The Unquiet Grave: A Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “That must have been some battle.”

  “Well, no, he said it wasn’t a battle at all. The bridge defenders just turned tail and ran without firing a shot, so Rucker’s party had a clear field to burn the bridge at their leisure.”

  “I wonder his neighbors didn’t hang him.”

  “They’d have given worlds for the privilege, I understand, but he spirited his family away in a confiscated carriage and dug in on his plantation near Summersville, where the nearby Federal forces afforded them protection.”

  “And there he lived quietly until the end of the war?”

  Gardner laughed. “Rucker? Why, trouble was meat and potatoes to him. He was more likely to seek it out than to shrink from it. Two months after the bridge burning, he got an invitation to go to a place in Shenandoah County to meet with General Frémont. He must have thought that another chance for mischief like the Cowpasture caper was on offer, because he hurried on over to Summersville to report to a Lieutenant Colonel Starr, who had recently replaced his buddy Crook as commander of the forces in that area. Starr was supposed to provide a safe escort to get Rucker over to Mount Jackson, where the general had his headquarters. He got there about dusk. Starr had taken up residence in a fine house in Summersville—confiscated, of course. Since the colonel had already arranged a birthday celebration for himself, they decided to delay their departure to Mount Jackson until the following morning. They also delayed their retiring for the night until the wee hours of the morning, because the drinking and story swapping went on quite late. Just about dawn, when they had finally settled down to sleep off the effects of the festivities, they were rousted out of bed by a band of Rebel cavalry, who arrested the whole boiling of them—including Colonel Starr and Dr. Rucker.”

  Dr. Boozer chuckled. “Boy, that must have been some hangover.”

  “I have no doubt that it was.”

  “Well, if you hadn’t told me that you read law under him in the 1890s, I would have hazarded a guess about how this story ended.”

  “Oh, it’s a daisy of a tale, and part of it stretches all the way to the 1890s, so hear me out.”

  Dr. Boozer glanced at his watch and waved for him to proceed. “It’s late, but I’d still like to hear it. All I have waiting for me in my cramped little room is a new medical journal.”

  “And I’d just as soon wait until the nightly serenade of my fellow patients subsides before I retire.”

  “Anyhow, it’ll be a couple of weeks before we can talk again. I worked over Christmas and New Year’s, so they’re letting me take my time off next week.”

  “Are you going home?”

  “Back to New York? Yes, indeed. There’s a new play on Broadway, and an old college buddy and I are going to see it—unless I can find a date. The Green Pastures. Bible stories dramatized as folktales, with an all-colored cast. Yessir, I am anxious to see that. Wouldn’t miss it.”

  Mr. Gardner frowned. “Never heard of it. Who wrote it?”

  “A white man named Connelly. Some people don’t like the way he plays fast and loose with our spiritual beliefs, but it sure is giving a lot of our acting folks a chance to work. It opened back in February with Richard B. Harrison in the starring role—playing God. I’m an admirer of his. That’s one good thing about living close to the city. Getting to hear all the latest music and see the new plays.”

  Mr. Gardner sniffed. “I’m surprised you want to hear my little backwater tales about Greenbrier County.”

  “But yours are true stories. Not even the best theatre can hold a candle to real life.”

  “Besides, talking to me is your job, right, Doctor? In case I let something slip about what ails me? Well, never mind. Now where was I? Oh, yes, the raid on Summersville. The Confederate troops, the 14th Virginia Cavalry, to be exact . . .”

  “How in the world do you remember that?”

  “Because most of them were from Greenbrier County, and they were mighty prone to telling war stories in later years.”

  “I’m sure they were. These days it’s stories of the Great War that I mostly hear. Go on.”

  “The cavalry was guided to Starr’s roost by a Rebel spy named Nancy Hart.”

  Boozer grinned. “—who was young and beautiful and in love with Dr. Rucker.”

  Mr. Gardner sighed and shook his head. “You watch too many movies, Doctor. I saw the lady nearly thirty years later, and even allowing for the passage of time, I cannot believe her ever to have been beautiful. She had sallow skin, gooseberry eyes, and teeth too big for her mouth, as I recall. I don’t say that Rucker was a saint, but judging by their wartime behavior, neither she nor my mentor felt anything except a mutual desire to annihilate one another. But the story is remarkable, nonetheless. As an aside, I should note that this might give you an idea how muddled things were in that war. Nancy Hart was a staunch Confederate sympathizer, but she and all her family were opposed to slavery. You recall that the rabidly pro-Union Dr. Rucker owned a goodly number of slaves.”

  Boozer grinned. “As a psychiatrist, I’d offer them a two-for-one deal for treatment.”

  “Oh, they both thought they were sane—and in the service of the Lord Almighty himself.” He sighed. “I suppose that doesn’t differentiate them from anybody locked up in here at that. But I reckon a lot of folks back then were crazy in one way or another, so those two hardly stood out from the crowd.”

  “Did they know each another?”

  “Miss Hart and Dr. Rucker? I don’t believe they did, but she knew Colonel Starr right enough because he had captured her two weeks before that raid took place.”

  Boozer laughed. “Sounds like he made a hash of it if she was able to capture him back.”

  “I think it helped that she was young, and apparently passably attractive to lonely soldiers. She had been put in the town jail, but after a few days, they moved her to the attic of a nearby house, which happened to be the one that Colonel Starr had commandeered for his own use when his troops took over the town. I’m sure that Miss Hart made every effort to charm her captors, and they fell for it, giving her books to peruse and allowing her to stroll around the grounds of the house while she chatted with the men on duty. She behaved like a perfect little lamb, I expect.”

  “Why didn’t she try to escape?”

  “She wasn’t reckless, and her captors mistook her prudent behavior for cooperation. It was only later that they realized she had been doing reconnaissance, memorizing all the details of the colonel’s headquarters. She must have been having a fine time. One of the soldiers even arranged for a photographer to take her portrait, and they say he borrowed the colonel’s hat to make her a fetching bonnet for the picture.”

  “And yet, despite all that pampering, she didn’t stay there enjoying Yankee food and hospitality? I’m amazed.”

  Gardner turned solemn. “That’s when the tale ceases to be an amusing idyll. Of course, it all happened sixty-eight years ago, so I don’t suppose it matters so much anymore. They’re all dead by now.”

  “What happened?”

  “After she had won the trust of her captors, most of whom were probably no older than she, Miss Hart invited one of the guards up to her attic room and beguiled him into giving her his weapon—on the pretext that she wanted to compare it to the gun she used to hunt with back home.”

  “And the poor sap fell for that yarn?”

  Gardner nodded. “The male sex has learned nothing since the Garden of Eden, Doctor.”

  “I don’t guess we have. So she held him at gunpoint while she made her escape?”

  “Oh, no. She shot him dead. Then she ran out of the building, stole the colonel’s favorite horse, and rode bareback all the way to Confederate lines—a distance of some thirty or forty miles, I believe.”

  “God Almighty.”

  “Mr. Kipling was correct. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

  “You don’t suppose she was . . . er, defending her virtue when she shot the guard?”

/>   The old man sighed. “You’re almost as much of a romantic fool as those besotted puppy soldiers were. No, I do not think Miss Hart’s virtue—if she possessed any—was in any danger from those uniformed adolescents. The men of that time and place would have made a pet of her, chivalrously thinking themselves defending a pure and helpless female. She had encouraged them to think it. She had a female companion with her, by the way, and the ladies stayed together. So after beguiling them into regarding her as a harmless country lass, she acted the part of a soldier, same as a man would. Maybe they had forgotten that she was an enemy agent, but I’ll warrant she never did.”

  “But you said she came back two weeks later. Surely, she was avenging—”

  “There was always avenging to be done in that war. Decades later people on both sides were still talking of the wrongs they had suffered. I heard and read their accounts until it became like rain on a roof. As for Nancy Hart’s motives: early in the war her sister’s husband, a Confederate sympathizer, had been taken from his home by Union soldiers on the pretext of making him give a speech in town in favor of the Union. He was later discovered, still a good ways from town, shot in the back. I expect that incident hardened Miss Hart’s partisanship considerably.”

  “Yes, if you look at it in that light . . .”

  “And there may have been a dozen other grievances she either saw or endured to fuel her rage against the army. But her actions toward Starr and his soldiers were reasonable. Judging her as a combatant rather than as a delicate female flower, you would conclude that she acted with cool and strategic logic. She availed herself of the opportunity to reconnoiter the enemy’s headquarters, and when she felt she had sufficient information, she escaped and made use of that intelligence. It was Dr. Rucker’s bad luck to be caught up in her reprisal. They must have been delighted to get him. There could hardly have been a more hated man in the area.”

  “Did he put up a fight when they tried to capture him?”

  “No. He tried to outsmart them. Well, some say he hid first. But a soldier noticed his boots sticking out from under the bed, and they hauled him out. Then he claimed to be a Confederate sympathizer, and offered to show them spoils they could take, and suggested that they burn down the house since it was a Union hole.”

  “I thought they had confiscated the house from a local citizen.”

  “They had. I suppose these finer points of ownership become obscured in matters of war. Anyhow, his ruse came to naught. The soldiers herded all their captives out into the street, and one among them immediately recognized Dr. Rucker, which ended his pretense of being an innocent bystander. They knew he wasn’t that, but they had some trouble deciding what he actually was—prisoner of war or captured spy. The rest of the captives got sent to prisons around Richmond, and the Union got them out on prisoner exchanges a few weeks later, but Dr. Rucker was another matter. They kept him in irons and moved him around here and there, to places you’ll have never heard of, Doctor: Salt Sulphur Springs, Christiansburg, then Lynchburg for a while. He told me that people came to see him there as if he were a zoo animal, which outraged him mightily. Then he was sent to Richmond, too, to Castle Thunder prison.”

  “That sounds like something out of a novel by Dumas.”

  “It was just a converted brick tobacco warehouse, but it held deserters, spies, and political prisoners for most of the war. From the little Rucker ever said about it, I gather that it was a hellish place to be shut up in, but he wasn’t there for long.”

  “So his Union comrades got him out?”

  “No, the Confederates kept moving him. He must have seen the inside of more prisons than a professional burglar. But the Federals did keep trying to effect his release. Six ways from Sunday they tried to put together a deal to exchange medical prisoners that would include him, but they did not succeed. The first thing they did—to prevent him from mysteriously dying in captivity—was to take four hostages in Lewisburg as insurance for his safety. Colonel Crook—Rucker’s bridge-burning associate—let it be known that if anything happened to Dr. Rucker, the hostages would be hanged. That move did nothing to endear him to Greenbrier County, I assure you.”

  “Were they hanged? No, wait—Dr. Rucker lived through the war, so I suppose not. But you said that he moved to Lewisburg after the war. That must have made for some awkward moments on occasion.”

  “I expect it did, but I never knew Dr. Rucker to care very much about what was awkward and what wasn’t.”

  “When did he get out of prison? Didn’t you say that they got Starr and the soldiers back from the Confederates in a matter of weeks?”

  “They did, but nobody cared much about them. That was just wartime business as usual. Rucker was a different matter altogether. He was local, and the animosity toward him was entirely personal. In fact, he said there was a catfight among authorities over the privilege of trying him. The provost marshal of his home county claimed the right to indict him for treason, and the governor of Virginia thought that the Commonwealth ought to have that honor. I suppose the Confederate government itself might have tried him if they had cared to. In the end, they referred the matter to Jefferson Davis, and the Confederate government agreed to let Virginia try him on three counts: treason, murder, and horse-stealing. All of which he denied. He claimed he hadn’t joined the Union army, hadn’t stolen anything, and didn’t burn the Cowpasture bridge.”

  “But he did burn it, didn’t he?”

  “Well, somebody did, and he was one of the party that day. Whether or not you could hold him responsible for the actions of an occupying army is a question for lawyers to wrangle over in court.”

  “A sly old fox, then, equivocating. But what did you think of him personally, Mr. Gardner?”

  “That’s like asking what I think of the weather, Doctor. It all depends. It all depends.”

  “How so?”

  “Dr. Rucker was nice enough to me, according to his lights. I might not have made a lawyer if he hadn’t taken me on. There’s many a white man who wouldn’t have done it then and now, but it doesn’t do to look too closely to certain aspects of the old rascal’s life or to speculate on his motives.”

  “You mean, like burning bridges and stabbing people in street brawls?”

  Gardner rubbed his chin while he considered the matter. “I don’t know that I was thinking precisely of those particular examples. The war years were tumultuous times, and desperate people did things they might not otherwise have done. What troubles me most is something that happened shortly after he went to prison—but on his orders, I have no doubt.”

  “What was that?”

  “Well, after the Confederates locked him up, Mrs. Rucker might have been worried about having enough money to live on while he was away, or maybe she figured she couldn’t manage all his various properties and enterprises on her own. Anyhow, she and the children decided to light out for Union territory—Ohio—where, presumably, they would have fewer enemies.” Mr. Gardner paused for a moment and stared out the window toward the cliffs of the Ohio border, only a mile away, but invisible in the darkness.

  “Mrs. Rucker sold the tavern in Covington, the plantation near Summersville, various bits and pieces of real estate—and she sold their slaves.”

  Dr. Boozer stared. “She sold— But he was a Union sympathizer. You said he helped the Union soldiers burn the bridge. And she was headed for Ohio? Union territory.”

  “That’s right. All the more reason.”

  “When was this again?”

  “Fall of 1862.”

  “So . . . wait . . . Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation at the first of the year in 1863. Surely people knew it was coming. And two months before the president would set those people free, the Ruckers sold them?”

  Gardner nodded. “I told you: the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the Confederacy, so in West Virginia, it did not apply.”

  “But surely . . . morally . . .”

  “I guess Rucker was a shre
wd businessman first and a patriot second. His wife was going to Ohio, and if she took the slaves with her, she would have had to free them. He probably reasoned that he stood to lose thousands of dollars if he still had his money tied up in human stock when his wife relocated to Union territory. So he liquidated his assets.”

  James Boozer was pacing now. He patted his pockets for cigarettes, but found none. He turned to look at the old man in the chair by the window, pointing, as if he’d caught him in a lie. “But that man claimed to be loyal to the Union. Surely he recognized Lincoln’s general intent . . . Surely he’d feel honor-bound to conform to the moral tenets of the country he chose to support. After all, he had a choice, and he chose the Union over the Confederacy, even when, geographically, it would have been more convenient and less dangerous to do the opposite. So why—?”

  Gardner laughed. “Well, Boozer, you’re the psychiatrist, aren’t you? Isn’t it your job to figure out why people do things?”

  Boozer sighed. “Most people behave more consistently—I’d even say more logically—than your former mentor. It’s hard to figure out where a loose cannon is going to roll. But morally, Dr. Rucker seems to be all over the place. He sells slaves, knowing that the side he favors opposes slavery, and then he takes you on as an apprentice, or whatever it is they call a lawyer-in-training.”

  Gardner motioned the doctor back to the other chair. “Yes, but remember that more than a quarter of a century elapsed between those two incidents. The one consistency that I can see is that Dr. Rucker was first and foremost a keen businessman. It made financial sense to sell those people while he could be sure of recouping his investment, and it made sense for him to take me on as an attorney, because I’d work harder and for less money than a white lawyer would.” His smile was grim. “With malice toward none, Doctor. It was just business. In both instances he got his money’s worth.”