Andersonville (69 page)

Willie scraped and scraped. When finally Teacher came out with his cane and surveyed the results, he said, William, you may not anticipate a brilliant career as a scholar—not after today’s blots and witlessness—but I vow you could make a living with a shovel.

Teacher locked up the schoolhouse and thumped Willie’s head with his stiff old finger, and turned west along the road toward where he boarded with the Pattersons. But Willie and the noble little Dutchwoman had to go east.

She walked fast, Willie walked faster, soon he was up with her and walking at speed fairly beside her, but she kept her hot face turned away.

Katrine. . . .

She seemed fearing to reply, and why should she hide her face in the folds of knitted blue?

Katrine. Let me carry your books.

Nein.

Why not, eh?

Cause—

Let me carry your stuff.

Nein.
Mineself I—carry—

Katrine, listen here. He snatched her free hand, and stopped her, and held her as a prisoner; she faced him with damp reddened soft face and blue eyes like silver.

You put them cookies in my bucket—

Nein,
she breathed, but of course she breathed a lie.

Yes you did. What kind of cookies are they?

Boy and girl, they stood alone in the slushy road, and nobody was about—no Teacher, no brothers or sisters or schoolmates, no rigs or teams—nothing there but February wind and a crow calling, and a pervading cold consciousness of spring to come.

Lebkuchen,
she whispered.

What? Them cookies? Is that what they’re called?

Ja.

She did not resist when he took her books and little willow basket. They made an awkward if not heavy burden along with his own things. In utter silence the children walked the way to a lane which bordered the Mann farm on the west, for the Fiedenbrusters lived down that lane on the old Carrington place. Katrine thanked him in the thinnest of whispers, and dared not meet his glance when she did it.

Willie stopped, halfway to his home, and stood looking across the field at that gray-shawled, blue-topped little figure a-hastening, and then she turned to look at him, and thus again each saw the other looking.

She was his girl, in this modern grown-up time; he was her fellow. They had belonged to each other, in pure and solemn devotion, from the very first.

Five times he had managed to kiss her. But only in kissing games, when other folks were looking on and laughing. And only on the cheek, because she’d try to hide away from him— She would seem to fight him. But not too hard—

This night the plum light was intense around him and around the white house of the Fiedenbrusters, and the strong glow went up as if from prairie fires beyond a row of cottonwoods, and a chorus of whip-poor-wills challenged steadily from black hollows of Beverly’s Timber. Oh God, please God, to be alone with her, to be alone in Beverly’s Timber or any place else in this spooky nighttime wonderland, but to be alone—

They roosted on a small porch and on the steps, the Fiedenbrusters. Papa and Mamma sat in the two rocking chairs received as premiums. Katrine and Wempkie, her next youngest sister, had sold bluing and vanilla throughout the neighborhood in their spare time; the rockers were their own accomplishment, and they were proportionately proud, but tonight they sat on stools. The girls had put down their mending, because now it was too dark to see properly, and they had taken up their knitting because they could knit ably, by touch, in the half-dark. All the girls could—even Marta and little Lena.

Jacob and Fritz were gone to the army. Henry and Lou were giggling out behind the plum trees—smoking grapevine, they were, and they became terrified and heavy with guilt when Willie Mann came upon them. Peter and Buck chased fireflies around the yard in this rare dusky moment of playtime, and the toddler, Link, was staggering after them.

Good evening.

To you good evening, Willie Mann.

The party on the stoop and steps loomed before him in dark solidity; they were a unit, a strong sedate family unit. How could he ever pry Katty loose from them?

He burst out with his tidings. I signed the roll today. Pa drove me to the courthouse. I’ll be eighteen Sunday.

Katty upset the work basket on her lap. Scissors and thimbles and a darning ball and things tumbled all over the stoop planks, and some things rolled down into the lily bed below. Willie had no matches; Willie did not smoke. Mrs. Fiedenbruster sent one of the girls into the house, and she came back with a small block of sulphur matches. Willie took the matches from her, and scouted amid tapering lily leaves until Katty’s lost property was restored. He straightened to find big Jake, the father, standing beside him, a mighty post of hewn manhood in dead brown darkness when the last match sputtered out.

Jake Fiedenbruster shook Willie’s hand. This is good. Now you are a man, like my Jake and Frederick are men, like your brother was a man. When do you go?

I reckon we go next week. They aimed to raise a company, but the recruiting captain said they’d never get that many in these parts—too many folks already gone to war. Ben Carrington’s signed, and Hudson Moberly and both the Pittridge boys.

Ja, das ist gut.
It is bad, but it is good. Were it not for
die Kinder
I too should go.

The girls sat motionless on their stools and on the steps, and Katrine seemed to exude a deeper silence than the others, and Mrs. Fiedenbruster rocked heavily in the chair too small for her fat body, and the chair protested with squeaks. Down at the gate the boys still cavorted after lightning-bugs, making few sounds in order to keep from frightening the bugs.

It was late—far too dark to lure Katty from her family circle by this time. They would say that it was dark, her family would not permit her to walk down the road with him; that much was certain. But he would not have to leave for several days and—

After he was in the army, especially after he became a prisoner, he liked to think of that night. Mostly he thought about an afternoon before he went away, and what had happened then. But he chose also to consider the firefly evening (
chose
was scarcely it: memories pushed over him and fed him and choked him with their color and scent and shadow, whenever he was not occupied by the immediate urgencies of war).

No longer did the town band blat forth its resounding Hail Columbia or Benny Havens, Oh! Two trumpeters were dead of smallpox in Kentucky, the piccolo would roll its sweet trills no longer when operated by the breath of big Tad Wheeling because big Tad Wheeling’s breath was taken from him by grapeshot. Most of the drummers were scattered and drumming still, but drumming at remote guard-mounts in remote places. No band—but throngs of people on the cindered platform, waiting for the cars to come; sisters to weep, mothers to weep and squeeze you desperately, fathers struggling to seem calm and unweeping, little brothers torn between wide-eyed fear for your lives and the ecstasy of envy. Everyone stood with bowed heads, after the engine pulsed to its hot and blowing stop, while Reverend Collins spoke his prayer. Baskets of lunch, the sacks and satchels, the umbrella Hud Moberly’s mother made him take along (how they would play with that, on the cars, and brandish it out of the window at other towns until the sergeant shouted them down).

Katty. Jewels and weapons in her bright wet blue eyes, the knowledge of what had already passed between them, the knowledge of her fragrance and softness and tenderness striking him like intoxication. Mother—ah, yes, one loved a mother—Willie loved his mother. Father—ah, Doctor was a father to be respected, to give the charm of calm manliness, to receive it back as his natural due. Sisters? Willie put his arms around the lot of them, or tried to, and patted them as a choice sprigged calico bouquet. But—Katty—

Finally, people had the decency to let him stand apart from them, to stand with Katty alone, looking directly into her face. She was not a tall girl, but she was nearly as tall as Willie.

Look what I bring to you, and she gave him a package. It seemed to be a bottle, sewn up in clean muslin and insulated against breakage with wads of paper inside the cloth.

Katty . . .

You do not ask me, but it is lemonade.

Katty, I . . .

Loaf sugar, one pound. In a trance she recited the formula. Citric acid, one-half ounce: this I buy from Mr. Partridge in his store. Also lemon essence. In a mortar I mix it, and it is all very dry. You should be sure to keep the bottle tight all the while.

Katty, you’ll write to me and let me know if . . .

Then, when it is your lemonade you want, I have here this tablespoon for you to measure. Not heaping, not flat, but round—so. That will make it proper.
Ach,
the amount of water I did not tell you: one half-pint. But maybe you like it not so strong; then more water you should use. Be sure to use pure and cold water.

Yes, yes, pure and cold— Katty—

The whistle blasted, steam blew on high, wet spatters came down. The boys went fleeting up the steps into the car, the sergeant was already aboard, Allen Pittridge was waving Willie’s bundle at him and screaming, Come on, Will, I got your plunder—

He kissed her, and all her folks were staring; long he mashed his face on hers, his lips grown fast around hers, and all his folks were staring too, and all the other folks were staring, the world was staring. Then he was in the moving car, and smoke went alongside to mask the people stumbling and waving and trying to sing, smoke lifted to disclose old Mr. Cull Calise waving his flask at the train and quacking an invocation: Give ’em hell, boys. Scalp ’em, scalp ’em!

Glory, glory, hallelujah. Glory, glory, hallelujah. Glory, Glory—

So the knowledge that he must absorb nothing but purest liquid was a lesson set first by Doctor, learned fervently by Willie Mann, and endorsed by Katty in the final adjuration she gave him. Pure cold water from pure cold wells and springs. In this way Willie learned to go without water; he went without water when he had to—and often when he didn’t, because he was over-zealous and his comrades thought him possessed of a mania. Privately he recognized that indeed he was possessed of a mania, but believed that it would sustain him. At first he was inclined to grow costive. This tendency he disciplined sternly by muscular exercise of his own abdominal area, by rubbings and proddings and twistings and bendings. Eventually he was convinced that his body needed only the moisture brought to it in mouthfuls of ordinary foods, though he drank boiled coffee along with other boys, and reveled in sweet milk whenever it might be bought or begged.

He survived the rigorous and disappointing earliest months of soldier life; he survived two transfers, the first frightening skirmish, the first utterly terrifying pitched battle; he survived four later battles, and various bang-bangs of desultory musket fire from rocks and woodlands (he refused to dignify these as skirmishes, because not an enemy was in sight). People caught scarlet fever in the winter of 1863–4; Willie Mann did not catch it. People caught mumps—fifteen boys in his company had the mumps at one time, and the mumps went down on four of the boys, and one boy died—of mumps and respiratory complications and gosh-knows-what. Willie Mann had had the mumps when he was nine; he did not catch the disease now. People died of pneumonia, intermittent fever, remittent fever, camp fever. Willie Mann suffered no fever whatsoever. He had grown half an inch since he enlisted. He was five-feet-seven and weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. His round tan-colored eyes were solid and all-seeing. His tan-colored hair grew wavy and thick, and twisted in a tuft like a queue at the nape of his neck. He was more wiry than ever, and still liked to wrestle; and one of the bigger corporals was a wrestler too, and taught Willie many new holds. Willie Mann read a Chapter nearly every day, as he had promised his mother that he would do; he failed to perform this rite only in times of fighting, or in times of marching when actually he fell asleep between strides and pitched to the ground or tumbled against the man ahead of him. Willie owned deep-driven lines on either side of his little-boy’s mouth, and nets of spidery lines around the outer corners of his eyesockets. He kept his body as clean as he could, and he dreamed of Katty Fiedenbruster. He carried his little Bible in his left breast pocket, confident that it would stop any bullet which sought his heart, and he had a letter from Katty folded in that Bible which letter would most certainly amplify the defense of the Bible, and he dreamed of Katty always while sleeping and whenever he could while waking.

Her lemonade was, while it lasted, a chalky treasure to be jeered at by his fellows, and promptly to be begged by them. He would remember always: hot, hot, and hollyhocks drooping on their roadside spikes, and dust twirling ahead sometimes diagonally across the road from southwest to northeast, the way cyclones blew. Sun made shivers out of remote windbreaks of cottonwood and sawed-off willows, and when the green regiment lay gasping at rest on swales along the floury roadside they could hear roosters wailing about the heat on distant small farms. Roosters talked with their mid-afternoon midsummer crowing, wan and hot and limp: it was not the inspiriting cry they uttered at dawn. Squad by squad, Willie’s company was allowed to approach the nearest well. The widow who lived on that place had given her permission when the lieutenant asked her, and the boys were cautioned not to step on nasturtium beds, and to treat the old gate kindly. Forcibly imprisoned within the house, a shaggy shepherd dog uttered his barks in regular pounding cadence, without let or variety.
Owgh. Owgh. Owgh. Owgh,
until you thought you’d go crazy with barking and hotness and dust and solid sun.

Then was the time for Willie Mann to produce that bottle which Katty had given him, and the spoon to go with it. He measured cannily: the rounded spoonful, as she had directed. What in tarnation, Will? What you got there? Medicine? A physic? He shook his head and tried to look wise, and succeeded only in looking smug. The others sensed his smugness; they made uncouth remarks about the stuff he was stirring into his can of water and—soon—the stuff he was drinking. Oh, but that was a good deep clear cool well; his father would have approved.