Andersonville (20 page)

During his search he had chanced upon a lone blue figure curled in a hollow and partly sheltered by roots. The first time he passed he did not bother to make further examination; that looked like a good place to sleep, and Edward Blamey supposed that the man was sleeping there—it was out of the wind. But as he circled the hole on his homeward trip he heard a wail and chattering. The figure moved, and there was the sound of weak retching. Edward paused and looked down. He could see foam on the man’s mouth. Hi there, he said, out of some sense of Christian duty. He remembered his father reading about the Levite who passed by on the other side. The man did not move.

Hi, Mister.

The curled-up man opened his eyes, they were glass, they saw nothing, the eyes fell shut again.

Want something?

A weak voice said, Catherine.

What say?

The fellow wore a short cavalry jacket very like Edward’s own, but newer and cleaner; he could not have been long imprisoned, but was about to be Exchanged. That was what they’d called it on the Island—and probably in every other prison camp, North or South. When someone died the others were apt to term him as Exchanged. When someone was shot by a guard they called him Paroled.

Hi, Mister. What’s your name?

The eyes failed to open, but the fellow shook quickly in spasm, and more fluid issued from his mouth. Swarner, he said.

What name did you say? Warner?

Swarner. J—H—Swarner.

Where from?

Second New York Ccccavalry. He managed to stutter the last word loose, but it was an almighty effort for him to do it.

You sick?

No.

Yes, you be. It was contrary to Edward’s habit, but again he considered his father’s favorite Chapter about the Good Samaritan (the moral of this text was cited often but practiced seldom by Mr. Blamey). Also his encounter with Willie Collins had stirred Edward into a recognition of Virtue as opposed to Wickedness. He supposed that he must be virtuous in the sight of God, if it would cost him nothing. He got down into the hole and bent over the huddled Swarner. Want some water, Mister? I could fetch some.

No.

I hain’t got any rations. You want rations?

No. Ccccatherine.

His attempted ministering thus unsuccessful, Edward climbed back out of the depression and walked to his shebang. Found a sick feller up yonder, he said casually to the others, but they gave little attention. They had seen many sick, many dying, many dead. In the middle of the afternoon they drew rations, and the food seemed munificent: nearly a quart of uncooked cornmeal, half a pound of beef, and a spoonful of salt per man. Mess Two still had five sweet potatoes left as well, and under the leadership of the New Hampshire sergeant—a mason by trade—a furnace of mud and sticks had been constructed. Ed Blamey and his family fed well, and they babbled about the improvement over conditions at Belle Isle. However, Ed still imagined that New York cavalryman bent like an abandoned cruller in his hole. Before dusk he turned his steps in that direction again, drawn as much by curiosity as by saintly intent. He came back from the east faster than he went.

Fellers, that man’s dead as mackerel.

What man? Man you saw?

Said his name was Swarner.

Well, what do we do about it? Ain’t he got no friends?

There don’t seem to be nobody about.

The New Hampshireman, whose name was Colony, went back with Ed Blamey; so did the brothers Wingate, when they heard that the dead man was from York State. They were from Troy. The four men stood around and looked at the curved stiffening morsel in the fairly new and fairly clean jacket.

Got a good coat on him, said the youngest Wingate. I could use a coat like that.

Take it, said Colony. He’ll never need it more.

Si Wingate slid down into the hole and, with some struggling, removed the jacket from the corpse. He climbed out, shook the garment violently, and turned out each pocket in turn. There was nothing in any of them except a half-gnawed turnip and, in the breast pocket, a letter worn to dirty tissue, a letter without an envelope. It was written in pencil and the penciling was blurred from much handling. Tup Wingate held the paper up to the fading light and spelled out a few words.

Seems to be from his sister, for she calls him Beloved Brother. Her name is Catherine. Hain’t no address that I can see.

Take care with that coat, said Sergeant Colony darkly. Maybe he’s dead of a plague.

No, looky there. He ain’t broke out in any way.

He’s too nigh to us for comfort, and if we leave him laying here he’ll stink. Get a hold on him and we’ll fetch him over to that nearest gate.

They went, carrying Swarner gingerly by his cold hands and rag-wrapped feet. As they approached the gate the adjacent guards called down a question from their sentry shacks.

He ain’t from our mess. Don’t know where he’s from. We just come acrost him in a hole.

Well, Yank, put him next the gate. Somebody’ll tote him out, the next time the gate’s open.

They did as instructed and turned away through windy gloom. Then Edward Blamey owned an idea. He had a pencil in his pocket. Give me that there letter of his, Wingate, and the York State man handed it over. Blamey held the letter spread against a flat chip, and across the fading text he printed in big black capitals:
J.
H. Swarner, 2 N Y Calvary.
He returned to the gate and stuffed the paper beneath the ragged trouser-band of the corpse where someone would be apt to see it. It was odd, but again it seemed that he could hear that weak stutter of, Ccccatherine.

The others were waiting silently, and they all walked back to their new shebang together. Scratches and cuts on Blamey’s face were stiff and puffing; his entire face felt as if it were on fire. He wished that he were older and hairier, he wished that he had more beard than this dirty mouse-colored down which he still wore at nineteen. A beard would have protected his skin somewhat when Collins kicked him to the ground.

I wonder if he’s the first to die in here? said Tup Wingate.

Colony said, Won’t be the last, I’ll warrant you that.

Next fellow dies, I trust he has some socks, said Si Wingate. I got great need of socks. This here jacket is a good fit.

Colony spoke again lugubriously. Won’t be the last.

Oh, come now, Sarge. We victualed well today. This puts Belle Isle in the shade.

Ed Blamey walked in silence, feeling the hurt of his torn face, but feeling also immeasurably noble as compared to an ogre like Willie Collins. Once back in Rhode Island he would be bound to tell his father that he had assumed the role of Good Samaritan, or at least had tried to.

Won’t be the last, repeated that dreary clipped voice.

 XIV 

C
aptain Oxford Puckett was in bed with the Widow Tebbs that evening when Floral answered their hallooing and stood outside the door of The Crib and responded with, Huh?

The widow said, Flory, Captain Ox has got a bottle of sorghum liquor in his saddle bag. Please to go fetch it.

Ox Puckett called out genially, I’ll give you five cents.

Secesh, thought Floral resentfully. Can’t buy much with that. Can’t buy scarcely nothing. Nevertheless he ran off on the errand—running because he was a nervous child and liked to move rapidly, and could move rapidly now that his sore foot was healed. Also he knew that it filled his elder brother Coral with furious envy to see him loping. The feud between them was blind, unreasoning, intense, a feud almost to the death.

Oxford Puckett had known Mag Lumpkin from her infancy; he could remember her mother when she was large with child and the child was Mag. As a butcher’s boy he had delivered meat to the Lumpkins. His father was the butcher, a savage hulk who kept a strip of tanned hide cut neatly into the shape of a paddle for the express purpose of beating his sons for trivial offenses. As fast as they grew tall enough the sons ran away from home; Oxford was the third to flee. He ran away to the army, and later served heroically in the campaign of invasion against Mexico City; he was given a sergeant’s stripes in the field. After that the army was his life periodically, although he turned an unsuccessful hand at farming, butchering and harness-making between enlistments. He drank a great deal, but no one ever saw him when he could be described as drunk. He was a jovial round-shouldered little man, capable of extreme lewdness. Ox Puckett boasted calmly that he had practiced every sin in the decalogue of sexual crime at one time or another (he could not have employed such phraseology, however, in describing his wickedness, since he was poorly educated and had a limited vocabulary). Now in young middle age his silky beard and silkier hair were almost snow-white; his pale blue eyes shone like bits of bottle glass from a lined face the color of an old saddle. The beard concealed a chuckling sensual mouth and made him appear like some patriarch of religious pursuits. He had served wherever the Fifty-fifth Georgia served. His wiry abused body was marked with wounds received in two wars and also in brawls.

The captain and the woman lay resting. Mag giggled as she explored his scars with her loose hands.

Ow, lady.

Hurt you, honey? I’m sorry.

Got that from some damn Yankee at Cumberland Gap, and it was right slow to heal.

Ox, what’s this here blue one down here next to your cock?

That’s old. Got that at Chapultepec. Like to shot my manhood clean away.

Few’s got more manhood than you, Ox Puckett. Well I know.

Reckon you ought to know if anybody does. How many men you reckon you’ve lain with, Mag, sweet?

Oh, I couldn’t never calculate. You know I hain’t got no head for figures and such. Maybe a hundred different ones in the course of a year . . . that was before the war. I guess so, honey. I’ve had a sight of folks a-loving me in my time.

Well, I’m a-going to love you again, right now.

Wait till Flory gets back with your liquor. I’d like a taste myself, if you’d be so kind; hain’t swallowed a drop all week.

It’s not much slouch of a drink. My, my, how I’d relish a canteen full of
mescal
! That’ll put the Old Scratch in any man’s breeches.

What did you call it, honey lamb?

Mescal.
What folks drink down Mexico way. They make it out of cactus, so they say.

We got right smart of cactus here on my place.

Reckon it’s a special kind they use. But this here other stuff— The boys over to the stockade call it pine-top. Sutler who sells it claims he puts a fresh rattlesnake head in every barrel, and it does taste like it, sure enough.

Flory returned with the bottle he’d found in Captain Ox’s saddle bag, and tapped at the door.

Oh, hell. You’ll have to go let him in, Mag.

Door hain’t bolted. Fetch the bottle in, Flory.

There was no especial novelty in Flory’s seeing his mother in bed with a man. He had seen her so ever since he could remember. As a very small child he had hidden in an empty barrel in The Crib, in order to peep out at operations carried on there. His mother saw the barrel head lifting and lowering; she caught him, and gave him a thrashing with the belt belonging to her customer of the moment. But in later pursuit of her vocation Mag became less sensitive to the scrutiny of watching eyes. Her daughter she would not permit to enter The Crib; some peculiar warped sense of delicacy kept her from allowing another female to observe her there; but both Coral and Floral had fetched and carried everything from peaches to firewood, more times than they could count. Sometimes the callers gave them gratuities, sometimes not.

Captain Puckett said, That’s a good boy, bubby. Reach me my pants from yonder chair. When Flory brought the garment, the captain rolled over in bed and got out his purse. He extracted a good hard round Federal half-dime.

Godsakes, thank you, Mister, said Flory.

You got some real live greenbacks in there, cried Mag.

No lie about that. Took exactly eleven dollars and sixty-three cents off of a Yankee this very day; and one of them green dollars is for you, Mag. What say you to that, hey?

Well, to tell the truth, Ox, I was suspecting you’d maybe give me a Yankee dollar. Or at least ten dollars Confed. It’s so hard to get along nowadays; and since Coral come back from the fighting that makes another mouth to feed.

What I mean, lady, it’s an
extra
dollar, all for you. Kind of a wedding present, on account of I’m happy to see you again.

You mean you’ll give me two greenbacks?

Sure as hell don’t mean nothing else.

Ox, you surely are a lamb. They don’t come no better-natured than you.

Right now I feel like a red-hot lamb filled with hellfire. Christ, this pine-top hain’t so bad!
Vamoose,
you small fry.

Flory said, Captain, sir?

Vamoose.
It’s foreign talk—it means to get to hell out of here. Same as
puk-a-chee.
But that’s Sioux Injun talk.

Flory ran out into a dusk which grew colder by the minute. He hesitated wildly, swinging this way and that. At the house he had a piece of blanket which he wore tied across his shoulders for a coat— With this sudden chill in the air he’d like to have his blanket— But Laurel was at the house, and she’d ask him where he was bound, and she’d want to know where he got the money to spend at the village store, and she’d beg candy from him— Well, he might give her part of a stick— Coral he would never give a bite to, but of course Coral didn’t like candy; all Coral wanted to do was snarl and curse, and clean that old shotgun, and tote it around in the fields as he staggered with his crutch—

His mind made up, Floral headed for the Anderson depot, coatless. There was one store in the place, consisting of a miserable collection of junk hawked to the public by a dirty old man named Uncle Arch Yeoman, no relation to the Yeomans who owned the sawmill. In other seasons Uncle Arch would have shut up shop long before this hour, but with the coming of two regiments or parts of two regiments on duty at the stockade he kept his door open until late at night. Uncle Arch was a reformed drunkard, a fanatical railer against The Curse of Drink, and he refused to peddle that commodity much desired by soldiers; but he kept candy, a few spices, grain coffee, vinegar, and a scanty supply of medicines. The troops visited his store frequently when off duty, so Floral Tebbs would not have to wait until tomorrow for his treat.

Floral had the candy associated with his mother in his mind. He could not read or write and could barely count; therefore the spelling meant nothing to him, and there was no difference in the sound. Horehound candy—he liked it better than peppermint or cinnamon sticks, or the wintergreen lozenges fed him by the Reverend Cato Dillard. Horehound candy . . . people said that his mother was a whore, he had heard the word applied to her often; he had heard coarsest conversation on the subject. The squared brown sticks, with a splintery dust of sugar on the outside . . . he thought of his mother whenever he rolled dissolving fragments in his mouth or, more frequently, when he hung about the store with not a penny in his clothes and could only glare worshipfully at the fly-specked jar where this delight was sealed.

He trotted down the railway track. At one point a portion of the distant stockade’s interior was visible by day, and Floral halted in dimness to peer across the ravine . . . fires, little freckled winkings and glowings: that was all he could see now. He ran on. Lanterns hung high in Uncle Arch Yeoman’s store, and soldiers lounged within the door or against the counters. Most of the soldiers seemed almighty old and tall to Flory, but some few of them were near to his own age . . . they always swaggered disdainfully when they knew that he was regarding them. In these few weeks since hordes of troops had camped down in the woods Flory had learned to avoid them except in some public place, such as the store, where the presence of grown men granted him a certain security from persecution.

He wormed his way through the gossiping crowd and confronted Uncle Arch across the counter where tobacco and candy were kept.

Well, what you want, Flory?

Five cents’ worth.

Horehound, same as usual? Five cents won’t get you much. Maybe a teeny little hunk.

Floral opened his grubby hand and displayed the five-cent piece. Yankee money.

...Them Reserve regiments, a voice was saying behind him.

Flory, that’s hard money for a fact. Uncle Arch began to rig a small poke of soiled newspaper, and he fumbled on the shelf for the sacred jar.

...Robbing the cradle and the grave, too.

...If’n Joe Brown comes around to rob
my
cradle back home. . . .

Uncle Arch’s palsied hand dragged a few sticks of candy from the jar, and he began to crumple the poke.

More! demanded Floral. You give me that much for three cents tother time.

Times is hard hereabouts, Flory; prices have risen up. Well, reckon I can let you have one more little stick.

...Do tell. A man of seventy-seven? Pretty regiment that one will be.

...Georgia Reserves! Ought to call them
Pre
serves. Laughter.

Here you be, Flory. How’s that wicked old whorehound, your Ma? Whorehounding about, same as ever, I reckon?

She’s fine, said Floral, and began to burrow out of the store.

...And boys as young as thirteen, tis told.

...Sure enough. I knowed one that wasn’t but twelve, and they took him.

...Drummer boy.

...No, sir, private soldier.

Floral Tebbs halted, bare feet frozen against the planks. For a few minutes he forgot even the treasure of brown sticks gripped in the newspaper bag. He had turned, he squatted down, he was listening, he wished he had a dozen ears. At last, when talk strayed to another topic, he slunk out into darkness. Now the sky was black, deadened by clouds; it was difficult to see the way until he reached the railroad. Then he ran on the rails, for they were scrubbed by wheels, they could be seen on even such a night. Floral ran lightly. Usually in this sport he was counting the number of paces he could take on a rail before losing his balance and needing to step to the ties; this night he did not count. The conversation of Uncle Arch’s store roared back at him from raw fields, from pines and vines and roadway; he heard it all again; he battened on it. Not until he was halfway home did he open the paper and wedge candy into his mouth until he could scarcely move his jaws.

At the Tebbs house little Zoral, the baby, had whined himself to sleep in the bedroom; Zoral had been howling about something or other when Flory first left the place in response to the summons from The Crib. Coral crouched by the fireplace, popping corn in a skillet; it was his favorite evening occupation, but seldom would he share his corn with the rest, never with Floral. The sister, Laurel, was trying to stitch up a rent in her petticoat by light of a feeble rag lamp. She was a listless child of fifteen with a pinched sharp-featured face and eyes like a mink’s. She ate clay continually in secret, though her mother tried to break her of the habit by frequent lashings of tongue and willow whip. Laurel’s coarse carroty hair, untidy as it was, became a singular beauty in the dull glow of the primitive lamp.