Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  Just before the attack a cock crowed. Then he and a hundred others charged on foot through the adjacent wheatfield to hit the encampment. The first fire came from pickets, alerted, Jarom guessed, by footfalls rustling among the sheaves. They fired a second time and pulled back, and Jarom heard at least one bullet as it ratcheted its way through the leaves of the tree behind him. And then he could see the camp, the ordered rows of quadrangular white tents, as it suddenly came alive with motion. The sudden stirring reminded him of the anthill he and one of his aunt’s hands, a boy named Easter, kicked over one summer day as they roamed the woods. They had watched, fascinated, as their prodding feet sent ants scurrying. After several minutes, the volume of fire increased as the defending federals rallied from their initial confusion and swung around to form a line of battle.

  Then Morgan commenced his mounted charge on the far side of the encampment, and the ragged blue line began to cave in on itself, shrinking to a protective but steadily eroding core. Though the belts of mist made sighting uncertain, Jarom believed he dropped one of the marksmen picking targets from behind a pile of railroad ties. Seeing the rifleman sink out of sight gave him a queasy feeling, knowing he had killed or injured someone not much different from himself beyond the tint of his uniform. The soldier part of him felt elated; another part, remembering Patterson in his pitiful state, was unaccountably shamed. His command disarmed and assembled the prisoners in sullen clusters. And Morgan, triumphant but knowing pursuers to be near, prepared to leave Cynthiana.

  Then, to the north of town someone sighted a thin ribbon of blue at the crest of a ridge. As he watched, Jarom witnessed the ribbon unravel into several strands, the strands into units of cavalry deploying for an attack. Morgan, not one to lose his head in a crisis, coolly deployed his own regiments, improvising almost spontaneously an effective fighting plan. As the first riders spilled down on his men, Morgan put his simple stratagem to the test. While one regiment remained dismounted and laid down harassing fire, Jarom’s regiment, still on horseback, circled to the rear, using the wooded terrain and the town itself to screen their movements.

  Halfway across the open ground, the advance of blue riders faltered like a boxing arm that had reached the limits of its thrust and, feeling the restraint of ball in socket, retracted. Those closest must have flinched in wonderment and fear as they heard the high keening that marked the Kentucky variant of the rebel yell. It came from behind them where Jarom and two hundred riders sprinted along a railroad ditch before fanning into the open field in a movement that neatly folded the Union rear. Though he had emptied his Colt at the fleeing Union cavalry, he doubted he had hit any of the riders. But others had. Under the force of the charge, they scattered like flushed quail. Looking back across a field of wheat that had been mashed to stubble, Jarom saw a blue litter of Union dead and wounded, several pained horses whinnying in agony, riderless, one downed sorrel struggling to rise in the snarl of its own reins.

  Turning, he saw Morgan canter up the frazzled line of gray, directing fire and savoring each rent in the federal line. When a white flag went up, Jarom looked up as Morgan, with his escort of Quirk and several officers, pranced over on his blooded mare to accept the sword of General Edward Hobson, a man who had chased him across Ohio and Indiana, now humiliated. Rigged out in a fancy uniform, Hobson reminded Jarom of a pigeon, a great puffed breast with spindly legs, a fitful manner, a mien swollen with self-importance.

  “There’s a man,” Frank Owen quipped, “has more buttons than sense.”

  But Hobson, more fox than pigeon, proved him wrong. The general shrewdly pretended to have the authority to exchange prisoners belonging to Morgan’s command for himself, his staff, and the six hundred volunteers he had brought down from Cincinnati. Anxious to recover men he could ill afford to lose, Morgan tried to come to terms with him, but Hobson only played him along, and the two dickered for four hours before exhaustion forced them to break off.

  Unable to agree on terms for an exchange, Morgan at last said he needed to sleep on the matter, certain that by morning he would have thought out a solution to the impasse. Believing no Union soldier closer than a two-day march, he gave orders to camp for the night. Jarom and the others unrolled their blankets and prepared to bed down, some sleeping in salvaged tents of their prisoners. Bone-tired as he must have been, Morgan seemed in no hurry for his day of triumph to end. Jarom saw him, obviously pleased with himself, strolling from cookfire to cookfire making small talk, smiling at jokes, and passing kind words. He wore a jaunty getup, a snappy vest over a clean, white linen shirt, cavalry pantaloons, and boots burnished the color of a walnut table leg. After a victory came the usual revelry, and the feasting and singing did not end until after midnight. Jarom, still leery of strong drink, stuffed some bits of wadding in his ears and did his best to sleep on the damp ground.

  Feeling indulgent, Morgan next morning permitted his men to have a leisurely breakfast—a critical mistake. As Jarom hunkered by the cook-fire eating some contraband eggs, someone shouted that the camp was being attacked. At first Jarom saw no one, and he hoped the warning was a practical joke. Then a hush fell over the encampment as a faint rumbling rose from the far side of Cynthiana. A minute later the first attackers crested the ridge. Off to the left on a rise near the rail track another mass of blue riders assembled, the metal of their muzzles and belt buckles glinting in the wide band of light at the horizon. For a moment Jarom felt dazed as though under the spell of some drug that robbed him of his senses. In the next instant he saw riders roll down the ridge in rivulets that turned to torrents, a flood sweeping through camp before any of the men could horse themselves.

  Grabbing his carbine from his saddle holster, Jarom ran to the nearest tree, drawing a bead on the closest rider, a big man waving a horse pistol. As he drew the trigger taut, something wrenched the carbine from his hands. He felt a terrific blow in the heel of his right hand. Only the spasm of pain shooting up his forearm told him he had been shot, a stunning sensation like the sear of iron heated to a glow. Looking down, he saw that something, a minie ball, he realized, had gouged out the fatty underside of his hand. The fact that he could still flex his fingers told him no bones had been shattered. He glanced at the splintered stock of the carbine that lay at his feet, then noticed that he was bleeding. He drew out his bandanna, remembering Aunt Mary’s injunction that no gentleman ever be caught without a handkerchief. Using his left hand and clenching one end with his teeth, he wrapped it around the gouge and managed to tie it tightly, knowing the pressure would help stanch the flow of blood, ease the throbbing.

  Pandemonium engulfed him. The main wave of the attack went halfway up an adjoining ridge where he could see a flimsy line of defense giving way under a tide of men and horses. Closer, men around him ran helter-skelter, other men on horseback trying to shoot or chase them down. Rattler, shot or captured or fleeing for his life, was nowhere in sight. Through the din of shot and shouting, his eye lighted on a cut where a small branch flowed into the Licking. Jumping over the embankment, he found a trickle of olive-colored water smothered in weeds and scrub willow. Wading to the inlet, he tied both ends of his neckerchief to a stick and twisted until the bleeding stopped.

  In an instant of self-appraisal he realized he had lost his weapons, his pistol belt still with his blanket, the carbine lying useless thirty yards away. Raising his head above the cut, he saw darting figures, a few of his comrades with hands raised skyward already being herded to the rear. Whinnying hysterically, a horse with a bloodied rump struggled to regain its feet and run, a sign to Jarom from whatever deity presided over battles that he should take flight.

  Cupping his right wrist with his good hand, he slid down the bank and tiptoed through the tepid water, trying to keep his footing on the slickish stones. Sticking close to the near bank, he worked his way upstream over shelves of lichen-splotched rock to an overgrown fencerow along a ridge running parallel to the Licking. Now fifty or sixty yards from the river, he followed the f
enceline until he reached a small clearing scooped out of the encompassing woods. Moving along its edge within a fringe of sumac and horseweed, he circled toward a mesh of wilderness so dense no horse could readily follow.

  The sting in his hand was a throbbing now. If pain were a sound, its utterance would have been a loud and persistent scream. Cradling his hand, he started running as he imagined fugitives in defeat had always run, intent only on distancing themselves from the probing swords of the victors, from the hooves of whatever carried them. He ran until he could hear only the vaguest popping, his shirt drenched with sweat, his chest heaving from an exertion he knew he couldn’t sustain. Only then did he feel that he had outdistanced the men who wanted to kill him.

  Resting under a giant tulip tree, he listened. Over his own labored breath he began to detect sounds in the woods around him, a thrashing through the underbrush and once a banging of tin. Back toward the river he could hear distant shouting, the firing muffled now and less frequent. The attack must have been a complete rout because he heard no concentrated fire to indicate Morgan had made a stand or paused to cover the retreat.

  Against the skyline he glimpsed something in motion, highlighted among the stand of verticals, the subtlest alteration of light, as though something had passed between the periphery of his eye and the light’s source. Watching, he could gradually detect figures, dozens of men ducking through the woods, a few, like himself, hobbling from wounds. From one of the bull sessions with Patterson and his comrades around the campfire, he remembered the joke about the hearts of some soldiers pumping rabbit blood.

  “Rabbit blood,” Patterson had said, “is the ungovernable impulse to run at the slightest threat of danger.”

  Once he saw two men making their way together, but most who came within his seeing went as solitaries on their own hook. Taking to the woods again, this time he spotted a group of a half dozen or so moving purposefully through the undergrowth. As Jarom stepped out from cover, the leader merely nodded, and he joined them, strangers and brothers, as did others while the day wore on into late afternoon. By evening there were over twenty in the party, all of them horseless, without food, most without weapons. They shared, it became evident to Jarom, an unspoken desire to elude whatever lay over the next ridge and make it back to Abingdon. Make it back they did, except for the two hundred fifty or so killed or captured. Or those who had simply had enough and quit.

  Feeling the absence of Rattler, Jarom hoped that the buff stallion had survived the fighting and was somewhere feeding on golden corn, whether federal or Confederate he didn’t care, so long as his loyal trail-mate survived.

  GREENEVILLE

  As Jarom would remember it, though he did not see the death of John Hunt Morgan at first hand, he was close enough to hear the shot that widowed Morgan’s new wife. He saw him for the last time the morning before the general’s death, September 3, 1864, a few miles outside of Greeneville, Tennessee, where Morgan planned to spend the night. Jarom’s company, detached from its artillery, had been chosen to ride as the advance because several of the men knew the back roads through the country.

  Late in the morning Morgan notified Captain Cantrell that he, the general, would ride at the head of the column, a practice not often advised because of the risk of being bushwhacked by ridge runners or enemy sharpshooters, especially by the discriminating—those who had a penchant for identifying and shooting officers. But Morgan, as evidenced in his choice of careers, his craving for excitement, gave little thought to self-preservation. Nor did he shrink from public sight, notwithstanding his imposing figure and the telltale plume that made him a tempting target. Knowing that clans of bushwhackers populated the hills, Cantrell sent one of his lieutenants to warn the general to stay to the rear—time wasted.

  “A general rides at the head of his army,” Morgan said. And that was the end of it.

  Jarom heard this story and for the remainder of the day fully expected to hear from some cove or fastness the rifle crack that would tumble the general. When he was a child, his father, placing Jarom in a chair next to his own in the parlor, read him Plutarch’s Lives and The Iliad. Though he regarded superstition as the scripture of the cave or cradle, Jarom minded the admonitions of antiquity—how fatal it was, for example, for humans to flout the will of the gods, to tempt them with an assertion of human will, no matter how heroic. “It’s the raised nail that feels the hammer,” his father said then. Morgan was brazen, was brash, traits that were not insurable.

  Before the lieutenant could take his place again in the column, General Morgan showed up astride a magnificent chestnut sorrel named Sir Oliver, a gift from a well-wisher to reward his escape from the Ohio State Penitentiary. Raising his hat in salute, the general passed Jarom, who was riding a skewbald mare named Nancy, going down the open road at a brisk canter. With perfect carriage he went bouncing by, so in tune with the stallion that he seemed some natural appendage. When Captain Cantrell again protested, Morgan dismissed him with a wave of his braided arm.

  “I don’t apprehend any harm from the enemy just now, Captain. Besides, it doesn’t take me long to tire of breathing your dust.”

  “But, General,” said Cantrell.

  “But me no buts, Captain, I mean to ride at the head of my men if it kills me.”

  Hearing this, Jarom suppressed the wish that someone would drop the man from his saddle. Such snootiness tempted the gods. Instead, as the general clopped past, he joined a tremendous cheer that followed him along the column like fire passing along a succession of match heads. Jarom saw such bravado as an omen, later reflecting that this was the last time many of the men would see Morgan alive.

  Their destination was Greeneville, a modest assembly of houses and buildings centered on a courthouse square located on the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. Adding to Jarom’s sense of something ominous in the air was the fact that Greeneville was the hometown of the state’s military governor, Andrew Johnson, now Lincoln’s vice-presidential running mate in the pending election. Tennesseans in Morgan’s command, especially East Tennesseans, despised Johnson. Assigned to another brigade, Jarom’s regiment set up camp on the Jonesboro road northeast of town. The general personally ordered Cantrell to place his battery on a high hill a few hundred yards from town. Cantrell chose the position well, for from the heights overlooking the street an approaching force could be ushered to oblivion. Jarom knew that Colonel Bradford’s Tennesseans camped on the Bulls Gap road at the other end of town and that Giltner had posted his brigade on the Rogersville Road but spread out his men to cover several others on the right flank.

  As Jarom later learned, Morgan planned to camp at Greeneville for the night and throw his force against General Gillem’s defenses at Bulls Gap in the morning. By two thirty that afternoon all the units had been deployed, all the approaches to Greeneville, so far as anyone knew, were protected. From his perch on the hill where the battery had been positioned, Jarom swiveled his binoculars over the town, the enlarged radii lighting on street corners, windows, the house in which he knew Morgan would be sleeping that night. He trained his lenses on a group of men in the yard behind the house, fixing on the general. Morgan bent over his camp table, studying a map and conferring with two or three of his officers under a tall locust whose canopy showed the first rust of fall. Even his critics owned that Morgan had an uncanny feel for terrain—an instinctive eye for the easiest route or the most defensible position—in the way a good farmer had an intuition for weather. But his antennae had no reading for impending danger. Jarom could imagine Morgan, dipper in hand, oblivious, strolling for a sip of water into the half-dark of a springhouse full of writhing snakes. Such was the loyalty of those who served him that they would have unquestioningly followed, even after they discovered the writhing forms.

  The next morning a letter from Aunt Mary Tibbs, dated three months earlier, caught up with him as he oiled and cleaned his pistols with a kit he had bought for a pile of Confederate scrip from a sutler who set up store f
or a couple of days outside camp. She wrote that everyone in the family was well but that Nether had died of old age—no one knew how old—and had been buried next to his long-dead wife. He lay, appropriately, Jarom thought, near his true love—his bee gums, set up in a stand of locusts on a ridge that overlooked the square miles of woods from which he had harvested his honey. According to her account, the old man simply rose one morning, said he wasn’t feeling well, and lay dead by noon. Jarom called up his face as it had been nearly a decade ago, an old man never more at home than in wilderness, a person comfortable in his world as, increasingly, Jarom wasn’t in his. Whenever he heard the droning of bees or tasted honey, he felt Nether’s presence. Jarom imagined him trekking through some celestial woods, his eyes lifted toward the airways, his ears pricked to detect the telltale hum.

  Patterson, his aunt wrote, had gone to stay the winter with relations, a cousin and his family, near Hopkinsville. He talked of finding a place of his own, one where he would not be anyone’s burden. The surgeon had sewn up his face, but where the bridge of his nose had been was a cleft that made strangers stare. He seemed, she wrote, some better, on his feet and able to hobble about, tapping his way with a cane. But, sadly, he did not seem to her to have anywhere to go, no destination toward which to direct his feet. After he toppled her favorite vase and upset some dishes, she had to put everything breakable away in the cupboard. She bought him some spectacles with dark glass in them, but he refused to wear them, insisting that he appear to the world as he was—just as I am, he had insisted, parodying the old hymn.

  Though Patterson often seemed dispirited and out of sorts, occasional zephyrs of warmth kept her hopeful. He told her he longed for spring, when he could sit outside and listen to birds warbling, feel the wind against his skin. One day he even asked her to read from a recent novel, The Mill on the Floss, by the British author George Eliot, who, he insisted, was really a woman. Mary Tibbs protested that it couldn’t be so, that she’d never in her days heard tell of a woman named George.