Confederates

by Thomas Keneally

  And by their laughter they knew it would not happen. They were old enough to know that fantasies don’t, yet not old enough to know that sometimes they do and then turn on the dreamer, as wild animals might. Meanwhile, they managed five cross-country miles before the sun came up, and drank water they found in a little run by a cart track, and chewed on a little hardtack for breakfast. At eight o’clock they’d still not seen any habitation and so they rested an hour at the edge of a thicket. It was as they rose from their rest that Danny saw, at the far edge of the clear land they faced, a U.S. cavalryman staring at them. Danny, a crafty man, immediately raised his rifle and yelled at the forest behind him, ‘Get down there, boys!’ And himself crouched, withdrawing a little behind some berry bushes.

  They lay for two minutes, Danny and Ash Judd, staring at the opposing forest. They couldn’t see the horseman any more. Perhaps he had gone. From what Danny had heard of Yankee horsemen, it would be like them to veer away if they thought there was a whole line of riflemen ready for them.

  ‘If they come out after us,’ Ash whispered to him, ‘and there’s say a whole squadron …’

  ‘Don’t count on them being a whole squadron,’ said Danny, the rational man. ‘If there was a whole squadron, we’d be able to see one or two of them.’

  ‘He was dressed like a French goddam prince, that son of a sow. Did you see it, Danny? Them great thigh boots, for Chris’ sake, and his natty hat and his repeating goddam rifle.’

  ‘He’s likely a new boy,’ Danny whispered in his savage schoolmaster’s whisper. ‘Dressing like that. You know how it’s a sign of a new boy, Ash.’

  So Ash Judd didn’t speak any more.

  ‘Avast there, Reb!’

  It was a voice not unlike their own coming to them across the clearing. When you hadn’t met a Yank for some time you got to imagine they spoke an indecent language of their own, but here it was, clean English.

  Ash got the laughs but kept them well in. ‘Avast?’ he hissed, spluttering. ‘Goddam avast?’

  ‘Yay, Billy Yank!’ called Danny. Maybe he hoped to learn something by answering.

  ‘You don’t mean to tell me you got a whole skirmish line in them woods, do you, Reb?’

  ‘I got a whole damn company here, Billy. So come and try our fire.’

  ‘Goddamit, Reb, I been looking at them woods with my binoculaters these past minutes and somehow I can’t see none but you and your friend, and these are goddam good Chicago binoculaters I got here at my pommel.’

  ‘You’re a talker, Billy,’ Danny called. ‘I suppose you won prizes for oratory up there in Illinois.’

  ‘Illinois? Goddamit, I’m an Ohio boy.’

  Danny laughed privately into the branches of his berry tree.

  ‘Listen to me,’ the cavalry man called again. ‘I don’t want to call you a stretcher of the truth, Reb, but there’s jest me and Henry MacManus here and you and your friend there. There ain’t no sense in fighting no equal-odds battle. Even if Henry and I shot you dead with our nice repeaters, what would it mean to anyone but us? So Henry and I are wondering if you two boys’re inclined to trade and fraternise a little. Henry here now is busting for a scrap of plug tobacco. You got any plug, Reb?’

  ‘You got any coffee, Billy?’

  ‘Goddam, it’s brimming to the lip of our saddlebags here.’

  Danny shrugged at Ash who made a face back. There was a strange excitement wrapped up in talking with the enemy as if they were neighbours, in checking on their features.

  ‘We got your word then, Reb?’

  ‘Our word’s better than yours, Billy. But do we have that?’

  ‘Why, d’you goddam Dixie boys think you own honesty?’

  The two horsemen rode out in the clearing, but only to the edge, sitting their horses and waiting there. One was a sergeant, the one who’d done the talking. All else you could tell about them at that distance was their youth and how fine their equipment was.

  Danny and Ash Judd also emerged but only to the same extent as the Ohio boys had. Everyone was ready to run.

  ‘How’s old Jeff Davis now?’ the Ohio sergeant called.

  ‘Come to Richmond and see,’ Danny called back.

  All four boys laughed. By these insults each side knew it was safe with the other.

  ‘Ain’t you Rebs got a new general? Didn’t I read that somewheres? Something about General Starvation?’

  ‘What about you Yanks? You all got nigger wifes yet?’ Ash Judd called, pleased with himself at getting into the dialogue between the two more eloquent men.

  ‘What’s Confederate money worth?’ called the young Union private.

  ‘What niggers command your brigades?’ asked Ash, sure that nigger jokes were the best offence. ‘And listen, have them niggers improved the Yankee breed yet?’

  The sergeant laughed and stood in his stirrups. ‘Ain’t you got no better clothes’n those I see you in?’

  ‘Do you suppose,’ said Danny, ‘we put on our good clothes to go and kill hogs?’

  And that sally succeeding, each side decided it was now safe not just to be in the same clearing, but to approach each other. The sergeant even dismounted at a bound and rummaged in his saddlebags, his back to Danny and Ashabel as if trust came easy to him.

  ‘I take it,’ he said, holding out a fat pouch of coffee, ‘that you boys are foraging and not wanting to desert to the great armies of the Republic?’

  ‘You take it goddam right, Billy.’

  ‘It happens my name is Billy. And this as I said is Henry.’

  ‘Danny,’ said Ash. ‘And Ash.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the sergeant, taking his hat off, pushing his hand towards Danny. He was a dark-haired, thick-faced boy and Henry was square-faced and freckled and uncertain.

  ‘No offence, Billy,’ Danny Blalock said, ‘but you can get back on your side of the Potomac and then I’ll make a train journey up there to shake you by the hand.…’

  ‘Why, I suppose you can’t manage fairer than that,’ the soldier told him, ‘given the bone blindness of you Southern boys.’

  They sat together in the grass. Ash gave Henry a plug of chewing tobacco and they eyed each other and ruminated and spat.

  ‘Reb,’ said Billy sergeant, ‘I don’t want you to take this as mere talk. It comes from me to you as from one American to another. Goddamit, Reb, we got so many men up there, just twenty miles off …’

  ‘Keep your secrets to yourself, Yank,’ Danny warned him.

  ‘God, but I hate to see men die for nothing.’

  The trouble was the sergeant meant it. His blatant sentiment was ruining this little picnic.

  ‘God, I pity even your rags, boy,’ he said.

  ‘Now listen,’ Danny told him. ‘We won’t sit here and be treated like poor relatives. And this isn’t talk either-we’re on our way, my friend, to get ourselves new suits in Philadelphia.’

  ‘In Philadelphia?’

  ‘Or in Baltimore,’ Ash Judd said. ‘It’s a matter of indifference to us.’

  ‘Well,’ the sergeant told them, his amusement throwing him back in the grass. ‘God bless your innocence! I can see it’s no use laying a meal of truth for you, so we might just as well waste our time on chatter. Is it true your orders are to cut prisoners’ throats?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To save food. Do you cut prisoners’ throats? It’s a simple question, ain’t it?’

  Ash stopped chewing, sat with back arched and staring eyes, as if he might fight a duel over the matter.

  ‘Well, we heard you boys were the cut-throats,’ said Danny. ‘Out at Fair Oaks our wounded had their throats cut. That’s what we heard.’

  ‘Goddamit, I know it ain’t the truth. I had a brother at Fair Oaks in FitzJohn Porter’s artillery.’

  ‘I guessed it was newspaper talk,’ Danny Blalock said. He slapped the rigid Ash Judd on the knee, letting him know it wasn’t a point of honour.

  ‘Goddamit, you can’t trust no way what colonels a
nd newspapers tell you,’ the sergeant said. ‘Henry and me, we’re in the Fourth Ohio. Colonel O’Grady. General George Bayard is our general of brigade and I tell you he’s a fine man. Why, Henry and I have been down on the Culpeper Road looking at your brothers. Holy Jake, it’s a tangle down there. Waggons. The men all held up, sitting on the sides of the road. There’s lots of cussing going on down there, I can promise you that.’

  Ash Judd asked him, ‘Why didn’t you capture the whole goddam waggon train, you and Henry? Make a name for yourself?’

  ‘Oh, there’s your cavalry watching it. But I tell you General Burford’s Pennsylvania boys did a raid this morning, about six. Shot a few waggoners, you know the kind of nonsense. Now, I would’ve thought Henry and me, we’d have to rush like hell to git back to Barnett’s Ford by noon. But the sun’ll be low before that tangle gets anywhere near the Rapidan. Why, there are boys dropping down there with the heat, I tell you.’

  ‘Is that a fact, Billy? You wouldn’t ever lie now?’

  ‘I tell you, Reb, it’s the word of a friend. If you had to catch them up, I wouldn’t be possessed by any unholy rush.’ The sergeant spat. ‘That’s the spitting goddam truth, Danny. Now, tell me who you boys work for?’

  ‘We work fer Stonewall Jackson,’ said Ash, as if it were a small matter. Even quiet Henry MacManus sat up when he heard it. ‘We’re from the Shenandoah which you boys have now and then despoiled and now and then got driven from.’

  The sergeant admitted soberly; ‘I can imagine to myself how Henry and myself might feel if you boys were marching up the Sandusky. But Stonewall Jackson …!’

  ‘We’re,’ said Ash, ‘members of the Shenandoah Volunteers which is a regiment in the Stonewall Brigade and the Stonewall goddam division!’

  ‘Goddamit, Henry!’ Billy told his subordinate. ‘Will you take that in? These boys are Stonewall Jackson’s boys. Goddamit, it must be something to march under a winning general.’

  ‘I thought all you boys loved Pope and McClellan,’ Blalock remarked. ‘According to the Northern press, you wouldn’t work in anyone else’s hands.’

  ‘Ole Mac looked after the boys, but goddamit! Where’s all the success they promised us? Look at us. Good mounts, fine boots, clean drawers, repeating Spencers. Look at you – no offence, but you wouldn’t tell me you represented the best in goddam Southern tailoring. Yet you boys are the ones who’ve had success up to the moment. Not … not that it ain’t all going to change arsey-versey. I think though that Henry and I can say we are honoured to meet you boys.’

  ‘And I can say,’ said Danny Blalock, ‘speaking I’m sure for Ash as well, that it’s more pleasure meeting you two than we would have thought.…’

  But Danny got on to schoolmaster sort of subjects then. ‘Ohio is flatter than this, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s dead right,’ the cavalrymen admitted. ‘Ohio is flatter. But it’s fine land as well, you know.’

  They talked then about the Shenandoah and a little politics. At last Billy said it was time for Henry and himself to go. Standing, he said: ‘It’s a hot day. You boys know your apples ducking away like this. Soon you’ll get on higher ground. The mountain you see ahead is Clark’s Mountain. The river’s just down round the corner of that. You boys want to go straight on, so Henry and me, we’ll go diagonal. It wouldn’t be a good thing stumbling into each other again and maybe feeling for our weapons.’

  The cavalrymen were half vanishing into the forest when Danny called out.

  ‘Hey there, Billy!’

  Billy pulled his horse’s head up and listened.

  ‘You could go into politics, you’re such a good goddam orator.’

  The Culpeper road was a funnel of dust. The lice in Usaph Bumpass’s shirt and the crabs in his crotch got lively with the heat, but he tried not to scratch at himself, the way the conscripts did, getting desperate and drying out their mouths with heavy exasperated breathing.

  No streams or springs presented themselves in this stretch of road, and Usaph could see Ole Bolly purple-faced beneath his parasol, and hear Gus wheezing. He himself just went on shunting his small ration of saliva around a parched mouth.

  He knew by now that he should have woken Gus and gone off with Blalock and Judd. He imagined Ash and Danny doing what they were in fact at that hour doing – finding thickets of blackberries and bursting into their luscious, moist, staining meat; searching for sweet liquid huckleberries which hid with an almost feminine wariness on the underside of the branches of their bushes; plucking and moistening their mouths with sky-blue boysenberries.

  It was noon when Ash Judd and Blalock saw the small white farmhouse on the western flank of Clark’s Mountain. For a time they observed it, for it looked so neat a little house that you’d expect to find Union cavalry there, since cavalry had a way of finding all the better places. There was, they saw, a barn with a pig pen at the back, but no sign of the hogs themselves. In the front garden, however, some chickens wandered in a melon-and-cabbage patch, and there were two heifers in a meadow.

  While they were still watching, a man a little older than themselves came clumping crookedly down the front steps. His method of walking was to thump one foot down and drag the other behind him. His arms were painfully bent as if there was very little play to them, his hands had the fingers spread and bent with the effort of his progress.

  ‘A cripple,’ Judd whispered.

  The young man disappeared into the barn, but Ash and Danny did not move yet. When the man came out of the barn five minutes later leading a saddled horse and carrying a shotgun – that was the moment Blalock chose to show himself.

  ‘Sir,’ he called. ‘Sir, I wonder could you advise us.…’

  The young man lifted the shotgun with his crooked right hand and rested its barrel across his crooked left arm. It pointed wildly 25 degrees north-west of where the two soldiers had revealed themselves.

  ‘Sir,’ Blalock said again, ‘I take it you’re a Virginian. Well, we’re Virginians as well.’

  The man, dark-haired, dark-eyed, his lips moist, corrected the alignment of the barrel.

  ‘What we were wondering is, could you sell us maybe a chicken or two, or some bread if your wife is baking or maybe some preserves to break the monotony of hardtack?’

  ‘I own no wife,’ said the boy. The disease had muffled his voice as well as doing some nasty work to his limbs.

  ‘We ain’t looters,’ Ash Judd explained. ‘Not like them blue-bellies. The law of the army prohibits looting, but even if it didn’t …’

  ‘This is our country,’ Danny Blalock concluded for him.

  ‘Maw!’ the young cripple called towards the house. ‘Maw!’

  From the house there appeared a woman of maybe forty. She was a smooth ample woman, her breasts hung like calabashes inside her grey dress. The woman stood there with that wryness about the eyes and mouth that characterises women who’ve seen everything, heard every promise utterable to a woman and seen it broken as well.

  ‘You boys deserters?’ she called.

  ‘No, ma’am. We’re from Stonewall’s column and we’re going all the way to Philadelphia.’

  ‘Is that so? And I suppose on them grounds you come to plunder us.’

  ‘Ma’am, if we plundered, we’d get flogged. But if you have anything you could spare, we can pay.’

  ‘Come an’ let’s see you close,’ she commanded.

  They advanced to the steps and the young cripple hobbled behind them. ‘You sit on the steps there at my feet,’ the woman commanded them. When they sat they stared up at her. She was a feast of a woman.

  ‘I got lemonade, first of all,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, ma’am,’ said Blalock, Ash willing to let him do the fancy talk since he sounded a little like an aristocrat. ‘Lemonade would be a delight to us. Isn’t that so, Ash?’

  The woman looked down the steps at mannerly Danny. She could tell he was no ravening deserter. ‘It’s a long time since we last saw you boys,’ she said. �
��Keep sat there!’

  She vanished and came forth again with a crock of lemonade and two small pannikins. As she poured, Ashabel spoke up clumsily to her son. ‘How do you go on horseback, sir?’

  ‘I go on the goddam saddle, soldier.’

  The mother laughed. ‘Don’t you blaspheme there, Arlan. I’d say they’re nice boys and intend no harm.’ She raised her chin and wiped the sweat from her gullet.

  ‘We can’t spare no chickens, maw,’ the son told her.

  ‘We can sell you a little bacon,’ she announced. ‘And you can have a loaf of my flourbread jest because you’re local boys.’

  ‘From the Valley,’ said Ashabel.

  ‘My, my. Nice people from the Valley. Arlan, you go fetch that milchcow, go on, son. I’m safe enough with these Valley boys.’

  The son lowered the shotgun and hobbled an uncertain step.

  ‘Our milchcow broke loose last night,’ the mother explained to Danny Blalock. ‘Arlan’ll have her back here in two shakes or sooner maybe.

  Arlan still wasn’t sure. Danny thought, he dislikes us like hell for being whole. Maybe even for being the soldiers he can’t be. Poor deluded boy.

  ‘They’ll keep to the steps?’ Arlan asked.

  ‘Oh, Arlan, honey. What if it rains? But you know your maw can manage them.’

  After one more stare, Arlan hauled himself crookedly up the flanks of his horse. It was painful to watch, but even Ash Judd knew better than to offer help. In the saddle, with the reins in his crooked claw-like hands, Arlan all at once became more masterly. He turned the horse on the patch of dust it occupied and cantered it out of the yard.

  ‘Fell on his head, poor child. Thrown by a horse. When he was no more’n eleven years. Couldn’t move much at all at first but he had a purpose to him, always has had. Look at him now. A horseman. And what I’d do without him, with the war on and all the rest, and milch-cows busting out …! For his paw’s been gone for four years.’

  ‘My condolences, ma’am,’ said Danny, courtly as he could manage from the stairs.

  ‘Oh,’ the woman laughed, ‘he ain’t dead. Leastways as far as we know. He lit out to Venezuelie. ’Course, they have the yellow fever in Venezuelie. How does it sound to you, a meal of cheese and fresh baked flourbread?’