by Robert Hicks
John had never avoided Blood Bucket, as so many others in town did. After he’d sent his own slaves off, he’d found it necessary to come in and hire day labor occasionally, when he and Theopolis couldn’t handle a job themselves. He never brought Theopolis with him. Sometimes he’d drive in with Mariah, who knew women who would sell her sundries for much less than the white traders. He didn’t mind bringing Mariah because he knew her, and knew she loved Carrie, and knew that she would never get her head turned by the illusory promises of freedom. Mariah was smarter than that, he knew, but Theopolis was still too young.
He also knew that Mariah occasionally came into Blood Bucket on her own to visit an old root doctor. This was a side of her he chose not to know anything about. He just barely tolerated it.
“What say, Colonel John?”
“Just taking a walk, Joe. Making my rounds.”
John didn’t exactly know why he’d come to talk to Joe, and he had only a vague idea of what he wanted to ask him. He didn’t have the words to put it just right.
“You seen anything, Joe?”
“Now, Colonel John, I got eyes. I see a whole lot. A whole lot. That ain’t a question I can take good aim at. I heard things, too, yes, I have.”
“What have you heard?”
“I’m not sure I know.”
“Don’t play with me. You know better than that.”
“I’m not sure I do, Colonel John.”
“Do what?”
“Know better than that.”
The sun streaked through the clouds, and the light fell upon Joe’s face. Shadows hid part of him, but his eyes gave off a shine. He smiled and chuckled and looked past John toward the end of the street. John imagined he was standing at the center of the earth and that lines of disruption radiated out from where he stood, from where the old man sat on his chair, like the lines of violence that emanated from the center of an artillery crater, thick gashes in the ground that tapered many yards away into a filigree of delicate lines traced by pebbles momentarily blown about and then left to rest again, forever. It was vertiginous, the feeling that came over him. For a moment he wanted nothing more than to sit on the old man’s lap and have him whisper secrets into his ear, to tell him the things he needed to know, the things he might tell his grandchildren. He laughed out loud, and Joe narrowed his eyes at him. Absurd, absurd! What could a Negro tell me? Children, all of them. What would a Negro be wise about that could ever concern me? He had heard of people, white people, who claimed special wisdom for the Negro on account of their experience and closer proximity to man’s natural, primitive state. John knew better. John knew they were no more primitive than he was, nor were they any more wise. Had they not fallen from paradise along with everyone else? They had. Along with their knowledge of the world came the same complication, and with the same complication came the scheming and the struggle and the betrayals and the inexorable slide into sin and disappointment. When did I start thinking like a theologian? He was fascinated by the man sitting before him, who chewed on the inside of his cheek and rocked in his chair.
“I seen your nigra girl go down the road just a little while ago. Gone to see Miss Eloisa for some knowledge, I do believe.”
John was slowly emerging from his fog.
“Who?”
“That nigra girl. Mariah.”
It had begun to snow. The flakes were hard, or seemed hard on John’s bare neck. Joe looked up and let a few flakes strike him in the face before lifting himself up from his chair and dragging it back to his porch, which was protected by eaves. The legs of the chair left black tracks in the snow that already lay on the ground. John’s horse stamped and shook his head. John watched snowflakes disappear into Joe’s head—first they were sitting there upon the wiry gray, and then they were gone. John reached up and felt the wet upon his own head. Snowflakes were rare enough in Franklin to give pause, but not rare enough to bring joy. The flakes seemed to hurl themselves to the ground, white streaks shot directly to their appointed places and then, arriving softly, freezing the earth below them. Flake by flake, Franklin was freezing in place. Good, John thought. Freeze it over. Freeze everything over. Stop this thing from growing.
“Why don’t you come out of the wet, Colonel John? Come on up here, it’s warmer. Got the stove going inside, and I can feel it out here.”
“Guess I will.”
John tied his horse to Joe’s fence, climbed the two wood steps, concave like saddles, and sat down on an old stool next to the door. Joe was right—the heat escaped under the door and through the chinks between the siding.
“You got whiskey, Joe?”
“Always got whiskey.”
Joe went inside and a moment later came out with an old brown jar made of glass, the kind a doctor might have had on his shelf. Joe saw John eyeing the jar.
“You ain’t the only one who sells his things to me.”
Joe poured a jigger’s worth into a tin cup and handed it to John. John sniffed. Flavored moonshine that smelled like rotted peaches. It smelled good. Liquor changes everything, even the meaning of smells. John threw it down like a practiced drinker.
“You said Mariah was down here? Where?”
“She gone down to see Miss Eloisa and her roots. Roots and powders and such.”
“Eloisa puts on curses?”
“I wouldn’t cross her, but don’t know nothing about curses, though.”
“No, you wouldn’t. But you’d go see her, wouldn’t you? You’d go see her if you hated someone enough, or wanted something badly enough, right?”
“I’ve been to see Miss Eloisa, yes, sir.”
John found himself rubbing the beams of the porch, admiring the rough craftsmanship that had created a house whose lineaments could not be named, whose shape could not be found in any book of architecture, but which was solid nevertheless. He knocked his knuckles against the tan weathered wood of the doorway and listened for the note. Cedar posts, that sound is unmistakable. He wished he could knock on the heads of people and suss out their characters by the ringing in his ears. He wondered what Mariah was doing. Thoughts of Baylor and his debt had left him entirely, piddling things next to the fears that were beginning to rise up in his head. He felt nervous and prickly and couldn’t immediately explain why.
Joe was staring down the road, toward the north end of town where the road met the pike and went on to Nashville. A figure appeared in the slackening snow shower. Shoeless and thin, thin like the ghost of one of the Confederate dead. He’d seen the body a thousand times before, only he’d seen it still and quiet, lying next to one of the holes that the gravediggers were still—I can still hear them, the picks and the shovels!—carving out of the frozen ground. This figure was not dead. It carried only a rifle. John stared with Joe, rapt. The man—it was obviously a man—came along a little farther before stopping at one of the houses across the street. He had an old blanket around his shoulders sewn with a boot lace into a cape, and he’d wrapped his head in a torn piece of shirt cloth as if he were a Mohammedan. He held his right hand high up on the porch rail and let his head sag down past his chest to his knees, retching. Nothing came out, which seemed to make him furious. He took his rifle and swung it like a club at the front door of the little shack, shouting for food.
“Give me your goddamn food, nigger. I see you in there with all your little bastards. I . . . can . . . see . . . you! Feed me, for God’s sake. Just a biscuit. I’ll protect you, I swear.”
He had only enough strength to strike the door three times before sinking to the floor and letting the rifle clatter down onto the porch. He didn’t move when it slipped down the steps and planted itself muzzle-first into the dirt. He didn’t seem to notice.
The man had come from Nashville, John realized. He had heard they had gone on to Nashville after the Yankees, he just never thought they’d come back. The man was so thin it was easy for John to see that his chest was sunken, even through the mismatched layers of the man’s clothing. His head droop
ed upon his chest, and the hinge of his jaw, outlined in shadow, was plainly visible from across the street. Here was what was left of the Southern ideal, the Southern man: starvation, filth, confusion, exhaustion. The man rasped and spit over the rail of the porch. He was hungry and cold and weak. He was human. His appearance undermined any notion of a special Southern exception, a separate branch of humankind. He was as broke-down and anonymous as any man would have been, Southern or not, had he fled barefoot from Nashville to save his life. He was the end and the beginning. The rest of the army would be coming, too.
The man across the street had fallen asleep. The soles of his feet were black and scabbed over. A hand parted the sheets that passed for window curtains, and John could see a pair of night-black eyes staring down at the soldier, whose age was impossible to tell. John thought of Mariah. He was quickly overcome by desperation.
“Joe, where did you say Eloisa lives?”
Joe was busy gathering his things—various bottles and jars, his chairs, a bag of old rice—and tossing them inside his house. He pulled closed the shutters he’d made out of scrap boards and was entirely uninterested in what the white man on his porch had to say. He’d figured out what was happening just as quickly as John.
“What, Colonel John?”
“Eloisa’s. Where is it?”
“Down farther the way you was coming, turn left at the white chapel, look for the tin house on the right with all them whirligigs in the front yard.”
“All right.”
“You looking for that nigra of yours?”
“Mariah.”
“You best hurry on. And I’d take that horse with you quick, or it be et up soon enough.”
The whirligigs were preposterous. John marveled at how much junk and energy had gone into making them. Blades made of old rusted tin sheeting caught the wind and spun long wooden rods, hand-carved, which in turn moved the diminutive wooden figures at the other end in all manner of ways. There was the wooden man ceaselessly bending over with his bucket to scoop water, there was the preacher pounding his pulpit with the same fist, over and over and over again, and there were the two little men facing each other with shovels, each digging while the other tossed the imaginary dirt over his shoulder. There was a witch at her cauldron and a dog snapping at a runaway’s heels. Each whirligig faced into the wind, and at least a hundred of varying sizes—some small enough to fit in John’s palm, others bearing figures the size of midgets—cluttered the yard. There was no escaping the wind at Miss Eloisa’s house, John reckoned. Even if you had wanted to.
The house itself was like every other in Blood Bucket—improvised, improbable. It was tin, every square inch of it. Although John knew there must be wood beneath, the tin facade looked entirely unnatural, like something coughed out whole from one of those big, black-smoke factories he’d read about in Harper’s Weekly. It would not have surprised him if the house itself was attached to a spindle and spun around if the wind was strong enough. It did not seem the sort of place a person would live in; it was the sort of place one might store things.
John walked up to the door, which was also covered in tin but punched with small holes in the shape of a giant rooster. He knocked and heard only a murmur behind the door. He waited and knocked again. He thought he heard moaning.
He opened the door, and rows of jars winked at him from every wall. The beams that held the roof on were exposed, black from soot, and ran the length of the small room. There was a table in the slap dead center of the room, and a figure sat at each end of it. In all four corners of the room John saw piles of wild things, the reaching and weaving tendrils of roots taken whole out of the ground, redolent of damp Tennessee soil ground out by the slip of glaciers, the beating of the wind, the trodding of feet. Other roots hung from the ceiling joists. Under the room’s only window, on the left, stood a small table bearing a pile of chicken feathers upon it, neatly gathered. The next thing John noticed was the flash of two sets of eyes, black and white all at once, as they took him in.
“Hello, Mariah.”
He expected Mariah to be shocked, and maybe a little afraid of him discovering her, but neither emotion passed across her face. Nothing passed across her face. Both Mariah and Miss Eloisa looked at him, and he could see he was being assessed, not as a threat, but simply as a fact, as if he were one of the posts that supported the roof, so familiar that they were practically invisible. Miss Eloisa turned back to the mortar and pestle she had been using. The muscles in her forearm were stringy and long, and they flexed as she crushed and scraped a green root into powder. John tried again.
“Mariah, we’d best be getting on now. There are soldiers coming, and I think we’d all be safer back at the house.”
Mariah stood, and Eloisa watched her, amused.
“Safe from what, Mr. McGavock?” Eloisa asked.
He was now conscious of her standing there, looking him in the eye like he was her peer.
“Gather your things and let’s go.”
“I expect you’d best not be going anywhere, mister.” Miss Eloisa’s voice sounded distant and thin, like the whispering that tall trees make when their tops rub against each other in the wind. It was a voice so tremulous it was ever in danger of cutting out altogether, and every word floated out after great effort. She was still grinding at her root, but now she had half stood and was leaning down on it as if to push it through the table and back into the earth. She talked without looking away from her work. John spoke up again.
“And why would that be?”
“They already here.”
“I only saw one.”
“They already here. You ain’t a-making it out of town, not now. At least your horse ain’t, and maybe not Mariah, neither.”
“There’s nobody in town.”
“I seen them.”
“I don’t believe in your sight.”
“That don’t mean nothing. And if you don’t believe me, ask your nigger what she seen.”
Mariah was looking up toward the rafters, where cascading clumps of roots and leaves and herbs hung tied together. Her face had gone smooth, expressionless. The permanent wrinkles of a woman accustomed to squinting in the sun had disappeared.
“Mariah?”
“Mr. John, I think we better stay here for a time. It’s safe here. They won’t mess with this place.”
John was beginning to feel that he was the last man in Tennessee and that all its women had decided they could get on without him. He was becoming angry. He wished Eloisa would quit with the powder and look at him.
“There is only one, and he was as unthreatening as a clod of mud. Practically dead, and he might be dead right now by the look of him. There might be others, but I didn’t see them, and I think we’ve got time to go.”
“You didn’t see them.”
“No.”
“Look out the window, Mr. John.”
John looked over to the window where the feathers rested upon the little table, catching the dim, filtered light. He walked over and felt the things dangling from the rafters sway at the vibrations of his feet upon the boards. The tin exoskeleton of the house creaked and clanked as the house shifted under his weight. He leaned on the window jamb and peered out. He had to blink his eyes. He blinked and took refuge in the dark and then opened his eyes again to a scene he could not credit.
He was not confused by the fact that the entire Confederate army was now streaming back through Franklin. This he had expected. It seemed natural. No, it was what the army had become. Or, rather, what the men had become.
In his youth his tutor had taught him Latin, and he had read medieval poems and accounts of armies of the dead arrayed against the chivalrous forces of good, skeleton men with terrible sunken eyes and permanent grins wielding sharp spears. His tutor had been fired for bringing those books into the house. They were not the Bible, nor were they the work of the Athenians or the Romans, nor were they the work of the pious Dark Age papists like Bernard of Clairvaux. They were g
odless ghost stories, his father had said, and blasphemous. His father had said, In life we are imperfect but reasonable approximations of the character of our souls. In death we become a crystal of ourselves, a perfectly condensed figure of our souls, of our character. We are not then rounded up and sent off to battle like a raggedy bunch of conscripts. Skeleton armies indeed. Our souls have no business with the earth. The state of our soul is all, it’s everything, it is eternal. Sow muddleheaded credulity in your soul now, and you will become a muddlehead evermore, a confused and misguided boy forever. His father had allowed him to keep the Dante his tutor had given him, and he burned the rest.
But the men were nothing if not a collection of the skeletal and the empty-eyed, moving along as if under the command of someone unseen. They walked and hobbled down the street in front of the house and down every street John could see from the window, all headed generally south. They were an army, and yet not one of them seemed connected to the other by anything other than a common desire to move ahead. They scarcely spoke to each other, although occasionally one could be seen carrying another. There were no officers, no horses, no carts. Many had lost their rifles. Three men passed closely by the window without looking into it. The first had wrapped a bandage around his head, and John could see the impression of his ear perfectly represented in blood, as if someone had drawn it upon the white cloth. The second man was short, and moved with the help of a stick upon what appeared to be a smashed and useless foot. He sucked at his thick blond mustache, the only spot of color upon him, as it curled over his front lip. When he accidentally stepped upon his bad foot, he’d suck so hard at his mustache that the flesh of his face slipped down and his eyes deformed into permanent sadness. The third man, white as an albino, did not seem hurt at all. He walked slowly but without effort. His eyes roamed from side to side, and occasionally he’d stop to assess those around him. No one paid attention to him. He wore blue pants and a gray blouse and riding boots. He had no coat. John watched him overtake the short man with the bad foot, walking alongside for a while, before reaching over and lifting the man by his coat collar and removing it. He put it on, and his arms shot through the end of the sleeves by three inches. The little man never protested and began to shiver. The two men walked off together, and the taller one put his arm around the shorter one for a time before withdrawing it. They never spoke a word. As John watched, the short man fell farther and farther behind until he was alone, and then he disappeared over a rise in the road.