Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  He had been with Sherman at Shiloh, a major by then, adjutant in an Indiana regiment which broke badly under the Sunday dawn attack. He was near the bluff above Pittsburg Landing, using the flat of his saber on stragglers, when a stray minié came his way with a spent whine and took out his left eye: whereupon he went under the bluff, tore off his shoulder straps, and lay down among the skulkers. There were ten thousand others down there, including officers, and only a few of them wounded; he had better provocation than most. Yet he could not accept it in the way those others apparently could. When the battle was over he bandaged his eye with a strip from his shirt, rejoined his regiment, and later was commended in reports. There were men in his outfit, however, including some of his own clerks, who had also been under the bluff, and he saw them looking at him as if to say, “If you wont tell on me, I wont on you.” Soon afterwards he was assigned to courts martial duty with the Adjutant General’s Department. When the army adopted its reprisal policy in the lower Mississippi Valley, he was given another promotion and a gunboat with special troops aboard to enforce it.

  Patrolling the river from Vicksburg north to Memphis, two hundred and fifty airline miles and almost twice that far by water, One-Eye Frisbie and the Starlight became well known throughout the delta country. Where partisan resistance had once been strongest, soon there was little activity of any kind. It became a bleak region, populated only by women and children and old men and house servants too feeble to join the others gone as ‘contraband’ with the Union armies. The fields lay fallow, last year’s cotton drooping on dead brown stalks. Even the birds went hungry, what few remained. The land was desolated as if by plague.

  The only protest now was an occasional shot from the levee, which was followed by instant reprisal in accordance with the Army policy. Colonel Frisbie would tie up at the nearest river town, sending word for evacuation within twenty minutes, and then would give the Starlight gunners half an hour’s brisk drill, throwing explosive shells over the levee and into the empty buildings and streets where chickens and dogs fluttered and slunk and squawked and howled. Or he would tie up at the point where the sniping occurred, lead the troops ashore, and march them overland sometimes as far as a dozen miles to burn an isolated plantation house.

  I was with him from the beginning and I remember him mainly as straddled in silhouette before the lick and soar of flames. Dispossessed, the family huddled somewhere in the background. At first they had been arrogant, threatening reprisal by Forrest or Jameson or Van Dorn. “You had better burn the trees as well,” one woman told us. “When we first came there was nothing but woods and we built our homes. We’ll build them again.” But when Atlanta was besieged their defiance faltered, and when Sherman had taken the city and was preparing for the march that would “make Georgia howl,” they knew they were beaten and their armies would never return. There had been a time when they sent their plantation bells and even their brass doorknobs to be melted for cannon, but not any more. Now the war had left them; they were faced with the aftermath before the finish.

  Colonel Frisbie looked upon all this as indemnity collectible for the loss of his eye and his courage at Shiloh. Saber and sash and gray eye glinting firelight, he would watch a house burn with a smile that was more like a grimace, lip lifted to expose the white teeth clamping the cigar. That was the way I remembered him now as I continued to walk up the driveway toward the house. Around one of its corners I saw that the outbuildings had already burned, and I wondered if it had been done by accident — a not uncommon plantation mishap — or by one of our armies passing through at the time of the Vicksburg campaign. Then, nearing the portico, I saw that the door was ajar. Beyond it I could see into a high dim hall where a staircase rose in a slow curve. I stood in the doorway, listening, then rapped.

  The rapping was abrupt and loud against the silence. Then there was only vacancy, somehow even more empty than before.

  “Hello!” I cried, my voice as reverberant as if I had spoken from the bottom of a well. “Hello in there!”

  I had a moment of sharp fear, a sudden vision of someone crouched at the top of the staircase, sighting down a rifle barrel at me with a hot, unwinking eye. But when I bent forward and peered, there was no one, nothing. I went in.

  Through a doorway on the right I saw a tall black man standing beside an armchair. He wore a rusty clawhammer coat with buttons of tarnished brass, and on his head there was what appeared to be a pair of enormous white horns. Looking closer I saw that the Negro had bound a dinner napkin about his jaws, one of which was badly swollen, and had tied it at the crown of his head so that the corners stood up stiffly from the knot like the ears on a rabbit. The armchair was wide and deep; it faced the cold fireplace, its high, fan-shaped back turned toward the door.

  I said, “Didnt you hear me calling?” The Negro just stood there, saying nothing. It occurred to me then that he might be deaf; he had that peculiar, vacant look on his face. I came forward. “I said didnt …”

  But as I approached him, obliquing to avoid the chair, I saw something else.

  There was a hand on the chair arm. Pale against the leather and mottled with dark brown liver spots, it resembled the hand of a mummy, the nails long and narrow, almond-shaped. Crossing to the hearth I looked down at the man in the chair, and the man looked up at me. He was old — though old was hardly word enough to express it; he was ancient — with sunken cheeks and a mass of white hair like a mane, obviously a tall man and probably a big one, once, but thin now to the point of emaciation, as if he had been reduced to skin and skeleton and only the most essential organs, heart and lungs and maybe bowels, though not very much of either — ‘Except heart; there’s plenty of that,’ I thought, looking into the cold green eyes. His chin, resting upon a high stock, trembled as he spoke.

  “Have you brum to run my howl?” he said.

  I stared at him. “How’s that?” I asked. But the old man did not answer.

  “He hyar you, captain,” the Negro said. His enormous horns bobbed with the motion of his jaw. “He hyar you well enough, but something happen to him here lately he caint talk right.”

  This was Isaac Jameson, who was born in a wilderness shack beside the Trace while his father, a South Carolina merchant, was removing his family and his business to the Natchez District as part of a caravan which he and other Loyalists had organized to escape the Revolution on the seaboard. Thus in later years, like so many of the leaders of his time, Isaac was able to say in truth that he was a log cabin boy. But it was misleading, for his father, who had prospered under the Crown back east, became even wealthier in the west, and Isaac grew up in a fine big house on the bluff overlooking the river. From the gallery he could watch Spanish sentries patrolling the wharf where steamboats, up from New Orleans, put in with goods for the Jameson warehouse. He was grown, twenty years old and four inches over six feet tall, when John Adams sent troops to take over for the United States and created the Mississippi Territory. The Republic, which his father had come seven hundred miles to escape, had dogged his heels.

  Isaac was sixth among eight sons, and he was unlike the others. It was not only that he stood half a head taller; there was some intrinsic difference. They were reliable men, even the two younger ones who followed the removal. Reserved and proper, useful in the mercantile business, they knew their responsibilities; they stayed within their class and they knew the uses of dignity. But Isaac would not stand at a desk totting figures or checking bills of lading. He was off to cockfights or horseraces, and he spent more evenings in the Under-the-Hill section than he did in Natchez proper. He liked a brawl and he knew he could always find one among the river people. They came off their boats with their heads backflung, calling for the bully of the town, gesticulating with a curiously combined bravado and deadly seriousness: “Hear me, all you town galoots! I’m a combination rubber ball, wildcat, and screaming maniac! I’m a ringtail roarer!” Then Isaac would come forward, in decent broadcloth and imported linen, and it would be claw
and gouge, no holds barred, best man on his feet when the thing was over.

  His father, remembering the shack by the Trace, the panthers screaming in the outward darkness while his wife was in labor, believed that his son — wilderness born, conceived in a time of revolution — had received in his blood, along with whatever it was that had given him the extra height and the unaccountable width of his shoulders, some goading spark of rebellion, some fierce, hot distillate of the jungle itself. But while this might explain his excesses, or anyhow account for them, it did not make them any easier to correct or to abide, and neither the elder Jameson nor the seven brothers felt much regret when Isaac disappeared in the fall of 1804. He did not say where he was going, or even that he was leaving. He just went.

  They did not see him for ten years. When his name failed to appear in the testimony at the Burr trial three years later, they believed he was dead. “He must be,” the father said. “Otherwise he’d be involved in it somewhere. It’s too wild for him to have missed.” He could have been at the bottom of some creek or river, with a belly full of gravel; that was the way the Trace bandits, Murrel and the Harps, disposed of bodies. But not long afterwards they heard from a planter just returned from New Orleans that he had seen Isaac sipping claret in a Royal Street cantine with Jean Lafitte and Dominique You. “So thats it,” the father said; “he’s a pirate. We should have thought of that at the outset.”

  There followed a five-year period during which they heard nothing. Then one of the brothers met on the street in Natchez a ragged man who had fought alongside the missing son against the Creeks at Burnt Corn. A year later they saw Isaac himself.

  He had come home to die, and he looked it. Four men brought him off the steamboat and up from the wharf on a stretcher. He was unconscious. Laid out, he appeared even taller than before, but he was considerably gaunted. His eyes were far back in their sockets and he had grown a wide blond beard that crawled with lice. One leg was wrapped full length in a rag bandage which was stained with suppuration and stank of gangrene. He had been wounded at the Battle of New Orleans — whether fighting under Jackson or Lafitte they did not know, though they thought it was probably Jackson since Lafitte took better care of his wounded than this. After two weeks in a riverfront hospital he had used a derringer to stand off the surgeon who wanted to amputate.

  “Youre being a fool,” the surgeon told him. “That thing has mortified, and now it will spread and kill you.”

  Isaac did not lower the derringer.

  “Then let it mortify in peace,” he said. “If I die I’ll die with both my legs.”

  When the surgeon came back that night, intending to find him asleep, Isaac was gone. He had got someone to help him board the steamboat and was on his way upriver, though by the time the boat reached Natchez he was in delirium and barely managed to direct the stretcher bearers to his father’s house at the top of the bluff.

  He woke and instead of pain there was warmth and comfort, smooth sheets, and a pleasant feeling of falling slowly through space. Then he recognized the furniture in his room; the ten years might have been a dream. Remembering his leg, he sat up in bed to look for it, and it was there; the only thing that was missing was the beard. He was a year mending. Then he spent another year trying to make up for lost time. But it did not go right. There were still the cockfights and the grog shops and the women under the hill, but the old life had paled on him. He was thirty-nine, a bachelor, well into middle age, and apparently it had all come to nothing.

  Then he found what he had been seeking from the start, though he did not know he was looking for it until some time after he found it. Just before his fortieth birthday — in the spring of 1818; Mississippi had entered the Union in December — he rode into the northern wilderness with two trappers who had come to town on their annual spree. This time he was gone a little over two years. Shortly after the treaty of Doaks Stand opened five and a half million acres of Choctaw land across the middle of the state, he reappeared at his father’s house. He was in buckskins, his hair shoulder length, and he had the beard again.

  Next day he was gone for good, with ten of his father’s Negroes and five thousand dollars in gold in his saddlebags. He had come back to claim his legacy, to take this now instead of his share in the Jameson estate when the old man died. The brothers were willing, since it would mean a larger share for them when the time came. The father considered it a downright bargain; he would have given twice that amount for Isaac’s guarantee to stay away from Natchez with his escapades and his damage to the name. He said, “If you want to play prodigal it’s all right with me. But mind you: when youre swilling with swine and chomping the husks, dont cut your eyes around in my direction. There wont be any lamp in the window, or fatted calf either. This is all.”

  It was all Isaac wanted, apparently. Between sunup and nightfall of the following day — a Sunday, early in June — they rolled forty miles along the road connecting hamlets north of Natchez. Sundown of the third day they made camp on the near bank of the Yazoo, facing the Walnut Hills, and Wednesday they entered the delta, a flat land baked gray by the sun wherever it exposed itself, which was rare, from under the intertwined branches of sycamores and water oaks and cottonwoods and elms. Grass grew so thick that even the broad tires of the Conestoga left no mark of passage. Slow, circuitous creeks, covered with dusty scum and steaming in the heat, drained east and south, away from the river, each doubling back on itself in convulsive loops and coils like a snake fighting lice. For four days then, while the Negroes clutched desperately at seats and stanchions in a din of creaking wood and clattering metal (they had been warehouse hands, townspeople, and ones the brothers could easiest spare at that) the wagon lurched through thickets of scrub oak and stunted willow and over fallen trunks and rotted stumps. It had a pitching roll, like that of a ship riding a heavy swell, which actually did cause most of the Negroes to become seasick four hundred miles from salt water.

  They followed no trail, for there was no trail to follow. There was only Isaac, who rode a claybank mare as far out front as visibility allowed, sometimes half a mile, sometimes ten feet, and even in the latter case they sometimes followed not the sight of him but the sound of snapping limbs and Isaac’s cursing. Often they had to dismount with axes and chop through. Just before noon of the eighth day, Sunday again, they struck the southern end of a lake, veered right, then left, and continued northward along its eastern shore. Two hours later Isaac reined in the mare, and when the wagon drew abreast he signaled for a halt. A wind had risen, ruffling the lake; through the screen of cypresses the waves were bright like little hatchets in the sunlight. “All right,” he said. “You can get the gear unloaded. We are home.”

  Thus he began the fulfillment of a dream which had come to him the previous month. It was May then, the oaks tasseling; he and the trappers had reached the lake at the close of day. While the sun went down, big and red across the water, they made camp on the grassy strip between the lake and the trees. Isaac lay rolled in his blanket, and all that night, surrounded by lake-country beauty — overhead the far, spangled reaches of sky, eastward the forest murmurs, the whisper of leaves and groan of limbs in the wind, the hoarse night-noises of animals, and westward, close at hand, the lapping of water — he dreamed. He dreamed an army of blacks marching upon the jungle, not halting to chop but walking steadily forward, swinging axes against the retreating green wall. Behind them the level fields lay stumpless and serene in watery sunlight, motionless until in the distance clanking trace chains and clacking singletrees announced the coming of the plowmen. Enormous lop-eared mules drew bulltongue plows across the green, and the long brown furrows of earth unrolled like threads off spools. What had been jungle became cultivated fields, and now the fields began to be striped with the pale green lines of plants soon burdened with squares, then purple-and-white dotted, then deep red with blooms, then shimmering white in the summer heat. In a long irregular line (they resembled skirmishers except for the singing; their sa
cks trailed from their shoulders like limp flags) the pickers passed over the fields, leaving them brown and desolate in the rain, and the stalks dissolved, going down into bottomless mud. Then in the dream there was quiet, autumnal death until the spring returned and the plowmen, and the dream began again. This was repeated three times, with a mystical clarity.

  “Wake up. Wake up, Ike.”

  “Dont,” he said, drawing the edge of the blanket over his eyes.

  “Wake up, Ike! It’s time to roll.”

  In the faint dawn light the lake and forest had that same quality of unreality as in the dream. He was not certain he was awake until one of the trappers nudged him in the ribs with the toe of his moccasin and spoke again. “Ike! You want to sleep your life away?”

  For a while he did not answer; he remained half-in half-out of the dream, which was still with him and which he knew already would always be with him. The trappers stood waiting, but he just lay there, looking out over the lake and at the forest. Then he sat up.

  “You two go on,” he told them. “This is where I stop.”

  He stayed there for three days, alone. A mile back from the lakeshore he found a deserted Choctaw village. The Indians had burned their shacks and gone; there was nothing left except an occasional shard of pottery in the ashes, and grass was already reclaiming the paths their feet had worn. During the past month he had seen them, or others like them, traveling single file, a people dispossessed, the braves in dirty blankets carrying nothing, the squaws with babies and utensils strapped to their backs, going north to land not yet ceded by the Chiefs.