Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  But mostly he just moped about, spending whole afternoons sitting wordless at the window he could not see out of, as if he could imagine the scenes that passed there, as a sleeper might construct a world populated by ghosts and invisible beings. She said that for some reason seeing flecks of sunlight on his pants leg had made her cry. Reading Harper’s to him, she skipped articles that made any reference to battles, but it was battles he wanted to hear about, knowing the war was going badly. Patterson constantly asked after Jarom, but she had little to report. She confessed that she at first felt relief when he left for Hopkinsville but now fretted about him, wondering whether he received enough attention, enough of the right things to eat, enough sympathy if he was blue. She convinced herself she could alter his mood by making him his favorite dish, sweet potato pie.

  The weather, typical of upper Tennessee in early September, hung stultifyingly hot and muggy, the air so laden with moisture that people wore as well as breathed it, waves of heat visibly fluting from the dust of the street. Even the crows in flight seemed sluggish, as though accoutered with weights. Merely walking caused horses to work up a lather, and a shawl of mustard-colored dust hung over the road. Patches of chicory, their open florets showing pale cobalt, grew along its shoulders. Chicory had a tint unlike anything else Jarom had seen in nature; where it had spread, whole fields vibrated with a silvery shimmer. Other colors seemed dry and lackluster like leaves of the black locust, spotted with rust. Everything felt overripe to Jarom, oppressively still. The weal where the bullet had hit his hand had nearly healed, leaving only a ghost of proud skin on the heel. Though his fingers sometimes stiffened, the flesh had knitted itself, through nature’s help, whole. Well enough for him to hold and fire his pistol without impediment.

  Jarom judged from the slant of afternoon light as they reached town that the hour was about four. After unfolding and buttoning his canvas to Frank Owens’s to form shelter for the night, Jarom stripped off his shirt and stretched out in some shade at the crest of the hill, eyeing the twitches of sunlight that poked patterns into the shade. On one elbow, for a time he watched the shadows inch across rock formations on an adjoining hill until they turned soot gray. Never completely loosening his body in repose, he worried about the ominous feel of things, the vulnerability one senses in an open space with unseen eyes watching.

  Mollie came to him in a waking dream. The two of them were posing for a likeness in a photographer’s studio. She held in her lap, bundled in a quilt, their firstborn—a son. She was smiling at him, her arms cradling the tiny head, barely visible in folds that formed a wreath. As the shadows deepened, he lay there until he heard the bell for supper, accompanied by a stream of lumpy storm clouds from the east, rolling in from the Smokies. Everyone around the mess seemed in a better humor, as if the rain they knew was coming would restore them all.

  Two days later, he learned in detail how Morgan spent his last hours before Death paid his call the next morning. In his customary quest for comfort, the general had gone into Greeneville to spend the night. He selected a large brick house used as a sleepover by officers in both armies. It belonged to Mrs. Catherine Williams, the mother of sons in both armies, two Confederate, one Union, so men from both armies felt equally welcome. Since one of the two sons in gray served as a major on Morgan’s staff, the invitation came as expectation rather than request. Mrs. Williams’s conscience, whether bowing to the sentiments of her neighbors or the greater weight of allegiances in her own family, quietly favored the South. But her daughter-in-law, Lucy Williams, made no secret that her hopes lay with the Union army in which her husband, Joseph, held a commission as an officer.

  Three stories high, the house occupied most of a block and fronted on a side street near the main-traveled road. In back was a formal garden with roses in bloom. A grape arbor and a hedge of boxwoods ran along the borders, backed by a high plank fence for privacy. Taking advantage of the house’s size, three junior officers shared bedrooms on the second floor, down the hall from Morgan’s. Around four thirty, Mrs. Williams showed the general to his room, where he removed his boots and stretched out for a nap.

  Lucy, characterized as stern-faced and affecting a masculine manner, didn’t show up for dinner. When asked about Lucy’s absence, her mother made excuses, explaining that her daughter had taken the buggy out to the family farm to fetch some watermelons for the guests. But she hadn’t returned, and those who made enquiries after Morgan’s death claimed that she rode eighteen miles to General Gillem’s camp. There she reported Morgan’s whereabouts and those of his men. She pointed out that most of his command bivouacked some distance away along the arteries into town.

  After dinner that evening, the general called for Sir Oliver and rode out to inspect each of the camps. Those close to him later reported that he seemed tired, acting fitful and restless, unusually worried about security, as if he had a premonition of something amiss. About eleven o’clock he sent his aides out to check the pickets again, and several interpreted this as another omen of trouble to come. He turned in after midnight, shortly before the thunderstorm, forming all day, descended on the valley. At one in the morning he rose and thoughtfully ordered the house guards to come in from the downpour.

  At that time Gillem’s column must have been groping toward Greeneville under cover of the storm, using flashes of lightning to guide the men along paths that skirted the picket posts. The rain fell until early morning. About four o’clock one of Morgan’s aides awakened him. The general asked if it was still raining, and the aide replied that it had let up a little. Morgan asked him to inform the staff that orders to march at daylight had been changed. Instead, they would move out of town at seven, giving the men time to dry their guns and have a warm breakfast. He then went back to bed.

  Unannounced, at dawn a troop of blue riders dashed into town, heading straight for the Williams house. They surrounded the entire block before most of Morgan’s men, inside and out, could rouse themselves. On the hill, as he remembered it later, Jarom became aware of the attack when he heard a rumbling like thunder that wasn’t thunder. He confirmed his misgivings when gunfire crackled in the distance and steadily moved closer. Then someone shouted the alarm. Some of Morgan’s guards jumped on their horses bareback to escape, and others, running for cover, returned fire. Morgan and several members of his staff bolted out of the house toward the stable before scattering. Accompanied by one or two others, Morgan crawled under the only building on the block that did not belong to the Williamses, a Presbyterian church. He attempted to hide because he knew the sentiment among his enemies that he should be shot on sight. There being no clear means of escape, one of the officers with him under the church suggested they barricade themselves in the house to give his outlying troops time to come to their rescue.

  “It’s no use,” Morgan said, “the boys cannot get here in time. This I do know—the Yankees will never take me prisoner again. They’ll shoot me first.”

  Feeling compelled to act, he and three men ran across the yard to the hotel facing Main Street. Hiding in the cellar, he sent Major Gasset to the front of the hotel to scout the street, just as a troop of Union cavalry rode up the alley running behind the hotel. Seeing his opportunity, the major hopped on a stray horse and made his escape, leaving Morgan trapped in the hotel basement. To avoid being cornered there, Morgan and his two remaining companions dived under some grapevines.

  When a man in a jeans jacket rode up to the garden fence, Morgan, mistaking him for one of his command, stood up. The rider shouted for him to surrender. After Morgan ignored him, the man in the jeans jacket aimed his long horse pistol and fired.

  “Oh, God!” Morgan yelled and threw up his arms, his body pitching forward, falling into some of the grapevines.

  The bullet, it was later determined, entered his back inside the left shoulder blade, pierced the heart, and exited through the left side of the chest.

  Though Jarom did not see the body until late the next day, he heard that at the time
of his death the general wore an old blue overcoat, a pair of parlor slippers, blue trousers, and a fancy white shirt with blue polka dots. Pinned to his shirt was his theretofore lucky Masonic pin. When his murderers discovered that they had downed “the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy,” they tore through the fence palings, tossed the body across a horse, and paraded their trophy through the streets.

  By the time Colonel Smith ordered Jarom’s and the other batteries to shell the cavalry in the streets around the Williams house, Morgan lay dead. Commanding four guns in the battery, Jarom rushed the crews over to charge the pieces. Moments before they fired, Jarom heard a great shout erupt in the street, but he had no idea at the time what it signified. Through his glass he could see cavalry milling around the block containing the residence. His first shot arched high over the town and dropped north of the Williams house, striking what appeared to be a church on the corner across the street. This scattered the cavalry. The second landed short in a vacant lot.

  Adjusting the elevations, Jarom placed several shots close to the house, but after the first few minutes the streets had all but emptied, leaving few discernible targets. Through the haze hanging over the rooftops Jarom caught glimpses of bluecoats, a careening horse, and stick men scurrying here and there. Only when Colonel Smith ordered a charge did Jarom and the rest of the gun crew realize that a second party of raiders had reinforced the first. As a consequence, the initial, almost spontaneous counterattack had been easily thrown back. As combined Union infantry and cavalry assembled to march on Jarom’s hill, Graves, arriving, ordered the battery to limber its gun and retreat to Jonesboro.

  When Jarom and his comrades got the news, no one could accept Morgan’s death. Jarom had seen him only a few hours before, radiant and confident. Then, despite his mixed feelings about the general, he had stayed the impulse to approach and introduce himself, to tell Morgan how much he and the others admired him. A better occasion, he was certain, would present itself. When Jarom first received word, he wanted to believe someone had made an error, that someone had misreported, that someone else had been shot, that Morgan had been captured again, or at the worst, that he was lying somewhere wounded. Dead did not seem possible to him, to any of them. The men under him, some with him since ’61, regarded him as a god, exempt from the laws that splintered organs and laid hundreds down in shallow ditches or under trees whose bark had been riven to pulpy shreds.

  Though Jarom scarcely knew the man and always felt awkward in his presence, Morgan’s death left him stricken with profound guilt. When Morgan exposed himself at the head of the column, Jarom had wished him ill, and this thought haunted him now as the wish fulfilled itself. Morgan wasn’t simply someone all of them took orders from and whose peccadilloes and lapses they tolerated or overlooked. For Jarom, Morgan was an emblem of his best self, a father whose approval he and the others fought to win. Most devastating, he felt he had lost a part of himself. As the fact of the general’s death took hold, a second wave of guilt passed over him—and, he suspected, many others. How had they failed him? Had the general been shot trying to surrender? If it had not stormed. If someone had checked to see that all of the points of entry were covered. If someone had been suspicious. If someone had stayed awake.

  When Jarom saw the corpse, he could no longer deny the fact of Morgan’s passing. Jarom saw the body first lying long and pale in a wagon bed, blood on the muddy nightshirt; the second Morgan lay in dress uniform in a polished coffin under a weight of fresh flowers. Jarom knew that something of himself went with him, though he had no name for it; was it spirit, an appetite for life, a will to victory? Or were these qualities he imputed to Morgan because he wished to believe them so? No one serving under Morgan, he knew, would be the same. Nor would the world, which now seemed drained, frayed, lusterless. He did realize finally that it was not the deflated anatomy under the bursting grapes that he mourned for, the bundle of slack flesh thrown over a horse and paraded through the streets, but himself.

  Later, after some reflection, he felt more ambivalent about the life and death of John Hunt Morgan, not love but a combination of attraction and repulsion, the same feelings he had toward the father he’d scarcely known. Both had been distant but looming and prominent in their authority. Both, in a sense, played war—more show than substance, more charade than somber calculation and commitment. Yet, these understandings didn’t exempt him from feeling the inescapable letdown and vacancy of loss. Another monument, a tarnished monument, had been extracted from the landscape of his life.

  When he wrapped himself in his blanket again that night, Jarom couldn’t sleep as he tried to reconstruct Morgan’s face. He could call up his lanky build, the way the braided hat sat on his head, the triangulation formed by his mustache and goatee, but he couldn’t bring back the expressive face, the intensity of the eyes. He knew only that something vital had been lost, someone whose life had affected his, and would still. Instead, he saw Patterson’s face uninjured, a pallid smile holding across the now smooth terrain of cheek and bone, light playing across the mouth and eyes, irresistibly alive, irresistibly human. As he lay on the damp ground, the face migrated to Tennessee, to Greeneville, this time wreathed in smoke, a dozen brute horses deviled and staggering under their human freight, stomping clumsily among the vines and bed of irises. Orphan, he said to himself, the word coming up unsummoned, orphaned for the last time from his last father.

  Before dusk the next day Jarom received orders to return to Kentucky as a courier. He was to bring out men there who had been engaged in guerrilla warfare. Knowing Nancy wasn’t up to so arduous a ride, he luckily managed to trade her for a likelier-looking mount, aptly named Pistol. Astride the new mount, over the next eight days he covered a distance of two hundred seventy-five miles, dodging the traffic of wagons and riders by taking back roads and isolated lanes. On the eighth day he was led to Colonel Jack Allen, CSA, the man delegated to come to Kentucky to recruit and organize what forces he could find and send them back to the regular army, in desperate need of more men. Though he knew Jack Allen only slightly, the colonel apparently knew something of him. To give Jarom some authority and credibility, given his youthful looks, Allen commissioned him a captain. Jarom didn’t know what to make of becoming a captain at nineteen, had no time to muse on what becoming an officer meant to him.

  Events crowded him. In Kentucky he came on more hard news. Adam Johnson had been shot blind at a place in Caldwell County called Grubbs Crossroads. A heavy pall of fog hung over the countryside when Johnson’s small band encountered a troop of home guards. During the skirmish that followed, his own men—like Stonewall Jackson’s at Chancellorsville—fired on him, a bullet striking his right eye and exiting through the left temple. He had been captured and sent north to a hospital or a prison, no one knew which.

  That night as he lay in his blanket, Jarom had an image of John Patterson and Adam Johnson wearing dark glasses, their arms linked as they tapped their way down an unfamiliar street. They followed the clop of a horse on which Morgan was riding, backward. A rush of anger rose up within him, a lust to revenge himself against Patterson’s enemies, against Johnson’s. One equation formed in his mind: to deprive the deprivers. The army with its rules and orders, it lulls and sluggishness, would subject him always to the will of others. He wanted to fight on his own terms, not those of arbitrary commanders, good or bad. And not in Tennessee, not in Virginia, but in Kentucky, where he knew who and what he was fighting for.

  Having returned to Kentucky after Morgan’s death, he fell in with a small band of detached Confederates under a man whom he knew only as Captain Alexander. When Alexander was killed in a skirmish near a place called Big Springs, Jarom slipped into another funk. Patterson, Johnson, Morgan, every candle in his life snuffed to darkness. This last death prompted another change of heart. Now he wanted to leave the war behind him, to shed it like molt from a bird with new wing feathers. An inner voice spoke low and told him to stop fighting, to leave the army, to go back home. H
e’d seen enough of death and dying. Regretting his enlistment, he decided to do what a week earlier would have been unthinkable—to secede from the secession. Nothing would bring Patterson back to him whole, nothing would resurrect Morgan or return Johnson, shot by his own men, a symbol of how the war fed on itself. That’s all, he told himself, that’s enough.

  He almost acted on this impulse to cut his losses and quit. Almost. He had to decide which direction to take—home, back to the army, or some middle ground between. He chose the ground between, trying to create for himself a zone of neutrality, a kind of voluntary purgatory where he could cleanse his soul and think things through.

  He found a place to live in Nelson County with a sympathetic farmer whose name was Pruitt, a widower who needed a hand and asked few questions. For a few weeks he shed his uniform and put on citizens’ clothes, some rough work pants and a jeans jacket. He turned to handing around the farm—milking, fencing, patching up a barn that had lost much of its siding in a storm. Pulling things out of the earth, he reasoned, was better than putting men under it. He worked, he ate, he slept. Pruitt lived alone, and Jarom welcomed the solitary life as a respite from the war.

  Things went well enough until he visited a church in Bloomfield one day and overheard a woman describe him as a rebel soldier who had ridden with Morgan. The word would eventually reach the ears of federals who recognized no truce and would come for him, sooner or later, but most likely sooner. He knew he couldn’t stay at Pruitt’s any longer, that some night while he slept or some noon while he rested in the fields, they would take him into custody.