Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (12 page)

Three rifles rang out as Tibbets vaulted the fence. Tibbets stumbled, fell to one knee, then rose and continued staggering toward the stockade wall. Maybe his fevered brain thought that reaching the wooden wall itself was some kind of victory, as if a door might open and usher him to Elysian fields. In any case, Tibbets fell dead when a fourth shot pierced his skull.

But he'd died in the evening, and a whole day's dispatch of dead were already waiting to be carried outside before him. So Tibbets lay stiff and nearly worthless near the end of the line, attended by some amateur hucksters who were no competition to the likes of Ragsdale and McCloskey.

“What got yours?” McCloskey said, biting off a small plug of chewing tobacco. Ragsdale watched him with disguised envy, then looked down at the corpse at his feet. The flesh around the sunken eyes was as black as the inside of coalstove pipe.

“Dysentery, diarrhea, the Tennessee trots, take your pick.”

“At least the lice is off him, eh?” McCloskey cackled juicily around his chaw.

“Every dark cloud,” Ragsdale said, tired of talking. But McCloskey was right. If you happened to be near a man at the moment the heat started fading from his dead body, all the fleas and lice and invisible parasites hopped and jumped onto the closest host. Ragsdale scratched his beard, remembering the things crawling there.

He looked off toward the center of the camp, at the stretch of swamp that served as the camp's sewer. A few men were in the thick of the morass, relieving themselves. A new prisoner stood at the edge, his face curdled in horror at what the others had accepted as routine. The surface of the swamp churned with the breeding of maggots. Ragsdale looked away as the new prisoner squatted at the edge of the soiled water.

The front gate opened, and a half-dozen Rebels slouched in, their guns lazily angled toward the ground. They were near-corpses themselves, gray-faced and war-weary and noses wrinkled against the constant fecal rot of the camp. A captain accompanied them, head high, wearing leather leggings and his brass polished and gleaming in the dawn. Ragsdale cursed under his breath.

This was the man whose pockets were filled by the mass misery. But Ragsdale knew he was no more honorable himself. He only begrudged the captain skimming off the profits, and avoided all reflections on morality. Now, with the guard coming, he thought of nothing but the tradesmen waiting outside, the smugglers and dealers waiting along the route to the dead-house and the grave ditch.

And he had first opportunity. Sure, it cost him a good thirty percent of his take, but he was making a killing inside the stockade. He was fat, which was a prisoner's true sign of wealth. He had clean water and cotton blankets and molasses and pipe tobacco. He had a pillow. And no one would touch him, because to cross Ragsdale meant getting no smuggled goods, subsisting on the meager camp rations, and likely a slow death.

The Rebel captain gave the command for the detail to move out. Ragsdale lifted his corpse with ease. The fellow was hardly more than a skeleton. That was another advantage of a disease victim. With fresh ones like Tibbets, two men had to carry the corpse on a makeshift stretcher, which split the profits.

Ragsdale dragged the corpse past the open dead line toward the gates. The guards watched, hollow-eyed, not even joyful about the goods that the hucksters would slip them upon the return trip. They were as much prisoners of war as the Union troops. All were bound to this boiling swamp of disease and death, and sometimes Ragsdale could imagine the war never ending, their ghost-like daily struggles extending into an afterlife of misery.

He never imagined anything for long, though. In the camp, dreams were dangerous. If you dreamed, you were apt to lose your reason. That was one of the few differences between the living and the dead: only the dead could afford to dream.

So he shook his head and damned himself for dreaming. All one had to do was look back toward the camp, at the pathetic shebangs made of old coats and tent scraps and dry tree limbs, with not even enough of a breeze to flutter a stray thread. And in front of the makeshift tents, or dying inside them, were men. Men who had letters from home folded carefully in their pockets, men with children waiting, men with hearts swollen by religious faith and patriotism and all false hopes.

Ragsdale smiled to himself. He wouldn't cling to bravery. He would survive. He pulled the corpse through the gates.

The captain nodded as Ragsdale passed.

“Morning, Johnny,” Ragsdale said, using the only term of address that the prisoners were allowed.

“Going to be a dandy one, Yank. Don't ya'll forget me on the way back in.”

“No, suh,” Ragsdale said, imitating a Southern accent. He kept his grin plastered on, and wondered if that was how the Negroes felt, smiling and smiling as the lash came down across their backs. He didn't know, because he'd never met one.

The haul to the dead-house was about a hundred yards. The corpse-bearers passed the cookhouse on the way, and a charred smell drowned out the rot of corpses. A gaunt civilian came from the cookhouse and dumped a thick greasy liquid into the stream. Ragsdale watched the gray slick make its way down the creek towards the stockade.

When Ragsdale reached the dead-house, which was an open covered area, he laid the corpse down and went into the shade of the high Georgia pines. The other hucksters laid out their corpses as well. In the dead-house, Confederate officials tried to determine the names and units of the dead and keep careful records. But as the death tolls mounted over the summer, the effort had become hurried and careless.

But, brief though the respite was, there was time enough for Ragsdale to do business.

“Hi, Johnny,” Ragsdale said to the Rebel guard who was slouched against a tree. The guard might have been a civilian from the manner of dress, but Ragsdale took no chances.

“Howdy.” The guard scarcely looked up. “Don't you go and try to run, or I got to put a bullet in your back.”

“Wouldn't dream of it, Johnny.” And he wouldn't. He was making too much money. “What's good today?”

“Hear tell there's some sweet potatoes. Smoked pork, too. Eggs.”

Eggs. A good egg could fetch fifty cents, a rotten egg a dime. Ragsdale smiled and reached inside his shirt, which was overlarge and worn loose so that he could smuggle as many items as possible back into camp. He pulled a small sack of dried beans from a hidden pocket and passed it to the Rebel.

“Much obliged,” the guard said, without looking up. Ragsdale hurried into the trees. McCloskey and the other hucksters would be along soon, and Ragsdale wanted his choice of merchandise. He was scarcely twenty feet into the forest when a man stepped out of the brush.

Their eyes met. The man held out his hands, revealing four small brown eggs.

“How much?”

“A quarter,” the man said. Deal done. Ragsdale then purchased some stale tobacco, pork that had not yet gone rancid in the heat, a dozen wrinkled potatoes. All for a dollar, which he would turn into ten dollars on the inside, and have a full belly besides. He put the goods inside his clothes, except for the eggs, which he wanted to protect until all the bodies were counted and it was time to bury the three-dollar corpse.

He started back toward the dead-house, pleased with his purchases. Another man stepped from the trees.

“Sorry, Johnny, all done up,” Ragsdale said.

“That's a shame,” the man said. “Because I got quality goods.”

Ragsdale glanced at the face. That dark hair, those bright eyes--

Ragsdale nearly dropped his eggs. Tibbets stood before him, smiling.

“Yeah, it's me.” Tibbets' mouth yawned open in speaking, and Ragsdale saw where the fatal bullet had shattered the man's jaw. Ragsdale felt the blood drain from his face. His mind screamed at him to run, but his legs were rooted to the Georgia clay.

“Nuh—” Ragsdale grunted, unable to formulate any words which would explain the impossibility before him. It was Tibbets, all right, fevered and pale and exactly the same as he had been yesterday, with the exception of the bloody holes in his worn tunic.

“It's better out here,” Tibbets said, again flapping the damaged lips. “Look.”

The dead man held out his thin hands, palms full of pink soap and razors and fine Illinois sausage and eggs the size of apples. Despite his shock, Ragsdale couldn't help coveting the merchandise.

It's a dream, Ragsdale said to himself. My belly's full and I'm dozing in the shade of my tent.

But the fine fragrance of the soap beckoned him, too real for dreams, more vivid than any sensation he had ever known. He reached for it. “How much?” he managed to gasp.Tibbets pulled the goods back into the folds of his tunic. “Not for sale.”

Not for sale? Why, everything was for sale, ever since those 3,000 Plymouth prisoners had been brought in. Just before their capture, they'd been furloughed from the Union army, and under the terms of their conditional surrender, they were allowed to keep the veteran's bounty that filled their pockets, hundreds of dollars per man. Since then, the huckster business was booming.

And Tibbets wasn't going to deny him what was rightfully his. He'd paid his three dollars for that first corpse, he'd bribed his captors, he'd earned first chances on the merchandise fair and square. What was it to Ragsdale if some men starved because they couldn't afford his mark-up?

“That soap,” Ragsdale said. Imagine the luxury of soap in a camp where the prisoners waded into an open swamp to relieve themselves? Where the odor of fevered sweat and gangrenous flesh and death, death, death, hung in the air like a solid thing? Who wouldn't want to scrub such misery from their skin? Why, soap would fetch five dollars a bar.

“You can have all this,” Tibbets said. “And more.”

“More?”

“Pumpkin and corn, raspberries, honey, sugar, coffee. All free.”

As if by magic, what had to be magic, the scent of those products wended into Ragsdale's nostrils. How long since he had tasted real coffee? Chickamauga , nearly a year ago?

There was a crashing in the brush nearby, and he knew that the guard had come to herd the hucksters back to the dead-house. Only moments to act. He knew he must be mad, and that Tibbets couldn't exist. Still, those smells haunted him as no mere ghost could.

“Yank?” called the guard from beyond the trees.

Ragsdale leaned toward Tibbets and whispered. “How?”

“Cross the deadline,” Tibbets said, his ragged lips stretching into a smile. “It's all here waiting. We've got a camp set up behind the forest.”

And as the Rebel guard blundered cursing through the bushes, Tibbets vanished back into the pines. Ragsdale gave the guard an egg to soothe the man's anger, then allowed himself to be led back to the dead-house. All the while, Ragsdale thought of those smells, tried to recall them and keep them full in his mind.

As he dragged the three-dollar corpse from the dead-house to the grave ditch, he looked at the others with their corpses and searched madly for Tibbets. Ragsdale and the others stooped and strained with their shovels, widening the ditch to add their fifty to the thousands already returned to the soil. McCloskey was digging beside him, stripped to the waist, the sheen of sweat bright on his muscles.

“McCloskey, have you seen Tibbets?”

“Tibbets? Who cares about Tibbets? I've got a pound of tobacco to sell when we get back inside.”

Then the deed was done, the bodies covered but the ditch still open and awaiting tomorrow's supply. As they went back to the stockade and again entered that dreary mass of groaning men, Ragsdale could take no joy in his smuggled goods. He gave the captain an egg, then went among the disease and squalor and filth and sat in his tent, thinking of orange pumpkins and strong coffee and, most of all, that sweet, sweet soap.