Sue Mundy Read online

  PATTERSON

  Jarom was never certain how the bond with John Patterson had formed. Moving to Aunt Mary Tibbs’s house in the fall of 1858, he didn’t meet Patterson until midwinter, when Patterson, a distant relative, returned to Beech Grove for a long visit. Ten years Jarom’s senior, Patterson had worked as a pilot on a steamboat and plied the Mississippi and its tributaries for months at a time. Water was his element. From New Orleans he would steam north to St. Louis or Louisville or farther upriver, as far as Pittsburgh. He professed that water gave him serenity, and Jarom likened him to a placid pond whose unruffled surface seemed immune from turbulence. Jarom imagined him high above the river, between belching smokestacks, his hands steady on the great wheel, eyes scanning the expanse of river before him. He was convinced that Patterson’s vigil against deadheads and sandbars, against tricky currents and shoals, gave him a kind of mastery over events and confidence to control what lay before him, the power to accept what lay beyond. Drawn by his worldliness and quiet authority, Jarom regarded him as a second father before he was ever conscious of it. He idolized him. Even the name seemed to possess special qualities. When he heard it spoken, he heard the echo “father-son, father-son, father-son.”

  A natural learner and an apt teacher, Patterson fueled Jarom’s own love of learning and curiosity about the world beyond Logan County. He brought the same rigor to local lore, becoming an encyclopedia of its few triumphs and many failures. And Jarom took to it, thirsting for what Patterson taught him and eventually supplementing that knowledge with books. He would read whatever Patterson put before him and whatever he could borrow elsewhere. Showing Jarom a map of the county one day, an irregular rectangle that lay in the region called the Pennyroyal (pronounced pennyrile) whose lower quadrant formed the northern border of Tennessee, Patterson taught him the one most interesting fact about the place.

  “Do you see anything irregular about the shape?” he had asked.

  Studying the boundaries, Jarom found what Patterson later described as a cartographical oddity. In an otherwise straight line between the two states a nipple of land protruded into Tennessee like a bite out of a corn-stick. Placing his forefinger on the spot, Patterson affirmed he’d been referring to the notch

  “Do you know how it came to be there?” he had asked.

  Patterson explained that the notch went back to one of the region’s earliest settlers, Captain Jake Groves. For some reason—taxes, pride, maybe simple preference—Groves was disappointed to learn that the land described in his patent was located in Tennessee rather than Kentucky. The story went that he let the government surveyors know he had placed a barrel of top-grade sippin’ whiskey under a blackjack tree at the southernmost tip of his holdings. If the surveyors would bend the line around it, they were welcome to consume as much of the barrel as they wanted. They would. And they did.

  Patterson taught Jarom that sinks and caves as well as “lost rivers” honeycombed the county’s level to gently rolling land, channels and streams that surfaced here and there but flowed underground for miles. Jarom visualized the subsurface of the county as a huge piece of Swiss cheese riddled with pockets through which hidden rivers flowed. Jarom saw Patterson himself as an expanse of hidden rivers through which facts flowed. Jarom learned, for example, that Simpson County contained one hundred eleven thousand nine hundred forty-eight acres, that wheat, corn, oats, and tobacco were its chief crops, that it was as ideally suited for grazing livestock as it had been for bison several generations earlier.

  In the deep woods in the back of the Tibbs farm, Patterson taught Jarom the grammar of trees: the peeling scrolls of the sycamore, the intricate and somehow oriental lobes of the locust leaf, the mittened hand of the sassafras. In the silt flats along the creek, Jarom studied the language of prints—possums, muskrats, coons, deer, even once a bear. Patterson showed him which bank offered the best clay for molding marbles. Along the creek Jarom had his first lesson in the art of idleness. Sometimes he waded whole afternoons, overturning rocks to snatch at crawfish that scuttled off in clouds of yellow underwater smoke. When the changing seasons made it too chilly to strip and swim, he waded, soaking himself in the construction of dams and bridges. He would take up terrapins and box turtles, confining them in a wood box from which they would mysteriously disappear by morning. In the fall he and Patterson hunted squirrels with the old muzzle-loader that had belonged to Fenton Tibbs, traipsing through a field of frost to the hollow where they scanned the bare limbs for movement, any silhouette against the dawn sky. Under the largest walnut, Jarom learned to hull nuts, smashing the green pulp with a wooden mallet, the stains yellowing his hands for weeks. Jarom added these things to his store of knowledge about bees.

  The woods became his second home, the place where he could be himself, dreaming or dawdling out of earshot of the house. Nature became for him a great library, trees and rocks the monuments of some vast outdoor museum. Sometimes he brought his books. In the natural seat carved out of rock over the eons, he spent long afternoons reading The Hunters of Kentucky and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

  Jarom soon learned that Patterson would hold forth about anything or anyone but himself. From Mary Tibbs he learned what few particulars he knew about Patterson himself. Born in 1835, Patterson had lost both parents, to cholera or one of the other scourges that periodically swept the upper South. Like Jarom, he had been brought up by aunts and uncles. As a young man, he’d clerked in country stores and bummed around the villages and hamlets of western Kentucky. For a few months he lived near Louisville in Jefferson County, working on a farm belonging to a Dr. Standiford. But he was too restless and venturesome to stay fixed on farming. After a round of various odd jobs, he found a berth in the river trade, drawn to water, he once confessed, because it kept him in motion. With a head for figures and an intelligence suited to reading spaces as well as charts, he made an excellent pilot. Towns with their randomness and unfocused complexities he came to despise, seldom exploring them beyond their wharves and warehouses, always within earshot of the lapping waters. A nomad by inclination, he enlisted among the cozy fraternity of rivermen and misfits that constituted the river’s floating brotherhood. Had he stayed and the war not intruded, he probably would have become a captain. When the fighting broke out in ’61, he held a responsible job as assistant engineer aboard the steamboat Peytona, making a weekly run between Louisville and New Orleans.

  Patterson harbored no love of slaveholders. He would not expect anyone to do for him what he could do for himself. Servants he saw not as aids but hindrances to his own freedom, encumbrances to be fed and clothed and cared for. Having a servant, he said, is like having a dog and doing your own barking. Footloose, he regarded dependents of any kind as impediments, which is why, Jarom told himself, Patterson had no wife, no children, no roof he called his own.

  To the surprise of those who thought they knew him, he got caught up in the war fever and decided to quit the river and become a private soldier in the Army of Southern Independence. Patterson told Jarom that the Peytona later went on to run the blockade that closed Southern ports and was not heard of again.

  Jarom and he became reacquainted when Patterson came back to Logan County for a short visit before enlisting. He had the courtesy to inform Mary Tibbs in person of his plans, feeling that because she was his closest surviving kin he needed her blessing, however reluctant she might be to bestow it.

  By then, Jarom lived at nearby Crow’s Pond with his older brother John and John’s wife, Elizabeth, who was a relation of Patterson and Mary Tibbs. His other brother, William, had married Elizabeth’s sister Sarelda Lashbrook, and for a time Jarom himself had a crush on the third Lashbrook sister, Sarah. His older brothers answered the call to arms and marched off within weeks of enlisting. Jarom initially tried to join them but was told that, like the tobacco in its bed, he was too green in the leaf. Hearing the news of Patterson’s intent to enlist, Jarom felt a sudden urge to follow him. At fifteen, he stood nearly six feet
and could easily pass for sixteen, the minimum age for legal enlistment. When Elizabeth got wind of his intentions, she told Mary Tibbs, who immediately summoned Jarom to Beech Grove. He went, and she tried to dissuade him. He would be foolish, the gist of her argument went, to lose his life before he’d started living it. But Jarom had made his mind up, and she could not get through to him, especially when he argued that John Patterson would be there to keep him out of harm’s way and advise him at every turn. The best she could extract from Jarom was a promise to speak with her again before signing the ledger of enlistment.

  To gain ground on Mary Tibbs, Jarom carried his cause to Patterson, steadily rasping away at Patterson’s reluctance to buck his blood relation. Patterson balked at first, reluctant for Jarom to join for all the same reasons plus a few of his own, namely, the responsibility of keeping Jarom alive and safe. As an inveterate loner, he had no desire to nursemaid a youth who would divert his energy and concentration from the enemy. As Mary Tibbs had, he tried to stall him, not directly assaulting Jarom’s essential premise but postponing it, asking to him to put off joining for a year or two.

  The stratagem bore no fruit. For every objection, Jarom had a justification or counterargument, for every negative an alternative proposal. “Everyone knows this war won’t last,” he said. “It’ll be over in a few months at most, and we’ll be the losers if we don’t act now.”

  Jarom adopted irritation as his method, pestering Patterson until Patterson saw no way out and no way to silence him. Conceding that Jarom had enough size to pass the age requirement and could enlist on his own without anyone’s consent, Patterson gradually crumbled and gave in, conditioning Jarom’s signing up with him on Aunt Mary’s blessing—the securing of which would be no small feat.

  So the venue changed and Jarom’s pleading with Mary Tibbs started again. All of one day he tried with no success to persuade her. The second day he convinced her that it was better for him to go one day with Patterson than the next with strangers. They both knew that if she’d been adamant in her disapproval, he would not have disobeyed her. But she faltered.

  “You remember that old gum tree to the side of the house?” she asked. “Remember when that wind storm nearly blew it over, tore up its roots? We loved that old tree, but all of us knew there was no putting it back. It was either cut it down or let it fall.”

  Accepting the inevitable, she finally agreed that Jarom had a better chance of survival under Patterson’s protective wing than running off on his own hook.

  “Even the blind bird,” she said, “by nature must try its wings, and who are we to bind it to the nest? I just pray that your wings bear you up and at least one of your eyes opens before you hit something or something hits you.”

  Then he had only to persuade his sweetheart, Mollie, who over a period of weeks had become his confidante, someone whose company he sought at every opportunity—at church, on errands, on weekend visits. A few days passed before he could arrange to see her. When he broke the news, she had no arsenal of arguments to fight his going. Hers was the rhetoric of the heart, not the courtroom, not the pulpit. Instead of putting forth her misgivings, she burst out crying, weeping until Jarom, much affected, felt himself on the verge of tears. When she raised questions about his age, he said God would forgive him for telling a “gray untruth.”

  “But lying?” she said.

  “If the Lord has put up with Yankees all this time,” he said, “I guess he can forgive me a little stretching my birthday.”

  “What if you’re hurt?” she came back. “What if you’re wounded? What,” she paused for emphasis, “if you are killed?”

  He asked if she would rather live with one who wore a yellow feather, who, should he survive, could no longer keep company with himself or others. She admitted she wouldn’t but equally insisted she couldn’t bear the thought of him lying wounded on some far-off battleground.

  Jarom assured her that Patterson would be along to see no harm came to him. He said he could never be happy if he let others down, if he failed to shoulder his share of the burden. If he was not actually aflame to join the Confederacy, she could see that he was kindled.

  For a time he himself faltered, uncertain how he could live not seeing her whenever he took a notion to. For her part, Mollie had grace and good sense enough to accept what she couldn’t prevent. She knew she would lose him if she stood in his path as an obstacle. Jarom believed she’d convinced herself that going was the only way he could prove himself to her.

  All that was left to do was seek out the recruiter and take the irrevocable step. About that time, Patterson reminded him that his father had chosen a military name for him, for his unused first name, often presented simply as M., was Marcellus, “one devoted to Ares, the Greek god of war whom the Romans called Mars.” According to Patterson, it derived from the Roman general Marcellus, whose specialty was cavalry tactics.

  DONELSON

  Early in September 1861, within a month of Jarom’s enlistment, General Simon Bolivar Buckner had taken command of the troops at Camp Burnett near Clarksville in Tennessee and appointed Major Rice E. Graves to form an artillery unit. At the time Jarom and Patterson were assigned to an infantry company under a Captain Ingram. The central command soon transferred his company to the light artillery. All accompanied General Buckner to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where they helped build an earthenworks fort as part of the chain of defenses designed to protect western Tennessee. A few days after they arrived, the general issued an order for the locks at Rochester on the Green River to be blown up. Major Graves, formerly a cadet at West Point and a native of nearby Owensboro, selected Jarom and Patterson as part of the demolition squad. At Rochester Jarom won his first commendation when he made a suggestion about where to place the powder charge used to blow up the locks. On the strength of this showing, Major Graves gave Jarom several special assignments, some of them taking him and Patterson behind enemy lines in the counties to the north.

  During that winter Jarom and Patterson temporarily separated when Graves sent Jarom to Nelson and Marion counties as a spy. Patterson told him that being chosen did him honor because commanders as a rule selected only their shrewdest and most reliable men for such duties.

  When not away on special assignments, Jarom worked with Patterson and his messmates building and strengthening the fort, an undertaking central to the Confederate plan of defense. For weeks he and Patterson dug trenches, heaping dirt in earthworks until Buckner ordered the army to Fort Donelson when it became clear that Union general Ulysses S. Grant planned to attack there. The defenses weren’t complete when word came that Grant had deployed the advance of his army.

  The sky to which Jarom opened his eyes shone dull as one of the pewter dishes leaning upright on Aunt Mary Tibbs’s mantel back in Logan County. The light pried through cracks in the dugout’s wattles and laid bands along the opposite wall where he could hear Patterson’s breath coming steady and untroubled. The weather had turned bitter cold. Though unseasonably warm air had blown up from the Gulf for three days in cruel mimicry of spring, overnight the temperature dropped to the teens, and the rain that fell during the night turned to sleet. Jarom felt the arctic bite on his skin as he propped himself on one elbow and watched the wispy threads of Patterson’s breath. Outside he could hear the first rustlings of the camp: low voices, a ding of metal, and the whickering of an artillery horse hobbled somewhere behind their battery. Farther off came the cawing of a crow in one of the barren cornfields west of their positions where thousands of men rose from their pallets of straw as a wedge of morning light cracked the ridge and began to eat at the shadows.

  An unfamiliar sound like a mechanical churn, a chaffing of driven metal that came from below in regular measures, brought Jarom to clarity. Its mechanical regularity reminded him of something he might hear in a millworks. Tying his stiff brogans, he stepped outside to the parapet, from which he could look down on the Cumberland. Timbered bluffs cut to the nearly invisible river, which gouge
d a wound in the landscape like a view of the Alps he’d seen in a book of travels. Hung with swatches of fog, the river bent and narrowed until sucked into the folds of west Tennessee. Two inches of snow had fallen, and dark bristles of trees poked out of slopes otherwise flawlessly white. A grainy pall hung over the valley, a wintry haze the texture of dirty wool. Already, the snow under his feet loosened to slush.

  Patterson came out wrapped in a blanket, clapping his arms to shake off the cold. Jarom watched him turn his attention as someone farther down the line shouted, “Ironclads, ironclads!”

  Through the haze at the bend of the river Jarom could make out what appeared to be a shallow barge surmounted by a sardine tin. The sides of the tin slanted inward, giving it the shape of a capless pyramid. As it huffed into view, he saw hatched portals along one side from which little sticks protruded. Atop the tin, two dark stems spouted black billows of coal smoke. At the bow he made out a pin-size pole from which hung a fluttering rag.

  They watched what Patterson described an “ugly contrivance” make progress against the current until it swelled to the size of a thumbnail. Jarom immediately thought of their unfinished defenses. Trees had been cut down along both sides of the river and towed to a point about nine hundred yards below the water batteries. Anchors and iron weights were chained to their roots and lower trunks to form a kind of submerged forest. But recent rains had so raised the river that their tangled limbs offered no threat to any boat whose draft was sufficiently shallow. When the boat approached within a quarter mile, its three bow guns rattled the silence, spitting flames and little collars of smoke. Two of the shots bounced harmlessly off the hillside above one of the water batteries. A third fell into the river fifty or sixty yards offshore. Where it hit, the brown surface puckered and swelled, spewing a geyser of white into the air.