Confederates (43 page)

The lawyer stared at her. At the corners of his mouth he began to look a little less lenient. ‘Very well. You tell me that, ma'am. I do not glory in punishing women, however. I still say this to you: that all we need to do to defeat the charge is not to make straight-out admissions until we have to. And if we have to, to then plead such things as the natural simplicity of the feminine mind, the unsettling grief of your late husband's death – for I believe you've lost a husband in this conflict?'

The mention of Major Yates Whipple made Dora really angry. It was such a pleasing change from feeling ill. ‘I will not plead any simple-mindedness, sir. My mind is at least as complicated as yours.'

‘Of course,' the lawyer muttered. ‘I didn't mean it that way.' He began to look even more searchingly at her. ‘It is important for me to know however whether you were under the romantic influence of this gentleman Pleasance, and was that your motive in …'

‘Do not ask offensive questions, sir! I did not even know the man's name. Let me say it again. It is the Union I clear-headedly cherish.'

Once again he asked her not to misjudge his motives. And then he got on to other matters. He gave her advice about answering questions in court which, in her still core, she hoped she'd be able to follow.

‘So the worst we have to contemplate,' he told her at the end, ‘is perhaps a jail sentence, and I'm sure your friend, Mrs Randolph, will ensure the jail sentence is not
too
painful. Mrs Randolph by the way told me to say she will come to Orange to see you.'

‘Too kind,' said Dora Whipple, once more feeling the embarrassment of being treated too pleasantly.

The lawyer packed his documents away in his valise, and stood up, still studying her. ‘By the way, ma'am, I do not hate you. God knows whose cause is right. I think it important for you to know I do not hate you.'

5

The day Mrs Whipple was arrested, Colonel Wheat woke in the forest as he had the morning before. It was so exactly like yesterday's waking, the buzz of the boys talking and the sharp summer sky beyond the leaves, that he almost decided that it was yesterday and that the fight by the road was one of those fierce dreams.

It was as his mind cleared that that griping panic of lonesomeness rose up from his belly. I must have someone to sit by me. Now. I don't care even if he takes me in his arms, and shows me by the pressure of his arms that I'm really here.

‘Diggie!' he found himself calling. He raised himself on his elbow. ‘Diggie!' he called again, but only in a tentative way. No one answered. And there were fires burning this morning; a thin waft of coffee fragrance came to him. For boys still had pockets full of coffee and sugar they'd brought with them from Manassas. Some of them had fought last night with coffee bulging in their jacket pockets. ‘Diggie,' said Colonel Wheat softly.

He had himself overseen the burying of the Reverend Dignam down near the road last night. A not-too-deep grave, dug with bayonets by a lot of tired boys. Some of them wanted to drop and sleep, some to stagger on if they could towards the field surgeries over the hill looking for friends. It was no sense moving the body, since Diggie would lose too much of his cerebral matter if he was carried far, even if there had been litters to spare. Somehow it had been of importance to bury Diggie whole.

All Wheat had been able to do was get him into a decent though shallow grave – two feet at the best, though at the ends it was lucky to be a foot and a half. To stop animals troubling his good and saintly friend, Lafcadio Wheat sent soldiers looking for stones; stones could be had round the foundations of an outhouse near by and from a portion of stone fence. With these filched weights Diggie was weighed down till Judgement Day. Then Wheat took a bearing on the corner of the orchard and paced out the distance, and he swore that after the war, next spring say, he'd bring Diggie's widow down here and they could see to a monument of some kind.

So in the morning Lafcadio Wheat sat there under the trees, letting his head clear and his terror settle, and wondering when his orderly was going to bring him a pot of coffee. He remembered then that his orderly sergeant had been shot through the chest, and his messenger killed too. So there was no one to bring him coffee this morning except the boy who normally held his horse, and that boy was back with the medical waggons in a bad way with pneumonia.

Wheat still felt so bereft that he would have welcomed any company and had to stop himself from getting up and going and begging boys to sit by him. Just the same, he was a little disappointed when he saw it was Lucius Taber walking towards him over the leaf mould, up amongst the breakfast fires.

Lucius's face looked smoky, and though he'd smoothed out his uniform and his hair, there was some forest bug on his neck, and a maple leaf stuck to his collar from where he'd been sleeping.

‘Nice to see you walking upright there, Lucius,' said Wheat, and tears he couldn't understand pricked his eyes. He found his shoes and slipped them on his feet and held out his hand to the boy like a 66-year-old instead of a man of 32 years. ‘Give me a haul up, would you?'

He stood upright and there was a giddiness like he'd been drinking half the night.

‘Cap'n Guess is dead, sir,' said Lucius. ‘He died straight off without pain, that I know of.'

‘Oh damn. But I think someone already told me that, Lucius.' Poor goddam Guess. The practice of dentistry is closed to you now, ole boy. ‘You were with him?'

‘I was, colonel.'

Before Major Dignam died last night he'd shamed Lucius by putting him back by a farm behind the firing line to stop people escaping the conflict by the usual device of two whole men assigning themselves to help along one lightly wounded one. Lucius had carried his sabre in one hand and his revolver in the other, but no one obliged him by running.

In the hour he spent on that beat he permitted wounded men to lie or be placed around the foundations of the barn, but not inside it, for it could catch fire and incinerate them all. And it was around the barn that he caught his only skulker of the evening. He'd seen Sean, the Irish fiddler, peeping round the corner of the barn and could tell from the liveliness of his features that he wasn't hurt. It was easy to guess why he was there, sitting amongst the wounded; and sure enough, Lucius found Sean's pretty boy Walter sitting at Sean's side with a bowed but – you could bet – unbloodied head.

So Lucius had all at once something to do. He'd led the fiddler and his boy at gunpoint back to Captain Guess, who was standing fair behind Decatur Cate and presented them to him. Guess lectured them fiercely, though Guess himself could not have heard what he was saying and only snatches got through. ‘Two goddam sodomites … bucked and gagged … on parade carrying a goddam placard … shoot the pair of you … musket off the dead … see you fighting.'

The fiddler had bent and picked up a Springfield and gone into the line without looking once at his fatal passion, the boy. The boy sank onto his knees. Guess opened his mouth again, but was shot in the heart and knelt down himself at the boy's side like he meant to make an effort to comfort the boy (it seemed to Lucius), but then fell over on his side.

Once that had happened, Lucius saw gangly Cate had turned around and was watching Guess. He wondered how the ball had found Guess without first travelling through that black Lincolnite conscript. There wasn't any justice to it.

‘Keep at your work, Cate,' Lucius had yelled.

‘Where'd you bury him?' the colonel was asking now.

‘In the woods hereabouts.' Lucius paused. ‘I guess that makes me commander of Guess's Company now.'

Lafcadio Wheat began laughing, and his laughter was as always a bit of a mystery to Lucius. One thing Wheat was laughing at was the mathematics of the fight last night. He'd taken 210 men down to the road, which was the best he could get together, having lost some to drunkenness, straggling and illness since the feast at Manassas. And of those some 210, he had lost some 92 or 93 killed and wounded during last night's madness. This broke the rule of thumb by which it was said that one in five was hurt in a fight. And the rule of thumb might go by the board again today. So was there any such thing as Guess's Company left? If there was, here was a boy who wanted to be its sovereign goddam voice.

‘I guess you are the commander of poor goddam Guess's Company, which he got together in the spring of '61, boy, in that season of hope. I guess you
are
the new man for Guess's Company.'

Well, there it was. But somehow Lucius didn't feel as happy about it as he felt he ought to.

‘In fact,' the colonel went on, ‘if you hang round you could end up inheriting the whole goddam brigade. Come with me now and we'll look at a few of your boys.'

The Shenandoah Volunteers were chirping round their campfires. This was one of those good and endless summer days you get in Virginia, and boys who'd woken horrified from their deep, blood-sticky sleep were feeling better now as the sun got higher. There was animal pride taking over, pride in living through the last evening. And each of them was telling himself secretly, whispering it to his own ear, that there was no bullet now that could stop him. That was the type of kindly lie by which, in telling it to himself, a soldier got ready for a new day. And what a goddam day it might turn out to be. For Pope would try to get these woods today. Meanwhile there were robins everywhere, pouncing down among the resting men, and woodpeckers doing their daily work near by. And in a light breeze the redbud and the pine, the hickory and the maple and walnut kept up the ancient murmur of their leaves.

‘What I need,' said the colonel as they walked, ‘are two good men, one to act as my orderly, another as my runner. Given the way this-here brigade is shrinking, he won't have to do so much damn running. But still a colonel needs a runner.'

Gus Ramseur and Usaph were at that time sitting by a little fire of sticks. They were making up a small mess of corn and bacon in a pint pot and looking quietly at the flames and thinking.

‘Them two,' said Wheat to Lucius. He pointed towards Gus and Usaph, and it seemed to him that their faces were ones he'd known since childhood, the very sort of face a man wanted around him in hours of despair. He wanted to stick those two close to him. They could be trusted like brothers; he could talk to men like those two! He could divert them with tales of his scandalous gran'daddy. ‘That's Ramseur, ain't that so? And old Bumpass? By hokey, them two are old hands now.'

Ignorant Lucius wasn't much impressed by them. Wheat could tell. That was highly in their favour. ‘Fetch 'em,' he told Lucius. ‘Boys,' he said when they were standing, a little amazed, in front of him. ‘Would you care to work close to me?'

‘Why,' said Usaph, as if there was any choice, ‘I would. Gus?'

‘To be sure, colonel.'

They stood in the forest's mottled light. Two flattered boys Wheat loved them for that. ‘You, Gus,' he said, ‘you can put on a sergeant's stripe now-paint it on your goddam hat with an ink ball. And you, Usaph, you can write and tell your spouse over in the Valley you've been made a corporal. Not that it's such a fine thing to be hanging round me. Hanging round colonels ain't a profitable business. You may know, boys, that my friend Colonel Johnnie Neff and my colleague Colonel Lawson Botts suffered death wounds last evening. And … and some others as well.'

Lafcadio Wheat was silent for a moment. He remembered the day last spring when it had come time to elect new colonels. Colonel Cummings had been in charge of the 33rd then but didn't want to stand for re-election, so Johnnie Neff stood against the major and the lieutenant-colonel of the Regiment, even though he was only a captain. And they'd elected him. Well, he'd died for the honour last evening.

‘Now you got certain duties straight off, boys. For one damn thing I want coffee. You'd find some in my saddlebags. And I want some flourbread baked up crisp from the same source. Now with your rank, you ought to be able to bully some conscript into doing most of the chores.'

He turned and went away. When he'd gone ten paces he heard Usaph hoot. ‘Goddam!' Usaph squealed to his friend the music teacher. ‘We'll be well off as goddam house niggers!'

Well now, the colonel asked silently. Will you be?

He was aware what he'd done to Usaph; he knew Usaph would stick like glue to anyone that uttered any sort of faith and trust in him. That German musician was calmer, more worldly. But Usaph would find it hard to pursue a fate separate from his colonel's. So if I'm dead, Wheat thought, so is that boy. Until then, I'll have his closeness.

At dawn Tom Jackson had 18,000 men in the woods. Guided in by the cavalry overnight, they stretched along that woody ridge for two miles.

By now Johnny Pope, over in Manassas where the air still stank of fire and loot, had heard all about last night's fight. He'd chosen to see it in the rosiest terms – General King's recruits had stumbled on Stonewall while Stonewall was in retreat. What had to be done now was pound the man while he fled.

He sent Sigel's German Corps in first.

Searcy, from his headquarters – a little circle of rocks in the woods up the northern end of the ridge – saw them coming. He didn't know quite why he was there – he'd never put himself this far forward in the Crimea, nor in northern Italy.

So what was the reason? Well, he could answer that in part. You have given yourself up to this conflict, Searcy old chap, by running intelligence to Mr Stanton. It is only proper you should stay here a few hours and feel the furnace heat! Not so long that Mrs Whipple will lose a lover. But for a time.

Apart from staff officers who huddled and smoked cheroots in nearby clusters of rocks, he could see, over the shoulders of Ambrose Hill's soldiers here in the woods, the Confederate front line down the slope a little. The Confederates were making use this morning of a railroad cut that ran all the way along the base of the ridge. This railroad cut was the front line. Ambrose Hill's youths lay in it and behind its fills, and waited for the Northern battalions.