Poison Spring

by Boggs, Johnny D. ; Abell, Chris;

  A sentence flashed through my brain: The epoch of adventure is now.

  Then the thought: Tell the truth, Travis.

  I pictured Miss Mary, sitting down beside me at the window of Mr. Mendenhall’s store, watching me as I tried to make my way through some passage in The Count of Monte Cristo. I heard myself telling her: “There sure are a lot of stories in France. Lot of adventures.”

  Then her voice came to me clearly, even though that had to have been almost two years ago, only three months or so after Papa had ridden off to join the Confederate cavalry. I could smell the leather and the paper in the bookstore, could hear Miss Mary laughing, and, if I turned my head, I knew I would see her sitting beside me—not in Papa’s mill, but at Mr. Mendenhall’s—and I held my breath as she spoke to me.

  “There are a lot of stories right here, Travis Ford.” She had tapped my head. “Just wanting to be put down on paper.”

  I had closed Dumas, turned to her, and asked: “How do you know?”

  Smiling, she shook her head, and I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but she had. “I had a lot of stories that I wanted to put down on paper. About Daddy. About Virginia. Even maybe some about Washington County. I just never had the courage, Travis. And probably not the imagination. To tell the truth.”

  I remember laughing, and telling her: “You don’t need imagination to tell the truth, Miss Mary.”

  “Yes,” she had said. “You do.”

  It struck me then, and I slipped off the edge of the mill, pulling the sack and Papa’s cigar box with me. She didn’t want me to write make-believe adventures about musketeers and Robin Hood and pirates. She wanted me to write about what’s happening now.

  The Spring of Hope. Poison Spring.

  I shoved the tablet into the box, and the box went into the burlap, and the sack went into the shed, not on the top shelf. I simply flung it inside, slammed the door, and walked away from the mill.

  Those kind of guts I knew I didn’t have. Would never have.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The menfolk from the Reverend White’s meeting house came that night, and the Yankees arrived the next morning. As was her nature, Mama was ready for them both.

  I had not written anything in that tablet, which I had put back in the box, back in the bag, back in the shed. Write the truth? Write about my family, my neighbors? No, that wasn’t an urge, an impulse, a desire. Not for Travis Ford. When I got home, I milked the cow, even went around trying to see if maybe there might be an egg we hadn’t found, or the Yankees hadn’t found, but that was another one of those forlorn hopes.

  We ate grits for supper, studied our Readers, then went to bed while Mama sat beside Miss Mary, who had not budged all day.

  “Is she gonna get better?” Baby Hugh asked.

  Mama’s head shook, and she sighed. “I don’t know, Hugh. I just don’t know.” She knew, though. I could see that in her eyes. She knew about Miss Mary, just wasn’t telling us.

  “Should we fetch a doctor?” Edith asked.

  “I don’t think a doctor, any doctor, could cure what ails Miss Mary, Edith.” Mama sounded so weary. I guess that little scrap with the Reverend White had taken a lot out of her. After all, it wasn’t that we Fords were the most popular folks in the county. Mama hadn’t had many friends, especially once the war broke out. There was no school for us to go to, so we did our learning—as did every other kid in the county—at home. I guess the only friend Mama ever really had was Miss Mary. And Papa, of course, but Papa was gone.

  The room seemed so empty that evening, so dark, and as hot as it had been that day, now I felt chilled.

  “Go to bed,” Mama told us.

  Up into the loft we climbed, and into our beds we tucked ourselves. We didn’t sleep. We listened, but heard nothing, just the melodic sound of the rocking chair as Mama sat by Miss Mary.

  “Travis?” Edith whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where did you go? Today. After the preacher left.”

  “The mill.”

  “What for?”

  “We should go fishing there,” I said. All of a sudden, for no rhyme or reason, the idea just struck me. Here we were, no crops, no chickens, and not much left in the root cellar, with fish jumping in the millpond.

  “I like catfish,” Baby Hugh said.

  “I don’t like to clean them,” I told him.

  “Make Mama clean them.”

  “That’s not right,” Edith said.

  “Well, she cooks them.”

  From downstairs, Mama called up: “I’ll clean them and cook them, and I’ll eat them, if you go to sleep.”

  We fell silent again. I hadn’t realized we’d been talking loud enough for Mama to hear.

  “Travis?” Edith again.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s going to become of us?”

  “We’ll ….” We’ll what?

  That was the question. There was a picture I had seen a long time ago in one of those illustrated magazines at Mr. Mendenhall’s bookstore in Camden. I guess it was supposed to be some sort of statement against some sort of politics somewhere. I really don’t remember the details, or what the writing said, but the image came clearly into my mind. A man, barefoot, wearing rolled-up trousers, shirt, suspenders, and a tall silk hat was walking on the top rail of a really tall split-rail fence. On one side, a bunch of men in city duds shouted up at the man. Some of them raised fists at him, but a bunch were kneeling, holding lances pointed up at him. If that fellow lost his balance and fell off the fence onto that side, he was done for. On the other side, a bunch of men in tall boots and wide-brimmed straw hats shouted up at the man on that fence, and they, too, raised fists and massive knives in his general direction. If that guy toppled onto that side, he was a goner, too. And the man was sweating, and you could see that he was having trouble keeping his balance. Sooner or later, he was going to fall.

  The title of the piece was Make a Stand! Underneath the illustration, in big, bold black letters were the words: Try to Balance and You’re Doomed to Fall.

  Maybe that’s what we were doing. Straddling a fence. Or trying to keep our balance. Union on Mama’s side. Confederate—or, at least, Arkansas—with Papa. Jared Greene and his Yankees. Preacher White and Uncle Willard and everybody else in Washington County.

  “We’ll be fine,” I told Edith, but that’s not what I believed, and it wasn’t what I was thinking when, after the longest time, I finally drifted into a troubled sleep.

  * * * * *

  “Travis!”

  Miss Mary punched my shoulder. She held a whip in her other hand, and she kept demanding that I take it, use it on poor Mowbray, who had been lashed to a post between the quarters for the slaves and the privies. I had seen that post forty times, I figured, but had never known what it was for.

  Until now.

  Somebody had ripped off Mowbray’s shirt, which hung in tatters from his waist. All the slaves had gathered around, crying, praying, some of them chanting in some odd tongue. Mama was there, too. So was Uncle Willard. Even Papa, Mr. Mendenhall, Edith, Baby Hugh.

  “Get on with it, boy!” the Reverend White yelled. He was there, too.

  “Please!” Mowbray cried.

  Miss Mary, her face stern, ugly, mean, thrust the whip at me again.

  “Travis!” she yelled. She punched my shoulder, hard.

  * * * * *

  “Travis!” My eyes opened, but I saw only darkness.

  “Travis! Get up! People are out there!”

  My senses returned. It wasn’t Miss Mary, but Edith, who kept shoving my shoulder.

  “Who … what …?”

  Now, Baby Hugh had grabbed my left arm, and was tugging me into a seated position. “For God’s sake, get up!” Terror filled his voice, and instantly I pushed the dream into the back of my head
, and sat up, swinging my legs over the bunk.

  “What?” I said. Then I heard the voices. Not that I could tell what they were saying, but I knew there was anger behind the words. Mama said something, and her tone was sharp, savage. I’d never heard her speak like that, even when I had done something really spiteful to Baby Hugh or Edith.

  I wiped sleep from my eyes, pulled my pants up over my nightshirt, slipped the suspenders over my shoulders as I headed for the ladder. “Stay here,” I told my sister and brother, and climbed down from the loft, not wearing shoes, no socks.

  When Papa had ridden off on Nutmeg to join the cavalry, he had taken with him his rifle, a .42-caliber with an over-and-under swivel barrel, made by some German he had known in Kentucky. A year earlier, Uncle Willard had brought Mama a revolver, telling her to keep it handy in case the slaves revolted, but I didn’t know where she kept it hidden. Baby Hugh was always begging her to show it to him, let him hold it, but she never gave in to those demands. I did know, however, where our shotgun was.

  I dragged a chair to the fireplace, climbed up on it, and reached above the mantel. I felt its cold twin barrels. Carefully I pulled it down, and jumped to the floor.

  Through the windows, I could see the yellow and orange glow of torches, and heard Mama cut loose with a cuss word, which is something I’d never heard from her before. I could also see Miss Mary, lying under the covers, still as death.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shut up, Hugh!”

  The shotgun felt heavier than an anvil. Papa had always kept one barrel loaded with buckshot, for deer and varmints, he had always said, and the other with bird shot for quail and doves. Of course, I didn’t remember which was which, and right then I couldn’t even recall which trigger pulled the left barrel, and which the right. But my sweating hand grabbed the forestock, and I began moving toward the door, slipping my fingers through the trigger guard.

  “It’s time you Yankee-lovin’ wench up and left his county, Anna Louella, with your Yankee-loving curs.” That was the preacher. My face flushed. “Else we burn you out.”

  “This is my home, Reverend.” She spat out the last word like Baby Hugh would spit out collard greens. “I’m waiting here for my husband to return. My husband, as you all know, who rides in the Second Arkansas Cavalry.”

  “Connor’s welcome,” somebody said. I knew the voice, could remember him singing bass in church, but I didn’t recall the name. “You ain’t, you God—”

  The voice stopped when I stepped through the door. The sound of those two hammers clicking as I thumbed them back even seemed to stop the wind.

  “Travis!” Mama said urgently.

  I wouldn’t let myself look at her. Slowly I brought the shotgun up, bracing the stock against my shoulder, keeping the big weapon as steady as I could as I pointed it at the preacher.

  I could see him clearly. He gripped a Bible in his right hand and a hickory cane in his left. Behind him, men held torches, strips of cloth soaked in coal oil, which cast a strange light across our farm. Some of the men held shotguns, and one had a big old Colt Dragoon, but the barrel was aimed at his foot, not at us.

  “This is my home,” I said, my voice sounding more like Edith’s than my own. “And you ain’t … aren’t … welcome here.”

  “That boy ain’t got the gumption to pull no trig—”

  “Shut up, Sweeney!” the preacher snapped.

  Mama stood on my left. I could see the revolver she held in her right hand, but she wasn’t gripping it in a threatening way. It wasn’t cocked, and her hand covered the brass frame, which had turned from gold to green, her fingers cupped underneath the trigger guard. Uncle Willard had told us it was a Spiller and Burr, .36-caliber six-shooter, made in Georgia for the Confederacy. The grip had been chipped on one side. Uncle Willard had called it a thumb-buster, and I recalled how hard it had been for even him to cock.

  “Anna, get that boy back inside. We ain’t here to fight no kids. Get ….”

  I couldn’t tell who was talking. The man stood in the dark behind the torches, but I didn’t care. I kept that shotgun pointed at the Reverend White. If I kill a preacher, I thought, does that mean I go straight to hell?

  The man stopped at the sound of footsteps on the porch. I heard Mama gasp, but I just stared at the preacher, shotgun wobbling.

  “Edith!” Mama cried. “Hugh. You get back inside this instant. It’s ….”

  “No, Mama.”

  Edith stepped around beside me. She held a butcher knife in her left hand. Baby Hugh scrambled beside Mama, put his arm around her waist, hugging her real close. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see something in his left hand, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I thought it might be one of the saplings I used for a rapier, but later I learned it was a poker from the fireplace.

  Now the men fell silent. In the silence I could hear the dancing flames of the torches, my own heart pounding.

  The Reverend Thaddeus White brought his Bible up and awkwardly wiped his face with the back of the hand that held the Good Book.

  “Mary Frederick is inside,” Mama said. “You plan on burning her out, too?”

  They didn’t answer.

  “What’s the matter?” I snapped. “You think it’s fine to threaten a woman, but not kids?”

  “Some men you are,” Edith said. “My daddy’s in the Confederate Army. Why aren’t y’all?”

  The man with the torch beside Reverend White shifted his feet uncomfortably.

  Mama took up our method of attack. “Will Sweeney. I brought your wife and kids soup when she was sick with the measles. Randall Bandy. Does your wife know where you are tonight? You think she’d approve? Do any of you think your wives, your mothers, would approve? We used to be neighbors. We’re still neighbors. When Mister Lincoln talked about a house divided, he was talking about our country, but I never thought he was talking about Washington County, Arkansas.”

  “It’s you …”—the Reverend Thaddeus White cleared his throat—“it’s you who’ve done the dividin’. You told the Yanks ….”

  “I told them nothing!” Mama shouted as she readjusted the .36 in her right hand, shifted a finger until it pressed against the trigger, put her thumb on the hammer, and brought it up. “My family told them nothing. I accepted a bit of coffee from Jared Greene. Do any of you remember him? Jared Greene. Lived down the road from us between our place and Mary Frederick’s. Worked for Connor at the sawmill. A freedman from Kentucky. A freedman! Until you, our state government, drove him out of this state.” She tossed back her head and laughed. “As God is my witness, when that happened, I should have taken my children and my husband and moved back to Illinois. But I didn’t.”

  “And why not?” the preacher’s thundered.

  “Because this is my home!” The hammer cocked. She pointed the Spiller and Burr right at the Reverend White’s head, and, unlike my shotgun, her weapon wasn’t weaving. It was straight and steady. “Our home. It may not be much, and we might not have much food, or money, or anything else, but it’s my home. My husband built it with his own hands, cleared the fields, built the barn, and I guess that’s what he’s fighting for. And I’ll fight for it, too. Now I’ll ask you kindly to get off my property.”

  One of the torches dropped a bit, and I thought the man who held it was going for whatever weapon he held, but then the torch turned away.

  “C’mon, Milton. I don’t won’t no part of this.”

  “Me, neither. Let’s go home.”

  Reverend White whirled around, and moved toward the men that were heading down the lane. “Milton! MacDonald. Get back here. She told the Yanks about the corn …!”

  “I don’t figger she told the Yanks nothin’, Preacher,” said the man beside White. “As hard-scrabble as this place looks, if she knowed where any corn was, she’d be stealin’ it for her own family.” He nodded at us,
tipped his hat at Mama and Edith, mumbled something that might have been an apology, and followed the others down the lane.

  Which left Thaddeus White and two others.

  “You owe me for a mule you let get stole!” the preacher shouted, pointing his cane at Mama.

  “She don’t owe you a blasted thing, White,” said one of the remaining men, and then he headed off, too.

  “Let’s go home, White,” the last man told the reverend.

  “But ….”

  “I ain’t fighting a woman and three kids,” he said. “Never should ’a’ let you drag me out of bed this time of night nohow. You coming?”

  The preacher’s shoulders sagged as the man put his arm through the minister’s arm, turned him around, nodded back at us, and then joined the procession with White.

  We just stood there, watching the light from the torches disappear, then reappear through the trees, until they were out of view, and we were standing in the darkness.

  It wasn’t until we had all gone into the kitchen, where Mama lit a candle and began heating up her coffee and fixing us breakfast—even though it was two hours before dawn—that we noticed the shotgun and the revolver. Oh, they were loaded, all right. At least, we assumed they were. But no percussion caps had been set on the nipples.

  We had fought off the first attack with weapons that could not have fired.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Usually we weren’t allowed back up in the loft once we got up each morning, unless we were sick, but Mama sent us back upstairs after we ate grits and cornbread. Baby Hugh was asleep in an instant, snoring like a drunkard, and Edith soon joined him. I couldn’t sleep. I lay beside Hugh, head cupped in my hands, staring at the ceiling. It grew lighter.

  The rocking of the chair downstairs stopped, and Mama’s footsteps moved toward the front door. It was opened, and I heard her on the porch, down the steps, heard her walking toward the garden, the corncrib.