Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Now? Now, ma’am?’

  ‘When else? Come inside now and make sure your manners are as they have been.’

  ‘You have our guarantee, ma’am.’

  ‘Here,’ she said, when they were in the kitchen sitting at the scrubbed table in front of the big hearth whose heat, even today, was welcome somehow. ‘I think Arlan and I get so few visitors …’ She lifted a wet patch of canvas from the corner where it lay crumpled. A jug lay beneath it. ‘So grab a cup an drink it up,’ she sang girlishly, ‘that fine ole mountain dew!’

  And so as they ate they drank the burning white liquor, the ferocious distillation of wheat and rye. She got their names from them and they talked of the army and she talked of her battle with the perfidy of men, especially with her husband. An hour and a half passed this way and all three of them were florid and hearty and convinced of the sweetness of the day. And at a certain point Ash Judd did a thing that amazed Danny. As the woman talked he lifted his hand and ran it by the fingertips down the top of the woman’s spine, the bit he could get at above the back of the chair. The woman seemed at first not to notice, not even pausing in her speech, but after some ten minutes of it, she began to give little pleasured flinchings as Ash’s hand worked.

  There we are, Danny thought, I’m the one that understands the exact terms of the Confederacy’s struggle, but Ash is more, much more, at an understanding with women. Even at his young age, even with his diminished intellect, he knew women. How did he know? Danny wondered. How did he know when he lifted his hand to stroke the woman’s back that she would not bridle and order him out of the kitchen?

  Then Ash was up against her right side, having moved his chair, and his hand was right round her shoulder, and they were both beaming across the room like children beneath a mistletoe. To save himself embarrassment, Danny rose and said he needed to take the air, a gentlemanly statement of his desire to use the outhouse. Once out in the brazen afternoon, he chose not to go to the woman’s white-washed sink but to walk thirty yards further and to urinate in the fringes of the forest where shade fell on his moonshine-heated face. ‘Oh that Ash!’ he kept saying, shaking his head. ‘Oh that Ash Judd!’

  When he returned to the kitchen they were gone upstairs. Danny could hear their footsteps and then other noises, questions and laughter and creaks. He sat at the table, clasping one hand in another amongst the crumbs. But through the flimsy ceiling he could hear every whisper and deep sigh. Oh God, he thought, send Arlan back. Yet don’t. No! What would he himself say to an Arlan who came in at the door this minute? Oh afternoon, Arlan. My colleague Ashabel Judd’s upstairs explaining the options of the Richmond Government to your maw!

  At last Danny got beyond bearing it and stood up. There were desires in his belly he’d never known he had up till then and there was an intent there. He would, if asked about it earlier this morning, have considered it un-Southern. Goddam it, he would share the woman with Ash. It was the only way he could bear her little whimpers. Up and beyond the poky stairs he found the top floor all one attic, and Ash in no more than his shirt was heaving bare-assed atop the woman. Her dress and chemise were up to her armpits and her whimperings were so loud up here under the roof, they seemed a sort of homage to manhood. Her little cries both begged off and they begged release, and they came to Danny as an admission that there might be a part to woman – to all women, not just to camp whores – which was an animal part far out beyond the seas of respectability. This was not such a grand discovery on a world-scale, but it was a fact on which Danny had not been up to now adequately informed.

  He expected and feared the mother would drive him away then. Instead, on seeing him, she extended a hand a little way as if making him welcome. As he began unbelting himself, he thought, Ash will give her crabs, Holy Hallelulah! Such a case of crabs! And I shall but add to them. But she didn’t seem to be thinking twice about that!

  In the column on the Culpeper Road, a large boy from the 5th Virginia dropped dead beneath the sun. They brought him, as they brought the others who had fallen over in the heat, to the embankment beside the road. They took his boots and left him open-mouthed and squinting up at the killing sky. There was no sweat and not even a death clamminess on his dusty face, Usaph noticed in passing him. He was a man with no moisture left in him at all.

  Colonel Wheat dismounted, climbed the embankment and inspected the dead boy’s face. He turned to his halted regiment. ‘That goddam Fifth Virginia. They didn’t even close their brother’s eyes.’ He didn’t himself and beckoned two riflemen out of the column. ‘Cover him with his blanket, boys. Go on, shroud his poor damn face.’

  Gus Ramseur, thirsty at Usaph’s side, did not even see Colonel Wheat’s mercy. He sustained and tormented himself with the music in his head. There was a day in Staunton once when there’d been a parade, and during the parade a man who’d been court-martialled for cowardice was walked in front of the division and two bands played at once. At one end of the parade field a band played ‘The Rogue’s March’ and at the other end another band played ‘Yankee Doodle’. The coward was marched in his shirt sleeves into the parade square, barefooted, the left half of his head shaven, a placard on his chest and another on his back saying I AM A COWARD. The discord of the bands was meant to shame the man all the more, but Gus thought instead, as the notes of the brass clashed with one another, that this was more like the music of the age. It was the music you heard in cities like Philadelphia, where Gus had once visited; it was the music you heard in factories from the discord of the machines; it was the music you heard on the battlefield, the conflict of cries, whistles, whirrings and bangings. So they were not really shaming the coward on that parade ground, they were really treating him to the music of his times, the music of the machine of war which, in making those noises and invoking certain brute protests from the men who were crushed and crippled, had made the coward run away in the first place. Sure there were still, somewhere, women and fawns, streams and mountains to write music for, but a man who wanted to write the real music of his age ought to write out of that discord and that dissonance the bands made on the day the coward was paraded.

  Gus therefore had in his blanket, wrapped in a wallet of oilskin, a thick wedge of notes and annotations for his war symphony. It could not be written properly, this symphony, till the war ended and he had learnt more theory and composition and gotten back to a piano. But that would all happen next year if the experts were right. I have just to shift my saliva and save my breath and keep my mind cool during the marches. Then new year I’ll be back at my piano, making my notes between visits from students. Mama bringing me in too much coffee and shortbread and telling me not to strain my eyes. He knew his symphony might not be popular, but it would be true, that was most important. He meant to call it The Fourth of July Symphony.

  Usaph Bumpass had often seen Gus humming and making his annotations on ruled notepaper. That was how Usaph had got to his conclusion that Gus was a man of great talent who had to be saved from the slaughter. Education of any kind awed Usaph. Gus felt that if ever Usaph was in a situation where there was Usaph himself and a graduate of the University of Virginia, and one of them had to give up his life for the other, Usaph might give up his on the simple grounds that the other man had a Bachelor of Arts degree.

  Anyhow, as Ramseur kept his brain coolly tuned to the music of discord, the cripple Arlan rode into the yard of his mother’s farm towing the milchcow he’d recaptured. He could see no sign of the two stragglers around the farm and the silence frightened him. He got down from the horse, left it and the cow tethered, and dragged himself towards the house. There were ways he could walk silently if he took the care and the time, if he did not clump his foot down in impatience.

  The kitchen was empty, but the crumbs of the meal were on the table, and the jug was there too. He could hear overly quiet conversation from the attic. He hauled himself to the stairs with great stealth and made barely a noise until he was on the last two steps. At that point he
began to hurry, he tottered across the floor, saw his mother half-stripped lying between the two bare-assed stragglers, and in an instant later loosed off the two barrels of his shotgun. Shot went into the wall above the bed and through the roof. If he had had more control in his hands he would have done some grievous work to all three of them with that shot of his.

  Before the explosion, Danny had been lying there thinking how natural it was for them to have this big woman between them, praising himself for being unbashful about lying there with her and with Ash. Now he danced up, wearing nothing but his shirt and more pained and ashamed than he’d ever been in his life. He got to Arlan, whose face had gone fish-white beneath his farmer’s tan. He flung arms round the man, half caressing him, half stopping him from reloading. ‘Arlan,’ he said. He himself was burning red; he could feel his blood burning in his face and at the rims of his ears. ‘Arlan, please!’

  ‘Get dressed and go,’ the woman commanded, as if it were entirely Danny’s fault and Ashabel’s. She was already up, shaking her grey dress down over her haunches, becoming again and very fast a distant and forbidden woman. ‘Arlan,’ she said, ‘your maw’s very weak.’ She came up to Arlan and extricated the shotgun from the tangles of Danny’s arms and her son’s. ‘You boys dress an’ go quick.’

  ‘What if he shoots at you again, ma’am?’ Ash Judd asked, dragging on britches.

  She raised her voice. ‘Allow us the dignity, boy, of settling all that for ourselves.’

  Ash and Danny dressed as quickly as the events and their shame demanded, Danny in the corner up out of the range of Arlan’s eyes. They were ready in ninety seconds. The woman stood holding the shotgun with one hand and caressing blank Arlan with the other. What would I do, Danny Blalock wondered, if I found my own mother between two boys of the Stonewall Brigade? But the question was too painful for him to deal with.

  They were clumping downstairs to fetch their muskets when Ash stopped, mindful of something. He called up the stairwell to the woman. ‘Ma’am, you mentioned something of bacon you could spare us.’

  ‘Get out!’ she screamed.

  Danny wanted to spring away from that farm but Ash insisted on going slow, with some dignity. In the yard he bent to a chicken, getting it all at once in his hands. He screwed its neck and tied it with cord from his britches’ belt.

  ‘Oh, Ash, that’s not decent,’ Danny said, but Ashabel shrugged. He knew the woman was too busy explaining herself to her offspring to care for the moment what happened to her chickens.

  When they were back to the fringe of the forest, Danny said: ‘What you did, Ash, is worthy of a Yank.’

  Ash grinned. He took it as a compliment. He had started the day as a lesser man than Danny on account that Danny was a reader and knew so much about generals and politics. But this afternoon had made him the superior for his management of the woman and the remorseless way he’d asked for bacon and destroyed a chicken. If he felt any pain for Arlan – and he did – he was not about to admit it to a clever man like Danny.

  7

  Ash and Danny got to the ford easy, took their shoes off for the second time that day and splashed across. Some of the cavalry were swimming from the north bank, others were brewing coffee. Vedettes were posted beneath the crest of the first hill. All this meant that the Union horsemen had been driven off, Billy the Orator and Henry MacManus with them.

  It was not till after eight in the evening that the Shenandoah Volunteers, less its stragglers and its heat-sick, crossed and found an encampment a mile north of the ford.

  That evening Tom Jackson wrote to Robert E. Lee. ‘Some regiments of Winder’s and Ewell’s divisions marched as far as eight miles today, and most of Hill’s barely two. I’m not making much progress. I regret to tell you that Union cavalry were today allowed to make raids on both Winder’s and Hill’s waggons. The heat has been oppressive, and General Hill’s unfortunate confusion over my movement orders permitted the sun to take a high toll on the health of my men. Tomorrow I do not expect much more except to close up and clear the country around the train of the enemy’s cavalry. I fear that the expedition will, in consequence of my tardy movements, be productive of little good.…’

  Yet next morning, when he got up before dawn, he began to suspect the elements were shaking together properly. Robertson’s cavalry was out harrying before four a.m., Ewell’s division took the road by five, and Winder’s marched behind it, then Hill. All the waggons, 1200 of them, travelled to the rear, making cumbrous time and guarded by two brigades of Georgians. The whole column stretched out for seven miles on the Culpeper Road; but it made good time.

  At noon Tom Jackson seemed to be asleep in Old Sorrel’s saddle but pointed all at once to a hill off to his right, a steep one for this rolling country. The mapmaker Hotchkiss didn’t have to consult a map yet. He knew the place, he said. It was called Slaughter’s Mountain.

  Old Popeye Ewell, who’d been riding that morning with Tom Jackson, said, ‘Not a promising name, that one.’

  Hotchkiss said, ‘It’s just the name of the family who farm it.’

  It was another of those fierce noons, and the ominous name was still settling redly in their minds when a cavalry officer came down the column, flogging his horse. The poor horse seemed in a frightful lather and spat foam in a way that said little for its chances of lasting the afternoon. Up there, this officer said, beyond the mountain, beyond a stream, the enemy were occupying a ridge in copious numbers.

  Tom Jackson and his group reined off to the side of the pike and crowded up against a worm fence which bounded someone’s timber lease from the public road. This action allowed the infantry to go on marching, while Hotchkiss rummaged in his saddlebags for the right map. He found it quickly and pointed out its features to the General. The stream was called Cedar Run. It flowed down from the Blue Ridge, running north-west to south-east.

  Dick Ewell said that if anyone wanted to anchor a line of battle, Slaughter’s Mountain over there with its deep green, wooded slopes, would be a good feature to anchor it on. He seemed pretty pleased when the cavalry officer told him the enemy weren’t on it. He kept saying, jabbing at the map: ‘That’s our anchor. Yessir, as anchors go, that anchor’s as good as anyone could want.’

  And while he was still repeating himself, everyone heard Yankee cannon speaking far up the road. Tom Jackson didn’t raise his eyes from the map.

  A new disposition came over humble soldiers though, and rumours zipped with electric speed down the seven miles of army and then zipped back so transformed that even by the men who’d started them they could not be recognised.

  ‘It’s McClellan up there,’ went one rumour Usaph heard. ‘He’s got himself back from the James already.’

  ‘Goddamit, if it ain’t a solid army of niggers up there. Ole Abe’s gone and emancipated the beggars.’

  ‘I heard Abe’s got himself down from Washington to watch Pope and Banks face up to us. Rumour is he says the Union can’t pull back from the Rapidan without them goddam British reckernising our cause.’

  They were all lies you could laugh at afterwards. But when you stood in that crowd of shoulders, with little knowledge except of whose head was in front of you, blocking your view, then maybe you took some of them as gospel.

  Jackson and Popeye and their retinues had taken to the road again, jogging in the dusty space between two of Popeye’s brigades. They did not halt till they got to a little rise in the pike from which the stream and the Union ridge behind it could be seen. Again the General turned off the road. There was a more spacious clearing here, the sort of place where travellers on the pike could pull off at noon to chew on a bit of bone or suck from a jar.

  Tom Jackson sat there silent for a time and Popeye knew not to ask him questions. They used binoculars on what they could see of the enemy.

  ‘A fine ridge they got themselves there,’ Popeye muttered, making calculations in his head of the lines of blue uniforms he could see over there amongst the trees.

&n
bsp; ‘How many of them would you say, Dick?’

  ‘I’d say two divisions. And that’s minimum, Tom.’

  Another cavalry man visited them, his horse in better condition than the earlier one. It seems the cavalry’d caught a poor Yankee picket urinating in a wooded stretch of Cedar Run. He’d said he belonged to Alpheus Williams’s U.S. division, but that there was also General Chris Auger’s division there on the ridge, and Rickett’s Pennsylvanians were said to be coming down from Culpeper.

  Tom Jackson thought to himself that Ewell could have the right of the road, including the mountain he’d been so keen about as an anchor. Popeye was used to getting by on the bare letter of Tom Jackson’s orders. He didn’t get much more than bare letters now.

  Jackson leaned down way over Sorrel’s mane and squinted. ‘Dick, you can have this side of the pike. The nature of the ground suggests an attack on their centre. Let me know when your boys are deployed.’

  ‘You’ll be with Winder, Tom?’ Popeye asked, wanting an address to send messages.

  ‘Right first off, Dick.’

  And Jackson just rode away then, as if they’d been discussing some idle deal in real estate. Dick Ewell believed he understood Tom Jackson’s purpose just the same. He – Dick Ewell himself – was to pin his line along the base of the mountain and, as Tom Jackson had said, punch at the middle of the other people’s line. (Dick Ewell always called the enemy ‘those other people’, perhaps because he had so many old friends over there.) Meantime Tom Jackson would no doubt send Winder’s boys off amongst the blind woods and low hills over to the left, with the idea of taking the other people from the flank. It was exactly what had been tried at Kernstown last spring. Except that today there were more reserves – there was the whole of Hill’s division coming up the road, and it could be used as needed.