The Widow of the South

  On that hot April morning the little officer came to the door without his guards and knocked. I knew that it was Zachariah’s time, and after opening the door and exchanging a few words, I hurried to his room. When I burst through the door of the extra bedroom in the wing, he was leaning on his crutch and looking out the window. He had seen the man ride up, too. I stood still, silent and bereft. He shuffled around on his crutch to face me, and I did not see the fear in his face that I felt for him. He let the corner of his mouth turn up, like he was about to smile but thought it wasn’t appropriate. He cocked his head, and—for the life of me this is true—he looked the charming rake. A rogue. It made me smile, even as I stomped my foot on the floor to get his attention and let him know I was serious. It wasn’t until he reached over and brushed my cheek that I felt the chill of my tears.

  “Might I borrow a comb from you, Mrs. McGavock?”

  A comb? Had he nothing to say to me? I straightened myself and wiped my face and pointed.

  “There’s one in the top drawer of that bureau.”

  He walked over to the bureau and pulled the drawer open. There was an old bone comb in there, one that I had used to untangle Winder’s curls. Zachariah looked at his hand, looked up at me, smiled, and then began to apply spit to his long black hair. He pulled the comb through it, again and again, and I watched the rats’ nest become a smooth stream of black. He put the comb down and hobbled over to the chest where Mariah had placed his folded and clean uniform. I turned and began to walk out of the room, out of modesty and confusion and sadness.

  “Please. I need some help.”

  When I turned around, he had dropped the coveralls I’d given him, which I had modified to accommodate his stump, and stood balanced before me in his long johns. I saw his eyes then. I discovered it was possible to look into a person’s eyes for months at a time and still not know his every shape and expression. I was surprised by how dark they seemed in that moment and how they turned down at the corners as if he would have to fight to make them turn up again. They were so unrelievedly sad. I waited for him to hop over and hold me and tell me he didn’t want to ever leave me, that he would take me with him. I wanted to smell his neck and feel his chest against mine. But he just stood there, looking at me through those weary green eyes, indulging for the moment whatever thoughts were passing behind those eyes, before blinking and trying to smile again.

  He was able to open the chest at the foot of the bed, but he couldn’t stoop down far enough to reach into it. I stepped forward and removed the uniform, placing it on the bed. I could hear his breath, so shallow, when I drew near. That was the last sign I ever saw of his anxiety.

  He picked up his uniform blouse, which looked far too torn and patched to ever wear again, and tugged it on. I watched his fingers work the buttons and was surprised at how graceful they were; I’d become so used to watching him lurch around on his crutch that I’d forgotten he might still possess some grace. Then he sat down on the bed with his trousers in his hand, and I understood that I was to help him put them on.

  I tugged at the pant legs, first by standing in front of him, then by kneeling behind with my arms around him. He had never allowed me to do this for him before.

  When his pants were most of the way on, I went back to standing in front of him and helped him to arrange the pant legs so that they were straight. The remainder of his missing leg had withered so. Touching his two legs was like touching two different men entirely, or catching two glimpses of the man’s future: to shrink and to falter, or to grow strong. I had no inkling what would happen to him, one way or the other.

  He finally stood again, and I will admit that he startled me. You’d think I wouldn’t have forgotten that he was Sergeant Cashwell, but I had. And there he was, those stripes on his arm. He saw me looking at them.

  “I’d rip these off and give them to you, but I might be able to get some money for ’em someday, them being collector’s items. I reckon I might not be seeing much money for a while, so please forgive me.”

  “I wouldn’t want those dirty old things.”

  “I don’t really want ’em, either, truth be told.”

  Zachariah looked over my head, and I turned to see John leaning in the doorway, and I blushed. He didn’t notice, fiddling with the loops on his trousers before he looked up.

  “Do you need anything, Sergeant Cashwell? Do you need money?”

  “I don’t reckon they’ll let me have money, Mr. McGavock.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  They both looked at each other, nodding their heads like heavy branches in a slow wind. I have since noticed that men communicate in this fashion, although I’m not sure how. What I knew was that they looked ridiculous, and yet I was happy that John had apparently come to see Zachariah off.

  We walked down the hall and into the main house, through the dining room and past the wallpaper with its scenes of exotic lands at the edge of my imagination. We turned left in the central passage, and at the door stood the little officer and Mariah, who had kept him waiting in the hall.

  I took Zachariah’s hand, warm and rough, and he gripped my hand tightly. Mariah and John were watching me, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care. When he walked toward the little officer, I went with him. When he stood before the man and surrendered himself as a prisoner, I held on to him. And when he walked out of the house and down the steps, his fingers loosened and pulled along my palm to the ends of my fingers.

  Then they were gone, and the fast-fading feeling of his callused skin on my fingertips was the only thing he’d left behind.

  FROM THE DIARY OF

  MAJOR JONATHAN VAN DER BROECK, U.S.A.

  He was under a sort of parole of honor, without being guarded. He had substantially recovered from his wounds at the time our regiment arrived at Franklin. On our arrival the colonel had handed me an order which directed me to keep track of the Confederates at McGavocks’ and to haul in those who were able to move. I would take a detail of two men, with two ambulances, and go to McGavocks’ every once in a while and take some of the men who were there and bring them to Franklin, for the purpose of being sent to Nashville and thence to the North to some military prison. Due to what I called a clerical oversight, for which I received a good drubbing, one sergeant enjoyed the hospitality at McGavocks’ far longer than any other. When the colonel found out, he ordered me to go immediately and take the man into custody, and so I took an ambulance myself and rode out there. I could have taken some men, but I didn’t think I needed them.

  I went into the house, met the lady of the establishment, and inquired of her for the sergeant, and was informed that he was in another room. I requested the lady to round up the sergeant and to tell him that I desired to see him. She disappeared, and after a little while the sergeant walked into the room on one crutch.

  He was a man of medium stature, thin and rangy, black hair, piercing green eyes that glistened, and looked to be about thirty years old. He was a splendid-looking soldier, even in his battle-torn rags. I stepped forward and briefly and courteously told him of my business. “All right,” he answered, “I reckon I’m ready.”

  We left the house. He moved well on the crutch, and he asked to sit up next to me in the cart, rather than down below. I allowed him this, but warned him that he would have to get into the bed when we approached town for appearance’s sake. When we were up, and I had just taken the reins in my hands, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind waiting a moment. He turned in the seat and looked toward the open front door, which was at some considerable distance and so dark that it was impossible to see anyone inside. Still, he looked and looked. I slapped the reins, and we bumped away along the driveway.

  Before we were out of sight he asked me to stop the cart, and I obliged him. I turned to follow his gaze.

  Everyone had gone back inside—everyone except the lady, who still stood on that high front porch, watching us.

  I slapped the reins. The horses moved off, but he kept
watching that house until we rounded the bend in the driveway and all you could see was part of the upper porch.

  Even without a leg he looked a capable man. If he could survive prison, he’d be better off than most men, I thought. Two days later he disappeared from the custody of the prison detail. One night he was there, the next morning he was gone. I got a good drubbing for that, too.

  B o o k III

  35

  THE GRIFFIN HOMESTEAD

  Becky Griffin grew bigger so slowly that her brother and her father didn’t notice until she was just a month or so from delivering. She had noticed, of course, and hadn’t cared to hide her condition. She had wanted to grow large quickly so that she would have to spend the spring and the summer answering the questions. I loved a boy and a boy loved me, she planned to say, and that’s all she planned to say. She had wanted to declare this much to the world, but the world didn’t notice. Only her father and her brother noticed, and by that time she could barely speak for the pain shooting through her back and the disorientation of her dizzy spells.

  She never told her father the name of the boy. Eli would have recognized him, but she knew he would never be able to give him any name other than Cotton Gin, and that would be guard enough against the revelation of Will’s identity. Now that Will was dead, she had no intention of sharing her child with the Baylors, or even allowing them to know of its existence. She would possess a living part of Will they could never share, and this pleased her. When she wasn’t too light-headed to think, she realized that the Baylors would probably say it was just as well, that the child of trash like her could never be the child of their Will. She knew what would happen if she told her father or her brother about Will Baylor. Soon enough her father would go see Mr. Baylor to ask for help supporting a child the Griffins could ill afford, and Mr. Baylor would likely treat him as a common beggar. She would not, not ever, allow her father to be humiliated like that. He would do it for her, she knew, setting aside whatever pride he had left to help her. She wouldn’t have it. And anyway, she reasoned, they wouldn’t help however hard her father begged.

  Mr. Griffin said no more about the circumstances of her pregnancy after it was clear she would never reveal the name of the father. He said nothing about her morals or her character or her foolishness. She had saved the family when their mother, his wife, had died. How would they have eaten? How would they have stayed together? He owed her these few months of happiness, and he owed her those faint smiles he saw steal across her face when she rubbed her belly.

  Eli couldn’t quit thinking about the man he had met at the farm, the one who called himself Cotton. Instead of considering what he owed Becky, he considered what this Cotton owed them. He minded his father and didn’t badger Becky about it, but in the hot, heavy months of July and August, Eli stole out of the house in just his coveralls and a hat, as if he were going swimming in the creek, and hiked around the countryside and the town trying to catch a glimpse of the man who had done this to his sister. What he would do when he found him, he hadn’t a notion. He knew only that he was angry that his sister and the baby had been left to fend for themselves by that tall, puzzling Confederate with the ridiculous name. He knew his sister had been in love with the man, and perhaps he should have left it at that. But what the hell was love if it meant being used up and left behind? What kind of man in love would do such a thing? Eli soured on the idea of love that summer. He loved his dead mother, his father, and his sister. Only them. All others had best not cross him. Someday he would find this Cotton. In the meantime he watched Becky carefully.

  Becky knew in August there was something gravely wrong. Her back spasmed constantly. She could not stand up for more than a minute without fainting, and her fingers and toes felt tingly and odd. She prayed that God would take her and spare her child and said nothing to Eli or her father. They could do nothing for her, she knew, and she wanted no charity from anyone else. She wanted to deliver this child herself, as her mother had done and her grandmother before. If she could not do that, how could she deserve a child? If she had been in her right mind, she might have asked for help, but the pain had made her stubborn and single-minded. What help she would have would be the help of her family, as bedraggled as it was.

  The baby decided to come into the world on August 29, 1865, whether the Griffins were ready or not. Becky was ready, but knew nothing but pain and more pain. Eli and his father had thought they were ready, but as Eli would write to Carrie much later, what did they know?

  Pa had birthed cattle, and he reckoned it weren’t much different, but it was a hell of a lot different, yes, it was. That baby wouldn’t come out for hours, and the whole damned time Becky was losing blood. For hours she was screaming, and I said to Pa, “Who can help us?” and he said there was nobody. Becky would faint from the pain, and I’d wake her up by splashing water on her, and then she’d push and groan and scream some more, and still that baby wouldn’t come out. And so I tried to think on it for myself. Where could I go for help? And I thought of you, Miss Carrie, but Becky weren’t hearing of it. “Don’t you go bothering her,” she said, again and again. But other than you, there weren’t no one. At least there weren’t no one who would help us.

  Right about that time, just after the war was done with, folks started moving out of this place, going other places where the war hadn’t turned everything to shit. Please pardon my language, but I can’t rightly think of a better word for what this place was like. My best friend, my only friend, Ab, he left. The neighbors on every side of us were gone. There weren’t anyone for miles. I didn’t no more care one damn about that war, or who won it or who lost it or any other damn thing about it. That war had cleared the place out. Don’t you remember how empty it got? I remember looking at all the unworked fields surrounding us for miles, like we was an island in an ocean of scraggly brush and thistle, and thinking that it all looked like someone had died. It looked like death itself out there. It was all around us, and there weren’t no getting out from under it, and all we had was that cabin and those candles and that sister of mine screaming and pleading to God, and there weren’t anything I could do to help her.

  I couldn’t take it no longer after watching my sister for most of a day, and that’s when I left the house and went running for help from you, all the time my sister screaming and cursing and damning me for leaving her. “This is my baby!” she kept on saying, over and over again. So that’s how I came to be standing up there on your porch, crying and trying to put words to the things I’d seen back in our cabin. You didn’t need me to say much, ’cause I could see you understood right when I said the word baby. Next thing I knew, you and me and Mariah were in your cart running your horse hard for our place. I remember you said, “I don’t know what I can do,” and so I said without thinking that she was as wounded as any of the damned soldiers you’d tended the winter before, and you’d been able to help them, so of course you could help Becky unless you got something about helping poor folk and not Confederates. You slapped me good then.

  You remember that it was Mariah what got down on her knees before my sister, like she was praying to her, and tried to turn that baby. I remember seeing her look into my sister’s eyes all fierce and tough, like she was trying to see into that part of Becky that was also fierce and tough. Reckon she didn’t find it, or that part of my sister was all wored out by then.

  You know most of the rest. Mariah delivered that baby with the greasy blue cord around its neck. The boy was already dead when it entered the world, blue as a berry. My daddy cut the cord and laid the boy down on the kitchen table and wrapped him up in some blankets, so that Becky could see him one last time, but she was already screaming again and couldn’t see anything with her eyes pinched so hard shut. Then the blood came, and I could tell by watching you and Mariah do your best to stop her blood that there wasn’t any hope. She didn’t quit bleeding for hours, and by the time she did quit she was white and clammy and talking gibberish. Hot as hell, too. You and Mari
ah laid wet rags on her forehead while my pa and I watched, but there was no cooling her off. You held her hand while she got hotter and hotter and thrashed around in her bed, and you kept holding her hand long after she’d quit thrashing and had passed from this world.

  It makes me feel better that you and Mariah were there with her when she passed. She talked about you two a lot.

  The thing you don’t know is that all the rest of what happened years later, at least my part of it, started that night. We was riding in the cart—you and me and Mariah and Pa—carrying Becky and her baby back to Carnton to be laid out proper. I was sitting between you and Mariah, and Pa was in the back of the cart holding on to Becky and not listening to anything or noticing anything around him. We was coming up around the bend in your driveway when you said this: “Damn him. Damn you right to hell, Will Baylor.” You said it under your breath, I guess thinking that no one was listening to you, but I was listening to you close right after I heard you say “him.”

  You probably didn’t realize that Becky had never told me or Pa the name of her beau. She was prideful in that way, I guess. I thought we’d never get justice after Becky passed, that the man who had killed my sister would never face a reckoning. Then you said those words, and everything became clear to me.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out that Will Baylor had died in the battle. It’s possible he wouldn’t have abandoned my sister had he been alive, but it’s hard to know. He was dead anyway, and so I didn’t have no more business with him. But I watched them Baylors close. I watched them in their fancy clothes and their gleaming carriages pulled by strong and beautiful horses. I watched them get richer, and I watched other people get poorer and more violent and more lonely, and I especially watched that old man, the man who I reckoned had been the one to scare my sister and Will into hiding. I watched him special close, but I didn’t do nothing. What was there to do?