By the end of 1864 Prentice stepped up the stories, in one instance stating that he had received a letter from Sue Mundy herself:
We have received from near West Point, at the mouth of Salt river, a communication signed with the names of Sue Mundy and three of her chief officers, together with a note in Sue’s name alone. Sue, in her individual note, asks us to publish the communication of herself and her officers, and proposed, when she and we meet, to pay us in whatever currency we prefer.
A lie, Jarom said to himself, probably one to confirm the female gender and to give Prentice license to take off on one of his flights of fancy. Here, Jarom concluded, is a man who loves his own jokes, revels in them. And Prentice proceeded to follow one bad pun with another:
Well, let us think what we will take pay in. We don’t want it in Confederate notes, for our pockets wouldn’t hold enough to pay for a “nip” apiece for Sue and ourselves. We don’t desire it in lead, for we have mettle enough in us already. We don’t want it in steel, for we have quite as much point now as we need. We prefer not to place it in hemp, for we are a temperance man and have objections to getting high. We won’t accept it in kisses, for we would rather be kissed by the Devil’s daughter with her brimstone breath than by a tomboy. We’ll not submit to have it in hugs, for those who have seen Sue in her guerilla costume say that she is a little bare. So we’ll not sue to Sue for favors of any sort. She has done a great deal of stealing, but she can’t steal our heart, and we don’t care to have her steel her own against us. She has committed great waste, but she can’t commit her own little one to our arms.
The terrible puns he could tolerate. They would be funny had they not hit so close to home. What bothered Jarom most about Prentice was his imputation of female gender, Prentice’s persistence in playing up the idea of his femininity to embarrass the Union military, to make him a pawn. Typically, when the news ended in Prentice’s stories, the taunting began. He would twist the knife with gratuitous speculations, complaining first that after months of atrocities Miss Sue hadn’t been caught, then flaunting gender before his readers:
Some say Mundy is a man and some say she is a woman. We don’t suppose the sexes will quarrel for the distinction of owning her. If she were captured and it became important to ascertain to what sex she belonged, would the committee consist of women or men? We have this moment received a communication that Sue is a compromise between a man and a woman—a hermaphrodite. Sue, whether of the masculine, feminine or neutral gender—whether he, she, or it—is certainly a grammatical puzzle. Which of our grammar schools can parse Sue Mundy?
Reading such libels, Jarom almost wished he could confront Prentice in the nude and put an end to the game. Maybe he should have a portrait made and sent to a rival paper. Though the paper wouldn’t, couldn’t, print it, the editor could report Jarom’s rightful gender and spoil Prentice’s game. But then everyone would know that Jarom Clarke was Sue Mundy—his family, Mollie Thomas, his enemies. He wished he’d fathered a child and could prove it. He came back to the fantasy of disguising himself and sneaking into the editor’s office with a kit from which he could don his plumed hat with the silver crescent, his most garish outfit, his boots, and his Colts. When he had Prentice alone, he would identify himself and drop his pants, saying, “Miss Sue Mundy, at your service.” He would threaten to shoot the editor the next time he read the name Sue Mundy in the news. Would this stop him? Probably not.
MCCLOSKEY’S
Apart from home, the country where Jarom felt most himself after nearly four years of war, was a cluster of counties on an invisible line between Lexington and Louisville and mostly to the south. They included Bullitt, Marion, Spencer, Shelby, and, to the north, “Sweet Owen,” which claimed to have produced proportionately more Confederate soldiers than any other county in the state. With few exceptions, people in these places treated Jarom and the others not as bandits and felons but as soldiers and kinsmen. Much of the country formed a no-man’s-land of farmsteads and villages whose citizens fundamentally wanted to be left alone. Though few of the landowners held slaves, the military presence they increasingly felt riled them. They bore no love for Stephen Burbridge and by extension the federal army, which they regarded as an occupying force in a free state.
So Jarom, the Berrys, Magruder, and company came to rely on a few friends and many strangers, on local farmers and keepers of crossroads stores. Without the aid of this anonymous association, Jarom knew he and the others would not last more than a week or two before being rooted out and shot. Resented and lacking this help themselves, the federals barked but could not tree Magruder or the Berrys, who came and went in these counties at will.
To counteract this advantage, Burbridge hired what others called federal guerrillas, many of them desperate men and professional killers, to track and hunt down guerrillas. Edwin Terrell and Captain Bridgewater’s bands had orders no more specific than to follow where Sue Mundy led and whittle as they went. Burbridge tried to wipe out the guerrilla menace by executing the innocent.
In February 1865, President Lincoln—who had narrowly won reelection the previous fall, and who had failed to carry Kentucky—replaced the despised Burbridge with General John Palmer, naming him commandant of the new Military Department of Kentucky. The posting was something of a homecoming for Palmer, who, although he had made his name as a politician in Illinois, where he was influential in organizing the Republican party, was a native of Kentucky. The appointment prompted editor George Prentice to write, “It is said that General Palmer came to Kentucky to relieve General Burbridge. Perhaps it might be more proper to say that he came to relieve Kentucky,” a sentiment with which Jarom agreed, even though he knew Palmer would be no friend to guerrillas.
In fact, Palmer, following the adage that it takes a thief to catch a thief, hired Terrell and commissioned Bridgewater to go after the guerrillas, following wherever they led. A turncoat and scoundrel as bad as, or worse than, those he hunted, Terrell had been a bareback rider in a circus before the war. Reputed to have murdered a bartender in Baltimore, he relished the role of hunter hunting the hunted. Enlisting in the First Kentucky (Confederate) in 1861, it was rumored that he deserted after he killed an officer. In 1863 he joined the Thirty-seventh Kentucky (Union), a unit of mounted cavalry. By the end of 1864, he managed to secure a discharge and returned to Shelby, his home county, where he became a captain of the home guard. Palmer, distrustful of his hired killer, kept a loaded revolver by his side when Terrell delivered his reports.
Though he had never met Terrell, Jarom felt an immediate affinity for him. True, they fought, now at least, on different sides, but they were about the same age, had a taste of war, and found themselves fighting in small bands outside the regular service. Terrell changed sides for convenience and profit; Jarom, whatever the changes in style and order of command, kept his. Jarom painfully felt one other inescapable difference. Terrell had chosen the winning side. Whatever wrongs he committed, at least for the present, would be forgiven, even rewarded.
What could Jarom expect?
When Terrell and his handpicked thugs took up the pursuit of guerrillas, Jarom and the others, accustomed to their role as predators, knew they had become prey. If pursuit became too hot, Jarom and his saddle-mates faded into the hills, the knobby backlands of Nelson and Spencer counties. The most favored hideaway belonged to Dr. Isaac McCloskey and was on his farm near Bloomfield in Nelson County, though everyone felt equally welcome with the Thomases, the Russells, and the Pences, who would open their homes, their larders, and their purses to anyone in gray. The McCloskey farm lay in the northern part of the county near the heart of the Salt River watershed, west of the Bluegrass. Though a few parts were level and arable, irregular rolling hills broke up the country, low ridges dissected by V-shaped valleys. These valleys, many of them picturesque, rose sharply to narrow ridgetops largely inaccessible to men on horseback, especially those unfamiliar with the skeins of cattle paths and game trails too narrow for wagon
s. Higher on the hillside farms, the fields and pasturelands dissolved in briars and dense cedar thickets, a desolate place consisting of outcroppings of rock whose dominant texture was the jagged bark of trees, a monochromatic country that would rasp a man to pieces.
Viewed from high ground, these uplands looked to Jarom like a succession of rooster combs. People inhabited only the base and lower slopes so that each wide space between the twisting spines had its hardscrabble farm, consisting of small plots of scraggly corn, a leaning barn or two, and a patch of dark-fired tobacco. Not much suitable for cultivation. Men and horses were doubly handicapped with natural barriers, which made it difficult to get about. Travel to market towns followed circuitous routes. Sometimes, even getting from one side of a farm to the other required a day’s ride. This worked to the advantage of Jarom and company, who counted inaccessibility and remoteness a virtue, affording them a perfect natural sanctuary.
“God, I’ve come to love this place,” Sam Berry said, “like the knife loves its sheath.”
Dr. Isaac McCloskey and his brothers confirmed the biblical text that adversity always turns up a Samaritan, the doctor becoming one of Sam Berry’s angels. Though the hopes of the McCloskeys rode with the South, the doctor never queried a patient about his politics before bandaging his wounds. True to his oath, he offered his services to anyone who needed them. For this reason, and this reason only, given his politics, the Union authorities, who controlled the area under martial law, left him unmolested. The McCloskeys held considerable property, about three thousand acres of woodland near the west boundary of Nelson County and the east line of Bullitt. On the periphery of cave country, the property had several large caverns, one reportedly large enough to shelter two hundred fifty men. Secure from outsiders and shielded by and from the weather, McCloskey’s became a combination of refuge and aid station, a place of respite.
His skills as a physician and surgeon gave Ike McCloskey a reputation as one of the finest doctors in the state. His specialty, by dint of long apprenticeship, was gunshot wounds. Visitors never worried about food because the family kept an abundant garden, butchered its own beef, and took great pride in the table they set. Though the farm possessed every comfort, Jarom never felt entirely comfortable there, constantly measuring it against Beech Grove. He missed the familiar lay of land in Logan County, a flatness that bespoke ampleness and generosity, a wider sky under fields more fertile and less hindered. He missed in particular a contrast of light set by the relation of house to ridge to treeline. In this stark and alien place, he felt the lack of the feminine, the absence of Mollie Thomas. Whenever Jarom heard the McCloskey name, he remembered a story the Berrys told about touching heels with Captain Terrell one fall afternoon. During one of the brief lulls between scouts, Sam and Tom Berry rambled over to nearby Fairfield to freshen their store of ammunition, riding back along a narrow road up one of the hogbacks. It was dusk, Sam Berry related, the sun lowering behind the ragged edge of a timbered ridge, the valley below them already steeped in shadow.
Just as they reached the summit, they heard a horse nicker a little distance away. Not thirty yards off, they spotted their implacable enemy Captain Terrell at the head of about forty riders, approaching along the trail that rose from the other side. As Sam told it, the Berrys immediately drew their pistols and veered to one side of the wagon road so as to better maneuver and fire. Also caught off his guard, Terrell and his men drew their arms and pulled off to the left of the byway, not really a road, not much more than a set of twin stripes cut by wagons and implements across the countryside.
The Berrys quickly calculated they were outnumbered about twenty to one, a not very favorable ratio. Knowing they would be summarily shot if they surrendered or turned to make a break back downhill, they considered several choices. They could attack and take down six or eight of their assailants before going down themselves, not a very promising tradeoff. Going back would put them at greater disadvantage since, unlike their pursuers, they would be firing over their shoulders. Their other option, even bolder, was to ride out a bluff, hoping to pass by their enemies with dignity and surviving to fight until the odds of survival improved. Without exchanging a word or slowing their pace, they came to a tacit accord that Jarom attributed to some mystical link between siblings.
At this point Tom Berry took over, displaying great flair when he came to the crux of the story.
“Then we closed the final few feet between us and Terrell’s dark bay. Holding our pistols cocked but aimed skyward so as not to provoke him unduly, we met the hostile looks of each rider. As we passed, I remember seeing a black tuft of hair curling from Terrell’s near nostril. We were so close I saw a shaving nick on one rider’s cheek. Near the end, one of the horses, a strawberry roan, swished its tail against my calf, the only actual contact we had with Terrell’s men. Everyone maintained his finest Sunday manners, and nobody fired. According to Tom, who took up the story again, not one word was uttered as all forty riders passed, close enough to clink spurs by raising a leg in the stirrup.
“As we met,” Tom Berry said, “the silence wasn’t human—no cough, no whistling of underbreath, not a syllable uttered.” He described an animal presence, a steady chaffing of leather against the flanks of the horses and a chuffing of labored breath above the cloppity-clop of the hooves.
Terrell, though caught off guard, performed his role to perfection, cleverly marshaling his wits for this test of survival. He wasn’t, after all, too startled to realize he would be among the first to fall if shooting started.
“What he could not resist,” Tom Berry said, “he wisely chose to ignore.”
Tom estimated that it took less than a minute for the whole column to pass, and the tut-ta, tut-ta, tut-ta of the horses as they moved became a kind of music that guaranteed their safety so long as it lasted. Sam Berry found the pressure almost unbearable. He told Jarom that by the time he cleared the last horse his body shuddered uncontrollably and a spasm of relief ran up his spine. A minute or two clear of them, he reported that Thomas relaxed the tension by snapping his cockerel head from side to side, both still rattled. Sam confirmed this when he confessed having to pry open Tom’s hands so his brother’s pistols could be reholstered.
Jarom had no doubts that singly or together Tom and Sam would have fought on open ground until breath left their bodies, but neither had been prepared for what he encountered on that lonely hillside—the Berrys too cunning to fire the first shot, Terrell too surprised to. Instead, they enacted a truce by default, what Tom Berry described as a mutual suspension of mayhem. By not acknowledging the original condition, they could mutually pretend that the meeting never happened. With no threat to their manly view of themselves, they could conveniently erase it from their minds. Unlike their other encounters, they bore no painful souvenirs of the meeting. No one lay dead or wounded, moaning along the roadside in pain. Tom confessed, however, that after he’d passed the last horseman, all parties widened the distance between them at a brisker gait.
QUANTRILL
By the last week of the first month of 1865, word reached Bloomfield that William Clarke Quantrill, “Bloody Quantrill,” had crossed the Mississippi and entered Kentucky with several dozen of his followers. He crossed the Mississippi above Memphis near a place called Devil’s Elbow on the first day of the year. With him came forty-eight seasoned guerrillas, men who preferred not to stay in Missouri. Though Quantrill held a commission as a colonel in the Confederate army, the federal authorities regarded him as an outlaw, especially after his 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where he and four hundred fifty of his men looted the town and massacred at least a hundred fifty civilians. As a result, west of the Mississippi Quantrill and his border band held low status as fugitives whose names and faces made survival a relentless and unending chore.
Like the Shawnee Indians whom Jarom had heard tales about, Quantrill seemed to regard Kentucky as a happy hunting ground, a place where he could continue fighting his private war with more pr
ofit, fewer rules, and less fear of an accounting. Jarom, like everyone, knew Quantrill’s reputation long before he met him. Masquerading as federal cavalry hunting guerrillas, he and his men murdered and robbed their way across the state, Quantrill vowing that his destination was Washington City, where he would kill President Lincoln, the granddaddy of all the greenbacks. Dressed in stolen federal uniforms, his band moved east across Kentucky until they reached Nelson and Spencer counties. Quantrill adopted the alias of Captain William Clarke of the Fourth Missouri Cavalry. When asked what his mission was, he claimed to be hunting guerrillas, specifically Sue Mundy and his band. Which was true, though he wanted not to capture but to join them.
Jarom was later to learn a great deal about Quantrill, some of it from the man himself. When they eventually met, Quantrill recounted to Jarom his activities when he first arrived in Kentucky. At Hartford in Ohio County, in the guise of Clarke, whose papers he had stolen, he had persuaded the Union commander to furnish him with a guide to hunt Sue Mundy and Billy Magruder along the Ohio River. A captain named Barnette volunteered to accompany him, as did two others, a discharged veteran homeward bound and another soldier on furlough looking for a little excitement.
Three miles from Hartford out the Greenville pike toward a place called Paradise, Quantrill hanged the veteran in some tall timber along the road. Nine miles farther along, he had the furloughed soldier, a prisoner by then, unceremoniously shot. Fourteen miles out of Hartford, Barnette himself was called, quite literally, to the other shore. At sunset, while crossing a creek, Quantrill gave the signal, and Frank James, whose younger brother Jesse was beginning to make a name for himself, calmly rode up from behind and shot the captain. The body tumbled into the creek waters, and Quantrill’s party rode on a little farther before settling down for the night. Quantrill told Jarom that the next morning they passed Barnette’s corpse lying face up, head and neck wreathed in ice, the forehead with its bullet hole covered by a light mantle of frost. “His eyes were set,” Quantrill remarked, “as if making an appeal.”
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