Confederates (68 page)

Anyhow, seeing the scarecrow at the gate, Bridie went to seek Aunt Sarrie for instructions. Aunt Sarrie was in the back garden among her beanpoles shelling green peas. She put down the bowl as soon as Bridie told her and went through the house to the porch, treading softly in case Ephie was asleep.

Out of the same consideration, she did not call to the man from the porch itself, she went halfway down the path. From there she could tell the man was quivering about the shoulders in a way that reminded her … yes, of a man quietly weeping.

It was a slow business for her to get to the conclusion that this was a wounded soldier and that those were military tatters. It was slower still to get to the fact that it was Usaph. First there was the unkempt whiskers to see past, then the dirt, then the lousy clothes. Fragments of the gunpowder with which Usaph had adorned himself at the urgings of the late Lafcadio Wheat still stuck in the seams of his skin. His hair, light-brown when he left home, had gone black with clotted mud and maybe even blood. He was leaner than his aunt had ever seen him. He had the pinched face of the very ill.

When it dawned, she ran up to him. But the mystery of how he'd got this way stopped her a yard short. She could smell him too. He smelt of urine and bowel dirt and the foul sweat of an entire summer. She could see the tears making mud on his filthy cheeks. The mess of black bandage on his left arm shocked her.

‘Aunt Sarrie,' he said, and it sounded as if the words caused him pain. ‘You got coffee at all?'

She started shedding tears too and she touched his right arm, but he looked such a mess that she forebore to caress him in case it hurt him too bad. She was already accustomed to his stench.

‘Yeah, darling Usaph,' she said in a small voice. ‘I got coffee. Come.' She led him up to the house by the right hand. As they passed Bridie, Bridie recognised him. She began to wail. ‘Oh I never seen a nigger look so bad! Oh I never!'

In the front parlour Aunt Sarrie steered him for the sofa. ‘Lice,' he said. He nodded his head, indicating the length of his body. ‘Lice.'

‘If lice get at the sofa, why I'll burn it, Usaph. To hell with the sofa! Bridie, get him maybe buttermilk. And brew coffee.'

From her bed Ephie heard the noise of some small domestic emergency and came out of her room and stood at the head of the stairs.

‘Aunt Sarrie!' she called.

Aunt Sarrie came to the foot of the stairs, looked up all solemn at Ephie.

‘Mrs Bumpass,' she said, almost like someone passing sentence, ‘your husband has come. He's in something approaching a state. You'll find him in the parlour.'

Bridie's husband Montie came in from the barn and began wailing like his wife at the sight of this poor man. Ephie too, coming in, was blinded by the stench of Usaph, but part from remorse and part from love and pity, forced a head down on his lousy thighs, crooning: ‘Oh, Usaph, my darling husband, my poor man.' From the back landing ole Liza, Usaph's slave, already in her mind if not in her body passed over into the land beyond Jordan, increased the volume of her ancient song as if she somehow knew.

So in that parlour, the three women and the slave man took Usaph's clothes off – it was Montie's job to burn them – and sponged him with warm water and gave him drink and wrapped him naked in blankets. The wound they dared not touch, but sent Montie over to Goshen with an urgent note for a Doctor Benson who lived there.

This doctor got back after dark with Montie. He cut the wood-hard bandages away that the Quakers had put on Usaph, and whistled as he looked at the swollen wound, and then lanced it to let the pus out, and said it seemed fit. He gave Usaph a draught of laudanum that put him to sleep for twelve hours.

‘Feed him,' the doctor told Ephie.

‘Oh yes, I sure will, sir,' said Ephie.

Ephie sat up all night and sometimes, when they were sure that Usaph's sleep was deep and his breath deep and steady, she would go to the kitchen to have a cup of coffee with Aunt Sarrie, who could not have slept tonight anyhow.

‘Well, your husband's home, gal,' Aunt Sarrie said.

‘And I praise God, I do, ma'am. It's more than I ever merited.'

‘You don't say that. You been a stupid gal by my lights, but don't go looking for punishment. I think that you make a good woman, Ephie, all taken in. But you're a beautiful and kind of lusty gal, not that that's any excuse. But it makes things harder.'

Ephie was blushing but so happy to hear Aunt Sarrie forgiving her her transgressions. Now she wanted Usaph to have her, oh so badly, but we must wait for the muck to drain and the flesh to heal. But it's hard, Lord, hard. She dug her fingers through her dress into the flesh above her left knee. It was just a little way to give vent to both her happiness and her desire.

Of course, the happiness she felt wasn't quite the whole hog of happiness. Usaph had either to be told of the baby or to have it kept secret from him. And Ephie's urge was to tell him.

Before she could say so, Aunt Sarrie forestalled her.

‘I can see it in you though, you silly gal, that you have this itch to let him know of the child you carried. Well, you know by now that itches ain't there to be attended to too willingly. You are to forget that child, I tell you. You're not to start indulging your queer idea of what is truthful by mentioning anything of that child to Usaph. Mister Lincoln done his best, gal, to kill the poor boy. Don't you join in that damned effort. You understand me?'

He woke up weeping. Ephie was sitting by him. It was the third night she'd sat by him.

‘What troubles you, my love?' Ephie whispered.

‘I don't know where they're buried,' said Usaph. For he had dreamed something confused, that the bodies of Gus and Wheat and Judd and that strange little drummer Rufe had not been justly treated.

His dream had foundation; for when the Yankee burial parties moved into the farmyard they threw Rebel bodies down that well from which the pump had been blown off. The farmer had argued about it with the Yankee officer, but since the well was already fouled, he decided he might be as wise to fill it up with dead Rebels for a contract price, and seal it over with stones, and then dig another well just up the hill a little. So he went to Union General Hooker and got a contract price of $1 per head for each Confederate corpse he slung down his well.

Into that pit then went Texans and Wheat and the drowned Ash Judd and Gus Ramseur for whose music the world would now wait, and Rufe the Arkansas drummer. And from that mute place they called out in Usaph's sleep. But as he got better and more distant from them, their cries and his own diminished.

There was still the problem of his connection with the army. Ole Cap'n Stilwell, the conscription official for Bath County, came round to Aunt Sarrie's to take his name so that his place of residence and the nature of his wound could be conveyed to the War Office in Richmond.

‘You need building up, boy,' said Cap'n Stilwell. ‘I think we should keep you here till spring.'

Ephie smiled in gratitude. But Usaph looked at his hands and his face turned red, as if he had decided never to go back, as if somehow the old officer's kindness was an insult.

He had the sweetest and most wistful Christmas of his life that year and the balm of Ephie's body made him weep as he lay beside her, and his last doubts of her were diminished by that, and he was already on the way to forgetting Cate for ever (if that was possible).

In the spring he went back to the army, which was upon the Rappahannock round Fredericksburg, the town where the Confederates under their old General Lee had had a great Christmas victory over the Army of the Potomac under their new general Burnside. Danny Blalock, having got out of his cellar, was up at Fredericksburg and had become an officer. He found a place for Usaph to sleep in a little winter-dwelling dug into the earth and roofed with canvas and boughs. It was cosy enough by the standards of the Army of Northern Virginia, but within a month, Usaph caught pneumonia and was sent to Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond. His lungs would remain wheezy the rest of his life.

In May of 1863 he was discharged and caught the train to Staunton, where Ephie met him and danced him to a good hotel. There they ate and drank as well as you could in an embattled nation.

They had four children in the end. All of them got to adulthood. One of the boys became a lawyer, the other a farmer, and there were two girls.

Usaph died of a lung condition in 1873 when his eldest child, his daughter, was eleven.

Ephie married again three years later to a man called Bridges, a Democratic Senator in the State House of Virginia, who saw her at a political social one evening in Staunton and loved her beyond all cure. Bridges ended life as a U.S. Congressman in 1903, but Ephie lived till 1922, and every year on the anniversary of Usaph's death put a notice about him in the
Richmond Enquirer
, how he never got over the damage he suffered doing his duty, and how loved he was.

Of the other survivors of that summer, Danny Blalock died at Gettysburg, a major by then. In a Pennsylvania hospital, Cate mended stubbornly. His father had got him exempted from imprisonment on the condition that he took an oath of loyalty to the Union. This he did with a full heart. His wounds had however castrated him and this, and the lack of a foot, made him a bitter young man. He left Philadelphia for Paris in 1866 on the pretext that he was going to study art, and lived there off an allowance from his father, with a series of woman companions, for five years. In 1870 he completed a two-volume novel which he published himself in Paris. The French compositors made a mess of it when they set the type.

In 1871, the day after his 23-year-old French companion left his apartment in Montparnasse, he shot himself. Neither Usaph nor Ephie ever heard of what had happened to him.

The Honourable Horace Searcy caught the
Calliope
after first despatching a scalding account of the Dora Whipple affair to
The Times
. In 1863 he wrote a narrative of his journeys in the South and admitted in it his connection with Secretary Stanton. He attended and spoke at British meetings in support of the Union cause and the emancipation of the slaves.

Although to the average American he seemed a characteristic stiff Briton, he had never enjoyed his destiny as the younger son of an English peer. In 1867 he emigrated to Canada, made money in railroad and mineral stocks, bought into iron in northern Michigan. He did not marry until 1882, by which time he was a Liberal member of the Canadian Parliament.

He had a statue of Mrs Whipple built in the market place of Langport, the town in Somerset which Dora Whipple's forebears had left to settle in Boston. He lived long, and as he got richer, wrote less and less.

On May 2, 1863, while Usaph was still in Chimborazo with lung trouble, Tom Jackson was wounded in the arm by a Confederate horseman on the evening of one of his best days. He had led his corps fair round General Hooker's flank at Chancellorsville. The rout of the Yankees was complete by dusk, and then one of his own cavalrymen shattered his arm by accident. Hunter Maguire took the arm off in the parlour of the Chandlers' house in Chancellorsville, but pleural pneumonia set in. Maguire applied heated cups to the right side and administered antimony and opium. Stonewall's wife, Anna Morrison, came up from North Carolina to nurse him. On her way to the Chandlers' she saw soldiers digging by the side of the road. She realised they were exhuming a coffin. When she asked them they told her it was the body of General Paxton, an old Lexington friend of hers, shot dead just a week past and now being dug up to be shipped home to Rockbridge County. The sight struck Mrs Jackson with a terrible fear.

Amongst her husband's last spoken sentences were these, uttered in delirium: ‘Order A. P. Hill to take the right flank. Major Pendleton, go see if there is higher ground between Chancellorsville and the river. Where
is
Pendleton? Tell him to push on those columns!'

But his last words of all before dying on the afternoon of May 10 were: ‘Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.'

Bibliographical Note

In telling this narrative, the author received invaluable assistance from a number of works, but especially:

Stonewall Jackson
, volumes 1 and 2, by Lenoir Chambers (1959)

The Blue and the Grey
, volumes 1 and 2, edited by Henry Steele Commager (1973)

The Confederate Reader
, edited by Richard B. Harwell (1957)

My Diary North and South
, volumes 1 and 2, by W. H. Russell (1863)

I Rode with Stonewall
by Henry Kyd Douglas (1940)

A Southern Woman's Story
by Phoebe Yates Pember (1959)

The four volumes of Bruce Catton's
Centennial History of the Civil War

The Life of Johnny Reb
by Bell I. Wiley (1943), and by the same author,

The Plain People of the Confederacy
(1944) and
Southern Negroes
, 1861–5 (1938)

May all these authors, the living and the dead, flourish in reputation.

About the Author

Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) is an Australian author of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, best known for his novel
Schindler's List
. Inspired by the true story of Oskar Schindler's courageous rescue of more than one thousand Jews during the Holocaust, the book was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg, which won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Picture. Keneally was included on the Man Booker Prize shortlist three times—for his novels
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
,
Gossip from the Forest
, and
Confederates
—before winning the award for
Schindler's List
in 1982. Keneally is active in Australian politics and is a founding member of the Australian Republican Movement, a group advocating for the nation to change its governance from a constitutional monarchy to a republic. In 1983 he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia for his achievements.