The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

The girl looked like she’d worked hard her whole life, and yet she was soft around her mouth and her chin, the places where you look for signs of kindness. She was hauling those buckets around like a man, two at a time. She looked up at Mrs. McGavock, nodded her head, and smiled.

  “She’s in love.”

  “With one of them?”

  “Of course not. With one of the boys who ought to be here but isn’t. Lord knows where he is.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “She didn’t tell me anything. I can just see it on her. The things she’s hoping for are right there on her face.”

  I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Mrs. McGavock talked like she was talking to someone else, even if her mouth was pointed at you. She acted like she’d seen everything, and that made me a little angry. How could a woman who had spent her life wrapped up in shawls and waited on by nigras know a damn thing about anything? I’d seen things. I’d done things. Once. Once upon a time.

  I reckon the old boy didn’t think we could see him, crouched down behind the pecan tree in the yard, one of hundreds of men lying about. He was off by himself a little, and I wouldn’t have noticed him except that when Becky came walking by the tree, swinging the buckets and calling out to the men—Water? Water? Got potatoes, too!—he grabbed her, and the buckets fell to the ground and clattered down the slight slope until they came to a rest next to the fence.

  There wasn’t a man who got up to help her, and I can’t really blame them. Who could pay attention to anything but their own new circumstances, their own odds of life? Mrs. McGavock didn’t see it, either, having turned her attention to the laundry again, her head taken up in a cloud of white steam over the black kettle.

  I shouted, but it had been days since I’d last used my voice like that, and all I got was a coughful of spit. I hacked out another shout, but it was indistinguishable from the sounds the men were making on the lawn, and no one seemed to hear me. I thought to go for her myself, but I looked out and couldn’t see how I’d get myself around all those bodies on my new crutches. Such a beautiful, hard girl, though. She reminded me of the girls I’d grown up around, the ones who’d had to work like the boys, who wouldn’t take no shit. I wondered if she could take care of herself. I decided I couldn’t wait.

  I threw the crutch on my good side away and realized I could move pretty quick if I hopped most of the way and just used the crutch to prop myself up when I had to stop or turn. I leaped across the field. I could see the faces of men, their gray uniforms, their white bandages, the ground they lay on, all passing below me when I looked down. I could feel them sit up to watch.

  At the tree the old-timer hadn’t gotten very far. During the battle he must have been shot in the head, grazed probably, but you can lose a whole lot of blood that way. He was weak. His beard was mostly gray with black speckles, and it grew high on his cheeks but not high enough to cover the divots and marks in his skin. He was an ugly man with a full head of stringy hair and his pecker in his hand. He was bigger than me, but I figured I was meaner.

  The girl had kicked him a few times, but he’d still managed to get her on her back, wedged into the space between two of the tree’s roots. She spit and clawed at him, and I picked up my crutch, balanced on my left foot, and took a swing at the geezer. I didn’t get him good, but it was enough to knock him back and start his head bleeding again. The girl just lay there, panting, covering herself, looking at me. The old soldier sputtered and cursed.

  “Who the hell are you? Get out of here, gimp. This don’t concern you.”

  “Just leave her alone, old man. Ain’t need to go any farther than this.”

  “I’ll say how far it goes.”

  A woman spoke from behind me.

  “I believe Mr. Cashwell will tell you how far it goes.”

  The lady of the house never missed anything, I would learn this later. But damned if it wasn’t a little frightening to have her come up on me like that, like a ghost. I began to turn to see her, but I saw the old guy coming at me right then, and so I turned back and whapped him again, this time in the gut, and he had to sit down for a second.

  I meant to wallop him a couple of times and get my one-legged self out of harm’s way before he got a chance to do me much real damage. I couldn’t be in a fight, not no more. Even the old man was my superior now. I’d ambushed him, but that couldn’t last. Surprise never lasted. There was a crow in the tree sitting on a branch above the girl, and it moved back and forth looking at us, stretching its neck and opening its beak like it was going to say something but never succeeding.

  The old man rocked on his haunches and hauled himself up. I turned to look at Mrs. McGavock again. The crotchety old pervert came at me again, and this time I got him on his jaw, right under his ear, and that knocked him out but good. He stumbled around for a second and then fell to his knees and rolled over like a baby.

  The girl, in the meanwhile, had got up. She walked over to the man, his mouth lolling open, and stood over him.

  “No, Becky.”

  Becky looked over at Mrs. McGavock with hate in her eyes at first, until she realized who was talking, and then her face softened and the lines between her eyes disappeared. She turned and walked toward the buckets. She began to dust off the potatoes.

  I stared at Mrs. McGavock. She said, “I just wanted to see what you would do. You don’t have a leg, you know.”

  23

  CARRIE MCGAVOCK

  Becky came to us the night I discovered Ab and Eli at the end of our walk. There were flurries of snow throughout that evening, but she looked as if she had been through a deluge. Her lovely brown hair, which she kept long and unhindered, traced lines across her cheeks and forehead, and not once did I see her bother to put a hair back in its place while she stood there on our front porch shouting at Mariah about her brother. My, she could have been a handsome girl. But someone had chosen to make her a farm implement; that was clear. Her hands were rough and brown and scabbed like a man’s.

  The newspapers were always on about how the best men of our country—and by that, they meant this new country of ours, these Confederate States of America—went off to fight and were lost forever. But what of the best of our women? How many lovely young women were sacrificed behind the plow in those years? Oh, I’m not saying that a woman oughtn’t guide a plow, although I shudder at the thought of my own incompetence at the reins. It’s not the plowing, you see; it’s the elimination of everything but plowing, the possibility that you could be anything but someone who walked behind a mule and gathered in the snap beans. A man could transform himself, and although these last few years that transformation had been completed by war and sometimes death, it is impossible to say how much bigger life must have seemed just knowing that it could be changed. A girl like Becky could not change anything for herself, and she had been called upon to take up the work and life of a man. Her charms had leached away, leaving something bone-hard in its place. Sometimes when I looked at her, the gulf between us made me dizzy. We could not move lightly between our worlds as a man might move easily between church and saloon, battle and sport. I was soft where she was hard, and when I caught her sitting off by herself and stemming tears, I knew that there were things I had mastered that she had not. We were halves of a whole, and the fathers and mothers and families and houses and histories that had sundered us were insurmountable. I wanted to love her, but I did not find a way. I pitied her, as she must have pitied me from time to time.

  I pitied Becky for reasons other than her station in life. What was station anymore? I could feel my own station slipping away, and good riddance. I wore plain clothes and quit bothering to powder my neck. I swore occasionally in front of the men and committed to memory the new curses I heard the men sputtering. I thought of the curses as passwords, the lingua franca of my new life, one I could not yet envision but which I knew would be coarser and not possessed of the
layers of fine scrim that had kept me in gauzy ignorance of the clang and stink and sharpness of things outside Carnton.

  I pitied Becky because she was in love. There were many signs of her condition: the systematic way she attended to all the men under our care, pausing to overhear their conversations; her questions about other hospitals and whether there were any Tennessee boys in any of them; her particular interest in the opinions and recollections of any Tennessean she happened across; the vehemence and violence with which she repelled the attentions of the men. When she stood over the man behind the pecan tree, I saw the cold hate of a woman who has lost something and was outraged by the idea that someone would think to take even more from her.

  She was just a girl. I was reminded of this when she sat by her brother, Eli, during slow moments, and I could see the family resemblance and their youth. They leaned into each other comfortably, a position obviously familiar to both of them. She stroked his head and ran her hands across the scab in his scalp. He picked at the folds of her skirt and gathered a few in his fist. She tickled him, and he tickled her back. She laughed and called him a little piglet. He stuck his tongue out at her and tried to yank at the long hair that spilled down her back. She slapped him on his knee, hard, and he pouted a little before getting up and dancing a little jig in front of her, teasing her about something, staying out of her reach. He was confused by her reaction, which was not to come after him and give his ear a yank, but to turn inward and shrivel a little before slowly getting to her feet and moving quietly into the house. Eli watched her go and then walked slowly among the men in the yard without listening to them or acknowledging their appeals.

  Eli had become a little master of the place and had found an acolyte in Winder. My son tagged along after the older boy as Eli carried water and food and contraband among the men. He was resourceful and kind: he took no money for the little bottles of whiskey and the sweets he brought to his favorites among the patients. He just passed their money along to his supplier. I’d seen him huddled with the quartermaster clerk who ran errands to town, the older man laughing but still pocketing the scrip that Eli held out in his little hand. Once I would have forbidden Winder from fraternizing with such a boy, but now I hadn’t the heart or the inclination. Winder was in love with the older boy in the way little boys fall in love with train conductors and frontier fighters and famous generals. Eli was Winder’s new obsession, the reflection of himself in a darker and deeper pool, one containing greater possibilities. That Eli could make himself not just tolerated but useful and even desired by the great men strewn around them—this achievement impressed Winder, who started walking bowlegged like Eli and never stopped for the rest of his life.

  I had my own obsession, my own little project. The man Cashwell was as foreign to me as Eli was to Winder. I can’t explain why I needed him around. He held no attraction for me, and I sometimes doubted if any man could. In the beginning I believe I was shocked to find a person, in this case a man and a soldier, who wanted to die. Once I had thought that I wanted to die, but I could see from watching Cashwell that I was only a pretender, a histrionic fool. Cashwell took no pleasure from the thought of dying, not that I could see, and that’s what made our difference clear to me. There had been a perverse pleasure to be taken from contemplating the big vial of laudanum I’d kept hidden from the world, and it was that contemplation that had sustained me and, if I’m not wrong, that had kept me alive. If what I could become, my potential for transformation, was as severely limited as Becky’s, at least I knew I could be transformed by death. The possibility of an option in a world empty of options had been liberating. But Cashwell, he wanted no more options. At times I’d come to his bedside and he’d ignore me for a while, but then we’d talk a little. He never said it, but I thought I detected the weariness of a man, a person, who had seen all the options of life. Of late these options had been brutal and unfair and ungodly. It thrilled me to stand next to a person who possessed a record of experiences entirely unimaginable to me. If he felt the pressure and weight of being alive, I felt its mysteries when I was with him. It was a relief to know there were still mysteries.

  A day or so after Cashwell’s debut as the knight-errant of that macabre little scene under our pecan tree, played out under the unseeing eye of the surgeons sawing away upstairs with our brandy still on their breath from the night before, he and I came to an understanding. I didn’t know where John was, and I didn’t care.

  Late one afternoon I went into Cashwell’s room—I thought of it as his room now—and fussed with some of the things lying about on the dresser. There was a hand mirror there, my old hand mirror, and I looked into it and saw a face that seemed younger than I imagined possible. I would have wagered that years had passed since the first of the mangled had been brought to our door and that I had become a gnarled hag left to sift the bones. That was not the case. I even looked, how would I put it, vehement, for once in my life. Assured. I smiled at myself, and it didn’t feel at all unnatural. I felt heavy. Not fat, but just less airy. I could feel the floor through my shoes and the pull of gravity through my knees.

  I straightened the dresser: moving the mirror to one corner, a tin of matches to another, a stocky little candle in its holder to another corner, and Cashwell’s belt—rolled up tightly like a snail’s shell or a snake—to the very middle. I thought he was sleeping, but he must have been watching me.

  “What you doing, Mrs. McGavock?”

  He startled me, and I jumped a little before recovering and turning to see him there in the bed. No flinching. I tried to look at him coldly.

  “I’m straightening things. This is still a house, a fine house, and no matter how long you and your friends lie around here, it will remain a fine house.”

  His face was still pale, but it was gathering a little color day by day. He sat up in the bed with his hands on either side of him, pulling the sheet tight across his waist. The sheet sagged in the emptiness where his right leg had been.

  “No one said it ain’t a fine house.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t say it was, either. No offense, but I ain’t going to exactly have pretty memories of this place. That might affect my judgment.”

  He looked at me straight on, like he was waiting to see something in my face, some reaction. A test. I struggled to hide myself behind feigned weariness. Weariness was a skill much practiced among the women of my acquaintance.

  “Perhaps I could have the surgeon cut your other leg off, and then you would be symmetrical. Symmetry is beauty, correct?”

  “Perhaps you could have let me alone down in that room. That place was pretty, with a nice blue ceiling that looked like the kind of sky I used to like to fish under. I could have died thinking of fishing, and that—”

  “I am bored by that sort of nonsense. You bore me. Here I thought you might be an interesting man, and you’re as imaginative as a stick of kindling. The ceiling looked like the sky. How touching and perceptive of you. I want to die. How tiresome. You’re a terrible conversationalist.”

  “Forgive me, ma’am, but I ain’t really up for a lot of talking, or conversationing, or whatever it is you come to my room for.”

  “My room.”

  “You’re welcome to it. Put me on the next wagon out of here, I’m ready to go.”

  I did not want him to leave on a wagon. Not yet.

  “Get me the hell out of here. You’ve chopped me into a freak, and I reckon it’s about time I got on with living my freak life. I didn’t much care for you letting that girl get roughed up like that, and I don’t want to be no part of whatever experiment you got cooking up in here. I ain’t yours to talk to. Who the hell are you, lady? You’ve got some kind of sickness on you, I can tell. I seen it. You twisted up somehow, something ain’t right. You’re watching all the time, watching me, watching the men laid out all around you, watching that girl. What the hell do you do, besides decide who lives and who dies?”

  I could not look at hi
m, and he went on:

  “I guess you’re God, or God’s messenger or prophet. You like Elisha, doling out miracles and leprosy as you see fit. You didn’t think I knew the Bible, did you? I’m just an uneducated man from Arkansas who can be of some kind of use to you, which remains to be seen. But I know the Bible, I can read. Even if I couldn’t read, I’d know the Bible. Mama was always spitting it at me before the preacher came. Yeah, a preacher ran off with my mother, ain’t that something? Bet you never thought such a thing could happen. Nah, bet you did.”

  I knew he was raving, and I went toward him, as if to calm him down, but he continued as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  “Bet you think that’s how it happens all the time outside this place, that all the dumb and ignorant trash in the world fall over at the sight of a person with learning and clean clothes and proper talk. But that ain’t exactly so. My mother knew what she was doing. She’d given me the name of Zachariah. She was the woman in the basket, you know that story? It’s in Zachariah. They bring this woman in a big basket with a lead lid on it, only Zachariah doesn’t know what the hell is in it, and the angels reveal a woman in it, and Zachariah says that ain’t right, but he puts the lid right back down on her. And the angels agree, and they say it ain’t right exactly, and so that’s why they’re taking her off to Babylon, and off she goes. Off to Babylon. See, I understand that prophecy better than my mother, who’s now off someplace with a preacher. Or she’s whoring or whatnot. She felt sorry for the woman in the basket, and she thought she was the woman in the basket, poor and boxed in by her family and that shack and her stupid son. But the woman was a sinner, and Babylon was the resting place of sin. This is what I learned when I started reading. I was Zachariah, who closed the lid, and my mother found a way to be lifted up and carried off to her rightful place. I ain’t ever heard from her again, and I don’t care to.”

  And then he turned his green eyes at me again.