Copyright © 2003 Ed Lynskey. All rights reserved. 

    A sooty gray tongue scraped his scabby lips. The young corporal beckoned me to lean in closer.

    "Surgeons h'aint got a half lick o' sense," he rasped. "They cut; they saw; they butcher. Never come here again. Never." His hot grasp on my wrist weakened. "You'd be better off dead, believe you me, Mr. Chambers."

    "I believe every word," I said. My vision skimmed over on his stumps for legs before dissolving into bitter tears. Mercy sakes alive, what lay in store for me?

    The dapper man seated on the other side of the double amputee's cot shrugged as if to slough off an irksome yoke. The dirt-brown derby slouched low to a razor face was never doffed, not even here inside Armory Square Hospital. I knew him as Pinkerton, superintendent of the Federal Secret Service. That made me a Pinkerton man. "Learned enough, Hoary?" he asked me.

    "Plenty enough," I said, nodding my thanks to the half-soldier.

    Our boot heels clomped across cedar planks into April's mangy sunlight. Two mule-drawn ambulances wobbled through the wrought iron gates. Whips cracked. A jet mastiff, its savage forepaws on the hearse's wagon seat, howled at us. I craved to blast it dead. Coppery tang of blood mingled with hyacinths tingled my nostrils. Bringing up a handkerchief, I coughed through it. Fresh pangs of nausea gored my midsection. Over the last couple days, I'd grown to detest hospitals.

    Pinkerton sidled me a glance. "By lightning, war is the vilest hell ever foaled."

    "Don't condescend to me," I said. "You're not bound for Georgia."

    "Their prison hospital," he said, "won't be near as horrid as this. Just a sick bay. Runny noses, that sort of thing."

    I saw red. My hands snaked up, grabbed a fistful of jacket under each lapel, and hoisted Pinkerton to eye level. Brass buttons snapped off. His perfumed mustache twitched. "No more false assurances, hear? Focus on the task at hand — my journey tomorrow."

    "Apologies, Hoary. Jehu! Don't you figure I know what possible perils await your? Unhand me, please."

    I did. Grudgingly. Wiping off my palms oiled with his sweat, my reply was: "I know if it succeeds, you'll be first in line to claim credit."

    Pinkerton, tucking the checkered shirt underneath his vest, conversed in a conspiratorial whisper. "Hoary, do you glean how vital this is? Huh? General Sherman is stalemated in Atlanta's front. Rumor has it thirty-thousand Yanks are cooped up at Andersonville to the south. Imagine: arming them will create an instant army deep in the Rebel's rear but . . ."

    "But you first need information and that's where I come in," I finished his thought. A toxic taste varnished my tongue.

    Pinkerton half-nodded. "Exactly. You're our best operative."

    "Why? Because my sister lives three miles away? Why do you think she'll welcome me?"

    "Because you're kin," said Pinkerton.

    I didn't answer straightaway. A bosomy lady in a lilac dress sashayed by us. To the right was the half-dome of the U.S. Capitol. A new rankness crept from the canal. "It makes no difference," I said. "Eunice isn't a rube. She knows where my sympathies lie. There's a hardness between us. Her husband, Angus, was slaughtered at Shiloh alongside my brother Pierre. Her grief is a deep, open wound."

    Pinkerton's girlish fingers clawed the doorknob. His office was atop the Healy Livery cattycorner to the Navy Yard. Chilly temperatures did little to deter the ripe manure seething the air. We climbed stairs, me leading. "Hoary, suffering is universal," he said. "She'll be understanding, I dare say."

    I mocked the heartwarming scene. "Knock, knock. Hello, sis. I've trained all this distance to see you again. Oh, please excuse my sneaking out nights. My superiors up north hope to spring and arm the nearby Yankee prisoners. When they break into your house, you can thank me for putting carbines in their hands."

    "Bah, you exaggerate. No harm will befall your sister," Pinkerton said.

    We entered his ill-lit office, sat down. I, on the slat-back seat. He, in the executive chair behind a ramshackle desk. "In battle with men's passions boiling, there's no restraint."

    "Well put," said Pinkerton. "Now, as we discussed, you'll volunteer for prison hospital work. Pass yourself off as a surgeon's assistant."

    "It's a rotten plan," I said. "By showing the least bit of interest in the prison, I'll be found out as a spy. Spies down Dixie way kiss a firing squad."

    Nodding, Pinkerton offered me a cheroot. I refused his turd of misery. "Suit yourself," he said. "Use your improvisatorial skills, proceed as you see fit."

    "That, believe it or not, is how I always proceed on a case."

    "Stop scowling. My plan is no crazier than the King of Siam offering Mr. Lincoln war elephants."

    To that, I had no reply.

***

    For three subsequent days, I lurched over miles and miles of shackledy rails in dust-choked, sun-baked cars. My final destination was reachable only via a circuitous route. Stretches of tracks lay in ruin from Yankee cavalry forays heating them into giant hairpins. Late winter downpours had also eroded away the trestle.

    Even in this rustic guise of a Virginia dirt farmer, I was chary. My story? A war widow, my sister, needed dire aid with spring planting. Although I collected gaunt gapes from other passengers, only a few civil grunts were exchanged. At several depots below Greensboro, North Carolina, injured ruffians clad in butternut on crutches fixed jaundiced eyes on me. Did they see through me? My digestion in the underbelly of the Confederacy went without upset.

    Last stop on the Southwestern Railroad was Andersonville Station, population 20. Hefting two moth-eaten satchels off the dock platform, I was God sure dementia must plague my family stock. Somehow Pinkerton's hare-brained ideas, like this present one, appealed to it. I shivered. An icy sweat in this ninety degree sun crusted along my spine bone. Slapping cinders off my britches, I tried to relax. My movements, however, were cloddish and mechanical.

    Stalking down the main stem, I flinched when a fice-hound chained to a hand pump growled at me. A ruff-whiskered merchant rushed out, halted with hands on hips, and shot me a hairy eyeball. I waved. Same drop-dead, intrusive stare. Whew. I could only suppose that Southern hospitality had died.

    Eunice, childless and now husbandless, dwelled in a two-room cabin knocked together from pine logs under a copse of honey locusts and Osage oranges. This much I knew from the three letters she'd penned me after Angus had perished at Shiloh. Several years older than my thirty-two, she was my favorite of seven sisters.

    Once around a gradual bend in a rutty road, her place bounded into view. Yow. I inhaled a sharp breath. Sinewy and toggle-jointed, Eunice let rip a double-bladed axe — whack! — to halve a chunk of oak. Hard living built hard muscles. Just then, she happened to gaze away from the sun and spotted me unhooking the paling gate, scoffing into her broom-swept yard.

    "Well, as I live and breathe, Hoary Chambers." She sprinted in calico skirts to embrace me in a bear hug that damn near stoved in my ribcage.

    "Might you have a gourd of spring water? I'm parched."

    After a little, we collapsed in cane-bottom chairs in the dog run, chatting and laughing. A bright breeze blew back our hair shot with more gray than either of us cared to admit. Our conversation skirted around the taboo topic of war. Still and all, we were noncombatants. Brother and sister. I had to go and ruin it all by saying:

    "Man in a linen duster and straw hat at the depot spoke of a new prison."

    Eunice's back stiffened a trifle. "Hmm-mm. That be Mr. Pelt. He owns everything hereabouts, including the acreage where the prison sits."

    Exercising my most disarming, congenial cheer, I shrugged. "It's absurd to pitch such a thing in this far-off province."

    "Don't reckon I didn't resist it with my every fiber," said Eunice. "Mattered very little."

    "But why?"

    "Don't be dense. Our so-called government in Richmond decreed it. Blue-bellies ship in by the trainloads. I h'aint been over to the stockade but the once two weeks ago. Aw Hoary, this war wears me down to the bone . . ."

    Sensing the pain packing her taut voice, I took a different path. "Is your seed corn set to sow?"

    Which said, we fell into earnest discourse over how best to cultivate by a hand hoe. Not one plow horse or draft mule in all of southwest Georgia was available. The Forrest Raiders from over in Alabama had lassoed them all for "The Cause." Her orange clay-dirt was hardscrabble, Eunice informed me. With a measurable rainfall and Irish luck, her seed would sprout green shoots.

    "Without any crop, you starve?" I asked.

    Eunice affirmed with a weary nod. "That's what I'm telling you."

    That night, supper on wood trays wasn't figs, candied quail, or oysters. Only cold tatters and cressy greens. At once, a rap rattled the door. My head jerked up, hands consolidated into fists. However, Eunice floated over and ushered in a bandy-legged, bedraggled German she introduced to me as Helmut. Of a brutish thew, he was a prison guard and her "gentleman-friend." For many reasons, my heart cantered into a frantic pulse.

    We congregated at the table, really rough pine slabs put across sawhorses, and chewed several minutes in an awkward hush. Evening had advanced enough to create spotty shadows heightening Helmut's grubby aspects. I didn't like him.

    "Eunice tells it you grow tobacco up in Virginny," he said.

    Apparently she hadn't divulged my true loyalties so I played along with her convenient lie. "Scratch at a dinky plot a few miles south of Petersburg," I muttered. The cress was sour as grass.

    "Petersburg?" He padlocked eyes on me. "Where Bobby Lee is pinned down?"

    "That be one and the same city." Squirming, I elected to defer to his superior status, being as a soldier was more admired than a meager farmer. "You're a sergeant-at-arms over yonder?" I cast it as a question, my hand circling to indicate some vague direction for him to correct.

    "Yes sir." He beamed a grin blackened by stubs for teeth. "Camp Sumter. Up the first knoll, down a mite along Sweet Water Branch. Darkies banged it up in a month. Out of long-leaf pine logs sharpened by axes. Had them build this cabin, too."

    "Hmm. You keep right smart number?" I asked real casual like between sips.

    "Thirty thousand," he replied. "And counting."

    "You don't say. No escape attempts through dug tunnels . . ."

    Eunice cut in. "Lord, where did I put my manners? More corn liquor, Helmut? And how about you, Hoary? You h'aint touched a measly drop out this jug. You turned religious?"

    My hands, fingers outspread, danced up in hasty protest. "No, I'm still a hell-bent pagan, sister. Just my stomach is feeling riled. Train ride through Georgia was bumpy."

    Helmut's face flinched like a cow's hide shooing off flies. "Ridden on a few of those rails lately myself. It's a bone-jarring jaunt, every clickety-infernal-clack mile of it."

***

    Nearabout moonrise, I was listening keen for normal noises. I'd billeted on a straw tick that Eunice had assembled just right of the entryway. A screech owl perched on the roof tooted his pipes. The scratchy buzz of my sister's snoring in the four-poster bed droned from beyond the burlap wall separating us. A slithering noise stirred my ear planted to the truncheon floor. Eunice had rued too many rattlesnakes infested the area. I kicked that thought out of my mind.

    My pumping Helmut for information had helped to shore up my faltering faith in Pinkerton's scheme. Thirty thousand strong would form a force to deal with. Next, I connected the nearby rail spur with a viable means to transport in rifles. A legion could smash the Rebels from the south while Sherman hammered out of the north. Blood sang a joy through my veins.

    As I tugged on sealskin boots, I recalled how Helmut's covetous eyes had lingered on them. Wait. More than covetous eyes. Hot flecks of suspicion, too. What yeoman farmer in wartime could afford extravagant footwear? I bolted upright. Was the seemingly crude German wise to me? Busy being clever, I'd misjudged him. Soldiers lobbed fatal Minie balls at clever spies like me.

    My only chance was to get a spry move on.

    I yanked on the incriminating boots, endeavoring to scoff the floor and rustle the straw with minimal agitation. By Eunice's cracked teacup, I left my only twenty-dollar gold piece. Mouth cork-dry, I prowled outdoors. An opalescent yellow fog swarmed me. I wished for a derringer, but would've settled for a tomahawk.

    The moon blazed a trek through broom sedge up the only rise of land. Helmut, I hoped, hadn't been suckering me into a trap. A few hundred rods after descending, I hit upon a west-tending stream — Sweet Water Branch — and followed it. His directions seemed accurate enough. No hostile hollers opposed my excursion as my boots slogged through boggy grass.

    When the palisade's ragged silhouette flung up, I felt immediate relief. It was Camp Sumter. Andersonville. So: Helmut hadn't been deceiving me. Even so, I played it safe, advanced like a lynx. A smaller, slower creek forked off Sweet Water Creek, where I crept along, step by step, quiet and ever observant. No noisy dogs snagged my scent and blared the trumpet.

    Ugh!

    It smacked me in the recoiling face.

    A stench tenfold more horrid than Armory Square Hospital's. Whew. Faint-headed, I swallowed down a bilious charge. Running, I drew within pistol range of the wall, could count its individual logs. Behind a palmetto trunk, I cobbled together a plan.

    The creek crawling underneath the pointy fence supplied their water source. Off to each side was an earthen bulwark, probably a cannon nest. I strained my eyes. The hospital squatted on the far side. At every twenty or thirty yards, a pigeon roost tip top the fence housed a drowsy sentry.

    My best bet was to scoot up one, bludgeon the guard. From that high vantage point, I'd commit the fort's overall layout to memory, probe the wall's most vulnerable sectors. Later, I could reproduce it in detail on paper for Pinkerton, one of my more useful talents. On second thought, I'd return as a scout, quite a feather in my cap.

    I loped over soft pine duff to the nearest ladder. A new piquant smell alerted me to the guard puffing on a homemade pipe tamped with dry corn silk, a piss poor substitute for prized tobacco. His breaths were ponderous wheezes. A beaked cap shoved back on his forehead, he gawked with malice inside the enclosure. If any prisoner should bolt for the wall, he'd lay down a withering crossfire with the other sentries.

    I concocted a ruse.

    "Pssst," I hissed up to the pipe smoker. "Pssst. Sergeant Helmut said you're relieved."

    "Huh? That be you, Milo? Relieved? I h'aint off for two hours more. Go away."

    "You disobeying orders?"

    "Nope, no. I'm climbing down. I'll go play cards or something." He lunged a heavy leg over the sentry box.

    "Sure. Hurry it up, huh?"

    A hulking shadow, wide arse jacked out, he thumped down the ladder's rungs. "Okay, it's all yours . . ."

    Whap!

    Hurling a chunk of jagged quartz, I conked his melon skull. The guard, out cold, toppled into a mound. Not wasting time to check for a pulse, I scurried up the ladder and into the raised platform. A midnight moon burned its eerie candlepower over the landscape spread before me. Huh!?

    Skeletons! Everywhere!

    Men emaciated by starvation and ague jumped into my eyes. A chalky, leprous incandescence cloaking them virtually glowed. Zombies. They milled along gullies carved to the creeklet. A desolate silence choked all. But the grim revelation, what seared my brain was their wretched physical vigor. Skin and bones. No longer soldiers, but cornstalks and beanpoles.

    Simply put, Pinkerton's grand army only fought for their next drawn breath, for their next morsel of nourishment. They were, indeed, better off dead.

    Once my boots hit the ground, I stooped down to pillage the unconscious soldier's bent bayonet. I retraced my steps along Sweet Water Branch, then cut northward at the railroad. Running like a raped ape. How long before I crossed into Union lines didn't much concern me. I only wanted to stop seeing that ineradicable horror behind me in Andersonville.