Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  He examined a catbird’s ragged nest, he saw the lettuce tint of eggs contained therein. (They looked like candied eggs in a grocery store jar.) He’d bound a handkerchief across his mouth, not to taint the catbird’s eggs so the mother would refuse to return; it told that one must do that in Our Feathered Friends, With Copious Illustrations. . . . Male redwings, polished like shoe leather with soot from the pot rubbed into it, redwings so black that they were silver in the morning as they swayed on reeds around a prairie slough. Their Quaker wives, wearing The Garb, more modest than sparrows. . . .

  When Eben arrived at Andersonville there was still activity among the tousle of mutilated pine. He’d explored past stumps that first day, observing how the gum oozed from every cut. It had turned white, crystallized, flaky; he chewed some, but he wasn’t accustomed to it—too much taste of turpentine, so he spat it out. Small birds, some he knew, some he’d never seen before— They took wing, streaked away through air before Eben as he walked. Come back, stay with us, he said in his heart, with the enchantment of eerie high-going larger birds still fresh in memory—the unidentified northbound tribes he’d heard two nights previously. But the birds would not stay, prisoners frightened them, they went to live in less disturbed areas beyond the rectangular fence.

  Through the remainder of springtime Eben heard their mating tunes, their early salute, one light instrument’s sound imposed on the trickle of a hundred others, many of them different. But now in May it was hot summer, a Georgia summer. Birds sang less, they sang little. If he’d had his precious telescope he might have spotted them and fetched them nigh to him again: there were many places on the North Side where you could see the outside fort at the southwest corner, and woods beyond that. On the South Side, near the South Gate, you could look across the fence where it dived toward the creek; you could see past the pine-roofed deadhouse, see smoke spilling up from the bake house, see guards and Outsiders trailing about their work, mule teams moving. Sometimes, oh sometimes, there shafted a blade of gold, an agate of whirring slate and white, the red speck which was a redbird. That was all Eben could see of gods and goddesses. His telescope had been stolen out of his knapsack in front of Vicksburg; never had he found the thief.

  Eben Dolliver knew that his body had changed, but he did not feel an alteration of his spirit; only it seemed easier nowadays for his spirit to separate from the body and go hiking into underbrush which his corporeal shape was restrained from entering. Bell’s Woods, Bryan’s Woods, the single towering hill far north of Dolliver’s Mill which settlers called Mount Washington: Ebe could visit those places in turn or simultaneously as impulse directed. In those places he discovered painted buntings he had never glimpsed, the groove-billed ani of which he’d only read, mockingbirds he’d seen during his first Andersonville week on the one happy day when they were sent Outside under guard with axes in their hands. . . . Flights of passenger pigeons came to impress the Iowa groves with uncountable numbers when they roosted; but peculiarly they wore no longer the dove and peach colors of orthodox pigeons—they were as tropical immigrants, with blazing crests and the plumes of peacocks.

  Eben sat with skeletal hands around his knobby knees, sat in shade furnished partially by the crazy quilt he’d cheated away from the Rebel, a quilt no longer crazy but patterned with dun in varying degrees. Exposed skin of his lank frame was pigmented with the pitch from burning oily wood, hardened in, baked in: it could not have been scrubbed away by soap of whatever strength; Eben would have needed to be flayed in order to be cleaned. His mop of pink hair hung stiff with dirt and twisted in a curl at the nape of his neck. His meager beard was a lichen spread over the weathered grime of his face. This was the afternoon of May twenty-fourth, a Tuesday.

  Within a few minutes the more active prisoners went wild. They leaped into the air, they found stones to throw, and threw them, and the stones came down and struck other prisoners to their grief. They began capering with lengths of board or dry pine torn from walls of their shebangs; with these improvised cudgels they battered at space above their heads. Now and then there was uplifted a howl of triumph, and several men converged, scrambling on the ground, snatching at something; and then one man would rise, the obvious victor, waving something in his hand.

  Birds had come. They were swallows, a multitude, planing low in any direction, giving out irascible cries. They came like bats past the guards loafing on the stockade’s rim and made the guards jump as wind of their passing brushed the guards’ faces. One swallow came alone, a dozen swept in a different direction to intercept his flight . . . now they spread and teetered in point-winged circles, so numerous in a given space that they must have broken themselves to bits and hatched a dozen new birds from each whirring fragment. High, aloft, squeaking, their pale swift breasts turned dark as their wings against the low motionless sun; then down to fairly comb the earth, and crowds gesticulating there and trying to kill them, and killing some. The birds’ wings clapped like limber scissors, their split tails were sharp as if drawn by pen and ink, the plumage of breasts and bellies was pearl when they came close, low. It was one of those convocations to which swallows are addicted under seasonable conditions; but no man might know why they had herded into this ugly place, and the swallows did not know.

  The stockade became a trap holding them in its grip. To the swallows it appeared that the sky was not sky—a favorable avenue, an uninterrupted lake wherein they might soar to any independence they desired. The sky was the lid of the trap, it seemed pressing down on them, they resisted its pressure with new squealings, and swarmed up to burst through it and were forced back to earth again by some compulsion impervious as the screening of a cage. With speed of insects they cut here and there, up, down, across, behind. Never did swallows halt to roost atop the huts; they rubbed the angles of huts, disturbed the hot motionless air, you felt it blowing this way and that as if fans were wielded. By how many scores, how many hundreds, how many thousands, did they appear? Were they as numerous as the tramps who grabbed at them? They seemed more numerous.

  Killing birds, said Eben Dolliver aloud. They’re trying to kill birds. He heard a boy’s voice speak from distance. Give me that there pocket rifle. You got no business shooting kingfishers. Another boy saying, Just try and take it from me. Joth Dolliver saying mildly from the mill door, Now, Ebe, don’t you try to pick a fight.

  Killing birds.

  Again they were bats, their wings were pointed like the wings of bats, perhaps in fact they were bats deployed from some awful cavern of history, and dressed in disguise of feathers to tempt these people into wickedness. It sounded as an Indian fight must have sounded; men voiced their stuttering chorus of yaps and yelps, the swallows burbled their own cries. Two huts away from him, Eben saw a tall man bounding up and down, a jacket spread between his hands. He was trying to batter the birds with his jacket, trying to swaddle them with the cloth; even as Eben looked the man swaddled one. He wadded the garment around the bird, made a ball of it, he killed the swallow by crushing the jacket-wad beneath his feet. Then he sank down on his knees, and when he arose half a minute later with a grin on his hairy face there was bright blood on his chin. Raw? said Kirke behind Eben. Not for me, Mister. If I got one I’d pluck it and toast it on a fire.

  Why, declared Eben, once more aloud, they’re meat.

  Meat might be concentrated in pills and potions, it was tonic. The doctor said, Now you go straight home and take a dose of meat. Swallow down a big dose of blood, hot blood. It’s the anodyne you stand in need of. . . . Had ever he thought that birds wore flesh beneath their down? Never before had they done so, now they must be wearing it. For all those thousands of years since they left off being snakes (this he believed; early in 1861 he had read a borrowed copy of Darwin, mostly in secret since his father did not approve) they had dressed their bones with thistledown instead of tissue, and doubtless the bones were leaf green, fragile as new maple leaves.

  Myrtle warbler shy
and peeking, goldfinch bold upon the milkweed plant, the fleeting dust of rust which blew when fox sparrows shot themselves across a road in spring . . . what was that soul bubbling its wet poetry from solitude of the dry brush pile? Call it angel, call it brown thrasher, call it heartbreak, call it God’s blessing. Call it meat.

  Call it a swallow.

  Eben Dolliver pulled out the heavy stick which anchored his comforter to the shebang’s roof in daytime, and could be drawn loose when the quilt was needed for a blanket. Hey, Ebe, take it easy; trying to tear down the whole roof? He emerged into open bird-haunted space, and a flight of the frantic things went up and away from him, and raced like moths toward the marsh, and new stragglers came flipping above. He waved his club this way and that, he beat it in a circle. Many other prisoners had been making desperate attempts at capture since the swallows first swarmed, and had not managed to strike a single specimen, but they did not own the luck of Eben. At the fifth or sixth ferocious smash of his stick there was a light thud, and something bounced on the ground like a crumple of blue-black-pale-gray paper blown by a wind. Other pirating hands tried to snatch it, but Eben plunged at full length, he fell on the bird and crushed it with chest and arms. He wrung its neck as he arose. Vaguely he heard surviving swallows condemning him with tiny words as he pushed his jaws, as he sucked, as he spat out feathers.

  XXIII

  An unbearable announcement was made in the Claffey household some time around the end of May or the first of June. When Lucy thought of it drearily, afterward, she could remember the season, not the date. It was just before the Big Rains began. There had been heavy rainfall in March, the weather improved generally during April, May was mostly hot with some unseasonably cold nights . . . ah, yes, the unbearable announcement was made perhaps during the first few days of June. Lucy counted rains that month as the unsheltered prisoners beyond the surviving fringe of pines counted them. It rained during twenty-four of the thirty June days that year. It rained on twenty successive days.

  Her mother— Before the Big Rains—

  The thing began with the misdeed of a white cat designated as Columbus. Lucy had named the creature thus because of his exploring propensities in kittenhood. He was always crawling about somewhere and getting stuck, and then sending out piercing yowls for assistance. He climbed high into trees, and ladders had to be brought; he entombed himself for two days within an unused chimney; once he crept into the west wall of the library and strips of siding had to be removed in order to rescue Columbus. The blacks could not pronounce the kitten’s name—mostly they spoke of him as Cumbus, and the Claffeys fell into the habit. Having now attained great size and some age, Cumbus had left off dangerous explorations. He’d turned half wild, he prowled savagely in the woods, whipped or assaulted other cats frequently, and only approached the kitchen to steal. He was a powerful animal, built like a wrestler, pink scars showing all over his white head, green-eyed and selfish.

  Ira Claffey brought a hat filled with mushrooms from the woods, and Lucy clapped her hands. These were a favorite of theirs; Ira had identified them as Russulas, unmistakable with broad caps of lavender-rose, short stems, gills delicate as the flesh of a nicely cooked fish. They had a tender nutty flavor when prepared with care, they were tastier far than the common agarics which Ira used to grow on trays in a dark shed, before the war, when he had time to spare for such nonsense.

  Poppy, I declare they’re remarkable. Regular honey lambs. Where did you find them?

  Among oaks above Little Sweetwater. Shall we have a pie?

  I’ll take them out to Naomi myself, and I’ll most certainly count them so’s there’ll be no foolishness; I’ll warn Naomi that all—yes, sir, Poppy, fifteen of them—had better be in that little pie! We’ll be just as selfish as selfish can be, and eat that whole pie our own selves.

  Ira said with anticipation, Twill be the best thing I’ve eaten since the Mexican War.

  Course it will. With scads of gravy under the crust, and just a mite of onion.

  I’ve fresh chervil and marjoram! Chervil in the third row of the kitchen garden, and marjoram in a pot on the shelf yonder.

  Well, Poppy, not too much, or you’ll sacrifice the woodsy taste. I’ll snip just a teentsie bit with my shears and give it to Naomi in a poke. What a pity—

  She stopped speaking on the instant, hurt by thought of the silent woman who remained mainly above stairs. A pity, she repeated, that Mother nor the boys never liked mushrooms.

  No, they did not. She does not. Father and daughter held a brief merciful silence between them. Automatically they both began to look toward the ceiling and then away quickly again, neither wishing the other to realize how they had responded.

  The mushroom pie came pungent and brown-crusted from the big oven in proper season for dinner, but at that moment Coffee and Jem turned up a den of small snakes in the south pasture lot, and the resulting squalls sent Ira to the scene to make sure that no one had been bitten and that the snakes were destroyed. During this interval the treasured pie waited on a kitchen table, half covered with a padded tea-cosy to keep it warm, sending its odor far. Lucy heard a combined clatter, thud and shrieking from the kitchen; she groaned and wondered What Now? She was going to investigate, but Extra came lumbering into the house to offer a report, her rolling eyes wet with tears of joy, black face shining . . . gulping for breath between yells as she tried to talk and could not manage it.

  What is it, Extra?

  Miss—Luce—yah—

  What is it?

  That—Cumbus cat—

  Lucy was standing at the foot of the front stairway. Extra writhed and gesticulated before her.

  Extra, do wait until you can talk.

  Yah! That Cumbus cat—

  It came out that Cumbus had been drawn to the kitchen by gravy scents. Unnoticed by servants he had leaped upon the table with thievish intent, and in his approach to the pie he had somehow upset a leaning platter. The platter smashed against a pitcher, other pots and pans had gone tumbling; the terrified cat jumped for the window but instead had landed in a tub of warm water— The chronology of this misadventure was confused by the narrator’s gasps and cries of delight. From the recounting emerged a picture of a bandit righteously punished by immersion, soaring off between cabins as if Old Satan were after him.

  Old Satan, Miss Lucy! That old cat, that what he think—

  Well, Extra, thank you for telling me, and I’m very glad our pie was saved—

  Ira had reëntered the house by this time and stood quizzically regarding his daughter and the black woman. A sound from above drew their combined attention to the head of the staircase. Veronica stood thin and stiff in her shabby mourning-dress, and the icy indignation of her expression was a glare.

  Please—daughter—Ira—Extra. Above all— Extra! She spoke the slave woman’s name with guttural rage.

  Lucy could not move. Ira took a step or two on the stairs. He said rapidly, My dear, what—?

  You’re making too much noise. You’ll wake the children. We must have quiet in this house. They’re asleep.

  The mushroom pie went mainly uneaten that day; Lucy gave the remains, which were really the bulk of the pie, to the blacks. She thought, I am weary of staring dumbly. How long must we stare, how long must we be dumb, why can we not expunge this cloud which swelters and strangles us, takes away all air, takes away even the desire to breathe air? She was so young that she felt blind fury at injustice, she wanted to reorganize the scheme of birth and life and death (she thought not of reorganizing the scheme of procreation, but had she suffered a wound while loving she would have wished to alter this process too, because of wrath).

  Soon it was learned that the children dwelt in Moses’s old room; Ira had feared that was where they would be domiciled. It was not clear whether all the other Claffey children were there or only the boys who’d died in the war. Perhaps little Arwood, Peggy
, Sally and Courtenay slumbered in the same chests with Suthy’s knitted boots, Badger’s brown plaid cambric dress, Moses’s unblemished New Testament & Psalms which he was awarded for committing to memory one hundred and one verses of the Scriptures, most of which he promptly forgot. Did the children sleep rosy and in health, did they choke with the diphtheria which had claimed two, did they complain with whimpers that the surviving family and slaves walked too heavily, spoke too loudly? They might not complain about laughter, there would be little laughter for them to complain about. At first Ira was afraid to go into that room. He muttered to his daughter, By God, my child, I can’t go. At last Lucy, braver in this hour than he, visited the ghastly chamber while her mother walked abroad with the mystified Ninny trudging dutifully behind. To Lucy’s relief she found no little beds made up. These she had feared she would find, she had entertained visions of her mother arranging a row of spectral pallets. It was good to observe— No, there could be nothing good about it; but it was helpful to know that the dead young warriors occupied couches which were simple illusion, not actual linen and feathers and ticking.

  Sometimes Veronica spoke of The Boys, more often it was The Children. Shh. This to a Pet or a Ninny who banged about while scrubbing the floor. You must work more quietly; I do not wish them waked. Shh.

  Out across the yard in the kitchen Naomi blubbered about it.

  Miss Lucy. Is Mistess gone crazy?

  Hush, Naomi.

  But she know the boys dead at the North. She know it! She know they not little babies in that room up there!

  Now, Naomi. The middle-aged slave sobbed, hot and perspiring and smelly, against the white girl’s slenderness; Lucy stroked the broad damp back with her hands; it seemed that she was reaching out through distance to touch Naomi. Now, Naomi, it’s only that— My mother is ill, we hope she will be better soon. She is ill.

  Suddenly the enormity of the cruel cycle weighted Lucy, it crushed and tore her inside and out. She said, louder and louder, She’s not crazy, you fool thing! Ill—do you hear me? Ill! Her straining hands came up and crumpled Naomi’s gown at the shoulders, and her pinch must have caught patches of the Negress’s skin in its compression, for Naomi struggled and cried, hurt in body as well as in her bewildered soul. Upstairs in the house Veronica stiffened at hearing Jonas bawl at his mule in the lane outside. She went to the window, looked down to where Jonas must be working, but she could not see him for the trees. She put a cool finger against her lips. Shh.