Free Confederates by Thomas Keneally Page A

our way of life.’
    Then, not being strong enough to grip, he laid a hand on top of Usaph’s. ‘You ought to wed this Ephie, nephew, she’s by way of being a tender girl.’
    Behind them, Ephephtha Corry laughed awkwardly. It seemed as if she was shamed somehow by this endorsement from Uncle Patrick. ‘Mr Usaph Bumpass don’t need no swamp girl, Mr Patrick. Mr Usaph is a plain-as-day gentleman.’
    He could tell she meant it. He was no gentleman to Mrs Kearsage but to this Ephephtha Corry he appeared a well-mannered and well-off visitor from the mountains. He liked himself in the role; he felt himself get more worldly as he sat there. It’s been said that if a woman gives a man a new picture of himself, then that’s the start of infatuation. A nervous infatuation had already got itself going in that little shack, and Ephie’s view of Usaph as a gentleman certainly helped it along.
    â€˜He can do his own arranging,’ Ephie said in a whisper, both shy and savage, to the uncle.
    Now, two and a half years later, in the lines before Richmond, it still worried Usaph that the first idea of a closeness between himself and Ephie came out of the mouth of his dying uncle.
    While the old man slept, he and the girl sat together in the sun. Her mother had died – she told Usaph – when she was three; she’d been raised by her father who fished the estuary of the Combahee River and sold his catch in the local villages. He was to have been Uncle Patrick’s manager in the ill-omened Combahee Drum-Fishing Company. Uncle Patrick planned to buy a nice cutter, to bring wealthy men to the Combahee and take them out to sea to find drum fish, for drum fish were a great Southern sport.
    Miss Corry was serious, shaking her head slowly, when she spoke of this folly. ‘God didn’t mean it to succeed,’ she said.
    â€˜Why not, Miss Corry?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ she said, her head still hanging. ‘I jest know He didn’t much care for that enterprise and that’s all.’
    â€˜Doesn’t the Lord like Uncle Patrick?’
    â€˜I don’t think He likes too many of us Combahee river-rats. And He don’t much like some gentlemen neither.’
    â€˜You mean me.’
    She grinned slowly, looking up under her black lashes, her smooth forehead. ‘No, not you. Other gentlemen he don’t like.’
    She had the look of a girl who’d been allowed to raise herself. So she was an odd mix of rough and polish. Her hair was clean, and her dress; but the dress was old, maybe one of Mrs Kearsage’s cast-offs, patched with sacking. You almost expected her to be barefoot, but she wore little black mules on her feet.
    Somewhere she’d got some education and knew something of the Bible and enough of her letters to read the editorials in the Mercury aloud to the uncle. Fishermen and raftsmen and their women, on coastal rivers or on the fabled Mississippi far away, were said to be shiftless and lacking in morals, and the idea that she might not be a virgin was already starting to torture him even as they sat there.
    During the early days of that stay in the region of Pocataligo, he could not look her full in the face, his desire was so cruel. One noon when they strolled the river flats she pressed up against him almost by accident, but he started away. He thought, if I caress her here, I’ll be lost. I’ll be out of all control in a strange land. So he tried to pretend for a while that the only thing uniting them was that they both tended and comforted his wry and dying uncle.
    Each evening, after Ephephtha had cooked them their meal, she would leave to find her dug-out canoe and skim away downriver towards her daddy’s home. Uncle Patrick would grow sullen after she went. He never seemed to sleep much, and Usaph, lying in a bedroll on the packed-earth floor, would wake often to hear the old man raving or coughing or rasping