Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  Next came an extraordinary liar by the name of Hiram Meadows, who said he was attached to Company C, First Wisconsin Infantry. While out “foraging on his own” during Christmas of 1864, he claimed to have been taken prisoner by Sue Mundy, whom he identified as “that man sitting there.” He testified that Mundy force-marched him and his brother for a night and a day and into the next night. When his brother “gave out,” the prisoner ordered someone to shoot him. This, according to Meadows, was done “right then.” Curiously to Jarom, at no time was the slain brother named or identified. Nor did Meadows state where the alleged murder occurred. Jarom had no recollection of any such event and acknowledged to himself that if for some reason he had wanted a prisoner shot, he would have done it himself rather than ask someone else. He was pretty well convinced that Hiram Meadows had no brother, at least not one who accompanied him foraging at Christmas. This death, he knew, was not his doing, if in fact there had been a death at all.

  The commission absorbed this fiction without comment, and Coyl brought on the next witness. He introduced himself as Private Alfred Hill, stating that he’d seen the defendant while riding on a train. A citizen, he said, pointed Sue Mundy out to him as the defendant rode along outside, shooting into the train windows. Hill said this incident had occurred “a little this side of St. Mary’s” and that he would have shot Mundy if the scoundrel had not ridden off before he could load his gun.

  At no time was Hill asked to fix the event to a time certain. It irked Jarom that his counsel let things ride without objection as if worried about taxing the judges with too much detail. As best Jarom could determine, Hill referred to the train Magruder robbed early in September. Fair enough, but he wasn’t with Magruder. Given the chance, he knew he could prove he was at the time with Morgan in Tennessee.

  A final witness, whose name Jarom missed, did not add anything material to what had been alleged. When he left the chair, Coyl rested his case, and the hearing was all but over. Through his attorney Jarom protested that he hadn’t been able to produce any witnesses. General Whitaker, ingenuous as Cinderella, said that none had been summoned. After Jarom requested Adam Johnson and Jack Allen, Coyl said these men’s testimony would be tainted because they fought with the rebel army and couldn’t readily be brought before the commission because they fought far away in an opposing army. At this moment Jarom knew he’d lost, knew that he’d probably lost before the trial began, and that he was playing a bit part in a larger charade in which he would be expected to pay with his life.

  After the last witness left the room, members of the commission conferred a little. Whitaker cleared his throat and spoke on their behalf, saying that the urgency of the proceedings required a timely disposition of the case. To this Jarom wanted to shout, “Bull!” Instead, Wharton took the opportunity to submit Jarom’s statement for the commission’s review, and Whitaker reluctantly agreed to append it to the record as exhibit A.

  Though Jarom didn’t expect anything to come of it, Wharton asked Coyl to send to Camp Chase and other places so that the defendant could prove he was indeed a Confederate soldier. Whitaker regretted that there was not sufficient time to call witnesses from all over the country, especially since there was, after all, a war going on.

  Even if there were time, he added, proof that Jarom was a Confederate soldier would be immaterial because the crimes he stood accused of were sufficient to convict him even if he was. The only charge, he reminded the commission, was that as a guerrilla Jarom had fired on the Thirtieth Wisconsin.

  Jarom, staring at a spot on the wall behind them, knew further debate was useless. They would do what they would do.

  After a brief pause in which Jarom listened to the ticking of the clock on the mantle, a twin of the Seth Thomas in the Tibbs parlor, Whitaker announced that the case had been heard and it was time for the members to confer and reach a decision based on evidence and law. With this, Whitaker rose, and the other members of the commission trooped out of the room after him, to give the matter, as Whitaker put it, “mature deliberation.”

  Momentarily confused, Jarom began to understand what “mature deliberation” meant. The hopeful could regard it as possible clemency. The cynical could interpret it as a way of saying that in fact the case had been decided and the tribunal did not wish to state its prejudices in the presence of the defendant. Jarom felt suspended above a chasm such as several he’d seen near Pound Gap in the Kentucky mountains. The rope that held him was in the grip of strangers who bore him no love. One of those standing by, less indifferent than hostile, was George Prentice, the editor holding his pen poised to see what more mischief he could do.

  So that was all there was to it, he thought. No decision announced, no resolution. He felt a constriction in his lungs that threatened to cut off his breath. He felt himself run through a gamut of emotions: frustration, betrayal, outrage at injustice, foreboding, a tinge of self-pity. He couldn’t imagine what Patterson would do, what advice he would give, what possible solace he could offer. He was perplexed and finally downcast, left with words to the effect that the commission would render its decision concerning his guilt or innocence, his life, his death, after “mature deliberation.”

  After the commission left, the same guards escorted him to the hack and drove him back to prison. This time people on the street seemed to go about their business ignorant of or indifferent to the doings of their government. Women carrying grocery sacks gabbled on a corner outside a sundries shop. A servant in a red vest and rakish hat cut a little caper as he passed a stooped workman pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks.

  Only the guards in the spare brick prison showed him deference, most of them having tasted the inequities of war, the homicidal whims of officers, knowing what it meant to be vulnerable. They stood back as he passed, holding their tongues, their stares. Jarom remembered a piece of wisdom his father recited when he spanked Jarom—then about ten—after he’d caught him teasing a neighbor’s dog that had strayed to their kitchen door.

  “Be kind,” he said, “for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

  “Even dogs?” Jarom asked.

  “Even dogs,” his father said.

  When his cell door clanged to and he was alone, the feelings he had stifled all morning knotted in his chest. Though he fought it, his body began to shudder. Along his arms he felt goose bumps. Crying for the first time since he’d discovered John Patterson bleeding in the hayfield, he buried his face in the rough blanket that covered his pallet.

  After he’d calmed himself, he mined his memory for each piece of testimony and imagined the impression it would make on impartial judges. And then on partial judges. He hashed everything over and over again, searching for any scrap of evidence or gesture on which he could fix his hopes. Even after he’d eaten his bread and beans and was staring at the plaster of the cell’s ceiling in the dark, he sifted through what he now thought of as a script, staying awake most of the night. He wondered where Medkiff was and whether Magruder had been given a bed in the infirmary. He wondered if Berry knew of his capture, if he was organizing to spring him from prison. He reflected on the trajectory of the trial. The turning point had come when Whitaker refused him witnesses. From that moment on, he knew he was doomed. The only thing he needed to know was how much time he had before they shot him.

  CHURCHED

  Early the next morning the Reverend J. J. Talbot, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, came to visit Jarom in his cell. Even if he had not worn dark clerical clothes and collar, Jarom would have identified him as an official of the church on some dark mission, not a bearer of good news. Though the minister approached him kindly, Jarom detected the same patronizing air he had experienced with others of his tribe, who, because of their special relationship with God, monopolized all the answers. Whether Talbot was sincere in sharing his special knowledge he couldn’t say. When Jarom first heard the name, he immediately thought of the Talbot in the song, who by the singer’s “shoul” would “cut all
the English throat,” the Talbot who would be made a lord, Talbot the dog. One part of him recognized his flirtation with coincidence. Another plumbed the implications of the name—was his the “English throat”? Talbot. Lord. Was Talbot the perverse God who held Jarom’s fate in His divine hands?

  But the Talbot before him only asked how he’d slept and how he felt. Jarom said he was feeling as well as he could, sitting in a cell certain about his future but uncertain about how soon.

  There came a silence that did not seem awkward to him, to either of them. And then Talbot changed the subject.

  “You are called Sue Mundy,” Talbot said. “I’m curious. What is your real name?”

  “Clarke,” Jarom said, “Marcellus Jerome Clarke. Marcellus was the name my father gave me, expecting I would be a soldier, a follower of Mars.”

  “And Jerome?”

  “It was the name my mother gave me,” he said, “though she shortened it to Jarom. A kind of pet name.”

  “And do you know who Jerome was?”

  “No, not really. I guess he was a minister of the church.”

  “A saint,” Talbot said. “A great student of the Word.”

  “Don’t the saints die terrible deaths?” Jarom asked. “How did he die?”

  “In his sleep,” Talbot said, “peacefully in his sleep.”

  Then Talbot pulled him back to his troubles with all the force of gravity, asking if he had heard the result of the court-martial. Jarom instinctively knew that if he had only intuited the outcome before, he would have it now as fixed and readable as letters chiseled into stone.

  “They will shoot me, I suppose,” he found himself saying.

  “When do you suppose that will be?” Talbot asked, Jarom hearing in his voice the tone he knew Talbot must use to console the bereaved or the dying, a voice unctuous with concern and kindliness.

  “In a few weeks, I guess,” Jarom said, having heard that authorities customarily gave the condemned time to settle their quarrels with God and prepare their souls for eternity. He stared at the lump of Talbot’s Adam’s apple as if he could discern the words before they were spoken. His own throat tightened, and he knew the worst was coming.

  “Who knows?” Talbot said gently in the way an adult might speak to a child. “Who knows that it may not be in a few days? Can I come around and be of some service to you?”

  “Yes,” Jarom heard himself saying, “come around,” as though the words were novel to him, wholly unexpected. “Yes, sir,” hearing himself use the word for the first time since leaving Morgan’s command in Tennessee. “I’d be glad to have you come and see me.”

  Talbot seemed willing to listen, a decent man he was sure, if nothing else company who could keep his mind from sinking. Talbot had kept an emotional distance, a clerical dispassion. Though he seemed sympathetic, he remained strangely placid, affected but detached. Jarom felt like a displaced boulder poised on the edge of a precipice above a lake. He already felt a terrible turbulence, the displacement of stone, obeying the only laws it knew, striking the placid water. And Talbot, as Jarom conceived him, was that water. This might have ended it, but he sensed Talbot had something more to say, that he had a boulder of his own to drop.

  “My young friend,” he said, “if in a few days, why not a few hours? You’d better train your thoughts to preparation now.”

  The reality behind Talbot’s words struck Jarom and hit with the force not of a dropped stone but of a tidal sweep, a force that broke over him and shattered what self-control he had been able to muster. When the words penetrated, he felt a constriction in his gut that preceded heaving, a realization that his execution—a word that cut him—was not a far-off event in an indeterminate future but something that would happen today—in the small breadth of hours and minutes. And he was powerless to prevent it. His breath shortened, he found himself gasping. The heaves moved up to his chest, and for a few seconds he felt he would throw up.

  “Parson,” he said, “are you telling me I am to be shot today?”

  “Father,” Talbot said.

  “Father,” Jarom said, “am I to be shot today?”

  Talbot lowered his eyes in answer.

  Then Jarom met Talbot’s eyes as they rose kindly to meet his own.

  “You are to be executed this afternoon at four o’clock.” He hesitated, “And there is one other thing. You are not to be shot.”

  “Hung then?” Jarom asked.

  Talbot nodded and looked down at some object invisible on the floor of the cell. How could he be surprised? Since he had surrendered in the barn, the dark prospect of execution loomed over him like a span of invisible wings, a presence like the shadow of a cloud moving across the landscape. Or the scissoring silhouette of a hawk skimming across a stricken pullet caught in an open field. Now he was the chicken that sensed something dark pass over him. Time after time he had imagined himself standing blindfolded against a wall, neat balls of lead punching through his open shirt, his ears concentrating on a band of music or hymnody. A clean shot to the chest and that was that. But hanging. He wasn’t prepared for such a leave-taking, hadn’t acknowledged the possibility.

  “They have no right!” he shouted in Talbot’s compassionate face. “I was commissioned in the regular service by Jack Allen, and I can prove Marion killed the men I’m charged with killing.”

  “Well, that may be,” said Talbot, “but this is not the time to say, nor am I the one to hear you say it. What I can do for you is pray.”

  As the reality began to take root in him, Jarom realized that at one level he was guilty. The evidence was not right, the judges not impartial, but at root he knew he was guilty. It occurred to him now that it was possible to be innocent and guilty at the same time, that both were summations of degrees and millimeters balanced here and tipped there, and that a final accounting could not be made until that person had performed his last act, leaving nothing more to measure. At some level Jarom realized he was being called to account not only for charges that had come before the commission but for everything—every shot he’d ever fired, every spark of anger he’d felt toward those who hurt the people he loved, every time he’d gone along when Marion or Magruder had overstepped the bounds. The charges brought against him were weak, but the moral weight of his other crimes bore down on him.

  Hate, like the generations of ancestors of whom he was composed, had a complex genealogy. The particular wrong that unnameable others had done him had aggregated into a hatred that was general—a hatred fueled not only by Patterson’s blinding but also by the bayonet that pierced Susan Berry’s side, the shot that downed John Hunt Morgan, the spent bullet that thumped Estin Polk, the blinding of Stovepipe Johnson by his own troops, and, yes, the shooting of good-natured Toby by Bill Marion. And finally, he was guilty in the sense, he thought, that everyone is guilty—guilty of believing in a cause more indefinite than himself, guilty of being his parents’ child, guilty of being taught to act according to what he believed without considering consequences. The guilt he was willing to accept he did not own—it was shared. Under this reckoning, his judges were as guilty as he the moment they let expedience and bias dictate the outcome of the trial. Tainted, they too were no more than their parents’ children.

  So Talbot knelt and Jarom joined him on the slabbed stone of the cell floor, the coldness working up through the knobs of his knees into the marrow of his bones. Without a book Talbot prayed for more than an hour. At first he spoke of the sickened heart and the perfect harvest of death that the war had visited on the world.

  “Let us rejoice,” he said, “in the hope of glory that will bring a surcease of human suffering on this sphere of rock in this shattered country where men take the lives of their neighbors and put stock to the sword and pillage their neighbors’ crops and incinerate what their neighbors have built so that it chars and blackens to ruin. So that not one stone stands on another.”

  He prayed for the vision to forsake mortal blindness and find a fuller vision encompassin
g Kingdom Come, that blithe and beautiful day that, like human hopes, shines but to hasten away. He acknowledged the frost and snows and storms that will hide the blue sky and lock up the riffling rill while man and beast go shivering. He affirmed that the only blue sky that persists is the Lord’s firmament in whose domain there is no storm, no strife, but only a pureness of spirit and warmth and splendor that is joy eternal. He invoked the years of deep sorrow on the land and the deep gloom that still enshrouds it and the coming years that might witness an increase in our sorrows, except that we accept the Lord in his mercy and enter his Kingdom where sorrow shall cease and the broken and dead shall be uplifted and made whole.

  Jarom felt the consolation of Talbot’s words, the comfort that only words can give, though in the end they were not comforting or soothing enough to erase his guilt or the vision of what lay ahead: the gallows, the trap, the noose that would strangle and wrench the breath from his lungs, his feet withdrawn from the solid earth he loved, dangling, suspended, dancing in the void.

  But then he came back to the more familiar world he loved: the crow of the cock, the exquisite motion of a running horse, sunlight translated across the yard through a grove of sugar trees late on a fall afternoon, the voices and features that defined poor Billy Magruder and the peace he found in Mollie Thomas’s earnest face. And the force of goodness that made these and others like nothing else that lived or had lived or would live for all he knew—these things and all things until every object and creature and influence that filled this life and made it both tolerable and wonderful could be touched and savored until there was no more to touch and savor.

  To be severed from all this was more than he could withstand, a loss no words or sentiment could describe. Expressions like “numbing void” or “utter emptiness” meant nothing to him because they could not finally delineate his feelings. For him—for the majority of us, too, he thought—the transition into nothing was everything. Letting it come was not enough—that is, blanking out or dimming the senses and mechanically accepting what followed in the annihilation of consciousness. He had to be at peace somehow, and gentle words and Jesus, he knew, would carry him only so far.