Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  Famished throngs swayed opposite the North Gate all that afternoon, watching with such hope that even sentries stared down to pity them. But no patched harness jingled, no wheels squeaked, no rabbit mules flicked their ears, no cornmeal was transported to its parceling out. Now forty-eight hours had passed since a bite of food had been issued. Only the acknowledged raiders had anything saved up for a rainy day, and even these joined in the din and grumble. Fierce youths who still had the litheness of willow and the verve of cats about them— They gathered in trembling groups, talk flew wildly.

  Come along, old top, I’m with you: better off dead than starved!

  If we get enough poles to batter with, we can bust out that little wicket door.

  Certain—some of us are going to get shot, but the bulk will get through.

  Harvey, I’ll be right alongside you!

  Let’s every fellow grab a club and—

  The gravel of these verbal torpedoes spread stinging; yet there was no leader, no supreme chemist to mix the desperation and hunger and rage, no one to shake the mixture and let it spurt. Far into hours of darkness the boys huddled and snarled; yet it was only a pathetic snarling, only a huddle.

  Once more in early morning the Rebel fife squeaked its message of Roll Call. Once more came bayonets and the skinny bearded man, now so universally loathed, scooting in the shadow of their security. This day the prisoners’ swollen feet seemed fastened to the ground with a mucilage of despair. They did not go ranging afield after they were first counted, they remained in ranks. Scores of them collapsed or sat down through sheer weakness; but they stayed, they did not drift, they were in the counted Thousands when the superintendent came back to make his final conversion into Detachments.

  He rewarded them with their day’s ration, but only that day’s ration. (This he debated in his mind, after he was once back in the shed: might he not give them the meal for the two other days? Nein: too much all at once, it would make them sick, the incidence of mortality might rise abruptly. One day’s rations: enough. They had earned this by good behavior. But their bad behavior of the two previous days had earned them exactly nothing save empty bellies. Like naughty children they must be brought to time, ja.) The toy mules came straining, the mess sergeants drew their meal, it was divided.

  ...He was but doing his duty, they must be aware of that. Since the squadding over was now complete, Henry Wirz had no thought that he needed longer a retinue of guards. The next morning he ventured into the stockade alone. Within minutes he came dodging out again, his unfired revolver shaking in his left hand, his calico waist dripping with mud and offal, his neck dirtied, his arms dirtied, his shoulder bruised where a rock had struck.

  Gott, they were devils! But if he had emptied his weapon into the bodies of some, then the others would surely have torn him to pieces, no matter how many dropped to the guards’ volley. He thought of a snake pit, thought of a lions’ den. Prisoners seethed through his aching head all that day; he could not eat dinner, no longer did he have appetite; he wished he could drink but liquor made him sick; ja, even food made him sick, even the idea of food, for he was a dyspeptic. Prisoners jabbered and seethed in his dreams that night, he cried out hoarsely, he awakened the neighbors. Henry Wirz wished for his wife, for his family. He felt alone and misunderstood.

  XVIII

  Two older but not so hefty boys showed Willie Collins how to make a bully out of a dead rat and handfuls of shot. This was in 1843 when Willie was nine years old. A common play for boys in the Fourth Ward (and in regions equally depraved in other portions of the United States) was to attach a dead rat to a stout cord and whirl the rat over your head, or round and round beside you as you ran and shrieked. Live rats abounded, a dead rat was to be avoided only because of its putridity . . . you whirled the plummet, smaller children got out of the way, girl children ran screaming. You could have battles with other boys, biffing them with your rat until its tail broke off; then you had to tie the cord around the neck, and it did not swing so well; eventually the rat would be mashed apart, flogged out of all usefulness; then you had to get another dead rat, but there were plenty of those to be had.

  The boys who taught a better trick to Willie were Danny Crogan and Gabriel Seek; one was white, the other colored but with red hair. Danny was dead at fourteen, his head splintered in a street fight. At sixteen red-headed Gabe was shot by a coachman who said that Gabe had raped his young daughter, and maybe Gabe had; but previously he bragged to friends that the girl gave herself to him, and she sneaked out to him a dinner bucket filled with delicious fried smelts almost every day.

  Get you your rat, said Danny. Slit him open and take out the guts. . . . Get a fresh rat what ain’t swoll up yet, said Gabe. Nail him to a board, scrape the skin so’s it won’t have much smell, so twill be good and soft. . . . Go you down to that tannery, end of Cherry Street; steal you a handful of the tan stuff and rub it on. . . . First thing you know, you got you a well-tanned rat. . . . It’s then you sew him up. . . . First you got to put in them shot, said Gabriel Seek. . . . Och, sure: and it’s tight you must stitch it, with the hide doubled, or the shot will leak. . . . Buckshot—that best. . . . Och, yes, said Danny Crogan. Go you down to Cowley the gunsmith, and he’s got buckshot in the third keg from the door; and wait you till he’s back at his bench with some crusher who’s brought a pistol to him, and it’s then you can snatch your buckshot and get away before he fibs you. . . . Stuff that rat full and sew him tight, said Gabe Seek, rolling his eyes.

  Willie Collins listened, Willie Collins learned. Within a few days he had his rat ready, tanned at least well enough to suit him. But use stout cordage, he had been told. Rawhide is best; and tie it to the neck, for the tail would snap, it’s that heavy.

  Willie went out into the gloaming—it was autumn, and trees drifted their dry spicy leaves when you got where there were trees. Willie had been instructed to look for a hockey. There were many hockeys staggering in narrow passages close to the Gotham Court tenement where he dwelt; but these drunken men were half naked, and none of them might have so much as a hogg, a single ten-cent piece, in his rags. Willie traveled farther afield, swinging the heavy rat-pouch from time to time, to pretend that he was an innocent lad, playing innocently with a dead rat and that was the truth. He idled his way toward the East River. Nearby there survived a short row of prim mansions, their iron gates locked against incursions, holding red brick shoulders stiff against the loose hordes now spilling across Franklin Square where once George Washington had dwelt, where once John Hancock had walked.

  A man moved toward Willie through the wan purple light. Most certainly he was a hockey; he was an elderly man, but he tottered as if he had swallowed an entire decanter of brandy before weaving on his homeward path. How was Willie Collins to know that Mr. Hans Van Auken, a long retired watchmaker, had suffered a stroke of paralysis the previous winter and could now walk only with difficulty? And would it have made any difference at all whether he was a hockey, fuddled with drink, or only an ancient with twitching limbs? Mr. Hans Van Auken leaned on his silver-headed cane, he wore a brushed beaver hat, his pantaloons were strapped neatly beneath his slippers. Had he seen danger approaching, he would have blown upon the shrill-noted whistle he carried on a ribbon around his neck, to alert policemen or servants or private watchmen, to send a thief scooting. But he saw no danger; he saw only a lad wheeling a dead rat round his head— Oh, poor lad from a poor home, and that was all he had to play with. Mr. Van Auken thought to give the lad a penny, and began to fumble in the lower left pocket of his waistcoat. A minute later he was dead. He died, he drained away unconsciously there on the cobbled sidewalk without a cry, without a whine, with the front of his fragile egg-shell skull crushed in, with several of his pockets turned out, and the treasured ebony walking stick gone from his dying grasp.

  Two streets away Willie Collins thought suddenly about the walking stick. Were he seen carrying it, someone might know
— He penetrated an alley, felt about until he found a narrow cranny between two jammed-up buildings. He put the silver head of the cane into this cranny and snapped it off. With the lump in his pocket, and still swinging his rat, he ran home to Gotham Court to see how well he had profited. He had profited to the extent of one gold watch, a few silver coins and coppers—and one gold eagle in the lot; and a beaded doeskin purse of Indian manufacture which Mr. Van Auken had carried as a precious souvenir sent by his son who traded with the Winnebagoes. This purse was found to contain twenty-eight American dollars, an English sovereign, and a promissory note for two hundred dollars drawn to Mr. Van Auken’s favor and signed by a man named Cameron. (Since Willie could not read, this information escaped him and he put the note into the chamber pot.) Purse and money he put into his pocket along with the cane-head, and he was gloating over the watch by candlelight when rudely interrupted by Big Biddy.

  Big Biddy was a gangling mulatto woman, deeply in love with Willie Collins’s father when she was drunk—which was most of the time—and resenting him (because he was an Irishman, and white) when she was sober. Which was now.

  A yack. Where you get that yack, Willie?

  And wouldn’t you like to know?

  Give me that yack.

  In a pig’s ass I will.

  She fell upon him, they fought, at nine years he might have been taken for twelve or older. Big Biddy had her hands full. (He had concealed his rat in a favorite hideaway, which was beneath a loose board under the pallet whereon Willie’s father and Big Biddy slept commonly together or singly; otherwise Willie might have used the rat on her. They might look for purloined goods under the mound of rags which was Willie’s, they had not wits enough to look under their own. . . . When their noisy ardor was spent, and when they were roaring with sleep, it was an easy matter to work the loose board out from beneath their couch.) At length, amid mutual buffetings and squawkings, Big Biddy was able to draw a fresh-filled gin bottle from the pocket of her red cloak, and she gave Willie such a bang on the head—but never breaking the bottle—that he went squealing down the stairs. The watch had fallen upon the bricks they used for a brazier in cold weather; when opened it proved to have the crystal broken and it would not run. But it was a gold-cased watch with the initials H.I.V.A. engraved elaborately. When Aloysius Collins came gasping in (you could hear his breathing as he approached, the grating wheeze of it, you could hear it from the bottom of the stairway) Big Biddy displayed her loot.

  You black bludget, you. Where did you hoist it?

  Kiddie had it, Al. She had drunk half the gin and was warming to him.

  He’s but a babe.

  God damn, man, he had it.

  Likely twas in the street he found it, muttered the gigantic decrepit Aloysius.

  Yah, she sneered, disapproving of Willie because he had hurt her breast during the struggle. I bet you, man, he hoist it from some shop.

  He’s but a babe, ladybird, but a babe.

  The next morning the elder Collins sold Mr. Van Auken’s watch to a popshop proprietor for five dollars: he should have received much more, but he was stupid and quivering, and it seemed that wild animals were roosting above his bed when he awakened; he stood in need of liquor. During the day policemen came searching the stores of all the Uncles in the area, for the murder of Hans Van Auken had caused a great hue and cry . . . one of the dead man’s sons was a rich merchant, another was a city official. They discovered the watch, Collins was pointed out as the man who’d sold it to the pawnshop proprietor, police came thundering into Gotham Court. But twenty men, including the proprietor of the Diving Bell (and the proprietor was well acquainted with the dead man’s politician son) swore that Aloysius Collins had slept on a bench in the corner of the Diving Bell from five p.m. until long after the body of Hans Van Auken was discovered. Thus Collins’s insistence that he had found the watch, broken in the street on his way home, could not be refuted. His wailing word was accepted as gospel in the end.

  Al Collins could never have done it, anyway, declared the proprietor of the Diving Bell. He’s a mighty man, but drink has took the pepper from him.

  No one even thought of nine-year-old Willie. They said, Be off with you, when he came slinking around, when the police had his father in tow. They said, Away with you, you spalpeen. This is a sorry business.

  Later, when the freed Aloysius was sufficiently sane, he beat half the life out of his son with a chair-leg.

  Willie endured, although he screamed loud enough to awaken all of Gotham Court. He did not awaken all of Gotham Court; they were accustomed to screams. Willie had the money tucked safely away, and the head of the silver walking stick was hidden against a future emergency (he used it eventually to make a slung-shot which he lost in a fight) and he would savor sugarplums, oysters, fried cod, hot corn and any other dainty he chose—forever and a day, it seemed then. He was thunderstruck and delighted to learn that he had killed a man. He walked with puffed chest, he snarled at smaller children, he stood around with other colts in front of public houses on Water Street, watching men and prostitutes moving in and out, watching with glee the fights which always developed. Sometimes there would be several fights in the course of an hour, sometimes men were left for dead, sometimes they were dead.

  It’s myself who’s kilt a man already, he told Gabriel Seek and Danny Crogan when he felt expansive.

  You’re not elderly enough to have hair in your crotch!

  But I did. With my leaded rat, as you showed me.

  And who did you give the nope to, kiddie?

  Twas an old hockey.

  Who you think you fool, Willie? . . . Ah, you’re not elderly enough to—

  And where are you after thinking I got all the brass I got?

  Hoisting purses off of owls! cried Danny in great pride at his own humor. Willie grappled with him and they rolled in the street, gouging and biting, until some passing sailors thoughtfully kicked them apart and into flight.

  At sixteen Willie Collins, grown already to some thirteen stone, drifted into river piracy with the Daybreak Boys, operating under the banner of Nick Saul and Billie Howlett. He was not yet nineteen, in 1853, when he stood in the Tombs yard and with interest watched Saul and Howlett drop from their scaffold. He did not wonder how it would feel to be hanged, he did not wonder about anything. A smarter slyer youth might plan the forays; he, Willie Collins, would carry them out. At least that portion of the work which fell to him commonly—the strong arm, the club on the skull, the kick in the groin, the arm around the neck until breathing stopped.

  Wait till it’s two o’clock, Willie.

  Yes. Two.

  Then get to Tanner’s wharf; it should take you ten minutes. The watchman keeps a fire in an iron drum, to keep him warm. I think he’ll be setting by the fire; if he’s making his rounds he’ll come back to it. Get him by the neck—take care he gives no yell, take care he has no chance to yell—and kick the fire into the river, drum and all. Then there’ll be no glim.

  That I’ll do.

  Mind, there must be no yelling.

  He’ll never yell, cove, that he’ll not do.

  ...That he did not do.

  It was said that a fellow named Slobbery Jim would take over command of the Daybreak Boys after Billie and Nick were hanged at the Tombs. But Willie Collins was not a favorite of Slobbery Jim. To begin with, the new captain was afraid of Willie, and still regarded him as even more stupid than he really was.

  Willie drifted up into the Eighteenth Ward where he heard that pickings were easier, and so they proved to be. The system there was exceedingly simple, much more to Willie’s liking and understanding than the devious split-second-timing incursions of the Daybreak Boys among docks and shipping. A man who called himself Paddy Delaney (he was built much as Willie was built, although he was not as large as Willie; and yet he was older, and more experienced) was Willie Collins’
s immediate superior. Take the corner of Twenty-ninth and Madison: that was all Willie had to do. Take the northeast corner—that was as good as any; and Saxey would have the northwest corner, and Cuban Cookie the southwest, and Skibbereen Mahone the southeast. If a well-dressed man approached in darkness— Well, take him and go through him. If there were two men together, as often happened, one of the other kiddies could step over from yonder corner.

  They, and the roughs who worked with them, were known as the Honeymoon Gang—a satirical tribute to their cruelty. If a pedestrian strolling through the fog appeared to be well clad, and then, on close and violent examination, proved no fit subject for profitable keel-hauling, the Honeymooners would batter him to ribbons merely for the sport of the thing. Willie took to this stand-up-and-slam-a-man-down simplicity with gusto. The second week of his operations he was lucky enough to observe a lone gentleman in an opera cloak leaving a nearby cathouse from in front of which his untipped hackman had long since driven away in dudgeon. Willie put his hand over the stranger’s bearded lips, carried him into a blind areaway and throttled him into insensibility. The man turned out to be a wealthy coffee merchant from Latin America; Willie could not know that; he knew only that he acquired over six hundred dollars in banknotes, to say nothing of jewelry. The newspapers cried that Juan Santa Maria Lopez, Esq., a visiting exporter, had been half-killed and was now under the care of surgeons at his lodgings, and had lost a fortune in jewelry to the roughs who attacked him. Juan Santa Maria Lopez affirmed that there were at least five men in the band who fell upon him.

  I don’t know who the other man was. Paddy Delaney sat with a cocked pistol in his hand. But let us be after seeing the sparks and the fawneys, you dirty buzzers, or I’ll pop the bladder of one of you.

  Saxey, Skibbereen and Cuban Cookie were loud in their protestations of ignorance of the affair, but it was not easy for Willie to lie with aplomb. Soon all four of them were arrayed against him, and that was too many, for Delaney and Skibbereen both approached him in size. He handed over a silk handkerchief containing the baubles, and gave up three dollars in currency which he swore by heaven and earth was all the money the foreigner had had upon him. In delight over emeralds Delaney did not press him further; but awarded Willie only a tenth share in the later proceeds as punishment. Willie never told about the six hundred dollars; in his mutton-headed musings he thought that he had out-smarted Patrick Delaney. He did not know that Delaney divvied up only a fraction of the money received for the jewelry. . . . The Honeymoon Gang waxed rich, then poorer as more police crowded that neighborhood in response to the agony of citizens. Some months later they were driven down into the Bowery by the intrepid Captain Walling and his Strong Arm Squad. It was merry while it lasted.