The Smell of Blood
The winds whipped through the trees in a funnel and tossed the five rocking chairs over and off the deck. “Has this happened before?” A response came quick, without emotion: “We get tornadoes … if you don’t want to stay for the tour, head back the way you came and through the gift shop.” I will stay. As we entered the main parlour, the oil patriarch looking down, with the Napoleon hand, resting obvious in his vest. “No one knows where the china is made, probably Louisiana.” I thought it would be funny if they were stamped, ‘made in China’. “We found a broken plate during an excavation. One of the McGavock children must have broken a plate and tried to hide it, that’s what I think, and it probably worked.”
Carrie ghasped as she looked out towards their back yard. Soldiers in grey and brown running towards the house, through the garden and into a hail of Federal shot, hot razors the size of broken bourbon glasses. They always remembered Carrie tending the wounded and dying. Two tables were set up next to each window, on the second floor of their home, which were left open “to keep the surgeons from passing out from ether and chloroform.” The lead minie balls made the blood poison, and expanded to shatter any bone it touched. Either way, amputation was the remedy. The wooden floors are still stained with blood. “It would have been carpeted back then.” You can smell the black powder and the smell of blood. Triage: “If it’s a head wound or to the chest or gut, you left them on the field.” There is nothing a surgeon can do. “Are there ghosts here?” No ghosts — but baptists do believe in ghosts, I checked on Google. “Your churches are like temples.” I guessed, whale oil . “No, the lamps were fueled with lard. The house always smelled of bacon.
The Twinkle manor has been converted to a B&B. “We are all booked up because of a wedding, it’s not the festival. It’s the wedding’.” The tables adorned with flowers, the master staircase below a crystal chandelier. “It was a terrible war. War is terrible. Wythville was desvastated, but I can take your picture.” Sherman knew it would be a war of conquest, sowing the fields with salt. “I was never political, but our new Governor banned CRT. I worked in his campaign. I’ve never done anything like that before.” I held my hat in my two hands between us. I wish I had asked her name. Pure white hair and the left eye stained with blood, and seemed to water up. She patted her bloody eye with a hankerchief. “We have guns!” she smiled, brightly. I mentioned we don’t have parties, only one. We all agree and have no wars. “Move to Virginia!” I have been remarkably fortunate in places I would rather live.
I faintly lit the childrens’ bed clothes and light blue wallpaper with my iphone flashlight, blending with the others, impossible to contemplate as anything but a death shroud. “He moved the slaves to Alabama for safekeeping.” When the war was over she came back and lived in town. She didn’t return to the plantation, but they were good friends the rest of her life. “The power has never gone out before?” she repeated in intervals of shadow and light. “Watch your step. Don’t touch the furniture, it’s all original, but you can hold the railing on your way down.” You can tell how the other children died, by the year, and whether there was scarlet fever.
Carnton was the largest field hospital in the area for hundreds of wounded and dying Confederate soldiers. In early 1866, John and Carrie McGavock designated two acres of land adjacent to their family cemetery as a final burial place for nearly 1,500 Confederate soldiers killed during the Battle of Franklin.
“Killed at Franklin, Alabama.”
“Killed at Franklin, Mississippi.”
“Killed at Franklin, Georgia.”
Carrie adjusted the lamp on her father’s desk. She managed and maintained the cemetery for the rest of her life, keeping an accurate log of every known man buried there. Carrie paused, leaned back and sighed, closed her log, opened the hidden drawer in her desk with her key, turned out the lamp.
I walked along the black steal fence, keeping the iphone shot steady, the white stones to my left, the field strewn with the dead and writhing wounded, to my right. “Where is the gateway?” The winds had calmed a bit. I put a dollar in the contribution box. They buried them where they fell. But with the cycle of the seasons, the freezing and thawing, the heat and cold, the bones began to grow. Sometimes you could tell where they came from. Even after 350 years, I thought, they say I’m not from here. The territory is unceded with bones and all you have to do is burn some incence at the feet of the statue of Augustus and you can go on your way, in the blistering heat, the buzzards overhead, dead deer, feet up, on the side of the road, and a very long way from home.