A Journey Beyond Innocence: A Novel

By Jim Herod

William Stone had a plan for his life. He would marry Olivia Moore, practice medicine in Selma, Alabama, and expand his love of creating anatomical drawings. The Battle of Shiloh in April, 1862 changed those plans. When a Tennessee newspaper brought news of an approaching Union Army, William decided to travel north. He would offer his assistance as a medical officer under the command of John Hunt Morgan. William arrived in Middle Tennessee in time to participate in the Battle of Hartsville. A Union garrison had set up camp around the Averitt House and in the valley below. Morgans forces crossed the Cumberland River before the Union troops had finished their morning coffee on December 7. After capturing the Union brigade and supplies, the Confederated soldiers re-crossed the river completing their mission just prior to the arrival of a larger Union army. William Stone chose to stay in the Averitt house. He would provide care for the wounded soldiers from both sides of the conflict. From there, he would face the brunt of anger incurred by this Union defeat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467849623

Jim Herod

Jim Herod was raised in an enchanted place a little south of Selma, Alabama. He was educated at the University of Alabama and the University of North Carolina. For thirty-five years, he told stories about science and mathematics at Georgia Tech, the University of Montana, the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the University of Karlsruhe. There was another story that needed to be told. It was the story of the young Confederate soldier who bled on the floor of the house known in Hartsville, Tennessee,as the Averitt-Herod House. It would be the story ofa journey by a young man too innocent to anticipate what could happen on the battlefields and in the prisons during the War Between the States. Herod now lives and writes from the edge of The Nethermost in Grove Hill, Alabama.

Book preview

The Plantation 

April 26, 1935 

I heard my profanity echo up the stairwell, through the halls, and into the empty rooms. No one heard my cry in what we had called The Plantation House – no one except maybe family ghosts. Ghosts of three cousins would have laughed at my show of rage. Ghosts of three cousins? Probably, there were four.

Had my grandmother been there, she would have put her hands on her hips and scolded. I could hear what she would say, and it made me laugh. Such language, young man, she would have said, is a sign of a limited vocabulary.

Grandfather would have taken my side. Hush, Olivia. He’s just got wildness in him. A boy has gotta have some wildness if he’s gonna ever be a man. I had heard Grandfather say those very words.

I was not a boy anymore, but I wouldn’t care if he called me a boy. I wished he had been there to say those things. He wasn’t, and I was tired. Exasperated, actually. I was exasperated because the last drawer in grandfather’s walnut table was stuck.

My suitcase had been packed and was sitting against the wall beside two full crates. The crates were filled with the remnants of my grandfather’s life as an artist. There were brushes, tins of colored powder, musty old books, and bits of broken pottery. Three easels stood like bare skeletons near the windows. Two high stools on which grandfather had sat as he painted were on top of the crates. And, there was a jumble of pillows and sheets crumpled on a mattress.

There was more. There was the chair in which I was sitting and the table with one drawer stuck half open.

I yanked again. Open sesame, damn it!

It didn’t.

I leaned back in my chair and propped my feet on the table. I could just close the damn thing and call it quits.

I knew that Jessie would be coming with my supper soon. She and Arthur had come on the train four days earlier. The two of them had finished their part in preparing the house to be sold. Each night, they went down the hill to stay with Jessie’s brother’s family. I offered to go down with them, but she said no. Instead, she’d walk back up the hill with my supper plate and with a jug of cold, sweet tea. I’d eat while looking out the wall of windows as the sun was setting. Darkness would creep up from the river. Fireflies would be signaling down along the water’s edge. The only sounds would be those of crickets and the empty house creaking and groaning as it and I remembered the family.

Yeah, memories. Those memories were part of the melancholy I had felt all weekend.

Jessie, Arthur, and me – the three of us were ready to go home, to say goodbye to The Plantation, to put away the memories that stirred in every corner of the house.

Jessie and Arthur had cleaned the upstairs rooms, while Jessie’s brother and I packed dishes and moved furniture to the front foyer. Two trucks would come on Monday to take all the furnishings of the house to Selma’s auction barn.

Each morning, I’d walk out onto the porch and watch the sun play with the fog down along the river. I wanted grandfather to be there with me on those mornings. We would have watched one more time as the fog ebbed and stirred. Without speaking, he would have pointed to smoke rising from the house below the hill, mixing with the river fog, giving confirmation that breakfast would be coming.

I’d be dressed before breakfast arrived.

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My mother always called Grandfather’s studio The Lair. It was no family secret that Charlotte Stone didn’t like being at The Plantation. I’d known this forever. I didn’t have to be told, but dear sister Esther enjoyed reminding me that she was older and wiser. You know why she doesn’t like our Granddaddy Stone? Esther had asked me when I was six or seven. Because he used to go off and leave our grandmamma. Grandmamma had to take care of everything, she’d say. Granddaddy always said he had to do his paintings. Mama thought he should stay home with Grandmamma and do all his painting and stuff at home.

Never mind the recognition and praise that grandfather got for his paintings. Our mother really didn’t appreciate all that. Well, not until the paintings went up for sale.

As long as Grandmother Stone lived, she had The Plantation’s tenants keep the meadow down toward the river cleared. She called it The Nethermost. The memory of the fun we cousins had in that meadow still causes me to smile. When we were little we would run and play down in the gardens. I shot my first deer down in The Nethermost; Grandfather was sitting beside me, and he roared with laughter.

In the summers, Daddy would take Esther and me to spend a week or so at The Plantation. It was a big celebration when we arrived on the train in Selma. Two buggies would be waiting. Esther and I would ride with Grandfather as he took us to The Plantation. Daddy never went with us to The Plantation the first night. I never paid any attention to that. Only later did I learn that he would spend that first night at the Albert Hotel in Selma.

Our buggy was hardly away from the curb in front of the Selma train depot when the pavement on Water Street came to an end. After the end of the pavement, it was a dirt road splitting right through the middle of cotton fields. Over to the right, across the fields, there was a line of oak trees growing beside the river. Esther would point to them, nudge me with her elbow and say the same words every time, The river, Robert. The Alabama River. I knew that, but I’d nod and let her say it again.

In the early fall, the smell along the road would be of rows of damp, black dirt and of dry clusters of white cotton waiting to be picked.

Daddy would arrive at The Plantation the next day. Back, before I was ten years old, I’d be waiting on the porch looking for his coming in Uncle Thomas Carter’s Model T-Ford. I was waiting because I knew the three Carter cousins would also be in that automobile. Those cousins filled the meadow below the house with their shouts of what I took to be just their fun, but it was more than fun. It was the joy of being a bunch of rowdy boys, all of us having a love of adventure. We were young and innocent before 1915.

My memory of those summer days before The Great War hardly included Esther. After two or three days at The Plantation, she and daddy would go back to Selma for visits with the Carter family: Aunt Lillian, Uncle Thomas, and Cousin Agnes. Whenever I asked Esther what daddy did in Selma, she’d say she didn’t know. Mother always asked too. Esther would say that daddy stayed downtown at the Albert Hotel. She stayed with Aunt Lillian. We had our own fun. That’s what she would say.

Whatever their fun was in Selma, I was sure that it did not compare with the fun of being with our Carter Cousins at The Plantation. Even though they were older, they took me into their care and made me a part of their romps.

I wanted to grow up to be just like those cousins. I wished I had brothers who would be with me like those three boys were with each other. With them, there was always a rough and tumble, an enjoyment of being a boy, an enjoyment of being in the country.

All that was good about the place was gone too soon. Daddy died when I was eleven. Mother decided we should move from Clarke County down to Mobile. There, we’d be near her parents.

All three of the Carter Cousins were caught up in The Great War. One was killed in France. Another came home briefly, and then left for California. Sam Carter, the youngest, lost a leg in Europe. Two years after the war, he disappeared in what was said to be a fishing accident on the Alabama River down below The Plantation House.

Grandmother Olivia Moore Stone died with influenza in 1921. After that, no one tended the meadow, and it grew up in briars.

Grandfather lived alone in the big house for a while. The acclaim he had received because of his paintings was over. The walls of the house held the best, but the loneliness of living alone at The Plantation took its toll.

Mother tried to get an overseer to keep the place going, but farms were failing all over the south in 1931. She persuaded Aunt Lillian Carter that they should sell the paintings and that Grandfather Stone should come live in Mobile. In the fall of 1934, Aunt Lillian finally agreed. The paintings were sold first. The Plantation would be next.

There was nearly eighteen hundred and fifty acres in the estate with some of the best cotton land in Dallas County. A lawyer in Selma agreed to make all the arrangements. I was chosen to prepare the house for sale. The first announcement of the estate sale went in Sunday’s edition of the Selma Times Journal the week before I came to clear the house.

The farm and the house were ready to show. Well, except, there was this one drawer in the walnut table that was stuck.

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I knew there had to be some reason why this drawer would not come open all the way. I slid my arm into the drawer to try to find what was holding it half open. That’s when I felt the peg. I caught the wooden peg with my fingernails and yanked it free. The cabinet maker who made this table figured that whoever tried to open this drawer would give up before getting it open completely. I almost did. The design was that the peg would catch on the frame of the table, keeping the drawer from opening all the way, hiding a secret compartment.

There was only one object in the compartment. For a moment I stared at the pouch wondering what Grandfather chose to hide. First guess was that it would be a wad of Confederate money.

A simple knot of rawhide held the moldy pouch closed. Inside it was a canvas bag also held closed by a rawhide string. I untied the last knot. That’s where I found the rolled canvas.

I cleaned the table top with a wipe of my hand and carefully unrolled the canvas. It was the painting of a house, a house on a hill. It was not this house, not The Plantation house.

Four books: that’s what would be needed, four books to hold the canvas flat. It didn’t take long to get the canvas spread.

For a moment, I stood, examining the painting. Then, I turned, walked to the wall of windows, and stared out into the woodland. It was a quiet question I spoke aloud while standing by the windows, Grandfather, what’s this all about? I didn’t recall ever having seen this painting or of hearing anyone talk of a painting of a house on a hill.

I figured there was nothing to do except to go see him when I went back to Mobile. I’d ask why this one was left, why it was rolled, why it was stored back in the hidden compartment of the old table. What was the story? Maybe Grandfather would remember. Maybe he would be willing to tell me. Grandfather would need to tell the story soon before its meaning was lost. There was a chance that the significance of the house was already forgotten, lost somewhere in grandfather’s silence.

I knew better than to tell mother about finding a lost painting by Grandfather. Another painting by William Logan Stone would bring a