Cate never got on with his father. He’d been the sort of child who spoke up amongst adults and needed a father who’d give him a pat on the head for his cleverness but a swat on the ass for being gawky. Well, Cate got plenty of swats but a bounty of humiliations as well from his father. By the time Cate senior enrolled his boy in Lancaster and Marshall College, the son was determined to fail. Decatur survived his freshman year but was expelled as a sophomore for neglect of his studies, persistent drunkenness and for painting too much.
He’s taken up the painting just because he knew it was best suited to irk a good Pennsylvania German like his father. He understood he wasn’t so talented at it. But then his father cut off all allowances, and he was left with it as the one thing he could do to earn his bread.
Now Cate was the sort of man who believed that everything that happened to him and would happen in the future was a judgement, and all his talk and bravado – he knew this too – was but a means of concealing that painful fact from himself. He saw his disinheritance therefore as part of that judgement.
He had enough money to buy a small rig and a good horse, and in the summer of ’59 he became a travelling portrait-painter. He worked his way through four of the southern counties of Pennsylvania. He understood he wasn’t accomplished enough to paint the wives and daughters of the big mill-owners and landholders. Besides, his father had had so much respect for the gentry that young Decatur had a set against them. So, instead of the houses of the gentry, he would call at rich-looking farms. He’d have a copy of one of his works under an arm and a dossier of appreciative letters from former customers.
Those years from ’59 to the start of the madness were fine times in the Republic of the United States. Ordinary people could read and write and keep money in bank accounts and have tenfold the riches of any farmer anywhere in the Old World. And the land was full of plump white farmhouses. Because Cate talked like an educated man and had manners to match, the farmer was generally willing to put him up in a guest room while he portrayed the wife or daughter of the house. Cate could usually depend on doing two $8 portraits a week, on eating well and sleeping warm as a guest of the house, and on spending many hours with females of varying shyness and attraction, who would let him dazzle them with talk. Two of them even visited him in the night.
In the Fall of 1860 he crossed into Maryland and – early in 1861 – into Virginia. In towns like Culpeper he was able to charge $10 per portrait, but he found the farmers in the central counties of Virginia very political and bloody-minded. And so, in search of more congenial subjects, he crossed the Blue Ridge by Swift Run Gap and began to work his way down the Valley. He had got to Staunton when the war broke out. Even the war seemed to be good for business at first – it made most people feel pushy and one of the pushiest things a man could do in this world was to have his womenfolk painted in real oil on real canvas.
But as he worked down towards the rich town of Lexington, the tensions of the war began to show in the manners of farmers. They began to ask if he was a Lincoln man and whether he meant to volunteer. One day, between a farmer’s place near Steele’s Tavern and his next calling place, he drew up his rig at the side of the road and practised a good limp in a clearing. When he presented himself at the next farm door he believed he had a pretty likely hobble. By the time he hit Lexington, a town full of shopkeepers who sold goods to the college and to the Military Institute just up on a neighbouring hill, the limp had become a habit.
It was as well. Some of the citizens of Lexington, mostly old men in militia uniforms, some of them veterans of the 1812 war against the English and others of Andrew Jackson’s campaigns against Indians over in the mountains, would fall on young men who were slow in joining the army and have long talks with them about it. These grey old soldiers were usually powerful men in town and could prevent ordinary town boys who resisted their suggestions from getting any work or contracts or from selling their produce.
At the other end of the scale of the ages of man were the young cadets from the Virginia Military Institute – hardly any of them more than fifteen years of age. If they saw a healthy male in the street they’d just stand there talking out loud about what a confounded cowardly whimperer he must be.
So months before any conscription law was laid before the Congress in Richmond, Lexington had just about been stripped of young men unless they were lame or ill. Lame Decatur Cate was left to go about his business, but it wasn’t the fun it had been. That was why, about the end of April 1862, Cate took the lonely road west, hoping to find some saner county, a county like the counties he’d known before the war began.
Yet even on his way through mountainous Goshen Pass, where the forests were just bursting into summer bud, he met bunches of lean fair-haired boys marching or being marched under ancient militia officers eastwards to the war. One of them told him that just south of Millboro Springs on the Cowpasture River there was a wealthy widow called Mrs Sarrie Muswell who’d likely go for a picture of herself to hang on the wall. Or if not of herself, then maybe of her niece who was living with her on account of her – the niece’s – husband being off with Stonewall. ‘Though if Stonewall is as sweet a bedmate as that gal is, the soldier said, ‘I’d be right surprised.’
That was how Cate came to meet Mrs Ephephtha Bumpass, the subject of the last portrait he would do that year.
10
About the time Bill Telfer was talking Tom Jackson into being sensible, Captain Guess walked along behind Usaph and Gus and the others, snarling at them: ‘Load! Load your goddam pieces!’ He made it sound as if they delayed doing that out of malice, whereas they’d been waiting, dry-mouthed, for the order, listening to all the screaming from the woods ahead.
Now, in a cooling sprinkle of rain, Usaph hunched to protect his powder and bit at the cartridge paper. I’ll remember that taste on my deathbed, he believed. The pungency of cartridge paper and the few grains of powder that came with it. He poured the powder carefully, still in a hunched stance to keep the rain off it. He pushed the ball down with the ramrod.
Then Lafcadio Wheat yelled a few things, they weren’t distinct, and the whole line stepped out across the clearing. The rain fell in big slow drops out of a sky that was thundery at its apex. But it was clear in the west and the sun still stood high over the Blue Ridge and lit it sharp as a knife-edge. And from this west, not yet reached by the storm clouds, there was a blinding dazzle of gold. As soon as he stepped out across this farmland, Usaph felt that old molten feeling in his belly. The lust to see the enemy’s face. He would confess and confide it to no one. He thought it wasn’t natural, that feeling, and in a way he feared it more than wounds, yet was grateful for it.
Crossing the clearing was easy work. But the moment they stepped into the woods, there was the wreckage of the regiments who had catcalled Bolly earlier, and men hobbling and with hanging arms and with blinded eyes being shunted along by friends. These boys passed through the brisk lines of the Shenandoah Volunteers as if the Volunteers weren’t there, as if they could have been already dead and ghosts for all the Volunteers meant to them. Just by Ashabel Judd, there was a boy walking along hatless with a leg wrapped in a blanket. You could see the stump sticking out of the end of the blanket and he talked to it as to a baby. By a tree an astounded Cate saw one of the Irish battalion sit with his insides in his lap and ask for water. ‘Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’ Captain Guess screamed, and no one stopped for the boy. ‘You ain’t about to like it up there, no sir,’ the boy said levelly, without complaint, as Cate passed him.
Then there were men who, though they limped, you could tell they were unharmed, but beaten in soul. They turned their eyes away as your line passed them, they lowered their shoulders and flitted by you. There was a flicker of blue ahead, between the trunks of trees. It was sharp, live blue. At the sight of it just about everyone, maybe Cate excepted, maybe some of the other conscripts counted out too, but just about everyone, without being able to help it, began to yell their long an
imal, demonish yell. And just about everyone stood still and fired at that electric flicker of blue, and then reloaded, yelling. ‘Who-ho-ho-ho-ho-whey-ho-ho-ho!’ they yelled, even delaying biting the cardboard end of the cartridge just so that they could finish this yelp.
Cate sighted his musket but chose not to fire. No, not yet. If they mass and rush me, maybe I have no choice. But not yet. Not on the blue of the Union, which to him, as to most Pennsylvanians, had a sacred meaning. Neither did he yell. He was not afraid yet. He was playing with the idea that a bullet would acquit him of his love of Ephephtha Bumpass, and that would be no mean blessing.
Beside him, Joe Nunnally fired and reloaded quick. The Confederacy had bought itself a good rifleman there. Cate had a sense of hundreds of Yankees up there amongst the hickories. But you got the sense that after they fired once, they dropped back further through those trees they had captured so quick an hour past.
So the Shenandoah Volunteers walked forward still. Cate stepped over a fallen Union man, some damage to his jaw. He did not inspect the shape too closely. Then there was another in his path, and a third. My God, he thought, it must be that Joe Nunnally. He looked around at Joe, who was standing still a second, pouring another charge of powder down the barrel of his Enfield. Joe was very studious about it. Cate saw the powder flow easy, for there was very little damp or rain in here amongst the trees. ‘Go easy, Joe!’ he yelled.
He felt a sting across his flanks then. The boy lieutenant Lucius Taber was right behind him and had whacked him on the hip with his sword. ‘Fire your weapon, you goddam conscript!’ the boy yelled.
Decatur Cate saw that there was hardly any colour in the boy’s eyes, they were all pupil. He could guess Lucius Taber was grateful to have someone close at hand to be angry with. Decatur, anyhow, raised his weapon and fired his first shot northwards, just off into the woods, seeming to aim, not aiming. It seemed there was a scream then and the scream was connected with him. But he could be wrong. There were yells and screams everywhere. But if it was a scream connected with him, he thought, as the tears stung into his eyes, what a comedy! And whose amusement is it supposed to be for?
They were back at the fringes of that arc of wood then, the angle the other brigade had been driven out of an hour before. It came to Colonel Ronald, as it did to Lafcadio Wheat, that they were as fit to be nipped off as that other brigade had been. But Ronald gave no order to halt. They went on out amongst the shocks of corn. The stubble was, as you’d expect, littered with blue-clad figures.
From the east came a long shriek and a shell burst apart in the light rain above the regiment on the Volunteers’ right. There were noises of animal protest from those who were struck. A message went up and down the line. Everyone was to run a little way forward and drop on his face.
The clap of shells above Cate’s head were themselves like a wound in the brain. Cate was frightened now. Beside Joe Nunnally, he had dropped down a yard or so from some dead boy. For ten minutes while Cate lay there, he recognised the presence of the thing. He felt that if he raised his head to inspect it he would draw himself the whole attention of the United States Artillery. At last he understood that by putting his head sideways, digging his left cheek into the lumpy earth of this farm land, he could inspect the boy.
Well, it happened that the boy was a U.S. second lieutenant with new shoulder straps, silver-leafed. They must have cost him a week’s pay. He wore a good frock-coat; even in that dust it still had the gloss on it of something new, and its tails were pushed back either side of him as if he’d been sprinting when he was struck down. He lay on his front, his knees pulled up a little. The wound must be to his front, for Cate could see no damage on him. Where was he from? Cate looked for shoulder markings. He found a little square of linen on the sleeve. 19th Mich., it said.
That amazed Cate. What did it really matter to a boy from Michigan if South Carolina or Virginia wished to manage itself. What did it matter to him if there were slaves in the South? God Almighty, Decatur Cate had been to Michigan. There were more forests there than whole populations of the earth could fell in a lifetime setting their minds to it. How could it count with this boy if South Carolina went its crazy way? Why didn’t he stay home and cut lumber? Cate felt sure this dead boy was, in the springtime he got this coat of his measured and cut, just about like most other Northerners. If they wanted slaves freed, it was for religious and moral reasons, as much because it debased Southern whites as for the fact it enslaved blacks. Or had there been in fact a scalding desire for the equality of blacks in this particular boy’s chest? Well, it was lulled now.
As the terrible wedges of noise went on above himself and the corpse and Joe Nunnally and Usaph Bumpass, Cate found himself cursing aloud. In a low private voice, beneath all that noise, he cursed the eyes and livers and genitals of those men who’d pushed the issue to the extent that boys from Michigan came down to the farms of Virginia to be killed amongst the corn.
Some three hundred paces off, a long line of blue appeared behind the furthest end of the farm land, presenting themselves, a Yankee brigade who looked fresh and unstained, who might have waited all afternoon in reserve. They had the look about them of people who meant to stand.
Usaph heard someone near him utter the foulest whoop he’d ever heard, before he understood it had been himself. The whole line of the Stonewall stood and fired at the blue. Cate fired off into the treetops and reloaded, pretending a conscript’s clumsiness. Even so he had to fire off four rounds in the two or so dazed minutes the Stonewall stood there. And he began to judge that the rate of fire from the Yankee line was not up to the rate of fire from the Stonewall.
While he rammed his fifth ball home, his musket was hit at the top of the stock and blown in two. He stood dumbly with the dismembered barrel in his hand. Captain Guess came up to his shoulder, snarling at him. ‘Pick up a new rifle.’
‘A new rifle?’
For he thought he ought to be exempt now, he ought to be allowed to go back through the woods.
‘For God’s sake get a new rifle from someone that’s down!’
Guess indicated with an irritable sweep of his hand that Cate was to go along the back of the firing line, looking for a fresh musket. Cate obeyed drunkenly. He turned westwards without knowing why because an instinct told him there was a lesser danger that way. He passed ten men in a row, all standing, all fussing coolly at their muskets, sometimes trilling their ridiculous cry between rounds, but more now as if they were singing to themselves.
He came to a conscript whose name he knew. The conscript was sitting on the ground weeping and holding his arm up by the wrist. A ball had struck him on the point of the elbow. There was no way he could hold the arm to soothe the broken nerves and he wept loudly from the throat. ‘Hoddy?’ Cate asked the plump boy. ‘Hoddy?’ The boy did not look at him, being far off and very likely out of his body, as people will be if an injury be too much. I should give him at least some water, Cate thought. He was unbelting his canteen when Guess turned up beside him yet again. ‘Leave that boy be there!’
‘I was getting him some water,’ Cate screamed. ‘Water!’
Guess took a Colt repeater from his belt and put its barrel right against Cate’s forehead. It felt cool and greasy. ‘You black Republican son of a bitch, Cate. Get his musket and take his place.’
So he picked up Hoddy’s Springfield and stood beside him. The musket seemed to be loaded, and he put it to his shoulder, aiming high as it was expected a newcomer would aim. But he couldn’t keep the goddam barrel steady. For it came to him, if my musket was shot in two, I was damn near shot in two myself. This goddam fixed idea I’ve got about Bumpass and Ephie Bumpass, it has to go! I can’t stay here shooting at goddam foliage. It’s a war to be deplored, but it’s in progress. Look at what I’ve seen today. Oh Jesus, it’s in progress! And I stay here, waiting for Bumpass to die, waiting to rescue Bumpass, in two minds and the both of them mad. And if so, then I have to fire on the uniform of the Union. And
I can’t fire on the uniform of the Union; therefore I have to desert.
So Cate fired high again, then took a cartridge from his pouch, bit it, poured the powder down the barrel, dropped in the musket ball still in its wads of paper and jammed it in tight. Then he capped the hammer with a copper cap from his cap box. Next, in this great confusion of mind that was his, he lifted the musket, fixed aim at the legs of a Union sergeant and put a bullet right through his chest.
11
‘Oh heaven and hell,’ said Usaph Bumpass. ‘Why ask me, Bolly?’
Bolly admitted it – he was an old man and tired and was making no bones about being stretched beyond his powers this evening. ‘I’m aged, Usaph, and the business is beginning to tell on me. If I find the boy, how can I carry him?’
‘Ask Ash Judd, for God’s sake. Ask Blalock!’
‘Goddamit, they’re already sleeping, Usaph.’
Usaph looked about. It was the truth. They were all sleeping. This camp was in a field a mile up the Culpeper Road from the corn and wheat fields where they’d decided their arm of the battle. Few campfires had been lit. Many boys had just thrown themselves down amongst the furrows and the corn stooks without benefit of blankets, such was their brain-tiredness. Gus laid himself down like that on the earth that was moist but not muddy, and a light rain fell on him. The clouds had gone their way west, and above the encampment, if you wanted to call it that, a harvest moon sent down a tranquil blue radiance over the bodies of all these fatigued boys. Usaph wished it was sending down a radiance on his own fallen shape. But goddam Bolly wouldn’t let him rest.
‘Everyone knows it, Usaph. You’re a good ole boy. Everyone knows you’re a sweet soul.’
‘But where the hell is he, Bolly?’
‘When we was going forward back there in that goddam cornfield, Usaph. I heared him call out and I stopped by him and there he was. It had come from the side and the jelly of his goddam eye was all over his cheek and his nose bridge, here,’ Bolly tweeked his own nose, ‘was gone. I bent to him but goddam Guess said, don’t touch that man, like we’d all fit to die if I laid a hand on poor Joe.’