by Sarah Bird
When I spoke, my own words startled me for they came out of a place deeper inside of me than I even knew was there. I said, “Mama didn’t put me on this earth to be some man’s brood sow or work ox.”
Then I fell so silent and so still that Clemmie said, “Cathy, you scaring me. You have that Africa look in your eyes. You talking to Iyaiya?”
“I’m talking,” I finally said, “but she ain’t answering.”
“Well, I’m answering and I’m telling you for true, you have no choice. Now let’s light a shuck.”
My head knew she was right, but I couldn’t convince my legs she was right and I remained planted next to Solomon’s grave. Bethany was beside me cooing to Matildy and feeding her night crawlers been turned up by the digging. My fingers finally turned loose of the shovel and I sagged onto the ground. I was whipped. As a strip of pink cracked across the far horizon, I accepted the truth: I would be a washerwoman. I would be the lowest of the low, a woman bent over a black cauldron, stirring dirty rags with a stick. I had no other choice.
I was about to follow Clemmie when two lonely figures appeared, silhouetted against the early dawn sky. It took me a minute to credit what I was seeing: the boy and his mother were plowing, furrowing the earth in a desperate attempt to get a crop in before the weather turned. The plow was too tall for Tad, but he held the forked handles strong and sure as a grown man. Up ahead, wearing the harness and pulling the plow, was his little bitty slip of a mother. Head down, she dragged the iron tool through the earth with will more than strength.
Clemmie was boarding the wagon when I told her to go on ahead without me.
“I am not leaving without you, sister,” she yelled down at me. “I leave you here and you’ll for God sure die then Iyaiya’ll haunt me forever and I am not having that. Come on with me now,” she ordered. “At least you be alive.”
“And spend this one life the ancestors gave me scrubbing the shit stains out some man’s dirty drawers? That’s not my idea of living.”
Clemmie stared hard, fixing to put up a fuss. But I was still the big sister, so instead, she moaned, “Oh, Lord, you got that look again means there’s no talking to you anymore.”
“My mind is made up.”
“Damn, girl, you stubborn as a cross-eyed mule. Always were.” Clemmie heaved a deep sigh, turned to bend into the wagon bed where she retrieved my yagger, climbed down off the wagon, and held it out to me. “Here. Take it. You be needing this a damn sight more than me.”
I waved away the offer. “Naw, you keep it. Wagon, too. Needs to be returned to Sheridan. I can’t be sashaying about with no weapon out in the open. We ain’t that free yet.”
Clemmie plunged her hand between her bosoms, and plucked out a little box-lock pistol. “Here, take my pepper pot then. Woman alone.” She tsk-tsked and shook her head in despair. “You better have something to protect yourself with.”
I fished out some of Solomon’s bills and forced Clemmie to take them, saying, “Get you another little gun. Something you can always have ready to hand. Whether you got a man or not, a woman’s always alone. Always needs to be ready to stand up for herself.” I gently traced the round of her plump cheek. She dropped her head low, throwing her arms around me, so that the top of her head was a bouquet beneath my nose, and I whispered into it, “Be strong, little sister.”
Clemmie hugged me ferocious tight, muttering, “Damn you, damn you, damn you. Damn your stubbornness.” She turned me loose and pivoted quickly away so I couldn’t see her face, but my dress was wet where she’d buried her face.
The light of the new day shone on Clemmie’s back as she drove away from me. In spite of how she’d plumped up, given herself more padding against a world she’d learned too young was wicked and mean, her shoulders were stooped again, like she was trying to crawl inside herself and hide, the way she had after Old Mister took her. We were both pretending to be tougher than we really were, but Clemmie had a natural sight more tenderness to cover up than I ever did. She couldn’t do what I saw I was called to do. She couldn’t be a woman alone amongst men.
After watching until she turned off and disappeared behind a low rise, I called out to the little girl, “Bethany, come here.” The little girl approached reluctantly, cradling Matildy in her arms, not wanting to give her new friend back.
“You, too,” I hollered to her shy big sister. The sister peered back over her shoulder like I was hailing someone behind her. Finally, she crept out of the shadows of the front door holding a skimpy bag of seed, clearly meant for planting as soon as the sun was full up.
“How you call your name?” I asked her. Though she was but a young girl, I saw that she was someone to be trusted.
“Mercy Jane,” she answered.
“All right then, Mercy Jane, I want you to take this.” Solemnly, I placed most of what remained of Solomon’s money in her hand. “Tuck it away,” I added when she didn’t pull her hand back. “Now, I want you to give that to your mother and tell her to pack all y’all up and leave this place. Go with the Yankees. Follow them back up North. Ain’t nothing here for y’all but hunger and heartache. Never will be. Go on, now,” I ordered. “Tell her.”
Though so skinny you’d of thought her bones would clatter like a skeleton’s when she ran, the girl took off running with a heavy, serious step that made me trust her even more.
Bethany held Matildy up to me and, though I longed for the comfort of the creature’s silky body and the feel of Solomon’s presence it carried, she could not come with me where I had to go. I asked the little girl, “Do you want to keep her?”
Bethany nodded and answered solemnly, “Yeth.”
“Can you take care of her? Keep her safe?” She reminded me of Clemmie when she was young. Clemmie, too, had been the sort of girl who was born yearning for something small and soft to care for. Who, if she had a scrap of cloth and a walnut, would turn it into a baby doll and glue moss to it for hair. Me? I’d blow my nose on the scrap of cloth, crack the walnut open and eat it. So, when I said, “Like a mama with her baby?” Bethany’s eyes lit up and I knew no harm would ever come to Solomon’s friend.
“Her name’s Matildy,” I said as I started down the road.
I watched Bethany caper away to join her siblings who were all gathered up around their mama, a tight little tribe who had each other. I thought of how I’d of had that with Solomon and something twisted inside of me so hard I stopped dead and didn’t believe I could go on. Not alone.
But the rising sun was as warm on my back as a hand pushing me toward what I intended to do and I set off again. I hastened my step until I was running. My mind was made up: what the world wouldn’t give Cathy Williams, Cathy Williams was bound to take.
BOOK TWO
Heading Out West
Chapter 28
“Whuh the—” As soon as Dupree’s mouth was open, I stuffed his words back into it with a dirty rag. The next sound he heard was the hammer of Clemmie’s pepper pot cocking back right next to his ear and me telling him that if he made one more sound, he’d meet his Jesus that very day. I whispered even though the passed-out pack of degenerates littering the ground around the campfire they’d returned to like the morons they were wouldn’t have stirred had an artillery round landed in their midst.
Still half jugged and entirely terrified, Dupree offered little resistance when I ordered him at gunpoint farther into the woods.
The forest floor was carpeted with a deep layer of pine needles that deadened our footsteps. I marched Dupree down to where the Appomattox River, churned to mud by the horses and men of two armies, was flanked by a wall of granite that would do to baffle the sound of the little revolver being fired point-blank into a man.
Not wanting to die next to a desolate mud wallow, the bushwhacker whirled around and made to grab the gun from my hand. His buckskin shirt and britches were stiff with filth and Dupree lumbered about with no more grace than a shaggy bear. I easily sidestepped his lunge and he stumbled face-first into t
he gravelly muck. He flipped over and lay there panting, two white eye holes and one pink, near-toothless mouth in all that slimy brown.
“Rebel,” I told him, “you already given me two reasons to blow out your lamp. Don’t give me another.”
But he did. He scrambled over and made a grab for my ankle. Lord, the man moved slow. I stepped hard on the top of his hand, trapped it beneath my shoe and the sharp gravel and ground down hard. Dupree shrieked as the shards of granite cut into his palm. Though any motion caused his hand to be mashed even deeper against the pointed stones, he wriggled about and yanked on my ankle until I kicked him in the head with my free foot.
Sometime later, when Dupree came to, he noticed immediately that he was sprawled out on his back in the mud, naked as the day he was born. “Whuh? Whuh?” he sputtered, splashing through the shallow water as he tried to crawfish away from the barrel of the revolver pointed straight at his little nubbin.
“Take your boots off,” I ordered.
“You can have them,” he said, obeying. “I’d of given you the buckskins, too,” he added for I was now wearing his filthy garments.
After the boots came off, he struggled to his knees, put his hands together and begged me to let him live. “Listen, I got money. Silver them planters buried. It’s all melted down. Buried in a secret place. I’ll take you right to it. You can have it. Have it all. Please…”
He started blubbering so hard I could barely make out the lies he was confabulating about the fortune in Secesh silver he was hiding so he could go on living off the weevily hardtack he stole from the Union army.
I ordered him to shut up and get to his feet then took my sweet time circling that miserable specimen shivering in the cold, hands cupped over his crotch, runty legs bowed out, arms skinny as hickory branches. If this item’d come wrapped in a black skin, he wouldn’t have fetched three dollars on the auction block. He’d of ended his life swinging a grub hoe down in Mississippi.
“Please, please, please—”
“Shut your trap and listen.”
His shameless begging fell off to a whimper of the most pitiable sort. When he finally shut up, I advised him, “Next time someone tells you to take your hand off a lady—”
I paused to shoot off the big toe of his left foot and he dropped on his ass, howling and clutching at his four-toed paw as the blood gushed through his fingers and down his skinny shank, before I concluded, “You best listen to her.”
Chapter 29
Dupree’s sodden pants and buckskin shirt hung on me like a sweated-up horse blanket and smelled a hundred times worse. The drop-front britches did contain one welcome surprise, though. In the pocket was a straight-edge razor. The bushwhacker must of stolen it off a Yankee for it had a fine whalebone handle with a four-master sailing boat scrimshawed into it. I opened it, sliced off my braids, and crammed the stinking coonskin hat onto my head. I didn’t know what I looked like. Sure not a woman. Probably something slightly below a man. A muskrat trapper maybe.
Thus disguised, I stood at the edge of the woods and peered out, afraid to take the first step into the new life I had determined would be mine. Though it was barely daylight and there wasn’t another soul on the Richmond–Lynchburg stage road into Appomattox Court House, I felt like the noonday sun and a thousand eyes were waiting to drill into me the instant I revealed myself. Holding my breath the way I used to do back home when I’d jump off Sunset Bluff into the swimming hole, I stepped out of the deep shadows and set to marching back into town.
The road was lined with rail fences that made long, zigzagging curves around land that might have been lush once upon a time before soldiers, blue and gray, had knocked the rails down and trampled the fields into muck. Shivering from the chill and weighted so bad with the heaviness of missing Solomon that I wanted to sit down and never rise again, I put my sorrow away sure as I’d put Old Mister away, whispered, “Hay foot. Straw foot. Hay foot. Straw foot,” and ordered myself forward.
So intent was I on hunching over and shrinking away under Dupree’s coonskin cap that I was considerably spooked when, first one, then another, and another silent group of men, two and three at a time, emerged from the woods, all heading in my direction. And not just any old men. White men. Enemy white men. Glum Rebels who’d been camping rough with the twigs and leaves in their hair and grimy faces and hands to prove it
In spite of looking more creature than human, for the first time in my life, I felt positively womanly. It suddenly seemed like the nubs of my small breasts had grown into massive udders certain to betray me and snatch my dream away. I ducked my head low as a turtle pulling back into her shell, yanked Dupree’s disgusting cap down even further over my eyes, and hunched so far forward that the only thing I could see were my feet.
There wasn’t much more to the village of Appomattox than a tavern, the courthouse it was named for, a general store, a squatty little law office, a few houses, a three-story redbrick jail with so few windows the place made me pity those unlucky enough to know its grim justice. But it was mobbed that day. Rebels. Yanks. Ex-slaves, they were all there.
The ex-Rebs all headed for the Clover Hill Tavern where passes that marked them as paroled prisoners of war were being handed out that would allow them safe passage home. Quick as I could, I skinned off away from the Rebs and sidled up to a cluster of men of color. I had to pass unnoticed until I located the recruitment depot.
Space immediately cleared around me due to the excessive ripeness of Dupree’s raggedy duds, but I could still hear muttering behind me with one asking the other where he thought the recruitment depot the heroic sergeant had referred to the night before might be.
We were milling about like cattle in a pen, shuffling one way, then the other, none brave enough to ask a white stranger for directions when who should strut up but Justice Vikers, the bespectacled fellow with the piercing voice who’d read out the Surrender Agreement. He led a band of followers that had been made brash by the bold words that swirled around Vikers’s head thick as a cloud of gnats.
“What ho?” he called out when he came upon us milling about. “What cause for your delay, good fellows? Have you lost your way in this great metropolis?” I once overheard a bunch of actors putting on a play for the white folk and they had the same high-toned manner of speech as Vikers was putting on.
“Is it the recruitment depot you’re seeking?” he asked, switching the words around so what you’d expect to go first come last and vicey versey. “Why don’t you simply read the notice clearly posted before you?”
And, sure enough, there was a sheet of paper hung from the square head of a nail sticking out the front of one of the Clover Hill Tavern’s porch columns. It was hard to miss for a reading person. For us, however, a piece of paper scribbled up with writing was of as little interest as a gold nugget to a sparrow flying overhead.
Vikers stepped forward, making a show of clearing his throat and cleaning the lenses of his spectacles a time or two before he read the directions written on the paper to himself. Instead of just telling us the way, he led us a couple of miles outside of town, talking the whole way. By the second mile, the peculiar voice and high-toned manner that I had been so taken with when he was reading out the Surrender Agreement was starting to grate. It was plain that, like the actors he reminded me of, Vikers had a need for an audience. The more adoring, the better.
“You were right about that one,” I whispered to Solomon. Imagining his know-it-all chuckle comforted me and I shambled on.
Vikers led us to an abandoned farm a mile or two east of town set upon a charred field that sported nothing but a few scorched stalks of what once might have been a fair corn crop along with a rickety old barn that had somehow survived the Burning. With my destination in plain sight, I moved out ahead of Vikers and his followers.
I searched the crowd both hoping and fearing I’d catch a glimpse of Sergeant Allbright. Though I’d of given considerable to look upon that fine face again, I did not want him to s
ee me in my current degraded condition. But neither he, nor any soldier of color, was to be found among the soldiers manning the depot. White soldiers pushed us into lines with shoves so unnecessarily rough that I feared once again we were to be tricked by the whites who were really running the show. I would have turned and left then and there but for the fact that I had no other place on earth to go.
A row of three tables with white soldiers sitting behind them were lined up outside the barn. A few ex-slaves, twisting hats in their big work-hardened hands, stood in front of each one, answering questions while the soldiers filled in their answers on enlistment forms.
Enlistment.
Suddenly, it felt like I was high up atop that shot tower again or someplace a heap higher than I had ever intended to go. I couldn’t catch my breath for I’d gone to panting too hard and fast to pull in a proper lungful of air. My hands shook until my fingers near rattled. Sweat that had nothing to do with the gathering heat of the day beaded up beneath the coonskin cap and came creeping down until it was dripping off my temples. Since Mama didn’t hold with giving in to emotions, my whole life I’d had to wait for my body to let me know what I was feeling, and at that very moment I came to know that I was terrified.
Chapter 30
“Form up! Form up!” a bucktoothed lion roared into my face and I barely stifled a shriek that would have announced me as the girliest of girls. On second glance I saw that my nerves had got the better of me, and it was only a round-faced corporal with a bushy blond mustache and beard and front teeth that poked out to where he couldn’t close his mouth over them.
I tried to step out of line so I could get my hands to quit shaking and take in the lay of the land before it was my turn at the enlistment table, but the bucktoothed corporal jobbed me a smart one in my hindquarters with the butt of his rifle and ordered, “Step up, boy! Step up! You’re on army time now!”
