“You’re Nate Caudell, are ye not? Aye, he’s here: sir. Where else would he be?”
Caudell lifted his hat again, walked on down the lane. He passed a stable with a cattle pen beside it, jumped over a tiny stream, then went by a corncrib and a woodpile. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of the pigpen by the corncrib, but beyond it stood the farmhouse, in the middle of a large, irregular yard where chickens and turkeys scratched.
Henry Pleasants came out onto the house’s covered porch just as Caudell got to the end of the yard. He waved to his friend and hurried over to greet him. Barnyard fowl scattered, clucking and gobbling indignantly. “Hello, Nate,” he said, pumping Caudell’s hand. He waved out to the fields that stretched back from the house. “Crop should be ail right, God willing, though we’ve had less rain than I’d hoped for.”
“Good.” Caudell looked at the fields, too, and back at the cow barn and pigpen, then at the farmhouse itself, a two-story whitewashed clapboard building with a timbered roof and a tall brick chimney—no planter’s mansion this, but no hovel, either. “It all looks very fine, Henry. I’m happy for you.”
“I still need a man with a good head for figures, Nate, to keep me from having to do my own bookkeeping,” Pleasants said. “You know I’d pay you better than your schoolteaching does.”
He’d made that offer the last time Caudell came to the farm, too. As he had then, Caudell shook his head. “I like teaching school, Henry. It’s not a line of work you get into for the money. And besides, I’d sooner be your friend than your hired man.”
“The one wouldn’t leave out the other, Nate. You know that.
“All right, but no thank you all the same.” Caudell knew nothing of the sort. As a teacher, he worked for wages but was largely free in what he did and how he did it. That suited his independent nature far better than sitting at a ledger with Henry Pleasants looking over his shoulder ever could.
A black man carrying a jar of whiskey and two glasses came out of the farmhouse. “Thank you, Israel,” Pleasants said.
“I knew I hadn’t seen you around the general store lately, Israel,” Caudell said. “When did you start working for Henry here?”
“Two—three weeks ago, suh,” The Negro answered. “Mistuh Pleasants, he pay as good as Mistuh Liles, an’ he got mo’ books to read, too. Now I learned how, I surely do love to read, suh, that I do. Mistuh Liles, he fuss some when I go, but it weren’t like he own me.”
“Only trouble I have with Israel is getting his nose out of a book when I need him for something,” Pleasants said. “If I can teach him ciphering, maybe I ‘II make him my bookkeeper, Nate, since you don’t want the job.” He spoke jocularly, but then turned and gave Israel a careful once-over. “Maybe I will at that, by God. I wonder if he could learn? Israel, do you want to try to learn arithmetic? If you can do it, it would mean more money for you.”
“I likes to learn, suh, an’ I likes money might well. You want to show me, reckon I try.”
“You’re a hard worker, Israel. Maybe you will learn. If you do, you can keep books for a lot of people in town, too, you know, not just for me,” Pleasants said. “Keep at it and you’ll end up with a fine house of your own one day.”
Caudell almost smiled at that, but at the last minute kept his face straight. It could happen. Thanks to the war, things were looser these days than they ever had been. A free Negro sensible enough to stay out of trouble might come a long way without a lot of people noticing.
“You want to show me, suh, reckon I try,” Israel repeated. “I got no place better to go than here, looks like. I’s jus’ glad I didn’t head No’th when the bluecoats sail away. By what the papers say, it’s rougher bein’ a nigger up there than down here—they hangs you to a lamp post jus’ fo’ walkin’ down the street.”
“You might be right, Israel, though I’m embarrassed to admit it,” Pleasants said.
Caudell nodded. “White men up North blame Negroes for the war, seems like.” Savage antiblack riots had convulsed New York and Philadelphia within days of each other, as if word of one triggered the next. In Washington, Confederate pickets across the Potomac watched Federal troops battle arsonists intent on burning down the colored part of town. And along the Ohio River, white men with guns turned away slaves fleeing across from Kentucky, saying, “This ain’t your country”—and opened fire if the Negroes would not go back. Southern papers reported every atrocity, every upheaval in the United States in loving detail, as if to warn blacks they could expect no warm reception if they ran away.
Israel heaved a long sigh. “Ain’t easy bein’ a nigger, no matter where you is.”
That, Caudell thought, was no doubt true. Israel set down the whiskey jar and went back into the house. Caudell swigged from his glass. He coughed, got it down. The fire in his throat fumed to warmth in his belly, warmth that spread through him. Pleasants raised his glass. “Here’s to a free-labor farm.”
“A free-labor farm,” Caudell echoed. He drank again; the warmth intensified. He looked around. The impression he’d had as he walked up to the farmhouse persisted.” A free-labor farm that’s doing right well for itself.”
“If the weather stays close to decent and prices hold up, I’ll get by,” Pleasants answered. He was new to farming, but seemed to have already picked up the man of the land’s ingrained aversion to sounding too optimistic. He went on, “By what the papers say, weather’s even worse farther south and west. I hate to see anyone else hurt, but it may help me.”
“How many hands do you have working for you?”
“Seven men—three free blacks, two Irishmen—”
“I saw one of them in your vegetable patch.” Caudel, lowered his voice.” Maybe you ought to know he ran off from my regiment.”
“Who, John? Did he?” Pleasants frowned. “I’ll keep a close eye on him, then, though he’s given me no trouble so far. Anyway, I also have a couple of local white men here, and Tom—he’s one of the blacks—bought his wife Hattie free a couple of ‘years ago, and she does the cooking for us.” As if the words were a cue, a long, unmelodious horn blast sounded from the back of the house. Pleasants grinned. “There’s dinner now. Come on, Nate.”
Dinner—fried ham, sweet potatoes, and corn bread—was served outdoors, in back of the house behind the kitchen. Hattie, a very large, very brown woman, seemed personally offended unless everyone who ate from her table stuffed himself until incapable of moving. Caudell was more than willing to oblige her. Happily replete, he leaned back on his bench and joined in the byplay between Pleasants and the farm hands.
Besides John Moring, Caudell also knew Bill Wells, who had joined his company not long before the last year’s campaign started. Wells had been only eighteen then; twenty now, he still looked years younger. “You better not send me out to fill canteens, Mr. First Sergeant, sir,” he said with a grin.
“I’ll let Henry here give you your fatigues now,” Caudell retorted, which made Wells duck as if a bullet had cracked past him.
Hattie’s husband Tom, Israel, and the other “colored man, whose name was Joseph, sat together. They were quieter than the whites, and took little part in the banter that flew around the rest of the table—though at liberty, free Negroes had to be leery about taking liberties. But when Israel started boasting about how he was going to learn arithmetic, Tom raised an eyebrow and said, “If you de man who do my pay, Israel, I gwine count it twice when I gits it, an’ that a fac’.”
“You couldn’t even count it oncet, nigger,” Israel said loftily.
“Marse Henry, I know he pay me right,” Tom said. “You—”
His pause carried a world of meaning. After a while, Henry Pleasants looked at his pocket watch and said, “Time to get back to it.” The workers got up and headed past the old overseer’s cabin toward the fields. Joseph reached out and snagged a sweet potato so he would have something to munch on if—unlikely as the notion seemed to Caudell—he got hungry in the middle of the afternoon.
“Th
is is very fine, Henry,” Caudell said as Hattie cleared away the plates. “You’ve done well for yourself, as usual.”
Instead of cheering Pleasants, the praise made him melancholy. He sighed, looked down at the planks of the table, ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair. In a low voice, he said, “If only Sallie could see this farm.”
“Sallie?” Caudell peered at his friend. In all the time he’d known Pleasants, he’d never heard him mention a woman’s name. He tried to figure out why, picked the most likely reason he could think of: “Didn’t she want to come South with you, Henry?”
Pleasants turned to stare at him; the pain in his eyes told Caudell at once that he’d made a mistake. “She would have come anywhere with me. But—oh, hell.” Pleasants shook his head. “Even now, how hard this is! We were married, Sallie and I, just at the start of 1860; I would take oath we were the happiest couple in Pottsville. Around Christmas, she would have borne my child.”
“Would have?” Caudell knew a sinking sensation. Gently, he asked, “Did you lose her in childbed, Henry?”
“I didn’t even have her so long.” Unshed tears glistened in Pleasants’s eyes. “She started to moan—God, such dreadful moans may I never hear again!—before dawn one October morning. She blazed with fever. The doctor lived only a couple of blocks away. I ran through the darkness to his house, fetched him back still in his nightshirt. He did all he could, I know that, but Sallie…Sallie died the ‘Same day.”
“May she have gone to a better world, as I’m sure she has.” The words felt flat and empty to Caudell, but he had none better to offer. Doctors could do so little—but he wondered, just for a futile moment, if a Rivington man could have saved her.”
Pleasants said, “She was a finer Christian than I can ever hope to be, so I am sure of it as well. But it took four big strong miners to keep me from leaping into the grave after her. Without her, the world was cold and empty and not worth living in. After Fort Sumter, my aunt Emily asked if I’d ever thought of enlisting in the army. I took her up on it: she must have thought it would help me forget. That was partly my reason, I suppose.”
Caudell knew he had not finished. “What was the rest?”
“If you must know, Nate, I hoped I would be killed. What better way to be set free from my sorrow and pain and uselessness? I lived, as you see, but you seemed a gift from God that day in Rocky Mount. I seized on any excuse not to go back to Pottsville, as you may imagine.”
“Whatever your reasons were for staying here in North Carolina, I’m glad you did. Life goes on. It’s the oldest thing in the world to say, but it’s true. If nothing else can, going through a war the size of ours will teach you that. At camp the last night after Gettysburg—” It was Caudell’s turn to have trouble continuing. So many friends had fallen in that futile charge, but he and his fellow survivors had to carry on as best they could.
Henry Pleasants nodded. “I do know that, but I know also that the words are easier to speak than to live. Moving on toward six years now that Sallie’s gone, yet the memory of her pierces me still. I would have spoken of her to you before, but—” He tightened his lips, blew air out through them. “It still hurts. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t blame you.” As pleasants had before, Caudell waved to the fields and the fine farmhouse. “She’d be proud of what you have here.” Caudell hesitated, wondering if he should say what had sprung into his mind. He decided to: “And if she was like a lot of Northern women, I reckon she’d be proud of the way you’re running this farm with free labor, too.”
“I thank you for that, truly I do. It can’t have come easy, not from a North Carolina man. But you’re right—Sallie was strong for abolition, likely stronger than I was then. I don’t think I could have hoped to meet her in the world to come if I’d bought Negroes to work this place.”
Caudell only grunted. He reached for the whiskey jug. More and more these days, he leaned against slavery himself. But he would not say that out loud, not yet, not even to a close friend who sprang from the North. If word he had such notions ever got around, he might be lucky to lose only his job. He finished his drink, then said, “Show me the inside of the house, why don’t you?”
“I’d be glad to.” Pleasants also emptied his glass, then led Caudell in through the open kitchen door. Hattie looked over her shoulder at him from the little tin tub in which she was washing the dishes. The furniture in the big sitting room was country-made, and therefore cheap, but looked comfortable: low chairs and a sofa, all with the seats of undressed calfskin. Hand-hewn shelves full of books lined one wall.
A washroom with a tin tub on feet and several storage rooms took up the rest of the ground floor. “Bedrooms are upstairs,” Pleasants said: “one for me; one for Israel, who works more around the house than in the fields; one for my Irishmen; and one for the two local boys. Hattie and Tom and Joshua sleep in the overseer’s cabin out back. I think they find that very funny and very satisfying; I know I would, in their shoes. There used to be a row of slave huts out there, too. I’ve knocked down every one of them.”
“It’s your farm, Henry. Do you get the work out of your people that an overseer could with a slave gang?”
“I certainly believe so, given what some of my neighbors tell me they expect from their Negroes. The two Irishmen are capital workers and the free blacks good enough. The ones with whom I’ve had the greatest difficulty are the local white men, if I may tell you that without causing offense. I’ve had to let several of them go; they will not work steadily for hire, and think the very idea smacks of turning them into niggers, as one of them said.”
“A lot of white folks in the South are like that,” Caudell said. “If they have to work at tasks slaves normally do, they feel as if they are slaves themselves,”
“But that’s wrong, don’t you see?” Pleasants said earnestly. “Keeping slaves degrades all labor, free and slave alike, and there’s nothing wrong with labor in itself. But when even a good many of your artisans are slaves, where’s the prod for a white man to learn a skill? Your rich planters here are very rich indeed; I’ll not deny that for a moment. But your poor are poorer than they are in the United States, and have fewer choices open to them to improve their lot. Where is this country of yours—country of mine now, too—going?”
“I don’t think we worry so much about going somewhere as folks do up North,” Caudell said. “Most of us are just content to stay where we are.” Throughout the war, All we want is to be left alone had served as a Confederate rallying cry.
“But the world keeps changing, whether you do or not,” Pleasants pointed out. “You can’t keep walls up forever—look at Admiral Perry’s trip to Japan.”
Caudell made a wry face and held up his hand. He suspected—he was virtually certain—his friend was right. That didn’t mean he wanted to admit it, or even to talk about it very much. “Let us finish getting back on our feet after the war and we’ll do pretty well for ourselves,” he insisted.
“All right,” Pleasants said pacifically, seeing he had irked his friend. Still, he did not abandon the argument: “The war’s been over for a couple of years now, Nate, and the world’s not in the habit of waiting.”
Josiah Gorgas’s round face beamed like the sun. “I am truly delighted you could visit the armory on: such short notice, General Lee.”
“When you sent word yesterday that you had something worthy of my consideration, Colonel, I naturally made it a point to come investigate at once,” Lee answered. “Your performance, both in the war and since, gives me every confidence in your judgment. Your note, however, I found mysterious. What precisely am I here to consider?”
The Confederate ordnance chief walked out of his office, returned a moment later with a pair of repeating rifles. “These,” he said proudly.
He held one of them out to Lee, who took it and said, “I have become moderately familiar with the AK-47 over the past couple of years, and this—” His voice trailed away as he examined the weapon more closely
. When he spoke again, it was without sarcasm. “This rifle appears different in certain small ways from those to which I have become accustomed. What have we here, Colonel?”
“A copy of the AK-47 manufactured here at the armory, sir. Two copies, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, how excellent,” Lee said softly. He worked the charging handle of the rifle Gorgas had given him. The smooth, well-oiled sniick! took him back to the tents northwest of Orange Court House and to the day he first heard that sound. He looked along the barrel. The Confederate gunsmiths had substituted a simpler sight for the calibrated one which normally graced an AK-47. “Have you tested these weapons as yet, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir,” Gorgas said. “We have successfully duplicated the repeating action of their models. When fired with cartridges furnished by the Rivington men, they also shoot about as accurately and with recoil similar to those models. Though trials have as yet been limited, they appear sturdy enough.” His eyes flicked away from Lee as he said that. He remembered the cavalry carbines which had proven as dangerous to their users as to the enemy, then—
“Have you tried firing them with the loads prepared down in Augusta?” Lee asked.
Gorgas nodded.” Again, they served. The flight path of the bullet is considerably higher with those loads, and the recoil considerably increased.” The ordnance chief winced reminiscently and rubbed his right shoulder.” As a matter of fact, when loaded with ordinary gunpowder, the rifle kicks like a mule.”
“A minor defect,” Lee said. “You’ve done marvelously well, Colonel Gorgas.”
“Not as well as I’d like to,” Gorgas answered, displaying the resolute perfectionism that suited him so well to his position. “For one thing, try as I might, I’ve not come close to matching the metal that goes into the barrel of the originals. So far as I can tell, it is as nearly indestructible as makes no difference. The ones we turn out both foul mote and are more difficult to clean than’ their prototypes. For another, both the rifles you see here are almost entirely handmade. Not only is production very slow on account of that, but parts from one weapon are not interchangeable with those of the other.”
The Guns of the South Page 45
