Purgatory: A Novel of the Civil War (23 page)

“No,” says Rufus, dejected. “I lost it all to the New
Market twins and their cursed cards.”

“I do, Jeremiah. A little left. Why?”

“I’ll tell you later. Right now, I got me a lady to
see. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to meet her tomorrow.” Then he’s
off, across the field and over the crest of the hill.

Rufus can’t read, his harmonica playing is far from
tuneful, and he’s not much of a talker—can’t tell a story worth a
damn—but the man sure can cook. With the paltry supplies we’ve got,
he’s soon got an aromatic pot of beans going and some cornbread
too. We sit together in camp chairs by the fire, the occasional
breeze shaking raindrops from the dense pine boughs above us. I
pull out my flask to share. It’s very quiet, save for the sizzle
and spark-spit of the fire.

“Just the three of us in camp tonight, Ian,” Rufus
says, rubbing his rusty chin-whiskers and sipping. “I’ll take the
pickets some food here in a little bit. Thanks for staying with me.
You can bring your poor Yank out if you’d like. Sarge won’t be back
till morning, nor the others neither, I reckon. I won’t tell if you
want to make him comfortable.”

“I think he needs his rest, Rufus. What with all the
beatings and little food, well, I’ll rouse him later.”

Rufus nods, then his face lights up. “Forgot!” He
rises, bounds over to his tent, rummages, then returns. He’s
holding a little tin in one hand and what looks like pale green
goose quills in the other. “This,” he says, lifting the tin, “is
bacon grease I been hoarding, and this,” he says, waving the
quills, “is wild onions I spied near the road right after that poor
woman waylaid us. Both’ll make this mess of beans tastier than
usual. Good to keep off the scurvy too, I hear tell.”

He stirs both ingredients in, then hunkers down to
turn hoecakes frying in the skillet. I take a flask-swig, welcome
warmth on this cool, wet evening, then realize I have my own
hoarded luxuries to offer. “You like sorghum?” I ask.

Rufus grins. He straightens up and wiggles in an
awkward approximation of a jig. “Oh, Lord. You got some? I ain’t
had much in the way of sweetening since winter quarters.”

“Would you rather have honey?”

Rufus’ eyes widen. “Can I have a little bit of
both?”

“As long as you don’t tell the others. Sarge can be
mighty strict, as you well know, but he is generous to kin. And I
don’t want to share my little cache of secret sweets with men who
are so unkind to the prisoner.”

Rufus nods. “Oh, no, I won’t say a word! And they
have been mighty unkind. It ain’t Christian.”

I leave him near to salivating by the fire, crawl
into my tent, and feel around for my haversack. That’s when Drew, a
big black bundle, rolls over and mumbles my name.

I feel for him, find a knee, then an elbow, then the
softness of his beard. “You awake, huh, big man?”

Drew gives a rag-muted grunt. His cuffed hands find
mine in the dark and squeeze.

“You hungry? We got a little feast on the fire.”

“Ummmmmm,” growls Drew, squeezing my hands
harder.

“Come on out, boy. It’s safe for a change. Sarge and
George and most of the others have gone into town. There’s pickets,
so I can’t get you out of here right yet, but I can feed you pretty
well.”

Drew’s stiff from his past torments and the long
day’s march, so I have to help him as he crawls from the tent,
painfully rights himself, and staggers the short way to the fire.
Twice he trips; twice I catch him before he falls. I’ve never seen
him weaker. Rufus rises, staring up at him with mingled awe and
pity, then offers him his chair. Drew proffers one cuffed hand;
Rufus hesitates, then shakes it. I help Drew ease himself into the
chair. His legs shake like an invalid’s. He leans back, takes a
deep breath around his bandana gag, and closes his blow-blackened
eyes.

“Beans’ll be ready directly,” says Rufus, fetching
another chair, then bending to stir the pot.

I look around. No one but us, true. Nothing visible
but trunks of pines, pine needle beds, dripping branches, empty
tents, and, far off, across the field and down the hill, the lights
of Lexington. For the moment, any source of cruelty has moved off.
And so I pat Drew’s shoulder, loosen the bandana’s knot, and pull
the gag from his mouth. “Thanks,” he grunts, looking up at me with
a weak smile, the first time he’s really met my eyes since Mrs.
Trent struck him. I offer him the flask. He takes a sip, then
slumps deeper in the chair, sighing with gratitude in the face of
this sudden and unexpected reprieve from discomfort.

I warm my hands over the flames, then sit beside
Drew. He stares blankly at the gray smoke drifting off the campfire
and trailing down the moist breeze. Today’s triumphant display of
strength seems to have sorely overtaxed him. I think only the
thought of imminent nourishment is giving him the strength to keep
his eyes open. “I’m Drew Conrad. You’re Rufus, right?” Drew
mumbles.

My messmate flinches. He seems startled to be
directly addressed. “Uh, yes, sir! Rufus Ballard.” It occurs to me
only now that no one in the camp save I has heard much of Drew’s
voice—other than his cloth-muffled moans and screams beneath the
whip or his bucked-and-gagged sobs—since the day he was first
brought to camp. “I—I’m glad to make your, your acquaintance,”
Rufus stammers.

Drew smiles, wry and crooked, at Rufus’ phrasing.
It’s as if they were meeting in an elegant parlor or a church
social. “Well, I owe you, Rufus. I know you have cause to hate my
guts, and I admit my fellow soldiers and I have given your people
nothing but hurt, but I do thank you for providing me with a
special breakfast this morning. That bacon was a real delight, and
it helped me endure the march. And this fire you’ve made feels
mighty nice after trudging in mud and rain all day.”

“I try not to hate anyone, sir. It’s my Christian
duty to love anyone, even a damn Yankee. Uh, begging your pardon!”
Flushed, Rufus fumbles about, fetching tin cups, ladling beans,
flipping hoecakes. Soon he has a wooden plank heaped with the
little corn cakes, each of which he’s smeared with a light layer of
bacon grease.

“Now where’s that sweetening you promised me?” Rufus
gives a little hop of anticipation.

“Ah, right. Forgot,” I say. A quick return to my tent
to fetch the haversack, and I’m pouring black dribbles of sorghum
and amber dribbles of honey on the cakes. “You want uncuffed while
you eat?” I say, offering Drew a cup of beans. I raise an eyebrow
at Rufus. He’s wide-eyed, clearly startled at the thought of an
enemy so huge suddenly unbound.

“Naw.” Drew exhales, then chuckles. “No point. Don’t
want to scare off Mr. Rufus here. And you’d get in trouble if the
pickets showed up, or anybody returned from town. Plus, it’s not
like I have the strength at this point, were I uncuffed, to
overpower you men and get back north in these.” He lifts one
bandaged foot off the ground and jingles his shackle-chain. “I’d
just as soon you feed me, Reb, as I’ve grown accustomed to it. And
I fear that I might make a mess in my present state of feebleness.”
He lifts his hands in their rusty bracelets. The shaking is visible
even in the irregular flicker of firelight.

“All right.” I pull my chair closer to Drew’s and
commence feeding him. Rufus looks on for a few fascinated seconds,
amazed at what must be to him an incongruous and absurd sight, then
his own hunger bests his curiosity and he falls to, grunting
appreciatively over the quality of the sweetening. Drew and I stare
into one another’s eyes in silence as I lift spoonfuls of beans to
his mouth, then bits of hoecake. All is as good as Rufus had
predicted: the bean broth is rich with flavors of bacon and onion;
the hoecake is golden-brown; the sorghum and honey are sweet
reminders of better days back home. But, though my Yank smacks his
lips and smiles, taking the food with murmurs of eagerness and
thanks, there’s despondency in his eyes I’ve never seen before.

In the absence of competition from our messmates, we
each devour second helpings, though our famine-shrunk stomachs
won’t allow us more. For a while, we pass the flask around till
it’s empty. Rufus sighs and drowses, scratches vigorously, settles
down, and begins to snore. I add more wood to the fire. Drew falls
asleep, seized by fatigue obviously bone-deep, and soon his snores
mingle with Rufus’. I fetch some poetry from my haversack, a book
my cousin in Washington sent me just before the war began, one I’ve
read and reread,
Leaves of Grass
by Walt
Whitman. The poems may be by a Yank, but they make me feel less
alone.

My favorite section’s named after a plant we have
back home, growing on my grandparents’ farm. It’s a pond-dweller, a
kind of reed, sprouting a funny little penis like a
Jack-in-the-pulpit. We call it sweet flag; Whitman uses the Latin,
Calamus
. The word makes me think of Drew,
his hairy groin, the taste of his big cock in my mouth last night,
the taste of his thick juice. Tonight, if I can rouse him from his
stupor and his sadness, perhaps I’ll taste him again.

“We two boys together clinging, / One the other never
leaving.” I’m entirely enrapt by the words—how perfectly they
reflect passions I once feared no one but I ever felt—when a hand
taps my shoulder. “Night.” It’s Rufus, standing by my chair. “I’m
taking food out to the boys on picket duty and then hitting the
hay.”

I nod. Rufus dips up beans, wraps hoecakes in
handkerchiefs, and departs. I read further. When thickening
raindrops begin to pimple the pages, I close the book. For a few
minutes, I lie back in the chair, watch the fire as it hisses and
steams under the onslaught of heavier rain, and study my Yank as he
sleeps.

“Up, Drew,” I say, shaking his shoulder. “Let’s get
you in the tent. The rain’s getting harder.”

Drew jolts. I’ve helped him half out of the chair,
cupping his elbows, when his legs buckle and he falls to his knees
in the pine needles.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Let me help,” I say.

“In just a minute,” he says, leaning against me, face
buried in my uniform jacket. For long seconds he gathers his
strength. At last he tries to rise; again he fails.

I lay my hands on his shoulders, pity clogging my
throat.

“I can’t, Ian. It’s all catching up to me. Freeing
that cart was the last of my old strength.”

I look around the circle of firelight, the night
blessedly free of hostile faces. I kiss the top of his head. “I
know, buddy. Can you crawl?”

Drew nods. He squeezes my thigh with one hand, then
falls onto hands and knees. I follow him as he creeps beneath
dripping pine boughs, first to the latrine-trench, then to our
little tent.

_

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

_

“For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the
same cover in the cool night, / In the stillness in the autumn
moonbeams his face was inclined toward me, / And his arm lay
lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.”

“That’s amazing,” whispers Drew, his head in my lap.
I sit cross-legged, leaning against the cot, reading him poem after
poem from
Leaves of Grass
. I’ve washed and
salved Drew’s hurts—thank God none of them are festering yet—though
his bandages are too soiled to reapply and I’m finally out of the
torn rags I’ve been using to wrap his wounds. At his request, for
the first time since we’ve shared this tent, I’ve stripped off not
only my muddy brogans and uniform jacket, but also my trousers and
underclothing. We’re both completely naked, draped in smelly
blankets, in the light of the candle. Since no one’s in camp
tonight save Rufus, it’s a chance I’m willing to take. Leering
George and snooping Sarge are in town doing who knows what? George
is probably deep in his cups and gambling. Sarge is probably
growing even bitterer as he tours the torched remains of his old
school, the Virginia Military Institute. I have very vague memories
of those grand buildings from a visit in my early childhood. They
looked like crenellated castles. Word is the Yankees have left
little but ashes.

“Do you think this poet is like us? That he’s felt
for other men the way we’ve come to feel about one another?” Drew
asks. Taking my hand, he lifts it to his lips.

“It certainly seems so. Before I read his poems, I
wondered if Thom and I were the only men in the world who felt such
things. I thought that warriors in
The
Iliad
might have shared such passions, but modern men did no
longer. Sometimes, when I recalled what Thom and I had done
together, and how he fled in shame, I thought perhaps the
preachers’ words were true, that I was harboring an unnatural vice,
that I was indecent and immoral. But when I got that book in the
mail—from a kinsman in Washington who was always trying to
encourage my education with the same zeal that Sarge has always
encouraged my soldierliness—then I knew that there were others like
me. A ‘brotherhood of lovers,’ Whitman says.”

“Speaking of love, sir,” Drew says, smiling up at me.
“I’d sure like to pleasure you tonight the way last night you
pleasured me, but I don’t think I have the strength yet.” His hands
brush my chest hair, grazing a nipple. “I feel like a
wood-whittler’s twig, Ian. Every day peels off a bit of me, and
soon I won’t have nothing left. Will we march tomorrow? I don’t
think I can make it.”

“I don’t think so. Sarge made no reference to leaving
tomorrow, and, what with a hard-drinking Saturday night in town,
many of the men will be too worn out with their entertainments to
march anyway. With any luck, tomorrow will be a day of rest for
you. Unless Sarge orders you bucked.”

“Lord, no. I don’t think I can take that again. You
saw how shaky my limbs are. Though tonight’s meal surely
helped.”