She got to her feet and left the doorway and walked back into the darkening March streets.
There was the rail station at Pine Street, where she might get on a train of cars of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain railroad that would take her down to southeast Missouri. But she dare not approach anyone now, at night, to ask for information. They would think she was a prostitute. That anyone would take her for a prostitute made her start crying. She strode along, down a street of brick buildings and walled-in interior yards, wiping tears from her cheeks. A lamplighter came down the street cursing in German. He put his ladder against a lamppost, and the first rung stove through when he stepped on it. He cursed again with frantic rage. He stomped on the second rung and climbed up, opened the glass and turned the key and put his punk to the valve and a thin bluish light leapt out through the glass.
She kept on walking south, feeling the increasing danger of the night. If only she had a market basket to carry, or some sort of grip and a bonnet. It looked as if she had stolen the bundle in her arms and had run off with it directly. Even a scarf over her hair would do. Then she would look normal. Then she would appear to be a young woman who had a family here in the city, and a home, and people who loved her and cared about her. Who was hurrying home from errands. A place with a door that shut and locked and a mirror and a fireplace and people who would say, Well there you are! We were worried about you! And she would drink deep of whatever boiled on the fire.
Now she was in a neighborhood of jumbled houses, some of old stone and some of frame and some of brick, brand-new. The crossways were lit by gas lamps. Each house had a number painted on it somewhere, over the door or to one side. It was as if they were drawers in a thread shop, or slots for letters in a type case. Adair realized it was so strangers could find the houses.
She walked past a tavern, one of the little old houses with twelve-paned windows and a puffing chimney stack at each end and a low door. A sign over the door said it was the william tell tavern and family grocery. Men were laughing and smoking inside.
Good evening, sweetheart! A man called from inside.
Adair grasped up as much of the great volumes of skirt as she could in one hand and ran fleet-footed down the street, past Myrtle and Elm and Almond. She dodged past late-homing carts driven by boys riding splay-legged who spoke to her in low tones and made kissing noises. Three black children walked up Third Street barefooted in raveling clothes of fustian. They held one another’s hands and looked at the paving and went past her.
She slowed at Poplar Street to a walk again. She looked down Poplar to the levee. Down there the great steam-driven boats bumped one another with knocking sounds, and men carrying torches moved in crowds, with all the loading and unloading and repair work. She heard the long groans of six-inch hemp ropes straining to hold the paddle wheelers against the current, tied to massive iron rings. She thought, I will turn down to the levee and steal something or find something. Just a market basket, an old basket, and I will look more normal.
But some soldiers were coming up from the levee. One of them paused beneath the pale gas lamp and began a jig. The others stood back for a moment and watched this display and then started clapping time and singing.
Adair stood back against the wall of a small wooden house jammed in between two brick tenements to avoid them. The shutters of the little house were open to the night and the coal smoke, and halfway up the wall the boards had been spattered with mud and gravel from passing vehicles. The house was so old that she could see the marks of the broadaxe on the window framings. Adair leaned back and pressed herself as flat as she could between the two open windows.
17
In addition to St. Louis as a trading center for stolen goods, Kansas provided a relatively secure place for resale. Illinois [especially Quincy], Iowa [especially Keokuk], and Kansas City were the other usual market places. Kansas Union Private W. W. Moses, for example, wrote his sister in 1862 that he had “Jayhawked some silver cupps and sent them to Illinois.”
—FROM Inside War
Black marketing of stolen goods such as clothing, jewelry, and home furnishings reached an impressive scale. Brigadier General Benjamin Loan in Jefferson City [Missouri] in 1862 offered a clear analysis of illicit commerce. Either “good society” or economic double-agents “claiming to be Government contractors and with provost marshal’s passes in their pockets would contact guerillas directly, purchase their stolen goods, warehouse them, and transport them, generally by riverboat to St. Louis, reselling them through merchants who either were secessionists or did not ask probing questions. Loan was particularly incensed that in the end government contractors repurchased Union horses stolen elsewhere in Missouri.
—FROM Inside War
INSIDE A LITTLE old man and a little old lady were having an argument.
Adair stood and sought for a clear breath and listened. The argument was about what the little old lady should be buried in. Adair breathed through her nose slowly to keep back her cough. Around the corner and down the street the soldier-dancer beat out time with his government shoes and his audience sang a song from the theater. It was “The Girls of Gravois Mills.”
The old woman said, I done went and bought it and it cost me a quarter dollar so I don’t want to hear you crying Hark from the Tomb about it! Lillie Sheehan made it!
She made it, did she? the old man shouted. Hark from the Tomb is what you’ll be doing if you are buried in that floozy’s hat. Lilac. With green ribbons and plaster fruit. Think how you’ll look a-layin in your coffin in that. I won’t be seen in the church with you.
Adair wondered what kind of an awful thing the hat was, if he was carrying on so about it.
Well, I won’t care, Mr. Casebolt, I won’t care. Just stay to home then.
You ain’t wearing that hat at your funeral. That’s all she wrote.
Adair heard stomping steps across the creaky floor and then a thump. He had stalked across the room and thrown himself into a chair. Then there were raking sounds as he took out his outrage on the fire. Adair saw even bigger puffs of smoke coming from the chimney overhead and some ashes rained down on her. Coal smoke from the soft St. Louis coal lay heavy and serpentine.
Oh I don’t care one way or another. What use is it a-argyin with you? I’ll just cast it out, then, will that satisfy you, Mr. Casebolt?
Adair flattened herself even more against the muddy wall of the house and the hat came flying out the window. It struck the brick sidewalk with a rattle of plaster cherries. Adair stared at it for a second and thought, Lord, I wouldn’t be buried in that thing either. But Adair knew that Jesus had given her a hat so that she could walk the streets of this alien place in disguise, and also that it wouldn’t be long before the old lady changed her mind and came looking for it. After all she had paid Lillie Sheehan a quarter dollar for it.
A dray came by, driven by a tall black teamster, full of coal sacks, and she watched the wheels straddle the hat and pass over it without harm. Adair ran out and pounced on it and carried the hat away, turning the corner onto Poplar as she put it on her head. Behind her she could hear them still yelling at each other.
The hat was made of hard lilac-colored straw and had a smart little brim in front and a cockade of cherries and guinea feathers. She tied the ribbons under her chin and forged past the dancing soldier and his audience. She needed something more: a basket, a grip, a ticket to somewhere. Reserves of strength that she did not know she had had opened up to her. But she was spending these reserves at a great rate.
The soldier stopped his clog dance and called out, Good evening, Miss, are you lost?
She ignored him. She had risen on the social scale now that she had a hat, and ladies don’t talk to strange men.
She kept on. The air was still and in its cool untroubled sea the moths massed around the pale lamps. The sun fell below the city skyline, and the shadows of the great mercantile buildings that lined the entire riverfront were cast far out onto the river and over th
e steamboats.
She walked out from Poplar Street onto the granite stones of the levee. It was a seething confusion of crowds and moving lights. Men and vehicles crossed one another in every direction, their faces appearing and disappearing in the lamps and torches. The steamboats were loaded and unloaded in a tide of black dockmen, free and unfree, carrying America’s tonnage on their backs. Adair could find some kind of a basket or grip down here somewhere, even one that had been cast aside, even a busted one. She walked into the swarming torchlit dark, and the incessant crashing noise.
She stood for a minute to look at the great flues erupting in sparks. There were bars of red light from the boilers, and the interior lamps and candles now being lit in the passengers’ rooms. The levee was frantic and opulent with war and the needs of war. Adair had come only to steal a basket.
She walked down the long cliff face of mercantile houses. They said it stretched from Convent Street to the wood yards at Bremen. For miles men and animals carried war materials and firewood and coal and passengers and preserved foods and fruit and furniture and glass panes packed in straw, copper wire for the telegraph lines and cotton bales and chemicals and shoes back and forth. Toted them in handbarrows and on dollies, in buckboards and two-wheeled drays. From far down toward the south levee Adair heard somebody playing on a concertina “Hard Times Come Again No More.” A tall black stevedore turned in the light of a torch and slowly placed on his head a new cap saying The LaSalle.
Adair lowered her head and pushed through the blundering dark shapes. Accountants and clerks called for the unloaders to Stop, stop, I have not yet enumerated these goods yet sir, and the men with carts appeared in the pale illumination of the warehouse doorways as if bringing some offerings into the ken of the beings of light, up out of the dark and the dark of the river and the dark of the war.
Adair moved down toward the packet landings, and to the glassy flat plane of the Mississippi beyond. The runneling lights streamed in unstable streaks far out over the black and oily surface, as if the city would print news of itself endlessly. Across on the Illinois shore a few lights stood out at the eastern railroad terminals and among the black sticks of the March woods in the American Bottoms.
A block down she saw a great sign made of planks and lit by cressets, KEOKUK PACKET. The planks were white and the letters bright red, and a knothole had fallen out of the O of Keokuk. Sparks cascaded out of the flue as the Keokuk boat came in. People stood around under the sign ready to entrust their lives to the nighttime water in their urgency to be in Keokuk.
Adair walked forward with an expectant look on her face. They would think she was meeting someone. The massive tent of Mrs. Buckley’s dress shifted around as if she were appearing in her own personal circus, and her lilac hat felt top-heavy. She pressed in with the other excited nighttime people. The stern-wheeler bumped in and in its wake a long train of roiled and frothing water. Coiled ropes were cast into the air and uncoiled themselves hurtling through the torchlight down toward the dockmen.
She stood directly behind a woman and her husband. She was a plump woman in a cream-colored dress that had a black dot in it, and many black ruffles. The woman looked around her for someone to hand the grip to and then looked toward her husband. He was paying their fare in coins.
I am ten cents short, said the man. Dorcas, give me ten cents if you have it.
What? Dorcas started to put the bag down and leaned toward him. Adair stepped up closer behind her and reached, but the woman did not put it down. Dorcas looked around her. It is so noisy.
I said, give me ten cents if you have it.
Dorcas finally put the grip down and Adair said to herself she would wait until the man turned to pay the fare. With intense concentration the woman dredged up her coin purse from the chain at her waist. She was clearly afflicted with bad eyesight. So Adair reached again.
A few minutes later she was hurrying down the levee, among the crowds. She carried the stolen grip like a load of sin. Thief! Thief! The high, repetitive birdlike cry made her heart clack frantically like a sticky, fibrillating valve.
Adair could never have imagined herself alone on a great levee like this and stealing somebody’s luggage. I guess you can get used to just about anything, she thought. And this is wartime anyway. Soldiers went past her at a trot casting about for the thief and here she was carrying the thing. She pushed on through the crowd. She wished to be in the dark where she was not so easily seen and where no doubt other thieves held their jubilees in corner taverns and empty lots.
She walked more confidently now up Plum Street on the gentle rise away from the river. Adair did not know how many miles it was to Ripley County but the only way to get there was to start walking. Her longing to be away from the noise of the city and the war was the most intense thing she had ever felt in her life.
She had to stop someplace now, where there was a light, and see what it was she had stolen. She had nearly spent the strength that had come to her. But she could go on a ways yet.
She had come so far south in the city that the streets were now unpaved. Sometimes there was an empty lot between houses walled off with a plank fence, and a board door in the fence. At one of these she stopped. Small casks were stacked around outside the door like fat men and smelling richly of cheese. Inside the plank wall there would be a place to hide. From the second story of the brick tenement, gaslight poured down from a window into the courtyard. If she could get in there quietly, she could inspect the contents of the grip in the hard, acidic light.
Adair took one of her hair combs from out of her hair to slip it through the crack and lift the latch. The board door was plastered with torn and flapping advertisements for Dan Rice, the World-Reknowned Clown, and her sleeve rasped against the paper and it sounded as loud as a gunshot. The metal latch rattled. She lifted up her pale face to look at the second-story window, but no one came to peer out.
She went in and shut the latch behind her in theftlike silence. With all her skirts close around her she walked silently among cheese casks to sit in the slat of whey-colored light from above. If she made a noise again the people up in the second story would look out and they would know very well what she was doing. Gloating over her stolen articles.
Her plaster cherries rattled slightly. She pressed the brass swinging clasp and opened the grip wide to the light. She lifted out a pair of drawers with tatting on the legs. Clean underwear! She found spectacles in a hard leather case, and then there was a daguerreotype of somebody dead in a coffin, a man. She put that on the ground and would leave it there. But the frame was good. She left it anyway. There was a little velvet sack with a silver-backed hairbrush and some steel hairpins, a pair of backless slippers, a light silk petticoat wadded tight, cotton stockings, a canvas sack containing cornstarch and a cotton one full of raw cotton bolls for applying the cornstarch. She felt of a paper package of long things. She carefully unrolled the paper.
She heard voices overhead but they were just talking to each other. The voices of two men. Four tallow candles and a bundle of matches fell into her hands. This was so they wouldn’t have to pay for candles on the boat north to Keokuk. Her father had done the same thing when they went up the river to Ste. Genevieve from New Madrid. The steamboat people charged you the earth for everything they gave you, even that common brown soap. Then Adair found four folded handkerchiefs, one fancy linen with openwork and the other three cotton. There was a small sewing kit in a roll of plaid flannel with three needles and six colors of thread.
She ran her hand along the bottom lining. It was heavy canvas. There was nothing else in there. Adair felt much better. She took a deep relieved breath and leaned back against the brick wall. She felt armed. Now she needed some kind of permit they issued to you to go where you wanted to go. There would be people in St. Louis who forged those sorts of passes all the time.
Above her she heard the two men in earnest discussion about whether to go to work in Belcher’s sugar refinery or not. That the t
ubular boiler had exploded not four years ago and was it worth the wages. One of them came to the window to reach out and closed the shutters against the increasing damp of the night and so she sat still. Overhead the shutters banged to and shed flakes of old paint and rust. They fell onto her lilac straw hat with tiny rattles.
Adair got up and moved out and away from the cheese barrels, slow and smooth like a nocturnal animal. She wished she had a nail bar or crowbar for she would have had the lid off of one of the cheese casks in a moment, but she did not. They were as closed to her as they were to the rats.
She opened the creaking board door in the plank wall, and rasped past the posters of Dan Rice with his lines of circus horses. She walked on down Third and wondered how she could safely pass the night. Maybe walking, but that was dangerous. She went on, trudging heavily. This was all something that just had to be got through. It wasn’t permanent, being a thief and alone and being stuck in this awful hell of coal smoke and brick.
After a while she came to a wagon yard and slipped in. She spent the night half-sitting in a pile of hay with the quilt around her shoulders and the stolen grip in her lap.
18
CONFEDERATE CORRESPONDENCE
Camp Emmet McDonald, April 4, 1863
Maj. E. G. Williams, Assistant Adjutant-General
Major: Captain Timothy Reeves reported this morning that he had information of 200 cavalry on the march to burn Bollinger’s Mills and destroy the records of Doniphan. He asked for reinforcements. I wrote him that his force was sufficient to defend the mill, and ordered him to do it. This Mill has the capacity for grinding for 5,000 men, and is the only one between the Eleven Point and the Current, south of Doniphan.
Enemy Women Page 16
