Bernard Cornwell - Rebel

He could have stopped. He could have refused to work one more moment and instead have just let go of the great wooden handle and shouted up at this foul man that Colonel Faulconer was unaccountably offering him a fifty-dollar bonus to sign up as a soldier, but he sensed that Truslow was testing him, and suddenly he resented the Southern attitude that assumed he was a feeble New Englander, too educated to be of any real use and too soft to be trusted with real men’s work. He had been fooled by Dominique, condemned as pious by Ethan Ridley and now he was being ridiculed by this filthy, tobacco-stained, bearded fiend, and Starbuck’s anger made him whip the saw down again and again and again so that the great blade rang through the slashing wood grain like a church bell.

‘Now you’re getting it!’ Truslow grunted.

‘And damn you, damn you too,’ Starbuck said, though under his panting breath. It felt extraordinarily daring to use the swear words, even under his breath for, though the devil above him could not hear the cursing, heaven’s recording angel could, and Starbuck knew he had just added another sin to the great list of sins marked to his account. And swearing was among the bad sins, almost as bad as thieving. Starbuck had been brought up to hate blaspheming and to despise the givers of oaths, and even the profane weeks he had spent with Major Trabell’s foul-mouthed Tom company had not quelled his unhappy conscience about cursing, but somehow he needed to defy God as well as Truslow at this moment, and so he went on spitting the word out to give himself strength.

‘Hold it!’ Truslow suddenly shouted, and Starbuck had an instant fear that his muttered imprecations had been heard, but instead the halt had merely been called so that the work could be adjusted. The saw had cut to within a few inches of the pit’s side, so now the trunk had to be moved. ‘Catch hold, boy!’ Truslow tossed down a stout branch that ended in a crutch. ‘Ram that under the far end and heave when I tell you.’

Starbuck heaved, moving the great trunk inch by painful inch until it was in its new position. Then there was a further respite as Truslow hammered wedges into the sawn cut.

‘So what’s Faulconer offering me?’ Truslow asked.

‘Fifty dollars.’ Starbuck spoke from the pit and wondered how Truslow had guessed that anything was being offered. ‘You’d like me to read you the letter?’

‘You suggesting I can’t read, boy?’

‘Let me give you the letter.’

‘Fifty, eh? He thinks he can buy me, does he? Faulconer thinks he can buy whatever he wants, whether it’s a horse, a man or a whore. But in the end he tires of whatever he buys, and you and me’ll be no different.’

‘He isn’t buying me,’ Starbuck said, and had that lie treated with a silent derision by Truslow. ‘Colonel Faulconer’s a good man,’ Starbuck insisted.

‘You know why he freed his niggers?’ Truslow asked.

Pecker Bird had told Starbuck that the manumission had been intended to spite Faulconer’s wife, but Starbuck neither believed the story nor would he repeat it. ‘Because it was the right thing to do,’ he said defiantly.

‘So it might have been,’ Truslow allowed, ‘but it was for another woman he did it. Roper will tell you the tale. She was some dollygob church girl from Philadelphia come to tell us southrons how to run our lives, and Faulconer let her stroll all over him. He reckoned he had to free his niggers before she’d ever lie with him, so he did but she didn’t anyway.’ Truslow laughed at this evidence of a fool befuddled. ‘She made a mock of him in front of all Virginia, and that’s why he’s making this Legion of his, to get his pride back. He thinks he’ll be a warrior hero for Virginia. Now, take hold, boy.’

Starbuck felt he had to protect his hero. ‘He’s a good man!’

‘He can afford to be good. His wealth’s bigger than his wits, now take hold, boy. Or are you afraid of hard work, is that it? I tell you boy, work should be hard. No bread tastes good that comes easy. So take hold. Roper will be here soon enough. He gave his word, and Roper don’t break his word. But you’ll have to do till he comes.’ Starbuck took hold, tensed, pulled, and the hellish rhythm began again. He dared not think of the blisters being raised on his hands, nor of the burning muscles of his back, arms and legs. He just concentrated blindly on the downstroke, dragging the pit saw’s teeth through the yellow wood and closing his eyes against the constant sifting of sawdust. In Boston, he thought, they had great steam-driven circular saws that could rip a dozen trunks into planks in the same time it took to make just one cut with this ripping saw, so why in God’s name were men still using saw pits?

They paused again as Truslow hammered more wedges into the cut trunk. ‘So what’s this war about, boy?’

‘States’ rights’ was all Starbuck could say.

‘What in hell’s name does that mean?’

‘It means, Mister Truslow, that America disagrees on how America should be governed.’

‘You could fill a bushel the way you talk, boy, but it don’t add up to a pot of turnips. I thought we had a Constitution to tell us how to govern ourselves?’

‘The Constitution has evidently failed us, Mister Truslow.’

‘You mean we ain’t fighting to keep our niggers?’

‘Oh, dear God,’ Starbuck sighed gently. He had once solemnly promised his father that he would never allow that word to be spoken in his presence, yet ever since he had met Dominique Demarest he had ignored the promise. Starbuck felt all his goodness, all his honor in the sight of God, slipping away like sand trickling through fingers.

‘Well, boy? Are we fighting for our niggers or aren’t we?’

Starbuck was leaning weakly on the dirt wall of the pit. He stirred himself to answer. ‘A faction of the North would dearly like to abolish slavery, yes. Others merely wish to stop it spreading westward, but the majority simply believe that the slave states should not dictate policy to the rest of America.’

‘What do the Yankees care about niggers? They ain’t got none.’

‘It is a matter of morality, Mister Truslow,’ Starbuck said, trying to wipe the sweat-matted sawdust out of his eyes with his sawdust-matted sleeve.

‘Does the Constitution say anything worth a piece of beaver shit about morality?’ Truslow asked in a tone of genuine inquiry.

‘No, sir. No, sir, it does not.’

‘I always reckon when a man speaks about morals he don’t know nothing about what he’s saying. Unless he’s a preacher. So what do you think we should do with the niggers, boy?’ Truslow asked.

‘I think, sir’—Starbuck wished to hell he was anywhere but in this mud and sawdust pit answering this foulmouth’s questions—‘I think, sir,’ he said again as he tried desperately to think of anything that might make sense, ‘I think that every man, of whatever color, has an equal right before God and before man to an equal measure of dignity and happiness.’ Starbuck decided he sounded just like his elder brother, James, who could make any proposition sound pompous and lifeless. His father would have trumpeted the rights of the Negroes in a voice fit to rouse echoes from the angels, but Starbuck could not raise the energy for that kind of defiance.

‘You like the niggers, is that the size of it?’

‘I think they are fellow creatures, Mister Truslow.’

‘Hogs are fellow creatures, but it don’t stop me killing ’em come berry time. Do you approve of slavery, boy?’

‘No, Mister Truslow.’

‘Why not, boy?’ The grating, mocking voice sounded from the brilliant sky above.

Starbuck tried to remember his father’s arguments, not just the easy one that no man had the right to own another, but the more complex ones, such as how slavery enslaved the owner as much as it enslaved the possessed, and how it demeaned the slaveholder, and how it denied God’s dignity to men who were the ebony image of God, and how it stultified the slavocracy’s economy by driving white artisans north and west, but somehow none of the complex, persuasive answers would come and he settled for a simple condemnation instead. ‘Because it’s wrong.’