The Orphan Mother (17 page)

July 28, 1867

The stars made the mud puddles shine, but he walked straight through them, coming back from working with Hooper, who had dropped him on the road past Carnton. They'd gone to some outlying farms collecting junk and making whiskey deliveries, and now Hooper had headed off to the woods while Tole returned to the light and flash of Franklin. All was dark and he was bone-weary.

And then the voice came out of the grove next to the road and nearly made him drop dead right there. He reached for his knife and flashed it.

“You'll get my son's boots dirty and wrecked, you keep doing that.”

Mariah
.

“You should put that knife away, too, ain't polite.”

She took his arm, turned him around, and walked with him. His heart calmed. He kept walking and she kept walking, and soon he knew where they were going—back toward Carnton, back to Mariah's small two-story brick cabin behind the main house. They took their time walking there.

The shadows from the stars and the moon wavered on Mariah's face, which seemed boundless. When she spoke again, it was as if she had already been talking to him for hours. It seemed as if he'd heard these words before, carved somewhere in some nameless place inside him that only she could reach. “It ain't enough to know that my boy been killed, by accident or by purpose, and that it was some kind of white men who done it,” she said. “Who don't already know that? No one got to be told that.”

“Always the white man at the heart of it,” he agreed.

“But,” Mariah said, “it's better to know
for sure
than to wonder. Wondering gets to worrying, and that gets to poison, poison like anger. Eat you up. Eat me up.”

“True.”

“He was a good boy.” She paused, corrected herself. “Wasn't a boy. A man. A good man.”

Tole saw a sky of stars and noticed how they painted her gray and flat. She looked old, suddenly, and bent. “He was.”

“Ain't paid attention to his mama, though,” Mariah said. Tole watched her. Did she smile when she said that? Her mouth turned up at the corner.

“What you tell him?”

Mariah looked up, wide-eyed. “What I tell him?” She shook her head and looked back down again. Tole watched her shoulders slump forward. The night was silent and cold around them. “I told him not to go speak in front of men, to keep himself down and happy and safe. I told him the world wasn't ready for him, and that it was dangerous.”

“He be alive today, if he listen to his mama.”

“Maybe he would.”

For a moment the only sound was their feet, scuffing through the dust and weeds. Carnton loomed over them, then behind them, and they circled the porch, the boxwoods smelling rich and sad. The ground sloped down, and Mariah's cabin sprang up before them, a light glimmering in the downstairs windows.

“I was right,” Mariah agreed, opening the door and letting him in before her. One candle burned on the table, with a scent Tole couldn't quite place but that smelled sharp, something he could feel in the back of his nose.

“But,” Mariah said, now staring holes into the floor, her eyes bright and hard and aflame. “I weren't right. And he knew that, and he smiled at me when he left me the last time and said he hoped I would come to hear him speak. But I didn't even have
that
much courage, to go hear him. I can never know what he sounded like up there, giving his speech and making his arguments and doing his preaching. I never saw him. I only saw him dead.”

“He was good, Mariah. Real good. Better than a preacher.” Theopolis had never had a chance to speak—the crowd had begun to riot around the time he took the stage. Even if he had spoken—and Tole knew that he had tried, he'd watched the boy's lips move—Tole had been too far away, too high up, to hear a word. But even so, perhaps the young man had been changing the world with his voice. Tole didn't know, but he wanted Mariah to think it anyway.

“I was wrong. He might have lived and I still been wrong. I might have been happy and wrong, I might have had my boy and been wrong, I might have kept to my ways with everything undisturbed and been wrong, and wrong again, and wrong some more.”

“You a mama, what you gonna say?”

“I'm a
woman
!” Mariah hissed it. “I'm a grown woman, a real person and not half a one, and so are you. We are real people. No matter what was past and where we was and how we used to think. Real people speak up and do what they can, and the rest in God's hands. Real people speak on two feet and are heard, in heaven and below. Real people made in God's image, breathed into by that God when we was clay, just like the rest of 'em. We got our own powers.”

Powers. Did Tole have power, any power beyond that of a rifle and a finger squeezing gentle on a trigger? Was there anything else, intrinsic and deep inside him, that would call out to the world and make it different? “Yes ma'am,” he said to her. “We got our powers. Amen.”

Mariah shook her head. “I ain't preaching, I just saying. I was wrong and Theopolis was right, even if he died after being right. Not
because
he was right. He wasn't punished for being right. Not one of them men said to theyselves, ‘Let's kill the nigger, he so right about all them things.' He was punished because men are small, the world of men is twisted and fallen, and ain't of God, and they don't think and do as God, and so what? That's the truth and ain't no getting around it. But it don't mean my boy shouldn't speak, stand up and speak as a man. The thing I hate the most is I never heard him.”

Neither of them spoke.

“And,” Mariah said, finally leaning back and stretching her neck, as if she had just let a weight fall from around it, “the thing I hate almost as much is that them white men going to come here and not give one goddamn about my boy's dying. They won't care for who he was no matter what. They won't even
hear
about him, except as ‘the Negro boy,' and that make me angry. We free now. We not slaves. We not
property.
”

He could sense she'd been circling what she'd sought him out for, circling it like a pack of wolves would head off a deer, or a fox anticipate the frantic, desperate leapings of a hare.

“Somethin' about that man chills my blood,” Mariah said. “Always has.”

“Who?”

“Elijah Dixon.”

“Why?”

“I remember seein' the way he held each of his babies the first time. He just has the blankest eyes. He smiles, says all the right things a new father supposed to. But his eyes—they just dead.”

Tole understood, but he lied, told her he never much paid attention to the man's eyes.

“I heard something about him. About him and my boy.”

Tole was quiet. Here it would come. She knew. She knew of Dixon, and him. He knew this would come out, and accepted it, but he hadn't anticipated the fierce love of Mariah and her fearless pursuit of the truth. He had long ago accepted that he was a dead man, and his actual time of dying was just a matter of luck and happenstance. But he never thought his consequences would become Mariah's. She was too brave for her own good.

“I heard that Mr. Elijah Dixon set up the whole thing.”

“Killing your boy?”

“Yessir. Loud and clear. Seems my boy wasn't the real target—he was mad that his boys killed the only good cobbler in town, I heard. But Mr. Dixon was the one who arranged everything. The magistrate is the big man who's killing niggers and white boys who get in his way.”

“You have proof?” Tole asked.

“No.” A pause. “I know it was him and half a dozen other men. That Aaron Haynes out in Hillsboro was one, and Bill Crutcher was another. Not sure who the others are.”

“Why?” It seemed an awfully small word for such a question.

“Money,” Mariah said. “Always is.”

Tole thought about the letters from Bliss.

“One of them took a gun and shot him,” Mariah said, thinking out loud. “It was one of them. They might have come to shoot some other poor bastard, but it was my son they shot.”

“You sure?”

“I'm sure. I feel it in my bones.”

Tole watched her face as if each twitch and wrinkle could tell him whether she knew the whole truth. He prayed she didn't.

But hadn't them white men done the killing, really? They were the guilty ones, not him. They had been beating the boy to death. He remembered the pattern of blood down the side of Theopolis's face, where a broken bottle had hit him.

Mariah was speaking, barely audible, as if it were a struggle: “I'm scared, Mr. Tole.”

His eyes softened. “I didn't think you were scared of nothing.”

“I wanted this tribunal. I wanted justice. But I know men like Dixon. I know they won't let such a thing happen, and they won't hesitate to kill a worthless old nigger like me to keep themselves high up on that hill.” She was right, and Tole didn't say anything.

“I'm scared. I can't lie about that. But I want justice. I want those men who killed my son to be punished. But they won't be, and I don't think I can live with that.”

And at that moment the path before George Tole became clear.

They were kin, Tole and Mariah—the killer and the midwife. Death and birth, both began and ended in blood and pain and, most of the time, in hope. They were alike in this way.

If Mariah could hear that thought rattling around in his head, she would laugh at him while cutting it out with a dull blade. And yet this is what he thought: that he belonged to her, like he was a part of her. They had been matched by the same mysterious Creator, that indifferent and inscrutable God that had amused himself by making him, a killer to the bone, into a tender of Confederate graves, and by causing this grave-tender to lose his mind over a woman who breathed life into the world while he snuffed it out. Tole knew what he needed to do.

“You ain't got nothing to be scared of, Mariah. Those men, whoever they are, ain't got no reason to bother you.”

“Not worried about them bothering me. Worried about them finding justice.”

“They'll have justice,” Tole said.

“You're an optimistic man,” Mariah said. “Too optimistic I reckon. But maybe, when you're riding with Hooper, you'll hear things. And if you hear any names, if you learn who those men are with Mr. Dixon, you tell me, you hear?”

He knew he would get those names. He would get them and never tell Mariah he knew them.

“What good will having those names do you, Mariah?” he said. “If you can't believe they gone get justice, then what use you got in having their names?”

“Because I ain't going to be grieving
and
ignorant. At least I will know the truth, and that's the thing people like me ain't never get from white people. Never the truth, never the whole truth. And maybe if I have the whole truth and can say it out loud in front of people, then maybe I'll be free.”

Neither of them spoke. And then, finally, Tole said, “I have some ideas. I think I have some ideas.” He reached over and placed his hand on hers, and she turned her hand so it was palm up, warm in his grasp. They sat like this for a long time, neither of them moving, both bound by grief and sorrow and a desperate desire to, just once, make things right.

Tole would find those men for her. He would bring them justice. He would bring them a reckoning beyond what them white men from Nashville could hand out if they were so inclined. And they would
not
be so inclined, he suspected. This justice, this reckoning, required blood. He would get that justice, and would probably die doing it, but he would get it for her.

When he awoke in the very early morning in his own cabin, surrounded by his underworld made of wood and glue and string, he couldn't remember the long trek back to Franklin, couldn't remember coming in the door, but could see the muddy footsteps. Songbirds sang, brittle in the cold predawn light. He had slept the easier, dreamless sleep of the almost-forgiven.

July 30, 1867

First, Tole decided the swig of sharp whiskey he'd had on the porch with Hooper would be his last. He was three days sober, which was three days longer than he'd gone in years. Since the war, he had been sober only one other time, just after Miles died, those first couple of weeks when he couldn't bring himself to even look at a bottle. He'd thought, then, with the optimism of the damned, that perhaps he'd never have another drink his entire life.

And then the terrible dreams—that one terrible dream—began. The same dream every night: him in a dark shed, building a baby's crib with pieces of lumber he'd found on the side of the road. But when he finished, what he held was a coffin. He could feel the warmth of the coffin's wood as he pushed it toward the shallow hole.

The night of Miles's ninth birthday, just a few weeks after they buried him, Tole started drinking again.

And here he was now, trying again. He doubted any man had failed at getting sober as many times as he had. He knew the first few days were the hardest, and he was well past that point. His hands were shaking less. He stopped choking up blood and vomit into the bucket next to his bed. He started aiming a bit straighter, steadier. He knew if he could make it past that first few days, he might be able to call himself a sober man.

In the park by the Presbyterian church, he'd seen the old minister having lunch now and again, usually sitting alone on a wooden bench, throwing crumbs to pigeons. And while Tole wasn't one for church, he had some questions he needed answered, reckoned maybe he ought to have a talk with God, one last time, before he saw about what he'd planned for next—seeking revenge for Theopolis Reddick.

In the tree-softened streets, with a light breeze painting the leaves, the park felt becalmed, peaceful, out of time. The minister had a mouthful of chicken when Tole reached the bench, and Tole removed his hat and waited.

“Can I help you?”

“Yous a priest?”

“Minister,” he corrected. “Something troubling you?”

“Your church here, it let Negroes inside?”

“No. Your church is down the street, in the Bucket.”

Tole stood, waiting.

“But perhaps I can help you,” the minister said finally, swallowing.

“Thank you.”

“How can I help?”

“Name's George Tole.”

“Elder Dawkins. You from Franklin, Mr. Tole?”

“New York.”

“A Calvinist Negro from New York?”

“My mama raised me and my brother as Baptist. That mean you can't talk to me?”

“No,” he said. “It doesn't mean that.”

“I ain't been inside a church since I was a kid.”

“Your relationship with God is very strained, I take it.”

“I ain't got no relationship with God.”

“You do, whether you believe that or not. You're talking to him right now.”

“No. I talking to you. You a man I can see. I don't believe in no God who hides up there in the sky.”

“He understands that. People sometimes go their entire lives not speaking to him, but he'll be there to listen if you change your mind.”

“I ain't gonna change my mind. Already told you I don't believe in him.”

“Then I guess I'm confused why you're here.”

“I guess I just wanted him to know that.”

The minister was quiet.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“My little boy. He die when he just eight years old. You know if he's up there in heaven?”

“My condolences. I'd have a hard time thinking of too many reasons why God would deny a boy so young. You say you don't believe in God. You believe in heaven?”

“I think maybe I do. For people like Miles, I think there's a heaven.”

“May I ask how he passed?”

“He dead because of me. He had dysentery, and then one night he found my bottle of whiskey, just eight years old, and choked to death on it till his face turned a kind of purple I won't never forget.”

Tole stared down at his feet, at the fine pair of boots that a dead man had gifted him.

“I ask you one more thing?”

“Certainly.”

“Every night before I go to sleep, I tell him I'm sorry. You think he can hear me? Or I just wasting my time?”

“I don't think anyone can answer that for you, Mr. Tole.”

“All right then.”

Tole thanked the minister for his time.

“Mr. Tole, remember, the door to that church in the Bucket is always open for you, should you change your mind.”