The Orphan Mother

by Robert Hicks

  Hooper’s question made him feel dried out and shrunk. Exposed. He should never have put that man there. He wondered if the big man would do him harm if he ever found out who that was and what he had done.

  “Don’t know,” Tole said. “Just put him there.”

  Hooper looked back at the house. “What’s he got there?” He pointed at something thin and dark in the hands of the wire man.

  “If you got work, let’s get started,” Tole said.

  “But it makes sense, don’t it, Mr. Tole?”

  “What?”

  “That there was a fellow with a rifle. Make a lot of sense, that would.”

  “Don’t know nothing about that.”

  Hooper looked queerly at Tole, his head cocked. “It do make sense, Tole.”

  Tole slumped over and leaned his backside into one of the only empty corners in his house. He was about to kick the big man out of his house when Hooper looked over at him with kind eyes.

  “Let’s get us a drink, Mr. Tole. I got a jug in the cart.” And before Tole could say anything, Hooper was out the door and down the path to the cart, where he reached under the bench seat and pulled out a large jug. He hooked an index finger through the hemp loop that he’d made into a handle and draped it over his right shoulder. He walked light, the step of a man with a mission he was happy to have. He climbed the porch.

  “Here we are, Tole,” he said, and handed it over.

  There is a state of mind men can reach together, on porches and not entirely in possession of all their faculties, that approaches a sort of comfortable, warm telepathy, Tole thought after drinking a goodly amount. It became less necessary to speak aloud because each of them knew what the other was thinking. Nothing on the street escaped their attention because each of their sets of eyes reported the news to one mind. That’s how it felt.

  After an hour or so, Hooper stood up and beckoned for Tole to follow. “Let’s get started on that job.”

  “What we doing, then?”

  And Hooper nodded in the direction of Theopolis’s house. “His mama asked me to clear that out.”

  Tole followed, dreading every step.

  * * *

  In Theopolis’s small house, most of the shoes were gone, but the forms still hung on the wall. Feet of every imaginable size and shape had their double there on the wall in matched pairs strung through the heel with twine and looped over nails. Tole knew they were only the working tools of a working man, but they nonetheless seemed macabre to him, and he looked away. They were like a wall of headstones.

  Hooper soon had him moving furniture. They carried out two workbenches, a table, a bed, two bent-oak chairs, several wooden stands on which the foot forms could be attached, several large, knee-high stacks of leather—cow and calf, pig—and five books, including one Bible.

  They carried out the foot forms last, piling them atop the furniture and in all the empty spaces they could find. Hooper said a lot of it they’d be able to sell for Mariah, and that the rest would get scrapped or burned. “That woman deserves to know her boy’s things been taken care of. Ain’t good for her to think that he still got any other place in the world but that grave where she can go to see him,” he said. “We laying him to rest for good.”

  Tole looked back at Hooper. “You know his mama pretty well, don’tcha?”

  “We go back a ways. Why you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “There’s always a reason.”

  “I just been getting to know her a little, is all. She ain’t like nobody I ever met before.”

  Hooper dragged a wooden table closer to the front door. “Mariah a special lady. She stronger than any living person I know. Too strong, you ask me.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It mean, she don’t know when she need help. She don’t know when she in trouble. She don’t know when it’s time to give up.”

  Tole helped Hooper lift the table and the two of them hoisted it, turned it to sneak it through the doorframe and out down the steps onto the street with the rest.

  “She don’t think of herself much, it’s true.”

  “What’s it to you?” Hooper said, suspicious.

  “Nothin’. Just seems odd that a woman like her, beautiful and smart and strong, spends her whole life helping other people.”

  “She still think like a slave. You don’t tell her I said that, or I’ll pull your lungs out. But she like to think she fierce and independent, but she don’t know how to be free.”

  Tole became quiet. “Let’s go get the rest of it,” he said, and Hooper followed him back in. The two men continued moving the rest of the furniture until Theopolis’s house was near empty.

  “Makes me a little sad to think about it,” Tole said.

  “What’s that?”

  “What you said about Mariah.”

  “Still don’t see why you care. You got more than friendly feelings for her?”

  Tole shrugged. “I just met her.”

  “It don’t matter how long you’ve known a woman. I seen people fall in love in five minutes. Usually my liquor has something to do with that, but sometimes it happens all by itself.”

  Tole laughed. “Without your help, eh?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Tole was quiet a moment, and then started, “Does she…”

  “Do she what?”

  “Do she take up with men?”

  Hooper laughed his loud laugh that turned into a coughing fit. “Taking up with men ain’t exactly what Mariah do for fun. She was married way back, but he died. She been worrying about raising Theopolis and taking care of Miss Carrie and her living children, and she seen more than her share of no-count men. Since she been free, she ain’t jumped right into nothing.”

  “You think she’d ever marry again?”

  Hooper grinned at him, but then his face became somber. “Don’t know. Not right now, though. She want some kind of justice for Theopolis, that’s all she think about. That’s what I mean about her being too strong. She could use a good man by her. But she don’t think she need it. She think she fine, she can do all this on her own. And she ain’t fine.”

  Tole took a swig of water from the jug and used some to wipe down his brow, the back of his neck. “Sure she could have just about any man she wanted,” he said.

  Hooper shrugged. “She intimidates most men. Scares ’em off. Scared me off years ago, told me to keep my hands to myself, and I done so ever since.”

  “That’s a shame,” Tole said, not meaning it at all.

  “She don’t scare you, though?”

  “No,” Tole said. “She don’t scare me. She the only one who make this town feel like home, you wanna know the truth.”

  * * *

  When they were through, Tole waited for Hooper at the door and the two walked back to Tole’s porch, where the liquor lay where they had left it. When they sat down again, Tole noticed that Hooper had a pair of brown leather boots in his hand. They were soft leather and polished; Tole could see the dimples in the curves and along the toe line.

  “Saw these stashed under the bed. They look your size.” Hooper held them out and looked down at Tole’s own shoes, which showed his toes.

  “I ain’t wearing a dead man’s shoes. Ain’t stealing either.” Tole didn’t want the shoes of the boy he’d killed, and he couldn’t say no to them either.

  “Oh, I don’t think they his shoes. I found his shoes, and they was worn out like yours, but they a real different size. Bigger.”

  “Why he got these under his bed then?”

  “Maybe he just thought they was good. Maybe he was proud of ’em. Why you sleep on the ground with a crazy town built all over you?”

  Tole had no good answer to that.

  “They ain’t his, so quit acting like you scared a ghosts. And anyway, yours are falling apart. Can’t have a bum working with me, so you’re takin’ ’em whether you wear ’em or not.”

  Hooper tossed the pair over toward Tole, and
they landed with a thunk, straight up, right next to his seat. “Quit walking around town like a poor Negro,” he said. “You give us all a bad name. Put them damn shoes on next time you out.”

  No one would ever know the complexity of the gesture Tole made when he bent over to pick up those shoes, and when he slipped off his old ones and laced up the new. An eon’s worth of worry about death, and one’s obligations to the dead, passed through his head. What are the dead? They aren’t the living. That seemed to be what Hooper was saying. And maybe that was true. The dead were gone, and those shoes had nothing to do with Theopolis anymore. He laced them up tight, and they fit well. No part of the dead man could be found in the objects piled high in that cart, and there was nothing in there that required anything of Tole, nothing that could speak to him anymore. It was only the living that mattered now. The dead wore death lightly, but under its weight the living could crumple. Hooper said this was a good thing they’d done for Mariah, and he believed him. He was glad. That was a start.

  “Looks good on you,” Hooper said.

  “Feels good,” said Tole.

  They sat in silence for a long minute, sipping moonshine, nothing but the sounds of their swallows between them.

  “Strange thing being in a dead man’s house, ain’t it?” Hooper asked.

  Tole barely nodded his head.

  “Always imagined myself dying an old man in my bed, somewhere, I don’t know, maybe in a cottage near the Smoky Mountains. Been up that way?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh, it’s a damn pretty picture up there.” Hooper pondered something. “You think about that ever?”

  “Dyin’?”

  “Dyin’, sure. Death.”

  “Too much, I reckon.”

  “Hard not to, these days.”

  “You make it sound like it ain’t nothing to be scared of,” Tole said.

  “I knew a man died at ninety years old. He tell me he spent his whole life worryin’ about death, and when it finally started to come, he said all the worryin’ drifted away. He said by the time death come around, he was layin’ there in bed, barely able to breathe around the pneumonia, and he told me that he said to death, ‘You? That’s it? That’s all you got?’ He died a couple days after he told me that.”

  Tole chuckled a bit. “He sound like a character.”

  “Oh, he was. He killed many men for their gold, and only ever liked one Negro, and that was me.”

  The two men let the silence wash over them.

  “When I was in the war,” Tole said, “me and some boys, we used to talk about dyin’. We used to talk about food from back home. This boy named Raymond Allbey, he from Philadelphia I think it was, he used to talk about this pork his mama used to make. He said if he knew he were dyin’, he’d crawl back to Pennsylvania just to get him one last bite of his mama’s pork.”

  “How ’bout you?”

  “For me it was a little café back in New York. Little old lady there make the best beans, they were smooth as cream.”

  “Any man who crawl home for beans ain’t right.”

  “I’m tellin’ you. You ever in New York, you let me know.”

  “For me, it’d be a slice of warm pecan pie from Nattie’s. You know Nattie?”

  Tole shook his head no.

  “Oh, everybody ’round here know Nattie. She a sweet old thing. And damn can she bake a fine pie. I don’t know what she do to it, but it so good you wouldn’t mind dyin’ afterward.”

  Tole smiled and sipped his drink and winced as he swallowed.

  “Listen, tomorrow I got more work,” Hooper said. “Chopping wood and hauling junk.”

  “I’ll take all the work you got. But can I borrow the cart sometimes?”

  “For what?”

  “Sometimes I got errands, sometimes I got my own junk that needs hauling. For friends.”

  “You got friends?”

  Tole didn’t reply.

  “Sure, you can use the cart, but I get a cut of what you make.”

  “I do it for free.”

  “Then you a stupid Negro, but that’s your business.” Hooper eyed him with a squint. “You just promise to tell me what you up to with it.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  And then they shook on it and toasted their partnership.

  Chapter 21

  Mariah

  July 22, 1867

  Thanks to Evangeline, Mariah had an idea about the identity of at least one of the gang who’d slaughtered her son, so one late morning, after her morning tasks at Carnton were for the moment accomplished, she walked into Franklin and out again, heading north to where the Crutcher family eked out a rough existence. The man of the house, Mariah knew, was missing the last three fingers of his hand. She hoped her excuse for going out there would be convincing to them. They were, as Evangeline had put it, very rough.

  She had not been welcome at the birth of Lizzie Crutcher’s daughter six months before, but she had been necessary. Lizzie and her husband—was he her husband? Mariah didn’t actually know—had not wanted her there. Bill Crutcher, one of the number of lumbermen who called the town home, had only grudgingly returned from the deep woods to attend the birth. He was not happy to see a Negro in his house when he got there.

  “We ain’t need the houdou woman. Now get the hell out.”

  Lizzie, who had called for her, was not much more welcoming, but she was in great pain and alone, except for the hulk in her corner who, when he wasn’t drinking, was cursing the nigger magic woman and her foul, dirty hands that would no doubt turn his child stupid. This child gone be stupid whatever I do, Crutcher, Mariah had thought. The cabin was cold, the chinking between the logs entirely crumbled away in spots so she could see the trees waving in the bright winter light, which streamed through the holes and gave Mariah more to see by than she would normally have expected from a backwoods cabin with no windows.

  “Nigger, why? God, nigger, why this hurt? What the hell you doing? Do. Jesus. Do something, nigger!” Lizzie cursed her, but underneath the curses Mariah could hear her desperation, how she needed her. She talked hard, but mostly for the ears of the man in the corner who wouldn’t lift a finger.

  The child lay across its path to the world, as if she knew what she was getting into and wanted no part of it. Nigger, fix it! This was the white woman’s first child, and she didn’t yet know that there were some mothering pains that couldn’t be fixed, that just had to be suffered. Mariah felt Lizzie’s stomach with her strong fingers, and got her hand slapped for it. The lumberman stood up. “Don’t be takin’ no liberties with a white woman, witch,” he said, before sitting back down. This was the world in which this white child would be raised and taught. Someday the child would taunt her and spit at her, Mariah was sure.

  The black of the world had settled there in that room and had sucked up everything warm and welcoming. There was no sign of any decorations or handwork, no touch of a woman’s hand, no fire in the tiny stone hearth. Good things had been erased, if they had ever existed. Even so, Mariah was fixed on delivering that baby.

  She put her hands on Lizzie again, this time feeling for the baby’s head and bottom, which she slowly pushed and pulled. Lizzie gasped but said nothing this time. The lumberman laid his head against the wall and closed his eyes, as if to sleep. Mariah pushed and pulled and the baby turned a little. Get it out, Lizzie hissed, but Mariah reached up and held her hand and told her it would come in a few minutes but not yet, not right that minute, that Lizzie had to hold tight to that child and keep her until all was ready. But Lizzie pushed anyway, moving with the pain, wanting to be rid of it. Mariah moved fast.

  She made Lizzie stand up. Lizzie gripped Mariah’s hand so hard she nearly broke it. Her blonde braid, dirty with clay dust and dripping wet at the end, hung in front of her. Her freckles glowed red. She cursed Mariah and lay back down, so Mariah took matters into her own hands. She reached up inside and turned the baby, ignoring Lizzie’s protests. Then a head began to emerge, whi
ch brought its own more intense pain—a pain that a mother knows is the beginning of the end of pain.

  Lizzie pushed and pushed again and the baby slipped out into the world, healthy and confused and afraid. She cried and Lizzie cried. The lumberman stirred long enough to take the baby from Mariah, inspect its privates, shrug, hand the baby back to Mariah. “Boy next time,” was all he said before slipping out the door and back into the woods.

  Mariah cleaned the child and watched for the rest of the birth, which finally came. The bleeding should have stopped then, but it didn’t. She handed the little girl to Lizzie, who snatched her daughter away. Get your time with her now, Mariah thought, because you dying.

  Why save such a woman? That was a question Mariah could only ask afterward, when the answer had become beside the point and meaningless. Mariah did what her mother and her mother’s mother and every other woman like her did.

  With one hand she pressed down hard on the part of Lizzie’s stomach where she knew her womb needed to shrink, and with her other hand she pressed the place where she knew the blood was flowing through. Lizzie screamed at her and the baby cried. Lizzie tried to kick and push and punch, she tried to move off the table. Her green eyes flashed hate, her teeth bared beneath her pudgy nose.

  “You’re murdering me!”

  There wasn’t anyone to hear them, Mariah knew, so she kept pressing and watching the flow of blood that pooled below Lizzie on the floor. The drops had become a spot, and then a pool overflowing. Mariah pressed harder.

  “You a dead nigger!”

  “You a dead white lady if you bleed like this. You stay still.”

  Calm, just like her mother had taught her. So calm that Lizzie listened to her. She gasped. Mariah knew the pain was terrible, but the little girl just born would have no chance in this world if left alone with the lumberman, Mariah knew. She needed a mama, even this one, this trashy and dirty backwoods bitch.

  “Nurse the child, Lizzie.” And Lizzie nursed the child. The little girl suckled greedily. Everything flowed from this mother at once, Mariah knew, and she felt a little sorry for her.