The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson

by Nancy Peacock

  “You fall in love again. I seed it happen. Men with they hearts broke all over the place. Broke so bad you think they ain’t never gonna get outta bed. Then some little gal come along and they be fallin’ in love again. I seed it. I seed it plenty of times. Heart broke one minute, trippin’ over they tongue the next. It could happen to you.”

  “Did it happen to you, after your wife died?”

  Mo spat and rolled away from me and became silent. I could always count on the subject of Mo’s wife clamming him up, and I used this strategy, cruelly and often.

  “What you go and do that fo’, Persy? You jest gettin’ mean,” Sedge said. He reached over and gave Mo’s back a little rub.

  I did not care what Sedge thought of me, nor did I care for Mo’s paternal overtures. I hobbled the horses at night and helped break camp in the morning. The lessons I had been giving Sedge and Mo ceased. I cared not for the trunk of books. I cared not for my companions. I cared not for the sun coming up each morning or setting each night. Five years apart, two years searching for her, and she had been dead all along. I slept. I woke. I fingered the button at my throat, and when it became too much for me I walked off into the prairie alone.

  We rattled on day after day. The grassland swallowed up our wagon tracks as if we had never been there. I barely spoke to either of them any longer. I merely rode along, driving one of the wagons, or in the saddle on the back of Cups or one of the other horses. I rode like this until one day, perhaps a week after we’d left Drunken Bride, Mo spat out his wad of tobacco and called out, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” to the mules and pulled the brake on the wagon. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sedge yelled, squealing his wagon to a halt. Mo jumped down and stomped over to me. He reached up and grabbed my belt, yanked me out of my saddle, threw me to the ground, and kicked me.

  “Get up, Persy.” Mo jerked me up by the back of my shirt and stood me before him, and then slammed his fist into my face. I fell back, and tasted the blood in my mouth. I wiped it with my sleeve and looked at the bright red stain blooming there. “Come on,” Mo said, dancing in front of me with his fists raised.

  I did not need any more invitation than that. I hauled myself up and was on him. He rolled into a ball and I pummeled my fists into his back. I kicked him. I yelled at him. I called him a son of a bitch, a bastard, a goddamn troll, and I grabbed him and rolled him back over. I pulled his head back by his long flowing hair that the Indians wanted for their shields, and I pulled my fist back, ready to slam it into his face. He raised his arms to protect himself. I hesitated and Mo rolled away from me again. The grass kicked up around us as I pounded my fists into his back. I heard him grunt with each blow. I heard myself grunt as I delivered a second punch and a third and a fourth.

  I do not know how long it went on, but at last I stopped. I was exhausted, and I lay down next to him, panting and bleeding. I looked over. Mo had rolled onto his back and lay in the prairie grass with his eyes closed. Blood oozed out of his mouth.

  “Mo?”

  He nodded. I thought I saw a tear glisten down his cheek, but he quickly wiped at his face, then pulled his bandana from his pocket and daubed the blood away from his mouth. I heard the wagon creak and the thump of Sedge’s feet as he jumped down, and then the long liquid sound of his urine splattering against the prairie as he took a piss. The mules snorted. The horses ripped up the grass and chewed. Mo finally said, “Listen here, Persy. I know you done lost someone. I know how it feel. My wife, I done lost her. It near ’bout kilt me.”

  I lay my arm across my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun. “How did you lose her?” I asked.

  I heard him take a deep breath. “Lost her in the war,” he said. “I was fightin’ fo’ the goddamned Rebs.” He looked over at me. “Biggest mistake I ever made, leavin’ her there all alone.”

  “Where?”

  “Back in the Piney Woods. A deserter raped her and kilt her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Like she warn’t nothin’.” His voice choked. “I shoulda been there. I shouldn’t of been off fightin’ that damn war so some rich bastard like yo’ Massuh Wilson could keep him some slaves and . . . and have Chloe. I sorry, Persy. I sorry fo’ yo’ loss and I sorry fo’ mine.” Mo rolled over and spit some blood out of his mouth, and said, “Damn if I couldn’t use me a chaw. Sedge, bring me my haversack, will you?”

  “Yassuh, Mistah Tilly.”

  Sedge ambled over, Mo’s haversack swinging in one hand and a canteen in the other. He plopped down in the grass beside us. “Y’all done had a tussle,” he observed, uncapping the canteen and pouring a little water onto a bandana. He offered it to me. “I believe you took the worse of it, Persy. You know Mistah Tilly be undestructible.”

  I took the offered cloth and touched it to my lip, which was cut, and above my left eye, also cut. Mo was rooting around in his bag, shaving off a piece of tobacco and settling it in his jaw. Then he pulled out a small, hinged case, opened it, and handed it to me.

  “My wife,” he said, pointing to one of the two tintypes inside. A young lady with an oval face, dark hair swept into a bun, piercing eyes, and black-lace-gloved hands resting in her lap stared back at me. The other tintype was of a younger-looking Mo, dressed in a Confederate uniform and holding a rifle. “My lovely Geraldine,” Mo said. He reached over and took the case from my hands, stared briefly at her likeness, and then snapped it shut and slid it back into his haversack. “My name is Maurice. Maurice Tilly. That was Mrs. Tilly. You keep callin’ me Mo if you don’t mind.” He spat. “You want a chaw, Persy?”

  “No sir. Thank you.”

  “I take one,” Sedge said.

  “I ain’t offer you one.”

  “All right.” Sedge settled in the grass beside me and took a drink out of the canteen before offering it to me. I took a swig and offered it to Mo, who shook his head and pointed to his mouth.

  “Tombaccer,” he said.

  The three of us sat quietly until Mo finally said, “I reckon we ought to be goin’ on now.”

  “Yassuh,” Sedge answered.

  Mo stood up and offered me a hand. I grasped his arm and he hauled me up and as he did so, he pulled me into an embrace. His face pressed against my chest. “I need you, Persy,” he said. “I need you payin’ attention. It ain’t jest yo’ life. It mine and Sedge too. You fuck up, we might all die.”

  “Yes sir,” I said. “I understand.”

  He let go of me. “I hope you done beat yo’ grief out.”

  “No sir, I don’t think so.”

  “I reckon not.”

  “I’m sorry. It did help to hit you.”

  “Yeah.” Mo spat. “It help to hit you too.”

  We rode on. I was, of course, not able to leave my grief behind, but I owed the living, and that night we started our lessons again.

  It was not long before we entered the edge of the frontier. Sedge and Mo had been armed all along, and now Mo provided me with weaponry as well, a Henry rifle and a six-shooter, along with a belt of bullets to wear around my waist, delivered, of course, with his ever-present advice to save one for myself, along with his ever-present observation that my hair would be of no interest to the Indians.

  The truth is we saw no Indians, and the rattle of the wagons, the squeak of tack, the snorts of horses and mules, the rhythm of day in and day out travel and encampment lulled me into a stuporous disbelief of anything Mo had to say about them. Eat the raw meat; don’t show fear, save a bullet fo’ yo’sef. On the subject of Indians, Mo’s voice had become a sort of buzz, like bees in a bush.

  The tall lush grass of the prairie gave way to shorter grass, and then to land patched together with brush and stubble and cat claw and mesquite. The wind whipped up in bursts, sending grit into my eyes and nose and mouth, and creating little dust devils that twirled along the road ahead of us, as if in escort. Occasionally, tumbleweeds rolled across our path and out into the plains as if they were animals fleeing a hunt.

  Oddly, the place did not frig
hten me. That I should find myself in such a landscape after losing Chloe seemed fitting and right. The very strangeness of it matched the strangeness of my heart. I fingered my button and rode on.

  We passed, on occasion, graves along the roadside, some piled with rocks and marked with blank staring crosses, others marked only with one stone if they were marked at all, and of these some had been dug at by animals, the bones scattered. I saw a femur rolled beneath a mesquite bush, and the bones of a rib cage lay chewed and cracked in our path one day. We did not stop to reassemble these dead or to give them a proper burial. Mo simply drove on, around them if necessary, politely taking his hat off at every grave and every human bone.

  I was driving one of the wagons when up ahead I saw Mo take off his hat and nod his regards. It was a skeleton this time, nearly whole, lying alongside the road. The skeleton was clothed in a faded, dry-rotting dress. The bones, what parts of them were not missing or covered with drifts of sand, were bleached to a blinding white, and at the ends of this skeleton’s legs a pair of women’s shoes stuck out, simple and black, with a row of brass grommets.

  “Whoa,” I said, pulling on the reins, putting the brake on, and jumping down from the wagon.

  “Whoa, whoa.” Mo pulled back on his reins. The mules stopped and Mo twisted in his seat to look back at me. I stood now at the side of the road, staring down at the skeleton.

  “Persy, what you doin’?” Mo yelled.

  Sedge came riding up beside me. “What is it, Persy?”

  “Do you see a button like this one?”

  Sedge leaned over. I felt his hand rest on my shoulder. “They a thousand buttons like that one, Persy. Mizz Doreen had a dress with buttons like that. It don’t mean nothin’.”

  I fell into the dirt and began pawing at it, sifting it through my fingers.

  “You ain’t gonna find no button, Persy,” Mo hollered. “What the hell you thinkin’ ’bout, anyway? Let’s quit this place.”

  “No,” I said, and I stood and walked to the back of the wagon and pulled the shovel out from beneath the tarp.

  “What the hell you doin’?” Mo asked.

  “I’m burying her.”

  “Why?”

  “What if it’s Chloe?” I said, and I shoved the blade into the earth.

  “What?” Mo pulled the brake on his wagon and jumped down. “It ain’t Chloe.”

  “How do you know?”

  “ ’Cause she passed on befo’ Wilson reach Drunken Bride. She buried back behind us, Persy, not in front of us. This ain’t Chloe. You think ’bout it. It don’t make no sense. She ain’t come this far.”

  I stopped my digging. Mo reached out and took the shovel from me. He lay his hand on my shoulder and led me back to the wagon, muttering the whole way. “Goddamn it all to hell. Sixty-seven gonna be one hell of a year. There you go, Persy, back in the wagon.” And he helped me up as if I were an old lady. “I ain’t as smart as you,” he said, “least ways that’s what I thought befo’ now.”

  As we rattled along again Mo yelled back to me, “You got to quit pinin’ fo’ her, Persy. Ain’t no good in this.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m here,” I hollered back.

  “You here to help out you ol’ friend Mo. You fo’get that somehow.”

  “He gettin’ moony again?” Sedge asked as he rode along beside us.

  “ ’Pear to be,” Mo answered.

  “I’ll give you the winter,” I yelled, “then I’m heading to San Antonio or Austin. I got to make a new life for myself.”

  “Glad to hear it. I ’bout had it with you anyway.”

  “Are you going to be able to pay me when I leave? Mr. Sanders wasn’t going to pay until he sold his beeves.”

  “I pay you somehow, Persy.” Mo spat. “If you determined to leave, I give you some horses, that rifle there, some grub to get you started. If you can find water and hunt game and take care of yo’ horses and don’t get lost and don’t get kilt by the damn Indians, you be all right.”

  “Who gonna teach me readin’ and writin’?” Sedge asked, turning his horse around and coming back to ride beside me.

  “We’ll just have to work hard through the winter,” I said.

  Ever the optimist, Mo yelled back, “They be plenty of time. Weather gonna be awful. You two girls be goin’ dog-heat crazy by the time spring come on. Prob’ly be a wonder we all don’t kill each other.”

  THE CASKET MAKER came an hour ago and measured my height. For the last few hours, I have listened to the saws and hammers of the men as they build my gallows. Right now I hear the carpenters laughing as they test the trapdoor, which will drop away from my feet and leave me swinging. They test it again and again, and it makes a loud thunking noise each time. The men laugh, and one hollers out, taunting me, “That ought to do it.”

  Jack brought my lunch not long ago. I pushed it aside. I have twenty-four hours left. The men outside test the trapdoor one more time, and then they walk together in a clump, heading up the street to the saloon. One glances at my window as they pass. I do not know if he can see me, but all the same, for some reason, I lift my hand and wave.

  It was the first of September, three days after leaving the shoed skeleton unburied along the trail, that we arrived at the Traveling S Ranch, the remuda raising a cloud of dust behind us. Since its abandonment at the start of the war the ranch had been reduced to remnants of broken-down corrals, an adobe house with one wall cracked and crumbling back into the earth, a dingy bunkhouse, various outbuildings, and a barn that loomed incongruously against the sky. We swept out the bunkhouse and moved our gear inside, and then set to work.

  Over the fall Sedge and I built up the corrals, cleaned the barn and outbuildings, scrubbed the bunkhouse and the ranch house, and made all the necessary repairs. We set up woodstoves that had fallen over or collapsed into the floor. We cleaned flues and chimneys and gathered wagonloads of twisted mesquite branches for firewood. We built a fence of lashed saplings around a garden plot that did not yet exist and pens for livestock that had not yet arrived.

  Mo assigned himself the duty of priming the well pump, and when the prime did not hold, the pump’s innards stiff and ornery from having not known water for so long, Mo took the thing apart and began rebuilding it while barking orders to Sedge and me. Right through the first days of winter’s snap in the air, Mo had us working.

  I flailed against the needs of the ranch just as I had once flailed against fields of cane. I needed no repose, wanted no rest or time off in which to think or feel. In fact I feared such rest, for the news of Chloe’s death had reached so far into my heart that her memory had become an artery of sorts. With every beat she was there, just as my blood was there, just as my lungs involuntarily took in air, just as my skin prickled when a cold wind brushed across it.

  After Mo finished with the pump he started in on another project, keeping his promise to Sedge that he would not have to bunk with the white hands by building us separate living quarters. For this Mo used the bit of lumber from Miss Doreen’s barn. Our abode, once finished, was a small house, no larger than ten by ten. Inside were three bunks cantilevered out from the walls, a potbelly stove, purchased in Drunken Bride, set in the center, a door facing east, windows with shutters over each bed, and a little shelf running beneath the windows.

  On the shelf above his bed, Mo placed the framed tintypes of himself and Geraldine, along with his block of “tombaccer” with a knife plunged into it. He banged a nail into the wall above and hung his haversack, and coat, and hat there. On the floor beneath the bed he tucked an old can in which to spit. On the opposite wall, along my own little shelf, I lined up the spellers and the few books from Miss Doreen’s trunk, and I tucked the torn-off piece of map that I’d carried from Sou Sou between them. On his shelf Sedge propped up his slate and set his nub of chalk beside it, and then carefully unwrapped Miss Doreen’s lamp, miraculously unbroken, and placed it on the corner shelf Mo had built especially for this purpose.

&nb
sp; It was November now and the jaws of winter clamped their teeth upon us. On good days we worked, gathering more wood and continuing with repairs. On days that were too bitterly cold or stormy we spent our time doing what few chores were necessary, and then we played poker, placing bets with the bent nails Mo had brought by the bucketful from Miss Doreen’s place. At night we had our lessons by the light of Sedge’s lamp while the wind whistled around the corners and shook the little building, causing our piles of betting nails to tremble on the shelf.

  Winter tediously moaned its way through the days and weeks, and soon enough it imprisoned us in blocks of time in which the weather was too cold and cruel to face more than daily chores. After we had tended the horses and brought in the firewood we could only play so many hands of cards, only bet so many nails, only have so many lessons, and only read so many pages of books, so there were times when we did nothing, when we each reclined in our beds and did not talk, times when even Mo was quiet. It was not uncomfortable between us, but just as I had feared, left without distraction, my mind always drifted to Chloe.

  I envied Mo his tintype of Geraldine. I wished for an image of Chloe, although not for the reason one might think, for she was not fading from my mind, but becoming more and more vivid, more and more real. My remembrances became tangible. At times I even felt her breath across my neck as I lay in bed. A photograph, I reasoned, might lesson the intensity of my dreams and my dreams had begun to frighten me.

  I need not tell you that I dreamt of her. I woke up certain that she was calling my name. There was distress in her voice, and more than once I got up and stepped around the glowing woodstove, and out into the night calling back to her, “Chloe. I’m coming. I’m coming.”

  The nights were bitter cold. The wind cut through my long johns. Bits of snow and ice bit against my skin with sharp little stings. My socks stuck to the earth.

  I did not know where to look for her. The rolling hills stretched out empty before me. The moon either shined or did not shine, was either full or a sliver, I could either see or not see. “Chloe?” I would call again. The cold air froze inside my lungs and made me cough. And then I would feel Mo’s hand on my shoulder. “Come on in now, Persy,” he’d say. “She ain’t out here.”