by Robert Hicks
Evangeline had always been kind to her, and Mariah would have called her sweet and quiet in the past, given their long history together. She guessed that Evangeline, in her childhood, had spent days pressing flowers and reading ladies’ poetry and staring out windows at floating leaves and dandelion seeds. That’s the kind of white woman she seemed to be, but this was not the woman who now sat on the sofa. She was preoccupied, fidgety, uncertain. Mariah noticed the sweat marks on Evangeline’s blouse, between her breasts and down her sides.
“I feel guilty, Mariah.”
“What you feel guilty about, ma’am?”
“That I don’t want to be a mother again, that I’m sorry I brought yet another child into this awful world. I have too many children who will suffer.”
“It ain’t so awful.”
Evangeline stared at her. “How can you of all people say such a thing, Mariah Reddick?”
How indeed? But Mariah knew what she was supposed to say to women who wanted to go back in time before they’d birthed their children, to before they’d let their men touch them, to the time before they had any responsibility to take care of another human being.
“I still believe in it, but I admit it’s been hard, Miss Evangeline.”
“I’m terribly sorry.” Evangeline burst into tears with a gasp. Mariah would have gone over to comfort her, but she had her hands full with Augusten, who was clawing at her breast.
“What are you sorry about? You ain’t done nothing. You givin’ birth to a beautiful little boy is all.”
“You saved his life.”
Mariah didn’t say anything to that. She let the words hang out in the air between them, lending the room more gravity, more weight. A child’s life had been saved, that was true.
“I do love him,” Evangeline said.
“’Course you do.”
“I don’t love myself, though.”
Mariah was taken aback. “He just need you to love him. You can love yourself later.”
“But how can he love a mother who can’t hardly stand to look at herself in the mirror?” Evangeline shook her head and slapped her thigh, hard, like she was trying to fling something out of her mind. She bent her head over for a moment, and then raised it. She looked directly into Mariah’s eyes, unblinking.
“You came because God sent you, didn’t he, Mariah?”
“Don’t know nothing about that, but God is in everything. I do believe that.” Had Evangeline forgotten the note she’d sent? Maybe. Mariah would play along. If this was what it would take to get her to say what Mariah could sense she was about to say, then she’d profess to be the Archangel Gabriel himself.
“God wants me to talk to you.”
Mariah stayed silent, waiting.
“I can’t keep this from you. I should keep it from you, because white business is not supposed to be Negro business, or so I’ve always been told. But you saved his life”—she pointed at her baby cradled on Mariah’s lap—“and that changes things. You saved his life with your teeth. You were fierce that day, Mariah. I remember looking up into your face and knowing as fully as I’ve ever known anything that you would take care of me and my baby, and that you would yourself banish death from this house. And you did.”
This talk made Mariah uncomfortable. She knew how the white ladies of Franklin thought of her. The mothers, the others in town. She had houdou, they thought. That’s what they called it when they thought she couldn’t hear them. She could see it in their faces: the awe. They handed her their births and their babies in the deep conviction that they were handing them over to a witch with power greater than their own. What she would do for them, what incantations and strange rituals she’d conduct, they’d rather not know; they were just in thrall to the idea of houdou, and more accepting of it than Mariah herself would ever have been.
Evangeline took a deep breath. “I know you’ve been asking around about what happened that day to your Theopolis. I heard it from the cook. When I heard this I knew I had to talk to you, but I didn’t have the courage to go see you. And now you’re here, as if you knew this. You are an amazing woman.”
“You sent me a note.”
“But you didn’t have to come.”
“Do you have something to tell me, Miss Evangeline?”
“I’m not a bad woman, Mariah. I want to be a good person. I want to be a good mother, and I can’t as long as I’m being eaten up inside.”
“Let it out then.”
Evangeline blew the air out, sucked it back in, arranged her skirts around her. “There are men in Nashville who arranged to have that rally attacked. They wanted one of the people on that stage to be killed. It was about politics, but I’m not certain the exact reason. But I do know this, that your boy wasn’t the one they wanted killed. And they’re angry about it.”
Mariah stood up with Augusten in her arms, strode over to the sofa, handed the child to his mother, and sat back down on the settee. She placed her hands in her lap in front of her and blinked the tears back. She had already heard part of this, from Della. “And how do you know this?”
“Because my husband knows, and I overheard him talking to some men out back in his shed. Elijah is a good man, Mariah, and he told them they had been damned fools and should have stayed out of Franklin. He told them they had managed to kill the one good cobbler in town.”
The one good cobbler.
“He doesn’t know that I heard. I wished I hadn’t, but now that you’re here I’m glad I did.”
Mariah realized that this path she had embarked upon, her quest for truth, would contain moments like this that she could hardly stand. She would suffer pain along the way, and relive her son’s death in a dozen different ways. She would have to accept this, or stop asking questions. She considered going back to Carnton and never leaving again, but shook her head. She would go on.
“Do you know who the men were? The men who were talking to your husband?”
“I don’t think so. Although many looked familiar. One has a few fingers missing from one hand, I think. But Elijah has never introduced me.”
So it was true: Theopolis hadn’t been the target, his death had been a cruel accident or mistake. But then she remembered those other men standing around her as he died on the ground in her arms, she remembered their faces. Maybe they didn’t come looking to kill her son, but they didn’t seem to mind that he had died.
“I don’t want Elijah finding out that I know anything, and he especially can’t ever know that I told you anything. About him or those men.”
“Is he one of them? Your husband?”
“One of the group? I don’t think so. I only came in at the end. It sounded to me like they came to him with a question or a problem or some such, and he was trying to advise them.”
“Why didn’t he just turn them in?”
“I don’t know. Really, I don’t.”
“Probably some of those Conservative white boys,” Mariah said.
“It didn’t sound like that. These men sounded—well, rougher somehow.”
Mariah paused, thinking. “What else you remember?”
“That’s it, I’m afraid. But I wanted you to know. I felt like I owed it to you.”
* * *
All Mariah wanted was to walk away from this place and be alone and walk some more. She couldn’t remember what she said when she left or if she said anything at all to Miss Evangeline. She just wanted away from the place. But Franklin was a small town, and there wasn’t much room for being lost and unnoticed. She could feel eyes on her, as if people could see what she now knew. The walls and roofs knew it, too, and the squirrel running along ahead of her knew about it. Every white face she saw could see what she possessed, and condemned her for trying to find out the truth. She thought she ought to be scared, but she wasn’t much scared at all. She looked at herself in the plate glass of the stores along Main Street and saw a taller woman than she remembered. She was Mariah Reddick; she had birthed their children and tended the
ir war wounded. She was owed. And perhaps Theopolis had been right, it was time for Negroes to get their due, and it might as well start with her, sitting in the Dixons’ house, listening to the white woman.
Mariah walked for a little while toward the Blood Bucket. In the window of the ladies’ garment store she saw some of Theopolis’s shoes, toes shining. She moved quickly past. I am Mariah Reddick; I birthed the children of this town and tended their war wounded. I have nothing to fear.
But she imagined the shoes following her down the street.
Chapter 20
Tole
July 20, 1867
The next morning, Tole carried his water jug out, chipped enamel cool and comforting in his hands. At his stoop, he poured some into his left hand and splashed it on his face. He rubbed his eyes and the water dripped down his open collar.
The opened letter on the table had been delivered in the night.
July 18
Tole,
You may write to me at this address. I am not there, but it will reach me. Your discretion is required in this matter. That means have it delivered by someone you trust.
Dixon and I don’t particularly see eye to eye when it comes to politics. My allegiance is with the Republicans and Reconstruction, and we’re in charge. Dixon would rather kill a Republican than listen to him.
I suppose because I am grateful to have my life, you should know the reason you were to kill me. Railroad companies are buying up good land for lumber and bribing everyone they can to subsidize them, especially our new governments. This is happening everywhere in the South. Some of my fellow Republicans, it appears, are not as committed to the party as they are to taking a share of the proceeds. I want to see a reconstructed South whose people aren’t ravaged by sky-high taxes and displaced because their homes lie in the way of railroad tracks. My fellow radicals and I want a united country again. We trust no one.
I came to Franklin because I had seen this corruption elsewhere and had a theory about Dixon. Judging by the fact that, probably on behalf of one of his Nashville masters, he hired you to kill me, I believe I am right.
You will hear more from me, and I will require your services again, soon. I am grateful that you spared my life.
Thank you, again, for sparing my life. Dixon will be brought to heel, and when he is, you will not need to concern yourself with me again.
Jesse Bliss
Tole read the letter twice, not wanting to miss anything. It amused him that Bliss thought he had to threaten him into helping, when in fact he could think of hardly anything better to do than to rattle Elijah Dixon and, as the man said, bring him to heel.
Unearthing a piece of paper and a pen, he sat down to write out a reply in his shaky, childish scrawl.
Dear Mr Bliss,
Im real glad to hear you safe and workin to get Dixon. I dont no what else he has planned to do here but it cant be any good I think. I will help you any way I can.
GT
When he was done, Tole folded both the letter and his response and tucked them away in his back pocket. Just then, a neighbor passed him by, on her way to get fresh water at the pump they all shared out by the road. Her name was Bett, and from three houses behind him he would often hear her cry out late at night, cries of lust and sadness and love. It made him lonely just looking at her.
“They coming week after next I hear, Mr. Tole.” Bett stopped at his porch, dark-eyed and wild-haired above her properly pressed camellia-green dress and white apron, arranged and cinched. She wore old leather slippers Tole recognized as Theopolis’s handiwork.
“Who they?”
“Some big men from Nashville, coming to have an investigation of them killings. Guess they ain’t satisfied with all that questioning folks all over town. Guess they coming to look into it more. Everybody been talkin’ about it. They gone be here in a couple weeks, they sayin’. Bringing the whole U.S. Army with them, I hear.”
He could guess what those big men from Nashville would want, and it wasn’t necessarily the truth. They would want order. He wondered how this fit into Bliss’s plans, or whether he knew about it.
He splashed more water on his face, until his collar was thoroughly wet. The birds laughed at him and gathered together. He wiped his face and neck and stood up straight. Before the sun came up, it split the sky with banners of purple and orange and yellow, as if it were sending out scouts to check, to give the all-clear. The rooftops lit up, some glowed, and then shadows appeared. He was surprised that Bett was still standing there.
“You gone be in the courtroom then?”
“Why you ask that?” He said it sharper than he’d meant, and that was sloppy. This was what came of talking to people. Secrets get revealed in a word.
“Just wondering.”
You are not a very good liar, Bett. Tole knew he was a figure of great suspicion and curiosity among his neighbors. An outsider.
Bett went off to get her water, passing the ragman in his cart coming the other way. Tole was surprised when the ragman pulled up right at his porch.
“Morning.” Hooper stood up in his cart so he was almost eye level with Tole standing on the porch.
“Morning.” Tole waited.
“Mariah Reddick requested I see you ’cause you need work, and since I got nothing against a man who can work, I got some.”
“You friends with Mariah?”
“Ain’t friends with no one. But she’s tolerable enough for a house Negro.”
“That she is,” Tole agreed, eyeing Hooper. “What you need?”
“I got some house cleaning needs doing, and then some wood chopping, and plenty of work for a few weeks at least,” Hooper said.
“How much you paying?”
Hooper named a price well below what Tole would have wanted. He nodded and waved Hooper into the house.
When Hooper stepped inside, he stopped short like he’d walked into a wall. He whistled and removed his cloth cap, as if he’d just walked into church. Tole tried to see his creation through the eyes of this new man seeing it for the first time. He goggled at it a little himself. The thing he had made still had the power to surprise him. He looked at it and couldn’t remember making half of it.
What had once been a town a week or two before had become a dense, sprawling version of a world constructed simultaneously in the physical (here are the buildings, here are the people, here is a man with a rifle in the attic of the doctor’s house) and the metaphysical context (here are the angels watching over them, here are the demons leading them down primrose paths, here are the souls caught in their migration, uncertain of heaven above and hell below). Heaven had been hung from the low ceiling of the house by hundreds of pieces of twine and string, each supporting an angel or a soul.
There weren’t many souls drifting upward toward the ceiling, which had recently been painted blue. Below the tables and platforms that bore up the model of the town, Tole had painted everything red in thick, sloppy strokes. On the legs of the tables, crossing here and there, he had attached a lattice of wood strips and platforms, which both stabilized the display and provided ample room to present the full horror of hell. Considerably more souls hung below, drifting past demons and devils, tortured by tiny grinning tommyknockers.
The display now spilled from the tables onto the floor, where Tole had been carving half-size animals that appeared to be stampeding out his back door and down into the small backyard. These had been made from scrap wood and old sewing spools for eyes—raccoons and possums, goggle-eyed wolves and rats. They looked to be fleeing. It’s the animals what always know what’s happening first, is what Tole had intended by this. They know to save themselves. At the end of the hallway he had built a small house on fire, and two tiny figures standing on its steep roof.
Tole looked over at Hooper, not at all surprised to find a man struck dumb by his creation. He crossed and recrossed his arms, and let slip a trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth before recovering his composure.
; “It’s always the damnedest people who get they hands on some part of the great truth, ain’t it?” Hooper said.
“Sounds like an insult, ragman.”
“I mean, this thing is true.”
“No you don’t.”
Hooper nodded and took a seat on a stool, still staring at it. “This is a day, right, Mr. Tole?”
“Part of a bunch of days, at least right there where the streets at. The rest, above and below it, that’s time out of time. Time don’t mean nothing above and below.”
“And that day is…”
“One part is they giving they speeches on the square that day, you know. Got black after that day, and nothing fit together after that.”
Tole tried to be patient, but he couldn’t help being eager to get to work. He’d thought about what working with the ragman would mean, and it would mean being able to move around the town smooth and without causing a disturbance. It meant becoming one of the locals who faded into the background. This was what he needed to complete his plan, because now everywhere he went he felt the eyes of white men on him, the strange Negro, tracking his movements and taking down his activities. He felt white eyes on him always; they were more aware of him than they were of each other. They listened to him and watched him. He wanted to be invisible, not chased by their gaze.
Hooper had a question. “Who on top of this house here?” He pointed north and west of the town square, where a man made of twisted baling wire and cloth scraps, with a tiny, bright red cork head, lay prone on the roof of a two-story house just about where one might find Doc Cliffe’s house, if this were all real and Doc Cliffe’s house were made of scrap pieces of an old Superior Grimes Golden Apples crate.