The Widow of the South (7 page)

9

T
HE
G
RIFFIN
H
OMESTEAD

B
ecky knew that Cotton was on that battlefield. She knew it like she had known he would come for her and that he would leave her and that he would die.

“‘Cotton’? What kind of man would let himself be called Cotton?” Eli would ask. It wasn’t a Christian name, that was certain.

Becky wouldn’t tell Eli who Cotton was. She never let Cotton meet her father or let her father even see them together, and they never went courting in the open like proper folks.

Cotton brought Eli gifts—fresh apples, puzzles, drawings of generals cut from the newspaper—and he must have won him over, for Eli conspired with them to keep their relationship secret.

After Cotton had enlisted, she would steal away to her bedroom to write letters—hundreds of letters, by her reckoning. He fought at Chattanooga, he had been captured by the Yankees, he had escaped at great risk to his life and had walked alone back to Tennessee, where he joined up again: she knew this, but it seemed sometimes when she thought about him that she was telling herself a fairy tale about some other person, not Cotton. It was one of the strange effects of war that a man so handsome and lighthearted could be revealed by circumstance to be a warrior. Each night she sat curled like a sapling at her little dressing table, writing to him. He rarely responded to her. Worry had taken her up and squeezed life out of her. All the baby fat had left her, the line of her cheekbones cut hard across her face, deep grooves dug in the space between her eyes. She barely filled out her dresses anymore. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes where wrinkles had collected after eighteen hot summers squinting at pea vines and searching for wayward hens gone off to lay their eggs in secret places. He said he loved her. But it had been so long.

And then, just a few days before the Confederates came marching up the pike, Cotton had appeared again. He rode up to the house on his old horse, looking dusty and harassed in his Confederate uniform with the single row of brass buttons bunching up over his chest. He was taller and blonder than most and had a straight beautiful nose that looked like it had been chiseled by a Greek sculptor two thousand years before, kind blue eyes, and a long neck. He was not the most likely candidate for a war hero, Becky thought. When he dismounted, he looked grim. He was thinner, and his face frowned more quickly than it used to. He didn’t see her immediately in the dimness of the house, and at first he stood straight with his chin cocked up as if he were about to give out commands, his eyes narrowed and unblinking. But then he saw Becky, and he slouched over, like he had just then remembered where he was. He looked relieved. He took Becky by the hand and walked her down to the neglected orchard.

In a clearing surrounded by apple trees all suffering at different stages of decline from cedar rust, they had stopped.

“It has been so long since you wrote,” Cotton said.

Becky wasn’t looking at him. She stared at the trees in front of her and stood very still.

“I don’t know what to say anymore. There’s nothing new here to write about, and I know I’ve bored you about my chores too many times.”

“Nothing you write bores me. And boredom might be a nice thing to experience every once in a while, besides. I long to be bored sometimes. So much marching and shooting, messengers whipping to and fro.”

“So you’re here because I haven’t been writing you about the chickens?”

Cotton smiled. “I’m here because I love you.”

That closed Becky’s mouth right quick. She looked hard at Cotton for a moment, right straight into his eyes, and he held her gaze. Withstood it actually. She stared at him, and then she placed her right hand on his gray coat sleeve and ran her palm over the dirty yellow piping that twisted over and around his cuffs. Then she withdrew her hand quickly, like the sleeve had burned her.

She backed off a few steps and strolled over to a dead fallen tree at the edge of the clearing. She sat down for a few seconds and then spoke again.

“What are you doing here? Isn’t there a war? I could have sworn there was a war, what with all the funerals they keep having up in town. Lots of people wearing black around here these days, but maybe that’s just the fashion. Is it the fashion? Because I don’t know a thing about fashion. Are they wearing it in Nashville? What do the girls at the Franklin Female Institute think? I surely wouldn’t know.”

Cotton walked closer to Becky but wouldn’t sit down. She was mad, but her eyes were full of tears.

“Please calm down, darling.”

“Oh piss.”

Cotton seemed momentarily flummoxed by Becky’s cursing. He stood and blinked at her for a moment and then ran his left hand through his hair a couple times, matting it against his head. Becky noticed how greasy it was.

“I am here because some of us local boys let off on French leave for a day to see family. The army is down in Columbia, and there was some time. You’ve got no cause to be angry with me.”

Becky hardened where she sat. Her face twisted down and puckered. She stared up at Cotton. “I have much cause to be angry with you. How dare you tell me you love me when you know your father would rather cut off his own arm than see his son with a farm girl who smells like woodsmoke and chores?”

“I thought that was ‘soap.’”

“I suppose you think that’s funny.”

Cotton slouched a little and looked at her out of the corner of his eye, like he was getting ready to be hit. “You know I love the way you smell. I’ve come riding up here past God knows how many Federals, out looking to skin someone like me, just so I could see you, so please don’t hold my every word against me. I have been in the company of men for too long.”

Becky fiddled with the hem of her dress. “By your own choice.”

“What?”

“That you’ve been in the company of men for too long. It’s by your own choice.”

“There was no choice.”

Becky rolled her eyes and twisted her dress into a little knot in her hand. “I will not be loved by any man with so little sense. I will not spend my time, my
life,
if that was ever a question, with a man who’d just as soon get his fat head shot off as come home.”

Cotton was beaten. Whatever remained of his military bearing drained out of him, and he seemed to go limp, balanced precariously on his skinny legs like a dizzy man on stilts. He ran his hands through his hair over and over again. He dragged himself over to Becky’s log and sat down on the opposite end, resting his elbows on his thighs. He watched the dirt like it was going to tell him something. A mockingbird berated him from its perch in an apple tree not ten feet away.

“I won’t go back if that’s what you ask me to do. I won’t. I will stay here and hide out until it’s all over, and pray that no one ever catches up to me and that my reputation isn’t ruined.”

“Curse your reputation.”

Cotton cocked his head at her. “When did you get so mean, Rebecca Griffin? It’s so easy for you to dismiss thought of my reputation. You know better than that, and yet you persist.”

“It’s because I have no reputation of my own, as you know.”

“That is your own ignorance talking, and it isn’t true.”

She had turned to him, dropping the hem of her dress and placing her hands in her lap like she was in church. “I suppose I am supposed to love a man who thinks I am ignorant?”

“I don’t think you’re ignorant, Lord knows. I think you’re being willfully ignorant and that you know what it would mean to desert, and that you also would not think nearly as much of me if I were the sort of fellow who left people to die, people who had put their trust in me. Who was it who gave me her first kiss when I went off to fight, and told me that she was proud? I don’t recall your opposition to the
company of men
back then.”

“First kiss? I don’t remember my first kiss. There have been so many.”

“Do not tease me.”

“Look who has no sense of humor now.”

Cotton rose up. “Give me your answer.”

Becky leaned backward and felt suddenly frightened. Her eyes went wide and they glistened. A strand of her long brown hair had escaped the tight bun on the back of her head and fell against her forehead.

“My answer?”

“Shall I stay?”

Becky’s mouth drew tight, and she bit down on her bottom lip. Cotton stood waiting, with his hands clasped behind him, his legs slightly apart, as if he were addressing troops at parade rest. Becky spoke first.

“You’re a kind man. You’re a good man. I’ve been unkind and awful.”

“I will stay here forever if you ask.”

Becky stood then and fiddled with her hands, trying to keep Cotton’s gaze but failing. Tears began to run down her cheeks, but she wasn’t the sort to sob.

“I can’t ask that.”

“You can. I promise. I’m sick of it, too.”

“But I won’t ask it.”

Cotton crossed quickly and wrapped his arms around her. She buried her face in his bony chest and put her hands around his waist. They stood still. Then they kissed. And whether it was their first kiss or their second kiss or their thousandth, it was as if the embrace was their proper state. The mockingbird flew off.

Later they walked up to the porch where Cotton had tied off his horse, and stood looking at each other with weird, quizzical looks on their faces, as if they weren’t sure what had just happened. Becky had not bothered to put her hair back in its bun but had tied it in a loose ponytail that swung to and fro across her back. Cotton had taken the time to put his uniform together again, and he looked unruffled and ready for war again.

Eli sat on the porch chewing a piece of straw, as if he were waiting for them.

“What’s your real name, Cotton?”

Cotton reached up and touched the side of Becky’s head and then reached over to take the reins of his horse.

“My full name, you mean, Eli?”

“Yes.”

He mounted, and Becky went stock-still and closed her eyes. She sat down on the steps and stared at Cotton’s horse, unwilling to look up at him.

“My full name is Cotton Gin, of course.”

“That’s your real name? Doesn’t seem right.”

Cotton paused to consider that idea and then just smiled at Eli.

“My horse has a stranger name.”

“What?”

“Guidance.”

“That’s a name?”

“More like a hope.”

He had nothing more to say. He looked down at Becky and nodded his head, trying to say something without speaking. Becky looked up only once, and when she caught Cotton’s eye, she quickly looked down again, nodding herself. Then Cotton turned the horse’s head down the path toward the pike and cantered off. When the sound of the horse’s hooves became almost silent, Becky and Eli both looked up in time to see Cotton turn around and wave his hat before disappearing.

It was when he turned back and waved that Becky knew Cotton would die.

10

S
ERGEANT
Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL,
24
TH
A
RKANSAS

I
was in my reverie, having made my peace with death, but the thing that shook me out of it was how precisely the Yankees cut us down. We were in rifle range, holding our fire until we got close, when the Yankees opened up a volley that flashed out at us like sheet lightning, and the men in the ranks ahead of me fell so quickly they lay in neat rows like mown hay. There was nothing chaotic about it. You could draw a straight line from the end of every Yankee rifle to the flesh of every one of our dead. There had been no waste, no error, no uncertainty. They were all dead, a hundred dead or worse, in a second. Luck had not fiddled with the aim of a single Yankee rifleman, nor had it turned the flight of any bullet. It had been luck that kept us all alive these many months, and without it what did we have? We stepped between the crumpled rows of the fallen and kept moving.

After that first volley we reckoned we were going to make it pretty far. They seemed to hold their fire after seeing what they had done to us. I guess they figured they didn’t have anything to worry about. So we got to hollering again, we got those flags up in the air, and we started to run. My lungs got to burning quick, it seemed so hot. The younger boys were trying to strip off their jackets and shirts, and some of us tried to tell them it was stupid because the weather would change soon, but it was hard enough to breathe, let alone give out lectures. So we left a trail of coats and blouses behind us. I figure there were a great many of our boys lying on the battlefield that night, the wounded and dying we had to leave behind, who wished they had something to keep them warm. God was fickle, and it got real cold that night. Hot and cold, hot and cold, whatever He wanted. It was as if He had turned His back on Franklin.

I thought we were almost there when we ran up against this long line of chopped-off Osage hedges, ripping and thick, which the Yankees had put out at the bottom of the hill leading up to their position. It was mighty clever of them. We were running, and then we were stopped in our tracks, just sitting there waiting to be shot. One of our officers, seeing what was happening, tried to run his horse through the hedge but got stuck. We stood there, listening to the sound of the air pulled apart by bullets, to the sounds of bullets striking wood, dirt, flesh. The horse got punctured everywhere and bled heavily. He kicked and screamed, showering blood and spittle on me. He finally threw off his rider and escaped. We were still watching that officer chop at the hedge with his saber when he got shot in the head. He was screaming at us to join him when he fell at my feet. I got his pistols.

We would have stood there all day if the Yankees hadn’t started picking us off, one by one. It was obvious that we were going to have to make it through that hedge if we were going to save ourselves. There was no retreating now: it was too far to run, and we’d come too far to be shot facing away from the enemy.

And so we all started chopping at that hedge. It was a bloody mess. Men would chop and beat at the branches until they got shot, we’d drag them back, and someone else would take their place, over and over again, until we’d cut some holes big enough for a couple men to pass through. I wonder how many men would have walked off that battlefield instead of being buried under it if we’d just left it at that: bravo, job well done, let’s go home. Because it was worse when we tried to go through those gaps in the hedge. We’d given the Yankees something to shoot at, a few places to concentrate their fire. Men would get to the other side of the hedge only to be sawn in half by the Yankee lead. After a while a few of the gaps we’d cut in the hedge were so filled with bodies that they were impassable again, as if the hedge had clotted itself shut.

It’s odd to think about all this now and to realize that it all took place in the span of just a few hours. It doesn’t seem possible that so much could happen in so short a time. It was a whole different world after the last shot echoed out over the field. I wonder sometimes about the person who fired that last shot, whoever he was. I wonder what it was like to be the man who finally said
, Well, that’s enough
.

We didn’t all die at the hedge. The thing about fighting is that if you throw enough bodies forward, eventually a few will break through almost anything. Those of us who ran through the hedge without getting shot got a little ways up the hill before we quit screaming and realized we hadn’t been killed yet. You can get so that every step, every little obstacle on the battlefield, becomes so big that you can’t see much past it, and when you do get past, it’s sometimes hard to remember what the hell you were supposed to be doing. We dropped to our bellies and hunkered down in the grass, wondering what to do with so few of us still alive. I had those two pistols I’d taken off that dead officer, and I just stared and stared at them, noticing every scratch and powder stain. Everything was bright and crisp. The smallest things became clear. I watched an ant crawl over the dirt and get to his hole, waving his head around once before descending. I counted the veins on a blade of grass. I lost my other powers of observation. I heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt nothing. I had forgotten my truce with death, and I was afraid.

I was no longer paying attention to the fighting, so I didn’t notice at first when the young assistant quartermaster on the general’s staff came riding down the line on the enemy’s side of the hedge, trying to rouse us for a charge. I looked up as his horse passed by. He was a tall and gangly man with a mop of dirty blond hair poking out from beneath his slouch hat. I remembered the horse’s name—Guidance—because it was so odd. I remember thinking,
He’s a fool; this is no place for a quartermaster. No one expects him to fight, and here he is risking his hide
. One of the sergeants jumped up, caught the bridle of the horse, and had words with him to that effect.
Go to the rear, sir, go to the rear!
I remember that clearly. But this young officer was too worked up already, waving his hat around and shouting that he would fight for his own town, by God. Slowly, man by man, the lot of us picked up and got on line. I think the last thing anyone ever said to him came out of that sergeant’s mouth:
Don’t start the charge too early, sir. You’ll get ’em tired out
. I thought that was pretty good advice at the time. But after we stood up, the Yankees opened up on us again, and when men started to drop dead, we all began to waver, and some of the men leaped to their bellies again. I think that young officer saw what was happening and decided he didn’t have time to hesitate. Whatever the reason, he turned that big gray toward the Yankee line, shouted something about his house and his family, and yanked his saber out of the scabbard. It was an impressive sight, and when he began to charge, we went with him.

He lost his hat early in the charge, and those blond locks of his were whipping back in the breeze as he got farther and farther ahead. Too far. In a few seconds he was all alone out there in front. We were huffing and puffing behind him as he got smaller and smaller, and when I noticed that the Yankees were shifting their fire away from the rest of us and toward something else, I knew he didn’t have long.

When he went down, his horse was already dead. He went careening over the horse’s head and into the air, and when he landed, he had been shot maybe half a dozen times. I know this because as we passed him by, he was screaming for help and shouting about how the bastards had shot him in his own yard. He was bleeding from his neck and his hip, and he’d gotten a mouth full of dirt when he landed. One odd thing, though. He didn’t look like a lot of the wounded, who look at you with their innocent, pleading eyes as if you could explain everything in the world to them. This young man, he just looked angry. He also looked like he’d never needed to shave in his life. The last I saw of him, he was losing his voice but still shouting at us to keep moving. And we did.

Just as I got past him, our color-bearer went down with a bullet through the mouth. He fell upon the flag and became entangled in it up ahead of us. He looked like he’d been sleeping in the damn flag when his body came to rest.

I’ll never be able to explain what happened next, not ever. It’s still mysterious. That loudmouth who had insisted the band play him a tune while we were on the march, a man who had never stuck that thick neck out once, not as long as I’d known him—that man left his place right next to me and ran to take up the colors. He was named Warren, he had a dark beard, he came from Nashville, and he stole food sometimes. Up to that moment that’s all I had cared to know about him.

I don’t know what set him off, but he got those big legs of his moving, and before long he was bent over the color-bearer, straining his broad back and rolling the man over like a barrel. He took the colors in one hand and his rifle in the other, and he turned around as we approached. His face was red like a cabbage. He shouted, spraying spit: “What, you wanna live forever?” Then he turned and sprinted forward, and we got behind him like a pack of dogs. Nobody said a word.

Up and down the line, I could see dozens of groups like ours lurching their way toward the Yankee line. I imagined each group had witnessed its own tragedy and drama, hundreds and thousands of moments like the moment our colors lifted off the ground and went forward in those stiff, fat, outstretched arms. I looked to my right, down toward the pike, and saw a squad of Arkansans disappear in the smoke of a whizzing shell, leaving behind only a faintly pink mist as proof they had once been there. Off to the left, at the bottom of a particularly steep part of the Yankee line, I saw some Mississippians crouched against the earthen wall like shadows, each craning his neck toward the sky as if he might see over the battlement if he just looked hard enough. Periodically they would steel the courage to lift a man up on their shoulders to shoot at the enemy and he would be either killed or captured. Farther down the line another group huddled against the wall and lifted a white rag on the end of a bayonet.

I ran on, slowly catching up with our new color-bearer. I was shocked by how insubstantial the pistols felt in my hand. It didn’t seem right that they could kill; they were like toys in my hand. Our new color-bearer began to stagger. The handkerchief around my neck began to itch, and I ripped it off. Warren resisted the urge to collapse and sprinted out ahead one last time. I thought then of that blond officer and his beautiful horse, their deaths so impressive and so unnecessary. The pike and field stretched upward and seemed to get longer as we ran. Men fell on each side of me and crumpled in heaps that were soon far behind us. They vanished, just like that. I wished I had once had a conversation with that young officer. I thought,
There is no good way to die
.

Our new color-bearer had sprinted to within twenty yards of the bulwarks when he stopped to get his breath. He turned to us and waved the flag back and forth, as if he had already taken the Yankee position and he wanted us to know about it. Warren’s eyes were wide, and sweat dripped off the end of his nose, and he was screaming again about living forever. That’s when he got a bullet in the back of his neck, and his small role in our tragedy played itself out.

There was no good way to die. But dying his way seemed easier than most, and that’s the only way I can explain what I did next.

I made my way up to the colors and grabbed them up, yanking them out of his left hand, which was flung far out from his body. I saw how perfectly still he was, how his neck had quit flexing itself, how that strong back had grown smooth. I realized then that we are never still in life, that even when we think we are motionless, we are still vibrating a little. It was odd and confusing, yet reassuring, to see a man at perfect rest, and I went to join him.

I didn’t need my pistols anymore, so I flung them to the ground. I didn’t say anything; I’m not one for speeches. I just turned and walked toward the bulwarks expecting at any moment to be cut down. I wasn’t happy. I was euphoric.