by Robert Hicks
After Becky’s death Eli had lived with his father in their little cabin down the pike. Winder went to see him every once in a while, and he’d come back with tales of how dirty the house had become, how the kitchen always smelled of rotted meat, and how all the neighbors had moved away, leaving Eli with no friends other than Winder. Even that little fat boy had left, the brave little soul who had brought Eli to me the night of the battle. I started sending food—smoked ham, eggs, a loaf of bread—with Winder, but he’d always bring it back untouched, with word that Eli’s father wanted no charity. He doesn’t want to be human, is what I thought, but I didn’t say it to Winder.
Then, in that winter, almost on the first anniversary of the battle, Eli again appeared on our doorstep, bearing a note.
Dear Mrs. M,
I cannot raise this boy. I am tore up with Becky’s passing, and I miss her as bad as I miss my poor wife, who I think about every day. I got to get away, to start something new. I want to change, I don’t want to be this here man no more. I want to be a different man. I will send for the boy when I’m right.
He didn’t bother to sign it, and I never heard from him again. I never asked John if we could take the boy in as our own son. He never asked me, either. John just showed him upstairs to Winder’s room—now the boys’ room—and that was that. The boy was dead tired and dirty. The cuffs of his overalls dragged long white threads behind. I didn’t bother ordering him into the bath that night.
Somehow Eli was able to stay dirty. It was the dirt of a clean creek, though, not the dirt and refuse of despair and resignation. I had been able to scrub that off him, I hoped.
No fish. We’d have to eat ham again.
“Do you need for me to go on down the cellar, Mrs. McGavock?”
“No, Eli, I think we’ll do fine with what we have tonight. Go see Mariah about what she needs for the kitchen.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Winder was about to bounce along after Eli when I stopped him by grabbing onto the back of his short pants and holding on. He practically dragged me out of my chair and down the steps before he realized I’d hooked him.
“Mama?”
“Sit next to me for a second, Winder.”
I went back to my chair, packed up my paper and pens, and looked down at Winder sitting next to me on the porch, his scratched and bloody knees—there were short hawthorns down by the creek—drawn up to his chest. How could he be so young but so grown up?
“Did y’all catch fish?”
“No, ma’am.”
I loved Winder with all of my heart. He was so loyal and kind. I hoped someday he’d know what deserved that loyalty and kindness.
“Answer me straight, Winder.”
He put his head on his knees and peered down between his legs. He let a little wad of drool slide out of his mouth and stretch itself to the floor.
“Stop that, Winder. Did you catch fish?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why didn’t you bring them home?”
“We put them back. Got ’em off the hooks and slipped ’em back down into the water. Mostly bream, a couple of suckerfish. Maybe one bass, but we weren’t sure.”
“Why did you do that?”
“It was Eli’s idea.”
I had suspected as much. They’d spent a lot of time down there at the creek, and I knew a boy as country as Eli would know how to catch fish, and yet they only brought home fish every once in a while, and always the littlest, most pathetic fish you ever saw.
“What was his idea?”
“Not to kill the fish. He said he don’t ever want to kill anything, and he makes me kill the fish when he decides we ought to bring some up to you. He says he didn’t want you suspicious. He even gets mad at me when I kill spiders. I think he likes to see the fish, he likes to feel them and hold them in his hand and look at them in the sunlight, but he almost always takes the hook out and slips ’em back into the water.”
“Does he make you return your fish to the water?”
“No, but I never catch fish. I’m not very good at it.”
“I see.”
What would I have written to Eli’s father if Eli had died on that battlefield?
Dear Sir,
Your son Eli was a gentle boy trapped in the body of a man.
It was too hard to write about someone you loved, or liked, or even knew briefly.
He hated killing, and would not kill. This is probably why he died.
All this death and dying. How is it possible to tell the story of one’s life entirely with reference to death? It must surely be impossible to describe life in death, and yet I felt then—and feel now—that there is no possible way to tell the story of my life without recounting these morbid years. There is no possible way to tell the story of my farm, my town, my state, this whole damnable Southern Confederacy we were so sure of, without recounting the deaths. I have heard men in the town square talk about the lingering shame of defeat, and they are welcome to spend their days ticking off the bill of particulars against their honor and dignity sealed that last day at the Appomattox Courthouse. That is their story. I saw absence instead. Not the absence of honor and dignity, but of people. How awfully empty this country seemed in those years.
I didn’t feel the shame of defeat, but I felt the horror in the empty farmhouses, the lonely roads, the untended land. We would occasionally ride up to Nashville on social business, John and I, past mile after mile of weed-choked fields quickly succumbing to the surrounding forests, past farmhouses turned gray from neglect, curtainless windows like empty eyes. No light ever came from within these houses, these dozens and dozens of houses that had once been home to someone. How I regretted that I had never bothered to stop in to speak with these people, to know them. They had been no more a part of my life than the landscape. But then their men had died, or had disappeared, countless thousands and thousands of men, and the dying broke through the bounds of the battlefield and came to embrace the countryside and our towns. All those young boys. We were a new country, that was certainly true. A new country of old men and angry, stubborn men. There were moments when I could look out from our carriage and think that there wasn’t anything this country couldn’t become, which was not at all a comforting thought.
I thought of Eli as one of the lucky ones, although I do not believe he thought of himself that way.
Eli was ever in pain, sir, and never quite understood what had happened to him. None of us did, truth be told. He was brave only in the way a mule is brave, stubbornly moving on without thought despite very good reasons for stopping. He did not embrace his fate so much as he walked right into it. I do not recall that he prayed at the end, although how would I know? I am not so pious as to believe that I know when a person is speaking to God, nor am I so falsely pious that I would venture a guess, at least not in Eli’s case. If Eli was praying, that was his business, I believe.
It would have been simply impossible to write such a letter, and I thanked God (without an ounce of self-piety) that it had not been necessary. It was so much easier to ease the minds of strangers about the children I had barely known, to tell them lies. I felt good telling them. I remembered a letter I’d sent to my mother years ago about the death of Martha. I’d felt so right, so righteous, in telling her every detail about her awful death, covering up nothing. I thought I’d done her a service, a tribute, a vengeance against death, and perhaps I did accomplish those things. But what had I done to my poor old mother? I would never know. Misery charts its own course, popping up here and there unintended. Perhaps there were some things best left unsaid about death, things that ought to be taken to the grave as the property of the dead. There would be plenty of time for all of us to suffer without suffering the death of others over and over again. I had learned to lie about some things and to leave other things unsaid. Oh, I had finally become such a proper lady!
I would never write such a letter for Eli, however sorely tempted I might be. I would never write such a le
tter for Winder or Hattie or John or Mariah or Theopolis. If I were to write a letter for any of them, I would always say that they went to their grave peacefully with the name of the Lord upon their lips, and pray that someday I would believe it.
I would not, however, tolerate the lies about fish. Eli and I would have to talk about that. Or perhaps John would talk to him. I rested in the chair and closed my eyes, feeling the breeze and blessing the dressmakers of New York and Paris for their abandoning of the corset. I was positively cool sitting there in my new crinoline dress, the first dress I’d bought in years. Black, of course, and just the kind of dress I could alter and mend as I saw fit, and thus the sort of dress I could wear forever. I intended to wear it forever. I was cool, perhaps for the first time in decades. Bless the porch, the gallery, the wind. If there was another war, I vowed, I would remain in this spot to defend the porch, with its view of the grove leading down to the creek, and my precious garden, which had been newly reborn. The rudbeckia again swayed and genuflected in the borders, which I could spy through the balusters at the end of the porch. Hattie had become quite a gardener. She had her hair up in a lazy chignon, and her work dress—indigo, like an old slave!—pinned up around her knees. The peas were coming to fruit, and the roses needed trimming, and the lamb’s ear needed culling, and there she was making sure it was all in order. She had turned brown in the sun, and when she stood up and looked off toward the sun, gauging its progress and angle, she looked like an Indian. I would have to tell her not to bare her legs so often. She was becoming a woman, and I suspected I knew what men might think of her. I knew she was still just a girl, and I aimed to keep it that way.
These were my days, writing letters, watching my children, and waiting for John to return from one of his missions to town. We had lost so much of our land that I’d been tempted to ask him why he bothered to appeal to the better natures of the moneylenders, Mr. Baylor chief among them, but I knew that it was the effort that kept him happy. We both somehow knew that this place, Carnton, would remain a shell of itself forever, that it had long since failed as a plantation and was in the process of collapsing into itself, with this old house the only thing left of the McGavock family’s ambition. The grove would move in on us, too. I didn’t mind.
John had vowed that he could support us without the plantation, and I had faith he could. But his ideas—turning Franklin into a railroad town, creating a wood-milling center, building a textile factory—gained no supporters and therefore no money. There were those in town who thought that life would naturally return to the way it had been before the war, and it was these men who had the money to make John’s ideas reality. I could not help being surprised at the persistence of John’s conviction: that he would have to be the man to drag Franklin into the modern world, or the town would die. This was not the man I had married, the haunted and timid heir to his family’s farm. I liked the new man even as he failed. I was especially surprised that his failures did not send him spiraling into anger, as they would have before the war. Now I had come to love those moments with him, in his office sipping sherry, when he laughed disparagingly at the men in town and their lack of imagination. If they want to live like primitives, watching the world go by, that’s their business, he’d say, raising a toast to my glass. I’ve done my best, and I’ll keep doing it until they’re all dead and gone and we can sweep away the dead wood and start anew around here.
I was awaiting his return that day on the porch and looking forward to just such a tête-à-tête in his office. I was only thinking of the comfortable chairs and the fine sherry when I spied him astride his horse, coming up the driveway. I saw no reason we could not continue like that indefinitely. It was pleasant enough.
I wish I could have looked closer at the man riding toward me, because then I might have been prepared. Later I would say to Mariah of that day, The sherry had to run out sometime, but that was the least of it.
38
CARNTON
Every clank, thump, rattle, and crash of the cookware angered Mariah just that much more, made her just that much more uncertain that she was right. She was not the cook. She wasn’t supposed to be cooking. They’d had a cook, they’d had half a dozen cooks since the war, all Negroes, and every one of them had left. The last had left telling Mariah she was still a slave. I ain’t livin’ like this, cooking and cleaning up after white folk. It’s like it ain’t changed, and I reckon there got to be something else in the world for a body to do. So I’ll be movin’ on, Mariah. Oh, she was going to move on? To where? To do what? Could she read? No, she couldn’t. Mariah could read, and so could her son, and yet cooking wasn’t below her. No, she was a slave still. She hadn’t broken the chains—wasn’t that what one of them had told her, laughing in her face?
Mariah assumed there would be no fish—she knew Eli’s game, he was no mystery to her—so she’d already been soaking the ham, and boiling grits, and cooking down mustard greens. Greens. How she hated everything to do with greens. Poor man’s food, and yet the McGavocks liked that green slop. They had the luxury of liking it and could eat it when they wanted. They didn’t have to eat it. That was the difference.
“You making greens again. Damn, I hate them greens.”
“Don’t you swear in my kitchen, Eli.”
Eli walked in with a happy grin and a big man’s swagger, rolling his shoulders around in their sockets like he was too big for the room. He was a funny boy becoming a funny man, Mariah thought. He sat down on the preacher’s bench in front of the fireplace and began to pick his fingernails with a thin, sharp piece of shale he carried in his pocket.
“I know you hate greens, too, Mariah, so I know you making something else for yourself. What is it? I want some of that.”
“I would have liked to have had some fish, Mr. Eli. Don’t suppose you got some fish this time.”
“Can’t say I do. Did. I mean, we didn’t catch any fish.”
“Just once, Eli, you could bring me one of them fish to fry up.”
“Talk to the fish, Mariah.”
“You don’t think I can?”
“I know you can.”
Now that Theopolis had gone off and made himself a life in town, Eli was the closest thing Mariah had to kin out at the house. He felt like kin, or at least like someone who knew better what her life was like because he’d come up hard, too. Even if he was a white boy. She knew he might someday be riding around slapping at her people and running his mouth, nigger, nigger, nigger. For all she knew, he was already picking up that kind of talk down there at the store, from that cracker storekeeper. She doubted it, because she admired the boy’s intelligence and had faith that it would win out, but you just never knew. She did know that he always visited Theopolis at his cobbler’s shop, and that was also good. She hadn’t talked to her son in a couple weeks. She was happy to have Eli around.
While Eli picked at his fingers, Mariah clanged at the stovetop and muttered under her breath. Eli looked up and brushed his raggedy brown hair from his eyes.
“What you saying now, Mariah?”
“Mind your own business.”
She’d been wondering about what Theopolis had said to her when he told her he was moving to town for good. He wasn’t mean about it, like the cooks had been. She was his mother, and besides, he could read just like her. He didn’t resent her. That’s what they were, just jealous. They don’t got nothing to go to, and they mad because I can do whatever I want. She thought about that lie for a moment. She couldn’t do whatever she wanted, but the reasons weren’t that she was just an old slave, like the parade of cooks had told her. And they weren’t what Theopolis thought they were. You just can’t see it, see what your life could be like. It’s not your fault. You’ll change. He’d been kind, but he’d also been firm, even as she begged him not to leave. He’d smiled and stroked her hair and looked every bit the businessman and pillar of the community he hoped to become. But she hadn’t cared a lick about being left alone, and her reasons for staying had
nothing to do with her lack of sight. She had plenty of sight, too much sight. Even Eli knew this, but Theopolis had never believed it. He was afraid that believing in her, or the warnings of Miss Eloisa, would mark him for an ignorant Negro the rest of his life. He was afraid of that worse than he was afraid of anything else, and that’s what scared Mariah. She could see, all right. She could see a future much more frightening than the one that Theopolis imagined. Where do all those folk think they’re going to go? she said to herself again. What do they know but cooking and cleaning and picking cotton and eating greens and sleeping on hay ticking?
“Mariah, I got some news for you. About Theopolis.”
“What about him?”
“He’s making shoes for Mr. Baylor’s store now, got himself ten new orders and more where that came from. Work boots and oxfords and all sorts of things I ain’t ever heard of. Mr. Baylor thinks Theopolis has a lot of something. I forget what, but it was good, I reckon.”