Confederates (39 page)

Oursley's colleague was already in the annex. ‘There's good and plenty here, Abel,' he was calling.

Oursley looked around at all these drunken boys. ‘All get out!' he yelled.

Gus went first; he was happy to go, to be under an open sky and have the breeze on his brow.

‘All go, do you hear, you goddam drunken whoresons!'

Surgeon Oursley looked like he might hit them with something if they didn't move. So they began to depart, in their slow, swimmy way. Maybe there was an intuition in their muddied brains that they might need his goodwill one day soon.

Only Bolly hadn't moved. The surgeon went and stood over him. Goddamit, there'd be trouble if he touched Bolly!

He was staring at Bolly and
touching
him. ‘Goddamit!' What age is this man?' Oursley asked.

Danny Blalock answered. ‘They think he might be all of seventy.'

Oursley put his hand on one of Bolly's eyelids. He wasn't angry now, there was a tenderness in the way he did it. ‘The poor son of a bitch is dead,' he said.

BOOK THREE

1

When the time came, Usaph walked away from the Junction with a headache but full of a strange happiness and with confidence in the events and generals that now carried him along. It was a cool evening march, back in a westerly direction. As you went uphill and looked over your shoulder or even upwards at the top of the evening sky, you could see that Stonewall's engineers had set fire to the whole goddam depot. The glow of burning Manassas came from the south-east with a glare that killed off the early stars. Down there everything was burning. The cars burning down to their wheels and axles, the warehouses going up, the sutlers' stores. And Bolly burning up like one of them Viking chiefs, burning up on that Made-in-Boston table under a nice sheet. And the engineers ripping up the rails, you could be sure, and heating them on fires and then bending them round posts. And the goddam radiance of it all hanging in the firmament like the afterglow of that great banquet they had all had down there.

‘I think,' said Gus, still sentimental from his wild encounter with liquor and in his faintly foreign accent, so that the
think
was
zink
, ‘that Bolly might jest have died the way he would've chose.'

And all around, the other boys began to say pious things about ole Bolly. ‘He died feasting at will behind his enemy's back. And that ain't so bad.' ‘Death,' said Danny Blalock, ‘came up to him in the guise of a whisky sleep.'

‘And on a soft surface,' said Ash Judd, ‘and he ain't had much acquaintance with soft surfaces this year past.'

None of them were sure why they were moving back westwards again, but no one seemed to resent the movement. They felt it was just part of dancin' Tom Jackson's mysterious plan, and since that plan had netted them the Manassas feast they did not much complain. There was a rumour they were moving back to Thoroughfare Gap to meet Longstreet's boys.

‘If it's so, Gus,' Usaph muttered, ‘at least we won't have to carry poor ole Bolly up the pass.'

Far down the railroad line, General Johnny Pope had woken up to the idea that it was the whole of Jackson's corps at Manassas. He had been helped in his perceptions by the fact that, when his army woke that morning along the banks of the Rappahannock and squinted through their binoculars, they found no one except a few taunting Rebel cavalry regiments looking at them from the other bank. Long-street had flitted. Not even Johnny Pope could ignore that piece of intelligence.

The first order he gave was to three of his corps, the German one of Franz Sigel's, McDowell's three willing divisions, and Reynolds's Pennsylvania boys, to get to the town of Gainesville. If they managed that march in two days, they would then be standing fair between Jackson in the area of Manassas, and Lee and Longstreet coming in from the west.

Johnny Pope sent four generals, Reno and Phil Kearny and Porter and Hooker, creeping and converging on Manassas. For he had that disposition of soul called wishful thinking and wished to believe that since Jackson had had the hide to spend all day on the 27th in Manassas, he ought in fairness to wait there on the 28th and 29th for the convenience of Reno, Kearny, Porter and Hooker, who would want very much to surround and swallow him.

In fact, this evening of August 27, Tom Jackson was riding out along a quiet road towards a little hamlet called Groveton and to a long low ridge beyond. Hotchkiss had pointed out the ridge on a map earlier that afternoon.

‘Wooded, Jed?'

‘Along the slopes, yessir.'

‘Good for hiding, then?'

Jed grinned. ‘What sort of hiding d'you intend, General?'

Under their screen of Stuart's cavalry, Tom Jackson's army moved as anonymous as farmers' sons on that thoroughfare, under that sky bright as two harvest moons.

Tom Jackson was sleeping in his saddle as was usual. It had pommels slightly higher than the regulation cavalry saddle and that helped keep him somewhat upright. But even while he drowsed he knew what country they were passing through.

The hill called the Henry Hill rose on the right of the road. This is where his brigade had stood last summer in July when the Yankees came flanking round over Bull Run. Tom Jackson had lost 560 men on that hill there and he'd spent the whole afternoon with a crazy little wound of his own, a needling pain that ran from his left hand up to his brain, on account of his middle finger being broken by a bullet. Now even in his sleep, he remembered how, about three o'clock that day, a Yankee regiment dressed all in red came running along the crown of Henry Hill, and it seemed to him then that they were the red-hot embodiment of the shattered bone in his middle finger of the left hand. In fact they were just the poor New York Fire Zouaves, and the graves of many of them were hereabout, on these slopes.

Whenever he stirred in the saddle he could see the weeds and briars growing round the little shacks in the meadows hereabout where the Confederates had spent that first innocent winter of the war, building these structures about Christmas time, leaving them about the end of March and not knowing how hard the summer could be that was waiting for them.

Usaph opened his eyes to a strong morning light and amongst a babble of talk. In a while he knew where he was. This was the wooded hilltop they'd come to after midnight. It was a strange hive-like noise that was going on all around him; there was something untoward about it. Then he understood there were no harmonicas or fiddles and there was no singing. Well, to a hiding army, all this was forbidden. And there was no smell of woodsmoke, since fires were forbidden. But there was sure a buzz of talk. For talk was free.

Of course, one of the talkers was Cate, but Usaph could listen even to Cate this morning without too much of a stomach knot. Cate was sitting some ten paces away from where Usaph lay and his audience was Gus Ramseur and young Ashabel.

‘I don't believe a word of that,' Ash was saying. ‘You trying to tell us that the might of this great army rests upon goddam night water?'

‘You could say that,' Cate admitted with a sort of lawyerish grandeur.

‘Well, where was this, Cate?' Gus Ramseur asked soberly.

‘Why, this was Loudoun County in this State of Virginia. I spent part of the winter up there, painting an English lady and her little maid.'

Goddam you, Cate, for saying
little maid
that way.

‘A godforsaken little place called Upperville. And there was this contractor from the Niter Mining Bureau. A fat man like you'd expect a contractor to be. And what was he doing but sending the slaves under their own houses – you know how those slave houses stand on little stilts – to dig up the earth there? They'd dig up about the top three inches, and then they'd percolate water through it into casks, and then the water would dry off. And there it was, saltpetre for gunpowder.'

‘I don't know if this is at all the truth,' Ash warned Gus Ramseur.

‘He told me,' Cate went on, ‘that he could get about fifteen pounds from any slave's house that had been up ten years. That is, a pound and a half for every year of occupancy.'

‘Every year of emptying their bladders,' Ash corrected him with that hectic, crazy laugh.

‘This same contractor,' said Cate, ‘claimed he got saltpetre from caves as well – I believe it's a matter of bat's droppings.'

‘Holy Jimmy!' Gus said wonderingly. ‘I have these forty rounds in my cartridge box and twenty in my pockets, and you tell me it's all the droppings of bats and coloured people.'

‘And not only bats, Gus, and not only black people. This gentleman tells me that before the war is much older waggons will visit every white household and make a collection of the lye. Only natural modesty prevents it from happening now.'

‘So,' said Ash, ‘them big bladdered women you see in the country … they'll be goddam heroes. I see this-here struggle to be one between the bladders of the Confederacy and the goddam factories of the North.…'

As if to give a little music to this idea of Ash's, firing started up away to the south, and it didn't seem to be much; it seemed to be some U.S. cavalry stumbling on the flank of the Stonewall, down there a mile or so through the woods.

Jackson heard it too. He was down on the flat land below the ridge where Usaph and the others were hidden. There was a little farmhouse there, and the farmer and his womenfolk, a wife and two daughters, looked out at Tom Jackson and his staff from behind their curtains. They were poor people and had little in store, or so they said, and it wasn't Stonewall's policy to make people give up their milk or eggs or butter, or even to claim shelter under a roof like theirs. So he settled down on a blanket spread under one of those nice oaks you find in Virginia. In a corner of the same meadow tall General Telfer lounged against a fence chewing a cheroot. Bird-like Popeye Ewell paced and talked to anyone who had the energy to pace with him.

In this field, just six miles from Thoroughfare Gap, Tom Jackson had spent the morning snoozing on a groundsheet. He was woken however each time his cavalry came in with a captured order, and there wasn't any doubt his cavalry was working hard that morning, snapping up Yankee couriers as they scuttled between one wing and another of Johnny Pope's army.

About noon one such order was brought into that little farmyard. A rider came up at a mad pace, just managing not to run into the fence posts, and without dismounting, handed the thing over the fence to Charlie Blackford, the young cavalryman who seemed have stuck himself onto Tom Jackson's staff. Charlie went and woke Jackson. Jackson read the page that was given him and stirred as if he knew it was the end of his sleep for that day. The captured order he had in his hand was one written out by Johnny Pope's adjutant and it swung four whole corps of the Union army round towards Manassas.

Tom Jackson hitched himself up and sat on the railing fence, thinking away, not saying a word to anyone about his thoughts. After a while he got down from the fence, got on his horse, rode up towards the woods where the Stonewall Division was hiding, then back again. You could tell he was getting madder and madder about something and Blackford was amused by the way Kyd Douglas and Sandie and Hunter Maguire all sat off to one side, letting him rage round, as if they'd got used to living with his moods.

What he was thinking through was a sort of painful military theorem: What if Pope's army all goes off to Manassas and then beyond Bull Run? Within a few days McClellan's troops will join him and there'll be no chance of beating him on his own. Therefore I have to attract him to me now, I have to show myself, this morning's secrecy has got to end. There the theorem ended, but there was a problem attached to it. How can I judge the hour to show myself until I know when the others will join me, when Lee and Longstreet are likely to be here?

Tom Jackson got an image of Jimmie Longstreet's features in his mind and they seemed to him to be essentially cautious features. Tom Jackson hoped Bob Lee was harrying Jimmie Longstreet along at an incontinent speed.

Those watching – Blackford, Kyd, Sandie, the others – could tell he was in a mental fix and that it was acting on him like some form of pain. The General stayed off on his own and in that state for close on two hours. It was one of those endless summer afternoons that seemed to expand before your eyes to about the size of a week.

Anyhow, young Charlie Blackford went strolling round the farm. He was up with two cavalry men, both wearing new blue britches filched from the storehouses at Manassas, both leaning against a worm fence drinking from a crock.

‘Where'd you get your sup, boys?' he asked with a grin that showed he thought it was whisky.

‘Why, it's buttermilk, cap'n. They got it by the gallon down there.' One of the horsemen pointed south. If you went towards the Bristoe Road, he said, and turned west by a little Methodist church, you came to a farm on the left where they'd been churning butter and had buttermilk for sale.

Charlie Blackford could think of nothing more sustaining this long afternoon than a canteen of buttermilk, so he went round gathering canteens from people who wanted some and set off with Sandie and a few troopers to visit the farm. They found the farmhouse just down by the silent main road to the west. They introduced themselves as members of Jackson's staff, and the farmer and his wife wouldn't take a cent for the buttermilk, and the farm wife said if they came back later she'd be done baking, and there'd be corncakes and butter. When Charlie and the others got back to the meadow that was headquarters, Jackson had got down again from his horse but was still pacing and glowering as if there was a good chance that today's first real explosion would be Stonewall Jackson going up. Charlie Blackford decided to risk going near him with a canteen. ‘Buttermilk, General?' he asked, and Tom Jackson took the canteen without getting out of stride with his thoughts and took in a long swig of the stuff and then handed the canteen back nigh empty and without saying one word.