‘He is as yet still wearing his britches and vest, though his boots are off, so as far as propriety goes he might as well be naked with his goddam weapon in his hand. Mrs China, well Mrs China is stark white as her husband’s produce and lying bare-assed under the sheets. First gran’daddy grabs the big pitcher which the niggers had placed on the wash table for Mrs China’s afternoon toilet, and he carries it across the room near the door and pours it over himself, some of it falling on the carpet in his recklessness. Then he flings a few towels about the floor and opens the door and faces Mr China. “Will you be quiet there, goddamit, China?” he calls. “Quiet, you serpent!” yells China and more in the same vein, and he gets all popeyed and comes up to Hugo as if he’s going to hit him. So Hugo gets to it first and delivers a great blow to Mr China and yells: “You ungrateful cur! Do you realise what kind of woman you have here as your spouse? Grief-stricken at the rumours that sweep this community – rumours which I hope, China, you are about to allay by replacing the money you took from the Benevolent Fund – she sends all the nigras away to town and leaps in the stream, crazy with the loss of your conjugal presence, demented with shame, China, demented with it, your shame, man! By a happy providence I came out here with a message from your works manager for Mrs China and found her struggling in the mighty Monongahela. Off came my jacket and shirt, my heavy boots. Well might you, China, bless my prowess in the water and the strong goddam sinews I built up as a boy. I brought her back to you from the murky bottom of the great river, you sow’s ass, China, and I bore her indoors and chafed her extremities with towels, as I hope a friend would do for my wife’s extremities if ever she were in Mrs China’s position. And I put her into her warm bed where you will now find her trembling, sir. I shall stay here now only long enough to gather up my coat, my shirt and my boots.” And gather them up he did and was gone, leaving Mrs China – who was what they called a woman of spirit – to carry the act on.’
Both Gus and Usaph were in now, and Usaph had forgotten the question of Ephie. For this was such a tale of villainy. And Wheat thought, even in the enthusiasm of his story-telling, ‘I’m binding you two boys to me by the magic of my narrative.’
‘A little later,’ Lafcadio Wheat went on, ‘Gran’daddy Hugo met Mr China in Main Street, Clarksburg, and Mr China was a little cool and said: “P’raps you could tell me, Mr Wheat, sir, how you transported my bride from the muddy banks of the Monongahela to her bedroom without dropping any water on the stairs?”’ And Gran’daddy Hugo winked at him and said: “Why, by about the same methods you use, China ole friend, to transmute the mites of mine-widders into racehorses or kilns. Come on, China, let’s be friends. Your goddam wife and your goddam name are intact and just because of my goodwill.” “Intact,” says China. “My wife intact?” But he starts to laugh and they go and drink and go on being friends.’
Usaph and Gus chortled and they could see that the way they received the story brightened Wheat even more. And the colonel bayed out his laughter, so the cannon could not drown it.
‘He was,’ yelled Wheat, ‘the greatest hell-raiser in Harrison County and one day, gentlemen, I mean to write a book about that old man. For though my speech may be mountain-rude, my style, gentlemen, my style is pure Augustan.’
7
That night, at a meeting in one of those eternal little Virginia farmhouses down by the crossroads, Tom Jackson conferred around a kitchen table with Lee and Longstreet. Robert Lee praised Tom.
‘Well, Tom, it seems from the reports I have here that today you held off Sigel’s corps and Reno’s and Milroy’s and Reynolds’ and Hooker’s and Kearny’s. Good men and bad, your boys held them off. Some 37,000 or so. With losses we know about. Well!’
But not much was decided. They would hold on to that godsend of a railroad cut, and sometime – whenever Jimmie Longstreet thought it was ‘militarily possible’ – the troops under his command would attack John Pope’s flank.
‘That’d be by noon?’ Jackson asked.
‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ Longstreet muttered. Jackson reflected that God and Ambrose Hill and Popeye and Andy Lawton and himself had been doing what was militarily impossible for days. But Jimmie Longstreet still had to wait for possibilities to present themselves.
His camp that night stood in a clearing up behind the Stonewall Division. Here Jim Lewis his servant – who’d arrived that afternoon with Longstreet’s waggons – had a good fire going and coffee on. Hotchkiss the mapmaker and Hunter Maguire were sitting by it, resting on a rubber sheet and sipping Jim’s good coffee. Jim was good at all cooking. He could do duck à l’orange and carré de porc roti. Tonight all he’d been able to get together was some ham and cornbread, but he baked cornbread better than a farm wife of sixty summers.
Jim came up to the General’s stirrup and helped him out of the saddle and gushed away as was his manner. ‘Why, it’s a blessing to see you whole, General Jackson. I got to thinking with all that noise we could hear on our way down here this evening that no soul at all would be left standing.’
Tom Jackson never passed up the chance to instruct blacks and poor people in the ways of the Lord. ‘Our Heavenly Father,’ he said, ‘had his hand on me. And if he withdrew it, how could I complain, Jim? Can I have some of that coffee?’
Jim poured a cup with all that jolly black willingness that always made Tom Jackson uncomfortable. The General had never felt at ease with the institution of slavery. He was one of those Southerners who said they were fighting for the constitutional issues. His favourite way of talking of the conflict when he wrote letters or spoke to soldiers was, ‘our second war of independence’. He didn’t think much about slaves unless he was forced to and his thinking on them wasn’t so very original. He guessed a time might come when they’d be sent back to their homelands in Africa. Tom Jackson wondered what Jim Lewis would do, either with freedom or an African homeland.
The General remembered the day when he was seventeen and he’d ridden over to Parkersburg on the Ohio with his friend Thad Moore. Uncle Cummins Jackson had sent them there because there was a lump of mill machinery waiting for collection. On the way home they passed the farm of a friend of Uncle Cummins’s called Mr Adams. Mr Adams was burying one of his negroes, and the boys reined in to watch the little funeral procession. The farmer’s five grown blacks, including the dead man’s wife, carried the coffin across the road to a deep hole. It was a fine black coffin, such as you’d put together for someone you respected, but it always made Tom Jackson pause when he saw a black buried. It made you think that now that black man had the freedom of the kingdom of death, for surely he had at least that much, given the way darkies sang of death as the great river crossing. He remembered he shocked his friend Thad Moore that afternoon. The opinion came out of him and he couldn’t stop it. ‘They ought to be free and have a chance,’ he’d said.
‘Chance of what?’ asked Thad. ‘What chance could they handle other than the chances they have already?’
‘Joe Lightburn says for a start they ought to be taught to read so they can read the Bible.’ Joe Lightburn was a respected friend of Uncle Cummins. ‘I think they should be too.’
Thad Moore had made one of those Southern rumbles in his throat. ‘I don’t think you should make known them views, Tom. Why, they’re regular Nat Turner views, those ones, and if they was carried out, we’d have to end up blacking our own boots.’
‘That’s no big thing,’ Tom Jackson at seventeen had said. ‘I black mine only on Sundays and even then not in the winter months.’
By this fire in northern Virginia years later, Tom Jackson was getting similar ideas from watching the way Jim Lewis poured and brought the coffee.
The General sat on a camp stool Jim had placed and sipped away. Tall young Dr Maguire came up and stood at his side. Maguire began reporting on the casualty numbers and the health of officers Jackson knew who’d been wounded that day. He talked of Forno, the Louisiana general, and General Isaac Trimble. And then he said: ‘And there’s
young Billie Preston with a wound in the chest. The right lung is perforated. There’s nothing to be done.’
Billie Preston was one of those Lexington boys whose fathers had been professors with Jackson at the V.M.I. Professor Preston had married one of the Junkin girls of Lexington as Stonewall had himself. Then he’d gone into business with Stonewall – they’d brought some land in Randolph Street, Lexington, and a tract about eight miles distant in the Blue Ridge. As well, he’d been Jackson’s chief aide for a time in the Valley. Now his seventeen-year-old boy was dying.
Jim Lewis, who as a house slave in Lexington had known all these boys – Sandie and Billie Preston and the others – sat and began to rock with grief and to wail when he heard the news. Stonewall stood still for a while but then turned like nothing so much as a judge on Maguire and grabbed his shoulder. Stonewall had that mountain-man kind of strength to him, and Maguire could feel it in the punishing force of Stonewall’s fingers.
‘Why did you leave him?’ he asked Maguire.
‘Why … he isn’t aware any more who’s with him and who isn’t.’
‘Do you know this will kill his father? Kill him, sir!’
And then Tom Jackson walked away into the shadows. Maguire felt a little insulted. We’re not back in peaceful Rockbridge County, he thought. It’s not such a strange thing these days for young men to die.
Two minutes later Stonewall returned to the camp stool, straddled it, picked up the coffee mug from the ground and held it out to be filled again by Jim, who had by now also finished his thrashing and rocking.
Hunter Maguire said in a low voice: ‘We won today by the hardest kind of fighting I’ve seen.’
Jackson spoke gently. ‘Hunter,’ he said, ‘we won it by the grace of God.’
Hunter shook his head. ‘That too,’ he muttered.
8
Dora Whipple had gone to sleep that evening of her first day of captivity in a happier frame of mind than she had up to now enjoyed. You can teach yourself to tell the mere truth, she promised herself, you can teach yourself to refuse to answer some questions and to mystify the judges.
She woke when the morning train from Charlottesville hooted in the dawn of the next day. She was eating a breakfast of eggs and coffee when Mrs Randolph, wife of the Confederate Secretary of War, a sweet-faced, brown-haired woman, was brought in the front door of the lockup by the old grey-haired colonel.
The old man did not know what to do. He could not very well lock up in a cell the wife of such an important man; so in the end he led Mrs Whipple out into the outer office, and then left the two women alone.
Mrs Randolph was wearing a light green dress and a pink hat, which was wise of her, since the day was starting out hot. She said, with a musical laugh: ‘I got to Orange as soon as I could, Dora. We’ll have you drinking tea in the parlour of the Lewis House by this evening, my dear gal. I mean, this is ridiculous, isn’t it?’
Dora Whipple’s eyes flinched. She wouldn’t lie to this good, intelligent friend. She could find therefore nothing to say.
‘Isn’t it ridiculous?’ asked Mrs Randolph, starting to frown.
‘There was always the danger this would happen, Isabelle,’ Dora Whipple said. She could not look at Mrs Randolph’s eyes any more.
Mrs Randolph thought a while, but then decided to chuckle bravely. ‘I mean, Dora, this is a joke. Isn’t it so? You’re playing at being jailbirds; you’re waiting for them to discover their mistake so you can make them feel their own foolishness, so you can cut them to pieces, the way … you have to admit it … the way you often do with people, Dora, the well-known Dora way. Tell me it’s so!’
‘You know I come from Boston,’ said Dora, half turning away.
‘What has that got to do with the business?’
‘Isabelle, just listen to me. I love you like a sister, that’s no news to you. But your whole cause, Isabelle is … a disease. And that’s all.’
Dora Whipple saw Mrs Randolph’s eyes widening. A statement like that terrified her. ‘Shush! Hush yourself there, Dora! If you say that kind of thing, no one can help you.’
‘It’s likely no one can, Isabelle.’
Mrs Randolph shook her head, wrapped up with the struggle of believing all this. ‘Dora,’ she said, ‘did you use our dinner table to …?’
Mrs Whipple did not answer that.
‘How could you do it to us, Dora? To decent men like Randolph?’
Mrs Whipple, having nothing to say still, plopped on the edge of a chair and tried to control her tears.
‘Don’t worry, Dora,’ said Mrs Randolph. ‘The loss of Yates Whipple was too much of a shock for you. Even if you go to jail, we’ll look after you … your head’s been turned, poor creature …’
Dora looked up at her. ‘I’m not weeping for myself. I’m weeping for the South. For your husband. For Buchanan, for Davis. For the slaveholders. For the sod-busters. For the mad cause!’
‘I’ve never seen anyone weep for the South,’ ‘Isabelle said. And she began to shed tears too and sat down beside Dora Whipple. And they held each other. ‘It don’t matter, you couldn’t help yourself, Dora. Randolph and I will stand by you, as I said. Or I will, even if Randolph won’t.’
The idea of the Randolphs standing by her was suddenly more than she could tolerate. What was the sense in fighting against the Confederacy if its champions insisted on standing by you when you were caught? Mrs Randolph’s simple decency filled that cell like a terrible reproach.
‘Isabelle, I don’t want you to visit me again,’ Mrs Whipple said, mopping up the tears.
‘But I’ve come all the way to Orange,’ Mrs Randolph said, aghast.
‘Under the idea that the arrest was a mistake, you came to Orange. Now you know it wasn’t. I know it’s different now. We can’t be friends again, Isabelle; we can’t be sisters.’ She thought about this a while. ‘No, I don’t want you to visit me.’
‘We can still be friends,’ said Isabelle Randolph, her voice edged with a sort of panic that made Dora Whipple’s need to get rid of her sharper still. ‘I forgive you, Dora. Your mind was turned as I say …’
Dora Whipple shook her head. ‘Get out! Please, Isabelle!’
‘I’ll bring you lunch,’ Isabelle promised frantically.
Dora Whipple couldn’t take that. She reached towards Mrs Randolph and slapped her face.
‘Ugh!’ said Mrs Randolph.
‘Get out when I tell you,’ said Dora. ‘Your charity means nothing any more. At least allow me my cell. Leave and don’t come back!’
Mrs Randolph backed to the door, still too forgiving, holding her face, her jaw open. It seemed that the pain of the blow got to her only after half a minute, for she became angry then, after having been understanding at such lengths. ‘I hope they punish you good, Dora! I can’t understand how you could do this, it surpasses my understanding, ma’am.’
She went out and dragged the heavy wooden door of the lockup sharply closed behind her. From outside she called: ‘And don’t expect any more visits in prison from me!’
Mrs Whipple felt so desolate then. The best of friends is gone, she thought. But at the same time she was frightened Mrs Randolph would forgive her and appear again by lunchtime.
Isabelle Randolph did not. Later in the day the grey-haired colonel said the wife of the Secretary of War had caught the train back to Charlottesville.
9
‘Again,’ called Lafcadio Wheat. ‘Again, boys. And it’s fresh’uns for us.’
It was the harshest morning of the summer. A sharp-as-needle sun sat high over Virginia, sat like a heathen god sure of itself. It didn’t intend to move. That sort of morning is bad enough for farmers who sow and crop the corn. And it has even more malice on a morning when the Yankees are still trying for that railroad cut as they have been since first light.
The Yankee regimental colours over there on the fringes of the woods looked so fresh and untorn and such a fierce confident blue and gold that the Volunteers gr
ew silent. Usaph saw this boy and that looking over his shoulder, making mental ciphers of the distance back to the shelter of the woods. Wheat noticed it too.
‘I don’t want no boys looking for lines of flight,’ he called. ‘You fellers ain’t going to need no lines of flight.’
But everyone was thinking, so many of them! So many!
The flags that had come up the slope towards the cut earlier this morning had had Michigan The Beaver State written all over them. These new ones said Vermont and underneath, the Green Mountain Boys. Oh God, a far place, Usaph thought. All them fresh blue boys from a fresh, far, green place.
The look of those well-dressed boys awed everyone and no one was talking along the railroad cut; or if they did it was in whispers. Even Wheat didn’t talk straight out but in mutters: ‘If we have to get, Usaph, I want you to get the fastest of the lot of us and take the news to Colonel Baylor. Mind you, I don’t want no premature getting. But you know what I mean.’
When hollow case exploded in the air above the Vermonters there’d been these noises like an axe to a man’s skull.
All at once some three or four or six Vermonters somewhere in the line would be heaped atop one another and there’d be a sudden show of raw meat and white limbs with the blue clothing ripped off them by the bang of the shell. But this officer who you couldn’t see – he was striding behind the boys’ shoulders – would call: ‘Remember ole Ethan Allen, you Green Mountain Boys. Steady and close up and remember Ethan Allen.’