Andersonville (8 page)

Nearby, men who had been left with the dead but who yet clung weakly to the end of their lives shook and frothed as these fearsome apparitions bore down on them, reached in, and tore their quivering souls free. The beastly spirits tore at them, molested them, and dragged them shrieking away, lamenting the violent, shocking transition from one hell to another with maddened wailing voices only he could hear.

Nettie Maynard's vision was true.

Andersonville was a piece of hell.

He laid his forehead against the pole as his knees gave out and he sagged on the chains and Turner's whip made him buck and dance like a pugilist's bag.

He did not want to die in hell.

It was a drizzly, cool afternoon in New Orleans, and when Jean-Lamont Lourdes leaned over the iron rail of the café veranda to spit on the head of a white man in a corduroy coat passing beneath, the man walked on heedless, thinking it had only been the rain.

Jean-Lamont watched the man proceed down Rue Royal, quickstepping to get under shelter while Barclay stared openmouthed across the table, aghast at his father's vulgarity.

“What are you staring at, boy?” the senior Lourdes rumbled when he glanced back across the table.

“Why did you do that?” Barclay exclaimed.

“That was Robeson, the notorious slave catcher. Some would say accomplished. I'd have done more than spit on him had he been in reach,” he said, tapping the point of his silver-headed rosewood cane on the floor meaningfully.

“If Mother had been here to see you do that, there would've been a row,” Barclay said, shaking his head and half smiling at his father's audacity.

“A row?” Jean-Lamont said, smiling thinly. “Did I ever tell you about the time your grandfather and I run off from Thornwood Plantation when I was a boy?”

“No,” Barclay said, leaning forward to sip his coffee. His father had almost never spoken about his life as a slave.

“We hadn't gotten very far when we heard the hounds. Papa put me on his back and ran those dogs over logs and around trees. He was such a strong man to be able to run like that with me. It was from working in the field, you know. He knew wherever he went, those dogs would go too, so he tired them out as best he could, see. And then he ran along the lip of the swamp, over a quaking bog, and right into the water. Swam us out to a paddock. We sat out there under the trees, dripping, and I was so scared. I could hear those dogs getting louder and louder. But he told me to wait and watch, not to be afraid. Then I saw them come out of the tree line across the marsh. There were maybe a half dozen of them, more. They were barking like devils, huffing in our sweat and our fear. They ran right into the water, just bowling over each other to get to us, howling mad. But Papa had tired them out so bad, they didn't have the strength left to swim, and the swamp sucked them all down.”

Barclay stared at his father, sitting there in his brocade vest and fine suit, and couldn't imagine him a poor boy clinging to his own father's back in the mud.

Jean-Lamont looked down into the rainy street again, eyes shining in his dark face, smiling, and after a bit he said: “Be thankful for the life you lead, my son. But never think for a moment that the white man won't up and take it from you in a heartbeat. I can spit on a slave catcher now and laugh over a pack of dead dogs. But in another year, fortunes could turn, and that man might be pissing on my grave. Always remember,
Sa'k
rive kodenn nan, ka rive kòk la
.”

Barclay nodded.

What happened to the turkey can happen to the rooster.

The summer night was still and cool as the men of Andersonville prison slept in their rugged shelters or curled like beasts of the field beneath the stars with only the barren Georgia earth and sand for a mattress.

But to the black man who hung by his raw, bleeding wrists from the taut chains nailed to the whipping post, the night was roaring.

It roared with the shrieks of tortured, dying souls and with the guttural laughter and animal chittering of the myriad demons that worried those fearful, pitiful human spirits being loosed out there in the dark.

To the man who crept toward him in the darkness, he simply hung there, bleeding. Bleeding from his skinned wrists, bleeding from the wounds slashing his back opened by the whip of the sadistic Sergeant Turner. The man looked like a piece of meat hung to cure.

But to the man himself, to Barclay Lourdes, who was not dead yet, he was bowing beneath an unending torture. Creatures crowded on his shoulders like a thick carpet of vermin, terrible things not human or animal and yet both that assailed his withering spirit with their talons, stung his ears with barbed, forked tongues, and chittered perverse entreaties and vile promises in words only the damned could understand.

He had closed his eyes against them and murmured old prayers and incantations taught to him by his parents to drive their speech from his mind, for he knew that once he began to understand it, he would be lost.

When the human hand touched his chin, he flinched and was afraid. His chains clinked.

“Sa'k
rive kodenn nan, ka rive kòk la,”
he mumbled, part of him still sharing a cup of coffee with his late father on a rainy veranda in New Orleans.

He dared to open his eyes and saw not some satanic monstrosity but the broad face of a man peering up at him from the shadows.

It was the Indian he had saved from a beating at the hands of Sarsfield and his fellow Raiders, Chester and Watt.

The man said nothing but looked at him with his shining dark eyes and tilted something in his hands to his lips.

It was water.

Not some murky warm foulness taken from that filthy creek that bisected the stockade but cool, clean water.

It wet his cracked lips, soaked his thick, parched tongue, trickled at last down his raw throat.

He drank as much as he dared, then turned his head from the offered receptacle.

The Indian put his hand to the back of Barclay's head and drew his forehead to Barclay's. It was a simple gesture that spoke more than any words the man might have said. It was gratitude and a promise and hope.

It, even more than the clean water, sustained him till morning after the Indian slunk off into the darkness undetected by the dozing boy sentry up in his pigeon roost on the wooden wall.

The torment of the spirit world lessened to a tremulous dread at the back of his mind.

The shrieking voices became the buzzing of flies on his back, the chirp of crickets in the pines, and finally the bugle call in the distance as the Confederates woke.

He was alive.

The men in the stockade stirred. Cooking fires cracked and popped. Yesterday's rations. Barclay's belly grumbled. He hadn't eaten anything for two days. The infirm stumbled to the South Gate near where he hung among the stocks and collapsed, moaning and waiting for the sergeants to mark them ill.

At first light, the wicket in the North Gate opened and Captain Wirz rode in with Turner and the other wardens to oversee the arduous roll call.

It was another two hours before the black soldiers assembled nearby, awaiting Sergeant Turner and the work detail chaperones. He blinked at them, strained to find Clemis Varrow among their number, but couldn't focus.

He heard Wirz's horse clop over.

A Confederate soldier appeared and unlocked his manacles.

He collapsed at the base of the post and lay there, too weak to stand, surprised at the betrayal by his own body. It was as though his legs and arms had been amputated.

“Anyone who wants him,” Wirz announced to the stockade, “come and get him.”

Then he heard the horse riding away.

He lay there, staring up at the pole, at the black chains and the open manacles, silhouetted against the bright sky, feeling the tiny legs of the flies skittering over his skin but being too weak even to swat them away. They crawled in and out of his nostrils. He didn't care.

Then a thin form blocked the light of the sun and bent over him.

“Barclay? You alive?”

Barclay blinked.

It was Charlie Trevors.

“Shit and pumpernickel, you
are
alive. Let's get you back to the shebang.”

The walk back was agony. Most of the way he leaned heavily on the smaller man. Charlie dragged him home. No one offered to help him. He slipped from Charlie's grasp and crashed to the ground twice. Twice more Charlie fell with him.

The third time, he tumbled through the flap of the shebang and fell to the ground.

And there he'd lie, for there was no way he would ever rise again. He'd die here and be on the pile at the South Gate, in the ration wagon, in the death house, in a shallow grave somewhere outside the stockade tomorrow. The only way out of Andersonville. In through the North Gate, out through the South.

Charlie worried over him. He even kneaded his slender hands like an actor in a stage play pretending to be worried, which made Barclay smile.

Charlie put something wet to his face. It was cool, but his back beneath him was on fire, a pulsing open wound, heaving blood.

“Damn, you're still bleeding,” Charlie muttered.

“ 'Course he's still bleeding,” came a voice from the doorway. “You got to clean and bandage that wound at the least.”

“Who the hell are you, mister?” Charlie snapped to the unseen visitor.

“Bill Mixinisaw. I come by to see how he's doing.”

“Well, you can see how he's doing. What do you care, anyway?”

“He spared me some pain and an empty belly,” the man returned. And when he leaned over, Barclay saw it was the Indian again. “He's gonna die still we don't fix him up.”

“Well, I don't know nothin' about doctoring,” Charlie said. “What about you?”

“No, I don't know much either,” Bill admitted. “But we can take him to Doctor John,” he said thoughtfully.

“What, the witch doctor?” Charlie said.

“He ain't no witch doctor; he was our damn field surgeon,” Bill said. “Can you help me carry him?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, sighing. He'd just carried Barclay across half the camp.

“Well, come on,” said Bill, moving to Barclay's feet. “I just hope we don't kill him gettin' him there. Lift.”

Barclay wailed as Charlie slipped his arms under his raw shoulders and hefted him from the ground, his bloody wounds sticking to the dirty blanket and then pulling away. He passed out.

In his dreams, he was a boy of nineteen again, rapidly hammering at the
segon
drum with his hand and the stick, keeping time with the deep boom of his father's
maman
drum beside him as the worshipers shrieked and hooted all around, their dark skin showing through their white clothes.

His mother, the
mambo sur pwen
, assisted the cigar-smoking old
mambo asogwe,
his great-aunt, in her white turban. The two women chanted, and in between leading the singing, the old
mambo
blew clouds of acrid smoke into the face of his twin sister, Euchariste, as she cavorted and shook.

When her eyes rolled up, showing only the whites, it was Erzulie the goddess who looked out, smiling and thrusting, rolling her hips and flirting with the other dancers, male and female.

She whirled and danced toward the only white member of the congregation, sniffing at him curiously.

Barclay grinned at the other boy's embarrassment. The
lwa
were bringing them together, bringing out what the both of them had so foolishly denied.

When Barclay woke, he was in an unfamiliar white canvas tent or, rather, two tents stitched together. He was lying on his stomach on a relatively clean blanket, and his back was covered with billowy cotton and a linen bandage.

A short-haired Indian with a goatee was kneeling beside him, peeling the bandage away. He had the look of a man who once had weighed a great deal, but now the skin on his face sagged, making him appear older than he was.

Barclay grunted.

“Oh, hey, you're awake. Good. John Penaisnowoquot. But don't worry about tryin' to massacre my name. It's Ojibwa, and I don't expect it to roll off no colored man's tongue. Just call me Doctor John. Everybody does.”

He balled the bloodstained cotton up and handed it back to Bill Mixinisaw, who was kneeling in the corner of the tent. In the light of day, Bill had a harried look, drawn face, weary eyes, much like the other prisoners and yet somehow more.

“Take care of that, will you, Bill?”

“Not as much blood on that as I would've guessed,” Barclay mumbled.

“Better not be. You been lyin' there three days.”

“Three days?” Barclay exclaimed, rolling over on his side. He groaned at the pain. It was a blunted pain now, though, not the razor agony he'd felt before.

“Easy,” said Doctor John. “You're gonna be tender a while yet.”

“You talk different,” Bill observed.

Barclay stretched his stiff arms, heard the elbows pop. There was no need for all that shuffling and patois affect among these men. Besides, if Clemis was right, he wasn't very good at it, apparently.

“I save the slave talk for the masters,” he said.

Bill nodded and smiled slightly.

“Where the hell did you get bandages?” Barclay asked.

“Most anything can be got in Andersonville if you got something to trade,” Doctor John said with a wink.

Bill had returned to the corner of the tent. He moved aside a heavy rock and produced a leather bag cut from an old boot. There was a three-foot-wide hole beneath the rock, and he dropped the boot into it. There was a far-off splash that made Barclay's eyes widen. Bill pulled the boot up by a string, poured out water into a tin cup, and handed it to Doctor John, who in turn swirled it around a bit, then held it out to Barclay.

He knew that if that well held clean water, it was as valuable here as if it had held oil. He wondered how many other ramshackle shelters hid a private well.

“So what do I owe you for this?” Barclay asked, sitting up stiffly and taking the cup, sipping the cool water.

“The price of that drink is your silence,” Doctor John said seriously, “and your life if you break it.”

“Don't worry. I can keep a secret.”

“I can see that,” Doctor John said.

“What about the doctoring?”

“It's on me,” said Bill, replacing the stone.

“What do I owe
you,
then?”

“I owed you, remember?”

“Fair enough,” Barclay said.