Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  Jarom never learned his reasons, for the same day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, news came that Bill Marion himself had been killed by Captain Terrell’s men in a fracas near Chaplintown. No one offered any regret or sentiment of grief. Fresh from laying Toby in the cold ground, the Berrys already were planning retribution when the news came. Later, Jarom learned that when the news reached Terrell, he grabbed up the body, lashed it to Marion’s compliant warhorse, and rushed off to General Palmer in Louisville to claim the reward.

  For Jarom, Marion’s death served as a lesson in incivility. He and Sam Berry, musing by the fire one night, tried to put a name to all the things they didn’t like about Bill Marion and why the world would not be a lesser place without him.

  “What it comes down to,” Jarom had said, “is that he was more brute than human.”

  “What that means,” Berry the schoolteacher said, “is that he was by nature undomesticated, feral. Take animals. They are of two types, tamed and wild. A pullet or a house-raised spaniel can’t make it in the wilderness. Nor will a raccoon or a ferret or a water moccasin make a house pet. Marion lacked any ties to human sympathy, a wild thing who lived during a time of civil breakdown.”

  “Does that excuse him from shooting poor Toby?”

  “No,” Berry said. “But it’s incorrect to understand Marion by measures of right and wrong, for he was a man who lacked any moral compass to guide him. He lived by brute promptings. As for moral sense, he was hollow as a gourd.”

  “And that’s what led to his killing Toby?” Jarom asked.

  “In a way,” said Berry, “I believe it did. You and I are superstitious enough to believe in some moral balance, the play of providence to ensure a balance necessary to keep the world turning on its axis, the work of angels and devils to keep things in balance.”

  “And Bill Marion?” asked Jarom.

  “Bill Marion,” he said, “upset the balance. When he stepped beyond the bounds, he destroyed the balance necessary to all things and must be prepared to accept what’s fitting to set it right—a run of bad luck, mishaps befalling someone he loved, though that’s unlikely—some hurt to his person.”

  “So Marion died to set the balance right?”

  Looking into the darkness beyond its nimbus of fire, Jarom felt himself on the threshold of some new understanding.

  “Something like that,” said Berry, cupping his stump in his good hand and rubbing it, a gesture Jarom had never noticed before.

  “So when crimes are committed against us,” said Jarom, “are we warranted in helping the angels to set that balance right?” Patterson came to mind. He expected Berry to remember his sister Susan.

  “Angels or devils,” Berry said as he stirred the fire, the log that he turned spewing up a funnel of sparks.

  Jarom, rolling into his blankets later that night, could not stop thinking of Toby and ultimately the wrong of putting one person, one race, under the direction of another. The limb that broke under Marion, he thought, broke under his own weight. The bullet that had brought him low hadn’t been fired by Terrell or his men in Chaplintown but by Marion himself in Nelson County nearly forty miles away where poor Toby was lying in his coffin, custom built, custom fitted.

  EXODUS

  Early in January word came that General Breckinridge had ordered all remaining Confederate troops in Kentucky to withdraw to Tennessee by March 1. By order of the War Department in Richmond those who did not comply would be remanded to the Union military as deserters. The message left little leeway for misunderstanding, and Jarom felt as many of the others did that time was a peach whose ripeness required they leave Kentucky or risk being executed with the connivance of what from time to time, for convenience mostly, they still recognized as their own government.

  As a farewell, their friends in Spencer, Nelson, and Bullitt organized a mammoth barbecue and fandango for all the Confederates in the area. The appointed day, February 27, was cold and clear, with not a cloud in the sky. At Newel and Isaac McCloskey’s farm the guests arrived by dribs and drabs before noon and in droves during the afternoon, some coming from as far away as thirty or forty miles, from Shelbyville and Elizabeth-town and Hodgensville but mostly from hamlets and road crossings too remote or too small even to have a name. They came by wagon and carriage, on horseback, some even on foot, walking the humps in the road between the crust of snow and ice that had been minced to mud.

  From noon on, they congregated before a large fire in the parlor and fed on gossip and stories that distorted the truth less often in the service of modesty than of grandeur. By suppertime over two hundred people had congregated, more than any house in the county could hold. A fair number wore skirts, more than Jarom had seen in any one place since before the war—mothers and sisters and maiden aunts and sweethearts, wives and brides-to-be as well as hopeful spinsters and ladies of the church who felt the thrill of patriotic zeal. A good many of the younger ones wore miniature flags pinned to their dresses. Too many of them, old and young, Jarom thought, wore black. He fantasized that Mollie might miraculously appear. Several of the girls reminded Jarom of Mollie in one department or another, a dark head of hair, a pitch of the neck, a slope of shoulder or conformation of the nose. Facets of Mollie appeared in a dozen of the girls, but no feat of sorcery could make the parts materialize into Mollie herself. The more he ogled them, the more he thought of her, holding out hope until last light that she might bob in astride her piebald mare or inside one of the wagons that pulled up by the house under the grove of bare-limbed locusts. She moved closest in his mind when war stayed most remote. He missed her to the point of pain. From fighting to being listless and bored, he came to fluctuate between manic states of excitability and longing.

  In addition to an array of familiar faces, many strangers showed up, including some recuperating from wounds and anxious to travel south in company. Though no one talked of leaving, all seemed full of what they would do when they came home and what their world would be like when the war ended. They speculated about conditions for failed rebels when the Yankees won. Sherman had recently completed his march through the Southland and swung back to the Carolinas, deftly cutting the country in two, demoralizing the population.

  Quantrill showed up, making a grand entrance on one of the blooded horses that Alexander bestowed on him, the one that came to replace Old Charley in his affections. Its proud carriage and Quantrill’s own stiff bearing made him look taller, more imposing. Jarom sensed that whatever the occasion, Quantrill, like the engraving of a puff adder he’d seen in a book of curiosities, had the knack of seeming larger and more important than he was. And it seemed to him that this exaggerated self accounted for his holding sway for so long over lesser lights around him. What surprised him was how in several weeks Quantrill had managed to age so much. His always serious expression had grown more somber, hard and angular as flint, relieved only by the tufts of sparse reddish hair sticking out from under his wide-brimmed Western hat. Around him clustered the familiar survivors of four years’ fighting: Bud Pence, John Ross, Frank James, Payne Jones, Clark Hockensmith, Dick Glasscock, and twenty others he imported with him from Missouri, plus the few he’d managed to recruit in Kentucky. The riskier and more fatal his maneuvers became, the more he attracted a certain breed of blades around him to die. Even in this company, he introduced himself as Captain Clarke of the Fourth Missouri Cavalry, leaving the persons who met him to assume that he meant Confederate cavalry. The ruse fooled no one. Only a blind man or an anchorite could fail to identify the strutting madman.

  When Quantrill entered the parlor, everyone seemed to take a respectful step backward as though royalty or lord high executioner had appeared—or some dreadful but perversely alluring combination. As Jarom looked on, he considered that maybe a collective intake of breath had created this sense of the crowd recoiling or shrinking into an attitude of subservience. Nowhere, not even with Morgan, had he seen a man who so successfully created an aura of power and invincibility.
As Quantrill entered, Jarom realized as a corrective that some of the onlookers did not actually move. They retracted, drew in on themselves the way a threatened animal, the possum he once` cornered in the henhouse, drew in on itself in the custom of defense. Many did not appear conscious of their fear of him.

  But Quantrill, in the way of egomaniacs, tried to take the edge off by cracking jokes and affecting an easy manner. No matter how many light words, his face, Jarom noticed, never softened. His nature, tensed like an archer’s bow, seemed to have no give. Haggard now, his deep-set eyes, rimmed with redness, reminded Jarom of concentric rings on a drillmaster’s target. Magruder, who made no secret of despising Quantrill, would not refer to him as Colonel or even by his surname but always as Hair-Trigger. Thinking of rabbit blood, Jarom wondered if he meant Hare-Trigger.

  When the rooms inside overflowed, McCloskey had large fires built outdoors by the sheltered side of the house. After the fiddlers came out, most of the revelers followed, and after they struck up “Soldier’s Joy,” the less inhibited guests bundled up and came outside to dance, looking to Jarom like a congress of dancing bears escaped from some gaudy and exuberant circus caravan. Inside on the trestle tables Jarom saw more food than he had seen and eaten for months—meats, apple fritters, sweet potatoes, hominy bread, shortbread, almond cakes, pones of baked Indian meal, pastries that tasted bland for lack of sugar, pies, and rabbit soup. Along the tables set up in the drafty hall, he served himself from every dish he could reach, going off to a corner of the room with a mound of food he wasn’t sure he could finish. One of a multitude of cooks smiled and ladled him a cup of hot punch from a large silver tureen. When he’d emptied his cup, he sampled some blackberry wine but passed on the brandies and colorless, popskull whiskey.

  Outside, he heard the deep thrumming of the guitars as the fiddles scratched and wheedled their melodies from resonant cavities of wood, instruments that replicated every human feeling: longing, carefreeness, lament, and, most insistently, melancholy. He remembered Patterson commenting on the Celtic origins of such music, attributing its magic to giving its listeners memories of experiences they’d never had. As he listened, he closed his eyes and imagined border clashes and clan rallies where cymbals and pipes and drums echoed in the highlands. But he also remembered Aunt Mary Tibbs’s fundamental distrust of any music not performed on an organ. She said that the guitar and the fiddle were a summons from Satan and that such music, accompanied by dancing and who knows what other shenanigans, represented a dinner bell to perdition sounded by the unsaved for the tottering. She had a special injunction against the banjo, which she loathed and would refer to only as “that low instrument.” Jarom himself thought of these familiar harmonies and rhythms as manufactured joy, spun melodies that relieved worries of the day and held up a prospect of better things, better times. He couldn’t keep his feet from tapping, the music filling him with a sense of well-being, temporary as he knew it would be.

  He stepped outdoors just as girls, young and not so young, paired off with partners for dancing, those finding none pairing off among themselves. The shuffling and awkward steppings lasted till after midnight, when most of the guests not staying the night saddled or harnessed up for home. Too self-conscious himself to dance, Jarom watched with envy the couples as they reeled and waltzed and scooted, never summoning nerve enough to ask one of those who stood on the fringes for a turn on the tramped ground that constituted the dance floor. As for drinking, remembering how much he’d retched the last time he tasted John Barleycorn, he restricted himself to cider. He consoled himself with small success with the notion that he had been faithful to Mollie.

  Though he longed to see her and though she lived less than two hours away, he was glad he’d decided not to invite her. First, he doubted that her mother would have permitted her to come. He also feared the questions she would ask, knowing he couldn’t lie to her about the questionable company he kept, his service in the army, his career as a guerrilla. If she knew of his link to Sue Mundy, she would have read of him in the papers. For him to discount it all as stuff and lies would probably feed rather than remove her doubts. He could not simply dismiss accusations by saying Prentice bandied the name Sue Mundy about for political purposes having no connection with him.

  Finally, the risk of conducting her would have been too great for them both. Prentice from his pulpit of print seldom missed an opportunity now to trumpet the name Sue Mundy until Jarom felt himself quarry in a hunt that would end only with his capture. If the number of his reported crimes was any measure of the number he’d actually committed, he would be a kind of wonder boy (or woman)—deadly, ubiquitous, uncatchable. If guerrillas anywhere shot someone, burned a public building, stopped a train of cars, or stole a pony from a cart, the victims attributed the crime to Sue Mundy and his band, no matter how sketchy or slender the evidence. Through news accounts and editorials, George Prentice had elevated “Miss Sue” in the public eye to the first order of rogues, the most sought after man, or woman, in Kentucky. He could not tell Mollie that if he were caught he might be charged with guerrillering and sent to prison after the war. Or worse.

  Painfully aware of this newfound notoriety, Jarom found himself taking more precautions—skirting towns, using back roads, riding mostly at night or early morning across fields stiffened with frost. He slept less, and then more fitfully, feeling a new languor that wore him down like the workings of a rasp on punky wood. Now he always rode with the flap that covered his holster unsnapped.

  Toward the end of the party someone started to sing “Dixie,” and everyone took up the words with a rush of feeling and wistfulness. The evening ended with some sentimental songs about home and campfires, enough to tell him to get on. Mounting Papaw, who stood well-fed in the stable, he rode under the clear sky to Bedford Russell’s farm several miles away. There he and some dozen other party guests curled up in the barn loft with their blankets. They all planned to rise at dawn, eat breakfast, and depart for Paris, Tennessee. There they hoped to rendezvous with other elements of the army being evacuated from western and west central parts of the state. Jarom sensed new possibilities, and he rolled into his blanket with a feeling of hopefulness and expectation.

  Next morning he woke to the sounds of low voices in the barnyard as some of the early birds saddled their horses. He emerged from a dream in which he had been home, Aunt Mary Tibbs stirring in the kitchen, smells of fried bacon wafting up to his bedroom, a cock crowing, a cowbell, sun lifting over the sill of his open window on a summer morning. Stiff from sleeping in the hayloft, he studied the light that passed between the pieces of vertical siding and splayed itself in intricate stripes and patterns across the hay-strewn floor. In the hay he found the faintest residue of summer, that sweet cloying freshness that settles over a field just cut, the windrows giving up their ghosts of greenness.

  After a glorious breakfast of hot biscuits and ham served up by Mrs. Russell and her daughters, they finally broke camp and followed the Lebanon Road toward Campbellsville on the first leg of their long journey. At the last minute Quantrill joined them, the rump of his frisky purebred pumping rhythmically as a shaft on a steam-powered engine.

  Magruder, William Hulse, Bud Pence, and Frank James rode forward, Jarom hanging back with the main body of riders where Quantrill, in a funk, jogged sullenly along, keeping counsel with himself. As a precaution, those in the front ranks had donned Union garb. Before they’d gone five miles, Hulse galloped back with news that he and James, riding ahead, had sighted a wagon train on the road from Lebanon, a winding caterpillar of white canvas. Keeping out of sight, they sneaked close enough to see wagons being escorted by a convoy of soldiers, four of them riding well in advance as scouts.

  Knowing that any hesitation would spoil the semblance of friend meeting friend, Magruder gamely cantered ahead to meet the front riders. When they approached within a few yards, Magruder and his four companions drew their pistols and ordered the four opposing scouts to surrender. The officer, a
stocky man whose full mustache had bristles stiff as a curry brush, sat on a gray charger, the most powerful saddle horse, Magruder told Jarom, that he had ever seen. Foolishly, the lieutenant tried to draw his revolver. Magruder and his men fired, killing him and two of the others instantly. The fourth managed to swing his mount around and make off toward the wagons, pressed hard by Frank James. When it became clear that the rider had gained too great a lead, James took aim and essayed a long shot as the rider pulled steadily away. It caught him at the base of his skull, tumbling him from his horse just yards from the first wagon, whose startled driver looked on in horror. Made at full gallop at a moving target, James’s shot certified marksmanship that impressed even Magruder.

  Jarom gave the dead man not another thought but spurred Papaw to the head of the attack that Magruder formed. He caught up with Magruder and thirty-odd others as they loaded and primed their arms in preparation for the charge. Magruder struck off in the lead, zigzagging his bay among the skittish mules and working his pistols in every direction. As they made their first contact with the teamsters, Jarom imagined a dam breaking, restrained force suddenly spilling into a channel, sweeping aside and crashing into whatever less resistant objects stood in its path.

  Though they heard the first shots, the cavalry escort responded slowly, and Quantrill’s veterans dropped many before they could fire a round. The fighting lasted no longer than five minutes. Of the thirty-eight horsemen and wagoners, twenty-seven were killed and ten wounded. Only a sutler who took refuge under his wagon surrendered alive and unhurt. Jarom counted twenty wagons captured, and Quantrill ordered them burned after removing what could be used. Out came a variety of foodstuffs, most of it crated metal cans in which government contractors found a way to package profit. Magruder, at heart a looter, rummaged about and found some fresh hams bagged and packed in straw, the cold providing a kind of natural icebox to prevent the scarlet pork from spoiling. Everyone helped himself to as much ammunition as he could carry. Feeling generous or perhaps fearing consequences, Quantrill turned the survivors loose on foot, knowing that wounded men would not go either far or fast and that some would not go at all.