Forty-Nine. The Discharge
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Discharge
There had been talk about it for a fortnight and none of the talk had been to him.
Then one morning they were paraded and a man read something out, and the number that had been said in front of Nelson’s name since August was a different number after breakfast, and everything else about the day was the same.
The same fort. The same detail. The same sergeant.
The same wall with a coat hanging on it.
Three men explained it to him before dinner and had it three ways. The one part all three agreed on was that there was now one regiment where there had been two, and every man’s paper had been altered to say so.
Nelson had spent his whole life being moved between one man’s name and another man’s name. This was the first time it had been done to him without his body going anywhere.
—
In April they said the war was over.
There was firing at Natchez for most of an afternoon and a good deal of noise in the town below the bluff, and men in that garrison did what men do, which was shout for a while and then stand about, and Nelson stood about with them.
Then the next morning there was guard mount and there was a working party.
In May they said it again. Nelson was still there.
That was the part nobody had warned him about, and he was not the only man in that fort who had understood the thing wrong.
A war ends and the men who fought it go home; that is what a war ending means.
Other regiments went home that summer. His did not.
There were Black regiments at posts all up and down that part of the river, still guarding and carrying and standing in roads after the fighting had stopped.
They went from Natchez down to Rodney and they were at other posts after that. They guarded. They carried. They stood in the road at Bureau meetings where planters and freedpeople argued about contracts, which Nelson could have written for either side and was not asked to.
Men asked when, all that summer and all that autumn. They asked sergeants and they asked lieutenants and once a man asked a colonel, and the answer every time was the same answer, which was that nobody knew and that the term of enlistment was three years.
Nelson had signed in July of 1864. He did that sum once, in the summer of 1865, sitting on a barrel, and he did not do it again, because the answer was 1867 and there was nothing to be done with it.
—
He wrote his letter in October.
He had been writing other men’s for fourteen months and there had been no reason to write his own, and then in the autumn of 1865 there was a post going into Virginia again, and there was no longer a war between him and Louisa County, and there was one address in the world that he was certain of.
He thought about it for three weeks and he wrote it on a Sunday and it took him most of an afternoon.
He wrote it to Corbin Ashmore, Esq., Louisa Court House, Louisa County, Virginia, because that was the name he was certain of, and he asked in it after a woman named Esther who was a seamstress on that gentleman’s place and a girl named Junie who would be fifteen years old, and he said where he was and what he was called and that he would pay any expense.
He put in that he was well.
He read it over twice and he did not like it and he sent it, and it went off in the bag from a post in Mississippi in the last week of October of 1865.
He allowed six weeks. Then he allowed until the end of the year. Then he stopped allowing.
It came back in January.
The envelope had been handled enough that the corners had gone soft. It had not been opened.
He looked at his own writing on the front of it for a while and put it away.
—
They mustered the regiment out on the seventh of March, 1866.
It took three days and most of it was standing.
The rolls were called and called again. There was an inspection of arms and the arms were turned in and counted, and there was an inspection of everything else and it was turned in and counted, and a man went along the line with a book taking back what belonged to the government and writing a figure against a name for what did not come back.
Then there was a table.
There were two officers at it and a clerk with the descriptive book open, and it went a man at a time and it went slowly, and Nelson stood in that line most of a morning.
“Nelson Reuben.”
“Here.”
The clerk had a page in front of him that had been written at Thibodaux in July of 1864, in another man’s hand, and he read the particulars off it out loud.
Age, twenty-four at enrollment. He was twenty-six now.
Height. Five feet eleven and a half.
Complexion, eyes, hair. The clerk looked up at him for about a second and a half each, exactly the way the other one had, and said nothing about any of the three.
Occupation, laborer.
Born, Louisa County, Virginia.
“That’s right,” Nelson said.
—
They counted him out his money on the second table.
It was what was owing on the final statement, and it was less than he had reckoned and more than he had feared, and there was an argument in front of him between a man and an officer about a knapsack that had been lost at Rodney which the officer won.
Nelson took eighty-one dollars and forty cents in United States currency and put it inside his shirt.
Then the clerk gave him the paper.
That was the whole of the transaction and it took a second or two and nobody made anything of it. The clerk turned it round on the table and held it out and Nelson took it and the clerk said, “Next.”
A sergeant standing at the end of the table said the only thing anybody said to him about it, and he said it to every man who came off that table, in the same words, so that by the time Nelson got there he had heard it a dozen times.
“Don’t lose it. You’ll be asked for it.”
—
He went off about twenty feet and stood out of the way of the line and read it.
He read it the way he read everything, which was slowly, with his lips going, and there were two words in the printed part that he could not get and he went on past them.
It had his name on it in a clerk’s hand: Nelson Reuben.
It had the regiment and the company. It had the day he was enrolled at Thibodaux and the day he was discharged at that post. It had his age and his height and the colour of his eyes, which he had never once been told and now read for the first time off a paper about himself.
And down in the particulars, where the printed line asked it, it said where he was born.
He stood there in the middle of Mississippi in March with it in both hands, and read that part again, and then folded it in three the way it wanted to be folded and put it inside his shirt with the money and Delphy’s thimble.
Nobody asked him for it back.
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