The Cellar
Authors: Curtis Richardson
|
The Cellar |
A Civil War Novella by |
|
C. G. Richardson |
8/6/2013 |
Text copyright © 2013 Curtis G.
Richardson
All Rights Reserved
Dedicated to David “Shorty” Rawls,
Though long gone your memory keeps me
company.
Foreward
This is a
work of historic fiction. The characters and specific events are purely from
my imagination, but the background events are as close to what was going on in
the 1860s as I can make them. Sherman’s army was indeed foraging in Northern Mississippi
in 1863, well before the march to the sea. Some minor incidents related were
from memoirs written by men in my Great Grandfather’s unit, the 40th Illinois
Volunteer Infantry. The clumsy butchering of the cow by the roadside, the
improvised rolls, and the slave children bringing water to the troops all came
from a couple of fellows I feel like I know personally from having read their
recollections again and again. I became acquainted with E. J. Hart and John T.
Hunt while I was doing research for my previous Novel, “Sergeant Tom’s War”. I
feel I owe them a debt for leaving some intimation of what life was like for my
Great Granddad and Great Uncles as they made their way through the
conflagration.
Ike woke up to darkness and silence.
Blinking a couple of times didn’t seem to make any difference, there was as
much light visible with his eyelids closed as with them open. Turning his head
from side to side only revealed that he was stiff from having lain in the same
position for too long. For a few moments he imagined that he might be dead. An
inventory of his numerous hurts erased all doubt and convinced him that he was
still among the living.
An
indistinct sound, like someone calling his name, startled Ike. His reflexive
jerking brought more pain. The voice sounded as if it came from the bottom of
a well. He strained to try to identify where the voice and the snatch of
laughter that followed it might have come from but heard nothing save the sound
of his own heartbeat in his ears and the ringing noises that had been near
constant since the night of the artillery barrage back at Pittsburgh landing.
Ike’s leg ached in a way that convinced
him that it was broken. It had been immobilized with a pair of wooden splints.
He felt light headed and weak as if he had been suffering from a long
illness. There was a cloth tied snugly around the top of his head. A two
fingered exploration of the area covered by the cloth was rewarded with a
stabbing pain just above his left eye. The spot seemed moist and there was a
small indentation which stung when pressure was applied.
Where ever he was felt cool but not
uncomfortably so. He didn’t feel as sick to his stomach as he had been back,
back where? He tried unsuccessfully to remember where he had been the last
time he was conscious. How long ago had it been? He was laying on something
soft but not too soft. He carefully patted his surroundings with hands that he
couldn’t see. The soft blanket underneath him was spread over a pile of straw strewn
on a hard floor. He raised his right arm slowly over his head and moved it
about to see if there was anything above him. His left arm encountered the
cool surface of a stone wall about a foot from his shoulder. He couldn’t shake
the feeling that he might be in a coffin or at least a tomb. Finding no lid
above his head to stop him, he attempted to sit up.
Everything seemed to spin and float when
Ike tried raising himself up. As dark as it was, colors bloomed before his
eyes and he felt like he was floating. A couple of seconds after his attempt
to sit up he was flat on his back again. He heard the laughter again just
before he lost consciousness. He slept and dreamed of home.
Emma was sitting on the porch, mending a pair
of his old trousers. She shook her head at how hard he was on his clothes, but
she smiled and made her careful stitches count as she extended the life of
Ike’s pants. Their bulldog Freddy was lying at Emma’s feet with his massive
head on his paws. Ike wanted to take his beautiful wife in his arms and kiss
her passionately but he couldn’t move in that direction. Freddy looked up as
if he had spotted an intruder but then the whole scene floated backwards and
disappeared.
A wall of flame appeared, searing his
exposed skin and making his clothing smoke. He could barely keep his eyes open
against the glare, but he was looking for something or someone in the
conflagration. Ike thought once more that he was dead and that the sermons on
Hell were more than just allegory to frighten the guilty to repentance. He
could feel his skin blister but he couldn’t seem to back away from the fire as
he desperately searched. He was confused about what or who he was looking for.
Just when he thought he would explode from the heat oblivion took him once
more. Dreamless sleep overcame him for a while, giving his mind a rest from
its inventory of a jumble of tangled memories.
A more recent and somehow more important
scene swam before him and solidified. Ike was with his squad on a foraging
detail. They had come upon an unusually prosperous looking farmhouse with a
chicken coop and a pen that held the first hogs they had seen in weeks. Johnny
O’Donnell joked about pork chops for supper as a middle aged woman came out on
the porch and glared at the blue coated men standing in her yard. The woman
was attractive and would have been more so had it not been for the look of
disdain as she swept the men with her gaze. The sun beat down on them fiercely
and the look from her eyes seemed to add to the waves of heat that were making
Ike feel queasy already. Ike had been feverish all morning and the heat was
adding to his woes. If he hadn’t been so hungry he probably would have went on
sick call and stayed back in camp, but the possibility of finding something to
eat enticed him to go on this little adventure. He had seen the water pump and
trough by the barn and quietly made his way toward it in hopes of quenching his
thirst and cooling his throbbing head. The weary soldier had leaned his rifle
against the watering trough and scooped water into his hands and began to
splash his face.
Sarge had tipped his hat to the woman who
stood with her arms crossed studying them as if they were something that had
been accidentally tracked into her parlor on the sole of someone’s shoe. He
had informed her that the Union army was in need of supplies and would be
confiscating some of the hogs and chickens. Sarge sounded like a defeated man
as the woman ignored his speech and turned to go back into her house.
Sarge often said that he hated “Jay
hawking” detail worse than facing artillery. He had told Ike that it made him
feel like the lowest kind of thief to take food from civilians, even the rabid
secessionists of northern Mississippi. Sarge had stood there speechless, with
his head down and his hat in his hand as the woman walked back through her door,
glancing over her shoulder at the woods. That was when all hell broke loose in
the yard.
Rifles popped in the trees that edged the
clearing. Ike heard the too familiar buzzing of the minie’ balls as they flew
and the splatting noise of the big lead slugs burrowing into the flesh of men
he had shared so much with over the last two years. A bullet grazed his
forehead and set it on fire as he dove over the watering trough for cover. He
seemed to be hanging in mid air when the bullet hit him. When the impact came
his suspension ceased and he felt like he was plummeting from a great height. He
felt the bone in his left leg crack as he went down hard and hit it on a rock. He
could hear screaming and moaning from the other side of the yard as another
round bored all the way through the trough just at the water level letting
loose a brief stream of cool water that jetted to the dusty ground just in
front of Ike’s face. He felt dust and then thin mud splattering in his face and
then once again there was nothing.
The wounded soldier’s brain had been
traumatized by the blow that had hammered in a small portion of its protective
skull. Ike neared the threshold of death and fought back several times as his
brain fired millions of messages here and there. Instructions went out to
vital organs, memories were processed, and some were lost or misplaced as parts
of his mind shut down in order to maintain his vital functions. His
subconscious dealt with the approach of possible death by replaying images of
his life. For a few moments it was taken somewhere beyond the barnyard where
his physical body lay fighting for its continued existence.
For a short interval peace reigned as Ike
stood on the bank of a creek. The creek crossed a meadow that was in full
bloom of a perfect spring. The clearest water he had ever seen babbled across
rocks in the creek and made a chuckling noise. Ike wanted to take off his
shoes and feel the coolness of the water as he waded across. In the distance a
figure stood on the edge of a green wood. Ike wanted to go to this figure and
was about to step off into the water when he was drawn back into darkness.
After a brief interlude of near
consciousness and searing pain Ike’s mind went back to Pittsburg landing and
the bloody April morning that had taken his brother and so many of his friends
from Company D. They had finally “seen the elephant” and the beast’s rampage had
stomped them flat as they made their first contact with the enemy. Ike seemed
to be marching endlessly across overgrown fields littered with corpses in blue
and gray uniforms. As he strode through the carnage young voices in his head
were repeating Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward.
All in the valley of death
Rode the six hundred.
Came the sound of school children
repeating the poem they had memorized as Ike marched across what looked to be
the valley of death. The voices sounded young and innocent and Ike smiled with
pride at how well they repeated the lines.
Storm'd at with
shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell…
A small boy’s voice was heard giggling at
the word “hell” and the children all broke into embarrassed laughter. Ike
continued marching, unhappy with the interruption.
Scenes from the two days of wholesale
killing of fellow human beings, losing friends, and living in terror beyond
anything he could have imagined floated in front of him. He found himself
standing in line among those who were left in his squad after the first day’s
carnage and who had spent the miserable night in a pouring rain as they waited
to do it all over again the next day.
He could see the rain running in a steady
stream off Sarge’s hat when one of the big artillery shells from the gunboats
arced overhead and lit up the sky for a few moments before it began to descend
and wreak havoc with the enemy scattered to their front. It might have been a
funny sight under other circumstances than these, but the look on the face of
the man under the streaming hat was so full of anguish that he wanted to reach
out to him. Ike had lost a brother in the fight and his Sergeant had lost a
son. He tried to put his hands out toward the man but the image floated away
into darkness.
They were digging, digging in mud while
they scraped out the long trench for the Rebels. The dead men laying there
seemed like an embarrassment to him; their presence was an accusation against
him and his comrades and he wanted to get them under the ground as quick as he
could so he wouldn’t have to look at them anymore. It felt like sweeping dirt
under a rug to hide it, when you were supposed to be cleaning the house. He
dug frantically until the blisters on his hands bled. The irrational idea had
come to Ike that if they could just get the hole filled and covered before God
looked this direction and noticed about 700 dead men lying about things would
be alright and he worked feverishly to that end. In his dream a bloated corpse
that he and Johnny O’Donnell dragged to the edge of the hole opened its gummy
eyes and leered at Ike. “You killed me, blue belly and now you’ll pay!”
Ike woke up screaming at the sound of the
corpse’s voice as it grated its accusation at him and blew the stench of its
decay into his face. The sound of his scream was swallowed by the darkness
that still surrounded him. He laid panting and sweating in the dark. His body
was drenched in sweat and in a way that felt like he might have had a fever and
it had just broken. He lay there for a while trying to discern where he was
but it was still a mystery.
“You must have had a terrible dream young
man.” a female voice droned from the gloom. Ike almost screamed again. He
tensed and his breath caught in his throat until he nearly passed out. Finally
his body relaxed and he regained enough lucidity to respond.
“Who…… Who’s there?”
There was a scratching, then a snap and a
hiss as the smell of sulphur assaulted his nose. A face appeared above him,
painted yellow by the light of a match. Ike recognized the face of the woman
on the porch that had turned her back on Sarge before………. “Oh God!” Ike
thought, “Sarge and my squad…..are they all dead?”
The woman used the match to light an oil
lamp that had been sitting on a small table next to a kitchen chair. He
surmised that she must have been sitting there in the dark, just waiting for
him to wake up. How long had she been there? How long had he been here?
Ike began to take in his surroundings as
the woman sat back in her chair. They were in what looked like a cellar
although there were no foodstuffs to be seen. Only the clean earthy smell of
potatoes hinted at the small room’s previous occupation. The smell reminded
Ike of how hungry he was. Ike had been hungry for days before he found himself
in this place, whatever this place was, and he didn’t know how long he had been
here.
They had been looking for food, a
commodity that was becoming scarce in northern Mississippi as two armies chased
each other back and forth across the landscape. His regiment’s supply lines
had been cut by Chalmers’ cavalry and they had been forced to live off a land
that had already been “lived off” by their enemies.
The last semblance of a meal Ike recalled
was when they had combined all the food they had, which had been some flour and
cornmeal, and made crude rolls. Someone had come up with the idea of mixing
the ground grain with water on a poncho and forming a sticky dough. They
improvised ways of cooking it over the fire, some used green sticks, but the
prevailing method became to impale it on their steel ramrods or bayonets and
hold it above the coals until it was brown. Compared to hardtack it wasn’t too
awful as long as it was still warm. Johnny had them laughing as usual when he
teased Sarge. “Hey Sarge, your roll looks like a horse turd. How do you like
it?”
“Johnny, if I was any hungrier I’d
probably eat a horse turd.” Sarge replied, keeping the laughter going. Before
long everyone was chuckling and joking about “horse turds” and making their
rolls into more bizarre and obscene shapes, producing even more gales of
laughter. Schoolboys playing hooky couldn’t have had a much better time than
Company D when they laughed together. Remembering better days with his friends
brought back his fear for them. How many had died in the ambush?