Bernard Cornwell - Rebel

‘You sound like a woman, boy.’ Truslow laughed. ‘So Faulconer thinks I should fight for his slave-holding friends, but no one in these hills can afford to feed and water a nigger, so why should I fight for them that can?’

‘I don’t know, sir, I really don’t know.’ Starbuck was too tired to argue.

‘So I’m supposed to fight for fifty bucks, is that it?’ Truslow’s voice was scathing. ‘Take hold, boy.’

‘Oh, God.’ The blisters on Starbuck’s hands had broken into raw patches of torn skin that were oozing blood and pus, but he had no choice but to seize the pit saw’s handle and drag it down. The pain of the first stroke made him whimper aloud, but the shame of the sound made him grip hard through the agony and to tear the steel teeth angrily through the wood.

‘That’s it, boy! You’re learning!’

Starbuck felt as if he were dying, as if his whole body had become a shank of pain that bent and pulled, bent and pulled, and he shamelessly allowed his weight to sag onto the handles during each upstroke so that Truslow caught and helped his tiredness for a brief instant before he let his weight drag the saw down once again. The saw handle was soggy with blood, the breath was rasping in his throat, his legs could barely hold him upright and still the toothed steel plunged up and down, up and down, up and mercilessly down.

‘You ain’t gettin’ tired now, boy, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Hardly started, we are. You go and look at Pastor Mitchell’s church in Nellysford, boy, and you’ll see a wide heart-pine floor that me and my pa whipsawed in a single day. Pull on, boy, pull on!’

Starbuck had never known work like it. Sometimes, in the winter, he went to his Uncle Matthew’s home in Lowell and they would saw ice from the frozen lake to fill the family ice house, but those excursions had been playful occasions, interspersed with snowball fights or bouts of wild skating along the lake banks beneath the icicle-hung trees. This plank sawing was relentless, cruel, remorseless, yet he dared not give up for he felt that his whole being, his future, his character, indeed his very soul were being weighed in the furious balance of Thomas Truslow’s scorn.

‘Hold there, boy, time for another wedge.’

Starbuck let go of the pit saw’s handle, staggered, tripped and half fell against the pit’s wall. His hands were too painful to uncurl. His breath hurt. He had been half aware that a second man had come to the saw pit and had been chatting to Truslow these last few painful minutes, but he did not want to look up and see whoever else was witnessing this humiliation.

‘You ever see anything to match it, Roper?’ Truslow’s voice was mocking.

Starbuck still did not look up.

‘This is Roper, boy,’ Truslow said. ‘Say your greeting.’

‘Good day, Mister Roper,’ Starbuck managed to say.

‘He calls you mister!’ Truslow found that amusing. ‘He thinks you niggers are his fellow creatures, Roper. Says you’ve got the same equal rights before God as he has. You reckon that’s how God sees it, Roper?’

Roper paused to inspect the exhausted Starbuck. ‘I reckon God would want me in his bosom long before he ever took that,’ Roper finally answered, and Starbuck looked unwillingly upward to see that Roper was a tall black man who was clearly amused by Starbuck’s predicament. ‘He don’t look good for nothing, does he now?’ Roper said.

‘He ain’t a bad worker,’ Truslow, astonishingly, came to Starbuck’s defense, and Starbuck, hearing it, felt as though he had never in all his life received a compliment half so valuable. Truslow, the compliment delivered, jumped down into the pit. ‘Now I’ll show you how it’s done, boy.’ Truslow took hold of the pit saw’s handle, nodded up at Roper, and suddenly the great blade of steel blurred as the two men went into an instant and much practiced rhythm. ‘This is how you do it!’ Truslow shouted over the saw’s ringing noise to the dazed Starbuck. ‘Let the steel do the work! You don’t fight it, you let it slice the wood for you. Roper and me could cut half the forests in America without catching breath.’ Truslow was using one hand only, and standing to one side of the work so that the flood of dust and chips did not stream onto his face. ‘So what brings you here, boy?’

‘I told you, a letter from—’

‘I mean what’s a Yankee doing in Virginia. You are a Yankee, aren’t you?’

Starbuck, remembering Washington Faulconer’s assertion of how much this man hated Yankees, decided to brazen it out. ‘And proud of it, yes.’

Truslow jetted a stream of tobacco juice into a corner of the pit. ‘So what are you doing here?’

Starbuck decided this was not the time to talk of Mademoiselle Demarest, nor of the Tom company, so offered an abbreviated and less anguished version of his story. ‘I’ve fallen out with my family and taken shelter with Mister Faulconer.’

‘Why him?’

‘I am a close friend of Adam Faulconer.’

‘Are you now?’ Truslow actually seemed to approve. ‘Where is Adam?’

‘The last we heard he was in Chicago.’

‘Doing what?’

‘He works with the Christian Peace Commission. They hold prayer meetings and distribute tracts.’

Truslow laughed. ‘Tracts and prayers won’t help, because America don’t want peace, boy. You Yankees want to tell us how to live our lives, just like the British did last century, but we ain’t any better listeners now than we were then. Nor is it their business. Who owns the house uses the best broom, boy. I’ll tell you what the North wants, boy.’ Truslow, while talking, was whipping the saw up and down in his slicing, tireless rhythm. ‘The North wants to give us more government, that’s what they want. It’s these Prussians, that’s what I reckon. They keep telling the Yankees how to make better government, and you Yankees is fool enough to listen, but I tell you it’s too late now.’

‘Too late?’

‘You can’t mend a broken egg, boy. America’s in two pieces, and the North will sell herself to the Prussians and we’ll mess through as we are.’

Starbuck was far too tired to care about the extraordinary theories that Truslow had about Prussia. ‘And the war?’

‘We just have to win it. See the Yankees off. I don’t want to tell them how to live, so long as they don’t tell me.’

‘So you’ll fight?’ Starbuck asked, sensing some hope for the success of his errand.

‘Of course I’ll fight. But not for fifty dollars.’ Truslow paused as Roper hammered a wedge into the new cut.

Starbuck, whose breath was slowly coming back, frowned. ‘I’m not empowered to offer more, Mister Truslow.’

‘I don’t want more. I’ll fight because I want to fight, and if I weren’t wanting to fight then fifty times fifty dollars wouldn’t buy me, though Faulconer would never understood that.’ Truslow paused to spit a stream of viscous tobacco juice. ‘His father now, he knew that a fed hound never hunts, but Washington? He’s a milksop, and he always pays to get what he wants, but I ain’t for sale. I’ll fight to keep America the way she is, boy, because the way she is makes her the best goddamned country in the whole goddamned world, and if that means killing a passel of you chicken-shit Northerners to keep her that way, then so be it. Are you ready, Roper?’

The saw slashed down again, leaving Starbuck to wonder why Washington Faulconer had been willing to pay so dearly for Truslow’s enlistment. Was it just because this man could bring other hard men from the mountains? In which case, Starbuck thought, it would be money well spent, for a regiment of hardscrabble demons like Truslow would surely be invincible.

‘So what are you trained to be, boy?’ Truslow kept sawing as he asked the question.