CHURCHED

Early the next morning the Reverend J. J. Talbot, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, came to visit Jarom in his cell. Even if he had not worn dark clerical clothes and collar, Jarom would have identified him as an official of the church on some dark mission, not a bearer of good news. Though the minister approached him kindly, Jarom detected the same patronizing air he had experienced with others of his tribe, who, because of their special relationship with God, monopolized all the answers. Whether Talbot was sincere in sharing his special knowledge he couldn’t say. When Jarom first heard the name, he immediately thought of the Talbot in the song, who by the singer’s “shoul” would “cut all the English throat,” the Talbot who would be made a lord, Talbot the dog. One part of him recognized his flirtation with coincidence. Another plumbed the implications of the name—was his the “English throat”? Talbot. Lord. Was Talbot the perverse God who held Jarom’s fate in His divine hands?

But the Talbot before him only asked how he’d slept and how he felt. Jarom said he was feeling as well as he could, sitting in a cell certain about his future but uncertain about how soon.

There came a silence that did not seem awkward to him, to either of them. And then Talbot changed the subject.

“You are called Sue Mundy,” Talbot said. “I’m curious. What is your real name?”

“Clarke,” Jarom said, “Marcellus Jerome Clarke. Marcellus was the name my father gave me, expecting I would be a soldier, a follower of Mars.”

“And Jerome?”

“It was the name my mother gave me,” he said, “though she shortened it to Jarom. A kind of pet name.”

“And do you know who Jerome was?”

“No, not really. I guess he was a minister of the church.”

“A saint,” Talbot said. “A great student of the Word.”

“Don’t the saints die terrible deaths?” Jarom asked. “How did he die?”

“In his sleep,” Talbot said, “peacefully in his sleep.”

Then Talbot pulled him back to his troubles with all the force of gravity, asking if he had heard the result of the court-martial. Jarom instinctively knew that if he had only intuited the outcome before, he would have it now as fixed and readable as letters chiseled into stone.

“They will shoot me, I suppose,” he found himself saying.

“When do you suppose that will be?” Talbot asked, Jarom hearing in his voice the tone he knew Talbot must use to console the bereaved or the dying, a voice unctuous with concern and kindliness.

“In a few weeks, I guess,” Jarom said, having heard that authorities customarily gave the condemned time to settle their quarrels with God and prepare their souls for eternity. He stared at the lump of Talbot’s Adam’s apple as if he could discern the words before they were spoken. His own throat tightened, and he knew the worst was coming.

“Who knows?” Talbot said gently in the way an adult might speak to a child. “Who knows that it may not be in a few days? Can I come around and be of some service to you?”

“Yes,” Jarom heard himself saying, “come around,” as though the words were novel to him, wholly unexpected. “Yes, sir,” hearing himself use the word for the first time since leaving Morgan’s command in Tennessee. “I’d be glad to have you come and see me.”

Talbot seemed willing to listen, a decent man he was sure, if nothing else company who could keep his mind from sinking. Talbot had kept an emotional distance, a clerical dispassion. Though he seemed sympathetic, he remained strangely placid, affected but detached. Jarom felt like a displaced boulder poised on the edge of a precipice above a lake. He already felt a terrible turbulence, the displacement of stone, obeying the only laws it knew, striking the placid water. And Talbot, as Jarom conceived him, was that water. This might have ended it, but he sensed Talbot had something more to say, that he had a boulder of his own to drop.

“My young friend,” he said, “if in a few days, why not a few hours? You’d better train your thoughts to preparation now.”

The reality behind Talbot’s words struck Jarom and hit with the force not of a dropped stone but of a tidal sweep, a force that broke over him and shattered what self-control he had been able to muster. When the words penetrated, he felt a constriction in his gut that preceded heaving, a realization that his execution—a word that cut him—was not a far-off event in an indeterminate future but something that would happen today—in the small breadth of hours and minutes. And he was powerless to prevent it. His breath shortened, he found himself gasping. The heaves moved up to his chest, and for a few seconds he felt he would throw up.

“Parson,” he said, “are you telling me I am to be shot today?”

“Father,” Talbot said.

“Father,” Jarom said, “am I to be shot today?”

Talbot lowered his eyes in answer.

Then Jarom met Talbot’s eyes as they rose kindly to meet his own.

“You are to be executed this afternoon at four o’clock.” He hesitated, “And there is one other thing. You are not to be shot.”

“Hung then?” Jarom asked.

Talbot nodded and looked down at some object invisible on the floor of the cell. How could he be surprised? Since he had surrendered in the barn, the dark prospect of execution loomed over him like a span of invisible wings, a presence like the shadow of a cloud moving across the landscape. Or the scissoring silhouette of a hawk skimming across a stricken pullet caught in an open field. Now he was the chicken that sensed something dark pass over him. Time after time he had imagined himself standing blindfolded against a wall, neat balls of lead punching through his open shirt, his ears concentrating on a band of music or hymnody. A clean shot to the chest and that was that. But hanging. He wasn’t prepared for such a leave-taking, hadn’t acknowledged the possibility.

“They have no right!” he shouted in Talbot’s compassionate face. “I was commissioned in the regular service by Jack Allen, and I can prove Marion killed the men I’m charged with killing.”

“Well, that may be,” said Talbot, “but this is not the time to say, nor am I the one to hear you say it. What I can do for you is pray.”

As the reality began to take root in him, Jarom realized that at one level he was guilty. The evidence was not right, the judges not impartial, but at root he knew he was guilty. It occurred to him now that it was possible to be innocent and guilty at the same time, that both were summations of degrees and millimeters balanced here and tipped there, and that a final accounting could not be made until that person had performed his last act, leaving nothing more to measure. At some level Jarom realized he was being called to account not only for charges that had come before the commission but for everything—every shot he’d ever fired, every spark of anger he’d felt toward those who hurt the people he loved, every time he’d gone along when Marion or Magruder had overstepped the bounds. The charges brought against him were weak, but the moral weight of his other crimes bore down on him.

Hate, like the generations of ancestors of whom he was composed, had a complex genealogy. The particular wrong that unnameable others had done him had aggregated into a hatred that was general—a hatred fueled not only by Patterson’s blinding but also by the bayonet that pierced Susan Berry’s side, the shot that downed John Hunt Morgan, the spent bullet that thumped Estin Polk, the blinding of Stovepipe Johnson by his own troops, and, yes, the shooting of good-natured Toby by Bill Marion. And finally, he was guilty in the sense, he thought, that everyone is guilty—guilty of believing in a cause more indefinite than himself, guilty of being his parents’ child, guilty of being taught to act according to what he believed without considering consequences. The guilt he was willing to accept he did not own—it was shared. Under this reckoning, his judges were as guilty as he the moment they let expedience and bias dictate the outcome of the trial. Tainted, they too were no more than their parents’ children.

So Talbot knelt and Jarom joined him on the slabbed stone of the cell floor, the coldness working up through the knobs of his knees into the marrow of his bones. Without a book Talbot prayed for more than an hour. At first he spoke of the sickened heart and the perfect harvest of death that the war had visited on the world.

“Let us rejoice,” he said, “in the hope of glory that will bring a surcease of human suffering on this sphere of rock in this shattered country where men take the lives of their neighbors and put stock to the sword and pillage their neighbors’ crops and incinerate what their neighbors have built so that it chars and blackens to ruin. So that not one stone stands on another.”

He prayed for the vision to forsake mortal blindness and find a fuller vision encompassing Kingdom Come, that blithe and beautiful day that, like human hopes, shines but to hasten away. He acknowledged the frost and snows and storms that will hide the blue sky and lock up the riffling rill while man and beast go shivering. He affirmed that the only blue sky that persists is the Lord’s firmament in whose domain there is no storm, no strife, but only a pureness of spirit and warmth and splendor that is joy eternal. He invoked the years of deep sorrow on the land and the deep gloom that still enshrouds it and the coming years that might witness an increase in our sorrows, except that we accept the Lord in his mercy and enter his Kingdom where sorrow shall cease and the broken and dead shall be uplifted and made whole.

Jarom felt the consolation of Talbot’s words, the comfort that only words can give, though in the end they were not comforting or soothing enough to erase his guilt or the vision of what lay ahead: the gallows, the trap, the noose that would strangle and wrench the breath from his lungs, his feet withdrawn from the solid earth he loved, dangling, suspended, dancing in the void.

But then he came back to the more familiar world he loved: the crow of the cock, the exquisite motion of a running horse, sunlight translated across the yard through a grove of sugar trees late on a fall afternoon, the voices and features that defined poor Billy Magruder and the peace he found in Mollie Thomas’s earnest face. And the force of goodness that made these and others like nothing else that lived or had lived or would live for all he knew—these things and all things until every object and creature and influence that filled this life and made it both tolerable and wonderful could be touched and savored until there was no more to touch and savor.

To be severed from all this was more than he could withstand, a loss no words or sentiment could describe. Expressions like “numbing void” or “utter emptiness” meant nothing to him because they could not finally delineate his feelings. For him—for the majority of us, too, he thought—the transition into nothing was everything. Letting it come was not enough—that is, blanking out or dimming the senses and mechanically accepting what followed in the annihilation of consciousness. He had to be at peace somehow, and gentle words and Jesus, he knew, would carry him only so far.

He realized he wanted to send, had to send, some messages to those he loved. A vague Mollie appeared to him, and he pulled out the ambrotype to coax her features into resolving themselves.

Talbot had been looking at him in that indulgent way of ministers who sometimes lead by being led.

“Will you get me a pen and some paper?” Jarom asked.

“Of course,” he said, “though there is a prohibition against my carrying messages beyond these walls.”

“Will you carry them for me?” Jarom asked.

“Of course I will,” he said. “I would be happy to.”

Talbot went to the cell door and through the bars asked the guard for some pen and paper and a bottle of ink. When the guard returned with the things he had requested, Jarom, unsure of the steadiness of his hand, asked Talbot if he would act as scribe. Talbot dutifully wrote down what he was told to, letters to Aunt Mary Tibbs, Nancy Bradshaw, John Patterson, and Mollie Thomas. Jarom saved Mollie’s for last because he knew it would be the hardest to compose, the most wrenching. What could he say to her, knowing that by the time she received it he would be dead? For a time the words wouldn’t come. Talbot used up several sheets of foolscap with false starts and falterings before Jarom could find the words he wanted her to read, something simple, something from the heart:

My dear Mollie,

I have to inform you of the sad fate which awaits your true friend. I am to suffer death this afternoon at four o’clock. I send you from my chains a message of true love; and as I stand on the brink of the grave I tell you, I do fondly and forever love you.

I am ever truly yours

He read what Talbot had written, then bent to sign the letter, debating for a few seconds whether to give his name as Jarom or Jerome. Unable to forgo this last gesture of correctness, of extravagance, he signed, “M. Jerome Clarke.”. Then he thought of sending something of himself with each letter, a token. At his request Talbot asked the guard for a pair of scissors, assuring him that they wouldn’t be used for any act of violence. The guard must have trusted him, for he came back with a small pair of snips. Having Jarom hold his head still, Talbot clipped some locks of his uncombed hair to be enclosed in each letter. With Mary Tibbs’s he included the brass button from his father’s uniform. He asked Talbot not to say anything about any of this, and Talbot gave his word that he wouldn’t. Then he took from his pocket the folded-up music sheet in which he had wrapped the ambrotype of Mollie and him, he on the settee with his arm about her, she sitting on its edge, her hand in his. He wrapped “Lillibulero,” the song he had never heard—and never would hear, he realized—inserting the letter to Mollie in its folds. When he’d given the letters to Talbot, he felt relieved. He thanked Talbot, who clasped his hand and said he would pray for him and would stay with him until the last. As Talbot stepped from the cell and the door swung to, Jarom vowed to himself that he would make his own exit from this world as neatly as he could, picking up after himself each step of the way until there were no more steps for him to take.

Around midday, the guard brought him dinner on a tin plate, lean beef and boiled potatoes. Bite by bite he ate what he knew would be his last meal. Afterward, he lay down on his cot and closed his eyes to the world. In the half-light of the cell, he found himself reviewing the budget of what he loved and things to which he owed allegiance, an inventory that grew as he combed his nearly twenty years on the planet: Logan County, blind Patterson, the loyalties of his messmates—especially One-Armed Berry and the wounded Magruder—Mollie Thomas, Aunt Mary Tibbs, farmscapes, whatever configuration of land lay before him in Kentucky, Samuel Colt, Papaw and Memphis, John Hunt Morgan, breast of chicken and collard greens, the regenerative power of rain, the sanctity of shape and texture in trees, the essential holiness of every animal in creaturedom, the interminable interplay of light and shadow.

Chief among the things he had learned through the tutelage of blood, his apprenticeship in suffering, was that this so-called civil war was at root uncivil, a distemper of wolves.

He composed a mental list of what he would never do or know: reach the age of twenty, marry, lead a stable life, grow a beard, dwindle into old age, see an ocean, lie with a woman, lie with Mollie Thomas, earn his own livelihood, go to California, voyage to the land and seat of his Clarke forebears, collect his own library of books, own a boundary of land, know the pleasure and satisfactions of constructing things, outlive Memphis, chronicle whatever peace followed the war, take pleasure in the roll of seasons as things grew and prospered under his hand, savor foods as yet untasted, feel the respect that accrues to elders like deepening mulch in a forest, attain maturity of mind, read the complete works of Mr. Charles Dickens. Nor would he ever get his hands on Windrup, even know the man’s first name. He would never become a father.

Jarom would never meet or even see George D. Prentice, his failed father, the author in part of his son’s destruction. Would he come visit? No. Had he been at the wharf or somewhere along the route to prison? Would he be among the throng that gathered for his execution, armed with sharpened quill to get the last word?

Looking fresh, Talbot came back after the noon hour and began going over the catechism, reading from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. Jarom accompanied him in prayer, and Talbot conferred with him about the nature of his beliefs.

He asked if Jarom accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and if he believed in life everlasting. Jarom answered that he did, wanting to believe and be believed though he knew nothing would alter what he had to go through and in the end make things any easier. How to get through the execution, the ritual of murder, gave him more concern than what lay in the Hereafter. For some reason he also wanted to please Talbot, the good shepherd who did not seem to doubt or question the words. About three o’clock Talbot conducted the sacrament of baptism, and Jarom for a brief moment felt he had been wrapped in the white garment of Christ’s infinite mercy. As the words had said. In his heart he was still terrified, still not one with himself and others, still unsure of what had to be done. There may have been a verdict in his military trial, but he knew his trials were not done. They had just begun. His hope was that his remains would be gathered to the dust of Kentucky, though he had no notion where. He had asked Talbot to contact Mary Tibbs, who would see that his remains reached a resting place in his home county.

One face among the shadow army of faces that rose before him came unsummoned, a furloughed soldier—was Caldwell the name?—rousted in his shirtsleeves from his supper table at a farmstead in Bullitt County, a man Magruder had known before the war and had been watching as a hunter might observe the habits of a buck that raided the truck in his garden. Prodded out to his barnyard, the man was shot by Jarom, Magruder, Marion, and a fourth man whose identity Jarom couldn’t remember, though it may have been Sam Berry. He remembered pulling the man’s mother loose from him, remembered her trying to shoo her other children back into the house so they would not see. But most he remembered the terror in the man’s face as silently he drew his last few breaths there in his own yard, the four of them cocking and preparing to fire, the man unsure from which pistol to expect the first load. Later, as they rode away, he’d wondered what the name, pronounced “kah-well,” meant, speculating that the dead man’s Scottish forebears lived at the place of the Cold Well. Caldwell.

His father also rose up, the late Brigadier-General Hector M. Clarke decked out in his braided militia uniform and plumed hat. Sitting at his large desk in the parlor, he asked Jarom to explain himself. Envisioning him, Jarom thought of his own gaudy duds, the red suit he’d worn with the fringe and tinsel along the sleeve and pants legs. How could he explain the past months, the shame he had brought on his family—the pitiless thefts, the low company he kept, the blood he’d shed? No better than his not-so-distant cousin Branch Clarke, the murderer. No better than Branch’s son Tandy, sitting in his Frankfort penitentiary cell, idle and handless. What would the old man think of him now—not a soldier but a fugitive from soldiers, a guerrilla at best, no longer fighting under a banner that would claim him, no longer associated with a cause beyond his own survival?

“Short of the glory,” his father would say, “short of the glory,” shaking his head, erect even while sitting, his back not touching the chair.

Jarom took consolation in his father not having lived long enough to know, for the knowledge would have killed him.

How did I come to find myself here in this place? he asked finally, eyeing the neat but monotonous courses of brick on the cell wall, a striped trapezoid of light against it from the small barred window.

He had no answer, nothing he could say by way of justification or excuse.

“What clemency do you hope for?” asked the voice inside.

“All,” he said.

“What clemency can you expect?”

“None.”

He no longer kindled even the faintest hope of Berry or Quantrill or Tom Henry or any of the others cheating the hangman by a dramatic rescue. The risks were too great, the rewards too small. Magruder, were he able, would not have hesitated. He felt a constriction in his chest and the beating of his heart, imagining the valves as fists beating frantically against a closed door. In his hopelessness he cried as the sequence of his last moments came to him. He remembered feelings like these only one other time, descending a steep ridge along a very narrow path, uncertain of Papaw’s steadiness. One misstep and the two of them would pitch to their deaths in the craggy bottom. Then, as now, he could only center his weight and try to concentrate on the way ahead. When he’d looked down, he saw the sleek muscles in Papaw’s upper right leg, the knobs and bony competence of her step, a few dark bristles protruding, knowing not to lean over, not to look down, until the path widened into a wagon road.

All the while, Talbot sat patiently in a corner of the cell, seemingly communing with the higher powers—there if needed. Jarom kept staring at the tiers of bricks with their stripes of lime, saying nothing. About three-thirty Talbot tactfully excused himself so Jarom could collect himself and think his final thoughts.

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