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.