Woe to Live On: A Novel Page 7

  “Any other news?” I asked.

  “Well, yes, Dutchy. Alf Bowden killed your father.” Gus pulled his hat off and held it in his hands. “Bowden shot him in the neck down by the river, then booted him along Main Street ’til he died.”

  Jack Bull’s hand went to my shoulder and my heart pumped bad blood-thoughts to my head.

  “My father,” I said. “My father was an Unconditional Unionist. Like all the Germans. An Unconditional Unionist.”

  “Well, yeah,” Gus said. “But he was mainly known as your father, Dutchy. You got a reputation.”

  “I spared Bowden,” I said. My mind was in a whirl, and a mix of unpleasant ideas came to me. “You know it. I know you know it. I spared Bowden.”

  “It didn’t make a friend of him,” Jack Bull said. “You taught him mercy but he forgot the lesson.”

  “Both your mothers went to Kentucky,” Gus went on. “By train, I think.”

  I felt my face warp and wobble and my arms quaked. I could have cried. Gray heads suffered while young ones went unnoosed.

  “I might as well have shot him myself,” I said. “Mercy has treachery in it. I need to forget I know of it. I’ll put it aside. I am not too brilliant with it.”

  “That may be the answer,” Jack Bull said.

  Oh, everything happens.

  8

  WHEN ALL THE trees were bare, we had trouble. We suffered fearful subtractions. John Colbert was killed. Lafe Pruitt, Ralph Sawyer, Randolph Haines and Joe Loubet were cut off in a range of trees and hunted down, then blasted neutral by a large squad of Federals. Wounds were as likely as sunup. It was a miserable season to fight in.

  Where it was possible we balanced things. At Holden we found a handful of militia, and Riley, Jack Bull and me did all the balancing. Five graves would be filled whenever someone took the trouble to dig them. We looted the Holden store and found forty pair of boots. The boots smelled finely of fresh leather, and in a corner of the store there was also a whiskey barrel. We punched holes in the boot tops, strung them together with rope, then bashed in the barrel and filled them with Old Crow. We hung the whiskey-sloshing boots about our necks like nooses, and drank by kicking up the heels.

  Just into December Black John and George Clyde decided we must disband until spring. Our large group was too easily located by larger groups of the enemy when we were so slowed by the season. Our plan was to go off and hide in groups of four, surviving the winter as best we could.

  Our breaths gave off clouds that wafted in the air and we stamped the ground to warm our feet. There were nervous looks in many faces. Small groups might be more easily hidden but if found it would be awful hot.

  As the cold wind slapped red on our cheeks and our nervous eyes went here and there, Black John Ambrose put on a ’til-we-meet-again-in-the-spring speech. When Black John’s ideas were spelled out plain, it was sometimes less good than confusion had been. He shouted about the cloven foot of tyranny and the Founders of our Nation and bodiless comrades and blue-bellied murderers who were even now sniffing close to our women and how wonderful the feel of an oppressor’s blood is when it dries on your hands. It went on and on.

  When his speech was played out the boys raised a couple of huzzahs and hoorahs. He accepted the acclaim with the coolness of an uncaught caesar.

  Then we all parted, heading for secret caves, or far-in-the-woods relatives, or friendly southern strangers, to wait out the bad weather.

  Jack Bull, me, George Clyde, Riley, Turner, the Hudspeths and Holt went the first leg of our journey together. At Captain Perdee’s farm we split up. Jack Bull and me and Clyde and Holt went on to the neighborhood of a certain miss named Juanita Willard. Clyde was sweet on her, but we could not stay safely on the Willard farm. This fact brought us to the nearby place of Jackson Evans.

  Jackson Evans had been a friend to Asa Chiles. At one time the Evans place had been highly prosperous and he’d owned more niggers than anyone in those parts.

  Things had changed.

  The Evans household held Jackson, his wife, a small girl called Honeybee but whose right name was Mary, and a teenaged girl who was the widow of Jackson’s son, Jackson, Junior. Junior had been killed at Independence in the house-to-house fighting after only a few weeks of marriage. The widow girl was named Sue Lee and her maiden name had been Shelley.

  All the niggers were gone to Kansas or into the Federal Army. The farm had a very lonely feel to it, for it was plain that it had been designed for dozens to live there. And they had once—but no more.

  A layer of hills were closed in around the farm like some feminine embrace. George Clyde and Jack Bull selected a likely spot among the humps and we started to dig in. To stay in the house would be ridiculous. Patrols passed by plenty.

  Jackson Evans loaned us shovels and a pickax and we went to it, slamming away through the thin frozen topsoil. Holt and I switched off on the pickax while George and Jack Bull did the shoveling.

  The day was gray, though not moist. It was cool, but a good clean sweat came up from the work.

  “It has been a while since we’ve done work,” Jack Bull said. “There is something soothing about it.”

  George Clyde laughed, his wide, square face splitting. He was not hard to like but terrible to cross.

  “Work has never been my main ambition,” he said. He laughed more and patted Holt on the shoulder. “We have done much work—just look at these hands—but I think I’ve spied an easier way to riches.”

  “Spell out this miracle,” Jack Bull said.

  “Why,” Clyde said, “you just ride up with the boys and take it.”

  “Ah, it’s the good old rule, the simple plan,” Jack Bull sang. “Those who would should take, and those should keep who can.”

  “Exactly,” said Clyde. “It’s a workable method—that is proven.”

  George Clyde and Jack Bull Chiles shared the nature that adapts quickly to the practical, but it was still inconvenient to my mind. It was the difference between What? and Why? Though I might rob, I did not believe myself as a robber.

  “I don’t know that the time is yet right for robbing wholesale,” I said.

  Clyde scooped a shovelful of dirt, then flung it aside. He grinned at me.

  “You don’t know enough, then,” he said. “I think it is as right as two rabbits.”

  I looked at his face and decided that I would differ with him on this but not make a debate of it.

  Something of the master builder rose to the surface in Jack Bull. The dugout was going to be deep and wide enough to hold us, our horses and their forage, and a rock and mud chimney. This meant much sweaty labor before any comfort could be had.

  I gathered rocks for the chimney when not digging. The hillsides were rocky and angled steeply, impossible terrain for plowing. Under the bare trees I scrambled about, hefting stones and inspecting them for weight and flatness. My compact dimensions allowed me to easily crawl under cockspur bushes and sticker weeds if a good chimney piece was beneath them. A few scratches showed up on my face but it was fun. The truth of it is, it was fun to be building something.

  All of us dug hard and blistered and heehawed at joking comments. By the end of the second day we had worked off a bunch of our jumpy attitudes and were feeling calmed by the effort.

  Jack Bull, with his fingers at his chin, paused often to stare at our ever-growing hole, then would begin to pace off lines and shapes, but he did it often and different each time. This was unsettling. He had grand plans for this ground but maybe too many of them.

  “We should face south,” he said. “We all know that. But the horses should be nearest the door.”

  “Whatever you think, Jack Bull,” Clyde said. “I just can’t get enough of this sweaty work, so you go on and feature it out right.”

  Holt and Clyde laughed. Laughs were the only sounds Holt had made in two days. He kept his tongue well rested.

  “We will be in it for weeks,” Jack Bull said, a little bit testy. “Might as wel
l do it right. I don’t see the sense in not doing it right.”

  “Ain’t no one going to fight you on that,” Clyde said. “I don’t want to spend the winter sleeping in mud no more than you do.”

  “Good, good,” Jack Bull said, his fingers at his chin again. “We can have a double door, or even two doors.” He began to pace off a whole new bunch of lines, and said, “Then put in mud bunks along the walls and lay the chimney…”

  All we diggers laughed and listened, and Jack Bull went on and on until we thought he made sense.

  Then we built it.

  It was right.

  Just after sundown of the seventh day Holt came huffing into the hole, his pistol pulled. He spoke his first sentence in a week.

  “Rider comin’ this way. One minute off.”

  The dugout was finished and awful cozy. The chimney was about the best piece of work I’ve ever done, and the house in general was as sweet as you’d find underground anywhere. I think it raised some proud up in all of us. We were slow to leave it.

  “Aw, let’s go see to our visitor,” Clyde said.

  Once outside it was clear the rider was coming on bold. There was no slinking involved in the way it came straight at us. Moonlight shone down bright over the cold bare landscape. The soft clopclop of hooves yawned out across the valley. The horse snuffled and whinnied once, and if this rider was a Federal it had to be a general to be so open and silly in this country by night.

  “It’s just me,” a feminine voice spoke. “Don’t shoot or some dumb damn thing like that.”

  It was Sue Lee, the widow girl.

  “Why, how do?” Jack Bull said and swept his hat off and swooped it around. “You talk nice, Mrs. Evans.”

  Sue Lee dropped down from her mount. She was bundled up thick in several pieces of clothes. They were all kinds of colors. She smelled good, or else the clothes smelled good, ’cause of a sudden something nearby smelled real good.

  “I’ve brung you some dinner,” she said. “Mr. Evans wishes me to apologize for not having sent you food sooner. The Federals have been on the move and he thought it safest not to. And don’t you call me Mrs. Evans. My name is Sue Lee Shelley. It’s a good one and I’m a widow now, you know, so I reckon I’ll go on back to it and use it.”

  “Please pardon me,” Jack Bull said in his most riverboat manner. I never liked this particular quality of his. “And come on in, won’t you, Sue Lee?”

  George Clyde held open the dirty plank door that opened over the dugout. Sue Lee stepped down into our place and Clyde said, “Evenin’, ma’am.”

  Holt and I stood solid and watched as Clyde and Jack Bull did a terrific series of winks at each other, accompanied by the sneaky slinging of elbows. All it took was a girlish widow with a bucket of grub to drop by and those boys commenced to preening like there would be some huggy waltzes to be danced.

  “I’ll look to the horse,” Holt said to me.

  I still did not move. I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different. I always felt that in their presence I was expected to swim a river of mud just so they could watch and giggle, then tell me I was too filthy to be seen with once I clambered up the bank. It didn’t seem like anything I had to do.

  “Roedel, I’ll look to the horse,” Holt said again. “You’d better get on in there. Let the woman see your face and know it, too.”

  The nigger was grinning. He’d gotten to where he acted awful familiar even if he didn’t say much. I could see that he was starting to look on me like he might look on himself. That’s just what happens with close living.

  “I believe I know best how to handle my personal affairs, Holt.” He kept his grin lit up and he didn’t move back. “Why don’t you see to the lady’s horse. I reckon I’ll go on in and check what she brung to eat.”

  Hold nodded, back to his mute ways, and I went on in.

  I had a feeling.

  There was red throughout her cheeks. One tooth was chipped in a showy part of her smile. Her hair was this big camp of black stuff falling out all around her face. Little winter drips beaded at her nose, which was a fine, thin instrument. A pale scar went an inch or so straight down her forehead and cleaved through her brow almost over the nose. Her eyes were of this endless dark hue you’ve never seen before.

  “My,” she said, “aren’t you bushwhackers the gentlemen.”

  We all had our hats in our hands watching her. My head felt cold. An insensible bit of manners, that hat business in winter.

  “We try to make the effort when possible,” Jack Bull said. There was a brightness to his eyes viewing this woman. Our social life had been for a good while restricted to men, and the novelty of this widow girl being in our dugout had him glowing. “Do you think manners should be dropped in times like these, Sue Lee?”

  I answered that question in my own mind right quick and hung my hat back on my head, the only spot where it did me any good.

  “No,” she said. Sue Lee sat on a blanket with her legs folded beneath her. She did this thing where her hand went raking soft through her hair. To me it had the aspect of a cat clawing after fleas, though I reckon it was meant to come off as coy. “But I don’t think horse sense ought to be dropped either. It’s cold.”

  Hats were slapped back on heads.

  “Hmmm,” went Jack Bull, a smile creeping slowly into his face. If he’d had a moustache, he would have given it a dashing tug or two. I don’t know where he picked up this paddlewheel rogue approach but he seemed to think it a devastating one. “You are so kind to think of us, ma’am.”

  She displayed her chipped tooth then and gawked downward, and by that gesture you knew she was yet a girl in some ways despite being a widow.

  “You men think of us more,” she said sincerely. “You do the good work. I know it’s dirty and dangerous.”

  I crouched back in my corner of the dugout and used the satchel of captured mail as a stool. I had carried the letters all summer long, as no good reason to dump them had hit me. It was the only gift my comrades had ever done to me and I suppose that is why I hoarded them.

  “Those are good words to hear,” George Clyde said. His sturdy person was squatted just to the right of the girl. “It’s not always we hear them.”

  The bucket of grub had not been touched. It was boiled potatoes with wet bacon and corn bread for variety. I didn’t feel like going through the test of eating in front of a widow who might find my table manners unique. I used to eat right, and dab my lips with a cloth after every grease dribble and hardly ever shove a potato into my mouth whole. But I had got shed of that style and did not want to hear any bad appraisals of the one I had adopted.

  “Well, now,” Sue Lee said, “I should be going. Mr. Evans will worry if I don’t.”

  “Oh, ma’am,” said Jack Bull. “I am awful sorry about Jackson, Junior, getting killed.”

  “We all suffer,” she said. “But he suffers no more.”

  “I once met him and he was a fine boy.”

  “Yes,” she said wistfully. She pushed up from the ground in a strong, springy way. “He was a good husband to me. For six weeks he was a good husband to me, but he didn’t last.”

  While Jack Bull did this consoling sort of stare into her face, the door creaked open and in came Holt. He was slapping away at himself to warm up.

  “What is he doing here?” Sue Lee asked.

  “Oh, ma’am,” George Clyde said, “this nigger’s with me. His name is Holt. He just about don’t talk at all.”

  A severe expression was on her face. There were not too many nigger rebels, although I had seen two others. It was a new one on her.

  “He ought to be off in a field plowing with a team of other niggers,” she said. “This is our revolution.”

  Clyde hooted and said, “Oh, I would reckon not, ma’am. No, ma’am. That’s one nigger I wouldn’t try to hitch behind a plow.” He snorted and slapped standing Holt on the knee. “Holt’s one nigger I wouldn’t try that on
.”

  Holt just stood there and so did the widow.

  “He comes in right handy,” Jack Bull said.

  “Well, now,” Sue Lee said dazedly. “It looks like we’re going to win the fight and lose the war.”

  The corner of the dugout nearest the horses was Holt’s, and he went over there and sat down. He sat with his legs split before him and piled his five or six pistols in between them and got real interested in how the guns looked and felt.

  The widow started for the door then, and I studied the way her legs worked. She took a stride in the same fashion a man did. There was no sort of itty-bittyness to her step at all. The Evans family were aristocrats, and she had married up the hill from her own kin. That was plain. I could not picture this girl gushing beneath a pink parasol on any kind of springtime occasion.

  This did not hurt her in my eyes.

  “Oh, yes,” she said and jumped her hand to her throat in a startled move. “I almost forgot. Mr. Evans asks that you come to the house tomorrow after dark. He is up on the Federal movements and could post you on them.”

  “Why, we’d be honored,” Jack Bull said. “Will you be joining us?”

  She squinted at him briefly, then said, “Of course. There will be food.” She then laughed pleasantly. “I haven’t trained myself to go without food.”

  “Look forward to it, then,” Jack Bull said.

  All of us men joined her in standing, including Holt, who did not face her.

  “I am not sure about him,” she said and nodded toward Holt. “Mr. Evans has had a number of bad things in his life these past two years. A nigger with guns at the dinner table might just break his health all the way. I don’t know.”

  “You got nothing to worry about on that score,” George Clyde said. What good manners he had were beginning to be strained. “You needn’t worry about Holt.” Clyde had gone plain-faced. “I’ll be taking him with me over to the Willards tomorrow. We won’t be coming to your dinner.”

  “Mr. Clyde,” she said. “I didn’t mean to speak ill of your nigger.”

  “He’s not my nigger. He’s just a nigger who I trust with my life every day and night.” George Clyde was one of the devoutest killers on the border, and there couldn’t be too many sweet spots in his makeup. But Holt was one and I understood it. “I trust Holt. That’s all. And it has never been a mistake.”