The Widow of the South (4 page)

4

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

I
heard the muffled voices downstairs in the central passage and then the sound of hard boots on the creaky stairs. I could smell tobacco and sweat, a scent I imagined drifting off him and insinuating itself into the warp and weave of my house, disturbing my peace, throwing everything off kilter. What could possibly be so important? I turned back to Martha’s dress and scrubbed until the threading began to fray.

We must endeavor to keep her cool, and her room darkened. Close the blinds, please.

The room felt suddenly hot and stale
.
There seemed to be no air; whatever air that remained seemed thin and fragile and musty. I stood up from the bed and crossed to the window that looked out over the front walk. The condensation had evaporated in the sun, which now loomed high over an unusually warm day. I could see out to the driveway and observed the men waiting with their horses. I began to drum the windowsill with my fingers, yawning. I yawned uncontrollably when I was nervous, one little yawn after another. It was an odd habit that had possessed me since childhood. It caused my hand to flutter mouthward whenever I felt myself growing agitated. I stared down at the horsemen and tried to project my thoughts toward them.
Go away
. I thought they might hear me, but they didn’t. They looked scared, but I didn’t trust my reckoning of things anymore. I would not credit them with fear.

I turned my back to the window and hurried toward the door, which I locked. I pressed my ear to it and felt the cool chalky paint against my cheek. What were they saying? I could barely hear.

Doctor, she won’t move
.

No. Something else. They were saying something about the war. The war, which had pulsed and droned all around me for so long and which had already leveled much of our ancient grove, cut down by slaves I hadn’t recognized for reasons I couldn’t fathom. There wasn’t much about the mechanics of war I cared to understand. Even so, I couldn’t help thinking that I was besieged, and I couldn’t help hoping that the Southern army would come raise the occupation and drive the invaders out. My desire to be rescued was tempered by the paradox of its source, which was my abiding urge to be left alone. I wanted the Confederates to fight, just not
here
.

It hurts, Mama.

I heard the man shuffle through the bedroom next to Martha’s, I heard the squeal and rattling of the big jib window being wrenched open, and then I heard the man step out onto the second floor of the porch. Mariah’s soft, irregular steps followed behind him. I turned slowly from the door and stood staring at Martha’s silk day dress, green and red plaid, so neatly laid out on the bed.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.

A new hole had appeared in the dress’s hem. Time kept ticking on and on, pounding and pounding at my temples. The moths would not leave my little girl’s things alone, always chewing and chewing and chewing. I could feel my pulse beating in my throat and my stomach twisting. I found it difficult to focus my eyes; everything seemed guarded by a gauzy shroud. I thought I might faint and looked around for a place to crumple.

We can only wait and see.

Without thinking I snatched up the dress as if the bed had stolen it from me. I walked to the closet, put the dress onto a hanger, and pushed on the closet door until it clicked shut. For a moment I could hear the clothes swishing back and forth before all went silent.

I went back to the door. They were out on the back porch. I held my breath and tried to shrink into the folds of my black crinoline. After a few minutes I heard a voice again, but this time the man seemed to be talking to himself, mumbling without reply in a voice that sounded rusty and agitated. I heard just a few words.
Lookout . . . order of battle . . . enfilade . . . skeer . . . wounded.
I wondered what kind of madman talked to himself like that.

Dear Mama,

We have lost Martha, who has gone to be united with our Lord Jesus. I was with her to the end, and even as she lay dying she reached out and took my hand and told me that all would be well. I shouldn’t worry, she said, our Savior would carry her home. Then she rose up from the bed a little, looked to heaven, smiled, and then fell back unto death. She was at peace, finally. She was so beautiful.

He was mumbling about the war. The man had invaded my house because of the war. I had to see him, to know who would dare bring that filthy business into my house, even if he
was
a Confederate. I straightened my dress, smoothing out the wrinkles where my lap had been, and looked in the mirror. I refused to acknowledge the face looking out at me. I looked out the window again and noticed that most of the men had dismounted and one of them was walking fast up the path toward the house, presumably to join his commander. I went to the door, unlocked it, and walked out.

In the passage the sunbeams from my doorway seemed solid, and the glowing and swirling dust was as substantial as anything I could imagine. I passed out of the light into the brief darkness of the hall and then turned into the spare bedroom the man had just clomped through. Long glass curtains flapped slowly in the window, which was almost as large as a door. I was shocked to discover that the air outside smelled fresh and sweet. I walked to the window to spy on the man without being seen.

Around the corner of the windowpane a tall and sour-looking man bent over the porch rail, leaning his head out and staring at Franklin in the distance. He pursed cracked lips and rubbed his hand over greasy hair. Before him stretched many acres of grove and farmland, a rolling sea of brown punctuated by an occasional stand of trees, a little creek running into the little river. He held that position and was almost motionless. I thought he might fall over if he were not careful. He wore big black boots that bore the remnants of mud and macadam. He rocked back and forth. Behind him, so close I could almost touch her, stood Mariah.

The man’s voice was startling.

“How big is this house?”

Too big,
I thought
. Bigger than the whole world sometimes.

“It got eight main rooms, some hallways, and the old wing where the family livin’ now. The rest of us, we in those cabins over there.”

She pointed at the lattice wall at the end of the porch. I looked about me as if I, too, were a stranger. Yellowing white linen still hung from every doorway and mirror, marking the death of the children who had once lived within. My children, so weak and pure and trusting. At night the drapes looked like ghosts, moving around in the drafts that broke through the walls and under the doors. Mariah had wanted to take them away years before, but I had forbidden her.

“They got water close by?”

I noticed how he referred to “they,” as if Mariah didn’t live here. There was something funny about the man, about the way he looked at Mariah through half-closed eyes. He looked like he was waiting for something to impress him, I thought, and that Mariah had somehow failed. I resented him and his people and wherever he came from. He looked like the kind of man who figured he knew everything about you, and about whom you could never know a thing, not really. I was afraid for Mariah.

I remembered a conversation I’d once had with her when we were children back in Louisiana, long before we’d come here.
My great-great-grandfather prayed for me a long time before I was born,
Mariah had said,
a long time before I was nigh on a thought in my mama’s mind. And my mama, she already doing the same for my children, and I ain’t even kissed a boy yet.
This was the way Mariah’s family made sure that their children’s children came into the world with the proper protection of God, Mariah said.

I had wondered aloud if my own grandparents had ever prayed for me like that. Mariah said that she had a hard time imagining those white people in the paintings on the wall of the house getting down on their knees and praying for someone who didn’t even exist, who might not ever exist. I had known she was right.
Too impractical, too superstitious, too much like the niggers,
I heard them saying.

Now I wondered if this was the problem. Maybe I
had
been forgotten in prayer, and perhaps this explained why I became lost to the world. It wasn’t as if I was the only one who had ever lost a child. Mariah was someone who believed she had been blessed by the long dead, so she was not fearful of men like the one standing in front of her, I knew.
Until I get the keys to the Kingdom, Lord, I ain’t giving up,
Mariah liked to say.

I was more skeptical, and this had the odd effect, at that moment, of making me want to pray for Mariah.

“They’s water nearby,” Mariah was saying. “They’s a cistern out the side door and a little creek nearby.”

Mariah met my eyes, as if trying to tell me something, but I only stared at her and twisted my fingers in the billowing curtain.

“Do any of you know how to bind wounds?”

“They only a few of us left, but I do believe we know how to take care a bumps and cuts.”

“Going to be a lot more than bumps and cuts, if I got this battlefield read right. What about Mrs. McGavock?”

“She indisposed.”

“I mean, she know how to take care of wounds?”

“I reckon she’s seen her share of blood.”

The man chuckled, as if he was warming to her. “You a smart nigra, ain’t you?”

“I’s smart enough, thank you.”

“You know what’s coming today?”

“No.”

“The whole goddamn Army of the Tennessee is comin’, that’s what. Where’s Mrs. McGavock?”

“She not feeling well.”

I knew that by repeating herself Mariah had meant to reprove the man, but even I could tell that this was a man on whom nothing was lost. His good humor disappeared. His eyes grew narrow and black.

“You’re smart, but I’ll still punch you in the mouth you keep talking like that. Mrs. McGavock’s goin’ to have to get out of that bed or wherever she is no matter what you think or what she want to do. When that army comes, I reckon there’ll be dead and dying and wounded all over this goddamn town who’ll need taking care of. And you goin’ to do some of it.”

I was about to reproach the man, but as I opened my mouth to speak, I noted that Mariah was not scared. She stood up straighter. Mariah could hold her own.

“Colonel McGavock will want to speak with you ’bout that, sir. May I get you something while you wait?”

Mariah motioned as if she was going to lead him off the porch and down to the sitting room. The man shook his head.

“I won’t be waitin’ on pretend colonels, nigra.”

A voice behind me: “I was looking for General Forrest, ma’am.”

I let out a little shriek and covered my mouth as I turned to face the man behind me, in the doorway of the spare bedroom. He was dirty like his commander, but his voice sounded Irish. He was also short, thin, and a little twitchy. He cleared his throat, dusted his pant legs with his slouch hat, and peered intently at me.

So that’s who the man is,
I thought.
A general.
There was nowhere to retreat, and so I stood up straight and struggled to smile, but yawned instead. I was so very nervous.

“The gentleman is out on the porch. Right through here.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

The man walked past me, but General Forrest seemed to ignore him. He turned toward the window.

“Mrs. McGavock? I’d like a word with you, ma’am.”

I had come to the window intending to confront the invader, but something about him and his voice had stopped me. He had cowed me. I hadn’t realized how isolated I had become these last couple years, how few people had come to visit me, how thin my connection to the larger world had really become. Who was the pastor at the church now? I did not know. Whose boy was the latest among the dead? I did not know that, either. From this back porch I had sometimes watched funeral wagons move up the pike toward town, and the only thing that I could remember of them were the most primitive impressions—the shapes of the wheels, the tilt of the men’s hats, the sound of the caisson crunching on the road, the color of the coffin laid out and polished like something they should all cherish. The faces . . . there were no faces. But there must have been faces! I could not recall a one.

This man stood before me now, and my mind emptied. I had no idea who he was or even what he was. He was a creature risen from swamps I’d never seen, molded by forces and events I could not name.

I had spent hours in John’s office bent over his globe, tracing its lines and squiggles and unnatural shapes. I spent some time memorizing the points of my own boundaries—here is Natchez, Mobile, humpbacked Kentucky, and Wilmington. There is Nashville. I spent hours whispering to myself the names of places on the other side of the world and wondering how they had been named and how their lines had been drawn and what forces conspired to make them stay put. I wondered if they really did stay put and, if they didn’t, why men bothered to draw them upon globes. I spent much time considering the border between Europe and Asia, which marked the boundary, apparently, between existence and nothingness. To the left, on the western side of “The Euxine (or Black Sea),” the map was full, dense with names rendered in a spidery typescript, and mountain ranges, and colors. Hungary, Moldavia, Little Tartary, The Krim, Dalmatia, Gallipoli, Bagnaluk. To the east the map went white and flat, broken only by the words “Anatolia (or Asia Minor).” Could it be that there was really nothing there in Anatolia? It was an extraordinary idea, one that made me nervous in my stomach. I also thought it strange that the mapmakers couldn’t decide what things were supposed to be called, and had decided not to choose. It had been difficult naming my own children, too.

General Forrest, standing before me now, was as alien as a platypus. Perhaps he was from Anatolia or one of those vast places on the globe labeled simply “Desert.” What could I say to such a man? He looked like a skeleton, a tree, a gnarled piece of metal. Did he even speak my language?