Confederates (63 page)

Searcy went pale. Everyone is going pale, she thought. Everyone but me.

‘You'll surely do this, Mrs Whipple?' Searcy asked.

‘You know I can't settle the matter this way,' she said.

‘My dear lady, the preservation of one's life,' the Reverend Archer said, ‘is the first issue of all …'

‘I can't let myself escape by these means,' she said. She resented this preacher horning in between Searcy and herself. ‘Searcy, you know how it is. You can tell. The conflict which finished my dear husband is meant to finish me as well. Simple as that.'

‘This is too much fatalism, ma'am,' said the Reverend Archer, like an amateur theologian.

‘Dora,' Searcy whispered, ‘I am begging you … for my sake …'

She was beginning to feel desperate. She said again: ‘I cannot escape by these means, Searcy. You understand that. I could not live on as anyone's proper wife under these terms. Our union, Searcy – which honest to heaven I'd want under any other conditions – would be poisoned by this stratagem we're using here. You can see it, Searcy. I know you can.'

‘Mrs Whipple,' the Reverend Archer pressed on, ‘your conscience is too delicate, ma'am. There is no shame in saving one's life by reasonable means.'

My God, he talks like a damn mathematician, in here when I should be on my own with Searcy. She began to shake her head. ‘I've been Yates Whipple's widow so long – it seems to me so long anyhow, even though it's only been a year. Don't you see, Searcy, I want to die as Whipple's widow? That's the appropriate thing. Don't you see?'

Searcy grasped her by the shoulders. She pitied him for the sweat he was in. ‘Dora! Please, Dora!'

His cheeks were getting so muddy from his tears that you would have thought he'd been crying even before he came in here, that he'd been weeping since dawn. ‘I can so easily save you.
You … you
can so easily save me. We'd live so well in Devon, Mrs Whipple, a world away from Union and Confederate. Please, Dora!'

Mrs Whipple couldn't understand how he could talk like that. He sounded like a dilettante, an idle admirer of the Union.

‘You can forget the slaves? You can forget them as easy as that?'

‘Yes. For you, yes. How much will
you
remember them if you hang?'

The eyes of Searcy and his parson and the two witnesses were fixed on her. They were all at once a greater combined torment for her than her judges had been.

‘You're causing me pain!' she told Searcy.

‘No. I'd never cause you pain.'

She shook her head in a frenzy. ‘Let me alone. Let me alone!' She glared at them, especially the Reverend Archer who seemed to her to be the most unyielding of the quartet and to have fouled this meeting between Searcy and herself with all his cold moral talk. ‘Don't persecute me, please. I can't do, Searcy, what I can't do.'

Searcy kept on weeping, but he did not bully her any more. ‘Our passes are good for a return visit this afternoon, my dear Dora,' he said.

‘Come back yourself, Searcy. Come back to sit with me and talk. But please don't bring any strangers. Please, please.'

Searcy nodded to the Reverend Archer and the Brownleys to go. They stumbled out, Archer not quite brave enough to argue with Searcy. When they had gone, Searcy held her for a while. He could feel the reverberations of her heart against her ribs, the way he had the first time he ever had hold of her.

‘Be still, be still, my little bird,' he told her. ‘The town is full of guards, all those middle-aged men are standing double watches. There's no escape that way. The only escape …'

‘You promised not to talk about it, Searcy. Hold me, just that.'

He obeyed her, but within a minute could tell, just by holding her, that it was useless, and that the turnkey was in any case waiting for him to leave. Going out, he promised again to be back later.

He found Archer and Mr and Mrs Brownley waiting disconsolately outside the lockup door.

‘I shall try again this afternoon, good people. Perhaps if it's convenient you could wait within call.'

‘Of course,' said Archer. ‘Of course, we must.'

But when they came back in the afternoon, they found an old grey-haired colonel at the lockup door. He said Mrs Whipple had a letter for Searcy and did not want to see them again. Searcy waved the parson and witnesses off, staggered away to the shadow of one of the elms and opened the letter.

I would be your wife if the world let me. I respect you, Searcy, and feel great affection for you, but I cannot see you again without pain to us both. I know, somehow, that you will remember me as a woman, not as something akin to one of those Russian icons or Christian martyrs.

Yours,

D.W.

6

‘Why ain't you got shoes on your feet?' Usaph yelled at the drummer. He had to yell because the noise had been going on since three o'clock in the morning.

The drummer boy blinked and didn't answer, but just looked down at his young horny feet. Goddam, he was young. Fifteen at best. Little bullet head. Mouth always just a little opened. He was Wheat's newest interest, this boy. He'd slept last night huddled up at the colonel's feet like a dog.

‘Shoes?' asked Gus. ‘Tell my friend Usaph why you got no shoes.'

‘Had a pair but they got took,' said the boy drummer. ‘By a feller looked something like you.'

‘I ain't got your shoes, boy,' Usaph assured him.

‘So you say,' said the drummer. He yawned. Wheat had had him playing drum rolls half the goddam night. A drummer was getting to be something of a military novelty. The Shenandoah Volunteers had last had their own drummer way down there near Richmond, all that time ago, at high summer.

This drummer had therefore been rattling away with his sticks in the misty grey as daylight came. The drum rattle got boys up from their wet blankets in the edges of the forest. Boys who'd slept uneasy and with their cartridges inside their jackets, near up against their heart warmth to keep the powder dry. And as they rose, they were muttering now about the open secret of Wheat being mad.

‘What's your name, boy?' Wheat had asked the boy on finding him last night.

‘Rufe.'

‘What's your other?'

‘Got none.'

‘My. What's your daddy's other name, then?'

‘Ain't got no daddy, colonel.'

‘Do tell! You the virgin birth, is that so?'

Rufe didn't say anything. He didn't understand.

‘Where you from then?'

‘Everywheres.'

‘Goddamit, Rufe, ain't you jest the universal American child!'

‘I did some living on the rivers, colonel,' said Rufe, like an old man with lots of phases to his life.

‘The river goddam Jordan, Rufe?'

‘The Mississip. The Arkansas. Working the rafts. One time a cap'n told me my pappy came from Arkansas. Don't know if that's true.'

Anyhow, Wheat now had this orphan child to make drum rolls in the first misty light. Rufe's rat-tat-tatting not only woke the boys but directed them to their places by the high worm fences just beside the pike. Though they squinted up the road towards Pennsylvania, they could see nothing. Hearing was different. They could hear cannon speaking to each other up there in the rural murk.

Kyd passed by on the pike, going north towards the Confederate cannon on Nicodemus Heights. These roads and gentle hills round about were the hills of Kyd's boyhood. He had travelled up this pike with his father on the way to Harrisburg and Philadelphia where Douglas senior seemed always to have dealings. Down the laneways of this countryside, the Douglases had hunted or picnicked or visited friends or relatives. Stonewall knew all this and had given Kyd, at four o'clock in the morning, his orders for the day. ‘I want you to go right now and find out where all our cannon are placed. And I want you to consider what roads can best be used for drawing off disabled guns and for supplying ammunition. Next I want you to advise all battery commanders on these specific points. That's all you have to do all day, Kyd.'

Kyd had thought that maybe that was a joke of some kind, but he couldn't tell, for there was no flicker along Stonewall's heavy-bearded lips.

So Kyd was on his way, and when he heard Rufe's artistry with the drumsticks, he urged his horse a little more and thought almost joyfully: ‘Today is the most dangerous day I'll spend in my life.'

Usaph waited by Wheat's side behind their fence and watched the first-rate pike running moist-topped north through this rich country. Maybe because it was so misty and he could not see far, things appeared to him the way they had to farmers Miller and Poffenberger. That battle lay like an abominable beast resting across the laneways, fields and woods of Washington County. Since the small hours it had been stirring, making careless grunts and growls. But when the mist rose off the Hagerstown pike off Antietam creek to the front and the Potomac at the back then the beast bestirred itself fair and proper, took its feet and uttered a roar that farmer and Mrs Poffenberger and family could hear even from the caves along the Potomac.

Next thing Usaph knew, after the rising of the mist and the roar of the beast, was that all the skirmishers who had been up the road during the night came running back throught the wet stands of trees to the fences where Wheat's regiment stood, with Rufe still drumming for them but no one being able to hear him. Lucius ran back with his revolver in his hand. Mad Ash Judd hooted as he came to show this was going to be some picnic. Even from his place in the line, Usaph could see that it was going to develop like every other battle, only in greater quantity. He got an image in his mind of the stone fences of his first fight at Kernstown. The Yankees who had charged the fences that day were plenteous, but even as you fired at them, you knew they came in but finite numbers. Usaph got this sudden spurt of anger, for Kernstown had been no fitting classroom for what was happening this morning. Such lines of blue came out of the woods, to the north and assailed your vision, that you thought it was a sudden disease of the eyeballs.

Coming on in four lines across the fields, they now and then stopped a second and fired. Usaph saw three Confederate skirmishers all climbing the snake fences along the pike at once, crossing the road to get into the woods behind. All three of them were shot in the one second, one of them putting his hand up behind his ear in a fly-swatting way before he slumped there across the railings with the other two. They hung like ragged and drying animal hides.

Rufe kept rattling away at his drums, competing with the great blocks of cannon sound. Half the boys loaded and passed muskets to the other half, who discharged them at the enemy. The only voice you could hear was Wheat's and even he was cut back to the ordinary and normal things colonels uttered. Stuff like, ‘Steady, steady,' and ‘Mark your target, boys.'

And then the cannon really got to it. Confederate cannon on Nicodemus Heights started tearing into the Yankees from sideways and Union cannon from up the road started ripping the trees up behind Usaph. Something awful was happening to the Georgians over in Miller's cornfield, and in the little torn snatches of time between bangs you heard a human shrieking there, and the air above the cornfield, you saw between blinking, flew with bits of farmer Miller's corn crop and with limbs, naked and clothed, and with haversacks and heads and hands.

This, Usaph believed, was an amazing thing to see. But it did not horrify him, even though he had average feeling for his fellows. There was something in him that stopped him being horrified as the heads and armless trunks of Georgia's children rose from the corn. The cornfield was a good 200 paces off, and something cool in his belly whispered to him that 200 paces was as good as a county.

He began to cough. Others were coughing too. The morning was coming on overcast and the stained powder smoke did not blow anywhere on a breeze as it did on an average day. It sat low on the pike and got into Usaph's pipes. He got more wrapped up in the condition of his throat than in the terrible whacking of balls against tree trunks and fence rails. A lump of fence rail about as long as a rule flew up and slashed Wheat's cheek, but he just felt the place and cursed.

Almost in the same act, he turned, cupped his mouth and yelled to Usaph: ‘Get on back to Grigsby. Tell him that in my calm goddam opinion, Usaph, this line offence jest can't be held.' He said the Georgians on the flank were going to hell in numbers, that ammunition was already at least half spent and so on.

He squeezed Usaph's elbow, as if to say: ‘Don't think of my oddities, boy, jest do this work proper.'

Usaph turned. He knew Grigsby, commanding the Stonewall Brigade, was posted by a stone fence below the little Dunker church. He headed down the fence by the turnpike. A shell fired from over the Antietam and meant for the piteous Georgians in the cornfield lit some twenty yards to his right, where Captain Hanks was standing, tore the captain open before Usaph's numb eyes and split the bodies of half a dozen boys round about.

Later Usaph could not quite remember the journey back to the Dunker church, could not even remember speaking the message about what great quantities of Yankees were coming on, and about the way Union cannon were ripping up those Georgians in the cornfields who were Grigsby's flank, and about Wheat's estimate of remaining powder and balls. He did remember that even that early the open grounds below the Dunker church were sort of sown with lines of wounded lain down on the trampled grass.

He had just turned back towards Wheat when he saw some of his own friends scuttling towards him, retreating fast as they could towards the church, vaulting fences between fields. The first he saw was Rufe, the young drummer, and Rufe was running hard, carrying his drum under his left arm like a boy carrying the pigskin in a football match, and his drumsticks like a relay baton, in his right hand. Sprinting barefoot and no, not like a footballer or an athlete, more like a farm boy in a novelty race at some fair.