A man may judge by this eating of the riverbank by the mines that Grand Rapids doing good so long as the drear war rages. Day comes when arms are laid down and then there is cheering in our narrow city but then also we know that hundreds will never come back and there ain’t no call for what the place was making formerly. There is a silence like a peopleless forest such as was found one time along the old Missouri river itself now so clogged with human matters. Everything makes a mighty pause, the little stores are still, the streets become the walkways of the old. Mr Noone must close his doors and his sparkling tribe disperse. Titus Noone looks puzzled, hands deep in his pockets. Surely he loves his players most of all and it pains him to his marrow to give them their marching orders. But no citizens no cents.
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.