Raiding With Morgan

by Jim R. Woolard

  The first step toward his release was a change of medicine. Nurse Lyle started him on Number One, a dark liquid with a bitter taste. “This will dry up your spots and make you hungry. Your spots should start to scale off in nine days. Then you can return to the barracks.”

  A delighted Ty ate a second piece of bread and two dried apples at supper, was happy to see mealtime come thereafter, and in forty-eight hours the bumps on his face developed dark spots, a clear indication that the drying phase of the pox was under way. Dr. Craig checked on him and encouraged him to walk about the ward each morning.

  The hardest part of the healing process for Ty was to fight the perpetual temptation to scratch his face and hands. Left alone, the scabs peeled off on their own, leaving small light-red places instead of pits. Ty asked Nurse Lyle for a mirror and studied his facial skin. Anybody watching would have caught his smile and figured he was a roguish young ladies’ man admiring himself, which was close to the truth. Though not terribly vain, Ty was thrilled the pox hadn’t seriously scarred him. Courting Dana Bainbridge with a limp was obstacle enough. To do so with a repelling face was a horse of another color, one he didn’t care to mount.

  A disturbance in the middle of the night created a minor panic in the southern wards of the hospital. When Nurse Lyle reported for morning duty, he gave the ward a succinct explanation. “Four night nurses are missing. The guards have search parties out in all directions. One or two usually get away.”

  Reports of frustrated and disgruntled guards the following day, relayed by Nurse Lyle, indicated the four Reb nurses were still on the loose and were presumed to be beyond the camp’s reach.

  Ty wondered if Jack Stedman’s son had gone with them. He cornered Nurse Lyle on his next round, described his father’s killer, and asked if he was one of the escapees.

  “You mean the gray-eyed bastard that lets the rest of the night nurses do the dirtiest of the work? I’d like to know myself. I’ll ask, but the guards keep a tight lip regarding escaped prisoners, and nurses caught passing information about them are treated more harshly than the escaping prisoners when they’re recaptured. The guards assume that if you’re talking about who’s already escaped, you’re probably planning to make a dash for it yourself. The guards these days are ripsaws pining for dry wood. I hear General Orme’s irate over escapes from here and from inside the stockade,” Nurse Lyle said.

  In the early-morning hours eight days later, Dr. Craig declared five patients, including Ty, fit for removal to the convalescent ward. A smiling Nurse Lyle handed Ty a shallow pan and he went to the hydrant outside the door of the ward and washed his face and hands for the first time since being diagnosed with the pox. It had been so long that watching dirt from his body turn clean water brown was nearly a divine experience.

  Ty had helped Nurse Lyle tend patients as he grew stronger. As Ty made ready to depart, the overworked Reb presented Ty with four large apples and a quart of sweet milk. Ty shook Lyle’s proffered hand and followed after Dr. Craig and the others, stopping to say good-bye to those who beckoned to him and wanted to thank him for his kindness and his willingness to assist the nurses on their behalf.

  Shawn Shannon’s boots were a little loose, but not enough to make Ty awkward on his feet. As he exited the ward, he understood why the lieutenant had insisted Ty have his footgear. There was no other means by which Ty could keep the stiletto out of sight during his transfer to the convalescent ward, for strict orders prevented healing patients from taking anything with them but their clothes and food items they could hold in their hands.

  Without gawking or swiveling his head, Ty kept an eye peeled for Jack Stedman’s son, but he didn’t catch a glimpse of him in the wards they passed through. The convalescent ward was near the center of the hospital, leaving southern wards that Ty had no cause to visit. He sighed. If the Stedman offspring had escaped, he might never know the whereabouts of his father’s murderer. Not knowing one way or the other meant he had to keep his guard up and sleep with one eye open. He was looking forward to gathering his barracks friends about him again. They offered a protective shield that might warn him of impending danger.

  Ty and his fellow convalescents were promptly ushered to the breakfast table in the ward’s kitchen. There were two separate tables: one for Ty’s group and one for the nurses, cooks, and Yankee guards. Coffee with sugar provided by the cooks and a dab of Ty’s sweet milk, which he gladly shared, provoked much slurping and lip smacking. The assembled prisoners were aware that, if the rumors were true that Prisoner’s Square was on strict bread-and-water rations, they might not taste such a delicacy again for a long while.

  After breakfast, a Confederate doctor new to Ty’s bunch appeared and, without any kind of examination, recorded each person’s name and ruled they were fit to return to camp. They were then led outside, where iron tubs awaited them in an open, roofless shed. After drawing water from a nearby well, they filled two barrel boilers fueled by a wood fire and obeyed the order to strip to bare skin. A Yankee private hauled their old duds away in a wheelbarrow. Ty was much relieved when they were allowed to keep their shoes and boots.

  Once the three bathing tubs in the roofless shed were filled with hot water, the convalescents divvied them out amongst the five of them. Because Ty had shared his milk for their morning coffee, he was given his own tub. He sank into the scalding hot water to his neck, not caring if it burned him. He accepted the rags and bar soap handed him by a Yankee attendant and used both liberally and thoroughly. The thickness of the brown scum that accumulated on top of his bathwater was downright insulting to a Baptist taught from childhood that cleanliness was next to godliness.

  He lingered in the tub and, out of the blue, thought how fine and wonderful it would be if he were sharing his bath with Dana Bainbridge and blushed all over. He couldn’t shake his imaginary picture of how beautiful she would look nude and became rock-hard aroused. Luckily, the water turned ice cold as he sat there daydreaming and dampened his ardor before he was ordered from the tub, saving him from an acute embarrassment that he might not live down. Being the butt of raucous barracks teasing wore thin quickly. He toweled himself off, certain his nighttime dreams had forever been altered.

  Ty and his equally naked companions were herded into the convalescent ward by Yankee guards and given new clothing, consisting of thin shoes without socks for those without usable footgear of their own, unlined blue pants without drawers, a quality gray shirt, and a thin black frock coat with a claw hammer tail. A red cravat tied “a la Brummell” completed their toilet.

  Though he didn’t have access to a mirror, Ty was certain he looked like a peacock at a gathering of somber-clad Baptists. If childhood friends Rory Howard and Abner Downs saw him now, they’d have clever Joshua Holder draw a sketch of him, have it printed into handbills at the Holder Print Shop, and distribute them the length and breadth of Elizabethtown. Sometimes it paid for certain things to happen to you far from home.

  Their final hospital dinner was a bountiful dish of beef, bread, and a bowl of vegetable soup. Hawkeyed Limon Fox joked that such plentiful fare made him feel like he was eating his last meal before his execution, instead of his discharge from a doctor’s care.

  A Yankee sergeant and two guards were assigned to oversee the return of Ty’s group to their respective barracks. They slogged up the drying road to Camp Douglas’s south gate. After a cursory search by the gate guards, they were turned in to Prisoner’s Square.

  Ty was shocked at the changes that had occurred during his hospitalization. The yard was teeming with milling Confederate prisoners. The barracks had grown in number, like wild mushrooms, and all seventy-one of them were ninety feet long, including a twenty-foot-long add-on kitchen. Elevated on wooden posts five feet off the ground, each barrack held 165 men. Ty learned from Given Campbell later in the day that the Rebel population of the forty-acre Prisoner’s Square had surpassed eleven thousand. A gruesome testimony to stricter Yankee discipline was a “Mule” fifteen feet
high and twelve feet long that required a ladder, where before it had been just five feet high.

  Larger guard patrols roamed amongst the prisoners. Additional Yankees watched the yard from the guard walk of the stockade. Gas-fired reflector lamps hung from the stockade walls at precise intervals for nighttime illumination of the yard. The dreaded Deadline was still in place, but it appeared the wooden stakes circling the barracks had been moved closer to them. Taking one step beyond the Deadline, day or night, was an open invitation to a Yankee bullet.

  To Ty, the brightly painted stores of the sutlers and the new photographic studio squatting on the fringes of that dreary, overrun, desolate panorama seemed as out of place as a jeweled necklace on a rattlesnake. They were striking reminders that even within walled prisons, money separated men into different camps.

  Ty’s homecoming began on a sour note. A step inside the door of Barrack Ten, he was accosted by a sneering Snag Oden and his bayoneted rifle. “So, that dead bastard Shannon’s favorite lad has come home to roost, has he? It will be different now, you young turd. There’s no one here to protect the bunch of you from proper Yankee discipline. I’m praying day and night you’ll step out of line. When you do, I’ll make you pay dearly, bucko.”

  With that warning, Snag shoved past Ty for the door. Ty gave way, not wanting to inflame the sergeant’s temper unnecessarily.

  The next person he encountered in the nearly empty barrack was a smiling Private E.J. Pursley. “Welcome back, Corporal,” the goateed chef said. “Come to the kitchen with me. I have news that will interest you.”

  The empty kitchen was stone cold, the stove fire a pile of ashes. E.J. dipped a gourd into a pail of cold water and presented it to Ty. “Everybody that survives the pox is dying for a cold drink. I don’t suppose you’re any different.”

  Ty’s answer was to drain the gourd dry in one long series of swallows. ”Oh, my, but that tastes good. Best water I’ve had since the ambulance hauled me off.”

  E.J. refilled the gourd for Ty. They seated themselves at a small table in the corner of the kitchen, the chef’s personal spot. Being the chief cook came with a few privileges—you sat there only at E.J.’s invitation.

  “Much has happened in your absence,” E.J. began. “Snag was delighted to hear of Lieutenant Shannon’s death. He damn near exploded when Sam Bryant and Cally Smith escaped.”

  A surprised Ty said, “How’d they manage that? I’ve never seen tighter security.”

  “Those two boys are mighty clever when they’ve a mind to be. They volunteered to help unload freight wagons delivering supplies to the camp commissary. With a chance at help from two healthy prisoners in the midst of all the sickness, the Yankees accepted. Sam Bryant said Cally has an uncle and a first cousin who lives in Chicago and one of them is a freighter. Well, it was raining hard one evening and the unloading went later than usual, way past dark. The soaked Yankee guards, trusting the gate guards to thoroughly search the outgoing wagons, went for their supper. The way the Yankees figure, the freighters nailed our two bunkmates in either empty pickle or flour barrels and drove them out the gate, slick as salt passing through a goose. Nobody has seen them since.”

  E.J.’s devilish smile showed his toothless gums. “Couple of the talkative Yankee guards told us what happened and said you could hear General Orme’s tirade clean to downtown Chicago when the guards told him what happened. He’d had a belly of escapes and put the entire camp on bread-and-water rations for three weeks. That didn’t keep our boys from having their fun. Remember the story of the Trojans and their wooden horse?”

  At Ty’s nod, E.J. said, “If any Yankee hadn’t heard that story, Billy Burke made sure they did through the rumor mill. It didn’t take but a short while for the news of the barrel escape to spread amongst the Yankees and the barracks. Now, every time the Yankee patrols are out and about, our boys chant, ‘Trojan horse, Trojan horse’ behind their backs. The guards look like dogs biting at their own tails until they quit trying to catch the prisoners heckling them. The problem is, they’re mad enough to bite an anchor chain in half and forgive nothing. Spitting on the barracks floor might earn you a ride on the ‘Mule.’ ”

  Unaware of any escape plans on the part of his messmates, Ty asked, “How long had Cally been planning his escape?”

  “For weeks, according to Sam. He gave up trying to bribe the guards and sought outside help.”

  “Did Lieutenant Shannon know about it?”

  E.J. spat into the stove’s ash bucket. “He certainly did. Cally and Sam begged him to break out with them, but he turned them down.”

  Intrigued that Shawn Shannon had refused to consider a plausible escape plan that included the local Confederate assistance he’d stressed was necessary, Ty inquired, “Did he say why?”

  A twinge of embarrassment tightened E.J.’s mouth. “Yep, he told them he couldn’t rightly leave me and Billy behind, not with Snag and Mouse prancing about hungry for an opportunity to bayonet us or have us thrown in the dungeon.”

  “That fits Shawn Shannon like a glove,” Ty said. “He thought of his men first. He was a fine officer and a better friend.”

  “Yes, he was,” agreed E.J. “But he’s gone and the guards were afraid of him. They aren’t afraid of us, which means we better keep a sharp eye out for each other. I don’t want to give the cussed Yankees any excuse to bury any more of us. A rabid dog deserves better than that.”

  E.J. stood and hitched his rope-belted trousers a notch higher beneath his apron. With hands on his hips, he said, “It won’t be the same without Cally and Sam. Those boys figured out how to enjoy themselves, instead of moping about, cursing the war, the Yankees, Jeff Davis, and President Lincoln for not exchanging us. My grandmother, the Lord God rest her soul, said that you make your own bed in this old world. You can laugh more than you cry, if you’ve a mind to. Seemed to her, strong folks with an honest purpose in life never had much trouble smiling and laughing at the drop of a hat. It might be helpful for us to remember what she preached.”

  Turning to the stove, E.J. said, “Now, let’s light a fire and start the supper bread baking.”

  Given E.J.’s New Orleans house of joy and Texas frontier background, Ty had never imagined E.J. Pursley having a grandmother who saw through the foibles and difficulties of everyday life and could cleverly state in a few words what the great philosophers he had read in his grandfather’s library spent countless words trying to do: spell out what it took for a person to be happy.

  The bloated population of Prisoner’s Square made it impossible for the Yankee command to assign more than six to eight prisoners from each barrack to daily work details. A free man for a few days, Ty converted a portion of his money in the commissary fund to sutler checks, purchased paper, pencil, and stamps, and penned a letter to Dana Bainbridge the very next morning.

  He didn’t waste words on flowery sentiments. He wrote that he prayed she was in good health, thought of her constantly, dreamed about her beauty and her laugh, and looked forward to the day when he could finally hold her in his arms. Whether she answered his letters or not, he vowed, in closing, that he would write to her as often as possible and love her forever.

  He made no mention of his unsettled future. His plan to travel to Texas with Shawn Shannon had gone up in smoke with the lieutenant’s passing. He had to hope in the meantime that a new prospect would emerge that would give him his chance at financial success and an opportunity to win Dana’s hand. The blunt truth was he had to trust to himself and the good Lord as his father and Shawn Shannon had.

  In a second letter, this one to Boone Jordan, he thanked the livery owner a second time for the greatcoat and the twenty dollars of greenbacks. He related the smallpox death of his father’s best friend and his own bout with the disease. He assured Mr. Jordan he had recovered completely and awaited his eventual release from captivity. Ty beseeched him once more to continue watching for mail forwarded to him from Ohio.

  Mailing letters had become an ardu
ous chore during Ty’s stretch in the hospital. By newly implemented camp regulations, the sender personally stood in long lines at the post office until his turn came and a Yankee censor read his letter, crossed out any unacceptable passages, and either rejected it or dropped it in the outgoing mail. The decision of the censors was final. Appeals were forbidden.

  Ty fought to keep his spirits high when he saw his censor was a grizzled Yankee sergeant who most certainly had drunk sour milk for breakfast. He accepted Ty’s letters with a shrug and no more interest than a fly for a swatter.

  As he read, Ty was certain the sergeant’s hazel eyes grew warm and longing. The sergeant snuffed out his smoldering cigar in a bucket of sand beside his desk, studied the Ohio address on Ty’s envelope, and said, “You truly love this Northern gal, don’t you, Reb?”

  Not entirely certain of the sergeant’s sincerity, Ty gambled that he wasn’t being kidded. “Yes, sir, I intend to marry her when I’m free.”

  The sergeant grinned. “Felt that way about my Martha in the beginning. Still feel that way after twenty years in the same buggy together. Be grand to see her again.”

  Without bothering to read Ty’s letter to Boone Jordan, the Yankee sergeant sealed both envelopes, checked that the postage was correct, dropped them in his basket of approved mail, extended his hand, and said, “Best of luck pursuing her, lad.”

  Ty shook the proffered hand. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Stand in my line the next time,” the sergeant advised. “I’ll put your mail straight through.”

  Boots scarcely touching the ground, a delighted Ty ambled back to his barrack. Knowing his mail would not be subjected to harsh censoring relieved his mind of any fear that the rumor about the Yankees keeping sweetheart letters for themselves to enjoy was a threat to his attempts to reach Dana.