Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

  Billy looked at Roecker, whose face was grim, and they kicked their horses ahead. What Degroat found lay not far beyond the next turn and when Billy saw it, he too, felt his gorge rise and bile fill his mouth.

  Sergeant Freeman sprawled across the trail, his naked body partially buried in mud, the top of his head bloodied and raw. His eyes stared, his mouth gaped, a look of horror twisted his features. A hole pierced the center of his forehead, powder burns framing it in a starburst. Roecker slid off his horse and dropped by the body, and Billy followed. They knelt, one on either side. Roecker gently turned the head from side to side.

  “They scalped him and cut off his ears,” he said, his voice quietly ferocious. He raised the arms, tied in front at the wrists. In the dim light they saw bruises swollen along the arms and across the chest. By the angle of the left leg, they knew the knee had been broken, the leg doubled up unnaturally beneath the body.

  “Christ in heaven,” Billy said. He rested his trembling hand on the shoulder of what, just that morning, had been a man, a good man. Roecker closed the jaw, pulled the eyelids down. The jaw sagged open again, and Roecker tied it closed with his kerchief. Billy, a wild fury in him, leaped up and wheeled on Degroat. “Bring a couple of men,” he snarled, “and a blanket. Be quick about it. Something to carry him.” Degroat whirled his horse and whipped it back to the column.

  They found the other two men a hundred yards up the trail. Both had been beaten. A dozen revolver holes punctured one man’s body, as if he’d been used for target practice. Billy wondered why he and his men hadn’t heard the shots. The other man’s head looked like a pumpkin dropped from the hayloft. Powder burns scored the sides of his neck, and Billy and Roecker figured they’d stuffed gunpowder in his ears and blown it.

  Billy glanced around him, into the darkening woods, shadows long, mist rising. He wondered if any of the butchers hid out there, watching the reaction to their handiwork, and his fury settled into a hot hard hatred that flowed through him like magma. He turned to Roecker. “Take some men into the woods and see if they’re out there still. I’ve got half a dozen trackers and hunters who can find anything in the woods at night. Take Degroat.” He dragged himself into his saddle and wheeled his gray around. “I don’t want the men to see this.”

  Roecker grasped the bridle. “Billy, that’s the wrong thing to do. They got to see this. It’ll mean the difference between seeing this war as a game and turning these boys into fighters.”

  Billy stared down at him. It was a cruelty to put his men through that, but he knew Roecker was right, and he nodded once. “Set it up,” he said and started back down the trail.

  By the time the last of the company filed past the bodies of Sergeant Freeman and his two men, who lay uncovered and repulsive along the trail’s edge, not a man wanted to return home before every secesh, every bushwhacker, every civilian sympathetic to the southern cause, was driven from the country or strung up on a gallows. Roecker’s strategy was good, Billy thought. He brought up the rear of the file, said a quiet prayer over the bodies, ordered them wrapped and loaded on horseback. Dozens of men volunteered to go with Roecker into the woods to search, and Billy named his best woodsmen. But Roecker wasn’t ready to go.

  “Just a minute, Captain,” he said, putting a hand on Billy’s arm. “We got something else to do before we go looking for those boys.” He gestured to the men watching the prisoners.

  Billy’d clean forgotten them, the four men they’d captured. They were tied, as Freeman had been, wrists in front of them so they could ride. Now their guards pushed them to the center of the trail with gun butts, none too gently. Billy’s men muttered. Somebody spit, and the gob splatted on a prisoner’s shoulder. Billy studied the faces of his men. The sight of the brutalized bodies had done more than turn them into soldiers, it had turned them into killers. He looked at Roecker. The man’s face was contorted, he wanted the kill as much as anyone. Billy stepped into the circle, grabbed the butt of a carbine aimed for a prisoner’s kidneys.

  “No,” he said. He lowered his voice, mustering all his authority. “That’s enough. We take them into Independence and turn them over to the regiment.”

  “Captain, these here vermin ain’t worth the food they’ll eat,” said one of his men, a farmer from Atchison County. “They’re just going to take the oath and go back to killing us.”

  Billy stared at the man until the farmer’s eyes shifted away, and he muttered and stepped back. Billy turned slowly, looking each man in the eye until they all subsided. When he swung around to Roecker, the other captain grimaced, his look pitying. “You’ll get over it, Canon,” he said. “This ain’t a war for justice and honor. It’s a war for survival. They got to be exterminated.” He turned and motioned to his crew of trackers, and they melted into the gathering dusk of the forest.

  Billy watched him go, then swung into his saddle. “Mount them up, corporal,” he said to Dow, and Dow shouted the order. He glanced at the prisoners. The looks on their faces varied from fear to relief. But one smirked at him and had the balls to wink. “He thinks I’m weak,” Billy thought, but all he said was “Get this scum out of here.”

  Roecker and his men caught up with them an hour before dawn. They’d turned up nothing, and Billy took his men, his dead and wounded, and his prisoners, on into Independence.

  32

  Summer 1862

  Jabez proceeded with his plan to send Agnes away, regardless of her wishes, and booked passage for her and the children on the railroad out of St. Joseph. Rose was to go, too. Arguing did Agnes no good and frightened the children, so she dropped into gloomy silence and promised herself they’d return at the earliest opportunity.

  And then just a week before their departure, she received word of the death of her father. Our father passed to his reward, wrote Mary, the eldest sister, on Friday last, the 3rd day of May, and one more thread to the past was severed.

  Her father was in his sixty-ninth year at his death, and she didn’t mourn him. He was difficult and distant during her childhood, bewildered by the way her mother raised their daughters, distressed by his inability to mold his children to his way of thinking, disappointed at the lack of sons-in-law and grandchildren. She wondered if he’d left any word or held any thought of her, but the letter mentioned nothing. She didn’t regret him, but she did regret the idea of him.

  Mary’s words struck her as cold and stilted. She’d not written at all in the ten years past, though Agnes wrote to her, often through their younger sister, Mattie. Their mother would have hated their distance. A memory flashed, Mama’s laughing eyes lifting to Agnes over the infant she cradled, one of the boys, William or Samuel, who passed on young. She’d have loved to have seen Agnes’s children, to know they continued her line. The family gathered to lay him to rest. All the sisters attended, as did all the aunts, Mary wrote. Everyone but me, Agnes was sure she intended to point out. Past, to present, to future. For so long she’d considered only the future, only what lay ahead. Now the present tilted, the future hid, shrouded in war and uncertainty. And the past tugged insistently.

  

  Late in May, Jabez and Dick McDonald took Agnes, Rose, and the children to the train station in St. Joseph. Jabez and Agnes had spent the last ten days in cool formality. They’d apologized prettily to each other, then did their best to absent themselves from one another’s company. So by the time the trunks and valises were piled into the borrowed wagon, she was more than ready to leave.

  St. Joe appeared as desolate as Agnes felt. Despoiled by secessionists, plundered by federals, its businesses shut down, broken into, looted and burned. The train station, once the symbol of an ambitious town’s future, bristled with the guns and hostility of its Union guards. At the last moment, while the train stood chuffing black smoke and cinders and Rose and the children climbed into the carriage, Jabez pulled her to him and held her tight, the rough wool of his waistcoat against her cheek. She drew
in the faint fragrant odor of cigar smoke, and could see the strands of coarse gray that invaded his silky black beard. For just that moment they were close again, holding each other as they had at the beginning. Then he released her, and they parted.

  She returned to that moment again and again as the train chugged slowly and carefully across Missouri. They boiled like plum duff during the day, even though the weather held cool and overcast, but when the windows were open, soot and cinders surged in from the engine’s great stack. The stoves at either end of the car smoldered all day long until the dinner stop, when a crewman filled their bellies with fir and oak, and the pungent smells of sap and pine tar blanketed the train, along with thick clouds of smoke. Then the stovepipes began to draw, the engine to move, and the miasma drew off with the speed of the train.

  The journey consumed well over two days, with meal stops and train changes along the way. One of the trains they switched to somewhere in Ohio towed a sleeper car, which they explored during a meal stop, the berths no more than bare mattresses on wooden platforms stacked one above the other. They rode that train only in the daylight, though, and slept in much discomfort on the stiff-backed benches of the passenger cars. Agnes had never ridden a train before, and Rose and the children turned the experience into one long adventure. Even Sarah Belle, sitting wide-eyed on her mother’s lap, found much to contemplate, in her solemn manner, in the sounds and sights of the belching monster in whose belly they rode. Charlie was in his element, tearing up and down the aisle woo-wooing with the whistle and chugging with the clack of the wheels. He enchanted all the civilian passengers, avoiding only the Union soldiers, asking his mother in a stage whisper if that was “really a Yankee,” and staring with large dark eyes that held a touch of fear.

  Agnes was fearful herself as they traveled through Missouri. Not too many months since, bushwhackers had burned a bridge east of St. Joe, and the resulting wreck of a passenger train killed dozens of civilians. The burning of bridges and destruction of tracks evolved into a kind of deadly game between the bushwhackers and the federals, with the federals declaring that anyone caught destroying the railroad would be summarily hanged. General Price decreed such actions permissible within the rules of war, and travelers hazarded their lives as they would. Agnes never adjusted to the thought of war as a game with rules and protocols, as if each side tallied deaths like points on a cribbage board, money wagered, lives traded, one team the victor to be celebrated with a round of ale at the local saloon. She continually cast about for a means of quick escape or a place to take cover if the cars suffered an attack and formulated plans in her mind for protecting her children from gunfire. The exercise kept the fears at bay until they left the train for the ferry across the Mississippi.

  Once in Illinois, and then across Indiana and Ohio, the journey began to pique her interest. The countryside rolled by, prosperous and peaceful, the war far away, farmhouses and barns intact, villages bustling, businesses open, in stark contrast to the Missouri countryside. As the miles slipped by, she thought of them as a skein being re-rolled, a thread that had unraveled ten years before as she headed west, now being rewound as she reversed. She was uneasy at the thought of returning east, when she’d turned her face to the west so decidedly. In quiet moments she tried to capture the memory of the feeling that drove her west so long ago, the feeling that clogs the throat, quickens the heart—anticipation, newness, endless possibility and promise. All she had left was that memory, really only a memory of a memory. Time and daily cares had diminished high hopes and muted the excitement. She’d traded her sense of adventure for marriage and children, a very different gamble.

  

  “Welcome.”

  With that single word accompanied by a solemn smile, Mary received Agnes home. She and Isabella, the next eldest, lived in the old farmhouse, the land leased to a second cousin who farmed the land much the way their father had done. Mary continued as stiff and distant as Agnes remembered, her hair iron gray, her eyes heavy lidded, her long face setting off a bony nose and a mouth surrounded by small, tight lines.

  “Come in, then, out of the rain,” she said and stepped back from the sill. “Isabella regrets not being here for your arrival. She has teaching duties.” The warmth of baking steamed up the windows, going a long way toward relieving the coolness of their reception. Agnes stood a moment in the doorway, light spring rain at her back, and absorbed.

  “So,” she said at last. “Little is changed.” She reached a gloved hand to the dresser just inside the door. “Mama’s violet dishes, every one. New curtains, though.” She glanced at Mary. “These are nice. Cheery.”

  Mary dipped her head and flushed, looked up at Agnes, then away. “Thank you, made them myself.”

  Agnes realized her sister was embarrassed, didn’t know what to say. She must have appeared exotic to her, a traveler, adventurer. And one with that most precious of commodities: children.

  “Mary, these are my children. Charlie, shake hands, please. This is your Aunt Mary.”

  Charlie’s little face was alive with want of the pies he smelled, but bashfulness ruled, and he hid his face in Agnes’s skirt. She gently unwrapped him and guided him by the shoulders toward his aunt. Mary reached a hand to him as one would to an unknown dog, and he touched it tentatively.

  “And this is Sarah Belle.” This time Mary did smile and smiled sincerely. She reached for Sarah Belle and held her close for a moment, but the baby would have none of it, and she wriggled and scowled until her aunt set her on her feet. Sarah Belle promptly stuck a finger in her mouth and gazed up, fascinated, at the stranger.

  Rose flustered Mary. A Negro in her kitchen presented a discomfiting situation, and she appeared at a loss whether to invite the woman to sit or whether to shoo her back out into the rain. “This is Rose. She helps me care for the children.” Sarah nodded abruptly and Rose, after a moment’s silence, said “I’ll unpack the children’s things, missus, if you tell me where they’re to stay.” Mary gave her directions, and Rose disappeared up the back stairs.

  And then a whirlwind flew in the kitchen door in a swirl of serge and cotton, spraying raindrops and shrieks of delight and wrapped Agnes in a bear hug that lifted her off her feet. Mattie, the youngest sister, who glowed with delight in everything and everyone, was their mother in her high-spirited youth reborn. Already she’d become Aunt Mattie to half the county, though scarcely into her thirties, and she lit up the quiet farmhouse like a roman candle. Even Mary grew good-humored and fond in Mattie’s jolly presence and folded her into her arms as she hadn’t done with Agnes.

  Mattie squealed over the children, and, before ten minutes elapsed, Charlie nestled into her lap, pie smeared over face and fingers, chattering to her about his home, his wooden letters, his papa, his imaginary pony. His aunt was tall and strong and superbly proportioned, and unlike the rest of the Canons, her hair was a honey brown, eyes hazel and full of merriment. She lived in town with two other sisters, both of whom taught, but Mattie refused to settle for teaching and invaded the world of business as a land agent and the half-owner of a woman’s ready-made shop. She had written to Agnes faithfully over the years, until the war interrupted the post, and Agnes had long worked at convincing her to leave Fayette County for Missouri, but she always demurred. Her roots sank deep into the Pennsylvania countryside and she flourished like an oak where she was.

  Charlie and Sarah Belle enchanted the family and the old neighbors who remembered Agnes from long ago. Charlie’s tow head often loomed over a cousin’s graying crown from a perch on his shoulders, Sarah Belle’s dark curls regularly rested on the shoulder of one aunt or another. Agnes doubted either child set a foot on the ground for most of the length of their visit. Mattie’s broad acquaintance entertained them with picnics and church socials, teas, quiltings, dinners, even a dance or two. The constant round of visiting and entertainments astonished Agnes and jarred her system. She’d slipped through a distortion of
time and space out of a society that no longer functioned, away from folks who would not trust and could not enjoy, into a community where life flowed the way it used to, as though no war, no young men dying, no horrible mutilations, no thievery or burnings or treachery haunted them.

  Mattie’s friends talked of household issues, raising children, the welfare of the Canon relatives in Missouri, but rarely of the war. It was as if the fighting took place in a far-off land, something to be read about in the papers, clucked and tsked over, but not allowed to interfere with the daily business of country life. Occasionally word arrived of the death of a young man of the county, or that someone’s son had enlisted and marched off to fight the rebels, and the ladies gathered to roll bandages or knit socks for “our boys at the front,” but no one discussed the reasons for the war or its progress or politics. Perhaps the men did, but in Fayette County, women took no part in such conversations. If word of Jabez’s political leanings had preceded Agnes, as surely they must have through Rachel and Nancy’s letters, no one gave an indication. But they slanted sideways glances at Rose, Agnes’s “darkie.” Very few Negroes appeared in Fayette County, and Agnes believed they looked at Rose and wondered how they would cope when slavery ended and the darkies came to live among them. The idea didn’t sit well with the good people of the county, and Agnes judged many of them hypocrites.

  

  “You miss him,” Mattie said, fanning her flushed face with the tail end of her apron. “I know something’s wrong, but you miss him.”

  They sat on the grass at the edge of the apple orchard, the shade of the ancient trees providing the smallest bit of relief from the early July afternoon. Both children lay on a blanket, napping in the warmth.