by Ann Rinaldi
"Well." He yawned. "Long as nobody's been shot, I suppose you three women can handle it. Maxine? Can I have some breakfast?"
"She might need stitches," Martha said to me.
"My ma taught me to stitch when I was five. Didn't I make shirts for Seth? We'll be all right, Martha. Please let me do this!"
She agreed and left. I stripped off the top of Sue Mundy's dress.
"You don't go ripping off anything below the waist now, you precious little girl, you. And don't let anybody else in here."
"Do I look like I am?"
"And don't sass me. You're an impudent little thing. Don't know why that brother of yours don't put a stop to it."
A knock came on the door. "Here, cover yourself up," I told her.
Maxine came in with a basin of water, cloths, and liquor.
"No vinegar?" I asked. "And what'd you do with Heffinger?"
"Gave him enough ham and eggs and fish and coffee to feed his whole army. That's what that man needs. It'll keep him busy all morning. What this gal needs is rum to dull the senses. Liquor to wash the wound. You ever done this before?"
"No."
"I have."
Silence. "Whatever you got goin' here," Maxine told us, "you kin swear me to secrecy. Seth always did. I kept more secrets for that brother of yours."
Sue Mundy and I exchanged glances. "Ail right," Sue said, "but only you. Not Martha. Only get her in trouble. Seth knows, but he's not here."
Sue told her. Maxine made low noises in her throat. "Thought I done heard everything," she said. "Thought I done seen everything by half. Still doan know that I believe it."
Sue Mundy took the sheet that I had covered her with off her upper body to display the chest of a healthy midtwenties man. "Name's Jerome Clark, ma'am," he said to Maxine.
Maxine kept a straight face. "Ain't proper a young girl seein' such. But with a war on I suppose the lines are blurred."
"The Yankees can't know, Maxine," I told her, "or they'll kill him. They love him as a girl. And as a girl she's accepted as a Yankee spy. As a man they'll hang him. And all of us, too."
Maxine nodded. "Why doan you go in the kitchen and get yourself a nice cup of tea, while I stitch this up and put some laudanum on it."
Strangely, I welcomed the idea. But I was no sooner in the kitchen, getting a container of tea out of the pantry, when Heffinger came out of the dining room, patting his stomach and belching. "'Scuse me, that was some breakfast, Maxine. Did I hear something about the Yankees hanging somebody?"
He did not see me in the pantry. He went right into Sue Mundy's room, which was off the kitchen.
"What in purple hell?"
He stood stock-still, as I saw him from the back, staring at Sue Mundy, laid out on her bed, and Maxine wrapping up the arm. Sun flooded in the kitchen windows, like God's blessing, trying to filter out the wrongness of the scene but succeeding only in planting it firmly in my mind forever.
"Who in hell are you, masquerading as Sue Mundy?" he demanded. "What's this all about?" And he drew his revolver. "I left Sue Mundy in this room. Where is she and why in purple tarnation are you wearing a skirt?"
He strode over to the bed and pulled Clark off it by his good arm. "You better come along with me, son."
For an instant I panicked. Then sense flooded my whole being and I knew I couldn't let this happen. The Yankees will hang Clark. And Sue Mundy. And they'll find Seth and hang him, too, and maybe even me and Martha and Maxine, all my family.
I knew what I had to do, and I had to do it now. There was no question about it. That was Sue Mundy's revolver, wasn't it, hanging on a hook beside the hearth, where it always hung when she wasn't practicing. All right, it wasn't a Sharpe's rifle, but I knew enough now about handling and shooting a gun, didn't I? Sweet mother of God, I had to.
Thank you, Bill Anderson, I thought as I grasped the revolver and held it in my hands. It was lighter than I thought it would be, and I held it with both hands to keep it steady and aimed it toward Captain Heffinger, who hadn't even sighted me yet.
He was intent upon bringing Jerome Clark out of the bedroom. "Stop where you are," I ordered. "Let him go."
Heffinger looked up. The surprise on his face turned into laughter. "Put it down, little girl. And when I get time later, I'll spank you."
"I'm serious. I can shoot."
"Oh, so they taught you to shoot, did they? Who taught you? Seth Bradshaw? Then you are the little sister."
"And proud of it. Now release Mr. Clark."
Maxine looked as if she was going to wet her pantalets. She had both hands over her mouth, horrified. I felt horrified. I was looking right at the dark side of my moon now and I knew it. But I was not afraid. There are times you must look at it, stare it down, know what it consists of, know what you are capable of, and face it.
The Yankee laughed and raised his pistol at me and I aimed mine right at him, at his heart.
"You're gonna be sorry, little girl," he said.
At that moment someone shot a gun and the noise in the house was enough to make your ears fall off. I saw the Yank drop his pistol and clutch his chest with both hands, saw his eyes go wide, saw him crumple to the floor in front of Jerome Clark. In the kitchen all around me, crockery fell from the shelves and shattered, glasses broke. I heard the world split in half.
Seth. I turned, expecting to see him standing there behind me.
All I saw was Martha, eyes wide in horror. She held no gun. Nobody held a gun but me. My gun was smoking. I was the one who'd shot the Yank.
He lay crumpled on the floor, blood seeping from his body onto Maxine's clean wood. Can you get bloodstains from wood? I found myself wondering.
A door slammed. Now there was Seth, bounding into the kitchen, his own gun in hand. He took in the scene: Maxine and the half-naked Jerome Clark leaning over the dead Yank, Martha standing there trembling. He sat her down, asked if she was all right. He looked at me, saw the revolver in my hands.
"You shot the damned Yankee?" he asked.
"Yes." Now I was scared. I had done it. Would I be punished?
Gently he took the revolver from my hands and laid it on the table. He lifted my chin so I would look at him, and looked into my eyes. "Maxine," he said, "give my little sister some rum."
She moved, glad to be able to do something. "He was going to take away Jerome Clark," I told Seth. "The Yankees would come and hang you. Hang us all."
He nodded. "Drink the rum," he said, "and stop shaking."
I drank it and watched as he knelt on the floor by the Yankee. "We've got to get him out of here," he said quietly, "bury him, clean this place up."
"I'll help," said Jerome Clark.
"No, you take care of that arm. Maxine, go to the barn and get a detail of men to help."
She left. In a few minutes about six nigras were helping carry Captain Heffinger outside, and another three were cleaning up the mess. Soon Seth had them taking Heffinger's horse aside and getting rid of the saddle and all the tack that indicated it belonged to the United States.
"We'll rebrand him this afternoon," he said.
Chapter Thirty-one
THE HOUSE quieted down in the thin afternoon sun. Everyone went about their business. Martha made a pie. Maxine ironed clothes.
Sue Mundy (for she was in a nightdress again) called me into her bedroom.
"I would speak with you."
"Seth wants to, too."
"Seth can wait. He'll have you all his life."
I went into the bedroom as she ordered, closed the door, and brought a chair up to her bed. She was made up to be a woman in case the Yankees came 'round, and it never ceased to amaze me how she succeeded at this.
"Child, you saved my life. He was about to take me away. They wouldn't have bothered with a trial. They'd have hanged me as a traitor."
"But you're not a Yankee," I pushed.
"They think I'm a double agent." That was all. They think. She refused to explain any further and I did not ask
.
"So I am beholden to you. You saved my life," she said again.
"You saved mine. Twice!" I said. "It was the least I could do."
"But you shot a Yankee! A little girl like you. And likely you saved all of them in this house, your brother included. Did you ever think of that?"
I nodded my head yes.
"Juliet, listen to me. I'm going to get better. If I take some laudanum, the arm doesn't bother me. I've got to get back to my work. I'll probably leave here within a day or so. I'll likely be back this spring, but the war will start to move forward fast now. The South talks victory, but reality is the word of the day. People are talking about how the South is to be welcomed back into the Union. All they talk about in the North is the abolition of slavery and the expansion to the west."
"How do you know?"
"I have contacts. Darling girl, one of these days it will be over. Your brother will be given a pardon and you'll get back to your lives. You may never see me again, so I wanted to tell you how much I think of you. How plucky I think you are. And I wanted to tell you always to remember these days and never to blame yourself for shooting that Yankee. It was something that had to be done to save many lives. And you did it. And someday you can tell your grandchildren about it. So don't be sad. I know it hurts now, but it will go away. Just be proud. And oh, one more thing. Be good to that brother of yours. He's trying to do right by you. And he's a sweetheart. Remember, I said so."
She kissed me then, on the side of the face. And she gave me something. A ring she wore on her right hand. It had a red ruby stone in it. "To remember me by, child," she said. "Now go. Your brother is waiting."
SETH WAS waiting for me in his office, going over his account books. He looked up when I came in.
"I'm sorry I kept you waiting," I said, "but I had to say good-bye to Sue Mundy."
"You mean Lieutenant Flowers, don't you?"
"No." I stood in front of his desk, looking down at him. "I mean Sue Mundy. She says she's leaving in a day or so."
He understood. He nodded his head and didn't press the matter. He pushed his chair back, looked at me, and gestured that I should sit. I did. "I think it's good that you should put whatever meaning on all of this that you want if it helps you get through," he said.
"I'm not lying to myself, Seth. It's just that, to me, she'll always be Sue Mundy."
He nodded again. I know he was waiting for me to bring up the Yankee I'd killed. I leaned back in the chair. "Did you bury the Yankee?"
"Yes."
"I don't want to know where."
"You don't have to."
"That's what you can really call `cleaning up after a mess I made,' isn't it?"
"You did what had to be done, Juliet. He'd have arrested your Sue Mundy, Martha, you, me, and god knows who else. They'd have come and fired the house. And it would have been back to step one all over again."
"So you're not angry at me?"
"Honey, how could I be? I'm not happy that you had to shoot him, no. I'm far from happy that my little sister had to be the one to pick up a gun and end a life in order to save the rest of us. It just shows what an all-out messed-up world we're living in. At your age, all you should be worried about is clothes and boys and reading Moll Flanders."
He was right. How far had I come that I didn't recognize this truth? That I didn't rebel against it?
"The best part of your life," he said, "is being wasted in war. Your father being shot, your house being burned, you spending time in jail, then nearly being killed when it collapses, losing your friends who were killed, a man you trusted kidnapping you, having to give away your mother's pearls in order to get a cow that gives milk, Yankees occupying this house, having your pets shot, and now having to shoot somebody. Juliet, I'm sorry, honey, for what we grown-ups robbed from you. And if I could restore it to you, I would."
"It's not your fault, Seth."
"And now this business this morning. You having to make a split-second decision whether or not to shoot a man or let him prosecute and possibly kill us all. How are you holding up, Juliet? Last I saw you in the kitchen, you were shaking like a bird in a cat's paws."
I shrugged. "How am I supposed to be, Seth?"
He hesitated. He looked down at his account books. "It's like—," he said, and then he had to start again, "—it's like these books I keep. There're two columns, profit and loss. You enter the killing and then you enter what profit it did to people and then you enter the loss. Lots of times you don't think there's any profit. But that's only because it's too big a thing to fit in the profit column. Understand?"
I said yes.
"You live with it, sleep with it, eat with it, and walk with it every minute of your life for quite a while, Juliet. And then one day you find you aren't eating with it anymore and you think it's disappearing, but then it comes back just when you sit down to a good meal of steak and eggs."
"Seth, can I ask a question?"
"Sure."
"How many men have you killed?"
He hesitated only a minute. He meditated. "I've never told anybody this," he said softly. "I'm not like Bill Anderson who had to make notches in a ribbon to show everybody how many he killed. I've got the notches inside."
He bit his lower lip, then continued. "You tell nobody this. You hear?"
I said I heard.
"Thirty-seven."
I couldn't swallow for a minute. Thirty-seven!
"Except for five in Lawrence, Kansas, all were going to kill me. I'm not proud of Lawrence, Kansas."
We were silent for a while. "Honey," he said, "you have an advantage. You're a girl. You can cry."
That tore into me when he said that. I didn't know what to do, so I got up and went around the desk and put my arms around his shoulders and hugged him. I kissed the top of his head, as if I were the older.
"I'm going to rescind your punishment," he said. "You no longer have to milk the cow."
"I don't mind, Seth."
"But I do. Martha told me how Bill came into the barn that morning and you were alone there. I never thought about that danger. I was foolish. So beginning tomorrow you can sleep as late as you want. You've served your time."
He looked up at me. "If this business about the shooting gets too much for you, come to me. Anytime. And do me a favor, will you?"
"Yes."
"Don't grow up too fast. I need somebody to teach, somebody to bawl out once in a while, somebody to look at me just the way you're looking at me now and who doesn't see how scared I am most of the time. I have to say, the look is even better than the ones you were giving Sue Mundy."
"You were jealous."
"Course I was."
I thought, If he's scared, then how can I hope not to be?
But I knew. I'd be all right, scared or not, as long as I did as well as him.
* * *
What Happened Next
"Bloody Bill" Anderson: During the winter of 1863–1864, Bill Anderson took twenty of Quantrill's men and left Quantrill's command. He went to join Brigadier General Henry E. McCulloch at his headquarters at Bonham, Texas. Anderson usurped Quantrill's place as commander and continued with his raids and atrocities. In late October 1864, in Kansas, he and his men were burning houses, barns, crops, and murdering male citizens when he and a man named Rains charged through a militia line. Anderson sustained two bullets in his head and fell from his horse, dead.
His body was searched. Found was a "likeness" (photo) of himself and wife, Bush Smith, a lock of her hair, and letters she had sent him from Texas; orders from General Price; six hundred dollars in gold and greenbacks; six revolvers; a gold watch; a Confederate flag; and, lastly, a buckskin pouch containing a silk ribbon with fifty-three knots in it, one for each man he had killed in vengeance for his sisters.
Sue Mundy (Marcellus Jerome Clark): On March 3, 1865, Sue Mundy, Henry Magruder, and Sam Jones were holed up in a mud-chinked tobacco barn on the Cox place, forty miles southwest of Louisville, Kentucky.
A retired federal infantry major by the name of Cyrus J. Wilson and fifty soldiers of Company B, Thirtieth Wisconsin Infantry, were dispatched and soon surrounded the barn. They threw rocks against the door. Sue Mundy blasted away and wounded four of them before they managed to arrest her and her two companions.
They were all taken by river steamer to Louisville, Kentucky, where Sue Mundy (Jerome Clark) stood trial, which was not a very fair court-martial, and she was hanged on March 15, 1865. An enormous crowd gathered as the gallows was built, and before the hanging Sue Mundy said, "I am a regular Confederate soldier and have served in the Confederate army for four years. I hope in, and die for, the Confederate cause."
ON MAY 10, 1865, William Clarke Quantrill, with twenty-one men, was riding down a road that led to the Wakefield Farm five miles south of Taylorsville, Kentucky. It was raining, so they took refuge in the barn and carriage house. Quantrill and some of his men climbed into the hayloft to sleep. The others played cards.
Out back, over the hill, came twenty-year-old Captain Edwin Terrell of the Secret Service, who had orders from the military commander of Kentucky to kill or capture Quantrill.
A fight ensued. Quantrill was riding a borrowed horse, since his "Old Charley," who had seen him through the whole war, had pulled a hamstring. The horse he now had was not accustomed to the sound of battle or gunfire, and so became frightened and reared, and he could not control it. The animal was shot in the hip. A bullet struck Quantrill in the back of his left shoulder blade and lodged in his spine. He fell into the mud. He was paralyzed below the shoulders. His own men tried to save him but were killed. Men from the Secret Service rolled him in a blanket and carried him into the house. He lied, saying he was Captain Clarke of the Fourth Missouri Confederate Cavalry. Then he asked to be allowed to stay on the farm to die. Terrell said yes, then rode off to try to find Quantrill.
The next morning, having learned who his prisoner really was, Terrell returned with a Conestoga wagon. He threw straw and pillows in the back and put Quantrill on top of it and headed for Louisville.
