Authors: Paulette Jiles
—OR,
CH. LXXX, P
. 492
Boyd had been one of the few people from Shannon County to enter Federal service . . .before the war, he had known many of the men he killed.
—
FROM
A History of the 15th Missouri Cavalry Regiment, CSA
A
DAIR RANDOLPH COLLEY
started out on stanger’s steep on the eighth of April, 1865. She tapped Whiskey into a smart trot and crossed the shallow water of the little creek and Dolly came behind. They rode up the faint marks of the old trace where thousands of sojourners walking and riding both had crossed it and before them the buffalo far back in time. She joined the stream of humanity that had gone down that road, just one more story in a stream of narratives both likely and unlikely that were being told somewhere even now, by someone, in a far place.
As she came into the valley of the Black River, she rode out of the forest and into long fields of grass. She passed between High Top and Taum Sauk mountains in this pleasant valley. The stands of big bluestem grass were as high as her shoulders where she sat on Whiskey, and by noon she could hear the booming of the shut-ins where the Black River battered its way through a canyon of granite.
It was chilly, and she could see her breath. She kept the red jacket buttoned up tight and the big sleeves rolled down to her knuckles. That night she tethered Dolly and Whiskey to the limb of a white oak on the slopes of Lee Mountain, with an oak forest thick around her.
She made no fire that first night. She ate her food cold and then sat in the quiet evening listening to the insects and the whippoorwills and the absence of human endeavor.
There was a vanishing quality now to the light and the portions of the day. The day vanished into evening, one valley into a forested highland, the evening vanished into the dusk and from there seamlessly into the night and the stars also were imperceptibly quenched as the daylight grew. The bloodroot flowers opened themselves and the old leaves drifted down from the oaks, pushed off by the new ones. In St. Louis there had been such violent sharp edges to time and light and occurrences.
In the days that followed she grazed her horses as often as she could, for here and there the great forests seemed to open of their own accord to form a prairie of grasses an acre or two acres in size, and in these prairies the bobwhites and yellowhammers flushed up from the grass at their feet. She let them go all night and in the mornings would find them coming toward her where she slept, with that alert and nervous air unridden horses always have at dawn. They are remembering some far time when predators came for them at first light. So they came toward her with the strange and painful air of fallen angels, treading carefully and slowly as if the earth were foreign soil. Their manes and tails moving in the dawn wind. Sometimes Whiskey would stop and lift his muzzle to drink in the wind and the messages it might be carrying, his ears cocked stiff and his eyes very alert, curious, interested.
The Steep led not from town to town but from water to grass to salt licks. And because human beings had ceased to inhabit the country, the bottomland trees were now inhabited by flocks of the tiny, red-beaked Cumberland parakeets that had not been seen for years. The mountains now occupied by black bear and panther and feral pigs.
Two days after she started, Adair saw, in one of the small open
glades, what seemed to be a man in a fur suit wrestling with something that lay on the ground. It was a sow bear. Her twin cubs boxed each other in play and squalled and strove with each other. The wind was behind her, so Adair knew Whiskey would not get their scent. She swung her plaid shawl around her head and said,
Bear, bear, Indian hair, go on home, your dinner’s done.
Adair saw that the sow bear had been tearing up the body of a man and she was so shocked she felt faint at first. He was strung all up and down the open glade, the arm and part of the torso torn loose, a checkered shirt ripped from the ribs, the skull with the hair nearly worn off it rolled into a stand of limestone where it took on the color of the rock except for the patches of deep auburn hair. The sow bear shook her head to loose one of the legs from the spine and it seemed half a man kicked and danced in her jaws.
She turned Whiskey before he and Dolly could get the scent of the bear, and galloped down the road a quarter of a mile with her dress flying. At a creek crossing, they came upon a one-room cabin sitting upon sandstone sills. It was in a stand of walnut trees and the earth was beaten bare at the doorsill. A woman stood at the doorway and watched Adair and her horses. She wore a dark brown dress that came only to her shins and she was barefoot. Then after a moment a yellow-pale child came and stood
at her skirt. It was so thin it seemed to be constructed of bones and its face was very old. It wore a rag with a hole cut for its head. The woman’s feet were broad and coated with horn and she was thin as a shovel. Adair and the woman stared at each other for long moments.
The woman said, You got ary thing to eat?
Adair said, Yes, and reached into Dolly’s pack for a package of the ham and threw it to her. Whiskey twisted and danced impatiently, he seemed to have caught wind of the bear. Dolly stood staring around her, snorting.
The woman sat down directly on the ground and opened the burlap and began to eat the ham with both hands. The eggshell-colored child sat down in front of her and watched her eat without saying anything.
He’s going to die anyhow, the woman said. A man child will die before a girl will.
Give him some, said Adair.
The boy carefully pinched a piece of the ham steak and took it apart in his insect fingers, as if food was no longer of any interest to him. He stared at the red, dry meat. He bit into it with great care. Then bit again. The woman sat steadily eating.
There’s a body over there a ways, said Adair.
I know it. It’s Basil. I ain’t got no way of burying him.
A bear is at him.
I cain’t help it.
Adair said, You better leave. Why don’t you and that boy go up to Iron Mountain?
It was only last week Basil died, the woman said. We were going to last them out till the war was over. We thought we heard them coming and he reached for his pistol and he kindly had it hung on the wall by a ribbon around the trigger guard, and he grabbed that ribbon and it went off. It hit him just behind the jaw and came out the top of his head.
She handed a piece about the size of a buckeye to the boy. Leave us what you got, she said. We might make it if we walked.
I can’t, said Adair. I am heading to the Little Black and this is all I got to get me there.
The woman stood up and went into the cabin and Adair could see that she took up a large wooden hayfork and dug into the dirt floor. There was nothing in the cabin in the way of furnishings but blankets on the earth and some few dishes of horn and clay. The woman came back out again with a tow sack and slowly unwrapped a silver cup. She took up her skirt hem and wiped the cup and its elaborate decorations clean of dirt.
I’ll give you this, she said.
Just give me the rest of that pig meat.
I can’t eat that, said Adair. Ain’t you got his pistol? You could have shot you that bear.
I can’t make myself do it, the woman said. To eat of her. She’s been eating at Basil. And I don’t have no powder. Do you have powder?
No.
Well, I have put up a snare and we are waiting for something to get into it. I figured I could kill it with a rock if something got into it.
The boy began to sing in a low voice. He whisper-sang to himself. He sang of Barbara Allen and how Lord Bailey turned his face unto the wall though she was only a girl of the castle town and he commenced a-crying, Hard-hearted Barbara Allen. Then hard-hearted Barbara did say, Young man, I think you’re dying.
You could take him with you, said the woman. Our names is Hightower. Mine was Presley before. He’ll work. He’s a good little worker.
I hope you get something in that snare, said Adair. I got to go on.
THAT NIGHT SHE
lay in a dream of perfect clarity as if she were broad awake and in it her father came to her dressed in his black broadcloth judge’s suit, and his white neckcloth and without a hat. It was not that he came to her so much as he appeared there in a place that was no place, but behind him a pleasant background of valley
and mountain with wildflowers growing. He stood utterly still and unmoving, and indeed it was not him but a portrait of him, formal and resolute.
In this portrait he wore a pleasant expression and looked off into the distance. Adair knew that he was dead, and he had sent her this remembrance of him as a keepsake forever, and that in whatever place of filth and misery he had been kept, and in whatever wounded condition, he was now beyond all earthly cares, and in her dream she cried extravagantly and without cease all the while the portrait remained luminous
in every detail. In the morning when she awoke she told herself that it was a dream only, that still he might live somewhere.
AS THEY TRAVELED
she felt the month of april going past them as if it were a slow-moving stream. The leaves came fully out except those of the sycamore, a tree that released its leaves reluctantly and slowly. The sassafras held up small mittens of green like elves’ hands and she stopped to take up the roots for tea. On the banks of creeks and springs the buckeye was blossoming in rich pink candelabras. Adair often made her camp by midafternoon, and piled her carpet sack and bedding together, and turned the sidesaddle up on its fork to relieve Whiskey of the pressures of it. Then she sat bareback and astride on Dolly as the horses grazed, her skirts billowed up around her thin legs and knees, wearing the red jacket and the shawl around her neck, not to be caught afoot if the soldiers or outlaws came upon them.
And once in a while, during the day, Adair would hear a long hollering through the hills. A man’s holler, calling out long, long. Yo! and whoever it was would stretch the Yo out until it was a mile
long and an octave lower. These calls would echo among the bluffs so that the source of them was confounded, and no one ever seemed to answer. Disembodied voices on Stanger’s Steep.
Sometimes she walked alongside Whiskey and Dolly in the grassy valleys. The horses drifted along either side of her, grazing. Their lips moved without sound and it seemed they were talking to the earth in a long, complex conversation. On the high barrens of the ridges, the wind tore at her hair and sent her shawl and strands of her black hair streaming behind her. The horses walked beside in protection. They spread the wings of their souls on either side of her. They drank of the air, and Adair walked lightly along with them.
She made her camp one warm evening in a valley where the high bluffs on one side leaned over a fast stream, and in the bluff was the dark eye of a cave. She tied both Dolly and Whiskey to picket ropes.
She put aside the lilac straw hat. The cherries had been torn off long ago. There was a freshening breeze, and so she decided to walk by herself to the next ridge and look for signs of human beings, for evidence that the world before her and the trace she was traveling on was not entirely deserted.
At the first dimming of the light the tree frogs began to sing in a loud choir of crude noise. They seemed to lure her on down the trace.
By dark she was on the next ridge. She looked out at the hills sweeping south, one ridge after another. The thin rind of the new moon blazed with light so that the old moon’s dead heart shone with a deep chocolate glow. Then below her she saw a gleam of light and over the rushing noise of the wind she heard something that sounded like a human voice singing.
She walked a ways closer and before long she found herself halfway down the ridge. Through the trunks of the white oaks shone the light of a fire. A man sat in front of it playing a fiddle there on the old trace for himself alone. Adair tucked her hands in the long sleeves of the Zouave jacket and leaned forward anxiously, trying to make him out. He wore a battered felt hat and a long red beard.
He seemed to pause in thought, staring at the fire, and then played in sequence “The Eighth of January” and “The Hunters of Kentucky” and “Soldier’s Joy.”
Adair had not heard this old mountain music for a long time and she was very much moved by the songs. In these forlorn melodies she seemed to hear all the stories of the people of these hills and other hills, and the mountains to the east in Tennessee and the Carolinas, where they had come from. They were a bordering people come across the sea from Scotland and Ireland and the north outlands of England, to cross the Atlantic with nothing in their possession but five silver shillings and the clothes they wore. In those melodies she heard the crowded ports of the New World, their strivings and conflicts. And how they moved along in the wilderness of the Carolinas, refusing to work for any but themselves, a people who made their own whiskey and
pulled their own teeth and were unconquerable in a fight and for this they had paid a great price. The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who did not know when to quit fighting. Like the Wild Geese of Ireland they were used and spent like coins by one army after another.
And the red-bearded fellow played on into the night until the fire died down and the tip of his bow leapt and shone, weaving out the patterns in the mind. Patterns of beauty, without weight or substance, called up out of the deep structures. Handed on to others through starvation and wars, from one border to another, over the border of one life to the one to follow.
When he played “Killiecrankie” he suddenly stopped. His face and beard were lit with the low firelight. He stood up with his fiddle in one hand and the bow in the other, and sang,
If you had seen what I had seen, you would not be so cantie-o
If you had seen what I have seen in the hills of Killiecrankie-o
Adair listened and would have listened all night. The songs were like an intoxicating drink in their high romance, their extravagance, the ballads of the border people in their poverty and their bitter, violent pride. Tales of revenge and murder and lost loves, lost heroes and war.