The Widow of the South

by Robert Hicks

  49

  CARRIE MCGAVOCK

  The day I began retrieving the dead was impossibly, incongruously beautiful. It was a day that might have been held over from before the war, from my childhood back in Terrebonne when the sky was deep blue and cloudless and the wind carried the scent of the woods and fields. It was innocent.

  The professor who had been excavating the Indian mound stood next to me, and we looked out across the field. He’d closed up the dig and resigned his position at whatever college had sent him. He had convinced five men to stay with him, including Jerrod, whom I remembered from his days with us at Carnton. The rest walked or rode off north somewhere. I was glad to have these six men who had so much experience handling remains. I’d decided on this course long before I’d ever considered what it actually meant.

  Professor Stiles had warned me away. He told me the sight of the recently uncovered men would be too much for some of his men to take, let alone a woman. I told him that I was meant to be there and that if I fainted, then I was intended to faint. But I would not shy from the remains of these men or pretend that what I was doing wasn’t itself a horrible solution to a more horrible proposition. I would not pretend that their movement from abandonment to discovery to final rest was an unremarkable journey. They would be exposed, the professor told me, and the stench would billow up, and some of them would be reduced to bones, and others would have mummified faces like leather. There would be hair and clothing everywhere. Their teeth would be bared and snarling. He did not think I should see such things. I said I thought I must see such things, that such things were the wages of war and it was only our own weakness as sinners, including my own, that required these last near 1,500 men to make the sacrifice that left them alone under a couple feet of Tennessee topsoil.

  I believe that the professor was a man of faith, although he did not say it, and that he had no more use for war than I did. He told me, reluctantly, that he had been at the Battle of Franklin and that many of the men he would be digging up would be men he had helped to kill. I told him it was good that he could be there to do penance for that, and he nodded his head and wiped the sweat from the rim under his big black hat. Penance. Don’t know that I’ve made penance even once since then, he said. A man of faith, I thought.

  Mr. Baylor had not complained about giving us access to his field. He could not walk for a while after his encounter with Eli, but he kept his leg, and I suppose that was something he appreciated. He was a man of his word, and I suppose I should have never doubted that. He had been a schemer, but not ever a liar, and although I don’t think he was happy about my plan for his field, he did not complain about it. He didn’t give us much time, only three weeks, but he did not interfere. Take on that nasty work if you must, he told me. He watched us from the remains of his gin, sitting on a chair under the lean-to attached to the side of the ruin. He watched us every day, as if he were standing vigil over something. Once I looked up at him as his daughter tried to bring him back to the house toward suppertime, and he fended her off. He would not leave until we had left, and sometimes I think he stayed there until it was too dark to see.

  Thanks to John’s few remaining acquaintances among veterans of the army, we’d been able to acquire the notes of many of the original gravediggers, enough so that we could map out the field with some accuracy. Arkansas by that redbud, Mississippi by the old hedge, Missouri in the middle right there, along with Texas and Tennessee. Alabama at the edge of the pike . . .

  We knew enough to begin digging, and that’s how I found myself on the prettiest day I could remember, waiting for the first man to put the first shovel in the ground. John had command of a line of five large oxen carts waiting behind us, which we would use to shuttle the dead back and forth to the old grove right next to our family cemetery, where I had once walked and admired the complexity of the trees and of creation.

  “Are you ready, Mrs. McGavock?”

  Professor Stiles was sweating under his hat and in his coat. I thought he looked every bit an undertaker, and I smiled at the thought. He took that as a sign I was ready.

  As they dug, I pulled out a bound book of blank pages, in which I intended to record the names and final resting places of the men. I had not brought a chair and had nowhere to sit, so I knelt a few yards away from the diggers and propped the book upon my lap.

  It wasn’t very long before they found the first grave, and as they scraped the dirt away, they exposed man after man, a dozen or more in a row, each facing up. They looked so much alike in death staring up at the sky out of sightless skulls. I cried out at the shame of it, that these men who had lived as individuals would be reduced to so many identical parts of some larger whole. The professor and John rushed over, thinking, I suppose, I’d been overcome by the gore of it all, but I waved them off.

  Upon the chests of each of the men lay a piece of wood on which the gravediggers had done their best to scrawl a name and unit. Who knew how they’d discovered these names? I suppose they’d known many of the dead and that the others had something to identify them. A letter from home or enlistment papers or a name sewn in their uniform. I was grateful there were names, at least.

  Each man was laid in a cart in the same order he was buried, and assigned a number, which was attached to the body and recorded in my book next to the name. Out of respect we did not pile the dead upon each other. This made John’s task that much more difficult, but he did not complain. He just mounted up and dragged cart after cart back across the fields toward Lewisburg Pike and down the pike to the tollhouse and then down our lane, where two of the professor’s men were waiting with fresh graves and wooden markers on which they scratched the initials and numbers I had assigned. John did not complain even when people began to line the road back to Carnton, watching him and craning their necks to get a good look at his cargo. I believe that he, too, had lost all interest in the good opinion of anyone around us and didn’t give a hoot what they did or thought or saw.

  The professor’s description of the dead had been accurate. What I hadn’t imagined was the magnitude of the task, which became apparent after the first dozen men were laid bare of dirt, and I considered how many similar rows of men must stretch out in every direction under my feet. Fifteen hundred. The entire plot must be filled with these men, I thought. We would have to work all day, every day, and I wasn’t sure we would be able to rescue even half the men before Baylor’s time limit expired.

  As the days wore on, I considered walking up to the gin and begging Baylor for an extension of time. I would have done it, but soon another group of strangers began to appear. They weren’t gawkers. These were the dirt farmers who lived perpetually in hock to the store, who worked much of what had been our land on behalf of Mr. Baylor himself. I’d forgotten them, and the fact that so many had been in the war themselves. They were stalk-thin and hollow-eyed, they had the yellow pallor of the perpetually undernourished, and they wore only threadbare clothes, but each brought with him a shovel and a cart and the promise of his time. Along with their labor, time was all they had to offer, I realized. I considered that it might be some kind of tribute to fallen comrades, but it was more likely the urge that some people have to pitch in and work when they see that work needs to be done. Every day a few more of these men showed up, until John had ten carts on the road to Carnton constantly. We would make our deadline.

  On that first day, I soon realized I could do no good down in the field and that I would be better suited to directing the reburial. I asked the men doing the digging to attach the names and numbers themselves so I could record them up at the cemetery. The grasshoppers were out again, and I scooted my feet along the ground and swung them at the weeds, hoping to roust the funny little insects. Soon I was accompanied by a cloud of winged and buzzing creatures reflecting the light here and there, and I swear they followed me all the way to Carnton. It was such a fine day.

  Mariah brought a stool out to this new cemetery after a while. I had been sitting on the
ground as the men were laid out, state by state, in neat and long rows while I recorded number and name, number and name, number and name. Mariah had been working to keep the household running while I stayed to rule over my newest obsession, and she hadn’t fixed her hair in days. I’d forgotten how wiry it could become. Before she could speak, I reached my hand toward her and took it. She looked so tired.

  She sat down heavily on the stool I had assumed had been meant for me, put her hands on her knees, and leaned her head back, as if she were trying to pick out stars in the blue sky. I thought she might have something important to say, but she was silent. She had been silent for days. It pained me to realize that she would have been able to imagine what I was feeling if I suffered as she had. She always knew. Always.

  “I do appreciate your help, Mariah.”

  I appreciated it. It was something one might say to a business partner, or the mail clerk who’d saved a seed catalog for you. It was something a stranger said to another stranger. Were we strangers? Impossible, and yet what did I know of her, really? I knew she was with me, that she had always been with me, and that as far as I could tell she intended to be with me until she died. I knew that she had been mine, and I had no idea what that meant except that it meant that she stayed by my side. The rest of it I had let remain a mystery.

  “Do you want to leave? Leave here? Carnton?”

  Me, is what I meant.

  Silence.

  “You can if you’d like. You always could have left, even when you weren’t allowed. I would have never stopped you.”

  She nodded her head, as if considering this, and I was momentarily frightened she would accept what I had intended more as a gesture of love than anything else. I did not want her to leave; I could not stand the thought of her leaving. She blew more air out of her lungs, like a big sigh.

  “Don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “That’s my fault.”

  “It is. That true. But I also don’t want to leave, and that’s your fault, too. You too helpless, Miss Carrie.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ain’t nothing to be done about it. I’m too old to be running away from crackers with ropes, and I reckon I prefer it all quiet and predictable out here at the house.”

  I thought of the future and how we would return to the house and she would go to her part and I would go to my part, and we would meet again in the morning and discuss food and mending and the messes that children make, and then I would come out to the cemetery to spend the day with the dead. That’s how it would be. It was some kind of normal, at least for us.

  At that moment I indulged the notion that perhaps the violence was finally ebbing. The war and that battle had opened a rift in what was acceptable and decent, I thought, but perhaps it had now closed again. Perhaps the appetite for punishment and vengeance had abated among the men capable of meting it out. Perhaps those incompetent, ineffectual, drunken men in town were all that was left, and Lord knows they looked as if they hadn’t the energy to continue. I wondered if Mariah shared my hope. I doubted it. And soon I doubted the notion itself. It would never end.

  Without speaking I handed Mariah the book, the pen, the inkwell, and the little blotter, and I walked toward the house. She looked up at me curiously, squinting through the deep crimping at the corners of her eyes. When I looked back, she was busily at work at the book, paying me no mind. Good, I thought.

  In the little room over the entryway there was a small chest. In that small chest was a drawer, and in that drawer was a mourning veil. I put it on and walked into Martha’s room to look in her mirror and make sure it fit. It looked old, but it would do.

  The violence would not end, but I still had my role to play. Someone had to do it, to be that person. I was the woman they wrote the letters to; this house was the last address of the war. Now it was the final resting place of the dead, or at least almost 1,500 of them, and they could not be left alone. I had resolved to be the designated mourner, to be the woman who would remember so others could forget. In the forgetting, I prayed, would be some relief, some respite from the violence and bitterness and vengeance. Did I have hope? It did not really matter, but I had little. Still, there are things we are called to do that we cannot refuse, as futile as they seem, because to refuse them would mean to lose faith. Not just faith in God so much as faith in man, which I suppose amounted to the same thing.

  When I returned to Mariah, I was carrying my own stool, and I sat down upon it and put my hands on my knees, just as she did. She looked up from the book and studied me.

  “That veil need some work, Miss Carrie.”

  “I’ve plenty of time to mend it.”

  “I reckon you do. Yes, ma’am, you do.”

  The two of us wore those stools out over the years, but John always made us new ones.

  CARNTON

  1894

  They walked slowly toward the house, back down the rows of the dead. Mariah followed behind, and little Paul scampered ahead. Three times Zachariah stopped to cough an evil, wracking cough, and three times Carrie helped him wipe his mouth and stand up. Those coughs told her all she needed to know. She thought it odd that the man who had taught her how to live in a world without sense was dying of a cause easily knowable and even predictable. Consumption. The cough.

  “I don’t want to be buried with Arkansas, if you don’t mind. I know you got that book and all, and you don’t like things not being exactly right and whatnot, but I’d just as soon be buried with Tennessee.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Seems like everything important happened here, so I might as well be buried with the Tennesseans.”

  “Anywhere you like. But you won’t die.”

  “I don’t need to be lied to.”

  “I know, but I do.”

  He coughed and spit, and Carrie could tell that his ribs would need tending.

  She helped him up the steps of the back porch, which hadn’t been painted in years. The balustrade had been wrapped up in wild vines and pokeberry, the wild world creeping in.

  Cashwell turned at the top of the steps and looked out over the yard and the cemetery, the remains of the grove and the hills that hid the town beyond.

  “I guess you couldn’t leave once you got them in the ground over there.”

  “No, I don’t think I could have, even after John died. Too much to do here.”

  “Like weeding.”

  Mariah harrumphed but let the insult slide. She could allow him that one, she thought.

  “You done good, Carrie.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, you did something. More than most people can say.”

  He looked over at Mariah.

  “You, too, Mariah. You done good. Don’t know why you stayed around this place so long, but you done good.”

  Mariah leaned against the top baluster and twiddled a piece of grass in her fingers.

  “Don’t know nothing about good. Stayed around, at least. Too much work to do.”

  Zachariah was too overcome by the urge to cough and didn’t reply. Carrie took him by the arm as if to lead him into the house, and he nodded.

  As they crossed into the house, Zachariah spoke once more, just to Carrie.

  “Eli’s got three girls who call me Granddaddy.”

  “I know. He writes me from time to time.”

  Then he let Carrie guide him toward clean sheets and cool water. After she had laid him down to nap, she walked over to her sewing box and pulled out her scissors, which she used to clip a lock of Zachariah’s gray hair, which she tied with a black ribbon and put in her pocket. Then she went to her wardrobe, and from the back of the bottom drawer she pulled an old and tattered flag, folded neatly into a triangle. She walked back to Zachariah’s room, where he had almost drifted off.

  “I believe this is yours. Professor Stiles gave it to me. He said he had kept it with him since the day of the battle. He said he’s sorry he lied to you, but that you woul
d understand him trying to forget. This is your property, he said.”

  Zachariah nodded, and closed his eyes. She turned to go, but then she heard him whisper.

  “I knew that sumbitch was lying. My memory weren’t ever that bad.”

  Then he fell asleep, and she walked softly down the stairs, pausing only to listen to him sigh as he settled in, comfortable at last.

  EPILOGUE

  Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended? Carrie walked her cemetery, and around her the wounds closed up and scarred over, but only in that way that an oak struck by lightning heals itself by twisting and bending around the wound: it is still recognizably a tree, it still lives as a tree, it still puts out its leaves and acorns, but its center, hidden deep within the curtain of green, remains empty and splintered where it hasn’t been grotesquely scarred over. We are happy the tree hasn’t died, and from the proper angle we can look on it and suppose that it is the same tree as it ever was, but it is not and never will be.

  The widow at Carnton embodied a hope that the tree would remain standing. No one with any sense would have looked upon the old fields and the abandoned farms of the once so proud and haughty South and not seen that things had been changed irrevocably and forever. Railroads began to unfurl again like spiderwebs across the Southern lands, killing off towns outside the turns and bends of the rails, creating others out of nothing more than proximity to the belching, screeching, clunking engines and their cargo. Men made and lost fortunes in those years and decades. A whole new kind of Southerner emerged, one for whom the customs and traditions of the old ways were nothing if not impediments to the acquisition and exploitation of wealth. They came to despise the old aristocrats and their thousand-acre plantations as forcefully, if not for the same reasons, as the abolitionists. But every transformation comes with the price of a whole new collection of frustrations and ennui born of rootlessness. Men transformed themselves and the South, and around Carnton fields were grown over with cedars and poplars while other old forests were cleared, the physical shape of middle Tennessee and the rest of the South shifting and recombining to correspond with the successes and failures of men. Once a cool grove of limbed-up old forest trees, now a golf course. Transformation carries with it the creeping awareness of the infinite possibility of change, the infinite likelihood of change, and at some point the whole thing becomes frightening and unmooring. One longs to know that some things don’t change, that some of us will not be forgotten, that our perambulations upon the earth are not without point or destination.