The Widow of the South (31 page)

39

Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL

W
e didn’t go to Franklin right away. We told ourselves that we were circling around the country, covering our tracks just in case one of them boys from the camp decided to catch up with us. It was likely that some word was getting passed around the railroad circuit about us, but it wasn’t real likely they were actually chasing us. We’d have to watch what we said to people, ’cause folks didn’t really like wandering strangers around, and you were liable to get in trouble quicker than shit if folks didn’t know you. But we were smart about it. What Jerrod was really doing was enjoying a little freedom, and what I was really doing was working up the courage to go back to Carnton. So we wandered around Tennessee, headed mostly east but taking detours north and south as the spirit moved us, or when we caught word of something interesting to see, usually a tavern.

The first thing to know about being on the run, which was a thing I had learned after much experience, was that you had to know how to explain every single damned thing you had with you, and every step you’d taken since practically the day you were born, and if you couldn’t do it, you were risking getting collared and dragged into the authorities, or robbed or shot. You had to know what to say no matter what some nosy jackass asked you. Sometimes you could tell ’em to mind their own damned business, but that never held people off for very long. You had to know what to say, and every word out of your mouth had to be true, just not true about
you
.

My saddle? Why, I got that special made in Memphis. Who made it? Well, Jimmy Blackstone over on Market Street, of course. I ain’t riding just any saddle around, friend. Got to take care of my backside, and I like a saddle smooth like glove leather. Ain’t ever had nice gloves, course, but you understand. Sure, run your hand over it, I don’t mind. Blackstone likes to work them special tools and carve up all kinds of curlicues and every pretty little thing he can think of when he ain’t drunk. It really ain’t my style, but, hell, I didn’t want to break old Jimmy’s heart, now, did I? No, sir, I can’t trade you for it. Won’t sell, either. Like I said, I’m mighty particular about my ass. It chaps pretty easy, if you get me. This here? Well, those are my custom-plated Colts. No problem, no problem at all, friend. You have a good ride, now.

It weren’t even close to being the softest saddle I’d ever ridden. I had boils and sores all up and down my backside, and I couldn’t stand to sit down at the end of the day. And if those pistols of Jerrod’s were custom-plated, they were custom-plated with tarnish and sweat and road dirt, and looked like hell. But you had to have a story, especially ’cause Jerrod had really started to look like death. Not like he was going to die, but like Death itself. His hair was so black it looked
heavy,
and that eye of his had become brighter and brighter as he’d become used to the loss of the other one. He was self-conscious about the hole where his eye should have been, and so he didn’t like to go about during the day. We traveled at night.

Jerrod was still bent on making his way, eventually, as a gun for hire and all-around tough man, and that meant practice, he said. I caught him one morning off in the woods shooting at my little Bible from a good seventy-five feet. I cuffed him and gave him hell, but not before noticing that he’d put a bullet right smack in the middle of the book, which had stopped the bullet.

My daddy gave me that book. I’d carried it everywhere ever since, even into battle, and it ain’t once got a bullet hole in it, or even a stain, until Jerrod went and had to play outlaw on the damned thing. He stomped off saying he was going to go find some whiskey.
Must be a moonshiner around here someplace,
he said.
They a whole lot nicer than you, that’s for damned sure, even if you got you a Bible and know how to talk out of it.
I went back over to the fire and flipped the two little bass fish I was roasting.

The hole in the book stopped at Second Samuel. I already knew those verses.

And Absalom met the servants of David. And Absalom rode upon a mule, and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.

I read on, where the pages were only a little torn by the bullet:

And a certain man saw it, and told Joab, and said, Behold, I saw Absalom hanged in an oak.

And Joab said unto the man that told him, And, behold, thou sawest him, and why didst thou not smite him there to the ground? and I would have given thee ten shekels of silver, and a girdle.

And the man said unto Joab, Though I should receive a thousand shekels of silver in mine hand, yet would I not put forth mine hand against the king’s son: for in our hearing the king charged thee and Abishai and Ittai, saying, Beware that none touch the young man Absalom.

Otherwise I should have wrought falsehood against mine own life: for there is no matter hid from the king, and thou thyself wouldest have set thyself against me.

Then said Joab, I may not tarry thus with thee. And he took three darts in his hand, and thrust them through the heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak.

Ain’t that the way of the betrayer, that old rascal Absalom? Seducer of Israel, caught up in an oak, abandoned by a ornery mule, killed where he hung. Mama used to say that if there’d been an oak somewhere around the house, which there weren’t, she’d have had it chopped down right quick to avoid temptation. I don’t even now know who would have been the tempted one. I remember that my father didn’t have much use for Absalom, though.

I kept reading and thinking about that book. I had thought about being a preacher once. Even thought I had heard the call. But I was little, and that was before I began dreaming of the angels and before I went to live with my aunt. After that, I hadn’t so much as gone to hear a preacher, not ever. Even so, I was sad about the hole in my book, and it made me think about what might have happened had I been a preacher.

This here book,
I said out loud,
has on it the mark of the devil. There is a bullet hole here, friend, and it stops right here in Second Samuel. Now, why? I tell you, friends, I was waylaid by the lowest of the low, the meanest and dirtiest man you seen, and he were the devil’s own soldier.

A preacher got license with the truth, I knew that much. Got to keep people in their seats.

And he went to rob me, and I held the Good Book up because I’d been reading it as I rode. Do I always read while I ride? By the Lord, yes! The Word of the Lord is good for any time, even if it ain’t the most comfortable time. And that bullet traveled through the book I held with love, and it turned that bullet away from my heart, and I thought I heard the Lord say, “I will not let this one, most humble of my dirty-faced and sinful children, be smited.” He stopped that bullet right here, right where Absalom gets hisself hung up in that tree. And I reckon Absalom stopped that bullet for me, and although I don’t dole out the forgiveness in this life, if I get a chance, I’ll be putting a good word in for old Absalom up in heaven.

And so that is how I come to have a Bible with a bullet hole in it, and I come to you today to spread the good news of this here book’s loyalty under fire.

Well, I sounded like a preacher, and that made me laugh right out. But then I picked at that fish and thought a little more about it. I could be a preacher. I knew enough about preaching, I’d seen it high and low. I’d do anything to get my daddy back, but if I had to steal a few ideas from that goddamn snake who come into our house and stole everything, that
reverend,
well, that seemed like it was right and just. Maybe that’s the new man I was to be.

“You a preacher now?”

Jerrod stood in the clearing with a jar of whiskey. If you’ve got a nose for where men make their whiskey, like we did, a trip across the country is just moving from one still to another. We’d look along the little creeks, in the cool dark places where the shiners keep their stills and the centipedes lie around waiting to fall on your neck when you ain’t looking. I’d always make a lot of noise to announce myself, and act real grateful that they’d sell me their rotgut for far more than its worth. Jerrod liked to sneak up on ’em. He thought that was funny.

“Preacher. That’s good cover. Good thinking. I just heard you from over there in the woods. Guess you practicing. Guess you preacher fellas gots to practice, although it seem a little funny you got to practice the Word of the Lord. Ain’t that the sort of thing that just comes to you right there slap on the spot, like you got the fire in your belly and it just got put there by the Lord Hisself? But what the fuck do I know, I’m as bad a sinner as they come. Where’s my fish?”

I looked at the little hunk of black on the spit and then back at him. It always surprised me how much he could eat, being so skinny and all. I watched him bite through the fish, skin and all, and damned if he didn’t find a whole lot of white flesh in that burned-up mess. I reckoned he knew some things that I didn’t, could see things I couldn’t.

“What you think we should call our gang?”

“We don’t got a gang, Jerrod.”

Jerrod got a thoughtful look on his face, which made him look a little queasy. Then he smiled.

“All right, then. Can’t blame a man for trying. I done heard about a job. Heard it from an old boy living out in the woods a few miles or so over those hills, moonshiner. Something about digging up Indian bones. Big-deal Yankee project, but they hiring. And I like anything to do with the injuns, seen a couple when I was little.”

“Indian bones.”

“That what the man said. Here’s the thing, too. It’s in Franklin. I reckon it’s time to get on, if that’s where we going and we ain’t going to have a gang.”

I hadn’t really thought I’d find a job, or even a good reason to go to Franklin besides
her
. And what was I going to do when I found her? Something, but I still didn’t know.

“They digging
in
Franklin?”

“Somewhere south of there, I think. Where they got those weird-looking hills off the side of the road. I remember them from when we was marching up in there. What do you know, turns out they ain’t hills at all, but
burial mounds
. Reckon they a lot of people all heaped up in there. Savages.”

I thought,
Too many bones already in Franklin,
which made digging up Indian bones seem right stupid. Then I noticed something odd about Jerrod. He had drawn one of his pistols and was staring at it, like it was going to talk to him.

“Jerrod?”

He was just wiping his mouth and swallowing his last bite of that burned fish. He was having a hard time swallowing.

“Yeah?”

“Where’d you get that moonshine?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“You just come across a moonshiner in the woods?”

“Yeah.”

“Snuck up on him.”

“Like usual.”

“Then what?”

“He had a fright, but we got to talking. Told me about the job. Sold me this whiskey.”

“And?”

“I took his money. Reckoned we needed it. We got nothing, Zachariah.”

“And?”

“And I killed him.”

I should have known that, and I shouldn’t have asked it. No matter how much you think you know a man, if he’s a killer, it’s hard to sleep or eat. Men like Jerrod, even a man who was my friend and who had saved my life, were hard to trust. I was afraid of Jerrod, truthfully, but I was also happy to have some company. I sat silent for a while.

“Zachariah?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I killed him. I didn’t need to kill him. I wish I hadn’t. I know you wouldn’t have killed him, and it makes me a little ashamed to admit it to you. You’d have never done something like that, would you?”

I didn’t say nothing.

“Zachariah?”

“What?”

“You a good man.”

For a few nights, at least, I slept comfortable on that. And then I prayed for Jerrod’s soul, something I hadn’t done for anyone since I was a boy.

40

C
ARRIE
M
CGAVOCK

T
here was one man in our little town who was not a backward-looking primitive, as John had called them. I was very sure that I wished he
were
a backward-looking primitive. Then his motives could have been ascertained, his intentions predicted. If only this man had been stupid like the rest of them.

But Baylor was not a stupid man. He was a bitter, hard man who had never once made a secret of his disdain for Confederate leaders during the war. On the Confederacy itself, who knew what he thought? He was not a man for abstractions, and he was certainly no sentimentalist. His contempt was for Confederate leaders, every one of which he had made a point of calling a fool at one time or another.
If the Confederacy is its leaders, I have little hope for the whole experiment,
he’d say. His contempt had only deepened since the war. He’d lost a son, Will, on the battlefield at Franklin, and I believe that this very fact caused him to gain a certain sense of provenance not only over his home and his fields but over the whole town. His son had gone and given himself to the cause in his blood, and from what I can tell, this made Baylor think he’d given more than any other man in Franklin and that they owed him something. Whether or not he got along with his son, a matter of some debate, was hopelessly beside the point. His son was dead and gone, led to his death by men that old man Baylor reviled.

Was Zachariah Cashwell, even though he wasn’t much of a leader, one of those men he would have hated so? I could not fathom it, although I knew it would be true. This is how I knew the depths of Baylor’s hatred. I had been made stronger and wiser by the knowledge that a man like Zachariah could love me, that I could be loved by so unlikely a man. On the rare occasion that I went to town and saw the way our town had gone on in no particularly remarkable way, I could not help but wonder if God had meant for Zachariah to lose his leg so that we could go on as ever. It seemed wrong, and I believed God had meant Zachariah for something far greater, which I had never quite understood. I wondered about this while walking in my garden and asking myself if Zachariah would enjoy the flowers Hattie had made to grow in fulsome waves again. I wondered about it while tending the graves of my children, and I wondered about it when I bathed myself and when I drifted off to sleep late into the night. I wondered, Lord help me, if the Lord had intended
me
for him. And then I fell into dreamless slumber.

John had gone to see Baylor yet again. He had long since given up on getting back the many acres of land Baylor and the trust company had taken into their possession when we defaulted on John’s loans. There was no question of getting any of our land back, since most of it was already in the process of being divided and let out to any number of poor young soldiers and their younger brides and their skinny hollow-eyed children, all of whom worked the land themselves and gave up part of their takings to Baylor. Every fourth Saturday you’d see a parade of men on mules or in homemade carts plodding toward town, toward Baylor’s store, where they’d settle accounts and buy more equipment and seed. A never-ending cycle. One of the little farms abutted the edge of our property at the railroad track, and sometimes I’d pass by and watch the little, dark, and nervous wife next door tend her beans and pick her squash. She never said hello, and neither did I. I think perhaps I frightened her.

The thing John wanted Baylor to understand was that he was a man of ideas, that despite the poor decision he’d made in buying uniforms and equipment for the Confederate company from Franklin, and paying for it with a loan secured by his family’s land, he could still be counted on to develop profitable ideas that would make them both money if only Baylor would unclench his fist and make the investment. This never happened. I don’t think it was because Baylor could not see that change was coming to Franklin. I believe Baylor simply didn’t want to share the future with a partner. The future was his. The Confederacy owed him.

John rode up to the porch that day, and I could see he was heavy with a burden he didn’t know how to lift off himself. The lines along the outside of his mouth, which had begun to form jowls, were deep and black. He would not look at me, just busied himself with hitching the horse to the balustrade. Finally he looked up, and it was as if his whole face were being pulled from some unknowable force below his feet. He was a sorry sight.

To this day I can’t fathom how he understood that the news he brought from town would send me into a fury. And yet there he stood in his black suit and well-shined boots, rubbing at his baby jowls and looking up at me with watery eyes, like he was a child about to be beaten. Many years later I would appreciate this prescience of his and what it said about his love for me.

“Seen Baylor.”

“Did he decide to take the house, too?”

“He doesn’t want the house.”

“What does he want?”

“He doesn’t want anything. At least not from us.”

I had come to feel like some sort of princess holding court up there on the porch, a sovereign in black sitting tall on her rocking throne while the blue paint of the ceiling boards flaked and the floorboards creaked. This was not how I wanted to act with John, not anymore. I gathered my skirts about me and stood up, still hoping that this conversation could be salvaged and that soon the two of us would be laughing over tales in his office.

“John, let’s go into your office. It’s cooler.”

John looked relieved for a moment, and the lines around his mouth softened. He removed his short hat and wiped the dirty grime from his brow.

“I’ll join you after I’ve put up the horse. Might take a while.”

“I have all the time in the world.”

In the office I paced. I knew John had some dreadful thing to tell me. I thumbed through his collection of
Harper’s Weekly
s, neatly stacked on the bookshelf, flounced down in the old Jackson rocker, got back up, and finally stretched out upon the small couch, under an old map of Tennessee. The dust rose up when I sat down, and I watched it fill the sun streaks flowing through the tops of the windowpanes and between the slats of the blinds.

John finally came in, having knocked the mud off his boots, and took his seat in the rocker across from me. I expected that he would reach for the decanter on the side table, but he did not. I sighed.

He slipped down like a little boy, until the back of his head rested against the top of the chair. He let his arms flop off the chair arms, and he looked at me with a squint.

“Baylor took me aside and told me he was fixing to plow up his south field and put it back into production, probably more cotton.”

I was not impressed by this revelation.

“So Mr. Baylor will actually do some farming for himself? Bravo for him. I suppose he’s worn out all his tenants by now.”

“In the field between his old gin and the pike.”

“Yes.”

“You understand which field I’m speaking of?”

“I do not.”

John wiped some dust off the knees of his trousers and, with what seemed like great reluctance, finally did reach for the sherry decanter, pouring himself a deep glass. He looked at me and I shook my head. I feared sherry if not taken in just the right mood. I wasn’t in that mood.

He sipped his drink.

“That’s the old Union trench line, Carrie.”

What did I care for a Union or Confederate trench line, or any other scar of those years? What did I care what Baylor did with his piece of the battlefield? I thought to myself,
The sooner it’s covered in white bolls, the easier it will be for us all to forget that it once ran with another color, a horrifying, tawdry, final color.

“Well, good for Mr. Baylor again.”

John stood up and walked over to one of the windows, rubbing his finger along the edge of the glass until it moaned and squeaked. He was looking at an old map of Tennessee while he spoke.

“Do you ever wonder what became of all the dead?”

They were taken from here. Taken away in carts and wagons and piled upon makeshift sleds that slipped almost silently over the cold winter mud. I assumed that most of them had been taken home, where the dead had their proper place. Of course, we had enough of our own dead lying in the grove across the yard, and there were those that had been buried in the trench through Baylor’s field. I suppose I believed that the dead would all make their way to similar little cemeteries, in similar groves, sons next to fathers next to mothers. The dead, the incontrovertible proof of failure, had mocked our efforts in those days after the battle. The truth is, I had sometimes stood by and watched the piles of men hauled off, and wished them a safe journey to the end of the earth. I hadn’t thought all of that through, not then.

“I assume most were taken home.”

John put his finger on the glass of the framed map and traced the meandering of the Mississippi.

“Many were.”

“Many.”

“Some.”

My breathing came harder and my face flushed, as it always did when I began to feel unmoored, or upon the discovery that there was yet another thing under the sun that I had not understood. Or both. John continued.

“A negligible number, really, from what I understand. The Union got their dead out of town, but they didn’t take them very far, just as far as the new cemeteries in Nashville and Murfreesboro.”

“That is a shame.”

“What kind of shame?”

“That they didn’t see fit to send those boys back to their homes.”

“How would they have done that?”

“By rail, horse, boat. There would have been so many ways. And why are we talking about this?”

John snorted out his nose and kept touching his precious map. He was beginning to irritate me.

“You know what bodies smell like after a few days? You can’t drag it wherever it came from without packing it in salt and coal, at least, and even then it’s a mighty queer affair. But I can assure you, no one went to that kind of trouble for our dead or their dead. No one ever did that, not during the entire war. Men stayed where they dropped, most of them.”

“So where are they? Where are all those men they hauled from here?”

My mind drifted. I imagined the dead beneath my feet, under the floorboards, in Hattie’s garden. Where were they hiding? I looked out the window past John’s shoulder and imagined that every tree protected a man lying at its feet, every hill a hill of bones. They could be anywhere.

“There were many more dead than were taken away from our house, Carrie. Thousands more. You saw only a few, the ones who had been able to leave the battlefield with breath in them. You never met the men who never left the field.”

It is possible to know something without ever understanding it. I had known that many more had died than had died here, because I had heard the numbers.
Five thousand dead, six thousand dead, countless dead.
Had I bothered to spend much time with those numbers, to divine their meaning, I would have understood the full cost of that November day. But I had not bothered until just then, with John’s back to me and a forest of trees waving at me through the window, each tree grasping and reaching toward me.
Thousands more
. It was incomprehensible. John turned back to me, and my face must have flushed, because he went over to the sideboard and poured me a little whiskey. Stronger medicine.

“Are you all right?” he asked as he handed me the glass.

“I am taken aback by my own ignorance.”

“Good. So you understand the problem.”

“I understand that my little part was so small and insignificant as to be almost worthless.”

“That isn’t what I meant, and it isn’t true. I won’t have you pouting.”

“I don’t pout.”

“The thing you have to understand is that those men, the thousands of men who died here in Franklin, they’re still here. Dead, but still here. And most of them, including the ones who died here, are lying under a couple of feet of dirt in Baylor’s field, Carrie, and he’s planning to plow it under.”

I imagined the plow going through those bones, crunching them up and turning them into fertilizer. I got up and poured another glass of whiskey and kept my hand on the center table, steadying myself.
These boys
.

“The thing is, it isn’t going to go over well, this plan of his. No, sir. There are people in this town who won’t let that happen, and they aren’t the sort to send a negotiating party out to the Baylors’ to parlay. There could be a fight. The way some of those men are, what they talk about,
down in Baylor’s own damned store
. It isn’t possible that he could do it without stirring up the snakes.”

“Who buried them?”

“Oh God, Carrie, would you stay with me for one moment? That doesn’t matter.”

“Matters to me.”

I finished my whiskey.

“What matters is that I don’t know why, but I think that Baylor is stirring things up on purpose. He don’t need that field. He’s got something else going, and I can’t figure it out.”

John went back to his seat, and we sat watching each other. I seemed to be getting drunk, which was a relatively rare experience for me. The air seemed slow and old, and I wished John had opened the window when he was standing by it. The house seemed unimaginably ancient right then, and me along with it. I watched John’s Adam’s apple as he swallowed his sherry. He switched to the whiskey, too, and then sat back down where I could watch him some more. The war was over, what were we doing worrying over the men who had died in it? They had no worries, surely.

And yet I could not shake the feeling that all that we had done in this house in those days—the healing and the comforting and the cleaning and the death watches—that they weren’t real, that they’d been figments of imagination, and that the only solid evidence of what we had done was lying in that field, rebuking me for failing them. I had already failed them, so they would not expect me to save them from Baylor’s plow.

Save them from the plow
. It was ridiculous and none of my business.