Andersonville (67 page)

In this manner Eric Torrosian was captured, and no enemy so much as touched an article of his belongings that first night. But the second day following, when the guardianship of seventy-two prisoners was taken over by irregular troops behind the lines, he was stripped of watch, pocketknife, new shoes and all such sundries. He saw what was happening to the column and managed to put slabs of currency inside both cheeks, for recently he had been paid. Hence the villains got only his small change. He talked oddly, with those folds of money bulking between his teeth and the wet flesh of his mouth’s inner lining, but since the Rebels didn’t know how he talked at other times they discerned nothing suspicious in his responses. His cheeks appeared smooth instead of hollow, and the Rebels didn’t know that he was naturally hollow-cheeked. He saved twenty-nine dollars in greenbacks which would be about three hundred dollars Confed. It gagged him when finally he removed the money, and he vomited copiously, but at least he had the money; and it helped to keep him and Malachi alive after they reached Andersonville, and it fed them en route. Malachi’s money was stolen.

They arrived at Andersonville in a pouring rain, and waded through mud all the way from the cars to the stockade.

They landed in a shebang with three fellows also from the Second Brigade of the Fourth Division of the Second Corps, who had been captured in the Virginia woods too. The other fellows said it was true about the wounded being burned to death in the forest fire; one man had been wounded himself, and, temporarily weakened from loss of blood, he had to lie there and listen to the squeals and
yaaah
and Mother, have mercy, shoot me for
Goddddssake.
Finally he summoned enough strength to drag himself out of the fire’s course and into some smoking rubble where a blaze had swept already. The man’s name was Toby Mutterson and Toby bragged that he had been a hero and had pulled out another man as well, but he didn’t know what happened to the other man finally. Toby’s clothing was pretty well scorched as he lay amid those soft embers, and he exhibited the holes and raw brown fibers to prove his tale. He said that his blood-soaked condition might have saved his life; and the bleeding had stopped, praise be, and didn’t start up again. He was wounded in the fleshy part of his thigh, but the bone wasn’t broken.

Toby did not thrive at Andersonville because worms got into his wound promptly, and the authorities wouldn’t let him into the hospital because he made the mistake of walking down to the gate surgeons to apply for admittance, instead of being carried. He jerked and whined in his sleep, and then his wound would hurt him so badly that he’d get up and limp around outside the shebang and blunder against neighboring shebangs or step upon sleeping men, and would be cursed and pummeled. Someone told him that ground oak ashes would expel the maggots from his wound, and he begged Eric to buy oak ashes for him. Finally Eric found an old man among the guards who said that he could burn some oak and fetch the ashes for ten dollars Confed. When the twelve o’clock round of calls issued from the stockade’s rim that night, Eric must be lying in wait in blackness, just next to the deadline in front of the old guard’s booth. The guard would toss down a cord with a stone attached to the end, and Eric should fasten his currency to the cord; the guard would pull it up, and then he would toss out the cord a second time with the packet of ground-up ashes attached. . . . Faithfully Eric followed instructions; he crouched amid shadows and heard the yells go out, and the answering growls of prisoners. A guard would start in and call, Station Number Three, twelve o’clock and all’s well, and immediately the prisoners would start yapping. Twelve o’clock and, Mister, here’s your mule, and other things less polite. Station Number Five, twelve o’clock and all’s well, and the whoop to confound all guards and all enemies, Station Number Five, twelve o’clock and go diddle your grandma.

The stone fell down, Eric found the cord by fumbling and raking with both hands; here was the rock, and a long end of string for tying; he knotted the folded one-dollar U.S. greenback into place and jerked the cord hard to signify that the money was ready. It went scraping and tapping up the wall, and after a few minutes there was another thud, and Eric Torrosian clawed round until he found the string and the precious solid little envelope tied to it. He took the packet and ran back to the shebang as fast as he could go, which wasn’t very fast. Oh, thanks, thanks, thanks, you’re a real sport, Eric; give me that stuff, so’s I can start getting rid of them old cutworms; Eric, I swear that when we get out of here and get North, you come to Pennsylvania and my mother will take good care of you; cook you the best pork ribs you ever tasted, and shoo-fly pies and truck; and you can lie abed on a featherbed all morning if you want to. Come on, let’s open the paper up. . . . They were out of pine splinters, they had no light, so Toby Mutterson had to anoint his wound in the dark. Pretty soon he began to howl like all possessed. Oh, God, it’s killing me, help me get that stuff out of there, and he went plunging around, rolling and gargling in the dark, and asking for somebody to pour water in his wound. But you say you don’t want swamp water, and that’s all we got. It’ll just give you more worms. Ow, ow, ahhhh, I don’t care what God damn water you use; the hell with clean wells and well rights, the God damn hell with clean water; wash it, wash it out, it’s killlling me. And people from other shebangs hallooing, For Christ sake, quit that noise, you crazy poop. . . . So they used swamp water, and washed out Mutterson’s lively wound; Eric guessed that he and Malachi sponged the wound a dozen times with a scrap of rag. Toby would howl every time they touched the suppurating hole, but after numerous swabbings he subsided into a quieter whimpering. At dawn they woke up and looked; here were the remains of the packet. No oak ashes. Salt. That was it: just plain coarse salt.

Eric went to the old guard’s station late that day when the old man came back on duty, and he stood below and assailed him. The old man said, Sonny, I couldn’t find no oak like I said I could. I lowed salt would do tolerable well. Eric kept crying epithets which had sunk early into his memory, but the bearded guard stood looking earnestly beyond Eric and pretending that he was deaf. Just about dusk Eric came back, and this time he had a stone. It was a fine stone, round and brownish and hard, and it was half as big as a good-sized apple. He watched his chance, and when the guard (a skinny patriarch he stood against the pale yellow western sky) was looking the other way, Eric flung the stone. He had taken careful aim, and as a small boy he had thrown stones in numerous street fights and hurled them accurately, but he missed the guard’s head by a few inches. The old man must have been astonished when he heard that whirring past his ear. He caught up his piece and fired into the stockade; in the dimness below there was a great scurrying and terror, but apparently no one was hit. The next day Eric saw a little throng around a shack of rags and pine bark, and people were pointing. He went over for a look, but naturally did not confess that it was he who threw the stone to provoke the guard. From the looks of that pine bark the musket had been loaded with buck-and-ball: maybe one of the old Sixty-nines from Harper’s Ferry. They took three buckshot and one heavy ball as a standard load. The charge passed just beneath the roof-tree, out the other side, and into earth beyond. Six men spooned together in that shack, and not one of them hit. Eric felt better. But Toby Mutterson was carried to the hospital the next Sunday, and they heard within the week that he was dead. Almost nobody ever came back from the hospital.

Eric went down to the old guard’s station and waited for him to appear. He wanted to have the satisfaction of telling him that he had killed Toby with that salt, although Eric’s conscience assured him that Toby would have died anyway sooner or later. Pretty soon the guard was changed, but it wasn’t the graybeard who came; it was a gaunt child. His gun was bigger than he was by far and maybe weighed more. Hey there, guard, where’s the old man used to be at this station? The boy was frightened—it seemed to be his first time on duty—for he jumped in surprise when Eric addressed him. Go way, Yank. We can’t speak to prisoners. Oh, don’t be a dunce; be a good fellow; all the guards talk to prisoners. Come on, where’s the old man? The boy looked around cautiously and then leaned his small shaggy head across the rim. He’s dead, Yank. Just died today. . . . What do you mean, dead? How did he die? . . . Just had a fit and died; just fell in a fit after eating. . . . That seemed queer. It seemed almost that Toby had come back like an avenging angel and taken the old man away with him.

Well, Eric Torrosian had made up his mind, and he wasn’t going to die like either of them; neither with worms and bad blood like Toby, nor in a sudden fit like the old man. He refused to shrink into slow wastage as he saw so many others doing. He was going to flank out of there, and it seemed that there was one way in which it might be done. He would flank out with the dead.

He hated and feared the dead, as most people always have, and sometimes when he looked at the long horrid row of them he questioned himself concerning his reason for this detestation. In actuality their ugliness was no worse than that of the living, except perhaps in those cases where the eyes had congealed open. Somehow those eyes made Eric think of grapes he used to see in fruit-stalls off the Bowery—grapes that were a little squashed—shed of their skins but still bulbous.

The living around him were ugly and he himself was ugly. A man died, and Malachi Plover helped to carry him to the dead row, so Plover and another fellow took what was left in the dead man’s pockets. Among other things the dead man had a mirror: a round flat wafer, tin on one side and looking glass on the other. It had been broken, perhaps long before, but two stiff shreds of the silvered glass remained stuck in the frame, and they were big enough for you to see yourself in, with the slash of the break cutting across your face and making a scar which didn’t exist. Eric Torrosian regarded himself with fright when he looked in that mirror; he looked like dead people. Being swarthy as to coloration and cursed with a stiff black beard, he thought that by this time (more than three months a prisoner) he looked like his own father. But Henry Torrosian’s beard was combed gently, and his hair was clipped by his wife’s scissors; when he could afford it he brushed cologne into his beard and linen to make himself more agreeable to lady customers. Eric had no cologne and no shears. His beard was grown into a mass and swarmed with lice; his hair, always lengthy, was black disordered sedge. Thin by the determination of his own nature (and—he disliked recognizing the thought but the knowledge was there: he was thinned by excessive masturbation during his early teens. He had heard that masturbation would drive him insane, and he had bad dreams in which he saw himself insane and roaring) he had fallen away as a filthy ghost since he entered this stockade. Maybe he weighed ten stone when he came in; he doubted that he weighed seven stone now.

He could pass as a dead man if he could remain quiet, and could endure without a sound the persecutions to which he would be subjected in handling.

Therefore, the second evening after he said, My mind’s made up, he was sewn into a blanket by Malachi. It was a mere shred of blanket, a pattern of holes held together by shoddy scraps, a spider-web, a leaf chewed by bugs. Once in a while you saw a dead man bundled in such wrapping, although more frequently they were carried down in their pants or drawers, and very often nude. It appeared that no one would bother to rip the worthless remnant from Eric’s body. Eric reached out and shook hands all round with his comrades, and then Malachi Plover stitched the upper part of the rags in two or three more places. No trouble about breathing; the holes took care of that. Malachi and a Pennsylvanian (a companion of the dead Mutterson whom they called Dutchy) lugged Eric to the dead row and whispered Goodbye before they put him down. The wagon wouldn’t come in until dawn, it was feared, and Eric would have to lie in the mute flat rank all night. Sometimes the wagon did appear in the evening, and the dead were lifted on, twenty-five or thereabouts to the load. Eric had instructed the boys to put him down somewhere near the farther end of a section of twenty-five—say number twenty-three or twenty-four. That way he would be almost certain to be placed on top of the load. But more bodies had been deposited since they spied out the situation, and Eric was actually number twenty-five, but he did not know it. His friends feared for his life. Maybe the blacks who took him away would carry only twenty-three or twenty-four as the first cargo, and Eric would find himself at the bottom of the next load under hundreds and hundreds of pounds of bodies. Well, there was no help for it—he had demanded that they aid him in this attempt, so Goodbye, old fellow, and I’m glad I ain’t laying there instead of you. They went away.

Slowly Eric Torrosian relaxed the few thin muscles remaining to him, which he had drawn taut to simulate the stiffness of a corpse. He dared not actually move his limbs while there was any daylight left, else a passerby might pay heed or a guard peer down and detect him. He lay in overpowering stench, for the man next to him had died of gangrene. This smell affected him, and at last he coughed involuntarily, and then gagged from trying to quell the coughing fit; thus he vomited. Not a soul heard him. Too many similar sounds in the area beyond that strip of scantling which ruled the dead from the living.

Another corpse was dumped at his right side. . . . Shadows deepened beyond Eric’s blanket holes, the general brownness of twilight came down; this did not take long to occur, for it was late when the others fetched him. But it seemed as long again as all the days which had passed since he was captured. He thought of bursting from his rough shroud and crawling out of there—giving up the whole miserable effort—and then he heard a howl of gate-hinges and felt the damp earth shake beneath an approach of heavy wheels. The dead wagon, it was the dead wagon.

Negroes’ voices talked to a guard, bodies were hoisted.