Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  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.

  Hey, wait there. This one he got pretty good pants.

  You nigs step lively. Take them pants off outside, not here! I want my supper.

  They grumbled between themselves, but went on with the loading.

  Said the guard, You got a full load. They were in the act of lifting the thing next to Eric. It was dark. Eric began to tighten his arms and legs and neck muscles and back muscles, he began to stiffen his toes and fingers.

  Ain’t but two more to go, Mastah Guard.

  Oh. Step lively. . . .

  Big paws grasped Eric’s upturned naked feet and dragged him forward. More big paws went scraping under his shoulders and sank hurtfully into his armpits; yea, he was rigid, he was rigid, they were tormenting him, he bit his tongue, it seemed that he must squeak, cry out, confound them into thinking he had come alive, get rid of their clasping, he’d never thought that they’d try to tear a corpse apart. Hoy. They swung him back and forth. Hoy, they said together on the second swing; and hoy! they cried in unison at the termination of the third swing, and he went sailing. Let go my stiffness, he thought in terror as he rose through the air, and then his head struck the head of a corpse atop the load; it struck a fraction of a second before his feet came down on the pile. Eric was knocked senseless. Just one quick burst of light, a sound to go with it. Nothing after that.

  When he recovered consciousness he was in the deadhouse and his face was bloody, and he didn’t know where he was, but he was in the deadhouse. Could a man bleed after death, if his nose had been smashed? Eric had bled; he thought for a time that he was dead; maybe he was dead; he was cold, he had never been so cold before, the cold was through and all around him, it emanated from the cold dead, the earth was cold underneath, the air was cold above, Eric was cold, the dead were cold, all the world cold, all the world dead.

  If ever he walked in the world of men again, he would tell that world how the dead smelled. They smelled like a dog run over by a beer wagon, and it crawled into a narrow space between two houses just off Houston Street, and there it lay whimpering unheard and unsought and unwanted for a day or two, rotting even before the rot of unliving flesh began. Eric went into that place after a ball he had tried to catch but had missed, and so he smelled the dog four days after it died, and he had to pick up the grimy ball lying beside the grimy dog. These Andersonville dead smelled like that. They were the reek of privies and corruption found in oozing drainpipes, they were the garbage box, the neglected fallen greasy flakes in gutters of fish markets, they were the greasy water put into an old bottle and stoppered and left in the sun (the boys whom Eric knew used to make bombshells like that, to throw at each other in warfare of their gangs; they called the bottles st
ink-bombs). The dead were old vomit, old bandages, old pus. They had no decency about them, they thought they were sainted and needed not to yield to manners required of men who were not dead. The dead breathed decay from lungs no longer breathing, and their lung cavities were putrid but they were cold. They had no fire or flame or query or statement about them; they lay grinning in beards and hayrick hair, their tongues were thrust out sometimes, their mouths were split open and tongueless sometimes, the fluid ran from their mouths sometimes, the fluid ran from other orifices of their bodies sometimes, the breath of their death went into soil on which they lay, and colored the cold air on either side of them, and it ascended in a noxious weighty metallic cloud above them, and the cloud was cold, and the people who made it were doughy and cold, and they were dead.

  Baleful in their silent mockery of him, it was as if the very silence which they created laughed along with their smaller individual silences. No more to do a thing any child or man-grown object had ever desired or earned—never to make the sound or speak the word or hear the sound; never, never to dream. In weak and stricken dread of this motionless herd, Eric Torrosian reconstructed their lives in the same fashion in which his own life had been poured: he shaped their existences so. Never to taste furry red wine from a stone bottle, never to eat an egg (ah, he had been fond of hens’ eggs) and never to eat the pickled herons’ eggs which he had tasted once. . . .

  The long Springfield with its proud eagle on the lock: never to clean it again, never to bite off the cartridge paper, never to abrade fingers with the crisp fine sandpaper bent as a polishing cloth. Nor to march, nor to suck boiling brown coffee from a blackened tin cup. Nor to fight in a street fight, and roll across stones, and drive your elbow against another’s belly, and hear him yip in his hot squirming as you fought. All these things the corpses had renounced, and Eric loathed them for it, because in silent conclave they were censuring him for even remembering such events, and for wishing to relive them. . . . Never to walk a street and see white-tanned-stoutly-patched sails rising at the end of the street between brick buildings, and to hasten, hasten for fear of missing closer sight of the ship as it pushed the Hudson waters aside. Never to make torn wisps of wastepaper into a ball for a kitten to play with, never to watch the kitten propelled upward by invisible springs in its feet, to see it somersault delightedly with the paper wad caught between mossy-striped paws. Never to rub a dog’s warm ribs until you found the Magic Place, and then, when you had found the Magic Place and while you were scratching it rapidly, you’d see the dog’s foot beat mechanically in air as if he too were scratching the Place, and so you laughed and called it Magic. These matters were not agreeable to the dead. They scorned these matters, and gave out, in one solid and crippling stench, the verdict of their disapproval.

  They refused also, these dead, to ever more carry great bales of rugs upon their shoulders, to ever more gaze past the bright curtains of eating-house windows and envy the well-to-do who sat before their porter and oysters, their beer and bread and pigeon breasts and lemonade and cod.

  To heave rocks at sparrows shooting past, to be afraid of a priest because he might lecture or thump you, to hear a woman’s voice teaching softly beside the warm stove, and with waxy smell of candles in your nose— To hear the woman’s voice buried in the long ago, separated from this moment by trivial and crabbèd years, but coming out stronger as the scent of candles continued—

  To hear her teaching, Zu Betlehem geboren—

  Your voice. Zu Betlehem geboren—

  Ist uns ein Kindelein—

  Your voice. Ist uns ein Kindelein.

  The dead would have none of it, never, never. They would abolish all treasure great and small, they would abolish pleasure, and assuredly they would abolish the rite of pain. They had voted to do so.

  To read a tale and feel your fancy drift, to walk with Little John, to draw a stronger bow than Friar Tuck himself, to be bored with Rollo and his cousin James, to wheel the thick blade of Marmion . . . they said No, they said, We will not do it, they said, We decline and refuse. Sternly. Forever. And they said also, We renounce the right to creep into rich houses, rug-laden and awed, and sit small and dusky and self-effacing on a bench in the hall while the old man is explaining about rugs to a rich dame in her parlor, and to marvel at polished mirrors and embossed walls with purple ladies playing tag under green trees.

  Nor would the dead approve of rioting over a dumping ground, and bringing up forgotten wealth from beneath the layers of soaked straw and barrel-staves. Clock weights they would not discover, nor the pestle minus its mortar, nor the brass false teeth so colorfully green in corrosion, nor the torn corset nor the horse-collar with a rat’s nest inside and baby rats peeping. . . . Nor would the dead countenance a solid click of billiard balls, smells of cigar smoke, the rich ferocious male laughter, the small voice saying, Paper, sir? Paper? . . . Click of billiard balls, the odor of peanuts being chewed, broadcloth buttocks bulging up beside green tables, the deep hearty frightening male laughter.

  Gone always, gone completely, never to be tolerated. The dreams lonely but enfolding . . . waking at night with nothing but your youth and the creamy lust of youth to keep you company . . . ah, vision . . . ladies appearing again, with the satin rustle in which they always tread, the imagined French scents in which they’ve dipped themselves, the delicate foot protruding coyly cased in its shiny slipper . . . and what is this? You are privileged: she has accepted you, this golden creature here, here, here, she has flung over all standard of deportment, she has gone wicked, she is a pure woman but also a strumpet; invitingly she draws up her gown to reveal the delicacy underneath, she is begging you to roll and tussle and lose yourself for eternity in the lacy lake of her female state . . . power of her prettiness rules you in hidden imagined rapture until once more you are weak and exhausted, and you lie spent, and no doubt will be a maniac soon, barred, groveling in a cage.

  The illusions of Eric Torrosian flared for minutes only, but they were numerous, they ruled him hard. Leaden, chill and stiff as sticks, the dead knew secrets but the secrets were secrets concerning a business of rot and dripping.

  From them now he would run away. Eric climbed to his feet. The deadhouse . . . he was beyond the stockade, he was in the deadhouse made of pine boughs, he’d heard of the place, now he would go retching out. He had no blanket to cover him longer; even those skimpy tatters had been taken from him by Negroes while he lay insensible, and in their ignorance they thought he was dead.

  He went staggering into the night and walked directly in front of a terrified guard. The man lifted his piece, fired, shot Eric Torrosian through the chest. At that close range the musket’s charge tore a great chunk out of the boy’s heart and it dangled behind his broken rib as he fell.

  Eric did not witness pine flames which burned above his glazing eyes, nor hear the speculations voiced. A record of the event was noted down, and Eric Torrosian was carried back into the deadhouse, where he was welcomed by chuckling unvoiced, unheard, but still the chuckling was there; and the ground was cold, cold, cold, and now everyone in the place was dead, and soon Eric also was as cold as the others, an accepted member of their fraternity.

  XLI

  Willie Mann was determined not to drink water; drink water he would not, unless personally God awarded it to him as from rainclouds, as from dew condensing. People said, Rain is in the air, sometimes; and those were the times when Willie Mann heard them, and tried to pretend that he didn’t hear the people because they might take advantage of his idea, which was somehow to suck rain out of the air before it broke loose in form of orthodox globules to be wasted, spraying or hammering against soil which could never absorb or appreciate rain, against men who were only chilled or killed by its coming.

  Willie Mann, Twenty-ninth Missouri Volunteers, came into the stockade shortly before the six raiders were hanged. Thus he witnessed a big man breaking free from a mass, a core of blacken
ed faces and striving thin arms half naked and half ragged; he saw that man plunging at a loose long pace all the way down the slope and into the marsh next to the Island. Willie saw what that marsh was made of; in his innocence he had not dreamed of its construction when first he arrived; he thought that the bad smell came sole alone from those bodies which supported those faces which stared and yelled and called him and his fellows fresh fish. He thought with tears spreading inside to drown him—he thought that these eviscerated cannibals or whatever they were— He thought that they were jeering and taunting; whereas mainly they were giving him a rowdy grim welcome filled with curiosity and a certain envy because he had not been compelled to suffer as they had suffered. But now he would suffer.

  The stench had been their stench, in Willie’s first diagnosis, but a bulk of it was the stench of Stockade Creek and ooze surrounding. He gazed, he couldn’t believe it, after Curtis ran away and plunged until he was mired waist-deep, and Nathan Dreyfoos waded in after him. Also, when Willie Mann heard that the tallest of the condemned was named Willie Collins it brought a dread kinship with the captured ringleader. He tried to tell himself that there must be hundreds of Willies walled in here, and so he should not be absurd about it; but that night he dreamed fiercely of the monster . . . gallows stood on the southern hill’s shoulder, and when planks were knocked loose and when (never tell Katty or Ma what happened then!)— When at last all six stretched shapes hung gyrating leisurely from their ropes, there seemed a dark completeness, a finality to the course of his initiation. Willie Mann was now a full-fledged prisoner with a parched tongue. One of the executed men had, in his unknowing way, helped to parch that tongue by once trying to walk on substance unsuited to man’s support. He was not Jesus, not even an exaggerated cartoon of a wicked overgrown Jesus born in a sinkhole instead of in a manger; so he had tried to walk upon the stuff, and had gone down. Willie Mann wandered once more to stare at the place.