Andersonville (39 page)

...The deadline! He said either My God or Mother—those closest could not tell which words he uttered, or whether it was only a discordant mumble of M-sounds. Chickamauga adjusted his crutches, bent down deliberately and placed his hand on the scantling. In a tumbling tilting maneuver he got his crutches over the scantling, and used them as vaulting poles to hop his left leg across. He stood poised on forbidden ground.

You damn fool son of a bitch, get out from that deadline! the superintendent screamed.

Chickamauga faced him. No, I won’t, he said more distinctly than he said most things. Not unless you take me Outside.

Wirz swore in German and drew his revolver. Come out, or I kill you dead.

Then kill me, God damn it.

Light was spreading behind Chickamauga’s tight-shut eyes, light was battering with a sound against his brain. That’s what you want to do, a voice rang at him, and not a voice from any human. It said, Stay. It said, They’ll never dare shoot you. They’ll let you go Outside.

He spoke again, with something close to clarity, I won’t come out unless you promise—

Wirz took aim, then lowered the weapon. He turned his thin bearded face upward and began to berate the sentry. My job is to keep these damn Yankees, never to shoot them, you lazy, you! Your job it is to do that. That Yankee is inside the deadline. Shoot him!

The sentry was a sixteen-year-old from the Twenty-sixth Alabama named Ben Drawhorn. Had he been one of the Fifty-fifth Georgia, Chickamauga would have been dead in a twinkling; but the Alabamans were schooled to hold their fire better than the Georgians. Ben held his old Queen Anne musket, it was loaded with buckshot, the muzzle went from side to side and up and down in an extravagant circle.

I can’t shoot that man, Captain—

I fix you, you bad sentinel, you! Now (to the prisoners closest to Chickamauga) you get that damn cripple out from that deadline! You I will not shoot! Wirz put away his revolver.

Promptly fellow prisoners dragged Chickamauga back to safer territory despite his struggles and strident protestation. Wirz was at the gate, he was beating and hallooing to have the portal swung, and slowly the hinges began to squeal. Wirz rode out with intent to discipline the reluctant boy on the parapet, the private who had disobeyed an order from a captain.

Look at that bastard.

A solitary voice said it, and then there came a dozen concerted yells mingled with laughter. Chickamauga had crept back inside the deadline, once hands released him, and while all attention was directed to the exit of Henry Wirz.

Again the white-faced boy lifted his Queen’s-arm. It was one of the ancient pieces altered for percussion. His act, as well as the hullabaloo within the stockade, told Wirz what had happened.

He screamed beyond the wall. If that damn bitch cripple is again in the deadline— Shoot him! Shoot, damn you, like I command you shoot!

Chickamauga was a good three yards within the line. No man could reach him to draw him out without exposing himself to that musket.

People understood him to say with stubbornness, I want to go Outside. There’s some bad folks—

Young Ben Drawhorn stood with open mouth and bowed shoulders, but he was aiming the musket. He pulled the trigger. The cap did not explode.

God damn you! They heard Wirz’s boots clumping on the ladder outside. I come up there and show you—

The explosion of the powder charge interrupted his cry. Ben Drawhorn had re-cocked his musket and this time the cap did not misfire. The buckshot tore Chickamauga’s lower jaw into a loose red spray and went deep inside him, to rest in his breast somewhere. He fell, jaw-less, blood spurting wide. Up on the sentry’s platform Ben Drawhorn dropped the musket and staggered back with both hands forced against his face, covering his eyes, but if he exclaimed no one heard him. Wirz soon appeared beside him on the box; he scarcely glanced down at the fallen Chickamauga, but instead began a violent accusation of the silently sobbing boy.

Someone called up, Can we carry him out? and Wirz told them to go ahead. They picked up Chickamauga and bore him off a little way, and then put him down to die. Though he could not speak without that lower jaw, his tongue was still active, and waved violently as he tried to talk. People wondered later what he would have liked to have said. On the whole there was little regret at his passing, but men laughed about that stoutly wagging red tongue in its crimson nest. It haunted some of the more sensitive in their sleep and for long.

 XXII 

I
t had been early in May that Ebe Dolliver, the Iowa bird-lover, first munched a ration of cooked bread. This came about a day or two after certain men were detailed to go Outside as bakers. The prisoners looked for a grand improvement in their rations as a result, but did not find it. As the novelty of a loaf instead of loose meal wore off, they realized that cobs were being ground along with the corn, and that the resulting cake was nearly as hard as hickory and scratched a man’s bowels to the quick as material passed through. People complained in communication to folks Outside, and the reply came back that the Outside men’s job was not to grind the corn, only to mix paste and bake the pones. In grinding quantities sufficient (or insufficient) to feed twelve thousand prisoners many cobs found their way among the kernels through accident, more through carelessness on the part of stupid blacks and shiftless whites, and still more through deliberate criminal neglect. From being a wealth and a much-sought-after currency, which the bread was at first, it changed to garbage. People went around with the stuff in their pockets, offering to trade; there were few takers among the old prisoners, but some among new ones until they became prison-wise.

You began to find slabs of uneaten corn pone among personal effects of the dead. Soon you began to see chunks of the stuff lying outside doors of shebangs—unwanted, cast aside. Wood was a treasure compared to bread, for you could cook other things over wood if you could secure other things to cook. The character of the morass along Stockade Creek changed in color; it was no longer composed solely of feces and organic slime; there was now a brownish yellowish crust, a flotsam of corn bread in every stage of spongy decay. Great metallic flies, frightening in burnished brassy armor, whirled above with a humming louder than bees. Some few prisoners might have had bowels of iron: they ate the stuff stoically, it did not rake their insides, the blood did not appear.

In revulsion from this stony ration, Eben Dolliver considered meat. Adjusted to the protraction of his starving, he did not beguile himself with discussion of Moon Hotel dinners and the like—with thoughts of his mother’s marble cake, fresh baked hermits, apple salad. Meat appeared as a medicine in his ideal, meat might have been bottled or put into pills, it might have rested in huge ornamented jars, well stoppered, on the shelves of some apothecary. Ebe tried to count the varieties of meat he had known, and sometimes in the middle of the night he thought of a new variety to add to his list. He tried to make up a hundred sorts of flesh which he had eaten in his young life, and was well on his way toward that goal. At first he said only pork, beef, lamb and the like, but soon recognized how different they were. Bacon was quite another thing from sausage, ham hocks were not to be confused with pork chops. Yet all came from the same beast. Eben argued with himself in detached philosophy on the subject, and at last yielded to his own importuning. Every variety of pork should be counted, and so with other products of other beasts. A catfish was not like a bass, nor was a wild goose like a tame chicken.

(Strangely he had never objected to killing chickens, and had killed many at his mother’s behest. He did not think of poultry as being birds: they were filthy and cannibalistic in their habits, they did not sing a dainty song, they did not enliven the hazel brush with miraculous flashes of blue and rose. They were wedded to the dirty ground where they fed, and he loathed their squawking; he was willing to kill them, for they were not a free wild glory which lifted him.)

The Moon Hotel mess clustered still in brotherhood, they tried to keep to their rules. Their effort at bathing was become a sorry thing. Hull of Michigan and Mendenhall of Pennsylvania were gone into scurvy: the linings of their mouths puffed and spotted, cords hurting in their legs. Still they made an attempt to speak cheerfully, to join in weak choruses. Everyone had heard the stories and anecdotes of the rest over and over again; yet now and then a man thought of something new to tell.

Mendenhall thought suddenly of a neighbor of his, a fat bachelor who did not have all his reason and was the butt of jokes. The man’s name was Johnny Jober; tales of Johnny, told in Mendenhall’s best Pennsylvania German style, enlivened the mess for days. The boys would say, Let’s hear it again, Mendy. Tell about Chonny Yober and how he put the shingles on his roof upside down. I like to split over that one. So Mendenhall would gather strength and tell again . . . the neighbor sat in his wagon and called to Johnny on the roof and said, Hey, ain’t it you put on them shingles ass backward? And how Johnny sat and gazed at the whole of that shed roof he’d shingled, starting at the ridgepole instead of along the eaves, and how he burst into tears and how he said—

People lay in shade of the shebang, tittering at these fine new stories of Chonny Yober, the stronger men breaking out with guffaws at the proper time. Other prisoners arose and came near, staring mutely, as if wondering what all the laughter was about, and yet not really caring. They drifted away slowly to be replaced by other mute watchers. The shuttle of this vagabond audience wove itself back and forth, flies hummed and bit, the blistering yellow stench of May sun was high. A wave of heat stole up to distort the looming fence and sentry stations, to turn them watery.

Often Ebe Dolliver drifted loose in thought from broken accents of Mendenhall’s recounting; he went off alone in his mind to dream of meat. Once, at play in the woods, he and little Neri had killed a groundhog; they had butchered the creature and cooked it over a small fire, trying to live like wild men or outlaws in hiding. Had he counted the groundhog among his meats? He thought he had; maybe not. That would make eighty-three varieties of flesh, if he hadn’t counted groundhog previously. Eighty-two, eighty-three. . . . Had he counted the last buffalo killed in their section when he was a little tad? Roll Brewer gave a chunk of the meat to Joth Dolliver as he came past the mill. Ebe remembered how they gathered round when the roast was removed from the baking pan—rare lean meat looked like gigantic rare beef but more orange in color; the fat was yellower than beef fat. . . .

Forever, in time, he wandered to the birds. When wearied of enumerating medicinal meats, Eben found ease in following a ground-robin. He had heard that towhee was also a name for this bird, perhaps a name given by the aborigines. Black-white-and-bay, the industrious little folk scratched their way among old leaves in a silent place. Eben had lain motionless and watched their coming . . . sometimes walking like hens upon the ground, but prettier and more delicate than hens . . . no sound but the watery trill of a fly-catcher hidden in some ravine, no other sound except light wind making poplars tremble their coins of leaves in pride, and the
ink, cheerink
made by ground-robins themselves as they gossiped.

Again he saw his first indigo bunting. . . . He sat on a special hill said to have been once a place of massacre; larks rose and descended and rose with spirit again, giving out their long fluting . . . more of them, more out in the grass, they played pipes across the boundary where an ear could still hear them; and then the ear lost strength to pick up their piping, but somehow a sleepy brain knew that they were practicing by multitudes in remoter pastures . . . their sound was a wonder, a promise of brave simple measures to be rippled Up Yonder . . .
or if on joyful wing, cleaving the sky . . . sun, moon and stars forgot, upward I fly.

He examined a catbird’s ragged nest, he saw the lettuce tint of eggs contained therein. (They looked like candied eggs in a grocery store jar.) He’d bound a handkerchief across his mouth, not to taint the catbird’s eggs so the mother would refuse to return; it told that one must do that in Our Feathered Friends, With Copious Illustrations. . . . Male redwings, polished like shoe leather with soot from the pot rubbed into it, redwings so black that they were silver in the morning as they swayed on reeds around a prairie slough. Their Quaker wives, wearing The Garb, more modest than sparrows. . . .

When Eben arrived at Andersonville there was still activity among the tousle of mutilated pine. He’d explored past stumps that first day, observing how the gum oozed from every cut. It had turned white, crystallized, flaky; he chewed some, but he wasn’t accustomed to it—too much taste of turpentine, so he spat it out. Small birds, some he knew, some he’d never seen before— They took wing, streaked away through air before Eben as he walked. Come back, stay with us, he said in his heart, with the enchantment of eerie high-going larger birds still fresh in memory—the unidentified northbound tribes he’d heard two nights previously. But the birds would not stay, prisoners frightened them, they went to live in less disturbed areas beyond the rectangular fence.

Through the remainder of springtime Eben heard their mating tunes, their early salute, one light instrument’s sound imposed on the trickle of a hundred others, many of them different. But now in May it was hot summer, a Georgia summer. Birds sang less, they sang little. If he’d had his precious telescope he might have spotted them and fetched them nigh to him again: there were many places on the North Side where you could see the outside fort at the southwest corner, and woods beyond that. On the South Side, near the South Gate, you could look across the fence where it dived toward the creek; you could see past the pine-roofed deadhouse, see smoke spilling up from the bake house, see guards and Outsiders trailing about their work, mule teams moving. Sometimes, oh sometimes, there shafted a blade of gold, an agate of whirring slate and white, the red speck which was a redbird. That was all Eben could see of gods and goddesses. His telescope had been stolen out of his knapsack in front of Vicksburg; never had he found the thief.

Eben Dolliver knew that his body had changed, but he did not feel an alteration of his spirit; only it seemed easier nowadays for his spirit to separate from the body and go hiking into underbrush which his corporeal shape was restrained from entering. Bell’s Woods, Bryan’s Woods, the single towering hill far north of Dolliver’s Mill which settlers called Mount Washington: Ebe could visit those places in turn or simultaneously as impulse directed. In those places he discovered painted buntings he had never glimpsed, the groove-billed ani of which he’d only read, mockingbirds he’d seen during his first Andersonville week on the one happy day when they were sent Outside under guard with axes in their hands. . . . Flights of passenger pigeons came to impress the Iowa groves with uncountable numbers when they roosted; but peculiarly they wore no longer the dove and peach colors of orthodox pigeons—they were as tropical immigrants, with blazing crests and the plumes of peacocks.

Eben sat with skeletal hands around his knobby knees, sat in shade furnished partially by the crazy quilt he’d cheated away from the Rebel, a quilt no longer crazy but patterned with dun in varying degrees. Exposed skin of his lank frame was pigmented with the pitch from burning oily wood, hardened in, baked in: it could not have been scrubbed away by soap of whatever strength; Eben would have needed to be flayed in order to be cleaned. His mop of pink hair hung stiff with dirt and twisted in a curl at the nape of his neck. His meager beard was a lichen spread over the weathered grime of his face. This was the afternoon of May twenty-fourth, a Tuesday.

Within a few minutes the more active prisoners went wild. They leaped into the air, they found stones to throw, and threw them, and the stones came down and struck other prisoners to their grief. They began capering with lengths of board or dry pine torn from walls of their shebangs; with these improvised cudgels they battered at space above their heads. Now and then there was uplifted a howl of triumph, and several men converged, scrambling on the ground, snatching at something; and then one man would rise, the obvious victor, waving something in his hand.

Birds had come. They were swallows, a multitude, planing low in any direction, giving out irascible cries. They came like bats past the guards loafing on the stockade’s rim and made the guards jump as wind of their passing brushed the guards’ faces. One swallow came alone, a dozen swept in a different direction to intercept his flight . . . now they spread and teetered in point-winged circles, so numerous in a given space that they must have broken themselves to bits and hatched a dozen new birds from each whirring fragment. High, aloft, squeaking, their pale swift breasts turned dark as their wings against the low motionless sun; then down to fairly comb the earth, and crowds gesticulating there and trying to kill them, and killing some. The birds’ wings clapped like limber scissors, their split tails were sharp as if drawn by pen and ink, the plumage of breasts and bellies was pearl when they came close, low. It was one of those convocations to which swallows are addicted under seasonable conditions; but no man might know why they had herded into this ugly place, and the swallows did not know.