The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
“Well, I reckon that’s possible. God’s penance is blessed, but it can be terrible, too.”
“That, Mr. Cashwell, is the truest thing you’ve said since walking into my tent with your companion here.”
I’d forgotten about Jerrod. I looked down at him, and he was just staring at me all squinty, like he wasn’t sure who he was standing beside.
“We’d like jobs, mister.”
“Professor Stiles. You can call me Professor. We’ve got jobs, but only your man here . . .”
“You can call me Jerrod.”
“Only Jerrod has the qualifications, which are that he can walk on two real legs and lift heavy things. I’m not sure what to do with a one-legged man.”
“Well . . .”
“But I’ll find something for you. It’s the least I can do for someone whose life I held in my hands and didn’t crush out. Perhaps you can catalog bones. Can you write?”
He was confusing me.
“So you believe me now?”
“No, but it’s a fiction that I’d dearly like to believe. If I believe in it hard enough, perhaps it will come true.”
He raised his hat off his head, and I saw dust motes rise up off it in the last beams of dusk coming through a tear in the tent. He was bald and shiny under that old hat. He wasn’t as young as I remembered. Not as young, and not nearly as pure as I’d imagined him. He’d had a hard few years, too.
“Yes, I can write.”
Hours later only a few of us were left around the cook fire, none of us saying much. I wanted to know what the hell the man from the tent, who they called the professor, and his crew were doing here, but I didn’t know how to start the question without being insulting. I said to him:
“You got a nice operation going here.”
Professor Stiles puffed on a pipe and looked at me through the haze of smoke. Jerrod kept edging toward him, trying to catch a snort.
“I actually don’t really know what I’m doing. Not really.”
That wasn’t the kind of thing I expected to hear. I was more used to hearing men boast about things there weren’t no way they could have done. Men were bound to have done or said bigger and more impressive things now more than they ever had years ago, when the things we done and said had actually been impressive. Now it was just a way of talking. But the professor was a Yankee.
“You look like you know what you’re doing.”
“I got sent down here by the college to supervise this excavation only because I’m a professor of antiquities, and they decided that these burial mounds qualified as antiquities. But I’m a Greek and Roman scholar, I don’t know a thing about Indians, and I don’t recognize or understand much of what I’ve seen come out of this burial place. But I have to do it, or lose my job, so there you are.”
He might as well have come from across the ocean speaking gibberish for all I understood of what he said. I could not imagine this college, those antiquities. He came from a place I would never see, where he spent his time doing things I couldn’t see the use of doing. It impressed me some, to think that men like him could waste their time in uncountable ways, collecting and sorting things that were forgotten and thrown out long ago, and still they had time to come down here and whup our asses. Mighty impressive.
“Why not just leave them alone? What you get out of taking them bones and jars and boxes out of the ground like that?”
“For preservation. They need to be preserved, for posterity.”
“How long you reckon they been there?”
“Oh, I’d say at least a thousand years, maybe more. Hard to tell. There’s only a little documentation of these cultures.”
“A thousand years in that hill?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds preserved to me.”
His pipe had gone out, and he fumbled around looking for a match to relight it. I half expected Jerrod to leap up and light it with a burning coal just to earn him some tobacco, but he’d already slunk off to find a dry place for sleeping. It was just the two of us.
“That’s a good point, I suppose. They were preserved where they were, as they were intended to be preserved.”
“Right.”
“But no one could see them, these treasures, these antiquities.”
“I could have lived without seeing a mess of Indian skulls lined up on your shelves.”
“But there’s knowledge there, things to learn about those skulls and the urns and jewelry they were buried wearing. And, anyway, what if someone comes along and is sick of this hill and tears it down? Then everything is lost.”
“So you got to take ’em up out of the ground to preserve them.”
“Right.”
“You going to bury them again? Around here?”
“No, I think I’ll return to the college with them, and perhaps some of the items will find their way to museums.”
I didn’t much care about dead Indians. I’d never much thought about them, really. It just seemed funny that they had to dig into the graves to save them and that the dead would end up scattered around the country, anywhere but where they’d started. In the dark I could still see into the side of the hill, where the workers had dug their tunnels. It was a twisty maze in there, and I reckoned there might be thousands of Indians buried in that clay. I got scared for a second thinking about the twisting little paths beneath the earth that led the way to things I weren’t ever supposed to see. It made me think of everything else that I had never seen and wasn’t supposed to see. Here was a village of the dead beneath my feet, and a mile or so away lay the war below, everything preserved in place.
45
CARRIE MCGAVOCK
Truly he was an awful man, so awful he fascinated me and made me want to stay near him and observe his every hand gesture, his every facial expression, his every foul idea snaking out of his mouth. How such a man had become a success was not in doubt. The strong always win, for a time. The mystery was how he could have become prominent in our town and not reviled. Perhaps that was the fear that kept him in the good graces of society. It was one more reason for me to eschew society, that was for certain.
John and I sat in the Baylors’ parlor, to the right of the staircase. There was an ancient harpsichord inside which looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years. Dust clogged the filigreed decoration on its legs and case, making the scenes that had once lived within them look as if they were fading and eroding to nothing.
Baylor was an old man, like so many others. His white hair, combed back, seemed placed upon his skull, a strand here, a strand there. Soon it would be all gone, and all that would be left would be the brown sphere and, perhaps, the tufts of hair poking up off his round ears. He had a small mouth but a sharp chin, and this he stroked incessantly. He wore a cotton suit, well pressed, and narrow black boots. His power was not in his body, but in his eyes, which were bright and unblinking, and in the insistence of his voice. It was a low, rattling voice that he let fill the air between us, absorbing whatever we said until we were left just to listen.
Again and again John and I implored him to leave the graves alone. Offer to sell the land to the town, John told him; perhaps the town could sign a note to make the full purchase price payable in five years, by which time the worst effects of this dreadful war would have passed us.
Instead, Baylor talked: about the skyrocketing prices of corn and beans, about the huge need for tilled fields, about his own empty pocketbook.
I sat watching Mr. Baylor talk on about the new situation in Franklin and how he couldn’t see any way of avoiding the plowing of his field, seeing how the economy was. But after the night before, with those letters, all I was thinking was, I will lift the burden of memory and place it somewhere else, and if I don’t, I will die. I will save those men in that field.
John had become used to my years of strength and optimism, but not so used to it that he didn’t remember the years of my melancholy. I must have looked a sight to him, gray-faced and silent. He had bee
Finally I said, losing all patience, “It is difficult for me to listen to these words, Mr. Baylor. I’m thinking of your boy.”
“My boy?”
“Will.”
“Leave him out of this.”
“He died right in here, didn’t he? Oh no, I’m sorry, he died outside, didn’t he? You wouldn’t even let your blessed son in this house. Young Will.”
“Get out.”
“We’re going,” John said.
John had me by the arm and was pulling me to the door before I could object. Baylor walked behind us, swinging that cane of his as if about to use it on us, like an overseer.
“Stay out of this house.”
John yanked at the door.
“He ignored you all the way to the grave, didn’t he?” I persisted. “And where is that grave? Not in the family plot, I believe. Did you put him in a pauper’s grave, or did you at least find him a decent place and mark it?”
Mr. Baylor’s face gained color while I watched, from gray to pink to red. He began to thump the floor in front of him with that cane he didn’t need and never used, but which he carried around at times.
“You dare to mention Will’s name?”
John could take no more.
“Should she call him Cotton? That’s what he called himself, right? When he wrote those newspaper columns? Cotton Gin.”
“What do you know of sacrifice, McGavock? Either of you. You talk to me of my son, and yet you couldn’t possibly understand what it meant to me to see him dead on that bed.”
“My wife and I have lost three children, Baylor. I know something of that pain.”
“No, you don’t. No, you don’t. If God took your children—and God bless them—then you have only to pray about it. But I lost my son to the cause of mountebanks and losers and cranks, whose fine talk and wayward sense of the truth led my son down the path to damnation, and me along with it. I lost my son for stupidity’s sake, and not his own, either. Oh, he was stupid, but stupid like an enthusiastic and credulous young man. His wasn’t the stupidity of the self-deceivers and the sentimentalists who ran that goddamn war, or the trash who started it in the first place. Let your child be wasted on purpose, with someone else’s blessing and approval, and then talk to me of your sacrifice. I will not let those men who ran that war, and those of you who stood by and let it go until it was too late to stop, escape into this new age without penalty. I want to see the humiliation and the anger and the pain on your faces. I have to see it. You owe me this, all of you owe me this. My son, my loving and beautiful son, was sacrificed upon the altar of your insanity and your evil. I loved him, but I will not commemorate his actions, or the actions of any of those other boys, any more than I would celebrate a suicide. I’ve given you your sacrifice, ask no more of me.”
Sacrifice, I thought. Is that what Martha was, and Mary Elizabeth, and John Randal? Sacrifice? They didn’t seem like sacrifices to me. They seemed like children. I remembered, separate and yet joined, the distinct moments of their birth: the swirls of wet black hair on their heads; my arms, reaching out, asking, Is she healthy? Or, when John Randal was born: Is he alive?
“We’ve all lost so much,” I said. “Why can you not see that the destruction of the graves will only do more?”
“My mind is settled on the matter, Mrs. McGavock. Please do not trouble me again.”
He turned his stare on John.
“You’re lucky I didn’t take your whole damned property, by the way. You’re as much of a loser as the rest of them. You’ll never have a damned thing, John McGavock, and when you die, there will be no one to remember you.”
We were down the stairs of the front porch and into the yard before he said this, and I could not leave it be. I wrenched my arm from John and turned back to Baylor. I wished and prayed at that moment that lightning would strike his house and that fire would erupt and that the whole place would burn to the ground and that nothing would ever emerge upon it again, like a salted ground. He looked down on me.
“Is memory so important?”
“What?”
“To be remembered when you die. Memory.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Must we debate the obvious?”
“So it’s yes. Yes, it’s important.”
“I suppose.”
“Then what shall you do about the dead in your field? They would require something to stoke the memory, would they not? They could not stand plowing.”
John was already in the cart and calling for me. Mr. Baylor was leaning against his porch post, looking at me as if I might leap up at him. I was floating above it all, anchored only by the weight of those letters, and I could see how odd I must have seemed to him at that moment. I’m not sure that Mr. Baylor even understood what I was talking about or what I was suggesting.
“I’m putting that back into corn and beans. I’ve already given you my answer.”
“No.”
“What do you mean no?”
I did not really know what I meant, but I knew I had to keep asking. I was making a fool of myself, but I didn’t care.
“I mean no, you won’t be plowing those men under. Those boys. It will not happen.”
He laughed. Perhaps he thought me a lunatic. He squinted out at John, hoping, I suppose, that my husband would ride over and sweep me up and take me and my insanity away with him. If I had been standing there on his porch, talking with such a woman standing in my yard, I might have run into the house and locked the door. I saw myself standing there, looking as pale as I used to look when I was willing myself to travel the border between the living and wherever my children had gone. I imagined I might look a little terrifying to a man who, at his age, must have thought of his own mortality. Could the Reaper come as a woman? It might have seemed so.
“That is impossible.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“Not for those men. I will not go out of my way for those men. They made their choice, and their choice dropped them right there, and that’s what they deserve. I will not help them.”
“You will.”
“Good day, Mrs. McGavock.”
He turned and walked slowly into his house. He looked over his shoulder at me once before he shut the door, and I saw pity in his crinkled, yellowing eyes. I could do a lot with that pity, I thought.
I called out once more, to his closed door, before turning and joining John in the carriage:
“You will, Mr. Baylor.”
We rode off.
“What have you done, Carrie?”
“We’ll see.”
A few days later I heard from Mariah, who had heard from Theopolis, that Zachariah Cashwell had returned to Franklin. She mentioned it casually, in passing, an afterthought, as I was retreating to my room to write my endless letters.
“Returned to Franklin?” I said to her as pleasantly as I could, but I know that I did not deceive her. My heart beat hard in my throat.
She told me that he’d found work in that Union officer’s archaeological excavations, south of town.
I wondered, as I went up the stairs and sat down to pen the next letter, if he would come to see me. Or when I would go to him.
Dear Mrs. Lloyd Pritchard,
I do not remember your son. It is quite possible that I never met him, and it is quite possible that he never came here to Carnton. It is most likely, in fact, that he died a soldier’s death on the battlefield and that he lies there to this day. I do not know where he is, but I intend to find out. I intend to find them all. You will hear from me again, very soon.
Zachariah. It was Zachariah, first and perhaps foremost, who showed me that there were people in the world who could abide the chaos and the brutality and even, sometimes, put it right.
Oh Lord, he could have been an omen of any number of things, a vision sent by God to tell me something that I couldn’t augur. O
46
CARNTON
From the moment Mariah saw them unburying the dead, she planned to return. Several times, in her hunt for wild roots and herbs, she would watch from the shadow of the trees not too far from the burial mounds, just close enough to see and hear the chink of the picks in earth and rock, but too distant to hear what the men were saying.
A week passed, and she wanted to know the man who would take those folks back up out of the ground, the man in the hat that was too big for him. She wanted to know more about the bones. Reckon I can bring ’em something to eat. Must be something I can do. She’d rarely had any interest in the doings of white men, but something, in the ending of the war and the beginning of a new life, had changed. I done caught that bug Theopolis caught. Freedom. Should have stayed back in the kitchen. What use do I have for that world?
Next day she brought biscuits to the men digging at the Indian bones, and some coffee beans for the black-hatted supervisor, a Yankee college professor, she learned, and she sat in the shade of a locust watching the men work.
They just like termites, them white ants, she thought. She’d spent hours as a child searching out termite nests and exposing them, just to watch the little white creatures scurry about futilely. She had watched them disappear into the depths of their tunnels, just as these men were doing, and emerge with bits of building material to begin rebuilding, an impossible task. After a while she’d break the nest apart to get to the center, where she’d find the huge, fat queen, whose massive egg sac made her look like a fat worm with the head of a termite. Her children stood by to defend her, rushing Mariah as she reached her hand into the royal chamber, and Mariah would usually come away with a few hanging on to her fingers by their jaws. These she would brush away, knowing they would soon die, that all of them would die once she’d taken their mama.