Andersonville Read Online Free Page B

beast’s whine. Lucy, where did it happen?
    Some place up in Tennessee. Chick-a-something. He was hurt on the twentieth of September, and we didn’t know it, Poppy, we didn’t know it all this time, we were in utter ignorance. Why didn’t they tell us? You might have gone to him. So he died of his wounds, just as my dear Rob died in that Yankee pen of his sickness.
    ...Lucy, are you certain that you don’t wish to pray? I think—it would—be—well—if we both went in to—prayers. Later Mr. Dillard can hold a service for the hands.
    It will do no good, said Lucy, but she came quivering along with him. It never does any good. We should know that by now.
    ...And there sat in a window a certain young man . . . and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead.
    And Paul went down, and fell on him, and embracing him said, Trouble not yourselves: for his life is in him.
    Ah, it was not, life not in him in the slightest, but only abysmal decay and bad sight and odor, like the cross-bred pumpkin-gourd-cucumbers in that unholy field yonder, nigh to the woods. He was the last: Moses, the youngest, first; then Suthy, the eldest; now Badger, the middle son. Get up from your mounds, you small fry behind that old rusty fence, and join in lamentation, for we’ve only Lucy to help us with the task of weeping.
    The Yankees got Moses and Suthy. Yankees now destroy Badge. They got him, with their many cannon and many men, and their quick-shooting breech-loading rifles. Damn the Yankees. Damn them forever, damn them to a hundred hells with their cannon and their money and their blankets and their medicines. God—damn—the Yankees. God damn the Yankees. God
damn
the Yankees. Amen.

 II 
    H aving shared the grief of the Claffeys for some hours, the Reverend Mr. Cato Dillard at last handed his wife into the gig and prepared to drive away. Grief was nothing new to Cato Dillard, whether he suffered his own or witnessed it in that portion of humanity he considered to be within his charge; and he believed that all mankind he had observed since leaving the seminary came within his charge. Excepting, possibly, Roman Catholics. Sometimes he wasn’t even too certain about those. And, of recent years, Yankees. . . .
    Veronica Claffey stared sightlessly at the canopy above her bed, and lay unable to read her Bible or to respond to any prayer offered. Lucy was in her own room, also, with the servant Ninny rubbing her ankles. Ira Claffey attended the brief service to which the slaves had been called. The black people’s wail and chanting hung bitterly protracted in the sunlight of early afternoon; the whites wished that the slaves would not manufacture such sounds, but there was no way of hushing them.
    The servant Pet came with a withe basket containing corn bread, fried chicken and a bottle of beer to refresh the Dillards on their drive to Americus. Cato Dillard embraced his friend and then drove away without looking back; it was better so.
    He wished with recurrent regret that Ira Claffey was not averse to metaphysical discussion, but Ira was averse to it. Ira was one of three men among the parson’s acquaintances who possessed sufficient scholarly background to indulge in such activity. Still Ira always changed the subject as soon as Cato Dillard was well-embarked and as soon as his tiny eyes burnt bright with intellectual zeal and as soon as his eager voice thrummed with a new range and timbre of enthusiasm. Ira’s religion was of a gentle, affectionate, pantheistic variety, and he refused stubbornly to be tricked into any exercise of theology.
    I fear the beer may be flat, Ira said in parting. It’s from the only brewing which kept, and this year we can’t spare the grain. What with military levies and all.
    Flat or not, it’ll be tasty. Goodbye, my dear friend.
    Goodbye, Mrs. Dillard. I can say but Thank You. Goodbye, Brother.
    And the dry shivering handclasp