The Widow of the South (32 page)

“How were they buried?”

“How should I know? It’s not important.”

I had been resting my feet on a little footstool that Martha had decorated. I pulled them off and placed them firmly on the ground and leaned forward. Very unladylike. John was scratching at his ear. He had lost interest in me for the moment. I could almost see his nose getting liquor red, second by second.

“It’s the most important thing, John.”

It still amuses me to remember the look of alarm on his face. It was his own fault, I have to say.

That evening, an hour or so before sunset, I took Mariah down to the pike. We rode in the horse cart and took the long way out to the road so that John wouldn’t be awakened from his nap. I didn’t tell Mariah why we were going, but I suspect she knew before I even asked her. This is how she had always been since we were little girls, aware of things before anyone else.

It didn’t take us long to travel up the pike and then strike out across the field, until we were in a low spot a few hundred yards across from Baylor’s old gin. Grasshoppers flew into the air away from us. I noticed how their wings glowed in the waning light; and the farther they receded, the more they seemed just small points of light until finally they were doused in the taller grass far away. We sat still, and when the grasshoppers ended their flights, it was as if they’d never been there at all.

Mariah wasn’t watching. She was staring straight ahead, and in my shadow her face seemed unnaturally dark. She knew why we were there, and she had no interest in any of it. I felt sad for her, and not because I was going to make her do something she’d rather not do. I felt no compunction about
that
. I felt sad for her because I knew she was thinking of her son.

“He’ll be all right, Mariah.”

“Ma’am?”

“Theopolis. He’ll be all right.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I believe it.”

“Well, I don’t believe it.”

“Chances are, he’ll stay right where he is and make his shoes, and that will be the end of it.”

“I don’t see that. Don’t see that at all. I see much worse.”

“You’re a pessimist.”

She turned toward me. She had hate upon her face, and it scared me.

“All I know is, you-all fighting that same war over and over and over again. One white man think he ought to do one thing, and another think he ought to do some other thing, and they all gone to make life hell for everyone else. You tell me how the sense in any of that.”

“There isn’t. I see that.”

“We here because that old man gone to plow up this field, and you can’t stand it. Can’t
stand
it. So you drag the nigger along to help you and protect you and tell you what you want to know.”

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Oh hell. Whip me, then. We gone on too long, Miss Carrie, for you to tell me my place. I known my place since I was a little girl. More than you knew.”

“Stop it.”

“We here because you gone fight with a man over what he want to do with his own land, where there buried hundreds of white men who ain’t done one damned thing for me or mine
ever
. If they’d had their way, my son wouldn’t have no cobbler shop. But you got to have everything
just so,
and you can’t stand that you didn’t save every one of them boys, that you didn’t come close even. Truth is, you just like all the rest of the white folk: you think everything what happens is because you did or didn’t do something. That Mr. Baylor, he think the same thing. He think he got to meddle and get people stirred up, elsewise the town ain’t going to be the town he wants. He wants power, like all you-all, and don’t tell me that coming down here to visit these dead men ain’t about power. Who got the power to do what they want with them bones? You been sitting up there on that porch for two years, thinking you done right and good, and then along come this man with his plow, and you got to do it all over again, and you got to drag me along with you. But you
did
do right; you don’t got to do right again. Who says it ain’t God’s plan for these dead boys to stay here in this field and get plowed over and ground to dust? You got that much power, Miss Carrie? You that rich? You know what God wants?”

I could think of nothing to say to that outburst except something silly and beside the point.

“We’re not rich.”

“You don’t have money, don’t mean you ain’t rich still.”

She misunderstood me, but I couldn’t help that. I moved the cart forward a little to watch the grasshoppers fly again. They disappeared like little memories.

I
did
want to have everything set right, but I thought I knew something about men she didn’t know. I knew that if a man like Baylor plowed that field, it would never be forgiven by others. Itself an act of violence, the plowing would breed more violence. It would be a challenge, and the men who would rise to Baylor’s challenge were the more terrifying. They were the defeated and the bitter, and there were so many of them. Mariah was right that we fought that war over and over and over again. I just didn’t see why I ought to sit by and let another skirmish erupt when I could stop it. I did not know how I would stop it. That was my dilemma.

“I don’t know what to do, Mariah.”

“Let’s ride home, Miss Carrie.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I know these men. I’ve read about them, in my letters. They are not strangers to me. I just need to know what they want.”

Mariah reached up and felt my forehead for fever. She sat back in her seat and chuckled. I’d heard that chuckle before. She thought I was crazy.

“They ain’t got much to say, Miss Carrie.”

“Then let’s just walk around the field a little bit and hear what they’re not saying.”

She knew what I was asking. She’d known it all along, and she’d been trying to postpone it. She always tried to postpone it, ever since she was a little girl and I found out about her sight. Could she see the dead? I never knew. I only knew that she took the dead more seriously than anyone I’d ever known, and what she thought she saw when in their presence was real to her. Perhaps these were only the wispy last bits of the fog I imagined souls to be, a fog that dissipated with time. Like memory, only more vivid.

“I could say no.”

“You won’t. You’re as curious as I am. Ornery but curious.”

I got down from the cart and went over to her side, where I waited. She sat with her arms crossed, as if trying to hold herself back. Then she said, “Damn,” and climbed down next to me.

We didn’t talk for some time. I took her arm, and we walked slowly through the field, a few dozen yards from a long pile of old dead Osage orange trees that ran parallel with the base of a hill, below Baylor’s place. Our skirts whispered against the grass and against each other. The ground was lumpy and uneven, and we often stumbled. After I nearly fell headfirst to the ground, my boot heel stuck in a hidden hole in the grass, Mariah held me up and then held me still. She quit walking.

“What is it?”

“Just a feeling. I’m seeing faces going by and into the distance until they real little, and then circling back and going by again. They got no expressions. They just going round and round. I almost think they going to go so far they can’t come back, but they come back.”

We walked on, found more solid ground, and I stroked Mariah’s hair while she looked down at her feet and cursed me under her breath.

When the cursing stopped, I spoke again.

“What now?”

“There a big bird, real white, like the ones we had back in Terrebonne. He stepping around in the shallows of a big water. And there a man rowing a boat along the shore, rowing and rowing. He singing something. I can tell because he moving like there’s music and I can see his mouth moving. Every so often he stops and pulls in a long line with a big net attached to the back of it, and he dumps all kind of little fish into a big bucket he got at the front of his boat. Then he just go on again. His boat say ‘Bait.’ Funny name. He look happy. He just keep doing it over and over again, happy as anything. Don’t look like he want to stop, ever. The sun is pretty on the water, but he don’t look like he sweating a lick.”

I tried to bring Mariah along, but she pulled back.

“They all alone. I see a lot of men. That one playing the piano, this one eating fried chicken, that one preaching in the pulpit and smiling up at the Lord Jesus upon the cross. I see a man drinking whiskey, and another man riding his horse faster than I ever seen a horse move. But there ain’t nobody else with them. That man eating chicken alone.”

I was starting to think that I didn’t want to hear any more, but Mariah was frantic.

“They gots what they want. They all gots what they want. They just don’t got anybody to share it with, I guess. I feel that. I feel lonely. I feel cold, real cold.”

I had never in my life tried to interpret the things Mariah saw, and I didn’t this time, either. But I imagined the man in the boat, turning his circles and catching his fish, over and over and over again. His heart’s desire, certainly, but only to be had without rest or relief. It was a horror I had not imagined, that one could hardly imagine. It was enough to make a body question paradise itself.

We rode back to the house in the dark, this time with Mariah driving the horses. I knew John would be upset, but I didn’t care. I knew those men in the field, and now Mariah knew them, too, and there wasn’t any way to ignore them any longer. Bones are bones, but not when they are married to life and memory, whether in the letters of the living or in the vision of a woman trembling at dusk in an unwelcoming field. After that, they’re something more than bones.

41

F
RANKLIN

I
t was too late in the year for blueberry flowers, so Mariah went after roots from the grove—forest peas, which were just flowering. If she could dry up some of those, maybe she could get Eli to slip some pieces into her boy’s clothes. The Indians said that the root of the forest pea would carry a soul through difficulty unharmed. That would be a start.

She hitched her skirt up and felt the summer sun beating down on the back of her legs and neck. She liked that feeling, the feeling of absorbing the sun. It made her feel larger. She did not enjoy the thorny vines scratching white lines across her legs, but that couldn’t be helped—the forest pea, an almost invisible purple ghost among wildflowers, had to be stalked. She followed the McGavocks’ creek until she was off the property and far away to the south. The forest floor was dry and smelled like a neglected attic except when the breeze kicked up and the trees hushed at each other, and suddenly she could smell the creek and the little black locust trees angling for a space at the water.

She couldn’t concentrate—her head was too full—and finally she quit looking. The forest pea was not a plant that could be stumbled upon. It had to be sought with an empty mind. But she couldn’t empty her mind; there was too much to think about. So she waded into the creek and watched the minnows poking at her toes. For the moment she was content to stand there and feel the water and watch the treetops. This was the kind of happiness she had hoped for her son. Modest, quiet, unseen, inalienable. She admitted, finally, that there were times, very rare ones, when she did go walking for its own sake. Or her own sake, more accurately.

She made for the edge of the forest and the pike, which would take her home. She broke through the wild hedge of little poplars that ringed the older trees and emerged into the wide sunlight, where she stopped short. She dropped her skirts until they hung properly. She straightened her dress. She wiped the dirt from her cheeks and tucked her hair behind her ears.

Where did all the white men come from?

Somehow she’d become twisted in the woods and had ended up in the middle of one of the cities of the dead. This old burial mound was one of a few around Franklin. Most were located along the Harpeth River, where they were part of that chain of mounds and subsumed ancient cities that ran down along the Natchez Trace. Mariah had never much wondered about them, only occasionally marveling at the odd shape of the hills, small, grass-covered pyramids whose peaks had been worn and rounded by the elements. She had never thought much about what might be contained in such a hill, and she had no idea who might have built them. They were, in fact, the remnants of a disappeared civilization, forgotten even to the few local Indians who still remained when the whites first brought slaves here.

White men in broad, thick mustaches, sleeves rolled above their elbows, crawled over the hill like termites. They carried shovels with them and had carved an indentation in the side of the mound. It looked like someone had taken a bite out of it.

Mariah backed herself back into the woods. They were pulling things out of the ground and carrying them down to a set of large tables, where men worked with brushes. A procession of men bore long bones like bundles of kindling upon their shoulders. The skulls they treated with some daintiness and, perhaps, respect.

A man with a broad black hat watched from the top of the hill. He stopped one of the workers, took a bone from him, hefted it in his hands, and then placed it along his own upper thigh, as if to measure himself against the other man who, Mariah guessed, must have been dead a million years. The dead man had been much taller, that was clear. The man in the hat laughed and handed the bone back to the worker, who took it down to the tables, where other workers began to brush the dirt away. She watched the man in the black hat and thought he looked like a nice man. His face was fat and red, but he looked strong and healthy, and he didn’t do much except to scratch his ear and nod at the men carrying bones away. Mariah wondered why he wanted those old bones and whether he knew whose souls those bones had once contained. He didn’t look much like an Indian.

Before she retreated entirely into the forest to find a different way back to the house, she felt her head begin to throb. She slumped down against a black oak and waited for the spell to pass. She hoped there would be no visions, no voices, because she was afraid of what might emerge from an open grave and enter her head. But she closed her eyes against the pain.

Then she saw the living, not the dead. She saw little boys chasing after their mothers, and old feists that by rights
should
have been dead. There were cook fires going here and there and tall, leathery men sitting on their haunches and smoking while they waited for their food. They all worked and cooked and smoked in the shadow of the hill behind them. It was early morning, and the sun had not risen off the horizon much. No one looked at Mariah except one old man off to the side, who pounded out tools on a large, flat, granite rock. He had his eye on her. Next to him a pile of arrowheads grew. Mariah’s head throbbed again, and the other people became streaks of light that glowed and dazzled and dimmed.
Shhhhhhh
. That’s all she heard. It was like an exhalation. Peace. Silence. They were gone.