Andersonville (24 page)

The burial detail had been postponed until after the executions so that the Raiders' bodies would not lie all night near the South Gate, where they might be desecrated. When Barclay and Clemis arrived at the South Gate, it was only just departing, and they slipped into its ranks.

The death house was emptied as usual, but this time the six dead Raiders were not carried inside. The Rebel sergeant ordered them laid to repose in the ditch beside the road, and when the cart was piled high with corpses as usual, the Raiders were draped on top.

The death cart stopped at a place outside the main cemetery, and the six bodies were removed. The prisoners had insisted that as traitors, they not be laid alongside the other Union prisoners. Barclay made sure that he and Clemis were the ones to volunteer to dig their graves.

A guard remained behind to watch over them as the rest of the dead were taken off to the main graveyard to be interred.

Barclay and Clemis dug a trench big enough to lay the six dead men in. The work was easy as the corpses were very fresh, and Barclay noticed early on that although they had not been laid in the death house, each bore the ritual brand, recently applied. That meant they had been branded alive. Perhaps at some point during their incarceration outside the stockade, before they were put in the stocks.

Poor Jack Muir they laid to rest last.

Here, Barclay knew, there was powerful mojo for the gathering. A man who had died badly for a crime he did not commit was said to leave behind a volatile, restless spirit, and dirt from the grave of such a man was potent. The grave dirt of a soldier, though, was doubly strong. Soldiers did violence and followed orders, and their energy could be better harnessed toward a worker's ends.

At least some good would come from this.

He said a quiet prayer when they covered the dead men, and under the ignorant eye of the guard, he sifted some of the dirt from over Muir into his shoe. He slipped a dime into the soft dirt as just payment.

They walked back to the stockade. The burning sun hid its eye behind a cloud.

That night, Barclay asked Clemis to go over every detail of the execution from the time Wirz rode in till the last man swung.

Delaney had said something about his flesh having been branded. He, and probably the others, too, had thought they'd received their ultimate punishment already. Their underlings, except for three who had died from their gauntlet beatings, had been allowed to rejoin the population. They had been branded and put in the stocks overnight. They had gone to their deaths surprised. Perhaps this was all part of the ritual somehow, up to and including their burial apart from the main cemetery. Probably the ground had been ritually prepared in some way. Wirz had verbally disassociated himself from the execution, too, emphasizing that it was the prisoners themselves who were responsible, not he. Such a verbal passing of responsibility must have been on purpose. What was Wirz doing?

Whatever it was, the sacrifice of these six men had been different, marking the execution as some milestone in the long ritual. It was at an end or near it. Even now Wirz might be completing it, and here he was, in the prison, with no way out until tomorrow.

But he wasn't helpless.

“Clemis, at any point, did Wirz get off his horse?”

Clemis thought hard.

“Yep. Before the whole thing started. At the stocks.”

“I'll be right back.”

He left Clemis in the dugout and went quickly to the South Gate and the area where he'd visited the condemned the day before.

There had been no foot traffic near the stocks themselves since that morning, and under the torchlight he knelt and peered closely at the ground.

The immediate vicinity was dried mud, and the marks of the brogans and bare feet of the prisoners were tramped over and mostly indistinguishable from the prints of the Rebels, but after much scrutiny, he found a set of tracks that he knew to be Wirz's because of the imprint from the spurs of his riding boots. He scraped a bit of earth from the heel of that track and returned to the dugout.

From the cache in the corner of the tent Barclay gathered some of the things he had collected from the woods and the sutler and from trading with the work detail guards: rattler sheddings, black pepper and sage, and a pinch of salt from a pouch that had cost him half the buttons from his shirt and two dollars besides. There was a pair of stubby tallow candles, lead detritus gathered from the cornmeal ration, powdered bone and snails, and last, a small amount of wood bark and the precious, precious fingernail parings of Captain Wirz himself.

He lit the tallow candles as Clemis watched, eyes wide and serious.

“What you doin', Barclay?” he whispered.

“Laying a trick.”

“What kind?”

“The worst kind.”

Clemis swallowed.

“Who for?”

“For Captain Wirz,” he said.

He took his mug and mixed the goofer dust and the parings and the track dirt together, reciting the Seventy-Ninth Psalm and stirring the concoction with an iron nail pried from the death cart:

“O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps. The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth. Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them.”

Clemis hugged his knees as Barclay stood up and undid his trousers, pissing in the cup.

“Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name. Let the sighing of the prisoner come before thee; according to the greatness of thy power preserve thou those that are appointed to die; And render unto our neighbors sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord.”

He knelt back down.

“Lend me your pocket knife,” he said, and Clemis handed it over.

“For a charm of powerful trouble,”
came a singsong voice from just outside the tent,
“like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”

Barclay swiftly pinched out the candles, ensuring the delay of the spell and not its finish, and set the mug in the far corner as the tent slit parted.

Romeo Larkin stood in the doorway, grinning. What the hell was he doing here?

But of course, Larkin was Limber Jim's right-hand man.

And Limber Jim was possessed.

So he had been discovered at last.

“Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble,”
he said.
“Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace.
Aaron
will have his soul black like his face.”

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here,”
said Barclay. “Now I see, Larkin. When you said that, it was a confession. Funny.”

In answer, Romeo bowed in an exaggerated, courtly manner. There was a bowie knife in his hand.

“A fool in good clothes, and something like thee. 'Tis a spirit: sometime 't appears like a lord; sometime like a lawyer; sometime like a philosopher, with two stones more than's artificial one: he is very often like a knight; and, generally, in all shapes that man goes up and down in from fourscore to thirteen, this spirit walks in.”

“What the hell's he talkin' about?” Clemis demanded. “You best put that knife down and see your ass on back outside.”

“Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee,”
said Romeo, stepping into the tent, brandishing his knife and grinning still.
“O happy dagger, here is thy sheath.”

He lunged at Barclay.

Barclay slipped aside. He tried to slash Romeo's face with the pocketknife, but the blade glanced off his skin and left no mark.

Romeo chuckled and swatted him with the back of his hand. It was almost a dusting gesture, but it floored him hard, knocking the wind from him.

Clemis tried to tackle him, but it was like wrestling a tree trunk. Romeo smiled as Clemis stared up at him, eyes bugging in disbelief.

Barclay picked himself up and sprang at Romeo, throwing his arms around his neck, trying to choke him. He couldn't even compress his throat. He insinuated his leg behind Romeo's calf and tried to lever him back. Though he roared with the effort, the man was immovable. He could only imagine what Jack Muir must have gone through in the ring against Big Jim.

Clemis transferred both of his hands to Romeo's wrist. Romeo turned the knife and lifted his arm as if Clemis were providing no resistance at all. With his free arm, he gripped Barclay by the nape of the neck between his thumb and fingers, and for a moment Barclay feared Romeo would rip his spine free or pinch his vertebrae. He certainly had strength enough to do it in that one hand.

But Romeo was enjoying himself like a cat. He squeezed him till the pain induced Barclay to let go, then hurled him to the floor.

They couldn't kill Romeo. Not like this. Day had said the demon inside him gave him powers, strength. If only he had held on to Corbett's hellhound fang. But wait. Salt could kill him, Day had said.

Barclay scooted back, flopped on his belly, and reached for the pouch of salt in his trick bag.

Romeo caught sight of the flannel mojo hand as it slipped out of Clemis's shirt. Romeo sneered at it, apparently dismissive of its meager protective powers, and cut it from his neck with a flick of the knife. It fell to the ground. Clemis screamed as the knife next punctured his sternum. Romeo clapped his hand over Clemis's mouth and stared into his eyes as he slowly wrenched the knife down the length of his torso. Clemis bit hard into Romeo's hand. It didn't even break the skin.

Clemis's dark skin shone with perspiration. His eyes streamed tears. His nose ran. All his bodily fluids fled his dying body as his abdomen tore wide open and his intestines spilled out and plopped over Romeo's shoes.

Barclay undid the tie on the salt pouch and turned just as Romeo dropped the wheezing body of Clemis to the floor among his quivering innards and turned his attention to him.

He grabbed Barclay's ankle and whisked him across the floor, then straddled him and pulled him to his feet by his shirt.

Romeo's hands scaled either side of his face, found his temples, and began to press together.

Barclay groaned.

Romeo opened his mouth, no doubt to issue some florid remark only tenuously relevant to the situation.

Barclay stuffed the salt pouch between his teeth and jammed it in with his fingers, shoving it to the back of his throat and narrowly escaping having them bitten off when Romeo's jaws snapped shut.

Romeo fell to his knees, gagging. Each grain of salt seemed to burn him independently like a tiny blazing coal. The stuff began to pass through his cheeks as if through butter, and his lips and teeth dissolved with a hiss, leaving a horrendous, ever-expanding cavity where his mouth had been.

The scream that bubbled out of his blocked throat was inarticulate as he dropped his knife, lurched to his feet, and stumbled out of the tent, clawing at his own face.

An unearthly howling noise filled the air, very close. Barclay stared out the tent flap after Romeo. The man staggered down toward the creek.

Something whipped past the tent, something fast, a flash of gray and black with a hint of luminous red eyes. It let out a crazed baying. One of the dogs. One of the Cubans. How had it gotten loose in the stockade?

But of course it was no ordinary dog. Romeo Larkin had made a deal with a demon, and a bag of salt had closed it. The hound had come to collect.

Romeo splashed up to his legs in the creek and stooped over, apparently hoping to splash the burning salt from his face.

The dog leaped into the air, but instead of colliding with him and driving him into the water, Barclay saw the dog shimmer for an instant and pass through his back like a ghost.

It emerged from the other side transformed into the ghastly thing he had seen the night of his beating: a fleshless black-boned and red-muscled canine monstrosity with foot-long fangs. It loped across the surface of the creek, and he shivered when he saw something clutched in its jaws. Something like a man that fluttered as though it were made of cobwebs and stretched its boneless mouth in a silent scream.

Then the apparition faded into nothingness somewhere in the middle of the creek, and the body of Romeo Larkin fell forward like a cut timber, landed with a splash, and floated off down the dark, murky tributary.

Barclay turned away and knelt beside Clemis.

The man was shivering, his limbs trembling like wires, eyes already growing distant.

He clasped Clemis's head in his hands and stared into his eyes.

“Kiss…my…ass!” he gasped.

Then he was still.

Barclay held Clemis's body for a long while. He sobbed. Had he been able to step back in time and whisper to that earlier version of himself that had been chained to a post and beaten at a few words from this man now lying in his arms, his younger self would have laughed to think he'd be mourning Clemis now.

He gathered Clemis's discharged viscera and pushed them back into his body as well as he could, then sewed him up and wrapped him in a blanket.

In through the North Gate, out through the South.

Barclay retired and relit the candles. His time here was ending one way or the other. Had Larkin come to their tent on orders? Would his death bring the fury of Wirz's underlings down on him?

He had to complete the ritual and pray that Wirz did not complete his first.

He worked the rest of the night, using Clemis's knife to whittle a small coffin-shaped box out of a piece of pine. On the inside lid he carved the name
HENRI
WIRZ
. Next he cut a little figure out of flannel and stitched eyes and a bearded mouth and then gave it a withered little arm. He upended the cup containing the trick into the flannel doll and sewed it shut, then lay the little figure in the coffin.

He closed it and put it in Clemis's tunic. He did not lay the body out at the gate. He didn't want him lying out all night.

In the morning they stood at roll call in a dry swelter, the earth beneath their feet cracking and crumbling like dried-out skin. Several men fell in their places, and many did not rise again. Afterward, he carried Clemis's wrapped body to the gate and tied his toes.

He joined the burial detail. It was announced that the death house wasn't full and they would bury all who had died immediately given the intensity of the dry heat and the flies gathering at the South Gate.

Of course it was because the ritual branding need not continue. The final sacrifice had been made.

How long did the world have? Was it already ending?

He buried Clemis with the death hex. Like a black seed, it would open in the burial ground, freeing the anger of the dead to blossom and carry the seed of revenge on the wind to Wirz's nose.

But was it too late?

That evening when the Negroes returned to the stockade, he found Limber Jim coming out of Bruegel's tent.

“Find anything interesting?” he asked when Limber Jim looked up and saw him.

“Last night Romeo was killed.”

“Is that a fact?”

“That's a fact. I sent him out last night to patrol this neighborhood. He was found this morning in the creek.”

Patrolling or snooping? Wirz had captured Day, probably killed him. Maybe before Day had died he had talked just enough for them to know that there was a man inside the prison who knew much of what Day had known. Maybe suspicion was coming around his way again.

“Next time you can come yourself.”

“What's that supposed to mean? Where's your bunk mate?”

“I just got back from burying him.”

“What happened?”

“Larkin came into our tent last night, waving a knife around. He and Clemis had a fight. Romeo gutted him. I guess Clemis did for him, too.”

“What did Clemis do to him?”

“Cut him, stabbed him in the face,” Barclay said, not batting an eye.

“I don't know what would've got into Romeo to make him do that.”

“I do,” Barclay said, watching his expression carefully.

“What do you mean?”

Barclay held the look for a moment or two, then shrugged.

“He didn't like Negroes. Came in spouting all this ‘blackamoor' stuff at us.”

“That doesn't sound like him.”

“Maybe he wasn't himself.”

Limber stepped to within inches of Barclay's face.

“What are you driving at, Barclay? You talk like you know something you ain't saying.”

Barclay shrugged.

“I'm saying maybe he's had a taste of authority and figured he liked it. Power changes a man. Doesn't it, Limber?”

Limber frowned deeply but said nothing. He walked off.

Barclay watched his back for a while. It was at that moment that he remembered Charlie. She had come to his tent yesterday morning in bad shape, and he had forgotten to check on her.

Limber wasn't walking in the direction of the tent he shared with her, so Barclay cut south through the shelters at a half run. It occurred to him that she had been sharing herself with a possessed man this whole time. What that meant, he didn't like to think about.

When he reached the old ninety and found his first home in Andersonville, he called through the flaps.

“Charlie? It's Barclay.”

“Barclay!” came a croaking reply.

He dipped his head cautiously inside.

She was curled on the floor, coughing, a puddle of fresh vomit inches from her face.

He moved in near her and held his hand to her bony face. It was feverish.

“Barclay, I'm sick,” she groaned.

“I can see that,” he said, hunkering down beside her and slipping his arms under her neck and knees. “Come on. I'm taking you to see Doctor John.”

Doctor John's tent had been broken and torn to pieces when the Rebels had found his secret well and filled it in. He now occupied half the space, being crowded on one side by a newcomer's burrow. His shelter was nothing more than a pup tent now, and though he agreed to examine Charlie, Barclay had to wait outside while he did so as there was no room for all three of them.

After he had set her inside, he drew Doctor John close and whispered, “I'm relying on your confidence here, Doc.”

Doctor John nodded.

He waited for about fifteen minutes outside before Doctor John emerged.

He settled down next to Barclay and yawned. “You heard the latest news?”

“What?” Barclay asked.

“Sherman's wailing on Hood over in Atlanta. Good news for old Abe. Us too, maybe. Captain Wirz couldn't get out of bed this morning. They say he's down with the same scurvy most of the men got. Couldn't happen to a nicer fellow. Now General Winder's in direct command of the prison.”

Well, that last part was relevant news, anyway. It meant the hex was working.

But he held up his hand.

“Doc, what about Charlie?”

Doctor John shrugged and slipped his arm over Barclay's shoulder. “Well, I can see why you stressed my confidentiality. I gave her something for the fever and the nausea, but I guess congratulations are in order.”

“Congratulations? For what?”

Doctor John raised his eyebrows.

“He means I'm pregnant,” Charlie whispered from the tent as her face poked through the flap.

Barclay's heart and gut sank.
Pregnant.

“You picked a hell of a place to start a family, Barclay.”

“What?
Me
?”

“It ain't him,” Charlie muttered, shoving her way to sitting between them. “It's Limber.”

“You want my medical advice, you march yourself to the gate and come clean,” Doctor John said. “Even these grayback lice won't keep a woman in your condition in here. Limber went and got you a guaranteed parole, Charlie.”

“I think that's the last thing you should do, unfortunately,” Barclay said, folding his hands between his knees.

“Why?” Doctor John said.

How to tell them why? It was because there was no telling what she'd give birth to. At the worst, a monster. At the very least, a child with no soul. A man with a demon inside him couldn't hope to father anything else. There was another possibility, too: it could be this was somehow part of Wirz's plan. Of course. A soulless child conceived in this misery by one of his own demon henchmen. Was this why the ha-Mashchit hadn't risen yet?

“Don't keep it, Charlie,” he said, gripping her upper arm strongly. “Whatever you do.”

She had her face in her hands.

“I knew it. Somehow I knew it. Something came over him. Something in his eyes and the way he talked that morning.”

“Which morning?” Barclay asked.

“The morning they hung them Raiders. I didn't want to, but he made me. Right before he left for the scaffold.”

“Charlie, it couldn't have been then,” said Doctor John. “That was barely two days ago. You couldn't be showing so soon.”

“I know what I know,” she insisted. “I felt it that morning when he…raped me.”

“Raped?” Barclay said with an involuntary scoff.

She wrenched away from him, glaring.

“That's what I said.”

“Sorry,” he said, shrinking before that look. “It's just that…you haven't exactly been a shrinking blossom with him before, have you?”

“Well, I was that time!” she shrieked, and her hand lashed out and cuffed him in the face.

When he had shaken off the sting, she already was storming off down the street.

He stood up and called after her.

“Charlie!”

Doctor John grabbed his wrist.

“Better not, Barclay.”

“She can't keep that baby, Doc. And she can't let him know about it.”

“She'll do what she'll do,” Doctor John said. “Now listen to me a minute. I'm callin' in my favor with you.”

“What's that? What favor? I didn't tell anybody about your water.”

“You didn't tell me about Bill and that goddamned tunnel venture, either,” he said in a low tone.

Barclay sighed and sat back down.

“I figured he would've told you.”

“If he'd have done that, I would've talked him out of it.”

“How'd you know I was in on it?”

“I saw you and Bill walking together the past few nights, when you never did before. After they pulled him and the others out of the ground, I figured you'd gotten out. You and Skinny have left me in a predicament. I got half my acreage now and nobody to watch over me and my medicinals at night.”

“Haven't you heard? We have the Regulators now,” Barclay said.

“Yeah, well, I don't trust Limber Jim and his bunch,” Doctor John said. “Case in point, I heard Clemis was killed last night.”

“He was.”

“That leaves you and me in the same boat, I expect. You've got that big old major's tent all to yourself now.”

“All right, Doc. You can move in with me if you want.”

“Good. You can help me pack right now.”

“Now?”

“My new next-door neighbors are infested with lice. I wanna get outta here before my property value drops.”