Hans felt nothing but a fearful shock bigger than the known world. It is likely that the fact of his death seemed a small thing beside the size of that great tearing he suffered. Indeed, his mother would report seeing him around the farm for some years after that afternoon at Manassas and, being his mother, she could tell he was hanging around bewildered and in need of a simple explanation.
Whereas the Yankee who had pulled the lanyard had a deep and decent sleep.
While Usaph lay in his bloody-nosed swoon, the four-mile sickle of the Confederate army ran on over Chinn and Bald Hill and on to the Henry house and beyond it to the Stone Bridge over Bull Run. Cloud came up in the evening, and with it rain, and the Federal army set nervous pickets along the Centerville Road and kept dragging off north. And all that time Wheat’s regiment stayed on their hill, guarding the captured cannon and putting the dead in three pits – one for the Union, one for the Confederacy, and one for corpses that carried no signs other than those of their humanity.
12
Into a plain decorated parlour in the White House in Washington that evening, two Union officers brought a brown despatch case. One carried it, the other served as escort. They stopped in front of a long table topped with morocco leather. Fair under the round bulbs of a gas chandelier and beneath a portrait of Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory – by an irony, the last Southerner to have become President of the Union – sat Abraham Lincoln, looking a little ill and scurfy by gaslight.
This was not his accustomed office, but he’d been working here since a meeting of the cabinet broke up only an hour before. It was after ten o’clock now and, as the President’s secretary, young John Hay, knew, the President had not yet eaten dinner.
The officers saluted, and one of them handed the despatch case to John Hay. Hay undid the case, took out the despatches and laid them on the morocco-top table. The President began to read them without any expression. ‘You might wait outside for a while,’ he suggested to the officers after a time.
John Hay knew how far down in the glooms his chief could go, but he didn’t see anything to worry about in the way Abe got rid of these two clothes-horses from the War Department. When the door was closed behind them though, Abe’s head began to loll as if he would be sick any second or just faint away. There was this half-whimper, half-groan from him. ‘Well, John,’ he said, ‘it’s happened again.’
He said nothing more for a while and John Hay didn’t ask.
‘We’ve bin whipped, I mean. You can read it all.’ He let the despatches flutter out of his hands. ‘Johnny Pope says he’s licked. He’s scuttling back to the old lines round Centerville. Right where we were at the start of last winter, mind you.’
John Hay himself wanted to slump down in a chair. The Union generals had wasted this summer. They had done more than waste it. John Hay had a normal respect for the office of the presidency but he didn’t think this was a decent version of it – to sit and work in Washington and hope that the generals out there would show the average enterprise of a hardware store proprietor say. And to be always disappointed.
Abe Lincoln suffered from a strong disadvantage for a man who liked power – he felt, almost as a personal hurt, the length of the casualty lists and the individual agonies and losses that they spoke of. He said, ‘By heaven and earth, John, if I was one of those thousands of boys who went under this summer – by heaven and earth, John! – I’d want to now what for, I would! I’d want to know what for!’
The President’s head went on lolling. ‘Do you want me to fetch Mr Secretary Stanton, Mr President?’ John Hay asked.
‘That I’ll think about,’ Abe Lincoln told him. Abe lifted another paper, the way a professor lifts an especially bad examination essay. ‘McClellan has diarrhoea, John, and Mr Secretary Chase of the Treasury tells me we can’t raise any more money and that he doesn’t want to take that easy way out the Rebs took and print the stuff. I tell you, the bottom is out of the tub, John. The bottom is out of the tub.’
He closed his eyes for a while. ‘Fetch General Meigs,’ he said in the end.
As John Hay went to find a messenger, he met General Meigs in the waiting room outside and was able to bring him straight in. ‘At least some things get done fast in this Republic,’ the President said, seeing the general.
Meigs was the Quartermaster General of the U.S., a sane old professional dedicated to the Union and the constitution. So he was the sort of soldier who – unlike the McClellan bunch – didn’t see the military as a holy brotherhood with rights to bully any civilian, even a President.
‘Is it time to pack yet, Montie?’ Lincoln asked.
‘Pack, sir?’
‘I mean, is it time to leave Washington? Is it time to choose a new capital? By hokey, the Bostonians would like that. What I’m getting at, Montie, is whether Pope can hold them at Centerville. Do we have to look forward to a siege?’
General Meigs smiled. ‘I don’t think we have to pack tonight, anyhow,’ he said.
‘What is the cause, Montie? How could anyone fail as thoroughly as Johnny Pope?’
The Quartermaster General shrugged. ‘I hear reliably that his staff work this past three days has been poor. And his intelligence poor. This afternoon of course he was gobbled up on the flank by an immense force that he scarcely knew was there.’
The President nursed his lean jaws. ‘That’s just about the same as going to a circus and failing to notice the damn elephant.’
Two hours before the news came in from Manassas the President had talked to his cabinet about a document he and Hay had got together between them. It was the document that had been waiting to be written for months. It was a decree freeing the slaves of the Confederacy. He had already signed an Act ending slavery in the District of Columbia by the device of buying slaves from their owners for no more than $200 each and then freeing them. Already the War Department had revised the regulations compelling army or naval officers to return runaway slaves to their owners. And from Vienna, the U.S. Ambassador, John Motley, was saying that only one of three things would stave off recognition of the Confederacy by the European powers; there had to be a great conclusive win over the Confederacy; or else there had to be the capture of the cotton ports so that cotton could be released to Europe; or else there had to be a clear-cut emancipation of the slaves.
Well, things were a little more complicated than that. Even Secretary Seward, who’d been so keen on abolition all his life, could see that you couldn’t have a clear-cut emancipation of slaves unless there was first a great compelling sort of victory. And with Johnny Pope whipped and McClellan in the privy with runny bowels, there was no way you could suddenly declare Confederate slaves free without looking ridiculous.
‘Montie, tell me this,’ said the President. ‘No reflection on you – but where do you think generals are manufactured? And how come the Confederacy seems to have cornered the market in them?’
13
There was a stillness in the valley of the Cowpasture, an endless hot day sat over Aunt Sarrie’s place and everyone moved slowly at their eternal tasks: Aunt Sarrie upstairs making beds with Bridie, Montie in the river pasture sowing corn for that summer’s second crop, Lisa crooning on the stoop and Ephie in the kitchen at the churn. The gurgling and whumping of that churn was just a background rhythm in Lisa’s quiet song.
Some counties away Ephie’s spouse toted sharp-edged ammunition boxes, but Ephie thought little of him this afternoon; not because she was not beset by him, but because she was fighting away at an urge to retch. She kept her hands firm on the churn handle, for she knew Aunt Sarrie had been looking sidewise at her, looking for signs to back up certain ideas she’d got about Ephie’s condition. So Ephie worked the churn hard both to distract Aunt Sarrie from fretting about her and also in the sweating hope that it might just clear her problem. Why, she’d had a cousin who’d lost four of them at an early time and only eventually managed to keep one till term. It had made it seem like the longest child-carrying in history. O
ther women used to joke with this cousin, ‘What you carrying in there? A brown bear?’
What Ephie had been saying to herself, sometimes aloud, each miserable night since Cate had left, was something like: you ain’t no decent wife, Ephie Bumpass. Sure, you were playing at being one since you met good Usaph Bumpass but you knew how it was but playing. You happen to be one of them swamp whores Daddy Corry sometimes brought into the house. You lay with a man jest because he could ply oil paints.
Oh, Ephie’s shame was like a sickness. It cramped her belly when she tried to eat. She’d get to bed tired, but it would pepper her brain up and her legs would twitch like something frantic. She thought how, when he was caressing her, Cate had said, you’ll come with me and travel the wild world, and how she’d thought Amen, how heady that would be, to travel with an artist and watch him do his work, watch him squint and frown and make lines and hues that no other creature on the earth could do. Whereas, and there was no denying it, one farmer could and did do pretty much what any other farmer could and did do. And thinking about this became part of the shame as well.
It seemed to Ephie the shame that followed on adultery with Cate was enough tax for a woman to pay without this extra thing that had befallen her.
All that hard work on the churn did for her this morning was make her want to puke. She stood up in a fever of sweat. Old Lisa’s song gave her sickness a sort of rhythm. ‘Lisa, will you be quiet for a minute!’ she called. But Lisa didn’t hear. It was Aunt Sarrie and Bridie who heard, and Aunt Sarrie who answered from the top of the stairs.
‘You calling there, Ephie?’
Ephie staggered into the hallway and turned and, so it seemed to her, could not stop turning. The stairwell was tipping up, she believed, and falling on her. She felt a hardness under her shoulder-blades and thought it was a wall, but then was surprised to find it was the floorboards. Bridie stood over her, working at her nose with the neck of an ammonia bottle. The fumes stung Ephie’s brain, but swung the house back on to its proper foundations.
Aunt Sarrie said: ‘Bridie, now you go and get lemonade for poor Mrs Bumpass. You’ll find us in the parlour. And mind you knock before you bring it in.’
When Aunt Sarrie got her back on her feet, Ephie didn’t quite want to go into the parlour. The parlour meant Aunt Sarrie looked on all this as a solemn event and wanted to talk solemn with her. And there was in that parlour, beside the Bible and the daguerreotype of Aunt Sarrie’s dead husband Lewis, and many other intimidating items, that accursed portrait on the wall.
Sarrie got her in there though and sat her in the velvet-upholstered seat and stood back, a righteous sensible woman in a grey dress. Her plainness seemed to Ephie to be a blessing, and Ephie wanted plainness like that more than brains or riches. ‘I know what it is, Ephie. I bin makin’ little guesses these past two weeks what your state is, gal.’
Ephie shook her bowed head. What could she say? ‘I only been making little guesses these past two weeks myself, for sweet Lord’s sake, Aunt Sarrie,’ she whispered.
‘Well you see, Ephie, I thought it had happened, you see. I thought it had or would happen, gal. I thought that artist feller and yourself had a fancy for each other. I take it it’s the artist feller. You got no further surprises for me, have you, Ephie girl?’
Ephie had her eyes closed and shook her head yet again. It was so sweet to have it out now, and Aunt Sarrie spoke to her in a way she hadn’t expected, like someone who was in a secret with her and who might herself have once or twice slept with men other than her daguerreotyped dead husband.
‘We could put it out for fostering but that’s cruel on a child … besides, with all the waggle-tongues and gossips we have in this county, there ain’t no ways the news won’t get round.’ Aunt Sarrie sighed. ‘Usaph shouldn’t have the hurt of that. It would follow him till he was an ole man. So …’
Bridie knocked and came in with the lemonade, putting it down in silence, and Aunt Sarrie kept a special silence, as if Bridie was in on the news too but it was against the rules to say so. So Ephie began to blush deep in front of the slave lady Bridie, who left the room while they were still, all three of them, locked up in that knowing silence.
‘That’s it,’ said Aunt Sarrie then. ‘We got to go and see Grannie Ambler over to Williamsville.’
‘Who’s this Grannie Ambler?’
Aunt Sarrie set her mouth on strong, no-nonsense lines. ‘Well, I believe you don’t want your Usaph to see you grow big with another fellow’s child come Christmas. Grannie Ambler helps people in your situation.’
‘Helps? Does it hurt?’
‘Tolerable,’ said Aunt Sarrie. ‘But woman is a creature made for some pain. And you must be brave, Ephie.’
Ephie knew it was settled then. When she wept, she didn’t know if it was fear or gratitude that sparked the tears.
14
Jed Hotchkiss, the mapmaker, had a mess of maps to get ready by dawn and a poor place to do it in. He was working at the kitchen table of a farmhouse up near the Chantilly estate, just twenty miles west of Lincoln’s nervous capital. It was cold and the rain clamoured on the farm roof. He knew this was September 1 and that the year had begun to turn now and that maybe a muddy fall and a fierce winter were just ahead.
The surface of the table he worked on was all holystoned. The farmer’s wife had spent so much effort on it that it had great hollows in it and wide cracks. There was a good table in the front room but it had the corpse of an important Yankee laid out on it. So Jed had to make do with a surface that just about followed the contours of the country he was making maps of.
By him he had inks and pens and pencils, rulers and compasses and protractors, sheets of drawing paper, rough diagrams of northern Virginia with triangulations pencilled in all over them, and notebooks full of figures.
At the end of the table sat his assistant, a young engineer from Augusta County, making a general map of western Maryland from a number of sources – old farmers’ almanacs and year books and an old-fashioned volume called A General Description of the State of Maryland.
Jed himself was drawing a map of the Aldie and Ball’s Bluff regions. One of his sources was a map he’d made himself as a younger man. One college vacation he’d set out to map the entire Commonwealth of Virginia just for the fun such an exercise would give him. While he worked now Jed listened to that English scribbler Searcy, who was sitting by the banked-down fire with very little to do except talk. Searcy was arguing away in his seesaw British voice about prices.
Searcy was in a strange mood. The sense that he was fatally locked to this foreign war frightened him. He had always been an observer before, it was a role that suited his unattached soul. He’d never felt a particular war would get him. He felt it now. The image of pixie-faced Mrs Whipple tonight only made him all the surer that this war wouldn’t let him off free as all the others had.
As well as that he was grieving, though he didn’t tell Jed that. It was now two days since Pope was routed at Manassas – and began his retreat. This afternoon, in the low muddy fields round Chantilly, Stonewall’s wing had been halted by terrible rain, and as well as that by a firm stand over a two-mile front by U.S. generals Porter and Kearny. What upset Searcy was that one of the best men in the Union was laid out on the good table in the front parlour, a captured corpse.
Searcy had been covering up all this worry and loss by arguing – as has been said – about currency and prices with Jed and the boy engineer from Augusta County. That boy seemed to have no trouble talking and at the same time drawing firm, exact lines.
‘My paw,’ he was saying as he worked away on that map of western Maryland which Stonewall wanted by breakfast-time tomorrow, ‘works in the War Department in Richmond. When he got the job last year at $110 a month, I thought – whoo-ee! My mammy and pappy is rich! They rented a house right there on Marshall Street, jest a stroll from the Capitol, for $50 a month and lived like a king and a queen with the rest. Alas, alack …’
??
?I know, I know,’ said Searcy, as if he were gloomily pleased about it. ‘You can’t rent an attic in Richmond for $50 a month any more.’
‘Are you telling me that?’ the young engineer asked. ‘Perdigious prices prevail in Richmond, Mr Searcy. Perdigious prices. For an instance $3 for a pound of candles …’
‘$8, I believe,’ said Searcy, still seeming to Jed to hang onto the words with a perverse joy, ‘for a pound of tea.’
‘Goddam! Whisky $10 a quart. Butter a goddam luxury at $2.50 a pound. It’s all that goddam paper money …’
All that goddam paper money. Searcy remembered a time just after the start of the war, before the conflict claimed him and took him over. At that stage the centre of the Confederacy was a little whitewashed Greek-style building on a modest hill in Montgomery, Alabama. Here he had interviewed the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Treasury, a long-faced, very sober man called Chris Memminger. Searcy found it pretty easy to sum Memminger up. He’d had a modest law practice in Savannah. You could tell just by looking at his suit that he was a thrifty man, and cautious. But the nature of the war that was just starting would soon turn him into a gambler. Memminger confessed that there hadn’t been enough money in the Treasury Department to buy him a desk – he’d had to get one on his own private bank draft.