Confederates

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Confederates

A Novel

Thomas Keneally

Prologue

In the second year of the war, Mrs Ephephtha Bumpass saw her husband Usaph unexpectedly one cold March night. This happened way over in the great Valley of Virginia on a night of bitter frost. Usaph had come knocking on the door of the Bumpass family farm near the fine town of Strasburg and, when the door opened, he was the last person she expected to see.

At the time, she was sitting at the kitchen hearth with the old slave Lisa and the fourteen-year-old boy of a neighbour called Travis. Mr Travis had lent her the boy to do chores for her and to keep her company. Ephie Bumpass had been married some sixteen months up to that point and had lived all those sixteen months on this highland farm in the shadow of Massanutten Mountain. But Bumpass had met and wooed her in a very different country from this. She'd been raised down in the Carolinas, in the torpid swamps round the mouth of the Combahee River. Her father had been a drum fisherman there and it was all the world she knew till Usaph brought her up here to Virginia.

On that March night in the second year of the war, before Usaph got to the door and knocked on it, Ephie had been finding the sight of the Travis boy there by the fire distressing. It reminded her of what Travis, neighbour to the Bumpasses, had said to her when he assigned her the boy. ‘I'll send my boy to chop the wood an' keep you company. For whatever else you need you can call on me.' Saying it he'd touched her wrist in a way you couldn't misunderstand. ‘You are a rose, Mrs Bumpass. You are a red rose up here in this valley of lilies. Are you perhaps one of them Creoles or some such?'

Travis's hints weren't any comfort to her. She knew men wanted her, men always had, bargemen and fishermen and parties of gentry her daddy used to take out drum fishing in his boat. Usaph's
own
uncle, overseer on the Kearsage place down in the Carolinas, while sickening for his death, had desired and had her – in spite of the state of his health – before she ever met Usaph. That fact and others stung her soul like a tumour. It would be hard to say where she got the idea that to be wanted was to be the bearer of a disease. Her daddy had sometimes taken river wives who all talked as if to be desired was the best and only fate a woman could wish. Up to that night in the second year of the war, the only man who had ever wanted her without making her feel accursed was Usaph Bumpass. The war she saw as a case of God making her pay for the sweetness and redemption that came to her in Usaph's presence – as simple as that. There wasn't anything in her life history to put that idea in her head either, the idea about having to pay. She was just born with it.

And so she sat by the fire of the Bumpass family farm which she'd only known these sixteen months since she'd wed Bumpass, and all she had to sit with was deaf old Lisa and the boy, and out in a corner of a nearby meadow Usaph's father, Mr Noah Bumpass, dead a year, slept under the frosted earth. And her womb, as on each quiet evening, wept for Bumpass.

When Usaph Bumpass knocked on the door that night it sounded such a flat neighbourly knocking that she didn't expect anything of it, and so sent the fourteen-year-old to answer it. There was Bumpass standing in the doorway. He wore a waterproof blanket over his shoulders, and his long musket hit sharply against the door jamb. Both his hair and his skin looked like the smoke of all the fires he'd sat at these past few months had changed them for good.

She couldn't believe this gift that had turned up on her doorstep. Old Lisa, who still had a clear head at that stage, recognised the boy she'd known from babyhood and began to laugh and praise God in a withered voice. ‘Why I jest knew the Lord would give these poor ole bones one sight more of the boy,' she sang. And in the doorway Usaph and Ephie crushed each other and chewed at each other's lips for a full minute. The fourteen-year-old thought it was a fine thing to watch.

‘Well,' Ephie said in the end, with snatches of breath. ‘Well … how come you here, Usaph?' She ran a finger down the fraying edge of his jacket and over the coarse-stitched blue patches on his collar.

‘It's cos of Winchester, Ephie.'

‘Winchester?'

‘Winchester's gone, Ephie.'

‘Winchester?' she repeated. It was but a morning's ride north of Strasburg.

‘When we left this morning,' said Usaph, ‘there was people weeping in the streets. But there ain't no avoiding it. Them Yankees are over to Berryville and they're over the Ridge as well.'

Ephie looked about the kitchen as if the enemy could be expected to turn up here at any moment.

‘No, no,' Usaph said, laughing at her. ‘Them Lincoln boys has a need to rest at night, same as us mortals.'

Jackson's army, he told her, was settled down for the night some three or four miles up the road, in the cold meadows astride the Valley turnpike. Usaph had just gone up and had a talk to his officer, a pleasant dentist called Guess, and had explained how his wife was on her own at Strasburg, no male slave to help her out, no Bumpass senior, only a sick old slave woman. He'd said he wanted to help her put the horse in the dray and to set her travelling southwards towards his Aunt Sarrie Muswell's in Bath County.

So Guess had let him go, but said he had to take a reliable man with him. That was pretty wise of Guess. A husband might decide to stay with his wife and ride with her all the way south. But the husband's friend would say, no you can't do that, you must get back to camp.

‘Why,' said Usaph, remembering, ‘I fetched my friend Mr Gus Ramseur along with me.' He pointed out into the dark by the woodpile.

‘Good evening, Mrs Bumpass,' called Gus in his half-Dutchy accent. She saw Gus's quiet grin, and his greeting steamed up into the cold air. She could tell he was a gentleman and scholar, like Usaph said in his letters.

‘Why, come in, Mr Ramseur. Usaph's told me a heap about your cleverness.'

Gus entered the kitchen, walking dainty as a dancer past the couple in the doorway. And now Usaph came in properly, setting his musket against the butter churn so that the door could be closed and the perilous night kept out.

Ephie surveyed Gus Ramseur, who even in his dirty clothes and his stained state moved and stood like a man who was used to working indoors. Orderly little steps. Ephie thought he was a fine friend for her spouse, the sort of friend Usaph deserved.

The old slave still sat with her mouth agape, grinning, her hand up palm-outwards to touch either of the soldiers. Gus Ramseur nodded towards her. She made one of those strange black noises no white could ever fully understand.

‘I met ole Travis in town,' Usaph told Ephie. ‘There's a big crowd at Main and Bank, discussing all the rumours – and Travis is among 'em. They goddam quizzed Gus and me, I can tell you that much. Ain't it so, Gus? They quizzed us?'

‘You got profane in that-there army, my love,' said Ephie. But then she laughed.

‘Travis says he ain't leaving Strasburg no matter if the armies of Hell arrive. He says he'll mind our hogs and the milch cow – and he will, he'll do it for the memory of my daddy.…'

‘Mind the hogs, Usaph? I bin minding the hogs like they was Christian souls.…'

‘I ain't complaining of your care for my pigs, darlin' Ephie. But I mean to put you on the road for Aunt Sarrie's and you're to tell her that as she loved her brother and as she loves me her nephew, she's to care for you.…'

‘This-here house?' Ephie said, still standing, still held by Usaph. She put out her hand and touched the hot stonework of the house. ‘This-here house?' she asked again in a voice he could only pity.

For Ephie had a crazy idea of the Bumpass house. It was nothing more than a white frame farm dwelling of the kind you find every two hundred paces up and down the Valley. But it was more of a house than she ever expected to own, and now a harsh God was asking her to pay it up too.

‘You can come back to it in the proper season,' Usaph whispered.

‘Cain't they be held, Usaph? Cain't they …?'

‘Oh, Ephie. Banks … he has hisself some five divisions of goddam New Yorkers and other similar trash jest up there in Martinsburg.'

‘Martinsburg?' she asked again, the way she'd asked
Winchester?
earlier. She'd gone to market in both towns. How could there be five divisions of New Yorkers in a place she'd gone to market? ‘What will them slum-boys do to my kitchen?' she asked.

Usaph and Gus Ramseur looked at each other. Then Usaph decided it was best not to answer that. ‘You jest be sure you pack all your clothes, Ephie Bumpass,' he told her with a false, jovial gruffness. ‘Both the winter and the summer style, gal, for I wish you to stun the goddam gentry down there in Bath.'

‘I'll take the boy, Usaph,' Gus Ramseur suddenly called, thoughtful, scratching his tangled blond head. ‘We'll put the horse in the shafts.'

Usaph went a kind of red beneath his smoked face. ‘Obliged, Gus. I'll jest help Mrs Bumpass out with her oddments.'

Somehow Gus found the task of harnessing the horse to the dray hard enough to keep himself and the boy out in the freezing barn for a good hour. Ephie and Usaph left Lisa sleeping by the fire – too deaf to know the journey that was ahead. Upstairs Ephie made little complaining noises at the buttons that were stiff. She seemed to have forgotten the immediate threat of Yankeedom. She was undressed and trembling in the cold sheets while Usaph, his shivering buttocks facing her, sponged himself with a rag dipped in a pitcher of water. ‘I don't have no camp lice,' he said, turning to her, spreading his arms innocently. ‘Only them filthy Irishmen in the 5th Virginia has got body lice. It takes an Irishman to pick up lice in the winter.'