Andersonville (4 page)

Barclay had never worked as an administrator, but the whole affair of roll call seemed to have been designed deliberately to be as stressful and inefficient as possible.

The regimental sergeants whose duty it was to maintain the list of each of their ninety charges had to compile their lists of able bodies and hand them over to a Confederate sergeant when he approached. Wirz would sit on his horse and listen as each of the men responded to his name, just as he had on the train platform. It was monotonous and prolonged, and each regiment was assigned a guard to watch it. If any man wavered or fell out of line or was heard to speak out of turn, the entire prison was summarily denied the daily ration.

The result was that men pissed themselves where they stood rather than step out of line. As the sun rose higher, the various odors of the camp conflated into a noxious mélange that was mind-numbing in its heaviness. It was a combination of bodily filth and shit, blood and pine smoke.

The great human inventory passed into its second hour, and newcomers began to croak for water, only to be hissed at and threatened into silence by their immediate neighbors.

A black man who had arrived on the train whined, “Why we got to stand through all this? I stood at the platform this morning. I'm parched!”

On Barclay's right-hand side, a lame-footed dark-skinned soldier with a chin of thick black wool whose spectacles magnified his disapproving glare warned him with a hiss as low and portentous as a water moccasin's: “Keep your lips shut! I ain't goin' hungry today on account of no thirsty hamfat.”

Barclay looked up at the sentries again and in the light of the sun noticed the poorness of their clothes. Some had nothing more than a secondhand or thirdhand cap to mark them as Confederate soldiers, the rest of their costume being composed of mismatched civilian clothes. The young guard he had noticed earlier had not been unique. Not one of the sentries appeared to be much older than Red Cap. They surely weren't regular soldiers. No doubt the lion's share of able-bodied men was deployed in the field against Sherman. The sentries had to be conscripts from the surrounding area. Why were they maintaining this ridiculous prison when the Confederacy could barely sustain its armed forces?

He wondered if the strictness of the roll call might be an excuse not to issue rations they didn't have. The South was stretched too thin. Maybe Grant and Lincoln's refusal to exchange prisoners was all part of some hellish plan to starve the South into more alacritous surrender by doubling its dependents.

When at last he heard the name Earl Stevens called, he replied, “Present!”

He heard a sharp intake of breath from the man with the spectacles.

He looked over to find the man staring at him and held his gaze until the sergeant called out, “Clemis Varrows!”

“Present!” the man with the spectacles responded.

Satisfied, Barclay let his gaze wander again.

The black troops had been arranged far south of their neighborhood in the stockade, near the putrid swamp bordering the creek. There was a Pennsylvania regiment to their immediate left, and he saw a man lean out of his formation and stoop down to reach over the deadline rope and get at the water flowing in from under the wall.

Barclay saw the man die. His stomach blew open at the same instant a loud boom echoed out over the stockade, making the stationary prisoners undulate in surprise.

The man fell over the rope and spilled his glistening innards to the dirt in a sloppy rain.

Barclay looked around, marking the sentry roosts, searching for the dissipating muzzle smoke, but couldn't make out which of the young guards had earned a furlough.

“Still need that drink, boy?” the soldier in the spectacles whispered as one of the Rebel guards booted the man off the rope and dragged him limply by his ankle, trailing intestines all the way to the dead pile.

The Negroes were told to stand aside when the roll call at last ended and Wirz and his men exited the stockade again. The white soldiers all returned to their dwellings and went about their business.

A big yellow-bearded Rebel sergeant in his forties with greasy hair and a pinched face and stained snaggleteeth ambled over with nearly two dozen Rebel privates under his charge.

Barclay knew his type right off by the swell of his belly, by the cruelty in his eyes, but especially by that big black braided bullwhip coiled on his belt opposite his pistol. He carried a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun under his arm.

The man spit a jet of tobacco juice on the ground, and Barclay wondered if he had been on the wall that morning.

“Well, well,” the sergeant said around his wad. “Looks like I got some new backs to bend. All right now, boys. There's a hundred and twelve of you now, which makes for even numbers. So startin' with you,” he said, pointing to the man on the far right end of the lineup, “by twos, I want each of you to reach over and touch the shoulder of the buck next to you.”

The men looked unsurely at one another for a second.

“Do it!” Turner yelled.

They did.

Barclay found to his chagrin that he happened to be standing next to the spectacled man with the lame foot, Clemis Varrows, who looked about as pleased as he was at the impromptu partnership.

“That's your work partner. You'll work in tandem just like any team of plow horses. Your partner messes up, you get ten lashes. If'n he wanders off, you both get forty. If'n you both take it into your woolly skulls to try and light out together and my dogs don't rip your throats out, I'm gonna hide you a hundred times at the post,” he said, slapping the bullwhip. “I run niggers in the field for fifteen years afore I come here, so I know all the tricks. I know an honest bellyache from shirkin', and I don't cotton to no back sass from no Boston snowflakes neither, so put all that behind you. You're gonna work and work hard.” The group was broken up evenly under the supervision of Turner's underlings, and each was assigned some menial task, some marching to the Rebel headquarters to clean or carry wood, some set to repairing or expanding the stockade wall, some assigned to forage for the sutler.

Barclay and Clemis were among a group under Turner's and another man's direction that was led to the edge of the pine forest and issued axes to cut wood.

Turner had not lied about it being hard work. Soon Barclay and Clemis had stripped off their tunics and were shining under the summer sun. The swinging of the ax handles and the chopping became a kind of rhythm all up and down the tree line.

About an hour into the work, Turner called for a rest, and a pair of black soldiers went down the line of woodcutters with a barrel of water and a dipper.

Resting on a freshly cut log, panting with his head between his knees, Barclay mopped at his head with his shirt and watched as a couple of soldiers came from the north, running a pack of wild, baying hounds.

Turner stepped from the shade of the tree he had been leaning against the whole time. He passed his shotgun to a subordinate and welcomed the dogs with a smile and open arms.

There were about a dozen or so of them, the usual curs, a patchwork of hides and patterns, but among them, standing out in their size and bearing like royalty, walked five unique specimens of the breed, bluish in color with black-spotted hides. They were overly large, and the pack leader looked to be about as heavy as a man, maybe 150 pounds. When they walked, their muscled shoulders rolled like those of prowling jaguars.

“That's Old Spot up at the head,” said Clemis, who had caught the direction of Barclay's look. “Meaner nigger dog you ain't never seen.”

“I think it's a Cuban bloodhound,” Barclay remarked.

His daddy had told him about them. The Spanish had developed the breed for hunting down the Maroons and Taino in Jamaica. The government had brought several of them Stateside to catch Seminoles in Florida about thirty years back, and they had proliferated through the South since as catch dogs, heedless of the dangers of the swamps the desperate runaways sometimes fled into and savage in the extreme. His daddy once had pointed one out to him. It had been on a wealthy planter's studded leash in Jackson Square, lifting its hind leg on a wall, and he had told his son it was all he could do not to go over there and shoot the animal.

“Oh, yeah?” Clemis said. “Well, it comprehend English just as good as Spanish. Look at that piece of trash.”

Turner had knelt down, and the happy dogs were swarming over him, licking his face and hands.

“Kissin' them foul dog lips that done et men up. Nasty bastard.”

Barclay shook his head.

“You talk funny,” Clemis said directly, turning back to him.

“What say?” said Barclay.

Clemis was staring at him over his spectacles now.

“I say you talk funny, boy. Don't talk like no nigger.”

“Well, that's 'cause I ain't never been that,” Barclay said.

“There, y'see? You try, but it ain't quite right,” Clemis went on, narrowing his eyes. “I bet the white folks can't tell the difference, but I can. You ain't talk like one of them New England Ne-groes. You ain't no field hand, but you don't strike me as no house nigger, neither. I can't figure out what you is.”

“Maybe you ought not to try,” Barclay said.

“Only thing I know for sure,” Clemis went on, “you ain't Earl Stevens.”

Barclay worked his jowls and looked back at the man seriously for once.

“So what you do with the genuine Earl Stevens?” Clemis asked, his tone low and threatening.

One of the Rebel guards gave a yell just then.

“Got a runner! Runner!”

The dogs began barking excitedly.

Far up the line, one of the black soldiers knelt on the ground, his face drawn, eyes popping in terror. He had his palms turned up and hands outstretched and was shaking his head.

“I told him not to! I told him!”

Turner stood up among the dogs and stretched his arms in a leisurely way, then took his shotgun from his assistant.

Though the dogs yipped and turned and nipped one another, the five spotted Cubans did nothing. The whole pack of slavering dogs seemed to defer to the authority of the five, and those five stood, stately, staring silently in the direction the man apparently had gone into the pines. In this, they almost mirrored the Confederates, as the privates were nearly jumping in place to go into the woods after the fugitive. Sergeant Turner stood calm with a lazy half smile on his dog-slimed lips.

But the spotted hounds were more somehow more regal than their repulsive master and waited, completely calm.

“Awright, Spot. Go get 'em!” Turner said.

The five bloodhounds exploded into motion. They bounded across the clearing and plunged into the forest, the pack baying and stumbling over one another to catch up.

One of the privates bounced in place and looked anxiously at Turner.

“Awright, George,” Turner said in the same tone he'd used for the dogs.

George gave a hoot and went off after the dogs.

“Let the dogs have 'im,” he called after him. Then he turned to the rest of the work detail. “You boys sit tight. Gonna show you all something.”

No one dared to speak or move. The only sound in the still clearing at the edge of the woods was the dwindling barking of the dogs and the huffing breath of the man whose work partner had fled. He was in danger of hyperventilating, but no one moved to his side.

The barking of the hounds grew faint as they topped some hill and swept down. Barclay for a moment imagined the man, conjuring him in his mind, smashing through grasping branches, blood thundering in his ears, not daring to look over his shoulder but hearing all that snarling wildness getting closer, bearing down on him.

Then there was a series of unearthly howls such as no dog Barclay, no dog any man in the line, had ever heard. It was a ragged, tortured sound like the call of some ravenous beast roaring in the belly of hell, riled at the fear scent of the damned. It was followed quickly by a single, almost laughably pitiful wail. Then the howling, the roaring, the cacophony of barking, drowned it out.

Turner chuckled.

“Sounds like they got him.”

Turner ambled over to the place where the pursuers had disappeared just as George emerged, cussing the dogs and dragging a limp burden behind him.

The curs were nipping and leaping at the carcass of the fugitive, which George pulled with effort by what looked to be the heel of a brogan till he deposited it in the clearing in front of them.

Barclay could see little of the man who had been. The dogs had reduced him to no more than a side of beef dressed in a blood-soaked tunic for a joke, with a lolling, fleshless head, one leg, and one ragged arm still attached. That horrible grinning face! The dogs had torn most of the skin from it, leaving the bright red muscle hanging from the bloody bone. The nose was gone, and one ear dangled and twisted by a scrap of red flesh, but the hideous lidless eyes remained, the brown irises rolling crazily.

The dogs had to be ordered away by Turner.

Barclay noticed that the five Cuban bloodhounds were not among the ones that tore at the corpse, though with their superior height and muscles they surely had been the first to pull the man down. He saw them walking behind, stately and aloof to the rowdiness of their pack mates, almost feigning innocence of the deed, as if their spotted muzzles weren't dripping blood like the rest.

“Lash that boy to the tree,” Turner said to his men as he unhooked his whip and let the tapering end slither to the grass.

The huffing man who was to be punished for allowing his partner to attempt to escape was dragged to a pine tree and made to hug it.

“Now, you're s'posed to have forty comin' to you,” Turner announced more to the silent onlookers than to the penitent, who was quivering and whimpering too violently to hear him. “But since your partner's lyin' dead…well, hell, I ain't about to flog no corpse. You'll have to take his, too.”