Authors: Paulette Jiles
Well. Where are they at. He sat down in his blankets again and scrounged around for his pipe, filled it and lit it with a stick from the fire. Your brother is with Reeves and has not been killed or wounded as far as I have heard. I think Reeves sent him down to Texas for more horses.
How do you know? Adair asked. She clutched her hands together inside the sleeves of the red jacket. That he hasn’t been killed or wounded?
The Federals have taken to publishing the names of prisoners or arrestees in their paper out of Bloomfield, the
Stars and Stripes.
See here. He worked up a cloud of smoke from the pipe. He shoved a newspaper at her. And as I am addicted to reading, I discover all sorts of things in it. I read your father’s name November last, arrested for disloyalty. But nothing since. Now, your two sisters were at Dalton’s Store at Christmas anyhow. I went there for the festivities. Wartime Christmases are always very festive. A ball of sorts was held. Young soldiers falling in love with your sisters, gallant boys in gray or some approximation of gray. A lot of Virginia reeling and schottisching. Knocking down the biscuit powder.
Adair smiled. Then the anxious look came back to her face. You ain’t lying? she asked. You ain’t just making that up to ease my mind?
I saw them with these bleary, whiskey-dimmed eyes, he said. But they have gone over to Tennessee with some family.
I know it, said Adair. I got a letter in prison. With my cousins and my aunt. I guess it’s better in Tennessee. She poked a stick at the fire. We’re beat, ain’t we?
Yes, we’re beat. Greasy John worked hard at his pipe and got up big clouds of smoke from it. He said, John Lee won’t come in to surrender. The Militia shot down seven men come home from surrendering in Virginia with Federal passes in their pockets, a week ago, not too far from here.
Adair crossed her ankles under her skirts and reached down to take hold of them. Her shawl ends lifted in the breeze. She appeared like a Hindu woman or a girl of the Bedouin tribes of the Holy Land.
Or he might go up to St. Louis looking for you if he ain’t got word you are home.
Well, said Adair. I left a message there at the prison for him with a girl.
We’re going into the stage business after everybody surrenders, said Greasy John. Now John Lee might want to get in on something like this, if he did come back from Texas.
He’d be crazy to come back from Texas, said Adair.
Well, we’re going around buying horses. Or stealing them, whatever.
Adair nodded. It was what she had wanted to do herself at one time. To deal in horses in some way. But that time was long gone.
Well, you rest up, said Greasy John. Smoke roiled up around his head. It was a cool blue dawn and the smell of the fire, the frying mush and coffee hung heavy in the grove and drifted over the gravestones. And you will not guess what horse my old cousin Asa Smitters has got in that string.
Adair looked up from her coffee.
Who?
Why, Dolly. Greasy John nodded. And I thought we were going to get away with her. But here you are.
No! She laughed. She got up and ran out in a great thrashing of skirts past the McCloskey gravestones, and she went down the string one by one. Yo! Yo! she called to them, touching their rumps.
Until she came to the gray mare. Oh my Dolly! This startled the gray mare, and she pulled back on her halter rope and stood thrashing her head back and forth. Then she saw it was Adair. Slowly her ears came up and she put her muzzle in Adair’s hand.
The pale gray mare walked forward and turned her head back so that she caught Adair in the curve of her throat. Her eyes were dark and surrounded by gray shadings. Adair knew every mark on her, and the old wheel-tire scar on her ankle, her long tail like a broach of silk thread.
Then Adair leaned her face against Dolly’s neck for a long time until the mare became impatient. Adair then stroked her neck and looked her all over, and found her to be in good flesh and unscarred. Her hooves were in good shape even though unshod, but Dolly had always had good feet, hard as cannonballs.
Well this is hard to believe, said Adair. Dolly flashed her eyes at the horse next to her and flattened her ears. You are as spoiled as you ever were.
Ain’t you going to eat? asked Asa Smitters. He was looking at Greasy John. Looks like it’s a family reunion is going on here.
I’d rather drink, said Greasy John. He felt around in his blankets and came out with a large, dark-brown glass medicine bottle. He tipped it up. He wiped his mouth. The Yankees are going to make us get licenses to sell this ambrosia after the war.
Adair came back, smiling, with a great swinging of skirts and sat down again on the horse blanket in front of the fire.
It’s her, she said. It is her. What are you doing with them? Where are you going? You ain’t taking them to Reeves are you? Not Dolly. You ain’t doing nothing with my sister’s horse but giving her back to me.
Well now, said Asa. I don’t know. He stared into the fire. The flames were nearly invisible now that the sun was well up. Fox squirrels sat in the oaks limbs above and insulted them at length with insistent clattering.
Asa looked over the tossing uncut new grass that gave way to the morning wind in a series of waves. He was a man that was always checking things. Alert. That’s how he came to be an old man. He said, She was running loose with busted reins in Cane Creek Fields. No saddle. The bits was stamped CSA at the bit guard.
Adair glanced from one to the other. They were in smoky-smelling clothes, for they had been on the road a good while. Tattered check shirts and worn boots.
You don’t know what? Adair reached into her carpet sack and took out her silver fork with the initials
WB.
She edged a slice of the fried mush out of the skillet and onto the small silver candy dish and ate it. You better not be thinking about going anywhere with Dolly.
I was, said Asa.
I will pay you for her. I have some Federal silver dollars and I will pay you for her. For your trouble. She pulls back and busts her reins all the time, that’s how come she was running loose along Cane Creek. She bites the other horses, my sister let her get away with anything and she’s spoiled rotten. You don’t want her.
Greasy John had taken up a fallen oak stick to shift the coals and bring more smoke against the insects.
He said, I can make you a deal on the mare and also I can get you a sidesaddle.
Adair said, I’ll give you twelve dollars in silver for both.
Greasy John said, Now, Asa is at some risk to go get that sidesaddle.
Adair hesitated. Twelve is all, she said.
Asa gazed around at the meadow with his one eye, and his empty leaking eye, and at the string of horses tied among the gravestones. Now I was at some risk to get that mare, too. I could of been shot at.
Well, what, then? asked Adair.
Fourteen.
Adair placed her feet together sole to sole under the skirts and petticoats. Twelve and a half. And draw me a map so I can stay off the Military Trace. So I can get home again and not be robbed of them again.
There is an older trace, said Greasy John. And a map of it would be some trouble to puzzle out and then reproduce on paper.
And that will cost you fifty cents, said Asa. So, thirteen for everything.
Where did you get the paper? Adair finished her coffee.
Greasy John dragged his saddlebags to himself and opened one pocket and brought out a sheaf of five-by-four sheets of printed forms.
I’m using the back of these, he said. They are Union telegraph forms.
Asa said, There’s a cutoff down here about twenty rod that goes back fifteen miles to the Military. The telegraph poles come down on it. So the Militia can get their news and so they can tell where everybody’s at. Send orders. What we do is, we cut it and then repair it with these horsehair strands so they can’t tell where it’s cut. You can hear them soldiers cussing all the way to St. Louis.
Greasy John said, And I found these here forms out on the Military laying in a heap, I guess they fell off a wagon or something. When they were looking to repair that line.
You should hear them cuss, said Asa.
All right, said Adair.
And we will throw in some smoked ham from that boar pig there. He was young and tender. We ate all the fresh and smoked the rest of him. You look like you need building up.
Greasy John then took the turkey feather from his hatband and looked at it carefully. Then he lay back on his blankets so he could get at his penknife in his pants pockets. He sat up and cut the quill at a slant against his thumb. Then he opened a much smaller and narrower blade and dug the fiber out from inside the quill.
Asa, hand me that ink.
Asa found a ladies’ perfume bottle full of a purplish homemade ink in the ammunition box.
Now this is the oldest trace of all, said Greasy John. He began to lay in a line of ink. It has been deserted since the Mexican War of 1846. It
is older than the Nachitoches and the Military. It is as old as the Shawnee. It is called the Atchafalaya Road, or Stanger’s Steep. John ran a dotted line toward the crossing of the Black River to the west. The road of bandits and lost tribes. It was made in the beginning of the world. It is a trace that has its own mind.
He wiped the nib on a leaf of flannel mullein and dipped it again.
It was on this route that chief Benge of the exiled Cherokee struck off from the main body and toiled with what remained of his people west to the Indian Nations. Benge was driven from his own land in Georgia but also from his own people, for they say he had an ungovernable temper and took delight in causing fear and terror in his own clan and killed men for the joy of it. For sport. We have seen his like in this war several times over.
Greasy John searched over the map. Adair stood at one shoulder and Asa looked over the other. Gnats danced over the wet ink.
I can hardly see anymore, said Asa.
Wait just a moment, then, Asa, said Adair, for it occurred to her that among the articles she had found in the stolen St. Louis carpet sack were a pair of spectacles. She squatted down in front of the opened grip and fished around and came out with the pair of lady’s eyeglasses.
Asa was delighted. He had to bend them nearly out of shape to get them on but he did it. Well, I’ll be, he said. He peered at his own hands and the strand of horsehair with his one eye and his other dark hole of an eye. Well, I’ll be. See, I could black out that other glass so people wouldn’t have to look at my bad eye.
Well, then, I will only charge you a dollar for them, said Adair.
Then the price for Dolly and the saddle and the map will be thirteen dollars.
Done, said Adair. She put out her hand and Asa took her hand in his and smiled down at her.
You are a brave and charming girl, he said.
Greasy John said, From the crossing of the middle fork of the Black at Centerville, Stanger’s Steep will go south directly for a way. It will be marked with old rut marks, and it will have been worn deep in the
earth. Here and there will be the remains of an old cabin where somebody overwintered and grew a crop of corn before going on. He drew in a small cabin.
Now I can see that just as clear, said Asa.
John said, Stanger’s Steep was the route of bandits and road agents and those too poor to pay the Spanish toll at the Sabine River when the Spanish had that country. But then Texas freed itself of those despotic governments and the route has fallen into disfavor. It goes by dangerous ways.
Greasy John took up a second telegraph blank and turned it over, numbered it 2 at the top and went on.
Now between the Black and the Current Rivers, Stanger’s Steep wanders without much direction in this part of the world. It goes to water in the valleys and then it stops on the high barrens and there it will wait for you to take your rest, there where the wind is good and blows away the gnats and the mosquitoes and the horseflies. Make your fire in the valleys out of sight. When you are ready to go on in the mornings, the road will go on as well.
She’ll cross the Current at House’s Ford, said Asa. Don’t linger so, John.
She’s paying fifty cents for this, Asa, he said.
Well, you are not drawing up a legal brief.
I know it. I am filling in this bare sketch with word pictures to make it fifty cents worth.
I’d say it was getting up past a dollar. He went on spinning his horsehair strand. It’s wonderful how I can see this now.
Greasy John drew in Stanger’s Steep as it wavered between one drainage basin and another, through the uncut forests that clothed the mountainsides in kelly green and the deep greens of pine. Over heights of land. Above the heads of Hominy Creek and Sweetwater Creek. He told her not to lose her horses or her supplies for the land was bare of sustenance and those people who remained in the counties were at the edge of starvation.
He said the Steep would take her through a place called the Irish
Wilderness and back in there men in butternut, Freeman’s men, drifted like feral things, men who had not known what it is to sit content before their own hearths in three long years. The Irish Wilderness was cut deeply with dark narrow valleys, the ridges only thinly clad in soil.
Greasy John said, And here are a set of old charcoal kilns just before the crossing of the Current at House’s Ford. You will not want to miss these interesting ruins.
Now as you go along the Pike Creek Valley for a good many miles take care not to take the deer trails off on one side toward the creek. Stay on the Steep. No shortcuts. For on all those deer trails, the Huddlestons have been setting up deer snares since the beginning of the war. So as not to shoot off arms and be located by the Militia. There is a snare on every deer trail down there, and if you don’t want to expire hanging by one leg in the air, stay on the trace.
He dipped his quill. Thence down to the town of Wilderness—aptly named!—and straight west to cross the Current once last time at Racetrack Hollow. Thence it is two miles to the headwaters of the Little Black, and that will take you home directly. Greasy John blew on the paper. It is winding and devious but you will stay out of the hands of the Militia. John turned to look at Adair. He handed her the papers and said, Have a care of it. Stanger’s Steep sometimes captures those who travel on it, and they never leave it, but travel on forever.