The Widow of the South (23 page)

He rubbed the stump of his right leg, as if for good luck.

“Did you forget why you were there?”

“No.”

“So why didn’t you jump into the ditch?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, they pulled me into the ditch quicker’n shit.”

“And you begged them to kill you.”

“Yes.”

“You ran at them unarmed and then begged them to kill you.”

“Yes.”

“You wanted to become a suicide.”

“I don’t know.”

“Has anyone ever asked you to kill them?”

“A couple of times. Some who were dying real poorly, a lot of pain. I did what they asked.”

“But you weren’t dying.”

“No.”

“If I asked you to kill me, would you?”

“No.”

“I’ve thought about it often, you know. I’ve wanted to die many times. I lost my children, and when that happened, I would have put my pain against any one of those boys you killed for mercy’s sake. What about mercy upon me?”

“You could still live. Things could change.”

“Nothing could change the fact that my children are dead. That is an absolute fact.”

“But you can change. It will pass. I wouldn’t kill you because you don’t need to die.”

“Yes, I suppose. Did you need to die?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you asked to die. Unarmed, unhurt, you asked to die.”

“Yes.”

“Did you know they would refuse you?”

Zachariah looked away from me. I could imagine him a boy in Arkansas with too much to think about. He looked relieved.

“I yelled at them, and the louder I yelled, the more I knew they weren’t going to kill me. I don’t know how I knew. I’d seen the other men with the colors get cut down, but I knew the colors were the only chance for me. I was just another man with a rifle otherwise. I didn’t expect to live. I expected to die. I’d taught myself to expect that, and not life.”

“But what we expect and what we want are not always the same.”

“Never are.”

“You wanted to live.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve always wanted to live.”

“Yes.”

“You knew how to stay alive.”

“I had an idea.”

“The colors.”

“Yes.”

He quit talking to me. He didn’t ignore me—it would have been impossible to ignore each other in that little cave with the dancing shadows and the vestiges of my household strewn about. There wasn’t enough room. But he didn’t talk, and I thought that perhaps he didn’t think he
needed
to talk. An understanding had been struck, and the air around us no longer seemed to vibrate. It was just air. I watched Zachariah relax and absentmindedly stroke the stump of his leg again, as if he was gaining comfort from it. I think he was.

I had discovered why I had been drawn to him, the unusual thing that had distinguished him. He was a living thing, not a dying one. He lived at the very edge of the border with death and had learned how to live by courting death and then tricking it. In that bedroom where I’d first seen him he was one of many men. Most of them were dying, and many had more immediate need of the surgeon. But he’d succeeded in drawing my attention by protesting it. He had some innate understanding of human nature that I was only beginning to understand. He had turned his dread of being left behind, which I had seen raw the night before, into a strategy for living. He knew I would take care of him, and the more he protested, the more extraordinary my efforts would become. I felt a surge of anger that quickly subsided. I had been tricked, and yet I had also been needed by a man, a person, who had wanted to live. I couldn’t be angry at him. Furthermore, I thought him even more heroic for having learned how to live when everyone around him was falling. An odd sort of war hero, but a war hero nonetheless.

Zachariah had closed his eyes and did not see me crawl across to him on my hands and knees, feeling at every moment that my arms would collapse under me, they were shaking so. I could hear his breath, which suddenly sounded loud. So did the sound of my skirts dragging in the dirt behind me, leaving behind a trail. I came upon him and crawled over his legs, or what was left of them, until my head had almost bumped his chest. I arched my back so that my body fit into his without touching and brought my face up to his. His bottom lip was thick.
I have never noticed that. Why have I not noticed that?
As he breathed, his rough lips moved slightly and the muscles in his jaw flexed and his chest rose intolerably close to mine, and so I did the only thing possible: I closed the gap between us and pressed my mouth hard against his. The blood rushed to my face. His lips received mine, and I felt him kiss me back, pressing his hand against the small of my back.
His hand is so big.
I kept my eyes open so that I could see his face, so I could see him kissing me. He never opened his eyes, and just when I thought that I was lost, he pulled away. He had both of his hands on my shoulders, holding me up.

He opened his eyes and looked at my face. He looked at the hair falling into my eyes, the flush in my cheeks, the swell of my numb lips, the trace of my chin. I realized my chin was trembling. There was wet on my cheek. I wasn’t crying. I looked at him and saw the trace leading from the corner of his eye to the edge of his jaw, so obvious on his dusty face. I began to push forward again, ready to abandon everything, and he held me back. He smiled. I sat kneeling before him, the blood pounding in my ears. Soon the pounding subsided, and when I looked at him, I saw that he had closed his eyes again. I backed away from him slowly and came to rest against the wall again, bereft and relieved and grateful.

I could not bear the thought of the Union soldiers taking Zachariah away. I knew he couldn’t stay, not forever, but I wasn’t done with him. I had more to learn. I didn’t know what John would think, but I would not let Zachariah be removed from my care. I dozed, and when I awoke, I watched Zachariah slap at pill bugs with his left hand, childishly intent on them. He was whispering,
Curl up, curl up like a baby,
while he flicked them around like tiny marbles. I did care what John thought. I had not cared for some time, but now I did. I wanted to tell him what I’d discovered and to show him that the years of my convalescence had not ended in vain, that my illness had not been the fruit of a morbid fascination with the beyond, but a desire. To live? That was too simple, too simpleminded. What I knew was that I was more like Zachariah than anyone else I’d ever known, even Mariah. Surely John would see that I needed to learn as much from this odd man before he went on, to God knows where.

I had been drawn to Zachariah Cashwell as an idea. I wanted to tell him these things, to explain how his strange and foreign presence had released me. I wanted to tell him what I had learned. I wanted him to be proud of me, to be impressed by me. It didn’t matter what I said, I realized, just so long as he saw me with new eyes, so long as I could not be forgotten. I had been drawn to him as an idea, but I had come to love him as a man. I had come to love him as a woman loves a man whom she can never have. An impossible man. An unreachable man. A man of infinite possibility. I hadn’t known that was what it felt like.

And when I knew this, I heard the voices above us.

30

Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL

I
t was true that I had never wanted to die. I thought my desire to live had been something I’d just recently picked up, right here at this godforsaken hospital. I had felt my gumption slip away and my blood thin, and I’d become just another beggar of life, just another survivor, but at least I’d once been a hero, a fearless man. Down in that hole, I began to doubt the whole goddamn story. My story.

That one day, the last day I saw my mother, I thought I would die and I prayed I wouldn’t. I remembered that now. I reckon it’s possible to remember things even when you don’t think much about them anymore or even think about them at all. Sneaky thoughts that lie around in your head, pulling on strings and making things happen, and you don’t even have the first thing to say about it because you don’t even feel it.

I thought I was ready to die many times. I thought that was how I had become strong. I thought pretty damn much of myself because of my willingness to take a bullet. I looked at the men around me and saw weakness. Even the men who were bigger than me, even that hog-necked loudmouth who picked up the colors before me—I reckoned even
he
was weak, at least weaker than me. Who would care about what the band was playing, and who would talk so damned much, and who would have so much fun poking and pushing at the little men around him, if he didn’t love life more than anything? I was stronger than that, I thought. I knew some of the old-timers thought the same way. It had crossed my mind that many of us who were old-timers were the ones who weren’t afeared of death, who didn’t care. I just hadn’t thought about how strange it was that us death-eaters—because that’s what I thought of myself—were the same bastards who had lived through the fighting year after year, and it was usually the new kid full of piss and life who took a bullet in his head. Well, that’s not true. I
had
thought about it, but I reckoned it meant that all of this was just a son of a bitch. At least that’s what I said when we were sitting around smoking and talking. But maybe it meant something else.

There is something beautiful about war, you can’t deny that. If you look at it the right way, even the killing has got its beautiful side. Once you get used to the sight of a whole line of men cut down in an open field, you can even start to appreciate the scene like it was a rare painting, something you ain’t ever going to see again, something perfect and absolute. There was also a lot of things complicated about war, which sounds like I’m saying something anybody with a brain would know, but it ain’t. A squad of men rushing a trench looks simple enough, I guess, but when you’re in the middle of them and you’re moving, there’s a lot that happens that you wouldn’t see if you weren’t paying attention. The squad tightens up one second and stretches out the other because of the hills, or because the bullets are flying through like a packed wedge of hornets, or because an artillery shell just exploded off to the side. The squad stretches and contracts like a spring, and it also shuffles itself up, and sometimes that means there’s a man right ahead of you looking and moving in the same direction as you. Sometimes, if you were tired enough or drunk enough, you’d think he
was
you, only he was a second or two ahead. When he took the bullet, sometimes you could almost feel the pain, and then you’d be happier than shit because it
wasn’t
you, like when you get waked by a bad dream.
But for the grace of God go I
.

But maybe it weren’t only the grace of God.

My soldiering life was over, I knew that sitting in that hole with Carrie, listening to her puzzle over me like I wasn’t really there, like I was something in one of her books. I can’t say I wanted to have that conversation, but I reckon that I was going to have it sooner or later, so why not have it while scrabbling around like a rat in the earth?

When she kissed me, I had a thought.
This is what I’ve been waiting for.
And she was so soft and warm, and the way she’d come crawling at me like a cat, well, I will never forget that. When I felt her heart against my chest, I knew I couldn’t never break it, which is the flip side of love the way I saw it. But I’d seen her come to me while faking sleep, and I’d felt her against me, and I knowed that she would have left everything behind. All that was much more than I had any right to expect. That kiss would last me for many years. I was never all alone after that.

31

C
ARNTON

J
ohn hadn’t known what to say to Carrie when he and Mariah rode up to the house, and so he had said very little.

He had walked the horse up to the edge of the back steps, where Carrie waited for them. Carrie’s skirts were smeared with red dirt, and she was slowly clapping dirt off her palms.

“Will Baylor is dead,” he said. “Just seen Mrs. Baylor. Died on the battlefield, I understand.”

Lord, I sound like a gossiping aunt. If she only knew.

Theopolis had gone to get Carrie when he saw the horse and riders from quite some distance, coming through the grove from the pike; he’d thought they might be the first of the Union men on the way to take over the house and imprison Cashwell and the others.

The others. Later she would admit to John that she had forgotten about the others, the lamest of the lame, the six destroyed men who remained in her hospital. Then she heard a couple of them scrabbling at the window behind her. They were trying to see who was coming. The men who could haul themselves up to the window were the least lame of the most wretched, their bodies twisted, carved, and shrunk into new forms.

These were the men who would never be ignored again in their lives, and that realization had just begun to dawn on them: on the man with no jaw or tongue, the other with only an arm left, the third missing an eye and a nose and most of his left side. These were the three who pulled themselves up to the window, the three Carrie turned around and saw while awaiting John’s approach. With some dread, they had wanted to see who would be the one to take them away, the first of the innumerable, the endless parade of people who would gasp and stare at them as long as they lived.

But it was Carrie who was the first to stare. She had spent the better part of a week among them, and never once had she stared. They had only been the sum of their wounds, a collection of tasks and duties. Perhaps it was the different perspective, seeing them through the window rather than lying at her feet. The window framed them like a perverse painting, and she saw them truly as men. They knocked and scratched at the sill, and they could see the horror pass across her face: they were creatures, lolling and bug-eyed ghouls, who had been made by God and unmade by man. The man with no jaw, who could not talk, let tears build and drop down his cheek because he knew no other way of telling her to stop staring.

The fact that it was Carrie McGavock who was the first to stare and recoil, the woman who had bathed their wounds and sung to them at night, who had smiled at them, and who wrote out the letters they dictated to their families—this was the hardest cut of all. Much later they became used to the stares, the unsolicited charity, the years of infantile conversation shaped by the common assumption that their brains had been somehow diminished by their wounds. But in that moment, staring back at the woman staring at them, the future seemed mightily oppressive and unbearable, and they would have given the rest of their bodies for the possibility of anonymity. Carrie had, in a moment, made them aware of themselves, and they would never lose that awareness. Through the years they would meet with other veterans at reunions and holiday parades, and at those times they’d refer to Carrie as an angel, telling expansive stories about her kindness and her care. Even so, they never quite forgot that it was Carrie who had given them that first glimpse of themselves.

It was a misunderstanding, but as no words passed between them, it could not be put right. Carrie was horrified not
by
them, but by the fact that she had
forgotten
them in her desire to know a man who, truth be told, didn’t need her. What they saw was shame.

No one ever came to look for John.
What was one more murder in a town of dead people?
John thought. He never told Carrie about the incident at the smokehouse. That’s how he would always think about it.
The incident.
Always
the incident
.

The next morning a short man in a worn blue uniform rode up to the house, dismounted, climbed the steps, and knocked on the back door. From the yard, John could see the men at the window, craning around to get a look at the visitor. When no one answered, he turned around and took his campaign hat off to scratch his head. A few strands of hair flowed over the slick dome of his head. He pulled at a lopsided mustache and finally spotted the burial party. None of them had called out or thought to call out. Nor had they thought to hide.

“
Where’s Sergeant Cashwell?” John asked Carrie.

“
In the house, John. He’ll be fine.”

Carrie plucked at a few hard clods of cold, crumbling dirt. She didn’t look up, but she didn’t sound frightened, either.

“
What do you mean, ‘fine’?” John said. “Why did he spend the night in that hole, then?”

“
The worst of them passed on by in the night, the men who would have taken things into their own hands, for revenge. They passed right on by, and I assume that this man is someone official. I’m not afraid of the officials.”

John wasn’t as certain of things, but he looked at Mariah and she seemed equally calm. He watched the man approach on foot, having tied his horse to the porch rail. He got within thirty feet before hailing them.

“
Is this the McGavocks’?”

“
I am John McGavock.”

The man stopped and scratched his head again.

“
Where are all the rebels?”

“
Dead or gone. Except for the few, the worst off. This was a hospital.”

The man looked at John with relief, and John knew that here was a man uncomfortable with his role. He looked like he’d spent the war behind a desk, transcribing messages for far more important men, men he feared and despised. He was pale and baggy, slightly gin-blossomed, and he wore his uniform stiffly in the way of men who could not forget what they were wearing. Such men wrote out the orders, saw to their delivery, kept the casualty lists, composed the triumphant white lies telegraphed back to headquarters, and ensured that the men who told those lies were always comfortable and well nourished. John knew men like the one standing in front of him, scratching his head and adjusting his collar. He knew that they were the men who made the war work. Not the ones who waged the war, but the ones who made it easier. There were such men on both sides. He wondered if he would have been such a man had he gone off to battle. He felt some measure of sadness for the man, knowing how he must have spent the war: unappreciated and resentful, perhaps even remorseful. He was not a happy man.

“
So there are only a few prisoners?”

“
We think of them as patients, although the doctors ran off days ago. Not prisoners. Certainly not
our
prisoners.”

The man let slip a little smile and a glimpse of unusually small and white teeth. He had very few opportunities to assert himself, John reckoned, and he was happy for this one.

“
They are most certainly prisoners, by order of General John Schofield, U.S. Army. All Confederate soldiers who cannot be moved for health and general brokenness—and I have been appointed the judge of that, sir—shall be prisoners in effect, if not in fact. And at such time that the prisoner regains his health and mobility, he shall be remanded to our custody to be transported to prison.”

John thought,
He must have memorized that, or his English has been corrupted by his work
.

“
I am Major Jonathan Van der Broeck, and I will be acting as garrison commander of the wounded, under the direct commission of General Schofield himself. I will need an accounting of each of the men under your care, to include their name, rank, unit, and state of origin. My assistant, Sergeant Allston, will be along to pick up the list and to make a preliminary inspection of the premises. Once a week I will be arriving to inspect the condition of each of your patients and to determine their ability to travel.”

“
That seems like a lot of fuss for so few men, Major Van der Broeck.”

A pained look broke through the officiousness. Van der Broeck shook his head.

“
There are wounded men all over this town, in every church and parlor big enough to hold them. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Didn’t you notice? I believe I may have the largest command of any major in the army, even if most of them are rebels. Not that I would keep track of such things.”

He nodded to Carrie, who had come to stand beside John, and turned on his heel. John could sense the burden of things lifting off all of them and dissipating. He imagined them all floating off. Carrie broke his reverie, as she was wont to do. He loved that she wasn’t floating away but standing on the ground behind him.

“
So they’re not taking him anywhere?”

“
Them.”

“
All of them. They’re staying?”

“
It appears so. For the moment.”

If he looked at it from the right angle, John could imagine that nothing had happened and nothing had changed. The town was back in the control of the Union, and his house was a hospital again. The war had subsided around them, and if he stayed out of town, he wouldn’t have to reckon with the changes it had wrought. Even the piles of men and uniforms and gear that had ringed his house were gone, carted off without John noticing.

“
Nothing will be the same again,” Carrie said. She was reading his mind but drawing the wrong conclusion.

“
It will be better,” he said.

“
For whom?”

John turned around and faced her, and could see Mariah and Theopolis gathering up their things.

“
You think it will be better for Mariah and Theopolis, John?”

John looked down at Carrie. She looked at him without sadness or judgment, just curiosity. Sadness and judgment were such familiar expressions it took him a second to register this new one.

“
For those two?”

“
Them. And the rest of them.”

“
I don’t know. It is better that the war has gone away, no matter what else happens.”

“
I’m not as sure of that. I can’t see into the future.”

“
Perhaps you should ask Mariah, then.”

“
What would she know, John? What are you suggesting?”

“
Only that she knows things, you’ve said so yourself. I’m not saying anything more about that.”

“
She knows things? You believe that now? I thought you didn’t believe in such superstitions.”

Mariah had stopped tidying up the cemetery and stood waiting for them, looking straight at John. Nothing had changed about her except the wrinkles of her brow, which had smoothed out and relaxed, as if she had nothing to fear or worry about. He could see that she would never be his slave again, no matter what he chose to call her. Theopolis, standing behind her but avoiding his eye, still acted like a slave, but John could see that this would change also. He had lost his power, not only over them but over his wife, too. And probably his children? Yes, them, too. It was a relief.

“
Oh, just ask her, Carrie.”

He drew her close and embraced her briefly and chastely, like a sister. He goosed her side, and she slapped at his hand. That would change, too, he thought. His feelings for her. Passion. It would change. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.