“Sounds like hard work,” Ebenezer said.
“Slave’s work, iffen you ask me,” Zeb said, without thinking, and watched Ebenezer’s back stiffen, his fingers ball into fists. You numbskull, Zeb thought. That was an ignorant thing to say. Yet he didn’t apologize, couldn’t apologize. I didn’t ask this Negro to come with me, he told himself. He taken up that notion his ownself. “Miserable work.” Zeb decided that if he kept jawing, maybe Ebenezer would forget what he’d said. “Just plain vile. I felt I should have been fighting, not doing road work. I ain’t no logger. And dangersome, too, that work was. I seen one man from the 16th nigh chop his foot off when he mis-swung his axe. Couple others got killed when them big pines fell on them. This was over in Georgia, before I got captured.”
Remaining quiet, Ebenezer kept walking ahead of Zeb. Zeb’s words, his poor choice of words, had riled the runaway.
Zeb frowned. He hadn’t meant anything about slave’s work. They had never owned slaves, not with Wisconsin being a free state, and especially with the Hogans being dirt poor. When he thought about it, Zeb realized that he had only seen a handful of Negroes in Wisconsin, and they’d all been free, naturally. His father had worked with a Negro while bricking up that Methodist church.
“That was a Methodist church I was locked in, wasn’t it?”
Ebenezer grunted.
“My pa, he helped build one in Madison. He’s a brick mason. Was.” Zeb’s eyes clouded. He wasn’t even certain his parents were still alive. He hadn’t got anyone to write them a letter, and he had been gone practically a year.
Ebenezer still kept quiet, just kept walking, till he came to a sign at a crossroad. He reached into the haversack, pulled out the map to study it.
“Which way we go?” Zeb asked when he’d caught up.
Ebenezer pointed at the sign’s arms. “That way is Lexington.” Then, pointing the other way, “That way . . . it’s ten miles to Edmund.”
Looking at the markings on that warped piece of wood nailed to a post, Zeb asked, “You read that?”
“I did.”
“You can read?”
“I can.” He gave Zeb a curious look. “Can’t you?”
Zeb didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Corporal Favour, he once told me it was illegal for slaves to learn to read and write.”
“It is.” Ebenezer folded the map, put it back inside the haversack, and walked straight. “We keep this way,” he said.
That was the most conversation they had for the next few days. They walked, neither of them limping now. They made good time, their minds focusing on just putting one foot ahead of the other, giving no thought to the rumbling in their stomachs.
Once Zeb spied a cottontail rabbit, and thought about shooting it with the revolver the woman had given him in Columbia, but he only had six shots and only five percussion caps, so didn’t risk it. Besides, he had never fired a revolver before, just the rifled musket he had carried with the 16th.
Two days later, Ebenezer Chase still wasn’t doing a whole lot of talking. When they came to a little river, Zeb had had enough. “Listen,” he told him, “I’m sorry about what I said the other day, about me corduroying the road being slave’s work. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“That didn’t bother me any,” Ebenezer said, but Zeb knew the slave was lying. “I’ve heard worse.”
“Well, I mean, it ain’t easy being a free man. I’m free. And I ain’t never had nothing. My folks, they was born poor. Never had no money. My ma, she raised chickens, sold eggs. That’s about all I ever had to eat. She’d kill a hen that wouldn’t lay. Eggs for supper. Eggs for breakfast. Providing them chickens was laying good. If not, we’d just do without. Like I told you, my pa was a brick mason, but that work wasn’t steady, and Pa, well, he had a thirst, so, when he’d make money, he’d just spend what he had at some groggery. Now you take your life. You had shelter. Knowed what was expected of you. Knowed you’d get fed every day. You had . . .”
“Zeb,” Ebenezer said.
“Yeah?”
“Shut up.”
Blood rushed to Zeb’s head, but he fought down his anger.
Ebenezer studied the map. “I think this is the Edisto River,” he said.
“Ain’t much of a river,” Zeb said.
“It’s pretty deep. Water’s up on account of all the rain. And that current, it can fool you. It must have taken out the bridge here, or you soldier boys tore it down after y’all crossed here.” He looked toward the woods, considering. “There’s some trees that have been felled. Probably from y’all corduroying this road. You think we could roll one of those logs, end over end, to here?”
Zeb shrugged.
“Those logs are big enough . . . should be able to reach ’cross the river.” Ebenezer nodded, approving the plan as it came to his mind. “Then we just walk across it.”
“Sounds good,” Zeb said. “Only . . .”
“Only what?”
“Well, we ain’t hardly et since before Columbia. I’m hungry, Ebenezer.”
Zeb stared at Ebenezer, the black face a mask, but quickly a grin spread across it, and Ebenezer nodded. “Me too.” Just like that, Ebenezer walked down the riverbank, into the woods, and Zeb followed. When Ebenezer came to a bend full of driftwood and rotten pine logs, he said, “This’ll do.” He started stripping naked. “You ever noodled for catfish?” he asked.
Zeb shook his head.
“Oh, that’s right. You can’t swim. Well, Zeb Hogan, you just wait here. I’ll see if I can noodle us up a couple of big cats.”
He waded into the river, face cringing at the cold. He was right. That water was deep, and Zeb could see how fast the current flowed past the slave’s bare chest. Ebenezer winked, but it was Zeb who was holding his breath when the runaway slave disappeared under that black water. Mouth agape, Zeb stared at the dark water.
About a minute later, Ebenezer surfaced, and Zeb cried out when he saw a huge fish on his right hand, halfway up his forearm, like it was trying to eat him. It reminded Zeb of that Bible story about Jonah.
Ebenezer made his way to the shore, his face masked in pain, lungs heaving, and he stumbled out onto the bank, crying, “Help get this monster off me, Zeb!”
As Zeb tried to pry that slippery devil’s mouth open, Ebenezer warned him, “Watch them fins. They’ll cut you to ribbons.”
Finally the boys managed to get the big catfish off Ebenezer’s arm, and it dropped onto the bank, flopping.
“That’s more like a whale,” Zeb marveled. “Must weigh ten pounds.” He backed away, looked up, and saw that Ebenezer’s arm was bleeding as he headed back into the Edisto.
“Where you going?” Zeb called out.
“To get your supper,” Ebenezer answered before the river swallowed him again.
He come up a few seconds later, shook his head, didn’t say a word, and dived back. When he surfaced the next time, he had another fish that looked as if it had swallowed his hand. This one was even bigger than the one that had stopped flopping on the banks. As Zeb helped remove it from Ebenezer’s hand, it sliced Zeb’s finger with its fin. That hurt like the blazes, but Zeb gritted his teeth as he pried open the second catfish’s mouth, keeping his hands clear of the fish’s whiskers as the leviathan dropped at their feet. Blood streaked down Ebenezer’s arm in rivulets, but he just toweled himself off with his butternut britches, and said, “Fetch me some of that moss, please, off that tree yonder, Zeb.”
Zeb obeyed.
* * * * *
“How’d you catch them fish like that?” Zeb asked.
They lounged under an elm, and Zeb speared another hunk of meat and put it over the coals. They were eating well this eve, Ebenezer having skinned the two fish with the knife he carried in his left brogan, the knife he said he had stolen from his master. The catfish had been the dickens to clean, but Ebenezer had done it, even with his arm wrapped with moss. Zeb had mostly watched.
Leaning back, Ebenezer said, “Uncle Cain taught me.�
� He shifted his legs, took a sip of water, and said, “Catfish are bottom feeders. So you got to find a hole, reach in, and let whatever’s in that hole bite you.”
Cringing, Zeb asked, “What if it ain’t a catfish hole?”
Ebenezer laughed. “Might not be. Uncle Cain lost two fingers on his left hand noodling. Got bit off by a snapping turtle. And sometimes you’ll find a snake. Guess you just pray to God that you’ll be lucky. Like we were today.”
Zeb turned the hunk of fish meat over.
Ebenezer kept right on talking. “Now once that catfish grabs your hand, you shove it deep inside the cat’s mouth and grab the gill cover, and just pull that cat out of the hole.” He shook his head, and sat up. “Got to be strong. A good swimmer. And mighty lucky.”
Zeb could only nod. He thought it just short of a miracle that Ebenezer hadn’t drowned trying to pull those fish out of their holes. He smiled and removed the sizzling meat from the fire, blew on it once, and let the hot chunk of fish fall on his tongue.
“Never seen fish that big,” he said as he chewed.
Ebenezer laughed. “They’re tiny compared to some cats me and Uncle Cain noodled out of the Pee Dee River or swamps around Hall Plantation.”
“This is the life,” Zeb said.
“That’s the truth.”
“How’s your arm?”
“It’ll be all right. Cats have razor sharp teeth, but they’re tiny. This moss’ll suck out any poison, prevent infection.”
“Your Uncle Cain teach you that, too?”
“Yes, he did. How’s your finger?”
Zeb looked at the moss Ebenezer had wrapped around where the cat fin had sliced it. “Don’t hurt none,” he said.
“Well, I reckon we’ll be in Georgia sometime tomorrow or early the next day.”
Means I’m that much closer to Sergeant Ben DeVere, Zeb thought.
They watched the moon rise. The skies were clear, and the temperature had warmed. The two boys just lay on their backs, gorging on catfish. Wind rustled the trees, and Ebenezer felt peaceful, content.
“Zeb, you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.” Zeb’s reply was barely audible.
“How come you want to go to Mississippi?”
Zeb’s body tensed. He remembered what had happened back in Atlanta, and later at the Florence Stockade. He recalled Sergeant Major Engstrand dying slowly, and Zeb’s pledge echoed inside his head. His right hand reached up, resting on the walnut butt of the revolver.
“There’s a man I got to see in Vicksburg.”
“Southerner?”
“No. He was a Union soldier. Sergeant Ben DeVere.”
“What you need to see him for?”
Chapter Six
“I aim to kill him,” Zeb Hogan replied.
It was his voice, the way he said it that chilled Ebenezer, who pushed himself up, looking over at the Union soldier. Zeb lay on his back, head resting in his hands, but his body rigid. Ebenezer tried to form the words, but they proved hard to say.
“Why . . . why . . . you want . . . to do that?” he managed after a struggle.
Drawing a deep breath, Zeb slowly rose. Despite the darkness, Ebenezer imagined seeing his eyes, how hard they’d become, how cold, and when Zeb looked at Ebenezer, even though he was just a shadow, Ebenezer had to look away.
“He’s a traitor,” Zeb said. “He got Sergeant Major Engstrand killed. He deserves to die. And I’ll kill him. That’s why I escaped.”
The catfish started swimming in Ebenezer’s stomach. Bile rose in his throat, but he swallowed it down, shaking his head, saying, “You’re too young to have murder in your heart.”
“Seems I recall somebody telling you that you’re too young to have a wife and a baby,” he said. “You mind your affairs. I’ll tend to my own.” He leaned back down.
Ebenezer’s eyes locked on the glowing coals. The wind picked up, and his whole body shook with cold.
“You wasn’t in the Florence Stockade,” Zeb said. His voice sounded far away, and Ebenezer realized that Zeb wasn’t really talking to anyone. Just talking.
“They taken us to Andersonville first . . . after we got captured outside of Atlanta.” Zeb let out a hollow laugh. “DeVere was in tears when they caught us, begging them Rebs to let him go . . . Sergeant Major Engstrand yelling at him to buck up, to be a man, not to let them Secesh see him like that. Then DeVere begged them for whiskey. ’Course, they don’t give him none.
“We’d been on the skirmish line. Got taken by some boys who said they was with the 11th Tennessee. They was nice boys, them Tennesseans. We traded them some tobacco and coffee for johnnycake. One of them warned us to hide any valuables we might have, but I figured them Rebs was just funning us. Wasn’t till they deposited us behind the front lines that I understood what them Tennesseans had meant. Our new guards taken my canteen, my hat. Most of our shoes got stole from us, too. Guess mine was too worn out for even them sorry excuses for soldiers. They liberated . . . that’s how they termed it, a Reb’s idea of a joke . . . Dave Gardenhire’s trousers. Oh, they give him a ratty old pair full of graybacks in return. Went on like that, with every change of guard. Even when there wasn’t much left to steal from us, the guards taken something.
“They marched us that night six miles to some miserable little town, and there we waited for a couple of days. Gave us hardtack. Said that would have to last us, and they taken us off to Andersonville. We wasn’t there but for a few months. By the Eternal, I never seen such horrors. Pray, Ebenezer Chase, that you never live to see nothing like what we saw at Andersonville, and then later at Florence.
“But them Rebs at that miserable prison in Georgia, oh, my, they had a sense of humor. Told us we was being paroled. Said the Yanks had decided to exchange prisoners again. Man, what a relief. So we marched out of them walls one afternoon in September. They taken us to the railroad, prodded us with their bayonets into boxcars. Stacked us in there like cordwood. Hot. Miserable. Couldn’t hardly breathe. We waited two hours in Macon, and when a couple of the boys died that afternoon, them guards said they wasn’t opening no doors. We made it to Charleston, and the Rebs said we was going to Richmond. We’d be exchanged there. Only they taken us to Florence, instead, made us sleep in the boxcars all night. Unloaded us that morn, and marched us to that prison. They said we could build cook fires, but they didn’t give us no food to cook. By the next day, five of the boys had died. Starved to death.
“The prison wasn’t finished. The Rebs had us put up some of them walls, and then one day a fellow from an Illinois outfit escaped. That’s when the commander first used his dogs. We heard them ’coons and curs baying for a couple of days. They caught him the third day.
“By then, we was given three tablespoons of cornmeal. That’s all we had till some citizens from Florence brung us a sorghum stalk.
“Finally the colonel of the Rebs makes us all stand in formation. He blames everything on Abe Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman . . . says if we’ll join the Confederacy, help man his post, he’ll give us each one hundred and sixty acres at the end of the war. Says he’ll pay us. Feed us. And when he looks at Sergeant Major Engstrand, the sarge, he says . . . ‘Colonel, thank you kindly, but I reckon me and the boys’ll starve a little more before we accept your terms.’
“That riled the colonel. What the colonel didn’t know, of course, was that we was digging a tunnel. We had to dig deep, too, because the Rebs had dug a trench around those pine walls to prevent a tunnel, but we did it, anyhow. A couple of nights later, we dug our way out. Hightailed it for the woods, but them dogs was on us immediately. I tripped, and the sarge, he come back, put me up in this sycamore tree, and them dogs was on him, pulling him down as he tried to climb up behind me. Sergeant Major Engstrand, he beat them back with a stick he’d fetched, and when the Carolina Reserves caught up with us, he screamed at them . . . ‘All right, you’ve caught us. Now call off your wolves.’
“They didn’t, though. One of them rasca
ls taken that club from the sarge’s hand, and let the dogs have at him. I jumped down from that tree, tried to help, but a red-mustached Secesh grabbed me. Didn’t have hardly no strength in me by then. They let them dogs half eat the sarge before they finally called them off, hauled us back to the Stockade. Nary a one of us got far. Put us in stocks for a week.”
Zeb Hogan was silent for a little while. The coals had died down. Ebenezer waited, wondering if Zeb would finish his story, or if it was indeed over.
A moment later, Zeb began talking again. “When we was back inside our shelter . . . if you could call what those Rebs give us shelter . . . we heard the news. Sergeant Ben DeVere had taken the Reb colonel’s offer. He’d decided to quit the 16th Wisconsin Infantry and join the Rebs. And he had informed the guards that we was digging a tunnel. He was a traitor. So when Engstrand was lying there, dying, we all drew lots. I got the short one, meaning I was to go. I was to get out of the Stockade, somehow, and track down that murdering, drunken scum of the earth, Ben DeVere, and kill him. And that, Ebenezer Chase, is what I aim to do.”
Nothing else was said that night. Ebenezer slept fitfully. Zeb Hogan didn’t sleep at all.
* * * * *
The following morning, after eating the last of the catfish, they walked to the felled trees and found one that wasn’t too rotted and seemed the right length. The boys took hold of one end, lifted, straining, grunting, heaving, got that log standing upright, and pushed it forward. The big timber crashed in the wet grass. They picked up the other end, muscles straining, practically tearing, and pushed it end over end. They had to do that five more times before it was close to the riverbank, after which they rolled it over a tad, lined it up, and gave it one more hard lift. For a moment Ebenezer thought that the bottom end would slip into the river, but it caught on a root, or a rock, or maybe it was just a bunch of mud, and held there. They pushed it over one last time, and the far end landed with a thud on the other bank.
South by Southwest Page 5