Andersonville (105 page)

...Reveille, Second Camp, Third Camp . . . many bars away the fifes silent, drums rolling. Slow Scotch . . . again the roll. The Austrian, and roll, roll. Quick Dutch, The Hessian, Quick Scotch, roll, roll, roll. Drumsticks were like dry bones of the past become hot fresh bones of the present. Sometimes Merry Kinsman thought his fife was the child of the drums, sometimes he thought his fifes fathered the drums. . . . Peas Upon A Trencher. How merry the tooting of the brisk two-four . . . how surprised he was to learn that there was one call for breakfast, an entirely different call for supper. How naked and piercing the notes poured from under his fingers: the Surgeon’s Call (Quinine Call, the boys named it) and a dozen different Guard Mounts, and Assembly and Retreat and Tattoo! He wished that Uncle Bijah was there to hear him spraying out the Single Drag. Maybe Uncle Bijah was there.

In ranks of the drum corps (one drummer and one fifer from each of the ten companies, with a regimental bass drummer thrown in) he met musicians of a dozen different communities. Two or three older men had traveled far and learned a lot. All Take Tea, The Squirrel Hunters, Biddy Oats, On the Road To Boston . . . many more he heard for the first time. He learned them. Here’s a new one, the Principal Musician said, and here’s the way she goes:
When we go down
to Washington, when we go down to Washington, I was shot five times in the ankle bone, and once at Manassas Junction. . . .

This is a hard one, son, said a tall fifer with a whiskey breath. (Yet somehow he reminded Merry of Uncle Bijah.) A clog, and tis hard to do. We call it the Corn Cob. . . . And this here one. His hand went down through firelight and lifted a tin cup: stolen whiskey mixed with water therein. Old Tupley was becoming drunk again, but still he could fife, he said that he could fife better when drunk than when sober, but Merry decided early that this was not true. Now we’re heading into another six-eight, Tupley said. One maybe you never heard before. Tis called, Go To the Devil and Shake Yourself.

Meriwether Kinsman drank deeply of Tupley’s lore. He did not drink whiskey, he only smoked his pipe and listened, but the tunes squirted into his memory and nothing could dislodge them. It was heartbreaking to participate in the final tragedy surrounding Tupley, but duty decreed that Merry must. During the same battle in which the cousins Norton lost their lives, Tupley disappeared. He was supposed to carry stretchers, he carried none; he was required to assist at a field hospital, he was not there. Later a sergeant discovered the old fellow drunk and quaking. He had hidden himself in a thicket behind an oak tree, had pulled leaves over his head in an effort to conceal himself. He was dragged out, arrested, confined. After the Northern army crossed a flooded Rappahannock in retreat—after the broken regiment was bedded down in a camp, Tupley was drummed out by the very musicians who once had respected his skill. It was a sad day, but they played, they obeyed orders. Shattered companies lined up, musicians massed . . . poor Tupley, coat hanging open, face like a mussel shell, beard dripping with drool as he passed in disgrace with big signs hung upon him, signs saying
Coward
front and back. The Rogues’ March shrilled. War was not all a pic-nic, though Merry found it a better pic-nic than most until he was captured.

The Sheepskin Battery became a hospital brigade in every battle. Drums were left behind, fifes put aside. Musicians went out hunting amid thickets and haycocks, hunting for the fallen, and some of them were killed doing this. Merry himself was nicked in the side on the second day of Gettysburg; blood came freely although the wound did not hurt much. He was frightened. Still he recognized that at last he was one of the elect: he had Shed Blood for His Country. . . . He climbed a wall. The countryside was thick with smoke, thicker with noise; but Merry ducked his head, and was bound and determined to go over that wall because someone yelled that young Brinkoff of Company C had tumbled wounded behind it. Merry Kinsman did not find Brinkoff; he found instead a party of crouching men in gray who glared at him, poked guns at him. One of them marshalled him away through mats of smoke to where other lugubrious captives were herded behind a barn. You hurt bad, Baby Yank? asked a Rebel. He ripped Merry’s shirt when Merry lifted his torn jacket, he examined the wound. Hell, ain’t nothing wrong with you that a good piece of sticking plaster wouldn’t cure! Just set here and don’t move till the firing stops, else you’ll get shot by your own men! That night Merry was taken to the rear of the Rebel lines with others. So he became a captive and remained a captive through the long winter at Belle Isle, and then was taken to Andersonville.

He celebrated his sixteenth birthday by watching the raider chiefs fall and dangle. Because of extreme youth and litheness, he remained in fair shape until August, then went downhill rapidly. Of the several members of his regiment who survived in the stockade at this time, there was only one with whom he had been fairly well acquainted previously: a youth somewhat older than himself, named Stricker. Stricker was captured in the same battle which made Merry Kinsman a prisoner. Stricker had but one hand, he could render little aid to Merry after scurvy began to bend and shrink him. Merry tried to flank out with detachments removed in September, but failed. He was knocked down by Henry Wirz, who became hysterical at seeing invalids trying to pretend that they were sound. Merry Kinsman was turned back inside and languished alone, since Stricker had become a Parole at the hospital (and later would become a patient).

Merry had recollection of being carried somewhere in a blanket. At this time he was thinking, as he usually thought, of his lost fife. It had remained in his possession through Belle Isle; there he played it to the diversion of fellow prisoners. Also to the pleasure of the Belle Isle superintendent, Lieutenant Boisseau, who often asked Merry to strike up a tune, and once had him to dinner. Lieutenant Boisseau frequently fed Belle Isle prisoners who caught his fancy; but such a thing was unheard of at Andersonville, except among favored Paroles detailed directly under Wirz.

Merry’s fife was taken from him by a guard while they journeyed south from the Richmond-Manchester area, so he arrived at Camp Sumter fifeless. Here he met up with a young fellow of his own age who had managed to retain his fife. Occasionally the boy lent it to Merry, but only occasionally, since it turned out that Wabash Davey was jealous because Meriwether Kinsman could play more skillfully than he. Finally the condition of Wabash Davey’s mouth was such that he could no longer build a tune. Merry now sought to bargain for the abandoned instrument, but had practically nothing to offer, and Wabash sat upon his fife—a dog in a manger. After he died his mates in the shebang held the fife for a high price. One morning the thing was reported as stolen; at least it disappeared. If some raider had taken it and found that he could make no music, he might have thrown the fife into the marsh. . . . Merry encountered also several musicians, most of them drummers, minus their instruments; during their season of comparative strength they sat in fury whenever they heard bleating across the stockade’s rim. There was a single fifer who played camp duties for the Georgia Reserves. He could play but one tune: the Bonnie Blue Flag, and that badly. It was The Bonnie Blue Flag for Guard Mount, Reveille, Mess Call, everything. Federal musicians cursed until severally they lost interest. One by one they died. Only two of the little group straggled out in the autumn, when able prisoners were removed. A freemasonry had held them together because it was the habit of many soldiers to regard musicians patronizingly or even with scorn. The term Sheepskin Battery was somehow derisive when applied by others. But in their own cult fifers and drummers were proud of the name.

...Stronger people carried him in a blanket, bent double with scurvy as he was, gums puffed into a wad. On this day, so early in the morning, there loomed a vacancy; Merry Kinsman was conveyed to the hospital. Some attempt had been made to separate types of cases, but exigency decreed that often the gangrenous would lie among scorbutics or those suffering from diarrhoea. Merry emerged from a spell of sodden unconsciousness to listen to wailing on one side of him, to feel the loose splashings of his left-hand neighbor shooting warm against his leg. A face swam above him often during the icy weather . . . he shivered and shook with cold. The face said, Lad, I’ve brought you a scrap of blanket. Hands pressed the fabric around him, Merry was weakly grateful. Face was attached to the body of a surgeon. Face wore great spectacles. Face brought to him sips of diluted vinegar with a bit of salt added. Once Face even brought him a trickle of some burning fluid which he said was whiskey . . . Merry Kinsman remembered that once there had been an old whiskey drinker named Tupley who was drummed out of camp. . . .

Face said, Here is a bit of raw potato. It would be good for you—raw sweet potato—if you can but get it down. Merry tried to gnaw the fragment, but another of his teeth came out and the contact hurt his mouth. He gave up with a groan. . . . Face had a knife, the knife scraped and scraped: you could hear the dragging sound of that blade on hard substance of potato. Shredded filaments were injected into Merry’s mouth; in this fashion he could swallow them. There came a noble keen spicy taste. He hoped that his eyes, though deeply receded in a swollen countenance, could look appreciation.

Once he saw something else clearly. The face had withdrawn mistily, had become a bread board. That bread board stood upon a shelf in the Widow Kinsman’s kitchen. The old German lady, who tended Merry when his hand was frozen, had given it to Mrs. Kinsman. It was carved of pale wood—a perfect circle. It was really a plate to be put upon the table, with little flowers and vines growing in carved wood around the edge. The cut-out letters read:
Gib uns heute unset täglich Brod,
and that meant give us our daily bread, or something of the sort. It was the only German which Merry knew. He associated it in his mind because the wooden bread plate was round and the surgeon’s wafers of glass before his eyes were round. It was odd to think of scraped sweet potato as being daily bread.

Merry became alert in imagination during his last hours. Because he had poetry in his nature, and the simple selfless courage sometimes evinced by good children who have a love of life, he could depart from personal tragedy and forget utterly the strain which disease put upon his carcass. He saw himself as a symbol of a proud manner of living. . . . Fifes were good, he thought, because of what they taught and the way they sounded. There needed to be no other reason for the existence of such music. . . . It did not occur to him that other boys in other lands had felt the same about their lands. Meriwether Kinsman’s honor and his faith were one with those of an Iroquois or a Delaware: he thought that his Nation was the best, that was all there was to it. It was the best because it was the best. Also because it abounded, or had abounded, in moose and wild turkeys, in mountainous wagons rumbling west, in long rifles to guard the wagons.

In this time the world turned into a picture which Merry thought someone should paint, he felt that it would be painted in the future. Perhaps even now somewhere there wandered a young veteran like himself who ached with the same vague unreasonable impractical dream which had occupied Merry Kinsman since first he stood, jumped and ran within that Pennsylvania grove, since first he heard fifes and drums. It was a dream unfounded in necessity (he hated the idea of necessity because necessity had ruled his childhood) and would pay a penny to no one (he hated the idea of pennies because men like Mr. Adams were always counting them). His dream took the form of marching men, old and young, who hammered drumheads and blew upon a fife. One was of the stamp of the dearly recalled Abijah Parker; he was the tallest. There was blood upon a bandage, bright blood shed willingly as Merry had shed his driblets of blood above the soil of his native Pennsylvania. There was smoke of cannon, men came through it. Dead and dying were upon the ground, wreckage of war littered the earth, bullets made their harsh quick
raahhhhh,
screaming off into terrible space. Somewhere sometime an artist might paint this picture; never could he paint the sound; other men and boys would have to fight in other wars, in order to pick up the sound again. Will ever our dear fifes be silent? Merry Kinsman wondered . . . somehow weakly he feared that they would be. Brass bands, he thought. Too many folks like their noise; and also there are the music boxes. . . .

But in distance were desert places and fabled mountains, so still the eagles and the hawks would cling to wild free air. They would hang high, wide of wing, angry of beak, ready to assault any force which came to threaten America. But— Why, he thought, I sought to destroy Americans by bolstering an attack with my melodies! And now, in captivity, Americans have destroyed
me.
I would weep at this awful knowledge, but somehow am too weak to weep. They have destroyed me—Southerners have killed me dead—Southerners, but still Americans. And how many bullets did the One Hundred and Forty-eighth Pennsylvania put into Southerners’ skins? Too many, he thought, too many; so they have taken revenge.

He lay quietly, hearing nothing of the mutter and squeal beneath that canvas and sagging scraps of pine, until the surgeon came again.

So you’re still with us, the queer voice came down to Merry’s ears.

Yes. He could let a whisper steal from his rotting mouth. He wanted to add something about, I’m still here but shan’t be for long, but could not find the words, could not summon strength to send forth the words. He felt that familiar solution of vinegar and salt wetting the great black mass of tissue from which his teeth had fallen out. Trickle found its way into his throat, there was a taste, he swallowed, it tasted good. Oh, how good it tasted. Chore name? he asked. It was his way of saying, What is your name? and it was strange to think that he had never asked before, he had never considered that Face might have a name.

My name, lad? Elkins. The surgeon floated away.