Free The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks Page B

didn’t happen. Instead, she had appreciated its cracked and imperfect beauty from a distance.
    “Not very hungry.”
    The gravediggers hitched up the cart and drove off between the back gallery of the house and the cemetery. The cart bristled with shovels and picks. They nodded their heads as they passed. Down at the end of the lane, they picked up that man Tole, who looked back once before they disappeared between the last ring of fences.
    Every piece of the McGavock property had been marked with borders of either white board horse fencing, reminders of the blooded horses that once grazed within their confines, or by drystack rock fences built from clearing fields. A few years before the war, Colonel McGavock had received a coin-silver cup at the county fair for the best half mile of drystacked rock fencing in the county. Though he had never laid a rock of it himself, he had taken great pride in that cup, just as he took great pride in his fences, back then.
    Rings circled within rings, fences marked paths. Here you are to stay, and here you are to walk . Out in the open, which is to say, out in the life she lived in town, there weren’t so many fences marking the danger areas. Here at Carnton, though, Mariah could understand the full utility of the fences she had hardly noticed before. They kept things out. But standing at the very center of the property, smelling the new dirt on Theopolis’s grave, she wondered if the fences, the rings within rings, weren’t also meant for those who were contained within, so that they might know the extent of the earth to which they were entitled to roam without care, no more and no less. It made her anxious, all those fences, and she nearly wept at the idea of being held back. But she could hardly think of what else to do, and at this felt relief, and then shame.
    Carrie glided across the way to the house. Mariah drifted back a few paces. Carrie held several white carnations in her hand, which Mariah knew could be made into a perfume to bring luck to gamblers. Her feet trod five-fingered grass, which could be made into a bath for uncrossing those who had been cursed, who had roots thrown at them. Over by the corner of the house, blowing in the wind, was sheep weed, which could be made into a tea to restore sanity. Everything was a material of conjure if looked at properly and with the imagination of spirit, the sort of imagination that had comforted her mother.
    Mariah returned to Theopolis’s grave. Carrie stopped and waited patiently, not watching. Mariah wondered if Carrie knew what she had it in her mind to do. Carrie was no stranger to the conjuring of spirits.
    At the grave, Mariah stooped down and scraped up a handful of dirt from the mound atop Theopolis. A handful of goofer dust. She did not know how to use it, but her mother would have taken it, and just having it in her hand calmed her. She wrapped it in the handkerchief she’d borrowed from Carrie, knotted it neatly, and dropped it in the secret pocket of her skirts. Carrie said nothing. If she had asked, Mariah would have said that she needed something to help her against the men who had taken her boy, but what she really needed, far more than dust, was names. She wanted the names of those responsible, whether or not there was justice in the world.
    At the steps up to the house, Carrie spoke again. “You know you can stay here as long as you like.”
    Mariah nodded and watched a tiny green beetle climb up the back of Carrie’s long black dress, worn for Mariah’s dead son. My dead son was the name of a patch of ground now, a patch of the Carnton estate.
    And what should Mariah call herself now? Mother ? There was no word for the woman left alone by the death of her own child. She had been a widow and had been honored as a widow, but no one honored the woman who buried her child.
    To her left she saw something moving across her field of view. A man she recognized, though he seemed barely a shadow. He carried