The Widow of the South (3 page)

One man raised his hand while spitting out some tobacco and pulled his yellow hair out of his eyes. He’d been in Forrest’s troop longer than most.

“My uncle lives around here, I been here before.”

“Where is there a place I can see the town from without getting out from cover?”

Forrest trusted this man, who had once shot a Federal officer in the face before he could run Forrest through. He liked that kind of loyalty, the kind that saved his skin.

“There’s a house off the Lewisburg Pike. Got two stories. McGavocks own it.”

McGavock, McGavock. I know that name.

“Where is this house at?”

“I can take us there. There’s woods, be easy to sneak up on it.”

McGavock. I might have sold him slaves.

“Go on, then.”

2

C
ARNTON

M
ariah knew Carrie would not come greet the men. She closed the door behind her before walking heavily across the passage to the staircase, which she took down to the ground floor. If Confederates were coming, she decided, she must receive them at the front of the big house like proper folks. If she had to cover for her missus yet again, and this time with men who frightened her like the devils in one of her old dreams, she would use all the power of the house and whatever might still be dignified and imposing about it. Not much to go on, but still . . .

Sometimes she thought of herself as the mistress of the house. She planned the meals and directed what was left of the house staff. She had intercepted many visitors on the front brick walkway during the last two years, telling each of them that her mistress was not feeling well and could not rise to see them. Town people had quit coming to visit unless it was to transact business with Colonel John or Mariah, and she had heard there was some speculation about Carrie’s health and the propriety of any household that would leave a nigger in charge. Hattie and Winder, Carrie’s children, came hollering for Mariah to settle their disputes now, after encountering Carrie’s closed and locked door all too often. It had come to this, finally: she sometimes forgot about Carrie, something that would never have happened when she was running around fetching food and sewing and books and mops and what all. When her mistress ran things. Sometimes now she would jump a little when she heard footsteps on the floor above her.

Mariah walked past the plaques of the “Masks of Tragedy” on the walls of the hallway and, now hurrying, across the worn-out floorcloth that led to the front doors, which she unlocked. She stepped out onto the portico. She held her hands clasped in front of her to keep them from shaking.

At the end of the front walkway a small group of riders had come to a halt, and between the rows of boxwoods and cedars that lined the front walk she could see a tall man unwind himself from the back of his horse and step to the ground. His movements seemed so languid she was surprised by how quickly he moved up the path. She wanted him to stay forever down by the gate. He walked bowlegged and loose, with his head down, and was upon her before she knew it. When he first noticed her, he made a gesture as if to take off his hat, but when he saw her fully, he left it on. Down by the gate one of the other gray men dismounted and held the horse of his leader in one bony hand.

“I need to use your back porch, second floor. I saw it on the way up here. Get your people so I can talk to ’em.”

“Pardon me, sir, but Colonel McGavock’s out, and Mrs. McGavock’s a mite too sick to take visitors. She would be happy to receive you on another day, and she send her regrets.”

He eyed her for a moment, as if he was trying to figure her out, and then he nodded. He knocked his boot against the bottom step of the landing, and clods of red mud fell into the path.

“I ain’t a visitor. I am General Forrest, and I’ma use your house to reconnoiter awhile. Watch yourself.”

With that, he strode up the stairs two at a time and tried to brush past Mariah, but she had already fallen back to the doorway.

“Please, sir, Colonel McGavock say no visitors or disturbances.”

Forrest pulled up and clenched his fists for a moment before rocking back on his heels and nodding again. He seemed to be trying to remember something he had once known, maybe something he had been taught when he was a boy but had long since forgotten. He nodded and took a deep breath.

“Please tell your mistress I am right sorry she’s sick and that I hope she gets well. I will do my damnedest to stay quiet, but I’m coming in. Get out of the way.”

Mariah had made her attempt, and now she knew it was time to step aside. She remembered where she’d heard Forrest’s name. Some of the town Negroes had been talking about him the last time she’d gone in to get supplies.
Forrest killed all them colored soldiers, throttled them right around the neck. He left not a one standing, and he put their heads on sticks all around the place. Fort Pillow it was. He the devil, no doubt. The Lord goin’ to make him pay, yes.
This memory made him seem smaller to her, less human, and therefore more contemptible. She would not give him respect. She stood with her back to the wall as he strode into the house and trod hard across the diagonal squares of the floorcloth toward the stairs. Mariah saw his steps raise little dust balls.

“Is this the way up’n the top floor?”

“Yes.”

“You let me know when
Colonel
McGavock gets back, hear?”

“Yes.”

But Mariah followed him up the stairs. She would not let him out of her sight, not while Carrie was up there.

3

S
ERGEANT
Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL,
24
TH
A
RKANSAS

W
e were marching up that pike, and everywhere you looked there were things cast off by the Yankees littering the sides of the road, and it was everything our officers could do to keep the young ones from ducking out of formation and snatching up something bright and useful-looking, like crows looking to decorate their nests. The old ones, like me, we knew better than to pick up anything, because you’d have to carry it, and we knew that our burden was heavy enough. But, hell, the Yankees had thrown away more than we’d laid our eyes on in months, maybe years. There were pocket Bibles and little writing desks, poker chips and love letters, euchre decks and nightshirts, canteens and pots of jam, and all kinds of fancy knives. It looked like a colossus had picked up a train full of things, from New York or one of those kinds of places, and dumped it all out to see what was what. And I’m just mentioning the things that you might want to pick up and keep. There was a lot more, besides. There were wagons left burning on the side of the road, crates of rotten and infested meat, horses and mules shot in their traces. I reckon those animals weren’t moving fast enough, and you couldn’t blame the Yankees for lightening their loads if they could, but it was a sorry sight. Even so, all that gear gladdened my heart because it seemed so desperate. They were
running,
by God. They were running from us, the 24th Arkansas, and all the rest of the brigades ahead of us and behind us. The columns stretched far as I could see when I wiped the sweat from my eyes and got a good look around. But mostly I just kept my head down and put my feet down, one in front of the other, the way I’d learned to do.

The officers rode up and down the column on their horses, saying all sorts of things to keep our spirits up. I’d learned that if you needed an officer to pick up your spirits, you were in sorry shape. But some of the younger boys listened, and they were heartened by it. The officers talked about the glory of the South and about how our women would be watching and how they would expect us to fight like Southern men—hard and without quitting. I wanted to say,
Until that bullet come for you,
but I didn’t. Those officers were getting a whole lot of the men riled up for a fight, and I figured that was good no matter what else I had to say about it. Some of our boys had their homes around there, and you could just tell they were itching to get going. You had to hold them back, tell them to pace themselves, or else they’d start running and whooping and getting all lathered.

One big hoss in the company ahead, a man with a full beard and a neck like a hog’s, started yelling for the band to give us a tune. He stomped his feet and rattled the bayonet he had at his side, and then some other of the boys did the same thing, and pretty soon we were all yelling at the band to play “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” to give us a tune and be useful for once. The band even got a few notes off before one of the company commanders rode by, snatched up a trumpet, and threatened to beat them with it if he heard another note. That was funny to watch, and it was about as good a morale lifter as hearing “The Bonnie Blue Flag” straight through, on account of our band wasn’t very accomplished.

The thing I kept thinking about was the nightshirts and the pots of jam, lying there on the roadside. They made me wonder whether we’d been fighting in the same war.

And then the order went out to get on line. They just up and stopped us, and I couldn’t help running into the man ahead of me and getting a whiff of the sweat and stink rising up off his homespun shirt. The men quit jabbering, and then the thousands of us were moving to either side of the road, all bunched up at first but then thinning out as the line got longer and longer, like a ball of twine unwinding. There wasn’t any stomping of the feet then, no bayonet rattling. We picked our way across the hills, some units stopping at the edge of a tree line, most of us out in the open. It took me a few moments to realize we were going to stop and fight right here, rather than chase the Yanks all the way to Nashville. It looked like a mighty long way to the Union lines, which were up on a rise. I could see men way up there in town tossing dirt around. The sunlight flashed off their shovels and picks, and sometimes it seemed like you could actually pick out the sound of their work a few seconds after you’d seen their tools go chunking into the dirt. It was so damn hot for late November. What had General Hood said when we crossed the river into Tennessee?
No more fighting on the enemy’s terms.
I looked at those battlements up ahead over a mile distant, and I thought,
We must be the greatest army in the world if these are our terms.

I’d been fighting for three years by then. I’d been shot once, and my left arm still didn’t feel right. Sometimes I had a hard time lifting my rifle and keeping it steady. I thought about this and began flexing my arm to get it limbered up. We sat down in place and began the long wait.

It always seemed a long wait before the fight, no matter how long it took. Officers rode here and there conferring with one another, and then they’d come back and huddle with their sergeants, and word would come down about what was happening, and then they’d do it all over again and the word would change. This drove some of the men crazy every time.
Shit, let’s just go,
they’d yell to no one in particular, and they’d jump up and pace around and kick a tree or something. Sometimes you didn’t know what they meant by “go”: fighting or running. I’m quite sure that both options crossed the minds of most men. It crossed my mind every time, and I’d been in a lot of fights and hadn’t run yet. Well, I hadn’t run until everyone else was running. I had that rule.

The thing I’m about to say, you might not understand unless you’ve been in war. But in those moments before the fight, if you were a smart man, you’d figure out a way to convince yourself that it didn’t matter to you if you lived or died. If you’re safe in your house, with your children running around underfoot and with fields that need to be worked, it’s an impossible way of thinking unless you’re sick or touched in the head. Of course it mattered if you lived or died. But if you went into a battle caring what happened to you, you wouldn’t be able to fight, even though you knew you were as likely to die as the next man whether you cared or not. There wasn’t any logic to who got killed and who didn’t, and it was better that your final thoughts not be of cowardice and regret. It was better not to care, and to let yourself be swept up in the rush of the men beside you, to drive forward into the smoke and fire with the knowledge that you had already beaten death. When you let yourself go like that, you could fight on and on.

Everyone had their own way of getting their mind right. We lingered there on the outskirts of Franklin, and I could see each of the men in my company going through their little rituals. There were two ways of getting ready. Most of the new men, unless they were unusually wise or strong-minded, went about tricking themselves into forgetting the possibility of death. One youngster in an almost clean uniform took a couple pieces of straw, stuck it in his hat, and began to loudly tell every joke he could remember to no one in particular, as if everything would be all right if he could keep laughing right up until the bullet got him. A few people were listening to him, but that wasn’t really the point.

Listen here, I got another one. Three old men come courting a young lady, and she says, “What can I expect from a marriage to you?” And the first old man, he says, “I’ve got a big ol’ . . .”

Other younger ones paced back and forth, hitting themselves in the chest, shaking their heads like bulls, and cursing. These were the ones who were trying to make themselves so angry and riled up that they’d run like they had blinders on and rush wherever someone pointed them without thinking about anything except throttling something or somebody. Some of these boys picked up rocks and threw them as hard as they could at the confused rabbits, squirrels, and coveys of quail flushed out of their hiding places by our noise. I caught one mountain boy with stringy auburn hair and no shoes punching and kicking at an old locust tree behind us, and I yanked him around and sat him down before he hurt himself.

Me and some of the other veterans, we had different ways. We’d all been in battle, and you couldn’t go through such a thing more than a couple times without it becoming impossible to forget death. The boy I’d joined up with three years before, my best friend from Fayetteville, he’d gotten a minié ball through the eye at Atlanta. In my dreams I still see his pink round face thrown back on the ground, his mouth open and his crooked teeth bared, his straw-blond hair matted with blood. After that, I never forgot about death.

The way I prepared myself was to sit down on my pack, pick out a point on the horizon, and stare at it. This is what I did that day at Franklin. I stared and stared at what appeared to be a church steeple on the edge of the town, just at the limits of my vision, and I took stock of my place in the world. My father had died young, and my ma ran off when I was about ten. I didn’t have a girl, I had no one to go back to. I was just a man, and even if I’d lived to be a hundred, I’d still be forgotten someday. Men die, that’s how it is. I had lost my faith by then; otherwise, I guess I would have prayed for my safety, but I didn’t. I took deep breaths, stared at that steeple, and convinced myself I didn’t matter in this world. I was an ant, a speck of dust, a forgotten memory. I was insignificant like everyone else, and it was this insignificance that made me strong. If my life was insignificant and my death meaningless, then I was free of this world and I became the sole sovereign of my own world, a world in which one act of courage before death would be mine to keep forever. I could keep that from God.

When they called us up to get on line again, this time for keeps, I was ready. Men dusted themselves off, tightened their belts, and obsessively checked their cartridges and ammunition, just in case. I stood there, staring forward, silent, looking out over the rolling land, hearing the
pop pop pop
of pickets firing their first shots, and thinking I could almost see around the bend of the earth if I looked hard enough. It was so pretty. The hills were glowing and soft-looking, and I saw a couple of deer scatter out of the woods and leap across the fields as we moved out. I could have seen myself living in that little town in front of me, in a proper house, under a different set of circumstances and in a different lifetime. Before we stepped off, I thought,
I wonder why they chose this place for me to die.

And that, finally, was my real strength: I knew I was going to die. I wasn’t happy about it, but I felt relieved to know it.