Enemy Women (38 page)

At last he played himself out and Adair slipped silently back up the Steep to her camp.

SHE AND HER
horses came to the main fork of the Black River, five miles from Centerville. The Steep seemed to lead into the water there, but Adair did not like the look of it. She went on farther up the river, where it ran fast and the current would have swept away the deeps and bogs. Another half mile, around a protruding bluff, she found a cairn of stones on the bank and guessed that this was the ford, and so it was. There was a clear hard bottom with a fast current. She turned Whiskey to the water and he did not pause but galloped in.

The sheets of water flew up around them and soaked her red jacket and she laughed. Whiskey charged into the deep but it came only to his chest, so in the middle he stopped and Dolly stopped and they drank deeply, and they were all pleased with themselves.

Then they rode on toward the Current.

Adair made a fireless camp that evening on the barrens of a high ridge, and turned the horses loose to graze. There she had a long view of the country ahead of her. The heavy forests were confining, and she wanted to see the sky and the stars. The redbud trees had lost their blossoms and were leafed out now. The dogwood still flowered in sprays of white. A thunderhead stood hard-edged as stone on the western horizon and the shadows of turkey buzzards slid over her. She made herself comfortable on the down quilt, and in the last light sat down to read the
Stars and Stripes.

The wind took her hair in long tendrils as if combing it. She bent to the rattling sheets. It was dated March 30. There was news about North Carolina; a battle at Bentonville and then more descriptions of the burning of Columbia. Then there was an article about a Lieutenant Davis who took a scout down into the swamp country beside the Mississippi and killed a Confederate named Lieutenant Reed. Hildebrand was chased by a patrol of Militia to Dent’s Station on the Iron Mountain Railroad. The Seventh Kansas Volunteers found more Confederates below Bloomington in the swamps and killed most of them. There were no names of the men they killed.

Then she found news of the siege of Spanish Fort and gripped the paper tight. It was Canby’s men, and General A. J. Smith. He was there somewhere, with Canby or Smith. They had come up from Fish River and were bombarding the fort. She found the casualty lists and went down to the
N
s with a shaking finger. Naves Neal Nelson Newbury Nice Nolan Norris Norse Northfield Nottingham Nugent. He was not among the casualties.

Adair lay back on her down comforter. Not far away Whiskey cropped the grass with ripping noises. She watched the sunset clouds
slide past in thin, almost transparent swirls. After a while she fell asleep and did not think about the major any more that night.

THE NEXT MORNING
she was half a mile off stanger’s steep in a valley that her map said was named Tinker Hollow. The creek that ran through it was called Hominy Creek and it was of a good size with gravelly shoals and banks. In the wide valley there was a stand of hackberry trees, and beneath them a thick growth of the oat grass that the horses loved above all else. There was no underbrush and the air beneath the hackberry trees seemed as green as underwater. Adair put her hand upon her other arm. She felt very thin. Insubstantial. She had begun to breathe in a shallow manner so that she would not cough and sometimes this worked, but it left her tired.

So Adair turned the horses into the grass and laid out her canvas and her shelter half on the warm sands. She lay at the bend of the creek where there were stands of sycamore saplings with small new leaves, and a stand of cane to screen her from the wind. The cane was ragged, with its winter leaves striped white by winter freezes. The new leaves were still very
small. The cane and the sycamores kept the wind from her and the sun was hot.

Adair remembered the steam doctor’s instruction to take cold baths and lay unclothed in the sun. She sat up to listen carefully but she heard no one or any sound of hooves. She then took off her dress and shoes and stockings. She untied the signet ring from her drawers, wrapped one of the ribbons from her stays around and around the ring, and then forced it on her finger so as not to lose it in the water. She stepped into Hominy Creek along a shoal of gravel until it came up to her waist. The water was very clear and so cold it seemed it had shut around her like a hand but she ducked under. Overhead banks of cumulus built up with icy bright edges and the sunlight came through the canopy of sycamore and elm in dots and dashes on the water. She burst up gasping, and strove through the dense water to the bank again.

She took up all her clothes and washed them, and herself and her long hair with the good soap. She wadded up her hair in a mass of suds and then ducked under the water, the suds drifting in white islands down-current.

She lay down shivering on the red gravel. It was good to lie in the open air as if the world were at peace and no danger anywhere. In a patch of sunlight she was warmed finally and so she lay and daydreamed. About the time they met in the matron’s courtyard with the fresh sheets flying and how he had put his arms around her and kissed her. The touch of his lips so intimate. She had breathed in his breath and felt his heart beneath the woolen coat. When he had opened her nightgown. She thought of the open stretches in the map of the West where they might have walked through the gates that shut them in and gone on to another world.

Adair drew out her long black hair through her fingers to dry it. Overhead a great blue heron honked, sailing like an airborne cross. Adair looked up at it. They weave not, neither do they spin. It was the world of people that had set them apart one from the other. Not this one here.

She clasped her knees and worried about it. Down the small creek valley sudden flights of small birds sprang up out of the grass meadows, and Adair saw a red-tailed hawk casting in a straight, lethal flight, flushing them up. Then with marriage she would be caught up with eternal work indoors, with carding wool and washing babies’ diapers and a truck garden and chickens and canning and the eternal weaving and spinning. She could probably not manage it even if she were to live.

She jumped up from the canvas. She did not want to die and leave this world for something called an Eternal Home. She began to cough from the exertion. Her enemy lay inside her. She walked among the sycamore saplings standing apart from one another on the gravel shoals, switching at them with a cane. She prayed briefly that the Lord would let her live, and had not her own mother prayed the same thing?

She held out her arms and looked at them. She had not gained anything,
but she told herself, neither have I lost. Lord, why would you take me to die? She put both hands to her eyes and the tears streamed through them. Lord, I’d rather you didn’t pay any attention to me one way or the other if you don’t mind.

Her toes gripped in the gravel as she rinsed soap out of her clothes and she became deeply chilled. Then she lay in the sun in her chemise and then in a fit of daring took that off too and lay naked in the sun. The steam doctor said it would be healing and so indeed after a number of hours she felt very well. Then she went in the water again and made herself endure it, naked but for her hair falling over her shoulders. She was in the water half of the day. The cold water made her fever go down and she felt very sleepy and very good.

SHE STAYED TWO
days on this creek. She lay in the cold water for a long time and then on her canvas in the sun on the gravel bank. Her hands and nails became very clean. She washed her hair twice each day. She lay in the sun and worked on the quilt and saw it was becoming whole again.

Well, I should not marry, but live at home, and I will have my sisters for company, she thought, but then she knew they would be meeting new fellows in Tennessee. Her cousin Lucinda was right, they would be married, because they expected to be; because they counted forty white horses and counted nine stars on nine nights and made a wish, because they sought to read his initials in apple parings and in cobwebs and sprinkled salt on the fire. Because they had little clocks ticking away inside them that told them it was time to have children and the numerals on these internal timepieces were coins to be spent on domestic affections.

She closed her eyes and fell asleep. In a dream Adair’s mother appeared to her on the far bank of the stream, wearing her blue-gray London Smoke silk, of the style of the 1840s, turning toward her with a pleased smile. Sarah Colley smiled at Adair over the stream’s clean
waters, come from a far land, and dry leaves fell through her and a bee wavered among her transparent skirts.

A thunderstorm grumbled at the edge of the world in the far west, and her mother said,
Have you fed Dolly?
Adair wanted to make some excuse but she fell even more deeply asleep and did not awaken until she heard the distant sound of men’s voices and horses walking. At that time she was dreaming again that she was walking down a valley road in the twilight, and there were the cut stumps of Osage orange trees, and that someone was coming behind her with a message concerning her death.

She woke up as suddenly as glass smashes. There were men and horses coming down the trail among the hackberry trees. Crows were scattering across the sky, black check marks, with their chipping and alarmed voices. Where were her own horses? They had gone farther up the bends of the creek and she prayed they were upwind of these sudden horses. Adair reached up quickly and pulled down the big silk twill from a sycamore sapling and crawled into a tangle of driftwood.

The grind of hooves on gravel grew louder and they were talking, their talk was loud and desperate.

She tried to put the dress on. She pulled it over her head but she could not find the neckhole once she was inside all the yardage of it. Then finally she stayed still because the weeds grown among the driftwood would thrash around and there was no wind. They were coming very close by. She was trapped inside the giant silk twill skirts of the dress. Finally she saw light and held the neckhole around her face and at last saw them passing by, heard the ceramic rattle of shod hooves on gravel. They were crossing upstream about ten rods.

They would want her horses if they had not already got them. Adair could see horse legs and none of them were hers. She lay with her face out of the neckhole of the dress and watched calmly between two old tree trunks of the driftwood. She saw them start into Hominy Creek. Between the men in butternut homespun was a young Union Militia
fellow with his hands tied behind his back. His hair was long and blond and tied behind his head with a wrapping of buckskin. He was wallowing in the saddle. On his face was a look of terror as she had never seen and his face was bruised on both sides. His nostrils were rimmed with blood.

He was repeating over and over, Fellows, they just went and forced me to join up. What can I offer you fellows? Boys, there’s money in this for you.

The entire troop then churned into the stream and Adair was surprised to see how deep it was farther up. The water came up to the young Union soldier’s calves and his horse, like his fate, strove onward to its appointed end.

On the far side Adair heard them struggling with one another and then Dolly came bolting out of the patch of cane stalks and into the creek so that Adair had to struggle up with the dress half on and catch the gray mare by the neck-rope and hold on to her. Then Adair pulled the dress the rest of the way on and lay hid and heard at a distance the young man’s high screams. How he pleaded for his life and how he promised all sorts of things and denied others.

How come you to kill old Asa Smitters? A man shouted. How come you to shoot that old man?

He was cutting the telegraph lines, we get to shoot people who cut telegraph lines, the prisoner said. It sounded as if he was trying to get his captors to see it from his point of view. He was so old he was near dead anyhow.

How come you to shoot him in the head you son of a bitch?

He wasn’t no good to anybody, the young Union soldier said. He was just an old man.

She put her hands over her ears and stood up. Then at least two long guns went off and there was a long, high shrieking that went on and on. He was only half dead and thrashing around in the brush and the cane with a peculiar, repeated yelping at a high pitch, and Adair heard Reeves’s men laughing.

Jesus look at him, he looks like a jumping jack.

The yelps were louder and wilder, and Dolly stood with her eyes rimmed in white and God alone knew where Whiskey was, and still it went on.

Just kill him, just kill him, Adair thought. She backed Dolly into the cane again and saw the young soldier flip backward over the bank of the stream and lie there in the shallows with both arms and both legs doubling up and then jerking straight out over and over and his head nodding like a Lazy Tom, yelping with every nod. Then a man came to the bank of the stream and fired a final pistol shot. Two more came and they dragged him from the water by one arm and one leg and then they went on.

Adair stood with Dolly in the cane for nearly an hour.

Toward late afternoon Whiskey came cautiously to the edge of the water, looking for her or for whatever had caused the noise and the screaming, turning his head here and there and he was very jumpy. Adair gathered up her traps and put the bridle on him and stood while he drank. As she crossed the creek she saw a piece of the soldier’s skull with the hair still on it. A triangular chip.

That evening she camped again without a fire on the high barrens so she could see in every direction and watched late into the night.

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