The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson

by Nancy Peacock

  “I heard her.”

  “You been dreamin’.”

  “Where is she?” I asked. “Where do you think she is, Mo?”

  “I don’t know, son.”

  “Where do you think Geraldine is?”

  “I don’t know, son.”

  “How can you bear not knowing?”

  “I cain’t bear it.”

  “But you do bear it.”

  “Exactly. Now come on in. Come on in, I’m cold.”

  I allowed Mo to lead me back inside and put me in bed. He pulled the blanket up to my chin, and then he tucked it close into my body, just as my mother had once done when I was a little boy on the Surley place in Virginia.

  I watched from my bunk as Mo opened the stove door and shoved another piece of wood in, the flames lapping their tongues out before he closed it. Between us Sedge snored. Mo would climb back into his bed and pull the blanket up. “Go on back to sleep, Persy,” he’d say. “You be hurtin’ jest as bad tomorry. Won’t miss nothin’ by sleepin’.”

  But it would happen again the next night, and the next. It was as though Chloe called to me, as though she had some message for me. I think now it was as though she wanted me to know that she was alive.

  Master Wilson had told her. I know this now. He had told her that he had seen me in Drunken Bride, and that I was asking about her. He had told her the entire story, right down to her own death along the trail. Perhaps, if one believes in such things, I could feel Chloe reaching for me. For the first time in five years she knew that I had not drowned in the river, and that I was looking for her. Perhaps every time Master Wilson forced himself on her now, Chloe called my name.

  Each time I heard her voice, I woke, and I answered her, and I stepped outside, and every time, no matter the weather, no matter the cold, or sleet, or snow, Mo came and got me, and every time he’d lead me back inside to my bed, and he’d pull the blanket up to my chin, and then I’d lay there and watch the fire lap out of the stove door as he lay another stick of wood on.

  I had been through two Texas winters before this one. I knew them to be harsh, but I swear that in 1867 the cold was colder, the ice icier. Winter howled. Some storms were worse than others. There were days that we were not sure if it was day. Had we fed the horses? Was it time for breakfast or dinner? The light so often looked the same.

  Our loss of time was not just limited to days, but also weeks and months. We did not know if it was Christmas or New Year’s or Monday or Wednesday. Our beards grew and we did not shave. Our skin became slick with oil and gritty with dirt that ground against our bedding at night.

  There were blizzards. They could come out of nowhere. A sunny day could suddenly go dark, like the end of the world. The snow was blown so far across the prairie that very little accumulated on the ground. Mostly it banked itself against anything in its path, the buildings, the woodshed, our own little bunkhouse. Still, you would not want to be out in one of these storms, for although very little snow accumulated, it fell at times so thick and wild that you could not see your own hand in front of your face. Once or twice one of us would get trapped in the barn when a blizzard suddenly came up and we would simply stay there, huddled close to the horses for warmth. It was into these storms that I sometimes stepped out looking for Chloe, and it was into these storms that Mo stepped out behind me and pulled me roughly back inside.

  Except for the weather, every day seemed the same. There were chores, a breakfast of cush-cush, a game of cards, a lunch of beans and sometimes bacon, more cards, taking turns reading a bit out loud from one of the books, Mo and Sedge laboring through this, then dinner same as lunch, and perhaps another round of poker.

  The cabin took on the intermingled smells of our existence: beans, body odors, the scent of the woodstove and kerosene and tobacco. Winter pressed and breathed down on us like a dragon with ice in its lungs instead of fire. The hunting scene from Sedge’s lamp cast its shadows on the walls, until, at last, we turned in each night, or was it day? Everything felt like its own equivalent until the morning Mo got sick.

  He had been coughing. I would recall this later, but at the time I was not concerned. This was Mo, and Mo was strong. He chewed his tobacco, and spit into his can, and stoked the fire, and beat me in poker, and hauled me in whenever I wandered into the night. I never thought it would be any other way, except that perhaps the details might change, but Mo would not. And then one morning I woke to the stove door creaking open, the roar and crackle of the fire against the sound of a blizzard hurling itself around the corners of our little house, and a wet, racking cough, filled with the sound of fluid. Sedge’s lamp glowed in the dark cabin.

  “Mistah Tilly sick,” Sedge said.

  I looked over. Sedge was sitting on the edge of Mo’s bunk and Mo was shivering.

  “Give me yo’ blanket. Get mine too. Put ’em on him.”

  I got up and pulled the blankets off the beds and spread them across Mo, pinching them close to his body just as he had done for me only hours before. I opened the stove door and lay more sticks on. “Build it up good,” Sedge said. “Build it up hot.” I added more wood until the stove glowed red, the fire as big and hot as I dared to make it.

  Just then Mo looked up at Sedge, his eyes as large as pecans. “Geraldine?” he said.

  “Nawsuh, Mistah Tilly. It me, Sedge. And Persy right here too. Don’t you worry none. We gonna get it hot in here. We gonna sweat this thing right outta you.” Sedge stood and took Mo’s leather coat off its nail and draped it across his feet. I handed him my pants and shirt and jacket, all hanging on my own nail, and Sedge draped them across Mo.

  Still Mo shivered. Another fit of coughing. Sedge helped him sit up a little and I watched as Mo’s body jerked through it. Sedge eased him back down, and Mo said once again, “Geraldine?”

  “Get him a dipper of water,” Sedge said.

  I did so, and while Sedge raised Mo’s head I dribbled a trickle into his mouth.

  Sedge reached under the covers to feel Mo’s skin. “He startin’ to sweat some. I gettin’ in with him. Give him mo’ heat. You keep the fire up, Persy. We take turns.” Sedge lifted the blankets and clothing and slid in beside Mo. He wrapped his arms around him and said, “It be all right, Mistah Tilly. It be all right.”

  Mo jerked and shuddered and called again for his dead wife. I reached up to the little shelf and took his tintypes down and placed them on top of the blanket.

  Sedge nodded. “That good,” he said. “That good. There she be, Mistah Tilly. There she be.” He held the picture up to Mo’s eyes, but Mo’s eyes did not focus on it. Sedge wrapped Mo’s fingers around the tintype and said again, “There she be, Mistah Tilly.”

  Mo coughed, another fit of coughing that lasted five minutes, ten it seemed like as the storm screamed around us and rattled the shutters. I fed the stove and sat across from them and waited to feed the stove again, staring at Sedge’s thin back as he lay wrapped around Mo. After some time we traded places and Sedge climbed out from under the blanket dripping with sweat, and I climbed into the bunk and wrapped my arms around Mo Tilly.

  He shivered violently against me. His skin was moist and hot. The wind wailed. The cabin shook. I have said that it was morning, and I suppose that this is true, yet I do not really know, for no light leaked through the spaces between our shutters. I heard the stove door open behind me, heard firewood scrape across the floor as Sedge hauled it out from under one of the bunks, heard the crackle and pop of flames.

  We spent hours trading off lying with Mo and keeping the stove stoked. We dribbled water into his mouth. We held him up as he coughed, and caught the greenish phlegm he produced in a bandana held to his face. Sedge heated broth from last night’s beans and tried to feed him, but Mo would not take it. He turned away from the spoon.

  “My mules,” he said at one point, his voice thick and swampy. “Take care of my mules.”

  “We takin’ care of ’em,” Sedge said.

  A little later Mo reached up
and touched Sedge’s hair. His eyes were glassy. “Keep yo’ scalp, Sedge,” he said.

  Sedge laughed nervously. “I be keepin’ it, Mistah Tilly. You be here to make sure of that.”

  Mo shook his head.

  The storm died down at last, as did Mo’s coughing. Sedge and I stopped rotating in and out of Mo’s bunk long enough to make and eat a pot of cush-cush.

  “We got to feed the horses,” Sedge said.

  I nodded.

  “And bring in the firewood.”

  “We’re going to need our clothes,” I said, eyeing Sedge’s and my britches and shirts and coats that we’d piled on top of Mo.

  “He be all right. We stoke up the stove nice and high, work fast. I believe he some better. Don’t you, Persy?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “I think he’s some better.”

  I stood and opened the stove door, jamming in stick after stick. When the fire seemed good and hot, Sedge and I pulled on our clothes and opened the cabin door and stepped outside. The air was frigid, with pings of ice that stung against our skin. The sun shone weakly through a sky muffled with clouds. Sedge headed toward the barn and I toward the woodshed. I filled the handcart with a load of wood and hauled it to the cabin, dumping it outside and going for another load, figuring that I could stack it more quickly inside if I had it all nearby.

  Mo must have built our little bunkhouse to invisible specifications that only he could have known how to calculate, or perhaps it was just sheer dumb luck that just enough wood for a few days would fit under the three bunks. We supplied up whenever there was a break in the weather, never letting our stock get too low. But we had used a lot of wood keeping the fire hotter than usual, and I made another trip with the handcart and then a third, and a fourth.

  I opened the door to the cabin. Mo said nothing as I went in and out bringing in armloads of wood. Once he looked at me as though he did not know who I was. “It’s Persy,” I told him, though he had not asked.

  Sedge came back soon. “Yo’ mules is fine,” he told Mo. Mo nodded, and we took this as a good sign.

  For three days we nursed him. We took turns lying beside him, and we propped him up and made him drink dipperfuls of water and tried to get him to take some broth, or beans, or maybe a small bit of bacon. His cough came and went. Sometimes it sounded light and tickly, and other times strings of greenish phlegm stained his beard. He asked for “tombaccer” once, and Sedge told him, “Nawsuh. You ain’t well enough fo’ a chaw. You have one when you better.” Sedge turned to me and smiled.

  On the third day we woke to another blizzard. The wind whistled and howled, and against this backdrop, Mo’s coughing seemed worse. Sedge got out of bed and stood over Mo and watched him wrack out cough after cough, the green phlegm dribbling down his chin. Sedge wet a cloth with warm water from the kettle and daubed it at Mo’s beard and face, but Mo pushed him away and continued to cough.

  When he was still at last Sedge lifted the covers and felt of Mo’s skin again. “He got the fever back,” Sedge said. “I gettin’ in with him some mo’. Get us the extra blankets again.”

  He climbed into bed and wrapped his arms around Mo. I spread my blanket and Sedge’s blanket across them, and then stoked the stove and sat on my bunk and watched the rise and fall of Sedge’s back. I thought of Miss Doreen, and how Mo had held the pillow over her face, and how he had done it for Sedge. I did not know their history, for I had been too preoccupied with my own grief and yearning to ask, but there was deep love there. It was easy to see, and I vowed that I would ask the story of their friendship when Mo was well again.

  The storm died that afternoon, and Sedge and I built up the fire and pulled on our clothes and boots and went out to do our chores, him off to the barn again and me hauling firewood in the handcart.

  As I brought in the last of the wood the sky went black and I shut the door against the second blizzard of the day. The tempest screamed around the corners of the cabin and shook the shutters. Sedge had not made it back in time, but he would be warm enough nestled between two of the horses.

  I sat on my bunk and watched Mo, who was now slowly rolling his head from side to side and calling out Geraldine’s name again. I got up and placed the tintypes on his chest. He ignored them and I brought his hand up and rolled his fingers around the little hinged case. “There she is,” I said.

  He weakly held the picture of Geraldine and said her name once again. Even in Mo’s weak and faded voice I could hear the longing and the hope and the puzzlement as to why Geraldine did not come to him, and where she could possibly be if not by his side.

  I stoked the stove again and sat on the edge of my bunk and stared at him. The tintypes dropped to the floor with a little clank. “Where you been, darlin’?” Mo said. His voice this time was different, so young and confident. His eyes were clear and focused. He smiled. “I been lookin’ all over fo’ you.” I watched as his hand closed, his fingers curling gently around something that I could not see. “Sweetheart,” Mo said, and then he was gone.

  The living do not always believe what they see. I stood and held my ear to his chest and heard nothing. I reached over and pulled the knife from Mo’s block of tobacco and held the blade to his parted lips and it did not fog. There was no breath.

  As if on some staged cue, the storm intensified its howling and screeching. The cabin groaned as if it would blow apart. I turned up the flame on Sedge’s lamp. I felt the wind suck through the walls, though I had never felt drafts in the cabin before. The stove burned brightly, but its heat, even in this small space, was inadequate. I shivered a bit, and then it occurred to me to close Mo’s eyes and to take one of his blankets and wrap up in it, and these things I did.

  I wished that Sedge were here to talk to, to add body warmth, to take turns with, one of us sleeping, and the other tending the fire. I wished for his presence also to prevent my thoughts from gaining too much strength, but he was not there, and as I stared at Mo’s body I remembered all the nights since we’d arrived at the ranch that he had stepped outside in the hacking cold to fetch me back in, and to answer my questions—“Where is Chloe? Where is Geraldine?”—with his simple reply that he did not know. He knew now, I thought.

  After some time I became grateful that Sedge was not there, for I did not like the idea of him seeing me blubber like a baby, and that is what I did. I sobbed, and I bawled, and I cried for the loss of Mo, and the bitter thought that a man like Mo Tilly must die, while a man like Master Wilson went on to live and breathe air that he did not deserve.

  The storm lasted the night. I slept fitfully on occasion. The next morning the world was quiet and sunny and Mo’s body was cold, and when I opened the door I found Sedge frozen and dead not ten feet away.

  I COULD NOT bury them. I tried. I picked a spot and I dragged Mo out of the house and Sedge up beside him. I pulled the dead grass away from the ground, creating two spaces large enough for graves, and I threw the blade of the pickax against the earth only to have the impact reverberate up the handle and into my arms. A small sliver of dirt, not even the size of Chloe’s button, pinged loose and fell against my boot. I hit the earth again, and again only a small chip came loose, and again this did not stop me.

  Whatever your opinion of me, I do not want you to believe that I gave up easily on this task, that I lazily hit the earth once or twice and then decided to wait for spring. I do not want you to presume, whatever else you presume about me, that I did not care about properly laying my friends in the ground.

  I cared a great deal. I loved these men, and I put my pickax and my back and every muscle I had to the task of giving them an immediate burial. I flailed at the ground. I swung down hard on it. After two hours, I had dug one hole, the size of the dough bowl on which I had floated to safety on the river.

  I was sweating, and the air was chill, and I came to understand that I would not be able to bury Mo and Sedge until the ground had thawed. I loaded my friends into the handcart and wheeled them to the unused bunkhouse, wh
ere I lay them on the floor just inside the door. I retrieved feed sacks from the barn and used them to cover the bodies. And there I left them for the winter.

  It was dusk when I closed the door to the bunkhouse. The sky was a beautiful eddy of red and pink and purple. I went into our own little house and lit Sedge’s lamp, and built up the fire. I warmed a pot of beans and sat on my bunk eating. I was afraid to go to sleep that night, afraid that Chloe would call to me and that I would wander out into the dark cold, this time without Mo to step outside and pull me back in. I sat up until daybreak, the lamp flickering; the hunting scene on its globe cast in shadows against one wall.

  In my mind I can see the interior of that cabin: the empty bunks, the disarray of blankets, Sedge’s lamp and his slate and his nub of chalk, Mo’s block of “tombaccer,” his haversack, our separate piles of rusty nails, and the dog-eared deck of cards sitting next to the tintypes of Mo and Geraldine.

  When morning broke I went to the barn to tend the horses. I brought in more firewood, emptied our slop pot, and refueled Sedge’s lamp. Then I ran a rope from the door of our cabin, my cabin now, to the barn. I do not understand why we had not thought to do this before. It was so simple, a guideline to hold on to if I was caught out in a sudden, blinding blizzard, a rope that might have saved Sedge’s life.

  Mo, who guided us from the Double H Ranch all the way up here along the Colorado River, who lay in enough provisions for us and the horses and mules, who built this cabin to withstand any wind and any blizzard, who came out to get me and bring me back inside night after night, this man, Mo, who had done all this had not thought of a guideline from home to barn.

  Mo had done his best by me. He had pulled me off my horse and beat me with the hopes that he could loosen my torment. He had shaken me, as best he could, out of my stupor, but he could not stop the dreams from coming at night. He could not stop Chloe from calling to me. He could not stop me from rising out of sleep and opening the door and stepping out into the cold darkling hours. Yet somehow I must stop it, for I was alone now. The only solution I could think of was to lock myself in.