The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
“I could say no.”
“You won’t. You’re as curious as I am. Ornery but curious.”
I got down from the cart and went over to her side, where I waited. She sat with her arms crossed, as if trying to hold herself back. Then she said, “Damn,” and climbed down next to me.
We didn’t talk for some time. I took her arm, and we walked slowly through the field, a few dozen yards from a long pile of old dead Osage orange trees that ran parallel with the base of a hill, below Baylor’s place. Our skirts whispered against the grass and against each other. The ground was lumpy and uneven, and we often stumbled. After I nearly fell headfirst to the ground, my boot heel stuck in a hidden hole in the grass, Mariah held me up and then held me still. She quit walking.
“What is it?”
“Just a feeling. I’m seeing faces going by and into the distance until they real little, and then circling back and going by again. They got no expressions. They just going round and round. I almost think they going to go so far they can’t come back, but they come back.”
We walked on, found more solid ground, and I stroked Mariah’s hair while she looked down at her feet and cursed me under her breath.
When the cursing stopped, I spoke again.
“What now?”
“There a big bird, real white, like the ones we had back in Terrebonne. He stepping around in the shallows of a big water. And there a man rowing a boat along the shore, rowing and rowing. He singing something. I can tell because he moving like there’s music and I can see his mouth moving. Every so often he stops and pulls in a long line with a big net attached to the back of it, and he dumps all kind of little fish into a big bucket he got at the front of his boat. Then he just go on again. His boat say ‘Bait.’ Funny name. He look happy. He just keep doing it over and over again, happy as anything. Don’t look like he want to stop, ever. The sun is pretty on the water, but he don’t look like he sweating a lick.”
I tried to bring Mariah along, but she pulled back.
“They all alone. I see a lot of men. That one playing the piano, this one eating fried chicken, that one preaching in the pulpit and smiling up at the Lord Jesus upon the cross. I see a man drinking whiskey, and another man riding his horse faster than I ever seen a horse move. But there ain’t nobody else with them. That man eating chicken alone.”
I was starting to think that I didn’t want to hear any more, but Mariah was frantic.
“They gots what they want. They all gots what they want. They just don’t got anybody to share it with, I guess. I feel that. I feel lonely. I feel cold, real cold.”
I had never in my life tried to interpret the things Mariah saw, and I didn’t this time, either. But I imagined the man in the boat, turning his circles and catching his fish, over and over and over again. His heart’s desire, certainly, but only to be had without rest or relief. It was a horror I had not imagined, that one could hardly imagine. It was enough to make a body question paradise itself.
We rode back to the house in the dark, this time with Mariah driving the horses. I knew John would be upset, but I didn’t care. I knew those men in the field, and now Mariah knew them, too, and there wasn’t any way to ignore them any longer. Bones are bones, but not when they are married to life and memory, whether in the letters of the living or in the vision of a woman trembling at dusk in an unwelcoming field. After that, they’re something more than bones.
41
FRANKLIN
It was too late in the year for blueberry flowers, so Mariah went after roots from the grove—forest peas, which were just flowering. If she could dry up some of those, maybe she could get Eli to slip some pieces into her boy’s clothes. The Indians said that the root of the forest pea would carry a soul through difficulty unharmed. That would be a start.
She hitched her skirt up and felt the summer sun beating down on the back of her legs and neck. She liked that feeling, the feeling of absorbing the sun. It made her feel larger. She did not enjoy the thorny vines scratching white lines across her legs, but that couldn’t be helped—the forest pea, an almost invisible purple ghost among wildflowers, had to be stalked. She followed the McGavocks’ creek until she was off the property and far away to the south. The forest floor was dry and smelled like a neglected attic except when the breeze kicked up and the trees hushed at each other, and suddenly she could smell the creek and the little black locust trees angling for a space at the water.
She couldn’t concentrate—her head was too full—and finally she quit looking. The forest pea was not a plant that could be stumbled upon. It had to be sought with an empty mind. But she couldn’t empty her mind; there was too much to think about. So she waded into the creek and watched the minnows poking at her toes. For the moment she was content to stand there and feel the water and watch the treetops. This was the kind of happiness she had hoped for her son. Modest, quiet, unseen, inalienable. She admitted, finally, that there were times, very rare ones, when she did go walking for its own sake. Or her own sake, more accurately.
She made for the edge of the forest and the pike, which would take her home. She broke through the wild hedge of little poplars that ringed the older trees and emerged into the wide sunlight, where she stopped short. She dropped her skirts until they hung properly. She straightened her dress. She wiped the dirt from her cheeks and tucked her hair behind her ears.
Where did all the white men come from?
Somehow she’d become twisted in the woods and had ended up in the middle of one of the cities of the dead. This old burial mound was one of a few around Franklin. Most were located along the Harpeth River, where they were part of that chain of mounds and subsumed ancient cities that ran down along the Natchez Trace. Mariah had never much wondered about them, only occasionally marveling at the odd shape of the hills, small, grass-covered pyramids whose peaks had been worn and rounded by the elements. She had never thought much about what might be contained in such a hill, and she had no idea who might have built them. They were, in fact, the remnants of a disappeared civilization, forgotten even to the few local Indians who still remained when the whites first brought slaves here.
White men in broad, thick mustaches, sleeves rolled above their elbows, crawled over the hill like termites. They carried shovels with them and had carved an indentation in the side of the mound. It looked like someone had taken a bite out of it.
Mariah backed herself back into the woods. They were pulling things out of the ground and carrying them down to a set of large tables, where men worked with brushes. A procession of men bore long bones like bundles of kindling upon their shoulders. The skulls they treated with some daintiness and, perhaps, respect.
A man with a broad black hat watched from the top of the hill. He stopped one of the workers, took a bone from him, hefted it in his hands, and then placed it along his own upper thigh, as if to measure himself against the other man who, Mariah guessed, must have been dead a million years. The dead man had been much taller, that was clear. The man in the hat laughed and handed the bone back to the worker, who took it down to the tables, where other workers began to brush the dirt away. She watched the man in the black hat and thought he looked like a nice man. His face was fat and red, but he looked strong and healthy, and he didn’t do much except to scratch his ear and nod at the men carrying bones away. Mariah wondered why he wanted those old bones and whether he knew whose souls those bones had once contained. He didn’t look much like an Indian.
Before she retreated entirely into the forest to find a different way back to the house, she felt her head begin to throb. She slumped down against a black oak and waited for the spell to pass. She hoped there would be no visions, no voices, because she was afraid of what might emerge from an open grave and enter her head. But she closed her eyes against the pain.
Then she saw the living, not the dead. She saw little boys chasing after their mothers, and old feists that by rights should have been dead. There were cook fires going here and there and ta
42
ZACHARIAH CASHWELL
By the time we arrived in Franklin and I walked into that nigger’s shoe store looking for a new boot for my wood leg, I’d almost begun believing that I was traveling toward my true home.
The nigger was Mrs. McGavock’s, I knew that straightaway. He’d been the one to shove me down in that hole. I didn’t hold that against him, but I remember his mistrust of me, and that I held against him. But from the looks of the other boots lining the shelves of his workshop, it seemed like he made a good boot, so I was willing to forget all about the past.
Jerrod and I had got all turned around on our way to Franklin, and we’d ended up coming through town from the north. Our journey had taken us past fields that were just being reclaimed again, past old men clearing little cedars and hip-high poplars from old cotton fields, and past young women cradling new babies on their hips, maybe fathered by them same old men in the fields. I didn’t see no other men except for the niggers. I’d long since got used to the niggers running their own places. What did I care? But they hadn’t got used to it yet, and sometimes I could tell they didn’t know whether to doff their hats or shoot me in the head. The countryside had changed.
As we got closer to Franklin, though, some of the hills were familiar, rolling around into the distance or eaten up by a stand of trees. My eyes showed me other hills that seemed familiar, too, their curve and height and whatnot, even if I’d never seen them before. My mind was playing tricks on me, reckon, since it knew I was heading toward Franklin and that soon I would be up on a hill I knew all too well. Or maybe God was playing that trick with me. Same thing.
I didn’t know whether Tennessee was emptier and quieter than it had been those years before, but that’s just how it seemed. I reckon I’d changed, or my memories had grown and twisted and shifted over time. Tennessee had been filled with noise and smoke, and now it was getting back its fields, and all you could hear was the sparrows and the mockingbirds chasing crows. Sometimes you could hear one of them young brides calling to her husband. I saw signs of the war here and there—the stumps of felled and burned trees, bullet holes in the sides of barns—but it was also possible to look around and imagine that it had never happened, that it was 1860 again and people were just going on with they lives like always, only the Negroes were going on with their lives a little more openly than normal. The closer we came to Franklin, the more it shocked me that the war weren’t on the lips of every single man, woman, and child we met. It wasn’t, but it was all I could think about. The war, Carnton, and her.
So Jerrod and I rode into town, and before long we were standing in front of a tin-roofed cottage with a little porch from which swung a sign with a shoe on it. And inside this house was that Negro of hers. I could see him from the street because he was so light he almost shined in the dark of that little room. I turned to Jerrod.
“Reckon I need a boot.”
Jerrod leaned up against the porch post and spit into the dirt.
“I never understood why you need a boot for a foot that don’t exist.”
“I got my reasons.”
“I mean, you could have anything at the end of that thing. You could have a hoof, and we could take you over to the smith’s. Or you could have a paw or a ball or something. You ain’t creative, I’ll say that.”
“I got a foot, and it needs a boot. Let me go in here and talk to this nigger about a boot. Maybe you could find the animals some water, too.”
“Ought to sell your horse, if you settling down here.”
“I ain’t settling down.”
“You’ll stay.”
He gave me a look, as if he was wanting to say more, but he didn’t. He knew me well enough not to say her name to me.
“I ain’t staying.”
I walked into the cobbler’s shop and stood in the doorway, looking down at the man cutting leather from a pattern. He was big, but his fingers were thin, and they moved faster than I could track them. I didn’t remember delicate fingers.
“Howdy.”
He looked up quickly. He hadn’t noticed I’d come in. He was about to say something but choked it off. He looked at me some more, and I saw him recognize me. A man’s eyes set just so when they got you pegged, and he’d got me pegged. Didn’t know how to play it, though, I reckon, so he chose to act like we was strangers.
“May I help you, sir?”
“You may. I need a boot.”
“One pair of boots.”
“One boot.”
I stomped my wood leg on his floor, and the echo gave him the idea.
“I see.”
“For the wood leg, not the good one.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was thinking they ought to match, though. Same kind of leather and all. Got to keep up my appearances.”
I knew I looked like hell, and I could see him trying to reckon what appearances, exactly, I was trying to keep up. And why.
“How quick can you work?”
“I’ve got a week’s worth of work already.”
“How much to jump ahead of the line a little?”
“Well, I can’t—”
“What if it was Mrs. McGavock done bring you one of her husband John’s shoes?”
That wasn’t exactly the right thing to say right then. He and I both knew he’d do up Mr. John’s shoes right quick, but if he were to admit that, it’d make him seem like not much more than the McGavocks’ house nigger still. He was one of the other kind of Negro, the kind that couldn’t stand to be reminded of that past. The kind who would think about shooting your head off before doffing their hat.
“I thought I knew you, mister.”
“You can call me Mr. Cashwell.”
“Zachariah Cashwell.”
“Mr. Cashwell.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Cashwell.”
“So you ain’t answered my question. How much?”
He stood up, and I realized again how tall he was and how distinguished he looked for a Negro. This fellow never let a thread slip out of place, I could tell. I had been trash to him once before, and I reckoned I was still trash to him. White, but trash even so. He stretched the fingers of his hands and cracked them, and yanked down on his vest until it lined up with the bottom of his belt, just proper-like.
“For a cripple I’ll do it right away. Got to be right with the least of His creation, however they come. And to answer you other question, I would not have to fix John McGavock’s shoes.”
“Why is that?”
“Because he has someone to fix his shoes already in his employ.”
I’d heard Negroes try to talk like educated men before, but this one was one of the first that sounded natural about it.
“Would that be your mama?”
“Ain’t your business, is it, sir?”
It wasn’t, and I let his rudeness slide. I was suddenly interested in making peace because he was part of my memory of the McGavocks, a piece of the story that ran through my head about Carrie. And as I’d come closer to Franklin, that story had got so it didn’t let up. It was all I could think about. Carrie McGavock, Carrie, Mrs. McGavock, Carrie. I’d played around with him enough.
“I’d be very grateful to you if you’d fix me up a boot for my wood leg here. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He gestured to a chair against the wall of the cottage, next to the door, where he wanted me to sit down. I did, and too
“This is going to take an hour or so. Will you wait?”
“I can’t go anywhere else without that leg, so I reckon so.”
“All right.”
He swept his work aside and stood my leg up on his table. It was carved of cedar so it wouldn’t rot or get insects chewing at it. It looked sunburned, mostly red with some white stripes in it. I could smell it from across the room. It still smelled good.
The man who made it had been a railroad hand who liked to think hisself an artist, and so every useless little toe had also been carved into the leg, and there was even the rounds and lines of some muscles on the back side of the calf. No sense in not being accurate, he’d said. I hadn’t complained, but now—standing there where that Negro could stare at it—I felt self-conscious about it. It was foolish, and it looked naked. But this Negro, who had carried me into a hole and protected me, much against his will, and had every right to be amused by the sculpture, he didn’t laugh. He stroked the leg with his big hands, feeling the grooves between the toes, the line of ligament up the heel, those two muscles at the back, and the sharp ridge of the shin. He looked at me again, and the look in his eyes was curious and sad. He looked at my stump and up at my face and then back at the wood thing in his grip.
“Sorry about your leg.”
“So it was you cut it off back there at McGavock’s. Bastard.” I smiled.
“I just carried off them old legs, I didn’t cut ’em off. That was for those white men and their saws. Can’t blame me.”
“Even so, you stay the hell away from this other leg.”
Theopolis smiled. “All right, then.”
We settled into a comfortable silence for a long time after that. All I could hear was the snipping of shears and the pop of his long, thick needles pressing through leather. He traced the outline of that wood foot, took its measurements, and fit the leather around it with care, like he was making a boot for a regular foot that might blister and scrape.