Andersonville (68 page)

Hey, wait there. This one he got pretty good pants.

You nigs step lively. Take them pants off outside, not here! I want my supper.

They grumbled between themselves, but went on with the loading.

Said the guard, You got a full load. They were in the act of lifting the thing next to Eric. It was dark. Eric began to tighten his arms and legs and neck muscles and back muscles, he began to stiffen his toes and fingers.

Ain’t but two more to go, Mastah Guard.

Oh. Step lively. . . .

Big paws grasped Eric’s upturned naked feet and dragged him forward. More big paws went scraping under his shoulders and sank hurtfully into his armpits; yea, he was rigid, he was rigid, they were tormenting him, he bit his tongue, it seemed that he must squeak, cry out, confound them into thinking he had come alive, get rid of their clasping, he’d never thought that they’d try to tear a corpse apart.
Hoy.
They swung him back and forth.
Hoy,
they said together on the second swing; and
hoy!
they cried in unison at the termination of the third swing, and he went sailing. Let go my stiffness, he thought in terror as he rose through the air, and then his head struck the head of a corpse atop the load; it struck a fraction of a second before his feet came down on the pile. Eric was knocked senseless. Just one quick burst of light, a sound to go with it. Nothing after that.

When he recovered consciousness he was in the deadhouse and his face was bloody, and he didn’t know where he was, but he was in the deadhouse. Could a man bleed after death, if his nose had been smashed? Eric had bled; he thought for a time that he was dead; maybe he was dead; he was cold, he had never been so cold before, the cold was through and all around him, it emanated from the cold dead, the earth was cold underneath, the air was cold above, Eric was cold, the dead were cold, all the world cold, all the world dead.

If ever he walked in the world of men again, he would tell that world how the dead smelled. They smelled like a dog run over by a beer wagon, and it crawled into a narrow space between two houses just off Houston Street, and there it lay whimpering unheard and unsought and unwanted for a day or two, rotting even before the rot of unliving flesh began. Eric went into that place after a ball he had tried to catch but had missed, and so he smelled the dog four days after it died, and he had to pick up the grimy ball lying beside the grimy dog. These Andersonville dead smelled like that. They were the reek of privies and corruption found in oozing drainpipes, they were the garbage box, the neglected fallen greasy flakes in gutters of fish markets, they were the greasy water put into an old bottle and stoppered and left in the sun (the boys whom Eric knew used to make bombshells like that, to throw at each other in warfare of their gangs; they called the bottles stink-bombs). The dead were old vomit, old bandages, old pus. They had no decency about them, they thought they were sainted and needed not to yield to manners required of men who were not dead. The dead breathed decay from lungs no longer breathing, and their lung cavities were putrid but they were cold. They had no fire or flame or query or statement about them; they lay grinning in beards and hayrick hair, their tongues were thrust out sometimes, their mouths were split open and tongueless sometimes, the fluid ran from their mouths sometimes, the fluid ran from other orifices of their bodies sometimes, the breath of their death went into soil on which they lay, and colored the cold air on either side of them, and it ascended in a noxious weighty metallic cloud above them, and the cloud was cold, and the people who made it were doughy and cold, and they were dead.

Baleful in their silent mockery of him, it was as if the very silence which they created laughed along with their smaller individual silences. No more to do a thing any child or man-grown object had ever desired or earned—never to make the sound or speak the word or hear the sound; never, never to dream. In weak and stricken dread of this motionless herd, Eric Torrosian reconstructed their lives in the same fashion in which his own life had been poured: he shaped their existences so. Never to taste furry red wine from a stone bottle, never to eat an egg (ah, he had been fond of hens’ eggs) and never to eat the pickled herons’ eggs which he had tasted once. . . .

The long Springfield with its proud eagle on the lock: never to clean it again, never to bite off the cartridge paper, never to abrade fingers with the crisp fine sandpaper bent as a polishing cloth. Nor to march, nor to suck boiling brown coffee from a blackened tin cup. Nor to fight in a street fight, and roll across stones, and drive your elbow against another’s belly, and hear him yip in his hot squirming as you fought. All these things the corpses had renounced, and Eric loathed them for it, because in silent conclave they were censuring him for even remembering such events, and for wishing to relive them. . . . Never to walk a street and see white-tanned-stoutly-patched sails rising at the end of the street between brick buildings, and to hasten, hasten for fear of missing closer sight of the ship as it pushed the Hudson waters aside. Never to make torn wisps of wastepaper into a ball for a kitten to play with, never to watch the kitten propelled upward by invisible springs in its feet, to see it somersault delightedly with the paper wad caught between mossy-striped paws. Never to rub a dog’s warm ribs until you found the Magic Place, and then, when you had found the Magic Place and while you were scratching it rapidly, you’d see the dog’s foot beat mechanically in air as if he too were scratching the Place, and so you laughed and called it Magic. These matters were not agreeable to the dead. They scorned these matters, and gave out, in one solid and crippling stench, the verdict of their disapproval.

They refused also, these dead, to ever more carry great bales of rugs upon their shoulders, to ever more gaze past the bright curtains of eating-house windows and envy the well-to-do who sat before their porter and oysters, their beer and bread and pigeon breasts and lemonade and cod.

To heave rocks at sparrows shooting past, to be afraid of a priest because he might lecture or thump you, to hear a woman’s voice teaching softly beside the warm stove, and with waxy smell of candles in your nose— To hear the woman’s voice buried in the long ago, separated from this moment by trivial and crabbèd years, but coming out stronger as the scent of candles continued—

To hear her teaching,
Zu Betlehem geboren—

Your voice.
Zu Betlehem geboren—

Ist uns ein Kindelein—

Your voice.
Ist uns ein Kindelein.

The dead would have none of it, never, never. They would abolish all treasure great and small, they would abolish pleasure, and assuredly they would abolish the rite of pain. They had voted to do so.

To read a tale and feel your fancy drift, to walk with Little John, to draw a stronger bow than Friar Tuck himself, to be bored with Rollo and his cousin James, to wheel the thick blade of Marmion . . . they said No, they said, We will not do it, they said, We decline and refuse. Sternly. Forever. And they said also, We renounce the right to creep into rich houses, rug-laden and awed, and sit small and dusky and self-effacing on a bench in the hall while the old man is explaining about rugs to a rich dame in her parlor, and to marvel at polished mirrors and embossed walls with purple ladies playing tag under green trees.

Nor would the dead approve of rioting over a dumping ground, and bringing up forgotten wealth from beneath the layers of soaked straw and barrel-staves. Clock weights they would not discover, nor the pestle minus its mortar, nor the brass false teeth so colorfully green in corrosion, nor the torn corset nor the horse-collar with a rat’s nest inside and baby rats peeping. . . . Nor would the dead countenance a solid click of billiard balls, smells of cigar smoke, the rich ferocious male laughter, the small voice saying, Paper, sir? Paper? . . . Click of billiard balls, the odor of peanuts being chewed, broadcloth buttocks bulging up beside green tables, the deep hearty frightening male laughter.

Gone always, gone completely, never to be tolerated. The dreams lonely but enfolding . . . waking at night with nothing but your youth and the creamy lust of youth to keep you company . . . ah, vision . . . ladies appearing again, with the satin rustle in which they always tread, the imagined French scents in which they’ve dipped themselves, the delicate foot protruding coyly cased in its shiny slipper . . . and what is this? You are privileged: she has accepted you, this golden creature here, here,
here,
she has flung over all standard of deportment, she has gone wicked, she is a pure woman but also a strumpet; invitingly she draws up her gown to reveal the delicacy underneath, she is begging you to roll and tussle and lose yourself for eternity in the lacy lake of her female state . . . power of her prettiness rules you in hidden imagined rapture until once more you are weak and exhausted, and you lie spent, and no doubt will be a maniac soon, barred, groveling in a cage.

The illusions of Eric Torrosian flared for minutes only, but they were numerous, they ruled him hard. Leaden, chill and stiff as sticks, the dead knew secrets but the secrets were secrets concerning a business of rot and dripping.

From them now he would run away. Eric climbed to his feet. The deadhouse . . . he was beyond the stockade, he was in the deadhouse made of pine boughs, he’d heard of the place, now he would go retching out. He had no blanket to cover him longer; even those skimpy tatters had been taken from him by Negroes while he lay insensible, and in their ignorance they thought he was dead.

He went staggering into the night and walked directly in front of a terrified guard. The man lifted his piece, fired, shot Eric Torrosian through the chest. At that close range the musket’s charge tore a great chunk out of the boy’s heart and it dangled behind his broken rib as he fell.

Eric did not witness pine flames which burned above his glazing eyes, nor hear the speculations voiced. A record of the event was noted down, and Eric Torrosian was carried back into the deadhouse, where he was welcomed by chuckling unvoiced, unheard, but still the chuckling was there; and the ground was cold, cold, cold, and now everyone in the place was dead, and soon Eric also was as cold as the others, an accepted member of their fraternity.

 XLI 

W
illie Mann was determined not to drink water; drink water he would not, unless personally God awarded it to him as from rainclouds, as from dew condensing. People said, Rain is in the air, sometimes; and those were the times when Willie Mann heard them, and tried to pretend that he didn’t hear the people because they might take advantage of his idea, which was somehow to suck rain out of the air before it broke loose in form of orthodox globules to be wasted, spraying or hammering against soil which could never absorb or appreciate rain, against men who were only chilled or killed by its coming.

Willie Mann, Twenty-ninth Missouri Volunteers, came into the stockade shortly before the six raiders were hanged. Thus he witnessed a big man breaking free from a mass, a core of blackened faces and striving thin arms half naked and half ragged; he saw that man plunging at a loose long pace all the way down the slope and into the marsh next to the Island. Willie saw what that marsh was made of; in his innocence he had not dreamed of its construction when first he arrived; he thought that the bad smell came sole alone from those bodies which supported those faces which stared and yelled and called him and his fellows fresh fish. He thought with tears spreading inside to drown him—he thought that these eviscerated cannibals or whatever they were— He thought that they were jeering and taunting; whereas mainly they were giving him a rowdy grim welcome filled with curiosity and a certain envy because he had not been compelled to suffer as they had suffered. But now he would suffer.

The stench had been their stench, in Willie’s first diagnosis, but a bulk of it was the stench of Stockade Creek and ooze surrounding. He gazed, he couldn’t believe it, after Curtis ran away and plunged until he was mired waist-deep, and Nathan Dreyfoos waded in after him. Also, when Willie Mann heard that the tallest of the condemned was named Willie Collins it brought a dread kinship with the captured ringleader. He tried to tell himself that there must be hundreds of Willies walled in here, and so he should not be absurd about it; but that night he dreamed fiercely of the monster . . . gallows stood on the southern hill’s shoulder, and when planks were knocked loose and when (never tell Katty or Ma what happened then!)— When at last all six stretched shapes hung gyrating leisurely from their ropes, there seemed a dark completeness, a finality to the course of his initiation. Willie Mann was now a full-fledged prisoner with a parched tongue. One of the executed men had, in his unknowing way, helped to parch that tongue by once trying to walk on substance unsuited to man’s support. He was not Jesus, not even an exaggerated cartoon of a wicked overgrown Jesus born in a sinkhole instead of in a manger; so he had tried to walk upon the stuff, and had gone down. Willie Mann wandered once more to stare at the place.

He witnessed prisoners floundering or creeping—senior prisoners of vast stockade experience but apparently with no sensitivity. He saw them with their cups and chunks of broken canteen material. They sought water and found it. It was putrid thick ink, and they called it water. It was the oil of corruption, the wine from dying human bowels, the lively acid of iniquity, and they dared to call it water. It was a soup rising from wet invisible wells drilled by the Devil himself, and stewed out of festering meatbones and rotting bits of cloth, corncobs, abandoned corn bread, the fresh tanned floating strings of firm healthy excrement which came borne on narrow tide from habitations of guards outside the jagged fence, the watery yellow slime drained from dysenteric hordes inside the jagged fence. A million million million worms worked in its borders, a black frosting of insects clung above and busy. These debased fellows of Willie Mann’s were willing to voice the evilest lie of all, and say Water.

Maybe they had never known true water, but Willie had. To begin with, the well of his family on the edge of the tiny Missouri village where he was born— This well was famous in the neighborhood. It served four families including the Manns, and Willie’s father said that the more the well was used the better he liked it. Doctor Zachary Mann was a slender solemn fellow with a sparse beard and mild brown inquiring eyes. His dappled mare Annette and his pale duster and his chaise with tall mended wheels: all were familiar to the entire northern end of the county and in southerly regions of the county above. When Doctor went to some farmhouse and found three or four children staring with fever (maybe one might be dead before he arrived) Doctor Zach Mann lingered eventually at the farm well. He noted the site where it was dug, he brought up water and held it to the light in a glass, he sniffed, sometimes he tasted wryly and spat the water out again and rinsed his mouth with some liquid carried in his own satchel. People said that Doctor Zach was foolish on the subject of water; but no one of the eight Mann children died in infancy. In this case it seemed that the shoemaker’s children had shoes.

Willie’s elder brother Sam had been killed at Wilson’s Creek or else in a skirmish immediately preceding the battle—no one knew which, or could find out for certain—so Willie begged to go to the war in a manner of vengeance. Not until you’re eighteen, said Doctor. You got your mother to see after, if Annette should be scairt by the cars and run away with me.

Of course fat Annette had never run away in the thirteen years of her life, and probably never would run away; but the doctor was a determined father, and he extracted his promise. Willie did not know how to deceive because he had never been taught nor had he suffered the example.

The week before his eighteenth birthday—that was the same week they heard the news about Vicksburg—recruiters came to the county seat, and Willie begged to go to the courthouse and sign the roll.

You’re not eighteen. You promised—

But I’ll be eighteen a Sunday.

Wait till then.

Want me to leg it all the way to Saint Louis and maybe join up with a batch of foreigners?

Doctor debated in his mind, and at last arose from the tattered sofa (Linda Moberly’s baby had been slow, and it took all night, and they nearly lost both the baby and Linda, but everything seemed all right now). He told Willie to hitch up Annette and not say anything to Ma. Silently they drove the five miles to the courthouse, Doctor dozing beside his one surviving son. When they pulled up along the shiny hitch-rail with its little strings of horse-hair caught in the polish of horses’ rubbing, Doctor opened his eyes alertly as if he hadn’t been asleep actually any of the time.

Well, sonny, go in and sign.

Willie came back, pale-faced and beaming—he came down from the courthouse three steps at a time, and nearly landed on top of old Mr. Cull Calice, who remembered Indian attacks on that very spot, and had actually shaken hands with Daniel Boone though he always spoke of him as Colonel Boone.

Did you sign, sonny?

Yup. But it’s all right, Pa—I mean about me being eighteen. I hain’t got to report until a Monday, and I’ll be eighteen by then.

They drove home slowly; on the way Doctor stopped to dress the stump of Mr. Rector’s finger at the cottage by the sawmill; and he stopped also to peek in at the exhausted Linda Moberly and her baby girl. When he came out he said, Sonny, I don’t want you ever to take up doctoring.

Don’t reckon I will. Rather be a soldier or work on a railroad. But why?

Might vaunt yourself pridefully, and get puffed up.

How so, Pa?

Hard to explain. Way a doctor gets to feel sometimes. Not maybe like God, but like the dear Lord’s little finger.

Up over the next green hills the weary Annette took them along, making hungry sounds inside her round empty belly, making louder sounds from her rear. They passed the abandoned Gentry house . . . Mr. Dolph Gentry had Rebel tendencies, and had left the county long before. They passed their next-door neighbors, the Garshows; and also Paul and Silas Garshow were wearing gray, and were said to be off fighting in General Sterling Price’s army somewhere. It was funny and awful how the neighborhood was split up, and so were a lot of other neighborhoods in Missouri.

Anyway, I got old Garshow to move his well.

What say, Pa?

There—you can see it gainst the west.

He pointed with his whip. That’s the new well: fine high curb, and observe where she stands. Under that cottonwood, high and convenient. But down the slope’s where they had the old well; just lazy because twas a low spot, and they figured twas easier to reach water so. Tweren’t more than six foot deep, I swear. And just go up amongst them cedars sometime—when you come home from the fighting, I mean—and count them graves. Seven Garshows and five of the inlaws, the Teddlers.

All from a rotten well, Pa? Could that be?

Could be.

First off that night, after they had broken the news to Ma and the five girls (Addie was newly married and moved away) Willie went along the edge of the oatfield behind the barn, he went in thin plum-purple light of a hot evening in Missouri (although he had never seen evenings in any place other than Missouri at that time). He went to call upon Miss Katrine Fiedenbruster.

The Fiedenbrusters had moved to the region only four or five years previously; they had come from Germany by way of St. Louis where Jake Fiedenbruster had been a thrifty shoemaker, but now he wanted to be a farmer and was one. The kids at school made fun of the little Fiedenbrusters because at first they spoke only a few words of English and those badly . . . it was during the winter term. Willie was not yet fourteen at the time, and very slight; but he was muscular from hard work, and also he liked to wrestle with his big brother Sam. Well, he was coming home through soggy snow, and he heard shrieks ahead. He looked and saw all the little Fiedenbrusters running and crying and yelling in German. It turned out that big Ame Moberly had ambushed them, and Ame wasn’t merely playing Indian: this was a real devilish ambush he had arranged. In advance he’d prepared ammunition consisting of snowballs soaked and then frozen; the missiles were stony and dangerous. He’d hidden behind the low crab-apple trees at the corner, and when the contingent of foreigners came by in their blue knitted woolen winter caps and scarfs, he up and opened fire. It was a mean business—snowballing girls, especially with frozen balls—but Ame did have a mean streak in him. (No more, though: he was killed in the attack on Fort Donelson.)

All of a sudden it came over Willie: what would his father have done?—truly he worshipped his father. Well, he figured that Doctor would have lit into Amos Moberly, so that was what Willie did now. Ame was whooping and dancing and running after the wailing Germans, and then stopping to heave another accurate snowball, and then he’d yell, Why don’t you talk
decent
? and then another ball and another shriek. Then Willie hit him like a cat off a limb; they were in the snow. Standing up, using fists solely, Ame might have thrashed Willie to a jelly, but on the ground the slighter boy held an advantage, after all those tussles with tall Sam. It was a bitter fight, however—gouge and punch and twist and choke. At least Ame was bent on choking in defense. But Willie brought his boot up against Ame’s belly, good and solid; after that there was no fight left in the bigger boy—nor any wind, either.

The Fiedenbrusters stood like a gallery, watching, fearing, appreciating the virtues of their savior. Finally when Ame got his breath back, he went off homeward across the old stubble field, refusing to look back because he was ashamed of being beaten, and even more ashamed at his own crying. He wouldn’t speak to Willie for weeks and weeks; but at last they became moderately friendly at a church supper in the spring; and certainly Amos never plagued the Fiedenbrusters again.

The day after the fight, Willie found a pink-streaked winter apple in his lunch bucket, and his mother hadn’t put it there: he’d watched her preparing his and his sisters’ lunches, while he leaped with impatience for fear Teacher would catch them with the tardy bell. Next day, some spicy heart-shaped cookies of a kind he’d never seen or tasted before. He saw Katrine Fiedenbruster watching him, and then her face turned red when she saw that he saw her watching him; she turned away quickly. But next day, more soft gingery cookies. It would have been easy for her to slip things into his lunch bucket undetected. All the buckets and baskets stood in a row on the long bench in the cloak room. . . . Willie realized suddenly how very pretty Katrine Fiedenbruster really was. Her skin was creamy white, her little cheeks were round as cookies but soft as fresh-stirred candy, her neck reminded him of ice cream. Suddenly he thought that he would like to eat Katrine Fiedenbruster—actually eat her up, and how good she would taste—and then he was overcome with embarrassment at having entertained such a thought . . . and he thought of other things that he would like to do to and with her; his face flamed behind his McGuffey . . . he made a botch of lessons on that day. But he made a great to-do about shoveling slush off the path for old Mr. Spriggs, after school, and his sisters went home without him, prepared to tell Ma how Willie had declared in geography class that Prussia was the capital of Russia. The Fiedenbruster tribe went home without Katrine, because she was the eldest girl and now partook of a special fifteen-minute lesson in English which Mr. Spriggs awarded because for some reason he declared that she was a noble little Dutchwoman, and pinched her cheeks and made them even pinker.