Authors: Ann Rinaldi
T
HE 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."
S
ETH 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 likeâ," he said, and then he had to start again, "âit'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.
"
Bloody Bill" Anderson:
During the winter of 1863â1864, 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."
O
N
M
AY
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.
There, doctors examined him and said his back was broken. He was put in the military prison's infirmary. As he lay dying, Quantrill was converted to Catholicism and given the last rites by a Catholic priest. He made arrangements that all his money be given to Kate King, his wife. He remained in a good mood to the end.
Legend has it that four women came to see him as he lay dying. One shed bitter tears as she left.
He died at 4:00
P.M.
on June 6, 1865. He was twenty-seven years old.
A
ND
âwhat I imagine happened to the characters that I made up.
Martha Anderson Bradshaw:
After the war when Confederate soldiers were on the roads, some wounded,
some lost, all trying to find their way home, she cared for them. She fed them, clothed them, and nursed them if necessary. Since President Abraham Lincoln had emancipated the slaves in January 1863, she and Seth had kept theirs on and paid them wages. All stayed, including Maxine, who still just about ran the place.
Martha had a second baby boy on June 9, 1865, two months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the North and the war ended. They named him William Clarke, after Quantrill. In the years that followed, she and Seth had four children, three boys and one girl, whom they named Sue Mundy Bradshaw. Juliet was her godmother. They raised their children successfully in the log cabin version of the house in the holler and remained a contented happy family and pillars of the community. Martha accompanied Seth to all the reunions of the Quantrill Raiders.
Seth Bradshaw:
Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865. The war was over, although in the West many did not know it for weeks and weeks. On May 11, Seth led his men to a place a mile and a half outside Lexington, Missouri. At
1
:00
P.M.
he sent a messenger into town under a flag of truce to offer the surrender of his band. A colonel went
to meet them. Seth had forty-eight men and they marched, on horseback, into town to the provost marshal's office, where they were ordered to dismount and turn over their arms. Then they took an oath of allegiance to the United States and all were permitted to go homeâall but Seth. He was given the job of helping the military bring in the rest of the guerrillas. He took it to make up for the men he had killed in the war, going home occasionally to make sure his family was all right. By the end of May he had brought in two hundred to surrender. The last group he brought in surrendered on July 26, 1865. One guerrilla who never surrendered or took the oath was Jesse James.
Seth then went home to his family for good. Slavery had ended in Missouri by early 1865, by state enactments, and he had to hire some workers for the slaves who eventually left and check on the ones he had already hired. He had to see to his new baby and wife and his little sister, his crops, and the horses he had taken to raising.