Out between the towns among the December frosted woods and the cold farms Winona sometimes sings a song the poet McSweny taught her while we was away. It’s a useful song because it’s as long as ten miles hoofing it. There ain’t a person alive could tell you what the song means. The song she sung was ‘The Famous Flower of Serving Men’. But she sings it as good as a linnet. I guess if anyone’s a loss to Titus Noone it’s her. Such a sweet clear note she keeps in her breast. Pours out like something valuable and sparse into the old soul of the year. Makes you see the country with better eyes. The distant country melting into the sky and the crumbs of human farms scattered over the deserted commons. The road just a threadbare ravelled sleeve between these usual sights. Like three thundering buffalo ran through long ago and that was all the people of Indiana craved for a path. Farmers just that bit easier with us than the town folk but still in this thrumming after-music of the war there’s caution and fear. Guess the human-looking bit is Winona but there again we find that Indians ain’t much favoured despite the name Indiana. Otherwise we snake down through swamp country and river country. We come to a broken-down old place at nightfall and a man there says he can ferry us over in the morning but he won’t do nothing in the dark or we’ll be sitting on sand for sure. He has an easy-going way about him. Don’t seem to fear us none. He pickets up our mules just like he knew them as his own and says we can throw our bedrolls down in his hut. I can’t understand why he so friendly and then it comes clearer. Says after we smoked a while with him and eaten some things he has mostly those mussels that he’s a Shawnee. Joe’s his whiteman name. Shawnee country here he says but most of the others gone years back. Still a few he says but the government want them gone too. Ever heard of Indian Territory? he says. Anyhow he’s sitting tight just at present and fishes the mussels in the river for pearls. Make shirt buttons out of them in the town over yonder. He don’t make much. Well he was a dark-faced man right enough though the summer makes Indians of everyone in Indiana. Then he asks Winona where she from and she says she’s John Cole’s daughter but before that she were Sioux in Nebraska Territory. He tries to say something to her in Indian but it’s not her old language. Me and John Cole sitting there and time raging past the little window. All he got for glass is the skin of a cow’s stomach stretched tight and dried. He said his wife was killed a while back by men he reckoned were renegades. Country ill at ease and at first he thought we might be killers too but then he saw the girl. Girl in a nice dress and her long black hair plaited nice. Made him think of the old days when he were young and things were better. Looks like we ain’t going to be around much longer. He wasn’t too sad when he said that. He were just shooting the breeze. Passing the time. Just an old widower Indian man by a river whose name we didn’t know.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ALL NIGHT THE MOSQUITOES eat our ravaged forms and we enjoy but a fitful sleep and in the later small hours a deluge wakes us. Joe’s hut don’t keep much of it out. At daybreak the swollen river has a new and violent aspect and great branches from some unknown riverbank ride down the flood like hornéd bulls. Still the rain pours down and the river rises to touch the foot of Joe’s hut. It’s cold as a gentleman’s icehouse and Winona is trembling like a little cat. Was human kind ever as wet. Joe gazes on the river and says this bank is Indiana and the other bank Kentucky but it might as well be heaven’s shore as far as reaching it goes. Then the rain clouds batter off and seem to be rushing towards the east as if with business to do there urgent and then the sky opens its vast skirts and a pale chill light seeps everywhere and a weak sun retrieves dominion. All day in sodden clothes we wait for the river to fall and the hoarfrost stiffens our clothes. Then in deep afternoon John Cole and Joe pull Joe’s fishing skiff down to the water and the skittery mules are asked to broach the torrent and we sit in like strange travellers and Joe pushes off. The pack mule has the worst of it. The long muscle of the river rocking him to and fro. And Joe rows mightily as if he were duty bound to risk his life and reach the other bank. He cannot find footing there for his boat and we are obliged to clamber off and into the icy boil and haul on the mules’ ropes and bring them on towards land and so here’s Kentucky. Joe breaks away and lets his boat run down in an angle to the current and there he floats and then finds the lee of some old rock and pauses and raises his hat to us in farewell. Lucky I paid him in Indiana, says John Cole. Soon we settle our mules and before too long enter a cold hushed wood of pines and John Cole has Winona change to her dry dress and throws my own dress to me since there’s nothing else. He pulls on his old army trews and jacket and he got a Zouave shirt he took as a battle souvenir long since so now he looks like a half a gypsy. We been sure to keep our pistols dry in the tar sack we keep for that purpose and so now I stick my pistol in my skirt. John Cole puts his pistol in his boot. The wet clothes are draped about like the flags and colours of some crazy regiment. When we emerge the other side of that wood I don’t know hardly what we look like.
Two days we enjoy the beauteous aspects of Kentucky if we can so call them and John Cole reckons we will gain Tennessee the day following. The road is firm and good under the tamping iron of the cold. We go on famously. Truth to tell the dress appeases me and I don’t change back though my other clothes is dry. John Cole is talking about the few things he knows about Kentucky which ain’t much. The towns we pass look quiet and clean enough and ragged smoke rises from the chimneys of farms. By God if that ain’t a milkmaid milking her cow. There’s men clearing fields of stubble with buckets of fire. Birds work at the last seeds in the remnant grass before them like another sort of fire. Black fire washing back and forward as their sense of danger bids. Wagons and carts clip by us and neither pay us any heed nor molest us. A better sort of man in clerical clothes doffs his black hat to me. Guess we’re just another family heading somewhere. It’s a kinda happiness. Then we pass into a district of bigger farms and fences going away over a turmoil of hills. Fences with the queer aspect of white grave markers. Sure enough coming down by a stately line of trees we see hanging there by the roadside about thirty blacks. Two girls amongst them. We ride past while the swollen faces look down on us. Every corpse has a note pinned to it and the note says Free. Someone wrote that in charcoal. The heads are bowed by the ropes in such a manner as to make the men seem humble and meek. Like old wooden saints. The girls’ heads is just big boils of blood. There’s a little breeze with a cargo of deep cold and the bodies all sway an inch towards us, an inch back, one after the other as the breeze chooses through them. Winona’s asleep in her saddle and we don’t say a word for fear to wake her.
We’re even kinda glad to cross into Tennessee but that only shown how little we knowed I guess. We’re soon a day in and we’re beginning to wonder how much of a cook Elijah Magan is. Wondering will there be beds or straw. Either way we’re thinking it will be nice to have this sitting on mules business over. We ain’t just got Trooper’s Back we got Trooper’s Leg, and Arse too. Never once has Winona complained and she’s been a meal for mosquitoes and I never seen a nose so red and raw from cold. You could think she relishes the journey.
Well we’re just ambling along when these four dark-suited men appeared on the road. Early evening and there’s just the black trees and the ten million acres of red sky. December twilights seem made for apparitions. Here are some. Seemed to come up sideways from the bushes out of nowhere. Quiet boys with good horses. Got glistening coats. Boys theyselves not rough neither, sorta well turned out but maybe was sleeping in the wilderness a while. One of them has a short light-blue jacket under his bear cloak. Looks like bear anyhow. They all got hats of not too large vintage and all in all they present a familiar military aspect. But they ain’t soldiers exactly. The man with the Rebel jacket badly hid he also got black whiskers hanging down and a black beard in a cone. Looks like a half-dressed colonel. The horses stamp a bit in the margin of the road and huff out big flosses of steam and go huff the way a horse is ordained by God to do. Each man has a
decent rifle at half arms of the sort Starling Carlton envies. Looks like Spencers. We only got a musket behind John Cole’s leg. Lucky I ain’t got too far to go in that skirt to fetch the pistol if needs be. John Cole already drawn his pistol from his belt and has it laid easy and friendly you might say across the mule’s mane. Like it lived there sometimes. Normal. The whiskered man laughs and nods at us. The other three faces stare, looking us over, trying to understand Winona maybe, the way all white men do. Where you heading? says Colonel Whiskers. John Cole don’t reply, he only just cocks his gun as if he were scratching his finger with it. Where you heading? he says again. Paris, says John Cole. You’ve a ways to go yet, says the dark man. I know, says John. This your woman? says another of the men, a smaller, hungrier-looking individual, with a patch on one eye. He got about two dark hairs falling from his hatbrim. He looks dirtier than the other three. Then there’s a fat man as heavy as Starling Carlton but with a handsome visage. The fourth man’s hat is sitting on a froth of russet hair. Mr Patch asks his question patiently again but John Cole has decided he don’t want to answer that one. You Northerners? the red-headed fella says. I guess so. Guess they’re Blue-bellies, wouldn’t you say? Now he’s asking this question of his companion Colonel Whiskers. I don’t doubt it, says the colonel, pleasantly. That pleasant tone ain’t good, we know. Trouble is, them Spencers. John Cole got one bullet for someone and I’ve got another. Maybe while I’m killing someone John Cole can get the musket up and then that’s a third. If we ain’t just dead as crows by then. It would all have to be done so quick. But they won’t be expecting a wife to fire maybe. Anyhow something must be done because we know clear as the Latin mass that they going to do more than ask questions. It sure was nice talking to you, says John Cole, as if he were intending to spur his mule on. What you got on the pack mule, friend? says the colonel. Just clothes and such, says John. You got gold maybe? he says, as simple as a child. John laughs, we ain’t got gold. Union dollars? No, not even, says John Cole. Well, we don’t tolerate no beggars in this county, says the colonel. Then no one says not a thing. The horses snort and their breath blooms. A fitful wind plucks at the leafless bushes. A robin flies down onto the track in front of the men as if he was hoping the hooves had turned up grubs. A robin is a quick-eyed bird. The robin is the labourer’s friend. Just in the moment I’m spotting the robin John Cole decides it’s time to fire his gun. Two of the horses heave back in surprise and a degree of terror. The bullet tears into the colonel’s right hand and God knows where then and I ain’t thinking much about that but fetch into my skirts and draw the pistol and try my damnedest to put the ball into the patch on that other man’s eye. It’s a good target anyhow and I can’t have missed by much because the man drops from his horse as if dispatched from a scaffold. Then John Cole fires the musket at Mr Red. All this in three seconds and both the red-haired man and the colonel get off shots but I don’t know where they go in the ruckus. Don’t reckon they thought John Cole would fire so reckless. Me neither, but here we are now. The colonel has fallen from his horse because I reckon that bullet went on through his hand. Mr Red looks dead enough and the man with the patch got a bullet somewhere. That leaves only the fat man and he fires in the same hand of seconds but a bullet hits him too so as I think for a moment one of our mules must have a gun. No it ain’t a mule it’s Winona. She got a little lady’s pistol all squared and pointed and she just fired it at the fat man and he just fired at her. Little Dillinger gun with a bullet you wouldn’t think would kill salt. She goes back off her mule like a branch struck her in a gallop. The Lord Christ I leap down and throw her up with John and remount myself in a flurry of skirts and we kick on our mules with fearsome desire. The colonel sits against the gravel bank and stares like he been assaulted by the Holy Family. On by we rush and thank God for mules that will run when bid. We never asked them to move quicker than a trot the whole way from Grand Rapids and now we ask them to be gazelles. They oblige, by God, the pack mule and riderless animal deciding it were best to come with us.
Somehow we expecting pursuit and capture so we keep those mules a-clattering on as best our spurs can urge them. The terror in our hearts. John Cole has one hand driving on and the other arm is holding round Winona. Some two miles on the mules is almost beat and by chance then we reach a decent wood and don’t mind how we canter in and blood our legs and hands with brambles. In a clearing then we tie the mules. It’s gotten real dark. John Cole bids me reload the guns in case we’re catched and he lays Winona on the frozen ground just like you would a corpse. He expecting it’s her corpse. Her eyes fast closed. He could bear all the deaths in the world but not this one death. He sees where the bullet torn her dress and he pulls the rip bigger. He’s looking for the hole in her skin so he can tend it somehow. The twilight’s agin him. He seen ten thousand bullet holes but never in Winona. Face blank as night too with sleep. She look so dead but she ain’t since you can see her breath rising. He shakes his head. There ain’t no sign, he says. We got to save her. She all we got, we got to save her. He’s gotten the top of the dress open now. Then he seen the gold coins that Miss Dinwiddie sewed and there’s one with a savage dent. God Almighty, he says. God Almighty.
It’s our good fortune that them mules ain’t at all mulish and come with us because now I must take off that dress and put on trews again. Still I’m finding a man can wear trews and be womanish still. Oh, a person sure may need a deal of nonsense in his head to make way in a life. That’s what I’m finding. The mules we bought in Muskegon are just the same way. Boethius Dilward would not have to lay the stick across these rumps. Supposed to be stubborn and they as faithful as hounds. Nature ain’t all, that’s clear and certain. John Cole look like he’d kill you easy and not think much about it after but the way he tends to Winona says volumes otherwise. The big thing is she been shot by a rifle which is a mighty hard-running bullet even if the bullet was took by the coin. She going to have a big bruise across her belly and anyhow she still out cold. We got that ratlike feeling that people might be creeping up on us so we got to go either way. Looks like that whiskery gentleman was shot bad enough maybe even in the stomach which will hopefully halt his gallop for good but we don’t know that for certain. If I was him I would be watering in the mouth wanting to get back at us. Could be coming up like a dark alligator now through the vicious underbrush. Goddamn brambles and poison weed and I’d say rattlesnakes and cottonmouths too only it’s so icy cold. Goddamn dark and drear Tennessee with its killer boys. We got to make haste and get to Lige. Lucky then Winona come to. Is I dead? she says. No, not yet, says John Cole.
Winona says she can sit her mule again and I guess she won’t feel the pain till later. Like sticking an invisible spear in her, that thwarted bullet. Going to be sore soon enough. Winona a girl of maybe thirteen, fourteen years, so why she so brave? Where you get that gun? says John Cole. Beulah gave it for going away, she says. If Mr Lincoln had her he’d a won his war easier. Goddamn filthy goddamn war but I guess you got to fight them. Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too. Much-lamented Mr Lincoln the goddamn proof. John Cole leads his mule and Winona’s out and I take the pack mule and my own. Going to be oats for these mules if we make it. We come down on the dark road and the moon has rose up a ways and he shines his light along the frozen way. The frost picks up the silvery illume. You could feel you was in an old storybook it’s all so strange. We mount up gingerly and John Cole casts a glance at our good girl Winona and he tells her to ride in front so he can see if she falls off in the darkness. I be all right, she says. Hey, Thomas, you keep looking back just in case, he says. I will, I say. So we ride on the whole night and we ain’t going to even dream of bedding down and sleeping. The night sky clears the way it does all of its choosing. Just the moon now high and bright like a lamp seen through a dusty window-glass. You got to wonder how things are up there? Some say the moon is like a coin, the very coin that just saved Winona. Big disc of silver like that might be wo
rth a bit. Some say you could catch it if you could reach that far. Must be some ways off anyhow. The cold is creeping under our hatbrims and down our collars. The cool cold light of the moon. The trees go silver before it like they was followers of the silver moon. Kentucky with all its critters and scattered souls sleeping, even the trees maybe sleeping. The moon is wide awake like a hunting owl. We hear the Kentucky owls screeching over the damp cold marshes westward. They trying to find each other in the tangled mess of trees. I feel of a sudden lighter than I were. I give thanks fierce and quick that Winona is alive. The mules treading along so mulish graceful and only their choosy footfall sounding. Otherwise the usual full sounds of night. Something cracking through the wood, bear or elk maybe. Maybe the wolves come hungrily through the brush. The sky is just beaten silver now too and the moon alters his light a shade to make sure he seen. Now has a coppery yellow tinge. My heart is full of Winona but also John Cole. How come we got to have Winona? I don’t know. We been through many slaughters, John Cole and me. But I am as peaceful and easy now as I ever been. Fear flies off and my box of thoughts feels light. I’m thinking, John Cole looks big for the mule. I’m thinking of all the cities and towns I never been to and I don’t know who’s in them and they don’t know me. Yep, he sure looks big for that mule. Like the mule and him ain’t in the same world exactly. Then he pulls his hat down tight. Ain’t nothing in it. He pulls his hatbrim down, under the moon. With the dark trees around. And the owls. Don’t mean nothing. Be hard to be in the world without him. I’m thinking that. That part of the country you see two or three shooting stars a minute. Must be time of year for shooting stars. Looking for each other, like everything is.