Enemy Women (43 page)

What? said Adair. I’m deaf. I can’t hear good. She put the bit in Whiskey’s mouth and the crownpiece over his ears.

Miss!
he shouted.
I would be glad to lend you a later edition of Harper’s!! I have the latest one!!

I don’t believe I will!
Adair shouted back.
I already ate!

She led Whiskey out of the barn at a run and led him to the tavern steps. She jumped on his glossy back astride, barefoot. Several of the Union officers got up from their tables and Jessie came out of the kitchen.

Adair kicked Whiskey and he went trotting out of Wilderness, his limp gone at the thought of being on the road again, through a flock of chickens, down to the ford. The mill wheel covered the noise of the
shouting behind her. She splashed past several women washing their dishes and Whiskey stepped on a tin plate and crushed it into the gravel.

Around the first bend they settled into a walk and Adair rode on to the crossing of the Current, and then to Beaverdam Creek. It was a good clear day and the way lay open before her.

30

“Glorious cause.” “Lives sacrificed on the country’s altar.” “Hearts bleeding for the country’s welfare.” Some modern readers of these (Civil War soldiers’) letters may feel they are drowning in bathos. We do not speak or write like that anymore. World War I, as Ernest Hemingway and Paul Fussell have noted, made such words as
glory, honor, courage, sacrifice, valor
and
sacred
vaguely embarrassing if not mock-heroic. But these soldiers, at some level at least, meant what they said about sacrificing their lives for their country.

Our cynicism about the genuineness of such sentiments is more our problem than theirs, a cultural/temporal barrier we must transcend if we are to understand why they fought. And how smugly can we sneer at their expressions of a willingness to die for their beliefs when we know they did precisely that?

—
FROM
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War,
BY
J
AMES
M. M
CPHERSON,
O
XFORD
U
NIVERSITY
P
RESS,
N
EW
Y
ORK,
1997

T
HE FERRYMAN HAD
a pet raccoon on a chain, and the chain had bells on it, so the creature was tortured both day and night with the sound of its own movements. The raccoon stared at Will Neumann briefly out of its mask, its demented small eyes, and then went back to fingering through its tail for fleas.

Will Neumann stood down off his bay horse and walked down the
earthen slope to the ferry landing. They stood there on the Kentucky shore, and behind them a cornfield’s long leaves hacked gently at the July air. He had turned the sign over on its swinging pivot bar, from nobody here to the other side: come and get me. And after a while the ferryman on the Missouri shore put down his pipe and began to crank the ferryboat across on its cable.

Neumann led the bay onto the planking. The big horse came reluctantly, with timorous steps, as if expecting the decking to give way any moment. Neumann tied him to the railing. He reached up and readjusted the haversack tied behind the saddle, the enormous striped umbrella he had acquired in a rainstorm in Natchez, and the saddlebags. The long-nosed revolver in its pommel holster. Neumann’s nails were black with campfire ashes, and so was the bandage on his left hand.

Where you coming from? the ferryman asked. He had tied a bandanna over his long light brown hair, close down over his eyes. His beard jumped when he talked. He wore trousers of reddish homespun, high in the waist, with a broad waistband, held up by one gallus. His riverman’s shirt had bloused sleeves and he was barefoot. The ferryman shoved off with a pole and grasped the cable. The sun flashed up from the sliding flat plates of brown water in wavering planes across his face. His big, prehensile toes gripped at the boards.

I’m coming from Mobile, said Neumann.

You’re a Yankee officer, said the ferryman. Discharged.

Yes.

What are you coming down here for?

The ferryman stared out over the water. Neumann stood with his legs apart and his back to the rail, one elbow on the railing and the other with a thumb hooked into his front pocket. It was noisy now with the wind and the water splashing. The ferryman pulled heartily on the cable crank. Neumann declined to help him. It was too close to the water and Neumann knew the ferryman could tip him into the river in a moment.

I’m looking for somebody.

Now they’s the Union over there, said the ferryman. On the far side. Just your kind of people. He jerked his chin toward the ferry landing on the Missouri side where a group of Union soldiers sat and smoked and watched the ferry cross.

All right, said Neumann. They may or may not be my kind of people.

I killed as many of you sons of bitches as I could, the ferryman said. They’s just so damn many of you.

We breed like rabbits, said Neumann. Who were you with?

Seventh Missouri, CSA, said the ferryman. Then we got so shot up they put me in with a bunch of Texans. Terry’s Eighth Texas.

Neumann braced his feet and rode on the taupe silk sheets of the Mississippi. He watched the ferryman’s hard hands on the cable crank and saw no weapon about the man. The world was in truth made of jackstraws. The world was very combustible, the human body was partible in ways heretofore unimagined. What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. Civilization was not in the natural order but was some sort of willed invention held taut like a fabric or a sail against the chaos of the winds. And why we had invented it, or how we knew to invent it, was beyond him.

Neumann had seen some truth that was completely out of his power to put into words. But he had come away knowing that even though the world of civilization was made of straw and lantern slides, he must live in it as if it were solid. Even when the heat of the lantern itself burnt away the illusions and a black hole appeared in the middle of the slide.

He looked upriver at the immense road of water that flowed from the heart of the nation, down from St. Louis and the northern cities, carrying in its bloodstream the silt and alluvial sands from the Missouri River, which poured out the rich gifts of the plains.

The baking wind tore at his hat and he held it by the brim with one hand. It relieved him to look at it, for the great river was like a long tale,
of both great joy and great woe. And it seemed to be a story road that a person could take, and it would take him to some place where he could free his mind. Men had striven against one another to control the unreeling river-road, battling at New Madrid and Island Number Ten, at Baton Rouge and Vicksburg, in the heat of the summer and the humid, choking air of the malarial swamps. But the river carried away men and guns and the garbage of war, covering it over, washing itself clean again as if they had never been. Neumann turned his face toward Missouri.

From the approaching shore he heard strains of music. At this crossing, the west shore was the low side, a swamp, except for the small rise where the Union soldiers were encamped. He heard a fiddle, a pennywhistle. He could see the group of Union men sitting around the ferry landing. The ferry creaked as it slid on the glassy surface of the river. His horse shifted and rebalanced himself, and the far shore drew nearer and nearer.

He saw the smoke of a breakfast fire in the early-morning dimness. The smoke slid in evaporating planes into the uncut forest and wetlands around. The fiddler was playing “Caragan Goalach,” slow and sad. The pennywhistle punctuated its long lament with bright trills, and Neumann could hear one of the soldiers in blue singing with it, singing in the Irish tongue.

THEY APPROACHED WITH
a smooth, dreamlike motion across the water. The odd Celtic melody lifted his spirits, and just as they docked he could see the men wore Union Militia badges.

The bay horse bolted down the gangway planks for solid land in a brief thunder, and then stood nodding at other horses tied back in the trees. The fiddler spat and turned to see who had arrived, and a redheaded captain stood up.

They came walking toward him through clouds of mosquitoes. The bearded fiddler called out,

And what delight he takes in his umbrella! His hand is on fire and
the cooling rains have not put it out yea though it rain forty days and forty nights.

He ain’t right in the head, said the boy sitting at the fire. The boy was hatless, in a blue uniform coat. He put the pennywhistle to his lips and blew spit out of it.

Who are you? The captain stared at Neumann. Got your discharge papers? Furlough?

Who are you? asked Neumann. The war’s over.

I am Captain Tom Poth of the Union Militia.

Neumann stared for a long moment at Captain Tom Poth. The other men, in decayed blue uniforms, stood around the fire with tin cups in their hands. Their insignia were frayed, their weapons muddied. Then he remembered the man’s name. He and his men had burnt down the Colley farm and had taken the judge, had sent Adair and her sisters wandering down the roads of the world.

Neumann knew there was nothing at this point that he could reasonably do. He turned to the captain. The ground they stood on was squelching.

Why do you want to know? he asked.

These southeast counties are under military rule, said Poth. Martial law. I’ve got the right and the duty to call to account ever wanderer and sojourner that comes passing into here. He squinted at Neumann and lit a cigar. The Constitution is suspended down here for a couple of years until we get things squared away.

It is, said Neumann. That’s an interesting state of affairs.

And I am empowered to ask for your papers, sir, and I’ll have them now.

Neumann reached into his saddlebags and drew out a leather folder, took out his furlough and handed it to the captain.

You are this Major William Neumann?

One and the same, said Neumann. Shortly to be discharged.

That so. The captain puffed on the cigar and then said, You a Baptist? and held out another cigar.

No, said Neumann. I’ll smoke the damn thing. He took the cigar and put it in his pocket. Where’d you get this tobacco?

The captain ignored Neumann and turned to the men around the fire and said, He ain’t no Rebel. He doesn’t talk like one.

Neumann said, What if I were?

I don’t guess you’d get through that swamp, the captain said. There was four men yesterday who didn’t make it. Wasn’t there, boys? A merry band of Rebels coming home to make trouble, but they will make trouble no more.

The men at the fire turned back to regard the flames with long, interested stares, and were silent.

What are you carrying in that saddlebag? And the haversack? Is that government property?

It’s my property, said Neumann. He turned his back to Poth and threw the stirrup over the seat with his right hand, took up the billets and began to tighten the saddle girth as best he could one-handed.

I could look in them if I wanted, said Poth. We’re under martial law here. We can look in anything and go in anybody’s house.

But you don’t want to, said Neumann. Do you?

What’s in them?

Look out, Captain, he’ll beat you over the head with that umbrella, said one of the soldiers at the fire. The fiddler started in on “Soldier’s Joy.” A young corporal complained, I can’t sing that. They ain’t no words to that.

The fiddler said, Yes there is, they are round ones though, like the bitter fruit of the Osage orange and they come to me when I am in the mountains and have no noise of my own.

The fiddler ain’t right in the head, the boy said to Neumann.

Neumann mounted up.

I ain’t give you permission to go, Poth said. State your destination.

Don’t fool with me, said Neumann. He pressed his boot heels to the horse and they started down the sloshing trail into the wetlands.

It had been a hot, dry summer and the Great East Swamp was not as wet as it was at other times, and here and there dry ground stood up out of the water. Back in among the boles of the great trees the occasional white face of a swamp flower shone, big as a cabbage, in standing pools. From across the river the raccoon chittered in a long, lonesome trill, calling out to others of his kind, and was answered from somewhere in the trees of the Missouri side. Neumann listened. The thought occurred to him that the calls could be men signaling one another in the dim shades. It could be anything.