The Orphan Mother

  Chapter 29

  Tole

  July 31, 1867

  On muggy days, the forests just outside of Franklin were rife with gnats and mosquitoes. Tole was used to the woodlands, to hiding in heavy brush or behind tall oaks wide as mud wagons. The smell of the dirt was made thick by the humid summer air. He had learned how to stalk quietly, how to keep his boots from crunching on leaves. He knew how to step, how to breathe, all without making a sound. That was the part about killing most sharpshooters didn’t get: you have to learn how to be invisible, and nobody knew how to disappear like George Tole.

  A few hundred feet ahead of him, Aaron Haynes was sawing a big white oak. A white boy from Hillsboro, a village just outside Franklin, Aaron, like his daddy, was a lumberman. He had a reddish, auburn beard like his daddy, too. Tole had heard that Dale Haynes was the best damn lumberman in the state. His wood had made the cannon wheels and the barracks for the Confederacy, had built towns where the boys in gray were raised, and when it came time for them to die, his wood had made their caskets, too.

  Tole had also heard that Aaron wasn’t the lumberman his daddy was. No head for business, he’d heard. And no head for the sawmill either—he had only two fingers on his left hand. He’d lopped the other three off in a sawmill accident.

  Tole remembered Aaron’s disfigured hand from the courthouse square, how the lumberman took his punches with his right hand. When he threw a bottle at Theopolis, he used his right hand, again—holding his left out awkwardly. The awkwardness marked him in Tole’s rifle sights.

  And Tole remembered this: bearded, friendly Aaron Haynes had kicked Theopolis in the ribs and in the mouth until the boy was spitting blood and tooth and flecks of bitten tongue onto the stage, clearly visible in the rifle’s sights. Tole knew he’d never forget that auburn beard. That grin.

  Today Haynes was working with a team of other lumbermen, but he’d gotten separated from them—they were behind him, down in the valley, and he’d gone on ahead to mark the next big stand of timber.

  Around the two-mile mark Haynes’s footsteps veered right, along a rougher track. A handsaw rasped, cutting deep.

  Killing in the wild had a natural order to it. Tole crouched down behind a scrub oak, peering through the mess of twigs, his pistol held close. Ol’ GT was strapped to his back, but he didn’t think he’d need the big rifle.

  Haynes was there, his back to him, twenty yards away, sawing on a tree, not looking around, not noticing Tole even when he stood just ten yards behind him, only half hidden by a little paw-paw. The tree swayed above Haynes, swaying more as the saw bit deeper; and then all the leaves trembled and there was a moment when everything stood still, Haynes stopped his saw and the tree stopped its trembling; and then like a gasp it was falling, collapsing forward into a roaring mass of leaves and branches and snapping boughs. At that exact moment, Tole took his shot, the pistol’s echo lost in the tree’s death roar.

  Haynes let out a guttural scream and reached down to grab his leg.

  The shot must’ve blown a hole straight through Haynes’s right calf, Tole thought. Precisely where he’d intended. He looked around to make sure they were still alone, listened for yells and rushing footsteps, but heard none. In a moment he loomed over Haynes, who was bent over, scrabbling, looking at the wound. He probably didn’t even realize he’d been shot.

  Tole put the pistol up against the back of Haynes’s head, the cock of the trigger suddenly loud and terrible. “Don’t you move another inch, son.”

  Haynes froze, blood slipping down his leg, pooling in the leaf mold.

  “Mr. Haynes, here’s how this gonna go. I’m gone to ask you a few questions and you gone help me understand a few things. I don’t want to drag this out, hear?”

  Haynes nodded vigorously.

  “Just so’s you and me understand each other, just want you to know that if you start shouting and carrying on, I will shoot you in the head. You understand me?”

  Again, nodding.

  “Sit down. Against the stump there.”

  Haynes crawled to the newly made stump, put his back into it. He cupped his hands protectively around his calf.

  “Listen now. You and I have a friend in common,” Tole said. “We’re both in business with a man named Elijah Dixon. You know a man named Elijah Dixon, don’t you?”

  Haynes’s lips trembled through the forest of his beard. His eyes darted back and forth but didn’t meet Tole’s. “No, no I don’t.”

  Tole lifted the butt of his gun and bashed him in the jaw. Haynes’s head flew back. Tole carefully placed the tip of the pistol under his chin, where it disappeared into the beard, and raised his head for him. “I’ll give you the one because we aren’t acquainted, but you only get the one.”

  “The one?”

  “You lie to me again and you’ll be dead before you finished talking.”

  Sweat poured down Haynes’s face. “I do know him,” he whispered. “Everybody knows him, so what?”

  “You call him a friend?”

  Haynes nodded yes. “He know my daddy since they was kids.”

  “That’s real nice,” Tole said. “Mr. Haynes, do you know the name Theopolis Reddick? Don’t answer. I know you do. Theopolis was my neighbor. He was also that poor nigger you damn near beat to death in the courthouse square about a month back. You remember almost beating a poor nigger to death, Mr. Haynes?”

  Haynes nodded. “I—I didn’t kill him. I swear.”

  “No, I know you didn’t. See, I was there that day, too. I watched you beat on him. I remember you in particular. You hit him over the head with a bottle. Broke that bottle right over him. I saw that, son. You could’ve killed him fast, but that ain’t no fun now, is it? Ain’t no fun unless the nigger suffers.”

  “That ain’t how it was.”

  “Yes that is how it was. That’s exactly how it was. You beat a poor shoemaker so there weren’t nothing left of him.” Tole paused, his voice and eyes full of Mariah. Then: “You need to tell me who your friends are. I want names. You tell me who else was there that day in the square.”

  “I don’t know nothing.”

  Tole pushed the pistol up farther, bent Haynes’s head back so all Tole could see was that beard, pointing up to the sky. Haynes struggled to stay upright, thrashing with his hands. Spots of blood sprayed in the leaves. “I told you not to lie to me.”

  “Please, God, no!”

  “You gonna tell me right now who else was there that day in the courthouse square. There was a whole gang of you boys with blood on your hands, and I wanna know every single one of their names.”

  “I said I don’t know!”

  In a movement so quick that Tole didn’t even see it himself, the pistol came off the chin and pointed down to Haynes’s other foot. Tole pulled the trigger.

  A mess of smoking leather and blood and flesh, and a hole appeared where his foot had been. Haynes wailed into the trees. “James!” he screamed. “He threw the first bottle! Not me!”

  “What James’s last name?”

  Aaron’s teeth chattered.

  “Mayberry.”

  “James Mayberry. Where can I find him?”

  “West Margin Street. I hear he still lives with his mom. Beyond that, I don’t know where. I swear on my life.”

  Tole replaced the gun under Haynes’s chin. “All right, all right. You done good. Sorry about your foot there.”

  Aaron shook, holding each wound with each hand. “My goddamn legs!” He sobbed, spitting and crying and heaving. “How’m I going to get out of here?”

  “First you gotta get through this. Then we’ll figure out how to get you out. Who else? I want names. All of them.”

  The names came:

  Joshua Knight from out toward Garrison.

  Samuel Shaw, who hung around the factory store.

  Bill Crutcher out toward the grove.

  Daniel Whitmore from Hen Peck Lane.

  When the names had all rolled out and Tole had memorized
them, he said, “Thank you. Just so you understand, Mr. Haynes, that boy’s mama deserves justice. She thinks she’s gonna get it from a court. Thinks those white men are gonna listen to the word of some nigger who spent more than half her life as a slave, polishing silver and waiting on the white folks.”

  Blood was leaking steadily between Haynes’s fingers, especially from the leg. Probably hit an artery, Tole thought. Haynes’s pants leg wicked up more blood, red creeping upward into the homespun.

  “Truth is, Mr. Haynes, justice ain’t a thing you ask for, it’s a thing you take.”

  And then another deafening blast of Tole’s pistol echoed through the rough Middle Tennessee forest that went on for miles and miles and miles. By the time the rest of the felling gang finally heard that last shot and went looking for Haynes, Tole was long gone.

  Chapter 30

  Letter

  July 31, 1867

  I may be wrong. Dixon’s buying up far more land than he could ever need for a railroad. I need to know what the land is really for, and where he’s getting the money. So here are your instructions for burgling his office, as I promised: look for deeds of trust, stock certificates, ledgers, records of sale, and bank notes. He will have hidden them, I trust you’re familiar with the places men hide their valuables. Be prepared.

  If you are arrested I will have you killed before you can speak, but if you succeed you will be a very rich man indeed.

  JB

  Chapter 31

  Mariah & Tole

  August 1, 1867

  Mariah kept thinking about a day she had once spent with Theopolis. She remembered wearing her favorite tattered linsey-woolsey dress that she wore for washing days. The coarse fabric had grown so soft from the years that it felt on her skin like the silks and velvets that Carrie McGavock hung in her own closet.

  Mariah had been hanging out the laundry, feeling oddly like a queen in her stained and worn shift, and Theopolis, six or seven years old, maybe, had been playing down in the ravine with some of the other slave children—and, quite possibly, some of the McGavock children as well—and he’d come running up to her, laughing, out of breath, in the middle of some chase. He’d grabbed her skirts and pulled himself behind her, hiding. Distantly the children’s shouts and calls floated out to them.

  Her son’s small hands gripped tight to the folds of her dress. She looked up, pointing into the sky. “You see that cloud there?” she asked Theopolis. “That’s where your daddy went. That’s where he lives now.” Theopolis followed her gaze up into the clouds, which glowed brighter than clouds should, as if lit by candles hidden inside them. He still held tight to her rough homespun dress, and his voice was clear: “I miss my daddy.”

  “I miss him, too,” Mariah said absently and went to pull Theopolis close, but he’d released her and was running off again, down to the ravine, where his playmates shouted and called his name.

  Now Mariah lay abed, thinking. She never saw her son’s face in the dream—his head was bent, or his back was to her, or she didn’t think to look down. He’d been right there, and she never thought to look down. We never think to look down, she thought. We’re always looking ahead or looking behind, but never see what’s standing right beside us.

  She wondered if it was true, her missing Bolen Reddick, her dead husband. He’d been dead for nine years; sometimes she had trouble remembering him. Colonel John had bought him in Montgomery, brought him back to help train the horses. He’d been kind, and the right age, and it seemed right to marry him when he’d asked. Had she loved him? She couldn’t remember. Love often seemed like a luxury to her, something not quite essential, what with laundry always needing to be done and the washerwoman never reliable, and the cook who’d get into sulks if she wasn’t complimented on her roasts, and the gardener boy who’d avoid weeding the patches in the corners of the flowerbeds if you didn’t stand right behind him and make him do it properly. How could love blossom or even exist, confronted with weedy flowerbeds and dirty laundry?

  She sat up. No tears, just a calm silence and the sounds of the outside wind blowing through an open window. She hadn’t allowed herself to think much about Theopolis, but she did see him now, and there he was a ghost following her in her thoughts. It was time she stopped ignoring him.

  * * *

  After supper, she took the horse-drawn cart from Carnton down to Franklin, bumping over rocks and potholes and wishing she’d just walked. She tied up the cart near Theopolis’s house. Mariah would put the house up for sale sometime—perhaps sell it to some young Negro couple from the country, perhaps with a baby of their own. She liked the idea of a family living there. Her shaking hand gripping the railing for support, she walked herself up the few steps to the front door. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stepped inside. It was empty and her shoes were heavy on the wooden floorboards.

  There was no trace of Theopolis anywhere, but Mariah remembered the day he moved in, how proud he was to have his own house. She remembered he kept forgetting little things from home, shoes and cooking tools, and each time, he would have to come back. Mariah thought maybe he was forgetting on purpose, afraid to leave home. But he had not been afraid.

  Carrie was right. The ghosts and the pain didn’t lessen by confronting them, but they did grow more bearable—as if you yourself got bigger, able to hold more grief.

  * * *

  On the way back to the dogcart she paused. George Tole, she knew, lived somewhere nearby. There, that house. Just up the way. She marched up the three steps to the tiny porch and banged on his door. Immediately she hoped he wasn’t home.

  Footsteps sounded from inside, and a moment later the door opened. Tole stood there, one hand in his pocket.

  “Mariah, you all right? Somethin’ the matter?” Plainly he was startled to see her.

  “I was visiting Theopolis’s house, thought I’d say hello before heading back.”

  “You want to come in?” He opened the door more fully.

  “Thank you,” she said, and did.

  “Coffee?”

  “No thanks. Just being neighborly and saying hello.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Mariah saw the model town sprawled out before her, and she moved toward it, gasping, amazed.

  Tole walked up behind her, shyly, as if embarrassed. “It’s just something I do to pass the time, that’s all.”

  She’d heard talk of this tiny town, fashioned from carved wood and pieces of glass and bits of trash, but had no idea of its scale. All around her and hanging from the ceiling were tiny figurines carved from wood and twigs or molded from melted wax and glue; old pieces of tin and copper, some of them welded together and painted, sloppily, but there was a beauty to it. In the center of the room, square in the middle of the floor so it was impossible to walk directly from one side to the other, lay the entire town of Franklin, miniaturized and bastardized, splayed out as if seen from above, from a great distance, from God’s own view.

  She wondered how a man who barely knew the town at all could know it so well. She stepped closer, gazing down Church Street, studying the roof of the Thirsty Bird Saloon on a tiny, winding block of Almond Street, the colored grocery on Fourth Avenue, the small park where she had sat with Theopolis so many afternoons, handing him stale bread from Carrie’s pantry to feed the birds. She could hear her younger self call out to him: Careful, baby, don’t get too close now!

  In the courthouse square, a tiny stage no bigger than a playing card had been erected, and on that stage sat a tiny wax figure, painted black, maybe with tar; he was sitting beside another figure, this one painted much lighter.

  Mariah wiped the sweat from her face. “How long this take you to build, Mr. Tole?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Guess I been workin’ on it some months now. Off and on. Started when I moved to town. Could be over six months now or so. Not too long.”

  “It’s a powerful thing.” Her eyes followed a miniature horse pulling a miniature cart down a miniature Main Stree
t, where they’d just installed the miniature streetlights. The businessmen’s bowler hats were constructed from what looked like tiny metal thimbles, melted down and polished. Almost unconsciously she looked for Army men, to see which uniform they would wear, blue or gray. She couldn’t find one. She looked closer.

  “I don’t see any Army boys. You forget to put ’em in?”

  “No ma’am. I didn’t forget.”

  “I wondered if you’d put them in blue or in gray.”

  “I wouldn’t put them in either. Wouldn’t have an army here.”

  She skirted the wall, surveying the—what was it, sculpture? art? a crazy unbelievable anomaly?—town from another angle. Miniature schools, barber’s parlor, taverns. Miniature churches bristled with toothpick steeples.

  Yet something was off. It took her a moment to realize what the issue was: miniature trees grew in places that should have held buildings. The police station. The jail. Both missing. Miniature trees grew there. Where the old jail should have been, Tole had carefully designed a garden park.

  Perhaps Tole had simply forgotten to add them. Maybe, she thought, he was working from an old map, before the jail was built. In the corner, by the trees he’d built with wax and sticks, she saw a man painted black and a smaller man, most likely a boy, sitting beside him. A man and his son, perhaps.

  And then, only then, it struck her. She realized what she was looking at. It wasn’t a miniature. And then she realized this wasn’t a replica of Franklin as it was; it was Franklin as it could be. In a better world, a more just world, maybe in a different time.

  “It’s beautiful, Mr. Tole.” Tears pricked at her eyes, old fool that she was. “Seems like such a happy place. Doesn’t seem to matter how much killin’ and sorrow goes on. I want to remember it just this way.”

  “Good.”

  “You think a place like this could ever exist, Mr. Tole?”