Andersonville (36 page)

Well, it’s not me that will club you. Willie Collins laughed richly; he liked the idea of himself with a pretty lady in a lobster palace. Now, tell me, Poll— What’s the hair that lady’s got upon her head?

Golden.

Golden? Why—

Yes, sir—lovely golden hair, and she’s got a red hat with a pink feather on it—

With what? You vampire, speak up like a man! Don’t you come at Willie Collins a-spitting and a-clacking like a bludget.

Pink feathers! What I said. Pretty pink feathers on her red hat—and curly yellow hair—

Doubtless a whore from a goosing slum on Water Street.

This was said by someone behind Collins, and Willie whirled, waving his club. His friends scattered, laughing uproariously, but bound to keep away from that angry club. Unable to select a particular target at the moment, Willie turned back and kicked the barrel and sent the cards fluttering. Chickamauga sought to elude him, but fell over his own crutch, and Willie Collins gave him stripes to turn his bottom black-and-blue. You ugly pigeon, you’ve sought to plague me. Don’t you know that I like them with brown hair? I hate all women with yellow hair, indeed I do, for one of them gave me the Venus curse when I was a lad. Get out of this and don’t you never be coming back!
Whack.

No, no! Willie—

Get—
whack—
out—
Whack.

No—oh God—

Chickamauga was now in pain, and would be for days, but he was hurt by these blows no worse than already he had been hurt by repeated woundings of life itself which offered no caress to him, only blows, blows, blows; and he did not know how to earn a caress from anyone. He crawled to his crutches and went weeping away, helped along by a few charitable persons who had been watching the scene, and who perhaps risked the wrath of Willie by ministering to the wretch. Chickamauga did not again seek the company of the raiders; his playing cards were lost; Collins had trampled them into the mud.

About the time of the arrival of the elegantly garbed prisoners from North Carolina, the quantity of rations began to decline; the quality had been non-existent for a long while. Men estimated as to whether they were getting one-quarter or one-third as much food as they needed to keep them going. To augment his slim pickings, Chickamauga could now be seen peeking and prying with double energy; he was bent on gathering some small detail concerning an escape plan which he might sell to Wirz or to the Officer of the Day. Even his insipid reason assured him that he must have accurate identifiable evidence; no mere rumor would suffice. On the morning of May second, when the first load of pone came rocking into the stockade behind its sorry mules, there was a concerted rush by a band—not of raiders, but of ordinary prisoners who had aligned themselves for the purpose. The cart was swept clean in an instant, and all over the vicinity men could be seen, darting or creeping off with two, three, four flat loaves clutched to their bodies . . . in some cases other prisoners hustled after them, bent on robbing the robbers. The cart-driver scratched his woolly head, the guard picked up the musket which had been knocked from his grasp. With two sergeants comprising this detail they drove back out to make their report. Guards on the parapet stood threatening, but mercifully no one was fired upon except one foolish man who went clambering past the deadline near the sink, seeking a scrap of stolen pone which had tumbled there. He was shot dead, shot through the head.

Wirz shrieked when the news came. An edict was pronounced at once, delivered to prisoners at both gates, and spread rapidly by word and shouting until the population was apprised wholly: no further rations would be delivered that day in punishment for the offense. Wirz was so righteously indignant that for once he forgot all about the necessity for personal guards. Revolver on his belt and holster unfastened, he came through the South Gate wicket . . . he had been awake all night with his arm, and stepdaughter Susie (his family was now arrived) had an illness and whinnied with it. Henry Wirz sent about among surgeons as soon as he reached his office that morning, seeking for sulphate of morphia, but the surgeons had none to give him.

He stood, teeth bared under his beard, cursing the ring of scarecrows who threatened and jeered.

By God, I find who stole that bread. Who stole bread? You, fellow there—tall— Did you steal bread?

A slow shake of the head.

By God damn, I find out.

Behind the nearer rank facing him, other voices ranted. Oh, shut up, you dirty Dutchman. Kill the son of a bitch. Take his pistol away from him!

He was getting nowhere with this crowd, so he turned with precision on toe and heel and started in the opposite direction, advancing toward a portion of the encircling throng who resembled the ones he’d just faced with a quality identical in appearance: they had the same thin blackened frames, the same clumps of matted hair and beard, the same rags, the same shedding of humanity.

A stone sang past his head. Wirz turned and drew his revolver. Two wads of mud struck him from the rear, one on the rump, one near his collar. Again he whirled.

I teach you to throw mud at me!

Teach us, teach us, you Dutch son of a bitch! Go ahead, old boy, teach us! What?—with that fucking pistol of yours? Yah, yah, yah, yah, yah—

His voice pressed thin and shrill from a shaking throat. I wish I find out—

Buck and gag the bastard! Let’s buck and gag him!

—Wish I find out who says to me such insulting words, I kill the damn Yankee, soon as I eat my supper!

Hear, hear! Aw, listen, Hartley, the poor little critter never had his supper. Hard lines, old fellow, hard lines—

Mud flew toward Henry Wirz. He shut pained eyes and tried to squeeze the trigger of his revolver as he aimed it; he could not squeeze the trigger, the hammer hadn’t been pulled to cock, he tried to cock the hammer, his twitching thumb knocked off a percussion cap. What would befall if he stood unarmed before these fiends?—oh death, oh beating and pain and death and lynching—suppose they got hold of his arm—his
right
arm—

He turned and ran violently toward the wicket gate, trying to jam the revolver into its holster as he ran, ducking his head to avoid stones. Voice from the parapet: Hey, open up that little door down there for the captain. And then the wicket swinging, and his own boots bumping the ledge as he clambered through, and mud striking the gate, and the prisoners howling as if they had done a brave thing. What was brave about that? Why should they exult? They were thousands against one, and he was a wounded man, and he had been aching all hours of the night—

He rubbed sweat from his forehead. I want a squad, he ordered. I want I should have two squads with muskets loaded and fixture of bayonets. Then I go back inside, I find those thieves who stole bread from the wagon.

Chickamauga was neither a witness to this event nor a participant in it. Chickamauga was skulking far over on the North Side close to the western border of the stockade. He had reason to think that several tunnels were being constructed, and Henry Wirz was driven wild by the threat of tunnels, and hoisted into glee when he could find a tunnel and break it in. Wirz would pay well for the news, granted it were correct, or at least he should pay well if he had justice about him. Sometimes Chickamauga doubted lugubriously and correctly that there was any justice in anything. But he held some small clues and itched to find more.

That night the Fortune Teller went to the sinks to relieve himself—not through any sense of sanitation or natural tidiness, but because he had learned that he would be pummeled if he grew careless near the habitations of other men. Diarrhoeic prisoners might be forgiven their lapses by the charitable—not Chickamauga. Sometimes he cried, to himself or to others—it did not matter—because he thought that no one ever forgave him for anything.

So he was at the sinks. In twilight he might have been mistaken for a stump, though by this time there was no visible portion of a stump left in the area. All stumps had been splintered apart by the population’s knives, forks, bits of tin, sharp stones, or even their own fingernails. The digging up of subterranean roots was in progress, to continue through the summer. But since Chickamauga squatted motionless on his one good leg, half supporting a portion of his weight by means of his leg-stump and a trusty crutch, there was nothing about him to cause alarm.

The man who came and stood nearest him did not indicate by word or gesture that he saw the mutilated figure amid shadows and spongy mats of excrement. If Chickamauga was not a stump then he was a rock, a harmless ghost, a blot before night-seeking eyes, an ink-blot spotted on a copybook of the past, a grease-stain on the muster roll of the future.

The man stood quietly, he did not squat, he might have been taking a leak. But at nighttime no one bothered to go far in order to leak; all the earth was becoming rapidly saturated with those poisons which sick men exude, and it wasn’t worth a fight (except in the more fastidious messes, and most of these people would live longer because of their care) to challenge a man when he leaked close to you. There was no sound of urine spraying. What could the man be a-doing? Chickamauga watched, he could not see.

For perhaps three unyielding minutes the man stood there, and as he faded off another figure came to take his place. The watching cripple could not be satisfied as to just what went on—his nearsightedness provoked him—but it seemed that the men made some slight contact . . . maybe it was a word they exchanged. Then the second man took the place of the first, or stood a few feet to the left of where the first man had stood. As in the initial case there was no stream of water. Only a dry trickle or so it seemed. Chickamauga had the ears of an owl; he could hear much, especially at night.

He hoisted up his ragged Confederate pants and crutched to a more comfortable post of observation after the second man departed. He waited, he waited and listened and observed as adroitly as he could, he crouched on watch for another hour or two. The life of the pen continued to make itself felt and heard with that groaning, hacking, contending crystallization which lost all variety because it had too much variety, and so came into a sameness like a single musical note played with monotony and forever . . . half-hourly reports of the guards, the boy who came creeping to the sinks soaked in tears and kept sobbing repeatedly for Aunt Ida and saying again, Aunt Ida, if I could only see you, if I could only see you and old Fan and the pups, Aunt Ida . . .
hulp, look out! Raiders!
(This very distantly.) Station Number Three, eight-thirty o’clock and all’s well. Aw, go fuck a duck . . . the mumble, mumble of how many thousand voices, dressed underneath with individual gagging, individual bursts of wind, noise of the fight which may have meant death to some boy weaker than the monsters who bore him down . . . Station Number Four, nine o’clock and alllllls welllll. Station Number Four, nine o’clock and Jeff Davis just buggered himself. And the very earth which was earth no longer, but instead a wet blanket of fecal matter laid across the rounded ribs of the sad punctured world—this apology for earth made its own conversation around Chickamauga; the unseen pools bubbled and stank, the bubbles came out of them as if forced by slow bellows underneath, and worms were working in that slime, or phantom snakes or toads. The bubbles popped, swallowed themselves, the smell came thickening.

But there was living going on, quite near the sentry Poll Parrot whose name may have been Herbert or Hurlburt or Hulburd or Hubbard, and what matter what it was? Or what mattered now whether it was the Thirty-eighth Illinois or the Ninety-sixth Illinois that he came from? Sometimes he thought that he had forgotten all; sometimes he was confident that he remembered clearly, even back unto the day when he was drafted and left the steam and boiling water and floating bits of food in that restaurant kitchen where he washed dishes on Madison Street in Chicago. He had washed dishes in Michigan and in Toronto and Milwaukee too.

There was living going on, a brief dwelling and visiting marked by men who came and went repeatedly. By judging their shapes against the night he thought that identical figures stood near him again and again. They didn’t leak, there wasn’t any water about the business they did, they only let go with a dry trickle.

At last, puzzled but still suspicious, Chickamauga went up the slope to his lonely shebang made of pine bark and portions of an overcoat. As often occurred, someone else had preëmpted his sleeping space. This interloper was an invalid on his last legs, or rather on his last raw wounds and swellings. He offered no resistance when Chickamauga spanked him cruelly with a crutch and drove him away to weep and die without shelter above. (The man was dead, with his head turned on one side and syrup congealed from his mouth, when Chickamauga saw him the next morning. . . . By gum, you won’t come stealing my bed no more.)

The cripple pondered concerning those figures moving in darkness near the sinks, he pondered as well as his lame brain would let him, but he could not understand. He thought with self-recognized slyness that he would go and investigate further at dawn, as soon as it was light enough to see, but before daily activity of the camp had destroyed whatever revealing evidence might exist. Then he settled himself beneath mouldy rags and dreamed of food.

Since he was a boy he had toiled in proximity to food and in proximity to big coal and wood ranges; he had heard and seen and smelt cookery, he had scraped away pungent food left on many plates and platters, he had saved the best of these leftovers for himself, and so he’d dined almost daily on the best. Sometimes the stuff was of a nature which might not bear reheating, but still it was of the very best. He had eaten veal chops with mushroom ketchup, he had eaten
Hasenpfeffer
along with rich dumplings speckled with caraway . . . oh, a fat lobster claw, dripping with butter and drenched in lemon juice . . . peach cobbler . . . just at this moment he thought of
Königsberger Klops
and that dish also he had rejoiced in, in the last German restaurant where he worked. He could not pronounce the name recognizably. His fellow kitchen employees teased him through the hours, trying to get him to say
Königsberger Klops,
but they were always teasing him. They said that he said
Whaneywhagger whop.
He thought of food.