Andersonville (37 page)

Sometimes there was a falsehood about the dawn. Some of the dawns were honest, murky as old dishwater, draining gradually lighter to reveal the jagged parapet, guards on high, the insane panorama of those masses of huts and sagging shelters, the scrawny wretches who stalked. Other mornings were honest in the fog they brought, for fog made the place the nightmare landscape which it was—fog accentuated nearer angles and ugliness, it turned the inhabitants into those visible apes they’d become in spirit. Chickamauga snored through his beaked nose and dreamed that he was being held down while people sawed his leg, as actually they had held him, with whiskey dashed into his mouth; he dreamed of this particular past and awoke yelling. Winking and shivering in cold he eyed the sky. This was surely the most dishonest dawn ever climbing up. It had a gentle yellow pinkness, and mockingbirds and redbirds were piping with spirit beyond the fence. In such an approaching sunrise one should be forever a child, and have a rosy street to scurry down on the way to work, with no one else abroad except an occasional stomping laborer or a night watchman turning his steps toward the warm breakfast awaiting. Chickamauga had known such sunrises, years before he became cut apart and confined.

He got up hurriedly, shivering in his trunk and three stiff extremities as he tried to stretch himself for the task of exploration. He clawed round in his pockets and found some bits of corn-and-pea bread and gobbled them. On his way down the slope he discovered the dead man whom he had beaten; so he searched the dead man’s clothing and found more pone: two ragged rocks of it which the dead man had been unable to eat because his teeth had fallen out from scurvy, or most of them had. Chickamauga found a stub of red pencil less than an inch long, barely big enough to write with, and a fold of dirty paper covered with scribbling. Chickamauga could read quite well, but he was uninterested, so he tossed the paper aside . . . probably a last love note or a last Will & Testament, and who cared about that?

Something firm and flat, sewed within the lining of the corpse’s gummy blue jacket (it was a cavalry jacket, short, with some of the seed-shaped buttons still attached down the front, and—Chickamauga bent closer, squinting through colored dimness—yes, there were a few stray threads still clinging to the shoulders, enough pattern of thread knobs to mark the shape of a bent rectangle on each shoulder. So the man had been an officer, one of those strangely dedicated beings who chose to accompany their men rather than go to an officers’ prison; and so he must have torn off his shoulder straps before his rank was noted, and he must have given his name as Silas Fassett, Private, Co. G, Eighth Michigan Cavalry; and so he must have come here with his men, and he must have watched them all die off or else he would not have been alone and untended, worming about for a place to lie in and a place to die in, and finding both while his bones still throbbed from the punishment of Chickamauga’s blows).

Chickamauga brushed aside the assembled lice and tore open the rotten jacket lining. He brought the flat object out, he snorted with excitement as he ripped shreds of decayed dun-colored silk which wrapped it. It was an ambrotype, a double ambrotype in a frame folding face to face. Cheeks and ribbons of the females therein had been tinted pink and yellow. From the left-hand frame smiled a young girl with bunched-up black curls, and in the right-hand frame that same young girl, a bit more grown up and certainly more than a bit more serious, held a fat stout-legged baby on her plaid lap, and both of them stared directly into your eyes and deep beyond them. They would have stared directly into Chickamauga’s soul if he’d possessed more than a shred of one. He dug the woman and baby out of their frames, wondering earnestly if the frames could be gold, but probably they were only of brass and gilt. Nevertheless he’d rub the thing up; and when he set up shop to market it, he would do so on Main Street in order to escape the raiders’ attention if possible. He threw the ambrotypes away and went off toward the sinks, pausing occasionally to polish the frame upon his rags. . . . He threw the ambrotypes away, and the one of the mother and child would be unheeded, trodden deeply into muck before an hour had passed, never being recovered, going to demolishment in time. But the picture of the mother before she was a mother—this would be picked up by a lonely youth, Opie Brandel, Co. E, Nineteenth Maine Infantry, and Opie would love and cherish her until he died in June; he would pretend that she was his girl, when in reality he had no girl because he was shy and hoarse-voiced and toadlike; he would call her Ellen because once he had loved from distance a Sunday School teacher named Miss Ellen; he would take her out, when he lay alone at night and when he felt strong enough, and he would turn her small face close to his own hairy one, and he would whisper, Ellen; and sometimes moonlight would find her there with him, and they would be quite alone, and there would be love between them.

Chickamauga ventured near the sinks. His crutch-marks had long since disappeared in slime, but he moved here and there until he was confident that he had found the exact spot where he squatted the evening before, and thus could select the place where mysterious men had appeared to do a mysterious errand. Here it was and . . . ah . . . other places nearby. He balanced his weight on his leg and poked about with one crutch. . . . It would all sink down and disappear during the day, but these traces were unmistakable. Clay and sand, that’s what it was—clay and sand, and occasional shreds of brown wet roots too slender for use as firewood . . . a few pebbles. Earth, dirt, soil. Those men had fetched quantities of sandy soil in their pockets or in bags, and had stood sifting it into the bog so as to escape detection.

Who was digging that tunnel, and where was the mouth of it? Under a folded blanket and secreted planks or a lattice of brush, most likely—under the ragged roof of somebody’s shebang. Well, there were so many huts. Yes, and so many tunnels or attempted tunnels. His split mouth grinned, thinking of how the men would swear if they knew that he, Poll Parrot, knew their secret already or at least a portion of it. He knew that they were digging the tunnel, and they thought that neither he nor anybody else except the loyal workers themselves knew that they were digging a tunnel. And in time Wirz would know about it, too; and Wirz would give him at least jackass meat, or maybe even currency, or salt which he could trade, or a chance to go Outside for sumac berries. Shrewdly Chickamauga sifted a little of the brown-yellow-sand-clay into his pocket for a specimen, and then he went away: there was nothing more to be done here just now.

That day, after his Ninety had received their rations (each prisoner was given a quarter loaf of corn bread, weighing possibly six ounces, and a piece of smelly pork weighing a little less) and after he had eaten his, and had eaten the portions taken from the dead cavalryman’s pocket—after dining so, he crouched on Main Street and held up his ambrotype frame for sale. Soon a man came by who had been a jeweler when he was a citizen; when Chickamauga begged him to, the jeweler examined the frame and hefted it lightly in his thin hand, and scratched with a bent fingernail. It was, he said, merely gilded brass, just as the vendor feared. Well, the brass could be broken apart to serve for little tools or implements if no one needed it to frame pictures in.

Here’s where you get a nice daguerreotype frame, cried Chickamauga. Step this way, gentlemen, and see a fine frame, beautifully gilded, fit to put pictures of your loved ones in. He would have tried to pass it off as solid gold but knew that he could find no takers; also he might attract Collins, John Sarsfield or their ilk. Best to admit that the thing was merely gilded brass. Step up and see, step up and see. . . . Other voices contended against his: men selling rice, men offering tobacco, men with buttons to sell, and boiled potatoes; a man with a ragged
Harper’s Weekly
to let, another with a New Testament for sale. Right this way, a beautiful gilded frame to put your loved ones in.

A tall well-built youth with every look of fresh fish about him stopped to examine the merchandise. Chickamauga was excited. This man might be laden with currency.

What did you say this was?

Ambrotype frame! Beautiful! You got a picture to put in it—?

I can’t understand you, so quit trying to make me understand. The youth opened the frame, closed it again. How much?

Five dollars currency. Five dollars greenbacks.

The boy laughed, threw the frame at him, turned to go.

Wait, wait! Chickamauga was desperate. This was the first person who’d shown any interest. How much will you pay?

Fifty cents Yank.

Fifty cents Yank? for this fine gilt—?

The customer started away through the crowd, but Chickamauga hastened after him. Wait, wait, Mister. Give me seventy-five. Seventy-five. He kept repeating it until he was sure that he was understood.

Look here, Old Clatterpuss. I’m a watchmaker by trade, and I can do some tinkering whilst I’m in this prison pen. Got a few of my tools and— I could use that brass, but I’d have to cut it up—

In the end they compromised on seven dollars Confed, and now it was Chickamauga himself who went shopping. He bought nine small onions with one of the dollars, and a pinch of salt for fifty cents Confed extra, and later he traded two of the onions for a bit of raw meat and bone which the vendor insisted was veal but which was probably dog. He went back to his shebang and cooked a stew in the battered stew-pan he’d stolen two weeks earlier, using pine splinters he’d brought from the outside on his last berry trip. Once he bothered to look down the hill to see whether the dead cavalryman was still there; he was, but neighbors were complaining; soon some of the more able-bodied neighbors would carry him away. Chickamauga finished his stew with relish.

He spent on the whole a peaceful and satisfying day. He watched two fights from a safe distance, he saw a wounded man bleeding after he’d been stabbed, he stood in a circle of other rubbernecks and observed a priest from Outside administering Last Rites to a consumptive old man; for a time he followed the priest on his rounds. Wirz appeared in the sentry-box at Station Number Nineteen, accompanied by another Confederate officer with a gray beard, and was roundly screamed at by the inmates. A prisoner was shot and killed near the deadline of the east stockade; the guard insisted that he’d tried to cross the deadline; other prisoners said the victim hadn’t tried to cross—that he had been jostled. The guard was ordered out of the sentry-box afterward; there was a rumor that he was a patriarch eighty years of age, and how had his eyesight been good enough to enable him to shoot so accurately? Chickamauga attended also a prayer service conducted by an exhorter of the Methodist faith. He attempted to join in hymns because he enjoyed singing, but no one would ever let him sing—he made such a harsh noise—and this time was no exception. The prisoners manhandled him, hustled him, pushed him away, while the exhorter called warnings and quoted Christ in a loud voice. Vaguely Chickamauga felt a kinship with Christ, for He too had been pounded and scorned.

On the whole however it was a good sunny day, beginning with his discovery of the ambrotype frame in the dead man’s jacket, and on through his examination of guilty sand deposited near the sinks, and on through all the rest. The events proceeded as on many other days, but sun shone for hours, a pleasant relief from the chill soaked skies which had clung recently.

That night he posted himself on a route where he might detect the sand-distributors passing, but rain swept down to drive him to cover. The next day Chickamauga shook with the ague for hours and lay miserably in his shebang; he took down the remnants of overcoat to wind around him. He still had currency, and bribed a neighbor to fetch rations. The man brought corn bread and a cup of coffee made from roasted okra seeds; Chickamauga paid more currency to have the coffee heated up. Gradually he regained sufficient strength and initiative to resume his detective operations.

On the night of Tuesday, May tenth, he followed the sand-carriers to the door of their shebang. It took him several hours to accomplish this feat, but Chickamauga felt that luck was with him, and relayed himself, as it were, from man to man through the sleeping, waking, growling, snoring, praying, gasping populace. The shebang was a large one, solidly made—there was even one whole rubber blanket incorporated in the roof. It was tenanted by a mess of Westerners, most of them Iowans. This information Chickamauga pumped from not-too-close neighbors the following morning, by means which seemed to him shrewd.

That morning Chickamauga was at the South Gate long before even the orderlies had arrived to examine prisoners who pleaded for hospitalization. He did not wish to meet the orderlies; he sought Captain Henry Wirz himself. When Chickamauga could get a sentry to heed him, he was stunned by the news that Wirz was sick abed. He moped about . . . should he approach the Officer of the Day or should he not? Wirz might pay better. He wanted to be certain that Wirz knew the source of the information which would be whispered, so that he might appreciate Chickamauga in the future; Chickamauga had no currency, but maybe the Officer of the Day was also flat of purse; certainly some food should be forthcoming; Chickamauga had fasted the day before; he suffered diarrhoea following his ague, and feared to eat corn bread because it irritated his intestines; how could he wait for Wirz and the next day? Perhaps someone else would stumble upon this tunnel project in the meantime and retail the information to guards, and Chickamauga’s hopes would be dashed because he had delayed. It was this latter consideration which kept him hanging there, and finally sent him bounding toward the officer, the moment that familiar soiled red sash came in view.

Please, Lieutenant— Please—

What’s ado? The Officer of the Day happened to be a plump oyster-eyed man named Gholson, resentful at serving as a lieutenant in middle age when people with half his years were sometimes captains, majors, even colonels.

Outside, whispered Chickamauga, bending close with wretched breath.