Now in St Louis we see changes since the old times. Vast wharf-houses as tall as hills. All the freedmen sprung up here like a crop of souls and near every face you see along the river be black and brown and yella. There ain’t nowhere their work don’t touch. They doing the hauling and the hooking and the roping. But they ain’t looking so much like slaves no more. The boss men is black and the shouting roars out of black lungs. No whips like heretofore. I don’t know but this looks like to be better. Still, me and Winona don’t see one Indian face. We ain’t lingering to find out the weevils and the bad worms in these new visions. But we flick through and there were something there don’t offend though in all truth St Louis smacked into desolation by the receding war and shell-ruined houses here and there still these times even if a-building. Sense of two worlds rubbing up. Am I American? I don’t know. Me and Winona take our place with the other mudsills in the fifth-class section. It’s a damn pleasure to do a bit of river travel. That old Mississippi is a temperate girl most times and her skin is soft and even. Something so old is perpetual young. River never crinkles and creases or if she does it’s storms. We got clement days though the woods along is clamped with ice and endless miles of white foliage festooning. Vines climb into the halted trees and frost wraps round their limbs till you think the woods be full of icy snakes. Then the great expanses of the farms and cotton fields all waiting for the errant sun and the baccy grounds sheared by fire. Those skies that God loves to show and can’t but favour with a gorgeous pallid light. Though still I gaze about and fear we’re followed I do find succour in these powerful waters.
Now healing from the sights of slaughter my fond Winona blossoms back to talk and she like a flower now that scorns even spring. A famous flower that likely blooms in frost. A lovely child with her scented breath and up from her limbs rising a smell of life and beauty. I guess she might be fifteen years, my daughter, but who can say. I call her my daughter though I do know she ain’t. Let’s say my ward, my care, the product of some strange instinct deep within that does rob from injustice a shard of love. The palms of her hands like two maps of home, the lines leading homeward like old trails. Her beautiful soft hands with tapering fingers. Her touches like true words. A daughter not a daughter but who I mother best I can. Ain’t that the task in this wilderness of furious death? I guess so. Got to be. My breast is surging with a crazy pride to be bringing her back homeward. We’ve sent a telegraph from St Louis to say that we return since till we reached the river I never dared to stir a nest. I can see John Cole take that news and stand with trembling heart in anticipation of her coming. Out on the porch gazing for us returning birds. We’ll be walking in part from Memphis since some links in the stages broken. But we’ll make steady progress walking on and watch the farms and feel steadier and steadier the approach of home. No matter what dangers and evils roundabout we will reach that moment of meeting again. These was my thoughts. The wide river slipping under the flat bottom. The songs of the chorusing passengers, the card-players’ silences. The blacks working all the tasks of the boat like they was bringing these exempted white souls to paradise. Something stopped, something in between. Sweet river travel.
Get down to Memphis. I know my clothes just stink. Bloomers urinous and shitty. It’s got to be. But we take a night’s rest in a boarding house and wash ourselves and then next morning as we stirring to go was that queer feeling of greeting the lice moving back onto clean limbs. They was residing in the seams of our dresses all night and now like those emigrants along that old Oregon trail they creep across the strange Americas of our skins.
Then the long cold walk to Paris. Then the farmhouse in the distance. Then John Cole’s arms around us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It’s John Cole tells Rosalee and Tennyson I got to keep the dress on. I tole him all recounts in our private bed of what occurred and including every small matter and every great. I tole him all and recounted the sad end of Starling Carlton. John Cole says in human matters there often three things rivalling. Truths fighting one with another. That’s the world, he says. Lige Magan loved that sweating man and it grieves him sore that he is dead but John Cole don’t tell him I ended him. John Cole would of fought by Starling Carlton and often did and would of stood between him and harm but it were wrong in his careful estimation to want to end Winona. Darkly devilish wrong. John Cole tells Lige we don’t know what’s coming but it’s best now if Thomas McNulty not here. Rosalee don’t make no mountain out of it. Tennyson don’t seem to care. Still talks to me but now like I was a woman. He very polite and lifts his hat when he see me. Morning, ma’am, is his way of talk. Morning, Mr Bouguereau. That’s how things go on. That mourning dove been getting peachier and peachier but she still resident. John Cole been sneaking her titbits from his dinners. That ain’t no crime.
We’re tucked in the house till spring and outside rages all the usual blather and violent tempers of storms. John Cole took Winona for a pupil and he got two books bought to help him called The American Lady’s and Gentleman’s Modern Letter Writer: relative to business, duty, love, and marriage and An Improved Grammar of the English Language. She going to be writing and talking like a emperor. The drifts pile up against the barn. Covers the rough graves of Tach Petrie and his boys that was dug for their long sleep. Covers the sleeping roots of things. The outlaws, the orphans, the angels and the innocents. Covers the long woods.
Then from the woods as spring ascends we hear the other wood doves call. General Lee cocks her head. Co-co-co-rico, looking for a mate before the year is older. When her wing heals I’ll let her go for sure. Co-co-co-rico. Looking for each other, like the shooting stars. Like the Tennessee owls. Like every damn thing.
Come proper spring we hear some news from far Wyoming. Captain Sowell been killed by hands unknown and in the absence of an accuser Major Neale been released. We hear he’s honourably discharged and gone home to Boston. To hell with the army that locks him up I guess. We don’t know what happens to his charges and we don’t know nothing about the looking into of the death of poor Starling. Maybe the German don’t count for much. We look at this from all sides like General Lee when she gazing upon an item and we hope we may consider it good news. John Cole mighty troubled since it seem to him that Silas Sowell was sorta right. Indians ain’t vermin to be burned out of the seams of the coats of the world. Witness is his old great-grandma inside of himself. Riding the caboose of John Cole. If I wasn’t no sharpshooter we’d a never seen none of this trouble maybe, says Lige Magan. Never meant to shoot no girl. That long long ago, says John Cole, that long long ago. Lotta goddamned water and a lotta goddamned bridges since then. Major was calling for me to stop and I heard him, why in hell did I go on with it? says Lige. You just forget about all that, says John Cole. I thinks about it every night of my days, says Lige, I surely do. I didn’t know that, I says. Yep, he says, every night of my days.
We’re going to put in crops of wheat and corn this year and give the land a rest from tobacco. Gives you a shorter year too. Ain’t none of that curing in barns and grading and the rest. I hitch up my skirts good as any country girl and work aside the men. Winona runs the wagon in and out of town for this and that and looks like the townspeople of Paris growing accustomed to seeing her about. Stop seeing just an Indian and start seeing Winona. John Cole reckons the young boy behind the counter in the dry-goods store’s sweet on her. He says it won’t be the worst thing if she gets connected to commerce. She ain’t going to be marrying yet, I say, in time-honoured motherly fashion. Then lo and behold don’t she gain employment clerking for the goddamn lawyer Briscoe. She got the best copperplate in the county, he says. Comes out on his gig to see us. Guess it don’t look too disreputable. A white couple and an old army man. Nice black folks. That’s what he sees I guess.