The Last Crossing (9 page)

My hands shake now when I think that was the last time I saw Madge, so alive and joyful, face shining among the quick. I don’t remember much else beyond that, try as I might. Those tiny hot lights started to spark a warning in the corners of my eyeballs. I knew I’d right soon be blind in swimming black, head athrob with a megrim. Madge had to be got home safe out of that mob of wild rascals while I was still fit to do it. So I took her hand and told her it was time for us to go. She didn’t want to and begged me to stay just a bit longer, but I dragged her off.

I can recollect nothing after that. The laudanum bottle was dry this morning. But even if I don’t remember how, I know I would have
seen Madge Dray home safe and sound as is a gentleman escort’s bounden duty.

There comes rain whistling down on the roof. My hands shake all the more, can’t even force them into my pockets to get them still. I got to climb up on the bed, hold to the window bars, look away from the corpse of little Madge Dray.

Not much to see, the rain’s driven most to cover. A mule train’s leaving, ten wagons, jennies straining to turn the wheels in the gumbo, ears standing up like bayonets. A street arab, one of the whores’ catch-colts, runs along beside a wagon, him all speckled with mud spitting off the rim, trying to jam a stick into the blur of wheel spokes. Some mongrel dog, patched with hairless skin, keeps darting at the pasterns of the swing mule, making it kick and bray like a cracked trumpet as the teamster tries to whip the dog off.

The kid, the dog, the mule train pass, leave the street empty except for the rain and the younger of the two Englishmen splashing through the mud. I’ve heard someone speak his name. Gant? Gantry? Whatever the name, he’s been the talk of the town for weeks, the lodestone for a tribe of fortune hunters pouring into the Overland Hotel, in the hopes of selling lies about the fate and whereabouts of his brother.

I wished I had my Bible to occupy me. Laying down on my plank bed, closing my eyes, I try to blank my mind. But it won’t do as I wish. Death lying near keeps crowding in. The jail starts to feel like that army hospital in Washington D.C., where they carted me off to after my last engagement in the war, the Battle of the Wilderness. Plenty of dead youngsters there. Every morning the beds were full of another night’s harvest of them. It came to me there in that hospital that thirty-eight was too old for foot-soldiering. And if I was too damn old, every boy on those rows of straw ticks was too damn young.

Living with a pillow wrapped around my head to shut out the whimpering, the pounding of mattresses, the begging to be given back the arms and legs that were carried away in buckets. I heard these sounds through those long, suffocatingly hot summer days and nights. I heard
the soul-savers trooping up and down the aisles, mumbling prayers over dying boys, reading them their letters, leading the hymn singing, holding hands and preaching resignation to the blind, the shattered.

One of these handed me a Bible. Strange to think I’d never dipped into the Good Book before then. Two years of schooling and I could read well enough, even as a boy I chewed every word in any newspaper came my way, even studied Mr. Daniel Webster’s Dictionary, had a taste for politicians’ stump oratory, loved large words, high-flown phrases. You’d have thought the Bible would have been right up my alley, but I had no interest in it.

Now, lying in this army hospital, miles from home in a swelter of gall and despair I pored over that book, every passage speaking to me of the war and nothing but the war. “And he said unto him, My lord knoweth that the children
are
tender, and the flocks and herds with young
are
with me: and if men should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die.” It ran around in my head for days, a prophecy of all those suffering boys around me. I’d study on the Bible continual, think strange thoughts that seemed true to me then.
If man is created in the image of God, then all these men are a picture of the wounded, crucified Jesus. God laid on cots, line after line, each holding up to God a picture of His suffering Self. God staring up at God, and God staring down at God
.

I recall lying in my bed one day, holding the Good Book pressed to my chest. The sun had flinched below the windowsill, the shadows of the trees outside were swaying crazily on the plaster wall when the parson arrived.

I reckon it was a heartening Christian sight for him to see a man with a Bible clasped tight to his breast. Bending down over me, he murmured, “God bless you, sir. Would you like me to pray with you? Is there anything you want?”

I told him plain what I wanted. I pointed that Bible down the row of pallets and said, “I want all these Jesuses to pick up their beds and walk. Matthew 9, verse 6. Jesus said to a suffering man, ‘Arise, take up thine bed, and go unto thine house.’ And the man did. Well, Jesus
is looking down and telling all these poor boys just the same. He’s saying, one Jesus to every Jesus, one God to every God. Go home, He’s saying to them.”

Pressing his hand to my brow, the parson smiled. “Rest now. Sleep,” he said, and went slanting off, boots whispering on the floor, certain I was crazed.

Not a particle of sleep or rest for me that night. Staring up into the darkness looking for the face of God peering down upon Himself. I could not find God up there in the dimness, but I did see the shades of boys quitting their beds, shouldering their stinking pallets, shuffling off homeward. I saw them winding up the blue passes of the Adirondacks, fording the black loam of the ploughed fields of Ohio. I saw them drifting along rich river bottoms, every whit as golden as the turning leaves that showered down upon their heads, or blowing grimy-faced as the dirty smoke that came blustering down the broad avenues of New York and Boston.

They were tramping under the buckshot stars that riddled the deep blue sky over Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. An Atlantic storm slapped them sideways, filled their boot prints with cold rain in Massachusetts. Home, they said to themselves as they scrambled over snake fences in Iowa or waded through the ditches of Illinois, grass trailing along their waists. Home.

I saw them resurrecting.

I knew then I would see these boys for all of my natural born days, would never forget them, and that for the rest of my life I would wish it was my fate to take up my bed and go with them.

Now I wish I could witness Madge Dray do the same. In my mind, get up and go home to her sister, Lucy Stoveall.

LUCY
The sun was so hot bright that when I came in the jail with Sheriff Hinckey, it nigh blinded me, the murk. I could just make out Justice Daniels setting behind a desk, shirt a patch of white in the dusk, and the silhouette of Mr. Straw, pressed up against the bars of the cell. I said nary a word, just stumbled by them, looking for Madge’s body. I found her in a corner. Her face was only part-covered, her two bare legs sticking out from the blanket, white, slender peeled willows. Madge’s body so thin, so small. Nobody had the decency to close her eyes.

I tried to cover her but the blanket wouldn’t reach head to toe. I caught a whiff of horse. The bastards had covered her with a saddle blanket. That she should be used so, the disrespect of it, put me all atremble, swept me with tears. I stood there, my head hanging, clenching down the shake in my throat until I could get my words out clear and strong. “You fetch my sister to our wagon. You get her off this dirt floor and out of this horse stink and you bring her to my wagon.” I turned round. The three of them, the law and Straw, were standing stock-still, looking at me.

I said to Mr. Daniels, loud and sharp, “I suppose you heard me?”

He didn’t like being spoken to so. It roused him up. “Miz Stoveall, we’ll deliver the body directly once you answer us a few questions. I got no interest in it going high here in my office.”

He had no business pushing back at me in that fashion. Putting it that way. But it worked. All I could do was fumble out, “What kind of questions?”

“Did Straw bring your sister back last night?”

“Yes, he did.”

“You are certain of that?”

“I heard her in the wagon. Felt her come over to kiss me. She always did so before sleep.”

“You did not lay eyes on Straw. But you say you felt your sister kiss you. Could be a dream you had.”

A sob rose up in me, I tried to choke it down. “No, no, this was no dream. I know what I felt!” I cried out. “But later I woke up and she wasn’t there. It scared me.”

“Maybe you supposed she’d snuck off to Straw. Tell the truth now, woman.”

“My baby sister, she was a good girl. She didn’t sneak off with Mr. Straw.”

“So where did she go, if it weren’t to Straw, do you reckon?”

Mr. Straw spoke up sudden, gave me a chance to collect myself. “Madame Magique. She went back to see more of Madame Magique, those boys parading her up and down Front Street. She had begged to stay.”

Mr. Daniels said, “You watch your p’s and q’s, Mr. Straw. Don’t go interfering with a witness.”

Mr. Straw said, “Mrs. Stoveall told you how it was and you got no business holding me.”

“We’ll see about that. I let you out of that cell, I know what you’re going to do. Run yourself across the Choteau County line and out of our jurisdiction. Then you’re scot-free. You’re laughing at us.”

I saw how it stood. Sheriff Hinckey could arrest nobody who was off this little parcel of land. By now the Kelsos were beyond the law’s short arm. Safe after a couple of hours of hard riding. But if I raised no hue and cry, laid no suspicion on them, they might believe they were free and clear. They might come back to Fort Benton in time, be delivered into my hands.

Mr. Daniels saw me thinking, stroked his fingers slowly up and down those shirt ruffles. It was like he was touching some spot on my body he oughtn’t. “Hinckey tells you your sister’s dead, but you don’t want to go see the body. You light out for Custis Straw’s property. Why’s that? Took off with a big old horse pistol. Sheriff Hinckey said you looked like you had a use for it.” He waited.

“It’s clear the law can’t keep a woman safe in this town, and it’s no use outside it. A body has to protect herself. That’s why I carried the gun.”

“You were going to settle with Straw yourself?”

“No,” I said, most careful, “my sister and me aren’t acquainted with many folks around here. Straw was a friendly customer. Only natural I’d turn his direction in time of trouble.”

“You ain’t being helpful, Miz Stoveall. Out with it.”

“I’m done talking to someone who does not listen. But you will listen to this. You see to it that my sister’s body is sent to our wagon. Right smartly.” Daniels tapped his desktop, Hinckey slouched against a wall, hands in his pockets. I looked at Custis Straw, who was hanging spread-eagled on the bars. There was sunlight coming through a window high up on the wall behind him, but he was blocking the most of it, the man is that wide. When I started for the door Mr. Straw called out to me. I stopped. “A wagon won’t do for preparing a body,” he said. “My room in the Stubhorn … you can have the use of it.”

I was about to say no, but then I saw he was right. That wagon is not a fitting place for a proper laying out. And Madge was always bragging on Mr. Straw’s hairbrushes, his bottles of sweet-smelling waters. She admired them so. I knew he would have store-bought soap, a dandified man like him. It wouldn’t do to wash her soft body with soap the two of us had boiled up out of fat and ashes. She ought to go to the earth sweet.

“I’m grateful,” I told Mr. Straw. Then my throat clutched, the fist of grief squeezing down hard, and I had to rush out of that jail.

I ran all the way back to the wagon, hand shielding my face from the looks of passersby, crawled into my gunny-sack bed like a mouse
into its nest. I lie here, studying the daylight seeping through the canvas roof.

All my life I’ve tried not to imagine what might have been, but I can’t stop myself from doing so now. If the typhus hadn’t carried off Mother and Father when I was sixteen and Madge only seven – what then? Every nastiness seems to have followed from that. My father might have been nought but a Tennessee sharecropper, but he was a worker. We Drays never went hungry, never went cold. A gentle house, no whippings but ones that were earned. They even sent me for a time to the dame school, although plenty said it was a waste, to teach a girl to read. I didn’t know how happy I was until seven years ago; the typhoid took Mother and Father off and happiness with it. Next thing I knew, the landlord was on the doorstep telling us that Madge and me had a month to get off the property, he had found another man to work the place.

What choice had I when Abner Stoveall came courting? All our kin gone West, bound for greener pastures. He promised us both a roof over our heads, swearing to treat Madge like she was his own flesh and blood. Sitting in Mother’s kitchen, the betraying bastard bounced Madge on his knee, crawling his fingers all over her, tickling happy shrieks out of her.

Fool. A fool I was to take him at his word, sell myself to a man older than my own dead father for the prospect of eighty acres, a team of mules, two milch cows, a runty, screw-horned bull, a dozen scraggly chickens, five skinny hogs, a dirt-floor cabin with greased parchment windows. First time the candle was blown out and he crawled over on to me, I knew the high price I’d paid.