“But why?” Jarom asked.
“For future reference and disposal,” said Sam, not without some irony.
After burying his sister, Sam, who might have described himself as mild and gentle-minded, vowed that his life’s business would be to wipe out the attackers for the injury perpetrated not only on his sister but on the wives and daughters of the entire state. What Jarom heard echoed chords in his own private war.
As a first step in carrying out his vendetta, Sam sent word to Tennessee where Tom was recovering from a knee wound received in Morgan’s fight with Frank Wolford’s cavalry at Cynthiana. Having no trust in the mails, Sam deputized a reliable friend to deliver the message to Tom personally. Tom, when the news reached him, needed little time to decide what he had to do. Though his wound hadn’t healed completely and he walked with a pronounced limp, he got leave and mounted his horse, scouring the country for help. He spoke to anyone who would hear his story. He would describe the particulars of his sister’s death, wait for the horror and outrage to sink in, then casually ask the listener if he had left a wife or sweetheart at home, a sister or mother. Within three days he recruited fifteen men, two of them veterans under Morgan, on leave while their own wounds mended.
Next, he sent one of them, Billy Magruder, to market at Georgetown to buy forty Colt revolvers and a thousand rounds of ammunition. When the arms arrived, Sam called for a muster, dividing his men into two parties, one of them under Magruder. Taking command of the second himself, he threaded along back roads to the most desolate place he knew, the rocky uplands and wooded bluffs above the deep gorge of the Kentucky, not far from Shakertown, where Sam had lived for a time, as he put it, “apart from the world.” In the bluffs, screened by cedars—the primary tree other than scrub that would grow on such thin upland soil—Tom found a place apart from the world, a secluded retreat where he could rendezvous with Sam and the other recruits without worrying about intruders.
Cautious in the extreme, Sam set up camp in a nearly impenetrable woods just north of Dix River where it flows into the Kentucky, a place of spectacle where formations of limestone and fissured cliffs tower four hundred feet over a band of green water. A winding road, blasted and cut into the face of the rock, provided the access down to the river, the road ending at the base of the gorge where rock met water. Too rough, too steep for farming, the land on which his hermitage was situated touched no near neighbors, no village, no main roads. Not even a church existed in the whole section. The woods of the approach grew so dense that horses had to be led. To get to the camp, riders had to dismount, duck tree limbs, and follow a narrow game trail through thickets of sawbriers and coils of thorny smilax. All this was to Sam’s liking. Magruder, acting as guide for the combined groups of riders, described these trails as rabbit paths. Even where the men were able to mount and ride, the shanks and undersides of their horses were raked by stickers until they bled. Nearing camp, they heard whistles from pickets and lookouts. Sam saw one posted above the trail in a makeshift deer stand lashed or nailed into the tree.
Sam told Jarom that the camp itself consisted of a single cabin snaggled with vines, a relic of the time when James Harrod and the country’s first settlers abandoned their dugout canoes to hew and heave their way toward the broad skies of the uplands. Inside the cabin, located at one end of a failed pasture, Tom found his brother Sam dozing on a bunk of boards, his long legs propped on a splint-bottomed chair, the only other furniture in the cabin’s one room. When Tom entered, Sam said his eyes popped open, alert for trouble. Recognizing his brother, he rose and threw his one arm about him in a bear hug. After commiserating over their sister, Tom introduced Sam to the men who’d followed him in, all having scores to settle with the local home guard, which they had come to see as an extended arm of federal tyranny that had reared its ugly head in Louisville.
With variations in detail, each of the wronged men had narratives differing in pattern only in incidental details from the account given by a farmer named George Enloe. A band of home guards burned his house and drove off his stock. They had traveled from a not-so-distant federal recruiting station called Camp Dick Robinson, a place in northern Garrard County named for an ardent Unionist who owned the farm. When Enloe complained to the nearest federal authority, Colonel Jacob at Camp Nelson, the guilty parties beat him and forced him into hiding. Among his friends he vowed that he always paid his debts with interest.
Next morning after breakfast, Sam Berry combined his men with Tom’s in a fraternity of free men and bandits that went back to the Celts. Meeting in an informal ceremony of war, they elected leaders from their number and took oaths of loyalty to the Confederate cause. No one was surprised that Sam was elected captain, and Tom, who adopted the alias of Henderson, as first lieutenant, and Billy Magruder, as second. They selected George Enloe, whose mind was a map of every hill and hamlet for miles about, as guide and scout.
Magruder raised a question about how to travel the roads without attracting undue notice. He proposed the ingenious solution of having several men got up in blue overcoats and trousers to act as leads for the rest. They divided into three squads of sixteen to eighteen men, one for each of the main roads out of Camp Robinson.
They calculated everything to the finest degree. Most of the squad would hide in the woods while two parties of two would ride out on the road in either direction to act as decoys, keeping a sharp lookout for guardsmen or federal regulars, but especially guardsmen. Once they sighted prey, tactics would be devised to suit number and circumstances. Large units they would permit to pass like fish through a weir in reverse. Smaller groups, up to four or five men, would be snared, tried, taken to the nearby ravines or thickets and shot if found guilty. Guilt translated to mean having accompanied the party that raided the Berry homeplace and stabbed Susan Berry. They decided to execute each of the condemned with a ball in the forehead, the band’s agreed-upon signature. What they lacked in numbers they hoped to make up in armaments. Each member carried no fewer than four pistols and, where feasible, a sawed-off shotgun. Tom Berry himself carried nearly half his weight in a small arsenal of six pistols and two double-barreled shotguns, firepower that gave him forty shots before he needed to reload.
“Oh, he’s a man of mettle,” Sam joked. “His only fear is magnets.”
The first day was a bust. The second, while patrolling a side road leading to the Harrodsburg pike, Sam’s party netted six home guardsmen. After disarming and escorting them to a deserted place out of sight of the road, Sam pulled out his list, which he kept scrolled in his bedroll for safekeeping against the elements. Strangers might take it for a list of deacons or subscribers to some charitable cause. Consulting it, he asked each prisoner to give his name, and Enloe confirmed all were present at the Berry farm on the day when Susan received her fatal wound. They stood, most of them, with their eyes on the ground as if staring at a dropped object that they were afraid to pick up. Ranging from too young to shave to late middle age, they dressed motley; most of them, from the look of their clothes, were farmers dressed in jeans and scruffy jackets of homespun, men not in any visible way distinguishable from their captors. Without ceremony their captors told them to place their hands behind their backs. Billy Magruder came along behind them, binding them from a shank of rope he pulled and cut from his saddlebag. Most of the captives clung to the belief that, though at the mercy of strangers, these strangers would march them off to a camp somewhere or even parole them with a warning to shed themselves of the vocation of home-guarding. At least one had a chaw of tobacco in his mouth and respectfully turned his head when he felt the need to spit ambeer onto the ground. His teeth, Sam remembered, were the color of rainwater in a bucket of walnuts he’d picked and forgotten.
When all were bound, Sam faced them and introduced himself as the brother of the late Susan Lavinia Berry of Woodford County. This drew a sigh from one of the captives. Sam later remembered that another went into a blinking fit, his eyes aflutter in motions like the flexing
wings of a butterfly, motions he could not control. Another man fell to his knees, looked to the heavens, a low hum emitting from the hollows of his chest.
“Lord, O Lord,” muttered the man with tobacco balled in his cheek, ‘Lord, O Lord.”
Sam stood before them and looked each of them in the eye, his pistol lowered at half-cock and pointed toward the ground.
“I am Samuel O. Berry,” he said, “and I intend to shoot you all to hell.”
A visible tremor passed through the six, the kind of shudder a body might produce when thrust into cold air from warmer water, a muscular contraction neither bidden nor avoidable. Sam later told Jarom he recognized most of the men from before the war. They were farmers he might encounter at the hardware or feed store and speak to in passing, along with a layabout or two seen around the courthouse when court was in session and often when it wasn’t. The man with the tobacco began pleading for his life, protesting that he shouldn’t answer for what the others did.
“Robertson stabbed her,” he said, pointing to a brawny, scowling fellow whose face was matted with whiskers that Sam described as resembling a curry brush, his person much in need of scouring with strong soap.
“It was a accident,” he protested, “and not one of us saw it coming. We’d never do hurt to a lady. No sir, it’s not right.”
“Do you know this man?” Sam had asked Enloe.
“Only by reputation,” Enloe said.
“Take Robertson and be done with him,” said the man, whose eyes started fluttering. “Take him and let the rest of us git home. We never meant her, nor anyone, no harm.”
Sam then asked Robertson if the others spoke the truth. Robertson denied stabbing Miz Berry, denied even being at the Berry farm.
“You going take the word of these goddamned liars?” he said. “Why, I haven’t even set foot in Woodford County since tobacco setting last spring.”
He went on in denial until he saw that Sam stood unfazed. Then he stopped, as though some voice in some recess of his mind had whispered for him to stop, because he wasn’t gaining any ground and wasn’t going to. He then started on another tack, admitting being at the farm but claiming he had not seen who stuck her.
Sam told Jarom that when the man’s hands began to tremble he knew he was getting closer to the truth.
Sensing his advantage, Sam quizzed Robertson, pressing him to cite particulars. After more temporizing, more hemming and hawing, the man finally gave in.
“All right,” he said, “I might of been there, but I never meant to harm her but only to give her a little scare.”
He owned that, yes, he was standing behind her in the parlor, and that, yes, he might have kind of like pricked her with his bayonet, but he insisted he never meant her any real hurt. Cocking his head, the flutter finally stilling to an anxious squint, he asked Sam with a hint of bravado, for the benefit of the others, what he intended to do about it.
“I purpose,” Sam said, “to shoot you like the dog you are and invite the buzzards of Mercer County to sup on your liver.”
To his credit, Robertson accepted his sentence with a scowl and spoke no more.
Sam told Jarom that from the first something about the man—the cut of his lips across the grizzled terrain of the wide face, a certain cowering belligerence about him—told him that this man was capable of sticking his sister, amenable to any meanness.
“He reminded me,” Sam said, “of a rat snake I cornered once in the stock barn one night after milking. By the light of my lantern I counted lumps of what must have been the cousins or in-laws of every rodent that ever burrowed in my corncrib. Caught as it was, it lacked the capacity to show any guilt because it was doing what nature had determined it to do. So I let it go.”
“And Robertson,” Jarom asked, “what did you do with him?”
Sam said he signaled Tom, who marched the unlucky six at gunpoint farther down the bluff into a deep ravine whose bottom was a dry creek bed. The rubble of rockfalls over the centuries sloped upward to ledges of rock layered in shadow, a place so craggy and narrow that sunlight shone directly on it only an hour or less each day. Part of the slope was a blow-down, an area where trees had been leveled by a high wind or tornado.
“It was late in the day,” Sam told Jarom, “and what trees there were made a fretwork against the rocks. Over one end of the ravine I could just make out little bits of the river below.”
They formed the six in two ranks, their backs against great chunks of limestone that spilled from the facings before any of them had been born. The rock faces looked mottled, scabbed with lichen and a yellowy moss.
One of the six, a gangly boy not out of his teens, started to cry. Several intoned prayers to their Maker. Then an executioner faced each of the six, Tom and Sam among them, each raising his pistol at Sam’s order and leveling it at his partner. After a brief pause, Sam, his Colt dead on Robertson, gave the command to fire. An explosion convulsed that narrow space, and each of the guardsmen fell, each forehead bored by a single shot. Sam told Jarom he’d waited and watched the tendrils of blue smoke interweave before melting in the still air. Sure finally that none of them yet breathed, he ordered the guardsmen left where they lay. Then he holstered his pistol and started climbing back to the horses, one or two of them skittish from the unexpected reports.
Next day, they resumed their hunting along the roads and captured three more men, shot three more. On the fourth day the whole company assembled on a cliff overlooking the countryside for miles around. From the high point, the landscape, as Sam Berry described it, was a quilt, an imperfect geometry of stobby cornfields broken by little fringes of trees and brush along the boundaries, flatter land where only the ridges were wooded. He described a vista of pastureland with clusters of buildings and tiny wisps of smoke rising over the frozen ground. Here Sam felt the safest since his sister’s death, able to take in half the county with his spy piece. He posted pickets and turned the horses out to graze on the sparse leavings of last season’s fieldgrass.
Midday, when the pale sun reached its apex, Tom Berry made out sixteen riders inching along the valley road nearly two miles away. Eyeing them through his fieldglasses, Tom thought the cavalcade resembled a file of ants. It contained more men than any group seen since the hunting began. How to exploit the opportunity concerned Tom most. Instead of laying an ambush or attempting to capture a column so long with the usual decoys—a greater risk—he decided to gamble on something bolder and risk all. The whole company would meet the sixteen at some predetermined point. After conferring with Sam and Magruder, he decided on a chancy plan, bold to the point of rashness. Riding at the head of his own column, Tom would greet their captain and divide his men on either side of the oncoming column, springing the trap as he came abreast of their last rider. This sounded plausible enough and played well with the others.
Quickly resaddling their horses, Sam’s party formed in two columns and trooped down the hill, picking up the lane that ran along the valley floor. Recognizing timing as crucial, Magruder galloped ahead as scout and gave arm signals to speed or slow the pace of the main party. About halfway to the advancing column Sam said he knew they had been spotted, for the oncoming riders stopped to parley among themselves. They bunched for a time, then came on again. Sam cautioned his men that each should proceed confidently and act the part of home guards with business at some distant destination.
As planned, the first riders met at a stream crossing. Sam hailed their captain, a husky, clean-shaven man astride a preening sorrel. Clopping through the shallows and spurring his horse up the embankment, Sam doffed his hat good-naturedly and went briskly on as though he had pressing business elsewhere. No one exchanged a word. They passed as though the men in both columns were mutes or members of tribes so distant in relations that they shared no word or gesture in common. Their captain, seeming at first a little perplexed, in turn worked his way down the bank and crossed the stream, the big sorrel’s hooves poking through the membrane of ice along the
edges. Without any obvious reluctance he proceeded purposefully past what he must have regarded as an itinerant troop of home guards. His fifteen men, tense and silent, followed and soon passed down the corridor formed by the two columns.
As their captain drew abreast of the last rider, Sam broke the silence with a shrill whistle. Instantly, the sixteen found themselves covered by revolvers. Some gaped in disbelief, some even laughed. Their leader, recognized by Sam as a combination haberdasher and outfitter in Nicholasville, quickly realized he had been duped. He slipped clumsily off the sorrel and spat in frustration. Even as Sam’s men deprived them of their weapons and ordered them to gather under the bared canopy of an elm tree by the side of the road, most of the prisoners still resisted accepting these riders in blue as enemies. Sam, acting as keeper of accounts, efficiently took their names and checked them against his list, as a supplier might check off items on a bill of lading. Nine of the sixteen had been at the Berry farm. Thomas sorted the seven reprieved men from the condemned, not letting on that anything was amiss. Even after Sam explained why the nine were to be shot, several persisted in believing themselves victims of some monstrous joke. Enloe, wielding a long piece of cowhide, whipped the seven lucky ones and deprived them of their horses. Tom threatened to shoot them if they were taken again. Off they jogged down the road, the first shots sounding before they dropped out of sight. Susan Lavinia Berry. Thirty men in four days.
Sam’s account of what happened to his sister inevitably put Jarom in mind of Patterson. He felt his own heart brimming cistern-full with hate. The sky ahead he imagined darkened by an expanse of thunderheads, a prospect of storm. Jarom told Sam what had happened to Patterson, the two of them linked in mutual suffering. To Jarom, Susan Berry might easily have been his Mollie or Mary Tibbs, or Patterson. Shooting Patterson had been equally senseless, part of a tragic consummation that impartially maimed and destroyed the innocent as well as those who knowingly undertook the risks.
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