Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  Marion and Zay Coulter wanted to rob the savings bank in Shelbyville, but Sam Berry made it clear he thought such an enterprise was folly. He opposed it under any conditions. Word came that a force of Yankees with a drove of cattle had left Mercer County on their way to Louisville, where the livestock could be corralled and butchered at the stockyards near the city market. Marion backed off the bank, allowing that though apples were sweet, too large a bite would choke the eater. All of them acknowledged the greater risk in raiding the county seat and saw the benefits of recovering stolen cattle.

  “Stumble into a fire,” Zay Coulter said, “you just liable to get burned.”

  And that settled it.

  They devised a plan to strike the cattle train at or near Simpsonville, a small town eight miles west of Shelbyville that once had been a stagecoach stop on the Louisville-Frankfort pike. Fairly close to Louisville, the town lacked military value; no troops were garrisoned there. As Jarom remembered it, the village comprised little more than a cluster of modest houses along the right-of-way and one or two general merchandise stores. Add the inevitable Baptist and Methodist churches, a smith’s shop, a steam sawmill, and a stone tavern dating from pioneer days that served as a stopping place for drovers and teamsters on the road to Louisville. Jarom estimated a population of no more than a hundred within a mile of town.

  From Finchville to Shelbyville was no more than eight or nine miles, but the weather the next morning turned raw and even colder. The thermometer dropped below zero before they reached Simpsonville, which but for some chimney smoke seemed to be depopulated. Overnight the temperature had slid nearly thirty degrees, and Jarom heard himself complaining to Sam Berry.

  “My blood just hasn’t adjusted,” he said. “My bones feel as cold as blue metal.”

  “You’ll survive it,” Sam Berry said. “You’ll survive.”

  Snow had accumulated since early December; the cold so severe that all traffic had disappeared from the road. Farmers along the pike left the comfort of their stoves only to feed livestock and bring in more firewood.

  Jarom longed to join them, feet propped before the fire, reading Charles Dickens, his eyes following a caravan of ink into spring. His hands had stiffened with cold, his feet going numb through his boots and thin wool socks. Once during the morning he spied an old farmer feebly trying to smash a hole in his pond so his stock could drink. So far away was Jarom that the sound didn’t reach his ears until the ax was halfway raised for the next stroke. Winter locked each house they passed in its grip, smoke threads rising out of the chimneys whiter than the sky they rose into, everything else gritty and as gray as Zay Coulter’s gelding. The trees about the houses stood rigid and leafless, the ponds covered with glaze in fields that bristled with spikes of frost above the snowfall.

  Jarom looked about him and saw that few of his companions were equipped to stave off cold, bundled as they were in whatever came to hand. Tom Berry and Marion wore captured overcoats, but the unexpected cold forced Jarom to improvise, cutting a head-hole in his blanket and winding scarves around his head and neck like an Arab. Under his blanket Jarom wore a mangy surtout with a fancy silk collar that he’d found in a vacant house. Long ago, Jarom had lost his rabbit-skin gloves. Since none of them had any, they wrapped their hands in linen or bandage gauze, anything that would sheathe their bare skin from the cold. Every couple of miles Jarom felt the need to dismount to beat the blood back into his hands and feet. The juice from Magruder’s tobacco froze to his whiskers in icy shards and the hooves of the horses clacked like wooden blocks on the brittle road.

  Entering town from the east, the men passed some houses and a neatly clapboarded church. Marion put up his horse and went inside the grocery, a smartly fitted-out article run by a notorious skinflint named Prince whose ties with the Union were close and profitable. Known locally as a sharp dealer, he had two prices for everything on his shelves—one for Lincolnites, another for followers of Jeff Davis. Zay Coulter didn’t dicker with him but simply insisted on unlimited credit, coming out with several pink hams of meat and a quantity of other foodstuffs, including some buttermilk and a wheel of German cheese. Marion doled out cotton work gloves, two pairs to a man. Jillson, one of the Louisville boys, devoured several tins of canned meat and made a silly joke about dying of lead poisoning. Jarom wondered if he himself ever appeared to his comrades such a fool and decided he probably did.

  Zay Coulter went back in for a second armload and stumbled onto the porch hugging a jar of pickles the size of the dinner bell Aunt Mary Tibbs used to call hands from the field. With the jackknife stolen from Perkins’s store he speared the contents and served them around like a prince dispensing favors, yellow brine still dripping from the knobby lobes. Jarom reflected on how ridiculous they must have appeared to anyone who dared to watch—the fifteen of them in the dead of winter picnicking on horseback in the center of a windswept road in Simpsonville, Kentucky.

  When the pickles had nearly made it around, Coulter spied a weathercock on the livery across the way. Drawing his navy pistol, he took aim and emptied it at chanticleer’s profile, the last shot chipping off one of its tin hackles. This brought huzzahs from the Louisvillians, who had been passing a flask of cognac around and were feeling no pain.

  Almost before the chips hit the ground, several bluecoats darted out of the tavern about a hundred yards down the road. They disappeared around the corner and reemerged a few moments later on horseback. Jarom and the others looked on as they crossed the pasture behind the stone building at a pretty brisk rate, dissolving in a screen of cedars at the base of the ridge.

  Zay Coulter took up the challenge first. Dropping the pickle jar, whose fragments splashed on Papaw’s hocks, he heaved himself into the saddle and spurred off in pursuit. Jarom, going more for sport than with any hope of catching the fugitives, joined the others, romping down to the tavern where they met the proprietor standing in the road. A rickety man in his sixties, obviously a noncombatant, he needlessly identified the runaways as federal officers.

  Just as they were about to take up the hunt, Jim Davis came loping up with news that the company of Yankees, who had left Camp Nelson with a large herd of cattle, had been sighted west of town on their way to Louisville. The tavern keeper, understandably anxious to get them out of Simpsonville, volunteered that the herd had passed through town less than a hour earlier and that the three they had flushed had been stragglers from the very party that Davis described. Davis added that Louis Berry, Sam and Tom’s uncle, had lost nearly a hundred head of prime cattle and John McGraw, another kinsman, forty. Louis Berry estimated the number of guards escorting the cattle at a hundred or more, mostly Negro recruits from Fort Nelson, commanded by a few white officers.

  Jarom wasn’t surprised to learn that the army was stealing cattle, for rumor had it that profiteers regularly shipped cattle, hogs, horses, shoats, jewelry, even furniture, out of the state in carloads. Without anyone needing to say it, they formed an unspoken pact to prevent this particular contraband from reaching Louisville. The issue became how to rustle them with maximum of success and minimum hurt—at least to themselves. Marion calculated that the guards outnumbered the sixteen of them at least eight to one, if Louis Berry’s estimates were accurate. This meant they couldn’t count on winning in an open fight without losing men. To set an ambush, they had to know the exact number and disposition of the drovers. With this knowledge they could choose a place that worked to their advantage and even the odds.

  Tom Berry, recovering from one of his perennial gunshot wounds, stepped in. Behind him trailed his servant Toby, a willowy stripling of fifteen, fiercely loyal to all the Berrys. He had been a favorite of Susan Berry, who gave him privileged employment in the house rather than back-breaking labor in the fields. Toby readily agreed to ride ahead as a spy. To prevent his attracting much notice, Jarom suggested that they get him up a disguise. Removing his warm clothes, he changed into a shabby work outfit such as any farmhand would wear. Wrapping himse
lf in a blanket shawl, he looked in every particular an ordinary fieldhand but for his fine bay horse. To remedy this defect, he exchanged it for an old mule that Jarom liberated from a nearby field. To make it appear that Toby had been snaking logs, the mule wore a blind bridle, a collar, old harness, and trace chains that someone fetched from a nearby stable.

  Jarom worried that the simplicity of the plan made it too transparent. Toby would ride ahead and fall in with the cattle train. He was to gather all the intelligence he could without seeming to meddle—how many soldiers, their condition and morale, how many cattle, their destination, and any other particulars that might be useful. When satisfied with what he’d learned, he would slip out again and make his report.

  Looking confident, Toby said he would be back before you could say “Versailles, Kentucky,” bade the Berrys goodbye, and jounced off on his mule toward Falls City. Admiring his loyalty but wondering if he himself, in a condition of slavery, would serve his masters so, Jarom watched until he dropped below the horizon, a boy in tatters bobbing almost comically on the mule. Just before he topped the rise, Toby turned and waved his hat.

  Aware of how critical timing was to the success of his plan, Coulter called on Enloe to a find a route that would put them ahead of the column. He also wanted Enloe to suggest a likely place to set an ambuscade. To know precisely when the column would reach the spot to be designated, Coulter sent Marion, Magruder, and all but one or two of the others to form an invisible corridor down which the caravan would pass. Five riders were to be posted out of sight at intervals along the road. Each was provided with a tin horn that Zay went back inside the store to fetch, bringing out a basket of them that he found by the counter. Jarom speculated that they were stocked to amuse children or to call in cattle at feeding or milking time. At ten-minute intervals the heralders were to blow their horns as the caravan passed so those waiting in ambush could mark the progress of march. Spaced an eighth-mile apart and keeping out of sight, the heralders, placed on either side of the road, were to sound their horns until the column reached within a quarter mile of the chosen site. As each rider was passed, he was to hurry forward, keeping invisible if possible, to where the others waited. Marion was not averse to using the horns to spook the cattle guards.

  Keeping out of sight of the road, Jarom, Marion, and two others broke the crusted snow and made their way cross-country, through farm gates and across icy creeks, to arrive at the designated spot, where they waited forty minutes before hearing the first blare of a horn. It sounded thin and shrill, passing like tremors in the still air over the frozen landscape. Jarom tried to find a word to describe what the horns sounded like. Not a blaring so much as the bellowings of a calf being smothered. After a few minutes, they heard still other blasts, this time nasal and more distinct, a “brer-rare, brer-rare” of dual horns almost in concert—menacing, metallic. One sounded slightly sooner than the other as though exchanging salutes or dialogues through some coded language peculiar to horn blowers, the buglings hanging in the air for an ominous instant before kiting off in the wind.

  As the minutes passed, the trumpeting came progressively closer.

  Jarom was tightening the cinch on Papaw’s saddle as Toby rode in astride the mule. He reported that the escort consisted of parts of two companies numbering upward of a hundred men. He had counted nearly a thousand cattle divided into bunches of twenty or thirty, a man or two assigned to each bunch, the rest forming advance and rear guards. According to Toby, who possessed a flair for the dramatic, the column was so disorganized, its progress so slow, that it stretched a mile along the road. Most of the white officers had stopped at a farmhouse outside Simpsonville to warm themselves, leaving the enlistees to drive the cattle as best they could. The sound of the first horns mystified the guards. They became wary, then afraid, especially when no blowers came into view.

  “What do those horns mean?” Toby was asked.

  “They’re calls to dinner,” he said.

  “At three in the afternoon?”

  “Maybe folks in these parts have they suppers early,” he said, “or they dinners late.”

  Waiting for Sam Berry’s signal to attack became, as Zay Coulter would say, tetchous. Enloe contracted a case of the fidgets and could hardly hold his horse’s reins, his hands were shaking so. To bolster his own confidence, Coulter cracked his knuckles and chattered incessantly.

  “Christmas ain’t over yet,” he said, “you bet your candle. No sir, it ain’t over yet.”

  It fell to Sam Berry to worry about particulars. He directed each of them to check and recheck their weapons, a process that took some doing since most of them carried from four to six revolvers plus one or more sawed-off, double-barreled shotguns.

  When Tom kidded his younger brother about the arsenal he carried, Sam smiled and came back at him, patting his holster with the hand of his good arm.

  “If anyone tries to pick on this Berry,” he said, “they’ll find he has briars.”

  With a hunter’s eye, Coulter and Sam carefully chose the spot for a classic ambuscade. About two miles west of Simpsonville the road narrowed to pass between two hillocks, one side lined with a rail fence, the other densely grown over with post oaks and chinquapins. Off to one side was a fine spring, a wide pool sheeted with ice laid down with a blueish sheen to it. The trees provided ample cover to screen a body of horsemen from those passing.

  Weather conditions suited their design perfectly. They found themselves in a pelting snowstorm in which the air filled with white platelets that cut across their vision diagonally. So Jarom smelled the caravan minutes before he saw or heard it, a rich odor of barn-lot manure and fermenting fodder that carried downwind so pungently Coulter swore he could touch it. Once Coulter sensed the nearness of their prey, his confidence swelled to cockiness. He stood up in the stirrups to make out what he could along the road, thumped his sidearm against his thigh, his knuckles cracking like castanets. Cold as it was, he seemed to Jarom to be sweating, beads of moisture forming about his nose and neck.

  At last the vanguard came into view, not as individual steers but as a shaggy mass of ambulant meat, steak on hooves. Jarom imagined a single great beast, a lumbering behemoth coated with grizzled, bark-colored fur, stamping out of the wildness into the chock-full lane. Here and there on its back and sides specks of blue clung to the hump like some strange species of parasite. The mass moved toward them as mindlessly as flowing water, the order of march being simply to fill the space in front and shoulder into the trees. When those foremost in the herd reached the spring, the single beast broke into pieces, the bits forming into discrete steers that, smelling water, lumbered about stomping holes in the ice so they could extend their long necks to drink.

  The men behind trees all watched as the firstcomers lowered their heads and took their fill, those behind moping and nudging their way forward, a few beginning to graze on tufts of scrawny grass along the road. Jarom could see the herd contained mostly shorthorns, husky brown steers fattened by unhusked corn and hay stored in the feed barns of Louis Berry, John McGraw, and who knows how many others whose farms lay along the route. At least some of these beef, Jarom felt persuaded, had been illegally confiscated from Southern sympathizers. They had to have been. Some others may have been legally bought with greenbacks from brokers and profiteers, men who did not let conscience or principle get in the way of making money. Others must have been simply stolen or appropriated as strays.

  As they crowded about the spring, not one of their protectors took precautions or attempted to keep the cattle moving. No one prodded. No one goaded them on or went ahead to scout the road. No one sent pickets out. Most of the guards simply cleared off to one side and squatted along the roadbanks, slapping themselves and stamping to keep their blood circulating. They laid their rifles by and rummaged in their haversacks for crackers or meat, anything to restore precious heat to their bodies, to replenish the energy expended as they trudged the road. Despite the cold, the period of rest seemed
welcome to keepers as well as kept. As still more of the cattle shouldered their way toward water, those first served wandered off toward the oaks and spilled onto the unfenced strip along the road.

  Though it was frozen, they stamped and hashed the ground to bits, steam rising from mounds of fresh dung. The spring, its edges still glazed with ice, acted as a natural lure. Under the first poking hooves, the crusted surface popped, then minced into icy shards. Two or three of the guards tried to prod the steers back onto the road, using the butts of their rifles as goads. This failing, they stepped back to escape the press and the chance of being crushed underfoot. Those on the banks, the predicament slowly beginning to dawn on them, stood by bewildered. Not an officer in sight.

  As the movement took on a life of its own, what started as a problem became a crisis. The roadway became a funnel clogged with tons of beef, the moans and bellows of the crimped cattle adding to the confusion. The foremost cows stalled and bumped themselves into tight wedges like cogs and ratchets in some outlandish rig of machinery. Smelling water, those to the rear pressed forward until their bodies wedged into prisons of flesh. Soon the forepart of the herd fixed itself in place as though soldered, making movement in any direction almost impossible. It was, Jarom felt, as though the forces governing nature conspired to bring about this impasse, as surely as the gods of the Greeks exacted retribution for the offenses, real and imagined, of erring humans.