After he described the directionlessness of his own life, he asked Patterson what he should do. Patterson sat in his chair and faced the window, musing, as though he could see into the future. He sat for a long minute before words came to him, his hands still steadying the drained cup.
“Quit,” he said. “Put up your guns. Leave the service, leave off guerrillering and make a new life for yourself. Make a tame life in the wilds, where all you have to fear is Indians and grizzly bears.”
“Just up and desert?” Jarom asked.
“You can only desert an army,” said Patterson. “You’re riding with men who are marked. For them there is no going back. Or for you if you stay with them. You’re riding with wolves.”
“But I can’t just cut and run,” Jarom said. “There’s a price on my head, and the federals would never let me live in peace, not in Kentucky.”
“Then go west,” he said. “Pick up and go west. Go where there is new ground, new geography, new faces, where the war is just something talked about in the papers. Go where nature is still wild but you can limit your fighting to enemies you can recognize, to Pawnees and Fox and Sioux.”
“Will you come with me?”
“Don’t be foolish,” he said. “I can hardly find my way to the privy out back.”
“Will you come with me?”
Patterson sat sightless in his chair before the window, vague dronings and eruptions of the world outside drifting up.
“I am always with you,” Patterson said.
And Jarom knew he had been dismissed, that wherever he went and whatever he did, it would not be with Patterson in any form other than that which he could conjure in his mind’s eye.
After a lunch that Mrs. Kittridge served at her spare but adequate table, after hugging Patterson once more as though he might never again see this man who had fathered him into adulthood, Jarom said his goodbyes and was off, traveling east, not west.
NANTURA
On the night of November 1, 1864, Jarom accompanied Sam Berry and five or six others when they raided Nantura Farm in Woodford County. Located two miles from Midway and comprising about fifteen hundred acres of prime bluegrass, the farm bred race horses and contained some of the most celebrated racers in the state, including Longfellow and Ten Broeck, well known among those who followed the turf. The farm had been the property of Adam Harper, patriarch of a family long prominent in that section. From the papers Jarom later learned who occupied the house when he and the others came. Adam Sr. and his wife had died several years before hostilities commenced but were survived by four siblings—Betsy, Jake, Adam Jr., and John, all of them unmarried and living at the farm, all home at the time. Berry selected this particular farm to raid because he knew the Harpers as strong Unionists with prime horses. He also knew they had little use for any of the Berrys, especially since the war divided the county and put them on opposing sides.
Following Berry’s instructions, Jarom and the others surrounded the house, a comfortable frame dwelling with porches on every side. After they found their positions, Zay Coulter clomped up the porch steps and rapped on the front door, demanding something to eat. By way of explanation, he said he and his men were soldiers on their way out of state to rejoin their units. Adam Harper hospitably opened the door. When he saw the men before him rigged out as guerrillas rather than uniformed soldiers, he let out a wail and started to retreat down the hall in search of a firearm to defend himself. Jarom still stood on the porch when someone, probably Coulter, shot the old man. A scream from upstairs told them that others occupied the house, and more shots followed, fired inside from the upstairs hall, some from an upstairs window. Jarom heard a crash and a tinkling of glass before the first shot from the upper floor, fired a minute or two after those from the hallway.
Zay Coulter, never a zealot in any contest of arms whose outcome was uncertain, thought it prudent to leave and hastened the others to their horses standing restive in the yard. Jarom hopped up on Papaw and drew his pistol to get off a shot should a target appear. As Sam Berry grasped the Texas-style horn of his saddle to pull himself up, Jarom saw a flash from one of the windows. Half in the saddle, Sam Berry gave a yelp and fell back onto the gravel drive, the breath knocked out of him.
“I’ve been shot!” he yelled, grabbing his hip just below his right buttock.
The reins ensnared one of his long legs, and he was trying, with little success, to kick himself free.
Seeing the danger, Jarom hopped off and dragged Berry out from under his spooked horse, picking up the reins, which had come loose. At first, Jarom thought the bullet had struck the horse too, which might have accounted for Berry being bucked and thrown to the ground. When Jarom saw the horse still standing, he knew it could still bear weight and likely transport Berry to safety. Acting by reflex, Zay Coulter raised his horse pistol and emptied it in the general direction of the window from which the shot was fired. The shooter must have been hit or scampered for cover, for the shooting stopped. Jarom and Ben Froman each put an arm under Berry’s shoulder and lifted one foot to the stirrup and swung the other over the horse’s back. They hoisted him on upright to center his weight in the swag of the horse’s back. More screams came from the house, and Jarom half expected a troop of armed men to burst outdoors and loose a volley on them. Before remounting Papaw, he fit Berry’s boots into the stirrups and had him clasp the horn of the saddle, telling him to hold on, that they were on their way to safety. Taking up the reins of Berry’s horse, a trim roan more settled now, Jarom escorted Berry, hand still clamped to his buttock, down the drive and into the moonlit lane.
When they had ridden far enough from the Harper farm to feel safe, Coulter stopped at a house belonging to one of his drinking cronies, a part-time farmer and full-time bootlegger named Hayes. They half-carried, half-dragged Berry into the house and laid him out on the floor, removing his boots and pulling off his blood-soaked pants. Coulter, the most experienced with gunshot injuries, examined the wound while Jarom held a kerosene lamp over the bared skin. He saw a rash of birdshot that stippled the area just below the pelvic bone. Though he noted inflammation and a loss of blood, it appeared that nothing vital had been hit. Under the skin the birdshot festered like blackheads. Coulter told him that he required a doctor’s hand to extract any shot that did not work its way out and that he should swab the wound with rubbing alcohol or, lacking that, whiskey, to prevent infection. The news relieved Berry. Zay Coulter kiddingly told him not to plan any running or trekking or dancing until the wound healed completely, that it would be tender for weeks, and that he would feel as though he’d aged decades overnight into an old man with a limp.
“Moving,” he said, “will be slow as victory.”
Not a week later, over the protests of the surviving Harpers, General Burbridge invoked order 59 and ordered a lot cast among Confederates imprisoned in Lexington. A detachment conveyed the losers to the Harper farm to be shot in retaliation for the death of Adam Harper. Three of the four who drew the fatal lots were young and healthy. The fourth, a pale youth in the final stages of consumption, was sickly and disabled. In an act of compassion—foolhardy to Coulter, noble beyond reckoning to Jarom—the sickly man’s brother, also a prisoner but unaware what lay ahead, took the lot of one of the other prisoners so he could look after his brother. They left Lexington and the guards escorted them along the Leestown Road to Midway. Not one of the four knew why he had been singled out until their executioners fetched them to the fatal spot.
On the way, the head of the party got word that the Harpers would not sanction shooting prisoners on their land, so he determined to shoot them in Midway. The guards drew the unfortunates up at a spot near the train depot and forced them to form a death line. The officer in charge, heeding his superiors, read the execution order then summoned what citizens he could gather by the depot as witnesses. According to the account Jarom later read in the Midway Sun, one of the victims emitted a hideous shriek at the instant the soldiers fired. One moment
the innocents stood in sad communion, the next they lay sprawled and broken under the smoking rifles. A sorry spectacle, the paper called it.
The manner of their interment attracted notice too, for their executioners buried them where they fell in a hastily dug trench only eighteen inches deep. The guards arranged the bodies in a row side by side, then threw a blanket and shovelsful of dirt over them. When they finished their grim work, the executioners remounted and returned to Lexington. Local citizens sought and were given permission to remove the bodies, place them in decent coffins, and carry them to the burying ground, Jarom later heard. They even took up subscriptions to erect a stone over the graves. The stone they underwrote had an eagle with spread wings cut into it. Beneath the wings, they added an inscription:
RETALIATION
M. Jackson
J. Jackson
G. Rissinger
M. Adams
SHOT AT MIDWAY, KY., NOVEMBER 5, 1864
by order of Gen. Burbridge
Jarom recognized in these shootings the actions of brutes, a plumbing of new depths of depravity among those of his own species, among those who professed to walk in the ways of God and peace to preserve the Union. He felt his face clenching up, and he fought the impulse to cry when he finished reading the account. He also felt a strong inclination to smash something, smash anything—to break it into bits.
MAXWELL
Six days after the raid on Nantura, Jarom rode into the town of Maxwell in Washington County. This time twenty others accompanied him, all bent on a mission of mischief and profit. This time someone among the riders, probably Zay Coulter, fired his gun as a means of gaining people’s attention. The first man who stepped into the street thought he’d come out to shush some drunken soldiers. On second look, he reconsidered. Undisciplined and dressed in motley, the horsemen could not be regular soldiers. He ran back into his house, rousing the inhabitants with a cry that could be heard up and down the street. “They are guerrillas!” he yelled. “Guerrillas!”
Tying Papaw to a rail, Jarom followed Coulter and two or three others through the front door of the apothecary, ordering those who had retreated to the back room to show themselves. Coulter stood with his back against the near wall, pistol raised.
“You God damn sons of bitches!” he yelled. “Come out of there, God damn you!”
No one came out.
“You God damn sons of bitches,” Coulter yelled again, “come out of there! Do you two men intend to come out? Do you think you can resist twenty-five soldiers?”
Three men meekly emerged from the unlighted back room—one who identified himself as Perkins, a druggist; another who called himself Boseley; and a third named Walker, a store clerk. Coulter, in no mood to exchange pleasantries, quickly got down to cases.
“Give us your money,” he demanded, approaching the nearest, pistol in hand. Jarom watched as Coulter felt about the man’s pockets smartly, drawing out a roll of tickets of some kind and a pocketbook.
Without hesitation the other two pulled some greenbacks and change from their pockets and placed them on the counter. While Coulter kept his pistol leveled, Jarom helped himself to whatever he fancied, rooting through the drawers and behind the counter. Scattering some papers that lay on the desk, he lifted a blotter under which he found some treasury notes and what appeared to be a California gold piece. He took them, though money meant little to him so long as he had enough for dinner and incidentals such as horse feed. He didn’t think about the long term. A saver he was not.
Then, for some unexplained reason, Coulter started cussing Walker, the clerk, a harmless-looking man who wore spectacles and for whom cringing seemed as natural as breathing. Coulter somehow got it into his head that this ineffectual man had written a pamphlet against guerrillas. The man denied it, saying he knew nothing of it, that he had never heard such a thing in his life.
For answer, Coulter scattered more of the papers around as if to find the offending pamphlet and confront him with it. Magruder went back to the room at the rear where the clerk slept and rummaged around his bed, finding a pistol under the covers. He cocked the pistol and came back to the front room where he pointed it at Boseley, who begged him not to shoot. When druggist Perkins intervened and started pleading for Boseley’s life, Magruder turned the pistol on him, stuck it in his side, and pushed him across the room.
“God damn you son of a bitch!” he said, “I intend to kill you anyhow.”
Perkins then appealed to Coulter, who was standing behind the counter taking it all in, and Coulter finally intervened.
“You God damn son of a bitch,” he said to Magruder, “put that pistol down, God damn you, and let that man alone.”
Magruder stiffened, and Jarom could feel his anger, but he lowered the pistol, easing the hammer until it rested harmless. He slipped it into his pocket and strode out of the room. Jarom climbed upstairs and helped prize open a wardrobe, taking some jewelry and silver secreted inside a trunk. Pulling the casing off one of the pillows, he stuffed the valuables into it. All of them, as Jarom saw it, took what they wanted, so why shouldn’t he? Going back downstairs, he found Berry behind the counter on the medical side. For some reason the door of the counter would not open.
“God damn it,” he said. “I can’t get it open.”
After trying again to strongarm it, he gave up, sticking his foot through the showcase with an awful crash, and everyone began to help himself to whatever struck his fancy. Berry, moving gingerly from the flesh wound he suffered at Nantura, took up a quantity of knives, most of the pocket variety, from what the clerk described as a fresh supply from Louisville. Someone had knocked Boseley in the head and blood runneled down his face.
Then Coulter demanded of Perkins some whiskey. By this time the druggist was visibly shaking.
“I’ve not got any,” Perkins said.
“You God damned old liar,” said Coulter. “I know you have, and I want some of that good whiskey you keep for medicinal purposes.”
Perkins went out to find a bottle and glass. After a minute or two, he came back and poured Coulter a generous drink, probably praying that would be the end of it.
Before he could drink it, Magruder, who had returned from his prowl through the building, spoke up. “Make the God damn son of a bitch drink first himself,” he said, as if Perkins might have tried to poison him. Jarom remembered reading about the Borgias in far-off Italy, who rid themselves of every obstacle to their advancement with poison. Perkins, certainly, was neither so clever nor so devious.
Several began passing the glass around, and Jarom took a drink, his first of rye whiskey. As it hit his throat, he felt as though someone had placed a hot poker on the back of his tongue. He nearly gagged from coughing.
Magruder and the others laughed, and he made a note to himself to take this firewater down in a more manly way, knowing now its power to burn. When Berry said it was time to leave, Jarom took up his pillow case. Coulter had Perkins refill the bottle and swaggered out grasping it by the neck.
But Maxwell, which was not unlike a dozen similar forays, wasn’t what made an impression on him. Next day about dinnertime they stopped at a tall, unpainted farmhouse to muster something to eat. The house stood along a desolate stretch of road out from Hustonville. Maybe the owners had seen them coming, maybe they were off on errands—a barn raising or a corn shucking. Tobacco stood in full leaf, nearly ripe enough to cut, and might in some way account for their absence. Whatever the reason, no one seemed to be at home. In the larder Marion found a cache of homemade wine and helped himself, passing the unstoppered greenish-black bottle over to Jarom. There were only three of them now, and Berry had gone up to the second floor to see what he could discover. As Jarom stood swirling wine around his mouth, he heard a scream upstairs. Marion, taking everything in stride, told Jarom he’d better go up to see what devilment Berry had got himself into. Climbing the stairs, Jarom could hear commotion from a room at the end of the hall.
Gun in hand, he
stepped in through the open door and saw Berry struggling with someone on a bolstered bed. Pants down to his ankles, he was hunched over a brown woman, a housekeeper probably left to watch after things, her bare legs thrashing as Berry, his one good hand still gripping his pistol, did his business with her. To Jarom, the pistol meant Berry had threatened to shoot her if she did not stop resisting. The wide unfocused eyes, the flaring nostrils in that tortured face, arrested him. His back to the doorway, Berry didn’t hear him enter, but the woman, nearly hysterical, stopped screaming when she saw him standing there, expecting the worst. Jarom had never seen such terror in a human face, features twisted in such pain, the eyes dilated in fear. Her skin was the color of caramel.
Not until he’d finished and put his pistol aside to hike up his breeches did Berry become aware that Jarom had entered the room. Unrattled, speaking to him as though he had known all along that Jarom had been there, Berry asked if he wanted a turn, pitching a quarter on the bed as payment.
Caught off guard, Jarom felt a strong impulse to run, to bolt out of the house and take to his horse and ride until both were faint with exhaustion. Instead he told Berry that he would be outside with the horses. He turned on his heel and hurried down the hall, anxious for the whole hideous moment to be erased from memory, at the same time knowing he would carry the image for the rest of his days.
Jarom, who had never had congress with a woman but dreamed of it constantly, was revolted. The image of the wracked face would not leave him, though afterward the woman had pulled down her skirts and curled into a heaving ball on the bed, subdued now, whimpering with fright.
Where was the pleasure? he asked himself. What he had imagined as lovemaking now seemed an exercise in pain, an ordeal, a struggle of battling forms that tokened torture more than it did pleasure. Witnessing the gyrations of Sam Berry’s white buttocks on the bed was the closest he had come to unraveling the mysteries of copulation, the act he’d heard bragged and whispered about since before the war. He’d never worked up nerve or desperation enough to visit one of the daughters of joy who followed both armies and sold themselves in tents. Like nearly every soldier he knew—even, he suspected, the religious Estin Polk—he’d stimulated himself when stirred by desire and found relief, but he’d never been on such terms of intimacy with anyone, had never seen a couple joined in such a knot.
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