Andersonville (29 page)

There was a dull man named Dawson who rose each day during that first month of the prison’s existence and made his comment about the weather. If the sun came clear, ready to accumulate and radiate the fierce stout heat of a Georgia sun in spring, the dullard would declare, Well, Old Sol the Haymaker is going to get in his work on us again today. And if—as came about more often in March—the skies were cased with zinc and ready to leak or burst, Dawson called the skies and the day Old Boo. Well, Old Boo gets us again today. The terse keen wisdom of the ages can be recollected and quoted by a few; it is the dunces who conceive or incubate the old saws, the slang, the common parlance. Dawson stood daily and turned his bleared gaze upward, and spoke his piece. In no time at all most of the men capable of observing an anecdote were talking about Old Boo. Dawson fell sick, he died, he smelled badly, he was lugged away, no one cared much about him, he was not missed. Months later new prisoners would enter and soon would hear about Old Boo, and they would laugh about Old Boo and in time would shrink in their terror of Old Boo; and then like Dawson they would go down to death, blaming Old Boo; or if they were more fortunately tougher they might survive, and thus live to procreate, to have their children procreate, to sit one day in a rocking chair out on the shady grass under maple trees and tell their grandchildren about Old Boo; and then the grandchildren would go to bed, and cry out in the middle of the night with bad dreams, and when Mother came soothing they would say, He was going to get me, he was going to grab me. Who was going to grab you, dearie? Old Boo! Now, there is no such thing as Old Boo; I never heard of Old Boo; that’s just silly. Say Now I Lay Me again, and go to sleep, and don’t dream about Old Boo any more because there isn’t any such thing.

Johnny Ransom took the wet stub out of his sore mouth and wrote painstakingly: Seems as if our government is at fault in not providing some way to get us out of here. The hot weather months must kill us all outright. Feel myself at times sick and feverish with no strength seemingly. . . . Raiders getting more bold as the situation grows worse. Often rob a man now of all he has, in public, making no attempt at concealment. In sticking up for the weaker party our mess gets into trouble nearly every day.

So indeed did the boys of John Ransom’s mess; so did many others. But their resistance (heroic in starved slight youths who battled against a vast anonymous cruelty) was ineffectual. There was no concert in action, no assembling of a force sufficient to cope with well-fed enemies most of whom had practiced the arts of subjugation from infancy. Charity, Christianity, eagerness, righteousness: these were lame swords with which to be armed no matter what the Scriptures had to say on the subject. History had taught a million lessons, history would teach a million more; few might profit from the teaching. Angry and continually apprehensive, the prisoners said, If we all get together . . . take a hundred men, every man jack of them carrying a club; why, we ought to be able to— No one mustered the hundred, no one prepared the cudgels. Say, fellers, we’ll make agreement with you folks in that Ohio tent; we’ll swap protection with you. If any raiders tackle you, we’ll join in; and you got to swear you’ll side with us if we get jumped. How about them new folks yonder in the next shebang? Hellfire, twon’t do no good to even ask them. Seventh New Hampshire, the whole boiling, and you know what that means: bounty jumpers who enlisted for the heavy pay. Not a true New Hampshireman in the lot, and I vow they’d turn tail in the first pinch.

The frantic disorder pertaining to housing—such as it was—and rations—such as were furnished— Disorder, crowding, the speedy rise of disease and resultant mortality: these ills worked for the raiders’ benefit. One noon news came skimming through the mobs: smallpox—didn’t you hear? It’s rife. No, I didn’t see the sick ones; but a boy from the next mess seen them: all blotched up and feverish, and itching like the Old Harry. Tis said the Rebs are going to vaccinate us. Well, by mighty, they’ll have to cinch and hog-tie me before they’ll get their rotten horse-piss into
my
arm! I seen a nigger man up in Virginia, and he lost his arm because of that damnable vaccination, and like to lost his life as well.

One day, urged by the bayonets of a seedy regiment marched inside for the purpose, the seven thousand men assembled in the stockade were walked to one side of the creek and made to return by slow files while the few contract surgeons scraped vaccine into their arms as they passed. Once beyond the surgeons, there was a growing rush to the marsh and boggy creek despite the fumes which now smoked above each turgid pool. People feared the vaccine more than they feared this noxious ooze—many of them did. They scrubbed madly at their abraded flesh, washing with mud and slime, trusting that they were expelling tainted medicament. There followed numerous cases of swelling and local putrefaction, with amputation and sometimes death as the logical result. Men who had bathed their vaccinations developed enormous sores, men who had not bathed their vaccinations developed enormous sores. There were as many theories about the sores as there were sores; some believed that the vaccine had been adulterated deliberately with blood taken from syphilitic invalids. The surgeons exhausted their store before half the men had been treated; the threat of later vaccination was another of the clouds lying above the stockade.

It was a community demoralized in its inception, demoralized through rapid growth, exploded into wreckage as each cap was detonated by a falling hammer: the cap of starvation . . .
bang!
and more lives flame out . . . the cap of illness, the cap of chill at night . . .
bang! Bang . . .
the dread of a beating, the water poisoned by human filth . . . Godsakes, Piper, I dipped out a half-canteen of that stuff and lifted it up to drink and— Godsakes, there was a turd floating right under my nose! . . . The hammer of the rifle falling, the fresh cap exploded spitefully . . .
bang . . .
the trigger pulled by an unseen finger, by a finger far away, by a finger inert, by a finger fumbling.

In such a teetering confusion there were crops to be gathered by savage simple people who knew but enough to strike a blow and had the power to strike it. Willie Collins was happier in Andersonville than he had ever been before. Other toughs emerged from their brutal obscurity—a man in sailor’s dress named Rickson, another alleged sailor named Munn. They had been worms in the outer world; there they stood in secret dread of manacles, a flogging, in dread of discipline itself. Here there was no discipline except such as the Goliaths chose to inflict upon their subordinates. Among themselves they brawled for fun, and to reassure themselves constantly as to their status as chieftains. The handsome Munn scowled his ponderous way among shebangs; weaker prisoners hurriedly freed a pathway for him. The heavy-fisted Sarsfield commanded more power than he would have commanded as the officer he never became in fact. Charley Curtis reminded some prisoners of the orangutans pictured in books of travel . . . low-browed, massive, his voice was a grunt, he had a trick of tearing the ear off any victim who offered resistance.

Sentries clucked at their stations. By God, Holley, I’m damned if them Yanks don’t just beat the devil.

Sure enough. Like a pack of wolves.

Holley, I hain’t never seen a pack of wolves; but if’n they’re as mean-tempered and all gone filthy as these Yankees I sure as hell don’t want to!

...Ah, Delaney, and it’s over to my own headquarters you must come immediately; and wait till you see what I’ve got to treat you with. Pine-top, man? Never! It’s a bottle of the finest brandy I’ve tasted since first I joined up. Devil knows where the guard at Station Thirty got it. A fine pocketknife I gave him for it, with four blades and a bone handle. It’s from a fresh Marylander I took it— Ah, you would have split a gut! Nickey snatch the lot of us if he didn’t make to jab me with it when I asked him for the knife politely. Sure, and there he lies yonder; hark you to the noise he’s making still; his jaw went to pieces like a teacup when I tapped him.

Hymns receded from the hearing of a bowlegged Rhode Islander named Edward Blamey; he could not hear his father reading aloud:
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air—

So
regularly that it became a commonplace, a frightened-looking young officer in a shabby dun-colored jacket appeared within the stockade on muleback; he rode from point to point, rattling off his memorized screed whenever he thought there was an audience sufficient, and receiving invariably the same vociferous response.

...Your Government has cruelly abandoned you, as you can now see, for it makes no attempt to release you and refuses all our offers of a fair exchange of prisoners, North and South. Since your capture you must have become increasingly aware that the Southern Confederacy will soon succeed in achieving its complete and undisputed independence. The Southern Confederacy now offers you an opportunity to enter its service. You will be taken out of this uncomfortable spot, you will receive bounteous rations and adequate apparel; you will be given an attractive bounty, and, at the conclusion of hostilities, you will receive a land warrant establishing your right to—

Aw, go fuck a duck.

Got any of those bounteous rations along with you now?

Why, your adequate apparel hain’t much better’n my own.

Where’s my farm going to be, with that land warrant and all? I don’t want no farm in Texas. Got a nice farm in hell?

Who the devil told you I wanted to be galvanized?

Now and then a lone man—sometimes two or three at a time (comrades who had talked it over and decided that they would dishonor themselves before they would die; but they were few)—slipped to the gate in dark. They asked to speak to an officer, they mumbled the words, the guards had no respect for them and they knew it, they felt a fierce hot breath of living Unionists down their spines, they felt a fierce cold breath of Unionists who were dead.

Some men wondered why, above all, the professional bounty jumpers and roughs did not take advantage of an opportunity to crawl out of this obnoxious slough. But the more discerning might understand easily; within these precincts there was prosperity for the rapacious. Unless driven frantic by the need for women, few of them cared to enlist as Confederates; they saw the Rebel sentries ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-equipped; where was the profit? As galvanized Rebels they would be suspect for a long time, and might not enjoy the freedom awarded to ordinary enlistees. They would have no eminence, they would be regarded suspiciously, accepted by their mates with a grudge. As ordinary Outsiders who had given their parole, even though they did not take the oath as Secessionists, they might not leave the region of the stockade under penalty of being shot. Women? . . . Sometimes you overheard officers joking about an obliging widow who lived nearby. Where were women, what were women when one considered food and drink and other comfort to be secured through bestiality and—later—barter? The more articulate thugs muttered about frying pans and fires; the less articulate thugs said nothing, but proceeded with their program of theft and murder in sullen dedication.

Edward Blamey recognized that Number One was doing poorly by himself. His grandmother used to make the best beach plum preserves anyone had ever tasted; Ed Blamey dreamed nightly about beach plum preserves; he saw himself ladling out the winy richness into a saucer, he felt himself spooning up the preserves and swallowing with love . . . his grandmother fried a chicken the day he went to visit her. With his three-tined black-handled fork and with his sharp black-handled knife he worked steaming white meat free from the little bones, and ate chicken with beach plum treasure spread thereon; there were sage and onion dressing, boiled potatoes, chicken gravy . . . he said, Grandmother, guess I’m feeding like a hog, but I do want to ask you for another saucerful. He heard his grandmother chuckle, complimented to the point of endearment; and then he awoke and knew that he dwelt in steadily increasing filth, that he owned a small amount of rough corn-meal-cob-meal in which black bugs were crawling; that was all he owned, he had no salt; he had a raw place on his right shin which pained and worried him; the shebang leaked badly, and water came around you with awful freshness, awful chill until the faint heat of even one’s own weak body warmed it, but the bodily heat could not warm it enough. The gums of Ed Blamey’s mouth were touchy, his teeth loosened in their sockets. . . .
Eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body. . . .
The Wrath To Come was less effectual, it moved shapeless beyond this horizon of up-ended logs, it moved far past the sentries, the sentries were more of a plague than The Wrath To Come. Suppose he was jostled in a crowd, as some prisoners had been jostled when clawing for rations, and so was jostled against the deadline until some half-brained guard thought that he was trying to escape, and shot him through the head? His father wouldn’t want him to die . . . Edward, you got to look out for Number One; if you don’t, who will? His elder brother wouldn’t wish him to die of bleeding toothless gums with which fabrications of coarse cornmeal could not be chewed. There was a rumor that some day, somehow, bread would be baked Outside and issued to the prisoners instead of meal. But Ed would not be able to chew corn bread if his teeth were gone.

The Baptist Church would never demand that he die. Oh, certainly—die in battle, die in a charge, have a bullet rip his rags, have a hot bulb of grapeshot take the top from his skull. But not to decay by inches and parts of inches . . . folks at home, all of Rhode Island; nobody demanding that he die as men now died near him; no idols or human patterns of the past exacting an assurance that he must spoil here while some people were stout and gay and able, living in plenty.

No one had said a word about this smelly eventuality when he joined the cavalry. At least, he couldn’t remember that they had.
With the garlands of victory around her, when so proudly she bore her brave crew . . . the shrine of each patriot’s devotion, a world offers homage to thee.
Good enough for singing on the Fourth of July when everybody crowded on the green, and Judge J. T. Day stood up on the bandstand and talked about hosannahs of filial devotion arising even unto the blue Empyrean; and the Daughters of the King Sunday School class had decided to serve a public dinner for the appalling sum of twenty cents per person in order to raise money for the new Baptistry (the old Baptistry leaked down into the cellar), and that meant more chicken and dressing and other sorts of preserves besides beach plum, and apple butter and coconut cakes; and Edward Blamey and some of his friends had stuffed a toy cannon with powder and wadded newspapers, and they touched it off right in the middle of Judge J. T. Day’s speech, and then they ran like whiteheads when they saw the constable coming . . . ran long and lightly and youthfully with their pockets filled with torpedoes and Chinese crackers and squibs . . .
three cheers for the Red, White and Blue!