“Who cares?” Allison High said. “Just means we have to stand here twice as long while they get wherever they’re supposed to go.”
It wasn’t quite twice as long, for only part of the Army of Tennessee seemed to be here after all. The rest of it, Caudell supposed, was likely to be in Tennessee, reclaiming land that had been under the Federal thumb for most of the war. Even so, the sun had sunk low in the northwest—and, from where Caudell stood, almost directly behind the reviewing stand—when Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Joe Johnston rode down the aisle between the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee. The two armies shouted themselves hoarse, each trying to outcheer the other. The Army of Northern Virginia outnumbered its rival and so had the better of that contest. The President and his generals waved from horseback, acknowledging the salute. The three men ascended the reviewing stand together.
Quiet came slowly and incompletely. The lean, hard soldiers who had done so much, endured so much behind their tattered battle flags, were not the sort from whom to expect perfect discipline or perfect courtesy. Lee and Johnston understood that. They had stopped a couple of steps below President Davis. Now they bowed, first to each other and then up to him. His answering bow, deeper than theirs, went not to them, but straight out to the soldiers they had led. The men raised another cheer. Their high, shrill war cries split the air.
“We shall hear the rebel yell no more,” Davis said, which brought fresh outcries and shouts of No! He held up a hand. “We shall hear the rebel yell no more, for we are not rebels, nor have we ever been. We are free and independent Southern men, with our native Southern yell—”
The President could not go on after that for some time. Caudell yelled at the top of his lungs but could not hear his own shout, for the cries of the two great Confederate armies rolled through his head, loud as the noise of the battlefield. His ears rang when the cheering finally faded away, and fresh yips and yowls kept breaking out somewhere in the assembled hosts every few minutes.
As a result, he heard Davis’s speech not as a complete and polished oration, but as a series of disjointed phrases, a sentence here, a paragraph there: “We showed ourselves worthy of the inheritance bequeathed us by the patriots of the Revolution; we emulated that heroic devotion which made reverse to them but the crucible in which their patriotism was refined.” “—our high-spirited and gallant soldiers’,” I congratulate you on the series of brilliant victories which, under the favor of Divine Providence, you have won, and, as the President of the Confederate States, do heartily tender to you the thanks of the country whose just cause you have so skillfully and heroically served.” “—driven the invader from your soil and wrung from an unscrupulous foe the recognition of your birthright, community independence. You have given assurance to the friends of constitutional liberty of our final triumph in the struggle against despotic usurpation.”
Repeated cheers rose as long as President Davis promised the soldiers before him. He did not content himself with that, however, but went on to speak of the Confederacy in the abstract: “After the war of the Revolution, the several states were each by name recognized to be independent. But the North willfully broke the compact between the independent states and claimed its government to be, not such a compact, but Set up over and above the states, perverting it into a machine for their control in domestic affairs. The creature was exalted above its creators, the principals made subordinate to the agent appointed by themselves. Thus our states dissolved their connections with the others, and thus our glorious Confederacy was born.”
Caudell heard that part clearly, for the men stood quiet through it. It was an appeal to the intellect, not to the passions; had he been standing in that place on this occasion, he thought he would have left it out. Every word of it was true, but it was not what the soldiers needed to hear now: Davis thought too much, felt too little.
He seemed to sense that himself, and why not?—he had been a soldier before he turned to politics. He did his best to reach a strong conclusion: “No one may successfully undertake the gigantic task of conquering a free people. This truth, always so patent to us, has now been forced upon the reluctant Northern mind. Mr. Lincoln discovered that no peace was attainable unless based upon the recognition of our indefeasible rights. For that, I have to thank the indomitable valor of our troops and the unquenchable spirit of our people. God bless you all.”
Again, Caudell cheered as loudly as anyone. Realizing the independence of the Confederate States was a heady moment, one he still sometimes had trouble believing had truly come. But in thanking soldiers and people, Jefferson Davis had omitted one factor that also played a major part in freeing the South: the Rivington men and their repeaters. Caudell wondered if they resented remaining unmentioned and unpraised.
The applause faded, died. The men of the armies of Northern Virginia and Tennessee stood in the deepening twilight, talking with their friends and comrades of what they’d done today. “Well, Nate, it’s all over now,” Mollie Bean said. “What the hell comes next?”
“I wish I knew,” he answered. For himself, he had a pretty fair idea: he would go home and do his best to put his life back together the way it had been before the war came. For Mollie, though, that choice looked grimmer.
Captain Lewis answered the question for the short term: “We’ll stay here at Camp Lee tonight. Rations are supposed to come tomorrow morning, and then they’ll start mustering us out.”
The captain, Caudell noticed, hadn’t said anything about rations for tonight. That failed to surprise him; once the Army of Northern Virginia got down below Bealeton again, it had returned to the care of the creaky Confederate commissary department. He shrugged. He wouldn’t go hungry, as he still had his last three or four hardtacks from Washington. They were stale by now, but he’d eaten much worse—and much less. Going back to worrying over how fresh his food was—as opposed to whether he’d have any—would be strange.
Mollie said, “When we get a fire goin’, Nate, will you spend some time with me by it with them books of yours?”
“Sure I will, Melvin,” he answered. “You’ve learned a lot since you took up your studies in earnest.” He meant every word of that. He wished his students who were half Mollie’s age showed half the intensity she displayed.
Her lips curled back in something that was not a smile. It pulled the skin tight against her bones, let him see for a moment how she would look when she was an old woman. She said, “I should’ve done more sooner. Now it’s about too late.”
“It’s never too late,” he said. She shook her head, apparently determined to be gloomy. He persisted: “You have the trick of reading now. To hold it, all you need to do is keep on reading and not let it lie fallow. It’s just like”—he groped for a comparison that would make sense to her—”like stripping and cleaning your AK-47. That was hard at first, but you kept practicing till you got the knack. Now you don’t even have to think about it anymore.”
“Maybe,” she said, anything but convinced.
“You’ll see.” Instead of a primer, he got out his pocket Testament that evening. Mollie protested, but he said, “Try it. See if I’m not right.” He opened the little book, pointed to a place. “Start right here.”
“I can’t do it.” But Mollie bent her head close to the tiny print of the Testament and began to read: “ ‘Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake’—why don’t it say broke?—‘it, and gave it to the…the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the re…uh…remission of sins.” Her face lit up in that special way she had; just for a moment, she outshone the campfire. “Goddam, I did it!”