Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

The old gentleman returned from the cellar with a dusty bottle, which he wiped with his sleeve.

  Impatient of opening it and spoiling to make a show, Marion struck off the neck with the big bowie knife that he always carried on his belt. He poured his spring water onto the floor and proceeded to fill every glass with wine. Jarom took a sip of the pale mulberry liquid and found it too dry, but its cellar coolness made him feel refreshed.

  After downing a second glass, Billy Magruder simpered and began to chortle. The missus, strained to her limits, started to cry, while her husband, his endurance stretched nearly beyond tolerance, stood stoically, helplessly by.

  Marion sipped at first, then glugged down two more glassfuls, including the one poured Sam Berry, who said he’d had enough. Marion ordered the host to bring more wine, and the man returned with two more bottles, again wiping the dust off with his sleeve.

  “Now, if I just had a segar,” Marion said.

  “Sir,” the host said, “I have a few in a box. One moment and I’ll fetch it.” His voice now had a tinge of exasperation in it, a slight raspiness beginning to show beneath the civility.

  He left the room, his face pinched in a martyr’s smile.

  Jarom had the impulse to apologize for Marion, though he felt no sympathy for the host who stood before them, superior, smoothed and polished to the point of glistening. He could picture him in his white sanctuary, sipping his wife’s homemade wine from tulip-shaped glasses and bossing the servants about.

  In a few moments he came back down the hall, presenting an opened box to Marion, who took one of the brown cylinders, pulled it under his nose to savor the aroma, then twirled it in his mouth to wet the makings. Their nameless host passed the box around, Jarom and the others each lighting up, the low-ceilinged kitchen quickly blueing with smoke. The host began to cough, asking politely if he and the lady of the house could be excused.

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” Marion said, pushing back his chair. “We are just leaving.”

  Jarom knew that the longer they stayed the greater the risk of attracting notice and causing a ruckus that might result in their being killed or taken.

  They rose from the table and trooped back through the hall, a pennant of blue smoke trailing behind. Magruder, having drunk too much, bumped along the wall in the passageway. They found their horses where they had left them. When they mounted, Jarom threw a mock salute to their host, who stood master of his porch again.

  “Don’t whisper a word of our being here,” Marion warned. “If you do, we’ll come back and burn this place to the ground.”

  It took little to convince the host, who said he wouldn’t, relieved, Jarom thought, to see these scoundrels about to disappear through the same portal to hell from which they came.

  Glancing back halfway down the drive, Jarom could just make him out, still standing in his shirtsleeves on the porch, small under the tall columns and the arc of trees, untouched by anything but the lengthening shade of his massive elm.

  Weeks later, Jarom had to amend his impression when he came across an account in The Louisville Journal of the troubles their visit caused. For the poor man, a physician, he learned, had a second visit, this one from detectives dispatched from the commandant’s office in downtown Louisville. The commandant, a man named Burbridge, was a war hero of Shiloh and, more recently, Cynthiana. For his services Lincoln appointed him military commandant of Kentucky. One of the neighbors reported to Burbridge that the doctor had been harboring bandits. Under questioning at headquarters, he confessed to having entertained a party of guerrillas under duress. The authorities seemed at first inclined to lock him up in the military prison as an example until the poor fellow explained in full the circumstances under which his hospitality had been offered.

  And that wasn’t their only expedition to Louisville. Late one sultry afternoon a month later, Jarom slipped into the city with Henry Medkiff, stopping for a drink at an uptown tavern on the Bardstown road. At the bar was the usual gathering of loafers and soaks: out-of-work mechanics, draft dodgers, a teamster or two, a drover, a professional panhandler. Most nuzzled schooners of beer against the heat and talked about the most recent doings off in Virginia. Then one of the teamsters mentioned that a person or persons unknown had shot a prominent Union man near Bloomfield. Guerrillas had been sighted in the vicinity but just whose band no one seemed to know. Mention of guerrillas roused a red-faced man at the end of the bar, a know-it-all wearing a faded hackman’s cap.

  “Mundy’s your man,” he said with conviction. “If it happened at Bloomfield, you can bet Sue Mundy’s on one end of it, yessir.”

  Jarom tried to hold his anger by calmly continuing to sip whiskey from his tumbler. But the topic caught on, and others named crimes for which Sue Mundy was to blame: two pickets murdered in Middletown, a prize saddle mare stolen, a mail wagon looted near Muldraugh’s Hill. In fact, Jarom, though not idle elsewhere, had no hand in any of these.

  Taking up the theme, Red-Face proceeded to pour forth a tirade, badmouthing Mundy as a common highwayman, a poltroon, a cutpurse, a jackanapes of anonymous parentage, a polly foxer, an all of all that was base and mean against all that was pure and noble. A spoiler. Still Jarom kept his composure, nonchalantly bottoming his drink and ordering another. On impulse he stood a round for the whole company, including Red-Face. And this seemed to silence the insults temporarily. The topic was about to die a natural death when the hackman caught a second wind.

  “I’ll wager,” he said, slapping a dollar down on the counter, “that any man at the bar is more than equal to Miz Mundy. More equal in all ways but one, and in that Miz Mundy is wanting.”

  He laughed, and the others joined in.

  Jarom felt his fingers tighten around the tumbler until his knuckles blanched and he thought the glass would shatter. Only Medkiff noticed. The rest paid no special attention until he stepped back abruptly from the bar, the rowels of one spur making an ugly sound as they scraped across the foot rail. By turns he stared each of them in the eye, testing to see if anyone would challenge him. No one did, so he slumped back against the bar and took up his drink.

  An uneasy minute passed as he gazed at the roomful of them in the mirror behind the bar, and they gazed back at him through the mirror behind the bar, his back to them as he leaned forward, resting his weight on his elbows. The pittings on the mirror’s surface gave each object a grimy rash. Dust motes complicated the band of sunlight angling into the dim room through the tall window by the bar.

  “Gentleman,” Jarom said, speaking into the mirror, “you should be careful when you abuse anybody. I am Sue Mundy.”

  Having their attention now, he paused for effect. Then he turned, lifting his wide-brimmed hat, the mane of matted hair dropping to his shoulders.

  His words hung in the air as the silence wove its invisible cocoon around them. No one wanted to be first to speak. But clearly what Jarom said couldn’t be ignored. Everything became suspended, floating like the motes of dust in a closed room with sunlight sprawling across the rug. His revelation caught the barkeep contemplating the crumpled bloom of his towel in an upturned glass. The hackman had the look of doom. Several customers playing parcheesi at the back table began inching toward the rear door. Glaring directly into each face, as if for future reference, Jarom drained his glass and set it on the counter with a tiny clink. The kiss of glass on wood, light as it was, must have resonated in every ear, for the silence seemed reverent. No one moved as Jarom crossed to the doorway and turned to face them again.

  “Now you can go down and invite your friends to call on me,” he said. “I’ll be glad to see any of them who choose to call out the Newburgh road this evening.”

  Motioning to Medkiff, he passed casually out the door, unhitched Papaw, and rode out the Newburgh road.

  SAM BERRY

  Like William C. Quantrill, his Missouri counterpart, Sam Berry, had been a schoolteacher before the war. Unlike Quantrill, he had also been a minister of the gospel, or so he to
ld Jarom. For a time he had even lived with the Shakers at a large communal holding of interconnecting farms called Pleasant Hill, located in the highlands above the Kentucky River on the outer rim of the Bluegrass. It seemed an odd fit to Jarom, for he knew the Society of Believers, more formally the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, did not countenance violence of any kind and practiced, with some slippage among the ever-erring few, celibacy. Given the pacific teachings of the sisters and brethren, Berry was the last person anyone would have expected to become a soldier, much less a guerrilla. He started his military career honorably enough, joining Company G of the Sixth Kentucky Cavalry, under John Hunt Morgan, at Lexington in October 1862.

  Around the campfire Jarom learned that Sam’s brother, Tom, a braggart much given to making exaggerated statements, claimed that he and his brother had killed as many men with their own hands as had any men in the Confederate army, excepting, possibly, a few sharpshooters. At any rate, at the time of Sumter, Sam Berry was teaching school in Mercer County at Harrodsburg, the oldest permanent settlement in Kentucky.

  From the moment he met him, Jarom saw that Sam Berry was cut from finer cloth than either Marion or Magruder—his manner, his grammar, a certain bemused detachment in his interaction with his comrades. Slowly he began to piece together Berry’s history. Watching him as he talked, Jarom could easily imagine him, a graduate of Lexington Normal School, lean and long-faced, not quite young enough now to pass for a student, not quite old enough or harried or haggard enough to pass for a teacher, still beardless, his right arm, which he lost to machinery working in a hemp factory, detached from his body long enough ago that he wasn’t self-conscious about the loss. The loss, of course, had pushed him into a schoolhouse. Jarom could picture him standing before a roomful of young scholars, lining out the contents of a speller or going over tables in Ray’s Arithmetic, one sleeve of his tunic folded and neatly pinned.

  He could visualize the class, farmers’ antsy sons and docile daughters, pacing themselves toward the moment when the hour told them they were free to quit the precincts of learning. Visualizing his short career as a preacher came harder. On Sundays, Berry told him, he had helped out at the church, occasionally giving a sermon, leading prayers for the sick or otherwise ministering to congregants in his neighborhood. As Jarom assayed him, he seemed too earnest, his face in unguarded moments betraying the slightest irritation, which would bloom later as disillusionment and spite.

  War must have come as release for Berry, a prolonged recess, a reprieve from shirt starch and boredom. Berry gave the impression that if war hadn’t come, a gold rush or the prospect of adventure in the West would have served as well. As it happened, Berry tried to remain neutral at a time when neutrality wasn’t possible, given the deep fissures that divided his neighborhood, his region, into two armed camps. A few months before war broke out, a majority of Woodford County’s citizens printed a notice of their allegiance to the Union, denouncing the secession movement. Very quickly the county split—those in the majority who had saved Woodford for the Union on one side, everyone else on the other. When the war started, the county’s pro-Union sentiments made it a target of guerrilla raids. Berry thought the severed arm might exempt him from enlisting in either army, might win him status as a neutral noncombatant. After the war came to Kentucky, new acquaintances assumed he had lost it in some nameless skirmish. The death of his sister taught him a fuller meaning of enmity.

  Just after Jarom met him, the two of them had their likeness made at a studio in Bloomfield, Kentucky. Berry, a little reluctant to depict for posterity his missing limb, contrived to pose in such a way that he seemed whole, placing the stump so that Jarom’s upper body obscured it. For his part, Jarom raised his right hand and cradled it over the empty sleeve, his relaxed fingers acting as a partial shield, contributing to the illusion. Excessively proud of this likeness, Jarom carried it with him everywhere, showing it to whoever would look at it.

  In his talks with Berry, Jarom learned Berry was descended from a family with long service in the military, harking back to peat bogs in Ireland for all he knew. For a hundred and fifty years every generation produced a crop of warriors, starting with his great-grandfather, who fought under John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, in the war of the Spanish succession. His grandfather fought in the American Revolution. His father, Samuel O. Berry Sr., saddled his best riding horse one day and rode off as a volunteer to the Mexican War. After Sumter, he had enlisted as a private in Morgan’s Raiders and claimed to be the oldest combatant on record in either army. Though Jarom had never met him, he did know several of the old man’s former messmates, and questions after the senior Berry’s health became a standard greeting among Morgan’s riders.

  “And how are you feeling today?”

  “As fit as Sam Berry,” the trooper would say.

  In prison and out, the old man, as durable and lean as the walking stick he carried, stuck with Morgan until Morgan’s death at Greeneville.

  When asked the secret of his longevity, Sam Berry Sr. had a stock answer: “Pretty music, pretty flowers, pretty women.”

  Once when someone asked if he wasn’t a hundred years old, he became thoughtful for a moment.

  “I always thought that when I got to be a hundred I would turn into an old gray mule or go to Utah where I could marry me seven wives.”

  “What’s keepin’ you here?” another wag asked.

  “The Southern cause,” he said. “I can’t strike out till we’ve licked these Yankees.”

  “And when’s that gonta be?”

  “Soon,” he said, “soon. If the Lord has put up with Yankees all this time, I guess we can stand ’em a few more days.”

  Sam Jr.’s brother, Thomas F. Berry, had been among the first to join the Lexington rifles when it was re-formed to become the nucleus of Morgan’s mounted infantry. A devil-may-care sort, he raised himself through the ranks from private to captain to colonel, claiming during his service to have been wounded sixty times, a claim that no one chose or dared to challenge. William, another brother, had enlisted as a private in Stonewall Jackson’s old brigade, rising to the rank of major before dying at Malvern Hill.

  The death of Sam’s sister, Susan, marked the severest blow to the family’s good fortune and drove an otherwise peaceable man to violence. Sam often cited it as the event that changed his life. After the Berry men rode off to war, she stayed behind to keep house and manage the family farm, situated out the Clifton Pike. Though both father and brothers worried about her well-being, she had a stubborn disposition, insisting she could go on living as though in normal times. She pointed out that she had hands on the place to work the fields, two servants to help around the house, and a few reliable neighbors who would look in on her from time to time. A spinster in her late twenties, she had earned a reputation for self-sufficiency. When she stated her intentions, the family relented and left her to her own devices.

  “She’s one woman who could saddle her own horse,” Sam once told Jarom, a high compliment.

  With four Berrys in the Confederate army, her family’s politics were no secret in the county. In the Clifton neighborhood, sentiment was split pretty evenly down the middle. Life in that remote section of Woodford went on as usual until local papers brought news of the heavy losses at Shiloh and, closer to home, Perryville.

  Then, families that had intermarried, shared labor and farm implements, and sat in adjoining pews for generations began to fall out over the death or injury of a husband or a favorite cousin or a brother. The world classified itself into a new taxonomy with two subparts—Lincolnite and Secesh. No luxury of a middle ground or free territory existed now, no individual neutrality for families connected with either side. And every family was connected, most of them closely. As casualties mounted and local rancor and local prejudices gained a purchase, fields full of cattle emptied overnight, tobacco curing in the barns went up in smoke, people sickened from drinking water from poisoned wells.
Detachments of home guards formed to protect the property of loyal citizens from raids by bands of guerrillas detached from both armies. Answerable only to the county judge—a staunch Unionist—the home guard units quickly degenerated into bands whose primary motive was the pursuit of vendettas and accumulation of plunder.

  So it was not wholly unexpected when, on some pretext or another, a party of local home guards rode out to the Berry farm one crisp fall afternoon. When they clattered into the farmyard, only Susan and a frightened house girl were at home, as the guardsmen probably knew. Knowing them to be up to no good, Susan locked the outer doors. The guardsmen forced their way in, pushed the women aside, and began ransacking the house for valuables. According to Sam, the family possessed an heirloom, a sword his grandfather had captured at Stony Point during the Indian campaigns while serving under “Mad” Anthony Wayne. Inevitably, one of the intruders took a fancy to it. As he pulled it from the wall above the mantel, Susan gamely tried to wrench it away. During the scuffle that followed, someone stabbed her from behind with a bayonet, the long triangular blade entering her right lower back—her back, mind you, Sam Berry had said, her back!—and lodging in the lower ribs. Realizing things had gone too far, the guardsmen quickly gathered their plunder, including the sword, and left.

  When the hysterical house girl recovered her senses, she bolted out the back door and ran for the nearest neighbors. The neighbors in turn rode off for a doctor, who examined the wound and said Susan would die by nightfall. She didn’t. Though the blade had penetrated the lower lobe of her liver, she hung on for nearly five days in the most extreme pain, long enough to plead with Sam, the first family member to arrive after the summons, not to take revenge on her murderers but to let things be.

  Sam solemnly swore that he wouldn’t, then set about sleuthing to discover the names of the culprits. With scholarly zeal, he meticulously compiled a list that eventually included every man who rode in the party, some forty or so.