Andersonville (83 page)

Dark, dark, dark. The dread, the stifling, the granules in the mouth, the ache of ill-nourished arms which seemed mouldering away even as they were employed. Judah Hansom lay pressed in a vise of the ground. The Adirondacks tumbled all the way down from York State to heap themselves on Rebel ground in Georgia, to effect extinction, the worst extinction if one of the quickest, the extinction of the squeeze, the extinction of the stamp and mashing.

A light snapped ice-white, glaring behind his eyes even as his tired paw hunted for the hoe.

That was it: the truth.

Now it was revealed.

He saw, he saw—he had reasoned it out.

Deadfalls. Traps made of logs. He’d made them often in the woods in winter, balancing heavy logs, trimming triggers and notches deftly so they’d never slip. How many creatures had he crushed beneath those logs? Pine martens, weasels galore, even a lynx . . . he’d sold the furs, he’d made money out of them; never should he have slain those animals, not in that way. Not with deadfalls. For this must be the wickedness because of which he was now commanded to be a lonely beetle.

The stockade of Andersonville was a deadfall log, balanced prettily above him, ready to drop.

Willie Mann crawled to relieve him, Willie closed his hand on Judah’s scabby ankle, and the perspiration was flowing anew.

Hey, Jude. Muffled voice booming stuffily.

Like I was under a deadfall.

What say?

Maybe a backlog. Like I told Benny . . . twould all be his, and now Aunt Annie’s gone too.

Hey, what you talking about?

Oh.

I got a drink for you. I got the canteen and bucket and bootlegs. Here you be. I’ll pass some up to you, and start filling back here. My, you done a sight. Lots of dirt.

Willie, I thought twas Eri’s turn down here.

He’s got running-off-of-the-bowels again. I’d rather do his chore myself than have him stinking everything up like he did the other day.

What time is it?

Six and after, hot as blazes still. Guard just shot a fellow in front of the Twenty-third station, clear over at the northeast corner. Everybody’s yelling about it. Wirz came up to the station.

Oh. Who’d he shoot?

They say it was a Michigander, I don’t know who. Here, I got water in your own cup. Harris fetched the bucket from the spring, and we all had a good swig. Sorry, but I reckon I spilt half of it a-crawling in.

Thankee.

Now I’ll get out to the well with these bootlegs, and you can back out after me. We’ll pass them up. Eri is holding the cord, if he hain’t gone to the sink. Somebody’s got the cord.

Air was shut off for awhile. I thought I was going to stifle. What happened?

Oh, couple of strangers came by, hunting for a man named Kennedy they thought was in your regiment. We were all sitting in front of the well, but we eased the overcoat across it just to be safe. They stayed about five minutes, but none of your comrades knew the man they wanted to find. Know him, Jude?

No. Could be he got captured after we did. It seemed longer’n five minutes.

Judah was shivering as he hitched himself out into the shaft and began to beat damply suspicious fresh dirt from his rags. They always did that before climbing to the top again. Thus far they believed that they had escaped the detection of informers. They were sly about their disposal of the dirt they hoisted up.

Judah was shivering, but it was the idea of the trap, the deadfall, the log pitching down, the tumbling Adirondacks, the power of a million tons of Georgia land coming down on him like a boulder squashing a grasshopper— It was this terror that ruled him. Willie Mann crawled to his job at the blacksnake’s head, and Judah Hansom went up to join tribes who had at least light if they did not have freedom.

As had occurred throughout all the long hot months, heat bred a fury. It was in a pattern so repetitious as to be unworthy of note. First, the sunset swaddled with dun metallic clouds, lightning twitching sickly behind them. Then a distant sound of lonely caravans, caravans traveling with heavy loaded wagons, and their trip was pursued down a pike of corduroy construction, hollow, hollow underneath . . . great wheels a-rumble, the ravine and slopes of the stockade unsteadied by rumbling. Then the beckoning of wind above the fence, the beckoning changing to power and malignancy, scooping lower in whirls and whorls, papers and ashes caught in the wind’s scope while thirty thousand rough male termagants began yelling with tonic of the wind which brought decent air to them for a moment (during most sunlit days no breeze moved between the walls, the stolid smell went aloft unbroken). They looked to props and fastenings of their huts, they hung onto scraps of overcoat, jacket, blanket, pine boughs; they hung onto their scraps of roofing material; but every now and then a chunk of clay-daubed chimney was blown free, or a loose leaf of Bible or a ragged leg-of-drawers went kiting on high, and showed black as a bat against the evening glare. Then, usually, rain hit them. Sometimes rain barely touched, and then lifted to assault another region; but more often it lingered to whip the people here. Guards turned up their ragged collars and hunched beneath sharp-sloped roofs of the sentry stations, but those high shacks offered little protection: soon the guards were as drenched as the men they watched.

To Judah, Willie, Old Bush, Eri, Lew and the rest, as they grubbed sporadically in turn—or to Judah and Willie as the responsibility of labor at their little mine’s face came more and more to the two of them—freshet or tempest or cyclonic garbage flapping above could make no difference.

We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noon day as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.

That was Isaiah, and the Missourian and the York Stater had mourned like doves and roared like bears, each in his time; they knew Isaiah; the verse recurred to them separately in their struggles.

But Job persisted more strenuously with Judah, for Judah’s bleak past life had been tinctured with the illusion of Job. He had thought it a compliment to any man to say, He has the patience of Job, and secretly had hoped that such compliment might in time be paid to himself.

Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.

Willie Mann had a grimness behind him, but there was music ahead. Judah had a grimness behind him and a grimness to go to. But still he thought of hills leading off to lakes and summits above West Canada Creek, he thought of the sound of a grindstone, he heard loons on one of those lakes, he felt his axe-blade sink cleanly into damp dressed wood, he saw the polished designs traced by God on a new chip as it lay prettily like a great coin.

Pelting through night the rain protracted, making gum of ground which had been gum before, recently, and would be gum consecutively again. Earth loosened, it was soaked sponge which amid the hours lost its spongy quality and dissolved into a paste as loose as cow manure. Dawn came gray, cooler than the dawn of yesterday; clouds were still soaked and soaking; at five-thirty o’clock, as time was told by the few watches still remaining to those hordes, no true light was discernible . . . clouds roosting above the eastern fence . . . barest hint of morning, perhaps imagined. At the bottom of the perpendicular shaft, knotted rags tightened once more in measurement, a new knot was counted.

Willie Mann came up with triumph in his shrunken face. He rubbed the colored spittle from his lips with a caked little hand, and his eyes were like pale brown buttons. Cracky, Jude. We ought to be under the stockade by now! Well past the deadline, at least.

How far do you make her?

Sixty-six feet, by cracky. Allowing for the curve in the slope, that’d bring her nigh the stockade or past.

Judah and Willie had saved their rations of bacon to eat for strength in the new day. Now they sat at the edge of the shebang, munching without more words for a while. The other York State men were spooned behind them (the rain had been unseasonably cold after the seasonable scorcher on the previous day, and men sought one another’s warmth). Over in Willie’s own shebang his comrades were still tented silently, none stirring. Close at hand Old Bush drove oxen in his sleep, as he did now with increasing fanaticism. Ho, he chirped, Bright . . . gee . . . he spoke to Bright more often than he did to the other ox of the team; apparently Bright had given him more trouble at home . . . gee, Bright!

Old Bush don’t sound able to go down, Jude.

Wouldn’t keep digging for more’n ten minutes if he did go. Tain’t his turn, anyway. Whose chore is it?

Willie pointed. Lew Ammons’s. But I reckon he’s over in our shebang all twisted up. He’s got the scurvy badly. I trust I don’t get it that badly.

They chewed the last pulp of raw pork; it was called bacon, it was nothing like bacon except that now and then you found brownish gristles of lean amid the curdled fat. You hunted it over for worms, and pulled out those worms you could see; then you shut your eyes and popped the pork into your mouth, and chewed and chewed to get it down, and it hurt to chew if your mouth was getting the way Willie’s mouth was getting.

Judah rose up on his haunches. I’ll go down.

No, no. You did one spell at six, another around ten.

That was only part of an hour whilst you went to the sink.

Then you did a full hour in the middle of the night. Two or three o’clock.

Finished up at three.

Jude, you’re doing a lion’s share and more than a lion’s share. There isn’t any call for you to dig the whole tunnel.

Judah set his wide thin jaw. I feel rested like.

I’ll go down myself.

What in tunket! You just finished your chore.

What about Eri?

Not till he gets over that looseness, if he ever does.

You can go for half an hour, said Willie with finality. Just let me take a breathing spell, and I’ll be down to spell you.

William, we got to keep digging while we got our strength. If we tarry too long, we won’t never get out.

I know. And I’m bound to get out.

So’m I.

That’s why we’re killing ourselves, Jude. But his fierce small face was grinning. We’ll make it, comrade. Just think of that: sixty-six feet!

Judah Hansom made his way into the tunnel and set to work. He moved the last disturbed earth left by Willie; he filled two bootlegs with it, and then he fell to with his twin spades, shaving at the tunnel’s face. He felt again, as perpetually, the dread of small space, close walls and roof, the pressure coming about him.

Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.

In the York State shebang, not in his own hut, Willie Mann stretched his brief narrow length and rested his cheek against his bony arm. Katty, are you there, are you somewhere?
Ja
. He liked to imagine that he heard her replying to him thus in a whisper; but he had forgotten what her whisper sounded like; he knew that she would often say
Ja
or
Nein,
but he couldn’t remember how she sounded when she said it.

Considerable disturbance began growing, over around the deadline and stockade to the west, and now the dawn was strong enough for one to see the pen in all directions, to see filmy figures moving in a thin slow shuttling mass among planes and angles of the shelters. It seemed to Willie that he had heard, remotely, some sort of thud and squeaking—the squeal of wood on wood as if one heavy timber trembled in sliding across another.

Considerable disturbance. Of course the prisoners always made a noise, but this was a noise of wonder and speculation; a good many men seemed peering and pointing. Willie braced himself on his elbows to watch. Suddenly he got up and ran toward his own shebang as fast as his sore joints would let him.

Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.

There came the Adirondacks, rolling upon Judah Hansom. The deadfall log was made of mountains, and he was the pine marten beneath. He recalled lovely golden tones of a fresh-killed frozen marten’s thick fur when he lifted the log which had crushed it.

Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day.

Judah in confusion observed a clear portrait, in memory, of Benny Ballentine. The portrait was clearer than a miniature painting, clearer than any type of photograph now prepared by modern methods: ambrotype, daguerreotype, wet-plate photograph, any modern thing he’d ever seen. Might get shot. But I didn’t, Benny, didn’t, never did get shot. What? Judah Hansom tried to speak to himself. What is this? What happened? In spite of the fears he’d hoarded, he was surprised to desperation . . . he heard his axe clanging as he stroked it, he heard a raven in fine fair winter woods ahead.

For now should I have lain still and been quiet. I should have slept: then had I been at rest.

Shoving dangerously near to the deadline, Willie Mann and lame Lew Ammons and a growing congregation from that section— All stood gazing up at the stockade. Two posts had pitched down and in—it was at a point perhaps a rod past the nearest sentry station—and rapidly sentry stations were thronged with more than their usual complement of guards. The two posts had dropped a yard or more, and the third, the tilted one, had dropped at least that far. No one of that immediate crowd except Willie and Lew knew exactly what had happened; but it would not take the guards long to decide, and then of course they would come hunting for the tunnel’s mouth.

How high is our tunnel roof, Willie?

A yard and more.

Who was down there, Willie?

Jude. I should have been.

Why, you barely finished. . . .

Lew! Let loose of me, get your claws out of my hide! I’m going down the well, and see—

Twon’t do no good.

Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light.

Willie went scrambling down the old well shaft, he lost his hold and fell the last several feet, landing on his face and knocking out two of his loosened front teeth. He went back into the tunnel as far as he could crawl, and with bleeding mouth he called Jude, Jude, Jude, until more earth came sliding around him as if responding to his cry. He had to snake backward out of there, rapidly, in order to avoid those developing cave-ins. He examined the ragged rope with his hand, on the way out, counting knots; he might have missed one or two. He told his companions, once he was come up to the surface, that he had been able to penetrate the tunnel only to a distance of approximately forty or forty-five feet. Beyond that point the ground had settled, and directly beneath the stockade it must have settled more quickly and tightly than anywhere else. What would one of those pine logs weigh? Maybe a foot to a foot-and-a-half in diameter; and they were said to be twenty feet in length, though but fifteen feet in height showed above the ground.