The Orphan Mother (6 page)

July 6, 1867

Running didn't seem fast enough. Mariah wondered about the people passing her going the other direction. Had they not heard the screams? What other important business did they have, their faces painted with worry or dreaminess, hands in their pockets or held before them, black hats and feathered hats on heads cocked down in thought, all of them seeming to want
out
when she wanted
in
? Their world seemed wide and forbidding, entirely mysterious.

She felt pulled along by a cord attached to the center of her chest. Every few steps she imagined the worst; the cord drew tighter and her feet moved faster. She had been the worst sort of mother, she thought. She had even resented being a mother at all sometimes, and now she dreaded that there was some kind of divine settling of accounts at work and she still had that debt to reckon with. Had she been a mother? Had she been enough?

She was so angry he had chosen this path of his through politics where he would always live at the whim of whichever white man decided he could find use for a clever ex-slave,
a dancing bear
, who could read and write and speak well in front of crowds.
That is not fair
, she thought. She was not being fair to her own son, who might very well have had a plan that was beyond even her. Maybe she was the ignorant one. He was her son, but also a man and not only a reminder of her neglect when he was a baby, his days in the cabins going hungry in the company of women not his mother. He had known his father only barely, and then only when his father was dying. Theopolis was now a grown man. She loved him, she hated him. He was hers nevertheless, a boy and a man.

She ran up the blocks and then up Main Street. The crowd grew denser on the wood sidewalk, so she weaved around carts and others walking down the middle of the street. They called out to her,
You're too late
, but she wouldn't turn. On this side of town it was black faces, but as she got closer to the square the faces turned white and red, eyes flashing. She was a block away when she realized that, yes, she had heard screams, and that under those screams were the loud, vibrating drone of shouts, curses, and feet stamping.

In the square the bodies moved in every direction. The crowd pulsed and rotated at its center, and at its edges men flung themselves out of the storm, running in every direction. The center, which she glimpsed only briefly here and there as she pushed closer, appeared to be located at the front of the stage, a dark and pulsing thing.

Time stretched out and she pushed through. Men stepped on her feet and she on theirs. She smelled them, they smelled of peat and coal. She fit herself between them, and as she got closer she began to push without regard for whom she was pushing or what the consequences would be. She nearly knocked over the magistrate Dixon, a big blowsy fancy man. He gaped at her. It felt a million years ago since she'd stood in his house and told him that he was a father again. What she cared about was finding her son and seeing that he was all right. She only wanted to see. Didn't need to speak to him, didn't need to touch him, he didn't need to know she was there. She had to see it for herself and then she could disappear and Theopolis could have his life and she could have hers and she would be free again. She told herself this.

She came closer to the center. Men began to recognize her and make way. They said things to her about what had happened, but she didn't hear them, or refused to register the meaning. There was the preacher, standing in her way, both palms toward her, shaking his head, and then he was gone, yanked to the side by the carpenter whose words she did hear:
S
he should see this
. Then she was through and stood at the center.

The others had drawn in a rough circle around an empty space. Entirely men, they were black and they were white. They radiated puzzlement or anger or horror or fascination, and sometimes all these at once. Their faces burned her; she shied away. She looked down. At the far end of the circle from her, a white man lay dead upon his back, his arms neatly at his sides, a dark pool of blood growing quickly underneath his mangled head. And upon the trampled ground lay Theopolis, her only son, the body of her body, the flesh of her flesh, without whom she was merely something afloat in time.

All things stopped, or seemed to. Dr. Cliffe knelt beside Theopolis, whose shirt had been ripped open. The doctor must have sensed life, because he pressed clean rags against the chest of her boy. He kept one hand on his chest, holding down a cloth, while he grabbed more rags from his bag with the other. The fabric kept the blood back for a moment, but soon it rose up through the bandages and seeped between the doctor's fingers. Her boy's chest rose and fell, but each time it became harder to see him move. Theopolis's head lay back on the doctor's coat. His eyes were open but he was not blinking. Blood ran down his face and the sides of his head, into his ears. His head was misshapen, she thought, like someone had been sanding it down and reshaping it. Blood soaked into the dirt and formed a dark halo around him. Sound disappeared, and Mariah heard nothing except the roar in her own head.

The doctor recovered and began trying to wrap Theopolis's chest. She held her son's head in her hands.

Mariah couldn't remember holding Theopolis this way since the morning of his birth. He was covered in blood that morning, too, and he wailed in her arms. She sang to him in a soft voice as she brought him to her breast. And now she sang to him, the melody lost behind sobs and her breaking voice. She remembered giving birth to Theopolis, alone on a strawtick pallet. She cried out and gripped the edges of the bed and screamed into the sky. He was heavy when he was born, and she held him then as she did now, trembling, kissing him on his forehead, pressing his face into her chest.

The little doctor sweated and pulled and stanched, but nothing changed until Theopolis rolled his head over in his mother's hands, toward her own face. He still did not blink, he did not see her, but he was faced toward her when he disappeared for good, drawn back into depthless darkness.

That was what had happened, she would say forever afterward. He just
left
, his face said nothing more eloquent than
gone
. There he was, and then, in less than an instant, he wasn't.

A man stepped forward.
And here's the nigger's gun
.
Rogue nigger. Just started shooting!

Mariah was not really hearing his words, not right then; but the words would echo in her ears for years afterward.

This nigger boy shot the grocer. Shot John Sykes dead.

The cobbler boy here shot him? No sir. That's not his gun.

You bet it's his gun. I the one who took it off him.

You a damn liar.

Somebody shut him up. He saying Theopolis Reddick started shooting. Where he get a gun from?

She watched as someone laid a pistol by Theopolis's hand. She ignored it, left it in place. It had nothing to do with her or with her son.

She didn't recognize this gun, old and worn and dark-handled. She doubted Theopolis had ever carried one in his life. Still, she could see the story unfolding. They would make Theopolis look like a killer when he was anything but. His head was heavy in her lap, paradoxically heavier now that the soul was gone. In truth, she preferred that story,
the rogue nigger
, to the one more likely, which was that he had been taken down from the stage and slaughtered like a winter hog.

Theopolis believed in this world, so much so that he would make for it some speeches and try to win its votes. Her own head felt heavy, too, and seemed in danger of collapsing in on itself from the pressure of sound, too much sound, everything so loud now, all of it directed inward through her ears to her brain.

It was some time before she realized that the sound in her ears was that of her own voice. She wailed and directed the sound at Theopolis's face, but the vibrations would not revive him.

July 6, 1867

Evening calmed the chaos. George Tole had returned to his house in the Bucket, where he listened to the sounds of the street. Children cried out and carts clattered quickly past, their owners eager to be done with their business and go inside, safe in their homes like Tole. But Tole didn't feel safe. The day's crowd had dispersed, but still the voices rang out inside his head—clear, brittle, overly sharp.

He hadn't expected to see so much mayhem. He saw a Negro boy shot dead, a white grocer, and dozens wounded. Had to be at least forty or so boys wounded from the gunshots and beatings.

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.