The two boys stared at him in admiration. The smaller children listened too, some of them trying not very well to pretend they weren’t doing any such thing. “But you weren’t afraid, were you, Mr. Caudell?” Jesse asked, obviously confident of the answer. “They made you first sergeant, so they must’ve known you’d never be afraid,”
One of the reasons Caudell had been made first sergeant was that the man in that position did much of his company’s record-keeping and so needed to have neat handwriting. He wondered what Jesse and William would say to that. Their idea of war did not include such mundane details. He answered,” Anybody who isn’t scared when people shoot at him, well, he’s a fool, if you ask me.”
The youths laughed, as if he’d said something funny. They thought he was being modest. He knew he wasn’t. As with Raeford Liles, he faced a chasm of incomprehension he could not bridge. He finished his last hoecake, wiped his hands on his pants, went out behind a tree himself, then walked back into the schoolroom and resumed lessons.
He sometimes thought that, if he ever quit teaching, he could join a circus as a juggler. With a roomful of children of all different ages, he needed to keep busy the ones he wasn’t actually instructing at any given moment. When the eight-year-olds were doing addition in Davies’ Primary Arithmetic, the twelve-year-olds were parsing sentences from Bullion’s English Grammar. Meanwhile, Jesse and William practiced their elocution, William putting fire into Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death,” Jesse giving William Yancey’s tribute to Jefferson Davis on Davis’s becoming provisional president at Montgomery less than four years before: “The man and the hour have met,” William declared loudly. Some of the younger children clapped.
Caudell dismissed his clutch of scholars about half an hour before sunset, to let the ones who did not live in town—the vast majority—find their way home to their farms before it got dark. A few local children—Colonel Faribault’s sons, the daughter of the justice of the peace—did not attend his school because they were off at fancy expensive private academies. Far more stayed away because they worked in the fields all day long, all year long.
That saddened him. Many of those children would still be living when the twentieth century rolled around, and would have not a letter to their names. Of course, if they came to school instead of working in the fields, they might be less likely to be living still in that distant day, for small farms needed every hand they could get, just to make ends meet.
After his students were gone, he straightened up benches and cleared away trash. He shut the door behind him, a door whose lock had long since rusted into uselessness. Little inside was worth stealing, anyhow. The school boasted neither blackboard, globe, charts, nor much of anything else in the way of equipment.
Caudell looked back over his shoulder as he walked up Alston Street. “Yup, I’m about it,” he said to no one in particular. He kept on walking.
The bell jingled as Caudell went into the general store. “Today, Mr. Liles?” he demanded.” Are we ever going to find out who won up North?” A week and a half after the election, its results remained in doubt.
Finally, though, finally, Raeford Liles grinned at him. “Got me a couple copies of Thursday’s Raleigh North Carolina Evening Standard, one o’ the Raleigh Constitution, an’ even one o’ the Wilmington Journal. You jus’ go ahead an’ take your pick—they all tell what you want to know.”
“About time,” Caudell said. “Give me an Evening Standard, then.” He slapped seven cents down on the counter. The storekeeper gave him his paper. The headline leaped out at him:
In slightly smaller letters, a subhead proclaimed,
Caudell took a deep breath. “So they turned him out, did they?”
“Looks that way,” Liles agreed cheerfully.
The more of the story Caudell read, the more misleading that subhead looked. He’d already known the election was very tight; with most of the results in at last, it looked close as a Minié ball cracking by one’s head. Lincoln, in fact, had taken twelve states to Seymour’s ten; McClellan won tiny, conservative Delaware and his home state of New Jersey, while Fremont prevailed only in radical Kansas. But Seymour won the states that counted: among them, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania gave him 80 of his 138 electoral votes, while Lincoln garnered 83, McClellan 10, and Fremont but 3. Out of more than four million votes cast, Seymour led Lincoln by only thirty-three thousand.
Liles had been reading the papers, too. He remarked, “Can’t see how even the damnfool Yankees came so close to electing that stinking Republican twice. Wasn’t oncet enough for ‘em? He’d just go an’ start a war with somebody else.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Liles.” Caudell thought back to that mad morning when he’d ended up on the White House lawn. Like almost all North Carolina, he’d despised Lincoln, who’d won not a single vote in the state in 1860. But the man who came out to talk to the army that had defeated his own deserved more respect than the South had given him. “I don’t know,” Caudell repeated. “There was something about him—”
“Bosh,” the storekeeper said positively. “Now this here Seymour, might could be he’ll keep the niggers in line, much as a Yankee can, anyways. If’n he manages that, reckon we’ll get on with him all right. Hope so, I truly do.”
“So do I, Mr. Liles.” Caudell looked down to the newspaper again. Accounts of the Northern elections took up most of the front page. In the lower right-hand corner, though, was a story about Nathan Bedford Forrest’s continuing war against the remnants of the colored Union regiments in the Mississippi valley. Of late, they’d been reduced to guerrilla raids rather than standup battles, but Forrest had bagged a whole band near Catahoula, Louisiana, and hanged all thirty-one men. Caudell showed Raeford Liles the article. “We’re having enough trouble keeping our own niggers in line.”
“I seen that story.” Liles took off his glasses, polished them on his apron, set them back in place. “You ask me, that’s just what niggers in arms is askin’ for, an’ I ain’t sorry to see ‘em get it. An’ if Hit-’em-Again Forrest hits ‘em a few more licks like that one there, God damn me if’n I wouldn’t be right pleased to see him President oncet Jefferson Davis steps down.”
“I hadn’t even thought about that,” Caudell said slowly. The Confederate Presidential elections were still almost three years away. That seemed like a very long time, but really wasn’t, not when Caudell had been thinking only a few weeks before about the onset of the twentieth century. After a pause, he went on, “First man I’d care to see in Richmond, if he wants the job, is General Lee.”
“He wouldn’t be bad either, I suppose,” Liles admitted.
“Not bad?” To any man who had served in the Army of Northern Virginia, faint praise for Robert E. Lee was not nearly praise enough. “There’s not a man in the Confederate States who’d be better, and that’s counting Hit-’em-Again Forrest, too.”
“Mmm…might could be you’re right, Nate. But I do hear tell he’s too soft on niggers.”
“I don’t think so,” Caudell said. Though he’d settled back as best he could into his prewar way of life, some of the things he’d seen while on active duty refused to go away: Georgie Ballentine, running off because the Rivington men wouldn’t trust him with a rifle; the colored troops at Bealeton, holding their ground under murderous fire until flesh would stand no more… “This whole business of niggers isn’t as simple as it looks.”