The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks Page B

quietest hour, when a single cricket’s chirp could keep time like a second hand, and she’d wait for sleep to come. Some nights, she’d hear a stirring in the summer kitchen just steps from her cabin, something like the wind, rattling the old windows, or maybe the soft patter of a bird walking on the roof. The sounds weren’t anything supernatural, nothing she couldn’t blame on the weather, but that didn’t mean she didn’t wish it. Mariah never much believed in ghosts, but now, during those nighttime hours, would she wish for them?
    Tears burned in her eyes, but she tightened her jaw. She was not weak. She would not appear weak. Not even in front of Carrie. Especially not in front of Carrie.
    “I miss him,” Mariah said.
    Tears burned down both cheeks. How had this happened? She vowed she would not weep, and then she had. She spoke, not to Carrie but to the window and out the window and to the universe.
    “When I’m dreaming, he’s there, Theopolis, my baby, and we’re somewhere together, I don’t know the place, ain’t no place I ever been, but he’s there, smiling, and I know I’m dreaming. I just know it. And I beg myself, ‘Please don’t wake up, not yet.’ And he turns to me and he says, ‘No, Mama, you ain’t dreaming. This world here is the real one. That other world is just a bad dream.’ And I feel this kind of relief. I can’t explain it. And then I wake up, and I stare up at the ceiling, and it takes me a moment to figure out which world is real, and which is a dream. Then I remember he gone. And I close my eyes tight as I can and I try to get back to the other world where he’s still walking around and where I can touch him and kiss his face. But I can’t never get back.”
    Carrie held Mariah’s hand tightly in hers. When she had reached over to take Mariah’s hand, Mariah almost pulled it free, but couldn’t summon the strength.
    “It’s going to take time, Mariah.”
    “How long?”
    “Until you stop dreaming of him? Maybe never.”
    Mariah smeared her tears away.
    “That’s not such a bad thing,” Carrie told her.
    “You dream of the dead, Miss Carrie?”
    Carrie looked down. “Every night,” she said.
    Would it be so bad, right now, to dream of the dead every night? Mariah thought not.
    And suddenly there it was, cold and stark before her: the road she would travel, back to her small house in town. The days stretching out, endless and free, before her. She’d heard someone talking about a woman in Franklin who’d lost her only child to consumption, and the loneliness, the emptiness she felt. This was what her days and nights would be. The burden seemed immense.
    She resolved that for a moment—only a moment—she would pause. She would hold her head high and not pick up that burden. Not quite yet. She would let the memory of her only son live around her. She would live where he lived. That was something she could do with freedom now, couldn’t she?
    “Ma’am?”
    Carrie turned.
    “If you still wanting me to stay, I’d just as soon stay,” Mariah said.
    Carrie clasped her hands in front of her. She smiled gratefully. “I will send someone to fetch your things from town.”
    “For just a little while.”
    “Of course. Just a little while.”

Chapter 12
Tole
    July 9, 1867
    A dog followed Tole on the way to Elijah Dixon’s office.
    Dixon was the sort of man who could be everywhere at once. He was one of them . The sort of white man who was always watching and taking note. Tole had known such men in New York, and you could see the fact of their power in their faces, which never flinched or betrayed what boiled underneath. They wielded enough power to animate men and mobs, though not always enough to control events once they were set in motion. Sometimes messes had to be cleaned up, and Tole assumed he was one of those messes now. He carried a small pistol in his pocket, just in case.
    Dixon hadn’t needed to spell it out for Tole, it was clear: P ut a bullet