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Authors: Robert Hicks
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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.
Chapter 11
Mariah
July 8, 1867
The warblers and finches and robins that lived in the oak trees of the cemetery had no sense of occasion, Mariah thought. Here they came, leaping from branch to branch, diving from tree to tree, all the time loudly oblivious to the young men buried just beneath them. Tiny bird shadows flashed across the raw black dirt. She thought she should feel enraged. She felt sure that a proper and good woman and mother would curse the birds, rend her dress, shout insults at God. But birds, as far as Mariah knew, had no particular sound for sorrow and mourning, no special chittery language for sadness. Not even these Tennessee birds, despite everything that they had seen.
She might say the same thing about herself. No words for any of this, and no tears. There was a white oak a couple of hills away that had been standing on the Carnton plantation since the time of George Washington, and that had cast shade on Andrew Jackson when he’d come visiting. Surely that living thing had witnessed horrors. She wondered if this could be seen in the branches, or in the way the grain bent and curled around the tree’s center.
The ghosts of war and the past were everywhere, in the sighing of the leaves and in the taste of the evening air on her tongue. The war was over, but it was still being fought, still surrounded her. Men still screamed and bled and wept for their mothers and wives.
And that riot was just the latest of the killing—not the last.
People stood around her in their dark colors, hands hanging down and clasped before them. Mariah lowered her head, stood beside her best friends, the sisters April and May, both of them now owners of the Thirsty Bird tavern, both of them former slaves of Robert Buchanan out
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.
Chapter 11
Mariah
July 8, 1867
The warblers and finches and robins that lived in the oak trees of the cemetery had no sense of occasion, Mariah thought. Here they came, leaping from branch to branch, diving from tree to tree, all the time loudly oblivious to the young men buried just beneath them. Tiny bird shadows flashed across the raw black dirt. She thought she should feel enraged. She felt sure that a proper and good woman and mother would curse the birds, rend her dress, shout insults at God. But birds, as far as Mariah knew, had no particular sound for sorrow and mourning, no special chittery language for sadness. Not even these Tennessee birds, despite everything that they had seen.
She might say the same thing about herself. No words for any of this, and no tears. There was a white oak a couple of hills away that had been standing on the Carnton plantation since the time of George Washington, and that had cast shade on Andrew Jackson when he’d come visiting. Surely that living thing had witnessed horrors. She wondered if this could be seen in the branches, or in the way the grain bent and curled around the tree’s center.
The ghosts of war and the past were everywhere, in the sighing of the leaves and in the taste of the evening air on her tongue. The war was over, but it was still being fought, still surrounded her. Men still screamed and bled and wept for their mothers and wives.
And that riot was just the latest of the killing—not the last.
People stood around her in their dark colors, hands hanging down and clasped before them. Mariah lowered her head, stood beside her best friends, the sisters April and May, both of them now owners of the Thirsty Bird tavern, both of them former slaves of Robert Buchanan out
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