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 gouged 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.
Though he’d never seen an ironclad, Jarom had heard stories of those who had escaped the surrender at Fort Henry on the Tennessee. Rumor had it that General Tilghman gave up because he believed such boats unsinkable. Instead of piercing their thick armor, shells ricocheted off the canted sides. Jarom knew how pitifully weak their own defenses were. For three days and two nights they had dug rifle pits but had completed only a third when they sighted the first bluecoats.
He also knew that General Buckner had met all night with his senior generals, Pillow and Floyd, to decide how their combined force of fifteen thousand men should be deployed. He himself saw Donelson not so much as a fortress as a crimp in the landscape with a few advantages, namely, a high bluff commanding a view of the Cumberland River. The earthenwork fort, enclosing about fifteen acres, had only three pieces, an eight-inch siege howitzer and two nine-pounders, most of the artillery being concentrated in the shore batteries at the base of the hill so as to sweep the river at the waterline. Generals Pillow and Bushrod Johnson deployed to protect their rear between Indian Creek and the landing near a little cluster of buildings named Dover. General Buckner’s line, including Graves’s battery, formed just to the rear of the fort overlooking a maze of gullies and a swamp between Indian and Hickman creeks.
As the contraption advanced into the cleft shadow of the ridge, it came within range of the nearest batteries, yet there had been no return fire. Emboldened, the ironclad moved still closer, firing a cannonade of seven loads, none of them doing any visible damage to the emplacements on shore. Their concussions clapped against Jarom’s ears and formed a protracted drone that buried itself finally in the immensity of the woods. To the ironclad’s crew, peering through gunports and slits in the metal, the fortifications must have seemed deserted. Five minutes after the tenth shot, the boat submitted to the current and drifted downstream out of sight.
“I can tell you what they’re up to,” Patterson said. “They’re trying to draw our fire.”
With his camp knife Jarom was splitting the last of a pone of cornbread that had been their chief sustenance for three days.
“They want to home in on where our emplacements are,” Patterson said, “but Buckner’s too smart to be taken in. He’s held off firing so as not to give away the placement of our guns.”
By two that afternoon the gunboats were back, and this time Jarom counted four ironclads and two armored gunboats as they rounded the bend. The fog had lifted, affording a clear view of the ridges. From nearly a half mile away they began to shell the bluffs, probing the slopes in calculated grids in the manner of bird dogs canvassing sections of a field to scare up quail.
But this time when the boats steamed to within four hundred yards, the gunners in the lower batteries loosed their first salvo, firing low across the pewter-smooth surface of the water. Jarom could feel the tremors under his feet. Graves ordered them to their guns and Jarom looked down on the gunboats. Because the waters of the river had risen so high, the lower batteries had the advantage of firing even lower across the water. The shells kissing across the surface reminded him of skipping stones across the farm pond but for their force of impact, which resembled a huge hammer. For about ten minutes, the parties traded salvos.
At one point Jarom saw a shell splinter a flagstaff above one of the emplacements. A stick man in gray dashed from behind the embrasure to fetch the flag. Ignoring the storm that broke above his head, he trotted back to the breastworks and hopped over. In a few moments he was back, clambering over with the flag on a new staff. After planting it firmly, he jogged almost casually back to safety. Still watching, Jarom then saw the Stars and Stripes shot away from between the twin stacks of one of the gunboats. Another stick man, blue this time, ran onto the deck to refasten it.
Jarom had never witnessed such an extravagant display. He had an image of a son of one of the stick men asking his mother how his father came to die in the Great War of the Rebellion. “Planting a rag on a stick in the earth,” the widow might truthfully say. After mess Jarom shared an account of this absurdity with Patterson. His senior thought a minute. “Whatever we lack in food,” he said, “in shoes, in bullets, cooks, and quartermasters, numbskull generals on whatever side always manage to supply more than enough ignorance to go round.”
About midafteroon the gunboats announced their return with more firing. The racket of their guns hurt Jarom’s ears, the blasts drowning out the gunnery officers who shouted their puny commands. Shells smacked the armor of the ironclads with loud whangs, the raw sound a blacksmith’s hammer makes against a naked anvil. Though he and the rest of the crew stood safely above the main fighting, Jarom fought the impulse to cover his head with his hands and hunker in the pit. Major Graves, no more than three years his senior, calmly propped his elbows on the breastworks and watched the spectacle through his glass, studiously making notations in his notebook as though in a classroom. At one point he commented to no one in particular that the closest ironclad, the St. Louis, had taken fifty hits.
Jarom could see that the pilothouse had been wrecked and that its steering seemed disengaged, for it floundered about until the current hauled it back downstream, floating broadside. The Louisville, a floating snuffbox, had also been hit, hanging sullenly for a time before drifting in silence beyond the range of the shore batteries. Standing by what he began to think of as his own cylinder of destruction as it cooled, Jarom cupped his hands along its barrel for warmth, as did his gunmates. That an instrument that served up mechanical death could also nurture and preserve was an idea he puzzled over. Following the others, he stamped his feet to shake off the cold, a practice that Patterson, making light of adversity, dubbed the snow waltz.
For Jarom, this was his first time under fire, the first time he became conscious that others sighted along the barrels of their weapons to loose hot metal at him. They intended to pierce his organs and end his life or seriously impede his ability to live it. From this distance he felt oddly detached, aware of the spectacle though not a part of it, absolved from bloodletting. Viewed from above, the action meant no more to him than a dispute in miniature he’d come on once in the woods, battalions of red and black ants swarming over an earthen mound, tiny formations and remote casualties in a silence that belied what must have been an epic struggle of the insect family. When the nearest ironclad drifted too far for a decent hit, Graves ordered them to withhold their fire. Unharmed, feeling harmless, Jarom awarded himself the honorific title, Inspector of Mayhem. Their would-be slayers, distanced by hillside and limits of sight, took on the appearance of featureless midgets, revealing themselves only in glimpses through wads of smoke.
Jarom and Patterson had enlisted in the Confederate army at Russellville, the seat of Logan County, less than six months previously. Though they did not actually muster in until August, Patterson, ever the historian, reminded Jarom that the enlistment day was Bastille Day, a time when an oppressed people rose to throw off the shackles of an unreasoning monarchy. Louis XVI was a hereditary king, he said, in many ways no worse than Lincoln, who threatened to enchain the people of his own country, a despot to beat all despots.
They were recuited by a Captain Morris from Henderson, an ardent secessionist who, they learned in passing, had clerked in a hardware store before the war. Smartly got up in a knee-length coat with a double row of buttons that tapered down his torso, Morris canvassed towns and villages in the borderland, recruiting dozens of young men from farms and village streets, from churchyards and shops, leading his volunteers to Tennessee as a kind of human harvest. Morris gave them a small travel allowance for the distance of a hundred and five miles to the place of rendezvous at Camp Burnett. Walking and hitching rides on farmers’ wagons for three days, Jarom and Patterson reported for duty on August 25 and mustered into Company B, Fourth Kentucky Infantry, of the First Kentucky Brigade. The date was firmly fixed in Jarom’s memory because it marked his sixteenth birthday. Walking back to camp, Patterson picked up a buckeye under a roadside tree and passed it to him as though conferring a gift.
“The buckeye,” he said solemnly, “is one of the first trees to leaf in spring, the first to lose its leaves in fall. Long as you carry this buckeye in your pocket, it will bring you good luck. My father told me this as his father told him. Keep this in your pocket for luck, as I tell you.”
Charmed and buoyed by the sense that this mystical connection might in some way protect him, Jarom put the shiny sphere in his pocket and kept it as he would a letter from home or the piece of music he kept folded in an oilcloth packet among his belongings.
The music was the score of a ballad named “Lillibulero.” He found it after his father’s death, while rummaging among some receipts and legal-looking documents in the tall desk in which his father had kept his papers. Jarom had been attracted by the musical notes, which looked to him like a procession of tiny banners moving along a straight but rutted roadway. The banners reminded him of his father, resplendent in his militia uniform on muster days. To an eleven-year-old the sheet of music was a memento, a keepsake that brought his father back to him each time he saw it. Above the score was an engraving of three sailing ships cannonading a fort from which puffs of smoke returned the compliment. He didn’t know what the images meant, but the scene brought back the image of his father in his gaudy uniform. For some reason he could not explain, he found the word “Lillibulero” alluring, and he loved to repeat it to himself. Was it a place, a person, a saying, as Patterson had mentioned, in the ancient tongue of the Irish? He included the score among the few personal things he packed to take with him when his father died and Nancy Bradshaw had come to clear up her brother’s affairs and see to his belongings. Since that day he’d carried it in his kit everywhere he went, its mystery a tonic. Its unheard melody carried a sense of excitement and possibility, and he came to associate it not so much with war as with the prospect of open ground and promise of a future.
If he later had to cite reasons for joining the Confederate army, he could not say he’d been seduced by the rhetoric of recruiters like Morris or by the editorial tocsin of the Russellville newspaper to defend Southern honor and self-determination against immigrant hordes and Unionist usurpers. Nor by any desire to defend the institution of slavery. Patriotism was not an answer. Nor had he felt, like Patterson, a lust for adventure that took him away from home. Nor could he say that he enlisted to protect those he loved since they all seemed perfectly able to protect themselves. Except for his older brothers and sisters—all of whom had married and started their own families—the elder generation of his family had pretty much died out. His grandparents on both sides all were dead. No, he joined simply because Patterson had.
Next day the ironclads reappeared, but Buckner had other uses for the Fourth Kentucky. A relatively untried but confident general named Grant had made several attempts to attack their rear, and skirmishing went on until midafternoon. Behind the breastworks, their gun primed but unfired, Jarom and Patterson tried to evaluate the battle by the density and direction of the firing of others. The rifle reports sounded in the distance like a sheet being ripped to pieces a little at a time, little stitches that sometimes heightened to a crescendo. Sometimes, storms of artillery deafened them, walls of timber and a pall of grayness obscuring their view. Fire from the gunboats worked up faintly through the hollows and a bulwark of trees. Jarom imagined the generals, men whose vision was no less limited, trying to get the gist of the fighting. Sightlines, even from the high ground, were obstructed, and sound had a way of deceiving among the gullies and hills that cut the slopes into isolated pockets. An officer ensconced in one of these crevices might not know over the spine of wilderness and rocky divides whether his troops scrapped for survival or had routed their enemies. Patterson gave these distortions the name of “sound shadows.” Feeling isolated, apart from things, neither Jarom nor Patterson could see a single swatch of blue.
Patterson found what comfort he could against the earthen backfill of the emplacement. Jarom was eyeing the thread of river when word arrived that General Buckner had ordered the Fourth Kentucky to secure a patch of scraggly woods above Indian Creek from which enemy skirmishers were firing enfilade across the bottom into the trenches. Colonel Hanson, a burly man on a dappled, low-centered horse, formed his regiment into a battle line and marched down the ravine and up toward the trees from which the firing came. Borrowing some binoculars, Jarom brought the ragged woodline into focus, spotting clusters of cottony smoke from the discharge of muskets and even a few spits of flame.
He watched Hanson dismount within thirty yards of the trees as his line, uneven now and considerably thinned, penetrated the timber. Without pausing, Hanson pushed the still invisible bluecoats deeper into the gray tangle of upright limbs. For a moment he remained visible as he followed his stick men into the woods, which seemed to suck them into a maw of wilderness from which they would return transformed, if they returned at all. As he scanned the bands of smoke that hung across the treeline, he could reckon the battle’s changing locus by sound until whatever it was that swallowed the men lapsed into near silence. A few pitiful stragglers staggered downhill as if in a swoon, many of them hobbling from wounds. Jarom turned to Patterson, who’d been watching too but without benefit of magnification.
“It’s the one who stays out of it,” he said, “that sees the most of a fight.”
Seeing the wounded and imagining the dead who must be piling up in the shelter of the woods, Jarom understood Patterson’s irony.
Then word came back to the ridge that Hanson and his men had lost their way, that somewhere during the intensity of firing they’d lost their bearings and were now in danger of being captured or annihilated in the darkness. Rice Graves, first to sense the danger, had asked the dozen or so men about him if anyone would volunteer to act as a runner to find Hanson and guide his men back to their lines. Jarom glanced at Patterson, who was signaling with his eyes not to go, but Jarom stepped forward and said he would try.
“There’s a good boy,” Graves said, not much more than a boy himself.
Stripping off his heavy jacket and emptying his pockets, Jarom felt a quickening and simultaneously a sinking somewhere in the hollows of his chest, a feeling he remembered from the time when at nine or ten he’d thrown his leg over a balky horse, knowing he couldn’t control it. To throw him, it veered suddenly into the orchard, dragging him through a scourge of low-lying limbs that raked across his back and gouged his face as he hugged the saddleless horse about the neck. Someone working in the barn had spied him and managed to drive the frenzied horse into a fence corner, grabbing the bridle and pulling him off to safety. That feeling of crashing through the stubby gauntlet of apple limbs he felt now, a sensation that constricted the air in his lungs and fired his body with exhilaration and fear.
As Jarom stooped instinctively to top the parapet, Graves handed him his navy pistol, a heavy affair known for its inaccuracy and tendency to misfire. It offered Jarom more assurance than actual protection in the face of what he knew, and didn’t know, was before him.
And then he was off, climbing over the parapet with the river to his back and starting to descend the bluff on the opposite side. The slope was steep and broken with outcroppings of rock and stumps from the trees felled for the defenses, the footing uncertain. In the failing light the landscape replicated the seared gray he’d seen in daguerreotypes glued in his mother’s family album. The images of trees resembled those in the album, blurred and slightly out of focus, the way he imagined they might look to a nearsighted person who’d lost his glasses. Working his way through the long shadows as the sun dropped over the western ridge, he entered a ravine. Thick with snarls of honeysuckle, dry vines tangled in skeins tore at his feet and made the going slow. In summer he knew it would be a place of serpents, but now it became the domain of snappings and cracks, a place to stumble and fall. Though he saw discarded haversacks and a rifle with a shattered stock, he saw not one of his kind, living or dead, until he crossed to a converging gully that opened onto a wide valley.
Scrabbling over the rocks, he encountered the first corpse he’d ever seen outside a coffin wherein the deceased had been properly fitted out, hands closed in some sanitized posture of repose. The dead man lay sprawled on his back as if napping after a family picnic or resting at noon after scything in a field. His right knee was raised, his right forearm rested across his stomach, his left stretched outward open-palmed, as if to expose itself to some imaginary sun. Death had closed his eyes; briary dark hair formed a wreath about his head. His woolen coat was pulled open midway up the chest, but nowhere could Jarom see the slightest sign of a wound. Though he didn’t recognize the face, he would lay a wager that the dead man, a private soldier, belonged to the Fourth Kentucky.
He moved on, sensing time and light against him now. As he came into the scrubby flatlands, he found more dead strewn like heaps of scattered laundry.
Passing along the base of the ridge, he followed a tricky path between the barely visible ridgeline and the edge of a slough that backed up from the river. Ridges hemmed in the pale and meager sky. He located the fighting by the pop of musketry. As he moved toward it, he expected at any instant to be fired on, maybe by his own troops. The shooting took on patterns of single reports punctuated by explosive sputters that resonated in the hollows. As the light failed, the firing slackened, and someone not twenty feet away rose out of the sedge and challenged him.
Jarom told him his name and unit, uncertain whether the challenger was friend or foe. The boy, shivering in what looked like his mother’s paisley shawl, led him by huddles of men resting along the hard ground. They found Colonel Hanson hunched under a tree talking to two of his surviving officers. He was a low-built man, blocky and muscular as a butcher, his face stubbled and drawn. When Jarom identified himself and said that Major Graves instructed him to lead the colonel back to their lines, Hanson cracked a smile.
He told Jarom he’d become disoriented, that in the excitement of the attack he’d been carried along much farther than he’d planned to go.
“All these hills look pretty damn much alike,” he said, “especially after we’d climbed three of four. First thing we know, we got turned around, and here we are at suppertime not daring to light a fire. We’re scattered all to hell in these woods between this ridge and the next.”
Jarom said he knew the way back.
“But can you guide us in the dark?”
Jarom said that he could, adding that the route they’d follow would keep them mostly shielded from fire.
“But how can we move without firing a torch?”
“We’ll feel our way,” Jarom said, projecting a confidence he wasn’t sure he could keep.
This pacified Colonel Hanson, who passed an order to collect as many of the outliers as they could to quit this place forever. He ordered the men to stick close, each to follow the man ahead of him. He made provision for litters to carry those wounded who couldn’t move by their own power. As much as the terrain permitted, he put out flankers to probe the darkness and prevent an ambush. Jarom leading, they snaked along the slough and by the edge of the woods, then into the ravine back to their lines, feeling their way until the landscape seemed more familiar. At one point Jarom heard enemy pickets and spotted a huge fire along a fringe of woods. Around it they could make out figures seated on the ground, their bodies angling toward warmth. Though these men easily could have been taken or killed, Hanson had no more heart for fighting, and they crept past the fire. Along the way they found six wounded men—four of their own, two of the enemy’s. When they crossed the embrasure into their line again, Graves shook Jarom’s hand and promised to make a full report to General Buckner. At formation the next morning Buckner, a serious man whose long mustaches extended across his face like wings, called Jarom to the head of the ranks and commended him before the company for acts of exemplary valor. Groggy, in his mind still threading his way in the darkness along the slope, Jarom stepped back into the ranks, wanting nothing more than sleep.
From that moment of triumph when Jarom felt he’d earned the respect he craved, things took a turn for the worse. The Fourth Kentucky had lost sixteen men on February 13, but another enemy, the weather, deployed its forces for an assault the next morning. By dark the temperature had dropped to ten degrees, freezing the water in Jarom’s canteen. Water seeping into the rifle pits hardened to ice so that moving even a few feet became a triumph of ingenuity. During the night several of the wounded, including two who had not been lost in the valley after nightfall, froze where they lay. Dozens suffered from frostbite. There was nowhere to send them, neither hospital nor cubicle of warmth in a farmhouse, because Grant, flushed with his victory at Fort Henry, had surrounded their fortification. A chain of ironclads forestalled evacuation along or across the river.
Jarom and Patterson hunkered in their dugout, getting up to fuel the fire and stomping their shoes against the frozen ground to keep their blood circulating. Jarom could feel the cold pry its way through his underclothes, the flannel vest he’d scavenged on the field, his woolen jacket, the blanket in which he shivered. The cold knifed through to the bone, where it established little outposts of numbness in his toes and fingertips. Worse, that night the order came down not to build fires, inside the huts or out, since sharpshooters had been posted along the edge of the woods, dropping anyone who stood out against the ridgeline. There was little to do except huddle under the flimsy shelter while the generals devised some means to sever the noose that threatened to strangle them.
In the morning, orders came that they would attack to the rear of the river to open a way for a retreat to Nashville. At half past six, before light had filtered down to the frozen backwaters, Bushrod Johnson led his men out of the gullies to attack Grant’s right wing. He aimed, as Graves surmised, to run a sweep of the Wynn’s Ferry road, the one remaining route of escape to Nashville. Attacking at dawn, Johnson caught the federals off guard. After what reports later described as a “brisk little scrap,” the enemy line folded in on itself. Elated, Bushrod Johnson bragged to his superiors that he’d “busted ’em up and scattered ’em from hell to breakfast.” An hour later, Buckner punched a hole in the federals’ left wing, pushing it far enough that the Wynn’s Ferry road could be held open for several hours, long enough for most of the army to escape.
Rice Graves, returning with orders, instructed the battery to direct its guns beyond the point along the road where the Second Kentucky had made its attack. Jarom and the others wheeled the nine-pounder around to a position where its dark muzzle aligned with a tongue of trees beyond the advance on the ferry road. From his nest above the low ground Jarom watched the even ranks of the Second Kentucky, three rows of them. The pale morning sun caught the gray of their backs and glinted from whatever metal was exposed. They marched in perfect order two hundred yards across a field toward Grant’s army secreted in the woods. He watched as the line seemed to buckle under the first fire, ranks closing in perfect order to fill the gaps where those in front went down. Jarom expected the command to return fire, but Hanson held back as his first rank approached the timber, their battle flag clearly visible in the smudges of smoke rising from the brush along the woodline. The troops did not return fire until they came within forty yards of the woods. Then they rushed into the dark mesh of trees, where the firing grew more intense. From a distance, the din reminded Jarom of a bonfire crackling through meshes of sticks. Looking back along the route at their march, Jarom saw a spoor of dead and wounded soldiers, a straggler or two trailing off toward the high ground in the cautious and crouching way of skulkers and survivors.
Graves gave commands to fire the nine-pounder. Touched off, the muzzle erupted with a deafening blast; the jolt of the barrel as it recoiled called for constant alertness lest it break an arm or knock the wind from their lungs. Jarom’s part was to ram home the charge, stepping out from the bore after setting the charge and ball, packing the powder and shot for maximum compression. As he raised the rammer time after time, he devised a kind of rhythm that made the movements of the crew steps an elaborate dance of precision and elegance in which each partner, like a practiced waltzer, grew accustomed to the others’ cues and gestures.
Moving from gun to gun, Graves personally directed the fire, sometimes elevating or lowering the muzzle to sight along a more favorable line, sometimes igniting the fuse himself. Hatless, he zipped about giving orders, his look of intense concentration setting a tone of high seriousness they all adopted in firing. Flushed red as a pepper, he ordered the crews to land shells twenty yards into the woods, then forty yards, then sixty, following the invisible foe as it presumably pulled back under the advance. His prompts were not so much visual as auditory, possessing as he did an uncanny sense of where the shot would most lethally fall. After a time, he ordered the crews to change their charges to canister and grape, elevating or lowering the fire wherever he imagined blue clusters. The firing raked blindly into the woods as hail might perforate the leaves of a tree. When the gun came to rest, Jarom and his gunmates again cupped their hands along its curvature for warmth.
Even before Hanson’s men entered the woods, the firing transformed the verticals to wreckage, reminding Jarom of a timber stand he’d once seen after a bouncing tornado had touched down. Trees in one small area had been felled as though struck by a giant mallet, a few feet from those that stood perfectly intact. Along the fringes of the woods, few trees remained unbroken and whole. Where fire had been most concentrated, the ground resembled a hayfield through which a swath had been mowed, not cut but bludgeoned as with a dull scythe that battered and bent everything it couldn’t cut. But among the mangled trees lay humans. The advance ground everything in its path to splinters, the dead lying in ragged windrows. Despite his ability to detach himself from what appeared so remote and minute, despite the abstract quality of so wide a panorama, the spectacle left Jarom shaking. He felt a constriction in his throat and an uneasiness in his bowels that made him think he would vomit.
During the early moments when those defending the woods clashed with those entering, a sober young man named Estin Polk was reassigned to swab the bore of Jarom’s nine-pounder. He was a native of Warren County, and Jarom knew the family name and even had talked with him about acquaintances they had in common. Polk’s people were farmers, owning a boundary of poor land in the knobby region of the county. He told Jarom his parents were poor, never had a stone. He told him that though there was no public school in his section, when he could he had attended a nearby academy where he had learned his letters and received his call to enter the Baptist ministry. Pious and shy among his comrades, he had been stuck with the moniker of Parson Polk, a name he accepted with a semblance of pride. Jarom had asked why he did not strike back at the scoffers.
“Such men we call Hellfire Christians,” he’d said. “When the ground starts shaking and the ground opens to reveal the burning pit, they are first to drag themselves forward for absolution. When the pit closes, they will go back to their unrepentant ways. I am not the Word. I am only the bringer of His Word.”
After each discharge of their piece, Estin Polk was assigned to swab out the leavings of the shot to prevent debris from accumulating and causing the muzzle to explode. Closest to the cannon’s eruptions, he had dark rings around his eyes and complained to Jarom after several detonations that the smoke shortened his breath. Patterson, no friend to religion, ragged him without stint, gibing him about getting singed if he drew too close to what he now called “the devil’s trumpet.”
Jarom thought Polk was decent enough and held no strong opinion on the existence of a deity, never having given the matter much thought. Though religion was a fever with Polk, he kept accounts of his spiritual struggles to himself. From what Jarom observed, Polk did not hang about and gossip with his messmates. He kept pretty much to himself except on Sunday afternoons when he conducted a kind of Bible society. Other days he spent his free time with his nose in the Testaments, a batch of bound sermons, or one of the American Tract Society pocketbooks that circulated around the camp. No exhorter to salvation, he delighted in quietly poring over Scripture and practicing unstinting good works.
“He’ll read that Bible to tatters,” Patterson said.
Because many in the regiment lacked skills to put pen to paper, Polk often took down their messages home. To his credit, though never known to sample strong drink or utter a profane word, he neither scorned nor scolded those who did. No ranter, he ministered by example. At camp meetings, it was said that he was prayerful and when the need arose would willingly act as chaplain and read words over the wounded or dead. His favorite hymns, he once mentioned to Jarom, were “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand” and “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.”
On the slavery question he held strong views. “The Southern Confederacy,” he declared to Jarom, “must humble itself, must renounce slavery and seek genuine spiritual redemption among Christ’s company through individuals leading the Christian life.” Jarom decided that Estin for his own peace of mind could countenance no middle ground. Estin, Jarom believed, knew that his stance on slavery was scorned by fire-eaters in the regiment, but he was tolerated because he performed his duties as a soldier with the same diligence and efficiency as his ministry, his work contributing to loosing storms of shot upon his fellow mortals. He had never skipped a roll call or complained about rations of tainted pork and inedible bread as the others did. Whenever Jarom saw him about camp or at his post, he was clean-shaven, having scraped his jaw with a straight razor and whatever softener he could concoct to cure the whiskers—precious portions of hand soap or even dollops of lard. Jarom attributed this obsession with cleanliness to a desire not to encounter his Maker looking less than his best.
Estin’s death raised more questions about the nature of the divine than ever his preachments did. During the cannonade, as he rammed a charge down the muzzle, his head and back exposed through the embrasure, he was struck in the nape of the neck by what Rice Graves later reckoned was a spent bullet.
“It was as though God had tapped him,” Patterson said, “wanting to get his attention.”
This freak shot descended out of the sky almost providentially and thumped against his upper spine, scarcely penetrating the skin but killing him instantly. Without a sound he reeled and dropped to his knees in a parody of prayer, pitching against the gun carriage and almost into Jarom’s lap. The bullet had traveled so slowly that it might have been dodged had he seen it coming. Examining him, Rice Graves found a raspberry bruise at the base of his brainpan, the head nodded to one side abnormally.
“The rain surely doesn’t trouble itself much,” Patterson said, “about who it falls on.”
He and Jarom eased the body off to a place where they wouldn’t have to see him until they laid him in the common pit dug for the ones who had fallen that day. There was no time for words at his burial.
Despite Hanson’s temporary success in rolling up the road, it was General Pillow’s attack that finally opened a route to evacuate the fort.
Overrunning General McClernand’s encampment, Pillow captured six guns and put two thousand federals out of the battle. Since the defenders of Donelson had no food to feed the prisoners, Pillow had paroled them, exacting a pledge not to take up arms again under penalty of being shot if captured. All the ground within the immediate vicinity of Jarom’s battery was under Confederate control again, and the federals had not had sufficient time to organize a counterattack. Jarom noted that even the wind seemed to cooperate, trees in the distance along the road coming to view again as smoke was swept from the hillside. An acrid smell of burning sulfur had worked its way into Jarom’s clothes and blankets, inflaming his eyes. All the cannoneers appeared tearful.
Though the stage was set to wedge the Confederate defenders between Grant and Nashville, the opportunity dissipated as quickly as the smoke when Pillow inexplicably ordered a retreat, this at a time when everyone was anxious, as Patterson put it, to fly the coop. It was common knowledge among everyone in the army that Grant was receiving reinforcements by the hour and that the strength of the Confederate army was declining, with no realistic hope of any relief. It was also clear to everyone except the generals that the opportunity to break the ring must be seized before it too was lost. Soon, everyone heard Pillow’s order. Perplexed, angry, they knew that on that single decision rested the chances of winning or losing the campaign—the whole game, as Patterson said.
Buckner, a scrapper less concerned with caution than honor, protested the order, but Floyd, a politician who had no military experience, went along with Pillow, an act his troops regarded as amounting to rank cowardice. As Jarom interpreted it, in one almost treasonous stroke the defenders of Donelson without a fight had forfeited everything they’d gained, and giving up under any circumstances went against his grain. So, without any cost in blood, Grant’s eager newcomers quickly retook the ground they had lost, placing his troops in a suitable posture to attack at first light. In less than an hour, the mood of jubilation of the army turned to gloom. Colonel Hanson, who had made deliverance possible, cupped his face in his hands and cried.
“ ‘The privates win the fights,’ ” Patterson said, quoting the old saw, “ ‘and the generals lose the battles.’ ”
As if anything could be worse, the generals who had bungled the victory with their decision to surrender withdrew themselves from humiliation by deserting during the night. Before absconding, General Floyd said he feared surrender because he might be hanged as a traitor, having served as secretary of war under President Buchanan. This had the effect of raising the suspicion that he was indeed still in the employ of the government and thus welcomed the chance to give up fifteen thousand armed rebels. At the very least, Floyd had suffered a loss of nerve. Both Floyd and Pillow protested that they feared what might happen if they fell into Union hands. What they really feared, according to Patterson, was becoming the first Confederate generals of the war to surrender their troops. They might be jailed, they might be hanged. Taking a few of his Virginia regiments with him, Floyd escaped on a steamboat still at its berth by the riverfront. Leaving less conspicuously, Pillow simply rowed across the Cumberland in a skiff under cover of night.
That left Buckner, the man who by rights and talent should originally have been senior commander, to negotiate a surrender he’d never wanted to make. The story passed through the ranks that before giving up the army, he had sent a message to Grant, his friend from West Point, asking terms of surrender. Grant, out to make a reputation, replied that the terms were immediate and unconditional surrender as he proposed to attack immediately. So much for friendship. Buckner was left with no recourse but to hoist white flags above the rifle pits on February 12, 1862. With this act he surrendered over twelve thousand men and forty guns, all irreplaceable. Great stores of provisions stockpiled for the winter, which he had refused to destroy, also fell into federal hands.
Jarom, soon to be a prisoner, felt some encouragement in the act of one little-known commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Stating simply that he had no stomach for surrender and that he hadn’t come up from Hernando, Mississippi, to be placed in captivity, he escaped sometime during the night, leading his ragtag cavalry through swamps that rose to the skirts of their saddles. Jarom and his comrades found themselves with no choice but to swallow a bitter pill. Their captors split those who surrendered into two groups—one made up of officers, the other of enlisted men. Officers were sent to Camp Chase in Ohio, the rest, including Jarom and Patterson, to Camp Morton near Indianapolis, farther north than Jarom had ever been. Boarding a captured steamboat named the Dr. Kane, Jarom and a boatload of other private soldiers floated down the Cumberland to the Ohio and upriver to the Falls at Louisville, then traveled by train and later marched overland to Camp Morton.
To the day, Jarom had enlisted five and a half months previously. Safe in his pocket, he still carried the buckeye that Patterson found under a tree and gave him the day he enlisted, its hull split into halves, a knob of wonder that reminded Jarom of the walnut patina on the three-footed table in Mary Tibbs’s parlor, placed next to her rocker with the back of arrows. Still holding its luster, it was now disfigured by an ugly crack, an uneven fissure that marred the burnished shell and shaped in Jarom’s mind a token of the world’s imperfection and changeability. When he showed it to Patterson, his friend said it represented the failed Confederacy, shiny on the surface but split all to pieces inside.
Among the belongings the guards allowed him to keep was an ambrotype of Mollie and himself, one they posed for in a studio in Springfield. He also held on to the folded-up sheet of music. Despite its encasement in oilcloth, it was beginning to show signs of wear. Jarom opened it and showed it again to Patterson, asking him what he made of it. Patterson had no ready answer but said he reckoned the tune and the lyrics were Irish, probably related to the strong political divisions between Protestants and Catholics during one of the Catholic uprisings at the time of the Glorious Revolution toward the end of the seventeenth century. Patterson had Jarom read all twelve stanzas to him, each ending with a refrain that was largely a repetition of the song’s title, with the addition of some nonsense syllables: “Lil-li-bur-ler-o bul-len-a-la Lero-o ler-o, Lil-li-bur-ler-o, Lil-li-bur-ler-o bul-len-a-la o ler-o ler-o, lil-li-bur-ler-o lil-liburler-o bul-len-a-la.”
Though he couldn’t fathom the song’s content, Jarom loved to repeat the words aloud, especially what he called the chorus, though he had no idea what they signified, what tune they were married to. Musically illiterate, he knew only that the melody had a fast tempo because of the notation at the beginning of the score that read “Briskly.” So he imagined some of the bravura of the drinking songs he’d heard, though he could not construct a specific tune for it since neither he nor Patterson could convert the notes and clefs into melody. The song consisted of twelve two-line stanzas, not one of which made complete sense to either Patterson or himself:
Ho, brother Teague, dost hear the decree?
Lilliburlero bullenala
That we shall have a new deputy,
[REFRAIN]
Ho! by my shoul it is the Talbot,
And he shall cut all the English throat;
Tho,’ by my shoul, the English do praat,
The law’s on their side, and Creish knows what.
But, if dispence do come from the Pope,
We’ll hang Magna Charta and themselves in a rope,
And the good Talbot is made a lord,
And he with brave lads is coming aboard,
Who all in France have taken a sware,
They that will have no Protestant heir.
O, but why does he stay behind?
Ho! by my shoul, ’tis a Protestant wind.
Now Tyrconnel is come ashore,
and we have commissions gillore;
And he that will not go to mass
Shall turn out, and look like an ass.
Now, now the hereticks all go down
by Creish and St Patrick, the nation’s our own.
There was an old prophecy found in a bog,
‘Ireland shall be ruled by an ass and a dog.’
And now this prophecy is come to pass,
For Talbot’s the dog, and James is the ass.
Patterson admitted that Talbot was a cipher to him, but James may have been James II, the Catholic king replaced at death with a Protestant one, much to the displeasure of Catholic Ireland. Whatever the words meant, Jarom felt a special need to preserve the sheet as a relic whose mysteries might someday be explained to him. He could see some connection with strife, with the war that rived the country. But politics meant little to him, and he could not name a single member of the Confederate government beyond Jeff Davis. Though the names and personalities in the song meant nothing to him, he could detect an obscure inner coherence. The words became an incantation, a kind of talisman or charm, something he could carry with him as protection and safe conduct through the end of the war. In some vague way these indecipherable words and notes represented a prospect of the future, a road toward some desirable destination. To Jarom, they tokened a prophecy of well-being and hope at present unreadable, a message encoded in events that lay before him.