Andersonville (6 page)

“I won't.”

“Here, have a worm castle anyway,” Limber said, passing him a piece of hardtack cracker.

It was stale to the taste.

“You go see Major Bruegel?”

Barclay nodded.

“That is a piss-poor way to treat an officer,” Limber remarked.

“That it is, sir,” Barclay agreed.

“He knew what he was in for,” Big Pete said, still staring at Barclay as if goading him for a reaction, “commandin' nigs.”

“Easy, Pete,” said a man.

“Hell with easy,” said Big Pete. “Goddamned Lincoln givin' the darkies guns is what laid us all in this mess. Except for them, we'd of been paroled home and been back to the front by now.”

“Well, now, Pete, Jeff Davis could just as easily put an amen on the whole thing by allowin' a fair trade, Rebs for coloreds,” Limber said.

“That ain't no fair trade,” Pete said, waiting, wanting Barclay to say otherwise.

Instead, he said, “I seen a man down by the creek today, preachin' in the middle of the water. Oddest man I ever seen. He didn't have no—”

“That's the Hatter,” Red Cap interrupted excitedly. “Praise Jesus-er!” he chuckled in an approximation of the man's odd speech pattern. “Crazy bastard lets the grubs hatch in his beard and then eats 'em. I heard tell he got drove crazy by mercury fumes when he was a habber…a habber…”

“Haberdasher?” Charlie asked.

“How he come by that wound?” Barclay asked.

“Nobody knows,” said Limber.

“I heard he done it to himself,” Red Cap said.

“That'd take something,” Limber said.

“We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body,”
said Romeo.

Barclay was beginning to wonder if Romeo Larkin might not be a bit mad himself.

Charlie slapped Barclay's knee.

“Say, Earl! Dig that pine root out and throw it on the fire,” he said, pointing to a little curl of matter protruding from the dirt near Barclay's foot.

Barclay leaned over and tugged at the precious root with his fingers, found it wouldn't budge, and dug in the dirt till he could get a better grip. When he wrenched the stubborn little root free, he found it more sizable than he had guessed. Something warm and wet flecked onto his hands, and when he looked down, there was an oily dark substance oozing from the hole.

He shook the root on the ground, spotting it with the stuff, and touching it with his fingers, he smelled a metallic scent. It was difficult to see the color in the firelight, but it smelled like blood.

“What's all over it?” Charlie asked, making a face.

“I think it's…blood,” Barclay said.

“Blood?” Limber scoffed, taking the root and holding it toward the fire. “Nah, that's just mud. There's a red clay deep down.”

It didn't smell like mud or clay to Barclay, but as he was about to say so, a scrawny fellow with a too-wide grin missing a good deal of teeth hopped into the firelight on a worn pine crutch.

“What say, fellers?” he wheezed, doffing his cockeyed cap for a minute to run his sleeve across his patchy head.

The man's appearance seemed to have a dampening effect on the whole party. They visibly hunkered as if for a siege and swapped glances with one another.

The crippled man peered at their faces and greeted them each by name until he came to Barclay and Charlie.

“Well! Here's two new recruits. What say, boys? Where was you taken at?”

“I transferred in from Libby,” Charlie answered.

He hopped closer and extended one bony hand.

“Name's Thompson. Folks call me Chickamauga on account of where I was took. Gen'ral Nathan Bedford Forrest hisself gimme this here game leg.”

Several of the other men rolled their eyes as Chickamauga slapped his useless leg for emphasis.

“How about you, buck?” he said, turning to Barclay and sticking out his hand. “You one of these 57th Colored boys, I guess. How'd they get you?”

Barclay shrugged and shook. The man's palm was sweaty.

“Just fell shy of luck, I guess,” he said.

Chickamauga scratched his stubbled chin loudly.

“Aw, come on, got to be a story to it. Ever'body's got a story. Where was you took?”

“Go on, get outta here and quit sniffin' around, you old tunnel rat!” Red Cap burst out, as if he'd been holding himself back since the man had appeared.

“The boy's right,” Limber said finally. “Find another fire.”

Chickamauga frowned but turned and hobbled away. Red Cap hawked a gob of spit into the middle of his back as he departed.

“So what's his story?” Charlie asked.

“One may smile and smile and be a villain,”
Romeo said, shaking his head.

“Folks think he sold out Wilderbeck to Wirz,” Limber said.

“He might spy for them Raiders, too,” said Big Pete.

“Just watch yourself around him,” Limber said. “He'll turn over on you in a minute for an extra mouthful of corn bread or a stick of firewood.”

Barclay looked back at the bloody spot in the ground, but in the interim, Limber had tossed the root into the fire.

“Why do they call you Limber?” Charlie asked.

“Aw, I spent some time in the circus,” Limber said.

“Go on!”

“Show him, Jim,” Red Cap said, grinning.

Limber waved them off, but the other men around the fire egged him on.

“Confinement has unlimbered me, boys,” he begged off.

But the men wouldn't hear it.

With mock reluctance, Limber rose stiffly and took the contents of his trouser pockets out: a small clasp knife, Barclay noticed, and some coins. He passed them to Romeo and then leaned forward and touched his toes. After a bit, he shifted his weight and stood on his hands. Then he backpedaled out of the ring of fire and circled it clockwise, his shoes bobbing in the air as the men hooted and laughed.

Charlie laughed a high-pitched, girlish giggle that doubled him over and sent the others laughing as well.

Barclay watched the hapless men without shelter settle down in long rows in the avenue that stretched almost to the east wall. There must have been three hundred men huddled tightly against one another. As he settled into the shebang with Charlie, he listened as a single voice begged for a shift in position.

The cry was carried down the line until a man at the head called out, as though ordering maneuvers: “Spoon left!”

And the great line of men groaned and turned in the night.

The temperature had dropped significantly, and he got close behind Charlie on the blanket floor, which smelled faintly of death.

“We're lucky we got this place, ain't we?” Charlie muttered in the stillness.

“Yeah. That we are.”

“You owe me, Barclay. You stick by me. I don't wanna wind up sleepin' out in the cold like them others.”

Barclay sighed. Was that Charlie's game? Protection from a big buck of a Negro for his skinny white ass?

He lay staring at the back of Charlie's head and occasionally swatting the vermin that crawled over him. His last thought was that he had to find some means of repelling them.

He had no idea how long they lay there. It might have been only a moment, or it might have been an hour. But when next Barclay opened his eyes, it was to see the toe of the shoe coming at his face. He turned his head and took it in the cheek rather than the teeth. The night blazed with stars only he could see as strong hands gripped him by the shirt and pants and dragged him from the shebang out into the night air.

He tried to raise an alarm and was struck with something hard in the base of his skull, so he drooped and gasped between the hands of his captors. Who would come for him, anyway, a black man camped among the whites? Maybe Big Pete himself had decided he didn't want a Negro for a neighbor, or maybe someone had had his eyes on the shelter and decided no fresh fish were going to take it.

He was barely conscious for the duration of the stealthy rapture across the camp, but he prayed briefly that they did not intend to drown him in that foul creek. When he was finally dropped on his face in the sand, it was in a circle of burning brands set in the ground, and the first thing he saw was Charlie pushing himself up from the ground alongside him, blood leaking from his nose.

Barclay looked up and saw a giant man with an unlikely belly perched like a feudal lord on a canvas field chair. He wore a dirty striped shirt and artilleryman's trousers tucked into a pair of serviceable but mismatched cavalry boots. Out of the leg of one of them was the brass-capped handle of a bowie knife. His black-bearded chin rested on his overlarge fist, and his long hair was plaited like a Comanche's beneath a battered Whipple hat.

He smoked from a hand-carved pipe, the bowl glowing orange like a captured sun as he inhaled and let the rich-smelling fog leak from the corners of his downturned mouth. There was something in his look and bearing that made Barclay think of Jean Lafitte, the pirate his mother had told him stories about.

He sat before the mouth of the large Raiders' tent complex Limber had pointed out to them the day before, and around him was a pack of men whose eyes were too hungry for the solid and well-fed condition of their bodies.

Among them was Sarsfield, swinging his pine club by the butt like a New York copper. The two men Barclay had scared off stood on either side of him, and the one whose teeth he'd busted stomped him back down with his heel when he tried to sit up. All three had blackened their faces and hands with ash to aide them in their night business.

“This the wog that done it, John?” asked the man in the chair in an English accent.

“Yeah,” said Sarsfield. “Stopped me, Chester, and Watts from rollin' one of the Injuns. Busted Watts's teeth right out.”

Mosby shook his head.

“One black brute against three strappin' lads like you, eh? Or was this one with 'im?”

“Yeah, that's it,” Sarsfield said. “Him, too.”

“You're a damn liar!” Charlie said. “I ain't never seen you before in my life!”

“He right.” Barclay laughed. “You are a damned liar, Sarsfield. And too piss-poor in a fight to fess up to it, too.”

“You black bastard!” Sarsfield roared. “Let him stand up and say that.”

Barclay felt the heel of the man behind him slide off, and he rose to his knee.

“Sure, sure, but how long I get to whup you before you goin' start cryin' for your friends to jump in, you cheap yellow wagon dog?”

Sarsfield advanced, but Mosby chuckled and held up his hand.

“Hang on a minute, John,” Mosby said, smiling with genuine amusement at Barclay. “You talk bold for a runaway.”

“I ain't never run away from nothing.”

“Oh, so you're a free man, are you? Or at least as free as a man can get here?”

Barclay said nothing.

“Tell me your name,” Mosby said.

“Earl Stevens.”

“So before I let my boys parole you out of the South Gate, tell me, Earl Stevens, what you were hopin' for, beatin' on my men. Was that Red Indian kin of yours?”

Barclay chewed his lip a bit. Maybe this could go only one way, but it was worth a shot. The Raiders seemed to operate with more freedom than the rest of the population, despicable as their company was. If he played this right, maybe he could join them, he thought. Even being amusement for Mosby might be a better position than huddling in a vermin-infested shebang with Charlie. But of course, Charlie had helped him out. Could he talk Charlie out of this trouble? Talking himself out would be the greater feat. Charlie hadn't done anything. Of course, eventually he would have to kill Sarsfield, Watts, and Chester, but no one would mourn them.

He was about to answer Mosby when another man stepped out of the tent behind him, stretched, and yawned. He was a slovenly infantryman with a double chin and a thick set of black eyebrows and bushy sideburns. A silvery locket rested in the nest of dark hair that poked through his open shirt.

“Rickson!” Charlie yelled unexpectedly at the sight of the man.

Before anyone could even turn his attention to him, Charlie had launched himself from the circle and bowled Mosby over out of his chair, snapping its legs in an attempt to throw himself on the new man. He tore the man's shirt as two Raiders rushed forward and pulled him off.

Mosby got to his feet sputtering and kicked angrily at his busted chair.

“Now what the goddamned hell is this?”

“Rickson, you son of a bitch! I told you I'd catch up with you!” Charlie screeched, fighting in the arms of the Raiders who held him back.

“Here now, who the hell is Rickson?” Mosby shouted. He looked at the new man for clarification.

“I've no idea, Mosby!” the man stammered in a thick brogue. “None!”

“Secesh snatch your spectacles, soldier?” Mosby said to Charlie. “This man's Terry Sullivan.”

“Bullshit he is!” Charlie spit. “His name's William Rickson, and he robbed and killed Ogden Davies at Libby Prison four months ago.”

Mosby looked at Sullivan.

Sullivan held up his hands and shook his head.

“That's Davies's locket his wife give 'im hangin' around his damn neck!” Charlie yelled. “Her portrait's inside.”

Mosby walked over and lifted the locket from Sullivan's chest, flipped it open, squinted, snapped it shut, and let it fall back in place.

He shrugged.

“And what if it is?”

“So I'm gonna gut him like a fish for what he done,” Charlie said, his voice cracking with emotion.

Barclay pursed his lips. So much for joining up with the Raiders.

“Ah, well, it's vendetta you're pursuing,” Mosby said, hooking his thumbs in his rope belt. “And just how do you aim to achieve it, prisoner as you are?”

“I'll chew through the whole lot of you to bite that bastard's throat out. Turn me loose and see if I don't!”

The Raiders chuckled at Charlie's rage, but Mosby smoked his pipe and said nothing till their jeers had died down.

“You've touched my black heart, boy,” Mosby said. “I'll let you have it out with Rickson, or Sullivan, or whoever he really is.”

Sullivan, who had been laughing along with the others, looked as if he'd been struck.

“Surely you're not serious!” he sputtered.

“Forgive me, John. I've an Englishman's love of melodrama. Turn the boy loose. Let's see how far his rage will carry him.”

Barclay watched as the Raiders let go of Charlie.

Charlie stood there for a moment, glaring around wildly, not believing they were actually going to let him at Sullivan. More Raiders appeared in the torchlight, leaning in close, eager to see blood.

Sullivan was bigger and rougher than Charlie, and Barclay wondered just what would drive the inherently meek soldier who had all but begged for his protection to challenge the man so brazenly. Who was this Ogden Davies to him?

Barclay tried to rise to his feet, but Watts shoved him down and cursed through a mush mouth of broken teeth: “Sit down, boy. You're gonna get your turn.”

Charlie moved to the center of the circle of firelight and raised his small fists slowly, as if the realization that he was outmatched had only just dawned on him. Still, he stood his ground gamely and waited for Sullivan to close.

Sullivan spit on the ground and took a step.

Mosby stopped him with his hand.

“Hang on, John, so there's no hard feelings between us.”

He reached down and plucked the bowie knife from his boot and tossed it point down into the dirt a few feet equidistant from both of them.

“Let's have a good show, shall we?”

He grinned and stepped back.

Sullivan launched himself into the circle.

Charlie dived for the knife, but Sullivan was faster and kicked him in the ribs with enough force to send him rolling away.

He plucked up the knife and flipped it in his hand expertly.

Barclay glanced over at the stockade wall. The sentries were clearly outlined in their spindly pigeon roosts. They weren't even aiming their muskets but seemed to be leaning on their rails to enjoy the show. He thought he heard one boy shout a wager to another.

Charlie got slowly to his feet, and as he was stooped over, one of the Raiders behind him planted his shoe in his backside and sent him wheeling awkwardly toward Sullivan.

Sullivan punched Charlie with his free hand. It was as if the skinny man had run into a clothesline. His feet went out from under him, and he fell flat on his back, dazed.

Sullivan shrugged at Mosby, who shook his head.

“Confucius said, ‘Embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.' But you won't even fill up one by half, you skinny little muck sniper,” he said.

The Raiders roared with laughter.

Sullivan grinned, straddled Charlie, and sat down on his thin trunk, leaning over and pinning both of his thin wrists with one hand, the silver locket dangling in front of Charlie's eyes.

He flicked the blade across Charlie's face. Charlie shrieked.

Barclay tried to stand again, but Watts pulled him down.

“You talk big, sure,” Sullivan said, laughing. “Real big for such a wee squint. I believe I'll liberate you of that tongue of yours so it don't get you into any more trouble.”

He reached down, and the Raiders hooted as Charlie gagged and groaned.

“Mosby!” roared a familiar voice from outside the fire.

Barclay looked back and saw Big Pete rise over the shoulders of two Raiders, reach in, and slam their heads together.

The others momentarily broke, and Limber, Romeo, and a few others charged into the circle, swinging sticks of firewood and their precious frying pan.

Watts, distracted by the intrusion, didn't see Barclay's elbow lunge back and drive deep into his groin. He doubled over, the wind hissing from him, and Barclay threw him head over heels over his shoulder and jumped to his feet.

As the Raiders and Limber's small band clashed, Mosby backed into the tent with a few other men and came back with unfinished pine clubs.

Barclay rushed up and kicked Sullivan upside the head. The Irishman sagged and rolled off of Charlie.

Charlie's face was awash with bright blood. He blinked up at Barclay, terrified.

“Barclay?” he managed.

Barclay pulled the smaller man to his feet, threw him over his shoulders, and after a brief glance made for a gap in the circle of Raiders.

Sarsfield barred his way, club in hand, with Chester beside him.

Suddenly, over the cursing and the blows, the night erupted with a peal of thunder and a flash of sunlight that made every man jump and a moment later throw himself flat on the ground. Raider and prisoner alike passed the word to get down in hushed tones.

The Rebels on the embankment had lobbed a shell over their heads. It exploded just on the other side of the east wall.

Barclay ran out of the firelight and into the night with Charlie bouncing on his shoulders. A few other men scattered all around him, diving into shelters and shadows alike.

From the wall, a Confederate sergeant yelled: “Prisoners will cease and desist! The next shot will be in your midst! Turn in!”

Another fleeing figure bumped into Barclay. He turned and saw Limber running alongside him.

“Is he dead?” Limber gasped.

“Naw,” Barclay said.

“Get him in the shebang and let's have a look!”

They jogged the rest of the way back to their division in silence and soon had Charlie spread out inside on the blanket.

Limber lit a match and held it to Charlie's face.

Sullivan had cut him diagonally from the left cheekbone down to the right-hand corner of his jaw, splitting his lower lip.

They mopped at the blood as best they could.

“What the hell brought that on?” Limber asked.

“I beat up on Sarsfield and two others: Chester and Watts,” Barclay said.