Chapter 18: Dimity

A few days later a motley bunch of bushwhackers got surprised by Foster's screening company as they lay sprawled by their makeshift tents. They were armed, dirty and stupid, but they had a woman with them so we stopped to find out what was going on. At first I was not sure that the woman was still alive.

"Who's the girl?" Lt. Foster asked the man who claimed to be their leader.

"Damn if I knows," he said, "but we been horsing her reg'lar, las' couple a'days."

"Where did she come from?" I asked, cutting the slim woman loose from the tree she was bound to and pulling her homespun dress back up on her shoulder. She slumped against me, and I grabbed her butt to keep her from falling.

"Shit," the man said, "she was jus' wanderin' around, lost I guess."

I handed the girl my canteen, and she drank deeply, her green eyes watching me over the rim like a frightened animal.

"Know her name?" Foster asked the man. "Who's her family?"

"Never ast," the gross man said, scratching his belly. "But I popped her cherry, I did, an' we all's had her a time or two. Ain't a bad piece a'ass."

Foster walked away, examined some the horses the bunch had hobbled nearby while I helped the young woman wash her face. "He's lying," she whispered to me. "They're Tories."

I nodded to show I had heard her and raked her hair back out of her face. She had a bruised cheek and scraped chin, her lip was split and swollen, but she was a handsome young one if a bit on the skinny side.

"Where'd you get the horses?" my lieutenant asked.

"None a'your damn business," the man said, and then he yelled, "Get at 'em, boys," and we had a regular melee. When the dust cleared, three of the ragged crew were dead, one of our boys was wounded, and I brought the girl over to tell the lieutenant what she knew.

"I'm indentured," she said, "four years. This bunch killed the folks that had my paper, stole their horses and hauled me off to rape day afore yesterday. He claims he works for Tarleton or some such name." She pointed at the leader of the group, who lay on his side, nursing a sprained wrist and a sore head. One thing led to another, and before sunset we had strung up the last two and watched them dance until their bowels let loose. We left them dangling there by the road and went back to rejoin, taking the girl with us.

Now Lt. Foster, as I might have said before, he mounts every female he sees if he can, and my friend George enjoys women as much as any man, so when this young girl with the fat lip hung onto me, I got a number of angry looks and sullen stares. Of course, I do like women as much as the next man so I did not mind her attentions.

The girl said her name was Nola and that she came from London, that her father had died on the trip across the Atlantic, and that her time had been purchased by a man in Annapolis whose wife would not let her stay since she had several adolescent boys who refused to let her alone. She was sold to an Alexandria merchant and worked for him for several weeks before the tobacco farmer took her as part payment for a debt. She had been with him only a few weeks when the raiders came, killed the man and his wife, took the livestock and the girl and lit out. That was when we came along. All that and she had only been in American for about a year.

We got her hooked up with some of the camp followers, and she became part of the clothes washing brigade that a stout lady organized. Nola and I rolled up in my blanket and soothed each other a time or two, but then I lost track of her.

While General Greene tried to get his dispirited army armed and organized, as well as fed and clothed, he split off about 600 infantry and mounted men, gave them to Morgan and sent him to stir up trouble out on the hilly frontier. Captain Foster and his dozen veterans went with him as skirmishers and scouts just as we had done back in New Jersey a couple of years before, seemed like a generation et least.

For cavalry, we got William Washington's troop who had just played a neat a trick on some Tories led by a man named Rugeley, forcing them to surrender by dressing up a tree trunk to look like an artillery piece. And we also had Howard's Continentals, mostly tough Marylanders who knew how to use their bayonets and could live off the land. Off we went to what they called the Up Country where, we were told, there were a lot of Tories but also a great deal of food and many horses and wagons.

Captain Foster sent five or six of us out in front of Morgan's force to do some heavy scouting since about all we knew for sure was that Cornwallis was camped at Winnsborough, South Carolina, unhappy that his Camden victory had not won him much. I was told to go find out what I could about a town with the unlikely name of Ninety-Six and keep an ear out for news of Tarleton and his bunch. I was also to look for men and women who were reliable sources of information in the northern part of the region. The captain gave me some paper money to spread about as I saw fit.

Most of the locals I came across in that hilly country near the border between the Carolinas were poor farmers although I did see a few big homes with rows of slave shanties back in the woods. Some folks had already suffered from raiding parties and scavengers of various stripes and were now hunkered down in December, hoping for an early spring. They were not exactly unfriendly, but I did not get invited to many suppers or places where I could sleep under a roof. I do not think I saw a single woman of bedding age, and I certainly do not know where or how they hid them. I looked.

At a cross roads tavern in a backwoods settlement too small to have name, a wizened old man told me that a big troop of Tory cavalrymen had just come through and were headed down toward Ninety-Six. He said he had never heard of anyone named "Tarleton." I asked him how that settlement down there got its name, and he chewed and laughed and said it was 96 miles from hell. When he stopped chuckling at his own wit, he managed to tell me which roads to take if I wanted to follow the horsemen's route.

At the next farm that was near enough to the road to see, a poor looking place red in the setting sun, I spotted a woman taking clothes off a line and decided to try to talk my way into a hot meal and a place to spend the night. When she saw my horse trotting up her lane, she hurried a bit, took her basket of laundry to the small back porch of the log house and shoved it inside like she was worried about me stealing her clothes. The stone chimney puffed out some wood smoke, which made me guess the young woman waiting for me with narrowed eyes and hands on her wide hips was not alone. She was the first nubile female I had seen for a long time, and I sure wish I had never seen her.

"Howdy," she said with a smile, folding her arms over her ample chest. "Where y'all headed?"

"Ninety-six," I told her.

"You got a ways to go. What's you after? You soldiering?"

"Yep," I said. "Came down with some Maryland boys."

"Bunch a'horsemen come through today, don't know for sure, but 'spect they's loyal. You loyal?"

I shook my head and watched her reaction. She gave me a pleasant smile. She was a plain, bare foot, hard working young woman with a dirty face who probably was not more than twenty-five but might have passed for twice that except when she smiled. She was missing a front tooth, but she sure was not starving. Must have gone twelve stone if she was a pound.

"You kin put yer horse in the shed, use the stall next to our mangy old nag. We got nothin' but corn and fat back, but yer welcome if you wants to eat with us. Maw," she called though the open back door, "we got a hungry stranger to feed."

I sat at their board table and introduced myself as the older woman at the fire ladled up plates of corn bread, beans and hunks of what looked like half-cooked bacon. The young woman said her name was Dimity and her mother was "Franny."

"I mean Frances," she said. "Mee-show's our name, but bet you can't spell it." We joshed about that and Mrs. Michaux came and sat with us and bowed her head. I bowed mine until she looked up and said, "Et-men," then we all dug in.

"He's going down to Ninety-Six, Maw. Ain't that a ways?"

"Lot a'creeks 'tween here and there," she said. "You're nearly in Georgia time you get way down there. Gotta watch for Indians, I 'spect."

"How many miles?" I asked, shoveling in the food and enjoying the greasy taste. There was no light in the room except from the hearth and what came through the dirty window.

"Not sure, seventy or eighty I reckon," Dimity said.

"Lot of Tories around here?" I asked and saw a look pass between the women.

"Yes," Mrs. Michaux admitted, "most of our neighbors, I fear. We've had some harsh words and a few animals killed. My husband's in the militia, but we ain't heard from him since that fight at Camden back in the summer." She sniffed.

"Don't cry, Maw," Dimity said, looking hard at me. "He'll come back soon as he can. Didn't the McComb's boy get home last week. They hadn't heard a word from him for six months."

By the time we finished talking and eating and wiping out our bowls with more corn bread, it was dark outside and time to think about bed and an early start in the morning. The house had no sleeping loft although there were some signs that there had been one. I unrolled my blanket in the shed after seeing to my horse and, out of habit, primed my old pistol and put it beside my head. It was a starless night, overcast and black as tar so I heard the girl's approach long before I saw her.

"You want some company?" she whispered as if not to wake the horses in the adjoining stalls. I opened my blanket, and she knelt and rolled in beside me.

"I hain't seen a real man in some time," she said. "Most of the boys is out playing war." She wriggled her wide backside into my groin.

It was a clammy, cool night, and I certainly welcomed the company, but some sort of warning bells were going off in the back of my head as I slid my hand out to cover her large breast and sniffed at her hair. It was not very clean but then neither was I.

"If we do it," she said quietly, "and I'd like to do it, really I would, you gotta promise to pull out a'fore you come."

I had not done that for a long time, not since I was chopping wood up near Philadelphia in '77. When I was growing up back in Frederick, we did it that way regularly as the older girls were teaching us the ropes. I could still see the raised knees in the shady places behind that barn when I closed my eyes and I could hear the moans and laughs.

"Don't you wanna?" she whined at me, turning over and starting to work on my waistband buttons.

I turned off the warning bells, cut short the youthful visions, and put my mind to the girl in my arms. She was in a hurry, and I was deep inside her in a minute or two. I never liked to do it that way, with our legs intermingled, but she was soon puffing, snorting and humping for all she was worth. She smelled of stale sweat and fried pork, and I recalled the perfume of the blonde in Philadelphia, the fresh smell of the Jean in Annapolis, Rowena's musky odor.

I rolled the woman to her broad back, got myself better situated with my feet braced against the stable side boards and did some first class rogering, pushing us back off my blanket and into the straw. She was bucking and carrying on when I put my hand on her damp forehead and said, "Now's the time, Dimity."