Confederates (24 page)

Well, you had to get down at a time like that, when you saw an old college friend. One of the soldiers waiting at Snowdon's side told Maguire, ‘It's fearful, doctor,' and when Hunter lifted the blanket he saw it was, for a great mess of Snowdon's viscera was tumbled forward into the dust.

Hunter saw Snowdon Andrews looking at him sideways. ‘I'm grieved to see you like this, Snowdon.'

‘I'm not too tickled about it myself, Hunter.'

‘I have to tell you … there's nothing I can do for you.'

‘Yes, that's what you fellows always say.'

So Hunter Maguire had sighed and turned the man over and got water from a canteen and rinsed Snowdon's viscera off and returned them by hand to the abdominal cavity while Snowdon watched him, grey in the face but calm-eyed. And then he'd sewn him up and fetched a stretcher and sent him off to die of it all.

A case beyond hope and the only surgery he had done all day!

They were now beside some vacant pasture land on their left. Jackson swung his horse under the shelter of some trees, for the rain was starting to have a bite to it now. Hotchkiss said: ‘D'you want us to fetch something to eat, General?'

The General was already dragging his cloak out of a saddlebag and spreading it on the ground. Then he fell on it face first. His words came out muffled by the cloth. ‘I want to rest, just rest,' he said.

12

Bolly and Usaph, bone-tired, found the cornfield at last, recognising it from the way that farmer had stacked the sheaths. They'd already stumbled past a lot of other boys who, hearing them moving or seeing them by moonlight, called out to them. But you couldn't answer those boys. Bolly and Usaph moved past, following their narrow purpose, the way Hunter Maguire was following his a mile down the road. Those other boys must have friends and so had to be left to their friends. In Bolly's brain and Usaph's there was room only for a sort of animal concern for Joe Murphy.

Bolly's memory of the event got them to that angle of the field where it had happened. If Usaph had been a little less weary it would have been nice to watch how Bolly did it. He had a memory for little differences in this place or that, just like an Indian's memory. It was easy to find Joe then. They could hear him sort of sobbing, and he could hear them approach too. ‘Coming for me, boys? Coming for me?'

He was sitting like a child, his legs spread in front of him.

‘I'm blinded, Bolly,' he announced. And he already had that way of lifting his ear that a blind man has. He was dazed too. When you looked at him close you saw his right eye hanging by a sort of wormy stalk out on his cheek, where it was stuck in a sort of paste of blood. The sight brought up some bile into Usaph's mouth and he had a hard, gaspy time swallowing it. ‘Bolly then?' Murphy said again, ‘Is it Bolly?'

‘It's me, Joe.'

‘Goddamit but I been waiting a long hour for the footfall of a friend, you son of a bitch, Bolly.'

‘They wouldn't let me stop, Joe. You know how they harass a man who tries to stop for a friend.'

‘Both my eyes gone, Bolly. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, both the bastards! Who is it with you there, Bolly?'

‘Usaph,' said Usaph.

‘Usaph is a good and brotherly boy,' said Bolly.

‘Well, you're out of it now there, Joe,' said Usaph. ‘You can go home and live now at rest.'

Joe Murphy spread his fingers like someone seeking, seeking. ‘Think you so, Usaph Bumpass?' he asked. ‘It's rest, is it? I can sit back I imagine and read the goddam newspapers, I suppose.'

There wasn't any way
that
could be answered.

‘Now listen, Bolly,' said Murphy. ‘I want to talk serious with you. You know damn well there's no place for a man without eyes. There's more place for a man without a dangle than there is for a man without eyes.'

Bolly didn't answer. Nor did Usaph.

‘I ask you, Bolly, what you'd ask me to do if you was in the one situation I'm in. I'm asking you Bolly to save me from the gangreeny an', even if I lived through that, from the shame of goddam darkness. Of needing goddam hands to guide me all me days when I ought to be out walking like a seeing man.'

He began weeping a gale. Out of them smashed eyes? Usaph wondered.

‘Now?' Bolly asked in a small voice. ‘You mean right now, Joe? You want to be … relieved from misery, son?'

‘While I'm at peace, Bolly. While I'm at peace. I tell you that there Frenchie goddam Jesuit in the Louisiana Brigade told the boys that God ain't about to turn away any boy who's after dying in battle for such a good democratic goddam cause. Now them Jesuits knows a powerful lot more than your average priest. The Lord won't turn away Joe Murphy even if he's been a profane and shameful braggard.' There was silence. ‘I'm at peace now, Bolly,' Murphy repeated after a time.

‘Well …
where
, Joe?' Bolly asked in a pained voice, awake now with all the sharp weight of the task Murphy had laid on him.

‘You know, Bolly. The back of this misused and degredated head. You're after doing it for enemies so they don't even feel pain. Do it for a friend, Bolly!'

Bolly thought awhile. Then he got out a cartridge. It seemed that in that hot battle he'd only used some twenty rounds, if that, and still had plenty to do the job for Joseph Murphy. He bit the cardboard cartridge secretly, half turning away, just like a man trying to slip a plug of tobacco in his mouth in polite company and against his wife's orders. He sprinkled the powder down the dirty barrel of his musket.

Usaph was dead against it, he couldn't say why, for he wouldn't want to live blind himself. He wouldn't want to be shunted round by Ephie and never see her special beauty. And never notice the other men looking at her and deciding she must be ripe for a suggestion, seeing as how she was stuck with a blind spouse.

‘Jest tell me when you're all ready,' Joe asked.

Usaph said ‘Whoa up, Bolly!' He didn't know why he did it, seeing he approved of Bolly's act of mercy in principle. Anyhow he got his neckerchief off and poured the dregs of water on it from his canteen. Usaph was a man of more than normal thirst and carried a canteen of U.S. make, like two dishes soldered together. To the dregs of water he added his spit. ‘Is there pain there, Joe?' he asked, pointing to the face.

Though he could see nothing, Murphy understood. ‘No. God is merciful. There's no pain to speak of, Usaph. Well, when I say no pain, I mean no screaming pain, anyhows.'

Usaph felt an urge to lever the hanging eye off the right cheek and pack it back in its socket. God knows it might work again. But no, he kept away from that side of the face and began to wash Murphy's left cheek, gently, expecting protest. By the chin he moved Joe's head to catch the light of the moon, that was still shining down between thunder clouds. There was such a paste of powder and blood and soil on Joe's cheek. ‘Bolly, you got water?' Usaph asked, but Bolly said no. So Usaph unbuttoned his britches and urinated on the cloth.

‘For God's sake, Usaph,' Bolly protested, wanting to get his task behind him.

The urine-soaked cloth stung Joe's forehead above the left eye. He yelped. ‘You hit a cut right there, Bumpass. It won't be troubling me much longer.'

‘A cut there, that's fine, Joe. But does
this one
hurt you?'

He laid the cloth fair on that eye and Joe said nothing. He began to ply the cloth, cleaning up the socket with a will, and still Joe did not complain. And after a few seconds, Usaph could see that the eye was there, sure enough, in its place, and it seemed unmarked. And as he made this find of the eye buried under all the battle muck, Joe reached out his left arm slowly and gripped Usaph's rag arm by the wrist. ‘Goddam it!' he called. ‘Oh Jesus, Usaph. I can see yourself there, you son of a bitch!'

He hopped up, still with his right eye on his cheek. He bayed under the moon with pleasure.

‘Goddamit,' he cried. ‘I'm going to be one of them grandfathers with a glass eye, and you take it out of your socket and roll it in your hand to frighten the littl'uns. Goddamit, I'm going to be one hell of a scary grandfather, oh Mother of God!'

Usaph and Bolly clapped and chortled and yippeed and danced with him. He made a strange dancer. But when they stopped celebrating with him, the cornfields seemed full all at once with fevered wails, the midnight screams that Maguire had expected. The joy of Bolly and Usaph for Murphy had brought all those damaged boys in that place out of their merciful daze and now they were raving under the moon like men who couldn't wait another second for peace or water or bandages.

In the morning a natty Yankee officer came across Cedar Run under flag of truce to ask that the day be set aside for finding the last of the wounded and for putting the dead in crowded but Christian graves.

Usaph was not put on burial detail, but he could see the parties working in the meadows round about, wearing masks of linen over their faces. The dead were starting to bloat, Usaph could see, and to burst the seams of the vests and trousers they'd died in. They were all barefooted under the sky – they always lost their shoes to needy Confederates.

The sight put Usaph in a black mood, which deepened when Guess sent him in a detail back to the waggons for cases of Springfield cartridges. But he went and fetched a case and so came back, the sun biting into one of his shoulders, the cartridge box into the other.

Along the embankment in the sun, calling on passers-by for water, were whole lines of stragglers bucked and bound. Usaph heard one of them calling to him by name. ‘
Usaph! Mr Bumpass!'

Usaph paused and looked up at the embankment. There was the Irish fiddler and his fancy-boy, knees locked up over a stick by their bound hands. The soft-faced boy had lost his hat and his face was beginning to blister.

‘You know me, Mr Bumpass sir. I'm Sean and I think I can say I've brought ye pleasure with me bow one time or another.'

Usaph wasn't gracious. ‘What of it, Irish?'

‘Bumpass, I've the diarrhoea.'

‘And I suppose that makes you different from the rest of us?'

‘If I could have a little water, Mr Bumpass. And if you could take me hat off me head and put it on poor Walter's …'

Well, there were flies all over the fiddler. He had the diarrhoea right enough.

‘We'd all like water,' said Bumpass.

‘Come, Bumpass. Ain't we practic'ly brothers?'

‘If we're brothers, why did you straggle off yesterday, brother?'

The fiddler said nothing. He let his head fall, for he'd come to the conclusion that Bumpass lacked mercy.

‘Goddam you, Irish!' yelled Usaph, and put the ammunition by the roadside. He climbed the side of the road, dragged the fiddler's hat off his head and pushed it on to the soft boy's. ‘You're the victim of an unholy goddam passion, fiddler,' he said, and for some reason thought of himself and Cate. He was just starting to feed them water, and other bucked backsliders were also beginning to yell at him for his bounty of water when a young officer, riding down the pike, screamed at him. ‘No water for them people, son,' he screamed. Son? thought Usaph.

‘We're all goddam sufferers,' he snarled at the roped boys as he stepped over them, but they groaned and whimpered back, and he was pleased to take up again that box and totter up the road. ‘An honourable goddam burden,' he muttered to himself once.

Back in the encampment, in a field of trampled corn, a thick-shouldered boy with dark hair and a big dark moustache was baking bread and chatting with Bolly.

‘Hey, Usaph there,' called Bolly. ‘This-here's my friend Hans Strahl. Why he's my partner now that Joe's gone and done that to his eyes.'

Usaph looked at Bolly there, sitting cross-legged on a blanket and, it seemed, fiercely pleased to have a new friend, any friend. ‘What's the name, boy?' Usaph asked, peevish.

‘Hans,' said the dark young man, wanting to be neighbourly. ‘Hans Strahl it is.' There was something a little German about his way of speech. But he wasn't any conscript, for his face was familiar from before the time of conscripts.

‘Another goddam Dutchy,' Usaph grunted and looked up to see Gus Ramseur staring at him. Too late Usaph began to laugh as if it had been a joke all along; and then he turned away red in the face.

‘You must watch out for that Bolly,' he called in a sort of strangled joviality to this Hans Strahl. Then he found his blanket, climbed a stone fence and slept deep all afternoon. Falling asleep he kept muttering: ‘You goddam hayseed, Bumpass! You goddam club-fisted hick!'

13

Mrs Whipple had had a distressing morning. It had begun in fact about 3.30 a.m. when Mrs Coleman went into childbirth in the laundry.

Mrs Coleman had come up from North Carolina two months back to visit her husband, a typhus-sufferer, in Ward 8. She'd picked up her sister along the way and brought her along too, and the both of the women had stayed ever since. They were lean unlovely country women – ‘'bout as pretty as a pair of shingles,' one of the boys in Ward 8 said of them.

But although she may not have been a beauty, Mrs Coleman was the only one who had ever won a battle of wills with Dora Whipple. What had happened was that Mrs Coleman had just refused to go home. On the very first night of her stay she'd come knocking on Mrs Whipple's door.

‘There must be a place for my sister and me to sup and lie down.'

‘This is a hospital, ma'am, not a hotel,' Mrs Whipple said, icy as she could manage.

‘Well, they seem t'have found a place for
you
. And you ain't married to no one.'

When it was clear to Mrs Coleman that there was no place for her to stay, she and her sister just camped out all night on the steps of Ward 8 and got pretty wet, for the spring had come in rainy.