Confederates (18 page)

She vanished and came forth again with a crock of lemonade and two small pannikins. As she poured, Ashabel spoke up clumsily to her son. ‘How do you go on horseback, sir?'

‘I go on the goddam saddle, soldier.'

The mother laughed. ‘Don't you blaspheme there, Arlan. I'd say they're nice boys and intend no harm.' She raised her chin and wiped the sweat from her gullet.

‘We can't spare no chickens, maw,' the son told her.

‘We can sell you a little bacon,' she announced. ‘And you can have a loaf of my flourbread jest because you're local boys.'

‘From the Valley,' said Ashabel.

‘My, my. Nice people from the Valley. Arlan, you go fetch that milchcow, go on, son. I'm safe enough with these Valley boys.'

The son lowered the shotgun and hobbled an uncertain step.

‘Our milchcow broke loose last night,' the mother explained to Danny Blalock. ‘Arlan'll have her back here in two shakes or sooner maybe.

Arlan still wasn't sure. Danny thought, he dislikes us like hell for being whole. Maybe even for being the soldiers he can't be. Poor deluded boy.

‘They'll keep to the steps?' Arlan asked.

‘Oh, Arlan, honey. What if it rains? But you know your maw can manage them.'

After one more stare, Arlan hauled himself crookedly up the flanks of his horse. It was painful to watch, but even Ash Judd knew better than to offer help. In the saddle, with the reins in his crooked claw-like hands, Arlan all at once became more masterly. He turned the horse on the patch of dust it occupied and cantered it out of the yard.

‘Fell on his head, poor child. Thrown by a horse. When he was no more'n eleven years. Couldn't move much at all at first but he had a purpose to him, always has had. Look at him now. A horseman. And what I'd do without him, with the war on and all the rest, and milch-cows busting out …! For his paw's been gone for four years.'

‘My condolences, ma'am,' said Danny, courtly as he could manage from the stairs.

‘Oh,' the woman laughed, ‘he ain't dead. Leastways as far as we know. He lit out to Venezuelie. 'Course, they have the yellow fever in Venezuelie. How does it sound to you, a meal of cheese and fresh baked flourbread?'

‘Now? Now, ma'am?'

‘When else? Come inside now and make sure your manners are as they have been.'

‘You have our guarantee, ma'am.'

‘Here,' she said, when they were in the kitchen sitting at the scrubbed table in front of the big hearth whose heat, even today, was welcome somehow. ‘I think Arlan and I get so few visitors …' She lifted a wet patch of canvas from the corner where it lay crumpled. A jug lay beneath it. ‘So grab a cup an drink it up,' she sang girlishly, ‘that fine ole mountain dew!'

And so as they ate they drank the burning white liquor, the ferocious distillation of wheat and rye. She got their names from them and they talked of the army and she talked of her battle with the perfidy of men, especially with her husband. An hour and a half passed this way and all three of them were florid and hearty and convinced of the sweetness of the day. And at a certain point Ash Judd did a thing that amazed Danny. As the woman talked he lifted his hand and ran it by the fingertips down the top of the woman's spine, the bit he could get at above the back of the chair. The woman seemed at first not to notice, not even pausing in her speech, but after some ten minutes of it, she began to give little pleasured flinchings as Ash's hand worked.

There we are, Danny thought, I'm the one that understands the exact terms of the Confederacy's struggle, but Ash is more, much more, at an understanding with women. Even at his young age, even with his diminished intellect, he
knew
women. How did he know? Danny wondered. How did he know when he lifted his hand to stroke the woman's back that she would not bridle and order him out of the kitchen?

Then Ash was up against her right side, having moved his chair, and his hand was right round her shoulder, and they were both beaming across the room like children beneath a mistletoe. To save himself embarrassment, Danny rose and said he needed to take the air, a gentlemanly statement of his desire to use the outhouse. Once out in the brazen afternoon, he chose not to go to the woman's white-washed sink but to walk thirty yards further and to urinate in the fringes of the forest where shade fell on his moonshine-heated face. ‘Oh that Ash!' he kept saying, shaking his head. ‘Oh that Ash Judd!'

When he returned to the kitchen they were gone upstairs. Danny could hear their footsteps and then other noises, questions and laughter and creaks. He sat at the table, clasping one hand in another amongst the crumbs. But through the flimsy ceiling he could hear every whisper and deep sigh. Oh God, he thought, send Arlan back. Yet don't. No! What would he himself say to an Arlan who came in at the door this minute? Oh afternoon, Arlan. My colleague Ashabel Judd's upstairs explaining the options of the Richmond Government to your maw!

At last Danny got beyond bearing it and stood up. There were desires in his belly he'd never known he had up till then and there was an intent there. He would, if asked about it earlier this morning, have considered it un-Southern. Goddam it, he would share the woman with Ash. It was the only way he could bear her little whimpers. Up and beyond the poky stairs he found the top floor all one attic, and Ash in no more than his shirt was heaving bare-assed atop the woman. Her dress and chemise were up to her armpits and her whimperings were so loud up here under the roof, they seemed a sort of homage to manhood. Her little cries both begged off and they begged release, and they came to Danny as an admission that there might be a part to woman – to all women, not just to camp whores – which was an animal part far out beyond the seas of respectability. This was not such a grand discovery on a world-scale, but it was a fact on which Danny had not been up to now adequately informed.

He expected and feared the mother would drive him away then. Instead, on seeing him, she extended a hand a little way as if making him welcome. As he began unbelting himself, he thought, Ash will give her crabs, Holy Hallelulah! Such a case of crabs! And I shall but add to them. But she didn't seem to be thinking twice about that!

In the column on the Culpeper Road, a large boy from the 5th Virginia dropped dead beneath the sun. They brought him, as they brought the others who had fallen over in the heat, to the embankment beside the road. They took his boots and left him open-mouthed and squinting up at the killing sky. There was no sweat and not even a death clamminess on his dusty face, Usaph noticed in passing him. He was a man with no moisture left in him at all.

Colonel Wheat dismounted, climbed the embankment and inspected the dead boy's face. He turned to his halted regiment. ‘That goddam Fifth Virginia. They didn't even close their brother's eyes.' He didn't himself and beckoned two riflemen out of the column. ‘Cover him with his blanket, boys. Go on, shroud his poor damn face.'

Gus Ramseur, thirsty at Usaph's side, did not even see Colonel Wheat's mercy. He sustained and tormented himself with the music in his head. There was a day in Staunton once when there'd been a parade, and during the parade a man who'd been court-martialled for cowardice was walked in front of the division and two bands played at once. At one end of the parade field a band played ‘The Rogue's March' and at the other end another band played ‘Yankee Doodle'. The coward was marched in his shirt sleeves into the parade square, barefooted, the left half of his head shaven, a placard on his chest and another on his back saying
I AM A COWARD
. The discord of the bands was meant to shame the man all the more, but Gus thought instead, as the notes of the brass clashed with one another, that this was more like the music of the age. It was the music you heard in cities like Philadelphia, where Gus had once visited; it was the music you heard in factories from the discord of the machines; it was the music you heard on the battlefield, the conflict of cries, whistles, whirrings and bangings. So they were not really shaming the coward on that parade ground, they were really treating him to the music of his times, the music of the machine of war which, in making those noises and invoking certain brute protests from the men who were crushed and crippled, had made the coward run away in the first place. Sure there were still, somewhere, women and fawns, streams and mountains to write music for, but a man who wanted to write the real music of his age ought to write out of that discord and that dissonance the bands made on the day the coward was paraded.

Gus therefore had in his blanket, wrapped in a wallet of oilskin, a thick wedge of notes and annotations for his war symphony. It could not be written properly, this symphony, till the war ended and he had learnt more theory and composition and gotten back to a piano. But that would all happen next year if the experts were right. I have just to shift my saliva and save my breath and keep my mind cool during the marches. Then new year I'll be back at my piano, making my notes between visits from students. Mama bringing me in too much coffee and shortbread and telling me not to strain my eyes. He knew his symphony might not be popular, but it would be true, that was most important. He meant to call it
The Fourth of July Symphony
.

Usaph Bumpass had often seen Gus humming and making his annotations on ruled notepaper. That was how Usaph had got to his conclusion that Gus was a man of great talent who had to be saved from the slaughter. Education of any kind awed Usaph. Gus felt that if ever Usaph was in a situation where there was Usaph himself and a graduate of the University of Virginia, and one of them had to give up his life for the other, Usaph might give up his on the simple grounds that the other man had a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Anyhow, as Ramseur kept his brain coolly tuned to the music of discord, the cripple Arlan rode into the yard of his mother's farm towing the milchcow he'd recaptured. He could see no sign of the two stragglers around the farm and the silence frightened him. He got down from the horse, left it and the cow tethered, and dragged himself towards the house. There were ways he could walk silently if he took the care and the time, if he did not clump his foot down in impatience.

The kitchen was empty, but the crumbs of the meal were on the table, and the jug was there too. He could hear overly quiet conversation from the attic. He hauled himself to the stairs with great stealth and made barely a noise until he was on the last two steps. At that point he began to hurry, he tottered across the floor, saw his mother half-stripped lying between the two bare-assed stragglers, and in an instant later loosed off the two barrels of his shotgun. Shot went into the wall above the bed and through the roof. If he had had more control in his hands he would have done some grievous work to all three of them with that shot of his.

Before the explosion, Danny had been lying there thinking how natural it was for them to have this big woman between them, praising himself for being unbashful about lying there with her and with Ash. Now he danced up, wearing nothing but his shirt and more pained and ashamed than he'd ever been in his life. He got to Arlan, whose face had gone fish-white beneath his farmer's tan. He flung arms round the man, half caressing him, half stopping him from reloading. ‘Arlan,' he said. He himself was burning red; he could feel his blood burning in his face and at the rims of his ears. ‘Arlan, please!'

‘Get dressed and go,' the woman commanded, as if it were entirely Danny's fault and Ashabel's. She was already up, shaking her grey dress down over her haunches, becoming again and very fast a distant and forbidden woman. ‘Arlan,' she said, ‘your maw's very weak.' She came up to Arlan and extricated the shotgun from the tangles of Danny's arms and her son's. ‘You boys dress an' go quick.'

‘What if he shoots at you again, ma'am?' Ash Judd asked, dragging on britches.

She raised her voice. ‘Allow us the dignity, boy, of settling all that for ourselves.'

Ash and Danny dressed as quickly as the events and their shame demanded, Danny in the corner up out of the range of Arlan's eyes. They were ready in ninety seconds. The woman stood holding the shotgun with one hand and caressing blank Arlan with the other. What would I do, Danny Blalock wondered, if I found my own mother between two boys of the Stonewall Brigade? But the question was too painful for him to deal with.

They were clumping downstairs to fetch their muskets when Ash stopped, mindful of something. He called up the stairwell to the woman. ‘Ma'am, you mentioned something of bacon you could spare us.'

‘Get out!' she screamed.

Danny wanted to spring away from that farm but Ash insisted on going slow, with some dignity. In the yard he bent to a chicken, getting it all at once in his hands. He screwed its neck and tied it with cord from his britches' belt.

‘Oh, Ash, that's not decent,' Danny said, but Ashabel shrugged. He knew the woman was too busy explaining herself to her offspring to care for the moment what happened to her chickens.

When they were back to the fringe of the forest, Danny said: ‘What you did, Ash, is worthy of a Yank.'

Ash grinned. He took it as a compliment. He had started the day as a lesser man than Danny on account that Danny was a reader and knew so much about generals and politics. But this afternoon had made him the superior for his management of the woman and the remorseless way he'd asked for bacon and destroyed a chicken. If he felt any pain for Arlan – and he did – he was not about to admit it to a clever man like Danny.

7

Ash and Danny got to the ford easy, took their shoes off for the second time that day and splashed across. Some of the cavalry were swimming from the north bank, others were brewing coffee. Vedettes were posted beneath the crest of the first hill. All this meant that the Union horsemen had been driven off, Billy the Orator and Henry MacManus with them.