One of the most violent encounters of the American Civil War occurred on Nov. 30, 1864, near the hamlet of Franklin, Tenn. It was not a long battle, no Gettysburg or Vicksburg, but in some five hours more than 9,000 men on both sides would die or be gravely injured. It is against this backdrop that Robert Hicks, whose real job is as a music writer in Nashville, sets his deeply moving debut novel “The Widow of the South.”
This is not one of those big, swaggering tales of set-piece battles where square-jawed, bearded generals move their armies up this draw or down that sunken road jockeying for strategic position, but rather “The Widow of the South” is more about love in a time of tragedy and of surviving the wounds, both physical and psychological, of a nation’s greatest sorrow.
It is also the story of one remarkable real-life woman named Carrie McGavock, who came to a nation’s attention, if only briefly, for her single-minded pursuit of a task that to many seemed heroic, but to her just seemed the proper thing to do.
Shaken by the unbridled violence that men brought to each other in the battle and worried that families would not know the plight of their fallen sons, brothers and fathers, Carrie decided after the war to turn part of her property into a cemetery.
Outraged that one of her neighbors planned to plow a field that contained the bodies of some 1,500 soldiers, Carrie and her husband dug up the bodies and had them removed to the cemetery, which became the country’s only private Confederate cemetery. She plotted the graves and recorded the names in her “book of the dead.”
But Hicks weaves a fictional tale around the reality that was Carrie and her cemetery. As the War Between the States has waged elsewhere, John and Carrie McGavock have been busy trying to keep their small plantation, Carnton, in working order. Carrie is in mourning, struggling with the depressing burden of losing three children to disease. She is barely coping.
As two opposing armies converge on Franklin, with its 2,500 residents, a Confederate general decides to turn Carnton into a field hospital for the many wounded who will need attention once the battle starts.
As the soldiers begin to appear at her door, Carrie comes out of her melancholy stupor and takes it upon herself to help tend to the wounded.
“I sometimes felt the old paralyzing darkness draw around me,” Hicks has Carrie say to herself, “but it was always tempered by the inescapable fact of the men lying around my house and in my yard, and the suspicion that they were harbingers of something I had not known before. How horrible, I thought occasionally, to think that these men were welcome and not a burden.
“I was freer than I’d ever been. I felt obliged to the world, a world much large than that contained between the four walls of Carnton, and although the burden seemed larger, I was similarly enlarged by the burden of shouldering it.”
One of those “burdens” is Sgt. Zachariah Cashwell, a taciturn Arkansan whose leg has to be amputated. It is Zachariah who catches Carrie’s attention and who allows her to admit to feelings that she had thought were long buried.
During the course of Zachariah’s convalescence, he and Carrie become closer – yet staying an arm’s length away as propriety dictated. Hicks makes it clear, though, that there are deeper feelings fermenting under both of their dour surfaces.
And it’s never clearer than when Zachariah is forced by the winning Union Army to leave Carnton:
“Oh Lord, I would have followed him had You let me, but You did not give me the strength to become a fallen woman. I was and have always been Carrie McGavock, mother of children and the wife of a good man. I cared what the world thought of me…”
But “The Widow of the South” is more than just a love story. Hicks does a masterful job of describing the Battle of Franklin, through the eyes of various soldiers – generals and common soldiers alike – and recounts the sounds and feelings of confusion, the fear and the anger of men trying desperately to kill each other.
It’s also a story of small-town Southern people who attempt to go on with their lives while the world burns around them.
If there are any complaints about “The Widow of the South,” it is that at times the language can be a little overreaching, a tad melodramatic.
“The Widow of the South” is sure to draw comparisons with Charles Frazier’s hugely successful “Cold Mountain,” and rightfully so. Both Frazier’s Ada and Hicks’ Carrie are strong women with damaged psyches, while Inman and Zachariah also share certain characteristics. Both books also deal with the inner struggles of men who have seen things in war that they never should have had to see.
While “Cold Mountain” is a tour de force of American fiction, “The Widow of the South” falls a bit short of that lofty position – but even with that said, it is a terrific read.
Books editor Tom Walker can be reached at 303-820-1624 or twalker@denverpost.com.
The Widow of the South
By Robert Hicks
Warner, 426 pages, $24.95
