The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your beau. He was Will Baylor, wasn’t he?”

  I could see the tears glistening in the dim light thrown off by the lamps. She only nodded her head. I was about to say something, extend some condolence or something equally useless, but she spoke first.

  “I loved him. And he loved me. He’s the only boy who ever did. We been sneaking around on account of his father.”

  Baylor. I understood without her saying anything about it.

  “He come to visit me whenever he had a chance, and before the war I would meet him up by the river and we’d spend days just walking in the shallows and all, getting our feet wet, stirring up the frogs and the shiners. I reckoned we’d always be doing such things.”

  There was nothing I could say. I had learned, by hard lessons, how pitiful the words of comfort could be. There was nothing that could possibly be said, not even I’m sorry, that accomplishes anything, at least not at first. The only truth that could be said is that there’s never enough time: love always snatches itself away before you’re ready. And why would I say such a thing to a girl so broken and alone?

  “I thought we would be married. Silly, reckon.”

  “That wasn’t silly.”

  “It was silly to ever think anything good could come of getting above myself like that, with a boy like that.”

  “The river was good, or am I wrong? When you were with him, that was good, right?”

  “It’s not enough. I won’t never be enough. I made a mistake.”

  She got up, and I knew she was going to be leaving for good. Then she kneeled on the floor, and before I knew what I was doing, I knelt down with her, feeling the hard wood under my knee and the rough, scratchy homespun under the hand I laid upon her shoulder. She prayed.

  “Dear Lord, I pray that You spared Will the pain and the lonesomeness I got on me right now. I pray that You took him quick and that he knows that I miss him more than any other thing under Your sun. Tell my dear mama to go find him and hold on to him, because I’ll be coming one day and I expect him to be there waiting on me. There ain’t nothing more I want from You, Lord. I don’t need nothing else except that. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

  Then she shrugged off my hand and stood up. She looked at me with hard eyes, not out of hate, but out of determination, I believe. She was determined to get about the rest of her life like all those other sharp-faced, work-worn women keeping their hopes and dreams screwed down like preserves in a jar. She didn’t want me to stop her or to hug her again. I gathered her in my arms anyway, and I felt her relax again. I felt the sobs coming up from deep in her chest. I thought if I could just hold her, I could persuade her to stay, and perhaps convince her that the life she had imagined was not over. But she stood up straight again, gently pushed me away, and looked at me with kinder eyes this time.

  “He loved me, you know. A girl like me, I can be loved, too. It ain’t impossible.”

  She walked out of the house, down the steps, and out into the driveway, kicking up a dirt cloud around her feet. The dust made her appear to be drifting away from me, until finally she disappeared beyond the bend and into the wood.

  34

  CARRIE MCGAVOCK

  After the Union officer left, Mariah and I spent some time calming the men who remained in the house. We tended to their various complaints and their certainty about being captured and sent to some Yankee prison and their anger about not being able to fight back and resist.

  The man with no jaw, whose name was Hunt, waved at me with his scrap piece of paper and wrote madly: I want a rifle.

  “I don’t have a rifle to give you, Hunt. What would you do with it?”

  Kill the Yankee bastards who did this to me.

  “The chances are, those Yankees are dead, Hunt. You’re alive, so you’ve won.”

  It don’t work like that.

  I wiped the spittle from his neck and tried to get him to lean back against the pile of pillows and linens that served as his backrest against the wall of our downstairs parlor. He was in a foul mood and wouldn’t be settled. He remained sitting in the middle of the floor, bent over his paper.

  You’ll give me up, all of us. Got to protect us. I’m the only one who can hold a rifle still.

  “I won’t give you a rifle, and I won’t have you fighting. There’s been enough fighting.”

  I am not a child.

  “I didn’t say you were a child, Hunt.”

  Quit treating me like one. Quit calling me Hunt. He looked up and licked the end of his pencil thoughtfully. Captain Hunter.

  “That’s you?”

  Yes. I saw how you looked at us, and I don’t want to hear Hunt anymore. Captain Hunter.

  “All right, Captain Hunter.”

  Don’t say it like you’re kidding.

  “Yes, Captain Hunter. But I can’t give you a rifle.”

  All right.

  Mariah was much more apt to spar with the soldiers, and she argued with them about what was going to happen to them all. Sometimes I would stop and listen to her in the hallway, and although she kept talking to them, I got the strange feeling that she was working out things for herself and that the men knew this and were temporarily turned from their own complaints by the fascination of thinking about what would happen to her, a Negro, now that the war was almost over. Everyone knew the war was almost over. It was something that didn’t have to be discussed.

  Mariah could never—or would never—talk about her plans and thoughts directly, and so they seemed to adopt a sort of code. One of them might ask, “Where am I going to go?” and Mariah would say, “Wherever you happiest. You got to be where you happy and on top of things, whoever you are.” Or they’d say, “Everything’s going to be different,” and Mariah would say, “That is the truth. You a smart one.”

  That was an odd thing for a Negro to say to a white man, and yet not one of the men said a word about it. They were enthusiastic about whatever she said, and avid listeners. They listened to her as one would listen to a bearer of immense wisdom, and although I knew that Mariah was no more wise than I was, it was the thing she was wise about that caught the attention of those men in the room. They imagined their lives newly bound by their injuries, constricted and controlled by the charity and whim of others. They saw a future in which certain prerogatives of a free man were denied by their wounds, and in this they must have seen a glimpse, a piece, of Mariah’s life. This struck me hard. She was the old-timer, the one who had gone before them down that road, and they were the newcomers thirsty for word from that world.

  Mariah, bless her, gave them solace. At least she talked as if happiness was a possibility. I felt relieved, but not for the soldiers. It occurred to me that I had never considered whether Mariah was happy or not and that this question would soon be the only question of any significance in my life. It occurred to me that I could lose her, as I had lost John Randal and Mary Elizabeth and Martha.

  Later I finally went upstairs to the room above the entryway, where I had once rocked away most of my time, and where I had once thought I could hear the voices of my children. Had they been happy? Had Mary Elizabeth found happiness in her six years? Was that happiness I had seen, watching her bounce along through the wheat field across the driveway, just a mess of brown curls bobbing along above the stalks, searching for the field mice with the ridiculously large ears, before she became too weak to walk and then to talk? Had that been happiness, and did she know it? Did Hattie and Winder know what happiness was? I wasn’t sure it mattered. Perhaps that’s the blessing of childhood, that happiness needn’t be named or even recognized. When does the mania for naming things come on? I wondered. Probably when the thing named has been lost. Would Hattie and Winder leave me then, when they could put a name to the happiness they had lost? I wouldn’t be able to bear it.

  I sat still and looked out the window across the property and listened for the voices of real men crossing it.

  What had conspired to mak
e Zachariah a wounded but living fugitive and to make revered leaders of the dead generals I had laid out on my porch? What separated them but luck? I stood up from the rocking chair. I had never feared Zachariah, but I had felt a tremor of fear within me while I covered the faces of those generals. I had heard it called the invisible hand: the possibility that they knew who or what was in charge, had been granted an audience with whatever power that was, while the rest of us suffered for our ignorance. This was the thing that frightened me. Those generals had been acquainted with whatever thing had sent men at each other bearing guns and knives. I wished one of them had lived, to tell me if this was true.

  Theopolis repaired the roof, which had been stripped of some planks for firewood when the yard was filled with men in camp. The yard looked wide and empty without them, and even though the charred black circles of their fires remained, and the grass was bent where they had lain, it was their absence that was most noticeable. The yard had forever changed, and I quickly considered asking John to preserve the fire rings as a remembrance. Something to mark the spot.

  I abandoned the thought. No one would forget what had happened here, no one would need reminding. I went into the house.

  A month passed. Then another. Spring arrived, and the soldiers came to take the lingering wounded away, even Zachariah. Off to prison, we all knew, but we didn’t speak of it.

  Zachariah and I spent those intervening days playing backgammon. We didn’t talk a lot, but I didn’t need that from him anymore. I was content to watch him grow stronger and to watch him stare out the window between games. I had decided that people talk an awful lot, perhaps too much, and that sitting silent was the greatest of luxuries.

  Every day the color came back to Zachariah’s face, shade by shade, until his face flushed and blanched like the rest of us. He became adept with his crutches, and I noticed his shoulders grow full and round. He was no longer gaunt, and this was most evident in his face. Where there had been lines and hollows of slack skin, there was flesh. His face was softer, younger. I could see the boy in him, the boy who had never been far from the surface anyway.

  In March, Hattie and Winder returned from visiting relatives in Louisiana. It was safe then. Their presence made things seem safer, as if two children playing in the dirt of the yard, or shouting and running into the cool grass to feel the morning wet on their skin, were the Lord’s guarantee of order. There was no one left to threaten them, and even if there was, I thought I would know how to take care of them if there was a problem. Their shouts and their rollicking around the house made everything seem a little lighter, a little less consequential. It was difficult to continue worrying about the future when Winder was eating dirt and making pig noises in the yard for the amusement of the remaining wounded, an act he kept putting on until they had all been taken away. I was surprised that he was not more frightened of the disfigured men who lived in our house, but I suppose disfigurement would never be uncommon again, and I’ve heard that children get used to things quicker than most people.

  What Zachariah didn’t know about me he had already guessed, so I rarely spoke up except to protest the way he’d cheat by upsetting the board and blaming it on the missing leg that had left him unbalanced. He was an enthusiastic cheat, but not a good one, and I knew that if he ever met up with a real sharp, he’d lose everything. I prayed he would fall in with good people when he left me.

  He told me an odd story, though. It was about his mother and his father. The story was disconnected, full of gaps, as if he was trying to tell it without revealing the worst parts. His father had died, and his mother had gone off with a preacher. This I had already known, and although it was sordid, I didn’t think it at all unusual for people of his kind. That was a terribly arrogant thought to have, but it was indisputably true. I had learned enough as a child about the people who moved up and down the great trace—lawless, poor, violent, and damned, every one—to be able to imagine life in Zachariah’s Arkansas, among the kind of people who couldn’t ever stand still, who always had to be moving on, for whom neighbors were an oppression. But Zachariah added a detail to the story that I couldn’t quite reconcile. He said the thing he remembered most about the day his mother left was the smell of the dirt on his father’s grave. That dirt smelled real fresh, like it hadn’t ever been in the light before. And I guess it hadn’t. The dirt was fresh on his father’s grave when his mother left. She rode off and I—I couldn’t move, see? I just could watch. He hadn’t run after his mother, he had just stayed behind and smelled the dirt. How could that be? The more I pondered the question, the more hideous the scene became. I had to force myself to quit thinking about it for fear of losing what sanity I had won back.

  I had my suspicions about what had happened that day when Zachariah was a boy, a boy whose face I could picture with greater clarity since Zachariah had recovered his health. I believe he meant for me to have those suspicions, but he didn’t want to confirm them aloud. He was, to the end, a source of endless mystery to me. There was always a new puzzle about him to solve. He was everything we—John and I—were not, and in his mysteries lay a certain kind of knowledge about the world that was both liberating and terrifying. I believe Zachariah knew this and was content to let these matters remain unspoken so that I would not be overcome by fear. I was grateful to him for this, even if I was indescribably anguished by my growing understanding of him.

  The day they came for him, the sun beat down upon the house and the grounds until the early morning mist had been dissipated and the ground became hot beneath our feet. It was too hot for April.

  Almost every week, that Union officer came to take away another of my charges. I could not understand why it was necessary to remove to prison men who not only could not fight but had told me separately and in their own way that they had no desire to threaten anyone anymore, despite their bluster. The last thing they could threaten would be the Union army, which had routed our Confederates with such dispatch those last five months. We all knew the war would soon be over, and yet here he came, that porcine little man in his Union blues, to explain why this one or that one needed to come with him to prison. I understood that he was only following orders—he didn’t seem the sort of man who would do anything without direction—and that he took no pleasure in his task. When he arrived on a morning, he would have two other soldiers with him, hard men with sunburned faces who looked like they wanted to be somewhere else, doing something other than hauling men off to prison. In my dreams I still remember those two men, whose faces are not terribly distinct anymore—I believe one had a red mustache—but who were eloquent in their exhaustion. They were as tired as I was, as the men lying in my parlor were, as my husband was, as Zachariah was. Exhaustion could not be transformed by victory, I saw. This gave me some comfort.

  All of the men who were taken away did their best to remain dignified despite their terror. Those that could walk did not resist, and walked out the door between the two guards without looking back at us once. Those who could not walk allowed themselves to be carried between the two guards. They would apologize for the awkward load they made, and thanked the men for assisting them. They would not look back, either.

  I know, of course, that the little Union officer had sensed my attachment to Zachariah and avoided taking him from the house even though he was as fit as he would ever become, even though he could walk off under his own power without any assistance at all. I believe Zachariah was spared capture so that I might be assuaged and more cooperative with the little officer as he went about his duties. In this he was right, and although I was not grateful to him for his shrewd assessment of the situation and my character, I was happy to have Zachariah with us as long as possible. I wanted him to know my children, I wanted him to imagine what I had lost while looking into their eyes. He gave no sign of any recognition, but only carved little toys for Hattie and Winder—a lean, ridge-backed hog for Winder and a little swaybacked horse for Hattie. He told them not to lose them, that there was so
mething special about the little toys and that bad luck would come to them if they were lost. The children, of course, became afraid of their toys and put them away in drawers for safekeeping and never took them out again. Zachariah, I knew, would never have his own children if he could help it.

  The Union man could not put off the capture of Zachariah forever. I knew I had to prepare for his departure after my strange, beautiful companion had become the last of the wounded left in the house, practically a new member of the family, and even a confidant of John, with whom he played cards late into the night.

  Nothing had ever lasted. This is how I pitied myself, by thinking it over and over again: Nothing had ever lasted. Nothing ever lasts. The fragile wonders such as love and children disappeared with abandon. Did I love Zachariah Cashwell? Yes, yes, yes. It was impossible, but yes. I imagined a day when he would pick me up and carry me off, and I would hold on to him by his arms, sensing heat in his ropy muscles, praying it was the same heat I felt in my scalp, my cheeks, my belly. How could I love such a man? He was a strange man from a stranger world, so foreign in every possible way. He knew nothing of running a household or a plantation or a business. My house did not impress him, nor our land, nor our few remaining fine things. What did he care for china or silver or French wallpaper? Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to him: he didn’t care, and I was shocked and excited by the idea that such things weren’t worth caring about, that the most beautiful objects were still objects and therefore dead. He was alive, and he had lived for reasons other than propriety and position. He had lived for its own sake, to breathe and to ride and to see what he could see. This thrilled me. He thrilled me.

  O Lord, I would have followed him had You let me, but You did not give me the strength to become a fallen woman. I was and have always been Carrie McGavock, mother of children and the wife of a good man. I cared what the world thought of me, and perhaps this was the truly foreign thing about Zachariah Cashwell—he didn’t care at all. I could only pray and hope that he cared for me, that my feelings weren’t silly and girlish fantasies, but that they were the response of a woman to a man who desired her. That was all I needed to know, that’s all I needed to sustain me. That I was the object of desire.