Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  But his forehead hit the table and soon he fell out of his chair and was left snoozing away on the ground. Lucius Taber thought, even in his whisky daze – what if ever I’m wounded and one day am brought to that drunk lying there?

  And that moment a boy passed thirty yards off, carrying a bundle in his arms. The colonel was distracted. ‘What you got there, feller?’

  ‘It’s a dog, sir.’

  ‘You meaning to devour that dog are you, boy?’

  ‘Sir, I shot this dog thinking it was the enemy.’

  ‘You know you got to pay the owner?’

  ‘I’ve been told that, Colonel.’

  ‘That’s the way the Confederacy does things. We ain’t no race of plunderers. Now bury that dog.’

  ‘Sir, Captain Guess told me to stand before his tent with it in my arms till noonday afore buryin’ it.’

  ‘Who’m I to contradict the captain. Lucius, give this poor lad a sup of brandy to stand him in his long vigil.’

  Lucius got up, urging himself to be steady, and poured the boy some brandy in a tin mug. ‘You teetotal, son?’ Major Dignam asked Joe Nunnally just in case, but Joe shook his head, dropped the dog’s corpse on the ground and drained the brandy. Then he replaced the mug on the table, bowed to the colonel, lifted the burden again and went off to stand in front of Guess’s tent.

  Wheat said: ‘Ole Popeye Ewell once said, the road to glory can’t be followed with much baggage.’ Lucius wasn’t sure whether Wheat was speaking of the toting of dogs or excess equipment like cartridge boxes and such. But there wasn’t any mistaking what the clicking of the colonel’s fingers meant. He wanted the brandy bottle. Taber passed it and, to his horror, got it back after the colonel had used it.

  Feeling obliged to pour himself another belt, he did so, looking at it in the mug and saying to it, not with his lips but with his stewed brain, you’re the one that’s going to kill me.

  ‘Now one last thing,’ said the colonel again. ‘It might be a thing of merit to try to explain the constitutional issue for which we fight to simple farm boys, but there’s very little use. I believe there is jest no question that low anger is the finest stimulant and every general, even teetotal Tom Jackson, knows that it outranks whisky itself as the primer of the tired and frightened soldier.’

  At the word whisky Taber got up, excused himself and walked fast away into the shadows, towards the far cool Blue Ridge, into the forests. He found he wasn’t out in some soothing unpopulated darkness, but standing amongst the shapes of sleeping men of the Stonewall Brigade. The gush from his belly fell on the blankets of two Irishmen of the Twenty Seventh Virginia. They woke instantly as veterans have a gift to do, and in his helpless spasms, he could hear them complaining and looking round for the source of this discomfort.

  ‘Oh Jaysus, Jimmy, thet’s him there, the bastard.’

  Jimmy got Taber by the collar and Lucius began shaking and was ill again. ‘What in the goddam name of Hell?’ Jimmy asked.

  But the adjutant had arrived. ‘Let go of him, son,’ he instructed. Jimmy obeyed but not without making a speech.

  ‘But it’s hard enough, Yer Honner, sleepin’ in shit without havin’ that ordure there atop ye.’

  Taber retched on in front of them. Oh God, I am so shamed. What sort of Immutable am I now? My colonel has done for me with a brandy bottle.

  4

  The English correspondent Searcy came up to Gordonsville with some officers of Ambrose Hill’s division, arriving the morning after Joe Nunnally shot the dog.

  Although he’d thought it was his duty both as journalist and agent to go up to Jackson’s headquarters, he hadn’t liked leaving Mrs Whipple. He visited Chimborazo two more times after that first meeting. The first of these two occasions he took with him a few diagrams of the way Longstreet’s half of the army had placed itself around Richmond. These practically valueless drawings were his excuse for visiting. He sat in her little kitchen and felt his soul expanding under the influence of her liveliness and her good sense and that bunched little smile of hers.

  ‘Is it a good thing for us to be friends?’ she asked when he was going.

  He’d look her full in the eyes. ‘Don’t even question it, madam.’

  Just before he left Richmond – his horse was already loaded aboard a freight train – he’d visited her a last time.

  But it hadn’t been a very happy visit. Orderlies and nurses kept coming to her door with messages and requests; and twice in the three hours he had spent there she had to leave him to himself – or at least to the company of her black maid – for more than half an hour at a time.

  ‘Your mistress is kept very busy,’ he’d said to the black girl.

  ‘Yassir, them slack surgeons, they get Mrs Whipple to break the news to boys when they’s dyin’.’

  Searcy didn’t like to think too closely about what that must do to the brain behind the small pug face.

  Perhaps there were Mrs Whipples all over Virginia who would meet with him and collect whatever he had for them. If there were, he didn’t know who they might be or how he would know them. It might end up that he’d have to cross the lines himself with any special knowledge he’d got together. He didn’t like that prospect, for pickets on both sides fired with a nervous quickness.

  Jackson’s headquarters was, predictably, a white frame farmhouse, pleasant, its lawn and rosebeds trampled and grazed out by the horses of visiting officers and couriers.

  Searcy was sitting on the stoop of this house one stifling Tuesday morning. He chatted with any officers who came and sat there to mop their faces or fan themselves with their hats. As he sprawled, making what mental note he could of what was said and lazily chewing on a sour cheroot, he saw a sort of mobile haze coming across the meadows towards the house.

  It was a cavalry detachment travelling cross-country, and soon it had drawn up at the gate, the troopers swearing and stretching in their saddles and reaching for the corncob pipes in the saddlebags. Their officer got down from his mount and came in through the gate. A typical cavalry colonel of maybe Searcy’s age, his uniform part military and part the outfit of an elegant travelling gentleman. Whoever he was, some of the other officers in the garden knew him and called to him.

  ‘I gotta see ole Jackson,’ he told them.

  ‘Why he’s locked in his room.’

  ‘Then root him out, my friend.’

  The officer stomped up the steps and ran into Sandie Pendleton, the General’s aide. After an argument, which Searcy could not overhear, Sandie fought his way up a hallway, crowded with officers and riders, and hammered on the General’s door. Jackson emerged in shirtsleeves and, after a while, followed Sandie. Such was his presence that every officer there in the hallway breathed in as he passed.

  ‘Colonel,’ he called, climbing onto the porch. The colonel was still there in his high dusty boots. ‘Come with me into the garden.’

  Before they left the steps the colonel was talking. Searcy could hear stray words and the names of Federal generals – Alpheus Williams, Sigel. The name Banks was heard a few times too. Tom Jackson had once said of U.S. General Banks: ‘He’s always ready for a fight and he generally gets whipped.’ Was Banks moving on Jackson? And in what numbers? And did he understand Jackson’s strength?

  Tom Jackson and the colonel had walked clear out of the front gate by now and the General, though still and silent, seemed to quiver in the light of the dusty road. The cavalry squadron could tell it, could tell that some decision governing all their futures was shuddering into shape inside Stonewall.

  At last the invisible quivering, which was visible as a barn to the horsemen, stopped and Tom Jackson turned and walked fast towards the house. ‘Sandie, Kyd.’

  Sandie reappeared quickly on the porch, but Kyd Douglas had to be hollered for, since he was deep in the house and perhaps cat-napping.

  ‘Kyd,’ Jackson called, ‘there’s that court-martial of Colonel Bright going on over on the Madison Court House Road.’ Searc
y had heard something of the court-martial – something about cowardice at a little battle over in the Valley. ‘General Ewell is the court president. Tell him the court will disband immediately.’

  Kyd, diplomatic as ever, suggested: ‘He might want a reason.’

  ‘Tell him the army will march, that’s his reason.’ Sandie was at side with a message pad ready. ‘To all brigade and division headquarters at once,’ Tom Jackson grunted, but audibly enough for Searcy. ‘Generals to have their men ready for the road by three this evening. They’ll receive more details in an hour or so about what country and main roads to travel by and what fords of the Rapidan to aim for. In the meantime each man to draw and cook three days’ rations.…’

  The rest of the orders were lost to Searcy, and Sandie was already reaching for the reins of his horse when Jackson yelled: ‘Tell them all I’ll be at the Jones house north of here in an hour’s time. That’s all, get everyone rushing.’

  It was like kicking an anthill, for Searcy saw more brigadiers and colonels than he would have ever guessed were inside, crushing past each other to get out the door of the white house. Amongst them, Searcy noticed a young Georgian brigadier called Andie Lawton leave by the window. For most people that had ever had anything to do with Jackson knew that the sins he didn’t forgive were the sins against speed.

  Searcy himself went looking for his horse, as if he too was a devoted member of the General’s staff.

  5

  What the young cavalry colonel had said was: he had ridden right round the Union army at Culpeper, taken prisoners, and could tell General Tom Jackson that there was but two Union divisions in that locale – a force commanded by General Nathaniel Banks, whom Tom Jackson had – as he’d said – whipped regularly in the Valley. Sure Johnny Pope had other men further up the railroad at Catlett’s Station, and there was Sigel’s German Corps over in Sperryville and King’s divison coming up from the east tomorrow or sometime or never. If all these elements coalesced, it would mean an army of 40,000 men. ‘But you know what they’re like for moving themselves, them Union generals,’ the young cavalry colonel said.

  Besides knowing the mental habits of Union generals, Tom Jackson knew too the mental habits of the men in Washington, Seward, Stanton, Ole Abe. If Banks were chewed up fast enough, the Washington set would demand that McClellan pull away for ever from the Richmond area. This would free Lee from his steamy garrison work around the capital. And while McClellan went home, it would be like a gift of time to the Confederate army. A gift of time while McClellan embarked his army on the James River, a gift of time while it was at sea, a gift of time while it regrouped itself round Washington, and equipped. And in that vacuum of time, Tom Jackson knew, something could be done to put a new complexion on the war. To consume Banks and Pope, to panic the Washington statesmen. If the movement was to be quick he had to use the Culpeper pike, but he did not care for the practice of walking straight up to the enemy’s face like that. For he was a dancing man. He waltzed round a flank. Both of his wives, dear dead Elinor Junkin, blooming Miss Anna Morrison, could tell you that their stolid spouse, when he decided to dance, could dance something fantastical, was as light as Ariel.

  To Tom Jackson the situation didn’t feel at all waltzy. But if you wanted 18,000 of boys to walk thirty miles in a day and a bit, and mount a battle at the end of the hike, then you were forced to use the best and most obvious roads.

  First the boys had to be fed. Soon the meadows around Gordonsville were fragrant with the smell of cush and of baked bread.

  Handsome Ash Judd ate his cush-stew as if that were his line of business. Joe Murphy, watching him, thought that the way Ash applied himself to his dish, as if there wasn’t room in the world for any idea or consideration, was a sign of the boy’s slow wits. In fact Ash ate with that amount of care because he knew he would need his stomach for some years after the battle of this summer. He knew, that is, that he was safe. He’d seen the old man again on the Madison Court House road the morning before last. And the witch he’d slept with as a seventeen-year-old in the mountains of Pendleton County had promised him that while ever he met the old man he would be safe.

  It had been when Guess’s Company were on their road back to camp after standing picket duty, just two mornings back, and there by a fence corner the old man was standing smoking a clay pipe with a wise indifferent look in his eye. Ash, by looking, couldn’t have told that the old man was any more interested in him than in any other boy in the ranks of Guess’s Company. That was the old man’s cleverness, not to recognise Ash, even though he and the old man were known to each other so well and bound together in such a compact that no Yankee marksman nor even the world’s widest-bore cannon had power over Ashabel Judd.

  Jackson’s army got eight miles behind them that afternoon and made their camp around the town of Orange, a town like all the other piedmont towns they knew so well, a town like Gordonsville and Charlottesville, white, a rich verdant even at high summer, and lying there amongst the hills like a promise of the decent life. Tom Jackson himself rode up the main street just an hour or so after his cavalry had ridden through. He dismounted at a little green in front of the courthouse. There was he and Sandie and Kyd and Hunter Maguire, and the body-servant Jim Lewis. While the others looked at maps, Jim went off looking for food and came back with some bread and cold chicken and a pitcher of lemonade he’d got from a private house. ‘But they tell me, Gen’ral, that all the bedrooms in dis town’s been reserved by other officers.’

  The chicken didn’t come to much when Jackson had divided it with his three staff officers. They stood about with a small fragment each in their hands.

  ‘You could go into any house, General,’ said Hunter Maguire; ‘you could cancel any junior officer’s right to a room.’

  ‘This is supposed to be an army of democrats,’ Tom Jackson said, grinning at his chicken. As the sun went down, he draped himself over a stile on the town green and slept there for a few hours as guns and men crept through to the northern edge of town. He awoke at ten again and dictated orders for the next day’s line of march, and was writing away there when a gentleman called Willis, a shopkeeper, came out and invited him into his house. He stayed awake till three in the parlour, discussing the nature of the land ahead with Major Hotchkiss. About then Kyd, who was sleeping on a truckle bed in the upstairs hall, found himself hollered for and came downstairs to write down the General’s new orders for Dick Ewell’s division.

  After that Tom Jackson fell asleep again. He was elated by the risks he was taking, the old familiar risks which were wine to his teetotal body. Tomorrow his soldiers would cover the twenty miles to Culpeper. There couldn’t be any doubt about that. The risks demanded fast work and everyone, down to the last waggon-driver, knew about it. The General was in for a disappointment. Of his three generals, one – not sick young Charles Winder, not Popeye Ewell who’d gone blackberrying with Tom Jackson, but the third one, Ambrose Hill – would get the orders mixed. So he’d move his boys too late in the morning out of their encampments, into the pike, which then would seize up with traffic – Popeye’s and Winder’s and Hill’s boys and guns and waggons all clogged together between the embankments of the roadway.

  6

  Before reveille that morning, at a time when Usaph was in his deepest and sweetest sleep in a field by the turnpike, Ash Judd woke him.

  ‘Saph, Saph!’ Ash hissed at him. Usaph came awake so slowly and his mind was mixed, he thought for a time it was Ephie waking him.

  Ash was full of pop-eyed excitement. ‘Danny Blalock and me, today we’re going off on our own swing and we was speculating as to whether you’d also care to come.’

  Usaph wished he hadn’t been robbed of sleep for so bad a reason. ‘Goddamit, Ash, you know how I have to care for Gus.’

  ‘Bring Gus along. Ain’t he better out in open country, and out of all that dust?’

  ‘And he gets sick out there, say, and we can’t catch up? What’s Gus and me then? Godd
am deserters!’

  For there were, as Cate had said, certain rules of thumb in that army. A man could absent himself for a day if his record was good, he could go off looking for chickens or even for women, as long as he was in his place the next morning. Two days’ absence began to be the sort of offence you got bucked and gagged for or forced to carry a rail through camp. Three days and you were getting towards a floggable offence, and four or more you might as well stay away altogether, for with bad luck you could be shot dead and you would at least get a month of humiliation, a shaved head, a branding of the face or hand or hip, and bucking and gagging for weeks on end.

  ‘Then,’ Usaph said, ‘there’s Yankee cavalry out there on any swing you two care to make.’

  ‘Come now, ’Saph. You know how dust kills more than any horseman ever did.’

  As he was going, Usaph called to him lightly across Gus Ramseur’s sleeping shape. ‘You two get back safe, you understand me!’

  Ash and Danny travelled by the hilly and nameless copses between the two roads Stonewall’s army was using. Sometimes hawthorn and sumac and poison ivy blocked their way, but mostly there were clear spaces between hemlocks and oaks, and the leaf mould made a sweet road for them. They would come on clearings and pastures and cornfields, they would climb old stone fences and, as the sun rose, would believe that all dust and threat, noise and madness were way off to either side of them. And of course everything seemed, by that light, likely. ‘What if we find a young widow, Danny?’ Ash asked the schoolteacher. ‘A woman crazed with grief?’

  ‘Do you think,’ Danny said but with a half smile, ‘it’s the act of a civilised Southern man to take a crazy woman?’

  ‘I mean, not full-born crazy … I mean, seeking that well-known solace.’

  ‘From two men at the one time?’

  ‘Well, well. You might jest have to abstain, Danny.’