Confederates (10 page)

8

It became a night of fireflies and mosquitoes. Gus Ramseur, the music master, had stopped raving. Usaph was schooled in the ways of fevers and knew that they were least high at the onset of dark. So he didn't ease off on his care; he went on now and then putting a flannel-wrapped hot brick into Gus's blankets, at the same time tormenting his own heart with the idea of Ephephtha and that conscript.

And they came at him all evening. Murphy and Judd, and that evil old man Bolly Quintard. ‘Nice news from your wife, Usaph?' ‘Nice news the conscript brang you, Usaph, from your own sweet spouse?' ‘What's your wife's opinion of conscripts, Private Bumpass?' He didn't answer them. At supper-time there was cornbread, baked crusty in the fire by Joe Murphy, and hanks of ham and good coffee. But when it was ready Usaph fetched his and took it to Gus Ramseur, and ate it beside Gus. He could see those others making ironic faces at each other. He thought, if Gus Ramseur don't come round, what will I do for gentle company? Even Danny Blalock, though a gentleman, seems to side with them.

After the meal one of the Irishmen got out his fiddle. He was some fiddler, that Irish boy. He had learned as a baby on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, playing in the public houses while the farmers danced. When he got to Newport News in 1858 and jumped his ship he found in Virginia the music he was used to in Dingle. For the music of Virginia was all Scots and Irish. He could play any air on the fiddle even if it had crazy Virginian words to it now in its new habitat, and a wild American name.

The fiddle he played tonight he'd found in a farmhouse near Gaines' Mill, and if the army moved again he'd no doubt leave it here in Thomas's pastures. But for a moment he hugged it and brought out its sound as if he had owned it from boyhood. He began with a tune they all liked, something like Dixie, with words they felt they had a right to sing.

‘We are the sons of ole Aunt Dinah

An' we go where we've got a mind ter,

An' we stay where we're inclined ter,

An' we don't care a damn cent.…'

Next he played the other sure-fire favourite, more sentimental, more restrained, making even brutes like Bolly think of soft women.

‘The years creep slowly by, Lorena,

The snow is on the ground again,

The sun's low down the sky, Lorena,

The frost gleams where the flowers have been,

But the heart throbs on as warmly now,

As when the summer days are nigh.'

Men holding their shirts over the campfires, singeing the greyback lice, sang and let the tears fall down their cheeks. Just because lice inhabited your armpits and made a city in your crotch didn't go to say you had no soul left at all.

‘That song,' said Danny Blalock, when the whole six verses were finished, ‘was written by a Trappist monk in Kentucky.' He could always give you that kind of information.

‘A monk you say?' Bolly murmured. ‘A goddam monk?'

‘He became a monk in Kentucky when his girl married another man. In no time the other man died and left her a widow. But it was too late then.'

Bolly whistled. Then he turned onto his other elbow and called to Usaph, ‘You might jest encourage that conscript feller to enlist with the monk, Usaph.'

The trouble was the humour was too low to answer. Usaph saved up his rancour for the conscript Cate.

When Bumpass didn't answer, the others just forgot him and sat there trading their usual stories of hot widows and wartime adulteries. Ashabel Judd told how he had gone out into the Pendleton County Hills looking for the tracks of a stag. ‘Christmas, two year back. And like a dang fool I ventured too far and had to find a house to bide the night. Well, the houses in Pendleton are few and I found this quiet place, no paint, mountain trash, you know the manner of people they might be. Well, that door was opened by a wild red-haired widder. There was just herself and her poor simple sister.…'

‘Oh, you service simple gals, do you, Ash Judd?' Murphy asked him.

But Ash was shaking his head, and there was something true about the way all bravado had vanished from his tale. ‘No,' he said, ‘Not the simple gal. Not her, poor thing.'

‘I,' said Murphy, ‘once met a girl in a field near Charlottesville.' He lowered his voice as if it were all a secret, but it wasn't so secret Usaph couldn't hear it. ‘I'd gone off looking for chickens and found herself culling early berries – she had, oh my dear Lord, sweet fingers. After I'd rode her bare-assed in edge of the woods, right there in the goddam sedge-grass, she says to me without blushing, d'you know Sergeant So-and-So my dear husband. He's Captain So-and-so's right hand in the 3rd Virginia, except it wasn't the 3rd Virginia, if you take my meaning, it was a regiment closer to home than the 3rd, but I ain't intending to specify further which one. Right there, off pat, with my fresh spunk in her, she says it.' Murphy adopted a feminine voice. ‘D'you know my dear husband Sergeant So-and-so …'

‘All right, all right,' called Usaph, sweating freely, wanting to
know
, that was all. Wanting to know. Never wanting to know. ‘The story's taken, for God's sake, the story's understood!'

And that made Ash and Bolly hoot and Murphy look mean.

Looking away, Usaph saw the fiddler studying the huddle of conscripts. The man began signalling with his eyes and eyebrows to someone, and the thin young conscript, maybe eighteen, that he'd shown an interest in earlier, stood up and walked over to the place the fiddler was playing and sat down near him. The fiddler and the boy stared at each other for some ten seconds until all around them disgusted hisses and grunts started to rise. There might have been some arguments about that kind of behaviour if it hadn't happened that all over the bivouac other fiddles were starting up, and from the 5th Virginia's camp site a little distance away a battery of tin whistles swelled the sound, for the 5th Virginia was all Irish.

It seemed to the tormented Usaph that everyone but him began singing ‘Just Before The Battle, Mother'. But they used the words that made a mock of the song.

‘Just before the battle, mother,

I was drinking mountain dew.

When I saw the Yankees marching,

To the rear I quickly flew,

O I long to see you, mother,

And the loving ones at home,

That's why I'm skedaddling southwards,

While there's still flesh on my bones.…'

The fiddler could tell that the evening was spoiling on him. Just because the others didn't like him giving favours to a conscript. So he went on to a real spell-binder. ‘All Quiet Along the Potomac', written in the North but imported South in smuggled copies of
Harper's
. It was – as boys said – ‘one of them songs against officers'.

‘All quiet along the Potomac, they say,

Except now and then a stray picket

Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,

By a rifleman hid in the thicket.

'Tis nothing, a private or two now and then

Will not count in the news of the battle;

Not an officer lost – only one of the men,

Moaning out, all alone, the death rattle …'

Under cover of the general absorption provided by this anthem, Usaph put another brick in Gus's blankets and moved quietly across the meadow to the loveless corner where the conscripts sat, talking low, eating their grits and cornbread. He tried to keep out of the light of their fires, just in case Bolly and the others saw him, and he called as he walked: ‘Cate! Cate!' All conscripts who weren't Cate averted their eyes.

Cate was out of the firelight, sitting against Thomas's railing fence. It was a bright enough night for Usaph to recognise the tattered clothes Cate was wearing as Murphy's old rags, minus of course Murphy's Southern Comfort Society shirt. Usaph was pleased to see Cate humbled in the Irishman's lousy tatters.

‘You itching, Cate?'

‘I've killed all the lice in these rags, Mr Bumpass,' said Cate quietly. ‘There was – I can tell you – a multitude of them.'

‘And they'll come back. Their eggs're still probably there in the threads. Just when you get a bit hot on the march and your body gets foul, they'll come back – young 'uns – in their hosts.'

But he couldn't understand why he talked lice. Lice could bite Cate's balls down to a stump and it would mean nothing to Usaph if the man had already had Ephephtha Bumpass.

‘Get up, Cate. I want a word of you.'

Cate looked up at him with a species of wary irony.

‘You don't want to sit by me here? None of your friends will see.…'

‘Oh sweet Jesus, I tell you, friend, get up here now and jest follow in my tracks.'

Cate obeyed, though like all such men he had a way of making his obedience seem one way or another an insult. Usaph itched and it was not entirely his own population of lice. It was the itch that comes from knowing you can't win against a particular man, that you might never get replies that satisfy you.

He led Cate over the zigzag fence;

Through a line of oaks they got to the entrance avenue of Thomas's plantation. Fireflies winked nicely amongst the foliage of the oaks.

‘Let me tell you something first, Cate, I don't want no funny answers. Do you catch my drift?'

Cate seemed to fluff up in front of his eyes, the way a turkey does. Is the man crazy? Usaph thought Ephie couldn't really tell the difference. Ephie would just as like think crazy was clever.

‘I give funny answers only to funny men,' the conscript answered, like an actor in a travelling play. ‘Men like your friends. Don't you think I knew how to slip that letter to you, that you wouldn't want it to come to you in public and by the hand of a conscript? Do you think I'm blind to your code, sir?'

Usaph had the terrible feeling that what Cate said was all mockery, but you couldn't be sure, because the conscript frowned while he talked, like an earnest man. It was just there was nothing to grab on to in his manner. He was about half a hand taller than Usaph and bent over him, looking hollow-cheeked and solemn as a travelling preacher foretelling doom. But you couldn't help noticing a sort of unheard laughter from somewhere in the area of the son-of-a-bitch.

Usaph said low: ‘You know nothing of my code, sir. Keep your goddam tongue off my code.'

‘As you say, Bumpass.'

They kept silent for a while. The bits of song came to them still. The army sounds so goddam contented, Usaph thought. I happen to have enough goddam heartburn to give a ration to everyone, to make every man goddam heavy at heart.

‘How do you know my wife, Mrs Ephephtha Bumpass?' Usaph asked suddenly, as if Ephie herself had said nothing of it in her letter.

‘Why, I painted her. I'm a travelling portraitist, a limner of quality with prices according. Your aunt met the bill though. She likes Ephephtha – Mrs Bumpass.'

‘You don't mean my Aunt Sarrie gave you a record of her likes and dislikes?'

Cate thought about this. There were a lot of cogitative flexings of his hollow jaws. ‘Well, she displayed what might be called suspicion at first. But we got to … well,
respect
each other.'

‘How long was it my wife sat while you put the paint on?'

‘Well, I would say it must have been eight days all told,' said Cate, bunching his eyes up, calculating. ‘A portrait can't be put together quick, Mr Bumpass. Oh, I know your average mean rural portraitist might do a likeness in two days. But the genuine article is not to be rushed.'

‘I hope as sure as yesterday's sun that there was none of that Union talk you come out with this day. I hope, and may I say, Decatur Cate, your goddam life hangs on it, that you never spoke your goddam black Republican thoughts to my bride.'

‘Do I look like it, Private Bumpass? Do I look the species of man who'd tamper with the political fancies of a good woman?'

In the dark under the oaks, Usaph trembled. But I won't hit him yet, he thought. I'll let the son-of-a-bitch come to a head.

Cate heard Usaph's grunting and fuming. ‘I am in a fix, Private Bumpass, sir. Nothing can I say that doesn't hit you like an insult. And through no fault of mine. Am I guilty in carrying a letter from wife to husband? Are the mails of this Confederacy so prompt that I shouldn't be used to carry a letter?'

Usaph waited, still breathing noisily through his nose.

‘You are,' Cate went on more quietly, ‘a man I am not and may never be. You are a man beloved of a sublime woman, sir.'

It seemed to be time to punish the conscript. Usaph pushed Cate against the trunk of a plantation oak. Because of the man's excessive beanpole height, Usaph had to raise his elbow somewhat to trap the artist's throat against the bark. He listened to the man gagging and it gave him an uncharacteristic pleasure.

‘How'd you come to fetch up with this regiment of all regiments, you whoreson, you pig's ass? How come this very company? How come?'

He was surprised Cate
could
answer, had the calmness to answer straight.

‘They told us,' said Cate, coughing in a manner that sounded stagy to Usaph, ‘they told us in Staunton that we was natural enough meant as new blood for this Shenandoah regiment.' Cate raised his eyes and there was still that sort of mockery in them, Usaph thought, but it still wasn't the kind you could be sure about and all it did was key up your hollow anger. ‘I couldn't believe my good fortune … since I meant to hand the letter in person. Then when the officer wrote me down for C Company, I swapped my place there with a boy … one who'd got written down for Guess's Company and didn't care either way.'

‘Why? Why in hell's name did you do that?'

Cate stared straight at Usaph, in a dead level way for once, and the eyes were sort of bleak. ‘I knew no one else. Not a soul, Bumpass.'