The Widow of the South (24 page)

32

Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL

O
ne morning after my night in the hole I woke up to see Mr. John McGavock sitting in a cane-back chair at the end of my bed, his head hung down between his shoulders like a man carrying a great weight without any hope of letting it go. I had noticed he didn’t often talk to Carrie. He looked like he was in trouble, like he was a boy just been blessed out. I was starting to feel like a prisoner
and
a geek in a carnival, everyone gawking at me. I wondered what business he had with me, what I could possibly tell
him
. I spoke up anyway, seemed polite.

“I’m Zachariah Cashwell.”

“I know. I’ve seen you. Around the house. I notice things.”

Then I saw him pull a thin knife from his coat pocket, the kind of thing you might use to bone a chicken.
Oh boy,
I thought
, the man of the house has a knife, and here I am
. I didn’t like the way he said “notice,” as if I’d done something with his wife, but I didn’t think it was the right time to square the record. He looked like a rich man who had become tired of owning things.

“Now that you’re awake, Mr. Cashwell, did you know your head is bleeding?”

I could feel a drop of blood run down behind my ear.

“Thank you.”

“For what, may I ask?”

“For telling me about my head.”

“I thought you might have meant something else.”

“I don’t know what else. Thanks for letting me stay here in this room at knifepoint?”

“This knife isn’t for you.”

“You going to fight off the Union boys all by yourself with that knife?”

“Not Union.”

“Who? Niggers?”

“Confederates. Your people. My people.”

Now, that was something I hadn’t been expecting. It hadn’t crossed my mind that he might be a sympathizer, a Union man. He looked like all of the men who ever came to the train depots to make speeches about our courage and sacrifice and honor and the rest of that mess. He looked like a politician, sideburns and all. He’d allowed his house to be overrun by us, and his wife to tend us. He couldn’t be one of them.

“Why are you afraid of them?”

“That’s my business.”

“Suppose it is.”

I wondered if every member of the McGavock family was going to take their turn sitting across from me and staring. McGavock looked at me not like he hated me, but like he had no use for me, which didn’t make me feel any safer in his care. I figured I’d have to take care of myself if it came to that. But he just kept looking and looking at me. There wasn’t much else to look at, I’ll admit to that, but it didn’t seem very polite.

“You and my wife get along well.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Mr. McGavock. I think she’d as soon beat me over the head as listen to me, truth be told.”

“She wants you to stay here. Very much.”

“She’s a kind lady, Mr. McGavock, and I reckon she don’t think I’m healthy yet.”

“I don’t think that’s it. I should be jealous, shouldn’t I?”

“No cause, sir. Please believe me about that.”

“I don’t know you, and therefore I have no reason to trust you on such a matter. I should throw you out. I should beat you down for trifling with my wife. That’s what most men would do, hmm?”

“I haven’t trifled with her, sir.”

“No, I don’t believe you have. Any other woman, I’d think that you
had,
but not with my wife. Carrie would not let herself be trifled with, I know that much. And so, although I don’t know what kind of person you are, I know that she is fond of you, and I will not come between her and a new friend, even if he is most unsuitable. I’ve learned that I have not the standing to intervene, I have much damage to undo. And she’s had so few friends. This does not mean that you and I are friends, although I will be as charitable and assume you are an honorable man worthy of my respect. I trust my wife in this matter.”

I didn’t have anything to say about any of that. I had never heard a man talk of his woman that way, but what he said seemed right. I just hadn’t decided what it was that Carrie wanted from me, exactly, and I could see that he didn’t know, either. McGavock turned his head and spit. There was a little blood in it, and I looked at him and realized that his face looked sour because he was chewing on his cheek pretty damned hard. He was nervous. He pulled out a flask and took a long pull, the kind of drink a man takes when he’s getting ready to drink and keep drinking. He offered it to me, and we drank together.

“You killed men. Correct, Mr. Cashwell?”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t ever stick around to check to make sure they were dead, but I had a good notion about it.”

“But you killed men up close?”

“Sometimes. Most of the time it wasn’t exactly a
close
thing, with bayonets and knives and all that. Just shooting at lines of men who were shooting at you, mostly.”

“Have you ever examined your work?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Did you ever have the opportunity to quietly contemplate the killing of a man and then to see it done just as you imagined?”

“Never quietly, and it was never like I imagined. It was worse.”

“I see. Pity.”

“Reckon I don’t see it that way.”

“Forgive me. What I mean, Mr. Cashwell, is that what you’re describing sounds so uncivil. Chaotic.”

“That hasn’t been much of a problem in my life. Being civil or not, I mean. Nobody expected it of me, one way or the other.”

McGavock spit again. The walls began to fade. I realized I wasn’t blinking. Something had happened to that poor son of a bitch. Or he’d done something I didn’t want to hear about. I distracted myself by stretching out my leg and yawning.

“You’ve been with whores, though, Mr. Cashwell?”

“I’ve known some, yes.”

“Known how?”

“Some of my aunt’s friends. My aunt and uncle owned a saloon back home. She was a religious lady who thought she was called to take care of the women who worked out of the bedrooms upstairs. She was their friend. My uncle took some of their money, but they were happy to give it because my aunt was so kind. She never let me upstairs.”

McGavock raised his eyebrows, and then he laughed.

“You grew up in a whorehouse.”

“A saloon.”

“Yes, of course.”

He fell to thinking, and running his hand through his hair. He stopped chewing the inside of his cheek.

“What is your opinion of the whore?”

“Which one?”

“As a group. All of them.”

“I don’t know all of them.”

McGavock began to laugh, and then he stopped. He had been all set to laugh at me because I was so goddamned dumb. I knew this, because I was trying to be dumb. I’d found that if they thought you were dumb, they’d quit talking to you after a while. But his laugh stopped before he could get off a good smile, and his face twisted back down until it was serious again. Only his eyes were big as supper plates.

“You don’t know all of them. That’s right. That’s right. You don’t. No one does. That’s exactly right.”

Then he
did
smile, but it was a kind smile. He smiled and he patted his knees.
Pat. Pat. Pat.
Real slow, like he had just thought of something but he couldn’t remember what it was.

“You’ll have to stay with us. You’re in no condition to be captured and taken away.”

“I suppose not, Mr. McGavock. Thank you.”

He told me his whole story then. It took hours, back to when he was a young man. I listened close. There were sounds come from outside the room every once in a while, and one time I thought I heard soldiers arguing with themselves, but no one ever found us. His story made me very happy, which sounds wrong. But I was looking at a man who was just a man. Not a special man, just a man, and that meant I could be a man like him someday, with a house and a family like his. And a wife like his.

33

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

B
ecky did not stay away from the house for very long, even after I sent her and her brother away for their own safety. I hadn’t really expected her to stay away after watching her tend the men, always appearing to be looking for someone who never appeared. A day or so later she was back, already changing bandages and water when I awoke and went into the sickrooms. I suppose she thought they might still be bringing wounded to the house and that one of them might be the man she was looking for or someone who had news of him. If she was disappointed to discover that no one had arrived in her absence, she didn’t show it. No one had arrived since the second day, although many had departed this house and this world. She kept working, which I understood to be her way of maintaining her dignity and guarding her heart. I had known women like her but older, poor, sharp-faced women who would not acknowledge having anything to do other than to work until they died, and for whom boundless labor guarded them against the perils of unreasonable hopes and foolish dreams. Dreams of love, for instance. I prayed that she would find this man, that he would help free her, and that they would indeed love each other unreasonably and foolishly.
And what do you know of love, Carrie McGavock?
I thought. Perhaps not very much, but I was learning.

I didn’t say anything to her when I saw her again, and she said nothing to me. I just walked over and helped her tie off the bandage on the stump of a man with long, hairy arms and a soft, lively red face. He looked kind.
Could you love him instead?
I thought, but knew better than to say anything.

Becky was standing in the house with the others, the ravaged and maimed, when John rode up and told me that Will Baylor had been killed, that he had been to see Mrs. Baylor. My first thought was that he was one of thousands, and so why was
that
news? But then I remembered that Will Baylor had been my favorite among the Baylors, the most intelligent and witty and thoughtful of the bunch. The prettiest, too. I said a silent prayer and didn’t think much more about it right then.

When I went back into the house, I found Becky standing stock-still and mute, her arms rigid at her sides and her fingers splayed apart, palms forward. She was not looking at me, she was looking up into the ceiling. I could tell she was trying to see up through it, into the sky, and on to whatever it was that ruled above us, because I had made that very same gesture too often to forget. It was the posture of a woman frozen by her pain and hatred.

I knew then that Will Baylor had been her beau.
Damn him, damn him,
I thought.
What was he doing toying with a girl like that? That wasn’t fair, that was damned awful of him.
I felt shame immediately. I knew nothing about them. I barely understood myself in these matters. I thought of Cashwell off in his room.

Of course, I went to Becky and took her in my arms, and she sobbed and sobbed, always wiping the tears from her face before they could run onto my dress, but I just hugged her harder. Then I brought her into the parlor to sit down.

She said nothing for a while and just struggled mightily to take back her tears. Eventually she stood up and said she had work to do, that it was nothing, that it was the strain of the war that had toyed with her head but that she was all right now.

“Sit,” I said.

She sat down, and the tension seemed to run out of her. I thought she might faint. She sat on the chair with both feet planted before her and rested her chin on her chest.

“Will Baylor. That’s the man.”

The lights were low, and I could barely see her face, but nevertheless, I knew she was shocked to hear me say his name.

“What do you mean?”

“Your beau. He was Will Baylor, wasn’t he?”

I could see the tears glistening in the dim light thrown off by the lamps. She only nodded her head. I was about to say something, extend some condolence or something equally useless, but she spoke first.

“I loved him. And he loved me. He’s the only boy who ever did. We been sneaking around on account of his father.”

Baylor. I understood without her saying anything about it.

“He come to visit me whenever he had a chance, and before the war I would meet him up by the river and we’d spend days just walking in the shallows and all, getting our feet wet, stirring up the frogs and the shiners. I reckoned we’d always be doing such things.”

There was nothing I could say. I had learned, by hard lessons, how pitiful the words of comfort could be. There was nothing that could possibly be said, not even
I’m sorry,
that accomplishes anything, at least not at first. The only truth that could be said is that there’s never enough time: love always snatches itself away before you’re ready. And why would I say such a thing to a girl so broken and alone?

“I thought we would be married. Silly, reckon.”

“That wasn’t silly.”

“It was silly to ever think anything good could come of getting above myself like that, with a boy like that.”

“The river was good, or am I wrong? When you were with him,
that
was good, right?”

“It’s not enough. I won’t never be enough. I made a mistake.”

She got up, and I knew she was going to be leaving for good. Then she kneeled on the floor, and before I knew what I was doing, I knelt down with her, feeling the hard wood under my knee and the rough, scratchy homespun under the hand I laid upon her shoulder. She prayed.

“Dear Lord, I pray that You spared Will the pain and the lonesomeness I got on me right now. I pray that You took him quick and that he knows that I miss him more than any other thing under Your sun. Tell my dear mama to go find him and hold on to him, because I’ll be coming one day and I expect him to be there waiting on me. There ain’t nothing more I want from You, Lord. I don’t need nothing else except that. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

Then she shrugged off my hand and stood up. She looked at me with hard eyes, not out of hate, but out of determination, I believe. She was determined to get about the rest of her life like all those other sharp-faced, work-worn women keeping their hopes and dreams screwed down like preserves in a jar. She didn’t want me to stop her or to hug her again. I gathered her in my arms anyway, and I felt her relax again. I felt the sobs coming up from deep in her chest. I thought if I could just hold her, I could persuade her to stay, and perhaps convince her that the life she had imagined was not over. But she stood up straight again, gently pushed me away, and looked at me with kinder eyes this time.

“He loved me, you know. A girl like me, I can be loved, too. It ain’t impossible.”

She walked out of the house, down the steps, and out into the driveway, kicking up a dirt cloud around her feet. The dust made her appear to be drifting away from me, until finally she disappeared beyond the bend and into the wood.