The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks Page A

herself that she probably forgot as it followed her from room to room, like a midday shadow.
    Was this how Mariah was doomed to live? Filled with grief and a rage so inarticulate and so elemental that she would come to rely upon it, like a cane or an extra toe, to give her balance? Would it come to a point, for Mariah, too, where the darkness was so much a part of her that she could not bear to live without it? A time when she would revel in the long straight rows of the Confederate dead, dead for their lost and stupid cause?
    “Have you decided what you’re going to do with his belongings?”
    “You like thinking about them things that don’t matter.”
    Carrie raised her eyes from her plate.
    “They can burn it for all I care,” Mariah continued.
    “Don’t do that,” Carrie said.
    “Do what?”
    “Pretend he never existed.”
    Mariah stood up, the wooden legs of her chair scraping along the floor. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. Not no more, Miss Carrie.”
    “I’ve noticed something since he’s been dead. You can’t even bring yourself to say his name. You say, ‘My son,’ or ‘My boy,’ but you can’t say ‘Theopolis,’ can you?”
    Mariah stood frozen. She pursed her lips.
    “Say it,” Carrie said.
    “You go to hell.”
    Carrie stood. “The regret will haunt you worse than any ghost if you don’t make peace.”
    “I ain’t like you.”
    “No, you aren’t. I know what kind of woman you are. I watched you raise that boy to become a man. A good, sweet, loving man who cared about the world and thought he could make a difference in it. But it doesn’t matter what you’ve survived or how strong you act. This is different. Remember that time you got bit by the copperhead?”
    Mariah nodded her head yes.
    “It was just on your finger but I remember how your hand swelled. Your whole arm swelled up. You couldn’t stop crying. Remember?”
    “That don’t matter.”
    “How old were we then? Seven? Eight? But I remember how awful it was for you. I remember how scared I was, and I wasn’t the one who was bit. Remember how you wept because the pain was so bad?”
    Mariah nodded again.
    “Now you know, the pain of that bite doesn’t come close to the pain in your chest, does it?”
    Mariah spoke through quivering lips: “No, it don’t.”
    “It’s all right to miss him, Mariah.”
    Mariah looked away.
    “Look at me.” Carrie took Mariah’s hand, her palms still rough and calloused. “It’s all right. And it’s all right to remember him. And it’s all right to laugh when a memory comes in the middle of the day of the silly little boy that used to run around this house. And if that laughter turns to tears, that’s all right, too.”
    “Why you saying this like I don’t know?”
    “Because you need to hear it and you don’t know it. Because you’re too brave and too strong for your own good. Sometimes you have to give in, be weak. That’s the only way you’ll survive it. You don’t always have to be so strong.”
    “I should be like you? Dress in black. Live with the dead every day. That’s what I got to do?”
    “No, Mariah.”
    “Good. I ain’t doing it. I won’t carry around the dead forever like you do.”
    “We all carry the dead. We all do it. Some of us ignore the ghosts that follow us. Some of us turn and face them, look them in the eye. And when you finally turn around, you’ll realize they’re not here to haunt you, my dear.”
    Warm summer blew through the open window. The heavy damask curtains—how long had it been since they’d had a good washing?—billowed and fell back against the windowpane. Soon it would be night, and Mariah would watch the moonlight ripple through deep purple sky, and she’d remember those nights when Theopolis was a young boy, the two of them lying on their backs, staring toward the heavens, and Theopolis would count the stars, and use his tiny finger to connect them all. He always had such an imagination. Night was the