Confederates (45 page)

The boy officer came on very savage. Orville was frightened by the hate that was there. He worked the lever but then it got properly stuck. The boy struck Orville at the side of the neck at the moment Orville was thinking of saying something to conciliate and soothe him. Orville felt the deep bite of the metal. Deep enough! he wanted to say. And his breath went out of him along with his first blood. The blade was halted at the front by his collar-bone and, amazed, he felt it grate against the bone atop his spine at the back. Dear Christ, I'm halfway beheaded. By this old-fashioned device.

He couldn't remember the blade coming out, but Orville noticed the boy had gone away; and you could see the bloody steel raised high.

He sat down and drowsed off again before he knew he had done it. His well-stored blood spilled out by the split in the collar of his artillery jacket. But the deepest blood, the blood that shouldn't be poured away, went on its easy way in Orville's jugular, which the blade had run beside but not sundered.

A railroad cut has its own specialities. Sometimes it is higher than the surrounding fields and in these parts it is called a fill. Then it slices fair through little hillocks, and there it is called a cut. Ordinary people tend to call the whole thing a cut. This railroad cut – of which Wheat was thinking that it would be very likely the scene of the worst railroad accident in America, with no locomotive even involved – had no tracks laid in it and was all cuts and fills, one after another. Some boys opted to lie atop the high embankments, others behind the tall fills. Fifteen feet high. At their base officers could stand on level ground if they wished, and call up for news.

In the hot noonday along their stretch of railroad cut the Volunteers were left alone and relished it. It was a mysterious mercy and they made use of it, some sleeping, some playing poker down in the bottom of the cut, some talking, some reading bartered and yellowed newspapers.

Usaph and Gus lay with Lafcadio Wheat atop an embankment, on their bellies, their ribs tickled by the spiky grass. Wheat could see blue regiments in the woods off to the north and he lent Usaph and Gus his glasses so they could see them too. Usaph began to think, but it was a fine thing to work with a colonel and discuss probabilities with him and be privy to the mental side of battle.

‘They're pushing away up there, them Lincoln boys,' Wheat said, pointing north. ‘You can be sure as a tune on a fiddle they mean to make a push at us down here.'

Yet all day Colonel Wheat's boys were left untroubled. A Union general called Porter was meant to have fallen on their end of the line with his whole fine and numerous corps. But although Usaph, Gus, Wheat and even Jackson did not know it, Porter had had an argument with Pope that morning and had reached the conclusion Johnny Pope didn't know for certain where any of his corps were or what they should be doing.

So he did not move. Later he would be court-martialled for his kindnesses to the Confederate lean right flank.

About mid-afternoon, when butterflies hung from the lupins with folded wings and the heat lay on Usaph's shoulders like a fierce but tolerable garment, Wheat began to talk about his gran'daddy. It amazed Gus and Usaph. They felt exalted and a little uneasy, being let look through Colonel Wheat's field-glasses. It didn't seem right to them that now they were being invited into the secrets of the Wheat family. But soon they could sense that in some ways the colonel needed to tell them of the scandalous ways of that first American Wheat, as if the best fate he could envisage for himself was to grow up to become just such an old man.

‘Now my gran'daddy,' said the colonel, ‘was a wild-haired attorney from Clarksburg, and his name it was Hugo Wheat, and he was such a big man and could nigh-on dig post holes with that there implement of his. Well, there he was, Chairman of the Miners' Benevolent Fund with powers to dish out the lucre to the families of any poor miners who left various of their extremities down in the pit. There was this rumour that he enjoyed many a fine mine-widder, but I doubt that's true, he wasn't the sort to dance on any man's grave. Though you know when that-there Sam Peeps was Secretary of the Navy to the old British tyrant Charles II he used to get his way with many a sea captain's bride who called there at the Navy office in old London town to fetch her absent husband's pay. And ole Hugo was of a literary turn and had read Peeps' book setting down all these particulars, so if he did get his corner into a nice mine wife then he was but following the dictates of literature.'

Usaph saw Gus hunching down on his side and glancing at the brassy sky with this wide childlike grin on his face. So, Usaph thought, why should I spoil things by scowling at this story? But the question of what ole Hugo Wheat did to miners'
widders
raised the question of what men might one day do to his
widder
.

‘Well, sometime on about twenty years ago,' Wheat pressed on, ‘my gran'daddy discovered that another member of the committee was using the funds to issue personal cheques for his own purposes. With one of the cheques, this feller had bought a racehorse, and with another a new kiln from Chicago for his china works, which were called the Monongahela Pottery Company. So we'll call him Mr China for the purpose of this-here narrative and we'll call his wife Mrs goddam China. It happened that old Hugo always had a leaning towards Mrs China and that governed Hugo's actions in all that followed, for Hugo was a victim of the heart as they say in those yeller-back novels. He went to Mr China and told him as a friend that a member of the committee had found the gap in the Society's books and that the best thing Mr China could do was to clear out to Parkersburg on the Ohio and on to Cincinnati and raise the missing funds from the bankers and the merchants of that city, given that he was known to many Ohio merchants because of the quality of his goddam chinaware. Of course, he could never expect to be taken back into the bosom of that-there committee, but nothing would be said as long the money came back. So Mr China took off on his racehorse at night and left ole Hugo free to stay in Clarksburg, yet riding as sweet a mount, if you can fathom that riddle, gentlemen. For Hugo was left with none other than Mrs China and they took delight in each other in the morning and on them dry mountain afternoons in summer, and they were together according to their will in that first hot flush of night and after the dogs had gone to bed and in the first grey.

‘Well, Mr China was absent a good five weeks and didn't return till this time of the year, round on about the first rains. He comes riding up to his fine house at Nutter Fort and there's a horse in the rain there, gran'daddy Hugo's horse, and there ain't any niggers about to put it in the stable, because Mrs China's sent all the house and stable niggers, about five of them, all to town on errands. And Mr China is in the door yelling blood and murder before Mrs China and ole Hugo know anything of him. It's a situation ole Hugo has been in before this and he has this here facility – a true lawyer's gift – to make everyone feel goddam at fault, including the goddam judge.

‘He is as yet still wearing his britches and vest, though his boots are off, so as far as propriety goes he might as well be naked with his goddam weapon in his hand. Mrs China, well Mrs China is stark white as her husband's produce and lying bare-assed under the sheets. First gran'daddy grabs the big pitcher which the niggers had placed on the wash table for Mrs China's afternoon toilet, and he carries it across the room near the door and pours it over himself, some of it falling on the carpet in his recklessness. Then he flings a few towels about the floor and opens the door and faces Mr China. “Will you be quiet there, goddamit, China?” he calls. “Quiet, you serpent!” yells China and more in the same vein, and he gets all popeyed and comes up to Hugo as if he's going to hit him. So Hugo gets to it first and delivers a great blow to Mr China and yells: “You ungrateful cur! Do you realise what kind of woman you have here as your spouse? Grief-stricken at the rumours that sweep this community – rumours which I hope, China, you are about to allay by replacing the money you took from the Benevolent Fund – she sends all the nigras away to town and leaps in the stream, crazy with the loss of your conjugal presence, demented with shame, China, demented with it, your shame, man! By a happy providence I came out here with a message from your works manager for Mrs China and found her struggling in the mighty Monongahela. Off came my jacket and shirt, my heavy boots. Well might you, China, bless my prowess in the water and the strong goddam sinews I built up as a boy. I brought her back to you from the murky bottom of the great river, you sow's ass, China, and I bore her indoors and chafed her extremities with towels, as I hope a friend would do for my wife's extremities if ever she were in Mrs China's position. And I put her into her warm bed where you will now find her trembling, sir. I shall stay here now only long enough to gather up my coat, my shirt and my boots.” And gather them up he did and was gone, leaving Mrs China – who was what they called a woman of spirit – to carry the act on.'

Both Gus and Usaph were in now, and Usaph had forgotten the question of Ephie. For this was such a tale of villainy. And Wheat thought, even in the enthusiasm of his story-telling, ‘I'm binding you two boys to me by the magic of my narrative.'

‘A little later,' Lafcadio Wheat went on, ‘Gran'daddy Hugo met Mr China in Main Street, Clarksburg, and Mr China was a little cool and said: “P'raps you could tell me, Mr Wheat, sir, how you transported my bride from the muddy banks of the Monongahela to her bedroom without dropping any water on the stairs?”' And Gran'daddy Hugo winked at him and said: “Why, by about the same methods you use, China ole friend, to transmute the mites of mine-widders into racehorses or kilns. Come on, China, let's be friends. Your goddam wife and your goddam name are intact and just because of my goodwill.” “Intact,” says China. “My wife intact?” But he starts to laugh and they go and drink and go on being friends.'

Usaph and Gus chortled and they could see that the way they received the story brightened Wheat even more. And the colonel bayed out his laughter, so the cannon could not drown it.

‘He was,' yelled Wheat, ‘the greatest hell-raiser in Harrison County and one day, gentlemen, I mean to write a book about that old man. For though my speech may be mountain-rude, my style, gentlemen, my style is pure Augustan.'

7

That night, at a meeting in one of those eternal little Virginia farmhouses down by the crossroads, Tom Jackson conferred around a kitchen table with Lee and Longstreet. Robert Lee praised Tom.

‘Well, Tom, it seems from the reports I have here that today you held off Sigel's corps and Reno's and Milroy's and Reynolds' and Hooker's and Kearny's. Good men and bad, your boys held them off. Some 37,000 or so. With losses we know about. Well!'

But not much was decided. They would hold on to that godsend of a railroad cut, and sometime – whenever Jimmie Longstreet thought it was ‘militarily possible' – the troops under his command would attack John Pope's flank.

‘That'd be by noon?' Jackson asked.

‘Perhaps, perhaps,' Longstreet muttered. Jackson reflected that God and Ambrose Hill and Popeye and Andy Lawton and himself had been doing what was militarily impossible for days. But Jimmie Longstreet still had to wait for possibilities to present themselves.

His camp that night stood in a clearing up behind the Stonewall Division. Here Jim Lewis his servant – who'd arrived that afternoon with Longstreet's waggons – had a good fire going and coffee on. Hotchkiss the mapmaker and Hunter Maguire were sitting by it, resting on a rubber sheet and sipping Jim's good coffee. Jim was good at all cooking. He could do duck
à l'orange
and
carré de porc roti
. Tonight all he'd been able to get together was some ham and cornbread, but he baked cornbread better than a farm wife of sixty summers.

Jim came up to the General's stirrup and helped him out of the saddle and gushed away as was his manner. ‘Why, it's a blessing to see you whole, General Jackson. I got to thinking with all that noise we could hear on our way down here this evening that no soul at all would be left standing.'

Tom Jackson never passed up the chance to instruct blacks and poor people in the ways of the Lord. ‘Our Heavenly Father,' he said, ‘had his hand on me. And if he withdrew it, how could I complain, Jim? Can I have some of that coffee?'

Jim poured a cup with all that jolly black willingness that always made Tom Jackson uncomfortable. The General had never felt at ease with the institution of slavery. He was one of those Southerners who said they were fighting for the constitutional issues. His favourite way of talking of the conflict when he wrote letters or spoke to soldiers was, ‘our second war of independence'. He didn't think much about slaves unless he was forced to and his thinking on them wasn't so very original. He guessed a time might come when they'd be sent back to their homelands in Africa. Tom Jackson wondered what Jim Lewis would do, either with freedom or an African homeland.

The General remembered the day when he was seventeen and he'd ridden over to Parkersburg on the Ohio with his friend Thad Moore. Uncle Cummins Jackson had sent them there because there was a lump of mill machinery waiting for collection. On the way home they passed the farm of a friend of Uncle Cummins's called Mr Adams. Mr Adams was burying one of his negroes, and the boys reined in to watch the little funeral procession. The farmer's five grown blacks, including the dead man's wife, carried the coffin across the road to a deep hole. It was a fine black coffin, such as you'd put together for someone you respected, but it always made Tom Jackson pause when he saw a black buried. It made you think that now that black man had the freedom of the kingdom of death, for surely he had at least that much, given the way darkies sang of death as the great river crossing. He remembered he shocked his friend Thad Moore that afternoon. The opinion came out of him and he couldn't stop it. ‘They ought to be free and have a chance,' he'd said.