At two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, Lee made up his mind. The army should depart Maryland that night, leaving their campfires burning. Jeb Stuart’s cavalry would screen the exodus and the reserve artillery of Sandie Pendleton’s father would be placed on the banks of the Potomac to stop the river-crossers being molested.
At the hour Lee made his decision Usaph was getting his first ride in a waggon. His wrist in a linen sling he had made himself, he lolled in a fever on the tailboard of an ambulance bound for Leetown, Virginia, where surgeons were waiting. He meant to slip off that tailboard and dart away before any surgeon could get a sight of him. At first when he had waved at the driver, the man said there was no room for him, but had softened, reined in, inspected his load and found two dead boys in the straw-filled inside of the vehicle. He laid them by the road under a blanket for cavalry to bury.
Riding, Usaph did not listen to the mutterings from the interior of the conveyance. He like Lee was in a state of decision. His decision was to reach the Valley pike by tomorrow noon and to sleep in Winchester tomorrow night. He needed nothing to eat, he told himself. His canteen which was still at his left side unpunctured was full of the waters of the Potomac. He thought of nothing except the hundred miles and more he had to travel to Ephie. His decision to travel was locked up hard and dry as a stone in his brain.
There was a third American harried by decision that particular Thursday afternoon. Abe Lincoln. Because he could just about get away now with calling the fight along the Antietam a victory, he had the chance to issue that edict about the slaves without looking ridiculous. In his office in the White House he first read over the reports of the engagement that had come in from McClellan. In a covering letter, McClellan had written: ‘Even Lee admits he’s been beaten.’
‘I wonder who in tarnation he admitted that to?’ Mr Lincoln asked John Hay. Neither of them respected George McClellan, but he had given the document they had prepared months before about freeing the slaves its only legitimacy. So they set to work revising it. They’d been careful not to make it wordy, so that it now sounded like a statement of a reluctant duty. They knew the opposition in cabinet would come from Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, native of Missouri. He’d rattled the old sword about how the border states, Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky, wouldn’t stand for it. ‘You remind me of a man out west,’ Lincoln had said in cabinet one day to Montgomery Blair. He was always telling cabinet members they reminded him of a ‘man out west’, by which he meant Illinois. ‘He’s got two oxen in yoke, and they’re pulling a waggon he’s got loaded up with hay. And one of the oxen just dies, like that, in the yoke. And hours later the man’s friend comes along that road and sees the man sitting on the stock-still waggon with one live oxen and one dead. And the friend says, Why don’t you take that dead one out of its chains and then just continue the journey. And the man on the waggon says, The load is too heavy for just one ox. So for all I know, Mr Blair, that man might be on that road still.’
Well, the dead oxen was the institution of slavery in the border states, Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland. The live one was the impulse to free black people, an impulse so strong in so many parts of the Union. That impulse alone was strong enough now to drag the loaded waggon.
The document, as Mr Lincoln and John Hay revised it that afternoon, said that if the Confederacy didn’t cease its rebellion by New Year’s Day, all slaves in the rebellious states would be considered free. In Southern areas occupied by the Army of the North, their freedom would become immediately real on that grand New Year’s Day, the Day of Jubilo. Slaves elsewhere would need to wait until their counties were liberated or until the Rebels gave in.
Abe Lincoln knew how this document would get them thinking in the Foreign Office in London. In one corner of his brain he knew too that there was a general on the Mississippi, a more or less successful one and that made him a rare breed. Ulysses Grant. Grant kept writing to the President that the work of slaves was the core strength of the South. This was because he’d had to punch his way through levees and along canals all dug by slaves. If slaves should find out Abe Lincoln considered them free, they wouldn’t work so well as diggers of tough fortifications and all the rest.
When the draft was ready, Hay had confidential copies written out and sent all over Washington to the houses of the Lincoln cabinet. Abe sat at his desk reading a copy of his favourite humorist’s latest book – Artemus Ward; His Book – just recently published and selling like cakes. He was reading this belly-thumper of a chapter called ‘Outraj’ous Behaviour in Utika’. It was about some citizens of Utica, New York, who smashed up a visiting wax show of The Last Supper because they didn’t hold with Judas visiting their town. Abe decided that when the cabinet met next Monday, he would read them a bit of Ward to loosen them up before they made their comments on the text of emancipation.
11
On the afternoon of September 24 that year, the black woman Bridie who belonged to Aunt Sarrie and knew nothing about the intentions Mr Abe Lincoln had for her, went out on the porch to fetch in a mat she’d been sunning out there. The valley was full of that blue autumn shadowiness, but she could see clear enough a ragged man standing still at the gate. The man wore his wrist in a foul linen sling and stood there wavering a little on his legs but with his feet fixed in place.
Bridie thought of shooing him off on her own authority but then wondered if she should maybe speak to one of them white ladies.
There was no speaking to Mrs Ephie Bumpass. Mrs Bumpass was up in her room having more of the vapours. Just ten days back she had lost her child. Miscarried as Aunt Sarrie called it. Bridie had had to bear away the stillborn little lump and Montie, her husband, dug for it a decent but nameless little pit. That had been done on Aunt Sarrie’s orders. Ephie had been too ill and in too sore distress to know what was happening. Though Bridie and Montie knew whose child it was, Aunt Sarrie didn’t even have to warn them about keeping their tongues still about it.
Since that misfortune – or whatever else you’d call it – Mrs Ephie Bumpass had been low at heart and wistful and full of shame. She felt that the women of the house were judging her. Well, that was true. Bridie judged her. Hard. But Bridie also knew that Aunt Sarrie, the real power, had decided to forget all about it, for ever, the way the forgiving Lord pretends that the sinner’s sin doesn’t exist once that sinner just turns a second to the Lord Jesus.
Anyhow, seeing the scarecrow at the gate, Bridie went to seek Aunt Sarrie for instructions. Aunt Sarrie was in the back garden among her beanpoles shelling green peas. She put down the bowl as soon as Bridie told her and went through the house to the porch, treading softly in case Ephie was asleep.
Out of the same consideration, she did not call to the man from the porch itself, she went halfway down the path. From there she could tell the man was quivering about the shoulders in a way that reminded her … yes, of a man quietly weeping.
It was a slow business for her to get to the conclusion that this was a wounded soldier and that those were military tatters. It was slower still to get to the fact that it was Usaph. First there was the unkempt whiskers to see past, then the dirt, then the lousy clothes. Fragments of the gunpowder with which Usaph had adorned himself at the urgings of the late Lafcadio Wheat still stuck in the seams of his skin. His hair, light-brown when he left home, had gone black with clotted mud and maybe even blood. He was leaner than his aunt had ever seen him. He had the pinched face of the very ill.
When it dawned, she ran up to him. But the mystery of how he’d got this way stopped her a yard short. She could smell him too. He smelt of urine and bowel dirt and the foul sweat of an entire summer. She could see the tears making mud on his filthy cheeks. The mess of black bandage on his left arm shocked her.
‘Aunt Sarrie,’ he said, and it sounded as if the words caused him pain. ‘You got coffee at all?’
She started shedding tears too and she touched his right arm, but he looked such a mess that she forebore to car
ess him in case it hurt him too bad. She was already accustomed to his stench.
‘Yeah, darling Usaph,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I got coffee. Come.’ She led him up to the house by the right hand. As they passed Bridie, Bridie recognised him. She began to wail. ‘Oh I never seen a nigger look so bad! Oh I never!’
In the front parlour Aunt Sarrie steered him for the sofa. ‘Lice,’ he said. He nodded his head, indicating the length of his body. ‘Lice.’
‘If lice get at the sofa, why I’ll burn it, Usaph. To hell with the sofa! Bridie, get him maybe buttermilk. And brew coffee.’
From her bed Ephie heard the noise of some small domestic emergency and came out of her room and stood at the head of the stairs.
‘Aunt Sarrie!’ she called.
Aunt Sarrie came to the foot of the stairs, looked up all solemn at Ephie.
‘Mrs Bumpass,’ she said, almost like someone passing sentence, ‘your husband has come. He’s in something approaching a state. You’ll find him in the parlour.’
Bridie’s husband Montie came in from the barn and began wailing like his wife at the sight of this poor man. Ephie too, coming in, was blinded by the stench of Usaph, but part from remorse and part from love and pity, forced a head down on his lousy thighs, crooning: ‘Oh, Usaph, my darling husband, my poor man.’ From the back landing ole Liza, Usaph’s slave, already in her mind if not in her body passed over into the land beyond Jordan, increased the volume of her ancient song as if she somehow knew.
So in that parlour, the three women and the slave man took Usaph’s clothes off – it was Montie’s job to burn them – and sponged him with warm water and gave him drink and wrapped him naked in blankets. The wound they dared not touch, but sent Montie over to Goshen with an urgent note for a Doctor Benson who lived there.
This doctor got back after dark with Montie. He cut the wood-hard bandages away that the Quakers had put on Usaph, and whistled as he looked at the swollen wound, and then lanced it to let the pus out, and said it seemed fit. He gave Usaph a draught of laudanum that put him to sleep for twelve hours.
‘Feed him,’ the doctor told Ephie.
‘Oh yes, I sure will, sir,’ said Ephie.
Ephie sat up all night and sometimes, when they were sure that Usaph’s sleep was deep and his breath deep and steady, she would go to the kitchen to have a cup of coffee with Aunt Sarrie, who could not have slept tonight anyhow.
‘Well, your husband’s home, gal,’ Aunt Sarrie said.
‘And I praise God, I do, ma’am. It’s more than I ever merited.’
‘You don’t say that. You been a stupid gal by my lights, but don’t go looking for punishment. I think that you make a good woman, Ephie, all taken in. But you’re a beautiful and kind of lusty gal, not that that’s any excuse. But it makes things harder.’
Ephie was blushing but so happy to hear Aunt Sarrie forgiving her her transgressions. Now she wanted Usaph to have her, oh so badly, but we must wait for the muck to drain and the flesh to heal. But it’s hard, Lord, hard. She dug her fingers through her dress into the flesh above her left knee. It was just a little way to give vent to both her happiness and her desire.
Of course, the happiness she felt wasn’t quite the whole hog of happiness. Usaph had either to be told of the baby or to have it kept secret from him. And Ephie’s urge was to tell him.
Before she could say so, Aunt Sarrie forestalled her.
‘I can see it in you though, you silly gal, that you have this itch to let him know of the child you carried. Well, you know by now that itches ain’t there to be attended to too willingly. You are to forget that child, I tell you. You’re not to start indulging your queer idea of what is truthful by mentioning anything of that child to Usaph. Mister Lincoln done his best, gal, to kill the poor boy. Don’t you join in that damned effort. You understand me?’
He woke up weeping. Ephie was sitting by him. It was the third night she’d sat by him.
‘What troubles you, my love?’ Ephie whispered.
‘I don’t know where they’re buried,’ said Usaph. For he had dreamed something confused, that the bodies of Gus and Wheat and Judd and that strange little drummer Rufe had not been justly treated.
His dream had foundation; for when the Yankee burial parties moved into the farmyard they threw Rebel bodies down that well from which the pump had been blown off. The farmer had argued about it with the Yankee officer, but since the well was already fouled, he decided he might be as wise to fill it up with dead Rebels for a contract price, and seal it over with stones, and then dig another well just up the hill a little. So he went to Union General Hooker and got a contract price of $1 per head for each Confederate corpse he slung down his well.
Into that pit then went Texans and Wheat and the drowned Ash Judd and Gus Ramseur for whose music the world would now wait, and Rufe the Arkansas drummer. And from that mute place they called out in Usaph’s sleep. But as he got better and more distant from them, their cries and his own diminished.
There was still the problem of his connection with the army. Ole Cap’n Stilwell, the conscription official for Bath County, came round to Aunt Sarrie’s to take his name so that his place of residence and the nature of his wound could be conveyed to the War Office in Richmond.
‘You need building up, boy,’ said Cap’n Stilwell. ‘I think we should keep you here till spring.’
Ephie smiled in gratitude. But Usaph looked at his hands and his face turned red, as if he had decided never to go back, as if somehow the old officer’s kindness was an insult.
He had the sweetest and most wistful Christmas of his life that year and the balm of Ephie’s body made him weep as he lay beside her, and his last doubts of her were diminished by that, and he was already on the way to forgetting Cate for ever (if that was possible).
In the spring he went back to the army, which was upon the Rappahannock round Fredericksburg, the town where the Confederates under their old General Lee had had a great Christmas victory over the Army of the Potomac under their new general Burnside. Danny Blalock, having got out of his cellar, was up at Fredericksburg and had become an officer. He found a place for Usaph to sleep in a little winter-dwelling dug into the earth and roofed with canvas and boughs. It was cosy enough by the standards of the Army of Northern Virginia, but within a month, Usaph caught pneumonia and was sent to Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond. His lungs would remain wheezy the rest of his life.
In May of 1863 he was discharged and caught the train to Staunton, where Ephie met him and danced him to a good hotel. There they ate and drank as well as you could in an embattled nation.
They had four children in the end. All of them got to adulthood. One of the boys became a lawyer, the other a farmer, and there were two girls.
Usaph died of a lung condition in 1873 when his eldest child, his daughter, was eleven.
Ephie married again three years later to a man called Bridges, a Democratic Senator in the State House of Virginia, who saw her at a political social one evening in Staunton and loved her beyond all cure. Bridges ended life as a U.S. Congressman in 1903, but Ephie lived till 1922, and every year on the anniversary of Usaph’s death put a notice about him in the Richmond Enquirer, how he never got over the damage he suffered doing his duty, and how loved he was.
Of the other survivors of that summer, Danny Blalock died at Gettysburg, a major by then. In a Pennsylvania hospital, Cate mended stubbornly. His father had got him exempted from imprisonment on the condition that he took an oath of loyalty to the Union. This he did with a full heart. His wounds had however castrated him and this, and the lack of a foot, made him a bitter young man. He left Philadelphia for Paris in 1866 on the pretext that he was going to study art, and lived there off an allowance from his father, with a series of woman companions, for five years. In 1870 he completed a two-volume novel which he published himself in Paris. The French compositors made a mess of it when they set the type.
In 1871, the day after his 23-year-old Fren
ch companion left his apartment in Montparnasse, he shot himself. Neither Usaph nor Ephie ever heard of what had happened to him.
The Honourable Horace Searcy caught the Calliope after first despatching a scalding account of the Dora Whipple affair to The Times. In 1863 he wrote a narrative of his journeys in the South and admitted in it his connection with Secretary Stanton. He attended and spoke at British meetings in support of the Union cause and the emancipation of the slaves.
Although to the average American he seemed a characteristic stiff Briton, he had never enjoyed his destiny as the younger son of an English peer. In 1867 he emigrated to Canada, made money in railroad and mineral stocks, bought into iron in northern Michigan. He did not marry until 1882, by which time he was a Liberal member of the Canadian Parliament.
He had a statue of Mrs Whipple built in the market place of Langport, the town in Somerset which Dora Whipple’s forebears had left to settle in Boston. He lived long, and as he got richer, wrote less and less.
On May 2, 1863, while Usaph was still in Chimborazo with lung trouble, Tom Jackson was wounded in the arm by a Confederate horseman on the evening of one of his best days. He had led his corps fair round General Hooker’s flank at Chancellorsville. The rout of the Yankees was complete by dusk, and then one of his own cavalrymen shattered his arm by accident. Hunter Maguire took the arm off in the parlour of the Chandlers’ house in Chancellorsville, but pleural pneumonia set in. Maguire applied heated cups to the right side and administered antimony and opium. Stonewall’s wife, Anna Morrison, came up from North Carolina to nurse him. On her way to the Chandlers’ she saw soldiers digging by the side of the road. She realised they were exhuming a coffin. When she asked them they told her it was the body of General Paxton, an old Lexington friend of hers, shot dead just a week past and now being dug up to be shipped home to Rockbridge County. The sight struck Mrs Jackson with a terrible fear.