Rifles for Watie (35 page)

He saw a church in the distance, the church where he had met Leemon Jones. Hancock Mission, Leemon had called it. He remembered Leemon “lived half a mile down the road theah.” Groggy, Jeff walked the dun until he came to a big, well-kept farm set back against the woods. It was growing dark. Several slave cabins stood in the open clearing. He saw Leemon Jones in a corral milking a cow.

Desperate, he decided to be thoroughly honest. He knew it was risky, but it was a chance he had to take. Orff had told him once that all scouts had to take lots of chances. Jeff laid it on the line.

“Leemon, I'm not a rebel. I'm a Union scout from Fort Gibson. I've got an important message for General Blunt at the fort. I'm too sick to deliver it myself. I want you to take my horse and gun and go in my place. I've got food packed in my haversack here. You said you knew a shortcut. Will you go?”

The young Negro's eyes gleamed proudly. “I sho will. I can be back in two days if they give me a fresh hoss at the fote. Or maybe I'll stay theah an' jine that colored regiment you told me about.” His face fell momentarily. “But I sho hates to leave mah ole mammy an' mah dog.” Jeff waited for him while he hurried inside to tell his mother good-by.

Soon Leemon came gliding back. “Yessuh. Now what's de message?”

Jeff decided to have him memorize it, then if he was captured, they wouldn't find any dispatch. Keeping the information brief, Jeff told Leemon twice and had Leemon repeat it back to him each time. The Negro leaped up behind him and, reaching both arms around Jeff, steered the dun and held Jeff on at the same time.

Using a short cut to avoid the rebel sentries, he returned Jeff close to the rebel camp. Dismounting, Leemon lifted Jeff out of the saddle.

“Good luck,” breathed Jeff and felt the cold chills coming back. He wished with all his heart he was going too. Leemon's white teeth gleamed in the dusk.

“Ah'll make it,” he said. He swung easily, lithely into the saddle.

Puzzled, the dun curved his graceful neck around to look at Jeff. He nickered softly as if asking, “What's going on here?” Jeff reached out feebly, grasping the animal's black mane with one hand and giving him a couple of pats.

“Tell them at the fort I said to take good care of my horse until I get back. Tell them to salt and water him often,” he charged.

The Negro nodded and dug his bare heels into the horse's flanks. A minute later the dusk swallowed them.

  
20

The Jackmans

The big four-poster bed was soft and comfortable. Jeff's head still felt heavy on the pillow, but his fever was gone, and for the first time in days he could think clearly. He opened his eyes wider and saw it was late afternoon and that he was lying in bed in somebody's house.

Looking down at his legs, he could scarcely believe they were his. They looked thin and emaciated instead of hard and wiry. And he could see his ribs showing above the pair of clean, white drawers somebody had drawn on him.

A Negro woman, huge and billowy, her shining, blue-black hair bound in a red handkerchief, waddled into the room, wheezing heavily at every step. Weakly Jeff jerked the sheet up over his bare legs and midriff.

“Hey, now,” she cackled in a strong, lusty contralto that rang through the hall like a man's, “you got yo' eyes open fo de fust time since you got heah!” When she opened her vast mouth to grin at him, her teeth reminded Jeff of a row of white piano keys. Her friendliness made him feel good all over.

He opened his eyes wider and saw he was in a large room with a highly arched ceiling. In all his life he had never seen a bedroom as nice as this. The walls were stained blue and there were pictures on them. There was a rag rug of red and blue upon the polished brown floor.

But the floor seemed farther away than it should be. At first Jeff thought it was his head swimming again, until he slid his chin over the side and saw that the bed was elevated. There was a dresser in the corner and nearby stood two handmade chairs with half-spindle backs. The room even had a fireplace. From the open window, yellow curtains ballooned toward him, propelled by the slow breeze. Everything was clean as a pin.

“How long have I been here, mam?” Jeff breathed and was surprised at the physical effort it cost him to speak.

“Oh, erbout two weeks.”

“What's the matter with me?”

Rolling her eyes in fear, she wrapped her heavy black arms nervously in her blue apron.

“Honey, when dey fust brought you heah, you looked all flaxed out an' dead on de vine. You had de flesh creeps an' de shivery-shakes. Den it went into de wee-waws. Den you got de heaves; evah time we fed you, you'd unswallow yo' food.” Jeff stirred restlessly on the pillow. He had never heard of any of those diseases. He wished she wouldn't talk so loudly. She made his head ache.

She went on, excitedly, “You even took spells wheah you'd get unnoodled an' queah in de head. When we bathed you, you'd call me Mama an' Bessie an' Mary an' Lucy. An' Honey, when you'd call me Lucy, you'd say de sweetest things.” Again she broke into a wild cackle of laughter. In spite of his pallor, Jeff blushed.

If, in his delirium, he had talked freely about his family and about Lucy, what had he said about himself? Had he also divulged that he was a Union scout? There was no sign of it in her beaming countenance.

From the buxom Negro, whose name was Hannah, and who told him she had come from Louisiana on a steamboat, Jeff learned he was staying at the home of the Jackmans, a wealthy rebel family living north of the Canadian River, near Briartown. Heifer had brought him here in a commissary wagon and Colonel Watie had personally sent a message to Mrs. Jackman, whom he called Aunt Maggie, asking her to take Jeff in until he recovered. With no hospital available, it was the custom to billet sick soldiers with friendly civilian families.

With one hand Jeff pushed his scraggly hair out of his eyes and felt a little ashamed. He found it hard to identify Watie the raider with the Watie who had found him a princely refuge like this.

Laboriously he turned from his left side to his right in the big bed. He didn't understand it. He wondered if Leemon Jones had made it through to Fort Gibson with his messages for Blunt.

Hannah left and came back presently with Mrs. Jackman, mistress of the home. She was small and prematurely gray, with a high forehead and a determined little twist of mouth. Her gray eyes were so wise and knowing that Jeff felt a twinge of panic, wondering if she were on to his masquerade. But she smiled cordially, saying, “Welcome to our home, sir. How are you feeling?”

Jeff managed a wan smile. “Kinda peeked, mam. And kind of embarrassed, too. I've never been sick a day in my life before. I don't know how to thank you, mam, for taking me in like this. I know I've been lots of trouble to everybody.”

She placed a cool hand on his forehead. “Nonsense, Mr. Bussey. You've been no trouble at all. We've enjoyed having you. I've never seen a worse case of malaria, but your fever seems to have subsided. Before long, I hope, we'll be able to send you back to Stand, well and strong.”

Smiling shyly, the rest of the family came into the room and were introduced. There were five of them, all girls. Like Lucy Washbourne, each had the same brownish cast of skin that denoted their Cherokee blood. They were black-haired, with high foreheads and small mouths and shrewd, intelligent eyes like their mother's.

When one laughed, they all laughed, and with the same soprano inflection. Marjorie and Sophie, the oldest, were married and had husbands in the rebel army and infants at home. Then there was Jill, eighteen, Janice, sixteen, and Patricia, thirteen, who wore boots and a riding habit. She looked like the tomboy of the family.

The following day was Sunday, and Jeff was awakened very early by a feminine voice calling insistently from outside his window, “Mr. Davis. Mr. Davis.” Whoever was calling was trying to do it quietly but wasn't succeeding very well. And she was “mistering” him by his second name, not his last one.

Jeff winked his eyes sleepily open and looked out into the cool flush of early morning. The east was oranged over with daybreak. A cowbell jangled down in the barn lot and he knew the cattle were getting up and stretching themselves. The insect drone had died to a small, tremulous murmur. It seemed that the whole world was just waking up and throwing off the covers.

“Mr. Davis. Mr. Davis.”

Standing bareheaded in the wet grass, an excited smile on her face, was Patricia. Her brown hair fell in a long braid down her back. Her boots were wet and had strands of wet green grass plastered to them. She was holding by the bridle reins a beautiful black colt with a red quilt strapped to his back. Young and irresponsible as his mistress, the colt was hungrily nibbling Marjorie's beloved hyacinths from the flower bed beneath the window.

“This is my horse, Barney,” the girl told Jeff. “Watch him go.”

She led him over to a wooden horse block and mounted from a flying leap. The instant she hit the red quilt, Barney broke fast, like an arrow from a bow. In a dozen quick strides he was galloping full tilt across the dewey Cherokee countryside. The girl rode as if she were glued to him, her brown pigtail floating horizontally behind.

After she had ridden a hundred yards, she turned him and cantered back to Jeff's window, her face beaming blissfully. The colt was panting gently.

Jeff put both his arms on the window sill. “Where's your saddle?” he asked her, trying to keep his voice low so he wouldn't awaken the household.

“I'd rather ride him this way,” Miss Patricia confided, with a frank grin. “That's why I get up early and ride. Mama doesn't like for me to ride without a saddle. So just before she wakes up, I go saddle him.”

Half an hour later she tied her horse, saddled this time, to one of the white front porch columns. With the dewy grass still plastered to her black boots, she strode into the parlor and began pounding on the grand piano to awaken the family for breakfast, which the slaves, moving everywhere on tiptoe, were leisurely preparing.

Jeff knew the Jackmans lived in a two-story house, because for days he had heard people walking around upstairs in the room over his head. Apparently they lived on a plantation; looking out the window he saw acres and acres of green corn stretching back to the woods.

His gaze traveling curiously about the room, he saw that somebody had brought him books to read, leaving them on the heavy walnut dresser, within easy reach of his hand. Jeff leaned across the bed, reading their titles. There was G. P. R. James'
History of Chivalry,
two novels by Sir Walter Scott, two border novels,
Guy Rivers
and
The Yemassee
by William Gilmore Simms and an old copy of
Harper's Weekly.

He heard kitchen utensils rattling and smelled food cooking. Later, Hannah brought him a fine breakfast, complete with a napkin on a tray, but he ate very little of it. He had completely lost his appetite.

With nothing better to do, Jeff listened to the conversation of the family at breakfast across the hall. All Miss Jill and Miss Janice talked about were their beaux in the Watie branch of the Confederate service. To his surprise, they seemed proud of it, as though it were the cavalier branch of the whole rebel army in the Indian country and being privileged to belong to it was some special honor. He remembered that the Washbourne family's menfolk had also gone into one of the Watie regiments and that the Washbourne women had seemed proud of it, too.

He was puzzled. The Jackmans, like the Washbournes, appeared to be intelligent, respectable, Christian people with a high reputation in the country. He couldn't understand why they wanted their husbands, sons and brothers to serve under a leader whose followers raided as barbarously as did the Watie men.

He was surprised two days later to see Miss Janice and Miss Pat walking about the house wearing hoop skirts and carrying books on their heads. And when the books on Miss Pat's head fell with a heavy crash to the hall floor, Hannah, who was cleaning Jeff's room, threw up her black arms in resignation.

“Dat Miss Pat done it agin,” the big Negress moaned. “She nevah gonna leahn to walk graceful, lak a lady.”

Jeff soon learned that in the Jackman home everything possible was done to teach the girls good breeding. They had to learn to sing, dance, play the piano, ride horseback, read the classics and flirt with boys without seeming forward or immodest. They were taught how to be good hostesses and how to manage a home. But they rarely did any actual cooking or sewing or cleaning. Apparently that was reserved for the slaves. Jeff wondered what kind of social training would have been imposed upon sons, had the Jackman family had any.

One morning a rebel courier trotted up to the front porch and talked for a few minutes with Mrs. Jackman. Then he rode off at a gallop, refusing her invitation to dine with them. A somber change came over the entire family. There were long conversations in the parlor, and a worried look appeared on Mrs. Jackman's face.