Watcher in the Piney Woods

by Elizabeth McDavid Jones

  When I regained consciousness, I found myself in a local home, which was being used for a hospital. It was here that I learned the unfortunate fate of your son. Our troops had been forced to retreat suddenly and hurriedly, and our dead and the mortally wounded had to be left behind. Jacob, I’m told, was one of those who died.

  After that, Cassie’s brain shut down. She was in a pond, she felt, floating facedown and looking through murky water to the bottom. She heard and saw what was going on, but only through a haze. She heard Mama going on with her reading, heard the sound and rhythm of Mama’s voice, but Cassie’s mind recorded nothing. She felt her eyelids blink. She was aware of her own breathing: in, out, in, out. She heard someone shrieking and let her eyes move across the room. It was Emma; Emma was sobbing into her hands. Cassie blinked again. Then she realized that the rhythm of Mama’s voice had stopped. There was no sound in the room but Emma’s sobbing.

  Then Cassie heard Ben speak. “What’s wrong with Emma?” he asked. Cassie’s eyes followed the sound of his voice to the hearth. She noticed that his hands were black with soot.

  At first nobody answered. Mama had her elbows propped on the arms of the rocker. Her hands covered her forehead and eyes.

  Ben hopped up and ambled over to Emma, leaving black, sooty footprints on the pinewood floor. “Why you crying, Emma?” He put a sooty hand on Emma’s knee and lowered his head to look into her face.

  Emma jerked away and put her head down on the writing desk. Ben looked hurt. He swiped at a shock of yellow hair hanging in his eyes, which left a black streak on his face. “What’s wrong, Mama? What’s wrong with Emma?”

  Mama sighed. “She’s sad, sugar.”

  “Why, Mama?”

  “’Cause your brother Jacob ain’t coming home from the war.”

  “Don’t he like us no more?”

  “No, sugar. It ain’t that.”

  “Then what?”

  Mama seemed barely able to force out the words. “He’s gone. Gone up to heaven.”

  “How’d he get there?”

  Mama squeezed her eyes shut again. Then, before she could answer, Philip was up, had Ben by the hand, and was bellowing at him. “I’ll tell you how he got there! A stinking, yellow-bellied Yankee shot Jacob down like a dog.”

  Ben’s eyes got as big as a full moon. Philip went on. “Them damn Yankees killed him, boy. They killed your brother dead.”

  Ben started to whimper.

  “Philip, that’s enough,” Mama said.

  Philip kept on like he didn’t even hear Mama. “I’ll get ’em back someday. You watch me. I’ll kill me a Yank. I will.”

  By then, Mama was standing. Her shawl had fallen off and lay in a heap on the floor. Her eyes flashed fire at Philip. “You hush your mouth right now, boy. What’s got into you, spewing out that hateful talk, scaring your little brother? We don’t act like that in this family. No matter what happens.”

  Philip slid his jawbone back and forth. He was struggling; he wanted to say something back to her, but he didn’t dare. So he looked around at everybody and said, “Y’all always finding fault with me. ’Spect me to work like a man, but you treat me like a boy. Pa setting me in his place—that’s a joke. Ain’t nobody treats me like they would him.”

  All of a sudden, Cassie’s mind cleared. Rage at Philip boiled up out of her throat. “Why don’t you quit thinking about yourself?” she said. “This ain’t about you! It’s about Jacob. So what if some lying letter says he’s dead? I don’t believe it! I don’t!”

  “Cassie—” said Mama.

  “No, Mama. It ain’t true. I’d know if he was dead. I’d feel it.”

  Mama opened her mouth to speak. Cassie didn’t give her the chance. “He ain’t dead!” Cassie said. Hector’s head jerked toward Cassie. He jumped up and trotted to her side. Cassie let her hand fall to Hector’s neck. She heard Jacob’s voice ringing in her head: “A puppy for you, Cass, to take my place on your treks through the woods. So you won’t be lonesome while I’m gone …” The memory pressed down on her, heavy as an anvil on her chest. Her breaths came quick and short.

  Philip, his face hard, said, “You’re the one that’s lying, Cassie, and you know it.”

  Mama started to walk toward Cassie. “Listen to me, honey.”

  Cassie was sweating—it was so hot in that room—and she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t bear to hear what they were saying. She clapped her hands over her ears and backed toward the door. “No. Please,” she said. “Don’t talk to me!” Then she turned and bolted outside. Hector scrambled out the door with her before it slammed.

  “Cassie!” It was Mama, calling after her, but Cassie didn’t look back. Around the side of the house she raced, Hector loping beside her, through the gate, and across the road, running, running, out to the pecan grove, and on.

  Where she was headed, Cassie didn’t know. Any place would have done, any place where she could get away from the mallet hammering the terrible words into her brain: Jacob is dead … Jacob is dead.

  On Cassie ran, into the piney woods, up an ancient, rutted wagon path, to the old apple orchard, where the tree trunks were blanketed with moss and the ground was covered with periwinkle. By now a purpose had formed in her mind, a destination. She was going to the thicket—of course—the secret hideaway in the woods that she and Jacob had shared.

  Winded, Cassie slowed to a jog, through a thicket of cedar trees and broomstraw, up a stony pine ridge to the deep woods. Everything here, where she and Jacob had played and explored for countless hours, reminded Cassie of him. A clump of pine saplings made her think of the way he used to bend saplings over for her to ride on like a pony. Partridges whistling brought to her mind the time the two of them found a partridge nest and brought the eggs home to Mama so she could make custard.

  The memories sliced into Cassie with sharp, searing pain, and she broke into a run again, through the briers and all. She stopped at the spring—she had to get a drink; her throat ached something awful and was so tight she could hardly breathe. She cupped her hands, slurped up the icy springwater, and gulped it down so fast, it made her throat hurt worse. Then she called to Hector and headed on up the hill toward the secret thicket.

  Jacob had hollowed out the thicket when he was twelve years old, the same age as Cassie now. He’d cut out a circular opening inside a stand of witch hazel shrubs and rose acacia bushes and hacked two secret entrances through the wisteria vines that tangled around the shrubs. Later on Jacob showed Cassie the thicket, and after a while it became “their” secret place. When Jacob went away to war, Cassie had promised herself she’d look after the thicket until he came back—keep it from growing over, and keep it secret. She had kept her promise for three long years.

  Hector ran ahead of Cassie. By the time she spotted the circle of shrubs that enclosed the thicket, Hector had disappeared through one of the secret entrances. The dogwoods and redbuds had bloomed since the last time she was here, and they blazed, gorgeous, in pink and red across the hill. The wild plums and the cherry laurels were also in bloom, and the air was filled with the smell of honeysuckle. Clumps of red and yellow columbine and tiny white spring beauties flourished everywhere.

  “It’s too beautiful,” Cassie whispered. “It shouldn’t be like this, not with Jacob gone.”

  Hector barked from inside the thicket. Cassie tugged at the wisteria vines until they gave way, and crawled through an opening to the clearing inside the thicket. Hector was lying against an old log on the thicket’s floor, sunning himself. She threw herself down beside him and rested her head on the log.

  Cassie’s feelings were all tangled up inside her, and it hurt too much to try to sort them out. She didn’t want to try; she would rather close them away and never have to think about them.

  If only she could hide here in the thicket forever, shut off from everyone else, shut off from this nightmare they called a war … As long as she was here, Jacob would be alive. He’d be whistling tunes and telling jokes somewhe
re, making the other soldiers laugh, and talking about how he couldn’t wait to get home to his little sister Cassie.

  Oh, if only she could.

  For a long time Cassie lay there, dry-eyed, against the log. She couldn’t cry. She watched a hawk, far above, curling through the sky. She listened to the woods, still but not still—there, the faintest wind breathing through the trees; there, the distant yelp of a wild turkey.

  She remembered all the hours she had spent with Jacob here in the thicket, playing or talking, or just listening, like she was doing now. She thought of the last afternoon before Jacob left for the army, when she had looked for him and found him here and they had stayed for hours and talked.

  It was summer then, in ’62; Jacob was barely fourteen. He hadn’t said a word then of soldiering. All he talked about was home, things they’d done, good times they’d had. She was too young then—only nine—to think much about it. But now, when she considered it, it seemed more and more to her that Jacob hadn’t really wanted to go to war at all.

  “Why did he go?” she whispered, her heart aching. “If he didn’t want to, why did he go?”

  Cassie closed her eyes. What she wanted most was to see Jacob’s face again, if only in her mind. She tried to remember, to picture him on the chilly gray morning when he had left. She pressed her eyelids together and concentrated hard. But the only picture that would come to her mind was another face—her own—reflected in the brass buttons of Jacob’s uniform jacket.

  The jacket was homespun, dyed yellowish-brown with butternuts, and sewed by Mama and Emma in their neat, tiny stitches. There were six buttons on it. And six blue-eyed, snub-nosed faces stared back at Cassie when she looked at them.

  And that was all Cassie could remember. She could see as clear as a summer sky those little round Cassie faces gleaming from Jacob’s buttons. But for the life of her, she could not conjure up a picture of his face.

  Then Cassie cried.

  Waves of sobs boiled up from the anguish within her, and kept coming, and coming, until Cassie’s insides felt empty, and she was very, very tired. It occurred to her then that she should be getting home. Who knows how long she had been here? Yet she couldn’t find the strength to move.

  Sometime while Cassie was crying, Hector had stirred from his place in the sun, come to her, and laid his head on her leg. Now Cassie stroked the spot under Hector’s chin where he liked to be scratched, and she happened to glance at the flattened leaves where he had been lying. She saw something glinting in the sun there, something round and shiny—a button, it looked like, a brass button.

  “How did that get here?” she said aloud. She reached out and picked up the button, cupped it in her hand. It was a plain, ordinary brass button, scratched, with most of the finish worn off. It looked like it might have come off someone’s good suit of clothes or off a uniform, a soldier’s uniform.

  “Ain’t that curious, Hector? A button here? When nobody knows about this place ’cept you and me?”

  But buttons, Cassie knew, didn’t turn up in thickets all by their lonesome. Somebody had been here.

  Mama’s warning leaped to Cassie’s mind: Yankees and no-good soldiers about … don’t go far.

  Cassie bit her lip and looked at the button again. She turned it over and over. It could belong to anyone. But it did look like a soldier’s button, didn’t it? And soldiers were passing through all the time—cavalry scouts, messengers, troops on the move. But those soldiers were doing just that—passing through. No decent, honorable soldier would leave his regiment and come out to the deep woods all alone. And no decent, honorable soldier would go crawling around in a thicket either.

  Cassie felt a twinge of fear. She had heard plenty of stories about rogue soldiers—escaped prisoners, deserters, and slackers, both Yankees and Confederates, who hid in the woods and roamed the countryside, stealing, plundering, and worse …

  A shiver went down Cassie’s spine. Whoever had been here in the thicket was someone who was up to no good. And there was no way to tell when that someone might come back.

  CHAPTER 3

  ALONE IN THE SWAMP

  Cassie’s heart thumped against her ribs. She clenched the button tightly in her fist. How long had the button been here? A week? A day? An hour? Maybe the soldier who had dropped the button—Cassie had already begun to think of him as a soldier—was somewhere nearby even now, watching her.

  Something rustled in the shrubs behind her. Seized by panic, Cassie dived for the passageway and scrambled outside, just in time to see a startled chipmunk dart away from the thicket. Hector sprang after the creature, barking, but the chipmunk disappeared into a hole.

  “Mercy,” Cassie said. She sank to the ground and tried to still her racing pulse. She’d been scared for nothing—this time. But she wasn’t about to wait around for someone who was a real threat to show up.

  “Let’s get on home,” she said to Hector. She dropped the button into her pocket and added, “Real quick.” She had already decided to take the fastest route back to the farm, which meant a shortcut through the huckleberry swamp. The swamp crawled with water moccasins and rattlers, but poisonous snakes seemed less frightening than the faceless image of the rogue soldier that loomed in her mind. Besides, Hector would give her fair warning before she stepped on a snake. Cassie picked out a big stick to carry, though, just in case.

  At the bottom of the hill, she turned east instead of south, and it was less than a mile to the swamp. The swamp, dotted with creamy white huckleberry blooms, looked almost inviting. Hector must have thought so; he plunged right in. Cassie started after him, following a deer trail through the tangle of huckleberry shrubs, past tall canes of swamp rose and snakeroot rising on long purple spikes. A ways into the swamp, her stomach began hurting—whether from hunger or fear, she didn’t know—and the farther she hurried through the muck and briers, the harder it was to ignore the pain.

  Cassie spotted a copse of sassafras trees just off the trail, on a little hummock at the edge of the swamp. Sassafras was the best thing for a stomachache, Mama said, so Cassie decided to get some sassafras bark to chew on. “This way, boy,” she said to Hector, and started up the hummock.

  When she got to the top, she saw that on most of the trees, the bark was infested with some sort of bug. As she pushed farther into the copse searching for some unblighted bark, she spied what looked like a shelter rigged up next to a little pawpaw tree. Taking a few steps closer, she could see it was a shelter: a blanket, raised a few feet off the ground by sticks to form a little tent. The other side was tied to some low branches of the pawpaw tree. Pine boughs had been piled on top of the blanket to hide it. Outside the shelter was a circle of blackened ground and charred wood, the remains of a campfire. A wooden canteen hung from the limb of a tree nearby.

  Then Cassie saw something that made her mouth go dry. Slung on the ground a few feet from the campfire were a military haversack and a soldier’s forage cap.

  This was a soldier’s campsite.

  Was it the same soldier who had trespassed in her secret thicket?

  Fear twisted in Cassie’s belly. She had the urge to run, but she made herself stay. Apparently there was no one around. Hector didn’t seem the least bit alarmed. He had already rushed forward to sniff at the campfire.

  Cautiously Cassie followed Hector. She bent to touch the charred wood; it was cold. There’d been no fire here for a while, anyway. Where was the soldier who had made the shelter and left his belongings? And who was he? The fellow was obviously hiding; why else would he camp smack-dab in the middle of a swamp? He was a no-good, that was for sure, probably a deserter. Maybe he was the Yankee who robbed the Waldrops, claiming to be foraging for supplies for his troops. “Foraging,” Cassie knew, was the Yankees’ way of stealing from everyday folks without calling it such.

  Cassie felt a little braver now, and curious, very curious. She moved forward to get a closer look, crouched, and picked up the haversack. Strange—it was empty. Hector pushed
past her and sniffed at the haversack. Then he caught sight of a rabbit in the brush at the edge of the clearing and took off after it. In an instant both Hector and the rabbit had disappeared down the side of the hummock.

  Cassie was puzzling so over the haversack, she scarcely noticed Hector was gone. Usually soldiers carried personal items in their haversacks, like mess kits, sewing kits, razors, and handkerchiefs. It was odd, she thought, that this haversack was empty. What did it mean? Had the soldier been forced to abandon his campsite? He must have gone in a hurry, to leave his hat and canteen—valuable articles for a soldier.

  Cassie eyed the hat. It was bedraggled and filthy, encrusted with mud, and a color that she couldn’t name. Had it once been Yankee blue or Rebel gray? There was no way to tell, not now. Likely it had been blue, she thought, for it would be like a Yankee to slink away and hole up like this in the woods.

  Then the canteen, twisting slowly in the breeze, caught Cassie’s eye. For the first time she noticed there were letters painted on its side. She watched as the canteen twisted away, then back again. Now she could see the letters clearly: CSA—Confederate States of America.

  Cassie’s stomach lurched. This no-good deserter was a Confederate—one of their own. He was supposed to be fighting for the South. Yet brave soldiers like Jacob were being killed, while this fellow ran away.

  Cassie felt sick with the knowledge, but angry, too. “It’d serve the coward right to be hauled off to Danville and turned over to army headquarters,” she said aloud. “To be shot, like he deserves.”

  Then Cassie jumped half out of her skin as she felt her arms pinned behind her. A voice, thick and gravelly, said, “Now, missy, you wouldn’t want to see a thing like that happen, would you?”