Confederates (26 page)

Aunt Sarrie didn't seem to mind the extra bother at all. Ephie, in the clear patches of her malarial fever, worried about it, about what Aunt Sarrie might think of her. She wanted to a piteous extent to be patted on the head by Usaph's relatives, and malaria was such a low-grade white-trash sort of disease. She worried too what she might say during fever, for all the wild men of her girlhood haunted her delirium, and she raved at them, she knew she did. And one of these men was Aunt Sarrie's own brother, Patrick Bumpass, plantation overseer.

Whomever Ephie ranted or pleaded with in her fever, Aunt Sarrie didn't seem to take much notice. Ephie, when she got better, was respectful to Aunt Sarrie and that didn't hurt either, for the older woman had a weakness for being treated with respect.

Ephie was helpful, didn't question Aunt Sarrie's generalship over the farmhouse, and didn't boss Aunt Sarrie's two slaves. She helped the slave Bridie attend to the messes poor old incontinent Lisa made, and spoke of her soldiering husband Usaph regularly and with clear affection. For all these things Aunt Sarrie liked the girl.

On the day Decatur Cate arrived at her gate, Aunt Sarrie Muswell's household was operating in a way that would have delighted those who wanted to argue that slavery was a humane and Christian institution. In a wicker chair on the porch sat Usaph's old slave Lisa, crooning to herself. Her crippled hands were all tortured and indented by rheumatism, but the summer sunlight sat on her lap. If he had been able to see through to the kitchen, Cate would have observed Ephie Bumpass working the butter churn. The gurgling and whumping of the churn was a background rhythm in Lisa's quiet song.

Upstairs he might have seen Aunt Sarrie herself making the beds with her slave Bridie; and Bridie's husband, Montie, a strong man of about fifty, down in one of the river meadows planting corn. It was a democratic household, everyone working in together, and the fiction that Ephie
owned
Lisa and Aunt Sarrie
owned
Bridie and Montie seemed to bring none of the parties any particular hubris or grief.

If Aunt Sarrie had been thinking about her ownership of slaves this morning, her opinion of it would have been like that of many another well-off but not rich farm wife from that side of Virginia. She'd been thinking some ten years that slavery only worked for the rich. But the fathers and grandfathers of women like her, coming from England or Scotland and settling in these westward counties, caught on quick that slaves were a sign of success in lowland Virginia and so had gone to a lot of trouble and expense to buy a few of their own. The trap was that many people could only manage to have that true Virginian highhandedness with slaves if they owned a few hundred of them. If you owned a few, those few tended to become members of the family. You couldn't rightly sell them even in bad times, because when you tried they wailed and begged you not to and it was like selling a brother. You fretted through their layings-in and their births, through their illnesses and their long dotage. And some of them sure had a long, long dotage!

Neither Decatur Cate approaching the house, nor Aunt Sarrie nor Ephie inside it, were thinking of the ironies of the peculiar institution that leafy spring morning when Decatur Cate left his surrey at the gate and limped up to the house carrying a big portfolio under his arm. Bridie, Aunt Sarrie's slave, answered his knocking and went and fetched the mistress.

Aunt Sarrie was taken by the quiet well-mannered tones of this limping man, and asked him into the parlour. ‘I work in a manner reminiscent of Copley and Rubens,' he told Aunt Sarrie, showing her a canvas he'd done in Pennsylvania of the sister of one of his drinking friends. ‘This is one of my early portraits, ma'am, but my work has improved since I painted it.' The girl had died also since then. Consumption devoured her. He didn't mention that to his clients.

Aunt Sarrie wanted so much for this strange gangly young man to paint Ephephtha. For Ephie was so lovely that sometimes Aunt Sarrie herself wanted to reach out her forefinger and, just like an artist, trace the lines of the girl's face. Aunt Sarrie told Bridie to fetch Mrs Bumpass, and while they waited for Ephie to put in an appearance, the widow looked at the bony boy and thought, he ain't up to much. Not even a young wife would desire a man like him.

She did not understand how much Ephie had known and hated men who were loud, big-boned and heavy-fisted. She did not understand how much Ephie might decide to lean towards any man who wasn't that way.

When Ephie came in she saw Aunt Sarrie sitting there just about twitching with the excitement of the gift she was about to give this fair young woman.

As for Cate, as soon as he saw Ephie come into the parlour and stand under the tintype of dead Mr Muswell, he fell in love with her in that way that suited his obsessed nature, fell in love that is, the way other men catch a disease. The world became as unclear to him all at once as are the outer limits of an old painting. Only this dazzling girl stood out sharp and clear at the centre. He could hear Aunt Sarrie chattering away and it meant nothing.

‘You realise,' Aunt Sarrie was saying, ‘that it would be no way proper for me to have you as our house guest, sir. But my man Montie … he'll set up a camp cot for your convenience in the barn and the nights're getting so passable warm that I do believe the arrangement will meet your comfort … meals you can eat with us.…'

Aunt Sarrie saw him straighten himself. He seemed to become in front of her eyes a little less lame.

Cate knew that he'd soon be turned out on the road if Aunt Sarrie sniffed out the passion he felt for that young Mrs Bumpass. He did not want to be turned out. He wanted to do a slow sketch first and then a slow portrait, and he wanted to take at least a week about it, and towards the end of that time to manage to tell her how she was breath and bread and water to him. He could sense in Ephie that she could be led, and he meant to lead her in a particular direction, namely California, a place undivided by war and unstained by brotherly hate. You could still – so he had heard – get to California from New Orleans. Even though the U.S. Navy sat off the delta of the Mississippi, there were English ships that slipped in and out.

Ephie, like Bumpass himself, had a terrible respect for learning. In Bumpass, it led to him seeking friendship with men like Gus Ramseur. In Ephie it made her listen with respect to Decatur Cate. At table Cate mentioned painters and books neither of the women had heard of, raised ideas they weren't familiar with, explained artistic matters to them and told them stories. Aunt Sarrie had always gone for practical men, and all Cate's blather just helped her to write him off. But Ephie was enchanted.

‘Your limp seems to be getting better, Mr Cate,' said Aunt Sarrie on the second morning at breakfast.

‘Why yes, ma'am, it was but a kick from a horse.'

Aunt Sarrie let him use the parlour for the sittings. The first part of the process was a charcoal sketch, then a water-colour sketch. As he had planned, he worked at a slow pace. He explained all the mysteries and magics of beginning a painting while she sat before him. Aunt Sarrie tried to be in the parlour with them as much as possible – just for decency's sake. But she was busy. First she had to have conferences with Montie, for there was ploughing of two meadows, tending of beehives, milking of cows, feeding of hogs, curing of bacon to be attended to. Montie had a funny place in that household. He and Aunt Sarrie knew each other backwards, and he lived in the house with his wife. He didn't exactly eat with the women, even his wife Bridie treated him as a nigger and gave him his meals separate. But at least half a dozen times a day Montie and Aunt Sarrie would have to meet in the vegetable garden or in the kitchen and discuss farm business like two old friends, which in fact they were. It was like Montie had just about forgotten he was owned.

As well as that, Aunt Sarrie and Bridie had to talk to each other about cooking and preserves and butter and so on. And logging men would come to the door, and now and then a country lawyer. So Aunt Sarrie couldn't do much more than visit the sittings in the parlour, and Cate saved all his best stories for when she was gone and there was just himself and stock-still Ephie in the parlour.

‘I remember a man I painted over in Fauquier County,' he told Ephie, ‘and that itself is strange, for as a rule men want their womenfolk painted. But this man, though he had a wife, looked straight at me and said yessir, I've always desired a picture of myself. So I painted him – it was hard work because he kept on rushing to talk to his manager and his slaves. And it was hard for other reasons as well. He didn't have the sort of strong features that're meat and cheese, Mrs Bumpass, meat and cheese, ma'am, to an artist. Well, during my work his wife kept to her kitchen and I barely saw her at all. But at last the painting was done …'

‘And how long did that take you, Mr Cate sir?' Ephie asked, stone-still and through barely moving lips.

‘Oh, oh, I'd say ten days or more I was at it,' Cate lied. His fingers around the brush were sweating with desire for her. ‘Yes, as I was just telling you, I scarcely saw his wife until the work was done, and then this gentleman went to the back of the house and fetched her – he was so well pleased with the work himself, I can tell you that, maybe a whole lot better pleased than I was. And he led his wife into his parlour by the elbow to view the thing.

‘Well, as I say, up to that time she'd been a shy woman who'd kept her place, but now she began to speak up. She said, oh no, I don't like that there picture, Silas. But she looked at
me
as she said it and I noticed that she never looked at him. On the times before that I'd seen her, if she spoke to him she looked at the wall or the roof as she did it. I can't abide them eyes the artist gen'lman has painted, she cries out. The eyes? he says. I think the eyes is fine.'

Ephie laughed in a nervous way for Cate was imitating the local accent as broad as he could. She wondered might he go on to another farmhouse and there imitate her mode of speech.

‘It's because it's me, the farmer speaks up, that she don't like it. If it happened to be her confounded son she'd like it, even if it had eyes like a confounded caterpillar! And the wife says to me, looking at me straight, take your painting off with you, sir, I don't want it in my parlour. A pity for you, says the farmer, for it's going to sit wide and proud above our mantelpiece and that's flat. And the wife then began to weep and then she says, I saw eyes like that on the axe killer they hanged three summers back at Warrenton …'

In Ephie's face the dark eyes, dark as jungles and as deep, had just about reached a roundness, the sort of roundness that goes with amazement. If I saw eyes like that in any other creature, Cate thought, I'd say
What a hick! What a bumpkin!
And he sat there pinching the tubes of water colour in his fingers and expecting to evaporate from wanting her.

‘That is the foolishest thing, said the farmer, that I heard this past ten year. You talk like nothing better'n an ignorant town girl and I can't tolerate it. And he came up to her and I thought that if I hadn't been there he would have hit her but instead he just bustled her out of the room by her elbow.… Could you, Mrs Bumpass, lift your head a little.…'

For the tension of the story was making Ephie's chin fall a little.

‘That was Easter,' Cate went on. ‘Easter twelve months. Last fall while I was down Orange way, I saw in the newspaper that my subject, the man I'd painted, I mean – that he had gone to his stepson's and shot the poor young man dead there, right on his doorstep, and then shot the stepson's wife who was, as they say, Mrs Bumpass,
enceinte
… with child.…'

‘Oh Lord have mercy, Mr Cate!' said divine Ephie Bumpass, almost comically through those unmoving lips, lest she break her pose.

‘… but then he had gone home to his own place and likewise murdered his quiet wife and then shot himself in the head.'

‘Oh no?' Ephie Bumpass groaned out.

‘And I often reflected after the event, Mrs Bumpass ma'am, how strange it was that he went to such expense to have his portrait done in oil and had just the same decided to destroy his living portrait, so to speak, his portrait in the flesh, and in particular his face.…'

And Ephie went on groaning for the horror of it through her fixed teeth.

It was about the time Cate got his slow water-colour sketch of Ephie finished that Aunt Sarrie got to see how Cate excited Ephie with his stories. Well, it wasn't a romantic excitement, she decided, it was just a sort of excitement that came with a man who could paint and tell stories, two activities which Aunt Sarrie placed very low on the scale of male talents. But she remembered she had once fallen for an ugly but silver-tongued Methodist preacher, and she began to reflect from her own experience of life how quickly one brand of excitement could become another and more dangerous one.

So she started to smile less at him at the dinner table, and to question him about the war.

‘I've little doubt,' Cate said, ‘that a State has the right to pull out of the Union. But since my State doesn't want to do that anyhow, I feel little interest in the struggle. Pardon me,' he said, grinning broadly at her, ‘for my frankness, ma'am. I would not fight to suppress the rebellion of free men, but neither have I any reason to fight for the rebellion.'

It was the sort of speech moderates were making all over America that summer. Moderates and cowards as well, of course. It sounded pretty grand in Aunt Sarrie's kitchen. But Aunt Sarrie didn't react for him; she stared at him and he smiled back. He thought, if anyone thwarts me, it's going to be that old bitch.

‘What then is your home state, sir?' Aunt Sarrie asked.

‘Pennsylvania, ma'am.'

‘But you paint enough Virginians, ain't it so?'

‘Virginians, ma'am, are a handsome race.'