Andersonville (2 page)

Charlie settled back against the other prisoners.

“Where was you captured, Mr. Charlie?” Barclay asked.

“Just call me Charlie,” the skinny soldier said, yawning. He folded his thin arms over his chest and pulled his cap low over his eyes, giving a perfect imitation of the dead man they'd just disposed of. “I got took at Olustree, back in February. Spent the last four months at Libby over in Richmond.”

Barclay allowed himself to lean against the other sleeping men.

“Charlie?” he said after a bit.

“Hm?” Charlie mumbled, already letting the rocking of the train put him to sleep.

“Why you helpin' me?”

Charlie's only answer was a nose-buzzing snore.

Barclay slept only intermittently. His legs, dangling off the edge of the train, were cold, and he kept jerking awake.

He nearly fell to dreaming before the train whistle blew out a long sharp blast sometime before dawn. The train slowed, then slammed to a stop, sending every man bowling over and groaning into the fellow to his right.

On a pine plank on a pair of poles along the tracks were carved the words
ANDERSON STATION.
Behind it there was a sizable Rebel encampment consisting of rows of tents and frame cabins, with their musket stacks hung with soldier traps like the naked frames of Indian tepees out front. A few guards paused in their patrols to take their rifles from their shoulders and stare at the wheezing train.

A moment later the Rebel guards had jumped from the train and Sergeant Beam marched up and down, roaring for the “damned Yankees” to disembark.

A line of riflemen rushed over and pointed their muskets up at all the sleepy prisoners on Barclay's side, indicating that they were to wait for the fellows behind them to exit and then get out on the other side of the car.

Barclay and Charlie and the rest of the line of men got to their feet, knees popping like embers in a campfire, and slowly turned to shuffle out behind the other prisoners.

Barclay felt something snap beneath his shoes and looked down to see a spindly white arm bent awkwardly at the wrist beneath his foot. He recoiled but was jostled toward the other door by the men crowding behind him and never saw the owner of the arm, who he assumed had died during the sojourn.

Deeper in the car, away from the open doorway, the stench of filth and piss wafted up from the straw-covered floor, and he thanked God he had not had to ride in the middle.

Finally he and Charlie reached the edge of the train and jumped down onto a crude plank platform situated before a diminutive whistle-stop consisting of a single log cabin. Over the door hung another rude sign etched in the same hand as the station name. This one read
BEN DYKES, AGENT
. An older man with a white-flecked red beard leaned in the lit doorway and chewed tobacco, watching the proceedings with a half-lidded lack of interest.

Sergeant Beam yelled for the men to form up by their regiments, and Charlie nudged him in the arm with a bony elbow.

“See you inside, Barclay,” he said, and slipped into the confused mass of blue tunics.

At least Barclay had it easier in that regard. He merely drifted toward the other black soldiers, and they filed into ordered lines as all around them their white counterparts murmured and wandered and were cussed by their captors.

None of the other black soldiers seemed to take much notice of him. There had been talk that the Rebs wouldn't even take Negro prisoners, and maybe some of them were worried that they'd soon face a firing squad. Barclay wasn't overly worried about that, though. If execution had been their fate, the Rebs wouldn't have gone to the trouble of carting them this far down the Central Railroad.

After about a half hour of confusion in the dim lantern light of the whistle-stop, with pitch blackness all around them, the prisoners stood in line coughing out the cool air and fidgeting.

A strange figure appeared behind the line of Rebs, obviously a man of some importance by his bearing. He was round-shouldered and black-bearded, and he kept his right arm tucked into a black sash that hung over his shoulder. He rode a white horse, which he spurred furiously up and down the length of the prisoners, barking for them to stay in line in a deep voice with a folksy, lilting cadence Barclay recognized as Swiss. He wore linen pants and a butternut coat over a matching tunic that bore the insignia of a captain and had an officer's kepi cap set squarely on his head.

“Got-dammit, you Yankees, you stand in line and listen for your names!” the captain yelled as he passed before the colored soldiers.

At the sight of them, the captain wheeled his horse around and sneered.

“Well, well, more black backs to haul firewood and shovel
scheisse
. Goot!”

Somewhere behind Barclay a man muttered, “The Flying Dutchman,” and snickered, but the captain didn't hear him.

He bolted off toward the front of the line and stood behind Sergeant Beam as he called out the names of one of the white regiments.

It took another hour for Beam at last to reach the 57th, and by that time many of the men were swaying where they stood.

To their right stood another group of ninety or so white soldiers, and as Beam shuffled through the roll papers, one of them groaned: “Hey, Cap'n, you got any bread we could eat?”

“I don't pack bread for Yankees,” the Swiss captain replied, slapping his hand on the butt of the pistol in the reverse-draw cavalry holster on his belt. “I pack bullets.”

Sergeant Beam announced the 57th Colored Regiment and began to read off a list of names. One by one the black soldiers replied “present” as their names were called.

Barclay watched the white soldiers in line nearby grumbling and whispering as they waited and shivered through the roll call. The bearded captain watched, too, and was obviously annoyed by their unruliness. Three times he interrupted Sergeant Beam to tell the white soldiers to shut up.

Beam called out: “Private Earl Stevens.”

There was no answer.

“Earl Stevens?”

Barclay saw his opportunity.

“Present!” he called.

A few of the men glanced at him suspiciously. Men who had known the real Stevens, maybe. Well, he was Stevens now. He ignored them. No one said a word.

The roll call continued, and then Beam moved over to the last white group.

He didn't get five names deep before one of the men in the front row suddenly pitched forward as if his legs had jellified. He crumbled onto the planks and began shaking and thrashing wildly in some kind of fit.

“Oh, shit,” whispered one of the black soldiers in earshot of Barclay. “He hainted?”

Another, older soldier sucked his teeth testily.

“He ain't hainted, field hand. He sick. Probably got the Saint Vitus' dance.”

“Get back in line!” the captain roared down from his horse.

The man flipped on his back and undulated, foaming at the mouth now.

“Get your Yankee ass back in line!” the captain insisted.

Two of the other soldiers in line broke rank, and one knelt beside the man and attempted to hold his head over his knees to keep him from banging it.

“Jesus, Cap'n! Can't you see he's havin' a fit?” one of them said before kneeling at the man's feet.

The captain flipped up the flap on his holster and drew his bulky-looking revolver. A LeMat nine-shot.

Sergeant Beam looked back at his superior and jumped aside as the captain leveled the pistol.

It barked twice, and the two men who had broken rank to help the other fell dead, spouting blood from the sides of their heads.

The captain cocked the pistol and took deliberate aim at the third man jumping all over the boards between the two corpses. He ended the unfortunate's seizure with a thunderclap and a flash.

The other white soldiers began to tense, and a few shuffled forward, muttering hotly.

Instantly the Rebel riflemen rushed into a firing line in front of the mounted officer and primed their muskets.

The prisoners stiffened. The blood of the three men was like seeping oil in the dark.

“Now you see how it is!” the captain spit, wild-eyed. The whole time he spoke, he tucked his LeMat under his useless arm, broke it open, and reloaded a spare cylinder from his coat. “You are not on some holiday here! You are the pitiful damned, naked at your last judgment, and I am the Lord. So quake and mutter and curse me under your breath, but I will have order or I will have blood!”

He snapped his pistol closed, dropped it back into its holster, and slapped the cover down with finality.

“Sergeant Beam. You may finish the roll call.”

“Yessir, Captain.”

The white soldiers glared up at the captain the entire time, and he stared back at them unafraid, regarding them like some medieval tyrant unassailable on his regal charger.

But they responded to their names and otherwise stood at quiet attention.

When it was all over, he said something to the sergeant and turned around.

“All right, fall in!” Beam ordered.

“That a hard man,” mumbled one of the black soldiers.

“That ain't no man,” another said. “That a one-armed devil.”

They were marched in an easterly direction down a dirt road into the pitch-black forest, and Barclay was reminded again of a medieval king leading his serfs to some pagan rite. Flanking the road were blazing pine knot torches jammed into the earth.

The fresh smell of pine, which should have been a relief after the stifling closeness of the prison car, was thick around them, the dark impenetrable beyond the glow of the brands.

They were near the front of the line now, and Barclay could see the captain on the horse bobbing slowly in front of the column, a ghostly figure at their head, a phantom leading them to some predetermined doom.

The ceremonial feel of the march, which extended about a quarter of a mile, culminated in the appearance of a pair of ominous massive wooden gates set on thick iron hinges within a primitive pine log palisade fourteen feet high whose length Barclay could not determine. It was like a huge Viking fortress situated in the middle of a hollow carved out of the deep backwoods.

When they passed out of the forest, he spied the lights of an encampment on a bluff to the north, and he saw a trio of artillery pieces silently awaiting the dawn, their inward-facing muzzles trained on the prison.

The sky was a deep, dark blue by the time they were ordered to halt, and Barclay saw spiraling columns of smoke rising high into the sky over the wall and smelled burning wood and trash, as if the whole place were a dump, constantly ablaze.

The captain signaled to a diminutive sharpshooter standing in a kind of open-air sentry box with a slanted roof on the wall. The man yelled down an order in a surprisingly high voice, and a few moments later the massive gates groaned open and the group of white soldiers ahead of them marched inside with the captain. Barclay craned his neck but could see nothing of the interior except another set of gates.

The column was ordered to advance and then stop at the gates as they swung shut behind the first group. He noticed that there was a wicket set into the great door, a smaller entryway, probably, so that less substantial groups could pass through without necessitating the laborious opening and closing of the heavy gates.

Barclay almost expected to hear a volley of rifle fire from within, but there was only the shouting of the captain and the wooden groan of the second set of gates opening. There came a noise of many voices beyond the wall, all running together and unintelligible.

They waited under the muzzle of the guards' rifles until the gates opened again like a great ponderous machine that had swallowed the previous entrants.

The black soldiers marched inside. They passed a large house of boughs beside which sat a big open wagon with a mule team waiting in the traces. There was a ribbon of running water perhaps forty yards to the south that appeared to drift under the wall into the stockade. Beside the creek was a busy-looking bake house. Barclay watched a pair of men in aprons dump a vat of yellowish grease into the water. Far to the south on another rise, a battery of twelve more cannons stood watch over the prison.

They stopped in a kind of lock between the outer and inner palisade walls. Rifles were trained down on them while the gates shut behind them, and as they waited, a few of the men stationed above directed long lines of brownish tobacco spit down on their heads. Barclay's shoulder was struck with a copious deluge of the nasty stuff, and he closed his eye against the spatter.

Then the tedious process was completed by the opening of the inner doors.

Beyond lay hell.

Or as near to hell on earth that Barclay had ever seen, anyway.

The stench of the place was the first thing to hit them, and a few of the soldiers doubled over in a wave of sudden, unexpected nausea and instantly heaved their guts into the mud.

There was no provision made for any such weakness, though, and the Rebels yelled shrilly for them to get inside on the double. The men in the back were goaded and kicked, stumbling into the ones who had lost their composure in the front.

The rising sun spilled a blinding reddish-orange light down on the place, which was vaster than he had expected.

All inside was mud or dust. Even the stumps that must have furnished the walls had been ripped clear of the tramped, hard-packed earth. Every inch of the nearly thirty acres of ground not vacated by the narrow avenue that continued almost out of sight to the far wall of the stockade was crowded with low improvised shelters, pine pole frames covered with ragged army blankets, a few precious weathered pup tents, timber-reinforced burrows, and lean-tos, all built almost on top of one another, ramshackle hovels elbowing one another for meager space. There was not a solid, permanent construction anywhere as far as he could see. No prisoner barracks, no rows of Confederate-issue tents, not even an awning to keep the sun and rain off the inhabitants.

The entire place moved like a putrid carcass infested with squirming men. Many of the prisoners could hardly be called men, so little was left of them. They were skeletal things with overlarge hands and flapping feet, patchy fetal heads, and ratty beards jumping with dark wigs of flies and lice. Their skin was so uniformly begrimed by smoke and filth that Barclay couldn't immediately tell white from black. The uniforms that hung in tatters from their bony bodies had been bleached as gray as the enemy's by the sun.

He tried to focus on the wraiths as they milled and advanced curiously to inspect the newcomers, but his eyes kept flitting to some horrific site. He heard a man wretch and saw a filthy beggar on his hands and knees puking a watery substance outside his threadbare tent. The man quickly scooped whatever he had vomited up in his hands and crammed it back into his mouth. Another flopped on his belly, pulling himself on his narrow callused elbows, leering horribly from distended bleeding gums. He was naked from the waist down and had no feet.

Barclay was reminded of the stories his Creole mother had told him as a boy of half-starved zombies, soulless slaves taken alive and ensorcelled from their graves to work until they wasted and died again. When he had actually seen such things in later life, they had not been half as repulsive as the men who now shambled before his eyes.

“Fresh fish! Fresh fish!” a voice croaked excitedly from among them.

“Take a good look, you men!”

It was the Swiss captain on his horse. He was off to the side, amid a retinue of armed guards, fanning the flies from his nostrils with his hat, proceeding over the entire horrible affair with the light air of a gentleman on a country ride inspecting his fields.

He was addressing not the newcomers but the miserable inmates.

“You want to know why that son of a bitch Abe Lincoln hasn't exchanged you from here yet?” He extended his open hand toward the black soldiers with an I-told-you-so shrug. “It is because he swears these niggers are worth the same as you white men. Until he acknowledges his miscalculation or until every one of these pickaninnies is allowed to be given back in bondage to his master, well, here you will stay. In the meantime, I hope you can make room for your new neighbors.”

The tirade had the desired effect. The curiosity in the hollow, dead eyes of some of the malnourished veterans turned to naked contempt. In some, Barclay noted, but to their credit, not all. Some just blinked tiredly, as if they'd heard this a million times before.

The influx of the column continued behind them, and they shuffled to accommodate the new prisoners, though it seemed impossible that there was any room for any of them anywhere in this place.

Barclay's eyes scanned the features of the immediate vicinity as he waited. There was a foot-long wooden box nailed to the picket wall near the gate in which the word
POST
was carved. He counted the sentry boxes as he was jostled. There was one about every 120 feet or so, with eight on the nearest wall. Assuming there was an equal amount on each side, that meant thirty-two altogether. About fifteen feet in from the outer wall was a rope fence about knee high, held up by stakes that seemed to circle the entire stockade.

The summer sun grew hot quickly, burning away the shadows and beating on the back of his neck. Some of the men were without shirts or hats.

At last the final contingent of prisoners was admitted.

The captain stood in his stirrups.

“Well, now! We are all inside at last. I am Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of the interior prison here at Camp Sumter. Listen close to what I say or you may not live to hear it again. You see that line of stakes and rope?” he said, pointing out the low fence.

The new men turned in place, curious.

“Now, you see those boys up on the wall? Each one earns himself a thirty-day furlough in Americus for every one of you they shoot. And make no mistake, any one of you who puts a little finger on or across that deadline will be shot dead. This is the only warning you will ever receive.”

Barclay squinted up at the nearest sentry from under a shading hand. He was surprised at the sentry's youth. Wirz had been right to call them boys. This one seemed to have trouble hefting his musket and balanced it on the wall.

“Now, in the event that you do manage to get beyond the wall into the woods,” Wirz went on, “our Sergeant Turner and his bloodhounds will bring you back. If you're lucky, they will have eaten that day, and you will return to us all in one piece. I must warn you, though, that they have developed a taste for Yankee flesh, particularly the darker persuasion.”

A couple of the Rebel guards around Wirz smiled at this.

“When you return, you will have corporal punishment to look forward to.”

He pointed to an area to the southwest, near a second set of gates, where a scrawny long-haired and bearded prisoner stood on the toes of his bare, dirty feet, gasping, fully extended, his head and wrists suspended in a heavy wooden plank set across two tall poles, almost the picture of Christ. Other implements stood empty and waiting.

“After being released from the stocks, or bucking and gagging if no stock is available, you will be fitted with chains and an iron ball. Perhaps—” He smiled in the direction of the Negroes. “—some of you are already accustomed to such accessories.”

His guards sure thought their captain was a cutup.

“Every morning it is the responsibility of the company sergeants to muster the men under their charge for the seven a.m. drumbeat. At such time, the dead will be piled at the South Gate and their names recorded and presented to the Confederate sergeant of the roll. No man may fall out of line for any reason. If any man breaks rank, no rations will be issued for the day. At ten o'clock, all infirm white soldiers may report to the hospital at the South Gate.”

“How about black soldiers?” Barclay found himself asking.

“We have no nigger surgeons here,” Wirz said drily. “This is not Massachusetts, thank Got.”

That got the Rebels chuckling again.

“That reminds me: all able-bodied niggers must report after roll call for day labor to the South Gate. Failure to report for work will result in fifty lashes at the whipping post,” he said, gesturing to a stout post set among the stocks and hung with a set of rusty iron manacles.

There were murmurs among the black soldiers, and the Rebels stirred, looking itchy to try out their muskets.

Wirz waited for it to die down, then continued as if there had been no interruption.

“Let's see…Oh, yes, our amenities. Our sutler, Adjutant Selman, sells eggs, fresh-picked blackberries, yellow onions, and various other goods from his store within the stockade at appropriate prices,” he said, pointing to a slant-roofed shed rising over the shelters about midway through the stockade on the north side of a thoroughfare. “We have provided a postbox for any outgoing correspondence. Postage can be purchased from the sutler. Our Lieutenant Day will of course open and peruse all letters line by line to ensure nothing sensitive or unfairly critical is being passed on to your loved ones back home.”

“How about incoming mail?” someone asked.

“Prisoner mail is distributed when it sufficiently accumulates. At such time, a receiving fee of ten cents per piece of mail is required to collect.”

“Ten cents!” another exclaimed.

Wirz ignored the outburst. He reached into his coat and produced a pocket watch, which he flipped open, glanced at, and then snapped shut.

“Roll call will commence in one hour. Until then, gentlemen,” he said, touching the brim of his cap and urging his horse toward the north gate.

The Rebel guards went with him and covered the prisoners as the wicket opened. Then they passed through and closed it behind them.