The Widow of the South (30 page)

It would have been simply impossible to write such a letter, and I thanked God (without an ounce of self-piety) that it had not been necessary. It was so much easier to ease the minds of strangers about the children I had barely known, to tell them lies. I felt
good
telling them. I remembered a letter I’d sent to my mother years ago about the death of Martha. I’d felt so right, so righteous, in telling her every detail about her awful death, covering up nothing. I thought I’d done her a service, a tribute, a vengeance against death, and perhaps I did accomplish those things. But what had I done to my poor old mother? I would never know. Misery charts its own course, popping up here and there unintended. Perhaps there were some things best left unsaid about death, things that ought to be taken to the grave as the property of the dead. There would be plenty of time for all of us to suffer without suffering the death of others over and over again. I had learned to lie about some things and to leave other things unsaid. Oh, I had finally become such a proper lady!

I would never write such a letter for Eli, however sorely tempted I might be. I would never write such a letter for Winder or Hattie or John or Mariah or Theopolis. If I were to write a letter for any of them, I would always say that they went to their grave peacefully with the name of the Lord upon their lips, and pray that someday I would believe it.

I
would not,
however, tolerate the lies about fish. Eli and I would have to talk about that. Or perhaps John would talk to him. I rested in the chair and closed my eyes, feeling the breeze and blessing the dressmakers of New York and Paris for their abandoning of the corset. I was positively cool sitting there in my new crinoline dress, the first dress I’d bought in years. Black, of course, and just the kind of dress I could alter and mend as I saw fit, and thus the sort of dress I could wear forever. I intended to wear it forever. I was cool, perhaps for the first time in decades. Bless the porch, the gallery, the wind. If there was another war, I vowed, I would remain in this spot to defend the porch, with its view of the grove leading down to the creek, and my precious garden, which had been newly reborn. The rudbeckia again swayed and genuflected in the borders, which I could spy through the balusters at the end of the porch. Hattie had become quite a gardener. She had her hair up in a lazy chignon, and her work dress—indigo, like an old slave!—pinned up around her knees. The peas were coming to fruit, and the roses needed trimming, and the lamb’s ear needed culling, and there she was making sure it was all in order. She had turned brown in the sun, and when she stood up and looked off toward the sun, gauging its progress and angle, she looked like an Indian. I would have to tell her not to bare her legs so often. She was becoming a woman, and I suspected I knew what men might think of her.
I
knew she was still just a girl, and I aimed to keep it that way.

These were my days, writing letters, watching my children, and waiting for John to return from one of his missions to town. We had lost so much of our land that I’d been tempted to ask him why he bothered to appeal to the better natures of the moneylenders, Mr. Baylor chief among them, but I knew that it was the effort that kept him happy. We both somehow knew that this place, Carnton, would remain a shell of itself forever, that it had long since failed as a plantation and was in the process of collapsing into itself, with this old house the only thing left of the McGavock family’s ambition. The grove would move in on us, too. I didn’t mind.

John had vowed that he could support us without the plantation, and I had faith he could. But his ideas—turning Franklin into a railroad town, creating a wood-milling center, building a textile factory—gained no supporters and therefore no money. There were those in town who thought that life would naturally return to the way it had been before the war, and it was these men who had the money to make John’s ideas reality. I could not help being surprised at the persistence of John’s conviction: that
he
would have to be the man to drag Franklin into the modern world, or the town would die. This was not the man I had married, the haunted and timid heir to his family’s farm. I liked the new man even as he failed. I was especially surprised that his failures did not send him spiraling into anger, as they would have before the war. Now I had come to love those moments with him, in his office sipping sherry, when he laughed disparagingly at the men in town and their lack of imagination.
If they want to live like primitives, watching the world go by, that’s their business,
he’d say, raising a toast to my glass.
I’ve done my best, and I’ll keep doing it until they’re all dead and gone and we can sweep away the dead wood and start anew around here.

I was awaiting his return that day on the porch and looking forward to just such a tête-à-tête in his office. I was only thinking of the comfortable chairs and the fine sherry when I spied him astride his horse, coming up the driveway. I saw no reason we could not continue like that indefinitely. It was pleasant enough.

I wish I could have looked closer at the man riding toward me, because then I might have been prepared. Later I would say to Mariah of that day,
The sherry had to run out sometime,
but that was the least of it.

38

C
ARNTON

E
very clank, thump, rattle, and crash of the cookware angered Mariah just that much more, made her just that much more uncertain that she was right. She was not the cook. She wasn’t supposed to be cooking. They’d
had
a cook, they’d had half a dozen cooks since the war, all Negroes, and every one of them had left. The last had left telling Mariah she was still a slave.
I ain’t livin’ like this, cooking and cleaning up after white folk. It’s like it ain’t changed, and I reckon there got to be something else in the world for a body to do. So I’ll be movin’ on, Mariah
. Oh, she was going to move on? To where? To do what? Could she read? No, she couldn’t.
Mariah
could read, and so could her son, and yet cooking wasn’t below
her
. No, she was a
slave
still. She hadn’t broken the chains—wasn’t that what one of them had told her, laughing in her face?

Mariah assumed there would be no fish—she knew Eli’s game, he was no mystery to her—so she’d already been soaking the ham, and boiling grits, and cooking down mustard greens. Greens. How she hated everything to do with greens. Poor man’s food, and yet the McGavocks liked that green slop. They had the luxury of liking it and could eat it when they wanted. They didn’t
have
to eat it. That was the difference.

“You making greens again. Damn, I hate them greens.”

“Don’t you swear in my kitchen, Eli.”

Eli walked in with a happy grin and a big man’s swagger, rolling his shoulders around in their sockets like he was too big for the room. He was a funny boy becoming a funny man, Mariah thought. He sat down on the preacher’s bench in front of the fireplace and began to pick his fingernails with a thin, sharp piece of shale he carried in his pocket.

“I know you hate greens, too, Mariah, so I
know
you making something else for yourself. What is it? I want some of that.”

“I would have liked to have had some fish, Mr. Eli. Don’t suppose you got some fish this time.”

“Can’t say I do. Did. I mean, we didn’t catch any fish.”

“Just once, Eli, you could bring me one of them fish to fry up.”

“Talk to the fish, Mariah.”

“You don’t think I can?”

“I know you can.”

Now that Theopolis had gone off and made himself a life in town, Eli was the closest thing Mariah had to kin out at the house. He felt like kin, or at least like someone who knew better what her life was like because he’d come up hard, too. Even if he was a white boy. She knew he might someday be riding around slapping at her people and running his mouth,
nigger, nigger, nigger
. For all she knew, he was already picking up that kind of talk down there at the store, from that cracker storekeeper. She doubted it, because she admired the boy’s intelligence and had faith that it would win out, but you just never knew. She did know that he always visited Theopolis at his cobbler’s shop, and that was also good. She hadn’t talked to her son in a couple weeks. She was happy to have Eli around.

While Eli picked at his fingers, Mariah clanged at the stovetop and muttered under her breath. Eli looked up and brushed his raggedy brown hair from his eyes.

“What you saying now, Mariah?”

“Mind your own business.”

She’d been wondering about what Theopolis had said to her when he told her he was moving to town for good. He wasn’t mean about it, like the cooks had been. She was his mother, and besides, he could read just like her. He didn’t resent her.
That’s what they were, just jealous. They don’t got nothing to go to, and they mad because I can do whatever I want
. She thought about that lie for a moment. She couldn’t do whatever she wanted, but the reasons weren’t that she was just an old slave, like the parade of cooks had told her. And they weren’t what Theopolis thought they were.
You just can’t see it, see what your life could be like. It’s not your fault. You’ll change.
He’d been kind, but he’d also been firm, even as she begged him not to leave. He’d smiled and stroked her hair and looked every bit the businessman and pillar of the community he hoped to become. But she hadn’t cared a lick about being left alone, and her reasons for staying had nothing to do with her lack of sight. She had plenty of sight, too much sight. Even Eli knew this, but Theopolis had never believed it. He was afraid that believing in her, or the warnings of Miss Eloisa, would mark him for an ignorant Negro the rest of his life. He was afraid of that worse than he was afraid of anything else, and
that’s
what scared Mariah. She could see, all right. She could see a future much more frightening than the one that Theopolis imagined.
Where do all those folk think they’re going to go?
she said to herself again.
What do they know but cooking and cleaning and picking cotton and eating greens and sleeping on hay ticking?

“Mariah, I got some news for you. About Theopolis.”

“What about him?”

“He’s making shoes for Mr. Baylor’s store now, got himself ten new orders and more where that came from. Work boots and oxfords and all sorts of things I ain’t ever heard of. Mr. Baylor thinks Theopolis has a lot of something. I forget what, but it was good, I reckon.”

“What, boy?”

“
Promise
. He said he had promise. Reckon that? He telling a Negro he got promise? What you think he promised, a white man like that, like Mr. Baylor? What you think Mr. Baylor don’t got that Theopolis got, and that he could make himself a promise about? What’s it, Mariah? You mad?”

“No, Mr. Eli. And don’t you go thinking I am, either. I just wish my boy could tell me such things hisself.”

She sniffed, and in her nose she caught the scent of the ham bone she was boiling with the greens. She had sometimes searched for a word to describe the smell of a ham bone in a pot of greens, at the very moment when the bone loses its flavor and the greens take over, bright and pungent. The word was
decayed,
she realized. It smelled like something decaying, going back to the earth.

What promise did Theopolis have? There was much the boy had to offer. The question was what that dried-up old man Baylor wanted with her boy. That was the question.

“You know, Mariah, I believe Theopolis would want to tell you hisself, only he’s so busy and you never go to visit. I believe he’d like you to visit.”

He’s nice enough for a white boy,
she thought.

While Mariah sat and thought, she let Eli mess around with the food on the stove, stirring the greens and flipping the ham steaks frying slow in the deep iron skillet. He yelped when the fat sprayed up onto his arm, but he stuck with it. He kept looking over his shoulder at Mariah, to see if she was all right. Or maybe it was to see whether
he
was all right, whether he was doing things right, whether he was pleasing her with his cooking. Mariah watched him dance and shuffle from pot to pot, flicking his face around to sneak a peek at her, and she thought that it would be his constant worrying about what other people were doing that would upend the boy someday, if he weren’t made to grow up quick and become his own man. She would see about that, take charge of it. He was a nice boy.

Her own boy was a nice boy. A nice and kind man who, of course, wouldn’t see anything wrong with Mr. Baylor bringing him into his circle. She hadn’t talked to Theopolis, but she knew how he’d be feeling: surprised, flattered, and especially vindicated in his decision to move to town. She could hear him rehearsing his speech to her.
Well, ain’t that something? Just a country Negro without nothing, and what you know? I might just start up a shoe factory, things keep a-goin’ like this right here. This Negro’s got promise, Mama. I been told so. I understand why you’d want to stay out here with these people. You ain’t known nothing else. But I got to make my way, make a new way, ’cause I’m young and ain’t no one going to take care of folk like me no more. Got to take care of your own self.

She wondered if they made him come through the back door of the store to deliver his shoes. She wondered how he explained that. He’d think of something, she was sure. She wondered how he explained the young Negro they’d found downriver, burned and drowned, with a plow collar around his neck weighing him down. He was from Pulaski, and word upriver was that
he
had had promise, too.

White men had another word for “promise” in a Negro. They had many words.
Uppity. Coon. Unnatural. Traitor.
There were lots of words for what Theopolis had.

She prayed that Theopolis would know how to stay out of trouble. He would be right about one thing—there weren’t no one to help him. Mr. John might have helped him.
Mr. McGavock
. But he could barely help himself lately, or the family, so what good could he do Theopolis? As long as Theopolis didn’t get any more mixed up with that Baylor man, as long as he didn’t take a notion to stick his head up too far, as long as he didn’t covet too much of the white man’s world. She knew that there wasn’t anything to covet that a good, God-fearing man like Theopolis didn’t already have, but she also knew that her prayer for Theopolis was nigh to hopeless. He would need her help, too.

Eli was tapping on the pots with her good wooden spoons, but she sat and listened for a moment. It was no tune she could recognize, but it was lively and smooth and a welcome noise. He was concentrating so hard on the sounds.

“Take the ham bone out the greens.”

“Aww, it ain’t right. I like the pork in my greens. Ought to have ten ham bones in the greens, I were making ’em. Only thing that saves it.”

“Take it out. It’s ready.”