Word out from the town was that Colonel Purton lost three men at West Sandy Creek and although I thought I had seen bodies lying around the houses there, no one seemed to believe that any of Zach Petrie’s fifty souls was killed. Lige Magan said that Purton’s lead had sunk in the gauge. If you were going to go killing rebels, well, you had best have a tally for it. But that had not happened, though I knew they had been surprised by the attack and hadn’t even had time to put on their trews let alone the burlap sacks they liked to wear to keep their faces unknown. Maybe the time was coming for them to be known and return as strange heroes and that was what troubled Lige Magan’s sleep, and troubled us all.
As for my part in the advancement against Zach Petrie’s city, I was instructed by Thomas and John never to attempt such a folly again and by God if I did they didn’t know what they might need to do and furthermore they were grateful if not to God then the devil that I had come back safe. Then there was the topic of Jas Jonski. I had been brought to him, right enough, in an error of judgement by the man who had recognised me as his fiancée, but if that wasn’t a signal to ride out hightail for Lige’s and deliver the news, they didn’t know what was. And only for Memucan Tharpe they might never have known where I was, not for days and days, by which time, Thomas McNulty said, he would have been ready for Old Blockley. And all through this sort of talk was that under-song of despair that oftentimes attends the conversation of parents when it comes to their children’s actions. This I knew and I laboured to reassure them as you might reassure children troubled by phantoms and vexing thoughts.
John Cole was of a strong mind to go into Paris and have words with Jas Jonski and maybe even, he said, just lose his head and bedamned to it and thrash that boy with a willow stick. I didn’t beg him not to and I didn’t beg him to. I was so confounded and confused by Jas Jonski that I had no words in English or Lakota to cover him. He was a closed book and the book was athwart with iron. Sometimes I was troubled by a good thought for him that rose unbidden. It was just a last spark of what I had felt for him in the past but it troubled me. Sometimes we are so foolish in our thoughts that even fools would baulk at what we are thinking.
Maybe part of my medicine was to be thinking about the Spencer rifle. I tried to think back to the journey through the woods and fields and at what point maybe the Spencer was last noticed by me and since that bear had set the mule to rearing was there a possibility that the gun had gone clattering away then and so if I returned to the spot would I find it? So then I was plotting as a person does to think of a way to go back there without the roars and worry of John Cole and without driving poor Thomas to Old Blockley Asylum, as he had attested might happen.
No part of me wished to be in a dress and I held fast to boy’s garb and Thomas was so kind as to throw me his second-best pair of old army trews and these in fact had a very agreeable yellow stripe down the leg because they were proper cavalry trousers that used to give the cavalrymen the nickname of yellowlegs before the war. They were the trousers he had had assigned to him on his first engagement in the army many years before when as he told me he and John Cole were sent riding into California to do something about the Yuroks. That something was not told so much as seemed a gaping hollow in his mouth to tell and a fiery terror in his eyes. Whitemen don’t have good history, they only have black stories they wish were otherwise.
Just neighbour to thoughts of Tennyson’s lost gun was that girl Peg and the yellow dress. As good as her word Rosalee washed out the bloodstain twenty times and then worked up the basin into a great foam of suds and struck that dress with a wooden paddle and then she drew it through the little creek a thousand times and then when she was satisfied with her work so far she crushed up some dried toadstools she favoured for yellow and put the yellow back into the linsey. She dried it all out in the new sun of summer and I don’t know if it wasn’t as good as new and could have been craved by a princess.
But I wasn’t going to wear it and anyhow it belonged to Peg. I couldn’t imagine her making a visit to me polite or otherwise so in my deepest heart I reckoned I had to go to her. That, when first thought by me, seemed a rightly crazy and a reckless thought but many crazy and reckless thoughts become less so by thinking them a few times.
Rosalee was not entirely happy about the dress since she had worked so hard to make good of it and she didn’t think yellowleg trews were a fit fashion for a girl but on giving up this belief she to her credit asked Lige Magan to purchase five and one half yards of osnaburg so she could make a pair of summer trews for me and it wasn’t very long before she measured me for this and carried out her plan. After the war free clothes used to come down to Paris from Boston to be given in charity to the new freedmen but Rosalee like indeed an Indian person wouldn’t countenance the wearing of clothes once worn by unknown strangers. They were only for burning. But none of that mattered because she was a highly expert seamstress and when the moths attacked Thomas McNulty’s two dresses in his bedroom it seemed to be just the work of a day to her to put them right again though one of them was a stage dress from Grand Rapids with proper Massachusetts lace. That was the one time I saw Rosalee embraced by Thomas McNulty but whether he found a speech for his emotion might be doubted.
Otherwise we felt that strange sense of aftermath that follows disaster which has always its own promise of disaster renewed bubbling through it. So that when nothing came, no riders rode out against us, we began foolishly to feel almost a disappointment, when of course we should have been feeling a jubilant relief.
Then, since we appeared to be in a period of unexpected marvels, Jas Jonski rode out to us to ‘explain himself’. I must tell you this following part with a steadiness I didn’t feel at that time and maybe still don’t.
*
I am sure if we had a lively sense of our danger Jas Jonski did too of his own, for his own reasons.
What did I think about Jas Jonski? I thought now he was the one that hurt me as only a man can hurt a woman – break into her like a murderous thief and bring a killing insult to her heart. I took Peg as the attorney for the matter. I had told her the story and she had opined. Why should a girl as lost as me be given that great authority? I did not know. But I had taken the measure of Frank Parkman and somehow couldn’t account him.
I had no other suspects that I knew of. Whiskey had drowned the memory but the soul of the memory lived on in me. It beat inside me.
As so much time had gone by I was beginning to be horrified by a sense that what had happened to me was a nothing, a nothing served upon a nothing. It was a strange potent thought that wormed into me, that went to the nest of my best thoughts and started to rampage there. That thought weighed down on me to crush me. I thought while in the grip of it that even if I spoke clearly now and said to the men what I thought Jas Jonski had done I would be surprised and mazed by their answer. That they would sit there nonplussed and unbeguiled and wonder why I had taken the matter so to heart. A small little thing of no account that all girls had to bear in the general affairs of the world. That it would mean nothing to them and that the word nothing would be much in their mouths as they applied it to me. Under this thought I perished time and time again. I shivered in my sense of dreadful smallness. I heard them laughing at me and looking at each other in mocking amaze and then I imagined them turning from me and never speaking to me again in the same deep loving manner for which I held them famous in my heart. That they would consider me defiled as the preachers might say and that not even Rosalee could sew me good again and that not even a spring and summer could redeem that filthy winter. That now I would be a bargain of no price and just a slave’s linsey of no value and now the whippoorwill would never sound for me again nor would Thomas McNulty show me his motherly kindness nor John Cole his fatherly concern. That they might want then to deposit me on the road as a Confederate dollar of no worth to be picked up by any wanderer, that I was to be a thing discarded and no one ever sent for my retrieval. That in breaking the tiny door i
nto myself Jas Jonski had left the house of myself ever open to the winds, to the howls of the storms, and the ransack of any passing marauder.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Thus occurred one of the strangest conversations I was ever witness to. It had more darkness in it than any daylight could unpick.
It is fair to say that Jas Jonski showed courage coming out there to Lige’s where he had no friend he knew of. Where he was obliged to stand in front of four hostile men and two glowering women and not even an invitation. Far from it. More like six souls happy to have his hide on a door. He came as he had the first time – that is, the first time he came to plead his case, not the days of his many visitations as a suitor. I suppose I thought the mystery of Tennyson’s attackers had been solved in the person of Aurelius Littlefair and his companions. But had Wynkle King taken his cue from Jas Jonski’s story of woe, beyond the ken even of the colonel?
It seemed to me life was a mire when you had so much said and so much not said and in between the two all the things that could have only been said by angels – who are supposed to know everything.
That was the little platoon against him, the four men and Rosalee and myself. It was a bright summer’s evening. He had been seen coming from a long way off, north-east of the cabin. Rosalee had been on picket just that hour. The men had been eating stew inside and now had come forth at her bidding to meet this red-faced boy.
He was a man on a mission, but he still had awful trouble with his mare’s head, trying to tie her to a stump post as before.
‘Goddamn it,’ he said.
He had twelve eyes watching him without a word or a greeting of any kind.
First duty he must have reckoned he had, he walked right up to Tennyson and held out his hand.
‘I just sorry you took those blows,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean you no harm, Mr Bouguereau.’
Tennyson didn’t hold out his hand, but it might have been confusion as much as caution or unfriendliness.
‘Just reckon I should be saying so,’ said Jas Jonski. ‘Just reckon.’
Then he stepped back again about five paces off the men. At this point I came down from the porch and walked right up beside John Cole and more or less planted myself in the earth and maybe I would show a crop later.
‘I just want to say in addition to my previous speech that Winona was brought in to me in great trouble from her wound. I never fetched her nor nothing. It was Wynkle King found her on the road and ferried her to my lodgings.’
I thought, that was not what he told Dr Tharpe. Didn’t he say the colonel’s men coming back from the fight found me? He did. And Wynkle King hadn’t known me from Adam. I said nothing for the moment, respecting his air of Socrates before the five hundred farmers.
‘I never had no chance to go tell you about it and anyhow Memucan Tharpe he done it just as good,’ he said, going on with his peroration despite my thoughts, as you might say. ‘And I called him in and he got two dollars off me for the privilege of doctoring Winona. And I was full glad to do it. I just saying, I ain’t no taker of girls and I ain’t no nothing except the man that wants to marry her.’
I remember only a sort of Hmm sound out of John Cole, which may or may not have been disapproval or disbelief.
‘You think you still fixing to marry her?’ said Rosalee behind us, maybe mostly to herself. ‘You a brainless fool.’
Jas Jonski was so worked up with his speeches and very likely so clear terrified of John Cole and the others standing there that I have to report he started to cry. He just broke out into sobs like a child and I don’t suppose he was glad to be doing so. But tears will rise unbidden. Well I knew it.
‘You ain’t got no business here except with me,’ I said.
I asked my men to go back up on the porch so I could be alone to talk to this boy. They didn’t mind doing that since in truth they were right there as armed as emperors. But I suddenly saw the use in talking to him when I was covered by their strength. At the same time I prayed backwards in time to my mother for my own strength. I knew a great wound had been done to me and the truth was I could feel something at the centre of me starting to rot away, that was how it seemed to me, and it frightened me greatly. You have to try to shore up the levee when the flood races down. Even with your bare hands.
‘Winona,’ he said, ‘I ain’t a farmboy or a fool. I know you cross with me. I ain’t just such a great fool. When you come in carried by Wynkle King I thought I just die to see you. Bullet wound in my girl.’
‘I just ain’t your girl,’ I said.
‘I come out here before and I say I don’t know how that previous injury happen you and that still the God’s truth. I lie in that bed of mine at night and I wonder how it will all be fixed. I got my mother and she turns out the biggest Indian hater I ever met in my whole life. She saying, oh, it good James that you don’t go marrying no Injun, and I know such and such a girl in Knoxville, and I going to bring you there to see her, and I say, Mamma, I ain’t going marrying no Knoxville girl I go marrying only Winona Cole. You ain’t going to go marrying no Injun, she cries.’
‘Well, you ain’t,’ I said. ‘She right.’
‘What happen that time you got the cuts and blows? Winona, what happen that time?’
So I stopped talking so quick then. I was thinking. I was trying to remember. It was like trying to bust a light of a lamp through dark fog. It can’t be done.
‘I just say I got a foggy head about it,’ he said, also mentioning fog. ‘Yes, I say to Lige Magan, I say, Lige, I don’t know what happened, I as much in the dark as you all – but is that true? I been trying, trying to think. Now, I know it was – it was wrong to give you whiskey, tarnation I see it was, and it was wrong to drink whiskey myself, since I don’t even like it, and I never do drink it, but we was drinking it – do you remember being up in the hayloft at Frank’s? I kinda remember that. I don’t even like to not remember. I remember how sweet and kind you were, and we were kissing …’
‘No, I don’t remember. And I don’t believe I ever was in no hayloft at Frank Parkman’s place of employment.’
‘You was. And I was. I do remember that.’
The men and Rosalee stirred on the porch when Jas Jonski raised his voice. He saw that straight off and kept it low again.
‘I swear to the Lord you were there, you were there, you and me, and we were laughing, and kissing, and then I swear to the same good Lord, I have no recollection, none at all, at what happen next.’
‘I can tell you, and Rosalee Bouguereau could tell you if she weren’t so shy. When I came home with bruises, and cuts to my face, and my heart failing in my breast from fear, and no memory of nothing, I had blood, you know, there, and Jas, I was torn, and someone done did that, and I say it was you, because who else in the world would do that, excepting someone I was let kiss me. Another man tries to kiss me and he not my sweetheart, I fetch up my knife and stick it in his belly.’
Now my voice had risen high. So I was obliged to tamp it down.
‘You saying someone – hurt you, there?’ he said.
‘I saying. That the whole nature of this import. Blackstone, chapter sixteen. It a felony, Jas Jonski – except, of course, the law don’t apply to me. I ain’t no citizen. Your mother right, you can’t be going to go marrying no Injun, because we ain’t even people. We ain’t even human people. We animals, that you can beat and harry and hurt as you please.’
I hadn’t raised my voice for that. I hadn’t needed to. I never saw a boy’s face blanch so. He was already a whiteman, now he was an even whiter whiteman.
‘You saying … that someone –?’
‘Yes, Jas Jonski, yes, I saying – why you thinking we been all through this mire of trouble?’
‘I thought some black-hearted fool maybe striked you down, or your mule throwed you, or I don’t know – but never that, not one second I had of thinking that.’
‘You is just a God’s fool, Jas Jonski, because what I saying is what happen most
often all the time. You likely thinking all those brave soldiers out at the wars was bringing soup to Indians? And Thomas McNulty and Lige and John Cole all dainty dancing across the plains?’
‘They know you were hurt like that?’ he said.
‘No, they don’t know because I don’t tell them. If I tell them, Jas, they kill you. They kill you till you be dead. You know why? Because they love me as a daughter. But Rosalee know, because she had to take her cloth and wipe away the blood.’
Jas Jonski didn’t talk then, he was standing there with all these words going into his head and then he was trying to sort them into places where he could regiment them.
‘And you reckon it was me, that I did that?’ he said finally.
‘Who else?’
‘You reckon that maybe I done that and then I hit you and broke your face?’
‘I guess.’
‘You might think I’d have a memory of that,’ he said, in a small sweating voice. Maybe, I was thinking, he was an honest soul enough. He looked so affrighted. Starling Carlton took Indian children to give to whitefolk for their pleasure. Even at six I saw soldiers, I think I did, it was nothing to hurt an Indian woman or a girl – or a boy too. It was nothing. It was something the soldiers did. Oh but, Jas Jonski didn’t think so. No. Just for a moment my heart went out to him and then I snatched it back, I had to.
‘I understand it now,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t have no understanding. Now I have it. Do it mean something good that I don’t remember? That you don’t remember? I don’t believe so. I thinking I done something black and dark. In whiskey be living demons. Why I take that whiskey? I don’t even crave it.’
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