Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  Katty. Jewels and weapons in her bright wet blue eyes, the knowledge of what had already passed between them, the knowledge of her fragrance and softness and tenderness striking him like intoxication. Mother—ah, yes, one loved a mother—Willie loved his mother. Father—ah, Doctor was a father to be respected, to give the charm of calm manliness, to receive it back as his natural due. Sisters? Willie put his arms around the lot of them, or tried to, and patted them as a choice sprigged calico bouquet. But—Katty—

  Finally, people had the decency to let him stand apart from them, to stand with Katty alone, looking directly into her face. She was not a tall girl, but she was nearly as tall as Willie.

  Look what I bring to you, and she gave him a package. It seemed to be a bottle, sewn up in clean muslin and insulated against breakage with wads of paper inside the cloth.

  Katty . . .

  You do not ask me, but it is lemonade.

  Katty, I . . .

  Loaf sugar, one pound. In a trance she recited the formula. Citric acid, one-half ounce: this I buy from Mr. Partridge in his store. Also lemon essence. In a mortar I mix it, and it is all very dry. You should be sure to keep the bottle tight all the while.

  Katty, you’ll write to me and let me know if . . .

  Then, when it is your lemonade you want, I have here this tablespoon for you to measure. Not heaping, not flat, but round—so. That will make it proper. Ach, the amount of water I did not tell you: one half-pint. But maybe you like it not so strong; then more water you should use. Be sure to use pure and cold water.

  Yes, yes, pure and cold— Katty—

  The whistle blasted, steam blew on high, wet spatters came down. The boys went fleeting up the steps into the car, the sergeant was already aboard, Allen Pittridge was waving Willie’s bundle at him and screaming, Come on, Will, I got your plunder—

  He kissed her, and all her folks were staring; long he mashed his face on hers, his lips grown fast around hers, and all his folks were staring too, and all the other folks were staring, the world was staring. Then he was in the moving car, and smoke went alongside to mask the people stumbling and waving and trying to sing, smoke lifted to disclose old Mr. Cull Calise waving his flask at the train and quacking an invocation: Give ’em hell, boys. Scalp ’em, scalp ’em!

  Glory, glory, hallelujah. Glory, glory, hallelujah. Glory, Glory—

  So the knowledge that he must absorb nothing but purest liquid was a lesson set first by Doctor, learned fervently by Willie Mann, and endorsed by Katty in the final adjuration she gave him. Pure cold water from pure cold wells and springs. In this way Willie learned to go without water; he went without water when he had to—and often when he didn’t, because he was over-zealous and his comrades thought him possessed of a mania. Privately he recognized that indeed he was possessed of a mania, but believed that it would sustain him. At first he was inclined to grow costive. This tendency he disciplined sternly by muscular exercise of his own abdominal area, by rubbings and proddings and twistings and bendings. Eventually he was convinced that his body needed only the moisture brought to it in mouthfuls of ordinary foods, though he drank boiled coffee along with other boys, and reveled in sweet milk whenever it might be bought or begged.

  He survived the rigorous and disappointing earliest months of soldier life; he survived two transfers, the first frightening skirmish, the first utterly terrifying pitched battle; he survived four later battles, and various bang-bangs of desultory musket fire from rocks and woodlands (he refused to dignify these as skirmishes, because not an enemy was in sight). People caught scarlet fever in the winter of 1863–4; Willie Mann did not catch it. People caught mumps—fifteen boys in his company had the mumps at one time, and the mumps went down on four of the boys, and one boy died—of mumps and respiratory complications and gosh-knows-what. Willie Mann had had the mumps when he was nine; he did not catch the disease now. People died of pneumonia, intermittent fever, remittent fever, camp fever. Willie Mann suffered no fever whatsoever. He had grown half an inch since he enlisted. He was five-feet-seven and weighed one hundred and thirty-eight pounds. His round tan-colored eyes were solid and all-seeing. His tan-colored hair grew wavy and thick, and twisted in a tuft like a queue at the nape of his neck. He was more wiry than ever, and still liked to wrestle; and one of the bigger corporals was a wrestler too, and taught Willie many new holds. Willie Mann read a Chapter nearly every day, as he had promised his mother that he would do; he failed to perform this rite only in times of fighting, or in times of marching when actually he fell asleep between strides and pitched to the ground or tumbled against the man ahead of him. Willie owned deep-driven lines on either side of his little-boy’s mouth, and nets of spidery lines around the outer corners of his eyesockets. He kept his body as clean as he could, and he dreamed of Katty Fiedenbruster. He carried his little Bible in his left breast pocket, confident that it would stop any bullet which sought his heart, and he had a letter from Katty folded in that Bible which letter would most certainly amplify the defense of the Bible, and he dreamed of Katty always while sleeping and whenever he could while waking.

  Her lemonade was, while it lasted, a chalky treasure to be jeered at by his fellows, and promptly to be begged by them. He would remember always: hot, hot, and hollyhocks drooping on their roadside spikes, and dust twirling ahead sometimes diagonally across the road from southwest to northeast, the way cyclones blew. Sun made shivers out of remote windbreaks of cottonwood and sawed-off willows, and when the green regiment lay gasping at rest on swales along the floury roadside they could hear roosters wailing about the heat on distant small farms. Roosters talked with their mid-afternoon midsummer crowing, wan and hot and limp: it was not the inspiriting cry they uttered at dawn. Squad by squad, Willie’s company was allowed to approach the nearest well. The widow who lived on that place had given her permission when the lieutenant asked her, and the boys were cautioned not to step on nasturtium beds, and to treat the old gate kindly. Forcibly imprisoned within the house, a shaggy shepherd dog uttered his barks in regular pounding cadence, without let or variety. Owgh. Owgh. Owgh. Owgh, until you thought you’d go crazy with barking and hotness and dust and solid sun.

  Then was the time for Willie Mann to produce that bottle which Katty had given him, and the spoon to go with it. He measured cannily: the rounded spoonful, as she had directed. What in tarnation, Will? What you got there? Medicine? A physic? He shook his head and tried to look wise, and succeeded only in looking smug. The others sensed his smugness; they made uncouth remarks about the stuff he was stirring into his can of water and—soon—the stuff he was drinking. Oh, but that was a good deep clear cool well; his father would have approved.

  But Tite Cherry and Rom Hillburner were his especial chums, and they had respect for Willie and knew that he wasn’t a dunce; neither was he an invalid in need of salts and powders. They hung back and begged quietly for a taste. After plain water, Katty Fiedenbruster’s gift seemed a nectar. The word got around. Consistently thereafter Willie was importuned each time the squad descended on a well . . . he set his jaw, and shrugged: to think he’d ever toyed with the notion that the powdered lemonade might last through an entire campaign! But a man couldn’t be niggardly with his campmates—especially not when he and Tite and Rom and Rom’s brother Reem all messed closely together. Remus Hillburner was a natural born forager; if he couldn’t beg a basket luncheon from bonneted ladies in some village he could manage to subtract a tender pullet from one of those same ladies’ hen-coops. Once he came back into camp with a corned leg of beef, and where had he stolen that? Reem stood in fine favor with the lieutenant, and even the cross-grained sergeant regarded him with a tenderly appraising eye. Pity that he had to die of fever that winter.

  Tite Cherry and the Hillburner brothers and a few others had their share of the deliciousness proffered by Katty; probably more than their share, for Willie was generous to a fault. The day he emptied the bottle, and
smashed it against a brick wall in sacred ceremony so that nothing else would ever be contained therein— That day he thought to himself, Hard lines from now on. Oh, I’ll drink; but maybe Katty’s lemonade powder took away a lot of the sickness I might have found in those wells along the roads, and now I got to show caution. So he did, though often his dry innards coiled like snakes at the sight of his fellows plunging their faces into dark streams which edged through dirty towns—rioting around some broken-down open well or cistern with a privy on one side of it and a hog-pen on the other, and manure piles rotting close.

  In arid moments like those he thought of Doctor, and somehow he managed to live and to train himself into Going Without. The discipline Willie wielded over himself was not so bad, in all likelihood, as the discipline which Doctor had had to muster. In rare intimacies Willie had learned the whole story, bit by bit: the bestial father, the blows and tortures and eventual flight, the busy lordly doctor whose garden-digger and stable-boy the senior Mann became, the medical books borrowed secretly—thieved would be more like it—and read by light of a tin lantern until the weary body fell off the bench and the weary brain hummed with a demons’ litany of discutients, femurs, carminatives, and tartareous adhesions. The Latin learned so slowly, the trip to a strange city on borrowed money, the waiting-on-table, the long lectures listened to by tired ears, the shoveling-of-coal, the first cadaver to excite the spirit—

  Doubtless his father was more of an ideal and symbol to Willie Mann than the National Flag; definitely more of an ideal and symbol than a vague thought of the President and the Congress and the engraved unfinished dome of the National Capitol. So what would Doctor say if he knew about Willie and Katrine? What would Doctor say—what would Doctor do—if—?

  Hard lines, waiting to hear. Oh, hard lines.

  The letter came finally, and gave to Willie a release and a freedom and vigor he did not well deserve, and knew that he did not well deserve.

  It was not the only letter she wrote to him, but it was the only one which reached him until the spring of 1864.

  It was after the Evening of Fireflies, and word had come that the soldier boys should prepare to depart on Wednesday. Sunday the skies wept at thought of their going. The Fiedenbrusters attended one church, the Manns another, so there was not even a glimpse of Katty to be caught in the wet of noon. In afternoon Willie put an old piece of blanket over his head in lieu of mackintosh, and walked to the Fiedenbruster place where things were dismal in the extreme. The two youngest boys were sick abed with whooping-cough and you could hear them whooping like animals or Indians or something as you sat in the sitting room. Wempkie and Marta insisted on keeping their elders company, and Katrine was indignant about this, and spoke shortly to her sisters and her face became colored as always when she was angry. She sat and looked out of the little window and Willie thought she was mad at him. He suggested Authors—the Fiedenbruster girls owned a set of the cards, each card decorated with imposing pictures of Dickens and Wordsworth and Shakespeare and folks like that; if Marta asked Wempkie for Love’s Labour’s Lost, Number Two, and Wempkie didn’t have it, then when it came your turn you could say, Marta, do you happen to have Midsummer Night’s Dream, Number Two? Sometimes Authors was a jolly business; but Mrs. Fiedenbruster wouldn’t let them play on this day because it was Sunday. She said, No, mein Kinder, hickory nuts you can crack.

  Katty said pettishly, Ach, Mamma, it won’t do no good. All last year’s nuts, and dried up. Not fit to eat.

  It was dull indeed; the drizzle kept up outside. Jake Fiedenbruster slumbered noisily on the sofa in the kitchen-dining room with a red handkerchief over his bearded face; and the other children read Sunday School books around the kitchen table . . . those were all they were allowed to read. Willie went home early, and was cross with his sisters; and back at the other house Katty covered herself with a comforter on her bed and Wempkie’s, and cried. He couldn’t know that, of course, but she told him later.

  Monday dawned as prettily painted as Sunday had been the tone of zinc. Willie went out to do his chores (only two more mornings would he do them) and he was so charged with life and strength that he roared martial songs at the top of his voice while he loped about with forks and pails. We leave our plows and workshops, sang Willie Mann or more properly chanted Willie Mann with sublime disregard of pitch because he could never carry a tune on a shovel, our wives and children dear, with hearts too full for utterance, and but a silent tear.

  His mother heard him, and thought of how the dead Samuel had once sung, with more melody, and she lay crying as she looked at bright light making gilt out of the slanted walls across from her.

  His father heard him, and snorted, half in his sleep and half awake. Not quite a silent tear, observed Doctor in a mumble.

  But Willie’s mother thought of the dead Sam, and of Willie’s departure day-after-tomorrow, and she cried steadily if silently. Doctor was lying on his back with yellow hairs of his beard intertwined with darker curlier hairs of his chest where his nightshirt hung open, and he realized that his wife was crying and why she was crying. He struggled round in bed until he could put both arms around Minnie; so she cried, so he tended and soothed her by saying nothing but by holding her close.

  We dare not look behind us, roared the youth at the stable, but steadfastly before. We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more. Morning glories were candies of pink and blue where they crawled on the trellis against the privy wall, warming wider and wider although the sun was not yet high; nasturtiums were orange and gold butter spread on the green bread of the lawn beside the well-curb; the tiger cat named Victoria sat on the wooden walk with legs cocked wide, and scrubbed herself with a harsh pink tongue. We are coming, we are coming, our Union to restore— Florence had built up the kitchen fire, and smoke smelled sweet; it promised toast and eggs and fried salt pork to come, to say nothing of the best red cherry preserves ever made.

  Willie thought of the holiday to be his as soon as morning chores were done, because soon he was going to the war. He thought of Beverly’s Timber, and the crawling of Beverly’s Creek, and the wide brown hole where first he had learned to swim, and where catfish hung dreaming outside the porticos of limestone where in earlier summer they made their nests and guarded their eggs. He thought of hazel thickets he had known in frosty fall; and now in July the grass would turn its tall length flat and lie in springy windrows like little glades of Nature’s featherbeds stretching from bunch of brush to bunch of brush.

  ...Would you like to go there with me?

  ...Ja.

  So that was the way he dreamed it. Within the hour after breakfast he stood at the Fiedenbruster kitchen door with his old stained straw hat in his hand . . . aw, Katty. Please ask your Ma. We could have a splendid pic-nic party: just you and me. You won’t have to fix anything—I’d fetch all the sandwiches and truck, and we got half a hen left from Sunday dinner in the cooler. And a jar of Ma’s grapejuice. I’ll bait your hook and everything; you won’t have to touch a worm.

  My mother might not let me go. Alone in the woods—with a young man. Nein, she might not—

  Dog my cats, I’ll ask her myself! He shooed Katty aside with enthusiasm, and found Mrs. Fiedenbruster in the buttery, lifting a damp cloth filled with white curds. There he asked her. The old clock spoke persistently on its shelf above the sink—the clock brought from Bavaria with such care, and it had monkeys and vines and rose petals painted on the front. The rooms were strangely silent, except for that clock, for all the rest of the Fiedenbrusters worked in field or garden save for the ailing little boys, and they dozed.

  The mother pushed her specs down on her round nose and peered intently over them. I do not know. Katty is so young a girl— But you are a good boy, Willie. And you go to war. Maybe you get killed, nein? She took up a corner of her wide blue apron to touch the honest wetness in her eyes.

  Mutter, that you should not say!
>
  But it could be. Ja, Katrine, you may go for pic-nic by Willie Mann. Across the road you must go, and through the long cornfield. I do not wish the neighbors should see you go—two, alone. And Willie, you take good care of mein Katchen?

  Course I will.

  No female Fiedenbruster dared permit a boy to prepare the luncheon to be carried to Beverly’s Timber or anywhere else, so Katty was a long while about cutting and wrapping the food, and would have been an even longer while about fixing her curls and getting into her fresh checked gingham. But her mother hastened her up. Mrs. Fiedenbruster deemed it wise that the other children should be unaware of this rustic festivity. They might be allowed to think that Katty had been permitted to spend the day at the Mann house, with Willie and his sisters; ja, that was what they could think. Jacob she might tell, Jacob she might not tell: she would decide later . . . come, come, little daughter, away with thee before the girls come from the garden in; and at the gate thy Willie is already with fishing poles. . . .

  Corn waited to conceal them, corn was a wilderness with its sharp-edged bent swords of leaves, and the new silk a beauty at the tip of every heartening ear. Solemnly the girl and the boy moved down the long damp corn-row; it was a task; if Katty moved first the leaves chafed at her hands and face; if Willie went ahead the long leaves whipped back and spatted Katty; but they made their way, the corn smelled youthfully rich and filled with strong green juice; they made their way.

  He took down two rails of Mr. Beverly’s fence, so that he might aid Katty across with a minimum of skirt-hoisting, and then with care he replaced the rails—set them solidly back into their notches.