The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  “There’s others coming. I might could have taken better care of her for them, but they’ll be here soon anyway. I sent them word. So you be better just getting on.”

  John looked down at the girl, who wouldn’t have been any older than Martha had Martha lived. Where did she come from? Whose daughter is she? Who cast her out? Had they carried her with them? Did she know she would die?

  Strength in a twisted and random world. John swung the board so hard he almost lost hold of it. The sound of it hitting the boy’s skull was very strange, he remembered later. There was a sharp noise and a moment of resistance followed by a soft, wet sound. He crushed the boy’s skull. The force of the blow threw the boy ten feet, and he died somewhere along the way. His body hit the wall without any fight, limp and useless. He landed in a crouch resting on his head, as if he were about to begin a somersault.

  He saw a tableau, not a woman. He reckoned there was a message in the tableau, a moral lesson, but he didn’t bother to take it in. He pulled her underthings back up around her waist and straightened her dress. This is the way of things now, he thought. He left her there, where she looked at least a little peaceful. He knew he had just killed, and he detected a wistful sadness floating inside him, but no regret about it. This is the way of things now, he repeated again to himself. Why had the boy killed her? He hadn’t killed the girl he’d been with so many years before, so why did this particular girl have to die? I am responsible for this, for all of it. This is my penance.

  Outside, Mariah had disappeared, and the dead boy’s friends had finally arrived. Mrs. Baylor fended off the others, three of them, with the handle of a broom. They laughed and grabbed at her skirts from the ground below the porch. She shouted her protest.

  “Not me, you fools. In there, in there!”

  She pointed at the smokehouse just as John emerged from it. That stopped the men cold, but only for a moment. Each of the three turned toward him, following the line of Mrs. Baylor’s broomstick. Their faces were blackened by dark beards in the hollows under their cheekbones, and they looked at him with the same weary loathing he had seen in the eyes of the boy. The tallest of them wore a coat with rank that had either fallen or been ripped from his shoulder, leaving the shadow of a sergeant’s stripes. His hair hung down in his face.

  “What you got there?”

  John didn’t know what to say. How to explain? Where to start?

  “You got our whore. Where’s Jimmy?”

  John didn’t say anything.

  “Jimmy!”

  The man called out and heard nothing. He looked at John and saw the blood running over his forearm and smeared against his chest. It was the girl’s blood, not Jimmy’s, but the man was confused and agitated and quick to judge.

  “What did you do to Jimmy?”

  They had rifles. They had knives. John had nothing, he was alone in the world. The soldier shouted at the other two.

  “Get in there and find Jimmy.”

  John would have picked a different circumstance for his death. The thing that most bothered him about it was not that he’d be killed in the presence of a whore, but that Mrs. Baylor was watching him and that he could see her. He wished she would go inside, but she was leaning against the porch railing trying to catch her breath and watching what would happen to John. John didn’t want her to be part of his final memory.

  Later Mariah would tell him that she had seen the men coming and knew they were too tired to chase her, so she lit out like she was fleeing, only to circle the horse back to hide on the other side of the smokehouse, where she had heard him kill the boy. It was from there that she and the horse shot around the corner, knocking the other two men to the ground just as they came running out of the smokehouse. She pulled alongside John.

  “Come on.”

  John was so mesmerized by the thought of his own death he didn’t move at first. He looked up at Mariah and wondered, When did she learn to ride?

  “We got to go, Mr. McGavock. Right now.”

  The tall man, the leader, was getting his rifle ready to fire. The other two were screaming.

  “Jimmy dead. Done killed him. Killed him dead!”

  Mariah leaned down and pulled John toward the horse. John understood and was about to mount when Mariah dug her heels in and turned the horse’s head toward the tall man. He was raising his rifle as they leaped upon him, knocking him to the ground and sending his rifle pinwheeling through the air. Mariah turned the horse back around and came alongside John again.

  “Last chance, Mistah John.”

  John leaped up behind Mariah, and the horse shuddered at the weight. Mariah spurred him and leaned over so she could talk into his ear. He began to trot away, around the side of the Baylor house and out into the street again. As they passed Mrs. Baylor, she called out to them.

  “I will tell Mr. Baylor you called.”

  They stopped only to switch places. The farther they went, the more the horse became confident in its strength, and as they passed through the woods that would lead them back to Carnton and away from the roads, he began to run. John only looked back once, when they crested the last hill. He thought he saw the glint of rifles and the movement of a blue mob, but he couldn’t be sure. He sensed that the town had not died, that it had just been holding its breath.

  29

  CARRIE MCGAVOCK

  I had not been down to the servants’ cabin in a very long time. The slaves’ cabin, Zachariah said, hanging with an arm around the broad shoulders of Theopolis. Into the slaves’ cabin I go, I go, ho ho, ho ho. He sounded drunk, although I knew that wasn’t possible. I could be a good slave, you know. Got a strong back. Maybe I’ll just stay. The cabin was a two-story box with a shake roof. On the front was a tall staircase that led straight up to the second floor’s two cabins, and around back was a smaller set of doors opening onto the first-floor quarters. It was a very strange building.

  We walked along the side of the building to the back, and Theopolis carried Zachariah into the door on the right. The servants hadn’t lived in there for a while, and it had become a storage hopper for corncobs and other grain to be fed to the hogs. The cabin was on the side of a hill, and inside, under the floorboards, was a tunnel that led to a small underground room. This room is where we had hidden some of our most precious belongings: a coin-silver tea service and most of the family coin-silver flatware, long-ago wedding gifts from happier times, John’s silver cigar holder, and such other things he had felt it necessary to hide. I had never been in the chamber, but I understood that it was not at all uncomfortable. This is where I sent Zachariah.

  “Down into the hole. I ain’t going. I ain’t a rat.”

  “There’s no time. You said yourself that they’d be coming soon.”

  “I want them to take me, Carrie.”

  He had never called me by my first name. I looked at Theopolis, but he pretended not to listen and fiddled with a couple of cobs.

  “You’ll be a prisoner.”

  “I’m sorry, reckon you’re right. It’s far better to live in a hole in the ground.”

  “You won’t be living there.”

  “I won’t be living.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why should I be your prisoner instead?”

  “You’re not my prisoner.”

  “What would you call it, then? Carrie?”

  He used my first name again.

  “I’ll sit with you.”

  “In there?”

  Now Theopolis was listening hard and seemed about to speak. I turned to him and looked him in the eyes and saw that he was frightened for me and that he would also do as he was told. He straightened his coat and clasped his arms behind his waist and waited for me to speak. He was an impressive man, and I pitied him.

  “I will be sitting with Mr. Cashwell for a while, until he has become accustomed and while he is still recuperating from his . . .”

  What did I call it? The attack? My attack? Theopolis knew how to keep up
appearances.

  “His injuries, yes, ma’am.”

  “His injuries, yes.”

  Theopolis pried the boards up and went first, carrying a small oil lamp ahead of him and dragging Zachariah behind him by the collar of his shirt. I followed behind in the narrow tunnel, my nose just inches from the worn, almost paper-thin sole of Zachariah’s boot. I found it difficult to crawl in my skirts, and so I stopped to hike them up and proceeded again upon my bare knees. I felt many things, but mostly I felt like a girl again, exploring the outer reaches of my home place, the dark corners of forgotten outbuildings, and crawling through the tiny gaps in the dense vines that formed walls in the undergrowth of the swampy areas. I felt the dirt on my hands and under my fingernails, and I realized I’d forgotten that dirt could smell so clean. It was us, me, who was foul and dirty.

  When I arrived in the chamber, Theopolis had already hung the lantern from a post driven in one wall, and was blowing into two iron pipes that had been driven into the ceiling.

  “The tubes, they clear. They go up into the room right up there. You-all be all right here, there be some good air coming through. Not long, though. Can’t stay real long, Miss Carrie.”

  Theopolis was obviously disturbed by this situation, and I imagined he was also frustrated that he could do nothing about it. I wondered where the air tubes had come from and why they were there. Zachariah sat on the dirt floor with his back against the sloping wall and one knee gathered to his chest, saying nothing. He rested his head on his knee and closed his eyes, as if he were nauseous. If Theopolis had decided to drag me out of there, which I could see he was contemplating, I would have made sure he was punished. I’d never ordered a Negro to be punished in my life, but I would have had Theopolis punished. I think he knew that. If his mother had been there, it would have been a different situation. Mariah might have shamed me into leaving. I think he knew that, too.

  “Well?”

  Zachariah spoke. He was quiet, his voice had no violence in it, no sharpness. I hardly recognized it.

  Theopolis ignored him. “I’m going, Miss Carrie. You holler you need anything. If the army men come, I’ll have to go put them boards back, and you’ll have to stay here until I come and let you out. You might have to stay in here a good long while if you wait too long.”

  “I understand, Theopolis. Thank you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Theopolis lowered his head and shoulders into the tunnel and quickly disappeared. After a while I could hear his feet stomping around up above and then nothing.

  I turned around to look for the Grecian rocker that President Jackson had given John so many years ago, but I couldn’t find it. The truth was, there wasn’t much in the chamber, none of the stacks and stacks of McGavock treasures I’d seen hauled out of the house. I saw no silver, no furniture, no paintings.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Our things. The things that were supposed to be here.”

  “Oh.”

  He went silent again, but this time he kept his eyes trained on me. They followed me around the little chamber while I tried to find a place to sit down, as far from him as I possibly could sit without tumbling back into the tunnel. His gaze made me uncomfortable. I had beaten him to death, and then he’d come back to life, and the whole experience had made me closer to him and therefore more uncomfortable sitting in a crowded rat hole with him. I did not know where to begin. I pulled my skirts all the way down, as far as they could go, and sat with my legs folded beneath me. He kept looking at me, and I would have sworn that he never blinked. He was waiting for something, I suppose. His eyes had little white spots on them where they reflected the lamplight.

  As I watched him, it occurred to me for the first time that I had never really understood how he’d been wounded. I’d heard the story, or overheard it rather, from some of the other men lying about the house in various stages of recuperation or disintegration. I had thought about it before, but there was something about his manner, his silence, his softness, that brought my mind back to it. I’d heard of the charge, and Zachariah grasping the flag and running toward the Yankees. I’d seen all this in my mind, and they were familiar images. Ancient. I had seen them when my father read to me those stories about the Greeks at Troy. He thought it a great romance, but all I had remembered were the lances and the charges and the great, self-conscious gestures of violence and wounded honor. It was the same scene, and I imagined it was always the same scene in every war, at least for those of us who did not fight them. They were familiar images, and because of their familiarity, they could be faced and accepted and sung into history. What would poetry be about otherwise? But there was something about that man sitting across from me deep in a hole in the earth. He was not an Achilles or a Hector. None of them were, not even those young men they called General who had lain upon my porch, dead and uncovered. If that was true, then there surely was more to Zachariah’s story than the charge and the flag and his triumphant stand upon the Yankee ditch. Whatever it was, I began to think it would explain why I wanted to protect him and keep him close to me.

  “Why did you pick up that flag?”

  Zachariah seemed lost. He was smiling, which was not at all appropriate. It was a child’s smile, the smile of someone who’s happy but doesn’t know enough to say why. The smile of the ignorant. He picked at a scab on the side of his face, the remnants of a poor shave job. He raised his head off his knee and leaned it back against the wall, looking up. He talked to the ceiling, and while he did so, I watched his coat fall open and felt the urge to reach out and feel for his ribs.

  “You mean, why did I pick up the colors? Because they’d fallen.”

  “But why you?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “All right. But how did you carry it with your rifle? Did you carry one in either hand?”

  “No. I carried it in both hands.”

  “Where was your rifle?”

  “Why are you asking these questions?”

  I didn’t quite know. But Zachariah’s life—the fact that he was living—was a mystery that could be solved, and in solving it, I might find an explanation for my own actions and my desire for him. The lamp flickered, and Zachariah momentarily faded into the darkness and grew into a monstrous shadow. I paused until he was small again. My legs tingled and grew numb, but I didn’t dare move. I acted as if I had trapped an animal, and guarded against sudden movements.

  “I’m just curious.”

  “I’d lost my rifle.”

  “And so you had no weapon.”

  “No, I had some pistols.”

  “So you carried a pistol in one hand and the flag in the other.”

  “The colors. The colors. And no, I didn’t carry a pistol in any hand.”

  “But you were armed?”

  “No, I wasn’t. I tossed the pistols when I picked up the colors.”

  “Why?”

  We were silent a long time after that, as Zachariah began to understand my questions and where I was going. I wasn’t sure exactly where this would end, but I knew the direction to go.

  I had Zachariah’s full attention now. He looked me square in the face. His forearms flexed and expanded across his one shin, which he had drawn up close to his chest. He looked much stronger than I’d thought he was, and I experienced a momentary shiver of fear, remembering our scuffle in the dark and realizing how easily I might have been hurt by him if he’d not been crippled. Maybe he was still more powerful than I knew, leg or no leg. Now his face was undecipherable in the wavering of the lamplight, but his voice was soft. I didn’t feel threatened now. Something had happened. His body was still—not from tension, but from perfect pliability and torpor. The little room was warm and dry, which surprised me. It was not how I had imagined the earth to be. There was one wet spot in the dirt ceiling, and every few minutes a small drop of water would collect and cling to the ceiling before dropping to the floor, where it was immediately swallowed by the dirt. I
supposed the little water drop would continue its journey through the dirt and rock until it reached the center of hell or out to China.

  “I dropped the pistols because I didn’t need ’em. Couldn’t use ’em.”

  “You could have used one, or was the . . . were the colors too heavy?”

  “They weren’t too heavy. I just didn’t think about it.”

  “Did you have any other weapon?”

  “Just the colors.”

  “That wasn’t really a weapon, was it? You ran to the enemy without any means of fighting back. You charged the enemy. You’re a hero.”

  “I never said I was.”

  He picked at a hole in the knee of his pant leg.

  “You dropped your weapons, picked up a pole with some cloth attached to it, and ran at men who were shooting at you. That’s heroic.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  I wasn’t right. I knew I wasn’t right. There was something I was missing.

  “What did you do when you got to the Yankees?”

  “I got up on top of their bulwarks and waved the colors before they dragged me down.”

  “They dragged you down. But they didn’t kill you. Why?”

  “I wish I knew. I begged them to.”

  He begged to be killed. He had begged me to let him die, too, and I had ignored him.