Enemy Women (20 page)

Then they were inside a restaurant and he sat her down across from him at a table with a white cloth. Adair picked up one of the bottles of sauce from the middle of the table, put it back down again. The salt and pepper were in small bottles with metal caps, and the caps had holes in them to shake out the contents. Giant silver coffee urns spouted steam; in one of them she saw herself very long and narrow.

Miss Adair, he said. I have long admired you from afar. Waiter!

I would think so, said Adair. She settled her shawl around her shoulders. She leaned over and brushed a light dusting of ash from his sleeve just for the joy of touching him.

The waiter came. He ordered the fricassee and bottles of charged water, and after they would have the pie. Adair sat and listened as he ordered up all the food he wanted.

If we were both free, he said. Of our present entanglements. Let me think how to put this. He touched her elbow.

The way you put it is one of those forms for release.

He ignored this. Drummed his fingers on the white tablecloth. He said, Have you been proposed to before?

Adair leaned toward the major and said in a low voice, Yes, but he was a ladies’ man. He was surrounded by immense droves of wild women.

In Ripley County?

We are fairly wild down there.

Am I standing in line?

Adair opened her black eyes wide and stared around the restaurant. Do you see a line here? She turned back. And the food came. Adair ate with little conviction. She didn’t seem to need victuals, the light skimming fever that inhabited her, and the presence of the major, seemed to be all she needed.

Do eat, Adair, he said. You are diminishing to nothing.

I am trying. She wrapped her hands around the enormous coffee mug.

You make me feel like deserting, he said. Or joining the Russian Navy. One or the other. He put his hand palm up on the table, and Adair placed her hand in his. She knew that she loved him. She looked into his eyes and there saw regret.

What? she said, alarmed.

I am being transferred to Alabama. General Canby’s troops.

When? She stared at him.

I am almost ready to say let us leave now. As we are. Walk to the landing and get on the first boat.

Why not? Adair smiled at him. She felt her freedom only inches away.

I misspent my youth already. He watched the people at the other tables for a moment, and then turned to her again. I will come back for you when the war is over. I will find you either here or in Ripley County. I will find your home.

But Adair didn’t hear him. Two tables away a waiter shouted toward the kitchen for a dish called copper pennies.

But you were to get my release . . .!

I can’t. I want you to go over the wall, he said. He held her hand tightly. Can you do it?

Adair looked up at him in surprise. Over the wall, she said. Yes I can. I have to catch it at a time when the supply barrels are up against the wall. Then Rhoda said you have to bribe the guards.

He gripped his cup. Take these. With the other hand he slid across the table two gold double eagles, worth twenty-five dollars each.

My God, said Adair. She put her hand over them and slid them down and into her lap, and then put them in her waist purse.

Don’t let the matron get them.

All right. Adair wondered if any of the jittery urban people around the restaurant might be thieves, might have seen her put the money in her waist purse. She had fifty dollars in gold on her person.

And then you’re going to have to get aboard a southbound boat. You have to have a pass, and you’ll be stopped everywhere. You’ll be searched before you get on the boat and afterward. He lit one of his malodorous cigars and waved out the match. Here. He slid a pass across to her. Put it somewhere else besides that waist purse. Put these things in two different places. He drew on the cigar and blew out smoke. So you won’t lose both at the same time if it comes to that.

Adair looked down at the pass. Read the printed form and her name written in below it and his name as the authorizing officer. Her mouth was open.

Neumann reached across the table and put one knuckle under her chin and shut her mouth.

Don’t look so surprised. Or grateful. I don’t know how far that’s going to get you.

Adair tucked the paper into her sleeve and looked at him. He leaned back and smoked.

So you are off into the streets, girl.

Adair said, When will you go? Her voice was high and alarmed.

He leaned his forehead on his fist and waited without interest as the
food was delivered. The waiter dodged around tables with the pies and more coffee. Two men bumped past them. One was drunk and the other was holding on to him in handfuls of his brown coat.

In three days.

Adair put down the pastry and her fork clattered.

Three days!

I will come for you, Adair, he said. When the war is over. But I must go where I am sent. I have to. Otherwise I would be a deserter, and they have taken to shooting deserters. He watched her. Not to speak of the disgrace.

You could have got my release any time you wanted, she said. She said it loudly, and the drunk man and his companion at the next table looked over at them. But I didn’t tell you where to catch my brother so you’re off to the battlefield. And I can just run through the city like a rat.

I asked to be transferred months before you came, he said. I told you but you didn’t hear me. You hear what you want.

As far as I know you could have somebody else waiting in a dog-house at the edge of the city. She began to cry and then bit her lip. You could be
married.
With twin babies and a mother-in-law.

If you think that then give me my gold pieces back.

Not on your life!

I am not married, nor do I have some mistress languishing in a love nest in the stews of St. Louis. I meant everything I have said to you.

Adair thought she saw hurt in the lines of his face and was glad.

Oh. And think how you’re going to miss all your ladies. Adair’s eyes sparkled with tears and malice. Maybe you’ll be transferred to some women’s prison down in N’Orleans, same thing different city. Go on. I’m glad.

And it’s quite possible that you have a beau as well, he said. That you are promised to another. What do we really know of each other.

He’s dead, said Adair. They’re all dead. Cal and the Parmalee boys and Speece Newnan and all of them.

He almost said
I’m glad
but he stopped himself. He said, Don’t think about those things. Think about starting all over again.

You’re a stick, she said. The only thing that means anything to you is paper. If I were some kind of a legal brief you’d be running off with me to California right now.

He held on to her hand. Listen to me, make sense. When I am discharged I want to go to the West. I want you to come with me. California, Texas, whatever. You wrote of your home, opened your heart, it was very brave. He kept a death grip on her hand. It hurt. She tried to pull away but he would not let her go. Even if you glossed over.

It was all lies, she said. I made it all up. We live in a cave and Mama makes whiskey and Daddy balls the jack.

Don’t use that language. No matter how hurt you are.

Adair blinked. What does balling the jack mean? She got her hand away from him.

I don’t know, he said. He leaned to her across the table as if across a widening chasm between them. She was on the far side and farther away every minute. He reached for her. He opened up his heart and the secret places he had held in reserve. Adair, be my companion. You are the woman I want. Be my companion. Away from both sides. Where men haven’t killed one another in the thousands. No political slogans or women in prisons. I want a place up a valley somewhere. A person could build their own house anew. Their house and their life.

I’d rather go back to my filthy cell now, she said. They are loading the shit barrels and I don’t want to miss it. I hope you get run over by a caisson. Maybe your boat will blow up.

She stood up.

Stop, he said.

I hope you get squashed.

Adair. Listen.

But she had turned and was walking toward the door of the restaurant, back to the prison cell, and he could do no more than follow.

15

June 9—Yesterday four citizens were brought in from Callaway County; three were physicians and one a lawyer—Jeff Jones—they are suspicioned of being connected with the Knights of the Golden Circle.

—G
RIFFIN
F
ROST,
Camp and Prison Journal

Interrogation of Mary Vaughn, [whose son was a member of Quantrill’s gang] and her daughter-in-law Nancy Jane Vaughn, and her daughter Susan, which took place in the Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis, spring of 1865:

“I never willingly furnished the rebels anything last year except my own sons and son-in-law who belonged to Price’s army, whom I willingly fed when at my house. . . .I have tried hard to act as a loyal woman. I have reported my son and two others to Union authorities, and have often seen guerillas eating at the home of my daughter-in-law Nancy Jane Vaughn.”

In turn, before her death of cholera in prison, Nancy Jane Vaughn turned on her neighbors, naming nine young men of her neighborhood who had become bushwhackers, and stating that two neighbor women were “bad rebels.”

Susan Vaughn then turned on Nancy Jane and reported that bushwhackers had been visiting Nancy Jane’s house.

—
QUOTED IN
Inside War

March 12, 1865: One of the lady prisoners, Mrs. Reynolds, is very sick—has been insensible for three days; her friends, especially her cousin Miss Maggie Oliver, seems greatly distressed about her.

March 19: about five o’clock this evening Capt. Gibbs came in and announced the death of Mrs. Reynolds.

—G
RIFFIN
F
ROST,
Camp and Prison Journal

T
HE MAJOR STOOD
before the commission in the operations room at headquarters in the Ogley House. It was a commission of inquiry. The day was warm for late February and the windows stood open.

It was a panel of seven officers. The flags of the United States and the state of Missouri stood each to one side, the national flag on the right. The long windows looked out on the graceful trimmed shrubbery of the Ogley House. Whose owners were in jail in Alton for disloyalty. The staff officers of headquarters for the provost marshal had scarred the polished floors with their boot heels, and used the library shelves for piles of papers and forms and tins of tobacco and lost articles, single gauntlets and a lonely dress spur without its mate.

Major, said the chairman. He was a colonel. He did not want to be there. Major, we have spoken and taken depositions from a great number of people here, and there seems to be quite a few accusations made as to the conduct of the personnel of the prison, mainly Mrs. Buckley. She has attacked prisoners, stolen prisoners’ parcels, stopped letters. This, for instance, is an exhibit. It would have probably done the prisoner some good to have read it. She could have contemplated the rigors of war.

He indicated a stained torn letter. The seal had been hastily ripped open so that the bottom half of the letter was torn nearly across. It was water stained and illegible. It was addressed to Adair Randolph Colley, from Savannah Colley, Sugar Tree Creek, Tennessee.

In addition, said the colonel, this Buckley woman has been accused of arranging improper and licentious meetings for some of the officers acting as lawyers for these women.

The major bent his head slightly.

He said, I understand, sir. The breeze came through the open window and surrounded him and went on. He heard faintly the great iron
bell of St. Louis Cathedral ringing the hour of two. Had I known it I would have stopped it, but I was told these things were not my responsibility. Mrs. Buckley goes to her patron in the political sphere.

We know about that. The judge advocate general’s department moves rather slowly. And you know that there has already been Captain Wentworth’s court-martial on that matter. With a young woman from Danville. Rhoda Cobb. And you know he has been dishonorably discharged.