South by Southwest

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “Sherman,” Zeb whispered, sitting up. From the guards at the Stockade, Zeb had heard a lot about Sherman’s march, but you couldn’t put much stock in anything those liars ever fed their prisoners. They had claimed that Yankee troops had been licked at Franklin and Nashville last winter, but later the prisoners had learned that those battles were disastrous Rebel losses. They had said that Uncle Billy himself had been killed at Savannah, but a preacher visiting the Stockade later told them the truth, that Savannah had been captured, practically without resistance, and that General Sherman was still alive, and burning and pillaging across South Carolina.

  “He’d be able to help us,” the slave said.

  Zeb’s head shook. “I don’t need any help. And I certainly don’t need to run into no Union . . .”

  The dogs! Ebenezer and Zeb heard them again. Zeb looked down at his muddy, bloody, bare legs. “I can’t go on like this,” he said. Naked below the waist, he felt embarrassed. “If I’m gonna be kilt or caught, I want to be wearing pants.”

  “Here.” The slave removed his vest, as gaudy a thing as Zeb had ever seen. “Wrap that around your waist.” He pulled a lengthy piece of twine from his trousers pocket, and tossed that at Zeb as well.

  He didn’t want to do it, felt like a fool, but Zeb figured this quilt would at least keep his buttocks warm, so he secured the vest around his waist with the twine. He probably looked like one of those fool Scotsmen in a kilt he had seen at some of the Union camps while campaigning across Georgia.

  “Come on,” Ebenezer said, and they started footing it again.

  * * * * *

  Three full days passed before they reached Lynches River, but after the first night, Ebenezer and Zeb no longer heard any hounds. After they had cleared the swamp, the slave had pulled an onion out of his pocket. Zeb had figured he meant to eat it, and his stomach starting growling at the prospect of food, even a yellow onion, but Ebenezer just rubbed that vegetable on his shoes, then did the same to Zeb’s bare feet, rubbing that onion till Zeb thought his poor, naked feet would turn raw. “That’ll keep those dogs off our scent,” Ebenezer had said, and the trick must have worked. Later, however, Zeb wished they had eaten that onion. The only thing they had eaten were a couple of raw eggs that Ebenezer swiped one evening from a chicken coop at a ramshackle farm.

  At least it had stopped raining, and the sun reappeared to warm them. Zeb’s feet began blistering, so Ebenezer cut off quilt patches from the vest serving as Zeb’s kilt and wrapped those around Zeb’s feet. That was good enough to carry him to Lynches River.

  Ebenezer looked upstream and downstream. Zeb shook his head, and let out an exasperated sigh.

  “You don’t know which way to go, do you, boy?” he said.

  Eyes blazing, Ebenezer whirled to face Zeb. Being wet, cold, and on the run had left his nerves as frayed and his fuse as short as Zeb Hogan’s.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I’m eighteen.” Zeb tried to stand a little taller.

  Ebenezer snorted. “Come on . . . truthful. How old?”

  “Eighteen!” Zeb fired back. “Be nineteen in August.”

  “How old?” The ferocity of Ebenezer’s tone caused Zeb to take an involuntary step or two backward.

  Zeb’s shoulders sagged. “I’m four months past fifteen.”

  “Well, I’m sixteen. So you watch who you’re calling boy, boy. I’ve told you . . . the name is Ebenezer. Ebenezer Chase.”

  Zeb’s own fuse was burning close to the powder. “All right,” he said, his voice laced with sarcasm, “Mister Ebenezer Chase, which way is it to that family you say’ll help us both?”

  “This way!” Ebenezer barked, and took off upstream. Using a walking stick he had picked up in the woods, Zeb slowly followed.

  It took them the rest of the day, but shortly before dusk, Ebenezer turned away from the river, and they entered a clearing. About sixty, maybe seventy rods from the river stood something that looked like a barn—actually, Ebenezer called it a pack house—that had been converted into a home. White smoke puffed out the chimney.

  “Wait here.” After filling his lungs with air, Ebenezer walked toward the door.

  A dog, tied up to a pine on the other side of the house, began barking.

  Ebenezer hadn’t made it halfway across the field, when the door flung open, and Zeb flattened his body against wet pine needles. Ebenezer stood motionlessly, spreading his arms out at his side, palms open.

  A blonde-haired woman in a green dress stepped outside, and she let out a mouthful of snuff. “Who are you?” she called out in a voice far from hospitable. “And what do you want?” Then—“Hush, Goliath”—and the dog not only quit barking, it dropped to its belly.

  Silence followed, but something sharp and metallic clicked somewhere inside that pack house, and Zeb knew somebody had just cocked a musket. If this ain’t the Hudgenses’ spread, and maybe even if it is, Zeb figured, I’d be wise to start backing my way to the river, and leave that runaway slave to his own devices.

  “Uncle Cain . . . !” Ebenezer’s cracking voice called out. “Uncle Cain said you might help me.”

  “I don’t know no Uncle Cain.”

  Quietly backing away, Zeb cursed himself for trusting a fool Negro.

  “I’m just following the drinking gourd, ma’am,” Ebenezer said. “Thought this might be a station.”

  The woman took a step from the pack house. For the longest while she just stared. Zeb had stopped backing. He didn’t know what to do. Finally the woman said, “Come here, son.”

  Once Ebenezer Chase started walking, a man’s voice boomed from inside the house: “And tell your friend to come out of those woods with you!”

  * * * * *

  They ate bacon and grits and drank buttermilk. Neither Ebenezer nor Zeb could recall when they’d ever eaten so well. Not at Hall Plantation. Not at the Stockade. Not with the 16th Wisconsin or back home in Madison. Not even on that wedding trip with Mrs. Hall to Columbia.

  Tres Hudgens was a barrel-chested man, broad-shouldered, bald at the top of his head, with hands the size of the seat of Zeb’s chair. His wife appeared to be practically all bones and snuff. Reformed Presbyterians, the Hudgenses had moved to South Carolina from Kentucky shortly after the war broke out. In Kentucky, Tres Hudgens said, they’d worked on the Underground Railroad, and hadn’t quit doing their part to free slaves, even though, from what Zeb had heard, that operation pretty much ended when the war broke out, and had rarely operated this deep in the South.

  While Zeb ate his third helping of grits, Patricia Hudgens applied a balm to his feet, and her husband brought in butternut wool britches and green flannel shirts for the two boys. Zeb pushed away the empty bowl, and ran his finger along the faded red stripe that ran down the legs of the pants. He looked up at Tres Hudgens.

  “That’s right, sonny. Them pants oncet belonged to a Johnny Reb cannon boy.”

  Zeb stared blankly, and Patricia Hudgens laughed as she wrapped a strip of linen around his right foot. “Don’t worry, Zeb,” she said. “Tres didn’t kill any Reb for his pants. We’s Reformed Presbyterians. God don’t like killin’.”

  “No, ma’am,” Ebenezer said. “He don’t.”

  Zeb tried to swallow. He looked at the pants, at the kindly woman doctoring his blistered feet. He thought of Sergeant Ben DeVere. He remembered Sergeant Major Engstrand.

  “Sherman will be in Columbia soon,” Tres Hudgens said. “I’ve heard that McLaws had to retreat from the Salkehatchie River a few days ago to Branchville after the Federals flanked him. Victory is inevitable.”

  “Hold your horses, Tres,” his wife told him, and splattered the side of a spittoon with tobacco juice. “Wade Hampton’s cavalry’s still in Columbia, and Hampton ain’t no McLaws.”

  “He ain’t no Sherman, neither.”

  “Bah.” Patricia waved her hand at her husband, then finished wrapping Zeb’s other foot. “There. That should hold you. Fetch ’em some footwear, Tres.”r />
  Zeb stood, testing his feet, then grabbed the trousers that had once been worn by a Confederate artilleryman. Ebenezer Chase was already dressing in his new duds. Mr. Hudgens fetched him a pair of brogans, and gave Zeb a pair of boots that were a couple of sizes too big, but Zeb wasn’t one to complain. He even handed Zeb a pair of linen underdrawers, and everyone turned their backs so Zeb could remove the slave’s quilted vest and get dressed.

  Ebenezer picked up the vest, and put it on.

  “You sure you want to wear that, son?” Patricia Hudgens asked.

  The runaway slave smiled. “Yes’m. It was . . . a gift.” The smile died. Lizzie had made it for him, before they had been married. He steeled himself, refusing to cry, and sat down to pull on the brogans.

  “It’s about fifty, sixty miles from here to Columbia,” Mrs. Hudgens said after the two boys were dressed. “You follow this little game trail out back, and it’ll lead you straight to the Cartersville Road. At the crossroads, you turn west on the Camden Pike. Just stick to the woods, or close to them, and follow that road. When you get to near abouts Camden, the road forks. Go southwest, and that’ll get you close to Columbia. You should be able to find the Union soldiers there, by then. But keep your eyes open for Rebs. I don’t care what Tres says. This war ain’t over. Not yet. South Carolina ain’t got no quit in her.”

  “We’re not going to Columbia,” the slave blurted out, and Zeb ground his teeth. “I’m bound for Texas. Zeb here’s going to Mississippi.”

  “What?” The couple’s eyes clouded with suspicion.

  “Thank you both,” Zeb said, and started for the door, but Tres Hudgens fetched and cocked, his long rifle, and poked Zeb’s stomach with the barrel.

  “Not so fast, son,” he said.

  Zeb was ready to tear Ebenezer Chase’s head clear off.

  “Mississippi’s a long way from South Carolina,” Patricia said, “and Texas is even farther, and both are Confederate states. What you two boys want to go there for?”

  Zeb didn’t answer, but Ebenezer said, “My wife and daughter got sold to a planter in Dallas, Texas.”

  Patricia said something about him being a poor child, but Tres said, “You’re too young to be a husband and a daddy.”

  “Well, I am both. And I’m going to Dallas.”

  “And you?” Tres still held that long rifle only inches from Zeb’s belly button. “What business you got in Mississippi?”

  “Personal. I got a fellow to see in Vicksburg.”

  “What a couple of young fools,” Tres said, but didn’t lower his musket. “You know how far it is to Dallas? Or even Vicksburg? Do you even know where your wife and child are? You’d never find them. You’d never get there. You’ll both get killed, or captured.”

  Ebenezer’s lips trembled, and tears welled in his eyes, but his voice never wavered. “I got to try.”

  “Tres,” his wife pleaded, and her husband lowered the rifle, said, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the loft. A few minutes later he climbed down with a rolled bit of parchment, which he spread out over the table between the empty bowls and glasses. It was a map, though not fancy, and not overly detailed. Tres Hudgens pointed to an empty spot. “Here’s about where we are.” He traced to a black star. “This is Columbia.” Dragging his finger across the paper. “You just go south by southwest across Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and you might reach here, if the good Lord’s willing.” His finger stopped at a black circle next to a blue line. “Vicksburg.” He sighed. “It’s on the Mississippi River. Been under Union control since ’63,” Tres said. “But you know that.”

  Patricia told Ebenezer: “You’ll be safe in Vicksburg, son.”

  “But I’m bound for Texas.” Ebenezer looked at the map. “Where’s Dallas?”

  “I’m sorry, boy,” Tres said. “This map ends at the Mississippi River. To get to Dallas, you have to cross that river, then go through Louisiana. Then you’re in Texas, but honestly, I don’t have any idea where Dallas is.”

  “Aye.” Patricia Hudgens slowly traced her finger from the black star that marked Columbia to another dot that marked Vicksburg, Mississippi. “It’s a long, long way to there. I’d go to Columbia. Your chances are much better of surviving than . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Zeb pointed to some lines on the map. “What are these?”

  “Railroads,” Tres replied. “You’ll need to stay clear of railroads. Although this map is some five years old, I am not sure if those railroads are still running, or if they’ve been destroyed by Federal troops. The map’s yours, boys, but that’s about all we can do to help you. Other than tell you, again, to make for Columbia. Make for the Union troops. Save yourselves. Forget your wife and child till this war’s over. Forget that man you need to see in Mississippi.”

  The two boys remained silent, stern.

  “Moon’s rising,” Patricia said. “Best to travel at night. Hide in the daytime. You’ll have a full moon to guide your way in a few days. That’s good . . . and bad, as it’ll be easier for y’all to be seen. Be careful. Remember what Tres said. South by southwest.”

  Tres rolled up the map and stuck it in a cloth haversack that Patricia had filled with scones, jerky, and a jar of molasses. He handed the haversack to Zeb. Zeb slung it over his shoulder and followed Ebenezer out the door.

  Patricia Hudgens called at them to wait as she fetched a couple of onions out of a barrel. She dropped them into the haversack, and said, “These onions, they ain’t to be et.”

  “I know what they’re for,” Ebenezer said, and Zeb knew that was the truth. His feet still ached from where Ebenezer had rubbed them to throw the hounds off their scent.

  After thanking the couple, Ebenezer and Zeb hurried back toward the river.

  * * * * *

  Everybody, it seemed, was coming down the road from Camden, even in the dead of night. Zeb and Ebenezer didn’t make good time.

  “Where’s everybody going?” Ebenezer asked.

  “Running, I guess,” Zeb replied. “Fleeing Uncle Billy’s troops.”

  The weather didn’t help. It would rain, hard at times, and the clouds kept that sun from heating up their bones. Both boys felt as if they’d never get warm again. Zeb and Ebenezer stuck to the woods, hardly daring to show their faces on the road. One time, they hid in a ditch as a troop of Rebel cavalry led a bunch of cannon and caisson down the road.

  “Reckon those soldiers are running, too,” Ebenezer said.

  They passed farms, the poor affairs owned by the white trash Sergeant Major Engstrand called dirt-eaters, and spotted dingy tablecloths hanging from the windows, words painted on them.

  “What’s that say?” Zeb asked.

  “You can read,” Ebenezer said.

  Zeb balled his hands into fist. “Got something in my eye.” He uncurled his fist, and began wiping his eye.

  Sighing, Ebenezer read the words to himself.

  HAVE MERCY ON US

  * * * * *

  The road ended at a river. Crossing by ferry would take some explaining to the ferryboat captain. Besides, neither Zeb nor the slave had the $50, Confederate, they heard the ferryman charged folks to cross the Wateree. But that river ran high from all the rains, way too wide for Ebenezer to swim, and Zeb couldn’t swim.

  Instead, they crossed the road that night, sneaking downstream about a mile. Then Ebenezer dragged a big log out into the shallows, told Zeb to hold on, and they floated across to a big island in the center of the river. There they spent the night, eating the last of the scones, though they still had some jerky and about half the bottle of molasses.

  All the next day, they rested on that island, hiding in the thickets as rain fell off and on. After sunset, the two hauled the log out and into the river, floating the rest of the way across the Wateree.

  Then they walked.

  Walked.

  Hid.

  Slept.

  Walked some more.

  Zeb couldn’t remember how long they had
been on the road, running, but hardly covering any distance. Ten days? Longer? Did time really matter any more?

  “Let’s get the lead out,” he suddenly announced, and picked up the pace, but he couldn’t keep it up. His legs, his feet hurt. In less than a hundred yards, he was limping again, walking through the woods near the road, then stopping, leaning against a pine, trying to catch his breath.

  “We’d better rest a mite,” Ebenezer said.

  Zeb tried to say they didn’t have time to rest. He had to get to Vicksburg. By the Eternal, he was used to marching from his tour with the 16th Wisconsin. But he couldn’t. He slid down against the tree, lungs working, and dropped his head.

  * * * * *

  A thick fog settled upon them for a few days, so they decided to chance walking in the daylight, but after a day or two, traffic on the road got heavier, much heavier, and steadier. Then, suddenly, the traffic died again.

  The day turned clear, and a rumbling came echoing from up the road.

  “Thunder.” Ebenezer sighed. “Lordy, I’ve seen enough rain.”

  “That ain’t rain,” Zeb told him. “Artillery.”

  * * * * *

  They stopped to eat under a maple tree.

  Ahead of them came the muffled reports of cannon fire.

  “Is that Columbia?” Ebenezer asked.

  “I reckon it is.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Find a way around that city. After we eat.”

  They had only the jar of molasses left, and Zeb unscrewed the lid, reached inside, pulling out fingers full of the sweet goo. He passed the jar to Ebenezer.

  They never heard anything until the soldiers were right on top of them.

  Chapter Four

  “Well, looky here.” About a dozen muskets being cocked punctuated that statement.

  Leaping to his feet, dropping the jar, Ebenezer reached for his knife. He would rather die than be captured and returned to Master Hall and Mr. Anderson’s black-snake whip, but when he saw the soldiers, he froze. Dressed in blue uniforms and bummer caps, none of the soldiers had shaved in days, and their eyes were rimmed red. Union soldiers. Dirty and miserable, Ebenezer thought, just like Zeb and me.