Jr. John Fox
Crittenden
A Kentucky Story of Love and War
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066212100
Table of Contents
CRITTENDEN
I
Day breaking on the edge of the Bluegrass and birds singing the dawn in. Ten minutes swiftly along the sunrise and the world is changed: from nervous exaltation of atmosphere to an air of balm and peace; from grim hills to the rolling sweep of green slopes; from a high mist of thin verdure to low wind-shaken banners of young leaves; from giant poplar to white ash and sugar-tree; from log-cabin to homesteads of brick and stone; from wood-thrush to meadow-lark; rhododendron to bluegrass; from mountain to lowland, Crittenden was passing home.
He had been in the backwoods for more than a month, ostensibly to fish and look at coal lands, but, really, to get away for a while, as his custom was, from his worse self to the better self that he was when he was in the mountains—alone. As usual, he had gone in with bitterness and, as usual, he had set his face homeward with but half a heart for the old fight against fate and himself that seemed destined always to end in defeat. At dusk, he heard the word of the outer world from the lips of an old mountaineer at the foot of the Cumberland—the first heard, except from his mother, for full thirty days—and the word was—war. He smiled incredulously at the old fellow, but, unconsciously, he pushed his horse on a little faster up the mountain, pushed him, as the moon rose, aslant the breast of a mighty hill and, winding at a gallop about the last downward turn of the snaky path, went at full speed alongside the big gray wall that, above him, rose sheer a thousand feet and, straight ahead, broke wildly and crumbled into historic Cumberland Gap. From a little knoll he saw the railway station in the shadow of the wall, and, on one prong of a switch, his train panting lazily; and, with a laugh, he pulled his horse down to a walk and then to a dead stop—his face grave again and uplifted. Where his eyes rested and plain in the moonlight was a rocky path winding upward—the old Wilderness Trail that the Kentucky pioneers had worn with moccasined feet more than a century before. He had seen it a hundred times before—moved always; but it thrilled him now, and he rode on slowly, looking up at it. His forefathers had helped blaze that trail. On one side of that wall they had fought savage and Briton for a home and a country, and on the other side they had done it again. Later, they had fought the Mexican and in time they came to fight each other, for and against the nation they had done so much to upbuild. It was even true that a Crittenden had already given his life for the very cause that was so tardily thrilling the nation now. Thus it had always been with his people straight down the bloody national highway from Yorktown to Appomattox, and if there was war, he thought proudly, as he swung from his horse—thus it would now be with him.
If there was war? He had lain awake in his berth a long while, looking out the window and wondering. He had been born among the bleeding memories of one war. The tales of his nursery had been tales of war. And though there had been talk of war through the land for weeks before he left home, it had no more seemed possible that in his lifetime could come another war than that he should live to see any other myth of his childhood come true.
Now, it was daybreak on the edge of the Bluegrass, and, like a dark truth from a white light, three tall letters leaped from the paper in his hand—War! There was a token in the very dawn, a sword-like flame flashing upward. The man in the White House had called for willing hands by the thousands to wield it, and the Kentucky Legion, that had fought in Mexico, had split in twain to fight for the North and for the South, and had come shoulder to shoulder when the breach was closed—the Legion of his own loved State—was the first body of volunteers to reach for the hilt. Regulars were gathering from the four winds to an old Southern battlefield. Already the Legion was on its way to camp in the Bluegrass. His town was making ready to welcome it, and among the names of the speakers who were to voice the welcome, he saw his own—Clay Crittenden.
II
The train slackened speed and stopped. There was his horse—Raincrow—and his buggy waiting for him when he stepped from the platform; and, as he went forward with his fishing tackle, a livery-stable boy sprang out of the buggy and went to the horse's head.
"Bob lef' yo' hoss in town las' night, Mistuh Crittenden," he said. "Miss Rachel said yestiddy she jes knowed you was comin' home this mornin'."
Crittenden smiled—it was one of his mother's premonitions; she seemed always to know when he was coming home.
"Come get these things," he said, and went on with his paper.
"Yessuh!"
Things had gone swiftly while he was in the hills. Old ex-Confederates were answering the call from the Capitol. One of his father's old comrades—little Jerry Carter—was to be made a major-general. Among the regulars mobilizing at Chickamauga was the regiment to which Rivers, a friend of his boyhood, belonged. There, three days later, his State was going to dedicate two monuments to her sons who had fallen on the old battlefield, where his father, fighting with one wing of the Legion for the Lost Cause, and his father's young brother, fighting with the other against it, had fought face to face; where his uncle met death on the field and his father got the wound that brought death to him years after the war. And then he saw something that for a moment quite blotted the war from his brain and made him close the paper quickly. Judith had come home—Judith was to unveil those statues—Judith Page.
The town was