Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  “Seeing the game was up, the madman came to his senses and simply stopped. He sat there a moment, his chest heaving. Then he shrugged and looked speechlessly at each of us, giving each the same woebegone look.”

  “What made you think he was mad?” Jarom asked. “Even a lunatic will fight for his life.”

  Porter didn’t choose to answer, though Jarom noted that afterward he exercised some discretion and stopped using the word “madman.”

  “Before the dust could settle,” he went on, “before any of us could read his purpose, up rode Windrup. Not taking his eyes from the prisoner’s, he coolly laid the long barrel against the man’s cheek as familiar as a brother—a taunt I was thinking—and pulled the trigger. Down came the hammer. There was a snap and a flash, the clap of the explosion ruffling the air between us, a hot gust slamming against me but most directly against the rider, who was knocked from the saddle and thrown into the lane under the hooves of my spooked mare.

  “She skittered to one side, and everything was jumbled by the close thunder of the shot. Windrup froze with the upright revolver in his hand. I remember sweat gleaming from one of the horse’s rumps, which I first thought was blood. Men on horseback were pinwheeling about the riderless sorrel. When the smoke cleared and the ringing gentled in my ears, the rider lay sprawled there on the road, intact and perfectly whole at one end, a ruin at the other. Blood was streaming from a terrible wound in his face and pooling in the dust. Even from where I sat, it was clear the ball had creased his upper right cheek, blasted at least one eye out, and wrecked the bridge of his nose. White splinters of bone poked out of the skin like drumsticks on a Sunday chicken.”

  Porter held off a bit. Jarom could see the sweat beading on his forehead and the eyes losing their focus.

  “You heard enough?” he asked.

  “Go on,” Jarom said. “Let’s hear it all.”

  “Without uttering a word, Windrup holstered his pistol and motioned to Hollis, who was still gaping at the nasty face. Hollis at the boots, Windrup under the shoulders, together they lifted the body and heaved it over the fence as casually as you would toss a sack of grain onto a wagon. As Windrup climbed back on his little mare, we saw a track of blood down the front of his checked jacket. He said not a word but made a kind of clucking sound in his cheek. Someone took the sorrel in tow, and we were gone.”

  When Porter finished, Jarom felt a wave of relief. He couldn’t speak. Then it was Porter’s turn.

  “Why are you so interested in this?”

  “He was my brother,” Jarom said.

  Porter went pale. Scrabbling for excuses, he said none of them believed for a minute that Windrup would shoot but that even if they’d known, they hadn’t time or means to stop him. Porter went on to say that afterward someone wanted to shoot Windrup but that Bethel had said what was done was done and they’d best forget about it, that they had other fish to fry.

  “Was Windrup reported?” Jarom asked.

  Bethel said Windrup wasn’t even in the army and that they couldn’t order him. He also said that most of the men were still het up about Newburgh, that some of them believed the man had it coming.

  Jarom had heard enough. He first had an inclination to shoot Porter and balance the scales a bit, at least even some scores. After all, he had been there and might have stopped Windrup. He seemed decent enough but also worried about what he’d said, probably wondering whether he’d said anything to set Jarom off—the man’s own brother. Jarom guessed Porter’s age to be mid- to late thirties; he was a decent enough man with some education, from the way he spoke. Still, though he seemed civil enough now, why didn’t he do something more then? The account put him back on that dry expanse of road. Again he imagined Patterson sprawled in the roadway and felt his blood rise. Porter could see it too, for he stepped back, anticipating, Jarom believed, that he was about to be shot in much the same way Patterson had been.

  Jarom’s oath came back to him, but he knew he could not pull the trigger—at least not on Porter. Shooting him now would put Jarom on a level with Windrup. What would Patterson say? Something like, “You don’t burn the forest to remove a cankered tree.” Porter, he decided, was simply the man who saw it and felt bad about it now but had done nothing when doing something would have counted.

  Over the next months Jarom ventured out on his own in an effort to locate Windrup, even crossing the river against his better judgment in hopes of finding him. Jarom would meet someone who had news of him but was never able to close the distance or to find out precisely where he lived, though he reckoned it was somewhere in southern Indiana, probably near Evansville. The man was elusive as smoke.

  BACK TO OLD KENTUCKY

  When General John Hunt Morgan entered a room or rode by on his blooded mare, Black Bess, people straightened themselves and took notice. Standing six feet tall, he was compactly built and weighed, Jarom estimated, about a hundred eighty-five pounds. He moved with the assurance of one on whom the world had conferred its bounty, a man who not only merited attention but implicitly demanded it. Jarom understood how uttering commands for him had long been an easy matter. Morgan had owned a large hemp factory and a woolen mill where dozens depended on his good offices to keep bread on the table. In Jarom’s experience such persons claimed command as a birthright. Morgan moved with a natural grace said to have resulted from a lifetime of dancing and riding. His precisely trimmed goatee and his tendency to assume picturesque poses gave him an imperial air, as though he’d stepped out of Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I hunting, an engraving Jarom had admired in one of Aunt Nancy Bradshaw’s Godey’s magazines. Van Dyck suited him, for though the general’s manners seemed relaxed, he aped the grand style of the Cavaliers, who were cavaliers more in the sense of courtly manner than equestrian skills.

  Usually, when Jarom caught a glimpse of him, he had one brim of his hat pinned to the block to reinforce the impression of devil-may-care. His gray eyes were close set, giving him in the right light a cross-eyed appearance, the hair thinning to form two deep scallops behind the temples. This hair loss may have been hastened by the appeal he had for the ladies, who would walk up to him with a pair of scissors and, usually with his permission, clip off a bit as a souvenir.

  Morgan fascinated Jarom the way that novelty invites comparison, not so much because he wanted to be like Morgan but because Morgan was so unlike himself. As the general strolled about the camp during lulls between scouts and raids, Jarom studied his manner and behavior. He learned that despite his outward show of ease and confidence, at times he brooded, gave himself over to sulks, being quick to withdraw when the currents did not flow his way. He noted that Morgan was always in motion, often without discernible purpose but going, doing, always initiating some weighty enterprise, or seeming to. In quieter moments he displayed a vein of melancholy, the tonic of all romantics, owing probably, Jarom thought, to the death of his first wife, Rebecca. She had been described to him as a delicate flower that bloomed, faded, and died just at the time her husband, certain that war was imminent, came into full flower. Jarom doubted that Morgan truly loved her, for he heard that the young Morgan spent most of his time in the company of men, especially with the Lexington Rifles, the company of neighbors and local bloods who rechristened themselves the Second Kentucky Cavalry when the war began. Though Morgan seemed charged with a special quality of magnetism, Jarom felt drawn to him largely by a quality he could name only as buoyancy.

  His association with Morgan had begun when Adam R. Johnson’s Tenth Kentucky Cavalry attached itself to Morgan’s brigade in northern Tennessee after the sensational raid on Hartsville, Kentucky, in early December of 1862. In that venture, over which much was made in the papers, Morgan captured two artillery pieces, two thousand prisoners, and several wagonloads of desperately needed boots and shoes. A few days later, President Davis himself arrived by a train of cars from Chattanooga and congratulated the intrepid Colonel Morgan, a man who brought morale-building good news. Davis, savvy abou
t the value of rewarding vigor and derring-do, lost little time in promoting him to brigadier general. Standing in a file of men who had gathered at the track siding, Jarom caught a glimpse of the president’s sober profile as he wheeled by on his way to review General Bragg’s veterans. They had lost some of their brio and many of their bravest since Bragg had returned with his army from a bumbling offensive into Kentucky that ended at the battle of Perryville in October of 1862.

  A week later, camp gossip circulated that Morgan had married his sweetheart, Martha Ready, in a ceremony conducted by a fellow general, Leonidas Polk, who also happened to be an Episcopal bishop. Four days before Christmas of 1862, after a short honeymoon, Morgan assembled his brigade, which numbered seventeen hundred men, and marched north, Jarom eagerly among them. He crossed the Cumberland River into Kentucky at a piddly little place called Sandy Shoals, near Tompkinsville in Monroe County. Still brooding about Patterson being left in the Locke sisters’ care until Mary Tibbs could fetch him, Jarom felt heartened to touch his feet on home ground with a chance to damage those who had damaged him.

  When Morgan led his serpentine column into Kentucky, cheering moved along the line, the same bravado and brashness of boys who had skipped Sunday school or tipped a lowing cow. Morgan staged a homecoming for these sons of old Kentucky, and they cantered with the zeal of crusaders reclaiming the Holy Land from the infidels.

  The friction began just south of Glasgow on the Louisville Pike when scouts ahead of the column brushed aside a small band of federals and overtook an enormous sutler’s wagon drawn by twenty magnificent Percherons. Its destination had been Glasgow, where the enterprising sutler intended to offer Christmas delicacies to the garrison encamped south of town. Instead, Morgan’s riders forced him to play Santa Claus, distributing gifts from the wagon’s interior until it emptied. Jarom hadn’t seen such largesse since he had enlisted: hams, corn, crackers, molasses, and candies among the foodstuffs; overcoats, shoes, and a plentiful supply of smoking and chewing tobacco, even snuff, among the dry goods. He snagged some tobacco, having experimented with smoking his own rolled cigarettes.

  He and Frank Owen stuffed themselves with chunks of ham and slices of raisin bread they’d whittled from round loaves with their camp knives. At the bottom of a trunk he found a fine pair of buckskin gloves lined with lamb’s wool. He slept with them on that night when they bivouacked five miles below Glasgow, the county seat of about five hundred, which Jarom remembered visiting with his aunt Nancy Bradshaw’s husband on construction business. The cold penetrated once they stopped, but it did not keep either him or Owen from caroling with the others around a huge bonfire, enjoying the spoils of war and drinking brandy for toasts made to Morgan and the liberation of Kentucky. Morgan’s scouts rode to the outskirts of Glasgow, reporting that the place seemed glum and cheerless, without decoration in the face of an attack the citizens expected at first light. Jarom and Owen rolled up in their blankets inside an unheated brick tannery, their horses snuffling a few feet away and stamping the earthen floor to ward off the cold.

  Cradling his head in the crook of his saddle, Jarom stared up at the heavens through a jagged hole in the roof. The constellations reminded him of the patterns on the rug in Alvina Locke’s parlor. He could see Patterson on the daybed, his head swathed in bandages. The skin of his face appeared peeled and pink as hams on the scraped hog he had helped butcher at the Tibbs farm. He imagined a Patterson of the future, his muscles slacking with inactivity, a cane in his hand as he begged on the streets of some nameless city. The life he would live seemed as bare and rooted as the bony oak whose limbs scraped against the split shakes on the roof of the barn, a sound he heard until reveille next morning.

  For weeks he’d felt a numbness unrelieved by what went on around him. Any reference to Patterson—a word, a memory, something they had done together, places they had been, someone who favored him or walked with his step—stabbed him with hopeless grief. He recognized Patterson’s nose on the face of a stranger, his posture on a passerby. He knew that he would spend the balance of his life enduring these painful pricks. Absent a cure, he knew that immersion in events, in a cause, in sheer busyness gave a temporary reprieve from the kind of sulk that would finally sink a mourner into despair. He wanted to live for Patterson, as a kind of unpaid substitute, to see what Patterson couldn’t see, do what he couldn’t do.

  Next morning, as he, Owen, and several of the others crouched around a fire roasting sutler bacon skewered on sticks, they discussed the report that Thomas Quirk, Morgan’s chief scout, had been shot twice in the head during a fracas with a federal patrol his men had blundered on along the road. Rather than seek out the surgeon, Quirk hobbled back to camp with a neckerchief tied about his head.

  “A cranium built in County Kerry, Ireland,” he said, “and toughened by shillelaghs can surely withstand mere bullets.”

  Later, the darkening clouds suddenly loosed a downpour that mired the roads, sending yellow gushets along the ditches on either side. A persistent murmur of complaint flowed among the horsemen as the water soaked their blankets and coarse woolen tunics that smelled rank as pond mud. Drenched, exhausted, Jarom felt relieved that they had bypassed Glasgow, this being no weather in which to fight. As he lay burrowed in a wet haystack, he was plagued by the picture of his enemies, neat rows of them, lying smug and dry in their barrack beds several miles away.

  The world that he awoke to next morning seemed a world returned to its base element of water. Everything lay sodden, the frozen ground around the camp pocked with iced puddles that made even the simplest maneuver chancy. The leather of their saddles, pinched and stiffened, creaked when they mounted and set off again. Someone passed the word to swaddle their firearms with blankets so as to be in firing order. Before that could be done, the blankets, saturated and sheathed with ice, had to thaw before an open fire.

  Morgan intended to cut the Union line of supply from Louisville to the armies farther south. Sitting on a wet log by the smoldering fire, Jarom for the first time heard their destination, two wooden railroad trestles at a great timbered dome in the landscape called Muldraugh’s Hill, about thirty-five miles south of Louisville. Destroy those trestles and they would cut off the lifeline of winter supplies for much of Kentucky and the lower South, paralyzing Rosecrans’s army in Tennessee until the Confederate army could be refitted after the losses at Forts Henry and Donelson and a half-dozen other battles.

  Late on Christmas Day Jarom heard that at a place called Bear Wallow outside Cave City the advance of Morgan’s brigade flushed a covey of skirmishers in a fight that lasted ten minutes. The sounds of battle came to him like raindrops plopping on a dry roof, a rain of distant fire deadly to those on whom it fell.

  The weather turned dry but stayed bitter cold. In midafternoon they came to Green River, a silvery band winding between palisades of stripped timber on each steep bank. Quirk and his scouts found a passable ford, and the hooves of Jarom’s horse, Rattler, minced the shattered ice in water that rose to the horse’s knees. When Morgan ordered them to cross four abreast, Jarom’s rank edged down the embankment, which, by the time Jarom reached it, had become a hashwork of mud. With prodding, Rattler waded into the water, quivering as the current cut into his flanks. Jarom instinctively raised his boots from the stirrups in a vain effort to keep dry. When he looked back, the crossing resembled a long funeral cortege. He could hear only cracklings of ice and a clacking of hooves as the horses clambered up the frozen bank on the far side, their bony faces glazed in sullen shock. From the higher ground on the other side, Jarom turned again in the saddle to check the progress of the crossers. The column extended along the road like a stricken caterpillar—one long, fat, braid of muscle nearly paralyzed by cold. That night they camped at a little rail stop called Upton, and again rain fell. Jarom came down with a cold, as had many of the others. The rain, unrelenting and chill, needled through his blanket and clothes with little pricks of ice that seemed to puddle at some low spot in his bone
s.

  In the morning, somber and depressed, he rode with a squad that Morgan detailed to tear up some track and fire the bridge at Bacon’s Creek. Given spud bars and crowbars brought specially for the purpose, Jarom and Owen pitched in with the others, prizing up rails and the sleepers on which they rode. Together they stacked the ties into pyramids and, by the hardest, struck a fire. Tom Hines, a specialist in this line, showed the company how to use heat to soften rails so they could be bent around trees. Some wag gave the twisted rails the name “Morgan’s neckties,” though they put Jarom more in mind of pretzels cast in metal. As a further affront to the Union war effort, others chopped or pulled down some nearby telegraph poles, wrapping the wires around trees and tossing other rolls of the tangled strands into a nearby creek. Tiring as it was, Jarom took satisfaction in the work, knowing he had helped to unravel the cords that connected Rosecrans to the North. He also witnessed the work of “Lightning” Ellsworth, a genius at tapping the wires and confounding the federals with false reports of Morgan’s whereabouts.

  Later, resting, it came to him that what he loved most about wilderness was its pristine order in which nothing, nothing at all, seemed out of place, in which little or nothing had been altered by the instruments of man. The woods untouched comprised an assemblage of the various and the random, everything at home. Those downed poles and twisted rails, his memories of the carnage on the slopes at Donelson, reminded him that this war, any war, came down to an organized effort to disassemble things—whether railways, bridges, landscapes, or bodies—to render them useless, disarticulate. And the bent rails, the wounded and dead he’d seen, became a part of his interior landscape, a ravaged place containing desolated valleys and bloodied streams, people and things deprived of vital purpose, deprived of their functions.