Andersonville (106 page)

Merry Kinsman stood motionless upon a formless plane. Now, he thought, I am removed from the earth, am here with the eagles. He looked down and saw a crowded mass of filthy skeletons, young and old—most of them were young skeletons—with blackened hide drawn tight, hide still trying to cover the bones and not always succeeding, for some of the bones had broken through the hide, and were oozing and raw. Up with the eagles, he said. He heard a rush and snap of their wings. He looked down and saw the surgeon return, saw his own shape lying, saw the surgeon bending, saw him straighten and turn and summon an orderly. Together surgeon and orderly picked up the wisp of Merry Kinsman, a piece of canvas was slid beneath; they carried the wisp out from under the sagging canopy; later two other ragged orderlies carried it still farther; but the watching Merry had lost interest, was turned away, did not care where they carried it.

Jefferson and Liberty, said the unmistakable voice of Abijah Parker beside him.

I hain’t forgotten!

Six-eight! The drums’ll catch us.

Merry’s fife was pressed into his hands, his hands were grown strong again. Uncle Bijah played the first three notes alone, then Merry joined him. They strode off together through the smoke, drums thudding and booming beside and behind them.

 LV 

L
ate in the autumn of 1864, John Winder had established his headquarters at Millen, Georgia, rather than at Florence, South Carolina. His new title of commissary-general of all prisoners east of the Mississippi brought with it a complete assumption of command, giving him full latitude. As he had told Henry Wirz in early September, the designation of the new prison at Millen was Camp Lawton. Here the superintendent, a lieutenant named Boyce, held some misguided notion that Yankees could make pretension to the estate of Man. In vain did General Winder attempt to dispel this idea: Boyce was a gentleman. John Winder would have loved to remove him, but literally there was not another officer to take the post.

Mortality at Camp Lawton was enormous despite improved internal conditions. Prisoners died of wounds, they died because Andersonville had wounded them. . . . Within the stockade nothing was known concerning Sherman’s advance. No fresh fish came to carry news; no fish had come excepting unfresh fish from Andersonville. Winder established grotesque but effective penalties, forbidding the circulation of gossip on the Sherman situation to any of the prisoners. Therefore they were not hard to handle when, at three o’clock of a drizzly morning in late November, the first detachments were routed out and herded to the cars. Within a day or two the entire living population of the stockade had been removed to Savannah. At first it was thought that they could be left there with safety. This was not to be: Sherman aimed at Savannah.

General Winder traveled up to South Carolina as speedily as possible. There, with the Florence superintendent, he arranged for eventual reception of Andersonville-Millen prisoners. Without difficulty he infected red-headed Lieutenant Barrett with his own viciousness. This was simple to accomplish: Barrett had practiced cruel arts since he was a child.

Barrett’s latest exhibition of native tolerance and charity concerned a rumored tunnel. The tunnel could not be found, but Barrett was convinced that it was there. General Winder filled his subordinate’s ears with mumblings concerning successful tunnels at Andersonville, by which means allegedly hordes of Yankees had crept forth to despoil the Confederacy. Barrett ordered all rations withheld from the stockade’s population until the tunnel-makers should voluntarily give themselves up to justice. After several days of enforced starvation (during which many of the more sickly were released from pangs by the most obvious means) sturdier Unionists banded together and selected four tunnel-makers by lot. In the interests of community survival these four marched to the gate and were delivered to the tenderness of the red-haired Lieutenant Barrett. His charity was exemplified promptly: he hung them by their thumbs for only two hours. He might have kept them hanging for five hours, but after two hours even he had become wearied of their yells.

Like Andersonville the prison at Florence was a parallelogram composed of pine trunks. Prisoners declared that the Confederates were the God damnedest people to go around standing logs on end. Fifteen acres of ground were enclosed by the palisade, including the inevitable creek, swamp, deadline area. No sentry stations bloomed atop the fence: there were only platforms for cannon at four corners. Earth had been shoveled against the outside of the pen in a high embankment; along this elevation guards walked their posts, beating a deep path into the mound. It had been difficult for John Winder to hoist himself to the eyries of Andersonville. Here there were easy twisting trails by which he might ascend. So he could stand, top of the stockade breast-high against his thick body . . . he could rest stained hands on the axed ends of logs, and peer down at the seething shivering herd.

Sir. They resemble a bunch of rats, don’t they?

A slippery sucking voice had spoken beside him. The general twisted his head, glowered. Who’re you?

Excuse me, sir! I’m afraid I shouldn’t have intruded on your thoughts. I apologize humbly.

...He had the manner of a pawnbroker. Or he was a man with something to sell . . . you did not know what he was selling . . . manner of a pawnbroker. Or else the manner of the weakling who approaches a pawnbroker, trusting to receive more than the pledging of the trophy is worth, knowing that he will never redeem it . . . perhaps he has stolen it. . . .

Here was the man who would bring John Winder to his end.

He was Sammons Kight, native to the Florence region. His miserly father and elder brother kept this incompetent on short fare. Sam Kight was forty-one, he looked older. His shoulders slumped, arms were limp, his belly jutted under the shabby long gray winter coat.

God damn it! Can’t you answer with civility? I said—who
are
you?

Captain Kight, sir. Excuse me—I assist your adjutant—

Without saluting or assuming the semblance of military posture, Kight removed his crushed felt hat. You could see his bald tight scalp glistening even in steady wind of February. Tendrils of brown hair lay brushed silkily across his bald head, brushed laboriously. Kight had a flat nose with hollow fuzzy nostrils; he wore a shaggy mustache; his mouth and chin disappeared beneath the mustache. He wore greasy spectacles, glasses cut into flat ellipses within brass frames; the window caging the right eye had been shattered, glued together again.

Captain Kight was married to a wisp of a woman whose father had married her off to him because of his own father’s wealth. None of the wealth had come their way. This woman drudged through cares of a numerous household aided only by two bungling Negresses, one of whom was quarter-witted. Rooms of their cavernous home were encrusted with religious mottoes. Bible reading occurred night and morning, Grace was spoken before each meal, Thanks rendered afterward. Agony rose from the Kight place on Sunday afternoons when one child or another was discovered in some activity deemed detrimental to the Sabbath, and was flayed accordingly. Mr. Sammons Kight held an office in the Baptist church, he was superintendent of the Sunday School. He respected the term
Loving Kindness
which he mumbled as a single word. He droned it long, pushed out his small lips under brindled hair whenever he spoke the term.

What you want with me? Hey?

Nothing, General Winder. . . . Nothing at all. . . . I was off duty . . . merely looking . . . at the prisoners.

Kight put his life into his throat.

General, allow me a question? One can see that most of them are villains—shockingly depraved— And yet— Would it be possible for the Word of God to lighten their souls?

He went on eagerly: A service of prayer, perhaps even a sermon attuned to their needs? I would be willing to volunteer! I know of others who—

No God in any of their souls! They haven’t
got
any souls! Now you go way!

Yes, General. Yes, yes. Of course—

The captain went gliding along the sentries’ path. . . . He had seen Winder many times across the breadth of a room. He had risen, bowed, smirked, had been ignored. Nevertheless he felt fearfully that something was now accomplished. Winder at least knew who he was.

Meat supply dwindled in the Kight family. It was decided to do a certain amount of butchering in mid-winter to supplement sides and hams still remaining from the first butchering of the season. Accordingly six hogs were chased and roped in woodland adjoining the country homestead of Sam Kight’s father. A single carcass fell to the share of Sammons Kight.

Even this was enough to awaken excitement in his spindly children when they heard the good news.

Mr. Kight, asked his wife drearily, Is your Pa giving us a whole hog, sure enough?

So he says. Sam drank dregs of grain coffee.

I am glad! All the little ones have just been a-begging and a-begging. We’re so shy of meat these days.

A great hope had risen within Sam Kight—a brilliant idea with which he was toying. Through natural inclination and sad experience he had grown to accept the truth: value and importance could not be gained in this world without the coöperation, even the benevolence, of higher stronger authority. Sammons Kight was mightily afraid of God, he believed that other men awarded veneration to God solely because also they were terrified by Him. In turn Sam was afraid of his father. Early in life he had learned that his father would award him no benefit unless he was pleased with him . . . to this office of giving pleasure Sam obtained but rarely.

He had hoped to be a minister. His father would not hear of it. Ministers earned but little money. . . . Sam studied long, he’d studied earnestly if ineffectually for the Law. He had failed each time he was examined. Old Kight roared, thrust him into the small ironmongery which he owned in Florence. Sammons had undertaken later to manage a tobacco farm belonging to his brother. He failed with one crop after another. Until this last winter of the war he failed at everything he undertook, except his superintendency of the Sunday School (in that also he would have been accounted a failure, had anyone been willing to consult the children). In 1862 Sam marched off to war, racked by ordeals awaiting him . . . he fell sick, lay near death. Eventually he was sent home, discharged as an invalid. Now in this fourth winter he was delighted to be addressed as Captain. The bottom of the barrel had been scraped. Sammons Kight was one of the scrapings.

But suppose he reached a higher situation in the military establishment? Suppose he was awarded field grade? . . . Captains were a dime a dozen. There were even captains who could barely read! And he, Sam Kight, had read Law for a time in the office of a man who later went to the Confederate Congress!

Suppose he were to be made a major? Generals had it in their power to award promotions. Suppose that Sam Kight pleased General Winder? He had scarcely been able to please anybody. . . .

As kindling for fire of his plan he could assemble only a few shreds of conversation: laughing and rather scornful conversation which passed between the adjutant and Winder’s son, when one day that worthy sat beside the adjutant’s desk.

But if the statement which he had heard were true . . . Sam became inattentive to clerical duties, he snapped at his children when they were restless during evening Bible reading at home (he was quartered in his own house, there was no other place for him). Later he took little Ocie into a bed chamber and whipped him with his belt: Ocie had sneezed repeatedly during the long prayer which followed Bible reading. Kight intoned a new prayer over the moaning child, put on his belt, went to the kitchen shanty to inspect a hog’s carcass which hung outside the door. It had been fetched, drawn but not quartered, from the senior Kight’s homestead that evening. Sam put his pale hand upon the pebbled clammy hide, he inspected the chopped ends of ribs, he thought of General Winder. He looked at scrubbed cloven hoofs, he thought of the Devil, he thought also of General Winder, he thought of pickled pig’s-feet.

Captain Sam Kight was up betimes the next day, giving orders to a reluctant wife. He badgered her into acceptance of a task far beyond her strength and beyond the abilities of the two wenches.

He was nervous through the morning, blotting reports which he copied. His hands shook. He dropped a sand-filled bottle which they used as a paperweight, and broke it . . . the adjutant spoke biting words. With his own hands Sammons Kight swept up the glass and sand; he did not ask a subordinate to do it, though there were two corporals in the office.

Early he had requested an audience with General Winder. The desired permission was slow in coming: Winder wanted to know why the damn captain didn’t talk to the adjutant instead, about whatever it was he wanted to talk about. Having progressed through echelons, it was nearly noon when at last Sam was permitted to tap his transparent knuckles against the old man’s door, and to be growled at after he had entered and closed the door.

John Winder sat upon the sofa which had been brought by train all the way from Andersonville (there might not be a sofa available in Florence). The general was dosing himself with Harlem oil. This mixture, composed of flowers of sulphur boiled in cottonseed oil, with amber and turpentine added, was accounted to be of great value in strengthening the stomach and kidneys, stimulating liver and lungs, quieting asthmatic complaints and palpitations, dispelling shortness of breath. The formula had been given to the general by a subordinate named Gwenn, who called it Welch medicamentum. Colonel Llewellyn Gwenn was alarmed at symptoms displayed by his superior. Winder started out with a dose of ten drops, now he took twenty-five. His thick breath could be heard.