After a time he was done with it and they lay facing each other and he told her of his sisters. Told of Mary and Jenny who were yet prisoners in a Yankee hospital at Fort Leavenworth and both crippled and both to be exiled from Missouri. Then told of Josephine. Killed because of his failure to protect her. Told of the bad dreams that woke him every night feeling like he could not breathe for the hot tightness in his throat. He told everything. About the special closeness he and Joey had shared since her babyhood, about the ways they’d touched each other from the time she’d grown to be a girl, about the becrazing circumstance of being unable to love each other as fully as they wanted to. And about her black silk ribbon and the three dozen knots he had so far put in it.
She listened with no hint on her face of what she might be thinking, not until he remarked on the resemblance she bore to Joey, and then he saw her eyes go uncertain. He put a hand to her face and said, “Hey girl, I’m not crazy. You’re not her and I know it as sure as I know she’s dead. It’s just that, when I saw you, I saw her too—for just a second. Then I knew I wasn’t looking at her but at somebody just as special in a lot of the same ways.”
“What was she like?”
He saw her in a hundred different moments in the span of a few heartbeats. “She had a way of carrying herself. A way of looking at things, of seeing things. She had a gentle heart but she was tough as a chain. She never shied at a damn thing the world showed her. The way she’d look at me made me feel…I don’t know…like she was seeing me for who I really am. Like she knew me even better than I do.”
Her gaze searched every region of his. “That’s just exactly how I felt when you looked at me,” she said. “You think I’m crazy or I’m lying, but it’s true. And I’ll tell you right now, mister, I—”
The last thing he would have thought to do just then was break out laughing—but that’s what he did.
She raised up on an elbow and stared at him in astonishment. “You think I’m lying?”
He thought she might be set to hit him and he waved his hand in dismissal of her notion. And managed at last to tell her he wasn’t laughing because he didn’t believe her, but because he did.
She made a mock scowl and tugged at his beard in chastisement—then grinned hugely as he put his face to her breasts, still laughing hard, and then she was laughing too. She pulled his face up and kissed him, and the clumsiness of kissing while laughing made them laugh the harder. They laughed until their bellies cramped.
“Hey, girl,” Bill said, “let’s get out of here.”
“Let’s,” she said. “And I never will come back, I promise you.”
“I know it. Let’s go to the hotel.”
“No,” she said. “Let’s go to my house.”
BUSH SMITH’S TALE
They ride out in her buggy, Edgar Allan trailing on a lead rope. The rain has stopped and the air is clear and cold and the horses’ exhalations plume like smoke. The lower eastern sky is streaked in hues of fire above the imminent sun. Two miles north of town they turn onto a narrow lane cutting through the trees and ascending a gradual rise into the deeper wood. A quarter-mile farther, the trail debouches into a small clearing and there her place is, a one-room cabin with a porch and a small dooryard enclosed by a rail fence. There is a stable as well, next to a swift creek rimed with frost at its banks. The property will not really be hers, she tells him, until she meets the four remaining mortgage payments. He unsaddles Edgar Allan and frees Bush’s horse of the traces and tethers both animals on long leads from the stable so they can drink at the creek. Then goes inside and sits at the little table near the hearth while she prepares breakfast for them and tells him who she is.
Two years ago she’d run away from her family’s farm in Bates County, Missouri, along the north bottom of the Marais des Cygnes, her mother dead four years by then, her bad-tempered father a worsening drunkard. As her body had begun to assume a woman’s swells and hollows, her daddy had more and more looked at her in ways a daddy ought not look at a daughter. She hated to abandon her brother Ned, two years her junior, but she figured she’d best run off before her father acted on the notions he’d been getting. She stole his horse and journeyed north to Doniphan County, Kansas, to live with a good friend named Lena Jeffers, whose family had moved up there a few months earlier. The Jeffers were impressed that she’d made the 120-mile journey by herself. They were kind and sympathetic people, and glad to take her in, knowing the sort of man her father was.
By the end of her first year with the Jeffers she was being courted by Tommy Colehammer, whose small family was their nearest neighbor. In the spring he asked her to marry him and she said yes. He gave her a small but exquisite diamond ring that had belonged to his grandmother, and they set the date for latter July. She didn’t really love him—she looked Bill in the eyes when she said this—but she liked him well enough, and he was sweet and truly did love her, and he would give her what she wanted above all else in this life, a home to call her own. Tommy’s daddy was going to deed them two hundred acres a little south of Wathena. They planned to build a house large enough for all the children they would have.
Since moving to Kansas she had regularly written to her brother Ned, who rarely wrote back. Nearly illegible in their semiliterate scrawl, his periodic letters were always brief but full of complaint, mainly about their daddy, who worked him too hard. He said she was smart to have gone away and he was about ready to run off too. The only reason he hadn’t done it yet was his fear of the army pressgangs roaming the countryside. He said he’d rather be a bushwhacker than get put into a uniform and made to take orders all day and get marched out to some battlefield to be blown apart by a cannonball. She ignored his bushwhacker talk as childish fancy and wrote to him of her engagement and asked him to come live with her and Tommy, but she had not received a response. Tommy assured her that as soon as they were married he would arrange for Ned to join them.
The only guests at the wedding were the Jeffers family, who lived but a mile from the Colehammer place, and Tommy’s three uncles, who shared in the ownership and operation of a hotel and adjoining livery stable in Saint Joseph, Missouri, just across the river, where Tommy himself had been born. Two of the uncles were married but childless and were accompanied by their wives. Bush would never forget the look and feel of that midsummer forenoon in the Colehammer farmyard, the clear sky and soft sunlight, the smell of fresh grass and the aroma of beefsides turning on spits. Puncheon tables stood laden with platters and bowls and jugs. Lena’s Uncle Roland sawed on a fiddle and Tommy’s bachelor Uncle Emmett plunked a banjo, and the duo sent the strains of ancient Appalachian ditties out over the Kansas plain. The preacher had just arrived and was taking a drink with the men when someone harked everyone’s attention to a low dust cloud beyond the cottonwoods on Hooper’s Creek and closing toward the farm from the wagon road. Conversations fell off. The music quit.
A company of riders came into view around the bend in the road, forty or so, coming at a lope and turning off the road and trampling through the Colehammer fields of wheat and corn. Their dust rolled ahead of them to fall over the farmyard as they reined up before the wedding party. The leader sat his horse in the midst of them, a man with a close blue beard and eyes that shone as if he were in fever. Every man of them wore red leggings.
Bush had never seen so many guns nor breathed such a smell as these men carried, an effluvium beyond rank flesh and tainted clothes, a malodor that seemed to rise out of something deep within them and long since gone to rot. An instinct she hadn’t known she possessed prompted her to slip the diamond off her finger and hide it in her bodice.
The redleg captain accused both the Kansas and the Missouri Colehammers of giving information on Union troop movements to Joe Hart’s guerrillas, who’d long been raising hell across the river in Andrew County. The Colehammers admitted to being southerners but swore they’d never given help to Hart or any other guerrillas or ever would. They produced their parole documents and sh
owed them to the redleg captain as proof of their Union fealty. But the captain hardly glanced at the papers. The redlegs were studying the blooded horses in the corral, the good mules and excellent wagons, the well-kept barn and the large fine house.
“When I saw how they were looking around at everything, I knew what was going to happen,” Bush says. She sets two plates of bacon and cornbread on the table, then refills Bill’s cup and pours a cup for herself and sits down. “I was scared, of course, but I think I was mostly sad. I knew everything was just about to change, that nothing was going to be the way I had thought it would be.”
One of the redlegs had been walking his horse slowly around the wedding party’s wagons, then suddenly reached down into a buggy and brought up an old Mississippi rifle. “They got guns, Captain!” he shouted. Bonded southerners were prohibited from bearing arms, and there was not another gun among the wedding party.
The preacher strode quickly toward the redleg captain, shaking a finger at him and saying, “You men just hold on. That’s my rifle and not—” But the captain drew his pistol as he shouted, “Hostile action, boys! Defend yourselves!” And shot the preacher through his top teeth.
There followed a blurred sequence of rapid action, of blasting gunfire and the screaming of men and women. Bush would never have clear memory of what she did in that time, but she vaguely recalled holding tight to one of the tables and waiting to be killed. She saw men running, being trampled by horses, saw blood jump from heads, saw men spin and fall. Little Tector Jeffers, Lena’s twelve-year-old brother, was standing two feet from Bush when he was shotgunned off his feet and into an awkward sprawl of carnage and bloody bits of him spattered her white dress. She saw Tommy Colehammer running toward her and couldn’t imagine what he had in mind to do. Had the poor boy been thinking to protect her? He was almost to her when a red spray burst from his chest and he fell dead at her feet in his handsome wedding suit.
The whole thing did not take two minutes. A mist of gunsmoke drifted over the yard. There had been eight adult men in the party and five boys grown beyond childhood and none was left alive. The only males spared were the Jeffers’ youngest boys—one seven years old and another not yet four. None of the women had been harmed but for Lena’s sister, who’d been nicked in the hand by a stray bullet, and Tommy’s mother, who’d been knocked down by a redleg horse and her leg stepped on by another. The leg wasn’t broken, but the pain had her breathing through her teeth. Bush was the only other female casualty—her lower lip had been split deeply and blood ran off her chin to add to the red stains on her dress, and how it happened she didn’t know or ever would.
The raiders rounded up the livestock, loaded the wagons with the sides of beef and other foods, with plunder from the house and barn. They went from one woman to the next and took from each whatever jewelry she wore—rings, necklaces, lockets, brooches. They were laughing like they were having the best time possible, laughing right through the women’s keenings.
“I cried too,” Bush tells Bill. “Partly for all those good people killed—for poor Tommy. But the truth is, I was mostly crying for myself. After a bit I felt so weak and foolish for doing it that I quit.”
While the redlegs were at their looting, another bunch of their fellows came riding from the south, driving before them a small herd of horses which the Jeffers women recognized. They saw now the distant smoke and knew it was rising off their own homestead. An hour later the Colehammer house and all outbuildings and cribs were burning too and the fields were afire. The redlegs at last rode off in whooping jubilation, taking with them all the horses and stock, all the wagons, and their parting dust mingled with the rising smoke.
Some of the women had needle and thread in their purses and Lena’s aunt stitched Bush’s lip while others cleaned and sewed and bound the arm wound on Lena’s sister. Then they turned to putting away the dead. By sundown they had buried the men in graves all in a row, working with no tools but tree limbs and charred pieces of board and their bare hands. The graves were too shallow to keep off the coyotes and other scavengers that would come in the night and the women all knew it and some of them wept with this knowledge—but none said anything of it because the graves were the best they could fashion and there was nothing else to be done for it. They’d spoken little as they worked, every woman and girl of them keeping to her own reeling thoughts as she dug, as she helped drag man and boy to his grave—fathers and husbands, brothers and sons. The Jeffers women then took leave and started back to their farm with the two boys to see if they might find anything worthy of salvage. They departed into the gathering twilight, bereft refugees scruffing down the road.
“Even though the wedding never did happen,” Bush tells Bill, “the Colehammers made me feel like I was part of their family just the same. What was left of the family, I should say. It was only Tommy’s momma Caroline and his twelve-year-old halfwit sister Florence and his uncles’ two widows. The widows said we could live with them in their hotel in Saint Joseph, so that’s where we headed.”
Bill listens without interruption. Their breakfast plates are still untouched.
They walked five miles to the river and then went north another two miles to the ferry crossing. The women plucked pennyroyal and crushed it with their fingers and rubbed its pungent sap on their faces and arms to keep off the mosquitoes. As they walked through the night, Bush took inexplicable solace from the low quarter moon and the countless stars that had endured since God’s shaping of them who could say how long ago—and strange comfort too from the river’s utter indifference to the events of that day or any other.
They had not a dime among them but the ferryman took pity and carried them over for free. When they arrived on the street where the hotel stood, the eastern sky was red as an open wound. A few people about at that early hour saw them shambling past and could only gape at their spectral aspects.
She was shown to a room and there slept the rest of the day, sweating and twitching with bad dreams. When she woke to a shaft of sunlight slanting through the window, her first thought was that she would not stay with this brood of new widows. After bathing, she put on the clean dress the aunts had provided, then joined them all for supper and ate two helpings of everything, despite the red pain of her bloated lip.
That night, when everyone else was asleep, she eased down the hall to the room where Emmett Colehammer, the bachelor uncle, had lived, and put on an outfit of his clothes. She turned up the pantleg bottoms to her ankles, belted the pinched waistband with a rolled bandanna, folded the shirtsleeves to her wrists, stuffed her hair into a gray slouch hat to achieve a slightly better fit as well as the male disguise she was after. His boots were large for her, of course, but Uncle Emmett had not been a big-footed man, and a double pair of thick stockings took up much of the looseness of their fit—with still enough room in the toe to hide her ring. She was glad for the absence of wall mirrors.
She went downstairs and into the kitchen, found a sharp knife and slipped it into her bandanna belt, then filled a sack with cold biscuits and several tins of food without even looking to see what kind it was. Then she went out and across the sideyard to the hotel livery. She’d prepared an elaborate lie to tell the stableboy but no one was in there, though a lantern was burning bright on a shelf. She spied a cowhide jacket on a wall peg and took it, thinking it would do a better job of concealing her breasts than did the baggy shirt alone. She saddled a strong-looking mare and tied her food sack to the saddlehorn, then stepped up onto the horse and hupped away. By sunup she was twenty miles to the south and still going.
Her notion was to return to her father’s farm (she refused to call it home), collect Ned and move on, though she had no idea where they might go. Her brother was almost sixteen now and she understood his fear of being forced into an army uniform. She thought that if they disguised him as a woman they might fool any pressgangs they ran into—but then again, they might attract even more notice from every man they encountered.
S
uch were her thoughts as she bore south, ferried over the Big Muddy, skirted Kansas City, and held to the lesser trails down through the border country. She slaked her thirst at water crossings, fed on biscuit and peaches or hash or beans, whatever canned good she drew from the sack. Each time she met with horsemen or wagon travelers going in the other direction, she’d tug her hatbrim lower and simply raise a hand if the other party hallooed as they passed. She had thought her outsized costume might raise curiosity, but found it was in keeping with the motley dress of these met pilgrims. She made her nightcamps in the woods, well off the trail, but made no fire that might attract passersby.
“I was a woman alone in bad country,” she says. “I didn’t even have a gun. I’m not without sand, Bill, but maybe you understand my caution.”
Bill reaches across the table and holds her hand.
The bad country she spoke of had suffered so greatly in the wake of Order 11 she hardly recognized it. “I’d heard how terrible things had been,” she says, “but I never imagined. So many places burnt to the ground. Everywhere you looked there was nothing standing but black chimneys.”
“I know,” Bill says.
She was three days getting to her daddy’s place and found there nothing but charred ruins which looked to have been that way for some time. At the weedy edge of the woods behind where the barn had stood, she found no new gravemound beside her mother’s. She walked slowly through the ashy remains of house and barn and found no bones that looked human, only a cow skull and ribcradle. Her urge to cry was mostly self-pity—she’d never felt so alone in the world—and she did not yield to it.
She rode to Red Hill, a hamlet where her family had regularly bought supplies. It too had been razed. Of the original dozen buildings, only one still stood, the old general store, though its shelves had long been barren. The remnants of two families were living there, and the only men among them were a few young boys, a very old man, and a pair of twenty-year-old cripples—one legless and the other blind. But the old man remembered her daddy, and some of the women now recognized her and asked her to step down for a cup of hickory tea. When she asked what had happened to the town, they looked around as if to see what she might mean. Then someone said, “Yankees—what else?”
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