The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks

coming whatever we say.”
    “They cannot come. They will not come. I will ask Colonel McGavock to speak with General Forrest. He will attend to it. He won’t let this house be violated, he won’t stand for it.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    But I knew they would come. If I had learned anything during my life here, it was that I could not keep things out. I had not been able to prevent death from waltzing in, and so how would I prevent this? I imagined what my house would look like when the wounded and their attendants had come here and gone.
How many? A dozen? Two dozen?
My stomach twisted when I thought of men in my home and their blood. Perhaps I could be of use to a few. Maybe the war would spare the rest.
    She seemed to never quit moaning and crying. Sometimes she screamed for me. This was the way it was to the end. Her skin was so dry and red and flaky. It almost seemed to burn my hand. Every day I sat by her and applied cold wet linens to her forehead, and her body seemed to take up every bit of moisture without returning anything—no coolness, no relief.
    A breeze blew across the porch, stirring up the air. It was almost noon, and the sun hung faded and fuzzy in the gray sky, a palimpsest of summer. I felt my forehead grow cold with sweat and my heart pulse in my throat. I resisted the urge to gasp for air.
    “Mariah, begin the preparations, will you? I’ll come in a moment.”
    “Yes. Yes, ma’am.”
    I walked into the house. It was cool in the shadowy corners and in the darkened hall. I wondered if anyone would miss me if I spent the day hidden away in the dark. I walked on.
    Out the back and into the yard the warm breeze wrapped me up again. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going. My feet carried me across the yard toward my garden, but my eyes were drawn off to my right, to a small stand of trees ringed by a black iron fence. The grass was still soft. The breeze kicked up again, and I felt I would suffocate. I wanted to strike out at it, to slap it away.
    I stood in the garden and stared at the cemetery across the way. I felt the grave markers marching toward me. I thought of it as another grove, a grove of trees and of limestone and of children beneath my feet, and it was for this reason that sometimes I could only bear to look at it by hiding in the garden and peeking through the foliage.
    The garden had once been so lovely, so trimmed and neat, packed between the paths with obedient rudbeckia and peonies and roses and boxwoods and sunflowers and crape myrtles. I had loved it unequivocally and had taken pleasure in its boundaries and distinctions, the concentration of its colors and textures. It had been a rebuke to the very idea of uncertainty.
    Now the garden looked nothing like it did that first day sixteen years before, when I was an eighteen-year-old riding up in my new husband’s carriage. It had become ragged like everything else in my house, in Franklin, in Tennessee, and, as far as I knew, in the world. In the summer the rudbeckia took over much of the sunny side of the garden, and even in the night I could see their bright and insistent yellow blooms from my porch. Bleeding heart, cemetery vine, and ivy had taken over the rest. The peonies fought for light, and their occasional breakthrough was cause for mild celebration. I would not help them, but I took solace from their little successes.
    So many years had passed since I had first gone to sleep at Carnton. The house had collapsed into itself.
Like me,
I thought without surprise.
    I stood there like a shadow among the browns and beiges of my once precise Italianate garden, and I remembered the first time I had seen the house. It was not the same house anymore, although this would not have been obvious to the casual observer. Its bones were still there, but very little of the rest seemed familiar to me anymore. This redbrick neoclassical pile, with the Grecian portico on the front, and its massive, two-story Italianate galleries running across