The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
Mariah walked past the plaques of the “Masks of Tragedy” on the walls of the hallway and, now hurrying, across the worn-out floorcloth that led to the front doors, which she unlocked. She stepped out onto the portico. She held her hands clasped in front of her to keep them from shaking.
At the end of the front walkway a small group of riders had come to a halt, and between the rows of boxwoods and cedars that lined the front walk she could see a tall man unwind himself from the back of his horse and step to the ground. His movements seemed so languid she was surprised by how quickly he moved up the path. She wanted him to stay forever down by the gate. He walked bowlegged and loose, with his head down, and was upon her before she knew it. When he first noticed her, he made a gesture as if to take off his hat, but when he saw her fully, he left it on. Down by the gate one of the other gray men dismounted and held the horse of his leader in one bony hand.
“I need to use your back porch, second floor. I saw it on the way up here. Get your people so I can talk to ’em.”
“Pardon me, sir, but Colonel McGavock’s out, and Mrs. McGavock’s a mite too sick to take visitors. She would be happy to receive you on another day, and she send her regrets.”
He eyed her for a moment, as if he was trying to figure her out, and then he nodded. He knocked his boot against the bottom step of the landing, and clods of red mud fell into the path.
“I ain’t a visitor. I am General Forrest, and I’ma use your house to reconnoiter awhile. Watch yourself.”
With that, he strode up the stairs two at a time and tried to brush past Mariah, but she had already fallen back to the doorway.
“Please, sir, Colonel McGavock say no visitors or disturbances.”
Forrest pulled up and clenched his fists for a moment before rocking back on his heels and nodding again. He seemed to be trying to remember something he had once known, maybe something he had been taught when he was a boy but had long since forgotten. He nodded and took a deep breath.
“Please tell your mistress I am right sorry she’s sick and that I hope she gets well. I will do my damnedest to stay quiet, but I’m coming in. Get out of the way.”
Mariah had made her attempt, and now she knew it was time to step aside. She remembered where she’d heard Forrest’s name. Some of the town Negroes had been talking about him the last time she’d gone in to get supplies. Forrest killed all them colored soldiers, throttled them right around the neck. He left not a one standing, and he put their heads on sticks all around the place. Fort Pillow it was. He the devil, no doubt. The Lord goin’ to make him pay, yes. This memory made him seem smaller to her, less human, and therefore more contemptible. She would not give him respect. She stood with her back to the wall as he strode into the house and trod hard across the diagonal squares of the floorcloth toward the stairs. Mariah saw his steps raise little dust balls.
“Is this the way up’n the top floor?”
“Yes.”
“You let me know when Colonel McGavock gets back, hear?”
“Yes.”
But Mariah followed him up the stairs. She would not let him out of her sight, not while Carrie was up there.
3
SERGEANT ZACHARIAH CASHWELL,
24TH ARKANSAS
We were marching up that pike, and everywhere you looked there were things cast off by the Yankees littering the sides of the road, and it was everything our officers could do to keep the young ones from ducking out of formation and snatching up something bright and useful-looking, like crows looking to decorate their nests. The old ones, like me, we knew better than to pick up anything, because you’d have to carry it, and we knew that our burden was heavy enough. But, hell, the Yankees had thrown away more than we’d laid our eyes on in months, maybe years. There were pocket Bibles and little writing desks, poker chips and love letters, euchre decks and nightshirts, canteens and pots of jam, and all kinds of fancy knives. It looked like a colossus had picked up a train full of things, from New York or one of those kinds of places, and dumped it all out to see what was what. And I’m just mentioning the things that you might want to pick up and keep. There was a lot more, besides. There were wagons left burning on the side of the road, crates of rotten and infested meat, horses and mules shot in their traces. I reckon those animals weren’t moving fast enough, and you couldn’t blame the Yankees for lightening their loads if they could, but it was a sorry sight. Even so, all that gear gladdened my heart because it seemed so desperate. They were running, by God. They were running from us, the 24th Arkansas, and all the rest of the brigades ahead of us and behind us. The columns stretched far as I could see when I wiped the sweat from my eyes and got a good look around. But mostly I just kept my head down and put my feet down, one in front of the other, the way I’d learned to do.
The officers rode up and down the column on their horses, saying all sorts of things to keep our spirits up. I’d learned that if you needed an officer to pick up your spirits, you were in sorry shape. But some of the younger boys listened, and they were heartened by it. The officers talked about the glory of the South and about how our women would be watching and how they would expect us to fight like Southern men—hard and without quitting. I wanted to say, Until that bullet come for you, but I didn’t. Those officers were getting a whole lot of the men riled up for a fight, and I figured that was good no matter what else I had to say about it. Some of our boys had their homes around there, and you could just tell they were itching to get going. You had to hold them back, tell them to pace themselves, or else they’d start running and whooping and getting all lathered.
One big hoss in the company ahead, a man with a full beard and a neck like a hog’s, started yelling for the band to give us a tune. He stomped his feet and rattled the bayonet he had at his side, and then some other of the boys did the same thing, and pretty soon we were all yelling at the band to play “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” to give us a tune and be useful for once. The band even got a few notes off before one of the company commanders rode by, snatched up a trumpet, and threatened to beat them with it if he heard another note. That was funny to watch, and it was about as good a morale lifter as hearing “The Bonnie Blue Flag” straight through, on account of our band wasn’t very accomplished.
The thing I kept thinking about was the nightshirts and the pots of jam, lying there on the roadside. They made me wonder whether we’d been fighting in the same war.
And then the order went out to get on line. They just up and stopped us, and I couldn’t help running into the man ahead of me and getting a whiff of the sweat and stink rising up off his homespun shirt. The men quit jabbering, and then the thousands of us were moving to either side of the road, all bunched up at first but then thinning out as the line got longer and longer, like a ball of twine unwinding. There wasn’t any stomping of the feet then, no bayonet rattling. We picked our way across the hills, some units stopping at the edge of a tree line, most of us out in the open. It took me a few moments to realize we were going to stop and fight right here, rather than chase the Yanks all the way to Nashville. It looked like a mighty long way to the Union lines, which were up on a rise. I could see men way up there in town tossing dirt around. The sunlight flashed off their shovels and picks, and sometimes it seemed like you could actually pick out the sound of their work a few seconds after you’d seen their tools go chunking into the dirt. It was so damn hot for late November. What had General Hood said when we crossed the river into Tennessee? No more fighting on the enemy’s terms. I looked at those battlements up ahead over a mile distant, and I thought, We must be the greatest army in the world if these are our terms.
I’d been fighting for three years by then. I’d been shot once, and my left arm still didn’t feel right. Sometimes I had a hard time lifting my rifle and keeping it steady. I thought about this and began flexing my arm to get it limbered up. We sat down in place and began the long wait.
It always seemed a long wait before the fight, no matter how long it took. Office
The thing I’m about to say, you might not understand unless you’ve been in war. But in those moments before the fight, if you were a smart man, you’d figure out a way to convince yourself that it didn’t matter to you if you lived or died. If you’re safe in your house, with your children running around underfoot and with fields that need to be worked, it’s an impossible way of thinking unless you’re sick or touched in the head. Of course it mattered if you lived or died. But if you went into a battle caring what happened to you, you wouldn’t be able to fight, even though you knew you were as likely to die as the next man whether you cared or not. There wasn’t any logic to who got killed and who didn’t, and it was better that your final thoughts not be of cowardice and regret. It was better not to care, and to let yourself be swept up in the rush of the men beside you, to drive forward into the smoke and fire with the knowledge that you had already beaten death. When you let yourself go like that, you could fight on and on.
Everyone had their own way of getting their mind right. We lingered there on the outskirts of Franklin, and I could see each of the men in my company going through their little rituals. There were two ways of getting ready. Most of the new men, unless they were unusually wise or strong-minded, went about tricking themselves into forgetting the possibility of death. One youngster in an almost clean uniform took a couple pieces of straw, stuck it in his hat, and began to loudly tell every joke he could remember to no one in particular, as if everything would be all right if he could keep laughing right up until the bullet got him. A few people were listening to him, but that wasn’t really the point.
Listen here, I got another one. Three old men come courting a young lady, and she says, “What can I expect from a marriage to you?” And the first old man, he says, “I’ve got a big ol’ . . .”
Other younger ones paced back and forth, hitting themselves in the chest, shaking their heads like bulls, and cursing. These were the ones who were trying to make themselves so angry and riled up that they’d run like they had blinders on and rush wherever someone pointed them without thinking about anything except throttling something or somebody. Some of these boys picked up rocks and threw them as hard as they could at the confused rabbits, squirrels, and coveys of quail flushed out of their hiding places by our noise. I caught one mountain boy with stringy auburn hair and no shoes punching and kicking at an old locust tree behind us, and I yanked him around and sat him down before he hurt himself.
Me and some of the other veterans, we had different ways. We’d all been in battle, and you couldn’t go through such a thing more than a couple times without it becoming impossible to forget death. The boy I’d joined up with three years before, my best friend from Fayetteville, he’d gotten a minié ball through the eye at Atlanta. In my dreams I still see his pink round face thrown back on the ground, his mouth open and his crooked teeth bared, his straw-blond hair matted with blood. After that, I never forgot about death.
The way I prepared myself was to sit down on my pack, pick out a point on the horizon, and stare at it. This is what I did that day at Franklin. I stared and stared at what appeared to be a church steeple on the edge of the town, just at the limits of my vision, and I took stock of my place in the world. My father had died young, and my ma ran off when I was about ten. I didn’t have a girl, I had no one to go back to. I was just a man, and even if I’d lived to be a hundred, I’d still be forgotten someday. Men die, that’s how it is. I had lost my faith by then; otherwise, I guess I would have prayed for my safety, but I didn’t. I took deep breaths, stared at that steeple, and convinced myself I didn’t matter in this world. I was an ant, a speck of dust, a forgotten memory. I was insignificant like everyone else, and it was this insignificance that made me strong. If my life was insignificant and my death meaningless, then I was free of this world and I became the sole sovereign of my own world, a world in which one act of courage before death would be mine to keep forever. I could keep that from God.
When they called us up to get on line again, this time for keeps, I was ready. Men dusted themselves off, tightened their belts, and obsessively checked their cartridges and ammunition, just in case. I stood there, staring forward, silent, looking out over the rolling land, hearing the pop pop pop of pickets firing their first shots, and thinking I could almost see around the bend of the earth if I looked hard enough. It was so pretty. The hills were glowing and soft-looking, and I saw a couple of deer scatter out of the woods and leap across the fields as we moved out. I could have seen myself living in that little town in front of me, in a proper house, under a different set of circumstances and in a different lifetime. Before we stepped off, I thought, I wonder why they chose this place for me to die.
And that, finally, was my real strength: I knew I was going to die. I wasn’t happy about it, but I felt relieved to know it.
4
CARRIE MCGAVOCK
I heard the muffled voices downstairs in the central passage and then the sound of hard boots on the creaky stairs. I could smell tobacco and sweat, a scent I imagined drifting off him and insinuating itself into the warp and weave of my house, disturbing my peace, throwing everything off kilter. What could possibly be so important? I turned back to Martha’s dress and scrubbed until the threading began to fray.
We must endeavor to keep her cool, and her room darkened. Close the blinds, please.
The room felt suddenly hot and stale. There seemed to be no air; whatever air that remained seemed thin and fragile and musty. I stood up from the bed and crossed to the window that looked out over the front walk. The condensation had evaporated in the sun, which now loomed high over an unusually warm day. I could see out to the driveway and observed the men waiting with their horses. I began to drum the windowsill with my fingers, yawning. I yawned uncontrollably when I was nervous, one little yawn after another. It was an odd habit that had possessed me since childhood. It caused my hand to flutter mouthward whenever I felt myself growing agitated. I stared down at the horsemen and tried to project my thoughts toward them. Go away. I thought they might hear me, but they didn’t. They looked scared, but I didn’t trust my reckoning of things anymore. I would not credit them with fear.
I turned my back to the window and hurried toward the door, which I locked. I pressed my ear to it and felt the cool chalky paint against my cheek. What were they saying? I could barely hear.
Doctor, she won’t move.
No. Something else. They were saying something about the war. The war, which had pulsed and droned all around me for so long and which had already leveled much of our ancient grove, cut down by slaves I hadn’t recognized for reasons I couldn’t fathom. There wasn’t much about the mechanics of war I cared to understand. Even so, I couldn’t help thinking that I was besieged, and I couldn’t help hoping that the Southern army would come raise the occupation and drive the invaders out. My desire to be rescued was tempered by the paradox of its source, which was my abiding urge to be left alone. I wanted the Confederates to fight, just not here.
It hurts, Mama.
I heard the man shuffle through the bedroom next to Martha’s, I heard the squeal and rattling of the big jib window being wrenched open, and then I heard the man step out onto the second floor of the porch. Mariah’s soft, irregular steps followed behind him. I turned slowly from the door and stood staring at Martha’s silk day dress, green and
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
A new hole had appeared in the dress’s hem. Time kept ticking on and on, pounding and pounding at my temples. The moths would not leave my little girl’s things alone, always chewing and chewing and chewing. I could feel my pulse beating in my throat and my stomach twisting. I found it difficult to focus my eyes; everything seemed guarded by a gauzy shroud. I thought I might faint and looked around for a place to crumple.
We can only wait and see.
Without thinking I snatched up the dress as if the bed had stolen it from me. I walked to the closet, put the dress onto a hanger, and pushed on the closet door until it clicked shut. For a moment I could hear the clothes swishing back and forth before all went silent.
I went back to the door. They were out on the back porch. I held my breath and tried to shrink into the folds of my black crinoline. After a few minutes I heard a voice again, but this time the man seemed to be talking to himself, mumbling without reply in a voice that sounded rusty and agitated. I heard just a few words. Lookout . . . order of battle . . . enfilade . . . skeer . . . wounded. I wondered what kind of madman talked to himself like that.
Dear Mama,
We have lost Martha, who has gone to be united with our Lord Jesus. I was with her to the end, and even as she lay dying she reached out and took my hand and told me that all would be well. I shouldn’t worry, she said, our Savior would carry her home. Then she rose up from the bed a little, looked to heaven, smiled, and then fell back unto death. She was at peace, finally. She was so beautiful.