Страница 38 из 78
”Don’t know. Don’t think so. Haven’t really looked.”
Kilrain paused. “He sure is black, and that’s a fact.”
”Did you get his name?”
”He said something I couldn’t understand. Hell, Colonel, I can’t even understand them Joh
”Guess he was a servant on the march, took a chance to run away. Guess they shot at him.”
Chamberlain looked at the bald head, the ragged dress. Impossible to tell the age. A young man, at least. No lines around the eyes. Thick-lipped, huge jaw. Look of animal strength. Chamberlain shook his head.
”He wouldn’t be a house servant. Look at his hands.
Field hands.” Chamberlain tried to communicate. The man said something weakly, softly. Chamberlain, who could speak seven languages, recognized nothing. The man said a word that sounded like Baatu, Baatu, and closed his eyes.
”God,” Kilrain said. “He can’t even speak English.”
Bucklin grunted. “Maybe he’s just bad wounded.”
Chamberlain shook his head. “No. I think you’re right. I don’t think he knows the language.”
The man opened his eyes again, looked directly at Chamberlain, nodded his head, grimaced, said again, Baatu, Baatu. Chamberlain said, “Do you suppose that could be ‘thank you’?”
The black man nodded strongly. “Tang oo, tang oo, baas.”
”That’s it.” Chamberlain reached out, patted the man happily on the arm. “Don’t worry, fella, you’ll be all right.” He gestured to Kilrain. “Here, let’s get him up.”
They carried the man down out of the rocks, lay him on open grass. A knot of soldiers gathered. The man pulled himself desperately up on one elbow, looked round in fear.
Kilrain brought some hardtack and bacon and he ate with obvious hunger, but his teeth were bad; he had trouble chewing the hardtack. The soldiers squatted around him curiously. You saw very few black men in New England.
Chamberlain knew one to speak to: a silent round-headed man with a white wife, a farmer, living far out of town, without friends. You saw black men in the cities but they kept to themselves. Chamberlain’s curiosity was natural and friendly, but there was a reserve in it, an unexpected caution. The man was really very black. Chamberlain felt an oddness, a crawly hesitation, not wanting to touch him.
He shook his head, amazed at himself. He saw: palm of the hand almost white; blood dries normally, skin seems dusty.
But he could not tell whether it was truly dust or only a natural sheen of light on hair above black skin. But he felt it again: a flutter of unmistakable revulsion. Fat lips, brute jaw, red-veined eyeballs. Chamberlain stood up. He had not expected this feeling. He had not even known this feeling was there. He remembered suddenly a conversation with a Southerner a long time ago, before the war, a Baptist minister. White complacent face, sense of bland enormous superiority: my dear man, you have to live among them, you simply don’t understand.
Kilrain said, “And this is what it’s all about.”
A soldier said softly, “Poor bastard.”
”Hey, Sarge. How much you figure he’s worth, this one, on the hoof?”
”Fu
”Really? Hell.” It was Bucklin, gri
Chamberlain said to Kilrain, “He can’t have been long in this country.”
”No. A recent import, you might say.”
”I wonder how much he knows of what’s happening.”
Kilrain shrugged. A crowd was gathering. Chamberlain said, “Get a surgeon to look at that wound.”
He backed off. He stared at the palm of his own hand. A matter of thin skin. A matter of color. The reaction is instinctive. Any alien thing. And yet Chamberlain was ashamed; he had not known it was there. He thought: If I feel this way, even I, an educated man… what was in God’s mind?
He remembered the minister: and what if it is you who are wrong, after all?
Tom came bubbling up with a message from Vincent: the Corps would move soon, on further orders. Tom was chuckling.
” Lawrence, you want to hear a fu
”Button your shirt,” Chamberlain said.
”Yassuh, boss. Hey, what we got here?” He moved to see the surrounded black. The surgeon had bent over the man and the red eyes had gone wild with new fear, rolling horse-like, terrified. Chamberlain went away, went back to the coffeepot. He felt a slow deep flow of sympathy. To be alien and alone, among white lords and glittering machines, uprooted by brute force and threat of death from the familiar earth of what he did not even know was Africa, to be shipped in black stinking darkness across an ocean he had not dreamed existed, forced then to work on alien soil, strange beyond belief, by men with guns whose words he could not even comprehend. What could the black man know of what was happening? Chamberlain tried to imagine it. He had seen ignorance, but this was more than that.
What could this man know of borders and states’ rights and the Constitution and Dred Scott? What did he know of the war? And yet he was truly what it was all about. It simplified to that. Seen in the flesh, the cause of the war was brutally clear.
He thought of writing Fa
He moved back to the cluster around the black man. The shirt was off and Nolan was attending him. The light was stronger; the sun was a blood red ball just over the hills. Chamberlain saw a glistening black chest, massive muscles. The black man was in pain.
Nolan said, “He’ll be all right. Colonel. Bullet glanced off a rib. Cut the skin. Looks just like anybody else inside.”
Nolan clucked in surprise. “Never treated a Negro before. This one’s a tough one. They all got muscles like this one, Colonel?”
”We’ll have to leave him,” Chamberlain said. “Let him have some rations, try to give him directions. Buster, can you talk to him?”
”A little. Found out who shot him. It was some woman in that town there, Gettysburg.”
”A woman?”
”He came into town looking for directions and a woman came out on a porch and shot at him. He don’t understand. I guess she didn’t want to take a chance on being caught with him. But shoot him? Christ. He crawled out here figurin’ on dyin’.”
Chamberlain shook his head slowly.
Kilrain said, “He’s only been in this country a few weeks. He says he’d like to go home. Since now he’s free.”
Bugles were blowing. The men were moving out into formation. Tom came up with the black mare.
”I don’t know what I can do,” Chamberlain said. “Give him some food. Bind him up. Make a good bandage. But I don’t know what else.”