Enemy Women

by Paulette Jiles

  At two in the afternoon a minié ball came directly between the blades of the side wheel and struck him with a ripping sound he later remembered hearing even above the noise of the machinery. It felt as if he had been struck in the face with a poker. Blood jumped in ropes down his tunic. It was splashing on his hands, running out of him, staining everything red. Lieutenant Brawley came running at him with wide eyes.

  Neumann pulled his revolver so fast he didn’t remember doing it, and stood at the rail with it at arm’s length looking for a target and his hand was stained with blood. He saw a puff of ochre gunpowder smoke rising above a tall cypress in the swamps on the Arkansas side.

  There he is!

  Sir, get away! Brawley yelled at him. He’s reloading!

  The hard watery wind off the Mississippi tore into his eyes and the shifting brilliant planes dazzled him but he held to the rail and tried to take aim. Another ball came past and below men were yelling Sharpshooter! Sharpshooter!

  Neumann fired all five shots in quick succession out of rage, though he had no chance of hitting anything. One was a misfire but the other four clipped a limb from a cypress and sent the new green needles spraying. Neumann stood watching intently, he was seized by the fierce craving to see a man fall out of one of the cypresses, to see him tumble out with his long rifle crashing through limbs before him. Thick smoke from his revolver barrel drifted away in lengthening streams, and the side-wheeler slid downstream on its flat, keelless bottom.

  He looked down at his uniform coat and saw streams of blood staining it, running off and spattering the deck. Where am I hit? Where am I hit? I’ve been hit.

  Come on, sir, down to sick bay!

  Brawley pulled out a cotton handkerchief and shoved it against the major’s right cheek. Brawley pressed hard and the side wheel churned on, bearing them downstream, past whatever cypress remote in those swamps that had been the perch of the Rebel sharpshooter.

  Here, let me have it, said Neumann. He snatched the handkerchief out of Brawley’s hand. Damn that son of a bitch, damn that son of a bitch.

  He proceeded to walk calmly down the vibrating deck and into the passenger compartments, laying out behind him a train of blood like a powder fuse. He walked down the stairs to the first deck. There some of the troops looked up at him from where they lay sprawled on the decks.

  Knock any teeth out? said an infantryman of the Eighth Iowa. I’d rather lose a finger than get any teeth knocked out.

  At ease! yelled the lieutenant. He walked behind the major to watch and see if he would faint or not. The men stuck their heads out of the cargo doors where they had been bunked in. At ease!

  Two men were busily cleaning their rifles, sawing up and down industriously with the ramrods.

  Did you get him, sir?

  No. I just knocked his teeth out. Neumann had to say this around the bubbling blood in his mouth. He had to lean and spit.

  I don’t see no teeth in that, the infantryman said.

  I don’t expect he got him, said a sergeant. Usually you can hear them splash. They go eeeeeeeee whumph.

  Neumann lay down on the cot in sick bay and turned to one side as the doctor began threading his needle. He stared resolutely at the white-painted wainscoting. His thoughts were nothing but a long furious stream of swearing. The curved needle penetrated the skin of his cheek and his guts coiled inside him as he felt the thread being drawn through.

  That night he sat in his bunk in passenger accommodation no. 10, fighting against the pain. His face was swollen like a full moon and his skin strained at the stitches. Lieutenant Brawley read the New Orleans newspaper by the light of a candle. There was a ping and Brawley looked up.

  There was one, he said.

  I think they’re shooting at your candlelight, said Neumann.

  Let ’em shoot, sir, said Brawley. What they’re using is those old smoothbores. That ball can’t penetrate nothing.

  Did pretty well on me, said Neumann. His whole head throbbed, and it beat out a rhythm with the blades.

  I mean these bulkheads. The lieutenant looked up from his newspaper. Now, if it had hit you in the skull, you see, you’d never have felt it. Brawley laughed in a sort of snorting chortle.

  Goddamn, Neumann said. Just think. There was another ping, and a thunking sound. They both looked up. The old conical .54 caliber ball had bit into the bulkhead and stopped. He thought, One could well come through the window. But neither of them had his head hanging out the window so he supposed it was all right. The side wheel walked across the waters of the Mississippi with smashing steps, drawing them down into the sugar country.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE the Bombardment of the Defenses of Mobile, Major Neumann had absentmindedly pulled out all the stitches of his face wound. His face was permanently distorted where the ball had chipped a cheekbone but he didn’t think about it, he was possessed with the nervousness men had before a battle, a kind of vivid, jittering dread.

  The Federal baggage train had bogged down in the sandy road coming up from Fish River, and the wagoneers were trying to jack the wheels out of the sand with new-cut pine poles. Neumann rode full tilt between the pines to one side of the jammed-up Federal wagons, looking for the First Indiana Artillery, his orders in his tunic pocket. The road alongside Mobile Bay snaked among the saw palmettos and the pines, a highway of red sand into which wheels sank and men straggled ankle deep. Enormous horseflies feasted on them at leisure.

  A. J. Smith’s men were volunteer troops from Iowa and Indiana. Veterans of Chattanooga and the march through Georgia. They called themselves Smith’s Gorillas and had learned to pray and eat and reload on the run and they were good at arson. The men had started burning houses and barns and sheds and fence rails at Fish River, as soon as the gangplanks were down. They marched through the sandy pine forests from one small village to another, from Fairhope to Montrose, and more often than not they took what was available.

  Neumann and Lieutenant Brawley came upon Company A of the Eighth Iowa Infantry rooting around in the sheds of a small farm among the pines. They called out to the dusty veterans in their blue faded tunics to keep moving on. The men dodged him. They had chickens tied to their haversacks and bunches of sugarcane in their hands.

  Wait till we get within range of their guns! Neumann shouted. Then you’ll think about something else!

  Go on, Major. A bearded and weathered corporal walked and ate a slab of the sludge called candy that came from the last boiling of the cane. I didn’t have my breakfast.

  There’s killing going to go on today, said Brawley. As if he had experienced much.

  I hope you find time to do some fighting, Corporal, said Neumann. As well as eating.

  I’ll see what I can do, sir.

  They slogged on through the sea grape and wait-a-minute vines. In the villages alongside Mobile Bay, hidden back in the thin forests, Neumann saw a people that seemed to him to be Red Indians. They stood in the doorways of huts thatched with palm leaf and moved very slowly out of the way as Smith’s Gorillas set the huts afire. They dressed themselves in dusty fustian with bright woven sashes and their bangs cut straight across their foreheads. They were a people of ancient lineage who cared little about modern war or soldiers of any stripe. As if they had retired from the world and from all desire for real estate or love of possessions. They sat on the ground beside their hammocks and watched their huts burn and the rats bolt out of the burning thatch.

  The corporal came upon a basket of dried peaches and began to devour them with one hand while carrying his Springfield in the other.

  Neumann rode past and said, If you men would stop having yourselves a party!

  One of the Iowa men yelled at him, Sir! The corporal’s eeeatin’ agaiiiiin!! You better stop him! Once he gets started he eats everthing, live chickens and everthing!

  Neumann shut his mouth and looked straight ahead.

  We’ll keep you informed whenever he’s eatin’ again! The private that yelled this at Neumann nodded eagerly w
ith a bright sarcastic smile.

  Thank you, Private, said Neumann and rode ahead.

  The lines of men in blue forged on at route step. The veterans had tied rags or socks over the firing mechanisms of their rifles to protect them from the sand, and as they swung along in they sang.

  They marched past large plantations, and the slaves abandoned their tools in the sugar fields, among the new shoots of cotton, their hands scarred with the cuts of cane leaves, burned with the sugar-boiling. So cruelly marked by their enslavement and yet they came singing. Four women with their arms across one another’s shoulders, dancing a jumping line dance. Calling to the men in a kind of song, and the men came before them calling out the response. Neumann could not understand the words, but it lifted his heart. The former slaves followed the army in the hundreds, shouting and waving.

  Then they came within range of the Confederate guns at Spanish Fort. Neumann heard a heavy crump. The groups of slaves from the fields turned and ran into the line of trees, and the women’s dresses flew like sheets before the wind, like quilts on a line, and they carried their children against them as they ran.

  A fountain of sand and palm leaves and pine branches blew skyward and it then rained down on the blue-clad troops with rattling noises, then two other hits nearby. So began their bombardment. And behind the screen of their artillery the Confederates put out one last line of troops.

  The Confederate infantry fired one volley from the pines, and then Neumann saw a solid wall of running men in butternut, the flash of ramrods in the air as they reloaded. They came running out of their own thick banks of smoke. They appeared out of the palmetto and pine like dismal ragged spirits, screaming, and their torn clothing fluttered. Neumann drew his revolver and suddenly found himself staggering forward on foot and his horse thrashing on the ground behind him. Apparently his horse had been shot out from under him and he had landed on his feet or maybe scrambled up.

  A man was coming at him under the umbrella of a wide-brimmed hat the size of a dinner table, and for a shirt he was wearing a woman’s dress bodice frothing with dirty lace and ribbons and he was barefoot. He held a six-shot revolver in one hand, and he was looking for a target. Neumann stood and held his own revolver straight out and fired. The ball hit the man in the right shoulder and he shot backward as if jerked by an invisible rope. The man came to his bare feet again like a cat. Then Neumann found himself among men in blue who were running, running past him and over him, nearly knocking him down. The Union forces were running forward over their own dead and wounded. They were racing toward the Confederates in a wild charge.

  Stop! he screamed. Stop and form up!

  Hoooooo, they yelled at him. A peculiar sound, as if a million men were blowing across the necks of bottles. A shell exploded nearby and Neumann smelled blood and turpentine but he did not stop to see what had been hit, because the men of the Eighth Iowa had not been prepared for this last Confederate charge and their ammunition was still on the baggage wagons, they had only four more volleys. He caught a loose horse and managed to get on it as it circled and circled in a wild panic. He shoved his foot in the stirrup and swung up even while he was being thrown outward by the centrifugal force of the horse’s spinning.

  The Union quartermasters were bringing up the baggage train in a frantic charge and the rest of the men coming up were forced to scramble over them, split up and run around. The big six-ton freight wagons needed a wide crossing to get turned onto the Spanish Fort road, but the road was narrow, three were jammed in the pines, sunk to the hubs in sand. Several had turned so tightly that they had overset and their teamsters were scrambling to cut the mules loose. The mob of bluecoats were running around and through the jammed wagons. They stopped to load and fire and load and fire again, and Neumann counted three good volleys that fogged the crossing in cordite smoke.

  Neumann put his horse in a gallop and the long, feathery bunches of needles on the loblolly pines lashed him in the face. Artillery boomed behind him, the peculiar wowing sound of a Parrott shell. A lieutenant colonel rode directly across his path.

  Get those men to form up! They are bunching up!

  Sir! shouted Neumann. Permission to help clear these wagons! He knew the men were not bunching up. Smith’s Gorillas were too experienced to pack up. A shell went by overhead as if it were a train on some solitary journey, determined to arrive on time, perhaps in Atlanta, for it tore past on a flat trajectory, removing limbs and treetops as it went. Branches fell on them and the smell of cordite came in clouds from behind them.

  Abandon them! yelled the lieutenant colonel. Just abandon the damn things!

  Neumann kept on. The horse under him probably had not rested in five days. Its gallop was uneven and stumbling. Men streamed past, keeping a distance from one another, stopping to kneel and reload, and then they went on. Smoke drifted among the pines in thin, trailing veils. The five-foot wheels of the wagons ground through the sand on their iron tires with a crisp sizzle.

  Two baggage wagons had locked wheels, and the teamsters were screaming at each other and shoving at the wheels while sweat poured down their faces. Neumann hauled up on his horse and at that time heard the low and ugly sound of a Whitworth mortar, the whoo-der whoo-der noise it made as it carved its way through the dense air, coming straight down on them from overhead. Major Neumann put both arms over his head. His horse squatted in terror.

  The mortar struck a commissary wagon and Neumann was sprayed with flour and blood. He felt as if he were somebody else, that he was living outside his own body and wondered for one millisecond if he were dead, had been beheaded. Two mules were down, one of them missing its forelegs, and the stumps churned in the air and hosed the men alongside with blood. The sides of the wagon were scattered in fragments among the trees and the trace chains were embedded in a pine at the side of the road. A mule hoof was sticking out of a burst barrel of flour.

  Cut loose and leave it! Neumann could hear himself screaming, so he couldn’t possibly be dead. In fact he was immensely alive. He jumped off his horse and drew his sword and began to cut what mules were left alive out of their harnesses. When he laid his left hand on his scabbard to draw out the sword with his right, he discovered he was missing the little finger and the ring finger on his left hand, ragged white leaders sticking out of the stumps. He took off his neck cloth and tied the hand in a tight bind, then got his sword out and went back to cutting the mules loose.

  Another shell came whooing overhead, a struggling mule kicked one of the teamsters in the face and knocked out all the upper teeth on one side of his mouth, so that when he jumped to his feet again Neumann thought the man had been hit with a shell fragment. The teamster spat blood and teeth onto his blue uniform coat and did not seem to notice it. Together Neumann and the teamsters wrenched and tore at the harness and then the mules were loose and the teamsters jumped on their backs to ride them back down the road out of range. Horses would stand through a bombardment, but mules would bolt, and so they had to be taken back. His coat was covered with flour and his ripped hand spewed blood out of the neck cloth.

  Neumann galloped to the next jam and the next. The wagons were turned every which way. Their wagon tongues were thrust into the Alabama sand, the mules kicking at the wagon tongues or their drivers or whatever they could reach. Neumann put his sword on the inside of the harness, ran it between mule and leather and then cut it through in one stroke.

  Lieutenant Brawly came up at a gallop and called to Neumann,

  The First Indiana’s guns are going into line up ahead! And Carlin’s guns are still on the transports!

  What the hell are they doing there? Neumann yelled. He had the almost overwhelming desire to knock the young lieutenant off his horse. Go back and tell him we are clearing the road for him! They are shelling the hell out of us!

  Yes sir! Ain’t this something? Brawley grinned. They’ve got Texas and Missouri troops in that fort, ain’t going to be easy to get them pried loose.

  Go on, Braw
ley.

  Neumann watched him go and then got on the commandeered horse. The road between Fish River and Spanish Fort was littered with Confederate caps and rifles and shoes, he saw powder horns and the bits of paper that served for wadding. The contents of Union baggage wagons were spewed over the trees on both sides. Somewhere in all that mess lay his fingers.

  THEY BIVOUACKED BEHIND a slight rise of ground, within the sandy pine forest east of Spanish Fort. The quartermasters were still attempting to sort out the stores of the baggage train.

  At the surgeon’s tent he bent his head down to his knees while the surgeon held his hand and whacked loose the ends of the leaders and drew the skin over the stumps with dirty thread. He heard men screaming in the tents beyond and before long he was screaming like the rest until the surgeon jerked the last thread tight and tied it off.

  Are you going to pass out? the surgeon asked.

  No, no, just wrap it up, said Neumann. His voice was hoarse from the screaming and the cordite smoke. Suddenly he felt his mouth fill with water and he fought back the vomit.

  Looks like you got hit before.

  Don’t remind me.

  There may be some metal fragments in here.

  Just leave it, said Neumann. I got to get out of here. He walked away from the tents to find Brawley. As he walked he shed flakes of flour and blood over his boots.

  He walked through the pines and both hands shook slightly as if they were jig dancing to some private music of their own and he could not stop them. He felt elated and alive in a peculiar and contingent way. He kept thinking of a body he had seen earlier, draped over the walls of Spanish Fort, missing its entire left side, so blood soaked he could not have said whether it were Union or Confederate or a butchered hog or a strung-out bag of rags.

  He found the fire near the beach where he and Brawley had unloaded their saddles and bedrolls. He felt the tension thrash through him, felt it beat its way through every muscle in his abdomen and his shoulders and then drain out of him. He ducked his head twice, to pull at the muscles at the back of his neck. He pulled his saddle blanket over his face and listened late into the night as the men of the Eighth Iowa waded into the waters of the bay for oysters, breaking them loose with their bayonets, calling out to one another how good they were.