Old Fort Lancaster, 1867
Will Cathay remembered all the times in Louisville when he’d passed the colored schoolhouse and wondered if he should stop the kindly-looking girl who turned out to be the teacher and ask her to write a few lines to send to his mother, Osceola. Or when, sometimes, after drill in Louisiana, he’d returned to the tent city of Sibleys, a score of them, lit from within like huge canvas lanterns, wondering who amongst them would be willing to write a letter on his behalf, saying Your child is fine or I’m alive.
But how would he have signed it — had he ever screwed up the courage to ask? His folks would wonder who the hell Will Cathay was, and where the hell Cathay Williams had gone. He couldn’t risk signing as he had during the War, back when he was a cook and a laundress. And he hadn’t spoken to any of the men since he’d gone from infantry to cavalry, so that was all conjecture. He’d have to beg the only colored sergeant — a heathenish New Orleanian named Stance, who was forever looking him up and down suspiciously, as if he’d known Will in another life — to do the deed.
No. Just as there had been no one to write for him then, there was no one to write for him now that he was in Texas. And what were they even in Texas for in the first place? Of that, Will knew next to nothing. The one bit he’d gleaned from the campfires — which, in turn, had been gleaned from some noseybody intent on overhearing officers’ news — was that the War had emptied out the Texas forts of their Confederates, who had swarmed north and east for battle, and in their place, vaqueros and rustlers had taken full advantage of the abandoned buildings, using them as cattle pens and stables. They’d filthed up the forts beyond pigsty conditions, and at Fort Lancaster they’d left behind manure-muddied floors in every post building — even the old chapel. Once the vaqueros had quit the fort, the Comancheros rushed in, and after them, the Lipan and the Kickapoo, taking away much of the fort with them, hacking down even the rafters for firewood.
It was the 9th Cavalry Colored’s charge to righten the network of forts back together: because that’s what colored soldiers were for — not soldiering, but slavery by some other name. They’d put in pitch and reconstructed many an old camp and fort until now, but the entire three days they’d bivouacked at Fort Lancaster, Heyl seemed too frightened to have them do much but drill, as they were on their way to rescue the bodies of some white men killed by Indians.
“Girth up. Posthaste!” Heyl yelled at them.
Lieutenant Heyl — whom everyone called “Lieutenant Hell,” or “Lieutenant Go-to-Hell” — rode a horse named Nigger and was rumored to suffer an abiding case of syphilis, the blame for which he laid squarely at the feet of a colored parlormaid he and his regiment had taken their turns rutting, having caught her unawares leaving an outhouse.
“Old Buddy Hell scared to death of them Injuns,” one soldier dared to comment.
Will could have pointed out that anyone would be afraid of Indians; white folks had messed with them for too long. These Indians didn’t bother with bullets if they could help it; they had better ways to snag white folks.
Lieutenant Heyl seemed not to know what to do about any of it and drilled them without ceasing in the same formation they’d learned back at Fort Stockton, though Will hadn’t recalled the 8th Indiana drilling in any formation at all when he’d been laundressing during the War.
“Posthaste!” Heyl yelled again.
Everyone said Yes sir! so slow and dirgelike, it was a wonder Heyl couldn’t hear the bitter threat of insurrection in it.
Once Heyl was far enough up front, the men got to talking about him, likening him to old masters and overseers without a one mentioning the parlormaid.
. . . . . .
The last thing Cathay remembered was Mrs. Danforth saying, “I won’t call on the midwife. Darkies are blessed with easy births.”
And so, there was only Cathay’s mother to help her deliver the baby when the pain would not ebb, leaving Cathay with nothing to do but watch the window, already frosted, barely recording the drifts that flew past as if spirits who’d robed themselves in snow. She almost welcomed the thought of her father visiting, even though she knew he’d have to cant his sight from the tent of blankets that ensconced her legs, gaping open so that her child would taste more air than wool.
Before she’d lost the first child, all Cathay wanted was for her months of carrying to come to an end, for them to be over so her mother could seize it up, wash it, balm it, feed it anything but her. If they let her, if she were allowed to be up in a day or two, she would sneak off to the woods, where the jackrabbits were practically popping out all over Independence County, as there’d be no hunting with her father or Exley, no fishing, nor doing anything other than helping her mother keep house for Mrs. Danforth, and caring for the baby when it came.
She hadn’t wanted some child hanging from her aching breasts, now huge as udders. They’d trooped off to the woods for possums they would never find, rabbits they couldn’t have caught had those rabbits’ cheekteeth nipped their heels. It went on like that until the day Exley covered her entire mouth with his and they bathed in pine needles, absenting their clothes along the way.
. . . . . .
No one had told her that giving birth was like being flayed, strip by strip of you, no butcher’s mercy to the hog, getting axed all at once. Instead, they hung you on the butcherman’s hook whilst still alive, getting sheared into hides and rashers from belly to maw every waking hour.
Nothing slaked it. Cathay screamed and wailed her pain, but that brought no release from it; the cool of the damp folded rags Osceola dabbed against her forehead felt like insults. Mrs. Danforth bickering with herself about having to keep watch over a colored gal would have been delicious enough revenge any other day, but nothing short of launching a wad of spit in the bargain would now do. And yet, as it was, she could do nothing but eat air and yelp and howl like an animal trapped and severed. Whenever the pain guttered to a mere dull hell, she could at least soothe herself by thinking of all the people she’d enjoy strangling.
Finally — the pain, when it arrived again — came in waves she could withstand.
She’d nearly come to this twice before. The first time felt like a fever, she having hardly understood she’d even been with child before she got to hemorrhaging.
The second time, they’d taken it out beforehand, knowing it would never survive.
. . . . . .
When the Union arrived at their doorstep, everything was painted blinding white by high-noon sunshine, its heat cooking every living thing. A body could hear and smell them before you could see them, ambling along in raggedy two-by-two formation. They tromped through the overgrown yellow weeds that hadn’t been scythed away from the footpath and kicked up loose scarves of russet-colored dust. The four chickens that had gone to greet them trotted to keep up, squawking and losing feathers.
Her mother watched, readjusting the basin on her hip. Without taking her eyes off the soldiers, she started up her orders to Cathay. “Go tell them troops they can eat with us tonight, but our missus’ll chase them out by morning.”
Cathay feared next to nothing, but her father had been working on their freedom for too long for some soldiers to snatch it from them. She’d heard the Union had freed folks, wheresoever they landed. But she’d also heard the Union could leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere, and slave catchers could come, and if you weren’t in your own county, no one would know who you were or what you were about or care that you were three months away from having your freedom bought.
“Missus Johnson said that if they ever came here, they’d try to overrun the place and make us slaves for their ownselves.”
“And who you believe?” Osceola said, putting the pepper to her stare. “A crazy old woman who can’t change her own rags? Or your ma?”
“Ma’am, I wasn’t saying I didn’t believe you,” Cathay said. “I was just saying that’s what Missus say. And telling you that she was sober minded when she — ”
“I said hush!” Her mother fixed her with a silencing glare, then set the basin down, squinting into the sun as she tried to reckon how many soldiers, and how much time she had before they landed in her yard. When she’d finished all her figuring, she put forth her final order. “You come back as soon as you tell ’em. You know you is a magnet for bad luck. The longer you be talking, the more trouble’ll be on you.”
Cathay drew herself up to her full height. “I ain’t troubled or disturbed or cursed no more’n the next gal,” she said, but her mother didn’t deem the contrariness worth dignifying with a response.
Soon Cathay joined her mother in silence, the men louder as they neared Johnson property. She strained to hear what they were saying, but everything was a jumble of words and sounds and splashes of laughter. When she could finally make out the men’s faces, ruddy and bronzed from the sun, it didn’t seem they could be soldiers at all. Instead of blue uniforms, these men wore osnaburg shirts of every hue, and barely blue trousers that for their condition and coloration looked to belong to the unearthed dead.
Then, strangely, the closer they approached the place, the quieter they became, as if all their concentration had been brought to bear on presenting themselves. A distinct odor wafted from them, en masse, and Cathay tried not to cover her nostrils lest one of the men slap her for her high-mindedness.
A man who looked like a captain or more stopped a yard short of her, his marble blue eyes circumferencing the farm chickens murderously screeching amidst a shower of their own white and brown feathers; the pale Johnson house out of true as if drunken; the shack in which Cathay and her parents lived, more of a lean-to than anything else. The sides had been filled with pitch, which oozed in summer, a magnet for stray chicken feed and hay, so that the whole thing looked no better than the muddy pottery of dauber wasps.
Now she felt as though the officer-soldier had seen every year of her life through the dusty windows neither she nor her mother could ever keep fully clean. Before he uttered so much as good day or another word of greeting, he chucked his chin toward their shack and said with an Irish accent:
“That where you live, love?”
Love. No person, colored or white, family or Missourian, had ever used the word around her, much less at her. Not as a term of endearment, accidental or otherwise. It was not soft, but clear and bell-like in its ring, and without a taint of orneriness, so that she was certain he was not advertising his freshness, the way most white men in these parts were wont to do. Yet it wasn’t a pet name, the kind her father, Cheeve, used for her mother. Sometimes, when her father didn’t see Cathay watching — or simply forgot Cathay was watching — he’d give a little smack to her mother’s jiggling rear end and call her “Petunia.” Petunia — as if he’d never heard of a log-built woman named Osceola who’d once twisted apart a snake and boiled it in a pot during their first escape. “Petunia!” he’d call out as sweetly as if pouring milk for mewling kittens, and this would send Cathay’s mother’s eyelashes fluttering up and down.
“Yes sir,” Cathay answered the officer. “Home sweet.” She looked at him to see what he would do with this information, but he just nodded.
Love, thought she. That must be some Irish talk.
. . . . . .
Once inside the Johnson place, the men — nearly fifty of them in all — had turned over every piece of wood in the house. Since they’d found neither jewelry stashed away nor gold under Mrs. Johnson’s mattresses, they settled themselves along the path that led to the well and stretched out their legs to eat and play hands of bezique. Cathay and her mother had put forth the huge bucket of pawpaws they had stored in the barn for later days, and a big pot of red-eye gravy to cover the beans and whatever else the men were bringing out of their haversacks.
“Hey,” a soldier called out to Cathay. The boy was freckle-faced, and he lifted his tin army cup and banged on it with a near-flat spoon. “I said Hey!” he said. “We’re plumb out of gravy over here.”
Even stoppering her ears she heard his racket, the doodle boy clanging like a cowbell.
She knew what she must and must not do around white folks. What to say and what to leave off from saying. Bring round more gravy, that was all there was to it. And perhaps she would have worked up to doing just that, fiddle-faddling her way over, just to show the boy her time was her own. She might have even given him a particularly generous pour, ladling gravy not only onto his plate but into his lap as well.
Had it not been for the boy barging up to her, standing right before her, she might not have said a thing.
“I gotta kick you like a mule for it?”
Don’t talk, her mother’s face said. Don’t you say anything atall.
. . . . . .
No one lost the third time. She was certain of it. But something else in the room fought against the feeling, and she shivered to think a ghost had settled on her for company, and she sharpened her eyes to pin it down and drive it off.
Though white folks aboveground could not be trifled with, the white dead could do nothing. Thus most of her elevenhood had been spent slapping them around, asking how it felt, them now wearing the same nothingness she wore every day.
Colored ghosts needed no apology. For certain, some might be upset, fuming still about the lives stolen from them whilst they’d yet breathed alongside the living, or searching for some son or daughter sold off long ago, or the home road from which they themselves had been sold off. But she found that if you put a pan of water out, they mostly kept away.
Big Water, Big Ship. The only un-African words Osceola’s meemaw had ever spoken. She always spoke them quaking, her hard distrust of water. White folks used it bad. Not to purify, but to scald. Not to baptize, but to drown. If they got ahold of enough of it together, white folks would find a way to sail off from those who’d birthed them. Enough water, enough white folks, and they’d set a-sail black folks from the ones who’d birthed them.
No colored ghosts — this-country born, at least — abided water. Big or small.
Most colored ghosts helped, knowing the way was hard for them colored yet living, and helped by visiting agues and catarrhs upon white folk, reversing fortunes. They spoke to Death. Begged it off on your behalf.
Yet she could find no spirits, white or colored, to ask about this child, nor the previous two, who’d failed to live. When her first leapt from life, Osceola told her she wasn’t ready for a child. Too young for it. And if Cheeve had known the boys who’d done it, and had killed them, as he surely would’ve, he’d have been hanged for it. When she’d lost her second, her mother told her she wasn’t built for it, tall and erect, like a tree. Branchy, Osceola’d deemed her, despite Cathay reminding her mother she would never grow any shorter. But she knew it also meant she’d heed none coming nearer than arm’s length, and would windmill anyone who tried.
That accounted for her trouble with heathenish boys. White boys. With their ropes that did not coil right. With their mules thinking they knew better than she. Horses loved her, but theirs hated getting shod, and gave her grief. Still yet — the horses, the mules, the fickle tomato patches she was called to tend to in this part of Missouri — all, she could gentle. But them, no.
The white boys of Missouri were their own nation. So numerous they required not one army, but two: the Bushwhackers, fronted by Quantrill and his pukes, and the Jayhawkers, now somewhere on the other side of the territory, almost to Kansas, which her father declared was freer than free, and rolled out land growing sunflowers as big as Osceola’s head. The Yankee and the Secesh. As many armies as there were boys to fight.
And there were thousands of them: their songs irregular, deaf to rhythm but not to rhyme, their games brutish and full of wild yelps. Even before her elevenhood, she’d fought them as if she wasn’t colored. As if she’d never been cut or lassoed before, for their fun.
. . . . . .
Will woke, the 9th’s third bivouac on their way to Fort Lancaster, and repaired himself behind a stand of cottonwoods, first checking to make sure no onanist was at work shucking his member, as he’d once discovered the man they called Redbone heatedly engaged. But that had been back at Fort Stockton, where he could regain himself at the cistern. Here there was nothing but the pack wagon, an encampment of tents, and the occasional mesquite, more shrub or bush than canopy.
He set about washing the plateaus of his chest, dabbed the poultice on where before there’d been infant circles of blood but now were two fissures like sewn-together lips. He then mummified himself in new cotton, wishing he could manage half an hour to scour the torn sheeting reeking from a month’s worth of pus, sweat, and lacquered blood from his bindings, wash the most recent personal rags accumulating in his haversack.
It had been more than a year since he’d been sequestered with the woman who had doctored him. He’d spent a good two months in Kentucky, where he’d worked on the Ohio River, then back to Missouri, this time Saint Louis, where he was mustered into the 38th Infantry. Determined to join the cavalry, he made his way back to Louisville, where his company eventually marched to the outskirts of New Orleans at Greenville, home of the first recruiting office of the 9th.
“Posthaste!” Heyl yelled, seeming to place special emphasis on Will, then insisted that they water their horses, check their girths, and cinch up. There was to be none of their blasted spirituals, none of their gossiping, none of their talk about haints, none of their trying to find wenches to tup out here in the blamed Texas desert — none of it.
Heyl told them posthaste once more. This is a forced march, niggers. And when he asked if they understood, each, to a man, shouted Yes.
. . . . . .
“Tighter,” Will said, eyeing each girth, gauging whether they’d have to go up one, two, or three notches.
“Ain’t but so much tight as you can get on that McClellan,” Redbone said, then winked at Will, smiling the way one would at a plucky child or a pretty-enough girl.
No use paying him any mind. Girthing wasn’t half as bad as latrine or guard duty, if not as good as a walkabout as rotating drill sergeant. And he loved more than biscuits sidling close to horses, close enough to inhale the sweet and sweaty smell of their leather saddles.
Some days it was perfect. No thinking overmuch.
Still, a memory came to him from another life: how his mother had warned him not to look; Cathay wasn’t supposed to see it. But she clawed — then hobbled — her way to the back room of the lean-to by grabbing on to anything that would support her shuffling weight. Osceola said she’d left a trail of blood like a wounded deer. She wasn’t supposed to see it, but she had. And Cathay cried over the thing, barely a boy. Months before its time, not much bigger than a skinned newling rabbit.
She held it. Red as if its entirety were skeins of blood, its outsized eyes sealed shut, keeping its secrets to itself.
