Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  The last Jarom saw of Alexander he stood in the drive, the hulk of his house rising among the trees and hedges, a surtout draped over his narrow shoulders, the chiseled face still florid with outrage and disbelief. His feet, he thought, must be freezing.

  And Jarom felt a wave of sympathy pass over him. He had no personal quarrel with Alexander, who seemed decent enough if too much wedded to his possessions, especially those of the equine stamp.

  He knew what it meant to love a horse. Papaw, almost instinctively sensitive to his intentions without prodding or whip, was more than enough horse for any one man to claim. He felt fidelity to her and wondered if this was some perverse variation on what it meant to be faithful to someone—Patterson, Aunt Mary Tibbs, Sarah Lashbrook, Mollie Thomas. The world that he knew he knew over Papaw’s neck. The world would not seem intact to him without her upright ears to frame it. She knew his weight, his ways, the messages of his heels. He convinced himself she could read his mood through something so subtle as the pinch of his calves against her flanks or the pull she felt through his stirrups, his tone of voice. He wondered if she felt resigned to him as the burden she was fated to carry. These dainty trotters and thoroughbreds had speed and carriage, class, looks, even nobility. What he valued in Papaw were reliability, stamina, and fearlessness, and less definable qualities he described as heart. She was, he realized, what he possessed instead of home, instead of spouse, instead of bonded friendship. For him to take another would be betrayal, a kind of equestrian adultery. He imagined acquiring a new mount as something as strange and discomfiting as slipping on a dead man’s boot.

  A TIGHT SPOT

  After they trotted out between the gated pillars of Woodburn, Marion led them back to the Kentucky where they found the river nearly at flood stage. The men, leading the stolen horses, managed to get across by ferry, breakfasting at a farmhouse near Lawrenceburg. While Jarom sat at the table finishing his ham and scrambled eggs, Frank James, sitting next to him and gazing casually out the window, raised the alarm.

  “Yonder they come!” he shouted, knocking over his chair as he leapt to his feet. “To the stable, boys, for your horses and your lives!”

  Hearing the first shots, Jarom peered out to see a stream of bluecoats pouring into the farmlot through the open gate. Frank James and several of the Missourians, accustomed to such drills, recognized the danger first, sprinting out the back door toward the barn to bring up their horses. Helter-skelter, they scrambled forty yards or so across open ground, dodging bullets, flitting first one way and then another. From the back window, Jarom saw at least one of the Missourians fall. Telling those who remained behind to follow him, Marion bolted out the door and jumped behind a stone wall. Jarom and some of the others ducked behind one of the outbuildings.

  From the barn Jarom heard more firing and knew Frank James and the three other Missourians were struggling to get their horses saddled. Jarom steadied himself and popped off four of his loads at several bluecoats who hopped from their horses and poked their pistols through the chinks in the barn. Magruder was firing too, and two of the attackers dropped to the ground with the first shots. Of the eight horses put up in the barn, only four made it out. Among the first to fall was Bay Chief, best of the horses taken at Woodburn, hit as he exposed himself for a few moments at the barn door.

  Some voice of caution told Jarom to make his break for Papaw while he could. Fortunately, Papaw and the other Kentuckians’ horses were hobbled at the rear of the lot where they couldn’t be seen from the road. Jarom told Magruder he felt now was the moment to go. The others agreed, and together they broke cover, getting halfway to the trees before those at the barn turned their attention to them and started firing. As he ran, Jarom saw a big man on horseback waving his gun. Bridgewater, he felt certain. Though the big man’s mount pranced some distance off, Jarom paused to draw a bead on him, popping off two shots that had no visible effect on the hulking figure still waving his pistol.

  Then he untied Papaw and hiked himself up on the stirrup, the others following him out onto the road, the firing behind them diminishing into little pops no louder than a puckering kiss. Not until they felt safe from pursuit did Jarom call a stop to rest and recover themselves. Marion and several stragglers soon caught up, all of them en route to a farm near Bloomfield where they’d agreed to rendezvous. Eight of Jarom’s bunch had been wounded in the fight—five Missourians and three Kentuckians. Except for one, they’d been able to take everyone with them. Tom Henry fell early with a shot in the breast that appeared to have killed him. After Jarom mounted Papaw before making his break, he saw one of Bridgewater’s men trot over to where Henry lay on the ground, poke his pistol at his prostrate form, and shoot him twice more from the saddle. Jarom assumed that Henry was killed then if he hadn’t been earlier, especially when he saw the man hop off his mount and crouch to go through Henry’s pockets. Jarom felt the impulse to charge over and shoot the man. But his prudent self cautioned against it, and he put spurs to Papaw, scurrying off with the others.

  Assured they had shaken off pursuers, Jarom, the four stolen horses, and the other survivors took refuge at Wakefield’s in Spencer County, a place where they felt safe enough to collect themselves and doctor their wounds. To Jarom, all seemed pretty well used up, especially Alexander’s blooded horses, lot-tamed and unaccustomed to rough use. Two in addition to Bay Chief had been wounded and left to die in Anderson County. One they had to desert. As Alexander had warned, Abdullah wasn’t conditioned for hard riding. Forced to swim the freezing waters of the Kentucky, he’d emerged, dispirited and limping, a pale nominee for death. In Lawrenceburg they had to abandon him, ridden until literally he could not take another step. Word soon got back to Alexander, who sent some men to care for him, but the newspapers reported he died four days later. The papers quoted Alexander as saying that Abdullah had been the most promising sire of broodmares in Kentucky.

  When news of the raid came to Quantrill and he saw the abused horses, he reacted with outrage. Despite the fact that he desperately needed more mounts, his men had broken these horses, used them up without forethought or pity. Answering to some residual impulse of rightness, he insisted they be returned to Alexander. Having lost his own prized Charley, Quantrill must have pitied Alexander, feeling for once another’s loss. Jarom recognized Quantrill’s gesture as the only sign he’d seen in Quantrill of a softer heart. Marion had no such feelings. Though a little intimidated, he didn’t want to give up what he regarded as plunder rightfully his, relenting only when someone warned him of Quantrill’s mercurial temper. So Marion, cowed for once, had the four surviving horses collected and delivered through third parties to Woodburn. Alexander was so grateful he presented Quantrill with a magnificent stallion named after a popular stage player whom Jarom had never heard of—Edwin Booth. The morning after their return, Quantrill and his bedraggled survivors, many visibly sagging in the saddle, parted company with the Kentuckians and went into seclusion to the extent they could find it, needing a few days to mend and to mull over what misfortune to perpetrate next

  And that wasn’t all. There came a windfall. Two of Quantrill’s men, riding ahead of the main body, fell in with a strong Union man who, seeing their federal uniforms, mistook them for federal cavalry. He praised them for their sacrifices and proudly declared his own dedication to the Union, his willingness to give up all of his property if that would further the cause. One of the two Quantrill men, Bud Pence, decided to take him up on his pledge. He asked the patriot if a man of his sentiments might be willing to exchange his fat and fresh mount for the jaded one that he, Bud Pence, was riding. Though the patriot hesitated longer than seemly, he realized that to save face he must make good on his boast. He allowed that his horse could be a temporary loan and that for his part he would fatten Pence’s horse so they could work an exchange when he returned. Pence pronounced that a capital proposal and set about putting his saddle on the stranger’s horse, all the while congratulating the man for his loyalty. No
t until several days later did the patriot learn that he’d awarded his fine horse to one of the hated rebels. This was the only levity Jarom remembered during the ordeal, and he knew he would tell and retell the story long after he’d forgotten more sanguinary details of the horse-stealing venture.

  Jarom thought no more about the supposed death of Tom Henry until a week later when word came that Henry still breathed and was expected to recover from all three of his wounds. The second shot, fired inches from his face, entered his mouth and exited through the left side of his neck. The third burrowed into the right cheek an inch below the eye, passing near the base of his right ear. When fired, the muzzle, all but resting against his upper cheek, blew powder into him, burning off his eyebrows and lashes, making an imprint that Magruder described as a gunpowder tattoo.

  His unconscious state probably saved him. When he came to, dark had fallen and the place was deserted. He had presence of mind enough to know he would die of exposure without a warm berth and caring hands to see to his wounds. Unable to walk, he dragged himself across the frozen ground for three miles until he reached a log house in which he saw no light. He managed to crawl up the steps onto the porch, where he used a piece of firewood to thump against the door until someone came. The Samaritan who took him in, suspecting what had happened, sent for Marion, who at great risk to himself sneaked to the place and guarded Henry until a doctor could be found—the first, the only, noble deed Jarom ever knew of Marion performing for one of his men.

  A few days later Jarom put his hands on George Prentice’s account of the raid. As usual, the editor managed to get some of the facts wrong. He accused Marion of stealing thirteen instead of fifteen horses. The piece contained other errors as well as the usual provocations. Reading Prentice’s character through the man’s writings, Jarom came to believe that the editor picked his phrases as an amateur orchardist would plums, more for their color and eye appeal than for their sweetness of taste. No one who regularly read his columns would accuse him of being fair-minded when he crafted such phrases as “punish the rascals as they deserve.” Prentice’s account also raised questions of degree. What Prentice characterized as a “hot pursuit” Jarom described as tepid at best. But what he most resented was Prentice’s habit of augmenting facts with judgments, shaping what he should have been describing. As a merchant of words sitting at his editor’s desk, Prentice, he decided, had little sense of who deserved punishment and who didn’t. Though Jarom conceded to himself that he didn’t know much better, he at least observed from the field where he could quickly learn to sort friend from foe. He’d also learned that a rival newspaper had questioned the guerrilla articles Prentice’s journal published, charging that some of them were the coinings of a fertile imagination.

  MARION

  For weeks Jarom pondered what made Marion in so many ways so despicable. Jarom didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, and felt it necessary to understand why. Size wasn’t a factor. Marion could never intimidate others by his size. He was thickset but modest of stature, standing about five-four in his stocking feet. To compensate, he wore Western boots with elevated heels that gave him another inch or so. These boots, tooled by some nameless artisan of the old Southwest, were his only concession to stylishness. Usually he wore a scruffy jeans jacket over a checked shirt much in need of washing, much in need of darning. Hard use had worn the denim of the jacket threadbare, the blue of an ideal summer sky long ago bleached out by wind and weather.

  Marion’s personal habits gave little cause for boasting. He never shaved and seldom bathed. His face formed a thicket from which the eyes stared out with a blend of wonder and malice, a look Jarom imagined a bear might give waking at the mouth of a cave or culvert from a winter sleep. A blunt mustache bristled above his thin upper lip. Hair thinning on his crown, he wore the scraggly remnants long and unkempt. It billowed from under his hat in dark snarls through which a comb seemed never to have passed. He adopted Remington pistols as his weapon of choice because they had drop cylinders that permitted quick reloading. Marion never ventured out without a half-dozen or so replacement cylinders, each holding six loads. He had Tailor Tinsley sew large pockets onto his vest with which to carry them, creating a fad that others called “guerrilla pockets.” Berry once commented to Jarom that the bulges on Marion gave him a lumpy look. Marion’s most characteristic expression was a look of intense concentration, a fixity of mien that masked his emotions. Jarom seldom, if ever, saw him put down his guard and wondered how he could sleep—if he did sleep. Jarom wasn’t long around him before discovering that Marion had an ungovernable temper, a whiplash tongue, and a weakness for peach brandy—not a combination that made for lasting friendships.

  In fact, the man answered to every descriptor of villainy that Jarom could summon: ruffian, miscreant, wretch, monster, reptile, imp, demon, cutthroat, incendiary, knave, rascal, rogue, scoundrel, scapegrace, blackguard. Berry referred to him as the Devil’s spawn. Being human remained a continent that Marion had little interest in discovering or exploring. Thinking of him, Jarom remembered an expression Aunt Mary used to describe everything from odd behavior to lunacy: “Not all of his birds roosting in one tree.” Berry, who likewise had little affection for Marion, once told Jarom he regarded Marion as a shark with teeth at the top and spurs at the bottom and not much in between but a paunch and a saddle.

  Marion lavished his greatest affection and care on his weapons. While others loafed or breezed around the cookfire, he would be cleaning one of his eight Remington pistols or ramming a rod down the barrel of his shotgun, meticulously swabbing out the bore with a wad of cotton or a cleaning patch. Piece by piece, Jarom noted, he would take his pistols apart like a lapidary working his jewels, spreading them on his spare shirt. With a surgeon’s deft touch he would adjust this spring or test that mechanism, oil every working part to a blue sheen. Pistols he used for individual targets, small game. Shotguns he preferred for close work because in a fracas targets could be multiple and expansive, the wide swath of the balls making allowance for his weak vision, his eyes so close-set they seemed at some angles to be crossed. Notoriously nearsighted, he could not distinguish a wagon from a windmill over thirty yards away. Early in the war he was rumored to have shot one of his only friends, mistaking him for an enemy. Despite his handicap, he counted more hits than any three of his cohorts.

  As far as Jarom could tell, Marion had no mottoes or teachings by which to direct his life, no articles of faith, other than his welcoming of perdition in, “Hooraw for hell! Who’s afraid of fire?” His major motivator was hate, indiscriminate but focused on the nearest object at hand. He burned down the Spencer County courthouse to make good a threat. The papers, especially George Prentice, could not get his name straight, sometimes spelling it Merriman or Meriman. Bereft of letters, Marion probably could not offer a correction; he boasted he’d never been to school a day in his life.

  Jarom learned that Marion had joined Berry, Magruder, and the rest when he realized that guerrillas were a more efficient instrument of hurt than massed troops or solo malevolence. His past was vague, but he once told Jarom that local Regulators—the home guard—had ruined his family. Picking a time when his father was away, they had stripped and beaten his mother and two sisters with hickory withes until blood ran to their toes. The punishers left them unconscious, their hands still bound, until the neighbors found them. Though his mother didn’t survive, the sisters recovered in a few months, at least physically, in time to bury the father, shot by never-identified bushwhackers. After that, his sisters had not been right in the head. Where or when this happened, Marion would not say, but Jarom believed every word of it, for he almost never saw Marion show a glimmer of feeling for anyone.

  “I haven’t a friend in the world but my pistols,” he told Jarom one night as they sat by the campfire, Jarom sipping coffee, Marion guzzling brandy from a flask. Jarom sensed that Marion made this statement not for sympathy, not as boast, but simply as a declaration of fact.

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nbsp; This statement partially explained what happened to Tom Berry’s Toby after Simpsonville. Before the attack Tom Berry, for reasons he didn’t explain but which everyone understood, instructed Toby to stay behind in the woods. When the shooting stopped, he rejoined the Berrys as they and the rest of the party made their way south to Spencer and thence to Nelson County. As a reward for his part in scouting the cattle train, Tom Berry exchanged Toby’s mule for a handsome sorrel saddle horse found after the ambush. Near Bloomfield, Toby, proudly astride his prize, happened to find himself riding next to Bill Marion. In an unoffending way, he tapped Marion lightly on the leg.

  “The fight was a hot one, wasn’t it, Marse Bill?”

  For some reason Marion reacted as though bitten by a water mocassin. As Jarom heard later, Marion cursed poor Toby and told him that he was going to kill him but would first order his coffin. Mortified but not wanting to believe anyone capable of spewing such venom, Toby apologized profusely and begged him not to do it, that he had never meant any offense.

  For answer, Marion spurred away after giving Toby a menacing look, refusing to speak or hear another word. When the party reached Bloomfield, Jarom thought Marion had forgotten his threat, for he seemed to act normally, or at least to act like himself. But true to his promise, Marion ordered a coffin, the cheapest, though custom-made to accommodate Toby’s long legs.

  The next morning, before Jarom and the others rose from their beds, Marion roused Toby and told him to say his prayers. He announced to him that his coffin had been fitted and already paid for. With an expression of dread and disbelief, Toby dropped to his knees and began to pray. Without any more ceremony Marion raised his pistol and shot him in the forehead, then galloped casually out of camp.