Confederates

  Then, at the start of May, he goes to Beckley to ask the mill-owner to advance the horse money against future deliveries of logs and there’s a man there, sitting outside the Renny House in a wicker chair, who comes up, talks to him, and buys him a drink in the parlour. And given that the drink is strong and the boy is young, there’s a lot of talk about mutual problems.

  ‘You need a horse,’ says the man. ‘Well I’ve got a son who’s been poorly all his days, otherwise he might be in the army of the Confederacy. Mind you now, I don’t think we mountain people have so much to thank the Commonwealth of Virginia for. Goddamit, ain’t it the truth, Mr Nunnally, that it’s easier for us mountain folks to get to New Orleans than to Richmond. The abysmal goddam roads, Mr Nunnally, the abysmal goddam roads! I mean, you just catch an Ohio ferry say in Parkersburg and you can be in Cairo, Illinois, in three days, and in New Orleans in eight. Or so it was in happier days, Mr Nunnally. So it was.

  ‘That aside, Mr Nunnally, my boy wouldn’t last more than two weeks in a goddam camp with them boys of no refinement all round him. Now I’d be willing to pay for a good substitute for him. I’d be willing to go up to $50 or more to find him a stand-in. Could you get a horse for round about that, think you, suitable for your line of work? Mind you, boy, you wouldn’t be round to work the horse for a while. But then even the Wheeling papers says this difference between the States ain’t going to last too much beyond the first fall of snow. Britain … Britain, Mr Nunnally, … has her interests. How old are you, Mr Nunnally?’

  ‘I’m fifteen years, sir.’

  ‘I think,’ the man said, ‘that for $60 you could say you were eighteen years. What do you say?’

  ‘I’d say eighteen years,’ said Joe.

  So Joe Nunnally got $60 and bought a horse with 30 of it, for his mother could make some money hiring it out. The rest of the cash was hid under a rock by a spring the family drew their water from. For there’d been tales of boys accepting substitute money like that, because they had sickly parents or one parent gone, and the bounty would feed a family for a year. And when the boys were gone and sworn in, the men who’d paid the money would come round to the family house and bully the cash back out of the folks.

  Now, as the man had said to Joe Nunnally, the mountain people didn’t have a lot to be grateful to Richmond for. The roads were bad, you had to go to big towns for the schools. Because the tidewater people counted their slaves in the population when it came to sending men to the State House, the mountains where there were few slaves didn’t have representatives in the numbers they should. Mountain Democrats thumping tubs in Beckley would say such things as: ‘Goddamit, they don’t count their slaves as human unless it comes to doing us out of a seat in the Capitol at Richmond. To keep us from our proper power, they’d count a goddam opossum on the rolls!’

  You found that the people in the Shenandoah Valley were for Virginia, but as you got into the mountains beyond the Valley, and across into the wild valley of the Kanawha, you met more and more people hostile to the Confederacy. The Nunnallys were, by temperament, hostile to it, but in a way typical of the mountain poor. They did not believe it worth fighting for either Union or Confederacy. They knew they’d be as poor under either. It was in their memory, their grandfathers had told them, that mountain men had been as poor under George III as under George Washington. It wasn’t expected ever to change.

  Yet these mountain politics had little part in Joe’s decision to run. Joe was running out of horror, Joe was running for his soul. Sure, he’d hide in central Virginia till the army passed on. He’d take his Springfield. God Almighty, with this Springfield musket he had he could frighten off any recruiting man or sheriff who came up into the Nunnallys’ hills. There were all manner of relatives up there who’d be helpful in frightening government agents. And the man Joe had met in the Renny House had had his goddam value from his $60 already. It didn’t matter to the man in the Renny House whether a substitute deserted. Even if it did, he could buy another one.

  Anyhow there wasn’t any choice. The God who had placed man in the earth, in the rich hardwood hills, would deny him air if he stayed here in this evil column.

  Deserting was simple. Green corn and green apples had kept the bowels of Jackson’s army in their accustomed state of flux. It was easy to break ranks with or without asking an officer. The affliction was sudden and could not often bide the asking of permission. Even harsh men like Captain Guess, even Lucius Taber knew that.

  There’d even been a story going round about young Lucius, as a matter of fact. He had a plague of diarrhoea the morning they marched up to Cedar Run and, lest anyone think that the unseemly stains on his britches were marks of fright, he’d lined (so the rumour had it) his seat with three back numbers of De Bow’s Review.

  Anyhow, when Joe Nunnally peeled off out of line at two on the morning of August 14 just to the south of Barnett’s Ford on the Rapidan, where forest stretched away to the east, he was taking advantage of the universal disease. Getting behind a tree, he slipped sideways towards another and then was gone from sight. He was moving east first of all, since he knew home was west and thought that if they hunted for him at all, they would hunt that way. He would hide east for a few weeks till all of the two devilish machines of North and South had gone their way up or down the road, or sideways or outflanking each other to hell and back. He knew he had to watch for cavalry, but his hearing was refined, he was sure he could sidestep anything he might meet.

  At dawn he began to feel cleaner and happier. He went to sleep right in a thicket of poison ivy at the bottom of Clark’s Mountain. He was sure he was safe there, and he’d always had this virtue against poison ivy, he could roll in it without it harming him. He would often roll in it to amuse his brothers and sisters, even though his mother said you could lose your virtue against poison ivy like that! There was nothing like the sting people then got from it, people who up to then hadn’t felt any harm from the plant. Well, that might be true, but virtue over poison ivy was a nice talent to have on a morning when two armies were over the land, and when it was a nice point which of them meant you the more harm.

  He stayed all that night and half the next day in the woods, eating his rations cold. By the next breakfast his hardtack would be gone, and his corn wasn’t fit for the hogs anyhow. He moved so slow that it was noon on his second day when he saw the farmhouse Ash Judd and Danny Blalock had visited some five days back. From the trees, he saw crippled Arlan come down the steps and stumble away to the barn. He saw Arlan’s mother at a window upstairs, lifting her throat in the still air as if she expected a breeze. Arlan returned to the house after some quarter of an hour. What had he been doing in the barn? Maybe he had a jug of whisky out there.

  Later in the day, the big woman came down into the garden, talking nonsense to the chickens that skittered away from her. It made Joe grievously homesick to hear the sweet nonsense she spoke. She got a stool and milked the cow expertly, sighing sometimes and talking to the animal like it was a fellow sufferer, and then she took the pail back into the house. In the late afternoon both she and the cripple sat at their ease on the porch, saying very little to each other. It was as the woman rose to go indoors and make supper, that Joe chose to come out of the forest. The boy picked up a shotgun that must have been at his feet, and the woman looked at Joe sidewise as he came to their gate.

  ‘Not to trouble you, ma’am, sir. I wonder … well, I wonder if you could spare me any of your victuals. I’ve a mite of cash.’

  Arlan’s shotgun wavered in arms that lacked the strength to hold it firm. But his voice, though slurred, was sharp. ‘What say you, maw? What say you to soldiers who come up to the gate asking to be fed? What say you to soldiers’ mites, maw?’

  The mother did not move her head. Looking more at Arlan than at Joe, she sighed. ‘You a deserter, boy?’

  ‘No, ma’am. I’m a one-year man and my one year is now past. I’m free now, ma’am, to find my way home. But I confess I want to keep to
quiet places while the armies’re round about. I don’t want to be re-enlisted no more, on account my pappy died and I have to go home to fell timber to keep maw and the brats.’

  ‘What’s your name, boy?’ Arlan asked him in a poisonous voice.

  ‘You had a bad time with soldiers, have you, sir?’

  ‘Never mind bad times. What’s your goddam name?’

  Joe only then decided to lie, and only on account of the vicious way Arlan was talking. ‘My name is Usaph Bumpass, sir.’

  ‘And you say you ain’t a deserter, Bumpass?’

  ‘I’m a one-year man, sir. Set your eyes on my uniform. There’s a year’s wear in this.’ It was true, because he had had his new clothes taken and been given year-old stuff. ‘And I can help you folks if you but give me a few meals. I can’t but notice, mister, your sore affliction.…’

  ‘You take your goddam tongue off my affliction, you son of a bitch.’

  What man spoke in front of his maw that way? Joe Nunnally asked himself. ‘I reckon,’ he said, talking fast and grinning as nicely as he could manage, ‘that in a few days I could set you up with all the wood you’ll need till midsummer next. I reckon I could husk corn for you and repair the barn and set myself to a year’s worth of odd ends of work.’

  There was a long silence while the cripple considered this. The mother said, like someone asking permission: ‘For God’s sake, Arlan, he’s but a boy.’

  ‘You’ll sleep in the goddam barn,’ the cripple told him.

  ‘That’s still heaven by me, sir.’

  ‘What did you call yourself, boy?’

  ‘Joe,’ Joe called gaily.

  ‘I thought you called yourself Asa or some goddam thing,’ Arlan barked out.

  ‘So I do,’ said Joe, face burning. ‘But you see, my friends all call me Joe.’

  ‘Come on in then, Joe,’ Arlan said, and he watched the boy come forward wary as a young animal. That boy’s such a poor liar, Arlan thought. For Arlan knew that there were no more one-year boys, that the Confederate Congress had done away with one-year boys, transmuting them all into three-year boys. You just had to go to market in Stevensburg, as Arlan did, and ask this or that merchant when his boy was coming home to be told that much.

  So Arlan let him stay a day and a half, till he’d chopped up a useful cordage of wood. And on the third day, he rode off early, leaving the boy whitewashing the back of the house, and he went down through the forest to the Gordonsville-Culpeper road. As he expected to, he met up with a Confederate cavalry vedette down there by the side of the road, watching out for Pope to cross the Rapidan. And part of their duty as well was to give stragglers a kick along and to bring in deserters. He said there was a deserter over to his place. Name of Bumpass.

  16

  All Monday morning Major Dignam, Methodist preacher and adjutant of the Shenandoah Volunteers, watched from beneath an oak in front of General Tom Jackson’s tent near Clark’s Mountain. He didn’t feel comfortable here, he tensed inside his grey jacket whenever some passing staff officer glanced at him. He’d been feeling awkward since seeing Jackson and Lee and Longstreet come riding down from the top of the mountain two hours back, all looking thunderous as if they’d been handed the Tables of the Law up there and were under strict orders from God to force their scriptures on a stiff-necked people. Dignam had seen them all dismount, three tall and sombre men, and go into Jackson’s tent to have some refreshment or other. The Reverend Dignam had never seen Lee before and had only read of Longstreet. He’d watched Jackson pass a couple of times. It was a shock to find that these great icons of the cause really lived and drew breath from the very air in that very tent there, the air he was presuming to breathe himself as soon as he could get in there.

  At last Longstreet and Lee had come out and ridden off south, and Dignam had started buttoning his collar. He wore a long frock-coat his congregation had given him fifteen months ago. It was better than butternut – you could at least say that. Now he watched Sandie Pendleton and Kyd Douglas and the mapmaker Hotchkiss and Major Harman the profane quartermaster dash in and out of the tent, and hoped and feared he would soon be called in himself.

  Well, that hope and fear got quashed. A general, one star, but a general none the less, rode up on a good bay and handed the reins to a guard. Then he barged into Jackson’s tent. From his place under the oak the Reverend Dignam couldn’t hear the details of the interview that was proceeding in there. He could hear enough, however, to know it wasn’t a happy one. It wouldn’t go any distance towards improving the General’s temper.

  At last the brigadier broke out of the tent, mounted his horse savagely, as if it were partly to blame, and gave it a swat with his reins. He left Jackson’s headquarters at a gallop.

  In the clearing, Kyd approached Dignam under his oak. The General had some time to talk to him now, Kyd said. He led Dignam to the tent and held back the flap for him.

  When Major Dignam passed through into the tent the first thing he saw was the General’s back. Jackson was sitting on a camp-table, not putting all his weight on it, for it wouldn’t have taken it. The table was piled with sheets of paper. Dignam looked at them with a little reverence. They were likely letters from Jefferson Davis, and Judah Benjamin’s office, and suchlike.

  The General stood, sort of turned and discovered him there. He nodded curtly to Dignam and sat at the desk, but his eyes weren’t on his visitor. Lord God, now give your humble servant guidance! prayed the major. The silence went on for a good half-minute before Dignam got the idea that he was the one supposed to talk.

  ‘Sir,’ he stated, ‘I’m adjutant of the Shenandoah Volunteers of your old brigade. In my private life I am a Methodist preacher from Augusta County.’

  There was no flicker from the General’s eyes. Dignam thought, God help me, the man isn’t even blinking, his eyelids are locked open.

  ‘On that account, sir, I am concerned for the soul of a particular man …’

  ‘We are all concerned for souls, Major …’

  ‘Dignam, sir.’

  ‘Major Dignam, we are all concerned for souls.’

  ‘This man is one of the three condemned to death for desertion.’

  ‘Oh.’ The General found and picked up the appropriate piece of paper. ‘Which of the three. I suppose it’s this Joe …’

  ‘Nunnally, sir. Yes.’

  ‘Nunnally is a conscript.’

  ‘Yessir. Very young. Very simple-minded. You know these mountain people.’

  Dignam went red, remembering that the General himself liked to be thought of as a mountain man. ‘I mean, sir, the folks from way up and deep in the mountains.’

  ‘Nunnally is also a substitute, it says here. The prosecution laid it down straight to the court-martial that Nunnally intended to go somewhere fresh and sell himself all over again as a substitute.’

  ‘Sir, he got $60 for acting as substitute for some rich man’s son. $60, General Jackson, isn’t the sort of amount a cunning boy would be likely to take. If Joe Nunnally was worldly enough he would have known he could have got $200 at least in any big town.’

  ‘You make the whole trade sound honourable, Major. How much did you take when you substituted for someone?’

  ‘Nothing, General. I’m a volunteer, you know that.’

  ‘That’s my exact point, Major Dignam. This whole money-for-substitution business is deep immoral.’

  ‘But that’s not Joe Nunnally’s fault, sir. It’s the fault of …’

  ‘Yes, of the Confederate Congress, you might just as well say so, Major. But this Nunnally … you say he’s not cunning.… When the cavalry fetched him in he was using another man’s name. The name of a volunteer called …’ Stonewall consulted the page ‘… Bumpass. A veteran of Romney and Kernstown and Port Republic, of the Seven Days in front of Richmond and of this last battle at Cedar Run. Now if he’s cunning enough to foul a good man’s name, you can be rocksure, Major Dignam, he’s cunning enough to sell himself again, and this
time for whatever price those rich skulkers see fit to pay.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Dignam in a small voice, ‘he told me something in making his peace this morning. He said he deserted on account he felt that if he killed any more of his fellow men he would be cursed by God.’

  The General’s voice came out small too but Dignam felt it was sort of dangerous to be near it. ‘These people rile me. Could I ask you, is General Lee the accursed of God? Is Jefferson Davis? Is Bishop Leonidas Polk, who holds a general’s commission in the Confederate army? Is the Reverend Moses D. Hoge the accursed of God? In the view of all these righteous men this war is pleasing in the nostrils of a just God. And then is a simple boy to come down off his mountain and tell us it isn’t?’

  The Reverend Dignam with his Methodist background, was used to the claims of a man’s individual conscience. The General’s idea that a man had no right to one, that only Jefferson Davis, Bishop Leonidas Polk and the Reverend Hoge had a right to one, seemed almost papist; and if General Jackson hadn’t been General Jackson, then Major Dignam might just have found the authority or the courage to tell him that.

  ‘In that case,’ said Dignam, and he didn’t know where he got the courage for saying this, ‘consider your responsibility, General, before the Lord. You are sending this boy’s soul to hell.’

  As he’d feared it might, a terrible silence settled in on the tent then, one of those electric silences you get in woods in midsummer that beg to be broken by lightning. The General reached out and took him by the shoulders, and there was all at once great sideways pressure on the top of Dignam’s body, and Dignam, a tall strong man himself, was amazed at the force Tom Jackson had in his wrists.

  ‘That is my business, sir. In a second you will go and do yours, for the sure-fire reason that you’re about to be pushed out of this tent. My courts are too lenient. For once they’ve done the right thing and you ask me to sidewhack their decision. It’s been suggested that only one man be shot, chosen by lot, but that suggestion seems to me to be nothing but a foul extension of this army’s general weakness for gambling. Let me tell you this. You say you serve in a division that used to be mine. Well, in that division, during the recent engagement on Cedar Run, there were 1200 absentees through straggling, through feigned illness, through absence without leave. In Ewell’s division there were 1600 absentees. These are losses inflicted on us by ourselves, major. So please do not pursue the matter of the sentence that has fallen on this boy. It has fallen with cause. It has also been upheld by General Lee and by the Secretary of War. Do you understand.’