“Is it your heart, General?” Rhoodie asked.
“My chest, at any rate. The doctors know no more than that, which I could tell them for myself.”
“Doctors in my time can do quite a lot better, General Lee. I can bring you medicine that may really help you. I’ll see to it as soon as I can. With the campaign coming up, we want you as well as you can be.”
“You are too kind, sir.” Yes, Rhoodie knew Lee’s allotted number of days could change. He wanted to make sure they didn’t unexpectedly shorten. Even that possibility made Lee feel freer. He thought of something else. “May I ask you an unrelated question, Mr. Rhoodie?”
“Of course.” Rhoodie was the picture of polite attentiveness.
“These Negroes you mentioned who were elected to the British Parliament—what manner of legislators do they make? And how were they elected, if I may ask? By other Negroes voting?”
“Mostly, yes, but, to the shame of the English, some deluded whites sank low enough to vote for them as well. As for what sort of members they make, they’re what you’d expect. They always push for more for the niggers, not that they don’t have too much already.”
“If they were elected to stand for their people, how are they to be blamed for carrying out that charge?” Storm clouds came over Andries Rhoodie’s face. Lee said, “Well, Mr. Rhoodie, it’s neither here nor there. Thank you once more for all of this. You’ve given me a great deal to think on further. And I do want to see that plan of what General Meade will attempt.”
Once off the topic of Negroes, Rhoodie relaxed again. “It will be General Grant, sir,” he said.
“Will it? So they will name him lieutenant general, then? Such has been rumored.”
“Yes, they will, in just a week or so.”
“And he will come east to fight in Virginia? Most interesting.” Lee frowned, looked sharply at Rhoodie. “The day you first came to this camp, sir, you spoke of General Sherman as commanding in the west, and Major Taylor corrected you. You were thinking of the time when operations would commence, weren’t you?”
“I remember that, General Lee. Yes, I was, and so I slipped.” He nodded and ducked his way out of the tent.
After a couple of minutes, Lee stepped outside, too. Rhoodie was riding back to Orange Court House. Lee started to call his aides, then stopped to consider whether he wanted them to know the Rivington men were from out of time. He decided he didn’t. The fewer ears that heard that secret, the better.
He went back inside, sat down once more at his work table. He reached out for that second glass of blackberry wine he had poured, finished it with two quick swallows. He seldom drank two glasses of wine, especially in the early afternoon, but he needed something to steady his nerves.
Men from the future! To say it was to find it laughable. To deal with Andries Rhoodie, with the new repeaters in almost everyone’s hands now, with the small, square ammunition crates growing to tall pyramids by every regiment’s munitions wagons, with the occasional shipments of desiccated food that helped keep hunger from turning to starvation, was to believe. The creaky machinery of the present-day Confederate States could not have produced such quantities of even ordinary arms and foodstuffs, let alone the wonders at Rhoodie’s beck and call.
Lee thought about General Grant. In the west, he’d shown both straight-ahead slugging and no small skill. From what Rhoodie said, he would win here too, defeat the indomitable Army of Northern Virginia.
“We shall see about that,” Lee said aloud, though no one was in the tent to hear him.
“Here you go, First Sergeant,” Preston Kelly said. “They’re ‘most as good as new.”
Nate Caudell tried on the shoes Kelly had repaired. He walked a few steps, smiled broadly. “Yup, that’s licked it. The cold doesn’t blow in between the soles and the uppers anymore. Thank you kindly. Pity you can’t do more; a good many of us don’t even have shoes to repair these days. Are you the only shoemaker in the regiment?”
“Heard tell there’s another one ‘mongst the Alamance Minute Men,” Kelly answered. “Couldn’t rightly swear to it, though. Them boys from Company K, they still stick close to themselves after all this time.” Alamance County lay a fair ways west of Wake, Nash; Franklin, and Granville, which provided most of the manpower for the regiment’s other nine companies.
“So they do,” Caudell said. “Come to that, I wish you were in my company, Preston. The Invincibles would all be better shod if you were.”
“Might could be, but then my boys from Company C’d be worse.” Kelly spat a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. “When you ain’t noways got enough to go around, First Sergeant, some poor bastard always has to do without.”
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Caudell said. “Well, thanks again for finding the time for me.”
“Wasn’t but a little repair, with more nailin’ than new leather. You keep your gear in good shape, not like some folks as let things fall to pieces ‘fore they fetch ‘em in to be fixed. Hell, if I had more leather an’ there was five of me, we’d be fine, far as shoes go.”
That was one of the smaller ifs Caudell had heard through the long, hungry winter. He waved good-bye to the shoemaker and headed back to his own company’s area. The parade ground was full of men watching two base ball nines go at each other. He decided to watch for a while himself.
The bat was hand-carved, and the ball, even seen from a distance, imperfectly round, but the players didn’t mind. The pitcher underhanded his missile toward the batter, who took a lusty swing and missed. The catcher caught the ball on the first bounce and tossed it back to his battery mate. The pitcher delivered again. The batter connected this time, launching the ball high but not far.
“Mortar shot!” somebody yelled. “Y’all take cover!”
“Get out your bumbershoots—that one’ll bring rain,” somebody else said.
The shortstop circled under the ball. “Catch it, Iverson!” his teammates screamed. The shortstop did catch it. Everyone cheered except the batter, who had run to first base in the confident expectation he would be able to stay there. He kicked at the dirt as he left. Caudell didn’t blame him. With a muddy, hole-strewn field to traverse, catching a ball barehanded was anything but easy.
Another batter came up. After taking a couple of pitches, he connected solidly. If the earlier pop had come from a mortar, this ball was blasted out of the brass muzzle of a twelve-pounder Napoleon. It also flew straight to the shortstop. He leaped high in the air and speared it. The watching soldiers went wild. The batter flipped his club away in disgust. The shortstop threw the ball to the pitcher, then rubbed his hands on the ragged seat of his trousers—that one had stung.
“Is that Iverson Longmire from Company G?” Caudell asked the man next to him. “He’s something to watch.”
“That’s him,” the private answered. “Yeah, he’s a demon baseballer, ain’t he?”
After those two quick outs, four straight hits fell in, and two runs scored. Then another ball, this one on the ground, went to the intrepid Longmire. Caudell waited for him to gobble it up and throw it to first base. But at the last instant, it kicked up off a pebble and hit him right between the legs. He went down in a heap, clutching at himself. Two more runners crossed the plate—actually, a piece of wood from an AK-47 crate. The men who had cheered Longmire to the skies laughed until they had to hang on to each other to stay on their feet.