Confederates (9 page)

Since that dreadful time she had sometimes let other men lie with her, mostly out of politeness, but without joy. There had been a few times with Usaph's ailing Uncle Patrick Bumpass. But it was not this that made her beg Usaph to stop now. It was that somehow his sharp desire reminded her bodily of the other gentlemen visitors those five years back; and so confused her.

‘Please,' she said again, and he stopped. Nothing she'd ever learned of men up till then gave her any idea that men could stop. But Usaph stopped so politely, his member still half-crippling him, but him frowning and asking so softly: ‘Did I hurt you?'

‘No,' she said. ‘No. No, you didn't. Tomorrow, Usaph. Honest. Tomorrow maybe.'

That seemed to make him so happy. It came to her for the first time in her life that she, in her ole green dress, with the malarial fever in her blood and with all her sorrows, had the power to give happiness.

They talked for a while, then she went to bed and he slept on a rug on the floor. Before midnight she woke him and said there was no need for them to wait till tomorrow.

When they lay clasped together on her truckle bed, he forgot once and for all to ask himself the question honest farmers are meant to ask about the women they love – the question of whether she was virgin. His knowledge of the body of woman up to that point was imperfect and derived from two whores he had visited in Winchester one market time and from the thirty-year-old wife of ole Travis, the Bumpasses' neighbour near Strasburg.

At the end of their first hour of coupling, it was already three times too late for him to ask Ephephtha Corry any questions about other men and other fornication. He had since wanted to, but never dared. A solemn boy like him could easily lose such a woman, he felt, by asking the wrong questions.

They were both back in their proper places when Daddy Corry came in before dawn and looked at them with suspicion. He was a little man, leathery from his profession, and he hadn't taken many fish. He wanted a meal and Ephie got it and sometimes smiled secretly at Usaph.

‘The Lord hisself couldn't get no miraculous draft out of that there,' he said, pointing east, towards the Atlantic ocean. And because the father was so low and tired, it made them all the happier and higher. When they set out for Uncle Patrick's again, they were like Adam and Eve travelling on the face of the waters, and somehow the gators didn't frighten Usaph at all, they were like so many harmless creatures in Eden.

The same evening he returned to the shack with her and told the fisherman he wanted to marry her. Pappy Corry grunted a lot. ‘There ain't no dowry,' he said. ‘If you can find any dowry in this place you're welcome to it, boy. You can have a half share in my nets if you care for 'em.' Late in the evening he said: ‘Your pappy's the one who won't go for it.' Later still, he growled: ‘I'll have to get me in a woman to cook my victuals for me.' And at dawn, when Usaph woke stiff from a chaste night on the uneven floor: ‘Ephephtha can't think of leaving your poor Uncle Patrick alone till his sufferings're over.'

Usaph couldn't wait in the Carolinas that long. He still had to get in the last of his father's corn before the first snows fell in the Valley. He could wait only long enough for Ephie to assure him that they weren't about to have an early child from their coupling. Then he went homewards in deep sorrow, believing he might never see her again, and grieving that she would spend most of her time in the next few months with that uncle of his. But he was caught. How could he deny his father's brother the comforts of a nurse in his last days? It would be unnatural to do so.

Ephie too felt she was seeing the last of him and wanted to flit with him. But she too was bound to the dying and unlovable Uncle Patrick. She was sure from what she'd heard of Uncle Patrick's upright brother Noah, Usaph's father, that the Bumpasses wouldn't let Usaph marry her. She was dowry-less trash. The only thing was that she had the gift of happiness in her keeping, and she wished there was some way she could tell ole Noah Bumpass that by letter.

Usaph and his father argued for two months about Ephie. Noah Bumpass could name a tribe of Valley girls of known family that Usaph could wed. People that live in river estuaries have poor morals, said Noah, and carry diseases. Usaph couldn't predict the griefs a swamp-rat wife would bring him, said Noah. ‘The fact that this Pappy Corry is your Uncle Patrick's best friend ain't any recommendation at all, I'm afraid.'

And in that two months and ever since, Usaph went on remembering that it was Uncle Patrick who, by a sort of knowing suggestion, had brought on their first lovemaking. As if his uncle had known more of Ephie's swamp-girl ways than a mountain boy like him, his brain touched by the ice of the high Valley he dwelt in, ever could.

As it happened, Uncle Patrick died in winter and Usaph went straight away to fetch Ephephtha. He took with him as chaperone his mother's sister from Winchester, a joyless widow he disliked. Ephie was clever enough to know she had to behave perfectly, and be skilful and helpful, if she was to win the Bumpasses round. She was all these things. By the time Noah Bumpass died, he went believing she was the best nurse and sweetest girl he'd ever met and was even envious of his son for possessing her beauty.

And now here was this painter, this Decatur Cate, this Union funny man, who talked like a master's student from Charlottesville. Usaph knew, just by the look, by the mocking ways of this goddamn conscript, that Cate and Ephie would have laughed together. And that they might have understood each other as Cate dabbed the pink paint on the canvas and told her to be still and obedient.

7

Sergeant Orville Puckett of the Rockbridge Artillery, a college boy from Lexington who came towards the sinks from the cannon park that afternoon, saw the tall blond rifleman with rough blue patches on his jacket, leaning against the fence of the slave quarters, groaning, dripping tears. Orville surprised himself by getting a sort of sexual excitement at the sight of the poor boy. But he remembered the principles of Socrates he had learned in Lexington, and thought of good order and, composing himself, passed behind the screen of cedars and dragged his breeches off quickly, as his diarrhoea demanded of him.

Orville Puckett commanded a gun in Captain Edward Brynam's battery of the Rockbridge Artillery. In the Rockbridge most of the officers were professors and the gunners mainly undergraduates. So up to the Easter of the college year of 1861 Captain Brynam had been Professor of Ethics and Geometry at Washington College in Rockbridge County, and Orville Puckett had been a student of classics there. There were many such college boy units in the artillery of the Confederacy, for when the war began college people, from their acquaintance with mathematics and trigonometry, considered themselves the natural-born and ordained cannoneers to the army of the infant nation.

Puckett remembered as a lovely, innocent sort of dream the way he'd got mixed up with cannonry during Saturday afternoon classes.

A sweet spring Saturday. When …? Well, as it turned out, just last year. The last Saturday before Virginia left the Union. Old Kenton up on the platform droning away on the subject of Cicero's ovations, using his dullest, most peevish classroom voice as if this were just any Saturday.

And one of the junior-class men came running up the green slopes to the lecture hall and stuck his head in the window and said that the cadets from the Virginia Military Institute were marching downhill towards Lexington to fight the town militia.

That particular Saturday afternoon the people of Lexington were of all shades of opinion. The mayor was still flying the U.S. flag from the City Hall, the townsfolk wanted Virginia to stay snug in the bosom of the Union. The professors and boys of Washington College wanted to fight against that craggy, uncouth lawyer from Illinois who was attempting to coerce Virginia's sisters, to tyrannise over Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and all those other Christian and sovereign states.

But if the college boys were hot against tyranny, the cadets of the Virginia Military Institute, sharing with the college a hill above the town, were hottest of all.

All morning that Saturday there had been arguments on the street corners, and fist fights between cadets and town boys, and – about lunchtime – a rumour reached the Military Institute that a town boy had killed a cadet. At once the cadets took their muskets from the dormitories and marched down on Lexington, marched right past the window of the Institute's president, Colonel Smith, who had pneumonia and couldn't move. The Mayor of Lexington, warned of this invasion of armed cadets, sent a message across town to the Captain of the Lexington Rifles. These were local boys, still, at that stage, in favour of the Union. They were drilling as they usually did on Saturday afternoons on open ground to the west of town. Some civilians joined in with the Rifles now and a battle line was formed on the edge of town facing the cadets' line of march.

Once the junior classman brought this news to Dr Kenton's lecture-hall window, the ageing don found himself without a class. The exits were rushed; some boys even left by the windows. Soon Orville Puckett and others were down on the banks of the James, watching the cadets cross by the bridge and march in column towards the place by a tavern on the edge of town where the Rockbridge Rifles were drawn up.

Then a few professors from the V.M.I. came scuttling out of their houses in the town, past the town yokels who whistled and catcalled them, and halted the column of cadets. It was the first time Orville had really noticed that gangly professor called Jackson, who now tried to pacify the cadets, talking low and hard to them. According to what Orville found out later, Tom Jackson had been planting celery that afternoon in his back garden with his wife Anna, as if he wanted to believe he'd still be there to pick it at the end of summer.

Orville booed and hissed as hard as anyone when Tom Jackson made the cadets wheel around and march briskly back to the Institute. But if there'd been firing that day, it would have been no replay of a town-versus-Institute ballgame. The townsmen would have been killed. Down in Charleston Harbour, Fort Sumter had been falling bloodlessly all week to the artillery of the State of South Carolina. But this here, on the edge of Lexington, wouldn't be bloodless. The Rifles were armed with old flintlocks and screwball muskets from the days of the Indian Wars of President Andrew Jackson. Such weapons as those were slow to load and inexact beyond fifty yards. The cadets, however, carried Enfield muskets, good over hundreds of yards, made in the armoury at Harper's Ferry. Each cadet had, as well, seven rounds issued earlier in the day for the Saturday afternoon target practice. They knew how to fire by order, whereas the Rifles were just a sort of drinking club.

That aside, the incident filled the college with a high martial ardour. The same evening various professors went round the dormitories taking names for a regiment of volunteers to serve the State of Virginia. By the time Virginia seceded from the Union the following Wednesday, the regiment – which existed only as names being carried in professors' pockets – was being called the Rockbridge Artillery.

Major Jackson, his loyalty now being to Virginia, lent the Rockbridge two gun carriages from the Institute on which to mount the town's ancient smooth-bores (war of 1812). He also sent down two bright cadets to give artillery instruction. They were wonderful days, those days before Orville found out what artillery could do to human flesh.

Orville had first found out something of that at that fight at Manassas, where Southern virtue, Southern individuality, Southern forthrightness routed the Union. And where the cannon-hungry South captured 28 U.S. guns. Cannon as such were the manufacture of Northern mills. Sure, rural ways kept the Southern States rustic, pure, American in the old sense of the word. But hard-up for artillery. The cannon taken at Manassas were a gift of the gods.

The gun Orville Puckett commanded these days, a Napoleon twelve-pounder, was one of them. But Orville had changed since the fight at Manassas. Today, the day he saw that infantry man weeping, he didn't know any more if Southern virtue could last a war that went on beyond this coming autumn. And he surely didn't know if he could last it himself. He was getting thin, he had stomach cramps all the time and ceaseless diarrhoea.

The war was wasting him. It was wasting the South too. It was turning the South into a sort of war factory, a greedy and wasteful manufacturing. He'd seen what had happened to Richmond, where his father was now a clerk in the War Department. Prices were pumped up, just as they were in the markets of New York; candles, flour, coffee, lumber, copper were hoarded and speculated in. Richmond might just as well be Boston.

He adjusted his trousers and took from his pocket the captured toilet soap his cousin in Jeb Stuart's cavalry had given him. If I can just get home to cornbread every day, and some ripe apples and honey and Thanksgiving turkey and other niceties, I'm going to be all right. He coughed and noticed that there was phlegm on his chest. He felt frightened straight away. I've got to be careful of that. I wonder can I buy a flannel undershirt. With a flannel undershirt he might be able to last out the autumn and early winter. And that should do it.

The weeping soldier had vanished. Orville went to Thomas's stream and washed his hands, making a face at the human excreta all up and down the muddy bank. ‘Too many goddam Irish.' He began to sluice his hands and his face.

The idea came to him, sharp as a pain, and he began to cough again. These boys who had fouled the stream would live on to inherit the new nation, but he doubted he could himself. He wanted to weep into the water, but he had already seen one boy weeping today and that was enough tears. Besides, he couldn't be sure he'd ever stop weeping once he got the way of it.

Sergeant Orville Puckett was a month less than twenty-one years, and wound taut to last the summer out.