The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
I answered her question.
“I don’t know.”
“No, you don’t. So perhaps you might consider being polite and listening to me try to answer your question, rather than interrupting me?”
She smiled sweetly, but behind the sweetness I could see her thinking that she had won.
“John McGavock was a kind man. That was all the reason I needed.”
“That’s it? That’s all a man had to be?”
“Yes. Now that I’m trying to remember, I believe that was it. But I hardly think of such things anymore.”
25
CARRIE MCGAVOCK
Tshat night I told Zachariah everything, everything I could remember. I had never talked to anyone like that. He was captive, and he irritated me in a way that made me want to talk to him even more, to make him see, to make him understand me. I thought I could talk to him like this because he would go away eventually and take with him what I’d said. But that wasn’t it entirely. He was so strange, and he was unafraid of me. He was a sinful, flawed man, and those sins lay upon his heroics as accents of color on a plain quilt. He was not like the rest of the men in gray. His sins were what emboldened me, because I knew I could not be judged by him. His sins drew me in.
He lay there like a fidgeting child while I talked, constantly brushing the hair from his eyes and running his fingers through it while trying to look at anything but me. His eyes drifted to the ceiling and then out the window and then to the dresser. He smelled tart and sour, like old vinegar. It was the smell of the Negroes who worked on my father’s plantation. He reminded me of them, only he talked back to me. He challenged me. Who had ever taken the time to challenge me, to argue with me? This man, who I had presumed was illiterate, paid attention. If as a girl I had loved John because he was a mystery and didn’t interrupt me, I became obsessed with the one-legged man in the bed because he was a mystery and he did interrupt. I had grown old, and I knew the pain of being left alone with my thoughts. The silence John had given me was no gift, as well intentioned as he was.
I had finished telling Zachariah about my decision to marry John when he abruptly swung himself to the other side of his bed, grabbed the crutches that leaned against the headboard on that side, and drew himself up to his full, now diminished height. I thought he was just fidgeting still, but when I looked at him, he was looking at me sadly.
“I don’t want to hear any more. I’m going for a walk.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Do you know where you’re going? In the dark?”
“I’ll find my way.”
He hobbled over to the far corner where his clothes were piled and awkwardly pulled an old coat over his shoulders. He didn’t look back at me when he passed out the door and turned down the passage. I sat for a moment, deciding whether to follow him. I laughed a little. Of course, I’d follow him.
The moon was hidden behind the clouds, but it was bright enough to cast a weak gray light onto the grounds. I watched him turn a slow circle in the yard, always looking outward. I suppose he had been drifting in and out of sleep that day, because he seemed confused by the absence of men. There were no men in the yard anymore. They had all disappeared in the previous day or so, as if they’d sensed something they could not tolerate. Some had even volunteered for the prison wagon. They had escaped this place, one way or another.
He looked over to where we had piled the dead and the leavings of the surgeons, and they were gone, too. He was alone except for me. My hands looked odd in the light, hard to distinguish from the ground or anything around me. I felt my own self falling into the depth of an empty night. I felt light-headed, as if the boundaries that described my body and my head—the neat lines between here and there—were dissipating to gray, losing their definition and precision, and that I was becoming indistinguishable from the air and the colorless clouds of breath rising from each of us. If I looked at Zachariah just right, he seemed a ghost, too.
“Where the hell is everybody?”
“They’re gone. Not everyone, but almost everyone.”
“I’ve been left behind, then.”
I walked over to him, where he stood between the house and the old cemetery. His eyes were narrowed, and he frightened me.
“Left behind is a matter of interpretation, I guess. It depends on knowing where you had wanted to go and where you are, and the difference between the two. Where had you wanted to go?”
He was frantic, and he began hobbling quickly toward the corner of the house by the garden, to see if the side yard was empty, too.
“Shut the hell up. Just shut the hell up. You talk too damned much. That little bastard Jerrod left me, too.”
I shut up and followed behind him slowly. When I caught up to him, he was leaning against the side of the house and breathing heavily, looking out at the empty side yard and the empty drive. Flecks of paint fell onto his shoulders as he rocked against the side of the house, scraping his back against it like he was trying to push it down. We must get the house painted, I thought, and immediately realized that I wasn’t all there, like I was floating above events. There was no sound except for the crunch of the ground beneath my shoes, and the hiss of air as he breathed through his teeth.
“The bastards left me. Almighty. How the hell am I going to get out of here?”
His voice broke a little, but he coughed and covered it up. The coughing became a hacking, and he had to bend over for a moment before straightening up and holding his hand to his head.
“My head hurts. Dammit.”
“Come inside.”
“I’m fine right here. You’ll tell me where the hell everyone went, and then you will send me on that way, too.”
“You’re in no condition to go anywhere.”
He moved quicker than I imagined possible for someone on crutches. His hand shot out and took hold of my hair, and he yanked my head back. My throat was cold and indecently exposed, I remember thinking, before the pain hit me and I gasped. He wound the hair tighter in his hand, and he pulled my face right to his, as if it were weightless and not attached to my body. His breath smelled like rotting hay.
“I’ll kill you. Don’t want to, but I’ll kill you. I’ve killed many less deserving than you. I don’t love you enough not to kill you. Did you think I did? You’re a strange woman, and you don’t know a thing about me and you don’t care. I ain’t your toy, your pet. You will save me, do you hear me? You will make sure I am not left behind, or I will kill you and your husband and your niggers, and then I will steal what I need and I will make my own way. Do you understand me? Where the hell is Jerrod? What did you do with him?”
When he slipped, he fell quickly and hard. His good leg went out from under him as he pulled back on my hair. He had forgotten his limitations. I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks and the burn at the back of my head, and then I was released and he was lying on the ground.
He’d said he loved me.
I picked up one of his crutches and swung it as hard as I could at his head, and I felt it strike him square in the face. He screamed. Some blood flowed dark down his mouth to his chin. I swung it again and hit his stomach. He’d said he loved me. I swung it again and again like I’d seen men do when they were chopping wood, and again and again he yelled. I would be doing the killing now. I would not let him leave. I couldn’t stop. He was vulnerable to me. He loved me.
I aimed at his head over and over and over, and his shouts became whispers and then silence. I would never stop. He would stay here.
There was pleasure, intense pleasure. I thought I could see every blade of grass in the dark and every frayed thread in his coat and every single drop of blood. I could see it all, so clearly, more clearly than anything I’d ever seen in my life. His arms flopped out from his sides, like a scarecrow.
Not since I was a child had I thought I could order the world to my liking, in the way I imagined it should be. It was the orderin
The hands that grabbed my shoulders and lifted me up were strong and black and callused. I thought they were God’s.
“Miss Carrie! Miss Carrie! No, Miss Carrie. You ain’t to do this, not this. No, ma’am. No, ma’am.”
It was Theopolis, and when he spun me around and I looked up at him, he was as frightened and determined as I’d ever seen a man. I sobbed up at him, hard, like I was hacking something awful up. I looked into his face and hated him, too. He was the child who had complicated everything by his birth. His face was almost as white as mine, and I hated him even more for that. How dare he not be black as night? What right did he have to glow in the faltering moonlight, to hold me, to keep me from doing anything? I would have him whipped—yes, I would. I beat his chest, and he gripped me tighter. He had smiled at me once that night he was born, and I had known he was innocent. He was innocent, and so he was more monstrous for the havoc he caused. I cursed him and cried and leaned against him.
“Who is that, Miss Carrie? Who is this? What he done?”
I knew I couldn’t tell him. This was an impossible situation. The Negro son of Mariah had his hands on me, and a Confederate soldier lay at our feet, possibly dead. Someone’s going to die for this, I thought. Whatever had driven me to violence flowed out of me. I saw things clear again. I looked up at Theopolis again. What a beautiful face, what a beautiful man, I thought. He must not suffer. I looked down at Zachariah. What a beautiful face, what a beautiful man.
“Did he hurt you, Miss Carrie?”
“No.”
“Then why you beat him like that?”
“I don’t know.”
I knew what to do then, right then. My mind was so clear I heard the beetles crawling through the dead leaves at my feet; I felt every tremor in Theopolis’s hand, every contraction of muscle and sinew. I knew exactly what I would do and how I would handle this. No one would be hurt. Everything that had happened here would be analyzed and categorized according to my wishes, and all I had to do was remain silent.
Theopolis looked down at me and drew his lips tight, as if he thought he understood. They’ll believe I’m crazy, they’ve always believed I’m crazy. That will save us all.
“You ain’t all right, are you, Miss Carrie?”
I just smiled and smiled. I began planning Zachariah’s funeral. We would bury him in the north corner of the cemetery, away from all the McGavocks. There would be no headstone, and after a time only I would remember where he was.
I cried. Who was the monster now? I told Theopolis to go away, that I would stay with the body until daylight, when we could see properly and could move it. He said I must not do any such thing, that I had to come into the house, that he could carry the dead man anywhere in the blackest night. I told him to bring me a blanket and leave me be. I told him I wanted to watch the sun rise. He shook his head and fetched a blanket, and I sat down next to Zachariah, who breathed shallowly next to me as I leaned against the house and waited for the day to begin.
26
FRANKLIN
John walked his horse through the town. The street was torn up, and the trees and houses on either side of the road were pocked with bullet holes or shredded by artillery fire. Articles of clothing lay in the road next to the sidewalks—shoes, hats, shirts—as if their owners had been snatched and lifted up out of their corporeal misery and made to disappear, leaving behind the things they’d no longer need.
Carrie had sent the children off, and since then she had not once noticed his coming or going. For all she knew, he’d been gone for a week. He had time. He had been coming to town for supplies he rarely found, and now he was in search of mercy from a man who would not possess it. Another wasted trip perhaps, but so what? He had time.
It was a few minutes before he noticed that the dead were gone. Elsewhere he had become accustomed to the sight of men lugging off the bodies, but here in its center the town seemed emptied of everyone, the living and the dead. He was looking down the road, straight down the center, and knew he was looking into the heart of the whole mess, the place where the violations of human decency had been the most common, and it was almost deserted. Denuded, like a field after a grass fire. The houses were still there, bearing their wounds, but there was no life about them. No one walking around. Maybe they’re still hiding in their basements, waiting. Waiting for what? For something to end? What would that be? How long had it been since everything happened? A day? Three days? I’ve lost track of the time. He began to wander, his purpose forgotten.
His path took him generally in the direction of the poor side of town, called Blood Bucket by the locals because of their belief that much blood was spilled there every weekend after its inhabitants had drunk their fill. It had long been a white enclave for failed farmers, gamblers, and drifters. A few years before, though, free Negroes had begun settling there, and because their freedom was always an open question, they kept to themselves and stuck close to their homes. If there had to be free Negroes, the thinking went among the town’s leaders and its hotheads, it was best that they kept quiet and bottled up by themselves. No sense bringing them into contact with the other Negroes, their Negroes. No telling what kind of havoc might be caused by open communication.
John knew that most of his neighbors were still flummoxed by the notion of a free Negro, but it didn’t shock John much. There had always been free Negroes, freed for one reason or another, usually the magnanimity that occasionally came over old masters facing death, especially if they had no heirs. John himself had known a number of freed Negroes in New Orleans quite well, during that time in his life when he traveled to Louisiana on business, before he married Carrie. Some of them were as white as he was and twice as cultured. This had surprised him, and he had been forever on his guard against seeming less than refined in their presence, for fear of embarrassing himself in front of a Negro, however white their skin. The thing that had shocked John the most was that they were proud of being Negroes.
In Blood Bucket the houses were short and leaned this way and that. Porches sloped, and the piers they were built upon seemed to sag in toward each other, like drunks trying to catch their balance. Every manner of odd amendment had been made to the houses when it suited their occupants. A window tacked on here, an extra room there, maybe a fireplace. The houses may have once had a design, but they had grown and expanded like natural things, like things that bent and twisted toward the light.
There was a dry goods store in Blood Bucket. It was too much to call it a store, really. It was a house owned by an old black man who occasionally got his hands on some things—shoes one week, rolls of homespun the next, liquor every week—and didn’t mind selling them. John strolled over to see the man. He had all the time in the world, and he didn’t mind using it.
Joe was the man’s name, just Joe as far as John knew. Little Negro children stared out from between the weatherworn balusters of their front porches, while their mothers went about boiling clothes and hanging the laundry on lines. He noticed the women didn’t wear shoes and that their toes curled under themselves, conserving heat against the cold ground. They called to their children, but their children did not listen. Or they couldn’t hear while the wind whistled down the alleys and through the eaves of their porches. They watched John walk by, their eyes glistening and crusted at the edges. Their mothers hung laundry and cursed the wind. They were the lucky Negroes, they were free. They still look like slaves, John thought. He could imagine ten thousand slaves hanging laundry on ten thousand lines at that very moment. Barefoot. The difference, John noted, was that their children watched him walk down the middle of their street. They paid him close attention, as if he and his horse, walking slowly and warily behind him, were circus animals on parade. But they didn’
Old Joe was watching him, too. John had been selling bits and pieces of Carnton to Joe for two years. Joe knew people who knew people who would buy such things as ceramic cigar stands and silver pens. These were the little things John could sneak out of the house without Carrie noticing. John wondered how much of Joe’s apparent prosperity had been bought with McGavock heirlooms. He scuffed across the dirt yard and shrugged his shoulders. It didn’t matter.
Joe just rocked back and forth on the back legs of the chair he had set out in the front yard of neatly raked hard-packed ground. John watched him stop rocking, balance on the back legs that had dug deep holes in the ground, and then slowly allow the earth to draw him back down until he was firmly planted again. Joe had decent clothes, clean dungarees without a patch anywhere, a boiled cotton shirt, and a coat made out of an almost new blanket, altered to fit his long arms and narrow shoulders. He let his head stay bare, and John wondered if that was not for poverty’s sake, but because he had a fine, lustrous head of gray hair that looked like a collection of silver curlings. A manly head of hair.