Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  In fact Searcy had been so enchanted since he’d come in that he’d nearly forgotten they had any such connection. ‘Of course you should have. Can we speak freely? Your black girl …?’

  ‘She’s out at market, sir.’ She smiled and pointed to a chair just by the table. ‘Sit here. True, a fine layer of flour-dust will cover your clothes, Mr Searcy. I shall try to compensate for that by giving you the first slice of gingerbread to come from my oven.’

  ‘A bargain, madam,’ said Searcy. He sat and they smiled at each other in silence for a while. When Searcy spoke again, it was in a voice which could hardly be heard, even by Dora Whipple. ‘You know the connections you had in Richmond? I don’t mean the social connections. I mean the … other connections?’

  A seriousness came over her small bunched face. ‘I know the kind of connections you mean, Mr Searcy.’

  ‘Do they operate here? In Orange?’

  ‘No one has made any contacts with me.’

  Searcy thought a moment. ‘I don’t ask this in any offensive way, my dear lady. But I wondered if perhaps you’d had a change of heart?’

  ‘My heart is steady, Mr Searcy; even more so my mind. It’s the way I’ll stay. No one has bothered to contact me. If you told me anything now I would not know to whom to relay it in my turn.’ She punched a particularly massive lump of dough. ‘I imagine someone will come to me in time.’

  Searcy smiled. ‘I have nothing in particular to tell, Mrs Whipple. Except the old, old story. That Lee has some 60,000 troops and that’s the best he’ll ever do. I’ve said so in one of my despatches to The Times. I wonder if they bother to read The Times in Washington?’

  ‘I don’t think they can, really,’ said Mrs Whipple. ‘Or if they do, I don’t think they believe what they read.’

  He could see that she’d become very serious. That they had become spy and spy again. He wanted to get back to being man and woman, friend and friend. He shook his head. ‘In any case I visited, madam … because I wanted to visit!’

  She looked straight at him. That acute frankness was in her eye. And he wondered what it meant, wondered whether he ought to go to her, be-floured as she was, and solve matters by wrapping her in his arms. But someone new had arrived at the door of her quarters and was hammering.

  Dora Whipple wiped her hands on a towel and crossed the room and opened. Searcy saw at the door a tall man with the white, slightly purplish complexion of a boozer. He wore an untidy surgeon’s uniform.

  ‘Doctor Canty,’ said Mrs Whipple.

  The surgeon did not answer. He handed Mrs Whipple a note, which she unfolded and read.

  ‘I’m too busy with gingerbread to answer this nonsense,’ she told the surgeon when she’d finished reading. ‘There are hundreds of men needing a whisky issue many times a day. If you give me a clerk, I can make sure these records you ask for are kept … how much whisky is given, when and to whom …’

  ‘It is not satisfactory, ma’am,’ the surgeon told her. ‘It is too easy for you to play favourites with the whisky keg, as happens with some of them Marylander officers you spend your time with in Ward 4.’

  ‘Do I read you right, Surgeon Canty …?’

  ‘You read me any way you like, ma’am.’

  Searcy got to his feet now, delighted to be able to do something definite for her. ‘Go before I take you with my fists, sir,’ he told the surgeon in what Mrs Whipple thought of as his best Britannic manner.

  Surgeon Canty went a dangerous purple. ‘This is my hospital. I have authority over every square foot of it.’

  Searcy was so anxious to get at him that he span Mrs Whipple aside and took the lapels of the man’s uniform. ‘Apologise to the matron,’ he said. Mrs Whipple was close to Searcy’s elbow, saying softly: ‘Let him go.’

  The surgeon’s eyes were bulging but he would not formulate any answer.

  ‘Apologise to this lady, you drunken pig-doctor!’

  ‘Please,’ Mrs Whipple whispered. ‘I have to stay on here with him. I have to work with him.’

  Searcy pushed the man away and was surprised how he toppled. Canty had that strange weakness of the inebriate, the man who drinks more than he eats.

  ‘I shall send a goddam corporal’s guard,’ he was calling, ‘to evict your guest, Mrs Whipple!’

  ‘And I, sir, on my return to the army,’ Searcy announced, ‘shall mention your charming manners to General Jackson.

  Canty turned away and vanished into the hospital. Searcy closed the door, and he and Mrs Whipple returned to the table, panting fiercely.

  ‘Oh, Mr Searcy, you’ve taken my hand,’ Mrs Whipple said all at once in a high breathy voice. For he had her hand, pallid with dough, clamped in his, and seemed to be studying it deeply. She laughed. ‘If you waited half an hour you could have it in its normal state.’

  But he could hear her excited breathing. He put his lips to her wrist and they came away comically marked with the gingerbread mix. That made both of them laugh. ‘Look at yourself in the mirror,’ Mrs Whipple advised Searcy.

  ‘Marry me, Mrs Whipple,’ Searcy said simply.

  ‘No,’ she said, equally simply. The laughter had vanished. ‘It can’t be done.’ She nodded over her shoulder. ‘Boys perish in that place, you know, my dear Searcy. Any need of ours isn’t as sharp, sir, as theirs.’

  ‘There are other matrons to take over the management, Mrs Whipple.’

  ‘Few as accomplished as I,’ she told him. ‘I have to say it. Few as accomplished as I.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ Searcy said, starting to argue hard. ‘Lee and Jackson have to come to grief in the North. There must be a retreat in the autumn …’

  ‘And oceans of wounded boys, my dear Searcy. Oceans!’

  He waved that aside, ‘Perhaps about Christmas matters will have settled. We can get out to the North with one of the blockade runners. We could go back to England. My father has a fine house in the West Country. Imagine us living there, Mrs Whipple, in such peace. In such happiness. I have a book to write there about North and South. You also ought to write a book.’

  ‘Which book?’ she asked, and her laugh was very nearly bitter. ‘The one about the matron or the one about the spy.’

  ‘Come, Mrs Whipple! I stagger round the earth from one battlefield to another. Like the ghost of Hannibal or someone like that. I tell you, my dear Mrs Whipple, if I had you, I could happily come to rest. We could live together in a well-ordered household.’

  She laughed again. ‘It sounds as if all you need is a good housekeeper.’

  ‘I tell the story badly, Mrs Whipple,’ he said with a confessional grin. ‘Let me say this. I desire you. Oh yes, more than anything. I desire you.’

  And it was now somehow that he decided he had a sort of right to take hold of her. She proved so small-boned, he got the illusion he could force her in between the fibres of his own body, take her over that way. The directness of her mouth on his was like the directness of her eyes. They stood clasped together for at least a minute. Then, like a sensible woman who didn’t want to go short of breath, Mrs Whipple pushed him away. ‘Please, let us sit down, Searcy,’ she murmured. ‘Just till our heads are clear.’

  He did not take her invitation to sit, but he watched her. Her hands were folded in front of her, not in the way women pray but in the way of people who are suddenly exhausted. ‘Now just hush up, Mr Searcy,’ she pleaded. ‘Please.’

  ‘As you wish,’ he said, turning his face away.

  ‘Now come, Searcy. Don’t let your features droop like that. You don’t need me to tell you I am honoured. You know that in other circumstances …’

  ‘We can make the circumstances.’

  ‘No, we can’t do that, Searcy. Don’t tell yourself we can make the circumstances as we wish. The war owns us both and we both know it. We met under its conditions and, unlike most people, we know it won’t end by Christmas.’

  ‘We could leave it tomorrow,’ Searcy insisted.

  She put her head down on h
er hands. ‘Do you think so? Look at the life I lead, Searcy. You yourself thought it was curious when you first met me. I tend the heroes of a cause I detest. My way of saying it is that I nurse the victims of that cause. Say I walked off now. How cavalier it would be of me. How light-headed. I nurse the Confederacy and send information to the Union. I do not have the right now to become a private woman all at once and to say enough to both causes.’ She sat up straight. ‘Of course I would like to fancy you’d ask me again when this war has let go of us both. I don’t presume anything, though …’

  Searcy sat there half an hour arguing and pleading with her, until it was time for her to go to the cookhouse and see to the evening diets. Then he sat a gloomy hour on his own, chewing on a cheroot. At last she came back. Walking in, she let her hand trail down his arm. Then she sat down again herself. Searcy could tell by looking at her that she had been thinking of him all that time in the cookhouse, not in any sentimental sense, but arguing with herself about what was possible and what was not. And while she spooned broth, she would have still been arguing and thinking. She was in a ferment all right.

  ‘I believe,’ she said, giving a small laugh, just like a woman who knows she is taking a risk, ‘that marriage is not the only context for lovers, Mr Searcy.’

  He smiled and looked wistful. He did not think she could have said what she just had. ‘I’ve heard that too. But marriage is the best context for us, dear Mrs Whipple.’

  ‘The best ideal one, yes, sir. Men get so solemn about marriage. Yet they are so promiscuous at heart.’ She coughed again as if she had trouble with her throat, which as far as Searcy could tell, she did not have.

  ‘You mean we may be lovers?’ he asked, amazed.

  She would not answer straight away. Then she said: ‘Nothing can happen between us here, my dear Searcy. The one thing Canty, our friend of a second ago, does with any efficiency is to watch me.’ Yet again she coughed. ‘I believe the situation is that when ladies visit gentlemen in their hotels, they wear a veil and enter by the back entrance. Believe me, Searcy, I would rather not wear a veil, but we labour under the circumstances this war … this war … imposes on us, my dear, dear, Searcy.’

  Searcy stood up and went to her. He was half joyous and half disappointed. ‘Yes,’ he said, kissing her. ‘Wear a veil.’

  ‘Is it true,’ she asked before he went, ‘men never marry women who visit hotels secretly?’

  ‘Be assured, my dear Mrs Dora Whipple, that this one does.’

  The result was that that evening, in a room on the second floor of the Lewis House in Orange, Mrs Whipple gave herself to the Honourable Searcy with all the thoroughness he could have wished for. Just the same, in too short a time, she had to leave. She told him that she must be back at the hospital by eleven p.m., for she was bound to make the rounds of the wards every night before retiring, to see who was dying or in distress.

  And as Searcy lay along at midnight, playing with the sadness of her going, it struck him she was exactly right. The war did own the both of them as surely as slaves were owned in the Carolinas. The thought kept him awake and fretful till dawn.

  23

  At three o’clock that morning there was a sort of party going on in a pleasant field some half a mile down the road from the little yellow farmhouse of Mr Tilley. Three waggons were drawn up in that field and their tailboards were down. Long queues of men led up to the tailboards of the waggons. The Stonewall Brigade were drawing three days’ rations again, and everyone was talking and everyone seemed fresh.

  Only Bolly was morose. He snarled at his messmate Hans Strahl and made remarks all the time about Dutchies and what low-grade beings they were. ‘Old Bolly’s gone and decided,’ said Hans to Usaph, ‘that he don’t want to be seen mixing with no Germans.’

  Yet contradictorily he hung round Gus and Usaph, as if he did want quieter company now than he’d had with Joe Murphy and Ash Judd. He listened, with puckered lips and a frown, even to Gus’s music talk and to anything fanciful Usaph wanted to say.

  The business of drawing three days’ rations in the middle of the night excited Usaph – he felt there must be special purpose for it, that such lumps of food must mean someone – Jackson, God, someone – thought the whole business of conflict was drawing towards an end.

  He thought he’d pass on to Bolly a hopeful rumour he’d got from Danny Blalock, who himself claimed to have read it in an issue of Harper’s.

  ‘It’s said,’ he told Bolly, ‘that the Yankees already, while we sit here, have got together plans for this big parade. The same to take place once we have Philadelphia and force a peace on them others. It’ll be fire brigades and Yankees and your humble goddam servants, just to show that America is fair at peace again. Why, could you imagine what it must be like to march in a big city like that?’

  ‘They’d shy at you with goddam offal,’ Bolly moaned. ‘Them New York Dutchies got no end of rubbish to throw at Christians.’

  Gus started to talk about a composition professor he wanted to meet, a German who had been in New York since the German riots of ’48.

  Ole Bolly wasn’t likely, in that mood, to let the Germans off the charge that they lived like trash, just because they happened to have a fancy perfesser.

  ‘But, Gus,’ he protested, under a night sky that was half stars, half low cloud. ‘You don’t need no Dutchy teaching you these things. You’re damn fine at the fiddle when you take it in your head to treat us to some tunes. Goddamit, you’re so much better than that fancy Irishman.’ Bolly, so it seemed, had a down on the races of the earth – Dutchies, Irish, the lot.

  And so the idle talk went on. ‘There’s a rumour anyhow,’ Hans Strahl dared say, ‘we’re jest going back over to the Valley itself.’

  ‘You heared my friend say Philadephia,’ Bolly growled. ‘Can’t you hear proper? My friend said Philadelphia. Why, there ain’t anything happening over the Valley.’

  ‘Except the Yankees hold it,’ Hans said, looking away. ‘Maybe the people in the Valley don’t call that nothing.’

  Over the tailboard of the waggon, each man was handed three pounds of cornflour. There was no standard way though that any one of the boys took it. Judd had nothing better to take it in than his wide-brimmed hat. Strahl had stripped a length of birch-bark from a tree and got his flour poured on that, and then the bark made a good kneading board for making it up into dough. Blalock had a pint pot, and Gus had got a jug from somewhere. Some other boy from the company tied up the arms of his lousy shirt and had the orderly from the waggon pour the ration of flour into the sleeves. And each of these methods were fairly standard ways men had for collecting their vitt’ls.

  Some of those whose hats weren’t in use for carrying flour used them for the molasses ration – you could eat the gooey stuff up straight away, dipping hardtack in it, and then you could wash the stickiness out of your hat before any vengeful sun came up.

  It was a real hive, that field, and everyone was buzzing, talking in the clearing, talking in line, talking while stuffing their faces with biscuit and goo and goober peas. It was no Roman orgy, but it was a Confederate orgy and it had a flavour to it, in that these lean boys now gorging themselves knew it meant big events.

  It all went a little sour just before four o’clock when the meat waggon came in, bringing with it the strange hearty smell of fresh meat. Officers like Captain Guess and Captain Hanks and Lieutenant Lucius Taber and the Reverend Dignam hurried the men up to it, saying there was only just time to collect the ration. So with only just time to collect it and no time to cook it, they needed to salt it so it wouldn’t taint by noon.

  In every waggon the orderlies were calling: ‘I don’t have no goddam salt.’ ‘Well, ask the goddam commissary.’ ‘Well, salt’s going short in the whole goddam South.’ ‘Well, if there’s plenty in Mobile jest you get down there and fetch us all a peck.’ And other stuff of that nature.

  Usaph had no choice now but to roll up his fine bit of beef in his blanket, but it
was Bolly who couldn’t bring himself to do that. He stood looking down on his share and shedding tears on it while Guess and Taber roared round the glade punishing delayers with a sword blade on the ass. That boy Taber took to command as easy as you’d expect from a foolish boy.

  ‘Bolly,’ said Usaph.

  ‘There ain’t salt, Usaph,’ Bolly told him, sounding amazed.

  ‘I know that, Bolly,’

  ‘Well goddamit, this could be the last fresh meat I ever see, Usaph.’

  ‘Well,’ said Usaph. It was true for everyone here, that sentiment about the meat. But it didn’t do any good to say so.

  ‘Put it in your haversack then, Bolly.’

  ‘And I tell you I ain’t never going to see a woman again, that I know, goddamit!’ And he started to wail through an open mouth so that anyone at all could have heard him. ‘How did the whoresons forget the salt, Usaph?’

  Usaph could see Bolly wasn’t going to be easy comforted and the fuss he was making would bring those raging officers to him. He began arguing and, turning sideways to make a point, found Cate beside him. Well, that was always happening. Cate said in a reflective way, ‘For if the salt lose its savour’, which though from The Book wasn’t much help. But then he pulled a little bag from nowhere. ‘You can have my salt, Bolly. You can salt your meat while we march.’

  ‘Your salt?’ said Bolly, feeling the bag and smiling like a child right in the middle of his tear-wet face.

  ‘That’s it, Bolly, my salt.’

  Cate began to lead Bolly off into the lane where the lines now formed fast. Usaph now had time to consider that this three pounds of beef he held in his hands could mean his life. It took little cleverness to work out that if it rotted, that would just about be the same as going half-lame on the road and under the sun. It was a simple matter now; would he like to die a proud man or could he beg Cate for the ordinary things of life, for salt for his meat?

  ‘Cate!’ he called, catching Cate and Bolly up. Cate looked at him very quiet, without smiling. ‘Do you have enough of that to salt my meat, Cate? I mean, I ask no goddam favours, I have money …’