‘Don’t worry, cap’n. I told my slave Montie to look out.’
Aunt Sarrie had done that. The problem was Montie didn’t exactly know what she meant. If she had told him to watch out and make sure the painter and Mrs Bumpass didn’t dance a reel, he’d have been in less doubt. But of course she couldn’t have said any such thing to him.
That evening Montie knew this much: that the painter ate supper on his own, for Mrs Ephie Bumpass had said she wasn’t in need of food. It seemed a good enough thing to Montie that the painter was left on his own like that. And by ten at night when all the doors were closed and Mrs Bumpass was safe in her room, and the painter had gone out to the barn, there seemed little much else to watch for. For Montie had reasonably enough thought that Aunt Sarrie meant, watch the painter while he’s in the house.
From the barn that night, Cate could see a low light burning in Ephie’s room. It seemed a hopeful sign to him, even though she hadn’t been at supper. How could they have talked at supper in any case, with Bridie fluttering round them?
Part of the time while he waited he spent lying on his cot in the stall he occupied. And whenever he looked the light was still burning in her bedroom upstairs. I’ll wait until a half-hour after midnight, he told himself; then I’ll break in somehow. Love’s burglar.
Ephie came just before midnight, by way of the front door so that Montie and Bridie could not see her from their bedroom at the back of the house. All Cate could say was, ‘You came.’ That made it seem more miraculous than if he’d had to get into the house somehow, and without alerting that big black ploughman.
‘You touch me, Mr Cate,’ she said insistently, seeking his hands, pulling them into her bodice. And perhaps the whole Cate–Bumpass mess started there. Because Cate thought, she can’t wait to be satisfied, she has desired me so many long hours. Whereas Ephie wanted him just to be quick, so that she could forget what she was about, so she’d have a little holiday from the arguments her brain suffered under. Likewise, when she opened his britches and clutched him, he thought it was all runaway desire, when half of it was runaway shame.
His little camp cot seemed to him wider than a Louis XIV, for they were so close they needed little room except to writhe. And when at last he put his hand between her thighs and found her moist, again unwisely he took it as straight-out homage for Decatur Cate. And she said: ‘No delay, Mr Cate. Come in and no delay, oh dear God,’ and he made the same mistake about that.
Cate had never known such a woman – she made such frank cries that he felt bound to put his fingers over her lips. When he flowed away into her, she was straight away grasping him again, demanding life of him …
And when she felt the mass of him in her she thought, I can’t bide a war, I must have this, this which Cate is here to give. By hokey, I’ll go to California with him.
After they had coupled a second time, Cate noticed how quiet she was.
‘You’ll travel with me, won’t you? Say you’ll travel with me.’
‘Yes,’ she said, but it was like a statement of despair.
She found her way back to the house ‘by owl hoot’, as the locals said. It was some time after two. If I go with him, she was thinking, it’ll mean I won’t have to stick here to confess things to Usaph, to be shamed in front of him.
When Aunt Sarrie got home the next day she found that Ephie was baking away in the kitchen. The kitchen table was covered with apple and boysenberry and blackberry pies. Aunt Sarrie had rarely seen so many pies outside a bakehouse.
‘Why, Ephie, you preparing for a harvest party?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Ephie, but did not smile. ‘Jest felt like baking.’ Aunt Sarrie looked at her and inspected her in her movements. Ephie did not look at Aunt Sarrie, though. The older woman could tell from Ephie’s manner and from this crazy number of pies that had been baked that something had happened. She could guess what too. She said gently: ‘You want to have a rest, gal?’
‘I do,’ Ephie said, and started weeping. ‘Aunt Sarrie, I don’t want to do no more sitting for Mr Cate.’
Cate came in to lunch, half bold, half wary, but found there was no one there to eat with.
‘Mrs Bumpass ill?’ he asked Bridie.
‘I wouldn’t know that,’ said Bridie, and not too politely. She didn’t know anything, though, she was just picking up her manners from her mistress.
All day Cate failed to sight Ephie and he was really in a sweat. ‘I need one more sitting from the lady,’ he told Aunt Sarrie at suppertime.
Aunt Sarrie chewed slowly and stared at him. Then she took and opened the purse she had, right there at the table, and counted out ten silver dollars. ‘Maybe you’ll have to abandon that portrait, Mr Cate.’
He looked at her through lowered lids, hating her frankly. ‘I’ll finish it overnight,’ he said.
‘Maybe you ought to get some rest,’ she said, and smiled as if it were a private joke.
There was no doubt now. The hatred between him and that old widow was out on the table.
When he went to his bed that night, he took the canvas with him. On his pillow he found a note. ‘I sail go with you to Calliforn,’ it said. He put the paper close to his lips. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow.’
The day began sweetly enough. He did not go near the house, but he propped the portrait on a chair where the morning sun would catch it, and as the last of it dried, it faced her room. It waited there on the chair like his morning gift. Then he began to pack. There were some of his sketch books and oils still in the parlour, but he could fetch them later in the day or, if Mrs Muswell proved too hostile, he could leave them behind with a free heart.
In the early afternoon he failed to hear the small detachment of militia trudging up the path to the barn, and he was just fetching his mare from her stall when the old officer knocked on the barn door.
‘Mr Cate?’ the old man asked.
Cate could somehow see the coming disaster in the old officer’s old-fashioned braid. You didn’t have a chance with those old boys. They had such a heart-and-gut interest in killing off the young.
‘I am Cate,’ Cate said, feeling ill.
‘I don’t want to get the wrong man. Is it Decatur Cate?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I am Cap’n Stilwell, recruiting-and-conscription official for Bath County. I give you notice that you are conscripted into the army of the Confederacy, young man. You got maybe half an hour to pack your things.’
Cate put a look of amazement on his face and looked about, grimacing. ‘I’ve got a horse and dray, Mr Stilwell. I can’t very well pack them.’
‘You will of course ride them to the Staunton military depot, where you can sell them. You ain’t likely to be needing a dray when you fight for Jackson, boy.’
But Cate smiled, for he’d just remembered the substitute system, and he knew he could sure afford a substitute.
‘I shan’t need to do that, sir,’ he said. ‘I do of course have a substantial amount of money for my use. I shall buy someone to stand in for me.’
‘No you won’t.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir.’
‘I don’t tolerate the substitute system in Bath County,’ the old man said.
Cate chuckled at him indulgently. ‘It’s provided for by Act of Congress. You don’t have the power to disallow it.’
The old man, with an extraordinary quickness, had all at once got a great revolver in his hand. ‘You will not find a substitute-broker to deal with you, boy. Nor will you find any local boy to take your money. Bath County is pretty well cleaned out of possible conscripts now in any case, son. Let me tell you, I’m an energetic man and I sure believe in my work. I ought to remind you too, son, that if you resist conscription I am powered to confiscate your property. Now, if you obey me, I’ll sell your horse and dray for a good price and hold the money for you or send it to your regiment for collection, jest whatever you like. You’ll find it more satisfactory, I believe, than forfeiting everything
. Come now, son, you’re wanted at Staunton military depot, and you ain’t got much time to pack.’
Cate looked at the four militia men who were waiting by the barn. The youngest seemed to be fifty. Escape must be a possibility, he thought. I’ll tell him there are things of mine in the parlour, and then I’ll escape out the back door and up into the woods. And then I’ll send Ephie a message.
‘There are things in the parlour I have to collect,’ Cate said.
‘Rob, Hennie,’ called the old man, and two militia sergeants of more than fifty years apiece appeared in the door of the barn. They carried smooth-bore muskets. Loaded? Cate wondered.
These two marched him into the house, straight in the open door, and into the parlour. There were a few sketchbooks round and a tray of oils. The two militia men, as country people will, looked around at the walls and furnishings. Yes, Cate was sure, there was a chance here. As he picked up the tray from the sideboard he noticed something distracting though. It was a letter addressed thus: To privet Bumpass, Guess Co., the Shenandoh Regment, Stonewall’s Divishun, neer Richmun. Ephie had written that at least three days ago and had left it there. She could have given it to Aunt Sarrie to post in Warm Springs yesterday, except there was so much for her to think of these past few days she clearly forgot. For a reason Cate could not understand – maybe as a gesture of victory over Private Bumpass – he put the thing in his pocket, then turned and faced the two rustic sergeants. ‘Look,’ he said, and then hurled the tray of paints at them.
He edged between them and ran down the hallway. Through an open back door he could see the sky and the deep forests just a sprint beyond.
Then Montie stepped into that doorway – he’d been waiting on the back porch with Aunt Sarrie all that time. He took Cate in his arms and held him in a bear hug. There wasn’t any breaking that fierce hold. Mrs Muswell’s strong man had him neat.
The militia men caught up. Cate saw Aunt Sarrie looking up at him from the kitchen garden. She had a bowl of runner beans in her hand. Now that his flight had been stopped, he wanted to get at her and strangle her.
‘Let me go, you goddam black brute!’ he screamed at Montie.
‘I thought all you Pennsylvania folk loved the black man,’ said Mrs Muswell.
‘God rot your barren old womb, ma’am,’ Cate screamed. At this insult to Southern womanhood, one of the militia men grabbed his hair and pulled his head backwards.
‘And you, sir,’ said Aunt Sarrie, ‘you do your duty.’
The militia and Montie dragged Cate down the hallway. ‘Mrs Bumpass!’ he yelled near the stairs. ‘Mrs Bumpass!’ But Ephie did not show herself. ‘I’ll come back!’ he called, holding on to the door-jamb of the front door. But no one answered.
As they wrestled him towards the waggon they’d brought with them, ignoring his own horse and dray, he watched her window. But there was nothing to see. They’ve made her prisoner, he concluded.
Another boy of saner mind might have got the right meaning from Ephie’s failure to show herself. Might have taken the meaning that the girl had decided against him. But Cate was too deep in love. They’ve made her a prisoner, he went on believing.
11
Thirty-seven Union regiments had struck the cut that noon. The body of Albert, who had tried to run his bayonet in Usaph, was one of the higher marks that tide had made.
Neat little Sean the fiddler, who hadn’t a sort of obsessed guardian angel to guard his flanks the way Cate had guarded Usaph’s, who had only Walter his boy-love to look out for him, had been bayoneted to death against the fill of that railroad cut. Sean lay on his side, his eyes open. Walter sat on in some species of trance, his back to Sean’s. Lucius Taber couldn’t get any answer out of him.
Danny Blalock looked down at Sean, at the open eyes and gritty face, the neat little mouth drawn back and the bones of the skull already pushing up through the flesh. Danny began to kick dirt over the serpent’s nest of Sean’s torn stomach. ‘You should be doing this,’ he told the boy. ‘You should be doing this, you goddam sodomite.’
Walter didn’t hear. He was staring mad. He would have to be carried away, but there was little chance of that, Danny Blalock knew. Even the wounded would be lucky to get litters by dusk. The mad had no chance.
Hans Strahl’s father had, in the summer of 1861, asked his son: ‘Vat ist about dis var? I don’ see dis schweine Lincoln at my damt farm gate, do you dis damt Lincoln see troublink your momma or me?’
It was a fair argument. But Hans still wanted to go to the war, for the war meant his liberation from that little German colony near Newmarket. Until the war began, the Lutheran way of things had seemed a good enough way to him. Sure, you could court a girl only under the heavy eyes of aunts, generally the girl’s. You sat heavy-suited and squeaky-booted in the parlour of a good German farm and old women listened to everything you said to the girl and then denounced you in church the following Sunday if there was something they didn’t like.
Your only chance of something different was to get to town on market day and make an arrangement with one of them fast girls they had in Newmarket or Woodstock or Strasburg. Otherwise you courted nice girls like Emma Groener in front of an audience of her relatives, who weren’t the most joyful folk you’d met, and you went home and dreamt of what might have happened if they’d ever left you alone for half an hour in one of them plain, no-nonsense parlours. But there wasn’t sense in complaint. That was the way everyone Hans knew up to the summer of ’61 had ever courted. And he didn’t, up till then, think it such a bad thing to live and die that way.
The coming of war churned him up though. The Strahls owned no slaves. They were gently in favour of the Union, but only in so far as they felt closer to their brethren in Pennsylvania than they did to any big landholder of British descent down in the lowlands. But Hans could tell that this war was his chance to change himself, and to taste a wider life, and to get loose from those aunts and elders, and to speak to women without a crowd of spectators, and to be profane for a while and earthy and, in the end, to have a call on the gratitude of a bigger bunch of people than he would normally get noticed by, on Methodists and Presbyterians and other englische people in towns like Newmarket.
So he made an honest soldier. He was happy with what had happened to him. He had stories to tell his grandchildren. He had memories. In Winchester early in the year, when local girls were able to pick with whom they’d walk, an Irish girl called Molly Nagel walked with him and coupled with him away from witness in as wild a way as you could want. He learned to speak profanity too in English, so he would know when he went back to that little clutch of Germans what he was giving up by talking seemly.
He’d always guessed that these kinds of reasons were the reasons half the boys were here, and that there must be Danes or Germans or others over in that Yankee army who were working away for just about the same reasons. Of course he wasn’t thinking about any of this today. He was generally aware of being in line in a cause a lot of clever people said was holy, and he had Americans both sides of him. He was not afraid any more and felt just about as good as he had three afternoons back, during the feast at Manassas Junction. He was sure the dysentery, which had plagued him these past three months, wasn’t going to trouble him any more.
That afternoon James Longstreet decided it was ‘militarily possible’ now to move his infantry in a great crescent-shaped line across the fields either side of the Gainesville turnpike. Jackson’s boys were able to leave the cut at last and go ahead. Since the Shenandoah Volunteers were close to the place where Longstreet’s line hinged on Jackson’s, they found themselves stumbling forward behind a line of Hood’s Texans.
All of them, Strahl too, had not untangled the sights and noises of the morning. Their minds were jumbled and dazed. The Texans, however, moved fast; they were a hundred paces ahead. Whenever they got to a fence, they’d dismantle it quickly, as if they didn’t want their movements hindered by fences.
They passed a schoolho
use, white, with a little belfry, and its windows locked. Deep in its summer sleep. From here, through open views amongst the trees, you could see lines of Rebel soldiers and battle flags away off to the south in a great sickle. When the Texans saw that they started making their funny noises. Tired and numb as he was, even Strahl felt their excitement and in the midst of that Texas yelling shells began to lob in the neighbourhood or burst in the air. One struck the school bell in a way that caused it to give a comic bong.
‘Goddamit!’ the Texans were hooting. ‘They’s musical bastards, they is.’
The Volunteers crossed the main pike in the wake of the Texans. Though some of them stumbled, they were drawn along by the magnetic drag of the frenzy of these strangers from the Confederacy’s furthest corner. Hans Strahl could see a good stone fence ahead and a parsonage beyond it. From behind this fence Yankees rose and shot the Texans fair in the face, but the Texans overran the parsonage yard. Now everyone was running for the cannon, both the Texans and the Yankee fleers. Hans Strahl, stepping amongst the fallen around the parsonage, felt like little more than a witness.
The Yankee gunners were so frightened on their little hill that they had their cannon filled to the lip of the muzzle with those terrible bunches of balls called grape. The Texans who were struck fell down to make a sort of animal hedge in Hans’s path.
It was the nature of the battle that though these heaps gave off screams, they meant as little to Hans as would the cries of migrating birds. The voices of those Napoleons and Parrotts on the hills were the only voices of any merit and drew on the Texans the way sirens draw sailors.
Later many boys wouldn’t remember approaching the guns. All Usaph, for example, could remember was being amongst them suddenly, a cannon wheel by his shoulders. The cannon fired and the wheel jolted backwards, spinning him with it. The blur of wheel and the shock of the firing dropped him down on the ground with a bleeding nose.
It was poor Hans Strahl, stumbling innocent in blue smoke, who happened to be fair in line with the mouth of one of those cannons just when a charge of grape went off into his chest. The man who had pulled the lanyard was himself already dying, for a Texan had pierced him with a bayonet. As one ball of grape tore Hans’s head off, others burst it into fragments and hanks of his dark hair were scattered wide. Both his arms were likewise torn away, ripped up and thrown wide. His entrails were scattered over the hillside, his left leg sundered into small lumps and his right thrown away to one side amongst Texans and strangers. Ash Judd, beside him, did not know where he had gone – to Ash, Hans Strahl’s vanishing was as magical as the ole man of widow Lesage. Later Ash would go seeking him in the fields around the parsonage and up forward, as far as Chinn Hill.