Andersonville (10 page)

Barclay stared at Bruegel's last gift. He felt a wave of love for the young man.

“Thank you,” Barclay said.

“Ain't no apology from me. Just orders from a good man.”

“I know,” Barclay said, looking down at the paper in his hands. “Was Earl Stevens a good man?”

Clemis looked momentarily taken aback. His fists balled at his sides, but he made no other move.

“He was a good friend to me. We grew up together. Run off to fight together. Done everything but die together, I 'spect.”

“Then he deserved better than I gave him,” Barclay said. “I'm sorry.”

He walked past Clemis.

“Hey! Lourdes!” Clemis called.

Barclay looked back.

Clemis looked a bit dumbfounded, as if he didn't know what to say next.

“Who you goin' write to?”

“To my sister,” he answered. “Maybe to an old friend.”

When Clemis had gone, Barclay settled on a stump nearby, spread the paper on his knees, and wrote in French:

My Dear Sister Euchariste,

The war and the fight against the oppressor goes on, but I find I am out of it for a bit.

Fate and my own foolishness has landed me in as miserable a place as ever I saw devised by man. I cannot say where of course, but know that for the time being I am relatively safe if not entirely sound in a southern prison camp. The hour of my liberation I cannot know.

I sometimes think that to distract myself from the daily horrors of this place, I will dwell upon our childhood and our parents, the games we played, the dances you and Mother enjoyed so much, your singing, and father's pipe smoke in the evenings. But I would not sully those memories by inviting them into this hell.

Nevertheless, I do keep you in my heart.

Love always, your brother,

As he scratched out the last lines, he became aware of someone standing over him.

It was the drummer boy, Red Cap, squinting thoughtfully over his shoulder at the paper.

“Nobody ever teach you it's bad manners to read another man's letter?” Barclay said as he folded it over and addressed it.

“Aw, it's all right. I can't read anyhow,” Red Cap said blissfully. “Say, who taught you to write like that?”

“My father,” Barclay said, standing up.

“No foolin'? Who taught him? I mean, he was a slave, too, right?”

“He was a slave till he was ten years old. A missionary taught him,” Barclay said. “In Haiti.”

It was a short walk to the sutler, where he purchased two stamps and then walked to the posttbox at the North Gate. The boy seemed determined to keep up with him.

“Haiti? Is that in Texas or something?”

“It's an island in the Caribbean.”

They reached the postbox.

“I can't even write my own name,” Red Cap said a little sadly.

Barclay wheeled on the boy.

“And here's a lowly Negro who can write a whole letter, you mean?” he said a little sharply.

Red Cap blinked.

“Naw. I just meant…”

Barclay sighed. He had been short. That business with Charlie and thinking of Euchariste, it all had him on edge. He hunkered down.

“Never mind, never mind. Come here, boy.”

The boy got down on his haunches, too.

“Do as I do.”

He put his index finger in the mud and traced an “R.”

Red Cap slowly did the same, but backward.

“No, no, like this,” he said, guiding Red Cap's hand and correcting him.

They crouched like that in the mud for several minutes, until two fairly identical “
RANSE
”s were etched in the slimy ground.

Red Cap smiled.

“There,” Barclay said, straightening. “Ranse. Now you can write your name.”

“You remembered my name. My real name,” said Red Cap.

“You told it to me. Why should I forget?”

“Could you…could you maybe teach me more?”

Barclay blew out his lips.

“I just want to be able to write a letter to my mother,” Red Cap said breathlessly. “Let her know I'm alive. After Pa died, I'm all she's got. And I worry sometimes how she's gettin' on.”

Barclay shrugged.

“All right. You meet me where you found me writing my letter in the evening after my work detail. If you're late, though, I won't be there.”

“What'll it cost?” Red Cap asked, his mercenary nature reining in his obvious excitement.

“I don't know. How about the money I paid you for that shelter?”

“I spent that a long time ago,” Red Cap said. He fished in his tunic and took out a tarnished silver watch on a chain. “I got this. Only…”

“Only what?”

“It was my pa's. My mother sent it to me after he passed.” He cradled the watch like a chick, then held it out. “But here, take it. It's worth it. I can't tell time on it anyhow.”

Barclay shook his head.

“We'll figure somethin' out later. All right?”

“All right,” Red Cap said, slowly putting the watch away.

The boy turned and fairly skipped off.

Barclay shook his head. He wondered if that story was true. Probably he had taken that watch off a corpse.

He turned and dropped the letter through the mail slot.

“Your mammy ask you to send her a grocery list, boy?” called a familiar voice.

Barclay looked and saw Sarsfield coming over, Chester and Watt in tow as ever.

He stepped back to give himself a few seconds in case they tried anything.

“What were you talkin' to that kid about, anyhow?” Sarsfield said. “I seen you playin' in the mud with him. You got your eye on him or something?”

Chester and Watt chuckled almost in unison. The wind through Watt's broken teeth made a strange sucking sound.

Barclay said nothing. He wouldn't be chivvied into anything, and he wouldn't let any hot exchange sabotage his guard.

Sarsfield looked down at the matching names on the ground.

“Ranse,” he read. “Well, ain't that just the bottom rail on the top? This darky thinks he can teach a white boy his readin' and writin'.”

Sarsfield dragged his heel across the names, smearing them.

Chester and Watt weren't smiling anymore. They spread out a bit, and Barclay took another step back, eyes flitting among all three of them.

“It ain't as easy fightin' face to face in the daylight, is it?” Sarsfield asked.

Just then the wicket in the North Gate clattered open and the Rebel detail in charge of retrieving the mail entered to empty the box.

Sarsfield frowned and raised his hands, silently calling Chester and Watt back.

Barclay shrugged and smiled as the soldiers got between them.

He didn't turn his back until he was sure they weren't following. When he did, the first person he saw was Skinny Wilderbeck, the multiple escapee, laden with leg chains and ball. He watched Barclay intently but made no move to hail him or come near.

Barclay shook his head. Too many in this prison were taking an interest in him.

He spent the latter part of the day trudging through the upper half of the stockade, looking for shelter. The Negroes were uniformly healthy, aside from a few bad amputations and infections. As they were the workhorses of the prison, Wirz allotted them a double ration that kept them sturdier than their white comrades. Yet there were no vacancies there.

The unfamiliar white portion of the pen proved belligerent to his inquiries, though, and once an outraged man from an Ohio regiment pitched a stone at him for daring to ask if there were any men there willing to “room” with him.

At nightfall he found himself lying down on the ground, at last equal among the benighted and wretched who huddled in the darkness for warmth. The only question that was put to him when he attempted to lie down beside another man was “Are you lousy?” He answered no, and he heard the same question uttered here and there. Every man answered no. It was just a formality, apparently.

Sleep came in fits that long and cumbersome night. He would just settle into oblivion for a few seconds when the ridiculous order would come rippling down the line and he would have to turn over to ease some unknown man's discomfort somewhere, sending his wounded back into agony.

The air was cold but not cold enough to deter the mosquitoes that buzzed incessantly in his ears. He had his cap over his face to keep them from his nostrils, lips, and eyes, but for his ears he could do nothing.

When he did doze, he dreamed of the whipping post, of grasping hands and shining eyes, of skinless dogs tearing him to pieces under a rain of watery excrement doled out by winged horrors he couldn't bear to look up at. He dreamed that Turner was the
Dinclinsin
, the leering white master
lwa
his mother had told him about who scarred men with his whip and poured rum into his pockets without getting them wet.

Then he would snap awake, shocked by his immediate partner screaming in his own sleep, as if suffering the same nightmare torments. Men would yell for the screamer to be quiet, and all would settle once more, only to be roused again by a man weeping and blubbering in his sleep.

All night long, every hour on the hour, the post sentries called out to one other:

“Post number one. Two o'clock and all's well. Post number two, General Lee's fallin' back and all's well.” The shout-out continuing around the stockade, degenerating among the giggling young sentries as it went until, “Post number five. Here's your mule and all's well.”

When the black sky turned a deep blue, the shadows of his mind seemed to spread still across the ground. The unwanted rose one by one from the line to go in search of food or fire and charity. Some rose later. Some, not at all.

These last were eagerly picked over, stripped of brogans and buttons if they had any. Most scavengers went away empty-handed. The men in the sleeping line had long ago traded away anything of value. This was the last bastion of the destitute.

Barclay rose stiffly and prayed he would not find himself among their number again.

“Fresh fish! Fresh fish!” Sarsfield called as he, Chester, Watt, and other faces Barclay had seen around the Raiders' fire that night moved among the new prisoners flooding the prison.

God, there were so many. Where could they possibly go? More warm bodies for the lines. Some already were coughing, bringing in new epidemics to ravage and strangle the meager life from those already here. Scrofula, flu, scurvy, pneumonia, and stinking gangrenous wounds coated with flies.

It occurred to him in passing that the flies of Andersonville were probably reenacting the same drama as their human hosts, descending on the newcomers, testing them, fighting over coveted patches of pestilent sores. But the flies differed from the men. There was plenty for them to eat. There would never be a shortage of food, and so there was no need to prey on one another.

He heard Sarsfield's voice again, raised in mock anger.

“Hey! You broke it!” he yelled.

He was in the face of a stout unshaven man in the dirty garb of a sailor, with an embroidered undershirt and kerchief, tattered broad high pants, a monkey coat over his shoulder, and a dirty white flat hat with the name of his ship, USS
Water Witch
, emblazoned on the band.

The man was smiling in the face of Sarsfield's outburst, as maybe he had smiled in the face of windier storms.

“It was broke already, friend,” he chuckled, looking down at the scattered pieces of Sarsfield's trick watch like an overconfident infant.

“The hell it was!” Sarsfield hollered back, red in the face.

But the sailor was unperturbed.

“Run your game elsewhere, buster,” he said, “while you can.”

“Don't you threaten me, you son of a bitch!” Sarsfield snarled, grabbing at the man's shirtfront.

That was all it took.

The little sailor threw his solid fist into Sarsfield's upper lip and laid him flat. He was a brawler born, this one, and he wasted no time standing over Sarsfield but turned and smashed Watt in the gut as he advanced from behind, then turned to face Chester, who was slinking up his flank, and put up his knuckles gamely, all the while dancing spryly back and forth, angling his knotty shoulders, on the lookout for more opponents.

The prisoners made a circle around them, but one tall figure moved into the space with his hands up in peace. It was Mosby himself.

“What's your name, sailor?” the Englishman asked.

“Jack Muir,” the little man answered. “Are they yours?” he said, nodding to Watt, who was on his knees gasping, and Sarsfield, who was picking himself off the ground, spitting mad.

Mosby grinned.

“They are indeed.”

“You'd do well to find better.”

“I think I just have,” Mosby said. “Why don't you come back to my camp, Sailor Jack, and let's talk turkey.”

Jack lowered his fists only a little.

“Sure. If they walk ahead.”

Mosby laughed and clapped his hands on Jack's shoulders, guiding him away toward the camp.

Barclay shook his head. Another recruit for the Raiders.

When roll call had finished, Turner selected Barclay and Clemis for corpse detail along with four others, one of them Callixtus, the lazy-eyed young soldier who had directed him to Major Bruegel's tent. If Turner even remembered Barclay, he did not betray it.

The wicket in the South Gate was opened, and they were led to the dead house on the other side of the wall, where Turner ordered them to begin loading the waiting mule wagons with corpses from inside.

The scent of the pine inside the dim charnel house vied with the stench of the slowly rotting corpses. They were issued kerchiefs to tie around their faces to keep from retching. The bluing flesh was bloated with gases, and the stiff bodies sloshed as they were borne into the wagon bed, the decomposing skin sometimes tearing off the bony wrists and ankles between their fingers. Barclay had to beat the ants from his sleeves after each body had been deposited. They tried to arrange the corpses in the wagon with some sort of respect, but the bed was too small, and eventually they had to lay them in alternating stacks like firewood, the naked heels of one man resting in the sunken eyes of the one below him. When twenty-five or thirty had been loaded, the first wagon lumbered off up the single-lane road past the bake house to the cemetery and the second was loaded. By the time it was filled, the first had returned, the same bed the rations were issued in filthy with detritus. Thus a steady conveyance of the dead was enacted.

Midway through the gruesome task, Barclay was surprised to find that the body of Chickamauga had not yet been buried. He stooped to lift the darkening corpse and noticed a raised scar just south of his collar that he hadn't noticed during his last examination. There was a design branded into the side of Chickamauga's neck, near his collarbone. At first he thought it was some kind of mark of punishment. He had known veterans of the Mexican War who had deserted their units and been branded with a letter “D” once recaptured. But the mark was no letter. It was a complex geometric pattern within a circle, something he recognized as a magic sigil, maybe Solomonic.

He was almost positive it had not been there when he'd carried the dead man to the South Gate yesterday.

After they had set Chickamauga in the wagon and returned for another body, Barclay tugged the collar of the next man down. He found an identical mark.

“What's that?” Clemis asked.

“Don't know,” Barclay said.

But after he checked the next body, he was sure. Every corpse that passed through the dead house got one.

When the dead house was nearly empty, Turner sent a man back into the stockade. A group of white volunteers began carrying out the dead waiting inside the stockade to lay them in the dead house.

Barclay had seen men waiting alongside their dead comrades, but he knew it wasn't entirely out of grief. He had seen men snatch up sticks of kindling along the path and shove them up their pant legs to smuggle in later, to use or trade. Others snatched so many fistfuls of wild blackberries from the bushes that fringed the road to the dead house that most were conspicuously bare of fruit. Any opportunity to get out of the stockade and forage was seized with both hands.

Barclay and Clemis were lifting the last corpse up to the top of the precarious load under Turner's watchful eye when the corpse being borne to the dead house by two passing prisoners suddenly sneezed.

At first, Barclay thought he'd imagined it. He, Clemis, and even Turner did a double take as the men walked stiffly by.

Turner called out for them to stop and walked over.

The body sagging between them made no further outburst. It was a rail-thin filthy specimen, and its jaw had been tied shut with a faded yellow kerchief.

Turner said nothing to either the men or the corpse, but he drew his bowie knife and without hesitation whisked its keen edge under the chin of the corpse.

Instantly it began to jump and buck in the men's hands, eyes bugging, an awful gagging sound rasping from its lips. A regular jet of blood spurted high into the air.

Turner wiped his blade on the corpse's belly and slid it back into the sheath on his hip.

“Looks like he wasn't quite done for,” he said. “You boys can take him in now.”