A Preservationist’s Fantasy

My favorite kind of book/audiobook is one that leaves me feeling an echo of emotion, like in the few moments before you fully wake from a dream.

A book doesn’t have to be perfect to make me feel that way. Robert Hicks’ The Widow of the South has its flaws, but at the end of 5 CDs, I wasn’t ready for it to end. The readers – Becky Ann Baker, Tom Wopat (yes, from the Dukes of Hazzard TV series), David Chandler and Jonathan Davis – bring the story and characters to life. The voices are warm and hypnotic, and the accents are right.

And for once the abridgement doesn’t leave gaping holes in the story. Hurray for good abridgements! Abridginator Andrew Loschert is my new hero.

Author Robert Hicks, as he says in the author commentary on CD 5, is a member of the preservation board for the McGavock house in Franklin, Tenn. He based the novel on the true story of Carrie McGavock, a Southern plantation owner’s wife whose house becomes a makeshift hospital and garden becomes a graveyard after the Battle of Franklin, “five of the bloodiest hours of the Civil War.”

Like Cold Mountain (the movie … I still need to read the book), the story focuses on two people who fall in a sort of love based more on an idea of each other than on any real intimacy.

The story starts off strong with a moving battle narrative from soldier Zachariah Cashwell’s point of view. The hospital scenes, too, are heartbreaking and vivid. This is the kind of stuff that comes back to you when you close your eyes to go to sleep at night.

Carrie McGavock’s point of view is fraught with emotion as well. She is a mother who has lost several children to disease and can’t pull herself out of depression. She sees something in Zachariah – a desire to live? – that pulls her toward him and lets her feel again.

If this all sounds awfully sentimental, you’re right. But the innate sadness and beauty of this tale lift it out of potential sappiness. The romance is not really the true heart of this story. It’s Carrie’s growth into a living, breathing woman again – in spite of the fact that she has to use death to get there.