The third time they nearly surprised her coming around a bend and the officer calling out “By twos, at a trot!” The only way clear of them was up a steep bank, but Whiskey dug in his toes and clawed his way up the bank, bucked himself upward the last five yards and over the top, thrashing his tail in the joy of it all. They rode into a pine thicket, and Adair jumped down and clamped his nostrils shut, so that when he did call out to the Union horses he made a peculiar buzzing noise and was startled at himself. Adair stood very quietly and listened. Whiskey was the sort of strong and lively animal an officer would like to take from her and ride him into battle. Well they will do a good job getting him away from me ever again, she thought. She waited until they were well gone and their commands and hoofbeats faded into the hills. Then after a half hour she went on.
Often during the night she heard the remote barking of dogs at house places far off the Trace, up distant mountain valleys and on hillsides. A light could be seen a long way off. But lights were rare in the dusk, and in the early mornings they started before dawn but there was no smell of woodsmoke from breakfast fires anywhere about them.
The road stayed mostly in the bottomlands, and when it forced itself upward over a ridge the stony roadbed made Whiskey pick his way carefully, his hooves slipping among the granite rocks. When they regained the bottomlands again the road became easier and once again floored in sand and gravel. It was hard going but Adair thought of her home with the lights in the windows, and being up in the girls’ room by herself with everybody else downstairs and herself dreaming in silent privacy, watching the lightning crawl up Copperhead. A house they themselves owned and were beholden to no one, were not beggars asking a place in somebody else’s kitchen.
She had to go around the Union garrison at Iron Mountain, so Adair took a road that went off to the west; the sign said it would arrive at Mungar’s Mills. After a mile or so of the clattering rocky bed, it did as it promised. In a good flat valley, alongside a graveled river, a millhouse stood asleep in the sun. The mill’s eighteen-foot undershot wheel made a regular thundering sound as the blades struck the water in the race. Houses beside it were all abandoned. There were no worn footpaths going from house to house, or smoke from the chimneys, or bedding being aired, nor cats in the windows. Three or four were burnt and only the chimneys standing. Adair crossed below the dam, riding through the spray. An elderly man sat on the steps in front and stared at her as she rode up.
What river is this? she asked.
North Fork of the Black. He nodded. Yes, ma’am, that’s the North Fork of the Black River.
I’m going around Iron Mountain, she said. How do I get around from here?
The man sat back and stared at her. His beard came down to the middle of his chest, and his hands were stained and feeble.
Well, if I was you, with that good-looking horse, I’d stay away from the Yankees too, he said.
Well, that’s what I am doing, said Adair.
Reeves or Coleman will take him from you too, any road.
I know it.
Where do you want to go to afterward?
Down to Doniphan Courthouse.
Well. The miller nodded to nobody in particular. Do you want to buy any corn? I have a sack of cracked corn. Red and blue. Country corn. The mill wheel revolved, spilling its slats of water.
I’ll take it, said Adair.
He lifted himself slowly and went into the millhouse, and came back out packing a twenty-five-pound sack of cracked corn.
Just stay on this road here, and it will take you to Centerville. You’ll be a good twenty miles southwest of the Union hole-up. Then on south on the Van Buren road, but them patrols go raiding down that road all the time. Stay on to the west of it. I’d go through the Irish Wilderness and then around. They raid down from Patterson all the time.
I know it. Thank you, said Adair. She handed him two silver dollars.
Have you heard aught of the war? he asked. He stood with his hand on Whiskey’s shoulder, patting him. Whiskey was looking at the mill wheel with great curiosity, his ears cocked up straight. We heard Lee was boxed up on ever side there in Virginia.
No, sir, I ain’t heard anything, she said. But it can’t go on much longer.
Well, you could stay here, he said. It’s hard getting up in the morning and nobody here.
I better keep on.
At nighttimes them houses look like they were talking to one another. Yersty a door fell in at Wellams’ house. Hinges rotted and it just fell in and laid there.
It looks pretty lonesome.
I have not fared well without my daughter. Her and the baby is buried in the floor of that house there. He turned toward a house place nearby and gestured at it. I was going to burn it down over their grave and leave the chimney for a headstone. She just screamed two-three days. Daddy! Daddy! But I couldn’t do nothing about it. The baby wouldn’t come.
I am sorry to hear it.
You could stay on here a while.
Well, sir, I’m sorry, but I got to be a witness in court in Oklahoma Territory.
She put the sack on behind her and then went on. She rode with her skirts tucked up under her and her stockinged legs hanging down each side. She leaned down often to pat Whiskey and stroke his neck. He strode along now with his old springing step, his tail lashing, looking about himself with interest at the the world. Several times he went forward at a trot and danced about in the road when she held him in. The leaves were already as large as a squirrel’s ear. Just beyond the mill and the houses, Adair made camp beside the ford of a little creek, under a sycamore whose shattering bark lay in rolls like paper at its feet and so it was easy to start a fire. The sycamore leaves were always the last to come out and the immense white limbs stood out lucent against the blue sky. She fed Whiskey handsful of the cracked corn and then boiled three eggs in the steel saucepan.
The next day Adair woke up to a clean sky and the sound of Whiskey devouring the new bluestem grass nearby. She sat up in her blankets. Whiskey dropped down to his side and rolled over and wallowed on his back, his feet swimming in the morning air. He jumped up and snorted and shook himself. The forests of the Ozarks had never been cut, so the yellow pine and oaks were sometimes fifteen feet around at the base. They stood far apart from one another without underbrush, and it was good traveling then, through the greening world. At the seeps and springs, there were banks of violets and fern, sweet williams and miniature wild irises whose flowers were no bigger than a person’s thumb and two fingertips held together. Wild pansies looked up with lion faces, the shadows of the new leaves were faint as the shadows of an eclipse.
At the next ridge south of Mungar’s was an open prairie of grasses of several acres. It was what the people called a barrens. Adair could see for a long way. The hills poured out southward, one after another. The wind tore at her hair and she felt herself lifting like a kite. She stood for a long time to listen for the sound of a mill wheel or a church bell, or foundry or circle saw squaring logs, the ringing of an anvil.
The hills were silent. She stood listening for a long space of time. There was only the long wind singing off the top of the receding ridges and their heavy forests.
It seemed all the people were gone. Soon there would be some other world and some other people to take their place. The grasses on the little barren seethed in the wind with their new seed-heads, and the wind was chill, and so they went on as the road drove downhill toward the main fork of the Black River.
The seventh day of slow traveling found them up and moving by dawn. It was very cold that morning, for it was yet early in April and she wore the Zouave jacket and the down quilt over her shoulders on top of it. They followed the road as it swung along a steep hillside in an oak forest. They were southwest of Iron Mountain, and she had no idea what was the name of the road.
Then Adair smelled smoke drifting up the trail toward her. It eased long through the tree trunks. She and Whiskey stopped in the road.
Whiskey thre
w his head up and stared, he began to dance around in the road. She heard a galloping horse. Adair turned Whiskey into the pines alongside, behind a screen of vines. It was a loose horse. The horse caught scent of Whiskey and turned in and came to stand beside them and touch noses with the dun gelding, and Whiskey flattened his ears to the mare to show her her position in the world. She wore a halter and a broken rope, so Adair leaned down and caught it up and went back to the road. She saw that the mare’s tracks turned off onto a side trail and so she took it. Then heard below her the noises of a camp.
25
Early in the Civil War, Timothy Reeves became the Captain of a hundred Rebel soldiers, and whether his army was at any time attached to any Rebel army the writer does not know, but in the last two years of the war he was a serious menace to the Federal scouts in southeast Missouri. In one instance in St. Francois County, he discovered Captain William Leeper and party who were doing scout duty in that territory, and started chasing him. While the Federals were running down a hill towards the St. Francois River, it is reported that one of Captain Leeper’s men said, “There is a ford to the right!” The Captain replied, “Any place is a ford in a case like this,” so their horses leaped off a bluff some twelve feet high, into as many feet of water, and escaped, as Captain Reeves stopped at the bluff.
Mr. Reeves kept his company together and took care of them until the end of the war. He was cunning and his men so resistant that the Federal scouts got so they would rather hunt for him than to find him.
—J. J. CHILTON, FROM THE Current Local, NOVEMBER 12, 1931, REPRINTED IN The Civil War in Carter and Shannon Counties
UNION CORRESPONDENCE
Patterson, Mo., December 19, 1863
General Fisk;
My scouts came in from Doniphan. They report that Reeves has got a colonel’s commission and is conscripting every man between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years and has ordered all to report to him for duty and when they all get together he will have 1,000 men. Can this old scoundrel not be taken in or run out of the country? He is said to be about Doniphan.
W. T. Leeper, Captain, Commanding Post
—OR, CH. XXXIV, P. 745
I remember an old man named Freshour. He was old and deaf and as he was walking along, the Yankees came up behind him and hollered at him to stop. Of course he did not hear them and they shot him in the back and killed him. My mother and some more ladies had to dig a grave and bury him, for my father and two brothers who had been home on a furlough had already gone back to the Southern Army. . . . On this same raid they went into the home of two of my uncles and took them out and hung them to their own gatepost. They were both big men and were my mother’s brothers. My mother was there and saw it all and as long as she lived she never got over the shock. And they called that a civil war. It was the cruelest war we ever had.
—E. J. WALKER, QUOTED IN Oldtimers, BY FLORENCE FENLEY, THE HORNBY PRESS, UVALDE, TEXAS, 1936. WALKER WAS BORN IN NORTHERN ARKANSAS IN 1856, SON OF A METHODIST MINISTER.
WELL, YOU HAVE done caught maggie.
An old man with one eye sat in front of a fire, tending a blackened coffeepot. Beside the elderly man, in a mess of tattered blankets, sat Greasy John.
Adair Colley! he said. He struggled up and picked up his old bowler hat and put it on. He then swept it off. You’re the best thing I have seen since 1802.
Greasy John! Adair smiled at him. Well, or whatever your last name is.
He wiped his hands on his pants and offered her one, and she shook it. Last name’s Grissom, he said. You are as pretty as you ever were. He put both hands on his hips. And ain’t that your horse Whiskey?
Adair patted the horse’s neck. Whiskey looked at the string of other horses back in the trees and called out and was answered immediately. She dared not let him go; he would trot to the strange herd and forthwith begin to make himself officer in charge. She threw his lead-rope over a low limb nearby and returned.
Yes sir, that’s him. She tipped her head to one side to look at Greasy John. You are the first person I have seen that I know. First person in a long time. She slid off and shook out her skirts. She stood beside her horse. It was a broad valley and the grove of trees stood in it like an island, their dawn shadows standing long across the stretches of grass. The old man took the red mare, Maggie, and tied her back with the others. The horses were all slashing their tails against the flies. He came back. His eyehole was crusted with blood, and fluid from it slowly leaked down his cheek. He wiped at it.
John there is my old cousin, said the elderly man. We are all old cousins now, all us first cousins. I’m Asa Smitters. He placed a skillet on the fire and began to cut up jelled cornmeal mush from an earthenware pot. He dropped it into the greasy skillet to fry. Smoke roiled around him in the blue air. We’re related on our mothers’ side. Greers, from Hickman County, Tennessee.
Adair looked around at the camp; the smoke puffed up into the oak limbs high overhead and she saw gravestones all around beneath the trees. They were new, and some of them said mccloskey. A stone jar of lard sat on one of the gravestones and a saddle was set over another. On one sat the head of a razorback boar and the blood and fluids leaked down the lettering of a headstone and stained the figure of a woman mourning by a weeping willow and over all this sorrow the boar’s head grinned with its roach of bristles between flop ears. The flies danced around it.
Now, where have you been, Miss Colley? asked Greasy John. Come and join us here at our spring arbor. He bent down and picked up a blanket, shook it out, and folded it. He laid it down again, and indicated with a sweep of his hand that it was to be her seat. He lay back among his own sorry-looking pile of blankets. The last I seen of you was you and them sisters of yours refugeed upon the Military Road. Carryin’ skillets and wearing peculiar hats. His bald head shone in the spring sunlight. His dusty bowler lay in the dirt beside him. A jaunty turkey feather was stuck in the band.
I am just coming from St. Louis, Adair said. I was held in prison and I escaped. I got clean away. She fanned away the smoke. I run right through the city afoot. Wait till I get my plunder. She went to Whiskey and took up her carpet sack and came back. Adair felt very anxious. Greasy John might know something of her family. She didn’t want to ask for fear of what she would hear.
Asa Smitters got up and searched around in a wooden ammunition box. He found a galvanized tin cup. He blew in it and then filled it with coffee and offered it to Adair.
A young girl like you traveling the roads alone. This is what the war has done to this world. He shook his head. Here, this is the only tin cup we got. We been drinking out of cow horns like savages. He began to spin a cord out of massed strands of horsehair. Hildebrand and his boys shot my eye out at Dent’s Station. Just to be shooting something.
Oh, I am sorry, said Adair.
Well, I still got one anyhow.
Where did you all get coffee? She lifted the cup to her nose and sniffed. Is this real coffee? She pulled the red jacket collar tight around her neck for it was cold at that hour of the morning.
Prison! said Greasy John. Surely you did not confess in an attempt to get a wagon ride to the garrison at Iron Mountain.
That coffee is from the Yankee commissary, Asa said. It is pure Rio, charmed to offer it. He sat down and once again took up his horsehair work. He was spinning them together between his fingers into a long strand. He squinted at the strand and bent closely to see it with his one eye. I guess I’m lucky I ain’t dead.
Adair sat down and her skirts spread out around her. She was wearing the big dress. Smoke from the fire drifted around into her face and she took off her hat to wave it away. She drank the coffee. It was real and strong. She had almost lost her taste for it.
I am on my way back home to Ripley County. The frying mush made crisp noises and smelled of bacon. Adair thought of how good it would taste with honey and butter. What county is this?
You are in Reynolds, my dear. The early wind made tufts of his hair stan
d up over his bald head. They looked like horns. And now tell us what happened.
Well, some people on the road took a dislike to me and went and told the Yankees I was a spy or something, said Adair. People named Upshaw. Or Upshears. No, it was Upshaw. She glared down into the cup. And I got sent up to St. Louis to a stone building of a prison and I tell you it was like being shut up in a butter churn.
My Lord, my Lord, said Greasy John.
Well, I made my way over the wall and headed home. I come down the Iron Mountain road, the one that goes alongside the railroad. She glanced up at the two elderly men with an anxious look. If a family was all scattered, don’t you reckon they would all make their way back to the home place if they were alive? I was shut up in prison while I should have been trying to find my father. The wind turned the woodsmoke into her face again, and this time Adair began to cough. It felt so explosive that she got up and walked around the fire until she conquered it and then sat down. It had exhausted her but if she sat still for a while she would recover.
Asa Smitters and Greasy John looked at each other in the drifting smoke.
You are not well at all, said Asa.
Yes I am, said Adair. It is a catarrh.
Doesn’t sound like the catarrh to me.
Well, it is too. This is what catarrh sounds like. It comes and goes, sometimes I don’t cough at all for a long time. I think it’s that smoke. She fanned at it with her hat but the wind shifted again.
Greasy John said, A young girl held in a vile dungeon and long in city pent. He shook his head. He then smacked his hand on top of his bald head and killed there some sort of biting insect. He put on the bowler hat with the turkey feather. Is there no end to their disregard of the laws of nature?
Enemy Women Page 23
