Confederates (6 page)

After the examinations, the president of Washington College informed the fathers of The Immutables that it was no use keeping them there while the conflict lasted. It was hoped that would not be beyond late autumn, since by then Confederate success must have caused a peace settlement.

Now Lucius considered himself a traveller. In his fifteenth summer he'd been up the Ohio to Cincinnati. But he'd never been down into coastal Virginia before and the fact that he travelled with conscripts hardly touched his joy as a tourist.

Colonel Wheat's adjutant, Major Dignam, met the newcomers at the entrance to the meadow. The scraggy-looking lawyerly man saluted him and handed him a list of the conscripts. All through the ceremony the veterans kept silent, except for Gus Ramseur who called out, ‘I regret I'm not trained for it' – replying to an officer in his fever who had ordered him to play in a string orchestra of which all the instruments were made of whisky barrels cut in two and covered with drum parchment.

In near silence, the adjutant, Major Dignam, a lanky Methodist preacher from Mount Meridian, appointed twenty of the conscripts to one company, fifteen to another, 25 to the centre company which had suffered surprising losses late on the afternoon of Gaines' Mill, and divided the last twenty between companies D and E. Listening, Bolly Quintard thought, the salt has lost its savour. The tainting of the Shenandoah Volunteers is completed. Yet like the others he wanted the new boys to be turned loose in the paddock, so that they could be punished for all the griefs and inequities he had suffered as a soldier of the Confederacy.

The new boys were not fools and could see what lay ahead. When they got the order to fall out they did not want to obey it, but remained in clutches of two or three near the gate to the meadow. Major Dignam loudly called the new captain and young Lucius Taber away to meet the other officers of the regiment, who were living near the general's staff in three captured tents heavily marked – like so much else of the equipment with which the war was being fought – with the enemy's initials, U.S.

The lawyer's name was Hanks. He protested to the adjutant. ‘I have to see to the comfort of my men.'

‘There's no seeing to it today. Tomorrow morning, Captain Hanks, is the time you take up your stewardship anew. Until then they have their new comrades.'

‘You're speaking, sir, from a knowledge of precedent?'

‘I'm speaking from a knowledge of reality, Captain Hanks.'

‘I depend on precedent … I am a lawyer, sir.…'

‘Well, maybe what I speak of can't yet be fully described as precedent, but if we help it along it might be precedent by sundown.'

‘What is your calling, sir?' asked Hanks. Saying it, he leaned back in a sort of county courtroom stance.

‘The word of God is my vocation, Captain Hanks. And heaven my destination. I am a Methodist preacher.'

‘You are a preacher and countenance the theft that will now commence to be done to the newcomers?'

‘Theft, theft, theft, sir?' groaned the adjutant. He smiled as if in pain. ‘The men about here have not had the touch of woman's hand, nor the ease of feather beds nor adequate cornbread nor any nicety of linen or toilet since we went out after General Milroy last Christmas. They have lacked all, even Bibles, which I must fetch for them off the corpses on the battlefield, being as how the Bible Society in New York has decided to deprive us of Bibles, as if we were not, sir, fit for the word. No sirree, captain, there will be no theft. There will be adjustments. Come now, both of you.'

Still the scrawny little man looked at his hundred conscripts, and his hundred conscripts looked at him.

‘Come,' Major Dignam insisted.

They couldn't disobey him. Lucius Taber in any case stepped out readily, being an Immutable. Conscripts deserved no defence from him. Lawyer Hanks went more slowly, not sure that the rule of law in that meadow would survive his going. As they went, Major Dignam pointed out to them items of interest of the Thomas plantation and indicated where the guns and teams of Poague's battery were ranged, pointing southwards towards the swamps and oak thickets.

4

There were, that lunchtime, 73 volunteers in Guess's B for brag company of the Shenandoah Volunteers. Of these no more than fifty could walk, for there were eight lame, nursing stone bruises on their feet, three with great swollen carbuncles on their arms or legs, a half dozen with malaria, shivering away in a nest of blankets, five with dysentery so bad they could not rise even for this chance at loot, and two or three with pneumonia and other fevers. Those in that company who
could
move moved now on their fifteen conscripts, all except Usaph Bumpass, who, though mobile, stayed just the same with Gus Ramseur. Sure, he looked at the conscripts with some feeling of malice. Yet he did not trust the malice, it sat uncomfortably in him, there was something not true to Usaph Bumpass about it. He would have liked to be able to go up to the new boys and take anything he wanted from their haversacks. Bolly and Murphy and Judd were having no trouble doing it, and neither was Danny Blalock, even though he was an educated man. Maybe Usaph would have looked them over for a pair of new brogans if he'd needed them, but he got himself a good pair off a corpse after the Shenandoah Volunteers moved up in support of Maxey Gregg's South Carolinans on Boatswain's Swamp the week before. He now felt fine-shod in the shoes of a poor dead Sandlapper. Now there might be fish-paste or molasses in the conscripts' haversacks. Well, he had fish-paste in his, captured Maine fish confection. And tons of captured molasses filled the waggons behind the staff tent, and a man could go according to his fancy and draw off a pint.

He saw large bullet-headed Murphy unbutton a conscript's jacket, and take from inside it a small Bible. Inside the Bible he found a daguerreotype of a plump girl in a white blouse. ‘Look here then, lads!' called Murphy. ‘Look what this-here feller carries in the Word of the Lord!'

Bolly inspected the daguerreotype and got a real evil grin on his face and asked the boy, ‘You bring the sword of the Lord to this damsel, son?'

The boy said nothing. He was very much a boy and, Usaph guessed, would always remember how he hadn't said anything to rebuff the veterans when they chose to be sneery about his betrothed.

‘And sure, you must really bounce round in her, sonny,' Murphy said. ‘A tiny whippet of a boy like you?'

‘A gnat in a barrel of molasses,' said young Judd. His chin was all a-tremble at his wit, and he looked round to inspect the hooting faces of Bolly and Murphy.

Danny Blalock might have been the most to blame. He'd been a schoolmaster and must have seen children savage each other in the schoolyard and got to detest those methods. Yet although he didn't laugh, he stood by, surveying, the way old Doctor Mollison, the bug-hunter Usaph used to see working with jar and net along the cliffs north of Strasburg, might watch a duck consume a June bug. As far as Usaph was concerned, the women even of conscripts should have been sacred. For that was the Southern way. The more they made jokes about the conscript's plump girl the more like the slum-boys of the North they became. And it was known what Yankees were when it came to the commerce of the flesh. The men in A Company had passed round a letter they took off a slum-boy from New York whose body had been found east of Gaines' Mill last week. It was from this boy's girl in the alleys of Manhattan and it promised the boy in straight-out terms carnal pleasures he would never now enjoy. No Southern woman wrote to her feller like that; such writing was even beyond the measure of a crude Irishman like Joseph Murphy.

Throughout the meadow there were like scenes. The veterans went through the conscripts' haversacks and took coffee, real coffee which you could still get in western Virginia, mainly through the courtesy of Cincinnati businessmen who smuggled it across the Ohio. The conscripts' haversacks yielded as well cigars and chewing tobacco; even neat Danny Blalock who didn't chaw or smoke took tobacco out of a haversack.

The conscripts resisted a second here or there, but it was no fair contest. Their spirits had already been worked on. All the way across Virginia from Staunton, they'd been mocked as latecomers. And here they were facing the men whose name the Southern press, the
Mobile Advertiser
equally with the
Richmond Enquirer
, extolled. If only those newspaper scribes, Usaph often thought, knew how much of an accident it is that any of us are here; if they knew how mean average we are, as given to skulking and straggling as any other brigade if we were given a whisker of a chance. We ain't princes, us Stonewall Brigade boys, Usaph thought, scratching himself on the ribs where, beneath his shirt, the lice were active. But the conscripts there find us awesome and let us demean them.

Looking out across the meadow, Usaph saw Ash Judd taking a man's watch, Bolly Quintard grossly feeding still on the plump girl's picture, and Murphy lifting socks out of some poor boy's sack, inspecting them against the sunlight and choosing to keep them. He saw too a neat little Irishman, veteran of Guess's Company, stopping in front of a young conscript, raising his hand to the boy's cheek, taking him gently by the elbow and leading him away to a fence corner.

There was a gangling conscript, a hollow-cheeked sort of boy, maybe 25 years of age, standing off on his own. No one had bothered him. His jacket was opened and his haversack sat on the ground at his feet, its flap undone for the convenience of looters. But up to now it remained untouched. It might have been they were all a little shamed by the way he'd laid himself open to theft. And you couldn't be sure of humbling a man like him in too convincing a manner. He had neat black hair, dark eyes and a narrow head, and the eyes gleamed as he looked full on people like Bolly making fools of others and maybe even of themselves.

Bumpass watched him, saw him shift his stance a little, like a man that's been waiting a long time for a train. He seemed to take some sort of interest in Joe Murphy, who had gone back to baiting the boy with the picture, saying such things as: ‘Does she know you're there, boy? Or is it a flea sting she thinks she's getting?' Tears ran murky through the dust on the boy's face.

The gangling young man said all at once: ‘Come now. Leave that boy alone. Your jokes are getting gas and repeating on themselves.'

Bolly and Murphy and Judd and the others just looked at him. Their sufferings on campaign had given them certain moral rights, no one south of the Potomac should have doubted that. As far as they were concerned, this thin creature had therefore blasphemed them.

It didn't seem to worry the thin creature. He kept showing this clear-eyed indifference to them. ‘I've got a clean vest. I've got coffee. Don't you gentlemen want it? Or do you intend to spend the summer standing there letting your low jokes chase their own asses?'

Bolly stalked up to him.

‘And who are you to speak out, you sowson, you whoreson bastard?' asked Bolly, falling back on the cuss-words his father had favoured during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.

The conscript looked Bolly fair in the eye.

‘My name is Decatur Cate …'

Ash Judd said, ‘Your daddy have the stutters?'

He laughed shrilly then, but Bolly stared at him for detracting from the event. The duty of the unmanning of this Decatur Cate. ‘And I take it you're here substitutin' for a rich boy from beyond the River?'

Cate gave a tight throaty laugh.

‘You take it wrong. I am a mere conscript. If I had stayed in my native Pennsylvania and finished reading for the Bar the way my pa commanded me, I would have now been in McClellan's army with maybe a better class of people.'

The man's sass was dazzling. There was no punishment you could hand out to a man like this, short of hanging him from one of Mr Thomas's plantation oaks.

Danny Blalock said in a high-toned way: ‘In McClellan's army. Under a bad general.'

‘A bad general but a good cause,' said thin Mr Cate. ‘Whereas down here it's all good generals and bad causes.'

‘I promise you, sir,' said teacher Blalock gallantly, just like something out of a novel, ‘if you say one word more in that vein of yours, I shall kill you here by knife or rifle and state to my colonel in defence that I but killed a viper.'

‘Well goddam me!' said Decatur Cate, kicking the earth with the toe of his shoe.

Most of the conscripts had had their pants taken by now and were struggling, blushing, into the foul and tattered britches of their persecutors, and feeling the first bites of the greyback lice that infested the clothing of veterans. Yet Cate was kicking the earth with a slight smile on his face.

‘I would not touch your coffee, sir,' Danny Blalock yelled. ‘I would not touch any delicacy you might have. I would be defiled in touching anything of yours.'

‘It would be nice,' said Cate, still pretending to be interested in the ground, ‘if the rest of your friends felt that way.'

‘By Christ,' Murphy called, ‘
I'll
take his coffee and anything else. I'll strip the bastard. I'm not particular like yourself, Danny.'

So they moved up and stripped Cate of his shirt and jacket and emptied his haversack. The boy they had forgotten picked up his daguerreotype and moved by stealth across to a bunch of his fellows who'd been through the process.

Ole Bolly was watching this bunch. ‘Oh Jesus, Usaph,' he said. ‘They shouldn't have done this to us.

‘This strikes at the only thing we can halfway call our own. Pride it strikes at, Usaph. It strikes at our sweet pride.'

Ashabel Judd was holding a letter he'd taken from Cate's jacket. His lips moved as he read the addressee's name. Then he whistled.

‘Hey there, Usaph,' he called. ‘This-here letter's for you.'

5

Usaph's face burned. He left Gus Ramseur and took the letter from Ashabel Judd. Ashabel's eyes were fixed, innocent. Yet Usaph felt shamed to get his letter by way of a stranger. It wasn't just that the man was a conscript, but what was his wife doing, giving her precious handwriting into the care of a man who loved the Union?