by Ed Gorman
He pulled himself away from her. Felt her pulse. None. The gun had fired just as the band music had swelled. The sound of the firing easily would have been lost.
He stood up. Stared down at her. Wife. Mother of his children. He knew that he loved her but at the moment it was an abstract feeling, one far less vivid than the hatred he bore. Someday he would revile himself for what had just happened on this hotel-room floor. But for now, there was the task at hand. Kimble should be leaving the hotel in less than ten minutes.
He grabbed his Sharps and went to the window. He thought of his dead brother and his own disgrace.
Soon now, he thought. Soon now.
Marie Jakober’s love affair with Civil War history began as a teenager on a remote farm in northern Canada, from books acquired through a mail order library. She is drawn to the subject not only for its drama and historical importance, but also for the unique quality of its documentary materials. “It was the first major war in which most participants could write, and the last in which they were allowed to write what they really said, or thought, or felt, unhindered by military censorship or public opinion. Their frankness was probably unwise on occasion, but today, a hundred and forty years later, it’s pure gold for the storyteller.”
Ms. Jakober writes both speculative and historical fiction. She has published five novels, most recently The Black Chalice. Her sixth, dealing with the Union underground in Richmond, will be published next year by Forge. She is presently dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of a seventh, set in Baltimore during the summer of 1862. Ms. Jakober lives in Calgary, Canada.
Though fictionalized in many respects, including names, “Slither” is based on an actual incident from Richmond’s Libby prison, related in his memoirs by Union captain Bernhard Domschke.
SLITHER
Marie Jakober
Sometimes the best way to go undercover is to hide in plain sight.…
A great many things can make life miserable when you’re living as a prisoner of war, but the worst of them is discovering that you can’t trust your own comrades. It was a discovery I desperately avoided making—which was why I didn’t want to talk with Colonel Thiessen that day, and why I still wish I hadn’t. I happened to glance up across the faded cover of the dime novel I was reading, and saw him heading in my general direction. I ducked my head again, fast, as if all six feet of me could disappear behind one small, battered book.
“Afternoon, Mackie,” he said, right by my shoulder.
There was no help for it. I laid my reading aside. “Good afternoon, sir.”
“Were you enjoying your book?” he asked, settling down beside me.
“No,” I said, truthfully. It was a stupid story, and I didn’t like reading anyway. Bur you had to do something in Libby Prison to make the time go by.
Thiessen chatted at me for a while, about all sorts of things I no longer remember. He’d been a lawyer in Connecticut before the war, and he could talk a man’s ears right off his head. He was somewhere in his forties, older than most of us, and he’d taken it upon himself to be father confessor to the whole prison, and the general watchdog of our well-being and morale. Needless to say, it was a task beyond the competence of any ordinary man.
“You know, Mackie,” he said finally, getting down to the real business of our little visit, “I’m a bit worried about your friend. Captain Slater. He seems to be … he’s getting rather too friendly with the Rebels.”
“Oh,” I said. “I hadn’t really noticed.”
Thiessen cocked an eyebrow at me. Do you really expect me to believe that?
“Have you talked to him about it?” he persisted.
“No, I haven’t.” I glanced around and saw that several of the men seemed to be paying us more than casual attention. They weren’t obvious about it. They played cards. They read the battered Richmond Examiner for the seventeenth time. They stared at the window, where a gray afternoon descended on a gray, gray city. But I’d been around groups of men long enough to know when they were watching someone and when they weren’t. I lowered my voice.
“Look,” I said. “It’s just the way Jeremy is, that’s all. He’s … he’s practical. And he’s never been tough, like some of us. Hell, I remember when we were kids, he was always getting hurt. Always catching something; I think he got himself every sickness known to man—”
“You’ve been friends that long?”
“We went to school together. But…” I faltered, reluctant to say more. We weren’t friends in our school days, Jeremy Slater and I. I suppose it would be truthful to say we weren’t really friends even now, not deep down. We were far too different for that. But I defended him to Colonel Thiessen. I had to, partly because I really thought I trusted him. And partly because I’d misjudged him so harshly once before.
“He doesn’t mean any harm, sir. He’s just … He’s just trying to get by. Like we all are.”
“Get by, yes, but at what price? Fraternizing with the enemy is a dangerous game … quite apart from the rotten example he sets for others. It’s bad on morale, what he’s doing. Especially for the younger men. And the Rebels aren’t stupid; they’re likely to raise the stakes. What happens when they ask him for something bigger than mending a trouser leg or sewing on a button?”
“He’ll say no.”
“I hope so. Some of the men think he won’t. They think his backbone’s made of taffy.”
“Well, they can damn well think different, sir. I fought with Slater, Ball’s Bluff, the whole damn peninsula, Bull Run, Antietam. I’ve seen him on a firing line, men in pieces around him, and him as calm as Moses waggling his hand at the ocean—”
“Yes,” Thiessen said, so heavily and so wisely that I stopped still and stared at him.
“That sort of thing,” he went on, “isn’t always courage. Sometimes it’s just fatalism. A man decides there’s a minié ball out there with his name on it, or there isn’t, and there’s nothing he can do about it. So he becomes … methodical, I suppose you could say. He just doesn’t think about it. Any of it. Real courage—the moral kind—is very different.”
He stood up. “I’m not judging the man. Not yet. But I think you should have a talk with him.”
* * *
It was like a bad headache, that stuff Thiessen said to me—one of those headaches that start at the back of your eyes and go deep into your brain and stay there for days. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop remembering all the things I knew about Jeremy Slater, things I thought didn’t matter anymore.
You see, when we were boys together, I had no use for him at all. He was the gold-plated sissy of Springfield, Massachusetts. He couldn’t run, couldn’t fight, couldn’t hit a baseball with a barn door—and to make matters worse, he was twice too smart for his own good. We picked on him, of course, as big, roughneck boys will do, and he’d slink off home with his nose bloody and his head down, thinking hard on how to get us back. And he managed it more than once, always in some sneaky, underhanded way. We all disliked the little grub, but I was the one who gave him the nickname he never outgrew. I called him Jeremy Slither.
So it was a shock for me, marching proudly up to a wooden table in the town hall to put my name down for the new Eighth Massachusetts Regiment, and seeing Jeremy Slater’s name on the same piece of paper. This was nothing, however, to the shock I received by the end of the day, when I discovered that I was only a sergeant, and he was a second lieutenant.
I thought I knew everything that went on in my town, but he had friends I knew nothing about. For half a dozen years, while I and most of my old schoolmates were working at the armory, making those famous rifles for the frontier cavalry, and spending our free time in the streets and the taverns, Jeremy Slater was learning how to be a gentleman. He got all his schooling, and quietly cultivated friends among what was called “the better people.” So when some fancy lawyer’s son said he thought Jeremy Slater was “officer material,” Slater was voted in as a second lieutenant.
That was right at the start of the war, of course, when a lot of regiments were electing their own officers. The army brass had to come along with a big broom afterward, and sweep out the rubbish. That’s when Slater got to be a first lieutenant.
The night we all signed up, though, we thought it was a wonderful joke—little Jeremy with shoulder pips, ha ha. The whole lot of us having to call him “sir,” well, chat wasn’t quite so funny. That hurt a bit, but we comforted ourselves by wagering how long he’d last. Then, bit by bit, he surprised the howling daylights out of us. He never got over being a sissy; he hated the cold, he hated the rain, he absolutely detested army rations, and most of all, I think, he detested army discipline. But after a while we stopped caring, because he was good at everything that mattered. Like I told Colonel Thiessen, he was steady as a rock when the shooting started, and he had a splendid eye. It came from his trade, I guess. His family were tailors, and had been for three or four-generations. After we got to be friendly, he told me it was his dream someday to move to Boston, to the very best part of Boston, and have himself a fancy shop with a fancy sign in the window: J. N. SLATER, ESQUIRE: FINE TAILORING FOR GENTLEMEN. You wouldn’t think tailoring had anything to do with war, but it did. Young Jeremy could look at a man and know right off what he ought to be wearing. He could see the shapes of a garment in his head, all the pieces and what they would look like and what he had to cut differently each rime, to make each one exactly right. And he could do the same thing with a company of men and a gulley and a patch of trees; he could see all the shapes of the landscape, and how the pieces fit, and how they didn’t. Through the whole damn war, the little grub always ranked me. He made captain in the spring of ’62, a week before I did. And I have to give him credit: he wore his authority well. If he held it against me, how I’d treated him when we were boys, he never gave a sign.
So we followed the Army of the Potomac from battle to battle, from disaster to disaster, and somewhere in all the violence and boredom and bad food and nights of black fear, somewhere between the town hall of Springfield and the mud of Marye’s Heights, I forgot all about Slither. The quick, scrawny boy with the quick, sneaky mind went clear out of my thoughts. Now, in the gray misery of a January day in Libby Prison, I didn’t much like Colonel Thiessen bringing him back.
Back he was, nonetheless. He came out of the stairwell into the second-floor quarters, quiet as a footpad, with his hand in his pocket. He was still small, barely five-seven in his ratty socks. He’d been nice-looking as a boy, in a dark-haired, street-urchin sort of way, and he had grown up the same: his face sharp and proudly chiseled, with fine, high cheekbones; his hands as slender and graceful as a girl’s. I watched him pick his way through the other prisoners, walking carefully around the pair who’d set up a homemade chessboard on the floor. He was always extraordinarily polite.
Or, perhaps, just giving himself airs…?
Damn Colonel Thiessen anyway.
“Hullo,” Slater said, and sat down beside me. We had no chairs, of course., in Libby. No furniture at all. Old wooden crates served for everything—tables and chairs and gaming boards and altars for the Sunday service. He pulled a muffin out of his pocket and broke it in half. “Here.”
My mouth watered unbearably, but I didn’t move. “Where’d you get that, Jeremy?”
“Dobbin,” he said, biting into his piece without hesitation. “He had a nice waistcoat that doesn’t fit him anymore. He asked me to cut it down for his boy.”
“He should live on our rations for a while. Then his waistcoat would fit him just fine.”
Slater laughed. “Sure you don’t want this?” he asked, waggling the rest of the muffin. “I’m not going to leave it hanging about.”
“Jeremy…”
“Dobbin’s really a decent fellow,” he went on, ignoring my faltering attempt to speak. “He tallied to Major Cluny for me, and Cluny says I can help out in the hospital, starting tomorrow.”
“What do you mean, ‘help out’?”
“Scrub the floors, mostly, I guess. Move stuff.”
“Nigger work.”
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Jeremy…” Suddenly I wanted to curse him, to call him names, to yell at him until something registered in his self-centered little head: Damn it to hell, man, can’t you see what you’re doing?
“You shouldn’t be doing stuff like that. It’s helping the Rebs.”
“Last time I looked, it was our boys in that hospital. Are you saying we should leave the floors dirty?”
“Don’t be an idiot. If you do that stuff, a slave doesn’t have to. He can do something else instead. Like work on their fortifications, maybe. Use your damned head, Slater.”
He looked at me, and he looked away. There was a last little scrap of muffin in his hand. He put it in his mouth, quickly. Like it shamed him, I thought.
“We don’t get half-enough food,” he said bitterly, “and half of what we get is rubbish. We have no blankets. We sleep on the floor with the wind blowing snow on our heads. We’re dying here, Robert, one of us, two of us, every single day—!”
“I know all that.”
“I’m nor doing any harm, damn it. I’m just trying to survive. Scrubbing a floor or two isn’t going to change the outcome of the war.”
“First it was just a bit of mending. Now it’s scrubbing a floor or two. What’s it going to be next week?”
“Oh, go preach at somebody else,” he said, and left me.
* * *
I sat like a block of wood for a long rime, after he was gone. I thought about the things Colonel Thiessen had said. I thought about Springfield, and the times we had waylaid Slither on some quiet street and pummeled him with snowballs. I thought about what it had been like when the Rebels dragged us here to Libby. I felt so sorry for him, those first few days—most of all the night he kept talking about the windows. It was dead of winter, probably the worst winter in the history of Virginia. We were hungry to the toes of our unshod feet, and both so cold we were shivering. The prisoners who had coats or blankets wrapped themselves up like mummies. A few paced endlessly, back and forth, trying to stay warm. The wind was howling to make you want to scream, and snow was gathering in small ridges on the floor around the windows. And I wondered if they got it wrong, in the Bible—if hell wasn’t a hot place at all, but wet and windy and icy as a grave. Libby Prison was as close to hell as I ever wanted to get.
Libby Prison, you see, wasn’t really a prison at all, not a proper one. It was a big, ugly slab of a warehouse on the edge of the James River, where they used to store cargo from the docks. There was no glass on the windows. There weren’t even shutters. That day, for the third day running, the Rebel guards hadn’t given us any coal, so we ate our meager offerings of cornmeal raw, mixed in a bit of ice water.
But the worst thing of all was that we had no decent clothing. On his last furlough home, Jeremy Slater had sewn himself a thick, beautiful greatcoat. It wasn’t made of the shoddy stuff the army suppliers gave us, but of the finest, softest wool. Every man in the regiment envied Slater his coat. The Rebels stole it, of course, when we were captured, along with everything else of ours they could use, including our shoes.
I still remember how he sat one night, huddled against a pillar, dark-souled like I’d never seen him. He wrapped his arms around his knees and curled himself into a tight little ball, and I knew he was thinking about his precious coat, thinking how it was tucked around some ruffian it probably didn’t even fit, chasing General Burnside through the mud. He looked just like a little boy again, bullied out of his treasures on a playground: But it was mine, you dirty rat, it was MINE…!
A vicious gust of wind hammered against the walls, ruffled his hair, and left a few white snowflakes briefly on his sleeve.
“How can people be so uncivilized?” he muttered. “Any idiot could put shutters on those windows.”
“A guard I talked to says they don’t have any supplies. Says it’s our own fault; we b
lockaded their ports.”
Slater’s scowl merely grew darker. “Wouldn’t have to be proper shutters,” he said. “Any slab of junk wood would do it. A couple of nails, a piece of old harness for a hinge. They don’t care, that’s all. Uncivilized, the whole howling lot of them.”
Uncivilized. It was one of Slater’s purest insults. It was his gripe against the whole war. He wasn’t an idiot; he hadn’t expected the war to be easy, the way some of us had. But he thought it would be … “sensible,” he told me once. Sane. The horrors would be unavoidable things, like getting blown to pieces in a battle. He hadn’t expected raw hale. He hadn’t expected generals with porridge for brains. And he hadn’t expected anything like Libby.
“We’ll be exchanged soon,” I said.
He burrowed his chin even deeper into his knees. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe we’ll just die. Maybe we’ll just lie down one night and wake up dead, stiff and straight as icicles.”
That was the first time I wondered if Jeremy Slater might be scared witless. Really witless, I mean—the way men got before their rifles fell out of their hands and they started blubbering. It was an unworthy thought, and I put it clear out of my head. Then Lieutenant Kramer died—the only other officer from the Eighth who’d been captured with us. He was a big, strapping fellow, twenty-one years old and solid as a tree. He had a bit of the grippe when we got to Richmond. Then he got a bad fever, and they took him down to the hospital on the ground floor. The next morning they came and told us he was dead. Pneumonia, they said. Just like that.
For three days or so Slater hunkered down inside himself like a cat who’d been chewed silly by a dog. He hadn’t known Kramer well, so it wasn’t a personal thing. It wasn’t grief. It was pure, naked panic. Shock, one prisoner called it; a lot of men reacted that way, he told me, when they found themselves inside a prisoner-of-war camp for the first time. Most of them got over it.
So it was all I wanted, at first. I wanted Slater to get over it. When he started talking friendly to the Rebel guards, I didn’t worry about it at all. I was just glad he was talking to somebody. I was glad to hear him laughing again. When he started doing favors for them, and getting extra food and little privileges, I still didn’t worry about it. I knew he was a little desperate, and I wasn’t going to fudge him. After all, I’d judged him wrong once before.
