The house the war left
Seven years is a long time anywhere. In a country that spends four of them at war, it is long enough to take a world apart, and when the world it takes apart is a woman's — quietly, without ever making her the point of it — she comes out the far side of it changed in ways the record has no column for.
When the second man with the second book had closed his ledger in the summer of 1860, the Rorie place had stood at the top of everything it would ever be: her father a man of five thousand dollars, the mill turning, the sons married and set up around him, the two unmarried daughters at home. Mary Jane had been twenty-seven then, and the house had been full, and the worst that could be said of her life was that it had not yet begun. By the time anything happened to her that the world would write down, seven years later, almost none of that was still standing, and the worst that could be said of her life was a great deal worse than that it had not begun. It was that so much of what she had was gone.
Her father was dead. Reuben Rorie had died in the August of 1862, in the second summer of the war — the man who had come off the Yadkin and read the fall of the creek and built the whole standing place out of the raw ground, gone in the middle of everything, at the cabin where he had slept. And the plainest surviving trace of his death is not a stone or a will but a debt, a line entered into a neighbor's estate book by a clerk settling other men's accounts: Reuben Rorie decd 1862. That was what was left of him on paper. The mill he had built, the five thousand dollars he had made, ran out into the war the way everything ran out into the war — into Confederate paper and cotton money and debts owed in a country that would not exist in three years — and the man himself came down to a clerk's aside in the settling of somebody else's estate.
Her brother was dead. Ezekiah — the brother nearest her in age, the boy of seventeen the first marshal had counted beside her, grown into the prosperous one, the note-holder with the two-thousand-dollar farm and the two small children — had been killed in the July of 1864, in the fighting east of Atlanta, three hundred miles from the ground he was raised on. And Mary Jane knew exactly where the news of that had gone, because she had watched her mother take it: to the Bible, to the deaths page, where Mary Polly wrote her son's name down in the careful round keeping-hand she had used for forty years. It was the last thing she ever wrote in the book. After Ezekiah the hand that had kept that Bible since before Mary Jane was born stopped keeping it. The book went quiet, the way a great many things in that house went quiet after the war, and it did not matter to Mary Jane at the time that it had gone quiet, because there was too much else to carry; but it would matter, later, in a way she could not yet see.
And there had been three people on her father's ground who were not Rories, whom the second census had counted as property in the year the house stood at its height — a woman, a man, a child who had come onto that yard in the 1850s — and in 1865 they were free, and they go on now into their own accounting, in their own place in this book and not in this chapter, which is Mary Jane's and has no right to make them hers.
So the high house of 1860 came down, in four years, to a widow and an unmarried daughter keeping a shrunken place together, in a county that had buried a great many of its men and would shortly not even be the county it had been. Mary Jane held it with her mother. That was the work of those years, and there is almost no record of it, because holding a diminished household together through the tail of a war and the ruin after it is work that generates no paper — no deed, no lawsuit, no entry in any book. She was in her early thirties. She had spent her twenties waiting for her life to begin, and now she spent the first years of her thirties learning that a life does not always begin; sometimes it is only handed things to carry, one after another, and the carrying is the life. She buried her father. She helped her mother through the news of her brother. She held the place. She was thirty, and thirty-one, and thirty-two, and thirty-three, and the county, if it thought of her at all, had long since stopped thinking of her as a woman anything was going to happen to. She had stopped thinking of herself that way. She was Reuben Rorie's unmarried daughter who kept house with her widowed mother, and that, everyone including Mary Jane had settled, was simply what she was and would go on being.
She was thirty-four when it turned out not to be.
· · ·
Miss
She married in the January of 1867, and the plainest way to say what that was is to say what it was not. It was not a girl's wedding.
The man was Freeman Searcy — the same Freeman the second book had written down at thirty in 1860, landless, a day-labourer in his brother's house, the poorest grown man on a road of landed families, the one who had been living a door from her sister the whole time and whom the neighborhood's arithmetic had set aside as too poor the way it had set her aside as too old. He was thirty-six now. What the war years had made of him, the record does not clearly say, and this book will not invent it; and how the two of them came, at last, to stand up together — whether they had half-known each other the whole time in the way people in one county do, or whether the leveling years had thrown them together — the record does not say that either, and it will not be guessed. What the record says is only the fact, on a single civil line: that on the tenth of January of 1867 a clerk took down a marriage between F. J. Searcy and Miss M. J. Rorie.
She was not a girl at that wedding and she did not pretend to be one. She was thirty-four. She had buried her father and her brother and held a diminished house together through four years of war, and she knew to the bone what she was doing and what it was. She was not being handed the crossing at fifteen the way her mother had been handed it, the way her sisters had, in the full flush of a girl who has done nothing yet and has everything ahead. She was marrying, at thirty-four, a poor man of thirty-six who had nothing in the world but himself, and she knew that too, and she did it anyway, and the doing of it was the most clear-eyed and least sentimental thing a person can do: she took the one who was left, being herself the one who was left, and out of the two of them she made a household. There is nothing in any record to say it was a love match and nothing to say it was not. There is only that two people the world had entirely finished expecting anything of looked at each other, at thirty-four and thirty-six, and judged that late and poor and past-it was a better thing done together than apart.
That is a grown woman's yes, and there is more in it than in a hundred girls', and it wants no dressing-up to be seen for what it was. She had waited seventeen years past the age her family married its women, and the waiting had not been rewarded with anything a girl would have recognized as a reward — not a young man with a place and a plan, not a courtship out of a story, not the flush of being chosen young. It had been rewarded, if reward is even the word, with a plain poor man her own hard age and a plain civil line in a county register, and she took it with both hands, because she had learned by thirty-four exactly what such a thing was worth, which is everything, and exactly what it was not, which is a girl's dream, and she had no more use for the girl's dream. She had buried the people who might have dreamed it for her.
And the record, on the one day it might have written her down whole, would not do even that.
Miss. The clerk wrote the word in the ordinary way of a clerk noting a bride, and had no idea he was setting down the truest single word the record would put beside her until the very end of her life. A Miss — an unmarried woman — of thirty-four, marrying under her own maiden name, out of her dead father's house, at an age when the whole county had long since stopped expecting it. And even then it would not give her her name. It gave her M. J. Rorie: two initials and the surname she had carried her whole life, with the small courtesy of her singleness set in front of it. Not Mary Jane. Not the given name her mother had written in the Bible on the day she was born. Miss M. J. Rorie. Seventeen years back, the first book had at least written her age down true; now, on her wedding day, the record gave her two letters and a title and let it stand, and that — two initials and a Miss — was the whole of what the founding of her family was allowed to be on paper.
The clerk who wrote it was a clerk of Tishomingo County, because the county was still Tishomingo that January, and would be for three years more, until the state cut a new county called Alcorn out of it in 1870 and laid the new name down over the same ground. So the marriage that began her family was recorded in a county that would not exist by the time her first son could walk, and would afterward be found, when anyone went looking for it, filed under the name of a county not yet thought of on the day the ink went down. Even the jurisdiction she married in did not hold still. Everything about her moved except her — the county's name, the record's version of her, the world she stood in — and she stood in the middle of all of it on the tenth of January of 1867 and became, at last, at thirty-four, a wife.
· · ·
The unwritten line, and the ground
There was one book that should have held it, and did not.
In the family's own Bible — the worn black book that had sat on the shelf of the parlor her whole life, that her mother had kept since before Mary Jane was born — there was a marriages page, and on it, in Mary Polly's careful hand, stood the weddings of the two elder daughters: Elizabeth's of 1834, Louisa Adeline's of 1838. There was room below them. There had always been room below them; the page had been waiting, Mary Jane's whole girlhood, for the lines of the daughters still to marry. And when Mary Jane married at last, at thirty-four, in the January of 1867, no line was written for her. There would never be one. The page that held her sisters' weddings holds nothing for hers, and the reason is not cruelty and not a slight; the reason is that the hand that kept the book had stopped. Her mother's last entry anywhere in it had been Ezekiah's death in the summer of 1864, and after that the book had gone quiet with the rest of the house, and the daughter's late and unlooked-for wedding — the one wedding in the family that against all the county's expectation anyone might have thought worth marking twice — fell into that quiet and was never set down.
Mary Jane knew the page was blank. She had grown up reading that book; she knew exactly what was on the marriages leaf and what was not. And it is a hard thing to know about your own wedding, that the one book in the world that was made to hold it will not — not because anyone decided against you but because the person who would have written you in had been asked to carry more than a keeping-hand can carry, and had set the book down after her son, and could not take it up again even for her daughter's one good day. The founding of the whole family that came down from Mary Jane and Freeman Searcy — five generations of it, and counting — went into no book but the county's, on a single civil line, under two initials and a Miss. Her mother did not write her in. Her mother could not. And Mary Jane, who had spent her whole life inside the keeping of that book, married out from under it into a marriage the book would never hold, and did not blame her mother for it for one moment of her life, and felt the blankness of that page for the rest of it.
And eight days after the clerk set the marriage down, there was a piece of ground to be bought.
It was her father's ground, and it was being sold at his own door. Reuben had been dead four years and more, and in all that time no one had gone to law over him — the widow had taken the farm the summer he died and carried it since — but land held by a dead man passes to all his heirs together, in undivided shares, and a farm cannot be run that way forever; sooner or later the heirs must divide it, and the law's way of dividing ground that will not cut fairly into parts is to sell the whole and split the money. So in the November term of 1866 her brother William Hubbard and the rest of the heirs had petitioned the Probate Court to sell their father's land for division, and the court had appointed a commissioner to cry the sale, and set the day, and set the place in the plain language such orders use: the land would be sold at the late residence of the said R. Rorie deceased. At the house. At the Rorie place itself — the dooryard Mary Jane had been brought to as a girl, the ground she had waited in through all her twenties and held through all the war, the yard her father had made out of the woods. That was where they would sell what was left of him, on the eighteenth of January of 1867, and Mary Jane was eight days a wife when they did it.
The sale drew the neighborhood the way such sales did, the kin and the near-neighbors come to bid on pieces of a dead man's homestead, and the ground went in parcels to be divided by the money it fetched. And the high bidder for one of the parcels — a piece of Section Eighteen, a corner of Reuben's own homestead ground — was set down in the commissioner's book under a name the record had carried for seven years with nothing at all beside it: F. J. Searcy. Freeman. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars, and the land was his.
Sit for a moment with what that name had meant the last time a book had written it down. Seven years back, the second marshal had put Freeman Searcy in the census at thirty and drawn his pen down the columns and left every one blank — no land, no property, nothing, a grown man who owned his own back and not one foot of the earth. That was the man Mary Jane had married. And eight days after she married him, that man stood in her dead father's dooryard and bought a piece of her dead father's ground, and walked away from the sale holding, for the first time in his life that any record shows, title to land. It will not do to make more of it than it was, and it does not need more made of it. The partition was already moving before the wedding; the sale would have happened whether Freeman married in or not; he took a share the way an in-law takes a share at a sale already in motion, and the fact carries itself without help. The landless man married the settled family's unmarriageable daughter, and within the fortnight he held a corner of the family's ground, bought at auction at the family's own door.
They settled on that ground and did not leave it. And here is the whole shape of Mary Jane's life in one unremarkable turn of the law: Freeman bought the land in the January of 1867; three years later, in the spring of 1870, the state cut Alcorn County out of the old body of Tishomingo and laid the new name down over the same fields, so that the ground he had bought in one county sat, without moving an inch, in another. She went to sleep a woman of Tishomingo and woke, on the same soil, in Alcorn, and had done nothing and gone nowhere to make it so. The dirt was the dirt. It was the world that moved.
It was not given to her. Nobody had held that ground for her against the day she finally married, or set it aside, or done her any kindness with it at all; it was sold at auction to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder for that corner of it happened to be the poor man she had just made her husband. But it came to the same place in the end, by the plainest and least sentimental road there was. At thirty-four, out of a dead father's estate, at a sale on a January morning eight days after her wedding, the woman who had never in her life had a place of her own came to stand on a piece of ground that was — bought and paid for and written down, in the one kind of book that would hold her, if not by her name. She had waited a very long time for a life to start. It started with a deed, and a poor man's two hundred and sixty-five dollars, and a corner of her father's dirt. It was not the beginning anyone would have dreamed for her at seventeen. But it was, at last, a beginning, and it was hers, and there were, though she did not know it yet, three sons in it.