it. “Me and Tom Dula are fixing to lay out in the woods this evening with this here jug, and another one just like it, and make us a party of it. We would be right glad if you was to join us.”
I could smell his breath from two feet away, and I flapped my hand to stir the stench away from my nose. “Seems like you have already started in on that jug without us.”
He gave me a wobbly grin and reached for my arm. “Just feeling the spirit move us, Pauline. Come on.”
I let him lead me into the woods then, keeping my eye on the whiskey jug to make sure he didn’t trip over a log and spill it out on the ground. I didn’t care if Wash Anderson broke his fool neck, but it would be a shame to waste good whiskey. Anyhow, I had nothing better to do that evening. I had much rather call on Wash’s sister, Mrs. Scott, or walk over to Miz Gilbert’s to spend the evening and maybe cadge a bite of supper, but if either of them had any gossip it would keep, and I’d just as soon pass the time with a jug as eat, even if it meant putting up with the likes of Wash and Tom Dula. I could suffer them well enough, for the sake of their whiskey. I reckoned they might try to make me pay for my share by letting them lay with me, but if I could put it off long enough, they might be too drunk to manage.
As soon as we had gone a ways into the woods, where the evening light was green, a-shining slant-wise through the leaves, I began to hear faint, shrill sounds, and I stopped in my tracks, thinking at first that it was the cry of a bobcat. But as I stood and listened, the screeching stopped, and then the sounds came together and made a tune, and then I knew that Tom Dula had already beat us to the meeting place, and that he was amusing himself on his fiddle while he waited.
I am not much of a music lover, though I suppose I like a lively dance as well as the next girl. It’s just that the tunes all sound more or less the same to me, and if the fiddler is an indifferent player, they all sound like scalded cats. I started forward again, following the sound, and it was a likely melody, though I did not know its name. I judged that he played it well, for the sound of it did not set my teeth on edge. I decided that Tom was a better fiddler than most I’d heard. I suppose he ought to be, though. It ain’t like he ever let work get in the way of his practicing.
We found him sitting on a fallen log with his back up against an oak tree, eyes closed and wrapped up in the tune he was playing. I held back for a moment watching him, because the way he moved with that bow in his hand showed more grace than I had ever seen in him before. A shock of hair slipped down across his forehead, and he glowed with the fever of his playing. For a moment there I thought I could see how Ann could be so taken with him. He was so handsome sitting there, lost in his fiddling, that he could have been one of those magic creatures they tell about in fairy tales, sitting there in the woods in twilight, conjuring up music. Funny, I felt closer to him then than I had back there in the barn when he had his pants down.
The music didn’t cut any ice with Wash Anderson, though. Maybe he was already too drunk to notice. He staggered right on past me and plopped down on the log next to Tom, jostling his elbow with his shoulder, and, even though Tom was playing a sad, slow tune, Wash stamped his feet and let out a “
Tom opened his eyes, looked from one of us to the other, and then he sighed and set the fiddle down behind the log, well away from Wash and his muddy boots. I sat down on the other side of Tom, almost shy at seeing this new side of him. “That was fine playing you was doing just now,” I told him.
Wash whooped again. “Didn’t you know, Pauline? Why, that was Tom’s job during the War. He was a musician for the mighty Confederacy. We was in it together.”
“What regiment were you in, then?” I said, hoping to take a long turn at the jug while they went maudlin with memories of the War.
“Company K, 42nd North Carolina,” Tom muttered, looking none too pleased to have the matter brought up. I never had heard him talk much about soldiering.
I turned to look at him. “They had a fiddler in the army? What for? Did you play for the officer’s dances?”
His frown deepened to a furrow. “I was a drummer, that’s all. It wasn’t music they wanted; it was somebody to mark time for the marching. When the army wasn’t getting itself shot to pieces at Petersburg and Cold Harbor, they liked to pass the time in camp by making us do drills. They had us beating out the cadence for that. And during a battle we’d beat out the regiment’s commands-charge or retreat. Like a code. There wasn’t much music to it. Just keeping time.”
Wash had spread out the blanket in the clearing in front of the log, and he began to tap a cadence on the side of the whiskey jug, but nobody paid him any mind. I nodded my head toward him. “Was he a musician, too?”
Tom shook his head. “Naw, he was just another warm body put out there to get shot at, same as everybody else.”
“I hear you got took prisoner.”
I felt Tom shiver when I said that. “Yeah, but it didn’t spare me much. I lasted until a month before the armistice, and after that I was just waiting until it got to be my turn to go home. They let us out by state-in the order that our states had left the union. First one to secede was the last to get to go home. Hard luck on those South Carolina boys.”
“So you made it right up to the end of the War before you got captured?”
“Yeah. March of ’65. That was only last year, wasn’t it? Seems like a lifetime ago. I got took at Kinston, when we went up against General Cox’s Federals. They got more than a thousand of us in one fell swoop. I shouldn’t have been there at all. I was sick with the fever off and on through my whole enlistment. I’d go to the hospital and start to get better, and they’d send me back to the line again, and the fever would come right back. If I’d a-been a Federal soldier, they’d have sent me home for good, but the Confederates would have kept the dead in the ranks if they could have figured out a way to keep them standing up.”
“And they wouldn’t have smelled any worse than the rest of us,” said Wash, hooting and slapping his thigh. Then he scooted down off the log, and sprawled out flat on his back, with his arm curled up around the jug. He lay there, peering up at us from the blanket, and the sight of his whiskery face, upside-down in the fading light, put me in mind of a goblin, except he didn’t scare me none. Drunks and fools-I was used to both by now.
I leaned down and wrenched the jug out from under his arm, and then I knocked back a long, burning draught of whiskey. It was raw and strong, and burned my throat all the way down to my stomach. I had tasted better stuff. This was rotgut-good for nothing except getting a body drunk, but that was all right with me, because that’s all I required. I figured that if I kept the two of them talking, they wouldn’t take their turn on the jug too often, and I couldn’t think of anything worth hearing from Wash, drunk as he was, so I said to Tom, “I never met anybody who had been in a prison camp before.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, you have.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I reckon you know James Melton, since you’re living at his place. He was there.”
I could barely see his face in the fading light, and I wondered if he was making a joke, but his voice was quiet and steady, like he meant every word.
“I never knew that. He never talks about the War. Did he serve with you?”
“Same war, same army-that’s about all. He joined up early, in the summer of ’61, the 26th North Carolina, same as Ann’s brother Pinkney. Wash and I went into the 42nd, in the spring of ’62. He had a hard war, did James. He was tomfool brave, too.”
I resolved to find out more about that, for it didn’t square with what I had seen of him. “Funny to think of you and James Melton being neighbors both here and there. Did the two of you stick together there in the prison camp?”
He shook his head. “I never saw him at all. We were in different regiments, and him being wounded might have made a difference in where they put him. I don’t know. We have talked about it since, him and me, and we reckon that I was already in there a month before he got taken prisoner in Richmond-early April, that was. And he didn’t reach Point Lookout until early May. They let me out a couple of weeks before him, too. I was already home three weeks before he got back.”
“What was it like, then, being a prisoner?”
He was quiet there in the darkness for so long, I didn’t think he was going to answer me at all, but finally he said, “I saw the ocean.”
I never had, of course, being born up the mountain two hundred miles from the Carolina coast. “The ocean. Well! What’s it like?”
Tom nodded toward Wash, sprawled out on his back and trying to keep a leaf in the air with his breath. “It’s
