“WISH THOSE damn fools had left me my Colt revolver instead of this rifle,” Bill was grumbling. “I’d rather teach you to shoot with a revolver any day. First off, you can’t ride and shoot a rifle at the same time. You can’t load the rifle while you’re riding. And with a Navy Colt, why, you can carry four of them at a time and keep shooting. Well, anyway, you know this is a Sharpe’s carbine and the Union rifles are only muzzleloading, single shot.”
I didn’t know, but I said yes.
“Well, come on over here, and I’ll show you how to hold it. Get you used to it.”
Reluctantly, I went over to him. “Seth isn’t going to like my doing this,” I said.
“You don’t shoot, you get no breakfast.”
I was about starved. The smell of the bacon in the fry pan over the morning fire made my stomach growl. Same for the bubbling coffee. We were going to have a shooting lesson first, however, he’d told me. And if I didn’t shoot, I didn’t eat all day.
I had to get away from this man, I determined, as I walked over to him. He was crazier than a hooty owl. I stood next to him, and he positioned the Sharpe’s rifle in my arms and aimed it at a rock in the distance, toward the east.
It was then that we saw the rider. On the horizon. Like a silhouette cut out of black paper against the red sky.
“Who in purple hell is that?” he asked.
I blinked to adjust my eyes to the sunrise and said I didn’t know.
“It’s a woman,” he said disgustedly. “I can see her billowing skirts. You leave any women friends back there in the wagon train?”
“No. Bill, the gun is hurting my shoulder.”
He adjusted it and went on with the shooting lesson. He showed me how to take aim, to hold the gun steady, to hold myself steady, to plant my feet in the ground so the recoil from the shot wouldn’t knock me back and down. I reminded him that I had no shoes, that they’d been stolen, and that the ground was full of stones. I couldn’t very well plant my feet, could I? At least he had an extra pair of boots for himself.
“No sass,” he said. “Just do as I say.”
Somehow I dug my feet in and managed to pull the trigger. The recoil almost did knock me down, would have, too, if Bill wasn’t standing behind me. “Good,” he said, “that was good. Next time you’ll be less afraid. We’ll do more later this afternoon.”
The woman on the horse still sat there, not moving, though the shot had echoed through the quiet morning with a sound that was almost blasphemous.
We went to have our breakfast. Bill cracked open some eggs into the fry pan with the bacon. “This afternoon, we come to a creek,” he said, “you’re gonna get out of those clothes of yours and bathe and put on something clean. You got another dress?”
“Just one more. But I can’t wear it.”
“Why?”
“It was”—I breathed softly—“Jenny’s.”
He did not look at me. “You’re still gonna get cleaned up.”
Something was wrong here. “Just in case you’re getting notions, I’m not going to get out of my clothes in front of you,” I told him firmly.
He shoved bacon and eggs into his mouth. “Hell’s bells, girl. I’ve seen all my sisters in all states of undress. Never thought a thing of it. Neither did they.”
“Well, in my house there was only me and Seth. And we respected each other’s privacy. And I don’t believe that Martha never thought a thing of it.”
He laughed. “All that’s over with now. It was part of civilization, families living together in houses and respecting each other’s privacy and such. The world got shed of that the minute the fool war started.”
“I recollect my pa saying something about that before the Yankees came ’round,” I told him.
“Oh? What did he say?”
“He said we had to hold fast to the things that made us civilized now that war was here. He said that no matter what happened, we must remember the small everyday things that made up civilization or we were whipped before we started.”
He gazed at the horizon where the woman still sat her horse. “Well, he’s dead, your pa. Most of his stripe are by now. We killed lots of ’em in Lawrence.”
“I’m still not taking my clothes off in front of you,” I said.
“We’ll see,” he returned.
I began to tremble and wonder how he had come to be, the Bill Anderson who now sat in front of me shoveling his food into his mouth. He was certainly not the Bill Anderson I had grown up knowing, the Bill Anderson his sisters had worshipped so. All the times our paths had crossed he’d been polite and gentlemanly, a good friend to Seth, caring of his own sisters. He’s changed, Seth had warned me. Since that building collapsed. They call him Bloody Bill now.
Could one person change that much?
I looked at the horizon and the woman on the horse. And in my bones I knew one true thing.
She was there for me. To watch me. And when we moved she would follow at a discreet distance. And if the time came when we happened upon a creek and Bill made me take off my clothes, all I had to do was put up a fight and she’d come galloping over to help me. All she was waiting for was to catch Bill treating me badly. Then she’d pounce. Who she was I did not know.
Maybe she was dead Jenny come to save me from her brother.
The Andersons were good Catholics. Jenny would say she was the Blessed Mother come to save me. I didn’t care if it was the wife of the devil himself as long as she was on my side.
I got up and scraped off my dish and poured Bill a second cup of coffee, which I knew by now he liked. I reached for my pillowcase to get another pair of stockings to put on my feet, and Charity McCorkle Kerr’s doll fell out on the ground. I reached for it, but Bill had it in his grasp first.
“What’s this? You still play with dolls?”
“No. It belonged to Charity McCorkle Kerr. She’s dead now.”
“I know damned well she’s dead. You ought to give it to her husband. Or her brother. Either one.”
He took it and put it in his saddlebag. “I’ll give it to her brother,” he promised. “It’ll mean more to him. What’s wrong? You don’t like the idea? You’d rather I throw it up in the air and show you how this Sharpe’s rifle can blow it to bits before it starts to come down?”
“No, give it to her brother,” I said. “Do.” No sense in provoking him now. I put on my stockings and to my surprise he told me to mount his horse or we’d never make any time that day. He’d walk beside me. I thanked him.
“No need for thanks. I just want to get out of sight of that siren on the horizon,” he said. “And find the nearest creek, fast as we can.”
I was given orders not to look back at the “siren” as we left our camp. So I didn’t dare.
And then, before we’d gone a mile I knew who it was. And quiet tears came down my face.