The Widow of the South (8 page)
C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK
I
would always think I heard the footsteps of the men echoing through the house hours after they left. I stood out on the porch for a long time afterward, peering out at the countryside and trying to see what had disturbed them so much. I saw nothing but the slowly rising hills, the little creek running across the edge of my sight and off into the distance, the jittery killdeers flitting across dormant fields and guarding their nests. Whatever the men had seen lay only in the future, a premonition of what the landscape might make possible. I could not see such things.
I looked over at Mariah, who waited expectantly, her hands clasped in front of her.
“What will we do?” I said. “They cannot do this here, they must know that. We are not nurses.”
I realized Mariah could not know whether I was referring to their plans to make the house a hospital or their plans to make war. Either way, there was no stopping it now. They would be back. I felt something clenching and cold pass through me like a ghost and sail out into the yard, where it shook the remaining leaves in the pecan trees. Mariah spoke up.
“We got to get ready. They coming whatever we say.”
“They cannot come. They will not come. I will ask Colonel McGavock to speak with General Forrest. He will attend to it. He won’t let this house be violated, he won’t stand for it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
But I knew they would come. If I had learned anything during my life here, it was that I could not keep things out. I had not been able to prevent death from waltzing in, and so how would I prevent this? I imagined what my house would look like when the wounded and their attendants had come here and gone.
How many? A dozen? Two dozen?
My stomach twisted when I thought of men in my home and their blood. Perhaps I could be of use to a few. Maybe the war would spare the rest.
She seemed to never quit moaning and crying. Sometimes she screamed for me. This was the way it was to the end. Her skin was so dry and red and flaky. It almost seemed to burn my hand. Every day I sat by her and applied cold wet linens to her forehead, and her body seemed to take up every bit of moisture without returning anything—no coolness, no relief.
A breeze blew across the porch, stirring up the air. It was almost noon, and the sun hung faded and fuzzy in the gray sky, a palimpsest of summer. I felt my forehead grow cold with sweat and my heart pulse in my throat. I resisted the urge to gasp for air.
“Mariah, begin the preparations, will you? I’ll come in a moment.”
“Yes. Yes, ma’am.”
I walked into the house. It was cool in the shadowy corners and in the darkened hall. I wondered if anyone would miss me if I spent the day hidden away in the dark. I walked on.
Out the back and into the yard the warm breeze wrapped me up again. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going. My feet carried me across the yard toward my garden, but my eyes were drawn off to my right, to a small stand of trees ringed by a black iron fence. The grass was still soft. The breeze kicked up again, and I felt I would suffocate. I wanted to strike out at it, to slap it away.
I stood in the garden and stared at the cemetery across the way. I felt the grave markers marching toward me. I thought of it as another grove, a grove of trees and of limestone and of children beneath my feet, and it was for this reason that sometimes I could only bear to look at it by hiding in the garden and peeking through the foliage.
The garden had once been so lovely, so trimmed and neat, packed between the paths with obedient rudbeckia and peonies and roses and boxwoods and sunflowers and crape myrtles. I had loved it unequivocally and had taken pleasure in its boundaries and distinctions, the concentration of its colors and textures. It had been a rebuke to the very idea of uncertainty.
Now the garden looked nothing like it did that first day sixteen years before, when I was an eighteen-year-old riding up in my new husband’s carriage. It had become ragged like everything else in my house, in Franklin, in Tennessee, and, as far as I knew, in the world. In the summer the rudbeckia took over much of the sunny side of the garden, and even in the night I could see their bright and insistent yellow blooms from my porch. Bleeding heart, cemetery vine, and ivy had taken over the rest. The peonies fought for light, and their occasional breakthrough was cause for mild celebration. I would not help them, but I took solace from their little successes.
So many years had passed since I had first gone to sleep at Carnton. The house had collapsed into itself.
Like me,
I thought without surprise.
I stood there like a shadow among the browns and beiges of my once precise Italianate garden, and I remembered the first time I had seen the house. It was not the same house anymore, although this would not have been obvious to the casual observer. Its bones were still there, but very little of the rest seemed familiar to me anymore. This redbrick neoclassical pile, with the Grecian portico on the front, and its massive, two-story Italianate galleries running across the entire back length, was empty: we had retreated back into the wing on the east side, which had once been the original frontier homestead.
We cannot run that house without all the slaves
. John had insisted that we send most of our slaves off to friends in Alabama before the Federals could requisition them and everything else they could get their hands on.
The house is much too big for Mariah to keep up,
John had said. I had known this to be only partly true. The rest of the truth, I knew, was that my husband wanted me to quit living among our dead children, if only for a while. This did not stop me from drifting through their rooms and listening for them.
I remembered the voices of my children and the sound of my own voice teaching them their lessons and reading them Bible stories, the sound of the piano, the sound of the tall case clock ticking in the hallway.
Nothing disappears
. I imagined that the sounds and smells of the children existed somewhere, borne away by the wind. That was a comforting thought. They also existed in my mind, as memories, but of late I had come to distrust those.
I could never leave those memories behind. They buzzed at me like gnats.
There was the central passage that ran the full length from front door to back, dividing the downstairs. There was the stairway that led to a similar hall upstairs. Heavy poplar doors led to two rooms on either side of both hallways. On the first floor the best parlor lay to the left of the entrance, my husband’s office to the right. At the back of the house a door opened into the family parlor, where the portraits of our family had once hung. Across the hallway there was the dining room, the table now covered in linen. Upstairs, the only place I spent much time anymore, the doors to my children’s bedrooms remained shut. Above the foyer there was an odd little room with no discernible purpose—an architectural accident, unintended space—and it was there that I spent my days sitting in a small haircloth rocker.
I was a medical puzzle. Like every other lady I’d known in Franklin, I’d been given my bottle of laudanum when the grief had overcome me, but unlike the other women, I had sunk deeper into my despair and—yes, I knew this—my eccentricity. This was not the usual outcome, according to Dr. Cliffe. In the little bottle the ladies of my former circle found the strength to sleep without dreaming as they sent their husbands off to war, or their children. They could move about and pretend to run their households, but in truth they spent their days moving through a sludgy torpor, never completely sure when a conversation had begun or when it should end.
But I had, in fact, never taken the laudanum. Every day I poured a little from the bottle into an empty perfume bottle which I kept hidden in a compartment of my dresser. Every month or so John dutifully went to get my next bottle, and every day I poured a little into my perfume bottle.
I won’t prescribe more than this, because any more would kill her if accidentally taken all at once,
Dr. Cliffe told John when he thought I hadn’t heard him.
In the years since I watched John Randal die when he was just three months old, the first of my children to leave me, I had collected the dozens and dozens of deadly doses, graduating to larger and larger perfume bottles as the months passed by. His eyes were so big, and he was so little, and when he looked up at me, his brows permanently wrinkled by pain and pleading, I saw the possibility of true innocence and the monstrous crime being committed against that very idea, against me,
against my son.
Sometimes the pain would ease, and he would smile, but only tears came when I tried to smile back and show him that I loved him, that he was the most wonderful thing. After a time he quit smiling. He was defenseless in this world, and so I loved him all the more and hated the world. Every day when I awoke I went to the wardrobe and pulled the bottle out. I’d feel its weight in my hand and ask myself if I would drink the bottle that day, and every day the answer was no. Then I’d put the bottle back in the secret compartment and slide the secret door shut. Some days I thought harder about the bottle than others, and once, I took the stopper out, but I had always put it away.
I knew it was there, though. I knew every day I could die, and this helped me. It was not the reminder of death that I desired. Everything around me was a reminder of death, every room, every length of wallpaper, every window. I needed no more reminders of that. What I wanted was to know what my dying children knew in their greatest moments, which were their moments of bravery and strength as they struggled to live. I had never seen my children so powerful as they were then, choking and shaking and whispering their apologies to me. Their
apologies
. They were at their best in the hours before death. I thought that if I could know it as they had known it, we would all share something that would not fade from my memory or disintegrate like the stones on their graves.
Dear Mother,
I must amend my earlier letter to you regarding Martha. It has weighed heavily on me, and though I meant to pay her a proper tribute, I feel I must correct a few misrepresentations. Martha did not go to her Maker quietly. She was frightened and she cried out to me, and I could not help her though I wished to. I am not sure what she saw when the light dimmed in her eyes, but I will always remember the terror. I pray that she was welcomed into the arms of our Savior, and if anyone is welcomed thus it would be Martha, but I cannot be sure. I hope that I will never see such a thing again before I am myself taken away to my blessed rest. I tell you this now only because I do not want to mingle the memory of my Martha with certain untruths, however kindly meant. Please forgive me.
— Your Loving Daughter,
Carrie
I stood in my garden and let the cold creep up my legs. I had let the delicate roses die of thirst, and in their place had come the weeds and the other invasives—living things that looked like death to the undiscerning eye. The decline of the garden was a sad thing, people said, but I knew differently. Decline was natural. I was embarrassed to remember the times when I tended the plots, weeding and hoeing, beating back the inevitable. I was not saddened by my garden, nor by my house, nor by the little family cemetery and its fresh gravestones.
Death had been with me from the beginning, and now my house would be a hospital. I was not a morbid woman, but if death wanted to confront me, well, I would not turn my head
. Say what you have to say to me or leave me alone
. I did not look away. I
saw.
The garden, the cemetery, Martha’s room—I had power. I had a power others did not. No, I would not have another child. No, I would not sow new seeds. I would not leave my house or change its decor. Nor would I sink into days of soft, drifting, opiated conversation with the ladies in town, fondling their laudanum. I did not have to run. I did not have to forget, I did not have to soothe myself, I did not have to ignore the most obvious fact of my life: that the things I loved had died and that I had failed them
. Let that wound stay open.
I understood that I could stand that pain and that I could even crave it sometimes. Dr. Cliffe advised John that I was spiraling down through the dark circles of melancholy, but it only felt like strength to me. Death could not make me afraid anymore.
If the price of that was seeming crazed and ignoring the doings of the living, it was a price I could pay. It was a price I was happy to pay, because it felt like vengeance. I took another look around my garden, and with a brief sweeping stroke I knocked down the brown stalks of two old sunflowers and watched them settle to the dark ground among the rotting leaves. Then I went inside.
L
IEUTENANT
N
ATHAN
S
TILES,
104
TH
O
HIO
I
watched a little rebel boy, couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, suffocate under the weight of the dead piled atop him. Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility. Only his head stuck through the pile, and I thought for a second that he was looking at me and trying to say something, only he didn’t have the air to do it. He couldn’t breathe, and God knows where he’d been shot. His jaws moved, and his eyes welled with tears. The last I saw of him he was closing his eyes just as another body landed on him, covering him completely. It was as if a wave had crashed over him and he’d been pulled out to sea.
We passed loaded rifles to the shooters at the battlements, and they passed their hot, smoking, and empty weapons to the back for reloading. The dead Confederates that filled our ditch were those who had made it to the top of our works, only to be instantly cut down. We had our own dead in that ditch, too, most all of them shot in the head after trying to take a peek at the onslaught. Most of our boys just raised their rifles over their heads, pointed out over the logs of the trench, and fired in the general direction of that god-awful screaming. There were so many dead in the trench we were forced to walk upon them, and I was afraid that soon they would fill our fighting position and force us out and that after that, they would fill every space around us and we would all suffocate like that grubby, breathless rebel boy.
If I had known what it meant to be defending a salient, I wouldn’t have joked about the colonel’s fancy language. We were surrounded on three sides, jutting out from the main line, and if the regiments on either side of us got a little too exuberant and shot at anything that moved in their front, they would start shooting into our position and we’d have to send someone over there to tell them to cut it the hell out. I lost two messengers that way.
We had robbed the cotton gin of much of its wood and steel—planks, joists, screw-press levers—in order to build our works, and in doing so we exposed the cotton bales in storage to the rebel volleys. Soon we were all covered in white puffs from the disintegrating bales, and much of the rest of it went floating out over the battlefield in front of us. In those rare moments when I risked a look over the top of our position, I watched how the cotton settled over the dead like a new snow. This is one of those things I can’t forget about that day, one of those things that made me think I was living in another world. It was horrible and lovely and unexpected.
Why did they keep coming? By the second hour of fighting the killing had become so distasteful that when a rebel appeared on top of our entrenchment waving a flag or a rifle around, we’d yank him down and make him a prisoner rather than shoot him. That is, unless he seemed particularly dangerous. The dangerous men ended up in the trench.
The prisoners seemed relieved more than anything. At first they wouldn’t be sure of what was happening, and then there’d be a brief moment of shame followed by the sunny, overwhelming realization that they were going to live. I saw one man begin to cry and another start slapping the backs of anyone within reach.
“Y’all fight like dogs, damn. Give them poor boys a break, ya hear? You got food? That’s one pretty rifle. Can I have it? Only kidding, friend, only kidding. I ain’t never seen a thing like that field out there. You can’t see it from here, too much smoke. You tearing us up, though, sure enough. I’m just saying. You won’t believe it when you see it. Which way to the rear? I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’ve had enough of this.”
And still they kept coming. They kept breaking against us, over and over and over again, each time ebbing away and leaving behind twisted and crumpled figures in the grass, rifles abandoned and glinting in the fading light, flags limp in the hands of fallen color-bearers. Some of our boys began to pick out their trophies, the things they would collect up later
.
“
That boy right there, see him? I’m going to take his pack. No, right there, see? The one that had his jaw shot clear off? How can you miss him, he’s got his tongue lolling out right there on the ground. Looks like he might have lost an eye, too. Can’t quite tell. There, now you see it? He’s got a good-looking knife, too. I’ll be taking that also.”
I put a stop to that talk, but I understood the urge. I wanted to take something away from that place, too. I looked up above my head and watched the cotton gin disintegrate bullet by bullet. I wanted to leave the whole war behind me, and yet I was seeing something on that battlefield that demanded commemoration. It was unholy ground, but I wanted to thank God for showing it to me. I would never again look at a man without wondering what crimes he was capable of committing. That seemed important to know.
It was in the midst of that reverie when I realized that the cracking sound I’d been hearing was not the sound of balls hitting the gin house. I looked up once after being sprayed by splinters, and realized the balls made a
thump-thump
sound against the wood slats. The cracking sound came from the opposite direction, out on the field. The dead and dying were packed so tightly that men were charging right over them, shattering legs, arms, and ribs. It was the sound of bones snapping.
I tried to keep them from shooting the color-bearer, but it was beyond my power. If anything, the sight of those colors made the men more vicious, each for their own private reasons, I assumed. And so the husky young man bellowing God knows what all, he fell just in front of our works as he waved the flag to rally the troops. He didn’t see it coming and pitched forward toward his men with his arms out wide like he meant to embrace them. We had watched this unit struggle its way through the abatis while we shot them dead. We had watched the survivors be rallied to the charge by a fiery-eyed young officer, and we shot him dead, too. And his horse. We shot a lot of men dead, and still the others kept stumbling up the field. The big color-bearer took the colors from a fallen comrade halfway up, and then he came on like a huffing train engine, occasionally bellowing something that seemed to make the other men hesitate for a moment before going on. He wasn’t a natural-born leader; that was obvious. Then he was dead.
I had lost my squeamishness. Killing was no longer distasteful. I was killing as many of them as I could by then, having seen enough of our boys get killed, almost all of them in the eye or the forehead as they peered through the slats in our position. Our trench was filled with dead from both sides, and I had to assign a couple men the task of hauling out as many corpses as they could, just to give us room to stand. No, I didn’t have any problem killing Confederates by then. The initial shock of battle had passed. I was numb.
But there was something about shooting an unarmed man, even if he was carrying their blasted colors, that still seemed beyond the pale. The zealousness, the absolute faith in the cause, that prompted a man to take up a largely symbolic task at the risk of certain death: I had to respect it, as foolhardy as it seemed. Someone given over to such blind courage had made contact with a primeval thing, perhaps best forgotten but nonetheless extraordinary.
But I was too late to save that first color-bearer, and he went down. It was then that I noticed the other man.
From just twenty yards away I could see that he was going to pick up those colors. He was tall, and he had sad brown eyes, and he seemed to sigh when the colors wavered and fell. The most memorable thing about him, though, was that he quit running. He walked up to the colors, flung down his pistols, took the pole in his hands, and then turned and walked toward us like he was at the head of a parade. He was silent, just holding the colors high above his head. He was smiling, too, and I think it was that one fact about him that caused our boys to hesitate, and gave me the chance to intercede.
“Don’t shoot the color-bearer!”
Weiss picked up his rifle as if he hadn’t heard me, and I leaped at him and knocked the rifle out of the way. It was like I had woken Weiss from a bad dream, because he looked around and began to shake his head as if to clear something out of it. I shouted again.
“Shoot past him! Shoot past him! Let the color-bearer come.”
For the most part the men did what I said, but a few shot at the colors, and it was a miracle that not a single shot hit that man, even an errant one. He strolled—and I can think of no better word to describe his gait—up to our line, climbed up on top, and planted that flag right in front of my face. He was still smiling, and he stuck his big nose in the air and laughed like hell. If there weren’t other things to worry about, other men to shoot at, the men of my company would have goggled at him longer. But finally it was just him and me. He was looking around like he’d conquered a mountain, and he held his arms out from his sides the way a supplicant might. He was waiting for something.
I reached up and grabbed him by the belt and dragged him down into the ditch, where he looked up at me, his eyes buried in the leathery tan of his face. He then pulled his collar down and exposed his neck. He pointed to it, as if to say
, Get me right here, and be quick about it
. I kept my foot on his chest, staring at him, until the expression on his face changed. He became angry and struggled against my foot. He called me a coward. He spit at me, and I almost became angry enough to slit his throat, but there was something about him that stayed my hand. A man like that shouldn’t die. He looked older, too old to throw his life away unthinkingly. Even as he struggled against me, his face relaxed and the furrows between his eyes smoothed out. He looked at me as if he knew me, and he smirked. I almost killed him then, too. But then he quit struggling and lay quietly.
“You are my prisoner,” I said.
“I reckon so.”
“Why do you want to die?”
“I don’t want to die, Yank. I want you to do your duty.”
“My duty?”
“If it’s not your duty to kill me, then what the hell are we doing here?”
“It’s not honorable now.”
He laughed then, a wheezing laugh that reminded me I was probably squeezing the air out of him. I stepped off his chest, and he didn’t move. He looked at me.
“When did they make that rule?” he said, still in the fever of battle. His mind wasn’t quite right, talking gibberish. I’d saved his life, that’s all I knew. I’d done something good for once, and he wasn’t going to talk me out of it. I picked him up by his collar and dragged him back to the rear, where I handed him off to a guard.
“This man is a prisoner.”
He looked back at me as he was led away, and laughed.
“Don’t I know it.”