The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks

something heavy on his back and, at that distance, seemed to disappear into the tall grass. She thought she recognized his head, or maybe the rhythm of his walk. This one, he of the old world , she thought, her other world, the one before she ever could have considered sitting down at the table with Carrie McGavock. In that world there had been the McGavock children, needing their noses wiped and their lessons laid out for them on rainy afternoons. There had been little Theopolis, in the cabin, making armies of straw men tied with twine and marched across the boards Mariah tried to keep swept in the cabin. There had been the bed in her cabin, a small thing barely bigger than a pallet.
    And most of all there had been no reason to think much about anything beyond the fences and the walls, the path between that cabin and those parlors.
    *  *  *
    Later in the afternoon Carrie and Mariah sat together inside, in the family parlor, the two of them sharing some finger sandwiches the cook had made, turnips and some cauliflower, a small bowl of chilled okra soup. Mariah hadn’t been eating, and Carrie remarked on this twice.
    Mariah remembered, almost with amusement, that it had been she—Mariah—who, all those years before, had forced Carrie to sit down and eat, to nibble on a carrot or a radish or a bite of bread. Have this piece of cheese, Miss Carrie. Worth taking just a bite. Here.
    Now, sitting here in the same room where she demanded that her mistress have a ham sandwich, Mariah was more stubborn. She forked her vegetables around her plate. The family parlor felt different, emptier than before, with those mismatched plates and stained cloth napkins. Mariah never would have tolerated stained napkins, wrinkled and tattered, but Carrie didn’t even seem to notice. The rooms seemed darker than before, gloomier, the summer sun failing to break through grimy windows and tattered curtains—had Carnton always been so filthy? Surely not. When Mariah was there, Carnton shone.
    Not her house anymore. Not her life.
    She surveyed the wreckage of the mashed turnips, and bit her lip to keep from crying out.
    A suffocating kind of silence had arisen now between them, former mistress and former slave: the gentle tapping of a coin-silver fork to porcelain plate, the clink of glass to table, each inadvertent noise a reminder of how little they spoke, and how little, really, they had to say to each other. They defined themselves by what they were not: they were not friends, they were not mistress and slave, or employer and employee. They were two people washed up together on a farther shore with nothing in common but the air they breathed, and perhaps they even breathed different air.
    And yet there was a kind of familiar peace about being back; a peace she hadn’t expected, a peace she resented. She hated that Carnton still felt like home, even in the slightest way. Carnton. What a horrible name for a house. She’d heard somewhere that it meant tomb—how could the McGavocks, Mr. John’s grandfather and great-grandfather, and all the line of all the McGavocks back to the past that Mariah could scarcely imagine, want to entomb their children?
    Carrie’s throat made a slight clicking sound as she swallowed. “I’ll be sure to have a proper tombstone made for him. A bigger one. With his name and all the dates.”
    “Not your place.”
    “Of course not. But it’s my cemetery.”
    “What does it matter?”
    Carrie sipped her water, and a sliver of a smile wrinkled her cheek. “Do you remember when he was little, probably four years old, and he’d hide beneath—”
    “Stop it.”
    Carrie’s smile froze.
    “I don’t want to talk about him.”
    “He was a special boy, Mariah.”
    “You don’t know nothing.” Mariah could hear the anger in her own voice.
    “I do,” Carrie replied. “If anyone would know, Mariah, it’s me.”
    Mariah didn’t respond. Carrie was probably right. Carrie had lived with grief and rage so long