Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘I,’ said Murphy, ‘once met a girl in a field near Charlottesville.’ He lowered his voice as if it were all a secret, but it wasn’t so secret Usaph couldn’t hear it. ‘I’d gone off looking for chickens and found herself culling early berries – she had, oh my dear Lord, sweet fingers. After I’d rode her bare-assed in edge of the woods, right there in the goddam sedge-grass, she says to me without blushing, d’you know Sergeant So-and-So my dear husband. He’s Captain So-and-so’s right hand in the 3rd Virginia, except it wasn’t the 3rd Virginia, if you take my meaning, it was a regiment closer to home than the 3rd, but I ain’t intending to specify further which one. Right there, off pat, with my fresh spunk in her, she says it.’ Murphy adopted a feminine voice. ‘D’you know my dear husband Sergeant So-and-so …’

  ‘All right, all right,’ called Usaph, sweating freely, wanting to know, that was all. Wanting to know. Never wanting to know. ‘The story’s taken, for God’s sake, the story’s understood!’

  And that made Ash and Bolly hoot and Murphy look mean.

  Looking away, Usaph saw the fiddler studying the huddle of conscripts. The man began signalling with his eyes and eyebrows to someone, and the thin young conscript, maybe eighteen, that he’d shown an interest in earlier, stood up and walked over to the place the fiddler was playing and sat down near him. The fiddler and the boy stared at each other for some ten seconds until all around them disgusted hisses and grunts started to rise. There might have been some arguments about that kind of behaviour if it hadn’t happened that all over the bivouac other fiddles were starting up, and from the 5th Virginia’s camp site a little distance away a battery of tin whistles swelled the sound, for the 5th Virginia was all Irish.

  It seemed to the tormented Usaph that everyone but him began singing ‘Just Before The Battle, Mother’. But they used the words that made a mock of the song.

  ‘Just before the battle, mother,

  I was drinking mountain dew.

  When I saw the Yankees marching,

  To the rear I quickly flew,

  O I long to see you, mother,

  And the loving ones at home,

  That’s why I’m skedaddling southwards,

  While there’s still flesh on my bones.…’

  The fiddler could tell that the evening was spoiling on him. Just because the others didn’t like him giving favours to a conscript. So he went on to a real spell-binder. ‘All Quiet Along the Potomac’, written in the North but imported South in smuggled copies of Harper’s. It was – as boys said – ‘one of them songs against officers’.

  ‘All quiet along the Potomac, they say,

  Except now and then a stray picket

  Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,

  By a rifleman hid in the thicket.

  ’Tis nothing, a private or two now and then

  Will not count in the news of the battle;

  Not an officer lost – only one of the men,

  Moaning out, all alone, the death rattle …’

  Under cover of the general absorption provided by this anthem, Usaph put another brick in Gus’s blankets and moved quietly across the meadow to the loveless corner where the conscripts sat, talking low, eating their grits and cornbread. He tried to keep out of the light of their fires, just in case Bolly and the others saw him, and he called as he walked: ‘Cate! Cate!’ All conscripts who weren’t Cate averted their eyes.

  Cate was out of the firelight, sitting against Thomas’s railing fence. It was a bright enough night for Usaph to recognise the tattered clothes Cate was wearing as Murphy’s old rags, minus of course Murphy’s Southern Comfort Society shirt. Usaph was pleased to see Cate humbled in the Irishman’s lousy tatters.

  ‘You itching, Cate?’

  ‘I’ve killed all the lice in these rags, Mr Bumpass,’ said Cate quietly. ‘There was – I can tell you – a multitude of them.’

  ‘And they’ll come back. Their eggs’re still probably there in the threads. Just when you get a bit hot on the march and your body gets foul, they’ll come back – young ’uns – in their hosts.’

  But he couldn’t understand why he talked lice. Lice could bite Cate’s balls down to a stump and it would mean nothing to Usaph if the man had already had Ephephtha Bumpass.

  ‘Get up, Cate. I want a word of you.’

  Cate looked up at him with a species of wary irony.

  ‘You don’t want to sit by me here? None of your friends will see.…’

  ‘Oh sweet Jesus, I tell you, friend, get up here now and jest follow in my tracks.’

  Cate obeyed, though like all such men he had a way of making his obedience seem one way or another an insult. Usaph itched and it was not entirely his own population of lice. It was the itch that comes from knowing you can’t win against a particular man, that you might never get replies that satisfy you.

  He led Cate over the zigzag fence;

  Through a line of oaks they got to the entrance avenue of Thomas’s plantation. Fireflies winked nicely amongst the foliage of the oaks.

  ‘Let me tell you something first, Cate, I don’t want no funny answers. Do you catch my drift?’

  Cate seemed to fluff up in front of his eyes, the way a turkey does. Is the man crazy? Usaph thought Ephie couldn’t really tell the difference. Ephie would just as like think crazy was clever.

  ‘I give funny answers only to funny men,’ the conscript answered, like an actor in a travelling play. ‘Men like your friends. Don’t you think I knew how to slip that letter to you, that you wouldn’t want it to come to you in public and by the hand of a conscript? Do you think I’m blind to your code, sir?’

  Usaph had the terrible feeling that what Cate said was all mockery, but you couldn’t be sure, because the conscript frowned while he talked, like an earnest man. It was just there was nothing to grab on to in his manner. He was about half a hand taller than Usaph and bent over him, looking hollow-cheeked and solemn as a travelling preacher foretelling doom. But you couldn’t help noticing a sort of unheard laughter from somewhere in the area of the son-of-a-bitch.

  Usaph said low: ‘You know nothing of my code, sir. Keep your goddam tongue off my code.’

  ‘As you say, Bumpass.’

  They kept silent for a while. The bits of song came to them still. The army sounds so goddam contented, Usaph thought. I happen to have enough goddam heartburn to give a ration to everyone, to make every man goddam heavy at heart.

  ‘How do you know my wife, Mrs Ephephtha Bumpass?’ Usaph asked suddenly, as if Ephie herself had said nothing of it in her letter.

  ‘Why, I painted her. I’m a travelling portraitist, a limner of quality with prices according. Your aunt met the bill though. She likes Ephephtha – Mrs Bumpass.’

  ‘You don’t mean my Aunt Sarrie gave you a record of her likes and dislikes?’

  Cate thought about this. There were a lot of cogitative flexings of his hollow jaws. ‘Well, she displayed what might be called suspicion at first. But we got to … well, respect each other.’

  ‘How long was it my wife sat while you put the paint on?’

  ‘Well, I would say it must have been eight days all told,’ said Cate, bunching his eyes up, calculating. ‘A portrait can’t be put together quick, Mr Bumpass. Oh, I know your average mean rural portraitist might do a likeness in two days. But the genuine article is not to be rushed.’

  ‘I hope as sure as yesterday’s sun that there was none of that Union talk you come out with this day. I hope, and may I say, Decatur Cate, your goddam life hangs on it, that you never spoke your goddam black Republican thoughts to my bride.’

  ‘Do I look like it, Private Bumpass? Do I look the species of man who’d tamper with the political fancies of a good woman?’

  In the dark under the oaks, Usaph trembled. But I won’t hit him yet, he thought. I’ll let the son-of-a-bitch come to a head.

  Cate heard Usaph’s grunting and fuming. ‘I am in a fix, Private Bumpass, sir. Nothing can I say that doesn’t hit yo
u like an insult. And through no fault of mine. Am I guilty in carrying a letter from wife to husband? Are the mails of this Confederacy so prompt that I shouldn’t be used to carry a letter?’

  Usaph waited, still breathing noisily through his nose.

  ‘You are,’ Cate went on more quietly, ‘a man I am not and may never be. You are a man beloved of a sublime woman, sir.’

  It seemed to be time to punish the conscript. Usaph pushed Cate against the trunk of a plantation oak. Because of the man’s excessive beanpole height, Usaph had to raise his elbow somewhat to trap the artist’s throat against the bark. He listened to the man gagging and it gave him an uncharacteristic pleasure.

  ‘How’d you come to fetch up with this regiment of all regiments, you whoreson, you pig’s ass? How come this very company? How come?’

  He was surprised Cate could answer, had the calmness to answer straight.

  ‘They told us,’ said Cate, coughing in a manner that sounded stagy to Usaph, ‘they told us in Staunton that we was natural enough meant as new blood for this Shenandoah regiment.’ Cate raised his eyes and there was still that sort of mockery in them, Usaph thought, but it still wasn’t the kind you could be sure about and all it did was key up your hollow anger. ‘I couldn’t believe my good fortune … since I meant to hand the letter in person. Then when the officer wrote me down for C Company, I swapped my place there with a boy … one who’d got written down for Guess’s Company and didn’t care either way.’

  ‘Why? Why in hell’s name did you do that?’

  Cate stared straight at Usaph, in a dead level way for once, and the eyes were sort of bleak. ‘I knew no one else. Not a soul, Bumpass.’

  ‘You know not me, you goddam scum!’

  Cate’s long head, imprisoned still by Usaph’s forearm, gave a little nod.

  ‘I feel I might, Bumpass. That’s all. I feel I might know you, from your wife’s words.’

  Usaph released Cate, pulled away as if he weren’t fit to touch, then shaped to hit him but despaired of it doing any good.

  ‘You might be funny, Cate, when you stand there talking with paints in your goddam hand. We’ll jest see how good you’ll make with the jolly jokes when your Republican friends in the army of the Union are pouring cannister at you.’

  Not knowing what else to do, Usaph turned and at first felt a little easier. But before he was fully back to his own campfire he understood that the question of Cate and Ephephtha still stood. Seeing two young conscripts talking over a dying fire, he kicked the skillet out of the hand of the one who held it, he kicked the chunks of kindling wood out of the fire. There was a cascade of sparks in the conscript boys’ faces and so much fright there that Usaph felt ashamed. Had his father raised him to treat people this way?

  He got back to his own fire. The Irish fiddler was sawing away at some sad love song, but no one seemed to be listening any more. The conscript boy still sat beside him and the only good things were that Gus Ramseur, the true musical talent, was cooler, and that mocking Bolly Quintard was working at dropping off to sleep under the tree where he and Joe Murphy had opted to spread their blankets.

  9

  On the same evening that Bumpass and Cate had first tussled with each other, an English journalist, the Honourable Horace Searcy, was riding down the Charles City Road towards the Thomas plantation. Searcy resembled Cate in being a lonesome soul and in having a father who disapproved of his son’s trade. He also had, like Cate, been expelled from a university, in his case the University of Oxford, for wounding a fellow student in a fencing match involving epees with no protective tips on them. It was not that Horace Searcy was a vicious man. He had daring, that was all, and misfortune sometimes attended his daring.

  Searcy’s father, Lord Grantham, was in some ways a reformer – helped ease the Bills doing away with child slavery in mines and factories through the House of Lords. Just the same, he thought journalism was a vulgar profession, but he had had enough influence at the time to have Horace taken onto the staff of The Times, which was the nearest thing to a proper newspaper.

  Then, to Lord Grantham’s pain, his son became a storm bird, and began to attend wars as if they were boxing matches. His first war was the Crimean, then the war in Italy in ’59, and finally the most vulgar of all wars, the conflict between all those former British colonies in North America.

  In later days, people would call Searcy a war correspondent, but there wasn’t such a term then, for Searcy was just about the first of the species. As his trade demanded, he travelled without much luggage. In his saddlebags he carried whisky, three shirts and a pair of drawers, a sketch book and two novels of Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. In his heart any affection he carried was for his three-year-old daughter. She was what people called a natural child, a bastard. She lived with her mamma on the edge of London. But she was not the only secret to be found beneath the journalist’s ribs.

  One of his profounder secrets was that he detested Southern institutions, that he had all the passion of an abolitionist, and that he carried a secret commission from U.S. Secretary of War Stanton to gather intelligence. It was a sign of his world-wide reputation that he sported, in his breast pocket, letters of introduction and safe passage from such Confederate generals as Longstreet and Magruder. He rode his horse comfortably, a dark, solid young man who resembled an Elizabethan pirate; and he looked forward to seeing once again the remarkable Tom Jackson.

  The Confederate lieutenant escorting him pointed to the Thomas house. ‘That’s it, Mr Searcy. That’s Jackson’s headquarters.’

  Searcy thought, not for the first time, what a plebeian war this was. American generals often as not headquartered in broken-down farmhouses with peeling whitewash. It wasn’t like that French-Austrian War of a few years back. Nothing but castles suited an Austrian general and even the French never camped in anywhere less than a hunting lodge. Searcy approved more of these democratic knock-about Americans, North and South, than he did of European generals. Only the bad ones here – McClellan and Fremont say – expected castles. Whereas any decaying tidewater house suited the good ones, suited Burnside and Phil Kearny and Longstreet and Jackson.

  ‘No palace,’ said Searcy to the young staff man.

  ‘Palaces ain’t so common in Henrico County.’

  ‘I expect you’re right.’

  In the plantation avenue the air seemed full of methane, the stink of swamp water mixed with the stench of excreta. Searcy had travelled freely North and South and had seen both Union and Confederate camps. In a report to British readers he had said that Confederate soldiers were on average smellier than Union ones – ‘malodorous’ was the word he’d used. It was partly that toilet soap was in short supply in the South, partly that most Northerners had the chance to change their linen more often, partly that they were often more worldly. It was partly the Southerners’ suspicion of latrines.

  But, whatever their rustic personal habits, Rebels were better behaved than Yankees. They did not regularly steal fence rails or chickens or pigs, whereas, when the Yankees turned up in any farmyard, they would steal a gnat that hadn’t been properly hidden away and behave like angels of the sword and the flame – as, however blind, stupid and ill-tutored about the facts they might be, they were, in Searcy’s eyes at least.

  His escort turned back towards Richmond. At the Thomases’ front door a soldier took the reins of his horse and a slave in yellow-stained livery with a ratty powdered wig on his head led the two gentlemen into the hall. Searcy pressed his card into the slave’s hand. ‘Tell the General the Honourable Horace Searcy begs an audience.’

  ‘Yassah,’ said the old slave. ‘Mastah Thomas and the General is at the dinner table, sah.’

  ‘So much the better,’ the journalist said. ‘I won’t be taking up his working time.’

  Because the Confederacy believed its chances depended on British good will, because that good will had (according to the South) not been evident, Searcy was used to being badmouthed, a
s a representative of vicious Britain, by Southern gentlemen. Generals who would have seen him willingly and talked to him freely in the spring, were now less free with him. Jackson had never been easy to speak to in any case, and would be even less so now.

  While the slave left him standing in the hallway, Searcy found himself stamping his foot and jolting his head. The liveried slave appeared again. ‘The gentleman can go in,’ he said, bowing in a way that wasn’t quite like the bows of the footmen at St James’s Palace.

  In Thomas’s living room the air was hot. There weren’t any women – Mrs Thomas, it seemed, had been sent out of the room. Thomas himself sat at the end of the table. He was a Southern type Searcy had described often enough for his English readers; a heavy-drinking, malarial man who looked sixty but was likely only 45. A tobacco-chewer who, when drunk, would likely expectorate the juice on the carpet. His collar sweat-stained, his suit stained under the armpits. No wonder he drank! As the crickets started up on these quiet magnolia-scented plantations and a man with half a brain could feel the stir of the slaves and hear their evening singing and their strange enslaved shouts and yelps, any owner might feel a prisoner and reach for the whisky jug.

  Besides Thomas, Jackson sat at the table with members of his staff. In a grudging way Jackson introduced Searcy to the others, to Surgeon Maguire and to Douglas and to Hotchkiss, the mapmaker, and to Quartermaster Harman and to Mr Thomas, the plantation-owner himself, who half rose, yelled ‘Honoured, sah!’ and sank back into a coma.

  They all avoid my eyes, Searcy noticed. All except the General, who bored at him with those dark globes of his from beneath those dark brows. Tom Jackson didn’t look unlike John Brown. They both had the look of backwoods prophets. But Jackson was a different sort of killer than Brown. He killed his men with marches and too much green corn for dinner and with wild daring battles in a bad cause. Yet he was still the sort of man who, when he looked at you, gave you an urge to confess something. What? That you are – well, not a spy, that’s a dramatic American word – but that you sent back information to Secretary Stanton.