Even the weather conspired to undo those attempting to unravel the snarl of cattle, for snow had started to fall, at first in sporadic floating tufts that stippled the air. Then the wind picked up from the east and blew in a blizzard, a blinding snowfall that shifted to the diagonal and pelted the faces of oncoming men and cattle alike. Jarom’s world reverted to the half-tone of a daguerrotype, a blurred and colorless landscape of tree limbs and slope that lacked all depth, anchored only by a few objects that stood solid before the eye. Things more than ten yards away were hard to make out. What seemed a tree was a fence post. Articulated forms melted into more elemental shapes under a sky that obscured the known world while bringing it closer, reducing all to subtle inflections of grayness. Jarom lifted his hat and wrapped the scarf about his head, leaving only a band of skin where he could peer out blinking. He regretted he hadn’t thought to cut eyeholes in the woolen cloth. In spite of discomfort, he knew snow for an ally. He wished each flake as it fell could be transformed to a bullet speeding toward those who blundered toward him.
As snow continued to fall, Coulter signaled for Jarom and the others to blow their own storm and smash what lay before them. Glancing to either side, one finger to his lips, he motioned for the sixteen—including Toby—to form the attack. Sam Berry, his pistol connected to its lanyard, took a position on the extreme left to nerve the city boys. Bill Marion and the main body, masked by the chinquapins, spread out along the right. The line they formed ran cheek by jowl to the road, maybe forty yards beyond the spring. The center Coulter reserved for himself. Next to him and slightly ahead was Jim Quince, a black man known as the Duke for his elegant manners and the fancy spotted vest and stovepipe Lincoln hat he sported. Other than Toby, who had done no actual fighting, he was one of only a few men of color to ride with them as trusted ally.
Jarom knew enough of the Duke to characterize him as an odd fish, an opportunist unduly fastidious about his person. The Duke was so conscious of his dress that he would not mount a white or dark-colored horse for fear the hairs would shed and show up on his clothes. As a compromise, he straddled a fat-haunched mare whose sandy shade nearly matched his own. Now, as the snow capped him in white, he hunched like a racer over the neck of his mare, a pistol in each hand, one garish gold tooth glittering in his whiskers like a promise.
Coulter, whose personal motto was “Hold your head up and die hard,” gave the cue for the attack by discharging one of his pistols. “Hooraw for hell,” he shouted, “and who’s afraid of fire!”
In that instant heels and spurs kicked the flanks of all sixteen horses, driving them pell-mell through the fringe of oaks and onto the road. The Duke broke into the open first, still hunched over jockey style and bobbing as his big horse found its stride, Jarom, Marion, and the others tagging several lengths behind. As they cleared the trees, the horses found surer footing and worked into a gallop, fanning out across the lane until they formed a phalanx of horseflesh, four or five riders abreast, each rank shaping into a ragged V. Looking over through the pelting snow, Jarom made out Coulter shouting something at him. His mouth opened and closed, but from it came no sound, the clatter of hooves deepening to a deafening rumble as horses and men fashioned themselves into a single implement of thrust. Gripping his pistol in one hand, the reins in the other, Jarom lost the first rank of riders in the snowfall, forcing himself not to fire until he could distinguish friends from the cattle guards.
Twenty yards from the mass of shaggy cattle, those ahead raised the local version of a rebel yell, a piercing caterwaul that started deep in the lungs and burst out as a shriek. To the guards, yanked from their daydreams by they knew not what, the attack must have been terrifying. In those first seconds, Jarom was conscious of the horses’ snorts and the creaking of leather as their cinches chaffed against the flanks in time with a gallop, at first only tentative and faltering. The weather that benefited them was now a leash, and things slowed almost to the slackened rate of dream.
From among the gray humps men began to appear, buckles glinting against the dark wool of their overcoats. Stunned, some gaping in horror, they turned to face the riders, each encumbered with a canvas knapsack, a plump white turtle in the center of his back. The riders’ first shots stampeded the cattle and scattered the remainder of the rear guard. Hundreds of cattle, packed chock-a-block in the roadway, collided with those pushing from behind. Bellowing hoarsely, steers on the outside tore through sections of fence, sweeping rails and posts before them. To escape being trampled, several panicked guards shot into the herd, but the firing only stirred the steers to greater frenzy. When one or two went down, they tripped those that tried to scrabble over them, causing still others to stumble and pile in the roadway.
As Jarom closed in on them, most of the advance guards broke and ran, each preferring to go his own hook than face the pummeling hooves and pistols of the riders. Jarom saw a dozen or so take cover behind some downed steers and fire a few shots before the horsemen milled among them, before Marion and the Duke and the Berrys began squeezing off rounds at the plump white turtles on their backs. One minute the vanguard had been comfortably lolling along the road, the next each man was fighting or running to keep breath in his body.
As he leveled and fired at two of the runners, Jarom saw Bill Marion, still yelling, storm his big mare up the embankment where several guards scrambled toward the fence. He fired until he’d emptied the pistol in his hand, then hurled it at one of the runners before pulling out another. Enloe’s blaze-faced mare, blood streaming from her hindquarters, furiously tried to throw him, rearing and turning pinwheels in the middle of the lane. Gripping his pommel with one hand, Enloe calmly poked and fired his revolver as she spun, men collapsing around him. Without officers to direct them, those behind the steers made a poor showing. Most got off a wild shot or two before dropping their rifles in capitulation. Those who did resist were shot out of hand. All told, it took less than four minutes from the first shot to the last.
After the shooting stopped, sixteen soldiers still stood, all sons of Africa. Jarom scanned the full gray faces, the upraised palms pink and somehow childlike against the government coats, gawking unfamiliarly at so many Indians on horseback, especially at one black Indian. With great dignity several stared back in defiance, but a few already lowered themselves to their knees. The snow had stopped falling, and their gyrating world was settling again to one more familiar, more fixed, more sobering.
No one ordered what happened next. It came naturally as reflex and as predetermined as the follow-through stroke of a thrower’s arm completing an arc. Marion, Magruder, Coulter, and several others dismounted and pushed the survivors to one side of the road, the fenced side. No houses or buildings stood along this stretch, which formed a natural trough between the two embankments. Dry tangles of honeysuckle choked the ditch next to the road and the uneven slope above with its pockets and drifts of snow. Downcast, humiliated, the condemned filed before their executioners in ill-fitting overcoats with buttons too shiny, their government brogans lost under ballooning trouser cuffs. Marion and the Duke were already trying on overcoats from two of the prisoners as the group dressed ranks in a ragged line before turning to face their captors, all of them knowing what would come next.
Someone started a death moan, which was joined farther down the line. Beginning as a low-hummed monotone, barely audible, it expanded into a crooning that wavered and rose to a feminine pitch. Jarom shuddered not from the cold but from the apprehension and fear that racked his body. To him, the sound took on a life of its own, a heft in the quieted air after the guns. The chorale of pain and frustration was the saddest sound he had ever heard, an acknowledgment of the long, somber history of human suffering, the fronting of captor and captive that had sounded through the ages as men had confronted each other, first over clubs and bows, then with sabers, flintlocks, and mortars.
Who fired the first shot Jarom didn’t know, but he stood with the others and leveled his pistol at one of the prisoners
, a defiant one who seemed intent on staring him down as if to stay the finger poised against the trigger. Jarom had a vision of Patterson lying in the pasture belonging to the Locke sisters, then sitting his horse helplessly as Windrup and the home guardsmen silently debated what to do with him. Then he felt the kick of his own pistol as his wrist involuntarily lifted, and he saw the standing man pitch backward into the ditch, thrown sprawling against the bank. The body snapped tensely, then loosened, the eyes fixed now in a terrified concentration that Jarom had come to recognize as the emphatic wonder of death. As the reverberation faded, a heavy silence returned, and he felt something pass over him, pass over the whole company. Something deep in his being told him that all of them, executioners and victims alike, had paused to consider their mortality, the frail slipknot that bound them to this earth. The hesitation was grudgingly reverent, if one could imagine reverence in Marion or Magruder or the Duke. Then a pistol beside him cracked, and others began cracking, the claps smacking through his scarf to fill his head with ringing as everything around him went floating and unreal.
Off to his right he saw the Duke, already wearing a captured coat, pot one of the kneelers with his Colt. After his own first shot, Jarom felt a stab of remorse at shooting an unarmed man. He stepped back from the slaughter. Despite his need to settle accounts, his longing to vindicate Patterson’s blinding, something held him back. Fighting was one thing, execution of the helpless another. He looked over at the Duke, who seemed sublimely unconcerned, casually sighting as if unaware that the discharges came from his own pistol until one of the bluecoats he faced winced and reeled into the ditch.
But Jarom found no force of will to withdraw. He looked on as the Duke aimed at one of the stoics, a large, almond-faced man gazing indifferently at the octagonal barrel of the gun until the percussion jarred the man from his vision. At that moment Jarom froze. He would not call it conscience, but some voice inside restrained him. He knew as certainly as he knew anything that he would not fire another shot that day unless forced to. He could watch, but he couldn’t, at least today, take another life that no longer threatened his. Though his hand still gripped the familiar handle, he couldn’t complete the procedure he’d learned so well: raise, aim, let out a little breath, slowly squeeze the trigger. Then he was distracted, as even those horses not shy of guns began wheeling and skitting, the yellowed squares of their teeth showing as they tried to bite through their bits.
In the confusion several prisoners broke for the rail fence above the road. To reach it, they had to leap the ditch, wade through snarls of honeysuckle, and scale the embankment before climbing the fence that enclosed a large pasture bordering what had been a field of corn. One was shot halfway up and slid reluctantly back to the ditch. The second, poised to jump from the uppermost rail, was boosted by a shot that tumbled him into the pasture beyond. The third successfully cleared the fence, miraculously unhit, as bullets swarmed about him like so many impotent wasps. When his long limbs touched the hardened ground, he sprinted across the stubble and disappeared among some stalks of withering corn, his footfalls making dark blotches on the frosted grass. Though the tracks could be followed, no one seemed inclined to cross the fence and follow.
When the ringing stopped, Jarom, still having fired only one shot after the surrender, forced himself to look down in the ditch. Sprawled or hunched up along the road and mixed with the stiffening cattle, the victims lay topsy-turvy in every attitude of death. The guilty knowledge of what had been done did not shake him so much as the spectacle, the familiar disarranged, slovenly, prone, emphatically still. He remembered how he’d felt when he saw new light filling the space in the Tibbs’s side yard where a familiar landmark, a great sugar tree, had toppled during a storm. Or in this instance, a whole grove of trees. Some of the dead lay composed as if sleeping off a knockabout. Others lay twisted rigidly in contortions no gymnast could duplicate, the limber cocoa faces hardened into porcelain, glazed with startlement, alarm. The skin of those slain was brittle and ridged like hulled walnuts, each cheek stiffening in its husk of death.
The corpses remained undisturbed just long enough for the whole ugly composition to fix itself in Jarom’s memory. Then the Duke, Bill Marion, and Magruder began rifling pockets and packs, littering the road with goods and trifles: papers, trinkets, mess kits, canteens, a shaving kit, a few books, and spare clothing strewn everywhere. From the scattered belongings, they removed valuables—watches, rings, greenbacks, and coins. In less than five minutes all the dead had been thoroughly picked over, their pockets turned out, knapsacks emptied, linings ripped out for hidden bills. Magruder collected a small arsenal, mostly Springfields, efficiently breaking each walnut stock over a fence rail.
Zay Coulter stepped his mare off the road and pretended to scan the hills. Unusually morose, he sat his horse like stone. Offering no excuses, the Berrys rode off to round up steers, driving them into the woods where they would be safe until their owners came. When he had smashed the last rifle, Magruder piled all the usable ammunition onto a blanket, then poured it into a tow sack. Around his neck was a necklace of pistols that made him look like some monster of mayhem, a mechanical apotheosis of Samuel Colt. He carefully unloaded each piece and strung it through the trigger guard. Being superstitious, he kept not even one for his own use but parceled them out like Christmas gifts among the band to whoever would take them.
Then Jarom caught sight of a discarded daguerreotype, the image hinged between cardboard backings and cased in oval glass. Picking it up from beside the ditch, he gazed on the likeness of a broad-faced young man standing unnaturally erect in his uniform, the chevrons on his sleeve signifying a sergeant. From the tinny surface the earnest eyes stared on some invisible superior behind the camera as if awaiting the next command, one of the white officers by the stove in the stone inn perhaps, whose acknowledging salute he was waiting to receive. The stiff bill of his kepi cut across the ball of his forehead like a wedge, everything sliced off three buttons below the collar. Examining the case, Jarom found nothing to identify the man: no name, no date, only the stamp of an artist’s studio in Louisville. Though the face signified nothing to him, he could not toss it away, so he stuffed it in the bottom of his saddlebag.
Poking among the bodies, Henry Medkiff, whom some called Metcalfe—a name Jarom recognized as belonging to a Kentucky governor—announced to anyone who cared to listen that he’d counted thirty-five dead, no wounded, no prisoners. As for their own hurts, a bullet had pinked the shin of one of the Louisville boys, a flush-faced cherub named Adkins. The saddest loss among the attackers was Enloe’s sable mare. Downed by a wild bullet and bleeding to death, she had to be shot.
By then the remnants of the guard had gained some distance, on its way back to Camp Nelson or Louisville where Jarom knew another fuss would come in the papers, another piece by Prentice criticizing the Union conduct of the war, probably something disparaging, too, about the employment of colored troops.
The attack scattered cattle in pastures and country lanes all over Shelby County. Some, he heard later, even strayed into Shelbyville, where some Odd Fellows quickly butchered them and served them up, holding an impromptu barbecue. Coulter sent several of the men, including at least one of the Berrys, to spread word among the claimants where their cattle could be found. Everyone also knew the news would soon reach the small garrison at Shelbyville where a pursuit would form.
As they readied themselves to leave, Jarom noticed Medkiff again. He sat hunkered on the bank, occupied with loading one of his revolvers. Next to him lay a dead private, a forearm crooked casually across his brow as though shading his eyes from a strong light. Someone, maybe Medkiff himself, had removed the shoes, and the naked toes in the raw air had a blueish cast. Ignoring the body as he might ignore a passerby on a crowded street, Medkiff concentrated on the task at hand, expertly spinning and testing the cylinder with his palm. When the spindle clicked, he prepared a load in the chamber and spun it again, repeating the process five ti
mes. Finally, he lifted the cylinder next his ear and gave it a last gratuitous flick. The tiny, well-oiled rachetings seemed to satisfy him, for he placed the pistol in one of the giant holsters that hung from his belt. He didn’t seem to notice Jarom, though he stood only a few feet away.
“What day of the month is this?” Jarom asked.
Without looking up, Medkiff raised his eyes over the barren fields, blinking into the weak light of the westering sun. Jarom ticked off the seconds as the coldness cut through his coat again, chilling him to the bone as he looked down at the carnage along the road.
“The twenty-fifth of January,” Medkiff said finally.
Two days later, January 27, George Prentice gave an account of the killings, as Jarom predicted, needling the Union authorities whose laxness had made the massacre possible:
Sue Mundy, at the head of a small band of guerillas, has been going to and fro through a few counties of the State for several months, committing outrages and atrocities of the worst [kind]. The theatre of her operations has not been a wide one; she has confined herself within a rather narrow circle. How very strange that she isn’t caught. She has no reputation, and probably deserves none, for military sagacity or tact or any other kind of sagacity or tact. Nevertheless she goes where she pleases, and does what she pleases, and none of our military leaders seem to have the ability, if they have the disposition, to lay their hands upon her. We can’t imagine what the matter is; surely they are not afraid of her. To permit this she-devil to pursue her horrid work successfuly much longer, will be, even if the past is not, a military scandal and shame.
Jarom almost felt at times that Prentice, embittered and cranky, worked to undermine the Union through print just as he himself did through bullets. How little the old editor knew how cleverly the attack at Simpsonville had been planned and executed. Though Jarom had witnessed the feats and blunders of Morgan and Grant, had read accounts of battles reported and analyzed, he could boast no training as a military strategist. But he felt he’d learned well the tactics of survival and attack of a small band, the method of horseflies that stung a horse’s rump and buzzed off into the airways.
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