Andersonville (25 page)

Always Ira Claffey prepared his carrot seed wisely according to rule: he had saved only the principal umbels; each head was cut as it turned brown, the seeds had been dried carefully in shade, rubbed out, and then dried further in the paper. . . . A carrot poultice. Had one been prepared for Lucy’s young man when he lay giving up the ghost in Illinois? But indeed what disease, what hurt, required the use of this particular remedy? Ira could not remember. It was peculiar (as his hands tried to tremble, working with the seed bags, and he labored to keep those hands from trembling) to think that he could name the remedy but not the ailment. Starvation? Dirt? Incarceration? Was incarceration a recognized disease? Could a doctor turn away from a corpse and inscribe upon the needed record: this man died of a severe case of incarceration?

He thought that the prisoners within the stockade were not too crowded—not as yet—but they would become crowded past the point of mere discomfort if trains kept fetching them. But at the moment: seven thousand squatters on, say, fifteen acres of habitable ground. Not too deplorable. . . .

They occupied his attention as a combined wretched curiosity because they or their kindred had killed his sons. In this way they made their intimacy with Ira. His wife progressed into straitened madness, his daughter felt her young hopeful strength still asserting itself and so she might open ears and eyes to the possibility of love. For himself Ira could contemplate no longer a personal physical attachment which might affect his emotion and thus in turn color the activities of heart, intellect and dream which others typified as soul or spirit (indistinguishable to him: always they had been). Sometimes he thought that he was dried from the waist up, frozen from the waist down, saturated with morphia from ear to ear. Yet a strange awareness of humanity as a whole had come upon him and he dared not deny it; it had not lived in him before save as an abstraction. He’d found that in standing on that splintery post above the fence, with a piece of rotten canvas hanging from the sloped shake roof to give the guard partial protection from sun or driving rain— He’d found that he was identified closely with Lieutenant-Colonel Persons, closely with the youthful guard who came down to give them room, even more closely with the prisoners beyond. They began to appear as his problem and his pain solely because they were human, not because he knew them; he did not know them.

Again and again through weeks to come he would reappear on that sentinel’s box, passed first by Persons and later in negligent fashion by subordinate officers of the guards because they knew Ira’s face and learned that he lived next door, and sometimes drifted over to the plantation to receive a gift of fresh things from the garden. Lucy gave fried eggs to one lieutenant, milk to another, gingerbread to any of the younger enlisted men who visited briefly, shyly, but ready to talk eagerly of their mothers, sweethearts, hound dogs, if given half a chance. Illusions of his own dead children faded away from Ira Claffey. No longer did he see the boys hunting beside him nor did he hear them walking on path or stairway; and that was because his mind was still level, still sound; he had not gone astray with Veronica, his balance would not permit him to accompany her. For this he gave thanks in prayer even while he prayed for his truant wife. The convocation of young slain Claffeys was replaced by disordered anonymous Yankees . . . the one he saw crawling, laced doubled in the corset of scurvy, the one he saw crawling to the marsh with his unsoldered half canteen in hand . . . the Yankee he witnessed thumbing his nose arrogantly at Ira up on the parapet . . . the boy picking lice from his pubic hair, the freshly-arrived boy displaying a scrap of newspaper to others who crowded close, the boy who whanged away on a jews-harp, the two bearded men wrestling and slugging about something-or-other, the narrow-shouldered graybeard sliding his ragged trousers below his knees as he prepared for evacuation at the swamp’s edge.

Sometimes in the middle of night, when pacing on desperate solitary rounds in his nightshirt, Ira fancied that he heard the warblers which had loved that tilted pine forest when it was a forest, the nocturnal animals which had lapped at the stream when it was a stream. But mostly he went prying among the present occupants. Had the graybeard died as yet? Who won the fight, and did one prisoner now own the other’s pocket comb? What had those boys read about in the newspaper? A Rebel retreat, a brazen Northern lie? The musket shot rapped out, prisoners yelled in distance and midnight, fires of the outside camp shone hard through trees, a wagon rattled, an engine whistled, frogs hallooed in a steady stream of birdlike music along the low places of farther woodland (they had gone from regions closer at hand, the waters had become too dirty for them). Who fired the musket, and at whom, and did he hit him; and why did that dog bark? Did Ike or Johnny or Silas cry in his sleep, did Ike or Johnny or Silas find sleep?

More and more the power of Andersonville poured over Ira Claffey like a glistening dark tide; it was there, reaching around him, it was sticky (he thought of molasses leaking from a barrel but the tide was not sweet). . . . Once more to the stockade the next day, wondering, staring, absorbing increased terror of the thing. The mean strength in number of the prisoners rose to ten thousand during April, the graves were said to be over nine hundred.

One time the very cones were clean, unsaturated, untrodden. One time peaceful trunks stood warm and ruddy with sunset on them, purplish when you looked toward the sunset and watched their shadowy eastern sides. There was pure silence, the ground doves’ cooing instead of the cooing which lorn invalids made. Wood of the stockade might have absorbed those wonders, wood of the stockade could never radiate them now. Wood of the stockade stood cut, hammered, malformed, mute in its resentment of the use to which it had been put. Once, said the night hovering above the increasing stench. Once.

 XVII 

W
hen Henry Wirz arrived in March he rented a house owned and occupied in part by a man named Boss. It was a double house with scabby window frames, and on the side which was to be the Wirz habitat several of the outer shutters were missing. Mr. Boss offered but weak hope that these could be replaced by the time Elizabeth Wirz and the children arrived: where might he get shutters, where might he find a carpenter to make them, what of the hardware? In the rear yawned an abandoned cistern into which a gray cat had slipped to drowning a few days earlier, and now the cat’s body floated like a striped bladder breaking the surface of dark seepage, and nobody’d even tried to get it out. This old cistern had been replaced by a more efficient one hollowed beneath the kitchen floor. There was no need for a disgusting spectacle, no excuse for it; Wirz’s physician’s soul revolted at the idea. The cavity might make a fit trap for an enemy but the gray cat had been nobody’s enemy. Also Wirz feared that little Coralie might fall in as the cat had done. He requested assistance from Lieutenant-Colonel Persons and received it lamely (he felt that it was lamely, since he was sourly certain that Persons did not like him at first sight; God knew why). Shortly thereafter Wirz came riding in a wagon driven by a Negro and containing, besides Henry Wirz, another Negro and some tools and scrap lumber. He presided glowering and barking over the two blacks while they toted stones, shoveled earth, and finally turned the trap into a cylindrical morass less frightening. The cat’s body was out of sight and out of smell. Scrap lumber served to construct a curb and platform ragged but efficient. Cora could not fall in. Susie and Cornelia were big enough not to endanger themselves heedlessly.

There. This was done. Had anyone ever said that he was not a good father, not a good stepfather? Who had said it? How dared they say it? They would not say it again. For Henry was a man who thought of his family even before he considered the interior of the double house or his own comfort, or which room would be shared by himself and his wife. Henry had wedded himself to the widowed Mrs. Wolfe in a Kentucky village near Louisville ten years previously. She possessed two children already whom Henry accepted as vague compensation for the boy and the girl he had left with their grandparents in Switzerland. With dedication during those moments when he was not burning with the zeal to earn money and thus become rich, or to serve ardently the Confederacy and thus become a storied hero, he had worked at making Elizabeth Wolfe into a good Zurich
Hausfrau.
Sometimes an acid of indignation burned his stomach and told him that such labors were in vain.

The Major Griswold incident gave Captain Henry Wirz fresh self-confidence to the point of exuberance. His arm was no better, sometimes he thought it worse; Bucheton’s surgery in Paris had been useless, worse than useless because it caused additional hurt and inconvenience. Wirz should strike Bucheton from his list of friends (
ach,
where was that list and how long might it be?) and never consult with him personally or professionally again! It was as if the enormous quantities of sulphate of morphia absorbed by Wirz’s body had built up a wall through which the drug’s beneficence might no longer penetrate; except that it leaked surprisingly through unperceived crannies at times. But exercise of such power as was decreed to him, knowledge that he owned prestige above and beyond his rank— They were neither food nor medicine but they were dazzlement. Aloof he could stand blinking at these brightnesses and feel no pain for a time. Griswold had been of field grade; but Wirz, the lowly captain, had managed to have Griswold sent packing and to another post. Wirz was bitter because allowed to wear no major’s insignia, but delighted at his own immediate accomplishment. He would accomplish more. The demonstration should begin at once. As for General Winder, one must remember that Winder meted out promotions grudgingly. His own cousin, his own son—these were but captains, and after three years of war too. This was said to be the case because the elder Winder had been so long in securing his own promotion through lower echelons. It had taken him forty years to attain his majority in the Regular establishment. Well, let him permit Henry Wirz to administer this new stockade; let Henry Wirz be executive, reorganizer, jailer, shrewd schemer. He would do more for the Government in this capacity than the most vaunted leaders might do at the front. Then General John Winder should see who was worthy of field grade.
Ja.

During that first night in the new house which soon would shelter his family, Wirz dwelt without furniture because the furniture had not yet been moved in. In austere extension of courtesy Persons had offered a tent to the newcomer for his convenience, but Henry Wirz wished to be withdrawn from the coughing and foot-pounding and challenging and rattling of camp life; he was no campaigner in the enviable sense; always he preferred to be withdrawn. He brought his blankets to the bare house, took silent supper with the Boss family, insisted on paying them— He could not understand why they pretended reluctance when he offered to pay them; food cost money; they were not in the restaurant business, but food cost money, you could not deny that.

Wirz sat cross-legged beside a candle on a box and worked out his plans in a manifold order book with a lead pencil. The book said
U.S.
and must have been captured, or perhaps preëmpted from some depot long before at the outset of the war. There was justice in the notion that now it was employed as a tool in the manipulation of Yankee prisoners.

...Thousands. Lieutenant-Colonel Persons had explained that the prisoners were divided into detachments of Thousands and subdivided into Hundreds, as was the case in other prisons. Ha, Thousands were too large, too unwieldy! Prisoners should never be unwieldy, they should be maneuvered as easily as one pushed dominoes. Ninety men were enough for a squad, a hundred men were too many. How many squads to be in a detachment? Henry Wirz pushed his scraggly dark brows together and peered through waving candlelight at the diagrams he had drawn, the numerals he had put down with neatness. Three squads per detachment—that was enough. Two hundred and seventy prisoners in the largest unit. It might make for more bookkeeping but he, Wirz, would find somebody to keep the books. . . . The population of Camp Sumter must become more fluid, more malleable. He himself would make them more fluid and malleable.

If any voice were raised, if one person beneath his authority sought to resist reforms—
Ach!
Almost it would be a pleasure.

He worked with his left hand; he had learned to write with it, his right hand hurt him sorely. . . . Three squads per detachment, ninety men per squad. Should he term them squads?
Nein.
That gave him an idea, and the bilingual connotation caused Henry nearly to smile. They should be Nineties.

Prisoner, who are you? Sir, I am James Büttner, Third Detachment, Second Ninety— What mess? . . . Thirty men to a mess; that should be convenient for the quartermaster’s purposes, convenient for Wirz’s own, convenient for the men themselves (he did not wish to afford them any convenience truly). But the double series of threes would simplify things. Three Messes to a Ninety, three Nineties to a Detachment. Three Detachments to a— To a what? A regiment, a brigade? Leave it there. Let the area swarm with detachments, not with strictly military designations. It would be well for the prisoners to realize that they were no longer troops, they were prisoners. He would never refer to them as men, he would refer to them always as prisoners.

Prisoner, Attention! Speak up, Prisoner, tell me your name. Sir, I am James Büttner (
ja,
you traitor, James Büttner, with a German-sounding name!), Third Detachment, Second Ninety, First Mess. Perhaps it should be the other way around? Instruct him to say in order, First Mess, Second Ninety, Third Detachment? Best to wait and see. He would tolerate no nonsense from prisoners. This they must get into their thick Yankee skulls at the very start. Suppose a prisoner did not speak correctly, did not reply in the prescribed manner? Then he should go supperless. Suppose that the prisoner continued to prove insolent, even so? . . . There were punishments. Chains could be forged. Wirz would cause stocks and whipping posts to be constructed; there should be arrangements for the bucking and gagging of mutineers; order should come from confusion. Confusion bred waste, expense, incompetence among the administrators. Everything here at Camp Sumter should be orderly. Promotions did not come about as a result of disorder. Henry Wirz blew out his candle and sought such sleep as his arm would permit him to find. It was not a good sleep.

Early he was awakened by children’s talking and running about in the Boss premises. He arose, pleased that for the moment he did not have to dress his forearm amid uncomfortable surroundings. The bone infection healed and opened alternately; he had lost track of the number of times when flesh grew in scarred covering over the minced tissues, the number of times when inflammation redeveloped, swelled, heated, throbbed, puffed, to be relieved only by its own bursting forth through the taut thin surface or by the slash of an instrument which he or some other person wielded. Midway through the act of donning his clothes, Henry Wirz remained motionless for a full five seconds while a delightfully bitter thought overwhelmed him. Suppose that the Yankee artillerist who had hurt him was even now a prisoner within the stockade! What justice in that! . . . But how would he know, how could ever the prisoner confess his crime, how could ever the prisoner know that he had been guilty of that most heinous offense: the Maiming of Doctor Henry Wirz? Impossible. But still the creature might be there, one of those scrofulous pinched-faced gypsies he had observed when he peeked from a sentry station. As yet Henry had not entered the stockade proper, he had only observed. Today he would go inside; he would walk with keen deliberation, estimating necessary changes which must be brought about under his jurisdiction. It was good that he needed not to go with his forearm swathed; it had healed when last he was in Richmond, perhaps it would remain with dermis and epidermis intact for a time, torturing him slowly but not draining, not making yellow stains and smelling like bran.

Elizabeth had worked a new shirt for her husband. The day was fair (he glanced through the six-paned window with one broken pane) and thus he should not be forced to wear a jacket. He was an individual, he was no professional soldier (although he knew that he could offer wisdom, courage and efficiency beyond the ability of many professional soldiers) and as he sought to relieve the drabness of his being by use of bright colors when in citizen’s attire, so he tried to vary the meanness, the uniformity of dun badly-dyed Confederate clothing. A few officers looked askance at him from time to time, but no one had ever lectured him for his lack of conformity. This was an army where few conformed or could conform. Uniform habiliments were scarce. In the field, men fought in red or tawny undershirts in summer, many of them were apt to be in Yankee overcoats when winter came. Officer X had a green velvet collar on his dress jacket because no gray velvet had been available when that jacket was stitched, Officer Y had a turned-down collar, Officer Z had a stiff standing collar. Officer Q wore the British vest he had worn when fighting for the Queen, and Officer P rode to inspect the pickets in a flat straw hat. Henry Wirz’s reluctance to garb himself according to regulation was neither unique nor ununderstandable. If Elizabeth presented him with a beautiful calico shirt (
ach,
where had that woman gotten calico? She was clever at times) it was his own business; and he would wear the shirt because he liked new clothing and could not often come by it.

Actually it was not a shirt but a waist, a waist such as was worn by young boys, and it gave him a fleeting sense of extreme youth and energy to put it on. White pearl buttons adorned the bottom hem of the waist—Elizabeth had sewn them at the proper intervals—probably she had used an old wornout pair of his uniform pants to measure with. He pressed the staring pearl wafers through button holes and stretched his thin chest and tried to square his round shoulders.
Ja.
Very nice. She should receive from him a letter of thanks as soon as he had time to write it; but perhaps his duties would keep him from writing until Elizabeth and the children arrived.