The Roswell Women

by Statham, Frances Patton

  They continued walking, crossing the deep-rutted road on the other side of the provost marshal's headquarters, where a row of pointed Sibley tents stood with a cookstove set on rocks in front of each tent.

  "Want a cuppa coffee, soldier? You look like you could do with one this morning."

  Tom looked at a huge, bearded cook with his dirty apron wrapped around his protruding front. The man stood before his grated iron stove and leaned toward the metal coffeepot, already steaming.

  Tom nodded and took his tin dipper cup from his musket, where he had tied it so he wouldn't lose it.

  Puckett did the same, and then, with full cups, the two walked back to the steps of the provost marshal's headquarters, where they pulled out some hardtack and dipped it into the hot coffee to soften it before eating.

  Everywhere he looked, Tom saw plentiful supplies and smelled food cooking. If his stomach wasn't so queasy, he would take out his creeper pan and fry up some bacon, too. But he didn't have much desire for army rations that morning.

  "Wish I had a big, juicy red apple from home," Tom said, putting down the hardtack.

  "That would be nice," Puckett agreed.

  "Even better than all those blackberries we ate back in Georgia."

  "I expect Lee wouldn't be mindin' the blackberries or the apples 'bout now," Alonzo said. "I heard tell he said it was awful hard fightin' a war on ashcakes and water."

  "You notice that's about all the women have been eatin' for the past two days?" Tom said.

  "Now, don’t be goin' soft on those women, Tom. We got a job to do, and it won't help none for you to start worryin' about what they get to eat."

  "But have you wondered what's gonna happen to them? I mean, once they get to Indiana and we just dump them out to forage for themselves?"

  "No. I got other things to worry about—like goin' to ordinance supply to get some more powder for my musket before we pull out of here."

  "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if we ran into some Rebs today."

  "Yeah. That's why I need me some gunpowder."

  Tom watched Alonzo chew on his hardtack and finish off his coffee. He stared down at his own half-empty cup and finally poured the coffee on the ground.

  "Now what did you go and do that for?" Alonzo asked.

  "I ain't hungry, or thirsty, either. I got a great big knot in my stomach. Had it ever since last night when I started thinkin' of my pa and the farm back home."

  "You're not that far away, are you?"

  "No. Just over the mountain, past Nashville."

  "Sometimes, Tom, I think your mind just ain't on fightin' Rebs."

  "It sure would be better than doin' what we're doin' right now. I won't ever forget that woman's scream when her little girl fell off the trestle."

  "Ain't no use worryin' about what happened yesterday, Tom Traymore. You better keep your mind on today."

  "I reckon so." The train whistle blew several short blasts, and Tom stood up. "And I reckon we'd better get goin' back to the train. Sounds like we're 'bout ready to leave again."

  "Well, I'll hurry on to get me some more powder. I'll see you back at the boxcar."

  The two parted company, with Tom headed once again for the tracks where the locomotive was beginning to build up steam. Smoke from the woodburner rose in the air in great white puffs, resembling Indian messages from the hills. And like an answer to the smoke signals, the women walked in a slow procession toward the rail yard.

  This time, Ellie was too weak to walk. Flood, with the same strength she had used to sling a sack of wool over her shoulders at the mill, now carried the young mill worker to boxcar eleven and hoisted her up into Madrigal's waiting arms.

  Rebecca, walking beside Allison, suddenly said, "You know what day it is, today?"

  "I'm not sure, but I think it's Thursday," Allison replied.

  Overhearing them, Alma, who was directly behind the two, joined in the conversation. "Wonder how long it'll be before we reach Nashville?"

  "Several more days, at least. That is, if we don’t run into trouble along the line."

  "My little Robert was sickly last night." Alma confided. "I sure hope he's not comin' down with the fever, too."

  "I pray not," Allison replied. She passed the basket containing Morrow to Rebecca after the woman had climbed aboard the train.

  Once the twenty-one women were all accounted for, the bolts were slid into place, cutting off most of the light and making them prisoners once more.

  To Madrigal, the sound of the door being shut that morning was particularly jarring. She didn't like the trapped feeling any more than she liked the darkness.

  As the train pulled from the station, low-hanging clouds, heavy with the seeds of rain, obscured the top of Lookout Mountain and the terraces of Missionary Ridge, where the trenches and foxholes of the recent battles waged by Bragg and Sherman pockmarked the land.

  The train approached the wide Tennessee River in the valley, settled onto the trestle bridge, and began its journey through the early morning fog enveloping the tracks.

  Now, as the locomotive crossed it, Tom Traymore viewed the landscape from the top of the caboose. Normally, that car was attached to the end of the train, but for the trip it had been placed directly behind the locomotive as additional protection from possible attack.

  All of the guards on the train would have to be especially careful, for the area between Chattanooga and Nashville contained small bands of Confederate irregulars.

  If word got out to any of the Rebs that they were transporting Confederate women, Tom knew the lives of the engineer and the guards wouldn't be worth a lead nickel.

  "What are you thinkin', Tom?"

  A startled Tom came out of his reverie. He shifted his body and said, "Oh, more than likely what you're thinkin', Lonnie. The sooner we get to Nashville, the better off we'll be."

  The uneasiness the guards felt was similar to that element of hidden danger that always lurks beneath the surface of consciousness, like a child's nightmare that no amount of gentle persuasion will rout. Their fear was transferred to the prisoners, but for the women, it was an inverse fear—that the Confederates would not come. And the one who worried the most, besides Madrigal, was Flood Tompkins.

  The train began the upgrade climb out of the valley and into more rugged land, the engine straining and puffing to carry the twenty loaded boxcars.

  The women's thoughts turned from possible rescue to the problem of maintaining their equilibrium against the sharp incline until the locomotive, hugging the rail bed, could reach the more level ground beyond the ridge.

  They had been traveling for less than thirty minutes when Flood, losing her balance, fell against Ellie, who was lying prone on the straw before her. As Flood's hand touched Ellie's face, she knew that something was different about her. Instead of being on fire, her brow was now cool to the touch. Relieved, Flood decided the fever much have broken some time that morning, even though Ellie had given no sign of coming out of her delirium. Then Flood began to get worried.

  "Allison?" she called. "Could you bring out that phosphorus light for just a moment? So I can check on Ellie?"

  "Of course." Allison reached into her pocket, but the flask was gone. "I can't find it, Flood. It isn't in my pocket."

  Madrigal spoke up with a fierceness in her voice. "All right. Whoever took Allison's pocket light last night, you'd better give it back. Now, I'm gonna sit by the door. I'll hold out my hand, and I want to feel that flask in my hand in less than a minute. If not, you'll answer to me as soon as we make the next stop."

  Allison listened. No one in the boxcar moved near the door once Madrigal had stationed herself there.

  Then Flood spoke up. "All right, Addie. We're waitin'."

  "What do want to pick on me for, Flood? I didn't take it."

  "You forget, Addie. I have the second sight. I know you're the one who took it."

  "Well, what if I did take it? She ruined my moss-filled pillow. It's only fair I get to keep s
omethin' in its place."

  "If you're speakin' of Allison, Addie, you know she didn't use the pillow for herself. It was to stop Ellie's bleedin'."

  There was a rustle of straw and a movement toward the bit of light coming through the crack in the bolted door. "All right, Madrigal, if that's your hand I feel. Take the old bottle."

  Once again there was a rustle of straw as Addie turned over the bottle and rushed back to her place.

  "I've got it, Allison. Where are you?" Madrigal called out.

  "Right beside Flood."

  The flask changed hands again. Removing its lid, Allison held up the flask until the phosphorus began to glow. Faces gathered around her assumed an eerie greenish shade. Then she moved it to illuminate Ellie's face. What she saw almost caused her to drop the flask in the straw.

  Ellie lay stiffly, her unseeing eyes staring upward. She was no longer feverish. Her skin, cold and clammy, proclaimed a new disaster.

  "Ellie?" Madrigal called out. "Can you hear me, Ellie?"

  Her question went unnoticed. "Ellie, you've got to answer me."

  Allison leaned over to feel the pulse at Ellie's throat. There was no trace. She placed her head on Ellie's chest. There was no sign of a heartbeat, however fragile. Ellie was dead.

  With the same gentleness she had used to close her own father's eyes at death, Allison Forsyth moved her fingers in a downward motion and closed the frightened blue eyes.

  "She can't hear you, Madrigal," she said. "She won't ever hear you again."

  "I know."

  Madrigal moved away as the phosphorus light went out. She shed no tears for her friend. Instead, she hugged her knees and put her head down to think. Ellie was the only reason she had remained on the train this far. Now she no longer had to stay. At the first opportunity, she would escape, just as Fannie Morton had done. And she knew the very person who would help her—the guard, Tom Traymore, who kept watching her every time the train stopped for water or fuel.

  Whatever she had to promise him, she would.

  Flood Tompkins was not so stoic. With great heaving sobs, she grieved, and soon all the babies in the boxcar joined in.

  "I'll take Morrow and try to quiet her, Miss Allison," Rebecca said.

  "Thank you, Rebecca. I've just fed her, so she can't be hungry."

  At the other end of the boxcar, Alma's low, mournful voice began to comfort her feverish child. "Hush, little baby, don't you cry. Mama's gonna sing you a lullaby."

  Rebecca joined in the singing, lulling Morrow to sleep, while Allison comforted Flood.

  But the red-haired young woman remained by herself. Madrigal O'Laney wanted no one to comfort her. She wanted to feel the grief sweeping over her like the waters rushing into the millrace gate; she wanted to remember Ellie as she had been that day by the Chattahoochee when the retreating soldiers had crossed the bridge before it was burned.

  She waited, but no grief came. Her heart was empty—every bit as empty as it had been that night she had shot Caleb Rabb.

  Chapter 16

  By late afternoon, the train had stopped.

  Beyond the tracks, in a small meadow where yellow bitterweed mingled with green blades of grass and the mountains were tiered in varied shades of blue to the east, the women stood with bowed heads.

  Nineteen bodies were being consigned to the earth that had once given them sustenance. Ellie was in the group. And Mr. Rowdybush, too—both dead of the fever that had swept through the mill workers like wildfire.

  Long, deep trenches had been dug by the guards. And in one corner of the meadow, slightly apart from the others, a smaller trench had been shallowed out from the hard red clay for Alma's son, little Robert E. Lee Brady.

  The smell of the earth was in the air—a fine red dust choked the nostrils like pungent incense sprinkled over the land. But in place of a priest's accompanying bell, the jarring, raucous whistle of the engine sounded, signaling that it was past time to go. And so, with a final prayer, the women began to return to the train—all except Alma, who sat by the small mound of earth and smoothed the dirt where she had transplanted a clump of blue flowers.

  Allison stood back, waiting to walk with the woman to the boxcar, but Alma seemed in no hurry to leave the grave site.

  Once she had finished the contouring of the mound, Alma placed little Robert's baby bonnet upon the small cross, made from the green twigs of a nearby weeping willow. Then she reached into her apron pocket, took out a bone rattle, and tied it to the ribbons of the bonnet.

  Her thin voice began to sing, "Hush, little baby, don't you cry. Mama's gonna sing you a lullaby."

  The train whistle again signaled the engineer's impatience, but Alma, unmindful of anything else, kept singing in a hypnotic manner over and over, until Tom Traymore motioned for Allison to help the woman back to the boxcar.

  "Alma, we have to go now."

  The woman stood up. "He's so little to be by himself, Allison. But I'm gonna sing to him every night of my life. You think he'll be able to hear me?"

  "Yes, Alma. He'll hear you."

  "It was Mama Lou who always sang to him before. But she doesn't even know he's dead."

  As Allison put her hand on Alma's arm and drew her toward the boxcar, two yellow monarch butterflies lit on the clump of flowers and folded their wings, while in the tree beyond, a bird began to chirp a strange, sweet song. And if Allison had not known better, she would have vowed that a mockingbird had taken up Alma's song and was now singing to little Robert in his lonely grave.

  Tom Traymore walked behind the two women. When Allison turned around, he quickly averted his face. But it was too late. She had already seen the tear rolling down his cheek.

  Once the train started again, it picked up speed, with a constant, punishing strain against the elevated grade of the roadbed, as if to make up for the time lost that afternoon.

  An uncommon silence gripped the women in boxcar eleven, and they seemed oblivious to the jolting and the metallic grinding noise that accompanied the turning of wheels. On tracks fired to anvil heat by the full day's absorption of the summer sun, they continued to travel, with Nashville as the destination of the more fortunate ones. Even the babies, enervated by the heat, refused to cry. And with each mile the unceasing clack of the wheels mocked them all with a subtle warning. Too far. Too far now. You'll never get home again.

  Several miles to the north, at one of the military outposts where a sentry shack had been erected to protect that area of track from the enemy, an impatient Marcus Stagg paced up and down under the shade of a sweet gum tree while he took out his gold watch to recheck the time. The train carrying the women was late. It should have gotten to the siding at least an hour ago.

  "You don't think something has happened to the train, do you?" Marcus asked one of the guards.

  "No, Mr. Stagg. It'll get here eventually. Just takes a little longer sometimes. Got to expect delays with a war going on."

  Stagg grunted. He replaced his watch and, uncomfortable from the heat, he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow, mopping it as he walked toward his carriage and horses.

  Despite himself, he smiled. It had taken quite a bit of doing to bribe the officer at the army post to sign the papers, giving him the pick of the mill workers for his own mill. It had cost him a pretty penny, too, but it wasn't every day that a man had a chance to get fifty or sixty skilled workers for nothing beyond a little food and shelter.

  He could count the profits already—even greater than he'd ever dreamed of. Making cloth for the Union army was a lucrative business. The fact that his goods hadn't held up very well was of little concern to him. The army didn't seem to mind, either. They kept ordering more goods without saying a word about the quality of the material or the exorbitant prices he charged.

  Marcus looked at his three empty wagons and the drivers sitting under the shade of the tree. "You'd better go ahead and feed the mules," he called out. "Looks like the train is going to be awhile in coming."
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br />   He seated himself on the leather cushion of the carriage and waited. Three-fourths of an hour later, Marcus heard the train. Relieved, he climbed out of his buggy and began to walk back toward the tracks.

  Inside boxcar eleven, the women heard the whistle of another train. Immediately, they felt the swerve as their own train responded, veering off to the right.

  "Feels like we're pulling off to a side track," Rebecca commented to no one in particular.

  "Well, I sure hope we aren't on the same track as that other engine," Madrigal answered. "Else the guards will have to dig some more graves today."

  "But they'd be dead, too," Flood said, "if that happened. Unless they jumped off the train in time."

  Allison was silent until Madrigal said, "What about it, Allison? You think any of 'em would really give a whoopubb as to what happened to any of us?"

  Allison remembered the tear on Tom Traymore's face. "Yes. There's at least one who wouldn't desert us."

  "And who might that be?" Madrigal asked.

  "The same one who watches you every time you get out of the boxcar."

  "Oh. Him. " Madrigal made a face, but it was too dark inside the boxcar for Allison to notice.

  But there was something else that Allison had noticed beyond Tom Traymore's obvious attraction to Madrigal. It was Madrigal herself and her reaction to her friend's demise. No tears had been shed over Ellie at the graveside. It was almost as if Madrigal had removed herself emotionally from Ellie long before the last rites. It couldn't be that the young girl was unfeeling. Madrigal had demonstrated her concern for Ellie over and over again, while she was still living. But now that she was dead, it was a different matter. Still, whatever prompted Madrigal's present reaction was her own concern. Not Allison's. She was prepared to accept Madrigal without judgment or reservation.

  Being in the boxcar with twenty other woman was an experience that Allison would never forget. For no two women were alike. Each had an inherent rhythm of her own that manifested itself in variations day after day—women who accepted, women who blamed.