Enemy Women (24 page)

She stood for a minute to look at the great flues erupting in sparks. There were bars of red light from the boilers, and the interior lamps and candles now being lit in the passengers’ rooms. The levee was frantic and opulent with war and the needs of war. Adair had come only to steal a basket.

She walked down the long cliff face of mercantile houses. They said it stretched from Convent Street to the wood yards at Bremen. For
miles men and animals carried war materials and firewood and coal and passengers and preserved foods and fruit and furniture and glass panes packed in straw, copper wire for the telegraph lines and cotton bales and chemicals and shoes back and forth. Toted them in handbarrows and on dollies, in buckboards and two-wheeled drays. From far down toward the south levee Adair heard somebody playing on a concertina “Hard Times Come Again No More.” A tall black stevedore turned in the light of a torch and slowly placed on his head a new cap saying The LaSalle.

Adair lowered her head and pushed through the blundering dark shapes. Accountants and clerks called for the unloaders to Stop, stop, I have not yet enumerated these goods yet sir, and the men with carts appeared in the pale illumination of the warehouse doorways as if bringing some offerings into the ken of the beings of light, up out of the dark and the dark of the river and the dark of the war.

Adair moved down toward the packet landings, and to the glassy flat plane of the Mississippi beyond. The runneling lights streamed in unstable streaks far out over the black and oily surface, as if the city would print news of itself endlessly. Across on the Illinois shore a few lights stood out at the eastern railroad terminals and among the black sticks of the March woods in the American Bottoms.

A block down she saw a great sign made of planks and lit by cressets, KEOKUK PACKET. The planks were white and the letters bright red, and a knothole had fallen out of the
O
of
Keokuk.
Sparks cascaded out of the flue as the Keokuk boat came in. People stood around under the sign ready to entrust their lives to the nighttime water in their urgency to be in Keokuk.

Adair walked forward with an expectant look on her face. They would think she was meeting someone. The massive tent of Mrs. Buckley’s dress shifted around as if she were appearing in her own personal circus, and her lilac hat felt top-heavy. She pressed in with the other excited nighttime people. The stern-wheeler bumped in and in its wake a long train of roiled and frothing water. Coiled ropes were cast
into the air and uncoiled themselves hurtling through the torchlight down toward the dockmen.

She stood directly behind a woman and her husband. She was a plump woman in a cream-colored dress that had a black dot in it, and many black ruffles. The woman looked around her for someone to hand the grip to and then looked toward her husband. He was paying their fare in coins.

I am ten cents short, said the man. Dorcas, give me ten cents if you have it.

What? Dorcas started to put the bag down and leaned toward him. Adair stepped up closer behind her and reached, but the woman did not put it down. Dorcas looked around her. It is so noisy.

I said, give me ten cents if you have it.

Dorcas finally put the grip down and Adair said to herself she would wait until the man turned to pay the fare. With intense concentration the woman dredged up her coin purse from the chain at her waist. She was clearly afflicted with bad eyesight. So Adair reached again.

A few minutes later she was hurrying down the levee, among the crowds. She carried the stolen grip like a load of sin. Thief! Thief! The high, repetitive birdlike cry made her heart clack frantically like a sticky, fibrillating valve.

Adair could never have imagined herself alone on a great levee like this and stealing somebody’s luggage. I guess you can get used to just about anything, she thought. And this is wartime anyway. Soldiers went past her at a trot casting about for the thief and here she was carrying the thing. She pushed on through the crowd. She wished to be in the dark where she was not so easily seen and where no doubt other thieves held their jubilees in corner taverns and empty lots.

She walked more confidently now up Plum Street on the gentle rise away from the river. Adair did not know how many miles it was to Ripley County but the only way to get there was to start walking. Her longing to be away from the noise of the city and the war was the most intense thing she had ever felt in her life.

She had to stop someplace now, where there was a light, and see what it was she had stolen. She had nearly spent the strength that had come to her. But she could go on a ways yet.

She had come so far south in the city that the streets were now unpaved. Sometimes there was an empty lot between houses walled off with a plank fence, and a board door in the fence. At one of these she stopped. Small casks were stacked around outside the door like fat men and smelling richly of cheese. Inside the plank wall there would be a place to hide. From the second story of the brick tenement, gaslight poured down from a window into the courtyard. If she could get in there quietly, she could inspect the contents of the grip in the hard, acidic light.

Adair took one of her hair combs from out of her hair to slip it through the crack and lift the latch. The board door was plastered with torn and flapping advertisements for Dan Rice, the World-Reknowned Clown, and her sleeve rasped against the paper and it sounded as loud as a gunshot. The metal latch rattled. She lifted up her pale face to look at the second-story window, but no one came to peer out.

She went in and shut the latch behind her in theftlike silence. With all her skirts close around her she walked silently among cheese casks to sit in the slat of whey-colored light from above. If she made a noise again the people up in the second story would look out and they would know very well what she was doing. Gloating over her stolen articles.

Her plaster cherries rattled slightly. She pressed the brass swinging clasp and opened the grip wide to the light. She lifted out a pair of drawers with tatting on the legs. Clean underwear! She found spectacles in a hard leather case, and then there was a daguerreotype of somebody dead in a coffin, a man. She put that on the ground and would leave it there. But the frame was good. She left it anyway. There was a little velvet sack with a silver-backed hairbrush and some steel hairpins, a pair of backless slippers, a light silk petticoat wadded tight, cotton stockings, a canvas sack containing cornstarch and a cotton one full of
raw cotton bolls for applying the cornstarch. She felt of a paper package of long things. She carefully unrolled the paper.

She heard voices overhead but they were just talking to each other. The voices of two men. Four tallow candles and a bundle of matches fell into her hands. This was so they wouldn’t have to pay for candles on the boat north to Keokuk. Her father had done the same thing when they went up the river to Ste. Genevieve from New Madrid. The steamboat people charged you the earth for everything they gave you, even that common brown soap. Then Adair found four folded handkerchiefs, one fancy linen with openwork and the other three cotton. There was a small sewing kit in a roll of plaid flannel with three needles and six colors of thread.

She ran her hand along the bottom lining. It was heavy canvas. There was nothing else in there. Adair felt much better. She took a deep relieved breath and leaned back against the brick wall. She felt armed. Now she needed some kind of permit they issued to you to go where you wanted to go. There would be people in St. Louis who forged those sorts of passes all the time.

Above her she heard the two men in earnest discussion about whether to go to work in Belcher’s sugar refinery or not. That the tubular boiler had exploded not four years ago and was it worth the wages. One of them came to the window to reach out and closed the shutters against the increasing damp of the night and so she sat still. Overhead the shutters banged to and shed flakes of old paint and rust. They fell onto her lilac straw hat with tiny rattles.

Adair got up and moved out and away from the cheese barrels, slow and smooth like a nocturnal animal. She wished she had a nail bar or crowbar for she would have had the lid off of one of the cheese casks in a moment, but she did not. They were as closed to her as they were to the rats.

She opened the creaking board door in the plank wall, and rasped past the posters of Dan Rice with his lines of circus horses. She walked on down Third and wondered how she could safely pass the night.
Maybe walking, but that was dangerous. She went on, trudging heavily. This was all something that just had to be got through. It wasn’t permanent, being a thief and alone and being stuck in this awful hell of coal smoke and brick.

After a while she came to a wagon yard and slipped in. She spent the night half-sitting in a pile of hay with the quilt around her shoulders and the stolen grip in her lap.

18

C
ONFEDERATE
C
ORRESPONDENCE

Camp Emmet McDonald, April 4, 1863

Maj. E. G. Williams, Assistant Adjutant-General

Major: Captain Timothy Reeves reported this morning that he had information of 200 cavalry on the march to burn Bollinger’s Mills and destroy the records of Doniphan. He asked for reinforcements. I wrote him that his force was sufficient to defend the mill, and ordered him to do it. This Mill has the capacity for grinding for 5,000 men, and is the only one between the Eleven Point and the Current, south of Doniphan.

Colton Greene, Colonel, Commanding Brigade

—OR,
CH. XXXIV, P
. 813

William L. Russell, who served as combination county clerk and circuit clerk and recorder, heard rumors of a Union order to occupy Doniphan. . . .He took all of Ripley County’s record books and hid them in a cave along the east side of the Current River just south of town for safekeeping. The cave had a small opening, just big enough to accommodate a youth or a very slim person, lying on his back, to ease the records inside. . . .In 1867, G. H. Hucherson, county clerk, retrieved the records and returned them to Doniphan. Few records from Ripley County exist from the period 1863 to 1867.

—
FROM
The History of Ripley County,
CHAPBOOK, PUBLISHED BY THE
D
ONIPHAN
P
ROSPECT
-N
EWS,
D
ONIPHAN
, M
ISSOURI,
1992

T
HE NEXT MORNING
before first light Adair took up her carpet sack and set out. She would not feel she had escaped until she had passed the city’s bounds. She walked through the limestone dust of the streets, and paused by a cart where hot sweet potatoes were sold, looking at them. After a minute the man who owned the cart handed her four hot sweet potatoes in a brown paper wrapper and shook his head when she said she could not pay. He didn’t speak English. It sounded to her that his words were Irish, but she wasn’t sure.

She dodged into a doorway to get out of the way of a drove of horses coming past, urged along by men in wide hats and weathered coats. They were being taken to market somewhere. She looked through the crowd of nervous horses as they trotted by, searching for Whiskey or Highlander, Dolly or Gimcrack but the dust was thick and they were moving too fast.

The train station was a great wooden hall with many large doors in it and a crowd of people going in and out. Adair stood for a moment to see how it was that people went about buying a ticket. She was afraid of the crowds.

She stood in line behind a man with a long back. He wore a striped coat that hung on him as if on a peg. Adair stood quietly listening as he spoke with the man selling tickets. The ticket seller hid within a sort of booth and peered out at the world from behind brass bars. He had a large beard with stripes of gray coming from the corners of his mouth. To one side was a dish of fried potatoes. It was his breakfast.

Where’s your pass? he said to the thin man.

Here, sir. The man laid a folded paper on the counter.