You could hear the tears in Bolly’s voice and see them on his moonlit left cheek. It just showed you, gross men like Bolly and Joe Murphy could be close. As close as Gus and himself were close. ‘I don’t know if I can make all that distance back there myself,’ wailed Bolly.
‘What if them ambulances have toted him back to the surgeons already?’ Usaph suggested.
‘When did the goddam ambulances ever find a soul?’ said Bolly.
‘He might have jest walked back to the goddam field surgery himself,’ Usaph suggested further. And there I go blaspheming once more, he thought, but I’m too tired tonight to start a blaspheme-free life. ‘God blast you, Bolly. You like well enough pretending to all the boys in the brigade that you’re as good as any young man. Don’t goddam come to me pleading to my heart because you’re an old man. I tell you, Bolly, it don’t go down!’
Frankly as a child, Bolly began to whimper now.
He can’t be goddam tireder than me, Usaph thought. Usaph and Bolly and the others had been going forward over cornfields and through woods since their triumph at dusk. But at every cornfield there’d been a few squadrons of Yankee cavalry to pour in a quick and delaying scatter of repeating-rifle fire. Sure, a few volleys of musketry would scatter them and no one you knew would have been hurt. But it was wearying work. Oh how weary was the loading drill when you had that bone tiredness that follows a great combat. A great combat that won’t break itself clean at sunset but has to drag on into the dark.
None of it ended until eleven, when there was cannon fire from ahead and solid musketry; and you knew, by the feel and sound, that the Yankees must have had one of their other armies converge with Banks’s beaten one. Colonel Wheat then halted you in a wood and at last told you to draw back a mile and sleep. Some of Ambrose Hill’s unbloodied boys would do your picket duty for you. Oh how nice! Except that Bolly Quintard had to go looking for his friend Joe Murphy at this time of night and there was no way Usaph could avoid helping him. Well, there was if Usaph would just let himself drop in the cornfield and be instantly asleep as were all the others.
Bolly said: ‘I am a goddam old fool, Usaph, with my posturing and the rest of it. But I swear if you come with me now seeking Joe, that I’ll go seeking you and Gus if you ever get caught in that condition.’
‘In that condition, Bolly? What do you think it is with Joe Murphy? D’you think he’s about to have a child?’
Bolly laughed low and moist.
‘Goddamit, Bolly,’ said Usaph, ‘let’s go!’
Stumbling south, Usaph and Bolly passed a few hundred paces from the place Tom Jackson waited by the Culpeper Road with Hotchkiss the mapmaker and with Surgeon Maguire and a few others. A cavalry sergeant, just back from scouting far up the road, found the General there in a light spit of rain. Tom Jackson was sucking a lemon and was all ears. The cavalry sergeant had talked to a dying Yankee boy up along to the right of the road. This boy had assured them that they were in for it now, ’cos Sigel’s German Corps had got in from Sperryville – sure, a Virginia farmer gave them bum directions but they’d hanged him for taking them the wrong way and now they were deploying for miles in front of Culpeper and the goddam Rebs wouldn’t ever get to see Culpeper again. So said the boy whose own chances of ever seeing Culpeper again were so low.
Jackson was happy there by the road that evening. He knew well what hysteria there’d be in the War Department in Washington next morning and in the White House. His own President, Jeff Davis, so nervy with neuralgia, might have begun to behave the same way as Lincoln if he had had the same resources of men. The General understood how it was lack of men that made the Confederate War Office more daring than the U.S. War Office, made Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin tougher-minded than jittery Edmund M. Stanton.
Tom Jackson had kept himself awake till now with the tart juices of the lemons he carried in his saddlebag. Now he tossed a lemon rind off into the dark.
‘That’s all there is to this day,’ he told Maguire and Hotchkiss. He climbed onto his horse, they climbed onto theirs. They watched him sway along in his saddle, bouncing in and out of sleep, as they rode south.
Officers who’d known Tom Jackson when he’d been a professor told Maguire that he’d needed ten hours sleep a night in those days and used sometimes to fall asleep at the podium just the same. He always sat straight up, his back not touching the chair, in the cockeyed belief that would keep his innards from bunching up. He used to bore people with talk about his dyspepsia, and at the age of thirty got leave to go to New York to see the best doctor on the problem. So when young Doctor Maguire was sent to Harpers Ferry last year to be the regimental surgeon of Colonel Tom Jackson, men had said to him: ‘You’ll need a staff of three surgeons just to deal with Crazy Tom’s complaints alone.’
But it hadn’t developed like that. Once the marching over the mountains and down the Valley started, the manœuvrings and the face-offs, Tom Jackson forgot his dyspepsia and his rheumatism as if they were the complaints of a dead uncle of his.
There were three or four farmhouses they passed, off in the meadows now, all with lights blazing. There were wounded lying all round them, not in rows, more like they’d been dropped by orderlies wherever there was space. You could see the big fires orderlies were burning a little way from the farm buildings. If you looked close, you saw them putting on one fire clothing too bad stained to be of use to anyone. Someone was stoking the other with a human leg or arm, and the terrible cannibal stink of blazing human meat was over the countryside. There were boys who trod amongst the shapes in the meadow, looking for the dead so that their bandages could be used again. There wasn’t much noise of protest coming from the ground outside these surgical stations, just sometimes the high voice of some boy protesting to a surgeon and the tough deep voice of the surgeon or the orderlies in reply. It might be some time after midnight that the ones who had got beyond the shock of it and had not yet bled away would begin their yelling, and all the woods and fields would be full of strange wild noises.
At each of these farmhouses, Hunter said: ‘They could clear a corner for you to lie down, sir.’
‘No,’ Tom Jackson would say. He wouldn’t give any reason. If the moans of boys irked the General’s conscience, there was sure no sign of it. Well, they certainly irked Hunter Maguire’s conscience. Through the wide-open window of one of the farmhouses, he could see a regimental surgeon called Abel Oursley working by lantern light. Now Oursley was one of the better ones. He’d joined up from a medical practice in Staunton, Virginia, to get away from his goddam wife, as he said. He was, at least, no quack or mountain pig doctor. Though given to the bottle, he kept sober for battles and would have been a brigade or divisional staff surgeon if it weren’t for the fact that most of the time in camp, where superiors had leisure to watch him such as they didn’t have in battle, poor old Abel was stewed. There was this about him too, he panicked on nights like this, as most of them panicked. Hunter Maguire knew that if he was in there, maybe he’d panic too. Surgeons were faced with so much mess and moaning that they would amputate anything they could rather than attend to a wound in its own right. And what old Abel couldn’t amputate he probed with hands that had too much of a tremble to them.
There was no doubt that Hunter Maguire, M.D., University of Pennsylvania, was a sight better surgeon than Abel Oursley though, and it would have been madness to pretend anything else. Therefore Maguire always had the urge to get down off his horse and go into the farmhouse and take the scalpel and saw from Abel’s hand. But he knew that even if Tom Jackson let him go into that butcher’s shop of Abel Oursley’s he would lose what control he had over the circus. It would be an act of too much passion. Not only unworthy of a Virginian gentleman and a high-rating tidewater doctor of fashion. It would also mean more boys would die in the end.
It was strange though that he’d got down off his horse today only for a case beyond hope. Late afternoon he saw a Marylander he knew, a Baltimore lawyer called Sn
owdon Andrews, lying half-covered by a blanket at the edge of the Culpeper pike. Two soldiers kept him company but Snowdon’s face was to the ground and his mouth made little private movements as if he was confiding in the dust.
Well, you had to get down at a time like that, when you saw an old college friend. One of the soldiers waiting at Snowdon’s side told Maguire, ‘It’s fearful, doctor,’ and when Hunter lifted the blanket he saw it was, for a great mess of Snowdon’s viscera was tumbled forward into the dust.
Hunter saw Snowdon Andrews looking at him sideways. ‘I’m grieved to see you like this, Snowdon.’
‘I’m not too tickled about it myself, Hunter.’
‘I have to tell you … there’s nothing I can do for you.’
‘Yes, that’s what you fellows always say.’
So Hunter Maguire had sighed and turned the man over and got water from a canteen and rinsed Snowdon’s viscera off and returned them by hand to the abdominal cavity while Snowdon watched him, grey in the face but calm-eyed. And then he’d sewn him up and fetched a stretcher and sent him off to die of it all.
A case beyond hope and the only surgery he had done all day!
They were now beside some vacant pasture land on their left. Jackson swung his horse under the shelter of some trees, for the rain was starting to have a bite to it now. Hotchkiss said: ‘D’you want us to fetch something to eat, General?’
The General was already dragging his cloak out of a saddlebag and spreading it on the ground. Then he fell on it face first. His words came out muffled by the cloth. ‘I want to rest, just rest,’ he said.
12
Bolly and Usaph, bone-tired, found the cornfield at last, recognising it from the way that farmer had stacked the sheaths. They’d already stumbled past a lot of other boys who, hearing them moving or seeing them by moonlight, called out to them. But you couldn’t answer those boys. Bolly and Usaph moved past, following their narrow purpose, the way Hunter Maguire was following his a mile down the road. Those other boys must have friends and so had to be left to their friends. In Bolly’s brain and Usaph’s there was room only for a sort of animal concern for Joe Murphy.
Bolly’s memory of the event got them to that angle of the field where it had happened. If Usaph had been a little less weary it would have been nice to watch how Bolly did it. He had a memory for little differences in this place or that, just like an Indian’s memory. It was easy to find Joe then. They could hear him sort of sobbing, and he could hear them approach too. ‘Coming for me, boys? Coming for me?’
He was sitting like a child, his legs spread in front of him.
‘I’m blinded, Bolly,’ he announced. And he already had that way of lifting his ear that a blind man has. He was dazed too. When you looked at him close you saw his right eye hanging by a sort of wormy stalk out on his cheek, where it was stuck in a sort of paste of blood. The sight brought up some bile into Usaph’s mouth and he had a hard, gaspy time swallowing it. ‘Bolly then?’ Murphy said again, ‘Is it Bolly?’
‘It’s me, Joe.’
‘Goddamit but I been waiting a long hour for the footfall of a friend, you son of a bitch, Bolly.’
‘They wouldn’t let me stop, Joe. You know how they harass a man who tries to stop for a friend.’
‘Both my eyes gone, Bolly. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, both the bastards! Who is it with you there, Bolly?’
‘Usaph,’ said Usaph.
‘Usaph is a good and brotherly boy,’ said Bolly.
‘Well, you’re out of it now there, Joe,’ said Usaph. ‘You can go home and live now at rest.’
Joe Murphy spread his fingers like someone seeking, seeking. ‘Think you so, Usaph Bumpass?’ he asked. ‘It’s rest, is it? I can sit back I imagine and read the goddam newspapers, I suppose.’
There wasn’t any way that could be answered.
‘Now listen, Bolly,’ said Murphy. ‘I want to talk serious with you. You know damn well there’s no place for a man without eyes. There’s more place for a man without a dangle than there is for a man without eyes.’
Bolly didn’t answer. Nor did Usaph.
‘I ask you, Bolly, what you’d ask me to do if you was in the one situation I’m in. I’m asking you Bolly to save me from the gangreeny an’, even if I lived through that, from the shame of goddam darkness. Of needing goddam hands to guide me all me days when I ought to be out walking like a seeing man.’
He began weeping a gale. Out of them smashed eyes? Usaph wondered.
‘Now?’ Bolly asked in a small voice. ‘You mean right now, Joe? You want to be … relieved from misery, son?’
‘While I’m at peace, Bolly. While I’m at peace. I tell you that there Frenchie goddam Jesuit in the Louisiana Brigade told the boys that God ain’t about to turn away any boy who’s after dying in battle for such a good democratic goddam cause. Now them Jesuits knows a powerful lot more than your average priest. The Lord won’t turn away Joe Murphy even if he’s been a profane and shameful braggard.’ There was silence. ‘I’m at peace now, Bolly,’ Murphy repeated after a time.
‘Well … where, Joe?’ Bolly asked in a pained voice, awake now with all the sharp weight of the task Murphy had laid on him.
‘You know, Bolly. The back of this misused and degredated head. You’re after doing it for enemies so they don’t even feel pain. Do it for a friend, Bolly!’
Bolly thought awhile. Then he got out a cartridge. It seemed that in that hot battle he’d only used some twenty rounds, if that, and still had plenty to do the job for Joseph Murphy. He bit the cardboard cartridge secretly, half turning away, just like a man trying to slip a plug of tobacco in his mouth in polite company and against his wife’s orders. He sprinkled the powder down the dirty barrel of his musket.
Usaph was dead against it, he couldn’t say why, for he wouldn’t want to live blind himself. He wouldn’t want to be shunted round by Ephie and never see her special beauty. And never notice the other men looking at her and deciding she must be ripe for a suggestion, seeing as how she was stuck with a blind spouse.
‘Jest tell me when you’re all ready,’ Joe asked.
Usaph said ‘Whoa up, Bolly!’ He didn’t know why he did it, seeing he approved of Bolly’s act of mercy in principle. Anyhow he got his neckerchief off and poured the dregs of water on it from his canteen. Usaph was a man of more than normal thirst and carried a canteen of U.S. make, like two dishes soldered together. To the dregs of water he added his spit. ‘Is there pain there, Joe?’ he asked, pointing to the face.
Though he could see nothing, Murphy understood. ‘No. God is merciful. There’s no pain to speak of, Usaph. Well, when I say no pain, I mean no screaming pain, anyhows.’
Usaph felt an urge to lever the hanging eye off the right cheek and pack it back in its socket. God knows it might work again. But no, he kept away from that side of the face and began to wash Murphy’s left cheek, gently, expecting protest. By the chin he moved Joe’s head to catch the light of the moon, that was still shining down between thunder clouds. There was such a paste of powder and blood and soil on Joe’s cheek. ‘Bolly, you got water?’ Usaph asked, but Bolly said no. So Usaph unbuttoned his britches and urinated on the cloth.
‘For God’s sake, Usaph,’ Bolly protested, wanting to get his task behind him.
The urine-soaked cloth stung Joe’s forehead above the left eye. He yelped. ‘You hit a cut right there, Bumpass. It won’t be troubling me much longer.’
‘A cut there, that’s fine, Joe. But does this one hurt you?’
He laid the cloth fair on that eye and Joe said nothing. He began to ply the cloth, cleaning up the socket with a will, and still Joe did not complain. And after a few seconds, Usaph could see that the eye was there, sure enough, in its place, and it seemed unmarked. And as he made this find of the eye buried under all the battle muck, Joe reached out his left arm slowly and gripped Usaph’s rag arm by the wrist. ‘Goddam it!’ he called. ‘Oh Jesus, Usaph. I can see yourself there, you son of a bitch!’
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He hopped up, still with his right eye on his cheek. He bayed under the moon with pleasure.
‘Goddamit,’ he cried. ‘I’m going to be one of them grandfathers with a glass eye, and you take it out of your socket and roll it in your hand to frighten the littl’uns. Goddamit, I’m going to be one hell of a scary grandfather, oh Mother of God!’
Usaph and Bolly clapped and chortled and yippeed and danced with him. He made a strange dancer. But when they stopped celebrating with him, the cornfields seemed full all at once with fevered wails, the midnight screams that Maguire had expected. The joy of Bolly and Usaph for Murphy had brought all those damaged boys in that place out of their merciful daze and now they were raving under the moon like men who couldn’t wait another second for peace or water or bandages.
In the morning a natty Yankee officer came across Cedar Run under flag of truce to ask that the day be set aside for finding the last of the wounded and for putting the dead in crowded but Christian graves.
Usaph was not put on burial detail, but he could see the parties working in the meadows round about, wearing masks of linen over their faces. The dead were starting to bloat, Usaph could see, and to burst the seams of the vests and trousers they’d died in. They were all barefooted under the sky – they always lost their shoes to needy Confederates.
The sight put Usaph in a black mood, which deepened when Guess sent him in a detail back to the waggons for cases of Springfield cartridges. But he went and fetched a case and so came back, the sun biting into one of his shoulders, the cartridge box into the other.
Along the embankment in the sun, calling on passers-by for water, were whole lines of stragglers bucked and bound. Usaph heard one of them calling to him by name. ‘Usaph! Mr Bumpass!’