Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  Everybody made a sound. The sergeant touched his lips with his tongue. Bub, can you put her back?

  Reckon I can. But I’d have to use both arms.

  Don’t rupture your belly, bub.

  Shan’t.

  ...And all eyes still on him as he bent his knees and brought his body low, keeping his huge feet close together. He put both arms around that barrel and suddenly pushed himself erect and brought the barrel up against his chest. He slammed it back in the wagon and the whole wagon shook, loaded as it was. Tite turned around to face the crowd; he was laughing. Flour dust was on his black hair and his dark face, and tears or sweat ran down through the dust and left tracks.

  Sergeant, I could break you in two.

  By cracky, said Buford. (He was a model churchman; never swore.) I’m beat if you couldn’t. Ain’t but one thing to do. He offered his hard freckled hand, and it disappeared in Tite’s dark hairy grasp, and they stood chuckling. Other folks went up to slap the flour barrel and to see if any two of them could move it, but they couldn’t.

  Willie Mann had been less than ten days in Andersonville when one morning he stood by the North Gate watching some fresh fish come in. Rebel sergeants were leading newly-instituted Nineties into various areas, designating these areas as places for them to settle themselves; which was all very well, except that by this time practically every square inch of habitable ground was already taken up by pioneer squatters, so there were bound to be fights. Suddenly a mighty black-and-blue shape loomed out at Willie, and he went scrambling past the populace to throw his arms around Titus Cherry.

  Tite stared long, down into Willie’s face. He said, You’re mighty poor. Just skin and bone.

  I never had much more than skin and bones, Tite. When’d they get you?

  Twas a Friday. I was out a-foraging with Linton and MacCarrick. They tried to cut for it, and both got shot. I gave myself up. He said these things in a tired awed voice, not the genial rumble of the Tite Cherry whom Willie had known as a fellow campaigner. Both eyes seemed peering distantly into the sky; it was as if Titus had had one crossed eye before, now he had both of them crossed. This place, he said, this place. What is it?

  Hell, Tite. They call it Camp Sumter. Andersonville. You had any rations today?

  Not since yesterday. They gave us cowpeas when we were on the cars, and a little bit of mule.

  Come along to our shebang. I got some corn bread saved.

  So he had, but when he offered it to Tite the big chap squeezed his eyes shut and made a gesture of refusal.

  Oh, come on. It hain’t too bad. Just coarse and dry—no salt.

  It’s all dirty and got cobs ground in it. I’ll go without.

  Someone might have struck him a heavy blow with a fence-rail, the moment Tite entered at the gate. That was the way he acted—dazed and disbelieving. He appeared to be telling himself, This is not true, this will fade away. He answered the questions Willie put to him about the Twenty-ninth Missouri, and whether they had thought Willie dead, and whether Titus knew whether Willie had been reported as killed— He answered questions dutifully, sleepily, as if there were some secret Other Person whom he had to consult before he could come up with the answers. In between times he would turn his majestic head from side to side, taking in the stockade and its people and its stench and its noises—rejecting the whole business and probably assuring himself that he would wake up soon.

  Going Without was one thing for a little shaver like Willie, and quite another thing for Titus. . . . There wasn’t room for him in the shebang where Willie dwelt, though Willie tried to have his friend included, no matter which Ninety he was in. At nightfall Tite went down the hill to bunk with the fresh fish with whom he’d arrived, and to contribute his blouse as partial covering for a new shebang. He did everything demanded of him with docility, yet his thoughts seemed far away. Willie had not been long enough in the stockade to have observed intimately such cases; yet there were many. The hatchet of horror lay waiting for certain men the moment they stepped through the North Gate; it came up invisibly and struck them between the eyes, its blade went deep, the hatchet fractured their skulls and the will and the purpose and the reason lurking inside; everything was splintered, they could not put the pieces together again; so they died, so Titus Cherry died.

  He would not eat. Willie ranted at him, cursed him, knelt and prayed beside him. He talked of Duty, parents, Tite’s little brother who would long to see him return— He spoke deliriously of good times they would have, back in Missouri together— He should go to Canton and join Tite and Tite’s people; Tite should come to visit him— They’d spread long tables out-of-doors under the wild grape arbor, they’d invite all the Fiedenbrusters and Moberlys, doughnuts and roast beef and baked apples and roasting ears would be theirs.

  But in the meantime you got to feed on something, Tite. Can’t exist solely on air. Bad as these rations be, you got to relish them.

  Know what I saw, Will, know what I saw?

  Oh, don’t tell me that again!

  It was down below there towards the sinks. Two men a-squatting with that running-off-of-the-bowels. And this other man—he was crippled—

  Tite, you got to think of other matters! You got to keep your mind healthy. I tell you, it goes on all the time— I’ve seen it, everybody’s seen it, tain’t anything new!

  He crawled right along behind them. Soon as one would get through with his business, he’d move along and then get the feeling and go to squatting again. This cripple would dig in his business. He was getting chunks of stuff—corn bread and it looked like potatoes—that the other man had et. Went right through him, never even changed color. And Willie, Willie, he was—

  Oh, God alive! All right—say it, it ain’t anything new— He was eating the stuff. Because he was hungry! Tite, you got to eat. I tell you, you got to. Not that. You don’t—

  Picking it out of all that loose business. I saw him. Little pieces of bread and— He was crawling along, eating it—

  Or sometimes it was dead bodies which bothered him more, as his fever and lassitude grew intense; but usually it was a scene such as he had witnessed near the sinks. Flesh hung on him like loose clothing, his sagging hollow cheeks were pink and later yellow beneath the grime. He slept, sat, walked, later tottered alone. The sinks fascinated him, and the marsh beside the sinks, and he sat for long periods staring, with wide gummy lips moving soundlessly under his raw black beard.

  Willie had little left to sell, but now he sold the housewife with its needles, pins, coils of thread, scissors, brass thimble, buttons. He bought meat, vegetables and rice, cooking them for Titus in his big tin cup, to have each offering declined as the first corn bread had been declined. . . . The meat was dog or cat, the rice had worms, the vegetables were poisoned by the Rebs. (This was later, when Tite’s mind as well as his vision began to sweep to far and absurd places.) One cupful of stew he managed to upset and waste when he swept out a gaunt hand to gesture refusal. . . . Willie was a philosopher. He had been fond of Titus, he had loved him as much as any other comrade, as much as he had loved Rom Hillburner; he squeezed out tears for Titus, but he wolfed the other food as fast as Tite turned it away.

  When Titus Cherry could stand no longer but lay jerking on his sodden blanket and recognizing no one, Willie prevailed upon two men from his shebang to help him carry Tite to the surgeons at the gate. First morning there was a dreadful press, and they couldn’t even lug Tite through to be noted; the cries of That’s All, No More, No More, Wait Until Tomorrow— These cries arose only fifteen minutes or so after they had fetched him. The other men growled about it; through his starvation Tite held only a fraction of the weight he’d owned when campaigning, but still the burden was nothing to be ignored by sickly men. Next morning Willie scratched amid his few effects and came up with a broken pocket comb and two iron staples which had fallen from the ration cart one day and which Wil
lie had picked up quickly. The staples might be used as implements of some sort; he had hoped to keep the comb, because he could rid himself of many vermin with that; but nothing counted at this time but getting Titus to the hospital (though few people recovered strength in the hospital. The vast majority of them died as soon as they were lugged there. Still the thought of Hospital was a poultice to apply against whatever brotherly affection remained to Willie Mann). He offered these articles to the same men who’d helped him carry Tite on the previous day; one refused, one accepted the staples, and Willie enlisted a man from Tite’s own mess through payment of the comb. They started very early, and thus got Tite through the gate and into a stall. There one orderly prescribed Dose Number Three, which was for scorbutus and all wrong; then a surgeon came by and shook his head, and tagged Titus Cherry for Hospital. He died there on a plank two or three days later, unconscious but mumbling until near the end.

  I won’t die, said Willie. God damn. I won’t. Pa, I won’t die. Katty (now the sheerest of visions, vague and papery), I won’t die. Won’t drink the water neither.

  He chewed dryly, he chewed with his sore jaws, he chewed the bitter woody bread, chewed beans and the worms which dwelt in them. Part of the shebang where he lived was formed from a square of oilcloth which Willie had retained in his knapsack on capture. The first young Confederates did not preëmpt it, and—later, obeying some fortunate instinct—Willie put the oilcloth inside his shirt. So he brought it into the stockade, and it was impermeable at first, though the oiled part began to flake off under the burning sun. But August developed with recurrent fierce rains, many of them occurring at night; old-timers said it had been like that in June when it rained twenty days straight—some said it rained twenty-four days in June. Since early spring the earth of Georgia had held no thirst.

  The loose soil was soaked, swollen past saturation. Occasionally it rejected a fresh onrush, and in one afternoon of early August its rejection was violent. Hour after hour a downpour thrummed on woodland, stockade; it pounded the dripping huddled masses of mankind within pine-stalked limits. Trickles ran down north slope and south, they widened into cascades; the stolid marsh became a lake pocked with infinite stabbings, the slow-crawling creek became a torrent. Yellow tide frothed and clung against those posts which were driven near the commonly-oozing streamlet. The tall logs had been high and dry before, now they were laved. Laving became a battering, each pole weakened in its socket. Deeply those trunks had been imbedded, but water weighted through the coarse ground; its constant pushing stroke could not be resisted.

  First a single log of the eastern palisade swayed (benefit accomplished for a space: a portion of the accumulated sewage would be swept out of the stockade down the flat valley. But soon it would be replaced by new seepage) and the massive length of wood leaned hard against another beside it. The combined heaviness of the two was enough to urge a third post from its socket. So it went: in minutes a dozen thick jack-straws had tumbled and splashed. There was a gap in the stockade.

  On high ground immediately west of this aperture, men rose from drenched hovels in disbelief. No wall, they cried in the rain, not believing it. Look at that hole! Promptly they came swarming from this same high ground, which was called the Island because ordinarily a pond of fetid ooze twisted to the north of it, and an equal morass curved to the south. Look at that hole! Stockade’s gone!

  They leaped swearing and screeching, some swam in the force of the cascade, others were running on the banks. Hundreds of prisoners on the twin slopes also had observed this catastrophe which might prove to be a release to all the thwarted and unkempt, so they came jumping.

  Not a shot was fired by any guard. Some people thought later that the drilling rain had dampened their enemies’ powder charges and caps, as it had cooled the prisoners’ will to burst free. A wise battle-toughened sergeant cried an order, and frightened Reserves came tumbling from their shacks. The word was passed along, and quickly, around the south boundary. It reached the earthen fort and the camp to the southwest beyond and the camp to the northwest opposite the North Gate. Squads, companies, guards not On Parapet came to mill at the breach, urged by those few officers alert to the danger involved, urged by the babbling Lieutenant Davis.

  Henry Wirz was not on duty. He was gone to Augusta, reported sick, the surgeon pecked at his arm. But among frantic subordinates left to discharge the duties he had laid out there were enough to form a nucleus of strength. They marshalled quaking boys, coughing graybeards, they held them along the boundaries of the raw river and formed them there with guns level, bayonets fixed.

  Skies kept melting and falling, the hose of mettlesome gods was directed down. On one side of the gap scarecrow Yankees congregated, on the other side herded scarecrow hobbledehoys and patriarchs—but with the impact of weapons. No boy tried to gallop past them or sought to pierce the tide and swim to freedom beneath its crest. Reinforcements trotted through the dark rain until prisoners gazed across the breach into a solidity of muzzles and steel. Philosophers said wearily, It couldn’t be. Twas too lucky to happen. They turned back to whatever shelter they had left, whatever other shelter they could find or imagine. In time the storm ceased its pounding. Within a night and a day laborers had made the stockade as solid as it was before, and no flash flood of equal proportions came again.

  In such thudding storms Willie Mann claimed the right to adjust his portion of tent-patching to his needs. In darkness he would lie with the broken oilcloth funneled toward his mouth, and rainwater would drip or pour, depending on the amount and velocity of rain— It would be directed into Willie’s open mouth. Thus he drank. These periodic dilutions were accomplished amid snarls and resentments of his tentmates . . . if you weren’t such a plaguèd young fool, and bound to sop up rainwater, we could all be laying fairly snug. . . . After discussion and prevailing acrimony during saner hours, it was agreed that Eph Bainbridge’s overcoat should be extended to help cover the gap left by Willie’s oilcloth, and that Willie should betake himself into other regions—clear away from the shebang, over against the deadline, and that he should lie unsheltered—when again he chose to absorb the gift of the rain. He did not tell his mates how bad the rain tasted. It was tainted with the prison’s effluvia as it came down; effluvia seemed to lie like a mattress above the thirty-odd thousand men and their reek. By the time the rain had dashed down to proximity with the crowded trampled earth it was noxious with retchings and throat-clearings and smells of disordered digestions, with the taint of corpses which had been more dead than alive when they were alive.

  How many gallons less had he drunk in this year of 1864 than he had drunk in the year of 1863? There was no way of estimating. He saw a spreading fountain somewhere off in the past or the future, such a fountain as was pictured in the Versailles of their one European travel book at home; and that fountain, with foamy push and laving, represented the canteens and cups and reservoirs which Willie had not poured down his hard-surfaced throat. He thought that his throat was made of old harness, he thought that his throat was sunburnt and peeling as his bony face was peeling and burnt. Desperately he worked at manipulating the scrawny portion of his trunk which hung flat beneath the hoops of his ribs; it wouldn’t do to grow costive, there were no physics to be had, and he was one inmate for whom diarrhoea held little threat—he’d only had a touch of it twice, both times mildly. When he witnessed his own feces he thought that a rabbit must have been halting there instead of Willie Mann.

  ...Thunder tussled in the southwest and a deluge burst upon the soaked stockade shortly before midnight. Clouds had gloomed and pressed low as if challenging the slivers atop the fence to rip them open; so in time they were ripped. Willie lay half submerged in a pool, close to the deadline on the steep north slope. Oilcloth covered the upper portion of his body, and stiffly he held his thin elbows immobile and pressed his palms up to tilt the long-punished fabric. The ill-favored ill-flavored storm distributed its substance into h
is mouth, flowing over cracks in his lips, filling cracks inside his mouth which felt like the cracks in a plaster wall.

  Lightning had been gashing since the storm broke, but suddenly a thrust came close enough to singe the hair in any man’s nostrils. Willie’s ears popped; he thought that he had been struck and torn and melted by the blaze (vaguely he recalled a farmer back home who’d had the watch melted in his pocket and the nails melted in his boots when he was struck). For a while Willie could see nothing but the rough ball of fire which had seemed to bounce on earth beside him, he could smell nothing but scorched brimstone and sulphur and storied chemicals. Prisoners hallooed in the nearer shebangs, and wanted to know who had been hit. Maybe no one had been hit, but you would have thought that a dozen people had been tossed and carved by the lightning’s lash, the crash of bursting cannon.

  Willie felt cold all along his side. He was drenched, he had been drenched before, but this was a strange and different coldness. Had lightning tapped the blood from his body, was his blood chill instead of warm? He flung out his right hand. There was a bubbling, a running in the mud.

  Willie Mann rose up on shaking knees. The next glare told him the truth . . . a stream, a small stream of clear water was coming his way, flowing desperately toward and around him. Another flare: he could see it rising in lather and bubbles from muck within the deadline space, carrying chunks of clay, swirls of mud, carrying scraps of bark and even pebbles on its crest. It wasn’t the rain . . . this was colder than rain, by God it was clearer than rain. He could see it in repeated explosions of the crazy sky. It was a little brook, a spring, it was coming out of the ground.