The Orphan Mother Page 6

  Around him he studied his hobby, the one thing he had that he loved: the tiny houses and buildings he carved out of scrap wood. They were little figures, the men in high pants and the women in long braids, going about their tiny days under the supervision of their God, George Tole. He had spent months carving his own crazy-angled version of a town and city, Franklin and New York and environs, a hybrid creature. This work took up most of his floor space—on the ground and on low tables he’d built for it. Now he looked at it and wondered why he ever bothered. In its regularity it seemed a horror.

  Through the window in the south wall, over his wood-and-clay version of the town square, he could see through several yards to the cobbler’s shop. He tried to pray, but he’d lost the rhythm of prayer, the sound of it. His prayer was straight wishing and pleading and waiting for a sign. He prayed for time not only to stop, but also to circle back on itself before certain decisions had been made, permanent and eternal.

  When he fled New York he thought he would forget, but there was no forgetting. Mariah Reddick would know this fact soon enough. He knew the guilt would catch her, the helplessness, the not knowing, the growing suspicion that it could have been anyone who had put that bullet in her son and, therefore, by the logic of the grieving, that it had been everyone.

  He thought he should flee again. Sure as day there would be men after him, maybe not that day, but soon. Dixon would be nervous, at the very least, about letting a Negro have so much knowledge of what happened and how it had been botched. That alone would get Dixon’s men lurking around with their knives and torches. Lord knew what story Dixon would invent, but Tole knew he would be blaming a Negro sure as hell. Or all the Negroes, perhaps.

  But the urge to run was weak. The idea of running exhausted him.

  All that long night he sat on that stool. He was not crazy. If he made it through the night without incident, he would stay. He would stay, and then he would try to discover what he was supposed to do next. He wanted control again, he wanted to understand the world and his place in it. The tiny town he had created made no sense anymore; he needed more knowledge to bring it back in line with the world.

  While he waited for the things to happen, he took out a piece of old oak flooring no bigger than his palm and began to carve a house with an attic. In the attic, he painted two eyes peering out from that window up under the eaves.

  * * *

  It was not true, as others assumed, that what existed in Tole’s house was an elaborate display of carvings. It was much more than carving. Some of the figures—horses and people and houses, small dark shacks, fences (split rail and picket), stone walls, rifles—were carved from wood, yes, but this was by no means the only way Tole made his figures. Some were of wire wrapped tightly around nails and shaped, others were newspaper cartoons cut out and pasted to scrap pieces of wood, some were marbles glued to clothespins, and some were silhouettes cut with tin snips from coffee cans. Tole had no particular instinct to use one thing over another; he used what he could find.

  But every figure, at least every human figure, was delicately painted, every detail down to the piping on trousers and the particular agitation of curl in an old man’s hair. But none of them had faces. Or, rather, they had color but no features. They were white and black, in every shade from chalk white through the ivories and tans to the browns and blue-blacks. Every figure had been given its own shade; no two seemed alike. Sometimes when he looked at them he saw each grain of sand on a river bar. It occurred to him that he had much, much more work to do on his creation.

  Tole poured his coffee and turned upon his chair toward the part of the diorama that portrayed the town square (in maple twigs, tobacco twine, clay, broken glass, and a gross of hatpins), where it appeared some men in hats and dark suits (carved cork, old lemon drops he’d painted white, and red clay) had gathered. There was a stage there against one side of the square, and the little men had begun to gather in front.

  Tole stood up and looked down. He put his hand on one of the houses and watched the little stage, staring, as if something might happen. But nothing ever happened, at least not while he was there, at least not while he was looking.

  But the town was growing up around him. It was alive and always changing. It was not strictly Franklin town, and it wasn’t strictly New York either. It was a collection of time, really, glimpses in time. Times that were clogging in his head and wouldn’t get out, wouldn’t be forgotten. Other men forgot things, especially the bad things, but Tole’s head was full to bursting with such memories. In his head they were too real and vivid, so he made them into the kinds of things he could hold in his hand or toss across the room: things that were real and yet not real, insignificant things, things that could not take over his head. He painted the display, and then painted it again every few weeks, always changing it. And all the time more people crowded the display until they were piled one atop the other.

  He knew his neighbors thought him an eccentric, prone to disappear for days, preoccupied with the little houses and buildings and wood horses that were filling up his place. Rumors of madness and so forth. “Oh, Tole got hisself a whole town up there. Hardly a place for a grown man to stand,” he overheard one day. “He carve what he could walk out the door and see, for goodness’ sake.” He hardly cared what they thought.

  He longed for his boy, Miles, his dead son, more than ever. Sometimes when he was working on his town he imagined that if Miles could rise again and come looking for his father through three hundred miles of dark terrible lands wracked by war and shivered by misery, he would stumble into his father’s little shack at first grateful for fire and light again. Then he would see the miniature world his father had created and look up at his father as if he understood that the town and the world that had killed him had been whittled and glued and nailed and placed so carefully down that they could never really be forgotten, and that each house and rail and roof and chimney had been put there for him, for Miles, to overcome and exceed on a day that could never be.

  Chapter 11

  Mariah

  July 8, 1867

  The warblers and finches and robins that lived in the oak trees of the cemetery had no sense of occasion, Mariah thought. Here they came, leaping from branch to branch, diving from tree to tree, all the time loudly oblivious to the young men buried just beneath them. Tiny bird shadows flashed across the raw black dirt. She thought she should feel enraged. She felt sure that a proper and good woman and mother would curse the birds, rend her dress, shout insults at God. But birds, as far as Mariah knew, had no particular sound for sorrow and mourning, no special chittery language for sadness. Not even these Tennessee birds, despite everything that they had seen.

  She might say the same thing about herself. No words for any of this, and no tears. There was a white oak a couple of hills away that had been standing on the Carnton plantation since the time of George Washington, and that had cast shade on Andrew Jackson when he’d come visiting. Surely that living thing had witnessed horrors. She wondered if this could be seen in the branches, or in the way the grain bent and curled around the tree’s center.

  The ghosts of war and the past were everywhere, in the sighing of the leaves and in the taste of the evening air on her tongue. The war was over, but it was still being fought, still surrounded her. Men still screamed and bled and wept for their mothers and wives.

  And that riot was just the latest of the killing—not the last.

  People stood around her in their dark colors, hands hanging down and clasped before them. Mariah lowered her head, stood beside her best friends, the sisters April and May, both of them now owners of the Thirsty Bird tavern, both of them former slaves of Robert Buchanan out on Coleman Road. April had been a cook and May the housekeeper. The two girls often dreamed of becoming tavern keepers, though they’d never before set foot inside a tavern until they’d opened one themselves.

  Minnie Bostick was there, too, and all the folks from the Thirsty Bird—the blind piano play
er, Hooper the ragman, the carpenter. Many white folks had shown up, and Mariah was gratified to see them, as if they owed her to come: the sawyer Thomas Hoosier and his family, who were always partial to Theopolis and used to give him sweets when they saw him in town; the postmistress and resident busybody Anna McArdles; William Johnson and Ben Bettson, who bought shoes from Theopolis; and many others besides.

  Presiding quietly from the back stood Carrie McGavock, her old mistress, clad in black mourning, with her black veil, and her good black lace gloves that came all the way from Paris, long before the war, and which Carrie kept for special funerals such as this.

  “Psalm 103,” the preacher said. From where she stood Mariah couldn’t see the top of the poplar coffin, now that it had been lowered. All she saw was the hole.

  She stepped forward, stood at the edge of the grave, and looked down. The coffin had been joined nicely, but it was still just an unfinished poplar box, canted slightly from one side to the other on the uneven bottom of the grave. It wouldn’t last long against the worms and beetles. She shook her head as if to shake the thought out of her ears. She wanted never to think of that again. There was a knot in the wood, a nearly perfect circle just above where Mariah imagined Theopolis’s face lay. An eyehole? A portal. If she could squeeze through that knot she could visit the next world. His days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone, she heard the preacher saying. That’s an ignorant thing to say out loud, Mariah thought.

  She remembered the pale yellow rose in her right hand. Who gave her that? Carrie. It seemed a long time ago, when she arrived in Hooper’s cart and Carrie helped her step down. For you, Carrie said while handing over the flower on its long stem. But no, it was not for her. She stood on the edge of the grave and accepted that this was what it had come to, that this was how it would be. She didn’t much care about being alone; she cared that this life of her son would end so badly, so commonly: in a wooden box at the bottom of a hole.

  Mariah tossed the flower in as if casting aside dirty laundry. With a gentle thump, almost a whisper, it covered the portal knot. It looked very pretty there on the lid. Mariah took three steps to the pile of dirt that the gravediggers stood next to, leaning on their shovels. She shoved her hand wrist deep into that pile and the gravediggers stepped back. She came away with a fist full of brown clay that spilled out between her fingers. She stepped back to the edge of the grave and threw the dirt in as hard as she could. It made an awful drumming sound, the sound of something knocking to come in. The flower had been thrown off center and befouled.

  Good. That is how it is and ever was.

  No, she did not accept that. She would not accept that. How it is and how it ever was? That’s talk that kills.

  She would do something.

  And what would she do? What could she do?

  Time slowed. She stepped back as others stepped forward to toss their own fistfuls of dirt. Mariah felt a little wobbly and sought out the oak tree to lean against. She felt the rough knobbiness of it on her spine, and it caught the back of her black veil, borrowed from Carrie. Carrie had a whole collection of such things.

  Around her the crowd whispered and shifted. She thought, Did you do it? Did all of you do it? You all did. She let her mind take off on its own, and then reeled it back. What if they had? All the killers, now shuffling forward to the grave and back again, past her, nodding their heads and clasping her hands, saying words she would never remember. What would justice look like when it was brought down on their heads? She shook her head. No, not these men and women, not April and May and the rest, they weren’t guilty. All mourners do look a little guilty about something, but not about that.

  These people also looked angry and hurt. Afraid. They had lost Theopolis, too, she thought. Not like she had, not like a mother, but they had lost him, too. Many of the Colored Leaguers were there, they who had marched with him and drummed with him, dreamed with him, talked with him and agreed with him about politics—and then had watched him die.

  They had all heard the whispers of the Conservatives, telling them they might be next. Telling them they should be next. These people weren’t killers, she thought, looking around. Some of them were puffed up with their anger, chests thrust out and chins raised as if they were preparing themselves for a fight. But most of them, with their hunched shoulders and their scared eyes, looked more like prey than anything, like mice standing in the shadow of a trap.

  Carrie detached herself from the other white folks on their mission of charity to the poor Negro funeral, and now she moved toward Mariah slowly, tentatively. Mariah wouldn’t look her in the eye, couldn’t stand to do it. What of the guilty, she wanted to shout at her. What about the white men? Was there any doubt that they had killed her boy? None. So what did justice look like on them? She didn’t know.

  Carrie stood beside her now, not saying anything, staring toward the grave. Mariah didn’t know what justice for Carrie’s kind was, and the thought of this made her tear up. Carrie offered a handkerchief, which Mariah took because she felt in a mood to take everything. Would a white man be beaten in his guilt? Would he be leaned against a post, back bare, and take his stripes from the leather? Would his rations be reduced, would he be made to sleep in a hole? Would he be sold as incorrigible? Would he be hanged?

  She dabbed her eyes with Carrie’s handkerchief, which smelled like rosehips. The mourners filed past her and began to leave, wandering down the little road to town, past the lines of the Confederate dead.

  For the first time she noticed George Tole, broad and impassive. Had it been only a few days ago that she’d met him at the Dixons’? She caught his eye for a moment before he turned away and followed the others. She remembered, after she’d met Dixon, that Theopolis had described the elaborate carvings and gewgaws that filled Tole’s little house. Mariah saw a black man who had kept his freedom his whole life, who might know what this kind of justice, the justice she imagined for the guilty, would look like. He had a hard face, dark. Such a man might know. Others might know, too; probably everyone else knew but Mariah Reddick. She felt so lost. Then Tole was gone down the road and Hooper and the gravediggers had begun to shovel in the dirt.

  Carrie gently tugged at her elbow. “We should go to the house, Mariah.” The house, Carnton, loomed open-eyed above them. “There’s food in the dining room.” Mariah had eschewed a funeral gathering. Now she wished she hadn’t as Carrie went on, “Please eat with me. Together.” This last clarification was, Mariah guessed, meant to be meaningful and gracious. She knew what that table would look like: set with the mismatched coin-silver and the worn-out Old Paris plates that Mariah had washed nearly every day of her previous life. Back then she had been fond of the McGavocks’ eccentric tableware that she had never been asked to eat on. Had she ever used it, though, she would have wondered why she couldn’t do so every day, and would have come to hate it. She knew herself well enough to know that. It occurred to her then that Carrie might have thought the same thing about introducing her slave to the china and, for her own reasons, had made sure it didn’t happen. Instead, she had appreciated its cracked and imperfect beauty from a distance.

  “Not very hungry.”

  The gravediggers hitched up the cart and drove off between the back gallery of the house and the cemetery. The cart bristled with shovels and picks. They nodded their heads as they passed. Down at the end of the lane, they picked up that man Tole, who looked back once before they disappeared between the last ring of fences.

  Every piece of the McGavock property had been marked with borders of either white board horse fencing, reminders of the blooded horses that once grazed within their confines, or by drystack rock fences built from clearing fields. A few years before the war, Colonel McGavock had received a coin-silver cup at the county fair for the best half mile of drystacked rock fencing in the county. Though he had never laid a rock of it himself, he had taken great pride in that cup, just as he took gre
at pride in his fences, back then.

  Rings circled within rings, fences marked paths. Here you are to stay, and here you are to walk. Out in the open, which is to say, out in the life she lived in town, there weren’t so many fences marking the danger areas. Here at Carnton, though, Mariah could understand the full utility of the fences she had hardly noticed before. They kept things out. But standing at the very center of the property, smelling the new dirt on Theopolis’s grave, she wondered if the fences, the rings within rings, weren’t also meant for those who were contained within, so that they might know the extent of the earth to which they were entitled to roam without care, no more and no less. It made her anxious, all those fences, and she nearly wept at the idea of being held back. But she could hardly think of what else to do, and at this felt relief, and then shame.

  Carrie glided across the way to the house. Mariah drifted back a few paces. Carrie held several white carnations in her hand, which Mariah knew could be made into a perfume to bring luck to gamblers. Her feet trod five-fingered grass, which could be made into a bath for uncrossing those who had been cursed, who had roots thrown at them. Over by the corner of the house, blowing in the wind, was sheep weed, which could be made into a tea to restore sanity. Everything was a material of conjure if looked at properly and with the imagination of spirit, the sort of imagination that had comforted her mother.

  Mariah returned to Theopolis’s grave. Carrie stopped and waited patiently, not watching. Mariah wondered if Carrie knew what she had it in her mind to do. Carrie was no stranger to the conjuring of spirits.

  At the grave, Mariah stooped down and scraped up a handful of dirt from the mound atop Theopolis. A handful of goofer dust. She did not know how to use it, but her mother would have taken it, and just having it in her hand calmed her. She wrapped it in the handkerchief she’d borrowed from Carrie, knotted it neatly, and dropped it in the secret pocket of her skirts. Carrie said nothing. If she had asked, Mariah would have said that she needed something to help her against the men who had taken her boy, but what she really needed, far more than dust, was names. She wanted the names of those responsible, whether or not there was justice in the world.