As they entered an overgrown pasture of sedge that grew in sallow spikes, an eroded slope choked with scrub and cedars, they heard a spatter of shots some distance ahead. Sound carried in the river bottom, and it was hard to determine how far away they were. As the tattoo of firing fainted away, more shots sounded, and Jarom knew he’d better catch up to see for himself.
They made their way down through a copse of thick timber into a wide field that spread and scalloped up the steep slope of another ridge. At the far end of the field, maybe two hundred yards away, Jarom could make out two riders straining through the stubble toward the trees. The first was charging up the hill toward the trees. Just at the treeline, he saw the form of a woman, her skirts hiked to her waist, sprinting faster than he had imagined anyone in skirts could move. The second rider, mounted on Marion’s big gray gelding, not far behind, was chasing up the hill, his passenger, a male from the looks of him, still hugging the man in the saddle.
As he and John Russell rode down into a swale, Jarom lost sight of the riders and the running woman, but more shots placed them somewhere off to the right. As they rose again to higher ground, he saw that Marion had turned and was heading back toward the river. He couldn’t see Magruder but guessed he was somewhere in the woods still after his own rider. Where Berry and the other woman were, he didn’t know. The shooting stopped, and he angled back toward the river following the direction in which he’d seen Marion moving. Marion and his burden disappeared again, a tongue of trees separating them, but he knew Marion would close the gap and likely would pop into view, sooner and closer than he might expect. Out of the blue came John Russell’s question. “Cap’n, are you going to shoot me?”
Jarom had no ready answer, not expecting so blunt a question from someone whose death he debated even then. His every instinct told him not to tell the truth, whatever he intended to do. He knew that the easiest way to placate him would be to tell John Russell, that, no, he, John Russell, was a good man, that Jarom had no intention of shooting him, would not think of it. He could then make up his mind before joining Marion and Magruder. He did know that if he closed with them again with John Russell still alive, he wouldn’t be after meeting them.
“I don’t know,” he said, and he felt John Russell stiffen and sigh, sigh again, and then go silent. The breath he felt on his neck from his fellow being who reminded him of Uncle Nether, the patient man who had shown him how to run a beeline half his life ago. It was best to come square with John Russell.
“Uncle,” Jarom said, “I believe they are going to kill the last damn one of you.”
“Then, Cap’n, why don’t you jest let me go?”
“Because if I do they might kill me,” Jarom heard himself saying, knowing this to be unlikely and amounting to a lie.
Then he saw Marion pop out of some trees in the uplands, cutting a diagonal across the pasture where he and Marion and John Russell would likely converge. Marion held a pistol at the ready, pointed toward heaven, with no rider at his back, no woman. And Jarom knew that she lay in some upland thicket, that Marion had come back without her because he had caught and done violence to her, for Marion was not a man who would have returned until he had snared whatever he was after.
Then he felt John Russell slide off Papaw’s rump and hit the ground. John Russell was up and running before Jarom could turn Papaw back to face the figure whose feet were beginning to get their purchase up the hill. John Russell vaulted over a clump of buckberries and tore off toward cover. The woods were maybe fifty yards away, though large single trees with spraddled limbs broke the skyline in the old field, one just ahead of him with its top knocked out by lightning. As Jarom passed it, he had to dodge the remnant limbs where they had fallen. Instinctively, he drew his pistol and raised it to align on the center of John Russell’s back.
Not once did the fleeing man look back, though he must have expected the shot at any instant. Nor did he zig and zag but beelined for the fringe of trees that rose to the ridge. Crossing it seemed the goal toward which his whole body and mind were striving. Jarom could see Marion coming in his direction now, his gelding bounding across the open ground in a steady lope.
Jarom raised the pistol, cocked back the hammer to steady his shot, and followed John Russell’s back as he made for the trees, gaining some distance now.
“John Russell!” he yelled. “You, John Russell, stop!”
But Jarom knew John Russell wouldn’t stop, just as he knew that he himself would not exert the pressure necessary through his crooked finger to trip the trigger. He glanced back and saw Marion getting closer. By now surely Marion, whose hatred of blacks was endemic, could see the upraised gun and the fugitive as he flew. Marion must have been wondering why Jarom didn’t fire, or why he didn’t at least spur Papaw into what would still be an easy pursuit.
Then what had been swelling inside him without shape or substance rose like the head of an infant crowning at birth.
I can’t do it, Jarom said to the part of him that was poised to fire. Finger, hand, hold back. I can’t shoot this man, just can’t do it. Won’t.
In plain sight of Marion, closing within eighty yards now, he raised the pistol and fired well over John Russell’s head. John Russell showed no sign of slowing but kept on clambering uphill, his run slowing to a dogged trot as he reached the thickets and undergrowth near the crest of the ridge. Jarom fired again, again for show, the pistol kicking up in the familiar way but the ball cutting air well wide of John Russell, who had nearly reached the ridgetop. The limbs and shelves of rock under Papaw’s hooves checked her progress until she stopped, as if frustrated by impediments she could not overstep. A third time Jarom fired, and then John Russell was over the crest and out of view.
Marion, pistol still raised, reined in next to him.
“Did you hit him?” he asked. “Myself, I couldn’t get a clear shot at the son of a bitch.”
“I might have have pinked him a little,” Jarom said, taking comfort in his lie. “It’ll take more than either Papaw or me to find him now.”
The two of them made their way to the summit and looked out over an expanse of gray timber, a great cone of wilderness that formed a mesh of limbs thicker than any man could negotiate on horseback. A blush of lavender showed in the buds of some of the near trees, a smear of it in those distant, filmy and blue. After checking his remaining loads, Jarom holstered his pistol, which seemed now to hold some new heaviness. But in his chest he felt that some great stone pinching his lungs had been lifted so that he could breathe again.
He knew he was all right when Marion holstered his gun, still scanning the woods for some sign of the fugitive.
“Did the others get away?” Jarom asked.
“Not hardly,” Marion said. “They’re down the river, the three of them.”
“Dead?” Jarom asked.
“Dead.”
First they came to one of the women, Berry’s charge, off to herself in a little clearing on a bluff near the water. Her feet with her laced-up shoes stuck pathetically from under her sprawled and twisted skirts. She lay on one cheek, one eye fixed in startlement, her arm outthrust, the caramel brown of her forearm contrasting with the pinkish cup of the exposed palm, her fingers clenched in death like the claws of a stricken hen. One arm was tucked under, and her billowing skirts formed a kind of fan. Around her neck hung a spotless yellow bandanna.
Marion led him to Magruder and Berry, who still sat their horses on a little sandbar that extended into the river. The horses showed fatigue now, especially Magruder’s, whose flanks heaved from exertion. The neck of Marion’s arched toward a ragged hole in the ice through which Jarom could make out gelid water. The men themselves were smoking and talking quietly in somber mood. Jarom studied the hole as he would something dark and ominous. Beneath the water with its collar of jagged ice Jarom could make out two forms, one male, one female. Whether they had been drowned or shot was not easy to tell, but the woman named Sallie Bell had a hole in the side of her c
heek. Her woolen dress was sopping and heavy, her head clearly visible. Under the cold water her skin had blenched white, her frizzed hair turned the blackest black, the greenish black of a grackle’s wing. Jarom could see more of the man but could detect no visible wounds, no bloodstained jacket or shattered face, the eyes squinched closed as if contracted against the cold.
On the other side of the river stood a mill and some outbuildings, half visible through the trees. Smoke from the chimney told him someone lived there, decent folk, he hoped, who would investigate and see to the burials, people who would fetch the owners to claim their property, someone in the end who would say that in some crude way propriety and custom, if not justice, had been served. Marion, puffing on one of John Russell’s cigars, was obviously pleased with himself. Magruder seemed more furtive, blowing little rings of blue smoke that unraveled in the invisible turbulences of that place. The breath snorted from the horses’ nostrils condensed as it met the frigid air of morning, making it seem for an instant that in some peculiar equine way they were smoking too.
When Berry and Jarom had a moment to themselves, Berry told him that Magruder, after ridding himself of his rider, had come along and ordered the woman off Berry’s horse. Protesting at first, Berry finally helped place her foot in the stirrup of Magruder’s mount, and the two cantered off. When Berry heard several shots a few minutes later, he did not have to be told what had happened. Hearing this, Jarom congratulated himself that he would never have surrendered John Russell. Savoring a satisfaction new to him, he tried to imagine John Russell, shivering but alive, hunkered in some hollow tree or doubling back to whatever friend or family he had in that place until he found someone who would work to restore warmth to his body—to spoon him some broth, chuck another stick of kindling on the fire.
MAGRUDER
From the first time he met Billy Magruder, Jarom felt the man had a fatal streak in him and was superstitious to the point of madness. Magruder seemed a creature made up of contraries. He never hesitated to take an enemy’s life, but he would suffer discomfort and sleeplessness rather than flick a mosquito from his forearm. He harbored the same fellow feeling for crickets, hoptoads, and ladybugs. One fall when the ladybugs were thick, somehow he bit into one as he ate some bread, spitting out the remains, which he swore he recognized by the bitter taste. For weeks afterward, he carefully inspected everything he ate for fear of consuming an insect, a creature to which he believed he was related, if distantly, in the great family of living things. “You don’t eat family,” he said.
Born a bastard in Bullitt County, he regarded his illegitimacy as a stain on his character that justified almost any behavior. His condition, as he saw it and believed others saw it, disgraced him. He felt himself an outcast with no need to answer to the rules by which others lived. “My life was darkened in its morning,” he once told Jarom, “and it has known no sunshine since.” For this, he asked no pity from anyone, no mercy, no sympathy. But he did not take kindly to anyone, even his friends, making reference to his origins.
Joking around one day at Bloomfield, Bill Marion called him a bastard.
“Woods colt,” Magruder corrected him, “woods colt.”
Marion allowed he’d never heard of such a thing and asked what he meant.
“It means this,” Magruder said, slapping one of his thighs on which he wore a holstered pistol. “And this Colt has a kick!” he added, tapping the pistol butt emphatically.
Henry C. Magruder joined the Confederate army in Nelson County in 1862, recruited by Colonel Jack Allen at a place called Camp Charity. He had been part of Albert Sidney Johnson’s bodyguard at Shiloh and saw the blood poured from the general’s boot before he died. Ordered to deliver dispatches across the battlefield after the first day, he rifled the pockets of the dead and dying, Union and Confederate alike. He told Jarom and anyone else who would listen that he courted death and had a heart for any fate. He joined Morgan’s cavalry and served until Morgan was killed, whereupon he returned to Kentucky and took to guerrillering as naturally, he used to say, as a baby suckles his mother’s milk.
Magruder’s knowledge and practice of moral character were at best exploratory. To him, the natural world was a living organism consisting of worlds within worlds, some being too great for the mind to encompass, some too small scarcely to reckon. To him, every creature, every action, was a sign writ in Nature’s hand. Once, Jarom saw him pull pegs from his tent rather than disturb a brown spider that had spun its filaments over the opening.
Though lacking moral substance, he was the kind of philosopher that might be found at any crossroads store, full of earthy wisdom. Jarom remembered Magruder’s little lecture on the leg as a means of escaping one’s enemies. He called it the philosophy of running. “Any man,” he said, “who imagines that his leg is simply an ornament to his person has failed to discover the purpose for which it is fastened on him. A man’s legs are to bear him out of danger. And the man who uses his arms and legs, the faster the better, is wiser than the man who rests his legs and stands.”
He loathed religion in general and Christians in particular. Though born a Catholic, he often seemed to be competing with himself to see how many of the Ten Commandments he could break and how often, and while he acknowledged no fear of the hereafter, he would not take up arms on Sunday. If circumstances dictated that he defend himself on that day, he would do his best to disappear until the contest was over or Monday came. He kept his nail parings in a mason jar as though they were jewels, and he refused to sit on tables. He upbraided Sam Berry for counting the wagons in a funeral procession that passed through Bardstown one day. Even if he were famished, at table he would not take the last biscuit or crust of hot bread from the plate. Believing his image could be spirited away, he would not look into mirrors and consequently often appeared unkempt and barked around the edges. He told Jarom that he once spent all the money he had, a fairly considerable sum, laying out his palms for an old black woman to read his fortune. He would not knowingly fire bullets from a dead man’s gun nor wield weapons or utensils captured from a corpse. This did not, however, prevent him from removing an item of apparel or a horse before the owner became a corpse.
Unschooled beyond the rudiments, Magruder’s philosophical strain was a mix of fatalism and pessimism with only a tiny dose of ethical sensitivity. Despite his off-centered self-centeredness, he at times could be insightful, even clever. As he and Jarom were riding back to Bloomfield one day, Jarom mentioned reading of troops routed at the Second Manasas. Magruder impressed Jarom by quoting some Latin, some bit of knowledge he’d picked up God knows where.
“I tell you,” he said, “I have long ago discovered this fact: that when a fellow is spoiling for a fight, when he’s hungry for blood, it answers the purpose just as well to let a little drop of his own as it does to take a great deal from his enemies, but it takes confoundedly little of his own.
“I have seen,” he went on, “a fellow go yelping out of a fight at the loss of a finger, when nothing less than the heads of a dozen Yanks would have satisfied him. That is to say, there is a difference between meum and tuum.”
Magruder had convinced himself of his own invincibility on odd days of the month, except for the thirteenth. Placing great faith in talismans, around his neck he wore a locket his mother had given him. It held a likeness of his grandmother, dried up and toothless, who looked, he confessed, like everyone’s grandmother. The knots and tangles in a horse’s mane he referred to as witches’ stirrups. The horse with the snarled mane must have belonged to someone else, for his own he kept immaculately combed and curried. His life was an endless inventory of prohibitions and mandates, not a few of them lacking any rational explanation. Magruder shot one poor man, an itinerant tinker who lived in a covered wagon, when he became convinced the fellow put the stink-eye on him.
One clear night in November Jarom found Magruder outside staring into the heavens. The sky was stippled with stars in their constellations, and the dippers were
in their customary relations. The air carried a chill, and Margruder had pulled a blanket about his shoulders. Not seeing Jarom approach, he continued to sway this way and that as though searching for something high and distant. Suddenly, he clapped his hands and shouted, “Moneymoneymoney!”
Stepping over to hand him the blanket that fell from his shoulders, Jarom asked what the outburst meant. Magruder explained with the absolute conviction of a child or true believer that if a person who saw a shooting star should shout the magic word three times before the star dimmed, he would be in for a budget of luck. When Jarom said that for luck he himself relied on the silver crescent pinned to his hat, Magruder shook his head and told Jarom that such a device held no power, that Jarom was superstitious.
SIMPSONVILLE
About this time, Captain Edwin Terrell, a turncoat who had deserted the Confederate army and sold out to the Union, began a series of raids on farms whose owners he knew to be Southern in their sympathies. Killing and arresting a number of individuals in Spencer, Washington, and Shelby counties, he confiscated cattle and horses conveniently described as contraband, part of what others later described as an enormous swindle. Hearing of the herd, Berry gathered men whose families had been mistreated, including some of Morgan’s veterans who had been left behind, a few wounded men not mended enough to fight, and four or five boys from Louisville, no older than Jarom, off on a tear. Sam Berry’s brother Tom had returned after escaping from Camp Morton. Altogether Jarom counted forty-two men bent on satisfaction, but some didn’t show up when it came to belling the cat.
The place agreed on for a rendezvous was an abandoned farm near Finchville in Shelby County. On the night of January 24 Jarom and a dozen or so veterans of the guerrilla war—“survivors,” Jarom called them—met in a tumbledown, abandoned farmhouse sitting a respectable distance off the road. The weather turned cold enough to freeze five or six inches of water in the trough to a platter of stone. After feeding the horses some spoiled hay found in the barn, Jarom helped drag in some fence rails to kindle a fire in the wide hearth of the dry-laid stone chimney. When the room had warmed as much as it was going to, Berry asked those gathered what they proposed to do. The company included Zay Coulter, Henry Medkiff, Magruder, the two Berry brothers, Enloe, Jim Quince, and Bill Marion. Several of the Louisville boys arrived late, but Sam Berry welcomed them, less because he trusted them or greatly valued their martial skills than because in a scrap he felt more secure with more targets for his enemies to shoot at.
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