Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  It is this: a small penknife. I bought it in Paris several years ago. It does not look like much but— Now, do as I do. Hold it up to the light, and apply your eye to this tiny hole. What see you?

  El Lobo bayed with delight. A beautiful woman! And without clothing. And all in color!

  The men clustered eagerly to view in their turns.

  Natán, this is a hard life for women. I have a woman friend, I have had many others, but they cannot dwell in these chambers of rock for long. It makes them complain, and also their presence causes much dissension among the men. But this woman you have just given me— Ah, she can delight me when I am lonely. Has she a name?

  I have never given her one.

  Then I shall give her one. I’ll call her Belita. I like that name, and never have I had a friend named Belita. There, there, Belita, rest snugly in thy private little pocket.

  Adiós. Until a little while.

  No, no, Natán. Farewell forever. I feel that we shall never meet again, but I shall remember thee.

  Nathan and Tomás were escorted to the road where he had been taken in charge by the shepherds, but neither they nor their few sheep were in sight. He said goodbye to Pedro and Joselito, and they stood watching as he moved down the long crooked trace, and he waved back at them many times, and they at him.

  (El Lobo spoke the truth; he and Nathan were not to meet again. In 1859 Nathan read an account of Spanish bandits, in a British magazine. It mentioned El Lobo, and told how he had been captured when he visited Ronda in disguise. He was put into a cell while the authorities wrangled about whether or not he should be condemned to death. They wrangled long, and The Wolf was suffering from consumption. He died in his cell. Nathan was pained to learn of this, but he was able to divorce his own recollection of the bandit from the hateful, coughing, damp, expectorating misery of the picture conjured up. He saw El Lobo always, in his mind’s eye, presiding over rude lunches by hillside fires; he saw him enriched by moonlight, and listening to the wail of his brother wolves even as he slept.)

  Being young and thus inclined toward rebellion, sometimes Nathan Dreyfoos doubted the existence of God, and very often he doubted the benevolence of God. But there were no moments of question or refusal as he progressed slowly eastward and southward through the mountains, hearing far away the mule song, seeing new eagles, marveling eventually at wind playing with loose grain on threshing floors near the villages, knowing that the last range of coastal hills would be roasted brutally by dry summer by the time he arrived there; yet he could carry highland poppies, gay blue straw flowers, the chocolate limbs of stripped cork oaks (curved with promise like the legs and arms of beautiful brown women)— He could carry with him whatever beauties he chose; a sad or an ugly thing he should ignore, he should leave behind him.

  Men of a village walked out to meet him sternly as he reached the outskirts; he dismounted and removed his hat while they paced in close-packed ragged column, for a flat black box was borne on the shoulders of several. They were bound for the white-walled cemetery on the next windy ridge. The coffin was a small one; it was a child who had died. Now that was a sad thing, and should be left behind . . . never carry it consciously; let the very awareness of death die; abandon it in the hills or wherever else it occurs to provoke.

  He passed a troop of gypsies, and one of their women had a wet reddish horror instead of a nose, she was dying of this cancer, and had stuffed a rag into it, and her black eyes, once perhaps as lively as Nathan’s own— Her eyes stared and said, This is a horror, I am it, I am the horror, do you see me, how could you avoid seeing the horror which I am? Her claw came out for the coin he gave; and Nathan thought in momentary agony of the Jew whom most of the Jews rejected, and why had not He chosen to walk Andalucia with His healing ways a good eighteen hundred years after He walked Palestine? This was ugliness; forget it, let the hills forget.

  Nathan thought of his own mother’s voice saying, God go with thee, and thought of the gentle perfection of her soul; and a great fountain of love for mankind and pity for mankind spouted up within him . . . take the beauties along, basket loads of them, bury the miseries beneath clay willing to receive them.

  Here and there he found shrines, some no longer in use, unoccupied by Crosses; others wearing small flowers which the peasants had left, and an old woman in black and two sunny freckled little girls knelt in front of one shrine. Nathan thought of the cave of the two altars, and how the felt of moss was blanketing those fallen rocks, cut and squared and beveled so long before. . . . How many sandaled feet had walked this road, how many bare feet, and for how long a time? How many mules had gone tinkling in file, how many whips had snapped, how many weapons of steel had been lugged by the armies, the retainers, the bandits, the youngest soldiers whooping a song of adventure? Each hill was dignified by its own antiquity . . . yes, yes, so it must be throughout the whole Mediterranean area. Sometime he should go to the land of the Moors, sometime to Egypt, sometime to Greece and the land of the Turks. He knew that in all those regions he would find that same impress of centuries to reassure him. It should have been frightening—the visible evidence, the reminder that human beings had been in love or warring hereabouts for thousands of years—but it was not. It was heartening.

  At fifteen Nathan was growing tall of spirit as already he had grown lengthy of body. He must study more and more, he must ask Mr. Halliburton to lay out an intensive course of reading, so that he could immerse himself in the great ocean of the past. The common truth now occurred to him for the first time (as in the first discovery of all common truths, it seemed very uncommon indeed, strictly personal, strictly his own attainment in thought): that there was no protection against the ills of the present day, no shield against dangers of the future so infallible as the wisdom which arises from a knowledge of the past. This was true, true! Nathan sang discordantly in celebration of this remarkable thought. So he rode on, singing. Would he serve the world as a philosopher or as an antiquarian? He didn’t know, it didn’t matter, he would learn and serve.

  The sun came hotter each day as he neared Málaga. He had bought Tomás a hat of heavy straw, with slits for his ears to stick through. Nathan decided to ask his mother, with her artistic skill, to draw a pen sketch of Tomás thus decked out, and he could keep it always. In Coín, the bandit areas now far behind, he went shopping. Coín was a bustling town, despite its distance from the sea, and there were many shops; Coín was the second largest city in the province, according to the Atlas of Spain put out by Bachiller. Here Nathan found the woven harness on which he’d set his heart; delighted by ornate medallions and colored tassels he permitted himself extravagance which would have brought a perfunctory groan from Solomon Dreyfoos; but Olmedo the gardener would be proud as a duke. And Tomás—he tossed his head, he brayed seventeen times as soon as the new adornment was put upon him. Nathan bought colored sandals for the camereras, a trinket for each of the other servants, a medal of St. Christopher for his tutor, a work basket for his mother, a pill-box of chased silver, very old but with the soft glory of antiquity when it was polished afresh, for his father. On a stifling Sunday evening, just when strolling soldiers and sailors began packing the avenue to smile at girls and whisper compliments if they got a chance, Nathan rode into the courtyard in front of the huge house which they rented from Don Carlos Alessandri. He was home at last, he had wandered for weeks, he had known that he would find delight and the beginnings of maturity in his traveling. He had found them.

  These treasures, invested through years, brought to Nathan a perpetual income—an appanage which could not be withheld from him by any lord chamberlain of the future. It accrued in Andersonville when sorely needed.

  ...Soldier, does stench arise in waves? There’s honeysuckle tangling on a broken tower above the pale sea. Go and find it.

  XLVII

  Commonly the Federals believed that a month’s furlough was the mandatory prize given to any guard who
shot a prisoner. They did not realize how silly this was in its essence. They did not realize that if this were true the mortality from gunshot wounds would have ascended to fantastic heights and that not half the guards would have been left On Parapet, they would have been off enjoying furloughs. A majority of smaller boys among the Reserves were homesick to the point of hysteria, so were many old men. Also the sentry shacks were infested often with nit-brained incompetents who had been rejected by recruiters until this season of Georgia’s downfall, and who grew as murderous under one sort of influence as they might have grown tractable under another.

  Sharing crowded miseries were several hundred citizens who had been gathered up along with the military during raids and Yankee defeats. Most of these citizens were teamsters employed by the National Government; there were sutlers, some topographical engineers, a few male nurses, a few telegraph operators. One of the latter was shot and killed by Private Mackey Nall of the Fourth Georgia Reserves, late in July. The victim was a nearsighted man named Loughran, a native of Cincinnati, whose specs had been broken before ever he was counted Inside. Loughran’s distorted vision could not estimate the fatal breadth of the deadline area, not when a section of scantling had been stolen during the night. Just after sunrise he blundered along the barrier. Mackey Nall screwed his face into a wad and shut his eyes as he fired. Citizen Loughran was dragged away with a ball in his backbone and he died in pain a few hours later, spared the longer pain of a hacking death from the consumption which had thinned him to a mere paring of humanity. Mackey Nall said, I blooded this weapon sure enough, when they stacked their arms on coming Off Parapet. Irby Flincher and Flory Tebbs both felt the tremor of curiosity and envy. How did it feel, to shoot a Yank?

  By Jesus, Sojers, did you listen to him holler?

  We heard him holler but—

  A Yankee ain’t but chicken shit neath my feet! Reckon they all deserve killing.

  Flory and Irby wished to know if Captain Wirz had been cross when he interrogated Mackey.

  Oh, he wasn’t mean about it no way. Just says, Was that prisoner past the deadline, and I said he sure as hell was. Then he says, God damn Yankees ought to stay away from the deadline, or something like that. You know how he talks, foreign like. Can’t tell much about what he is speaking, saving when he cusses. Course, that’s most of the time.

  Some weeks later a dancing skeleton, clad only in dirty drawers which draped his nether portions, trotted within the region surveyed by Irby Flincher, trotted in ever widening circles. Scurvy-bent Yankees fell back to make space for his gyrations. His gray elf-locks waved, he waved great thin hands limply, bending them at the wrists, the hands flapped on high as he held his stiff arms aloft. This wild man’s leapings carried him on a course wider and wider, bound to include the deadline if he continued to travel so. Irby cocked his musket. First one voice, then another, then more, took up the warning in a litany of pleas. Don’t shoot, hey, don’t shoot! He’s crazy. Hey, guard, don’t shoot, he’s crazy, that’s a crazy man. Guard! Irby lifted the heavy gun and sighted ahead of the crazy man, sighted at the deadline where he thought the man would strike, he waited for the victim to pass beneath his muzzle. The wild man danced ahead, a prisoner grabbed one of his arms, he spun twice around before he broke loose from the Yankee holding him, and then he came on, flapping his hands like fins. Don’t shoot! Hey, that fellow’s crazy! So Mackey Nall thinks he’s Big Injun Chief, was the only thing in Irby’s mind. Now you just bet I’ll show that Mackey. His buck-and-ball gouged the Yank’s ribby chest, front and back; there flew a smoky red spatter.

  Oh, you son of a bitch! You son of a bitching little—

  Thirty days for you, thirty days, you coward!

  Give the little fart a furlough!

  Joe Brown’s Pets! Trundle-bed poops—

  You’d break your neck running if anyone ever busted a cap behind you, you knee-high piss-ant!

  They’re all piss-ants. Think of shooting a crazy man that way!

  That’s old Weinlund from New Jersey, isn’t it?

  Yep, deader’n hell. That little cuss up there just shot him!

  Only one of the other nearby guards was enraged by this abuse to the point of firing, and his charge made a harmless splash in the marsh beyond. Irby Flincher tried to reload his musket. His body was shaking worse than he had feared it might, he was spilling powder right and left. His jaws ground out the words, Mother-fucking old Yankee mudsills. . . .

  That night Nall said, So you went and done it too.

  Them was my orders: shoot to kill. I sure as hell kilt.

  Their tentmate Duckworth read them a lecture, rambling and vague, based mainly upon Thou Shall Not Kill, but the children gave him little attention. They were bent on putting their equipment to rights in case the sergeant appeared, they were bent on feeding themselves and then proceeding to Uncle Arch Yeoman’s store where they might barter some of their stolen sorghum for tobacco (they had sold all of their stolen tobacco to Yanks, except what portion they themselves had chewed).

  If Thou Shalt Not Kill, old whiskers, what you a-doing up on that fence with a musket?

  I never did want to come to be a soldier no way. I’m of a religious persuasion. They just took and fetched me! The old man let the asthma rock him, shook his tousled head, held his Bible closer to firelight. He could not read the Bible actually; yet lines of text stimulated his memory; his wife could read, he thought of her reading, he thought of verses he had learned or partially learned, they were mixed up, they were addled as his mind was addled. And now his wife was dead, many months dead. Oily tears ran in his wrinkles.

  Floral Tebbs felt once more the weakness of the unaccomplished. Irby and Mackey invited him to accompany them through yellow-smelling twilight to Uncle Arch’s, but there was a carelessness in the manner of their invitation. It was as if, Oh, shall we ask him? Oh, he might as well come along. Usually when the path to the road narrowed, one of the three had to fall back or go ahead, only two could walk abreast. Usually it was Floral and Irby Flincher who walked abreast, but now it was Irby and Mackey Nall. They Belonged, Flory Tebbs did not Belong. They had each Shot A Mudsill. He had not Shot A Mudsill.

  ...Got me a Yank today, cried Irby with nervous glee, and all the faces came closer through pocked light of tin lanterns. Men with beards, men with mustaches, men with heavy mannish voices— They treated Irby Flincher as a full-fledged adult, as one of note.

  Where you shoot that Yankee—in the head or in the body?

  Kill him quick, or did he flutter much?

  There was a dark-faced young man from Savannah who was said to be of Spanish or French extraction, and who had certainly spent a great deal of time in prison before the drafters got him, for he could tell you every detail of a city prison’s interior, sleeping arrangements, menu. I got me two already, declared Looey Blooey, which was what they called him. Always I aim for body, not the head. They wag their heads and you might miss.

  I sure didn’t miss today! Again attention swung toward Irby Flincher.

  Uncle Arch doled out tobacco in payment for the sorghum. Them Yankees steep themselves in wine, he said. Natural born drunkards, and let that be the fate of every drunkard! Oh, I know that some of you military people are engaged in liquor traffic, and as engagers in that traffic you are equally guilty as if them same drops of devil’s brew had passed your own lips—

  Uncle Arch, cried Irby, where’d a feller be apt to make the raise of a canteen of pine-top around here?

  Now you get out from my place, you Irby!—I don’t care how many Yanks you done kilt. I got my cattle whip for protection, and I’ll sure take it to you—

  Aw, Uncle Arch, I was a-funning.

  There hain’t no fun in the sight of children with empty bellies, in the sight of women a-selling their virtue along city streets where them saloons are! Irby, you pay heed: doubtless twas the Almighty’s own hand that pressed
that trigger, not your’n. For them Yankees send ships to tropic ports, and just load them with nothing but rum. Look not upon the wine when tis red in your cup, and them are the words of our dear Lord. But them Yankees look upon the wine, and they sop it up like beasts, that they do.

  Someone wished to know, Well, what about Jesus Christ, when He done changed that water into wine, like it says?

  Heed me, you all! Twasn’t no wine like people got today. Twas a special kind, kind of Bible wine, twouldn’t fuddle a man’s wits. Kind of grapejuice and tweren’t wicked to drink it. But this here wine them Yankees have a-brewed and are a-drinking of, in this day and age— And brandy-peaches too! I mind the day a bunch of Yanks was marching past my little place here, bound for the stockade, and one of them actually had the evil intent to ask me did I have any peaches-in-brandy to sell, and he waved a greenback in my face. Little Irby, you’re a good boy, and so is Mackey there, for you were avengers tried and true! If I wasn’t so tight run I’d give you each a stick of candy. As tis, I’ll give you one stick, and you can divide betwixt the two of you.

  Here tis—cinnamon candy. He sniffed. . . . No, this one’s a peppermint stick.

  Shoot to kill when you got to shoot. Them rum-pots are one and all traffickers with Satan. I hear they got them a round thousand saloons in the great City of New York alone.

  Uncle Arch Yeoman’s opinion of the Yankees’ drinking proclivities was formed during the raiders’ heyday; he had not bothered to readjust it. The bulk of prisoners still sane, and with hopes and imagination still active, were much more concerned about the progress of Sherman’s army than they were with bartering for pine-top.

  A great many fresh fish had come in after the fierce engagements of late July; those battles were indecisive. A spindly but tough young prisoner named John McElroy declared tersely to fellow Illinoisans: Anything short of an absolute success is a disguised defeat. There was a general nodding of heads over this. Leroy Key and Seneca MacBean felt the same way; thus shrewder prisoners refused to entertain an extravagant notion that they might be freed at any moment. They heard of the defeat of Stoneman and his cavalry, they twisted their lips. They heard of the defeat of Union infantry at Etowah Creek; they spat, their silence was a snarl of acceptance of the inevitable. A few maltreated Rebel newspapers found their way Inside; the columns proved conclusively that Sherman’s failure was already become history. Prisoners heard later that Sherman had raised the siege of Atlanta and fallen back to the Chattahoochee River. From that moment even men and boys who’d owned the most ardent spirit sat in bitterness.