Andersonville (18 page)

I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden;

Thou needest not fear mine;

My spirit is too deeply laden

Ever to burden thine.

On this evening of Wednesday, February twenty-fourth (it was after nine o’clock), Elkins sprang up in the middle of Ira’s deliberately wicked quotation of Shelley, crying, Beg pardon—looks like a fire! They joined him at the window: the entire valley to the north was colored brilliantly. The Biles’ house was much farther beyond, the Yeoman house farther to the west, the McWhorters’ farther to the east. Could the damp forest itself be burning, could the few sprawling houses of Anderson be alight?

In glow the three left the house and hurried west along the lane. Ira led sharply to the right on a footpath worked out by slaves going to and from the village. Years before, he had had his people build a crude bridge with a handrail across the little branch of Sweetwater and squashy ground surrounding it at this point. Looking ahead through the trees as they hastened, they could see that the newly carved-out road was become a sluice of ruddy light. It looked as if bonfires had been kindled for a gay homecoming (except that no one was coming home) or some such festivity (except that there was little to be gay about). Stumps, roots, branches, tops and needles: the debris of slain pines was heaped regularly to illuminate the road. These brush piles howled and crackled on high.

The snapping blazes revealed a train halted beside the Anderson depot; the train had been loaded with goblins, and several hundred goblins had trooped already from their box cars. Pine knots burned at intervals along the front and wispish lantern lights went scouting between ragged ranks, coming together again by twos and threes as if lightning bugs assembled for conference.

Next car, called a distant voice of authority. Count them as they come out, align them in ranks of fifty, two ranks deep, form them by Hundreds. Hold on! March those first eight men over here to complete this Hundred.

Many guards convened along the borders of the muddy road, and they were being ordered into position like posts of a loose fence stretching from fire to fire: one fire, three guards between like a short post and tall posts, next fire larger and farther away, five guards in between, next fire and three guards, more fires, more guards, the color of flames reflected as on splinters of broken looking glass by pine gum dry and icy on the stumps. Some of the guards had bayonets fixed to their weapons, others had not; there was a tingling gleam to the bayonets. Some of the guards wore blue and the blazes turned them to purple.

You men in this formation are First Squad, First Hundred. Repeat after me: First Squad, First Hundred. The ragged mumble following. You men in this formation are Second Squad, First Hundred. Repeat after me: Second Squad, First Hundred. Mumble, mumble in the manner of an extended groan. A thin mad voice soared, Hey, Johnny, how are the rations here?

Silence in the ranks! You men in this formation are Third Squad, First Hundred.

Something popped and burst in one of the fires, perhaps it was a bottle. Two guards approached the flames cautiously, they found nothing, they moved to their posts. You men in this formation are Second Squad, Second Hundred. Past trees and stumps the twin rows of blaze were spaced, curving slightly south, curving sharply north again all the way to the stockade.

Ira turned quickly at sound of a familiar voice. In a cluster his black people were grouped—all of them seemed gathered, even Old Leander and the children. Yes, all: Pet held the sleeping Sukey wrapped in her arms. A reek of orange touched their polished dark faces.

Mastah, please, Mastah. We come. . . .

Feared something was afire, said Jonas.

Mastah, is them Yankees over by them cars?

Ira cleared his throat. Yes, Coffee, I believe they are.

Look just like folks.

Mighty poor white trash, said the skinny voice of one of the wenches. There was a shiver of laughter.

A hand slid into the grip of Ira’s hand, it was Lucy’s hand, it trembled. Beyond her Harrell Elkins said, It’s well that I was delayed until now. I can look them over tomorrow before I leave, and gain some notion of their general physical condition. It might affect my recommendations.

Yes, Ira heard himself saying, it might. But these prisoners are not newly captured?

I was informed that they were to come from Richmond.

Then there will be a difference in the physical condition of these, and in the condition of those who are brought here shortly after their capture?

Bound to be, sir. It was an inclement winter at Richmond, with severe mortality among the Northern prisoners. . . . Reminded speedily of the dead Rob Lamar, and how Rob must be pinned in Lucy’s thought at this moment, Elkins felt chagrined.

Would these guards be the same troops who’ve been assigned here lately?

Twenty-sixth Alabama and Fifty-fifth Georgia. Or rather—remnants of those regiments. But I’m told that they’ll soon be sent to the front, and some of the new Georgia Reserve regiments will be stationed here in their stead.

Orders shouted alongside the depot . . . goblins began to move. They straggled in a column of twos, guards hovering. Squarely through the avenue of flames they advanced, fifty couples, more guards, another fifty stumbling couples, more guards, the next shambling Hundred in their grotesque wedding march, the next. They were dressed in every variety of rags afforded by their own uniforms at the time of capture, every variety of garment flung out from Sanitary Commission barrels at Belle Isle, every variety bartered for, stolen, traded for, ripped from the dead. Pancake caps, slouched hats, citizens’ hats, no hats at all, hair of the hatless looked like wads of leaves in oaks where crows had nested. Blue jacket, undershirt, a man wrapped in a shawl, another Indian shape with a blanket folded around him, more blue jackets and flannel shirts. (The Claffeys did not see him, he did not see them, he did not know them, they would never know him; but a youth named Eben Dolliver walked in his crazy quilt.) Some carried cloth-wrapped bundles, a few wore knapsacks on their backs, there were haversacks and rolls of bedding slung across the shoulders in Confederate style, one man carried a carpetbag, there were skillets and buckets hanging. The more mature were grizzled wildly in their beards . . . dirty crusted faces of sixteen-year-olds were pinched and squeezed. Oh thank Heaven, cried Ira Claffey in his heart, that Moses was never captured. He might have looked like one of these, like one of these; he might have been marched to one of those evil places of which I’ve heard, Yankee prison pens, Rock Island or Johnson’s Island or Point Lookout.

...But if he had been captured, instead of shot in Maryland, he might be alive still.

...Are these alive? Walking, it is true—parading now before our gaze—but are they The Quick? Might not this be a procession of The Dead?

Few sounds did they make, they coughed, there were hawkings of those with maladies of the throat; one man kept bending out to blow his nose between his fingers. God damn it, he cried impatiently but recognizably, now I’ve tooted myself into a nosebleed again.

Hush up, Yank. You heard the order. No talking!

In all there were six Hundreds, although the final Hundred did not move with its full complement. There came a burst of steam, froth of sparks from the railroad engine; it jerked forward with the line of empty box cars, heading for Albany and foodstuffs which must be loaded. Driving wheels shivered and spun with racking clatter; no voice of guard or prisoner could be heard against the engine’s riot.

Distantly on the fiery boulevard Yankees seemed fumbling in indecision. There were delays outside the stockade gate, where names were being checked, rolls written out. Flames wavered, expunged them for a moment, brought the last batch into final glare and showed them for what they were: insects disturbed in a sandy channel, progressing sluggishly as their own larvae.

With the train’s departure, Ira could hear his Negroes returning in an orderly drove across the branch. They were discussing the Yankees, and had been sadly disappointed in the Yankees’ appearance.

Harrell Elkins said, Did I tell you there’s still a broad gap on one side of the stockade? We’ve artillery mounted there.

Oh, Lucy cried, some may escape. They’re such a desperate lot.

Never fear. A squad of guards remains on duty through every hour of the twenty-four, and will until the gap is closed.

The torchlight procession has passed, said Ira. He led the way back toward the plantation. He kept thinking, Why, they came too early! I had not expected prisoners so soon. Lucy and Cousin Harry followed slowly on the path, Cousin Harry helping Lucy in the dark. There was not such strong light now; fires were burning down. But a deepening glow could be seen from Claffey windows even after the three people had said Goodnight and had gone to their rooms.

 XIII 

A
t nineteen years of age Edward Blamey was a corporal in the First Rhode Island Cavalry, and had been a captive since he was dismounted near Chancellorsville when his horse broke its leg. Edward was somewhat the worse for wear after an autumn and winter at Belle Isle, but his practiced eye still rolled keenly. Blamey had remarkable eyesight, inherited from generations of fishermen who put out daily past Point Judith, although he did not incline toward the sea.

The first morning after he’d arrived at Camp Sumter, he mounted a wedge of pine-root and clay which lay like the bulb of a giant’s onion tossed aside. This was at a point of vantage on the northern summit, a few rods from the north fence, and Edward Blamey had a clear view of the whole interior. Most of the men were at work, rigging shelters out of the forest’s wreckage left by axemen, but some were sitting in apathy, too tired or ill or depressed to join in this general pioneering. Groups gathered opposite the breach in the wall, staring at a brass cannon which glared back with its blank black muzzle.

Blamey’s ancestors, who awarded him such vision, had been accustomed to gauging the activities of birds on distant waters and thus discovering shoals of fish they sought. In the cavalry, men used to amuse themselves by saying, Ed, I hain’t got my spy-glasses handy. What are those critters doing on that road down yonder? Are they Federals or Johnnies? Or maybe a herd of muley cows? Ed Blamey could examine the tiny moving figures, and report that they constituted a foraging party of four men, driving in some rather sorry beeves. This he could do with his naked gray eyes narrowed to telescopic power. His comrades used to lay wagers as to whether he was right or wrong, but usually he was right. In this way he formed a perpetual diversion for himself—measuring distances, estimating numbers, evaluating faraway activities of troops or wagon trains. Most men would have needed field-glasses to do this; and Blamey’s developed skill helped to win him two wide stripes.

As a cavalryman he had been compact as to stature, a spruce figure in spite of violently bowed legs that folks made jokes about. The spruceness was long since departed: Blamey appeared as a dried bean or nut, rattling in the husk of his short jacket and patched sodden pants. The big patch on the seat had come loose and flapped and sagged, every step that Ed Blamey took. No one of the people with whom he messed had needle or thread to repair the damage, and it annoyed Edward’s dignity to have his grimy buttocks exposed to the world. Here his search could be pursued more widely and, he hoped, successfully. That was his main reason for climbing upon the hillock of stump: he wished to estimate the number of prisoners assembled in this new stockade, and pick out a likely group where men seemed better dressed and better supplied than the average; such a group might include a man with a housewife in his possession. That was Ed’s chief compulsion; but also he knew that he would have done it if he’d needed no patch at all—merely for the challenge, merely from habit.

He stood breakfasting on part of the cornmeal mush he had saved from yesterday’s ration. It had weighed nearly two pounds—a sizeable chunk of cold mush, and he hadn’t eaten it all, because his mess still had some boiled sweet potatoes they’d purchased on the railroad. Ed Blamey assorted days in his mind. This was Saturday the twenty-seventh. Well, folks said that the first shipment had arrived on the twenty-fourth—five hundred and ninety-one strong. Those represented the six hundred who had been told off and marched out of Belle Isle on St. Valentine’s day . . . there were rumors that they were to be sent to the North for exchange, and many men not included in this detachment tried to flank out with them, and were struck or—if unduly persistent—punished in other ways. Men yelled after the departing gang, Hey, give The Girl I Left Behind Me a pretty valentine for me! . . . Five hundred and ninety-one, they had reached this place: nine either died of disease en route, or were shot by guards in trying to escape from the cars. Two more detachments of three hundred each came on the twenty-sixth, one of these being Edward Blamey’s crowd. The Rebs didn’t seem able to handle more than a few hundred at one swoop. There was such a jumble of box cars coming south and troop trains going north, that the two groups had arrived within a few hours of each other. Officers commanding the guards hurried wildly about at the station, cursing. They said that rations had not been made available for such numbers. Some of the new men would have to go hungry, and they did go hungry, but they were accustomed to going hungry.

There must be nearly twelve hundred prisoners now penned inside this place. It was nothing like so crowded as Belle Isle, and Edward felt relief about that. His glance roved the fence. Somewhere above fifteen acres was the area contained. Later he would pace the length of the walls and then he’d know exactly. Of course that creek took up space, and obviously men and teams had trampled the adjacent sides into a mire when they were building the prison. A certain amount of uninhabitable space must thus be deducted from the whole. Blamey watched the creek, and stiffened with disgust: some people were squatted down, there, doing their business. Fine business indeed—didn’t they realize that that was the only source of drinking water in the entire place? Well, he couldn’t whip the lot of them (his spirit was dry, selfish and quiet; but he was impelled by the small man’s demand for assertion) or he’d have gone down there and tried it. Doubtless guards or prison officials would put a stop to that dirty habit soon.

He thought of the James River, boiling coldly past the side of the Belle Isle camp, rushing foamy brown among its rocks. This creek wasn’t much. Suppose it ran dry?

Edward Blamey thought to select the family engaged in building the most efficient-looking and best-equipped shelter of the lot. Over there, black figures tussling and heaving: it was beyond the creek valley on the south hilltop, and they were actually setting tall poles in the ground, and roofing them with what shone like India rubber blankets, fairly new ones. Men as well supplied as those men must have needles, thread, all such things. Ed Blamey chewed the last of his solidified mush and spat out a stray piece of unground cob. He slid down through the red twist of roots to the ground.

He called himself Number One, in slang he had picked up after joining the cavalry (which he and many of his companions still called
calvary
as they had when they were children) and one reason why he was in fair shape now was that he looked after Number One with care. At Belle Isle he had jeered and thrown clods like the rest when a few turncoats yielded to the inducements of Rebel emissaries, and marched out of the camp to accept food, clothing and liberty as Confederate States’ soldiers. Ed’s grim small conscience would not have permitted such deviation on his own part; at least his nervousness regarding The Wrath To Come would not have permitted it. But within limitation of a prisoner’s existence Edward Blamey was adept at finding the driest corner of any shebang, the freshest chunk of pork, the least weevily meal, the warmest spot by a winter fireside. His common expression, when anyone else touched an article belonging to him, was, That’s mine. Take care. That’s mine. He was not admired as generous or entertaining; still he kept himself as clean as possible, he would share his scrap of blanket if someone else offered a share in a waterproof in return; he would do his share in any task, but only his share. Here’s Number One’s chunk of kindling, he’d say, and put it down for the fire; but it would have taken much persuasion for him to go out and seek kindling for one of the invalids. He was not loved, he was accepted.

(Edward’s father was treasurer of the Baptist Church at home in Rhode Island, and neighbors thought or pretended to think that the elder Blamey found certain unmentionable perquisites in his office. This was untrue. Mr. Blamey’s accounts could always be balanced to the penny, and he was fond of asserting that they could be.)

On the south hill of the prison pen, Edward encountered the busy batch of men he had observed from afar. Critically he paused to watch their activity. A fine cabin was being constructed by their united efforts. Slighter, weaker folks came lugging armloads of dry pine boughs for stuffing chinks, more powerful men were disrupting roots and stumps, dragging them into the outline of a primitive castle.

Dolan, you rat, said a deep vibrating voice. Blamey jumped to hear it.

Hey? What did you say, Willie?

Dolan, you rat, that main pole’s not resting proper. Put it deeper, man—deeper. Make it stout.

Seated on a pile of blankets and overcoats, a mighty figure held his huge arms folded across his chest. His head was oversized, covered on top by scraggly ginger-colored hair, covered on the jowls and cheeks by a scrubby ginger-colored beard. His eyes rolled large and white. His arms were forest logs. My, my, said Ed Blamey in his thought, so he’s here too. Mosby the Raider! At Belle Isle he and Mosby had been numbered in the same Hundred. The man’s name actually was William Collins, and he had earned the appellation of Mosby the Raider through exertion of a piracy which might have caused the Confederate Mosby to shudder, and surely would have filled him with loathing. Willie Collins’s philosophy was plain, abrupt: a weak man has no business in this place nor in any place where physical force may rule. An invalid should die and be an invalid no longer. A strong man should be strong to begin with, and should remain powerful. He cannot do that unless he feed and shelter himself. I shall feed and shelter myself at whatever expense of anguish by another. Is there a luxury, a dainty, a pair of handmade boots, a Shetland shawl to be had? These I shall have. Only a power greater than I can exert shall prevent me from having them.

Edward Blamey had first observed William Collins in the ice of December, in that week when many Belle Islanders limped on frozen feet, making the same sound which Edward remembered his three-year-old sister as making after she fell from a bag-swing and broke her arm: a steady high keening like a fiddle string consistently tortured by rosin and horse-hair. You heard it everywhere, it lived in the air, and on the earth where less heartened victims crouched, rocking their shoulders and striking at their feet, trying to thaw them. Through this sound came the blast of Willie Collins’s rich voice saying, Take them off, God damn it, you heard me. He had found a fellow prisoner with feet the size of his own, and was forcing the prisoner to give up his shoes. It seemed that Collins’s own shoes had disappeared during the night. The prisoner had huge feet but no other hugeness about him; he was a rack of bones, his right arm hung idle from an old wound. Collins twisted the prisoner’s ear between thumb and finger, forcing the man to the ground. There he stood over him, threatening with the flat of his hand until the fellow untied his shoe-cords with his one good hand and kicked off the shoes. Edward and others stared glumly, but only one man tried to interfere. He was a sturdy Kentuckian whom they called Dark And Bloody. Dark And Bloody plunged suddenly toward the Irishman, caught hold of his arm and swung him around. Before he could deliver the blow he’d aimed, Willie’s foot came up like a rock from a gunpowder blast and caught the Kentuckian squarely in the crotch. One man fainted at sound of that scream. After Willie Collins had paraded away in his stolen shoes, people picked up the kicking figure from the ground and carried it, twisting and blubbering, to the hospital. Folks said that Dark And Bloody’s testicles were mashed to a pulp and that the whole bottom part of his belly was turning blue. Dark And Bloody, indeed. Few people even thought of resisting Willie Collins after that. As would be bound to occur, he gathered round him a mob of gentry of his own persuasion: some were incompetents, mere chinless starvelings, but they were feists who might hamstring a bull while a bolder dog had him by the throat. Since dashing exploits of the partisan John Mosby were common lore in that year, Collins was called Mosby. The name stuck.

Loot was taken from all and sundry, either through open assault in daylight or by sneak thievery at night. Loot could be traded, sold to the guards in exchange for any comfort obtainable. Cash exchange, the exchange of barter: it mattered not what machinery was employed so long as stewpots bubbled and raw corn whiskey was delivered in jugs. The more venal among the guards tolerated William Collins and his gang because they were a source of knives, watches, scissors, needles, buttons and clothing no longer commonly to be procured in the South. Other guards looked upon Collins with disgust, and swore to shoot him at the first opportunity. At Belle Isle Willie never went near the boundary ditch in consequence. When a new prisoner had been selected as a victim for search and seizure, and he chanced to be a prisoner located near the ditch, Willie would send subordinates to do the job.