Andersonville (5 page)

The man gibbered something like a plea as the soldier tied his wrists together and stepped aside.

Turner said nothing but took up a position behind him and drew the whip back with a whistle, then lunged forward to crack the popper against the man's bare back.

Barclay flinched, as did a few of the other black men, but none of them looked away.

By the fiftieth lash the man was on his knees, only the strap around his wrists keeping him aright. His back was flayed to the muscle, and he no longer jerked and bucked with each crack.

Turner counted out the remainder, anyway.

The man was left to hang there till the work detail finished, flies gathering thick and black on his shredded skin. Only when he was cut down did they discover that he had died.

They marched in heavy silence back to the gate, and passing the long picket house made of boughs once more, Barclay saw that the wagon was now loaded with a heap of corpses, the dead who had been brought to the South Gate before roll call. The bough house was a dead house, and he watched two black men carrying the corpses inside as their Rebel guard leaned on his musket in the shade.

The corpse of the fugitive was deposited beside the wagon, but Turner called for the men to pick it back up and carry it into the inner stockade.

When the wicket opened, Turner marched in with his men and waved for the two men bearing the bloody remains to step forward.

The prisoners near the porch of the gate recoiled at the sight of the slaughtered man, and Turner ordered him dropped.

“Up north,” Turner shouted, “y'all got your own ideas of dogs. Maybe the worst thing they can do is piddle on your leg a bit, chaw on your slipper, hump your leg. You smack 'em with a rolled up Sunday edition of the
New York Times
on the nose and your troubles is over. Y'all take a good look at this here sack of shit an' remember: southern dogs is different.”

He grinned, spit a streak of tobacco juice on the corpse, and went out the widget door with his men.

The prisoners shuffled closer to the corpse, curiosity overwhelming their earlier horror. One scrawny, thickly bearded white man, a particularly odd-looking fellow with bright deep-set eyes over chiseled high cheekbones and a mop of greasy flat-combed hair, darted out of the crowd and actually reached forward to pry something from the corpse. Barclay couldn't begin to guess what. Then the man was gone.

Barclay shook his head and followed the other Negroes as they plodded back to their divisions in the camp.

He caught up with another man and tapped his shoulder. He was a young fellow, caramel-skinned, with a lazy eye.

“Where can I find Major Bruegel?” he asked.

The lazy-eyed youth, an infantryman from the 54th Massachusetts named Callixtus Drew, led Barclay through the Negro encampment to a respectable single field tent set into a dugout at the center, where he stooped and called inside: “New man here to see the major!”

“Enter,” croaked a voice.

Barclay thanked Callixtus, lifted the flap, and ducked inside.

The sunken shelter was cool compared with the heat of the June sun outside, but there was a subtle raw stink of metal and sickness, of blood and death.

Major Bruegel was sitting on the floor against the earthen wall of the shebang, one hand tucked into his unbuttoned filthy officer's tunic, the sleeve dark with blood. He was no more than twenty-four or so, very pale, with darkly ringed eyes and a handsome blond mustache that although meticulously waxed and styled had begun to smear down his pickled face with stray hairs. His hair was combed and oiled neatly, and his blue eyes shone in glassy red-cracked seas as though peering across the dimness at him from beneath the surface of a murky pond. He straightened at Barclay's entrance, though it appeared to take much effort just to keep his posture aright. There was a dark wound just below his left knee that stank of gangrene.

Bruegel managed a thin smile when Barclay saluted and weakly returned the gesture.

There was a gentlemanliness to the young man, a civility despite his ravaged state. Barclay had seen older, harder men cry and bemoan their approaching death. Bruegel was maintaining his professionalism to such a degree in the face of his impending fate that Barclay felt, maybe foolishly, he owed it to the younger man not to lie to him, at least not entirely.

“Barclay Lourdes, sir,” said Barclay. “44th Colored.”

“Major Archimedes Bruegel, 12th Colored. Welcome to Camp Sumter, Lourdes,” Bruegel said. There was a bit of a southern twang to his speech, which surprised Barclay.

“Sir, there's something familiar about your name,” Barclay said.

“I get that all the time. My father makes Bruegel's Hair Tonic,” he said, smiling as he stroked his curled mustache. “That's how I keep myself so impeccably well groomed. Pa always kept me well supplied with the stuff.”

Barclay grinned. He liked Bruegel.

“Well, at any rate, as you can see, I'm somewhat incapacitated, but if there are any questions you have concerning your incarceration, I can certainly do my best to answer them or direct you to the right parties if you need anything.”

Barclay peered at Bruegel, listening to the ragged breath rattling in his lungs.

“You should be in the hospital, sir,” Barcay said, forgetting his affect altogether as he leaned in and inspected the wound in the major's stomach, wrinkling his nose at the smell coming from it.

“Well, our captors have refused me a place there,” said Bruegel, “though by the quality of the amputations I've seen, perhaps I'm better off.”

Barclay pursed his lips and shook his head.

“I don't think so, sir.”

“I know I am pretty well done for, Lourdes, but I'm not suffering as much as some. You know, there was a man in my command. A fellow named Partridge. The bravest man I ever saw, black or white. He had personally shot so many Rebels that when he was taken, they took his ears off as souvenirs and shot him through both his knees. They would have killed him if I hadn't stepped in. That was how I got my wound. It was his coup de grâce. I was a fool not to have let them kill him. He could do no more than flop around like a catfish on the bank. They wouldn't treat his wounds, either, and he succumbed not long after, in much pain.”

Barclay's eyes went to the rotten wound in his knee.

“Oh, that?” said Bruegel. “An even more ignominious wound, I'm afraid. When the train stopped at a water tower between Macon and Andersonville, a Rebel captain learned I was inside and emptied his revolver into the car. He was a poor shot. Only caught me the once.”

“Haven't you written any letters of protest?”

“I have, as have some of the men,” Bruegel said, shrugging with a smile of feigned flippancy. “But even if they have made it through the censor, I very much doubt I shall receive any kind of response before my funeral. My advice to you, Lourdes, is to be careful, do your work, keep as clean as you can. Infection will lay you low here as swiftly as any sentry's bullet.”

There was a sound of excitement outside, and Barclay turned his head in distraction.

“You ought to be going,” Bruegel said. “The ration wagon's here.”

“Can I help you?” Barclay asked.

“Oh, no; someone will bring me mine. Or rather his. Since I can't report for roll call, I am not issued rations. The colored men, they rotate the burden. Every day a different man gives up his daily bread for me. They've been very kindly.”

“You can add me to that rotation, sir,” Barclay told him.

“That's not necessary,” Bruegel said. “But thank you. Isn't there anything I can do for you?”

“There is one thing I'd like to ask, sir,” Barclay said. “Where might a man get a hold of some pencils and paper? For correspondence.”

“You want to write home?” Bruegel asked.

“Yes, sir. To tell my kin I'm all right.”

“Where's home for you, Lourdes?”

Barclay took a breath. He found himself speaking low, as if the truth might be turned up and shot in this place. But he simply could not bring himself to lie to the dying man.

“New Orleans.”

Bruegel closed his eyes.

“Tell me about your home and your family.”

Barclay cleared his throat.

“Well, sir, my mother, she used to throw these grand soirees, her and my sister.”

“What's your sister's name?” he asked, his eyes still closed.

“Euchariste.”

Bruegel smiled and nodded to himself.

“That's a cracking good name. Lovely. Go on.”

“My father and I were not much for parties. We used every excuse to get away. I can remember walking in the dark with my father, smelling his pipe smoke and watching the women in their big gowns on the veranda or twirling with the men in their suits through big bay windows. The crickets were louder than the orchestra, and the people seemed to sway to the music of insects until the evening wore on and they shook to the
calinda
and the beat of the drums.”

Barclay smiled, having become lost in the memory.

“I didn't take you for a slave, Lourdes,” Bruegel said, opening his eyes. “Nor for a New England man, either. You've got an air of blue blood in you. It's uncommon.”

Barclay swallowed. Clemis had seen that, too. He'd better rein it in.

“What about you, Major?”

“We make quite a pair,” Bruegel said, chuckling. “My father's people were mostly poor Nickajack farmers. He was a trader, but once the tonic formula took off, he bettered himself by marriage.”

“He sounds like my own father,” said Barclay. “He was a runaway. My mother would scold him for going around the yard barefoot.”

“Confidentially, Lourdes,” Bruegel said, “my enlistment in the Union was not well received. My brother is in the 4th Tennessee Cavalry, and my in-laws veritably pepper the Confederacy. You may imagine, news that I took command of colored soldiers only exacerbated our estrangement. I've not had a letter from my wife in over a year.”

Barclay bit his lip. Why was he so open with this man? Maybe because he spoke to him as an equal, such a rarity in a white man. Or perhaps the confidentiality of a dying man need not be depended on. It all came spilling out, free of affect, of guile, of caution.

“I had a friend,” he said. “A white man but as close to a brother as I've ever had. He very nearly was my brother. Was engaged to my sister. You have to understand. I was a southerner. That was my home. My people were
gens du couleur libres
. Except for my father, we had never been slaves. We had no great love of abolitionism. We knew only that we were occupied, that the Union threatened our property, our land. I enlisted in the Louisiana Home Guard. Crescent City Native Guards under Captain Bonseigneur. I was a lieutenant. I was ready to fight. But then my own friend, my so-called brother, he came and told me the Confederacy didn't want me, didn't want a colored unit. They took our arms, put my family in a refugee camp. I lost my home, all my father and mother had built. He's out there still. Even now. Fighting for the South. But whose South? Not mine.”

Barclay spit into the earth.

Bruegel stared at the floor, then looked up at Barclay.

“Don't waste your life in hate, Lourdes. When it's all said and done, I'd rather have a brother than an enemy any old day.”

“Major?” came a voice from outside. “Got your ration, sir.”

“Come in,” Bruegel said.

In stepped Clemis. He stiffened and adjusted his spectacles at the sight of Barclay, then shuffled past with a wooden dish of corn bread and cold meat.

“Clemis,” said Bruegel. “This is—”

“Yeah, Earl Stevens. We was on work detail together, sir,” said Clemis.

Bruegel glanced at Barclay askance but said nothing.

Barclay straightened and touched his cap.

“I'll be takin' my leave, Major.”

“I'll see what I can do about the paper. Do come and see me again.”

Barclay smiled and exited, ignoring the withering glare of Clemis.

Barclay looked back at Bruegel's dugout and wondered how badly he had been mistaken in telling the man so much. Idle conversation between the major and Clemis, who appeared to hate him already, could very easily lead to trouble. He knew better than that. What had possessed him? He had behaved like some addle-brained amateur.

Perhaps the flogging he had seen that morning had affected his judgment. In the back of his mind, the crack of Turner's whip kept sounding. Maybe he had needed to, for once, dispense with falsehood, not worry about keeping all his lies in the air. He only hoped it didn't end up costing him his purpose.

On the way back to the shebang he shared with Charlie, he rounded a corner and found three men shoving a fourth between them, drubbing him about the head and shoulders with their fists. One was Sarsfield, the redhead who had robbed and killed the boy only that morning. He had a stout knotty piece of pine in his fist, one end whittled into a handle, and as Barclay watched, he swung it into the man's gut and sent him to his knees in the mud.

An unreasoning anger welled up in his chest at the sight of that red hair, and he thought of the glassy eyes of the boy, the sloppy cut beneath his chin.

“Get it, boys,” Sarsfield ordered, and his two cronies stooped down and tried to pry something from the man's grip.

The men struggled with him for a bit, and Sarsfield kicked the kneeling man onto his side, where he curled up into a ball.

“Give it up, you goddamned savage, or I'll bust your skull wide open!” he growled, pointing down at him with the pine club.

Barclay moved swiftly behind Sarsfield as the man raised the club back over his head. He snatched the man by his wrist and twisted, slapping his other hand to his elbow and forcing him back across his outstretched leg, throwing him flat on his back and coming away with the club.

The closest man whirled and opened his mouth in a belligerent curse, but Barclay closed it with a swipe of the club that flung a few bloody teeth into the air and sent him away howling, clutching at his bleeding mouth. The third man turned and ran.

Barclay spun as Sarsfield got to his feet and planted a swift kick to his chest that sent him sprawling a few feet away, heaving breathlessly and hugging his torso.

He threw the club down in the mud.

The battered man on the ground uncurled and looked up in confusion at Barclay. He was Indian, with dark eyes and black hair past his ears, woefully underfed. He had a wooden bowl containing about two or three ounces of boiled bacon in his hands, his precious ration.

The man scrambled to his feet and limped off without a word or a nod of thanks.

Barclay spared Sarsfield one last glance and continued on his way. That had felt good, a physical unburdening to match the lapse in mental concentration he had allowed himself with Bruegel. This place was like an assault on his whole being. He had been feeling like a clenched fist since passing through the gate.

He was nearly to the shebang when he encountered a gaggle of foot traffic crowding around the North Gate backed up clear to the center of the stockade.

He craned his neck and saw some Rebel soldiers perched atop a mule wagon, handing a few pine boxes of something into the outstretched hands of the crowding prisoners. It was the ration wagon, he realized, and joined the press and let the choking tide of filthy men carry him closer to observe.

It seemed the Union sergeants were entrusted to distribute the pine boxes to their various companies. Barclay saw Limber and Romeo carry a pair of the boxes on their shoulders over to an area where Charlie and a few other faces he had seen in his new neighborhood waited around a blanket spread on the ground.

Limber tipped the box and spilled a mound of cornmeal onto the dirty blanket, meal ground so coarsely that he could see bits of cob tumble out, and Romeo emptied a box of boiled bacon. Then Limber returned the box to the issuing Rebels, who dropped it back into the wagon bed and hefted out another for the next sergeant in line.

Barclay wasn't overly squeamish, but a look at the pint or so of meal the men carried away from the blankets in hats or cow horns, tin plates, or other makeshift receptacles put him off his stomach. It was crawling with weevils.

As he drifted closer to the Rebels, he realized, with a considerable drop in his appetite, that they were dishing out the rations from the very same wagon they had hauled the piles of putrid corpses out that morning.

No, he wasn't quite that hungry yet, though he knew in the days to come he would be.

He decided to head down to the swampy creek to ascertain the best way to gather drinkable water.

The creek was a sorry affair. The men apparently could do nothing to keep it clean. The scummy tributary was coated with a yellowish film, probably the greasy trash he had seen the bakers dumping carelessly into it upstream. He wondered if this was the only water supply of the place. If so, it seemed the best thing to do was to get up early in the morning before the bake house was running and gather water at the point where it was newly entering the stockade. This area stank to high heaven of shit. The air whirred with buzzing flies, and the sand beneath his shoes jumped with hordes of fleas. Although there was an area to the extreme east near where the creek flowed out under the stockade wall set up alongside a plank bridge and a squatting rail designated as the sinks, apparently the less mobile men used the entire creek for their latrine. Then again, he had spied men squatting over shallow holes beside their dugouts. No doubt when the rains came the lower domiciles paid the price for their upper neighbors' convenience when they flooded and spilled their murky contents down into the creek. The water was filthy with refuse. The area made Barclay's stomach turn and put a harrow deep in him. He saw a corpse, little more than a skeleton wrapped tightly in yellow flesh, with a crowd of flies crawling over its back drift by facedown. No one paid it any mind.

As he stood covering his mouth and nose against the stench, a man walked past him purposefully and descended to the bank of the putrid creek, where he unbuttoned his tunic, revealing his ghastly starved frame, each knobby vertebra distinctly visible through his pasty skin. He neatly folded his shell jacket, laying it atop the marshy sand. The man continued to disrobe and added his baggy trousers and ratty shoes to the pile, then waded out into the disgusting water stark naked until it reached his bony thighs, at which point he raised his arms and called out in a surprisingly strident voice: “Oh, that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence, as when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence-er!”

Barclay recognized it as something from Isaiah.

The man continued his loud recitation, and though a few sickly men wandering around the banks turned to him, most looked away.

The man slowly turned as he cried out: “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away-er. And there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee: for thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us, because of our iniquities-er.”

Barclay shuddered at the sight of the man. He was a scarecrow, as deathly looking as many of the men he'd seen, though his nudity made him a more unbearable sight. His outstretched arms were as thin as cornstalks, and his skinny neck seemed ill suited to hold his huge, bony face aright.

But Barclay had seen that face earlier. It was the bright-eyed, high-cheeked man with the bushy beard and flat hair who had taken something from the body of the man the dogs had caught.

Those eyes shone bright with madness and streamed tears like the eyes of a man who had gone blind staring into the sun. That face was alight with an ecstatic smile.

And now, as he spoke, he methodically drew something across his sunken chest, some small jagged something clenched in his fist, perhaps a stone, that plowed crooked furrows in his flesh, which streamed blood.

He roared like a wild John the Baptist not to his fellow prisoners, not to his captors, but to God himself.

“But now, O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand-er. Be not wroth very sore, O Lord, neither remember iniquity forever: behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people-er. Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation-er. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire: and all our pleasant things are laid waste-er.”

Worst of all was the terrible wound he carried. It was not some fresh mark of his capture or of battle or of his own recent self-torture. It was an old mutilation, twisted with scar tissue. His tapering, dark-haired pelvis terminated in a stub of pale cicatricial tissue where his manhood should have dangled. He was a eunuch.

Barclay stared at the terrible apocalyptic figure in a kind of morbid glamour, and to his real horror, the man locked eyes with him and pointed one long, skeletal finger directly at him and fixed him with his blazing eyes.

“Brother!” he called, sputtering, maggots and grubs dripping from his thick beard. “Don't eat the cornmeal-er!”

Barclay stepped back from the water, shaking his head at the absurdity and madness of it, and stumbled away. He found that in the short time he had spent stationary near the creek, lice and ticks had swarmed up his pant legs. They looked like grains of wet black sand on his trousers. He swatted at them uselessly.

He wandered through the stockade as the sun slipped west, getting a feel for its layout.

He discovered that the creek wasn't the only source of fresh water. On the north end of the stockade he spied prisoners extracting leather bags of fresh water from wells dug into the hillside. This water, of course, was closely guarded and was sold to other inmates at a sizable cost in greenbacks or trade goods, usually foodstuffs or wood for fire or shelter construction but also brass uniform buttons that could be traded to the Rebel guards for various contraband items such as salt from the bake house, peppers, or vegetables.

Of the two main streets, the one north of the creek that ran from the North Gate to the other end of the stockade was called Broadway, whereas the southernmost was called Market, as it housed the sutler's shack just inside the South Gate and also bore a gamut of entrepreneurial tumbledown prisoner-run businesses. Such men as had entered into the service from some useful trade, such as a cobbler or a barber, set themselves up along Market, plying their old trade. A man named Ransom and his Indian partner Battese ran a laundry service with a ridged washboard they had carved from scrap lumber. They cleaned and deloused clothing at the price of a pound of bread per day's work. He made a note of that.

Baked bread could be bought from a man who had fashioned a small clay oven from the mud. A woodcarver whittled chess pieces from pine roots, blackening half of them with soot. Another man sold well-worn books, presumably taken from the effects of dead prisoners. Barclay saw a copy of
Grey's Anatomy
there, displaying the nude female sketches and priced at five dollars. A man calling himself Captain Jack offered tattoos. There was even a gambling den where men played with homemade cards and minié balls hammered into lead cubes for uncooked peas and beans.

The sutler was a local named Selman who apparently acted as agent for the surrounding farms. He operated out of a slant-roofed scrap lumber shed under which had been dug a kind of cellar to keep produce cool. He sold onions and potatoes and fresh eggs at five dollars apiece without batting an eye. There were pints of black beans at forty cents per, and Barclay saw the very same blackberries he had seen growing wild just beyond the walls during his work detail going for sixty cents a pint.

It was early evening by the time he made it back to Charlie. On the way he saw a few prisoners gathered near the wall, taking turns with an old cane pole, trying to swat chimney swallows out of the air. The little birds apparently wove their mud nests into the cracks in the walls and came out at twilight to hunt insects. He saw a man strike one down to the ground, where it bounced feebly around. Three of the bystanders leaped at it, and a general brawl ensued.

The more fortunate men were settling down to cook their rations or eat them raw, and Barclay found Charlie out front of their shebang sitting around a small root fire with Limber, Romeo, Red Cap, and several other men from the neighborhood, singing “Rally Round the Flag.” Red Cap's high voice rose incongruously above the others.

As he stepped into the firelight, a hulking man in nothing but a dirty union suit got to his feet and balled his fists, but Limber waved him down.

“It's all right, Big Pete. This is Earl Stevens. He's Charlie's bunk mate.”

Big Pete sat back down but kept glaring at Barclay as he took his seat.

“You get your cornmeal?” Charlie asked. “Go on and add it to the blanket. We're makin' johnnycakes.”

Barclay saw that Romeo was frying the pints of cornmeal into flat cakes with a bit of water in a pan over the fire.

“I didn't draw no ration, sir,” Barclay said, slipping back into the affect he had adopted with Charlie.

“Didn't draw no ration?” Charlie repeated, and the other men looked at him askance as well. “Why not?”

He had a flash of the strange man in the creek warning him against the cornmeal.

“Not hungry today,” Barclay muttered.

“Maybe you ain't today, but you could be tomorrow,” Limber said. “And there ain't no telling if there'll even be rations tomorrow. The Rebs can hardly feed themselves, let alone us. They'll look for every excuse not to give you anything. And don't rely on charity, either, or you'll find yourself starving.”