Confederates (27 page)

‘You'd say so, would you? But this-here war has a way of claiming people. Of taking their lives over, you get my meaning? What do you mean to do when it goes and takes your life over, Mr Cate?'

‘God forgive me, ma'am, I am not one for killing my brother Christians. I intend to go to California soon enough.'

‘Oh, California.'

Yes, and I intend to take Mrs Bumpass with me
.

About this time Ephie Bumpass began to write a letter to her campaigning husband. It took her so long. She sat there at the table, wincing in her struggles with spelling, seeming so consumed that Cate felt a rage of jealousy and wished he
was
a soldier of Pennsylvania, since that might give him a chance of shooting this unknown Private Bumpass.

15

Joe Nunnally had spent the two days after the battle round Cedar Run in that state of hellish anguish that comes after your first fight. He wouldn't eat the hardtack and the green corn and fritters Cate made up over the fire. It wasn't that it was poor food. It had some savour for a boy of his years. Yet he, never one for undue washing, had got this strange feeling that the world had lost its cleanness and honesty now, and he had lost his too.

Now he knew he was supposed to take his pain of soul to the adjutant, Major Dignam, who'd been a Methodist preacher in the Valley. But
this
pain was something a Methodist preacher couldn't touch or talk away;
this
was a pain which couldn't be explained.

Cate had been ill in the stomach himself these past days and had little enough taste for food. ‘I know what you're undergoing there, Joe,' he would say, but he didn't talk further. He couldn't explain this feeling in the normal Cate manner, in the way he'd explained to Joe everything that had happened since they'd been conscripted in Staunton. The reason was he was going through it himself, Joe could tell, and
he
had no power over it either. So there was no way Cate could tell Joe Nunnally to be calm, that it was all just the big forces of history working away, and if you let them big wheels grind, and sat small and easy on their rim, you might escape being mashed down to pap by them. Since the battle Cate'd been pale as a sick aunt and looked like he couldn't crawl out of the way of one of them great wheels if they was to come rolling across the encampment fields right now.

‘Sure, I know what you're undergoing there, Joe. But everyone's got a right to feed himself,' Cate would say, chewing drily and without joy, and then staggering up and away into the undergrowth. Cate knew that part of the problem was that Joe had a talent prized much in that country – he could see what he was hitting, he hit what he aimed for. Well, it was a talent that was devouring its host right at the moment.

Joe's family were timber-cutters and kept a few cows in the deep green hills of Raleigh County. They cut all the hardwood that grew in those hills, the richest hardwood hills in the world according to what mayors and Democratic politicians always told the people of Beckley. Joe Nunnally's father and later Joe Nunnally himself felled tulip and locust, gum, hickory, magnolia and ash and maple. They felled oak and walnut and cherry and beech and buckeye, sycamore, birch, willow – and they could have had a hundred more types of trees to choose from and still stayed poor working for the Beckley Mills.

Joe's father had always needed to hire some local man to help him with the crosscut, but when Joe got to be twelve years or so he was more useful already than the sort of poor drunken hill-farmer who was all his daddy could afford to pay.

What happened in Joe's family is a common story in timber-cutting families. The boy is working with his daddy, the old horse, shaggy-coated, bought by the father in better and more hopesome days, and older than the boy himself, is hauling on a chain-pulley to lift a log from the ground. The father and son are by to guide the log on to its cradle on the waggon. The horse dies in its traces, like that, in mid-grunt you could say. The log falls, slowed in that it has to pull the dead horse with it but fast enough to put the father on the ground and crush his chest there in front of the boy.

It is spring and there are lots of deer in the Appalachians, deer and elk and foxes, so the family does not starve, given that the boy has a magical aiming eye. So, while there's game in the woods, the family have meat. But there's things the poorest family has to get in by winter. The boy needs to sell the timber and so he needs a new horse. He can't sell timber till he has a new horse and he can't have a new horse till he sells timber. It's a human enough fix, and the boy knows it.

Then, at the start of May, he goes to Beckley to ask the mill-owner to advance the horse money against future deliveries of logs and there's a man there, sitting outside the Renny House in a wicker chair, who comes up, talks to him, and buys him a drink in the parlour. And given that the drink is strong and the boy is young, there's a lot of talk about mutual problems.

‘You need a horse,' says the man. ‘Well I've got a son who's been poorly all his days, otherwise he
might
be in the army of the Confederacy. Mind you now, I don't think we mountain people have so much to thank the Commonwealth of Virginia for. Goddamit, ain't it the truth, Mr Nunnally, that it's easier for us mountain folks to get to New Orleans than to Richmond. The abysmal goddam roads, Mr Nunnally, the abysmal goddam roads! I mean, you just catch an Ohio ferry say in Parkersburg and you can be in Cairo, Illinois, in three days, and in New Orleans in eight. Or so it was in happier days, Mr Nunnally. So it was.

‘That aside, Mr Nunnally, my boy wouldn't last more than two weeks in a goddam camp with them boys of no refinement all round him. Now I'd be willing to pay for a good substitute for him. I'd be willing to go up to $50 or more to find him a stand-in. Could you get a horse for round about that, think you, suitable for your line of work? Mind you, boy, you wouldn't be round to work the horse for a while. But then even the Wheeling papers says this difference between the States ain't going to last too much beyond the first fall of snow. Britain … Britain, Mr Nunnally, … has her interests. How old are you, Mr Nunnally?'

‘I'm fifteen years, sir.'

‘I think,' the man said, ‘that for $60 you could say you were eighteen years. What do you say?'

‘I'd say eighteen years,' said Joe.

So Joe Nunnally got $60 and bought a horse with 30 of it, for his mother could make some money hiring it out. The rest of the cash was hid under a rock by a spring the family drew their water from. For there'd been tales of boys accepting substitute money like that, because they had sickly parents or one parent gone, and the bounty would feed a family for a year. And when the boys were gone and sworn in, the men who'd paid the money would come round to the family house and bully the cash back out of the folks.

Now, as the man had said to Joe Nunnally, the mountain people didn't have a lot to be grateful to Richmond for. The roads were bad, you had to go to big towns for the schools. Because the tidewater people counted their slaves in the population when it came to sending men to the State House, the mountains where there were few slaves didn't have representatives in the numbers they should. Mountain Democrats thumping tubs in Beckley would say such things as: ‘Goddamit, they don't count their slaves as human unless it comes to doing us out of a seat in the Capitol at Richmond. To keep us from our proper power, they'd count a goddam opossum on the rolls!'

You found that the people in the Shenandoah Valley were for Virginia, but as you got into the mountains beyond the Valley, and across into the wild valley of the Kanawha, you met more and more people hostile to the Confederacy. The Nunnallys were, by temperament, hostile to it, but in a way typical of the mountain poor. They did not believe it worth fighting for either Union or Confederacy. They knew they'd be as poor under either. It was in their memory, their grandfathers had told them, that mountain men had been as poor under George III as under George Washington. It wasn't expected ever to change.

Yet these mountain politics had little part in Joe's decision to run. Joe was running out of horror, Joe was running for his soul. Sure, he'd hide in central Virginia till the army passed on. He'd take his Springfield. God Almighty, with this Springfield musket he had he could frighten off any recruiting man or sheriff who came up into the Nunnallys' hills. There were all manner of relatives up there who'd be helpful in frightening government agents. And the man Joe had met in the Renny House had had his goddam value from his $60 already. It didn't matter to the man in the Renny House whether a substitute deserted. Even if it did, he could buy another one.

Anyhow there wasn't any choice. The God who had placed man in the earth, in the rich hardwood hills, would deny him air if he stayed here in this evil column.

Deserting was simple. Green corn and green apples had kept the bowels of Jackson's army in their accustomed state of flux. It was easy to break ranks with or without asking an officer. The affliction was sudden and could not often bide the asking of permission. Even harsh men like Captain Guess, even Lucius Taber knew that.

There'd even been a story going round about young Lucius, as a matter of fact. He had a plague of diarrhoea the morning they marched up to Cedar Run and, lest anyone think that the unseemly stains on his britches were marks of fright, he'd lined (so the rumour had it) his seat with three back numbers of
De Bow's Review
.

Anyhow, when Joe Nunnally peeled off out of line at two on the morning of August 14 just to the south of Barnett's Ford on the Rapidan, where forest stretched away to the east, he was taking advantage of the universal disease. Getting behind a tree, he slipped sideways towards another and then was gone from sight. He was moving east first of all, since he knew home was west and thought that if they hunted for him at all, they would hunt that way. He would hide east for a few weeks till all of the two devilish machines of North and South had gone their way up or down the road, or sideways or outflanking each other to hell and back. He knew he had to watch for cavalry, but his hearing was refined, he was sure he could sidestep anything he might meet.

At dawn he began to feel cleaner and happier. He went to sleep right in a thicket of poison ivy at the bottom of Clark's Mountain. He was sure he was safe there, and he'd always had this virtue against poison ivy, he could roll in it without it harming him. He would often roll in it to amuse his brothers and sisters, even though his mother said you could lose your virtue against poison ivy like
that
! There was nothing like the sting people then got from it, people who up to then hadn't felt any harm from the plant. Well, that might be true, but virtue over poison ivy was a nice talent to have on a morning when two armies were over the land, and when it was a nice point which of them meant you the more harm.

He stayed all that night and half the next day in the woods, eating his rations cold. By the next breakfast his hardtack would be gone, and his corn wasn't fit for the hogs anyhow. He moved so slow that it was noon on his second day when he saw the farmhouse Ash Judd and Danny Blalock had visited some five days back. From the trees, he saw crippled Arlan come down the steps and stumble away to the barn. He saw Arlan's mother at a window upstairs, lifting her throat in the still air as if she expected a breeze. Arlan returned to the house after some quarter of an hour. What had he been doing in the barn? Maybe he had a jug of whisky out there.

Later in the day, the big woman came down into the garden, talking nonsense to the chickens that skittered away from her. It made Joe grievously homesick to hear the sweet nonsense she spoke. She got a stool and milked the cow expertly, sighing sometimes and talking to the animal like it was a fellow sufferer, and then she took the pail back into the house. In the late afternoon both she and the cripple sat at their ease on the porch, saying very little to each other. It was as the woman rose to go indoors and make supper, that Joe chose to come out of the forest. The boy picked up a shotgun that must have been at his feet, and the woman looked at Joe sidewise as he came to their gate.

‘Not to trouble you, ma'am, sir. I wonder … well, I wonder if you could spare me any of your victuals. I've a mite of cash.'

Arlan's shotgun wavered in arms that lacked the strength to hold it firm. But his voice, though slurred, was sharp. ‘What say
you
, maw? What say
you
to soldiers who come up to the gate asking to be fed? What say
you
to soldiers' mites, maw?'

The mother did not move her head. Looking more at Arlan than at Joe, she sighed. ‘You a deserter, boy?'

‘No, ma'am. I'm a one-year man and my one year is now past. I'm free now, ma'am, to find my way home. But I confess I want to keep to quiet places while the armies're round about. I don't want to be re-enlisted no more, on account my pappy died and I have to go home to fell timber to keep maw and the brats.'

‘What's your name, boy?' Arlan asked him in a poisonous voice.

‘You had a bad time with soldiers, have you, sir?'

‘Never mind
bad times
. What's your goddam name?'

Joe only then decided to lie, and only on account of the vicious way Arlan was talking. ‘My name is Usaph Bumpass, sir.'

‘And you say you ain't a deserter, Bumpass?'

‘I'm a one-year man, sir. Set your eyes on my uniform. There's a year's wear in this.' It was true, because he had had his new clothes taken and been given year-old stuff. ‘And I can help you folks if you but give me a few meals. I can't but notice, mister, your sore affliction.…'

‘You take your goddam tongue off my affliction, you son of a bitch.'

What man spoke in front of his maw that way? Joe Nunnally asked himself. ‘I reckon,' he said, talking fast and grinning as nicely as he could manage, ‘that in a few days I could set you up with all the wood you'll need till midsummer next. I reckon I could husk corn for you and repair the barn and set myself to a year's worth of odd ends of work.'