Confederates (50 page)

What Ephie had been saying to herself, sometimes aloud, each miserable night since Cate had left, was something like: you ain't no decent wife, Ephie Bumpass. Sure, you were playing at being one since you met good Usaph Bumpass but you knew how it was but playing. You happen to be one of them swamp whores Daddy Corry sometimes brought into the house. You lay with a man jest because he could ply oil paints.

Oh, Ephie's shame was like a sickness. It cramped her belly when she tried to eat. She'd get to bed tired, but it would pepper her brain up and her legs would twitch like something frantic. She thought how, when he was caressing her, Cate had said, you'll come with me and travel the wild world, and how she'd thought Amen, how heady that would be, to travel with an artist and watch him do his work, watch him squint and frown and make lines and hues that no other creature on the earth could do. Whereas, and there was no denying it, one farmer could and did do pretty much what any other farmer could and did do. And thinking about this became part of the shame as well.

It seemed to Ephie the shame that followed on adultery with Cate was enough tax for a woman to pay without this extra thing that had befallen her.

All that hard work on the churn did for her this morning was make her want to puke. She stood up in a fever of sweat. Old Lisa's song gave her sickness a sort of rhythm. ‘Lisa, will you be quiet for a minute!' she called. But Lisa didn't hear. It was Aunt Sarrie and Bridie who heard, and Aunt Sarrie who answered from the top of the stairs.

‘You calling there, Ephie?'

Ephie staggered into the hallway and turned and, so it seemed to her, could not stop turning. The stairwell was tipping up, she believed, and falling on her. She felt a hardness under her shoulder-blades and thought it was a wall, but then was surprised to find it was the floorboards. Bridie stood over her, working at her nose with the neck of an ammonia bottle. The fumes stung Ephie's brain, but swung the house back on to its proper foundations.

Aunt Sarrie said: ‘Bridie, now you go and get lemonade for poor Mrs Bumpass. You'll find us in the parlour. And mind you knock before you bring it in.'

When Aunt Sarrie got her back on her feet, Ephie didn't quite want to go into the parlour. The parlour meant Aunt Sarrie looked on all this as a solemn event and wanted to talk solemn with her. And there was in that parlour, beside the Bible and the daguerreotype of Aunt Sarrie's dead husband Lewis, and many other intimidating items, that accursed portrait on the wall.

Sarrie got her in there though and sat her in the velvet-upholstered seat and stood back, a righteous sensible woman in a grey dress. Her plainness seemed to Ephie to be a blessing, and Ephie wanted plainness like that more than brains or riches. ‘I know what it is, Ephie. I bin makin' little guesses these past two weeks what your state is, gal.'

Ephie shook her bowed head. What could she say? ‘I only been making little guesses these past two weeks myself, for sweet Lord's sake, Aunt Sarrie,' she whispered.

‘Well you see, Ephie, I thought
it
had happened, you see. I thought it
had
or
would
happen, gal. I thought that artist feller and yourself had a fancy for each other. I take it it's the artist feller. You got no further surprises for me, have you, Ephie girl?'

Ephie had her eyes closed and shook her head yet again. It was so sweet to have it out now, and Aunt Sarrie spoke to her in a way she hadn't expected, like someone who was in a secret with her and who might herself have once or twice slept with men other than her daguerreotyped dead husband.

‘We could put it out for fostering but that's cruel on a child … besides, with all the waggle-tongues and gossips we have in this county, there ain't no ways the news won't get round.' Aunt Sarrie sighed. ‘Usaph shouldn't have the hurt of that. It would follow him till he was an ole man. So …'

Bridie knocked and came in with the lemonade, putting it down in silence, and Aunt Sarrie kept a special silence, as if Bridie was in on the news too but it was against the rules to say so. So Ephie began to blush deep in front of the slave lady Bridie, who left the room while they were still, all three of them, locked up in that knowing silence.

‘That's it,' said Aunt Sarrie then. ‘We got to go and see Grannie Ambler over to Williamsville.'

‘Who's this Grannie Ambler?'

Aunt Sarrie set her mouth on strong, no-nonsense lines. ‘Well, I believe you don't want your Usaph to see you grow big with another fellow's child come Christmas. Grannie Ambler helps people in your situation.'

‘Helps? Does it hurt?'

‘Tolerable,' said Aunt Sarrie. ‘But woman is a creature made for some pain. And you must be brave, Ephie.'

Ephie knew it was settled then. When she wept, she didn't know if it was fear or gratitude that sparked the tears.

14

Jed Hotchkiss, the mapmaker, had a mess of maps to get ready by dawn and a poor place to do it in. He was working at the kitchen table of a farmhouse up near the Chantilly estate, just twenty miles west of Lincoln's nervous capital. It was cold and the rain clamoured on the farm roof. He knew this was September 1 and that the year had begun to turn now and that maybe a muddy fall and a fierce winter were just ahead.

The surface of the table he worked on was all holystoned. The farmer's wife had spent so much effort on it that it had great hollows in it and wide cracks. There was a good table in the front room but it had the corpse of an important Yankee laid out on it. So Jed had to make do with a surface that just about followed the contours of the country he was making maps of.

By him he had inks and pens and pencils, rulers and compasses and protractors, sheets of drawing paper, rough diagrams of northern Virginia with triangulations pencilled in all over them, and notebooks full of figures.

At the end of the table sat his assistant, a young engineer from Augusta County, making a general map of western Maryland from a number of sources – old farmers' almanacs and year books and an old-fashioned volume called
A General Description of the State of Maryland
.

Jed himself was drawing a map of the Aldie and Ball's Bluff regions. One of his sources was a map he'd made himself as a younger man. One college vacation he'd set out to map the entire Commonwealth of Virginia just for the fun such an exercise would give him. While he worked now Jed listened to that English scribbler Searcy, who was sitting by the banked-down fire with very little to do except talk. Searcy was arguing away in his seesaw British voice about prices.

Searcy was in a strange mood. The sense that he was fatally locked to this foreign war frightened him. He had always been an observer before, it was a role that suited his unattached soul. He'd never felt a particular war would get him. He felt it now. The image of pixie-faced Mrs Whipple tonight only made him all the surer that
this
war wouldn't let him off free as all the others had.

As well as that he was grieving, though he didn't tell Jed that. It was now two days since Pope was routed at Manassas – and began his retreat. This afternoon, in the low muddy fields round Chantilly, Stonewall's wing had been halted by terrible rain, and as well as that by a firm stand over a two-mile front by U.S. generals Porter and Kearny. What upset Searcy was that one of the best men in the Union was laid out on the good table in the front parlour, a captured corpse.

Searcy had been covering up all this worry and loss by arguing – as has been said – about currency and prices with Jed and the boy engineer from Augusta County. That boy seemed to have no trouble talking and at the same time drawing firm, exact lines.

‘My paw,' he was saying as he worked away on that map of western Maryland which Stonewall wanted by breakfast-time tomorrow, ‘works in the War Department in Richmond. When he got the job last year at $110 a month, I thought – whoo-ee! My mammy and pappy is rich! They rented a house right there on Marshall Street, jest a stroll from the Capitol, for $50 a month and lived like a king and a queen with the rest. Alas, alack …'

‘I know, I know,' said Searcy, as if he were gloomily pleased about it. ‘You can't rent an attic in Richmond for $50 a month any more.'

‘Are you telling
me
that?' the young engineer asked. ‘Perdigious prices prevail in Richmond, Mr Searcy. Perdigious prices. For an instance $3 for a pound of candles …'

‘$8, I believe,' said Searcy, still seeming to Jed to hang onto the words with a perverse joy, ‘for a pound of tea.'

‘Goddam! Whisky $10 a quart. Butter a goddam luxury at $2.50 a pound. It's all that goddam paper money …'

All that goddam paper money
. Searcy remembered a time just after the start of the war, before the conflict claimed him and took him over. At that stage the centre of the Confederacy was a little whitewashed Greek-style building on a modest hill in Montgomery, Alabama. Here he had interviewed the Confederacy's Secretary of the Treasury, a long-faced, very sober man called Chris Memminger. Searcy found it pretty easy to sum Memminger up. He'd had a modest law practice in Savannah. You could tell just by looking at his suit that he was a thrifty man, and cautious. But the nature of the war that was just starting would soon turn him into a gambler. Memminger confessed that there hadn't been enough money in the Treasury Department to buy him a desk – he'd had to get one on his own private bank draft.

‘I recall a time,' said Searcy aloud, ‘when there wasn't in the entire Confederacy one sheet of banknote paper to print money on. Well, things have changed. Things have changed.'

Jed whistled, shook his head and went on drawing. He knew nothing about economics. But he didn't like to hear Englishmen running down Confederate notes.

Why, earlier in the evening a gang of ten Rebel soldiers had tried to break their way into this very kitchen. Jed had shooed them out at gunpoint. Ten hollow-faced boys who hadn't had rations since yesterday morning, or so they said. Ten boys in rotten butternut jackets and shredded britches. Two of them barefoot. It seemed to Jed that the English government could put shoes on the feet of those boys, bread in their bellies and value into the Confederate dollar just by the simple act of recognising the South. And that for an Englishman to take delight in the fact that the Confederate dollar lacked value was altogether too rich. However, Jed didn't say anything. He was busy enough.

Yet Searcy seemed to pick up his unspoken ideas and to get piqued by them.

‘I know exactly what you're doing, Major Hotchkiss,' Searcy called out. ‘You're making maps of Loudoun and Jefferson Counties, paying special care to mark in the fords on the Potomac, and our young friend here is putting together a map of western Maryland. I know all that. And Jackson means to rampage all over Maryland, and go straight on into the North. But what has he got to pay for it all with except Treasury notes? Memminger prints banknotes as if they were so many harmless pages out of the Bible. But there's no hard money, Major Hotchkiss. All the collateral that the South has is their hope of winning the war.'

‘Maybe that's enough,' said Jed simply.

Searcy laughed. ‘There's something to be admired about your people.'

Jed didn't like the way it was said. Searcy used those indulgent tones that are reserved usually for talking about fools and hicks. ‘I'm finding it hard to work,' he told Searcy all at once. ‘I don't understand any of this bank talk. I only know that Stonewall wants more maps by morning than I'm likely to have finished. Would you mind leaving, sir, or at least going to sleep?'

Searcy shook his head and sort of laughed and got up.

‘I think your
paw
should understand,' said Searcy to the younger mapmaker, ‘that things won't get better in Richmond. For paper money is like the hounds and the good things, tea and coffee and candles, are like the fox. When you have too many hounds chasing too few foxes, no one has much sport.'

‘Please!' said Jed. ‘Please, Mr Searcy!'

So Searcy went out into the hallway, leaving the mapmakers alone.

‘Goddam, he talks some, don't he?' he heard the young engineer mutter before he'd closed the door properly.

Searcy kept on down the dark hall with nothing but a little radiance from the fanlight above the front door to help him. ‘Oh what a world!' he whimpered as he collided with an overcoat.

In the front parlour Major General Phil Kearny, U.S., lay between four burned-down tapers in a box on a cloth on a cedar table. Searcy came to a stop beside the table and inspected the man inside the coffin. Even laid out, Kearny looked tall, and his dark sensitive face was as Searcy had remembered it. Just four hours past Phil had been raging through the rain looking for a Yankee brigade to send against Ambrose Hill's division. Instead he'd found a string of Confederate skirmishers behind a rail fence. Their fire had torn his back open and cut most of his right hand off as he turned to warn his aides to flee.

Two hours ago the body had been borne here in an ambulance, and the farmer got in black women to undress Phil Kearny, to sew up the back and wash the body and put it again in its uniform. A glove now lay over the remnants of Kearny's right hand.

Searcy had been travelling with the French General Le Tellier in the hot north Italian summer in 1859 when he first met Phil Kearny. The English journalist had the beginnings of what turned out to be typhus, and General Le Tellier had kindly let him travel in his carriage. Carriage! Searcy couldn't imagine Tom Jackson travelling in a carriage. The carriage, like the rest of the French army, was making for Milan, a city that lay wide open to it. In the midst of all the traffic, there was a cavalry officer giving orders in bad New Jersey French:
‘A bas! A bas! A droit, vacheur! Mon dieu, à droit!'

When he had the columns and waggons moving again, this same officer leaned in the carriage window, reported to General Le Tellier and found the fevered Englishman there. That was the start of the friendship. Searcy went through his fevers and his convalescence in a vast cool room in a palazzo in Milan. Phil Kearny used to come round with fruit and brandy. That had been another world. A world of Popes and French dragoons in uniforms dreamed up from grand opera, and generals who weren't much different, really, from ordinary men. He wished he were back there now, in a war between the French and the Piedmontese on the one hand and the Austrians on the other. He wished he were back in a war that meant damn all to him.