Confederates (30 page)

Now, after his short season of peace, panic came to Joe, for he wanted water and it came to him that it was stupid for him to want it. And peace and panic went sweeping in and out of him, changing places all the time. And then, he could tell, the preacher had moved into his summing up. ‘No!' said Joe aloud, but not too loud. He wanted to raise his voice in argument with the chaplain, but couldn't find the words.

‘Take courage then, companions in arms,' the preacher ranted. ‘All things around us today bid us be of good courage. History fails to tell us of any instance of ten millions of free men being enslaved once they determined to be free. When I have seen our brave men in winter's cold and summer's heat, marching from battlefield to battlefield, barefooted as they were born, and without a murmur, I could never doubt our final success. Such men as these were never born to be slaves. Then let your trust today be strong in the God of Nations', etc., etc. There was silence at last except for the noise of insects, and the shuffling of the awestruck Stonewall Division sounded like the shuffling of cattle.

‘Joe.'

It was Major Dignam's apologetic voice off to Joe's left. ‘I'll say the Lord's Prayer out loud. You may say it too.'

‘You told me to hope!' Joe screamed. ‘You went and told me!'

‘Don't curse me for that,' said Major Dignam. The man in the blue pants could be heard sobbing. Joe could somehow tell it was the man in blue pants, and not Frank Weller. Frank Weller had shown already that if pushed to the edge he got the stark-staring giggles.

‘Our Father, which art …' said Dignam.

‘Do it good, boys!' Frank Weller yelled. ‘If it's done, do it good. Three in the heart.'

He knew that was how things were arranged. Each victim had all of five men to fire at him, but only three of the muskets would have live rounds and the other two would be blanks. And of the five men who would fell him, each would be able to comfort himself to his death's day that it was likely
his
musket that held the blank. Goddam their comfort …!

‘… and forgive us our trespasses,' said the Reverend Dignam from an increasing distance. Now the orders must have been silent ones, because a great tearing and a great shock entered Nunnally's rib-cage and he was pushed back on his bare feet and tipped sideways, and after the ringing left his ears he was content to lie there, holding back his breath since he knew breathing would split him down the middle with pain. But he could
hear
breathing and shoes and the call of insects, and the worst pain he had, just about the only one other than breathlessness, was homesickness. ‘Maw, maw, maw, maw!' he called over and over.

‘Goddamit,' he heard someone scream, an officer you could bet. ‘Call yourselves marksmen? Fifteen goddam paces and you don't do it clean!'

‘Maw, maw, maw …' The officer came to kneel by the boy and put a bullet in his head, and Joe
did
feel the barrel of the Colt fit against a fleshy indentation behind his ear, but before the officer fired, Joe – with a quiet act of his own will – chose to die; and so beat the bullet and entered a decent oblivion.

19

If you asked Usaph Bumpass he might have said the next move North began under bad omens. First they paraded the regiment past Joe Nunnally's pit to view the bodies there, and somehow it was the worst thing that Usaph had ever seen. For Joe and the other two were tumbled naked together. Someone had taken their trousers. What sort of country couldn't spare a deserter's trousers? The fact their trousers had been taken contradicted all the preacher's blather.

‘Why in the name of heaven and earth, Gus?' he asked Gus Ramseur, ‘why are they so bent on taking the britches off them boys.'

But Gus, stronger now and of a stronger mind, wouldn't get mixed up with the question. He wanted to keep the powers of his soul together for facing any future fevers and conflicts and for putting his strange music down on paper. ‘I don't know, Usaph, why for the britches. But they have reasons, I suspect. Most likely mad ones.' And he began humming some clumsy tune before they were a hundred paces past that pit.

Cate was marching along a few ranks behind Usaph and started to utter this bright, bitter speech.

Everyone listened, because it had a sort of authority about it, a sort of outrage, and it vented some of the poisonous feeling that was in all of them. ‘That's what it's like with these so-named democracies,' Cate started ranting. ‘They tell you all that the state's there by your free and enlightened choice. But if your free and enlightened choice don't fit in with theirs they say then,
Sorry, ole feller, but you have to have your heart peppered up by marksmen at fifteen paces. Why, we're preparing the way for the great freedom and sorry, ole feller, you ain't going to be round to see it. But just take our word it's coming, sure as the Charlottesville Express
. But I ask you, gentlemen, what manner of democracy is it if
they
say when it begins. Aren't you the
demos
? Aren't you the people? Had again, gentlemen! Had again!'

It came to Usaph during the speech, that urge to club Cate, and when Cate drew breath, Usaph marched on some paces, feeling he could leave it to Judd or Hans Strahl or Danny Blalock or Bolly to make reply to Cate. They didn't. They were getting used to him. His crazy speeches were as habitual to them as the buzz of flies.

With a roar that seemed to Usaph to come from someone else, he broke through the rank behind him and swung the butt of his Springfield wildly against Cate's body. It came down against the hipbone; Usaph felt the body thud – through the wood and metal of the weapon – in his own hands. Cate started to stagger sideways and dropped his own musket. Bolly and Hans Strahl straightened him up and picked up his rifle and pushed it back in his hands, for Captain Guess could be heard yelling some way back. ‘What's that? Is that brawling? Cease that goddam brawling!' Judd and Strahl and Gus Ramseur were guiding Usaph back into his own place in the formation. But a lot of damage had been done. For, in the second Cate looked at him, in that white-faced, sick second, an open boast had come out of the conscript's eyes. The boast said – and Usaph had no doubt about it –
I had your wife, you son of a bitch!
The instant after it appeared Cate was trying to change that look, trying to hide it away, trying to look just clouded, like a man with a fresh-bruised hip has a right to look.

Usaph was the one that was near falling over now. He felt like that man in the joke who was kicked in the belly by a horse. As the company shuffled ahead, he managed to bully himself back out of the state of certainty about Cate and Ephie and into a state of coy doubt again. The one thing he didn't doubt was that on a day soon he would take the life of Decatur Cate.

Then, as a mercy, things got so damn hard and hectic that all thoughts of presages and all doubts about Ephie got ground out of his mind. They marched, Usaph locked in the ranks of the Shenandoah Volunteers, twenty miles that day. Usaph welcomed this hard, numbing march. They got through Culpeper, where Ambrose Hill spotted his home places, but they didn't stop until the Rappahannock River. Then for two days they moved west and every strategist in the ranks knew what they were doing, they were feeling for the flank again. Usaph and the others saw little. They travelled on country roads through little hamlets, out of sight of the river most times, and slaves would come to the fences to watch them with mute eyes as they went by. West and west they walked and it began to seem they could march to Canada before they'd get round the end of Pope's Yankees.

At night Gus and Usaph slept on one waterproof with the other on top of them, and their blankets and food cached between them to stop casual theft. They had not lived under cover for a year and to their backs and loins luxury was two waterproofs and flat earth to lie on that was not total liquid mud. And though it was a regimen that would have killed a town-dweller, they slept well.

The word kept coming back that you couldn't get round the Yankee flank. There was a rumour Lincoln had put a solid line of Germans and slum-boys, two paces apart, from Fredericksburg all the way to San Francisco.

It was the evening of that third day's marching upstream that Cate came up to Usaph in the midst of a thunderstorm, when Usaph was trying to get his evening fire going. Cate stood, watching as if to find out how to strike flame to wet kindling. ‘Bumpass,' he said softly after a time. Bumpass seemed not to hear and Cate stood awhile in his weatherproof cape with the rain in his eyes, and wanting Ephie Bumpass so much he could have brained Usaph Bumpass with a rock right there to have her.

Bumpass knew Cate was there. He felt helpless. What will the son of a bitch tell me? Cate hung over the fire site like a strange skinny bird. How Bumpass wished he'd go away in the most complete sense, would die or get a killing fever.

‘You have to forgive me, Bumpass, for being so provoking the other day.'

‘I weren't affected,' Usaph boasted but didn't look up. ‘Were you worried I was affected, Cate?' But Usaph didn't give him time to say why. ‘Why don't you jest go and desert? I mean you don't believe in nothing. So what's keepin' you? I want to know that for once. I ain't asking for the fun of it, I want to be told, goddamit! What I mean is, a boy like Joe knows nothing of the world and of railway systems and the rest, but you could make a fist of deserting. How I wish you goddam would and rest my poor soul, Cate!'

Cate said: ‘There's always the chance we could be friends, you know, Bumpass. Like two ordinary gentlemen.'

‘Maybe the lion will lie down with the lamb.' There was a merry little flame now under Usaph's hands. He picked up a twig and flourished it at Cate. ‘Listen, we had this goddam confabulation before. A man like you should get … Why? Why don't you jest get?'

Cate thought for a while. Lord, don't let him make any clean breast, Usaph prayed. ‘What if I said I gave your wife certain undertakings …?'Cate asked.

‘If you said that, Cate, I'd cut out your goddam tongue.' Usaph stood up the better to threaten Cate. ‘Ephie has no need of any of your undertakings. I have Gus to look for my body if my body goes down, which by hokey it ain't going to.' He began to push Cate hard by the shoulder. ‘So get! Go on! It's a positive act of that-there moral turpitude for you to hang round in the camp of the children of goddam blindness.' And he pushed the shoulder again and again. ‘Get!'

Cate looked like he would cry, coming over all dismal, and he turned and sloped off in the rain.

Usaph ran after him and got him by the arm and whirled him around. There was that ploughboy strength to Bumpass.

‘Tell me, Cate. I saw the way you looked, you son of a goddam sow. Did it happen? Did it?'

Cate started weeping. ‘Bumpass,' he said. ‘No. No.'

‘You want to see me die, so you can carry the news to Ephie. Widow's goddam comforter! First in the bed, Cate. Is that the way you want it?'

‘No,' said Cate. It wasn't fear that worked in him. It was a sort of perverse love of this innocent yokel.

There were tears amongst those raindrops on Usaph's face too. Cate pulled away and for some reason Usaph let him go free.

‘And I hope they find you in any event,' he yelled after Cate, ‘and I'll be on that execution detail and I'll make sure I get a musket with one of them genuine bullets for your goddam black heart, Cate! Yeah, you can wager on that, Cate!'

When he turned back to his fire, water had put it out.

20

Cate remembered with a special sharpness how the widow had got gradually less and less polite to him. He got the idea she only ate supper with him those days to stop him saying things to Ephie. As a matter of fact, one evening, she took to sending his supper to the barn on a tray. By these signs Cate had known he'd have to act soon.

His chance came on a morning when Aunt Sarrie seemed to be readying herself for a trip to town. She appeared to be in a bad mood about it; he could hear her stamping round asking Bridie for pins and where she'd put her – Aunt Sarrie's – best lace kerchief.

Of course, even as he thought away in that meadow near Cedar Run, Cate still thought of Ephie as a beautiful and simple being over whom two intelligences – his own and Mrs Muswell's – were fighting. In fact Ephie too had been aware of the undertones of what was happening that morning. It looked to Ephie as if Aunt Sarrie was all the time trying to make up her mind to say something, to give some advice, and then shaking her head as if that would be unwise. Ephie saw her however talking deep and earnest with Montie before climbing into her gig and taking off. She had not told Ephie where she was going, just kissed her solemnly. Ephie presumed she was off to see some mill-owner or lawyer in one of the towns about, but guessed that the journey might have something to do with Cate.

When she went into the parlour an hour later, for what should have been one of her last sittings, she discovered all at once that Aunt Sarrie's absence had changed the whole feeling between her and Cate. She listened to him chattering away, but there was some sort of tension between them; her hands were sweating. It seemed to her as if this meeting could only end in a howling argument or … or something.

Afterwards she could barely remember what they'd spoken about in that first hour of the sitting. One thing she knew was that she had asked, just like someone pleading: ‘Ain't I jest about through with this sitting business, Mr Cate?'

And when she said that, Cate gave an argument why she wasn't through with the business, but she did not even hear what it was. She nodded and nodded, and wanted both to flee and to stay. At one stage too he explained to her how to grind and mix your own oils, but she heard nothing of it, even though she kept saying: ‘Is that so?' and ‘Oh, like that?'