Authors: Paulette Jiles
There are several applications by Missourians to become members of my command. My company being full, I cannot take them without permission to raise another company. You will please let me know what I shall do in regard to it.
Yours, respectfully, T. Reeves, Captain, Commanding
—OR,
CH. XXXIV, P
. 867
Captain Lucien Farris and a large band of the Rebel faith, paid us a visit in November or early December of 1864. They came past Mr. Moore’s and on down to our home and pitched camp by a twelve acre field of yellow corn and yellow pumpkins. They used the pumpkins, cut in half, as bread trays and the corn to feed their animals. They selected two fat heifers belonging to Robert Taylor and butchered them. They stayed three days and as there were 400 of
them and 400 horses to feed, you can imagine our corn crop was missing many bushels at harvest time but it was a friendly visit you know.
—J. J. C
HILTON, FROM THE
Current Local,
D
ECEMBER
31, 1931,
REPRINTED IN
The Civil War in Carter and Shannon Counties
A
T MIDNIGHT FURNITURE
shapes strangely human and humble stood around like wooden servants abandoned. Adair got up and pulled on the plaid dress. Mrs. Buckley’s dress was stuffed into the carpet sack and so were the shoes that laced up the side. Also a length of hempen rope. In the silence she heard her own breathing, the searing crackle of her lungs.
The window stood open to the spring air. It was March 25. She drew on her red jacket, and took her carpet sack in one hand and her hat in the other. She stepped out of the drawing room window, and dropped. She walked across the north lawn to the rails of the pasture. The scent of honeysuckle was sweet and very lulling. She walked silently on the new grass.
Adair felt a cutting chill breeze spring up at her back. It would carry her scent downwind to the lineback dun horse. She stood still and waited. Whiskey lifted his head in a startled motion and opened his nostrils to the wind. Then he pricked up his ears and turned and looked at her standing at the rails. He nodded several times and lashed his tail and then he came striding over to her, shushing through the ragweed.
He walked slowly, his strength very low, but still with that inner vitality and intelligence, the alert curiosity. He stepped forward on his good straight legs, and no matter how thin he was he still carried his head well on his arched neck. She stood watching him come. He came finally to the rails. Adair stroked away the long fan of his forelock and pressed her forehead to his. Her lungs sang and whistled. She drew out the butcher knife she had stolen from the kitchen and tried to cut the string but she saw that it was smooth wire. The bell trembled overhead but did not ring. Then Whiskey shoved at the gate with his nose, impatient,
and the bell jingled. Adair grabbed his head and pushed him away, and quit trying to get the gate open.
She put the carpet sack and her heavy bundle over the rails, and then silently slid over herself. She put the rope on Whiskey’s neck and led him away from the gate, along the rail fence behind the washhouse and there she slowly lifted down the top rail without dropping it. Then the second one.
Come on, she said. She tugged at the rope. A wind started up and the brass bell began to ring. Come on, Whiskey, she said. You got to come on.
Whiskey stared hard at the bottom rail as if he might have lost some of his eyesight, and then bent to sniff at it. She pulled again. He sat back on his haunches, and she knew he was going to jump it so she stood aside and he lifted himself and sailed over it. For a moment he was in the night sky and outlined against Capricorn, his mane a black wave. He plunged ahead of Adair, into the grapevine thicket and pulled her after him. She hung onto her baggage, and Whiskey stepped into the grave with one hoof and it went in up over his ankle, and Adair felt her feet sink and her skirts catch on something, then she was pulled behind again as Whiskey kicked himself loose and gained the road.
Adair took up her carpet sack and bundle, and then she and Whiskey hurried southward on down the road in the starlight. The roadside fields soon gave way to thick forest. Her skirts blew out around her ankles, and she kept her hand on his neck. He turned his head as he walked and pressed his nose against her again and took in her scent. Then he strode along willingly, but sometimes he would drop his head low and she knew he was not his former self. They went on all night under the stars and she felt no need of sleep because of her vigilance and her fear of the Spencers.
Adair jumped onto his bare back at a low place, and held her baggage in front of her and pushed him into a trot. He struck out and looked around himself with a deep interest. His smooth trot was the same as always, long and reaching. She thought it was possible that they covered a good ten or fifteen miles before first light. Whiskey’s spine
was like a rafter but with her skirts packed up under her she could sit him well enough. He nodded his head up and down in a fit of nodding as if very pleased with himself and with her and with being on the road home, or on the road to anywhere. He was a traveling kind of horse.
At dawn they came to a trail that went off to the left. The road went down to a bottomland, where hackberry trees made a grove of shade and under them grew acres of the short oat grass that horses love. Among the hackberry she found an abandoned log hunting cabin and tarried in it for a day. Adair turned him loose in the oat grass, and he grazed very hungrily, as if he would not leave a blade of grass standing. He ripped up fifteen bites before he even stopped to chew.
Adair hung her red Zouave jacket out in the sun. She combed her hair with the silver-backed brush, looking at herself in the hand mirror. Well, at least she didn’t kill anybody for it. She sat down and put on the new ladies’ shoes. They came up above her ankle and laced up on the inside. They would not slide and her feet could heal. She went repeatedly to the slanted doorframe to look at her horse, at the way the sun shone on his taffeta, changeable coat turning pale gold and then silver-gray in the shadows, the burnished black stripe down his spine. A great joy seemed to possess him as he walked as a free being in the rich grass.
The sun came through one of the empty windows and glistened on the cobwebs strung across the opening. Adair looked at it carefully, bending forward with her hands upon her thighs. She searched for his initials,
W
and
N,
and when she didn’t she pulled several strands loose to make it look as if there were a
W
and an
N.
William Neumann. Then she watched at the doorway to see if the Spencer women had come after her.
Then that night she lay down and dreamed a terrible dream that she remembered in infinite detail and in which she was being hanged for cutting telegraph lines. She woke up exhausted.
And so they went on down the road south, moving toward Iron Mountain. Traveling at evenings and early mornings only, through the heavily forested county. Over the next few days Whiskey began to gain strength, for Adair found every lush creek bottom on the way south
and paused there to let him graze. She stood off the trail at least twice, when she had heard Union patrols in the distance. She got Whiskey upwind of them, so he would not call out to their horses.
The third time they nearly surprised her coming around a bend and the officer calling out “By twos, at a trot!” The only way clear of them was up a steep bank, but Whiskey dug in his toes and clawed his way up the bank, bucked himself upward the last five yards and over the top, thrashing his tail in the joy of it all. They rode into a pine thicket, and Adair jumped down and clamped his nostrils shut, so that when he did call out to the Union horses he made a peculiar buzzing noise and was startled at himself. Adair stood very quietly and listened. Whiskey was the sort of strong and lively animal an officer would like to take from her and ride him into battle. Well they will do a good job getting him away from me ever again, she thought. She waited until they were well gone and their commands and hoofbeats faded into the hills. Then after a half hour she went on.
Often during the night she heard the remote barking of dogs at house places far off the Trace, up distant mountain valleys and on hillsides. A light could be seen a long way off. But lights were rare in the dusk, and in the early mornings they started before dawn but there was no smell of woodsmoke from breakfast fires anywhere about them.
The road stayed mostly in the bottomlands, and when it forced itself upward over a ridge the stony roadbed made Whiskey pick his way carefully, his hooves slipping among the granite rocks. When they regained the bottomlands again the road became easier and once again floored in sand and gravel. It was hard going but Adair thought of her home with the lights in the windows, and being up in the girls’ room by herself with everybody else downstairs and herself dreaming in silent privacy, watching the lightning crawl up Copperhead. A house they themselves owned and were beholden to no one, were not beggars asking a place in somebody else’s kitchen.
She had to go around the Union garrison at Iron Mountain, so Adair took a road that went off to the west; the sign said it would arrive at Mungar’s Mills. After a mile or so of the clattering rocky bed, it did
as it promised. In a good flat valley, alongside a graveled river, a millhouse stood asleep in the sun. The mill’s eighteen-foot undershot wheel made a regular thundering sound as the blades struck the water in the race. Houses beside it were all abandoned. There were no worn footpaths going from house to house, or smoke from the chimneys, or bedding being aired, nor cats in the windows. Three or four were burnt and only the chimneys standing. Adair crossed below the dam, riding through the spray. An elderly man sat on the steps in front and stared at her as she rode up.
What river is this? she asked.
North Fork of the Black. He nodded. Yes, ma’am, that’s the North Fork of the Black River.
I’m going around Iron Mountain, she said. How do I get around from here?
The man sat back and stared at her. His beard came down to the middle of his chest, and his hands were stained and feeble.
Well, if I was you, with that good-looking horse, I’d stay away from the Yankees too, he said.
Well, that’s what I am doing, said Adair.
Reeves or Coleman will take him from you too, any road.
I know it.
Where do you want to go to afterward?
Down to Doniphan Courthouse.
Well. The miller nodded to nobody in particular. Do you want to buy any corn? I have a sack of cracked corn. Red and blue. Country corn. The mill wheel revolved, spilling its slats of water.
I’ll take it, said Adair.
He lifted himself slowly and went into the millhouse, and came back out packing a twenty-five-pound sack of cracked corn.
Just stay on this road here, and it will take you to Centerville. You’ll be a good twenty miles southwest of the Union hole-up. Then on south on the Van Buren road, but them patrols go raiding down that road all the time. Stay on to the west of it. I’d go through the Irish Wilderness and then around. They raid down from Patterson all the time.
I know it. Thank you, said Adair. She handed him two silver dollars.
Have you heard aught of the war? he asked. He stood with his hand on Whiskey’s shoulder, patting him. Whiskey was looking at the mill wheel with great curiosity, his ears cocked up straight. We heard Lee was boxed up on ever side there in Virginia.
No, sir, I ain’t heard anything, she said. But it can’t go on much longer.
Well, you could stay here, he said. It’s hard getting up in the morning and nobody here.
I better keep on.
At nighttimes them houses look like they were talking to one another. Yersty a door fell in at Wellams’ house. Hinges rotted and it just fell in and laid there.
It looks pretty lonesome.
I have not fared well without my daughter. Her and the baby is buried in the floor of that house there. He turned toward a house place nearby and gestured at it. I was going to burn it down over their grave and leave the chimney for a headstone. She just screamed two-three days. Daddy! Daddy! But I couldn’t do nothing about it. The baby wouldn’t come.
I am sorry to hear it.
You could stay on here a while.
Well, sir, I’m sorry, but I got to be a witness in court in Oklahoma Territory.
She put the sack on behind her and then went on. She rode with her skirts tucked up under her and her stockinged legs hanging down each side. She leaned down often to pat Whiskey and stroke his neck. He strode along now with his old springing step, his tail lashing, looking about himself with interest at the the world. Several times he went forward at a trot and danced about in the road when she held him in. The leaves were already as large as a squirrel’s ear. Just beyond the mill and the houses, Adair made camp beside the ford of a little creek, under a sycamore whose shattering bark lay in rolls like paper at its feet and so it was easy to start a fire. The sycamore leaves were always the last to
come out and the immense white limbs stood out lucent against the blue sky. She fed Whiskey handsful of the cracked corn and then boiled three eggs in the steel saucepan.
The next day Adair woke up to a clean sky and the sound of Whiskey devouring the new bluestem grass nearby. She sat up in her blankets. Whiskey dropped down to his side and rolled over and wallowed on his back, his feet swimming in the morning air. He jumped up and snorted and shook himself. The forests of the Ozarks had never been cut, so the yellow pine and oaks were sometimes fifteen feet around at the base. They stood far apart from one another without underbrush, and it was good traveling then, through the greening world. At the seeps and springs, there were banks of violets and fern, sweet williams and miniature wild irises whose flowers were no bigger than a person’s thumb and two fingertips held together. Wild pansies looked up with lion faces, the shadows of the new leaves were faint as the shadows of an eclipse.