The Unquiet Grave: A Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “The wonder is that he’s still alive thirty years after the war.”

  James laughed. “Hell doesn’t want him. He’d try to take over. Now this railroad man—his name was Michael Joice—bandied words with Dr. Rucker for a bit, both of them getting madder by the minute, and he ended up by asking what Dr. Rucker would do if he called him a traitor. Well, Dr. Rucker claimed he brandished that bowie knife and told Michael Joice exactly what he would do under those circumstances.”

  Eliza shook her head. “My lands. They must’a all been likkered up to be acting like that.”

  “I believe you. So then this Michael Joice took the dare and called Dr. Rucker a traitor outright. He prefaced it with profanity, which is not fit for your ears, Eliza, but you can imagine the gist of it. And he swung that heavy club at Dr. Rucker, but Rucker was smaller and more wiry, and apparently he managed to dodge the blow and set on his attacker with that knife.”

  “Well, that’s self-defense, isn’t it, James?”

  “The first stab was. The problem was that Dr. Rucker didn’t stop there. He kept sticking his knife into Joice’s body over and over, even when the man was lying helpless on the ground.”

  “What about the rest of the mob? Didn’t they try to help him?”

  “Well, I expect that Dr. Rucker was aiming his pistol at them by that time, and after what he’d just done to their leader, there couldn’t have been a doubt in any of their minds that he would blow them away without a second’s hesitation. One of them must have got away, though, to fetch the law, because someone in an official capacity took charge at that point, and ordered the bystanders to carry the injured man into a nearby hotel to receive medical attention.”

  Eliza clapped her hand over her mouth. She whispered, “Not from . . .”

  “Yes, indeed.” James could not suppress a chuckle at the irony of it. “Dr. Rucker. He was a medical school graduate, you know. And he swears that he wasn’t ordered to do it. Said he considered it his duty to try to save the fellow.”

  “Do you think he really did try to save him? Did the man live?”

  “Well, he may have tried. I guess if you’ve had medical training, your instinct might come into play, regardless of your personal feelings. He didn’t elaborate on that, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was as pigheaded fighting against Death as he was fighting against everything else in creation. But the railroad man died of his wounds the following day.”

  “Surely they arrested Dr. Rucker?” Eliza sighed. “I keep having to remind myself that the man is a lawyer himself now.”

  “And I wonder if that isn’t partially in consequence of this incident. Anyhow, you are correct, Miss Eliza. The day after his patient died, they arrested him.”

  “Well, at least they waited until his patient died.” She looked up at him, eyes sparkling. “And what came after that is the part of the story that you understand perfectly, isn’t it, James?”

  “It’s in my line of country, certainly. I know court procedure the way you might know the variations on a . . .” He searched for some feminine equivalent that she might comprehend. “. . . a recipe.”

  If her smile was mischievous, he didn’t notice, so intent was he on his recital of the particulars of the case. “Well, Mr. Attorney-at-Law, how would this legal recipe go, then, sir?”

  “Standard procedure. They arrested Dr. Rucker after the death of his opponent . . . victim.” He shrugged. “How I would refer to the deceased would depend on which side of the case I was representing. Anyhow, they brought Dr. Rucker before a coroner’s jury, who viewed the body, heard some testimony about the circumstances, and decided that Dr. Rucker should stand trial for the man’s death. He might have got away with self-defense on just one stab wound, but the fact that he kept knifing the fellow repeatedly—in front of a host of witnesses, mind you—made the matter more complex. So he went to trial.”

  “Did he defend himself?”

  “He never said otherwise. I don’t think you could fault Dr. Rucker for a lack of self-confidence. He got his trial a month after the incident, and there were a good number of witnesses called, but no jury. A panel of justices heard the case. They acquitted him.”

  “They never!”

  “The way Dr. Rucker tells it—and I am inclined to believe him, because I don’t see how else he could have got off—Michael Joice made a deathbed statement exonerating his assailant. Said the fight was his own fault, and that Dr. Rucker was not to be blamed for his death. There must have been witnesses to that statement. I don’t think they would have taken Dr. Rucker’s word for it.”

  “Well, I reckon that poor man went to heaven, anyhow, forgiving his enemy like he did, even knowing he was going to die.”

  “Perhaps—assuming that last act of charity canceled out the rest of his sorry life.”

  “So Dr. Rucker got off on the charge of murder and went off to practice law himself. Like the Good Book says: Go and sin no more.”

  James shook his head. “Not Dr. Rucker. A year later he was back in court for burning up bridges.”

  fourteen

  “WAIT,” JAMES BOOZER SAID. “Just wait.” He laid a restraining hand upon the old man’s arm. “What do you mean, he was back in court for burning bridges? I thought the man was a lawyer.”

  Beyond the curtains in the patients’ parlor, a dark sky spangled with stars spread out above the bare branches of the trees across the road. He could imagine the broad expanse of the river silvered by moonlight. But James Boozer had been too captivated by the past to care about the present beauty of the present night. Gardner smiled a little to himself and turned away from the window.

  He noted the discomfiture of the young doctor. “Well, before we get to that, I wanted to ask you about another matter. I have received letters from colleagues back in Bluefield, and they are concerned about my continued confinement here. Who should I tell them to write to about that?”

  The doctor hesitated. “Why are they writing? Are they concerned that you are being ill-treated?”

  “No. I haven’t complained about the hospital, per se. It’s just that I don’t think staying here longer will make any difference. Either I’ll soldier on, or I won’t. So I’d just as soon be going about my business, and my colleagues back home have offered to speak out on my behalf. But they want to know whom to write to. You?”

  James Boozer shook his head. “Not if you’re talking about pulling strings. I’m low man on the totem pole around here. They’re welcome to write, though I don’t know that it will do any good. Dr. Barnett has the final say-so in here, of course.”

  “I know that Barnett is the director here, but to whom does he report?”

  Boozer shrugged. “Somebody in the state government, I suppose. But I hope that I would be consulted before anything was decided. As your attending physician, my recommendation ought to count for a lot.”

  Mr. Gardner smiled. “Then I hope to stay on your good side, Doctor.”

  “Now, you were telling me about your mentor, Dr. Rucker, the bridge burner. And he was a lawyer back then?”

  “Perhaps not during the war, but he was indeed a lawyer when I was acquainted with him thirty years ago. But thirty-odd years before that, he was—according to his lights—a fire-eating patriot. Mm-hmm, yes, he most certainly was. Back in the war. I wasn’t born until two years after it ended, but it seems to me like people didn’t talk about much of anything else the whole time I was growing up. The way I understood it, there were soldiers on both sides who got conscripted into the army with no choice in the matter, but a goodly number of other men with strong beliefs joined up with one army or the other to fight for their cause. Dr. Rucker would rank high among those with strong beliefs, but he never was much of a joiner, not being conspicuously blessed with friends, and maybe feeling that it would be difficult to consort with his peers when he didn’t think he had any. He always insisted on going his own way, no matter what it cost him. I’d say that when it came to the war, his beliefs c
ost him a few years of his life. It was even harder on his family, I’ll warrant, but he wouldn’t have taken that into consideration.”

  “So he turned to the law in later life.”

  “Not all that much later. In 1870 he became the Greenbrier County prosecutor.”

  “That was quick. When did he have time to qualify as a lawyer?”

  “Lord knows. The man was bright enough, though. I’d say he was a quick study. And as for becoming the county’s prosecuting attorney, remember that in Reconstruction, only people who were loyal to the Union got to hold government positions. He probably didn’t have too much competition in Greenbrier County back then. He only served two years, though. After that, he either got fed up with the job or else it was back to business as usual among the local politicians.”

  Boozer smiled. “So old Rucker became part of the established order. Do you take that to mean he learned the error of his ways from his war experience?”

  Mr. Gardner laughed. “William P. Rucker? Why, I don’t believe that man ever regretted a single thing in his entire life, no matter the consequences. On his moral compass, whatever he took a notion to do was true north. Old enough to know better, too. When that war came along, he was older than you are now, Doctor. Old enough to have had some sense. Had a wife and four sons, too, but that didn’t slow him down in pursuing his own peculiar notion of service to the war effort.”

  “Thirty isn’t old in wartime. Why wasn’t he conscripted into the army? You said he was a physician. Lord knows they must have needed them on both sides.”

  “Well, I think he got up to his shenanigans before they passed the conscription act, and by the time they did pass it, he was unavailable.”

  “How did he get mixed up in burning bridges?”

  “I think one thing must have led to another. Early in 1862 he left Covington, where he was none too popular, and went over into West Virginia. He had a plantation there on the Gauley River, and the Union Army had stationed an Ohio Infantry regiment nearby. Dr. Rucker fell in with Colonel George Crook, the commander. Crook.” Gardner considered it. “His name is hardly an improvement over yours, Doctor.”

  Boozer sighed. “We’ve already had that conversation. I’ll bet he got tired of hearing the name jokes as quick as I did—about age ten.”

  “There are those in the area where Crook was headquartered who might disagree with you about the appropriateness of his name, though. Confiscating property was quite a pastime with occupying armies. By the way, that’s the same Crook who became a general later on, but this was still early in the war. Anyhow, the two of them—”

  “No. Wait. Go back. You said Dr. Rucker owned a plantation over there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A plantation. With crops and cows . . . He didn’t own slaves, did he?”

  Gardner sighed. “A plantation is a big farm, Dr. New York City Boy. Of course, he owned slaves. How else was he going to run that place?”

  “Well, you said he was pro-Union, so it seemed logical. Besides, if he was consorting with a Union Army commander, shouldn’t they have insisted on his freeing his slaves?”

  “Not then. Not even later in the war, because the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to border states like West Virginia. Early on the Union officers concerned themselves with military strategy, as if they were sheepdogs trying to round up the straying states. I never did ask Dr. Rucker why he chose the Union side in the war. It hardly mattered by the time I got to know him, but as you may have noticed, he certainly had things in common with the other side in that conflict. Illogical, I know, but there it is. I know it’s your job to expect people to make sense, Doctor, but I gave up on that endeavor a good long while ago.”

  “Well, tell me more about him, and let me see if I can make sense of it.”

  “All right. Good luck to you. He never made sense to me. I don’t know what made Dr. Rucker hunt up a Union commander, but it is the sort of thing he’d have been likely to do. Thought he’d be invaluable to the war effort. Never was a diffident man.” He peered slyly at Boozer. “Apparently, doctors are never in doubt about their own importance.”

  “All right, Mr. Gardner. Point taken. So Rucker makes himself an adviser to the local military commander. I suppose he knew the surrounding area, which would make him useful.”

  “So he did. He and the colonel got to talking about what a good idea it would be to destroy a bridge over the Cowpasture River.”

  “Cowpasture River, huh? Sounds like it’s out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know much about the war as it played out away from the major battlefields—Gettysburg, Antietam, we studied those in history class—but why would they bother to blow up a bridge in the hinterlands?”

  “Because that railroad bridge was located a few miles from a railroad depot, and the most important commodity that was sent to that depot was salt.”

  “Salt? Table salt?”

  Gardner smiled. “We don’t think much about salt these days, do we? Here in 1930 we have lost our dependence on the old ways, with our cars and telephones and refrigerators. Time is like that big slow river over yonder, and you just drift along, thinking about your own concerns, and then one day you look up and realize how far you are from where you started. By then there’s no going back. I started out in those simpler times, but even I take it all for granted sometimes. You’re too young to know what a different world it was seventy years ago.”

  “Don’t sell me short. I have studied history, even a course in college.”

  “It’s the little things that trip you up, though. Things that wouldn’t cross your mind, that seem too commonplace to ever have been missing from ordinary life. Corn flakes. Toilet paper. Tomatoes in December. And salt. Nowadays, you can go to the grocery store and buy all you want for pennies a box. It’s hard to think that once upon a time it was a vital necessity, worth fighting over.”

  “Well, it is hardly a rare commodity.”

  “Oh, but it was then—at least in much of the South it was. There weren’t many salt deposits available for mining, and salt was something the population could not do without. Back in the days before refrigeration, people salted meat to preserve it through the winter. They salted vegetables to preserve them. Added salt to butter to keep it from spoiling. Used it for tanning hides to make leather. The army needed it for that, and for adding to gunpowder. For medical reasons, too. They used to put salt in wounds—”

  “Thank you. I went to medical school, you know. People have been treating wounds with salt since Roman times. I know that salt is a necessity for more than just seasoning your dinner; I just didn’t know there was a shortage of it anywhere that mattered. I take it that destroying that bridge had something to do with cutting off the supply of salt to some critical area?”

  “That’s it. The railroad bridge was a covered structure, about two hundred yards long, situated maybe eight miles from the train depot. Loads of salt would be sent regularly to that station from one of the few salt deposits around—some brine wells over near Charleston. Apparently Rucker and his officer friend decided that if they destroyed the bridge and stopped the salt shipments, it would help the Union war effort.”

  “I expect it would, but if that army commander had a whole regiment of troops at his disposal, what did he need Rucker for? Local geography?”

  “Probably. Dr. Rucker knew the area and the political sympathies of all the local residents. Besides, I expect the whole thing was his idea in the first place.” The old man smiled. “His job was to guide the soldiers past local pockets of Rebel sympathizers and get them safely to the bridge. Of course, Dr. Rucker being who he was, he took it upon himself to do more than that. And if you think people hated him before then, you should have heard them talk about his exploits in the Cowpasture campaign of ’62. He had done some doctoring in those parts, on account of having a residence nearby, and apparently he’d held some local bureaucratic position at some point in the past. He told me all about it once, but I have lo
ng forgotten the rights of it. Anyhow, those two activities enabled him to acquire a good bit of local knowledge about the area residents and what they owned. They say he ended up with more than a thousand soldiers accompanying him around the county, although not that many later on the actual mission. So as a prelude to destroying that bridge, Dr. Rucker took it upon himself to tell the soldiers which farms belonged to Rebel partisans, and who owned good horses, and where they might find some wagons, stores of grain—whatever supplies might be useful to an army or might constitute a tragedy to the families who were losing them. They burned a few buildings while they were at it.”

  “Was the doctor settling old scores, by any chance?”

  “No one ever doubted that. The local folks forever after called that campaign Rucker’s Raid, and there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that he was motivated as much by personal spite as he was by patriotism for the Union. Remember, this was his own stomping grounds. He knew all these people, and I suppose this would have been a perfect opportunity for him to retaliate with impunity. In Greenbrier County, people were still muttering about his iniquities in the 1890s, when I knew him. The wonder is that nobody ever tried to bushwhack him. They never forgot it, I promise you that.”

  Boozer nodded. “Understandable. So did the soldiers succeed in burning the bridge?”

  “You should have heard Rucker tell it. In his cups, he’d wax long and loud about the twenty-mile march over backwoods trails in the pouring rain. I question that part of the tale.”

  “Seems like it would be hard to burn a bridge in a rainstorm.”

  “That’s what I thought, but I never did voice my objections to Dr. Rucker. He didn’t like being cross-examined, and since he was my boss, mostly I just listened and acted like I believed every word he said. The Rebels were guarding the bridge, of course, but Rucker’s forces outsmarted them. The bridge-burning expedition consisted of fewer than a hundred men, but the locals had seen a thousand soldiers in the previous days’ raids. So when Rucker and his party got close to the bridge, he—or some actual Union officer, more likely, but he claimed it was him—sent the whole force charging the bridge, in order to make the defenders think that Crook’s entire army was coming at them.”