Enemy Women (7 page)

Adair said, Well, I wouldn’t know about stillhouses.

No, no, of course not, you all are the Judge’s girls.

Adair said, And the Militia took him. Have you seen him?

Your father? You can’t hardly recognize anybody these days. He distributed his thin and scholarly hands about in the air, making gestures of amazement. They’re either in a uniform or they been beat up.

Well tell me if you have seen him or not! said Adair. She gave the reins a shake as if to knock sense into either him or his horse. The cream-colored horse tipped his head to one side and swung his rear end around to evade her.

I wouldn’t have recognized him if I did, he said. They are harrying their prisoners northwards in lines of them. Covered with snow. Up to Iron Mountain to send them here, there, or yonder. He patted himself on the chest. I didn’t even know Doniphan had been burnt. Scared the blue Jesus out of me. I had only come into town to locate some saleratus for my biscuits. I absconded on my only horse. Let go them reins.

Adair held on. Trade me this horse for some sapphire earbobs, she said.

Sapphire earbobs. Now wouldn’t I be fetching in sapphire earbobs? He laughed with delight. Let go them reins.

Adair let go. Greasy John gazed around him into the rattling dry leaves of the roadside brush, then the other way, leaned down out of the saddle and said,

They are taking some women prisoners. Just go to the Yankee commander if you can tell where he is at this particular moment in time, and tell him you are a Rebel spy, and you won’t have to walk all the way to Iron Mountain. You’ll be taken there in a
wagon,
in chains.

Adair hit at his cream-colored horse with her fist. Go on, she said.

Greasy John laughed and rode on. He rode through the short grass of the high Barrens and then downhill into the dim snowy columns of the pines. He turned, and called out,

They’s a mule running loose near Ten-Mile Creek if you can catch him!

THEY DESCENDED THE
hillsides and walked on into the Valley of Ten-Mile Creek. The pines gave way to oak and sycamore in the bottoms. In the heavy cold shade of the oaks that lined the road, their rusty leaves still clinging, Adair strode on. She told her little sisters that their father would be held in the Yankee camp right now out of the cold. If you thought about it, he would likely be warmer than they were.

So they camped that night in the wind shadow of an upturned maple tree root before a raveling fire. They piled up heaps of leaves and curled up in the piles like canines, covered with their shawls and blankets and the Log Cabin. They lay their heads on the old carpetbag and the saddlebag. All Adair could think of was to get the girls and herself somewhere safe until the war was over, and then come home and see if her father would not be released and come home too. It snowed intermittently in the night and then cleared.

Adair and her sisters saw refugee wagons going past even late into the dark, and the lanterns tied to the backs of the vehicles cast long, revolving shadows on the stony road. The bodies of the immense old water oaks and sycamores of the creek bottom threw their shadows forward into the pouring snow, and then as the wagons passed, the shadows swung around behind the trees and then drained off back down the road and then fainted away into the dark again. Adair lay wrapped in all they owned with her little sisters and watched. It made the old trees seem animate, as if the shadows were their thoughts, and these great woody thoughts came out and took place in the world only when human beings passed by in the night with lanterns. The wolves did not
sing that night but to Adair it seemed they conversed among themselves in low voices just outside the blaze of their fire.

The following morning they walked on. They walked wrapped in their heavy plaid shawls, beneath the great iron trees whining in the wind, and they fell in with the other people of the Ozarks in their long retreat. Women also afoot, and old men. They were in the midst of a refugee army carrying quilts and books and burlap-wrapped sides of bacon. The children walked sturdily and did not cry for the war had been going on for three years and they had endured many things.

At Ten-Mile Creek the girls saw wagons lined up to cross, and that someone else had laid hands on the loose mule. He was tied to the ringbolt of a buckboard.

At noon on the road ahead of them, Adair saw a group of refugees stop for a moment and stare off to the right-hand side and then go on. Then in their own line of stragglers Adair and the girls came past three dead Union soldiers laid in the snow, and the snow drifting over their open eyes. One man lay on his back with his hands stiffly in the air and his fingers curved downward. Another was a black soldier and he was almost completely covered with snow. They seemed like dismal piles of rags or trash barely recognizable as having once been human. She couldn’t see what had killed them.

Don’t look, said Adair. She took her sisters each by a hand and gripped their hands hard. She jerked their arms. Don’t look. Look straight ahead and keep walking.

Who shot them? said Savannah.

Nobody, said Adair. They just froze.

They don’t look froze.

They were caught in a deer snare. They’re not from here, they don’t know where the snares are.

The Colley girls bent their heads and walked on, on that stretch of the road between Ten-Mile Creek and Cane Creek, a deeply cut path hardly wide enough for a wagon, which turned and sliced through the red earth of the hills. They walked through drifting tissues of snow.

Savannah, hold hands with me, she said. My hands are cold.

By and by Adair and her sisters came upon Jessie Hyssop, the Witch of Slayton Ford.

Ma’am! Ma’am! said Adair. She ran forward down the road. They were just coming to where a trail turned off the Nachitoches Trace toward Cane Creek Fields.

Well, here you all are, said Jessie. She was a strong woman of no more than forty-five, with heavy hips and thighs and a good-looking face. Her slick brown hair showed under her enormous straw hat. It was not a bonnet but a daisy-wheel hat, with a flat crown. Her skirts were made of gores of all different materials in various patterns. She wore a cloak with a shoulder cape and carried an empty tow sack. Around her danced a pack of feist dogs, shaggy terriers with square ears and bright, mean eyes.

Well, I am glad to see you, said Adair. Last year I wanted to come and talk with you. One of the terriers dashed at her and barked. Adair pulled back her skirts and spat at the dog. Get!

Well, that time has gone, ain’t it? said Jessie. I’ve got these dogs here, and that one has puppies back at the tavern. You wouldn’t want to take one to raise, would you? She kept on walking.

No, ma’am, said Adair. Are you burnt out? Adair hurried to walk beside her.

They started to, Jessie said. A big fat sergeant was running around with a torch. But we make good whiskey there at the tavern. The captain says, that’s Hyssop’s Rest, boys. Leave it be. So this fat sergeant went and shoved the torch under the back kitchen, where the captain couldn’t see him do it. The fanatic element has taken over, she said. She marched on. I prayed for rain. I guess the Lord heard me. I was loud enough about it. The Lord sent a general rain over the entire county and it put out the kitchen fire. And I have walked all the way from Slayton Ford in the Irish Wilderness to here for turnips and potatoes.

Yes, ma’am, said Adair. The rain saved our house.

Then how come you are on the road?

They took Pa. They said he was disloyal. Adair kicked at a rock in the road. Disloyal to what?

Jessie reached down and stroked the ears of one of the dogs. Her hand was surprisingly young-looking and rounded with muscle. The small dog stood on its hind legs with its paws on her skirt and stared up into her eyes as if taking in some vital substance.

They’ll think of something, said Jessie. I guess they just wanted your horses. That Captain Tom Poth is selling them up to St. Louis. He is a mercenary son of a bitch.

Savannah jabbed her knuckle into Adair’s waist and asked, Can she cuss like that?

Little Mary whispered, She’s a witch, Savannah, she can cuss if she wants to.

Adair said, Can you tell where he is at?

Your pa?

Yes, ma’am.

By witching? Better ask the Yankee commander.

I thought you could tell things by looking in a pan of water or something.

I am turning off here, said Jessie. To Cane Creek Fields. Then back home. I am going to dig up some of these potatoes from Fursey’s old place. Some people can tell things by looking in a pan of water, but I don’t care to look anymore.

They are going to kill Pa, said Savannah. She started crying again. She dropped the skillet and Adair picked it up.

A person should really learn the telegraph alphabet, said Jessie. You could talk to people in Georgia if you knew the telegraph alphabet.

Savannah bent her head down and looked at her shoes and continued to cry in low, persistent strangling noises.

We have come to the end of days, said Jessie Hyssop. Whatever kind of days it is we been in. The courthouses are gone and so are records and ain’t you seen those men laying dead beside the road? Now we have a world of devices and not of witching.

Well, Jessie, can’t you help a person? Adair was so angry she was near tears. I have an old shilling I could give you. Fix it so that I could speak to a horse and he would throw his rider in the Current River and drown him. So I could call Whiskey to me, and he would break his reins and come to me.

That is another matter, said Jessie. Horses are another matter. They are already mostly in the witch world because they eat no meat. You have spent half your life wandering in the woods horseback by yourself or with Lucinda and them girls. Don’t you know anything? Jessie’s flapping straw hat winged up and down like a sailing crane. I know you, Adair, and I know you’d be gone in the hills for all of your natural life if you could. Your mother used to have to sit watch on you ever second, you were a trial to her.

I was? Adair kept walking beside Jessie.

Yes.

Her sisters came silently behind, and down in the valley of Cane Creek the wind became confused and turned the falling snow into spirals.

Well, Jessie, we are just looking for somewhere to sit out until this war is over, and if a person had the second sight like you do, they could see where other people’s loved ones had been carried away to, and their horses too. Do you see spirits?

Yes, but I don’t pay any attention to them, said Jessie.

But they come to tell us things.

No they don’t. People ain’t smart just because they’re dead.

Well what are they?

Just mournful. They’ve lost something and can never leave off looking. Such is the power of desire even beyond the grave. They are trembling with want.

Adair struggled along against the wind with the carpetbag in one hand and the skillet in the other. I don’t know how I’d learn the telegraph alphabet. Can’t you look in a well, or when you throw out coffee grounds?

Jessie stared into the snowy aisles of the woods for a while. Then she said, I don’t know if I could or not. I myself have asked old women for what they knew, and the old women at that time remembered things from old women they had known and so on until the beginning of the world. What they knew didn’t always please me.

Jessie had come to the turnoff. The trail to Cane Creek Fields wound through the valley lands now curtained with snow flurries. The wind whistled. Adair came close to hear what she was saying.

We are in the middle of many changes, and this endless changing is become disorder and people cannot long endure disorder. They’ll do anything rather than put up with it. Desperate things. Things that they don’t want to remember later. Jessie drifted into the snowy air, eastward down the small trace. She turned. Her breath came in clouds.

She waved her hand. The dogs ran around her skirts smelling at the road.

At every crossroads you come to, she called back, pile three stones one on another. For the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This is to prevent the spirits from coming next behind you.

Adair stood and watched her disappear down the Cane Creek Fields road, among the great valley trees, their limbs crested with snow.

She’s just a common woman, said Adair. She runs that tavern over in that town called Wilderness right there in the middle of the Irish Wilderness and there are riotous things that go on over there. She’s just a public woman.

What? Savannah raised her head.

Nothing.

You better shut up, Adair, said Little Mary. She’ll hear you and do something. Little Mary knocked the drops of moisture from her shoulders. Something you won’t like.

Adair stood discouraged and hurt for a while, looking at the ground. She was trying to remember the last time she had put her arms around her father and told him she loved him. How long ago had it been? Until finally her sisters said for them to go on. But before they went
on, Adair piled three stones one on the other, for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

At Cane Creek Adair and her little sisters found a place to cross where they had to wade only up to their knees. The water numbed them. They took off their shoes, held their skirts up in wads and their bundles overhead in one hand. They forged through.

A wagon came up the Trace behind them, heading north like everybody else. It was driven by a man with a hard face and beside him two women; behind, three half-grown children sat backward, leaning against the seat. The children were staring glumly at the Trace receding away from them and then at the water as the wagon came across. The wagon trundled through the ford, spraying crescents of water from its wheels. The children turned their heads all in unison to look at the Colley girls and then turned back again. The girl had a white eye and both boys had long hair tied back with boot strings. In her shawl the girl held a squirrel head and after staring long at Adair and her sisters, went back to eating on it. Turning it in her fingers to see what meat was left on the bone. The wagon jangled with household goods. Baskets, a clock, a bale of blankets.