Enemy Women Read online

  I need him tonight, said John Lee. He was sitting in front of the fireplace, his heels out on the hearthstones, his leather leggins smoking. To himself he said, Shit fire and save the matches. He held his shrunken left arm in his right. He had stood the smoothbore in the corner. Either me or Pa are on Highlander all the time, he’s about wore out. John Lee turned in the chair to look at his father. The pockets of his hunting coat were full of .58 caliber conical balls, and they thudded together when he turned.

  You can’t have Dolly, said Savannah. She had come to the doorway from the kitchen. Dolly is very emotional.

  John Lee snorted and turned back. His black hair fell in his face. Adair can’t ride that horse all day ever day.

  All the time, said Adair. And I am going to start at first light tomorrow.

  When the Dipper’s handle had turned under the mountains she went to the outhouse where the frozen shit down in the vault was piling up into a rigid peak until it nearly reached the seat but her father would not do anything about it and John Lee was going hunting so everything was left up to the girls. She turned over a gourd of fireplace ash into the pit. In the kitchen she filled the wooden bucket with hot water and washed herself under her nightgown and thought she would rather live in the woods than put up with people like this.

  Upstairs, Savannah lay asleep with two kittens and the pet skunk so Adair pulled her own feather tick onto the floor and slept there.

  ADAIR GOT UP at six the next morning in the dark and put the girls’ hand mirror in her dress pocket. Then she took a pinch of salt out of the salt box and sprinkled it on the coals of the fire. She watched the sparks but saw no message in them of the man she was to marry. She did it once again and thought she might have seen the face of a soldier. One of the young men of the county.

  Outside, as she passed the kitchen window, she watched her breath appear before her in the lamplight and then it died away in moist clouds. This was the smoke of her internal fire and her soul. Every breath was a letter to the world. These she mailed into the cold air leaning back with pursed lips to send it upward. She stood and listened to the black wolves on Courtois singing up and down the scales. She held a candle in her hands and it shone in bars through her fingers on the snow.

  She went to the barn and put the candle in its sconce against the crossbeam of the main stall. The girls’ sidesaddles were lined up on the rail of the junk stall. She put her saddle on Whiskey. His taffeta coat shone in different colors as he moved, from gold to tobacco to gray, and he was anxious to get out of the stall. Adair knew he was a horse of great courage and amiability by the way he cocked his ears toward her and listened to her when she spoke to him.

  She led him out to the yard rails and the world was silent, and this silence was a coin to be spent very carefully. She wadded up her skirts so she could get her knee around the leaping horn and put her left toe into the stirrup. She wore her brother’s long johns under her skirts and heavy stockings rolled down over her light shoes. Then Adair and Whiskey rode out into the dawn along Beaverdam Creek, and the snow was as pale as mist and the pack that belonged to the black wolf was running through the pines on the ridges above them.

  They began to gallop and the snow flew up around her in waves. It was the winter of 1860-1861, before the war had begun. Whiskey charged forward, she could hardly hold him back, he wanted to leap out into the world and find out what was in it. Adair braced her weight on her right thighbone, gripped the leaping horn with her right knee against the surge of his gallop. They ran straight through the glassy black pools of Beaverdam where new snow massed white on the banks. The water spouted around her in fountains and her skirts billowed out behind her.

  They rode down the valley of Beaverdam Creek, on to where it narrowed. They charged up the ridge trail at a full gallop and passed her mother’s grave and its armor of flat limestones. When they gained the top of the ridge, even from that distance she could hear the percussive grinding of Ponder’s Steam Mill on the Little Black River. There while they stood the sun came up. It boiled up molten in the cold pines and lit every massive trunk as they stood in their ranks. Struck the top of the mountains, and made mists in the valleys.

  Whiskey stepped out eagerly, his ears up, his neck arched high, looking for the next new thing. They came to the Blue Hole spring. The spring sprawled out of a bluff of limestone and was caught in a mossy dam someone had made. You were supposed to lean backward over a well and look at the well water in the mirror to see the face of your future intended. But there were so many rivers and creeks and springs in the hills that nobody dug wells. The pool of the Blue Hole spring would have to do. Her cousin Lucinda Newnan said these devices told only what your own desires were, and these tricks of descrying the future just revealed a girl’s own intentions and not a thing else. But Adair wanted to know somehow, for the wrong man could shut you up in a house, he could take your horse away from you if he proved to be cruel, and put him to a plow, and beat you with a broom handle and no one could rescue you. She had not heard of anyone who hadn’t married, except the Witch of Slayton Ford. She had to know. Perhaps she was asking to see the wrong man so she could be forewarned. Could see his dark intentions even though they were hidden behind a handsome face.

  She tied Whiskey to a low limb, and then sat at the foot of a sycamore that leaned out over the pool. She sat down in the snow, with her head tipped back and the hand mirror held overhead. Leaned farther and farther back, trying to bring the pool’s surface within the small moon of the hand mirror. And at last it appeared. The rocks below the surface formed a face, and the reflection of the back of her own head made it seem that the face was surrounded with dark hair, and a small fish swam out of the teeth. Well, who is it? She thought. Who is it? Her breath clouded the mirror and she wiped it on her sleeve and looked again. She thought of the boys of Ripley County and Carter and Butler, almost all of them ready to go away to war, and could recognize none of them. What lay beneath the water was the face of a stranger in limestones the color of bone with topside minnows floating through his head like intentions that she could not decipher. Her fingers in the crocheted gloves were cold. A brown, dry oak leaf fell into the water and the stranger smiled. Adair gasped and the mirror fell out of her hand into the pool. It flashed and wavered into darkness. She beat the snow from the back of her skirt and although she tried to find the little mirror with a sycamore rod, and later with a cant hook, she could never recover it.

  3

  But in general, and whenever they wished, Union troops shot or hanged their prisoners, as did their guerilla foes. Many soldiers alluded to this widespread practice, but few so matter-of-factly as Private Edward Hansen . . . who had joined the Union Second Missouri Light Artillery. On July 19, 1864, near Patterson [southeastern] Missouri, Hansen noted in his diary, “Up to this day we had done but little skirmishing and catched several fellows, very mistrusting figures, which we had orders to take with us as prisoners, but no sooner did we find one in arms we just hung them to the next best tree.”

  —FROM Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri, 1861-1865,

  BY MICHAEL J. FELLMAN,

  OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK, 1989

  The Federals came to our home two or three days later and began to try to persuade Mother to have Father come in and surrender and go to Pilot Knob [Iron Mountain] and take the oath of allegiance. Meantime, while mother was discussing the matter with them, two of them took me up on a hill west of the house and out of sight of mother, and one of them took a belt from around his pants and buckled it around my neck, then bent a small sapling over and tied the end of the belt around it and hung me up for a minute or so. I had told them where father was, as mother had told them, and when they let me down I told them he was down in the field, which they knew was not so for they had come by the field. The hanging hurt my throat so that it was sore for several days. I was seven years old at the time.

  —J. J. CHILTON, FROM THE Current Local, May 26, 1932, REPRINTED IN The
Civil War in Carter and Shannon Counties

  A give-and-take war developed between Reeves’ 15th Missouri Cavalry, CSA, and the Missouri Union Militia units in the area. Many families were forced to refugee, some as far north as St. Louis.

  —FROM A History of the 15th Missouri Cavalry Regiment, CSA, BY JERRY PONDER, PONDER BOOKS, DONIPHAN, MISSOURI, 1994

  THEIR FATHER WAS taken on november 16, 1864.

  Well, here they come, said Savannah. She stood at the door with a handful of quills and the penknife. I don’t know why we thought they’d keep on missing us.

  John Lee, go on, said her father. Cut the horses loose and get up the hill.

  Her brother John Lee ran, going straight up Copperhead without bothering about the path, for they were taking prisoner all young men of military age whether they were crippled or no.

  Then Savannah ran to the fields to chase Dolly into the hills. The ground was hard frozen as stone and she fell down and then got up again and kept running. Adair shoved the clothes trunk out the front door and threw the washing over it.

  They wore dark blue. They were young men from St. Louis or from the river towns. Their horses were ganted, rake thin, and the blue coats torn and faded, for they had been long in the field and the Ozark mountains were a geography that could beat men and equipment and horses all to pieces. The fenders and girths of their saddles were scarred and repaired with whang leather. They were hungry-looking and cold and rank, jangling loose in their saddles at a hard trot. They watched from one side to the other in a nervous, habitual searching stare, as if looking for the rebel bullet that might strive toward them out of the deep woods of the southeastern Ozarks and blow them out of their saddles.

  Their father stood at the front-yard rails to meet them.

  A captain on a sorrel horse pulled up and asked Marquis Colley what unit he had joined.

  He said he had never joined any military unit and that they had no business messing with him.

  The captain asked him who taught the common school, and Adair’s father said that he himself did, except it had been burnt down and a new one had not been built because of the war and the hard times that had come on everybody.

  What were you teaching them? asked the captain.

  Geography and the structure of the Constitution, he said. And their arithmetic and their spelling.

  Adair and Little Mary stood behind their father. Adair could not see Savannah but she was fairly certain that Savannah had come back from chasing Dolly away, to the back of the house to run the pigs out over John Lee’s tracks.

  I bet you are teaching them about the advantages of human bondage, said the captain. You are instructing them in disloyal thoughts.

  I am not instructing anybody in anything, said Judge Colley. At present.

  Where’s your boy? Ain’t you got a boy?

  He’s gone to Cape for flour.

  Well, we are levying a tax on you for the war effort, said the captain.

  The Militia took everything the Colley girls had garnered and spun and sheared and gathered into casks. They took the butternuts in their split-oak baskets, they loaded their commissary wagon with the corn. A sergeant cut ten yards of jeans twill out of the loom. They shot the dogs and took as many chickens and geese and pigs as they could catch. They tied the chickens and geese by their legs to the ringbolts of the wagon. The gander and several hen geese got away by taking to the air. The rooster beat his way into the blackberry thickets; two soldiers kicked at the brambles and thrashed at them with their rifle butts but they could not dislodge him. Another came out of the barn pen leading the milk cow and her calf. Two other soldiers seized the horses, including Whiskey.

  Adair fought with the soldier who had Whiskey and tried to wrench his hands loose from Whiskey’s halter. His fingers were very hairy, and they locked hands and turned and turned in the wintry front yard. They tore through the red honeysuckle vines. It was sensual and cruel, and Adair would not let go. She held on even when he slammed her knuckles up against the yard rails.

  They fell over the soap-boiling fireplace, Whiskey was snorting with such force he was whistling like a stag and he flung his head up and down, and backed up away from them, dragging them with him. Finally another soldier came up behind her and struck her across the shoulders with something, and knocked her down.

  When she got to her feet, she saw other soldiers setting the house on fire. They threw as many objects as they could into the fireplace and then shoveled coals all over the floor and table. The smoke expanded inside, thick and yellow. Adair let go of Whiskey in order to help her sisters drag things out of the house. So the soldiers tied Whiskey and Gimcrack and Highlander to the back of their wagon. One soldier had set the barn on fire and it was well on its way to making a great November bonfire, the smoke pouring upward into the oaks and the crows flying overhead.

  The Union Militiamen also dragged things out of the house and went through the kitchen to take what seemed to them desirable or valuable. They smashed the Tennessee looking glass just to be smashing it. They took her mother’s cut-glass decanter. They threw the girls’ bonnets in the fire and the family Bible as well. They took a nail bar to the spring wagon and jacked the swivel off the striker plate, and knocked the wheels off their hubs. Adair began to scream that the house was afire, as the outside walls of the house took on a layer of flames, rippling upward in the increasing wind.

  Then the rain came in sheets. It stormed through the open windows and soaked The Horse Fair in its frame, and the fire began to sizzle like frying bacon and then the flames diminished.

  The captain and a sergeant bent Marquis Colley’s hands behind him, tied them with rope. They said they were taking her father in for disloyalty. A man was never too old to be disloyal. The captain struck Marquis Colley several times in the face with a wagon spoke. Adair and Little Mary tried to put themselves between the captain and their father, but the sergeant kicked Little Mary’s legs out from under her and then kicked her again in the ribs when she was down.

  Don’t touch my girls, said Marquis. Leave my girls alone.

  The captain grabbed Adair by the hair and threw her to one side.

  If you keep on, I’ll shoot him right here, he said.

  I know you, Tom Poth, her father said to the captain.

  And I know you, Marquis Colley, said the captain. He was a redheaded man. I don’t know how you got elected justice of the peace. Tom Poth had teeth that were very white and small. You gave aid and information to Price, didn’t you?

  I never spoke to any of his men or officers, said her father.

  Yes you did, said Captain Poth and raised the wagon spoke and struck Marquis Colley in the face again and again, and then began to beat him in the head and the sound of it was as if he were striking a melon. Blood sprayed. Adair ran to the tailgate and tried to climb over it. Her father’s head fell forward and began to drain blood all down the front of his coat and striped shirt. A soldier shoved her off the tailgate.

  We’re back, said one of the others. Several men laughed. We’re just cleaning up the last few here. You all are about all that’s left.

  The driver of the wagon raised the long reins and slapped them on the horse’s rumps and they surged forward into their collars.

  Adair and Little Mary ran after the Union Militiamen in the rain, holding to the gunnel of the wagon where Marquis Colley sat with his arms bound, his face looking like a mask made of red stuff that began to run pinkish in the heavy cold rain. Gimcrack and Whiskey and the tall, dark Highlander were being dragged behind and their long necks stretched out in resistance. Whiskey’s changeable coat had turned a sodden tobacco color in the rain and he kept trying to turn his head to see where Adair was, and called out furiously to her.

  Then Little Mary’s skirts grew heavy in the rain and she had to let go of the gunnels. Adair tried to climb up on the running board to lay hold of the brake and throw off its catch, but one of the men guarding her father banged her fingers with the butt of his
rifle, and Adair had to let go and fall back.

  JOHN LEE CAME back down the mountain after the militia were gone. They all stood inside the house among the wreckage and the smoke. Savannah and Little Mary ran around and closed the shutters again. The barn was still burning for some reason, taking with it the girls’ sidesaddles and the harnesses.

  John Lee said he had best get clear of the house before they came back again. He sat with the smoothbore in his good hand and the withered arm tucked in his belt.

  I’ll get Pa loose from them, he said. I think you should head north toward the Yankee garrison. At least they ain’t fighting up there. I don’t think they will hurt women. That’s what Father said. I will be looking for you on the road. Just get moving.

  Adair said, Can’t we follow them and talk to their commander? Let’s go and speak with their superior officer. That’s what the Laphams did. Adair fastened her bruised hands together in a hard grip. She wiped her face on her shoulder and her shoes gritted on the broken glass. They got Mr. Lapham back.

  John Lee, can’t you follow them and shoot them? Savannah said. You could lay up somewhere and get that captain in the head.

  I don’t have the firepower, said John Lee. And I’m on foot. I will try to get to Doniphan Courthouse and get old Mrs. Carter to enquire for Father. If they see me they’ll take me. He wiped his right hand across both eyes to sear off his tears. Where’s Dolly?

  Savannah said, I ran her up Copperhead.

  All right. I’m going, girls.

  He struck off on foot with the old smoothbore. He carried it as always in the crook of his right arm. He was bent against the driving winter rain, and his hat brim was drooped and streaming water.