Confederates (14 page)

The air in front of their picket post, above the gentle pastures, was a deep smoky blue when Usaph and the others took their post amongst hawthorn and sumac. The moon would rise early tonight. Lucius Taber, the new officer and former Immutable, went along the line shooshing people who knew better than he did how to be quiet. Soon he left, he had to go back and dine with Colonel Wheat, and low, low talk began, since the veterans knew talk didn't carry so far. It was the sound of disturbed underbrush that carried.

Usaph knew you had to talk to stop boredom getting you. He was damn sure he wouldn't talk to Cate.

‘What's your name, son?' Usaph asked the boy three yards on the other side of him.

‘Joe Nunnally,' the boy hissed. He hadn't moved anything like seven paces off. Maybe he was scared.

‘You a substitute, Joe Nunnally? You get a few hundred dollars from a rich boy?'

The boy didn't answer. ‘I ain't asking for the sake of meanness, boy. I'm jest curious.'

Close to Usaph's other side, Decatur Cate started murmuring. ‘If he's a substitute, it means he's taken blood money. If he's a mere conscript, why he's a coward or a Lincoln-lover. You can't expect people, Mr Bumpass, to answer questions if there's no benefit in any of the answers they can give.'

Usaph coughed in an irritable way and spat and didn't reply.

The boy said, ‘I'm a substitute. What of it? $200? That ain't goddam likely. Sixty I got from a lawyer's son over to Raleigh County.'

Usaph whispered: ‘That ain't what the papers say you ought to get, Joe Nunnally.'

‘I don't read no papers.'

‘Sixty ain't much.'

‘It is to my maw.'

‘Coming from over to Raleigh, you'd be one of them black Republicans like some other people,' Usaph stated. He still would not include Cate in the talk. As for looking, he looked all the time at the hills before him, without even thinking about it, and Nunnally found himself doing the same, since he believed this must be veteran's behaviour and everything veterans did – he supposed – was aimed at avoiding death.

‘Maybe I am one of them black Republicans,' he said. ‘But then maybe I jest got hungry kin. The hungry don't give a hoot about no politics.'

Usaph laughed soundlessly. Here he stood with a Yankee picket either side of him. That's what conscription had done, put a Northerner on one flank and one of those Union-loving boys from the western counties on the other. If Lincoln or McClellan could know that tonight, how they'd laugh over their goddam brandy.

But these political thoughts of Bumpass's, the amusement they gave his mind, were a mere surface thing. The deep tumour, the question that wouldn't cease its throb, was still whether Ephie had lain with his dead Uncle, that dead boozy man who had engineered Ephie and him together, and now whether Cate had dazzled and possessed her.

Guess walked behind them and said one man in three could rest.

‘Cate,' Usaph said in the edges of that thicket.
And may your dreams reek, and may snakes rise from them!

Cate went without a word, but Usaph believed that he was smiling in the dark.

Virginia, as Usaph Bumpass had learnt, was a mass of clearings cooped off one from the other by thickets. The moon rose and lit up the particular thicket beyond the field that Usaph and Joe Nunnally faced. You could hardly hear anything from the other pickets and the only shuffling was the busy shuffling paws of raccoons and possums all around you, and the only real buzz was the buzz of insects.

Usaph and Joe Nunnally didn't say anything for some fifteen minutes. Then Joe Nunnally coughed. ‘If they come – I only ask – if they come, they'll be on horses?'

Usaph smiled at the moon. ‘That's how they'll be, Joe.'

‘I only ask,' said Joe.

There was more silence, though Nunnally twitched somewhat. Usaph knew Joe Nunnally would be all the time sighting phantom horsemen amongst the far shadows and then screwing up his eyes and finding them to be illusions.

‘Joe,' said Usaph after a further time.

‘Yessah.'

‘You know, it's shaping to be over by Christmas. All them knowledgeable people will tell you that.'

‘That's the best news since the dog whelped.'

‘So there's something I mean to ask, Joe. See, I got this nice wife to get home to. Now you wouldn't ever run and leave a man like me, would you, Joe? Not between now and Christmas, would you?'

But Joe wouldn't say.

‘Well, Joe?'

‘Well, I suppose no one runs from them that've got kind words. But how do I know? To be blamed cowards is men's nature, that's what Preacher Hinton's always telling us out to Raleigh County.'

‘Well, Joe?'

‘How can I make any such promise, Mr Bumpass?' Joe Nunnally groaned, his eyes fixed too hard on the distant end of the moonlit pastures. ‘Why, I don't even know what it's like …'

There, Usaph thought, there's a good honest will there. There might be good enough and honest enough wills in the lot of them conscripts.

Usaph had first gone into what people liked to call a ‘pitched' or ‘organised' battle on an afternoon in April near the village of Kernstown. From it alone he knew Joe Nunnally was correct to consider battle a mysterious event that could take you in any direction.

The afternoon of Kernstown all the thoughts that were supposed to steel a soldier's heart were operating on Private Usaph Bumpass. Only the day before, the Confederates had entered Strasburg again, the town from which Mrs Ephie Bumpass had been driven six weeks before. Kernstown was just up the road from Strasburg. Usaph Bumpass was fighting for his own meadows and for the graves of his father and mother. Compared to any Yankee, to whom this stretch of the Valley was just a stretch of valley, he should have been firm and ferocious and mad with outrage.

What Usaph Bumpass learned that afternoon in fact was that there wasn't always much difference between the standfast and the man who ran. Even though presidents and colonels and preachers tried to tell you otherwise, the standfast and the runner were often the same man on different days or at a different hour. So from two to three o'clock in the afternoon of the battle he had moved up a ridge near Kernstown, found a stone fence to stand at beside his fellows, stood there from three to half past five against whole brigades of Union soldiers and was resolute enough to take cartridges out of the boxes of the fallen, and then spent most of the last hour of light scrambling, if not running, back down towards the waggons near the pike.

Usaph had, before that afternoon, experienced brief skirmishes, and he thought that a battle would be just a skirmish times five or ten. But he had not been ready for the real elements of battle – the cannon shrieks, the feel of the air when it is raddled with musket balls and you feel that if you sniff you'll breathe one in. You could not ready yourself for the wild varieties of damage men suffered or the range of grunts and groans and roars they uttered. You couldn't picture to yourself beforehand the thirst or the sort of terrible daze you stayed in while you held a line of fence, or the speed you'd panic with. You couldn't guess the craziness with which you might roar up towards artillery if ordered to or the equal craziness with which you'd run. And you couldn't most of all imagine how it was to live through your first battle and look back on it.

It was said most boys who shot themselves did it after their first battle. They did it because they felt accursed; like – in the manner of ole Macbeth in the well-known play – they had murdered sleep.

The night of Kernstown – which people now, only a season later, talked of as a ‘small fite' – Usaph walked back some five miles south to Middletown. He was crazy with tiredness but his eyes were locked open. Unsprung ambulance waggons trampled past him, and blood dropped through the floorboards and made the road muddy, while the boys inside called awesome things. ‘In sweet Christ's name, a bullet, a bullet!' ‘Jesus, put me by the road to die.' Usaph Bumpass felt that night like the ordinary world of farms and girls and steeples and milk-churns had been carried away for good. He believed no soldier could ever see God's face. He was as terrified of the stars and of Gus Ramseur at his side as he was of any cavalry that might burst on him out of the oak woods. And he believed that if ever he were to be sane again and to have half a minute's happiness he had to desert and flee a great distance towards the land of bees and babies and old men in cane chairs, towards the land of Ephie.

‘I tell you what, Mr Bumpass, sir,' Joe Nunnally said now. ‘I'll do what I can by you, that's the best I can say.'

‘You're one honest boy, Joe,' said Usaph. And after that they spoke little.

Later in the night Cate was roused up and Joe went to sleep. Cate took up his scarecrow stance amongst the low trees. Usaph was glad it was not one of the artist's talkative nights. Even so, Cate's presence was itself sort of a loud torment and Usaph's eyes kept coming back to the man's shape and to the side of his face all blue from the moonlight.

That way an hour passed. At one time Usaph hunkered for a period. At another he urinated against a tree. Joe Murphy brought them each a mug of acrid, stewed coffee, and they drank it without talking. The moon was so high now that the meadow ahead seemed bright as a ballroom and someone with a watch passed on the word that the time was past one in the morning, as if he was saying nothing can happen at such an hour and under such a wide flood of moonlight.

About that time, Usaph got drowsy and jolted upright when he found a hand on his elbow. Cate's.

‘You get back, Cate.'

‘I thought you was about to fall, Bumpass.'

‘Then that would be my own concern, wouldn't you say?'

Cate nodded and swallowed and studied the other man's face, the features so familiar now that they could have been those of a hated brother. But Cate didn't feel any particular hate tonight, or the need to make bright, bitter talk, even though Bumpass, around the mouth anyhow, resembled that old bitch of an aunt of his.

At the moment Cate was just pleased that the night was going on so harmless and bright, that the hour hadn't come when he had to fire on the Union or choose sort of conspicuously not to.

‘Let's settle this,' Usaph said. ‘You going back or not?'

‘Before I go back,' said Cate, ‘there's this information you should have about me.'

‘Goddam!' Usaph muttered. But he was thinking,
Information? Is this where I'm told? Is this where he poisons the goddam earth?
And he knew that if it was that kind of information, then he would have to shoot Cate, there could be no help for it, and that that act would sour everything. ‘What goddam information would I need of you?'

Cate stared at him. Usaph couldn't tell whether there was mischief or goodwill in what Cate was saying. Cate himself couldn't have told.

‘To make the boys laugh,' said Cate, ‘I sometimes masquerade as a black-hearted Lincoln man. Yet I'm what they call in the North a copperhead. In truth, Mr Bumpass, I believe no Northern army should come South and no Southern army should go north. And that's just about the sum of my beliefs.'

Usaph laughed crazily, more high-pitched than a boy should in a picket line. ‘Hokey, if you ain't a solemn bastard, Cate! Why should I care if you was a copperhead or a horny toad.'

But the whole thing still made Usaph's blood creep. For Cate always behaved as if he and Bumpass had confidences between them, and so ought to know something of each other. And Bumpass could not have thought of anyone in the continent he'd less like to keep secrets with or know close.

‘For Jesus' sake, Cate! Why don't you jest run off from the army?'

Cate considered this like a serious proposition. The moonlight lay on his right eye, the rest of his face stood in shadow. ‘I know nowhere to hide,' he said like an orphan. I've got no kin who'd hide me down here. I'm not made for living in the wilderness; I never hunted squirrel in my life. Besides that, I'm told that when you veterans desert you get a second chance, you're maybe bucked and gagged for a while or have half your head shaved, and that's it. But if a conscript deserted and was found again, there'd be no such indulgence.'

‘They happen to be the meanest reasons I ever did hear.'

‘I mean, Mister Bumpass,' boasted Cate dismally, like one of those Roman philosophers, ‘since I am human.'

Usaph was about to tell him to get the hell back to his place when, from between them and just by their ears, they heard a hammer cocked and a shot fired. Cate thought the noise would knock him over.

It was Joe Nunnally, who'd been listening and not sleeping, firing towards the north. Before Usaph could complain, other firing like that began up and down the line. After a few seconds, while Joe Nunnally was thoughtfully reloading, Captain Guess came through the underbrush screaming for silence.

‘Who fired first?' he yelled when the spatter of shooting stopped. ‘What blackguard fired first, eh?'

Joe Nunnally said coolly, ‘There was a thing climbing over the further fence yonder.'

‘A
thing
? A goddam
thing
?'

Across the pastures a small whisper, almost a whimper came to them. ‘You, Bumpass, take this boy and see. And bring it back, whatever it might be.'

Me? thought Bumpass. Why should I make a target in a moonlit pasture for the sake of a substitute from Raleigh County. But of course he went. He knew the army worked by ordinary men taking a risk on crazy commands this once and promising themselves that they'd argue and disobey the next time. That was the way of it. And so he stepped from cover and went with the boy.

Out in the moonlight they felt naked.

‘You goddam ask me afore you ever shoot again,' Usaph said. ‘You hear?'

‘I seen it,' said Joe. ‘You and that perfesser couldn't see it cause you was jawing. I seen it.'