Enemy Women (23 page)

The daguerreotypist held himself in a long pause. He was speechless.

She said, Better stand in a doorway!

An earthquake? What? He held both hands out to his sides, alarmed, and then placed one hand on the vitrine of the showcase to feel for vibrations and it looked as if he were prepared to go outside and see if anything were falling.

So she turned quickly and went out the door and back into the street.

St. Charles Street went straight down toward the levee. Here and there were small frame houses jammed in between tall three- and four-story commercial buildings. They were the remnants of the older city. Inside these ancient houses old ladies looked out, wearing coal-shovel bonnets with long sun flaps over the shoulders. Adair thought, Maybe they are Dutch women, or Irish. She strode on, taking long steps, flying down the brick sidewalks under awnings, around stacks of casks and piles of siding. Her fever beat like a foundry hammer in the veins of her face. She was alone and had no bonnet on her head and men in uniforms were hunting for her.

Young woman! an old lady called to her in good English. Your dress is too big and you are running too fast!

My aunt is about to have a baby and I am going for the midwife, said Adair, and kept on. She didn’t even know where she was going. There didn’t seem to be any particular place to go. She turned right on Third Street. She could hear the noise and commotion of the levee, and she could glimpse it through the buildings at Chestnut. She could see the steamers. Their sterns were all turned downstream. So now she knew which way south was. She kept on down Third Street.

At last she came to the old French houses around St. Louis Cathedral, and sat down on the steps of the cathedral and put herself in the hands of God. Any God, even a Catholic one. The stone-paved street was full of traffic, people on foot and coal carts bringing coal from the Gravois coal diggings and dropping bituminous chips up and down the street at random, a milk cart tugged along by a ponderous red-and-white ox, a light surrey with a lady in it. Adair put her head in her hands. An omnibus pulled by two thin horses came by and the driver yelled out, Kennet Shot Tower! over and over. Biddle Street Levee and Kennet Shot Tower! Adair sat on the steps of the cathedral and told herself over and over, I am in the hands of God.

A woman in a very old-fashioned dress with the waist high up around the armpits and a narrow skirt came up the steps. She wore a broken straw bonnet and wooden clogs on her feet.

Are you well, then, kulleen? she said.

Adair looked up, trying to breathe normally. I can’t understand you, Adair said. She began to cough again and shut her mouth against it and the cough exploded out her nose.

Are ye well?

Yes, I am well. Don’t you speak any English?

I’m Irish, said the woman.

Well go on, said Adair. Just go on. She put her fist to her mouth and coughed violently.

The woman went on into the church. Startling bongs came from overhead as the great bells rang for mass. More people began coming up the steps and so Adair got up again and picked up the front of her
skirts and went down the steps to the street. She went to one side of the enormous cathedral and found a doorway and sat in it. It was the door to the old sacristy. She had put herself in the hands of God and she liked the feeling and wanted to stay in it but shreds of dirty coal smoke began to drift along overhead now with the evening fires and Adair felt that it looked spectral and dangerous. Soon it would be night and she didn’t know where she would go.

She got to her feet and left the doorway and walked back into the darkening March streets.

There was the rail station at Pine Street, where she might get on a train of cars of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain railroad that would take her down to southeast Missouri. But she dare not approach anyone now, at night, to ask for information. They would think she was a prostitute. That anyone would take her for a prostitute made her start crying. She strode along, down a street of brick buildings and walled-in interior yards, wiping tears from her cheeks. A lamplighter came down the street cursing in German. He put his ladder against a lamppost, and the first rung stove through when he stepped on it. He cursed again with frantic rage. He stomped on the second rung and climbed up, opened the glass and turned the key and put his punk to the valve and a thin bluish light leapt out through the glass.

She kept on walking south, feeling the increasing danger of the night. If only she had a market basket to carry, or some sort of grip and a bonnet. It looked as if she had stolen the bundle in her arms and had run off with it directly. Even a scarf over her hair would do. Then she would look normal. Then she would appear to be a young woman who had a family here in the city, and a home, and people who loved her and cared about her. Who was hurrying home from errands. A place with a door that shut and locked and a mirror and a fireplace and people who would say, Well
there
you are! We were worried about you! And she would drink deep of whatever boiled on the fire.

Now she was in a neighborhood of jumbled houses, some of old stone and some of frame and some of brick, brand-new. The crossways were lit by gas lamps. Each house had a number painted on it somewhere, over the door or to one side. It was as if they were drawers in a thread shop, or slots for letters in a type case. Adair realized it was so strangers could find the houses.

She walked past a tavern, one of the little old houses with twelve-paned windows and a puffing chimney stack at each end and a low door. A sign over the door said it was the william tell tavern and family grocery. Men were laughing and smoking inside.

Good evening, sweetheart! A man called from inside.

Adair grasped up as much of the great volumes of skirt as she could in one hand and ran fleet-footed down the street, past Myrtle and Elm and Almond. She dodged past late-homing carts driven by boys riding splay-legged who spoke to her in low tones and made kissing noises. Three black children walked up Third Street barefooted in raveling clothes of fustian. They held one another’s hands and looked at the paving and went past her.

She slowed at Poplar Street to a walk again. She looked down Poplar to the levee. Down there the great steam-driven boats bumped one another with knocking sounds, and men carrying torches moved in crowds, with all the loading and unloading and repair work. She heard the long groans of six-inch hemp ropes straining to hold the paddle wheelers against the current, tied to massive iron rings. She thought, I will turn down to the levee and steal something or find something. Just a market basket, an old basket, and I will look more normal.

But some soldiers were coming up from the levee. One of them paused beneath the pale gas lamp and began a jig. The others stood back for a moment and watched this display and then started clapping time and singing.

Adair stood back against the wall of a small wooden house jammed in between two brick tenements to avoid them. The shutters of the little
house were open to the night and the coal smoke, and halfway up the wall the boards had been spattered with mud and gravel from passing vehicles. The house was so old that she could see the marks of the broadaxe on the window framings. Adair leaned back and pressed herself as flat as she could between the two open windows.

17

In addition to St. Louis as a trading center for stolen goods, Kansas provided a relatively secure place for resale. Illinois [especially Quincy], Iowa [especially Keokuk], and Kansas City were the other usual market places. Kansas Union Private W. W. Moses, for example, wrote his sister in 1862 that he had “Jayhawked some silver cupps and sent them to Illinois.”

—
FROM
Inside War

Black marketing of stolen goods such as clothing, jewelry, and home furnishings reached an impressive scale. Brigadier General Benjamin Loan in Jefferson City [Missouri] in 1862 offered a clear analysis of illicit commerce. Either “good society” or economic double-agents “claiming to be Government contractors and with provost marshal’s passes in their pockets would contact guerillas directly, purchase their stolen goods, warehouse them, and transport them, generally by riverboat to St. Louis, reselling them through merchants who either were secessionists or did not ask probing questions. Loan was particularly incensed that in the end government contractors repurchased Union horses stolen elsewhere in Missouri.

—
FROM
Inside War

I
NSIDE A LITTLE
old man and a little old lady were having an argument.

Adair stood and sought for a clear breath and listened. The argument was about what the little old lady should be buried in. Adair
breathed through her nose slowly to keep back her cough. Around the corner and down the street the soldier-dancer beat out time with his government shoes and his audience sang a song from the theater. It was “The Girls of Gravois Mills.”

The old woman said, I done went and bought it and it cost me a quarter dollar so I don’t want to hear you crying Hark from the Tomb about it! Lillie Sheehan made it!

She made it, did she? the old man shouted. Hark from the Tomb is what you’ll be doing if you are buried in that floozy’s hat. Lilac. With green ribbons and plaster fruit. Think how you’ll look a-layin in your coffin in that. I won’t be seen in the church with you.

Adair wondered what kind of an awful thing the hat was, if he was carrying on so about it.

Well, I won’t care, Mr. Casebolt, I won’t care. Just stay to home then.

You ain’t wearing that hat at your funeral. That’s all she wrote.

Adair heard stomping steps across the creaky floor and then a thump. He had stalked across the room and thrown himself into a chair. Then there were raking sounds as he took out his outrage on the fire. Adair saw even bigger puffs of smoke coming from the chimney overhead and some ashes rained down on her. Coal smoke from the soft St. Louis coal lay heavy and serpentine.

Oh I don’t care one way or another. What use is it a-argyin with you? I’ll just cast it out, then, will
that
satisfy you, Mr. Casebolt?

Adair flattened herself even more against the muddy wall of the house and the hat came flying out the window. It struck the brick sidewalk with a rattle of plaster cherries. Adair stared at it for a second and thought, Lord, I wouldn’t be buried in that thing either. But Adair knew that Jesus had given her a hat so that she could walk the streets of this alien place in disguise, and also that it wouldn’t be long before the old lady changed her mind and came looking for it. After all she had paid Lillie Sheehan a quarter dollar for it.

A dray came by, driven by a tall black teamster, full of coal sacks, and she watched the wheels straddle the hat and pass over it without harm. Adair ran out and pounced on it and carried the hat away, turning the
corner onto Poplar as she put it on her head. Behind her she could hear them still yelling at each other.

The hat was made of hard lilac-colored straw and had a smart little brim in front and a cockade of cherries and guinea feathers. She tied the ribbons under her chin and forged past the dancing soldier and his audience. She needed something more: a basket, a grip, a ticket to somewhere. Reserves of strength that she did not know she had had opened up to her. But she was spending these reserves at a great rate.

The soldier stopped his clog dance and called out, Good evening, Miss, are you lost?

She ignored him. She had risen on the social scale now that she had a hat, and ladies don’t talk to strange men.

She kept on. The air was still and in its cool untroubled sea the moths massed around the pale lamps. The sun fell below the city skyline, and the shadows of the great mercantile buildings that lined the entire riverfront were cast far out onto the river and over the steamboats.

She walked out from Poplar Street onto the granite stones of the levee. It was a seething confusion of crowds and moving lights. Men and vehicles crossed one another in every direction, their faces appearing and disappearing in the lamps and torches. The steamboats were loaded and unloaded in a tide of black dockmen, free and unfree, carrying America’s tonnage on their backs. Adair could find some kind of a basket or grip down here somewhere, even one that had been cast aside, even a busted one. She walked into the swarming torchlit dark, and the incessant crashing noise.