Andersonville (80 page)

 XLV 

J
udah Hansom was one of many men who tried to escape from the prison through a tunnel. He was twenty-six years old, and had a thinnish face with small sad green eyes. His mouse-brown hair was mostly gone—premature baldness was said to have run in his mother’s family—and his slanting forehead carried branded transverse lines which might have grooved the brow of a much older man. But Judah’s shoulders were broad out of proportion to his medium height, and his great arms might have come swinging from a jungle. When a citizen he had been in fact a farmer, but first and foremost he liked to think of himself as a woodman—rather, a woodman before whom no trees should be spared unless especially desirable for shade, fruit or nuts.

Judah Hansom did not tell his comrades how much he dreaded lonely darkness below the earth’s foul crust. A silent person by habit, he had never grown sufficiently articulate to voice other than commonplace utterances. The few people who had known him, and the further few who had been sufficiently interested to assay his nature for themselves, typified him as phlegmatic and unfeeling. He needed space around him in order to settle into security. When Judah worked through the first strength of his youth he gained more than pride as he saw the forest dissolve, yard by yard and stick by stick, under the clamor of his axe, under the assault of axes of his fellow workmen. He felt a private comfort, an exalted assurance, because he was achieving space; he was building it. Sometimes wide long vistas opened after trees lay toppled and the tops were stripped; he could stand sweaty, even when there was snow about, and soak his muscles and spirit in the blue boon of limitless distances surrounding him. He could look over the nearest ridge and see other feathered rolls of hills go inching toward the Adirondacks and always fading in shade, growing looser as to texture and detail, until they brought up unyielding against the mountain wall.

Knowing little except the ritual of helve and blade and forest silences, Judah found his God easily. He was devout after the manner of unimaginative men who have known little of human complication and the resulting perplexity. Moreover he had lived in civilian affairs as a practiced coward in that he avoided constantly, deliberately any situation which might bring him ill, any force against which he might not cope readily and with the assurance of victory. A town . . . he hated towns because there the trains champed and blew sparks from their cumbrous funneled stacks, there the teams tried to run him down, there strangers jostled and talked loudly of people and matters beyond his experience. He stood away from towns. Women and girls . . . they appalled him with their rustling and cackling, with constant reminder in every tone and gesture and mood that they were of a different pattern physically and yet were somehow glad and impudent about it. In that remote farmhouse called home there was only Aunt Annie, and she wore freckled blue calico caps, with a slatted bonnet literally bigger than a half-bushel measure when she worked in the garden; she had a scant black mustache turning gray, and clumped in heavy plain-toed slippers when she walked about the kitchen; she did not seem like other women, she could be endured because she never giggled and was fully as dour as Judah Hansom’s father, her brother . . . it was just that she refused to wring a chicken’s neck, and couldn’t abide snakes, and you must never mention privies in her presence.

At a church or neighborhood sociable Judah squirmed in a corner on the most uncomfortable chair he could find, if the party were a small one; or he stood in a doorway and stared suspiciously from behind draped flags or corn-shucks if the party were large, a real merrymaking. He mumbled Thankee when the hostess or her daughters offered a plate of pie and a mug of coffee. He went home early.

From the time he was sixteen or seventeen he feared that all women might wish to marry him because of the land—it totaled over six hundred acres—which his father owned. His father was niggardly, and bound to have Judah earn his salt, as Elijah Hansom expressed it. Judah developed craft with the axe very early, and had left school and was hiring out as a woodcutter at the age of fourteen. He did not mind hard work, he had never minded it; he preferred it to any sort of ease he knew (he had known very little ease of the body) because the Hansoms believed that there was a virtue in pain and discomfort. In another time, another civilization, the Hansoms might have squatted on pillars in order to bring about their own saintliness or to emphasize it to the rest of mankind.

But they did not court death, despite their eagerness to torture themselves. They wanted to live long and toil determinedly and reap what they were fond of hearing the preacher describe as a Bounteous Harvest. Whenever the preacher mentioned a Bounteous Harvest the elder Hansom reacted in thought to his six hundred and twenty-four acres, his livestock, the mortgages he held and which yielded him, under pressure applied, a steady and substantial interest. He thought of the three hundred and ninety-three double eagles and the small sack of silver coins locked in an iron box under the chicken house floor (the chickens would fuss and squawk if anyone came in there at night and started to dig) and which box only Elijah Hansom himself knew was buried. He had not yet informed his son Judah about the box, which had been brought from New Hampshire in a wagon before Judah was born. He planned to tell Judah in time. He thought of the lesser amount of cash placed to his credit in the Bindale Commercial Savings Bank, for convenience sake, and of the still lesser amount kept on the highest pantry shelf in a broken coffee-mill, and which of course Judah and Aunt Annie knew was there, although they never mentioned it. These comprised his Bounteous Harvest; it was to accumulations such as these that Reverend Burgess referred. Son Judah considered Bounteous Harvests in identical terms, although his own harvest was comparatively skimpy as yet.

They did not court death; death interfered with Bounteous Harvests unless death appeared as boon and release to an invalid. Take Elijah Hansom’s wife Clementine: she died when Judah was two, and had not left her bed since Judah was born. It was a great relief to Elijah Hansom when Clementine was Gathered To Her Reward (Reverend Burgess preached a sonorous funeral sermon) because he had to hire a woman to look after her for thirteen months, until Annie could be prevailed upon to come and live with them. Disgusted neighbors who had bold tongues and who did not owe Mr. Hansom any money said that poor Clementine was brought to premature labor and consequent disaster through overwork and short commons. Mrs. Calkins went over there only two days before the skinny infant was delivered into Granny Ballentine’s hands— She went to buy a set of eggs. Lo and behold, there was Clementine Hansom putting up currant jam, and the kitchen hotter than Tophet, and right behind her on the table were fifteen quarts of beans she had already put up—Mrs. Calkins counted. She said, Sakes a mercy, Clemmy, let them currants spoil. Oh, no, says Clementine, and she looked like a wrung-out dishrag, poor little body. If I let anything spoil, Lijah would make me rue the day. It’s not the canning that I mind, really, because I can set down part of the time. But I hate picking berries so. Twas awful hot out there in the sun around them bushes, out of the shade. . . . Well, you saw what happened.

The Hansoms did not court death, but usually death seemed to find them without much trouble and without much warning. Judah’s great-grandfather was killed instantly at the battle of Bennington. His grandfather, also named Judah Hansom, slipped on the ice while crossing a river in his old age, and lay peacefully unconscious until the end. Elijah, the one who fathered young Judah in York State, perished in 1860 through wrath at hearing of the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. Elijah said that the Democrats were bound to be defeated, come November, and all the ragtag and bobtail of Creation would ride into office on that quarter-witted monkey’s shoulders or through his appointments. They would frisk in public offices like rats in a cheese-keg, they would squander public funds, their relatives would feed from the public trough; there might be a war, and certainly banks would close—not that Elijah had ever trusted banks. Nor had he yet brought himself to inform his son Jude about the hoard beneath the dirt floor of the chicken shed, which was basted generously in extreme secrecy every six months or so. By this time the iron box contained more than nine thousand dollars.

Elijah Hansom said that rats in public office would hold what he called High Carnival as soon as that lantern-jawed baboon was inaugurated. He was so mad that he would have beaten a wife if he’d had one, or Son Judah if Judah hadn’t been too big for him to tackle. Well, he couldn’t whip his sister Annie, so he decided to go out and cut down a tree. There was a maple at the corner of the woodshed, diseased and ugly; habitually it cluttered the yard with fallen branches, and one big live branch was scraping at the kitchen roof and threatening to dislodge shingles. The maple appeared as Lijah Hansom’s enemy, so he touched up his axe, and Annie heard him say that he was going to level that blame tree if it was the last thing he ever did. It was the last thing he ever did. Later it was decided that the grass was wet on that slope, and the man must have slipped in striding away from the trunk when it tipped. Aunt Annie heard the tree go down, but she heard no further remarks from her brother, and two hours later she went out to feed the hens. She saw the fallen maple, and saw something black-checked and reddish alongside the trunk. The black-checked material turned out to be Lijah’s shirt, and the red turned out to be—

It took nine neighbors to turn the trunk off of Lijah Hansom, and Judah didn’t know a thing about the whole business (he had driven to the lumber market in Bindale with a load of seasoned posts; the load weighed so much that he had to use oxen) until he was halfway home, late that afternoon. Then he met that squint-eyed little muskrat of a Benny Ballentine, and the Ballentines didn’t like the Hansoms any more because Elijah had brought foreclosure proceedings against their nephew. No reason for them to act mean about it: Mr. Hansom asked only that which was his in the best judgment of God and man. Well, little Benny Ballentine looked Judah squarely in the eye and said, Howdy do, orphant. Judah thought, Tosh, that’s a funny thing for him to say. Calculate he’s trying to get gay with me, and maybe seeks a hiding. Except that Judah was mild of manner, and never brawled with the neighbor men; he hadn’t been in a fight since he was eleven, and then he lost; but now he was too powerful for any of them to wish to tackle him. . . . When he passed the Petrie place, Sally Petrie ran out waving her apron, and she told him.

(The iron box reposed beneath chicken-droppings, while Judah Hansom dwelt in Andersonville. It would remain there indefinitely. No one ever found it. The chicken shed would burn down, much later, and bushes would grow on the site.)

Well, Judah was twenty-two when his father died, and twenty-four when he went into the army, and nobody expected him to go. Everybody thought that he would hire a substitute if the draft wheel turned against him. Strangely, it was that same squinting Benny Ballentine who really set the knapsack on Judah’s back and the bayonet hanging at his belt. Benny went away with the first troops raised at Bindale . . . spunky little rat for sure. His father said admiringly in Wilkins’s store, By mighty, my Benny hain’t afraid of God, man, nor the Devil. When this was repeated back to Benny he grinned and squeezed his eyelids even tighter, and he said in his high-pitched voice that he was truly afraid of God and the Devil, but he hadn’t yet met any man that he was afraid of. He doubted that the Rebels were any worse than Hulk Allen at the livery barn; and once Hulk Allen had knocked Benny flat with one slap of his big hand . . . when Benny got up he was holding a bottle with a broken neck, and he took off half of Hulk Allen’s right cheek before the livery barn folks could tear him loose from the big fellow. So Benny went to war, and got himself shot through the chest at Big Bethel, Virginia, and he came home coughing. He kept coughing all the time. His mother said that although the wound had healed on the outside, front and back, it didn’t seem to have cured itself in Benny’s vitals. He had to keep a pan by his bed at night, to cough into, and sometimes he raised blood. It was silent at night under the high black-trunked maples on that cool road beyond the single business block of Bindale, and if you walked home late, like from prayer meeting on a Wednesday, you could hear only two sounds: the sound of your own feet on the hollow wooden sidewalk, and the sound of Benny Ballentine, hacking away on his bed past the white picket fence and the white lilacs and within the walls of the little white house.