The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks
There must’ve been a few hundred folks gathered in the courthouse square by two o’clock: businessmen and homeless vagrants, disenfranchised Confederate boys and members of the Colored League, conservative loyalists and Republicans. It was a rally of sorts, Republicans and Conservatives, politicians shouting over each other, over jeers and riotous yelling. Tole sat up straight.
He hadn’t anticipated a gathering this large, a killing this public. Mr. Dixon must want to make an example outta this man, he thought to himself. In the right corner, at the back of the stage, almost obscured by picket signs and tall hats, he saw a white man with a round face, his upper lip swallowed by a graying, upturned mustache, and a black top hat pulled down tight.
Tole’s gaze would have shifted, seeking other pale faces in the crowd for his mark, had it not been for a flash of color that caught his eye on the mustached man’s hat. There, at the top, sprouting from the base like some sort of extraordinary flower, curled a bright orange feather. The man Mr. Dixon wants dead. Jesse Bliss.
He repeated the name in his head, the next man he would kill: Jesse Bliss. One moment Bliss would be breathing, speaking, yearning; and the next Tole would squeeze a small metal lever and, like some type of terrible magic, a metal ball would puncture the front of Jesse Bliss’s forehead and all of his breathing, speaking, and yearning—his hopes and his cheating at cards when he got drunk and his laughing too loud at his father-in-law’s jokes, the things Tole imagined white men did with their time—all that would end. Click.
Tole made minute adjustments to the angle of the barrel, judging the direction and strength of the breeze by the soft billow of the nation’s flag in his periphery. His hands stilled as he cocked the trigger and squinted, eyes trained on that orange feather as his heartbeat slowed. One more instant and—
Just then, Theopolis walked out onto the stage and stood behind the podium. A roar from the crowds. Tole heard, or thought he heard, men shouting, Get back in the field where you belong. But he was too far away to hear distinctly.
These boys gonna reignite a war right here, they ain’t careful. The crowd seemed suddenly much more unruly as it condensed toward the front of the stage.
Theopolis, he could tell, was trying to yell over the crowd.
And then Tole’s nightmare really began.
Chapter 7
Mariah
July 6, 1867
A rumble, like the earth clearing its throat, came drifting over from the courthouse square. Down the wide expanse of Fourth Avenue, where she stood in the doorway of the dim little quilt shop, Mariah could see the fringe of the crowd clustered around the stage, though not the stage itself. She could see the great brick courthouse, with its grand cast-iron columns and long windows, its long smooth steps and the round clock face that stood out in the middle of the pediment, looming over the gathered figures like History itself. The courthouse made everything around it look smaller—the surrounding buildings, squatter and made from darker brick, that bordered the square; the pair of elm trees that framed its entryway; and the people, black and white, who stood in its shadow. For a moment she just looked toward the square and listened to the swelling sound.
“They got theyself started I guess,” Minnie Bostick, the chimney sweep’s wife, said from behind her table, arms crossed, short and wide-set, cheeks full and dark. Her eyes said, What you doing here?
Mariah didn’t answer—neither the spoken nor unspoken. “Someday I’m getting one of these here quilts, Minnie, but not today.” How she keep them quilts so clean with Mr. Bostick’s dust all over everything? He as coal chalky as they come, she thought. She walked on, letting Minnie eyeball the back of her head.
More cheers and groans wafted over from the courthouse square. Mariah wondered if Theopolis had given his speech, and whether the others had liked it. She took another two steps, toward the courthouse, yet safely far away.
At that very moment—at least, this was the way Mariah would always remember it—she heard the first screams and shouts from the courthouse square.
And then, unmistakably, gunfire.
She spun on her heel and ran toward the square.
Chapter 8
Tole
July 6, 1867
At the base of the podium, the crowd surged. Tole could not see the cause—the press of bodies was too tight—a whirl of heads and arms reaching out.
A bottle crashed near the stage. Gunshots rang out from the corner, and from Sykes’s grocery, too. The Colored League boys ran for cover, pulling pistols from bootstraps.
The white Conservatives were firing.
A Negro in rough blue homespun staggered and fell, shot in the back. Women were screaming. The Leaguers fled the square, some turning to return fire. The courthouse bell rang out. A few white boys went down, some trampled, some shot in the legs or shoulders. A stampede of whites and Negroes, gunfire and burning flags. A riot of shouts. Three white men stormed the stage. Another smashed a bottle. One man set fire to a washrag and threw it into the mob.
Jesse Bliss and his hat loomed bright and clear in the midst of the chaos.
Tole’s mind tumbled over itself. He sighted back in. He calmed his heart and his breath. This was the only thing that gave him any power, that rifle and its ball seated in the chamber, his eye, his knowledge of wind and angles. He felt the stock smooth on his cheek. Beyond the straight line between that window and the stage, the world faded away and time stopped.
Bliss’s men tried to get him down from the stage, but it was all happening too fast. Tole had only a few moments to take his shot. This was his only chance. He had nearly squeezed the trigger when his chance disappeared.
He lost sight of Bliss in the raucous ebb and flow of people. He swung the front sight post over the crowd, past a white man with a twisted, two-fingered hand raised to shield his face, past the burning washrag, past the men fighting on the stage, and on to the front left corner of the platform. There was Bliss. He sighted in on the man’s face, and let his eyes focus one last time on the target before he entered that loneliness of eye and front sight post, when the world was reduced down to a small piece of metal and a slow draw of breath. He looked one last time at the target, to make sure it was indeed a man and that he could tell his head from his ass end.
A head, blond, with a heavy-brimmed dark hat, loomed up between Tole and Bliss. Then Bliss’s hat disappeared in the mob. Reappeared.
Again and again Tole sighted, aimed, but couldn’t get a clear shot.
The hat disappeared again.
Tole could see Theopolis Reddick, young and vibrant and waving his hands for calm and a stop to the disruption. Good luck, Tole thought. Mariah’s son very obviously had no idea what to do.
As Tole searched through the chaos, the man with the missing fingers raised a bottle in his good hand and threw it toward the stage. This one shattered over the head of the young black man who’d been trying, desperately, to speak before the chaos erupted.
After the bottle hit him, Theopolis seemed to sway a moment, and then crumpled. Several other men—white men, all—leaned in over him. They’ll help him, Tole thought, they’ll pick him up and carry him out to safety. That Negro was an innocent, they would know that.
And then one big man with a reddish-auburn beard pulled back his arm and his shoulder and let loose a powerful roundhouse punch at Theopolis’s face.
The mob swarmed in, kicking.
They had the boy surrounded. Tole could see one man choking him from behind while another leaned in with a club, aiming for his face. Tole could imagine the brittle crack of jaw and bone. They were beating the boy to death, Tole had seen it before. It wasn’t just the violence, it was the looks on their faces. They couldn’t stop themselves if they tried; they’d crossed a terrible line Tole knew very well.
Why kill him? Was it because of his politics or simply because he was a nigger in the wrong place and they had come to kill as many as they could? He wondered if even they knew. The crowd was so dense that
There was a moment that George Tole would relive till the end of his days, a moment that he recognized even as it happened as a moment dividing all others, creating a world contained entirely in the words before and after. A redtail hawk wheeled overhead, and although George Tole was fixed upon the scene in the courthouse square, he also remembered the bird’s flight, its slow, lazy circles, imprinted on him forever.
For the briefest moment the mob parted and Tole had a clear line of sight to Theopolis, bloody and screaming and mangled. A man raised an axe.
* * *
If anyone had been listening, they would have heard a single shot ring out. In the clamor and the dust Theopolis quit moving. His arms lay twisted at his sides and blood flooded the stage. The white men slowly backed away.
* * *
Afterward—his whole life would now be, it seemed, an afterward—he fled to the river and thought of leaving ol’ GT right there on the bank and wading in to die, to finally be bathed in the blood for good. Instead he headed home through the shaded grove and by back alleys, drinking in deep gulps until his flask was empty, trying to stop the trembling of his hands. He took GT with him, as if it were attached.
Chapter 9
Mariah
July 6, 1867
Running didn’t seem fast enough. Mariah wondered about the people passing her going the other direction. Had they not heard the screams? What other important business did they have, their faces painted with worry or dreaminess, hands in their pockets or held before them, black hats and feathered hats on heads cocked down in thought, all of them seeming to want out when she wanted in? Their world seemed wide and forbidding, entirely mysterious.
She felt pulled along by a cord attached to the center of her chest. Every few steps she imagined the worst; the cord drew tighter and her feet moved faster. She had been the worst sort of mother, she thought. She had even resented being a mother at all sometimes, and now she dreaded that there was some kind of divine settling of accounts at work and she still had that debt to reckon with. Had she been a mother? Had she been enough?
She was so angry he had chosen this path of his through politics where he would always live at the whim of whichever white man decided he could find use for a clever ex-slave, a dancing bear, who could read and write and speak well in front of crowds. That is not fair, she thought. She was not being fair to her own son, who might very well have had a plan that was beyond even her. Maybe she was the ignorant one. He was her son, but also a man and not only a reminder of her neglect when he was a baby, his days in the cabins going hungry in the company of women not his mother. He had known his father only barely, and then only when his father was dying. Theopolis was now a grown man. She loved him, she hated him. He was hers nevertheless, a boy and a man.
She ran up the blocks and then up Main Street. The crowd grew denser on the wood sidewalk, so she weaved around carts and others walking down the middle of the street. They called out to her, You’re too late, but she wouldn’t turn. On this side of town it was black faces, but as she got closer to the square the faces turned white and red, eyes flashing. She was a block away when she realized that, yes, she had heard screams, and that under those screams were the loud, vibrating drone of shouts, curses, and feet stamping.
In the square the bodies moved in every direction. The crowd pulsed and rotated at its center, and at its edges men flung themselves out of the storm, running in every direction. The center, which she glimpsed only briefly here and there as she pushed closer, appeared to be located at the front of the stage, a dark and pulsing thing.
Time stretched out and she pushed through. Men stepped on her feet and she on theirs. She smelled them, they smelled of peat and coal. She fit herself between them, and as she got closer she began to push without regard for whom she was pushing or what the consequences would be. She nearly knocked over the magistrate Dixon, a big blowsy fancy man. He gaped at her. It felt a million years ago since she’d stood in his house and told him that he was a father again. What she cared about was finding her son and seeing that he was all right. She only wanted to see. Didn’t need to speak to him, didn’t need to touch him, he didn’t need to know she was there. She had to see it for herself and then she could disappear and Theopolis could have his life and she could have hers and she would be free again. She told herself this.
She came closer to the center. Men began to recognize her and make way. They said things to her about what had happened, but she didn’t hear them, or refused to register the meaning. There was the preacher, standing in her way, both palms toward her, shaking his head, and then he was gone, yanked to the side by the carpenter whose words she did hear: She should see this. Then she was through and stood at the center.
The others had drawn in a rough circle around an empty space. Entirely men, they were black and they were white. They radiated puzzlement or anger or horror or fascination, and sometimes all these at once. Their faces burned her; she shied away. She looked down. At the far end of the circle from her, a white man lay dead upon his back, his arms neatly at his sides, a dark pool of blood growing quickly underneath his mangled head. And upon the trampled ground lay Theopolis, her only son, the body of her body, the flesh of her flesh, without whom she was merely something afloat in time.
All things stopped, or seemed to. Dr. Cliffe knelt beside Theopolis, whose shirt had been ripped open. The doctor must have sensed life, because he pressed clean rags against the chest of her boy. He kept one hand on his chest, holding down a cloth, while he grabbed more rags from his bag with the other. The fabric kept the blood back for a moment, but soon it rose up through the bandages and seeped between the doctor’s fingers. Her boy’s chest rose and fell, but each time it became harder to see him move. Theopolis’s head lay back on the doctor’s coat. His eyes were open but he was not blinking. Blood ran down his face and the sides of his head, into his ears. His head was misshapen, she thought, like someone had been sanding it down and reshaping it. Blood soaked into the dirt and formed a dark halo around him. Sound disappeared, and Mariah heard nothing except the roar in her own head.
The doctor recovered and began trying to wrap Theopolis’s chest. She held her son’s head in her hands.
Mariah couldn’t remember holding Theopolis this way since the morning of his birth. He was covered in blood that morning, too, and he wailed in her arms. She sang to him in a soft voice as she brought him to her breast. And now she sang to him, the melody lost behind sobs and her breaking voice. She remembered giving birth to Theopolis, alone on a strawtick pallet. She cried out and gripped the edges of the bed and screamed into the sky. He was heavy when he was born, and she held him then as she did now, trembling, kissing him on his forehead, pressing his face into her chest.
The little doctor sweated and pulled and stanched, but nothing changed until Theopolis rolled his head over in his mother’s hands, toward her own face. He still did not blink, he did not see her, but he was faced toward her when he disappeared for good, drawn back into depthless darkness.
That was what had happened, she would say forever afterward. He just left, his face said nothing more eloquent than gone. There he was, and then, in less than an instant, he wasn’t.
A man stepped forward. And here’s the nigger’s gun. Rogue nigger. Just started shooting!
Mariah was not really hearing his words, not right then; but the words would echo in her ears for years afterward.
This nigger boy shot the grocer. Shot John Sykes dead.
The cobbler boy here shot him? No sir. That’s not his gun.
You bet it’s his gun. I the one who took it off him.
You a damn liar.
Somebody shut him up. He saying Theopolis Redd
She watched as someone laid a pistol by Theopolis’s hand. She ignored it, left it in place. It had nothing to do with her or with her son.
She didn’t recognize this gun, old and worn and dark-handled. She doubted Theopolis had ever carried one in his life. Still, she could see the story unfolding. They would make Theopolis look like a killer when he was anything but. His head was heavy in her lap, paradoxically heavier now that the soul was gone. In truth, she preferred that story, the rogue nigger, to the one more likely, which was that he had been taken down from the stage and slaughtered like a winter hog.
Theopolis believed in this world, so much so that he would make for it some speeches and try to win its votes. Her own head felt heavy, too, and seemed in danger of collapsing in on itself from the pressure of sound, too much sound, everything so loud now, all of it directed inward through her ears to her brain.
It was some time before she realized that the sound in her ears was that of her own voice. She wailed and directed the sound at Theopolis’s face, but the vibrations would not revive him.
Chapter 10
Tole
July 6, 1867
Evening calmed the chaos. George Tole had returned to his house in the Bucket, where he listened to the sounds of the street. Children cried out and carts clattered quickly past, their owners eager to be done with their business and go inside, safe in their homes like Tole. But Tole didn’t feel safe. The day’s crowd had dispersed, but still the voices rang out inside his head—clear, brittle, overly sharp.
He hadn’t expected to see so much mayhem. He saw a Negro boy shot dead, a white grocer, and dozens wounded. Had to be at least forty or so boys wounded from the gunshots and beatings.