Reining Rattler in, Jarom stared into the rising mist for a view of the far bank, the steamy shreds drawn into coves and pockets along the Indiana shore. At first all he could see of the alien place he had escaped were several chartreuse fields rising to the darker treeline on the bluffs. That world had soft edges, blue wings of vapor clinging to the riverbanks. In the bottoms, patches of corn scalloped into slopes and rose to bluffs too steep for tillage, now pasturage. He could make out a few humps like terrapins that he knew to be haystacks from a first cutting. Three-quarters of the way up, a wall of fieldstone ran roughly parallel to the base of the hill. Behind it he saw ranks of sticklike figures he remembered from Donelson, their rifles like bristles on some slithering beast behind a stack of rocks. One longer stick held a limp scrap of cloth. Off to one side stood a fieldpiece from whose mouth spurted fire and a collar of black smoke, the hollow boom rolling down the hillside, through a screen of white-topped sycamores, and across the swollen river, the sound heard an instant before it clapped against his ears. Off to the right a bouquet of white rose from the water, ruffling the swell with a bull’s-eye of widening concentric rings. From the Kentucky shore came the bark of one of Palmer’s Parrots, lifting several bushels of Indiana and promoting a general scramble to the rear.
The squadron disembarked and formed quickly into mounted columns. Once ashore, they met no resistance until they reached Corydon, where defenders threw up a barricade across the road. Morgan gave orders, and Jarom saw a body of men sweep toward the barricade, driving the defenders into houses along the route. As they advanced, he counted eight of the cavalry dead and estimated thirty wounded. Incensed, Morgan turned his foragers loose on the business district to liberate what they wanted from the shops and store windows.
Astride Rattler, Jarom watched as troopers lugged out sacks of fresh bread, cheese, butter, preserves, canned peaches, berries, and bottles of wine cordial—commodities they had not seen or tasted in months. Several filled their canteens with buttermilk, which formed a white foam around their mouths when they drank. Dismounting, he joined some men carving a beef from someone’s larder. He helped himself, making a sandwich of cold roast, and took some swigs of cider from an earthenware jug making the rounds. The jubilation ended when Tom Hines, having located the telegraph office, arrived with news that Lee had retreated after a battle fought near a town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg. He also brought news that a pursuit had formed outside Corydon, making it necessary to move eastward toward the town of Salem.
After they routed a party of home guards at Salem, Jarom rode down a side street with John Carrico, an older married man who replaced Estin Polk as rammer in Jarom’s old battery. Bells from several churches clanged the age-old signal of alarm. Pointing up the street, Carrico leaned over to get Jarom’s attention.
“What do you suppose that rascal up there is trying to do?” he asked.
Jarom at first saw no one but a bonneted woman in full skirts shuffling into the shadow of a porch. Farther up the street, he spied two men trying to bridle a skittish horse. Beyond them, the street seemed deserted.
“I don’t see anyone but those men with the horse,” he said.
“No,” said Carrico, “I mean by that big tree over there,” pointing again.
Now Jarom saw him, a wiry man in a blue vest coming out of the smithy’s next to what appeared to be a public stable. He jogged up one side of the street, balancing an extended shovel before him in an effort not to drop an orange coal the size of a cantaloupe.
“Let’s see what he’s about,” Jarom shouted back, and the two of them set off at a canter up the street.
They saw Blue Vest turn and regard them, stopping for a few moments like some inveterate idler caught with a work implement in his hand. Jarom knew something was amiss when Blue Vest hastened his step and looked back over his shoulder while Jarom and Carrico closed the distance between them. Once, as he looked, the man stumbled and nearly fell, the shovel still miraculously balanced in his hands. Quickly recovering, he started a kind of awkward scooting so as not to lose his balance, the shovel before him as though it carried something precious.
“Stop, you!” Carrico shouted, as they approached within twenty yards of him. “I command you to stop!”
The man kept running.
“Drop that shovel and stop,” Carrico shouted, “or I’ll shoot you as you run.” Jarom looked over and saw that he’d raised the hammer, sighting on the man’s back.
Abruptly, the runner stopped, the shovel with its glowing cantaloupe still extended. He stood before them panting, an athletic-looking boy about Jarom’s age with long dark hair slicked back over his ears. His chest heaved, but his face held the composure of the righteous as Jarom imagined them, martyrs extending their arms for the nails, their necks for the noose.
“Where you off to in such a rush?” Carrico said casually, his right hand with the pistol in it resting on the pommel of his saddle.
“I was trying to get home,” Blue Vest said, shrugging and glancing up the street where Jarom could see the cupola of the courthouse on a shaded green.
Jarom and Carrico remained unconvinced.
“Why the fire?” Carrico asked.
No answer.
Suddenly, what the man was up to dawned on Jarom.
“Hold him till I get back,” he said to Carrico.
Neatly rotating Rattler, he spurred up the street toward the courthouse about sixty or seventy yards away. On the shaded lawn four or five citizens stooped over some sort of contraption. Bells still clanged, and Jarom heard more shots fired farther down the street. In the confusion, the men didn’t spot Jarom until he’d closed with them, only several horse lengths away. Too late, two of them broke toward the courthouse door. Two others, a lanky man in dusty jeans and a pudgy man, his head bald and smooth as a white onion, threw up their hands.
“Don’t shoot us, mister,” said the pudgy man, “don’t shoot.” His dark suit suggested an official of some kind, a judge or maybe someone employed at a bank.
Between them, buffed and shining, perched a miniature brass swivel, a cannon so small it might be taken for a toy or a salesman’s model. Mounted on a stone pedestal, it could swing on its axis in any direction. At a glance Jarom saw it was charged and pointed in the direction from which he’d just come.
“It’s ceremonial,” the pudgy man said by way of apology, “used only on holidays and celebrations.” He had the look of a man who lied and knew others knew it.
“What day are we celebrating?” Jarom shot back.
Again, no answer. His lanky comrade, who had found his courage but not his voice, glared at Jarom now, his eyes fixed on the dark eyelet of the leveled pistol. Using his pistol as a baton, Jarom waved the two of them away from the swivel.
Jarom yelled back to Carrico, jogging up the street with some other riders, their pistols held handy over their heads. They reined in, climbing off their huffing horses to admire the swivel, which, despite its age and probable origins aboard some antique vessel in times equally uncertain, seemed capable of firing. Carrico, who had an aptitude for things mechanical, began to dismantle the swivel from its carriage, removing the tapered muzzle from atop the stone pedestal. Someone else went off with the lanky prisoner for tools, and in minutes the three of them hoisted and lashed the swivel across the saddle on Rattler’s back. When Jarom presented it to Adam Johnson later that day, Johnson congratulated him and made a lame jest about collecting stovepipes.
After having the horses fed and cared for, Morgan ordered the telegraph lines cut and the railroad depot burned as well as a bridge over the nearby Blue River, to slow pursuit. He then discreetly disappeared while both brigades methodically plundered the town. Jarom, who had previously witnessed lawlessness only on a modest scale, looked on as troopers broke into buildings and removed valuables as frightened storekeepers stood helplessly by. Jarom interpreted the plundering as the natural climax of frustration and fear that preyed on the men, in part owing to the in
tensely hot weather and in part to the brandy and other spirits found on store shelves and in the local tavern.
Carrico brought a demijohn of homemade wine fetched from someone’s cellar and offered Jarom a taste. Grasping the large bottle with both hands, he upended it and clenched his lips for a tentative sip. It reminded him of fruit juice with an edge, its scent reminiscent of blackberries, neither sweet nor sour but strangely fortified. Taking several swigs as the wickered bottle made its rounds, he began to feel a little dizzy. After several more swallows, he felt tipsy, experiencing a lightness as though the blood had drained from his head to pulse against the skin of his cheeks and forehead.
After a time he felt an agreeable giddiness as though he’d been stone-struck in the head, but painlessly. He eased down against a tree and laughed at everything that was said, having trouble following the dips and swervings of the talk, which seemed vaguely to center on who would win the war. When several of the topers got up and began rummaging about a sundries and dry goods store, he joined them, tossing things around until they’d wrecked the place.
A list of the culprits could be compiled by inspecting them as they rode. One man in Duke’s brigade traveled with seven pairs of ice skates about his neck. Another ladened himself with sleigh bells, great leather belts of bells the size of a two-bit piece, which an officer made him discard because they announced the column’s whereabouts for some distance in all directions. A corporal in his company accumulated the most plunder, items packed in his saddle roll and strung from his pommel. Jarom speculated that Stickyfingers had equipped himself to host a banquet in the field or set up a sundries shop. Jarom ran an inkless inventory of the items attached to the corporal’s person or fixed to his kit: a large chafing dish, a medium-sized Dutch clock, a green glass decanter with glasses to match, a bag of horn buttons, bolts of calico, and a cage with three canaries. When quizzed about the canaries, the corporal had a ready answer.
“They give me a sense of well-being,” he said, “a feeling of tranquility.”
After two days and some gentle persuasion from his messmates, the rescuer of birds left the sole survivor with a Christian lady at a farmhouse along the road.
Jarom brought off a pair of binoculars he thought would help him sight artillery or at least spot trouble coming. On a whim he also picked up a piece of china that reminded him of his aunt’s Sunday dinners. The pink rose heads, turned in symmetrical patterns and connected to pale stems and stylized vines, gave him a sense of permanency and order in a world that seemed to lack both. He wrapped it carefully in his blanket. Each time he looked at it he saw Aunt Mary in her kitchen serving him slices of baked ham or a breast of chicken. He carried it successfully for days until one night he opened the folds and found it broken into five pieces. Even then, he couldn’t throw the fragments away.
RECROSSING THE RIVER
Jarom could remember all the particulars of the last time he saw Hunt Morgan before enemy cavalry captured the great man. The general was sitting comfortably on the gallery of a crossroads store where troopers stopped to fill their canteens at the well. Though everyone in his command knew that his old enemy Colonel Frank Wolford of the First Kentucky Cavalry had joined the pursuit, he seemed relaxed and good humored. He had opened his tailored wool jacket and pulled off his boots. His forehead and nose shone tomato red from the summer sun that beat down on them all. Except for the uniform, he might have been a local farmer escaping the heat for a few minutes while the storekeeper filled his grocery order.
Adam Johnson joined him for a few minutes and later reported the conversation to Jarom. Morgan, nothing if not a gentleman, first asked Johnson to sit down and rest. Johnson pulled over a chair, though nervous apprehension harried him and fed his anxiety about whether they could recross the river before Frank Wolford attacked in force. After hearing his concerns, Morgan thanked him and gave assurances that his worries were groundless.
“By this time tomorrow,” Morgan said, “we’ll all be secure on Southern soil. The river is only twenty-five miles away and no one, not even Frank Wolford, is close enough to stop us.”
Johnson admitted that he could only shrug and accept the general’s assessment when he actually wanted to wail in exasperation. Others had told him that nothing could penetrate the general’s shield of self-confidence, and now he believed it.
Johnson had small satisfaction when he reached the ford to find the shallow bars covered with high water from heavy rains upstream, the ford itself guarded by a ragtag band of ad hoc militia with supporting artillery.
That night while Jarom and several other pickets sat under some trees by the road listening to crickets and the pained sonatas of tree frogs, they heard an indefinite rustling in the woods, the slightest interruption of what might have been the creaking of leather and the collective weight of multiple hooves muffled in the leaf fall, the slightest break in the natural rhythms, more felt than heard. As they listened, he thought he heard the dinging of metal on metal, a horse snorting, once even a distant voice. Someone fetched the captain, who sent word back to Morgan that enemy cavalry were bearing down on them.
The captain directed Jarom and the others to hide themselves along the road and hold fire until they heard a shot from his pistol. When the first riders appeared as shapeless shadows in the darkened road maybe thirty yards away, the captain fired. The roadway erupted with jets of fire, and flashes spit back and forth in the darkness. Jarom raised his Colt, aimed it toward the flashes, and tripped the hammer, the concussion lifting his barrel with each shot. He fired until he emptied both his revolvers. He heard agonized screams on the road, proof certain that some of the men and horses had fallen. Like pranksters caught in some feat of vandal stealth, the mass of riders turned back and raced down the road in a jumble of men and horses.
Jarom woke next morning in the perfect stillness of dawn. Around him, tentless, slept hundreds of blanketed forms, a few stirring in the half-light. Someone was coughing, and a crow cawed in the river bottom. Rolling up his blanket and securing it on Rattler’s back, he stood on the bluff and looked out across the river where he made out the dim outline of ridges, a gray succession of furrow and hump in what he knew must be Virginia. The camp stirred now, and some musicians, as if divining the moment’s serenity, began strumming sentimental tunes on their stolen guitars. Someone took up a fiddle, and a hundred voices began singing a popular song that Jarom recognized as “Juanita,” followed by a patriotic rendering of “My Old Kentucky Home.”
A crackling of gunfire interrupted “The Hills of Tennessee,” and Jarom rushed to take his place in the battle line he knew would be forming. Clapping the saddle on Rattler’s back, he hitched himself up by the stirrup and followed others down the bluff to the flats near the river. At midriver he saw a shallow-draft sternwheeler, artillery pieces protruding from makeshift armor strapped to its sides, twin stacks rising through the threads of river mist. As the vapors lifted, the boat started tossing shells on the encampment, now full of scampering men. At the same time, the cavalry they had routed the night before advanced on the rear of the column. Duke and his men rode back to hold them off while Morgan and the main body took to the water, forcing their reluctant horses to swim. Morgan himself had crossed halfway when, apparently deeming the effort futile, he turned back to lead those not in the water north in search of another crossing.
Prodding Rattler down the bank, Jarom hit the water. The unexpected coldness sent a shock through his arms and legs that left him gasping. Ahead, he could make out Adam Johnson hanging around the neck of his Texas-bred stallion, water up to their necks so that they seemed bodiless survivors of some beneficent guillotine that left the heads with life yet in them. Jarom winced as he felt the water stab through his clothes and settle in his crotch and upper thighs. Upriver, beyond Buffington Island, he could see several spouts of smoke rising ominously above the river. More gunboats. To his left, a man in a wide-brimmed hat, hugging the neck of a stolen Norman horse that struggled to keep its no
se above the swell of water, shouted that he couldn’t swim. His hat had been dunked and clearly he’d lost his gear in the current.
“Hold on!” Jarom shouted, as he heeled Rattler in the flanks to steer toward him, reining him to the left. “Hold on! I’m coming.”
This assurance did not visibly soothe the panic in the rider’s eyes. Jarom interpreted his expression as I-am-drowning, I-am-drowning. The rider clasped his arms in a death hold around the horse’s neck, the big horse itself choking and beginning to fail.
“Let go the neck!” Jarom shouted as he closed the distance between them. “Grab hold of the saddle,” he said more calmly. “Let your horse do the swimming.”
But the heavy Norman draft horse, already succumbing, turned on its side and barged into Rattler, nearly dragging the four of them under. Jarom envisioned them all being sucked into the roiling waters, his bleached white remains eventually washing up on one of the piles of drift that collected along the riverbank, his clacking bones lashed by the reins to Rattler, whose once muscular haunches had slackened to a ghost of their former shape.
The rider, a stranger to Jarom, gave him an imploring look, a wordless but emphatic plea for deliverance. Sliding off Rattler’s downriver flank, Jarom grabbed the cantle of the drowning man’s saddle and paddled alongside, coaxing Rattler and palming the water with one hand, as he slowly towed the three of them—the larger horse, the terrified rider, and Jarom himself—toward the Virginia shore. In that welter of struggling forms, distracted by booming gunboats, by shouts of the wounded and drowning, Jarom fixed on the fringe of shorn trees that marked a return to the solid element on which men and horses were condemned and blessed to tread.
A few yards short of the bank, Jarom felt his feet touch bottom. Seconds later, he sensed a shifting of weight as both horses found their footing again and heaved upward almost involuntarily, trembling, dripping, spent. Unsnarling the reins, Jarom led them out onto a sandbar. Exhausted, resisting the clinging weight of water in his clothes, he lugged the waterlogged rider up the bank. Hopelessly distraught, the big man, bearded and burly, scared out of his wits, moaned senselessly. Water ran from the ringlets of his beard as he slowly woke to the prospect of redemption.
Sue Mundy Page 14