The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks

  He lost his hat early in the charge, and those blond locks of his were whipping back in the breeze as he got farther and farther ahead. Too far. In a few seconds he was all alone out there in front. We were huffing and puffing behind him as he got smaller and smaller, and when I noticed that the Yankees were shifting their fire away from the rest of us and toward something else, I knew he didn’t have long.

  When he went down, his horse was already dead. He went careening over the horse’s head and into the air, and when he landed, he had been shot maybe half a dozen times. I know this because as we passed him by, he was screaming for help and shouting about how the bastards had shot him in his own yard. He was bleeding from his neck and his hip, and he’d gotten a mouth full of dirt when he landed. One odd thing, though. He didn’t look like a lot of the wounded, who look at you with their innocent, pleading eyes as if you could explain everything in the world to them. This young man, he just looked angry. He also looked like he’d never needed to shave in his life. The last I saw of him, he was losing his voice but still shouting at us to keep moving. And we did.

  Just as I got past him, our color-bearer went down with a bullet through the mouth. He fell upon the flag and became entangled in it up ahead of us. He looked like he’d been sleeping in the damn flag when his body came to rest.

  I’ll never be able to explain what happened next, not ever. It’s still mysterious. That loudmouth who had insisted the band play him a tune while we were on the march, a man who had never stuck that thick neck out once, not as long as I’d known him—that man left his place right next to me and ran to take up the colors. He was named Warren, he had a dark beard, he came from Nashville, and he stole food sometimes. Up to that moment that’s all I had cared to know about him.

  I don’t know what set him off, but he got those big legs of his moving, and before long he was bent over the color-bearer, straining his broad back and rolling the man over like a barrel. He took the colors in one hand and his rifle in the other, and he turned around as we approached. His face was red like a cabbage. He shouted, spraying spit: “What, you wanna live forever?” Then he turned and sprinted forward, and we got behind him like a pack of dogs. Nobody said a word.

  Up and down the line, I could see dozens of groups like ours lurching their way toward the Yankee line. I imagined each group had witnessed its own tragedy and drama, hundreds and thousands of moments like the moment our colors lifted off the ground and went forward in those stiff, fat, outstretched arms. I looked to my right, down toward the pike, and saw a squad of Arkansans disappear in the smoke of a whizzing shell, leaving behind only a faintly pink mist as proof they had once been there. Off to the left, at the bottom of a particularly steep part of the Yankee line, I saw some Mississippians crouched against the earthen wall like shadows, each craning his neck toward the sky as if he might see over the battlement if he just looked hard enough. Periodically they would steel the courage to lift a man up on their shoulders to shoot at the enemy and he would be either killed or captured. Farther down the line another group huddled against the wall and lifted a white rag on the end of a bayonet.

  I ran on, slowly catching up with our new color-bearer. I was shocked by how insubstantial the pistols felt in my hand. It didn’t seem right that they could kill; they were like toys in my hand. Our new color-bearer began to stagger. The handkerchief around my neck began to itch, and I ripped it off. Warren resisted the urge to collapse and sprinted out ahead one last time. I thought then of that blond officer and his beautiful horse, their deaths so impressive and so unnecessary. The pike and field stretched upward and seemed to get longer as we ran. Men fell on each side of me and crumpled in heaps that were soon far behind us. They vanished, just like that. I wished I had once had a conversation with that young officer. I thought, There is no good way to die.

  Our new color-bearer had sprinted to within twenty yards of the bulwarks when he stopped to get his breath. He turned to us and waved the flag back and forth, as if he had already taken the Yankee position and he wanted us to know about it. Warren’s eyes were wide, and sweat dripped off the end of his nose, and he was screaming again about living forever. That’s when he got a bullet in the back of his neck, and his small role in our tragedy played itself out.

  There was no good way to die. But dying his way seemed easier than most, and that’s the only way I can explain what I did next.

  I made my way up to the colors and grabbed them up, yanking them out of his left hand, which was flung far out from his body. I saw how perfectly still he was, how his neck had quit flexing itself, how that strong back had grown smooth. I realized then that we are never still in life, that even when we think we are motionless, we are still vibrating a little. It was odd and confusing, yet reassuring, to see a man at perfect rest, and I went to join him.

  I didn’t need my pistols anymore, so I flung them to the ground. I didn’t say anything; I’m not one for speeches. I just turned and walked toward the bulwarks expecting at any moment to be cut down. I wasn’t happy. I was euphoric.

  11

  CARRIE MCGAVOCK

  I would always think I heard the footsteps of the men echoing through the house hours after they left. I stood out on the porch for a long time afterward, peering out at the countryside and trying to see what had disturbed them so much. I saw nothing but the slowly rising hills, the little creek running across the edge of my sight and off into the distance, the jittery killdeers flitting across dormant fields and guarding their nests. Whatever the men had seen lay only in the future, a premonition of what the landscape might make possible. I could not see such things.

  I looked over at Mariah, who waited expectantly, her hands clasped in front of her.

  “What will we do?” I said. “They cannot do this here, they must know that. We are not nurses.”

  I realized Mariah could not know whether I was referring to their plans to make the house a hospital or their plans to make war. Either way, there was no stopping it now. They would be back. I felt something clenching and cold pass through me like a ghost and sail out into the yard, where it shook the remaining leaves in the pecan trees. Mariah spoke up.

  “We got to get ready. They coming whatever we say.”

  “They cannot come. They will not come. I will ask Colonel McGavock to speak with General Forrest. He will attend to it. He won’t let this house be violated, he won’t stand for it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  But I knew they would come. If I had learned anything during my life here, it was that I could not keep things out. I had not been able to prevent death from waltzing in, and so how would I prevent this? I imagined what my house would look like when the wounded and their attendants had come here and gone. How many? A dozen? Two dozen? My stomach twisted when I thought of men in my home and their blood. Perhaps I could be of use to a few. Maybe the war would spare the rest.

  She seemed to never quit moaning and crying. Sometimes she screamed for me. This was the way it was to the end. Her skin was so dry and red and flaky. It almost seemed to burn my hand. Every day I sat by her and applied cold wet linens to her forehead, and her body seemed to take up every bit of moisture without returning anything—no coolness, no relief.

  A breeze blew across the porch, stirring up the air. It was almost noon, and the sun hung faded and fuzzy in the gray sky, a palimpsest of summer. I felt my forehead grow cold with sweat and my heart pulse in my throat. I resisted the urge to gasp for air.

  “Mariah, begin the preparations, will you? I’ll come in a moment.”

  “Yes. Yes, ma’am.”

  I walked into the house. It was cool in the shadowy corners and in the darkened hall. I wondered if anyone would miss me if I spent the day hidden away in the dark. I walked on.

  Out the back and into the yard the warm breeze wrapped me up again. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going. My feet carried me across the yard toward my garden, but my eyes were drawn off to my right, to a small stand of trees ringed by a
black iron fence. The grass was still soft. The breeze kicked up again, and I felt I would suffocate. I wanted to strike out at it, to slap it away.

  I stood in the garden and stared at the cemetery across the way. I felt the grave markers marching toward me. I thought of it as another grove, a grove of trees and of limestone and of children beneath my feet, and it was for this reason that sometimes I could only bear to look at it by hiding in the garden and peeking through the foliage.

  The garden had once been so lovely, so trimmed and neat, packed between the paths with obedient rudbeckia and peonies and roses and boxwoods and sunflowers and crape myrtles. I had loved it unequivocally and had taken pleasure in its boundaries and distinctions, the concentration of its colors and textures. It had been a rebuke to the very idea of uncertainty.

  Now the garden looked nothing like it did that first day sixteen years before, when I was an eighteen-year-old riding up in my new husband’s carriage. It had become ragged like everything else in my house, in Franklin, in Tennessee, and, as far as I knew, in the world. In the summer the rudbeckia took over much of the sunny side of the garden, and even in the night I could see their bright and insistent yellow blooms from my porch. Bleeding heart, cemetery vine, and ivy had taken over the rest. The peonies fought for light, and their occasional breakthrough was cause for mild celebration. I would not help them, but I took solace from their little successes.

  So many years had passed since I had first gone to sleep at Carnton. The house had collapsed into itself. Like me, I thought without surprise.

  I stood there like a shadow among the browns and beiges of my once precise Italianate garden, and I remembered the first time I had seen the house. It was not the same house anymore, although this would not have been obvious to the casual observer. Its bones were still there, but very little of the rest seemed familiar to me anymore. This redbrick neoclassical pile, with the Grecian portico on the front, and its massive, two-story Italianate galleries running across the entire back length, was empty: we had retreated back into the wing on the east side, which had once been the original frontier homestead. We cannot run that house without all the slaves. John had insisted that we send most of our slaves off to friends in Alabama before the Federals could requisition them and everything else they could get their hands on. The house is much too big for Mariah to keep up, John had said. I had known this to be only partly true. The rest of the truth, I knew, was that my husband wanted me to quit living among our dead children, if only for a while. This did not stop me from drifting through their rooms and listening for them.

  I remembered the voices of my children and the sound of my own voice teaching them their lessons and reading them Bible stories, the sound of the piano, the sound of the tall case clock ticking in the hallway. Nothing disappears. I imagined that the sounds and smells of the children existed somewhere, borne away by the wind. That was a comforting thought. They also existed in my mind, as memories, but of late I had come to distrust those.

  I could never leave those memories behind. They buzzed at me like gnats.

  There was the central passage that ran the full length from front door to back, dividing the downstairs. There was the stairway that led to a similar hall upstairs. Heavy poplar doors led to two rooms on either side of both hallways. On the first floor the best parlor lay to the left of the entrance, my husband’s office to the right. At the back of the house a door opened into the family parlor, where the portraits of our family had once hung. Across the hallway there was the dining room, the table now covered in linen. Upstairs, the only place I spent much time anymore, the doors to my children’s bedrooms remained shut. Above the foyer there was an odd little room with no discernible purpose—an architectural accident, unintended space—and it was there that I spent my days sitting in a small haircloth rocker.

  I was a medical puzzle. Like every other lady I’d known in Franklin, I’d been given my bottle of laudanum when the grief had overcome me, but unlike the other women, I had sunk deeper into my despair and—yes, I knew this—my eccentricity. This was not the usual outcome, according to Dr. Cliffe. In the little bottle the ladies of my former circle found the strength to sleep without dreaming as they sent their husbands off to war, or their children. They could move about and pretend to run their households, but in truth they spent their days moving through a sludgy torpor, never completely sure when a conversation had begun or when it should end.

  But I had, in fact, never taken the laudanum. Every day I poured a little from the bottle into an empty perfume bottle which I kept hidden in a compartment of my dresser. Every month or so John dutifully went to get my next bottle, and every day I poured a little into my perfume bottle. I won’t prescribe more than this, because any more would kill her if accidentally taken all at once, Dr. Cliffe told John when he thought I hadn’t heard him.

  In the years since I watched John Randal die when he was just three months old, the first of my children to leave me, I had collected the dozens and dozens of deadly doses, graduating to larger and larger perfume bottles as the months passed by. His eyes were so big, and he was so little, and when he looked up at me, his brows permanently wrinkled by pain and pleading, I saw the possibility of true innocence and the monstrous crime being committed against that very idea, against me, against my son. Sometimes the pain would ease, and he would smile, but only tears came when I tried to smile back and show him that I loved him, that he was the most wonderful thing. After a time he quit smiling. He was defenseless in this world, and so I loved him all the more and hated the world. Every day when I awoke I went to the wardrobe and pulled the bottle out. I’d feel its weight in my hand and ask myself if I would drink the bottle that day, and every day the answer was no. Then I’d put the bottle back in the secret compartment and slide the secret door shut. Some days I thought harder about the bottle than others, and once, I took the stopper out, but I had always put it away.

  I knew it was there, though. I knew every day I could die, and this helped me. It was not the reminder of death that I desired. Everything around me was a reminder of death, every room, every length of wallpaper, every window. I needed no more reminders of that. What I wanted was to know what my dying children knew in their greatest moments, which were their moments of bravery and strength as they struggled to live. I had never seen my children so powerful as they were then, choking and shaking and whispering their apologies to me. Their apologies. They were at their best in the hours before death. I thought that if I could know it as they had known it, we would all share something that would not fade from my memory or disintegrate like the stones on their graves.

  Dear Mother,

  I must amend my earlier letter to you regarding Martha. It has weighed heavily on me, and though I meant to pay her a proper tribute, I feel I must correct a few misrepresentations. Martha did not go to her Maker quietly. She was frightened and she cried out to me, and I could not help her though I wished to. I am not sure what she saw when the light dimmed in her eyes, but I will always remember the terror. I pray that she was welcomed into the arms of our Savior, and if anyone is welcomed thus it would be Martha, but I cannot be sure. I hope that I will never see such a thing again before I am myself taken away to my blessed rest. I tell you this now only because I do not want to mingle the memory of my Martha with certain untruths, however kindly meant. Please forgive me.

  — Your Loving Daughter,

  Carrie

  I stood in my garden and let the cold creep up my legs. I had let the delicate roses die of thirst, and in their place had come the weeds and the other invasives—living things that looked like death to the undiscerning eye. The decline of the garden was a sad thing, people said, but I knew differently. Decline was natural. I was embarrassed to remember the times when I tended the plots, weeding and hoeing, beating back the inevitable. I was not saddened by my garden, nor by my house, nor by the little family cemetery and its fresh gravestones.

  Death had been with me from the beginning, and now
my house would be a hospital. I was not a morbid woman, but if death wanted to confront me, well, I would not turn my head. Say what you have to say to me or leave me alone. I did not look away. I saw. The garden, the cemetery, Martha’s room—I had power. I had a power others did not. No, I would not have another child. No, I would not sow new seeds. I would not leave my house or change its decor. Nor would I sink into days of soft, drifting, opiated conversation with the ladies in town, fondling their laudanum. I did not have to run. I did not have to forget, I did not have to soothe myself, I did not have to ignore the most obvious fact of my life: that the things I loved had died and that I had failed them. Let that wound stay open. I understood that I could stand that pain and that I could even crave it sometimes. Dr. Cliffe advised John that I was spiraling down through the dark circles of melancholy, but it only felt like strength to me. Death could not make me afraid anymore.

  If the price of that was seeming crazed and ignoring the doings of the living, it was a price I could pay. It was a price I was happy to pay, because it felt like vengeance. I took another look around my garden, and with a brief sweeping stroke I knocked down the brown stalks of two old sunflowers and watched them settle to the dark ground among the rotting leaves. Then I went inside.

  12

  LIEUTENANT NATHAN STILES, 104TH OHIO

  I watched a little rebel boy, couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, suffocate under the weight of the dead piled atop him. Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility. Only his head stuck through the pile, and I thought for a second that he was looking at me and trying to say something, only he didn’t have the air to do it. He couldn’t breathe, and God knows where he’d been shot. His jaws moved, and his eyes welled with tears. The last I saw of him he was closing his eyes just as another body landed on him, covering him completely. It was as if a wave had crashed over him and he’d been pulled out to sea.