by Robert Hicks
“That’s what I mean. Tell me about that.”
“About what?”
“You’re not dumb, Mr. Cashwell, you know what I’m talking about.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“About charging. About killing. About fighting. I want to know that.”
“I’m done with that.”
“I don’t think so. Not you. No. You’re not finished, I can see it. You’ll kill again.”
“I’m done with soldiering.”
“I’m not talking about soldiering. Do you know Mariah?”
“The Negro woman who was just in here?”
“Yes. She’s got a prophecy about you.”
“She don’t look like a prophet.”
“Would you like to know what she saw in her dream?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
The sun was setting just then, and that low orange light seemed to light up every individual piece of dust on the windowsill. I’d never noticed the dust before, and I stared at it like it was something important, like there was something there. It didn’t do anything. The back of my head hurt. Not like I’d been hit in the head, but like there was something wrong up in there. It tingled, like my arm did when it fell asleep and the blood had just begun to rush back to it. That part of my head felt empty except for the tingling, and I felt as scattered as the dust on the windowsill. I had no ground to stand on, no place from which to say, This is who I am, this is what I am, this is where I’m from. I could be one of any number of men. I had been any number of men in my life. The man who had rushed the barricade and who had killed other men was as dead as the boy who watched his mother ride off with the black-coated preacher. What could I say about him, the soldier and killer, except that he had lived? What could I tell someone like Carrie McGavock? I knew what she was asking, and the truth was that I had never thought much about what it felt like to kill other men. Killing was just another part of not being killed, at least the way I had experienced it, the unavoidable other side of the coin, and it had been my own willingness to be killed that had made it possible to kill. That’s what I told myself, every day after every bad night of sleeping on the cold ground, hugging my rifle. It was a puzzle, though, and how could I explain that to this woman who had probably never been threatened in her life? I knew that death had been in this house, but it had snuck up on her unannounced, and to me that was some kind of mercy. She didn’t have nothing to do with it, and I wasn’t one of those folks who thought sickness and death was some sort of punishment for crimes against God, for sin. Sickness and death was like termites in the forest. Just something to take care of the dead wood and nothing special at all.
“Ask your questions. I reckon your husband wouldn’t like it if he knew you were spending so much time with another man, even a man like me, so we ought to hurry up and get this over with.”
“My husband is off on his own errands these days. He has no interest in you.”
“He’s a wise man, then.”
“I suppose.”
She said this like she didn’t really know what I meant and was just humoring me. I took offense. My head hurt, and I was rapidly losing control of my tongue. I wanted to hurt her, to make it plain that I didn’t take shit off rich ladies with too much time on their hands. The question came to me quick.
“Do you love him?”
I should never have asked that question, because that question seemed to break something open in her, and I became just something she talked at for the next couple of hours. Her talk had been in pieces before, and it continued to be, but as time went on, I began to recognize the pattern and put some things together. If I had wanted to insult this woman and push her off and get her to leave me alone, I failed. Instead, I fell in love with her, and as a result she never left me alone again.
She quit looking at me when she talked. She looked at the ceiling, down at her hands in her lap, and farther down at the cracks between the floorboards. But no matter where she was looking, she was talking. I could not quit looking at her and listening, even when it became plain to me that she was talking to herself, to the walls, to the ceiling, to the hard cold ground outside, which was just possible to see in little splashes of light that fell out of the window.
She told me she had been a little girl in love with her papa and that her papa had been the master of a sugarcane plantation somewhere down in Louisiana. She said it was in a place called Terrebonne, which sounded like terrible to me, but I never been good with languages and such. The way she talked about it didn’t make it sound terrible. Sounded nice, although not in a way that I knew anything about, something like how a drawing of the western mountains looks nice and pretty, but you don’t really know whether they’re nice or not because you ain’t ever been there or to anywhere like it.
She told me about her papa’s wrought-iron porch rail and the gargoyles and cherubs that were molded into it, all connected by twisting iron wisteria and magnolia leaves. She said she thought she could see the whole world from the stoop of that porch, which appeared to be at the center of a conquered land, sugarcane in every direction and all things brought to heel and civilized under her father’s command and then made to yield up riches. That was what she knew of the world, that it worked, that it made sense, that it could be brought under control. Everything fit just right in her home down there in Terrebonne, she said. She said that the order seemed to work its way out from their house and into the fields and marshes beyond. She said it was all so flat, like the Lord Himself had come along and leveled the imperfections so that they would know that their place was the center of His creation. For example, she said, as a child I often wondered if other people had fig trees like ours in their yard, and it would not have surprised me at all to find out that our fig trees were the only ones in the world. It would not have surprised me to hear that the white herons that stood out like white candles against the green sward of the marsh were the only such herons in the world. That our wet, vine-twisted bayous marked the edge of everything and were the source of all that was good.
Mariah, the Negro with the prophecy I didn’t want to hear, had been her childhood companion. Her only friend, she said. I said that must have been lonely, having only a nigger for a friend, and she looked at me like I hadn’t understood a word she’d said, and continued talking. She wasn’t sure if Mariah was older or younger than she was, but it had always seemed that Mariah saw things before Carrie ever thought to look. She said that a lot of the Negroes on the plantation said this was because Mariah’s mother had the second sight, which she had inherited from her own mother and passed down to her daughter. Witches, they would call them, and that wasn’t an insult exactly, she said. I remember Mariah’s mother gathering roots, and, if she was walking up the way with the roots wrapped up before her in her apron, the other Negroes would move to the side and make room. She was respected and feared, which I thought were words for the same thing.
It was the birth of Mariah’s baby that changed things, she said. Mariah wasn’t married, which wasn’t surprising by itself, but they were only children. Mariah and Carrie had always been children, and even if they were sixteen or seventeen, the pregnancy and motherhood of Mariah came as a nasty shock to Carrie. The boy baby was named Theopolis, she said, and he came out every bit as pale as Mariah, maybe even paler. Carrie could not look at the baby. That baby was evidence of secrets between the two of them, and she couldn’t stand that. Why hadn’t she told me? I thought she was getting awfully worked up about a relationship with someone who wasn’t even white, one of her people, but I had begun to notice that she didn’t recognize that distinction, at least when it came to talking about Mariah. Nobody knew who the father was, at least the white folks didn’t. Mariah wouldn’t tell her. Just some boy from someplace else, she said to me. I asked her why she hadn’t told me about him, and she said it was because she didn’t want me to think less of her. She said she wasn’t afraid of being pregnant, it was just that she was afr
aid of me knowing the particulars. I said, “I know the particulars, I’m not as ignorant as you think I am.” But in fact I was as ignorant as she thought I was, and I knew the particulars neither of the physical act nor of Mariah’s own private performance of it. I could imagine it, though. I felt quite alone of a sudden.
The world seemed at once more expansive and more pressing on her. Oppressive, she said. Where she had thought she’d seen order emanating in an orbit around her house and her family, she saw threat. It was as if every tree, curved so beautifully this way and that, had turned on her and that what she had taken for beauty—beauty created for her enjoyment, pure beauty—was the work of something beyond her control and understanding and was neither beautiful nor ugly, but just itself. Without meaning. It was the disregard, my own insignificance, the idea that I was being laughed at behind my back or just ignored. And all because of one baby.
The two girls grew apart a little, although Carrie eventually grew out of her bad feelings about the little baby and helped Mariah take care of him once in a while. Carrie began to wear black, though. I suddenly realized she had probably been wearing black for going on twenty years. Young girls do not wear black, my mother said. But I ignored her and went about wearing black to show that I understood that none of us knew anything and that what was proper was arbitrary and meaningless. Then I just never stopped wearing it. I got used to it, like we always become accustomed to things. I thought I looked good, I thought the boys I saw every once in a while thought I might be pretty in my black. I learned we can become accustomed to anything, which is why things can seem to us like they’re in their proper place when they really aren’t. We just don’t pay attention after a while.
She moved her chair into the circle of light thrown off by the solar lamp on the table next to my bed. The chair squeaked and it rocked, and she took to moving it back and forth so that there was noise to fill the emptiness in the air while she thought about what to say next. I was uncomfortable having her so close, because I was uncertain how I might react. I was prone to sudden urges most of my life. When I was running around in the army, I would have the almost irresistible urge to kick someone for no reason or to start cursing at the colonel or to cry. Picking up the colors in the rain of Yankee bullets had been one of those urges that had gotten away from me. The most scary times were when I got the urge to put my arm around one of the smaller boys trying to hoist his rifle onto his shoulder, tell him that I loved him, and give him a kiss on the top of his head. The idea would shoot through my head and be out just before I’d ever have time to act on it. The idea was dangerous, and it frightened me how close I could come to doing something like that, or that I had even thunk it. I was never no “Nancy,” for I didn’t fancy men, I knew that. But those weird thoughts, urging me to act, would pop up, and they would be powerful. I fought them and they’d disappear. I’d wonder what would happen. If I got the urge to kiss this woman talking next to me, I didn’t know if I could resist it.
“What’s this got to do with your husband?”
“I’m getting to that. It’s not a simple question, Sergeant Cashwell.”
“Call me Zachariah.”
“I can’t just answer that question with a simple yes or no. It’s scandalously presumptuous of you to ask the question anyway, so I think you should be quiet while I choose to answer it my own way, if I choose to answer it at all. Are you comfortable? Do you need anything?”
“I don’t need anything.”
“That’s good, Zach.”
“Zachariah.”
She ignored me and went back to rocking on the chair that squeaked, in and out of the yellow light of the lamp. The shadows on her face got deeper and blacker, and she seemed to gradually disappear as the light from the sky faded. The black shadows on her face matched her dress, I noticed.
She went on about Mariah. She told me how she, Carrie, went about trying to learn to flirt with the boys from the parish and about the endless procession of cousins who came to her father’s house for one reason or another. She was not good at it, she said. But she was by God going to get her a sweetheart to teach her the things Mariah already knew, if Mariah was going to keep such things a secret from her. But she was clumsy, and she was shocked to hear that boys didn’t like to talk about the books on her daddy’s shelf, most of which she’d read part through. She liked to talk about Milton, she said. I didn’t know who that was, but she said he wrote about heaven and hell, so I nodded my head because I knew about those things. She’d try to talk to the boys about paradise, and they’d interrupt to talk about sugar prices or the weather or how the neighbor’s bull had jumped the pen again or about the blue crawfish they’d pulled out of the swamp. She had nothing to say to them, these boys named Boudreaux, Landrieaux, Pontellier. She loved their skin, though, even their sunburned noses. I had one thing I could give them, and I knew that they knew this, that they were thinking about it. Carrie’s mother was wise to that, though. She could see what her daughter was fixing to do with those Cajun boys, and she weren’t having it. Mama thought it was bad enough to live in a swamp without getting friendly with the swamp creatures. And so she run off the boys and began to invite real suitors, and this was worse to Carrie because they were all so old and she didn’t like the way they looked at her, like they were shopping.
This was the case until her cousin John arrived on business from Nashville. They said business anyway. He had been to the plantation on business many times before and was said to have a way with the Negroes and didn’t mind spending a lot of time around them, teaching them new farming techniques and assessing their worth for Carrie’s father. He was handsome, and when he talked to her, he didn’t change the subject when she was talking. Maybe he wasn’t listening, I don’t know. But he let me talk about God and poetry and death, and the way things weren’t what they seemed, and he never corrected me. I was very appreciative of this. I remembered him from previous visits, of course. He was hard to miss. He was an interesting man.
“So that was love.”
“You’re impertinent.”
“Just trying to get to the answer.”
“You wouldn’t want to know what I think love is.”
“And why would that be, Mrs. McGavock?”
She looked at me, and I could hear the chair squeaking and filling the entire room with its little noises. I could smell corn bread being burned in the kitchen, and for a moment I could barely keep myself from jumping out of the bed as best I could and going to save it. Keep it from going all black and wasted. Carrie’s hair had fallen around her face. I hadn’t noticed when it happened. It covered half her face, like a thin screen, and sometimes an eye would shine through, or a lip or a cheek or a tooth. Mostly her eye is what I noticed, though. She spoke from behind that veil.
“Why do you stay in this room?”
I was surprised by this question. She was poking at me. Why did I stay in the room?
“I didn’t realize I had a choice. You put me here once you’d taken my leg and thrown it out on the trash heap. I reckoned you felt bad.”
“Taking your leg saved your life. Anyway, it was going to be cut off sooner or later, and not by me, and so I believe you should leave off that argument once and for all. It’s tiresome and childish. And I don’t believe you’ve come up with the right answer anyway.”
“Why do I stay here? Why wouldn’t I?”
“I can think of many reasons. You’ve taken a special privilege over every other man in this house, and you don’t appear to me as someone who routinely takes privileges. I’d call you a humble man. Am I wrong?”
“I think you’ve got the thing pegged all wrong. I may be humble, but no soldier is going to turn down his own bed and special dining privileges, not any soldier I know. Luck went my way, and I got the bed, and I been hunkering down here ever since.”
“Even if it’s meant hearing men talk about you like you thought you were special?”
“I ain’t heard that.”
“If I’ve heard that, surely you have.”
The truth was, I had heard it, but every man I heard say something about it knew I could still whup his ass, and he shut up quick. She was right, though. This was a privilege I should have shared, and I hadn’t. They had cause to hold that against me. I had never taken privileges. I had always eaten last in the field when we got chow, and I always filled my canteens last, and I always took watch in the middle of the night. That had been my duty as a sergeant as I saw it, and so I’d done it. Now it was different.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you let me, a woman and a stranger, talk to you like this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you talk back? Why do you listen?”
I knew, I knew. I knew the answer to that. I was there because of her, because I had not ever been so close to a woman who seemed also possessed of that black thread that wound down through time and the fabric of my life, fraying here and there but never leaving me, always growing longer and stronger, pulling me toward God only knows what, nothing good. It surprised me that a woman of means, with such fine things and a family and a beautiful face like polished china, that she would also have been bound by this thread, which could spin and weave around a person until there was nothing left to see of this person, only the black cocoon. I could pull that thread, tie it onto my own, and I knew that I could be at some peace with myself if I did exactly that, spinning her away from the tangles of time.
Time, twisting on and on, always taking away and never bringing anything back, could kill people years before they extricated themselves from their bodies and flew off to God. I had heard her float through the hallways of the house, whispering the names of her children as she blew out the lamps. John Randal, Mary Elizabeth, Martha. It sounded like prayer, like some sort of invocation. I’d been in a Catholic church once, down on toward Natchez, and I’d heard the same sound when the priests approached the altar, muttering the sounds that would bring Christ back to them. I didn’t much care for that sort of thing, and I had no faith that a priest could work such magic, but I found myself praying that someday, maybe, Carrie McGavock would perform that miracle, that time would get all wrapped up on itself and confused, and that those children would walk the hallways with their mother again. There was beauty in that woman. Not in her pain, but in the part of her obscured by the pain and the black crinkly dress and the black thread of time. I saw a young and beautiful woman, a woman who could lift burdens and redeem men. I wanted to be redeemed, I wanted to be absolved. And I wanted that woman, the angel who walked in the cemetery among her dead children and kissed their gravestones when she thought no one was looking, to be the one doing the redeeming. I had no name for that, no word. Just a feeling.