The major’s rooms is quiet and cold and Winona ain’t lit no stove or nothing. So I tell her we going at last but first I got to find a goddamn dress and then she got to help me daub my face. Winona knows where was the major’s bedroom and going in there’s like breaking someone’s tomb. I ain’t got no hearty wish to do it but needs must. Nothing’s cleaned out of Mrs Neale. Her row of dresses hangs in the fancy wardrobe. Feels just like we was robbing her real body. Down comes a dress and God forgive me but I go to search out stockings. I can forgo the damn bloomers and the like because the skirt of the dress is to the ankle but I took the bloomers anyhow. I ain’t robbing no goddamn bloomers anyhow since poor Mrs Neale in truth gone by. Then I pulled my hair tight on my crown and we choose a no-nonsense hat from among a aviary of birdlike fancies. Stuff that down. All the time feeling like a thief. What the hell has life come to, stripping the dead? I got to say I notice Winona don’t see it so. She liked that Mrs Neale and maybe she loved her. Guess a dress is a token of her soul. She sits me at the dressing table and goes to work. Could be Grand Rapids afore the show but it sure ain’t. Smears on the make-up, does the eyes with kohl, and paints the lips, looks at me dubious and shakes powder over all. I look like a ten-cent quick job whore. It’s not going to be stage lights so we got to get it right. She rubs off the kohl so then I look like my best beau punched me. It don’t matter. Tones down the lipstick. Then by God we’re set if ever we could be set. Stuff all that business in her carpetbag and I obliged to steal the major’s razor. I don’t know how long this new-fangled journey will take us but I can’t become no bearded lady.
Big heavy sky of threatening snow outside. A huge glob of dark cloud leaning on the roofs. There’s a detail coming in and they make their clatter on the ground. Those boys been out some days and they look pulled and wearied. Shipshape too and sort of trimmed. Strikes me this work is kinda crazy noble and I never had that thought before exactly. Not just on the nose like that. Strange boil of love for them like the trout makes in the river. Their handsome youth given o’er to toil. Troopers paid the clippings of tin. That don’t change. Riding out to chaos and no sign much of that glory. First lieutenant at the head salutes me as I pass, I nearly salute back, strike me dead. Keep my hand stuffed in a muffler. Yep, stole a muffler and a coat to add to my crimes. Winona took a cloaklike coat may have been a daughter’s. It don’t fit well and her arms look long but the cold is vicious-minded. Then out the gates and the sentry also stiffens and salutes. He don’t know me clearly but I guess he thinks all women’s worth a greeting. I’m sweating worse than Starling. The stagecoach is there but it’s more of a mud-wagon. A globule of passengers inside already. Driver won’t have Winona getting in so she climbs up top and I struggle up with her. A dress just a menace to mountaineering. You can go in, ma’am, he says. Just not the Injun. Don’t matter none, I say, I’ll sit up here. I see corporals now going about everywhere. Like I drank bad whisky and seeing visions. Corporals, corporals, everywhere. Out on constable duty, I’ll swear. Everyone I imagine looking for the killer of Starling Carlton. I fetch my eyes forward. Goddamn move this goddamn stage. The huge cloud surrenders and snow washes down, passing at a swirling angle. All that old world of bugles, lice and sabres disappears and the stage lurches off.
It’s just a filthy old affair being thrown about for a hundred miles. You can climb down for victuals but soon it’s the pitching ride again. Round and round till your stomach swole and you’re hurling that set of kippers into the fond air of Wyoming. Three other victims up there with us starting to howl with sickness without making a sound. One a runner for some prospectors said to be sniffing for gold in the back hills. Good luck and yous’ll soon be Indian stew. Another man a scout I recognise, he was on the recent programme of so-called removal. Through chattering teeth Winona talking to him in her own bits of lingo. I ask her what they talking about and she says they talking about the snow. You talking about the weather? I said. Yes, sir, she says.
Big train blowing steam and smoke at the depot. It’s like a creature. Something in perpetual explosion. Huge long muscle body on her and four big men punching coal into her boiler. It’s a sight. It’s going to be dragging four carriages east and they say they’ll go good. The light pall of snow hisses on the boiler sheets. Wish I could report well of the third-class wagon but it’s evil cold and damp and me and Winona got to sit in close as cats. Not an inch to move because our fellow voyagers thought to bring their whole possession with them. We even got goats and the mark of goats is stink. Man next me is a nightmare pile of coats. Can’t say what size of corpse he is he is so wrapped. We’ve bought some pies in Laramie and a bag of that famed cornbread. Famed to twist your belly. We’re told we’ll see a hundred stops or so but the train moves like a giant dancer for all its bulk. Out front the snow-guard parts the snow just like a ship through blustering foam. The snow thrown up pours back across the roofs and in it comes through glassless windows to be brother to soot and sister to choking smoke. Here is new-fangled luxury I guess. We tear on through country would of took long wretched hours by horse, the train traversing like a spooked buffalo. In two three days we’re going to see St Louis. That’s just a blank miracle. We go so fast I believe we leave our thinking parts back the line, only our battered bodies hurtling forward. Dizzy and frozen. If we’d had the dollars handy for first class, by God we would a spent them if they was the last dollars we’d ever seen. At trembling stops we buy grub and the great engine drinks and clanks and shudders. It sure be a manly beast, that girl. Me and Winona talk the yards of time. Her top wish now is to be with John Cole. Something in John is calming right enough. For me over these long years he’s sacred. I never think bad of John, just can’t. I don’t even truly know his nature. He a perpetual stranger and I delight in that.
Each day we find a quiet spot and wield the razor. Forgot to bring the strop so it slowly blunts. Cuts lines and nicks across my face like I was breaking into yellow fever. Winona daubs me good. Crazy thing is I’m cold and wet and sore but I’m growing happy since we moving far from Death. That’s what it seems. Winona loosening too, and laughing now. She just a girl and should be laughing regular. She should be playing maybe if she ain’t too old. Certainly acts the lady and knows how. We like mother and child right enough and that’s how it plays. I give thanks for that. Maybe in my deepest soul I believe my own fakery. I suppose I do. I feel a woman more than I ever felt a man, though I were a fighting man most of my days. Got to be thinking them Indians in dresses shown my path. Could gird in men’s britches and go to war. Just a thing that’s in you and you can’t gainsay. Maybe I took the fortune of my sister when all those times ago I saw her dead. Still as a scrap of seaweed. Her thin legs sticking out. Her ragged pinny. I had never seen such things nor suspected there could ever be such suffering. That was true and it will always be true. But maybe she crept into me and made a nest. It’s like a great solace, like great sacks of gold given. My heart beats slowly I do believe. I guess the why is dark as doom but I am just witness to the state of things. I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of woman and wake with the same. I don’t foresee no time where this ain’t true no more. Maybe I was born a man and growing into a woman. Maybe that boy that John Cole met was but a girl already. He weren’t no girl hisself for sure. This could be mountainous evil. I ain’t read the Book on that. Maybe no hand has ever wrote its truth. I never heard of such a matter unless from us prancers on the stage. In Mr Noone’s hall you just was what you seemed. Acting ain’t no subterfuge-ing trickery. Strange magic changing things. You thinking along some lines and so you become that new thing. I only know as we was tore along, Winona lying on my breast, I was a thorough-going ordinary woman. In my windblown head. Even if my bosom was my army socks stuffed in.