Enemy Women (29 page)

Adair said, I have the consumption and the steam doctor in Valles Mines says I must eat eggs and get a lot of fresh air and rest. I can’t rest until I am home.

Where’s that?

Near Doniphan, in Ripley County.

Well, I understand that, said the young woman driving. I hope you last till you get there.

The other said, We would carry you on down the road a ways but we can’t because of this hog. The hog made a deep, compact grunt as if it knew it had been referred to. You would do well to get you some kind of animal to pack that load of truck even if it is only a jackass.

There are none about, said Adair. Because of the war, I suspect.

Are your menfolk off fighting? Which side?

They are all dead, said Adair.

Well, you be careful. There’s nothing going on around here but
horse stealing, said the younger woman. That scoundrel Hildebrand and his men are thieving horses from the Federals and holding them here and there, and then running them to market in St. Louis. They don’t care who gets in front of them, either, they’ll run right over you.

The other woman said, I’d keep on going through Rouenne if I were you.

I’ll be careful, said Adair, and went on.

ADAIR CAME WALKING,
tired and coughing heavily, down the single street of Rouenne at about noon. She looked upon the few small French-style houses with great discouragement. They were built of stone with thick walls, a high, steep roof and long verandas. Beyond them, at a far bend of the road, she could see a two-story frame house in the American style, with tall windows and peeling paint. The March sky was full of eastbound clouds in running streams. She was suspended on a light fever once again. This was disheartening. She walked down to the bend in the road, and then sat down on the stone curb in front of the grand old house. How many miles on to her home? She sat in the sun and drew back the long cuffs of the red jacket so she could count on her fingers.

She must stay on the Military Road, and cross the St. Francis at Greenville. Then the Military Crossing of the Black River, after that it was Cane Creek and then Ten-Mile Creek. Adair put her forefinger to her head, between her eyebrows, as if it would help
her think. How many miles was it between all those crossings? More than a hundred.

A woman came out of the house and regarded her.

Well now, there you are, all on your lonesome, said the woman. Lorn and lonesome.

Yes I am, said Adair. I am walking home. I thought I would sit and rest here for a minute.

This March weather can go bad any hour, said the woman. You’d better come on in. She had a print dress and a large scoop-shovel bonnet
on her head. She opened the door and gestured inside with an imperious motion.

I don’t think I want to, said Adair. This stone wall has gathered heat for my benefit.

You don’t look well, said the woman. I don’t want you a-sitting out here.

The house was very silent. Adair came into the hallway and looked around her. It was a big house and echoed to their steps because there was almost no furniture nor rugs. Adair put down the carpet sack and bundle and smoothed back her hair.

Come in the kitchen and have some buttermilk and cornbread, said the woman, and so Adair followed her. Adair did not like the feel of the place, as it seemed very empty and devoid of life. There were old silhouettes on the walls, cut from black paper, framed in ovals.

I’m Lila Spencer, said the woman. This here was my grandfather’s house.

How do you do, said Adair. I’m Adair Colley, lately of Egypt.

Adair sat at the kitchen table and ate the cornbread with butter on it, and drank the buttermilk. She did not take off the red jacket. It had a mandarin collar that stood up around her face and made her feel armored against the world. The March sun came through the tall windows in twenty-four squares and the kitchen smelled of old ashes and a cold fireplace.

There ain’t nobody here but me and my daughter, the woman said. She took off her bonnet and sat across from Adair. He’s gone off with Van Dorn’s men two years ago and I ain’t seen him since.

Adair nodded. You’re better off.

I think you ought to get to bed, said the woman. She was a thin woman and had a receding chin. She reached out to Adair’s face and touched her cheek. I think you’d best spend a week in bed before you go on anywheres.

Maybe I ought, said Adair. She felt so weak she put her head in both hands. But I got to get home.

What for? Where you going? The woman bent forward, looking at her intently.

Adair saw that the grain of the wood tabletop appeared to her in marvelous clarity. A knot that seemed to be an eye staring up out of the wood, some strange being trapped in the tabletop and staring out.

I am going down to Ripley County, she said. That’s where my home is. She tried to think of why she would have been in St. Louis. I went up to St. Louis to see if I could get my brother out of Alton. He was captured at Shiloh.

Huh! said the woman. I bet that’s a lie.

Well! said Adair. I don’t know why I’d tell any lie. She thought, No wonder her husband run off to fight with Van Dorn.

You been up there chasing a man.

Adair reached down for her carpet sack. I think I’ll just go on. She was not supposed to become exercised about mean, vulgar people but to command her feelings so her inner electricity could assail the predator Consumption.

The woman stood up and came around to Adair’s side of the table and picked up the carpet sack and hoisted it.

You are far too sick to go on. You come on with me. Adair followed the woman into the pantry and watched her as she pulled sheets from a shelf, and a down quilt in an embroidered covering. Then into a drawing-room on one side of the great hall. The woman made up an ancient chaise longue into a bed. Directly Adair sat down on it she felt as if she were falling asleep. She took off the lilac straw hat.

I bet he was a Yankee soldier, wasn’t he? Lila Spencer beat up a pillow and put it in place. She almost seemed to be talking to herself so little reference did she give to anything Adair said. And he come and just won your heart and then went on to St. Louis.

No, ma’am, she said. I went to find my brother at Alton and that’s all I went to do.

Adair took off the red jacket. She struggled out of her dress and the corset and retied the signet ring securely to the stays. She kicked off
the ankle-jacks. Then she fell asleep. It was a sleep so deep as to seem drugged. It was like a coma. Every corner of her consciousness was extinguished in her body and mind’s effort to heal itself, to set things to rights in some deep interior affray.

She partly awoke late some time that evening. She heard noises from the other houses in the small town just up the road, people cutting wood for the evening fire, and a churn thumping in its barrel. The sound of two people out on the road in front of the great house speaking in French. She heard the ringing of an anvil.

There were voices and the noise of clattering dishes in the kitchen. She heard a fire crackling. Lila Spencer and her daughter were talking. Adair listened. She couldn’t do much else but listen. From what Adair could gather from their conversation, the woman’s husband was not with the Confederate general Van Dorn at all, but a plain bushwhacker with Hildebrand, and there was a price on his head and another woman in his arms.

They came into the room to look in on her, and then sat down.

Adair tried to look as if she had just woke up and had heard nothing of their talk. She nodded sleepily as they told her that this ancient house was the construction of a man named John Smith T, who had added the
T
to his name to distinguish himself from the hundreds of other John Smiths. That was his cutout there on the wall. He came from Virginia and claimed land from the French government in 1806, and started up the silver diggins here in this country, near DeSoto and Valles Mines and Bonne Terre.

Adair drifted in and out of their talking. She managed to nod as if all were normal. Days seemed to go by. She sat up and then fell asleep again over soup. Once she woke up in the night and stayed awake for a long time. As she lay there she saw a cart going slowly down the road with a lantern hung from the back. Bars of light following behind as if tied to the tailgate.

O, for a beaker full of the warm south, said the girl. Adair opened her eyes and sat up with the blankets around her to look at the young
woman. She sat on a chair beside Adair with a hand gin and turned the crank. Cottonseeds rattled into the tray. Instead of this cold March weather here in this forsaken district. And then the girl whispered to Adair,
My father is with Hildebrand, robbing and killing, and he’s run off with another woman.

Adair lay back down and went to sleep again.

21

About this time [when Lefors was five or six years old, at the family farm just south of Fort Smith Arkansas] a squad of Yankees came to our house and hitched a team of fine mules to a large wagon and loaded it with grain and feedstuffs, then hitched up another span of good mules to a smaller wagon and loaded it with all the provisions they could find in the house. They even taken the bedding off the beds and taken all the best of the women’s clothing to give to the Yankee women, and turned over the cupboard and stomped the dishes. One soldier grabbed my sister Dollie and tried to Kiss her but she jerked back and slapped him a hard blow in the face. He then started for her in great anger but one, I suppose the officer in charge of the soldiers, said to let that girl alone. He did so. Dollie was about 17 years old.

My father and brothers were in the Southern Army, brother Perry was about 16 and brother Bill was about 15 years old. In 1863 a squad of Yankees captured my brother Perry and was holding him along with some other men of the Southern Army for exchange. Perry heard the Yankees planning to come to our house to kill my Father who was then about 55 years old and a neighbor, old man Bunch, who was about 70 years old. Perry managed to escape that night and walked and run some 15 miles, and come by Mr. Bunch’s and told him what he had overheard. But Mr. Bunch said they would not do that to an old man like him. . . .

I remember they saddled a small black pony for my father and helped him on it, as he was crippled from the rheumatism, and they left, my brother on foot. They made it to some southern army. I think it was General Price’s army. Soon after daylight the next morning a squad of Yankees came to our
house to kill my Father, as they came by Mr. Bunch’s and shot him to death. My father told Mother before he left to load up what she could in a small, rather old wagon, and she with us children to go south and try to make it to Texas.

—
Autobiography of Rufe Lefors,
BY
R
UFE
L
EFORS,
U
NIVERSITY OF
T
EXAS
P
RESS,
A
USTIN,
T
EXAS,
1986

T
HEN IT WAS
early morning. The young woman was sitting on the single chair and looking at Adair. In her hands she held a sheet of paper. It was a playbill, and she had written on the back of it.

She saw that Adair was awake and sat up straight.

Would you like to hear some of my compositions? said the young woman. There are so few people here I can share them with. Everybody around here is French and they are very common people. People of a low class.

Adair brought herself upright in the chaise longue, and the sheets tangled around her legs. You are going to read me some of your compositions?

Poetry, said the young woman. My name is Rosalie. She nodded as if to encourage Adair to agree with her.

Adair wiped her hands across her face, pulled her long hair to the back of her neck. She began to cough but lay back again still and quiet. It went away.

Well, I guess, she said. I sure don’t want to be like all those low people. Read on.

Adair felt she had slept out her fever. She had emerged on the other side of it. There did not appear to be a fire in the entire house. The drawing room fireplace was utterly empty of ashes and its cream-
colored stones were swept clean.