Enemy Women

by Paulette Jiles

  He wanted then to go west to the Spanish settlements but he had a widowed mother and younger sisters to look after and to provide for. He was not a man to marry without due deliberation. Twice he deliberated too long and the young women returned his letters and married others. By the time he completed his apprenticeship to a printer in Macon his mother had died and both sisters finally married. After Santa Ana had shot up San Antonio and burned the bodies of Travis and his men at the Alamo and then got whipped at San Jacinto, he left for Texas.

  The second war was President Tyler’s war with Mexico. By that time Jefferson Kidd was nearly fifty and had long settled into life in San Antonio where he finally met his wife. He had set up his press in the Plaza de Las Islas, which was also called Main Plaza, on the first floor of a new modern building belonging to a lawyer named Branholme. He found type with tildas and the aigu accent and the upside down exclamation and question marks. He studied Spanish so he could print whatever circulars and broadsheets were needed, many for the Cathedral parish. The San Antonio newspaper fed him a great deal of business, as did the hay market and the saloons.

  Often on his long rides about Texas with his newspapers in his portfolio and the portfolio in his saddlebags, the Captain fell into memories of his wife. The first day he ever saw Maria Luisa Betancort y Real. This was how the Captain knew that things of the imagination were often as real as those you laid your hand upon. And as for making her acquaintance, seeing and meeting were two different things. She was of an old Spanish family and formal arrangements had to be made for an introduction. There is a repeat mechanism in the human mind that operates independently of will. The memory brought with it the vacuity of loss, irremediable loss and so he told himself he would not indulge himself in memory but it could not be helped. She was running down Soledad after the milkman and his buckskin horse. The milkman’s name was Policarpo and he had passed by her family’s house without stopping. Poli! Poli! She lost a shoe running. She had gray eyes. They were the color of rain. Her hair was curly. Her family’s house was the big casa de dueña of the Betancort family at the intersection of Soledad and Dolorosa. The corner of Sad and Lonely.

  The Captain walked out of his print shop and took the buckskin’s halter. Poli, stop, he said. A señorita wants you. So he recalled it anyway, against his will, every bead on her sash fringe and her hand on his arm to balance herself as she wormed her thin, small foot back into the shoe and then the warm milk pouring into her jug. The milk smelled like cow, the vanilla scent of the whitebrush that the milk cows loved to eat on the banks of Calamares Creek. Her gray eyes.

  So he became a man with a wife and two daughters. He loved print, felt something right about sending out information into the world. Independent of its content. He had a Stanhope press and a shop with nine-foot windows that allowed all the light he needed onto the casings and the plates and layout tables. During the Mexican War they said they needed him anyway, even at his age. He was to organize the communications of Taylor’s forces and was given a small hand press to print orders of the day. He had never seen a hand press so small. He wrote up Taylor’s orders and handed them to Captain Walker of the Texas Rangers and Walker’s horsemen galloped with messages between Port Isabel on the Gulf to the Army encampment north of Matamoros, on the Rio Grande.

  At one point an aide-de-camp on Taylor’s staff came up with the idea of sending up a hot-air balloon to spy on Arista’s lines and drop propaganda. Finally someone else pointed out that one good shot would bring the balloon down. Others pointed out that most of the Mexican recruits could not read. A lieutenant-colonel quashed the brainstorm. Never underestimate the ingenuity of the U.S. Army.

  Taylor made him a brevet captain in the Second Division so he could organize the couriers and get what he needed: paper, ink, horses. His service in the War of 1812 recommended him for the rank. Ever afterward he was known as Captain Kidd.

  And so he was at Resaca de la Palma when one of Arista’s twelve-pound balls came through the staff tent and shattered a table into fragments three feet from him. Oil from the lamps jumped into great transparent dots on the canvas. A major stood arrested with a table splinter through his neck. This collar is too tight, he said, and fainted. Against all odds he lived.

  He heard the centinela alerto as the men crashed through Arista’s lines and saw them come back cheering with their loot; the Mexican general’s table silver and his writing desk and the colors of the Tampico Battalion. What is the use of winning a battle without loot? You overwhelm them and take their stuff—military basics.

  He was with Taylor’s forces at Buena Vista, in the high mountains above Monterrey. They had been shot at all the way from the Rio Grande by either Mexican Army sharpshooters or Apaches, it was a tossup as to which. The Captain was handed a Model 1830 Springfield flintlock but he had been raised with them and knew them well. He lay in a wagon bed and fired at the gunsmoke and, he hoped, brought down more than one hidden sniper. It was the middle of February of 1847. In the thin air of the mountains outside that Mexican town, with smoke from their campfires rising straight up in the still air, the young men wanted to know about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. They wanted to compare their own behavior with that of their forebears. They wanted to know if they measured up, if what they endured was as difficult, if their enemies were as cunning and as brave.

  The Texas Rangers lounged against the caissons and listened. They were cool young men and utterly reckless and apparently without fear. The Mexicans hated them and called them rinches but if they could have fielded an independent cavalry wing as skilled and as lethal they would have, but they didn’t, and so there you were.

  The Captain had never met any troops or unit like them. They listened out of courtesy to an older man. And so in the cold night under the high stars of Mexico, he told them what he could. Or what he felt like telling. The Creek and the Choctaw were using smoothbores, he said. His Georgia militia company brought their own rifles and used minie balls, that on their way to Pensacola their wagons had sunk hub-deep in the sand. That his captain had got killed on the second day of the battle and he managed to crawl out and drag him back under cover but he died. And quickly went on: that Jackson was a fearless man, he was a maniac when he was fighting. The question hung unasked in the air: Were you wounded?

  And yes, I got shot in the hip, he said. Didn’t hit the bone. I didn’t know it until later. The Red Sticks had run out of ammunition and they were firing all kinds of things out of those smoothbores. I think I got hit with a spoon.

  He paused. The knees of his trousers smoked from the heat of the fire and his hands were stained with ink. At that time he carried a new Colt revolver and it dragged and was heavy at his belt. The Rangers smoked and waited in silence in the shadow of their hats. Their beards were silky because they were young but when you looked at their faces it seemed they were artificially aged in some way.

  They wanted some wisdom, some advice.

  You can get hit and not know it, he said. So could the man next to you. Take care of one another.

  They nodded and stared at the fire and thought about it. They thought about fighting now in a strange land and against a strange army, one that was stiffly European and formal where the barefoot mestizo privates still were forced to wear neck stocks. Their own opponent was José Mariano Martín Buenaventura Ignacio Nepomuceno García de Arista Nuez, who was a fiercely committed republican and at odds with his own general staff. The Mexican Army was in fact torn into factions by immoveable aristocrats and generals with liberal theories.

  Afterward, late, when he was alone and the fire of mesquite wood was dying, it came to him that he should take on the task of dispensing these interesting, nay, vital facts gleaned from the intelligence reports and the general press. For instance, the struggles going on at the top levels of the Mexican Army. If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be
a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five.

  And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters.

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  Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, whose encouragement, persistence, and skill are the reasons you have this book in your hands. Thanks to my cousin Susan for all those years of finding the way on Ozark trails, for her hospitality and love of Civil War history, and for her noble horses Whiskey, Cowboy, and Buddy, who carried us so many miles through the mountains. Without the excellent works of Jerry Ponder, historian of southeastern Missouri, I could not have told this story. He has persisted for many decades in the face of indifference and has meticulously set down the facts of the war, and his books will be groundwork for many writers in the years to come. The following were also helpful in my research into the Civil War era: Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War, by Michael Fellman, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989; A History of the 15th Missouri Cavalry Regiment, C.S.A., by Jerry Ponder, Ponder Books, Doniphan, Missouri, 1994; The History of Ripley County, Missouri, by Jerry Ponder, 1987; Camp and Prison Journal, by Griffin Frost, reprinted by the Press of the Camp Pope Bookshop, Iowa City, Iowa; The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote, Random House, New York, 1963; Civil War in the Ozarks, by Philip W. Steele and Steve Cottrell, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, Louisiana, 1998; The Civil War in Carter and Shannon County, by J. J. Chilton, Eunice Pennington, David Lewis, Esau Hewett, et al., West Carter County Genealogical Society, Van Buren, Missouri, n.d.; The Little Gods: Union Provost Marshals in Missouri, 1861–1865, by Joanne Chiles Eakin, Two Trails Publishing Company, Independence, Missouri, 1996; Likeness and Landscape: Thomas M. Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype, by Dolores A. Kilgo, Missouri Historical Society Press, St. Louis, Missouri, 1994; War of the Rebellion, Official Records, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1880–1901; Ozark Tales and Superstitions, by Philip W. Steele, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, Louisiana, 1998; various reminiscences of the Civil War from old diaries, letters, and other material published in the Daily American Republic of Poplar Bluff, Missouri; Lost Family, Lost Cause, by Ivan N. McKee, Pine Hill Press, Freeman, South Dakota, 1978. I will be forever grateful to Lois Glass Webb for her encouragement and especially for sending me the photocopies of the OR reports on southeastern Missouri and a great deal of other rare material, taking time off from writing her own novel to do so. Thanks to my cheerful and efficient editor at Morrow, Jennifer Brehl, for an excellent editing job on a complex manuscript. Many thanks to Dr. Deborah McCormick for teaching me to ride sidesaddle. Thanks to Rick and Kristan Casey for the use of the jacal. Many thanks to Sky and Tim Lewey of the Open V ranch in Uvalde for all their hospitality and good conversation and for the use of the other house in a lightning storm, when the power blew out, where I finally finished this manuscript by hand and by candlelight. Thanks to Rocky Sisk for guiding us up the Devil’s Backbone and over to the old military graveyard on the Trace. A special thanks to Bob and Nancy Shivers for their help in printing out manuscripts, putting up with my odd hours in the office, and their encouragement. Thanks as always to Gordon himself for being the literary genius of discernment and acumen he is and having the wisdom not to miss the Second World War. Thanks to friends Naomi Nye, Wendy Barker, Nan Cuba, Trish Maloney, Janice De Lara, Karen Janny, and Bob and Jean Flynn for their faith in the book and for reading first drafts. Appreciation is due Genevieve Kile, Carter County history buff, for her unpaid years of work in rescuing primary source materials. Special thanks to Jim for his close editing, advice on military matters, and his patience.

  About the Author

  PAULETTE JILES was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and now has dual citizenship with Canada. A critically acclaimed poet, she is a past winner of the Canadian Governor General Award, Canada’s highest literary honor. Her previous books include North Spirit (1995) and Cousins (1992). She lives with her husband in San Antonio, Texas. Enemy Women is her first novel.

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  Credits

  Cover design by Liz Driesbach

  Cover photograph by Gary Isaacs/Photonica

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  ENEMY WOMEN. Copyright © 2002 by Paulette Jiles. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  “Enemy Women: A Reading Group Guide” copyright © 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  EPub © Edition v 1. SEPTEMBER 2002 ISBN 9780061741692

  Version 08302013

  Print edition first published in 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

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