The boy said nothing. He was very much a boy and, Usaph guessed, would always remember how he hadn’t said anything to rebuff the veterans when they chose to be sneery about his betrothed.
‘And sure, you must really bounce round in her, sonny,’ Murphy said. ‘A tiny whippet of a boy like you?’
‘A gnat in a barrel of molasses,’ said young Judd. His chin was all a-tremble at his wit, and he looked round to inspect the hooting faces of Bolly and Murphy.
Danny Blalock might have been the most to blame. He’d been a schoolmaster and must have seen children savage each other in the schoolyard and got to detest those methods. Yet although he didn’t laugh, he stood by, surveying, the way old Doctor Mollison, the bug-hunter Usaph used to see working with jar and net along the cliffs north of Strasburg, might watch a duck consume a June bug. As far as Usaph was concerned, the women even of conscripts should have been sacred. For that was the Southern way. The more they made jokes about the conscript’s plump girl the more like the slum-boys of the North they became. And it was known what Yankees were when it came to the commerce of the flesh. The men in A Company had passed round a letter they took off a slum-boy from New York whose body had been found east of Gaines’ Mill last week. It was from this boy’s girl in the alleys of Manhattan and it promised the boy in straight-out terms carnal pleasures he would never now enjoy. No Southern woman wrote to her feller like that; such writing was even beyond the measure of a crude Irishman like Joseph Murphy.
Throughout the meadow there were like scenes. The veterans went through the conscripts’ haversacks and took coffee, real coffee which you could still get in western Virginia, mainly through the courtesy of Cincinnati businessmen who smuggled it across the Ohio. The conscripts’ haversacks yielded as well cigars and chewing tobacco; even neat Danny Blalock who didn’t chaw or smoke took tobacco out of a haversack.
The conscripts resisted a second here or there, but it was no fair contest. Their spirits had already been worked on. All the way across Virginia from Staunton, they’d been mocked as latecomers. And here they were facing the men whose name the Southern press, the Mobile Advertiser equally with the Richmond Enquirer, extolled. If only those newspaper scribes, Usaph often thought, knew how much of an accident it is that any of us are here; if they knew how mean average we are, as given to skulking and straggling as any other brigade if we were given a whisker of a chance. We ain’t princes, us Stonewall Brigade boys, Usaph thought, scratching himself on the ribs where, beneath his shirt, the lice were active. But the conscripts there find us awesome and let us demean them.
Looking out across the meadow, Usaph saw Ash Judd taking a man’s watch, Bolly Quintard grossly feeding still on the plump girl’s picture, and Murphy lifting socks out of some poor boy’s sack, inspecting them against the sunlight and choosing to keep them. He saw too a neat little Irishman, veteran of Guess’s Company, stopping in front of a young conscript, raising his hand to the boy’s cheek, taking him gently by the elbow and leading him away to a fence corner.
There was a gangling conscript, a hollow-cheeked sort of boy, maybe 25 years of age, standing off on his own. No one had bothered him. His jacket was opened and his haversack sat on the ground at his feet, its flap undone for the convenience of looters. But up to now it remained untouched. It might have been they were all a little shamed by the way he’d laid himself open to theft. And you couldn’t be sure of humbling a man like him in too convincing a manner. He had neat black hair, dark eyes and a narrow head, and the eyes gleamed as he looked full on people like Bolly making fools of others and maybe even of themselves.
Bumpass watched him, saw him shift his stance a little, like a man that’s been waiting a long time for a train. He seemed to take some sort of interest in Joe Murphy, who had gone back to baiting the boy with the picture, saying such things as: ‘Does she know you’re there, boy? Or is it a flea sting she thinks she’s getting?’ Tears ran murky through the dust on the boy’s face.
The gangling young man said all at once: ‘Come now. Leave that boy alone. Your jokes are getting gas and repeating on themselves.’
Bolly and Murphy and Judd and the others just looked at him. Their sufferings on campaign had given them certain moral rights, no one south of the Potomac should have doubted that. As far as they were concerned, this thin creature had therefore blasphemed them.
It didn’t seem to worry the thin creature. He kept showing this clear-eyed indifference to them. ‘I’ve got a clean vest. I’ve got coffee. Don’t you gentlemen want it? Or do you intend to spend the summer standing there letting your low jokes chase their own asses?’
Bolly stalked up to him.
‘And who are you to speak out, you sowson, you whoreson bastard?’ asked Bolly, falling back on the cuss-words his father had favoured during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.
The conscript looked Bolly fair in the eye.
‘My name is Decatur Cate …’
Ash Judd said, ‘Your daddy have the stutters?’
He laughed shrilly then, but Bolly stared at him for detracting from the event. The duty of the unmanning of this Decatur Cate. ‘And I take it you’re here substitutin’ for a rich boy from beyond the River?’
Cate gave a tight throaty laugh.
‘You take it wrong. I am a mere conscript. If I had stayed in my native Pennsylvania and finished reading for the Bar the way my pa commanded me, I would have now been in McClellan’s army with maybe a better class of people.’
The man’s sass was dazzling. There was no punishment you could hand out to a man like this, short of hanging him from one of Mr Thomas’s plantation oaks.
Danny Blalock said in a high-toned way: ‘In McClellan’s army. Under a bad general.’
‘A bad general but a good cause,’ said thin Mr Cate. ‘Whereas down here it’s all good generals and bad causes.’
‘I promise you, sir,’ said teacher Blalock gallantly, just like something out of a novel, ‘if you say one word more in that vein of yours, I shall kill you here by knife or rifle and state to my colonel in defence that I but killed a viper.’
‘Well goddam me!’ said Decatur Cate, kicking the earth with the toe of his shoe.
Most of the conscripts had had their pants taken by now and were struggling, blushing, into the foul and tattered britches of their persecutors, and feeling the first bites of the greyback lice that infested the clothing of veterans. Yet Cate was kicking the earth with a slight smile on his face.
‘I would not touch your coffee, sir,’ Danny Blalock yelled. ‘I would not touch any delicacy you might have. I would be defiled in touching anything of yours.’
‘It would be nice,’ said Cate, still pretending to be interested in the ground, ‘if the rest of your friends felt that way.’
‘By Christ,’ Murphy called, ‘I’ll take his coffee and anything else. I’ll strip the bastard. I’m not particular like yourself, Danny.’
So they moved up and stripped Cate of his shirt and jacket and emptied his haversack. The boy they had forgotten picked up his daguerreotype and moved by stealth across to a bunch of his fellows who’d been through the process.
Ole Bolly was watching this bunch. ‘Oh Jesus, Usaph,’ he said. ‘They shouldn’t have done this to us.
‘This strikes at the only thing we can halfway call our own. Pride it strikes at, Usaph. It strikes at our sweet pride.’
Ashabel Judd was holding a letter he’d taken from Cate’s jacket. His lips moved as he read the addressee’s name. Then he whistled.
‘Hey there, Usaph,’ he called. ‘This-here letter’s for you.’
5
Usaph’s face burned. He left Gus Ramseur and took the letter from Ashabel Judd. Ashabel’s eyes were fixed, innocent. Yet Usaph felt shamed to get his letter by way of a stranger. It wasn’t just that the man was a conscript, but what was his wife doing, giving her precious handwriting into the care of a man who loved the Union?
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 cotto
n 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.
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