Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  He fell forward, burying his face in the flow, draining mouthful after mouthful, trying to condemn his stony throat to a banquet of swallowing. This was something to drown in, he would drown in it. Then he rose, supporting himself on trembling hands as he screamed with all his strength, Water! Fresh water! It’s a spring! He did not distribute these tidings with any notion of sharing a treat with the rank and file of fellow men; it was only that he had to voice the discovery, bellow it above cracking thunder in order to reassure himself that it was true.

  Within a matter of seconds there were fifty men tumbled around him, guzzling like spooks shed by the bursting night; and more scores came shoving on top of them.

  Previous moisture had been nothing but the muck of obscenity; now there was Grace. How did it taste? It was Doctor’s water and Katty’s advised water: pure and cool and clear. It tasted as a forest pool where none but clean russet-coated beasts assembled to drink, and where unspoiled Indians bowed to drink and pray. It was the spring found by Daniel Boone when Boone came tramping in youth, prime, or frosty age. It tasted of simple and pretty things: violets, and taffy, and winter making pine-tree patterns on a thin sharp windowpane. It was Beverly’s Creek with crawdads scuttling, and the blue-purple-sky-colored bird being delicate in woodsy air overhead, the miniature bird the virgin boy and virgin girl had seen and heard, the bird without a name. It was the well at Grandpappy’s house, where butter and cheese hung in a damp sack, and sometimes fresh little wild strawberries were put down there to keep them cool. O water, O bittersweet the cleanliness; it carried its own spice, not the meager drip of disconsolate rainfall; but you could taste the clarity of this stuff for all the rain which smashed upon it. The stream grew wider, it came in free panic seeping under the sagging timber of the deadline, it flowed and talked of Church and Christ Himself, it rippled of Home. Lightning reeked persistently, lightning was like fragrant lilacs in the bubbling reflection. Water, water, fresh water here, a hundred dollars a drink! Yells lost the restriction of words, all yells united in a single persistent whooping blast; and cripples tried to share as well, but many of them were knocked down or aside as the rush went on. Guards crouched under the slanting roofs of their sentry stations, they did not like to step out in the rain; some men feared that guards might shoot into the scrambling mass, and already weaker individuals were being shoved fairly across the deadline, and the deadline broke, but still the guards held their fire. He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink. . . . Clear and cool and pure, as the saintly Doctor and the saintly Katty had ordered.

  ...Tasted of ferns, and wake-robins which opened early and pale when blackbirds were teetering on new green reeds and making their chink sounds . . . O springtime when bees came swarming, and sap had climbed clear up into the bundles of new maple seeds. Dear water—it might have been released by thunder’s pulsation or the spear-thrust of lightning itself, and already a dozen prisoners announced staunchly that they had witnessed the very bolt which drilled the ground. It might have been released by the heaviness of saturation of soaked sandy soil . . . all those torrents of June, these new freshets of ugly August uniting to disturb the hard-tamped anchorage of a hillside where every tree had been felled, where a ditch had been spaded out, where roughly squared pine trunks had been socketed, where an ancient sweet spring had been hidden and trodden into muteness.

  It was the deep round narrow haunted cistern at home, where you busied yourself with rope and bucket on washday, filling the family tubs before you took yourself off to school; yes, that wine from the cistern was rainwater, but not the rainwater of Andersonville funneled from rotten blankets, from draped overcoats with the taste of forgotten blood and forgotten piss in them . . . ah, so long tanked among dark buried limestone and cistern lining that the water awarded itself the flavor of a native spring, nor did it smell like rainwater longer.

  Knowing nothing of this magic breaking forth, Ira Claffey stirred on his bed beyond the stockade and the southwest hill. He emerged from a dream about one of his dead sons, and was aware of lightning’s brilliance and protracted thunder. He might have heard (he did not hear, at this time) a child speaking from memory. Lucy it was.

  ...Where do they sleep?

  ...Ah, there’s that moss. Where do you think?

  ...And for table linen, too. Would they let me drink their water?

  ...Assuredly. That’s the reason they keep it running. Here, child, I’ll make a cup of my hand . . . miniature fairies of the damp sort, scarcely as big as your finger.

  ...I saw one, whilst I was drinking.

  It was not frozen, it was not ice, it was running loose in a summer night in Georgia, yet it had the perfume of icicles. You were a little boy again, and there came an exceptionally heavy snow to swaddle the roofs, and then a quick thaw, and then a freeze again. They hung in tapering clubs at the corner of the house where the slope of the rear portion met the slope of the front. Icicles were a menace, and Doctor said to knock them down with a pole; so you knocked them down, and it was sport. But the tiniest stilettos of all, the baby daggers on the summer kitchen eave—these you did not set to falling and crashing. These you broke off and carried in your red mitten until the hairs of yarn grew crimson against the icicles, and you sucked the icicles as you walked; they tasted crisp and of winter.

  It was a fresh apple, this water, a harvest apple eaten before it was quite ripe, but still a softer apple than the one Katty had hidden in your lunch bucket. It was feast and comfort for a good elderly dog named Ben. Here, old fellow, you’re panting at a great rate—and you’re so warm in that heavy coat of yours— Here’s the pan. And lap, lap, lap eternally after you had set the pan of clear water before him; lap, lap, lap, lap with a long tongue as pink as boiled meat; and the gratitude he offered when he came to sink his muzzle upon your knee. . . .

  O wild grapes with their tan, O inner bark of slippery elm, O tang and tendril of sorrel growing crisp: these tastes were there. High on a shaded hillside in Beverly’s Timber the winding gully cut its course, and there stood an elm in serenity—not a slippery elm, but one of another kind—with a great bared root outthrust, and the root had grown bark upon it like the trunk of the tree. Scored deeply across this mighty root, a little stream came down. Sometimes it dried to nothingness in late summer when no rains fell, but usually it was there, in winter it might be frozen, usually it was there, a baby waterfall across the root, a fall three inches wide and perhaps a foot long in the falling. It had built the dark depression by its own persistence over the bulk of that elm root, and when you were small you could lie at length beside the resulting pool and put your face beneath the hollowed root and let the waterfall wash your face and drown your mouth. Even slim Willie had grown too tall, by the time he was thirteen, to fit into the gully and force his face under the vertical pouring, but he remembered the wet clear drowning. So he remembered it this night.

  As Willie Mann remembered, a thousand other men remembered beneficent drinks they had had; but not all of them were capable of entertaining the poetry Willie entertained; very few were capable of entertaining it. Something said in their souls, Water has come, it’s here, it has burst from the hill, look out for that deadline, and when they’d scrambled and fought to absorb their share and more than their share, there might have been the briefest flash of recollection: a horse-trough in which a youth bathed his hot head, the welcome bitterness of cool beer in a riverside saloon, a natural flowing well where sulphur and other ingredients formed corded flowers and patterns beneath the foam, a lonely cave where stalactites dripped.

  But it was Willie’s water, he called it his own, he was the first prisoner to detect and taste it. For a time he lay recumbent beneath the scuffle, alternately sucking through the short tube he made of his lips, or plowing his entire face into the current. Then, as the rush and crush and fight developed to a point of actual danger—as men wailed and swore and caught weaker men by the arms or legs and dragged
them away, bound to usurp their places— Willie had been kicked enough. He staggered off to a safe distance with water splashing inside him as if he carried a tin pail within his tight-drawn skin. He lay down and belched; a small portion of the water arose with belching and trickled from the corners of his mouth . . . but he had Gone Without, he had Gone Without for a very long time, and now he had drunk his rich reward and soon would drink again.

  The riot continued. Lightning snapped at gradually decreasing intervals, but the flashes were quaking longer as the storm moved on. Wide-spread electricity revealed every filament of the scene with clear exactness: there was the stockade towering with the nearest sentry shack cut sharp on an impressive green-lilac sky—you could even see the shakes of the sentry-shack roof which had curled like leaves in a summer sun—you could see the guard and count his whiskers and see him spit. Then blackness ruled, hurting the eyes; groans and yells and admiration of the miracle continued; then another extensive glaring quivering, and closer at hand you witnessed the tufted heads, the bald heads, the tangle of ragged shapes bending, squirming, elbowing, beating about, making a herding as beasts should never herd—bound to drink, bound to drink the good water for which Providence exacted not one red cent; and no one else could put a price upon it, for it issued from beyond the deadline.

  Wirz was gone, Wirz was sick abed. But the next day Lieutenant Davis looked down from the parapet and ordered a sluice to be built, conducting the flow past the deadline into camp. Make it long enough, he ordered. I don’t want that gang busting them posts and scantlings down. Davis knew that if there was too much shooting by the guards at this particular point there would be some sort of investigation; Davis hated investigations chiefly because of the paper work entailed. It was no skin off his behind: there were plenty of springs outside the stockade to supply the Confederates amply, and so no need to conduct the new little stream in a westerly direction, through the fence itself. Davis would never have spent the effort or the attention necessary to drill a deep well for the prisoners; but since the storm had dug one the prisoners could have the use of it. Furthermore, there would now be less incentive for people to sink deep wells; thus opportunities for tunneling would be decreased.

  A. R. Hill and his police brought about a form of discipline that day; the discipline continued tolerably. At any hour you could look that way and see two extensive lines of prisoners shambling along, moving by degrees toward the sluice and filling their cups, their cans, their broken canteens, their leaky kettles. Some who owned no such equipment merely stood in line, waiting for the treat of drinking from their dirty hands; and then they returned to the end of the line and gradually progressed springwards again for another drink; it was something to do.

  Providence Spring, they called it universally. Many were the sermons recited by worshipping lay parsons who spoke their pieces throughout the stockade whenever and wherever a congregation might be assembled. They ascribed the phenomenon to direct interference by Celestial engineers, and more than one man swore that he had seen angels at the spot. Only the most hard-bitten heretics stood on the outskirts, heckling and desiring to know why God hadn’t acted sooner, before their comrades died from drinking the maggoty reek of the marsh. By and large the flow was accepted as evidence that the One Above had not forgotten the stockade and the people in it, no matter how many generals and exchange commissioners had chosen apparently to forget.

  Willie Mann read his soiled Bible with new energy, and was very near to becoming one of those same lay preachers. But he did not sermonize, he only read aloud from the Book to any friends who would listen. He thrilled at each reference to springs or brooks or just plain water which he might find, and he found them in the Psalms, but of course the seventeenth chapter of Exodus was his favorite text at the time, along with Numbers, Twenty. Sometimes Revelations. A mean scarecrow sauntered past and halted to jibe at him. Willie glowered in a rush of returning strength. It seemed that his bones jangled together when he moved, that his young muscles had shriveled from ropes to threads; but he rushed upon the profane scoffing heathen and hurled him flat in the mud. His congregation cheered him derisively. Willie went on reading aloud.

  They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.

  For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.

  More sharply, more eagerly distinct than in weeks, Katty moved through the Biblical incidents which came to his attention in reading. She wore Hebraic robes and trod the wilderness. Willie regarded Providence Spring as a portent . . . had he suffered doubts before, had he doubted when he watched Titus Cherry die? Now he knew. He would return to Missouri, he would walk once more in the timber, he would wed Katty, they would have flocks of children. They would have a deep well, clear and pure; and on August days the children would petition him for cool drinks, and so as soon as they were big enough he would train them to operate the well-sweep or maybe the windlass—he didn’t know just what sort of machinery he would have. But he heard the water trickling . . . it was there for him to drink, for all men to drink.

  Guards talked about it outside, and so Ira Claffey came to hear of the spring. He listened with wonder, he heard his sons chatting and drinking there, he heard the voice of small Lucy, heard his own voice. . . . Here, child, I’ll make a cup of my hand. Beneath this rock, so. Now you bend down—take care, don’t wet your boots and skirts— That’s the way.

  XLII

  Cato Dillard searched his conscience and found himself remiss. In first years of the war he had made a kind of game out of discovering Biblical support for the Secessionist cause. When Prophets discussed people of the North he knew of course that they referred to historic or fabled Hebraic wars. The Prophets were not cognizant of Abolitionists, or of greasy mechanics from urban New York and Pennsylvania who must now be considered as supporting the Republicans and Abolitionists, no matter how much they might differ in private theory. Cato Dillard was far too intelligent to believe so.

  But still it was a game and titillating; it taxed his powers of research and application. Always he shone before a challenge.

  Effie Dillard labeled the Southern cause as Right, and the Northern cause as Wrong. She prayed nightly that Lincoln would be packed out of his White House, and that Washington City, New York City, Philadelphia and Chicago might know the triumphant tread of gray columns. She let it go at that, she was too busy in the application of her flouncing ardent Christianity to waste hours in poking after a reassuring Text.

  Both the old people suffered anguish as their grandsons were destroyed (five were gone by this August of 1864—and all in the past eight months: two dead of disease, two of wounds, one killed in a Hood’s cavalry skirmish) and then they found comfort in the stout draught of Faith. They believed that a general family pic-nic of Dillards and their descendants would ensue during that sunny afternoon following Resurrection Morn.

  In early months Cato had thought of conflict within Andersonville just as he’d typified it in speech: brawling. His witnessing of the raiders’ execution, and subsequent examination of the motives involved, shattered this opinion. The men had died attended by an officer of the Catholic church; they were Catholics; surely the priest would have refused his services in the mere conclusion of a brawl. Ira assured the Reverend Mr. Dillard that those hanged had been sentenced by a Yankee court, defended by Yankee lawyers, prosecuted by Yankee lawyers or men serving as such. So Redeemed Yankees had sentenced Unredeemed Yankees to the worst penalty on earth . . . naturally there were worse penalties in the Hereafter . . . it was disquieting to think that, by law of averages, there must be many elect Presbyterians milling within the stockade . . . religionists conducted services, Cato himself had heard their songs arise.

  He besought the Scriptures again to relieve his confusion.

  Now, thou s
on of man, wilt thou judge, wilt thou judge the bloody city? . . . Cato read Ezekiel, on through all the talk of whoredoms and abominations which never ceased to offend him; because he was pure, had remained pure through his life, taught purity to his children, trusted in turn that they had passed this limpid inheritance on to the next generation. And Aholah played the harlot . . . and she doted on her lovers, on the Assyrians her neighbors . . . which were clothed with blue, captains and rulers, all of them desirable young men, horsemen riding upon horses. Yankee cavalry, beyond a doubt.

  Mr. Dillard sighed, thudded his Bible shut, opened it again on the Gospels instead of the Prophets. Always he had imagined St. Mark as owning a voice firm but gentle, and especially gentle as he recounted the exploits and recited the words of the Gentlest Man. Cato Dillard’s own father had possessed such a voice, such a spirit.

  ...So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast

  seed into the ground;

  And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed

  should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.

  Cato Dillard lifted his gaze from the fine-lettered page, and snuffed his candle, and sat pillowed up in darkness beside his slumbering wife. He looked across sharp patches of moonlight on the old carpet, and through the window into moonlight washing warmly his own garden.

  For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the

  blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.