Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  To the day, Jarom had enlisted five and a half months previously. Safe in his pocket, he still carried the buckeye that Patterson found under a tree and gave him the day he enlisted, its hull split into halves, a knob of wonder that reminded Jarom of the walnut patina on the three-footed table in Mary Tibbs’s parlor, placed next to her rocker with the back of arrows. Still holding its luster, it was now disfigured by an ugly crack, an uneven fissure that marred the burnished shell and shaped in Jarom’s mind a token of the world’s imperfection and changeability. When he showed it to Patterson, his friend said it represented the failed Confederacy, shiny on the surface but split all to pieces inside.

  Among the belongings the guards allowed him to keep was an ambrotype of Mollie and himself, one they posed for in a studio in Springfield. He also held on to the folded-up sheet of music. Despite its encasement in oilcloth, it was beginning to show signs of wear. Jarom opened it and showed it again to Patterson, asking him what he made of it. Patterson had no ready answer but said he reckoned the tune and the lyrics were Irish, probably related to the strong political divisions between Protestants and Catholics during one of the Catholic uprisings at the time of the Glorious Revolution toward the end of the seventeenth century. Patterson had Jarom read all twelve stanzas to him, each ending with a refrain that was largely a repetition of the song’s title, with the addition of some nonsense syllables: “Lil-li-bur-ler-o bul-len-a-la Lero-o ler-o, Lil-li-bur-ler-o, Lil-li-bur-ler-o bul-len-a-la o ler-o ler-o, lil-li-bur-ler-o lil-liburler-o bul-len-a-la.”

  Though he couldn’t fathom the song’s content, Jarom loved to repeat the words aloud, especially what he called the chorus, though he had no idea what they signified, what tune they were married to. Musically illiterate, he knew only that the melody had a fast tempo because of the notation at the beginning of the score that read “Briskly.” So he imagined some of the bravura of the drinking songs he’d heard, though he could not construct a specific tune for it since neither he nor Patterson could convert the notes and clefs into melody. The song consisted of twelve two-line stanzas, not one of which made complete sense to either Patterson or himself:

  Ho, brother Teague, dost hear the decree?

  Lilliburlero bullenala

  That we shall have a new deputy,

  [REFRAIN]

  Ho! by my shoul it is the Talbot,

  And he shall cut all the English throat;

  Tho,’ by my shoul, the English do praat,

  The law’s on their side, and Creish knows what.

  But, if dispence do come from the Pope,

  We’ll hang Magna Charta and themselves in a rope,

  And the good Talbot is made a lord,

  And he with brave lads is coming aboard,

  Who all in France have taken a sware,

  They that will have no Protestant heir.

  O, but why does he stay behind?

  Ho! by my shoul, ’tis a Protestant wind.

  Now Tyrconnel is come ashore,

  and we have commissions gillore;

  And he that will not go to mass

  Shall turn out, and look like an ass.

  Now, now the hereticks all go down

  by Creish and St Patrick, the nation’s our own.

  There was an old prophecy found in a bog,

  ‘Ireland shall be ruled by an ass and a dog.’

  And now this prophecy is come to pass,

  For Talbot’s the dog, and James is the ass.

  Patterson admitted that Talbot was a cipher to him, but James may have been James II, the Catholic king replaced at death with a Protestant one, much to the displeasure of Catholic Ireland. Whatever the words meant, Jarom felt a special need to preserve the sheet as a relic whose mysteries might someday be explained to him. He could see some connection with strife, with the war that rived the country. But politics meant little to him, and he could not name a single member of the Confederate government beyond Jeff Davis. Though the names and personalities in the song meant nothing to him, he could detect an obscure inner coherence. The words became an incantation, a kind of talisman or charm, something he could carry with him as protection and safe conduct through the end of the war. In some vague way these indecipherable words and notes represented a prospect of the future, a road toward some desirable destination. To Jarom, they tokened a prophecy of well-being and hope at present unreadable, a message encoded in events that lay before him.

  CAMP MORTON

  For the first time in his life Jarom found himself with more time than he had things to do. Prison bored him. Discipline loosened to almost complete laxity because for some unfathomable reason almost all of the officers at the prison had been transferred elsewhere. The chief authority became the guards themselves, most of them green in the game of lock and key. Much of the surplus time the inmates spent yarning in the mess or barracks, and Jarom often sat in, more to listen than to speak while others prattled about their families or bragged about the virtues and comeliness of their sweethearts. He longed for books and newspapers, but there were no books, no papers.

  The more he heard, the more Mollie came to dominate his thoughts. He tried at first to summon her in his imagination. He created a neutral space in which they were the sole occupants, a picnic, a parlor, a walk on the farthest feather of ridgeland. He saw her look up smiling in the kitchen, her arms blanched with flour. He saw her outside feeding the chickens, broadcasting handfuls of golden corn from her pouched apron. On Sundays he saw her got up for Methodism, prim and bonneted, wearing pink ribbons and a matching sash in the spring morning. Sometimes while he lay on his pallet, there came dark moments when he saw her flirting at socials, dancing or sparking with strangers.

  Though Patterson carried in his pack a pair of scissors to trim hair, Jarom let his grow. It grew dark in long tresses that he tucked in the crevice behind his ear, swept back over his neck. At first he thought long hair made him appear more manly, but then as it inched down over his ears and his back he realized it gave him the aspect of a young woman, especially when he began to shave off the stubble that sprouted on his chin and about his mouth. Though Patterson and others cultivated mustaches, he took pains to scrape off every facial hair, only half conscious of the results until some of his messmates began to call him Young Miss. When he borrowed Patterson’s rust-stippled mirror to pull the pocket razor over his high cheeks, he began for the first time to think of himself as handsome, almost pretty.

  One evening around the fire one of his messmates, a joker with a streak of meanness, tried to get a rise out of him, saying he bet Young Miss didn’t have a sweetheart. When Jarom owned that he did, the giber tried to provoke him, saying that if he did he should have proof certain, a letter perhaps.

  “I can do you one better,” Jarom said. “I have a likeness that she gave me.”

  A little reluctantly, Jarom tendered to the man, whose name was Evans, a carte de visite that Mollie had given him, an image of her standing in a camera studio flanked by an Ionic column on which stood a vase of plucked flowers. She was sitting bare-armed in a print dress whose pattern formed a constellation of intricate geometries, her hands crossed on her lap, more child than woman, about fifteen. She stared straight into the lens, dark tresses, resembling his own, to her shoulders, a part line dead center like a cleft above her broad forehead, a beaded necklace at the base of her neck. Playfully defiant, her eyes caught the light, locked on the cameraman’s lens as though he had dared her not to stir. He looked at it, but not so often because it seemed lifeless and cold, a study in inertness. It did not match her corporeal self, her flurries of nervous motion.

  Studying it a few moments, Evans passed it on to the next man, and around the circle it went until it came to a bully named Crow. For no good reason Crow snatched it up and tossed it into the fire, too fast for Jarom to pull it out. He watched helplessly as the heat first smudged then curled the backing, the flames consuming her image, reducing it to charred wisps. Crow, still wrapped in his blanket, snickered and
smirked at him across the fire.

  Uttering a kind of half-scream, Jarom hopped to his feet and leapt across the fire. He tackled Crow’s midsection, landing with such force that the man had no time to react, surprised and too much encumbered to put up much resistance as Jarom’s weight fell against his chest. Jarom tore into him with his fists. Crow thrashed about in his blanket as Jarom pummeled him, unable to free his arms to get in a swing of his own. Evans, who must have felt some responsibility, pulled the two of them apart, and that was the end of it. Crow wiped the blood from his mouth, cursed the Ruler of Heaven once or twice, and rolled over in his blanket.

  Reporting this incident to Patterson, Jarom said that hitting the bastard had done him some good, had done both of them some good.

  “When I saw that picture aflame,” he said, “I knew I could fight the bastard into next week.”

  He rubbed his skinned knuckles, one of them gashed from striking a tooth. They throbbed so persistently he believed he must have broken something. After that evening, Jarom kept mostly to himself. Crow scowled now and then but kept his distance, a dog once bitten. Afterward, at other evening assemblies around the fire, no one questioned or made light of his feelings for Mollie Thomas, though Crow and some others now addressed him, behind his back, as Sweet Missy.

  ESCAPE

  Chafing under weeks of confinement, his freedom hampered, Patterson organized his cellmates in a plan to escape, the object being to rejoin their comrades in Tennessee. Some hygiene-minded authority at the prison had ordered daily sorties to the river, rotating the bathers cell by cell so that in a week everyone had at least one dip in the water. The routine in which prisoners marched beyond the brick walls seemed made to order. Jules George of the Second Louisiana and Ben Coleman from Jellico, Tennessee, joined the conspiracy. Coleman stood a giant, an oversized farmer who looked capable of lifting a sutler’s wagon. Following Patterson’s lead, the four of them plotted a scenario of escape when it came their time to bathe.

  On that sultry afternoon four guards, led by a self-important corporal named Heinzman, marched the four captives through the prison gate past a guard tower. The crenellations of this roofless tower reminded Jarom of a Gothic castle he’d seen engraved in one of his uncle’s books. Slogging in the heat, they turned off the county road onto a wooded lane that twisted around a rugged hillside to the river, a sluggish stream that in Kentucky Jarom would have called a creek. When he saw it, Patterson disdainfully declared it a piddlin’ branch, a ditch, with just enough water barely to wet their heels. At the waterside, the four of them stripped off their tattered uniforms while the guards lounged in the shade of an enormous sycamore whose white roots formed a snarl maybe twenty feet from the water.

  As he waded into waist-high water, Jarom felt a band of coolness beneath the heated surface. Across it, the late afternoon sun laid down a blinding sheen. When the four of them reached midstream, they went through the motions of scrubbing themselves, sharing two bars of rough lye soap Heinzman tossed out to them. Jarom noticed that against the muddy yellow of the water their upper bodies had a greenish tint, the unshorn hair plastered to their noggins, enlarging their features as their head sizes seemed to shrink.

  Acting on cue, Jules George began to pick a fight with Patterson, slapping a handful of water into his face and reaching out his long white arm to dunk him. Patterson took up the challenge by thrashing about in the water and cursing George as a goddamned spittle head. From the left, Ben Coleman joined the fracas, diving underwater and pulling George’s legs from under him. The guards, their rifles leaning against the base of the sycamore, looked up from their game of cards, mildly amused and only vaguely interested. “Let these yokels drown themselves” seemed to be the prevailing sentiment. Sprawling in the shade of the scabby white limbs, they soon turned back to their card hands, taking this rambunctiousness in stride. What started as horseplay in the river quickly escalated into a free-for-all, the four prisoners kicking and throwing punches in the water.

  This new sport soon caught the guards’ notice, and each began to yell for his favorite, egging him on. The guards were too green or indifferent to see that each punch and counterpunch was feigned, the commotion in the White River all performance. “All juice and no pickle,” as Patterson later put it.

  “Go get him, George,” Corporal Heinzman cried. “Grab him round the neck and dunk him good.”

  Slowly, the guards entered into the spirit of things, whooping and cheering the fighters on, one or two of them rising and coming closer, leaving their arms where they rested against the tree. They hollered for a while, gibing and rooting, even doing a pantomime of exchanged punches. Soon bored, they returned to the complexities of their game, all but ignoring the horseplay in the river as if to say, “If these damn rebels want to maim themselves, who are we to hinder them?”

  Jarom, seeing his chance, dived underwater and swam ten or so yards downstream, surfacing in a little stand of scrub willows close to the bank. As he cupped his hands into fins and pulled, he prayed that the guards for a few moments would imagine four where now they saw only three. He glimpsed Patterson upstream, thrashing about, trying to break George’s hammerlock. Coleman was yawping to one side, jockeying about in the shallow water and acting as referee. Grabbing one of the willow branches, Jarom pulled himself out of the shallows, almost slipping on the slimy beard of a rock as he crouched on dry ground. He paused a few seconds before starting his sprint toward the guns, as close to him now as to the unsuspecting guards. Looking up from their cards, the one facing in his direction must have been astonished to see a naked man with intense eyes rushing toward the tree. Quickly undeceived, he started to hoist himself up to meet the threat. Reaching the guns a step or two ahead of him, Jarom grabbed the weapon closest to hand and trained it on his chest.

  “Back off or lay dead,” he said.

  The man stood stock-still, dazed, so close Jarom could feel the warmth of his breath, close enough, he realized with some alarm, to twist the barrel from his grasp. The others were on their feet now but hung back in bafflement as the enormity of the ruse began to dawn on them. For a few seconds, the man at the end of his rifle barrel glared at him perplexed, a clean-cut boy, Jarom surmised, from one of the small towns that honeycombed Indiana. His enemy took a step backward and raised his hands, still confused, not able to grasp in summation what had happened: the flailing fists, the yelping in the water, this strange turn of fate in which he and his comrades found themselves duped.

  Jarom stood the four of them down while the bathers emerged from the water fresh from their serious frolic. In just seconds the features on Heinzman’s face passed from amazement to alarm to defiance.

  “You can’t do this,” he said. “You can’t just pick up and walk two hundred miles of country where you have no friends. You’ll never make it back to wherever you came from.”

  “I can,” Patterson said, as he stepped closer, dripping. “I can, I have, and I will.”

  Saying this, he took up one of the rifles and directed its business end toward the speaker’s chest, a move that stifled further conversation.

  “Now strip,” said Patterson, “unless you can tell me which one of you has a mother that wants to bury a son?”

  They stripped off shoes and tunics and dusty trousers, their castoff clothing forming a blue heap in the clearing. George rolled their clothes into a bundle, shoes tucked inside, and secured it with the broad belts, which had spangled brass buckles embossed with the letters US.

  As the guards stripped, Ben Coleman gathered up the guns and began chucking them into the river, all but the one Jarom still held. Everyone looked on entranced as the new Springfields, still slicked in government oil, seemed to pan on the surface a moment before sinking into the murk. Jules George made a pack of their prison clothes, weighted them with a flat stone, and then tossed them into the deepest part of the river. Shadows lengthening on the water gave reminders of the time.

  Jarom kept his gun directed at the g
uards as the others waded out into the water, the heap of contraband clothes raised like a trophy over Patterson’s head. They rose on the far bank, dressing again in the discarded uniforms, as their former keepers felt sufficiently emboldened to bellow complaints before beginning the humiliating trek back to their barracks, bare-bummed and barefooted.

  Watching them move away in a style between wariness and panic, Coleman whooped in triumph. Swinging his elbows in little arcs, he began a shuffle that evolved into a kind of low country jig. Whirling, he vowed that he never tasted a wine so sweet as liberty, then raised a shrill rebel yell that sent the guards packing, white hams in the rushes.

  NEWBURGH

  Weighing their chances of escape, Jarom and the others decided to split up, George and Coleman going one way, Jarom and Patterson another. They clasped hands and wished each other luck, vowing to call a reunion when the war was won, then slipped into the dusk of Indiana. Hiking most of the night, Jarom and Patterson put up for a few hours under a corncrib. They stole some clothes from a Negro’s cabin and traveled as near as they could reckon southwest. They passed through fields and along back roads some of the next day and most of the night, sleeping again toward morning in a dilapidated barn far off the road. They ate what they could forage, raiding gardens and grain sheds, once eating themselves sick in an orchard whose limbs sagged with green apples. Occasionally, they met strangers on the road from whom they cautiously asked directions.