Enemy Women (46 page)

Well, I’m sorry, said Jeth Walker.

We lost people too, said the woman. Everybody has suffered.

Adair pressed her hair back from her face. She went to the veranda to look at Whiskey and for the view from there. Then she turned and regarded Copperhead Mountain and the Devil’s Backbone. Now their land was gone, and somebody else would gain their living here. Adair walked down the veranda from one end to the other, her head in her hands. Finally she picked up her tow sack and went back to the kitchen.

Well, she said. I came traveling a long way thinking I was coming home. But I could have just stopped off anywhere.

They were all respectfully silent, as if at the scene of a fatal accident, and watched her walk from room to room and back again, not able to go or to stay. She went again to the back kitchen door.

Go on to the courthouse, said Jeth Walker. He held his silk top hat in front of him like a stubby toy cannon. You’ll never feel right about it until you see for yourself.

Not with the Union Militia there, she said. They would find something against me.

You can come with us, he said. We’re, a ha, going on the road. We lost our tavern there at Greenville to taxes same as you.

We had performances and music there for fifteen years before we lost it, said Sarah.

And so we’re just getting up a traveling show. I taught that pig to dance and I do Master of Ceremonies.

Adair said, That pig dances?

Ain’t that skirt cute? Sarah said. I made it myself out of a tablecloth I found just lying around. And Pru sings.

The young woman said, I’m the one who sings the last song about
“comin through the rye” in a kilt. It’s real short. I wear silk tights and lace-ups. You just do what you have to do. We don’t pretend to be quality.

Adair watched the pig in the tablecloth skirt come to the back kitchen door and stand on the sill stone. It waved its snout in the air.

Watch this, said Jeth Walker. He began to whistle “Arkansas Traveler.” The pig stood up on its hind legs and shuffled uneasily toward them. It made pig noises and the skirt dangled around its hooves. Jeth Walker put on the top hat and did a few dance steps himself. Now, we are doing a short excerpt from a play as well, so that we have cultured and refined things as well as mere sensations for the masses. We do short scenes from
The Hermit of Gervais.

I never saw it, said Adair. Performances always made my hair stand on end on the back of my neck. I get too excited and I end up crying.

You could come along, said Sarah.

Yes, you could be in it. The young woman gave baby Jim a handful of cooled boiled turnip. We all have misery to face up to, girl. I lost my husband in Price’s raid and here I am with the baby and everything. So you just got to get along how you can.

She could be the Saucy Girl, said Jeth. You see, there has to be the Aristocratic Girl that he marries, and then the servant is the Saucy Girl, and she says smart and impertinent things.

Pru Lester said, then the Aristocratic Girl, she isn’t saucy. She’s easy to do. She never does anything, she’s just real refined and snooty. I’m her because I don’t have time to learn scripts because of the baby. All I have to do is say Brigit I Want You and Oh Help Me, Sir and Please Don’t Cut My Hand Off and such as that. Please Don’t do whatever they are doing.

There’s not much other way to get your living here, said Sarah. People losing their land to taxes and you couldn’t have done much here alone anyway.

I couldn’t go onstage. I get too agitated, said Adair. What do you do? Adair turned to Sarah and made herself smile.

Oh, I’m a guard and a messenger and I play guitar, and make costumes and scenery. I get to wear britches a lot. I find them handy.

Can you sing? Jeth asked Adair.

Well, I used to, but anymore I start crying. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

The young woman handed baby Jim to Sarah and sized up Adair with a measuring stare.

Well, she could let her hair down and stand in front of the Noble Ruins and sing Oh Frail Lamp of Love Extinguished and cry. She would do very well.

Her eyes, said Sarah. They’re so black, they would show up well onstage.

No, she couldn’t stand up to it, said Jeth. The people adoring her the way they do with the Saucy Girl. And us traveling to the cities, Pocahontas and Poplar Bluff and Cape on the steamboats.

Sarah Walker nodded. Regretfully. And the Saucy Girl lines are hard because they’re so smart, they get the best laughs. People scream.

Adair let all this fall into silence as a fire dies down.

I better go on, she said. I might come upon some news of what happened to my father one of these days. She took herself in hand and turned to Pru and smiled. I am sure you are very beautiful as the Aristocratic Girl, she said. I know you all make people happy.

Well, said Sarah.

Who was your father? Jeth took off the hat and laid it on the table as if to make it sit still, and sat down bareheaded.

Marquis Colley. He was the justice of the peace and he taught the common school.

Well, we’re just plain old people, said Pru. She rocked baby Jim on her hip again.

Adair said, And he and my mother came here from Tennessee in 1845, and he helped set up the school board and the county courthouse. She listened for a moment to the mockingbird singing with wild joy over her new nest in the sycamore. And he loved to read in his law
books and he was very mild with us. He died somewhere alone without ever sending a last word to us or knowing what become of us. She stopped and wrapped her hands together in her lap. My mother is buried up there on the Devil’s Backbone.

A hot wind moved over the valley meadows and poured through the Shawnee Oak as if through a reeded instrument in a long, blooming hush. Lucy the cat slowly stalked in the back door paw by paw and came and sat before Adair. She gazed up into Adair’s eyes in a searching, intense stare and then gathered herself and sailed into Adair’s lap.

Go on to Vandiver’s, Adair said. I can’t take care of you.

My grandmother died in the bale shed of the Mingo gin, said Sarah Walker. Nobody knew she was gone for a week.

Well hush, Mrs. Walker, said Jeth.

ADAIR TOOK WITH
her the last fragment of the tennessee mirror wrapped in burlap, and a few other things of use in a traveling and solitary life. She found articles in her mother’s clothes trunk—a haversack, stockings, a shawl—and took the blankets from her bed upstairs. She told the Walkers they could take whatever they wanted or could find. They were disturbed and regretful and tried to press other things on her, but Adair had learned the specific gravity of possessions and how they weighed a person down.

She walked back up Stanger’s Steep, leading Whiskey, to search for the Log Cabin quilt and the silver dollars and other things she had been forced to leave there, traveling mostly at night. Against the high ridges of the Irish Wilderness she thought she saw the mournful spirit of the soldier in the snare and how against the pale barrens above Pike Creek he hung upside down like the Hanged Man, swaying in the moonlight, and then he was a woman upside down with her skirts tied around her
ankles but Adair turned her head away and walked on with Whiskey behind her.

She went back along the Steep until she saw at a distance Dolly’s
bones beneath the oak tree and the skull hanging in the halter, and did not go any farther but turned back to search the trace. She didn’t find anything nor did she expect to very much, because of the soldiers coming down the Steep to the surrender points and others on the road who were poor and desperate, and someone had found the silver dollars. Maybe they needed them more than Adair did.

After a week she came back to her home place and sat up on the barrens at the ridge of Copperhead Mountain. The traveling show people had gone on. It looked as if the Vandivers were storing hay in the house now, and more of the windowlights were gone. She stayed there three days and let Whiskey graze in his slow, limping walk.

On the third day at sunset she was combing out her hair when she saw a man in civilian clothes and a broad hat ride down the road and past the Shawnee Oak. He rode a bay horse. He got off and stood before the empty house, holding his horse’s reins in a bandaged hand. There was a folded umbrella tied to the pommel of the saddle, suspended there like a sword.

Major Neumann called out, Adair? He waited. Adair! he shouted. Adair!

He walked into the house and after a few minutes she saw him in her bedroom window looking out. One side of his face was bigger than the other. After a while he came back out again.

Adair! he called. He turned to the hills around. I said I would come for you! Adair!

The light of the world failed to gray and shoals of lightning bugs drifted down the valley in white, insubstantial fires, millions of icy bone-lights.

She sat with her long hair flying loose and the silver brush in her hand and Whiskey grazing nearby. She watched as ghosts watch from the other side of a looking glass, come from a distant place of being and not of the same world.

Adair! I will not stop looking until I find you!

Over the folded blue mountains an evening wind came up, stroked
over the trees in silky rushes. She saw the thin edge of a new moon glinting through the trees over Courtois and then it rose with the old moon glowing in its arms, as if to present to the summer night this dark, mysterious gift.

Will Neumann sat on the veranda and Adair saw the flash of a match, the deep glow of his cigar as he settled to wait.

She rose to her feet and laid the silver brush down on her bundle. She gathered her skirts in her hand and began to walk down the hill, hurrying, before the light failed.

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, whose encouragement, persistence, and skill are the reasons you have this book in your hands. Thanks to my cousin Susan for all those years of .nding the way on Ozark trails, for her hospitality and love of Civil War history, and for her noble horses Whiskey, Cowboy, and Buddy, who carried us so many miles through the mountains. Without the excellent works of Jerry Ponder, historian of southeastern Missouri, I could not have told this story. He has persisted for many decades in the face of indifference and has meticulously set down the facts of the war, and his books will be groundwork for many writers in the years to come. The following were also helpful in my research into the Civil War era:
Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War,
by Michael Fellman, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989;
A History of the 15th Missouri Cavalry Regiment, C.S.A.,
by Jerry Ponder, Ponder Books, Doniphan, Missouri, 1994;
The History of Ripley County, Missouri,
by Jerry Ponder, 1987;
Camp and Prison Journal,
by Griffin Frost, reprinted by the Press of the Camp Pope Bookshop, Iowa City, Iowa;
The Civil War: A Narrative,
by Shelby Foote, Random House, New York, 1963;
Civil War in the Ozarks,
by Philip W. Steele and Steve Cottrell, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, Louisiana, 1998;
The Civil War in Carter and Shannon County,
by J. J. Chilton, Eunice Pennington, David Lewis, Esau Hewett, et al., West Carter County Genealogical Society, Van Buren, Missouri, n.d.;
The Little Gods: Union Provost Marshals in Missouri,
1861–1865, by Joanne Chiles Eakin, Two Trails Publishing Company, Independence, Missouri, 1996;
Likeness and Landscape: Thomas M. Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype,
by Dolores A. Kilgo, Missouri Historical Society Press, St. Louis, Missouri, 1994;
War of the Rebellion,
Official Records, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1880–1901;
Ozark Tales and Superstitions,
by Philip W. Steele, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, Louisiana,
1998; various reminiscences of the Civil War from old diaries, letters, and other material published in the
Daily American Republic
of Poplar Bluff, Missouri;
Lost Family, Lost Cause,
by Ivan N. McKee, Pine Hill Press, Freeman, South Dakota, 1978. I will be forever grateful to Lois Glass Webb for her encouragement and especially for sending me the photocopies of the OR reports on southeastern Missouri and a great deal of other rare material, taking time off from writing her own novel to do so. Thanks to my cheerful and ef.cient editor at Morrow, Jennifer Brehl, for an excellent editing job on a complex manuscript. Many thanks to Dr. Deborah McCormick for teaching me to ride sidesaddle. Thanks to Rick and Kristan Casey for the use of the jacal. Many thanks to Sky and Tim Lewey of the Open V ranch in Uvalde for all their hospitality and good conversation and for the use of the other house in a lightning storm, when the power blew out, where I .nally .nished this manuscript by hand and by candlelight. Thanks to Rocky
Sisk for guiding us up the Devil’s Backbone and over to the old military graveyard on the Trace. A special thanks to Bob and
Nancy Shivers for their help in printing out manuscripts, putting up with my odd hours in the of.ce, and their encouragement. Thanks as always to Gordon himself for being the literary genius of discernment and acumen he is and having the wisdom not to miss the Second World War. Thanks to friends Naomi Nye, Wendy Barker, Nan Cuba, Trish Maloney, Janice De Lara, Karen Janny, and Bob and Jean Flynn for their faith in the book and for reading first drafts. Appreciation is due Genevieve Kile, Carter County history buff, for her unpaid years of work in rescuing primary source materials. Special thanks to Jim for his close editing, advice on military matters, and his patience.