Enemy Women

by Paulette Jiles

  We lived without telegraph lines. They are things that carry evil gossip without your being able to see the gossiper and identify them and take your revenge. They speak unseen somewhere afar off. This spy voice is now ticking all over the Ozarks and ordering the taking of women to prison and because of it fifteen Militia shot Mrs. West in her doorway.

  We had 1,200 acres all told. We had hay meadows, 2 cornfields, forty acres in cotton, 25 sheep, pigs, silverware, clothes, a great many law books for Missouri and also for the Texas Constitution which interested my father, and other volumes with engraved and colored illustrations. Also a beveled looking glass from Tennessee recently smashed up by the crew of the MSM led by Captain Tom Poth who has red hair. Now this is the kind of thing people go to hell for. We did not look at ourselves again for a long time being on the road, so we presented ourselves to the commander at Iron Mountain and we were as uncouth as savages who never regard themselves. But are instead regarded.

  He put his finger on his place and watched the fire. She had changed it all to a shining tale without stillbirths or floods, or parasites or deformed people. Her mother had not died screaming or crying but had faded away like ruined silk. There were no Confederates in this story. They were all perfectly innocent, set upon by lunatics in blue for no reason. And as far as Adair Colley knew there was no reason. What could she have known of the Constitutional issues or political clashes in far places? The major turned back to the script.

  In the fall persimmins were plentiful as well as apples and I liked to put them in a bowl together because of their colors. We roasted the apples and had them with cream. These colors were also beautiful, the cream being a pale yellow and the apples carmine. You put maple sugar all over this, as much as you can get away with.

  I dream of the provisions we had at that time and they seem like fare of great elegance but that is because of the dismal substances were are forced to eat in this place and of which I hope you will take note, Major. The bell of St. Louis Cathedral has just rung six o’clock with that old Catholic bell, which is suppertime in this prison. My father put the hams in salt to draw, for though he was poor at farming he loved to cook. I see him now with his hands frosted with the fine salt and his Tavern hat cocked on his head. I used to ride away up the Devil’s Backbone when they killed a hog because it was not good for the horses to hear it or me either.

  The heart of a pig is exactly like the heart of a human being if you have ever seen one, Major, and it was for this the huntsman killed a pig and presented the heart to the queen who said mirror mirror on the wall, so that Snow White could walk on through the snow with her shawl flying and herself on her way to a place like Iron Mountain. Now, think on this: Snow White laying still in her coffin with the piece of apple in her mouth as if dead, as it was depicted in our book of fairy tales. And did she not rise again when a prince came? I’ll tell you who the prince was, it was the huntsman himself, who harries us away from the mirror, where we stand entranced with ourselves and mezmerized with what lies behind that mirror and the dark realms.

  For we must not dwell on Death, as it is a mystery and it is something Unknown we leave to the Lord and his disposing for if we knew everything we would be too full of perfectly known things, and thus never rested nor content but driven with busyness and stuffed full. When I rode out in the early mornings in summertimes everything appeared to me, one after the other, in its own selfe without having to be known about beforehand, before you even get to it. In the order of the world is a deep pattern. You can’t know it beforehand. If you did you would remain forever unsurprised and dwarfed and hardened. In the early mornings one after another we broke up the planes of water in the pools of Beaverdam with slow steps, horse and rider, and the trees appeared in their reflections like underwater spirits of themselves. Before these things a person is silent.

  He held the paper tipped to the lantern light. And in her silences Adair Colley would spread out her old folk tales. What he was reading was a work of the imagination and a resolute determination not to live in the world as it was. Nobody brought the Rebel mail, nor were men hanged from white oak trees by either Militia or guerillas. No crows pecked out the eyes of men lying unburied. There were no latrines here or whores, and this information would capture no bushwhackers. It was a kind of music.

  My father was too old to go for a soldier, and had poor eyesight from his law reading, and had always stayed out of local politics. My brother whom you accuse of being a soldier with Reeves’s Fifteenth Cavalry CSA is on the contrary a cripple and could never carry a weapon atall, neither long gun nor pistol. They were putting J. B. Crean’s millstone into place on September 10th, 1857, and there was a ten-cent piece laying on the lower stone and my brother John Lee said Here, I’ll get it, and the stone rolled over his arm. The men in my family are thus useless for the ingins injuns enjins of war due to the law and a ten-cent piece.

  This Rebellion against the lawful Order was ordained by Heaven, for the Lord must have planned and prepared for this as He does for all things and something this big surely did not catch Him by surprize but on the other hand there may be surprizes in Heaven as elsewhere.

  The men alaying under the earth in gray have lain down their lives for some reason we may never know, just as the Lord knows all things, for some strange purpose He allowed this great conflict to take place on the earth and the people held in bondage to be unfettered and men of the South to be blinded even in their own doorways. And so everything is in an endless changing and disorder at present.

  Only one thing I know, Major, and that is this War was sent by Heaven to free the slaves and preserve the Union. I have seen great armies of men with artillery and heard the canon in the hills. I have seen them come through my country in their thousands both in blue and gray and butternut and it was to the advantage of none. So the Lord has cast down his Rebel Angels. Did He not raise them up to Glory with a great congregation of flags and horse troops and music bands on that day of Secession? And yet the Rebel Angels are now cast down.

  I remain,

  Yours very truly,

  Adair Randolph Colley

  He sat with the pages a while watching his fire burn down the logs. Then he undressed and lay in his solitary bed and looked at the ceiling. He did not sleep well. He arose in the night and struck a match to the lamp wick and sat down and read her confession again and then put it away once more. Before the first light of dawn he dressed in his boots and his uniform, and went down the stairs to the kitchen. There the giant Welshman sat in front of the fire while the cook beat the biscuit dough with a wooden mallet as if it had been caught in doing something wicked.

  Would you pull out my horse, Christopher? he said.

  Awrahhhh.

  He rode out into the dark streets and saw that the sky had cleared. Stars stood out in electrifying spangles, the Dipper and the Charioteer, riding over and over again their eternal routes across the heaven. He rode north at a slow walk, and his large bay gelding searched about for other horses and spoke in a low voice to the milkman’s horse pulling a small two-wheeled cart. He had been told in Maryland when he was young that the Big Dipper was also seen as a milkman’s cart called The Wain that turned on its route through the night hours and poured out its milk into the foam of stars. He had watched it swing through the night sky from the bow of a skipjack skimming across Chesapeake Bay, all canvas up and taut in the starry wind. He wished she were with him, riding alongside. The major felt diminished now despite his height because he was helpless to aid her. Shrunk by the problem he was up against. And the horse carried him on toward Florissant until the dawn came.

  Neumann rode up to Bellefontaine Road, and into a great beech woods. He waited as the sun came up.

  He put his gloved hand to his forehead in a nervous gesture of dismay, tapped on his forehead with his own knuckles. His fellow officers in other departments made jokes about his ladies. Six months ago at Benker’s Tavern, he had told stories about the chilly Miss Rhoda Cobb, and hin
ted at the seductiveness of little Kisia. But after a while it came to him that they considered this assignment not quite honorable; this arrangement of papers and filing depositions, the interrogation of captive women. Then he had sent in repeated requests for transfer. To a fighting unit. But he was also determined to leave the judge advocate general’s department with a successful record. Success in obtaining confessions that would break down Reeves’s organization and with the credit accruing to himself. This credit standing him in good stead afterward when the surrender came.

  He took off his broad-brimmed hat and sat on the horse and looked down the Bellefontaine Road, and tried to think what to do.

  Then he turned back and rode toward the Ogley House, where the provost marshal’s general staff abided in their confiscated mansion. Young women in bonnets hurried past on racketing clogs toward the big houses where they worked. Drays were now surging up Natural Bridge Plank Road with barrels of beer and cheese and fish and then came the bakers’ carts. He would begin with the colonel, and try to push her case through as far as possible. And because he was trained in the law, he tried to think of their objections one by one, and how he could overcome them.

  The colonel would say, Her male relatives are all known to have joined Confederate units.

  He would say, Sir, I am not entirely sure of this, but at any rate, we cannot imprison the female relations of the entire Confederate Army.

  Of course not, sir, merely the ones we can get our hands on. The ones who are keeping Colonel Reeves in the field.

  Sir, she is eighteen years old and cannot possibly equip a regiment.

  Major, the women of that section of the country are worse than the men. Martial law has been declared in this state.

  Yes, sir, it certainly has, however the people of this sector have not been apprised of this as far as I know, and apparently her male relations are incapable of service in the army, one being too old and the other crippled.

  Have you proof of this?

  Only her word, sir. However, we seemed to be prepared to accept her word on other matters.

  It is her loyalty that is in question, Major Neumann, not her harmlessness. If she were to reveal something of what she knows of Confederate operations in her area, it would prove her loyalty and then certainly she should be released. It is a dreadful thing to imprison women.

  There have been several incidents, said the major. With the women.

  We are aware of that. Charges are being brought.

  What if she doesn’t know anything?

  This is impossible. Captain Poth has written that her father knows everyone in the area. Her brother was captured in Reeves’s uniform and escaped.

  I wonder about the trustworthiness of Poth’s reports.

  Major, what exactly is your interest in this matter?

  Sir, my interest is that I would like to retire on full pay with a good record and have the girl released as well. How about that.

  Major William Neumann rode looking at his horse’s ears, as they twitched here and there picking up sounds, the sight of another horse. The perfect silver trunks of the beech trees passed him one by one and their shadows slipped over him like the bars of a prison.

  12

  In 1860 about one Missouri family in eight (as opposed to one in five in the lower south) held slaves, nearly three-fourths of those holding fewer than five, and only 38 holding more than fifty. . . . Ninety per cent of Missourians lived on farms or in villages of less than 2,000 people. With the exception of St. Louis, there were no cities in Missouri . . . statistically, the average Missourian was a Methodist from Kentucky who owned a 215-acre family farm, owned no slaves, and produced most of the family’s subsistence.

  —FROM Inside War

  June 18, Saturday, 1864

  At the Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis, Mo., between the hours of 9 and 10 a.m., some prisoners exercising in the yard seized an axe from the kitchen and broke the lock on a gate leading into an alley. Some of the Rebel prisoners disarmed the guard from behind and several scattered in all directions. Troops from the 10th Kansas Infantry were sent after them and they were joined by other Union troops in the area. After a wild scramble over backyard fences, through sheds and outbuildings, and down alleys, two of the escapees were killed and three wounded. The remainder were captured and returned to prison.

  —FROM Civil War Prisons and Escapes, BY ROBERT E. DENNEY, STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY, NEW YORK, 1993

  Great Heavens, my blood boils—women in this hole of filth and blasphemy! I could scarcely believe it until I saw it with my own eyes, Mrs. Mitchell, who is here with a little daughter five or six years old. She is charged with smuggling goods through to the Confederacy.

  . . . One old man named Murphy has been added to our room, imprisoned, he says, for selling miscegenation photographs.

  —GRIFFIN FROST, Camp and Prison Journal

  MISS COLLEY, HE said. he shut the door behind her. i am very pleased that you have professed loyalty to the Union in your writing.

  Well, good. Adair sat down. She felt lighthearted. Just being in the same room with him. The cough rose in her chest and she subdued it.

  He nodded. Placed all his fingertips together as if completing some kind of interior circuit.

  And other than that, I don’t have any information to give you about any one thing in particular.

  He sat on the edge of his desk and looked at her. She had on a pair of sparkling earrings this time and an embroidered jacket. He crossed his arms across his chest.

  He said, Do you have a mirror in your cell?

  Oh, Major, how kind of you to ask, but I have a big hall looking glass, said Adair. And a dressing table and a clothes press and one of those things with pockets to put all my shoes in.

  Can I not get a straight answer from you?

  Adair said, I’m living in a filthy cell.

  He lifted his hand. Well, then, here is my mirror, and I have brought you a brush. This is not proper, but we are not living in a proper world, here. He drew out his chair and placed it in front of the mirror near the stove. I have some reports to look at.

  Adair took the brush from him and stood still for a moment without saying anything. Then she sat in front of the mirror with its beveled edges that caught the light in prismatic planes. She unpinned her hair and drew it out stroke after stroke, entranced with her reflection, in the warmth of the parlor stove. After a few minutes she began to hum a Scotch slow air and listened to the traffic outside the window, people talking as they went past. She separated her hair into two long hanks and then took one of the hanks and divided it into three strands. Black, black, black is the color, she sang to herself in a whisper.

  He read his reports, and dipped his pen in the inkwell without looking up. He said, Miss Colley, what are you going to do with your life after you get out of here?

  Oh I have dreamed of raising horses, she said. She couldn’t imagine why she was confessing this to him. She braided one side and coiled the long braid. I guess I’m supposed to find somebody and get married. But I want to raise horses.

  He shook sand on the ink and blew on it. And all that that implies, he said. Brood mares and a good stallion. I don’t know if they allow ladies to do that, he said. You may have to get a dispensation from the Pope or something.

  Adair braided the other hank, regarding herself carefully in the mirror, turned her head from one side to the other. She could see the major lining up two columns of names side by side and comparing them. Well, I’ll just go to hell then, she said.

  The major laughed. He opened a drawer and took out a cigar and cut the end of it off with a penknife. Lit it and blew smoke out of his nose. He went to open a window to let the smoke escape and threw the dead match out onto the sidewalk. A rush of cold city air and its coal smoke came in and he quickly shut it. He turned to watch her draw the braids around her head in a crown and lay down the brush.

  He said, This is somewhat indelicate, Miss Colley. Ladies have no busi
ness with that kind of thing.

  But it is so absorbing! It’s magic. She stood up and walked to him, took one of his hands and lifted it, and the ring glinted. Ink stained, she said. You are an inky man.

  How is it magic?

  The mare and the stallion gallop away together in the fields. Then my sisters and I go inside the house. Then, you been waiting eleven months and then there they are. Adair went to the window to see all the traffic in the street and then turned to face him, leaned against the sill with her hands behind her. She tipped her head to one side. You wake up one morning and the mare is standing back in the trees. Looking out, so carefully. She won’t move. Then you see little legs on her other side. The fog coming down off Courtois and Copperhead in long sheets, drifting clear over the meadow and there she is. This is how Dolly came to us. Adair turned and pressed her forefinger against her lower lip and stared out the window. They are made out of nothing. They come out of nowhere. Look there at that building going up. Now, you understand where all those buildings come from, but nobody understands how that young thing is made with eyes and everything. She sat in the chair again. Close to him.

  They sat in companionable silence for a moment. Then he got up and cleared his throat, opened the stove door. Took up the tongs and placed several pieces of coal on the flames.

  In some ways we understand but only in the most mechanical sense. We are a mechanical people.

  Maybe you are, said Adair. Speak for yourself.

  He smiled. And here you are in the city. Do you not want to be released, and then perhaps stay on here in St. Louis? The social events are endless.