Prologue
1894

Carrie watched him go and then turned to Mariah, whom she had once
owned, a gift to her from her father. She was a gift,
whatever the meaning and implications of that word. Mariah had been
her tether to the earth when things had spun away, when Carrie
wasn't sure if there remaineda real and true life for her, and then
when she wasn't sure if she wanted that life even if it existed.
Things had been different once. She couldn't believe that she had
ever been so . . . what? Weak? No, that wasn't it. She'd
never been weak. She'd been buffeted and knocked down, like grass
bent to the ground by the wind preceding a thunderstorm. She'd been
slow to get up. But she did get up, eventually. There had been no
choice. She was not afraid of much, and she especially wasn't
afraid of God. Not anymore, not for a long time.

"Mariah, what do you see?"

A mockingbird chased a hawk across the width of the cemetery,
diving and chattering at the black shadow until it was banished
from whatever bit of territory the smaller bird claimed for its
own.

"I see a mockingbird. And some of them yellow birds. Finches. Big
old bird with claws, too."

Mariah looked past her mistress, across the field of tall
grass.

424 Killed at Franklin/Mississippi

"You know that isn't what I mean."

Carrie could see the markers and the grass, and the iron fence
ringing the graveyard. She could turn and see the back of her house
and remember the beards on the dead generals laid out on the porch
below and the keening of the wounded on the balcony above. She
could see just fine. But there was more to seeing than that, she
thought. It was either a failure of imagination or a slight by the
Lord Himself, but in any case she could not see the things Mariah
could see. Mariah could tell her about things that gave her
comfort, and Carrie cared not a whit about how she came upon the
knowledge.

She pointed at a grave marker in the Tennessee section. MJM,
it read. In places, twigs leaned against the stones. She made a
mental note to tell the yard boy about them.

"What about him? That one."

"Miss Carrie, please, ma'am. This ain't right."

Carrie stared hard at the seam of her dress, where the new thread
of her latest mending stood out like a long dark cord against the
faded black of her ankle-length dress. She hadn't known how to sew
before the war, and she still wasn't very good at it. They would
have to dye the whole thing soon.

"I would like to know about that man."

Mariah wasn't sure that what she saw in her mind was real, just the
product of a fevered imagination, or maybe the work of the devil
himself making her play games with the white woman whom she loved
in a way she could not describe. Fragments of light and sound came
to her when she let her mind drift, and the words Carrie craved
formed on Mariah's lips unbidden. It was a thoughtless exercise, a
pastime to while away an afternoon. The thing she did know,
the only thing she knew for sure, was that Carrie believed.
Mariah could feel that on her.

"I don't know what to say, ma'am."

"Yes, you do. Don't play. We're too old for that. Tell me what you
see when you stare into the earth right there. Don't hold back. I
know when you're holding back."

Mariah closed her eyes and went silent, hoping Carrie would forget
her little obsession and keep walking. But Carrie stayed put, so
Mariah began to speak.

"There a man and a boy. It sunny. They ain't working, so maybe they
just home from church."

"How old?"

"The man, he a man. Got a beard. Dark, strong. He ain't old or
young. The boy, he just a little one, though he think he bigger.
Maybe ten. He got a fishing pole in his hand. They going to catch
fish."

"Is there a woman?"

"She dead."

"How do you know that?"

"'Cause they going out fishing in they church clothes."

******

She heard him before she saw him. A small cough, followed by a
louder, deeper cough that he tried to swallow back. She turned
toward the house and there, in the path between the gravestones,
stood an old man. A surprisingly old man. He was thin and
pepper-haired, and his eyes were too dark for her to see where he
was looking. They were set back too far in his head to distinguish
them from the shadows. He stood up tall and held his old bowler in
his hand. She could see him nervously massaging his knuckles under
the hat, which caused a little halo of dust to rise up off the
felt. He wore a long coat that was slightly too short and scuffed
boots. His mouth was twisted up in what appeared to be a smirk, but
which she knew was not. He watched her closely and walked toward
her with the faintest hint of a limp, enough to make her heart
break. The twisted and dried-out parts of him still contained just
the memory of his old beauty—all the parts of him were still
there, they'd just been used up. He stood before her, so close she
could hear the air whistling in and out of him. She knew him
immediately, as if he'd left only the day before.

"Why'd you scare that boy, Mrs. McGavock?"

"I love that boy."

"He one of yours?"

"Do I look like he could be my child?"

"I meant, is he your grandson or something? That's possible, ain't
it?"

"No, he's not my grandson, just a stray off the street."

"Just a stray," the man repeated.

They paused and looked at each other, and Carrie felt angry that
he'd come without warning. The feeling passed. She pushed a stray
lock of hair behind her ear and squinted hard at him.

"I didn't mean to insinuate anything," she said.

"I reckon I ain't had anyone insinuate anything about me in a long
time. I didn't take no offense."

"But none was meant."

The old man stopped and toed at the grass with his foot. He looked
around at the grave markers like he had misplaced something. He
started to sway a little, and Mariah moved quickly behind him,
ready to steady him if she had to, but not willing to speak or
acknowledge him. He spoke again.

"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."

3

Sergeant Zachariah Cashwell, 24th Arkansas

We were marching up that pike, and everywhere you looked there were
things cast off by the Yankees littering the sides of the road, and
it was everything our officers could do to keep the young ones from
ducking out of formation and snatching up something bright and
useful-looking, like crows looking to decorate their nests. The old
ones, like me, we knew better than to pick up anything, because
you'd have to carry it, and we knew that our burden was heavy
enough. But, hell, the Yankees had thrown away more than we'd laid
our eyes on in months, maybe years. There were pocket Bibles and
little writing desks, poker chips and love letters, euchre decks
and nightshirts, canteens and pots of jam, and all kinds of fancy
knives. It looked like a colossus had picked up a train full of
things, from New York or one of those kinds of places, and dumped
it all out to see what was what. And I'm just mentioning the things
that you might want to pick up and keep. There was a lot more,
besides. There were wagons left burning on the side of the road,
crates of rotten and infested meat, horses and mules shot in their
traces. I reckon those animals weren't moving fast enough, and you
couldn't blame the Yankees for lightening their loads if they
could, but it was a sorry sight. Even so, all that gear gladdened
my heart because it seemed so desperate. They were running,
by God. They were running from us, the 24th Arkansas, and all the
rest of the brigades ahead of us and behind us. The columns
stretched far as I could see when I wiped the sweat from my eyes
and got a good look around. But mostly I just kept my head down and
put my feet down, one in front of the other, the way I'd learned to
do.

The officers rode up and down the column on their horses, saying
all sorts of things to keep our spirits up. I'd learned that if you
needed an officer to pick up your spirits, you were in sorry shape.
But some of the younger boys listened, and they were heartened by
it. The officers talked about the glory of the South and about how
our women would be watching and how they would expect us to fight
like Southern men—hard and without quitting. I wanted to say,
Until that bullet come for you, but I didn't. Those officers
were getting a whole lot of the men riled up for a fight, and I
figured that was good no matter what else I had to say about it.
Some of our boys had their homes around there, and you could just
tell they were itching to get going. You had to hold them back,
tell them to pace themselves, or else they'd start running and
whooping and getting all lathered.

One big hoss in the company ahead, a man with a full beard and a
neck like a hog's, started yelling for the band to give us a tune.
He stomped his feet and rattled the bayonet he had at his side, and
then some other of the boys did the same thing, and pretty soon we
were all yelling at the band to play "The Bonnie Blue Flag," to
give us a tune and be useful for once. The band even got a few
notes off before one of the company commanders rode by, snatched up
a trumpet, and threatened to beat them with it if he heard another
note. That was funny to watch, and it was about as good a morale
lifter as hearing "The Bonnie Blue Flag" straight through, on
account of our band wasn't very accomplished.

The thing I kept thinking about was the nightshirts and the pots of
jam, lying there on the roadside. They made me wonder whether we'd
been fighting in the same war.

And then the order went out to get on line. They just up and
stopped us, and I couldn't help running into the man ahead of me
and getting a whiff of the sweat and stink rising up off his
homespun shirt. The men quit jabbering, and then the thousands of
us were moving to either side of the road, all bunched up at first
but then thinning out as the line got longer and longer, like a
ball of twine unwinding. There wasn't any stomping of the feet
then, no bayonet rattling. We picked our way across the hills, some
units stopping at the edge of a tree line, most of us out in the
open. It took me a few moments to realize we were going to stop and
fight right here, rather than chase the Yanks all the way to
Nashville. It looked like a mighty long way to the Union lines,
which were up on a rise. I could see men way up there in town
tossing dirt around. The sunlight flashed off their shovels and
picks, and sometimes it seemed like you could actually pick out the
sound of their work a few seconds after you'd seen their tools go
chunking into the dirt. It was so damn hot for late November. What
had General Hood said when we crossed the river into Tennessee?
No more fighting on the enemy's terms. I looked at those
battlements up ahead over a mile distant, and I thought, We must
be the greatest army in the world if these are our terms.

I'd been fighting for three years by then. I'd been shot once, and
my left arm still didn't feel right. Sometimes I had a hard time
lifting my rifle and keeping it steady. I thought about this and
began flexing my arm to get it limbered up. We sat down in place
and began the long wait.

It always seemed a long wait before the fight, no matter how long
it took. Officers rode here and there conferring with one another,
and then they'd come back and huddle with their sergeants, and word
would come down about what was happening, and then they'd do it all
over again and the word would change. This drove some of the men
crazy every time. Shit, let's just go, they'd yell to no one
in particular, and they'd jump up and pace around and kick a tree
or something. Sometimes you didn't know what they meant by "go":
fighting or running. I'm quite sure that both options crossed the
minds of most men. It crossed my mind every time, and I'd been in a
lot of fights and hadn't run yet. Well, I hadn't run until everyone
else was running. I had that rule.

The thing I'm about to say, you might not understand unless you've
been in war. But in those moments before the fight, if you were a
smart man, you'd figure out a way to convince yourself that it
didn't matter to you if you lived or died. If you're safe in your
house, with your children running around underfoot and with fields
that need to be worked, it's an impossible way of thinking unless
you're sick or touched in the head. Of course it mattered if you
lived or died. But if you went into a battle caring what happened
to you, you wouldn't be able to fight, even though you knew you
were as likely to die as the next man whether you cared or not.
There wasn't any logic to who got killed and who didn't, and it was
better that your final thoughts not be of cowardice and regret. It
was better not to care, and to let yourself be swept up in the rush
of the men beside you, to drive forward into the smoke and fire
with the knowledge that you had already beaten death. When you let
yourself go like that, you could fight on and on.

Everyone had their own way of getting their mind right. We lingered
there on the outskirts of Franklin, and I could see each of the men
in my company going through their little rituals. There were two
ways of getting ready. Most of the new men, unless they were
unusually wise or strong-minded, went about tricking themselves
into forgetting the possibility of death. One youngster in an
almost clean uniform took a couple pieces of straw, stuck it in his
hat, and began to loudly tell every joke he could remember to no
one in particular, as if everything would be all right if he could
keep laughing right up until the bullet got him. A few people were
listening to him, but that wasn't really the point.

Listen here, I got another one. Three old men come courting a
young lady, and she says, "What can I expect from a marriage to
you?" And the first old man, he says, "I've got a big ol' . .
."

Other younger ones paced back and forth, hitting themselves in the
chest, shaking their heads like bulls, and cursing. These were the
ones who were trying to make themselves so angry and riled up that
they'd run like they had blinders on and rush wherever someone
pointed them without thinking about anything except throttling
something or somebody. Some of these boys picked up rocks and threw
them as hard as they could at the confused rabbits, squirrels, and
coveys of quail flushed out of their hiding places by our noise. I
caught one mountain boy with stringy auburn hair and no shoes
punching and kicking at an old locust tree behind us, and I yanked
him around and sat him down before he hurt himself.

Me and some of the other veterans, we had different ways. We'd all
been in battle, and you couldn't go through such a thing more than
a couple times without it becoming impossible to forget death. The
boy I'd joined up with three years before, my best friend from
Fayetteville, he'd gotten a minié ball through the eye at
Atlanta. In my dreams I still see his pink round face thrown back
on the ground, his mouth open and his crooked teeth bared, his
straw-blond hair matted with blood. After that, I never forgot
about death.

The way I prepared myself was to sit down on my pack, pick out a
point on the horizon, and stare at it. This is what I did that day
at Franklin. I stared and stared at what appeared to be a church
steeple on the edge of the town, just at the limits of my vision,
and I took stock of my place in the world. My father had died
young, and my ma ran off when I was about ten. I didn't have a
girl, I had no one to go back to. I was just a man, and even if I'd
lived to be a hundred, I'd still be forgotten someday. Men die,
that's how it is. I had lost my faith by then; otherwise, I guess I
would have prayed for my safety, but I didn't. I took deep breaths,
stared at that steeple, and convinced myself I didn't matter in
this world. I was an ant, a speck of dust, a forgotten memory. I
was insignificant like everyone else, and it was this
insignificance that made me strong. If my life was insignificant
and my death meaningless, then I was free of this world and I
became the sole sovereign of my own world, a world in which one act
of courage before death would be mine to keep forever. I could keep
that from God.

When they called us up to get on line again, this time for keeps, I
was ready. Men dusted themselves off, tightened their belts, and
obsessively checked their cartridges and ammunition, just in case.
I stood there, staring forward, silent, looking out over the
rolling land, hearing the pop pop pop of pickets firing
their first shots, and thinking I could almost see around the bend
of the earth if I looked hard enough. It was so pretty. The hills
were glowing and soft-looking, and I saw a couple of deer scatter
out of the woods and leap across the fields as we moved out. I
could have seen myself living in that little town in front of me,
in a proper house, under a different set of circumstances and in a
different lifetime. Before we stepped off, I thought, I wonder
why they chose this place for me to die.

And that, finally, was my real strength: I knew I was going to die.
I wasn't happy about it, but I felt relieved to know it.

Excerpted from THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH © Copyright 2005 by
Robert Hicks. Reprinted with permission by Warner Books, an imprint
of Time Warner Bookmark. All rights reserved.