Read Online Hell or Richmond by Ralph Peters - Free Book Online

it. “Damned shame.”
    “Wasn’t much to be done, sir,” Strickland told him. “Just all bad, beginning to end. Not sure any one man would’ve made much difference.”
    Oates almost said, “Unless he’d replaced Longstreet.” But that wasn’t the way to talk in front of subordinates.
    Instead of ranting, he smiled, spreading his black beard. It was one of his queer smiles, though. “Man can’t help but feel guilty, that’s the thing. Laying up in a fine house like Colonel Toney’s. Laying there in a poster bed, fearing his men aren’t going to be properly handled.”
    “They were glad to see you, when you turned up, sir.” The captain paused, choosing his words carefully. “We didn’t know if we’d ever see you again.”
    Oates grunted. “I suppose I looked a sight. Back on the river.”
    “Yes, sir. Mad-dog angry, too.”
    “God almighty. Look at that horse there. Wouldn’t be worth the killing for the meat.”
    “That’s how the cavalry mounts all looked at Knoxville,” Strickland told him.
    “Just hard to believe,” Oates said, going back to his musing. “There I am, living in luxury and dandling babies, every need provided for. Like there wasn’t a war at all, not anywhere.” He paused. “I wanted the feeling to last, tell you the truth.”
    “But you came back, sir.”
    Oates nodded, thoughts shifting again. “I grew up hard, Billy. Don’t know if I ever said. So hard. You know what it’s like in the backcountry. Might say it made me what I am, but I’d as lief not go through that ordeal twice. And there I am, lying up in that big, fine house … oh, I wasn’t thinking about the war every single minute. No, sir. Not even thinking about the boys as much as I should have. I was thinking I’d like to have me a house like that.”
    He laughed. “Wouldn’t make a plug of difference, I suppose. Even if I struck it rich, or married some high gentleman’s spinster daughter—which I don’t have a mind to do—even with that big house and all, there’s a kind of fence they put up. They ask you along on a hunt, but it’s really your dogs they want. No, there’s always this fence. And they aren’t going to let you jump it, because folks like you and me aren’t welcome behind it.” He slapped at a greenbottle. “Lawyer? Officer? That’s no mind. Not once this war is over. It’ll all go back to being the way it was. Men like you and me, we’ll never be fine. We might be respected in a middling way. Might even wind up in the legislature. But we won’t be fine.”
    “Were they rude, sir? The people who took you in?”
    Oates laughed. It was a big sound in the meadows.
    “High folks are never rude,” he said. “That’s part of the bundle.” He laughed again. “Where you and I would make a fist, they just lift them an eyebrow. I wasn’t speaking against old Toney, now. I’ll be grateful to that man and his family until the day I die. I’d been robbed of every penny I had down in the train yard, lying there wounded and crazy with fever, and thank you for your service to our great Confederacy.” He swung his head like a bothered horse. “Colonel Toney took me into the bosom of his family. Out of kindness, nothing but. Another man might donate a gold piece or two to some sanitary commission, but isn’t like to open his doors to a wounded man who’s not blood kin. No, sir. Old Toney treated me handsome. I was talking on the principle.” He stopped himself. “But I do talk on. And I still haven’t got ’round to what I had to say to you, Billy.”
    “Sir?”
    Oates kicked a stone. His boot leather was so thin his toes felt the hardness. In the strange way a man had of doing things, just below the level of true thinking, he had hoped the gesture would lengthen out his bad leg, making the thigh right again.
    “Best turn around,” Oates said. “Don’t want to get too far from the regiment.” He twisted up a wormwood smile. “Can’t have Major Lowther overtaxing