And so on and so on. Prentice suffered fits of punning and created his own folklore about Jarom marrying the devil, endlessly inventing what he hoped were clever gibes to amuse and indoctrinate his readers. Prentice’s jeering flights of fancy amused Jarom in one mood, irked him in another. He thought the old editor finally an author of dark fables. When he read one to Magruder, never seen reading anything, Magruder vowed that by God he could stop it by replacing the flow of ink with the flow of blood.
“Just how do you propose to accomplish that?” Jarom asked.
“Well,” Magruder said, “I’ll just ride to Louisville, find the damn newspaper, and shoot the son of a bitch. There will be as many to rejoice as will mourn. They may say the pen’s mightier than the sword, but mighty few are willing to put it to the test.”
A LEAKING ROOF
While in a crossroads store near Lebanon Junction the third week in October, Jarom found Sue Mundy in the news again:
Louisville Daily Journal
October 17, 1864
SUE MUNDY AGAIN—HER ATROCITIES—A correspondent, writing from Jeffersontown, in this State, under date of October 14, furnishes some details of the operations of the outlaws under Captain Berry in that vicinity. We published last week an account of their depredations at Harrodsburg. After passing Conley’s toll-gate, the outlaws started from their camp in Spencer County, twelve miles from Jeffersontown. A number of citizens on the road were met, halted, and robbed of their valuables. Mr. Finley was knocked down and relieved of his watch and money. Abraham Fink was robbed of a fine horse and all the money on his person. Mr. and Mrs. Haller, Mr. Phillip and lady, Mrs. James Goose, and others, were treated in the same cavalierly manner—halted on the highway and robbed of their purses and valuables.
Up to this point, Jarom felt the account, though inaccurate in a few particulars, generally recreated the incident with as much fidelity as one could expect of someone who hadn’t witnessed the events.
For Jarom and the others, robberies had become standard practice as they encountered strangers on the road or stopped at isolated farmhouses. He knew what he did was wrong, that no one who had brought him up would approve, that it was against everything he had heard for a lifetime of Sundays. But he also discovered that the turbulent world in which he lived lacked a compass, that it was a lost world, that the times in which he lived were such that the darker half of man’s nature overbalanced the lighter. So he had no quarrel with what he read on paper, the words that gave voice to much of what had happened and only a little of what hadn’t. And so he read on, knowing that the words evinced no badge of pride or act of generosity but only a world in which creatures struggled to annihilate other creatures whose only difference to sight was the tint of dye used in their clothing, blue or butternut:
About eight o-clock in the forenoon, the marauding gang, with Berry and Sue Mundy at its head, dashed into Jeffersontown, and took forcible possession of the place.
A negro boy, belonging to Mr. Vernon, was mounted on a horse, armed in the most complete fashion, and rode with the gang. He stood guard over the horses in Jeffersontown while the scoundrels were scattered about the town engaged in robbing the people. Sue Mundy dismounted at the Davis house and had her canteen filled with whiskey. The negro recruit had learned the duties of his vocation, and in the coolest manner imaginable, he relieved a number of his Ethiopian brothers of their pocket change. The outlaws had captured a Federal soldier along the road and retained him as their prisoner. After plundering the town, guerillas mounted their horses and departed from the place, moving on the Heady road.
They proceeded to a dark ravine in the woods of Mr. Joseph Latherman, where a halt was ordered, and subsequent developments proved that they murdered their prisoner in cold blood.
The discharge of firearms was heard by several parties residing in the vicinity, but they were ignorant of the cause. A short time after the reports were heard, Mr. James Simpson, on his way to Jeffersontown, was met in the road by the outlaws and robbed of twenty-seven dollars in money. He observed that Sue Mundy’s pistol was empty, and the fresh stains showed that it had but very recently been discharged. While Mr. S. was being robbed, this she-devil was engaged in reloading her revolver. She pointed the muzzle at the breast of Mr. S., and smiled with fiendish satisfaction at his embarrassment, as she capped the tube of each barrel of the cylinder. After being released, Mr. Simpson rode directly to Jeffersontown and related his adventure. He was informed, that, with the prisoner in Federal uniform, the party numbered eight when in town. He met but seven on the road, and was positive that no prisoner accompanied the outlaws.
The Citizens at once surmised that the soldier had been murdered, and, following the trail of the guerillas, they approached the dark ravine, and found that their worst apprehensions were only too true. The day had passed, and the moon looked calmly down from a cloudless sky.
The dead body of the prisoner was discovered. He was stretched upon his back, and the rays of the moon fell softly upon his cold, white, upturned face, bathing it in a ghostly light, adding a strange, fearful power to the ashen hue of death. His body was marked by five pistol-shot wounds, and two deep stabs, as if made by the keen blade of a dagger. All the circumstances go to prove that the murder was committed by one hand, and that hand was Sue Mundy’s, the outlaw woman, and the wild, daring leader of the band. By a record in a small memorandum-book found upon the dead body, it was learned that the name of the murdered man was Hugh Wilson. Upon his person was also found a letter, dated Mt. Vernon, Illinois, and presumed to be from his wife, as it commenced with “My dear husband.” She wrote in an affectionate manner, and spoke with loving fondness of their pleasant home and the little darling ones who “sent love to pa.” This letter, from the home of his love, and written with so much tenderness, was found in his bosom, pierced by balls and stained with the crimson blood that gushed in warm life-torrents from his heart. A new mound has been heaped in the little graveyard at Jeffersontown, and there the murdered soldier sleeps.
After the perpetration of this cold-blooded fiendish outrage, the outlaws rode directly for their camp. They were pursued a short distance by a party of mounted citizens from Jeffersontown, but without effect. Sue Mundy, the tigress, seems to be abandoned, lost to every kind, womanly feeling, and, exulting in scenes of blood, leads her desperate followers on to the perpetration of the most damnable outrages. Her many atrocities will be remembered, and we trust will be the means of bringing her to the gallows.
As he read Prentice’s accounts, Jarom understood why others described him not only as a poet but as a talented prosecutor, a man who knew that words could turn events to advantage. Prentice knew how to milk the emotions of his readers, with both castles of sentiment and barbs of contempt, with quips and subtleties of tongue. In his description of the shooting he ignited his readers’ prejudices, calling Jarom a tigress, a committer of outrages.
But Prentice couldn’t know entirely what he hadn’t witnessed, for reporters could only write about what others saw, more often about effects than causes. Jarom knew that no one conspired to kill the prisoner. Though killing him had been likely or even probable, the prisoner himself made his death a necessity. As they moved along a shady defile south of Bloomfield, the prisoner managed to pull Ben Froman’s carbine from its scabbard and hightail it into the wooded slopes of a ravine, which, as the paper stated, probably belonged to Mr. Latherman. Catching everyone off guard, the prisoner succeeded in escaping before anyone had the presence of mind to shoot him. But he had misjudged the terrain, as it happened, fatally. Backed into a cul-de-sac, he had no choice but to fight. Dismounting where the ravine ended in shelves of rock that formed what had been a waterfall of a dried-up creek, he took refuge behind a large fallen rock as if daring Jarom and the others to come after him. Most of Jarom’s party wanted to leave him be, but Coulter, his instincts aroused, insisted they root him out.
The seven of them, three newly joined, fanned out to come at the fugitiv
e from different directions. By the time Ben Froman scaled the leaf-strewn bank and circled behind the lip of stone that formed the waterfall, it was over. Darting from tree to tree in the desperate man’s line of sight, Sam Berry drew his fire, the bullet slapping the bark of the locust tree he stepped behind. As soon as the report sounded, the others rushed forward. Not having the makings with which to reload, the prisoner, a feisty little man in whose mouthings Jarom detected a trace of brogue, began to curse and swing his carbine about his head as though bereft of his senses. In an act of perverse chivalry, Zay Coulter put away his pistols and went after him with only a knife, working in close under the swiveling stock of the carbine to prick, then stab, the frenzied Hibernian.
When the stock of the rifle clipped Coulter’s shoulder and rolled him defenseless on his back, Jarom and Berry intervened to slow the berserker with pistol loads. Rising, Coulter closed in for the kill, twice stabbing the thrashing prisoner, who managed to keep his feet but staggered as though drunk. Then, backing against a tree, he slumped against its trunk and slid to the ground lifeless. Admiring his pluck, no one touched him further or stooped to rifle his belongings.
Jarom remembered the story Mary Tibbs told him about the neighbor who noticed a leak in the ceiling of his porch. One day while this neighbor sat under the eaves during a spring shower, a drop of water filliped him on his forehead. He thought nothing about it until the next time it rained, and he discovered a small puddle on his porch floor. This time he said to himself that he ought to get out his ladder and climb up on his roof to tar the leak, but it might have been too dark or too cold or too pretty a day for house repairs. And before long it came winter, and snow accumulated around Christmastime. He noticed when it melted that the leak had spread and the whitewashed wood around the leak had turned the lime green of decay. That next spring, he finally put up the ladder and took some patching to plug the leak. When he stood on the spot, his leg slipped through the punky sheathing, and he scuffed up his shin. The point, Mary Tibbs drove home, was that by the time he got around to tending to what started as a drop of water, the underside of the roof had rotted, not to mention the floorboards that he also had to replace.
“So what do you think he did then?” Mary Tibbs asked.
“Did he build a new house?” Jarom asked, with a little archness.
“No, he had to hire a carpenter to lay down a new roof,” Mary Tibbs replied, “spending more than he had to set it aright. Afterwards, he checked that porch each time it rained. A wet dog print was enough to send him off for the ladder.”
Jarom considered the number and extent of his own leaks, his own moral failings. Especially killing. He took no special pleasure in it. Taking the lives of strangers was war’s work. But he knew he’d moved from fighting for a cause in which he believed to fighting for the sake of fighting—robbing strangers, executing anonymous enemies, practicing acts of meanness under the guise of continuing a guerrilla war where armies had failed. He had a rare moment of self-reckoning, a sober weighing of the moral scales. He could find a few justifications, primarily the gratuitous shooting of Patterson, but that excuse was wearing thin. He could cite commendations as a soldier, acts of selfless bravery, but he also recognized that he had changed, that he no longer fought under any flag but that of self-gain and violent whim. Could he change directions? Could he mend his own roof? He felt that he had become who he was through slow stages; maybe he could work his way back. He hoped the porch was not too far gone to think of mending it.
PILGRIMAGE
Coming out of this reflective mood, on impulse Jarom paid his long-contemplated visit to Patterson in Hopkinsville. He awoke one morning with Patterson centered in his mind. Telling no one, and with almost no forethought, he threw a saddle onto Papaw’s broad back, filled his canteen and packed a little food, and lit out toward the southwestern part of the state. He dressed in his best suit of clothes, hoping to pass as a factor if authorities stopped him. Traveling mostly at night, he slept or read during the light hours. In a vacated house he found a translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Transferring his attention to France in the early decades of his century, he absorbed himself in another life in times as troubled as his own. For the much-abused Jean Valjean he felt great affection and kinship, recognizing in that good man struggling to evade police inspector Javert a fugitive, unjustly persecuted, relentlessly pursued.
For two days he passed along unimproved country roads, possessed by the prospect of seeing Patterson again. Did Patterson still hold something of his old zest for life? What had he found to nourish his restless mind? Could he get around on his own? Had his injuries reduced him to a shadow man? In a kind of trance he dreamed of several versions of his reunion, meeting after so long the person who knew and brought out the best in him. In one half-waking dream doctors by some medicinal magic restored his sight, Patterson’s eyes blinking under the glare of rediscovered sunlight. He imagined what the two of them would do together then, venturing somewhere far from the war, maybe sailing to Brazil where they would ranch and step the fandango with raven-haired senoritas. As he came closer to his destination, his visions sobered as he prepared himself to meet a broken Patterson, a man ruined and shattered beyond all salvaging.
Without encountering a single uniform, he arrived without mishap at the outskirts of Hopkinsville on Tuesday, almost two days to the hour after leaving Bloomfield. Laid out around a small but elegant courthouse, the town had an economy centered on marketing tobacco, though it had several mechanics’ shops and a large tannery. Jarom counted the spires of six churches rising above the rooftops. It was a neat and flourishing place that did not seem much affected by the war.
Finding Patterson was his next task. He knew that Aunt Mary Tibbs had placed him at the home of a widow, a needy but caring woman of her acquaintance who took in boarders. He had only to ask the first storekeeper he met to learn where Patterson lived. How many blind men, after all, could be living in a town of sixteen hundred residents? Tying Papaw to the tine of a rusty iron fence, he walked up to a modest house a block off Hopkinsville’s main street, where the storekeeper told him a blind man lived in a rented room.
A sallow woman, in her thirties he guessed, opened the door and introduced herself as Mrs. Kittridge. Yes, she said, there was a Mr. Patterson living under her roof. As if anticipating he might imagine her asking how he’d learned her address, she explained that all the neighbors knew Patterson, were accustomed to seeing him on the streets he’d evidently memorized, walking with a silver-knobbed cane given him by the woman who had brought him there over two years ago, a Mrs. Tibbs. Jarom told her he was kin to her and to Patterson and had come to pay his respects. She said she supposed that was fine and would take him to Mr. Patterson’s room. On the way, she confided that her guest was a man of regular habits and that she was pleased to have him in her house.
Then she knocked on a closed door at the rear of the first floor and announced to Patterson that he had a visitor.
Jarom wasn’t prepared for the Patterson who sat by an open window listening to the noises of the street. He’d sunk in on himself, his shoulders slouched, his long legs dwindled to sticks, a paunch in his middle. Dark glasses with lenses the size of dollars covered much of the area of his wounds. Tiny white scars nicked his cheeks and forehead, discolorations that would never fade. Some device that fleshed out, at least covered, the wrecked nose. He tried not to look at it.
“Here’s an old friend come to see you,” the widow said.
Patterson slowly straightened in his chair, turning to face his visitor.
“It’s me,” Jarom said, and reached for his hand to shake it.
Patterson slowly lifted himself to his feet. When his hand failed to rise, Jarom stepped closer.
“It’s me,” he said, “Jarom.”
Patterson, as though struck dumb, slowly showed signs of reviving. At last he spread his arms and Jarom stepped into his embrace, the first time he had hugged any male in this manner. Pa
tterson threw his arms about Jarom, choked by feelings Jarom had never witnessed in him, in any male.
Patterson asked him to draw up a chair and started asking questions. Where was he now? What was he doing? Was he still fighting with Morgan’s old command?
Jarom summarized everything from the killing of Morgan to his taking up with Magruder and Berry. He described his life in Nelson County and the daily risks that had begun to form his routine, a life that added the randomness and violence of the soldier’s life to spells of hibernation and hiding out. His lost personal identity, his lost citizenship, deprived him of ordinary rights and pleasures, of walking carefree down a street, not having to keep vigilant for anything around him out of the normal.
Widow Kittridge brought them tea on a tray, and Jarom self-consciously balanced the cup and saucer on the knee of pants he had worn in a dozen shooting scrapes in central and southwestern Kentucky.
After sipping his hot tea, the cup cradled in his palms, Patterson opened up a bit and described the half life he lived as a blind man, restricted to the barest necessities of warmth, food, and shelter—a life of privations. He said how lucky he had been to find lodging with Mina Kittridge. Her husband had been counted among the dead at Antietam fighting under another Kentuckian, General John Bell Hood, but she held out the hope that one day he would simply reenter her life, turning up when she least expected him. She gladly kept Patterson company, in the evening reading him the books that Aunt Mary sent. During the days Patterson hung around wherever he could listen, making friends with several veterans who no longer fought in the war and welcomed the obligation to look after him.
Afraid of the answer he would get, Jarom had no heart to ask the only question he wanted answered: was he happy?
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