Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  While Martin and the other men unloaded the ferry, a gunboat hove into view, its decks bristling with soldiers. The ferry had been steered downriver two miles to a long peninsula between the Ohio and Green Rivers where the latter emptied into the main stream. When it became clear that their play guns had outlived their usefulness, Jarom and Patterson abandoned them and tramped out to rejoin their jubilant comrades. Johnson quickly saw the tactical danger of the gunboats unloading troops up the Green River, for the river had to be crossed to move the guns south. He sent Patterson, Frank Owen, Jarom, and a young man named Jack Thompson to come with him to the mouth of the river.

  Borrowing horses, Jarom and Patterson followed Johnson, who made a dash along a farm lane to the mouth of the river, approaching it just as a gunboat and transport nosed into the shade line of the Green. Heavily wooded, the peninsula made an ideal spot for an ambush. The colonel sent Patterson and Owen to a patch of willow scrub and brush across the river near the point. Leaving their horses tethered in the trees, Patterson and Owen swam the backwaters and took positions at the designated spot. The colonel, Jarom, and Thompson found cover fifty or so yards upriver in a stand of water maples just a few feet from the water.

  As they made their way through the trees, Johnson explained that he proposed to create another diversion, calling it “a trick these people never learn.” From among the maples, fist-thick saplings full of suckers, they could see the gunboat along the narrow channel, its deck only yards away. When it approached so close Jarom could count the rivets on the metal slabs beside the cannon ports, he and Thompson started firing.

  With the first shots, the pilot ducked his head, as did several venturesome souls who had stepped onto the deck to watch for drift and deadheads. After the firing commenced, the pilot immediately reversed the engine and backed the boat into the Ohio, where it joined the troop transport, which was a mill of confusion. Someone was shouting orders and the men had nowhere to take cover except behind the ironclad, which came chugging to their deliverance. Before it reached the point, Patterson and Owen commenced yelling and shooting their carbines, trying to create the impression that a regiment lay in ambush, rebels spoiling for a fray. Hovering near the middle of the wider water, the gunboat shelled the point for two hours, long after Thompson and Patterson had strode off upstream to help transport the plunder across the Green.

  Jarom, a month later, came across a tattered Louisville Times that described the incident as a great sensation, exaggerating the facts sufficiently to locate Henderson and Newburgh on the larger map of the war. Newburgh, he read, enjoyed the distinction of becoming the first town captured north of Mason and Dixon’s line. Later, Adam Johnson told him the London Times devoted a disproportionate amount of print in accounting for the capture of the great tobacco port of Henderson. The writer, someone who’d probably never set foot in North America, described it as an important town in Ohio—someone had his geography wrong—and its capture as a significant triumph for the South. In both the Northern and Southern press the event took on the grandeur of epic. More immediately, enlistments in the Breckinridge Guards increased dramatically as local youths vied to enlist, seduced by the old prospects of excitement and glory.

  For Jarom and Patterson as well as many others, Newburgh became a defining event. Bethel was humiliated and Johnson promoted to colonel. Jarom and Patterson became members of the Tenth Kentucky Cavalry, the entity that the Breckinridge Guards was absorbed into, and the Tenth Kentucky was in turn annexed into Morgan’s Brigade at Hartsville, Tennessee. Jarom later learned that tobacco marketed at Henderson that season fetched a higher price than ordinary tobacco elsewhere and, even more amusing, that Colonel Adam R. Johnson had picked up the sobriquet “Stovepipe Johnson.”

  ALVINA LOCKE

  Heading south—Johnson’s order being to move in small groups—Jarom and Frank almost passed Patterson without seeing him, Patterson practicing his penchant for scouting ahead on his own. With the help of others, they would later try to reconstruct what had happened. Though they had not heard them, shots had obviously been fired. Either Patterson was too far ahead for them to hear, or sound shadow had deceived them again. They were in rugged, hilly terrain in which sound had a way of straying, sucked up in a ridge or foliage or burrowing into valleys or draws. A cannon blast less than a mile away might simply be swallowed by a cushion of hills or dissipated in recesses or densities of air that hung in certain valleys. Science Jarom had no mind for, and he willingly resigned himself to the growing sum of the world’s mysteries, large and small, he would never fathom: the fact that the earth under his feet was part of a speeding rotation, that life on the planet was much older than church elders were likely to acknowledge, that an infant might be born with six toes, that the stones about him held the remains of creatures that had swum in a sea covering most of Kentucky. He acknowledged to himself that beneath the world of observable cause and effect there existed a murky realm alive with mysteries and subtleties cut too finely for him to understand, and what Patterson called sound shadow was one of them.

  Whatever the cause, neither he nor Owen heard the shots whose thunderings would normally have carried at least a mile. As he had done dozens of times, Patterson had left them, saying he would scout a little ways ahead and meet them up the road. Not meeting him, Jarom supposed him to be waiting somewhere ahead, maybe at a hospitable farmstead where some trusting householder served him sumptuous foods and opened his barn to provide provender for his horse. Patterson would not detour from the main road without leaving a note on a fencepost or a token of some kind, a rag tied to a limb or a teepee of sticks. Of that Jarom was sure. He could not remember crossroads of any dimension at which Patterson would have felt the need to indicate a change of direction. The road before him wound a bit but was generally southerly in its intention. Still there was no trace of him, and Jarom felt a rasp of worry, a vague but perceptible sense that things weren’t right.

  Then ahead of them was a rider, a woman they surmised from the side-saddle style of sitting the horse. As she drew closer on a smoky gray mare, he could see her frailness, limbs long and nearly meatless, her bony frame covered by the sheerest knitting of flesh, what skin there was exposed as fragile and translucent as old parchment. She frantically worked a willow switch across the mare’s ample rump to little effect, for the mare seemed to be as intent on dawdling as she was on hastening its pace. When Jarom and Owen came close enough to hear her, she drew up in the center of the road as though afraid the two of them would simply pass her by.

  “Can either of you show me a doctor?” she asked, her voice high pitched and shrill, her question preceded by no acknowledgment, no greeting.

  Jarom saw blotches of what appeared to be bloodstains tracking down her frock, a gray-print gingham buttoned from ankles to throat. He thought at first she’d been injured and wanted medical aid. Jarom asked what the matter was and what they could do.

  “Praise God,” the woman said, spewing forth what had happened in a cascade of desperation.

  Alvina Locke lived with her sister Sabina not too far back the way she had come. She was a widow—Jarom estimated she was in her sixties, and the way she spoke indicated she’d been brought up genteel—and lived there with only her maiden sister to keep her company. She had been outside parceling corn to the chickens, her sister inside baking bread, when they heard a spatter of shots close by that broke the stillness of the afternoon. According to her account, a cover of trees stood between their house and the road. She and Sabina had let it grow over as protection against designing strangers and the tramps who filled the roads these days.

  When they heard firing, they took refuge in the root cellar behind the house, a stone cubicle dug into the hillside, closed off from the world by a battened door. Inside, they sat on some upended crocks, the space darker than a cow’s stomach. Having forgotten both lamp and candle, they waited, keeping tally of the shots they heard. Seventeen fired in rapid succession. The sister, Sabina, said they sound
ed like corn popping under a tin lid. After the shooting stopped, they sat quiet for a full minute, then heard a single shot, the last and somewhat louder. It sang in their ears and died off slowly.

  They waited a full quarter hour until they were satisfied the firing had stopped. Opening the cellar door, they heard what seemed to be a troop of riders passing in the lane, the sounds of multiple hooves clapping on hardpan. They shut themselves in again. They waited long after the clatter died, then reopened the cellar door and crept cautiously along an overgrown fenceline that ran parallel to the road. They followed it toward where the shots had been fired until Sabina tripped over a body in field grass that was high as their heads. Her scream summoned Alvina, who took Sabina’s arm to help her to her feet. Then Alvina saw what she described as a destiny of flies buzzing about a destroyed face, lifeblood thick as jelly caked over a hideous wound. Certain that all breath had left that tenement of flesh, they’d improvised a prayer, and Sabina had gone in decency to fetch a coverlet from the house.

  Fretting while she was gone, Alvina noticed several tiny bubbles rising from the nucleus of the face where the nose had been. A bubble would appear and swell like a fragile balloon before noiselessly popping. As she watched, she first believed that the corpse was simply sloughing off its spirit or that the organs had constricted in death and somehow exhaled as the body closed down province by province. When the bubbles persisted in a slow simmer like stew over a steady fire, Alvina finally convinced herself that life had not passed from the body. His chest, like a leaky bellows, rose and fell ever so slightly.

  Shouting for Sabina, she cradled the man’s head in her lap and tore some cloth from her underthings. She dampened the cloth with spittle and carefully wiped the crust of blood to clear a channel so air could pass more freely. By the time Sabina returned with a horse blanket, his breathing seemed steadier, less faltering. When they edged him onto the blanket and tried to raise it, the weight was too much for them. They had come to an impasse. With no male help on the farm and no near neighbors, they had to rely on the closest farmhouse nearly two miles away, and harnessing the horse and hitching it to the old buggy would take too long. Alvina had determined to saddle the buggy mare and ride for help, hoping to meet someone on the road, when Sabina came up with a solution. Wrapping the man in the blanket, she devised a means for the two of them to drag the deadweight to the house.

  This maneuver took the better part of an hour to go less than forty yards, their greatest worry that the rough handling would finish him. When they bumped him up the porch stairs and across the threshold into the house and discovered he was still breathing, they were mildly surprised and greatly relieved. They said another prayer. Then it dawned on them that they must care for him until help could be summoned, or he would die. In the stuffy parlor with its needlework and shelves of bric-a-brac, they laid him out on their only couch, a settee really, not long enough to accommodate the ropy calves and feet but fortunately armless. Removing his boots, they improvised by lifting his lower extremities onto a caned chair. Sabina, racking her memory of sickbeds and visits from the doctor, brought a pan of water and tore some sheets for a compress to stanch any bleeding aggravated by the move. Blood sopped the bosom of her dress and dried the color of chestnut; her sleeves were tracked with darkening flecks. Sabina had the better touch for nursing, so Alvina went out to coax the buggy mare with a carrot, caught her, and cinched the saddle to go for help. Setting off to fetch the doctor, who was miles away and might or mightn’t be at home and might or mightn’t be willing to come, she met Jarom and Frank Owen instead.

  Jarom found Patterson stretched out on a daybed in the parlor, his socked feet protruding under a beautiful quilt of the Lone Star pattern. One eye had been shot away; the other was intact but apparently sightless. What had been the straight edge of his nose had a ravine excavated by the bullet. When Sabina raised the compress, he saw the mess of the nose and forehead, a broad mulberry swipe across them like jam smeared on with a butter knife. His high leather boots, still spurred, stood side by side on the filigreed carpet.

  Though no one said it, Jarom knew they were considering that Patterson could not last more than an hour or two at best. He was pitiful to see, the topography of the face ravaged beyond recognition, a sorry imitation of the face Jarom had known as intimately as his own. Swollen with hurt, his features took on the crudeness of a carved potato. A turban of bandages was swathed around the head, and Jarom wanted to believe that the ruin before him was not Patterson but an impostor, some stranger who had stolen Patterson’s boots with their peculiar olive tint and replicated the cracked leather of his belt. The size and general shape belonged to Patterson, but he had deflated like one of the gas balloons the Yankees sent up to study the disposition of their troops. The arms and legs were sapped of vigor, the color drained from his skin. Jarom had to force himself to acknowledge that what lay broken on the couch was John Patterson, the man who had trotted so confidently into the afternoon two hours earlier. He remembered his feeling of disquiet at Patterson’s absence and persuaded himself that at the moment of his shooting some mystical means, maybe something electrical, had telegraphed the news to him—so close had they bonded.

  In the kitchen the sisters told Jarom and Owen what they knew. When they mentioned hearing a final shot after a spate of firing, Jarom fit the pieces into a speculation about what happened. This last shot did the injury, and almost certainly it had been fired after Patterson had become a prisoner. The pistol had been discharged so close that particles of black powder were embedded like metal filings in the wound and adjacent skin. It singed off the hair on the right side of the head, confirming that the pistol had been only inches away when discharged. When it occurred to Jarom that Patterson had been shot after putting down his weapons, he couldn’t understand it, could not explain to himself how one human being could do this to another.

  Excusing himself, he stepped out onto the porch. At nearly dusk, the air still hung oppressively hot, listless, stagnant as the low water in the farm pond they had passed along the road. The katydids had begun their parliament in the old trees that backed up on an overgrown orchard. From the plantain stems the first wave of fireflies rose into the near dark. Several swifts dodged above the line of the shake roof, each jag in their flight thinning the insect population of the world.

  He thought back to 1858 when he’d first met Patterson, who had returned to the farm for one of his visits. After New Year’s, Patterson had taken him to a cockfight in a neighboring county. He’d heard about cockfights all his life but never seen one. They entered a common stock barn, six or eight stalls to either side of an earthen walkway. The central part had formed a crude circle or pit. Its circumference had been striped with lime, less a boundary for those inside the ring than those outside it. A large company of farmers had gathered, most from the neighborhood but a few like themselves from beyond.

  They also found an assortment of vagabonds and touts who followed the roosters. The bet takers stuck gaudy feathers in their hat brims, recording their wagers on chits and pocket-sized ledgers in script that resembled the scratchings of domesticated chickens. All the onlookers were men and boys, some hanging on their fathers’ pants legs. Most were past middle age, slack men, a little stooped, wearing old clothes in which they appeared to have shrunk. Under lanterns that hung along the rafters, their faces had a coppery cast that reminded him of dried tobacco. All were hatted.

  Other fights had occurred before they’d arrived, for to one side of the door someone had set a barrel into which dead and dying birds had been thrown. In the pit an old Negro man spread sand from a bucket, raking the packed ground with a switch broom to smooth it for the next fight. Into his gunnysack the man swept wads of white fluff and plucked feathers. Much of the barn, as Jarom recalled, had been in shadow. He remembered it lacked heat of any kind; he was so cold Patterson had given him his scarf to wind about his neck. Amidst so much stamping of feet and rubbing of hands, Jarom wondered why these men
had not stayed home in front of their woodstoves. A few drank, drawing swigs from bottles and flasks tucked into their pockets. Despite the cold, the space seemed filled with good humor—the age-old defense of the miserable—and Patterson took a swig from a bottle proffered by a farmer standing beside him, a man with eyes nearly lost in a thicket of eyebrows. Patterson carefully showed his manners by thanking him and making a joke or two.

  From a loft above the pit on three sides feet dangled, most of them shod in cheap brogans, though Jarom could remember one pair of polished knee-length boots. The smell of raw whiskey mixed with hay rot and the reek of fresh manure. Then above the din someone raised a hullabaloo that sounded like a henhouse under siege, a stream of squalls and mindless cluckings answered with a cockcrow—four guttural notes exploding from the throat, perfectly accented on the third. Stomping their feet, grumbling, the company began to lose patience.

  Patterson asked the bearded man when the next fight would start. The old man thrust a finger toward the stall across the ring. “Soon’s that pokeslow fixes a knife to that bird is when,” he’d said, sputtering little bits of tobacco.

  Jarom looked over in the stall to their rear and saw a man and a boy crouching. The boy held a rust-colored gamecock and stroked its breast while the man tied gaffs to the nubs of its spurs. Patterson explained that gaffs were gently curved lancets of steel maybe two inches long. Jarom locked in memory the look of them, their edges, honed and deadly looking, prickling with light. Patterson served as Jarom’s interpreter as, one after the other, the man wound an invisible thread around the horny legs to fasten the gaffs. When he finished each one, he would bite off the excess thread and deftly knot it to the hock, carefully cutting the string ends with a pen knife.