The Widow of the South
There was one place I felt I had to make safe before the onslaught, before things I could not imagine took over my home. I went to my desk and unlocked the slanted lid. It was filled with toys, worn-out dolls, a spelling book, a rattle. I opened one of the little drawers and removed two daguerreotypes and studied them. One showed Martha holding Mary Elizabeth’s hand on Mary Elizabeth’s sixth and last birthday. Mary Elizabeth’s party dress looked a little stained and wrinkled, a casualty of playing with her cousins and friends during the party. The second picture showed a baby in his white dress sleeping—no, dead: John Randal. It was my only picture of him, he had died so young. I put the pictures back.
Martha didn’t die at once. It was slow, so slow. She seemed to melt away. Every day she was a little smaller than the day before. After two weeks she rarely spoke, but her eyes were on me, and I thought I could tell what she was thinking by the way she held her eyelids. Perspiration was ever dripping into her eyes, and it stung so much that she often spent minutes at a time blinking uncontrollably. If I wanted to listen to her—I thought of it as listening—I had to sit there next to her and mop her brow. Sometimes I applied the wet tobacco leaves, but that never seemed to bring the fever down, and it stained her forehead a dark orange, which was unbearable to see. So I just sat there, tossing the linens on the floor as they became sodden and heavy.
Tucked into the back of the desk was my sewing basket. I lifted the woven straw lid, and on top of scissors and ribbons and needles and spools of thread lay a folded piece of lace. I took it out and placed it on my lap. I unfolded the top panel, revealing the three locks of hair, each tied with a thin black ribbon. For years I had kept the desk as a little shrine, occasionally taking up the locks and placing them against my cheeks. Now I just looked at them, lying there in a row on my lap. I stared, until I could distinguish every hair in every bundle. And then I wrapped them up, stuffed them in the pocket of my apron, and called for one of the servants to haul the desk away. With the sound of the wind whistling from the front door to the back door and the loud tearing of sheets and the general pandemonium, I didn’t hear John ride up to the house until I saw his head (and Theopolis’s behind him) bounce along the driveway. He was scowling, and that was another thing I hadn’t remembered him doing before. Was that new? Had John scowled before?
I watched John slide off the horse. Theopolis strode off with purpose and vigor toward the kitchen porch on the other side of the house. He was the most unlikely Negro I had ever known, and I wondered idly what kind of man he would be if he were white.
John opened the front door and stared at his house turned inside out. He looked puzzled.
I walked up behind him.
“What is going on here?” he said.
“It’s like a fire, come to purge us and burn away what’s rotten.”
John turned slowly. I could see it in his eyes. She’s still not right.
“I think you must lie down.”
“I am not tired.”
But I was.
14
SERGEANT ZACHARIAH CASHWELL,
24TH ARKANSAS
I was lost. It was so easy to become lost. I was amazed at how quickly my life was transformed, from one moment on the brink of death to the next tied at the wrists and seated in the dirt against an old smokehouse. The thought This ain’t right never crossed my mind. I became a prisoner and accepted all the duties of a prisoner just as easily as I’d picked up the damned colors and walked forward to the bulwarks. And it happened without thinking on it one bit. I suffered, and I accepted that suffering was my appointed job now. We had been routed, and the Union men who passed me by on their way to the rear—dragging their own wounded, wiping the smoke grime from their faces—gave me grief.
“Where are your friends, reb? Left them behind, huh? Saved your skin like a good little coward.” A slight, balding private with an arm tied against his body with a length of cord, he walked right up to me and spit in my face. I would have broken him in two once, but now I just took it. Felt the spit run down my cheek and dry there.
This was my new life. My mind was packed up with thoughts falling all over themselves, thoughts I hadn’t had in days. Thoughts about what would happen to me. In the minutes after that lieutenant put his pistol down and made me his captive, my mind went from thinking of nothing else but going forward, of nothing else but each footstep and each stretch of dirt in front of me and each bullet that tumbled past my head, to a fire of thoughts about my life and the new world I’d fallen into. It was too much to be thinking about and left me no energy to worry about spit in my face. I became a different person. Who would I become? Where would I go? Why was I spared, for what purpose? When would I get something to eat?
Occasionally I looked up from staring at my boots and their frayed laces to watch the things going on around me. There were five of us lined up against that smokehouse, and none of us spoke a word. I reckon we all had things to think about. I was seated against the corner, with a view of the road passing by to my right. To my left one of my fellow prisoners kept raising his bonded hands to his face to scratch at his head, and little flakes of his scalp fell onto his pant leg, where they sat until the wind picked up.
As the sun went down, I watched the Yankees begin to move their gear and their men down that road to the rear, and after a while a couple of big Union men came over.
“Get your asses up, rebs. We’re moving.”
They had their Springfields trained on us, and one was worrying a fat, unlit cigar in his mouth. We got to our feet and shuffled alongside them, out into the road. They were as confused as we were, I think, because they kept stopping us and starting us again, taking us down one way and then back another way.
“Why the hell are we taking them with us?” the taller one said. He had a scar on his neck that went from white to red every time he started talking. He sounded English to me. The other guard, just a little shorter but built like a brick, kept looking for a fire to light his cigar.
“Just do it, Campbell. What we got here, we got us the spoils of war.” He laughed when he said that, a little laugh, like he didn’t really believe what he was saying.
We were stopped under a big oak, waiting for the carts and caissons to pass after we were almost run over as the supply train made for a bridge in the distance. A limping soldier carrying nothing but a shovel slapped me on the back of the head as he passed. Then he stopped and began to rifle through my pockets.
“Get the hell away from that man, or I’ll shoot you dead, Private.”
It was the man with the cigar talking.
“But he’s got some matches.”
The man with the shovel pulled out my little round tin of matches, which I had been saving since Atlanta. He waved them in the air, in front of my nose.
“Put ’em back,” the guard with the cigar said.
“Why the hell do you care?”
“I don’t like you all of a sudden, that’s why. Get movin’.”
“Shit.”
The man jammed the matches back into my pocket and elbowed me in the stomach in one slick move, and then he went and jumped up on the back of a cart and yelled out, “You aren’t going to need matches where you’re going, reb. It’ll be hot enough without ’em.”
“Go to hell,” said the cigar man.
“Well, that’s exactly what I mean.”
As the cart pulled off, the stocky guard walked up to me. We were still standing there, and the cart train just seemed to get longer and longer, and I figured we’d be standing there quite some time.
“You got matches, reb?”
“Yes.”
“Could I have one?”
I must have looked at him funny, because his scar got all purple and he frowned.
“I meant, give me a match.”
He wasn’t cut out for this, I knew that then. No sense of place or position. Probably a good man, but you never know. Could have been just stupid, not recognizing the power he had. Or not used to
it yet. The funny thing was, I sympathized with him a little, even though I came to realize that I couldn’t allow myself to stay under his control. Or any man’s control. This, I reckon, was what all those piercing hard thoughts jabbing inside me had come to: I had to go. I was a prisoner. I was a reviled man, all right. That’s who I had become. But I would not live like that forever. I would not allow it.
He reached into my pocket and pulled out the tin, took one out, struck it against the barrel of his rifle, and lit his cigar. I smelled that tobacco, and it smelled good. He looked at me and said, “I saw you run up that hill.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You ought to be dead.”
I nodded.
“Maybe you could use a cigar.”
And I nodded again.
His partner was getting hot and mad. “Don’t fool with that son of a bitch. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
I looked over at my fellow prisoners, and they all had their heads down, staring at the dirt. They’d remain prisoners for a long time to come, I thought.
“Shut up,” the man with the cigar said. And then he pulled out a tin case and popped it open to reveal some of the worst-looking cigars I had ever laid eyes on. He put one in my mouth and struck another match, lighting it. Then he took my matches, stuck them in his trousers, and walked off. I took a deep breath and let the smoke burn my throat and struggled mightily to keep from coughing and spitting the thing out. I hadn’t smoked much before.
The two soldiers conferred, and then the taller one said, “Let’s go, we’re taking a shortcut.”
They led us down an alley between two houses, through their yards, and through the fence of a stable that had been riddled with bullet holes. As if I had willed it to happen in just that way, they had decided to march us around the main line of traffic and head for the bridge by a back route. And that route brought us into the stable yard and past the stable with its manger of hay lying just inside the door.
And when I passed that manger, I hacked up a god-awful cough and let that cigar fly into the manger onto the dry hay before my keepers saw me. And when they turned back to me, I was busy mashing the ground with the toe of my boot, as if grinding the cigar into the mud.
“Got to take it easy with that tobacco,” the shorter one said. “That’s some powerful Tennessee bounty.”
I nodded, and we walked off toward that bridge to God knew where.
There was a fire, of course. They were trying to sneak themselves out of town, all of them Union boys, and I set off the biggest damn signal fire you’ve ever seen, and it queered their plans a bit, I reckon. There was a lot of running around, and a captain grabbed our two captors for a firefighting detail, and while they struggled to explain that they had to keep an eye on us, I slipped off. Down through a little alley, down the bank, and into the waters of a little river. When I looked back, I saw the two men still arguing with the officer, and my fellow captives still standing there with their heads down, black against the firelight.
Stretched out before me in the dark lay everything, and I walked toward it.
15
LIEUTENANT NATHAN STILES, 104TH OHIO
I did not see that color-bearer again that day. That night, when the fighting had died down and all you could hear were the plaintive bleatings of the wounded strewn before us, I thought, I saved one of them. God knows what I consigned him to by not letting him be killed, but I hoped he would appreciate it someday.
We sat there for hours after the sun went down, listening to the occasional crack of one more gun in the hands of one more wayward and stubborn rebel soldier, but the battle was over. And as soon as the battle was over, the rhapsodizing began.
“Hood has crashed and broken upon our shoal,” cried one of the bad poets in our company, and I was sure every man would file that little bit of doggerel away for future use in letters or in their memoirs or while sitting on one of a hundred porches scattered all over the Union. What garbage. Men from other units went out onto the battlefield to gather souvenirs, but I kept my men back under great pressure. What were they going to get off those sorry corpses? Just another chance to get their hands bloody, I thought. I wouldn’t go along with that.
We got the word to pull out, but we had to sit there and wait our turn. We were going to sneak out again, just like the night before. While I sat there, cleaning my pistol, I thought about my precious Greek books back home in my parents’ house. I wondered if I’d be able to pick up my studies again, whether there would be anyone left to run a college when I returned. I knew I would not be able to read those books again with the same mind. I had seen Spartans and Thebans and Atticans for myself now. The only glory to be had was the glory of surviving. Crashed and broken upon our shoal—well, that just meant we were living and they weren’t. What man could take pride in the killing of another man? Not pride. Relief, yes, and damn them who would put a man in the position of even being relieved at the death of another. That’s what made the sentiments of glory and honor, on that battlefield, such lies. If we were lucky, we might live to an age when our memory would fail us.
At one point, while awash in my dark ruminations, a fire started in town far to the rear. There goes our stealthy retreat, I thought. But it was quickly extinguished, no harm done. No harm done.
16
CARRIE MCGAVOCK
I returned to the garden. I stood in the diagonal plot formed by intersecting walkways, upon the dirt which, despite the brief hours of warmth, remained hard underfoot. I was listening to the new sounds echoing back to me while absentmindedly running my hands through the brown hollow stalks of the dormant liatris and coneflowers. Seeds sprang from their pods and attached themselves to the back of my long black wool skirt. I stood silently so I could listen clearly. The sound had stopped me and demanded my attention.
It was the sound of battle. What I took to be the report of rifles seemed, two miles distant, like the crackling of a new fire in a cold fireplace. I was surprised by how innocuous it sounded, and yet it was pervasive and never-ending. Once I heard the first shot, I could hear almost nothing else. I could also hear the occasional deep shhthump-shtthump of artillery shells, each of them gathering the air and transforming it into the deep percussion of something like a parade drum. I strained to hear other things—the twitter of finches and titmice, for instance, but either they had departed or I had become deaf to them. There was no other sound. Not even a rattle from the last dry leaves clinging to the trees above my head. The sound of the artillery shells became louder and louder, and suddenly I realized that they were exploding on our land, in the remnants of our own grove. We, who had spent what seemed like a lifetime waiting for this war to pass, now found this war passing all too close to our world. Why would anyone turn their guns on our land? Surely there was no army at Carnton.
The two surgeons, each with a little group of attendants, had arrived just as the fighting began. They had taken down two of the interior doors, long, thick slabs of poplar painted in delicate faux mahogany, and transformed them into operating tables lying across hastily fabricated trestles. The first doctor to come through the door was a slight, frowning, bald man with a limp, who trailed dirt across the floor and smelled of ether and horse droppings. He was the one who demanded more bandages after seeing the pile of torn sheets Mariah had laid out in the foyer.
The second doctor moved slowly. He was heavy and old, and his cheeks glowed red in an otherwise pale face.
“Good Lord, Winston, there’s never enough bandages. We’ll run out sooner or later, always do. Calm down.”
The old doctor said this as the little one shook his finger in Mariah’s face, and I was grateful the old man had stepped in. I could see Mariah balling her fists and struggling to keep from frowning.
Their voices echoed against the bare floors and through the empty rooms, and the house seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, as if the walls were moving away and soon I would be lost within them, something small and forgetta
ble. While the surgeons and their staff prepared the house, I had paced around the grounds with my children. John had walked with me for a time and tried to hold my hand, but I would not let it out of the front pocket of my apron, where it was buried. It had been years since we’d walked together without a destination, and I thought it best not to mention this fact. We passed between the garden and the house, through the rows of cedars lining the front walkway, down around the old wing, and past the slave quarters. As we passed the cistern, John looked in.
“They’ll be needing more water, I expect.”
“Yes.”
“Theopolis and I can go to the well and start hauling it up. You can stay here.”
“Of course.”
John put his chin on top of my head and pulled me toward him. I stood stiffly in his arms, and John seemed embarrassed again. He let me go.
“I must get the water.”
I continued to walk around the house grounds, listening to Mariah’s shouts through the open windows. Listen to the man, bring those chairs over here, get me the scissors. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I walked. I didn’t know what I was expected to do next. Lord, give me the wisdom to know what you want from me and the strength to do it. I offered that prayer each time I passed the front door of the house, at least a dozen times.
Then, finally, a husky boy stood at the end of the brick front walkway with his arms around another boy, who leaned hard against him. They couldn’t have been older than fourteen. I walked over to the front of the house, and the two of us—the unhurt boy and I—stared at each other down the corridor of cedars. I would have waved them forward, but I could not bring my hands out of my apron pockets. I stood mute. The boy shouted across the bricks.