Enemy Women (15 page)

Adair began to cough in small, surprising explosions and shut her teeth against it. The major wanted something that would get somebody imprisoned, or jailed, or run down in the pine forests of southeastern Missouri by a patrol of the Union Militia and shot. He wanted
it in fair copy and signed. But it was not his fault or his doing. He was a soldier and he did what he was assigned to do, and so did millions of soldiers all over the world. She got up again and paced. Then took the quilt out of its linen wrapper for the pleasure of the brilliant colors and the feel of the velvet. The needlework was very fine and regular. Adair hated needlework and she could not imagine sitting and stitching the fine crow’s-foot seams.

Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought.

Adair thought of Major Neumann and her talk with him and found herself wishing to talk to him more. Just the two of them in the warm room, talking and not writing. The two of them in that quiet room, and his voice. Because it was so good to have someone speaking to her and listening to her.

She carefully set the brass ink bottle and the quire of paper on her steel bunk with its shuck pallet, and then stepped onto the bunk and then up to the writing table. She gripped the limestone sill and looked out at the streets of St. Louis. If she managed to escape, which way would she go? She saw that the barrels had been moved away from the wall again. She counted all the guards she could see and there were six. The other six walked the halls of the prison or marched outside, along the sidewalk.

The sycamores around the old Presbyterian church held up their winter hands in the smoke of the thousands of coal fires and wood fires. She could now see the storefront signs, all the things the city had to offer. daguerreotypes, turkey carpets, incorruptible teeth made to order.

Then in the distance Adair heard the loud laughter and abrasive shouting from Seventh and Morgan Streets where Dougherty’s Tavern lit the dim day with its gas lamps. The Irish with their gins and porters mazing off into the urgent and smoky city streets. Christmas greens had appeared in drooping swags at every shop window.

There was a good snow beginning, with flakes large as doilies, softening the air and all the hostile sounds of the city, the wheels and train noises and steam whistle at the white lead factory. Then from down at Dougherty’s Tavern she heard singing.

She saw Kisia standing at the corner beside the tavern, singing “The Holly and the Ivy,” singing easily, negotiating the octave-wide shifts. The girl had on the actress’s shawl, and a boy was with her, so she should not be alone on the street. He was holding out a tin bowl of some kind, and the girl’s faultless unbreaking voice, alive with a shimmering vibrato, poured out into the winter air. Passersby slid coins clattering into the bowl. The street urchin, in a tall busted hat and striped muffler, danced with delight. He ran to hold the bowl out to passing vehicles. Kisia’s pale Scots hair slid from under the shawl. It was frosted with snow. Her cheeks were bright red with the cold but she sang out over the rumble of iron-tired wheels and over the noise of draymen shouting at one another and the omnibuses clattering by. Adair began to cry because of the beauty of the melody.

So the engines of the city thundered into the Christmas season and Kisia stood on a street corner and sang old anthems of the solstice into the weave of the city’s strife. Adair heard her song drift away into the noise. She heard paperboys screaming. This was the world of headlines. Of cities falling and burning. Of armies blundering toward one another at Petersburg and Nashville.

Then Adair saw the major come by on a dark bay horse with high white stockings. She stopped crying and wiped her eyes.

He stopped. His wide-brimmed hat was caked with snow and his collar was turned up. He bent down to talk to Kisia, and the girl ran up to him at the curb, put her small white hand on the stirrup of his military saddle. He waved her away with his gloved hand, and still she laughed and held to the metal curve of his stirrup. He reached down to remove her hand but still she would not let go. Adair’s hands were nearly frozen with clinging to the bars of the window.

Adair heard music from a marching band and then the band itself came into the street. They appeared out of the snow in an undefined
dark, striding mass that then distinguished itself into a drummer with a dull drum, its skin head loosened by the wet snow, and a flute and other shining metal instruments. Striding by on the street, going somewhere, a reception or a speech, playing as they went to stay warm. The flute player stopped playing a moment and held his hand over the silver mouthpiece to warm it and then began again, “The Bonny Light Horseman.”

At last Kisia turned and grasped the boy by the hand and ran off after the band, turning once to wave at the major. Stuck her tongue out at him. The major sat his horse and looked after her, and then pressed his heels to the horse and rode on at a slow walk into the darkening scrim of the snowy evening. Adair suddenly saw how attractive the major was, and he was attractive, moreover, to other women. Any woman. Or girl.

The candle threw shadows upward, her great furred head loomed dark on the wall and up to the ceiling as if it would pour itself out and aloft into the darkening sky. The light in her high window faded. She got down and sat before the paper again. Picked up the pen and put it down once more. Because she knew she would see the major again soon she took the diamond-and-sapphire earbobs out of the soft soap in the blue mass tin, and cleaned them, and laid them ready to put in. She took her hairbrush and brushed the mandarin jacket until it was clean. She did the best she could with her hair without a looking glass.

Adair opened her beaded bag. It contained many sentimental relics, reminders of her former life. And there in the prison cell she opened it and found her mother’s handwritten receipt for apple butter. Even though the handwriting was in some ways clumsy it was contained and ornate at the ends of words. It seemed as if her mother were utterly there and present in this very cell, as if she had never gone on before. As if her mother had just written it.

Adair sat and again and again tried to emulate her mother’s hand. But her own handwriting was strong and definite, her mother’s faintly unsure.

Wash and pare apples, (skin on).

Adair knew she must have written “and pare” by mistake or out of habit.

And slice into small bits. Cover with water and boil till soft.

Thus she had built her mother up out of these small remnants and had done so for years and now more than ever in the prison cell she must reconstruct her. Adair tried to copy her mother’s hand, especially the
S
and the capital
T
but could not do it and so finally her pen began to move over the page.

And so she wrote. She wrote the first thing that came into her head. She wrote in tumbling artless sentences that rambled and stopped and jumped from thought to thought. She drove the pen across the paper, her fingers white and thin as pale horses. To construct a world of high romance and innocence, innocence above all, to show him who he held in this place and melt his heart and make him let her go, as the Huntsman had paused in the snowy woods of Grimm and said to Snow White, Run for your life.

Adair dipped her steel pen in the ink and began,
Once upon a Time.

11

Artist Manuel DeFranca was St. Louis’ most popular portrait painter during the mid-nineteenth century. His richly colored portraits adorned the walls of practically every upper-class parlor in the city. . . .DeFranca’s success can . . .be attributed to his romanticized treatment of his subjects, a style employing nineteenth century standards of beauty. His portraits utilized rich colors, elaborate landscaped backgrounds, and an overall delicacy, traits that led to the artist’s new reputation as a “lady’s painter” . . .he died on August 22, 1865. [His monument] stands in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

—
FROM
Gateway Heritage,
VOL.
16,
NO.
1, 1995

Special Report E (Spy for the [Union] Provost Marshal’s Department, St. Louis)

Dan Woods, Pat McKay & McLaughlin expressed themselves in the following manner, [on the corner of 14th & Spruce Sts.] “It was a damned good ball that killed General Lyon, the cowardly son-of-a-bitch” and other disgraceful and disloyal remarks. . . .They are on the police force at night. James Newell—witness. Duncan S. Carter. Loud in his denunciation of the Federal government—used very improper remarks regarding the “Provost Marshall,” calling him a damned Scotch Highlander and questioning his right to close bars, &c., that he had purchased a good rifle and had a man to use it, in the Southern cause. . . .William Dutro—bricklayer, a tall, dark-complexioned man—living in the neighborhood of 17th and Biddle Streets, used the following expressions after hearing of the battle of Springfield, “Ah, another thousand of the damned Union sons-of-bitches have been made to
bite the dust.” . . .Witnesses P. Goff, Capt. of Home Guards, cor. of 4th and Elm streets.

—
FROM
The Little Gods

T
WO DAYS LATER
major william neumann rode west on locust Street toward his boardinghouse at Twenty-first and Locust. He was nearly beyond the city’s bounds. The streets were unpaved and rutted. It was six in the evening and already dark. They had nearly come to the shortest day of the year, December 21. This edge of the city was on higher ground; he could see down into the center of St. Louis. It was banked in coal smoke, the great church steeples rising out of it, and down in its heart was the dim glow of gas lamps as if they burnt at the heart of a cold foundry producing by alchemy the elements of war and progress.

In his saddlebags Major Neumann carried her confession. He would read it and he would then know something of her. Of who she was, where she came from, how she had come to be in that desolate prison. His tall bay horse walked down Locust in a reaching stride, and as they were nearing home the gelding lifted his head on his long neck and tossed his nose up and down as if nodding Yes Yes Yes.

He came to his boardinghouse. He dismounted in the gaslight and handed his reins to the giant Welshman who took care of the horses. His name was Christopher Columbus Jones and he would sleep nowhere but in a fodder box behind the boardinghouse. Not even if offered a bed.

Well ah, arrr, the Welshman said, and took the bay horse away.

Arrrr, said the major to his back.

The boardinghouse was pleasant and quiet. Heavy double chimneys at either end, verandas on both stories and the walls were plastered white. The major walked up the stairs with his leather portfolio in hand. He had a double suite of rooms and he paid a boy seven dollars a month out of his bachelor officer’s allowance to keep the room clean and fetch hot water and take his clothes to the laundress. Army slang
called the young and ragged valet a dog-robber, Neumann never knew where the word came from.

The fire had been laid and lit. He put the portfolio on the round lamp table. Opened the flap. He could see her handwriting and briefly in his imagination could see her head bent over the writing paper and her remarkable eyes. He reached for it. Then he decided to wait.

The twelve-paned windows looked out on the winter street, the diminishing houses and the gaslights. He listened to the click of gigs and rockaways being drawn past, on their way home, the crisp clip of the horses’ hooves striking stones in the road. The dog-robber opened his door. Neumann stood holding his belt in his hands.

Coffee, said the major. And where is my bootjack?

Coming, said the boy. Within a short time a bootjack came flying into the room from the open door and then a pair of rolled fresh socks. Neumann picked them up. He stood on the bootjack with one foot and caught up the heel of his other boot in the crotch and felt great relief as it was drawn off. Then the right one. He stood them in front of the fire to dry. Pulled on the dry socks. He watched the flames burning yellow from new kindling, and tapped the gold signet ring on his left hand on his teeth so that it made clicking noises. His boots were wet through. Then the boy brought in a graniteware pot of coffee and an ironstone mug.