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There’s a half-blind preacher in a temple called Bartram House and I don my best dress and me and John Cole go there and we tie the knot. Rev. Hindle he says the lovely words and John Cole kiss the bride and then it’s done and who to know. Maybe you could read it in their holy book, John Cole and Thomasina McNulty wed this day of our Lord Dec. 7th 1866. In the euphoria of war’s end we reckon a craziness is desired. God don’t mind we know because that day of deep winter is clement, clear and bright. Then as if a token of God’s favour we get a letter from Lige Magan. We been sending missives back and forth while we putting meat back on our bones. He’s struggling with his farm. The men that his pa freed been killed by militia long since but two. His whole country ruined by war and like a waste of ghosts. The coming year lies heavy on his mind and how he to burn the land alone in January? Been set in grass six years and now it ripe for baccy. If we not otherwise engaged could we come and help him in his hour of need? He says all his cold district is a swamp of mistrust and he trusts me and John. Going to be hard years but maybe we could feel
there were something to win. He got no
kin
but us. If we come he hoping we got good pistols and also further states that rifles would be wise and a hundred rounds per soul army-style. Fact is that they calling him just a scalawag like his pa and fact is he is. John Cole reads the letter to me on the porch by the river. We muffled to our eyes with old sack coats and our heads encased in old bearskin hats. Our breath is flowing out like lonesome flowers that die on the air. The deep river runs cleaner now the mine is halted. Winter birds sing their wise old songs on withered river posts. Winona in her winter dress and she as glad as a rose. Old Father Time seems to be looking on with his scythe and sand-clock. Mr McSweny listening while he smokes his seven-cent cheroot. This Tennessee baccy, he says. It good.

We cast an imploration on Beulah McSweny to come with us but he says he ain’t testing the patience of the South towards his kind just now and anyhow how would Mr Noone thrive without him? John Cole treks up to Muskegon where the army unloading ten thousand mules and horses now the late war is done and buys four mules for nothing. We have wrote back to Lige and he is mighty pleased we coming and he says to bring mules for ploughing if we can get some. Says horses being eaten now and Tennessee starving. Going to take a week get down there. Maybe two. Depending what we find. Beulah gives us ten two-dollar Erie and Kalamazoo notes he got saved. Can’t take that from you, says John Cole. John, he says, you might as well. We also got five gold coins and two five-dollar bills which is everything we got after army service and a little bit owed by Mr Noone when
we left to go to war. It ain’t no Yankee fortune. The fourth mule will take our slender stuff. Winona’s spare dress and my private dresses except the moths been into them somewhat. The dress I were married in goes back to Mr Noone’s prop-master. John Cole asks the seamstress Miss Dinwiddie to sew the gold coins into the fancy bit below the bodice of Winona’s daily dress. It’s to keep them hidden but Winona smiles and says her grandfather did just the same in the long ago when he were riding out to war. Mighty medicine, old Spanish coins sewn into his war dress.

That night we drink more whisky with Mr Noone and company than was wise. It was a sweet time. Mr Noone makes a speech about the old days and new days to come. Farewells and promises of eternal friendship pass our mouths and make our faces sombre.

Looks like we’re ready to go south. You could drop a plumb line from Grand Rapids and it would pull down straight to Paris, Tennessee, so we going strict south by the compass through Indiana and Kentucky, says John Cole. Mr McSweny nodding now like we are talking about something he will never have to think of again. He says the best thing is take care of Winona. Mr McSweny be a hundred years old maybe but he ain’t too old to feel the pain of parting. Guess Winona rooted deep into his heart just like she done with us. Guess Winona feels like something special in the world. A sort of boon and award for being alive. Beulah McSweny holds out his grizzled brown hand and shakes her smooth hand as brown as polished pinewood. Thank you for everything you done, Beulah, she
says. The poet McSweny looks down. I guess you don’t need to thank me, he says. No, Beulah, I do, she says.

Since we got them cheap mules we ain’t going to be able to catch them trains in a Memphis direction. Can’t put four mules on a stagecoach neither. But we don’t mind it. We’ll go along easy and not bust their wind. Be glad to show Winona all that country, John Cole says. Guess we discover that the worst roads in Christendom go down through Indiana. Ain’t they got shovels? says John Cole. Dire mud to put boots of black on the mules. All the same they look busy in the Indiana towns, astir with themselves. New-looking places. And all to us a nameless country though I expect everything has a name but we don’t know them. Sometimes we ask a name of a river as we cross just for the hell of it but it makes no difference since we passing through. Our business is going south. Folk look out at us under the hatbrims like we was not very desirable creatures. We traipsing down main street of a dozen podunk places and in one or two Winona gets filthy words thrown. One big boozy red-faced charlatan soul one place laughing at us and saying looks like we travelling with our whore. Ain’t that unusual. John Cole not being easy with talk like that stops his mule and slowly dismounts and starts to walk over to the great galoot. Well, he runs like a fat rabbit and squeals too. You just got to answer a bully, says John Cole. That will do it. Then he comes back to us and swings his leg again across his black mule. Nods his head and we go on. Maybe we go a little faster just in case that brave boy got friends. Winona though looking proud like John Cole did the right thing there. Guess he did. Lot of what they call civilisation in
Indiana we notice. Theatres. Which makes us sad that we ain’t lookers no more. Old men afore our time but we still have a hankering for the work we done before. I still feel the sadness of not donning no dress. Always remembering the strange silence in the crowd and things without words hovering in the air. Crazy nights. Queer way to make a living but we made it all the same. I’m wondering if Lige Magan grows good eats could something of the bloom of youth return? It might. Mr Noone never said a word about it but we knew what the trouble was. Beauty lives in the faces of youth. No going round that. Never was a hag yet that men desired. I don’t mind being a matron now if that’s our fate. Guess it comes to every woman by and by.

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.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

A
LL
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.