by Diane Munier
“Take him to Mullen’s and get back. Come morning we got double the work, so don’t dally.”
“Tom,” Seth said, “I should say words. Once he gets to town…they’ll put him in the potter’s field most likely. And Mr. Varn…he deserves something.” He already held his hat in his hand, his blonde hair stuck to his head in the shape of his hat. He favored Garrett, and Gaylin was the image of my ma. But me, there was an uncle, they said, but I had Pa’s hands.
I thought about what it must be like…for them. The smell of that dead body, and I’d been brutal, but they didn’t know the worry I felt for that woman. Still…, “Go on.”
We jumped to the ground then, me and Gaylin. That one wore no hat, and I kept mine pulled tight.
Seth said the words, and I watched him, trying to be patient. I was brought up short to realize how unsullied he and Gaylin still were. We’d been that way once, Garrett and me, Jimmy and William. Just country boys ornery, but knowing how to be good too, full of bluster, laughing our way through.
“Well,” Seth said when he was done, “We’d best get to it then.”
Gaylin wanted to argue with Seth about who drove first and that he wasn’t bedding down with that body beside him. I ignored such foolishness and put out my hand. “Gaylin stared at my offer, but Seth took it quick. “Careful on that dark road,” I told Seth, shaking his hand and slapping his shoulder. Then I turned to Gaylin, my hand still there. He looked at it and took it with grudge. I pumped it a couple of times, but his arm was heavy. I did not touch his shoulder.
So they took off and it was back to the house where Ma would dish my supper. I went there, and she pulled the door and warned me about my boots. I sat on the porch and left them there, studying the stains from where the men fell. I went to the stains in my socks and started to kick at them, stirring up the dirt, then bending and scratching at the stains with my hands like a damn rooster, but I couldn’t stop, didn’t want to. Finally I stood up straight, panting, and looking at the poorly job I’d done, but I didn’t care, I needed to do it cause it made me so angry to think of it, and how they’d want to look and bother this poor woman, this Miss Addie, and how Johnny saw it, and how wrong it was that the mister had a shotgun that listed right and high and had a charge that had barely been fresh enough to fire.
I went to the well and drew water. I peeled to my long johns, then I dropped them, too. I filled buckets and poured them over my head, one after another. Then I filled the wash pan and soaped myself and stood in it to soap and scrub. But I couldn’t wash it away, not matter how much I tried. The stain inside me.
After more cold buckets over my head to rinse, I put my long johns on, and my pants, letting my suspenders hang. The shirt I stuck in the pan with the dirty water so it could soak some of the vileness from it. My socks, too. I no longer smelled like animal shit and death. I went in the house then. “Give me the washing,” I said. “I’ll put it in the pan so it can soak overnight.”
Ma bundled it up. There was more than would fit in the pan. I took it, and she stopped me. “It’s like with Grampa, remember how it was? You were always the one who would do the hard things.”
I would build the fire in the morning, but for now it could soak. It took me several trips to fill the wash kettle, and I was able to fit all of the bloody mess in there.
Back inside, my eyes went to the blanket. Ma worked with the milk Seth had brought in earlier. “Thought we’d take turns on the small bed. You could spell me and I’ll spell you. She’s too weak to be left unattended.”
Her eyes shot to me, but her mouth was set.
“Yes Ma’am.” I said. I told her about sending the boys on. She was uneasy with what had happened, but I assured her the soldier had traveled alone.
So I ate some of the stew and put my dish to sink. Ma finished straining the milk and covered it with a cloth.
“Is she fit?” I asked.
“She’s bleeding heavy, but it’s easing some. She’ll be weak from the loss of it, and she’ll need help for a good while.”
I nodded, looking at the quilt again. “I’ll take first watch,” I said.
“You’re done in,” she said, ready to argue.
“It’s settled,” I said, standing and walking around the quilt.
The baby had a cradle now that had been in the attic since the boy. Ma had cleaned it and readied it, and she slept there all bundled. I put the cradle by Ma’s trundle so she could bring her to the missus should she waken, and I went round the curtain to keep vigil.
She laid there, and it wasn’t right, but I stood watching her sleep. Just the night before she’d shared this bed with her husband, and rightly so. Now here I stood, when I should be in my room in the barn three miles yonder, nursing my whiskey and my sad stories. Shit.
I took the one chair and pulled it up close to her. I sat, and the chair creaked, and I knew Ma would know just where I was. This woman. It was natural I’d feel kinship after what I had shared with her this afternoon. I wasn’t a fool. Not love-struck. I hadn’t had me but one woman one time, and that was because Jimmy had convinced me I was going to die the next day, but that’s a campfire and whiskey story for another time, but I’d seen nothing though she let me put it in her glory hole and I thought I went blind when I spurted my seed.
But that had nothing to do with this. I shouldn’t think such a thing in here. I didn’t know how long I would have to be near Miss Addie and her brown satin hair. She was my angel. And that was a thing so embarrassing…but she was. I had never known someone so sweet and brave. Ma had fixed her up, and I saw her thin pale beauty like she wasn’t real. Her lashes were thick and dark on her pale cheeks. She was freckled, but not too much. Her lips were a curve and a bow. Her nose and ears shell-like and delicate. Her skin like the milk after Ma strained it pure.
And I would spend this one night looking. For I could not sleep. It’s then I went back to the war…and Garrett. But now, I didn’t need sleep, I craved the comfort of just looking on her. That would be the greatest gift God could allow a son-of-a-bitch like me.
But when dawn came and the rooster crowed, I found myself leaning on the bed, my head beside hers on the pillow, one hand twined in her hair, but the other beneath her full breast. I saw it there as though it had detached from me and climbed there to nest. Yet when the horror speared me, the hand jumped, rough, callused, snagging the quilt. And I lifted quick, my neck protesting I moved so fast.
She woke with a start, me so close and looking like a fiend I’d wager, with the way my hair could stand on end, and the guilt that made me speechless.
“Mr. Tom,” she said. Then she calmed, seeing it was me. “Oh, Mr. Tom,” she whispered, and her arms reached and came around me, and she pulled my head to the place where the baby nursed, the place my hand had sought in honest sleep, and she cradled me as she cried. “Oh Mr. Tom,” in the softest voice, in a voice dropped and broken, and I smelled her smell, and I wanted to turn my face into her gown and breathe again.
“Lass,” I said finally, as I gathered her in my arms and kissed her hair. “Lass,” I said again. And there was no stopping me.
Tom Tanner
Chapter Five
I was shaken. And I knew shaken from the field of battle to after.
So I dug that grave and I dug that grave. But Jimmy and William rode in before I could contemplate it fully, before I could leave behind the sleep that had claimed the missus, the baby, me, and even my ma.
Never had I known Ma to sleep beyond four, and yet, even she had reposed like the dead. What if she had come around that blanket and seen me tangled with the missus?
But I’d done nothing. I hadn’t been aware. And it was brokenness in the missus made her reach for me--our shared sympathy over the events. In the height of battle friendships were forged. They rarely lasted, but they were real for the duration nonetheless. And that is what had happened between the missus and me. Nothing more. That kiss in her hair…nothing more. She brought a kindness forward in
me. That was it.
I didn’t know who I was arguing with as I built a fire for the wash beneath the full kettle. But the sight of Jimmy and William coming on, William on his big mule, Jimmy riding that black stallion, it made me edgy. Yet I’d had such a strange deep sleep, and I wasn’t hung over.
“Mornin’,” Jimmy said, raising his hat. He was the politician now, appointed as he’d been by that simpering committee. He was our great hero, they said.
William did not speak. We often sparred over whether he’d used ten words during the entire war or twenty.
I didn’t know how they got here so quick, but I knew Jimmy would tell me. So he did. They came to town right after Gaylin and Seth had brought the body in. Jimmy sent those boys home, and he and William came from the trail straight here. They looked about spent, but I knew them that way, spent from living in the saddle.
So I said I had a grave to finish digging and a coffin big as an elephant to plant in it. They helped me finish the digging and it went quick now. Together we got rope and lowered that coffin down and it was like letting a piano settle is what.
After we filled that grave I told them what had happened. They knew some of the details already from the boys. “This will be big news round here. That fellow rode for the blue,” Jimmy said.
“He’s for nothin’ but his crazy self,” I said.
They were used to me, but Jimmy’s eyes had that shine, and the corner of his mouth, he was always laughing at me. When I called him on it, he denied it every time. But every now and then I wiped that grin right off his face, and then I saw the real Jimmy, the one the politician couldn’t cover, and it was settled between us for a while—he was full of shit.
“Guess I need to talk to the woman…Miss Addie is it?”
Too at ease he was. This was the part of his job he would find sweetest, saving the orphans and widows. That’s if they were of a ripe womanly age.
“She be asleep,” I said, and my hands were closed.
There was that grin and I was in the mood to take care of it, so I had to breathe slow.
My ma opened the door then. “Jimmy? What you two doing here at this hour?”
He pulled off the hat now, and tethered his horse to the post.
“William,” Ma was saying, “you wipe your feet, and there’s coffee.”
“No,” I said. “They’ll take it out here.”
But none of them paid me mind, and the boys were on the porch kissing her cheek and her lit up like a coal oil lamp, telling them to come inside.
“See you don’t wake the baby,” I said, like some nursemaid. I cursed under my breath and followed them in, my eyes going to the curtain where I heard the baby lightly fussing the way she did when the missus tried to feed her.
There was no way these two should be in here. Sometimes my ma…an infuriating woman who thought the world was made out of daisies and sunshine, still saw these two like the motherless scalawags they were at ten years old. They were a heap older now with a lot of trail behind them and she had no idea. No idea.
So there they were, scraping chairs on the floor, like the cavalry charging into battle for noise, and that babe set up a protest. They smelled like they’d been riding hard, and I went for the window, forced it open, then when I saw the way the morning breeze rippled the blanket, I feared it would be too much for Miss Addie and her child.
And from where I stood, the blanket blew enough that I saw her, the baby attached to her creamy flesh, and her dark eyes on mine, and me looking back, like she was the Madonna, so beautiful I forgot I was standing in that cabin staring like a fool.
But the three, Ma included, had stopped their foolery and were also looking at me, unable to understand how it had been with me and the woman…unable to know, and I didn’t want them knowing.
I knocked a few frogs off my tongue and said, “That too much air, Missus?”
She was such a beauty. The baby pulled from her breast, not liking my voice, and I saw her rosy nipple. That breast looked pretty and ripe, and it was the first I’d seen just right there in the flesh and all. I felt my heart grow into something as big as a shield. I wanted to protect her with everything I had. Starting with throwing Jimmy and William clean out this window I’d just opened.
So I swallowed all those frogs and went to the stove to pour my own coffee cause Ma just poured it for those not her own blood, I guessed.
When I turned around William had his face over his cup, but Jimmy looked full on at me, crowing inside.
“Ain’t you got some saving business to get to?” I said.
“Yes. Mrs. Varn,” he said over his shoulder and toward the blanket, “you be fit enough to tell me some about the killing?”
Well, I didn’t think he should put it that way, but he didn’t know anything about being a sheriff, so there it was.
Ma hurried back there and came out holding the baby. She showed her to the two, and they knew better than to try and touch something so pure and clean. Ma took the little mite to the cradle, and I got up to make sure Jimmy didn’t think he had a clear path to the missus.
I stuck my head around the blanket, but kept my eyes on the floor, but I could see she was modest, so I looked into those brown eyes. “Missus,” I said, letting them know we talked, her and me, and they’d go through me now, “if you feel too frail to speak about this thing, then Jimmy can just hightail it out of here for another time.”
I heard Jimmy laugh a little, but I paid him no mind whatever.
“I can answer,” she said, her voice so ladylike and smooth.
“How-do, Mrs. Varn, I’m Sherriff Jimmy Leidner,” Jimmy said from the table, talking loud like the blanket that hid her from view was made out of pinewood.
“Tom, could you take down the blanket, you think?” she asked me, scooting herself higher in the bed.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “He ain’t nothin’ to look at,” I added.
He and William guffawed and the baby cried. Ma spoke to her, and I gritted my teeth for I had not been making a joke. I reached and pulled the blanket free from the rafter. I bundled it in my hand, then placed it over the basket and sat on the one chair near her bed, the chair I had slept in. I wanted to reach beneath the quilt and take her little hand, but I did not, letting my presence be enough because these matters were trial-some to recall.
I looked at the two, albeit defiantly, eager to have them collect their business and ride out. My arms were crossed against my chest, and it covered only by my long johns. I was a bull in the chest, and I cared not to remind either of them, not that we didn’t know one another’s forms better than our own for we had run naked for sundry reasons growing up, most of them having to do with swimming in the creek, or taking a dare. As men in war we hadn’t cared for modesty, only for surviving one thing then another.
So just to remind them, I sat there mulish and cantankerous and did not give them the most sanguine flicker.
Yet for this missus I had nothing but softness. My heart was made out of butter and she was warmth. So you see the mix.
Yes, William saw it all in one sweep of attention. He would not look often, but studying things with barely a look was one of his gifts.
Jimmy, however, exceeded my dread. Like me, he saw a vision. I had observed him with the fairer gender, and he liked them all, treated them all with an equal amount of appreciation. But this…he was at a loss. He couldn’t renew like usual. He looked at me, his fingers raking his greasy hair, the bone in his throat bobbing like a cork in a spring pond. He stood slowly, bringing his heels together, one hand on his heart while his head did a little bow. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Ma’am.” Then he remembered William, and that was just an excuse to look away so he could regain himself.
“And this here’s my deputy William Strongbow.”
William stood quick and said, “Ma’am.” Then he sat again, trying to hide a smile.
Jimmy’s eyes swept back to Missus and she said, “Pleased to make your acquaintan
ce, gentlemen.” Then she looked at me and we smiled at each other.
Jimmy cleared his throat drawing her attention to him again. “Ma’am it grieves me to have to address this terrible crime when you are in such a delicate way.”
“I am not so delicate I can’t speak, Sir. Please, carry on,” she said, and he was a little thrown, I think, for she could cut through to the gizzard, and her voice had quality.
I wanted to hear this myself, I’ll admit. So we waited while she picked at the quilt for one tick on the clock. “He came from the direction of the river. You know how they come through. We feed them sometimes…well I do…and Richard doesn’t…didn’t want me to, so we had disagreement. He said they would mark this place…and I said it was the Lord’s mark of generosity, then for all they had sacrificed. I cared not what flag they had fought under, we are under one and under God, I said, and we all get hungry.”
“Here, here,” Ma said, and I feared we’d have revival meeting soon.
Tears were there, but Missus wiped them away and spoke strongly, “This one was different. He said he knew Richard’s father…Charles. Seems he had a disagreement with Charles back east. I couldn’t imagine what he referred to as that man does not have business with us these days. This soldier said he owed Charles money. I think, perhaps, he wanted Charles to take care of his family while he went to prison. He lost his children, you see, when he got out. She had taken them west. So he…came here…to us…to our farm…to settle…to…to kill...,” she dipped her head, and squeezed my hand with both of hers, so I added my other to the top of the pile, and I was bent toward her, barely breathing I could feel so much building in her, and as it did it built in me like we were one.