In the newspaper account of the murder, Jarom later read that Cunningham, an orphan like himself, had been raised by his uncle and entered the service at seventeen, fighting first with the Eighth Kentucky Cavalry and then with Colonel Weatherford’s regiment of the Thirteenth Kentucky. According to the writer, he was not only the youngest officer but the youngest man in the regiment. The article, probably sent over the wires from someone who knew him, referred to the men who shot him as fiends. What stayed with Jarom was the gist of lamentation in the article. Cunningham had been taken from the circle of his associates just in the bloom of life with hopes and bright anticipations of success in the new business he was commencing. “None knew him but to love him,” the article stated,” none lisped his name but to praise.” The article went on to say that gloom still lingered in the midst of those who knew him and that the tear of sympathy had been freely shed over his bier. One seemingly innocuous sentence toward the end of the article especially got to Jarom. The writer, describing the reactions of those who witnessed the raid, quoted one of the town’s citizens. “They are,” he said, “a vicious set of men, very.” It was the “very” that troubled him more than the “vicious”—the afterthought that “very” was needed to describe the intensity of the viciousness visited on Hustonville.
Reading the piece, Jarom, remembering his loss, felt a pang of conscience. They had no reason, no provocation, to gun Cunningham down. He had surrendered. He was giving up his pistol. Why had they shot him? Was it instinct, an ingrained reflex of some kind? That the men he shot had lives and hopes similar to his own he well understood. But until that moment he had not considered himself a fiend who snuffed out the life of someone his own age, a person with characteristics that made him more than another abstraction in blue. Until then he had not felt the anguish of those who knew Cunningham.
So far as Jarom knew, George Prentice wrote about each of the killings, and occasionally Jarom happened on a back issue at a grocer’s or hardware. One he came across in mid-December typified the notices:
Louisville Daily Journal
December 8, 1864
SUE MUNDY’S GANG—A CHAPTER OF ROBBERIES AND MURDERS.—On Saturday last, a gang of twelve guerillas, led by Sue Mundy and a scoundrel named Dick Mitchell, started on a tour of robbery and murder, and the outlaws were quite successful. They first visited Springfield, robbed the stores and private parties of about two thousand dollars in money and property, and, without provocation, shot two citizens down in cold blood. T. W. Lee, a wagon maker, was one of the murdered men, and Wetherton, a shoemaker, was the other. The marauders then started from the town, paid a visit to the villages of Texas and Pottsville, and robbed each of them of small amounts. Just after dark, on Friday night, the town of Perryville was thrown into a commotion by a report being brought in that a band of guerillas, said to be one hundred strong, was approaching the place by way of Mackville. The citizens were terribly excited, and a number of them were up keeping watch over the town all night. They were without arms, and came to the conclusion, that, if the force was as large as represented, it would be useless to attempt to offer any resistance. About two o-clock P.M., the next day, Sue Mundy dashed into the town at the head of her gang of twelve men, which, it appears, report had magnified into one hundred. An unusual number of men and women were in the streets at the time, and, in less than fifteen minutes, under the effects of a pistol argument, everyone was relieved of their purses. The scoundrels did not dismount from their horses, but rode up to store-doors, and made the merchants bring to them the contents of their money-drawers. Money appeared to be the sole object of their raid as they carried away with them but little, if any, goods. They “confiscated” several horses and saddles.
A young man named Lawson, a Federal soldier, was shot and mortally wounded while in the act of handing over his purse. The miscreant guilty of the cowardly outrage claimed that the shooting was an accident. The gang did not remain in the town more than twenty minutes.
From Perryville the outlaws moved to Nevade, then to Cornishville. When last heard from, they were at Bloomfield. About an hour after they had departed from Perryville, Captains Fiddler and Wharton, from Lebanon, in command of a detachment of soldiers and armed citizens, arrived and pushed forward in hot pursuit. We did not learn with what success the pursuers met. It is fair to assume that they did not overtake the outlaws.
As a general thing, a scout manages to keep about one mile behind the force that it is sent in pursuit of. Surely, if a proper effort was made, some means could be devised for the capture of Sue Mundy and her horse-thieving, murdering gang. If the citizens would exhibit a spirit of bravery worthy of Kentuckians, the handful of marauders might be picked up and turned over to the military authorities as prisoners without anybody getting very badly hurt.
Jarom had to admit that, aside from name-calling, Prentice reported things as they had happened. Dick Mitchell, another adopted Nelson Countian, had been with him, as had Dick’s brother Tom. But Jarom only partially agreed that an exhibition of bravery would bring him and the others to their knees. He emphatically disagreed that they could be taken without, as Prentice might put it, great effusion of blood. He fingered one of the metal buttons on his jacket: United we stand, divided we fall.
REDEMPTION
Jarom could think of no special reason for any of them, on a bitter cold Monday morning, to be in Taylorsville, a town of no special importance except as a watering place on the way to Bloomfield and other destinations in Nelson County. Not one of them—neither Magruder, Berry, Bill Marion, nor Jarom himself—had any business there until Marion manufactured some in the form of abducting four persons of color from the local jail.
Like much that begins as mischief and ends in calamity, it opened by chance and played out in the old molds of predictability. Knocking about the town, Marion stopped a man named Dunstan, a carpenter, and asked him what the news was. Froman told him that four Negroes had been jailed on Sunday, two of them women. Marion asked what they’d done, and Dunstan told him that they had been charged with burning and looting a house a mile or so north of town. He explained that at the time of the fire someone saw the woman near the site and that when questioned, none too gently, she’d named three others. So the constable enlisted some good men and true, men who happened at the time to be idle, and they scoured the country gathering them up, fetching them from the farms of their owners. At each place, after the circumstances had been explained, the owners reluctantly gave them up, all except the Widow Hume, who had to be restrained while the men bound her young domestic to a spare horse and led her away. The others went willingly enough to the jail in Taylorsville, where they sat behind bars until an inquiry could be made.
“Inquiry be damned,” Marion said. “They ought to be shot, and we’re just the boys to do it.”
Without any other prompting, he went over, as he put it, to reason with the jailer, a man named Samuel Snyder, a part-time turnkey, who made most of his living as a blacksmith. Snyder had gone across the street to fetch cigars requested by one of the prisoners, a man possessed theretofore of a good reputation. When Snyder returned with a handful, Marion and Magruder confronted him outside on horseback with pistols presented. Pistolless himself, still clasping the cigars, Snyder was in no position to resist even if he had been inclined to. Marion demanded the prisoners, ordering Snyder to unlock the door and to do it quick.
Marion and Magruder then dismounted and bullied Snyder into the jail, pushing him up the stairs and down an ill-lighted corridor to the cell where they were kept. Snyder, afraid that giving up the prisoners too easily might make him appear lax, lamely protested that he held the prisoners in his custody and that all good citizens should let justice do its work. He and the growing number of onlookers knew that he protested mainly for show, as he had not the faintest hope of dissuading a man as determined as Marion, a man well known to all of them.
He went on to promise Marion that justice might take some time but that it would
be done and done proper. Taking the undelivered cigars from Snyder’s hand and stuffing them in his jacket, Marion responded with curses, forcing Snyder at gunpoint to unlock the cell door. Leaving him with a key in his hand and an empty cell, Marion and Magruder escorted the four prisoners downstairs and onto the porch. Which was when Berry rode up, meeting Dunstan and some other citizens who had assembled outside the jail, more out of curiosity than outrage.
Dunstan and a man named Kirk appealed to him to prevent the Negroes from being killed and to let the civil law run its course. Berry told them he would do what he could to save the Negroes’ lives. He slid off his horse and joined Snyder, who was still pleading with Marion and Magruder on the porch of the jail. They talked a few minutes, then Berry came back and said there was nothing he could do, that his friends were determined to kill the Negroes. He said that he feared for his own life and that he’d been threatened for arguing on behalf of the Negroes.
“The long and short of it,” he said, “is that I won’t risk my life for any Negroes.”
Dunstan then appealed to him not to have the Negroes killed in town.
“What difference does it make,” said Berry, “if the Negroes are killed here or killed out of town?”
“Because,” Dunstan said, “the town already has a bad enough name. If you’re determined to kill them, have the courtesy to take them out of town.”
A body of twenty or so citizens had now collected outside the jail. They did not appear in any way threatening, but Marion willingly granted them this small concession. “In town or out of town don’t matter to me,” he said. “I estimate I can shoot them out of town just as well as in.”
Hearing the hubbub, Jarom, who had been up the street at a stable having a loose shoe on Papaw’s right forehoof checked, rode down to the jailhouse where Marion and Magruder were prodding the Negroes into the street. Berry stood by with a hangdog look on his face. Marion and Magruder, who said not a word, mounted their horses and marched the Negroes ahead of them toward the Salt River bridge. Berry held back a minute or two, explaining for Jarom’s benefit what he knew of what happened before he’d come to the jail. What Berry himself had not witnessed he pieced together from Froman and Snyder as well as from what he could gather from Marion and Magruder. Then Berry, resigned, hoisted himself onto his horse in his one-armed way and went after the others.
When the three riders with their four charges were halfway to the bridge, Jarom, disgusted by the whole episode, went after them. He caught up just as the party vanished into the dark mouth of the covered bridge, a structure that had been the town’s pride for over thirty years and that Marion threatened to burn each time he crossed it, just as he threatened to burn the courthouse, a threat he later made good on. When they came out at the other end, Marion ordered each of the Negroes to hop on the back of a horse, each of the four behind a rider. And Jarom went along with Marion’s instructions, as the older of the two captive men, with some effort, climbed up behind him. Sensing that the crowd at the jail might gather pluck enough to set up a pursuit, Marion put spurs to his big gelding, and the eight of them took off upriver as hard as they could go on double-weighted horses. Still worried about the shoe, as Papaw strained under the double weight, Jarom slowed while the others steadily widened their lead.
Jarom learned that his passenger, a burly man with a wreath of white stubble around his mouth and jowls, was named John Russell. His breath smelled of rancid bacon. Jarom, lagging behind the others, ordered John Russell to clasp him about the middle and hold on. In response to Jarom’s questioning, John Russell said his master was Cal Grigsby, a farmer from up around a section called Little Union. Russell said Grigsby treated him “pretty tolerable.”
Jarom explained to John Russell what the man already knew, that he’d got himself into serious trouble and asked him to tell straight out what had happened. The Negro, speaking over Jarom’s shoulder into his right ear, said the first he knew of the house burning was from a cook in the neighborhood named Sallie Bell, a plumpish yellow woman in her forties who belonged to a not-too-prosperous farmer named Eli Cooper. She told him that there had been a fire in a vacant house and that he could take what he wanted that wasn’t burned. He’d gone to the place and found most of the upper floor a blackened ruin, the downstairs damaged by smoke but mostly intact. Where the fire had burned, the roofline was broken and filled with unfamiliar light, the sticks of charred sheathing poking up to suggest the ghost angle of the structure when it had been whole. From among the clothes and belongings strewn on the floor he had taken a few things, nothing valuable, and carried them back to Cooper’s. No, he hadn’t set the fire, and, no, he didn’t have any notion who did.
“And that’s all I know about the fire,” he said, “until the gang of them come for me and put me in the prison house. I’ve never messed with any real trouble in my life. I do my work, I mind my business. I don’t do thataway.”
Jarom was inclined to believe him and said so, unable without turning completely around to read his expression. Though he didn’t know what involvement John Russell had with taking items from the house, he didn’t think the man had struck the fire. If he had scavenged some clothing from the abandoned house, no one, to Jarom’s way of thinking, would be the less for it. Snatching up useful things struck him as closer to practicing good husbandry than “looting,” an ugly word better described as “salvage” here.
On this side of the river the going was less sure because they followed no road. The pike to Bloomfield ran on the town side of the bridge, but Jarom knew there was a passable ford a mile or two upriver where they could double back. Marion chose this side for its relative remoteness and to discourage followers. It was easy to lay an ambush along such an unformed route. But for an occasional clearing the landscape was hilly and densely wooded with great rough-barked hickories and flanks of dusky oaks whose limbs formed fingerlike canopies over their heads. They passed up and down steep, bridgeless declivities that dipped to ravines and dry creek beds that fed into the river whenever rain fell.
“What kind of man did you say Cal Grigsby is?” Jarom asked.
John Russell, the warmth of his bulk behind almost an extension of Jarom now—physically closer to him than anyone, even than Mollie Thomas, had ever been—did not answer at first. Jarom reckoned the man pondered how honest he could afford to be, white people sticking up for white people, black for black. Finally, he broke the silence with the answer of someone who had survived servitude a long time, a hybrid of truth and fiction. “Oh, Cap’n,” he said, “he’s better’n most and worse than some. He’s fine when he’s not been drinking.”
“And how often is he drinking?” Jarom asked.
“Most the time,” John Russell said, “most the time.”
“Do you have a wife?”
“I do, and three children, but they live up in Shelby County at Dickson’s and I am with them only a little. A son and two daughters.”
“And what did you have to do with this house burning?” Jarom asked. “Are you sure it wasn’t you who set the fire?”
“On my soul,” John Russell said, “it wasn’t. I swear to you. I only came to the house when Sallie Bell told me things were out for the taking, that they would be ruint if someone didn’t take them. So I says to myself, says I, ‘If they’re here for someone, I might as well be that someone cause ain’t I someone too?’ ”
They were passing under a large sweet gum, and one of the lower limbs brushed the hat off Jarom’s head.
“Woops,” he said, “I’ve lost my hat,” sweeping his arm back in a vain effort to catch it.
John Russell, wonderfully limber, slid off the Papaw’s rump and fetched it up, handing it up to Jarom, who pulled it over his snaggled head and thanked him. Jarom was surprised to hear himself thanking this stranger who had done him a kindness at a time when he was designing to take the man’s life—which did not accord with whatever conventions of kindness governed even so wild a place.
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