The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
“Aw shit. Just dig, boy.”
Little boys ran through the streets playing with rifles they’d confiscated. The guns were almost as heavy as the boys themselves. They lurched under the weight of the weapons and pointed them at soldiers and at horses and at each other. He did not recognize these children, even though they must have been locals. They did not look right. They wore hats removed from the corpses and were possessed of enraptured, frenzied expressions, as if they had been granted the greatest toys imaginable and the only price of them had been a glimpse of things beyond their ability to describe. These were the crazed grins of beings who had agreed to a terrible price and were getting their money’s worth while they could.
What will happen to our children? John thought.
22
ZACHARIAH CASHWELL
I don’t really know how long I was asleep. Days, a year maybe. Hard to tell. Made me wonder whether putting names to time made much of a difference anyway. What did it measure? Not how much life passes. Hell no. Your whole life can pass and be changed in a second or in a century. Don’t matter.
I dreamed dreams that were weird and colorful and comforting and scary and perverse, but the details ain’t really important enough to tell about. I reckon they weren’t any better or worse than anyone else’s dreams. The flashes, the lights, the things you think are there but aren’t—none of it makes a lick of difference. I ain’t one to talk about dreams anyway. But there was something important about the dreams, and that was the fact that I could remember them all when I woke up. I remembered the details, every color and every word. I knew that I had dreamed for days and that the dreaming had not stopped, that I had thought things I had rarely thought before. I had dreamed before, but I’d usually lose the foggy impressions of those dreams after a few minutes awake, after I’d had time to splash water on my face.
But this time it was as if I’d lived another life, like I’d been gone somewhere for God knows how long. In this place were things I’d seen before but had forgot. I was a child in those days. I was close to being the child I’d once been, when my brain was full of fancy notions and impossible feats. When I awoke, I was as alone as a child, too.
I knew what had happened to me, how that damn woman had reached into the room and plucked me out and sent me off to see the surgeon and his saw. I could remember that, and I could remember staring her down as the surgeon drew the blade across my leg. Folks can’t stand that, to see the evidence of their badness, and I made sure it was right there in the room, plain as could be.
When I awoke, I knew that my leg was gone, but I couldn’t feel it gone. So I didn’t look down for a few hours. They’d given me a hell of a lot of medicine to take the edge off, and I thought it was possible that I had been asleep and someone had changed their mind, and so I didn’t make no big effort to get the fact straight. I even felt that I could wiggle my toes, and that gave me a powerful urge to look down at my leg, but I’d heard of men and their ghost limbs, and I wasn’t going to be tricked like that, not right away anyway. I kept thinking the leg was there, resisting the urge to find out it wasn’t, until a colored servant came into the room I was in and flipped me over like I was no heavier than a child. I have lost my leg. I am smaller. I am less human. I am lighter upon the earth. I am of less significance.
“Get your nigger hands off me.”
Her hands, the hands of this beautiful Negro woman with the freckles and the hard look, those hands made it clear I wasn’t a whole man. In her hands I could feel a lifetime of hobbling around like an old man, whittling peg legs in my spare time, trying to ignore google-eyed children. I would never be able to escape, I would never run again. I felt that I had been chained and bound and made to live at the end of a rope like a dog pegged to the earth. I was contained, to use the word the officers like to throw around. Contain the enemy, that’s the plan. The bed, the room, the bandages on my right leg, none of that was in my plan. There had been no plan, just fire and shrapnel and running forward. I wondered how I would earn a living.
“There’s no need to talk to her like that.”
I knew that voice, but at first I could not tell where it was coming from. It was the woman, the bossy one, the thief who stole my leg.
“She’s just trying to get you clean again.”
The voice came from above and behind me to my left, and I tried to flip over to tell her what the hell I thought of her and her Negress, but I couldn’t push off to roll over to my left. No leg to push with. I flopped like a fish in the summer shallows and snorted out my nose.
“Don’t remember being clean, and I don’t believe I want you this close to me. Liable to take an eye from me, or my liver. You want some other part of me? Here, take my head. This here is Zachariah Cashwell’s head, and you can have it.”
Finally I pushed off with my right arm and rolled onto my left side. The Negress had joined the white woman on that side of the bed, and they both stood there with their arms folded over their chests like they were sizing up livestock.
“I don’t believe I will be the one to clean you. It wouldn’t be proper, though Lord knows what’s proper these days. I don’t suppose it’s proper for a woman to be alone in a house with hundreds of men, but there isn’t any helping that, is there?”
She spoke direct to me without fear, like she’d spoken to those men back in the room where we were all laid out. She had spoken to us like little boys who weren’t aware of something she knew all about and was tired of having to explain. I wasn’t used to being spoken to by a woman that way. I wasn’t used to being spoken to by a woman, truth be told, but I knew this was one woman who was taking some liberties, who knew she was in control for once.
“Who are you?”
Carrie McGavock, she said, and this was her house and her bed. You are lying in my bed, so I believe it would be best if you watched yourself and treated Mariah with a little respect. She said this, and her eyes seemed to get bigger and a little darker all at once, like a cat that’s been startled by what it sees. This is all mine, she said, and I don’t mind saying that those words scared me a little.
The Negress shook her head slowly, from side to side. I was scared of her, too. I was scared of every damned thing at that moment. My leg hurt like hell, sometimes like it had been ripped off by giant men and sewn up with baling wire, and sometimes like a band of swamp elves were gathered around my stump and poking flaming cypress branches into the wound. I hadn’t thought of swamp elves since I was a child. I was asleep again.
I dreamed lightly and moved in and out of wakefulness. I dreamed of the McGavock woman, who led me by the hand through a grove of trees, each of them perfectly aligned and identical, row upon row of trees with deeply furrowed bark that scratched my hand as I tried to grab them, to keep her from taking me farther in. But I was dragged along by something, and the trees would not help me. She was saying something I couldn’t understand. She turned to me with black eyes and said something so nice it sounded like bells, and after a while I come to think that she was telling me the names of the trees. Not their kind—they were all the same kind, whatever they were—but their names. She’d named them and knew where each stood. I tried to say, You’re crazy, but somehow it came out as a speech to a squad of faceless men, and I was telling them that there was no hope at all and that there had never been any and that we might as well enjoy it while we can, and how bad could a bullet feel anyway? And they nodded their faceless heads and jumped to their feet and went tear-assing through the grove until all I could see was the glint of their rifle barrels in the distant dark. The woman stood beside me, and her face changed and her eyes lightened, and I could see a glimpse of my mother in those eyes, before she left me with my aunt. I’m going West, and I’ll send for you right soon, son. The words twisted my guts like they always did. The McGavock woman’s face changed again, and she was herself once more. When the trees began to sway and topple in the wind, crashing about us, we went striding out like gods, pushing the big trunks asi
I awoke again and thought, Is she Death? How could Death be so pretty?
The room was empty, and I could barely hear the shouts and cries of the men in the surgeons’ room. I reckoned I was in some other, distant part of the house. Why had I been put there, in the big bed with the soft ticking and the clean sheets? I saw the sky through the window and was surprised that it wasn’t gray, like a proper winter sky. It was bruised and yellow like it had been punched, like a sky looks when a storm’s coming up the river and dumping buckets of rain every which way. It was low and pressed in on me, even through that little window, and I thought I could feel it lying heavy on my chest. Occasionally I’d see soldiers walk by the window, and occasionally one would slip and fall like he’d been tripped up or pushed from above.
I decided against ever getting up again, but the Negress came back and she had other plans.
“Sergeant Cashwell, it’s time for you to be gettin’ up.”
“No, I think I’ll be stayin’ here awhile. It’s right comfortable, and it’s the least you-all can do for me, having hacked me up like a hog. I ain’t been in such a bed before, and I’m just startin’ to get used to it.”
The Negress ran her hand along an old chest of drawers that sat along one side of the room, and studied the white dust that attached itself to the edge of her hand. She looked over at me like she was fixin’ to bring the edge of that hand down across the bridge of my nose, and I wasn’t sure I could stop her. I was weak, which was also a new experience for me.
“What we done . . . what Miss Carrie and those doctors has done . . . is the most that can be done for you. But I ain’t been sent here to argue with you. I been sent to give you these.”
She reached outside the door and pulled in a pair of rough-cut crutches. The tops of them had been wrapped with cloth and twine, but they still looked pretty hard.
“What you goin’ to do with those?” I asked.
“Give them to you, Miss Carrie says.”
“I appreciate that, but I don’t think I’ll be needing them. Give ’em to one of those boys who keep stumbling around out there, outside that window. I plan to stay right here. Comfortable and safe, that’s my new plan.”
She laughed. “Ain’t safe here.”
“Is that right?”
“Ain’t safe nowhere around here. You a prisoner, you know.”
“This is prison? Hate to see freedom, then. Couldn’t take it. Too much pleasure in it, I reckon.”
“You laugh all you want, but you’ll be wantin’ them crutches right soon when they come to take you all away.”
“Who’s they?”
“Who do you think?”
“The Yankees?”
“The very same.”
“The men in blue?”
“Them, too.”
“Unionists, then.”
“I reckon I heard that word, yes.”
“Republicans.”
“Hard to tell who’s a Republican these days.”
“I guess that’s the truth.”
“Don’t doubt me, Sergeant Cashwell. I know a little more than your average nigger.”
“I didn’t doubt it.”
“Yes, you did.”
I liked her. She was like me, only she was a Negro and a beautiful woman. She was tough and smart-mouthed, and I liked it. There were a lot of men who would have smacked her down for talking like that, but I had never been bothered by such talk. I never did care much one way or another about a Negro and never gave much thought to what was proper coming out of their mouths. I was never obsessed by ’em like a lot of other white folks. I didn’t get scared by the thought of a Negro uprising, which made me a little unusual where I come from. I just reckoned I could always take care of myself and fade into the swamp. Disappear. Now I had a Negro handing me a pair of crutches so I could try to take care of myself before the Yankees came for me. I wasn’t at all as confident about things. The swamp could drown me now.
“All right, I’ll take ’em.”
“Miss Carrie wants to see you on the back porch.”
“Anything else she want? She want me to dance for her?”
“That be it for now.”
That wouldn’t be it, though. That Negress knew a lot more, she just wasn’t going to let on. I liked her less for that, but not until later.
I rolled over onto my right side because I could get some push from my good left leg. Still strong, yes, sir, like an oak. I took the opportunity to check out my pecker, too, and everything seemed to be working proper once I pulled my trousers down a bit. Like an oak. That made me laugh. Next to the empty air where my leg had once been, my pecker was as solid and impressive as it had ever been, which had never been much, to tell the truth. That had never mattered to me much. Now it did. Now it mattered, and I suddenly couldn’t imagine the woman who would want to see me now. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. The Lord likes His jokes.
I got so I could sit up on the side of the bed, and I pulled the crutches over the bed and set them standing on either side of me so I could lift myself up to stand. My arms trembled as I tried to yank myself up, and the crutches got so wobbly that one scooted out from under me and clattered to the floor. I fell back on my ass and lost the other crutch. I lay there for a few minutes looking up at the ceiling and admiring the wallpaper moldings and the almost perfect plaster ceiling, with only a few mold marks here and there. I counted them. Seven. I wondered how mold chose where to appear and blossom. Was it random, or was there some sort of plan for it? Don’t matter. The mold looked like it was meant to be there to make the room seem real and worldly, where things were never quite as clean and smooth and perfect as you thought they ought to be.
I rolled over on my stomach and felt the wool blanket scratching my belly. I hoped they hadn’t used one of the army blankets, or else they’d have fleas and mites everywhere in the house in no time, but I looked at it and it was too finely woven and too colorful to be one of ours. I pulled myself over to the side of the bed and reached out to try to snag the crutches. I got far out over the edge until I could feel myself wobbling and about to fall. Got to remember I ain’t got so much ballast anymore. It was just enough to snatch up the crutches and get them situated again. This time I set myself up on the side of the bed and rocked myself into a standing position, and this seemed to work pretty good. The crutches were hard on my pits, though.
Once you get the swinging action going, you can move steady on crutches. My leg hurt awful, but they give me dope for the pain, and I made good use of it. I stumbled a few times right off, and I took a couple of practice laps around the bed to get the hang of it. But finally I went out the door of the bedroom and into the sunlit hallway, keeping my eyes on the floor ahead of me in case of divots in the wood or other things that could trip a man up. The floor was joined tight, though, and I admired it. Clean, too.
I saw a small door up ahead that looked like it led out onto a porch, and I reckoned that was where the McGavock woman was at. The door was solid poplar and fit perfectly in its door frame, and I had a time trying to get it pushed open. Someone around here knows how to cut a piece of wood, I thought. But I finally got the door open, and I stepped out into perversity. That’s the only word I got for it.
I’d seen my share of battles, and after the battles, to be sure; so perhaps it was the sudden chaos of this, after all the quiet and solitude of the room. Now I thought it was like being at the carnival that came through our town back in Arkansas, only the things that were promised on the sides of the wagons—great terrifying freaks that oughtn’t to ever have lived—were real. The knowledge I had had as a kid, that the terrors were illusions, was not there for me now. I tried to think fake, fake, fake, but it was impossible to keep up with what I saw.
The carts were loaded with dead men, and the smoke that blew everywhere and kept me coughing only partially obscured the stink. Men limped and crawled across the ground below me, calling for water or frien
“Good morning, Mr. Cashwell.”
I saw Mrs. McGavock boiling bloody bandages in a pot off one end of the porch. I couldn’t speak.
“Things look bad out here, but I’m sure you’ve seen worse.”
But I’d never seen worse.
The worm is among us, the preacher said, before he took my mother away. The worm is among us, heed the signs. He breaks the hearts of men, snaps their bones, tears asunder the bond between man and woman, turns child upon child, rains injustice upon the fields until they have blackened and wilted from the poison. And the worm will leave the broken and the poisoned in his slimy trail, as the serpent left wormwood behind in its escape from paradise. The worm is here, oh yes.
My head hurt, but soon I was used to it and the sight of the men in front of me. A young white woman I’d seen once or twice moved among the men, bringing water and what looked like boiled potatoes in pots. The McGavock woman called out to her, directing her here and there, from this group to that group. After a while Mrs. McGavock sat on the back steps to watch, and I stood over her, trying to get used to balancing on my new crutches.
“Becky, mind you don’t give out the water all at once. Move around. There are some fellows over there who look thirstier than those.”
Mrs. McGavock turned toward me without looking up and began to talk.
“That girl’s brother, a little boy, almost had his head shot off.”
“Was he in the fight?”
“No, of course not.”
“Bad luck, then.”
“I don’t believe in luck anymore, Mr. Cashwell.”