Enemy Women (32 page)

Down the road she heard a woman’s voice calling
Pelagie? Pelagie?

The flies fought with one another and sparkled with their green backs over the fingers and the knuckles. Adair backed away and then turned quickly and ran back to the house. Her hair crept up her neck.

She stopped in the kitchen. She looked back out the window toward the washhouse again, as if the dead would arise and come shambling in the sunlight toward the kitchen door. She turned and ran to the drawing room. She stumbled and nearly fell. She wiped her palms on her skirt. It was some Federal soldier who didn’t want to give up his horse and look where it got him.

Rosalie and her mother came down the road talking together. The gate clattered. Adair tried to think if she had left tracks behind the washhouse. It was too late to go back again and see.

Lila began supper, stirring up the fire and setting on a kettle. Lila smiled at Adair with a deadly and intense smile. It was a smile made of nettles and spines. Her eyes stayed open and glassy when she smiled.

Well, old William wants fifty cents to lay out a garden. There is so little cash these days.

Hardly any at all, said Adair. Maybe they had gone through her things when she was sleeping out the fever and knew she had the silver dollars. She fervently wished for night to come, in case she had left tracks by the washhouse. The sun hung suspended at the edge of the mountain and it seemed like it would hang there an entire day more, as when Joshua said, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, so it could shine down on all the dead soldiers. Adair smiled quickly at Lila and walked
to the fireplace and then tried to think why she had done so. She took the poker and stirred the coals.

Lila began to hammer at a piece of steak with the meat mallet. We need your help around here, girl. You’ve been eating our rations and not doing a thing.

Then hand over that meat mallet, said Adair. Lila went on striking and striking. Adair stood up. I can pound that steak as well as you.

There’s shovel work to be done, said Lila. This rain has settled things.

Hush, mother, said Rosalie. Just hush up.

Give me that meat mallet then, said Adair. And you go do the shovel work. She put her hand out for the mallet and smiled. Lila frowned.

Just sit down for now, said Lila. You ain’t well. She drove the knife with a fine, expert cut into salt pork. She looked sideways at Adair. Things have to be done that you evidently can’t imagine.

That night thunder strode up out of the west, marching toward Rouenne, and its echoes rolled over and over through the hills. Then it began to rain again. It came in flat sheets shivering down the glass panes, and the pecan trees outside bowed over. The house shook. Adair knew that the thunder was making iron. Lightning and thunder collided with the granite hills of the mining country and it made iron. She listened to the hammer of the storm strike the hills as if they were anvils. They all sat out on the veranda and watched the storm pass. After an hour it rumbled off to the southeast.

Sometimes people went by on the road but no one looked up at the house or hailed them. Rosalie read in a small thin book of poems for a while until the light failed. Then they went inside and lit three candles. Each of them sat in a chair in the drawing room to do their needlework. Adair sat on the couch with her candle on an upended ammunition box. She sat on the end where the shoes and the other things had been shoved under, so her skirts falling to the floor would hide them better. Her hands were sweaty and the needle slipped from between
her fingers repeatedly. She tried to wipe her palms on her skirt without the two women seeing her.

She took out the Log Cabin and began to piece in strips she had cut from the brass-colored silk twill, to replace the disintegrated silk organza. She waited. Soon they would become sleepy. Soon, soon.

That’s a Sutherland plaid, isn’t it? Lila gestured toward Adair’s worn dress.

Is it? said Adair. I forgot which clan we were. They would give over and go upstairs to sleep and she would walk out the window and down the road and take Whiskey with her.

But they sewed on, and chatted, bright-eyed and nocturnal.

Adair forced herself to yawn, for yawning was contagious, and soon they would yawn too, and be sleepy and stupid. She was pretending to yawn but soon enough they were real ones.

That was a good quilt, said Lila, and yawned. Well, excuse me.

Is it all silk and velvet? said Rosalie. What happened to it?

Adair said, Well, a neighbor woman wanted to do my mother a favor and washed it in boiling water and thrashed it with a washing dolly. And it just come apart.

Why, I would have thrashed that neighbor woman! said Lila.

It’s a Sunshine and Shadow, isn’t it? asked Rosalie. Adair said it was, but then Lila kept on about the neighbor woman. She was working herself up into an indignant fit and so would be wider awake than before. Outside somewhere in that dark and starving pasture Whiskey was grazing desperately on whatever he could get. Ragweed. Leaves and sticks. Adair would leave with him this very night if only these murdering owl-women would go to sleep. The hand reached up into the back of her mind as if seeking a way in and Adair bent to her work and thought of her horse, and how she would save him, and the power he would convey to her, the power of flight and distance.

It was then ten minutes after ten. She yawned again like a jar mouth.

I’ve thrashed people, said Lila. I took after that Pelagie Benet with that meat mallet, her trying to take something that wasn’t hers.

Let’s talk about something else, said Rosalie. Something else than thrashing.

Lila snorted. She said, I suppose that is an old family quilt, Adair.

Adair wiped her eyes and said, Yes, it is. There’s a lot of stories in it. Then it occurred to her she could put them to sleep with stories the way you did children. Long, dull stories.

Mother was never a hand with quilts, said Rosalie.

No, no, I am just left to do all the shovel work around here, said Lila.

Well, shut up, Mother.

Don’t tell me to shut up, Rosalie May.

Adair said, Now this piece was from Tolliver Jackson’s wedding dress and they said she was a deaf-mute and never spoke a word in her entire life. She ran her thin fingers over the dark rose velvet hearth. Deaf as a cow skull. She blatted sometimes. Like a sheep. When she was excited. And out in the pasture by the road all the sheep would look up and stop chewing. It wasn’t a human sound. It was a kind of a call of the wild. I never heard it myself but they said it would raise the hair on your neck especially if she was up in the dark and wandering around the house.

Rosalie should have been born a deaf-mute, said Lila. We’d have all been better off.

Adair said,
But!
there were those who said as a baby she could tell most conversation wasn’t worth the trouble it took to learn how to talk or listen either. Adair lowered her voice, kept her voice low so that they had to strain to hear her. And you know, one time her father my great-great uncle who was a justice of the peace, he was Nathaniel Crownover Colley . . .let’s see, but she married James Harvey Jackson, that’s right.

Of the Waxhaw Jacksons? Lila asked. She yawned and wiped her eyes. Adair glanced over quickly at the women. They were nearly bald eyed with boredom and fallen into various states of hypnosis. Lila yawned so hard she sniggered.

No, ma’am, no relation to the president. James Harvey Jackson always said he fought in the Revolution because he bit off a Tory’s finger
in a political brawl in front of the Mecklenburg mailhouse but myself, I don’t think that counts.

Adair leaned closer to her candle. She peered at her stitches.

Now he hired a professor to come down from Transylvania College, whose name was, his name was . . .Adair let a long pause drift into the room.

The women waited impatiently, stabbing the cloth with their winking needles. Rosalie wiped her eyes.

His name was Cromwell Backhouse, Professor Cromwell Backhouse, or it could have been Cromwell Chesholme. Or both. Maybe he had two heads and a name for each one. And a hat for each one.

Adair drew out her thread and with it a long considering silence.

No, it was Backhouse. He was supposed to come and talk to Tolliver concerning things of interest. Adair stopped and yawned and then both of the other women yawned. Notions and theories. The motions of the stars and other celestial spheres, and the pressure of water per square inch.

Rosalie’s head dropped on her sternum and then snapped upright again. She yawned and squinted at her embroidery.

But she didn’t respond to any of it at all. She fell asleep lying on the dog. It was one of those big old yellow hounds that don’t care if you lie on them. And she would get tired like that and just lay down and go to sleep and just sink away into sleep because she couldn’t hear anything, not a sound, she lived in a world of peace and quiet where she could just lay down and go to sleep anytime day or night.

Suddenly both women yawned at the same time. Adair leaned close to one of the garnet pieces. The ones with the clocks on them were very pretty but they had curled up.

She used to go to sleep in the sunshine on the porch and then once she fell asleep in the hay wagon when it was coming back from the fields and it was rocking back and forth so gently and she would get the deepest sleep of anybody, and she fell asleep once in the middle of a militia parade and slept the entire afternoon while everybody else was
arguing about the war, and she would also sleep for hours when they took the horses to be shod and the anvil ringing and men telling stories, there she was dozing very peacefully in spite of the swearing and dirty talk, nothing bothered her while she slept and slept and slept.

She heard Lila yawn again and say in a low voice,
Oh Lord.

Rosalie closed her eyes and then opened them very wide and stared at the towel she was hemming. Lila’s head had fallen on the chair back. Then she opened her eyes and threw her head forward to try to bring herself upright and awake. Laid back again.

Adair was silent for a long moment and the candlelight shone along her needle. She began to cough, and so she put her fist to her mouth and choked it back.

She would sleep there at Sugar Tree while the men were sitting outside in the yard telling stories, and I remember that my daddy was with them and the hens were pecking around their feet and it was summertime. There was this hen that got hold of a grasshopper that was as big as your entire thumb and the hen was shaking her head and trying to swallow it but the grasshopper was a-crawling back out with all six legs like it was rowing up the Ohio. And Tolliver was asleep on the dog. . . .

Rosalie’s head was on the chair arm. She was sound asleep. Adair spoke more and more slowly. Asle-e-e-e-p on the dog and the d-o-g was asl-e-e-e-e-p too, and a-snoring, with its big old lips flubbering in and out. . . .Lila’s head dropped forward.

Adair paused. The silence of the house was broken only by the whippoorwills singing in the outer darkness and the clock snicking out the seconds as if it were cutting them off from an endless strand of seconds with a sharp, invisible knife.

Adair was silent for a long time. Suddenly Lila jerked all over and sat up and said,

My goodness it’s late. Mother and daughter struggled up out of their sleep and stood looking around themselves like dazed chickens.

Well, good night, said Rosalie.

Adair laid her wet and sweaty hands flat in her lap, the needle and
thread laid across them. She said good night and watched them carrying their candles in hand to the stairway and thump upstairs. Their shadows streamed downstairs behind them. She listened to the beds creak. She sat for a long time in the beauty of the secret and private darkness.

24

C
ONFEDERATE
C
ORRESPONDENCE

Camp Martin, On Cherokee Bay, June 13, 1863

To: Brigadier-General Marmaduke From: Captain Timothy Reeves

I wish to say to General Price that there are distilleries on the borders of Arkansas and Missouri that are consuming all the corn through this country (they pay $4 per bushel), taking the forage from our horses, and leaving the soldiers’ families in a state of suffering, unless they pay $4 per bushel for corn for their subsistence. They sell their whiskey for $20 per gallon, making about $60 out of a bushel of corn. It is the wish of the majority of the people that there be put a stop to it, which we submit for his consideration.