Wildwood Boys (44 page)

 

She went downstairs and into the kitchen, found a sharp knife
and slipped it into her bandanna belt, then filled a sack with cold biscuits and several tins of food without even looking to see what kind
it was. Then she went out and across the sideyard to the hotel livery.
She’d prepared an elaborate lie to tell the stableboy but no one was
in there, though a lantern was burning bright on a shelf. She spied a
cowhide jacket on a wall peg and took it, thinking it would do a better job of concealing her breasts than did the baggy shirt alone. She
saddled a strong-looking mare and tied her food sack to the saddlehorn, then stepped up onto the horse and hupped away. By sunup
she was twenty miles to the south and still going.

 

Her notion was to return to her father’s farm (she refused to call
it home), collect Ned and move on, though she had no idea where
they might go. Her brother was almost sixteen now and she understood his fear of being forced into an army uniform. She thought that
if they disguised him as a woman they might fool any pressgangs
they ran into—but then again, they might attract even more notice
from every man they encountered.

 

Such were her thoughts as she bore south, ferried over the Big
Muddy, skirted Kansas City, and held to the lesser trails down
through the border country. She slaked her thirst at water crossings,
fed on biscuit and peaches or hash or beans, whatever canned good
she drew from the sack. Each time she met with horsemen or wagon
travelers going in the other direction, she’d tug her hatbrim lower
and simply raise a hand if the other party hallooed as they passed.
She had thought her outsized costume might raise curiosity, but
found it was in keeping with the motley dress of these met pilgrims.
She made her nightcamps in the woods, well off the trail, but made
no fire that might attract passersby.

 

“I was a woman alone in bad country,” she says. “I didn’t even
have a gun. I’m not without sand, Bill, but maybe you understand
my caution.”

 

Bill reaches across the table and holds her hand.

 

The bad country she spoke of had suffered so greatly in the wake
of Order 11 she hardly recognized it. “I’d heard how terrible things
had been,” she says, “but I never imagined. So
many
places burnt to
the ground. Everywhere you looked there was nothing standing but
black chimneys.”

 

“I know,” Bill says.

 

She was three days getting to her daddy’s place and found there
nothing but charred ruins which looked to have been that way for
some time. At the weedy edge of the woods behind where the barn
had stood, she found no new gravemound beside her mother’s. She
walked slowly through the ashy remains of house and barn and
found no bones that looked human, only a cow skull and ribcradle.
Her urge to cry was mostly self-pity—she’d never felt so alone in the
world—and she did not yield to it.

 

She rode to Red Hill, a hamlet where her family had regularly
bought supplies. It too had been razed. Of the original dozen buildings, only one still stood, the old general store, though its shelves had
long been barren. The remnants of two families were living there,
and the only men among them were a few young boys, a very old
man, and a pair of twenty-year-old cripples—one legless and the
other blind. But the old man remembered her daddy, and some of the
women now recognized her and asked her to step down for a cup of
hickory tea. When she asked what had happened to the town, they
looked around as if to see what she might mean. Then someone said,
“Yankees—what else?”

 

One of the women gestured at Bush’s lip and said, “You seen a
recent hard time yourself, sister girl.” Then looked closely on the lip
and said it looked sufficiently sealed for the thread to come out.
“You’ll have a scar to the grave,” the woman said, “but the sooner
the stitches come out, the less of a sight it’s like to be.” So Bush let
her snip and pluck. When the job was done, the lip felt bulbous. She
looked at it in a hand mirror and saw that it was still grossly swollen
and the cut still looked raw. “Too bad,” the woman said. “Pretty
thing like you.”

 

They were sorry to say they had no idea what had become of her
daddy, but there were rumors about the boy Ned. One story was that
he’d joined a band of bushwhackers in the early spring and was
killed shortly after, though no one knew where or even if any part of
that story was true. The old man said he’d heard Ned Smith went to
Texas, to Fort Worth, but he didn’t remember where he heard it.

 

Bush refused to believe he was dead, but there was no way to
know if he’d truly joined a guerrilla band, or, if he had, which one it
might be. She could think of nothing to do but go to Fort Worth and
seek for him, though the women all advised against it. Nothing but
ill fortune could come to a woman alone on the trail. She’d been
awful lucky so far not to have met with bad trouble, they told her,
but if she rode on by herself her luck was sure to run out. She
thanked them for their concern but would not be dissuaded. The
next day she set out, provisioned with a sack of hoecakes and raw
turnips and a few ears of roasted corn.

 

Her luck held most of the way through the Indian Territory and
then finally ran out two days north of the Red River. She was wakened one morning by the barking of a scruffy yellow dog glaring at
her from the shadowy brush in gray dawnlight. The mutt would not
be run off by the stones she threw at it, but kept barking and barking
and dodging the rocks. Pretty soon here came a pair of riders out of
the gloomy scrub. She quickly stuffed her hair in her hat and buttoned up her jacket, then stood with legs apart and hands on hips in
the way of a man unafraid. The horsemen reined up at the edge of
the clearing where she’d picketed the mare, and even in the weak
light she could see their grins. One was big and full-bearded, the
other only mustached. The mustache was playing out a length of lariat from the coil in his hand.

 

They spared no breath on amenities. “Know why that dog’s
barking at you?” the bearded one said.

 

She gave a shrug and said in a gruff voice, “Don’t like strangers,
I guess.”

 

“It’s trained to sniff out quim,” the bearded one said.

 

She broke for the brush behind her but the lariat noose looped
lazily over her head and shoulders and abruptly snugged taut and
yanked her down. She tried to get to her feet as they dismounted, but
the mustached one gave the rope a hard snatch and down she went
again. As they closed on her she kicked out and caught the bearded
one on the shin and he yelped and fetched her a kick to the ribs that
blew the breath out of her. The mustached one said, “Don’t, Wallace,” and stepped between them. He knelt beside her and slipped
the rope off her. Her vision was blurred by tears of pain and she was
still gasping for breath as he eased her over to her bedding, then used
her own knife to cut through her bandanna belt and the buttons of
her pants, all the while saying, “Easy, easy now,” in the tone she’d
heard wranglers use on horses they would break. He tugged off her
boots and threw them aside, then pulled off her baggy pants and
handed them to the bearded one, who searched them for money and
cursed and flung them away.

 

They didn’t pluck any flower. She had surrendered her maidenhead to Tommy Colehammer one twilit evening a couple of months
earlier in the Jeffers barn, in full agreement with his reasoning that
all they were doing was getting a head start on what they’d be doing
plenty as man and wife, and they’d done it a bunch more times in the
days to follow. But it’s a whole different thing when a couple of
hardcases figure to just help themselves. She had thought to fight
them, then realized she’d suffer the worse for it and they’d still have
their way, so she simply lay there and let it happen. They each had a
turn with her, and what she chiefly remembered about it was the dog
lying on its belly beside her and looking at her as if it wondered what
she might be thinking. After spending himself, the bearded one tried
to kiss her but she turned her face away, and the mustached one said,
“That’s all right, Wallace. She ain’t got to if she don’t want. That lip
don’t look all that kissable noway.”

 

Bill’s grip is now so tight on her hand she winces and says softly,
“Bill.” He eases his hold and lets a long breath.
Wallace,
he tells himself.
With a beard
.

 

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” she says. “I want you to
know everything.”

 

“I’m grateful,” Bill says. “You know who they are? Where they
went?”

 

She shakes her head.

 

“I’d find them, you know. Settle it proper.”

 

She smiles tiredly and pats his hand. “I know you would. That’s
not why I’m telling you.”

 

“I guess I know that,” he says.
Wallace. With a beard
.

 

Then they were gone, men and dog, and the mare gone with
them. The risen sun was hot on her legs when she finally got to her
feet, grunting with the pain of her kicked ribs and grimacing at the
soreness in her sex. She put on her pants and gathered her boots and
the ring was still in the one. She rolled up her bedding and tucked it
under her arm and hiked out to the main road and headed on south.

 

She remembers little of what passed through her mind over the
next couple of days except for the awful thought that if she found
herself pregnant she wouldn’t know whether it was by Tommy or
one of those sonsofbitches—a fear that would be relieved a week
later with the onset of her menses. She kept a sharp watch for the
dust of riders coming from either direction and each time she spied it
she took to the trees or shrubs to hide until the horsemen were past.
There were streams where she could drink all along this route, but by
the afternoon of her second day of walking she was ravenous. At
dusk she could smell the river not far ahead, and then suddenly
caught a savory smell of cooking that made her moan in hunger.

 

What she smelled was a rabbit stew simmering on the hearth of
the ferrymen’s cabin. There were two of them, partners who took
turns operating the ferry. When she presented herself on the shadowed porch and asked if she might have something to eat, they stood
in the door and gawked at her as if uncertain of what they were
looking at. Then one said, “You got money?”

 

She wasn’t about to trade a diamond for a plate of stew. The
alternatives were that she could go without eating or she could pay
them some other way. In that moment, she knew what she was about
to become, but she was too tired and too hungry to argue with herself about it. She stepped forward into the better light and took off

 

her hat and shook her head and her hair tumbled down. The ferrymen’s faces came alight. They grinned at each other and then at her.

 

“Well now, darlin,” one said, “we might could strike a bargain.”
“I thought maybe we could,” she said.

 

There were several lighted oil lamps in the room and she picked

 

one up and asked if they had a candle. The men looked at each other

 

and then one of them went into the other room and came out with a

 

thick short candle fixed to a tin holder. She said it would do just fine

 

and asked him to light it, then took it from him and said she’d be

 

back directly and went into the small sideroom and closed the door.

 

She dropped her pants and squatted, scooped some of the fresh wax

 

drippings off the tin plate with her finger and fashioned a small shallow cup on the end of her thumb, then inserted the cup as far up

 

inside herself as she could. She didn’t recall where she’d heard of this

 

method to protect against conception, was not even sure it worked,

 

but she was glad it came to mind. For all she knew she was already

 

pregnant, but if she wasn’t she didn’t intend to get that way if she

 

could help it. She then opened the door and said she was ready.
After the business was done with, they fed her well and gave her

 

a blanket and permitted her to sleep on the floor in the sideroom.

 

Twice in the night she was awakened by travelers hallooing the ferryhouse for a crossing. She heard men’s voices and laughter, horse

 

snortings, hooves clomping on ferry planks, splashings. She was surprised the ferrymen left her undisturbed through the night, but not at

 

their smirking announcement in the morning that for the same price

 

she paid last night they’d give her breakfast and see to it she got a

 

safe ride to Fort Worth in the bargain. On impulse she informed

 

them that the price of the same treat they’d enjoyed last night was a

 

full plate of breakfast, a ride to Fort Worth, and a dollar apiece.

 

She’d said it with a confident smile, though in truth she was afraid

 

they’d get angry and simply take what they wanted.

 

But all they did was haggle. Seeing as she was getting breakfast

 

and
a ride too, they said, one dollar ought to cover for both of them.

 

They bargained back and forth and finally settled on a dollar and a

 

half, breakfast and a ride. As she pocketed the money and headed

 

into the sideroom with the first of them, she thought to herself, Well

 

girl, there’s no question about it now.

 

She pauses in her story to stare hard at Bill across the table. “Do
you understand?” she says. “I chose it, Bill. Nobody was forcing me.
Oh, I was still hungry, but I wasn’t starving. And I always did have a
diamond ring right there in my boot.”

 

“I’m not judging you on it,” Bill says. “Not now nor ever.”

 

“I just want you to know the truth of it,” she says.