Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  But he had no reliable horse. Pistol, the dappled gray he had ridden to Pruitt’s, had come down with the heaves, an ailment Pruitt described as broken wind, a disease of the lungs. Nostrils flared, Pistol suffered coughing bouts and percussive breathing that produced a wheezing noise. He frequently passed noxious wind. Pruitt said the sickly horse needed to be pastured for a time, that chopped carrots and potatoes mixed with his oats would contribute to the cure, and that after a time he would probably recover. When Jarom said he had no time, Pruitt offered to take the horse in trade.

  “In trade for what?” Jarom asked.

  “Take that one over there,” Pruitt said, pointing to a large mare grazing by a billowing oak in the lower pasture, downhill from the barn where they were standing. Her flanks, partially in sunlight, shimmered, the black mane nearly obscuring the face as the neck bent into the grass. When she rose and turned her long head toward them, Jarom saw the blaze along her muzzle; when she stirred, he saw white socks that rose above her fetlocks almost to the knees.

  Even from a distance, Jarom could tell that this horse was better than the run of horses he and his companions had ridden, mostly hard-used cavalry mounts, many of them captured, with “US” emblazoned on their haunches.

  “I don’t have enough money to buy her,” he said, “and she’s worth at least three of Pistol.”

  Pruitt shrugged and turned out his palms in a gesture of generosity.

  “Take her for your horse and your labor,” he said.

  “But I don’t have enough to make up the difference.”

  “Take her,” Pruitt said, as if trying to rid himself of something he didn’t value.

  “What do you call her?”

  “Papaw.”

  Jarom liked the name. Pruitt explained that even as a colt she had what he called “the honey tooth.” It was the fall of the year and near the house was a papaw, a small tree, almost a shrub. When the tree was in fruit, she would leave her dam each day at dusk and come to the fence, where she would, almost delicately, take the green, sweet, custardy-tasting fruit from his outstretched hand with her foreteeth, slowly working her jaws as if to savor the sweetness.

  Before nightfall, Jarom made his goodbye to Pruitt, who forced him to take a few dollars and thanked him for his help and his company. Jarom packed his meager belongings, bundling most of his things in his rolled blanket, and saddled Papaw for the first time. She was docile, accepting his authority, his weight, almost immediately, as though she sensed that where she was going would be different from anywhere she had been. His two Colts he carried in a satchel made of carpet, whose handles he tied to the cantle of his saddle. Then he headed in the direction of Bardstown, the seat of Nelson County. Making some inquiries, he heard reports of a local band of partisan rangers near Bloomfield. Arranging a meeting wasn’t difficult, and the next day he made the acquaintance of Henry C. “Billy” Magruder and Sam “One-Armed” Berry.

  PART TWO

  The term “guerrilla” is the diminutive of the word “guerra,” war, and means petty war that is carried on by detached parties. Guerrillas properly may be defined as troops not belonging to a regular army consisting of volunteers, perhaps self-constructed, but generally by individuals authorized to do so by the authority they acknowledge as their government. They do not stand on the regular payroll of the army or are not paid at all, take up arms and lay them down at intervals, and carry on petty war chiefly by raids, extortion, destruction and massacre and who cannot encumber themselves with many prisoners and will therefore generally give no quarter. They are peculiarly dangerous because they easily evade pursuit, and by laying down their arms become insidious enemies because they cannot otherwise subsist than by rapine and almost always degenerate into simple robbers or brigands. Whatever may be our final definition, it is universally understood in this country at the present time that a guerrilla party means an irregular band of armed men, carrying on an irregular war, not being able, according to their character as a guerrilla party, to carry on what the law terms a regular war.

  —Government Prosecutor, U.S. vs. Magruder

  War imbrutes instead of refines.

  —Eldress Nancy Elam Moore,

  South Union Shaker Village

  A POND OF WATER

  Something unexpected happens when Jarom and Papaw enter the pond. Off to the left there is a splash, the wallop a bass makes against water, silence a moment, then another wallop. In rapid succession come more splashes, this time like gloved hands clapping. Jarom scans the surface for jumping fish but sees none. Whatever it is, he thinks, must be jumping from the banks. As he and Papaw move deeper in, something closer plops, his eye catching motion but no mover. Not a reptile, not a fish. A diving bird, a kingfish, say, would reemerge from the water.

  Then something inside Jarom flashes, and he is at Aunt Mary’s again, skipping stones that lie at the edge of the pond near the stock barn. It is early spring, sometime after supper. The grass is awash with dewfall, a first spray of gnats misting the air in feverish clusters. They are nearly absorbed by darkness when the pasture erupts with a dissonance that drowns out the low trill of insects his ear has become accustomed to. Now the air throbs with harsh, hammering noises that cancel other sounds, hushed fidgeting of the crickets subsiding. Patterson says the noisemakers are tree frogs. Aunt Mary calls them peepers, spring peepers.

  “They’re creatures of peculiar habit,” she had said, “lying low during the day to come out at night. They’re slow-pulsed, all leg and chest, the bellows of their chests pump little gulps of air that sound like wheezing. Nights, they deafen, filling the air with their ratchetings and love-sick complaints.”

  Jarom at first guesses that what he hears jumping in the pond aren’t tree frogs because these creatures gather a cocoon of silence around themselves. When their zone of solitude is broken, they lob themselves into the water, withdrawing to a safer element. The first that jumps serves to raise the alarm. The others enter on cue as their zones are violated.

  When Papaw and Jarom trip the alarm, the first jumps almost at their feet. The splashes take on a pattern, beginning almost underfoot and extending around both banks until the circuit is closed at the farthest end. Though Jarom tries to anticipate where the next one will jump, he cannot detect him, so perfect is their blending. Even the leaps are invisible. Where they land, the water spreads in wide, overlapping ribs. Each time the banks seem cleared, another detonates the silence like a flattened palm smacking a horse’s rump. As the message passes, the pauses between slaps lengthen, as if the message has weakened in volume and urgency. Finally, one last straggler bellywhops in the shallows, raising mud clouds above the algae.

  Papaw settles into the water, pond ooze up to her thighs, just short of Jarom’s boot soles. Uneasy in this second element, her forelegs cut off at the water, she stiffens for a moment, then relaxes as belly and flanks accept the murky coolness. It is hot still, and the heat rises from her back in steamy vapors. As Jarom slackens the reins, she lowers her neck to water. When her muzzle touches, he feels himself slipping against the pommel. To keep from falling over her ears, he tilts his heels in the stirrups and pushes downward. Knees against her sides, he feels the rivulets passing through her gullet and swelling against his calves. As she drinks, air and water become one, perfectly still, the silence broken only by the rhythmic swishing of her tail and the ticking in her mane to worry the gnats.

  The pond is not large, no larger than the acutest angle a farm wagon can turn, not half the size of the one in the Tibbs barn lot. Jarom imagines it as a flattened pear, the smaller oval belling into a larger, low for the season and banded with a collar of mud where the water evaporated or drained off. Stringy beards of algae show just beneath the surface, smoky thickets of phosphorescence that seem to him another world dominated by the sickly yellow of overgrown marshes or overripe corn. The water itself is a flat black with an unhealthy cast that carries no reflection.

  As he sits locked to that moment, toward th
e center in the deepest part, a black knuckle protrudes from the surface, shedding almost indecipherable rings that widen across the water and melt into the banks. Like the rotating head of a hawk, this knuckle swivels until it comes to rest on a line with Papaw’s chest. Several feet to the left by a clump of cattails, another knuckle appears. Then another off to the rear, to the right, others bobbing up until bullet-sized heads populate the water, a congress of eyes. At first Jarom takes them for snappers, a vat of them, but he knows them at last as peepers, bubble lungs drifting through a rim of light to spy him out.

  Something about them troubles him—they make no sound, give no sign, show no acknowledgment in their creaturely self-sufficiency. To him this signifies contempt. Only their eyes show above water, and Jarom senses that he and Papaw somehow have darkened their horizon, intruded against their light.

  He has an impulse to draw his pistol for some practice—to detonate some heads. To do this not so much to humble them into recognition as to shake them from their study, jar them from their witness. Under their gaze he feels uneasy. He comes so close to firing he can imagine the beads of thrown water, the rise and slip-knotting of pond water as it escapes containment for a moment, stretches its sinews into rope, then drops back to it somnolent bulk. He can see featureless heads the size of marbles yanked suddenly beneath his sight or exploding into fragments with a lucky hit, the survivors popping up a few minutes later a few feet away, still taking him in, still waltzing in the slimy dark.

  A DAY OF INDEPENDENCE

  Jarom made no conscious choice to join the guerrillas. He knew such bands existed, that they had sprung up like crocuses, gaudy and short-lived, in one spot or another over the state. What options did he have? Though he still regarded himself as a soldier, he had no one to report to, no army within the borders of Kentucky to whose muster he could add his name. There was always the thought of Patterson living out his days in darkness, but there was no assignable moment when he made the choice. His allegiances known, his service easily traced, he could not elect to return home and pick up his interrupted life. Barely nineteen, he lacked the confidence and means to elope with Mollie Thomas somewhere west. Neither the Union army nor loyal Unionists bore him any love. Technically, he knew, his own army regarded him as a deserter.

  So he entered the small war on the domestic scene almost by default, simply going along with the stronger personalities that carried him as a strong current pulls an oarless skiff. Chance and circumstances brought him to Magruder and Berry and to the stronger will of Bill Marion, who collected others about him in the way of bandits and princes throughout history, their followers attracted less by zeal for some great cause than by lures of adventure, profit, or lawlessness, the undecided submitting themselves to a dominating will. And so Jarom went along, not by choice, but by happenstance and casual momentum.

  Counting Jarom, their number came to four, the others being Bill Marion, Sam Berry, and Billy Magruder. They spent the day in Louisville at several saloons celebrating their independence without any serious upset. None of them wore uniforms or other signs indicating they were anything but unaffiliated young men celebrating. Jarom, a little tipsy, felt relieved to be leaving the city where he knew they could be arrested at any turn. Every time he’d seen a bluecoat on the street he had an impulse to shoot the man and run. A mile or so out the Bardstown Road, south of the city, Bill Marion announced he was starving and meant to have some hospitality at one of the big houses that sat on the ridge along the pike.

  “I could eat,” said Billy Magruder, as if to cinch the matter.

  All of them had been drinking since early morning but hadn’t had a bite since breakfast. Despite misgivings, Jarom willingly followed the path of least resistance. If Marion had said they were off to congratulate General Burbridge at his headquarters and toast President Lincoln’s health, Jarom knew the others would probably have gone along with him. Over the past few weeks with Magruder and the others, he had learned that relaxing was not inactivity but the art of not making any decisions.

  Marion turned in at a likely-looking drive, unlatching the double iron gate and waving the others through, remounting and spurring his huge roan stallion. Mirroring the capacity of his owner to manufacture affront at every opportunity, his stallion hooves spewed gravel as he broke into a canter up the drive. Through the trees at the crest of the hill, Jarom could make out the shaft of a white column. Winding up the drive, they followed Marion to a large house behind shade trees that formed a buffer between house and road. It was sweltering hot, sultry and moist as only it can be during summer in the Ohio River Valley. Jarom felt as though every pore in his body was a spigot that purposed to drain him dry. Moisture sopped his shirt. The flanks of the horses steamed, their backs glossy as oiled metal.

  Once he entered the shade of the ornamental elms that aproned the front of the house, the air cooled. The breeze stirred, and sweat beads under his broad hat began to tingle and pop. Marion’s roan, anticipating a rest in the shade, began whisking his tail from side to side and nickering.

  When Marion reached the porch, he slid off the roan’s back and knotted the reins to a lilac bush as if he didn’t plan to stay long. He clomped up the steps and rapped the butt of his pistol against the paneled door. No one came. He shrugged, eyed Jarom and the others with a silly grin, then rapped again, louder. This time the door opened, and a white-haired citizen in shirtsleeves asked Marion what he could do for him.

  “We want some supper,” he said, “and we want it soon as yesterday.”

  Their host, a polished-looking man in his sixties, surveyed the four of them, understandably worried from what Jarom could read of his expression. Jarom imagined what he and the others must look like from his perspective—hair unkempt, sweat stains in the block of his crumpled hat, scruffy shirt in need of laundering, a tear in his pants above the right knee, all of them dusty and rough around the edges. He tried to imagine his own reaction if, old and unarmed, he were confronted by a band of ruffians crowding his door and making demands to be fed, the sharp hooves of their slick-haunched horses poised at the edge of his wife’s flowerbed. Jarom concluded that this homeowner, no fool from his appearance, would try to talk or bribe his way free of his predicament. He remembered the story about a fellow, a sheriff it happened, who was asked what he would do if faced by the whole of the band of rogues he was charged with bringing to justice. “I think,” he said after due deliberation, “I shall bless them.”

  “My wife and I are here alone today,” said their reluctant host, as if in apology. “The servants have gone to a picnic, and my wife is not in the habit of cooking. I hope you will excuse me.”

  He stepped back from the threshold and began to pull the door after him, but Marion interposed his boot, at the same time cocking his revolver in a menacing way.

  “And we are not in the habit of waiting supper,” he said. “We want vittles and want them now, damn you.”

  The householder quickly knew Marion as a man not to trifle with, for he did a turnaround and began to show his manners. He put on a face that exuded graciousness.

  “Light and come in, gentlemen,” he said. “We will do the best for you we can.”

  He seemed relaxed, almost confident now, though Jarom sensed beneath this facade a low, prickly hedge of formality and resentment. Despite his soft words, he stood as if supported along his spine by an invisible rod.

  Then Magruder asked if he could feed his horse.

  “Certainly,” said their host, waving his hands expansively and gesturing toward the rear. “If you take your horses around to the stable, there you’ll find plenty of corn and fodder. Use all you like.”

  Jarom saw the pale cornice of a large, whitewashed stable, visible from the edge of the porch.

  “We’re obliged,” Magruder said with exaggerated politeness and began to lead his horse away.

  Before he turned the corner of the house, Marion, considering the need to leave on short notice, called him back.


  “Wait a minute, Billy,” he said. “Better bring the corn and fodder around here. Let’s take the bridles off and turn them out on the grass.”

  Magruder eyed the carpet of green and nodded. Leaving his horse to graze, Magruder set off to fetch some fodder.

  Holding the door open, their host—Jarom never heard his name—summoned his wife, a petite nervous woman whom Jarom suspected of eavesdropping from a room off the hallway, cringing at every word. He led the way down the hall to a large kitchen at the rear of the house. They pulled up chairs around the table, and Sam Berry went on about bands of music and nothing in particular, asking questions in the manner of a schoolteacher, which he’d been for a time before the war. The wife, when she wasn’t bustling about the stove and larder, kept stealing glances at the pinned-up sleeve where Berry’s right arm had been. She soon had a meal laid out for them—cold chicken, parboiled potatoes, cabbage and onions, fresh-sliced tomatoes. The missus, at her husband’s suggestion, fetched buttermilk from a cellar by the side of the house, putting a pitcherful at the center of the table.

  “Is there anything to drink?” Marion asked, giving the clabbered liquid a look of scorn. With glasses of well water already before them, he clearly wasn’t referring to soft beverages.

  “We keep no strong spirits in the house,” the missus said, still keeping her composure. She had a Presbyterian look about her, Jarom decided. Not a teetotaler but a person who seldom partook of anything that would alter her somber view of the world and those of Marion’s stripe. Her husband rescued the moment.

  “My wife does have a few bottles of native wine,” he said with a wink. “But she is stingy of it.”

  “Well, then,” said Marion. “Then bring a bottle for us to sample of it.”