The Widow of the South (6 page)

7

T
HE
G
RIFFIN
H
OMESTEAD

O
n Winstead Hill, a couple miles south of Franklin along the pike, two boys crouched in the weeds, watching.

Each had stuffed a ham biscuit in his pocket, not cured, but fresh meat off the pig that the Willises had killed not two weeks before. Ab Willis had water in a canteen made from a bull’s bladder, which he claimed had once been the cherished possession of a slain Indian but which his friend Eli just happened to know had been bought off one of the traders that came through the country every once in a while. Eli had bought himself a little pocketknife from the trader with some of his egg money, and that’s how he knew about the canteen. The old trader and his unusually young wife had kept dozens of the things piled up in the back of their wagon, and Eli had mistaken the canteens for a pile of fantastically large mushrooms. He played along with Ab’s story, though. Ab was a good friend, if a little slow.

Ab had been the one to bring the news of the war that afternoon, pounding on the Griffins’ door while Eli was finishing his midday dinner. Eli had been trying to convince his pa that the steers didn’t need to be moved that afternoon, and he was proposing that fishing wouldn’t be such a bad way to spend some time, when he heard Ab stumble up the steps to the front porch.

Pound pound pound
.
Ouch
.

Ab had found the nail sticking out of the door. Eli was supposed to have removed the nail last winter, but he’d forgotten, and then he figured it didn’t make any sense to take it out anyway. Mr. Griffin came to the door, and Ab, always afraid of the old widower with his baggy eye sockets and heavy, fat boots, could barely squeak out his request to see Eli while sucking on his knuckle.

Eli Griffin’s house was something more than a cabin, but just barely. It stood several miles down the pike toward Columbia, about a mile off the road in quiet woods. It had two floors and a wood stove in the kitchen, where Becky cooked their meals. Everything was gray, washed-wood, horizontal beaded poplar boards on the inside, from floor to ceiling, but there was a small stone fireplace at the opposite end of the room from the kitchen stove, and they all—Eli, Becky, and their father, Joseph—thought it was quite smart and cozy. They each had their own special chairs drawn right up to the hearth. There were three bedrooms upstairs, each with a plain-style rope bed covered with a corn husk mattress. The Griffins didn’t have anything hanging on the walls except for a picture of George Washington that Eli had lifted from a farmhouse abandoned a few years before by their neighbors, and a sketch of their mother that Becky had drawn when she was little. It had been three years since Mrs. Griffin had died, and they still prayed for her safe passage to paradise whenever they sat down to eat at the table. She had never bothered to teach Becky her special recipes—probably because she hadn’t figured on dying of the cough—but Becky had made up a few of her own, and Eli never thought to complain about the food.

When Eli came to the door, Ab told him loudly what he’d seen earlier that morning: thousands and thousands of Confederates marching up the pike with guns and sabers and all sorts of things warlike. It looked like the end of the world, Ab said. Without a word Mr. Griffin hurried out to move the cattle, forgetting that he’d told Eli to do it, and Becky, who had also been listening while she put away the dishes, disappeared upstairs to her bedroom. For the first time in recent memory Eli had been left alone. He didn’t bother to wonder about it.

Guns! Men on horses!
Ab handed him a biscuit, and they were off, out the front door and down the path that led to the Griffins’ well, and then past the well. They ran fast and recklessly, howling and leaping around like they had been released from someplace stuffy and dark, where all anyone ever did was pray nothing would happen. Something was happening now, by heaven, it was.

They ran for a long time through the fields that lined the road, occasionally stopping to fondle things the soldiers had left strewn along the way. Eli picked up a bone-handled knife with notches on the hilt and stuck it in his pants. Ab held a jar of some sort of confection high above his head to see what the sun looked like when filtered through the glass, and then he threw it down against the road where it broke with a pop, spreading tendrils of peach jam in every direction. They wrestled over a pack of cards, and Eli won. Ab settled for a dented brass spyglass with a couple big scratches and a crack on the lens. Then they paused to catch their breath.

“Well, where are they? Thought you said there were thousands of ’em.” Eli wondered if it had all been a figment of Ab’s imagination, the litter on the side of the road notwithstanding.

“They gone up the road, probably to town by now. They’s moving fast, faster than you can run, slug. I bet they taken the town by now, and we missed it because you too busy eating and not minding what’s goin’ on.”

“You saying you didn’t eat lunch, fatty?”

“I’m saying I don’t eat lunch all leisure-like.”

They wrestled some more, and then, without saying anything, they started running up the road toward town. Each had only the vaguest idea what they would find up there, which was the main reason they were so eager to see it for themselves. By fits and starts they spent the next couple of hours traveling the five miles to the foot of Breezy and Winstead hills, on the east and west sides of the pike, respectively. To the west they could see a number of people on top of Winstead Hill, men and women, who had gathered to watch whatever was about to happen. A few of the ladies sat in chairs that their husbands had brought in the buggies Eli and Ab found parked on the south side at the bottom of the hill. A couple dozen people milled around up there like they were at a party, and Eli and Ab climbed up to join them.

“Let’s make like we’re spies,” Eli said.

“Hard to be a spy with all them people around. They catch you right quick.”

“We’ll sneak around ’em, jackass. They’re right there on top of the hill, and they can’t see us if we sneak around the side all the way to the front. We’ll stay in the tall grass.”

“I don’t know, they look like they got a good view up there, and they right comfortable. I think there’s a whole mess of them, if I ain’t mistaken.”

“We are well provisioned, Private Willis. Let’s go.”

They crawled crouched low and climbed halfway up the back side of the hill and then began making their way around the hill to the right. It was slow going. Eli kept insisting on using Ab’s new spyglass to observe the people gathered on top of the hill. The crack in the lens cut everyone in half and made their heads gigantic and their legs tiny like a midget’s. Eli giggled at them. They were like elves up there on that hill, strange little monsters.

After a half hour of wiggling around through the weeds, Eli and Ab found a position on the front of the hill, down from its crest and out of sight of the picnickers. What they saw in front of them was breathtaking and so foreign they just lay there without speaking.

Directly in front of them, and spreading out a mile each way, stood the army. The long gray line snaked on and on in each direction. They tried to count, but after a while they could swear they were seeing the same men over and over again, as if they were all the same man. They nibbled on their biscuits and took turns with the spyglass. The boys watched the Confederates spread themselves out along the line, some men mincing along on tender feet, others striding along like nothing had ever hurt them in their entire lives. One man stopped to relieve himself in the bushes at the bottom of the hill, and when the wind kicked up, Eli swore he could smell the wet odor of chicory and maybe a little coffee. There were flags of all sorts whipping in the wind and tangling around the guidons. The flags were mere decorations, but the men looked like the whole world.

Ab was the first to break the silence. He shook his head a couple of times like he was going to say something and then thought better of it. He picked up the spyglass and looked for something he could understand.

“Look at that skinny man right over there. He looks like he’s about to burn up and float away. Cooked up in that uniform of his. Like a sausage.”

Ab pointed to a weedy, gangly private lost in his oversize uniform, barefoot and sweating. He was fiddling with a long rifle and trying to get his shirt off at the same time. Ab thought he saw a button go flying off into the grass.

“What kind of gun you reckon that is?”

Eli took the glass and looked at the thin man. He had bags under his eyes that seemed to jiggle some, and he looked a little scared. Eli felt sorry for him. He didn’t know anything about the man’s rifle, but he made something up.

“That right there is a Robert E. Lee rifle with special deluxe hawkeye sights. Kill a man at two miles. That soldier right there must be a right good shot. They don’t give them rifles out to but a few. I bet he’s one of the best shooters in the army.”

“Never heard of that gun. Two miles? Damn.”

“Shoots a thousand bullets without even getting a little warm, you know.
And
it’s got a timbering attachment that cuts down trees big around as you. And you know that’s big.”

“Damn.”

They were silent again. Eli watched the skinny soldier waddle off to get on line, and he let his mind wander. He wondered if Cotton, the only Confederate soldier he’d ever seen up close, was somewhere on that field.
I wish Becky were here to see this,
Eli thought.
Then maybe she’d understand.

Ab trained the spyglass away from the Confederate lines forming in front of them and noticed that over on another hill, a mile or so distant and east of town, a Yankee artillery battery was limbering up. Men in blue were shoring up the trails of their three-inch rifled guns, others were piling up hundreds of shells for action. Still others were busy aiming the black, glistening, wrought-iron weapons toward the bottom of Winstead Hill. It all seemed so distant, so separate from his world, as if he were watching a fabulously intricate play.

The first shot from the artillery battery was long. The shot went into the air, and it began to whistle and wail as it descended in the last part of its ballistic arc. That sound finally made things clear for Ab. He had just enough time to throw himself to the ground and squirm into a little indentation in the dirt. But Eli raised himself to one knee to look around, curious to the end. The sharp-nosed shell buried itself in the dirt of the hill behind the Confederate line and forty yards in front of the boys’ position. The shell was a few inches in the dirt before it exploded, a malfunction of the fuse that saved the boys from the ripping and buzzing shrapnel. But the
sound
. The percussion of the explosion shattered one of Eli’s eardrums. The compressed air, fanning out in waves from the impact, lifted the boy up off his feet and threw him back ten yards. The last thing he noticed was how deep the sky appeared, endless and calm, before his head met the sharp edge of a limestone shelf barely peeking out of the soil.

8

C
ARNTON

A
tall young black man on a mule picked his way among the old cobs and broken stalks of a hilly cornfield that lay a couple miles away from the McGavock house. He had spent the better part of the morning casting around the property, spurring Zack the mule to stumble along a little faster, and cursing when the beast looked back and bared his teeth. This was Theopolis, Mariah’s nineteen-year-old son. When he finally spotted Colonel McGavock across the large cornfield winding wire around a fence post, he reined in old Zack and approached with some semblance of dignity and grace. For he was a young man who greatly prized dignity and grace, and it was for this reason that the Colonel liked him better than any slave he had ever owned.

Colonel John McGavock could barely see for all the sweat in his eyes, and so he didn’t notice Theopolis until he and the mule were almost upon him. He noticed how Theopolis struggled to keep his face still, but the corners of the young man’s mouth turned up slightly. The Colonel knew it amused Theopolis to see a white man laboring away in a suit.

“What are you laughing at, boy?”

“Ain’t laughing at nothing, sir. That’s a fine fence right there, sir.”

John looked back at his work. The snake fence had begun to rot down there in the corner of the field where it got wet and muddy near the creek, and so he had cut down some young trees, stripped them of their bark, and lashed them together. The new pieces stuck out like parts of a giant jigsaw puzzle, glaring and white against the muted silver of the old fence pieces. Not bad.

“It’s better than I would have thought. Now, why are you interrupting me?”

“I come to tell you they’s men come to the house, men on horses and in uniforms.”

“What kind of uniforms?”

This news worried John very much. He started to whistle for his horse, who was eating old corn shucks off in the distance.

“They gray uniforms. Secesh, I reckon.”

“Confederate.”

“Yes, sir.”

John bit his lip and crossed his arms. “We’re going to ride back and see what’s going on. I’ll lead.”

John swung up onto his horse and took up the reins. McGavock looked much younger than his forty-odd years. His full beard was unsullied by even the smallest gray hair, and in the saddle he rode with his back unwaveringly straight. His eyes were a deep evening black, shot through with flecks of lighter brown. His three dead children had had the same eyes, but his two living ones did not. He was a sensitive enough man, and he had noticed and filed away that coincidence.

Since he’d sent most of his slaves south to escape capture, loaning them out to friends in Montgomery who were out of the way of the fighting, he himself had done most of the work required to keep the plantation running, and it had kept him fit. He liked to think he was running the plantation. But in his more thoughtful moments he admitted to himself that he was really just able to raise enough food to feed his household and keep a little money coming in. He hadn’t even bothered to make a payment on the debt he owed on his land, and if not for the chaos of wartime, he surely would have already lost it through foreclosure. He’d resigned himself to simply holding on until the war ended, when he would be able to put the whole of his rolling farm into cultivation: the green sea of corn and tobacco and clover would return, the orchards would be groomed, and the Herefords and Shorthorns would be able to live well again. He was a colonel in name only, an honorific bestowed upon him when he bought uniforms and supplies for the Confederate company that mustered out of Franklin. The money he’d borrowed had gone to clothe and arm men, many of whom had been killed and buried in places far away from Franklin. That’s where much of his debt was—moldering in the ground in graves already forgotten. To John McGavock the word
colonel
had come to mean “debtor.”

They’d been riding in the general direction of the house for a few minutes when off to the left they saw something moving in the tree line. Horses.

John stopped to look harder. He saw a flash, then another flash, and then he heard the report of a repeater. He looked over at Theopolis, who had withdrawn under the shadow of his broad straw hat, as if he could disappear. When he looked back again, he saw a rider astride a piebald mare step out from the woods. From a half mile distant, John could see the man push his blue campaign hat back and scratch his forehead. He seemed to be trying to lock eyes with John.

At any other moment on any other day this encounter would not have troubled him very much. The Yankee presence in the county had become something he’d learned to tolerate, something that had evolved from a terror to a nuisance. He’d suffered their occasional inspections, their disrespect, their veiled taunts. He had even taken their meaningless loyalty oath, as had most everyone else in the county. He prayed for their defeat even as he accepted their occupation.

But today, if Theopolis was correct about what was happening back at the house, the presence of Yankees on his property posed a threat. If they were following him, and God knows why they would, he could not lead them back to a confrontation at his house. He had escaped the war thus far, and he would not have it unfold on his doorstep in front of his family.

He turned east, away from home, and began picking his way across the field.

“We is expected at the house.” Theopolis’s voice quavered.

John cut him off. “Be quiet, boy, and come on.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw three more men saunter out of the woods to join the first. John reckoned they were scouts. They looked like they’d been riding hard, not like the well-fed and content men who had manned the quiet garrison at Franklin. Their appearance foretold something new.

John and Theopolis managed to ride most of the way across the field, headed for another road that would take them across the creek and back toward town, before the scouts took up the chase and spurred their rides on, closing quickly. Just as John and Theopolis entered the woods, they heard gunfire. Three bullets whipped through the brush around them, one after the other. John dug his heels into his mare to make a run for the bridge. The limbs of young redbud saplings slapped at his face, raising welts.

But old Zack rushed for no man, damn the gunfire. Theopolis began to kick and punch the mule, but it was no good, and when John looked around, he realized he would have to turn back. He wrenched Zack’s head around and came to a skidding, stumbling stop. Behind them he saw the scouts appear on the brink of the tree line and crash into the woods behind them. One lingered behind and raised his rifle.

“Get down,” John yelled, and waved his hands at Theopolis, who began to slip off the mule on the side opposite their pursuers. A bullet slammed against old Zack’s withers, and Theopolis could feel the vibration of lead against bone just as he fell to the ground and rolled into the brush. Zack screamed and turned on his rear legs, colliding with a tree and knocking himself to the ground. Blood splattered against the trunk of the tree and dotted the limbs above. He kicked twice with his rear legs, each time almost crushing Theopolis’s skull. Theopolis scrambled off, ran to John, hollering for a leg up behind the saddle.

John knew they could not escape. He placed his boot in the center of Theopolis’s chest just as Theopolis took hold of the horse, and shoved him violently to the ground, hoping that Theopolis would realize it was just for show and not hold it against him.

John watched the scouts make their way toward him. He sat tall in his saddle at first, but then he thought better of that posture and decided to slump a little, pretending that not even a Federal patrol could arouse him. He tried to keep his horse from fidgeting, with no luck. Zack’s dying moments—the squeals and honks and thrashing—kept her on edge.

The man on the piebald horse reached the clearing first. He was short, paunchy, and bald, with a wild, long beard that was matted at the ends. He looked at once like a feedstore clerk and an avenging prophet. His eyes were a light blue, and they flashed from behind puffy crimson-veined cheeks. His men pulled into the clearing and gathered around him in an elaborate choreography of intimidation. They were younger than their master, and they were having various degrees of success with their beards.

“If you don’t mind, would you kindly get off that horse, sir?”

He was solicitous, even deferential, to the tall middle-aged Tennessean he had captured at gunpoint: he was a comedian, and this was one of the reasons why his little band of scouts and cavalrymen stuck by him.

John waited a few prudent seconds before dismounting, trying to decide how quickly he could get down without seeming weak.

“Why did you chase us? We did nothing.”

“Why did you run, if you’ll pardon my prying?”

The other scouts chuckled and eyed each other.

“We thought you might be Confederates out foraging, or maybe bandits. It’s hard to know who you’re dealing with these days.”

“We are not bandits, and we are not Confederates, as you can plainly see. Who the hell are you?”

John stared up, and the scout looked down, his chin lost in a confusion of beard. John decided to take the offensive.

“Why did you shoot my mule? That’s a good animal, a hard worker. We were only passing through to town. I will want compensation.”

“Your mule?”

“The animal should be shot to spare it any more pain, and as you can see, we have no guns. I insist that you complete what you started.”

“
Your
mule? I don’t think so.”

John was momentarily flummoxed. “If you are suggesting that I have stolen this animal, sir, you are quite mistaken.”

His words hung out there in the air between them.

The scout leaned back a little in his saddle.

“This here is Union country, whatever you think. And everything in it, that’s Union, too. That mule? How many fields has it plowed these last four years? How many nasty rebels has it worked to feed? That animal there is a weapon of the enemy, and as such is the property of the U.S. of A.”

Zack had collapsed into a pile, lying on one side, groaning from down deep in his throat. Bloody foam dribbled out of his mouth. John had never much liked Zack as a working animal. When he’d allow himself to be hitched up—which wasn’t often—he had to be hitched up solo. He wouldn’t work alongside another mule or horse, and there were a half dozen animals in John’s barn with scars on their neck and withers to prove it. But he didn’t mind being ridden, especially by Theopolis. Fancied himself a horse, John had always thought.

“Well, seeing as how this is your mule, sir, my original point still stands. Have one of your men shoot him.”

The scout shook his head.

“I don’t think so. I would need to get authorization, you see.”

“Then I shall do it. Give me a gun.”

“I am not in the practice of arming rebels. And if you harm that mule, there will be consequences, my rebel friend.”

John let the insult pass by. He was overcome with remorse, the illogical feeling that he had betrayed old Zack and the conviction that every moment Zack suffered was a rebuke to John personally. He might not be roused to defend his honor before men, but the dumb beast had become his most eloquent accuser. He went to the tool bag hanging from the saddle and removed the sledgehammer he had used on the fence. He swung it a few times in a slow arc, trying to get it balanced perfectly.

The scout spit a stream of tobacco juice at John’s feet.

“Think about what you’re about to do, my friend. That there is government property.”

He said this only halfheartedly. He and the other scouts appeared more interested in watching John than in stopping him. John toed some dirt over the pool of tobacco juice, crushed it to mud under his boot heel, and strode toward Zack.

The animal lay his head back and kept his eye on his master. He stopped trembling, as if he knew what was coming. John tried to decide on the best place to land the blow. On the forehead or the back of the head? On the ear? He wondered whether Zack felt lonely, then cringed and shook his head at the thought. When had he become so sentimental and stupid? He stood over Zack and tried to be as calm and reassuring as it was possible to be with a sledgehammer. The scouts grew silent, and Theopolis pulled back into the woods. John decided that Zack’s temple held the most promise. He drew the hammer behind him and then raised it above his head. Zack exhaled and seemed to be trying to close his rheumy eyes.

When, after it was over, John turned back to his tormentor, the fat little scout had his repeater trained on him.

“You are now a criminal, besides being a coward and a reb. And you ain’t much with a sledgehammer.”

John felt certain he would be shot, and the prospect was not as frightening as he thought it would be. His stomach clenched and roiled, his heart raced, and the blood ran to his face. He clenched his teeth and frowned. He was ready.

But the little scout shrugged his shoulders as if bored, and then turned his horse back toward the opening in the tree line, back toward the field. His other scouts crashed about in the brush and dead tree limbs until they were lined up again, two by two. The little scout steered his horse to the side and waved the rest on through, ordering them to head south by the Columbia road. He turned back to John and tipped his hat.

“The fellow at your house, whom your nigger here has seen, is the bloody General Nathan Forrest. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. He’s surely no gentleman, like you and me,
sir
. While you were out here playing in the woods, a battle has been convening all around this place. I’ll wager you didn’t even hear it coming. If I were you, I’d leave the mule for the crows and make for the house as quickly as you can. Good day,
sir
.”

When the Federals had vanished from sight, John and Theopolis mounted up and took the man’s advice.