Confederates (29 page)

‘Can I help you, ma'am?' he asked pointedly.

She introduced herself.

‘I would have preferred, Curtis ole boy,' Canty said with a forced, angry grin, ‘if you'd waited for me to be fetched.'

‘The night cans are overflowing, Surgeon Canty,' said Mrs Whipple. ‘You may not know of it. Would you like me to have the orderlies empty them?'

Canty closed his eyes and shook his head in an amused way that said
fussy female
. ‘I'll have it attended to, ma'am, if it would make you the happier.'

‘I think there are some boys in the wards who'd be made happy too.'

She saw the way he lifted his head and looked sideways at her. Oh well, dislike, thought Mrs Whipple. We all have to live with dislike.

On the way back to the seminary Mrs Whipple said to Surgeon Curtis: ‘I should live over there.'

‘But ma'am, it isn't a very pleasant building.'

‘No. All the more reason I shouldn't use up any of your space. Given that your space is pleasant, Surgeon Curtis, and your hospital looks like a hospital.' He grinned and may even have blushed. ‘Why thank you, ma'am. Canty … he's quite a skilled surgeon …'

‘And a characteristic drunk, Surgeon Curtis. There's one more thing. The distribution of all whisky in this hospital comes under my control from tomorrow morning.'

‘Of course, I've no objection to that, ma'am.'

But Canty will have, she thought.

18

How had they chosen them? Usaph Bumpass wondered.

The Shenandoah Volunteers came out of a deep forest and into the glare of a big clearing. And there were fifteen men, in a squad, standing close up to a great hole in the ground. And deep in the hole stood three men, still shovelling dirt.

It came to Usaph late, as if he was a slow boy, that the hole must be a grave. Did they make them dig their own graves? That seemed damned wrong to Usaph. It seemed an abomination to make boys dig their own grave.

And then back to the other question. How did they choose them. Those fifteen boys standing so close up to the hole. Which brigade were they from? Were they chosen by lot or had some officer gone about calling for those who'd like to do the task? If so, Usaph hadn't heard him and was glad not to have heard him.

The afternoon was hot, full of a blur of flies and the screaming of katydids. The vast meadow where they stood was like a sort of history of America itself. It sat amongst ancient forests. It had been cleared maybe about 1760 by some Scot, some Irishman, some sharp Yorkshireman. It had borne more crops than a sow has litters for a century and more, but now its owner did not much esteem it, or was happy to let it rest, for blackberries grew in clumps there, the grass was high, and the forest that had preceded the farmers was growing back at the edges. America was not however easily cancelled.

They lined the Shenandoah Volunteers out, with the rest of its brigade, facing the grave and no more than fifty yards back from it. As that happened bands came into the field playing the ‘Dead March', and then the 2nd and 3rd Brigades were marched in and lined out on either flank in such a way that the graves ended up in a sort of hollow square of spectators. But in spite of all the music and the shouting, the men in the hole in the earth went on shovelling. Usaph wondered what made them keep working like that. He said it aloud without understanding that he had. ‘What makes 'em keep on working like that?' The bands sounded tinny under that great sky, in that great field.

‘What?' Danny Blalock asked nearby.

‘Why do they go on digging? Surely there ain't nothing more they can threaten 'em with to make 'em dig like that.'

Off to his left and in the rank behind him, Decatur Cate spoke up. ‘They don't think they'll die, that's why. They think maybe if they work hard, they'll be let off for good spade work.'

Danny Blalock said: ‘This isn't the right time, Cate, for your disgusting opinions.' But he didn't press it. He'd changed since the fight near Culpeper Road; he wasn't as sure of his ideas. Usaph stared round at Cate and saw tears in the man's eyes. Let the son of a bitch weep, thought Usaph.

The truth was that Joe Nunnally dug in some hope. Major Dignam had told him to entertain hope and he was entertaining it strongly. As well as that, Frank Weller had also told him to keep hope bright. Frank Weller was a Tarheel who'd deserted twice already. First time he'd got all the way home to his farm in Waynesville, North Carolina. That was last April and Frank had wanted to get a spring crop sown. Not that he would have come back even then but they fetched him back. The State militia came for him one morning and brought him back, and he was sentenced to flogging two days in a row and being paraded with a placard every day for a month. It was hard for a man to keep his enthusiasm for the military life after that. Then his messmate, a simple boy called Jackie Swelter, was torn in two by a shell near the Culpeper Road the other day. Frank decided then it was time to go for good. He was sure he could hang out along the Blue Ridge all winter, there might even be willing mountain women up there to warm his solitude, and then maybe in the middle of the next summer he could sneak down to Waynesville by the many back roads of the Appalachians.

It hadn't worked. The cavalry found him after just two days. Like Joe, he was making himself accommodating to a farm wife and to her children, this one being resident on the road towards Powell's Gap. Frank and Joe Nunnally and the other prisoner had spent last night chained together in this clearing. Frank was a brave man and looked like a brave man. He stood above six feet, his face was square and his hair and beard curly. His eyes beamed wild and ironical. It was just he didn't feel a life given for this struggle was a life well spent. He came from the mountain end of Carolina, where people were as poor as the Nunnallys were in Virginia. The spectre of nigger equality and Northern tyranny didn't seem such a big scare to such people as it did to the people in the lowlands. He had volunteered while drunk and everything he'd seen on his military travels, and everything he'd seen in that Babylon of a capital called Richmond, convinced him that this
was
a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. Just over the border from Frank Weller's place, just over in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, the Confederacy had had to send troops into towns like Newport, Madisonville, Morganton, Sevierville to hang and shoot the Union men and to burn their farms and put their widows and kin on the roads. Now it seemed to Frank that they were going to shoot
him
, not for being so hot and strong for the Union but for not believing enough in this other cause.

Yet he'd gone on muttering hope all night to the boy Joe. ‘Why, Joe, they ain't never shot anyone from the Stonewall Division yet. Make an example of 'em, sure. But shoot a man, no. You see, this is meant to be an army of goddam democrats and free men. If it weren't so, why there'd be niggers in the ranks, ain't that so? Now it sits odd with some of the boys in the ranks to have free democrats shooting down free democrats, and so as like they'll march the whole goddam circus up to see us and then an officer will come riding forth with a pardon. Jail and hard labour, sure. I deserve it for my original drunken will to have a hair of this war … but not even a goddam colonel would tell you that those boys who'll be looking us in the eye come tomorrow are any way partial to the business of firing on their own.'

The guards had backed this up by being kind as brothers to them, feeding them bacon for supper, looking at them strange and almost tenderly.

The third condemned man was also a Tarheel from the mountain border with Tennessee. He was somehow separate because his opinions or some other large accident had led him to desert northwards where, on his capture, he'd straightway offered to put on the uniform of the U.S. The Confederacy had captured him back a few evenings past. Last night he'd kept silent and sat, as far as the chains allowed him, separate from Joe and Frank. He was the thorn in all Frank Weller's arguments of hope, since it was no way likely there'd be any forgiveness for him. He was a thin man, much shorter than Frank, yet the guards seemed to have a special respect for him, as if he'd chosen the toughest, the most principled way, of getting himself before a firing squad.

But despite this man, and because of the help of Frank Weller and Major Dignam, Joe Nunnally dug his grave in as good a frame of mind as could be managed. ‘Don't think that it's a goddam grave,' Frank had whispered. ‘Think it's jest a bacon pit or some such.'

And in this way they worked, sweating like honest farmers, and soon they were waist-deep in a hole that measured maybe seven feet by seven feet and would soon be four feet deep. And now and then, fear would blind Joe, and he couldn't help thinking that if Frank's comforting weren't true, and if Major Dignam was wrong, then he
would
sleep for ever, for all time, with these other two, and their bodies and bones would be twined close as lovers' and so they would rot together.

Well, if that happened, at least the Reverend Dignam had given a promise to mark the place with a stone or a cross.

Soon an officer came, inspected the pit and told them to climb out. The man who'd been found in Union uniform sat down in the bottom and was sick between his legs, which were still encased in their blue trousers. The officer screamed, ‘Cover that muck! Go on, cover it!' And Frank Weller and Joe Nunnally sprinkled it with loam. But then it was hard for Joe to get out of the pit. His legs felt slack. He came up over the mounds of displaced farm dirt, and not fifteen paces away were the squad who were meant to kill him. ‘I know none of them,' said Frank Weller evenly, inspecting their averted eyes.

There were three orderlies with blindfolds to tie round the eyes of the condemned, and Joe's blindfold was on before he understood that, if Frank was wrong, that was all the world he was ever going to see, and familiar things like grass, stones, trees and katydids were now rarer with him than were nuggets of gold. ‘Hope, friends, hope!' he heard Frank Weller mutter in his sing-song way.

Joe was taken by the elbow and made to kneel. Oh dear God, what now? This is when the officer with the pardon is meant to come spurring up. But there was instead another sort of surprise altogether. A tough and piercing voice rose in that old farm land. It was a chaplain with a message for those who were not condemned.

‘I speak out,' the voice said, ‘not for the benefit of the condemned but for the sake of the honourable. Of all deserters and traitors, Judas Iscariot is without doubt the most infamous of all those whose names have found a place in history, either sacred or profane.…'

Joe could feel the clods of earth beneath his knees and the air he breathed seemed gritty with the hatefulness of that parson's voice.

‘… no name has ever been more justly execrated by mankind, and all this has been justly done. Turning to the history of your own country, I find written high on the scroll of infamy the name of Benedict Arnold, who at one time stood in the confidence of the great and good Washington. What was Arnold's crime? Desertion and treason! He too hoped to better his manner of life by selling his principles for money to the enemies of his country, betraying his Washington into the hands of his foes and committing the heaven-cursed crime of perjury before God and men.…'

Joe could hear a stutter of hushed laughter beside him and Frank muttered: ‘Oh Lord, ain't it a grand thing …?' The laughter took Frank over again for a while, ‘… a grand thing to be as famous bad as Benedict Arnold.'

And Frank's juddering laughter went on for some more time as the preacher raged on.

‘I now lay down the proposition that every man who has taken up arms in defence of his country, and basely deserts or abandons that service, belongs in principle and practice to the family of Judas and Arnold. These three wretches! Like you did they come to fight for the independence of their own country. Like you they received the benefits of pay and, in one case, bounty money. Like you they took upon themselves the most solemn obligations of this oath:
I
,
A. B
.,
do solemnly swear that I will bear true allegiance to the Confederate States of America and that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever.…

‘These three, they are your fellow beings! They marched under the same beautiful flag that waves over our heads. But in an evil hour, they yielded to mischievous influence and from motives and feelings base and sordid, unmanly and vile, abandoned the principles of patriotism.…'

The condemnation rolled on. Joe imagined a smooth fat rabid clergyman whose soul had not been tested ever. He began to tremble, kneeling there, but it was not with shame.

‘They took to the woods,' the florid voice said, ‘traversing weary roads by night, hoping at last to reach the places in which they claimed their homes or their strange allegiances.…

The preacher then compared the three miscreants to the Tories of 1776, whose shame had followed them no matter where they ran. ‘Yea, though they all fled to Canada, it would still pursue them!'

While the preacher exhorted everyone in the Stonewall Division to detest him, Joe went on feeling the sharp bite of the sun across his shoulders and on the back of his head, and wondered if Cate and Bumpass were watching. He felt a trembly peace as he put himself in God's hands, even though the preacher said he had no right to. Joe was sure that preacher must be Baptist or some such heathenish sect. For now, not happy with cursing any generations he and Frank Weller and the other man might beget, he moved on to bad-mouthing the folks at home.

‘I am fully satisfied that the great amount of desertions from our army is produced by and is the fruit of a bad, mischievous, restless and dissatisfied, not to say
disloyal
, influence that is at work in this country at home. Some people profess to be greatly afflicted in mind about the state of public affairs. In their doleful wailings you hear such melancholy lamentations as
the country is getting impoverished! We can't make our independence stick. The price is too high. This is a rich man's war and a poor man's fight
. Some newspapers have caught the mania and lent their influence to the evil work, while the pulpit – to the scandal of its character for faith and holiness – has belched forth in some places doctrines and counsels sufficient to cause Christians to blush.'