Enemy Women

by Paulette Jiles

  Well, here you all are, said Jessie. She was a strong woman of no more than forty-five, with heavy hips and thighs and a good-looking face. Her slick brown hair showed under her enormous straw hat. It was not a bonnet but a daisy-wheel hat, with a flat crown. Her skirts were made of gores of all different materials in various patterns. She wore a cloak with a shoulder cape and carried an empty tow sack. Around her danced a pack of feist dogs, shaggy terriers with square ears and bright, mean eyes.

  Well, I am glad to see you, said Adair. Last year I wanted to come and talk with you. One of the terriers dashed at her and barked. Adair pulled back her skirts and spat at the dog. Get!

  Well, that time has gone, ain’t it? said Jessie. I’ve got these dogs here, and that one has puppies back at the tavern. You wouldn’t want to take one to raise, would you? She kept on walking.

  No, ma’am, said Adair. Are you burnt out? Adair hurried to walk beside her.

  They started to, Jessie said. A big fat sergeant was running around with a torch. But we make good whiskey there at the tavern. The captain says, that’s Hyssop’s Rest, boys. Leave it be. So this fat sergeant went and shoved the torch under the back kitchen, where the captain couldn’t see him do it. The fanatic element has taken over, she said. She marched on. I prayed for rain. I guess the Lord heard me. I was loud enough about it. The Lord sent a general rain over the entire county and it put out the kitchen fire. And I have walked all the way from Slayton Ford in the Irish Wilderness to here for turnips and potatoes.

  Yes, ma’am, said Adair. The rain saved our house.

  Then how come you are on the road?

  They took Pa. They said he was disloyal. Adair kicked at a rock in the road. Disloyal to what?

  Jessie reached down and stroked the ears of one of the dogs. Her hand was surprisingly young-looking and rounded with muscle. The small dog stood on its hind legs with its paws on her skirt and stared up into her eyes as if taking in some vital substance.

  They’ll think of something, said Jessie. I guess they just wanted your horses. That Captain Tom Poth is selling them up to St. Louis. He is a mercenary son of a bitch.

  Savannah jabbed her knuckle into Adair’s waist and asked, Can she cuss like that?

  Little Mary whispered, She’s a witch, Savannah, she can cuss if she wants to.

  Adair said, Can you tell where he is at?

  Your pa?

  Yes, ma’am.

  By witching? Better ask the Yankee commander.

  I thought you could tell things by looking in a pan of water or something.

  I am turning off here, said Jessie. To Cane Creek Fields. Then back home. I am going to dig up some of these potatoes from Fursey’s old place. Some people can tell things by looking in a pan of water, but I don’t care to look anymore.

  They are going to kill Pa, said Savannah. She started crying again. She dropped the skillet and Adair picked it up.

  A person should really learn the telegraph alphabet, said Jessie. You could talk to people in Georgia if you knew the telegraph alphabet.

  Savannah bent her head down and looked at her shoes and continued to cry in low, persistent strangling noises.

  We have come to the end of days, said Jessie Hyssop. Whatever kind of days it is we been in. The courthouses are gone and so are records and ain’t you seen those men laying dead beside the road? Now we have a world of devices and not of witching.

  Well, Jessie, can’t you help a person? Adair was so angry she was near tears. I have an old shilling I could give you. Fix it so that I could speak to a horse and he would throw his rider in the Current River and drown him. So I could call Whiskey to me, and he would break his reins and come to me.

  That is another matter, said Jessie. Horses are another matter. They are already mostly in the witch world because they eat no meat. You have spent half your life wandering in the woods horseback by yourself or with Lucinda and them girls. Don’t you know anything? Jessie’s flapping straw hat winged up and down like a sailing crane. I know you, Adair, and I know you’d be gone in the hills for all of your natural life if you could. Your mother used to have to sit watch on you ever second, you were a trial to her.

  I was? Adair kept walking beside Jessie.

  Yes.

  Her sisters came silently behind, and down in the valley of Cane Creek the wind became confused and turned the falling snow into spirals.

  Well, Jessie, we are just looking for somewhere to sit out until this war is over, and if a person had the second sight like you do, they could see where other people’s loved ones had been carried away to, and their horses too. Do you see spirits?

  Yes, but I don’t pay any attention to them, said Jessie.

  But they come to tell us things.

  No they don’t. People ain’t smart just because they’re dead.

  Well what are they?

  Just mournful. They’ve lost something and can never leave off looking. Such is the power of desire even beyond the grave. They are trembling with want.

  Adair struggled along against the wind with the carpetbag in one hand and the skillet in the other. I don’t know how I’d learn the telegraph alphabet. Can’t you look in a well, or when you throw out coffee grounds?

  Jessie stared into the snowy aisles of the woods for a while. Then she said, I don’t know if I could or not. I myself have asked old women for what they knew, and the old women at that time remembered things from old women they had known and so on until the beginning of the world. What they knew didn’t always please me.

  Jessie had come to the turnoff. The trail to Cane Creek Fields wound through the valley lands now curtained with snow flurries. The wind whistled. Adair came close to hear what she was saying.

  We are in the middle of many changes, and this endless changing is become disorder and people cannot long endure disorder. They’ll do anything rather than put up with it. Desperate things. Things that they don’t want to remember later. Jessie drifted into the snowy air, eastward down the small trace. She turned. Her breath came in clouds.

  She waved her hand. The dogs ran around her skirts smelling at the road.

  At every crossroads you come to, she called back, pile three stones one on another. For the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This is to prevent the spirits from coming next behind you.

  Adair stood and watched her disappear down the Cane Creek Fields road, among the great valley trees, their limbs crested with snow.

  She’s just a common woman, said Adair. She runs that tavern over in that town called Wilderness right there in the middle of the Irish Wilderness and there are riotous things that go on over there. She’s just a public woman.

  What? Savannah raised her head.

  Nothing.

  You better shut up, Adair, said Little Mary. She’ll hear you and do something. Little Mary knocked the drops of moisture from her shoulders. Something you won’t like.

  Adair stood discouraged and hurt for a while, looking at the ground. She was trying to remember the last time she had put her arms around her father and told him she loved him. How long ago had it been? Until finally her sisters said for them to go on. But before they went on, Adair piled three stones one on the other, for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

  At Cane Creek Adair and her little sisters found a place to cross where they had to wade only up to their knees. The water numbed them. They took off their shoes, held their skirts up in wads and their bundles overhead in one hand. They forged through.

  A wagon came up the Trace behind them, heading north like everybody else. It was driven by a man with a hard face and beside him two women; behind, three half-grown children sat backward, leaning against the seat. The children were staring glumly at the Trace receding away from them and then at the water as the wagon came across. The wagon trundled through the ford, spraying crescents of water from its wheels. The children turned their heads all in unison to look at the Colley girls and then turned back again. The girl had a white eye and both boys had long ha
ir tied back with boot strings. In her shawl the girl held a squirrel head and after staring long at Adair and her sisters, went back to eating on it. Turning it in her fingers to see what meat was left on the bone. The wagon jangled with household goods. Baskets, a clock, a bale of blankets.

  Adair said, Good day, and the man with the reins in his hands said,

  That’s the damndest hat I ever saw.

  Adair didn’t know which hat he was referring to, but she said, You don’t look so good yourself. She and Savannah and Little Mary sat down and tried to dry their legs and cotton stockings without being indiscreet.

  Who are you all?

  Upshaws.

  From where?

  From the Irish Wilderness. Near Jessie Hyssop’s tavern, town of Wilderness on Slayton Ford.

  The man had a pair of jaws like church pews, augmented by a curling brown beard. He said, Reeves burnt us out because we went into the Union Army camp to trade horses. Said we were collaborating.

  Well, said Adair. If you been trading for our horses I’ll go back and burn down whatever’s left. She stared at them with furious black eyes. If you’ve collaborated for my horse. Whiskey is his name. He’s a lineback dun with tiger stripes on his legs. They took him two days ago. And a heavy horse, brass colored, and a dark seal brown with no white on him. Our names are Colley. My father is Judge Marquis Colley.

  Well, you ain’t nothing special just because your daddy is a squire, said the man.

  I never seen horses that looked like that, one of the women said. And don’t you go threatening us.

  I ain’t threatening, said Adair. I am going to find our horses again and anybody who took them will pay for it. The three children, two boys and a girl, turned again all together in a single movement to stare at Adair and kept on staring. I need them to go find my father.

  Hush up, Adair, said Savannah. You’ll get us taken in.

  The horses leaned into their collars and the wagon creaked as it moved forward. The horses had U.S. Army brands on them. The Upshaw children continued to watch her and her sisters as they went off down the road.

  Did you see the brands? asked Little Mary.

  Also they had a U.S. Army ammunition box in there, said Savannah. The girl was sitting on it.

  After another mile the girls came upon them once again. One wobbling wheel had bent itself off the nave and collapsed. The front end had dropped onto the singletree. They were standing in the red dirt of the road and the wind took up the women’s skirts and pressed them against their legs and shoes. It scattered the snow in light sprays.

  Looks like you’re afoot, said Adair. She smiled.

  We got these horses to ride, said the woman. You’re the ones that are afoot.

  Adair and her sisters walked on. They came to the Military Crossing of the Black River and joined the lines of refugees and vehicles waiting to cross on the ferry. Nobody talked much for all they had to speak of were tales of misery and fire, and all these tales were alike, but instead inquired of one another for missing relatives. Mostly the missing were the men but also children had gone astray, and old people.

  As they neared Iron Mountain the road became disordered with broken gray basalt. The stones were the size of a skillet and the road had two shallow ruts through a jumbled bed of black stones. On an uphill stretch where the right-hand side fell off into a deep ravine, and the refugees’ wagons crashed and battered on the stones, a sign said the stony battery: worst stretch of road made by man. Alongside, Adair saw the remains of wheel hubs, broken spokes, horseshoes, and sections of iron tires. Down in the ravine were broken bottles and chairs, things that had fallen from the wagons and that no one cared to climb down and retrieve. The noise of the wagons was deafening.

  The following day at noon they found themselves alone on a long stretch of road going up the Saint Francis River valley. Walking between walls of standing dry grasses, big bluestem as tall as they themselves were, bent over as if pointing downwind toward something that had escaped.

  At this place their brother rode out of a stand of cane and stood waiting for them. He had a good Union carbine stood up on its butt on his thigh and the reins wrapped around his bad hand.

  He sat his horse and nodded to them, and smiled a thin smile. He rode a dwarfish gray horse that had stout legs and a head like a cheese cask. His uniform was of homespun and drawn up by hand, for the Confederacy had long ago abandoned the hopeless task of provisioning any troops whatever north of Little Rock. He had on a pair of laced-up boots that were nearly new, and Adair knew they were U.S. Army issue as well.

  Yo, girls, he said. His eyes were watchful. His jaw worked as he searched both ways up and down the Trace.

  Adair reached up and took her brother’s arm briefly and then let it go. He swung down and put his withered arm around her. Then in turn around Little Mary and then Savannah. He did not let go of the carbine.

  Adair heard then the long grinding complaints of alarmed fox squirrels. Somebody was coming up the road. Crows scattered among the treetops like black quarter notes. Then she saw the Upshaw family who had been in the broken wagon coming up the road. The women were riding the harnessed horses sitting sideways and the children riding behind. The U.S. brand stood out clearly on the horses’ jaws. The women’s bonnets billowed out in the wind. The man was afoot.

  John Lee stared at them out of his black eyes without cease until they passed by. They took in the sight of John Lee’s uniform and then turned away. They gazed straight ahead, for the whereabouts of a Confederate soldier was a dangerous thing to know. They went past with strange blank countenances as if they had been temporarily struck blind. John Lee bent over and spat on the ground.

  Who were those people?

  Upshaws, Adair said. They said they were from the Irish.

  They said Reeves burnt them out, said Savannah.

  For what?

  They claimed he caught them going to the Militia to trade horses.

  I bet they done more than trade horses.

  Where’d you go after you left the house?

  I went to Ponder’s Mill on the Little Black after the Militia pulled out, he said. You could see the Militia going north along the Military.

  Where were you looking from? Adair asked.

  Stanger’s Steep. He pulled his hat brim down against the stinging light snow. Colonel Berryman was there gathering up men. I bet there was three hundred men there. He stayed about as long as you can hold a hot horseshoe. Then he was off after them. Me along with them. People said they took Pa on north with some other prisoners. Carters said.

  Adair bent over against the wind and tucked her hands inside the shawl.

  What are we going to do?

  John Lee thought about it for a while.

  Go on north. They’re raiding down here till hell wouldn’t have you. Now, I don’t want you all living anywhere near the Yankee garrison. He paused and cleared his throat and spit in the snow. There are women that fall into bad habits in refugee camps. Pa wouldn’t want you all near women like that. Go and live with the Daltons at the store on the Saint Francis River. Stay out of the way of everybody.

  All right, said Adair. She and her sisters stood around him.

  John Lee nodded and watched the tree line. Now look here, what I got. It’s a new kind of rifle, what they call a repeater, a Spencer. I can almost shoot it with one hand. But it’s hard getting ammunition for it. It takes rimfire cartridges.

  Where’d you get that uniform?

  The Chilton girls still have a barn loom. I’ll be all right. But you all stay safe with the Daltons. They done their best over the whole war to stay out of everything and out of everybody’s way. Besides, they’re old people and surely they’ll let them alone. John Lee ran his bad hand down the breech of the Spencer repeater, for though the hand and arm were withered the sense of touch remained keen and he admired the blued steel. He said, Isn’t this one hell of a rifle?

  Adair said, I’ll go to the garrison first and ask after
Pa, then we’ll go to Daltons’.

  All right. He paused. Take care of that old quilt. The Militia will take it from you.

  All right. John Lee, I wish you wouldn’t go. We need somebody to go home.

  Home’s gone.

  The house ain’t gone.

  He had a grave and considering look on his face. He was a tall young male manned by great, silent, driving forces that worked in him like noiseless machinery. He had turned himself and these inchoate forces over to Colonel Reeves’s Fifteenth Missouri Cavalry, CSA.

  I like soldiering, he said. He rasped his palm on his rough homespun pants. If I live long enough to learn how. He paused again. I tell you what, it’s exciting. Traveling around the country with Reeves’s fellows. Hunting people. He paused. I shot a man for these shoes. The sun broke through, illuminating the light veils of snow. An explosion of crows in the treetops announced that more people were coming up the road. He stood in the stirrup and settled himself in the dragoon saddle. Though there’s some of the men won’t wear a dead man’s shoes.

  Savannah said, Now maybe somebody’s wearing Pa’s shoes.

  Shut your mouth, said Adair. You just keep it up and keep it up.

  Stop fighting, said John Lee. Look after one another. Family is all we got.

  All right, said Little Mary.

  Y’all take care, he said.

  He put his spurs to his gray horse. He turned back in the saddle and watched them for a long time and then rode away at a gallop through the foreground snow, and into a path in the thick cane, trailing a cloud of horse breath and flying powder.

  5

  Sunday July 24, 1864:

  Warm and pleasent in camp. In Camp al day. Enspection of armes by the Captain. Preaching at the schoolhouse. four of our bois from the Scout returned with 2 of the Mayfield girls prisonors. Rote a letter to My Sister and & Recieved on from her. The bois saw nothing of note.

  —FROM Found No Bushwhackers: The 1864 Diary of Sgt. James P. Mallery, Company A, Third Wisconsin Cavalry Stationed at Balltown, Missouri, PUBLISHED BY THE VERNON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, NEVADA, MISSOURI