Enemy Women (30 page)

The young woman cleared her throat. The playbill advertised a monologue by the famous comedian Philadelphia Jones, with an engraving of his face. It was from several years ago. Clearly paper was scarce here as elsewhere.

The girl held the paper straight up so that Adair was looking at the grinning face of Philadelphia Jones. She read in a strenuous voice.

My heart has ached, and panted so at dawn

O Aurora, in Thy simple gown of lawn

My senses dulled as if of Morpheus’ potion I had drawn

When on Thee! I think, Thou cruel soldier of my heart.

When we last did kiss and then did part

And me didst Thou pierce to the soul with that dart

Of love. Here is leaden-eyed despair, I cannot lift

My lustrous eyes but remain alone and miffed

When on Thee I think, lain in some cruel field. . . .

Rosalie paused, staring at the paper, and then let her hand fall lightly to her lap.

Field, she said. She gazed out the window.
Field, smield, dealed, peeled, reeled
 . . .She bit her lip. I don’t have a rhyme for it.

Adair said, Y’all don’t have anything hot to drink, do you?

Oh! The girl leapt to her feet. Let me bring you something! Stay there!

Before long she was back. Rosalie pulled up an ammunition box from the corner, an empty one, and set a tray on it beside the couch. There was food on china plates and hot sassafras tea.

And really,
field
is a diphthong, said the girl. And then anything that rhymes with it makes a feminine rhyme. I don’t want a feminine rhyme here. Feminine rhymes are for limericks and they are of course comical. Rosalie turned over the playbill. Like old Philadelphia Jones, here. She then looked at Adair with intent, sad eyes. I
know
your heart is torn for him. Mine as well. A different him. My father . . .The girl paused. Then she whispered, Gone with another.

I thought you said he was with Hildebrand, said Adair. She ate the cornbread and curds. She swirled the cup of red tea. She drank it all.

The girl whispered, No! With Van Dorn. Then she laughed in a
nervous trill and tossed her head. I just said that other to be
dramatic.
I am naturally dramatic.

Well, I don’t know what to say. Crushed as I am by the dreadnought called fever.

There is aught to be said! Rosalie got to her feet. I have to go do something about the wood. She paused, and took a small anxious breath. Were you raised in the country?

Yes, said Adair. There are hardly any towns down there to be raised in.

Then you know about firewood and everything, Rosalie said. You know. Rosalie looked down. You had such
good
sturdy shoes.

Adair gazed down at the sorry pair of ankle-jacks, their tongues sticking up out of the lacing as if they were panting their last. The thick soles and square toes grinned at them like nosy redneck jokesters.

My mother and I just . . .Rosalie waved her hands in little circles on the ends of her wrists. Well, all our servants run off. She turned and gazed out the tall windows. And these people around here, they won’t work and they’re too lazy to steal.

I don’t know a
thing
about the wood either, Adair said. She flopped both hands down with the palms up in a helpless gesture.

Where are you going to, all by yourself? Rosalie asked. And ill?

Well, I have bouts of dementia, said Adair. Sometimes I come to myself and I am ten or fifteen miles from where I thought I was.

Rosalie considered this.

Well, where were you?

I don’t know. Adair put her finger to her lips. Was it anywhere near here?

I have no idea, said Rosalie. Were you not going to Iron Mountain?

It seems to me that I was, Adair said. But what do I know?

She got up slowly and pulled the matron’s big dress over her head and then turned and without another word walked to the kitchen. Rosalie came behind her. She sat on a kitchen chair and watched while Adair made herself more sassafras tea and then drank it all.

My mother and I are going to town, said Rosalie. Now she was hesitant and uneasy. To see if there is anybody to hire to work around here.

Well, go on, said Adair. I reckon I’ll be here. I don’t think I’ll have another seizure.

So, well, make yourself at home, said Rosalie.

I will, said Adair. Though I think my true home is in the Forbidden Realms.

Rosalie hurried out the door.

ADAIR WALKED SLOWLY
to the back door.

Out in the field behind the house Adair saw a herd of horses grazing on what little grass there was. They had so many horses out there on so few acres that they had eaten off the grass, even the newly grown spring grass. Adair knew that they had all been stolen, probably from the Union, and were being held there until they could be driven to market. She watched while Rosalie, the daughter, walked out into the field and put a halter on a lineback dun gelding that had tiger stripes on his legs.

Adair held her breath.

The women hitched up the horse to their small wagon.

He was ganted and thin and there were open sores under the sliding and ill-fitting harness. His hooves seemed to be too heavy for him to lift. His black tail hung thick almost to the ground and his body was an unusual taffeta of pale gold and gray. When Lila and Rosalie dropped the harness clumsily on his back he flung his head around as if he would bite them, and then dropped his head and stared with furious boredom at the ground.

It was Whiskey.

Well, we are off to town! Lila Spencer called out. Next time you will be well enough to come along!

Adair waved, but she could not take her eyes off the dun. The sun sparkled in that deep blue part of his eye and he suddenly turned his
head and stared at her. Adair felt the pressure of tears behind her eyes so she smiled at them. She watched the dun horse struggle forward in his harness. The girl Rosalie bit her lip and hit him hard and repeatedly with a coach whip. Whiskey resigned himself, and strove nobly forward against the heavy weight of the wagon, struggling to do what was asked of him. The wagon began to move. Every pale gold hair on him sparkled in the March sunlight, and tufts of his winter hair were coming out. He looked like a couch that was losing its stuffing. Dust rose up in puffs when the girl struck him.

Stop hitting him! thought Adair. That’s my horse! She watched, both hands over her mouth, as they pulled out onto the road. Tears were streaming down over her hands.

22

Yet as primitive as Civil War medical conditions were, the majority of amputees were probably saved by the saw. According to fairly well-kept Union records, of some twenty-nine thousand amputations performed, a little more than seven thousand resulted in death. Operations performed within forty-eight hours of a wound were twice as likely to be successful as those performed after that length of time. Union medical records—the Civil War was the first bureaucratic war, and very good records exist, at least on the Union side—show that amputation was far from a death sentence, depending on what was amputated.

—
FROM
Don’t Know Much About the Civil War,
BY
K
ENNETH
C. D
AVIS,
W
ILLIAM
M
ORROW,
N
EW
Y
ORK,
1995

M
AJOR WILLIAM NEUMANN
entered the colonel’s quarters at seven in the morning. He held his bandaged left hand against his chest to keep it from bumping into anything. The colonel of the First Indiana Heavy Artillery had taken up his quarters in one of Mobile’s old Creole homes on De Tonti Square. The early light was brilliant on the whitewashed walls. They were the color of salt. It was the time of day for the adjutant to read the morning reports, for orders of the day to be issued. The tall windows, which reached from the floor nearly to the ceiling, filled themselves with a soft sea-light.

Well, Major, did I not ask you to report to the surgeon?

Yes, sir, you did, said Neumann. And I haven’t gone.

Well? Colonel Hayes looked up. Well?

It was healing up and then apparently there was a piece of spherical case still in it.

And?

I’m afraid he’ll say it’s gangrenous, sir.

And he’ll take it off. Well, it’s going to have to go off, Major Neumann, if that’s what he says and this time I am ordering you to the surgeon’s. That’s an
order.

William Neumann leaned on his stick. Sir, would you write out my furlough then? If you’d write it out now. I don’t know if I will be walking back here to get it from you afterward. Nursing my bloody stump.

Yes, I certainly will. Colonel Hayes pulled out a form and dipped his steel pen in an inkwell. I know this is hard but you’re alive.

Yes, sir. It is hard.

And the surgeon has ether. It has just come in. He is there in the cotton warehouse on Water Street. It’s like a regular hospital.

He walked slowly from the Creole house on Tensaw Street toward the bay. The streets of Mobile were filled with the soldiers of the Union Army. With men of the Eighth Iowa and they saluted him as he went past them. They had stopped yelling
Major the corporal’s eeeetin agaiiiin!
He was sorry they had.

At the bay tall iron cranes stood silent, their hooks for lifting cotton bales dangling in the blue middle air. Egrets stalked through the shallow water at the slant of the brick levee. Men sat on boxes in the sun in front of the cotton warehouse being used for a hospital, their stumps wrapped in white cloths. Hair sticking up like spiky furniture dusters. They had been utterly changed in their demeanor and outlook, from one side of the bone saw to the other.

Neumann found himself stripped of his uniform jacket and lying on a long wooden table. He was in what used to be the office of the cotton warehouse. His arm was as round and hot as a stovepipe. The stubs of the missing fingers were healing well but somewhere in his hand a
fragment of shrapnel radiated infection and rot. An attendant leaned against the wall and slowly picked dried blood out of his fingernails. The attendant wore an apron that was stiff with blood.

He’ll be here in a minute, the attendant said. I know it’s hard.

There were shelves of accounting books and a sentimental engraving of a plantation scene. The Big House, the happy white children in pantalettes and velvet bows. The blithe colored cook cheerfully offering a plate of dainties. And out in the cotton fields, the merry Negroes laughing under the lash. Neumann could smell the ether.

On another table, the bone saws and things for pulling bullets out of flesh, and probes, and the clamps for shutting off spurting arteries. His arm throbbed, and every red streak that shot down from the imbedded metal fragment in his hand was a line of fire. His thoughts were not thoughts but a series of pictures, colored engravings. Of trying to drive a wagon into the west with one arm. Of greeting Adair once more and her eyes going to the pinned-up sleeve. Of trying to handle a team with a wooden arm. Of getting in bed with Adair without his clothes.

The surgeon was outside arguing with someone. The argument was about the disposal of remains. You can’t go throwing legs and arms in the bay, the surgeon said.

Just a minute, said the attendant. I got to go help Dr. Wheatly.

Sounds like he needs it, said Neumann. I’ll just lay here and suffer.

When the attendant was gone out the door and Neumann could hear that the argument was well in progress, and the soldiers sent to dispose of remains were stoutly defending themselves, Neumann got up.

He pulled on his blue wool uniform jacket and pulling on the left sleeve was a matter of enduring pain so intense he nearly blacked out. All from a tiny sliver of spherical case. He took up his signed furlough papers in his right hand and put on his forage cap. He turned and walked out the door into an alleyway. His entire right arm was a column of pain.

He kept on. He did not hurry. Down Water Street, under the scattering flocks of gulls, and then on to where the Eighth Iowa was bivouacked in a place where they made pottery. A potter’s field. He found his and Brawley’s tent in a stand of pines, and pulled out his haversack and his Spencer rifle and his blankets with one hand. The railroad was not practical; the Mobile and Ohio had no rolling stock left and Wilson’s raids had torn up hundreds of miles of track.