Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  He realized he wanted to send, had to send, some messages to those he loved. A vague Mollie appeared to him, and he pulled out the ambrotype to coax her features into resolving themselves.

  Talbot had been looking at him in that indulgent way of ministers who sometimes lead by being led.

  “Will you get me a pen and some paper?” Jarom asked.

  “Of course,” he said, “though there is a prohibition against my carrying messages beyond these walls.”

  “Will you carry them for me?” Jarom asked.

  “Of course I will,” he said. “I would be happy to.”

  Talbot went to the cell door and through the bars asked the guard for some pen and paper and a bottle of ink. When the guard returned with the things he had requested, Jarom, unsure of the steadiness of his hand, asked Talbot if he would act as scribe. Talbot dutifully wrote down what he was told to, letters to Aunt Mary Tibbs, Nancy Bradshaw, John Patterson, and Mollie Thomas. Jarom saved Mollie’s for last because he knew it would be the hardest to compose, the most wrenching. What could he say to her, knowing that by the time she received it he would be dead? For a time the words wouldn’t come. Talbot used up several sheets of foolscap with false starts and falterings before Jarom could find the words he wanted her to read, something simple, something from the heart:

  My dear Mollie,

  I have to inform you of the sad fate which awaits your true friend. I am to suffer death this afternoon at four o’clock. I send you from my chains a message of true love; and as I stand on the brink of the grave I tell you, I do fondly and forever love you.

  I am ever truly yours

  He read what Talbot had written, then bent to sign the letter, debating for a few seconds whether to give his name as Jarom or Jerome. Unable to forgo this last gesture of correctness, of extravagance, he signed, “M. Jerome Clarke.”. Then he thought of sending something of himself with each letter, a token. At his request Talbot asked the guard for a pair of scissors, assuring him that they wouldn’t be used for any act of violence. The guard must have trusted him, for he came back with a small pair of snips. Having Jarom hold his head still, Talbot clipped some locks of his uncombed hair to be enclosed in each letter. With Mary Tibbs’s he included the brass button from his father’s uniform. He asked Talbot not to say anything about any of this, and Talbot gave his word that he wouldn’t. Then he took from his pocket the folded-up music sheet in which he had wrapped the ambrotype of Mollie and him, he on the settee with his arm about her, she sitting on its edge, her hand in his. He wrapped “Lillibulero,” the song he had never heard—and never would hear, he realized—inserting the letter to Mollie in its folds. When he’d given the letters to Talbot, he felt relieved. He thanked Talbot, who clasped his hand and said he would pray for him and would stay with him until the last. As Talbot stepped from the cell and the door swung to, Jarom vowed to himself that he would make his own exit from this world as neatly as he could, picking up after himself each step of the way until there were no more steps for him to take.

  Around midday, the guard brought him dinner on a tin plate, lean beef and boiled potatoes. Bite by bite he ate what he knew would be his last meal. Afterward, he lay down on his cot and closed his eyes to the world. In the half-light of the cell, he found himself reviewing the budget of what he loved and things to which he owed allegiance, an inventory that grew as he combed his nearly twenty years on the planet: Logan County, blind Patterson, the loyalties of his messmates—especially One-Armed Berry and the wounded Magruder—Mollie Thomas, Aunt Mary Tibbs, farmscapes, whatever configuration of land lay before him in Kentucky, Samuel Colt, Papaw and Memphis, John Hunt Morgan, breast of chicken and collard greens, the regenerative power of rain, the sanctity of shape and texture in trees, the essential holiness of every animal in creaturedom, the interminable interplay of light and shadow.

  Chief among the things he had learned through the tutelage of blood, his apprenticeship in suffering, was that this so-called civil war was at root uncivil, a distemper of wolves.

  He composed a mental list of what he would never do or know: reach the age of twenty, marry, lead a stable life, grow a beard, dwindle into old age, see an ocean, lie with a woman, lie with Mollie Thomas, earn his own livelihood, go to California, voyage to the land and seat of his Clarke forebears, collect his own library of books, own a boundary of land, know the pleasure and satisfactions of constructing things, outlive Memphis, chronicle whatever peace followed the war, take pleasure in the roll of seasons as things grew and prospered under his hand, savor foods as yet untasted, feel the respect that accrues to elders like deepening mulch in a forest, attain maturity of mind, read the complete works of Mr. Charles Dickens. Nor would he ever get his hands on Windrup, even know the man’s first name. He would never become a father.

  Jarom would never meet or even see George D. Prentice, his failed father, the author in part of his son’s destruction. Would he come visit? No. Had he been at the wharf or somewhere along the route to prison? Would he be among the throng that gathered for his execution, armed with sharpened quill to get the last word?

  Looking fresh, Talbot came back after the noon hour and began going over the catechism, reading from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. Jarom accompanied him in prayer, and Talbot conferred with him about the nature of his beliefs.

  He asked if Jarom accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and if he believed in life everlasting. Jarom answered that he did, wanting to believe and be believed though he knew nothing would alter what he had to go through and in the end make things any easier. How to get through the execution, the ritual of murder, gave him more concern than what lay in the Hereafter. For some reason he also wanted to please Talbot, the good shepherd who did not seem to doubt or question the words. About three o’clock Talbot conducted the sacrament of baptism, and Jarom for a brief moment felt he had been wrapped in the white garment of Christ’s infinite mercy. As the words had said. In his heart he was still terrified, still not one with himself and others, still unsure of what had to be done. There may have been a verdict in his military trial, but he knew his trials were not done. They had just begun. His hope was that his remains would be gathered to the dust of Kentucky, though he had no notion where. He had asked Talbot to contact Mary Tibbs, who would see that his remains reached a resting place in his home county.

  One face among the shadow army of faces that rose before him came unsummoned, a furloughed soldier—was Caldwell the name?—rousted in his shirtsleeves from his supper table at a farmstead in Bullitt County, a man Magruder had known before the war and had been watching as a hunter might observe the habits of a buck that raided the truck in his garden. Prodded out to his barnyard, the man was shot by Jarom, Magruder, Marion, and a fourth man whose identity Jarom couldn’t remember, though it may have been Sam Berry. He remembered pulling the man’s mother loose from him, remembered her trying to shoo her other children back into the house so they would not see. But most he remembered the terror in the man’s face as silently he drew his last few breaths there in his own yard, the four of them cocking and preparing to fire, the man unsure from which pistol to expect the first load. Later, as they rode away, he’d wondered what the name, pronounced “kah-well,” meant, speculating that the dead man’s Scottish forebears lived at the place of the Cold Well. Caldwell.

  His father also rose up, the late Brigadier-General Hector M. Clarke decked out in his braided militia uniform and plumed hat. Sitting at his large desk in the parlor, he asked Jarom to explain himself. Envisioning him, Jarom thought of his own gaudy duds, the red suit he’d worn with the fringe and tinsel along the sleeve and pants legs. How could he explain the past months, the shame he had brought on his family—the pitiless thefts, the low company he kept, the blood he’d shed? No better than his not-so-distant cousin Branch Clarke, the murderer. No better than Branch’s son Tandy, sitting in his Frankfort penitentiary cell, idle and handless. What would the old man think of him now—not a so
ldier but a fugitive from soldiers, a guerrilla at best, no longer fighting under a banner that would claim him, no longer associated with a cause beyond his own survival?

  “Short of the glory,” his father would say, “short of the glory,” shaking his head, erect even while sitting, his back not touching the chair.

  Jarom took consolation in his father not having lived long enough to know, for the knowledge would have killed him.

  How did I come to find myself here in this place? he asked finally, eyeing the neat but monotonous courses of brick on the cell wall, a striped trapezoid of light against it from the small barred window.

  He had no answer, nothing he could say by way of justification or excuse.

  “What clemency do you hope for?” asked the voice inside.

  “All,” he said.

  “What clemency can you expect?”

  “None.”

  He no longer kindled even the faintest hope of Berry or Quantrill or Tom Henry or any of the others cheating the hangman by a dramatic rescue. The risks were too great, the rewards too small. Magruder, were he able, would not have hesitated. He felt a constriction in his chest and the beating of his heart, imagining the valves as fists beating frantically against a closed door. In his hopelessness he cried as the sequence of his last moments came to him. He remembered feelings like these only one other time, descending a steep ridge along a very narrow path, uncertain of Papaw’s steadiness. One misstep and the two of them would pitch to their deaths in the craggy bottom. Then, as now, he could only center his weight and try to concentrate on the way ahead. When he’d looked down, he saw the sleek muscles in Papaw’s upper right leg, the knobs and bony competence of her step, a few dark bristles protruding, knowing not to lean over, not to look down, until the path widened into a wagon road.

  All the while, Talbot sat patiently in a corner of the cell, seemingly communing with the higher powers—there if needed. Jarom kept staring at the tiers of bricks with their stripes of lime, saying nothing. About three-thirty Talbot tactfully excused himself so Jarom could collect himself and think his final thoughts.

  RECESSIONAL

  March 15, 1865

  As the reality of his execution bore down on him, Jarom tried to forestall his fear by registering every detail, as though by amassing everything, he could preserve all that was his life. He counted three others in the hack, a roomy leather nest perched on great spring bows with facing seats and a collapsible top. The two whose names he knew were Captain George Swope and the Reverend J. J. Talbot. The third was a hayseed with a blotchy complexion whose task, Jarom realized with grim amusement, was to shoot him if he jumped in his chains and attempted to run.

  Between Swope and Talbot he saw a bond—the man of war and the man of God making the best of their temporary association, one pretending the next world primary, the other agreeing to the extent that he would lend a hand to transporting Jarom there. He noticed that neither seemed comfortable speaking directly to the other, so they talked through or to him so the other could hear.

  To Jarom, they were players in an elaborate performance, a pair of mismatched horses carting precious baggage—himself—through each stage of an awkward and bumpy journey from one kingdom to the next. The Power and the Glory. One was Power, the other Glory. Where did he stand in this hierarchy? At best he thought of himself as Aunt Mary’s last-minute Christian, a reluctant Christian, a Christian by necessity. He remembered the story his aunt told him about the New Madrid earthquake of 1811, when the earth ruptured so strongly the Ohio River flowed backward for a time. So powerfully came the tremors that great numbers of wastrels and felons and scamps suddenly converted to the ways of Christ. In droves the churches reported converts, those who’d finally come to recognize God’s message to infidels. So long as there remained a possibility of more tremors, attendance remained high. After a few weeks, the tremors ceased and attendance dropped back to prequake levels. And Jarom recognized that though the church had its hold on him, he fell into the category of earthquake Christian, gallows Christian.

  Forward on the driver’s seat were another guard and the hackman, an ancient whose hands, grasping the reins, were smudged with age spots, a brown archipelago mapping his skin from knuckles to wrist. Jarom was drawn to these hands as to a map on which the sum of all the man’s winters had been imprinted. With a pang he realized that though he’d weathered his share of storms in his three years of war, his skin would not feel another rain, would not feel the warm palm of another sun.

  Across and to his right sat Talbot, riding backward, the light on his blind side. He didn’t seem to mind, his eyes half-shut under his steel spectacles. He had the look of one of the mystics of the early church, a desert dweller who had removed himself from one world in contemplation of the next. For a time Jarom raised his handkerchief to his eyes to lessen the glare, leaning his head against the side of the cab as if to hide his agony from those who looked on. The intensity of these last minutes engulfed him.

  As they passed down Broadway, the widest street in the Falls City, Jarom noticed that Talbot ignored the crowd, the commotion in the street, the music of murder. He looked beyond as if he knew everything by some higher intuition accessible only to priests. His lips were moving, reciting a prayer or maybe an appropriate psalm, a litany of whispered hisses and exploding consonants, sounds that hovered, like the church itself, feasibly on the edge of sense. What he said, Jarom concluded, wasn’t meant for his ears but instead was audible only to angels, the membership of the Heavenly Host. He tucked his right forefinger into his black book, marking what was probably the prayer for the dead in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,” a text that he had heard as a child and had heard in his own mind since Talbot came to his cell at nine o’clock that morning.

  Fighting off tremors of anxiety, Jarom looked at the guard on a leather seat directly across from him and next to Talbot. He had the fidgets, could not keep still. Swope addressed him as Ruckles or Rockles, Jarom couldn’t tell which. To Jarom he was Jack-in-the-Box. Never completely at rest, he shifted his weight, cocked his head from one side to the other, drummed and clenched his fingers, flicked his eyes about him nervously. Pimples formed a red constellation on his chin; across his nose was a generous pepper-spill of freckles that reminded Jarom of the Indiana farmlands he had seen after the escape from Camp Morton. He couldn’t have been much older, if any, than Jarom. His holstered pistol—a Colt issued for the occasion and with which, he would bet, he was not overly familiar—was placed butt forward, the flap unfastened for easy drawing. Jarom wanted to assure him that he had nothing to fear from his hands, itching in their metal bracelets. The two steel rings yoking his wrists rubbed and chafed with the slightest movement. Freckle-Face knew and Jarom knew there would be nothing to worry about so long as the metal didn’t slip or melt from his wrists. What worried the guard lay beyond, ahead, behind. As he squirmed, he scanned the streets for desperadoes, invisible armies of gray rescuers. Even Jarom had heard rumors that guerrilla cronies would snatch him from the jaws of Death. Jarom wanted desperately to believe it but couldn’t—Magruder wounded, Marion dead, Berry God knows where. But to Rockles—or Ruckles—every alley or side street was a point of attack for which he braced himself.

  Captain Swope sat supremely untroubled to Jarom’s right, every pound of his considerable self cushioned and confident. Jarom thought of the vast muttonchops forming a double hedge across Swope’s upper jowls. They rose out of his collar and up his cheeks like tails of pet squirrels, twins, their furry sleekness buried in the expansive folds of his uniform. The hairs of his coat were coarse as steel filings, gray-tipped and slightly coiled. He had the rooted, ponderous look of a small-town banker or alderman, the shape of a possum with eyes pink and feral. Or a rain barrel. He wore the uniform as masquerade, a blue safe-conduct from one snug burrow to the next. Short of breath, he huffed at reliable intervals and looked on everything he saw with an appra
iser’s eye. To Jarom, the now familiar warmth and bulk of the overfed body against him felt oddly comforting, almost paternal, though this father was composed of betrayal. He knew that when the wheels stopped their rotations Swope would escort him to destruction as casually as he would bid the regimental cook twist the neck of his Sunday chicken.

  “Where will it happen?” Jarom asked.

  “At the fairgrounds,” Swope said, “Eighteenth and Broadway, a few more blocks.”

  As he spoke, Jarom could feel the steady expansion and contraction of the man’s chest like a bloated concertina, his voice offensively nasal.

  “How much is the admission?” Jarom asked, trying to rankle him a little.

  “Not a cent for you,” he said. “Free, in fact, for all comers.” He could have said, Jarom thought, that you will be admitted at the cost of your neck.

  Jarom wished his hands were free so he could wipe the smirk from Swope’s face, his sidelong glare of outrage when he realized that Jarom baited him and remained defiant yet. Swope’s chest rose and fell undisturbed though the breath came deeper and his face flamed red. Jarom took some small pleasure in bringing Swope’s water to a boil in the way he took pleasure generally from pretense being exposed and any balloon of self-importance punctured.

  Finally, the wheels came to a stop. The well-fed horses stood in their harness, tails switching at the flies. Jarom imagined himself outside on the curb with the onlookers, watching the radial blur as the iron-rimmed wheels slowed into focus, the spokes arranging themselves around the hub, locking into sight. Jarom watched the others as they sunk lower into the hot leather of the seats. In turn, each stepped off, the balance shifting as the tensed springs beneath them shrugged free of their burden. When it came his turn, Swope and the guard supported his underarms and lifted him down, his feet momentarily suspended. He felt their support as he hobbled, half-hopped, onto the yellow crust of the fairground. To either side of him stood soldiers of the Thirtieth Wisconsin, forming a corridor of blue that led to a high wooden scaffolding well off the street. From somewhere nearby, a band began playing the Dead March.