answer. Usaph saved up his rancour for the conscript Cate.
When Bumpass didnât answer, the others just forgot him and sat there trading their usual stories of hot widows and wartime adulteries. Ashabel Judd told how he had gone out into the Pendleton County Hills looking for the tracks of a stag. âChristmas, two year back. And like a dang fool I ventured too far and had to find a house to bide the night. Well, the houses in Pendleton are few and I found this quiet place, no paint, mountain trash, you know the manner of people they might be. Well, that door was opened by a wild red-haired widder. There was just herself and her poor simple sister.â¦â
âOh, you service simple gals, do you, Ash Judd?â Murphy asked him.
But Ash was shaking his head, and there was something true about the way all bravado had vanished from his tale. âNo,â he said, âNot the simple gal. Not her, poor thing.â
âI,â said Murphy, âonce met a girl in a field near Charlottesville.â He lowered his voice as if it were all a secret, but it wasnât so secret Usaph couldnât hear it. âIâd gone off looking for chickens and found herself culling early berries â she had, oh my dear Lord, sweet fingers. After Iâd rode her bare-assed in edge of the woods, right there in the goddam sedge-grass, she says to me without blushing, dâyou know Sergeant So-and-So my dear husband. Heâs Captain So-and-soâs right hand in the 3rd Virginia, except it wasnât the 3rd Virginia, if you take my meaning, it was a regiment closer to home than the 3rd, but I ainât intending to specify further which one. Right there, off pat, with my fresh spunk in her, she says it.â Murphy adopted a feminine voice. âDâyou know my dear husband Sergeant So-and-so â¦â
âAll right, all right,â called Usaph, sweating freely, wanting to know , that was all. Wanting to know. Never wanting to know. âThe storyâs taken, for Godâs sake, the storyâs understood!â
And that made Ash and Bolly hoot and Murphy look mean.
Looking away, Usaph saw the fiddler studying the huddle of conscripts. The man began signalling with his eyes and eyebrows to someone, and the thin young conscript, maybe eighteen, that heâd shown an interest in earlier, stood up and walked over to the place the fiddler was playing and sat down near him. The fiddler and the boy stared at each other for some ten seconds until all around them disgusted hisses and grunts started to rise. There might have been some arguments about that kind of behaviour if it hadnât happened that all over the bivouac other fiddles were starting up, and from the 5th Virginiaâs camp site a little distance away a battery of tin whistles swelled the sound, for the 5th Virginia was all Irish.
It seemed to the tormented Usaph that everyone but him began singing âJust Before The Battle, Motherâ. But they used the words that made a mock of the song.
âJust before the battle, mother,
I was drinking mountain dew.
When I saw the Yankees marching,
To the rear I quickly flew,
O I long to see you, mother,
And the loving ones at home,
Thatâs why Iâm skedaddling southwards,
While thereâs still flesh on my bones.â¦â
The fiddler could tell that the evening was spoiling on him. Just because the others didnât like him giving favours to a conscript. So he went on to a real spell-binder. âAll Quiet Along the Potomacâ, written in the North but imported South in smuggled copies of Harperâs . It was â as boys said â âone of them songs against officersâ.
âAll quiet along the Potomac, they say,
Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
âTis nothing, a private or two now and then
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an
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