Confederates (33 page)

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 her 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 …'

‘I would have offered,' said Cate straight out, not putting on side.' Except I thought of course my offers was some sort of insult.'

By the time the sun got up Bolly Quintard, Cate and Bumpass had all had their beef safe salted, and it was as well. For it became a clear hot day and there was a stink of rotting beef all over the marching brigade. All through the day men were cussing about their spoiling meat and how they'd never get to eat it. But Bolly marched jolly under his parasol, and it was strange, Usaph thought, how a handful of salt could make for this old man the difference between contentment and despair.

Ash Judd, moving in the column, saw his ole man sitting on a porch in the hamlet of Amissville. It was the sort of village where no one who lived there had ever seen much of note, and so the sight of an army coming down amongst its straggle of white frame houses, its store or two, its two little white boxes of churches, must have shocked the townsfolk this early morn, and now there wasn't a chicken in sight or a dog or a child, every soul was deep in its house except for the ole man, who belonged to no one village, no one habitation. A little before the Stonewall Brigade, Ambrose Hill's division had tramped through, and maybe the good but not too clever folk of Amissville thought that that was the end of it. Now here was another division. Just the same the ole man had sat there calmly, alone, a cold corncob in his hand. Other boys must have seen him but no one ever seemed to wonder what he was there for. Some of the boys called to him now. ‘You come join us, youngster!' they'd call. ‘Don't you go skulking there.' But the ole man didn't answer them. He seemed to be dozing, and only Ash knew his true nature.

The morning was hot as the Stonewall Brigade came through Amissville, past the ole man. But after last week's rain there wasn't much dust and everyone could see, clearer than they'd ever seen it since they left the Valley, the sharp line of the Blue Ridge, sweet as a letter from home and fair ahead.

When Ash looked back towards the porch where the ole man had been, he saw he had left it and was strolling round the back of the house, for all the world just like an oldster making for the privy. He was a sharp one, that ole man.

Ash had first seen him two winters back. The ole man'd been sleeping under pine boughs and snow then, and his flesh had been blue as you'd expect; but now, in the war's high summer, it had a good colour.