The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks
At the steps up to the house, Carrie spoke again. “You know you can stay here as long as you like.”
Mariah nodded and watched a tiny green beetle climb up the back of Carrie’s long black dress, worn for Mariah’s dead son. My dead son was the name of a patch of ground now, a patch of the Carnton estate.
And what should Mariah call herself now? Mother? There was no word for the woman left alone by the death of her own child. She had been a widow and had been honored as a widow, but no one honored the woman who buried her child.
To her left she saw something moving across her field of view. A man she recognized, though he seemed barely a shadow. He carried something heavy on his back and, at that distance, seemed to disappear into the tall grass. She thought she recognized his head, or maybe the rhythm of his walk. This one, he of the old world, she thought, her other world, the one before she ever could have considered sitting down at the table with Carrie McGavock. In that world there had been the McGavock children, needing their noses wiped and their lessons laid out for them on rainy afternoons. There had been little Theopolis, in the cabin, making armies of straw men tied with twine and marched across the boards Mariah tried to keep swept in the cabin. There had been the bed in her cabin, a small thing barely bigger than a pallet.
And most of all there had been no reason to think much about anything beyond the fences and the walls, the path between that cabin and those parlors.
* * *
Later in the afternoon Carrie and Mariah sat together inside, in the family parlor, the two of them sharing some finger sandwiches the cook had made, turnips and some cauliflower, a small bowl of chilled okra soup. Mariah hadn’t been eating, and Carrie remarked on this twice.
Mariah remembered, almost with amusement, that it had been she—Mariah—who, all those years before, had forced Carrie to sit down and eat, to nibble on a carrot or a radish or a bite of bread. Have this piece of cheese, Miss Carrie. Worth taking just a bite. Here.
Now, sitting here in the same room where she demanded that her mistress have a ham sandwich, Mariah was more stubborn. She forked her vegetables around her plate. The family parlor felt different, emptier than before, with those mismatched plates and stained cloth napkins. Mariah never would have tolerated stained napkins, wrinkled and tattered, but Carrie didn’t even seem to notice. The rooms seemed darker than before, gloomier, the summer sun failing to break through grimy windows and tattered curtains—had Carnton always been so filthy? Surely not. When Mariah was there, Carnton shone.
Not her house anymore. Not her life.
She surveyed the wreckage of the mashed turnips, and bit her lip to keep from crying out.
A suffocating kind of silence had arisen now between them, former mistress and former slave: the gentle tapping of a coin-silver fork to porcelain plate, the clink of glass to table, each inadvertent noise a reminder of how little they spoke, and how little, really, they had to say to each other. They defined themselves by what they were not: they were not friends, they were not mistress and slave, or employer and employee. They were two people washed up together on a farther shore with nothing in common but the air they breathed, and perhaps they even breathed different air.
And yet there was a kind of familiar peace about being back; a peace she hadn’t expected, a peace she resented. She hated that Carnton still felt like home, even in the slightest way. Carnton. What a horrible name for a house. She’d heard somewhere that it meant tomb—how could the McGavocks, Mr. John’s grandfather and great-grandfather, and all the line of all the McGavocks back to the past that Mariah could scarcely imagine, want to entomb their children?
Carrie’s throat made a slight clicking sound as she swallowed. “I’ll be sure to have a proper tombstone made for him. A bigger one. With his name and all the dates.”
“Not your place.”
“Of course not. But it’s my cemetery.”
“What does it matter?”
Carrie sipped her water, and a sliver of a smile wrinkled her cheek. “Do you remember when he was little, probably four years old, and he’d hide beneath—”
“Stop it.”
Carrie’s smile froze.
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
“He was a special boy, Mariah.”
“You don’t know nothing.” Mariah could hear the anger in her own voice.
“I do,” Carrie replied. “If anyone would know, Mariah, it’s me.”
Mariah didn’t respond. Carrie was probably right. Carrie had lived with grief and rage so long herself that she probably forgot as it followed her from room to room, like a midday shadow.
Was this how Mariah was doomed to live? Filled with grief and a rage so inarticulate and so elemental that she would come to rely upon it, like a cane or an extra toe, to give her balance? Would it come to a point, for Mariah, too, where the darkness was so much a part of her that she could not bear to live without it? A time when she would revel in the long straight rows of the Confederate dead, dead for their lost and stupid cause?
“Have you decided what you’re going to do with his belongings?”
“You like thinking about them things that don’t matter.”
Carrie raised her eyes from her plate.
“They can burn it for all I care,” Mariah continued.
“Don’t do that,” Carrie said.
“Do what?”
“Pretend he never existed.”
Mariah stood up, the wooden legs of her chair scraping along the floor. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. Not no more, Miss Carrie.”
“I’ve noticed something since he’s been dead. You can’t even bring yourself to say his name. You say, ‘My son,’ or ‘My boy,’ but you can’t say ‘Theopolis,’ can you?”
Mariah stood frozen. She pursed her lips.
“Say it,” Carrie said.
“You go to hell.”
Carrie stood. “The regret will haunt you worse than any ghost if you don’t make peace.”
“I ain’t like you.”
“No, you aren’t. I know what kind of woman you are. I watched you raise that boy to become a man. A good, sweet, loving man who cared about the world and thought he could make a difference in it. But it doesn’t matter what you’ve survived or how strong you act. This is different. Remember that time you got bit by the copperhead?”
Mariah nodded her head yes.
“It was just on your finger but I remember how your hand swelled. Your whole arm swelled up. You couldn’t stop crying. Remember?”
“That don’t matter.”
“How old were we then? Seven? Eight? But I remember how awful it was for you. I remember how scared I was, and I wasn’t the one who was bit. Remember how you wept because the pain was so bad?”
Mariah nodded again.
“Now you know, the pain of that bite doesn’t come close to the pain in your chest, does it?”
Mariah spoke through quivering lips: “No, it don’t.”
“It’s all right to miss him, Mariah.”
Mariah looked away.
“Look at me.” Carrie took Mariah’s hand, her palms still rough and calloused. “It’s all right. And it’s all right to remember him. And it’s all right to laugh when a memory comes in the middle of the day of the silly little boy that used to run around this house. And if that laughter turns to tears, that’s all right, too.”
“Why you saying this like I don’t know?”
“Because you need to hear it and you don’t know it. Because you’re too brave and too strong for your own good. Sometimes you have to give in, be weak. That’s the only way you’ll survive it. You don’t always have to be so strong.”
“I should be like you? Dress in black. Live with the dead every day. That’s what I got to do?”
“No, Mariah.”
“Good. I ain’t doing it. I won’t carry around the dead forever like you do.”
“We all carry the dead. We all do it. Some of us ignore the ghosts that fo
Warm summer blew through the open window. The heavy damask curtains—how long had it been since they’d had a good washing?—billowed and fell back against the windowpane. Soon it would be night, and Mariah would watch the moonlight ripple through deep purple sky, and she’d remember those nights when Theopolis was a young boy, the two of them lying on their backs, staring toward the heavens, and Theopolis would count the stars, and use his tiny finger to connect them all. He always had such an imagination. Night was the quietest hour, when a single cricket’s chirp could keep time like a second hand, and she’d wait for sleep to come. Some nights, she’d hear a stirring in the summer kitchen just steps from her cabin, something like the wind, rattling the old windows, or maybe the soft patter of a bird walking on the roof. The sounds weren’t anything supernatural, nothing she couldn’t blame on the weather, but that didn’t mean she didn’t wish it. Mariah never much believed in ghosts, but now, during those nighttime hours, would she wish for them?
Tears burned in her eyes, but she tightened her jaw. She was not weak. She would not appear weak. Not even in front of Carrie. Especially not in front of Carrie.
“I miss him,” Mariah said.
Tears burned down both cheeks. How had this happened? She vowed she would not weep, and then she had. She spoke, not to Carrie but to the window and out the window and to the universe.
“When I’m dreaming, he’s there, Theopolis, my baby, and we’re somewhere together, I don’t know the place, ain’t no place I ever been, but he’s there, smiling, and I know I’m dreaming. I just know it. And I beg myself, ‘Please don’t wake up, not yet.’ And he turns to me and he says, ‘No, Mama, you ain’t dreaming. This world here is the real one. That other world is just a bad dream.’ And I feel this kind of relief. I can’t explain it. And then I wake up, and I stare up at the ceiling, and it takes me a moment to figure out which world is real, and which is a dream. Then I remember he gone. And I close my eyes tight as I can and I try to get back to the other world where he’s still walking around and where I can touch him and kiss his face. But I can’t never get back.”
Carrie held Mariah’s hand tightly in hers. When she had reached over to take Mariah’s hand, Mariah almost pulled it free, but couldn’t summon the strength.
“It’s going to take time, Mariah.”
“How long?”
“Until you stop dreaming of him? Maybe never.”
Mariah smeared her tears away.
“That’s not such a bad thing,” Carrie told her.
“You dream of the dead, Miss Carrie?”
Carrie looked down. “Every night,” she said.
Would it be so bad, right now, to dream of the dead every night? Mariah thought not.
And suddenly there it was, cold and stark before her: the road she would travel, back to her small house in town. The days stretching out, endless and free, before her. She’d heard someone talking about a woman in Franklin who’d lost her only child to consumption, and the loneliness, the emptiness she felt. This was what her days and nights would be. The burden seemed immense.
She resolved that for a moment—only a moment—she would pause. She would hold her head high and not pick up that burden. Not quite yet. She would let the memory of her only son live around her. She would live where he lived. That was something she could do with freedom now, couldn’t she?
“Ma’am?”
Carrie turned.
“If you still wanting me to stay, I’d just as soon stay,” Mariah said.
Carrie clasped her hands in front of her. She smiled gratefully. “I will send someone to fetch your things from town.”
“For just a little while.”
“Of course. Just a little while.”
Chapter 12
Tole
July 9, 1867
A dog followed Tole on the way to Elijah Dixon’s office.
Dixon was the sort of man who could be everywhere at once. He was one of them. The sort of white man who was always watching and taking note. Tole had known such men in New York, and you could see the fact of their power in their faces, which never flinched or betrayed what boiled underneath. They wielded enough power to animate men and mobs, though not always enough to control events once they were set in motion. Sometimes messes had to be cleaned up, and Tole assumed he was one of those messes now. He carried a small pistol in his pocket, just in case.
Dixon hadn’t needed to spell it out for Tole, it was clear: Put a bullet through the bastard. Tole would be cutting off the head of the snake, and Tole had expected to be shown a great monster of a man taking the podium, someone like the men he’d known back in the Five Points, hulking and top-hatted and dead to everything but getting theirs, and to hell with the Negroes if they got in the way.
But when Jesse Bliss stood on the stage with his feathered hat, Tole had momentarily thought to pack it up and slink away. He had thought: No more killing. He had thought: I can be better than this. He had thought: I can be like everyone else.
And then Theopolis Reddick had come into the crowd, and the bottle had smashed over Theopolis’s face, and the blood ran down his ear and neck.
He had known Theopolis, knew more about him than he did most people just by virtue of living a few houses over. Theopolis talked loud when he’d been drinking a little, could sing hymns down low in his throat, and he walked a little bowlegged. He smiled often, sometimes to himself when he was walking up the street to his mother’s.
His mother, Mariah, reminded Tole of his own Charlotte. It was just a fact, both were light-eyed and worry-lined and fierce.
Dixon stood on the landing in the sunlight that set the air and dust on fire, swirling here and there ahead of Tole as he mounted the stairs. Then Dixon turned and reentered his office, leaving the door open, which Tole shut behind him.
Dixon sat at his desk, and Tole stood on the other side of the room under a bird’s-eye map of New Orleans. He kept Dixon between him and the window, and his back to the corner, just in case the men Dixon had sent to follow him were planning something with gunfire.
Dixon looked at him dumbly and innocently, like he halfway expected Tole to compliment him. Maybe he wanted to know what Tole thought of the bourbon so magnanimously poured out in a tin cup and handed to him with such ceremony. “Of course, Mr. Tole, I will need your cooperation in the coming days.”
Dixon could not make his move now, could he? Rumors had spread of an investigation brought by men from Nashville, from the Freedmen’s Bureau or perhaps the U.S. Army, on the subject of the riot and the deaths of the men, Theopolis and the grocer.
The day before, a group of Federal men had come to town, fanned out, and taken depositions of anybody who might have seen what happened, or had something to say about it. Tole had heard they would take their findings back to Nashville and decide on next steps, quite possibly a full-on investigation.
Dixon couldn’t have another killing and another Negro get lynched if investigators were on their way, so Tole reckoned he was safe for a while, maybe a week. But as long as he was alive he assumed Dixon would think of him as a danger, someone who could run his mouth. Tole made these calculations nearly instantly. He had been suckled and raised on such practical reasoning in New York, which had at times seemed not just a real city, but also an exquisitely calibrated scaffolding of plots and hierarchies and postponed revenges. But it turned out that Franklin was unlike New York in some ways he hadn’t predicted.
“I aim to cooperate and always have, Mr. Dixon.”
“We had an agreement in place, Mr. Tole, and as far as I can tell, you failed to hold up your end. My directions were as clear as my intentions, but instead of a clean job, I have a mess. I have just now received official communication to the effect that the U.S. Army will be here in a month—exactly one month after the killings—to hold a tribunal on those killing
Tole looked at the floor. He seemed to always be looking at the floor, as if he were scared to make eye contact with the man in front of him. He didn’t like the way Dixon said educated, as if it were an accusation aimed at him.
“All those stories I’d heard about you being a marksman. They were all just folklore, weren’t they?”
“Those were different times. I was a different man. I told you.”
“You lose your nerve? All that booze got your hands shakin’? Can’t aim right anymore? You know what a broke-down nigger means to me? I know you do.”
This one will kill me when he gets the chance, is what Tole heard.
“But I am in a generous mood, and so I don’t intend to hold that against you. Not much, anyway.”
They sat silently together for a minute or two, Dixon watching Tole’s face.
“You ain’t afraid of me talking?”
Dixon laughed, and reached out to fill up Tole’s tin cup. “No, I’m not afraid of you talking, Mr. Tole.”
“Because I know a lot.” Tole sounded to himself like he was still a boy a million years before, boasting and puzzling his way.
“Right, of course, you’re from New York. I suppose they listen to niggers there, right? To what they say they know?”
Tole nodded, knowing exactly where the man’s point was headed.
“Your knowledge is not a danger to me, it is merely inconvenient. If you talked, I would have to have a few extra conversations I don’t have time to have, I’d have to make extra assurances to the right people, but what you know is not a danger to me. If I thought you would talk I might have you killed, but not because you’re a threat, but simply an annoyance. I don’t like to be annoyed.”