Andersonville (111 page)

What you doing up so early, Coral?

Going a-hunting.

What you going to hunt?

Just a-hunting.

What you cooking?

Hen-fruit. I collected— He looked into the pot. Collected five. I give one to Zoral. He spilt his milk, the little bastard.

Coral, don’t you talk so bout my baby boy. You saving an egg for me, sonny?

Saving two. There was five. I et two.

Well, thank you for a good boy, Coral, she said drowsily, and soon was raucous in her snoring once more.

Again Coral packed the haversack: three boiled eggs for Naz Stricker, more pone, the last of the cold potatoes, the last slab of cooked pork. He shook the empty canteen . . . the balance of that milk was no good, but wasn’t there some wine in that keg yonder? He remembered that his mother had bought a cask of wine for future hospitality. Scuppernong wine, but just about the worst ever made. Coral opened the spigot and tasted, and made a face. Sour and muddy into the bargain, but it would be better than nothing for the invalid Yankee, so he filled the canteen. He left the house finally, weighted with shotgun and ammunition. These he hid as soon as he was out of sight, he wasn’t going to lug them to the swamp, he had no intention of hunting. In highest excitement he made his way through the forest . . . it seemed that the gray world was grown immaculately bright, promising bounty, promising varieties of wealth. Coral chanted quietly as he went; he could not sing well, but he chanted. Only the few stark birds and field-mice heard him.
O baby, O baby, I’ve tolt you before, just make me a pallet, I’ll lay on the floor.

Nazareth Stricker had built himself a house; he said that he scratched it together in the late afternoon after he came from stupor. He was not able to tell Coral that he had been nerved as much by unexpected charity from a foe as by the few nourishing juices which strayed into his body; no more would Coral have been able to countenance the thought consciously; yet in secret fashion each youth was aware of the benefit offered, the goodness prevailing and digested, the warm human treasure accruing to the pair of them. Naz Stricker had drawn light twigs and flakes of old moss into a pile amid which he’d nested in the quilt. Overhead hung the cowl of the torn raincoat, held aloft by broken sticks, serving as cape and shelter tent. Naz said that he had been truly cosy for the first time in— For the first time in a long time. He thought that he had never been so cosy before. He remembered—but, again, could not tell Coral—that in sudden frantic awakenings he had felt a horror at the soundlessness, the detachment from that race of noisy monsters amid whom he’d dwelt. And then, throbbing through lone blackness and past a twitch of branches and the night cry spoken by some bird or animal, Nazareth had heard the ticking of the mantel clock in the kitchen-living-room at home. On this first occasion of his long separation from home, he had heard it. He had heard a doctor’s buggy rattling away down Lilac Street, he had heard his eldest sister talking in her sleep in the next room as often she talked, he had heard and felt his shepherd dog Buchanan changing position under the bed. He had whispered, Buke. Good Buke. You want to go out? Go to sleep, Buke. Then he himself had gone floating, unhurt, unstarved, master of time and distance, loved.

Nazareth Stricker ate eggs and pone, he said that he would save the potatoes and the bit of meat and the rest of the pone, he drank greedily of sour wine.

Don’t you go drinking too much all to once’t. Twill put you flat.

I’ve been drinking this water beside the island.

Swamp water! No good for your innards.

It’s better than in the stockade—much better. Cepting for the spring.

You got a spring in there? I mean, you had—?

It busted loose last summer. They said God broke it free of the ground. It was good water, but I only had a little cup—practically doll-sized—and then I’d have to stand in line again.

Yank. You feared of ghosts?

Nazareth Stricker said judiciously, I never met any.

You mind dwelling in a privy?

Would it stink?

No, it’s mighty old, no smell left.

Couldn’t stink as bad as the—stockade. Whose privy is it?

Next place to our’n, but everything else got burnt; and tis told that Granny Rambo goes walking there, but I hain’t never seen her, and I don’t reckon she’d hurt a flea. Naz Stricker, you tolt me about that queer kind of wood they used for legs. What might be its name?

I can’t remember. It came by ship from some tropic port. Pa couldn’t always get hold of it.

Could you make me a foot?

Me with my one hand?

Reckon I could help. Reckon I could hold things, and turn them, and cut, and shave away, if’n I was showed proper.

Stricker meditated on this. Finally he said, It’s a question of tools and materials. Up home in Pennsylvania we had everything: Pa and Uncle Asaph have got a turning lathe they work with a treadle, and we’ve got tools galore. We fill orders from— Oh, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, places such as that. Guess Pa and Uncle Asaph are now rushed to death, what with the war and all.

He said later, Guess they think I’m dead.

Well, you hain’t.

Guess I could try to make a kind of peg-leg-foot, granted we had the proper wood and some tools. With you helping. Let me see your—leg.

On no other occasion had Coral displayed his stump to anyone as an exhibition, as a deliberate act. His family had seen the thing necessarily in their intimacy . . . his mother crooned about it until Coral shouted for her to keep still. Once the exasperated Flory called him Old Stumpy-Stump, and that time Coral’s crutch caught Flory between the shoulders and like to busted his back. Floral was nigh to knocked senseless. He blubbered in bed for a day and a half, and his back was lame for weeks. The Widow Tebbs beat Coral across the head and shoulders until she broke her broom, but he only sat laughing, saying repeatedly that he was glad he had not missed.

The amputation was effected about two inches above the nodule of his ankle bone at the narrowest portion of his left shin. Peel off the sock, you damn Rebel, said Naz Stricker. Meekly Coral obeyed, removing the dirty knitted woolen wrappings so that Naz might examine the stump. The flap had grown into place soundly. Naz Stricker pushed against the stump with his hand. Hurt?

Not too much.

Does it hurt, really? Sometimes my stump feels all a-quiver. Sometimes it feels like my hand—was still there. Then I try to grab something and can’t.

Reckon I know. Same way. Oft I feel like I got a left foot.

Ain’t it—funny? Both left? Funnier than if it had been me right and you left, or tother way around.

It’s just as blame funny as all hell, said Coral Tebbs. The two of them engaged in a tittering laugh; thus they were no longer Entered Apprentices, they had taken the Second Degree of their Lodge. They were Fellow Craftsmen.

Coral, I’m no surgeon. But I’ve watched Pa fit feet—fit feet, and more often wooden legs. And he’s made some of cork-wood, cork-wood that comes all the way from Spain and places. But it has to be braced within.

God damn it, can you make me a foot or can’t you?

Guess I—
we
—could fashion a peg-leg-foot. Granted we had the makings.

Would it work?

Straps—would be hard to manage. The fastenings . . . twould have to be thickly padded where the stump fits in. . . .

I said, Can you or can’t you?

We’ll see. That was all that Coral Tebbs could get out of him.

That day Nazareth Stricker lived on potatoes, pone, wine and the scrap of fried meat. He regretted the waste of food on the previous day, but was too much of a philosopher to torture himself idly with unhappy contemplations. He kept looking ahead, Coral had made him able to look ahead. Naz had slept well and in comparative warmth. Inside his skeletal frame the values of milk, eggs and other nobilities were enriching him. This night he might sleep with a board roof over his head for the first time since he had been hauled from Richmond to Andersonville (albeit a backhouse roof). His shrunken face turned into a black smile at thought of Granny Rambo’s ghost. He had lain amid some thirteen thousand men while they died; many of them he had seen puffed to fierce proportions before they were removed from his sight; he had worked in the hospital, also he had been a patient there; he had worked Outside, he had languished Inside; and he should be afraid of Granny Rambo, he should recoil from fancied odors of an unused latrine? Were he not a philosopher he had never been able to crawl through the reek of the old hospital drain, to worm his cold wet way past shivering trigger-ready guards, to circle the stockade and embrasures so that folks might think he’d escaped to the east instead of to the west, to provide himself with pepper and to scatter it, to flounder in low places where the wet going was hard; and to collapse at last in wilderness, no matter how loudly the dogs sounded in other portions of this boundless Avernus; and then to have the hawk come toppling.

While in the hospital Coral Tebbs had traded a stolen watch for a broken pepperbox revolver and ten dollars in greenbacks. The money was long since spent, but he had managed to repair the revolver, and now it would shoot. Late in the afternoon he fired the revolver three times at a rusty codfish can and missed every time. Mag popped her head out of the house door and cried, You Coral, take care like I bid you if’n you go shooting at a mark, for Zoral’s at play in the dooryard. Hell, he told her, I was firing towards the brush. Three revolver shots were the agreed signal for Nazareth Stricker to take up his journey, blanket roll and all. Naz must be established in the old Rambo privy before dark, because Coral could travel through brambles and ruin of the Rambo homestead only by daylight or in the edges of dusk. He could not travel there when it was black-dark.

Painstakingly the Yankee must walk his solitary path as directed: through the swamp to the sweet-gum thicket, off in a left oblique directly toward the tall twin pines which could be seen rising in the east . . . then, when arrived between the pines, he must scrooch down and work south until he reached the remains of a rail fence. That was the most dangerous part of his journey: the woods were open. But Coral had met not so much as a stray Georgia Reserve or a Negro through all his recent trips to the swamp.

Coral thrust the revolver in his belt and crutched leisurely behind a weedy brake as if bent on more target shooting; then he headed for the Rambo ruins as fast as he could travel. It was hard for him to negotiate the last fifty yards because of blackberry coils. He arrived at the privy cursing and scratched. He envisioned misfortunes— he saw Naz forgetting to scatter the last of his pepper, and thus he was pursued by the noisy hounds once more. Would Naz remember to cross the broken rails, and slink behind concealing dried-out vines until he saw the charred chimney on Granny Rambo’s cottage site looming before him? Would he have sense enough to lie flat and motionless if he heard voices or the step of an approaching mule?

Coral pushed open the swollen door of the old bleached structure and nearly fell backward. Naz Stricker was lounging upon his rolled quilt.

Jesus God! You scairt the piss out of my bladder.

But ain’t this the place? This backhouse—

Sure it’s the place, but you ought to waited my signal.

You did shoot.

They had a lively discussion. It seemed that an hour earlier Nazareth Stricker had heard three shots and had started out. They did not know where the shots came from; Coral had not heard them.

Guards at Andersonville, said Naz. Guess they shot three more of our boys. Thirty-day furlough apiece.

They don’t get that!

Devil they don’t. Every time they shoot one of us.

God damn lie.

Well, said Naz judiciously, we won’t get anywhere arguing about it.

Tangles grew high, the railroad was out of sight, so was the Tebbs place, so was any track traveled commonly by slaves of the region. Together the youths dragged an old plank and placed it across the privy holes, and on this the quilt and coat could be arranged.

Couldn’t find much to feed you on, said Coral. He produced half a dozen raw turnips from the pockets of his ragged jacket.

These’ll be prime, Coral. I’m fairly starved for greenery. Naz started gnawing.

Got anything left to wet your whistle?

I filled the canteen with swamp water on the way.

Reckon there’s plenty water in Granny’s old well. Tomorrow we can rig you a bucket. Too bad you can’t build no fire, but smoke’d give us away.

So easily it became
we
and
us
.

Coral, two things I wish I could have. Strange things.

Like what?

A shawl and a bonnet. An old lady’s bonnet. Maybe one of those big wide ones that hides the face?

Coral stared at him blankly until he saw Satan jumping in the splintery gaze of Naz Stricker’s deep small eyes. Then their glee rose together. Coral laughed seldom, usually he only grinned when he was sardonically pleased. Now he brayed in a choking anguish which had not overwhelmed him since he was wounded. He said, Granny Rambo! Shawl and bonnet! Well, by Jesus, Yank, you shall have them!

He provided these articles of dress the next day but not without peril. He stole an old shawl which he had not seen his mother wear in years, and found a crushed bonnet in the barrel. The slats were bent, the bonnet was a tatter but it would serve. He was in the act of stuffing the booty into his haversack when he was pounced upon by Mag, who had been watching through the crack of the open bedroom door, and he had thought that she was asleep all the time.

Coral. What you think you’re a-doing?

He felt dizzy, he felt his face go hot and then felt strength and color draining. Well, he said, sparring for time.

Set down on that bench. Look at me. Look at your Ma. What you up to, anyway?

Well, he said.

You got my shawl that belonged to Aunt Eliza; and half that ham is gone that was left this morning, and I don’t know what’s come with all the corn pone and leftovers. Who you giving things to?

Well.