Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  Though he’d never seen an ironclad, Jarom had heard stories of those who had escaped the surrender at Fort Henry on the Tennessee. Rumor had it that General Tilghman gave up because he believed such boats unsinkable. Instead of piercing their thick armor, shells ricocheted off the canted sides. Jarom knew how pitifully weak their own defenses were. For three days and two nights they had dug rifle pits but had completed only a third when they sighted the first bluecoats.

  He also knew that General Buckner had met all night with his senior generals, Pillow and Floyd, to decide how their combined force of fifteen thousand men should be deployed. He himself saw Donelson not so much as a fortress as a crimp in the landscape with a few advantages, namely, a high bluff commanding a view of the Cumberland River. The earthenwork fort, enclosing about fifteen acres, had only three pieces, an eight-inch siege howitzer and two nine-pounders, most of the artillery being concentrated in the shore batteries at the base of the hill so as to sweep the river at the waterline. Generals Pillow and Bushrod Johnson deployed to protect their rear between Indian Creek and the landing near a little cluster of buildings named Dover. General Buckner’s line, including Graves’s battery, formed just to the rear of the fort overlooking a maze of gullies and a swamp between Indian and Hickman creeks.

  As the contraption advanced into the cleft shadow of the ridge, it came within range of the nearest batteries, yet there had been no return fire. Emboldened, the ironclad moved still closer, firing a cannonade of seven loads, none of them doing any visible damage to the emplacements on shore. Their concussions clapped against Jarom’s ears and formed a protracted drone that buried itself finally in the immensity of the woods. To the ironclad’s crew, peering through gunports and slits in the metal, the fortifications must have seemed deserted. Five minutes after the tenth shot, the boat submitted to the current and drifted downstream out of sight.

  “I can tell you what they’re up to,” Patterson said. “They’re trying to draw our fire.”

  With his camp knife Jarom was splitting the last of a pone of cornbread that had been their chief sustenance for three days.

  “They want to home in on where our emplacements are,” Patterson said, “but Buckner’s too smart to be taken in. He’s held off firing so as not to give away the placement of our guns.”

  By two that afternoon the gunboats were back, and this time Jarom counted four ironclads and two armored gunboats as they rounded the bend. The fog had lifted, affording a clear view of the ridges. From nearly a half mile away they began to shell the bluffs, probing the slopes in calculated grids in the manner of bird dogs canvassing sections of a field to scare up quail.

  But this time when the boats steamed to within four hundred yards, the gunners in the lower batteries loosed their first salvo, firing low across the pewter-smooth surface of the water. Jarom could feel the tremors under his feet. Graves ordered them to their guns and Jarom looked down on the gunboats. Because the waters of the river had risen so high, the lower batteries had the advantage of firing even lower across the water. The shells kissing across the surface reminded him of skipping stones across the farm pond but for their force of impact, which resembled a huge hammer. For about ten minutes, the parties traded salvos.

  At one point Jarom saw a shell splinter a flagstaff above one of the emplacements. A stick man in gray dashed from behind the embrasure to fetch the flag. Ignoring the storm that broke above his head, he trotted back to the breastworks and hopped over. In a few moments he was back, clambering over with the flag on a new staff. After planting it firmly, he jogged almost casually back to safety. Still watching, Jarom then saw the Stars and Stripes shot away from between the twin stacks of one of the gunboats. Another stick man, blue this time, ran onto the deck to refasten it.

  Jarom had never witnessed such an extravagant display. He had an image of a son of one of the stick men asking his mother how his father came to die in the Great War of the Rebellion. “Planting a rag on a stick in the earth,” the widow might truthfully say. After mess Jarom shared an account of this absurdity with Patterson. His senior thought a minute. “Whatever we lack in food,” he said, “in shoes, in bullets, cooks, and quartermasters, numbskull generals on whatever side always manage to supply more than enough ignorance to go round.”

  About midafteroon the gunboats announced their return with more firing. The racket of their guns hurt Jarom’s ears, the blasts drowning out the gunnery officers who shouted their puny commands. Shells smacked the armor of the ironclads with loud whangs, the raw sound a blacksmith’s hammer makes against a naked anvil. Though he and the rest of the crew stood safely above the main fighting, Jarom fought the impulse to cover his head with his hands and hunker in the pit. Major Graves, no more than three years his senior, calmly propped his elbows on the breastworks and watched the spectacle through his glass, studiously making notations in his notebook as though in a classroom. At one point he commented to no one in particular that the closest ironclad, the St. Louis, had taken fifty hits.

  Jarom could see that the pilothouse had been wrecked and that its steering seemed disengaged, for it floundered about until the current hauled it back downstream, floating broadside. The Louisville, a floating snuffbox, had also been hit, hanging sullenly for a time before drifting in silence beyond the range of the shore batteries. Standing by what he began to think of as his own cylinder of destruction as it cooled, Jarom cupped his hands along its barrel for warmth, as did his gunmates. That an instrument that served up mechanical death could also nurture and preserve was an idea he puzzled over. Following the others, he stamped his feet to shake off the cold, a practice that Patterson, making light of adversity, dubbed the snow waltz.

  For Jarom, this was his first time under fire, the first time he became conscious that others sighted along the barrels of their weapons to loose hot metal at him. They intended to pierce his organs and end his life or seriously impede his ability to live it. From this distance he felt oddly detached, aware of the spectacle though not a part of it, absolved from bloodletting. Viewed from above, the action meant no more to him than a dispute in miniature he’d come on once in the woods, battalions of red and black ants swarming over an earthen mound, tiny formations and remote casualties in a silence that belied what must have been an epic struggle of the insect family. When the nearest ironclad drifted too far for a decent hit, Graves ordered them to withhold their fire. Unharmed, feeling harmless, Jarom awarded himself the honorific title, Inspector of Mayhem. Their would-be slayers, distanced by hillside and limits of sight, took on the appearance of featureless midgets, revealing themselves only in glimpses through wads of smoke.

  Jarom and Patterson had enlisted in the Confederate army at Russellville, the seat of Logan County, less than six months previously. Though they did not actually muster in until August, Patterson, ever the historian, reminded Jarom that the enlistment day was Bastille Day, a time when an oppressed people rose to throw off the shackles of an unreasoning monarchy. Louis XVI was a hereditary king, he said, in many ways no worse than Lincoln, who threatened to enchain the people of his own country, a despot to beat all despots.

  They were recuited by a Captain Morris from Henderson, an ardent secessionist who, they learned in passing, had clerked in a hardware store before the war. Smartly got up in a knee-length coat with a double row of buttons that tapered down his torso, Morris canvassed towns and villages in the borderland, recruiting dozens of young men from farms and village streets, from churchyards and shops, leading his volunteers to Tennessee as a kind of human harvest. Morris gave them a small travel allowance for the distance of a hundred and five miles to the place of rendezvous at Camp Burnett. Walking and hitching rides on farmers’ wagons for three days, Jarom and Patterson reported for duty on August 25 and mustered into Company B, Fourth Kentucky Infantry, of the First Kentucky Brigade. The date was firmly fixed in Jarom’s memory because it marked his sixteenth birthday. Walking back to camp, Patterson picked up a buckeye under a roadside tree and p
assed it to him as though conferring a gift.

  “The buckeye,” he said solemnly, “is one of the first trees to leaf in spring, the first to lose its leaves in fall. Long as you carry this buckeye in your pocket, it will bring you good luck. My father told me this as his father told him. Keep this in your pocket for luck, as I tell you.”

  Charmed and buoyed by the sense that this mystical connection might in some way protect him, Jarom put the shiny sphere in his pocket and kept it as he would a letter from home or the piece of music he kept folded in an oilcloth packet among his belongings.

  The music was the score of a ballad named “Lillibulero.” He found it after his father’s death, while rummaging among some receipts and legal-looking documents in the tall desk in which his father had kept his papers. Jarom had been attracted by the musical notes, which looked to him like a procession of tiny banners moving along a straight but rutted roadway. The banners reminded him of his father, resplendent in his militia uniform on muster days. To an eleven-year-old the sheet of music was a memento, a keepsake that brought his father back to him each time he saw it. Above the score was an engraving of three sailing ships cannonading a fort from which puffs of smoke returned the compliment. He didn’t know what the images meant, but the scene brought back the image of his father in his gaudy uniform. For some reason he could not explain, he found the word “Lillibulero” alluring, and he loved to repeat it to himself. Was it a place, a person, a saying, as Patterson had mentioned, in the ancient tongue of the Irish? He included the score among the few personal things he packed to take with him when his father died and Nancy Bradshaw had come to clear up her brother’s affairs and see to his belongings. Since that day he’d carried it in his kit everywhere he went, its mystery a tonic. Its unheard melody carried a sense of excitement and possibility, and he came to associate it not so much with war as with the prospect of open ground and promise of a future.

  If he later had to cite reasons for joining the Confederate army, he could not say he’d been seduced by the rhetoric of recruiters like Morris or by the editorial tocsin of the Russellville newspaper to defend Southern honor and self-determination against immigrant hordes and Unionist usurpers. Nor by any desire to defend the institution of slavery. Patriotism was not an answer. Nor had he felt, like Patterson, a lust for adventure that took him away from home. Nor could he say that he enlisted to protect those he loved since they all seemed perfectly able to protect themselves. Except for his older brothers and sisters—all of whom had married and started their own families—the elder generation of his family had pretty much died out. His grandparents on both sides all were dead. No, he joined simply because Patterson had.

  Next day the ironclads reappeared, but Buckner had other uses for the Fourth Kentucky. A relatively untried but confident general named Grant had made several attempts to attack their rear, and skirmishing went on until midafternoon. Behind the breastworks, their gun primed but unfired, Jarom and Patterson tried to evaluate the battle by the density and direction of the firing of others. The rifle reports sounded in the distance like a sheet being ripped to pieces a little at a time, little stitches that sometimes heightened to a crescendo. Sometimes, storms of artillery deafened them, walls of timber and a pall of grayness obscuring their view. Fire from the gunboats worked up faintly through the hollows and a bulwark of trees. Jarom imagined the generals, men whose vision was no less limited, trying to get the gist of the fighting. Sightlines, even from the high ground, were obstructed, and sound had a way of deceiving among the gullies and hills that cut the slopes into isolated pockets. An officer ensconced in one of these crevices might not know over the spine of wilderness and rocky divides whether his troops scrapped for survival or had routed their enemies. Patterson gave these distortions the name of “sound shadows.” Feeling isolated, apart from things, neither Jarom nor Patterson could see a single swatch of blue.

  Patterson found what comfort he could against the earthen backfill of the emplacement. Jarom was eyeing the thread of river when word arrived that General Buckner had ordered the Fourth Kentucky to secure a patch of scraggly woods above Indian Creek from which enemy skirmishers were firing enfilade across the bottom into the trenches. Colonel Hanson, a burly man on a dappled, low-centered horse, formed his regiment into a battle line and marched down the ravine and up toward the trees from which the firing came. Borrowing some binoculars, Jarom brought the ragged woodline into focus, spotting clusters of cottony smoke from the discharge of muskets and even a few spits of flame.

  He watched Hanson dismount within thirty yards of the trees as his line, uneven now and considerably thinned, penetrated the timber. Without pausing, Hanson pushed the still invisible bluecoats deeper into the gray tangle of upright limbs. For a moment he remained visible as he followed his stick men into the woods, which seemed to suck them into a maw of wilderness from which they would return transformed, if they returned at all. As he scanned the bands of smoke that hung across the treeline, he could reckon the battle’s changing locus by sound until whatever it was that swallowed the men lapsed into near silence. A few pitiful stragglers staggered downhill as if in a swoon, many of them hobbling from wounds. Jarom turned to Patterson, who’d been watching too but without benefit of magnification.

  “It’s the one who stays out of it,” he said, “that sees the most of a fight.”

  Seeing the wounded and imagining the dead who must be piling up in the shelter of the woods, Jarom understood Patterson’s irony.

  Then word came back to the ridge that Hanson and his men had lost their way, that somewhere during the intensity of firing they’d lost their bearings and were now in danger of being captured or annihilated in the darkness. Rice Graves, first to sense the danger, had asked the dozen or so men about him if anyone would volunteer to act as a runner to find Hanson and guide his men back to their lines. Jarom glanced at Patterson, who was signaling with his eyes not to go, but Jarom stepped forward and said he would try.

  “There’s a good boy,” Graves said, not much more than a boy himself.

  Stripping off his heavy jacket and emptying his pockets, Jarom felt a quickening and simultaneously a sinking somewhere in the hollows of his chest, a feeling he remembered from the time when at nine or ten he’d thrown his leg over a balky horse, knowing he couldn’t control it. To throw him, it veered suddenly into the orchard, dragging him through a scourge of low-lying limbs that raked across his back and gouged his face as he hugged the saddleless horse about the neck. Someone working in the barn had spied him and managed to drive the frenzied horse into a fence corner, grabbing the bridle and pulling him off to safety. That feeling of crashing through the stubby gauntlet of apple limbs he felt now, a sensation that constricted the air in his lungs and fired his body with exhilaration and fear.

  As Jarom stooped instinctively to top the parapet, Graves handed him his navy pistol, a heavy affair known for its inaccuracy and tendency to misfire. It offered Jarom more assurance than actual protection in the face of what he knew, and didn’t know, was before him.

  And then he was off, climbing over the parapet with the river to his back and starting to descend the bluff on the opposite side. The slope was steep and broken with outcroppings of rock and stumps from the trees felled for the defenses, the footing uncertain. In the failing light the landscape replicated the seared gray he’d seen in daguerreotypes glued in his mother’s family album. The images of trees resembled those in the album, blurred and slightly out of focus, the way he imagined they might look to a nearsighted person who’d lost his glasses. Working his way through the long shadows as the sun dropped over the western ridge, he entered a ravine. Thick with snarls of honeysuckle, dry vines tangled in skeins tore at his feet and made the going slow. In summer he knew it would be a place of serpents, but now it became the domain of snappings and cracks, a place to stumble and fall. Though he saw discarded haversacks and a rifle with a shattered stock, he saw not one of his kind, living or dead, until he crossed to a co
nverging gully that opened onto a wide valley.

  Scrabbling over the rocks, he encountered the first corpse he’d ever seen outside a coffin wherein the deceased had been properly fitted out, hands closed in some sanitized posture of repose. The dead man lay sprawled on his back as if napping after a family picnic or resting at noon after scything in a field. His right knee was raised, his right forearm rested across his stomach, his left stretched outward open-palmed, as if to expose itself to some imaginary sun. Death had closed his eyes; briary dark hair formed a wreath about his head. His woolen coat was pulled open midway up the chest, but nowhere could Jarom see the slightest sign of a wound. Though he didn’t recognize the face, he would lay a wager that the dead man, a private soldier, belonged to the Fourth Kentucky.

  He moved on, sensing time and light against him now. As he came into the scrubby flatlands, he found more dead strewn like heaps of scattered laundry.

  Passing along the base of the ridge, he followed a tricky path between the barely visible ridgeline and the edge of a slough that backed up from the river. Ridges hemmed in the pale and meager sky. He located the fighting by the pop of musketry. As he moved toward it, he expected at any instant to be fired on, maybe by his own troops. The shooting took on patterns of single reports punctuated by explosive sputters that resonated in the hollows. As the light failed, the firing slackened, and someone not twenty feet away rose out of the sedge and challenged him.

  Jarom told him his name and unit, uncertain whether the challenger was friend or foe. The boy, shivering in what looked like his mother’s paisley shawl, led him by huddles of men resting along the hard ground. They found Colonel Hanson hunched under a tree talking to two of his surviving officers. He was a low-built man, blocky and muscular as a butcher, his face stubbled and drawn. When Jarom identified himself and said that Major Graves instructed him to lead the colonel back to their lines, Hanson cracked a smile.