The Widow of the South (16 page)

“If not to me, I’d sure as hell not want to meet the man you did pity. Must be a real sorry bastard.”

I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t so, that I wasn’t doing anything but attending to the wounded, that this hadn’t been my choice but something, in a long line of somethings, that had been thrust upon me without my permission. But then who would have been angling for pity? Things are thrust upon you; that’s just the way it is. But I also wanted to tell him that they were not all an undifferentiated mass of men to me, not something to be experimented upon. He thought I couldn’t see them individually, but it was the man lying before me, this apparently insane man befuddled by Old Testament prophecies and the perfidy of his mother, who could not see them individually. He was the one who had spent the last years walking in step with them, wearing the same clothes and eating the same food, watching one man fall and another step into his place, like a colony of termites driven by God knows what to move ever forward together, stopping at nothing, sacrificing the weak.
He
saw them that way, and why not?

But I could see them as men and boys, hundreds of men living with me, individuals, each with a story and a different face and a different future.

My children could see the differences that Cashwell couldn’t see. Hattie, who had become Mariah’s own assistant in charge of tearing up sheets for bandages and checking the cistern’s water level, told me many stories of the men. She kept a count on her little black lesson slate of the number of men with blond, black, brown, and red hair and then went back and counted up the bald and silver-headed ones.

Yesterday morning—had it only been yesterday?—she came to me in the kitchen, the only place Mariah and I and John (when he wasn’t off on some other errand or drinking) could gather in peace, and she would tell us about the men who had talked to her that day or the ones she had spied on.

She told me about the boy crying in the upstairs guest room, the one who had been shoved into a corner by the bigger men and who faced the wall all day. He was a boy who had been shot in the arm, and the surgeons had removed the bullet and patched the wound, but he’d gotten the fever anyway and spent his days becoming paler and glazed in sweat. He was dying from the infection, and I could not tell Hattie this. But I think she knew it anyway. She told me that she had brought water to the room with Mariah and that she had heard the boy weeping. She stepped over the other men who had become so used to her flitting about that they didn’t even bother to watch her anymore, and she went over to the boy.
I’m so cold,
he said, over and over again.
I’m so cold, I’m so cold, I’m so cold.
So Hattie, who is nothing if not a practical and sensible girl, went down to her own bed and pulled off the blanket that her grandmother had made for her of lace and white cotton and satin, and brought it to the boy. The boy looked at her and smiled, but pushed it back.

“And so, Mama, I said, ‘Why don’t you want my blanket?’ And he said, ‘My mama gave me a blanket she made for me with my name on it, and I brought it to the war, but some people took it from me when it started to get cold a month or so ago, and I ain’t seen it since.’ He didn’t want to take a blanket from anyone, not even me, Mama, and it’s a nice blanket and I was nice as I could be. He said it would be like stealing. I don’t know about that, Mama, but he wouldn’t take my blanket. He was shivering like he was real cold, and crying, and he said, ‘I want my mama’s blanket. I want the blanket she gave me.’”

Hattie began to cry, and I could see that she wasn’t sure why. I was sorry and angry that she had already learned to cry like that, to cry about cruelty. From the sound of her story I didn’t think the boy would live much longer before giving up, so I excused myself. John didn’t even seem to notice I was getting up, but Mariah did. Mariah shook her head. I didn’t care.

With a candle in one hand, a piece of paper and a pen in the other, I went upstairs to the boy. I could hear him as soon as I walked into the room. He was no longer saying
cold
. He was saying
no
.
No, no, no,
over and over again, barely a whisper above the rattle of the leafless poplars outside the window and the wind as it swept down the porch outside. I stood over him. He was a dark little ragamuffin, but I supposed he’d been shrunk by the war and by his wound. His hair was brown, and his face was streaked with the mud of sweat and smoke and dirt. He had his eyes closed, but his mouth moved. I kneeled beside him and shook his shoulder, and he started awake and looked hard into my eyes to make sure I wasn’t someone else, someone better, before resting again.

“Can’t I get you a blanket?”

“No blanket. Had a blanket. No more blankets.”

“We have plenty of blankets.”

“I’m going, I don’t need any blanket.”

“You’re cold.”

“I just wish I had my mama’s blanket.”

“Your mother made a blanket for you. That was nice of her.”

He looked at me without any expression on his face, like he was still waiting for me to say something sensible. I didn’t know what else to say. He spoke first.

“You ain’t supposed to go like this. They never said this would happen, they never talked about any of this. We just signed up, give me a gun and a hat and let me get ’em, yes, sir. My mama is in North Carolina. Far away. You ain’t supposed to talk about your mama if you a man, but shit. I’m sorry to swear, ma’am. You supposed to be around people who love you when you go, not all these farting and cussing sons of bitches. I don’t love a person in this room or in this state or in this army. I love one person, and she could keep me alive, I know she could. And now I’m going to pass—no, I know it, don’t shake your head, ma’am, it’s nice but you don’t have to do that—and she ain’t ever going to know where I am. I’ll just be gone. And she’ll be gone from me. I won’t be able to think of her no more, and she won’t know where I am. I been thinking of her every day, and now that’s going to end. I don’t want to do this without her. She’d know what I’m supposed to do now. I don’t know what to do, and I’m so afraid I’m going to do this wrong. I’ve been trying to pray, but I don’t know much prayers—she was the one who always did the praying. What do I ask for now? I don’t know. I don’t know. I miss her. I miss her, ma’am. I do. I’m going to hell. She gave me a blanket, you know. I don’t got it anymore. It was stole from me, and I couldn’t get it back. I tried. Please tell her I tried. I didn’t mean to lose it. Please tell her that. Can’t you?”

I’d never made Winder a blanket, and I’d never prayed over him. I had only prayed over my dying children. I held the boy’s hand.

“I’ve got a piece of paper here. Would you like me to write to your mother?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What would you like to say?”

“I don’t know. Just what I said, I reckon. Or maybe not that much. Maybe you can write her and just tell her that I was here and where she can find me when I go. I just don’t want to be lost.”

“Would you like to write it?”

“I can’t write. And my mama can’t read, so just address it to Pittsboro, North Carolina. Somebody will read it to her.”

“What’s your name?”

“Marcus. Marcus Sanders of Pittsboro, North Carolina. My mama’s name is Mattie, but folks only call her Mat, so you better call her that.”

“I will.”

“You have a nice house.”

I stayed with the boy through most of that night until he passed. I thought I could feel the blood stop moving in his wrist, which I held and stroked for hours.

Marcus Sanders was one of hundreds who died at my house in those days, and most of them left me with memories. They were not all the same men, they were not just bodies. Sometimes my memories weren’t as detailed as those I had of Marcus. Sometimes they were just snatches of things: songs I heard a man singing in a weird, high-pitched tongue, songs that drew a little crowd and made some of the men stomp up and down on their boots like they were trying to rattle the trees at their roots; the time one of the men, who claimed to be college-educated, held forth and lectured to a room full of unconscious men on the betrayal of Achilles; the time I watched for hours as a young man from Georgia named Stace carved a leering, bucktoothed face in one of the spindles lining our back porch.

They all died, and I remember them all.

24

Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL

T
here came a time when I didn’t worry so awful much about getting my leg cut off. I remember that this happened on the fifth day of my stay at the McGavocks’ house. I was sitting up looking for something to whittle and for something to whittle with when I saw two heads go bobbing past the window on the other side of the room. Up and down, up and down. I could see the man trailing behind yell at the man in front every once in a while, and they’d both stop, and the man in the back would shrug and make like he was heaving something up, and then they’d go on. They did this most of the morning. Finally, after not finding anything to whittle with, and after I’d got tired of trying to think about the things I would whittle if I could, I got out of the bed and hopped to the window. I could lean my arms on the sill, and that held me up pretty good. I looked out, and there were fewer men in the yard than I remembered from a couple days before. Just a few groups of men here and there. I looked for the men with the heads, and after a while I saw them come by again. They were carrying bodies, some of them wrapped up in stained white sheets, and others just as they were when they died. I saw that they were moving the pile from one end of the yard to the other, from down by the Negro cabins over to where there looked like there was a garden. Just moving them, that was it. The piles looked the same on either end of the yard, only one was getting bigger while the other got smaller. The dead men were stiff, but they still flexed a little. Sometimes they’d bend right in half if the two men bunched up too quick as they were walking, and then they’d have to put them down and step on the legs until they went back flat again, kind of like how you’d stomp saplings into something you could carry while clearing brush. I watched them for an hour, I think, one pile to the other, and every one of the dead faces was gray.

When Mrs. McGavock wasn’t in my room harassing me, I had some time to think and to listen to the things going on around me. Every day the house got quieter, like it was going to sleep. I didn’t hear screams much anymore, and the moans, even though I’d got used to them, were not so constant. I suppose it was just the natural course of things, that after a few days all the fuss over whether we were going to live or die was settled, and those who died went quiet, and those who were going to live shut their mouths and got on with it. I reckoned that a goodly number of men snuck out of there and headed home. I thought about doing it myself, but every time I thought to get up and go, I come up with a little reason not to do it right then.
I’ll do it right after they bring me some supper
. But I was always hungry, so I never left. Seems like an excuse, but I didn’t barely know where the hell I was, and food ain’t always easy to come by when you’re lost. You got to think about those things.

After I watched the men carry the bodies, I thought to start counting my blessings. I was still enough of a Christian to do that, and so I did it. I wasn’t going to thank anybody for taking my leg, but I quit cursing about it. I thought I could probably get on without it. I even thought that maybe I wouldn’t ever have to get out of that bed if I played things right, and let Mrs. McGavock have her words with me when it suited her. I would have done that if I’d gotten the chance.

As soon as I quit crying about the leg, though, I started taking stock of the
other
things I was missing. And the one that made me the angriest was that I knew, lying in that bed, that I was not any longer the man who had picked up that flag and run into the Yankee works. I was not the sergeant who knew every damn thing about fighting. I was not that man. I was a man who would not ever again think to pick up a flag like that. It was not that I had become afraid. I was not and I had never been a coward. No. The thing was, I cared about living now, and taking care of my own business and nobody else’s. I had been ready to die, and that had made me strong and fearsome and in control. But now I wasn’t ready to die, and I didn’t see as how I would ever be ready to die again. I’d been ready to die even as the surgeons sawed my leg off, and I’d been ready to die in the days after, when the pain seemed like it was demanding that I die. But now, like I said, the fuss was over, and I was going to live. I didn’t know how to live, exactly, but I knew I had to figure that out now. I had become like any other man, like I had once been before. Before the war, before the fighting, before the charge. Living did not seem like a gift. It was a heavy weight, but it was all I had anymore, and it didn’t matter how low I sunk as long as I stayed alive. This is what I thought, and it made me angry and sick. There was nothing worth dying for anymore, and that made everything around me seem smaller, including myself. The whole world was cheap and mean, and I was going to be cheap and mean along with it just so long as it meant staying alive. It made me common. I was common again.

There was some good things about being common, I’ll admit that, about
having feet of clay,
as my old aunt used to say. She’d say it when I got into trouble. I liked the way it sounded—
feet of clay
. Or foot of clay, if you get my meaning.

One of the things about being common was you could get up a game of cards for money and not think twice about it no more. Gambling was a sin, but since sin seemed like it was going to be a natural part of things from then on out, I figured I might as well get started right away. There were still enough of the boys around the house to go out on the porch and wager over a few hands, and so I took to clomping around the house on my new crutch looking for men who were awake and could move around a little. There was a fellow named Jerrod Smalls—missing an eye—who had a deck of cards he’d carried up with him from Montgomery. Smalls was young, maybe twenty or so, but he fancied himself some sort of master of the game since he was from the city, and so I could count on him for a game or two. He was not as good as he thought, and he couldn’t count very well anymore due to being hit slap upside his head with the butt end of a Yankee rifle, and so he never seemed to know when he was losing, and I didn’t always bother to tell him.

On days when I wanted to play cards I’d go find Jerrod first. He was usually up in one of the rooms overlooking the front drive, staring out the window at something I never could figure out. His hair was long and jet black, and he’d let it hang over his face so he looked crazy and people would leave him alone.
Just want to do what I want to do from here on,
he said. He didn’t look like he’d ever shaved, and his one good eye was big and dark like a heifer’s. He was thin and bony like the rest of us, but he still looked soft. I’d come into the room and call him Lefty, because that was the eye he was missing, and he’d just call me a gimp, and we’d walk out of the room looking for others. He’d start shuffling his cards in his hand. He was good at it, and so the cards made a loud sound like someone was ripping a tent, over and over again. The men who weren’t dying recognized the sound, and the ones who could talk would call out, and soon we’d have us a game.

We played for scrip, which had never been worth much and I reckoned would be worthless soon enough, and so maybe we weren’t gambling technically. But I felt it in my heart and my gut, wanting to have all that worthless paper in my pile. I didn’t care what it was, I wanted it, I wanted all of it, and so I reckon I was gambling in spirit if not exactly in fact.

We played all kinds of games. Faro, euchre, poker, boo ray, even chuck-a-luck once when we found some dice in the pocket of a dead man, but Jerrod got so mad at the dice that he threw them into the tall grass off the porch, and we never did find them again.

We were playing outside in front of the house one morning when I watched Mrs. McGavock pack her children into a fancy covered carriage and stand at the end of the walkway crying and waving them good-bye.

“You see that?” I said to Jerrod.

“Yep. You just lost that trick, my friend.”

“No, I mean over there.”

He turned around to look with his good eye.

“Mrs. McGavock? Uh-huh.”

“She just sent her children off. Don’t look like she wanted to.”

“Should have sent them off a lot earlier than this, you ask me. Ain’t no place for a child.”

Jerrod looked over at me quick, so none of the other boys throwing down cards would see him. He looked sad and was looking at me to see if I looked sad, too, I guess. I don’t know what I looked like, but he was satisfied enough to turn his eye back to the cards.

It
was
no place for a child. Jerrod and I had seen that real clear. Mrs. McGavock’s children, the little boy and the older girl, had been flitting around for days. They were always there, filling mouths with water or, in the case of the boy and his older friend, Eli, running a little trade in whiskey and clothing. I did not understand why Mrs. McGavock let them be around us so much. We were a horrible-looking lot, and what business did children have seeing us like this? I couldn’t imagine what kind of cockeyed vision of the world they would have after tending to us, the crippled and the condemned. But that was her business; if she wanted to raise ghouls, then let her.

But that girl of hers, Hattie she was called, was the prettiest thing, and some of the men noticed. A lot of soldier talk is just talk, and so there ain’t no sense in taking serious everything you hear. But sometimes you can hear something different in a man’s voice, something calm and harder than the regular bullshit, that makes you know that what the man is saying ain’t the usual bullshit. Could be he’s telling the truth.

Jerrod and I started hearing that kind of talk around the card game a couple days before I watched the McGavock children go riding off, with their mother standing in the road behind, waving. We started hearing talk about that girl, Hattie. She was too pretty and too young and too trusting to be around men like us. I decided to tell Mrs. McGavock, and so I did. I told her that the thing that had almost happened to that girl Becky, at the hands of that broke-down old goat, might also happen to Hattie if she weren’t careful. Mrs. McGavock had her apron crumpled in her hand while she listened to me, and her eyes got darker and darker. I couldn’t tell if she was scared or angry. But then she told me to mind my own business and that if she ever wanted tips on child raising, she would be sure to come to me, but at the moment she was doing right fine, thank you very much. I figured she was angry at me for pointing out the danger to her own child, who was not just some country girl from down the road with a pistol in her pocket.

Then I went and found that boy Eli. He reminded me of myself, or what I might have been as a boy if I’d had a sister to love and love me back. He was a scrapper, I could tell it on him, and I could see he didn’t let nothing get by him. He was taking orders for liquor from some of the men when I grabbed him by the arm and took him around to the back porch.

“What you think you’re doing, Eli?”

“Nothing.”

“You mighty busy for doing nothing.”

“Reckon so.”

Tough kid. I didn’t scare him. I didn’t want to scare him. I had the awful strange feeling that I wanted the little kid to
like
me and that I wanted him to do right and not get him or his friends in bad trouble. I wanted to protect him, even if I was myself a gimp who could barely protect himself no more.

“You friends with Hattie?”

“She’s my friend’s sister. I know her all right.”

“You know what happened to your sister, right?”

“I know you walloped the hell out of a man over her. Thank you, sir.”

He shrugged his shoulders and turned to go, like all I’d wanted was to be thanked. I hadn’t even been thinking about being thanked.

“That same thing could happen to Hattie and your sister again if you and your friends and your sister don’t get the hell out of this place.”

Smart kid. He knew what I meant right off. He knew these men almost as well as I did now. Like I said, he didn’t miss nothing.

“We got work to do.”

“Not here. Not no more. You get them and your sister safe, hear?”

He was holding some crumpled Confederate scrip, and he looked down on it, and maybe for the first time he was seeing it weren’t worth much.

“What do I do?”

He looked at me with real fear, for the first time, in his face, and I knew I could make that fear go away, at least for a minute.

“You go to Mrs. McGavock, and you tell her you been hearin’ the men talking about Hattie and Becky. Just say that. She don’t want to believe me, but she’ll believe you.”

“Why?”

“Because she will. Now, git.”

He tossed the scrip back at the men he’d taken it from for liquor, and on his way back into the house he turned and waved and said something I couldn’t quite hear. Sounded like
See you,
but I couldn’t tell. I remember thinking, though, that maybe I weren’t useless, after all. I also remember thinking that he sure did remind me of myself.

Just as the McGavock children were rolling out of sight at the end of the driveway, I spotted those two other castaways, that girl Becky and her brother, Eli, walking down the drive away from the house. The dust kicked up by the carriage must have hid them. They walked purposeful without looking back, and I reckoned I would never see them again. Or, maybe more true, I’d be seeing folks like them again and again and again. They were people like me, who ain’t got shit, and I believed there’d be a whole lot more of us after the war had sorted itself out. I hoped they’d be all right, that they’d stay away from men like me. I was shocked that I felt that way, seeing as how I had barely known them. But those days at the McGavocks’ had felt like forever, and every little thing like the only thing in the world.

At least Mrs. McGavock must have taken me serious about the threat, sending those two away also. No matter what she said.

Later, after Jerrod and I broke up the card game and headed back into the house, I said something to Mrs. McGavock about watching her ship off her children. I said I reckoned it was the right thing to do, and she turned to me slowly like she was having to take things real slow on account of she was talking to an idiot.