Confederates (67 page)

‘This is my goddam furlough,' said the boy softly and raised his rifle and pointed it at the officer's chest. The officer could see the boy meant to shoot if he were stopped and so let him go through. That old officer knew the price wasn't worth it.

Usaph's sleeveless arm, tightly dressed in the Quaker dressing, was now
his
furlough. The bandages were hard brown like bark from all the stiffened blood and to anyone who saw it, it looked a frightful wound. So he was let through.

The wound was not just his furlough, it was his ticket, too. For Lee and the army left Maryland not fifteen hours after Usaph, and as the ambulance and ordnance waggons of the withdrawing force caught him up, he would be given rides, and when not in army waggons, farmers and people in carriages would often ask him to ride with them. And so he made his way down the Valley. And people fed him on account of that mess on his upper arm.

Whereas mere stagglers stole or starved.

9

It was murky in Orange that last evening. Rain had settled in again at the hour when Mrs Whipple got her last caller of the day. Young Surgeon Curtis, the head surgeon in the Orange Girls' Seminary, stood in the doorway. He was carrying a basket covered with a cloth.

‘Dear Mrs Whipple,' he said, ‘I've brought you your dinner.'

She liked the look of Dr Curtis tonight. He had none of that solemnity most of her visitors had, the solemnity of people visiting the already dead. Perhaps it was his experiences in the military hospital that gave him such an easy manner at the door of death cells. The depression that had come on her after Searcy's visit was lifted, and she smiled at the young surgeon.

‘You are very welcome, sir. Do you think you can persuade the turnkey to let you in?'

The turnkey obeyed her wish without being asked. Once in the cell Dr Curtis bowed to her. ‘I have wine, ma'am, light, dry, white. It is North Carolina wine, but good enough to eat fried chicken with.'

The bottle sat in a bucket of ice which filled one corner of the basket. In the other corners were flourbread rolls, fried chicken and gravy, roast potatoes and green peas. By the standards of the Confederacy it was an expensive meal, and the surgeon must have commanded most of the resources of the Lewis House to get a meal like it together.

Chatting, they unpacked, then they sat and began to eat, not before having an argument about who would use the one chair.

While they ate, she asked questions concerning patients she knew. Some had died. Well, it isn't such a big issue to die. Others had got better and been put into detachments moving northwards. They would likely come back more grievously wounded or ill than they had been in the first place. That was the irony of the conflict.

Then she said: ‘I don't want to talk at length about this. But have you seen a hanging?'

‘Once.'

‘What is your frank …
frank
, mind you … opinion of the sufferings of the hanged person?'

He looked at her direct, as if he could tell it was no use being coy. ‘I've spoken to this hangman,' he said. ‘And I think I can assure you, ma'am, as a surgeon, that you will suffer nothing. The world, ma'am, is amazed at your courage, if not your politics. I can assure you, you won't be made to suffer.'

‘It wouldn't have mattered,' she said simply. ‘I will see Yates Whipple again.'

‘Mr Searcy,' he said and coughed, ‘sends his warmest affection and hopes you would reconsider his offer … there is still time to contact Richmond by telegraph.'

She lifted her hand. ‘Don't say it!' She thought a while. ‘Tell him I am as you see me. That I am settled in my mind, in other words.'

‘I'll tell him,' he said. Then his face lit up. ‘Did you hear what the Marylanders did to Canty? They locked him in the privy at the Lewis House. Bound his hands, gagged him. There was a line of people, ma'am, if you don't mind my being indelicate, hammering at the door, and Canty not even able to answer them except for a grunt.'

Mrs Whipple clapped her hands and laughed. ‘He must have sounded like some case of dysentery.'

‘He
is
some case of dysentery, ma'am. Never mind, his brain will soon burst with all that booze.'

‘You are a good man, Surgeon Curtis,' she said.

He closed his eyes and lowered his head, taking the compliment. ‘And you among the best of women, ma'am.' Then he spoiled it a little by saying what they all did. ‘I don't know who is right, ma'am. But whoever is right, whoever prevails you will always be remembered. And if we are defeated …' He shook his head, ‘our name will be dirt for having done this to you.'

‘Not your name, sir,' she said. ‘Your name won't be dirt.'

‘My name,' he nodded; ‘my name with all the others.'

The chicken was eaten and only half a glass of wine was left when the turnkey brought them coffee. Mrs Whipple, already euphoric, found that an immense sleepiness overtook her as she drank the coffee.

‘I'm not accustomed to wine, sir.'

‘Perhaps you should lie down, ma'am.'

‘In the presence of a gentleman?'

‘Far from a gentleman, ma'am, a surgeon.' He grinned. He helped her to her cot. She fell heavily down on it and went almost immediately into a profound sleep. Strange she didn't suspect, Curtis thought. She should have suspected, given her familiarity with hospitals. He felt her brow and her pulse. Then he called to the outer office and they let in a nurse to sit by Mrs Whipple all night.

‘She'll not be very aware in the morning,' Surgeon Curtis told the nurse. ‘In fact she should not even be properly conscious. It will take you and one of the guards to get her to the scaffold. Hold her firmly all the way.'

The nurse said she would.

‘When she's cut down, be sure her body is as thoroughly cleaned and arranged as she has a right to expect.'

Mrs Whipple was snoring. The surgeon shook his head and gathered up the feast to take the basket and dishes, the glasses and the bottles back to the Lewis House. After he had delivered them to the kitchen there, he went into the lounge, where he found Searcy sitting in a corner, a hand over his mouth, his eyes lowered.

‘Sir, there were two grains of morphia in her coffee,' the surgeon told Searcy. ‘She will not suffer, no matter if the hangman makes mistakes.'

Searcy began to sob, so loudly that people in the lobby began looking in at him through the doors. ‘I think of what the rope will do to her sweet little body,' he said.

Curtis murmured: ‘Sir, there's no profit in that.' He glared at the spectators in the lobby and frightened them off. ‘Be as brave as Mrs Whipple is,' he muttered. ‘I think we should have some brandy, sir.'

10

The idea that the Army of Northern Virginia should leave Maryland came up clear on the afternoon of the day following the fight. Stonewall and James Longstreet and Lee kept getting reports of latecomers reaching Sharpsburg, a dribble of slow and lame who were at last arriving. Stonewall rode up the pike again with one of the artillery chiefs and they considered the question whether they could with their fifty guns break up that northern end of McClellan's army. Even Jackson decided it couldn't be done, not with what was left and with a few thousand foot-blistered and weary stragglers. Across the creek of Antietam, two new Union divisions arrived that day and took up their positions on the low hills. Others still would be coming up from Washington. Whereas Lee could expect nothing, nothing ever until today's fourteen-year-olds in Virginia and Alabama and the Carolinas grew up.

At two o'clock on Thursday afternoon, Lee made up his mind. The army should depart Maryland that night, leaving their campfires burning. Jeb Stuart's cavalry would screen the exodus and the reserve artillery of Sandie Pendleton's father would be placed on the banks of the Potomac to stop the river-crossers being molested.

At the hour Lee made his decision Usaph was getting his first ride in a waggon. His wrist in a linen sling he had made himself, he lolled in a fever on the tailboard of an ambulance bound for Leetown, Virginia, where surgeons were waiting. He meant to slip off that tailboard and dart away before any surgeon could get a sight of him. At first when he had waved at the driver, the man said there was no room for him, but had softened, reined in, inspected his load and found two dead boys in the straw-filled inside of the vehicle. He laid them by the road under a blanket for cavalry to bury.

Riding, Usaph did not listen to the mutterings from the interior of the conveyance. He like Lee was in a state of decision. His decision was to reach the Valley pike by tomorrow noon and to sleep in Winchester tomorrow night. He needed nothing to eat, he told himself. His canteen which was still at his left side unpunctured was full of the waters of the Potomac. He thought of nothing except the hundred miles and more he had to travel to Ephie. His decision to travel was locked up hard and dry as a stone in his brain.

There was a third American harried by decision that particular Thursday afternoon. Abe Lincoln. Because he could just about get away now with calling the fight along the Antietam a victory, he had the chance to issue that edict about the slaves without looking ridiculous. In his office in the White House he first read over the reports of the engagement that had come in from McClellan. In a covering letter, McClellan had written: ‘Even Lee admits he's been beaten.'

‘I wonder who in tarnation he admitted that to?' Mr Lincoln asked John Hay. Neither of them respected George McClellan, but he had given the document they had prepared months before about freeing the slaves its only legitimacy. So they set to work revising it. They'd been careful not to make it wordy, so that it now sounded like a statement of a reluctant duty. They knew the opposition in cabinet would come from Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, native of Missouri. He'd rattled the old sword about how the border states, Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky, wouldn't stand for it. ‘You remind me of a man out west,' Lincoln had said in cabinet one day to Montgomery Blair. He was always telling cabinet members they reminded him of a ‘man out west', by which he meant Illinois. ‘He's got two oxen in yoke, and they're pulling a waggon he's got loaded up with hay. And one of the oxen just dies, like that, in the yoke. And hours later the man's friend comes along that road and sees the man sitting on the stock-still waggon with one live oxen and one dead. And the friend says, Why don't you take that dead one out of its chains and then just continue the journey. And the man on the waggon says, The load is too heavy for just one ox. So for all I know, Mr Blair, that man might be on that road still.'

Well, the dead oxen was the institution of slavery in the border states, Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland. The live one was the impulse to free black people, an impulse so strong in so many parts of the Union. That impulse alone was strong enough now to drag the loaded waggon.

The document, as Mr Lincoln and John Hay revised it that afternoon, said that if the Confederacy didn't cease its rebellion by New Year's Day, all slaves in the rebellious states would be considered free. In Southern areas occupied by the Army of the North, their freedom would become immediately real on that grand New Year's Day, the Day of Jubilo. Slaves elsewhere would need to wait until their counties were liberated or until the Rebels gave in.

Abe Lincoln knew how this document would get them thinking in the Foreign Office in London. In one corner of his brain he knew too that there was a general on the Mississippi, a more or less successful one and that made him a rare breed. Ulysses Grant. Grant kept writing to the President that the work of slaves was the core strength of the South. This was because he'd had to punch his way through levees and along canals all dug by slaves. If slaves should find out Abe Lincoln considered them free, they wouldn't work so well as diggers of tough fortifications and all the rest.

When the draft was ready, Hay had confidential copies written out and sent all over Washington to the houses of the Lincoln cabinet. Abe sat at his desk reading a copy of his favourite humorist's latest book –
Artemus Ward; His Book
– just recently published and selling like cakes. He was reading this belly-thumper of a chapter called ‘Outraj'ous Behaviour in Utika'. It was about some citizens of Utica, New York, who smashed up a visiting wax show of The Last Supper because they didn't hold with Judas visiting their town. Abe decided that when the cabinet met next Monday, he would read them a bit of Ward to loosen them up before they made their comments on the text of emancipation.

11

On the afternoon of September 24 that year, the black woman Bridie who belonged to Aunt Sarrie and knew nothing about the intentions Mr Abe Lincoln had for her, went out on the porch to fetch in a mat she'd been sunning out there. The valley was full of that blue autumn shadowiness, but she could see clear enough a ragged man standing still at the gate. The man wore his wrist in a foul linen sling and stood there wavering a little on his legs but with his feet fixed in place.

Bridie thought of shooing him off on her own authority but then wondered if she should maybe speak to one of them white ladies.

There was no speaking to Mrs Ephie Bumpass. Mrs Bumpass was up in her room having more of the vapours. Just ten days back she had lost her child. Miscarried as Aunt Sarrie called it. Bridie had had to bear away the stillborn little lump and Montie, her husband, dug for it a decent but nameless little pit. That had been done on Aunt Sarrie's orders. Ephie had been too ill and in too sore distress to know what was happening. Though Bridie and Montie knew whose child it was, Aunt Sarrie didn't even have to warn them about keeping their tongues still about it.

Since that misfortune – or whatever else you'd call it – Mrs Ephie Bumpass had been low at heart and wistful and full of shame. She felt that the women of the house were judging her. Well, that was true. Bridie judged her. Hard. But Bridie also knew that Aunt Sarrie, the real power, had decided to forget all about it, for ever, the way the forgiving Lord pretends that the sinner's sin doesn't exist once that sinner just turns a second to the Lord Jesus.