I. Lost on the March
On the morning of September 8, 1781, the British army in South Carolina was eating breakfast at Eutaw Springs when Nathanael Greene’s army came out of the trees, and by the time the sun went down that evening the two of them had fought the bloodiest battle of the war in that state, in heat that killed men who had never been touched by a ball.
The British had sent out a foraging party at dawn to dig sweet potatoes. Greene’s riders took most of them before a shot was fired. Then the Americans hit the camp, and the lines went back and forth for the better part of four hours, and the British finally broke, and the Americans chased them through the tents, and there the battle turned, because the camp was full of everything a tired army had dreamed about for a month. Rum. Flour. Officers’ trunks. The Americans stopped to take it. A British major named Marjoribanks rallied what he had around a brick house and drove them back out, and both sides claimed the day, and both sides had lost a quarter of everyone they’d brought.
Three days later, Colonel Stewart gave up the field and pulled his column back toward Charleston, and that is the part of the story nobody paints, because a retreat does not make a picture. But a retreat is what it was. A beaten, bleeding column with wagons and wounded and whatever it had saved from a looted camp, moving as fast as it could down roads it did not know, with American cavalry riding its edges. Wade Hampton’s dragoons were out there, and Hampton knew these swamps. He had taken the Four Holes causeway that July. He knew every crossing between the Santee and the Edisto.
So the wagons did not all stay with the column. Some took the back roads.
One of them, by an account that exists in exactly one place and will be discussed in its turn, carried the pay chest of a regiment of foot. The man riding on it was a paymaster’s sergeant named Hobbs, who had the pay roll folded in his coat, every name and every shilling owed. Somewhere between Eutaw Springs and the British post at Dorchester, on a sand road through the pines with a broken axle behind him and riders somewhere in the dark, Hobbs took the chest off the wagon and put it in the ground. He meant to come back.
The regimental return for that week lists him in three words. Lost on the march.
Not killed. Not deserted. Lost on the march, as if the road had taken him.
II. The Field
Smoak Road runs off Highway 78 near Pregnall, which is a crossroads between Dorchester and St. George that a person could miss by sneezing, and it is paved, and it does not feel paved. Pines stand close on one side. On the other is a long field that somebody has kept open for two hundred years, with a fence line of cedar posts gone silver and a pond at the low end the color of weak tea.
Ruth Ann Fender owned the field. She was seventy-three. She had kept cows on it since her husband died in 1994 and had never once asked anybody for help with them, and she told Jackie Rhame this at the gate in a tone that made clear she wasn’t going to start.
“Royce says you want to put me in the paper.”
“Royce says a lot of things.”
“He does.” Ruth Ann looked at the field. “He also says I ought to sell. He’s not wrong about that one, and I’ll thank you not to tell him I said so.”
Jackie had come out because of the cows. Royce Fender, who ran the feed store in Harleyville and was Ruth Ann’s nephew and had a map on his back wall that Jackie had spent a good deal of the autumn looking at, had said over the counter one morning that his aunt’s cows wouldn’t go in the north corner of her field, and never had, and that it was the kind of thing Jackie wrote about now.
“They won’t,” Ruth Ann said. “Not in thirty years. Not one cow. There’s good grass up there and they’ll stand at the edge of it and look at you like you’re a fool. You can drive them up with the truck and they’ll come back around you like water around a rock.”
“Is it wet up there?”
“Dry as a bone. That’s the thing.” She pointed with her chin. “And it’s where he does his counting.”
Jackie waited.
“You’ll hear about it from Royce if you don’t hear it from me,” Ruth Ann said, “and he’ll get it wrong. So I’ll tell you. But you’re going to sit on my porch and drink a glass of tea while I do it, because I’m not standing at this gate in the cold for the newspaper.”
III. Thirty-One Years
She had first heard it the September after her husband was buried. She had gone out at dusk to check the cows, because that had been Earl’s job and she had taken over his jobs the way you do, without deciding to, one at a time, until she looked up one day and was doing all of them.
“I thought it was a hunter,” she said. They were on the porch. The tea was sweet enough to stand a spoon in. “A man’s voice, up in the north corner. Flat, steady, like somebody reading a grocery list to himself. Couldn’t make out words. I hollered that he was on posted land. He didn’t stop. Didn’t speed up. Went right on like I wasn’t there, and then he stopped, and I heard him clear his throat, and he started over.”
She went inside. She did not go out at dusk on September 8 again for six years.
“When I finally did, in 2000, I took a flashlight and Earl’s shotgun and I walked up the fence line toward that corner. And here’s the thing that made me turn around. He didn’t get louder.” She looked at Jackie to see if she understood. “A sound’s supposed to get bigger when you walk at it. This didn’t. It was the same size everywhere. It was in the field, not in a place in the field.”
She got close enough that night to understand two things. It was counting. And it was a long count. She stood with her hand on a cedar post and listened to a man she could not see go up and up, in a voice that got no more tired and no less tired, until he reached a number and stopped.
“Two hundred and seventy-nine,” Ruth Ann said. “I’ve heard it enough Septembers now to know. He gets to two hundred and seventy-nine and he quits, and there’s a quiet, and I swear before God it’s a disappointed quiet. And then he says one word and goes again.”
“What word?”
“‘Again.’”
She fed early on the eighth now. She was not afraid of it. She had had thirty-one Septembers to get over being afraid. “He’s not doing anything to anybody,” she said. “He’s just not finished. I know what that’s like.”
Jackie asked her, carefully, what Royce wanted her to sell.
Ruth Ann set her glass down. “The field,” she said. “Not to a farmer. There’s a man from Charleston been out here twice with a metal detector in his truck and a lawyer in his passenger seat. Wants to buy the digging rights to the north corner. Won’t say why, which means he knows. Offered me more than the whole farm’s worth.” She looked at the field. “Royce thinks I’m a fool to say no. Royce doesn’t have to listen to him count.”
“You’ve said no?”
“Twice. The lawyer’s coming back Thursday with a bigger number.” She picked the glass up again. “I’m seventy-three, Jackie. I’ve got a nephew who means well and a barn that needs a roof. I don’t know how many more times I can say it.”
IV. The Collector
The man in Summerville who collected things about the Revolution did not want his name in the paper, and Jackie gave him her word, and so he will be called here what he asked to be called, which was nothing.
He lived in a brick ranch off Bacons Bridge Road with the blinds drawn and a dehumidifier running in every room, and he had, in a filing cabinet in what had been a bedroom, a photocopy of a British regimental return for the second week of September 1781. He had gotten it, he said, from a man in England who had gotten it from a man who was dead. He would not say how much he had paid.
“Hobbs,” he said, and put his finger on the line. “Sergeant, paymaster’s department. Lost on the march.” He looked at Jackie over his glasses. “You know what that means in a return like this? It means they didn’t know. Not dead, not run. He was there on the eleventh when they pulled out, and on the fourteenth when they counted at Dorchester, he wasn’t. And the chest wasn’t either.”
“How do you know about the chest?”
“Because the next page is the regiment asking Charleston for money to pay the men, and the page after that is Charleston asking why.”
He had a second thing. A muster for the same regiment, dated the week after the battle, with its losses subtracted. Jackie read it standing up because he had not offered her a chair. Two hundred and eighty men fit for duty and owed pay.
Two hundred and eighty. Not two hundred and seventy-nine.
“There’s a man from Charleston trying to buy digging rights on Smoak Road,” she said.
The collector’s face did not change, which was how she knew. “I’ve had calls,” he said. “I don’t sell to people with lawyers.”
“He’s going to find it.”
“No, he isn’t.” He put the photocopy back in its folder. “You don’t find a thing like that with a machine, Miss Rhame. You find it the way the man who buried it would find it. He’d stand where he stood, and he’d count.”
V. The Eighth
It had been ninety-one degrees that afternoon, and at seven o’clock the field was still giving the heat back.
Ruth Ann had fed at five and gone inside and left the gate unlatched and the porch light on, which Jackie noticed and did not remark on. The lawyer had been and gone on Thursday with his bigger number, and Ruth Ann had said no a third time and then sat down on her kitchen floor for a while, which Royce did not know and Jackie did, because Ruth Ann had called her.
The pond at the low end was flat as a plate. The pines across the road had gone from green to black while Jackie was still parking. The cows were down by the water, forty of them, and every one of them was facing north. Not grazing. Facing.
She walked the fence line. It was a long walk, maybe four hundred yards, with the cedar posts coming up one after another out of the grass like they’d been planted to count by. She was sweating through her shirt by the halfway point. She was thinking about Delia, who had died in March, and who had once told her that the dead keep better time than the living because they’re not distracted, and she had thought at the time that it was a thing Delia said and was beginning to understand it was a thing Delia knew.
The cicadas were screaming, the way they do in September. The whole field was one sound.
Then it wasn’t.
They did not fade. They stopped, all of them, between one breath and the next, as if somebody had lifted a needle off a record. In the silence Jackie could hear the pond. She could hear a cow shift its weight a hundred yards off. She could hear her own heart, which she had not noticed was going so fast.
And from the north corner, in the voice of a man reading a grocery list, somebody said, “Abbott. One.”
She did not go closer. Ruth Ann had been right that it would make no difference, and she knew it the way you know a thing in a dream.
“Adair. Two. Allen. Three. Anstey. Four.”
A name and a number. A name and a number. The voice was English, or near it, with the vowels pressed flat. It was not ghostly, which was the word people wanted, and it was wrong. It was a working voice. A clerk’s voice. A man doing the one job he had been given with the care of somebody who knows that if he gets it wrong a soldier does not eat. It had no echo and no distance. It was in her ear and in the far corner and in the field all at once, and the only place it wasn’t was anywhere she could walk to.
She counted with him. She had meant to. She had carried the number out here in her pocket and she wanted to find where he lost one.
The A’s. The B’s, which took a long time, because there are always a lot of B’s. The C’s and the D’s. “Dunn. Fifty-one. Eames. Fifty-two.” Up through the F’s and the G’s, every man present and accounted for in a voice that was never going to get tired.
By the H’s her knees ached from standing still. “Hall. One hundred and nine. Hamer. One hundred and ten. Hinton. One hundred and eleven.”
And then, “Hollis. One hundred and twelve.”
She heard it the way you hear a stair that isn’t there.
Hinton. Hollis. There was a space between those two names in any alphabet, and he had stepped over it without a hitch, the way a man steps over a hole in his own floor that he has stepped over for forty years. He did not pause. He did not stumble. He went on into the I’s and the J’s with the sun gone behind the pines and the light going from orange to the gray that comes before blue, and Jackie stood at a cedar post with her hand on it and understood why the count was always one short, and why “Again” never fixed it.
He was reading the roll of a regiment, and the man reading was on the roll, and he had never once counted himself.
VI. Who Is Owed
It took him most of an hour to reach the end. She did not move. The cows did not move. Out on 78 a truck went by with its lights on, and the sound of it came from another world.
“Wyatt. Two hundred and seventy-seven. Yardley. Two hundred and seventy-eight. Young. Two hundred and seventy-nine.”
Then the silence. Ruth Ann had described it exactly. It was a disappointed silence, the silence of a man standing in the dark with a paper in his hand, two hundred and forty-five years into a job, knowing the number at the bottom of the page did not match the number in his head and not able to see why.
Jackie had thought, driving out, that she might be too frightened to do it. She was not. She was sorry for him. It was a terrible thing, to be the one name you could not read.
Before he could say “Again,” she said it for him.
“Hobbs.”
Not loud. She said it the way you would say it across a table to a man who had forgotten his own name, which is to say gently, and with her whole chest, because she knew it was the only thing anyone had said to him in a very long time.
The silence changed. She could not have said how she knew. There is a difference between a room where nobody is speaking and a room where somebody has just heard you, and the field became the second kind.
Then the voice started again, and it was fast. Not panicked. Fast the way you read a thing you have read a thousand times when you finally know how it ends. “Abbott, one. Adair, two.” The A’s in a breath, the B’s in three, the whole list going by like fence posts from a truck window, until the H’s came up, and this time, between Hinton and Hollis, without the smallest break:
“Hobbs. One hundred and twelve.”
And on. All the way. She heard it go past Young, two hundred and eighty, and she heard him stop, and the silence after that was not disappointed. It was the silence of a sum that comes out right.
She thought that was the end. She thought she had given a dead man his name back and the cicadas would come up and Ruth Ann’s cows would walk into the north corner in the morning and eat the good grass.
The voice said one more thing.
“Rhame. Two hundred and eighty-one.”
The cicadas came back before she reached her truck. Ruth Ann’s porch light was still on. She did not come out, and Jackie did not knock.
She sat in the truck with the engine off and did the arithmetic that she would go on doing every night for the rest of the year.
A pay roll is a list of who is owed. Hobbs had kept it for two hundred and forty-five years with one name missing, and the missing name was the only one that mattered, because it was the keeper’s. When she gave it to him the roll was complete for the first time since 1781. A complete roll is a settled account. It is finished. It is a thing a man can put down.
And he had not put it down. He had added a line.
She thought she understood, and she did not like it. A roll like that does not belong to the men on it. It belongs to whoever reads it. Hobbs had read it for two and a half centuries because he was the last one who could. She was the first person who had read a name off it since, and the roll, which was the only thing in that field still doing its job, had drawn its own conclusion about what that made her.
The cows went into the north corner the next morning. Ruth Ann called to tell her. All forty of them, and they ate it down to the dirt.
The lawyer from Charleston came back the Thursday after with a number that would have bought the farm twice, and Ruth Ann Fender, who had sat on her kitchen floor the week before, met him at the gate and did not invite him in.
“There’s nothing up there,” she told him. “I had the newspaper out. They walked the whole corner with a machine. Sand and roots.” She said it looking him in the eye. She had never in her life told a lie she couldn’t live with, and she had decided, somewhere between the kitchen floor and the gate, that this one she could. “You tell your man he’s wasting his money.”
Royce was not pleased. Royce would get over it.
There is a chest in the north corner of that field. Jackie was as sure of it as she was of her own name, which was saying more than it used to. She did not know what was in it. The sensible answer was coin, a regiment’s pay, and she would have been lying to say she had not thought about what that would mean for the county and for Ruth Ann and for herself. But she kept coming back to the roll. The roll was a list of what each man was owed, and what a soldier is owed in the end is not money. It is to be counted. It is to have somebody say your name at the end of the day, so you know you came through.
She was on the list now. She was owed, and she was the one who read it. Out there those were the same thing.
She would be at the fence line next September 8. She expected to hear two hundred and eighty-one names. She did not know yet whether she would be the one reading them or the one being read, and she had stopped pretending there was much difference. What she knew was that an account was open on Smoak Road, and she had not opened it, and the only thing she had ever seen settle an account out there was a name.
— County Line Confidential
A note on what’s real. The Battle of Eutaw Springs, the plundering of the British camp, and Colonel Stewart’s retreat toward Charleston on September 11, 1781, are documented history. So is Wade Hampton’s seizure of the Four Holes causeway that July. Smoak Road and Pregnall are real places in Dorchester County. Sergeant Hobbs, the pay chest, the “lost on the march” entry, the collector in Summerville, Ruth Ann Fender, her field, the man from Charleston, and the counting are fiction. No actual family, property, or person on Smoak Road is intended.
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