by Sarah Bird
The horses, who’d ridden below in the shade of the upper deck, were led down a wide gangplank. With their hooves clopping big and echoey against that wooden plank, the company gathered its traps and prepared to go ashore. I hauled myself up by clinging to the pilothouse. The instant I put the least bit of weight on my legs, though, I came down in a heap. I wondered what was broken and if I’d be a cripple, seeing double, for the rest of my days.
“Guess I’ll haul you off way I got you on,” Lem said, and made to scoop me up.
“Naw,” I mumbled, for even pushing words out exhausted me. “Got to walk.”
And though I leaned on Lem so heavy he might as well have been carrying me for all the good my legs were, I made it ashore on my own two feet. I don’t intend to moan any further about my miseries and will simply state that mounting up on Bunny and riding out of Vicksburg was a disagreeable business. But, oh, what a comfort it was to be reunited with my floppy-eared friend. She healed a loneliness in me that Lem, for all his goodness, could not touch. For Lem did not know my secret and Bunny did.
After a few days, my vision leveled out. Then, once I got myself splinted and bound up to where I could sit the saddle again and not fall out from the pain, I found myself embarked upon a right pleasant ride. It was as if the war had never ended and I was once again out camping with the General. The joy of being released from the barracks and away from Vikers’s tormenting attention was a first-class tonic. Away in whatever little corner of the forest that Lem and I found to camp in of a night, I was free again. Free to be alone, free to squat and do my business, free to breathe.
We headed south by southwest for over a week through wet grassland and pine forests so thick we rode single file, spread out for miles. In that way, we passed into east Texas where the ringing of axes and the thunder as the giant pines fell told the story that the houses and barns and businesses the war had burned to ash were to be built again. It was odd, though, that the farther west into those piney woods we rode, the heavier grew the spell of the South that fell upon us. Buried within the deep woods, sound and air and even time was stopped so still by those walls of pine trunks that it seemed the war had never been fought. That slavery times not only had never ended in east Texas but would go on for all eternity.
The story passed among us that this state had fought not one, but two wars for the right to own us and build Texas off of free black labor. The first one was against the Mexicans who didn’t allow slavery. Then they fought the United States of America to keep my people in chains. I figured this explained why the state seemed double haunted and double damned.
Whenever we passed a work crew, the hands pulling the long saws and swinging the axes were all black. The ones holding the reins, all white. The axmen blinked a time or two as we rode past like they couldn’t believe they were seeing black men, armed and mounted, wearing the blue suits of the Union Army. The company, which had come off that paddle wheel boat gay and full of song at being real soldiers riding West, fell silent upon seeing these zombie men.
I summoned up the strength to yell out to the frozen black figures watching us pass, “You’re free. Come with us! You’re free! Free!” I repeated, but they acted like they either didn’t know the meaning of the word or didn’t believe it held true in Texas. They were back to their sawing and ax swinging even before we’d finished passing through.
The white masters were another story. Late on a morning, so muggy I feared I might drown from breathing the swampy air, I heard a shot ring out, then a couple dozen terrified troopers came thundering past. One of them was riding double, his passenger clinging to him, eyes wild with fright. A white boss had shot the man’s horse right out from under him and threatened to kill the next black ______ that trespassed on his property.
Later, when I recounted the hardships of my years in the army, the doubters, the ones who called me a liar, would always ask, “If it was as tough and hard as you make out, why didn’t you just leave?”
My answer came from the sorrowful, ghostly creatures who inhabited the piney woods of Texas and from the demons who drove them. Nothing could be worse than that.
Lem and I rode on, silent until he said, “Thought things was gon be different out West.”
“This isn’t the West,” a voice pronounced from behind us. Me and Bunny’d been flopping along in our pitiful way, but the instant I heard that voice, I came up straight as a die and my hand cleavered a salute into my forehead.
“At ease, men,” Allbright said. “No one out here to see us except that mama turkey down there.”
He tipped his head toward a pile of underbrush and it shaped itself into a lanky, lock-kneed gobbler leading a wobbling clutch of six babies through the shadows. I, who thought myself a sharp hunting eye, had not so much as glimpsed that tasty bird and her young. We were alone, we three, for the column, tiptoeing over fallen trees and around marshes, was stretched out far ahead and behind, leaving us with our own space of lonely quiet.
The Sergeant, free from command for a moment, expanded into that open space and said, “No, Powdrell, we’re a long ways from where the West begins. What we’re riding through here is the worst of the South that will never end.”
“Yessir,” I piped up, excited that Sergeant Allbright had spoken my thoughts. “It’s all this Spanish moss. Stuff gives me the all-overs.”
Allbright said, “Like fog and pond scum had a baby.”
I noted that Sergeant Allbright had spoken to me without the disgust that usually pickled his face. I think not dying might have graded me up some in his eyes. When we finally rode into a bit of sunshine and glimpsed a patch of sky and a horizon to go along with it, Allbright said, “Let’s see exactly where we are.”
We dismounted and Allbright dug a beautiful brass instrument he called a sextant from his saddlebag. This he held to his eye and explained as he measured various angles how to pinpoint our precise spot on the face of the earth. Juggling the instrument, he fumbled to write the numbers in his notebook and I offered to do the writing for him.
“You can read?” he asked.
“No, sir, but I can cipher. I do know my numbers. Can write a fair hand when it’s not letters.”
Suspicious, he turned his notebook over to me, and after shaking the rust out of my fingers, I showed him how well Daddy had taught me. We finished and rode on, the Sergeant clearly lost in his thoughts. After a bit, he asked, as though the three of us had all been part of the conversation he was having in his head, “What was it that slavery required to grow and flourish?”
“Wicked white folk,” Lem answered in complete sincerity.
“You can find those anywhere,” the Sergeant said. “No, what slavery required was water. No point in slaves unless you had the water to raise cotton, tobacco, sugar. That’s what saved the West. Not enough water for slavery to make white men rich in that parched terrain. If they’d had the water, they’d have had the slaves. But they didn’t. Which is why true freedom will not begin until we reach the ninety-eighth meridian.”
“Is that right?” Lem said, having no more idea what a “meridian” was than I did—just that it was the spot where freedom would begin.
“The ninety-eighth,” Allbright went on. “That’s where annual rainfall drops off to less than twenty inches a year. That’s where we can breathe free. By my measurements, we crossed the ninety-third a while back.”
“Five more to go,” I said, showing off. I was considerably puffed up to be riding along with Sergeant Allbright, being schooled about meridians and annual rainfall. It was like being back with Solomon. If Solomon had been young and had skin that shone like it had been rubbed with linseed oil and broad shoulders and a lavish plenty of eyelashes that curled up tight as a music box spring and a manner of speaking that was educated but didn’t low-rate everyone else.
And then the Sergeant got going on someone I would come to find out was, essentially, the love of his life: Mr. Frederick Douglass. When he started in quoting his idol, a spirit p
ossessed the Sergeant purer and stronger than any preacher I’d ever heard. And so it was that, with Mr. Douglass’s thoughts on “color-phobia,” which is what that great man called the “disease” of racialism, ringing in my ears, Sergeant Allbright led us like Moses out of that land of bondage and toward the Promised Land of the ninety-eighth meridian.
Chapter 46
Once released from its piney prison, Texas opened out into sugar then cotton plantations, neither of which appeared to have been inconvenienced by the war that had left much of the South east of the Mississippi a smoldering graveyard.
In a pretty stretch of hilly limestone country, we came upon a settlement of Germans who had fought with the Union against slavery and showed themselves to be the most welcoming whites I had ever encountered. Their limestone farmhouses, cedar fences, peach orchards, and cornfields were as neat and tidy as the plump wives and blond children who waved as we passed by. Some even ran up to offer us apples or a kerchief filled with dewberries.
But the true wonders of Texas did not present themselves until we rode into the old Spanish capital of San Antonio de Béxar where grandees with chin beards, thin and sharp as daggers, wandered the city’s narrow, twisting streets. A river, cool and green, ran through the city where citizens of all ages swam in the shade of giant cypress and willow trees. If I’d of run off anywhere, it would have been there in San Antone.
Instead, after four days’ rest while we resupplied and reshod the horses, we headed west by way of the Emigrant Trail, following in the tracks of a few settlers and a whole herd of prospectors bound for the gold fields of California.
As the Sergeant promised, the farther west we rode, the drier it got. Bit by bit all the greenery that had given me what privacy I could steal, commenced to thin out and dwindle in size. On the forty-fifth day out, we rode for nine hours before encountering any greenery higher than the rough grasses that extended as far as the eye could see. And that was only a patch of prickly pear that barely gave me enough cover to do my squatting business.
By then all the plants had turned on us. Gone were such as the sweet and gentle weeping willow that couldn’t of slapped a housefly in a hurricane. Instead of being the kind friends that did naught but feed and clothe and shelter, plants became sworn enemies dedicated to killing us and every other creature that passed by. They had the names to prove it, too: Spanish dagger. Devil’s darning needle. Horse crippler. Apache lance. Crucifixion thorn. Coach whip.
As Vikers had warned, there was no place to hide in this barren country and I had to wait until long after dark when the mens’ snores grew louder than the yips and howls of coyotes yodeling out their hunting songs to sneak off and relieve myself. One of those endless days seemed worse than all the others with strange cramps deep in my gut caused by my having to hold it for so long. The aching even reached up farther, making my breasts sore and tender beneath the tight bindings. That night, the moon was so full it was near bright as day and I was forced to venture even farther away than usual to find privacy.
In this light, when I pulled down my britches and squatted, the catastrophe that had struck was plain to see: After all these years, my nature had arrived.
I had no choice but to unwind my chest bindings and stuff them into my stained drawers. As I waddled back to my bedroll I wondered why the woman’s curse had found me after I’d ducked it for so long. It had to be that, for the first time in my life, out here on the trail, I was eating regular. We had all the game we could shoot, plenty of beans, and even vegetables whenever there were any to be bought. After a lifetime of hoecakes, hardtack, and mush, the long hollows on my body were filling out. My hipbones no longer stuck out like knife blades and I couldn’t count every single one of my ribs. Also, hard as army life was, it was a picnic compared to what it had been back at Old Mister’s.
I had to conclude that the army had made me soft, soft enough to become a real woman. For a minute or two, the thought that I was normal in this way comforted me. Then the cramping in my nethers almost ripped a moan from my lips and I realized that my woman’s body had betrayed me again and just made a hard road even harder.
Chapter 47
“Cathay, you not going to pee?” Vikers yelled back over his shoulder at me the next day. He was lined up with most of the other troopers. They had their backs turned and were pissing onto the hard-baked dirt.
It was three in the afternoon. We’d been riding for ten hours since we broke camp at five and hadn’t come across so much as a pile of rocks high enough to squat behind. The prairie rolled on in all directions, endless as an ocean. An ocean set hard on drowning me. The only things throwing shadows across that dry flat land were a long column of horses and men and one girl had to pee so bad she was sweating yellow. No milch cow, hours past milking time, had ever been as full as I was.
Though I’d made sure that neither my unharnessed bumps nor the least stain on my light blue trousers would betray me, Vikers seemed to notice that something was different. He was paying me even more attention than usual, remarking on how I didn’t piss with the others and the like. The way he sniffed around made him seem about half wolf, like he’d picked up the scent of blood and tracked it back to me.
A horse nickered and Greene, peeing with the others, jerked to look behind, sending his stream flying over the boots of the soldier next to him who cursed and promised to slit Greene’s throat if that ever happened again.
Vikers, mounted now, came up next to me, and asked again, “You’re not going to relieve yourself?” His piercing voice had dried out so much it now sounded like a rusty nail being pulled from a cedar post.
I tucked my chin into my neck and came back salty, “What? You keepin’ count?”
Vikers’s ugly, bow-faced mare nudged in close to Bunny. “Nothing to count. Last two times we stopped, you stayed in the saddle.”
“So, you are keepin’ count.”
“Oh, I’m counting, Cathay. You best believe I am counting.”
“You ain’t right, Vikers.”
He wheeled his mount around so he faced me head-on, plucked his spectacles out, and wrapped the gold curl of one arm then the other around his ears like he was fixing to read one of the papers that decided our fates. And now, in the withering glare of a sun that shone twice as bright as it did back home, he was reading me, and pronounced, “Someone round here isn’t right, but it isn’t me. Is it?”
I pulled up tall and stared kerosene waiting for the flame back at him. I’d give the pipsqueak something to read. I’d give him a grandma sharpened her teeth to points so she could rip out the throats of her enemies.
His voice softened until he sounded almost kind and he went on, “I said it before, I’ll say it again, something’s not right about you, Cathay. Not your fault,” he said, sounding like a friend concerned about my welfare, wanting to help me. “You know it. I know it. Every trooper here knows it. It’s bound to come out. Bound to.”
For one second, I thought about how easy it’d be to confess, clear the air, just be myself the way I always had. I snapped out of that, though, and said, “Step off, Vikers. You crowding me. Man.”
He smirked and rode away. I gripped the stock of my carbine, and looked off into the distance, praying for a few scraggly trees, even some piles of rocks. Nothing stopped my gaze, though, until it hit a line of blue mountains could of been a thousand miles away. It took me a bit to notice a few pale squiggles of motion. I figured they were just heat waves rising from the sandy earth, but the squiggles took shape and I saw them to be the pale wolves the Mexicans called lobos. They trotted along in the shimmery heat for a long time, watching us with their yellow eyes. Then, in the blink of an eye, that cruel emptiness swallowed them up whole.
Chapter 48
Never before or after did I hear coyotes howl the way they did that night. Seemed they were taking the woes of the world and flinging them back at the moon, and the moon didn’t care.
When the moon finally sank beneath the horizon, leaving us in
darkness, the coyotes left off howling and I was finally safe to creep away from camp. Along the way, I stole half a dozen of the kerchiefs troopers had laid out to dry. When I was far enough off that the embers of the string of burned-down fires the troopers were bedded down next to were pinpricks of orange in the black night, I relieved myself. I tossed away the fouled bindings, replaced them with a pad of kerchiefs then sat down to consider my situation.
I had to conclude that Vikers and his boys were bound to find me out. For a second or two, I wondered whether it wouldn’t be better for me to walk on out into the night until I met up with the yellow eyes of a pack of lobos. I was wondering if having my guts strung across the prairie by Mexican wolves might not be preferable to getting done in by Vikers, when a rattler, attracted by my warmth, slithered up. I had a rock in my hand and his brains bashed out before he had a chance to raise his tail and shake out even one rattle.
“Thank you, Iyaiya,” I said, uplifted mightily by this evidence that my grandmother was still looking out for me. No telegram could of been clearer and I knew sure as creek run to river what I had to do.
Back in camp, I crept over to where Vikers and his boys lay curled around the ashes of their fire, dead asleep. Vikers’s special tin coffeepot set on a rock next to the cold fire. I swiped that pot. In exchange, I tucked Grandma’s messenger into bed with Vikers then slipped away.
I made for the remuda staked out at the far edge of camp. The mounted guard was Milton Favor, a wheelwright out of Illinois. This was bad luck for me as Favor was a bright-eyed lad when what I needed at that moment was a shirker slumped over in the saddle, dreaming his shift away. Quiet though I was, the horses caught my smell and started snorting and shifting about, eager for their morning grain.