The Blue and the Gray Undercover

by Ed Gorman

  It was all about courage, I suppose. Courage is the measure of a man in an army, and every time I saw him cozying up to the Rebs, I remembered how he was on the battlefield, scared of nothing that lived, and I told myself he’d be fine. A man like Slater would never sell out to the enemy. He might tell a joke or two, trade a favor even, but nothing serious, nothing that really mattered. He’d die in Libby first.

  Talking to Thiessen changed everything. What if what I had thought was courage, was only fatalism all along, like the colonel said? What if there was no substance inside the man, just the same weak, wet-nosed boy we’d sent scurrying for shelter more times than we could count? What if it was only Slither with us, after all?

  * * *

  I started paying more attention to him after that. I noticed how he moved around among us, so quietly, like he was watching us even more than we were watching him. I noticed that he got up sometimes in the middle of the night, as if he were going to relieve himself, and then didn’t come back for upward of an hour. Mornings, of course, he went down to the hospital, where he did chores for the Rebels. And I saw how they won him over, bit by bit, just like Thiessen feared they would. The Rebel doctor, Major Cluny, was one of those sterling gentlemen, the kind Slater admired so much, the kind who talked like dictionaries and knew the difference between seventeen different kinds of spoons. Slater would come back and tell me what a fine man Cluny was, and how he was trying to do the best for the sick prisoners, he really was. It was “Cluny did this” and “Cluny said that,” until one day I had enough of it, and told Slater where he could put his Major Cluny, along with the entire Confederate States of America and its armies. After that we didn’t talk much anymore.

  I didn’t really turn on him, though, until the day he got the boots. They weren’t new boots, of course. Even by the start of ’63, a pair of new boots was worth a fortune in Virginia. But they were still in decent shape, and they fit his small feet extremely well. The whole room stopped what it was doing and turned to stare at him as he walked in.

  “Hey, look at that, boys,” somebody hooted. “Goody Two-shoes has got himself some shoes.”

  “What’s up, Slater?” shouted another. “We all going dancing?”

  There was more joshing, all of it somewhat barbed, but none of it really malicious until Lieutenant Sprague joined in. Sprague was a Pennsylvanian, a farm boy with a sharp eye and a mean, mean temper. The sort you said a prayer over every night, thanking the good Lord he was in your own army and not on the other side.

  “So what do you think, boys? Which of our friends is lying barefoot on his deathbed down there?”

  The silence was sudden and ugly. Slater looked from one to the other, slowly. There were seventy-odd men in the room, ordinary decent men, most of them, but soldiers nonetheless—killers, really, when you looked at it straight; killing was our reason for being—and I think Slater made the connection the same moment I did.

  “Do you think I’d steal from my own comrades?” he said, very quietly.

  “I don’t think you know who your comrades are,” Sprague flung back.

  Then Slater made a tactical mistake—one of the few I’d ever seen him make. He sat on a crate and lifted his feet. “Look at those boots,” he said. “Do they look like ours?”

  They didn’t, of course. They had no right or left feet. They were Southern-made boots.

  Sprague jumped like a cat on the opening. “Well, I’ll be damned. He does know who his comrades are. Tell us, Slater, when you going to get yourself a nice gray outfit to go with your new shoes?”

  “You’re out of line, Lieutenant.”

  “And what are you going to do about it … Captain?”

  I never thought an officer’s rank could sound like an insult, but in Sprague’s snarling voice, it truly did. Heaven knows what might have happened then, but Sprague’s own company commander was there in a breath, moving between them. “All right, men, let’s just get on about our own affairs, shall we?”

  Slither made himself scarce with no further urging, and stayed out of sight for the rest of the day.

  * * *

  That was when I told them—the whole of Libby Prison—I told them what we had called him back in Springfield. I told them what a sissy he had been and how he never fought back when we pushed him, but used tricks and traps on us instead. I told them how I found a dead mouse in my lunch one day, all rank and smelly, lying right on my chicken sandwich. It was the day of a championship ball game, so I had to play empty as a beggar, and didn’t get a scrap to eat till I got home after dark. I told them how my cousin John had arrived one night at a big country wedding dance, with Mariana Kopke on his arm and a great spreading stain of brown glue all over the backside of his trousers, thanks to a booby-trapped buggy seat. Of course, no one could ever prove who was responsible, any more than we could ever prove where the dead mouse had come from. But there was Slither at the dance, entirely alone, with nothing to do but rescue the beautiful, neglected Mariana, and dance with her the whole night long, while poor John smoked and sizzled in the yard.

  I told them everything I remembered—or most of it, anyway—and if you want to know the truth, I felt a little guilty doing it, because I was grown up now, and had a bit more sense than I had as a boy, and I knew a lot of what he did to us we damn well had coming. It was the method which seemed to matter now, the sneakiness, the absolute lack of scruples. He didn’t care if our school lost the ball game because I couldn’t play my best, or if he broke up a courtship which might have ended in a good marriage.

  So we talked it around, and looked at all the parallels, then and now, and there was a general agreement that the man could not be trusted. A few, however, had their doubts—including Captain Deihl, the Pennsylvanian, Sprague’s company commander.

  “So which of them did Mariana Kopke marry in the end?” he asked, all out of the blue.

  “Neither of them,” I said. “She went back to Cambridge and married her cousin.”

  Deihl laughed. “I think, gentlemen, you are all making a mountain out of a molehill.” And he got up, rather pointedly, and walked away.

  I knew what he was thinking. He was remembering alt the things I’d said before, about Slater’s competence and courage in the war, and he was weighing it alongside my list of youthful pranks, and the pranks didn’t count for piffle in the balance.

  * * *

  I wondered what he thought about it all the next day, when the prison commander himself marched into the second-floor quarters, flanked by a dozen armed guards, and dragged Captain Deihl away to the dungeon.

  We were in the cook room when it happened, our mess and three others, the last of the day. It was an utterly vile afternoon, gray and cold, and all we’d had to eat was a watery broth no self-respecting beggar would have called soup, and two small spoonfuls of beans. But at least it was hot; and after several shifts of men had made their meals, the cook room was actually warm. So we lingered in it, huddled around the table nearest to the stove.

  Every time I went down there I thought of home: my mother’s big roaring stove and all the food we used to have—chickens and hams and sweet brandied puddings in sacks; prune cakes and buttermilk muffins and every kind of bread; fat chunks of cheese; raisins and oranges and slabs of pie drowning in cream … It was unbearable sometimes, sitting in that bare cook room, hungrier than ever for having eaten just a mouthful, remembering the laden tables of home. Yet we all did it. We couldn’t help ourselves. We even talked about it. If we could go to the Astor House in New York for supper tonight, what would we order? And every man would mention his favorites, and we’d ache over them, and laugh over them, and swear we’d go there one day, and eat everything in the place, and send the bill to Jeff Davis.…

  After a while the men grew melancholy and drifted away, one by one, and there were only half a dozen of my own mess left, Slither among them. Nobody had asked him what he’d eat at the Astor House, and he never said. He scarcely said anything at all. He looke
d like a man with way too much on his mind, and I had a fair idea what some of it might be. His girl back in Springfield, for one thing. She was from one of those ’forty-eighter families, refugees from the troubles in Europe. They were poor as mice, he told me once, but very patriotic—all for the Union and liberty, as passionate about it as any native-born American. I knew he was utterly, hopelessly, in love with her. He would take out the small daguerreotype he had, fondle it like a jewel and run a finger very gently around the frame, as though he could touch her so, and his face would turn all soft and hungry. How would he explain himself, I wondered, when all of this got back to Springfield? How would he tell her what a nice gentleman Major Cluny was, and how he, Slater, was just trying to survive?

  There was a clatter of feet on the stairs, and we all looked up in dismay, expecting the prison guards, wondering what new and unexpected misery they would inflict on us. But it was Lieutenant Sprague who came storming in, followed by a small horde of his friends.

  “You dirty rat!” he cried, and swore—the longest, vilest string of cuss words I’d ever heard a man use, all of them flung at Jeremy Slater. He was still swearing when he got to the table and hauled the captain out of his chair. Some of us were shouting, too, by then: What’s going on? What happened?

  Sprague was a bigger man even than me. He towered over Slither, and shook him like a rat, still calling him names. It took three of us to calm him down enough to make sense.

  “He told! The dirty bastard told! That’s how he got his boots!” There was another flood of cuss words, and Slither’s voice somewhere in the midst of them, protesting: he didn’t know what Sprague was talking about, and whatever it was, he didn’t do it. Sprague hit him in the stomach, and Slither folded like a wet towel.

  “Told what, damn it,” I demanded. “What the devil’s going on?”

  “Our escape! Captain Deihl had it all planned, and this son of a bitch gave it away! The Rebs just came in, a couple of minutes ago, and they went right to the place. Right to the window. We had the bar almost worked loose; the captain figured a couple more days would have done it. He had a rope hid away, made out of scraps of blanket, and they went straight for that, too. Pulled up the floorboard and there it was. How the hell did they know if he didn’t tell them?”

  I looked at Slither, still bent over, trying to get his breath. I felt sick all through. Still, I stood up for him … one more time.

  “Did he even know about it?” I asked.

  “Of course he did. He come in on us once, just when we were putting the stuff away. You all know he’s sneaking around all the time. Everybody else was gathering for roll call an’ he was busy spying on us. And then he made a big show of seeing nothing. But I know he saw it. And I know he told.”

  “… Didn’t…” Slater muttered, between gulps of pain.

  “Oh, you didn’t, huh?” Sprague grabbed hold of his hair and yanked his head up. “All right, then. You tell us what you gave the Rebels for those boots, and maybe we’ll believe you. Maybe.”

  “It was for helping … in the hospital. Back off, Sprague … damn you.… I never told them anything. I—”

  “Hospital, my ass!” With another string of curses, Sprague smashed the captain back across the table. “You get all sorts of things for helping in the hospital. They gave you extra food. They gave you a blanket. They didn’t goddamn give you boots, too. You tell us what you did for them or I’ll break your scummy arm off!”

  “Sprague…” somebody cautioned.

  Sprague wasn’t listening. He had Slither’s right arm pinned hard against the sharp edge of the wooden table. One quick snap, I thought, and shuddered.

  Slither looked straight at me. “I never betrayed anyone! For Christ’s sake, Rob, you know me! Tell them!”

  You know me.… For a moment I stood irresolute, my officer’s training and my Christian conscience—such as they both were—pushing me in one direction, and fifteen years of memories pushing me in the other—those fifteen years he had just drawn to my attention. It was the worst wrong thing he could have done, reminding me how well I knew him, how thoroughly I remembered his weaseling, underhanded ways.

  I drew a deep breath, and turned away. You got yourself into this mess, Slither; you get yourself out.…

  I started walking, too numb to think, and almost plowed headlong into Colonel Thiessen. I don’t believe he even saw me. He was in full flight, and he looked like Jehovah on the morning of the flood. Even Sprague must have wilted at the sound of his voice—not a loud voice, but so dangerous it could have splintered a tree.

  “That will be enough, gentlemen! That will be quite enough!”

  Sprague hesitated, but only for a second. Then he cursed and flung Slither’s arm aside. The captain eased himself upright, with considerably more dignity than I expected. He looked straight at Sprague.

  “Lieutenant, next time you say your prayers, ask the good Lord to fetch you up some brains. He missed you the first time around.”

  “Get out of here, Slater,” Thiessen said grimly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Thiessen barely waited till the little grub was gone, and then he tore into us. This was not—and he repeated—not the sort of behavior he expected from officers of the United States Army. We were a disgrace to our uniforms. We were an embarrassment to our country. What the devil did we think we were doing, anyway?

  “You were the one who said he was getting too friendly with the Rebels, sir,” I pointed out.

  “I told you to have a talk with him, damn it. I didn’t tell you to lynch him.”

  “He sold Deihl to the Rebels!” Sprague cried savagely, “For a goddamn pair of boots!”

  “Maybe he did. And maybe he didn’t. What evidence do you have? I mean facts, Lieutenant Sprague. Not hunches, not suspicion, not prejudice, not a pile of goddamn schoolyard nonsense. Evidence. Something that would stand up for one minute, somewhere, in at least one shabby backwoods excuse for a courtroom.… What do you have, Sprague? Or have any of you men ever heard of due process?”

  “And what due process is Deihl going to get, down in that hole with the rats?”

  “So we lower ourselves to the level of our jailers? Is that it?”

  For this we had no answer. And though Thiessen and Sprague went on arguing, mostly about the question of what Slither knew, and who else might or might not have known it, I pretty much stopped listening. I felt ashamed in a pan of myself, because Thiessen was right: we’d behaved like thugs. And in another part of myself I was mad as hell, because Slither had got the best of us again. Used our own best man and our own best principles against us, and walked away with a jaunty insult on his lips: Get the Lord to fetch you up some brains, Sprague.…

  Evidence. Fair enough, Thiessen. You want evidence, you’ll get it … if it’s the fast thing I ever do!

  * * *

  I thought it would be a long wait, getting something solid on the little grub. It took all of three days. They must have been hard days for Slater. Hardly anyone would talk to him, except maybe to call him Slither to his face, or to make soft hissing noises and small, snaky wiggles with their hands as he walked by. He went about quiet as a mouse, and spent as much time in the hospital as he could, with the Rebels.

  I almost never let him out of my sight. I kept myself awake at night for hours, but if he snuck out on us, I never caught him at it.

  Every morning around nine o’clock, and every afternoon around four, we had to gather in the central room of the second-floor quarters, where we lined up in rows to be counted. Immediately after this, on the third afternoon, Slither disappeared. I suppose I blinked, because I never saw him leave. I simply looked around the room for him, and he was no longer there. I searched the rest of our quarters, quickly, and then, as a last resort, I went down to the cook room. I didn’t expect him to be there; he had made a point of going nowhere by himself, except to the hospital. Most especially he stayed away from places where he might be cornered and attacked.


  The cook room was empty, too. Just a long, dismal stretch of wooden tables and high gloomy windows. Even the stove had grown cold.

  I heard the voice of a Rebel guard behind me, very soft.

  “Well, Mackie, what do you think? Do I make a passable Virginian?”

  I spun around, utterly bewildered. And for ten or twenty seconds—perhaps for even longer—I almost didn’t recognize him. Because he was perfect. The drawl. The uniform. Even the stance, polished and easy and master of all he surveyed. A Southern gentleman born and bred. Oh, yes, he was a passable Virginian.

  The uniform was spanking new, and bore the insignia of a Confederate major.

  “Where the devil did you get that?” I whispered.

  “Major Cluny ordered up a new one. Standard military issue, so of course it didn’t fit. He’s a man who likes to took dashing, and heaven knows I’m the best tailor in Richmond. And the cheapest. He even gave me a day off to work on it. I had to shorten the legs quite a bit; he’s taller than I am. But it’s rather becoming, don’t you think? A nice gray outfit to go with my new shoes?”

  “You planned this all along, didn’t you?” I felt like an idiot. And I felt small, too, unbearably small, because it had never crossed my mind that he might be planning anything. “You should have told us. Goddamn it, man, you might’ve got your arm broke to splinters.”

  “Yes, that was a near thing.” He didn’t look at me, saying it, and I felt smaller still. “I had to do it right, Rob, or not at all.”

  I had no business questioning him further, but I did it anyway. Because I knew Sprague was correct about one thing: the blanket and the extra food the Rebels gave him were all he was likely to have received for his work in the hospital. And Cluny, naive though he was, probably hadn’t rewarded him before the work on his uniform was done.