Andersonville (43 page)

But what’s that there saleratus good for? (They had secreted their spoils in loose underbrush beyond the guards’ sinks.)

Sell it to the Yanks, old Poop Brain.

What they want with it?

Oh, they use it for bread and truck. Maybe biscuits. Medicine.

What you get for it?

Buttons with hens on them, if not cold cash.

The brass buttons on Flory’s jacket had been removed before the garment was handed to him, his own buttons were mere disks of wood. He longed for eagle-shine, he longed for the gleam of minted stars. Dog my cats, Sojer. How many buttons ought I to make a Yank give me?

Say a jacket-full for a teeny little sack. Don’t you fret—they’ll get the buttons if you got the other stuff.

That night they swung to a new shifting of the guards. Flory found himself On Parapet at sundown. He’d called his squealing eight o’clock and all’s well . . . his half-after-eight, his nine o’clock and all’s well . . . he heard taunts flung up because of his childhood and the baby squawk of his voice. He itched to kill a Yankee as he had itched long; yet he was afraid to fire his musket because old Ducky warned him that the kick would knock him off the platform and break his neck for him. Flory had never fired the musket; they had no gunnery range, no targets; he wondered if truly the kick was worse than the kick of Coral’s shotgun. He had no idea how to begin negotiating with prisoners, but presently he became aware that something odd was going on at the next station. Several prisoners huddled near the deadline in the dark. A good-sized moon was rising in the east. Soon it would be light enough to see what was happening. But when the moon preened itself in unattainable yellow splendor the Yanks were vanished.

Flory looked down across the newly excavated ditch on the outside. No sergeants in sight, no details moving about. The coast was clear. He called to the guard at Station Number Thirty-eight (a mere acquaintance, a nearsighted older man who ignored Flory usually); he called, trying to make his treble seem gruff and casual. What’d you get over there, Johnson?

Pair of shears, bub. I swear, won’t the old lady be proud.

What kind of shears?

Sewing shears sure enough.

What you have to give for them, Johnson?

Bub, quit calling my name out loud. . . . I give some salt.

Sakes. Where you get that old salt?

Well, where you think, you little fart? I ain’t telling nobody. Now you shut up—quit your yelling at me fore we get in trouble.

This warning caused Flory to fall silent. Soon he lost himself in a child’s musings, the eternal Wish I Had of the scrawny and ill-favored. He dreamed of horehound candy (he would buy a quantity when he was paid) and favorite foods which he had tasted infrequently and thus considered rare, and he dreamed of foods he had heard about but had never seen or smelled, and of other delicacies of which he had never even heard . . . what were they? Off in delectable space somewhere beyond the buzz, the murmur, the squawling, the reek of this prison . . . great hot platters of tempting meats and colored fruits.

He wished he owned a pistol such as was owned by this officer and that. A gun was all right; he had been taught how to load his musket, how to cap it, how to draw the charge. But there was something especially man-grown about the idea of a holster rubbing beside your leg as you moved. Flory liked the flap of a revolver holster, he liked the way it curved and fastened down, he liked the feel and solidity and promise of guarding leather, the way it became polished by rubbing and by sweat (he had never worn a holster, he could but imagine). He had lost much of his curiosity about Yanks, knowing them with intimacy now when they congregated below him. But Flory had been told that there was money to be made out of them, profit to be gained; he desired money and profit. He did not know how to begin a transaction, he was afraid that the Yanks would laugh at him. Floral Tebbs hated to be laughed at, and yet he was laughed at frequently.

His imaginings were limited by primitive inexperience. He was an infant and an illiterate, but some illiterates had absorbed the stimulation of profound emotion and thus were above the beasts. Flory was not. He was a beast, although a weak and confused little animal and thus proportionately dangerous. He did not know exactly what occupied the thought and attention of the branded scoundrels whom he had been set to watch. If he considered that they had secret pulsations and agonies such as lacerated him, it was only to ascribe to them a concerted wickedness: they would like to get out, and rove horned and prankish through the unprotected landscape. He must give none of them an opportunity to do this.

(Within ten rods of Flory’s sentry-box an ex-miner and an ex-baggage-handler and an ex-mule-driver and an ex-book-agent-who-longed-to-be-a-writer-of-novels huddled together in their rags busy with lice. They were wrapped by the tape of common knowledge, common tragedy. They had been comrades in the Forty-fifth Ohio, and already had watched numerous of their friends die, and these men also would die. The other three listened while the book-agent told of scuppernong grapes. He had traveled through gulfside wildernesses a few years before the war, and that was how he’d come to know scuppernongs. Three shriveled fuzzy skull-faces pressed near him and low moonlight touched them when they turned, and the blanched brains behind the faces played, each in its own fashion, with imagined joy of fruit juices, fruit crystals, the power contained in thin skins and rich pulp of a peculiar sort they had never tasted and now never would taste. The book-agent said that the grapes crawled on truant vines in wild places where you’d never think to find them. You drove along the forest road in a buggy or a wagon, and the driver stopped suddenly, and you said or he said, Here they be. You reached out and pressed the bulbous things into your mouth. They were salt and sugar and sustenance, deep purple purity and grace, tang and promise. You rolled an invisible morsel of their taste around on your tongue, and it struck the roof of your mouth and it occupied your soul and you could think of nothing else. Here it was: spice and fragrance and power. It was like the moment when you were with a hearty woman and she yielded with her drive and delicacy, and you yielded unto her your whip-snapping and private bitter concentrated flogging, and here it was and this was it, the summation of bountiful flavor. Your body lived and died and was revivified as you absorbed.)

Floral did not know how he might have appeared to the prisoners, or how his fellows might have appeared. It was impossible that it might occur to him to wonder how the prisoners thought of him and other Reserves. He did not realize that after the moon ascended farther, wafer-thin above the stockade, guard shacks along the eastern parapet became small haunted houses with death dwelling in them. The shaggy figures of guards stood motionless or rarely moving, but always with menace in their silhouetting; so he himself, not yet fourteen, was a menace. The guards said to the Yankees in essence between their throat-hawkings and tobacco-spittings, Try to get past us. Only try. We have bullets and powder, the musket barrels to contain velocity and expend it against you. We’re up here On Parapet; you ain’t; you’re down below. We got our eyes on you. Just try it, Fourth Pennsylvania and Fourth Vermont and Fourth Kentucky and Fourth Iowa. Try it, Thirteenth U.S. Infantry and Cole’s Cavalry and Michiganders and folks from Wisconsin in the Iron Brigade. Try to get past us.

Night and day, in sunlight and smell, or in moonlight or in darkness and increased and concentrated smell . . . we got our muzzles ready and the percussion caps ready on tubes at tother end, and the squeeze of powder and balls jammed in between. We loaf up here, excused by too old age or too young age from feeling any feeling but a blind unreasoning unreckoning undiscerning hatred. We loaf on our planks, we are bored, we cry the reports of the hours and half hours. Somebody starts off on the stroke of twelve or of seven or of two or of whatever hour of the night, and middling thereafter, and the calls drone from lair to lair along the fence. Post Sixteen, ten o’clock and all’s well, or we yell for fun, Post Thirty-three, ten o’clock and here’s your mule. Maybe some other members of our far-flung regiment are laughing their livers out along the rim, or maybe they aren’t paying any attention at all, and wouldn’t have sense enough to pay heed if they had the waking ears to pay heed. Just try to get past this stockade, just try to get past the deadline in shadows, Tenth Connecticut and Pennsylvania Lancers and Twenty-second Indiana and Pennsylvania Bucktails and folks from out West, from Crocker’s Brigade and such. Just try it; all we ask, or sometimes we won’t even wait to ask; just try. We got the muskets loaded and we ain’t asleep by any chance. We got the fire ready, Chicago Board of Trade Battery and Second Maryland and Minnesota Indians and any God damn niggers that claim they’re soldiers like white men, even Yankees, and haven’t been sent to a labor detail in the burying trenches yet. Just try it. In stench of wormy black, in clarity of the thing in the sky, we linger amid haunted houses on the fence, and we dare you. You will die if you take the dare.

Hi, Reb.

Flory jumped from his vague blank retreat and looked down. He had thought it was a post, it wasn’t a post, it was too wide for a post, and that post he’d thought it was (the toughened remains of a small pine from which prisoners ripped the last splinters) had disappeared under erosion of fingernails and homemade knives sometime previously.

Reb. Hi, Guard!

With shuddering hands Floral Tebbs slid his musket barrel across the fence.

Take care, don’t shoot me, you damn fool.

Yank—get—away—from that—deadline. Flory spoke the words thinly with a mouth near to blubbering.

Hah. Thought you was the guard we call Little Tattnall. He’s usually on this post.

Flory’s jellied finger went inside the trigger guard. The Yankee stood close to death, he didn’t know how close he stood. Flory’s stage-whisper came down to him. Little Tattnall’s took sick. They give me this post.

You might do. Be a sport, kiddie. Raise that gun barrel a trifle. . . .

He was safe, after all—he was up on the fence—no Yankee could jump fifteen feet into the air, although sometimes Flory imagined that a Yankee could. Flory tilted the musket toward the moon.

Thanks, kiddie. What I need is soda.

Who’re you?

Kid, I’m Donner. You ought to know—Willie Collins’s cookie?

Flory had heard of Willie Collins since the first time he went On Parapet. Collins had been pointed out to him, he had seen the giant, had watched him slugging and bossing.

You understand? Soda. You Rebs call it saleratus.

Flory shuffled loosely on his perch. I got some.

This was a miracle, the Yank asking him for saleratus; and all the time that twisted paper had been lying squeezed in his jeans’ pocket.

Guess you didn’t follow me. Little Reb, what’s your name?

Flory.

Well, Flory, Willie wants some York biscuits. I got everything else—sufficient flour and butter and sugar, got the milk souring. But we need soda. Saleratus.

I—got some.

Devil suck it, here’s luck! You know what I mean, now? Sal—

Saleratus.

How much you got?

Nigh onto a pocket full.

I’ll be sucked. What you want for it? Greenback?

Flory spewed the low words in a stream. No I want buttons with hens on them.

Give you two dollars in good currency.

No. Buttons with hens on them.

You fool little Reb, I’ll give you a bean, a gold piece.

Want buttons with hens—

The man named Donner swore softly and went stalking off until he was mingled in the noisy pattern of moonlight and tilted shebang roofs, until he could not be seen moving, could not be separated from the wide-spread garbage dump with its fire-flickers and bird sounds. A few minutes later the cry of
Raiders!
was raised near the creekside. There was a feeling that a few people ran toward the spot and many more went tottering away. More minutes elapsed, Donner returned. The light swept increasingly brighter, increasingly shadows flattened as the moon sailed. Flory could see that the cook held a loose dark patch in his hand.

I got here a jacket with them buttons on it.

Dddon’t need no jacket, Yank. Just buttons—

Brown your God damn nose, I hain’t got nothing to cut buttons off with! Should I pull them off twould likely bust them little gilt loops. Kiddie, you got a string?

Flory had no twine, he had not thought to bring a length of it.

I’ll hurl it up. You catch. Donner wadded the garment and tossed it high. It fluttered and fell short within the deadline. Casually the big Donner stepped across the deadline and picked up the jacket. Johnson, the guard at the next station toward the north, and the guard at the next station toward the south— Both were watching, neither bothered to lift his gun. They were more accustomed to such transactions than was Floral Tebbs, but Flory would grow accustomed. Donner weighted the jacket with a wad of mud, wrapped it with care, threw it high. It came hard and hurtfully against Flory’s face with a button bruising his eyelid when it struck. His calico hat was knocked from his head, but he held the jacket, he had it in his arms, he had buttons with proud eagles threatening amid circles of stars, those were the glory he sought.

Well, kiddie, I’m waiting. Toss the soda.

Flory tossed it and Donner caught the poke easily in one hand. He said nothing more but strolled into the tangle of huts and population; and Willie Collins would have his York biscuits the next morning, with butter and jam and rashers of fresh bacon.

In the huge conical tent draped beside Collins’s winter castle, Donner leered through the firelight at Edward Blamey. Rubber Legs, you did a fair deed.

What?

Member that freshie you sighted this afternoon with the artillery jacket on him? I was hard put to find some buttons just now, to buy soda for these biscuits. Damn if I didn’t mind that artillery jacket then and there.

Edward Blamey remembered. He was moved into that overcoat shebang, this side of the sinks, wa’n’t he?