The Orphan Mother (21 page)

“If I'm needed. And even if I'm not needed, Mariah, I will help you. Know that. Whatever you need. I am here.”

August 4, 1867

There had been seven conspirators. Five had met unfortunate accidents, their bodies hidden in the Harpeth River or buried in shallow graves or slid into ditches; one—Bill Crutcher, husband of Lizzie—seemed to have lit out days ago, and no one knew where he was, but talk was that his wife had left him, and he'd gone south to hunt her down. Crutcher was out of Tole's hands.

Only one man—apart from Elijah Dixon—remained. Tole was saving Dixon, the man most critical, for last: he would cut off the head so the beast would be dead for good. This would be the one killing that would probably get Tole killed in turn. The world didn't miss backwoodsmen and drunks, but it would miss Elijah Dixon. There would be a price to pay for taking that one's head, and Tole thought he was almost ready to pay it now. Almost.

But first he had to visit the last of Dixon's men. Daniel Whitmore, out on Hen Peck Lane.

Whitmore was a fisherman from Louisiana. Far as Tole could tell, he lived alone, was missing his right leg from the war, and spat tobacco so constantly that his beard had been permanently stained red on his chin. These days, he made his living hobbling around on errands and scouting land for Elijah Dixon, but he still got himself on a fishing boat any chance he could.

Tole spent the early morning scouting the Harpeth where Whitmore kept his boat. Time was slipping away from Tole; the tribunal was just two days away now. Late that morning a heavy, bearded man with a limp stepped unsteadily down the hill and climbed into the rowboat Tole had been watching. The man held on to the edge as the boat wobbled. The lettering on the side of the boat said
AB Fishing Co.

Hello, Daniel Whitmore.

Tole crouched down, took cover, stalked and crawled as he had in the war days when every rock concealed an ambush, every steep hill a cover for movement, every tall tree a potential lookout. The war had created a different world, and in that new world all things arrayed themselves as friend or foe, even the inanimate ground and the unconscious beast. He himself had been his only friend, isolated from all things. He was at war again.

Whitmore spat, happy as anything. Life was indeed good. He didn't hear Tole circling far up the hill behind him, always downwind and covered. He didn't feel him getting closer, so close Tole could watch his chest rise and fall with every breath and could smell the dull reek of sweat and tobacco stain. What did a fisherman have to fear? It was broad daylight hardly a half mile from town. Tole assumed this was why the man seemed so oblivious to the threat. But though they were close to town, they were also hemmed in on two sides by steep river-cut banks, and on the third by a severe bend in the river. This was a great fishing hole, but hardly anyone fished it. They might have been a hundred miles away from Franklin.

Tole sank into himself, integrated and indistinguishable from leaf and bud, no boundaries between him and rock. It was a kind of pulling apart of body and mind.

He could hear Whitmore's whistle, louder than before. He watched the man tend his hook and listened to the unintelligible hum of someone in constant conversation with himself.

Tole raised his rifle. This was what he did best. The August sun seemed to burn the top of his head, the tips of his ears. Sweat poured down his brow. He tried to concentrate on his target while gnats chewed away at the back of his neck, his ankles. He watched as a gust of cool summer wind, strong from the west, blew the leaves of the sycamore across from the river. He was invisible in the bushes. Whitmore leaned over, doing something with his line, and when he lifted his head, Tole took his shot. A thunderous explosion.

Whitmore slumped down and the boat drifted into the current.

Tole stood from the bushes and checked his surroundings. No one around. Should he let the boat just drift downstream? Having the body so visible, floating along with a bullet wound to the head, made him very uncomfortable: he wanted it out of sight, melting away into dust and maggots.

But Tole couldn't swim.

The boat floated out farther, picking up speed in the current, and he shambled after it, stumbling over rocks and logs at the river's edge. To the west the Harpeth ran for miles, winding through farms and fields and forests, and then becoming the Cumberland, and then the Ohio, then into the Mississippi. Tole imagined Whitmore's body, fleshless and baked in the sun, making its way back home to Louisiana and then out to the gulf and beyond, riding the waves forever. It seemed like a glorious way to pass into whatever comes next.

Tole was about to give up following the boat when, about a quarter mile downstream, his luck turned. The boat hit a submerged log and bumped along, sliding almost to shore—close enough so Tole could wade in and pull it to shallower waters.

Blood had pooled like falling shadows at the bottom of the hull. Whitmore was lifeless on his side, and Tole rolled him onto his back.

The man's face transformed Tole. He'd seen death before, of course—so many times. He was used to how the eyes seemed to look straight into him and know something even Tole refused to understand. Was there a smile then, a smirk? No, just the mouth relaxing. The whole face had relaxed and had gone from hard to soft. The eyes kept on him, though, they sought out Tole's face. They looked into his own eyes. The eyes insisted on watching him and seeing him; they rebuked him.
I know you, I know you
. The eyes remained open, even if they stared straight into nothingness, the light gone.

It came to him that the men and boys he had killed knew him better than anyone in the world, better than his wife and son, better than his family, better than Mariah could ever know him. Better than he knew himself.

When he pulled the body out of the boat and dragged it down to the beaver dam and hid it underneath the dark wet branches, he cried as if this were the body of someone dear and loved.

He was a killer. He could never love nor be loved.

Throughout that afternoon, he wandered. He didn't dare see another human being until he knew he had control of himself. When he was hungry, he stole rock-hard turnips from an old garden. He pulled out that old boy's Bible and tried to read, but every passage was a rebuke. He had made the mistake of seeing his quarry and being seen by him, both of them humans living and breathing until one was not. Morning slid into afternoon and then night. He had seen death, watched it take over a man's body. He had watched it free him! He envied the man in the water below the beaver dam. He tried to shake this thought out of his head. He would leave him there to float, facedown and lifeless, his blood coloring the water a murky red, until he'd either sink for good or wash up on the dock.

He climbed trees and sat in them looking over the town. Higher and higher he climbed until all there was to see were toy houses and ants on two legs moving about their business. In the trees he began to breathe deeper, calmer. After the shame and horror came a degree of pride. At least he felt something, he thought. This thought gave way to other thoughts, and he became more certain of himself. He was a human, just a terribly tangled one—a human whose sins were great and whose soul was in mortal danger. But tangles could be traced backward and made straight again, he pleaded to God.

August 5, 1867

The next day Tole spent the day at the Carnton cemetery. He barely saw Mariah—she was in the house, and then he caught a glimpse of her walking down the driveway toward Franklin.

Late that afternoon, however, just as he was putting away his tools in the shed near Mariah's cabin, Mariah appeared out of nowhere with a bunch of goldenrod it looked like she'd just gathered.

“You go and hurt yourself, Mr. Tole?”

He had: dragging Daniel Whitmore's heavy corpse out of the boat, he'd sliced his arm on a sharp piece of wire fencing that had gotten hung up on the waterline.

“Just cut myself doing some yard work, is all,” he said, but Mariah squinted suspiciously.

“And the bruise there on your face? I reckon a tree reach out and sock you?”

Tole set the bread down. He still had so many secrets from her. None of it seemed real as long as he harbored the burden of knowing what happened to Theopolis. “Maybe so.”

“Interesting news from town,” Mariah said, almost conversationally. “You hear about the body wash up ashore?”

Tole did not move. “No.”

“Everybody's talking of it. They say it's that Haynes boy, out from Hillsboro.”

“Don't reckon I know him,” Tole said.

“You don't?”

“No'm.”

“He's one of the men I told you about, the ones who are working with Mr. Dixon.”

“Oh.”

“He was shot, they say. Bunch of times.”

“Oh.”

“Terrible thing,” Mariah said, staring at him.

A long pause between them to consider the death of a man who helped kill her son.

“I know something…” Tole said, and his voice trailed away.

Her hand reached across the space between them and touched his shoulder. Almost instinctively he put his hand on hers. Warm.

“I got something to tell you,” he said.

The sun set and it turned to night. Mariah listened and looked hard through the big, worm-shaped crack in the bench outside her cabin, through which she could sometimes see things moving on the ground. Tole kept his hands folded in front of him, only occasionally looking up to catch her eye.

He had been a criminal, he said. He'd seen evil. He had been a fraud. He said this with great drama in his eyes, looking straight at her.

But who hadn't been a fraud themselves? she thought, listening to him run down the particular stations of his descent. He told her about the lying and stealing, a lifetime's worth.

Mariah stood up and laid the goldenrod on the bench behind her. She stood up straight, and in doing so she realized that she
always
stood straight, and she wondered why she did that. The world had got heavy on her, and she deserved a bend at the shoulders. But no. She walked head up without tripping. She fixed her eyes on Tole. Then she went over to the water bucket, drew Tole a tin of it, and walked over and gave him the cup. He thanked her. He made her tired, with his reservations and little secrets—his obvious secrets.

“That ain't all the evil you seen, Mr. Tole,” Mariah said, as plainly and menacingly as she could.

He watched her face. She felt naked, and offended that he thought he could look at her so directly. She stared back until he turned away.

“No, that's true. I seen your boy get killed. I seen it.” He ran his finger around the rim of the tin cup, three times.

“How did you see it?”

“No particular way, just…well, everybody seen it, ain't they?”

“I only saw the very last moment,” Mariah said. “I only saw him dead on the ground. I put my arms around him, and then he died. But I didn't see what happened before that, or who done it.”

Mariah got up again. She seemed unsure of where to stand. She went over to the porch rail and stood with one hand resting lightly on its surface. “Tell me everything you saw.” She had almost convinced herself she never wanted to know, but that had been a lie, too. Now she wanted the truth that would hurt.

Tole watched her eyes, nodded, and closed his eyes for more than a couple of beats, before opening them again.

“I saw him come up on the stage.” He had seen the crowd collapsing and expanding in little knots that grew into bigger knots until the whole space in front of the stage had been filled in. He had seen people he recognized, and some he didn't. He had seen the tops of their heads. He had seen arms thrust in the air, and he had seen fists. He had seen a group of black-hatted men standing right at the foot of the stage, just underneath Theopolis. He had seen the podium splinter apart. Tole had seen grown men running scared in every direction. He had seen the men drag Theopolis down.

“How you seen this?” Mariah asked, squinting hard at Tole as if she could concentrate the truth right there in the air in front of them. As if she might scare it out of Tole and into the open. But Tole just shook his head and ignored her. He was not intimidated.

“Why you never told me you were there that day?” she asked.

“I didn't want to upset you.”

“Upset me?” She had wildfire in her eyes, flared nostrils, a look of outrage he had never before seen. “You sit here with me for weeks now, and you don't think to tell me you seen my boy up there right before he murdered?”

“Me seeing him die don't change the fact that he dead.”

“I have searched this town high and low trying to figure out what happened that day, and all this time, you seen it all. That what you tellin' me?”

“I seen him take the stage. I seen the crowd get bigger, fulla white folks, angry folks, filled in. I seen the tops of their heads.”

“The tops?”

“Yes ma'am. I saw your boy try to speak. I saw some white man with missing fingers throw a bottle at him. I saw them pull him off that stage.”

Mariah's eyes filled with tears. Tole stopped talking. “This why I didn't want to tell you. Those tears in your eyes the reason I been so quiet.”

“Nevermind no tears. You finish your story. I want to know. I don't care if blood comin' out my ear by the end of it. You don't stop.”

This is what he wanted to say to her:
I seen terrible things in my time, all them things that take place in the dark and sometimes in secret, and you don't hardly realize how twisted up it all is until, right then, it happens, and all them souls go floating off in their terrible states, like the earth done gone to crack open and drag 'em down if they don't get going quick, so they gone.

“I saw the mob riot, I saw five men, maybe six, pull your boy off that stage and beat him until he bleeding from his mouth and his head. Seen them drag him down and he gave the good fight. Do that make things better for you, that he kicked some teeth? He did do that, they threw three of them men on him like they was wrestling a hog, and the hog got the better of it. He were a whirlwind, every leg and arm swinging out,
pop
, catching someone in the ear or the gut. He was going good, but then I seen a bottle catch him in the head and he went a little more limp after that, still swinging but like he were in water or something.

“I only seen Theopolis once or twice after that, just flashes, and each time I seen him, he a worse bloody mess. Then something hard and quick happened, and them men went to pulling away like they got burned, and then you come through into the clear of that circle and take up the boy, though he already gone. I seen him go. The doctor came through, too, but there weren't nothing to do. What was going to be done had already got done.”

Tole looked down. He could see Mariah's tears thudding against the wooden porch floor. Heavy tears. “There so much noise but I thought I heard him scream for help. I thought I heard him scream for you.”

“For me?”

Tole nodded, lying. Lying for a good purpose, for once.

“And what did you do? You just sit there and watch like a goddamn coward?” Mariah leaned against the porch, stood up, and took a deep breath as the reality of what she'd just heard sank in. And then went to sit down beside him.

The light
, Tole thought.
The light goes out
snap
in a man's eyes. It's on and then it's off. You don't even got to be looking in their eyes, you can be watching their leg or an arm or their backside, and maybe nothing moves at all, but all the same you
know
they gone, and all that's left won't never move again. Maybe the color changes, or whatever was vibrating in 'em just gone and stopped
.

“I don't believe much in a life after life,” he said. “The life you got is what you got, and in war that life ain't much to talk about. Spend the war looking out for the last moment, wondering where and when it coming. Maybe it's the most merciful thing to bring that end quick. This is what I said to myself sometimes, up in those trees and in those haylofts, picking them men out. I said to myself,
You are a mercy
. But I don't know now, and I never did know. There weren't ever anyone to
ask
. The dead were gone and who was left? I never knew. But maybe Ise wrong. Sure like to think so.”

“So you seen the men who did this, is what you're saying, isn't it? When I asked you to be on the lookout for those men, you already knew, didn't you?”

“Didn't know they names.”

She ignored him. “You had seen them when I told you I wanted them to face the justice they deserve.”

“You ain't gone find them anywhere, Mariah.”

Now she heard him. “What are you saying precisely, Mr. Tole?”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, the bruised eye, cut and swollen. “I said, you ain't gone find those boys walking this earth.”

“That's what I've been thinking, this whole day, ever since April said the name Aaron Haynes to me.” She looked down at his bandaged hand and up again at his bruised face. “I been thinking, ‘I wonder where Mr. Tole was when that man disappeared?'”

“That's not the only one.”

“You been killing them,” she said. It wasn't a question. She knew. “How many?”

Tole sucked his breath and looked at her.

“You been killing them who killed my boy. Don't say nothing.”

Silence. Tole shut his mouth and watched her. She seemed like she might split apart, not certain if she should be angry or grateful. It made her look older than she was.

“Why?”

“Because they deserve to die.”

“So now you the Lord? You decide who lives and dies?”

“I did it for you.”

She stood up, pulled away from him. “Don't you dare say that to me,” she hissed. “I never once asked you to hurt no one. I just asked you for
names
.”

“You're so sad. Any man who put that on you, who cut that hole in you, he don't deserve to live.”

“Don't you dare say you did it for me.”

“I did it because it need to happen. You deserved justice, and you ain't gone get it from no court fulla white men who don't even know you exist.”

“You gone stop killing them men.”

“I already stopped.”

“Liar. Can't trust a killer. Say you
will
! You ain't going to lose no more of your broken little soul, hear? Not on my account. That's over. You stop.”

More silence.

“Say you will.”

“I will.”

“They ain't the reason my boy dead, anyway. They just the weapon, the dumb and ignorant weapons. Are you too stupid to know that? Or maybe you just like them.”

It was quiet. What Mariah had said was true. It wasn't any one man who killed Theopolis—it was the hatred of the world they lived in that killed him. He could've been any Negro standing there and they would've killed him just the same. All this time she held tight to her anger because it gave her purpose. She didn't have any time for tears, not until she had her justice. But now, sitting here in silence beside Tole, she had to face a hostile truth that the kind of justice she had imagined would no longer be possible. Tole felt the shame burn him.

“I thought it would be easier if there was somebody to blame,” she said. “As long as I was hunting those men, I wouldn't have to face myself. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I was happy when I heard it was Elijah Dixon. I finally had somebody to hate. But the truth is, he didn't kill my boy. He just a greedy man like all the rest of 'em. My whole life, I was a slave. My reason for getting out of bed in the morning was to serve somebody else. I didn't have no purpose of my own. There was no me. Not ever. And when I had Theopolis, that changed. I was a mother. I was still a slave, sure, but not to him. To him, I was Mama. When he was young, he didn't understand all this bullshit. The politics. He didn't know white men could trade me like I was cash. I wasn't a
she
, I was just an
it
. Theopolis didn't see me as a thing. He saw me as his mother. And all of a sudden, I had a different purpose for getting up in the morning.”

Tole nodded. “I understand.”

“I figured you might. And I figure you'll understand this, too. When that purpose gets ripped away, the only purpose you have left is justice. That's the reason I get up now. It's to find the men who killed my boy and bring them to justice. But what happens when there ain't nobody left to go after? What happens when there's nobody to blame, Mr. Tole?”

Mariah remembered Carrie's words:
Some of us turn and face them, look them in the eye. And when you finally turn around, you'll realize they're not here to haunt you, my dear.

“Someone was in charge,” Mariah said.

“Maybe.”

“You know who?” she asked.

“I know who.”

“Well then.” She glared at him. “What's the name? I want you to tell me.”

Tole wiped his shining forehead with his sleeve.

Mariah stood over him with her arms crossed.
It all gets so complicated and twisted up so easily
, she thought. She wanted to stab him and kiss him; she wanted to run away from him; she wanted him to disappear, and she wanted him to stay.