Confederates (4 page)

3

In a field near the Thomases' plantation house, the men whose breakfast fires the General had seen through the mist that morning were now considering lunch. In Usaph Bumpass's mess they still had half a captured ham left and if they were ordered to march tomorrow they didn't want to have to lug ham all over hilly Virginia with them.

They had two slow-burning fires going, the men of Usaph Bumpass's mess.

On one of the fires, fuelled by kindling bought from Mr Thomas – for the General forbade them to steal Mr Thomas's rail fences – young Ash Judd was frying ham in the mess's skillet, and on the other, ancient Bolly Quintard baked flourbread. Bolly's dough had been shaped round the ramrod of his Springfield rifle, like a fleece on a distaff, into the form of a loaf of bread. As he turned the mixture on its hot steel rod, in hands made big and harsh by a lifetime of pushing pit saws and wielding axes, he sang ‘Oh Lord, Gals One Friday' in his old tenor voice.

Usaph Bumpass didn't like that noise, but he and the others tolerated it because they needed Bolly's skillet. Bumpass's young friend Ash Judd had once owned one which he shared with Usaph and the others. He'd been carrying it on the march out of the Valley in a way that was getting to be common in this army, its handle down the barrel of his rifle, its pan sticking out of the mouth like a great black sunflower. It was very likely that Ashabel had been asleep as he walked, a skill a man had to pick up if the pace wasn't going to kill him. And one of ‘them horsemen', passing along, must have lifted it without effort out of the rifle barrel of weary Ashabel Judd.

There'd been four men dependent on that skillet. First, there was Bumpass himself and Ash Judd. Bumpass and Judd were both farmers of middling wealth. Then there was the schoolmaster Danny Blalock and the music teacher Gus Ramseur.

Bumpass was secretly proud of sharing a skillet with two educated men like Blalock and Ramseur. So he sought some of the better men in the regiment and said that if anyone would give him and Ramseur and Blalock and Ash Judd half-rights in a skillet, he guaranteed in return that the person who did would get equal shares in any delicacies the four of them managed to buy or forage or find. The only people interested were old Bolly Quintard and his Irish friend Joseph Murphy. Bolly and Murphy knew what a temporary possession a skillet was and that they might need future favours from the others and so thought that the terms were fair.

While the regiment was in bivouac, the skillet was shared. On the march you didn't get a chance to cook anyhow. Not in Tom Jackson's twenty-miles-a-day, eat-from-the-orchards, sleep-where-you-drop foot-cavalry.

Ole Bolly stood out amongst the men about him because of his air of worldly evil and his age. Now, for example, the schoolteacher Blalock and the music man Ramseur were each 24 years of age, Usaph was 23, young Ash Judd was barely twenty. Joe Murphy didn't know how old he was but guessed he was maybe thirty. Bolly, however, was old as any three of them put together.

Sometimes, to put on side, he said he was seventy, but it was likely he was only about 65. He had lived a hard, profane life in the lumber business on the far side of the Shenandoah Valley near Brock's Gap. There was a 22-year-old girl back at Quintard's Mill who was his seventh wife, for he had had seven, all of whom he had loved and heartily impregnated. He would say proudly that the first six all died fair and square, he hadn't encouraged any of them to do so. One had perished of the flux, another had had her skull bust by an overturning waggon, two died giving birth, another of what Bolly called ‘spotted mountain fever' and a sixth of snake-bite. This seventh wife had been brought in from Loudon County, way up at the mouth of the Shenandoah, because nearly all the pretty faces round Quintard's Mill had been kin if not offspring of Bolly's. We're poor people, Bolly would say, but not so poor we have to start begetting off each other. Although he had a few slaves he found the free labour of begotten children cheaper.

His friends in Guess's Company teased him about what his young wife might be doing while he was off campaigning, but Bolly had a lot of pride in himself as a lover; he believed that once she had had the taste of him, no woman could do with anything less. Therefore look to your own women, you race of slackroots.

Usaph was not easy about all this teasing over women. Ephie Bumpass was a lovely woman – a girl in fact – living lonely on a farm. Usaph didn't need reminding about what might just happen. Even his Aunt Sarrie might not be able to keep guard against such a thing happening.

It irked Usaph that Ash and Joe Murphy didn't seem to talk about anything except willing widows or ripe girls from farms. It irked Usaph that Bolly, an old man, talked with such ease about his wife, who must have been more or less the same age as Ephie, and about how she wouldn't stray.

As well as for his age and many wives, Bolly was also renowned for having an umbrella he had brought everywhere with him since December 1861, when he first appeared out of Brock's Gap and presented himself to Brigadier-General Garnett in Winchester. It was the umbrella by which men remembered him rather than his age. Somehow he was so tough, you forgot that he was older than your own grandfather.

While they waited for Ash Judd to cook the ham and Bolly to brown the bread, the others moved around the meadows or lolled near a pear tree against Thomas's plantation fence and uttered rumours, mockeries, profanities, prophecies, observations.

‘Look at that gloss of sweat on his face there,' Joseph Murphy invited everyone.

Across the corner of the field, striped with shadow and sunlight from a paling fence, Gus Ramseur, the music teacher, was sweating out his pneumonia. This midsummer's day he lay on two rubberised sheets and beneath two more. His sodden yellow hair spilled all over his hat, which had been pummelled into the shape of a pillow. Usaph heated bricks he'd borrowed from the Thomases' garden on Ash Judd's fire and put them in rotation between Gus's blankets. He also dosed Gus with frequent mouthfuls of a whisky called
How Come You So
that he had brought from a sutler on the Gaines' Mill side of the Chickahominy a week ago.

‘But he looks fine,' said Usaph, inspecting the slick of sweat on Gus's face. ‘That looks as it should look.'

‘And the shrivel-gut you got in that jar?' asked Bolly.

‘It's better'n what you get from the surgeon,' said Usaph. ‘That there morphia stuff ain't good for the soul.'

‘There's no doubt the man himself is better right here,' said Joseph Murphy, who had been away in Richmond at the Chimborazo Hospital suffering from the flux. They had kicked him out of his ward to make way for the wounded of White Oak Swamp and Frayser's Farm and Malvern Hill. ‘Oh yeh, even if he could get inside Chimborazo, he's maybe still better here. I mean, you should see that Richmond. They got the goddam wounded all the way down Grace Street from the depot. No such nice situation as a friend slipping hot bricks in under your blankets! There ain't no question of more'n one. The lips on some of them wounds on them boys is like hardwood bark now and still they wait in the streets, and the private citizens of Richmond is all the time bringing more in by dray and waggon. They never made in any goddam Christian country blankets enough for them boys who are still coming in with wounds and the die-sen-try. And half the surgeons drunk and half the nurses sluts. Going through the pockets of the very corpses, looking for cash and trinkets.…'

‘You must have been right at home in the that there Chimborazo then, Joe,' called Ashabel Judd. ‘With them thieves for brothers and them sluts for company.'

Murphy stared back at Judd a while, which made Judd's high laughter thinner still, squeakier.

‘Why,' the Irishman went on at last – he'd rather tell his traveller's tales than punish Judd, ‘they led a Yankee lieutenant of cavalry through the streets one day, a prisoner. He had goddam kid gauntlets and chicken guts all over his collar.' (Chicken guts, it happened, was gold braid.) ‘They let him keep his goddam sabre and it was like all the world's best goddam cutlery. And his boots still had a goddam gloss under the dust. He was so young it was like his mother had just dropped him fully uniformed and he went straight to Gaines' Mill for to get himself captured. And there was this poor Reb, thin as a goddam ghost in a bad year, calling to him: “Lord, you look such a grand feller with your grand braid and your lovely kid gloves and your boots with a good gloss on 'em … why, and I bet your bowels is oh so regular.…”'

That made them all laugh. Good bowels were beyond price in this gathering. Most of these boys suffered with chronic diarrhoea. Since last winter they had all had dysentery of some severity or other. It was what they were given to eat that was the cause. On the Charlottesville march they'd lived off little green apples and unripe corn. When they got flour they fried up fritters in bacon fat; a recipe mortally hard on any man's bowels. If they captured U.S. commissary waggons – as when at Middletown on the Valley pike last May they surrounded General Banks's waggons – it made matters worse. They wolfed captured delicacies very quick. They dreaded having luggage to carry on the march, so diets of little pellet apples and immature corn gave way to sudden orgies of ham, fish paste, jellies and bacon, and the sudden violent feast was as hard on the belly as green apples ever were.

In the Army of Northern Virginia, the man whose bowels were
regular
was considered so rare and blessed that his friends might bring guests from other regiments to shake hands with him.

‘One thing they did do for me at that Chimborazo though,' Joe Murphy went on; ‘they give me the scratch to stop the smallpox.'

‘Inoculation?' said Danny Blalock. He had looked up from a browning edition of
De Bow's Review
he'd borrowed from Captain Guess. The article he'd been reading was headed ‘Will the British Government Recognise the Confederacy This Year?' ‘Inoculation, Joe?' he repeated.

Joe pulled up the sleeve of the new shirt the Southern Soldiers' Comfort Society had given him in Chimborazo. There was a dime-sized scab on his upper arm.

Old Bolly Quintard's eyes fixed at the idea of a little scab protecting you all your days against smallpox. He was an old man from the mountains mixing amongst citified diseases for the first time in his life. Germans and Irishmen from Richmond were all round him, and then there were the New Orleans regiments in Ewell's division who didn't even speak English and had all sorts of bayou-swamp illnesses about them. So Bolly was interested in protection against diseases.

‘Will they ever come round here, doing that for us'ns?' he asked.

‘Maybe,' said Joe. ‘God knows when.'

‘I'd dearly love a sovereign shield against the smallpox.'

Young Ashabel Judd said, ‘There ain't been no smallpox in this army.'

‘But smallpox comes,' Bolly told him. ‘There ain't many valleys it don't find once a generation, and do you think it won't find this-here great army?'

Danny Blalock read a sentence about the pernicious kingdom of Britain which would hold off acknowledging the Confederate States as long as it could. Then he looked up and said, ‘Joe could inoculate you, Bolly, easy as wink.'

‘That's right,' said Joe. ‘I seen it done; I make a little cut in your arm, I knock off a portion of my scab and mash it round in your cut, Bolly.'

‘You're mocking me, Joe Murphy. Damn you, Murphy, I'll give you scab!'

‘But it's the truth, Bolly,' Danny Blalock announced. Everyone believed Danny. He was their encyclopaedia, he knew he was, he liked the stature, he therefore never told tall tales. Any ignorant farmer from the mountains could tell tall tales. ‘That scab there is his protection against smallpox. If he gives you a scab, you're protected too.'

‘Let him give
you
some of his scab then,' Bolly challenged him.

‘I'm not the one that's worried about smallpox.'

Bolly took thought. He blew heavily into his beard which was still a little red at the roots. Danny had gone back to his article on diplomacy so calmly that Bolly had to believe him.

‘You're willing, Joe?' he asked the Irishman, just to give himself time to decide.

‘I told you that already, Bolly.'

‘Let it be a clean knife then,' said Bolly.

Still reading, Danny Blalock heard the small grunts of discomfort as Joe Murphy knocked off part of his scab and as the boy Ashabel left his cooking a second to cut a small slot for it in Bolly's stringy upper arm. Even while Ashabel plied the knife, Bolly hung on tight to the ramrod and its loaf.

‘The Southern Presidents who led the United States in its fledgling years,' Danny Blalock read in
De Bow's
, ‘Washington, Jefferson, Madison, always recognised the
de facto
government of a particular country as a matter of course. The United States, when it was still a fresh and pure entity, recognised the revolutionary government of France before any other nation had done so. But the British have always had a different policy. Albion is, in any case, jealous of the success of its former colony the United States. Therefore they will let the Confederacy bludgeon the United States for a little while longer before they step in to recognise the infant Confederacy.

‘The belief long-cherished in the South that need of Southern cotton will force the British to recognise the government at Richmond has proven a little illusory.…'

‘You're enjoying it,' Bolly accused Joe Murphy, who was leaning over Bolly with a knife and a fragment of smallpox scab on its point.

‘Don't be ridiculous. I'm the gentlest sort of feller.'

‘Certainly,' Danny Blalock read on, ‘textile mills and textile workers in cities such as Manchester are suffering. But British governments are accustomed to living with the suffering of their citizens. It would take some sudden and spectacular coup by the South to ensure British recognition. Such a coup would be to enter Maryland and outflank Washington. Or to capture Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and descend on Baltimore from the north by way of the Northern Central railroad (See Map) and then on Washington itself! In fact, it is certain that by the time Harrisburg fell, the British government would want to talk with respect to the government in Richmond. If Washington could be conclusively threatened, the British would bring force to bear on the North to end the war.'