Dempsey Eure lit a twig at the fire, got his pipe going. Daniel did the same. Caudell lit up a cigar, tilted his head back, and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. The cabin filled with fragrant smoke. “Glad we’re not short of tobacco, anyhow,” he said.
“Not in this regiment,” Eure said. The 47th drew its men from the heart of North Carolina’s tobacco country; half a dozen soldiers had been tobacconists before the war.
“Almost makes me wish I was on picket duty up by the Rapidan,” Powell said, shifting a chaw from one cheek to the other. “Might could be I’d find mea friendly Yank on the other side, trade him some tobacco for coffee and sugar and maybe some o’ them little hard candies they have sometimes.”
His messmates sighed. That kind of trading went on all the time. Confederates and Federals winked at it. Why not? Caudell thought—it isn’t going to change who wins the war, only make both sides more comfortable. At the moment, with some food in his belly, a cigar in his hand, and a warm cabin around him, he was comfortable enough. He took another drag. “Picket duty’s cold,” he said reflectively.
“That’s true,” a couple of the other sergeants said. Dempsey. Eure added, “To hell with your coffee and sugar, Edwin. I ain’t gonna freeze to get it.”
They talked awhile longer, and smoked, and passed around the new repeater. One by one, they went to bed. The last thing Caudell saw before he fell asleep was Edwin Powell sitting close by the fire, assembling the AK-47 and taking it apart again.
Reveille the next morning hit Caudell like an artillery barrage. He threw off his threadbare blanket, scrambled out of bed, and put on his shoes, tunic, and slouch hat. Everyone else was getting dressed at the same time. The hut wasn’t really big enough for five men to dress in all at once, but they managed; by now they’d been doing it for three months.
Dempsey Eure’s black felt hat was even more disreputable than Caudell’s, but he kept a gaudy turkey feather in the band. “You walk out wearin’ that bird, somebody’ll shoot it off you,” Rufus Daniel said. He cracked the same joke about once a week.
Caudell went outside. As always, he had mixed feelings about that first breath of early morning air. It was sweet and fresh and free of most of the smoke that built up inside the cabin, but it was bitterly cold. When he exhaled, he breathed out as big a cloud as if he’d started another cigar.
Soldiers came scrambling out of their shelters to line up for morning roll call. In the Federal army, their appearance would have given apoplexy to any noncommissioned officer worth his stripes. Not all of them had shoes. Their torn trousers were variously blue—Union booty—gray, or butternut. No one wore a blue blouse, for fear of being mistaken for a Yankee troop, but that was as far as uniformity went there. Some wore forage caps, others slouch hats like Caudell’s. The only thing of which that imaginary Federal sergeant would have approved was their bearing. The Castalia Invincibles might have been in rags, but they could fight.
“Dress ranks!” Allison High shouted. The men shifted a little. Company D, as a whole, numbered between five and six dozen men, which total included two corporals, four sergeants, First Sergeant Nate Caudell, a couple of lieutenants, and a captain. Right after Gettysburg, sergeants had commanded some companies of the 47th North Carolina; at the moment, the Invincibles were oversupervised.
Captain Lewis limped up. “Call the roll, First Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.” Caudell took from his pocket a much-folded piece of paper. After so many repetitions, he hardly needed to look at it as he called the men’s names: “Bailey, Ransom…Barnes, Lewis D. W… Bass, Gideon…” He finished a few minutes later: “Winstead, John A…Winstead, William T.” He turned back to Lewis with a salute.” All present, sir.”
“Very good. Sick call?”
“Sick call!” Caudell said loudly. A couple of men took a step forward. “What’s your trouble, Granbury?” he asked one of them.
“I got the shits—beggin’ your pardon, First Sergeant, the runs—again,” Granbury Proctor said.
Caudell sighed. With the bad food and bad water the regiment got, diarrhea was a common complaint. This was Proctor’s third bout this winter. Caudell said, “Go see the assistant surgeon, Granbury. Maybe he can do something for you.” Proctor nodded and walked off. Caudell turned to the other sufferer. “What about you, Southard?”
“Don’t rightly know, First Sergeant,” Bob Southard answered. His voice cracked as he answered; he was only eighteen or so. He bent his head and coughed. “I’m feelin’ right poorly, though.”
Caudell put a skeptical hand on the youngster’s forehead. Southard had already deserted the regiment once; he was a shirker. “No fever. Get back in line.” Dejectedly, the private went back into his slot. The cook banged on his pan. Caudell said, “Dismissed for breakfast.”
Breakfast was corn bread. The meal from which it had been made was ground so coarse that some kernels lay in wait, intact and rock-hard, to ambush the teeth. Caudell plucked at his beard to knock crumbs loose. He heard a wagon—no, more than one—rolling down from Orange Court House. “You don’t suppose—?” he said to Rufus Daniel.
“This early? Naah,” Daniel said.
But it was. The wagon train turned off the road and rumbled toward the regimental parade ground. Benny Lang rode beside the lead wagon’s driver. Slaves accompanied the others. Caudell held out his hand, palm up, to Allison High. “Pay up.”
“Hell.” High reached into his hip pocket, drew out a wad of bills, and gave two of them to Caudell. “Here’s your twenty. Who’d’ve thought anybody’d move so quick? Hell.” He walked off scowling, his head down.
“Easy there, Allison,” Caudell called after him. “It’s only. twenty dollars Confederate, not like before the war when that was a lot of money.
“Benny Lang leaped down from his wagon and started shouting like a man possessed: “Come on, get those crates off! This isn’t a bloody picnic, so move it, you lazy kaffirs!” The slaves started unloading the wagons at the same steady but leisurely pace they usually used. It was not fast enough to suit Lang. “Move, damn you!” he shouted again.
The blacks were used to letting such shouts roll off their backs, secure in the knowledge that the work would eventually get done and the yelling white man would shut up and leave them alone. Lang met that quiet resistance head on. He stamped over to one of the slaves, threw him to the ground with a flip like the one he’d used against Billy Beddingfield. “Ow!” the man cried. “What’d I do, boss?”
“Not bloody much,” Lang snarled, punctuating his words with a kick. The slave cried out again. Lang said scornfully, “You aren’t hurt. Now get up and work. And I mean work, damn you. That goes for the rest of you lazy buggers, too, or you’ll get worse than I just gave him. Move!”
The black men moved. Boxes came down from wagons at an astonishing rate. “Will you look at that?” Rufus Daniel said…If I had me enough niggers to hire an overseer, that there Lang’d be first man I’d pick for the job.”
“Maybe so,” Caudell said. But he watched the sidelong glances that were the only safe way the slaves could use to show their resentment. “If he treats ‘em like that all the time, though, he’d better grow eyes in the back of his head, or else he’ll have an accident one fine day—or lots of runaways, anyhow.”
“Might could be you’re right,” Daniel allowed.
Once the wagons were unloaded, Lang ordered the work crew to carry a share of the crates to each company standard. When the slaves again didn’t work fast enough to suit him, he booted one of them in the backside. They moved quicker after that.