Andersonville (73 page)

Not a shot was fired by any guard. Some people thought later that the drilling rain had dampened their enemies’ powder charges and caps, as it had cooled the prisoners’ will to burst free. A wise battle-toughened sergeant cried an order, and frightened Reserves came tumbling from their shacks. The word was passed along, and quickly, around the south boundary. It reached the earthen fort and the camp to the southwest beyond and the camp to the northwest opposite the North Gate. Squads, companies, guards not On Parapet came to mill at the breach, urged by those few officers alert to the danger involved, urged by the babbling Lieutenant Davis.

Henry Wirz was not on duty. He was gone to Augusta, reported sick, the surgeon pecked at his arm. But among frantic subordinates left to discharge the duties he had laid out there were enough to form a nucleus of strength. They marshalled quaking boys, coughing graybeards, they held them along the boundaries of the raw river and formed them there with guns level, bayonets fixed.

Skies kept melting and falling, the hose of mettlesome gods was directed down. On one side of the gap scarecrow Yankees congregated, on the other side herded scarecrow hobbledehoys and patriarchs—but with the impact of weapons. No boy tried to gallop past them or sought to pierce the tide and swim to freedom beneath its crest. Reinforcements trotted through the dark rain until prisoners gazed across the breach into a solidity of muzzles and steel. Philosophers said wearily, It couldn’t be. Twas too lucky to happen. They turned back to whatever shelter they had left, whatever other shelter they could find or imagine. In time the storm ceased its pounding. Within a night and a day laborers had made the stockade as solid as it was before, and no flash flood of equal proportions came again.

In such thudding storms Willie Mann claimed the right to adjust his portion of tent-patching to his needs. In darkness he would lie with the broken oilcloth funneled toward his mouth, and rainwater would drip or pour, depending on the amount and velocity of rain— It would be directed into Willie’s open mouth. Thus he drank. These periodic dilutions were accomplished amid snarls and resentments of his tentmates . . . if you weren’t such a plaguèd young fool, and bound to sop up rainwater, we could all be laying fairly snug. . . . After discussion and prevailing acrimony during saner hours, it was agreed that Eph Bainbridge’s overcoat should be extended to help cover the gap left by Willie’s oilcloth, and that Willie should betake himself into other regions—clear away from the shebang, over against the deadline, and that he should lie unsheltered—when again he chose to absorb the gift of the rain. He did not tell his mates how bad the rain tasted. It was tainted with the prison’s effluvia as it came down; effluvia seemed to lie like a mattress above the thirty-odd thousand men and their reek. By the time the rain had dashed down to proximity with the crowded trampled earth it was noxious with retchings and throat-clearings and smells of disordered digestions, with the taint of corpses which had been more dead than alive when they were alive.

How many gallons less had he drunk in this year of 1864 than he had drunk in the year of 1863? There was no way of estimating. He saw a spreading fountain somewhere off in the past or the future, such a fountain as was pictured in the Versailles of their one European travel book at home; and that fountain, with foamy push and laving, represented the canteens and cups and reservoirs which Willie had not poured down his hard-surfaced throat. He thought that his throat was made of old harness, he thought that his throat was sunburnt and peeling as his bony face was peeling and burnt. Desperately he worked at manipulating the scrawny portion of his trunk which hung flat beneath the hoops of his ribs; it wouldn’t do to grow costive, there were no physics to be had, and he was one inmate for whom diarrhoea held little threat—he’d only had a touch of it twice, both times mildly. When he witnessed his own feces he thought that a rabbit must have been halting there instead of Willie Mann.

...Thunder tussled in the southwest and a deluge burst upon the soaked stockade shortly before midnight. Clouds had gloomed and pressed low as if challenging the slivers atop the fence to rip them open; so in time they were ripped. Willie lay half submerged in a pool, close to the deadline on the steep north slope. Oilcloth covered the upper portion of his body, and stiffly he held his thin elbows immobile and pressed his palms up to tilt the long-punished fabric. The ill-favored ill-flavored storm distributed its substance into his mouth, flowing over cracks in his lips, filling cracks inside his mouth which felt like the cracks in a plaster wall.

Lightning had been gashing since the storm broke, but suddenly a thrust came close enough to singe the hair in any man’s nostrils. Willie’s ears popped; he thought that he had been struck and torn and melted by the blaze (vaguely he recalled a farmer back home who’d had the watch melted in his pocket and the nails melted in his boots when he was struck). For a while Willie could see nothing but the rough ball of fire which had seemed to bounce on earth beside him, he could smell nothing but scorched brimstone and sulphur and storied chemicals. Prisoners hallooed in the nearer shebangs, and wanted to know who had been hit. Maybe no one had been hit, but you would have thought that a dozen people had been tossed and carved by the lightning’s lash, the crash of bursting cannon.

Willie felt cold all along his side. He was drenched, he had been drenched before, but this was a strange and different coldness. Had lightning tapped the blood from his body, was his blood chill instead of warm? He flung out his right hand. There was a bubbling, a running in the mud.

Willie Mann rose up on shaking knees. The next glare told him the truth . . . a stream, a small stream of clear water was coming his way, flowing desperately toward and around him. Another flare: he could see it rising in lather and bubbles from muck within the deadline space, carrying chunks of clay, swirls of mud, carrying scraps of bark and even pebbles on its crest. It wasn’t the rain . . . this was colder than rain, by God it was clearer than rain. He could see it in repeated explosions of the crazy sky. It was a little brook, a spring, it was coming out of the ground.

He fell forward, burying his face in the flow, draining mouthful after mouthful, trying to condemn his stony throat to a banquet of swallowing. This was something to drown in, he would drown in it. Then he rose, supporting himself on trembling hands as he screamed with all his strength, Water! Fresh water! It’s a spring! He did not distribute these tidings with any notion of sharing a treat with the rank and file of fellow men; it was only that he had to voice the discovery, bellow it above cracking thunder in order to reassure himself that it was true.

Within a matter of seconds there were fifty men tumbled around him, guzzling like spooks shed by the bursting night; and more scores came shoving on top of them.

Previous moisture had been nothing but the muck of obscenity; now there was Grace. How did it taste? It was Doctor’s water and Katty’s advised water: pure and cool and clear. It tasted as a forest pool where none but clean russet-coated beasts assembled to drink, and where unspoiled Indians bowed to drink and pray. It was the spring found by Daniel Boone when Boone came tramping in youth, prime, or frosty age. It tasted of simple and pretty things: violets, and taffy, and winter making pine-tree patterns on a thin sharp windowpane. It was Beverly’s Creek with crawdads scuttling, and the blue-purple-sky-colored bird being delicate in woodsy air overhead, the miniature bird the virgin boy and virgin girl had seen and heard, the bird without a name. It was the well at Grandpappy’s house, where butter and cheese hung in a damp sack, and sometimes fresh little wild strawberries were put down there to keep them cool. O water, O bittersweet the cleanliness; it carried its own spice, not the meager drip of disconsolate rainfall; but you could taste the clarity of this stuff for all the rain which smashed upon it. The stream grew wider, it came in free panic seeping under the sagging timber of the deadline, it flowed and talked of Church and Christ Himself, it rippled of Home. Lightning reeked persistently, lightning was like fragrant lilacs in the bubbling reflection. Water, water, fresh water here, a hundred dollars a drink! Yells lost the restriction of words, all yells united in a single persistent whooping blast; and cripples tried to share as well, but many of them were knocked down or aside as the rush went on. Guards crouched under the slanting roofs of their sentry stations, they did not like to step out in the rain; some men feared that guards might shoot into the scrambling mass, and already weaker individuals were being shoved fairly across the deadline, and the deadline broke, but still the guards held their fire.
He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink. . . .
Clear and cool and pure, as the saintly Doctor and the saintly Katty had ordered.

...Tasted of ferns, and wake-robins which opened early and pale when blackbirds were teetering on new green reeds and making their
chink
sounds . . . O springtime when bees came swarming, and sap had climbed clear up into the bundles of new maple seeds. Dear water—it might have been released by thunder’s pulsation or the spear-thrust of lightning itself, and already a dozen prisoners announced staunchly that they had witnessed the very bolt which drilled the ground. It might have been released by the heaviness of saturation of soaked sandy soil . . . all those torrents of June, these new freshets of ugly August uniting to disturb the hard-tamped anchorage of a hillside where every tree had been felled, where a ditch had been spaded out, where roughly squared pine trunks had been socketed, where an ancient sweet spring had been hidden and trodden into muteness.

It was the deep round narrow haunted cistern at home, where you busied yourself with rope and bucket on washday, filling the family tubs before you took yourself off to school; yes, that wine from the cistern was rainwater, but not the rainwater of Andersonville funneled from rotten blankets, from draped overcoats with the taste of forgotten blood and forgotten piss in them . . . ah, so long tanked among dark buried limestone and cistern lining that the water awarded itself the flavor of a native spring, nor did it smell like rainwater longer.

Knowing nothing of this magic breaking forth, Ira Claffey stirred on his bed beyond the stockade and the southwest hill. He emerged from a dream about one of his dead sons, and was aware of lightning’s brilliance and protracted thunder. He might have heard (he did not hear, at this time) a child speaking from memory. Lucy it was.

...Where do they sleep?

...Ah, there’s that moss. Where do you think?

...And for table linen, too. Would they let me drink their water?

...Assuredly. That’s the reason they keep it running. Here, child, I’ll make a cup of my hand . . . miniature fairies of the damp sort, scarcely as big as your finger.

...I saw one, whilst I was drinking.

It was not frozen, it was not ice, it was running loose in a summer night in Georgia, yet it had the perfume of icicles. You were a little boy again, and there came an exceptionally heavy snow to swaddle the roofs, and then a quick thaw, and then a freeze again. They hung in tapering clubs at the corner of the house where the slope of the rear portion met the slope of the front. Icicles were a menace, and Doctor said to knock them down with a pole; so you knocked them down, and it was sport. But the tiniest stilettos of all, the baby daggers on the summer kitchen eave—these you did not set to falling and crashing. These you broke off and carried in your red mitten until the hairs of yarn grew crimson against the icicles, and you sucked the icicles as you walked; they tasted crisp and of winter.

It was a fresh apple, this water, a harvest apple eaten before it was quite ripe, but still a softer apple than the one Katty had hidden in your lunch bucket. It was feast and comfort for a good elderly dog named Ben. Here, old fellow, you’re panting at a great rate—and you’re so warm in that heavy coat of yours— Here’s the pan. And lap, lap, lap eternally after you had set the pan of clear water before him; lap, lap, lap, lap with a long tongue as pink as boiled meat; and the gratitude he offered when he came to sink his muzzle upon your knee. . . .

O wild grapes with their tan, O inner bark of slippery elm, O tang and tendril of sorrel growing crisp: these tastes were there. High on a shaded hillside in Beverly’s Timber the winding gully cut its course, and there stood an elm in serenity—not a slippery elm, but one of another kind—with a great bared root outthrust, and the root had grown bark upon it like the trunk of the tree. Scored deeply across this mighty root, a little stream came down. Sometimes it dried to nothingness in late summer when no rains fell, but usually it was there, in winter it might be frozen, usually it was there, a baby waterfall across the root, a fall three inches wide and perhaps a foot long in the falling. It had built the dark depression by its own persistence over the bulk of that elm root, and when you were small you could lie at length beside the resulting pool and put your face beneath the hollowed root and let the waterfall wash your face and drown your mouth. Even slim Willie had grown too tall, by the time he was thirteen, to fit into the gully and force his face under the vertical pouring, but he remembered the wet clear drowning. So he remembered it this night.

As Willie Mann remembered, a thousand other men remembered beneficent drinks they had had; but not all of them were capable of entertaining the poetry Willie entertained; very few were capable of entertaining it. Something said in their souls, Water has come, it’s here, it has burst from the hill, look out for that deadline, and when they’d scrambled and fought to absorb their share and more than their share, there might have been the briefest flash of recollection: a horse-trough in which a youth bathed his hot head, the welcome bitterness of cool beer in a riverside saloon, a natural flowing well where sulphur and other ingredients formed corded flowers and patterns beneath the foam, a lonely cave where stalactites dripped.

But it was Willie’s water, he called it his own, he was the first prisoner to detect and taste it. For a time he lay recumbent beneath the scuffle, alternately sucking through the short tube he made of his lips, or plowing his entire face into the current. Then, as the rush and crush and fight developed to a point of actual danger—as men wailed and swore and caught weaker men by the arms or legs and dragged them away, bound to usurp their places— Willie had been kicked enough. He staggered off to a safe distance with water splashing inside him as if he carried a tin pail within his tight-drawn skin. He lay down and belched; a small portion of the water arose with belching and trickled from the corners of his mouth . . . but he had Gone Without, he had Gone Without for a very long time, and now he had drunk his rich reward and soon would drink again.