Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  The pursuit that Jarom knew would be coming, as soon as the telegraph could alert the nearest garrison town, did not catch up with them until they reached the tollgate two miles west of a little town named Bradsfordville. Jarom first noticed a spatter of fire at the rear of the column. They were passing along a narrow wagon road with dense cedar woods to either side, and at first the shots sounded far off, muffled by the wall of boughs and needles. He imagined the sound like shots fired from under a pillow. As Jarom reined in Papaw, her ears pricked in warning. He turned to see the roadway full of blue riders pressing down on them at full gallop, rapidly closing the hundred yards that separated them. Before Quantrill or any of them could react, the riders bore down on them. Relying solely on instinct, Jarom, along with Magruder, a man named Barnwell, Quantrill, and a dozen others, instinctively swung their horses around and charged back down the road to meet them.

  By that time the riders had come so close that Jarom could see the determined faces of the oncomers as they hunched over their horses’ necks, sidearms drawn for business. Turning to face them in the constricted road was like corking a bottle. With no room to maneuver, only those in the forefront could work their weapons without risk of shooting their own. Jarom popped a man in blue who had jumped or fallen from his horse and was firing from behind a thickish cedar. The man spotted him as he aimed and dodged behind the trunk, which lacked width to shield all of him. Jarom saw him snuggle against it as protection from the shot he anticipated, hugging the bark as though to merge with it. When Jarom fired, he saw the man drop his carbine and grab his thigh.

  Those to the rear of the point of friction reeled under the tide as front riders, those surviving the first fire, fell back against the mass of men and horses clogging the road. Jarom felt a flash of anxiety as he closed among them, working two Colts as fast as they would fire. When he would empty one, he would pull out another from his belt and then his two pommel holsters. He shot three riders in as many seconds before Papaw reared and fell sidelong in the road with a shot to her chest. Before he could clear his leg, she’d pinned him under, her full weight falling against him as she hit the ground.

  Now is my time, he said to himself, struggling to work his way free, expecting the fatal shot at any instant. An image flashed before him of Mollie Thomas and Patterson, still sighted, standing wordlessly over his grave.

  He looked up to see six or eight bluejackets, having scented a kill, closing in to finish him.

  Now is my time, he said to himself again, now is my time, as he struggled to work himself out from Papaw’s writhing bulk. She neighed in pain and fright, a hoarse bellow he interpreted as a death song.

  Two of the riders carried sabers, the first he’d ever seen outside a parade ground. One waved the gleaming metal above his head, and the other shifted his weight, leaning over his horse and jabbing it downward at him like a lance. The eyes of the man seemed strangely calm, oblivious to what went on around him, like someone intent on performing a difficult and intricate task. His face flushed crimson, his eyes shone cold and hard and blue as gunmetal.

  Jarom realized that the burden of Papaw was his only protection. Papaw’s exposed rear and front leg pummeled as though to gain purchase on what was only air, in vain hope that the motion would give her momentum enough to rise. But her bulk formed a barrier between him and the jabber. This cool-headed patriot, jaw and chin spiked with an untrimmed growth of reddish whiskers and wearing a faded uniform, made several more swipes at him before his own horse, a dappled gray, stumbled and fell motionless in the road. Whiskers must have been hit at the same time, for he pitched over to one side and did not rise.

  From that moment Jarom felt unmoored from events, which happened too fast for him to translate into sequence. From his low perspective the fighting went on not so much around him as above him. The horses seemed to be dancing, throwing their heads, their legs thrashing and stomping about as though stuck in mire or immersed in water. Then horses and men meshed together in a shambling waltz, their bodies locked on a teetering toy carousel that reeled and staggered about under a weight no single one of them could shoulder. The movement slowed, the path of each arc or thrust joining the swirls of motion around it. Jarom imagined himself floating down a flooded river choked with driftwood. The current carried logs and pieces of debris in its flow, bobbing and sinking. Some caught in black eddies that formed swirling cones. Others shifted and freed themselves from the current to beach and pile in the backwaters. Jarom could see no joinder between action and consequence, only the broad, roiling sweep of movement and color whose dominant shade was that of mud. That no pattern emerged both terrified and fascinated him. He felt more helpless than ever before, as though adrift in a watery world in which predictable motion had been suspended, all laws by which the universe ran, all assurances, had gone.

  The bullets whumping into Papaw’s flank confirmed this feeling. He expected at any instant the projectiles to penetrate his own vulnerable skin. He saw around him a wheel of riders, passing and spinning, spinning and prancing, poking and prodding at him with pistols. Though he could see fire spit from the barrels, he couldn’t hear the individual reports, drowned out in the uproar. For an instant he held an image of himself dead under the trampling hooves. Again he strained, again to no avail, to push the dead weight off. Papaw, no longer flailing, wouldn’t budge. He no longer felt the comforting heave of her lungs as she pressed against him. He felt himself under a weight from which he could never arise.

  Into this maelstrom Billy Magruder and little William Hulse prodded their horses as though dragging heavy loads up a steep incline. They emptied their pistols in the faces of their enemies as those enemies passed on the carousel. Then Jarom could register only fragments of sense: the square, yellow cusps of a wounded horse forming a death smile under its curled muzzle, a glint of burnished metal against some coarse blue wool, a riderless horse standing calmly by the road rubbing its rump under a cedar bough. He worked one of his hands free to grip the pommel, but still he couldn’t pull out from under. The faces of his murderers ballooned up in pitiful mime, their antics performed against the whinnying of injured horses and a deafening thunder louder than any storm.

  How long the fight lasted he did not know, but after a time he felt the surge pass over and beyond him, the crush of muscle easing and ebbing back down the road, where he glimpsed the survivors limping through the splintered cedars in the direction of what he guessed was Brad-fordsville. As his senses readjusted to what lay before him, up rode Billy Magruder, a red scarf wound about his head like a turban. He jumped from his horse and shouted for several of the others to help him drag Papaw off. Magruder, together with Bud Pence and Sam Berry, doing his best with one arm, commenced to push and prize, sliding the carcass off inch by inch until Jarom could roll free.

  Jarom didn’t know how long it took for the message that the weight had been removed to penetrate his numbness. Though he knew he would mourn Papaw, in that moment he felt a powerful elation. Seconds earlier, death, with all certainty, had snared him in its grip. Snatched back to life by Billy Magruder, he felt renewed, emphatically alive at the center of a field radiant with intense light, where every grass blade, every leaf and shimmering stem, had life and breath of its own, the smallest motion quivering to permeate the whole. A power not physical so much as psychic swept through him. For the first time he felt preternaturally aware of everything about him: the fissures in a fencepost, a shattered canteen, the minutest twig, crow caw, the ruined bodies pulsing among the stones. He felt great release, a freeing not from death’s hold but from all that held him from the fullness of things.

  Then he became aware that Billy Magruder, his deliverer, stood next to him, grinning innocently above the carnage. Picking up Jarom’s hat, Magruder wet his finger and applied it to the lucky crescent, rubbing the silver against his sleeve until it shined. Finishing, he plopped the hat on Jarom’s head.

  “You better stop napping,” he said, “before someone comes and bu
ries you and the horse both.”

  THE BARN

  The wound in Billy Magruder’s chest had finally stopped bleeding. The pea-sized hole with its carnation of dried blood was stuffed with cotton and bound over with several lengths of gauze. Magruder slept on his back in a nest of sour hay Medkiff had raked up from the barn floor, as comfortable as he and Jarom could make him. While he slept, Jarom and Medkiff speculated on his chances of survival—on their own chances. The wound seemed clean enough but in a nasty place. Entering just below the collar bone, the bullet punctured Magruder’s left lung before exiting through the upper back a half inch from the spine. Jarom guessed it a pistol ball from its size, too small for a rifle or carbine, too uncomplicated for a shotgun. The wound had suppurated, the lung collapsed, and Magruder’s breathing took the form of labored wheezing. Even in sleep his chest heaved in shaky spasms, the breath sucked in deep and passed out weak with a sound like air being blown through a torn paper sack. It rose and fell in sputters, reminding Jarom somehow of pulsating butterfly wings.

  If Magruder was bad off, he fared better than Sam Jones, the man who had brought the order for Jarom and the others to report to Paris, Tennessee. He’d tumbled off his horse in the first volley of fire, the life gone out of him before he hit the ground. Not one of them would have picked the spot their enemies chose for a bushwhacking, a stretch of open ground in country veined with narrow trails through dense timber. The fact that it was a bad choice made it a good one for those who lay in wait for them. In the open the four of them had put their guard down, not reckoning on amateurs. He, Medkiff, Magruder, and Jones trekked the back roads toward Paris, Tennessee, where they hoped to rejoin the remainder of the Confederate army in the West. Though they anticipated some trouble on the way, especially after the fight when Jarom was nearly killed, they didn’t expect to meet it at this place or to meet it so soon.

  Without hint or warning, the first volley came from a patch of stobby tobacco about thirty yards to the east of the road, the second from a rise about an equal distance to the west. As Jarom ducked, he glimpsed two figures stooped behind a pile of fencerails, another in a gully to one side of the tobacco. Eight he counted in all, eight against three. Struck by more than one bullet, Jones had pitched from the saddle. Sprawled motionless in the roadway, he was clearly dead. The road ahead appeared unobstructed, so the three goosed their horses, Jarom riding a chestnut filly that had already proven her spirit and staying power. Stolen two days earlier from a pasture not far from where Jarom had been born, she was beginning to respond when he called her Memphis. The three of them had ducked their heads and put spurs to the horses. They had nearly ridden out the storm when Billy Magruder dropped his reins, freeing his chestnut gelding to veer off the road and nearly unseat him. Magruder now seemed to be seated upright in the saddle more by habit than any obedience to gravity’s law. Before he could slip off, Medkiff wheeled about and steadied him, snatching the loose reins to bring the chestnut around.

  As soon as they had outrun the bullets, Jarom swapped horses, mounting behind Magruder and passing the reins of Memphis over to Medkiff. Placing Magruder’s hands at his side, he formed a cage with his own to keep him from falling. Neither he nor Medkiff had to debate whether Billy Magruder needed a doctor, but neither had an idea where one could be found. Jarom did know that they rode in Hancock County and that they would need a place to lie low until Magruder’s wounds healed—or he died. He knew Magruder wasn’t in any condition to ride and that plainly his wounds would kill him it they didn’t find a doctor soon.

  They passed through a desolate and meager country, a land with few people and farms that did not guarantee even subsistence. One grim little farmstead after another had the look of land in a primal stage of settlement, as though the first generation of settlers had arrived and started to carve cornfields and homesteads out of the landscape but somehow had its energies sapped until progress slowed and finally stopped. With their remaining energy, the survivors held against the vagaries of weather and conditions of privation. Despite an occasional church or intact farmhouse, the landscape showed little sociability or change. The unpainted houses and ill-repaired dependencies stood lamely in their path, neglected and wasting. Jarom called it the Land of Missing Boards after counting dozens of outbuildings that needed siding or roof sheathing replaced.

  Because Magruder might incur further injury if they moved faster than a walk, the progress on horseback slowed. Riding double, Jarom and Magruder would go six or eight miles and then change horses. Medkiff often rode ahead to scout the way. From time to time Billy Magruder would raise his head to ask their whereabouts and then nod off again. When conscious, he moaned from the jolting as the horses plodded under a double load. Jarom tried to imagine Magruder’s thoughts. He knew him for a fatalist, grimly making casual and oblique references to the mark being on him. Once he asked Jarom to deposit him at the next farmhouse. Jarom replied that his wound would be seen to once they found a place of refuge. Neither Jarom nor Medkiff, so far as Jarom could tell, considered abandoning Magruder, especially since they knew Magruder would never desert them in the same condition.

  Whenever Jarom tired of ministering, the image of Magruder rolling Papaw off him on the road to Lebanon came back to him. Then, Magruder had become a frenzied wasp, stinging whatever threatened and stinging hard. His impetuousness saved Jarom’s life. Though no one said as much, Jarom knew he had a debt to repay. Hope for relief lay in finding sanctuary within a day’s ride, the closer the better, a place where they could get a doctor and sit things out.

  “If you won’t leave me,” Billy said, woozy but finally coming to, “carry me to Meade County. There I can claim kin to some who’ll look after me.”

  When questioned further, he named a Dr. Lewis, a physician who lived somewhere between Webster and Brandenburg. He guessed the doctor’s house lay about thirty or thirty-five miles to the east.

  And that decided it. Making their way along more back roads the rest of that day and night, next morning they reached the section where Dr. Lewis lived. An old farmer they stopped along the way gave them directions. Billy’s shirt was sopped with blood, and the protrusion of the makeshift bandages under it gave the appearance of misshapened breasts. When they neared the place, Billy recognized the road. He directed them to a vacant barn out of sight of passersby where they could wait while someone, either Jarom or Medkiff, fetched the doctor.

  They found the empty barn located in the boondocks not far from Webster, a stopping place ten miles south of the county seat along the market road. Webster itself they passed through, a village sequestered among a profusion of knobs that seemed an aberration of nature, a series of bumps on the landscape as if God had stamped them on with a muffin pan. The barn belonged to James S. Cox, a distant cousin of Billy’s mother’s people. Billy relied on Mr. Cox’s good will to let them stay for a time if they would go along with the fiction that he didn’t know it. By edict, harboring guerrillas was a criminal offense punishable by fine and imprisonment, possibly death. If someone could prove Cox in cahoots with guerrillas, he could be shot as a traitor to his country. On the other hand, informing would earn the betrayer both commendation and a hefty reward. So Jarom and Medkiff agreed that one of them would stay to care for Billy, the other would fetch the doctor. Already edgy in the confines of the barn, Medkiff volunteered to go.

  Sometime before midnight, Jarom, drowsy against one of the stanchions, heard the clickity-clack of horses on the frozen ground outside the barn. Medkiff whistled and led in a dapper little man lugging a leather satchel. Without any comment he knelt by Magruder and reached into his bag for a pair of scissors, carefully snipping open the shirt to examine the wound. To Jarom, it looked like a ruptured plum, a purple mass of shredded flesh on which blood stood too long, giving it the consistency and color of congealed gravy. The doctor deftly swabbed it with a clear liquid poured onto a cloth, dabbing and wiping with a delicate touch. When he’d cleansed the wound, he dressed it from a spool
of gauze, saying there was nothing more he could do in that place to prevent infection.

  Jarom looked on, impressed with his obvious skill, especially since many of the country doctors he’d seen knew more of delivering calves than treating humans. The doctor seemed more attuned to treating his own.

  “Where did you learn to tend such wounds?” Jarom asked.

  “Before the war,” he said, “I’d hardly seen any but innocent blood, the cut of a misapplied scythe, a gash from a fall. Since it started, I’ve seen barrels of blood, more than I thought to see in a lifetime.”

  Trimly built and formal in his bearing despite the crude conditions, the doctor wore a gray swallowtail coat at least two generations removed from what Jarom recognized as current fashion, something as antique as billowing pantaloons or knee-length stockings. To his credit, Jarom thought, the doctor acted as though in his practice he commonly visited patients in tobacco barns. If troubled, he withheld showing it, either too polite or too canny to let his concern show through. Though below average height, he bore a strange resemblance to the latest tintypes of Lincoln, a long haggard face cut deep as the gullied terrain about them. He appeared irremediably sad, his eyes unnaturally alert and probing. The wound, he told them finally, was open, and there had been a good deal of discharge. The bullet had entered the left side of his torso, halfway between the nipple and the sternum. Though the ball punctured his left lung as it passed through his body, the right lung seemed sound and functioned properly. Then he told them what they already knew, that healing, if it took, would be slow and that the patient must be given adequate rest. None of them, including the patient himself, reasonably expected Billy to last over a day or so, two days at best.