Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  Usaph and Joe Nunnally didn’t say anything for some fifteen minutes. Then Joe Nunnally coughed. ‘If they come – I only ask – if they come, they’ll be on horses?’

  Usaph smiled at the moon. ‘That’s how they’ll be, Joe.’

  ‘I only ask,’ said Joe.

  There was more silence, though Nunnally twitched somewhat. Usaph knew Joe Nunnally would be all the time sighting phantom horsemen amongst the far shadows and then screwing up his eyes and finding them to be illusions.

  ‘Joe,’ said Usaph after a further time.

  ‘Yessah.’

  ‘You know, it’s shaping to be over by Christmas. All them knowledgeable people will tell you that.’

  ‘That’s the best news since the dog whelped.’

  ‘So there’s something I mean to ask, Joe. See, I got this nice wife to get home to. Now you wouldn’t ever run and leave a man like me, would you, Joe? Not between now and Christmas, would you?’

  But Joe wouldn’t say.

  ‘Well, Joe?’

  ‘Well, I suppose no one runs from them that’ve got kind words. But how do I know? To be blamed cowards is men’s nature, that’s what Preacher Hinton’s always telling us out to Raleigh County.’

  ‘Well, Joe?’

  ‘How can I make any such promise, Mr Bumpass?’ Joe Nunnally groaned, his eyes fixed too hard on the distant end of the moonlit pastures. ‘Why, I don’t even know what it’s like …’

  There, Usaph thought, there’s a good honest will there. There might be good enough and honest enough wills in the lot of them conscripts.

  Usaph had first gone into what people liked to call a ‘pitched’ or ‘organised’ battle on an afternoon in April near the village of Kernstown. From it alone he knew Joe Nunnally was correct to consider battle a mysterious event that could take you in any direction.

  The afternoon of Kernstown all the thoughts that were supposed to steel a soldier’s heart were operating on Private Usaph Bumpass. Only the day before, the Confederates had entered Strasburg again, the town from which Mrs Ephie Bumpass had been driven six weeks before. Kernstown was just up the road from Strasburg. Usaph Bumpass was fighting for his own meadows and for the graves of his father and mother. Compared to any Yankee, to whom this stretch of the Valley was just a stretch of valley, he should have been firm and ferocious and mad with outrage.

  What Usaph Bumpass learned that afternoon in fact was that there wasn’t always much difference between the standfast and the man who ran. Even though presidents and colonels and preachers tried to tell you otherwise, the standfast and the runner were often the same man on different days or at a different hour. So from two to three o’clock in the afternoon of the battle he had moved up a ridge near Kernstown, found a stone fence to stand at beside his fellows, stood there from three to half past five against whole brigades of Union soldiers and was resolute enough to take cartridges out of the boxes of the fallen, and then spent most of the last hour of light scrambling, if not running, back down towards the waggons near the pike.

  Usaph had, before that afternoon, experienced brief skirmishes, and he thought that a battle would be just a skirmish times five or ten. But he had not been ready for the real elements of battle – the cannon shrieks, the feel of the air when it is raddled with musket balls and you feel that if you sniff you’ll breathe one in. You could not ready yourself for the wild varieties of damage men suffered or the range of grunts and groans and roars they uttered. You couldn’t picture to yourself beforehand the thirst or the sort of terrible daze you stayed in while you held a line of fence, or the speed you’d panic with. You couldn’t guess the craziness with which you might roar up towards artillery if ordered to or the equal craziness with which you’d run. And you couldn’t most of all imagine how it was to live through your first battle and look back on it.

  It was said most boys who shot themselves did it after their first battle. They did it because they felt accursed; like – in the manner of ole Macbeth in the well-known play – they had murdered sleep.

  The night of Kernstown – which people now, only a season later, talked of as a ‘small fite’ – Usaph walked back some five miles south to Middletown. He was crazy with tiredness but his eyes were locked open. Unsprung ambulance waggons trampled past him, and blood dropped through the floorboards and made the road muddy, while the boys inside called awesome things. ‘In sweet Christ’s name, a bullet, a bullet!’ ‘Jesus, put me by the road to die.’ Usaph Bumpass felt that night like the ordinary world of farms and girls and steeples and milk-churns had been carried away for good. He believed no soldier could ever see God’s face. He was as terrified of the stars and of Gus Ramseur at his side as he was of any cavalry that might burst on him out of the oak woods. And he believed that if ever he were to be sane again and to have half a minute’s happiness he had to desert and flee a great distance towards the land of bees and babies and old men in cane chairs, towards the land of Ephie.

  ‘I tell you what, Mr Bumpass, sir,’ Joe Nunnally said now. ‘I’ll do what I can by you, that’s the best I can say.’

  ‘You’re one honest boy, Joe,’ said Usaph. And after that they spoke little.

  Later in the night Cate was roused up and Joe went to sleep. Cate took up his scarecrow stance amongst the low trees. Usaph was glad it was not one of the artist’s talkative nights. Even so, Cate’s presence was itself sort of a loud torment and Usaph’s eyes kept coming back to the man’s shape and to the side of his face all blue from the moonlight.

  That way an hour passed. At one time Usaph hunkered for a period. At another he urinated against a tree. Joe Murphy brought them each a mug of acrid, stewed coffee, and they drank it without talking. The moon was so high now that the meadow ahead seemed bright as a ballroom and someone with a watch passed on the word that the time was past one in the morning, as if he was saying nothing can happen at such an hour and under such a wide flood of moonlight.

  About that time, Usaph got drowsy and jolted upright when he found a hand on his elbow. Cate’s.

  ‘You get back, Cate.’

  ‘I thought you was about to fall, Bumpass.’

  ‘Then that would be my own concern, wouldn’t you say?’

  Cate nodded and swallowed and studied the other man’s face, the features so familiar now that they could have been those of a hated brother. But Cate didn’t feel any particular hate tonight, or the need to make bright, bitter talk, even though Bumpass, around the mouth anyhow, resembled that old bitch of an aunt of his.

  At the moment Cate was just pleased that the night was going on so harmless and bright, that the hour hadn’t come when he had to fire on the Union or choose sort of conspicuously not to.

  ‘Let’s settle this,’ Usaph said. ‘You going back or not?’

  ‘Before I go back,’ said Cate, ‘there’s this information you should have about me.’

  ‘Goddam!’ Usaph muttered. But he was thinking, Information? Is this where I’m told? Is this where he poisons the goddam earth? And he knew that if it was that kind of information, then he would have to shoot Cate, there could be no help for it, and that that act would sour everything. ‘What goddam information would I need of you?’

  Cate stared at him. Usaph couldn’t tell whether there was mischief or goodwill in what Cate was saying. Cate himself couldn’t have told.

  ‘To make the boys laugh,’ said Cate, ‘I sometimes masquerade as a black-hearted Lincoln man. Yet I’m what they call in the North a copperhead. In truth, Mr Bumpass, I believe no Northern army should come South and no Southern army should go north. And that’s just about the sum of my beliefs.’

  Usaph laughed crazily, more high-pitched than a boy should in a picket line. ‘Hokey, if you ain’t a solemn bastard, Cate! Why should I care if you was a copperhead or a horny toad.’

  But the whole thing still made Usaph’s blood creep. For Cate always behaved as if he and Bumpass had confidences between them, and so ought to know something of each other. And Bumpass c
ould not have thought of anyone in the continent he’d less like to keep secrets with or know close.

  ‘For Jesus’ sake, Cate! Why don’t you jest run off from the army?’

  Cate considered this like a serious proposition. The moonlight lay on his right eye, the rest of his face stood in shadow. ‘I know nowhere to hide,’ he said like an orphan. I’ve got no kin who’d hide me down here. I’m not made for living in the wilderness; I never hunted squirrel in my life. Besides that, I’m told that when you veterans desert you get a second chance, you’re maybe bucked and gagged for a while or have half your head shaved, and that’s it. But if a conscript deserted and was found again, there’d be no such indulgence.’

  ‘They happen to be the meanest reasons I ever did hear.’

  ‘I mean, Mister Bumpass,’ boasted Cate dismally, like one of those Roman philosophers, ‘since I am human.’

  Usaph was about to tell him to get the hell back to his place when, from between them and just by their ears, they heard a hammer cocked and a shot fired. Cate thought the noise would knock him over.

  It was Joe Nunnally, who’d been listening and not sleeping, firing towards the north. Before Usaph could complain, other firing like that began up and down the line. After a few seconds, while Joe Nunnally was thoughtfully reloading, Captain Guess came through the underbrush screaming for silence.

  ‘Who fired first?’ he yelled when the spatter of shooting stopped. ‘What blackguard fired first, eh?’

  Joe Nunnally said coolly, ‘There was a thing climbing over the further fence yonder.’

  ‘A thing? A goddam thing?’

  Across the pastures a small whisper, almost a whimper came to them. ‘You, Bumpass, take this boy and see. And bring it back, whatever it might be.’

  Me? thought Bumpass. Why should I make a target in a moonlit pasture for the sake of a substitute from Raleigh County. But of course he went. He knew the army worked by ordinary men taking a risk on crazy commands this once and promising themselves that they’d argue and disobey the next time. That was the way of it. And so he stepped from cover and went with the boy.

  Out in the moonlight they felt naked.

  ‘You goddam ask me afore you ever shoot again,’ Usaph said. ‘You hear?’

  ‘I seen it,’ said Joe. ‘You and that perfesser couldn’t see it cause you was jawing. I seen it.’

  They climbed one fence and then another, finding behind it a dead pointer, a fine dog who’d been maybe doing a little rabbiting in his own right and who’d been transfixed through the shoulders by Joe Nunnally’s shot.

  ‘Oh Lordy,’ said Joe and began to cry. ‘Oh Lordy I’m shamed before you, Usaph.’

  Usaph laughed. A dog was better news than a cavalry man.

  ‘No, Joe. That’s a shot you fired! Holy Betsy, what a shot!’

  Joe gathered the dog up closely in his arms, not caring about stains, and Bumpass carried his musket for him. Captain Guess was waiting for them back on the picket line.

  ‘A dog. A goddam dog! Say, there’s cavalry over there, boy. They know where we stand now all because you had to shoot a goddam dog!’

  Joe Nunnally still had tears on his face. He weighed it a terrible thing to kill a working dog.

  ‘You take that dog back to camp, boy,’ Captain Guess told him, ‘carried in your own goddam arms, and stand beside my tent with it until noonday tomorrow, and then you bury it and when next you see a pay waggon, you pay me three dollars to replace it to its owner.’

  Joe started to limp away straight off. Usaph caught him and slung the rifle over his back. ‘Don’t weep there, Joe,’ Usaph whispered. ‘That was one shot, that was!’

  3

  As Joe Nunnally carried the dog back to camp, grieving for it in its own right but also because it hung in his arms with the dead weight of an omen, the brandy bottle was being passed at the end of dinner outside Colonel Wheat’s tent. Dinner had been cornbread and fried chicken and sweet yams and grits served by Colonel Wheat’s orderly. Wheat drank whisky with each mouthful and young Lucius Taber felt bound to do the same. By coffee time Lucius’s head reeled and he felt like a happy child on a carousel. But the fireflies off amongst the beech trees seemed to be blurs to him, not points of light, and he should have taken warning from that.

  He noticed that Captain Hanks, the middle-aged Valley lawyer, who with Lucius had brought the conscripts to camp, drank pretty carefully. At first, like a true Immutable should, Lucius despised Hanks for this. But after some six or seven ounces of brandy on top of all that whisky, Lucius stopped comparing himself with other officers and began to worry about his own nausea. Soon he began to dream of being sick the way you dream of a sweet release. But he went on trying to listen to each of the colonel’s words, for the colonel had called this dinner to inform Hanks and Lucius of certain rules of thumb that apply to military campaigning.

  ‘… the percentage of hits is always very small,’ said the colonel. He dropped his voice. ‘As low as a half of one per cent, the ordnance officers say, though I don’t know where they get the figures and I don’t want it mentioned to the men. They also say the Yankee figures are even lower. Abe is lucky if one in 400 rounds that his boys fire off strikes flesh. Now the Lord’s decreed that here in the South we’re short of lead and powder and copper, and so the customary reasoning runs like this. Don’t give the men breech-loaders, even if we beg and buy and steal them. If you give the men breech-loaders the waste of lead and powder and copper will be more than our means can tolerate. So goes what passes for the ordinary wisdom!’

  And Colonel Wheat took another gulletful of brandy. He looked at the regimental surgeon, Abel Oursley, who was also full up with one of those medical stimulants he often used in amputations, namely whisky. Abel nodded over the table, sometimes waking to say a few words about his profession in a thick voice. The adjutant, Major Dignam, sat straight, tall, round-faced, sipping a glass of lime juice. All at once Lucius envied him that tall Methodist glass of lime juice, wishing he himself wasn’t an Immutable and wasn’t bound to a career of whisky-and-brandy gobbling.

  ‘But look at the question from its other side,’ said the colonel. ‘The Southern rifleman is likely a farmer or a farm boy. He’s been since babyhood shooting squirrels and coons and, in our part of the Confederacy, goddam bears! He’s a natural marksman, that is, unlike the low-grade immigrants and slum-boys that oppose our cause.…’

  Captain Hanks frowned and put in an objection. ‘But they shoot squirrels and coons and bears in Michigan too. And in Ohio and Minnesota and Wisconsin. And in upstate New York the country’s, why, full of marksmen.’

  Hanks was clearly a traveller and wanted Wheat to know it. Wheat nodded. It was a brushing-aside nod. ‘But, capt’n, the gift of marksmanship just ain’t the rule in the North. Sure as hell it might be the rule in the backwoods, but most of the Yankee rankers ain’t from the backwoods. They’re goddam Germans straight off the ship. They’re goddam Irish. They’re slum-boys and degenerates who can use a knife or a brick from behind but have not in their lives before been called on to be marksmen.’

  Hanks gave a nod that was halfway a shake of the head and halfway respectful. The colonel sighed and his parroty eyes took in Hanks in a way that said, I hope we won’t have any more trouble in mid-argument. ‘What I was reaching for,’ he went on, ‘was the proposition that given the Yankees as a rule ain’t marksmen an’ given that our boys are as a rule marksmen, wouldn’t it be clear enough to a purblind jackass that if our boys were armed at all costs with Spencer breechloaders, the casualties we’d cause would increase by the power of the followin’ factors – first, the greater percentage of hits we already enjoy, second, the increased accuracy-cum-muzzle velocity of the breechloaders, an’ third, the increased rate of fire. Oh, I can see young Lucius there saying to himself, why we’d use up a few years’ supply of lead, powder and copper in the one year. Weren’t you jest thinking that, Lucius?’

  Lucius nodded and wished he’d brought a noteb
ook for that first, second, third of the colonel’s. He sat swaying in misery, sure that he’d missed out on vital news.

  ‘Well, I say one year’s supply is all we’d need, Lucius. Northern mothers would end the war. Northern casualty rates, Northern goddam grief. That’s the way it seems to this mountain lawyer anyways.’

  In the silence the surgeon, Doctor Oursley, raised his head.

  ‘When I get boys coming to me on the march, why I’ve got a ball of blue mass in my left pocket and a ball of opium in my right … a ball of blue mass …’

  ‘Good for you, Abel,’ said the colonel, and Abel Oursley went back to sleep.

  Wheat went on with his reflections and advice. They should never, he said, fret themselves too much if they saw boys throw their bayonets away. ‘To be of use in battle the bayonet – on the chance of a charge from either side – must be attached to the musket during loading, as any fool knows. That means men are likely to spike their hands while loading, to cut a finger off maybe at the knuckle, or to wound their neighbours as they lift the long apparatus to fire. Believe me, our regiment ran through all its ammunition at Kernstown and the first thing the boys did then – and it was, mark you, instinctual – was grasp their muskets by the barrel and ready them for use as clubs. And I promise you, gentlemen, that the damage done thereby to the first of the Yankee slum-boys who got into our section was as worthy as anything the bayonet could do.’

  Hanks felt appalled by this little oration, and his sense of being lost amongst barbarians was made worse as Oursley, the surgeon, raised his turtle-like head again and finished the speech that had defeated him ten minutes before.

  ‘… blue mass in one pocket and opium in the other,’ Oursley persisted. ‘And when they come to me on the march and say, Doc, I’m ailing, I say are your bowels open? If so, I administer a plug of opium; if shut I give a plug of blue mass. On the march you jest have to reduce the practice of medicine to its lowest …’