Confederates (35 page)

So all the good mathematics of the signals lieutenant in the hills above Waterloo Bridge went to waste. Pope told his generals that this splinter force was heading towards Front Royal or Luray townships in the Valley.

On the second morning of that march, before the heat was too bad, the word got back to Bolly and Usaph and Gus, having passed from man to man down a line ten miles long or more, that the column was turning east at Salem. Not west towards the Valley, but in behind Johnny Pope. So it was a northwards movement, a movement to threaten all those fabled cities Usaph had never seen – Washington, Harrisburg, Philadelphia! The regiments sprang along nicely that morning, but by noon everything began to break up as the road rose towards the blue-green range called the Bull Run Mountains.

This road up to the pass rose between tall forests which threw a good shade over the marching boys. It was on the last shadowy and tall-timbered miles to the top of Thoroughfare Gap that Bolly petered out altogether. He gave a little yelp and hobbled away to the edge of the road, to the cliff-edge that is, where dozens of lame or ill or cunning boys already sat panting, vomiting, binding up their feet with linen torn from old shirts, and all this above a nice little forested gulch. Somewhere down there a mountain stream ran deep in its socket, or was it just wind in the beeches and the oaks? Bolly hunched his body down, ashamed of himself, knowing that everyone knew of him, the most ancient veteran of the Stonewall, and everyone would see him there, unmanned by the rise of the road. He looked away. He studied the great fall of greenery below him.

Usaph ducked out of the line to talk to him.

‘I'm done proper, Usaph. I'm lame's any old horse and my wind's broke.'

‘That ain't nothing to feel so ashamed about, Bolly.'

Bolly shrugged. Usaph could tell he was thinking on his old lines. Which were, if I can't get up the pass, maybe the boys are right and my wife of 22 summers rides a better bull than me.

Gus too bent over Bolly, and Hans Strahl, tentative, not sure anything he did would be welcome. Then Major Dignam came along. They were all glad it was a sentimental man like Dignam who'd know neither Bolly nor themselves were average stragglers. Dignam just said: ‘Too much, Bolly?'

‘We could take him pick-a-back,' Gus said, ‘to the top. He'd be fine on the downhill.'

‘Goddamit, Gus,' Usaph hissed at him. ‘When was your own wind as good as that?'

Hans Strahl said: ‘I can tote him some.'

Bolly looked at the three of them, shook his head and covered his eyes.

But Dignam liked the suggestion all right. ‘It means you've got three boys out of line to carry one. But then I've seen boys earlier today running from the lines to pick green corn in the fields.' They'd seen that too. What else could a man do whose meat was eaten or maybe rotted? ‘I think if men can leave ranks for the sake of unripe corn, they can leave ranks to carry Bolly,' said Dignam, like goddam Solomon in judgement.

So they had their orders and Dignam passed on. Usaph took Bolly's musket and Gus's, and along with his own they made a fierce burden in their own right. Then Gus, frowning over Bolly as if he were a piece of cunning musical notation, took the old man's shoes off and slung them too over Hans Strahl's shoulder. Bolly's feet were hard and older than the bole of an oak and more calloused.

‘Up, Bolly,!' said Gus.

Bolly did not move. ‘I don't care,' he said, ‘to go over the Gap like a goddam clown or a child.'

‘And we don't care for this added goddam burden,' Usaph told him. ‘So you'd best jest sit there till the first snows, Bolly.'

‘Oh Lord,' said Bolly, speaking directly to the Deity, ‘how you humble the mighty. You gave your servant Bolly an eye more pointed than a hawk's, ears like a hound's, oh Lord, and a manhood like a stag at rutting, but kept in store this-here humiliation. Hauled up a mountain by boys and Dutchies! So be it.'

He dragged himself upright and fell so hard against thin Gus that Gus was very near toppled. At last Gus managed to hitch the old man up on his back. ‘Don't be a goddam dead weight like that, Bolly,' Hans Strahl told him.

Gus staggered away and was soon tottering. The path was hard enough even for the unburdened, and few boys had the breath to whistle them or call mocking questions. Gus would struggle along some few hundred paces, then Usaph would take the load, then Hans, and so they made their slow way. And regiment after regiment passed them by and considered them stragglers, which at this late and heady stage of the war hurt their feelings not a little.

Usaph noticed, on account of keeping his eyes low and away from the strangers who were passing, that there was a high number of boys walking barefoot. Some had their shoes tied round their necks and were saving them from this pass road, rather risking cut heels and stone bruises than wear out leather that mightn't be readily replaced. Others lacked any shoes at all and the feet were usually cut about, but their owners didn't seem to notice it.

Usaph Bumpass was therefore reminded of the state of his own shoes. The uppers of his right one were tearing away from the lowers on the outside, the stitching was exposed and soon would break, though it wasn't a matter for grief yet. There wasn't much cure for it either. You could hammer the upper on to a wooden sole that would last you a long time, except with a wooden sole you couldn't bend your feet, as a man walking some 25 miles in a day needed to. You could stuff wads of the
Richmond Enquirer
into the innards but that too crowded the shoe and hampered the foot.

These shoes of Usaph's were the ones he'd got off a North Carolina corpse at Gaines' Mill. They'd looked decent then, but they were wearing fast on these back roads.

He could just about feel the strain on the stitching of those dead man's shoes as he laboured up Thoroughfare Gap with Bolly on his back. His brown throat was tense as cedar wood with that despairing burden he carried. It was getting dark, though a corner of the road here or there would catch a golden acre of light and make men think of tomorrow and its danger, yes, but most of all its promise. ‘Carryin' your own daddy?' they'd maybe call to Usaph or Hans or Gus, now that the crest was near, and whoever was carrying ole Bolly would feel the old soldier's clammy, shamed breath on his neck.

In the long twilight a battery of the Rockbridge Artillery came up behind them on the road. Six scrawny horses hauling each 12-pounder, and leather harness and wooden traces squeaking with the stress of it; and behind each wheel of the caisson and the limber and the gun itself, two men pushing. And a rider on each of the three left-hand horses, striking the flanks with crops and yelling like waggoneers.

On one of the chests on the caisson of Maskill's guns sat Orville Puckett wrapped in a blanket, cruel pain in his jaws from the fever he had, and all his bones aching with the jolting they were getting. He too suffered from a deathly pride and it was such that he wouldn't let his gun-crew see him riding uphill on the caisson of his own gun. So his friend Patrick Maskill had lifted him aboard the caisson of the battery's No. 2 Napoleon, Maskill's own.

Orville Puckett was too tired to protest about that. Pat Maskill thought Orville was likely dying.

Maskill now saw Usaph carrying Bolly, saw Usaph's legs jolt and stumble at the edge of the mountain road and, watching Bolly's shape, saw it was that of an old man.

‘Gran'daddy,' he called to Bolly.
‘Gran'daddy!
What in the name of hokey is a boy your age doing here?'

Bolly muttered, in the loose undignified hunch which Usaph held him. ‘I marched, boy, from Romney to Harrison's Landing. But nowadays all the virtue's gone out of ole Bolly.…'

‘My gun,' said Patrick Maskill, ‘weighs half a ton as foundered, and then there's the weight of the caisson and the limber and I don't know if you add in the weight of the wheels or not. That's a question of physics and my bent ain't in that direction, being rather to the law. But what I think is that if we added the weight of one gran'daddy to the weight of this-here – I don't think it would make that much difference to the overall burden.'

He ordered two of his gunners to lift Bolly up on the caisson by Orville Puckett's side. Orville saw the old man there but took no interest in him. Unlike Ash Judd, Orville hadn't had any promises concerning old men, and was wrapped up in the question of whether he himself was dying.

Ole Bolly, sitting up like a general, felt belittled. ‘I'll always be added weight now, Usaph,' he told Bumpass.

‘You'll be like a spring lamb on the downgrade, Bolly,' Usaph promised.

But he didn't blame Bolly for his feelings; in fact he felt some sort of anger against Maskill himself. Sure the man had taken from him a bruising burden. But it was all right for these gentlemen of the artillery with their degrees in law and Latin and Greek to come up to you and say ‘ain't' and ‘this-here' like regular boys. Speaking like that to you only because they thought you were an unlettered country boy. Why didn't Gus speak up and show them something of the mental capacities of ordinary riflemen? But Gus never gave officers or college boys the benefit of his mind, standing by instead like an oaf.

So if Bolly hadn't weighed so much Usaph would have had a mind to carry him all the way to the top. You could see Bolly would've liked it better that way. While ever he was carried by friends, he felt he might get his strength back. To be carried by strangers meant he'd become some kind of official burden.

So Usaph and Hans Strahl and Gus all understood but didn't let on to Bolly they did. The muscles of their back and shoulders were paining too much.

25

About dusk that day some hundred or so Confederate cavalrymen edged down to the forest on the rim of the village of Bristoe Station. They could see the railway depot just a hundred yards away across a meadow. There was no one there. No pickets, no railroad workers. Beyond the depot the little white town sat on a bit of a rise. The Railroad Hotel stood behind a picket fence just fifty paces or so from the railroad yard itself.

The captain commanding the cavalry put his left squadron to the task of sealing off the north end of Main Street and his right to sealing off the southern. He knew that some of General Henry Forno's Frenchies from Louisiana were coming down the Bristoe road to join him, but it went against the cavalry officer's temperament to wait for them – the noise of their goddam feet would likely give them away in any case.

Over beyond the railroad, in the front parlour of the Railroad Hotel, Captain Pinder of the 8th Connecticut sat drinking whisky with two of his young officers. They were boys from western Connecticut, from the gentle towns round the foothills of the Berkshires. They were waiting for the innkeeper to come and tell them dinner was ready. Just before seven these three gentlemen heard a shot in Main Street and then a fury of rifle fire. Pinder and the two boys had never been in action before and it took them a struggle of the mind to believe that a test of fire had dropped in on them this summer evening, so far up the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, with dinner cooking.

Captain Pinder went into the hallway. He saw the host of the hotel trembling in the doorway of the dining room and then there were dozens of his own men pounding up the hotel front steps, crowding into the narrow passage.

‘Stuart's boys!' they were yelling. ‘It's a goddam Stuart raid!' and like stuff.

He could tell they thought it was against the rules for cavalry to come down on them at supper-time, and goddam it, Captain Pinder agreed with them. ‘Front rooms!' he ordered them, and they crowded into the front parlour. Above the firing came the Rebel scream, getting close along the road, and it stung the skin behind their ears and at the backs of their necks.

They crushed up to the open window of the room where Pinder and the two boys had been drinking. The whisky bottle sat on the table there still. They began firing through the window, a dozen boys firing at a time, a dozen loading up and milling behind them. Pinder thought that it was so crowded in here they'd start killing each other just by accident or through panic. ‘You others,' he yelled into the hallway, ‘upstairs!'

But there was already a lean man on a lean horse clattering up the hotel's wooden steps onto the porch. There an eighteen-year-old Connecticut boy looked up at him as if he were a horseman from God, rake-lean and impermeable against the setting sun. And he sure looked like something you couldn't argue with. Pinder, some five paces behind the boy, saw the horseman shoot the boy through the forehead and ride on up to the front door, leaning in and shooting. Pinder blinked but no bullet struck him. The din was hellish and Pinder began to bite his hand. For he could see through the parlour door that young men were being shot in the throat and the infernal Rebel cavalry was shoulder to shoulder in front of the hotel, leaning over their horses' manes and firing calmly and without animus like boys at turkey shoots. In the hall there was a young man either side of Pinder, keeping close because they trusted him; he had once been a popular mayor of New Milford. Both of them dropped and were groaning on the floor. These boys, thought Pinder, have families in Litchfield County, Connecticut, and their folk are always going to enquire of me, what did you do with our sons? With our boys from New Milford and Danbury and Kent, from Sherman and Canaan and all those towns with high-steepled churches and village greens? Their families will never forgive me, Captain Pinder thought.

He found he had his white handkerchief in his hand and he stepped over the dead and the damaged, waving it at the horseman. ‘Surrender,' he was screaming, not as a demand but as an offer. ‘Surrender!'

He sent one of his drinking friends upstairs to tell them there that it was over, and now there was sudden still. He went out onto the porch, and a young Confederate officer was waiting for him. ‘I suppose you're Stuart's boys?' Pinder said, tears all over his face.