“That sounds right good to me,” Mollie said. But just then, the steam whistle let go with a blast that rang through the town. “Oh, goddam.” She kicked at the dirt, began to turn away.
“I guess they mean that half an hour after all,” Caudell said regretfully. Then he had an inspiration: “Tell you what, Mollie: one of these days soon, you go on into that Notahilton, find out what it’s like. Then you write me a letter and tell me about it. I’ll write back; I promise I will. That way we can stay friends, even if we’re far apart.”
“Write a letter?” Mollie looked more frightened than she ever had, marching into battle. “Nate, you learned me some readin’, but writin’—”
“You can do it. I know you can. In fact, I’ll write you first, so you’ll know where I am; I’m not sure whether I’m going to stay in Nashville or head on up to Castalia. And I expect to hear back from you, do you understand?” He did his best to sound like a first sergeant.
“I don’t know, Nate. Well, maybe if you do write first, I can try and answer you back. If you do.” If you don’t want to forget you ever knew me the minute that train rolls out of here, he read in her eyes. He wondered how many lies she had heard over the years, and from how many men.
“I’ll write,” he promised. The train whistle wailed a second warning. Caudell scowled. “They did mean it.” He hugged Mollie hard. It would not have seemed out of place to an onlooker even had she been only a fellow soldier. Through her shirt, though, her small firm breasts pressed against him. She hugged him, too. “Good luck to you,” he said.
“To you, too, Nate.” The whistle wailed again. Mollie pushed him away. “Go on. You don’t want to miss it.”
He knew she was right. He turned and trotted toward the train. He didn’t look back until just before he climbed aboard. Mollie was walking, not to the Notahilton, but into the old Excelsior. He shook his head, stared down at the dirty parquet floor of the passenger car. The train jerked, began to roll. Very soon, the bulk of the station hid the hotel from sight—very soon, but not soon enough.
“Rocky Mount!” the brakeman yelled as the train wheezed to a stop. “One-hour layover. Rocky Mount!”
Caudell climbed to his feet. Allison High stood too, held out his hand. “I wish you well, Nate, and that’s a fact,” he said.
“Thank you, Allison, and the same to you.” Caudell walked to the front of the car, shaking a few more hands as he went, Allison High sat back down; he wouldn’t get off until Wilson, down in the next county.
Caudell jumped down. Leaving the train for the last time made leaving the army seem real. He looked around, Save for the sign that told what town it belonged to, the station might have been cut from the same mold as Rivington’s: cut from that mold, and then left out in the rain for eighty or a hundred years. It was weather-beaten; two of the windows had empty panes; the decorative wooden latticework that edged the roof was broken in half a dozen places.
He looked north toward the mound on the far side of the falls of the Tar River, where Rocky Mount had first begun to grow. He had a clearer view than he really wanted; the year before, Federal raiders had burnt most of the cotton mills and cotton and tobacco warehouses that stood between the vain station and the older part of town. Here a wall stood, there a few charred timbers. The odor of burnt tobacco still hung in the air.
Off to one side lay the fine house that belonged to Benjamin Battle, who owned the mills. Somehow, it had escaped the flames. Seeing that, Caudell clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Them as has, gits,” he muttered to himself. He seldom let such uncouth Southernisms pass his lips, but nothing more refined seemed appropriate.
He walked over to the station. The stationmaster, a tall, thin, dour fellow in his sixties, peered out at him through one of the glassless panes. They had a few seconds’ staring contest before the stationmaster unwillingly said, “He’p you, so’jer?”
“When’s the next stage for Nashville?” Caudell asked.
Now the stationmaster smiled, exposing pink gums and a few yellowed stubs of teeth. “Just set out an hour or so ago,” he said with malicious satisfaction. “Ain’t gonna be another one fo’ two days, might could be three.”
“Damnation,” Caudell said. The stationmaster’s smile got wider. Caudell wanted to knock out the teeth he had left. He’d done some huge number of dozen-mile hikes in the army, and plenty worse than that, but the thought of returning to civilian life with one was less than appetizing. He turned away from the window. The stationmaster chuckled till he started to cough. Caudell hoped he’d choke.
Another train, this one coming up from the south, let its whistle squeal as it pulled into Rocky Mount. Caudell walked over to the east side of the station to have a look at who was coming in. A few small boys and old men joined him. Idlers, he thought. For the moment, he was an idler himself.
He gaped at the skeletal faces pressed against coach windows, at the rags and tatters that covered those emaciated bodies. Who were these victims of disaster, and how could his fellow spectators take the sight of them so calmly? Then an old man remarked, “Mo’ Yankee prisoners headin’ home,” and Caudell noticed that most of the train passengers’ rags were, or might once have been, blue.
He shook his head in mute, horrified sympathy. The men of the Army of Northern Virginia had gone hungry. The memory of that hunger would stay with him an his life. But these men had starved. Now he understood the difference. He also felt ashamed that his country could have let them suffer so. But with everything scarce, was it any wonder the Confederacy had seen to its own first?
Only a couple of men got off the train to stretch their legs; perhaps only a couple of men had the strength to do so. One of them spied Caudell. The man looked in better shape than most of his comrades; even his uniform was hardly more ragged than the first sergeant’s. “Hello, Johnny Reb,” he said with a nod and a grin. “How’re they hangin’?”
“Hello,” Caudell answered, rather more hesitantly. Casting about for something more to add to that, he asked, “Where’d they catch you, Yank?”
“Bealeton, just this past spring,” the Federal said. He jerked a thumb back toward the train. “Otherwise I’d look more like these poor devils.”
“Bealeton?” Caudell exclaimed. “I was there, in Hill’s corps.”
“Were you? We fought some of Hill’s men. Matter of fact, I was leading the 48th Pennsylvania there, in the IX Corps. I’m Henry Pleasants. I am—I used to be, I guess I mean—a lieutenant colonel.” Pleasants tapped the silver oak leaf on his left shoulder strap; the right strap was missing. He stuck out his hand.
Caudell shook it, gave his own name. He said, “We went up against IX Corps troops, but they were niggers. They fought better than I thought they might, but we chewed ‘em up pretty good.”
“That would have been Ferrero’s division,” Pleasants said. “They were all colored troops. I was under Brigadier General Potter.” He shook his head ruefully. He was somewhere not far from Caudell’s age, with dark hair, very fair, pale skin, and a scraggly beard that looked new. He went on, “Worse luck for the country, you chewed up the whole Army of the Potomac pretty good, you and those damned repeaters of yours.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s worse luck for the country,” Caudell retorted.
“No, I don’t suppose you would.” Pleasants chuckled. He seemed a man well able to take care of himself under any circumstances. “And since your side won, the history books won’t say that, either. But I do. It’s too damn bad. So there.”