Andersonville (9 page)

“You said some interesting things while you been here, Lourdes,” Doctor John said.

Barclay narrowed his eyes. Had he resisted Turner's lash only to spill the beans in a delirium? How much did they know?

“Such as?”

“You talked a lot…about spirits,” Bill said. “And something called loa.”

Barclay relaxed slightly but then looked at them askance.

“It's all right,” Bill said. “We're Indians.”

Barclay shrugged.

“All right.
Lwa
. You know vodoun? Voodoo?”

“Voodoo?” said Doctor John, grinning and exchanging a look with Bill.

Bill didn't smile.

“We're from Michigan,” Bill said.

“
Lwa
are the spirits of the ancients and the ancestors. The Invisibles who act as intermediaries between
Bon Dieu
—God—and man.”

“Like the
manidoog
,” said Bill, leaning forward.

“Mani —?” Barclay said.

“
Manidoog.
Or
Manitou
. Spirits of rock and tree, everything,” said Bill. “Each one has a function. Each a nation, and each can be a go-between for us and the
Gitche Manitou
. The Great Spirit.”

“What else do you know about this stuff, Lourdes?” Doctor John asked.

Barclay shrugged.

“To be honest, I don't go in for it all that much anymore.”

“Why not?” Bill asked.

Why? Because something had happened. The
lwa
had interfered in his life, guided his family a certain way, and they had been wrong. He had trusted their judgment, welcomed it, and it had cost him dearly. He didn't disbelieve in them, of course, but he didn't seek their counsel anymore or show them deference.

“I just don't,” he said.

“What were you dreaming of just now?” Doctor John asked.

Barclay shrugged.

“My sister. Things that happened…a long time ago.”

“Is that the only dream you've had here in Andersonville?”

Barclay frowned. He thought of the things he'd seen at the whipping post. But those were not dreams, he knew. Yet he wasn't ready to talk about that just yet. Not to anybody.

“Why? What do
you
dream?” Barclay countered, looking at both of them.

“I barely sleep. My dreams are bad,” said Bill. “Every night, bad.”

“A lot of men who are aware of such things,” Doctor John said, “have the same complaint.”

“There's something wrong with this place,” Bill said. “In my dreams I see another nation, one that lived here on this land and raised great earth mounds, built big lodges on top of them. Whole cities like that. Here they worshiped a dark
manitou
, a thing of violence that drank the blood of men, women, and children. In my dream the sun worshipers came in from the fields and the forests and made war on the mound builders. They killed them all and sealed the hungry
manitou
beneath the ground in a lake of their blood. Then the sun priestess bound the high priest of the mound builders and threw him from a boat in the middle of the big water. She weighed him down with sacred stones so even his spirit could not rise again from the darkness.”

Barclay stared at Bill and thought of the bloody root he'd pulled from the ground his first night in the stockade. He looked at Doctor John, who sat listening intently.

“Do you know a white man named Boston Corbett?”

“The Hatter?” Doctor John said.

“Yes. People tell me he's a lunatic,” said Barclay.

“He's crazy,” Bill agreed. “But like all lunatics, he sees things others don't. Why do you ask about him?”

“I saw him bathing in the creek,” Barclay said. “He looked right at me. Said something. He told me not to eat the cornmeal. Why would he say that?”

“Well, as a doctor,” said Doctor John, “I wouldn't recommend anybody eat that shit. Sifting through it, we've found everything from bone to lead filaments in it.”

Barclay frowned. Bone and lead.

“Where's my shirt?”

“We had it laundered. And your pants,” Doctor John said, reaching behind him and fishing Barclay's tunic out. “For that, you
do
owe me. Word of advice: hold the seams over a fire every so often. The ticks like to lay their eggs there.”

Barclay took his shirt and buttoned it.

Doctor John shifted again and found Barclay's cap. He took a small leather bag and dropped it inside, then handed it over.

Barclay looked at the bag. It contained some gooey gray substance.

“Salve for your back.”

Barclay blinked back the sunlight and trudged out into the unwelcome but familiar smells and sights of the stockade. He wondered about the strange ingredients in the cornmeal ration and Corbett's weird admonition. It had seemed to him more than a general warning to a newcomer. He had felt that the man had been speaking directly, almost personally to him.

Three days he had lost. What all had happened in that time? How had Charlie been without him? Was he even alive? Had Sullivan and the Raiders returned for him?

He quickened his pace a bit, but when he reached the neighborhood of the old ninety, he found the prisoners standing, craning their necks to witness some drama unfolding in the center, somewhat near where he and Charlie's shebang stood.

“What's goin' on, soldier?” he asked the man nearest him.

“Looks like that bastard Chickamauga's finally gonna get his,” the man answered without looking.

Chickamauga? The crippled informant who'd pointed him out to Turner and Wirz?

He pressed closer until he could see the center stage and its players through the thick knot of men.

To his surprise, he saw Charlie. He looked all right. The stitches were still in his face, but the swelling had gone down considerably.

Limber was there, too, bellowing at the top of his voice and pointing accusingly at Chickamauga, who stood between them, looking terrified. Apparently this had all come about in the middle of their breakfast, for the crocks were scattered everywhere.

The scrawny old cripple would hop back from Limber, only to be intercepted by Charlie and pushed back.

“The Flying Dutchman's favorite!” he was saying when Barclay was close enough to hear clearly. “When the Dutchman goes to punish one of us, he asks if there's anybody who'll come out and speak for the accused. Well? Is there anybody here?”

The prisoners were deathly silent.

“C'mon, boys,” Chickamauga stuttered, something white falling from his mouth. It looked like he still had a mouthful of whatever he'd been eating. Johnnycake, maybe, or even raw meal, which Barclay had seen a man without a fire chewing earlier. “Why, I'm one of you! Y'all know I wouldn't harm nobody.”

“How about the man you caused to get whipped to the bone last week?” Charlie accused shrilly.

“That colored? That don't hardly count, rattin' on a colored. He was in the wrong! I was just tryin'—”

“Tryin' to squeeze out a little extra for yourself, you cheese-eatin' son of a bitch!” said Limber. “And don't pretend this is over that one colored. You turned over on plenty of white men to the goddamned Raiders. And to Wirz.”

“I ain't never!” Chickamauga argued, shaking where he stood.

There were nods of agreement and angry stares from the crowd, peppered by a few calls of “Liar!” “Yessir!” and “Traitor!”

“How about Wilderbeck and a dozen others tried to get over the wall?” Limber shouted. “How come every time a man gets taken by Turner or the guards, it's right after you been hoppin' around askin' questions?”

The crowd began to close in on the man.

Barclay saw Romeo Larkin step from the crowd, a knife in his hand.

“Though those that are betray'd do feel the treason sharply, yet the traitor stands in worse case of woe,”
he said a little dramatically, as if he were stalking applause rather than the man in front of him.

Chickamauga saw the knife and let out a pitiful wail.

“Guards! Guards!” he hollered up at the pigeon roosts.

At the shout of “guards,” some of the men in the circle broke and Chickamauga launched himself through the gap, making impressive strides on his crutch, glancing back over his shoulder the whole time as Limber, Charlie, Romeo, and now Big Pete came up swiftly behind.

“Guards!” he yelled again. “Help! Help me! They got a knife among 'em!”

He broke from the shebangs and limped straight for the deadline, hollering the whole time as Limber and the others closed, menacing him.

He stopped at a post and leaned on it, waving frantically up at the sentries.

“Hey! Hey!”

“Your time's come, you goddamned traitor!” Limber shouted.

The nearest boy sentry looked down at Chickamauga and raised his rifle.

“Get back, you sonsabitches!” he called. “Get back or I'll—”

Suddenly, with an accompanying crack, Chickamauga's lower jaw burst open in a spontaneous bloom of red and pink that scattered teeth and blood in the air.

The cripple apparently had leaned just over the deadline either accidentally or in fear of Limber. Now he lingered in disbelief for a half a moment, eyes bugging stupidly at the loss of his lower jaw, blood and bits of tongue dripping down his shirtfront in bloody clumps. Then he flipped entirely over the rope and crumpled facedown in the mud on the other side.

The men nearest Chickamauga scattered at the shot and ran for their respective shelters. Limber, Charlie, and their cohorts led the pack.

But there would be no thirty-day furlough for the young sentry who had shouted the warning. Barclay had been staring right at him. He hadn't fired the shot.

Again Barclay scanned the other pigeon roosts for a sign of muzzle smoke and saw nothing.

“What the hell's happening here?” came a loud southern voice from the roost.

Barclay watched as a sergeant, well fed and red-faced from scaling the ladder, pulled himself up into the roost with the boy sentry.

“Did you shoot that man?” he said, pointing down to where Chickamauga lay sprawled, one foot hung up on the deadline rope.

“No,” the sentry said, looking white as a sheet. But then perhaps he remembered the standing reward and added, “That is, yes, sir. He come across the deadline. I give him fair warning.”

“Then you did your duty,” the sergeant said, slapping a hand on his small shoulder. “Don't worry about it.” Then the sergeant leaned on the rail and shouted down over the wall. “Down in the stockade! That man was duly warned, and now he's dead. Which of you'll carry him to the South Gate?”

Barclay stepped immediately forward.

“I'll do it, Sergeant!” he said.

No one else said a word.

“Fine, fine. Just get it done!” the sergeant called. “If I see that sack of shit breeding maggots across my deadline later, it's on your damn head, boy.”

“Yessir,” Barclay called, walking up to the deadline.

Not wanting to risk anything, he reached over and pulled Chickamauga's body back under the rope into the stockade.

As he turned the corpse over, he searched the ground all around it. He found Chickamauga's lower jaw, shattered, held together only by the lower lip. But he could find no impression in the earth where the musket ball should have struck nor see any powder burns. He also detected no smell of black powder but a strange, lingering sulfurous stench.

Back singing out, he stooped and lifted the frail man in his arms. Droves of lice bounced off the body onto his sleeves as if sensing the demise of their host and actively seeking new pastures.

He carried Chickamauga to the dead pile and deposited him there. It was midday, so he had missed the corpse wagon, and the body probably would lie there all day and night.

As he tied Chickamauga's toes together and crossed his arms, he inspected the man's ruined mouth, dragging the tip of his finger along his exposed palate. It was encrusted with soggy, stale blood-soaked corn bread.

“Hey, boy!” yelled a guard near the gate. “Quit worryin' that corpse and get back to your ninety.”

Barclay stood up, wiped his finger on his trousers, touched the brim of his cap, and walked off, almost as puzzled as before.

He took a circuitous route back to his and Charlie's shebang. There had been a chance before, ever so slight, that his vision during the whipping had been a mere hallucination. But combined with Bill Mixinisaw's dreams and what had happened to Chickamauga, he was certain there was something diabolic happening here. That was the second shooting death he'd seen in which he had not been able to identify the trigger puller. There was something else going on with the deadline surrounding the stockade. Something to do with the cornmeal, apparently. He thought of the Hatter's warning and Doctor John's declaration that they had found bone and lead in the cornmeal. It felt like the ingredients of a spell to him.

Barclay found the old shebang and leaned in toward the canvas flap, about to announce his presence, when he heard a strange huffing sound coming from inside and a kind of low mewling that gave him pause.

Instead of going directly in, he made a knife with the edge of his hand and slowly parted the opening to peer inside.

Charlie was on his hands and knees on the blankets, trousers around his ankles, tunic unbuttoned, cap askew, yellow hair in his face.

Limber was kneeling behind him, clutching Charlie's narrow, pale hips in his grubby hands, rocking his smaller body with every thrust and panting to beat the band.

Barclay felt his blood boil. Had Charlie sought Limber's protection in Barclay's absence, and was this the price Limber had demanded?

He ducked inside.

His sudden appearance made Charlie gasp, and Limber disengaged and fell back, clutching his wagging member.

Charlie scuttled to the opposite side of the shebang and hugged his chest, then threw a splayed hand over his pelvis.

But it was too late to hide his small breasts and dark womanly notch.

Or rather,
her.

“Goddammit, Barclay!” Limber hissed, fastening his trousers. “Why the hell'd you barge in like that?”

“My place, ain't it? I paid for it. Not as much as you, though, I guess.”

“You watch your lip, you—”

“What?” Barclay snapped, and held Limber's eyes. “Is this how the two of y'all celebrate gettin' an old cripple killed?”

“We didn't mean for Chickamauga to get killed,” Limber said. “Romeo was just gonna shave his head, is all, maybe cut a letter ‘T' into him.”

“I bet.”

“We thought you was dead, Barclay,” Charlie said quietly.

Limber glanced at Charlie, then back at Barclay.

“Guess I'll leave you to it,” Limber muttered.

“Don't go far,” Barclay said as Limber eased past him to the entrance. “I ain't stayin'.”

Limber coughed and went outside.

“If I'd of told you…” Charlie said.

“You might not of been safe here with a Negro,” Barclay said, staring. He shrugged.

“When my husband was called up,” Charlie said, lowering her eyes, “I cut my hair and went along with him. Didn't have nothing but a hardscrabble potato farm. I couldn't take care of it myself. Then, when we got captured together—”

“You and Ogden Davies,” Barclay said.

Charlie nodded slowly.

“Rickson knifed him at Libby Prison,” she said quietly, her eyes far away.

“That's your picture in that locket,” Barclay said. “That's why you want it back. So nobody finds out.”

Charlie's eyes flashed at Barclay.

“I want it back 'cause he give it to me. It's all I got left of him, my Ogden. And I want that son of a bitch to pay for what he done.”

“Yeah, the grievin' widow Davies. Just cryin' her heart out while she gets her back forty plowed by eager-to-be-of-service ol' Limber.”

“He saw me peein'. I had to be sure he kept quiet,” she whispered.

“So how about me? Now that I know, you goin' offer me the same deal?”

Charlie lowered her eyes again. She slowly opened her tunic, revealing her breasts, which were streaked with dirt from Jim's fingers.

“If you want,” she said quietly.

Barclay chuckled.

“Forget it,” he said. He took the bag of salve from his pocket and tossed it at her. It bounced off her chest and landed in her lap. “Here. For your face.”

He turned and left the shebang without waiting to hear a reply. Limber was standing out there with his hands in his pockets, whistling. Paragon of his ninety, that one, discharging his duty as their sergeant with real ardor. Driving cripples to their death and capping it off with a good rutting.

“Barclay,” he said when he saw him emerge. “Listen, I didn't think you'd be back from that Injun, what with the beating you took. If you want your place here back…”

Did he think Barclay had had the same arrangement with Charlie?

“Save it, Sergeant,” Barclay said, slapping his shoulder, perhaps a little harder than normal. “All yours. Privilege of rank.”

He stalked off, not sure where he was heading, not sure precisely why he was mad, why he had said what he'd said. One thing was certain: he had no place to sleep tonight. He couldn't very well return to Doctor John and beg for a spot. He was already indebted to them enough. The cold night, sleeping on the ground with all those sickly men, was going to be hell on his back. Why had he gone and given that salve to Charlie?

Then, to really put an amen on his morning, there was Clemis Varrow blocking his way, clutching something in his hand: a club.

“Lourdes,” Clemis said steadily, as if he'd done nothing wrong. Well, maybe he hadn't at that. Who had Earl Stevens been to him? He had said they'd enlisted together. Barclay had just picked the wrong name, was all. Bad luck.

“Clemis.”

They stared at each other for an interminable time.

“The major's dead,” Clemis said. “Died yesterday. I buried him myself this morning.”

Barclay let his lips part at that news. He'd liked Bruegel.

“I'm sorry for that,” he said.

“He had me trade in all his hair cream to one of them Rebs up in the pigeon roosts. Got a sheaf of papers and a pencil for you right here.”

That was when Barclay realized it was not a club in Clemis's hands but a rolled up bundle of paper. He handed it over with the pencil.