Andersonville (47 page)

He could not have remained inside; they would have sought him out, he would have been stabbed or bludgeoned as he lay.

To the gaze of these three emissaries who squinted their challenge he seemed to stand weaponless.

He said later that he thought one of them was Mosby the Raider’s man Dolan; he was almost certain that it was Dolan; he could not identify the other two.

Will you listen, Key? We people on the South Side have been hearing things.

What did you hear?

Talk of police and such.

You did?

They had been sent to kill him. Their bosses were most of them not brainy men, but they knew enough to squelch an uprising (it amounted to an uprising against authority, since from the beginning the raiders had been the supreme power operating in Andersonville) by cutting off its head. Who had talked, who had carried information? No use figuring that out, you couldn’t figure it out. Too many cooks stirring this particular kettle of broth.

Is it true? They asked it naively.

Yep, said the Bloomington printer.

A tiny fire was burning some twenty yards away; it was strong enough to make a glint on the knife which showed in the hand of the nearest man. The others moved in closer, Key heard the rasp as a club or billy was drawn from under a belt. He flung up his right hand holding the fortuitous revolver, and clicked back the hammer as he lifted it. He would have fired on the instant, but felt that he must wait almost until the men were upon him. He dreaded missing one of the dusky shapes and shooting some innocent person in a hut beyond. The metallic sharp
kack
was as good as a bullet except that it did not kill. The raiders’ committee fell back before the sound so rapidly that it seemed they must have anticipated Key’s gesture. They ran off like cattle blundering; one of them crashed into and through a shebang, there were grunts, wails, sounds of ripping, the sound of entanglement, the sound of a big man wrenching himself loose from fabric and then thudding away after other creatures who galloped in ruthless retreat.

On the fence a nervous guard fired at the sky, you could tell from the direction of the painted flash that his musket was pointed upward as he fired. Key stood listening and deciding what to do.

He thought that he had given sufficient discouragement to these individuals, but more might creep up on him later. He hated the event more than he hated peril to himself: it was forcing the Regulators’ hand. They were by no means ready for an engagement. But from now on none of them would be safe from murder under cover of darkness, nor would they be safe in daylight unless they clung together. Key released the hammer of his gun, put the revolver inside his belted jacket, and went in search of Nathan Dreyfoos. He owed his life to the present of the revolver on that day.

He called softly outside Dreyfoos’s hut, and the lame voice of Private Allen said, No, he’s not here.

Where’s he at, son?

Gone over to MacBean’s place.

In the region of the Sucker Laundry & Cleaning Co. several dark shapes were motionless as stumps while Sergeant Key approached, then detached themselves from the ground to greet him as they recognized his figure. There were MacBean, Dreyfoos, a long-armed man from the One Hundred and Eleventh Illinois known as Egypt, and Ned Carrigan from Chicago. Carrigan was a jolly youngster of enormous frame who had fought in the ring and admitted reluctantly that he had killed another pugilist with one blow during a prize fight held in a hay barn near St. Louis. Had he emerged from another environment Carrigan might have been one of the raiders; as it was he stood ready to march in phalanx with fellow Westerners.

What you doing, boys?

Talking things over.

Where’s Brother Nathan? That was what Seneca MacBean called Dreyfoos continually, and Key had adopted the address.

I am here, Sergeant Key.

Key felt through darkness, found Nathan’s hand, shook it with spirit. That pistol saved me, Brother Nathan.

The others pushed closer around him as he told of the experience, and there was a general cluck-clucking. Glad you’re sound, Key. But that surely is a poser.

A restlessness rose within the stockade on this night, and through regions close around. It affected the mass of the living. The raiders (such as were sufficiently sensitive to recognize the thing, to feel) ascribed this uncertain tingling to the fact that a definite organization was being formed to controvert them. Key and MacBean and Limber Jim and Nathan Dreyfoos and the rest— They ascribed their nervousness to the indisputable evidence that now their enemies had knowledge of the Westerners’ plan, and the hand of the Regulators might be forced to bring about calamity. The flame-spit of a sentry’s gun, fired from the parapet when hoodlums ran away from Leroy Key and his revolver, had never initiated this quivering but had underlined it, punctuated it, emphasized it, shown that it was there. Camp Sumter with its thousands and the pen controlled by Camp Sumter were become a loose black jelly on the saucer of Georgia.

A boy named Dolliver felt the tremor and he thought of blackbirds. They dwelt in wavering tribes amid prairie sloughs, they clung festooned on reeds and made amiable metallic sounds; but something occurred suddenly to disturb them, and you might not descry the signal given, you might not identify the messenger. He flew in without your seeing him . . . or he could have been a hungry animal approaching soft-footed, wet-footed, intending to feed on blackbirds. He could have been a snake winding there, intending to feed on blackbirds’ eggs. Whatever the peril, the redwings flocked up above grasses, glint of jewelry came off their shininess, the small throats rang with what they were saying and fearing.

A man who hailed from farther on the plains, and like the Indians had crept in a coyote’s skin in order to approach buffalo herds closely, thought of buffalo as Eben Dolliver relied on birds for comparison. Where were this man’s comrades of the Eighth Kansas, where were Williams and Gensarde and Freeman? Dead they were, dead during the month past. Where was Weidman? He was here, he was close, and he would not die until October. But the erstwhile buffalo hunter did not linger for long, dwelling on the tragedy of his friends, thinking of how they had rotted or were rotting, and how he himself was putrefying while still he could walk and talk. He sensed the drift of the night, sensed its peculiar qualm. In comparison he thought of a herd, and could smell fairly the bitter dusty buffalo, the oily perfume shed by kinky manes. He could feel the plain shaking like a drumhead merely because so many creatures stood and moved upon it. They were feeding quietly . . . then a surge reached them and alarm was conveyed to thick brains within the mountainous skulls. Heads lifted, eyes rolled, hoofs touched the ground, refused the ground, there was a telegraph wire stretched under dry earth, a message was tapped there. Was it arrow or bullet or wolf which would come? There was a fright not yet become a true fright (call it rumor spoken silently from cow to cow, call it legend never dignified as fact). A message reeked in the unseen telegraph wire. Which bull might read it, who could read the code? Was this disaster, or merely mosquitoes, or sharp seeds of the spear grass itching their moulting hides? Might one become reassured in time and thus stand ready to munch, chew a cud, lift a tail, let the dung go splashing? The Kansan believed vaguely that such a herd was around him. He was one member of it. In his dream he wore horns bent upon his head.

And also this was the ominous swaying and bawling of cattle who felt a storm on the way. It was sleepy clucking of poultry on lime-smeared perches (perhaps a weasel slunk like a rapid worm, skimming, twisting amid the stones on which the poultry shed was built. The weasel was trying to find a way in).

A wounded veteran of the Seven Days—one of the few such veterans now serving with the Reserves—sniffed suspiciously on the platform of Station Number Thirty-nine. He rolled his quid into his cheek, spat across the jagged chopped pine, called to a fellow guard in darkness thirty yards away.

What you say, Pokey?

Didn’t say nothing. Thought you said something.

Didn’t say nothing myself until now. But hain’t something funny going on?

Somebody down there by the deadline?

Can’t see nothing. Too blame dark. But it feels like they was up to something.

Feels that way.

Station Number One, eleven o’clock and allllls wellll. Station Number Two, eleven o’clock and allllls wellll. Station Number Three . . . repeated yell, voice to voice, boy to man, man to boy, boy to boy, boy to man, man to very old man, going along the rim in yapped solo and chorus, overlapping, muttered, squealed, neglected by two guards who were asleep, finished within a minute or two, seldom derided and interrupted by prisoners in this unsubstantial night.

Men who knew cities felt the tremor of a crowd which might turn into a mob and go to breaking windows and upsetting freight cars to loot them. They thought of a mob not yet a mob, yet ready to spring into a mob if the stone were hurled or the oath were cried.

There was a Turk who had worked in a zoological garden; he understood wild animals; he knew that there were nights when lions walked unceasingly, when mothers carried their cubs into farthest corners and lay licking them, when big fierce faces rubbed against the bars. He knew that there were nights when a rumbling growl came without a reason which could be guessed, yet the growl sounded and was coughed and grunted from cage to cage. No lightning trickled above the horizon, no storm approached across the peasantry beyond the town; but electricity occupied the air. Animals smelled stronger on such a night, and this was such a night, Andersonville smelled stronger now.

MacBean said, Going to turn in, Brother Nathan?

Somehow I am not sleepy.

Lieutenant Davis, Wirz’s deputy, swung sock-footed legs off his hot bed and groped around for his boots. The officer who shared Davis’s quarters mumbled, Going to check the Posts?

Reckon I’ll take a look around.

Not time for regular check, is it?

No, but I just can’t sleep no way.

And there was a man who had spent much of his youth in fishing for mullet. He recalled the glassiness of pools amid mangrove islands, and how on a still day there might be no mullet; then suddenly the treasure would be leaping, drove after drove plunging up out of the water, throwing themselves with curve and flip, thousands of pounds of mullet racing under shallowness which had been quiescent and now so quickly was torn. In this man’s thought the prison was a bay and prisoners were fish. What might occur to set them into antics beneath the salty surface, ripping out with their burnished heads, arching in long thrusts of purplish silver, high and wet, jumping by hundreds, the sun sharp upon them? Something in secret avenues of shell and sands, something moving fiercely; a summons and threat among mullet; there was something. . . .

Now, the mayor he knew Brennan. And, I think, says he,

Your name is Willie Brennan, ha? You must come along with me—

Devil suck you, Sarsfield! Tis Willie Collins, never Brennan.

Way I heard twas Brennan.

Och, nay, never! It’s myself who trained my kiddies to sing it different. Give heed:

Your name is Willie Collins, ha? You must come along with me—

Oh, Collins on the moor, Collins on the moor!

Fuck Willie Collins! Laughter, laughter. . . .

Now what rat has thieved my bottle of bingo? Hand it over, or I’ll tear the wattles—

They were gathered in and around the tall conical tent of Mosby the Raider (seldom called Mosby at this late day, called Willie Collins by most). The roll was a roll of the damned and damnable, the rich, the blind uncaring cruel, the selfish, the powerful, the exalted of this place. The sailors Munn and Rickson, Patrick Delaney of the Dead Rabbits, Curtis with brick-red brow and brick-thick bone above the brow, John Sarsfield the renegade hero from the One Hundred and Forty-fourth New York: these were the leaders. If a roll of colossi had been called they would have answered Here; Willie Collins would have roared his response along with theirs. Turbulence possessed them, they drew together, drank pine-top, sent underlings with loot to the deadline to bargain for more. They said, These greenbacks are enough, and be after telling that snot of a guard I’ll never pay more for a gallon; and he’s to let it down in buckets with no leak to them.

In Athol there lived a man named Jerry Lanagan;

He battered away till he hadn’t a pound—

Their cohorts sat or lay, attendants encircling the captains. The cooks cooked late, a smell of fried meat came up to vie with the wide mat of ordinary stench (and other prisoners watched this convention of monsters from a distance they hoped was safe; on scenting the meat and watching the orange reek of flames they thought of Hell. The meat of sinners was burning). Edward Blamey had learned to drink unmeasured quantities of sorghum whiskey. He was become the first drunkard in uncounted generations of stiff New Englanders, Old Englanders, Norman French. His eyeballs were laced with pink veins like silken thread tangled on oystery whiteness, but his fantastic vision still served . . . excepting in nighttime, then it did not need to serve. One of the homosexuals crawled close to importune him. This fellow had been hounding Edward Blamey for some time. Edward kicked out with a strong sound stolen boot, the homosexual screamed like a frightened spinster and told Edward that he was perfectly horrid. Where was The Wrath To Come? Out yonder—oh, out yonder—stalking through the spread of tremulous hours. The Wrath To Come was kept at bay, Willie Collins could keep it at bay forever. Edward Blamey grunted, belched, rolled over on his blanket, rested his untidy head on a bent elbow, slept immediately. But he had a nightmare wherein the leaky baptistry of his Rhode Island boyhood was filled with pine-top, and Willie Collins said, Delaney, you rubber-legged louse, it’s you must drink it up. Edward Blamey set to work laboriously to remove planks which formed a lid above the immersion tank; first he had to shove back the old oak pulpit, and that was a job; next he had to roll the faded greenish carpet, with its worn place where the preacher always stood; next he had to lift the planks one at a time. And when he had raised the last plank, and peered down into a dim splashing interior, there sat his own father, totally naked, bathing himself in raw burning whiskey. Mr. Blamey rolled his cold narrow gaze toward the frightened son crouched above him and said,
But
if thine eye be evil—