LVI.

The rebel guerillas decamped before dawn as the stars grew faint in the lightening firmament and they moved east down the Cumberland Mountain for their rendezvous. There were two-hundred all of Gurley's troop, men and horses snaking down the switchbacks of the escarpment. They avoided the main roads where the Yankees were patrolling, and with their knowledge of the ground they used old game trails and the gullies slabbed by limestone down which the springs would rill. They made their way down into the Valley of the Sequatchie. 

From the clearings between the thick wooded slopes they gained a sublime vantage of the land which lay below them.  The sun was about three palms westing over the Walden's Ridge. It began to burn patches of fog which shrouded the Sequatchie River below.  Gurley and Bill Marmaduke removed their eyepieces and surveyed up and down the valley, which opened like a wide gash from the Crab Orchard Mountains of the northeast and down towards the Tennessee River to the southwest, near Bridgeport.  There the Tennessee River picks up the floor of this great rift valley and flows thence southwest towards Gunter's Landing.

The Sequatchie River glittered between the gossamers of fog.  Upon that road they beheld a great caterpillar of wagons curving into the valley from the south around the Jasper Bend. It stretched across the length of that great divide before turning east over a high pass through the Walden's Ridge. It was miles long from one horizon to the next, the canvas covers of the wagons like the metamerism of some great insect, and they were pulled by mules that looked like ants. This great stream of vehicles and asses and all their precious burden was coming to be called the Cracker Line, a mere thread of artery feeding 50,000 Yankees trapped just beyond the Great Tennessee Gorge. Supplies were never in want.  Only the means to get it where it was needed was lacking, and they were desperately needed in Chattanooga.

It is October 1863.  The Yankees under General Rosencrans were defeated at the great battle of Chickamauga, Georgia by the Army of Tennessee and were now bottled up in Chattanooga.  From his observation post on Bell Hill, the anxious general could survey the campfires of rebel soldiers blinking along the wrap-around crest of Missionary Ridge and then up the brooding shoulder of Lookout Mountain.  The numbers were about even, but after a solid whipping at Chickamauga, General Rosencrans was in no mood to test rebel resolve, not yet anyway.  The problem was that he was running out of time. Mr. Lincoln was aggrieved at this setback, and War Secretary Stanton was at once apoplectic and downcast.  The General's primary problem was one of supply.  Napoleon once said that an army marches on its stomach, and as of yet, there was but one supply line that stood to snake around the Great Tennessee Gorge and across the lower Sequatchie Valley.  Reinforcements were on the way, he was wired by Secretary Stanton.  Rosencrans was certain reinforcements also a meant a replacement for himself... perhaps Sherman, or even Grant.

In the event, it was both of them. Already great forces were on the move to rescue the Yankee army besieged in Chattanooga, a bowl as it were with the high ground all around teeming with rebel infantry under General Braxton Bragg.  But that would take time. Meanwhile, General Rosencrans wrung his hands anxiously as but a thin, single road was all that stood to feed his army, which was already on half rations and bombarded daily by the rebel cannons.  To interdict this lifeline, General Joseph Wheeler proposed a raid into the Nickajack to sever it across its length.  It was agreed to by General Bragg, and Wheeler crossed the Tennessee River above the beleaguered city and crossed over the Walden's Ridge into the Sequatchie Valley.

And so with their optics Frank Gurley and Bill Marmaduke peered north up the valley where the boom of artillery suddenly echoed down between the two escarpments.  That must have been General Wheeler, who had descended into the Valley from across the way and was pushing in the Yankee cavalry screen. They continued down the mountain and into the valley floor and north towards the rising crescendo of fire some five miles distant when they encountered a like-sized troop of Federal cavalry. They were about three hundreds off and moving at a canter along the brush line. Both parties halted, seeming to take notice of one another at the same time.  Then they observed one another with binoculars. Gurley and the Yankee cavalry captain looked at one another and then they looked at each other's guidons. And when they were certain each were one another's enemy, they seemed to come to the like-mind. 

And so Captain Gurley sounded the bugle to charge, and they rode thundering down in a shallow wedge whooping like savages, and the Yankee captain did likewise. And this terrible mass of flesh and gunpowder and steel came careening towards one another across a field of cut corn and rotten squash.  And so these two mobs collided into one another, horses screeching and rearing up and men blazing away with their pistols at one another.  Men fell with a thud, legs crushed by their steeds, or just bowling over dead, shot through the hearts. Sabers were drawn and men incised one another in blood.  

It was impossible to tell how or when it would end. Smoke and dust embroiled this bedlam of mutual slaughter, and the men continued to circle around one another on their terrified horses, slashing with their sabers and firing their pistols at one another. By and by the whole bloody affair suddenly ended within the space of a few minutes. For the victor, they simply saw less and less of the enemy to kill as they either died, fell wounded, or were fleeing to the rear.  As it were, Frank Gurley's company prevailed, and when they had come to the collective realization of this, they cheered however wearily, but it was carnage. There were wailing, wild-eyed horses jerking in the field, and moaning men and the certainly dead, and the probably dead.  And Gurley took stock, and the sergeant reported fifteen dead and thirty-seven wounded. The enemy left thirty dead on the field and forty-two wounded.  

Contact had been made with General Wheeler, and he forwarded carts for the wounded and summoned the remainder of Gurley's command.  They were admitted into lines and both Gurley and Marmaduke reported to the General at his headquarters in the field. Bill Marmaduke was warmly acquainted with the General when the latter had commanded the 19th Alabama at Shiloh. The General explained that the Yankee cavalry guarding the wagon train had been driven off, and that his men were now looting the baggage and scavenging what they could take, and destroying the rest. It was no small enterprise. There were hundreds of wagons loaded with supplies stretching for miles.  They all needed to burned before Yankee reinforcements arrive.  Moreover, the mules could not be left to the Yankees either.  They were too valuable in driving supplies over the Walden's Ridge and must be killed. Gurley was told to rest up his men for an hour before they were to proceed to kill all the animals they could find along the train. Then they were report back when they had encountered the enemy. When he had finished, the General gave a very serious salute to them and dismissed them both.  

Gurley and Marmaduke were less appalled by the orders than they were disgusted by them.  It was war, after all, and war is a beast that will feed itself.  The men were fed lavishly from the loot of the train, and they began to examine the wagons that Wheeler's boys were looting. They were great covered wagons as big as balloons and stamped with the mark U.S.A. And they were at once astonished to find within them all the largess of a superior Yankee economy.  There were whole loaves of sugar, and hoops of cheese, bushels of pasta and barrels of flour. One wagon held an entire printing press. Another was filled with musical instruments, and yet another with a steam laundry. There were even wagons carrying wagons.  Most amazing of all was a vehicle which encased a precious cargo of ice. It was the excess of the Army of Xerxes itself, and for miles and miles this great train had stalled and broken down in the Sequatchie Valley, and left almost wholly unguarded.  

When Gurley's men had finished gawking at the immensity of this bounty, they mounted up and prepared to carry out their notorious deed.  All around them Wheeler's men were sliding into a drunken revelry.  Discipline was breaking down. For soldiers who were half-starved and mostly deprived these days, the temptation was too great.   Men were stuffing their pockets with what they could never get home. Some collected little piles of doubtful items to claim possession over, like furniture and dresses. Someone had found a whiskey cart, and the musical instruments were brought out and a man put on the dress jacket of a Yankee colonel and began to sing Yankee Doodle. Gurley's men set off.

As dusk was casting rosy fingers across the cool October sky, Gurley's men rode along the column with their sabers out.  They approached each mule, four to a wagon, and lanced each in the throat with the tips of their blades.  The mules screamed and sprayed blood on the wagons' canvas top.  They sprayed blood on the men.  When they came across a drove of cattle, they shot volleys at them with their carbines. The animals lowed and huddled and took every bullet and all gave up and fell.  Shooting the horses was the worst, and they most often dismounted for this work.  Taking each horse from its harness, they felt compelled to walk it some before putting a bullet up through the bottom of its head. Then they fired the wagons. By and by Gurley and his men left about a thousand yards of such carnage across the Valley floor. 

By night the wagons were all lurid pyres. Their embers licked up into the firmament in great cyclones. as they burned all up and down the Valley. It was like a fault had opened up from Hyades itself across the landscape. All that sublime munificence of human industry reduced to ash.  That didn't bother Gurley, or Marmaduke, or any of the other men. They had killed thirty men that day, and Lord knows who else yet. They rarely minded killing the mules either.  What they did mind was killing of the horses.  And slathered in the blood of all the beasts they had killed that day, every man thought to himself that this was not what he had signed up for.  

XLVIII

Bill Marmaduke, Sheriff of Limestone County, tipped his hat to the ladies as he walked down the boardwalk, and shook hands and patted the backs of the good ole boys and brothers of Strangetown. His smile was as big as a shotgun blast, and his grip as warm and as welcome as a Christmas fire. You couldn't help but love the man.  He knew everyone's name.  He knew something about you, some connection or witness, that he never forgot. He was a master politicker. Goddam him, Bourbon George Houston would say, give him five minutes and you'd go from hating a man you never met to making a friend you'd share your sister's diary with.  To the Democrat Greeks of the County, he was a dangerous political opponent.  

He walked far up the deep bottoms of Town Creek past Madame de Smet's cathouse and the Nickajack Theater, and past the public gazebo where, directly across a foot bridge crossing over to the left bank sat the lair of Maw Possum. It was a two story clapboard rowhouse with no windows at all save for a large, round and curious porthole on the second floor.  This is where the old witch told fortunes and worked hoodoo elixirs and cast magic spells. Like it were church, Bill removed his hat before entering.  Inside the single porthole cast an iridescent shaft of light into this space, which was hazed by the smoke of berries and pinecones that smoldered from a pair of urns, beside which a sort of altar-like table sat on a platform.  Something like a laced bridal veil hung over this table, obscuring the figure which sat behind it.  This wasn't the first figure to notice, however.  That would be the large black man who sat behind the door trying to read the papers by the scant light. That was Papa Laduc, who at full height was near seven foot plus a stovepipe hat.  Slung at the man's side, Bill noticed a long Colt 1860 Army revolver.  A bit antiquated by this time, it was a beast of a pistol.  The man was said to be one of Maw Possum's husbands. Even the sheriff did not seem to draw his interest. He merely nodded to Bill, then nodded over to a sweetgrass basket on a pedestal beside the door.  

In this basket, most supplicants would usually place cash, sometimes to see the Witch of Strangetown, and sometimes just to pay their kickback to her. Others would place a stone into the basket, a small polished obsidian stone that she called a Quark, unique to the carrier which they were loathe to lose, for it bound them in thrall to Maw Possum's power and favor. Every freedman that Maw Possum had moved through her Underground Railroad had a Quark.  Every man who couldn't pay for one of her spells or remedies had a Quark.  Every man who owed a debt to Maw Possum had a Quark. And for every Quark they had presented, there was an equal and mysteriously identical Quark she would fish out from a velvet bag.  It was all a very nice trick, Bill admitted.  Nevertheless, he took out his Quark from his pocket and tossed it into the sweetgrass basket and carried it thus before the alter-like table where, behind the white veil, Maw Possum sighed.  

Well if its not our Knight of Cups, she said.  You just hang on, Bill. I's got your Quark somewhere. She spoke with a raspy voice with a surprising singsong range of pitch.  

She grunted as she leaned down to grab her velvet bag of Quarks.  On the table at which he took a seat sat a human skull draped in wax from a sagging candle. The flame looked sick. Bill looked around.  Beyond the veil and around the platform were shelves and benches filled with curious objects and strange bottles. There was a satanic-looking cornucopia, there was the flayed skull of a lamb that had been cured, there was a jar of eyes, there was a necklace of German sausages dangling from a bookcase. A statue of High John de Conquer held out a morsel of molded bread. There was a boiling cauldron with what must have been Maw Possum's supper, because it smelled of vinegar and lemons and oil.  Maw Possum had finally found her bag and she shook out about a dozen Quarks. The bag looked like it held a hundred of such Quarks, but amazingly she found the one that matched that which Bill Marmaduke placed on the table from the basket. Bill shifted uncomfortably. Her tricks were uncanny. He overcame this sensation and rubbed his eyebrows, then blurted out.  

Let's cut the shit, Maw. Your so-called husbands are squeezing in on my tote.  I get 15% of the purse on the tracks, and 10% of the tables across Strangetown. What the hell is this I hear that you raising your taxes on Wagon Wheel and the Broken Spoke?  I'm getting shrugs when I come around to collect.  They say your rail-splitter here had done cleaned them out. He tossed a hand towards Papa Laduc, who remained uninterested.  

Bill Marmaduke was the only white man who talked to her like this, and it snapped the old witch's patience.  She threw open the veil and shook her matching Quark at Bill between her gnarled old fingers. She looked old, crumpled and porcine. She wore a turban set with rhinestones, and wore a panoply of charms from about her neck. Her spirit was spry, however, and she spat back at Bill Marmaduke.  

I wonder, Bill, if it ain't a goddam nuisance to even hold onto this thing.  You have been the biggest pain in my ass since I got you elected.  Did I not build this town?  Did I not make you Sheriff?  

I wonder if that wasn't Barry Hogan who got my elected with his wagons and his liquor.  

I's got his Quark too, Bill. She was nearly out of her seat.  Everyone was on edge. The gubernatorial election was approaching and the Klan was pressing in on the rural precincts. She shook her head and sighed again.  

Let's go for a walk together, Bill. It will do us both good.  

She stepped out from behind the veil with her cane, a gnarled old women who was surprisingly locomotive on her feet once she got started. When Bill thought to offer his hand to help her down the platform, she snapped at him.

Git your goddam hands away from me.  They've got greed all over them.  I don't want to lose my coins.  

Outside in the broad noonday sun, Papa Laduc removed a parasol and walked with Maw Possum down the boardwalk offering shade to his wife. Bill Marmaduke walked beside Maw Possum. He kept his hat off out of respect for the Witch.  She approved of this smugly.  

Folks tipped their hats and curtsied to these respected matron and patron of Strangetown.  All eyes were on them.  Maw Possum walked with a limping and rhythmic gait, first throwing her cane and dragging herself forward behind it with a surprisingly rapid and light motion. She gave an airy grunt with each step she took, though she never gave the impression of exertion or exhaustion.  She was like some dark old gnome who had strolled down from the mountains for a brisk hike among the realm of men.  

Look what I built here, Bill, she said.  Dey's nowhere in the world like it.  Not in da whole South. I come into this place from a home and family I don't even remember.  I come from the East, over the mountains.  I been bought and sold a half dozen times over.  All I've got is dis family.  This is my home.  These are my Darlings.  And you my Darling too, you know.  White and greedy as you ass is. 

She placed her hand on Bill's lower back, her hand glittering with rings and nails as long as bullets.  She continued.

Look. Times are tough. I know. Ask a sister how tough times can be?  You just white.  You ain't never going to know, and I don't hold that again' you. But there are evil plans afoot. I need you to do as you been elected to do, Sheriff. The new world we building together here?  It is in great danger, Bill.  I can guarantee you first cut on Wagon Wheel and Broken Spoke, but I need you to turn your attentions to this danger, or we risk losing it all.

Bill held out a hand. She stopped.  They were just outside the Wagon Wheel where a handful of Germans were playing dominoes on the porch of the saloon.  

What evil, he asked?  What the hell are you talking about?  

I talking about an old evil from over the water dat come to the New World. She squinted an eye and cast it about before shooting it up towards his face.  Then she asked, what do you know about Adelphon Kuklos?  

XLV

After the war, Bill Marmaduke's home and plantation had been confiscated by the military government of Alabama on account of a forfeiture of property taxes. He had been away fighting in Jackson Co. when his father died, leaving the estate to wither and the slaves to wander into freedom. And so it was auctioned from the Limestone Co. Courthouse steps by Captain Fritz Hermann, who commanded the local Yankee garrison of Fort Henderson on the Browns Ferry Road. By freak of bureaucratic fumbling, he commanded a company of 120 Irish "volunteers" who spoke incomprehensible English while he himself spoke only German.  It was by luck that there were several German families who had taken up temporary residence in Strangetown, many of whom spoke English.  These were immigrants who were bound for Colonel John Cullman's colony of Germans south beyond Falkville in the Warrior Mountains, where Jimmy Sloss was building his railroad to Birmingham.

Colonel Cullman and Captain Hermann became fond friends. Among the German immigrants, they organized concerts at the public gazebo in Strangetown where polka and the waltz wafted through the crisp autumn air.  Oktoberfest was celebrated, and these immigrants set up a makeshift beerhall beneath a circus tent on the Niphonia Track on West Houston Street.  To the dismay of Ms. Mary Fletcher Wells and the Temperance Society, the Germans brewed a a variety of beers for public consumption.  Most negroes had never tasted beer before. It flowed freely along with linked sausages and boiled cabbage.  And so did the Bavarian polka and the Austrian waltz. Both John Cullman and Captain Hermann dined together often in the Nickajack Hotel over a fine bottle of Franconian and retired to the Captain's private quarters for cards or to recite Goethe together.  The Greeks whispered else. 

Oktoberfest brought its own joys, but the freedman were celebrating more than that.  Captain Hermann was auctioning off confiscated properties of former Confederates who had failed to pay their property taxes.  These included Bill Marmaduke's plantation Damascus, and Drake Shoney's farm at Gloaming Birch.  According to a formula formerly proposed by General Sherman, each plantation would be subdivided into 40 acre parcels. Prices ranged from $4 - $12 per acre.  The Freedman's' Bureau under The Major, Bonwit Vrooman, ensured all coloreds had the first right of refusal on bidding above the reserve.  Big Jim Crow had high hopes.  He counted himself lucky. His survived the war and more in the Union Army and found gainful employment in the uncertain world of post-war freedom as a carpenter.  He had help construct most of Strangetown's boarding houses and saloons. He'd even help build Father Jessup's new African Methodist Church and Swampy Joe's Chapel of Freedom, which was vaguely of the Baptist tradition. Now with all he saved, he had his eyes set on his 40 acres of fertile bottomland on Bill Marmaduke's plantation called Damascus.  Bill Marmaduke was as of yet the Sheriff of Limestone County. He was at that time nowhere to be seen. He was rumored to be mining in Nevada, whaling in the Galapagos, or filibustering in Venezuela.  Wherever he was, he was nowhere to dispute the sale or payoff the lien.  

And so the morning of the sale, Drake Shoney had shown up with a mysterious carpet bag full of cash and paid off his lien in the nick of the moment.  He retained Gloaming Birch.  Damascus, however, was sold off in ten parcels of 40 acres, and the mansion went to the carpetbagging attorney names Rufus Lipman.  Big Jim Crow won his bid for the price of $385 the plot he so desired.  But the sale had been sneered at by Lyman Resnick of the Limestone Democrat.  He reflected the arguments of Dr. Prentiss, that the negro was naturally indolent and impulsive, and whose inability to subsist even on his own property will subject the State to burdensome welfare.  Better that the negro continue to work the plantations they knew under contracts negotiated by the planters.  This, of course, would not do so long as the Yankees were in charge. Freedman who continued to work these plantations had their contracts negotiated by The Major himself, who organized their labor according to blocs of collective contracts.  It infuriated the Greeks, but not more than giving negroes their own land. If their black labor fled to the yeomanry to plant their own plots, they will simply grow subsistence crops.  The Greeks' entire plantation system, which was dependent on the ability to command labor, was in jeopardy.  

But these concerns were none of Big Jim Crow's. He held in his hand something more than freedom - he land of his own.  It was a deed with his name - Jonas Jackson, owner of 40 acres of good bottom land on parcel 16-06-16 along Piney Creek. This was it - the Square Deal.  Not so many others were lucky.  As a carpenter and a soldier, Big Jim Crow was able to save up for his land.  Most of the freedman were laboring on contracts that, although negotiated by The Major, still resulted in conflict with former masters.  Many planters sought to impose old habits of controlling the lives of their laborers, while at the same charging them for clothing, food and shelter... all of which they benefitted from for free during slavery.  It was a tumultuous time as the freedman sought to exert their new independence, and define what their new freedom and community would look like after emancipation.  Meanwhile, the planters sought to command from their laborers as much work as they provided during slavery.  It was an impasse of plantation capital against agricultural labor, complicated by the racist assumption that a man like Jonas Jackson, on account of his skin, could not make it on his own, nor should he.  

XLIII

Before he became Sheriff of Limestone County and rode his chuck wagon through the roaring crowds of the Darling of Strangetown, Royal Bill Marmaduke had been a different man altogether before he came home from the war. The Cause notwithstanding, something changed during the two years he fought guerilla in the mountains of Nickajack. It was as though it had been different arc of his life, different before and different after and never like the rest of it altogether. Only love could do that.

And so it was he saw her in church, which was to say the Estill Fork Methodist Church. It was deep up the valley, whose ponderous shoulders embrace the Paint Rock River in their cusps. The chapel itself was a single room clapboard structure. It was coddled on the sandstone ledges above the rustling waters of the fork. The gothic windows were shaded first by the woods, then by the mountain's draw towards sunset. And down the valley would echo the Sacred Harp these Holy people chorused from the mountains, for their Reverend was of the Holiness movement.

Her hair was brown, her eyes almond. Before church she passed mountain flowers to the elderly from a wicker basket. They baptized in the pools they call Jericho where they wore linen robes and sang Idumea. These praises were pleasing to the Lord like the aroma of burnt offerings, and thus the war had not yet reached these people of the mountains, who owned no slaves, and worked communally in the scratch of the sandy soils to raise lamb and cattle and grow patches of corn. Not one of this congregation had sent a son to the war.

This Bill Marmaduke respected, and honored the Reverend's wishes to attend service unarmed. It was up the Paint Rock River that Frank Gurley had pitched camp for his guerilla band for a time, striking south out of the valley to raid the Yankee outposts at Woodville and Gurley's Tank along the Memphis & Charleston. It turned ugly. Farms were burnt out, livestock shot up. They'd stick up the railroad to Bridgeport then burn the train carriages down to cinders.  The Yankees rarely ventured away from the railroad and chose to keep most of their garrison close to the Huntsville Depot. The mountains belonged to the rebels.  

They also belonged to her.  

Her name was Amanda, and she did not understand the war. None of them did. They were pacifists all. And he'd try to explain the Cause, but he felt he wasn't making any sense. She laughed at him. She was charmed by him. She was afraid of him. He carried firearms.  He's killed men.  He was Episcopalian. He had fallen madly in love with her.  He brought her flowers.  He asked to write to her. She was receptive, but cautious. There were the admonitions of her counsel.  Nothing sinister, but disapproving.  The Godly do not consort with killers.  And she did as she was bade. It was love irreconcilable to God.  

But the time grew to pass anxiously for her during which they were parted from each other's sight.  During one raid, Bill Marmaduke took a ball in the gut and he was brought in to Mr. Somerfield's farm where the doctor shook his head and removed his spectacles and place his arm on her shoulder. He wasn't expected to make it. The fever set in. She spent interminable hours at his side in prayer.  He spent a fortnight in the fitful brink before his fever broke and he came to.  Prayers were answered.  A promise was struck.  She took hold of his hand and walked with him as he convalesced beside the gliding mountain meadows.  She read the Bible to him beside cool waters.  She picked him bouquets and sang to him Lochaber No More beside the pools of Jericho.  It was time standing still.  But she could not marry him.  He pleaded, she demurred. He swore he would love her the rest of his days. He knelt before her as he parted, and she kissed his forehead, like Guinevere and Lancelot of the Lake.   

He did not return for two seasons.  He was swept up by the Wizard of the Saddle and rode with him burning across West Tennessee.  General Bragg and the Army of the Tennessee had turned out the Yankee occupation of the Nickajack and was now facing the mighty Union army of General Rosencrans's Army of the Cumberland near the Shelbyville, Tennessee.  General Bragg's agents swept into the Nickajack and confiscated everything that could be eaten, exchanging them for scrips in Confederate dollars.  Then they enforced conscription.  It was the unassailable force of incontestable authority.  When most of the yeomen of the mountain country sequestered their stocks and evaded the draft deep in the mountains, the congregants of Estill Fork prayed for deliverance instead.  Nothing came but the sutler's wagons and men with guns who passed them a scrip note and saluted them as they loaded away barrels of cereal. Then they drove off the cattle with them.  They were gone within the week and left scarcely anything behind but the mules to tend the next harvest. Malnutrition set in.  

Amanda was carried away by the diphtheria later that mournful July.  When Bill returned to Estill Fork, he felt as though his heart had suddenly swollen, then suddenly emptied onto the Earth.  He never knew when was the last time he would see her each time he had ridden off to war. He could have accepted that, but he never imagined it would be her the one to go.  They had never even kissed. They had never even made love.  All the time that had stood still but a memory. In time, the memories would fade too. Then there were just ghosts in his dream, where they'd never say a word to one another.  He never repeated her name again. 

Boo hags. 

He began to blot this one with sins.  It took years, even into the after-war. There was the soldiering, which she had called killing. Then the gambling.  Then, many say, his ambitions and pride.  He never cared much for Jesus, he concluded.  Never met him.  If she meant nothing, then all that meant nothing.  You could make room for Jesus, or you could make room for her. Not both. So he'd chose neither. Here is where they said Bill Marmaduke grew selfish and peevish, shrewd and cold.  Say what they will, he thought, I run ahead of my demons.  

But he never forgot the impression of charity in Amanda's heart. There were Bible verses she read he couldn't get out of his head, like from Malachi and Ephesians.  What is this Cause you were willing to kill for, Bill?  Who shall enslave his brother and sister in Christ but he who is a slave to the enemy's power?  

If Amanda was beyond a memory, and beyond a ghost, then maybe she could have been an angel.  

XXXVIII

Bill Marmaduke took official leave of the 19th Alabama Infantry at Bridgeport, Alabama in the Summer of '62. The regiment had remained behind to guard the western approaches to Chattanooga while General Bragg took the Army of Tennessee on its invasion of Kentucky. Bill had been pretty tore up about the loss of so many friends at Shiloh. They all had. While encamped on a knobby hill overlooking downtown Bridgeport, Bill Marmaduke was visited by his old friend Frank Gurley. He looking for recruits for his company of mounted irregulars, who were attached to the 4th Alabama Cavalry, CSA. Looking for some open air from the rank confines of army camp life, he jumped at the opportunity.

They were called Gurley's Ghosts, and they operated throughout the mountains of Madison and Jackson county protecting the western approaches to rebel Chattanooga from Yankee occupied Huntsville. The vital Memphis & Charleston, it must not be remembered, ran from Huntsville to Chattanooga. The one hundred miles between the two cities became a no man's land which was never wholly occupied by either side throughout the war. Gurley's cavalry would ride down out of the mountains to raid Yankee foraging parties or the occasional train.

Frank Gurley had by that point had a bounty placed on him for his alleged murder of the Yankee General Robert McCook on the Winchester Road near New Market, Ala. during an ambush. General McCook was a member of the famous "Fighting McCook" family of Ohioan War Democrats. This concerned Frank none in the least, and for the next two years Bill Marmaduke fought with a wanted man.

For Bill Marmaduke, this experience in the mountains of the Nickajack would influence his future ascension into Reconstruction politics as a Republican war hero. It was here that he grew to become a folk sensation of the Nickajack while riding with the "outlaw" Frank Gurley. It was here, also, he would also fall in and out of love. For there was no soldier in this cruel war that love and death did not go hand in hand.

XXXVI

However Mr. Lincoln felt about it, the Confederate States of America was a going concern, de facto if not de jure. Less than a month after Alabama declared Independence from the Union, all of the seceded states sent delegates to Montgomery. They included Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana in a list that reads like an SEC roster. As of yet the other states had not seceded from the Union. And so in Montgomery they formed a Congress and elected a President. The constitution mimicked that of the United States of America except where it pertained to the protection of slavery. However these founding fathers of the Confederacy felt about their Second American Revolution, theirs was an empire of bondage, a republic of suffering.

And so Jefferson Davis received a cable from the rebel Congress appointing him President of these Confederate States of America. He hadn't even known he was on the ballot. Varina, his beloved wife, was struck by how ashen he turned. It was as though the most enormous responsibility had been assailed upon him. He had been Mississippi's Senator and a former Secretary of War to Washington. He was a hero of the Mexican War, and though he was not a Fire-Eater, he was a uniting conservative of the Democratic Party. When he arrived by the cars to Montgomery, he was greeted on the Capitol steps by crowds of white people. There may have been a few slaves, but it wasn't their republic. He ascended the steps of the Capitol where he was embraced by the King of Fire-Eaters, plump little Alabama Senator William Lowndes Yancey. Never one to miss a good politicking, Senator Yancey grasped Jefferson Davis's arm and raised it high and called out to the crowd:

The man and the hour have met!

The crowds erupted! They played Dixie and paraded down Bibb Street singing the Bonnie Blue. Jefferson Davis was too grim a man to indulge himself in these jollities. The fate of this new Nation rest heavy upon his shoulders. So he took up a single office in the Exchange Hotel where the frosted glass door was crudely scrawled with the word - President. From this he would begin to craft the bureaucratic organs of this peculiar nation until, towards the end, he was a worse tyrant that Mr. Lincoln. Even the Fire Eaters would abandon him in time. But that was in the future, and after a great many trials.

As it were, Mr. Lincoln didn't even acknowledge or give credence to this rebel republic. In fact, he played dumb while the whole country had torn itself asunder. He was playing a very delicate game to keep what remained of the Union intact. As of yet, important border states had not yet seceded, like Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri and Kentucky. It was not war yet. It was a crisis of intransigence. Trade continued as usual. Travel between these two nations went unabated. To the concert of nations, who warily watched this bifurcation of a major commercial rival with interest, Jefferson Davis had this to say to elicit their sympathies.

All we ask is to be left alone!

Mr. Lincoln, who was endowed with the genius of patience, continued to wait out for the opportunity to goad the rebels into firing first, so as not to antagonize the Europeans. It soon came when a loyal Kentuckian by the name of Robert Patterson spiked the guns of Fort Moultrie and rowed his men for Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. There he refused all demands to give up his post as an officer of the United States. He was one of the precious few Union officers in the South who hadn't turned over their post to the rebel government. Most officers of the tiny pre-war army were Southerners.

And so that little creole general, P.G.T. Beauregard, gave the order for the batteries to fire on Fort Sumter. It was April 12, 1861. In the pre-dawn hours, a single 10-inch mortar creased a yellow arc through the sky where it burst like a firework over the fort. A few seconds later, the report echoed across Charleston Harbor. The crowds who had collected on the waterfront burst with joy and awe. The first shot of the war had been fired. It would not abate again for four more Aprils.

Back in the Nickajack, they kept the Union flag flying from the courthouses for some weeks after secession. The mountainous region had deep Whig roots with its large yeomanry and a growing burgher class. They were even horrified by the events of Fort Sumter. But what horrified them most of all was Mr. Lincoln calling up 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, for which Old Dixie had fired the first shot. No man of true republican instincts would possibly order soldiers to arms against his own citizens! These were the actions of a Tyrant! The Whigs had long been skeptical of executive power, and now here it was in its worst form. War against his own People!

It was then that Burnside Lee had rallied together the Athenian Hoplites, which became A Company, 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. Branse Havelock and William Marmaduke were part of this company. But the Athenian Hoplites were not the first to go battle. The most ardent Greek secessionists had formed the Limestone Grays under Theodore Hobbes even before Fort Sumter. They formed the F Company of the 4th Alabama Infantry Regiment. They got sent to Virginia. Included in that group was Branse Havelock's father, who was Branse Senior.

Whatever their personal motives were for joining, they rallied around the Cause, which was short for they had all been sold a bill of goods by the Fire Eaters. They had all bought into the Big Lie which drove the whole machine of slavery... that a black man wasn't good enough to be free or equal. So much so, that they all marched into all-but-certain death for that Big Lie.

But they would do it so with an uncommon valor.

XXXIII

Alabama declared Independence from the United States of America on January 11, 1861. Or so the document said. It went through on a vote of 61 to 39 among the delegates of the Secession Convention, which had convened in Montgomery. A young negro page had rushed out of the legislative chambers to announce it to the throng of citizens who gathered below the Capitol steps. Everyone erupted in cheers! Steamboats piped their horns as fireworks burst over the wharfs along the Alabama River. A torchlight ball in the open streets of Commerce Street where bands played Dixie. The flag of the United States was hauled down from the Capitol and replaced by the flag of the Bonnie Blue. This new flag snapped brightly below that of the flag of Alabama, now paramount among nations to these celebrants.

As it were, the delegates from the Nickajack were disgusted. Most of them had opposed secession against the radicals. They included youthful Greeks like William Marmaduke and Branse Havelock and Burnside Lee. Even Bourbon George was a hold out until the last moment when he threw in his lot with the secessionists. These radicals, who were branded the Fire-Eaters, felt they were inaugurating a new Second American Revolution. But it was wholly reactionary and lacked any of those fundamental humanistic merits embodied in the Spirit of '76. It was, quite simply, a dangerous and escalatory political ploy to protect the institution of slavery, Union be damned.

They called the present crisis the "Negro Quarrel," but it really meant war. It had been the inevitable trajectory of history that was arcing towards this moment, when the question of human bondage and its place in modern society must be settled. America would be all free, or it will be all slave, as Mr. Lincoln defined the quandary, but it would all be the same. And this he was prepared to do by the sword to keep the whole lot together, and the same as it were. And so the war came.

For the negroes in bondage, they knew something was up in the air. Very few among them had any idea about politics. Asking about it was taboo. Politics was impossible to grasp for the slave without any political agency to exercise it. But they did have the 'grapvine telegraph,' that vast diaphanous network of rumor and gossip that travelled across the landscape. Slaves who ran errands traded information in the towns with other slaves and white trash. And though slaves could not read the papers, the network originated with people who did, especially in Louisville, Kentucky. News travelled down with the railroad.

Jonas Jackson, who was called Big Jim Crow on account of the blackface minstrel ditty, learned about the secession as he was unloading a consignment of wood at Cottonport. He was a carpenter and slave for Lawrence Darby, a yeoman of Limestone County who owned 80 acres and four slaves. He didn't understand it anymore than the stevedore he exchanged the news with. When he returned home to his Master, however, he found him pale and looking rather shocked. He sat next to the fire place staring into the flaming pit.

Eveythang okay massa? Can I getchu somethin to drank?

He didn't answer, although Master Darby did look thoughtfully at Big Jim and pouted. Then he gently held Big Jim's wrist, which confused him. What he felt in this grasp was trepidation. It crept into him through his Master's hand. From it he sensed things were about to change. More than that, he sense upheaval and calamity. He also sensed death. All these things processed through his mind in no real order. But one thread remained constant among the babel of possibilities. It resolved itself into an infinite point of light. And in it, he sensed the spark of freedom.

XVI

Burnside Lee, being a Democrat of the Whig tradition, voted against secession. His family were Burghers of Athens who made their fortune on hardware and believed in internal improvements and high tariffs. Still, he owned twelve slaves and 150 acres at his plantation Cerro Gordo, which he had specially constructed in the Spanish style of a hacienda and named after the battle in which he never ceased to recount. He was a proud veteran of the Mexican War where he fought under a bright constellation of heroes like Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and U.S. Grant. He had brought home a senorita, Romina Delgado, who was dusky and exotic and domineering. He called her his esposita.

After Fort Sumter, when Lincoln called up his 75,000 to suppress the rebellion, he threw in his towel with the secessionists like most other Southern Whigs. He personally financed a company of volunteers in Limestone County and called them the "Athenian Hoplites." He even designed a uniform (grey with bronze epaulets) and armed them with the excellent 1841 Mississippi rifle. Several scions of the Greeks joined up, including Bill Marmaduke and Branse Havelock. They were sworn into the Confederate Army in Huntsville, Ala. as Company A of the 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. "With the Old Guard." Their commanding officer was a dashing young Georgian named Joseph Wheeler. He placed the colors into the hands of Burnside Lee who would lead Company A in battle - a blue field with a white border and the image of an ancient Greek hoplite sown into the center.

They rode the cars to Mobile where they spent the next nine months drilling in the invariably stifling air of the Gulf. Their sergeant major was a profane martinet who whipped them into the most parade-sharp company in the regiment. In the winter of '62, Fort Donelson on the Tennessee-Kentucky border fell to Grant's army. Nashville was abandoned and the Confederate Army was falling back into the Deep South. If the Hoplites were eager for action, they were soon obliged. They were shipped north to join the mighty army of General Albert Sydney Johnston then concentrating at Corinth, Mississippi. It was time to strike back.

Their target was the army of Ulysses S. Grant, who had disembarked at a place called Pittsburgh Landing on the Tennessee River, near the Shiloh Church. He intended to collect more reinforcements before advancing with superior numbers on Corinth. General Johnston decided to strike first, and his army sallied forth to smash into Grant's exposed position. The great Battle of Shiloh opened with a surprise attack on the Yankees as they were cooking their breakfast. A crescendo of fire and thunder alerted Grant to the danger and the Yankees dug their heels in and made the rebels pay for every yard of ground.

A rider rushed forward and gave a crisp salute to Burnside Lee and passed him a slip. Sir, you are hereby ordered by Colonel Wheeler to advance your company up the Savannah Road and drive the enemy from his position. It sounded simple enough. Only the courage was lacking, so Burnside Lee withdrew a flask and emptied it down his gullet. Then he withdrew his sword, nodded to the drummer boy and they all stepped off to the cadence of The White Cockade. The entire 19th Alabama surged forward towards a peach orchard on the left side of the Savannah Road.

Nobody could see the enemy. Peach blossoms were raining down like confetti from an incessant rain of shots. They sounded like bees. As they reached the firing line men started dropping. The wounds were grievous. Burnside could see the flash of muskets from behind the curtain of smoke that blanketed everything. He halted the company. Make ready! They checked their primers. Take aim! They levelled their muskets with a clacking sound. Fire! The line erupted with a flash and long stabs of smoke. Load! It took a long thirty seconds to load a musket. They repeated this business for fifteen minutes during which men continued to fall with troubling regularity. Nobody could tell if they were hitting anybody.

Whatever the effect of their shooting, the firing receded. The Yankees were falling back. They then advanced up the right side of a road and found a grove where they rested for an hour. Rations were brought up, but there was no water. A nearby pond was greased with too much offal and blood to drink. Firing was heard everywhere around them as they ate. The boys were shocked to find their ranks missing so many friends they knew. Rumors started going around that General Johnston was dead. They could believe it. The fighting had been a maelstrom of bullets flying everywhere. No one was safe from that. PGT Beauregard was in command now.

They made the final push to drive Grant into the Tennessee River towards dusk. Company A was mustered into line and sent forward again. This time the Yankees weren't driven back. They had massed ranks of cannon and threw thick black shot you could see into the Hoplites' ranks. The men were simply blown back, or torn to pieces. Exhausted, they broke into camp for the night. Old Bernie walked around encouraging his boys then retired to his tent to weep. No one slept because Yankee gunboats on the Tennessee kept throwing shells into their camp.

The next morning it wasn't even contest. Grant had been reinforced by the army of Don Carlos Buell and had counterattacked with overwhelming numbers. It was the Hoplites' turn to feel the pressure, and they gave in. They had lost too much blood. General Beauregard called for a retreat. The Battle of Shiloh was over. They slogged back south to Corinth where the hospitals were swamped with casualties.

It was time to take to stock of their losses. In its first action, Company A lost over half of its ranks. They mustered 122 before battle. When they returned to Corinth only 55 remained fit for duty. Burnside Lee was crestfallen. He had lost so many of his boys. For the Athenian Hoplites, Shiloh was only the beginning of a war that would arc across three more Aprils.

Map of the Franklin Campaign: Sept. - Dec. 1864

 

XIII

The sheriff was ushered into the study by a servant in white gloves where Burnside Lee was stooped over a large table by the light of a hundred candles. My eyes are going to s**t, he said without looking up. The table was crowded with hundreds of pewter toy soldiers and elaborately sculpted with plaster terrain. What battle is this, Bill asked? Rossbach. Frederick the Great's most magnificent victory! Bill had never heard of it, and worried Old Bernie would open into one of those ramblings-on about things that interested no one.

 
Instead, Burnside straightened up and took a puff of his cigar and studied Bill. You want something from me, he said. Forget it. You used to be one of us, Bill. A Republican? Your father would roll in his grave. You used to be a Democrat!

 
My father was a Whig. So were you before the war. You're not one of them, and they're not one of us. We served. We gave it all to the Cause, but whose Cause was it? It was theirs. It was Dr. Prentiss and the rest of those selfish philistines. The darkies are free, but the Greeks are all still grasping at reigns. Don't you see what's going on down there? He pointed in the direction of Strangetown. That's the new world down there.

 
Burnside looked off. Sighed. The world sure has changed, that's for sure. Now my coloreds are out there voting Republican. And here you are! Royal Bill! King of Strangetown!

 
He began to contemplate. We should have freed them long ago, he said distantly. It would have spared a good many of my boys.

 
Looking down at his toy soldiers he heard distant cannon fire from beyond time. It was the preliminary bombardment before Hood ordered them forward into the woods. It was a triumphant moment. He was colonel of the 19th Alabama leading his boys into the primeval dens of Chickamauga. They moved through the forest hallooing the old rebel yell as though flushing quail. Stabs of musketry and carnage. When it was over, they had broken through. The blue bellies were in flight.

 
When he had sobered up, his horse was dead, his leg was gone and his boys were shot to pieces. His war was over. The boys all still loved him though. Every veteran tipped their hat to Old Bernie. And he reveled in telling old war stories and boring tales of historical arcanum. Bill was right. The Greeks were not one of us.

Bill approached Bernie and looked very serious at him. I need you to keep me informed of what Prentiss and the Greeks are up to. I want you to be my spy on the inside. Can you do this?
Bernie looked mournful. A rivulet of tears ran down his cheek. He was weeping for them all. All of those beautiful boys lost. Bill was right about the Greeks and their "Cause." Bernie looked up as Bill stirred inside the leather pouch he had brought with him. He drew from it a shot-torn flag. It was blue rimmed with a white border. At its center was a seal sewn with the image of an ancient Greek hoplite. Inscribed upon it were the names of Shiloh, Stones River, Chickamauga and Franklin. A Company, 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. "With the Old Guard"

 
Bill pressed it into Bernie's hands, who was inconsolable. It was the colonel's first command. I kept it after the surrender, Bill said quietly. It's for you. The only cause now, old friend, is to get along with what's left. You'll do this for me, sir? For them? Burnside nodded yes.

With the Old Guard, Bill said.

Burnside Lee nodded again. With the Old Guard.

XII

William Stovall Marmaduke, Capt. CSA, bid farewell to friends, including Frank Gurley with whom he had grown close. He had ridden guerilla with him for over two years in the mountains of Jackson County, Ala. It was a difficult moment for Bill Marmaduke. He had fallen in love in these mountains, and had lost that love along the way in what seemed like another lifetime. He had to move on. Now great armies were on the move and mighty plans were afoot. The Confederate army of John Bell Hood set its sights on Nashville to cut off Sherman's army, which was then slashing and burning its way across Georgia towards the sea. So Bill joined back up with the old Army of Tennessee which was then marching its way west along the river near Gunter's Landing.

 
He was convinced to join by the appeals of a fellow Greek from Athens, Branse Havelock, who was then a Major on Hood's staff and with whom Bill had joined the Cause with. It was a warm reunion. Branse needed an old hand to take B Company of their old regiment, the 19th Alabama, so Bill obliged. His new company was a sorry sight but not because he doubted their courage. They seemed too young to shave, or make love, or to die. They looked like they were just pressed into the ranks straight from grammar school by the local home guard. So he drilled them for what he called "The Elephant," the din and terror of battle under which they must survive, and furthermore prevail. Bill discarded the manuals. Thrust your bayonet underhanded into the gut and tip your enemy over to the side, like bailing wet hay. Overhanded bayonet thrusts tended to strike and lodge in the ribs. There is no shame in laying down under fire, particularly from artillery. Shots float high when firing downhill, so aim at the enemy’s waist.

 
While the army was encamped at Tuscumbia, Bill was sent on a secret errand to occupied Limestone County by Branse to gather more recruits, and where General Hood believed enthusiasm for the Cause was still strong. He was wrong. Bill met clandestinely with Dr. Prentiss and the other Greeks. He found them nothing better than Yankee collaborators. Instead of growing corn to feed the starving countryside, they grew cotton and sold it North. He was disgusted. They didn't bother asking about the substitutes they had hired for themselves to avoid conscription. They would have learned they were all dead.

 
Bill felt stung by the indifference of his fellow Greeks. He had served. He had hired no substitute. His plantation was in disrepair and abandoned by its slaves. He was most probably in financial ruin, though he had no idea. He hadn't been home since he joined in the Cause, and didn't go back just then learning Yankees were quartered there. When he returned to B Company, he cursed the Greeks as selfish traitors. They had all voted for secession, but did nothing for the war effort except pay off a $300 substitute to catch a bullet in the chest for them. He had seen it all happen too. They were buried all over Tennessee and Georgia.

 
When the cold November rains came, Hood's army crossed the river at Muscle Shoals and invaded Tennessee. The boys of B Company, 19th Alabama began their long slog north looking for a fight. The Yankees, fearing defeat in piecemeal, abandoned their outposts in the Nickajack and concentrated north towards the Duck River, just south of Franklin. But now that the Yankees had abandoned Athens, Bill Marmaduke wondered whether Hood should not turn east and sack the Greeks on the Hill instead.

VI

Licinius Mordecai Prentiss, Doctor Divinitatis, President of the Athens Theological Seminary. Prim and pencil thin, smooth shaven. He read Matthew with love, and Plato with passion. He lived in his mansion on Beaty Street called Parthenon. Now he was being harangued at his desk by his fellow Greek petitioners. These elite few gathered around him like Olympus Mons. What were they going to do about Strangetown? There are illegal whiskies and ladies-of-the-night down there. There are Republicans and transvestites. There are negroes with guns, although they did not say it like that. Dr. Prentiss’s normally steadfast patience snapped. Enough!!

 
The Democratic Party of Limestone County was dominated by the Greeks of Athens. They were for the most part the planter elite and ran it like a machine with Dr. Prentiss as the chairman. Even when the Union army occupied the town early in the war, they remained surly and obstreperous. That is until the mad Russian Ivan Turchininov descended on Athens and sacked it like the Muscovite he was. That was in the Spring of ‘62. The Greeks became pretty docile after that. In fact, they collaborated with the Yankee power to preserve their status. They sold cotton up North in exchange for real money. Formerly ardent secessionists, they were now flexible opportunists. But while they adjusted to gradual emancipation by paying their former slaves, there were already cracks in the edifice. Freedmen were pouring into town from the countryside. They took up residence along Town Creek in a ‘contraband camp,’ which is a rude word for a place of refuge. When the Yankees started paying them real money to dig forts along the Decatur & Nashville railroad, word got around. The Greeks were losing their freedmen workers. They were moving into Strangetown. That just will not do!

 
For Dr. Prentiss, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment turned crisis for the party’s hold on power. Suddenly thousands of negroes had the right to vote, and who did they vote for? They voted for the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself. They voted Republican! The Greeks blinked and did nothing. They had grossly underestimated the surge of political muscle this voting bloc suddenly brought to the polls. When elections came and went, the Democrats were flabergasted to find a Republican was now in control of the most powerful office in Limestone County - Sheriff. They thanked their heavens he was white. But my god? What if he had been black? The possibility terrified the Democrat elites, and so they slowly and surely drew their plans against the source of this new power – Strangetown.

V

The Darlings of Strangetown all loved “Royal Bill” Marmaduke, Sheriff of Limestone County. The man was a living legend, and a deep thorn in the side of the Greeks. He was a Republican. Among their councils on the Hill they sneered him as a scallawag, traitor to his class, traitor to his race. But he was a war hero. He swore his oath to the Confederacy in Huntsville, Alabama and mustered into the 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. He fought under Fighting Joe Wheeler at Shiloh with the 19th Alabama, and rode as a guerilla fighter with his friend Frank Gurley, who became Sheriff of Madison County. When John Bell Hood invaded Tennessee in the winter of ’64, he came down out of Hurricane Valley to fight with the 19th Alabama one last time. When he mustered back in, there wasn’t anybody left he knew. And when he fought at Franklin, he lost all the new friends he’d made too. He was a changed man after all that. But that’s a whole another story.

 
He ran on the Republican ticket, which was roundly viewed with cynicism by his fellow Greeks and suspicion by Strangetown. Maw Possum brought in the colored vote and helped elect Limestone County’s first Republican. Royal Bill ran down the Klan’s operations out of Dogwood Flats while getting his take out of Strangetown’s tables. The Klan was bad enough. There were a lot of people coming home from the war with everything gone, and then being told it’s the negro’s fault, it’s the Yankees’ fault. They’re told that they might have lost everything, but at least they are still white and they should be grateful. And people actually believed that stuff and joined the Klan because they just ate it up. The Klan’s problem was that most of them were stupid, but they provided a pool of useful idiots for the real enemy of Strangetown.

Adelphon Kuklos was a secret society of absolute white terrorists. They were a committed few willing to do violence on their fellow man for a white world. No one knew who its members were. Rumors and gossip abound about the AK. They controlled the Klan from the shadows, and possibly the Greeks themselves. All anyone really knew is that Royal Bill Marmaduke shot one of them dead saving the life of Drake Shoney down in Belle Mina. The Adelphon Kuklos had strung Shoney up by the noose when Royal Bill pulled out his Navy Colt and shot down a figure in a scarlet robe as the others fled. No one recognized the man who Royal Bill shot, and the investigation into this curious episode is a story for another time.
After that, Royal Bill grew beloved in Strangetown. He had taken on the terrorists himself. His popularity snowballed from there. He ran parades and rodeos and raced wagons around the track. The crowds in Strangetown cheered Royal Bill who rode along like a king on his wagon. He became a powerful political force that was resented by the Greeks, admired by The Major, and profitable to Maw Possum.

II

Growing up in Limestone County and around the city of Athens you might have heard stories about Strange Street. It don’t run but a hundred yards or so across the Town Creek floodplain near downtown Athens. About the only thing its known for today is a place to drop off your cable bill. But back during Reconstruction it was known as Strangetown.

They were heady times then. Everyone was glad the war was over. The Yankees came down and brought real money. Life was coming back. There was a new promise in the air, and nowhere was that promise felt more vibrantly than in Strangetown. There was music again. It was in those years lined with shacks and cathouses, saloons and a racktrack. It was looked askance by the folks on the Hill who lived in columned mansions, and whom the folks of Strangetown called the Greeks. It was a hot bed of sin and generally disapproved of behavior, but also a wellspring of Republican votes.

Strangetown was run by three power brokers then. There was Maw Possum, a former slave and hero of the Underground Railroad before settling into Strangetown. Supposedly she ran a wide network of rackets across town. And then there was “Royal Bill” Marmaduke, who was a hero of the Army of the Tennessee and who became the Republican sheriff. All the game tables paid up to him while he kept down the Klan, who ran their own red light outfit down in Dogwood Flats. Then there was Brother Pruitt, who loved Jesus and ate and walked with the coloreds, but to whom every one paid up anyway on account of their guilty consciences. Most folks in Athens don’t think about all that went down in Strangetown, probably because its so seldom heard of. I'll see if I can't dig up more stories from this fascinating time in Limestone County, Ala.