‘Ain’t he a talkative son of a bitch?’ Wheat murmured. ‘Can’t you see him, Usaph?’
‘No sir, Colonel Wheat.’
‘He must be a stumpy whoreson. If you can get a sight on that-there orator, Usaph, shoot the son of a bitch through the heart.’
It was a season of grass fires. Flames might start of their own mysterious accord, and a shell came down in the sere crabgrass in front of the Vermonters and shattered there and started fire. The flames went fast along the slope towards the Green Mountain Boys.
The thing that tipped Cate’s reason happened then. There was a Michigan soldier who’d been wounded on that slope an hour before. He began heaving on his arms to get himself out of the fire’s way, but it caught his blue coat. And he must have had cartridges in his pockets the way soldiers often did, for as he screamed as frightful as anyone in history ever had, the rounds in his pockets went off and tore his side away.
Usaph looked away. He saw Walter, the fiddler’s fancy boy, begin to weep and slide down the fill and curl up on his side in the rank grass.
Sean went down after him and began to kick him as if he was a troublesome stranger.
Meanwhile Cate had rolled on his back and started gasping. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he called, loudly addressing the high sun, ‘do you enjoy these things? Do you goddam enjoy them?’
Wheat overheard this but didn’t seem to know who it was who had spoken. ‘Who was it blasphemed?’ he yelled. He knew what ill fortune it was to blaspheme on the edge of a battle. ‘What son of a goddam sow blasphemed there?’
‘God damn us all!’ Cate screamed even louder. Now he stood up on top of the cut, the better to be shot at. His chin was back; he was still roaring at the sky. ‘God damn us all. It is my sin. My goddam crime …’
Usaph was flabbergasted to hear Cate talk that way. To use a word like sin. Did it mean the son of a bitch wasn’t a total godless mocker? But if he believed in sin, what sin was he talking about?
Lucius Taber stood up beside Cate. He had one of the lumps of granite that seemed to be scattered up and down the cut. Holding it in his two hands he brought it in a slow but mighty swing against the side of Cate’s head, knocking Cate’s forage cap off. Then Cate and Lucius fell together down the embankment, as if Lucius had done himself as much damage as he had to the conscript. But Lucius got up in the end and crawled back into his place atop the cut. It was Decatur Cate who didn’t move. Usaph could see a patch of Cate’s face and it looked pale and there was blood from his temple.
‘I hope the son of a bitch is finished,’ he muttered to himself. But he knew it was a lie. Because you can’t get the dead back to question them. And there was that thing Cate had said about sin and crime and damnation.
Colonel Wheat called out as if it were a battle order. ‘I want no more goddam insults to the Almighty.’
Bumpass’s mouth was making water now. He wondered why? Why under this sun?
Well, it was a frightful reason and it came to him. The smell of meat was the cause. The grass fire burned the Union dead and there’d be this stammer of sharp noise whenever the flames got to a dead boy’s cartridges. Usaph spat the guilty saliva from his mouth but more took its place. Best to ignore it.
Through the open places in the smoke Wheat and Gus and Usaph could see the Vermont lines coming on. If they had fancy boys who wanted to sit and weep, and Cates who wanted to call defiance at Christ, they had somehow settled them. In some places they formed columns to cut through corridors amongst the blazing grass and then re-formed in line again. Soon they were but three hundred paces off, a little scattered about, but looking business-like.
Lafcadio Wheat, using his field-glasses, looked past them. Beyond the distant woods were further hillsides where regiments were forming. He saw a nice brisk regiment lined up on the edge of a wooded slope perhaps half a mile off. It would back up the Green Mountain boys.
‘Do they have no bottom to their goddam barrel?’ he asked himself. He called lazily that everyone should fire at will. The first volley went out, Usaph fixing on a tall captain and firing but missing. There seemed so little damage to the Vermonters that they got excited and started to come on faster.
Fifty steps further along they got while Usaph loaded, but now the fire had a harsher effect and they began to sit or fall over in some numbers.
You could make out their faces now. They started to run. There was a boy only a little way from the cut, running crouched, his lips set in a sort of wince of effort that made him look as if he were laughing. Usaph shot him in the top of the hip on the right side. He tottered on a bit and the grin got wider, but in the end he toppled over. When that had been done Usaph loaded yet again, now lying on his back and holding his musket between his knees. When he had the new round ready and peeped over the cut again, they were on the far side not the length of a farm parlour away, and they were standing awhile, letting their brothers catch them up so that together they could all jump into the cut and mix business with the enemies of their Republic. But as fast as they mustered there they were shot down. Too close. Too close. Some of them looked up at you as you lay atop the grading and shot at your face. Usaph and four others all aimed at the sergeant who was holding the Vermont flag, and when he fell, it was picked up by a boy with a moustache who was red in the face and waving it like he was in some sort of competition at a fair. He stood there like that for half a minute till Lucius Taber shot him twice, in the forehead and the eye. And then there were some three or four others who picked it up and were each shot. Usaph had seen this sort of flag madness once before. Once the man with the regimental colours was shot, the others wouldn’t let the colours just lie, they would line up for a turn to hold them, and in turn they would be shot.
At last a boy of about fourteen who was a drummer picked it up.
He lasted a long time there because, hardly knowing they were going easy on him, the crazed, dazed Shenandoah Volunteers in the cut avoided shooting at him. He was moon-faced, that boy, and he didn’t do anything with the flag, he just stood with its stump on the toe of his shoe and its staff in his right hand and with his left he had to hold both his drumsticks. And he blinked all the time. And he seemed apologetic about what he was doing.
Well, everyone knew without having to be told how it was with drummers. They were generally orphans. This one stood there blinking all the time for perhaps some three or four minutes. Each time Usaph loaded he’d see him standing there. And then all at once he was sitting on the flag like a farm child sitting on a mat. He’d been shot in the foot. Maybe it was an act of mercy. Or an accident.
Sometimes those Vermonters would stagger forward into the cut in twos or threes, and one who did that, and stood dazed in the cut, was himself staggered up to by Lucius who cracked his skull with stone – maybe the same stone he’d used on Cate. It seemed Lucius had no cartridges left for his fine blue-surfaced Colt. So every time Usaph looked there was Lucius stumbling along the cut hitting the sons of the Union on the skull.
Then up through the slope and the grass fires came the reserve regiment Wheat had seen more than half an hour before. To the abstract military part of his brain it seemed a sort of military crime that the Yankee generals hadn’t sent them along earlier. Lafcadio Wheat did some calculations in his mind and decided that his boys might have no more than seven or so rounds – excluding of course what could be taken from the dead. He grabbed Usaph by the shoulders. Usaph was alarmed by his popping mad eyes and by his hot breath which was tainted by some disorder of the belly Wheat had. ‘Find William Baylor up in the woods. Tell him – God, you know what to tell him, Usaph. We are low in all ways. All our powder nigh on shot away. Tell him I need his reserves at this point if he has any sons of bitches in reserve. Take the message, Usaph, and may the Lord preserve your ass!’
Usaph slid down the embankment on the said part of his body which Colonel Wheat had just called on the Deity to protect. He met Lucius Taber at the bottom, resting mutely between excursions into the cut.
Lucius and the granite in his hand and a fixed frowning look on his dirty face. And Wheat, looking from above and anxious for the boy, saw that the young officer was about to punish Usaph as a deserter. ‘Lucius,’ he screamed. ‘Lucius! He’s my runner, don’t you mind? Let him goddam run!’
Well, there were grass fires all over the Confederate slope too that Usaph was running on, taking the colonel’s message. Since the railroad cut travelled in a bow here, there was – just a little way off to his left – a place where Yankees had got through the cut and were trying, face to face, to put bayonets into the Irishmen of the 5th Virginia. And like apparations, there amidst the hot tang of grass smoke, came two Vermonters right up to Usaph’s side and front.
‘You take him from that side, Albert,’ one of them said, not taking his eyes off Usaph. Usaph began to urinate and he saw their faces with all the sharpness of his sick terror. Albert was a soulful long-mouthed boy, but he must have been a tough one to have got this far. The other one, the one who was giving instructions, was a broader-faced pug-nosed tall man with soot all over his face and a drooping black moustache. Both of them had bayonets of triangular mould fixed on their muskets and meant to transfix Usaph from each flank.
Usaph had some seconds looking from one to the other before he understood that his own musket still carried a charge. Up to then he’d been in such a sickness of fear that he wasn’t sure whether he would go down on his knees and vomit and wait the bayonet, or actually try to do something about these two. Now he started to calculate his chances.
Albert’s bayonet flashed at his side; Usaph was sure it touched his jacket at the waist. The lunge made Albert stagger. ‘Stand still, Reb,’ he told Usaph. Usaph thought, if they knew about Ephie and about all my doubts, would they still try to pierce me through? The one with the moustache probed for the right side of Usaph’s body. At the second Usaph fired straight at the man’s belly, his musket was knocked away by the bayonet. There was an upwards discharge and Usaph’s attacker took the ball in the side of his face. The wound appeared through, and was just about hidden by the cloud of powder his dirty musket blew at the Vermonter. The boy’s eyes rolled upwards, he swiped at them with a hand as if trying to keep his sight. Then he dropped down.
Now Usaph really had to dance to get from Albert’s bayonet. He danced once, and wondered how many more seconds of this awesome nonsense he could take. He knew Albert would get him. So he himself got a vast anger against his executioner from Vermont and he took his musket by the barrel and screamed, ‘Come on, you goddam Vermonter son of a bitch. You goddam horse-fucking Yankee whoreson.’
Albert said nothing except he was whimpering with the effort of getting that French-style bayonet of his into Usaph.
Usaph considered it a sort of death dream when he saw Cate come empty-handed and bare-headed, stumbling up behind Albert and picking up the dropped musket and bayonet of Albert’s fallen friend. And running it into Albert’s back with such a dose of mad energy that the thing came through the front of Albert’s jacket. Mad as a mink, Usaph thought the bayonet point sticking from Albert and the coughing and yelping noises Albert made were a sort of prefiguring of what was just about to befall him. He went down on his knees, bowed his head, spat his bitter breakfast on the yellow grass and waited for the steel to enter him. It was a little time coming and his crutch began to itch with the urine and all them crabs. And he forgot that an itch wasn’t worth worrying about on the verge of eternity and he began to scratch and said, ‘God have mercy,’ and looked up. Cate stood there with the musket in his hands. There was all kinds of muck on it, on the bayonet torn from Albert. Albert lay on his side, eyes fixed and nose pinched up and making a little protesting noise that had no meaning.
Usaph got straight up and left the site like a man getting clear of a murder in a bar. Cate sat down by Albert and went into a trance which Usaph knew well was part of the granite on the head he’d had from Taber, part of the terrible thing he’d just done to the fabric of the Union.
And all the rage Usaph felt now was rage against Cate for going to those lengths to save him, Bumpass. What did these goddam lengths mean? Usaph got nearly to the edge of the Confederate woods before he turned and saw Cate again, still there, and yelled at him, ‘Don’t you expect me to be goddam grateful. You goddam black Republican …!’ But Cate did not even look at him.
Then Usaph remembered he had a message for Billie Baylor, the commander of the shrunken Stonewall Brigade. He dashed on through the pine trees to find him.
10
The day Aunt Sarrie vanished from her farm, leaving Ephie in Montie’s care, she had been on her way to see Captain Stilwell.
Captain Stilwell was a kindly but patriotic man of nearly seventy years of age. He had got his rank during the Indian wars over in the western counties in the ’20s. Now he was recruiting-and-conscription officer for Bath County, Virginia, and he worked from a corner of his large dry-goods business in Warm Springs. In the past week he had served conscription notices on some one hundred or more feckless mountain boys who hadn’t managed to hide in the hills or to outride him.
On the day of Aunt Sarrie’s visit to Warm Springs, he had been lunching at the Springs Hotel with some of the other town worthies and was walking out of the dining room with them, smoking a rotten wartime cigar, when he saw a plain but live-eyed woman of about fifty years sitting in the lobby and looking about as good as she could hope to in a yellow dress and a small green hat. I know that woman, he thought. Why, that’s Sarrie Muswell, looking not at all like a widder. Her eyes met his. He told his friends to excuse him and went out and bowed at her.
‘Mrs Muswell, you’re looking a treat,’ he told her.
‘Better than I feel,’ she said. ‘I’ve come all this way to Warm Springs to speak to you, Cap’n Stilwell.’
‘My dear lady, I’m sure flattered.’
‘Do you have time to sit down awhile?’ she asked.
He agreed that he did. When he had settled himself and stubbed out his foul cigar, she began to talk.
‘You know I have this nephew serving in that Shenandoah Regiment …?’
‘A renowned battalion, ma’am.’
She nodded her head impatiently at his military politeness. ‘My nephew’s wife happens to be staying at my place, for she hails from Strasburg, at least Usaph does. Now his wife – Ephie’s her name – hails all the way from the coastal swamps of South Carolina. She’s one of them authentic swamp lilies, is Ephie.’
‘Pretty, you mean?’
‘Like a rose …’ said Aunt Sarrie.
‘But not of such a good background?’
‘You said it, Cap’n Stilwell. Dragged up by a trashy paw – some sort of fisherman. A fine gal, mind you. Of the best intentions …’
Captain Stilwell had a soldier’s ear for that kind of hint.
‘You don’t mean she’s seeing a new man …?’
‘No, I don’t mean exactly that, Cap’n Stilwell.’
The old man actually blushed – Aunt Sarrie could see the blood reddening his creased old neck. ‘Forgive me then, Mrs Muswell.’
She told him that any trouble, if it were to come, was yet ahead of sweet Ephie. But this portrait-painter was working on her. Aunt Sarrie could tell he wouldn’t leave without trying to take Ephie with him.
‘Has the blackguard said so, ma’am?’ gallant Captain Stilwell asked her.
‘He has not. Not yet, I mean. But I am a worldly enough woman, Cap’n Stilwell. And I can tell.’
Captain Stilwell looked at her. ‘But do you think Ephie would be tempted to go?’
‘She ain’t a worldly woman at all. She’d never met a man like Cate. She ain’t never been to a city except once to change trains in Richmond. She thinks Cate’s the cleverest man she’s ever like to meet. Whereas he’s jest your average spruiker.’ She frowned at her hands a little. ‘I don’t want my nephew Usaph to lose his wife, Cap’n Stilwell. Specially not when she’s in my hand. What I think is … I think this Cate ou
ght to be in the army.’
She stared at Stilwell. The old man smiled. ‘Why ain’t he already?’ he asked.
‘He hails from Pennsylvania, he says.’
‘A Lincoln man?’
‘He says he ain’t in particular.’
‘I wonder if it’s much use recruiting Lincoln men …’
‘I think, sir, to be honest, that you ought to conscript this boy no matter what his politics might be. Marriage, sir, has its value and it’s a higher value than any politics I can think of.’
The old officer nodded for a while. ‘I can be at your place Friday, ma’am,’ said the old captain. ‘With a militia guard. Make sure someway he don’t run off on us before then.’
‘He won’t run off. While ever Ephie’s there. Cap’n Stilwell, I want you to know how grateful I am.’
She put her hand on top of his well-scrubbed old wrist. Well, it’s a good thing to be treated as a gallant, he thought. Aunt Sarrie could see how happy she’d made him. A liveliness came into his eyes.
‘Are you staying in this house, ma’am?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t have no chance of reaching home by dark.’
She saw his adam’s apple bob. ‘My room is 38,’ she told him.’
’38,’ he whispered. ‘Obliged, ma’am. For that news.’
Well, thought Aunt Sarrie, there’s nothing wrong with hugging a nice ole man if it brings some good. ‘One thing,’ murmured Aunt Sarrie, her mind still working, ‘he has money of his own – I owe him $10 myself. It’d be a perversion of our intentions for the boy, Cap’n Stilwell, if he was able to buy himself a substitute.’
The old captain smiled in his grandfatherly way. ‘I’ll blacklist him, ma’am, before the event, I’ll blacklist him, so no substitute-broker’ll touch him. By hokey, dear Mrs Muswell, I shan’t give him time to look sidewise for a substitute.’ Then he coughed. ‘Ain’t you anxious, ma’am, that something bad will happen during this brief absence from your home? With the miscreant, I mean, and your nephew’s wife?’