Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘You goddam eunuch!’ said Murphy. He did not want trouble provoked between himself and Bolly. He wasn’t sure that Bolly couldn’t whip him; Bolly had once whipped a young man from the 21st Virginia. A 65-year-old lumber man who had had seven wives and could keep up in the war of the young must be a tough and crafty being. Now if Joe was whipped by him, there would be the shame. There’d be shame either way. ‘There goes Joe Murphy. He likes whupping ole men.’ Or even worse, ‘There goes Joe Murphy. He gets whupped by ole men.’

  Ash Judd, having made the trouble, now saved it from taking root. ‘Look at that there!’ he said, pointing down the road from Charles City. You couldn’t see far down roads in this country, the swampy oak forests pressed hard up against the edges of the thoroughfares. So the some one hundred or more men who had now halted by Thomas’s plantation gate must have come down the Charles City Road, yet they were there by the gates so suddenly they might just as well have been dropped like manna out of the sky.

  Everyone was silent, taking in these new people, and even Usaph Bumpass turned away from Gus Ramseur for the first time in two hours and studied them. They were men who looked displaced. Some of them had indoor complexions, as if they’d clerked in shops till just last week. More than half of them had grey jackets – some commissary officer must have got a shipment and handed them out. Yet in Jackson’s corps there were hardly any of those mythical Confederacy-grey coats and most men lived in the homespun of their forefathers, in jackets stained to a butternut colour with a dye made up of copperas and walnut hulls. The newspapers called it the war between the blue and the grey. Well, it was the war between the blue and the butternut.

  So even the regulation coats they wore made the boys at the gate something like outsiders. Another strange aspect to them was that they wore grey forage caps. They were therefore fresh soldiers, for veterans wore slouch hats which could be used as umbrellas in foul weather, as parasols in midsummer, as pillows at night.

  Usaph noticed the others around him getting to this conclusion and their faces going taut and their eyes beginning to squint. It was natural enough that veterans should feel that way about new soldiers, as if they wanted to ask: ‘Why weren’t you here last month to save us some of our suffering?’

  ‘Your ham’s burning there, Ash,’ Usaph muttered. And the boy, still looking at the men at the gate, took the skillet off and laid it on the ground.

  Usaph went on watching the pure hate growing in Ashabel’s face and in Joseph Murphy’s. Those fellers at Thomas’s newel posts had had months more of sweet-talking girls, of eating off plates, of listening to the fiddle by the fire than Ashabel and Murphy had. Now Ashabel and Murphy would like to make the visitors at the gate expiate all that.

  Usaph Bumpass found himself laughing at them. ‘Why are you looking at them all mean-eyed like that, Ash? They ain’t the hosts of the Amelekites.’

  ‘No, Amelekites they may not be,’ Ash admitted. ‘But they’re scabs. They’re latecomers and poor comers and – and poor hands!’

  Joe Murphy whispered, looking at Bolly: ‘Don’t go talking scabs again.’

  All at once there was a movement to the centre of the field in which Usaph Bumpass and the others stood. The colonel had arrived from somewhere and men were drawing in close towards him. Because maybe he would say: ‘All right, boys, for all your good works and meritorious service, you can have the reward of going down to the gate and crucifying those gentlemen.’

  The colonel’s name was Lafcadio Wheat. He was a lawyer from Clarksburg, way over in the mountains. He stood quite tall, black curls spilling out under his hat, the line of his mouth lost amongst rich black whiskers. He was about 33 years old and had a wit about him. No one had ever seen him laugh, however – he would have made a good judge or a carnival comic.

  ‘Dear boys and brothers of the Shenandoah Volunteers,’ Colonel Wheat began now, for that was his standard starter for speeches. ‘You might remember that last April 16 the Confederate Congress happened to pass a conscription law. Or has all this backing and forwarding across the Blue Ridge knocked your memory of April clear off its perch? No? Damn good, I say. Well, it’s taken a little time for the conscripts called up under that law to reach us, but the day when they see us and we see them has come, bygad, and that’s conscripts there by the gate.’

  It was said Wheat had studied law in Philadelphia, that he had a bushel of Latin and enough Greek to know a little of Homer and that crowd. But he’d always talked in a drawling backwoods way, and Usaph thought it was just to get the boys in and cause them to elect him colonel, as they had done some two months back.

  Now Usaph didn’t particularly object to Lafcadio Wheat’s election, for Wheat was a brave man. For instance, on a stewing lowland afternoon the week before, beneath Malvern Hill, when the regiment had been told to lie down on marshy ground in the rear of the Rockbridge artillery and to wait in the event of the guns being rushed, Wheat did the thing all ideal colonels were said to do according to the newspapers of Richmond. He walked amongst the companies of men, who’d been ordered to lie flat on the quaggy ground like sheafs of mown grass, and he joked. And he spoke in his homely mountain way.

  Occasionally a feller would say to him, ‘Colonel, the scourge of the di-harree is on your humble servant.’

  ‘Well,’ the colonel might say, ‘I suggest my humble servant gets his tail back in that screen of hawthorn and drops his drawers while the dropping is good.’

  Although there were swamp oaks growing round about, the Federals would have needed no more than binoculars to have spotted Wheat prancing round. It was known the Yankee sharpshooters on the brow of Malvern Hill used Whitworth rifles, long and lovely in their own right and set up with one of the dazzling items of this modern age, telescopic sights. Now, by the talk that went round, a Yankee with a telescopic Whitworth rifle could study the distant man he was about to strike, the way you’d study the daguerreotype of your wife or brother. If he was a Yankee of religious leanings, he might even pray for the soul he was about to send screaming out to judgement, before actually blowing the beneficiary’s throat or temples away. Though some sniper might have prayed for Wheat, he didn’t succeed in harming any part of his impressive upper body.

  In the Thomases’ meadow, Wheat went on village-pumping it without shame. ‘Now I can tell you boys have some feelings of vengefulness about this whole business of conscripts, so we may jest as well draw off all the poison from your glands and say everything that’s on your minds. Now some of those boys at the gate are no cowards. No. Some of ’em are Union-sympathy fellers from over to the South Branch of the Potomac. Well, I swear by my granddaddy’s pecker, and that’s no small oath, that them Yankee boys are going to settle in and make the best goddam Confederates in North Virginia.’

  ‘Granddaddy’s pecker?’ Usaph asked Ash Judd, scarcely believing. He didn’t think it was right of a man to pledge away bits of his grandfather’s body to a clutch of ungodly soldiers.

  ‘Yeh, yeh,’ said Ash, who had never known his own grandfather and so wasn’t shocked. ‘He’s some colonel, this Wheat!’

  Usaph bent and pulled the blankets closer round Gus Ramseur’s golden beard. Gus was a man of real talents and worth saving. He spoke of the pianoforte, and would have been in the band if he hadn’t considered band music vulgar. Yet he’d played mountain music on his fiddle. He loved those old songs even though he was more or less a foreigner. ‘Where’re your parents from, Gus?’ they asked when he first joined them.

  ‘Lorraine.’

  ‘Lorraine who?’

  For Usaph’s money, Gus Ramseur was the true remarkable man of the Shenandoah Volunteers and he must not die of fever in a lowland meadow.

  ‘Let me tell you more about them boys at the gate,’ Colonel Wheat persisted, ‘for I want to have it all out with you before you meet them. Some of them is substitutes. Some wealthy boy’s got drafted and rather than join us himself, he advertised in the papers or hunted round the taverns or left his name
at the cat house to hire a stand-in.’

  There was the standard laughter, and all the more laughter because Colonel Wheat would not join in it.

  ‘Now down in this palmy section of tidewater Virginny, down here in Henrico and Hanover and Louisa Counties and all that …’ There were catcalls, for Shenandoah people loved to hear the lowlanders mocked. ‘… where most well-to-do gentlemen own more niggers than freckles on Aunt Libby’s ass, a wealthy boy could pay $500 for a substitute. Up in the poor mountains from which we stem, a substitute might fetch no more than $200 or $300. Even so, when did you last see $300 in the one pile?’

  ‘U.S. or Confederate Treasury?’ someone called. Everyone laughed again and Colonel Wheat stared, as if angered at the interlocutor.

  ‘Now,’ he continued at last in a voice that was secretive – if you can be secretive with some hundreds of men, ‘there is another aspect to them Yankee-leaning or shirking or dollar-stuffed boys at the gate. And that is that they represent a necessity. In plain terms, we have need of them. Therefore, I am telling you and you best heed it. You can use a sharp tongue on them and for today you can exchange with them your old equipment for their new. But in spite of all and every perversity you might associate with them boys, you are not to harm them bodily nor, after this first day, humiliate them. Look on them, gentlemen. Let your eyes see them for what they are. New blood, new blood! Lord be praised!’

  Favouring the cut on his arm, and having left his loaf of bread to cool on a flat stone, old Bolly Quintard, in view of his age, felt he could raise a subtle point with his colonel. ‘Colonel Wheat, sir, sure as hell we’re going to have to change our name. With them people we’re no longer volunteers.’

  Deliberately, the colonel made his eyes bulge like a mad parrot’s. ‘What, Bolly? Yield up a name you earned yourself jest for a clutch of latecomers. They’re going to be volunteers. You gentlemen’re going to volunteer them!’

  Wheat turned away now and waved his hat towards whomsoever commanded the men at the gate. The conscripts advanced under the direction of two newcomer officers. They were both typical of certain species of Confederate officer. One was a man in his forties, something of a shuffler, Usaph noticed, not a trained officer. Probably an upland lawyer or professor who had decided he could no longer tolerate following the conflict through newsprint and wanted bodily to assist in imposing the Confederates’ Christian will on the North. Having volunteered and bought his uniform, he’d been given the drab task of bringing conscripts cross-country. He looked as footsore as you’d expect. The other officer was a tall boy of no more than eighteen. The son of what you’d call a good mountain family, gangling but sure of himself, clever-looking yet something of a hick. He would have volunteered as soon as the school year ended at whatever college he’d been at. Probably Washington College in Lexington, or the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Usaph watched him and thought, what would I give to be a learned man myself, a college boy like that.

  He was not to know it, but the boy – whose name was Lucius Taber – had failed his Bachelor exams at Washington College, having not studied since last February, as he saw the history of Athenian democracy and the syntax of Horace and Socrates as irrelevant to this high perilous year in which Virginia found itself. He’d had two friends at Washington College. Their fathers, like his own, insisted they stay there until the end of the academic year. These boys therefore pledged not to study anything, and Lucius formed with them a secret body called The Immutables. The Immutables agreed to avoid study; to shun the company of other college boys and to seek that of the senior cadets from the Virginia Military Institute which stood near by on the hill above the gracious town of Lexington; to get used to taking whisky in quantities, a gift they were sure every Confederate officer should possess; and when asked to answer questions about the Age of Pericles, to reply with an explanation of Stonewall Jackson’s Valley command or of the manner in which Yankeedom had destroyed the great American constitution.

  After the examinations, the president of Washington College informed the fathers of The Immutables that it was no use keeping them there while the conflict lasted. It was hoped that would not be beyond late autumn, since by then Confederate success must have caused a peace settlement.

  Now Lucius considered himself a traveller. In his fifteenth summer he’d been up the Ohio to Cincinnati. But he’d never been down into coastal Virginia before and the fact that he travelled with conscripts hardly touched his joy as a tourist.

  Colonel Wheat’s adjutant, Major Dignam, met the newcomers at the entrance to the meadow. The scraggy-looking lawyerly man saluted him and handed him a list of the conscripts. All through the ceremony the veterans kept silent, except for Gus Ramseur who called out, ‘I regret I’m not trained for it’ – replying to an officer in his fever who had ordered him to play in a string orchestra of which all the instruments were made of whisky barrels cut in two and covered with drum parchment.

  In near silence, the adjutant, Major Dignam, a lanky Methodist preacher from Mount Meridian, appointed twenty of the conscripts to one company, fifteen to another, 25 to the centre company which had suffered surprising losses late on the afternoon of Gaines’ Mill, and divided the last twenty between companies D and E. Listening, Bolly Quintard thought, the salt has lost its savour. The tainting of the Shenandoah Volunteers is completed. Yet like the others he wanted the new boys to be turned loose in the paddock, so that they could be punished for all the griefs and inequities he had suffered as a soldier of the Confederacy.

  The new boys were not fools and could see what lay ahead. When they got the order to fall out they did not want to obey it, but remained in clutches of two or three near the gate to the meadow. Major Dignam loudly called the new captain and young Lucius Taber away to meet the other officers of the regiment, who were living near the general’s staff in three captured tents heavily marked – like so much else of the equipment with which the war was being fought – with the enemy’s initials, U.S.

  The lawyer’s name was Hanks. He protested to the adjutant. ‘I have to see to the comfort of my men.’

  ‘There’s no seeing to it today. Tomorrow morning, Captain Hanks, is the time you take up your stewardship anew. Until then they have their new comrades.’

  ‘You’re speaking, sir, from a knowledge of precedent?’

  ‘I’m speaking from a knowledge of reality, Captain Hanks.’

  ‘I depend on precedent … I am a lawyer, sir.…’

  ‘Well, maybe what I speak of can’t yet be fully described as precedent, but if we help it along it might be precedent by sundown.’

  ‘What is your calling, sir?’ asked Hanks. Saying it, he leaned back in a sort of county courtroom stance.

  ‘The word of God is my vocation, Captain Hanks. And heaven my destination. I am a Methodist preacher.’

  ‘You are a preacher and countenance the theft that will now commence to be done to the newcomers?’

  ‘Theft, theft, theft, sir?’ groaned the adjutant. He smiled as if in pain. ‘The men about here have not had the touch of woman’s hand, nor the ease of feather beds nor adequate cornbread nor any nicety of linen or toilet since we went out after General Milroy last Christmas. They have lacked all, even Bibles, which I must fetch for them off the corpses on the battlefield, being as how the Bible Society in New York has decided to deprive us of Bibles, as if we were not, sir, fit for the word. No sirree, captain, there will be no theft. There will be adjustments. Come now, both of you.’

  Still the scrawny little man looked at his hundred conscripts, and his hundred conscripts looked at him.

  ‘Come,’ Major Dignam insisted.

  They couldn’t disobey him. Lucius Taber in any case stepped out readily, being an Immutable. Conscripts deserved no defence from him. Lawyer Hanks went more slowly, not sure that the rule of law in that meadow would survive his going. As they went, Major Dignam pointed out to them items of interest of the Thomas plantation and indicated where the guns and teams of
Poague’s battery were ranged, pointing southwards towards the swamps and oak thickets.

  4

  There were, that lunchtime, 73 volunteers in Guess’s B for brag company of the Shenandoah Volunteers. Of these no more than fifty could walk, for there were eight lame, nursing stone bruises on their feet, three with great swollen carbuncles on their arms or legs, a half dozen with malaria, shivering away in a nest of blankets, five with dysentery so bad they could not rise even for this chance at loot, and two or three with pneumonia and other fevers. Those in that company who could move moved now on their fifteen conscripts, all except Usaph Bumpass, who, though mobile, stayed just the same with Gus Ramseur. Sure, he looked at the conscripts with some feeling of malice. Yet he did not trust the malice, it sat uncomfortably in him, there was something not true to Usaph Bumpass about it. He would have liked to be able to go up to the new boys and take anything he wanted from their haversacks. Bolly and Murphy and Judd were having no trouble doing it, and neither was Danny Blalock, even though he was an educated man. Maybe Usaph would have looked them over for a pair of new brogans if he’d needed them, but he got himself a good pair off a corpse after the Shenandoah Volunteers moved up in support of Maxey Gregg’s South Carolinans on Boatswain’s Swamp the week before. He now felt fine-shod in the shoes of a poor dead Sandlapper. Now there might be fish-paste or molasses in the conscripts’ haversacks. Well, he had fish-paste in his, captured Maine fish confection. And tons of captured molasses filled the waggons behind the staff tent, and a man could go according to his fancy and draw off a pint.

  He saw large bullet-headed Murphy unbutton a conscript’s jacket, and take from inside it a small Bible. Inside the Bible he found a daguerreotype of a plump girl in a white blouse. ‘Look here then, lads!’ called Murphy. ‘Look what this-here feller carries in the Word of the Lord!’

  Bolly inspected the daguerreotype and got a real evil grin on his face and asked the boy, ‘You bring the sword of the Lord to this damsel, son?’