What kind of shears?
Sewing shears sure enough.
What you have to give for them, Johnson?
Bub, quit calling my name out loud. . . . I give some salt.
Sakes. Where you get that old salt?
Well, where you think, you little fart? I ain’t telling nobody. Now you shut up—quit your yelling at me fore we get in trouble.
This warning caused Flory to fall silent. Soon he lost himself in a child’s musings, the eternal Wish I Had of the scrawny and ill-favored. He dreamed of horehound candy (he would buy a quantity when he was paid) and favorite foods which he had tasted infrequently and thus considered rare, and he dreamed of foods he had heard about but had never seen or smelled, and of other delicacies of which he had never even heard . . . what were they? Off in delectable space somewhere beyond the buzz, the murmur, the squawling, the reek of this prison . . . great hot platters of tempting meats and colored fruits.
He wished he owned a pistol such as was owned by this officer and that. A gun was all right; he had been taught how to load his musket, how to cap it, how to draw the charge. But there was something especially man-grown about the idea of a holster rubbing beside your leg as you moved. Flory liked the flap of a revolver holster, he liked the way it curved and fastened down, he liked the feel and solidity and promise of guarding leather, the way it became polished by rubbing and by sweat (he had never worn a holster, he could but imagine). He had lost much of his curiosity about Yanks, knowing them with intimacy now when they congregated below him. But Flory had been told that there was money to be made out of them, profit to be gained; he desired money and profit. He did not know how to begin a transaction, he was afraid that the Yanks would laugh at him. Floral Tebbs hated to be laughed at, and yet he was laughed at frequently.
His imaginings were limited by primitive inexperience. He was an infant and an illiterate, but some illiterates had absorbed the stimulation of profound emotion and thus were above the beasts. Flory was not. He was a beast, although a weak and confused little animal and thus proportionately dangerous. He did not know exactly what occupied the thought and attention of the branded scoundrels whom he had been set to watch. If he considered that they had secret pulsations and agonies such as lacerated him, it was only to ascribe to them a concerted wickedness: they would like to get out, and rove horned and prankish through the unprotected landscape. He must give none of them an opportunity to do this.
(Within ten rods of Flory’s sentry-box an ex-miner and an ex-baggage-handler and an ex-mule-driver and an ex-book-agent-who-longed-to-be-a-writer-of-novels huddled together in their rags busy with lice. They were wrapped by the tape of common knowledge, common tragedy. They had been comrades in the Forty-fifth Ohio, and already had watched numerous of their friends die, and these men also would die. The other three listened while the book-agent told of scuppernong grapes. He had traveled through gulfside wildernesses a few years before the war, and that was how he’d come to know scuppernongs. Three shriveled fuzzy skull-faces pressed near him and low moonlight touched them when they turned, and the blanched brains behind the faces played, each in its own fashion, with imagined joy of fruit juices, fruit crystals, the power contained in thin skins and rich pulp of a peculiar sort they had never tasted and now never would taste. The book-agent said that the grapes crawled on truant vines in wild places where you’d never think to find them. You drove along the forest road in a buggy or a wagon, and the driver stopped suddenly, and you said or he said, Here they be. You reached out and pressed the bulbous things into your mouth. They were salt and sugar and sustenance, deep purple purity and grace, tang and promise. You rolled an invisible morsel of their taste around on your tongue, and it struck the roof of your mouth and it occupied your soul and you could think of nothing else. Here it was: spice and fragrance and power. It was like the moment when you were with a hearty woman and she yielded with her drive and delicacy, and you yielded unto her your whip-snapping and private bitter concentrated flogging, and here it was and this was it, the summation of bountiful flavor. Your body lived and died and was revivified as you absorbed.)
Floral did not know how he might have appeared to the prisoners, or how his fellows might have appeared. It was impossible that it might occur to him to wonder how the prisoners thought of him and other Reserves. He did not realize that after the moon ascended farther, wafer-thin above the stockade, guard shacks along the eastern parapet became small haunted houses with death dwelling in them. The shaggy figures of guards stood motionless or rarely moving, but always with menace in their silhouetting; so he himself, not yet fourteen, was a menace. The guards said to the Yankees in essence between their throat-hawkings and tobacco-spittings, Try to get past us. Only try. We have bullets and powder, the musket barrels to contain velocity and expend it against you. We’re up here On Parapet; you ain’t; you’re down below. We got our eyes on you. Just try it, Fourth Pennsylvania and Fourth Vermont and Fourth Kentucky and Fourth Iowa. Try it, Thirteenth U.S. Infantry and Cole’s Cavalry and Michiganders and folks from Wisconsin in the Iron Brigade. Try to get past us.
Night and day, in sunlight and smell, or in moonlight or in darkness and increased and concentrated smell . . . we got our muzzles ready and the percussion caps ready on tubes at tother end, and the squeeze of powder and balls jammed in between. We loaf up here, excused by too old age or too young age from feeling any feeling but a blind unreasoning unreckoning undiscerning hatred. We loaf on our planks, we are bored, we cry the reports of the hours and half hours. Somebody starts off on the stroke of twelve or of seven or of two or of whatever hour of the night, and middling thereafter, and the calls drone from lair to lair along the fence. Post Sixteen, ten o’clock and all’s well, or we yell for fun, Post Thirty-three, ten o’clock and here’s your mule. Maybe some other members of our far-flung regiment are laughing their livers out along the rim, or maybe they aren’t paying any attention at all, and wouldn’t have sense enough to pay heed if they had the waking ears to pay heed. Just try to get past this stockade, just try to get past the deadline in shadows, Tenth Connecticut and Pennsylvania Lancers and Twenty-second Indiana and Pennsylvania Bucktails and folks from out West, from Crocker’s Brigade and such. Just try it; all we ask, or sometimes we won’t even wait to ask; just try. We got the muskets loaded and we ain’t asleep by any chance. We got the fire ready, Chicago Board of Trade Battery and Second Maryland and Minnesota Indians and any God damn niggers that claim they’re soldiers like white men, even Yankees, and haven’t been sent to a labor detail in the burying trenches yet. Just try it. In stench of wormy black, in clarity of the thing in the sky, we linger amid haunted houses on the fence, and we dare you. You will die if you take the dare.
Hi, Reb.
Flory jumped from his vague blank retreat and looked down. He had thought it was a post, it wasn’t a post, it was too wide for a post, and that post he’d thought it was (the toughened remains of a small pine from which prisoners ripped the last splinters) had disappeared under erosion of fingernails and homemade knives sometime previously.
Reb. Hi, Guard!
With shuddering hands Floral Tebbs slid his musket barrel across the fence.
Take care, don’t shoot me, you damn fool.
Yank—get—away—from that—deadline. Flory spoke the words thinly with a mouth near to blubbering.
Hah. Thought you was the guard we call Little Tattnall. He’s usually on this post.
Flory’s jellied finger went inside the trigger guard. The Yankee stood close to death, he didn’t know how close he stood. Flory’s stage-whisper came down to him. Little Tattnall’s took sick. They give me this post.
You might do. Be a sport, kiddie. Raise that gun barrel a trifle. . . .
He was safe, after all—he was up on the fence—no Yankee could jump fifteen feet into the air, although sometimes Flory imagined that a Yankee could. Flory tilted the musket toward the moon.
>
Thanks, kiddie. What I need is soda.
Who’re you?
Kid, I’m Donner. You ought to know—Willie Collins’s cookie?
Flory had heard of Willie Collins since the first time he went On Parapet. Collins had been pointed out to him, he had seen the giant, had watched him slugging and bossing.
You understand? Soda. You Rebs call it saleratus.
Flory shuffled loosely on his perch. I got some.
This was a miracle, the Yank asking him for saleratus; and all the time that twisted paper had been lying squeezed in his jeans’ pocket.
Guess you didn’t follow me. Little Reb, what’s your name?
Flory.
Well, Flory, Willie wants some York biscuits. I got everything else—sufficient flour and butter and sugar, got the milk souring. But we need soda. Saleratus.
I—got some.
Devil suck it, here’s luck! You know what I mean, now? Sal—
Saleratus.
How much you got?
Nigh onto a pocket full.
I’ll be sucked. What you want for it? Greenback?
Flory spewed the low words in a stream. No I want buttons with hens on them.
Give you two dollars in good currency.
No. Buttons with hens on them.
You fool little Reb, I’ll give you a bean, a gold piece.
Want buttons with hens—
The man named Donner swore softly and went stalking off until he was mingled in the noisy pattern of moonlight and tilted shebang roofs, until he could not be seen moving, could not be separated from the wide-spread garbage dump with its fire-flickers and bird sounds. A few minutes later the cry of Raiders! was raised near the creekside. There was a feeling that a few people ran toward the spot and many more went tottering away. More minutes elapsed, Donner returned. The light swept increasingly brighter, increasingly shadows flattened as the moon sailed. Flory could see that the cook held a loose dark patch in his hand.
I got here a jacket with them buttons on it.
Dddon’t need no jacket, Yank. Just buttons—
Brown your God damn nose, I hain’t got nothing to cut buttons off with! Should I pull them off twould likely bust them little gilt loops. Kiddie, you got a string?
Flory had no twine, he had not thought to bring a length of it.
I’ll hurl it up. You catch. Donner wadded the garment and tossed it high. It fluttered and fell short within the deadline. Casually the big Donner stepped across the deadline and picked up the jacket. Johnson, the guard at the next station toward the north, and the guard at the next station toward the south— Both were watching, neither bothered to lift his gun. They were more accustomed to such transactions than was Floral Tebbs, but Flory would grow accustomed. Donner weighted the jacket with a wad of mud, wrapped it with care, threw it high. It came hard and hurtfully against Flory’s face with a button bruising his eyelid when it struck. His calico hat was knocked from his head, but he held the jacket, he had it in his arms, he had buttons with proud eagles threatening amid circles of stars, those were the glory he sought.
Well, kiddie, I’m waiting. Toss the soda.
Flory tossed it and Donner caught the poke easily in one hand. He said nothing more but strolled into the tangle of huts and population; and Willie Collins would have his York biscuits the next morning, with butter and jam and rashers of fresh bacon.
In the huge conical tent draped beside Collins’s winter castle, Donner leered through the firelight at Edward Blamey. Rubber Legs, you did a fair deed.
What?
Member that freshie you sighted this afternoon with the artillery jacket on him? I was hard put to find some buttons just now, to buy soda for these biscuits. Damn if I didn’t mind that artillery jacket then and there.
Edward Blamey remembered. He was moved into that overcoat shebang, this side of the sinks, wa’n’t he?
Hah, he’s still there. Little squirt—he weren’t more’n sixteen and skinny too—he tried to give me trouble.
Cookie looked critically at his big right fist and saw that there was blood drying. He wiped the blood on his trousers. He quoted gaily to Ed Blamey before he turned to his wooden trough, to begin raising the biscuit dough— He quoted, If you don’t believe I’m a butcher, just smell of me boots.
Ed Blamey reached for his bottle of pine-top.
On the sentry platform Floral Tebbs stroked buttons of the stolen jacket, and considered how they would shine even more delightfully in the sun if tomorrow became one of the rare fair days of this month, if indeed the sun shone. He would rub buttons, they would be alive with golden fire, people who had no such buttons would look their envy.
Fifty rods away a gaunt Jewish sergeant of the Eighty-fifth New York (but still powerful, holding control of himself, not straying too far no matter how many similar moons he had worshipped above other lands) sat with big hands clasped across his ragged knees, worshipping this moon. Suddenly Nathan Dreyfoos realized that he had been craving the moon and the silent simplicity and clear freedom which it represented more than he had craved any delight or fulfillment during the twenty-three years through which he’d lived. He had forgotten that brothers-in-arms and brothers who had once borne arms alongside him had suffered and hungered and desired in the same manner. He had been selfish, insensitive to their need. He thought of the dead Corley, the dead Stevenson—he had neglected their memory utterly. He was blanketed with shame. In weakness he prayed to moonlight and to the Almighty God or Monster who made that moonlight, he prayed: Oh, give these other survivors the same release and independence, afford them the same ability to go kiting beyond the stockade, grant it more quickly and more firmly than you grant it to me!
He begged this; but it was as if some caterpillar of voracious falsity crawled active beneath the stalk of his benevolence—a larva who fed on the stem, and awarded rottenness before it could be recognized by his soul (but recognized only by the small portion which begged). Please me first, give me escape in the first moment you can manage it, I care not for the rest, find me a way out, leave me free, Devil take the others.
XXVI
Sometimes it seemed to Henry Wirz that his brain was made of rubber, it was a rubber sack filled with stones, it stretched to paleness as more stones were necessarily introduced and as the weight grew. Stones were labeled Hospital, Crowding, Incompetence of Guards, Poison Swamp, labeled with many other unpleasant names and reminders. In constant screaming temper Wirz bounded from desk to stockade to headquarters, back again to the office of the quartermaster, thence to the quarters of the surly Dick Winder, back on horseback to the stockade to mete out a new punishment or to make a new observation. If it were possible for him to loathe the prisoners more each hour of his life he loathed them so. But his trained physician’s attitude could not countenance the filth of these creatures without wishing to exorcise it merely on the grounds that it was filth. A row of sinks—these he’d built (they were totally inadequate, and this he knew; but they were placed on the lowest ground within the pen for purposes of drainage; and half the sick were too sick to use them, to muster strength to creep or stagger to the sinks; and he ran out of lumber). A bridge across the creek—this he’d managed to have constructed (but it was too narrow, it sagged: again the shortage of lumber and tools). A shoring of the creekside, a fumbling attempt to deepen the stream and thus increase its flow . . . this hopeless effort was achieved amid shrieks. Almost before his eyes Henry saw planks of the shoring melt away, split for tent poles, hacked into bits for firewood. His shivering hands were tied, the entreaties he sent to higher echelons were lost or filed. Who cared? Not the Winders.
By God, I get that damn hospital out of there once.
Odds seemed at times insurmountable but he toiled with frenzy, he hated the sight of those few tent flies packed in the northeast corner, hated the sight and clamor and stink of invalids mo
tionless or gesticulating. In heat of late May he would have rested with pride if rest were ever a state to be attained by Henry Wirz (but it was not). He saw the tent flies sprouting in a new location, and outside the pen at last. He’d procured more tents, lumber to build bunks (not enough lumber, not enough bunks) and had even built a portion of a separate fence around the establishment. It was not a good hospital. At least it was outside the main stockade. Outside, ja . . . he kept telling himself that it was better, better. Rotten tent flies, a considerable number of small A tents, a limited number of wall tents scraped from some camp farther at the North and dumped off a flat car one rainy day along with the sodden supply of A tents. . . . This collection of awning rose on a few acres of land east of the star fort, east also of the surgeons’ offices. The ground was higher than the areas immediately adjacent, and sloped toward the southeast, but marshes sent up their aroma on two sides. A small stream, one of the many branches amid those valleys, ran through a corner of the hospital enclosure. Quickly this became a thing of reek and evil.
This was the place where Ira Claffey’s black people had dumped their loads of bastard melons months before. A more noisome cargo of decay was now dumped here on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of May. After that many people were carried out daily on carts, and more came to take their places, puffing, drooling, hullooing; they were lugged in blankets or on makeshift stretchers, they were carried in the arms of stronger men.
Still it was better. It was outside the stockade. Outside! Much better, ja.
Four patients were jammed into each of the A tents, eight patients in the wall tents; under common flies lay as many as could be crowded together—six or eight men—sometimes more, under the larger flies. Bunks had been made by driving forks of saplings into the soil and placing scraps of planking—or, more frequently, pine poles—across them. But— Not enough bunks. The sick lay on the ground, some had pine straw, some had no pine straw. If Henry Wirz had been able to devote a greater share of his time to this task he would have seen to it that all had pine straw to lie in. He was a very busy man. He had to be many places at once.
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