The Widow of the South (29 page)

Didn’t know where to go or how to get there
. At least I knew that much now.

Much later I read that Forrest bragged about setting free a Negro who had been unlawfully imprisoned at one of his railroad camps. By then his company had failed and he hisself was almost dead, so I didn’t grudge him trying to make something more of hisself with that story. He didn’t mean nothing to me. Let him believe what he wanted. I knew he was what he was, and men like that don’t change.

37

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

I
was wrong about the breeze in Tennessee, that it couldn’t compare to the cooling wind off the water surrounding my papa’s plantation. I learned how to find a spot on the back gallery that perfectly intercepted whatever wind or puff had decided to kick up during those heavy, sun-flooded days of summer, and in my rocker I could achieve a modicum of cool and comfort. Inside, it was impossible to find a cool spot except in the evenings, but on the back gallery it was possible to look out over our yard and watch the children and think that there wasn’t a place anywhere more suited to me. This was necessary on those days I spent out there, writing letters to the families of the dead. It was good to know I was planted somewhere pleasant.

June 12, 1866

Dear Mr. Robertson,

Please forgive my tardiness with this letter. I have been inexcusably remiss in my correspondence, which is a doubly contemptible state of affairs considering your loss and the kindness of your letter, dated May the 22nd. I will endeavor to tell you all I know about your son, Randolph, in the hopes that it might ease your burden for even a moment. I cannot imagine the despair of a father such as yourself.

But, of course, I could.

Your son was a strong young man who spent his days praying to his Lord Jesus Christ that he would be delivered unto Him, and that He would guard and protect those he loved, who I took to be you and your family.

I had no earthly idea if Ran Robertson, who died on my best parlor floor from an infection and loss of blood from his stomach, had any warm feelings about his family or that he cared that they would be protected. I did not know whether he was a believer or that his father was a believer or that his father would take word of his son’s prayer as comfort. I only knew that writing such a thing to this man, even if he was no believer, was the best way I knew to convey my own sorrow for him and his son. In my experience I’d learned that even those undisposed to pray would take solace from the knowledge that others had prayed for them. And if such a prayer had not been offered to the Lord from Ran Robertson’s lips, I thought, so what? I was writing a letter to the living, not the dead; what did the dead care? The white lie soothed the pain of a man who had written to me,
I dohn know what becaim of me son, and I wished I did. I sorely do.
My lies were justified.

He was with us for a few days, but I always think he knew that he would pass on. He was strong-minded and not afraid. He was a comfort to the other men around him, who were facing the same prospect of quitting this life earlier than they had ever expected, and for that I am grateful that your son, whom we called Ran, was with us even for those few short days.

The men did indeed take solace from men like Ran and the others who were slipping away. They were not alone in the room. It didn’t matter whether Ran had stoically borne his pain and his destiny or had screamed and cried the whole way to his final rest—it was his presence alone that would have been a comfort. So I had no qualm presenting Ran as a strong and resigned man, even if he hadn’t been. He might as well have been. I was writing to the living.

His death was peaceful, quiet, and quick.

It had not been peaceful—few if any of their deaths had been peaceful. To what I know war rarely makes peaceful deaths, but that was something that I thought a man like Ran had a right to carry to his grave. Everything was over now.

I received many letters, and in the years after that battle I spent much of my time on the back gallery, rocking slowly and trying to keep my stationery steady in my lap. I did not like to compose those letters while sitting inside, even when it was cold, because there was too much about the house to remind me of what it had actually been like to have those boys there. I didn’t want the truth slipping unbidden into the letters.

They wrote to me because they heard from survivors of the battle who returned home, wherever home was, that our house was the last place many of the missing had been seen. Some of the men told stories about us, tales that made us into angels who had gone to extraordinary lengths to save not just a few men, but all that was left of the entire Confederacy, and that we—well, they meant
me,
of course; Mariah and the others were never mentioned—were bright polestars of Southern womanhood. These families—fathers, mothers, brothers, aunts—wrote to me to find out what had become of their men. And so I told them.

After I finished my letter to Mr. Robertson and set it aside for Mariah to deliver to the postal clerk in town, I looked out over the yard and watched Winder and Eli returning from the creek. It surprised me to see how tall Winder had become, but it always surprised me. He was just this side of becoming that little man he had always longed to be. Eli, who
had
become a man, was barely taller than my little boy, whose bones seemed to rattle around in his skin, so gangly. They sauntered up to the porch like they were old gunslingers.

“No fish, Winder?”

“No fish, Mama. I think we got ’em all a few weeks ago. Ain’t none left.”

“There
are none
left.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Eli stood beside him, smiling his toothy grin, knowing it was his fault my son sometimes talked like he didn’t have any education. Eli was my new son. He was Winder’s hero, leader, instigator, comrade in arms in battle against the fish of our creek. He was an orphan, and even when he smiled, I could see that he still didn’t think he had a right to be happy for a second. I could understand why he felt that way, and it pained me to see a boy, even one about to be seventeen, torn against himself like that. In all of the history books and newspaper articles that would be written about the war, who would write or even remember the people like Eli?

Becky had died, more than a year ago, in the summer after the battle while giving birth to a baby boy. This had changed Eli, and Lord knows he had good reason.

There was a hardness in his way of speaking, an edge, that made him seem angry. At what, I didn’t know for quite some time. He always volunteered to run into town to get provisions at Baylor’s store, and I had been told by some of the ladies in town that he could be seen wandering the streets of Franklin regularly, a package of groceries under his arm, looking into windows and peeking around the corners of houses, watching men work. One day Josh Harper, the blacksmith, caught Eli spying through the window of the Baylor house, trussed him up like a Christmas turkey, and deposited him on our front porch with a note explaining Eli’s perversity. I knew there was something more wrong with the boy than the loss of his family. But when John and I looked at him sitting on the edge of the old Jackson rocker in the office, rubbing the rope burns on his wrists and awaiting his punishment, we knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t a perversity. He was persevering in something, some idea of his, regardless of the consequences. John made him dig potatoes for two days straight as punishment, but neither of us had any hope that he would stop searching for that thing that was missing, whatever it was.

After Becky’s death Eli had lived with his father in their little cabin down the pike. Winder went to see him every once in a while, and he’d come back with tales of how dirty the house had become, how the kitchen always smelled of rotted meat, and how all the neighbors had moved away, leaving Eli with no friends other than Winder. Even that little fat boy had left, the brave little soul who had brought Eli to me the night of the battle. I started sending food—smoked ham, eggs, a loaf of bread—with Winder, but he’d always bring it back untouched, with word that Eli’s father wanted no charity.
He doesn’t want to be human,
is what I thought, but I didn’t say it to Winder.

Then, in that winter, almost on the first anniversary of the battle, Eli again appeared on our doorstep, bearing a note.

Dear Mrs. M,

I cannot raise this boy. I am tore up with Becky’s passing, and I miss her as bad as I miss my poor wife, who I think about every day. I got to get away, to start something new. I want to change, I don’t want to be this here man no more. I want to be a different man. I will send for the boy when I’m right.

He didn’t bother to sign it, and I never heard from him again. I never asked John if we could take the boy in as our own son. He never asked me, either. John just showed him upstairs to Winder’s room—now
the boys’
room—and that was that. The boy was dead tired and dirty. The cuffs of his overalls dragged long white threads behind. I didn’t bother ordering him into the bath that night.

Somehow Eli was able to stay dirty. It was the dirt of a clean creek, though, not the dirt and refuse of despair and resignation. I had been able to scrub that off him, I hoped.

No fish. We’d have to eat ham again.

“Do you need for me to go on down the cellar, Mrs. McGavock?”

“No, Eli, I think we’ll do fine with what we have tonight. Go see Mariah about what she needs for the kitchen.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Winder was about to bounce along after Eli when I stopped him by grabbing onto the back of his short pants and holding on. He practically dragged me out of my chair and down the steps before he realized I’d hooked him.

“Mama?”

“Sit next to me for a second, Winder.”

I went back to my chair, packed up my paper and pens, and looked down at Winder sitting next to me on the porch, his scratched and bloody knees—there were short hawthorns down by the creek—drawn up to his chest. How could he be so young but so grown up?

“Did y’all catch fish?”

“No, ma’am.”

I loved Winder with all of my heart. He was so loyal and kind. I hoped someday he’d know what deserved that loyalty and kindness.

“Answer me straight, Winder.”

He put his head on his knees and peered down between his legs. He let a little wad of drool slide out of his mouth and stretch itself to the floor.

“Stop that, Winder. Did you catch fish?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why didn’t you bring them home?”

“We put them back. Got ’em off the hooks and slipped ’em back down into the water. Mostly bream, a couple of suckerfish. Maybe one bass, but we weren’t sure.”

“Why did you do that?”

“It was Eli’s idea.”

I had suspected as much. They’d spent a lot of time down there at the creek, and I knew a boy as country as Eli would know how to catch fish, and yet they only brought home fish every once in a while, and always the littlest, most pathetic fish you ever saw.

“What was his idea?”

“Not to kill the fish. He said he don’t ever want to kill anything, and he makes me kill the fish when he decides we ought to bring some up to you. He says he didn’t want you suspicious. He even gets mad at me when I kill spiders. I think he likes to see the fish, he likes to feel them and hold them in his hand and look at them in the sunlight, but he almost always takes the hook out and slips ’em back into the water.”

“Does he make you return your fish to the water?”

“No, but I never catch fish. I’m not very good at it.”

“I see.”

What would I have written to Eli’s father if Eli had died on that battlefield?

Dear Sir,

Your son Eli was a gentle boy trapped in the body of a man.

It was too hard to write about someone you loved, or liked, or even knew briefly.

He hated killing, and would not kill. This is probably why he died.

All this death and dying. How is it possible to tell the story of one’s life entirely with reference to death? It must surely be impossible to describe life in death, and yet I felt then—and feel now—that there is no possible way to tell the story of my life without recounting these morbid years. There is no possible way to tell the story of my farm, my town, my state, this whole damnable Southern Confederacy we were so sure of, without recounting the deaths. I have heard men in the town square talk about the lingering shame of defeat, and they are welcome to spend their days ticking off the bill of particulars against their honor and dignity sealed that last day at the Appomattox Courthouse. That is their story. I saw absence instead. Not the absence of honor and dignity, but of people. How awfully empty this country seemed in those years.

I didn’t feel the shame of defeat, but I felt the horror in the empty farmhouses, the lonely roads, the untended land. We would occasionally ride up to Nashville on social business, John and I, past mile after mile of weed-choked fields quickly succumbing to the surrounding forests, past farmhouses turned gray from neglect, curtainless windows like empty eyes. No light ever came from within these houses, these dozens and dozens of houses that had once been home to
someone
. How I regretted that I had never bothered to stop in to speak with these people, to know them. They had been no more a part of my life than the landscape. But then their men had died, or had disappeared, countless thousands and thousands of men, and the dying broke through the bounds of the battlefield and came to embrace the countryside and our towns. All those young boys. We were a new country, that was certainly true. A new country of old men and angry, stubborn men. There were moments when I could look out from our carriage and think that there wasn’t anything this country couldn’t become, which was not at all a comforting thought.

I thought of Eli as one of the lucky ones, although I do not believe he thought of himself that way.

Eli was ever in pain, sir, and never quite understood what had happened to him. None of us did, truth be told. He was brave only in the way a mule is brave, stubbornly moving on without thought despite very good reasons for stopping. He did not embrace his fate so much as he walked right into it. I do not recall that he prayed at the end, although how would I know? I am not so pious as to believe that I know when a person is speaking to God, nor am I so falsely pious that I would venture a guess, at least not in Eli’s case. If Eli was praying, that was his business, I believe.