The Widow of the South (10 page)

15

L
IEUTENANT
N
ATHAN
S
TILES,
104
TH
O
HIO

I
did not see that color-bearer again that day. That night, when the fighting had died down and all you could hear were the plaintive bleatings of the wounded strewn before us, I thought,
I saved one of them.
God knows what I consigned him to by not letting him be killed, but I hoped he would appreciate it someday.

We sat there for hours after the sun went down, listening to the occasional crack of one more gun in the hands of one more wayward and stubborn rebel soldier, but the battle was over. And as soon as the battle was over, the rhapsodizing began.

“Hood has crashed and broken upon our shoal,” cried one of the bad poets in our company, and I was sure every man would file that little bit of doggerel away for future use in letters or in their memoirs or while sitting on one of a hundred porches scattered all over the Union. What garbage. Men from other units went out onto the battlefield to gather souvenirs, but I kept my men back under great pressure. What were they going to get off those sorry corpses?
Just another chance to get their hands bloody,
I thought. I wouldn’t go along with that.

We got the word to pull out, but we had to sit there and wait our turn. We were going to sneak out again, just like the night before. While I sat there, cleaning my pistol, I thought about my precious Greek books back home in my parents’ house. I wondered if I’d be able to pick up my studies again, whether there would be anyone left to run a college when I returned. I knew I would not be able to read those books again with the same mind. I had seen Spartans and Thebans and Atticans for myself now. The only glory to be had was the glory of surviving. Crashed and broken upon our shoal—well, that just meant we were living and they weren’t. What man could take pride in the killing of another man? Not pride. Relief, yes, and damn them who would put a man in the position of even being relieved at the death of another. That’s what made the sentiments of glory and honor, on that battlefield, such lies. If we were lucky, we might live to an age when our memory would fail us.

At one point, while awash in my dark ruminations, a fire started in town far to the rear.
There goes our stealthy retreat,
I thought. But it was quickly extinguished, no harm done. No harm done.

16

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

I
returned to the garden. I stood in the diagonal plot formed by intersecting walkways, upon the dirt which, despite the brief hours of warmth, remained hard underfoot. I was listening to the new sounds echoing back to me while absentmindedly running my hands through the brown hollow stalks of the dormant liatris and coneflowers. Seeds sprang from their pods and attached themselves to the back of my long black wool skirt. I stood silently so I could listen clearly. The sound had stopped me and demanded my attention.

It was the sound of battle. What I took to be the report of rifles seemed, two miles distant, like the crackling of a new fire in a cold fireplace. I was surprised by how innocuous it sounded, and yet it was pervasive and never-ending. Once I heard the first shot, I could hear almost nothing else. I could also hear the occasional deep
shhthump-shtthump
of artillery shells, each of them gathering the air and transforming it into the deep percussion of something like a parade drum. I strained to hear other things—the twitter of finches and titmice, for instance, but either they had departed or I had become deaf to them. There was no other sound. Not even a rattle from the last dry leaves clinging to the trees above my head. The sound of the artillery shells became louder and louder, and suddenly I realized that they were exploding on our land, in the remnants of our own grove. We, who had spent what seemed like a lifetime waiting for this war to pass, now found this war passing all too close to our world. Why would anyone turn their guns on our land? Surely there was no army at Carnton.

The two surgeons, each with a little group of attendants, had arrived just as the fighting began. They had taken down two of the interior doors, long, thick slabs of poplar painted in delicate faux mahogany, and transformed them into operating tables lying across hastily fabricated trestles. The first doctor to come through the door was a slight, frowning, bald man with a limp, who trailed dirt across the floor and smelled of ether and horse droppings. He was the one who demanded more bandages after seeing the pile of torn sheets Mariah had laid out in the foyer.

The second doctor moved slowly. He was heavy and old, and his cheeks glowed red in an otherwise pale face.

“Good Lord, Winston, there’s never enough bandages. We’ll run out sooner or later, always do. Calm
down
.”

The old doctor said this as the little one shook his finger in Mariah’s face, and I was grateful the old man had stepped in. I could see Mariah balling her fists and struggling to keep from frowning.

Their voices echoed against the bare floors and through the empty rooms, and the house seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, as if the walls were moving away and soon I would be lost within them, something small and forgettable. While the surgeons and their staff prepared the house, I had paced around the grounds with my children. John had walked with me for a time and tried to hold my hand, but I would not let it out of the front pocket of my apron, where it was buried. It had been years since we’d walked together without a destination, and I thought it best not to mention this fact. We passed between the garden and the house, through the rows of cedars lining the front walkway, down around the old wing, and past the slave quarters. As we passed the cistern, John looked in.

“They’ll be needing more water, I expect.”

“Yes.”

“Theopolis and I can go to the well and start hauling it up. You can stay here.”

“Of course.”

John put his chin on top of my head and pulled me toward him. I stood stiffly in his arms, and John seemed embarrassed again. He let me go.

“I must get the water.”

I continued to walk around the house grounds, listening to Mariah’s shouts through the open windows.
Listen to the man, bring those chairs over here, get me the scissors
. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I walked. I didn’t know what I was expected to do next.
Lord, give me the wisdom to know what you want from me and the strength to do it.
I offered that prayer each time I passed the front door of the house, at least a dozen times.

Then, finally, a husky boy stood at the end of the brick front walkway with his arms around another boy, who leaned hard against him. They couldn’t have been older than fourteen. I walked over to the front of the house, and the two of us—the unhurt boy and I—stared at each other down the corridor of cedars. I would have waved them forward, but I could not bring my hands out of my apron pockets. I stood mute. The boy shouted across the bricks.

“Some men told me this here’s a hospital.”

I nodded my head.

The boy stayed where he was, shifting his friend’s weight around to get a better grip. He shouted in the high-pitched singsong of a boy who knows he’s in trouble.

“My friend got himself whumped on the head after a big explosion when we was just watching and not doing nothing wrong. Wham, just like that, and he flying through the air and the dirt was in my eyes, and he’s sometimes awake and sometimes asleep, and I had to carry him some of the way, and, ma’am, I think he’s hurt.”

Not a child. Not another child. General Forrest had said soldiers, hadn’t he? Soldiers were men. Not children.

I would have run. I thought to run. I saw before me another child waiting to die in my arms, waiting for me to take him up and nurse him so that he could be forsaken and abandoned by a distant God who had not once—
not once
—interceded in consideration of what I couldn’t endure. What did it say in Deuteronomy?
As thy days, so shall thy strength be
. I had believed this! We had all believed this! Every widow and mother, every one of the foggy-headed wraiths wandering through their houses in town, every black-shrouded figure casting her eyes upward while Negro men throw dirt into the graves—we had all
believed!
And our reward had been more than anyone could endure. I did not forget God’s anointed earthly intermediaries—the men. Carrying on their holy, hellish war as if there were an unlimited supply of bodies and strength to draw on, as if there weren’t enough despair. What did God want from me? I could witness no more. My heart had become flinty and cold, concealing nothing. It was a rock, and He could have it. But another child?

Get away, little boy,
I thought.
You will die here. I am a killer: it’s what God has revealed to me, His great plan for me
.

I shuddered. I loved God. No, I didn’t. I feared Him, I was in awe of His strength, and I had always obeyed Him. Here was a boy, now. Right in front of me, standing at the end of my walkway, his friend crying little tears and staring at me for a sign. What was unbearable was not the dying, but the idea that the dying was part of His plan and that we had trusted Him to deliver us from evil. I hoped the little boy in front of me would wait while I sorted it out, looking for a way to help. The little plump boy, so steady for so long, had begun to sink under the weight of his friend, and as his knees buckled, he brought his cheek to the top of his friend’s head and pulled mightily under his arms to keep him upright. The blood, when he pulled away, stained his wide, pale cheek.

As thy days, so shall thy strength be
. Thy strength.
Thy
strength. My strength. Mine. Not His, but
mine
. He was not responsible for this. He was not responsible for Martha or for John Randal or for Mary Elizabeth.
He was weak
. The sudden realization of this brought spots before my eyes and made it hard to breathe. He was weak? My children had not been taken, they had
just died
. Just died, no special significance to it, no betrayal. He had not been there, there had been no purpose to their deaths, no purpose to the intervening years of my mourning.

I passed from fear to love in that instant, while I stared down at the little boy and his dying friend. I no longer feared God, I loved Him. I loved that He did not even save His own Son. He had not taken His Son, He had
lost
Him
because
of the sin of this world.

I would not blame Him anymore, but neither would I ever again pray,
Thy will be done.
His will was never that His own Son die or that my children die any more than He had
willed
sin into this world. I would not pray to God that His will be done, as if He could make it so.
I
would make it so, as far as I understood it. He was not the author of children’s deaths.

I would serve Him because I could. It was men who hurt that boy. Powerful men all around me. I heard them in the distance and smelled their fires.

Run.

Run.

Run.

I took my hands out of my front pocket and ran toward the boys down the walkway. The boy wiped at the tears on his cheeks and almost dropped his friend. He lifted him up again and started toward me.

And so it began.

I took the injured boy around the other shoulder, and between the two of us we got him up the front steps, through the portico, and into the house. As he passed under the portico, his head lolling back on his skinny neck, the wounded one awoke and saw the blue ceiling.

“The sky is damn beautiful, ain’t it?”

His friend looked embarrassed and apologized to me as we sat him down in a chair.

“He’s been talking funny like that all the way back here. He doesn’t normally swear. Much.”

He continued on, telling me all about how he’d lost his spyglass, which was a crying shame, and how he was named Ab and his friend was named Eli, and how the Confederates had flags and guns that could shoot a man at a hundred miles, and how they were spies but not really, and how he wished that rock hadn’t been there.

I wasn’t listening. I wanted to tell the boy to go inside, to bring out one of the surgeons or orderlies. I ran my fingers through the back of Eli’s brown sticky hair, looking for the wound. I started when I found it—a three-inch gash at the base of his head, wet and warm. I looked at the back of his shirt and saw how it had been stained brown by the blood. My heart began to beat in my ears, but I kept focused by gently caressing the boy’s head and face. He looked like a good boy.

I called out for help, and then again, until I heard Mariah and one of the doctors clatter down the steps behind me. Mariah grabbed Ab without a word and pulled him toward her and away from the wounded one. Ab didn’t struggle. The short, sour doctor picked at his mustache and snorted.

“What’s this?”

I told him the boy had been hit on the head and was cut. The doctor laid his delicate hand on top of the boy’s head, shoved it forward, and roughly poked at the back of his head.

“He’s just bumped his damned head, he’s got a little cut. Where the hell did he come from? He needs to be out of the way right now. Wrap his head and send him out of here. Right now.”

He spoke to me as someone who didn’t know me, for whom my house was just a hospital, one of probably hundreds he’d haunted over the years. He knew nothing of me, not even my name. I could be anyone. He stood waiting for me to reply to him, twiddling his thin mustache and rolling his eyes, but I only nodded. He stomped back up the stairs and into his operating chamber. I looked after him briefly and then turned back to the boy.

Mariah, who had been conferring with Ab in the corner, sent the boy off to tell Eli’s family about what had happened. Ab ran out the door and disappeared down the walkway.

The injured boy was unconscious again. I pulled his chair sideways and pushed it against the wall so that he wouldn’t fall over. Without being asked, Mariah found a basin of water, a clean towel, and one long, narrow bandage.

I knelt down behind the boy and felt the hard wood on my knees. I took the towel, wetted it, and began to dab at the boy’s wound. The pain and the cold woke him, and he groaned and cursed, but then he relaxed and let his hand rest in the palm of my free hand. I dabbed some more, lightly, and rinsed the towel out in the basin. Slowly the water turned a light shade of pink. I worked at the long, thin line of the cut, drawing out the dirt and exposing the healthy pink flesh. Soon I had forgotten that Mariah was standing there, watching me crouched on the floor like a washerwoman.

I remained kneeling behind the boy as the second wounded man arrived. And then the third and the fourth. I was there when the fiftieth man came in with his ragged pant leg dangling half-empty off the side of the stretcher and a belt tied around his thigh. They all brushed past me in a blur—the orderlies, the wounded, the dying, the members of the burial detail. They were only a tapestry of muted colors and muffled sounds so long as I dabbed at Eli’s head. My knees went numb, and my house filled quickly. I continued to kneel and wash the wound of the little boy.

Men filled up the rooms on the first floor, and soon orderlies began hauling their burden up the stairs. In the parlor the men were lined up in rows, most unconscious, some groaning, but I didn’t go to them. As I rubbed the last piece of dirt from Eli’s head, I was deaf to the sound of the doctor’s saw upstairs. I slowly wrapped his head with the bandage, three times, and the only thing I noticed was how precise Mariah had been while cutting up my old cotton sheets. I did not respond to the redheaded North Carolinian lying a few feet from me, holding his hands over the hole in his stomach.
Please, ma’am, if it ain’t any trouble, I would very much like some water.

“. . . please, ma’am, please. I’m fine, please. That man, that man . . . he needs you.”

The boy—Eli—had awoken a few minutes before, and
he
had not failed to notice the men passing by him. He did not know me, the woman with her arm around him. He just saw that man, the man who needed the water. He could see only the blood seeping between his tightly clenched fingers and soaking into the floor. I saw this in his face.

“That man.”

“You’re all right.”

“That man.”

“You didn’t die. You’re going to be fine.”

“Please, ma’am, please. I’m fine, please. That man, that man . . . he needs you.”