Andersonville (32 page)

The boy who had been pleading with Nathan Dreyfoos buried his head in his arms and began to blubber.

Nathan sat quietly in the bright stinking sunshine for a while, trying to decide what to say to Private Allen. At last he put his arm around the boy’s shaking shoulders and said, Don’t do that if you can help it, Allen. Weeping is the easiest but the worst thing that any of us can do here.

Yyyyeh.

You still have your strength. We have arrived at this ugly place in splendid condition. Instead of indulging in tears, we must keep our spirits up and our wits alive. There may be some way out.

Yyyyeh, Sarge.

Perhaps you can escape. Perhaps many of us can.

The man who had said, A great many of them don’t, moved off slowly through the crowd. He thought of Nathan, He talks like an officer, but is only a sergeant like me. He oughtn’t to delude himself about escape. . . . Oh, well, I used to try to escape, myself. Eventually I learned that it was wiser to devote myself to the science of living here, living as well as possible and as long as possible. . . . I wonder what that big Jew has got in his big knapsack? Maybe we can make a swap.

The man’s name was Seneca MacBean, and he came from Galena, Illinois. He was long a prisoner, shrewd in experience with mankind before he became a prisoner, shrewder now a thousand fold. MacBean had served with the Eighth Illinois Cavalry until that storied afternoon of July first, 1863, when dismounted troopers of Gamble’s Brigade went stringing east from a certain bullet-pocked seminary building, still firing their carbines if they had any rounds left to fire. In the town beyond they ran down this street and that, hunting for a way to safety, darting across backyards, trampling the rhubarb and onion tops and moss roses. Eventually the way behind them was barred by panting gangs of strangers in sweat-drenched gray shirts and undershirts, and the way ahead was thronged with other sweaty people who advanced on them meaningly with muskets at the ready.

Drop that carbine, Yank.

One man tried to get away by climbing a brick wall, and several guns banged, and the man fell into a tangle of tomato vines. This is
futility,
said Seneca MacBean, imagining that he was setting the word in Italic antique boldface; it was an odd trick, emphasizing words in that manner, but he was a printer by trade; he had been a printer’s devil at ten. He called to those of his men who were near, ordering them not to resist. Forms all locked up, he said. We’ve gone to press, gentlemen. The cavalrymen did not know exactly what he meant by this, but the example of Sergeant MacBean was unmistakable: he had dropped his carbine, and was holding up a yellow bandana in lieu of a white flag. . . . At Belle Isle he tried to escape by swimming the James River but was picked up by Home Guards on the Richmond side and returned to the Island. Here at Andersonville he had tried to escape by tunneling, along with a great many others; some dogs scouted him out, less than an hour after he left the tunnel. Seneca MacBean was resting, exhausted, on a cypress knee in the nearby swamp. My tongue, he told his friends later, was hanging longer than the dogs’. He spent a week in the stocks, which he endured stoically, and was then marched back into the pen.

Wirz remembered him well, because of his height (his rangy body towered four inches over six feet) and the circumstances. So, Henry Wirz would say each time he encountered the bony Illinoisan, Maybe you want you should go back in the stocks,
nein?

No thanks, Captain.

Then no more tunnels you make, you bad sergeant, you!

Nope. I won’t.

MacBean sustained himself at Andersonville by conducting a laundry. He had two wooden buckets which he cared for lovingly in order to keep them from springing leaks. He had no soap, but ashes and sand served. He’d made himself a scrubbing board, buying the end of a wide planed plank of hardwood, and this piece of plank he had grooved diligently. It did not work as well as his grandmother’s well-remembered scrubbing board, back home at the shady end of Bench Street, but it worked.

Often he thought of his grandmother; he could see her scrubbing under a morning-glory arbor as she had scrubbed when he was small—when his grandfather lost his job, when Gran MacBean took in washings, when Seneca MacBean drew those same washings—pressed beautifully by Gran’s hot irons—back to the tall homes of the Campbells or Gratiots or Kittoes on his squeaky-wheeled wagon, or sometimes in winter on his sled.

Senny, did your Gran say how much it was, this time?

Yes’m. She said she guessed a shilling.

Wait till I get my purse. . . . Here it is, in fractional currency. Count it carefully. Or can you count, yet?

Yes’m. I can count to a hundred.

What are you sniffing at, Senny? Those muffins Ellen is baking for tea?

Yes’m.

You shall have one. Ellen, fetch a strawberry muffin for the MacBean child. Fetch two. . . . And little Mrs. Gratiot smiled down at him, and he thought that she was beautiful.

It had been a good childhood, marred only by trivial matters like poverty, like being an orphan, like having a grandfather who often lay on his bed for days at a time . . . mumble, mumble, mumble, sometimes in English, sometimes in the Gaelic which John MacBean couldn’t recollect when he was sober. Then, at the age of fifty-nine, John MacBean signed The Pledge. I’ve never gone back on my word, he told the plain-faced woman who loved him devotedly. No more do I intend to go back on this word I’ve given now. He did not go back on his word; he never took another drink, and repeatedly counseled Seneca never to take The First Drink.

It was drink that took that fine handsome father of yours, laddie, and, in a way, it was drink that took the fair young mother who bore you, for she had not the will or strength to survive. Never take The First Drink.

Seneca did not, until he was seventeen. Then, while working across the big river in Dubuque, he fell in with a riotous crowd of Irishmen, and attended a pic-nic where the whiskey called forty-rod was flowing. He took The First Drink, the second, the third and more. He became furiously drunk, scrapped with the Irish, thrashed several of them, was himself thrashed by the survivors. He throbbed to wakefulness in the middle of the night, pounded, aching, black-eyed, scratched. He lay abandoned in that same horrid grove, lying in his own vomit.

He washed in the first stream he came to, and tottered back to his lodging house where he wrote out a pledge for himself and signed it with a quivering hand. In the morning he looked at that pledge and could scarcely make out his own signature, so he signed it again. Like his grandfather and the other storied MacBeans whom he had never seen but of whom he had heard much, Sen MacBean did not go back on his word. He owned immeasurable strength. Sometimes he felt that he needed all of it, to keep going in Andersonville.

Seneca was proud of his sign and pleased often by his own humor. In early March, when there was still an abundance of forest trash all over the place, he had amused himself by hunting for curly splinters, chips and other morsels of pine wood or roots which had dried into the shape of letters. At first he tried merely to assemble an alphabet; then he got the idea of a sign to advertise his laundry. He had assisted another man periodically in washing the prisoners’ clothes at Belle Isle; but now the other man was dead, so Sen went into business for himself. He pulled little nails out of a pair of wornout boots which he acquired, and tacked the rustic letters on a branch suspended above his hut. Since Illinoisans were often called Suckers, he had a name ready-made for this concern.
Sucker Laundry & Cleaning Co.
read the sign,
S. MacBean, Prop.
Only the
k,
two
a
’s, the
b
and one
p
(and the & sign) had needed to be cobbled together a bit. The rest of the letters were natural, just as he had found them, and Seneca MacBean was fond of pointing this out. In time he met a few fellow printers, and they had discussions as to the type style of the various letters—Gothic, Tudor black, German text, and so on.

He prospered if anyone could be said to prosper in the stockade. The more intelligent and resourceful prisoners recognized that cleanliness would aid in their survival; scrubbing would allay the activities of vermin; it was as simple as that. But few owned the facilities for even an attempt at washing their clothes, and many did not own the strength to try. Seneca MacBean accepted any currency, for he could barter away things which he did not need. Except corn bread (later)—he would not accept that. He would take wood, clothing, buckles, vegetables, bones, pieces of string, buttons, fragments of reading matter—any and every object—in payment for his services. His arms and shoulders were powerful, even after the Belle Isle winter. He ate sparingly, he ate not to allay his hunger for that was impossible; but he ate only those materials which he thought would be good for him; if he thought that something might make him sick he would not feed on it, no matter how hungry he was. He drank only water from wells dug on the higher ground of the North Side; this he received as laundering pay from the proprietors of the wells. He weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and eighty pounds at the time of his capture, went down to perhaps a hundred and fifty on Belle Isle; now at Andersonville he managed to hold this weight very well, it even seemed that he had put on a few pounds, or was he dreaming?

Collins’s Raiders had begun operations the moment they entered the stockade; Sarsfield’s Raiders and Curtis’s Raiders and the rest were not far behind with thefts and incursions. If there was any man whom Willie Collins feared that man was Seneca MacBean. Collins never attacked Seneca, and discouraged those of his herd who suggested it. The man named Tomcat O’Connor, who was shot by Father Time on Belle Isle— He was a former member of the Daybreak Boys in New York City, who found as much delight as actual profit in overhauling a weaker man. A few days after he reached the Island, O’Connor attempted to remove from Seneca MacBean’s finger the old seal ring which had belonged to John MacBean’s father’s father, in Glasgow. Perhaps Tomcat outweighed Seneca by twenty-five or thirty pounds. A starved assemblage actually left the ration wagon to watch the beating which MacBean awarded to Tomcat O’Connor.

People screamed, Kill him, kill him! You should have killed him. You could have killed him—

Yes, I think so, said Seneca, and licked his raw knuckles. Along with the raiders he recognized that this was a violent world, and violence was a necessary adjunct to reaching a desired end. The difference was that the gangsters and he had different conceptions of what might constitute a desired end. They were selfish and avaricious; Sen was not. He enjoyed serenity, but (like so many Scots before him) he was willing to engage in conflict to attain serenity.
We shall have Peace if we must fight for it
was a philosophy jested about through the generations, but to Seneca MacBean this seemed not incongruous.

The morning when the Plymouth Pilgrims arrived he was halfway back to his shebang when consideration prompted him to halt and then to retrace his steps. He found the big Jew at the same place where he had seen him first, except that now he was standing with knapsack and blanket roll at his feet, gazing curiously toward the South Side. A hullabaloo ascended over there; it sounded and looked like a riot. Morning, said Sen MacBean, and told the stranger his name and regiment, and held out his hand.

Nathan Dreyfoos responded in kind, but when he released MacBean’s hand he looked down at it and smiled. I cannot understand why your hands are comparatively so clean and—

And the rest of me dirty? That’s the result of my laundry business. Scrubbing for hours, every day. But it does crack my hands and make them sore. Tell me, Sergeant, have you been squadded yet?

Last night before they turned us into—this place. I’m Thirty-ninth Detachment, Second Ninety, Third Mess.

But you’ve got no quarters as yet?

No. They said— The Rebel sergeant’s words were, Pick out a place.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to pick a good one. How’d you like to come over to my shebang, and see how we live here?

A fresh series of yells and shrieks issued from the South Side, and Nathan Dreyfoos jerked his head. What’s going on, over there?

Raiders. Probably attacking some of you new men.

Raiders? Nathan would learn in another hour that three boys of his regiment had strayed incautiously near the headquarters of Charley Curtis. When attacked these boys screamed for help and several more of the Eighty-fifth New York went to their assistance. The battle ended—if such battles could be said to ever end—with three of the Pilgrims kicked and clubbed into insensibility . . . one had a fractured skull, and died four days later. The rest had their jackets and shirts literally torn from their backs, and of course all of them lost their knapsacks.

They are gangsters, robbers, said MacBean. The majority of them come from the slums of New York. Come along. I’ll show you my shebang.

Thank you. I’d best stay with my men, here. Do you mean that the Confederates do nothing to ameliorate this situation? They allow hoodlums to go unpunished?

Friend, said Seneca, you’ve got a lot to learn about this place. You fetch the people of your squad together, and bid them sit on their knapsacks. Get at least six or eight together, and bid them keep together. What have you got in the way of arms?

Nathan looked his astonishment. But all our weapons were taken from us when we surrendered.

All, Mister? What’s in these bureaus? Knives, forks— You got any scissors amongst you? Any Barlow knives? Even a spoon; you can break off the bowl, sharpen the end on a stone: it makes one of the meanest weapons alive because you carry it concealed in your hand. . . .

Nathan went with Seneca MacBean to the northwest central portion of the area, not far above Main Street where they had met. MacBean lectured him all the way there. He said frankly that he had been struck by Nathan’s size and physical makeup, and by the manner in which he addressed Private Allen.

You have qualities of leadership, Dreyfoos.