Enemy Women

by Paulette Jiles

  Look at this. What have you got here?

  That’s from some rich fellow, said Poth. He’s got his money in a Cape Girardeau bank and I aim to confiscate it. I can do that kind of thing. Martial law. I’ll give you it, I’ll give you all of it, look there, he had thousands of dollars. I think there’s more than two thousand dollars.

  Where is Marquis Colley? Neumann’s hat was pulled tight over his forehead. Where is Judge Marquis Colley? He turned cold eyes on Poth, it was as if the blood within him had turned cold and so he became slow and deliberate in his speech.

  Cut me loose, said Poth.

  Neumann stared at Poth for a long moment. Where is he?

  I let the boys have him, said Poth. I never did nothing to him. The boys wanted him, before God, I never did a thing to him. I swear, he could be free somewhere.

  His leg was stretched out in the stirrup iron and it seemed the iron was cutting through his boot, his foot was badly twisted, maybe the ankle was broken. Neumann stepped a muddy boot on Poth’s throat.

  I will drown you, he said. Where is he?

  The boys! he screamed. The boys took him, it wasn’t me! They was mad about something before the war! The boys shot him!

  The leeches were already nestling into his neck, like gray kisses.

  No they didn’t. A raccoon chittered in a long purring stutter from a tree and wavy lines in the pool marked where cottonmouths spun off into their holes.

  All right, I shot him, I shot him. Now look, look, that two thousand dollars is easy got, said Poth. He lifted both hands to the cypress knees and fought to get his head out of the crotch. I can show you where they lived.

  Where is he?

  You get me loose, Major, I’ll take you there.

  Neumann looked down at Poth and knew that Poth would never take him to Marquis Colley’s grave. Nor could he force him to. As soon as they got out of the swamps they would be back in the hands of the Militia and under martial law.

  Neumann took his revolver out of the holster on his saddle, and then searched through Poth’s saddlebags where he found a box of ammunition. He worried it out between his bad hand and his good one.

  Oh yes, you can have that ammunition, said Poth, and the horse too, the horse too. Just cut me loose.

  Shut up. The watery and hollow silence of the wetlands closed around them. Neumann felt the strange glacial surge in himself that he did before a battle. He sat and watched as Poth sank lower and lower into the water. Listened to him beg. The horse started forward again and again.

  Finally Neumann heard Poth’s neck snap. He looked down into Poth’s eyes. His hands had fallen each to one side in the tea-colored water.

  No use now, said Neumann. You’re paralyzed. Your neck’s broken.

  I could still live, said Poth in a small voice. I could still get along.

  Neumann watched as the face sank below the water and its eyes began to bulge like eggs with white all around them, and he waited until all was still, and then he turned the sorrel loose. He got on his horse and rode away.

  AFTER A WHILE he came to a plank road raised a few inches above the water. It sank and wavered under the weight of the bay horse. It sloshed as he drummed along. The sycamores and cottonwoods now turned bright green, scattering leaves like largess, like green shillings. The willow oaks spilled off tumbles of grapevines weighed down by emerald unripe grapes. There were flocks of red-beaked Cumberland paroquets that made noises like doors being broken open by burglars. In their thousands they launched into the upper canopy and they all cried out together with a noise like nails being torn out of wood.

  He rode on mile after mile into the dim golden sunset light. The low land was juicy with water. His horse sounded like a drum orchestra on the plank road. Neumann knew he would not hear horses if they were to come up riding behind them at a distance. And so long into the night he went on.

  31

  The people of the southern highlands would become famous in the nineteenth century for the intensity of their xenophobia, and also for the violence of its expression. In the early nineteenth century, they tended to detest great planters and abolitionists in equal measure. During the Civil War some fought against both sides. In our own time they are furiously hostile to both communists and capitalists. The people of the southern highlands have been remarkably even-handed in their antipathies—which they have applied to all strangers without regard to race, religion or nationality.

  —FROM Albion’s Seed, BY DAVID HACKETT FISCHER, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK, 1989

  Other travelers have recorded descriptions of solitary old women who wandered alone through the American backcountry. . . . Rhoda Barker remembered an aged female named Mary Pitcher. “I have heard my mother describe her as wandering through the woods leading an old horse, her only property her knitting in her hand, and her dress mostly sheepskin.”

  —RHODA BARKER JOURNAL, MANUSCRIPT, HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA, QUOTED IN Albion’s Seed

  I remember as a little girl we always used to go and decorate those graves on Decoration Day. It was our Baptist Church over there, and people around this neighborhood. We would take a picnic lunch and go and pull weeds and whatever needed doing. Now at that time you could see the Union graves on the other side of the road clearer. We took care of them like the others. I guess they were just put up at the time when they had that battle with whatever people had; just rocks. Just piled up those stone slabs. That was all they had.

  —INTERVIEW BY THE AUTHOR WITH MRS. ALBERT SISK, BEAVERDAM CREEK, RIPLEY COUNTY

  Life is like a mountain railroad

  with an engineer that’s brave

  He will keep and he will guide you

  from the cradle to the grave

  Watch the curves, the fills, the tunnels

  never falter, never fail

  Keep your hand upon the throttle

  and your eyes upon the rail

  —TRADITIONAL MOUNTAIN HYMN

  ADAIR CAME AT last to the height of land between the current and the Little Black Rivers. She came to the Military Road and took it toward her home. Whiskey walked along with a halting step, for she had run him too hard on his injured leg, but after a while his ears came up and he looked about himself eagerly. Soon they came to Ponder’s Steam Mill and Store on the Little Black. The wheel was still and the pond undisturbed and the stone house on the hillside empty. There was no one there and so she went on.

  She passed the Military Graveyard where they had buried the soldiers in blue and gray on opposite sides of the road, their graves outlined in limestone sills with stones raised up over them like ancient monuments from some distant age. She rode past their nameless gravestones. Confederate and Union alike.

  Up the Devil’s Backbone and past her mother’s grave. Whiskey called out and tested the air with his nose. He lashed his tail and did not regard his injured leg but began to dance around in the road.

  From the clear space on Copperhead, Adair saw that the house was still standing. She saw a buckboard at the rails in front of the house and it was painted a rusty, fading red with indecipherable lettering. Smoke boiled out of the chimneys and human voices called to each other from room to room of the house in careless ease. She sat on Whiskey for a long time listening and watching; a man’s voice was singing lines of song. The trumpet vine devoured the veranda and it had blossomed out, and blankets hung out the windows to air from the second-story windows.

  She crossed Beaverdam at the rocky ford and continued on past the Shawnee Oak. She tied Whiskey to the rails beside the buckboard. Watching cautiously. The cat Lucy ran along the veranda roof and then sat in the trumpet vines to stare down at Adair.

  Daddy? she called. Papa! John Lee!

  Adair dropped her tow sack and walked up the steps. In the doorway to all she had known of home, stood a man in a yellow vest. He smiled at her from under a silk top hat much the worse for wear. He carried a carbide lamp in one hand and a screwdriver in the other.

  Well! he
said. Ha! Well! And who might you be?

  This is my house, said Adair.

  Your house?

  Where is my father? Marquis Colley. And for a moment Adair thought he still might have come home and that he might be behind the house digging in the heap of burnt barn timbers or just about to whistle something or on his hands and knees looking under the bed for his glasses.

  Why no, said the man. He took off the silk hat and put it on again. Why, a ha, no, this place was abandoned. The abode of the owl and the wood mouse. Clean empty.

  Adair walked straight at him and he turned quickly out of her way. She walked into the hall and then into the drawing room and saw painted stiff muslin on lath forms laid over the chairs which were still marked with charring. She came upon a triangular piece of her face in a fragment of the Tennessee mirror that remained in the ornate frame. The china cabinet had been righted and the shattered china swept up.

  She opened her mother’s old clothes trunk and saw there were still things inside but not much, and she let the lid fall shut. The Horse Fair hung askew in its frame, rippled with damp. Holland’s Pictorial History of the World and two volumes of Dickens and all her father’s law books lay jumbled in a corner.

  Adair turned and pushed past a woman who wore a frilled pink dress, to her father’s bedroom.

  Those were our dresses, she said. My and my sisters’ dresses. These people had cut up what dresses the girls had left behind and had sewn the pieces together for a coverlid over her father’s blankets.

  She walked out to the back where the heaped black sticks of the burnt barn were now grown over with milkweed and purslane. There at the hog pen rails Adair saw a young pig in a pink-and-blue-

  checkered skirt. It was walking toward her with expectant, begging grunts. The skirt flounced over its pink behind.

  Get away! she shouted, and turned into the house again. She went on to the kitchen and saw all the blackware in use, the kettle hissing with its iron lips pursed and some of her mother’s dishes stacked up in the dishpan.

  You all get out, said Adair. She turned on the green brocade slippers and jerked her hair out of her eyes. I don’t know who you are. Pack up all your stuff and get out.

  It was entirely abandoned, said the man.

  A young woman with a baby on her hip walked in. She said, There wasn’t nobody here and hadn’t been for a long time.

  I’ll go to the law, said Adair. If you all are not out of here by tonight.

  You better tell her, Mr. Walker, said the woman in pink.

  You’d better do some good telling, said Adair. Tell me what?

  Miss, it’s been, a ha, sold, said the man.

  No it hasn’t, said Adair. None of us sold anything. You show me where it’s been sold.

  Well, we didn’t buy it either, said the woman. It ain’t ours, either. She sat down on one of the Colley kitchen chairs and her idiotic pink dress like a hot-air balloon surged around her. The frills had been made by folding squares of white muslin and cutting diamonds and triangles in them, the way children make snowflakes of sheets of paper.

  Of course it’s not yours, it’s ours, said Adair. She coughed into her hand and cleared her throat.

  It belongs to the Vandivers now, said the man. They bought it for taxes. There hadn’t been no taxes paid for three years and nobody here for half a year. He waved his hand around the kitchen as if to the entire place. They declared Marquis Colley deceased and his heirs not to be found.

  But I am found, said Adair. I’ve come home.

  But it’s sold already.

  Adair stood stubbornly and crossed her thin arms. Stood in the middle of the kitchen floor. She heard the minute thumping of Lucy running across the kitchen roof and knew that she would come down by the peach tree outside the west window.

  I’m Jeth Walker, the man said. My wife, Sarah, and our daughter Pru Lester and baby Jim. I sure am sorry about this, Miss.

  But there was nobody to pay taxes to, said Adair. For three years. They burnt the courthouse.

  And what is your name, Miss? He bowed and put the hat on and took it off again.

  Adair Randolph Colley. She turned to the fire and stared at it, bit her knuckle.

  Well, they got a new courthouse a-building now. Go see for yourself.

  Who is at the courthouse?

  Well, a ha, the Union Militia. The man danced from one foot to the other. This part of the country is under martial law for the next two years. They run the courthouse.

  Adair didn’t say anything for a while. She sat down and regarded her feet in the stolen green brocade bedroom slippers.

  Can I get you a cup of coffee? The woman in pink took up a blue spongewear cup.

  Yes, said Adair. She put her feet on the broad hearthstones in the kitchen fireplace. Laid one after the other in a bed of sand by her father and John Lee and Speece Newnan when she was ten.

  Well, I’ve got to get it back, she said. There has got to be a way they made a mistake. They can’t have sold it. We have twelve hundred acres here.

  The Walker family stood in silence and waited for whatever else she would say.

  Adair stood up again and with a yearning, lonely gesture ran her hand down the fireplace stones, the faces that lived in the stone. There were seashells in it and on the bottom stone a fern leaf. She said, How much were the taxes?

  Jeth Walker took his silk hat off again and turned it around in his hands and then drummed his fingers on the top. Outside the lazy July day was swagged with orange daylilies and leaf shadows.

  The Vandivers went and paid the taxes is what they, a ha, say, he said. And they paid for Coleman as an administrator of the deceased’s estate in probate and so on is what they said. The Vandivers said we could tarry here awhile to rehearse our performances before we went on, since the place was abandoned.

  Who in the Militia is at the courthouse? Adair got up again and clutched her hands together. She did not know what to do with herself. Is it that Captain Poth? Tom Poth?

  No, him, ha, I heard he was drowned in the Great East Swamp, no, him, we had him up in Wayne County same as here. It’s Garner, about just as bad, Lieutenant Garner, the one that killed the Parmalee boys and the Goforths and them back in ’63.

  Adair thought for a while and watched the turnips boiling in the pot. Well, there is no use of me going to the courthouse, I guess. I’m not even of age. She turned the colander over in her hands and the carved meat fork and the big sycamore-wood ladle. Found her name carved in the kitchen windowsill.

  We lost our place too, said Sarah Walker.

  Adair sat down again and then got up and went into her father’s bedroom. On the floor beside the bed she found the leather case that had held his folding magnifying glass and held it in her hand in a tight grip. Then she went up the Daughter Stairs to the girls’ room. That young woman Pru and her baby, Jim, were evidently nesting up here, she thought, and despised the sight of a stack of folded diapers in her linen basket and a nursing corset that laced up the front draped over a chair and some sort of blue bodice with spangles.

  She put her hand on the homespun blanket spread over her own bed where it was drawn up against the window, where she used to sleep to be by the open air and to be able to see out, to watch the moon rise over Copperhead and pass the squares of the windowpane over her bed both summer and winter, as if the rectangles of moonlight were rare white pages of books written by nocturnal magic, containing stories of great mystery. Adair sat on the bed and gazed out the window to the open prairies on Copperhead’s crown, at the tangle of black timbers that had been the barn.

  She sat on the bed in silence. Away from the crazy people downstairs. On those nights she had thought of herself as a person that wonderful things would happen to because she was uncommon and marked apart. That a clear light burned inside her that nothing could extinguish and it would always illuminate her way. That then before the war she had held this light between her hands as she had taken the candle out to see Whiskey led in thro
ugh the snow. And that no wind would ever put it out. It seemed to her that at that time she had been a very pure person and had not wanted anybody to die nor led anyone to their death, nor had she stolen anything or lied or hated as she had hated. But now her name was written in the Book of Dirt.

  Adair took up the homespun blanket between her fingers for its familiar touch and found the place where the ocher yarn had been woven in instead of green because they had run out of green. She knew there were many others also who had hoarded their light against all trouble and all assault and had gone down into darkness as well, without a word spoken and their names were known to no one. You would think this could not be true but it was.

  She went back down to the kitchen.

  Well, was that your room? asked Pru Lester. She jumped baby Jim up and down on her hip.

  Yes, said Adair. Me and my sisters. But I guess it’s not now. She drank the last of the coffee from the blue spongewear cup that she had used for many years and put it back in the dishpan. The only way ever to get it back is to find my father, but I have come to believe he is no longer alive. She rinsed the cup. And at the courthouse they don’t think so either. And of all people they would know.

  Well, I’m sorry, said Jeth Walker.

  We lost people too, said the woman. Everybody has suffered.

  Adair pressed her hair back from her face. She went to the veranda to look at Whiskey and for the view from there. Then she turned and regarded Copperhead Mountain and the Devil’s Backbone. Now their land was gone, and somebody else would gain their living here. Adair walked down the veranda from one end to the other, her head in her hands. Finally she picked up her tow sack and went back to the kitchen.

  Well, she said. I came traveling a long way thinking I was coming home. But I could have just stopped off anywhere.

  They were all respectfully silent, as if at the scene of a fatal accident, and watched her walk from room to room and back again, not able to go or to stay. She went again to the back kitchen door.