The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks

noses and ears, had got twisted up and mashed down by time. But not April’s.
    “Guess they don’t got none of Hooper’s cure out there at the big house, Miss Mariah?”
    “Better cures than that,” Mariah said. She was happy to see April and sat down close to her on a stool.
    May, who hardly talked, brought Mariah a short drink of the thick Hooper liquor. She winked when she did it, and took her seat on the other side of April again.
    Mariah took a long sip at the sticky jar. Across the room, at the end of a long table, April and May had set liquor and loaves of bread. This was their idea of a saloon, and why not? Mariah thought. She leaned over and put a little coin in May’s hand. It occurred to her to stand up and announce that, in fact, she had earned this money herself and not taken it from the white lady who was her former owner. She knew no one would care, and so she stayed quiet. There was a lot of shouting, anyway, and she wasn’t sure she’d be heard over the din.
    The last couple of days, April told Mariah, their tavern had been half-full with black saloon-goers, riled up about the shootings, talking too loudly, too drunkenly, about Theopolis being shot. Each Negro had their own theory.
    But so much of the talk was political: these freedmen could vote. The very idea was enough to get them drunk. Many were vocal about supporting Brownlow. A few of them were Conservatives, and they would try to shout the others down, saying that the Republicans needed to tone down their support for the Reconstruction government so that they could live alongside the whites, and get and keep their jobs working for them.
    It was easy for Mariah to ignore such talk—she was focused on something else.
    She looked out at the rest in the room: the fiddler was plunking at his fiddle like it was a guitar and mooning at April; a couple danced with one arm around the other and a jar in the other hand; a treecutter and a turpentiner sat on chairs in the corner closest to the window; and a scattering of others, mostly country people she’d seen before but whose names did not immediately penetrate the growing fog of Hooper’s liquor. These men talked to each other animatedly, their hands sweeping through the air with the force of their words. The saloon, usually light with laughter and friendly conversation, felt heavy with their anger and their fear. Brownlow , Mariah heard them say, again and again. Bliss. Dixon. Brownlow. Theopolis. Dixon. Brownlow. Brownlow, Brownlow, Brownlow . She wished they would be quiet.
    April put her hand on Mariah’s shoulder. “They gone to come and set a hearing for the killings. Maybe you knew that.”
    Mariah leaned forward again. “Who they?”
    “Nashville people. They coming soon. August 6. Just a few weeks away now. Freedmen’s office too. And the U.S. Army itself is coming back.”
    “The whole Army?”
    “Don’t know. Talk is a hundred or so. There to keep the peace for the Nashville folk.”
    “White folk from Nashville? I got my fill of them for right now.”
    “Well, who you think, Mariah? Who you think they send? Least they send someone.”
    “Someone ain’t always better than no one.” Mariah thought for a moment, wrinkled her eyes with her squinting. “What they looking for?”
    “Want to know who killed your boy and the grocer, and they wanna talk to all them others who got hurt. They say more’n thirty people got a bullet in ’em that day, black and white folks.”
    “They don’t care about none of that.” That day Mariah had lost any faith she might have had in the idea that there was even one person in Nashville who cared how her boy had died, or that he had never owned a pistol in his life, and had very clearly been murdered without a thing to defend himself with except for a speech he had scrawled on some crumpled butcher paper. Not a gun or a knife or a stick or a rock.
    Theopolis had stood beside her when they filled in the grave of his father, her one and only