houses awful bright colors and were always tap-tap-tapping at the roof and the walls with their hammers, like they were all hell-bent on building up their own creation. He lived surrounded by a crowd of manic colored doers and builders, cobblers and carpenters. They tolerated him well enough for an outsider. He tolerated them well enough for a lot of folks who couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  Every once in a while he checked the crowd that had begun to gather in the square. What he was about to do, he’d been told, would be a great service. We’ll see about that. Tole unlatched the attic window and pushed it open. Wind and voices blew in with the late morning sun. He unwrapped ol’ GT from the blanket, raised the butt against his shoulder, sat down cross-legged with his elbows on his knees, and looked through the rear sight and stared at the front sight. He lowered the rifle, adjusted his position until he was aligned with the podium set up in the courthouse square. He breathed in deep and sighted in again.

  Across the way, in the square, men gathered, buzzing like ants. Two crowds, really, the Colored League men hard by the stage and the Conservatives across the street, standing on the corner, under cover of a shop’s front wall, facing the square. The crowd by the stage was almost all Negroes, former slaves now freedmen with their drums held close to their chests and banners clasped in some of their hands.

  One skinny black man held his banner out toward the crowd at the corner like a dare: The Radicals Build School Houses—The Conservatives Burn Them.

  Another, right at the head of the crowd, proudly held an American flag. Tole thought of the Union boys carrying the stars and stripes into battle, how the other boys had rallied around it, eyes raised to watch it wave. He remembered, too, how many of those Union boys later lay bleeding on the ground with that flag at their sides.

  There weren’t as many Conservatives at the corner—no more than thirty overall—but they all had a simila
r look to them. All those hard white faces. Pistols clipped to their belts or strapped to their chests. A smattering of Negroes stood among them. Always somebody to disagree, Tole thought.

  As the time for the speeches got closer, he could tell that words were being lobbed between the groups, thrown like stones into separate pools, but he was too far away to hear what they said.

  The men at the corner bristled as the speakers filed onto the stage. Tole thought he recognized one of them, high up above the crowd. He wasn’t sure at first—the angle and the hat obscured the man’s face—but once he turned, he knew for sure it was him: his neighbor, Theopolis Reddick. The cobbler. Tole wasn’t sure why Theopolis was there. He assumed he would speak. Tole himself was never one for great oratory and had respect for any man who did, especially young Negroes, many of whom were taking advantage of the new opportunities opening up to them—becoming politicians, business owners, and who knew what other possibilities. No slave ever did that, Tole thought. The young had a courage that made him proud and envious. He’d been born free in New York City, but somehow the opportunities had never really presented themselves to him—and then the war came, and the possibilities had been defined by the notches of a rifle’s sight.

  Near Theopolis, but not speaking to him, were two white men—politicians, Tole could tell, important men from out of town. Another white man came behind them, with another Negro by his side.

  The mayor trailed at the very back, near the sheriff and his deputies, stalking around the stage like guard dogs, keeping the Colored League men back. Even from this distance Tole could hear the beat of drums and the cheers ringing out.

  From the group of white men at the corner he heard nothing at all. Near them a pair of mockingbirds worked out their disagreements, which among birds meant a whole lot of fierceness, pecking and clawing, feet first. It was always over quick, which was one thing different about birds. Men never wanted to get things sorted out for good. They liked their blood feuds.