“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” he said, “I’m saved.” He focused on Jarom, his deliverer. “There’s no denyin’ I owe you my life. Thank you, thank God.”
When the man made it to his feet, Jarom asked him to take the horses to a copse of scraggly willows a ways from the river. As he turned back toward the water, he saw other horses rising out of the Ohio, shaking their backs with great spasms of relief, their mane-drenched heads swinging from side to side as their hooves found purchase on the bank, reentering a world all their instincts told them they had lost. Now Morgan’s command was divided, one on temporarily safe ground, the other racing to find another crossing. Looking back toward the land of the Buckeyes, Jarom saw a vista of bobbing heads, black lumps protruding across the river’s gray expanse. Someone rowed out in a fisherman’s skiff to pull in those still reachable. Others waded into the shallows to drag the weak ones to safety. At the moment when Jarom felt most relieved, it occurred to him that all of them—those under the trees, those still in the water, those marooned on the Ohio shore—had survived one danger only to face others, and he tasked himself to drag in as many as he could. He knew the soldier’s greatest fear of confronting peril alone.
Feeling a desperate energy, he fished out more of those floundering in the water, expecting any second that the gunboats dropping shells on the Ohio shore would turn their guns toward Virginia. Adam Johnson, heedless of any harm, stood perched on a sandbar. As those that survived the water crawled and scrabbled up the embankment, he ordered each, rider or walker, to rendezvous a quarter mile inland beyond the shells of the gunners. In the confusion, Jarom couldn’t understand Johnson’s gestures and mouthings, but Jarom knew he would be shouting.
Jarom remounted, looking back over the river. He knew that most of those who hadn’t made the crossing likely would soon be prisoners—Duke, Morgan, and Thomas Quirk among the hundreds taken with the prized horse-drawn guns. He knew that most of those in the water were drowned men, their sodden remains being swept off by the current to resurface in some backwater or eddy, nameless, graveless, the features that might identify them bloated and chafed beyond knowing. The multitude of hats floating on the surface of the river brought him low. He had at first mistaken them from a distance for swimmers; they reminded him now of stepping stones, then drifting grave markers. He could see dozens, but he knew to multiply those dozens to hundreds he couldn’t count. He felt a desperate need to inventory his own small store of belongings, some of it certainly at the bottom of the river. As soon as he could, he dismounted and unrolled his blanket, opening the oilcloth packet that contained the shards of china plate and the folded sheet of music, which had a few wet blotches but remained otherwise undamaged. He felt the lucky buckeye in his pocket.
CYNTHIANA
In May 1864, Jarom accompanied his comrades on the march to Saltville, Virginia, where Morgan assumed command of the Department of Southwest Virginia. After being forced to divide his forces on the so-called Great Raid, the general had managed to evade Union cavalry for another week before being captured while trying to cross the river at West Point, Ohio. After several months in captivity, he had escaped from the Ohio State Penitentiary. Morgan had ordered his reorganized forces to Wytheville, Virginia, to fend off an attack from Union forces that penetrated from Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, the passageway between mountains through which Daniel Boone and the first settlers entered Kentucky.
On May 11 at Wytheville, Jarom and others found some citizens, amateurs, trying to maneuver an old six-pounder that belonged to the town. When Morgan took charge of the gun and called for volunteers to man it, Jarom and a man named Davis stepped forward. The episode was the closest Jarom had come to meeting Morgan, who stood by to direct the fire. Their eyes met as Morgan looked on while Jarom and the others wheeled the gun into service.
“Good work, son,” the general said, redirecting his attention to what lay ahead. Jarom felt himself swell with pride, imagining that the addition of the cannon might change the battle.
By summer Jarom found himself among more remnants of Morgan’s command that reassembled at Abingdon, Virginia. By some miracle of goodwill and necessity, Morgan was still in good graces with his superiors. The South badly needed a symbol of boldness and invincibility in the face of losses in almost every department, and Morgan fit the description. The Confederacy was being bled to incapacity by casualties that were irreplaceable and a will to fight that was showing signs of strain. Morgan’s escape seemed a miracle, a tonic for flagging spirits. Several hundred of those outmaneuvered at Buffington Island, a quarter of the men who set out at the beginning of July nearly a year earlier, had been killed or captured.
The losses compelled a reorganization, and Jarom and Frank Owen, who also nearly drowned crossing the Ohio, were reassigned to Captain James Cantrill’s company of Major Cassell’s Second Battalion, a muster of men that contained the core of the “Old Guard,” the veterans who had survived raids, skirmishes, substandard food, and camp diseases. Two other regiments were made up mostly of replacements, many of them eager recruits from the hills of East Tennessee, which was largely loyalist. To Jarom, the replacements seemed a sorry lot: inexperienced, green, many without guns and horses, some without shoes or decent clothes. Like the diminished trees that replaced the forest giants, this timber lacked the stature and growth of the originals. The numbers might increase but not the quality of what had been lost.
Rumor had reached Morgan in late spring that the Union army occupying his hometown of Lexington possessed hundreds of horses, some of them blooded thoroughbreds from the heart of Kentucky horse country. The press to provide his men with mounts justified his drawing his troops from the defense of southwestern Virginia and making another foray into his home state, this one to Lexington. Jarom couldn’t understand how losing a quarter of his command on the last raid had magnified Morgan’s stature in the press and drawn so many recruits. Eight hundred men seemed willing to walk two hundred fifty miles with the prospect of fighting for him and capturing a horse along the way.
As for himself, though he had misgivings about the general’s patience to form and execute a plan, he didn’t doubt Morgan’s pluck or determination. The weather was fine, the trees full-leafed, the pastures lush enough for a first cutting of hay, though with fewer men to cut it. Despite the neglect he saw on several farms, he felt he had entered a land where God purposed to create an ideal against which to compare the places on which He had frowned, the barren and rocky places, the dry and the sterile. Tobacco had been set, and wide fields of corn would soon be tasseling. Few regions of the state or country could match the Bluegrass as a breadbasket to provision an army.
To reach this replica of Eden, the column passed through a land in which God in the guise of sightseer had opted for spectacle over plenty. The landscape paralleled His displeasure at earthly offenses, both real and imagined. The rugged landscape through which they passed represented what a newcomer, seeking to read Providence by its shadows, might construct if the Maker had swept all the scourings from the Blue-grass to this corner of the commonwealth. To get to Eden, they had to pass through a desolate mountainous country in which everything seemed canted, inhospitable to all but a few species of beasts. Jarom likened it to entering the kingdom of the rock, the unscalable cliff, the dried-up creek bed.
Morgan chose this uninviting and unpopulated route through a pass in the crenellated wall of mountains as an entryway, the long column passing through Pound Gap. Atop one of the foothills that rose out of the lowlands, Jarom mapped the topography of narrow valleys, steep ravines with their inevitable rills, and dense wilderness that sprang up wherever a pinch of soil formed to sheathe the stone. Rattler, though acclimated to hardship, strained in such terrain, his hooves seeking solid footing among the scatter of rocks that lay along the route, as though sown by some malevolent strewer who declared man his sworn enemy. If the four-leggeds found the way hard, those who proceeded by shank’s mare, especially the shoeless, suffe
red a greater penalty. Their scrapes and lacerations left records of blood among the flags of rock.
Such rough ground took its toll on the riders too. Passing through this harsh country, Jarom felt a chafing against his thighs that pinched and rashed him until he rode saddlesore. The constant rasp of Rattler’s rocking and swervings along the path wore the skin of his inner thigh raw. Critically in need of reshoeing, Rattler himself seemed in a desperate state, but he plodded on, clopping one hoof in front of the other.
When they came to open country, Jarom felt he had been repatriated to a land of the living, a sweet domain of broad farms and villages. Citizens gathered along the roads sometimes waved. They seemed well fed and secure in their lives, at least as secure as the defenseless could be as rebels passed through their dooryards bent on unseating established authority. Passing beyond a country of knobs and hummocks covered with dense thickets and cedar stands, they encountered more farms tucked into coves and hollows, a more gracious country of gentle rolls and swells. The great clumps of wild roses blooming along the road put Jarom in mind of Beech Grove, where they spouted in white fountains along the fencerows.
The cavalcade reached the outer rim of the inner Bluegrass without mishap. Passing a field overgrown with blackberries whose white blossoms betokened a season of plenty, Jarom felt a sudden pang of homesickness after nearly a year outside his native state. He thought of John Patterson tutoring himself to live with a cane in a world deprived of blooming and the pleasurable architecture of trees. Passing through rolling pastureland and by well-kept farms, he imagined Mary Tibbs performing her daily chores, twisting the neck of a chicken, tending her kitchen garden, patching an old quilt. Mollie Thomas he saw, bonneted and well fed, relaxing in a lawn chair near the Thomas grape arbor.
Jarom and every man in the formation knew the Confederate States of America had all but lost the war in the West and things weren’t going well in the East, though only a few confirmed pessimists would certify the final outcome. His messmates contracted in their relations to the world, hardened themselves—some bitter about the loss of friends, some pining for family, some despairing of ever crossing their own doorstep again. Still, they retained pride in their leaders and a will to carry the fight to their enemies’ strongholds.
“The devil take those who don’t believe we can chew ’em up and swallow ’em,” Frank Owen said, “or at least chase them back to wherever the hell they come from.”
The next opportunity to chase came at Mount Sterling, the last of the mountain counties on the fringe of the Bluegrass, a transitional terrain that partook of both. At the outskirts the column deployed to attack a tent camp of slumbering federals. Unlike the encampments of Morgan and his men, this bivouac had an air of permanency, laid out like candles stacked in a gift box, a grid of canvas cubes that held a pleasing and tempting symmetry.
Taken by surprise at breakfast time, the startled defenders quickly surrendered after Duke’s cavalry enveloped the camp and closed off every means of escape. Jarom captured a portly cook in his shirtsleeves standing with a larded skillet in his hand, a study in bafflement. Jarom next came upon a host of his comrades, who, with little ceremony, helped themselves to their enemies’ breakfast, sitting at their enemies’ camp tables, eating off captured plates with captured utensils. Hungry, he bolted down most of a rasher of bacon and fresh-baked bread, drinking his first cup of coffee in six months, a great tin cup of it sweetened with lumps of genuine sugar. Afterward, the troops marched into Mount Sterling’s business district, where officers looked the other way when the looting began. Towns, even sympathetic towns, had become both commissary and quartermaster to the desperate and needy.
Ashamed to be associated with an army reduced to larceny, Jarom held back. In his own moral primer he made a distinction between depriving his fellow Kentuckians of property and depriving their enemy of theirs in Indiana or Ohio. He stuck on a fine legal distinction between stealing and liberating. Wherever Morgan now went, his men left a wake of dry goods, pieces of furniture, and other household utensils strewn in the street. The same citizens who had welcomed Morgan’s troopers a year ago now stood by in fear and wonder, believers who had seen lapses of discipline degenerate into outright thievery. Some were kin to men in Morgan’s command, cousins and aunts and in-laws, even siblings. No longer able to scoop off the cream, Morgan in desperation had filled his depleted ranks with anyone willing to sign a ledger. He conceded that many of them, unrepentant scoundrels and rank opportunists, lacked any principle of restraint or decency. Jarom wanted no part of it.
When the column arrived at Lexington, thirty or so miles to the west, Morgan didn’t find the rumored five thousand horses. Though Morgan took the town with little resistance and destroyed some government property, in the end Jarom felt fortunate to come away uncaptured and unharmed. After Morgan dispatched men to burn the warehouses and train depot, the dawn sky glowed so intensely that many Lexingtonians, awaking to find another flag over their city, believed that Morgan had ordered the whole downtown torched. Jarom heard the fire bells ringing as the Lexington Volunteer Fire Department came to extinguish the flames as best they could.
“Fact is,” said Frank Owen, “this is the same department that citizen Morgan served in fulfilling his civil duty before the war. Now he’s putting ’em to the test, starting fires, not putting ’em out.”
Jarom picked up a report that one of the local banks had been robbed. In the horse department Morgan managed to acquire about a thousand mounts, much to the relief of those still walking. Many were thoroughbreds, fine sleek horses whose tinkering Creator seemed to have put together with elegance and speed foremost in His specifications. One of these specimens was the famous Skedaddle, a filly taken from Ashland, the home of the late Senator Henry Clay, who, though deceased, remained Lexington’s most persuasive claim to prominence.
During the turmoil that ensued, Morgan was said to have visited Hopemont, his family home two blocks north of Main Street. While riding alone in the neighborhood of the college, he’d been spotted by a federal patrol. Chased up the street in which he had played as a boy, he sought refuge at Hopemont and rode his horse up the front steps and through the wide double doors, his sudden disappearance baffling his pursuers.
In defiance of caution and the dictates of good sense, Morgan, when he departed Lexington, struck out northwest along the pike that led to Cynthiana. His staff and others, who often tried to second-guess him, anticipated that he would move southeast and swing back toward Virginia. As Jarom now understood the erratic actions of the man who governed his fate and that of a thousand others, unpredictability was Morgan’s greatest virtue, his greatest fault. Morgan at times seemed less motivated by strategies derived from maps or sage counsel than by whim, as if he asked himself, which is the boldest course, which the way that will most exhibit my pluck and foil my enemies?
The farms that they passed, ample and well tended, showed few signs of privation, often having a manicured look that showed less the diligent fruits of husbandry than the presence of slaves who could be impressed for any task between the seasons of planting and harvest. Fields of tobacco exploded into green, and there were stands of shoulder-high hemp and tidy ranks of sweet corn, which reminded Jarom of the neat troop formations he’d seen in artists’ renderings of battles in Harper’s Weekly but nowhere else. The rolling landscape matched his mental image of Canaan, the land promised to Moses, where rich soil, abundant rain, and palmy weather combined to make crops thrive.
Rattler perked up when he smelled the cloying sweetness of honeysuckle that covered the embankment along one stretch of lane. Trumpet vines twined around the uprights of a rail fence, their blooms a gaudy reddish orange. Jarom remembered that Patterson had aptly called this roadside growth devil’s trumpet. Where the wood fence ended, native limestone walls began, an artful stacking that bespoke permanence and care. Herds of shorthorns and Herefords congregated under the native trees, leafy spreads of bur oak and blue ash that had shade
d similar congresses of buffalo.
Marching all night, the advance riders of Morgan’s men reached Cynthiana at dawn. The little town of eight hundred lay profoundly still, not a dog barking. According to Frank Owen, a man named Harris founded the town, naming it after his two daughters, Cynthia and Anna, and naming the larger entity of county after himself. Cynthiana typified the country towns that formed a constellation radiating from Lexington, and Owen, reared in neighboring Bourbon County, described it as insular and sleepy, idyllic. Situated on the South Fork of the Licking River, its trim brick buildings and covered bridge gave it the look of a place untouched by war. Jarom spotted two steeples poking up from the treetops and the cupola of what must been the Harrison County courthouse.
Quirk reported that the federal troops stationed at the town had set up camp in the flats near the covered bridge marking its western approach. Bennett ordered Jarom and those about him to dismount and tether their horses; the attack was to take place on foot. Jarom slid off Rattler into a meadow whose grass slicked his boots and pants legs with dew. He could hear a dove cooing nearby, and a mist still hung over the river bottom, giving the blurred buildings and trees across the river a nappy edge that defied definition—similar, he thought, to the unfocused movement of pounding hooves or the gyrating wings of hummingbirds. Vague forms rose around him in the grass, and he could make them out as cows, standing nearby still as porcelain figurines, their only motion a measured raising and bending of heads. He heard the friction of their teeth in a subtle chawing that broke the stillness, and he could imagine the ruminant, oddly circular movement of their jaws, the knobby heads extended in dumb concentration.
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