The Orphan Mother (3 page)

The woman was carrying linens and instruments that Tole didn't recognize. She set them down on a table, went out back and pumped a few spurts of water into the bucket, returned and began washing the instruments. Blood polluted the water, spiraling like spilled ink, until the bucket was a dull shade of dirty pink. Tole watched her wring out a towel and mop down her arms.

“You the one delivered the baby in there?” he asked.

“You a pretty observant fella,” she said. “What gave it away?”

“Ain't no easy way I know of to get dry blood off your hands. Not unless you got some kinda alcohol.”

She turned to him, intrigued. “What reason would you have for knowin' that?”

“There was a war, you know.” He was full of sarcasm and yet this woman made him want to confess, too. “Found myself with blood like that on my hands more times than I'd like to count.”

It was the truth, Tole thought, with one difference: the blood on her hands was the blood of life, the blood of labor and innocence, the result of bringing something perfect into the imperfect world. The only blood Tole knew was the blood of vengeance, of endings, and even though he knew the blood of a dead soldier and the blood of a birthing mother looked the same, he couldn't imagine it felt the same when it was on your hands.

“Too many men like you around these days,” she said.

“What kind a men are those?”

“The killin' kind.”

And then Tole recognized her. He'd seen her before, near his house. The laugh lines around her mouth, the brilliant gray of her eyes. He hadn't been able to place her before, and then it came to him. “You Mariah Reddick.”

Mariah turned, the angle of the sun lighting the planes of her face. “We know each other?”

“I suppose we don't. I live near your boy.”

“You know my son? You know Theopolis?”

“Yes'm.”

“What's your name?”

“Name's Tole.”

“Tole? That a Christian name?”

“My mama named me George, but I never liked it much. George Tole. Most people call me Tole.”

“I like the name George myself. Sounds presidential.”

Tole smiled. “I reckon it does. But lots of Negroes named George, you ever notice that? Lot of wishful thinking, I think. Anyway, not many folks goin' to confuse me for a president.”

Tole watched Mariah scrub the blood off her hands, blood that left a faded copper stain on her palms and forearms. He took a beat-up flask he had tucked down in his boot and unscrewed it. He stood up from his stool. “Got a good amount of whiskey left in here. It'll surely clean the stains right off.”

Mariah looked up at him, and Tole moved closer. The floorboards creaked under his weight. He reached out toward her hands. “May I?”

Mariah nodded, so Tole held her hands in his and poured a thin stream of the moonshine over the back of her hands, rubbed the cloth over the thick, protruding veins that jutted out, high as her knuckles, and then asked her to turn her hands over. He drizzled a bit more liquor onto her palms. The smell filled the air like a promise or a ghost between them. He rubbed her hands with his, and up her arms, his eyes careful to stay directed at the task, never straying to meet hers.

“There you are, ma'am,” he said, letting her palms fall from his.

“I think I can finish up here.” Mariah took the bloodstained towel from him. “You shouldn't be drinkin' that poison.”

“Hooper made it.”

“Hooper?” She laughed. “Then it ain't poison, but still kill you.”

Tole took a short swig from the flask and tucked it back in his boot. “I'ma be on my way now. That baby in there's real lucky to be born into your hands.”

She stared at him a moment, impassive. Then he could see a smile touch the corners of her eyes. He wondered what a full-blown smile would look like. Dazzling, he thought.

“Kind to say.”

“You have a real good day, Missus Reddick. Get some rest now.”

July 6, 1867

Mariah awoke and lay in bed to listen to the branches of the poplar brushing the side of her little house. She worked too hard for too little—even if the money now was hers, and didn't just go to the McGavocks as it had when she'd been a slave. She took on every birth she could, but Dr. Cliffe had managed to cut into her business recently with his promises of scientific reproduction and rational birth. He gave lectures. She'd been to one, “Progress of the New Man,” down at the public room of the Masonic Hall. The point of this lecture, from what she had understood, was to reveal the existence of things called germs, little critters too small to see, which caused every manner of illness, including stillbirth, and which could only be battled by advanced sterilization procedures that the doctor, coincidentally, had learned. Well, she'd been doing just fine without his invisible germs, and she could see her handiwork walking down the street tailing after their mothers.

Once she'd cleaned up and eaten a cold biscuit, Mariah went and stood on her porch a couple of feet above the muddy thoroughfare of Cameron Street: the queen of all she surveyed, she leaned on her front porch rail like she had herself prepared a few remarks to share with the gathered mosquitoes, the flies, the white men rattling past behind their mule teams. Pillowy bolls of the Middle Tennessee sky floated above a wide expanse of blue.

Franklin was a town that some time before had lost a limb or two, or some fingers and toes, and had not yet fully recovered. It still limped; it could still feel its phantom limbs. What had not been forgotten had been pulled down or plowed under. Carter's cotton gin had been destroyed under the rush of the rebel army only to rise up again afterward; hundreds were buried where they dropped, right where the foundations had been. The entrenchments that had arced in front of Franklin's south side had been filled in, but the soil's settling had left long and shallow concavities, twisting here and there through town like the trail of a great snake.

People, soldiers and not, had disappeared, no word from them again. Quite a few of the Negroes had lit out for other places north. White families left, too, having lost a business or a father, back to Mama's old home place where they crowded into too few rooms and fought over the family land. Others, like the fancy German carpenter and furniture maker, Lotz and his family, had tried to stay, but eventually fled for some new life in the West.

In some parts of town, houses still stood empty. The quiet on some streets could be unnerving. An empty dwelling always seemed on the verge of being filled again, each window just a moment away from being lit by lamplight. And each day that a house's eyes remained dark and dead, its people snatched up and delivered to new places, was a shock; a rebuke to those who stayed. And why did they stay? Habit, greed, faith, philosophy, poverty—who could know?

There had been no black blocks before the war because there had been very few black cabins. But now little neighborhoods had grown up around those few freemen's houses that had existed before the war. Blood Bucket was the best known of these, and white people had made way for it by moving across town as quickly as they were able. New houses and shacks grew up on the white west side of town, while black men and women moved into the old ones on the east side.

The new houses on the west side were lined out and straight-cornered, elegant and monumental, building geometrically to angled peaks that looked out over the town. These Greek Revivals
appeared
, suddenly, but the metamorphosed shacks and shotguns of the Bucket just seemed to
grow
. This seemed right to Mariah; it seemed beautiful.

Mariah had brought Franklin into the world, in a manner of speaking. Not the physical town, but a goodly number of those who dwelt in it, especially the young. There they were right over there, across the way in the courthouse square, white boys and girls trying to climb over the new platform built that morning for the political meeting. The colored carpenters shooed them away. She had birthed all those children, she had caught them coming out, she had been the first person they'd ever seen. She was the first to bathe them, the first to whisper to them, the first to look them in the eye before handing them off to their mothers. She believed this was the hidden beginning of their memories. Even if they couldn't explain to themselves why they were so respectful and a little afraid of the colored woman with the gray eyes, it was no puzzle to the woman herself.

Inside, she stoked the fire and poured water for coffee.
Her
fire and
her
coffee. Her pot. Her house. She hoped she never got used to saying those words and meaning them, knowing they were hers in a fundamental and absolute way, that they were better than gifts. They were not loans made by her mistress, but hers that she could burn to the ground if she felt like it. She could paint a face on the side of her house, she could sit up on the peak of the roof and spend the day singing to the sparrows. Why not? She
could
. This could make some people very angry, she knew. Would she rattle her freedom at them, sing it from that rooftop? She wouldn't, because she had never actually stopped being the wise woman, the responsible woman, the sock darner and fever tender. She couldn't sweep back time, however much she wished it.

An hour later Mariah's own flesh and blood, her son, sat on a hard gray slatted chair next to her, talking low and amused about politics, which she let him do. He was a cobbler by trade, set up his own shop a few streets away, but already he was thinking beyond owning his shop. Now he was thinking of owning the whole world, Mariah sometimes thought. As if slavery were something that a stroke of a pen could just wipe away, and the whole world could open up before you.

Mariah kept two potted plants on the railing of her small porch, on either side of the steps to the street. She kept two chairs on the porch, facing the street on opposite sides of the front door. Mariah always sat on the left, and any visitor would sit on the right. Her chair had worn down some on the back legs, and there was the slightest black mark on the clapboard wall just behind. Mariah liked to lean back on the chair and rest against the wall. She liked to lean just past the moment of balance, constantly testing that balance. Sometimes she rocked forward, and other times she eased back. When she was balanced she thought it felt like flying. Or at least floating.

Theopolis once told her that she looked like an old man when she rocked like that with her legs spread wide. Her son leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him, staring at whatever happened to be going by on the porch floor, often ants. Or he looked out down the street squinty-eyed like he could see from there to Perdition.

“You'll come then, Mama?”

“If you going to make a fool of yourself, I suppose I'll be there to watch it.”

“Who do you think is going to run, Mama, if it's not me?”

“Some other not my son. But you go on, you do what best.”

“Good thing I don't listen to you.”

Her Theopolis was damned modern, thinking he was going to put himself in charge of that House of Representatives in Nashville, even just a little bit.

This terrified her.

Theopolis would be giving a speech today. In public, in the town square, alongside a man running for the U.S. Congress and other bigwigs. But how could she try to talk her son out of something as honorable as giving a speech?
Quit thinking like a slave
. She vowed she would not say anything more to Theopolis about it.

“If you listened to me you'd be in that San Francisco by now, you'd have already took your mama out there where I be a comfortable lady looking out that ocean. But here I am.”

“You wouldn't leave this place.”

“Might consider it, you don't know.”

Theopolis snorted and drank his coffee.

Theopolis had told her it gave him comfort to think that he, a Negro, might soon be sitting in the legislature with his feet up on the rail and voting according to his own instincts and philosophies.
I have instincts and philosophies, Mama. You do, too.
He would have his own polished spittoon when he sat in that beautiful chamber. He would sit and spit alongside his heroes in the state's Reconstruction government.

Governor Brownlow, for instance—Theopolis had last year traveled clear to Nashville to see him, and could recite whole chunks of the speech the governor gave. Someday Governor Brownlow himself might turn to Representative Theopolis Reddick and ask him what he thought of a new law, or some problem that needed fixing. Governor Brownlow would ask him for his vote. Governor Brownlow would reach out with his big, important hand and shake Theopolis's. This is what he had told his mother, and it was these very words that terrified her. Not the words, but the fact that he believed them.

It would all start today, whatever she thought. These big, important white men and Theopolis, her son, with his instincts and philosophies, would stand onstage trying to win votes side by side.

Theopolis loved his mama. He loved her so much he came to see her every morning for his coffee, but he did not
fear
her like she would have liked. If he had feared her, he wouldn't be giving any speeches that afternoon right there, across the way, where the white men with their bricked-in faces would be watching.

His love for her, which when he was a boy she had felt powerfully every time he had slotted his hand into hers, couldn't compete now. Who was she, his mama, but a foolish woman who could hardly read and write, who needed to be reminded she had her own ideas about politics? Who was she next to those men, whose words he hung on like they were all that mattered in the world? No, he would go and he would speak and she would stand by, as always, afraid of what would happen when he raised his voice.

No one could say that Mariah acted like a slave: she held her head up and met every white man's gaze with a clear, gray-eyed stare. But no matter how she acted, she knew one thing:
Negro folk did not speak.
They raised their voices in a chorus only to praise the Lord and pray for a better time to come. They did not stand before white folk and try to change their minds, try to understand them, try to make the white folk
see
them.

And now, this afternoon, Theopolis would be
seen
.

She smelled liquor and tobacco smoke and biscuits, and thought all three had never smelled so sweet or so definite, so full of things she'd never noticed before. Even the dogs seemed to know that something was imminent, for they trotted along barking at nearly everything they saw and nipping each other's necks distractedly.

“What about Mrs. McGavock, Mama? She'll want to come. She'll be there, I'll bet.”

“She got better things to do.”

“What's better than to be in the middle of change? Nothing, that's what.”

“Miss Carrie has her dead folk to tend to. And Mr. John's away, traveling.”

“That ain't more important than today. I'd think they'd want to come hear me speak.”

“Don't be a sassy boy.”

The whole town seemed jittery—even the air and the leaves dancing on it. Mariah's neighbors plied the wood sidewalks to and fro, from the academy to the Presbyterian church to the courthouse and back again, everyone buzzing. The Colored League Negroes swaggered, boots clattering on the paving stones, stopping each other with a clap on the back, bending their heads together, joining their voices in an excited hum. Upon meeting or parting they would give a spirited chant for the Republican governor—“Huzzah for Brownlow!” It all seemed very unnatural to Mariah.

The Conservatives buzzed with a different energy, dark and angry, coiled up like snakes preparing to strike. Their eyes followed the Leaguers around town as if they were tracking them. They spoke in whispers. Some had been angry for a long time. Some were planters made poor and small by Reconstruction, their punishment for opposing the Republicans and fighting for the Confederacy. They had watched their land and slaves disappear, their houses deteriorate. Mariah could feel their anger stalking the streets, bristling against the eager anticipation of the League men.

You couldn't
not
feel it. The day was breaking open, and it was everywhere—the anger and excitement both. It would be good to be out of town this morning. Mariah thought about going up to Carnton since Miss Carrie had sent her another note, another request to return. It was time to end
that
nonsense. She would never go back for good like Miss Carrie wanted. She even shivered at the idea of going back just for the morning, but she never refused Miss Carrie. That would have to change. She strengthened her resolve. It was time, finally, to sever the ties.

The farrier's hammer clanked clearly, ringing out agreement, as if Mariah were standing right next to the anvil and not four blocks away.

Theopolis got up to go, straightening his black trousers and tucking in his best white shirt, which Mariah knew would be a filthy mess by the end of the day.
The boy has good intentions
, she thought,
he just needs a lick more common sense
. Theopolis had been soiling his shirts since he was a boy, though, and Mariah supposed she would be disappointed if he ever stopped.

“I don't want to sass you, Mama. I just want you to come see me speak. It ain't going to happen every day.”

“I'll come if you quit talking about it.”

He smiled and kissed her on her forehead. Mariah smoothed the back of his shirt as he walked away from her, down the steps, and off up the street.

A breath of windblown dandelion fluff came to rest on his hair, white against dark, as if anointing him.

Later, she wished she had at least got up, followed him off the porch, and pulled him close enough to brush the stray fluff away, or told him he was a good man, or told him she loved him more than any child she had ever brought into the world.