Longshadow's Woman

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The woman was crazy.

Chapter Three

Together the next morning they set fire to the pile of stumps, some of which were dry, a few still damp from the earth. When flames whipped through the heap and spread to the bigger stumps in the middle, they turned to one another with a look of shared triumph. Then, almost as if they were embarrassed, Jonah began gathering dead branches to toss on the fire, and Carrie began stepping off the length and breadth of the clearing for perhaps the hundredth time. The ground was hard, baked dry by weeks without rain. Scrubby vegetation had flourished once the tall trees had been cut down, allowing the sun to reach the ground. Those would have to be cleared next. Even as they worked, they both watched the burn pile carefully to see that the flames didn’t spread. When a finger of flames spilled out and began creeping through the dry grass, they both rushed to beat it out with tote sacks wet from the nearby creek.

With the fire once more under control, they stared at each other, sweaty, sooty, and triumphant. And there it was again. That shimmering awareness that made the world go utterly silent for one endless moment.

Silently, Jonah called himself a fool for staying as long as he had. He had meant to slip away at the first opportunity, but here he still was. Now, in exchange for food, a clean place to sleep and the occasional smile when the woman forgot herself, he was going to have to follow that damned plow and turn the earth so that she could plant her corn. He had not meant to linger so long.

She didn’t even know how he was called. The sheriff had called him Kie-oh-way. He had heard him call her Adams. Miss or Mrs. Adams? There was no man in her bed or at her table, but a man’s coat and shirt hung from a hook on the wall. Perhaps she had once had a man and he had died. Or perhaps he had thrown her away, as a Kiowa did if one of his wives displeased him. He could easily see how this woman could displease a man.

Yet he could also see how she might please a man….

“Now this,” Carrie informed him the next morning, “is what we call a plow.”

“It is also what I call a plow,” he wanted to say, but held his tongue. It had angered him at first when she forgot he was only an ignorant savage and spoke to him as if he were slightly more intelligent than her mule. Now it amused him.

Using pantomime to illustrate her words, she said, “What I aim to do is harness it to Sorry so that he can do the pulling, the way he did with the stumps.” Placing the worn straps over her own shoulders, she mimicked pulling the plow. “But you’ll have to steady it, else it’ll skitter over the top of the ground and fall over. I’d do it myself, but the thing’s got two handles and I’ve only got one good hand.”

He was curious about that. Her hand was still bundled up in a grimy rag, reeking of the turpentine she had used on his ankle that had burned down to the bone. She held it against her breasts now and then, as if it pained her. More than likely what pained her was holding that damned Springfield, which she insisted on carrying with her into the field, even though they both knew he could have easily escaped many times.

“I don’t reckon you know what the devil I’m saying, but I was ever one for talking, and you’re all I’ve got to talk to.” She pointed to the rusty plow. “Plow. Now, you try saying it. Plow.”

It was all he could not to laugh, but soberly, he repeated the word. “Plow.”

“Oh, that’s real good! We’ll have you talking in no time, you see if we don’t.” Her smile was as warm and encouraging as a pat on the head, as if he’d just retrieved the stick she had thrown.

So he followed her into the field, appreciating the way she walked in spite of his irritation, amused at the way she squared her hat on her head, then lifted it to fork her flyaway hair from her eyes. It was a man’s straw hat, ugly, but useful for one with skin so fair it reddened each day from the sun and faded by nightfall, leaving behind light brown speckles. She began each day with the sleeves of her dress covering her arms, but before the day was half over, she would turn up the sleeves and unfasten the buttons at her throat.

Gazing past the mule’s bony haunches, Jonah watched the way she moved, fascinated at how much a man could learn about a woman from the way she walked, the way she bent to chop at a stubborn shrub. Buoyed by hope and determination, she strode into the field each morning like a warrior riding into battle. Although he had to admit there was nothing at all warrior-like in the movement of her hips or the way her bosoms bounced under the thin covering of calico.

By the end of each day she drooped like a flower that had been plucked and cast aside. Plodding in from the field, it was all she could do to keep the rifle from dragging on the ground. He would have offered to carry it for her, but he suspected she might misunderstand his motives.

Irritating woman. Were all white women so contrary, or was it only this one small individual? The women of St. Augustine who had taught him to read and write had not affected him this way.

The problem, Jonah told himself, was not this particular woman. He would have reacted the same way toward any woman between the ages of fifteen and fifty, having been without the comfort of a woman’s body for so long. His blood still grew heated when he thought of the way he had dropped his clothes before her, standing ankle-deep in her creek. He had done it out of anger, out of resentment, wanting to shock her, to frighten her.

Instead, he had been the one who was affected. He’d had to turn away quickly and lower himself into the water.

Steering the white man’s plow, he told himself that evening, was not as bad as he’d feared. He understood the mule. The mule understood him. They worked well together. As for the woman, that was another matter. She walked beside him every step of the way, from one end of the clearing to the other, sometimes moving ahead to chop down a bush, or falling behind to crumble a handful of freshly turned earth in her hand. They would stop at the far end, drink from the jar of water she’d left there in the shade, then set out again.

“This is the first time I’ve tried planting a cash crop,” she confided. “Corn—well, everybody needs corn. Last year I had to buy corn. There’s still some left in the crib, but it’s old and buggy, and I have to grind it, and the grinder’s gone to blazes. It’s good enough for Sorry and the chickens, but with a decent harvest, I can take my corn to the mill and get it ground, and pay the miller with part of the crop. That’s the way we do it,” she said gravely, as if imparting a valuable tenet of her white man’s wisdom.

Jonah reminded himself of his promise to Lieutenant Pratt, that he would help the first white person in need he encountered. The Adams woman needed help all right. She was weak, injured and alone, yet no one came to her aid. There were houses within a few miles of her cabin, yet no one visited. She had mentioned a friend, but the friend had not come to help her plow her field. It was becoming increasingly obvious that she was an outcast. Jonah knew what it felt like to be an outcast.

“You might have noticed, I’ve been raking up leaves and piling them up out behind the chicken house.” She had fallen into the habit of conversing with him as if he were an ordinary, reasonably intelligent man. He had already learned two things about her. She was kind-hearted…and she was lonely. “Emma says if I can get me some oyster shells and dump them on the heap and then set it afire with some trash wood on top, it’ll make the sweetest kind of fertilizer. She says the land hereabouts is sour. It needs shelling, if I can find a Currituck fisherman willing to trade me a load of shells for corn or a few jars of wild honey.”

She chattered the way he sometimes talked to his horses, only he rarely used words. His horses understood his thoughts, and he theirs. It was a gift he’d been given as if to make up for being two halves and never a whole.

Soon he must leave, he promised himself, not for the first time. The hardest work was finished. She would use a planting stick in the month of the dogwood, and her corn would flourish. The land was rich, some of it was boggy, but all was fertile. He had read books on such matters once he had decided what he would do with his life.

“Lordy, I’m starvin’, aren’t you?” she said, mopping her damp, sunburned face.

“Lordy,” Jonah echoed solemnly, wondering why it was the white man called Indians redskins, when it was the white men themselves who turned red as his old Koitsenga sash from sunlight and whiskey. His own skin was more the color of a freshly tanned hide. Sun only deepened the color. Whiskey, he never touched, having seen what it did to his shipmates and too many of his own people.

They had taken to sharing the evening meal. She had not allowed him inside her house again since treating his ankles, but when she came outside to lock up her chickens and bring him his supper, she would often bring her own and join him, sitting on a plank bench outside the barn while he squatted on the ground nearby. Now and then she would speak, and he would nod and grunt in response, or lift his shoulders as if he didn’t understand, and she would shake her head and sigh her impatience with him. He had come to enjoy the game, even though he was beginning to feel guilty, yet how could he break the silence now? It had gone on too long. She would be angry with him for tricking her.

Angry enough to shoot him? He was all but certain the rifle was not loaded. Even loaded, it wasn’t much of a threat, for the barrel was so heavy she could hardly support it with her one good hand. She might shoot out one of her precious glass windows, but he no longer feared she would kill him, no matter what he did.

So why didn’t he simply walk away?

Jonah couldn’t answer. It was not the accommodations. The barracks in St. Augustine had been newer, cleaner and more comfortable, except for the mosquitoes. The food she provided, usually beans, sometimes greens, sometimes only cornbread soaked with bacon grease or honey, and on special occasions, a strip of fried side meat, was obviously the best she could offer, for she ate the same thing. It was filling and satisfying, but he would have enjoyed a meal of buffalo or venison, or even fish.

“Moon. See, coming up over yonder woods? It’s called a moon.”

The woman was not an idiot. Why did she insist on sounding like one?

But he knew why, of course. It was because she thought he had less intelligence than one of those stumps he had cut free of the earth and burned. It made him angry, and that very anger was a reminder that he had stayed too long. He had given the woman her money’s worth. The sooner he retrieved his papers, the sooner he could clear his name and get back to his own land.

And perhaps someday before he was too old, the gods willing, he could find a woman of his own. Another outcast, perhaps, who would not look down on him for his mixed blood.

The Adams woman had not gone to a church-house since he had been with her, yet he knew she had a day of the week when work was forbidden. A day to rest, according to the Jesus Rules. She had used her last Rest Day to pull up the withered bean vines outside her door and scrub the privy. While she raked the dirt around her house, with the chickens following after to peck at any bugs uncovered, Jonah had worked on repairing the barn and enlarging the fenced paddock. Then he had propped his feet on a tussock under a giant oak tree and allowed the warm, sweet air to flow over his body. Freedom had a taste—a flavor and a scent all its own.

Increasingly worried about his horses, Jonah knew he could not wait much longer. The mystery was why he had waited this long. He made up his mind to go on her next Jesus Day. He had fallen out of the habit of running since his imprisonment and his sailing days, but his ankles were nearly healed now. He was fairly certain he could run at least half a day, maybe longer, without needing to stop. He could take the mule, but stealing a mule was a hanging offense.

On the other hand, he would rather hang for something he did than for something he didn’t. Either way, he concluded, he would be back with his papers before she brought his supper.

When her Jesus Day came around, the woman was up before sunrise, harnessing Sorry to the cart. She set a napkin-covered basket in the cart, handed him a plate of bread, side meat and greens, and explained that she was going to visit her friend. “I’m going to trust you,” she said, her small, pink face so earnest he wanted to take it between his hands and reassure her. “I’m not going to lock you up, because I can’t think of a way to do it without using those miserable old irons, and I wouldn’t do that to a mad dog. But I cooked you some greens last night because a body needs greens to stay healthy, and I’ll bring back a jar of Emma’s peach preserves. You can have that to look forward to.”

Wearing a different dress from the one she wore every day—a faded yellow that bared her arms and throat, she stared at him as if waiting for a response.

He was tempted. By Daw-k’hee, the good mother earth, he was tempted.

But he only nodded his agreement. Watching her drive away a few minutes later, he set aside his conflicted feelings and concentrated on fixing directions in his mind. He had noted certain landmarks on his way north from the jailhouse. His sense of direction was well honed, both from instinct and from experience, but he had never traveled from this place to his own land. Asking directions would be risky.

Carrie’s hand was not healing. “Honey, I’m going to have to open it up again,” the old woman said, shaking her head. Carrie knew the procedure. Dreaded it like a bad toothache, but she knew it had to be done. So she washed Emma’s butcher knife, sharpened it on the stone, then held it in the candle flame until the edge glowed red.

She cried. Couldn’t help herself, and with Emma, she didn’t even try to pretend. She cried not only from the pain, but for what her life had become, for what it had been before, which was both better and worse—and for the glimpse of something more wonderful than anything she could have imagined.

Something she would never have.

While she sat with the basin on her lap, allowing the blood and pus to flow from her ragged hatchet wound, she told the old woman about her prisoner. “I know it’s only because I’m there alone so much, but it’s almost like having another friend. I don’t even know his name, but he’s got the clearest gray eyes. I’ve seen him smile, mostly when he doesn’t know I’m watching. And Emma, he’s got the whitest teeth.”

“Mmm-hmm. A woman can’t help but think, as long as that’s as far as it goes.” It was clearly a warning, and Carrie took it in the spirit in which it had been offered. Her own mother would have probably done the same.

Emma Tamplin was a small woman, barely four and a half feet tall. Having once been wed to a successful farmer who had gone to war when the Yankees had invaded the south, she had lost everything—husband, home, children—everything except for her dignity, her wisdom and her kind heart.

All of which Carrie had come to value enormously. Trying hard to ignore the throbbing of her hand that went all the way up to her shoulder, she said, “I know, I know—I’m being foolish. But Emma, following him in the field every day, watching the way he works so hard—Why, if Darther ever put in a single day’s work, I swear, I’d fall over in a dead heap, but my prisoner works like it was his corn we’d be planting come spring.”

“Any man worth his salt would rather be outside in the fresh air than rotting away in jail.” Emma’s husband had died in a Yankee prison. To this day she couldn’t bear to see things penned up if she could possibly help it. “I’m going to poultice you with my special salve, if you’ll hand me that there jar over there on the dresser.”

Carrie happened to know the greasy salve was made of ground mouse dung and butter, with a few herbs mixed in, but if Emma believed in it, then Carrie did, too. An hour later, her arm no longer throbbing quite so fearfully, they sat on the tiny front porch and talked about this and that. Emma never complained, which made Carrie ashamed of all her own complaints.

“I know it’s not right, but sometimes I wish he would forget where he lived and not come home at all,” she said, cradling her hand in her lap. She’d been airing her latest grievance against Darther, who’d refused to give her money to buy a cow because he had a chance to buy into a certain surefire winner.

“Racetrack trash, that’s what he is. I heard all about racetrack trash when I was at Uncle Henry’s. That’s all they ever talked about—who was losing his shirt, and who was winning big, and where the next race was going to be. They weren’t even real races, not the kind where ladies go and wear nice gowns and fancy hats.”

“I don’t know your husband personally, child. I do know he’s not made a single friend in these parts in all the years he’s been here, but there’s bound to be some good in him somewhere, even if he is a Yankee. He had the good sense to marry you, didn’t he?”

Carrie didn’t bother to reply. Emma knew how hopeless things were. She had seen Carrie’s bruises too many times to believe they were all caused by her own carelessness. Besides, they almost always coincided with one of Darther’s infrequent visits home.

“Living alone can be peaceful, I’ll not deny that. Still, I’d give anything in the world to hear my Luther ranting and raving over the fools who’re running our government now, or fussing because I can’t make bread the way his mother used to do. Sometimes even harsh words are better than no words at all.”

Carrie couldn’t think of a thing to say to that. Harsh words were about all she’d heard ever since her Uncle Henry had sent for her, and Mrs. Robinson had put her on the train with a change of clothes in a paper sack and a dollar bill pinned inside her pinafore pocket.

A little while later, pleasantly full from the biscuits she’d baked and brought with her, served with Emma’s wild peach preserves, Carrie hitched Sorry to the cart and set out along the narrow road. There was a shortcut through the woods she took when she was afoot, but today she’d felt like riding. She had actually expected that blasted mule to behave, seeing as how her Kie-oh-way had him trained now. The man didn’t even have to swear at him, he just looked him in the eye before they set out to do a job, and the mule turned sweet as pie.

As if sensing her inattention, Sorry came to an abrupt stop, laid back his ears and brayed. Startled, Carrie nearly dropped the reins. “You stubborn, no-account crazy bastard, you do that again and I’m going to whomp your hide till it’s raw, you hear me? Now, git to movin’!” She cracked the whip in the air, and the mule moved another few steps, then halted again.

The man was a witch. Carrie didn’t know if mules and witches spoke the same language, she only knew that her hand was hurting again from being cut open, drained and poulticed, and then having to drive a contrary mule. What’s more, she was starting to get that crampy feeling in the pit of her belly, which meant drinking a slug of whiskey, which she despised, and going to bed with a hot brick wrapped in a towel.

She finally gave up and let the beast have his head. He knew the way home as well as she did. He also knew he wouldn’t be fed or watered until he got her there. She was in no mood to put up with stubborn animals, four-legged or two-legged. “No wonder Darther calls you Sorry,” she muttered. “You’re the sorriest son of a bitch ever to suck air.”

She was going to have to stop swearing. Emma didn’t like it. Mrs. Robinson would be shocked. All the missionaries would be shocked. Her own parents would have been shocked. Sometimes Carrie even shocked herself, and not always with the words that came out of her mouth.

But dammit, things were different now. If she had to deal with a stubborn mule who knew when she was feeling miserable and went out of his way to aggravate her—with a drunken sot of a husband who cared far more for his horse than he did for his wife, and an Indian prisoner who couldn’t speak the language, she had to make up her own rules.

Bumping over the rutted cart trail at a snail’s pace gave her time to think, time to wonder about things such as whether or not her Indian had a wife waiting for him at home, wherever his home was. Wondering if he had a name. Well, of course he had a name. It was probably one of those heathen-sounding names no white man could wrap his tongue around. She felt guilty for not having asked, and guilt, added to all the rest, made her feel even more miserable. Every now and then, usually when she had her monthly bellyache, she would get to feeling this way. Out of sorts. Weepy for no reason at all.

By the time she pulled into her yard, she was close to tears again. What if she lost her hand? It happened more often than not when a wound refused to heal, and hers had refused for weeks, probably because she kept flexing it and breaking it open again and again.

What was she going to do when her prisoner had to leave? In spite of Darther, she had come so far, encouraged by Emma and by her own dreams. In spite of everything that had happened in the past, she was doing so well, with her own home and a field almost ready for planting come spring.

Not even the familiar sight of her neatly raked yard and her snug little cabin could cheer her as she neared the end of the road. Home. Her first real home in so long, with the water-oaks turning gold and the gum trees turning purple. Emerging into the clearing, she braced herself to do what needed doing before she could rest. The chickens still had to be fed. The mule had to be unhitched, watered, fed, rubbed down and penned up.

Her prisoner would probably want to be fed, too, with whatever she could scratch together for a meal.

He wasn’t outside. He wasn’t in the barn. She knew very well he wasn’t in the house, because she’d warned him the very first day that she’d shoot him if he came messing around.

But since then she’d taken him inside to dress his ankles. Maybe he thought that meant he could come and go at will. “Well, we’ll just see about that,” she muttered, glaring at the chain he used to wear, which was neatly coiled on a nail on the inside of the barn door. “If that damned heathen has run out on me, I’ll shoot his sorry ass,” she swore, feeling tearful and oddly discouraged, considering all they’d accomplished. Here she was so close to getting her field ready so that all she would have to do come spring was spread manure, poke holes in the ground and drop in her seeds, four in each hill. One for the soil, one for the crow, one for the mole and one to grow. Emma had told her everything she would need to know about planting and laying by food for the winter, and curing everything from mites on her chickens to bugs on her vegetables. She had even tried to explain away these monthly miseries, but knowing they would pass didn’t make her feel any better when her belly hurt and her hand hurt and she felt so discouraged she could cry.

Carrie had just hung the harness on a nail inside the barn when she heard a noise overhead in the hayloft. Dust sifted down through the cracks, drifting through the shaft of late afternoon sunlight that slanted in through the wide opening. There wasn’t a single thing in that loft but hay left over from last year and Darther’s store of whiskey.

“Oh, lordy, I don’t need this,” she muttered. Bracing her fists on her hips, she tipped back her head and yelled, “You up there—Kie-o-way, or whatever your blasted name is, you just get yourself down here right this minute, you hear me?”

She felt like crying. She felt like kicking something. Blast it all to blazes, she knew her emotions were all over the road, but she had trusted the man! And then, the minute her back was turned, he’d had to go snooping around until he’d found Darther’s jugs that Liam had toted up there last April when they’d won that big pot and spent every red cent of it on Buffalo City moonshine instead of the fresh cow she’d been begging for.

Since then, every time they came home from a successful trip, the two of them would bring down a few jugs and spend the first night celebrating. She would hear them all the way over to the house, laughing and singing and carrying on—shouting and whoo-hawing at one another. It got so she’d find herself wishing the next time one of them climbed up after another jug he would fall off the edge of the hayloft and break his miserable neck, and then she’d have to go and pray over her own wicked thoughts.

Hearing a rustling sound overhead, she set her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. It might be rats. Usually they got to the grain and left the hay alone, but maybe they were holing up for the winter.

It wasn’t rats. She’d have seen signs of them, because she watched diligently for such things. Besides, she had two good rat snakes that kept the barn pretty well clear of rodents. Either her prisoner was up there, drunk as a crow in a barrel of mash, or Darther and Liam had come back and chased him off.

Or worse.

Carrie didn’t dare think of what worse might mean, she only knew she had another mess to deal with when all in the world she felt like doing was falling into bed and sleeping her miseries away.

There was no sound coming from Peck’s stall. No saddlebags tossed down on Liam’s cot. Liam’s mare wasn’t out back in the paddock, which meant it couldn’t be Liam and Darther up in the hayloft drinking themselves sick.

Which meant…

Well, shoot. She almost wished Darther had come back home. And that said something about her state of mind that didn’t bear close examination, she told herself as she began to climb the steep, narrow ladder to the loft.

Chapter Four

It was dark as pitch in the hayloft. And dusty. Carrie sneezed, swore, and sneezed again. “All right, you might as well show yourself, I know you’re up here.”

She waited. No response. But of course, if he was sprawled out in a corner, dead drunk, he wouldn’t answer. Couldn’t answer even if by some miracle he was sober enough, as he barely understood plain English. “Speak up, else I’ll go off and leave you here to fall down and break your miserable neck!”

For two beans and a straight pin she would do just that. Save the county the cost of hanging him. Save herself the aggravation of watching him walk behind her plow, with his dark hair shining in the sun, pulled back so that it was neater than her own. With his narrow little behind and his wide shoulders and his hands, so square and steady on the splintered wooden handles.

She should never have peeked that first day at the creek. She had tried so hard not to think about the way he’d looked standing there in the morning sun, strip, stark naked. But the harder she tried not to think about it, the more she thought about it, the image stuck in her mind like a cocklebur in a sheep’s pelt. The only other man she had ever seen naked from head to toe was her husband. It was hard to believe they were the same species.

Evidently, they had something in common after all. Drink.

Disgusted, disappointed and thoroughly out of sorts, Carrie stood there, uncertain of what to do next. She told herself that soon he’d be going back to jail, where they would probably hang him. She couldn’t allow herself to think about him as a man—as a real person. It hurt too much. “Then stay there,” she muttered, turning back to the ladder. “Drink yourself into an early grave. Fall down the ladder and break your fool neck, see if I care!”

“Aah-choo!” The loud sneeze was quickly followed by three more. One hand on the ladder, Carrie froze. Hearing a brief scuffling sound, she squinted in the darkness and saw—or at least thought she saw—something moving in the small pile of hay that had been scraped into a corner to make room for Darther’s jugs of moonshine.

Whispering.

Whispering? He was talking to himself when he couldn’t even spare her so much as a single word?

“Damn your sorry hide, if you can still crawl, then you’d better get yourself down this ladder! If I have to come after you—!” She’d give him one more last chance, and then she was leaving him to his fate. She had run plumb out of patience. And bellyache or not, she had a full day’s work planned for tomorrow. “You listen here, I don’t care how sick you are come morning, you’re going to be out in that field at first light, you hear me? I paid for your services, and I’m damned well going to have them!”