Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  Later that afternoon they joined the party attacking a blockhouse built to protect a bridge over the Nolin River. After a brief show of resistance, the garrison surrendered, and Jarom assisted in firing the bridge and two blockhouses that had failed to protect it, witnessing the largest fire he’d ever seen. Its blaze turned night into day, throwing spits of flame high into the chill air, galaxies of sparks that popped in the mizzling rain.

  Next morning the temperature dropped to the twenties, and he awoke to a sky as colorless as pond ice, the first such sky since leaving Tennessee. He chose to interpret it as an omen of good fortune to follow. They advanced steadily north through a country of low hummocks and swells that graduated to hills rising ever higher and steeper. Some, protruding from land that tended toward flatness, reminded him of an engraving he’d seen of humps on a camel. Along the road Morgan’s advance met a party of three riders from Elizabethtown, the seat of Hardin County. They advanced under a flag of truce. Incredibly, they presented the demand of a Colonel Smith for Morgan to surrender the army into the colonel’s custody. Morgan informed the messenger, a brash and callow lieutenant, that he had been mistaken about the condition and the intentions of Morgan’s command. He then issued his own counterultimatum, namely, that Smith immediately surrender Elizabethtown’s garrison. A quarter-hour later, the colonel replied that as an officer of the United States he had been schooled to fight, not to surrender.

  Creating a command post on a knoll six hundred yards south of the town whose church spires rose above an arbor of shade trees, Morgan personally directed the fire of the four Parrot guns they had brought along for just such an enterprise. Basil Duke, Morgan’s brother-in-law and second in command, deployed his brigade to the right of the track leading into town, and William Breckinridge—a cousin of the former vice president—formed his men to the left. Jarom heard that Adam Johnson had been offered this command but for some reason had declined it. Jarom and Owen, who was complaining of a toothache, took their positions with Breckinridge’s unit, learning later that they were to stand by with the reserve.

  From the hill where they gathered as observers Jarom had a spectacular view of the attack. A Parrot that had been wheeled onto the road shattered the stillness, sending a shot into one of three brick warehouses where the defenders took refuge. From the heights Baylor Palmer let loose with the other three, shells punching dark holes through brick walls like pins through paper. A bugle signaled the attack. In a wave of gray, the Ninth Kentucky dashed from sheltering trees toward the buildings, drawing the fire of federal sharpshooters scattered in houses along the town’s fringes. Running across an open field, Stoner’s men reached the walls of a warehouse and proceeded to batter down the doors with their rifle butts.

  After several minutes Jarom spied a stream of bluecoats pouring out of the building, hands over their heads. But as Stoner’s men disarmed them, they received fire from a building, which Jarom surmised to be a retail business by the sign across its facade. Three stories high, it had two rows of upper windows and other apertures ideal for firing into the street. Atop it, he spotted a fluttering Stars and Stripes. Jarom assumed it must be where the federals had formed their headquarters. Next to it was a neatly trimmed brick building whose spire identified it as a church.

  Duke had two of Palmer’s six-pounders wheeled forward to root out the defenders. At the same time, he placed another howitzer behind the railroad embankment, facing the rear of the building, where there were no windows. With great precision Corbett’s gunners poked holes in the building’s blind side while Palmer’s shot point-blank at the front. But flushing out the defenders was not easy. After each shot Jarom could see a dozen or so bluecoats rush from the building to snipe at the cannoneers. This continued until Breckinridge moved up a company on either flank of the Ninth Kentucky and laid down fire that persuaded the defenders to stay indoors. Though no one expected them to hold out much longer, someone foolishly ordered a direct assault. The gray line marched forward, exposed to fire on the side of the building honeycombed with windows. Jarom saw eight or ten of the attackers fall before someone had sense enough to order a withdrawal. Finally, a white flag waved at one of the second-story windows, and the garrison surrendered. Jarom saw Colonel Smith deliver his sword to Morgan, who accepted it without comment. Among the spoils were some Enfield rifles, which Jarom recognized as the finest firearms on either side at that stage of the war. As for the prisoners for whom a score of graycoats had died, Morgan held them only a few hours before paroling them.

  That night the column moved south again, camping near Bear Wallow. The name held for Jarom a strange fascination, and he wondered what it must be like to see a bear wallow. He imagined great balls of fur with feral eyes that glowed in the night, paws the width of a flat broom that could swat rival mammals senseless. He saw great balls of matted fur caked with dust or mud that offered some protection from the mists of insects that must follow them during the temperate months as they did his own species. He wondered about what prompted some early settler or wanderer who came upon such a place, a dust bowl perhaps, or a place where salt permeated the soil, to name the spot, giving it lifetime that would last longer than the bears that had at one time found comfort there.

  After firing three more bridges the next morning and tearing up several miles of track north and south of Elizabethtown, all before noon, scouts confirmed what Jarom and others anticipated—that a pursuit had formed and was bearing down on the cavalcade. Quirk reported that John Marshall Harlan, a fellow Kentuckian, was snapping at Morgan’s heels, hoping to intercept the main force before it reached Muldraugh’s Hill, the most vulnerable point on the rail line between Louisville and Nashville. Though no alien horses appeared and no one placed bets, Jarom knew that all of them had committed to a race.

  Rattler, his buff coat turned a somber gray, was nearly exhausted when the column passed through a deep cut about five miles north of Elizabethtown. Hearing a great commotion ahead of him, Jarom learned that Quirk’s scouts had sighted the trestles. Men to the front raised huzzahs and waved their arms in celebration. Several bolted ahead as though to clinch the race and declare Morgan the winner.

  When they reached the top of the next rise, Jarom looked out over a vast expanse of furrowed ridges that stretched as far as he could see. On either side of the largest he spied two trestleworks, fabrications of matchsticks over three hundred yards long and sixty or eighty yards high, which towered above the valleys. Rails cut across the top of the rise between the steep slopes and a prickly knoll of timber like the carefully combed part dividing a head of hair. The hill itself, bristling with shorn trees, resembled an oversized pin cushion. At either end of the trestles he could make out earthworks and artillery emplacements. At the southern and northern ends substantial blockhouses covered the approaches. According to Quirk’s intelligence, the Seventy-first Indiana had been reinforced by two companies of the Twenty-seventh Illinois. He also learned that the emplacements contained no cannon.

  Morgan immediately called a powwow and again split the force into two wings. Encircling the trestles, again he used Palmer’s battery to press his argument with the iron logic of shot and ball. Through the fork of a buckeye tree on an adjoining ridge, Jarom watched the gun crews spew a storm of shot that dented and chipped and chewed the blockhouses to ruin, some shots ploughing gullies in the earthen mounds heaped to protect them. The concussions of the cannonade sent tremors he could feel through his boot soles. This studious procedure of igniting powder to propel hardened bits of the planet, it came home to him as never before, was a crude but effective means of extinguishing life, an even more effective instrument of indiscriminate maiming. He remembered the broken bodies he’d seen at Donelson, the terrible canal in Patterson’s face. For what? For one government to impose its will on another, giving up its young as payment to assure its enforcement, a resulting back and forth of spilt blood, severed limbs, ruptured vitals, sightless eyes, fractured lives. To justify the mayhem, those in comma
nd provided flags and martial music to soften the barbarism, appeals to honor and duty to steel those who survived for the next onslaught. And he acknowledged himself a part of it. Though he had not knowingly snuffed out another life, not yet, he knew that he would, if not today, then tomorrow or some day in the weeks to come.

  For an hour he watched the bombardment until the defenders, their resolve flagging, waved a white pennant, and several hundred more troops surrendered themselves into their enemy’s keeping. Miraculously, this time neither side lost a single man. Whatever demon exacted his toll in lives and shattered bodies had breached the protocols of ravagement and waste, though probably not without an injunction from below to make it up next time. In the aftermath, when the last projectile buried its thunder in the hollows of the hills, Jarom saw Morgan in his business-like way giving instructions to Duke and several other officers, directing them to parole prisoners, distribute the captured arms and foodstuffs, and designate a special unit to fire the trestles.

  Jarom marveled at the efficiency of those chosen to demolish the great mesh of wood that made up the trestles. As he and hundreds of others, both friend and foe, looked on, the fire starters dragged fallen limbs and branches from the woods and piled them around the base of the elaborate timber trestlework. Jarom thought of Mary Tibbs fashioning little cabins of tinder in her cookstove to cook sausage for breakfast. The workers stacked limbs against the foundation at thirty-yard intervals, starting at the proximate center and extending four or five piles in either direction. They doused each pile with coal oil carried nearly two hundred miles specially for the purpose. For several minutes, they allowed it to saturate the pith before other men with torches touched off each pile, the flames fluttering and slowly licking themselves to an unimaginable brightness as the fire began its long ascent up the vertical trusses. When the wood caught, it crackled like gunshots as resins trapped inside ignited and sooty black smoke plumed through the gorge, billowy serpents, the air filling with the noxious stink of burning creosote.

  After the cheering stopped, Jarom and a blanketed multitude watching from the heights looked down on the arc of light for three hours as the flames consumed a vast forest of struts and trusses on each span. Even the prisoners stood by in wonder as the timbers charred and twisted to spidery wisps before collapsing into the valley, striking the frozen ground in an eruption of sparks. Jarom mused that the rising smoke must have been visible to John Marshall Harlan, certifying to all the outcome of the race.

  But Harlan seemed unwilling to concede. Before the fire petered out, Jarom heard shots ahead and learned that Harlan’s cavalry had caught up with the southbound column at a ford on Rolling Fork just south of Bardstown. As Jarom prodded Rattler into freezing water that fortunately did not rise about the horse’s fetlocks, he saw flashes from Harlan’s cavalry, whose troopers had dismounted and taken cover behind piles of driftwood that had accumulated upstream. A great confusion of horses thrashed about in the river as Jarom and others rushed across the exposed space and broke for the screen of trees south of the water. Duke and the rear guard, with help from Palmer’s artillery, which unlimbered on the safe side of the water, held the advance long enough for everyone else to cross.

  Then word came that Duke had been hit by some shell fragments and was believed dead. Thomas Quirk, Jarom learned later, carried him unconscious to the nearest farmhouse where he impressed a carriage, stuffed it with mattresses, and drove to Bardstown in search of a doctor. Next morning Duke miraculously reappeared, swathed in bandages like a Hindu, but alive. Under a heap of blankets he lounged in the buggy on a bed of feathers. The fragment tore out a chunk of skin and bone behind his right ear but hadn’t injured his brain, another wonder of survival.

  Leaving the rail line, Morgan turned south through Bardstown and Lebanon, rushing to prevent his pursuers from getting between him and Tennessee. In this second race Jarom knew the finish line to be the Cumberland River. If they could reach it first, Harlan would be unable to cut them off.

  What Morgan had not reckoned on was changeable weather. Late in the afternoon of December 30 the skies unleashed a snowstorm, a blinding swill of cascading snow that covered the roads and everything it touched. After midnight the snow turned to icy rain, encasing Rattler in a glacial sheath. The cold razored through Jarom’s new fur-lined gloves so that they might as well have been cotton. He petitioned the invisible gods that presided over armies, asking them what misbehavior merited this punishment. Because the pursuit had not slowed, those pursued could not pause to build fires and shelter themselves from the nipping wind. Jarom felt his fingers and toes going numb. When he tried to dismount to pee, he found his boots frozen to his stirrups. He had to beat them with the butt of his carbine to prize them loose.

  That night was the worst he could remember. Icicles formed on Rattler’s mane. Owen had daggers of ice protruding from his nostrils, the same ice that froze the mucus in Rattler’s nasal cavities, giving him the appearance of having tusks belonging to some hulking creature arrived from the first age of mammals. The shards crystallized in beards and mustaches like mean teeth, giving everyone an aspect of ghoulishness. Jarom’s eyelashes froze. To fight the cold, he pulled out his knife and cut a hole in his blanket to form a crude poncho, draping the excess over Rattler as best he could. Where his calves rubbed against Rattler’s flanks, wherever hide touched skin, he felt a primal heat that mammals must have shared in the first ancient cuddling of man and beast for mutual survival. They rode through the night. The driving sleet bit into Jarom’s hands and gnawed his skin raw. Along the way men periodically dismounted to stomp circulation back into their frostbitten feet and clap lifeblood back into their hands.

  On New Year’s Eve, after almost thirty-six hours in the saddle with only two brief stops for rest, the column halted in Campbellsville, where foragers discovered a large commissary. Since no one had eaten a solid meal for over two days, the men fell on this godsend, forgetting discipline and rank in the press to restore heat to their bodies. Finding a large cauldron used to scald hogs, someone made a stew, throwing in chunks of meat, whole onions, unskinned potatoes, hardtack called worm castles, and tins of sardines, from whose label a Neptune with trident grinned. Taking shelter with others in a barn, Jarom stuffed himself and then burrowed into a heap of men who spooned themselves together for warmth, waking the next day to an even colder first day of 1863. He thought nothing of the fact that those with whom he bundled were males, though he would have preferred an ample woman, a pretty one.

  That afternoon as they rode over a bleak landscape of stubbled fields and wooded ridges, the faintest sound of distant thunder jolted Jarom from his stupor. He looked up at the cloudless sky, its color the dull gray of stoneware. He did not learn until days later that they’d heard a cannonade nearly seventy-five miles away as Bragg challenged Rosecrans at Stone’s River. Two days later they crossed the Cumberland to safety. Tom Hines worked up a report of the damage they had wrought and shared it with the men: thirty-five miles of wrecked track, including three depots and two thousand two hundred ninety feet of bridging. Prisoners in the sum of eighteen hundred seventy-seven had been captured in addition to huge stores of much-needed rations and ammunition. They had broken, at least temporarily, the vital linkage between Louisville and Nashville. Frank Owen, a punster in the style of famed Louisville newspaper editor George D. Prentice, made a joke of it.

  “Now, for a change,” he said, “the feds’ll go unfed.”

  FURLOUGH

  A week after what became known as the Christmas Raid, Jarom felt an irresistible pull toward home, at least toward Mollie Thomas. Though he had sent and received several letters, he hadn’t seen her for the better part of two years. Exploiting whatever goodwill he had accrued for his service, he asked for permission to visit his family in not-too-distant Logan County. To his surprise, he was granted the week he needed. But instead of returning to Nancy Bradshaw or Mary Tibbs, headstrong, he took out for Nelson County, twice the distance he had pro
posed and triple the risk. At the time, he felt the lie was a small price to pay for the reward of seeing Mollie. Though he had no way of contacting her beforehand and no assurance she would be there when he arrived, he resolved to make a try. But if careful, if lucky, if fast, he might be able to see her face and return intact in time for duty.

  So it was that in the second week of Old Christmas in early 1863, Jarom set eyes on Mollie for the first time since enlisting. The weather had turned snapping cold after a few almost balmy days, and on the way he had a mishap, which he later read as an ill omen. When he crossed the platter of ice that covered Green River, Rattler, on whom he increasingly relied, lost his footing as he clambered up the bank, pitching both of them onto the pleated ground, whose frozen ridges drew blood from Jarom’s knee. Feeling himself toppling, his weight shifting, he was able to escape greater injury by cushioning the fall with his arms so that he scuffed his hands and thigh along the ice. They seared with pain.

  But Rattler got the worst of it. In falling he broke the crown of one of his long anterior teeth, gashing his nether lip. His legs splayed, and Jarom had to tug and push the horse against the bank before the animal gained enough traction to stand up. But no bones had been broken so far as Jarom could see. A spoor of hashed-up ground recorded the mishap. Rattler’s hooves, useless on ice, chiseled white grooves that etched his struggles in a flurry of swirls and gouges. For the remainder of the ride they shared their suffering, Jarom catching an awful cold that burrowed into his chest and did not loosen its grip for weeks. At times he felt that a wing of the federal army had invaded his lungs, driving tent stakes and making a drill ground of his chest.