Death on the River

by John Wilson

The figures are close now. I drag Billy to his feet and pull him away toward the Raiders’ camp. There’s no sign of Sam.

  When we’re safely back, Billy shakes me off. “We never got the money,” he says.

  “Or maybe he lost it like he said.”

  “Or maybe he hid it too good.”

  “There was no need to kill him,” I say.

  “His whining was gettin’ on my nerves,” Billy says. “Anyways, I better tell the boss we got nothin’ from this one. He’s not gonna be happy.”

  I watch Billy’s retreating back and feel like bawling. Not because the kid’s dead and his mother’ll miss him. Life’s pitifully cheap in this place. What’s tying a knot in my gut is that, in all the time the kid and I were together, I never knew his name was Nathaniel.

  NINE

  It’s already noon the next day, but I’m still in the tent, too exhausted and miserable to move. I haven’t slept a wink. Every time I close my eyes all I can see is the surprised face of the kid Nathaniel, as Billy sticks the knife into him.

  Billy doesn’t care. His only worry is that we didn’t get any money and that Mosby will think we stole it. Billy doesn’t understand how I feel.

  “He would’ve been dead in a couple weeks anyway,” he tells me. “Dozens gets dragged out to the grave every day. He’s just one more loser, didn’t have what it takes to survive in here. Forget him.”

  But I can’t forget him, and I don’t understand, any more than Billy does, why Nathaniel’s death bothers me so. The deaths I saw at Cold Harbor don’t worry me—I can’t even remember what Zach looked like—but the kid’s haunts me. I know I was partly responsible, I held him while Billy stabbed, but I didn’t do it deliberately. I was trying to calm him.

  Maybe it’s because the kid was so weak and helpless. Nathaniel just wanted to live and didn’t know how to. He never stood a chance against the likes of Mosby and Billy—or me.

  I’m a Raider now, one of the strong, one of the killers. But I don’t want to change that just because I feel bad about the kid’s death. Being one of the Raiders also makes me one of the survivors, and I want to live. I don’t feel bad enough about last night to want to go and sit beside the stinking cesspool of the creek. Besides, what good would starving to death do? It wouldn’t bring Nathaniel back. I’ve made my choice, to live at whatever cost. I just wish I didn’t feel so shitty about it.

  “What’s going on? Who the hell are you?” Mosby’s voice breaks into my self-pity. It’s loud and angry enough to make me crawl out of the tent to see what’s happening.

  Mosby and a few others are standing outside the big tent. Several are holding clubs, knives or brass knuckle-dusters. Mosby’s shouting at a group of about a hundred men from the rest of the camp.

  A jolt of fear runs down my spine. My first thought is that these men are here for Billy and me. That they want to avenge Nathaniel’s death. I’m certain that Mosby will hand us over as quick as blink if he thinks it’ll be to his advantage.

  “We’re Regulators,” a tall skinny man at the front replies. “We’ve had enough of your Raiders and their murdering ways.” A rumble of agreement runs through the group. “We’re here to arrest you.”

  “Arrest me?” Mosby grins. “I run this camp. Ain’t no bunch of ragged do-gooders goin’ to change that. Even if you do have a few sticks. Now get back to your hovels and maybe I’ll forget this.”

  “We can’t do that,” the thin man says.

  Mosby takes a step forward but stops and looks over at a disturbance by the main gate. A squad of Confederate soldiers is coming in. Prisoners scramble to get out of their way as they head over to us and form a ragged line on each side of the Regulators. They cock their muskets and level them at Mosby and the others by the big tent.

  “You see,” the leader of the Regulators continues, “we talked with Commander Wirz, and he agrees that something needs to be done about your murdering gang. Now, if you come quiet, you’ll get a proper trial with lawyers and such. If not—” The man gestures at the armed soldiers.

  Mosby stares hard at the Regulators, an expression of cold fury on his face and his shoulders tensed for action. The future hangs in the balance. If Mosby gives the word, there will be a bloodbath and my plan of surviving as a Raider will be destroyed.

  Mosby’s shoulders relax and he laughs. “All right. We’ll come quiet. I’ll wager I can afford a better lawyer than you.” He turns to his cronies around him. “Come on, boys, let’s play their game.”

  The Regulators move forward and begin rounding up the Raiders. I stare at the men moving toward me. In twenty-four hours, I have gone from being a confused new prisoner, to a privileged Raider, to a criminal without even the chance of life I came in with. I’ve lost all my money and am feeling hideously guilty about being part of murdering a helpless boy. Any control I had of my life has vanished.

  “Jake! There you are.” I look round to see Billy coming toward me. “What’n hell you doin’ in the middle of the Raiders’ camp?”

  I stare at Billy in confusion. The two Regulators who are approaching me stop.

  “I told you not to come here on your own. You ain’t gonna get your money back.”

  “Who’re you?” one of the Regulators asks.

  “Name’s Billy, and this here’s Jake. We come in yesterday. Been walking for weeks, ever since we was captured at Cold Harbor.”

  “Why’re you in the Raiders’ camp?”

  “That’d be Jake’s fault,” Billy says with a smile. “Raiders came to our tent last night. I got nothin’ to steal, but Jake here had some coin stashed away in his jacket. The scum took every cent. Show these boys the rip in the linin’, Jake.”

  I open my jacket and show the torn place where my money was.

  “Now, Jake, he ain’t one to take that sort of thing lyin’ down. Are you, Jake?”

  I shake my head blankly.

  “So, this mornin’, Jake says he’s comin’ over here to get his money back. I says don’t be stupid. Just get yourself beat up or worse if you come into this hornet’s nest and start causin’ a ruckus. But Jake’s a stubborn sort and he snuck away while I weren’t lookin’. Just as well you lads come along afore he got himself into a real mess. Now, we’ll just go and get Jake’s money and be on our way.”

  “Can’t let you do that,” the Regulator says. “We got orders to collect all the valuables we find and hold them. If you boys got a claim, you take it up after the trial with the judge.”

  Billy scratches his ear, thoughtfully. “Well, I suppose that’s fair enough. What do you say, Jake?”

  “Fair enough,” I say.

  “Least there won’t be Raiders to bother honest folk anymore. Mighty obliged to you boys.”

  Billy takes my arm and leads me away from the Regulators. They don’t try to stop us. We walk in silence until we are well clear of the Raiders’ camp. He sits down and starts laughing.

  “I’ll be damned,” he says eventually. “Those boys finally got some backbone. You’re lucky I was close by and thinkin’.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “I didn’t do it just for you,” Billy says. “It was the easiest way I could see to get both of us out of there.”

  “What’ll happen now?” I ask.

  “Way I see it, Mosby gets a good enough lawyer, swings the trial and comes back to start up again, or else they hang him. Either way, the Raiders as we knew them is gone, and we keep a low profile for now.”

  “Won’t be too hard,” I say. “We’ve got nothing.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Billy smiles and shakes his pocket. I hear the rattle of coins. “I got a little put aside fer a rainy day like today. And I got this.” Billy shows me his blade. “We’re survivors, Jake, you and me. Not like them weaklings that don’t last a day in here. We’ll get by.”

  “Why are you helping me?” I ask.

  “You think I would desert my friend?”

  “Billy, if it was to your advantage, you’d feed your mother to
a pack of coyotes.”

  Anger momentarily flashes across Billy’s face. Then he laughs again. “You got me pegged, Jake, boy. Remember what I said about the way to survive bein’ to organize? Well, I want us to be a team. With Mosby out of the picture, maybe permanent, you and me is the Raiders, at least fer now.”

  TEN

  It takes Billy and me two days to get a shelter.

  “Got to find a small one with only a couple of men in it,” Billy says. “Make sure at least one of them’s sick. Then we move close by and wait, so’s we’re the first to move in when they die.”

  “That could be a long wait,” I say.

  Billy winks at me. “Less’n you might think. Most folk’s ain’t got a long life expectancy here.”

  We split up and wander around the camp. It’s even larger and more crowded than I thought when I arrived. Billy says it’s something like sixteen acres, although you lose a couple of acres of living space for the swamp in the middle. According to the roll call we have to attend every day at 7:00 am, there’s more than thirty thousand men in that space.

  It’s hard to tell exact numbers because the roll call’s pretty chaotic. Most prisoners are divided into detachments of about a thousand men each. Within each detachment, men naturally try to keep the army structure together, cavalry stick with cavalry, Pennsylvania regiments stay close and so on. The groupings within the detachment often call themselves “regiments,” but they vary in size and, as there are few officers in here, they are run by sergeants. Each detachment is counted separately, but the guards are often lazy and simply accept the figures that the sergeants give them. In addition to the detachments, there are what the Rebel guards call floating prisoners, not part of any group. Most prisoners try, through a false sense of security, to join a detachment, but some, like Billy and me, are happy enough to be independent.

  “I don’t want to be beholden to any sergeant who thinks he’s good enough to be an officer,” Billy says. “Only advantage I can see of this place is a chance to get out from under that army discipline.”

  At best the count at roll call is just a rough estimate, and it doesn’t take account of the men too sick to leave their shelters. The only truly accurate count is of the bodies taken out for burial every day.

  On the second day of looking, I find our shelter. It’s up near where I first met Billy. It’s a lean-to but sturdy, and the patched canvas looks as if it would keep out all but the heaviest rain. Best part is, of the two men outside it, one of them’s already dead.

  The living one looks like the pictures I’ve seen in my schoolbooks of an Old Testament prophet. He’s almost naked, wearing only cutoff trousers and a patched jacket that still sports half a dozen shiny brass buttons. He has filthy, matted hair and beard and wild staring eyes, and his skin has a yellowish tinge. He’s squatting, rocking back and forth beside his tentmate, mumbling to himself. I rush off to find Billy.

  By the time we get back, the dead cart’s there, but the wild man won’t let them take the body.

  “Angels is comin’ to take him,” the man screams, clutching onto his tentmate’s legs as the dead-cart men haul on the other end. “This is Hell and death is a release. I told him the angels would take him to Heaven. Here they come.” The man throws his head back, and everyone within hearing looks up.

  There’s nothing there, just a few white clouds scudding across the blue.

  “Let go, you crazy old coot,” one of the dead-cart men says. “Ain’t no angels in this place.” The two men give one last tug and release the body. The wild man collapses, sobbing on the ground. As the dead cart rumbles off, Billy steps forward.

  “Don’t show no respect in this place,” he says. “That a close friend?”

  The man looks up, his tears cutting two tracks down the filth on his cheeks. “My brother,” he says. “They wouldn’t leave him. The angels is comin’, fer sure.” I had assumed that the man was old, but up close I can see that, beneath the dirt, he’s not more than a few years older than my brother Jim.

  “Angels’ll find your brother wherever he is,” Billy says soothingly.

  “No!” The man yells and lurches to his feet. “I spoke to them direct. Told them to come here. Now they’ll never find him. We’re all trapped in Hell.”

  “Calm down,” Billy says. “It’ll be fine. How’d it be if me and Jake here build a fire and boil some water?”

  “You’re the devil,” the man says, swinging a fist weakly at Billy. Billy dodges easily and the man falls over. “You want to tempt me from the path of righteousness. The angels is comin’ to Hell, I say, but they ain’t comin’ fer the likes of you.” He looks slyly up at us. “And you want my tent. You can’t have it. It’s fer the angels.” He crawls back into his lean-to and huddles in the shade.

  “What do we do now?” I ask.

  “We wait,” Billy says. “Ain’t gonna be long.”

  That night we sleep on the ground near the crazy man’s lean-to. I’m troubled by strange dreams.

  Nathaniel’s there, staring accusingly at me, but so is Jim, standing beside him. They’re both surrounded by glowing white angels. One of the angels has the bearded face of the crazy man. He’s smiling.

  “You want to kill me,” he says, “but my angels won’t let you. Will they, Jim?”

  My brother steps forward. “No more killing. If the strong don’t protect the weak, we’re no better than animals. You must make amends, Jake, amends.”

  “How?” I ask, but no one answers. They just stand there and laugh. Jim’s face has changed to Billy’s. “Survive. Do what you have to. Live,” he says gleefully. “The strong survive, the weak die. That’s the way the world is.”

  I wake up sweating and confused. Clouds are covering the moon and it’s dark. I roll over to get more comfortable on the hard ground. I notice that Billy’s gone. To the latrines, I suppose. I drift back into my disturbed sleep.

  ELEVEN

  “Wake up, Jake, boy.” Billy shakes my shoulder. “We got oursel’s a shelter.”

  I sit up and rub my eyes. I have a pounding headache and I don’t feel as if I’ve slept at all.

  “What?” I ask stupidly.

  “We got oursel’s a shelter. The old coot died in the night. Come and help me get his body out. We got to let everyone know this place is ours afore we go down to roll call and rations.”

  “Died? What did he die of?”

  Billy laughs. “What does anyone die of in this place? It weren’t old age, that’s fer sure. Now come and help.”

  Together we haul the body out of the lean-to and lay it beside the track for the dead cart. The man looks peaceful.

  “I hope his angels come for him,” I say.

  “Angels! Ain’t no angels here fer the livin’ nor the dead. All there is is us, and all we can do is the best we can to survive. Start believin’ in angels and you ain’t gonna last long.

  “Well, I’ll be. Look at this.”

  Billy has been rummaging among the blankets in the lean-to. He sits back, holding up a small black bag. He rattles it, and I hear the clink of coins.

  “We struck it lucky, Jake, boy. He may have been crazy, but he knew enough to keep something aside. And we got ourselves some good blankets, a flint, a couple of mess tins, a pocketknife, a watch, and there’s even two forks in here. We’re gonna live like kings.”

  Billy stands up and addresses the men in the tents around us. “The crazy coot’s dead now, as dead as his brother was yesterday.”

  “How’d he die?” someone shouts.

  “In his sleep,” Billy answers. “Reckon his angels came fer him after all.”

  “Dead from a blade between his ribs, more like,” the man outside the tent nearest us says.

  “This blade?” Like lightning, Billy whips out his knife, steps over and holds it under the man’s nose.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’,” the man says, drawing back. “Don’t care what the fool died of.”

  “No,” Billy says, “we got to
clear this up. I ain’t about to have folks whisperin’ that me and Jake come by this place foul. I’ll make a deal. You check the body and if you find a knife hole, you can have my blade, and me and Jake’ll go and find ourselves another shelter. If ’n you don’t find no hole, you shut up.”

  “It’s okay,” the man says nervously. “I believe you.”

  “But others might not now that you’ve put the suspicion in their minds. Check.”

  Reluctantly, the man goes over to the body and checks it for knife wounds. The rest of us watch in silence. I’m remembering that Billy was gone when I woke in the night.

  “Aint nothin’ there,” the man says, straightening up. “Must’ve died in his sleep like this fella says.”

  Billy nods. “Ain’t good to have distrust ’tween neighbors. Now we can all look out fer each other.”

  “Sure,” the man says.

  Billy goes to the body and deftly slices off the brass buttons from the dead man’s jacket. He tosses one over to our neighbor.

  “There,” he says, “that’ll get you some wood fer a fire.”

  “Thank you,” the man says in surprise.

  “’Tain’t nothing,” Billy says with a smile. “Just bein’ neighborly. Come on, Jake. Our spot’ll be safe enough now. Time we was at roll call.”

  On the way down the hill, I wonder how the crazy man really died. Billy had put the thought in my mind, and stabbing is not the only way to kill a man, especially a sick, weak one. But I push the thought away. We have a shelter and blankets now.

  Roll call is more cursory than usual this morning, and the guards seem nervous. We are given our half-brick-sized piece of corn bread and, as if to confirm that this day is different, a rare slice of salt pork. Just after we’ve grabbed our share, there’s a commotion at the gate. The guards stand to attention and Commander Wirz rides through on his white horse, dressed exactly as he was the first time I saw him.

  “Death on a pale horse,” a man beside me whispers.

  Wirz sits for an age and surveys his pathetic charges.

  “I haf examined ze Raiders,” he says eventually. “Zey are, as you say, bad mens. But zere are too much of zem. I shall keep ze six baddest for you men to try, and at vun of ze clock today, I shall return ze rest.”