Civil War passion and compassion

IN his appealing first novel, “The Widow of the South,” Robert Hicks’ concluding author’s note gives the historical context for his fictional story. It is set during the Battle of Franklin, Tenn. -- “the bloodiest five hours of the Civil War,” he writes -- when 9,200 Confederate troops “in a few hours ... would fall dead, or mangled so badly they would sometimes wish they were dead.” Hicks focuses on those agonizingly wounded soldiers, who were taken for treatment to a nearby plantation house, Carnton, a real place with a real mistress, Carrie McGavock (1829-1905), who nursed the men, buried them and lovingly tended their nearly 1,500 graves -- and above all their memories. Carrie, the “Widow” of the title, is the novel’s heroine. “Other than Carrie and her immediate family and slaves,” Hicks writes, “most of the other characters are either composites of historical figures from Franklin’s past or were born in my imagination.”

Fair enough. In our literary era when nonfiction writers press actual events into novelistic shape and novelists interweave fictional creations with historical figures, Hicks’ fact-based fiction is mainstream. The question arises: Does Hicks, on his freshman run as a historical novelist, give as much credibility to both sets of characters -- those grounded in yesteryear and others seemingly made up?

The setting feels convincing enough, as does the savage battle that rages through the opening passages. Hicks renders the clash of Rebs and Yanks in vivid particulars: At daybreak on Nov. 30, 1864, “long and twisting columns of butternut gray moved slowly up the three pikes ... bright metal flashed from within each column”; later that day, one Union soldier says, “there were so many dead in the trench we were forced to walk upon them.”

Carrie, whose portraits as a young and an old woman are reprinted in the book, comes to life recounting Carnton’s transformation into a hospital: “I saw them clearly, the twisting limbs and the trembling chests, the rolling eyes in every head in every direction. I saw the letters peeking out of their pockets.... And every one of them seemed to beg me for water. Please, ma’am. Please.”

Hicks creates a counterpoint of nearly equal narrative weight in Sgt. Zachariah Cashwell, a dashing young member of the 24th Arkansas Infantry who picks up the Confederate battle flag, “the colors ... because they’d fallen,” and charges the Yankee bulwarks only to be horribly wounded, captured and left at Carnton to heal before being shipped off as a prisoner of war.

Although many of the novel’s best passages are rendered through an all-seeing third-person narrator, Hicks plays the minuet of Carrie and Zachariah’s relationship -- it smolders into an emotional tango -- in alternating first-person monologues. When Zachariah reflects on Carrie, the nature of love and his feelings, it feels as if the author’s 21st century sensibility has crept into the 19th century character’s voice: “When she kissed me, I had a thought. This is what I’ve been waiting for. And she was so soft and warm, and the way she’d come crawling at me like a cat, well, I will never forget that. When I felt her heart against my chest, I knew I couldn’t never break it, which is the flip side of love the way I saw it.”

A wounded Rebel, battlefield devastation, romantic yearning -- Hicks’ novel, on the surface, conjures thoughts of “Cold Mountain,” but its strangers-in-passing love story seems to owe more to “The Bridges of Madison County.” Carrie, married to dutiful but dull John, finds in the heroic, mysterious Zachariah, a way out of Carnton, at least in her fantasies: “Did I love Zachariah Cashwell? Yes, yes, yes. It was impossible, but yes. I imagined a day in which he would pick me up and carry me off.... How could I love such a man? He was a strange man from a stranger world, so foreign in every possible way.... He had lived for its own sake, to breathe and to ride and to see what he could see. This thrilled me. He thrilled me.”

Romantic hyperbole aside, “The Widow of the South” gives us a real character in Carrie McGavock, one the reader will remember -- and want to know more about from historical accounts -- long after the lesser inventions have drifted away.

Roy Hoffman, a writer for the Mobile (Ala.) Register, is the author of “Back Home: Journeys Through Mobile” and the novels “Almost Family” and “Chicken Dreaming Corn.”