The Orphan Mother (12 page)

“A Negro,” Mariah said, disgusted. “Them white men would love that. They'd build a statue in the courthouse square for him. You think it's true?”

Nessie considered it. “It could be. Might not be. It ain't like we Negroes agree on much.” She looked over at Caruthers. “Maybe someone had their reasons, I don't know.”

A pause, an inhalation, an exhalation. Mariah looked about her—at the Preacher, at John Scrugg, at the others. Someone would know something. One of them
would.
She would not stay a slave to the abuse of that white world no more. She would at least know it, it would not be a mystery.

July 15, 1867

The next few days, Tole and Mariah developed a routine. Tole went out to Carnton to work around the cemetery by late morning dressed in tattered overalls and work boots crusted with field dirt, and Mariah would have the day's work planned out for him. In the early evening, when swirls of pink and sapphire would marble the sky with billows of broken cloud, Mariah would holler for him, tell him supper was on the table, and Tole would go first to the shed to wash up some, and then go inside to the kitchen and sit in front of a hot bowl of stew.

“Musta been somethin', livin' in this house during the war.” Tole slurped his soup, held his spoon like a young child. Mariah sat beside him with a bowl of her own.

“You seen your fair share of war. Don't know the difference.”

“Did indeed. Thing is, I was out there killin'. You was here bringin' em back to life.”

“Mostly they died, too. But slow. Or they lost they legs. Maybe you done that to them.”

She'd remembered being on her knees with old sheets and linens, mopping up puddles—lakes, oceans, it seemed—of blood. She remembered the piles of limbs outside and below the bedroom window where the surgeons did their work.

She couldn't remember every man's name who died, and she often thought of this. Was it William who had asked for water, William from Georgia? Or was that Hank, from Alabama? It sometimes seemed desperately important that she remember. There was one essential thing different from their two experiences, Tole's and Mariah's: Tole's enemy had been Confederates, but Mariah's enemy had been death. Though some of them would have liked to see her and her posterity in chains forever, and all of them fought on the side that would have ensured that, she remembered fighting the deaths and pain of the Confederate men, who whispered their gratitude to her. Death, despair, giving up—that was the enemy. She hardly saw the color of their uniforms, which were all different shades anyway. She was not sure she would be so generous now.

Mariah sat back in her chair. “You ever wonder what your life would've been like if it wasn't for that war, Mr. Tole?”

“I wonder, yes.” Tole took a pause, a slurp of soup, and said, “Sad for me to admit this, but awful as it was, the war gave me purpose.”

“That sounds ugly.”

“I was good at it. Never been real good at nothing before. Hell of a thing for a man to be good at, but it's true.”

“What about before the war? You ain't gone tell me you grew up wanting to be a soldier.”

“You mean when I was a child?”

He had the weathered face of a man twice his age, etched like a hunting knife into soft birchwood, lines and crevices that splintered like shattered glass, and the droopy eyes of a drinker. He could hardly remember being a child. By her reaction, it appeared Mariah couldn't hardly think of him as a child either.

“What's so funny?”

“Nothin', Mr. Tole. You go on. Answer the question.”

“Childhood seems so long ago these days. I can barely remember running around uptown with my older brother. He and I used to talk about joining the circus.”

Mariah's mouth twitched.

“Don't go laughin' now. Ain't nothing funny about that. Them boys work real hard.”

“Oh, I know it. I was just picturing you balancing yourself on one foot on some beast of an elephant. They'd call you
Zanzibar the Zulu King
or some such.”

“All right, make fun.”

“I'm not makin' fun, Mr. Tole. I think it's nice when boys dream.”

“I wanted to be a clown, myself.”

“Oh Lord help me.”

“One night my daddy caught my brother painting my face white and he whipped me.”

“He don't like clowns.”

“Nah. He thought I was making my face white so I could look like the white kids.”

“Were you?”

“Maybe I just wanted to look like a clown, how about that? Ain't that good enough?”

“George Tole, the circus clown. You done made my day with that one.” Mariah sipped her water.

Tole smiled and used his spoon to push his vegetables around the reddish-brown broth. “All right then,” he said. “What about you? You ever have dreams as a little girl?”

Mariah was quiet for a moment, then said, “No,” with an unblinking honesty. It was just a fact to her.

“No? Just like that.”

“It was different for me, Mr. Tole. You was free. I wasn't raised like that. I lived on the plantation in Louisiana with Miss Carrie. I was hers. Her plaything, though sometimes I thought we was friends. And when I grew up, I was the girl who kept her clothes neat and brought her breakfast in bed. And when I grew older still, and Miss Carrie suffered them children dying, I was the one who ran this house.”

“And all that time, you never let yourself daydream? You never wondered what was beyond those trees?”

Mariah shook her head. “Didn't do much good to dream. Never seemed much point in it. Life wasn't bad.”

“I don't understand.”

“The McGavocks treated their slaves better than most. We didn't get whipped or beaten or taken advantage of as much.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Miss Carrie never laid a finger on me. I was never hurt. Not ever. Other slaves on other places, they wanted to escape worse than I did. They wanted to be free right then. But me, I could imagine staying at Carnton forever. I never thought there'd be a day where I'd be free, that was the problem...It was a different kinda slavery, the kind that steals your desire and hides the world. I spent my whole life serving other people, and I didn't think much was wrong about that. It just was. Some women stare out the window their whole lives wondering what's out there. They know there's something else they was missin'. I didn't look out the window—too busy.”

Tole felt angry, hearing this. These were terrible words to hear from a woman so intelligent, and he hated slavery even more in that moment. “What about now?” he finally asked, barely able to say the words. “Now that you free. You have any dreams now?”

Mariah pondered the question for a moment. “You promise you won't laugh?”

“Long as you don't say you wanna join the circus.”

Mariah chuckled. “I think I'd make a fine doctor.”

Tole nodded. “I can picture it.”

“Yeah? You ain't just sayin' that?”

“Not just saying that, no sir. You as strong a woman as any I ever met. I remember seein' you that day with Missus Dixon's blood all over your hands. Besides that, you have a special way with people. You know when to be hard, know when to be soft.”

“I always thought medicine was the only magic I'd ever need.”

She stopped talking and tucked her lips in. Her eyes turned glassy and she widened.

Tole could tell she was keeping herself from crying. Maybe she was thinking of the war.

“Healing people makes me feel like I matter.”

Tole considered this. “I reckon that's a true thing, it does matter.”

The two of them finished their soup and stared off through the window, grimy with cook smoke.

“Soup was good,” Tole said. “Thank you.”

Mariah picked up her bowl and his and brought them to the washing area. “It's no bother. Used to make it for my husband, but he died. Couldn't heal him neither.” She looked back at him as she washed the dishes with soap and a washcloth.

“You ever miss being married, Missus Reddick?”

Mariah dried her hands on the towel. “Suppose I miss it some nights. If it were up to me, it would always be daylight,” she said. “How about you?”

“Oh, I weren't much of a husband.”

“That ain't what I asked.”

“I miss having somebody around. Feel like I've gotten a little too used to it being so quiet all the time.”

Mariah nodded in agreement.

“I bet you were real good at it,” Tole said. “Being married.”

“I was young. Not sure I believe there's such a thing as being good at it. You just gotta try your best to be decent. I think maybe we learned that a little too late.”

“Where you meet him?”

“McGavocks bought him over in Montgomery. Brought him back to train their blood horses. That's what John McGavock did, before the war—raised horses. They're all gone now, of course. Now he's trying for fruit trees.”

“He a good man?”

“Bolen? He was. He was a difficult man, but I could depend on him.”

“Did you love him?”

Mariah smiled sadly. “I don't know. Some days I guess I did. Some days I coulda strangled him, too, 'specially in the beginning. But we had some happy times. He knew how to make me laugh. He got under my skin like nobody else. He used to whistle in the morning time, sometimes before the sun. I might have stabbed him some of those mornings. But we was happy enough. We was always working, and always knew they could split us whatever time they want, we weren't officially married in a church or nothing. We was as happy as they let us be. It's some kind of marriage, I reckon, but not the kind for white ladies.”

Tole nodded and bowed his head shyly.

“I never expected much in the way of kindness. But I remember I musta told him a hundred times how much I loved white lilies.”

“White lilies?”

“They been my favorite flower since I was a little girl and I always wanted a man to bring me white lilies. I always thought, someday, he gone take the hint, and he gone bring me some. But he never did.”

“I know how that goes,” Tole said. “There so many things I think back on, things I shoulda done.”

“I remember I'd hear stories of women bein' in love. They'd tell me about that feelin' in their stomach when their man would come around. Said it felt like a million butterflies, and I'd say I knew that feeling real well, but the truth was, I ain't never had it. You ever had that feelin', Mr. Tole?

Tole looked up at Mariah and said, “Yes ma'am.”

That evening, Tole worked well into the blackness of night, the cemetery lit by a soft dusting of light from the half-moon. Finally he pulled a pile of brush from one corner of the cemetery, dragged it into the fallow field to be burned, and decided he'd had enough for one day. He glanced off across the trees and the fields to where Franklin lay sleeping.

When he turned around, Mariah was standing there staring right up into his eyes, her brow crumpled and angry. “She leave you after your boy passed on?”

Tole nodded, as if the conversation had been going through his mind as well. “Not right away. Think maybe she should've. She was a better woman than that. She tried to forgive me for his death and how it was after he died, but after a while it was too late. I wasn't much of a husband to her. I wasn't much of anything.”

“You was a sorry man.” She said it because it was true, and she said it direct because that was her way. It didn't make him mad.

“Can't think of a single night I didn't wake up on the floor somewhere,” he agreed. “Stinkin' like booze. And then I'd get home and yell at her the way my daddy used to do me and my brother. Pound on the doors when she'd lock herself in the bedroom. Punched holes in the walls. Never lay a hand on her, but only because she left before I could get that bad. One day, I woke up and found a note on the bed. She said she'd gone to stay with her sister upstate. I didn't even care, just went back to drinkin'. It was probably a week or so before I realized she was gone for good.”

“It's the Devil in it.”

“And then he get in you.”

“Why she need to forgive you for your boy dying?” Mariah still stared up into his eyes, frowning, searching. The moonlight was cold upon them. Far away the crickets sawed, out of tune. A single candle lit up one of Carnton's windows upstairs, and Tole could see the curtains moving slowly in the breeze, like water, like grief.

“When I tell you little Miles die of dysentery, I didn't tell everything, neither. He die because of me. Because I leave my whiskey where he could reach it. Eight years old. He was sick, already dying, and then he took a big gulp of my whiskey. Maybe more, no one was paying attention, we was sleeping. After a while he began choking up blood. Charlotte woke up first, tried to help him, waked me up, too. She was shaking me and crying and hollerin', but I was too goddamn drunk to even stand. But still I tried, Mrs. Reddick. I tried to get him to stop choking. He was already weak. His big brown eyes turn red and he had blood in his tears. And I screamed, ‘Somebody help him, please,' but nobody come.”

Quiet grew between them. What more was there to say? A lot, Tole thought, but not then. She had been tense and on guard at first, but he could sense her relaxing, unclenching. After a while: “Where he buried?”

“Don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“Wasn't in no fit state to remember.”

“How drunk were you?”

He didn't answer. More quiet. An owl called out, mournful, from down in the Alabama section of the cemetery. Mariah walked right up to him; he could feel her heat. “Reckon not knowing that is the worst kind of torture.”

She knows
, Tole thought.

She inspected him, and he became conscious of how he appeared—his clothes, once the best of the best, had worn through here and there at the elbows and knees, and had gone gray from dust. His shoes flapped at the toe. He had no socks. He could feel her taking stock, and felt unworthy.

“You been here how long?”

“Since just after noon.”

“I mean in town.”

“Six months.”

“And the work you do here the only work you got?”

Tole nodded. “Not found any of my kind of work,” he said, which was a lie. He'd found
too
much of his kind of work. Any amount was too much.