Just west of the station stood a row of warehouses that were plainly new: the pine boards from which they’d been built were a bright, unweathered straw color. Sentries wearing the motley green-brown that was the uniform of the Rivington men and carrying AK-47s walked a beat around the warehouses. They looked alert and dangerous, and measured Caudell with their eyes when he glanced their way. They did not seem much impressed, which irritated him. What sort of action had they been through?
“Never seen them before,” Mollie said; Caudell wondered if she meant the warehouses or their arrogant guards. She pointed to the corduroyed road that ran west from the new buildings until it disappeared into the pine woods that grew almost to the edge of town. “That there’s new, too. Wonder where it goes? Never knew anybody to live out that way.”
“Fancy road to go nowhere,” Caudell said; corduroying was expensive.
“Have to ask at the Excelsior.” Mollie nodded toward a rather shabby hotel a few doors down from the station. It hadn’t been repainted any time recently. Neither had the general store, the Baptist church, or the blacksmith’s shop nearby. They seemed reassuringly normal. But beyond them was another hotel that. dwarfed the old Excelsior. It was smaller than the Powhatan in Richmond, but not much. In bold red letters above the doorway, its sign said NOTAHILTON. “What’s a Notahilton?” Mollie said, her eyes wide. “That’s new since I left. So are the bank and the church by it.”
“Damned if I know what a Notahilton is,” Caudell answered. “Shall we wander over and find out?”
“Wouldn’t want you to miss your train, Nate. Fellow said half an hour.”
“Just because he said it doesn’t make it so. Half an hour train time is usually an hour and a half if you’re not railroading.” Despite his confident words, Caudell glanced back toward the train. The local Negroes certainly seemed more diligent than the ordinary run of slaves. He supposed he oughtn’t to have been surprised; if the Rivington men worked niggers hard in the army, they would hardly let them slack at home.
But his eyes opened wide at the vim with which a crew of four black men hauled wood from a covered rick and tossed it into the tender, at the care with which another slave, this one hardly more than a boy, oiled the trucks under each car. In his experience, most niggers would not have bothered to lift the oil can as they went from one car to the next: they would let a stream of oil spill onto the ground, though it had cost a dollar and a half a gallon even before the war. This Negro wasted not a drop; few white mechanics would have been so fussy.
Caudell stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. One hand closed on his pay warrant. He took it out. “I know what I can do fast, though: turn this into money. Let’s try your new bank instead of the Notahilton.”
“I got one of them, too,” Mollie said. “Let’s go.”
FIRST RIVINGTON BANK proclaimed the gilded sign above the entrance. Three clerks waited behind a high counter. A guard stood inside. He nodded politely to Caudell and Mollie. Caudell nodded back, also politely: the guard carried a repeater with the safety off and wore green-brown. He looked like a combat soldier.
“How can I help you gentlemen?” asked the clerk whom Caudell and Mollie approached. He had an accent like Benny Lang’s. Caudell passed him the warrant. “Forty dollars? Yes, sir, with pleasure.” He opened a drawer on his side of the counter, took out two big gold coins, a tiny gold dollar, two silver dimes, and a large copper cent, then passed them across the polished marble. “Here you are.”
Caudell gaped at the coins. “Gold?” he said, his voice a startled croak.
“Yes, sir, of course,” the clerk said patiently. “Forty dollars is 990 grains, or two ounces thirty grains. These are one ounce apiece.” He picked up the big coins, let them ring sweetly against the counter. They were like no coins Caudell had seen before, with the profile of a bearded man on one side and an antelope on the other, but below the antelope were magic words: 1 oz. GOLD, .999 FINE. The clerk went on, “Thirty grains of gold comes to $1.21, which is your balance here.”
“I—never expected gold at all,” Caudell said. “Just banknotes.” No matter how big a lie that .999 FINE was, he had to come out ahead on this deal. He also abruptly understood why the First Rivington Bank needed a guard with an AK-47.
The clerk frowned at him. “This is Rivington, sir. We deal properly here, especially to soldiers.” His eyes dared Caudell to challenge him. All at once, Caudell was convinced his gold was the real thing. He scooped it up.
“Pay me, too.” Mollie passed the Rivington man her warrant.
“Twenty-six dollars, Private, makes 643-½ grains, which is…” The clerk thought for a moment.” A trifle more than an ounce and a third.” He took out another of those one-ounce coins, another one smaller but otherwise identical—”Here is a quarter-ounce piece. “—a gold dollar, three quarters, and, after another pause for thought, a one-cent piece. “That should do it.”
Mollie and Caudell both shook their heads in disbelief as they left the bank. “Gold,” Mollie whispered. “I got me a bit of a stake.”
“Me, too,” Caudell said. Rivington men might trade gold dollars for Confederate dollars one for one, but no one else did. Forty dollars in gold would take him a long way. “Let’s go spend some of it, and have ourselves a drink at that Notahilton.”
“That sounds right good to me,” Mollie said. But just then, the steam whistle let go with a blast that rang through the town. “Oh, goddam.” She kicked at the dirt, began to turn away.
“I guess they mean that half an hour after all,” Caudell said regretfully. Then he had an inspiration: “Tell you what, Mollie: one of these days soon, you go on into that Notahilton, find out what it’s like. Then you write me a letter and tell me about it. I’ll write back; I promise I will. That way we can stay friends, even if we’re far apart.”
“Write a letter?” Mollie looked more frightened than she ever had, marching into battle. “Nate, you learned me some readin’, but writin’—”
“You can do it. I know you can. In fact, I’ll write you first, so you’ll know where I am; I’m not sure whether I’m going to stay in Nashville or head on up to Castalia. And I expect to hear back from you, do you understand?” He did his best to sound like a first sergeant.
“I don’t know, Nate. Well, maybe if you do write first, I can try and answer you back. If you do.” If you don’t want to forget you ever knew me the minute that train rolls out of here, he read in her eyes. He wondered how many lies she had heard over the years, and from how many men.
“I’ll write,” he promised. The train whistle wailed a second warning. Caudell scowled. “They did mean it.” He hugged Mollie hard. It would not have seemed out of place to an onlooker even had she been only a fellow soldier. Through her shirt, though, her small firm breasts pressed against him. She hugged him, too. “Good luck to you,” he said.
“To you, too, Nate.” The whistle wailed again. Mollie pushed him away. “Go on. You don’t want to miss it.”
He knew she was right. He turned and trotted toward the train. He didn’t look back until just before he climbed aboard. Mollie was walking, not to the Notahilton, but into the old Excelsior. He shook his head, stared down at the dirty parquet floor of the passenger car. The train jerked, began to roll. Very soon, the bulk of the station hid the hotel from sight—very soon, but not soon enough.
“Rocky Mount!” the brakeman yelled as the train wheezed to a stop. “One-hour layover. Rocky Mount!”
Caudell climbed to his feet. Allison High stood too, held out his hand. “I wish you well, Nate, and that’s a fact,” he said.
“Thank you, Allison, and the same to you.” Caudell walked to the front of the car, shaking a few more hands as he went, Allison High sat back down; he wouldn’t get off until Wilson, down in the next county.
Caudell jumped down. Leaving the train for the last time made leaving the army seem real. He looked around, Save for the sign that told what town it belonged to, the station might have been
cut from the same mold as Rivington’s: cut from that mold, and then left out in the rain for eighty or a hundred years. It was weather-beaten; two of the windows had empty panes; the decorative wooden latticework that edged the roof was broken in half a dozen places.
He looked north toward the mound on the far side of the falls of the Tar River, where Rocky Mount had first begun to grow. He had a clearer view than he really wanted; the year before, Federal raiders had burnt most of the cotton mills and cotton and tobacco warehouses that stood between the vain station and the older part of town. Here a wall stood, there a few charred timbers. The odor of burnt tobacco still hung in the air.
Off to one side lay the fine house that belonged to Benjamin Battle, who owned the mills. Somehow, it had escaped the flames. Seeing that, Caudell clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Them as has, gits,” he muttered to himself. He seldom let such uncouth Southernisms pass his lips, but nothing more refined seemed appropriate.
He walked over to the station. The stationmaster, a tall, thin, dour fellow in his sixties, peered out at him through one of the glassless panes. They had a few seconds’ staring contest before the stationmaster unwillingly said, “He’p you, so’jer?”
“When’s the next stage for Nashville?” Caudell asked.
Now the stationmaster smiled, exposing pink gums and a few yellowed stubs of teeth. “Just set out an hour or so ago,” he said with malicious satisfaction. “Ain’t gonna be another one fo’ two days, might could be three.”
“Damnation,” Caudell said. The stationmaster’s smile got wider. Caudell wanted to knock out the teeth he had left. He’d done some huge number of dozen-mile hikes in the army, and plenty worse than that, but the thought of returning to civilian life with one was less than appetizing. He turned away from the window. The stationmaster chuckled till he started to cough. Caudell hoped he’d choke.
Another train, this one coming up from the south, let its whistle squeal as it pulled into Rocky Mount. Caudell walked over to the east side of the station to have a look at who was coming in. A few small boys and old men joined him. Idlers, he thought. For the moment, he was an idler himself.
He gaped at the skeletal faces pressed against coach windows, at the rags and tatters that covered those emaciated bodies. Who were these victims of disaster, and how could his fellow spectators take the sight of them so calmly? Then an old man remarked, “Mo’ Yankee prisoners headin’ home,” and Caudell noticed that most of the train passengers’ rags were, or might once have been, blue.
He shook his head in mute, horrified sympathy. The men of the Army of Northern Virginia had gone hungry. The memory of that hunger would stay with him an his life. But these men had starved. Now he understood the difference. He also felt ashamed that his country could have let them suffer so. But with everything scarce, was it any wonder the Confederacy had seen to its own first?
Only a couple of men got off the train to stretch their legs; perhaps only a couple of men had the strength to do so. One of them spied Caudell. The man looked in better shape than most of his comrades; even his uniform was hardly more ragged than the first sergeant’s. “Hello, Johnny Reb,” he said with a nod and a grin. “How’re they hangin’?”
“Hello,” Caudell answered, rather more hesitantly. Casting about for something more to add to that, he asked, “Where’d they catch you, Yank?”
“Bealeton, just this past spring,” the Federal said. He jerked a thumb back toward the train. “Otherwise I’d look more like these poor devils.”
“Bealeton?” Caudell exclaimed. “I was there, in Hill’s corps.”
“Were you? We fought some of Hill’s men. Matter of fact, I was leading the 48th Pennsylvania there, in the IX Corps. I’m Henry Pleasants. I am—I used to be, I guess I mean—a lieutenant colonel.” Pleasants tapped the silver oak leaf on his left shoulder strap; the right strap was missing. He stuck out his hand.
Caudell shook it, gave his own name. He said, “We went up against IX Corps troops, but they were niggers. They fought better than I thought they might, but we chewed ‘em up pretty good.”
“That would have been Ferrero’s division,” Pleasants said. “They were all colored troops. I was under Brigadier General Potter.” He shook his head ruefully. He was somewhere not far from Caudell’s age, with dark hair, very fair, pale skin, and a scraggly beard that looked new. He went on, “Worse luck for the country, you chewed up the whole Army of the Potomac pretty good, you and those damned repeaters of yours.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s worse luck for the country,” Caudell retorted.
“No, I don’t suppose you would.” Pleasants chuckled. He seemed a man well able to take care of himself under any circumstances. “And since your side won, the history books won’t say that, either. But I do. It’s too damn bad. So there.”
Caudell laughed. He found himself liking this cheerfully defiant Northerner. “Tell you what, Yank—suppose I buy you a drink and we can argue about what’s good and what’s bad?”
“For a drink, Mr. First Sergeant Nate Caudell, sir, I’ll argue or not, just as you please. Where shall we go?”
Caudell thought about asking the sour stationmaster, decided not to bother. “We’ll find a place.” His confidence was soon rewarded. Of the three or four rebuilt buildings by the station, two proved to be taverns. He waved his new friend toward the cleaner-looking one.
Pleasants glanced back toward the train, which did not seem likely to go anywhere any time soon. He ran a hand through his hair. “Damned if I see. how you people ever managed to get from here to there. I’ve been on three different gauges of track since I set out from Andersonville, your locomotives are all fixing to die, and your tracks and beds are wearing out even though they’re on flat, easy ground. Disgraceful, if you ask me.”
“We manage,” Caudell said shortly. He eyed the Northern man. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
“Damn well ought to.” It was amazing how well Pleasants could preen in such a shabby uniform. “I was a railroad engineer for years before I went into mining instead. But to hell with that. Are we going to stand out here gabbing all afternoon, or will you buy me that drink?”
When Caudell set his two silver dimes in front of the taverner, they bought him a quart jug. One drink turned into several. The whiskey hit Caudell hard; he’d stayed mostly sober in the army. He stared owlishly across the rickety table at Pleasants. “Why the devil do you want to go back North at all, Henry? You Yankees, you have engineers of this and engineers of that coming out of your ears. You stay down here, you could write your own ticket. Not much mining in this part of the state, but the railroads are crying for somebody who knows what he’s doing.”
Pleasants stared back for a little while before he answered; he was feeling his load, too. “You know, Nate, that’s tempting, it truly is. But I have me a train to catch.” He got up and wobbled toward the door. Caudell followed. They took a couple of steps in the direction of the station before they noticed the train was gone—possibly long gone, by the way the sun had become a sullen red ball just above the horizon. “It’s an omen, that’s what it is,” Pleasants declared. “Here I’m meant to be.” He struck a pose, staggered, and reeled into Caudell. They both laughed, then went back to the tavern.
The fellow who ran the place admitted he had rooms above the bar. For a gold dollar, Caudell got use of one of those rooms, a promise of breakfast, his two dimes back, and ten dollars in Confederate paper. He also got a thin tallow candle, hardly more than a taper, in a pewter holder to light his way up the stairs.
The room had only one bed, and that none too wide. Neither man cared. Caudell set the candle on the window while they undressed, then blew it out. Straw hissed and whispered as he and Pleasants lay down. Next thing he knew, it was morning.
He used the chamber pot, splashed water from the nightstand pitcher on his face and hands. Pleasants, who was still in bed, looked up at him accusingly. “You, sir, snore.”
“Sorry.” Caudell splashed himself again. The water was pleasantly cool, and took the edge off the ache behind his eyes. If Pleasants was similarly afflicted, a night spent with a bed companion who snored must have been grim. “Sorry,” he repeated, more sincerely this time.
A big plate of ham and grits and corn bread and honey further eased their pain. Pleasants was whistling as he went outside. He pointed back to the train station. “This miserable excuse for a railroad is the Wilmington and Weldon, am I right?” By his tone, he knew perfectly well he was right.
Caudell started to be offended. The Wilmington and Weldon, and its continuation up to Petersburg, had been a Confederate lifeline, carrying supplies from the blockade-runners at the port up to the Army of Northern Virginia—and sending rifles, ammunition, and desiccated meals from Rivington as well. From necessity, it had received such care as the South could give. Then he remembered his one short trip down to Manassas Junction on a line recently Northern. By Pleasants’s standards, this was a miserable excuse for a railroad.
Pleasants went on, “Then I suppose I have to I make my way to Wilmington to hire on, That would be—hmm—a hundred miles, maybe a hundred ten.” He seemed to have consulted a map he kept in his head.
“Here.” Caudell gave him the change from the night before. “This will help you get there, Henry. The South needs more men like you than it has.”
Pleasants took the money: “The South needs more men like you, too, Nate,” he said soberly. “I’ll pay you back every cent of this, I promise.” He clapped him on the shoulder.
“Don’t fret over it,” Caudell said, his voice gruff with embarrassment.
The Guns of the South Page 30