Andersonville (15 page)

Eben listened until the last hollering had left the limit of his hearing. Then he fell back and slept in peace, dreaming little but dreaming mainly of the mill and of a heron which kissed the willows as it soared.

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W
hat would it have been like in the old days at this same season? Ira Claffey tried to think. Not only the face and texture of the world had been altered, but also fundamental values underlying had been revised. It was difficult for him to envision the overseer’s report which might have been handed him, say, in the late 1850’s, if he had been absent, say, in Atlanta or Milledgeville. The corn land would have been ready for planting, but possibly sufficient manure would not have been hauled to cover it; some hands would haul manure for another fortnight. They would have been ridging up the land for cotton—perhaps fifty acres or more might be ridged up already. They would soon commence fencing. They would have finished rolling logs, perhaps? Usually the Claffeys were ready to plant as soon as anyone else in Sumter County, usually sooner. If the season weren’t behindhand. . . . Ducks would soon commence laying.

What of the harness? Would it survive the rigors of planting, or shouldn’t it be wise to set Putty and Shem to going over all the old harness? What of the twisted-cotton rope for plow-lines, the mule-collars constructed of sewn corn-husks? Would it be necessary to buy two or three new plows—cast plows, the Number Fifty size? Perhaps one of those rare but violent February deluges would have occurred, washing out the low place in the main road, taking out the oldest bridge on the road to Americus, forming gullies in the cornfield, washing out part of the slope where the slave quarters were built (the old quarters, far down the south ridge toward the main Sweetwater, and all standing empty except for birds and varmints, now in this February of 1864).

...Wind south, cloudy. One and one-half hands sick: Putty, Lake. Ten hands hauling manure. Eight hands still ridging cotton. Three hands in kitchen garden. Two hands still rolling logs. Ten and one-half hands repairing road after storm. Three hands mauling rails. Japeth building, Ruth spinning, Naomi and Pet cooking for hands; Leander and Jonas with stock; Triton minding the hogs. The fare would have been plain but ample for all, and there would be treats on holidays, on Sundays, and when Badge and Suthy came from Oglethorpe. The week before Christmas Ira Claffey always went to Americus to buy Christmas for the black people; always he needed at least two people to help him, and they went with a four-mule team when the roads were bad, for the wagon swayed heavily on its return trip.

His people worked hard and ate well and were housed snugly, but he did not pamper them to the point of abuse. If Nestor or Dudley misbehaved they would be punished, and knew it; but if they misbehaved frequently they knew that they would be sold; and so they were sold.

Ira Claffey was shocked speechless at the thought of a general abolition of slavery. He imagined hordes of illiterates trooping the highways with no roofs to lie beneath at night, with no one to buy food for them, with no money and without sufficient knowledge to buy sustenance for themselves. Worse than that, he saw them exploited as tools of unscrupulous white men who might fetter them in an industrial slavery in cities, where sun and comfort of wild places would be denied them.

When he was young he had walked through an area in New York (it was somewhere near the place called Five Points, and he had been cautioned to carry a pistol if he ventured there alone even in daylight) where besotted people white and black sprawled actually in the swill of the roadway, and wild eyes rolled in kinky heads thrust, slathering, cursing inarticulately, from windows. What terrors lay inside those crazy dwellings he could only guess. Twice he felt that he was being followed, but when he turned, stood, and put his hand in his pistol pocket the followers found business elsewhere. He did not have to defend himself, but he could find no defense for the wretchedness. In a box of offal and rotten vegetables which he stepped away to avoid, he saw—scarcely could he believe it. Stench or no stench, he forced himself to halt and look. It was the body of a child, a black child, apparently the result of an extremely premature birth. Such hideous exposure might never occur on any plantation he’d ever visited or heard of. He fled the slums and found refuge at his Broadway hotel, but it was long before he could bathe away this most evil recollection.

In the worst of his current imaginings, Ira had visions of Ninny, Naomi, little Bun, Coffee and the rest, being herded into mines or sweatshops and compelled to live in those tenements before which he’d shuddered. He did not see them or their descendants made respectable, dwelling in homes comparable to those of the whites, schooled, taught to work in trades or even in professions, making a satisfactory economic way as individuals and as a mass. He did not see how that transformation could be achieved in a thousand years, let alone a hundred. And the thought of black men given uniforms and arms and trained to make targets of the whites against whom they were marched— Ira ordered himself to slay this thought, never to entertain it, never to consider that the reality was even now in existence.

He worked among his cabbages, he sought for kinder musings as he held his trowel. Consider Cousin Harry. How good it was to have him about, how good to hear a young man’s enthusiasm and prayer for the future. Harrell Elkins had humor and high hopes left to him; they had not drained away through his wounds or been expunged by peril and bereavement.

...These were Early York cabbages. Ira was choice of the delicate seedlings, he would not permit Jem, Jonas or Coffee to remove them from the glass frames where they’d stood over the winter. This task he must perform himself. Each time he touched one of the pale immature plants with its sheen, its blush of frost and dust, he thought of the mature plant which it might come to be in time: an oval head slightly heart-shaped, a short stem, all very firm and with a flavor to remember. If the cutworms didn’t devour it first.

...Salt should have been sown in the prospective cabbage patch last autumn, but salt was hard to come by, like so many other things; it would have taken perhaps ten bushels or even more. But there was another way of guarding against cutworms; Old Leander taught it to Ira some twenty years before. Ira had had two of the hands at work on a dry day, throwing the ground into ridges and trenches: he’d cut some sticks to the exact length for them to measure with. The ridges were sixteen inches apart, the trenches seven inches deep. In the bottom of these furrows tender flaky young cabbages should be transplanted now—it was a moist day, a perfect day for the job. He would set the plants a foot apart. As soon as they were well rooted he would have the soil stirred gently about them; but the trenches should never be filled until all danger of worms was past.

...A benefit to have Cousin Harry at the plantation; his presence aided in exercise of Ira’s own intelligence and Lucy’s . . . Veronica was becoming a pale spectre who stalked, only a spectre. The horticulture which claimed Ira throughout his days could not occupy his thoughts at mealtime, his attention during evenings.

Except for the old wound, life had been good to Ira’s body; he had treated his body sanely, had not drunk or eaten to excess, had been scrupulous about not over-indulging at the greasy banquets which many others of his persuasion fancied. He cherished still the sensual appetite of a much younger person, but there was left in the small circle of existence no object to serve as partner in his sporadic but tempting lusts. There had been two experiences wherein he sought to seduce Veronica into rapture; the first time, she repelled him by saying, I cannot, I cannot. Never in her life had she demonstrated refusal, even after her change occurred. (Ira thought that her change came about earlier than in most cases, and with fewer of the unpleasant symptoms, and was more abrupt.) But there must have been some dread protraction; not all the substance of her cold mania could be charged sensibly to the recurrent losses.

Still, a nail of anguish had been driven through her coil of white-blonde hair and into her skull, each time a child died. The four small children died; each time, that nail hammered in. Then the pause, then in rapid succession the great spikes marked Crampton’s Gap, Gettysburg, Chickamauga. In delusion her husband turned his sad eye upon her and saw the seven nails bristled out like quills. No wonder that her expression was glazed, her tongue lying silent! Oh, my Veronica, such joy we manufactured between us, divine joy, brutal joy, every variety. It was a charm, and now it is gone, now it is gone.

The second time, he tried to persuade her with tender courting, but she lay like marble under his touch.

I cannot.

Don’t say that again.

Because it is grief.

For God’s sake, woman! It’s not a grief, and never was.

Isn’t that the way we begat our children?

Yes, but—

Our children are a grief. All but Lucy. Doubtless something will befall her too. You’ll see.

Don’t say it, Veronica. For God’s sake don’t speak the thought! We must think of Lucy as having a good life, a long life.

If I let— If I let you do It now, it would be as if— As if we were doing It again to get Suthy. To get poor little Arwood. To get Badge. Poor little Peggy. Moses. Lucy. Poor little—

Cease naming those names! You heard me! His coarse whisper was intense and frightening as a roar. Veronica sobbed, but she went on and spoke the other poor little names: Sally, Courtenay.

I’ll leave you now. You want peace, and you want to be left alone. By God I’ll leave you alone. You want to wallow amid the graves; go lie in them. You want to remain in love with the dead, you forget the living, you forget your own living.

I loved my children, Ira. Now all are dead except Lucy. Do you not pity me? Does the Creator not pity me? Perhaps—neither of you! The boys are gone, claimed by the earth. The boys—

Ira flew to his own room, he would not attempt this thing again. Let the juice dry in his body, let the green go from it as it went from cactus growing in unkempt untillable portions of the landscape. When cactus slabs died they turned disgustingly red, like rotten fruit. In extinction they were dry, papery, thin, discarded, bleached snakeskin. So let him, Ira Claffey, bleach.

But body and spirit refused to accept this dictum without a struggle, so at times he rolled sleeplessly, or put on his clothes at some unseemly hour and went pacing out of doors. The hoary Deuce rose from his deep drugged sleep of infirmity and, blinder each week than the week before, came nosing to Ira in the dark, cursed by imaginary sand-spurs. Ira knew that he should shoot Deuce, or perhaps put him to sleep with chloroform; still, there was no chloroform to be had, and as for the rifle—

Death, withdraw, cease reminding me that you are.

On one of these disconsolate strolls, at perhaps three o’clock of a cold morning, Ira went wrapped in the cape which had belonged to his father; his father had died in 1842, but the cape was still warm and wearable. Like some sad romantic being stepped from the tumult of Shakespeare he went cape-wrapped along the lane and came at length to the railroad, and the spot where ruts led to the house of the Widow Tebbs.

Poor Mag . . . even thought of her could come fairly to Ira in his extremity.

Fair, fair, she was more than fair; why, consider her: she was a glutton for It. What would she be like under the husks of her clothing, once those limp husks were removed? Why, she would be a pet, an adoring partner in the gayest crime of all: adultery.

She would be his fleshy little plaything—the welter of ruddy hair, the weak mouth wide with pleasure, the soft arms around him, thighs squeezing his own thighs.

Ira dropped his cape to the ground; too hot, too hot. Ah, could he ever permit himself to go up that doleful road, even sneaking in darkness? He picked up the cape once more, shook it, folded it across his arm, the while he was torn between seeking forgiveness and prayer and considering the spasm of excited debauchery which Mag might afford. Touch of his father’s cape suggested the press where it had hung long among scent of camphor contained heavily by other garments there. There was his own military jacket with its epaulets turned dull by time, there were gowns of another day in which little Lucy had loved to swathe herself and then mince about with a fan. There was— He started, to think of it. A red silk wrapper which had belonged to an aunt. Veronica never chose to wear it, she did not approve of herself in red. What might not the gift of this wrapper to the Widow Tebbs provide for him? A devilish boy in Americus had made a rhyme about, Old Mag Lumpkin, I think she’s nice, I gave her a ribband, she did It twice; that dull rhyme was recited in Ira’s hearing years before, and he rejected it as unworthy of being blamed even on a child. He had not thought of it consciously since, but here it was, he thought of it.