Authors: Paulette Jiles
Then the lightning came in sheets and there were no intervals
between the flash and the thunder. Adair’s horse stood in the log barn with his head down. The chickens hid under the millhouse, darting into a hole beneath the log sills at a place they clearly much frequented.
Medical Dick waited for them in the log barn with a sack full of instruments, which he drew out one by one. A tiny pair of shears for cutting skin and a long bent probe and a rubber bottle.
Well, here’s the storm, he said. Adair stood to one side of him. You ain’t the fainting kind, are you? Medical Dick wore a hat made of fraying wheat straw that was longer in the back than the front. His beard was striped black and white like a bobcat. He was barefoot. He stuck the curved probe into his leather belt.
Well, it depends, said Adair.
Hold him. Medical Dick took out the shears and put the lower jaw into the bullet hole and sliced through the skin. Whiskey groaned and fell back on his halter rope.
Jessie, said Adair. Don’t you know how to cure a wound like this without cutting on him? Her voice was rising. I thought you were a horse witch!
Fresh blood poured out.
I’m a marriage and baby witch, said Jessie. And I make whiskey and I run a tavern.
Why do you have to cut him? said Adair.
Don’t be a titty-baby, said Medical Dick. Hold that horse. He took his probe out of his belt and thrust it into the slashed hole. He jammed the probe here and there with great vigor into the muscle and a gout of pus poured out over the probe and over his hand. It dripped into the straw. Whiskey lifted his rear leg high and his hoof trembled the way a human hand would tremble under great pain and weakness.
I feel it, he said. But it’s been in there a while and scar tissue is starting to grow around it. He went on jamming the probe into the muscle. I said hang on to that horse.
Adair sat down.
They don’t feel pain the way you and I do, said Jessie.
Medical Dick laid the probe down into the straw and took up a pair of long-nosed pincers. He pushed these into the wound and drew out long strings of white tissue.
That there is scar, he said. Grown up around it. He stared at the strings and then threw them down on the floor and drew out more. Adair heard a light click. The ball came out caught in the pincers, trailing red strands. Rain hammered down on the roof and leaked onto the hay above, made a beaded curtain at the window.
There it is, he said. A thirty-two caliber. Anybody want it for a souvenir?
Throw it away, said Adair.
Medical Dick went to a water bucket and filled the rubber bottle with water. He squirted the water up into the wound so that fresh red blood poured out, and bits of flesh and pus. Whiskey’s neck was wet with sweat and still he held his trembling leg in the air. The pale gold and gray taffeta colors of his coat seemed dull and lifeless.
He’s poor, said the man. Carrying a ball like that will draw you down.
I’ll give you fifty pounds of corn if you’ll help me out here, said Jessie. At the tavern. While he rests up. You can eat all you like and take on some flesh yourself.
I’ll do it, said Adair. Can I feed him now? Before I do the work?
He wants water, said Medical Dick, and Whiskey drank the entire bucket that Adair brought to him, and then half of another. She washed the blood and pus from his leg with a tow sack and stroked his neck and left a pile of corn in front of him. Then finally went back to the tavern to see what work Jessie wanted done.
A GROUP OF
soldiers came out of the pines. They were a good many, fifty or more. Many of them were barefoot and all were stained to the knees with the red dirt of the trace. They wore butternut homespun with hand-embroidered insignia. Some were missing an eye or a hand. There were men with old wounds carrying nothing but a blanket over
their shoulders and sometimes sections of rifles. A stock or a barrel or a flintlock mechanism.
They came all the rest of that day, in the rain. Sometimes five or ten in a group. Their beards burst out from under their hats like hair cascades. Sometimes a pair of men possessed a mule or a Chickashaw pony and one of them rode, and some part of the rider would be thick with bandages made of rags, often the rags were wrapped over a stump.
To save her slippers and stockings Adair went barefoot in the tavern to carry food out to those who could afford it and they asked her who she was and what had brought her here. Adair told them of her father but no one had heard anything of him.
More came. Then a group of Union officers going down to oversee the surrender in Jacksonport, Arkansas, rode out of the pines to come to Hyssop’s Rest. Adair would not go out to serve them but stayed in the kitchen to tend the fire and bring water. To cut up the hindquarters of pork and beat up the biscuits. She would not sleep in the tavern, either, not in any place, not in the kitchen or the woodshed but went to the barn instead with a wool U.S. Army blanket taken from Jessie’s stores and slept in the barn loft over Whiskey’s stall. Listened to him grind up the corn in his great molars, got up often to look and see if he were down or still standing on all four feet. For more than a week he stood with his leg drawn up and moved with great difficulty.
Still the men came. They slept in the mill loft or came to sit on their heels in front of the tavern. Many sat under the eaves and watched the rain come down, and some came in and looked at the shelves and said nothing, for they had nothing to spend. They listened to the June rain.
They talked in low voices among themselves and then there was laughter, for they were telling stories. They were making their past lives now into tales, and they were exchanging the tales so they could go and tell not only their own, but also others’, and somehow this would make a sort of thin, fragile text or texture that might give way and might not, might hold, might be raveled out and be gone forever.
An old man and an old woman came in to sit uneasily at one of the tables, looking around themselves. They also stared for a long time as the sun came in the open door and drew a luminous band across the things for sale on the shelves, the bright images and maker’s labels.
The old man was bald on the crown, and a mane of snow white hair poured down from all around the edges of the bald spot. His tiny old wife sat across from him and stared out of the cave of her coal-shovel bonnet.
They come down here and went to killin’ and burnin’ to liberate the niggers, the old man said. He held his hat in his lap. He said it to Hyssop’s Rest and the mill on Slayton Ford and the town of Wilderness in general. They come down here warrin’ and shootin’ for four years to liberate fifteen niggers.
More like seventy or so, said the old lady. Better watch what you say or you’ll get us in trouble.
They could have bought ever one of them darkies with the money they used up on Parrott shells, said the old man. Or horseshoes. Bought ’em and set ’em free and give ’em silk dresses and a carriage each one. With the money they used up on hardtack. If that isn’t the ignorantest damn thing I ever heard of in my life. Fifteen niggers.
Seventy, said the old lady.
If I ever see a nigger again in my life I am going to shoot him. There ought not to be no niggers down here ever again. The sons of bitches draw fire.
Mason, said his wife. Why don’t you hesh.
ADAIR LIFTED THE
bags of beans and bushels of turnips. She was bloodied to the elbows cutting up meat and she walked barefoot in the big kitchen upon discarded turnip tops and spoiled cornbread batter. She cut off the ragged hems of her dress so that the hem came to the middle of her shins and under it she wore a pair of men’s long-handled
underwear that wadded up and hid her ankles. In the evenings she walked up White’s Creek to a pool and washed her hair and her clothes and sat in silence for a long time.
AFTER A WEEK
Jessie sat down with her in the barn where her bed was, up in the hayloft.
You have no business getting married, Adair, if in fact you have a fellow in mind, she said. I have heard you coughing in the mornings.
Well, how do you know if I have a fellow in mind or not? asked Adair.
I looked in a pan of water, said Jessie. With the new moon over my left shoulder and all things become clear to me. Now, consumption does not allow of those hopes. I am a marriage and a baby witch, and I have been forced to give this advice before now to young women with consumption. Take Ada Blair for example. She died with her first baby and the baby died too, and it came about that she somehow gave the consumption to her husband and then he up and died.
I know it, said Adair. She began to cry. Well, stop it, she said to herself, and felt around in the hay to see if one of the chickens had laid nearby.
Jessie said, the work is too hard unless you marry a rich man with servants, and there ain’t none left around here. Washing and the bread and weaving and scrubbing floors with sand. It’s all you can do to help me out here. And you get to quit of an evening. If you’re married you can’t quit of an evening. You will be up all night with a baby or sewing and repairing things that are broke.
Adair dredged up two brown-speckled eggs out of a nest under a timber. She said, I could do it. There’s some people that have lived with consumption.
They’d have to have an awful good husband.
Maybe I could find one.
Well, you can stay here and do what you’re able. You can live here. You can read and write and do sums, and you could help me with the accounts.
No, I am going on home here in a little while, as soon as Whiskey can travel. I can’t figure very well, and all the people all the time, I would end by becoming a lunatic.
OVER THE NEXT
week the men kept coming. In the mornings they would get up from outside the tavern or wherever they had slept. Forty or fifty or more. They were shouldering their burdens with the ease of long habit. They began to walk off down the roads, each one to take his own way home.
Then one day the men paused in their departure, for up the trail had come a kind of hallooing, that long call that was meant to carry from mountain to mountain.
Colonel Reeves! they called. Reeves! The call echoed from bluffs and from the newly spread plates of green oak leaves, it came up the trail from man to man.
Colonel Reeves!
A party of horsemen bearing a flag came into view. At their head a tall man with a rifle in a scabbard and eyes that shone like bone china. Colonel Reeves rode past on a buttermilk dun, a worn horse with a shock of black mane, at the head of a contingent of officers. They carried, unfurled and lifting slightly in the spring breeze, their State Guard flag, a faded blue silk, and in the middle of it in a battered gold color, the state seal and the growling bears of Missouri. The men lined the road. There was a long silence as Reeves and his officers came down the trail and through Wilderness, past the tavern. As he went past the men’s hats came off, one after the other like a line of birds taking flight. They stood holding their rifles or their cut hickory walking sticks, their hats in their hands.
Colonel, they said.
Colonel Reeves gazed out from under his hat brim. It was a cavalry officer’s hat pinned up to one side. One boot was kicked out of the stirrup and his uniform was worn through the leather patches at the elbows, the leather hung in little fluttering banners.
Men. Good day, men. God bless you all.
He nodded to each man and looked each man in the eye and then they rode on and the strange flag disappeared into the descending hillside of yellow pine, riding slowly out of the official history of the world.
THE UNION OFFICERS
sat in the tavern’s shade at wooden tables and smoked and watched the last ragged soldiers go by. A young officer seemed to be something of a scholar with eyeglasses and a book of reports in which he wrote industriously. He became curious about Adair, even as she hid from them in the kitchen and the barn. The thin girl with remarkable black eyes and her hair so carefully braided in a crown and the rest of her ragged.
She sat in the kitchen reading
Harper’s Weekly
with her bare feet up on the table. She was reading about the hanging of the conspirators in Washington. The ones who killed Lincoln. She examined the engraving of the hanging bodies and saw they had tied Mrs. Surratt’s skirts around her feet. So that as she strangled she would not kick and show her legs.
Miss? Excuse me.
Adair laid down the
Harper’s
and put her feet on the floor. She stood up.
What? she said. What do you want?
I would like to talk to you. He smiled. His eyeglasses shone and his blue uniform was neatly brushed. The smoke of the kitchen fireplace leaked into the air.
Well, I don’t want to talk to you, she said.
About rare coins, he said. He followed her out the door. I have heard
that many people down here have hoarded coins. I am a coin collector. For instance old shillings.
For instance old shillings, Adair said, and broke into a run for the barn.
And I wanted to get acquainted with you!
She ran up the ladder to the loft. He stood below.
I didn’t mean to frighten you! he called.
In the loft, Adair took up her tow sack with the silver dish and brush, candle ends and a rusted ladle and hardtack and her bedroom slippers, her jacket and shawl. She grabbed her blankets and Whiskey’s bridle. She hurried ankle deep through the sifting hay and the stripes of sunlight that poured through the cracks. She came down the ladder and did not care if he could see up her skirts. He wanted to ask her about the Union militiaman hanging by one leg in a deer snare. And then she would be in prison again until she was led out to the noose and had her skirts tied around her ankles.
The young officer in blue stood back with his hands at his sides, long, thin hands and his hair brown and curling. His eyebrows were wrinkled up in the middle.
This is very distressing, he said. I can’t imagine what I’ve said to cause this commotion.