Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  4

  Wheat was a profane and adulterous man. It hadn’t escaped Usaph that to be his runner might not be a pleasant thing if the Lord all at once singled Lafcadio Wheat out for special vengeance.

  Though the runner for someone as important as a Virginia colonel didn’t need to do picket duty, Usaph was glad to take a few messages up to the picket line that night, just to avoid the colonel’s speeches and stories. It wasn’t that they weren’t fine stories and eloquent speeches. It was just that they came on so ceaseless and without stint. Besides, Wheat had taken to winking at Usaph and calling him ‘the Reverend Bumpass’. The way he did it was half-mocking and half-begging and Usaph didn’t like it.

  So Usaph was happy to leave Wheat’s campfire and move north down the Hagerstown pike, a fine straight pike amongst the smoky meadows of Maryland.

  The pickets stood along the north end of the wood, just a little way from the Dunker church. Some of them were chatting low and chawing and huddling by the railing fence on the turnpike. Others were across the road by a big cornfield. Lucius Taber had charge of the fifteen or so Shenandoah boys who stood in this picket line. It had come on drizzly as Usaph delivered his letter to Lucius. Lucius stood by a stone fence looking north, reading the letter in little bursts and then raising his eyes again. The Yankees had crossed way up the Antietam stream and were off in the wood there, at least a good half-mile away. But sometimes you felt you could just about hear their whispering. It was like a shuffle of leaves, their conversation.

  Usaph thought he could feel a joyfulness up here amongst the dripping leaves. There was a sort of breathiness in the way boys whispered, as if they couldn’t wait till morning. It wasn’t like that back where the rest of the regiment were trying to sleep against fences and in murky little ravines along the road. But the excitement was here, and as sweet as it was to taste, it made Usaph ill at ease.

  Ash Judd, one of the pickets, was resting against a walnut tree. As Usaph turned back from talking to Lucius, Ash called to him.

  ‘Saph! Saph!’ He pointed north with his thumb, as if the north was not dark but was lit up. ‘Tell me what you can see there, Saph?’

  ‘I can’t see nothing,’ said Usaph.

  ‘There you go!’ Ash whistled, very pleased. ‘You see, they don’t have no fires, Usaph, ole friend. Their goddam generals are pretending we don’t know where they are and so no fires’re permitted the poor sons of bitches.’ And Ash whistled low and shook his head. To him it just showed what happened to Northern people all the time as a punishment for electing Lincoln and all them other Republican hoodlums. ‘They’re up there chawing on dried coffee grounds and shivering to theirselves.’

  ‘You ain’t much better off yourself there, Ash.’

  ‘Ain’t I? Goddam, why I had a conscript bring me a mug of coffee up from that-there cornfield right there, and it was goddam nectar, Saphie, goddam nectar.’ And Ash grinned up at Usaph like one man grinning up at another amongst the comforts of the lobby of the Virginia House in Richmond.

  ‘Tell me this,’ Ash said then; ‘is ole Wheat still telling Gus back there them stretchers regarding his gran’daddy?’

  ‘When I left him, yeh, Ash. He was still telling away.’

  ‘I wonder what tales of their gran’daddies them Union colonels’re telling the Yankee boys to keep ’em warm tonight?’

  Far away, where the Union pickets must be, there was quite a clatter and yelling all at once. You couldn’t tell what words were said, but it sure sounded like loud oaths. ‘Some goddam conscript of theirs must’ve tripped over a nag,’ said Ash.

  Going back to the shed by the pike where Wheat was sheltering from the drizzle, Usaph left behind all the temporary optimism young Ashabel Judd had given him. He felt clammy and scarcely knew whether it was drizzle or fever. The moon was thin when it came out over beyond the pike, and in the low pastures near the Antietam stream mists were forming. One more day, he promised himself. Just one more day of conflict. ‘Oh, Ephie, oh, Ephie,’ he said out loud, without knowing he was doing it.

  ‘Be quiet there, boy,’ said someone from the darkness.

  5

  That morning Dora Whipple received three sets of visitors in her cell. The last of the night’s rain was dripping from the eaves when the first one arrived. It was her counsel. She could tell from his dismal face what he had come for.

  ‘There’s no mercy,’ she stated, looking up from her chair by the table where she was composing a long painful letter to Mrs Isabelle Randolph.

  ‘There is none,’ he said. ‘My poor Mrs Whipple.’

  She nodded like someone who had just found out that the storekeeper has run out of coffee. She was amazed herself at how tranquil she could be. She saw that her attitude was confusing poor honest Pember. ‘My dear sir,’ she said, ‘it’s a matter of what is inevitable, that’s all.’ She chewed the end of her pen a little. ‘Thank you for all you did. But a crime is a crime, sir.’ She looked down on her letter as if re-reading it and placed a deft comma in one of the sentences. ‘Tell me, who is doing it?’

  ‘They are bringing the navy executioner from Norfolk, ma’am. He’s said to be the … the best. By that I mean, ma’am, the least … painful.’

  They shook hands and he left. He said he would have stayed but … he had been ordered back to Richmond by his superior officers. She wondered if that was true.

  She’d just about finished eating her breakfast when she looked up and saw standing in her doorway in silence her second visitor, a bulky man with a brown beard and wearing the uniform of a chief petty officer in the Confederate navy. She looked him fair in the eye, as was her manner, and he did not flinch away. He looked like all the others she’d been seeing lately – a serious, kindly man.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘Sir, can I help you?’

  He shook his head. After some seconds he nodded to her and left. She rang her little hand bell and one of those elderly guards came.

  ‘Corporal!’ she barked. ‘I don’t want any visitor … any visitor … being brought in here without my being told. Do you understand?’

  He said he did.

  But later still, when he had gone off duty, she heard quite a crowd of people being let into the lockup. Oh my God, she thought, undertakers and all that rabble!

  ‘Friends of yours, ma’am,’ the guard called as he turned the key in her lock. She went on writing even while these visitors were entering.

  ‘Mrs Whipple,’ she heard in a voice that shook her ear and resounded through her body. She looked up and it was Searcy. He placed his forefinger on his lips while the turnkey locked up and went away.

  ‘I paid for four passes to see you,’ he told her. ‘You see, help is feasible, and it has arrived.’ He spread his arms.

  She looked at those who’d come in with him. There was first of all a minister of religion, and then a middle-aged couple standing together, probably husband and wife. They all waited there, looking at her with the usual solemnity, the look she was getting used to.

  ‘It is not easy getting passes,’ Searcy said with a wide smile. ‘But seeing you is worth every trouble, Mrs Whipple? He smiled and took her hand and pressed it against his lips.

  ‘I am in good heart, Mr Searcy,’ she said, smiling remotely. ‘It is such a wonder to see you. I have a letter for you … I was trying to get someone to deliver it …’ She frowned. ‘I hope you take no risk, coming here.’

  ‘They would not dare touch me, Mrs Whipple. In half an hour, I assure you, they will not dare touch you.’

  ‘Oh, they won’t touch me anyhow, Mr Searcy. They won’t touch me where I reside, I’m very happy to say.’ And she tapped her chest, above her breasts, to indicate the place she resided so safely.

  ‘They will not touch you, my dear lady,’ said Searcy exultantly, ‘because you will be my wife. The protection of my name and of my family will hang over you. This, Mrs Whipple, is the Reverend Archer, and this Mr and Mrs Brownley. They are of like mind t
o us. Mr Archer will marry us now, Mr and Mrs Brownley will be our witnesses. I shall drop our legal wedding certificate on President Davis’s desk by this evening at the latest. He will then know that if he proceeds with harming you he will become a pariah in Europe –’

  ‘Amen,’ said the Reverend Archer.

  ‘– that his name shall be synonymous with Bluebeard’s and Genghis Khan’s. If he did not even care about that, he cannot afford it in the political sense, madam. Therefore, I think I can say with humility, my dear Dora, that I’ve come to save you.’

  She inspected him for a while. He’s coming on a little strong, she thought. She closed her eyes and sat down again. While she loved him for going to this trouble, she was amazed how little bearing it had, how little it meant.

  She waved her hand in a negative way. ‘Please, I am honoured by all your trouble …’

  Searcy went pale. Everyone is going pale, she thought. Everyone but me.

  ‘You’ll surely do this, Mrs Whipple?’ Searcy asked.

  ‘You know I can’t settle the matter this way,’ she said.

  ‘My dear lady, the preservation of one’s life,’ the Reverend Archer said, ‘is the first issue of all …’

  ‘I can’t let myself escape by these means,’ she said. She resented this preacher horning in between Searcy and herself. ‘Searcy, you know how it is. You can tell. The conflict which finished my dear husband is meant to finish me as well. Simple as that.’

  ‘This is too much fatalism, ma’am,’ said the Reverend Archer, like an amateur theologian.

  ‘Dora,’ Searcy whispered, ‘I am begging you … for my sake …’

  She was beginning to feel desperate. She said again: ‘I cannot escape by these means, Searcy. You understand that. I could not live on as anyone’s proper wife under these terms. Our union, Searcy – which honest to heaven I’d want under any other conditions – would be poisoned by this stratagem we’re using here. You can see it, Searcy. I know you can.’

  ‘Mrs Whipple,’ the Reverend Archer pressed on, ‘your conscience is too delicate, ma’am. There is no shame in saving one’s life by reasonable means.’

  My God, he talks like a damn mathematician, in here when I should be on my own with Searcy. She began to shake her head. ‘I’ve been Yates Whipple’s widow so long – it seems to me so long anyhow, even though it’s only been a year. Don’t you see, Searcy, I want to die as Whipple’s widow? That’s the appropriate thing. Don’t you see?’

  Searcy grasped her by the shoulders. She pitied him for the sweat he was in. ‘Dora! Please, Dora!’

  His cheeks were getting so muddy from his tears that you would have thought he’d been crying even before he came in here, that he’d been weeping since dawn. ‘I can so easily save you. You … you can so easily save me. We’d live so well in Devon, Mrs Whipple, a world away from Union and Confederate. Please, Dora!’

  Mrs Whipple couldn’t understand how he could talk like that. He sounded like a dilettante, an idle admirer of the Union.

  ‘You can forget the slaves? You can forget them as easy as that?’

  ‘Yes. For you, yes. How much will you remember them if you hang?’

  The eyes of Searcy and his parson and the two witnesses were fixed on her. They were all at once a greater combined torment for her than her judges had been.

  ‘You’re causing me pain!’ she told Searcy.

  ‘No. I’d never cause you pain.’

  She shook her head in a frenzy. ‘Let me alone. Let me alone!’ She glared at them, especially the Reverend Archer who seemed to her to be the most unyielding of the quartet and to have fouled this meeting between Searcy and herself with all his cold moral talk. ‘Don’t persecute me, please. I can’t do, Searcy, what I can’t do.’

  Searcy kept on weeping, but he did not bully her any more. ‘Our passes are good for a return visit this afternoon, my dear Dora,’ he said.

  ‘Come back yourself, Searcy. Come back to sit with me and talk. But please don’t bring any strangers. Please, please.’

  Searcy nodded to the Reverend Archer and the Brownleys to go. They stumbled out, Archer not quite brave enough to argue with Searcy. When they had gone, Searcy held her for a while. He could feel the reverberations of her heart against her ribs, the way he had the first time he ever had hold of her.

  ‘Be still, be still, my little bird,’ he told her. ‘The town is full of guards, all those middle-aged men are standing double watches. There’s no escape that way. The only escape …’

  ‘You promised not to talk about it, Searcy. Hold me, just that.’

  He obeyed her, but within a minute could tell, just by holding her, that it was useless, and that the turnkey was in any case waiting for him to leave. Going out, he promised again to be back later.

  He found Archer and Mr and Mrs Brownley waiting disconsolately outside the lockup door.

  ‘I shall try again this afternoon, good people. Perhaps if it’s convenient you could wait within call.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Archer. ‘Of course, we must.’

  But when they came back in the afternoon, they found an old grey-haired colonel at the lockup door. He said Mrs Whipple had a letter for Searcy and did not want to see them again. Searcy waved the parson and witnesses off, staggered away to the shadow of one of the elms and opened the letter.

  I would be your wife if the world let me. I respect you, Searcy, and feel great affection for you, but I cannot see you again without pain to us both. I know, somehow, that you will remember me as a woman, not as something akin to one of those Russian icons or Christian martyrs.

  Yours,

  D.W.

  6

  ‘Why ain’t you got shoes on your feet?’ Usaph yelled at the drummer. He had to yell because the noise had been going on since three o’clock in the morning.

  The drummer boy blinked and didn’t answer, but just looked down at his young horny feet. Goddam, he was young. Fifteen at best. Little bullet head. Mouth always just a little opened. He was Wheat’s newest interest, this boy. He’d slept last night huddled up at the colonel’s feet like a dog.

  ‘Shoes?’ asked Gus. ‘Tell my friend Usaph why you got no shoes.’

  ‘Had a pair but they got took,’ said the boy drummer. ‘By a feller looked something like you.’

  ‘I ain’t got your shoes, boy,’ Usaph assured him.

  ‘So you say,’ said the drummer. He yawned. Wheat had had him playing drum rolls half the goddam night. A drummer was getting to be something of a military novelty. The Shenandoah Volunteers had last had their own drummer way down there near Richmond, all that time ago, at high summer.

  This drummer had therefore been rattling away with his sticks in the misty grey as daylight came. The drum rattle got boys up from their wet blankets in the edges of the forest. Boys who’d slept uneasy and with their cartridges inside their jackets, near up against their heart warmth to keep the powder dry. And as they rose, they were muttering now about the open secret of Wheat being mad.

  ‘What’s your name, boy?’ Wheat had asked the boy on finding him last night.

  ‘Rufe.’

  ‘What’s your other?’

  ‘Got none.’

  ‘My. What’s your daddy’s other name, then?’

  ‘Ain’t got no daddy, colonel.’

  ‘Do tell! You the virgin birth, is that so?’

  Rufe didn’t say anything. He didn’t understand.

  ‘Where you from then?’

  ‘Everywheres.’

  ‘Goddamit, Rufe, ain’t you jest the universal American child!’

  ‘I did some living on the rivers, colonel,’ said Rufe, like an old man with lots of phases to his life.

  ‘The river goddam Jordan, Rufe?’

  ‘The Mississip. The Arkansas. Working the rafts. One time a cap’n told me my pappy came from Arkansas. Don’t know if that’s true.’

  Anyhow, Wheat now had this orphan child to make drum rolls in the first misty light. Rufe’s rat-tat
-tatting not only woke the boys but directed them to their places by the high worm fences just beside the pike. Though they squinted up the road towards Pennsylvania, they could see nothing. Hearing was different. They could hear cannon speaking to each other up there in the rural murk.

  Kyd passed by on the pike, going north towards the Confederate cannon on Nicodemus Heights. These roads and gentle hills round about were the hills of Kyd’s boyhood. He had travelled up this pike with his father on the way to Harrisburg and Philadelphia where Douglas senior seemed always to have dealings. Down the laneways of this countryside, the Douglases had hunted or picnicked or visited friends or relatives. Stonewall knew all this and had given Kyd, at four o’clock in the morning, his orders for the day. ‘I want you to go right now and find out where all our cannon are placed. And I want you to consider what roads can best be used for drawing off disabled guns and for supplying ammunition. Next I want you to advise all battery commanders on these specific points. That’s all you have to do all day, Kyd.’

  Kyd had thought that maybe that was a joke of some kind, but he couldn’t tell, for there was no flicker along Stonewall’s heavy-bearded lips.

  So Kyd was on his way, and when he heard Rufe’s artistry with the drumsticks, he urged his horse a little more and thought almost joyfully: ‘Today is the most dangerous day I’ll spend in my life.’

  Usaph waited by Wheat’s side behind their fence and watched the first-rate pike running moist-topped north through this rich country. Maybe because it was so misty and he could not see far, things appeared to him the way they had to farmers Miller and Poffenberger. That battle lay like an abominable beast resting across the laneways, fields and woods of Washington County. Since the small hours it had been stirring, making careless grunts and growls. But when the mist rose off the Hagerstown pike off Antietam creek to the front and the Potomac at the back then the beast bestirred itself fair and proper, took its feet and uttered a roar that farmer and Mrs Poffenberger and family could hear even from the caves along the Potomac.