He witnessed prisoners floundering or creeping—senior prisoners of vast stockade experience but apparently with no sensitivity. He saw them with their cups and chunks of broken canteen material. They sought water and found it. It was putrid thick ink, and they called it water. It was the oil of corruption, the wine from dying human bowels, the lively acid of iniquity, and they dared to call it water. It was a soup rising from wet invisible wells drilled by the Devil himself, and stewed out of festering meatbones and rotting bits of cloth, corncobs, abandoned corn bread, the fresh tanned floating strings of firm healthy excrement which came borne on narrow tide from habitations of guards outside the jagged fence, the watery yellow slime drained from dysenteric hordes inside the jagged fence. A million million million worms worked in its borders, a black frosting of insects clung above and busy. These debased fellows of Willie Mann’s were willing to voice the evilest lie of all, and say Water.
Maybe they had never known true water, but Willie had. To begin with, the well of his family on the edge of the tiny Missouri village where he was born— This well was famous in the neighborhood. It served four families including the Manns, and Willie’s father said that the more the well was used the better he liked it. Doctor Zachary Mann was a slender solemn fellow with a sparse beard and mild brown inquiring eyes. His dappled mare Annette and his pale duster and his chaise with tall mended wheels: all were familiar to the entire northern end of the county and in southerly regions of the county above. When Doctor went to some farmhouse and found three or four children staring with fever (maybe one might be dead before he arrived) Doctor Zach Mann lingered eventually at the farm well. He noted the site where it was dug, he brought up water and held it to the light in a glass, he sniffed, sometimes he tasted wryly and spat the water out again and rinsed his mouth with some liquid carried in his own satchel. People said that Doctor Zach was foolish on the subject of water; but no one of the eight Mann children died in infancy. In this case it seemed that the shoemaker’s children had shoes.
Willie’s elder brother Sam had been killed at Wilson’s Creek or else in a skirmish immediately preceding the battle—no one knew which, or could find out for certain—so Willie begged to go to the war in a manner of vengeance. Not until you’re eighteen, said Doctor. You got your mother to see after, if Annette should be scairt by the cars and run away with me.
Of course fat Annette had never run away in the thirteen years of her life, and probably never would run away; but the doctor was a determined father, and he extracted his promise. Willie did not know how to deceive because he had never been taught nor had he suffered the example.
The week before his eighteenth birthday—that was the same week they heard the news about Vicksburg—recruiters came to the county seat, and Willie begged to go to the courthouse and sign the roll.
You’re not eighteen. You promised—
But I’ll be eighteen a Sunday.
Wait till then.
Want me to leg it all the way to Saint Louis and maybe join up with a batch of foreigners?
Doctor debated in his mind, and at last arose from the tattered sofa (Linda Moberly’s baby had been slow, and it took all night, and they nearly lost both the baby and Linda, but everything seemed all right now). He told Willie to hitch up Annette and not say anything to Ma. Silently they drove the five miles to the courthouse, Doctor dozing beside his one surviving son. When they pulled up along the shiny hitch-rail with its little strings of horse-hair caught in the polish of horses’ rubbing, Doctor opened his eyes alertly as if he hadn’t been asleep actually any of the time.
Well, sonny, go in and sign.
Willie came back, pale-faced and beaming—he came down from the courthouse three steps at a time, and nearly landed on top of old Mr. Cull Calice, who remembered Indian attacks on that very spot, and had actually shaken hands with Daniel Boone though he always spoke of him as Colonel Boone.
Did you sign, sonny?
Yup. But it’s all right, Pa—I mean about me being eighteen. I hain’t got to report until a Monday, and I’ll be eighteen by then.
They drove home slowly; on the way Doctor stopped to dress the stump of Mr. Rector’s finger at the cottage by the sawmill; and he stopped also to peek in at the exhausted Linda Moberly and her baby girl. When he came out he said, Sonny, I don’t want you ever to take up doctoring.
Don’t reckon I will. Rather be a soldier or work on a railroad. But why?
Might vaunt yourself pridefully, and get puffed up.
How so, Pa?
Hard to explain. Way a doctor gets to feel sometimes. Not maybe like God, but like the dear Lord’s little finger.
Up over the next green hills the weary Annette took them along, making hungry sounds inside her round empty belly, making louder sounds from her rear. They passed the abandoned Gentry house . . . Mr. Dolph Gentry had Rebel tendencies, and had left the county long before. They passed their next-door neighbors, the Garshows; and also Paul and Silas Garshow were wearing gray, and were said to be off fighting in General Sterling Price’s army somewhere. It was funny and awful how the neighborhood was split up, and so were a lot of other neighborhoods in Missouri.
Anyway, I got old Garshow to move his well.
What say, Pa?
There—you can see it gainst the west.
He pointed with his whip. That’s the new well: fine high curb, and observe where she stands. Under that cottonwood, high and convenient. But down the slope’s where they had the old well; just lazy because twas a low spot, and they figured twas easier to reach water so. Tweren’t more than six foot deep, I swear. And just go up amongst them cedars sometime—when you come home from the fighting, I mean—and count them graves. Seven Garshows and five of the inlaws, the Teddlers.
All from a rotten well, Pa? Could that be?
Could be.
First off that night, after they had broken the news to Ma and the five girls (Addie was newly married and moved away) Willie went along the edge of the oatfield behind the barn, he went in thin plum-purple light of a hot evening in Missouri (although he had never seen evenings in any place other than Missouri at that time). He went to call upon Miss Katrine Fiedenbruster.
The Fiedenbrusters had moved to the region only four or five years previously; they had come from Germany by way of St. Louis where Jake Fiedenbruster had been a thrifty shoemaker, but now he wanted to be a farmer and was one. The kids at school made fun of the little Fiedenbrusters because at first they spoke only a few words of English and those badly . . . it was during the winter term. Willie was not yet fourteen at the time, and very slight; but he was muscular from hard work, and also he liked to wrestle with his big brother Sam. Well, he was coming home through soggy snow, and he heard shrieks ahead. He looked and saw all the little Fiedenbrusters running and crying and yelling in German. It turned out that big Ame Moberly had ambushed them, and Ame wasn’t merely playing Indian: this was a real devilish ambush he had arranged. In advance he’d prepared ammunition consisting of snowballs soaked and then frozen; the missiles were stony and dangerous. He’d hidden behind the low crab-apple trees at the corner, and when the contingent of foreigners came by in their blue knitted woolen winter caps and scarfs, he up and opened fire. It was a mean business—snowballing girls, especially with frozen balls—but Ame did have a mean streak in him. (No more, though: he was killed in the attack on Fort Donelson.)
All of a sudden it came over Willie: what would his father have done?—truly he worshipped his father. Well, he figured that Doctor would have lit into Amos Moberly, so that was what Willie did now. Ame was whooping and dancing and running after the wailing Germans, and then stopping to heave another accurate snowball, and then he’d yell, Why don’t you talk decent? and then another ball and another shriek. Then Willie hit him like a cat off a limb; they were in the snow. Standing up, using fists solely, Ame might have thrashed Willie to a jelly, but on the ground th
e slighter boy held an advantage, after all those tussles with tall Sam. It was a bitter fight, however—gouge and punch and twist and choke. At least Ame was bent on choking in defense. But Willie brought his boot up against Ame’s belly, good and solid; after that there was no fight left in the bigger boy—nor any wind, either.
The Fiedenbrusters stood like a gallery, watching, fearing, appreciating the virtues of their savior. Finally when Ame got his breath back, he went off homeward across the old stubble field, refusing to look back because he was ashamed of being beaten, and even more ashamed at his own crying. He wouldn’t speak to Willie for weeks and weeks; but at last they became moderately friendly at a church supper in the spring; and certainly Amos never plagued the Fiedenbrusters again.
The day after the fight, Willie found a pink-streaked winter apple in his lunch bucket, and his mother hadn’t put it there: he’d watched her preparing his and his sisters’ lunches, while he leaped with impatience for fear Teacher would catch them with the tardy bell. Next day, some spicy heart-shaped cookies of a kind he’d never seen or tasted before. He saw Katrine Fiedenbruster watching him, and then her face turned red when she saw that he saw her watching him; she turned away quickly. But next day, more soft gingery cookies. It would have been easy for her to slip things into his lunch bucket undetected. All the buckets and baskets stood in a row on the long bench in the cloak room. . . . Willie realized suddenly how very pretty Katrine Fiedenbruster really was. Her skin was creamy white, her little cheeks were round as cookies but soft as fresh-stirred candy, her neck reminded him of ice cream. Suddenly he thought that he would like to eat Katrine Fiedenbruster—actually eat her up, and how good she would taste—and then he was overcome with embarrassment at having entertained such a thought . . . and he thought of other things that he would like to do to and with her; his face flamed behind his McGuffey . . . he made a botch of lessons on that day. But he made a great to-do about shoveling slush off the path for old Mr. Spriggs, after school, and his sisters went home without him, prepared to tell Ma how Willie had declared in geography class that Prussia was the capital of Russia. The Fiedenbruster tribe went home without Katrine, because she was the eldest girl and now partook of a special fifteen-minute lesson in English which Mr. Spriggs awarded because for some reason he declared that she was a noble little Dutchwoman, and pinched her cheeks and made them even pinker.
Willie scraped and scraped. When finally Teacher came out with his cane and surveyed the results, he said, William, you may not anticipate a brilliant career as a scholar—not after today’s blots and witlessness—but I vow you could make a living with a shovel.
Teacher locked up the schoolhouse and thumped Willie’s head with his stiff old finger, and turned west along the road toward where he boarded with the Pattersons. But Willie and the noble little Dutchwoman had to go east.
She walked fast, Willie walked faster, soon he was up with her and walking at speed fairly beside her, but she kept her hot face turned away.
Katrine. . . .
She seemed fearing to reply, and why should she hide her face in the folds of knitted blue?
Katrine. Let me carry your books.
Nein.
Why not, eh?
Cause—
Let me carry your stuff.
Nein. Mineself I—carry—
Katrine, listen here. He snatched her free hand, and stopped her, and held her as a prisoner; she faced him with damp reddened soft face and blue eyes like silver.
You put them cookies in my bucket—
Nein, she breathed, but of course she breathed a lie.
Yes you did. What kind of cookies are they?
Boy and girl, they stood alone in the slushy road, and nobody was about—no Teacher, no brothers or sisters or schoolmates, no rigs or teams—nothing there but February wind and a crow calling, and a pervading cold consciousness of spring to come.
Lebkuchen, she whispered.
What? Them cookies? Is that what they’re called?
Ja.
She did not resist when he took her books and little willow basket. They made an awkward if not heavy burden along with his own things. In utter silence the children walked the way to a lane which bordered the Mann farm on the west, for the Fiedenbrusters lived down that lane on the old Carrington place. Katrine thanked him in the thinnest of whispers, and dared not meet his glance when she did it.
Willie stopped, halfway to his home, and stood looking across the field at that gray-shawled, blue-topped little figure a-hastening, and then she turned to look at him, and thus again each saw the other looking.
She was his girl, in this modern grown-up time; he was her fellow. They had belonged to each other, in pure and solemn devotion, from the very first.
Five times he had managed to kiss her. But only in kissing games, when other folks were looking on and laughing. And only on the cheek, because she’d try to hide away from him— She would seem to fight him. But not too hard—
This night the plum light was intense around him and around the white house of the Fiedenbrusters, and the strong glow went up as if from prairie fires beyond a row of cottonwoods, and a chorus of whip-poor-wills challenged steadily from black hollows of Beverly’s Timber. Oh God, please God, to be alone with her, to be alone in Beverly’s Timber or any place else in this spooky nighttime wonderland, but to be alone—
They roosted on a small porch and on the steps, the Fiedenbrusters. Papa and Mamma sat in the two rocking chairs received as premiums. Katrine and Wempkie, her next youngest sister, had sold bluing and vanilla throughout the neighborhood in their spare time; the rockers were their own accomplishment, and they were proportionately proud, but tonight they sat on stools. The girls had put down their mending, because now it was too dark to see properly, and they had taken up their knitting because they could knit ably, by touch, in the half-dark. All the girls could—even Marta and little Lena.
Jacob and Fritz were gone to the army. Henry and Lou were giggling out behind the plum trees—smoking grapevine, they were, and they became terrified and heavy with guilt when Willie Mann came upon them. Peter and Buck chased fireflies around the yard in this rare dusky moment of playtime, and the toddler, Link, was staggering after them.
Good evening.
To you good evening, Willie Mann.
The party on the stoop and steps loomed before him in dark solidity; they were a unit, a strong sedate family unit. How could he ever pry Katty loose from them?
He burst out with his tidings. I signed the roll today. Pa drove me to the courthouse. I’ll be eighteen Sunday.
Katty upset the work basket on her lap. Scissors and thimbles and a darning ball and things tumbled all over the stoop planks, and some things rolled down into the lily bed below. Willie had no matches; Willie did not smoke. Mrs. Fiedenbruster sent one of the girls into the house, and she came back with a small block of sulphur matches. Willie took the matches from her, and scouted amid tapering lily leaves until Katty’s lost property was restored. He straightened to find big Jake, the father, standing beside him, a mighty post of hewn manhood in dead brown darkness when the last match sputtered out.
Jake Fiedenbruster shook Willie’s hand. This is good. Now you are a man, like my Jake and Frederick are men, like your brother was a man. When do you go?
I reckon we go next week. They aimed to raise a company, but the recruiting captain said they’d never get that many in these parts—too many folks already gone to war. Ben Carrington’s signed, and Hudson Moberly and both the Pittridge boys.
Ja, das ist gut. It is bad, but it is good. Were it not for die Kinder I too should go.
The girls sat motionless on their stools and on the steps, and Katrine seemed to exude a deeper silence than the others, and Mrs. Fiedenbruster rocked heavily in the chair too small for her fat body, and the chair protested with squeaks. Down at the gate the boys still cavorted aft
er lightning-bugs, making few sounds in order to keep from frightening the bugs.
It was late—far too dark to lure Katty from her family circle by this time. They would say that it was dark, her family would not permit her to walk down the road with him; that much was certain. But he would not have to leave for several days and—
After he was in the army, especially after he became a prisoner, he liked to think of that night. Mostly he thought about an afternoon before he went away, and what had happened then. But he chose also to consider the firefly evening (chose was scarcely it: memories pushed over him and fed him and choked him with their color and scent and shadow, whenever he was not occupied by the immediate urgencies of war).
No longer did the town band blat forth its resounding Hail Columbia or Benny Havens, Oh! Two trumpeters were dead of smallpox in Kentucky, the piccolo would roll its sweet trills no longer when operated by the breath of big Tad Wheeling because big Tad Wheeling’s breath was taken from him by grapeshot. Most of the drummers were scattered and drumming still, but drumming at remote guard-mounts in remote places. No band—but throngs of people on the cindered platform, waiting for the cars to come; sisters to weep, mothers to weep and squeeze you desperately, fathers struggling to seem calm and unweeping, little brothers torn between wide-eyed fear for your lives and the ecstasy of envy. Everyone stood with bowed heads, after the engine pulsed to its hot and blowing stop, while Reverend Collins spoke his prayer. Baskets of lunch, the sacks and satchels, the umbrella Hud Moberly’s mother made him take along (how they would play with that, on the cars, and brandish it out of the window at other towns until the sergeant shouted them down).
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