Enemy Women (8 page)

Adair said, Good day, and the man with the reins in his hands said,

That’s the damndest hat I ever saw.

Adair didn’t know which hat he was referring to, but she said, You don’t look so good yourself. She and Savannah and Little Mary sat down and tried to dry their legs and cotton stockings without being indiscreet.

Who are you all?

Upshaws.

From where?

From the Irish Wilderness. Near Jessie Hyssop’s tavern, town of Wilderness on Slayton Ford.

The man had a pair of jaws like church pews, augmented by a curling brown beard. He said, Reeves burnt us out because we went into the Union Army camp to trade horses. Said we were collaborating.

Well, said Adair. If you been trading for our horses I’ll go back and burn down whatever’s left. She stared at them with furious black eyes. If you’ve collaborated for my horse. Whiskey is his name. He’s a lineback dun with tiger stripes on his legs. They took him two days ago. And a heavy horse, brass colored, and a dark seal brown with no white on him. Our names are Colley. My father is Judge Marquis Colley.

Well, you ain’t nothing special just because your daddy is a squire, said the man.

I never seen horses that looked like that, one of the women said. And don’t you go threatening us.

I ain’t threatening, said Adair. I am going to find our horses again and anybody who took them will pay for it. The three children, two boys and a girl, turned again all together in a single movement to stare at Adair and kept on staring. I need them to go find my father.

Hush up, Adair, said Savannah. You’ll get us taken in.

The horses leaned into their collars and the wagon creaked as it moved forward. The horses had U.S. Army brands on them. The Upshaw children continued to watch her and her sisters as they went off down the road.

Did you see the brands? asked Little Mary.

Also they had a U.S. Army ammunition box in there, said Savannah. The girl was sitting on it.

After another mile the girls came upon them once again. One wobbling wheel had bent itself off the nave and collapsed. The front end had dropped onto the singletree. They were standing in the red dirt of the road and the wind took up the women’s skirts and pressed them against their legs and shoes. It scattered the snow in light sprays.

Looks like you’re afoot, said Adair. She smiled.

We got these horses to ride, said the woman. You’re the ones that are afoot.

Adair and her sisters walked on. They came to the Military Crossing of the Black River and joined the lines of refugees and vehicles waiting to cross on the ferry. Nobody talked much for all they had to speak of were tales of misery and fire, and all these tales were alike, but instead
inquired of one another for missing relatives. Mostly the missing were the men but also children had gone astray, and old people.

As they neared Iron Mountain the road became disordered with broken gray basalt. The stones were the size of a skillet and the road had two shallow ruts through a jumbled bed of black stones. On an uphill stretch where the right-hand side fell off into a deep ravine, and the refugees’ wagons crashed and battered on the stones, a sign said the stony battery: worst stretch of road made by man. Alongside, Adair saw the remains of wheel hubs, broken spokes, horseshoes, and sections of iron tires. Down in the ravine were broken bottles and chairs, things that had fallen from the wagons and that no one cared to climb down and retrieve. The noise of the wagons was deafening.

The following day at noon they found themselves alone on a long stretch of road going up the Saint Francis River valley. Walking between walls of standing dry grasses, big bluestem as tall as they themselves were, bent over as if pointing downwind toward something that had escaped.

At this place their brother rode out of a stand of cane and stood waiting for them. He had a good Union carbine stood up on its butt on his thigh and the reins wrapped around his bad hand.

He sat his horse and nodded to them, and smiled a thin smile. He rode a dwarfish gray horse that had stout legs and a head like a cheese cask. His uniform was of homespun and drawn up by hand, for the Confederacy had long ago abandoned the hopeless task of provisioning any troops whatever north of Little Rock. He had on a pair of laced-up boots that were nearly new, and Adair knew they were U.S. Army issue as well.

Yo, girls, he said. His eyes were watchful. His jaw worked as he searched both ways up and down the Trace.

Adair reached up and took her brother’s arm briefly and then let it go. He swung down and put his withered arm around her. Then in turn around Little Mary and then Savannah. He did not let go of the carbine.

Adair heard then the long grinding complaints of alarmed fox squirrels.
Somebody was coming up the road. Crows scattered among the treetops like black quarter notes. Then she saw the Upshaw family who had been in the broken wagon coming up the road. The women were riding the harnessed horses sitting sideways and the children riding behind. The U.S. brand stood out clearly on the horses’ jaws. The women’s bonnets billowed out in the wind. The man was afoot.

John Lee stared at them out of his black eyes without cease until they passed by. They took in the sight of John Lee’s uniform and then turned away. They gazed straight ahead, for the whereabouts of a Confederate soldier was a dangerous thing to know. They went past with strange blank countenances as if they had been temporarily struck blind. John Lee bent over and spat on the ground.

Who were those people?

Upshaws, Adair said. They said they were from the Irish.

They said Reeves burnt them out, said Savannah.

For what?

They claimed he caught them going to the Militia to trade horses.

I bet they done more than trade horses.

Where’d you go after you left the house?

I went to Ponder’s Mill on the Little Black after the Militia pulled out, he said. You could see the Militia going north along the Military.

Where were you looking from? Adair asked.

Stanger’s Steep. He pulled his hat brim down against the stinging light snow. Colonel Berryman was there gathering up men. I bet there was three hundred men there. He stayed about as long as you can hold a hot horseshoe. Then he was off after them. Me along with them. People said they took Pa on north with some other prisoners. Carters said.

Adair bent over against the wind and tucked her hands inside the shawl.

What are we going to do?

John Lee thought about it for a while.

Go on north. They’re raiding down here till hell wouldn’t have you. Now, I don’t want you all living anywhere near the Yankee garrison.
He paused and cleared his throat and spit in the snow. There are women that fall into bad habits in refugee camps. Pa wouldn’t want you all near women like that. Go and live with the Daltons at the store on the Saint Francis River. Stay out of the way of everybody.

All right, said Adair. She and her sisters stood around him.

John Lee nodded and watched the tree line. Now look here, what I got. It’s a new kind of rifle, what they call a repeater, a Spencer. I can almost shoot it with one hand. But it’s hard getting ammunition for it. It takes rimfire cartridges.

Where’d you get that uniform?

The Chilton girls still have a barn loom. I’ll be all right. But you all stay safe with the Daltons. They done their best over the whole war to stay out of everything and out of everybody’s way. Besides, they’re old people and surely they’ll let them alone. John Lee ran his bad hand down the breech of the Spencer repeater, for though the hand and arm were withered the sense of touch remained keen and he admired the blued steel. He said, Isn’t this one hell of a rifle?

Adair said, I’ll go to the garrison first and ask after Pa, then we’ll go to Daltons’.

All right. He paused. Take care of that old quilt. The Militia will take it from you.

All right. John Lee, I wish you wouldn’t go. We need somebody to go home.

Home’s gone.

The house ain’t gone.

He had a grave and considering look on his face. He was a tall young male manned by great, silent, driving forces that worked in him like noiseless machinery. He had turned himself and these inchoate forces over to Colonel Reeves’s Fifteenth Missouri Cavalry, CSA.

I like soldiering, he said. He rasped his palm on his rough homespun pants. If I live long enough to learn how. He paused again. I tell you what, it’s exciting. Traveling around the country with Reeves’s fellows. Hunting people. He paused. I shot a man for these shoes. The sun
broke through, illuminating the light veils of snow. An explosion of crows in the treetops announced that more people were coming up the road. He stood in the stirrup and settled himself in the dragoon saddle. Though there’s some of the men won’t wear a dead man’s shoes.

Savannah said, Now maybe somebody’s wearing Pa’s shoes.

Shut your mouth, said Adair. You just keep it up and keep it up.

Stop fighting, said John Lee. Look after one another. Family is all we got.

All right, said Little Mary.

Y’all take care, he said.

He put his spurs to his gray horse. He turned back in the saddle and watched them for a long time and then rode away at a gallop through the foreground snow, and into a path in the thick cane, trailing a cloud of horse breath and flying powder.

5

Sunday July 24, 1864:

Warm and pleasent in camp. In Camp al day. Enspection of armes by the Captain. Preaching at the schoolhouse. four of our bois from the Scout returned with 2 of the Mayfield girls prisonors. Rote a letter to My Sister and & Recieved on from her. The bois saw nothing of note.

—
FROM
Found No Bushwhackers: The 1864 Diary of Sgt. James P. Mallery,
Company A, Third Wisconsin Cavalry Stationed at Balltown, Missouri,
PUBLISHED BY THE
V
ERNON
C
OUNTY
H
ISTORICAL
S
OCIETY,
N
EVADA,
M
ISSOURI

March 29, 1865, Respectfully returned. The within named prisoners are hereby remanded to prison:

Col: I send you under guard the prisoners; Georgiana Taylor, Sarah L. Taylor, Virginia Taylor, Lydia Taylor, Mary Vaughn, Sarah Vaughn . . .Returned to Captain R.C. Allen the prisoner, John T. Taylor is in the Female Prison. [Probably a child.]

Signed, Albert G. Clark, Chief Examiner, Office Gratiot St. Mil. Prison, St. Louis, Mo.

—
FROM
The Little Gods: Union Provost Marshals in Missouri, 1861-1865,
BY
J
OANNE
C
HILES
E
AKIN,
T
WO
T
RAILS
P
UBLISHING,
I
NDEPENDENCE,
M
ISSOURI,
1996

April 26, 1864: Tuesday a scrap of gossip from [the Federal prison for Confederates in] Rock Island was handed round; it seems that one of their prisoners, a portly young fellow in Confederate grey, was lately delivered of a fine boy.

—G
RIFFIN
F
ROST,
Camp and Prison Journal

A
FTER A WEEK
they came to the iron mountain garrison. they had walked all the way up the Saint Francis River valley and into that range of mountains that were made of a dark stone the color of cast iron. The Union fort there was stockaded, and the gates were wide open like a mouth. The whole valley beneath Shepherd’s Mountain and Pilot Knob had been cleared of trees for the iron furnaces. Loads of supplies were being brought in, teamsters stood on the loads and shouted at the girls to get out of the way. On Shepherd’s Mountain they could see the ragged battalions of refugees and their tents of blankets and wagon sheets.

They walked through the confusion. The Union Army was rebuilding what Price had burnt down. Soldiers were making themselves shelters and sewing their own clothes. Some of them called out to the girls. There were Union Militia as well as Regular Army and U.S. State troops. Adair had never seen a gathering of people this large since the recruiting rallies in Doniphan at the beginning of the war. And none of these men were from families she knew, they were aliens with flat accents. A few light flakes of snow drifted from a low sky.