The Old Weird South

by Tim Westover

  #

  Rain falls on my skin, cold and heavy, and I open my eyes.

  The clearing is empty, aside from myself and the remains of the wolf-mother.

  Her body has been skinned and is held above a fire by a tent of branches. The fire burns low, and I can tell I have been asleep a long time. The meat is cooked and calls to my hungry gut.

  My lacerated gut.

  I reach to feel the wounds and find them covered. The she-wolf’s skin has been wrapped around me and tied together with long grass woven into a fine thin rope. I hurt all over, and it will be a long time before I can walk without pain, but I am alive.

  And Yowa has made me a man unlike anyone else of the Aniyunwiya people. She has blessed me with the mightiest scar of my tribe. She has given me the living memory of both the Tsul Kalu of the mountain and the Wendigo from the north.

  And I know my purpose of my quest.

  My people will not fall into disbelief, even with the coming of the white man. My scar will remind me, and it will remind them. And one day, when I am old like Gentle Bear, the boys will come to me, and I will tell them the story over again as they go into the forest to become men themselves. And my words will go with them and be law and be all they have in that day.

  So I eat. I will need the strength to return home and to tell my father and Gentle Bear and the others my new name: Wolf Who Remembers.

  Yalobusha County, 1862

  Ken Teutsch

  It’s simple enough, I suppose, how it happened—how the boy from Iowa came to be in Mississippi. Mr. Lincoln wanted Vicksburg and sent General Grant to take it. In the spring of that year, General Grant led his men into a meat grinder that they named after a church: Shiloh. Twenty thousand casualties in two days. In purely practical terms, this created a need for a lot of new soldiers down in Mississippi, and so William Allen came south.

  As I say. Simple. Great people make decisions, and little people pay the consequences.

  So here was Pvt. Willie Allen at the end of a dreary day, on the seat of a wagon drawn by two U.S. Army mules. Next to him on the seat was a great hulking man from Chicago named Kretzinger. Corporal Kretzinger. Willie Allen had only just got off the train in Memphis and marched down, but this Kretzinger was an older man, a grey and grizzled man, a veteran. He had been through the meat grinder. Willie was the kind of fellow who tried to get along with everyone, but he pretty quickly gave up trying to be friendly with Kretzinger. Kretzinger was German, a city man with no patience for little green replacements like this country boy from Iowa. He was big and constantly snarling, forever ill-humored for no reason Willie could see. By now, Willie just wanted to stay as far away as he could, but that wasn’t far on a wagon seat.

  To make matters worse, Kretzinger had on his knee a crockery jug he had picked up a couple of houses back, and he was working as fast as he could at emptying it. As the level in the jug got lower and lower, Willie squeezed farther and farther over on the seat until he was in danger of toppling off.

  The wagon they were driving was loaded with corn and meal and flour, sacks of potatoes, baskets of peas and beans, buckets of molasses—all kinds of foodstuffs. And despite everything they had told Willie about the rules of war, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it was all stolen.

  The reason for this was that shortly after Willie got to Memphis on the train—they’d been drilling in Illinois, then taken to Columbus, Kentucky, and from there down to Tennessee—Forrest and Van Dorn, rebel generals, came west with cavalry and started harassing the Union troops, tearing up the railroad tracks, upsetting the supply lines and communications, capturing supply depots, and sowing confusion all through the rearguard of the Union army. This was calculated to disrupt the offensive, of course, and to some extent, it did. But Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was nothing if not innovative. He had an idea that would serve two purposes. It would feed his army, and it would teach a lesson to people who rise up against their government. He issued an order. The order was to send out troops to fifteen miles on either side of the road between Holly Springs and Grenada, Mississippi, to gather up everything edible. That’s how he would feed his army. When the local people came to General Grant in dismay about this, he shrugged and said, “You cannot expect armed men to starve in the midst of plenty.” So instead of marching into battle against Johnny Reb, as he thought he was coming down here to do, Willie Allen had been spending his days prying sacks of potatoes out of the hands of weeping women.

  It was mostly women because the men had gone for soldiers or were in hiding, afraid of being taken for soldiers. The order supposedly said that they were to leave enough food for the people to get by for a month or so, but that part of the order tended to be overlooked. Day in and day out now since he had gotten to Mississippi, they’d been going out in teams and rounding up the hogs and cattle, raiding root cellars and pantries, and plundering barns, corn cribs, and henhouses.

  He had signed on to be a hero, and they had made him a chicken thief.

  It was even a little hard sometimes for Willie to remember that these people were the enemy. He kept looking into the eyes of these women and seeing his mother’s eyes, and he kept seeing his own face in the dirty little faces peering around from behind the skirts. But you have to be hard to be a soldier. That’s the way it has always been. He would remind himself, thinking, They’re rebels. They’re only getting what’s coming to them.

  But now, on this particular day, as he was trying to slide away from Corporal Kretzinger on the bench, they were heading back to camp. The rest of the squad had gone on earlier, driving the livestock. It was getting dark. It got dark early now; it was more than half a year after Shiloh. The last week or so, the weather had turned wetter and colder, and now the wind kicked up out of the north to make it worse. It was getting dark, and it was darker still because it was coming on to rain again. They were passing back by a house that they had already hit that morning. It was a low log house, not much more than a shack, really. This wasn’t the rich land near the river. There were no big houses, no fields of cotton, no gangs of slaves. Just hardscrabble people. As the wagon rolled up to the front of the house, Kretzinger mumbled something. Willie didn’t understand him.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Stop and marm mum . . .”

  “Uh . . . all right.”

  Kretzinger wanted to stop at the house to warm up.

  As the mules shuffled to a stop and the wheels creaked, Willie saw the door of the house swing open. A shape appeared in the doorway. A woman. Willie hadn’t gone inside the house earlier, so he hadn’t really seen this woman when they came through the first time. He saw her silhouetted now against the glow of a lamp inside. She stood watching for a moment, then slammed the door. Kretzinger set the brake and got down. He ignored Willie, tucked his jug under his arm, and started toward the house.

  Willie didn’t want to go in the house, but he couldn’t just sit out there and wait for the rain, so he grabbed his rifle and climbed down. He sometimes felt foolish with that rifle, given the duty he’d been at lately. Still, you never knew what was going to happen, and they had told him to keep his bayonet fixed as some of these people had vicious dogs. By the time he got down, Kretzinger had already reached the cabin door. He made no pretense of asking permission. He just shoved at the door with the heel of his hand, and when it didn’t give, he took a step back and slammed into it with his shoulder. The little latch or whatever held it shut popped right off and Kretzinger walked inside. Willie followed after.

  The first thing Willie thought when he stepped through the door was That sure smells good. He looked around the room. There was a lamp on the table against the far wall. A door led to a room off to the left. He could see part of a bedstead in there in the shaft of lamplight. Those two rooms made up the whole house. There was not much furniture in the room. Not much of anything. Next to the bedroom door was a low table with a large book on it, and Willie knew right away that it was the family Bible because there wa
s one just like it in his own house. Big book with pages in it to write down all the births and the deaths. And there was the woman. She was standing in the middle of the room on a square horse blanket thrown down on the floor for a rug.

  She had on a blue dress, faded from age and many washings. He wasn’t sure how old she was. A farm woman. Lines on her face from work and from care. Dark hair pulled up. She had high cheekbones like maybe there was some Indian blood in her family. And dark eyes. Black eyes. Those eyes were burning, looking at these two soldiers as they walked into her home.

  Now Willie realized what the smell was. There was a low iron stove near the far wall, and on the stove was a skillet with biscuits in it. For a second, he couldn’t quite think why this seemed peculiar, and then he remembered. She shouldn’t have any flour to make biscuits. They had cleaned her out. Willie looked at Kretzinger and saw that he was thinking the same thing. The big man carefully set his jug down on the table by the lamp, put his hands on his hips, narrowed his eyes, and said, “What’s this now?”

  The woman didn’t say anything.

  Kretzinger turned and looked at Willie. “You see that?” he said.

  It sounded like “You zee zat?” When Kretzinger drank, he talked more like a German. Willie nodded. Kretzinger turned back to the woman. “That’s a nice trick,” he said.

  Kretzinger started walking toward her. “Holding out,” he said. The woman tensed as he drew nearer, but she didn’t move. “How? How did you . . .” He stopped. He got a quizzical look on his face. He looked down at the rug. The woman’s face tightened up even more, but she didn’t take her eyes off Kretzinger.

  The big man looked back at Willie, and his face creased and crackled into a smile. “Smart!” he said, and he put a long finger alongside his nose. He stood up straight and lifted one foot off the floor as though about to go into a dance. Thump, thump, thump went his boot heel. He turned his unpleasant smile back on the woman.

  “Pretty smart, you rebs, is it?” he said.

  He stepped back, reached down, and grabbed a corner of the horse blanket and flipped it back. There, beneath it, was a trap door. There was a cellar under the kitchen floor, and they had somehow completely missed it earlier. Kretzinger stood back up and started laughing. “Pretty good!” he barked, and he looked at Willie again. “Pretty good, hah?”

  The woman suddenly came unfrozen. Her hands went up to the front of her dress and clasped just below her chin. She started shaking her head. Words came pouring out now, in that drawly way they talked down here. Her voice was partly both pleading and partly reasoning. “Mister,” she said, “there ain’t nothing down there. It’s just some preserves is all. You took my hogs and you took my cow. It’s dead winter comin’ on, and I gotta live somehow. I done give you everything—everything big.”

  Her pleading was pathetic and would have moved a lot of people. But Kretzinger didn’t give a damn about that woman. It was partly the liquor, but nowhere near all, for the fact was Kretzinger didn’t give a damn about any rebel. As for pleading—he had heard a lot of pleading lately. There was a lot of pleading at Shiloh. “Give me water. Don’t let me die.” Pleading didn’t help them any, did it? Didn’t help his friend Walt or his cousin Franz there in the Hornet’s Nest. And this bitch’s son or husband might have been the one as pulled the trigger.

  Willie hadn’t seen and heard the things Kretzinger had seen and heard. Would he have acted differently if he had? No way to know. All we can say is that what he did do was to step forward and speak. “Corporal Kretzinger!” The big man turned his hard face toward him, and Willie took half a step back again. “We have these biscuits. Why don’t we just take these biscuits for our supper?” Kretzinger said nothing. The woman looked at young Willie and held her breath. “Wagon’s full anyway,” the boy went on. “Why don’t we just—”

  Kretzinger snapped at him. “Shut up! We got orders, don’t we? We take it all.” Willie knew those weren’t quite the orders and that Kretzinger wasn’t usually such a stickler for orders. And he almost said so. But he didn’t. “We take it all!” Kretzinger repeated, and he made a gesture like cutting with a sword. He turned his glare back on the woman. “I want what’s in the keller.” She just looked at him and didn’t move. He pushed her, and she staggered back against the wall.

  She cried out now, the reasoning tone gone from her voice. “No! Don’t you go down there!” Kretzinger reached down and grabbed the handle and started to pull up the trapdoor. Willie saw the woman look from Kretzinger to the stove. Before he could move—before he could even blink—she had grabbed the skillet and swung it at Kretzinger’s head.

  He saw it coming out of the corner of his eye and tried to duck it, which saved him. Instead of on the skull, he took the blow on his shoulder. The biscuits flew into the air in all directions. Kretzinger dropped the trapdoor, stood up, and gave an animal howl of pain; he turned to the woman and hit her as hard as he could. She crashed into the wall and fell to the floor. Kretzinger kept yowling and rubbing his shoulder, cussing in German. Then he reached again for the trapdoor.

  Amazingly, the woman got up. She still held the skillet, and Willie, frozen, could only think, Hot! That must be hot! The woman started toward Kretzinger again.

  The sudden violence, the noise, hitting the woman—it all shocked Willie so that he couldn’t move. He couldn’t believe the woman had gotten back up. He couldn’t believe this was happening. Kretzinger spun toward him, and—just like that, like a magic trick—his rifle was gone. One second, Willie was holding it, and then it was gone and Kretzinger had it. Kretzinger turned back toward the advancing woman and stuck the bayonet right into her. Then he pulled it out. Willie couldn’t speak, couldn’t shout. Kretzinger stabbed the woman again. Pulled it out again. The woman fell to the floor, stretched across the trapdoor.

  Kretzinger stabbed her again.

  Willie felt like he’d been dropped into icy water. He heard a voice yelling, and it must have been his own. “What did you do? What did you do?” Kretzinger wheeled around to face him, and Willie Allen thought, I’m going to die now. He’ll do it to me too.

  But Kretzinger didn’t kill him. He swung his arm wide and slapped Willie down. “Shut up! Stop that hollering!” And everything got quiet. The cold wind moved around the corners of the house. Something popped in the stove. Kretzinger stood still a long moment, rubbing his shoulder, his eyes jammed closed in pain. He growled something in German. Finally, he turned and looked at the woman, and Willie followed his gaze. They both stared at her and at the blood—so much blood—coming out and spreading across the floor.

  As the blinding rage oozed out of him, Kretzinger began to realize that this was bad. A rebel, yes, but a civilian and a woman. This could be trouble. Big trouble. He started cussing. He cussed the woman and he cussed Willie Allen. He turned away from the bloody form and threw the rifle down on the floor. He stepped over, dragged the woman over to one side, and sat her up.

  When Kretzinger lifted the woman up, she looked at Willie. Or that is, Willie could see her face, and she seemed to be looking at him. Those black, black eyes. They were dead now, and they were looking straight at him and straight through him. Kretzinger jerked open the trapdoor and shoved the woman. She pitched forward, vanishing into the black hole below—and boom—the trapdoor fell shut.

  Kretzinger stalked over to Willie. “Now listen to me, you pup,” he said. “Eh? You listening? Ain’t just one man will hang for this. If anybody hangs, it’s both of us! You hear? You say a word, you go down too, boy. Eh? Whose knife was it stabbed her? Huh?”

  Willie couldn’t say anything. Kretzinger began to pace back and forth. He tracked through the blood. He groaned from the pain in his shoulder and a new pain growing in his head. There was a sick panic in his darting eyes. “Look here,” he said finally. “We’re going back. We go on back tonight. But I gotta rest a minute. I gotta rest.” He looked past Willie into the other room. “Look at that! That’s a featherbed in that room there! I ain’
t even seen a featherbed in a year!” He gave a humorless bark of laughter. “Little rest here. And then we leave.”

  He walked into the bedroom and slapped the door closed behind him, leaving Willie sitting there in this room, the lamp flickering on the table and the pool of blood on the floor. There was a creaking of the bed, and Kretzinger groaned, and then there was nothing. Just the wind picking up outside.

  It was as though Willie was in a trance. Time oozed around and past him. His shoulder was against the table with the Bible on it, and thinking of the Bible made him think of his mother. How she cried when he left home and how he laughed and told her he’d be all right and that the Union needed him. He didn’t know how much time passed. He was unaware of anything until he heard a new sound. A steady drip, drip, drip—the blood falling through the cracks in the floor and down into the cellar. More time passed, and Willie’s mind went blank until another sound came. Something tapped the walls and pattered on the roof. It had begun to rain. He realized that beneath the muttering of the world outside, he could hear a voice—a low, raspy voice—his own.

  He heard himself saying over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He was talking to that woman down in the cellar, and he was talking to his mother back in Iowa. When he tried to see his mother in his mind, she had that woman’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—” A rustle. A scratch.

  It came from under that trapdoor.

  Willie’s mind spun loose for a few seconds, and he held his breath, listening. Oh, dear Jesus, he thought, there’s rats down there! Rats down there—and that woman, she was down there! And those eyes. All he could see were those eyes, and he knew those eyes were still open. And there’s rats down there. His breath ripped loose with a tearing sound. Now he couldn’t seem to get enough air.

  But then there was a thump, and wait a minute now.

  That wasn’t any rat.

  Willie tried to push himself up the wall, but his feet just skittered on the floor. He looked around at the closed bedroom door. He heard Kretzinger’s raspy breathing, a half-snore. He looked back toward the center of the room. The lamp cast its light on the wall and the ceiling, but the trapdoor lay in the table’s black shadow. The noises continued. A scratching. A rustle. Another thump. A creak.

  The trapdoor was opening.

  It was like one of those dreams where he tried to stir but his limbs wouldn’t obey. He watched the door swing up higher, higher, and then fall with a muffled thud onto the rolled up horse blanket behind it. He saw a shape in the shadow coming up out of the hole, swaying slightly as it rose up into the light.

  And there she was.

  The blood looked black in the lamplight. Blood was streaked all over the faded blue gingham. Her hair had fallen down. It was wild, and it swirled all around her face. But he could see the eyes. The eyes—unchanged, dark, black—looking straight at him, into him. She stepped toward him, sending her shadow across the floor and up the wall, until she stood over him. He drew in a long shaking breath.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”

  She leaned toward him, and Willie gave a small involuntary whimper. But she wasn’t leaning down for him. She straightened up again, holding his rifle. He had forgotten that it was there on the floor.

  The edge of her dress brushed across him, the wetness cold on his face. She pushed open the door to the bedroom. Kretzinger’s snoring got louder, but it was no louder than the sigh of the wind and patter of the rain. There was a pause long enough for Willie to begin to hope that he really had been dreaming. Yes, dreaming. A sort of relief began to grow in him. Then came a sharp tearing sound, and Kretzinger’s soft snore staggered, stumbled, and twisted into a cry. There was a rush of noise as Kretzinger thrashed among the bedclothes.

  The rifle went off like thunder, and Willie was on his feet.

  He didn’t remember opening the door or leaving the house. He found himself in the rain, running. He ran past the wagon and the U.S. Army mules. He didn’t think of where he was running to. He didn’t think of anything at all. He just ran. Across the lane, into the blackness among the trees. Just running and stumbling, arms raised to shield his face, falling and rising to keep on running. Behind him, the house was quiet.