The year the men went
The war did not come to Mary Jane the way it came to the men, as a thing to be gone and done. It came to her the way most of the great things of her life had come to her, as a thing to be waited through — and she was, by the time it came, a woman well practiced at waiting.
She was twenty-eight when it began, and twenty-nine, and then thirty, across the first of it. She had come out of the 1860 summer a woman written down two years short in a prospering house, and she had thought, insofar as she let herself think about the shape of her life at all, that nothing was ever going to happen to her; and then the whole country happened to everyone at once, and she learned the thing every generation that lives through a war learns, which is that "nothing happening to you" is a condition a person does not know to be grateful for until it ends. The talk had been coming for a year — the talk that had gone up and down the ridge and the crossroads store and the meeting-house steps all through the winter of the secession, the men's talk, loud and certain, of what would be done and how fast — and Mary Jane had heard it the way she heard most of the men's talk, from the edge of it, with her hands full, and had not believed in it the way the men believed in it, because she had noticed across twenty-eight years that the things the men were loudest and most certain about were not always the things that came to pass. But this one came to pass. In the spring it stopped being talk. And by the next spring it had taken her brothers.
There were three of them, the Rorie sons, and the war took all three at once out of the settled world they had made along that ridge, the world Chapter Three had left standing at its height — the sons married and placed, the households struck off the old one and set down within a morning's walk, the whole thickened family arranged on its ground. That arrangement came apart in a season. Ezekiah went, and William went, and Fred went, and the three roofs that had gone up along the road in the fifties stood, of a sudden, with the men gone out from under them and the wives and the children and the old people left, and Mary Jane — who was none of those things, not a wife left behind and not a mother left holding, but only the unmarried sister still in her father's house — watched all three of her brothers turn from farmers into soldiers in the space of a few weeks, and had no place in the leaving that anyone would have thought to give her, and felt it all the same.
Ezekiah's going was the one she felt to the bone, because Ezekiah was the one nearest her. He was the brother closest to her in age, the boy of seventeen the first marshal had counted beside her at the loom, grown now into the most prosperous of all of them — a man past thirty with two thousand dollars of his own land and a young wife and two small children and a farm running well, a man, in short, with everything a man could have to lose and every reason in the world to stay home and keep it. He did not stay home. In the March of 1862 he rode down to Kossuth, the little town south of the ridge, and gave his name to the muster there and made himself a soldier, at an age and a station where no law and no shame would have compelled him to it. That was the thing Mary Jane could not get past, turning it over in the days after. He was not a boy of eighteen with nothing yet and everything to prove, swept up in the loud certainty because he had no weight to hold him down. He was a grown man with a farm and a family and thirty-one years on him, and he weighed all of it, and went anyway. She did not understand it and she did not try to talk him out of it, because a sister does not talk a grown man out of the thing he has decided his honor requires, and because she knew that whatever the thing was that sent men of Ezekiah's age and Ezekiah's holdings off to a war they could have sat out, it was not a thing a woman's talking was going to move. She only watched him go, and marked it, the way she marked everything: her brother, past thirty, with the most to lose of any of them, first to the muster.
William went, and Fred went, and of their goings the record keeps less and this account will guess at less, but they went, the eldest son and the youngest, out of their own new households and into the war, and left their own wives and their own small children the way Ezekiah left his. And the road past the mill, which had filled up across the fifties with Rorie roofs and Rorie children, went quiet of its grown men in a single season, the way every road in that country went quiet, until the only men left on that whole stretch of it were the very old and the very young and the ones the war did not want — and Mary Jane's father, Reuben, who was old now and failing, and would not see the war out.
She was left, then, in a house and a neighborhood the war had emptied of its men, one of the women now — though not a wife and not a mother, still only the sister and the daughter — and she took up, without being asked and without remark, the share of the going-on that fell to the ones who stayed. There was more of it now, with the men gone. She had always done the work of a daughter; now she did some of the work the men had done, or saw that it got done, the way women all over that country quietly took up the running of places whose men were at the war. And she waited. That was the real work of those years, the work under all the other work, and she had been apprenticed to it her whole life without knowing she was being made ready for anything: she waited for news of her brothers, down the long roads, out of the country the war had swallowed them into, and the waiting was the same waiting she had always done, only now it had three men's lives inside it.
· · ·
The war at the door
And the war, that first year, was not off in some far country at all. It was thirteen miles up the road, at the town she had watched come out of the woods.
This was the thing about Mary Jane's war that set it apart from the war of most of the women who waited it out in most of the country: hers was fought, the first great year of it, in her own dooryard's sight. The town she had watched rise in her girlhood — Corinth, the place that had come out of the north pinewoods in the space of a few seasons because two railroads crossed there — was, precisely because two railroads crossed there, one of the things the war most wanted in the whole of the West; and so the war came for it, and came for it thirteen miles from where she stood.
It came first as a sound. In the early spring of 1862 there was a battle two days long up on the Tennessee line, a little north of Corinth, at a country meeting-house by the river — the fight the world would call Shiloh — and the ridge heard it, a far continuous grumble on the north wind, days of it, a sound like a storm that would not pass and did not pass and was not weather. Mary Jane had heard thunder her whole life and knew the difference. This did not stop the way thunder stops. It went on, hour into hour, the way nothing in nature goes on, and every soul on that ridge knew what it was and stood still in the yard to hear it and thought of the men they had up in it, and Mary Jane stood among them and thought of her three.
And then, in the weeks after, the war came down off the Tennessee line and settled onto Corinth itself, and the town she had watched being built became, in a season, a thing she could hardly have imagined it becoming. The beaten army fell back into it, tens of thousands of men, and behind them came the sickness that always came where armies gathered, and the town filled up — the churches, the depots, the houses, the very streets — with the wounded and the fevered and the dying, until the place that had been raised in her lifetime out of nothing was, within a decade of its raising, one of the great charnel houses of that country's war. Thirteen miles north of the Rorie mill, the town with the borrowed Greek name was burying men faster than it could dig, of wounds and of the camp fevers that killed more than the wounds did; and the great federal army came down against it through the late spring, a slow enormous siege, a hundred thousand men creeping toward the crossing a mile a day; and the army that held the town slipped out of it in the end, in the night, and left it; and in the fall the war came back and fought a second time over the same ground, two days of it in the October, close enough that the ridge heard the guns again. Twice in one year the world tried to take the town Mary Jane had watched being born, and both times the taking was a thing she heard from her own yard.
She did not see the fields of it; the women of the ridge did not ride up to look, and Mary Jane was not a woman who would have wanted to. But she did not need to see it. She heard it, and she knew what the sounds were, and she knew the town, and she knew — everyone knew — what was happening in it: that the place she had watched come up out of the woods, the one genuinely new thing the world had made in the whole of her young womanhood, had been made, in the end, for this; that the rails men had run through the empty pinewoods so that cotton and freight could cross had turned out to be rails the war would cross, and men, and the wounded, and the dead. She had thought, as a girl, that the town's coming out of nothing was the most remarkable thing a piece of ground could do. She learned, at thirty, that a piece of ground can do a more remarkable and a more terrible thing than come into being, which is to fill up with the dying almost as fast as it was built.
The years of it ground on the way the wheel at her father's race ground on — steadily, going nowhere, taking everything the country fed into it and giving back less. The money failed and went on failing; a dollar bought less each season until it bought nothing, and the paper the new government printed was believed in for a while and then was not. The salt gave out, and the coffee, and the cloth, and the women turned and re-turned the same dresses and made do and made do. The men did not come home and did not come home. And the news, when it came at all, came old and thin and by no reliable road, a letter that had been three weeks coming, a thing a neighbor's boy had heard at the depot, a name on a list. Mary Jane waited through all of it in a house that got quieter and poorer and older around her — her father failing through those very years and, in the second summer of the war, dying, though that grief and the taking-up that followed it belong to the next turn of this account and not to this one. What belongs here is only the waiting itself, and the three names inside it, and the long holding of breath that was a woman's whole part in that war: three brothers gone into the country the guns came out of, and no way to do anything for any of them but wait, and keep the place, and listen to the north wind.
Two of the three names would come back down the road. One would not.
· · ·
The one who did not come back
The word about Ezekiah came in the summer of 1864, in the third year of the waiting, and it came the way the worst words always came in that war — late, and secondhand, and certain.
He had been killed in the July, in the fighting around Atlanta, three hundred miles east of the ground he was raised on. The great federal army that had taken Corinth two years before had ground its way down into Georgia by then, toward the city that was the last thing holding the middle of the Confederacy together, and the armies had fought over it through that summer the way they had fought over Corinth, and on a day in the last third of July they fought a great battle on the east side of the city, and Ezekiah Rorie was in it, and he was killed. That was the whole of what the family got, or the whole of what came down to them that anyone wrote down: killed, in July, at Atlanta. The particular field, the particular hour, the manner of it, whether it was quick — the things a family most wants and least often gets — the record does not keep and this book will not invent them for the comfort of inventing them. He was killed near Atlanta in the July of 1864. He was a man past thirty with a wife and two small children and two thousand dollars of land at home. And he did not come back.
Mary Jane took it the way the news of a death takes the one it is nearest to, which is bodily, before the mind has agreed to it. This was the brother closest to her in age, the one she had stood beside in the very first book anyone made of that family, the boy of seventeen grown into the man with everything to lose who had gone first to the muster because his honor asked it — and now the everything-to-lose was lost, all of it, the farm made a widow's and the children made half-orphans and the man himself put into Georgia ground his family would never stand on. She had known, from the day he rode down to Kossuth, that this was a thing that could happen; she had done the grim arithmetic every waiting woman does, the counting of the ways the roads could end; and knowing a thing can happen is no armor at all against its happening, as she had learned before over other beds and would learn again, and the knowing did nothing for her now but let her recognize, when the word came, the shape of the thing that had arrived. Her brother was dead in Georgia. The war had reached three hundred miles into the middle of the country and taken the one of the three she loved best, and left the two she loved to come home, which is the arithmetic wars keep and no family gets a vote in.
She grieved him the way she did everything, without much noise and without any collapse, because there was a household to hold and a mother to see through it and no one else to do either. And she watched what her mother did with the news — watched Mary Polly, who had borne this son and would outlive him by decades, receive the word and go, in her grief, to the one thing she had always gone to, the Bible on the parlor shelf and the careful keeping-hand — but what her mother wrote there, and what it cost her, and why it would turn out to be the very last thing that hand ever set in that book, belongs to the chapter that is her mother's more than it is the brothers', and this account leaves it there, in Chapter Five, where the widow's keeping is told. Here it is enough to say that the family did with Ezekiah's death what that family did with all its deaths: it wrote him down, and it went on, because going on was the only thing there was to do and the family had always known how to do it.
And somewhere in the doing-on, in the settling of the small hard business a death leaves behind even in the middle of a war, there is a detail the record did keep, and it is the truest thing the war ever wrote about those three brothers, and it is this: that when Ezekiah's estate was reckoned up — the little estate of a dead soldier, the gold and the silver and the notes — it was found that both of the brothers who had come home owed money to the estate of the brother who had not. They had borrowed from him, the way brothers do, in the years before; and now the accounting stood there in the estate book, the two living men indebted to the one dead one. And the debts were denominated in the money of that time and place, which is to say that one of them was to be settled in cotton money and the other was to be paid in Confederate money — a debt acknowledged and agreed and entered in a book, owed by a living brother to a dead one, in the currency of a country that by the time anyone could have collected it did not exist. There is the whole war in one line of an estate ledger. The brother who went first and weighed the most and lost everything was owed, at the end, a sum his surviving brothers had promised him in a money that had ceased to be money, in a nation that had ceased to be a nation, and the debt would never be paid because there was nothing left to pay it in. Mary Jane did not read the estate book; that was men's business and lawyers'. But she was of a family that could do arithmetic, and she would have understood, if the fact ever reached her, exactly what it meant and exactly how little and how much it was worth.
· · ·
The two who came home
The war ended in the spring of 1865, the way it had begun, all at once after going on so long it had come to seem permanent, and down the long roads out of the wrecked country the two surviving Rorie brothers came home.
William came, and Fred came, off the roads, in the weeks and months of that ragged spring when men all over the South were walking home out of surrenders hundreds of miles apart — the eldest son and the youngest, gone three and four years, come back at last up the same lane they had ridden down out of. Mary Jane was there for their coming the way she had been there for their going, one of the women of a house the war had hollowed, and their coming home was the great mercy of those years and she felt it as one; but it was a mercy with the shape of the war still on it, because the men who came back up the lane were not the men who had ridden down it. No man came back from that war the man he had been, and no house he came back to was the house he had left. William came home to a father dead and a family's fortune run out into worthless paper and a brother in Georgia ground, and to a country whose whole arrangement — the arrangement his father had built the family's standing on — had been taken apart around him while he was gone. He had gone to the war, whatever had sent him, a Confederate man; he would name sons, in the years after, for the two great generals of that lost army, so that the loyalty he had carried into it was written afterward into his own children's names, the way men wrote their unhealed allegiances into the next generation all over that defeated country. What regiment he had carried it in, and over what fields, this account does not certainly know and will not pretend to; the record of the particular unit is one of the things still open in this family's papers, and a book that has been careful this long will not spend that care now for the sake of a fuller-sounding sentence. He went. He served. He came home. That is what is known, and it is enough for what this chapter is, which is not a muster roll but a sister's account of the war that took one brother and gave two back.
Fred came home the youngest and would live the longest of them, and would do the thing the living do that is the quiet answer to a war, which is to make more life: he settled a little way off, two beats over, and raised a houseful of children over the decades after, seven or so of them, and among them he named one for the brother who had not come back — set Ezekiah's initials on a living child, so that the name went on in the family the way names go on, carried forward on somebody new. That is the other thing families do with their dead, besides writing them in the book: they hand the name down onto the living, and let it walk around in the world again. Ezekiah was in Georgia ground. But there would be an E. B. Rorie growing up two beats over, running in a dooryard, answering to the initials of an uncle he would never meet, because his father had wanted the name kept and the family had always kept its names as hard as it kept anything.
And Mary Jane came out of the war the way she had gone into it — in the house, on the ground, unmarried, waiting; only older now, and poorer, and one brother fewer. She was thirty-two when it ended. The war had taken four years out of the middle of her thirties, the years a woman of her time who was ever going to marry and bear children had left, and it had spent them the way it spent everything, on waiting and want and grief, and given nothing back that a woman could build a life on. She had gone into it a landed man's unmarried daughter in a prospering house; she came out of it a dead man's unmarried daughter in a ruined one, in a country where everyone was ruined, where the whole careful sorting that had once kept a woman of twenty-seven from a poor man of thirty had been leveled along with everything else — though she could not see that yet, and would not see it for two more years, when it finally came round to her in the plainest and least expected way. What she could see, in the spring of 1865, was only what everyone on that ridge could see: that the war was over, and the men who were coming home were home, and the men who were not were not, and the world the war had left was going to have to be lived in by whoever was left to live in it. Her father was gone. Her brother was gone. Two brothers were back and changed. Her mother held the place. And Mary Jane, thirty-two and unmarried, took up the after of the war the way she had taken up the during of it and the before of it, which was to do the work in front of her and to wait and to keep — because she was a Searcy's coming wife and a Rorie's daughter, and the doing and the waiting and the keeping were the whole of what her people had ever been trained to, and they were what was left when everything else the war could take had been taken.
The town up the road began, slowly, to become a town again. The wheel at the race turned when there was grain to turn it. And the roads that had carried her brothers off and carried two of them back lay quiet again in the sun, the way they had lain quiet before the war came, as though the country meant to go on — which it did, because countries and families both go on, over their dead, because there is nothing else that the living have ever found to do.