John had gone to see Baylor yet again. He had long since given up on getting back the many acres of land Baylor and the trust company had taken into their possession when we defaulted on John’s loans. There was no question of getting any of our land back, since most of it was already in the process of being divided and let out to any number of poor young soldiers and their younger brides and their skinny hollow-eyed children, all of whom worked the land themselves and gave up part of their takings to Baylor. Every fourth Saturday you’d see a parade of men on mules or in homemade carts plodding toward town, toward Baylor’s store, where they’d settle accounts and buy more equipment and seed. A never-ending cycle. One of the little farms abutted the edge of our property at the railroad track, and sometimes I’d pass by and watch the little, dark, and nervous wife next door tend her beans and pick her squash. She never said hello, and neither did I. I think perhaps I frightened her.
The thing John wanted Baylor to understand was that he was a man of ideas, that despite the poor decision he’d made in buying uniforms and equipment for the Confederate company from Franklin, and paying for it with a loan secured by his family’s land, he could still be counted on to develop profitable ideas that would make them both money if only Baylor would unclench his fist and make the investment. This never happened. I don’t think it was because Baylor could not see that change was coming to Franklin. I believe Baylor simply didn’t want to share the future with a partner. The future was his. The Confederacy owed him.
John rode up to the porch that day, and I could see he was heavy with a burden he didn’t know how to lift off himself. The lines along the outside of his mouth, which had begun to form jowls, were deep and black. He would not look at me, just busied himself with hitching the horse to the balustrade. Finally he looked up, and it was as if his whole face were being pulled from some unknowable force below his feet. He was a sorry sight.
To this day I can’t fathom how he understood that the news he brought from town would send me into a fury. And yet there he stood in his black suit and well-shined boots, rubbing at his baby jowls and looking up at me with watery eyes, like he was a child about to be beaten. Many years later I would appreciate this prescience of his and what it said about his love for me.
“Seen Baylor.”
“Did he decide to take the house, too?”
“He doesn’t want the house.”
“What does he want?”
“He doesn’t want anything. At least not from us.”
I had come to feel like some sort of princess holding court up there on the porch, a sovereign in black sitting tall on her rocking throne while the blue paint of the ceiling boards flaked and the floorboards creaked. This was not how I wanted to act with John, not anymore. I gathered my skirts about me and stood up, still hoping that this conversation could be salvaged and that soon the two of us would be laughing over tales in his office.
“John, let’s go into your office. It’s cooler.”
John looked relieved for a moment, and the lines around his mouth softened. He removed his short hat and wiped the dirty grime from his brow.
“I’ll join you after I’ve put up the horse. Might take a while.”
“I have all the time in the world.”
In the office I paced. I knew John had some dreadful thing to tell me. I thumbed through his collection of Harper’s Weeklys, neatly stacked on the bookshelf, flounced down in the old Jackson rocker, got back up, and finally stretched out upon the small couch, under an old map of Tennessee. The dust rose up when I sat down, and I watched it fill the sun streaks flowing through the tops of the windowpanes and between the slats of the blinds.
John finally came in, having knocked the mud off his boots, and took his seat in the rocker across from me. I expected that he would reach for the decanter on the side table, but he did not. I sighed.
He slipped down like a little boy, until the back of his head rested against the top of the chair. He let his arms flop off the chair arms, and he looked at me with a squint.
“Baylor took me aside and told me he was fixing to plow up his south field and put it back into production, probably more cotton.”
I was not impressed by this revelation.
“So Mr. Baylor will actually do some farming for himself? Bravo for him. I suppose he’s worn out all his tenants by now.”
“In the field between his old gin and the pike.”
“Yes.”
“You understand which field I’m speaking of?”
“I do not.”
John wiped some dust off the knees of his trousers and, with what seemed like great reluctance, finally did reach for the sherry decanter, pouring himself a deep glass. He looked at me and I shook my head. I feared sherry if not taken in just the right mood. I wasn’t in that mood.
He sipped his drink.
“That’s the old Union trench line, Carrie.”
What did I care for a Union or Confederate trench line, or any other scar of those years? What did I care what Baylor did with his piece of the battlefield? I thought to myself, The sooner it’s covered in white bolls, the easier it will be for us all to forget that it once ran with another color, a horrifying, tawdry, final color.
“Well, good for Mr. Baylor again.”
John stood up and walked over to one of the windows, rubbing his finger along the edge of the glass until it moaned and squeaked. He was looking at an old map of Tennessee while he spoke.
“Do you ever wonder what became of all the dead?”
They were taken from here. Taken away in carts and wagons and piled upon makeshift sleds that slipped almost silently over the cold winter mud. I assumed that most of them had been taken home, where the dead had their proper place. Of course, we had enough of our own dead lying in the grove across the yard, and there were those that had been buried in the trench through Baylor’s field. I suppose I believed that the dead would all make their way to similar little cemeteries, in similar groves, sons next to fathers next to mothers. The dead, the incontrovertible proof of failure, had mocked our efforts in those days after the battle. The truth is, I had sometimes stood by and watched the piles of men hauled off, and wished them a safe journey to the end of the earth. I hadn’t thought all of that through, not then.
“I assume most were taken home.”
John put his finger on the glass of the framed map and traced the meandering of the Mississippi.
“Many were.”
“Many.”
“Some.”
My breathing came harder and my face flushed, as it always did when I began to feel unmoored, or upon the discovery that there was yet another thing under the sun that I had not understood. Or both. John continued.
“A negligible number, really, from what I understand. The Union got their dead out of town, but they didn’t take them very far, just as far as the new cemeteries in Nashville and Murfreesboro.”
“That is a shame.”
“What kind of shame?”
“That they didn’t see fit to send those boys back to their homes.”
“How would they have done that?”
“By rail, horse, boat. There would have been so many ways. And why are we talking about this?”
John snorted out his nose and kept touching his precious map. He was beginning to irritate me.
“You know what bodies smell like after a few days? You can’t drag it wherever it came from without packing it in salt and coal, at least, and even then it’s a mighty queer affair. But I can assure you, no one went to that kind of trouble for our dead or their dead. No one ever did that, not during the entire war. Men stayed where they dropped, most of them.”
“So where are they? Where are all those men they hauled from here?”
My mind drifted. I imagined the dead beneath my feet, under the floorboards, in Hattie’s garden. Where were they hiding? I looked out the window past John’s shoulder and imagined that every tree protected a man lying at its feet, every hill a hill of
bones. They could be anywhere.
“There were many more dead than were taken away from our house, Carrie. Thousands more. You saw only a few, the ones who had been able to leave the battlefield with breath in them. You never met the men who never left the field.”
It is possible to know something without ever understanding it. I had known that many more had died than had died here, because I had heard the numbers. Five thousand dead, six thousand dead, countless dead. Had I bothered to spend much time with those numbers, to divine their meaning, I would have understood the full cost of that November day. But I had not bothered until just then, with John’s back to me and a forest of trees waving at me through the window, each tree grasping and reaching toward me. Thousands more. It was incomprehensible. John turned back to me, and my face must have flushed, because he went over to the sideboard and poured me a little whiskey. Stronger medicine.
“Are you all right?” he asked as he handed me the glass.
“I am taken aback by my own ignorance.”
“Good. So you understand the problem.”
“I understand that my little part was so small and insignificant as to be almost worthless.”
“That isn’t what I meant, and it isn’t true. I won’t have you pouting.”
“I don’t pout.”
“The thing you have to understand is that those men, the thousands of men who died here in Franklin, they’re still here. Dead, but still here. And most of them, including the ones who died here, are lying under a couple of feet of dirt in Baylor’s field, Carrie, and he’s planning to plow it under.”
I imagined the plow going through those bones, crunching them up and turning them into fertilizer. I got up and poured another glass of whiskey and kept my hand on the center table, steadying myself. These boys.
“The thing is, it isn’t going to go over well, this plan of his. No, sir. There are people in this town who won’t let that happen, and they aren’t the sort to send a negotiating party out to the Baylors’ to parlay. There could be a fight. The way some of those men are, what they talk about, down in Baylor’s own damned store. It isn’t possible that he could do it without stirring up the snakes.”
“Who buried them?”
“Oh God, Carrie, would you stay with me for one moment? That doesn’t matter.”
“Matters to me.”
I finished my whiskey.
“What matters is that I don’t know why, but I think that Baylor is stirring things up on purpose. He don’t need that field. He’s got something else going, and I can’t figure it out.”
John went back to his seat, and we sat watching each other. I seemed to be getting drunk, which was a relatively rare experience for me. The air seemed slow and old, and I wished John had opened the window when he was standing by it. The house seemed unimaginably ancient right then, and me along with it. I watched John’s Adam’s apple as he swallowed his sherry. He switched to the whiskey, too, and then sat back down where I could watch him some more. The war was over, what were we doing worrying over the men who had died in it? They had no worries, surely.
And yet I could not shake the feeling that all that we had done in this house in those days—the healing and the comforting and the cleaning and the death watches—that they weren’t real, that they’d been figments of imagination, and that the only solid evidence of what we had done was lying in that field, rebuking me for failing them. I had already failed them, so they would not expect me to save them from Baylor’s plow.
Save them from the plow. It was ridiculous and none of my business.
“How were they buried?”
“How should I know? It’s not important.”
I had been resting my feet on a little footstool that Martha had decorated. I pulled them off and placed them firmly on the ground and leaned forward. Very unladylike. John was scratching at his ear. He had lost interest in me for the moment. I could almost see his nose getting liquor red, second by second.
“It’s the most important thing, John.”
It still amuses me to remember the look of alarm on his face. It was his own fault, I have to say.
That evening, an hour or so before sunset, I took Mariah down to the pike. We rode in the horse cart and took the long way out to the road so that John wouldn’t be awakened from his nap. I didn’t tell Mariah why we were going, but I suspect she knew before I even asked her. This is how she had always been since we were little girls, aware of things before anyone else.
It didn’t take us long to travel up the pike and then strike out across the field, until we were in a low spot a few hundred yards across from Baylor’s old gin. Grasshoppers flew into the air away from us. I noticed how their wings glowed in the waning light; and the farther they receded, the more they seemed just small points of light until finally they were doused in the taller grass far away. We sat still, and when the grasshoppers ended their flights, it was as if they’d never been there at all.
Mariah wasn’t watching. She was staring straight ahead, and in my shadow her face seemed unnaturally dark. She knew why we were there, and she had no interest in any of it. I felt sad for her, and not because I was going to make her do something she’d rather not do. I felt no compunction about that. I felt sad for her because I knew she was thinking of her son.
“He’ll be all right, Mariah.”
“Ma’am?”
“Theopolis. He’ll be all right.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I believe it.”
“Well, I don’t believe it.”
“Chances are, he’ll stay right where he is and make his shoes, and that will be the end of it.”
“I don’t see that. Don’t see that at all. I see much worse.”
“You’re a pessimist.”
She turned toward me. She had hate upon her face, and it scared me.
“All I know is, you-all fighting that same war over and over and over again. One white man think he ought to do one thing, and another think he ought to do some other thing, and they all gone to make life hell for everyone else. You tell me how the sense in any of that.”
“There isn’t. I see that.”
“We here because that old man gone to plow up this field, and you can’t stand it. Can’t stand it. So you drag the nigger along to help you and protect you and tell you what you want to know.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Oh hell. Whip me, then. We gone on too long, Miss Carrie, for you to tell me my place. I known my place since I was a little girl. More than you knew.”
“Stop it.”
“We here because you gone fight with a man over what he want to do with his own land, where there buried hundreds of white men who ain’t done one damned thing for me or mine ever. If they’d had their way, my son wouldn’t have no cobbler shop. But you got to have everything just so, and you can’t stand that you didn’t save every one of them boys, that you didn’t come close even. Truth is, you just like all the rest of the white folk: you think everything what happens is because you did or didn’t do something. That Mr. Baylor, he think the same thing. He think he got to meddle and get people stirred up, elsewise the town ain’t going to be the town he wants. He wants power, like all you-all, and don’t tell me that coming down here to visit these dead men ain’t about power. Who got the power to do what they want with them bones? You been sitting up there on that porch for two years, thinking you done right and good, and then along come this man with his plow, and you got to do it all over again, and you got to drag me along with you. But you did do right; you don’t got to do right again. Who says it ain’t God’s plan for these dead boys to stay here in this field and get plowed over and ground to dust? You got that much power, Miss Carrie? You that rich? You know what God wants?”
I could think of nothing to say to that outburst except something silly and beside the point.
“We’re not rich.”
“You don’t have money, don’t mean you ain’t rich still.
”
She misunderstood me, but I couldn’t help that. I moved the cart forward a little to watch the grasshoppers fly again. They disappeared like little memories.
I did want to have everything set right, but I thought I knew something about men she didn’t know. I knew that if a man like Baylor plowed that field, it would never be forgiven by others. Itself an act of violence, the plowing would breed more violence. It would be a challenge, and the men who would rise to Baylor’s challenge were the more terrifying. They were the defeated and the bitter, and there were so many of them. Mariah was right that we fought that war over and over and over again. I just didn’t see why I ought to sit by and let another skirmish erupt when I could stop it. I did not know how I would stop it. That was my dilemma.
“I don’t know what to do, Mariah.”
“Let’s ride home, Miss Carrie.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know these men. I’ve read about them, in my letters. They are not strangers to me. I just need to know what they want.”
Mariah reached up and felt my forehead for fever. She sat back in her seat and chuckled. I’d heard that chuckle before. She thought I was crazy.
“They ain’t got much to say, Miss Carrie.”
“Then let’s just walk around the field a little bit and hear what they’re not saying.”
She knew what I was asking. She’d known it all along, and she’d been trying to postpone it. She always tried to postpone it, ever since she was a little girl and I found out about her sight. Could she see the dead? I never knew. I only knew that she took the dead more seriously than anyone I’d ever known, and what she thought she saw when in their presence was real to her. Perhaps these were only the wispy last bits of the fog I imagined souls to be, a fog that dissipated with time. Like memory, only more vivid.