Confederates (34 page)

That winter two years back, Ash went out hunting two days after Christmas, carrying his old flintlock. His daddie might normally have gone along with him but was ill that day – likely as not from the mountain liquors he'd drunk on the afternoon of Christmas. So Ash stepped out alone into the woods that sparkling morn, into the snowy forests of the hill country on the borders of Pendleton and Rockingham Counties.

Some two miles out in the woods he saw a track in the snow he'd been seeing since the winter of '56, when he himself was a boy of fourteen. It was the track of the great stag who came through there every winter, and it was a standing ambition of the Judds, both father and son, to stalk it and bring it home, not least because it was a hard life for the family at that time of year, and fresh meat was a rarity with them in the months between Yule and springtime. One year they'd tracked this stag twelve miles and had to sleep out, being damned lucky the weather grew mild.

That day then, two days after the Christmas of 1859, he knew it wouldn't do to stalk the animal late into the afternoon. He didn't want to be finding his way home in a freezing night all alone. But there was something about following the trail of a great stag – there wasn't really any one point you could break off and turn back unless nature or man made you, and by three in the afternoon Ash was well over into the Pendleton hills above the raging Moorfield River which ran with chunks of ice but was too fast moving to freeze over. Now there wasn't a town this side of darkness he could reach and very likely there wasn't even a habitation. He knew, though, that he was likely closer to the town of Fort Seybert than he was to home, so he headed up in that line, following the river.

That's how he came to the witch's place. It was a long shack, no whitewash to its boards, but there was smoke from its chimney. There were outhouses but no barns. Likely, Ash thought, these people made their living by odd ends of trade, from moonshine, from cutting lumber, burning charcoal, stealing a cow or a horse here or there. Ash looked at this house for a good while before showing himself. He looked at it with all the snobbery and mistrust of those who live in farms that are whitewashed even if poor.

Soon there wasn't must light and he had to go and knock. He knocked a long time, yelling out homely things to show he wasn't a man to fear. When the door opened, it opened at speed, like a falling trapdoor, and there was a mad red-haired woman in the doorway, her hair sort of blazing and frizzled and her eyes bulging from her head. She nearly scared him away from the place straight off. But in the growing cold he needed to get into that hot kitchen.

‘I'm Ashabel Judd, ma'am, from over to Singer Creek,' he said.

‘Then, Mr Ashabel, I'm Mrs Lesage,' said the red-haired woman. ‘I'd wager a pig to a gallon of mud you've heard tell of me.'

And he had, by damn. He'd heard women talk about her in whispers. Talk of the strange disease of women which country doctors couldn't do much for but Mrs Lesage of Pendleton County could mend. Ashabel had heard Mrs Lesage's name uttered since he was a wee boy, and it had seemed to him that not only were the diseases fixed up not to be spoken of aloud by women, most of all the cures weren't to be spoken of.

When Ash didn't move, just shivering on the doorstep, Mrs Lesage laughed at him. It was a high, loud, mad laugh. ‘I've tended kin of yours. Ash, I remember the names of half your aunts, boy. Besides that, it's nice to get visitors this time of year, when a body's got the last of the ham on the skillet.'

And sure, the kitchen was full of the savour of ham and batter and potatoes. Mrs Lesage stood back to let him past the door. Ash did it slowly. He could see another woman in there. ‘This is my sister, Miss Gassaway,' said the witch of women's diseases. ‘She speaks only in tongues.'

A fat girl of maybe twenty-five sat at the end of the table. There was nothing in her face, in her eyes, and she didn't notice Ash when he said, ‘How do, Miss Gassaway?' and bowed.

‘People say to me,' said Mrs Lesage, ‘how come you can cure them strangers yet you can't cure your own sister? Well, how do I know the answer to that? But Miss Gassaway here can talk in Greek and in the languages people spoke before the Lord Christ was on this earth. Only sometimes, of course, when the spirit moves her. You watch.'

And taking up a knife by its blade she rapped her stupid sister a sharp hit on the wrist with the knife handle, and the sister began to speak in what might have been Christ's Aramaic or might just have been a loony language, but at least it had expression. But Mrs Lesage didn't care to listen to it all, and as the sister raved, the red-haired witch raised her voice over the babble and went on talking with Ashabel. After the ham fritters and the potatoes were eaten, she put her sister to bed in a room on the back end of the kitchen, pushing her along tenderly enough and talking to her in God's English even though the poor fool couldn't understand it. Then the witch got out some whisky and she and Ash talked and laughed and drank together as snow came down outside. And in the end Ash wasn't sure which bits of the evening were a whisky dream and which bits really happened.

Anyhow, it went this way. Mrs Lesage got to looking prettier and prettier, smoothing down her fierce red hair, and they both got to being amorous – her hand in his hair at the back of his head and his on her dress at the thigh, and all at once they were all over each other. As they were coupling on Mrs Lesage's bed, behind a curtain on that side of the kitchen that was furthest from the fireplace, yet naked and warm and merry, the witch stopped proceedings dead, stopped plunging and rearing, and looked at Ash with the start of a tear in each of her eyes.

‘I have such dreams, Ashabel,' she said. ‘Dreams of a time close to now. Dreams of the time when all the young bulls go forth to the slaughter, all the young boys. I have these dreams, Ash, full of the corpses of young bulls, of the young men, Ash.'

‘War?' Ashabel suggested, for there was the expectation of war even in Pendleton County that winter.

‘War? A shambles, Ash. A slaughter-house, boy.'

Well, it wasn't a very new thing to have people predict war, but the way she looked at Ash, as if she'd dreamed of exactly
his
sad corpse, scared him a little. There was as well in her eyes a sort of offer of help. Ash didn't know what crazy help it would be.

Anyhow, they settled back to what they were at, and then Ashabel began to doze and opened his eyes to find her standing above him with a knife she'd got from somewhere. He yelled and tried to roll from the bed, but his ankles were tangled in the covers. Mrs Lesage made a deft wound in the meat of his leg and then threw the knife away. Before his scream was out, her mouth came down over the injury and she drank there as if with a real thirst. ‘Whoa,' he yelled, ‘what's this?'

Within a little while it began to be pleasant, that movement of her mouth on the cut, and he caught on that it had something to do with her witchery.

When she had drunk till her face was blue, she reeled off to the side of the bed, fetched a cup and spat the quantity of blood into it. Then, while he watched sort of enchanted, she began all manner of mad daubings and paintings of his body with the mixture of her spit and his blood. The whole business wasn't unpleasant and Mrs Lesage sang songs in tongues as weird as her sister's. Then sometime, in that deep snowing night, she was done and they lay together, panting and sticky with warm blood and warm juice, and they slept deep, worn to a wire by the struggle to make him safe in any battles to come.

But that was nothing beside what happened next morn. Ashabel woke in the witch's bed with the quilt to his ears and his head pulsing and his mouth seeming full of gravel, and the first thing he heard was the witch chattering to her sister outside while they ate their breakfast. After a time he rose, pulled the curtains aside in the corner, and signalled,
what ought I to do?
to the widow-witch.

Mrs Lesage laughed: ‘Why, Ash, you could walk through here dressed the way you come from your maw and Missie Gassaway wouldn't know any difference. But quick, take this here bowl of coffee and drink it up while you wash from that bucket in the corner. Quick now. Then dress yourself snug. I've a thing to show you.'

Some fifteen minutes later, when he was washed and dressed warm, she led him out into the grey morning. The snow was just petering out amongst the spruces and maples and aspens on this hillside and the day would come up sharp and freezing soon. He blew on his hands. ‘Get the shovel from that-there outhouse,' the witch told him.

He obeyed and they walked a small stretch to a snow mound. ‘Scrape the snow back from that,' said the widow. ‘Break any ice.'

Again Ashabel obeyed, digging heartily into the mound. ‘No, no, careful, Ash!' the widow advised him. ‘You don't want to bark any flesh there.'

Beneath the layer of snow Ash found boughs of spruce in a heap. Mrs Lesage gestured to him to pull them aside. When he'd done that, he saw first the naked blue thighs of a woman beneath the branches, an old woman whose flesh hung slack on the bone, whose paps were dry and frozen to her ribs. Then he saw the naked old man, lying on his back, his eyes closed, no breath fluttering in him. The pair of them made an ancient ice-blue husband and wife, sleeping deep under mounded snow and cut boughs.

‘Dead?' he asked the witch. He was taken by the half smile on the old man's face.

‘Not dead, Ashabel. These are grand folk, these're the mammy and pappy of my dead love, Mr Lesage. You know how it is, Ash, in the wintertime. With four people in the house the food gets scarce by now for folks like us. These last three winters Mr and Mrs Lesage sleeps out here. At the first decent fall they rill themselves up with applejack and I lays them down out here and cover 'em decently. In the spring I drop 'em in a warm tub and they jest shakes themselves like an old dog and sit up joking.'

How can I believe such a story? Ashabel asked himself. I must git away from here. She's killed those ole folk, nothing surer.

‘Quick now,' said the witch, ‘cover 'em up again before the air gets to them.'

Ash did it, thinking, I gotta run and never tell anyone I was ever here.

‘When that-there slaughter I spoke of, Ash, the one in my dreams, when it comes along I'll send ole Lesage there –' she nodded to the mound ‘– out to care for you in all them summer slaughters. He's got powers, ole Lesage, by heaven and earth he's got powers. Look for him in the spring and you'll keep seeing him till late autumn, and then you'll know, Ashabel, you'll be preserved. Now you won't forget his ole face, will you?'

He wouldn't ever forget
that
. Ashabel thanked her as polite as he could and then hurried off into the icy forests as fast as he could make his excuses, heading back towards Rockingham County. He'd heard tales of hill people storing their extra mouths and all other parts of the body thereto attached in snowy mounds all winter. But no one really believed it possible.

Ash joined the Shenandoah Volunteers in May of 1861. He began to see the ole man on country roads soon thereafter. Goddam it, he thought then, the proof of the pudding …!

24

In Amissville General Tom Jackson remembered he hadn't written to his lovely Anna before taking to the road. He stopped at the parson's place to get a real quick letter off to her. He couldn't say her name without his belly becoming molten, his heart a sweet hive. But he had to be quick about writing to her this morning.

He wrote the letter as if he was still in Mr Tilley's farmhouse. ‘The enemy,' he wrote, ‘has taken a position, or rather several positions, on the Fauquier Hot Springs side of the Rappahannock. I've only time to tell you how much I love my little pet dove.'

Although he wouldn't tell his intentions even to his love in North Carolina, his army wasn't moving unseen. For there was a Federal signal station in the hills north-east of Waterloo Bridge on the Rappahannock, and in the dustless air a dozen men there could see Hill's division and the regimental flags, scarlet and blue against the deep green of a rainy high summer. As early as 7.15 a.m. these signallers spotted the regiments, only some four hours after the movement began. At first the Union signalmen thought it was some small detachment returning to the Valley, but when at 8.30 a.m. the infantry and artillery brigades were still rolling along the narrow roads there off to the west, the lieutenant in charge of the station drafted off a message. A whole division, he said, going north, probably to cross the river at Henson's Mill. Some waggons, not so many.

By 10.30 the Stonewall Brigade had appeared at the head of
its
division and a further message was flashed off by heliograph eastwards – two divisions moving well closed up and goddam fast. By noonday, when elements of Ewell's division had also been noticed, the young lieutenant – who'd been keeping a count of regimental flags – signalled Pope's headquarters that there were 20,000 men on the road to Henson's Mill. Within an hour of that, General H. W. Halleck, Union Chief of Staff in Washington, knew about it all. McDowell's corps, way over to the west, was alerted. For once the Union had been given an accurate estimate of a movement by Confederates.

But those bad mental habits of Union generals again, as James Long-street had prayed they would, protected the Southern army. Johnny Pope had a habit of overstating, by a factor of at least three, the numbers of Confederates that opposed him. He didn't believe that the movement of 20,000 Confederates was a movement of more than a quarter of the enemy and therefore saw no danger to his rear. He believed it could only be a sideshow. It was beyond Johnny Pope's mind too to imagine that Lee might split half his army away from the main force and send it fifty miles into the rear of an enemy who had some 80,000 men, and more coming up to join him.