Authors: Paulette Jiles
Sixty-nine years ago last week [September 1863] the people of Shannon County [southeastern Missouri Ozarks] were thrown into grief over the murder of John West, Mrs. Sam West, Louis Conway, James Henry Galvon, Wm. Chilton, Henry Smith, Sam Herring, Jack Herring, John Huddleston, John Story, and Joshua Chilton. . . .As the story is told by relatives of the victims . . .a company of Federal soldiers came over from Rolla to the vicinity where the Chiltons lived and the drive on the various homes was made in the dead of night. . . .[The Federals; i.e., Union Militia] started their raid going for the Chiltons. . . .Joe Butler and Alex Chilton were at the home of the latter’s mother, and just as they were mounting to leave, eight Federal soldiers came in sight. The soldiers dashed in pursuit, but Mrs. Susan Orchard, sister of Alex Chilton, stepped into the road in front of the oncoming soldiers and flaunted her apron in front of the horses of the soldiers,
until they stopped, and by the time the pursuers got around her the fleeing pair were too far gone to be caught.
—J. J. C
HILTON, FROM THE
CURRENT LOCAL,
NOVEMBER 12, 1931, REPRINTED IN
THE CIVIL WAR IN CARTER AND SHANNON COUNTIES,
WEST CARTER COUNTY GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY, VAN BUREN, MISSOURI, 2001
I
N THE YEAR
before the war began Adair’s father brought home a horse early on a winter night. Adair saw her father coming down the road on Highlander with the lineback dun on a lead following behind, and the two horses were spraying up snow in a froth all around themselves.
The lantern he carried shone in moving bars between the oaks and then onto the rails of the yard. She ran behind her father through the drifts with her skirts lifted while he led Whiskey into the barn. The dun horse stared at everything about him, alert and suspicious. Her father put him in the end stall away from Gimcrack and Highlander and Dolly. His color was unusual and burnished; the body color was mixed, of pale straw-colored hairs mixed with black hairs, which made a glistening gray-gold, and as he moved restlessly in the stall the color shifted in the lantern light, as if his coat was of twill or taffeta. His mane and tail and legs were black. There was a line of black up his spine, and faint tiger stripes on his legs where the
black faded into the body color. His head began dark and then trailed off to gold around the muzzle. He had a strong body, a high-arched neck, and his long black tail was set high.
Is he mine? She reached out to stroke his neck. His winter coat was thick and healthy.
He’s yours, daughter.
Adair held up the candle-lantern to see the blue lights that shone in his corneas, and the dun horse stared at the yellow flame for a moment, and then turned again to look around him and called out to Highlander. His nostrils were large and full and she could see every eyelash over his dark eyes. Before they went back into the house Adair took her saddle from the junk stall rail and put it on his back to see if it would fit, and it settled well on his withers.
Now come in and leave him be, said her father. He’s in a new place and I suspect he is uneasy, so leave him be awhile.
Adair went inside to the drawing room and sat down on the clothes trunk by the fire. She didn’t want anybody to talk to her so she could think about the trails she and Whiskey would ride on in the morning. With a horse like that she could attempt the crossing of the Current River and ride on to Slayton Ford. She could make it all the way to the Eleven-Point. She could be gone most of the day without tiring him. There were only a few years left to her before she would have to marry
and be closed up in a noisy house, trapped by domesticity. Adair dreamed often of the waste places and their silences. Places where nobody lived and so there would be no smoke and dirt and ceilings and mindless talking, only herself and the clean snow and the way the world went at every cant and turn of the seasons, and herself riding through it.
You can’t be riding that horse out at all times of the day and night, her brother said. I need that horse sometimes too.
I’ll ride out whenever I want, said Adair. She laid out her heavy stockings and lace-ups in front of the fire. And when I say I’m going, don’t stand in the doorway.
Savannah, get rid of that skunk, said Little Mary. It does its business in the corners. There’s some over there now. I can smell it.
Savannah sat on the upturned churn with a skunk kitten in her hands. It was born out of season, she said. The skunk turned its triangular head to look in amazement at the fire, and then gazed up into Savannah’s face. Its paws moved in erratic, vague motions. And the cats got the other ones. Just left heads and feet lying there around the milk vessels. All it can eat is milk.
Well, get it out of the family room anyhow.
It’s hungry, poor baby. Savannah got up and went into the kitchen. She was nearly fifteen and all her maternal instincts were in full bloom.
Adair, you listen to your brother, her father said. It’s your horse but he gets to borry it sometimes. Her father was reading. He didn’t want any arguments. He’d do anything to get out of an argument when he was reading. The pamphlet was “Missouri Report:
Dred Scott vs. Emerson.
” He said, Be kind to one another. We are about to go to war. It’s going to be the great American war. Bigger than ary war we had yet. They’ve invented right smart of new kinds of armaments. Be kind to one another. He slowly turned the pages by the light of a coal-oil lamp.
He had endured them all with a great deal of patience. Adair’s mother had been taken from them with a fever in 1855. Because their brother was a hunter and the three girls had few skills at weaving or
cooking, they lived an untidy life and were improvident and argumentative and content.
You bought that horse for me. Adair got to her feet. This isn’t fair. You give Whiskey to me.
I can’t believe you are talking to Pa like that, said Little Mary. She sat across from Pa wrapped in her heavy knitted shawl. She was braiding shoestrings. He is the only parent we got. You were supposed to take over milking April when she come fresh and you never did. Little Mary was a twelve-year-old martinet, a person Adair thought was already fit to be running a girls’ seminary.
I ain’t here to do your bidding, Mary.
Girls, said her father. He turned a page.
And her brother said, Girls! Girls!
You just lay a hand on my horse, John Lee, said Adair.
The fire raided the interiors of the hickory logs thrown on it, and their faces turned to it. The smell of hickory and the sharp smell of oak. The moon looked briefly in the window and then the snow started up again.
Well, when are you riding? said John Lee. We could study out how to share the cussed horse if we could come to an agreement.
You’re behind in all your work, said her father.
Well, what? said Adair. There’s nothing that needs doing tomorrow morning. Savannah can milk. She just loves that sorry old cow to death.
She looked in the clothes trunk for some kind of gloves. She found a pair of crocheted lace mitts, and although they were very old and formal and raveling loose, she thought they would do as well as anything else. The old clothes trunk Adair sat on was filled with quilts and odd leavings. Her mother had saved everything and was extremely prudent, for in this wilderness, who knew when she could replace clothing or women’s tools? It contained a Log Cabin quilt of great age and almost every discarded piece of clothing her family had worn since 1819. The Log Cabin was made from the remnants of clothes of family long gone on before, from their Sunday and wedding clothes, pieces of figured
silks and velvets. Their mother had said there were stories in it, some of them scandalous. When she died, she had taken most of the scandals to the grave with her unspoken.
I need him tonight, said John Lee. He was sitting in front of the fireplace, his heels out on the hearthstones, his leather leggins smoking. To himself he said, Shit fire and save the matches. He held his shrunken left arm in his right. He had stood the smoothbore in the corner. Either me or Pa are on Highlander all the time, he’s about wore out. John Lee turned in the chair to look at his father. The pockets of his hunting coat were full of .58 caliber conical balls, and they thudded together when he turned.
You can’t have Dolly, said Savannah. She had come to the doorway from the kitchen. Dolly is very emotional.
John Lee snorted and turned back. His black hair fell in his face. Adair can’t ride that horse all day ever day.
All the time, said Adair. And I am going to start at first light tomorrow.
When the Dipper’s handle had turned under the mountains she went to the outhouse where the frozen shit down in the vault was piling up into a rigid peak until it nearly reached the seat but her father would not do anything about it and John Lee was going hunting so everything was left up to the girls. She turned over a gourd of fireplace ash into the pit. In the kitchen she filled the wooden bucket with hot water and washed herself under her nightgown and thought she would rather live in the woods than put up with people like this.
Upstairs, Savannah lay asleep with two kittens and the pet skunk so Adair pulled her own feather tick onto the floor and slept there.
ADAIR GOT UP
at six the next morning in the dark and put the girls’ hand mirror in her dress pocket. Then she took a pinch of salt out of the salt box and sprinkled it on the coals of the fire. She watched the sparks but saw no message in them of the man she was to marry. She
did it once again and thought she might have seen the face of a soldier. One of the young men of the county.
Outside, as she passed the kitchen window, she watched her breath appear before her in the lamplight and then it died away in moist clouds. This was the smoke of her internal fire and her soul. Every breath was a letter to the world. These she mailed into the cold air leaning back with pursed lips to send it upward. She stood and listened to the black wolves on Courtois singing up and down the scales. She held a candle in her hands and it shone in bars through her fingers on the snow.
She went to the barn and put the candle in its sconce against the crossbeam of the main stall. The girls’ sidesaddles were lined up on the rail of the junk stall. She put her saddle on Whiskey. His taffeta coat shone in different colors as he moved, from gold to tobacco to gray, and he was anxious to get out of the stall. Adair knew he was a horse of great courage and amiability by the way he cocked his ears toward her and listened to her when she spoke to him.
She led him out to the yard rails and the world was silent, and this silence was a coin to be spent very carefully. She wadded up her skirts so she could get her knee around the leaping horn and put her left toe into the stirrup. She wore her brother’s long johns under her skirts and heavy stockings rolled down over her light shoes. Then Adair and Whiskey rode out into the dawn along Beaverdam Creek, and the snow was as pale as mist and the pack that belonged to the black wolf was running through the pines on the ridges above them.
They began to gallop and the snow flew up around her in waves. It was the winter of 1860-1861, before the war had begun. Whiskey charged forward, she could hardly hold him back, he wanted to leap out into the world and find out what was in it. Adair braced her weight on her right thighbone, gripped the leaping horn with her right knee against the surge of his gallop. They ran straight through the glassy black pools of Beaverdam where new snow massed white on the banks. The water spouted around her in fountains and her skirts billowed out behind her.
They rode down the valley of Beaverdam Creek, on to where it narrowed. They charged up the ridge trail at a full gallop and passed her mother’s grave and its armor of flat limestones. When they gained the top of the ridge, even from that distance she could hear the percussive grinding of Ponder’s Steam Mill on the Little Black River. There while they stood the sun came up. It boiled up molten in the cold pines and lit every massive trunk as they stood in their ranks. Struck the top of the mountains, and made mists in the valleys.
Whiskey stepped out eagerly, his ears up, his neck arched high, looking for the next new thing. They came to the Blue Hole spring. The spring sprawled out of a bluff of limestone and was caught in a mossy dam someone had made. You were supposed to lean backward over a well and look at the well water in the mirror to see the face of your future intended. But there were so many rivers and creeks and springs in the hills that nobody dug wells. The pool of the Blue Hole spring would have to do. Her cousin Lucinda Newnan said these devices told only what your own desires were, and these tricks of descrying the future just revealed a girl’s own intentions and not a thing else. But Adair wanted to know somehow, for the wrong man could shut you up in a house, he could take your horse away from you if he proved to be cruel, and put him to a plow, and beat you with a broom handle and no one could rescue you. She had not heard of anyone who hadn’t married, except the Witch of Slayton Ford. She had to know. Perhaps
she was asking to see the wrong man so she could be forewarned. Could see his dark intentions even though they were hidden behind a handsome face.
She tied Whiskey to a low limb, and then sat at the foot of a sycamore that leaned out over the pool. She sat down in the snow, with her head tipped back and the hand mirror held overhead. Leaned farther and farther back, trying to bring the pool’s surface within the small moon of the hand mirror. And at last it appeared. The rocks below the surface formed a face, and the reflection of the back of her own head made it seem that the face was surrounded with dark hair, and a small fish swam out of the teeth. Well, who is it? She thought. Who is it?
Her breath clouded the mirror and she wiped it on her sleeve and looked again. She thought of the boys of Ripley County and Carter and Butler, almost all of them ready to go away to war, and could recognize none of them. What lay beneath the water was the face of a stranger in limestones the color of bone with topside minnows floating through his head like intentions that she could not decipher. Her fingers in the crocheted gloves were cold. A brown, dry oak leaf
fell into the water and the stranger smiled. Adair gasped and the mirror fell out of her hand into the pool. It flashed and wavered into darkness. She beat the snow from the back of her skirt and although she tried to find the little mirror with a sycamore rod, and later with a cant hook, she could never recover it.