The Orphan Mother

by Robert Hicks

  Maybe it was a half hour, maybe it was an hour, Mariah couldn’t say. Her arms and hands were numb when it was over. But by some miracle the blood, now having washed over her feet to form a puddle six feet across, slowed its flow. Lizzie had gone pale and shallow-breathed, but now began to get her color back. Sometime later there was no blood, and Mariah gently, gently, pulled her hands off the white lady. There were bruises on that pale white stomach where the butt of her hands had dug in.

  Mariah folded clean rags together in a wad and placed them between Lizzie’s legs, and took Lizzie’s free hand and placed it there to hold. She pulled her to sit up at the edge of the table. The little girl sucked hard at her mother’s breast. Lizzie swayed, got lightheaded, nearly fell, and Mariah held her up until the stars and darkness cleared and Lizzie could see straight again. The white lady looked down at the blood and vomited. Mariah looked for more blood then, but there was none. It was dark outside. Hours had passed. “Got no rags for the blood, Miss Lizzie.”

  “I was going to die,” Lizzie said wonderingly, ignoring her.

  “No you wasn’t.”

  “I was. I should have died.”

  “God had a different plan.”

  “You kept me from dying.”

  “God did,” Mariah said. “Now, I can go get something to clean up this blood—”

  “Get out,” Lizzie said. “Don’t come back. I’ll clean it.”

  “I can help.”

  “You’ve helped enough. Right now you got to get out. Bill won’t like any of this.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “He’ll think you tried to kill me.”

  And that was all Mariah needed to hear. She understood more than needed to be said. She gathered her things. At the door Lizzie called after her. Mariah looked back and in the dark could see the ghostly glow of Lizzie’s nightgown perched on the edge of the table.

  “Thank you.”

  The memory was still as fresh as the day she made it.

  * * *

  That was the Crutcher Mariah thought she should go see. Bill hated Governor Brownlow, hated seeing the freedmen taking his land, or anyone’s land, or having anything at all. He thought they would also take his money and his rights. Theopolis had been one of those men. Bill would not be helpful.

  Down the path to the cabin, tendrils of creeper and wild blackberry had lain down across the way, as if it hadn’t been walked in ages. In the clearing around the cabin, Mariah smelled the tang of vegetation crowding in, grass growing man high, more vines, wild onions, foot-high pines already reaching up. The forest was moving in to claim it, but there was smoke from the ramshackle chimney, and Mariah knew that the woman and child had not succumbed, not yet.

  Mariah knocked and heard scraping and scurrying.

  “Who there?”

  “Mariah Reddick.”

  “What you want, witch?” The voice said the words, but the heart wasn’t in it. Mariah could hear a note of excitement.

  “Just come to check on the baby.”

  “Well, I ain’t get rid of you until you do, reckon.”

  The door opened and Mariah walked inside. What she saw she hadn’t expected: a cabin swept and washed, every chair and bowl in its place, a fat child sleeping under crookedly sewn quilts, tucked in neat beside the woodstove. The child glowed.

  Lizzie was no longer so pale nor so hard-faced. She wore her hair loose and had brushed it so that it lay full in front of her shoulders. Her green eyes were clear, her freckles not nearly so livid. Her apron was clean.

  “What you looking at?” she asked, taking her hair in a fist and pulling it behind her.

  “The child looks healthy, sure enough.”

  “And you wondering where the man is.”

  I am and I ain’t, Mariah thought.

  “He’s been gone a week, maybe more. And I’m about to go, too.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I love that girl right there more than I love anything in this world.”

  Mariah nodded.

  “Kind of funny you showing up when you did,” Lizzie went on. “’Cause if you came tomorrow we be gone. We ain’t staying here. We gone go to New Orleans. My sister live there. We gone to the big city and we gone dress in proper dresses and have tea and learn to read things. We changing, Lucy and me. She ain’t gone be Lizzie, she gone be Lucy.”

  Ain’t nothing wrong with not naming a child after yourself, Mariah thought.

  “She ain’t gone grow up with a father like Bill, with a man got fists like that.”

  Now Lizzie got a tight look on her face, her mouth was drawn. She sat down at her little table. There was another seat across from her, but Mariah stood. The child wheezed a little in her sleep. Her mother squinted at the midwife, the Negress looming in her house. Mariah was patient to wait. Her instinct had led her to Lizzie Crutcher, and her instinct told her it was about to become worth the trip.

  “Sit down.”

  Mariah sat.

  “She alive because of you, and so am I, and I don’t like it one bit, but I owe you a blood favor. I got a debt to you.”

  Her brushed hair began to curtain her face when she leaned forward. “You lost your own boy.”

  “He was murdered.”

  “Your only child.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “You ain’t got anyone else in this world.”

  “No ma’am.”

  Lizzie leaned back in her chair, rethinking what she had begun. She shook her head and leaned forward again. She had been eating better, her face was full like a moon, but her eyes were hard as crystal. And yet Mariah didn’t have to ask her a single question. Just her presence brought out the words she wanted to hear.

  “I don’t know nothing about how your boy died. But I know men who couldn’t hardly talk about nothing else. And Bill, he were one of them. They was all spun up about your boy and what would happen because of that day they had them speeches in town. They was all spun up about all you niggers, truth is, but they was particular worried about your boy’s dying.”

  Somehow Mariah had known this. She had dreamt of this cabin, and of the light through the chinks between the logs, and of the stove. She had seen the wild-eyed backwoods girl shining in front of her. The great hand—of God, fate, the roots and cures—had drawn her. She sat quiet and listened, not needing to ask any questions.

  For the two or three days after the rally, Lizzie said, Bill wouldn’t stay still as the Army patrolled the town, taking depositions, writing down names. His comings and goings were constant, unless he was out back near the fire pit with that raggedy crew of strange men he had taken to hosting sometimes. All told there were seven men, though no more than four ever appeared at the cabin at once. She didn’t know all their names. They each arrived separately on horseback, at night, all of them heavy with beard and wearing black. These strange men rode horses saddled tight and high like cavalrymen. Some limped, and none of them talked very much near the cabin, only way out by the fire pit. They were polite, they tipped their hats to Lizzie if they saw her, and quietly thanked her for the biscuits and ham Bill insisted she give them when they left for home. They seemed the sort of men who worked very hard not to be noticed. They squinted over their beards and flexed the muscles in their jaws, but remained quiet until they stepped into the firelight. Lizzie recognized some of their voices.

  She especially recognized Elijah Dixon, the fancy man from the fancy house with the fancy wife. He talked the most.

  “Mr. Dixon was there,” Mariah repeated. “You sure?”

  “’Course I’m sure. He was the boss man. They all listened to him.”

  Mariah let Lizzie’s words pour over her like a shadow. The boss man, she repeated to herself. Elijah Dixon hadn’t just been talking to those men, chastising them for killing the one good cobbler: he was their leader. She wondered if Evangeline knew this. Lizzie continued.

  A week before, Lizzie had taken a basket of bread and cheese out the door and crossed the
woods to the fire. There was an old hickory log along the path some distance away from the fire pit, which was where Lizzie usually left the food wrapped in a clean towel. By some trick of the woods, the echo of their voices was clear as anything right there at the log, and she could hear them as plain as day. Every other night she just left the food and walked back, uninterested in the talk. But that night, the last night she saw Bill, something caused her to sit down on the log, beside the basket, and listen.

  She heard pacing, shoes scraping and thumping on the hard-pack. She heard the bright ring of a jar—of whiskey, she thought—put down, clink, upon a rock. It took a moment for the sound of their voices to clarify.

  “You goddamn will do what I tell you,” came Dixon’s voice, rough with power but mannered. “I tell you I have it all handled.”

  “Said that before, didn’t you?” Lizzie thought this was the voice of Aaron Haynes, who lived over near Hillsboro.

  “Gonna be a big payday for all of us,” Dixon said. It sounded as if he’d said the phrase several times already.

  “For you, you mean,” came another voice, shriller. “You just want us to do the dirty work.”

  “Ain’t that dirty.”

  “The Army is coming back,” said Haynes. “They catch us—”

  “Why would they even think of looking?” Dixon said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Get the land.”

  “Those people don’t want to sell. Poor niggers never had a place of their own.”

  “I’m sick of repeating this to you,” Dixon went on. “Just do what I tell you. Scare the hell out of ’em. You know how to do that, at least.”

  “Don’t see you out there scaring hell out of ’em.”

  “I’m the one who’s going to make you rich,” Dixon said. “Got to stay above all that. Stick with me and you’ll be fine.”

  They began to move, and Lizzie understood at least one of them was coming her way. She whipped around, nearly tripping on a pea vine, and ran—leapt—back to the cabin. Then she stood in the doorway as if nothing had happened.

  When Bill at last came through the door and sat down at the kitchen table, he seemed much smaller than he had ever seemed before. The next day he left for a three-day logging trip, and was three days past due. She took this as a sign she should leave.

  “I don’t want that blood money, if there even is any,” Lizzie told Mariah now. “Ain’t my business, and I don’t want no part in it. I’m going to New Orleans, I’m going up in this world. All this place soon be dead and past to me. But I ain’t been able to take my eyes off this little girl here. She everything, Lucy is, and this weren’t something I knowed would happen to me, and now I wonder what any woman, even a Negro woman, thinks when she loses a child. And I owe you something at least, which I don’t like but that’s the damned truth. So I don’t know if it help to know this, but I know your boy were killed by them men and my husband. They meant to do it, it weren’t no accident or high spirits. They set out to kill themselves a nigger. Mr. Dixon was their puppet master, making them dance and do what he wanted them to do. Bill laughed about killing your boy, said that was one thing Dixon hadn’t planned. But Bill is a stupid man. I myself know what happens when you send weasels into a chicken house. What happens ain’t no surprise.”

  She took a breath, stood up, walked over to Lucy, and took her up in her arms.

  All the air in the house seemed to vanish. Mariah slipped through the door and out toward the path that would take her far away. Lizzie stood on the threshold looking after her, Lucy nuzzling at her bosom.

  Now Mariah knew them. If she didn’t know all their names, she knew where they walked and what they said to each other. She knew she could find them and touch them. And, most shocking of all, she had names: Elijah Dixon, Aaron Haynes. She had known Dixon was meeting with the big men from Nashville, but she had not known he was one of the brutes who yanked the life from her son.

  “I should have strangled your child, Elijah Dixon,” she whispered to herself, and this thought so shocked and nauseated her that she had to stop by the side of the road and wait to be sick. When the waves of nausea passed, she continued on. Just a baby, she told herself over and over again as she walked. She vowed she would take no revenge upon babies, but men were another matter.

  Chapter 22

  Tole

  July 23, 1867

  From the beginning, Tole and Hooper worked, or Tole went out to Carnton to help the women with their cemetery and around the house. But some days he had to himself, and on those days he went to the woods in the pockets of wildness that still ringed Franklin here and there. He came to know the wildflowers and to know how certain of the animal tracks—deer and raccoon, the smeared trail of the beaver—would lead him to water. He knew to avoid the understory of cedars and redbuds in the early spring, lest he find himself crawling with the inchworms suspended down on their tiny strings in curtains of the lower air’s own green stars. This was hard-won knowledge of ordinary things.

  On occasion, while he was working in the yard at Carnton, he liked to take small breaks, wipe the sweat from his brow, and watch the lady of the house, Carrie McGavock, step out the side of the house near the kitchen and take a few puffs of tobacco from an old pipe. The smoke curled around her head and she periodically waved it away from her face like she was shooing horseflies. Tole imagined she thought no one could see her taking respite from her well-known occupation of public mourning over in the cemetery, and for this he liked her better. Down the creek from Carnton he sometimes watched the Negro tenant Caruthers family on their new share stake, and the big Caruthers boys tearing around field and wood, sometimes tossing each other over the end of the porch and rolling down the hill.

  Most often, however, Tole joined Hooper on his rounds. They chopped wood, made deliveries, and collected junk that could be fixed and sold in the Bucket. Why the people called Hooper “the ragman” was a mystery to Tole; he saw not one rag in all that time. Hooper collected old dresses, too, and perhaps that’s what people meant by rags: the old dresses of white ladies, torn and stained, which he would bring back to sell at April and May’s place, or to the market. He hardly ever had success selling those dresses, Tole noticed. Black women walked right on by. “But this fit you!” Hooper would call out after another who had passed them by in the market, nose in the air. Tole would look over then and Hooper would be smiling. It was a joke Hooper kept running, it was something that amused him. Days later they’d burn the dresses. Lace burnt quick and bright, crinoline smoldered.

  Another thing Tole noticed: Negroes were always stopping Hooper to take him aside to ask him questions, or to beg for some advice, or to whisper something in his ear. Every day Tole watched Hooper baptize himself in the Harpeth in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, which in Tole’s book made the ragman crazy, but nevertheless the black people of Franklin treated him as a wise man. It took some time before Tole understood.

  Hardly a single white person ever noticed Hooper when he walked in the back through their kitchens to talk with cooks and maids about firewood and junk. They just kept carrying on their conversations—in their sitting rooms and hallways, in their libraries and dining rooms—as if Hooper weren’t standing right there, hands in his pockets, trying to figure out how to carry a desk with a broken leg out through the door and kitchen to the cart. But by God, if Tole walked in to help him lift the desk, all conversation stopped and all eyes turned to him. Men put down their forks and stared at him. He and Hooper would carry the desk out, and as they passed through the kitchen he would hear the white talk begin again.

  “You a strange nigger, thasall,” Hooper said once, as they pulled away with a full load. “They notice you. ‘Who the hell is this one?’ they say. ‘Don’t know him. What he want? Which people his?’ They keep quiet. Strange niggers scare ’em. There wasn’t never no strange niggers before. Back before, if there was a strange nigger walking through the town, he be locked up quick and they try to fig
ure where he come from and who he got to be returned to. This ain’t New York City. A black man don’t just appear.

  “But, if you not a strange black man, if you a black man they known since they were little and got used to ignoring, well”—Hooper smiled—“you hear a lot. They say any damned thing in front of you. When you young that make you mad. When you young and you strong and you stupid, you hate it and you want to fight it, you want to say, ‘I’m standing here, missus.’ But when you get old and you can see the long stretch of time, you see what you got: a gift they don’t even know they made to you. And so you keep even quieter and let them talk.”

  Tole began hanging back in the kitchens so as not to disturb the delicate balance of known and unknowns, so that Hooper and the black ladies who worked in those big houses could go about their business like ghosts and the white people could keep talking. And they talked. Tole began to notice how, when they were done, Hooper would take a cup of water from the cook or the nurse, and they would stand close talking low for a few minutes, and then Hooper would stomp out of the house whistling.

  The realization of what Hooper was came all at once to Tole, so fast he laughed out loud while they were driving away from a big house one day. “You the town gossip.” He poked Hooper in the chest.

  “I hate towns,” Hooper said. But he didn’t deny it. “There ain’t a thing them black ladies don’t know about them they work for, and there ain’t a one of them black ladies I don’t see every week.”

  It was true. Through Hooper, over time Tole met the whole network of maids and cooks and nurses of Franklin, the whole network of Hooper’s informers. He came to have knowledge of white men who drank too much, who cheated at cards. This wasn’t knowledge for mere amusement, Tole realized. Hooper believed white people needed watching. Most of the time the news was exactly like gossip, the whos and whats and whens of white folks. Sometimes the gossip was good to a white man or woman, someone who was kind or generous, and Tole noticed that such news gave Hooper pause to recalibrate the system of relations he had been mapping for many years. But most men, white and black, never did much on principle, never acted crosswise with the crowd. Hooper—and Tole, for that matter, now that he thought about it—didn’t care what was in a white man’s heart or what he said; he cared about what a white man did.