Andersonville (114 page)

There came only Jonas, seeking a whetstone, and he gazed in curiosity. What you do with that thing, please, Mastah?

It’s a peg-leg for Coral Tebbs. He’s done most of the work himself.

That poor young cripple soldier-boy, said Jonas.

In the afternoon, having disregarded his midday meal, Ira carried the artificial limb back to the Rambo site, lugging it in a grain sack. Coral Tebbs, scowling and frightened and sulky, was there with Naz Stricker. Like the other boy he found it difficult to believe that Ira Claffey could award such traitorous benevolence. Coral thought that if he were Ira he should wish to kill all Yankees in wholesale revenge. Ira had not lost a limb, he did not belong to the Lodge, he had not been fighting at that wheatfield place. Ira recognized their mutual attitude but said nothing in explanation, because he could not explain the whole thing, not even to himself. He could not say, Yes, once I too was a soldier. In Mexico. I was wounded painfully; I thought that I would lose my leg; for years I had to tie dressings about the wound each day, and let them fill up, and throw them away; until at last a surgeon’s probe brought out the remaining loose bits of bone, and those bits had turned black as coal.

To be frank with himself, this was all beside the point.

Coral sat inert while they strapped the thing.

Don’t become too ambitious all at once, mind! Ira added, Your knee is weak, your leg shrunken from disuse. You must go slowly. Use your crutches at first.

On a level patch close to the burnt relics Coral crutched solemnly back and forth, putting the heavy peg down cautiously, lifting it again, resting more and more of his bodily weight upon the stump. It caused him a degree of pain . . . it would all take time, but Naz Stricker had warned him of this again and again. Tentatively Coral slid his crutches out from under his arms and used them as canes to hobble with. Oh, the peg was heavier than he had thought it would be; he hoisted his leg in labor, he perspired, but persisted as in a trance. At last he stood in the lowest weeds, resting his entire weight on his good right foot and on the spindle thrusting down from his left leg. He spread his arms wide, and dropped the crutches from his hand. He stood crutch-less for the first time since he was wounded. His black eyebrows rose up. I’ll be dipped in shit, he said.

Ira forgave him the vulgarity, he would have forgiven him anything. He turned away and busied himself with the grain sack he had brought. He produced some of Moses’s old clothing: jeans trousers for wear in the forest, a rough brown jacket, a shirt and shoes and socks (the shoes were Badger’s; Naz Stricker’s feet had appeared to be more the size of Badger’s), an old black hat.

I’d get out of this, he told the Yankee, as soon as possible. Wait for dark, then travel the railroad. There were guards at the bridges, but I hear they’ve been removed. But take care; it might have been false information.

Sir, I don’t know how to thank—

Coral and I have our secret . . . it won’t be long . . . as I said before, we are whipped. Ira repeated it under his breath. Whipped, whipped, whipped. Beaten down.

He took a fold of currency from his pocket. Fifty dollars Confederate. All I can spare. We are very short of cash these days. But it will help you to secure food.

Sir, God bless you.

Ah. He moves in a mysterious way . . . you know the song?

Yes, sir. Used to sing it up home in Pennsylvania.

Goodbye, my boys.

They mumbled their farewell, they stood united and wondering. Ira went home and found that Lucy was sleeping the afternoon away, she had not rested well during the night. But were she awake she might not have appreciated the texts which Ira pondered over in the library. Ruin was here, but she was young, she had a love.

The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted: the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth.

Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for the wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is perished.

...Gird yourselves, and lament, ye priests: howl, ye ministers of the altar: come, lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God. . . .

Ira had no sackcloth, but he lay down all the same; he lay on the sofa and turned away from his dread past; and thought of the scrawny mixed future, but it was a peril, a bewilderment. He slept; he was lucky in having no dreams. He slept into the dusk.

You can always take to the woods, Coral Tebbs told Naz Stricker.

That’s so. But I mean to travel by night solely, unless I come to complete wilderness.

Coral stood beside him in the dark. The two shapes bulked dangerously, sometimes teetering close together, sometimes drifting farther apart as if washed by winds, though no wind stirred. It was chilly. A bobcat made a kill in the distant swamp, and screamed in the process; a few scattered dogs preached their immediate alarm.

Wish you could take this here haversack, but twould attract notice.

Why not? If you want to let me have it, Coral. I could be a Rebel soldier bound for home. Guess that’s what I will be, though I don’t much talk like it.

Then that saves putting spare rations in your clothes!

Coral passed the sack to Naz, and the Yankee slid the strap over his shoulder. Coral said, Looky, and Nazareth poked his head forward through the gloom to see the other youth poised on his true leg and his false leg, crutches upheld in his hands.

Don’t you get too gay, Reb.

Shan’t.

Coral.

What?

That Mr. Claffey gave me fifty dollars Confed. I’d like to go halves on that.

Coral Tebbs was strangling. Hell, I got Ma to see after me, and she’s got enough and plenty. Right now, anyways. You’ll need what little cash you got. Twill be slim pickings along the way, though I reckon niggers might help you. All they got in their heads these days is that cusséd Yankee freedom notion, dad blast them! And fifty Secesh hain’t no fortune.

(He would say to his mother when at last he went to the house, Old lady, I fibbed my head off. . . . What you mean, you Coral? . . . Bout that wench. I didn’t have no wench, I wasn’t a-keeping no nigger girl down a cotton row nor no place else. Twas a Yankee, skun out of that stockade, and I’ve helped him away; and look what he made for me. . . . Coral! You helped a Yankee. You ought to be blown dead! My own flesh and blood, helping a Yankee! . . . Oh, shut up. Look at the pin he fixed for me! Week hence I’ll throw these God damn crutches to the crows.)

Guess I’ll get along.

Their hands trailed through the night. Long would Coral feel the clasp on his own hand, long would Naz Stricker poke his way southward, choking as he went.

Look out for Home Guards, you bastard Yankee.

Don’t stick that peg of yours down a gopher hole.

Now I just won’t.

Very softly,
Foooorward
— They parted.

At first each could hear the crunching pace of the other, going away, soon they could hear nothing. Coral Tebbs toiled homeward. Emotionally he was profiting from war as some wise survivors profit. He had a dim notion of knights. When he was small he had looked long at a picture-book someone gave him, and there was a picture of knights carrying shields, with visors lifted to show their faces; he could not read the story, and no one had read it to him, but he remembered the picture, and it spread before him now in the lone cold black. Naz was a knight, so was he; oddly Ira Claffey joined them, and the dead sons paraded behind; so did Jo Coppedge, Apostle Epperson, Darius Voyles and the rest of the expired Rebels. He thought of the nigh-onto-thirteen-thousand dead who had been buried from the nearby stockade, or so Naz declared . . . they put on their mail and walked in his imaginings, even though they were Yanks and so to be despised. There was something in the concentration of death and peril which had occupied his young years, which quickened his sensitivity to a degree unbelievable. It was as if he walked stripped of flesh, tissues exposed, blood open to the night. No one might understand what he felt, he could not speak of it, there was no one to know.

He was only eighteen, for all the angry barbarous maturity which had become his through suffering. Release from storming emotion came to Coral. Crutches slipped, fell from his open clutch, he lay in burs and pea-vines in his mother’s dooryard, kneading crushed little sheaves of wire grass in his large hands, sobbing, momentarily without hope. God damn it, Naz, don’t go way. But Naz was gone with not even a star to lessen the night into which he walked.

 LVII 

T
he weather warmed for Lucy. Her father would not have wished that she go dreaming alone, nor would her husband. There were chores to be done . . . she knew that Pet and Extra would laze at tasks she had set them to, perhaps they might ruin the entire batch of summer candles, might forget to put in the beeswax. Lucy felt that she did not care. Again she had become a disobedient child, when in fact in childhood seldom had she been disobedient. Yet with the rest of humankind she found spice in the forbidden.

It was late afternoon. She went past cabins, over the rise and down the long gentle slope toward a steeper ravine of Little Sweetwater. Frogs were crunching in some low place already shadowed permanently, forgotten by the drifting sun. A breeze came; the young woman saw the brushes of each separate pine tuft painting erratically on far sky, never leaving paint to mark the sky. Soon Lucy’s small shabby mended shoes were slipping among old cornstalks, stalks of a field now let go to weeds because there was not the strength within this population to work an additional field. The stalks were sad about it. How could corn stems—once firm, containing fluid—become so dispirited, leaning sodden? She wanted to say, Be of better faith, old plants. I feel sure that your descendants will one day push up proudly in this same place. There were relics of ancient cotton in an adjacent field; through all this time they had survived, as exhibits contained in a museum . . . through summers, the mass of rain coming down repeatedly, winter freezing stiff. Still they exhibited themselves amid more perishable reeds, and bitter flakes clung to the dry cotton plants, burnt to wire by age. In a swamp delicate new leaves had come out into the warmth—they were widening, showing red-lipped colors. Leaves on taller trees held the pale tender green of new pea-plants. It was a good season . . . one perspired when active, but grew chilly in breeze if jacket or shawl were removed.

O frogs in the swamp. How odd that there could be endearment and promise in such rocky stuttering. (Lucy’s frogs were not of the variety which beleaguered Henry Wirz: frogs which jumped and ached in his miserable arm.) They were like water birds, and in solid dark of evening they would be speaking thin-voiced, high-pitched, their vociferous persistent wail and whistle would be suggestive of robins . . . early the following morning they would be calling still, even after chickens began to call, although the frogs’ chorus would be thinner. Forever springs had affected Lucy Claffey, as one time she prayed that the promised beauty of religion might glorify her. Yet she could not find the same provocative majesty in contemplation of the Hereafter, or in God’s works apparent. The teachings were favorable, they had value; they did not choke her throat as she was choked when she beheld brown-chocolate pads of water plants motionless on silent pools. . . . She went on beneath pines, down nearer the frogs. She was safe here from insult or intrusion, from any ugliness which her menfolks suggested might result from the proximity of a disordered ignorant undisciplined soldiery. In memory she was reminded of the night when she had flown from her room, the white long-ago moonlight when she ran with Deuce the setter, and—yes—she had told her father of that recollection many months before. They laughed about it, then they went on to the cottage where Laurel Tebbs lay. Remembrance came gasping. Lucy closed her eyes momentarily and put her left hand against a tree to steady herself, to draw sustaining quality from the ardent life of that tree. She remembered clearly the dreadful room, the girl with puffed face, the misery. She remembered how she applied the muscles of her hands to squeeze alum, with mortar and pestle . . . and there was the business of the syringe, the tall stooped man with queer face . . . how she had grown to love that face!—then and there, amid that very intrusion, the shared intimacy. It was an act symbolic of the dangers and disgust of the act of love when love was perverted into cruelty. Thus people were made into beasts; some of them might not wash off the stain. Lucy prayed in her heart that the color of that memory would be washed in time from Laurel’s parched little spirit. Then the young girl might find such magnificence as overwhelmed Lucy now. It was a magnificence of soul and body intermingled.

She invoked forces of generosity, she wanted all women to share a joy that burst within her like the great verdant pain of Nature itself.

Did my mother feel that way when she was carrying me?

Carrying. Odd word, for the mite must be so tiny—but a bare speck, a speck.

Human, and therefore of God.

Of the Heavenly Kingdom. There is a Heavenly Kingdom here on earth. It’s embraced me, it stretches before.

In a thicket a cardinal grosbeak danced amid those twigs which would hold him. He was wearing mating colors redder than raw flesh, showing zest which was in him until the eyes hurt beholding as his song came out, sometimes squeezed, sometimes spilled free and loose, he was aflame with song. He knew every flute and lute and played them. He piped on intimate pipes other males might not handle, blew a whistle other males might not know how to blow. You did not need to remember his song consciously; because it stayed, suspended in air, after he had whisked to last burning in other thickets.

Magnolias’ steady green, back at the place, back at the place.

Before too long our child may run beneath them.

Other children may run.

...Am I wrong? She prayed, Am I doing a wicked thing in worshipping the power of woods and of winds, power of the sexes? Is it disproportionate, my intense savoring of these matters? Should I not set my mind more acutely upon the matter of Godliness for my child to come? What am I—pantheist, hedonist?

Her soul laughed even while the original strictness of conventional early teaching was rejected. She had rejected it first in lying with Harry. She could not tell which she loved the more: the original experience, or the recollection and frequent repetition thereof. A spectacle of bereavement and war stood taunting, accusing also; but it had been there before, been there long, it was so wide-spread as to have become meaningless.

...What of the South, what of my State? Poppy says we are going down so fast. Why do I not cringe and cry, give myself up to perpetual weeping because of the youth I loved as a girl, the brothers I knew and loved and lost, the mother who went to ruin in dismal fashion? Yet those people are no longer thick around me, they do not persist. It is almost as if they never existed in fact, but are now become legend. Duty and respect and affection will cause me to teach them to the children borne in my body, once they are born from my body, once they have their growing wits, prankish hands, fond eyes turning gladly to me for what sustenance I may give.

It has been so long-drawn a conflict, so degrading and caustic a war.

How many other wars have there been?

I cannot recite history, I do not wish to parrot knowledge previously gained.

I fear there will be more wars.

Yea, but there will be women alive then, as well as men. Strangely they may emerge from doom with lips still able to love, wombs still eager to receive the seed pulsed into them. Yea, I know this to be true.

True as God.

A blinding thought struck her. Perhaps this
is
God. These matters are what
make
God.

She turned and floated back toward the plantation. Feel like I’d been to church, she told herself. And how Uncle Dayto might knit his brows over such an affirmation!

A squeaking undercurrent of tiny unidentifiable birds—warblers, no doubt—hid ahead among mats of vines, danced their way north as she came on. Soon she would reach the black people’s cabins, the dark life of blacks flowing. She would pause and appreciate the garden, look at bright lettuce; she would appreciate even crinkled leather of old collards standing tall beyond. There would be her flowers (she had so little time to spend with them). Yet perennials were hearty . . . there would be japonicas to dazzle. She would take a single japonica to put before Harry’s plate, and say that she had found not a violet, and hoped that someday he would fetch violets to her.

Here, she thought. Her hand went up to touch the fine-spun hair. He loved me here, loved me and my hair. He has worshipped and gladdened my lips, nostrils. His strong fresh male tongue has played its game with the curl of my ear. My breasts, he has known them, will know them again. Our child will know them, more children to come will know them. And that other holy warm glistening orifice of my body—that province which we women guard as we would guard all— He has known that, occupied it well. He will know it again. Oh, dear God in Heaven—again, again. One day there will be a mighty pain, and the child shall emerge. Then my dear one may know me again . . . know me long, know me while life continues to run.

I have never set myself to be a prophet. Now I burn unseen incense in my ritual, cry my prophecy: this local ugliness shall cease. Shortly the last scarecrow columns will come dragging from the gate; wagons will freight out the last of the dead, wagons freight the last of the living. I’ll be given a glory. To me will be awarded power of the conquering rescuing army.

Sakes alive, I shouldn’t desire the power of
Yankees
! Yet I shall hold it, and with it release those cords which have bound a burden to the back of my brave dear one: a horny thorny pack of stench and wickedness will slip from his shoulders, twill thud and be forgotten. We’ll love and cry and weep for joy and relief when it falls.

Sounds of the ragged forest fell behind her. I must know Nature better, she thought, far better than I do. For there’s urgency waiting, the urgency of teaching my children.

Yet she knew that she might love Nature less if she knew her better. For, like the capricious woman Nature was, a portion of her enfolding charm lay in mystery.

Far overhead the pines were saying Hush in a determined admonition whenever long high wind moved against them.