Enemy Women (16 page)

Take care of these boots, sir? The boy picked them up.

Yes, said the major. Don’t be wearing them, either.

Sir! The child saluted. He was twelve years old and dying to join the army.

All right, Sarge, the major said.

He poured a cup of coffee and sat in front of the fire. Drank it. And then at last he drew the pages out of the portfolio and sat with them at the lamp table.

He read:

Once upon a Time there was a farm in the Ozark Mountains. And there were a father and four chillren. Three were girls and one
was a boy. Their beloved mother had died of a fever in the spring of 1855 when she seemed to evaporate out of human hands. She was thin as smoke, as if her shadow had holes in it. She was laid to rest on the Devil’s Backbone never to be forgotten.

     So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little Mary had to be the chicken and Savannah shoved her out of the loft and broke her collarbone. The hearts of children are hard naturally because of their short memories. Everything they play with becomes true and unquestionable such as an acorn cap for a Holy Grail, such is the power of the untrained mind, and all our training of it is both of advantage and not. I hope you will think on this, Major.

     So we lived there summer and winter. Since my father could not knit, our stockings wore out and then we tied up the holes with string until Aunt Kelly came and made us new ones and said we were like savages. My horse was named Whiskey, he came from a trader near Cato Springs who traveled the country with all manner of horses but my father chose him for me out of the entire string because of the look in his eye which my father said was noble.

     We lived without telegraph lines. They are things that carry evil gossip without your being able to see the gossiper and identify them and take your revenge. They speak unseen somewhere afar off. This spy voice is now ticking all over the Ozarks and ordering the taking of women to prison and because of it fifteen Militia shot Mrs. West in her doorway.

     We had 1,200 acres all told. We had hay meadows, 2 cornfields, forty acres in cotton, 25 sheep, pigs, silverware, clothes, a great many law books for Missouri and also for the Texas Constitution which interested my father, and other volumes with engraved and colored illustrations. Also a beveled looking glass from Tennessee
recently smashed up by the crew of the MSM led by Captain Tom Poth who has red hair. Now this is the kind of thing people go to hell for. We did not look at ourselves again for a long time being on the road, so we presented ourselves to the commander at Iron Mountain and we were as uncouth as savages who never regard themselves. But are instead regarded.

He put his finger on his place and watched the fire. She had changed it all to a shining tale without stillbirths or floods, or parasites or deformed people. Her mother had not died screaming or crying but had faded away like ruined silk. There were no Confederates in this story. They were all perfectly innocent, set upon by lunatics in blue for no reason. And as far as Adair Colley knew there was no reason. What could she have known of the Constitutional issues or political clashes in far places? The major turned back to the script.

In the fall persimmins were plentiful as well as apples and I liked to put them in a bowl together because of their colors. We roasted the apples and had them with cream. These colors were also beautiful, the cream being a pale yellow and the apples carmine. You put maple sugar all over this, as much as you can get away with.

     I dream of the provisions we had at that time and they seem like fare of great elegance but that is because of the dismal substances were are forced to eat in this place and of which I hope you will take note, Major. The bell of St. Louis Cathedral has just rung six o’clock with that old Catholic bell, which is suppertime in this prison. My father put the hams in salt to draw, for though he was poor at farming he loved to cook. I see him now with his hands frosted with the fine salt and his Tavern hat cocked on his head. I used to ride away up the Devil’s Backbone when they killed a hog because it was not good for the horses to hear it or me either.

     The heart of a pig is exactly like the heart of a human being if you have ever seen one, Major, and it was for this the huntsman
killed a pig and presented the heart to the queen who said mirror mirror on the wall, so that Snow White could walk on through the snow with her shawl flying and herself on her way to a place like Iron Mountain. Now, think on this: Snow White laying still in her coffin with the piece of apple in her mouth as if dead, as it was depicted in our book of fairy tales. And did she not rise again when a prince came? I’ll tell you who the prince was, it was the huntsman himself, who harries us away from the mirror, where we stand entranced with ourselves and mezmerized with what lies behind that mirror and the dark realms.

     For we must not dwell on Death, as it is a mystery and it is something Unknown we leave to the Lord and his disposing for if we knew everything we would be too full of perfectly known things, and thus never rested nor content but driven with busyness and stuffed full. When I rode out in the early mornings in summertimes everything appeared to me, one after the other, in its own selfe without having to be known about beforehand, before you even get to it. In the order of the world is a deep pattern. You can’t know it beforehand. If you did you would remain forever unsurprised and dwarfed and hardened. In the early mornings one after another we broke up the planes of water in the pools of Beaverdam with slow steps, horse and rider, and the trees appeared in their reflections like underwater spirits of themselves. Before these things a person is silent.

He held the paper tipped to the lantern light. And in her silences Adair Colley would spread out her old folk tales. What he was reading was a work of the imagination and a resolute determination not to live in the world as it was. Nobody brought the Rebel mail, nor were men hanged from white oak trees by either Militia or guerillas. No crows pecked out the eyes of men lying unburied. There were no latrines here or whores, and this information would capture no bushwhackers. It was a kind of music.

My father was too old to go for a soldier, and had poor eyesight from his law reading, and had always stayed out of local politics. My brother whom you accuse of being a soldier with Reeves’s Fifteenth Cavalry CSA is on the contrary a cripple and could never carry a weapon atall, neither long gun nor pistol. They were putting J. B. Crean’s millstone into place on September 10th, 1857, and there was a ten-cent piece laying on the lower stone and my brother John Lee said Here, I’ll get it, and the stone rolled over his arm. The men in my family are thus useless for the
ingins injuns
enjins of war due to the law and a ten-cent piece.

This Rebellion against the lawful Order was ordained by Heaven, for the Lord must have planned and prepared for this as He does for all things and something this big surely did not catch Him by surprize but on the other hand there may be surprizes in Heaven as elsewhere.

     The men alaying under the earth in gray have lain down their lives for some reason we may never know, just as the Lord knows all things, for some strange purpose He allowed this great conflict to take place on the earth and the people held in bondage to be unfettered and men of the South to be blinded even in their own doorways. And so everything is in an endless changing and disorder at present.

     Only one thing I know, Major, and that is this War was sent by Heaven to free the slaves and preserve the Union. I have seen great armies of men with artillery and heard the canon in the hills. I have seen them come through my country in their thousands both in blue and gray and butternut and it was to the advantage of none. So the Lord has cast down his Rebel Angels. Did He not raise them up to Glory with a great congregation of flags and horse troops and music bands on that day of Secession? And yet the Rebel Angels are now cast down.

I remain,
Yours very truly,
Adair Randolph Colley

He sat with the pages a while watching his fire burn down the logs. Then he undressed and lay in his solitary bed and looked at the ceiling. He did not sleep well. He arose in the night and struck a match to the lamp wick and sat down and read her confession again and then put it away once more. Before the first light of dawn he dressed in his boots and his uniform, and went down the stairs to the kitchen. There the giant Welshman sat in front of the fire while the cook beat the biscuit dough with a wooden mallet as if it had been caught in doing something wicked.

Would you pull out my horse, Christopher? he said.

Awrahhhh.

He rode out into the dark streets and saw that the sky had cleared. Stars stood out in electrifying spangles, the Dipper and the Charioteer, riding over and over again their eternal routes across the heaven. He rode north at a slow walk, and his large bay gelding searched about for other horses and spoke in a low voice to the milkman’s horse pulling a small two-wheeled cart. He had been told in Maryland when he was young that the Big Dipper was also seen as a milkman’s cart called The Wain that turned on its route through the night hours and poured out its milk into the foam of stars. He had watched it swing through the night sky from the bow of a skipjack skimming across Chesapeake Bay, all canvas up and taut in the starry wind. He wished she were with him, riding alongside. The major felt diminished now despite his height because he was helpless to aid her. Shrunk by the problem he was up against. And the horse carried him on toward Florissant until the dawn came.

Neumann rode up to Bellefontaine Road, and into a great beech woods. He waited as the sun came up.

He put his gloved hand to his forehead in a nervous gesture of dismay, tapped on his forehead with his own knuckles. His fellow officers in other departments made jokes about his ladies. Six months ago at Benker’s Tavern, he had told stories about the chilly Miss Rhoda Cobb, and hinted at the seductiveness of little Kisia. But after a while it came to him that they considered this assignment not quite honorable; this
arrangement of papers and filing depositions, the interrogation of captive women. Then he had sent in repeated requests for transfer. To a fighting unit. But he was also determined to leave the judge advocate general’s department with a successful record. Success in obtaining confessions that would break down Reeves’s organization and with the credit accruing to himself. This credit standing him in good stead afterward when the surrender came.

He took off his broad-brimmed hat and sat on the horse and looked down the Bellefontaine Road, and tried to think what to do.

Then he turned back and rode toward the Ogley House, where the provost marshal’s general staff abided in their confiscated mansion. Young women in bonnets hurried past on racketing clogs toward the big houses where they worked. Drays were now surging up Natural Bridge Plank Road with barrels of beer and cheese and fish and then came the bakers’ carts. He would begin with the colonel, and try to push her case through as far as possible. And because he was trained in the law, he tried to think of their objections one by one, and how he could overcome them.

The colonel would say, Her male relatives are all known to have joined Confederate units.

He would say, Sir, I am not entirely sure of this, but at any rate, we cannot imprison the female relations of the entire Confederate Army.

Of course not, sir, merely the ones we can get our hands on. The ones who are keeping Colonel Reeves in the field.

Sir, she is eighteen years old and cannot possibly equip a regiment.

Major, the women of that section of the country are worse than the men. Martial law has been declared in this state.

Yes, sir, it certainly has, however the people of this sector have not been apprised of this as far as I know, and apparently her male relations are incapable of service in the army, one being too old and the other crippled.

Have you proof of this?

Only her word, sir. However, we seemed to be prepared to accept her word on other matters.

It is her loyalty that is in question, Major Neumann, not her harmlessness. If she were to reveal something of what she knows of Confederate operations in her area, it would prove her loyalty and then certainly she should be released. It is a dreadful thing to imprison women.

There have been several incidents, said the major. With the women.

We are aware of that. Charges are being brought.

What if she doesn’t know anything?

This is impossible. Captain Poth has written that her father knows everyone in the area. Her brother was captured in Reeves’s uniform and escaped.

I wonder about the trustworthiness of Poth’s reports.

Major, what exactly is your interest in this matter?

Sir, my interest is that I would like to retire on full pay with a good record and have the girl released as well. How about that.

Major William Neumann rode looking at his horse’s ears, as they twitched here and there picking up sounds, the sight of another horse. The perfect silver trunks of the beech trees passed him one by one and their shadows slipped over him like the bars of a prison.

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