0525427368 (19 page)

Well we come into this wide compound and see a great horde of poor bedraggled men. Union soldiers as once was. We got maybe a thousand tents Sibleys and A-frames. That’s our city. Avenue of dirt between making two halves and fifty paths into these curious residences. Must be three thousand prisoners maybe more. Hard to make out. Forlorn and ragged trees also look like prisoners of something beyond the high log fence. Watchtowers looking down on us. All we Irish troop in. Guards everywhere standing with muskets sloped and Confederate boys sitting by their propped guns maybe waiting for the order to annihilate us. We don’t know. A stench like it were coming from the arse of the devil. Heavy crust and smear of filth everywhere that has killed every growing thing. We can see soldiers taking a shit at the sinks as open as a field. Bony moony arses. Then we sit in thirteen to a tent, me and John and Dan among the rest. Dan keeping close to us because his mind be dark with remembering. He seen all this before, he says, at first I can’t catch what he means. The journey’s not been good to Dan, his feet are leaking yellow water looks like. If there’s a surgeon he must be on furlough, we don’t see them. Goddamn guards puts in two blacks with us, seem to think it’s humorous judging by their grins. One of them got a hand falling off where he took a swipe of a sabre and he’s missing some toes. This boy needs a doctor
and he groaning all day and night on the filthy floor. All I can do is watch him. His friend tries to clean him up but everything’s too sore I guess. His friend says his name is Carthage Daly and at first he looks at us to see if we haters. I guess we ain’t because he tells us they been fighting now a year. Seen action in Virginia and also was under the walls of Richmond as the saying goes. Seems like a decent man and he tries and helps his friend who he says is called Bert Calhoun. Young Bert Calhoun needs a damn doctor is my opinion but there ain’t one. The whole prison camp full of this need. The Reb in charge of our little merry lane of tents is First Lieutenant Sprague. Any question you ask him he laughs, as if to say, you filthy bluecoats funny boys. We amuse him greatly. I ask the guard is there something to be done for Bert Calhoun and he laughs too. Guess we must be one of them comedic acts of Mr Noone. Probably could tour the South judging by the laughter. That boy’s hand is hanging by a thread, I say. Can’t you get someone to do for him? Surgeon won’t attend no nigger, says the guard. Private Kidd is his handle. Ain’t you got to tend a man so sick? says John Cole. I don’t know, says Private Kidd. He should a thought of that afore he thought to fight us. Goddamn niggers. There’s another dark-haired boy in the tent with us wants us to stop asking to help Bert Calhoun. Says they shoot anyone that helps the niggers. Says the niggers put in with us to find out where we stand. Says he seen just yesterday a guard shoot a bluecoat sergeant because he asked just the same question John Cole did. I’m looking at John Cole now see how he taking this. John Cole nods like a sage. Guess I understand, he says.

Bert Calhoun dies but he ain’t the only one. The winter drear with her icy soul’s come in now and there ain’t a stick of wood. Half the prisoners don’t got shoes no more and all of us is missing bits of clothes. We ain’t got a coat between us being summer and fall soldiers. That’s the cold then eating your skin like rats. They’ve opened a wide long pit in the east corner and every day the dead are tipped in there. Maybe thirty a night. Maybe more. We ain’t got no goddamned food except that lousy cornbread. We get three fingers of that a day. Swear to the good God no man was ever conceived could live on that. Week after week go by and we praying Mr Lincoln will exchange for us. That’s how it used to be done. But Lieutenant Sprague delights to tell us that Mr Lincoln says he don’t want no skeletons back. That’s us. He don’t want to exchange Reb prisoners all plump with Northern grub for no Union skeletons. No good to him no more, says Homer Sprague. And he laughing again. We such a source of fun. A river-source of fun. We lying there week after week. No point moving about except to drag your sorry backside over for a shit. The sinks. Such a stink you never could imagine. Nothing ever cleared out. I swear you could read the long dread history of cornbread in them sinks. Now the nights drop far below the limit of the gauge. We all sleep like a nest of slugs tucked tight together. We take turns on the outside of the pile. You might die in the night from the frost against your heart and many do. Over to the pit with them. After six months we don’t care as much as we did. We’re trying to live but we have a sneaky care to die. Handsome John Cole, Handsome John Cole. Dan FitzGerald’s a man of bones. John too. Myself too. It’s nearly crazy how thin
a man can get and still breathe and move. In the south corner are Reb prisoners in a special hut and these boys are tried and taken out and shot. Their own boys so what chance we got. Mr Lincoln, please send us news. Mr Lincoln, we done beared arms for you. Don’t leave us here. Lieutenant Sprague must of been spawned by the devil because he laughs and laughs. Maybe he laughing because otherwise he would tear out his hair and go mad. I guess maybe so. They got precious little to eat theyselves so it’s skeletons minding skeletons somewhat. They ain’t withholding food, they ain’t got any. I swear I see guards han’t got no shoes either. What crazy war is this? What world we making? We don’t know. I guess whatever world it is is ending. We come to the end time and here it is. Just like the goddamn Bible says, says John Cole. How come we lying here and guarded and inside four walls and the camp lying within this wooded land and the dogs of winter biting and scraping at our limbs? What in tarnation for? John Cole just for eternal badness keeps an eye on Carthage Daly. He don’t speak for him and he don’t speak against him but he inclined to share his cornbread because the guard don’t give Carthage one tiny morsel. Not a crumb. John Cole sharing a moiety of nothing. Tears his cornbread down the middle and when no one seeing passes it to Carthage. I watch this day after day for three four months. Got to say it is a marvel how the mortal bones stand out. I can see his hip bones and his leg bones where they thicken at the knees. His arms just whittled branches from a dried-out tree. Long hours we lie close and John Cole lays his hand on my head and leaves it there. John Cole, my beau.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

T
HE
COLDEST
WINTER
in the history of the world they say. I guess I believe it. John Cole says if something don’t happen very soon by the good Lord he going to die. I say that John Cole will never die and he signed the dotted line on that so he must oblige. But I can see he ain’t good. He’s shitting water and we have to crutch each other when we trying to go east to the sinks. But we are two boys among thousands. No one gets a ticket to the ball. Noble boys that won in fierce battles and maybe cowards too with their coward’s deeds hid in the dateless mists of war all equal under the sun and moon of Andersonville. Homer Sprague who I guess is the king of this demented compound he famishing too. Queer to see. All the guards and the Rebel boys on picket skinnying up. By God. There ain’t nothing in the South they say. Union burned every crop in the fall and burned the land and burned the shelters of these folk. And yet they tell us fallen men of great victories and Richmond han’t fallen like Vicksburg did. They could tell us any damn history and we wouldn’t know the truth of it. They seem to believe all the words in their mouths. It hurts us to hear of such things.

But has this fair world ever seen this long tallystick of suffering?
We got boys here from all corners, mostly eastern men but also some of those states that rub up against Canada. We got farmers, coopers, joiners, settlers. Merchants and sutlers that served the Union cause. They all the same citizen now. Harrowed by hunger and ploughed through by sickness. We got splendid examples of dropsy, scurvy, and the pox. We got ailments of the chest, of the bones, of the arse, of the feet, of the eyes, of the face. Huge vicious rashes of redness mark a hundred faces. Bodies painted with ringworm, lice bites, and a million bugs. Men so sick they are dying of death. Strong men to start that are hard to kill. When you get your scrap of food you got to stuff it down your throat quick march or it will be stole. No cards hardly, no music hardly, only silent stubborn suffering. Men lose their sense and they are lucky. Men are shot for wandering over the death line which is just a row of white sticks near the boundary wall. They don’t know where they are. Men stand mute and crazy looking in the mouth of tents with long beards and whiskers. Just stand all day for weeks and weeks and then lie all day. The blacks, Johnny Reb just clean hates these boys. Forty lashes on a wounded soul. Just walk up and shoot them in the head. John Cole he starts to speak but I hushing him time after time.

Then Abe maybe he get a rush of guilt I don’t know and a bunch of Rebs was let out in Illinois and flushed back south and we in a batch of equal number sent northward. Mr Lincoln right about something because we just rags and bones. Thousands left behind in Georgia glimmer in our dreams. Dan FitzGerald don’t get his walking papers and we are obliged to shake his hand in farewell. A boy that come through seven
types of slaughter. All those faces never rescued and consigned to death. We lie side by side in open carts and feel our leg bones knock against each other like some strange music. Once we get to Union country they put us in ambulances that clop-clop north. The destitution of the war marks everything. Looks like we want to rub out America. Farms in ruins and blackened towns. Guess the world ended while we was away. John Cole’s quiet face looking out through the flaps of the ambulance. His black eyes like river-stones. Those ain’t constant tears just rheumy eyes. I guess that’s it. What we was seems broken on a wheel but still we long to reach Winona. That’s what we got. Mr McSweny’s moved further up the river because the gypsum mines are taking land. He got a place on four poles on the river-bank. Two rooms and a porch to watch the day. Winona she is twelve maybe more and she say nothing when she see us and her face say all she needs. The boys carry us in and put us in our bed. John Cole’s face so thin you can see quite clearly how he will look in the grave. We’re sorta dead men looking to come back. There are six doors of mercy they say and we are hoping to find one open to our touch. We got the strength of eggs. Mr Noone come in and looks at us and by God he cries. Right there by the filthy waters. John Cole he laughs then and says, Titus, it ain’t so bad. By God, says Mr Noone, I know, I cry easy. All the blackface men and women pledge pies and cakes. They going to spoil us into strength, that’s certain. Maybe you can show us in an act, says John Cole. The Incredible Skeleton Men. I ain’t doing that, says Titus Noone, I ain’t. Of course you ain’t, says John, abashed. I ain’t, says Mr Noone. Major Neale he writes
and says he reads we got out and sends his best wishes. Says he found Mrs Neale and his girls all well back a year and they send their best. He says the war has took the spancels off the west and it’s all a great ruckus of trouble. Starling Carlton back in harness and going on well, made sergeant now in what the major calls the real army. Guess there’s the real and the unreal right enough. Everything like a goddamn dream there by the river in Grand Rapids. Months where Winona strives to haul us back. Day comes when we pull on clothes and John Cole laughing at how we flap. It’s comical. Slowly we build back to men and not ghouls to fright a child. More months and then we’re sitting at the eating table and then out on the porch in healing sunlight. Beginning to feel the proper itch of life. Turning our heads to plans. One morning we walk slow as turtles to Ed West’s barber shop to shave our beards. Man, we don’t look like John and Thomas, no. Not the ones we knew. Look old and strange though we ain’t even thirty far as we know. Any man in his rights to curse this world but we find we don’t so much. Looks like we be stitched at our sides me and John Cole for a start. That’s plum. How come we got Winona from the storm of life and she says the same and says she’s so glad to have us home. That’s better music than leg bones knocking in a cart. We set to go on. Why not.

A man may judge by this eating of the riverbank by the mines that Grand Rapids doing good so long as the drear war rages. Day comes when arms are laid down and then there is cheering in our narrow city but then also we know that hundreds will never come back and there ain’t no call for what the place was
making formerly. There is a silence like a peopleless forest such as was found one time along the old Missouri river itself now so clogged with human matters. Everything makes a mighty pause, the little stores are still, the streets become the walkways of the old. Mr Noone must close his doors and his sparkling tribe disperse. Titus Noone looks puzzled, hands deep in his pockets. Surely he loves his players most of all and it pains him to his marrow to give them their marching orders. But no citizens no cents.