Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 16.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



He came south and east along US 169, at first still hoping against hope to see the old James farm in Kearney.  But he'd already been too long delayed.

He crossed a stream.  What was it?  He saw no sign.  But it could only be the Little Platte River again, he felt sure.  That meant he was only a few miles downstream of the railroad disaster from early in the war, after Wilson's Creek, about the time of Lexington.

In the moonless night the engineer couldn't see that saboteurs had fired the trestles under the onrushing bridge.  Tons of steamer locomotive going airborne, plunging forward, twisting and inverting in midair, screwing itself snout down into riverbed muck.  Thin-skin passenger cars following, merciless causal linkage cause-effect, cause-effect, plowing one into another in the waters below.  Sudden night-piercing screams of ripping steel, and waves running ripples lengthwise through glass windows that explode in sequence, breaking sleeping human bodies apart.  Cars split longitudinally like oysters divulging tender sweets, propel the bleeding and the dead into hot black iron corkscrewed rails, cold water, and savage long metal prongs and spikes and fat chunks of burnt wooden splinters.  Crushing smoke and fire and huddled half-ghosts gather together in shock, exsanguinating half-drowned rats pulled up on the banks in the perilously silent again night like stunned ducks, no idea of what was happening.  Somewhere Tom, fifteen years old by then, eyes shining, hears the story of murderous bushwhackers marauding in northwest Missouri.  "Glad we left," his mother chuffs.  "Rules of war," Price excuses in his letter to Halleck.  We all belong to the same fingerprint-besmeared manuscript of the ages.

It occurred to Max suddenly that Jerusalem John Cutter's farm ought to be somewhere close by.  He wondered whether the old man had gone to the aid of the victims of that senseless attack.  No, he was probably still in Nebraska with Nancy and the kids.

Terrorism we'd call it now.  Then, it hit like an inexplicable outrage, lightning out of a blue sky, an unexpected slap in the face, but it was only one of the first impacts.  Its horror dissipated in the escalations that followed.  Sliding scales of horror don't make those killed and maimed any less dead or mutilated, though.  The wounds they carried afterwards we still bear.  Vengeance.  Despair.  Cruelty.  Rage.  Channeled into subsequent generations, cutting erosive through the tender topsoil of infinite possibility that unfolds before the unsullied eyes of children.  Tragedies cataclysmic or undistinguished, remembered or forgotten, no matter.  The dead and wounded influence our passage.

After another ten miles the road angled due south.  The sky was beginning to relax in golden and tangerine bands over the wide, grassy hills and fields that held the bare trees at bay, pushed well back from the road.  The edge of the woods.

He was wondering about Sterling Price.  The man was an enigma.  A tall, handsome, pompous ass, surely, sphinx-like, absorbing any hopes and aspirations projected upon him by his affronted Southern constituents, a ready-made symbol for resistance to Northern aggression.  In the decade before the war Price had been governor of Missouri, and early on he'd even opposed secession; in fact, his initial dubious loyalties later threatened his relationship with Jefferson Davis.  Not that he'd ever enjoyed much of a relationship with Davis.  And never mind Davis' own initial jolt of fear at the thought of presiding over the Confederacy.

Those were heady days, the first few months of sixty-one, with Lincoln sneaking into Washington, sneakin' Lincoln, and cadaverous Davis, flaunting, openly training up to Montgomery, moody, sullenly speechifying along the way the party-pooper, and local heroes running on testosterone and adrenalin scrabbling to grab hold of whatever they might hope to control.  Price's opinions tipped toward rebellion when irascible Nathaniel-Lyon-of-the-flaming-mane-of-red-hair peremptorily seized the arsenal in St Louis.  How dared the Federals appropriate those weapons in such a highhanded manner!  And the riot after all the militiamen at Camp Jackson were taken prisoner.  So reminiscent of the Boston Massacre, at least in the minds of those primed to kill Yankees.  Price found it expedient to forget that pro-slavery men on the Kansas border had seized the Liberty arsenal shortly after Fort Sumter.  Flamboyant M Jeff Thompson in between careers, ex-mayor of St Joseph and not yet Grant's bothersome swamp fox, divvying up the commandeered gunpowder among his unwashed ragamuffin bosom buddies hiding in the hills.  And cagey Price, still teetering on the fence, also ignored the fact that Jefferson Davis had himself authorized a secret shipment of mortars and siege guns to St Louis in order to snatch up the arsenal before the Unionists could.  Details, details.  But maybe history overran Price before he could decide for himself.  Cloistered away with the pigheaded governor:  that could have been no picnic.  That might account for the Boonville debacle.  Price excused himself on the eve of what looked to be an imminent disastrous battle to go home because of um er well you see diarrhea.  Price trots away in the face of the enemy.  Maybe to buy a little time to try to come to terms with finding himself on either side despite his constitutional mugwumpism. 

Having been hastily consecrated to the Southern cause ‑‑ too hastily? he must have considered, given the potentially grave consequences ‑‑ Price landed command of the Missouri State Guard from Governor Jackson.  It happened very quickly.  No time to think.

Everyone was making profound, life-altering choices early in sixty-one, Max thought.  In the excitement of the moment.  Little realizing those impulsive decisions would change their lives forever.

A few months later Lyon was killed at Wilson's Creek, having chased Price too far south.  Price had the good fortune to team up temporarily with Ben McCulloch from Texas, and the Union forces were outnumbered.  Newly promoted, Nathaniel Lyon was the first Union general killed in the war.  Fortune had smiled on Price, who soon advanced north toward Lexington.  McCulloch went back to Arkansas.

I'll be in Lexington tomorrow, Max thought.  I'll see it for myself.

Darkness was falling when he made the left turn after Smithville.  Reluctantly he gave up on reaching Kearney on this trip.  You can't do it all.  He was driving east under rapidly darkening skies and resetting the glowing GPS on a new route for the motel in Liberty.  Fifteen minutes later he'd checked in at the desk and lugged his bag upstairs.  It was quite dark out and very cold.  In the room he soon he had the heater on and the power strip with its various chargers and adaptors plugged in.

He felt tired.  He watched a little of the weather on TV.  A storm system was following him, coming in from Colorado and Kansas.  The next few days should be cold and drizzly, especially in St Louis on Sunday.

He uploaded his pictures from Leavenworth and took some time to write a brief email to Flynn.  After getting a bite to eat from a pizza joint next door -- I wonder whether the Liberty arsenal was located anywhere near the pizzeria? -- he came back to the warm motel room and climbed into bed.

His throat was raw and sore.  He'd get something for his cold in the morning.  For now, the first day was over.  Sleep awaited him.