Andersonville (11 page)

Callixtus drove the corpse wagon to the cemetery while Turner rode shotgun. Barclay, Clemis, and the rest were ordered to walk along behind, watching the bodies bounce in the rumbling bed.

Two hundred yards up past the bake house the wagon stopped at a vast cleared area, a field of jutting planks, the burial markers, each branded with an ever-increasing number. Every corpse was assigned a number as it was unloaded on a stretcher, carried to a small tent, and there recorded in a “dead book” by a white prisoner named Atwater before being hauled to its final rest.

The graves were long trenches about three feet deep that ran north-south. They were dug by a semipermanent burial detail of white parolees who lived in a guarded cabin adjoining the cemetery and were issued a whiskey ration to assist them in their grisly duty.

“Sometimes they make us bury 'em, too,” Callixtus whispered to them after Turner had jumped down to go speak with the officer in command of the burial detail, “but usually not.”

“Why not?” Barclay asked.

“ 'Cause they think we goin' cut the weddin' rings off they fingers,” Clemis said drily.

“I seen some of them white parolees do just that,” Callixtus said.

The stretchers the detail used to bear the bodies were in poor condition, and as Barclay watched, one particularly rotten corpse suddenly ruptured and spilled through a torn gap in the stretcher with a loud rip and splatter.

The white soldier at the head of the corpse dropped the stretcher in disgust, further obliterating the dead man.

“I'm through with this!” he yelled, pulling down his kerchief and stalking off to the cabin, throwing his hands up in the air. He had the look of an animate corpse himself, with drawn face and bloody teeth, as though he subsisted on the dead.

Turner saw the man and intercepted him, drawing his pistol.

“You get back there and put that man in the grave or you'll take his place.”

“Put me there! Put me back in the stockade! I don't care! I'm done. There ain't nothin' worth this!”

Several of the diggers excavating the long trench in which the dead were laid side by side stopped their work and leaned on their shovels to see what would happen next.

Turner wheeled around, sputtering in rage.

Then they heard the clop of hoofbeats and saw Wirz himself riding into the cemetery, right over the long, low mounds of the dead.

“What the hell is going on?” he roared.

“We can't do this work no more, Captain!” the bloody-mouthed man spit. “No man can and stay sane! We buried a hundred men today! The sun's near settin', and we got thirty more! And look at the state of them!”

“And tomorrow there'll be a hundred and fifty more!” Wirz bellowed at the man, wheeling his horse to address them all, eyes wide and mad. “Two hundred! Three hundred,
Gud
willing! And by
Gud
, you'll bury them, if you have to pass them down in buckets, or I'll have you put alive in that trench and dump a mountain of rotting dead on top of you!”

“We need more men,” the prisoner muttered in resignation.

“
There's
more men!” Wirz yelled, gesturing to the small group of black soldiers standing near the wagons. “Get back to work! No man returns to his bed until all these good Yankees are underground!”

Wirz kicked his horse and galloped off down the lane, sparing no further glance. Beyond the borders of the cemetery, Barclay saw a cabin farther up the road in the direction from which Wirz had come.

Barclay and Clemis and Callixtus and another man were put at the lip of the long trench and issued pitchforks. Their job was to “bail” the disintegrating corpses from the dripping stretchers and then douse them in lye with their bare hands.

They went on this way almost until sunset, when a Rebel lieutenant arrived at the tent to collect the dead list at last.

They traded their pitchforks for shovels and turned the earth over the white-powdered dead, who were arranged like macabre confections in a case below.

When the work was finished, they were issued their rations and water and supped over the dead, gingerly eating old salt pork from their own poisoned hands.

Barclay stood up when he had finished and walked idly over to the older section of the trench, which contained the dead of the previous day. He scanned the markers in the failing light and found Major Bruegel's.

He said no words but considered the injustice the officer had suffered. On a whim, he crouched down and scooped up a handful of grave dirt and put it in his pocket. Such earth had its uses.

When he straightened, he saw Clemis standing there, staring at him. His eyes were shining in strange amusement.

“What you goin' do with that, boy? Make you some goofer dust?”

Barclay stiffened uncontrollably. That was exactly what he intended to do.

“What do you know about it?” he asked sharply.

Clemis's dour face split into a bright white grin.

“Shit, my auntie was a root worker. Kiss my ass!” He laughed. “All your high talkin' and education, and you just as scary a nigger as me at heart. Who taught you that hoodoo?”

Barclay couldn't help but smile back at the usually stone-faced angry man's infectious high laugh. He shrugged.

“My daddy. Best conjure man in New Orleans.”

Clemis's eyes bugged.

“New Orleans? Kiss
my
ass!”

“Glad you two can find something to laugh about in all this,” came a steady voice with a deep, ingrained southern drawl.

Clemis and Barclay stopped laughing and turned to see the lieutenant who had come to collect the dead book standing before them. He was a smart-looking fellow about Barclay's age, clean-shaven with neat blond hair trimmed over his ears beneath his blue forage cap. A cigar glowed between his teeth. He looked much the same as when Barclay had last seen him except for a black patch over his left eye.

“Well, well,” Barclay said. “
Lieutenant
Day now, is it? You gained a bar and lost an eye.”

“Come with me,” Day said, turning on his heel without waiting for a reply.

Clemis looked at Barclay. Barclay held up a reassuring hand briefly and followed Day.

The lieutenant stopped at the edge of the freshly dug open trench.

“Tomorrow this'll be filled,” Day said when they were out of earshot of anyone else.

“I ought to fill it right now, you son of a bitch,” Barclay hissed, barely able to keep himself from clamping his hands around that white neck.

Quitman Day.

They had been friends once. Their daddies had been friends, too. Barclay's, a powerful Haitian conjure man, the scion of old, old magic brought over from Dahomey. Quitman's father, a shrewd master of the western traditions, a cabalist and magus who worked in tallow, pentacles, and bells. But Quitman and Barclay…As he'd told Bruegel, they had been brothers.

The two of them had grown up side by side, immersed in magic, each eager to share his family's secrets with the other. Quit had taught him the complexities of the Solomonic seals and the ins and outs of the Goetia, and he in turn had instructed the white boy in the intricate cornmeal
veves
and trick laying of the voodoo queens and hoodoo doctors, had even invited him to his aunt's sacred
hounfor
to watch the
lwa
mount the faithful.

It was there that he had seen the goddess Erzulie match him to his beloved sister, Euchariste. How his heart had sung at that moment.

“I got your letter,” Day said, blowing smoke at the setting sun.

“I knew you would when Wirz mentioned you were the censor.”

His letter, ostensibly to Euchariste. Euchariste, who had been dead two years now. He still could picture her lying in that cot in the refugee camp, cradling his bloody stillborn nephew.

Day's son.

“I came for the dead book as soon as I heard there were Negroes on the burial detail. I had a feeling you'd be here. I didn't know about…what happened with Sergeant Turner. Until it was too late. I would've sent a surgeon for you, but it would never have worked. There would have been questions. I'm sorry.”

Barclay said nothing but willed his eyes to burn holes in the man before him.

“It cut me to my core to read her name,” Day said quietly.

“Shut your goddamned mouth!” Barclay exploded.

“Keep your voice down,” Day warned, looking furtively around.

“You're going to stand there and tell me that it hurts you now?” Barclay went on, only a little quieter. “Why didn't it cut you to your core to leave her in that goddamned hell of a camp? How did it cut you when you learned she was dead…
that your son was dead
? You couldn't even give him a name.”

“It was…a boy?” Day said quietly.

“I guess it would've been embarrassing for a Confederate officer to have a Negro woman on his arm, a mulatto boy in his pram. It was probably a relief to you.”

“Lord, but I could kill you for saying that to me,” Day snapped, turning on him, furious and miserable all at once. “If you knew…God, it took an army to keep us apart, man.”

“Just an army?”

“This is because of that day. That day I disarmed the Corps d'Afrique. I had orders, Barclay. God, what I wouldn't have given to have you fight alongside me that day. We sure could've used you. Maybe things would've been different. Maybe I could've got back to them somehow.”

“Just a lot of talk,” Barclay said.

“I guess it is now.” Day sighed. “Listen. I know you mean to kill me. What I need to know is, can you put all that aside long enough to do what needs to be done here?”

“You wouldn't have been fool enough to send for me if you didn't think I could.”

“All right,” Day said, nodding to himself. “Meet me by the mail drop in the stockade in two hours.”

Barclay went back to Clemis, who stood dumbfounded as Day returned to the tent. Before Clemis could voice his questions, a hand gripped Barclay's arm hard.

He turned, thinking it was Day, ready to strike him, and saw it was Turner.

“What the hell was that about, boy?” the sergeant demanded.

“What's that, sir?”

“Don't play the jughead with me. I mean you and that lieutenant. What was y'all jawin' about so hot?”

Barclay bit his lip.

“I oughtn't to say, sir.”

“You oughtn't…Boy, you better unfasten your lip or I'll have your hide nailed on my wall like a black rabbit's.”

“The officer…he want me to…he say…”

“What?” Turner nearly howled in frustration. “Spit it!”

“He want me to bugger him, sir,” Barclay said lowly. “I say no, I won't do it. I'm a Christian. An' what the Good Book say about that is—”

“Never mind that,” Turner said quickly, letting him go and casting a look after Day. “You two get back to that wagon. We're headin' back to the pen.”

Turner marched over to Callixtus and the other man and barked at them to come on.

Clemis shook his head.

“You don't want to get caught lyin' to him,” he whispered. “If ever they was a fiend in a man, it be Turner. He ain't never caught a black man runnin' alive.”

Barclay nodded. Clemis couldn't possibly guess just how spot on he was.

On the march back to the stockade in the failing light, Barclay watched Clemis and several other men break sticks of wood from the sides of the road and stuff them into their tunics. A few grabbed branches of berries. Each man did this in silence and in turn so that none would spoil the picking for the others by getting caught. Barclay noticed a two-foot-high stalk of wild broomcorn and plucked it, cramming it under his jacket.

The sun set by the time the wicket closed behind them, and they dispersed to their various shelters in the stockade.

Barclay stood and rubbed his tired muscles, dreading another sleepless night spooning in the row under the stars.

Clemis hung back.

“You ain't stayin' with that white boy no more?”

“No, I'm not staying there anymore.”

“With the major gone,” he said, pawing the dirt with his toe, “I got his dugout all to myself. Only a matter of time before some raggedy sumbitch I can't stand move in there with me.” He shrugged. “Might as well be you.”

“Well, I'd appreciate that,” Barclay said.

“Come on, then.”

They walked through the rows to the north, passing the edges of the dying fires and listening to the weeping and groaning men, the low singing, and the scattered laughter.

“ 'Course, I got another reason askin' you to stay with me,” Clemis said when they were nearly at Bruegel's dugout.

“What's that?” Barclay asked curiously.

“You know that hoodoo. I been havin' real bad dreams—”

Clemis stopped short then and held up his hand for Barclay to do the same and keep quiet.

After a moment's listening, Barclay heard the sound of rummaging and low talk from the direction of Bruegel's tent.

“Kiss my ass!” Clemis snapped, and broke into a fast, purposeful limp.

Barclay kept up, snatching up a rock as he went.

There were blurred shadows moving behind the canvas.

Clemis tore through the doorway before Barclay could stop him, yelling to beat the band.

Barclay followed and saw a club lash out of his periphery and strike Clemis behind the head, putting him on his stomach.

Barclay threw up his hand and blocked a club meant for him, though it made him drop his rock. He threw his fist into the intruder's eye. When he brought his other arm back for a follow-up blow, he felt arms wrap around his elbow. He jabbed his heel into the owner's instep, heard a curse, and felt himself released, but a minute later he was dog piled with two or three bodies and groaned as they slipped their knuckles into his ribs and stomach.

Finally he was pulled up to his knees, arms held by two men, with someone else's feet on his calves.

Sarsfield crouched in front of him, straddling the unconscious Clemis, a bundle of Bruegel's personal effects under his arm. He knew it was Watt and Chester behind him.

“Well, it's our lucky goddamned night, boys,” Sarsfield said, and slid a barber's razor from his boot. He unfolded it, the rusty blade catching the moonlight sifting in through the tent flap. “I'm gonna rip you two darkies chin to dick.”

“You do that,” came another voice from inside the tent that Barclay thought he recognized, “and you'll have to cut me next, buster.”

A broad-shouldered figure in a sailor's cap moved out of the shadows into the dim moonlight. Jack Muir, the stubby sailor who'd arrived only that morning. He, too, had pilfered goods under each bowling pin arm.

“Who the fuck do you think you are, greenhorn?” Sarsfield said. “Get out of here. Get back to the camp. Mosby's gonna—”

Quick as lightning, Jack dropped the parcel of rations in his right arm and slipped a knife under Sarsfield's chin.

“Mosby said we take anything we want. He didn't say we kill anybody.” He glanced over Barclay's shoulder at the men holding him. “Out.”

Sarsfield's lip curled and his right eye trembled, but he nodded.

Barclay felt the weight ease off his calves and jerked his arms out of the two men's grasp. He rubbed circulation back into them as they slunk off outside.

Jack took the point of his knife from Sarsfield's throat.

Sarsfield shrugged past Barclay but paused in the doorway to say: “You and me's gonna have words when we get back to camp, sailor boy.”

“I can hardly wait to see what kind,” Muir replied evenly.

He put away his knife and retrieved his bundle of stolen goods.

“Gangway, mister,” he told Barclay.

“Hang on,” Barclay said. “Why side with those men and then keep 'em from killing us?”

“I don't kin to killing a Union man,” Jack said, shrugging. “Besides that, my mother's a staunch New Bedford abolitionist. I ain't like these others that think this war's about states' rights or what have you. God is visiting hell on the South for their wicked institution what's kept your people in bondage. And I'll not stand by and see a Negro mistreated or murdered in the same way as them godless southerners do.”

He smiled roguishly and went to the tent flap.

“And what would your mother say about the company you're keeping now?” Barclay asked.

Jack looked back at Barclay and frowned.

“She also told me to do whatever it takes to make it back home.”

He went out into the night.

Barclay went over to Clemis and rolled him over. His bell had been soundly rung, but his scalp was intact. He took off his shell jacket and made a pillow for the man, folded his spectacles, and set them aside.

He settled into the far end of the tent and sat in the quiet, thinking. The dugout was a bit roomier than Charlie's shebang. The Raiders had cleaned it out pretty well. Here among the other Negroes, though, he would attract less attention than before and be free of the prying, nosy eyes of the whites.

He ducked outside for a moment and went to a neighboring shelter. He called inside and was pleased to see Callixtus. He asked to borrow a cup of water for Clemis if Callixtus could spare it. Far from the wrathful cursing he would have received if he had asked one of his prior white neighbors, Callixtus disappeared inside and returned with a small, precious tin of clear water.

Barclay promised to return it and went back to the dugout.

He carefully set the tin of water down and took out the sprig of broomcorn he'd gotten from the side of the road and broke it in half, setting aside some for later, just in case. He dipped the other half into the water. Reciting Psalm 23, he crawled around the tent, sprinkling the corners of the room, lashing the blankets.

When he had concluded the simple cleansing spell, he saw that Clemis was sitting up looking at him, rubbing his head.

“Kiss my ass, I'm blind. They knocked my fuckin' eyeballs loose in the back,” he mumbled.

“Your spectacles are to your left,” Barclay said.

Clemis reached over, gingerly unfolded them, and put them on his nose.

“Only ones I'll ever have, likely. What was that you was doin'?”

“You said you were having bad dreams. Later on, I'll drop this broomcorn at a crossroads, and that ought to take care of them in here, anyway. If I can lay my hands on some salt, I can whip up something stronger.”

“You have nightmares, too?” Clemis asked.

Barclay shrugged.

“I do. I ain't ashamed,” Clemis went on. “I dream I'm walkin' through the stockade, but it's empty. Ain't nobody else. I'm powerful thirsty, and devils be up in the pigeon roosts up on the wall. I dream they is a clean spring bubblin' up on the other side of the line, and if I can just reach it, I know it be the coolest, cleanest water I ever drank. Like it come from the Master's well. God, I mean. I reach across with a cup tied to a stick, but I slip. I cross over the line, and they fly down like buzzards and drag me to the middle of that terrible creek and drown me. Now how about you?”

“I dream of devils, too,” Barclay said quietly. Then he took out his papers and pencil and began to scrawl a letter.

“What you writing?”

“A letter to my brother up north,” he said, folding it over when he'd finished.

“Who you is, Barclay?” Clemis asked. “Why you here?”

“I've got to get to the postbox,” Barclay said. “Keep your head cool. I'll be back in a few.”

As he passed down Market Street through the gaggles of hungry gamblers, Barclay discerned that the camp was abuzz with the altercation between Jack the sailor and the Raider Sarsfield that morning. The newcomer obviously had some fighting skill, and naturally there were men keen to see it tested. From snatches of conversation he gathered that some of the more entrepreneurial personalities were talking of organizing a prizefight and that the names of Sergeant Key and Big Pete, who apparently had been a fighter at one time before the war, were being bandied about as potential challengers to Sailor Jack. Hypothetical odds already were being laid.

He shook his head at it all: that men too weak to lift their own hands above their heads let alone knock another man down were willing to wager what little they had over such a thing. His father had instilled in him a distaste for pugilist contests, though he had taught him to fight with his hands and feet, just as his grandfather had taught him.

When he had first begun learning to fight in the yard, he had been eager to test his skills on his peers and organized little penny-a-bet bouts between himself and the neighborhood children. He had been perplexed at his father's anger when he'd found out about it and asked what fun learning to fight was if he never got to do it.

“When my grandfather arrived at the seasoning camp in Jamaica, the drunken slave masters blindfolded him along with twenty or thirty men and made them fight for their amusement. When only two stood, the blindfolds were removed. Tell me, Barclay. What do you think the victor won when it was all over?”

“Pride? At being the winner?”

“What pride is there in bleeding to make another man smile or to swell his pockets with winnings? No, Barclay. The victor was made to fight the next time the same as the others, no better for all his skill. I do not teach you to fight for pleasure. You fight for the only thing worth fighting for: your life.”

He saw a man standing next to the mail drop and quickened his pace, thinking it was Day. It wasn't. The escapee, Skinny Wilderbeck, watched him intently as he dropped his folded, addressed letter into the slot.

“Who are you, Lourdes?” Wilderbeck asked quietly, itching idly at the ball and chain still shackled to his ankle. “Are you an intelligence agent?”

Barclay grinned stupidly.

“A what?”

“Keep your voice down. I heard about Pinkerton trainin' black dispatchers. You're literate; you arrived here under…odd circumstances. I heard tell you had a long talk with one of the Rebel officers in the graveyard. Maybe you're a spy. But for who?”

“I sure ain't no spy, sir,” Barclay said, shaking his head and grinning. “Lord, if my sister could hear you. I'm just a runaway tryin' to get home's all.”

“Everybody calls me Skinny,” Wilderbeck said, leaning on the mail drop. “I'm gonna lay my cards on the table, Lourdes. I seen the beating you took. You'd have to be a madman to take a beating like that and swear fealty to Jeff Davis. We've had escape attempts before.”

“Yeah, I heard you knowed somethin' about that, sir,” Barclay said, looking down at the chain clamped around his ankle and the heavy ball resting behind it.

“Usually they're caught and brung back or killed. Maybe some have gotten away. We don't know, 'cause we never hear from 'em again.”

That's because Old Spot and his chums pick their bones clean out in the woods, Barclay thought.

“If matters here are ever to be brought to light, if the suffering is ever to be alleviated, the right man needs to escape. Not some fool who's going to run straight home to his farm; I mean somebody who'll give eyewitness testimony to all he's seen to the men that can do somethin' about it. Do you understand me? We can't just let 'em forget about this place when it's all over.”

Barclay shrugged.

“I guess so. Maybe I keep an eye out for the right man for you, sir.”

Skinny sighed and stooped down to heft his heavy ball.

“All right. You do that. Ask anybody in the northeast corner for my shelter.”

He slapped the mailbox and touched the bent brim of his cap.

“Be seein' you, Lourdes.”

Barclay touched his hat and watched Skinny shuffled off into the dark, chains clinking, like some poor ghost.

Up above, there was some discussion in the pigeon roost. One of the young boys was being relieved, and the man who took his place hollered down as the kid sleepily descended the ladder.

“Go to bed, boy!”

Barclay frowned. He knew Turner's voice. He turned to go.

There was a groan, and the wicket in the gate squealed open.

At first Barclay thought it was Wirz riding in on his horse, but the color was all wrong. This was a chocolate mare, and it was Day atop her.

He rode right up to the mailbox, turned his horse around, and pointed down to Barclay, calling in a loud voice.

“Hey, boy! Come here! I need a strong back!”

Barclay shuffled over.

“Me, sir?” he asked, pointing to his own breast innocently.

“Yeah, you. You're gonna carry the mail out.”

From the wall, Turner called down again. He sounded slightly amused.

“That box ain't hardly half full, Lieutenant. Why can't you carry it yourself?”

Day whirled angrily and shaded his hands against the torchlight to glare up at the sentry roost.

“What'd you say? Who's up there? Sound off!”

“Sergeant Turner, sir.”

“Turner! Who the hell are you to question an officer?”

“Apologies, sir,” Turner droned disingenuously, not a hint of fear in his tone. “We ain't supposed to let no prisoners out after dark without the commandant's knowin'. I just thought, since that box ain't even half full—”