The Widow of the South Read online

  “I thought we decided a long time ago that folks don’t always know what they mean. Or what things mean, for that matter.”

  Carrie considered this. “I suppose we did.”

  The old man bent over in a fit of coughing, slapping at his breast pocket until he found an old handkerchief to spit into. Mariah bent over him with her hand on his back and looked up at Carrie like she’d just seen something she wished she hadn’t. He stared at his handkerchief, snorted dismissively, and put it away, all the while bent over like he was catching his breath.

  Carrie had the feeling that she was falling. How could he be like this? This was not the man she’d known, not the man she remembered. The air spun and hummed around her.

  She walked to his side and took his chin in her hand, hard, and pulled until he was looking her in the eye. Mariah cried out and tried to stop her, but Carrie waved her off. She saw him fully for the first time and reached with her other hand to wipe rheumy tears from the corners of his eyes and to feel the loose drape of his skin over sharp cheekbones. He struggled to keep from coughing in her face.

  “What’s the matter with you, soldier?”

  She let him go, and he slowly stood up straight. He held his bowler near his mouth, just in case.

  “Well, I reckon I can guess, but I ain’t seen anyone who could tell me straight. Can’t afford such a person. I’ve been thinking that, after all these years, I might finally die and not know for sure what killed me. That makes me laugh some.”

  Carrie said nothing, and then: “If I were to guess from your past history, I would say you’ll outlive us all.”

  “I once thought I was cursed that way, yes, ma’am. But no more. There ain’t no more curses out there. My history don’t mean nothing. Not anymore, thank God.”

  She could picture him as a younger man, lying bleeding on the floor of her parlor and then sitting up in one of the chairs of her husband’s study, staring out the window. She remembered his nose and how sharp it was in profile, how the light seemed changed after passing over it. He was like a cameo; at least that’s what her mind remembered. She’d become used to him quickly, and back then she thought he’d be there forever. Then he was gone. She closed her eyes.

  “If you’re going to die, there’s a place for you here.”

  “That’s what I meant to ask you about.”

  B O O K I

  1

  NOVEMBER 30, 1864: DAWN

  That day in 1864 was unseasonably mild for late November. There had been a frost already, and the land lay fallow. The cotton, which lay white on the fields in early fall like the crashed remains of an exhausted wave, had been gathered and ginned and baled and shipped off for when it could be transported in safety, which was practically never. Most of it sat stacked near the gins, in warehouses, and in barns around town. But the fields looked healthy, and the houses weren’t burned to the ground, and the barns weren’t stripped of their joists and planking, and the nearby rail line, the Nashville & Decatur Railroad, still had all the pieces of its track.

  Early that morning, long and twisting columns of butternut gray moved slowly up the three pikes that cut their way toward Franklin, Tennessee. They were miles away but closing fast. Bright metal flashed from within each column, like the glistening of a snake’s scales. The locals later remembered that the thump of boots and bare feet upon the macadam rattled the windows of their houses. These were the Confederates, come to smash the Federals. They had been ridden hard. They wore raggedy homespun and crumpled felt slouch hats, and they were so skinny that no one—not even the Federals—blamed them for looting the dead of their food. It did not escape their notice that the land they were moving into had been spared the ravages of war, unlike Atlanta and the little towns of northern Alabama where they had lately been. There they had seen ghost towns and torched fields, houses that retained only the barest skeletal relation to their former selves. There they had seen what looked like the ruins of an ancient civilization.

  Here they saw houses circled by groves of giant cedars and magnolias so beautiful they thought they would never see a thing so pretty again, and white board churches that inspired silent oaths of faith and devotion from even the lapsed and godless, promises of good works in exchange for survival. The meanest, most dissolute and liquored-up men looked on the land and wanted nothing more than the quiet, pious life they could lead in one of the houses along the side of the road, tending crops and riding to the little wooden churches with their plump wives and their cherub-faced children. Few such men ever lived such lives later on, if they survived, but it could be said that the imminence of death had inspired in even the hardest cases a momentary appreciation of anonymity and quiet.

  The columns kept on, converging as the roads angled in. They seemed unstoppable, inexorable, churning on and on as if to chase down and devour the town itself. There would soon be no escape, but this was not something anyone in Franklin could know at dawn on November 30.

  In the town another mass—this one of blue—swarmed and jittered upon the outskirts, scraping at the dirt with their shovels and picks and bayonets, felling trees and Osage orange hedges, building bulwarks and ramparts. These were the Federals, who had snuck by the Confederates the night before when they rightfully should have been beaten down and destroyed. Good-bye, Andersonville, they had whispered to each other as they walked quietly up the pike past the Confederates at Spring Hill, invoking the name of the most feared Confederate prison. How could 21,000 men walk up a road within a few hundred yards of another 25,000 men and not be noticed? Better not to wonder, thought the men laboring at the ditches, their shirts torn off and their muscles glazed in dirt and sweat. Might jinx it.

  And so the Federals, bone-tired, threw up even more defenses across the southern end of town, a crooked smile of trenches that ran across the bend in the river, from one side of town to the other, in the off chance that the rebels would put up a fight. The possibility was absurd, and after getting together a decent defensive position, many of the Federals wandered about the town in search of food and drink. Many of the Federal officers, that is. They found the natives friendly and hospitable. Or perhaps they were just worn down by the occupation and endless requisitions of the small Yankee garrison that had lived among them for two years while fortifying the town. In any case, the newcomers helped themselves to their stores and their whiskey. Don’t mind if I do, they said, filling their canteens and propping their boots up on the railing of porches, watching their men dig and saw and hammer.

  A little town, Franklin had its share of rambling two-story frame manses surrounding its square, and plenty of ancient oaks and maple trees with branches hiding little boys staring goggle-eyed and dumbstruck at the bluecoats, thousands more than they’d ever seen. Amid the sound of pickaxes and shouts drifting up toward the square, ladies sat on their porches moving backgammon pieces and wondered if they’d actually see a real battle now, the sort of thing they had read about in the Chattanooga Rebel, which published the clever little irreverent letters of one of the local boys off fighting somewhere to the south.

  A hawk circling high above the land, floating on the thermals thrown into such disorder by the heat of the day, would have seen the stream of butternut gray gliding ever closer to the mob of blue, the glint of metal and the flash of bright flags, the gashes of newly turned dirt, the orderly streets and the regular gray roofs of Franklin. Whatever coincidence or divine intent had conspired to bring it about, Franklin was surrounded.

  A squad stirred awake. They stoked fires grown cold overnight and watched them crack and spark before they remembered that the things they had to eat weren’t worth cooking. Hickory nuts and sugarcane. One by one they abandoned their fires. They dried their rifles with their shirts and hoped they would fire when the time came. They were in no hurry for that time to come, but the sun kept rising. A few voices carried over the shuffling and groaning.

  “What you gonna do with them oats? Give ’em here.”

  “Damn, boy,
you look green. What’s that smell?”

  “Please, y’all, that blanket was from my mama.”

  “The hell you say. My oats. Mine.”

  “I don’t know about this cut I gotcheer on my arm. It’s got a smell to it.”

  “The blanket was from his mama! Well, somebody better give it over right quick, or Mama gonna whup his ass.”

  “There bugs in ’em oats, so what you care? Cough it up. You gonna die anyway.”

  “You got to see the doc about that, Harlon.”

  “He all infested, you ain’t gone want it. Got the fleas or something, got that itch. Just give the boy his blanket.”

  “And you’ll be a-dying right before me, I guarantee it. No oats for any of you. Get back.”

  “I ain’t gone see the doc. Just as soon keep my arm.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll just get it back when you through with it. Don’t go getting blood on it, now.”

  “All right, just a few, then. Gimme some crumbs.”

  “Better your arm than otherwise.”

  “When we’re what with it? Speak up.”

  “Steal your own damn oats. Steal from Pendergrass.”

  “What’s worse than losing an arm?”

  “When you’re through, when you’re dead.”

  “Pendergrass is dead.”

  “Than otherwise dead.”

  The bright jingle of stirrups and bridles silenced them. Officers. No sense calling attention to themselves. Silence could keep you alive sometimes, keep you from being volunteered for something stupid.

  Hundreds of horsemen rode out of the Confederate camp as the sun rose behind the clouds. They were led by a tall man, hunched over in his saddle and unnaturally thin. The tall rider led them along the Columbia Pike, which ran hard by the army’s night camp, and headed north toward Franklin. Many more of his horsemen rode toward the town on other roads. The cavalry was on the move.

  In the dust of the macadam road the tall rider could make out the boot prints of 21,000 Union soldiers who had somehow passed that way undetected in the night, a turn of events so impossible it made him flinch every time his new mare stumbled over a caisson track. When fellow riders strayed too close, he pushed them off with one of his big, bony hands and warned them to watch the road and stay the hell away from him. He had no time for their god-awful horsemanship. He had no time, either, for the god-awful hills of middle Tennessee, with their hollows, draws, ridges, and points, all no doubt hiding Yankees lying in ambuscade.

  When did that happen? When did the Yankees start lying in wait for him? He was the impossible fighter, not the stumbling Yankees, who were ever fat and lethargic in his unsettling night dreams. He worked miracles against long odds, he made General William T. Sherman afraid, he made fools of the enemy. Had he not been called a monster and a devil by the abolitionist newspapers? Yes, he had, and damn them for their ignorance. He was no monster, he thought. He just wanted victory worse than most men.

  And yet it was undeniable that they had all been fooled in their sleep, even Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Whose fault was that? It was a question that couldn’t really be answered, not right then, but the tall man was damned if he’d have the blame laid at his feet. Not ever. He was not in charge, not this time. He, Forrest, had never been beaten when he was in charge, which is a whole lot more than he could say for that cripple Hood. Let the commanding officer pull himself away from the fog of his precious laudanum and take the blame. Let Hood take it, and damn him to hell.

  In four years he had never seen Southern land so unmolested. Tennessee had once been his home. Now look at it: Unionists and deserters and traitors everywhere. He wondered what deals had been struck to spare those fields. He’d been a businessman once, and he knew about deals. There was a time when he always got the better half of a deal on a slave, but no longer. That life was past him now, and that fact made him resentful.

  He rode with the broad brim of his hat pulled over his face, shielding his sunken eyes and the cheekbones that seemed ready to burst through his sallow skin. He had boils and a cough. The years of battle had made him seem smaller, robbing his frame of its solidity and power and leaving behind a bony carcass that could only be roused by battle. Before Hood began his mad march into oblivion, Forrest had hoped to get some time to go back to Mississippi and recuperate. There was no time for that now. He rode on, swaying in his saddle and brooding.

  Yes, he knew something about chasing Yankees. Get ’em skeered and then keep the skeer on ’em. How he wished those Yankees up there in Franklin were scared. He could work with fear. Hell, he had won whole battles with little more than the fear in the eyes of trembling Union commanders peering out between the cracks of their forts. But it would be a queer thing if those Yankees were scared much right then, he figured. It was his men who were riding into the unknown. Who’s got the skeer on ’em now?

  His staff wasn’t much to look at. He’d had so many of them come and go he sometimes forgot their names. They were skeletal and bone-tired like Forrest, but they had a certain irrational hope that Forrest could not share. They were riding with Forrest, by God! Hero of Shiloh and Brice’s Cross Roads! They had faith in him, and Forrest felt the burden of their faith. They could not see battlefields like he could; the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy were not as plain to them. He had come to resent that they could not read his mind and anticipate what he would do. This was unfair of him, but he could get wore out just like any man. Why do I got to do all the thinking all the time? They were loyal, at least. He could say that for them.

  Up the pike they went, gray and ragged, picking their way over the footprints of the enemy. The road rolled gently and straight, bordered on each side by farmhouses and fields lying rich and fallow. Faces watched warily from farmhouse windows. Women used to run out of their homes in their bedclothes when we rode through, and now we get this. Shit. That pretty little bastard Jeff Davis should see this.

  The whole world was queered, and Forrest no longer knew who loved him and who hated him. Well, that wasn’t exactly true: he knew the Yankees hated him. And the niggers. They could be Yankees and niggers behind those windows, homegrown goddamn Yankees and runaways, for all he knew.

  He stopped. He looked out at the farmland passing beside him, dormant brown humps rolling off as far as he could see. The remnants of old weeds poked out of the fields here and there and shook in the wind. He looked harder at the fields stretching out before him, and everything was familiar for a moment. He had almost forgotten that he’d been there before, right on that road. He’d fought there and won, way back almost two years before. He’d lost his favorite horse there, too, a big sorrel stallion named Roderick. Loyal and stupid. Wouldn’t stay out of the fight, even when Forrest had sent him to the rear with a gunshot wound. Broke loose and went galloping around the battlefield until he took a bullet in his head while leaping over a hedge. Just looking for his master. There was no lesson in that, Forrest thought. It just was what it was.

  They rode on. He expected to hear the sounds of cattle and chickens, the shouts of children, the creaking of wagons—but there were none. Except for the eyes peering out from the windows, everyone seemed to have vanished. They know a fight’s comin’. He spurred his horse on a little more. It wasn’t far to Franklin, but it seemed an endless slog over the hills. Forrest didn’t like how the road had begun to slope gently up toward the town, straight and unbroken by cover or protection. He called a halt, and his men’s horses came skittering and snorting to a stop around him. He scanned the sunburned and dirty faces staring expectantly at him and asked if anyone knew this place.

  One man raised his hand while spitting out some tobacco and pulled his yellow hair out of his eyes. He’d been in Forrest’s troop longer than most.

  “My uncle lives around here, I been here before.”

  “Where is there a place I can see the town from without getting out from cover?”

  Forrest trusted this man, who had once shot a Federa
l officer in the face before he could run Forrest through. He liked that kind of loyalty, the kind that saved his skin.

  “There’s a house off the Lewisburg Pike. Got two stories. McGavocks own it.”

  McGavock, McGavock. I know that name.

  “Where is this house at?”

  “I can take us there. There’s woods, be easy to sneak up on it.”

  McGavock. I might have sold him slaves.

  “Go on, then.”

  2

  CARNTON

  Mariah knew Carrie would not come greet the men. She closed the door behind her before walking heavily across the passage to the staircase, which she took down to the ground floor. If Confederates were coming, she decided, she must receive them at the front of the big house like proper folks. If she had to cover for her missus yet again, and this time with men who frightened her like the devils in one of her old dreams, she would use all the power of the house and whatever might still be dignified and imposing about it. Not much to go on, but still . . .

  Sometimes she thought of herself as the mistress of the house. She planned the meals and directed what was left of the house staff. She had intercepted many visitors on the front brick walkway during the last two years, telling each of them that her mistress was not feeling well and could not rise to see them. Town people had quit coming to visit unless it was to transact business with Colonel John or Mariah, and she had heard there was some speculation about Carrie’s health and the propriety of any household that would leave a nigger in charge. Hattie and Winder, Carrie’s children, came hollering for Mariah to settle their disputes now, after encountering Carrie’s closed and locked door all too often. It had come to this, finally: she sometimes forgot about Carrie, something that would never have happened when she was running around fetching food and sewing and books and mops and what all. When her mistress ran things. Sometimes now she would jump a little when she heard footsteps on the floor above her.