Enemy Women

by Paulette Jiles

  I’m coming from Mobile, said Neumann.

  You’re a Yankee officer, said the ferryman. Discharged.

  Yes.

  What are you coming down here for?

  The ferryman stared out over the water. Neumann stood with his legs apart and his back to the rail, one elbow on the railing and the other with a thumb hooked into his front pocket. It was noisy now with the wind and the water splashing. The ferryman pulled heartily on the cable crank. Neumann declined to help him. It was too close to the water and Neumann knew the ferryman could tip him into the river in a moment.

  I’m looking for somebody.

  Now they’s the Union over there, said the ferryman. On the far side. Just your kind of people. He jerked his chin toward the ferry landing on the Missouri side where a group of Union soldiers sat and smoked and watched the ferry cross.

  All right, said Neumann. They may or may not be my kind of people.

  I killed as many of you sons of bitches as I could, the ferryman said. They’s just so damn many of you.

  We breed like rabbits, said Neumann. Who were you with?

  Seventh Missouri, CSA, said the ferryman. Then we got so shot up they put me in with a bunch of Texans. Terry’s Eighth Texas.

  Neumann braced his feet and rode on the taupe silk sheets of the Mississippi. He watched the ferryman’s hard hands on the cable crank and saw no weapon about the man. The world was in truth made of jackstraws. The world was very combustible, the human body was partible in ways heretofore unimagined. What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. Civilization was not in the natural order but was some sort of willed invention held taut like a fabric or a sail against the chaos of the winds. And why we had invented it, or how we knew to invent it, was beyond him.

  Neumann had seen some truth that was completely out of his power to put into words. But he had come away knowing that even though the world of civilization was made of straw and lantern slides, he must live in it as if it were solid. Even when the heat of the lantern itself burnt away the illusions and a black hole appeared in the middle of the slide.

  He looked upriver at the immense road of water that flowed from the heart of the nation, down from St. Louis and the northern cities, carrying in its bloodstream the silt and alluvial sands from the Missouri River, which poured out the rich gifts of the plains.

  The baking wind tore at his hat and he held it by the brim with one hand. It relieved him to look at it, for the great river was like a long tale, of both great joy and great woe. And it seemed to be a story road that a person could take, and it would take him to some place where he could free his mind. Men had striven against one another to control the unreeling river-road, battling at New Madrid and Island Number Ten, at Baton Rouge and Vicksburg, in the heat of the summer and the humid, choking air of the malarial swamps. But the river carried away men and guns and the garbage of war, covering it over, washing itself clean again as if they had never been. Neumann turned his face toward Missouri.

  From the approaching shore he heard strains of music. At this crossing, the west shore was the low side, a swamp, except for the small rise where the Union soldiers were encamped. He heard a fiddle, a pennywhistle. He could see the group of Union men sitting around the ferry landing. The ferry creaked as it slid on the glassy surface of the river. His horse shifted and rebalanced himself, and the far shore drew nearer and nearer.

  He saw the smoke of a breakfast fire in the early-morning dimness. The smoke slid in evaporating planes into the uncut forest and wetlands around. The fiddler was playing “Caragan Goalach,” slow and sad. The pennywhistle punctuated its long lament with bright trills, and Neumann could hear one of the soldiers in blue singing with it, singing in the Irish tongue.

  THEY APPROACHED WITH a smooth, dreamlike motion across the water. The odd Celtic melody lifted his spirits, and just as they docked he could see the men wore Union Militia badges.

  The bay horse bolted down the gangway planks for solid land in a brief thunder, and then stood nodding at other horses tied back in the trees. The fiddler spat and turned to see who had arrived, and a redheaded captain stood up.

  They came walking toward him through clouds of mosquitoes. The bearded fiddler called out,

  And what delight he takes in his umbrella! His hand is on fire and the cooling rains have not put it out yea though it rain forty days and forty nights.

  He ain’t right in the head, said the boy sitting at the fire. The boy was hatless, in a blue uniform coat. He put the pennywhistle to his lips and blew spit out of it.

  Who are you? The captain stared at Neumann. Got your discharge papers? Furlough?

  Who are you? asked Neumann. The war’s over.

  I am Captain Tom Poth of the Union Militia.

  Neumann stared for a long moment at Captain Tom Poth. The other men, in decayed blue uniforms, stood around the fire with tin cups in their hands. Their insignia were frayed, their weapons muddied. Then he remembered the man’s name. He and his men had burnt down the Colley farm and had taken the judge, had sent Adair and her sisters wandering down the roads of the world.

  Neumann knew there was nothing at this point that he could reasonably do. He turned to the captain. The ground they stood on was squelching.

  Why do you want to know? he asked.

  These southeast counties are under military rule, said Poth. Martial law. I’ve got the right and the duty to call to account ever wanderer and sojourner that comes passing into here. He squinted at Neumann and lit a cigar. The Constitution is suspended down here for a couple of years until we get things squared away.

  It is, said Neumann. That’s an interesting state of affairs.

  And I am empowered to ask for your papers, sir, and I’ll have them now.

  Neumann reached into his saddlebags and drew out a leather folder, took out his furlough and handed it to the captain.

  You are this Major William Neumann?

  One and the same, said Neumann. Shortly to be discharged.

  That so. The captain puffed on the cigar and then said, You a Baptist? and held out another cigar.

  No, said Neumann. I’ll smoke the damn thing. He took the cigar and put it in his pocket. Where’d you get this tobacco?

  The captain ignored Neumann and turned to the men around the fire and said, He ain’t no Rebel. He doesn’t talk like one.

  Neumann said, What if I were?

  I don’t guess you’d get through that swamp, the captain said. There was four men yesterday who didn’t make it. Wasn’t there, boys? A merry band of Rebels coming home to make trouble, but they will make trouble no more.

  The men at the fire turned back to regard the flames with long, interested stares, and were silent.

  What are you carrying in that saddlebag? And the haversack? Is that government property?

  It’s my property, said Neumann. He turned his back to Poth and threw the stirrup over the seat with his right hand, took up the billets and began to tighten the saddle girth as best he could one-handed.

  I could look in them if I wanted, said Poth. We’re under martial law here. We can look in anything and go in anybody’s house.

  But you don’t want to, said Neumann. Do you?

  What’s in them?

  Look out, Captain, he’ll beat you over the head with that umbrella, said one of the soldiers at the fire. The fiddler started in on “Soldier’s Joy.” A young corporal complained, I can’t sing that. They ain’t no words to that.

  The fiddler said, Yes there is, they are round ones though, like the bitter fruit of the Osage orange and they come to me when I am in the mountains and have no noise of my own.

  The fiddler ain’t right in the head, the boy said to Neumann.

  Neumann mounted up.

  I ain’t give you permission to go, Poth said. State your destination.

  Don’t fool with me, said Neumann. He pressed his boot heels to the horse and they started down the sloshing trail into the wetl
ands.

  It had been a hot, dry summer and the Great East Swamp was not as wet as it was at other times, and here and there dry ground stood up out of the water. Back in among the boles of the great trees the occasional white face of a swamp flower shone, big as a cabbage, in standing pools. From across the river the raccoon chittered in a long, lonesome trill, calling out to others of his kind, and was answered from somewhere in the trees of the Missouri side. Neumann listened. The thought occurred to him that the calls could be men signaling one another in the dim shades. It could be anything.

  His horse wavered on into the hundreds of square miles of wetland, into the nation of mosquitoes and rare, damp flowers. The boles of the immense trees standing away like the arches of a cathedral. Neumann was sweaty and dirty, his horse’s hooves sucked holes in the mud and water. He leaned forward on the split pommel of the saddle. He took out his penknife and cut the end from the cigar. He lit it with a phosphorus match, dropped the smoking match into the water. He puffed on the cigar and waved it to keep the mosquitoes away. He made himself use his injured hand in spite of the pain.

  He went on for another mile or so. Enough to smoke half the cigar. Neumann rode the bay up to the bole of a water oak and pressed the glowing ash from the end of the cigar, to save it. Then he rode on for a while, leaning forward over the horse’s shoulders to try and see what it was they were stepping into.

  He put the cigar butt in his jacket pocket.

  All morning he threaded his way through the swamplands, guessing where the high ground lay beneath several inches of water. They splashed on through and listened to the sounds of bitterns laughing, something unseen hurrying away. Neumann lifted his hat from his head and ran his clawed fingers through his hair. His left hand throbbed.

  Then he pulled up the bay horse to listen.

  For the last half hour he had heard a distant steady splashing, drawing closer and closer.

  Neumann took out the half cigar and lit up the cigar stub again, squirting out fumes, tipping his head back.

  He turned, and through the trees he saw Captain Tom Poth come riding. Neumann reached behind himself and worried the umbrella loose from its ties. He laid it across his lap.

  Poth came up to Neumann, weaving through the dark water on a jittery, nervous sorrel horse. He was smiling. There was a long roll of rope tied to a saddle ring behind the cantle and he was carrying in one hand, loose in his lap, a government issue revolver. Hanging from his belt was a pair of manacles. They jingled. His face wavered through the shadows of the vast trees, grinning.

  I’m empowered to look in them saddlebags, he said.

  Don’t they pay you people? said Neumann. That you have to make your living by robbing? The damp air closed around Neumann’s chest like a vise and he wondered if he should shoot Poth’s horse now. Do something now. He was so close to finding Adair and was so weary of dead men.

  He said, I’m tired of the war, Captain Poth. Let’s see if we can come to some kind of an agreement here.

  Tom Poth had taken off his coat in the heat, and had tied it in a bundle behind the saddle. He was wearing a nonregulation checkered shirt of green and blue linen homespun. His hands were hairy with red hairs and his nails were black. His face was freckled and running with sweat. The sorrel he was riding jittered and stamped, afraid of the swamp and the standing water. He started to lift the revolver.

  Neumann didn’t want to shoot. They would hear it back at the ferry landing.

  There’s nothing in my saddlebags you want, Neumann said. But now, we could trade horses.

  Trade horses?

  Yes, look here. There’s money in this for both of us. Poth frowned and stared at him with small eyes. Neumann leaned down and grasped Poth’s looped reins. Poth reached down to stop him but all he got was a slash across the back of his hand and a line of blood sprang up and began to run. Neumann whipped his penknife through the reins, and then jammed the smoking cigar up the sorrel’s nostril.

  Poth was lifting the revolver and Neumann opened the umbrella. The great fan of the umbrella, blossoming up out of nowhere, and the cigar up his nose, turned the sorrel to a lunatic. He reared up so high he nearly went over backward and Tom Poth’s shot roared upward into the trees.

  The sorrel gelding then squatted down on its haunches and sprang forward in a leap that was a perfect arch, and when he hit the water he was running. He was throwing his head from one side to another and so could not see where he was going.

  The horse’s cut reins were flying and sheets of water flew up from its hooves like fans, ropy with duckweed and stems. Tom Poth clung to the saddle pommel with both hands. You son of a whore!! he screamed.

  Neumann sat and watched as the horse bolted onto what seemed to be higher ground and crashed against a water oak, slamming Poth bodily against the bole of the tree so hard his head flew back. Somewhere in all the turmoil Poth got off another shot but it too went wild and the thick puff of smoke lifted slowly. The horse charged on with Poth reeling and slopping side to side in the saddle, and then they disappeared.

  Neumann sat and listened to the fainter and fainter sounds of hooves splashing, it sounded like a fulling mill. Then he couldn’t hear anything but tree frogs.

  Neumann quieted himself. He bent down to look at his revolver in the pommel holster and took a series of long breaths. After a while he rode on.

  He followed the trail torn through the wetlands, for the sorrel horse seemed to know his way; he was going somewhere. Maybe he had been stolen from the people of the Ozarks and was heading home, back to the mountains and the high country. The horse had found one of the ridges, one of those snaking, meandering dykes of land a foot or so higher than the surrounding swamp, and was following it, and so Neumann and the bay horse followed it too. The wavering path he had slashed through was even now closing up again. The dark, four-inch-deep water was quieting now into stillness, the trefoil surface plant sliding back in, the wetland saw grasses springing upright. In the distance Neumann heard the clattering noise of a flight of ducks taking to the air. It told him that Poth was still on ahead.

  The ripped trail of his horse was marked with things: Poth’s hat, the pieces of leather reins, torn brush.

  Overhead in the canopy of vines rare swampland birds sang and fought and announced the presence of human beings. The splash of the bay horse’s hooves sprayed mud and water, and made it hard to hear anything, but occasionally he stopped to listen. There was the cry of a bittern, and then a slow whap-whap-whap as off in the trees a blue heron rose on its pipestem legs and beat its way upward with immense wings. After half an hour Neumann began to hear something like a tuneless singing up ahead.

  As he drew nearer, Neumann knew it was a moaning sound. Ohhhhhh, the voice said. Ohhhh God. Help me. He heard the snorts of a frightened horse.

  He stopped his horse again to listen, looking with a deep predator’s intent through the trees, his hand closing on the revolver’s grip.

  Ohhh stop. Whoa fellow. Oh stop. Stop.

  He splashed on and then ahead between the tree boles he saw a long deep light. A reflection. In the strange geography of the swamps there was a sort of lake, and the cypresses had sent up their conical root structures into the air, two feet tall, cypress knees. In among them was the sorrel horse with the U.S. saddle and bridle. He was leaning and pulling, for his stirrup seemed to be hung up. Sunlight fell from overhead in brilliant drapes of light, illuminating the shining sorrel hide in spots, and then a boot, and a leg in Federal blue hung up in the irons, stretched out long.

  Tom Poth lay with his head caught firmly between two cypress knees, his face barely above water, calling out to Neumann. The horse had thrown him at some point, and his foot had gone through the stirrup iron, and the sorrel had dragged him pell mell through the runneling dark waters and weeds, and then Poth’s head had caught up between two cypress knees as if the wetlands itself had taken him in hand.

  Neumann came up and got off his horse, dropped into the ankle-deep wat
er and felt roots crush beneath his boots. He walked through the sloshing water. Looked down at Tom Poth.

  The Militia captain’s head was firmly jammed between two large knees. His ears were nearly torn loose and blood was staining the water around his head. He gripped a tall cypress knee with one hand and the other, probably broken, dangled uselessly in the water. The pistol had twisted over onto his belly in its long-nosed holster and it was half under water, and so the powder would be useless. The horse was stomping as if he would stave holes in the water. He fought to be loose of this confusion.

  Help me! Poth screamed.

  Look at this, said Neumann. He stood there with his hands touching a cypress knee, amazed at the entanglement the man had got himself into. I’ll be damned.

  Help me, said Poth. He looked up helplessly, his eyes dark with mud.

  In hell, said Neumann. I would help you on your way to hell.

  Neumann sloshed over to the straining horse.

  Don’t scare him, said Poth. His voice was suddenly calm. I’m about killed. He’s tearin’ my head off.

  Neumann turned and smiled down at the man. I could whip the horse, he said. It would likely pull your head off.

  Before God, gasped Poth, from down in the mud. I am about to die.

  Neumann patted the horse on the chest, between the front legs, and then on the neck, and the sorrel quieted a little. He slogged around to the far side, looking at Poth over the seat of the saddle. He took the Federal blue coat from the saddle strings.

  Then he looked in the saddlebags and there he found an account book. He opened the pages with muddied, damp hands. It was in a dark red leather. Inside was written, Marquis L. Colley, Justice of the Peace, Jackson Township, Ripley County, Missouri. There were dark stains of old blood on it.