The Guns of the South Read online

  They haggled amiably for a while. Caudell ended up buying the hat for thirteen dollars in banknotes. Confederate paper had gone up now that the South was no longer at war. He knew he could have had the hat for a silver dollar and a little change, but like most people he spent specie only when he had to.

  He jammed the hat down low on his head, braced himself to brave the rain again. “Don’t go yet,” Liles said. “Almost forgot—I got a couple of letters for you here.” He reached under the counter, handed Caudell two envelopes. Then he cocked his head and grinned. “This here Mollie Bean up in Rivington, you courtin’ her? Pretty gal, I bet.”

  “She’s a friend, Mr. Liles. How many times do I have to tell you?” Caudell’s cheeks heated. His flush must have been visible even in the dim store, for Raeford Liles laughed at him. That only made him blush harder. To give himself a moment in which to recover, he looked at the other envelope.

  It was from Henry Pleasants, down in Wilmington. Caudell grinned when he saw the engineer’s name. Pleasants had indeed been snapped up by the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, at a salary a good many times the one Caudell made for teaching school. He opened the letter, quickly read through it. Sure enough, everything was still going well for Henry: “I expect to escape my rented room here before long, and buy myself a proper house.” Caudell could not evade a pang of jealousy at that. He was living in a rented room on Joyner Street, and had no prospect of escaping it.

  Pleasants went on: “I do wonder that you Carolinians ever built a railroad at all, or kept it running once built, with your dearth of men trained not only in the mechanic arts but also in any sort of skilled labor. I have written to several miners in Pennsylvania, some of whom I knew before the war, others who served in my regiment, urging them to come hither. I hope they take me up on this soon, while travel arrangements between U.S.A. and C.S.A. remain pleasantly informal.”

  Caudell hoped so, too. As Pleasants said, the South needed every sort of skilled workman. The engineer’s last phrase brought him up short. Proud as he was of belonging to an independent nation, he kept encountering implications of that independence which hadn’t occurred to him. One of these days, and probably one day soon, he would need a passport if he wanted to visit Pennsylvania. The last time he’d gone into that state, his only passport had been a rifle.

  He folded Pleasants’s letter, returned it to its envelope, and put that envelope and the one with Mollie Bean’s letter in a trouser pocket. Raeford Liles chuckled knowingly. “You ain’t gonna read that there one where anybody else’s eyes might light on it, is you? Must be from your sweetheart, I says.”

  “Oh, shut up, Mr. Liles,” Caudell said, which only made the storekeeper laugh harder. Giving up, Caudell went out onto muddy Washington Street. He ran a block to Collins Street, almost fell as he turned right, ran two more blocks and turned left onto Virginia, then right onto Joyner. The widow Bissett’s house was the third one on the left.

  Barbara Bissett’s husband, Jackson, had died in camp the winter before. Now she rented out a room to bring in some money. Her brother and his family shared the house with her and her boarder, so everything was perfectly proper and above reproach, but Caudell would have had no interest in her even had the two of them been alone there together. She was large and plump and inclined to burst into crying fits for any reason or none. He would have sympathized if he thought she was mourning her lost Jackson; but she’d been like that before the war, too.

  Once inside his own upstairs room, he took both letters from his pocket. The rainwater had blurred Henry Pleasants’s fine round script on the envelope, but the paper inside remained dry. And Pleasants’s letter had shielded Mollie’s from the wet. Her hand was anything but fine and round, but this was the fifth or sixth letter she’d sent, and with each her writing grew more legible.

  He opened the envelope and drew out the single sheet of the letter; Pleasants had gone on for three pages. “Dear Nate,” he read, “I hope you is wel sinse I last rote. Got this hear paper at the Notahilton, wich sels like it was a ginral stor. But Rivington is a cawshun al ways, as you seen for your ownself. I bin out to Benny Langs hous wich is one of the ones out in the woods like we saw when you was there. He dident reckonize me on a count of I was warin a dres in sted of my old youniform.”

  Caudell clicked his tongue between his teeth and made a sour face. Mollie didn’t say why she’d gone out to Benny Lang’s place, but he could paint his own mental pictures. He didn’t care for them. Scowling still, he read on:

  “The hous is poorly”—after a moment, he realized Mollie meant purely—”remarkabul. Benny Lang he dont us lanterns or even gas lights. He has a thing ware you pres a nob on the side of the wal and a light corns on up top. I ast him how do you do that and he laffs and tels me eleksity or som thing like that wat ever it may be. Wat ever it may be it is the best light for night time you cood think of ever in yor born dayes. Its more remarkabul than the AK47 if you ask me.”

  Caudell whistled softly. After those repeaters, desiccated meals, and gold paid, dollar for dollar, for Confederate paper, he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by anything that came from Rivington, but a fine light that went on here if you pushed a knob there? He wondered how electricity—if that was what Mollie was trying to write—could do that; so far as he knew, it had no use past the telegraph.

  Her letter continued: “May be on a count of this light making night into day wich sounds like Good Book tauk and giving him time to read Benny Lang he has hole cases ful of books. May be one of them tauks about eleksity. If I get the chans I wil try to find out on a count of it sounds like a thing worth noing. Yor true frend al ways, M. Bean, 47NC.”

  A reliable light by which to read at night…The notion roused pure, sea-green envy in Caudell. Even on a gloomy, rainy day like today, reading in front of a window was Jess than comfortable. Reading at night, with one’s head jammed down close to both book and a dim, flickering, smoky candle, brought on eyestrain and headaches in short order. Though he had scant use for Abraham Lincoln, the stories of how the U.S. President studied law by firelight raised nothing but admiration in him. To sit down with a law book in front of a fire night after night after night, after a hard day’s work each day, took special dedication—and perhaps special eyes as well. He wondered how Lincoln could see at all these days.

  He also wondered whether Lincoln could possibly be reelected after leading the United States into a losing war. With both Democrats and Republicans split, the North was growing more parties than it knew what to do with. Caudell read newspaper reports of their bickering with detached amusement, as if they were accounts of the unsavory doings of an ex-wife’s kin. Not for the first time, he thought the Confederacy well free of such chaos. Where the North had too many parties, the South had none. The war had been too all-consumingly important to let such organized factions develop. He hoped they would not emerge now that peace had taken the strain off his country.

  Writing in bad light was no easier than reading, but he sat down on his bed to compose replies to Pleasants and to Mollie Bean. He knew no better way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and also knew that if he did not answer now, he probably would not get another chance until next Saturday. He would be at church tomorrow and teaching school from sunup to sundown the rest of the week.

  “I hope you are well,” he wrote to Mollie. “I hope you are happy in Rivington with all its wonders.” In his mind’s eye, he saw her on a bed with Benny Lang, maybe under the sunlike glare of one of the lights she’d described. He shook his head; even imagining anything so shameless embarrassed him… and left him wishing he were there instead of the Rivington man.

  Thinking about the light helped him pull his pen back toward the impersonal: “If you learn more about eleksity and how it burns in the lamps there, let me know. If the Rivington men will sell it outside their town, it sounds better than whale oil or even gas. And tell me more about these books you mentioned. Are they just print on paper like our own, or are they
filled with colored plates to go along with the words?” If even the lights in a Rivington man’s house were something special, what would his books be like? Caudell chose the fanciest thing he could think of, and smiled at the power of his own imagination.

  He went on, “Your letters keep getting longer and more interesting. I hope to have many more of them, and hope that you now and then remember the wide world outside Rivington.” He hesitated, then added, “I also hope to see you again one day. Your friend always, Nathaniel N. Caudell.” He looked down at that last line, wondering whether he ought to strike it out. Mollie might think he meant only that he wanted to have her again. Or she might show up on the doorstep of the widow Bissett’s house, either in tart’s finery or in her old Confederate uniform. He wondered which would stir up the greater scandal.

  But in the end, he decided to leave the sentence alone. It was true, and Mollie had sense enough not to read too much or too little into it. He waited until the ink dried, then folded the letter and put it in an envelope. He thought about going back to Raeford Liles’s store to post that letter and the one to Henry Pleasants, but only for a moment. Monday would do well enough, if the rain had let up by then.

  Lightning cracked. While it lasted, it lit his room with a hot, purple glare and turned every shadow black as pitch. He blinked, afterimages dancing inside his eyes, and wondered if the eleksity lights were that bright. He hoped not. Too much light could be as bad as too little. Thunder boomed overhead.

  He Set the letters on top of the chest of drawers by the wall opposite the bed, then went back and lay down. The rain kept coming. Another bolt of lightning lit up everything in harsh relief, then died. Thunder growled again. Children—not a few grown men and women, too—were afraid of it. He’d had his own anxieties, until Gettysburg and the wilderness and the ring of forts around Washington. After a few cannonadings, thunder was nothing to worry about.

  He pulled his new hat down over his eyes so the lightning would not bother him anymore. Inside of five minutes, he was snoring.

  Boys and a few girls, their ages ranging from five up toward full adulthood, crowded the benches of the Nashville, North Carolina schoolhouse. The building, on Alston Street several blocks south of Washington, was near the edge of town and hardly deserved to be called a schoolhouse at all—schoolshed would have been a better word for it. The walls were timber, the roof leaked—though the rain was done, wet, muddy spots remained on the floor as reminders of its recent appearance. “Get away from there, Rufus!” Caudell shouted at a small boy who was about to jump in one of the wet places.

  Rufus sulkily sat back on his bench. Sighing, Caudell stood between two of his older students, who had a geometry problem chalked on their slates. “If these two angles are equal, the triangles have to be congruent,” one said.

  “Are the angles equal?” Caudell asked. The youth nodded. “How do you know?”

  “Because they’re—what’s the name for them? Vertical angles, that’s what they are.”

  “That’s right,” Caudell said approvingly. “So you see that—”

  Before he could point out what the budding Euclid was supposed to see, a girl gave a piercing shriek. Bored with sitting on his bench, Rufus had yanked her braids. Caudell hurried over. He habitually carried a long, thin stick; he’d been using it to point to the figures in the geometry lesson. Now he whacked Rufus on the wrist with it. Rufus howled. He probably made more noise than the girl whose hair he’d pulled, but it was noise of a sort the students were used to ignoring.

  Without breaking stride, Caudell went back and finished the interrupted lesson: Then he walked over to three or four nine-year-olds. “You have your spelling words all written down?” he asked. “Take out your Old Blue Backs and we’ll find out how you did.” The children opened their Webster’s Elementary Spellers, checked the scrawls on their slates against the right answers. “Write the proper spelling of each word you missed ten times,” Caudell said; that would keep the nine-year-olds busy while he taught arithmetic to their older brothers and sisters. He also thought fleetingly that Mollie Bean could have done with some more work in the Elementary Speller.

  From arithmetic, he went on to geography and history, both of which came from the North Carolina Reader of Calvin H. Wiley, a former state school superintendent. Had everyone in the state been as heroic and virtuous as Wiley made its people out to be, North Carolina would have been the earthly paradise. The discrepancy between text and real world did not bother Caudell; school books were supposed to inculcate virtue in their readers.

  He went over to his youngest students, said, “Let me hear the alphabet again.”

  The familiar chant rang out: “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,—”

  “Mr. Caudell, I got to pee,” Rufus interrupted.

  “Go on outside,” Caudell said, sighing again. “You come back quick now, mind, or I’ll give you another taste of the switch.” Rufus left hastily. Caudell knew the odds of his return were less than even money. And by tomorrow morning, he would have forgotten all about being told to come back. Well, that was what the switch was for: to exercise his memory until it could carry the load for itself.

  For a wonder, Rufus did return. For a bigger wonder, he recited the whole alphabet without a miss. Knowing he wasn’t likely to get a bigger surprise that day, Caudell announced a dinner break. Some children ate where they sat; others—though not as many as in spring—went out to sit on the grass. The youths to whom he’d taught geometry came up to him while he was eating his sowbelly and hoecakes. “Tell us more about how you all got into Washington City, Mr. Caudell,” one of them said.

  The down was beginning to darken on their cheeks and upper lips. They wondered what they’d missed by staying home from the war. Had it gone on another year or two, they would have found out. Having seen the elephant, Caudell would willingly have traded what he knew for ignorance.

  “Jesse, William, it was dark and it was dirty and everybody was firing as fast as he could, us and the Yankees both,” he said. “Finally we fought our way through their works and then into the city. I tell you, pieces of it I don’t remember to this day. You’re just doing things in a fight; you don’t have time to think about them.”

  The two boys stared at him in admiration. The smaller children listened too, some of them trying not very well to pretend they weren’t doing any such thing. “But you weren’t afraid, were you, Mr. Caudell?” Jesse asked, obviously confident of the answer. “They made you first sergeant, so they must’ve known you’d never be afraid,”

  One of the reasons Caudell had been made first sergeant was that the man in that position did much of his company’s record-keeping and so needed to have neat handwriting. He wondered what Jesse and William would say to that. Their idea of war did not include such mundane details. He answered,” Anybody who isn’t scared when people shoot at him, well, he’s a fool, if you ask me.”

  The youths laughed, as if he’d said something funny. They thought he was being modest. He knew he wasn’t. As with Raeford Liles, he faced a chasm of incomprehension he could not bridge. He finished his last hoecake, wiped his hands on his pants, went out behind a tree himself, then walked back into the schoolroom and resumed lessons.

  He sometimes thought that, if he ever quit teaching, he could join a circus as a juggler. With a roomful of children of all different ages, he needed to keep busy the ones he wasn’t actually instructing at any given moment. When the eight-year-olds were doing addition in Davies’ Primary Arithmetic, the twelve-year-olds were parsing sentences from Bullion’s English Grammar. Meanwhile, Jesse and William practiced their elocution, William putting fire into Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death,” Jesse giving William Yancey’s tribute to Jefferson Davis on Davis’s becoming provisional president at Montgomery less than four years before: “The man and the hour have met,” William declared loudly. Some of the younger children clapped.

  Caudell dismissed his clutch of scholars about half an hour before sunset, t
o let the ones who did not live in town—the vast majority—find their way home to their farms before it got dark. A few local children—Colonel Faribault’s sons, the daughter of the justice of the peace—did not attend his school because they were off at fancy expensive private academies. Far more stayed away because they worked in the fields all day long, all year long.

  That saddened him. Many of those children would still be living when the twentieth century rolled around, and would have not a letter to their names. Of course, if they came to school instead of working in the fields, they might be less likely to be living still in that distant day, for small farms needed every hand they could get, just to make ends meet.

  After his students were gone, he straightened up benches and cleared away trash. He shut the door behind him, a door whose lock had long since rusted into uselessness. Little inside was worth stealing, anyhow. The school boasted neither blackboard, globe, charts, nor much of anything else in the way of equipment.

  Caudell looked back over his shoulder as he walked up Alston Street. “Yup, I’m about it,” he said to no one in particular. He kept on walking.

  The bell jingled as Caudell went into the general store. “Today, Mr. Liles?” he demanded.” Are we ever going to find out who won up North?” A week and a half after the election, its results remained in doubt.

  Finally, though, finally, Raeford Liles grinned at him. “Got me a couple copies of Thursday’s Raleigh North Carolina Evening Standard, one o’ the Raleigh Constitution, an’ even one o’ the Wilmington Journal. You jus’ go ahead an’ take your pick—they all tell what you want to know.”

  “About time,” Caudell said. “Give me an Evening Standard, then.” He slapped seven cents down on the counter. The storekeeper gave him his paper. The headline leaped out at him: