Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  Jim Keeling came up with no fear and shook his fist at the Northerners; the major’s horse shied. You blue-bellied devils, said Jim Keeling. Burnt the roof right off the heads of my family! Does a man’s heart good to see you Yanks warring against women and girls!

  The Unionist motioned toward the ruined bridge beyond, where posts were glowing still. What of the bridge?

  I never put hand to it! But I wish your damn Sherman had stood here and heard my wife and daughter a-crying. We should of marched into the North, God damn it! Would of trained you God damn Yanks how to act decent.

  Major Hitchcock, sir! cried one of the privates. You want us to arrest this man? He’s abusive.

  By no means, Chris. His house has just been burnt; I don’t blame him for being abusive, not in the slightest. The frightened cat raced across the roadway once more, and the major’s horse began to dance. He brought the animal under control and pulled over against the fence. He asked calmly of Ira, Have any troops passed this way, sir? At the moment I’m looking for some people from Illinois.

  Obviously they’ve passed. They were cavalry.

  No, no, and at this closer range Ira could see that Major Hitchcock’s face held a great weariness, there was solemn grief in his face. No, I’m seeking infantry. Perhaps they’re on the next road north.

  He addressed himself directly to Jim Keeling. A word with you, Friend Southerner.

  I got no good words for you, said Keeling. And I’m no friend.

  I wish to say this: the fortunes of war held your army mainly away from the North; but at least you made no bones about burning Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. And we’ve had you people planting mines in the roads ahead of us. Citizens—making war! Some of our boys have been killed by those mines, some had their feet blown off. We’ve discovered you Georgians burning forage and corn along our route. Therefore General Sherman has ordered that houses will be burnt and cotton gins will be burnt to keep them company. Back on Buffalo Creek we found a bridge in ashes. The adjacent house was destroyed. I must admit that I felt impelled to argue with the general about this, and I’ll tell you exactly what he said. He said: Let the enemy look to his own people. If the Southerners find that their burning of bridges only destroys their own houses, they’ll soon stop it.

  His face was tinted to bright copper by diminishing flames. Major Hitchcock closed his eyes in concentration, then leaned toward the people in the yard. He spoke earnestly. That is General Sherman’s belief, I heard him say it. He said: In war everything is right that prevents anything. He said that he feels there’s nothing to do but to make war so terrible that when peace comes it will last.

  There was something in his speech. . . . Where were you born? Ira asked. . . . Hitchcock smiled. Alabama. But my parents had come from the North. Oh yes, I was reared in Missouri and in Tennessee, but educated at Yale. I do have, as you might understand, a strong sympathy for the Southern people. Also I hold unalterable devotion to the Union cause. Now we must be on our way. Good evening. And you, he said to the tall thin Keeling— I am sorry for your loss; but I fear it had to be. Abruptly he rode toward the creek, soldiers clattering after him. The Georgians could hear them splashing through the stream, then they vanished.

  Ira spent the night beside the embers. It was unhappily warm there, an open refuge from November’s chill. The Keelings took the bedclothing which had escaped destruction and bedded down in the stable. Jim Keeling said that he owned plenty of clean corn-shucks, they were not uncomfortable. The people offered to share their meager supply with Ira, in appreciation for help he had given them, but he refused. He was affected deeply by their gratitude. The man insisted on bringing a piece of canvas, and with this Ira made a rude tent to keep off winds. He lay within the folds, watching the play of light from ruins which still fried. He thought that he was safer here than he might be along avenues traveled by dangerous bands who clung alongside the Federal advance. Men would see that destruction had occurred already; obviously the place was stripped, they would pass by.

  There came disturbances through the night: horses passed, men talked; they stopped to discuss the lingering blaze, went on. Once two wagons came also, with hullabaloo about their fording the stream. Soon after sunrise a frightened elderly couple appeared with a basket. These were the Jarells from down the road, and feared to come sooner . . . they had seen the blaze, knew that the Keeling place must have burned, there was nothing else to burn at that point. Mr. Jarell said that his own place had been visited by foragers who took nothing except chickens. They said that Mrs. Keeling and her daughter must sleep in their house for the time being. It appeared that they were distant cousins of the wounded veteran; Ira heard talk about Aunt Mame and Cousin Neddy. The Jarells had fetched bread and side meat . . . Ira ate but sparingly. An extra mouth was a dreadful thing in times like these.

  Ira went into the privy and extracted a thousand dollars Confederate from his hoard. He insisted that Jim Keeling should accept this as a loan—to be paid back, without interest, when and if. It may be worth nothing at all, now that the Yanks are come, Ira told the haggard man. Again it may be the only currency in circulation for some time. Do with it as you can. Keeling cried openly.

  After Ira stopped to play with the rescued kittens in their basket—with the mother cat no longer terrified but buzzing contentedly as the kittens fed—he went away. He smiled grimly. Literally he did not know which way to turn. From conversation which he’d heard, and rumor reaching the Jarells during the night, he judged that the bulk of the Federal army trod paths to the north and east. There was no point any longer in even considering Savannah.

  Freebooters had passed but more might be trailing. A man might remain in danger as long as he remained in this region . . . all people would be in danger. Ira wondered if a talon of the blue iron hand reached toward Andersonville. He might come home to find his own house in ashes; but at least thousands of the prisoners still incarcerated were too weak to do much revengeful harm. Most of the Reserves could not fight, they would run away. He thought of hasty feet trampling in his hall, big shoes pounding the stair, drawers jerked out, tables upset. In his imaginings a hooting bandit dressed himself in Ira’s Mexican War uniform and went parading. Ira Claffey thought about his black people. Most of all Lucy was in his thoughts. But he felt that Mrs. Effie Dillard could cope with almost any band of raiders. Also Cousin Harry would be at hand. . . . No, he found no real worry, none worth entertaining. Resolutely he put the unhappy panorama out of his mind.

  Beyond the next hill he was confronted by a party of terror-stricken citizens, driving a few head of sheep and a white cow about to come fresh. There were dogs trotting, and children, and an old man being pushed in a hand-cart. They just gave us sut! cried an old woman. My son-in-law, he’d made thirty-two hundred gallons of syrup; twas more than he had casks for, so he’d sunk a tank in the ground, buried it deep, and if those Yanks didn’t come along yesterday and help themselves to the whole! . . . They ruint my flower garden, cried a younger woman. They took Pa’s watch! screamed a child. Oh, Mister, they all cried. You better turn round and go back tother way. . . . Wouldn’t even wait for me to give them the keys to the bureau, cried the woman who’d lamented the loss of her garden. They just smashed in the drawers with musket butts. . . . They shot Jed! cried a little boy, as Ira continued doggedly on his way. He speculated drearily who Jed might have been: dog or pig or tomcat, he did not suppose that Jed was a person.

  He went on and met the mass of the Union army’s right wing: rank and file and furbelow. Long afterward, Ira learned that there had been sixty-odd thousand men in the punishing hordes which slammed from Atlanta to Savannah; but on sight he thought that there were millions. The next northwest-to-southeast road was crammed as he had seen a small hallway in Milledgeville crammed during legislative session. There was not space enough in the road for the people. They would have shoved fences aside but the fences were gone: smoking patches showed where
rails burned during the night. At the first intersection a foraging party assembled with their loot. A group of boys stood guarding a heap of smoked hams—a heap which might have filled one of the Claffey wardrobes to capacity and then some. The boys were laughing, not especially in arrogance, but seemingly with sheer spookish joy of living and of plundering. Always Ira would remember one: a hard-faced youngster of seventeen or thereabouts, who stood arrogantly with a cob pipe turned upside down in his mouth, as he would guard it against a rain; but it was not raining now. Whenever in after years someone said Sherman, or Sherman’s Invasion, or Sherman’s March to the Sea, he would think of that lean boy . . . freckled, beardless, shock-headed, with upside-down pipe. A big wagon came banging, and the boys yelled a question at the wagoner. Thirty-ninth Iowa? The wagoner nodded. He did not pull his four-horse team to a stand. It was impossible for anyone to halt in the road: too many people came swarming on their course. As the wagon continued, the group of youths labored after it with armloads of the hams. They pushed hams up across the tailboard, unseen hands received them apparently, hams vanished into the black-draped interior. Back and forth the soldiers went, hurrying through a distance of perhaps thirty rods before the meat was all put aboard. Them Iowa boys must have found themselves a big butcher, said someone behind Ira Claffey; but he could not even turn to see who was talking, he was agape.

  There rode on good horses a noisy herd of wenches (all young, perhaps the youngest was fourteen) dressed in gowns of colored silk stolen undoubtedly from some wealthy house. Crimson and gold of their disheveled costuming fairly hurt the eyes. They were headed by a pompous fat Negro bestriding a dappled stallion; he rode bareback, he kept turning to the chattering mounted bevy behind, holding out his hand, saying sharply, Keep up, you all, keep up, stay together! He wore a gilt-piped coat hanging open, unbuttoned, and a beaver hat too small for his head. Ira supposed the fellow was some officer’s servant who had gathered this harem.

  Ira stood at the edge of a clump of trees and blackberry vines; still he carried his carpetbag: it had endured through vicissitudes since the train was stopped. But now he felt the bag wrenched from his grasp. A clumsy young man had stepped out of the lounging files, twisted the carpetbag away, and was going off with it coolly. A voice sang sharply, Hi! with an inquiring lift to the cry. A young lieutenant on a bay kicked his horse into a trot along the edge of the field and overtook the robber. He retrieved the carpetbag, whirled his horse, came back to Ira. Here, Mister, and he leaned down to deliver the bag. Better drop it out of sight behind that brush. Some of these folks have got the itch, they’ll steal anything in sight! He was gone before Ira could thank him.

  He tossed the bag behind him into a weed patch. He would have liked to have sat on his haunches. His stiff knee would not permit this, but a little farther on there was a stump; there he sat for a time. Regiments, cattle, black wanderers, wagons from which corn and parlor chairs spilled down, more lounging tough companies—the crowd kept flowing. Ira thought of a celebration he’d seen in New York, with Broadway thronged between its shop fronts, brass bands hallooing. Here there were no bands, although he did see a bass drum carried atop a chaise. It was as if the earth had erupted in the northwest and spewed a strange concentrated lava of people, brown and white, to come rolling down these sluiceways. A Negro woman skipped there, young, waving long bony arms, trying to make screams although her voice was worn from previous screaming. Tildy, cried another black woman, overtaking her and tugging her to the side. Now you quit crying for that baby! He’s safe with Jesus. . . . In the wwwater, the other woman kept blubbering. In that old wwwater. Got push off that old bridge. All these soldier folks they push my baby. . . .

  More troops coming, herds of ragged blacks keeping them company. Zachary Clark, a voice yelled. Oh, Zach, where are you? and a big laugh sounded ahead, a curly head turned. Zachary Clark was a Yankee soldier, an older man, his ringlets were silver, his fleshy face beamed. Right up here, he called in response. Come along, Archie! . . . What you carrying, Zach? . . . Ladies’ pants. . . . And so he was: a queer double bag made from voluminous drawers with each leg tied at the bottom. This strange receptable rode atop his right shoulder, his rifle was slung on his left. . . . What you got in them pants, Zach? Hey, Bob! . . . there was running of feet to catch up with him. . . . I bet you’d just like to know! Voices drifted off into the pounding, striding, hoofing, wheel-turning.

  Smoke and dust lay in a compress high over the road and beyond it . . . would Georgia ever rise again? Smudge of the Keelings’ house had been but a firefly. Ira thought drearily of what Major Hitchcock, the tired-faced Yankee, had said the night before. Hitchcock spoke of burning cotton gins. Oh, would we have ruined the simple economy of the North, if we instead had made a march? Say that we had gone the length of Indiana. Would we have put their corn into ashes? Perhaps, perhaps. . . . No, no, we would never have done so. I, at least, have a pretension to decency. So have people like Cato Dillard, so has even the crippled Coral Tebbs—a hard warped pride. So have men like the unfortunate Keeling. But would we have done this, what homes might we have looted? In Indiana are no slaves for us to turn loose, but— Ira thought of the vicious Winder. He treated us so. How might he have treated Yankees at the North? Ira got up from his stump, went back and gathered up the carpetbag. Now he did not even care if it were taken from him. So much else had been taken from everyone.

  A silver shine came bobbing along the road: yes, it was a helmet, a souvenir perhaps from Napoleonic times. God knew how it had ever come to Georgia. But a boy found it, in press or cupboard, so now he wore it gaily, the old horse-hair plume blew in the wind. Mooooo said the cows, great buffalo herds of them, they dropped their dung as they traveled. A thousand feet of men came to tread and skate in slime behind them, wagon wheels came to crease the dung.

  But these people were not mere bummers: bummers drifted far on the outskirts of the march. These men were plunderers, they were arsonists, but first they were soldiers. They had the stringy tough weathered look of veterans, they were of the West, there was a pioneer hunter’s quality to their marching. They carried blankets rolled, their rifles were well rubbed; very few wore the bulky knapsacks, their haversacks swung as Confederate haversacks swung. Ira thought of what their units might be: Thirty-second Missouri, Ninth Iowa, One Hundred and Eleventh Illinois, Nineteenth Wisconsin, Thirtieth Iowa . . . they looked as if they had risen out of tall grass and unkempt woods. . . . Have we sufficient force to stand against them? Will they be turned back before they reach Savannah? Never, thought Ira. Our power is drained; we cannot halt them, scarcely impede their youthful brutal Western force. Miner, trapper, lumberman, and miner’s son and trapper’s son and lumberman’s son: they come, they possess somehow the quality of Indians, you expect them to whoop as Indians do, some of them whoop so.

  Ira Claffey suffered the depression of one who looks at bad weather and knows that he may not restrain it. . . . You cannot subdue a tornado; this shaggy twisting wind has sprung from beyond the horizon. Its thunder is heard, lightning has knived us already, rain comes smashing, our roof is gone.

  He was haunted by the absurd delusion that if his sons had been allowed to survive, they might have kept this rabble out of Georgia. But if his sons had been born beside the upper Mississippi, instead of in the county where they were born, they would have helped to make the rabble. He turned and started south stubbornly, resolved to watch no more. He had seen enough, seen too much. These invaders took everything, burned everything, they cut their swath toward the coast. Now Ira Claffey was marooned, and so was Andersonville marooned, unless wild cavalry had gone pushing there. Behind him the jumble of individual identifiable sounds resolved into a low roar, the call and flapping of a million birds. There they traveled, cutting landscape at his back: Forty-seventh Ohio and Fifteenth Michigan and Twelfth Indiana and Fourth Iowa; they’d gathered up the very soil of Georgia, folded it around them, were wearing it as uniforms. . . . Later that day
, Ira managed to buy a dinner of sorts, and also a very sorry mule. He rode the mule down into Dooly County where the mule died. Ira walked the rest of the way home.

  LIII

  ...We go the gate again, Surgeon Crumbley. What is your news from Albany? A letter on Thursday, to be sure? I am glad, sir, that Mrs. Crumbley is mending. It must be an ordeal for you to serve so far away during her illness. . . . Paregoric? Fortunate that it was available. I wish that we might have some at this point.

  ...No, no, Surgeon White established no particular pens for any of us today. I observed no such notation on the Duty List. Take any pen you choose—they’ll all be filled. There remains but to prescribe formulas and numbers as has been the custom. How many have you on your list? Mine runs up to thirty-odd: Number One is prescribed to serve for diarrhoea; Number Two for dysentery; Number Three for scorbutus, and so on. Is it in accord with your notions of medical procedure to take the discretion entirely away from the prescribing physician himself? I objected to this in my first assignment to such duty, as did you. I felt that I could not prescribe properly for my patients. I looked upon it as utter quackery! Quite so, Surgeon Crumbley. I discovered that the diseases from which our patients were suffering stemmed from want of the proper kind of dieting, remedies, etc. To begin with, I was convinced that I could have done more—indeed yes, I know I could—with proper dieting, than I could have with the medicines available. When first I came here—it must have been for two whole days, not more—I examined each new case, made my diagnosis, wrote out my prescription accordingly. I found that the medicines had not been supplied. I asked the reason, and they informed me that I was not to practice in that way: I must practice according to the numbers and formulas presented. I told them: I know nothing of such formulas and numbers, and care nothing for them. And, gentlemen, I refuse to practice in any such way! . . . What’s more, I went my round, diagnosed the cases again, made out a prescription for each case. It was extremely laborious; there were many under my charge, as you will understand, Surgeon Crumbley, as you have had under your charge. I sent up the prescriptions, and once again they were refused. I said to my clerk—a Yankee prisoner, no less, and On Parole, but with some claim to a background embracing pharmacopoeia—I said, What ho, Yank? . . . Surgeon Elkins, he told me, it is quite useless for you to make out such prescriptions.