He was feeling a little better when he reached the Thomas farm just at dark after two and a half days’ ride. The trees to either side of the house stood thinner than he remembered them. The wind raked some upper limbs against the eaves, making the sound of a dry pen against paper. Someone had drawn the curtains on the parlor windows, but a light shone in one upstairs. After unsaddling Rattler in the barn and helping himself to some hay for the famished horse, he cut back toward the darkened rear of the house, taking a shortcut through what remained of a vegetable garden where he tangled his feet in a snarl of vines, some balls of shriveled squash still clinging to the stems. Another omen.
The moon reflected light enough for him to see his blue shadow as he crossed the yard and rapped on the back door, loud enough to be heard but not urgent or menacing. Mrs. Thomas, an oil lamp in her hand, stepped back as she opened the door. As he entered the lean-to kitchen, Jarom felt a wave of brightness and warmth. Mrs. Thomas studied him a moment before the corners of her mouth smiled in recognition.
“Well, praise glory!” she said. “It’s you. When I heard the knock, I said to myself, well, here’s another poor refugee come for potluck and some lazy time by my stove.”
Pulling him inside, she made a fuss, taking his muddy surtout and prodding him to the parlor where Mollie had just risen from the settee in the firelit room, a pile of knitting on the lap stool beside her.
Mollie hesitated slightly. Then she recognized him and summoned a smile. She smiled again and took a step or two toward him. Her hair was pinned back on the nape of her neck in a way he hadn’t seen it. Her skin seemed paler, and the shawl over her shoulders made her look frailer than she was. She stood five foot, two inches and, nearly sixteen, seemed on the verge of womanhood but still mostly child. As he took her hand almost formally, he felt a chill, certain that either she was sick or recovering from sickness. He compared her face with the one fixed in memory. The skin around her eyes seemed drawn, the face less playful, somehow more knowing, her expression coming into alignment with the world.
She said she was so glad to see him, and that she had no notion of where he’d been, whether he was well or wounded, whole or in parts. She said she was certain he would tell her about all that. But for now she was happy to see him standing before her alive and entire.
“I’m well enough,” he told her, “but I’ve been places I couldn’t describe to you. You don’t look well yourself.”
“I’ve been down with the influenza, but Mama says I’m nearly back to normal.”
This explained the pallor. Jarom remembered the old joke about one messmate inquiring about his comrade’s recovery: “Is he back to normal?” he asked. “No sir,” said the other, “but he’s back to himself.” And that was enough for Jarom. She was, he decided, both herself and not herself. Something in the green eyes, in the pressure of her hand, told him she was not the same person he had left so many months ago.
After what seemed only a few seconds Mrs. Thomas came into the room, still smiling. She carried a plate of warmed-over biscuits from which little spouts of steam rose. She told him that Mr. Thomas was off to the east fighting with the Army of Northern Virginia. As Jarom helped himself, she asked a few polite questions about the fighting, especially rumors that the war would be over by summer. Jarom gave her the expected brave words and improvised weak answers. The truth was he couldn’t imagine the war, at least his war, ending at all, so he said something about having come too far to back off now and let the matter die a natural death. She said she had made up a bed for him in the spare room at the top of the stairs. Then she left the room again, not before asking Jarom if he wanted some buttermilk. Jarom thanked her and said he’d had enough, thank you, and he heard her going up the hall toward the kitchen, located in the lean-to addition at the rear of the house.
Before he could begin to speak his heart to Mollie, Mrs. Thomas came back with her knitting basket, seating herself by the fire. She stayed, Jarom decided, part as sentinel, part as curious listener and retailer of news. He imagined she must be very lonely and worried sick over the fitness of her husband, a man in his forties, to withstand the rigors of hard rations and exposure to the elements, not to mention the possibility of being shot or blown to pieces.
Jarom hadn’t noticed the three gold bands she wore on her wrists until they started clicking as her flashing needles began to punctuate the conversation. Asked what she was knitting, she said a pair of socks for her husband with a double heel in anticipation of hard wear. She said she would trust them in a parcel to the mails and pray they reached him in Virginia. But Jarom also suspected that now she knitted them for him, the surer hands, the surer feet. It would be like her not to tell him until satisfied they would suit. He would know in the morning. She sat off to herself and pretended to be oblivious, but over the clicking of the gold bands Jarom knew she latched onto every word.
Mollie, as if anticipating what her mother wanted to know, asked a spate of questions about the war—where he had been and what he was doing, the words strangely animated coming out of the tired face. Jarom answered as vaguely as he could, describing how he had become separated from Morgan’s command and had been weeks unsuccessfully trying to rejoin it. He explained that once he was back in Kentucky he found it difficult to get back to Tennessee. Federals or self-appointed regulators nested on every hilltop, guarded every ford and crossroads. The limited Confederate presence consisted of a few irregular units banded together more for survival than initiative. The needlework would stop as Mrs. Thomas took in the more vital pieces of information.
As for the fighting, he referred to one or two skirmishes, downplaying the danger. He tried to give the impression that he spent most of his time in camp, far removed from the actual fighting. He said he had hankered to be in uniform again with the remnants of Morgan’s mounted infantry, manning his battery and waiting out the end of the war when he could come honorably home.
Mollie, ignorant of what he’d seen and done, kept coming back to risks, asking how he’d managed to keep out of harm’s way, whether he’d found enough to eat, whether he’d pinched himself in what she’d called “tight places.” Jarom sensed that the question she could never quite bring herself to ask was whether he had another sweetheart. She seemed less concerned with what he’d done than with what might be done to him if wounded or captured.
What attracted him to her most, he suspected, was her innocence, her insulation from the war. Armies were massed and closing in on what remained of the Confederacy in the east and a few concentrations of defense in the west. Scattered episodes of violence occurred daily in almost every county of the state. Not yet sixteen, unfamiliar with war except for what she’d picked up in gossip from neighbors or gleaned from newspapers, she was an island of purity, undefiled by politics and mayhem. Sometimes Jarom thought he was drawn to her more for what she wasn’t than for what she was.
What kept her alive in his thoughts? He had no ready answer. But over the months he had found himself obsessed with her, the notion of someone whose existence was not touched by the death and carnage he had witnessed all around him. After much pondering he suspected his own desire for escape fueled the romance, his desire to protect someone who needed protecting. At times he felt more like an older brother than a lover. She was petite, her figure slight under the billowing skirts, her breasts more gesture than swell. She came to represent for him all that he himself was not—innocent, expectant, genuinely sanguine about the prospect of a long and promising life.
In moments of revelation, he confessed to himself that his fixing on her stemmed in part from the things he had watched dissolve in his life. He likened the loss to a block of salt he had carried to the pasture for Mary Tibbs. The first few times he saw it, he found it cubed and white, but over the weeks its edges rounded, the squared planes scalloped from the pink tongues that would eventually lick it down to nothing.
He could not tell her about his bitterness over Patterson’s blinding, about his resolve to
kill all his enemies he could, so he told one sweet lie after another. While she eagerly described the future she imagined, he estimated the chances of seeing her again or his odds of surviving the war, the Confederacy obviously losing ground. In his brightest moments, he saw the two of them in a clean, high-ceilinged house, surrounded by rough but tillable fields, a team of draft horses standing in harness. He peopled this dream with sons and at least one daughter. When he couldn’t visualize himself as a turner of earth, he created a variation in which they would move to town where he would clerk in a store, later start a business of his own. What kind he couldn’t imagine. Even the details of the house he would build would not reduce to particulars, the image of it founded on incidental details—clumps of bridal-wreath spirea and rosebushes, a wide porch, big trees in whose shade they would have picnics. What varieties of trees he didn’t know. The plan of the house, its dimensions, even its building material, he could not envision.
Mrs. Thomas finally rose from her knitting and announced that she must get to bed. As she put the snicking needles into her sewing basket, the room went awkwardly still. She excused herself, wishing Jarom a snug sleep in his featherbed and commenting about not having to take his repose this night on the cold, hard ground. She gave her daughter a knowing look, half admonition, half indulgence, then excused herself. She stuck her head in the door a few moments later, as though she’d forgotten something.
“Mr. Clarke must be pretty well played out,” she said to Mollie from the doorway. “Don’t keep him up too long.”
They heard her reach the landing before Jarom began to speak his heart, knowing Mollie would be expected to leave in a few minutes.
“There’re times,” he told her, “when I try to imagine what you are doing. Sometimes you’re sewing or reading a book. Other times you’re collecting eggs in the henhouse or just sitting under the tall elm out front.”
He stifled the impulse to confide that even if he survived the war, things would never be the same, and that everyone, even those who had never been in earshot of a rifle, carried wounds that would never mend completely. He realized now that the most lasting wounds were never visible, drew no blood. Patterson carried both visible and invisible wounds, and no one could give him back his view of the yard or let him select for himself what color socks he would wear. Jarom couldn’t bring himself to mention the reality that both of them understood at some level—that the South teetered, trying to keep its feet in a fight it could never win, its vitality eroding in the way that salt block had melted to a cube no larger than a butter mold, a snuffbox, a button of bone.
He changed the subject, asking about her mother’s health, how she managed on the farm. She told him how hard it had been for her mother to take on her father’s chores in addition to her own—seeing that the stock were fed, the corn picked, shocked, and shucked, the horses shod and trimmed, and keeping up with the random demands of mending fence or rehanging a gate, patching the roof of the henhouse, replacing a wagon wheel. She had helped her mother, she said, as much as she could.
He took her hand. As the two of them sat staring into the fire and wondering what would happen next, Jarom suddenly sensed this might be the last time he would see her. He wanted to prolong the moment, at least to memorize everything as it was: the plaid shawl across the narrow shoulders, the light as it shone on her forehead, the steadiness of her pale green eyes, the color of the underside of the leaf on the water maple. One forefinger unconsciously twirled and untwirled a piece of fringe on the shawl. The other hand, which Jarom’s covered, curled over the knob of the chair arm. The smallest crease in her skirt seemed crucial to record, every nod and gesture, even the marbling of veins on the underside of her wrist. Knowing what he knew, he wanted this night to last. He wanted to commit her every breath and movement to some ledger in his mind that he could thumb through to restore the instant, recover each word. He would have been content to sit the night studying her across the hearth as she dozed.
“If I don’t go upstairs,” she said about half past eleven, “she will come down.”
He took her hand again, feeling the warmth restored in her fingers, seeing some color in her cheeks now. As she stood up to move toward the doorway to the hall, he stepped toward her. For a moment she kept her stride, then stopped abruptly. She started to say something when he cupped her chin and drew her close, her swishing skirts resolving themselves after the legs stopped moving. He felt the upper half of her body melt into his. Her hair smelled faintly of smoke, a scent of woodiness he knew he would remember. Before kissing her, he felt her warm breath on his cheek, the small breasts appling into his chest. Though he knew what he knew, he promised he would come back. She looked him in the eye, then floated up the stairs, turning for an instant to glance at him over her shoulder as she turned the landing.
Next morning when she came down for breakfast, Jarom felt the invisible screen erected between them again. Mrs. Thomas, dressed in clothes she would not ordinarily have worn anywhere but church, flitted in and out, pouring something that tasted vaguely like coffee and asking nervous questions to break the silences. She hovered over them, protective and smothering. When the sun broke through the grayness, he could not put off going any longer. He bundled up again and made his way across the frost-hardened yard to the barn where he saddled Rattler, breaking ice in the water trough so he could drink.
He stopped at the house only long enough to thank Mrs. Thomas, who presented him with a thick new pair of gray woolen socks, the thickest he’d ever seen. He could imagine the snug feel of them in his boots. He thanked her and she went inside, leaving Mollie on the porch, the shawl clasped tightly at her throat. He could still see her waving, one hand clasping the shawl, one raised in a gesture of farewell, as he twisted back in the saddle, Rattler’s clip-clops erasing whatever it was she shouted. As he rode the rest of that morning, he carried the image of her in that high-ceilinged room, light playing across her face, bright eyes rising from the fire.
DOLDRUMS
Safely returned from Nelson County, Jarom settled into life at the other end of the dipper, a long period of inactivity while Morgan waited for the thermometer to inch its way into spring. He wrote some letters to his relations in Kentucky and received two back, one from Mary Tibbs, one from Mollie. As winter dragged into late February, he discovered himself, as Patterson so aptly said, low in his mind. At odd times during the day Patterson would appear to him unbidden, a blindfold over his eyes, a crooked stick in his hand. One day, commenting on his hair, which Jarom had let grow long—perhaps because Patterson had been his barber—an effeminate young blade named Ira Crune played up to him and asked him if he wanted to take a walk some evening. Perplexed and caught off guard, Jarom quickly spurned him. Crune responded by getting huffy and calling him a tease.
For recreation he played faro and learned the fundamentals of five-and seven-card stud with Owen and several other messmates, holed up in one of the perpetually cold oilcloth shelters. He read whatever came to hand, old Nashville papers, an occasional Harper’s with its abbreviated and often biased accounts of battles to the east of them in Virginia. He read and reread a dog-eared copy of Mr. Dickens’s Great Expectations. Drawn to the orphaned Pip, he had a fascinated repulsion for Miss Havisham, who because of being jilted on her wedding day, felt cheated in life and hated all men. When he read that she stopped all the clocks on the hour of her betrayal, he felt a perverse kinship with her. Hadn’t his own expectations been betrayed in that pistol flash along the road near Slaughtersville? For weeks he simply went through the most frugal and cursory motions of survival. He ate sad rations, he slept, he drilled, he wrote, he took walks and did his time on picket duty. He played stud poker with a deck from which several cards were missing and read the omission as another metaphor for his life’s emerging pattern.
In the early spring of that year, 1863, someone received in the mail a copy of a book titled Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men, written by a Bluegrass bluestocking named Sa
lly Rochester Ford. For a week around the campfire Tom Hines read it aloud to anyone who would listen. To Jarom’s thinking, the book demonstrated beyond dispute that Mrs. Ford had not been among the horsemen at Muldraugh’s Hill or skirmished with Harlan’s cavalry. She depicted Morgan as a gray knight, high minded and honor bound, a man who could do no wrong. His men had consecrated themselves to a cause that included a courtly code, gratuitous risk-taking, and grand gestures. Listening with the others, he found it syrupy and artificial. Though familiar with most of the names given its characters, he wasn’t attuned to the personalities she’d given them. The book had all the qualities needed to fuel the illusions of the loyal ladies who read it, sparing them from stinks, the rancid meat, the gore of a field hospital, the fear with which any soldier in either army slept and woke. She depicted John Morgan as an Ivanhoe who surrounded himself with champions of virtue and manly prowess. She peopled her cast of villains with caricatures of abolitionists, turncoats, defeatists, skulkers, and unleashed tyrants. She inseminated her plot with impossible feats, abductions, and daring rescues—Sir Walter Scott transferred to the American heartland and his characters given names that any American reader would recognize. Her account of Morgan’s forays, Jarom concluded, amounted to a flattering diversion, her account of the December raid a romantic journey down roads neither he nor she had ever traveled.
THE GREAT RAID
In late June, Morgan moved what he called his mounted infantry north again, this time on a raid that extended to Ohio and Indiana. Toward Bardstown and north toward Brandenburg, where they crossed into Ohio, they rode for a short time without challenge through country flush in full summer, hay fields up to their waists, corn tasseling, fat cattle clumping under great shade trees. With great good luck Quirk and his scouts captured two steamboats and used them to ferry horses and men across the gray expanse of the Ohio.
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