Enemy Women (9 page)

They passed an encampment of Iowans. Adair took off her daddy’s hat and walked bareheaded. She was ashamed of the way she and her sisters looked.

Two Iowa soldiers were sitting together on kitchen chairs in front of their tent.

Another wildwood flower, one said. He made kissing noises.

These are the damndest people I ever seen, said the other.

Then why don’t you go home? said Adair and walked on.

There were colored people living in tents and shanties at the far end of the breastworks, both escaped slaves and freemen. A tall colored man stood on a whiskey box and addressed the crowd. Adair saw that most of them were colored but white soldiers stood at the back with their arms crossed, listening. Adair and her sisters went close in order to hear what he was saying.

Live as free men! he shouted. But do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil but live as servants of God! So saith the prophet Isaiah!

The women stood holding children by the hands or upon their hips and the light flakes drifted onto their headrags. And the preacher, whose name was William Thurston, stood in the snow and the spraying mud and spoke to them about the gift of belonging to oneself.

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light! They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them has a light shined! The crowd of colored people said Amen, Amen in a singing chorus. And from Deuteronomy, chapter thirty, verse three! Then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee! And if any of thine be driven out to the outermost parts of the heavens, from thence he will fetch thee forth! And the women turned to one another and then back, for their thoughts were on their mothers and fathers and other children sold into places they had no knowledge of.

Adair took out one of the silver shilling coins and bought three venison pies from a cook wagon that said sutler on a broad banner stretched across the front. The sutlers followed the armies and sold the troops various small articles and oysters and whiskey, and lent them money at high interest when the men had spent everything on drink and yet wanted more.

The sutler held up the old shilling between thumb and forefinger. I ain’t seen one of these in a long time, the man said. You hill jacks come up with the damndest things. Mud and snow slush sprayed them from the wheels of a passing carriage with a Union officer in it.

Give me my change, said Adair. The sutler paused for a long time, for she was pleasing to look at with her black hair, her ebony black eyes, and her white skin. Her cheeks now very red from the cold. Adair had never been in such an industrious place of people. They were building and hammering and sawing. Men drilled with rifles and a sergeant chased alongside a column of men screaming at them.

What change you think I ought to give you? And still he stared. Her
dress was dirty with the mud of the road and her shoes seemed like hooves they were so hard.

Give me a Spanish milled dollar and we’ll call it even, she said. That coin is valuable.

He said, But a shilling is only worth a quarter dollar U.S.

Adair took the coin back and looked at it, and then returned it. Try and see how well it spends, she said. It was good enough for King George, wasn’t it?

The sutler laughed at her. Well, go on then, he said, and handed her a Spanish milled dollar. He dragged his eyes away from her as if he were extracting something from a well. Adair took the pies before he changed his mind.

She was so nervous she only ate half of her own, and then put the other half, wrapped in brown paper, into the felt hat, her daddy’s tavern hat, and then asked her way to the provost marshal’s office. Her younger sisters trailed behind her, holding each other and their pies.

There were guards at the door in Federal blue uniforms. They wore oilskin capes that dripped, so that they were standing in the midst of their own puddles. Inside, an officer behind a counter. The rainy snow beat on the roof.

The guard said, Sir, there are more people here looking for relatives.

The officer was wearing a greatcoat with a buffalo collar and a sort of stovepipe hat.

There’s a list hung up on the side of the building, he said. Of everybody in the refugee camp. They put up their names. He turned back to his papers. Or they get somebody to write it for them.

No sir, said Adair. She walked up to the counter. My father was arrested by the Militia a week ago. I want to know where he is at.

What’d he do? The officer tipped his stovepipe hat back. How come he got himself arrested? He had light eyes the color of tin. Behind him on the wall was a list of officers, and the name of the officer in charge was Lieutenant Colonel Miller.

Adair’s voice was cracking and so she cleared her throat. She said, He didn’t do anything. I want to know where you all took him.

Who was the officer in command?

Captain Tom Poth. And they took our horses and everything else they could lay their hands on.

Put it in writing, said the officer. What is his name? He took in her clothes and her face, a narrow stare.

My father’s name is Judge Marquis Colley.

He got up and went to a box of pigeonholes that had been nailed to the wall and looked in several of the slots. He took out a paper.

Look here, he said. He turned and signaled to the guards at the door and they came and took her each by an arm.

You are accused of giving information to Rebel spies, and other things, the officer said. Adair’s mouth dropped open and she turned and saw outside the people who had passed them on the Military Trace as she stood talking to John Lee. The man and the two women with the broken wagon. The Upshaws. They were standing in the snow flurries, staring in at the lighted windows of the provost marshal’s building, and beside them their children pulled their cuffs down over their bare hands and kicked at the snow. Adair knew that they had denounced her.

She said, Let go of me. I don’t want you holding on to me like that.

You are under arrest.

But I never did anything. Adair’s voice was ragged, and her mouth was dry. She tried to jerk away from the soldiers who had hold of her arm, but this caused her to drop the tavern hat with the half a pie in it. One of the soldiers, a young man with a round pink face, let go of her arm and reached down to hand it back to her. Are you Lieutenant Colonel Miller?

Yes.

Well, sir, you are going to have to account for this. For arresting me. And everything you stole. You are going to have to account for this.

She tried to pull loose again but this time the guards had taken a harder grip on her arms.

Lieutenant Colonel Miller said, You are giving aid and comfort to the enemy and information as well.

No I didn’t, she said. I’d like to know who said that. Adair was
becoming reckless. Where’s my father? And you have to account for our horses, you have to write down what you took.

The soldiers to either side of her held on to her, and looked from her to the lieutenant colonel.

This state is under martial law, said Miller. The Militia is here to enforce it.

Well, what is marshal’s law? said Adair. You explain to me what marshal’s law is.

The U.S. Constitution is suspended, Miller said. I am responsible for the security and peace of this region.

I don’t know what you call peace, but you all beat up my father and took him away. I may be confused about the term.

Shut up, young woman, said Lieutenant Colonel Miller.

And you are
thieves,
you are thieves.

Shut up, said Miller.

Before they put her on the train to St. Louis she told Little Mary and Savannah to get to the Daltons, back down the Trace to the crossing of the Black River. She gave them the four silver shillings and the rest of her pie. The two girls held hands and stared, bereft, carrying the remnants of their bacon and cornmeal. Adair told them to go there and stay and be good and to help Mrs. Dalton in every way and to pray every night for this family. She said she would escape and come back to them, and send word to them that she was coming. They seemed very dubious about this, and beneath the doubt lay terror. They held each other and did not cry in front of the Union soldiers.

Then she was put into a truck car with three other women on a train north to St. Louis. Three guards sat in the pile of hay with them. Adair had never been on a train before, nor had the other women. They did not speak to one another for the soldiers would not allow it. The steam whistle shrieked so that Adair had to put her hands over her ears. The train began to move, jerking forward. They were all thrown sideways in concert, as if this aggregation of strangers had just become an accomplished dance team.

The wind and snow came in the open door of the truck car and as they went on the straw flew more thickly so that the women had to put their shawls across their faces. Adair held her tavern hat against her chest and wrapped her shawl over her head. The straw was peppered with fleas and manure and it was blowing up into her face. She watched out the open door as the forests tore past them at thirty miles an hour, through deep slashes in the hills that were still raw and red, and over trestles high above the Saint Francis River and the Meramec. The tunnel of limbs they sped through raked at the sides of the car, and steam drifted back.

Adair was silent with amazement. Things had evaporated so quickly she hardly had time to study on it. The other women in the car seemed to her very passive and resigned to being shipped somewhere like cows. Like creatures in bondage, and one of them glanced at Adair and then away again and her face was humble and whipped looking, and Adair wondered how the woman had got beaten down into that state, if it could happen to her as well. She put her fingertips across her mouth to guard herself against the flying dirty straw and the guard saw it, and offered her his canteen. She turned her back on him.

The train engine shrieked with its powerful whistle all through the mountains going north. At Overtop they paused while a second engine backed up to help pull the first one and its train of cars over the grade. The engineer came out and climbed up on the rails alongside the engine to blow the boiler down. He pulled a lanyard and the steam exploded outward along the track and drifted into the truck car. It froze to the pine boles in crystals.

By this time another upsurge of snow had come, a blizzard of snow, and Adair could see out the open doorway how the soldiers’ blue coats grew shoulder bars of white. They stood guard while the locomotive engines poured out fire from their chimneys and sent red flashes muffling into the storm.

Adair watched it snow. She wiped tears from her face again, they seemed to flow of their own accord. The soldier who sat beside her
wore the insignia of the U.S. Regular Army. He smelled of wet wool. He stared out at the retreating mountains and did not offer to help her again.

Then the train cleared Overtop and they lost the helper engine. They went on north through the tumbling hills, farther and farther north. The track followed the river valleys. The train clanked and jerked around the curves of the Meramec River while snow in drifting curtains swept slow stipples across the black water and the reeds stood up crowned in white. At a place called Jefferson Barracks alongside the Mississippi River Adair saw a great busyness in the train yard, wagons of provisions being unloaded and a troop of Union cavalry boarding their horses onto a cattle car.

The horses made a thundering noise, and she saw how deeply distressed they were, knowing nothing of where they were being sent, pressing up against one another in fear. They surged into the dark cave of the car because they were being whipped into it and could do nothing else. The great river was broad and cold and on the Illinois shore black winter trees turned red in the sunset light.

By this time it was nearly dark. Lights surrounded them, thicker and thicker, Adair had never seen so many gaslights and house lights and streetlights in her life. And so they came to the Pine Street Station in St. Louis.

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