Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  Jarom remembered gawking at the rooster, which was surprisingly small. Its coat was a mixture of reds and golds with a full cushion of tail-feathers. Patterson described its tail as a gracefully crooked upright that spilled behind like a fountain.

  Patterson pointed out that the rooster’s comb was missing. “Trimmed off,” Patterson said, making a snipping motion with two fingers. The same, he said, with the spurs and wattles. The gamesters called the practice dubbing.

  “Why cut him?” Jarom had asked.

  “Cocking,” Patterson said, “is sport only for those who watch. For the cock it’s a contest to survive—spike and dodge, dodge and spike. Throw two roosters in a ring and blood comes. Get the other fellow before he gets you.”

  “But why the comb?”

  “Because,” he said, “the comb makes a ready target and bleeds easily. Peck at the comb and the bird might be blinded or bleed to death before the fight has really started.”

  As with everything, Patterson seemed to know all there was to know. He had witnessed cockfights up and down the river, many on the decks of whatever steamer he was working on.

  Together they had watched the cock, its nervous head cupped tenderly in the boy’s hand. At the crown where the comb should have been Jarom saw a pink scab. Patterson explained that serious breeders held certain superstitions. Birds could be trimmed only when the moon was in Pisces, for old-timers believed that birds not trimmed during the sign of the Feet would bleed to death. He also said that fighting did not begin until November, when cocks came into full feather, having molted their old plumage during the summer months.

  Some commotion sounded, and from another stall came an eagle-faced man with thick mustachios. He looked vaguely kin to the birds he handled, his brows like feathers, his nose forming a beak between close-set eyes. As Jarom remembered, he carried a blondish-gray cock whose pupils shone tomato red. The bird-man’s stepping into the ring as challenger had been the signal for preliminaries to begin. Patterson had alerted Jarom to watch the stages as part of an elaborate ritual—“spar and gambit,” Patterson called it. The defender started with a mock bow as the first man, alone then, walked, half strutted, to the center of the ring. With outstretched arms, he raised the rust bird above his head with a yell that caused the bird to flap its wings as though to fly. The second man followed on cue, stepping to the center and holding his own bird up for inspection. A flurry of bet making followed as the feather hats registered amounts and odds shouted across the ring. The crowd pressed in, forming a natural corral about the ring, feet scrupulously up to, on, but never crossing the white stripe.

  Cradling their birds, the handlers began to pace about as if they would spar, the birds resting complacently in their arms. Patterson commented that the rusty bird was a high flier, a cock whose torso sat high off the ground and whose long legs gave the impression of agility and speed. “Splendid” was the word that came to Jarom to describe how he looked. The feathers smoothed down about the body in a reddish sheen, the wings appeared slickish as though they’d been dipped in oil. In the wavering light of the barn, his back glowed with an eerie iridescence. By contrast, the gray bird had been low stationed, almost squat. Though both weighed nearly the same, the gray looked stouter, more powerful. Patterson described him as a “stayer.”

  Because they’d so unsettled him, Jarom could still recall the murmurs and grumblings of impatience as the tension mounted.

  “Let blood! Let blood!” someone behind him shouted.

  “Go git him, fox!” another began yelling. “Go git him, fox. Go on, go git him now.”

  Still cradling their birds, one hand grasping the legs just above the gaffs, the other clutching the neck, the handlers talked each other around the ring. They gradually closed distance until the roosters’ beaks came within pecking range, only inches apart. Patterson told him regulars called this phase of the contest the “tease.” Watching, Jarom noticed a change as the cocks’ hackles rose and their necks spread like half-opened parasols. He could tell now they were tense and threatening, their necks crooked like feathered snakes, each poised to strike. The handlers continued to flirt in an outlandish waltz, leading and closing, then drawing back, circling the ring until both birds ruffled their feathers, spoiling to fight.

  On signal, the handlers pitched them to the clay floor and nimbly stepped clear. Loosed, the roosters rushed together in high hops, their legs thrusting forward so the gaffs could be used to advantage, the tiny blades snicking and flashing in a blur, their wings beating furiously, snapping and spitting like flags in a storm. Spreading their wings, they leapt at each other, their legs, a burnt orange, making fanlike arcs and razory swipes. Four feet up in midair they clashed, necks still arched, the wings pummeling to gain height and keep balance, both of them lost in a squall of motion. Time after time they dropped, only to spring up again, needling with the gaffs, fanning slow blizzards of pinfeathers and down.

  At first, everyone hushed in wonder, awed by the fury of the attack. But after a few clashes the novelty began to pale, and each hit produced a heathenish clamor. Inches from Jarom’s ear, Patterson began to root for the gray bird, his face flushed, the veins in his neck bulging like strained cords. In that closed space Jarom could feel a tension swelling for release as the fight moved toward climax. For a moment he imagined himself in the ring with the swiping gaffs, probing for the spot that would still the frenzied wings, soothe the shrillness into some semblance of calm. Impatient for the kill.

  Then the rust bird went down with a gaff in his back.

  “Git at him,” someone shouted. “Go for the heart!”

  “Handle!” someone yelled from the other side of the ring. “Handle now!”

  Both owners reentered the ring and carefully separated the birds, the rust bird’s owner delicately removing the gray bird’s gaff from the upper back just behind the wings. Where the gaff had stuck, the feathers were bloodied, stain already spreading in sticky crimson blotches.

  But the fight wasn’t over. Again the handlers set the birds eight feet apart, and again they danced and maneuvered, slower this time, the rusty bird sluggish, Jarom guessed, from loss of his life’s blood. Moving in for the kill, the gray bird pounced on the rust, which in one inspired instant, reflexively threw up a gaff, catching the gray’s soft underside. The shock of the blow knocked the gray cock off his feet, and someone urged the rust bird to show some steel.

  Dazed, the dying gray cock tipped to one side, his head on the hay-strewn floor of the barn, a ribbon of blood stringing from his beak. Someone pronounced him a goner, a dead one for sure. Tipsy, unsure of his footing, the gray bird rose. Before he could right himself, the rust was on him, yellow bill hammering, pecking and treading him into the clay.

  Feeling a nudge on his back, Jarom turned to look behind him. When he faced the ring again, the gray bird lay in a slick of blood, beak open, throat stretching and gasping for breath. Patterson told him this was called “rattling,” an indication a lung had been punctured. Now the rust bird was standing in triumph, his orange back caped with blood. Following the established etiquette, his owner lifted him from the ring. As the winners crowed, the bird nuzzled against his owner’s chest. The loser next stepped in to pick up his bird. The wings drew in on themselves, tight against a body that seemed depleted, shriveled in defeat. The blood dried on the wings in dark splinters. The pale legs looked brittle as twigs; both eyes were miraculously still open.

  As Jarom remembered it, the fight from start to finish took less than three minutes. It opened and closed with the old black ringman, who now spread sand on the floor and raked it for the next fight. Jarom had a vision of the floor as a brief ledger on which the ringman smoothed over the scratches and scrawlings that recorded the fight, leaving as little trace as the clouds his breath formed on the bluff at Fort Donelson. The lanterns after the fight seemed dimmer, and for the first time that night he felt an abiding chill. Patterson, he remembered, had picked up one of the sickles and handed it to h
im as a souvenir—a long, curved tail feather. Settling their bets, the winners and losers puffed little fists of vapor that blended into shadow and rose to the ridgepole of the barn. As Jarom began again to think of armies, he remembered that neither he nor Patterson had any inclination to stay for a second fight, had no need even to say so.

  Somewhere at the base of his ribs Jarom felt an abiding void, a fluttering lightness that wouldn’t settle, that combination of glut and emptiness one feels in the moment before vomiting. He forced himself to swallow, considering that this Patterson was not his Patterson. Blind, an invalid, probably addled in his mind, he would, if his wounds mended, walk out his days with a stick. He would never mount a horse again, never pilot a boat. He would be obliged to rely on the charity of others to pilot him.

  Jarom reeled back his mind to the history of changes in the way they understood each other, the inventory of things Patterson had taught him to see and understand that Patterson himself would no longer see. He remembered the poet of old who knew life as a movement through darkness into a brightly lit hall and into darkness again. For Patterson and for himself, he realized, the room was too narrow, the room too soon dark. He had an image of the continuous night that Patterson would endure for the balance of his days. The path that his life ran would be lightless, illuminated only by what light shone from within.

  The longer he stood on the porch in that failing light the more he sensed some powerful feeling that welled up from some dark aquifer within, a surge of rage that rose from the cavity in his chest in a mixture of hatred and helplessness. He wanted to strike back, to kill the man who had fired the shot, a man whose name he would probably never know. There being no specific object or being to which he could attach his hate, he felt frustrated and hurt. He conjured ways in which he would take out his frustration and pain on the heads of his enemies, known and unknown.

  Over the farm’s expanse of darkened fields and leafed trees he imagined a colossal flood, a tide roiling over the lowlands. In the near fields he envisioned battered cornstalks and drowned calves, the loosened palings of fences that had been swept over by some irresistible force with origins unknown, destination unknowable. Like water. He came to see water as a metaphor for the force he was beginning to recognize as malevolence. Like flooding waters, it ran blind and limitless, taking on definition only by the levels it could sink to, the reservoirs in which it could pool. He imagined the flatlands ravaged, a wake of ruin and decimation where the torrents had passed. Unlike fire, water would not consume itself but grow in volume and momentum as it surged. Like water, the god this force would worship lacked discrimination or loyalty to anything human. It defined itself only by motion.

  Back in the room, over Patterson’s nearly lifeless form, Jarom studied Patterson’s ravaged face, his bandaged eyes, the blue splinters of pistol burns on exposed cheek.

  “Can you hear me?” he whispered.

  No response.

  “I will find him,” he swore, not so much to Patterson as to himself. “I will find him. I will the pay these devils back in specie.” Then he conferred with the gentle sisters and discussed what to do if Patterson died, what to do if he survived. In either case, he asked them to contact Mary Tibbs, and knew they would, one way or another.

  “By the way,” he asked before acting on an imperative to move on, “what county are we in?”

  “Union,” Alvina said.

  PORTER

  Jarom didn’t learn the particulars of Patterson’s shooting until some months later. Whenever he came upon prisoners, he quizzed them, asking where they called home and whether they or anyone they knew had been at Newburgh. Outside Bardstown he finally happened on a man named Porter, who admitted he lived near Newburgh. Garrisoned at Evansville, he hadn’t been at Newburgh during Johnson’s raid, but he had been a member of the party that Bethel organized the next day to chase down the culprits.

  Within a few hours of Johnson’s snatching the guns, Porter said, Bethel’s pursuit crossed the river in one of the available transports, horses and all. Bethel led Porter’s bunch in person, most of the party consisting of home guards whom Johnson had captured and paroled. Still smarting from the humiliation of being taken by chicanery, they rode out to redeem themselves. Promising he would not be harmed, Jarom persuaded Porter to give an account of what happened to see if it confirmed what he had already pieced together.

  Bethel, quickly assembling his men, had crossed the river at Henderson in hopes of cutting Johnson off before he could slip farther south. It amused Jarom to hear that Bethel’s party, as it paraded through town, suffered much taunting, mostly about stovepipes. Meeting riders on the road, Bethel asked all he met if they had seen other riders, but he got little help from the locals, who all, as Porter put it, sang rebel songs. Bethel made little headway until he hired a man named Windrup, who claimed intimate knowledge of the back roads. Porter said he had come jogging up to them, a worried-looking man astride a piebald mare with feral eyes and welts on its rump.

  “From the look of that mare,” he said, “you knew you couldn’t trust him, a man that would treat an animal like that.” Porter said this looking Jarom in the eye, and Jarom would have bet a loaded Colt that he had heard an accurate appraisal of the man.

  Bethel asked him which way they should go, and Windrup said they should get on the nearest back road heading south. “Minnows,” he said, “you’ll find in branches or creeks but never rivers.”

  Jarom asked Porter to describe Windrup, wanting enough particulars to pick him out in a crowd. Porter weighed this as if he were reconstructing a portrait from memory.

  “He was scrawny,” he said finally, “and dried up, kindly like a prune, you might say. His face was all socket and knob, skin the color of over-cooked turkey, stretched tight over the bone and pitted with smallpox. He’d curled the brim of his hat into tiny scrolls. His face was rough ground, all gulched and furrowed. His eyes were flat and dark as shale. He was a man of dark countenance, even darker under the stiff felt hat he wore low on his head.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “He rode so low on his mount,” Porter said, “that his spurs raked seeds from the roadside grass. He could read signs, the merest stirring of dust or hoof scuff on the road. He made up for these skills in his deficiencies of speech, mostly the language of grunts and nods. He claimed to be a resident of Webster County in the sovereign state of Kentucky, but from the wear on him he was by all appearances a vagabond.”

  “All right, then,” Jarom said, changing directions. “Tell me with as much detail as you can what happened.”

  “Riding several horse lengths ahead, Windrup sighted the rider first. Just north of a little town called Slaughtersville, we rounded a bend and Windrup shouted back to us, ‘Hey, look up the road there.’ About eighty yards ahead sat a man on horseback. Spotting us about the same time, he reined up and sidled off into some trees. From their shade he stood up in the stirrups to determine whether we were friend or foe. After a little he must have been satisfied, for he waved his hat, dropped in the saddle, and came on in a confident canter. Even from that distance he looked to be smiling.

  “At half the distance, about forty yards off, he drew in his reins and stopped, maybe realizing his mistake. The head of his horse flinched, wrenched by his motion. Then his horse, a sorrel, cocked and twisted his head as if to cushion the shock. Coming to a standstill, the rider looked about for cover. There was none, only an expanse of pasture enclosed by a rail fence, a steep slope of brooms edge on the other. He lacked time or distance enough to turn around, a chance to break and run. Close as we were, he knew and we knew we could easily have chased or shot him down.

  “So what does he do? He had no choice but to give himself over—or so we thought until he hunched down jockey-style over the sorrel’s neck, pulled down his hat, and took the reins in his teeth. He set spur to her flanks and came dash at us, a pistol in each hand, the devil for mischief. We stood by in unbelief and wonder. When he’d clo
sed half the distance between us, he leveled a pistol to either side of the sorrel’s head and tried to shoot his way through. And nearly did. Balls started singing by our heads, the firing so close we shuddered and ducked as we saw the hammers fall.”

  “Was there anyone hit?” Jarom asked.

  “No,” Porter said, “but it wasn’t for lack of trying. After the first shots, no one needed to ask us to get clear of him. Windrup, already firing back, peeled off to one side of the pitching horses, trying to get a clear shot. One or two of the boys in the rear turned tail to get back down the road as if to have a head start on a race they knew they’d lose. The rest of us drew and tried to bring our pistols to bear, but by this time he’d come amongst us, barging and bullying that wild-eyed sorrel through, working both pistols. It was the shots that started the commotion. The whole spectacle seemed to be happening somewhere far off, mouths shouting sounds that didn’t reach my ears, horse eyes and flashing metal taking on a presence of their own. One or two cooler heads got off a shot before he closed with us, but the most of us just hugged our horses and tried to stand clear as you might in a wagon stalled on a track with a train of cars bearing down on you.

  “As he passed, I caught a glimpse of the mustache and the desperate eyes. In all the confusion some of our riders fell or were knocked off their horses. One of them, a young buck named Hollis, whose father I know, snagged the madman’s bridle just as the sorrel broadsided Windrup’s little mare. Though both kept their saddles, the collision slowed the madman long enough for Hollis to get a purchase on the sorrel. Using his weight to advantage, Hollis jerked the bridle so the muzzle wrenched back against its chest. That was enough to break its stride, though the legs kept churning until the other horses pressed in to close the gap. Hollis then managed to snatch one of the Colts, someone from the left side knocking the other from his hand.