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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 worth 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.

Winona bent over further and further and then grew in hardship and her face were blanched by pain and at daybreak I cut two poles and braced them with a third for a travois and tied what we had spare between and covered her with my dress and pulled her along on that. She was so slight it were like drawing a leaf. She never moaned once though she could of moaned free as she like considering. I’d a moaned good let me tell you. Strike from a bullet’s like Death’s brother. I’ll say.

Lige Magan’s letter it said to pass quietly around the town of Paris by means of a sheltering wood to the west and when we come out the other side we would reach a creek and then to follow the trail along the bank of that creek westward so we did that.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

W
E
CAN
SEE
L
IGE
’
S
need straight off even as we move along the trail. Beautiful creek running like an endless frosted beard. Field upon field of worried-looking land. Tall blackened weeds and some festering crop half won. This yellowed land and then the frighted-looking sky stretching away to heaven and all on the horizon the stubs and spikes of unknown black trees. Then hills heaping away into the distance and stubborn forest and even further maybe mountains with their Jewish caps of snow. But not enough hands to make good these fields that’s clear. Don’t have the spruced-up spank of work. Ain’t in army order nor shipshape neither. We come slow up to the house and there’s old Lige with his crown in blessed white and his smile cutting open his mouth above a long white-speckled meg. No hat and the hair a fume of smoke. Queer to see him in civilian garb that’s certain. Colour Sergeant Magan. That bore the colours of the regiment. Come down his steps onto the tamped sand and took our hands in his. By God his eyes are shining. Hey, Lige, how is it? It’s good, it’s good.