Can you see this?
Yes. It’s your ring.
I’m leaving it with you as a fee, that I mean what I say.
They’ll steal it.
He unbuttoned her nightgown to her waist. Spread it apart. Inside the printed flannel her body lay as white as bone, her nipples, like her lips, bright red with fever. He drew up the ribbons that tied her drawers, untied them, and threaded the ring onto the ribbon and tied the ends again.
Then when you are dressed, keep it tied to your stays.
He drew his hand down over her body with fingers spread and then buttoned her nightgown again. Slowly, button by button.
All right.
To leave you like this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, he said. I do not believe the war could be any worse.
Where are you going?
I told you. Alabama.
All right, Major. She was whispering. She had round red spots on her cheeks.
Call me William. I want to hear you say it before I get my head shot off. Or you could call me Major Stick.
She gripped his hand. William, she said.
Adair.
Then he bent to pick up a valise or portfolio or some carryall from the floor and then he was gone.
16
Entries in 1860:
Joseph Yezach, [A Bohemian lad] garroted accidentally by a machinery; at work at the rope factory in New Bremen with loose hemp coils around his neck [as is customary with factory boys] the hemp caught the shaft of a wheel and it strangled him.
Man killed on the track of the North Missouri Railroad at Bellefontaine Rd.
Dead on the floor of a bar-room
Fell from the West wall of the Southern Hotel at Elm and Walnut, 2nd block south of the courthouse, near Cathedral.
Run over by an ice wagon
Overdose of laudanum, Ellen Clark, since found to be one Deborah White, of Peoria Illinois
P. Dexter Tiffany, suicide, slit wrists; a millionaire
Louis Drucker, an Indian doctor, disappeared from a levee boat at Carondelet, found later below Quarantine, near the magazine, had on his person papers, snuff box, letters in a spectacle case
Thomas Wilkerson, a Scotchman, a machinist employed in Hannibal Missouri, in the machine shop, fell from the steamer Louisville
Jean Baptiste Augier, a member of the Farienne Society of Cheltenham, Mo., a native of Bargemont, near Draguinan, Dept. of Varennes, France: suicide by drowning whilst laboring under brain excitement caused by congestive chills and socialistic ideas.
Coroner Louis-William Boisliniere
—ST. LOUIS COUNTY CORONER’S RECORDS, NORTHCOTT, MISSOURI, 1997
At the hub of development in the 1850s was St. Louis, one of the fastest growing industrial cities in the Union. St. Louis more than doubled in population in the 1850s to 166,773 persons of whom 60 per cent were foreign born, the highest percentage of foreign-born in any American city. This included 39,000 Irish and nearly 60,000 Germans.
—FROM Inside War
There were others who did not . . . survive the suffering which they experienced [as refugees]. On November 21, 1864, four children from Georgia died at the Chattanooga Railroad depot [in Nashville] from “cold, hunger and exposure.”
—FROM Reluctant Partners, Nashville and the Union, BY WALTER T. DURHAM, TENNESSEE HISTORICAL SOCIETY, NASHVILLE, N.D.
SHE WOULD GO over the wall today, when they went out to the washing. As in Acts 5:18-20, when the angel of the lord came and opened the door of the prison, and told the apostles to come out and go and preach to all of the people the words of this life. What life? Adair wondered. What life did that mean?
She sat in the sun, trying to stitch the Log Cabin quilt back together. It had nearly come apart. She told herself she was not ill. She told herself a little fever burnt out the bad humors and was good for a person from time to time. That when she was over the wall she would begin to get well in the fresh country air.
It was not until late afternoon that the wagon came in with its supplies of hardtack and pork, sacks of white beans and cornmeal. Adair watched them unload the barrels and stack the empty ones in the middle, away from the wall. Kisia and a young mulatto girl were playing some kind of dice game with the ham bones.
Kisia, roll one of those barrels against the wall, behind the washing. The blonde girl put down the ham bone dice. I am going over the wall in the next fifteen minutes.
Kisia stuck out her lower lip and looked at Adair very doubtfully, her pale, tangling hair corkscrewing in the breeze.
You are in no condition, she said.
Go on.
So Kisia rolled one of the empty hardtack barrels against the street wall of the courtyard, behind the washing lines of dresses and petticoats and stockings. She jumped up on it, her ragged skirts flying. She called to a young mulatto girl.
Kisia shouted, You are the Moorish Battalion and I am the Queen of the Barrels! The mulatto girl laughed and grabbed her by the ankles to pull her down.
A guard watched from his position on the wall on the other side of the gates.
Get that barrel away from the wall, he said.
Soons I pull her down! said the mulatto girl.
Get in there and get your washing done! the matron shouted at Adair. She stood looking at her with her hands on her hips. So Adair stood up and carried the green camisette and her shawl with her behind the lines of washing and shoved it into the pot of boiling, soapy water. There was no help for it. She would have to leave the green dress behind, but Adair knew she had to go now. If she were going to go. But it didn’t matter. When she was in the sickroom somebody had stolen her diamond-and-sapphire earbobs, and the mandarin jacket, but what were they as compared to her life?
Adair rolled the quilt tightly. She was sweating. She looked at the dress in the boiling water and realized she had left the pass in the pocket and it would now be paper mush and the ink washed away. Oh my God what have I done? She grabbed at a sleeve but the water was too hot and the pocket was sewn shut, and she knew the paper was boiled to nothing. There was no help for it.
Kisia, she said. Go start a fight with somebody.
The child jumped down and ran to her. She took one of Adair’s hands in both of hers. She said,
Good-bye, Miss Adair. I love you.
And I love you too, Kisia. The Lord keep you.
The two girls ran under the lines of washing. Then darted away among the stacks of barrels being unloaded. Adair stood up to go over the wall and was suddenly overwhelmed with fright. A crash of panic went through her. Suddenly Adair felt as if she were going to die in the next moment.
She shut her hands tight and waited for the feeling to pass. But it began to build inside her. As if her interior was something like a nautilus shell, building and building a terrible pearl of overwhelming dread. They would shoot her. She was going to be extinguished. She was going to be lowered into a grave and the earth shut over her. Electricity of some kind ran in waves through her, and everything, every object, seemed very distant and false.
The matron’s big dress was hanging on a long pole. Adair turned her face up to it, and it seemed like an angel in the wind, as if it were going to open the doors of the prison for her. The dress cracked its silks in the wind and opened its arms and said, I will devour thine enemies!
Adair looked up at the great flying dress. It ballooned up on another gust of wind, a wild and buffeting angel, and held out its arms and said, Come with me now!
Suddenly there was a great noise of screaming and shouting from the lower windows that gave into the General Ward. Adair heard Kisia shouting You will not, Cloris! I will pull ever hair out of your head! Everyone in the courtyard began to run toward the door into the ward. Even the guards jumped down from the wall and began to walk across the courtyard, and then in the door.
Adair stepped behind the clothesline and pulled off her dress and drew Mrs. Buckley’s petticoats over her head. She tied them with the drawstrings. Then she pu
lled Mrs. Buckley’s big dress over her head and jerked it down straight. It was a glossy, brass-colored silk twill with a navy blue figure in it, and there must have been eleven yards in the skirt alone. She took up her waist purse from the heaps of folded material that was her old plaid dress. Then the plaid dress and the quilt and its wrapping.
Adair stood up on the barrel and glanced right and then left. The outside guards were all down in the street buying some old wormy last year’s apples from a cart. Except for one. It was the man with one arm. The grinner. He stood on the street, looking up at Adair on the wall with a somewhat amazed expression. A great swirl of the limestone dust rose into the air and surrounded her.
Cloris’s terrier had jumped up on the barrel and was barking at her with its red mouth open as wide as a bat’s mouth. Adair reached down and grabbed it by the lower jaw and threw it over the wall and into the street. She was possessed of a kind of lunatic strength. The terrier ran wildly between carriage wheels, heading down the street, and was never seen again.
Adair said, Let the found be found and the lost stay lost. She swung over the wall and dropped to the sidewalk.
The guard came up to her. Looking at her with curiosity as if wondering what she was going to do. He was perhaps in his forties, grizzled and his Federal uniform somewhat shabby.
I thought you were the matron or I’d have pulled you off that wall, he said.
Adair slipped one of the double eagles out of her waist purse, and held it in the flat of her palm and showed it to him.
There is something down the street that needs your attention, she said. Her hand was shaking violently.
He stared down at the double eagle for what seemed an eternity while her freedom leaked away drop by drop. Then finally he nodded.
Well, I had better go see about it, he said. He took the gold coin from her palm with his only hand. He grinned. Good luck, girl.
She went off walking down the street without a hat or anything she owned except her waist purse and the ungainly wad of quilt and dress under her left arm. It was all back in the cell. It didn’t matter. She strode off and her skirt hems dragged along behind her like dogs.
There were no shouts or shots or whistles. She clutched her skirts with her right hand. It was shaking. She was walking, miraculously, down the streets of St. Louis. She was afire with a kind of feverish panic.
It was so sudden that for a moment Adair did not exactly know how she got where she was.
She held her head high and kept walking. Adair felt as if she were running away from her own execution. She did not hear anyone shouting or calling her name or calling anything. It was now sunset, and clouds with precise, hard edges skated across the early-spring city sky looking as if they were infused with some sort of aerial foxfire, gleaming on the edges like white silk.
She stepped up on a white limestone curb and kept on. Still no one shouted. She held herself as stiffly as if she were carrying a glass of water full to the brim. She was about to spill. She went on down St. Charles Street. Adair wondered which way was south. Her heart was racing and despite its terrible smashing she thought she might be drifting several inches off the ground and this was a dangerous feeling. She walked past a cast-iron horse head with a ring in its mouth and touched it, for iron was of the earth and it grounded you. She was a silent, drifting bolt of lightning. She might come apart at any moment. A peculiar ragged man with a great wen on his forehead came past her, nodding, screaming Ratbane!! Adair held up the bundle of cloth like a shield and dodged to one side and kept on.
A troop of Wisconsin infantry came past, shining with banners and buckles, taking up the entire street width and making incoming vehicles from Sixth and Fifth Streets pull up. They stormed past in files with their flag, which was blue and had a man chopping wood on it. They smelled of woodsmoke and tobacco. They were gone on past within a minute like a brief, moving vision of triumph and order, and she crossed the street as the last rank went by.
As she walked along, a miraculous thing happened and that was she began to recover herself. It was as if she was gathering herself up. She felt like she had gone to pieces and was now back together. She kept her calm and continued to walk.
She should get on one of the omnibuses. She pressed aside, into the wall of a furriers’ shop, as one came bashing down the street with a jangle of trace chains and hooves and people calling to one another. But she only had the gold coin, and how could she pay a penny fare with a twenty-five-dollar gold piece? The omnibus went on, slicing the mud with yellow wheels and rolling on its rounded and curvilinear body. It said Arsenal on the front. Adair didn’t know if the arsenal was a place she wanted to go, but all she could think of to do was to get on a street near the levee so she could get her directions from the river, and then turn south and keep walking south.
She came upon a daguerreotypist’s shop. In the window were portraits of famous people. She stood in the doorway and pretended great interest in the pictures and her heart was pounding. Behind her she heard several men running, shouting, coming down St. Charles Street. She didn’t need to look, she knew it would be men in blue with the insignia of the provost marshal’s department.
She opened the door and walked into the shop. A man with a lean, dark face asked her what she wished. He smiled at her. But there she was without a bonnet or purse or market basket. She seemed to have just stepped out of her own bedroom.
Why, I wish to have a portrait made, she said.
I see. He nodded. He was confused as to what sort of person she might be.
I just live around the street there, she gestured vaguely, and her hand was shaking as she did so, so she hid it in the folds of her skirt again. And I had a few minutes and I thought I would step in here real quick to see about getting a likeness made.
All right, I am happy to oblige.
Adair smiled at him as she listened to the men running by outside. The daguerreotypist listened too but he didn’t say anything. She did not turn her head but she counted as they went past. It was hard to talk and count as well so she paused. Seven eight nine. There were twelve guards altogether. The daguerreotypist looked out at the running soldiers and then back at her. Ten eleven twelve.
Now there were no more noises from the street other than ordinary street noises.
Thank you! she said. She smiled her white smile at him. She turned and gathered up as much of the front of her skirts as she well could. The daguerreotypist paused for a moment with a confused frown. She was breathing too hard. She could not quiet herself. Adair smiled again and she could feel her mouth was very dry and her lips were shaking.
For what? he said. You haven’t seen the studio yet.
Well, I’d better be on my way! she said with false brightness. I was just taking these things to the washerwoman.
Why, are you not interested in a likeness?
Adair took in a breath as if to speak and then held it for she couldn’t think of what to say. Then she said, I think I felt an earthquake! She looked around in alarm.
The daguerreotypist held himself in a long pause. He was speechless.
She said, Better stand in a doorway!
An earthquake? What? He held both hands out to his sides, alarmed, and then placed one hand on the vitrine of the showcase to feel for vibrations and it looked as if he were prepared to go outside and see if anything were falling.
So she turned quickly and went out the door and back into the street.
St. Charles Street went straight down toward the levee. Here and there were small frame houses jammed in between tall three- and four-story commercial buildings. They were the remnants of the older city. Inside these ancient houses old ladies looked out, wearing coal-shovel bonnets with long sun flaps over the shoulders. Adair thought, Maybe they are Dutch women, or Irish. She strode on, taking long steps, flying down the brick sidewalks under awnings, around stacks of casks and piles of siding. Her fever beat like a foundry hammer in the veins of her face. She was alone and had no bonnet on her
head and men in uniforms were hunting for her.
Young woman! an old lady called to her in good English. Your dress is too big and you are running too fast!
My aunt is about to have a baby and I am going for the midwife, said Adair, and kept on. She didn’t even know where she was going. There didn’t seem to be any particular place to go. She turned right on Third Street. She could hear the noise and commotion of the levee, and she could glimpse it through the buildings at Chestnut. She could see the steamers. Their sterns were all turned downstream. So now she knew which way south was. She kept on down Third Street.
At last she came to the old French houses around St. Louis Cathedral, and sat down on the steps of the cathedral and put herself in the hands of God. Any God, even a Catholic one. The stone-paved street was full of traffic, people on foot and coal carts bringing coal from the Gravois coal diggings and dropping bituminous chips up and down the street at random, a milk cart tugged along by a ponderous red-and-white ox, a light surrey with a lady in it. Adair put her head in her hands. An omnibus pulled by two thin horses came by and the driver yelled out, Kennet Shot Tower! over and over. Biddle Street Levee and Kennet Shot Tower! Adair sat on the steps of the cathedral and told herself over and over, I am in the hands of God.
A woman in a very old-fashioned dress with the waist high up around the armpits and a narrow skirt came up the steps. She wore a broken straw bonnet and wooden clogs on her feet.
Are you well, then, kulleen? she said.
Adair looked up, trying to breathe normally. I can’t understand you, Adair said. She began to cough again and shut her mouth against it and the cough exploded out her nose.
Are ye well?
Yes, I am well. Don’t you speak any English?
I’m Irish, said the woman.
Well go on, said Adair. Just go on. She put her fist to her mouth and coughed violently.
The woman went on into the church. Startling bongs came from overhead as the great bells rang for mass. More people began coming up the steps and so Adair got up again and picked up the front of her skirts and went down the steps to the street. She went to one side of the enormous cathedral and found a doorway and sat in it. It was the door to the old sacristy. She had put herself in the hands of God and she liked the feeling and wanted to stay in it but shreds of dirty coal smoke began to drift along overhead now with the evening fires and Adair felt that it looked spectral and dangerous. Soon it would be night and she didn’t know where she would go.
Enemy Women Page 15
