Confederates (7 page)

Usaph saw his Ephephtha's wide letters on the outside of the sheet of paper and then, assured that the letter was hers, shoved it into his jacket. Turning back to Gus, he felt already halfway a wronged husband. Later, at a private time, without Irishmen and evil elders like Bolly looking on, he'd get that conscript aside and ask him what the hell he was doing, acting as Ephie's postman.

After eating a wedge of Bolly's ramrod loaf, Usaph pretended to wander off to the regimental sinks. These had been dug behind a fringe of live oaks by Thomas's slave huts. The sinks were a private place, because most men rarely used them, making their droppings wherever the urge took them. The Surgeon-General was always writing decrees that soldiers would be punished for squatting and excreting at random, but most of them, poor hill farmers, or labourers of the flat lands of the Carolinas, had been doing just that since babyhood. To them, crapping where the urge took you was all part of those direct and honest country ways those Yankees would try to convert you from, if you gave them the chance.

Usaph leaned on a fence by Thomas's slave quarters. There weren't many slaves round, mostly older people and little pot-bellied children. Most of the strong slaves were off on rental to the government, working on the fortifications round Richmond. Usaph didn't feel crowded by black eyes therefore. In a clumsy rush he pulled the letter not only open, but very nearly apart.

Dearest husban Usaph [he read], I take my pen in han to rite to you. My pen is rude. My ink is pail, my love of you will never fale my sweetest husban Usaph. My sole cries for you, yore my turtle dove in the crevers of the rock darlin Usaph. An my arms cry out and my lips say sweet Jesus …

Usaph pressed his thigh against the fence of the Thomas slave quarters, hoping that the dumb wood would turn to feminine flesh, Ephie's flesh. When she said arms and lips she meant her sweet body. A Valley woman, unlike a slum Yankee, didn't go in for immodest particulars. But the pink skin of her groin would have wept as she wrote. And what consolation did she have? No more than he did, he hoped, and all he had was a fence.

Unless she had this
Decatur
. The thought caused Usaph to begin to weep. He left the fence, tottering a bit with grief for her, for himself. But, of course, he thought, in the midst of his tears, if that had happened she wouldn't send letters by him. Anyhow, Usaph Bumpass decided to forget the question. The posts were bad, letters were meant to be a joy. And you could chase your tail mistrusting a woman like Ephie.

Its bin a hot summer Usaph here at youre Aunt Sarries. Youd think you was down in my neck on the woods. Thays snaiks everwhers, ol Montie lifts a hay bale in the barn t'other day an they's a copperhead sittin there as if he oned Aunt Sarries. Still its good to be out of the way of the Yankees. I sore ole Mr. Chales from Mount Jackson the other day at a funrale hier an he tole me the Yankee cavlry would of bin over our place at Strasburg twies this summer. I hates to think of it an so I don.

Everyone says you boys is gone drive that Maclellin all the way back over to Phildelfier before the first snows. England gone tell ol Abe to call it quits an leave us be an youll be back for Crissmas an will be plantin corn in Strasburg agen nex summer. Pray the Lord God it be so. Even Mr Deckater Cate a paynter whos bin through thinks it likly. An he professis to luv Abe. Though no critter could luv that scowndrell as much as Mr Cate sais he dos. His a teese that Mr Cate, he gose roun the farms painting poortrades of the yonge an Aunt Sarrie payd him to paint me. When you come home will hang it up in the frunt parler back in Strasburg.

Done let anythin happen to you darlin husban for yore wife cudden stan it. I hev made a deal with the Lord so youll be safe an come back safe. Its paneful to write you an not be able to touch. Roses is red violets is blue, I swear to the hevvens I luv you.

Yore adorin spouse

Mrs Ephephtha Bumpass

Aunt Sarrie sez done worry on the matter of yore pappy's grave. She sez not even Yankees trubbels graves.

Lovin E.B.

He kissed the letter's open page and dropped tears on its riotous spelling. She could spell her name, his, the Lord's. But that was about all she could guarantee.

It came to him that he was shivering. Ephie became a blood fever, you didn't easily get over a letter from her.

6

Usaph had met her in the fall of '59. Usaph's daddy, who was himself ailing, had news of his elder brother, an overseer on a plantation at Pocataligo in South Carolina. The brother was said to be dying and Usaph's father felt one of the family should go and visit him, for there were no other Bumpasses down that way. He asked Usaph to go, to take letters and greetings, a bottle of brandy and a little money. Usaph had never before been east of Manassas Gap. He'd only heard of the cotton-growing South, of the rice plantations, of the South of the julep and the great slaveholders, of the unbuttoned, rundown, rich, steamy, enticing world of the Carolina lowlands. So the journey he took amazed and upset him some.

He travelled by railroads that were to become the framework of the war he now – three years later – found himself fighting. The Manassas Gap Railroad, the Orange and Alexandria, the Virginia Central, the Norfolk and Petersburg, the Seaboard and Roanoke, the Wilmington and Weldon, and all the rest. On great trestle bridges he travelled through Dismal Swamp. In the inky waters there were alligators; the coastal jungles were thickened by creepers of Spanish moss. He observed Southern gentlemen drinking cocktails and mint juleps with their breakfasts in the saloon car, and outside the foul water and the swamp thickets blurred past. Here, according to the legends white Southerners tormented themselves with at night, runaway and renegade slaves hid and maybe planned a war against their owners, but the dogs of the slave-hunters and malarial miasmas and the alligators usually broke up those plans. Yet one could never be sure. It looked like the place out of which some nigger king, some unconquerable black man with mad eyes and savage thews and a great manhood that threatened all Southern womankind, might come some day.

Everyone had a cigar in his teeth on those coastal lines and talked of politics and the fine nature of Southern institutions. In a mean village smelling of turpentine and the pine woods of North Carolina, a Tarheel Congressman left the train and spoke to the crowd of poor whites and to the gentlefolk who had come out of the woods on fine horses in well-cut clothes. The women were wearing crinolines in this balmy Southern winter; and the slaves carried the bandboxes and portmanteaux and babies.

‘We are an agricultural people,' proclaimed the Congressman, only a little drunk, ‘pursuing our own system, working out our own destiny. We bred up men and women to some better purposes than to make them vulgar and fanatical and cheating Yankees. Let me tell you, my friends, about the Republicans, who have risen in the North like a plague. Their women are only hypocrites if they pretend they have real virtue. Their men are only liars if they pretend to be honest. They're nice people to have in your home if you don't mind your littl'uns corrupted, your wife vitiated, your principles compromised. They have no gentry up there as we have, and so they have no order. We have a system that enables us to reap the earth's fruits through a race which we saved from barbarism in restoring them to their real place in the world as labourers, whilst we are enabled to cultivate the arts, the graces and the accomplishments of life …'

The poor whites, sallow from malaria and from their trade of extracting resins and turpentine from the forest, looked at him soberly, and the tall planters too, their eyebrows lowered a little. Even then, two and a half years back, the battle lines were being drawn in the winter air by tipsy Southern Democrats and by crazed Republicans.

The Charleston and Savannah had gotten Usaph to Pocataligo one brisk dawn, and without eating breakfast, he hired a horse at the livery stable and got directions to the Kearsage plantation, where his uncle was said to be dying. The man at the stables talked reverently about the Kearsages. Mr Kearsage had once been a U.S. attaché in London and was even known to have written a book so deep no one in Pocataligo had ever read it.

Mist sat on the low rice fields and hid all but the stookie tops of the cotton bushes when Usaph rode out of Pocataligo eastwards. Soon he met long lines of slaves moving along the road, shovels on their shoulders, to work on the sluice ditches in the rice fields. They were singing – just like all the books said they did – in a subtle harmony they took for granted.

‘Ah mah soul, ah mah soul! Ah's goin' to the churchyard to lay this body down.

‘Ah mah soul, ah mah soul! We's goin' to the churchyard to lay this nigger down.'

He'd never heard the massed African voice like this. Why, in the Valley no one owned so many slaves. A wealthy Valley man might have as many as three slaves or even five – house-staff and a ploughman and a waggoner, maybe, if he transported his own produce. But Valley niggers lived far apart and in small numbers and never sang in such voice.

After two hours, Usaph reached a plantation settlement, screened by trees and standing up in the rich mud flats of the Combahee River. The big house was two storeys high, there were creepers up its walls. It was part-timber, part-brick, and had that unapologising air of blowsy elegance he had, on his train ride, gotten used to seeing. A house-black in a wig and britches opened the door, but there was a large bustling woman of about forty coming down the central staircase, a glass of liquor already in her hand at this hour. For some reason she came straight to the door. Usaph knew through some instinct that if he'd been a planter, or dressed as a planter, he would have been asked in, for she seemed anxious for company. But he was just the son of a Valley farmer, a wearer of solid plain stuff, neither white trash nor white gentry. If he had to live down here, he'd likely end up as a clerk or an overseer like his uncle. And the tall woman knew it at a glance.

He explained he was looking for his uncle. She bit her lip, put her glass down and called on her black maid to fetch her wrap.

‘I hope this ain't any trouble,' Usaph had said.

‘No, no, come with me.'

As she passed him he felt on his ear her hot brandy breath. In the Valley you drank in the morning only if you had to go out at the peak of winter, or had had an overnight fever. Yet in the Carolinas, he could tell, it was booze for breakfast, summer or winter, well or ill.

She led him through a kitchen garden. Beyond a narrow road were the shacks of the slaves, a whole village of shacks, shingle roofs, unglazed windows, fading whitewash. Garbage middens stood by the doors, heaps of oyster shell, old rags, broken boots and crockery and chicken feathers. Some old slave-wives sat by the doors laughing their laugh. Their laugh was melancholy and rich and feminine. They tended almost naked pot-bellied slave children, future workers for the Kearsage plantation.

‘I sometimes feel badly about your uncle, boy,' Mrs Kearsage said. ‘I see him little enough. I hope he understands I have my duties to the slaves. People talk of my having so many slaves. I tell them it's the slaves who have me. Morning, noon and night I'm obliged to look after them, doctor them, and tend to them in this way and that. If Calhoun and Yancey are right, sir, and we ever have to fight for our way of life, I reckon I can manage the commissary as well as the medical side for the whole militia of this glorious state. There's your uncle's place. I won't come in. But you're to give him my warmest and best wishes.'

She turned and walked away, an elegant gait. The hut she had pointed to wasn't much different from those he'd seen in the slave-quarters, though one of its windows was glazed. Flakes of white on the grey and weathered surface of the timber showed where – about 1845 Usaph would guess – whitewash had once been put on. He knocked. He knew there would be no liveried negro answering at this door.

A white girl answered instead. She was dressed in an old crinoline. She was dark-complexioned and her eyes were dark. There was something wifely in the way she stood on the doorstep – that was Usaph's impression, that she was a young wife his uncle had picked up and since she was so beautiful he felt a spurt of jealousy for his uncle. Later, after he'd married this dark-eyed girl, that impression – that she'd opened his uncle's door in so wifely a manner – still tormented him.

‘Miss,' he said, ‘I am Patrick Bumpass's nephew, Usaph.'

‘You come right in then, Mr Usaph.' She stepped back, hanging her head shyly as if she didn't believe in her own beauty.

He passed into the murky, torpid interior. The floor was of packed mud. On the undressed walls were unframed prints of Jefferson and Ole Hickory and various fire-eating Southern Democrats. It looked as if Usaph's Uncle Patrick, having lived by the peculiar institution of slavery, was determined to die by it, with pictures of its patron saints all over his walls. The uncle lay on a bed by the one window. He'd once been a big man, and his wasted jaws jutted aggressively even now, while he was hard up for breath. He watched his nephew. On a stool by his bedside was a copy of the
Charlestown Mercury
and a near-empty bowl of oatmeal. Usaph knew the lovely girl had been feeding it to him.

‘Sir,' said Usaph reverently, ‘I'm your nephew, Usaph. I'm your brother Noah's boy from Shenandoah County, Virginia.'

The man's breath rasped. ‘You are welcome, son,' he said and tears came into his eyes.

‘My father – Noah – is poorly. But he wanted you to have a few comforts …'

Usaph got a bottle of brandy from the valise, and a deer-skin purse with ten dollars in it. He put the bottle and the purse on top of the
Charlestown Mercury
. The dark-eyed, dark-haired girl watched, and Usaph smiled at her in a tortured way. If the luxuriant, humid, magnolia-drugged lowlands ever got together to create a lush woman, this woman was close to what might result. She had already infested Usaph's blood, she was already a lowland fever in him and he found it hard to look at her.