Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  Thomas Truslow was a short, dark-haired stump of a man; a flint-faced, bitter-eyed creature whose skin was grimy with dirt and whose clothes were shiny with grease. His black hair was long and tangled like the thick beard that jutted pugnaciously from his dark-tanned face. His boots were thick-soled cowhide brogans, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, filthy Kentucky jeans and a homespun shirt with sleeves torn short enough to show the corded muscles of his upper arms. There was a heart tattooed on his right forearm with the odd word Emly written beneath it, and it took Starbuck a few seconds to realize that it was probably a misspelling of Emily.

  “Lost your way, boy?” This unprepossessing creature now challenged Starbuck. Truslow was carrying an antique flintlock musket that had a depressingly blackened muzzle pointing unwaveringly at Starbuck’s head.

  “I’m looking for Mister Thomas Truslow,” Starbuck said.

  “I’m Truslow.” The gun muzzle did not waver, nor did the oddly light eyes. When all was said and done, Starbuck decided, it was those eyes that scared him most. You could clean up this brute, trim his beard, scrub his face and dress him in a churchgoing suit, and still those wild eyes would radiate the chilling message that Thomas Truslow had nothing to lose.

  “I’ve brought you a letter from Washington Faulconer.”

  “Faulconer!” The name was expressed as a joyless burst of laughter. “Wants me for a soldier, is that it?”

  “He does, Mister Truslow, yes.” Starbuck was making an effort to keep his voice neutral and not betray the fear engendered by those eyes and by the threat of violence that came off Truslow as thick as the smoke from a green bonfire. It seemed that at any second a trembling mechanism could give way in the dark brain behind those pale eyes to unleash a pulverizing bout of destructiveness. It was a menace that seemed horribly close to madness, and very far from the reasoned world of Yale and Boston and Washington Faulconer’s gracious house.

  “Took his time in sending for me, didn’t he?” Truslow asked suspiciously.

  “He’s been in Richmond. But he did send someone called Ethan Ridley to see you last week.”

  The mention of Ridley’s name made Truslow strike like a starving snake. He reached up with his left hand, grabbed Starbuck’s coat, and pulled down so that Starbuck was leaning precariously out of his saddle. He could smell the rank tobacco on Truslow’s breath, and see the scraps of food caught in the wiry black bristles of his beard. The mad eyes glared into Starbuck’s face. “Ridley was here?”

  “I understand he visited you, yes.” Starbuck was struggling to be courteous and even dignified, though he was remembering how his father had once tried to preach to some half-drunken immigrant longshoremen working on the quays of Boston Harbor and how even the impressive Reverend Elial had struggled to maintain his composure in the face of their maniacal coarseness. Breeding and education, Starbuck reflected, were poor things with which to confront raw nature. “He says you were not here.”

  Truslow abruptly let go of Starbuck’s coat, at the same time making a growling noise that was half-threat and half-puzzlement. “I wasn’t here,” he said, but distantly, as if trying to make sense of some new and important information, “but no one told me how he was here either. Come on, boy.”

  Starbuck pulled his coat straight and surreptitiously loosened the big Savage revolver in its holster. “As I said, Mister Truslow, I have a letter for you from Colonel Faulconer…”

  “Colonel is he, now?” Truslow laughed. He had stumped ahead of Starbuck, forcing the northerner to follow him into a wide clearing that was evidently the Truslow homestead. Bedraggled vegetables grew in long rows, there was a small orchard, its trees a glory of white blossom, while the house itself was a one-storey log cabin surmounted by a stout stone chimney from which a wisp of smoke trickled. The cabin was ramshackle and surrounded by untidy stacks of timber, broken carts, sawhorses and barrels. A brindled dog, seeing Starbuck, lunged furiously at the end of its chain, scattering a flock of terrified chickens that had been scratching in the dirt. “Get off your horse, boy,” Truslow snapped at Starbuck.

  “I don’t want to detain you, Mister Truslow. I have Mister Faulconer’s letter here.” Starbuck reached inside his coat.

  “I said get off that damned horse!” Truslow snapped the command so fiercely that even the dog, which had seemed wilder than its own master, suddenly whimpered itself into silence and skulked back to the shade of the broken porch. “I’ve got work for you, boy,” Truslow added.

  “Work?” Starbuck slid out of the saddle, wondering just what kind of hell he had come to.

  Truslow snatched the horse’s reins and tied them to a post. “I was expecting Roper,” he said in impenetrable explanation, “but till he comes, you’ll have to do. Over there, boy.” He pointed at a deep pit which lay just beyond one of the piles of broken carts. It was a saw pit, maybe eight feet deep and straddled by a tree trunk in which a massive great double-handed ripsaw was embedded.

  “Jump down, boy! You’ll be bottom man,” Truslow snapped.

  “Mister Truslow!” Starbuck tried to stem the madness with an appeal to reason.

  “Jump, boy!” That tone of voice would have made the devil snap to attention, and Starbuck did take an involuntary step toward the pit’s edge, but then his innate stubbornness took command.

  “I’m not here to work.”

  Truslow grinned. “You’ve got a gun, boy, you’d better be prepared to use it.”

  “I’m here to give you this letter.” Starbuck took the envelope from an inside pocket.

  “You could kill a buffalo with that pistol, boy. You want to use it on me? Or you want to work for me?”

  “I want you to read this letter…”

  “Work or fight, boy.” Truslow stepped closer to Starbuck. “I don’t give a sack of shit which one you want, but I ain’t waiting all day for you to make up your mind on it either.”

  There was a time for fighting, Starbuck thought, and a time for deciding he would be bottom man in a saw pit. He jumped, landing in a slurry of mud, sawdust and woodchips.

  “Take your coat off, boy, and that hog pistol with it.”

  “Mister Truslow!” Starbuck made one last effort to retain a shred of control over this encounter. “Would you just read this letter?”

  “Listen, boy, your letter’s just words, and words never filled a belly yet. Your fancy Colonel is asking me for a favor, and you’ll have to work to earn him his answer. You understand me? If Washington Faulconer himself had come I’d have him down that pit, so leave off your whining, get off your coat, take hold of that handle, and give me some work.”

  So Starbuck left off his whining, took off his coat, took hold of the handle and gave him some work.

  It seemed to Starbuck that he was mired in a pit beneath a cackling and vengeful demon. The great pit saw, singing through the trunk, was repeatedly rammed down at him in a shower of sawdust and chips that stung Starbuck’s eyes and clogged his mouth and nostrils, yet each time he took a hand off the saw to try and cuff his face, Truslow would bellow a reproof. “What’s the matter, boy? Gone soft on me? Work!”

  The pit was straddled by a pinewood trunk that, judging by its size, had to be older than the Republic. Truslow had grudgingly informed Starbuck that he was cutting the trunk into planks which he had promised to deliver for a new floor being laid at the general store at Hankey’s Ford. “This and two other trunks should manage it,” Truslow announced before they were even halfway through the first cut, by which time Starbuck’s muscles were already aching like fire and his hands were smarting.

  “Pull, boy, pull!” Truslow shouted. “I can’t keep the cut straight if you’re lollygagging!” The saw blade was nine feet long and supposed to be powered equally by the top and bottom men, though Thomas Truslow, perched on top of the trunk in his nailed boots, was doing by far the greater amount of work. Starbuck tried to keep up. He gathered that his role was to pull down hard, for it was the downstroke that provided most of the cutting force,
and if he tried to push up too hard he risked buckling the saw, so it was better to let Truslow yank the great steel blade up from the pit, but though that upward motion gave Starbuck a half second of blessed relief, it immediately led to the crucial, brutal downstroke. Sweat was pouring off Starbuck.

  He could have stopped. He could have refused to work one more moment and instead have just let go of the great wooden handle and shouted up at this foul man that Colonel Faulconer was unaccountably offering him a fifty-dollar bonus to sign up as a soldier, but he sensed that Truslow was testing him, and suddenly he resented the southern attitude that assumed he was a feeble New Englander, too educated to be of any real use and too soft to be trusted with real men’s work. He had been fooled by Dominique, condemned as pious by Ethan Ridley and now he was being ridiculed by this filthy, tobacco-stained, bearded fiend, and Starbuck’s anger made him whip the saw down again and again and again so that the great blade rang through the slashing wood grain like a church bell.

  “Now you’re getting it!” Truslow grunted.

  “And damn you, damn you too,” Starbuck said, though under his panting breath. It felt extraordinarily daring to use the swear words, even under his breath for, though the devil above him could not hear the cursing, heaven’s recording angel could, and Starbuck knew he had just added another sin to the great list of sins marked to his account. And swearing was among the bad sins, almost as bad as thieving. Starbuck had been brought up to hate blaspheming and to despise the givers of oaths, and even the profane weeks he had spent with Major Trabell’s foul-mouthed Tom company had not quelled his unhappy conscience about cursing, but somehow he needed to defy God as well as Truslow at this moment, and so he went on spitting the word out to give himself strength.

  “Hold it!” Truslow suddenly shouted, and Starbuck had an instant fear that his muttered imprecations had been heard, but instead the halt had merely been called so that the work could be adjusted. The saw had cut to within a few inches of the pit’s side, so now the trunk had to be moved. “Catch hold, boy!” Truslow tossed down a stout branch that ended in a crutch. “Ram that under the far end and heave when I tell you.”

  Starbuck heaved, moving the great trunk inch by painful inch until it was in its new position. Then there was a further respite as Truslow hammered wedges into the sawn cut.

  “So what’s Faulconer offering me?” Truslow asked.

  “Fifty dollars.” Starbuck spoke from the pit and wondered how Truslow had guessed that anything was being offered. “You’d like me to read you the letter?”

  “You suggesting I can’t read, boy?”

  “Let me give you the letter.”

  “Fifty, eh? He thinks he can buy me, does he? Faulconer thinks he can buy whatever he wants, whether it’s a horse, a man or a whore. But in the end he tires of whatever he buys, and you and me’ll be no different.”

  “He isn’t buying me,” Starbuck said, and had that lie treated with a silent derision by Truslow. “Colonel Faulconer’s a good man,” Starbuck insisted.

  “You know why he freed his niggers?” Truslow asked.

  Pecker Bird had told Starbuck that the manumission had been intended to spite Faulconer’s wife, but Starbuck neither believed the story nor would he repeat it. “Because it was the right thing to do,” he said defiantly.

  “So it might have been,” Truslow allowed, “but it was for another woman he did it. Roper will tell you the tale. She was some dollygob church girl from Philadelphia come to tell us southrons how to run our lives, and Faulconer let her stroll all over him. He reckoned he had to free his niggers before she’d ever lie with him, so he did but she didn’t anyway.” Truslow laughed at this evidence of a fool befuddled. “She made a mock of him in front of all Virginia, and that’s why he’s making this Legion of his, to get his pride back. He thinks he’ll be a warrior hero for Virginia. Now, take hold, boy.”

  Starbuck felt he had to protect his hero. “He’s a good man!”

  “He can afford to be good. His wealth’s bigger than his wits, now take hold, boy. Or are you afraid of hard work, is that it? I tell you boy, work should be hard. No bread tastes good that comes easy. So take hold. Roper will be here soon enough. He gave his word, and Roper don’t break his word. But you’ll have to do till he comes.” Starbuck took hold, tensed, pulled, and the hellish rhythm began again. He dared not think of the blisters being raised on his hands, nor of the burning muscles of his back, arms and legs. He just concentrated blindly on the downstroke, dragging the pit saw’s teeth through the yellow wood and closing his eyes against the constant sifting of sawdust. In Boston, he thought, they had great steam-driven circular saws that could rip a dozen trunks into planks in the same time it took to make just one cut with this ripping saw, so why in God’s name were men still using saw pits?

  They paused again as Truslow hammered more wedges into the cut trunk. “So what’s this war about, boy?”

  “States’ rights” was all Starbuck could say.

  “What in hell’s name does that mean?”

  “It means, Mister Truslow, that America disagrees on how America should be governed.”

  “You could fill a bushel the way you talk, boy, but it don’t add up to a pot of turnips. I thought we had a Constitution to tell us how to govern ourselves?”

  “The Constitution has evidently failed us, Mister Truslow.”

  “You mean we ain’t fighting to keep our niggers?”

  “Oh, dear God,” Starbuck sighed gently. He had once solemnly promised his father that he would never allow that word to be spoken in his presence, yet ever since he had met Dominique Demarest he had ignored the promise. Starbuck felt all his goodness, all his honor in the sight of God, slipping away like sand trickling through fingers.

  “Well, boy? Are we fighting for our niggers or aren’t we?”

  Starbuck was leaning weakly on the dirt wall of the pit. He stirred himself to answer. “A faction of the North would dearly like to abolish slavery, yes. Others merely wish to stop it spreading westward, but the majority simply believe that the slave states should not dictate policy to the rest of America.”

  “What do the Yankees care about niggers? They ain’t got none.”

  “It is a matter of morality, Mister Truslow,” Starbuck said, trying to wipe the sweat-matted sawdust out of his eyes with his sawdust-matted sleeve.

  “Does the Constitution say anything worth a piece of beaver shit about morality?” Truslow asked in a tone of genuine enquiry.

  “No, sir. No, sir, it does not.”

  “I always reckon when a man speaks about morals he don’t know nothing about what he’s saying. Unless he’s a preacher. So what do you think we should do with the niggers, boy?” Truslow asked.

  “I think, sir”—Starbuck wished to hell he was anywhere but in this mud and sawdust pit answering this foulmouth’s questions—“I think, sir,” he said again as he tried desperately to think of anything that might make sense, “I think that every man, of whatever color, has an equal right before God and before man to an equal measure of dignity and happiness.” Starbuck decided he sounded just like his elder brother, James, who could make any proposition sound pompous and lifeless. His father would have trumpeted the rights of the Negroes in a voice fit to rouse echoes from the angels, but Starbuck could not raise the energy for that kind of defiance.

  “You like the niggers, is that the size of it?”

  “I think they are fellow creatures, Mister Truslow.”

  “Hogs are fellow creatures, but it don’t stop me killing ’em come berry time. Do you approve of slavery, boy?”

  “No, Mister Truslow.”

  “Why not, boy?” The grating, mocking voice sounded from the brilliant sky above.

  Starbuck tried to remember his father’s arguments, not just the easy one that no man had the right to own another, but the more complex ones, such as how slavery enslaved the owner as much as it enslaved the possessed, and how it demeaned the slaveholder, and how it deni
ed God’s dignity to men who were the ebony image of God, and how it stultified the slavocracy’s economy by driving white artisans north and west, but somehow none of the complex, persuasive answers would come and he settled for a simple condemnation instead. “Because it’s wrong.”

  “You sound like a woman, boy.” Truslow laughed. “So Faulconer thinks I should fight for his slave-holding friends, but no one in these hills can afford to feed and water a nigger, so why should I fight for them that can?”

  “I don’t know, sir, I really don’t know.” Starbuck was too tired to argue.

  “So I’m supposed to fight for fifty bucks, is that it?” Truslow’s voice was scathing. “Take hold, boy.”

  “Oh, God.” The blisters on Starbuck’s hands had broken into raw patches of torn skin that were oozing blood and pus, but he had no choice but to seize the pit saw’s handle and drag it down. The pain of the first stroke made him whimper aloud, but the shame of the sound made him grip hard through the agony and to tear the steel teeth angrily through the wood.

  “That’s it, boy! You’re learning!”

  Starbuck felt as if he were dying, as if his whole body had become a shank of pain that bent and pulled, bent and pulled, and he shamelessly allowed his weight to sag onto the handles during each upstroke so that Truslow caught and helped his tiredness for a brief instant before he let his weight drag the saw down once again. The saw handle was soggy with blood, the breath was rasping in his throat, his legs could barely hold him upright and still the toothed steel plunged up and down, up and down, up and mercilessly down.