The Orphan Mother

by Robert Hicks

  Tole nodded yes, as if he did believe it.

  She noticed a man, made of twisted baling wire and with a tiny, bright red cork head, perched on Dr. Cliffe’s house. He seemed to be holding a long stick—a wand or a staff, or a tiny rifle. Some initials seemed carved, infinitely small, into the staff, but they were too minute for her to see.

  “Who’s he supposed to be?” Mariah asked.

  “Just somebody I added. I like to think of him as a guardian of the city.”

  “A guardian? What’s paradise need a guardian for?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe he don’ trust it.”

  “He a magician? That a wand he holding?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or a rifle?”

  “Maybe.”

  “If it were my town,” Mariah said, “I’d take that rifle from his hands.”

  Chapter 32

  Tole

  August 2, 1867

  A warm, windless Friday evening, and George Tole squatted at the edge of the roof of the Billard Saloon on Main Street. It had been a warm day, but the night was brisk, with a sky black with hostile gray swaths and an occasional grumble that seemed to threaten rain. Well after dark, Tole felt a cold drop land on the back of his hand, and another on the barrel of ol’ GT. A flash of lightning cast a blue shadow along Main Street. Not a single person on the block.

  The saloon was just a few blocks from West Margin Street, where James Mayberry lived with his mama. Some of the black folks around town said Mayberry usually drank himself half to death in this bar here. They said you’d be more likely to find him falling down in the saloon outhouse than you would in any church on Sunday mornings. And now, perched just a couple of stories above, kneeling on the thin shingled roof, Tole could hear the men laughing and getting on, a little rowdy and beer drunk.

  Another rumble from the sky, a bellowing barroom of thunder. Tole threw an oilskin over himself and the rifle before it started to drizzle—a warm summer rain that quickly soaked the roof. Tole didn’t mind the rain so long as his powder stayed dry. Miles, oddly, had learned to walk in the rain. He had taken his first steps in such weather, naked and unsteady, a chubby baby boy waddling, barely able to stand, and Tole on his knees with his arms stretched out wide, ready to catch him if he fell. The years passed and Tole could remember chasing Miles through thunderstorms, the same way his mama had chased after him and his younger brother—You boys get back here now, before you go and catch yourselves a cold! Tole had sounded just like his mama, calling after his son the same way. And when they’d return home, he would wrap Miles in the blanket his mama had knitted.

  Tole never thought of those days now. Almost never.

  A glass shattered below him and wooden doors swung open. He took a knee at the edge of the roof and saw two men stumble out. The man on the left was Mayberry, stumbling drunk, barely standing. If a stiff wind comes rollin’ down this street, Tole thought, this boy gone fall and break his neck, save me the trouble. He didn’t recognize the other man. He figured he wouldn’t kill any man he didn’t know for certain to be involved with Theopolis’s death. He lifted the rifle butt to his shoulder and squinted through the sights. The rain came down a bit harder now, cold on his legs and feet, which were still exposed.

  “You go on home, ya bastard!” Mayberry shouted and slurred. As he turned into the moonlight, Tole could see his cleft lip. “Tell the missus we’re expecting her for Sunday dinner.”

  The two men parted with Mayberry heading east, a few wobbly steps before he stumbled down, first to his knees, and then onto his back, laughing, his belly heaving, and talking nonsense to the clouds. The second man, tall and gangly, made his way around to the back of the saloon.

  Mayberry mumbled and cursed, trying to reach his feet. Tole had him, sighted in on his forehead. He waited for Mayberry to make it up, watched him fumble with his belt buckle and piss right there on Main Street. Mayberry fell backward, stumbled straight, whistling something that sounded like a lullaby.

  Tole thought of the man’s mama. He thought of what he was taking from her. She would be changed forever, but her son was a killer and a cruel man. Maybe someday someone would tell her this.

  He took his shot. Mayberry crumpled like burning paper. The boom from the rifle should’ve been enough to wake the whole damn town except for the thunder.

  Tole climbed down and walked over to the body. The man lay still, facedown in a puddle. Tole reached into his pockets and found some coins and paper money, and a small yellowed bank check signed by Elijah Dixon for thirty-three dollars. He stuffed it all back in the pocket. He had no use for blood money.

  Time to haul the body away. Tole was glad the river wasn’t far.

  Chapter 33

  Mariah

  August 2, 1867

  “Do we have the 9th Regiment from Alabama here, Mariah?” Carrie asked. The two of them stood in the cemetery, Mariah still a little shaky from the evening before at Tole’s house. She still wasn’t sure what she had seen. Now she checked the book. “No.”

  She trailed behind Carrie, Book of the Dead in hand, a bundle of letters in the front pocket of her apron. These letters came from all over the country, Texas to Maryland, and in them parents and widows plaintively asked if, by some chance, their man had come to rest there at Carnton.

  We never knew where he could be, but we want to come visit if he’s there.

  Got a flower to put on him.

  His daddy ain’t the same, it would do him good.

  Maybe he run away, but I prefer to think he died. I may go to hell for thinking that.

  Every few weeks Carrie put on her veil and the two of them went out into the cemetery to check on these missing men, to see if their records in the Book of the Dead matched the names and fighting units given in the letters. They would sometimes find a few, and when Carrie wrote back to those families she wrote in joyful bursts and left great blots of ink everywhere. But most of the time there was nothing to report. In the cemetery lay a large grassy emptiness marked by an obelisk, containing the remnants of hundreds who had never been named. When Carrie wrote back to the others, she would tell them of this monument to the unnamed dead, how pretty it was. She always invited these people to come visit it, and sometimes they did. Carrie would turn their visits into an event: invite them into the house, serve them tea and pastries (if Becky Ann, the semi-incompetent cook, had prepared something edible). The families always left awed and pleased that their son or husband had someone like Carrie McGavock to watch over him.

  In between the rows, Carrie, and now Mariah, had worn thin matted paths in the grass. From the top of the cemetery, Mariah looked down and thought they looked like the trails of ants, or the sort of meandering line a child draws in his puzzle book.

  How well she knew these paths, that sky, the fences and slopes of Carnton. Every other place of her life had faded, but not Carnton.

  Carnton, in that moment of revelation, seemed to Mariah removed from the rest of the world, protected as if walled off and ringed with moats. Here she stood not far from her boy, and however hard she squinted through the trees she could not see the town, or its smoke and brimstone, its mud and shit, its hurrying and shouting, its men with knives. Franklin might have been the moon.

  Carrie approached up the wide main path between headstones, no longer floating. She had her skirts gathered in her right fist. She came over and stood in the shade of the old oak with Mariah. “Do you have the letters?” she asked.

  Mariah nodded and pulled the bundle out of her apron pocket. Two squirrels squabbled in the limbs above them. Carrie sat down under the tree, arranged her skirts around her, and held her hand out. Mariah sat down, too, a little heavier and more tired, not worrying about her dress. She handed the first letter to Carrie, who began the ritual.

  Though she had already read them once, Carrie liked to read the letters again in the cemetery.

  Dear Missus McGavick,

  I herd from my nayber Louisa Mae Bollingbrook that you
have her son berred in your gravyard and I want to know if my son be ther two. His name is Donald James Burns and he was 20 in 1863. Hes a tall boy with a shock of yellow hair that he got from his daddy and hes rite handy with a harmmonaka or a kazoon in case you a boy playing music. He enlist with Tommy John Bollingbrook and was in the Alabama Volunteer Infantry under Colonel Julian Bibb. I nit him a gray skarf speshul and Lila Rose his girlfrend nit him gray sox too. We aint herd from him since a letr in Octobr 1863. Plese mam if hes ther can you plese let us know. His daddy and I miss him somthin feers. I keep riting letrs but nobody know wat happin to him.

  God bless you,

  Rita Burns

  “Donald James Burns isn’t here, is he?” Carrie asked.

  “No.”

  “What about the friend? Bollingbrook?”

  “Ain’t no Tommy or Thomas John Bollingbrook either.”

  “No matches today,” Carrie said. “Poor things.”

  “You tired, Miss Carrie?”

  “Today I am.”

  “I mean”—Mariah looked away—“I mean tired of all this?”

  “What this?” Carrie always liked the terms spelled out nice and neat. “Which part?”

  “Most of it. All of it?”

  “The letters are a bit much. But perhaps I think this because I’ve got seven of the hard letters to write when I go back to the house. Those people will have ghosts upon them always. What else becomes of the son who just disappears, as if he’d never walked on the earth? Sometimes I think I am condemning them to a haunting. That’s tiring and dispiriting, yes.”

  Carrie bent down and picked three twigs from Theopolis’s grave and tossed them away. Mariah nearly grabbed her by the arm to stop her and had to check herself. The familiarity of the gesture boiled her blood. How dare she? That is my son. She thought Carrie might be trying to say something to her about the nature of motherhood and sons, and one’s obligation to the dead. She knew Carrie meant to chastise her, even if Carrie herself didn’t.

  “You act like they was all your sons,” she said, when Carrie stood straight again.

  “And why not? I have my own dead children in this cemetery, just like you and all those seven mothers from today, plus the thousands of others. I say ‘my own,’ but what is really different about my own now? They live in my mind, but here…” Carrie leaned against the oak. “There’s nothing to distinguish them from the others except for their grave markers, and those they never saw in life. They were carved by strangers. These planks have nothing to do with those people, they are not them, and so what is one marker apart from another? Nothing. Our children’s are stone and the soldiers’ are wood, but they both serve the same purpose. I could be, you could be, mother to all or none in this cemetery. I’ve chosen all of them.”

  Mariah imagined all of them as children, tagging along after Carrie, climbing into her arms until her back bent. And then still more, tugging and pulling until her mistress could not move, until she had been pinned to the earth like a lacy black butterfly, ecstatic to be finally motionless. She looked down at her son. This is not for me, Theopolis.

  She was not mother to them all. She was mother to one. He was no ghost, but he was alive in a way, and different from every other in that cemetery. It surprised Mariah that Carrie could suggest otherwise. Mariah had memories, felt obligations.

  Mariah said slowly, “I been trying to find out the truth, Miss Carrie.”

  Carrie kept her head bent over the letter she was reading and twiddled a loose bit of lace in her other hand. “Truth of what, dear?” she said. “Have you begun going to church?”

  Carrie would call her “dear.” The mistress had always imagined herself old, older than Mariah, though Mariah could remember the day Carrie was born.

  “Not church. The truth about what happened to my boy.”

  Now Carrie looked up. “For what reason?”

  For what reason, indeed? Because, after all, he was just another black man. To most, he didn’t even have a name—he was “the cobbler” if he was anything at all.

  Tears burned like bile in the back of her throat. “To know for sure.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Other men coming to investigate next week, from Nashville, but I don’t trust none of that.”

  “Those men are worried about the man who was killed, John Sykes, they’re not coming for some black shoemaker,” Carrie said absentmindedly, and she was right, but Mariah felt stabbed by the words anyway. Carrie could see what she’d done, and let the letter flutter from her hand to her lap.

  “I’m sorry, Mariah,” she said. “I care nothing for the grocer, he was a rude little man. I cared for Theopolis.”

  “I know.”

  “But it’s the truth, even so. It’s how that world works.”

  “I hope they want to know about my Theopolis. But whether they do or not, I do.” Mariah said this with lips drawn tight, looking straight at Carrie, watching for a reaction. She thought, You didn’t expect this of Mariah, did you? But Carrie didn’t flinch, merely folded her hands in her lap.

  “You’re alone.”

  Of all the things Mariah expected to hear from Carrie, she hadn’t expected this. Lectures about danger, the futility of confronting men—that was what she had expected. But she was alone, she had been alone listening to Evangeline Dixon and Lizzie Crutcher, and she’d been alone hurrying away from them. She was more alone than she and Carrie were at that exact moment, not another living soul in sight and thousands of bones beneath their feet.

  “You won’t make them interested in anything they aren’t already interested in,” Carrie said.

  “Theopolis didn’t kill no one. He was murdered. They ain’t interested in that? They ain’t interested in all the other black folk hurt that day? Twenty-six they was, Hooper told me.” She knew the answer to her question even as she said it.

  “No. They won’t care.”

  It infuriated Mariah to know not only that Carrie was right, but also that she was so certain of being right. How could she be so certain when she never left this place and never invited the world in?

  Because she knew her people. No matter what else she did, no matter how perfectly Carrie McGavock closed the circle around her and her thousands of dead boys, she would always have that knowledge of her people bred in the bone. What they thought, late at night when they were snuffing the candles in the windows of their houses—that was no mystery to Carrie. And she knew that her people, out there in the world beyond the fences and the tree line, would not care that Theopolis had only wanted to speak and had never owned a pistol and had been murdered by cold men from this very town. Never done anything out of the ordinary except have his own house and a little business, and on occasion visit with his mother. They would not care.

  A dark, breathtaking thought crossed Mariah’s mind: Maybe Carrie doesn’t really care either. Maybe she cares more about keeping me close. Mariah sat still and listened to the squirrels, watched the long grass in the field roll and shudder in waves of breeze, watched the tree line for the hog or whatever it was. Carrie left her hands in her lap, now intent on Mariah. What would her own life be like, Mariah thought, if she stayed there at Carnton forever? It would be exactly like this every day, she knew. She would grow old trailing behind the widow of the South, carrying the bundle of letters. The world would recede like a tide, and no news would disturb the rhythm of their days. They would remain as they were, evermore, because that’s how Carrie had always wanted it. They would grow wrinkles and that would be it.

  I am alone right now, Mariah thought. And I’ll be alone forever if I stay.

  “Still got to know,” she said.

  Carrie kept reading the next letter.

  “And when I find out, maybe I go to testify for the Nashville men.”

  Carrie still kept reading.

  “I will find out. I ain’t gone stop.” Mariah had not known this until she said it. But now she knew she would go on just as she formed the words
.

  Carrie finished tracing her gloved finger across the lines on the paper, carefully folded the letter she had picked up again, replaced it atop the bundle, and ran her thumb across the edge. “Of course you will find out,” she said.

  “Just so you know.”

  “You didn’t have to tell me.”

  Now Mariah was silent. This was true. Why had she told Carrie anything? A second time, Carrie’s words stabbed her, but this time she felt the knife going in tenderly, like it was removing something.

  “Just being friendly,” she said, for want of anything else to say.

  Silence.

  “Are we friends, Mariah?” Carrie said this with force, with fire in her voice. Mariah could not answer that question aloud. It had never been asked, only assumed, from the time they were children. More than assumed—assigned. She had been assigned to Carrie as friend and helpmate. There had never been the question. She was unprepared to face it spoken aloud, baldly. She knew somewhere in the core of her mind that it had never been a question for her, only for Carrie. She said nothing.

  Carrie watched her for a moment. Then she leaned over, letting a couple of letters spill from her lap, and placed her hand on Mariah’s arm.

  “No, we are not,” she said. “We are not friends.”

  Mariah said nothing but looked Carrie straight in the eye. She saw a woman gathering herself, lining things up in her mind, releasing the bonds of thoughts long tied down.

  “We are not friends, and I dare say you know you have no obligation to confide in me. Confidence is not the word for what passes between people like you and me. Friends is not the word for what we are. What we are I can hardly contemplate, and there is no word for it. The Greeks would have had a word, but I do not. Whether or not we are friends, you know me better than anyone, and you know what goes on here in this cemetery.”

  What could Mariah say? She had listened to Carrie and her soliloquies a thousand times over the years. “I am the mother of a murdered man,” she said. “The mother of nobody.”