The Widow of the South (21 page)

28

F
RANKLIN

J
ohn hadn’t moved. He had shut his eyes, leaning back against the paneling of Miss Eloisa’s wall. He sat for five minutes, and then ten, and then thirty. He listened to the boots upon the road and tried to count the men by the distinction of their gaits. After a while he opened his eyes and looked over at Mariah, but she had put her head down facing away from him, toward the fire. He could hear her soft, unconscious breaths as she slept away the ebbing of the Confederate army. Eloisa ground and ground at her root.

He felt light, like he would float up to the rafters and bump up against the slats of the roof if he didn’t hold on to something tight. He had trouble breathing and for the first time noticed the odd smoke coming from a pot in the fire. It was bluish, and as it gathered around the room, it was barely visible.

New Orleans was a sunken, decrepit, and beautiful place entirely run over by graspers and con men, and it was a matter of pride for me that I was not taken in by schemes. But it made me distrustful and hard, an uncomfortable way of living. On every business trip I always rode down into the southern parishes to my cousin’s plantation in Terrebonne Parish, where I could rest. I am not a distrustful and hard man, I am not a grasper or a schemer or a thief. And so I enjoyed the hospitality of my uncle, who was none of those things, either, and who reminded me that I was to become a man of property and position and honor. There was a plantation waiting for me back in Tennessee.

Before one of those visits, I’d had a particularly hard time with a Creole trader who said he thought very little of our cotton. I learned that the Creole was taking our cotton and selling it at a premium as a special strain of Alabama lowland cotton, specially picked by slaves bred to possess particularly long fingers for stripping cotton without fraying its fibers. It was absurd, and a lie, and a con he had run on me. I was angry, and I went back to the Fauborg St. Mary to sit in my room and collect my thoughts. Then I returned to the St. Louis, where I found the trader again.

I challenged him. He fiddled with the button on his high collar, which sat below a thin, freckled face and eyes like a vole’s. He laughed in my face and stomped his high-heel boots and said,
“I’ll kill you in your sleep before you see me out at the dueling tree, Americain.”
His fellows guffawed and slapped each other’s backs.

I walked out and was afraid, afraid for my life. I had never before been afraid for my life, nor had I ever felt such hatred for that trader’s kind.
He’s a Negro, he’s a Negro,
I said to myself over and over as I walked to my hotel and cleared out, resigning myself to having been bested in the deal. He’s a Negro. He’s low, he has no honor, even if his suits are made for him personally and his women summer in France. He’s just a nigger. The more I said this to myself, the happier I became. It was
my
fault for doing business with a son of Ham, not his. What could I have expected?

It got so that I could chuckle at myself for my folly because I had not been bested by an equal, I’d been betrayed by a lower man, and that’s what lower men do. Nothing more to expect.

I will say that this changed my view, temporarily, of the Negro. Or more to the point, it changed the way I was inclined to treat the Negro. And this meant that when I arrived at my cousin’s two days later, when I walked up the steps of the house where my future wife lived, I was newly receptive to the invitation of a group of my cousins—there were always cousins of various degrees of descent hanging around the place—who enjoyed making nocturnal visits to the cabins. I suppose I’d always known what they were doing, but this time I was curious to see for myself. I was not appalled, as I’d once been, by the very idea.

It had never crossed my conscious mind to ask who the young Negress was. It had never occurred to me that she was anyone. She was a feeling, a smell, an event. It was not fair to think that such a memory had a name, a history. My memory with no name had never said a word, only gripping the rough edges of her hand-hewn bedposts with her black hands, knuckles turning gray. She never opened her eyes, and so I closed mine. She did not struggle, but she did not acquiesce, either. Her body did not receive me, did not ease backward with my motion as if catching me, but remained still and hard and impenetrable in every way but the crucial one. I felt shame. I felt shame while I was in her cabin. It was the shame that made me move harder and faster, that made her sweat smell so rancid and so wonderful. It was the shame that spurred me on, that gave me pleasure. I was degraded and I was degrading, all at once. Nothing lower than that, I reckoned. I did not last long, and I stumbled out.

Mariah’s voice jolted him.

“They breaking your things, Miss Eloisa.”

John opened his eyes and saw Mariah sitting up in her chair, looking out the window; he followed her gaze. Some of the soldiers stopped to watch the whirligigs, as flummoxed by the sight as John himself had been. Their faces softened, and they seemed like children for a moment. John thought he saw their eyes turning and turning in small circles a moment behind the motion of the whirligigs. One by one, with smiles on their faces, men walked into the yard and yanked the whirligigs off their posts or out of the ground and either carried them away or cast them down at their feet. The tin crumpled, and the figures bent under their boots. John, watching, thought of the word
wanton
and knew what it meant. There was no reason for the destruction except that it could be done and that it bestowed upon the men some sort of joy that John could almost understand. If he had gained nothing else from the long day, he had gained an understanding of the paradox he watched acted out in the root doctor’s front yard.
In the random, order
. Many instances of order, a form of order for every man who stepped foot in the yard, an order known only to the man himself and therefore inscrutable. John had developed a new idea of order, and he knew there was no turning back from it. John could understand the trampling of the whirligigs in a way he wouldn’t have the day before. The whirligigs, endlessly repeating the same motion again and again, could not escape the chaos.
Would
not escape the chaos if those soldiers had anything to say about it, by God.

Miss Eloisa slowly stroked her cheek with one long finger and watched the events in her front yard unfold without flinching or even frowning. Her face was immobile and knowing.

“They break anyway, Mariah. They break someday, why not today?”

She looked into the mortar where she’d been grinding the root, sniffed at it, and seemed satisfied. She pulled a rag out of her pocket and poured all but a little into it, then folded it up and handed it to Mariah. She took the rest and put it in her palm, and while looking straight into John’s eyes, she blew the powder at him. John tried to watch it flutter to the ground, but it seemed to disappear. He became angry and got quickly to his feet.

“What was that?”

“Can’t say.”

“Damn you! What was that?”

“You don’t believe in me, in these roots. What you care?”

John conceded the point silently while frowning down at the little black woman in her head scarf. He knew he shouldn’t care, and yet he was afraid.

“I believe in you. Now tell me what it is.”

Mariah quietly slipped her little parcel into a pocket among her skirts.

“I can’t. It won’t work then.”

“It won’t work how?”

Mariah rose to her feet and seemed to John to be decades younger. It was the light, he thought. She reached back into her pocket, pulled a pinch of the powder out, and let it drift down upon her head. Eloisa laughed and clapped her hands.

“You will never find out, Mr. John. Just a mystery . . .”

Her voice trailed off. She let her face relax until it was without expression, and then she turned her back and walked to the other side of the room, where she stood with her back to them and ran her hands through the chicken feathers. John had the odd feeling that time had resumed again and that he no longer existed in that room. He had been fearful of the two Negro women, even
deferent
to them. He no longer felt that way. His old sense of control returned. His sense of place. If the world had changed, he had changed with it. He would have to be sharp from now on, not only aware of trouble but prepared for it. This understanding gave him power, he thought, in an unpredictable and merciless place. It would take strength to be merciful now. He looked at Mariah.

“Let’s go.”

“Yes, sir.”

They walked out into the yard and stepped around the whirligigs and mounted Josiah. Miracle of miracles, he had not been stolen.

Mariah held on to John around his waist, and John rode quickly the way he’d come, against the progress of the retreating army, which flowed in fits and starts toward God knows where. He sensed that they were in danger, but none of the soldiers even bothered to look up at them. Nevertheless, he desperately wanted to be home, to be at Carnton. Mariah hugged him tight, and he felt stronger for it. As they passed the houses on the edge of town, he looked around him and caught sight of Mrs. Baylor standing on her back porch in full black. She was wringing her hands and looking around, pleading.

Mariah had been following his gaze and answered his question before he had formed it.

“She in mourning. Her son.”

“Which son?”

“The young one, Mr. Will. The one off at the war. He died close by.”

“How do you know this?”

“I heard it.”

“Will Baylor is dead?”

“Yes.”

If he hadn’t turned his head to look back at Mrs. Baylor, he might never have seen it through the window. Just a flash, a momentary glimpse of something he couldn’t quite place. It was gray and it was bare. It was a quick motion, violent. A bare arm slapping at the air before disappearing into the dark. A door slammed closed. A shout and, perhaps, a half-choked laugh.

“Mr. McGavock?”

He hadn’t remembered guiding the horse to the back of the Baylor house, but there they were. He stopped and stared hard at the old smokehouse back of the Baylors’ place.
Why have I come back here?
he thought. He had forgotten he had business with Baylor, and now he had no desire to meet the man. It wasn’t Baylor who fixed his attention, but the smokehouse all gray and pockmarked. He knew what was happening in there. He knew it instinctively; he could have predicted it.
This has been a very bad day
.

He stopped the horse and dismounted.

“Mr. McGavock, where you goin’? What we doin’?”

“You stay here with the horse.”

On the back porch of the Baylor place, Mrs. Baylor stood silently, and he could see that she was not wringing her hands in anguish, as he’d thought, but in anger. She was staring at the smokehouse, too. He walked toward it, past the woman on the porch.

“Oh, thank God, Mr. McGavock. There’s a man in there, and I think he’s hurting someone. I didn’t know what to do. I’m alone. Please do something.

John looked up at Mrs. Baylor, a woman thin and sharp as a finch, enfolded in layer upon layer of black dresses and frocks and long coats. She wore a hood, and her tiny white face looked as if it were receding into a dark cave, dragged backward slowly. For once she seemed honestly concerned about what was happening in her smokehouse, and John found himself warming to her.

“I will. You tell Mr. Baylor I want to see him, though.”

He looked around on the ground and found a solid piece of poplar board, split at one end so he could hold it like it had a handle. He swung it a couple times and hefted it over his shoulder. Mariah nodded as if she understood. She frowned at him, the frown of a mother scolding a little child for playing with snakes. But she did not seem worried. She did not look worried at all, only annoyed. He wondered why, but there was no time for that.

He turned and ran toward the smokehouse with the board held ready before him. Mrs. Baylor called after him.

“I don’t want that sort of thing happening on my property. If anything happens to her, they’ll think we’re running a brothel here.”

Should have known,
he thought.
Merciless Baylors.

She was dead by the time he broke through the door.

The man, one of the soldiers, was hitching up his britches and turned, startled. He had a heavy metal hook in his hand, one of the many that hung from the rafters of the smokehouse and which were used to suspend the meat for smoking. He was still just a boy, a skinny, emaciated boy whose hair was falling out in clumps, and who looked at John as if he had never seen anyone so disgusting and unworthy of his attention. The prostitute lay in one of the hollowed-out hickory logs that ran the length of the room, her legs and lower body stripped bare and hanging off the sides of the log. Her head was cocked to one side and resting against the wood, and John couldn’t immediately see what was wrong with her—besides the fact that this man,
this boy,
had forced himself on her. John became strangely agitated by the darkness and the low ceilings and the lingering smell of ham. The ugliness of it was almost unbearable, although it was exactly like every other smokehouse he’d ever seen.
Who invented the wall and the ceiling, I’d like to know. Who started hemming things in?
Only the ugly, dark, and dank comes of it
. He wished he were standing in the smokehouse a month before, when there would have been nothing to notice except the smell of food. He liked a smoked side of pork as much as any man. These thoughts flashed through his head in an instant without being consciously summoned. They separated him from the matter at hand, allowed him to float over it. He saw the blood streaming down the sides of the log just as the boy spoke.

“There’s others coming. I might could have taken better care of her for them, but they’ll be here soon anyway. I sent them word. So you be better just getting on.”

John looked down at the girl, who wouldn’t have been any older than Martha had Martha lived.
Where did she come from? Whose daughter is she? Who cast her out? Had they carried her with them? Did she know she would die?