The Widow of the South (9 page)

13

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

I
stood looking down from the landing on the stairs. I watched Mariah striding about, carrying tables over here, the chairs over there. When Hattie and Winder tried to help, she slapped at their hands.
I whip you myself you drop that vase, youngun. Don’t look at me like that, now. Get going, we got to clear it out.
I had not seen Mariah so happy in a long time. Or perhaps I hadn’t noticed.

Hattie and Winder had finally retreated to the corner by the front door, where they took turns brushing each other’s hair with Martha’s brush. Hattie was wearing an old dress of Martha’s, blue taffeta with white organdy collar. It was still too big for her, and it billowed out like a tent from where she kneeled behind Winder, his curls in her fingers. Chaos swelled and crested around them, but they took no notice.

“We getting ready, Missus Carrie. We clearing out some space and getting the nice things out the way. They be mens with muddy boots in here before long, and I figured you wouldn’t want all them filthy things on the carpets. Let ’em stomp around on bare wood, I figure.”

During those months and years I spent sitting in my Grecian rocker in my little room above the foyer, rocking and rocking, I had passing thoughts of the house’s substructure, the walls behind the walls, the floors under the floors. I had wondered what it looked like. I had wondered if it had decomposed over the years and whether it could hold the weight of my household much longer. There were things that smelled like rot in the house, and walls that bowed out slightly. (This last fact I knew from time spent lying on the cool floor with my head against the wall, looking up.) I imagined that things lived beneath me and around me and that I would never see them. But I assumed that someday the house would come crashing down, and then perhaps I’d catch a glimpse of whatever it was that had been feeding off me for so long. It was thoughts like these that had reminded me that I oughtn’t go to town and see people. I was no longer presentable.

Now the windows had been thrown open, and it felt as if the house itself was breathing deep while I stood on the landing taking quick, shallow gasps. The outside had blown in, sure enough, along with a few dead leaves and a mouse that one of the house cats was tossing about in the corner of the dining room. The house had peeled itself back and given way to the onslaught of folly and time. I felt euphoric, as I imagined I might feel if I were drowning and had finally abandoned myself, letting the water fill my lungs and cover my head. It was all out of my hands now.

“That’s right, Mariah. Very good. But I’ll take care of the children’s things.”

“Yes’m.”

I descended the steps and glided across the hall to the front door, where I stood over my other two children.

“That’s a pretty dress, Hattie darling.”

Hattie was dark like me. She never seemed quite as aware as she should have been, even for a nine-year-old. She was ever stumbling over tree roots and laughing at stories a half-beat too late. I thought her merely a dreamy girl who would come to no great harm in her life, but on this day I could see peril looming for my little one—men crashing around knocking into things, screaming and crying, bleeding—and I vowed to keep my girl close.

“Yes, Mama. Mama? All of Martha’s dresses are there in her room. Thrown up on the bed in a big pile, with everything all mixed up and going every which way. I told Mariah to be careful and not to wrinkle them, I did, Mama, but she weren’t listening to me, which is quite rude, I do believe, but they aren’t too wrinkled laying out right there, just as plain as you please, and this one is so pretty and I always liked it and . . .”

She paused to take a breath.

“. . . can I have it, Mama?”

I stroked Hattie’s dark hair and resisted the passing urge to cut it off and stick it in my pocket, which reminded me of something I would have to do later.
Later. For now I have this one, warm and delicate and awkward. I never knew her hair was so smooth.

“You can have whatever you want now, little girl. But we must get to work.”

Winder whirled around to look at me and yelped when Hattie forgot to let go of
his
hair.

“What work, Mama?”

Winder was seven and fancied himself a big boy, a man even, and cried each time his father refused to let him plow or shoot the crows that stole their seed. I looked down on my two children and wondered how I had missed noticing that they were getting bigger. It seemed ridiculous, but I was momentarily surprised by the idea that children grow. I had become too accustomed to looking at the portrait of my other children hanging on the wall opposite the foot of my bed, with their beatific smiles frozen for all time.

“There will be men coming, little one, and they will be hurt, but we’re going to take care of them.”

“Are they soldiers, Mama?”

Winder was also unclear why he couldn’t be a soldier, a “caffryman.” John had given up trying to explain and had given him a little cavalryman’s hat at supper one day, which he promptly lost out in the yard, where it was torn to pieces by two stray dogs and devoured by our boar, Prince Edward.

“Yes, they will be soldiers. Now stand up—you, too, Hattie—and brush yourselves off. You’re to help me pack.”

I could see Mariah watching the scene out of the corner of her eye, but I’m sure she hadn’t been able to hear what was said, even if she strained her ears mightily over the din of furniture scraping.

We had known each other since we were children, back in Louisiana, on my father’s plantation. She had called me Miss Carrie, and Miss Carrie had briefly scandalized the household by calling her Miss Mariah. We had explored the lowlands together back home, when we could sneak away, braving the snakes and the leeches in search of ferns and tiny sleek tadpoles. But time had snuck between us, and now it was impossible to reconcile our previous history with life at Carnton, especially since I had begun to lose my children.

I’m certain Mariah was surprised to see the children stand up quietly and follow me into Martha’s room. She would have expected the two of them to stay underfoot and cause trouble, which was their usual manner. But I had them marching behind me like two wee attendants, and I hoped Mariah was impressed. She wasn’t the only one who could make people jump.

We hid away most everything in the main house. Casualties of war. Much later, when the house was finally empty of men, I imagined that the house—as I had known it—still existed somewhere, only disembodied, its pieces hauled off here and there, buried beneath a tree or hidden in a hayloft: the rolls of Brussels carpets, the books, the canopied beds. The only familiar thing was the wallpaper in the dining room, once gaudy with scenes of Egyptian ruins and Mayan palaces that had gone gray with mildew and dust.
Nothing disappears entirely,
I thought.

The house was transformed into something harder, barer, tougher. I presided over the boxing of my children’s clothing and toys and stole some of Mariah’s younger workers, the few remaining servants not yet sent off by John, to lug them up into the attic. Hattie and Winder were no help to anyone but me, and they amused me.

Trains and hoops and wooden horses went into the attic, balanced on the heads of young Negro men who had never played with such things except when they were broken and cast off, and who stole a few brief moments pushing the train around the attic when they thought no one was looking. Most of the furniture disappeared. We took the portraits off the walls, then the candlesticks from the tables, and then all my Parian figurines I had once so cherished.

We put these things away in places even I didn’t know existed—cramped crawl spaces under loose floorboards, sideboards with hidden compartments, dark places behind corner cupboards. Mariah took the silver and the china, boxed them up, and had them buried near one of the cedars in the garden. The floors were swept and scrubbed, and old sheets were torn into long strips for bandages. Mariah searched the house and the old wing for buckets and basins for water, and she scrounged every bit of lye soap she could find, even the crumbs some of the slaves kept squirreled away under loose boards in the cabins, hidden for special occasions.

There was one place I felt I had to make safe before the onslaught, before things I could not imagine took over my home. I went to my desk and unlocked the slanted lid. It was filled with toys, worn-out dolls, a spelling book, a rattle. I opened one of the little drawers and removed two daguerreotypes and studied them. One showed Martha holding Mary Elizabeth’s hand on Mary Elizabeth’s sixth and last birthday. Mary Elizabeth’s party dress looked a little stained and wrinkled, a casualty of playing with her cousins and friends during the party. The second picture showed a baby in his white dress sleeping—no, dead: John Randal. It was my only picture of him, he had died so young. I put the pictures back.

Martha didn’t die at once. It was slow, so slow. She seemed to melt away. Every day she was a little smaller than the day before. After two weeks she rarely spoke, but her eyes were on me, and I thought I could tell what she was thinking by the way she held her eyelids. Perspiration was ever dripping into her eyes, and it stung so much that she often spent minutes at a time blinking uncontrollably. If I wanted to listen to her—I thought of it as listening—I had to sit there next to her and mop her brow. Sometimes I applied the wet tobacco leaves, but that never seemed to bring the fever down, and it stained her forehead a dark orange, which was unbearable to see. So I just sat there, tossing the linens on the floor as they became sodden and heavy.

Tucked into the back of the desk was my sewing basket. I lifted the woven straw lid, and on top of scissors and ribbons and needles and spools of thread lay a folded piece of lace. I took it out and placed it on my lap. I unfolded the top panel, revealing the three locks of hair, each tied with a thin black ribbon. For years I had kept the desk as a little shrine, occasionally taking up the locks and placing them against my cheeks. Now I just looked at them, lying there in a row on my lap. I stared, until I could distinguish every hair in every bundle. And then I wrapped them up, stuffed them in the pocket of my apron, and called for one of the servants to haul the desk away. With the sound of the wind whistling from the front door to the back door and the loud tearing of sheets and the general pandemonium, I didn’t hear John ride up to the house until I saw his head (and Theopolis’s behind him) bounce along the driveway. He was scowling, and that was another thing I hadn’t remembered him doing before. Was that new? Had John scowled before?

I watched John slide off the horse. Theopolis strode off with purpose and vigor toward the kitchen porch on the other side of the house. He was the most unlikely Negro I had ever known, and I wondered idly what kind of man he would be if he were white.

John opened the front door and stared at his house turned inside out. He looked puzzled.

I walked up behind him.

“What is going on here?” he said.

“It’s like a fire, come to purge us and burn away what’s rotten.”

John turned slowly. I could see it in his eyes.
She’s still not right
.

“I think you must lie down.”

“I am not tired.”

But I was.

14

S
ERGEANT
Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL,
24
TH
A
RKANSAS

I
was lost. It was so easy to become lost. I was amazed at how quickly my life was transformed, from one moment on the brink of death to the next tied at the wrists and seated in the dirt against an old smokehouse. The thought
This ain’t right
never crossed my mind. I became a prisoner and accepted all the duties of a prisoner just as easily as I’d picked up the damned colors and walked forward to the bulwarks. And it happened without thinking on it one bit. I suffered, and I accepted that suffering was my appointed job now. We had been routed, and the Union men who passed me by on their way to the rear—dragging their own wounded, wiping the smoke grime from their faces—gave me grief.

“Where are your friends, reb? Left them behind, huh? Saved your skin like a good little coward.” A slight, balding private with an arm tied against his body with a length of cord, he walked right up to me and spit in my face. I would have broken him in two once, but now I just took it. Felt the spit run down my cheek and dry there.

This was my new life. My mind was packed up with thoughts falling all over themselves, thoughts I hadn’t had in days. Thoughts about what would happen to me. In the minutes after that lieutenant put his pistol down and made me his captive, my mind went from thinking of nothing else but going forward, of nothing else but each footstep and each stretch of dirt in front of me and each bullet that tumbled past my head, to a fire of thoughts about my life and the new world I’d fallen into. It was too much to be thinking about and left me no energy to worry about spit in my face. I became a different person. Who would I become? Where would I go? Why was I spared, for what purpose? When would I get something to eat?

Occasionally I looked up from staring at my boots and their frayed laces to watch the things going on around me. There were five of us lined up against that smokehouse, and none of us spoke a word. I reckon we all had things to think about. I was seated against the corner, with a view of the road passing by to my right. To my left one of my fellow prisoners kept raising his bonded hands to his face to scratch at his head, and little flakes of his scalp fell onto his pant leg, where they sat until the wind picked up.

As the sun went down, I watched the Yankees begin to move their gear and their men down that road to the rear, and after a while a couple of big Union men came over.

“Get your asses up, rebs. We’re moving.”

They had their Springfields trained on us, and one was worrying a fat, unlit cigar in his mouth. We got to our feet and shuffled alongside them, out into the road. They were as confused as we were, I think, because they kept stopping us and starting us again, taking us down one way and then back another way.

“Why the hell are we taking them with us?” the taller one said. He had a scar on his neck that went from white to red every time he started talking. He sounded English to me. The other guard, just a little shorter but built like a brick, kept looking for a fire to light his cigar.

“Just do it, Campbell. What we got here, we got us the spoils of war.” He laughed when he said that, a little laugh, like he didn’t really believe what he was saying.

We were stopped under a big oak, waiting for the carts and caissons to pass after we were almost run over as the supply train made for a bridge in the distance. A limping soldier carrying nothing but a shovel slapped me on the back of the head as he passed. Then he stopped and began to rifle through my pockets.

“Get the hell away from that man, or I’ll shoot you dead, Private.”

It was the man with the cigar talking.

“But he’s got some matches.”

The man with the shovel pulled out my little round tin of matches, which I had been saving since Atlanta. He waved them in the air, in front of my nose.

“Put ’em back,” the guard with the cigar said.

“Why the hell do you care?”

“I don’t like you all of a sudden, that’s why. Get movin’.”

“Shit.”

The man jammed the matches back into my pocket and elbowed me in the stomach in one slick move, and then he went and jumped up on the back of a cart and yelled out, “You aren’t going to need matches where you’re going, reb. It’ll be hot enough without ’em.”

“Go to hell,” said the cigar man.

“Well, that’s exactly what I mean.”

As the cart pulled off, the stocky guard walked up to me. We were still standing there, and the cart train just seemed to get longer and longer, and I figured we’d be standing there quite some time.

“You got matches, reb?”

“Yes.”

“Could I have one?”

I must have looked at him funny, because his scar got all purple and he frowned.

“I meant, give me a match.”

He wasn’t cut out for this, I knew that then. No sense of place or position. Probably a good man, but you never know. Could have been just stupid, not recognizing the power he had. Or not used to it yet. The funny thing was, I sympathized with him a little, even though I came to realize that I couldn’t allow myself to stay under his control. Or any man’s control. This, I reckon, was what all those piercing hard thoughts jabbing inside me had come to: I had to go. I was a prisoner. I was a reviled man, all right. That’s who I had become. But I would not live like that forever. I would not allow it.

He reached into my pocket and pulled out the tin, took one out, struck it against the barrel of his rifle, and lit his cigar. I smelled that tobacco, and it smelled good. He looked at me and said, “I saw you run up that hill.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You ought to be dead.”

I nodded.

“Maybe you could use a cigar.”

And I nodded again.

His partner was getting hot and mad. “Don’t fool with that son of a bitch. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

I looked over at my fellow prisoners, and they all had their heads down, staring at the dirt. They’d remain prisoners for a long time to come, I thought.

“Shut up,” the man with the cigar said. And then he pulled out a tin case and popped it open to reveal some of the worst-looking cigars I had ever laid eyes on. He put one in my mouth and struck another match, lighting it. Then he took my matches, stuck them in his trousers, and walked off. I took a deep breath and let the smoke burn my throat and struggled mightily to keep from coughing and spitting the thing out. I hadn’t smoked much before.

The two soldiers conferred, and then the taller one said, “Let’s go, we’re taking a shortcut.”

They led us down an alley between two houses, through their yards, and through the fence of a stable that had been riddled with bullet holes. As if I had willed it to happen in just that way, they had decided to march us around the main line of traffic and head for the bridge by a back route. And that route brought us into the stable yard and past the stable with its manger of hay lying just inside the door.

And when I passed that manger, I hacked up a god-awful cough and let that cigar fly into the manger onto the dry hay before my keepers saw me. And when they turned back to me, I was busy mashing the ground with the toe of my boot, as if grinding the cigar into the mud.

“Got to take it easy with that tobacco,” the shorter one said. “That’s some powerful Tennessee bounty.”

I nodded, and we walked off toward that bridge to God knew where.

There was a fire, of course. They were trying to sneak themselves out of town, all of them Union boys, and I set off the biggest damn signal fire you’ve ever seen, and it queered their plans a bit, I reckon. There was a lot of running around, and a captain grabbed our two captors for a firefighting detail, and while they struggled to explain that they had to keep an eye on us, I slipped off. Down through a little alley, down the bank, and into the waters of a little river. When I looked back, I saw the two men still arguing with the officer, and my fellow captives still standing there with their heads down, black against the firelight.

Stretched out before me in the dark lay everything, and I walked toward it.