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.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WE CAN SEE LIGE’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.
Then we telling him about Winona and the man with the whiskers and Lige says he knows that man. He ain’t no colonel but was something in the yellowleg army right enough. Those boys with him was boys of his command. They been ranging round doing mischief and hanging blacks. We said we seen his work along the way. That’s it, says Lige. You might expect to see that man again if he live, he says. Tach Petrie is his name. Tach Petrie, I think they call him, says Lige.
Man we got a lot to do other than worry about Tach Petrie and his possible demise or resurrection. Lige got a nice woman called Rosalee that tends Winona. She fetches in and lifts her to the house. My dress kinda lifts in the breeze and slides onto the ground. Whose dress that? says Rosalee, that Mrs Cole’s? Where she? We don’t have an answer for that. That Rosalee sets Winona on a trestle by a big long fire. Trying to think back when I saw Lige so happy. Guess he’s mighty relieved. Rosalee got a brother works with Lige. Tennyson Bouguereau. They’s freed Negroes and Tennyson works five acres for a share. All they had before us was a winded mare to plough. A mule worth three times a horse up here, says Lige. Mule like gold. He’s so happy to see four. I say these the best mules ever lived in my opinion. Told him about the pack mule and Winona’s riderless mule running with us. Hot damn, says Lige. Who’d a known a thing like that was possible. We ask him has he heard from Starling Carlton and how’s he doing. Lige says he hears everything west of the North Platte river and the plains in general all gone to pot. Sioux rampaging. Caught-His-Horse-First been seen and has a new band. All going to hell in a bucket. Says he heard Dan FitzGerald come home from Andersonville and is topping trees in Alaska. That real good, I say. Surprised to hear that. Thought he was a goner for sure. Yup, says Lige, he made it.