Confederates (65 page)

But the Connecticut boys did not want to fight for a cellar. Once in the farmhouse, they just slipped the bolt on the kitchen side of the cellar door, and that meant Danny and the Texicans would not get out until midnight. They would, however, get out whole.

Meantime, in the farmyard by the pump, Usaph saw now that the bedevilment that had brought them here, the madness of painting their bodies with blood and powder, now locked them here. They could not run like normal uncrazed beings; they were stuck.

Usaph saw four or maybe five wounds appear in the chest of Colonel Lafcadio Wheat. Wheat, who'd wanted to grow up to be someone's scandalous gran'daddy, had suffered these injuries all in the same second, for the Connecticut riflemen could see he was a colonel, could spot the tarnished oak leaf on his collar.

It was natural that Wheat, seeing Usaph and the drummer Rufe staring at him so childlike and terrified, would want to make a speech to tell them to be of good heart. But sadly he had no breath for it. He noticed as he fell that the sash that linked him to Rufe had somehow been split, very likely by a bullet, and Rufe looked down on him like a child orphaned twice over. Wheat drew up one knee, tried to smile up at poor Rufe. But it came to his face as a snarl.

Wheat had read correctly the fears of Usaph and Rufe. Usaph felt more afraid and bereft than he'd ever felt before. Poor Wheat was fluttering his eyes and waving his right hand at Usaph, and Usaph got the idea that Wheat wanted to tell him something that would save him, some bit of good advice the colonel had himself until now forgotten to pass on.

But when Usaph bent low he saw that Wheat's belly was a spring of gore, and all that sassy and oratorical blood ran forth on a tide, and the britches were drenched. Wheat's voice was so low that there was no chance of hearing unless you could lip read. ‘Wife,' he seemed to say, and Usaph thought, in judgement, ‘Well might you say so.' Usaph worked his head closer and felt peevish. A colonel was meant to give hard advice. Maybe they were right, all them goddam critics who said Wheat had gone off in the head.

‘Tell them … Clarksburg,' said Wheat. Usaph began to weep. He almost wanted to hit the colonel. Where are all your goddam words gone now I need a few of them? ‘What are we to do?' yelled Usaph.

‘Not the knife,' said Wheat, very loudly.

Usaph looked about. He saw Cate and Gus surrendering to the soldiers of the Union, and Rufe still standing there in a mute way which could be interpreted as surrender. There was lots of yelling, some crying. But the noises were fading some. None the less, no one had any words to say to each other, neither the Connecticut boys as they made Cate and Gus captive nor Cate and Gus themselves. They looked well enough, those Yankee boys, they even had their goddam great-coats strapped to their shoulders like boys who meant to go a long way this autumn. It all began to look to Usaph like a goddam tableau – he saw Gus and Cate as two ragged and all at once strange-looking Rebels with their hands up, and the Yankees almost neat as toys out of a box, and their Springfields and their bayonets pointed straight at Gus as if he wasn't the earth's greatest goddam music man.

Someone's cannon was sighted right then on the farmyard. It was perhaps a cannon of the Confederacy on Nicodemus Heights, beyond the Pike, which wanted to stop the advance of the New Englanders towards Miller's cornfield. Or else it was one of Lincoln's pieces trying to nip off the rush of the Texicans. Because smoke lay so low over the farmyard, the man who ordered the gun to fire had little play for the exercise of any knowledge of Greek, Latin, Optics, Ethics or Mathematics he might have picked up in college. That is, he was firing as blind as any ordinary man would.

Later, when Usaph was suffering the results of the shell, even in his pain and bewilderment, it came to him that the thing had been fired from a rifled piece manufactured, you could bet, in the North; that it was hollowcase shell, about twenty pounds. The little of its noise he heard before it struck led him to believe this. For it made a shrieking of the kind shells from rifled pieces, the lead of their bases fluted from their journey up the tooled barrel, made in their passage through the air. He believed later, from the effect of the thing, that it carried one of them percussion fuses in its nose. Percussion fuses were more likely to work when fired from rifled pieces instead of from the old smoothbores.

Anyhow, it landed by the pump and pieces of Pittsburg iron from that device flew all ways, together with fragments of the shell-case itself. Usaph was of course lifted and then slapped flat on the earth, and when the dirt stopped plopping was deaf and could see but in a blur. He did however notice that a rolled overcoat had been blown on to the roof of the farm. There were also naked limbs up there, and the top half of a man still wearing a jacket. The boyish figure of Rufe had been thrown all the way to the porch and was bent in two.

Next with his hazed sight, Usaph saw Gus was on his back, his britches torn at the knees, his belly split and all his inward parts strewn out. Gus lay in a posture Usaph had seen, without looking too close, with other boys slain by artillery. Head back on its crown, eyes open, mouth parted as if to yell, arms bent at the elbows and the fingers spread and hooked like those of a spruiker making a point. Gus, the most original man Usaph knew, had taken up without complaining or making any apologies this posture that wasn't goddam original at all.

Usaph opened his own mouth, but the terror and concern he tried to let out didn't make any sound. How could they have done this to Gus so easy, in just the winking of an eye? The news of it, the noise of the shell was – he didn't doubt an instant – like to end the war. You could bet they had heard the noise in Richmond and Washington, and by now they must be starting to repent of it.

Usaph had been blown a little way and was sitting in a sort of sump by the barn. This little dip of earth was full of chicken feathers, for the farmer must have lately dressed his chickens here. Or likely the farmer's wife and daughters. The daughters of the man who broke the pump handle! What a goddam awful father he must be!

Usaph noticed that the left arm had been ripped away from his jacket. The muscle of the upper arm was sort of hanging down in a flap, dangling by a piece of gristle. Usaph's eyesight was double and kept on clouding and stinging, worst when he tried to look down on this wound. He would get a double version of the damage at the one time, a double version of the gluey tendons and the bone in there.

When his hearing came back in a rush he was frightened of what it might tell him. He felt a hell of a lot safer while he suffered that ringing deafness. Close by him he could hear someone chattering away now. It was a Yankee with his coat ripped off who lay in the sump with him. This Yankee seemed a mess from the waist down. It was a matter of debate whether he'd ever beget children. Just the same he was yammering away to himself, this boy of whom battle had made a steer.

Usaph got the feeling he'd had earlier with Wheat, that maybe he should listen to this man, that maybe there was good advice to be got. So he lifted his own damaged bicep up and held it in its place with his right hand – and that brought him some ease – then he blinked and his eyesight firmed all at once, though not as good as it had been before the shell, and then he looked at his companion and got a milky image of him.

It was Cate.

That goddam Cate had got a pair of blue britches in Manassas and worn them since. And with the one good shoe, gift of Usaph Bumpass, that was left on his remaining foot, he looked as lean and well setup a Yankee as anyone ever drew a picture of.

Cate was speaking at tedious length about that goddam Punic general called Hannibal. All over the farmyard were Yankees, making a line by the farmyard fence, congratulating each other. Over by the porch some of them were arguing about how to fix the flag to the roof. You could hear as well a hundred separate pleadings and whimpers and callings of names and, worst of all, the farmer arguing with an officer. ‘How much more of this is a man's goddam property meant to take? My perfect Pittsburg pump is broke off at the base. What oh what!'

Sometimes he would feel dizzy or time would lurch the way it does for drunks. For example, he was beside Cate without remembering the struggle to get there across that space of chicken feathers. He inspected the wound across Cate's groin, something lodged there, something harsh – hard wood or shard of shell or a piece of pump – lodged across the crotch and the upper leg, fixed, a deep part of Cate now. Whoever eased it out would release all Cate's blood and that would end things. Cate had been punished even more severe than that though. All down the legs were wounds and crushed places. The left foot was blown or broken off at the ankle.

Usaph was not so dizzied or double-sighted that he could not conclude Cate was doomed. It was the first time he'd ever really believed Cate might be taken away, that he wasn't eternal like rain or the devil. He stank like the pit as Usaph leaned over him – the stuff in his wound had pierced all his bowels as well. Usaph had to stop himself growing boastful. No one's ever like to desire you again, Mister Artist, he came close to saying.

It was no shame to ask Cate questions now, for God or someone had chosen Usaph above Cate, chosen Usaph to be kind of whole and chosen to crush Cate's manroot and loins. And all that made it right to ask.

‘Cate, you son of a bitch? Tell me this. Did you ever misuse my Ephie, did you ever, you black goddam Republican? Did you ever
have
her?'

Cate blinked madly. ‘Oh, Bumpass, unless I've slept it is yet morning. Shops are not even open in Washington, Bumpass. But look what it's like round here already.'

He began weeping.

‘Stop it, Cate,' said Usaph – he would have hit Cate, apart from that he needed his right hand to hold his left arm together. ‘None of that college boy horseshit, I warn you. Not a word – do you hear? of that son of a bitch Hannibal.'

‘This, Bumpass,' Cate persisted, ‘this earth, Bumpass, that will drink our bodies …'

‘Not my body, Cate. Not mine.'

‘We are already done for, Bumpass. It is not a matter of men and women, and of whether A had B. It is beyond that for us, dear friend. We are the manure of Washington County, Bumpass. Like I told you.'

He even reached a hand out towards Usaph's shoulder.

‘Not me, not me, Cate. Not manure, goddamit it! Not done for. Not me.'

He wasn't going to take this goddam college boy argument of Cate's, that things were so bad that he didn't need to know about Ephie. As if the whole golden world had come to an end. Maybe it had, but there was still Ephie, and the blood of Usaph over which Ephie reigned, in which Ephie was still a fever, had not left Usaph and wasn't going to; he felt certain of it, he felt arrogant certain. He felt a meaner bastard than ever he'd been when whole.

So, still holding his left arm together, he reared up and struck Cate's chest with his right elbow. The jolt of that elbow on Cate's ribs somehow all went to his own wound and Usaph was overtaken by great giddiness and the wish to puke.

Still dizzied, he felt hands dragging at his shoulders. ‘Friends, be content,' said the voice that went with the hands.

There were two tall blue litter-bearers there and they began to lift Cate out of his sump, being careful to support his buttocks so as not to start the groin wound pouring. They laid him flat on a canvas litter, the bearers thinking by the blue cloth that showed through the blood and feathers that Cate was Union. Usaph felt wildly joyful. They were about to carry the bastard away from him. They were about to carry Cate away to his own country.

‘Bumpass, Bumpass,' Cate raved, but Usaph did not look at him and the bearers thought it was just those delusions of the brain that go with wounds.

Usaph could not understand where these prim brave bearers had come from, who didn't cuss or treat the wounded man as an enemy delaying and burdening them in a dangerous place. Later he would decide they were two of those Quakers the Northern states had just started calling up. If so they may not have been in the army more than ten days. But the Lord knew what he was doing, inducting them. The Lord wanted Cate, who had given Usaph a season of torment, to be plucked out of Usaph's flesh like the thorn he was and would ever be.

Anyhow, both these Quakers had little haversacks full of dressings and such, and one looked to the stump of Cate's ankle while the other, a blonde man of maybe thirty years, spoke to Usaph. ‘Brother, there's no way we can carry you, so you must walk to a field post. I'll dress your wounds so everyone will know you're a wounded Southerner and no danger to anyone.'

He opened the flap of Usaph's arm and while Usaph threatened to faint spoke of how good Providence had been to him, how a blade of shell-casing had sliced the arm but touched neither the shoulder nor the bones of the limb, and how by a miracle an item called the brachial artery had not been punctured. Usaph sometimes tried to pull away. He feared getting into the hands of surgeons. ‘But we are not surgeons,' said the litter-bearer, understanding fully. From his haversack he took a bottle of fluid about the size of a whisky bottle. It was more or less the right colour for whisky and Usaph thought he would be offered a drink. Supporting the flap of flesh and tendon in his left hand though, the litter-bearer uncorked this bottle with his teeth and poured the liquor all over the wound. It seemed to Usaph that his whole body had been set alight, that his brain was going up in a vapour. Bellowing, he choked and swooned away.

He did not wake till there was a mighty noise. Cate and the littermen were not to be seen. His arm was tied firm in bandages and pulsing away. Yankees were running everywhere. One bleeding from the mouth flopped on the earth by the sump and, while dying, looked Usaph full in the eye, as if he expected suggestions from Usaph the way Usaph had earlier expected them from Wheat. Later, Usaph would remember, at times when he was considering the question of what kind of beast man was, that he had felt cosy there and safe in that little dip.