Confederates

  Boys got their wet and smouldery fires going on the site of last night’s fires and heated up their handful of cornmush and their coffee. Even Wheat had little more than that to eat this morning, and the starey-eyed crazes seemed to be on him, so he began telling tales once again of his gran’daddy Wheat, as if that would stem his hunger. ‘Breakfast awaits you down in Harpers Ferry, sir,’ boys told each other, trying to sound like British butlers they’d seen in plays performed by touring companies. For they thought they’d be in Harpers Ferry in time for a fair breakfast.

  Cate? Cate had ague. The shivers. He sat up in his wet blanket as he’d sat up all night, hard for breath and quivering away. He had no friends of the sort to bring him coffee even if they’d had plenty. All the conscript friends he’d had were killed or ill or deserted. Earlier on in his military career, someone like Judd might have become his friend through getting all dazzled by his line of talk. But Cate didn’t have much of a line of talk any more. Since crossing the Potomac into Maryland he’d got sullen. He’d got sullener still after that incident when Usaph grabbed his ankle while he straddled the fence beyond which lay those whores from the town of Frederick. And when Stonewall led the Shenandoah Volunteers back over the Potomac at Williamsport last Thursday, back into Virginia itself with the bands playing ‘Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny’ as lusty as a week before they’d played ‘Maryland, My Maryland’, Cate hadn’t made a whisper of a speech about it all being comic or ironic or any of that stuff.

  While eating a gritty ball of cornmeal, Usaph watched Cate. Hans Strahl vanishing in the air worried Usaph, but it worried him too that Cate stuck on. It was almost as if the painter was dragging along just to get a word from him, from Usaph Bumpass. Amongst all the noise of the march and the bivouac, the silence between them was stretched now thin as a spiderweb. Usaph’s detestation of the man had waxed sharper than ever since Cate delivered him from those Union bayonets.

  The place where they sat this morning eating their mush and their ashy little balls of cornmeal was called Bolivar Heights. Way below, beyond the town, the grand Shenandoah, daughter of a thousand mountain streams, ran boiling up across heaps of shingle against its equal partner the Potomac. Even up here you could hear, though you couldn’t see, the boiling business of the two rivers. And as Usaph lolled there, frowning and hearing Wheat’s ancestral story, he kept watching Cate and feeling a little panic. If I don’t give him a kindly word to break his fever, he thought, who will? Yet I’m damned if I will. I forgave goddam Wheat, and that’s enough.

  Wheat’s story that morning threw light on the whole business of how the Wheats came to this sweet land in the first instance. It also had a more moral ring than the tale about Mrs China. Gran’daddy Wheat, in his young days a sugar refiner in the English town of Bristol, had got into cash problems and so had forged a bill for £1500, in the name of someone else, against Lubbock’s Bank in London. Gran’daddy Wheat got to London with his young wife, cashed the bill for somewhat less than its nominal price, and bought a ticket to Norfolk, Virginia, on a ship called the Wellesley. Then he’d said goodbye to his wife, and boarded his ship. The young Mrs Wheat headed back for Somerset and, on the Bristol Road, met a constable and gran’daddy Wheat’s partner galloping towards London to catch the forger. Since she was sure the ship was already out in the Channel going westwards for Virginia, she told them all the details of gran’daddy Wheat’s escape. Her husband, she said, would send for her later. She crowed at them a treat.

  ‘Where’s Somerset?’ Usaph asked, a little sullen. ‘Where’s this Bristol?’

  ‘Far from here, Usaph boy,’ said Wheat. And Usaph would have had to own up, that was part of the appeal of the story.

  According to Wheat, the two men went on to London and found that the Wellesley had been delayed for some reason – something to do with tides. They hired a boat and hailed the captain, saying who they were and that they wanted to know in the name of the King no less if gran’daddy Wheat was aboard. Gran’daddy Wheat came up on the quarterdeck wearing a cloak over his head and offered the captain the bulk of his money if he’d weigh anchor right away for Virginia.

  Now this made a fine story, but even at this point, when the destiny of gran’daddy Wheat hung on whether the captain would clear harbour, Usaph couldn’t stop watching Cate.

  ‘So the captain agreed to my gran’daddy’s offer,’ said the colonel. ‘It was some risk, for if gran’daddy’s partner and that constable could beat the ship downriver to the marine station, they could get off from the bank with troops, and that would sure end gran’daddy’s flight and likely his life as well. For this was 1820 and they hanged men who forged bills as big as that. Just as night came on, when they was at the mouth of that famed River Thames, the captain and gran’daddy saw a pinnace full of goddam redcoats bobbing about in the tide, but far enough astern for the captain to pretend he hadn’t seen them. And that’s how gran’daddy got his start in a new life, landing without a cent on the docks of Newport News. And he was always aware of his good fortune and said that he could jest as easily have become a dishonoured corpse as an honoured citizen of Harrison County. And it wasn’t that he got away free with his little trick with that bill he wrote. His wife stayed on in Bristol with the partner and died there of the goddam typhus. And that was when gran’daddy married Mrs Ettie Pleasant, a rich young widder of Doddridge County and the grandmother of your humble friend.’

  Throughout this whole fine tale, as well as being plagued by the presence of Cate, Usaph could see Captain Hanks standing wrapped in a blanket, and Lucius Taber, leaning up against a wet pine tree, staring at Wheat, and both of them disapproving of the commonness of the colonel in sharing round stories of his ancestors like this, and both of them wondering if Wheat was fit for command.

  Usaph got so troubled and distracted by the sight of them that he got up from his place without thinking of it and edged away from Wheat, and found himself walking through moist pine needles towards Cate and standing over him. The first words were like forcing cores out of a boil.

  ‘You ailing, Cate?’ Usaph asked. And then he felt stupid for asking. Anyone could see, Cate was ailing.

  Anyhow, Cate said nothing.

  ‘If you’re ailing, Cate,’ said Usaph, keeping his voice flat so that there was neither brotherliness nor hate in it, ‘you should maybe stay on round here. Rest yourself up in some farmhouse here. Look at them brogues of yours. Stitching all gone. Yeah, I’d say you might stay on. Hereabouts …’

  Cate still said nothing, but his shivering got worse. Usaph turned from him. He tried to move without his movement saying one thing or the other, hatred or forgiveness.

  ‘I don’t mean to leave off,’ said Cate behind him. He said it like a drunkard talking about the bottle. Like he was really saying, it don’t mean to leave me off.

  ‘Well, you have to suit yourself, Cate. But there ain’t no one to look after you on the road.’

  Again Cate had nothing to say. The lonesomest man in the whole goddam Army of Northern Virginia.

  ‘You got coffee?’ Usaph asked then in spite of himself.

  He could tell by the nature of Cate’s silence that he didn’t have.

  ‘Goddam you,’ Usaph said, like not having coffee was some sort of crime. ‘I’ll go get you some.’

  He went and fetched a little of Lafcadio Wheat’s coffee. The colonel didn’t object. He was listening rapt to Gus’s story of how the Ramseurs turned up in the New World. When Usaph gave Cate the coffee, the conscript put his quivering hands round it and his nose down to the steam. ‘That’s a comfort,’ he muttered.

  ‘Cate, did you maybe see something of young Hans Strahl the other day. Did you maybe see him walk away, out of line?’

  Cate shook his head.

  ‘Then where did he go?’ Usaph asked, as if it was up to Cate to know these things.

  ‘Maybe he got sick and went behind a tree.’

  ‘He wasn’t goddam sick. I seen him at noon and he wasn’t a hair of
sick.’

  ‘Maybe he just sidled off.’

  ‘What? Him? Hans Strahl goes? And goddam Cate stays? Is this what you tell me?’

  ‘I stay, Bumpass,’ said Cate, and Usaph couldn’t make out whether he was joking or bitter, ‘because I got this view of history. I see that you and me, Bumpass, in all our present discomfort, are dead in the heart of history, like currants in a cake.’ He laughed a little, secretly. ‘Did you ever in your life hear, Bumpass, of an old battle called Cannae. Long ago and far away, boy. A general from North Africa called Hannibal got all round the Romans about lunchtime and scarce a poor suffering son of a bitch of them lived through the afternoon. History, Bumpass, history is a building whose goddam mortar is the blood of the young. History is a river, Bumpass, in which you and I are the fish. Have you caught a river perch, Bumpass, and when he lay panting wondered if he’d had a happy morning before you hauled him ashore? Did you wonder what his passions were, if he’d been near lady fish that day, what the poor son of a bitch had had for breakfast? Neither does God or history enquire such things of us, Bumpass. Yet without us, God and history would not be a river. That’s the puzzle, Bumpass, that keeps us here.’

  ‘Take care, Cate. Blasphemy ain’t easily forgiven jest on account of you having a fever when you utter it.’

  ‘Now the Yankees, Bumpass, down beneath that cloud are nameless as the 50,000 young Romans that Hannibal chewed up one afternoon. And you and I, we’re faceless as the boys of Hannibal’s infantry, as his goddam Celtic cavalry. But we have here, among us, a grand Presbyterian Hannibal, a goddam Confederate behemoth who’ll likely consume them thousands down there under the cloud before shop opening time. And you ask me, Bumpass, to give up observing the manners and tricks and ways of this behemoth, to give up my part in them … my place in the goddam river, Bumpass. You want me to go for a rest on a farm?’

  Usaph was so mad he kicked the bark of the tree nearest to sick Cate. ‘You tell me, Cate, you’re travelling around with us jest to see the circus? Goddamit, Cate, you ain’t even decent. Jest listen to me, Mr Clever. I ain’t going to carry your goddam musket or anything else of your truck. You understand that?’

  There was noise now in the forest, shouting, the thud of the lids of limber chests opening, the chink, chink of artillery horses stamping and sniffing the excitement of the gunners. As Usaph reached Gus and opened his mouth to speak, the most tremendous banging he had ever heard began. Confederate fire went down on the invisible village from four sides. From over on the other mountain top that showed above the cloud the blast and the flashes reached Usaph. Across the other side of the Shenandoah, John Walker’s artillery screamed on Loudoun Heights, and just over there beyond the place where the two rivers met, on top of the straight-up cliffs of Maryland, Lafayette McLaws had his guns working. Down on the lower ground, on both sides of the bank of the Shenandoah and to the south of town, Ambrose Hill’s boys were firing fair up the valley at the Yankee lines and at the sweet town itself.

  Gus and Usaph stared at each other. Gus looked amazed. How would he fit a noise like that into music?

  Down there by the Potomac, behind the long brick buildings of the old arsenal, there was a flutter of white on a flag-pole. Tom Jackson saw it through his field-glasses.

  ‘Tell me, Captain Pendleton. Can you spot a patch of white down there past the old superintendent’s house?’

  Sandie squinted. His war, like the general’s, had started here. He knew the little town well and could name all its old buildings. But although the cloud had cleared away, there was such a taint of purple powder smoke washing across the town and away over the Potomac on the wind from the south that it was hard to see much. Way over on the cliffs on the far side of the Shenandoah, a few batteries of Johnny Walker’s force stopped firing – they had seen the show of white too. But then they started up again.

  Tom Jackson stood on a hill within sight of the river and the town. But Ambrose Hill’s boys were closest of all to the village, and Tom Jackson was just about thinking of sending someone to ask Ambrose if he’d seen something, when Kyd Douglas came riding along, returning from that very same gentleman.

  Ambrose was back in command, but just for battles. The rest of the time he was under arrest. Kyd thought Ambrose’s boys had done fine work down there by the river; the Federal guns that faced them from behind mounds of dirt were just about silent now. But when Kyd spoke to him, Ambrose was sort of clipped and hostile like he abominated Tom Jackson and all his friends, not just plain disliked them.

  Anyhow Kyd was back at Stonewall’s hill now, back amongst friends. ‘That’s a white flag they’re showing, General,’ he was calling. ‘I don’t know whether it’s official or just a scared boy. But you can see it clear from down by the river. Canvas. A square. Cut maybe out of a tent.’

  Stonewall closed one eye and thought awhile. He could see there was scarcely more than two Federal guns flashing away down there.

  ‘Would you care to visit Harpers Ferry yourself, Mr Douglas?’

  ‘Visit Harpers Ferry, General?’

  ‘I would like you to ask the Federal commander what he means to do?’

  Then Tom Jackson closed his eyes chastely like a parson in a bar. Kyd Douglas wanted to shake him. Rejoice, he wanted to say. Jump up and down and whistle and strike your thigh. 13,000 Yankees are about to be yielded up to you!

  But Tom Jackson wasn’t about to whistle or slap his thigh.

  ‘I … I don’t have a flag of truce,’ said Kyd. His big white handkerchief was soiled and he was such a natty young man, he didn’t want to ride into a conquered town waving it.

  Sandie Pendleton, subduing a smile that had come to his lips, offered his. It was an immaculate white kerchief which, if you unfolded it, was just about as big as a battle flag. Kyd took it, fetched an officer of the Black Horse troop to ride down the hill and along Shenandoah Street with him and to wave the handkerchief. As he turned his horse away, he heard Stonewall.

  Stonewall Jackson was full of a wild impatience now, an impatience just about as hectic as Kyd’s. But he knew men didn’t exist to give way to such passions.

  Sitting there waiting, he asked the Lord to curb his, Tom Jackson’s, pride. The pride that made phrases like ‘brilliant manœuvres’ rise in his mind when he thought of what had been done around Harpers Ferry these past few days.

  Hard prayer can be as distracting to a man as solid vanity is, and he woke up all at once with a shock to the fact that all firing had stopped. Through his glasses he could see white flags all over the township now. From the balcony of an hotel on Shenandoah Street, above the river’s high bank and beyond some stilled and sullen Union cannon, sheets were being waved, and tablecloths, the whole linen supply of the establishment.

  Stonewall spurred his big new mare – the one who’d given him his bad leg – downhill on to the road towards the ferry. Hunter and Hotchkiss and Sandie tagged after, and the cavalry escort.

  2

  Searcy, half happy but his nerves strung out tight, sat on a rocky embankment just to the south of the village of Sharpsburg writing in his journal that Monday morning.

  He tried to write in an objective style, as if he had no stake in the outcome of whatever happened here on these low ridges, in these country lanes amongst the low hills. As if it was just another country skirmish that was shaping, he wrote slowly, squinting around at the foreign landscape. Anyone approaching him – and there were two men approaching him, even though he didn’t know it – would have noticed how relaxed he looked, a man doing a small, unimportant task on a humid day at the end of the summer.

  Inwardly, of course, he knew that these pleasant hills behind a stream called Antietam Creek had been chosen by whatever forces act in these matters, as the venue for one of this earth’s crucial fights – just as the same forces, half a century before, had picked out the environs of a Belgian village named Waterloo as the place where Wellington could stop the tyrant Napoleon.

  None of this crept into
Searcy’s notes.

  ‘Lee has chosen a fair place to make his stand,’ he wrote. ‘He is on a low ridge facing a creek called Antietam Creek. (This is pronounced by the locals with the accent on the “tie” – that is, Antietam.) Behind him, looping like a snake, some of its body only a mile back, two miles back in other cases, the Potomac flows. Beyond the Potomac is Virginia. Just behind the ridge, on its back slope, sits the little town of Sharpsburg, much much smaller than Frederick. Even whiter, more dreamy, the great American rural slumber. Population – I would guess – 500 souls. Green fields all round. Corn in big acreages. This arrival of the Army of Northern Virginia is the biggest thing that has happened here, so a local told me, since the wars against the French and the Indians in the days when the British and the Americans, friends then, had a fort here …’

  He always liked to sit on rocks to write. Later, long after the war, people who were asked to describe their memories of him, always remembered that. The sun was thin today. There’d been some mists earlier. Now and then he looked off to the east. If you looked hard at the forest a few miles beyond the Antietam, you could see the blue of Federal cavalry. You could see the dust clouds that meant infantry. The Army of Light were arriving and making their bivouacs. And all these staff officers whom Searcy had met at breakfast were talking about ole Mac’s unexpected spunk.

  But if there was one man Searcy despised it was McClellan. He had an image in his mind of the handsome square face and the lush, fashionable whiskers. Searcy wanted to get at him and shake till those whiskers flapped. He imagined meeting the general when the war was over and tongue-lashing him. ‘While I, sir, risked my skin, you dawdled around Maryland and made decisions only in office hours …’ That sort of thing.