Confederates (23 page)

As the terrible wedges of noise went on above himself and the corpse and Joe Nunnally and Usaph Bumpass, Cate found himself cursing aloud. In a low private voice, beneath all that noise, he cursed the eyes and livers and genitals of those men who'd pushed the issue to the extent that boys from Michigan came down to the farms of Virginia to be killed amongst the corn.

Some three hundred paces off, a long line of blue appeared behind the furthest end of the farm land, presenting themselves, a Yankee brigade who looked fresh and unstained, who might have waited all afternoon in reserve. They had the look about them of people who meant to stand.

Usaph heard someone near him utter the foulest whoop he'd ever heard, before he understood it had been himself. The whole line of the Stonewall stood and fired at the blue. Cate fired off into the treetops and reloaded, pretending a conscript's clumsiness. Even so he had to fire off four rounds in the two or so dazed minutes the Stonewall stood there. And he began to judge that the rate of fire from the Yankee line was not up to the rate of fire from the Stonewall.

While he rammed his fifth ball home, his musket was hit at the top of the stock and blown in two. He stood dumbly with the dismembered barrel in his hand. Captain Guess came up to his shoulder, snarling at him. ‘Pick up a new rifle.'

‘A new rifle?'

For he thought he ought to be exempt now, he ought to be allowed to go back through the woods.

‘For God's sake get a new rifle from someone that's down!'

Guess indicated with an irritable sweep of his hand that Cate was to go along the back of the firing line, looking for a fresh musket. Cate obeyed drunkenly. He turned westwards without knowing why because an instinct told him there was a lesser danger that way. He passed ten men in a row, all standing, all fussing coolly at their muskets, sometimes trilling their ridiculous cry between rounds, but more now as if they were singing to themselves.

He came to a conscript whose name he knew. The conscript was sitting on the ground weeping and holding his arm up by the wrist. A ball had struck him on the point of the elbow. There was no way he could hold the arm to soothe the broken nerves and he wept loudly from the throat. ‘Hoddy?' Cate asked the plump boy. ‘Hoddy?' The boy did not look at him, being far off and very likely out of his body, as people will be if an injury be too much. I should give him at least some water, Cate thought. He was unbelting his canteen when Guess turned up beside him yet again. ‘Leave that boy
be
there!'

‘I was getting him some water,' Cate screamed.
‘Water!'

Guess took a Colt repeater from his belt and put its barrel right against Cate's forehead. It felt cool and greasy. ‘You black Republican son of a bitch, Cate. Get his musket and take his place.'

So he picked up Hoddy's Springfield and stood beside him. The musket seemed to be loaded, and he put it to his shoulder, aiming high as it was expected a newcomer would aim. But he couldn't keep the goddam barrel steady. For it came to him, if my musket was shot in two, I was damn near shot in two myself. This goddam fixed idea I've got about Bumpass and Ephie Bumpass, it has to go! I can't stay here shooting at goddam foliage. It's a war to be deplored, but it's in progress. Look at what I've seen today. Oh Jesus, it's in progress! And I stay here, waiting for Bumpass to die, waiting to rescue Bumpass, in two minds and the both of them mad. And if so, then I have to fire on the uniform of the Union. And I can't fire on the uniform of the Union; therefore I have to desert.

So Cate fired high again, then took a cartridge from his pouch, bit it, poured the powder down the barrel, dropped in the musket ball still in its wads of paper and jammed it in tight. Then he capped the hammer with a copper cap from his cap box. Next, in this great confusion of mind that was his, he lifted the musket, fixed aim at the legs of a Union sergeant and put a bullet right through his chest.

11

‘Oh heaven and hell,' said Usaph Bumpass. ‘Why ask me, Bolly?'

Bolly admitted it – he was an old man and tired and was making no bones about being stretched beyond his powers this evening. ‘I'm aged, Usaph, and the business is beginning to tell on me. If I find the boy, how can I carry him?'

‘Ask Ash Judd, for God's sake. Ask Blalock!'

‘Goddamit, they're already sleeping, Usaph.'

Usaph looked about. It was the truth. They were all sleeping. This camp was in a field a mile up the Culpeper Road from the corn and wheat fields where they'd decided their arm of the battle. Few campfires had been lit. Many boys had just thrown themselves down amongst the furrows and the corn stooks without benefit of blankets, such was their brain-tiredness. Gus laid himself down like that on the earth that was moist but not muddy, and a light rain fell on him. The clouds had gone their way west, and above the encampment, if you wanted to call it that, a harvest moon sent down a tranquil blue radiance over the bodies of all these fatigued boys. Usaph wished it was sending down a radiance on his own fallen shape. But goddam Bolly wouldn't let him rest.

‘Everyone knows it, Usaph. You're a good ole boy. Everyone knows you're a sweet soul.'

‘But where the hell is he, Bolly?'

‘When we was going forward back there in that goddam cornfield, Usaph. I heared him call out and I stopped by him and there he was. It had come from the side and the jelly of his goddam eye was all over his cheek and his nose bridge, here,' Bolly tweeked his own nose, ‘was gone. I bent to him but goddam Guess said, don't touch that man, like we'd all fit to die if I laid a hand on poor Joe.'

You could hear the tears in Bolly's voice and see them on his moonlit left cheek. It just showed you, gross men like Bolly and Joe Murphy could be close. As close as Gus and himself were close. ‘I don't know if I can make all that distance back there myself,' wailed Bolly.

‘What if them ambulances have toted him back to the surgeons already?' Usaph suggested.

‘When did the goddam ambulances ever find a soul?' said Bolly.

‘He might have jest walked back to the goddam field surgery himself,' Usaph suggested further. And there I go blaspheming once more, he thought, but I'm too tired tonight to start a blaspheme-free life. ‘God blast you, Bolly. You like well enough pretending to all the boys in the brigade that you're as good as any young man. Don't goddam come to me pleading to my heart because you're an old man. I tell you, Bolly, it don't go down!'

Frankly as a child, Bolly began to whimper now.

He can't be goddam tireder than me, Usaph thought. Usaph and Bolly and the others had been going forward over cornfields and through woods since their triumph at dusk. But at every cornfield there'd been a few squadrons of Yankee cavalry to pour in a quick and delaying scatter of repeating-rifle fire. Sure, a few volleys of musketry would scatter them and no one you knew would have been hurt. But it was wearying work. Oh how weary was the loading drill when you had that bone tiredness that follows a great combat. A great combat that won't break itself clean at sunset but has to drag on into the dark.

None of it ended until eleven, when there was cannon fire from ahead and solid musketry; and you knew, by the feel and sound, that the Yankees must have had one of their other armies converge with Banks's beaten one. Colonel Wheat then halted you in a wood and at last told you to draw back a mile and sleep. Some of Ambrose Hill's unbloodied boys would do your picket duty for you. Oh how nice! Except that Bolly Quintard had to go looking for his friend Joe Murphy at this time of night and there was no way Usaph could avoid helping him. Well, there was if Usaph would just let himself drop in the cornfield and be instantly asleep as were all the others.

Bolly said: ‘I
am
a goddam old fool, Usaph, with my posturing and the rest of it. But I swear if you come with me now seeking Joe, that I'll go seeking you and Gus if you ever get caught in that condition.'

‘In that condition, Bolly? What do you think it is with Joe Murphy? D'you think he's about to have a child?'

Bolly laughed low and moist.

‘Goddamit, Bolly,' said Usaph, ‘let's go!'

Stumbling south, Usaph and Bolly passed a few hundred paces from the place Tom Jackson waited by the Culpeper Road with Hotchkiss the mapmaker and with Surgeon Maguire and a few others. A cavalry sergeant, just back from scouting far up the road, found the General there in a light spit of rain. Tom Jackson was sucking a lemon and was all ears. The cavalry sergeant had talked to a dying Yankee boy up along to the right of the road. This boy had assured them that they were in for it now, 'cos Sigel's German Corps had got in from Sperryville – sure, a Virginia farmer gave them bum directions but they'd hanged him for taking them the wrong way and now they were deploying for miles in front of Culpeper and the goddam Rebs wouldn't ever get to see Culpeper again. So said the boy whose own chances of ever seeing Culpeper again were so low.

Jackson was happy there by the road that evening. He knew well what hysteria there'd be in the War Department in Washington next morning and in the White House. His own President, Jeff Davis, so nervy with neuralgia, might have begun to behave the same way as Lincoln if he had had the same resources of men. The General understood how it was
lack
of men that made the Confederate War Office more daring than the U.S. War Office, made Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin tougher-minded than jittery Edmund M. Stanton.

Tom Jackson had kept himself awake till now with the tart juices of the lemons he carried in his saddlebag. Now he tossed a lemon rind off into the dark.

‘That's all there is to this day,' he told Maguire and Hotchkiss. He climbed onto his horse, they climbed onto theirs. They watched him sway along in his saddle, bouncing in and out of sleep, as they rode south.

Officers who'd known Tom Jackson when he'd been a professor told Maguire that he'd needed ten hours sleep a night in those days and used sometimes to fall asleep at the podium just the same. He always sat straight up, his back not touching the chair, in the cockeyed belief that would keep his innards from bunching up. He used to bore people with talk about his dyspepsia, and at the age of thirty got leave to go to New York to see the best doctor on the problem. So when young Doctor Maguire was sent to Harpers Ferry last year to be the regimental surgeon of Colonel Tom Jackson, men had said to him: ‘You'll need a staff of three surgeons just to deal with Crazy Tom's complaints alone.'

But it hadn't developed like that. Once the marching over the mountains and down the Valley started, the manœuvrings and the face-offs, Tom Jackson forgot his dyspepsia and his rheumatism as if they were the complaints of a dead uncle of his.

There were three or four farmhouses they passed, off in the meadows now, all with lights blazing. There were wounded lying all round them, not in rows, more like they'd been dropped by orderlies wherever there was space. You could see the big fires orderlies were burning a little way from the farm buildings. If you looked close, you saw them putting on one fire clothing too bad stained to be of use to anyone. Someone was stoking the other with a human leg or arm, and the terrible cannibal stink of blazing human meat was over the countryside. There were boys who trod amongst the shapes in the meadow, looking for the dead so that their bandages could be used again. There wasn't much noise of protest coming from the ground outside these surgical stations, just sometimes the high voice of some boy protesting to a surgeon and the tough deep voice of the surgeon or the orderlies in reply. It might be some time
after
midnight that the ones who had got beyond the shock of it and had not yet bled away would begin their yelling, and all the woods and fields would be full of strange wild noises.

At each of these farmhouses, Hunter said: ‘They could clear a corner for you to lie down, sir.'

‘No,' Tom Jackson would say. He wouldn't give any reason. If the moans of boys irked the General's conscience, there was sure no sign of it. Well, they certainly irked Hunter Maguire's conscience. Through the wide-open window of one of the farmhouses, he could see a regimental surgeon called Abel Oursley working by lantern light. Now Oursley was one of the better ones. He'd joined up from a medical practice in Staunton, Virginia, to get away from his goddam wife, as he said. He was, at least, no quack or mountain pig doctor. Though given to the bottle, he kept sober for battles and would have been a brigade or divisional staff surgeon if it weren't for the fact that most of the time in camp, where superiors had leisure to watch him such as they didn't have in battle, poor old Abel was stewed. There was this about him too, he panicked on nights like this, as most of them panicked. Hunter Maguire knew that if he was in there, maybe he'd panic too. Surgeons were faced with so much mess and moaning that they would amputate anything they could rather than attend to a wound in its own right. And what old Abel couldn't amputate he probed with hands that had too much of a tremble to them.

There was no doubt that Hunter Maguire, M.D., University of Pennsylvania, was a sight better surgeon than Abel Oursley though, and it would have been madness to pretend anything else. Therefore Maguire always had the urge to get down off his horse and go into the farmhouse and take the scalpel and saw from Abel's hand. But he knew that even if Tom Jackson let him go into that butcher's shop of Abel Oursley's he would lose what control he had over the circus. It would be an act of too much passion. Not only unworthy of a Virginian gentleman and a high-rating tidewater doctor of fashion. It would also mean more boys would die in the end.

It was strange though that he'd got down off his horse today only for a case beyond hope. Late afternoon he saw a Marylander he knew, a Baltimore lawyer called Snowdon Andrews, lying half-covered by a blanket at the edge of the Culpeper pike. Two soldiers kept him company but Snowdon's face was to the ground and his mouth made little private movements as if he was confiding in the dust.