Confederates [antikvár]

In a beautiful blend of fact and fiction,CONFEDERATESoffers a picture at once dramatic and ironic of the poor white soldiers who formed the heart of the Confederate Army, and of the women who loved them. Set in 1862, at the floodtide of Southern hopes, it reaches its stirring climax at Antietam. Thomas Keneally evokes the cruel conflicts of the war, its-victories and tragedies, with a breathtaking grandeur that will grip the reader from the first page to the last.PrologueIn the second year of the war, Mrs. Ephephtha Bumpass saw her husband Usaph unexpectedly one cold March night. This happened way over in the great Valley of Virginia on a night of bitter frost. Usaph had come knocking on the door of the Bumpass family farm near the fine town of Strasburg and, when the door opened, he was the last person she expected to see.At the time, she was sitting at the kitchen hearth with the old slave Lisa and the fourteen-year-old boy of a neighbor called Travis. Mr. Travis had lent her the boy to do chores for her and to keep her company. Ephie Bumpass had been married some sixteen months up to that point and had lived all those sixteen months on this highland farm in the shadow of Mas-sanutten Mountain. But Bumpass had met and wooed her in a very different country from this. She'd been raised down in the Carolinas, in the torpid swamps round the mouth of the Combahee River. Her father had been a drum fisherman there and it was all the world she knew till Usaph brought her up here to Virginia.On that March night in the second year of the war, before Usaph got to the door and knocked on it, Ephie had been finding the sight of the Travis boy there by the fire distressing. It reminded her of what Travis, neighbor to the Bumpasses, had said to her when he assigned her the boy. "I'll send my boy to chop the wood an' keep you company. For whatever else you need you can call on me." Saying it he'd touched her wrist in a way you couldn't misunderstand. "You are a rose, Mrs. Bumpass. You are a red rose up here in this valley of lilies. Are you perhaps one of them Creoles or some such?"Travis's hints weren't any comfort to her. She knew men wanted her, men always had, bargemen and fishermen and parties of gentry her daddy used to take out drum fishing in his boat. Usaph's own uncle, overseer on the Kearsage place