Andersonville (21 page)

Barclay walked off into the dark, picking his way through the stockade, navigating by the campfires and the faces of the men illuminated in them, like a pilot sailing by the stars, making inquiries when he reached the northeastern neighborhoods.

Finally he came to Skinny Wilderbeck's dugout, where he was surprised to find Bill Mixinisaw at the fire.

The Indian looked up sharply at his approach and dropped a tin cup in his hand onto a stone at his feet with a loud clang.

“You startled me, Lourdes,” he said, though his eyes betrayed no surprise.

“You're the lookout,” Barclay whispered.

Bill straightened.

“What?”

“Don't play me for a fool, Bill. I'm not going to rat you out. I want in. Let me speak to Skinny.”

In his eagerness, he stepped past the Indian toward the dugout entrance and suddenly found the point of a knife pressed to his throat, Bill's face inches from his own.

“Careful, Lourdes. Why don't you sit by the fire with me for a bit?”

Barclay knew he could twist and send the Indian sprawling into the campfire. Maybe Bill wasn't quick enough to cut his throat. Maybe. But he didn't move.

He sat down slowly next to Bill.

A few seconds later, Skinny himself emerged from the dugout, clinking, carrying his heavy iron ball, drawing the tattered curtain closed behind him.

There was a smudge of dirt on the end of his nose.

“You missed a spot,” he said when Skinny sat down across from them.

“Lourdes. What are you doing here this time of night?”

“If your invitation still stands, I want to take you up on it,” Barclay said.

“My invitation?” Skinny said, grinning. “You're speaking a lot better than the last time I talked to you. Somebody been tutoring you?”

“All right, Skinny,” Barclay said. “You laid your cards on the table last time; I'm doing the same with you. I need to get out of here.”

“Why the sudden change of heart?”

“A situation's arisen,” he whispered, leaning closer to the fire and fixing him with a serious look.

“If you remember, I said I needed a man who would take news of the situation here to Washington. Are you prepared to be that man, or will you use us to your own end and then depart on some secret errand?”

“Part of my errand was to ascertain just what was going on here,” Barclay said.

“But there is another part,” Skinny said. “Or you would've found a way out of here long ago. I want your word. Same word you give the men you work for. That you ain't gonna abandon us should this undertaking bear fruit.”

“You have it. I won't forget you,” he said, holding out his hand.

Skinny took it and shook.

Then he rose and led Barclay inside the dugout.

Once he had pulled the flap shut again, he reached down and easily undid his ankle chain, rolling the iron ball into the corner.

“I knocked it loose ages ago,” he explained, grinning.

“Some of the men think you're a spy yourself,” Barclay said.

“Well, they also say I'm from Delaware.”

“But you've tried to escape before,” Barclay said.

“First time I wandered off from foraging detail,” he said. “Another time I faked dying and snuck out of the death house. Third time, I took a long pole and went over the pickets.”

“And the fourth time?”

“Fourth time?” he said, smirking at Barclay. “Just more of my conflated reputation. This
is
the fourth time.”

He rolled up his blanket on the floor, revealing the same innocuous sand that covered the floor of Bruegel's dugout. He began to scoop up armfuls of the stuff. About eight inches down he uncovered a three-foot space of planking. Setting aside the wood stretched across a ledge beneath revealed a black hole very similar to one he'd seen elsewhere before.

“You dug Doctor John's well.”

“That was our first attempt,” Skinny said. “We had the bad luck of striking water.”

“Bad luck?”

“Well, relatively. It made a good practice run, anyway. Digging tunnels in this sand isn't easy or advisable. You have to find a belt of clay to tunnel through, and for that, you've got to just keep going deep till you find one. You've also got to find a spot close enough to the walls or the tunnel isn't viable. We sank test shafts all over the stockade in the name of well digging early on, when Wirz was encouraging it. Finally found this spot.”

He reached down to the ledge on the side of the shaft and produced a small candle, which he lit.

The shaft went down about twenty feet before it reached an elbow tunnel stretching to the north.

“We're about a hundred feet in. There are ten of us, working in rotation. We're four days from the outer wall. Implements are at the bottom. Half a canteen, the end of a shovel we managed to keep from the well-digging days.”

Barclay bit his lip. He wasn't fond of tight spaces. He began to sweat just looking down into that hole.

“What about ventilation?”

“We tried using a baffle and fire to draw in fresh air, but it was too hard to hide the smoke. We bribed a guard into stealing us a bellows from the bake house, told him it was for a still. It works all right. You ever dig a tunnel before?”

“No.”

Skinny clapped his hand on Barclay's shoulder.

“Best way to learn is by doing.”

Of the eight other conspirators employed in the tunneling enterprise, three were Pennsylvania men like Skinny, former coal miners from the 83rd and 101st Infantry. Two were Irishmen from the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. There was a German from the Indiana 7th and a Puerto Rican from the Garibaldi Guard. Barclay rotated among the various jobs, sometimes doing the digging (he was cautioned to use alternating hands as too many right- or left-handed diggers could cause them to wind up with a horseshoe-shaped tunnel instead of a straight line), sometimes working the bellows. The Pennsylvanians insisted on doing the shoring with precious firewood, and Barclay was grateful for their expertise.

They did their digging at night, and two or three of them would fill their trousers with the red clay from the night's excavation and walk along the shore of the creek, letting it sprinkle from their cuffs a bit at a time. The first morning Barclay had seen the long red lines of clay along the creek banks, he had been sure they would be caught, but the Rebels never took any notice.

On work detail he took every opportunity to gather wood for tunnel shoring.

As the tunnel inched along beneath the stockade, on its surface the trial progressed in unison.

Although the jury was culled from the latest batch of newcomers and the six men were appointed a defense attorney, one of their own, an underhanded Tombs lawyer named Bradley, Limber and his fellow Regulators were allowed to attend the trial as bailiffs, and the entire trial was held in a shed just outside the stockade.

No doubt the proceedings were being heavily influenced by Wirz.

As the days passed, various men were called to bear witness, and Barclay wondered if he would be summoned to testify about the night Limber had rescued him and Charlie from the Raiders. Charlie was called to report to the court-martial, but Barclay was never mentioned. He thought about flat out offering his testimony that Muir hadn't had Red Cap's watch on him when he was captured, but he knew the deck was stacked. If he tried to upset the conspiracy, he would only wind up killed, and none of the soldiers who weren't privy to it would believe a black man's testimony over Limber's at any rate. If Charlie represented the caliber of the witnesses the prosecution was calling, there was no doubt the trial was already decided.

On Sunday night Barclay emerged from a breathless few hours in the tunnel.

He spied the priest, Whelan, leaving a nearby tent. The man hailed him and waved him over.

“Boy, can I ask your help?”

“What is it, Father?”

“A man's just died inside,” he said, pointing to the tent. “Will you help me carry him to the South Gate?”

The man was unknown to him. Just another skeleton with a mouth full of blood whose paper-thin flesh would be branded that night in the death house.

The old priest stooped to help Barclay, but he waved the man off and carried the corpse in his arms.

“Bless you, boy,” said Whelan, and accompanied him through the camp.

As they walked, Barclay saw that the men were in a rare good mood. There was singing around the cooking fires, and a few pitiful ragamuffins even shimmied about in poor rag doll approximations of dance.

“Shameful display,” said Whelan at his side, shaking his head.

“What's everybody so happy about?”

“You haven't heard? No, I guess you were out working with the other Negroes,” Whelan said. “The court-martial reached its verdict, and General Winder's ratified it. It's to be execution by hanging tomorrow afternoon.”

Tomorrow? Suddenly his timetable had accelerated considerably.

As they approached the South Gate, Barclay heard the sound of hammering. At the head of South Street, very near to where Mosby's camp once had stood, the carpenters were working by torchlight, hammering and sawing within a ring of armed Regulators.

“The gallows,” Father Whelan remarked. “Captain Wirz wants it finished by morning.”

A man on the ground sat on a stump, braiding ropes.

Barclay laid the corpse down among the rest and tied the toes.

“Do you know his name?” Barclay asked.

“No,” Whelan said.

“Father?” he asked, standing up. “You ever minister to the sick inside the Confederate hospital?”

“Sometimes,” Whelan said. “I was there just yesterday. Why do you ask?”

“There was an officer. He was kindly to me. I heard tell he was poorly. Lieutenant Day. Yellow hair and an eye patch. I heard he'd been hurt on the road from Americus.”

“Really? I don't recall seeing anyone like that.”

Barclay shrugged.

So Day had not been taken to the Confederate hospital, after all.

Then it was very likely that Day was dead. Wirz probably had taken him somewhere and disposed of him. Barclay didn't know quite what to think about that. He was angry and saddened at the same time. Angry that he had come all this way, mainly at the mention of Day's name, intending when all was said and done to kill him for Euchariste and his unnamed nephew. But he also felt himself pining for the friend of his youth. The grinning boy whom he'd taught mumble peg and jacks, the boy with whom he'd terrorized the Creole girls in Jackson Square out walking under their blooming lacy parasols with their fist-shaking mothers. He thought back to that first whitewashing that had ended in them both being drenched and the buckets upended, their fathers roaring their displeasure. And the day years later when under the same gazebo he had looked across the veiled head of his sister and smiled to realize that the brother he had always wanted as a boy, now officially that, had been his brother all along.

“Are you all right?” Father Whelan asked.

Barclay passed the back of his hand across his eyes and nodded.

“Where are they keeping 'em, Father? In the shed still?”

“The Raiders? No, they've been moved to the stocks. Wirz wants them to spend the night there. The men have been harassing them all day.”

He excused himself and marched over to the stocks.

To accommodate the condemned men, three new vertical spread-eagle stocks had been built with finished new wood and set aside the existing ones. They consisted of two upright poles about five foot ten. Between them was a split hinged plank with two holes that enclosed the ankles and a second, adjustable plank with one hole for the head.

Mosby, Sarsfield, Delaney, Sullivan, Curtis, and Muir were in the stocks, their arms outspread and lashed, stretched to their absolute limit so that they were forced to stand upright. Even sagging in their bonds seemed to cause them considerable pain.

Each man was covered with all manner of refuse, from rotten food matter to feces. Muir and Mosby had received the worst torments. In addition to their humiliation, their tunics had been torn open and their skin slashed with a myriad of tiny bleeding cuts.

Thinking that their last night on earth was to be spent in such a manner turned Barclay's stomach. What had Wirz driven the prisoners to become?

Romeo and Big Pete stood silent watch over them, clubs in hand. The Rebel sentries on the walls appeared uninterested.

When Barclay approached, there were about a dozen men gathered there. The bulk of the population had spent its wrath while he had been occupied with the tunnel, it seemed. The two Regulators were ushering them along in a line, letting them one by one pass the prisoners face-to-face, like a queue at a wake. Some of them struck the men in the stocks or spit in their faces or whispered low, threatening words.

He became aware of a quiet but incessant moaning.

It was Muir. He was repeating something over and over, heedless of the men who accosted him.

“Can't you do a man a kindness and shut him up?” Sullivan hissed to the guards.

Romeo sauntered over to Sullivan.

“A wretched soul, bruised with adversity,”
he said, “
we bid be quiet when we hear it cry; but were we burdened with like weight of
pain,” and as he said the last, without warning, he struck Sullivan in the knee with his club, eliciting a howl of agony.
“As much or more we should ourselves complain
.
”

Big Pete shook his head, smiling approvingly.

“How is it you keep all that in your head, Romeo?”

“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,”
he replied.

“That ain't no answer.”

Barclay took his place at the end of the line.

The first man he passed without a word. It was Curtis, and he'd had no personal dealings with them. The third was Mosby, who blinked at him through swollen eyes and flashed a broken-toothed smile.

“Well, well, the free man,” Mosby croaked. “I guess Providence had its eye on you, boyo.”

“How do you mean?”

“Had your skinny friend not interrupted us, I might've took you on. And you might've wound up swinging alongside me tomorrow. It seems to me you owe him.”

He had never considered that outcome.

“Are ye a prayin' man, boyo?”

“I'm coming around to it again.”

“Then spare one for my soul in the morning.”

Barclay nodded and moved on.

Sarsfield hung in the next stock, and he scowled at the sight of Barclay.

“Go on, get outta here!” he said hoarsely. “I ain't gonna stand here and take nothing from no coon!”

“You don't have any choice, Sarsfield,” Barclay said.

“Oh, yeah? So what do you got? Huh? What do you got for me, you black son of a bitch?”

“Just an observation.”

“Huh?”

“That you look right at home covered in shit.”

Sarsfield's eyes popped nearly from his head, and he snarled and shook helplessly in the stocks, fingers scrambling like pinned spiders.

Muir was the next in line, and he half hung, half stood, delirious.

He was mumbling over and over: “I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I didn't do it.”

“I know,” Barclay whispered.

One of Muri's eyes opened weakly. The other was encrusted in filth.

He smiled lazily.

“My ace in the hole.”

Barclay reached out and rubbed the caked shit and mud from Muir's eye with his thumb.

“I'm going to do whatever I can,” he promised.

“Sure,” said Muir, and his face shriveled up. He began to weep like a child.

Barclay left the line and returned to Bruegel's tent, where he startled Clemis into waking.

“Clemis. Everything in the tent. My goods, my money, it's yours if you want it.”

Clemis shook his head.

“You goin' need it yet.”

Barclay shrugged.

“If you want it.”

From there, he went straight to Skinny's tent, where he found the man cooking his ration.

“Lourdes,” he said. “What's up?”

“How far till we get under the wall?”

Skinny looked around and lowered his voice.

“Not far. Maybe three yards.”

“Can we finish it before dawn?”

“Dawn?” Skinny shrugged. “If we had all hands at it, yeah, I suppose, but it's not the best time to—”

“It's got to be now,” Barclay interrupted. “I can't explain why.”

Skinny narrowed his eyes.

“Here's the thing,” he said. “If we do this at a quickstep now, then we absolutely
have
to be out before dawn. Long before. Every morning during roll call Sergeant Duncan goes hunting for tunnels. He overloads a mule cart with boulders and drives it around the perimeter. If it rolls over our tunnel, the whole shebang will fall right through.”

“It has to be now,” he reiterated.

“All right,” Skinny said, standing up. “I'll go and get Bill. Jorge and the Germans are down there now. We'll round up the others.”

“I'll be down below.”