by John Jakes
“It’s the Jesperson place,” Catherine whispered. “That’s where the smoke is. Oh, poor Mr. Jesperson! He’s worked all his life to build that little patch into a decent farm.”
Jeremiah hardly heard. He was most concerned about the darkness. Unseen, the Yanks were approaching through it. Unseen, Price might be lurking in it.
With that damn gun! he thought, feeling for one ghastly moment just as terrified as he had when he’d first climbed toward Union marksmen at Chickamauga.
Chapter X
The Prisoner
i
ON THE MONDAY MORNING following Thanksgiving, hundreds of miles to the north, Gideon Kent sat cross-legged among the all but silent Confederate officers who formed a ring around the single small stove in the barracks.
During the night the weather had changed. Severe winds out of the northwest had brought snowflakes whirling down on the island the local residents called Pea Patch. The wind speared through dozens of ill-fitting joints in the boards of the shedlike structure.
The barracks had been Gideon’s home for six months. The sergeant in charge of this particular pen had lit the stove about half an hour earlier—nine thirty—after tossing in a handful of wood chips. One handful. And he’d done it smiling that unctuous smile Gideon had come to loathe.
“There, boys. Don’t say Father Abraham doesn’t care about your welfare. You’ll be cozy all day and all night too.”
A couple of officers had muttered obscene replies. But not loudly. By now, most of the inmates were well acquainted with the temperamental idiosyncrasies of Sergeant Oliver Tillotson. Staying safe in the state that passed for living was just slightly preferable to risking Tillotson’s wrath.
The sergeant was always cheerful when he dispensed items necessary for mere survival. A few stove chips or the morning’s ration of three hardtacks were presented as though he expected the prisoners to be grateful for his generosity, and by extension, that of the commandant, Brigadier General Schoepf.
Tillotson dealt harshly with complaints. Some said he patterned his behavior after the officer who controlled the island. This Gideon couldn’t verify. He’d only seen Schoepf once, from a distance, as the commandant was entering the little Gothic chapel built, ironically enough, by the so-called chain gang: murderers, thieves, and deserters from the Union army who were kept at Fort Delaware along with the Confederate prisoners. Unfortunately he saw Tillotson every day except the Sabbath.
The stove’s iron door stood wide open. Yet the heat did almost nothing to dispel the chill in the shed. Gideon’s teeth started to chatter. He clenched them. It helped a little.
He’d wakened well before daylight, vainly struggling to find warmth by readjusting his one small, worn blanket. The blanket was folded so half of it cushioned his feet and calves and the other half covered them. But the blanket, now draped over his shoulders, and the grimy overcoat and the filthy clothing beneath, couldn’t begin to restore heat to his emaciated body; not even with Tillotson’s largesse blazing inside the stove.
The thin paperbound book he was attempting to read slipped from his stiffening hands. Around him he heard the Confederate officers speaking in quiet, resigned voices. Discussing what they always discussed.
How long the war would last.
How they were unlucky enough to be captured and sent to the most feared prison in all the North.
Their loved ones.
And escape. That was a truly laughable subject.
Ridiculous rumors circulated on the island at least once a week. Most sprang from the occasional issues of The Palmetto Flag, a pro-Southern newspaper published up the river in Philadelphia. The Flag was not permissible reading for the prisoners. But they heard from certain guards that it hinted more than once that the twelve thousand Confederate inmates might break out and seize the whole river corridor.
Which twelve thousand? Gideon usually asked himself when he heard the latest story. Last month’s? Or this month’s? The population of the island in the Delaware River was constantly changing. New prisoners arrived; former ones who hadn’t survived the dirt and foul food and sporadic physical abuse were flung into pits in Salem County, over on the Jersey shore. When the air was clear, a man allowed up on the dikes could look out and see gravediggers preparing new pits. The work never stopped.
In Gideon’s opinion, if the sponsors and writers of The Palmetto Flag wanted an insurrection, they’d have to plan and conduct it themselves. The prison population contained few men strong enough to fight anyone for longer than fifteen or twenty seconds; it required all of a man’s depleted strength and mental stability just to endure from day to day.
Growing colder, Gideon gave up trying to read. He let his eyes drift around the circle. Did the other men feel as dispirited and miserable as he?
Most looked as if they did, though there were exceptions. Two officers on the opposite side of the ring, for example. Hughes and Chatsworth. They were disliked by the rest of the inmates of the pen because both had come to Fort Delaware with an ample, and unexplained, supply of Yankee currency. No doubt they had wealthy and influential relatives in the North. In any case, the two had quickly formed an alliance.
With their money Hughes and Chatsworth could solicit extra favors from Tillotson. They bought slivers of soap they refused to share. At the moment they were playing checkers with pebbles. Their board was a section of siding marked off with charcoal. They’d paid Tillotson fifteen dollars for the piece of lumber, and made no secret of it.
The two officers sometimes rented the board to others. But the price was high. Part of the day’s rations of each man who wanted an hour’s game. There weren’t many takers—nor much cordiality toward the profiteers. Hughes and Chatsworth took turns sleeping with the board so it wouldn’t be stolen.
Near Gideon were four men much better liked. John Hunt Morgan’s brothers, one, a captain and one a colonel, were playing euchre with Cicero Coleman, late of the Eighth Kentucky Cavalry, and Hart Gibson, who’d been assistant adjutant general on John Morgan’s staff.
John Hunt Morgan was dead now; they’d heard that in October. The audacious cavalryman had raided into the North, been captured, then escaped from a prison in Columbus, Ohio, only to be shot down in a minor skirmish near Greeneville, Tennessee. Another loss of an able man that was creating a disastrous pattern for the South.
Morgan might have been luckier than the rest of us, Gideon said to himself, his closed eyes watering. The book slid out of his lap. For a moment he was too listless to retrieve it from the rank-smelling straw littered on the floor. His mind was drawn along a steadily darkening current of thought: Might have been better to go quickly, like Stuart, instead of this way, one miserable hour at a time.
He stretched, hoping the movement would stir him out of his depressed state. He knew he shouldn’t permit himself to think such morbid thoughts. He’d worked hard to survive on this damned island by remembering his wife and his small daughter—and his consuming desire to start a new life once he was free.
He’d made an effort to use the time in prison constructively. Use it to continue to make up for the abysmal lack of knowledge that was his constant burden:
If I don’t know how to read well, and write well—how to think well when I walk out of this place—I won’t be able to support Margaret and the baby with anything except menial work.
For them, he wanted to be able to do more than that. So whenever he could, he read. Old issues of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, or pro-Union newspapers from Wilmington and Philadelphia. Sergeant Tillotson passed them out now and then, but always as if he were some blasted millionaire bent on good works and wanting everyone to appreciate it. Tillotson inevitably made it a point to indicate the columns and the engravings dealing with Union successes in the field.
Gideon wished for one of the papers or a Leslie’s right now. He couldn’t concentrate on the peculiar unrhymed fines in the cheaply printed volume Tillotson had grudgingly delivered to him the day before Thanksgi
ving. The book had been oddly wrapped in a triple layer of brown paper bound with an inordinately long piece of twine.
Except for short topical verses contributed to Virginia papers, Gideon had read practically no poetry during his boyhood and adolescence. He’d found the first few pages of the work called Leaves of Grass beyond him.
And he’d been brutally disappointed when Leaves of Grass was all Tillotson had handed him; just one slim volume with a short message from his father folded and inserted next to the title page. He’d been hoping for a good-sized shipment of books, hoping for it ever since early November, when he’d received an already opened letter written from the parsonage of the small Methodist church on Orange Street in New York City, where Jephtha Kent had again taken up his original calling.
In the letter, Jephtha had described how difficult it had been to locate his son.
He’d begun his search after a note from Lexington reached him via a route he preferred not to describe. Gideon supposed the route was across the warring lines. He’d heard there was still a good deal of illegal trading and smuggling going on. At any rate, Fan had informed Jephtha their eldest son was a prisoner. She didn’t know where.
Former newspaper contacts in Washington made inquiries. They reported to Jephtha that Major Gideon Kent was incarcerated along with other officers, enlisted men, civilian political prisoners, and Yankee felons on the island located where the Delaware River took a sharp, almost ninety-degree turn toward the southeast, below Wilmington.
Gideon hadn’t wanted his reply to be read. His request might be snipped out by the censor. So he’d answered Jephtha with the help of an overworked, prickly tempered physician from the prison infirmary. The doctor voluntarily visited the barracks every few days, checking on the health of the inmates. He was one of the few Yanks at Fort Delaware who seemed to give a damn about the captives—and he usually went away in bad spirits, grumbling and cursing over what he’d seen.
Gideon had persuaded the doctor to smuggle a sealed letter off the island in his satchel and post it. The letter asked Jephtha for books.
Presently a second communication from Jephtha arrived. It said he’d attempted to gain permission to visit his son. The permission had been denied. Still, Jephtha’s Washington contacts might at least make it possible for Gideon to receive reading material. He’d gotten his son’s letter. But he’d wisely phrased the statement about books as if the idea were his own.
Thus, on the day before Thanksgiving, Tillotson had brought Gideon the volume of poetry. “A gift from that Copperhead father of yours, sir.” Tillotson mockingly addressed all the officers in the shed as “sir.”
The note the censor had allowed to remain in the book promised that Jephtha would pass along any information he might unearth concerning Gideon’s two younger brothers. Their welfare was part of Gideon’s constant burden of fear.
He feared for Margaret and little Eleanor as Grant’s war machine maneuvered toward Richmond.
But he feared for Matthew, too, vanished on a blockade runner.
And for Jeremiah, who’d mustered in and had been shipped on the cars to the Army of Tennessee.
God, he said to himself, blue-lipped and shivering, how long can a man last, not knowing what’s happening to his loved ones?
How long can a man last that way—in a place like this?
The pessimistic thought was again counteracted by shame. When they’d shipped him north in a fetid boxcar, he’d vowed he’d live through the worst the Yanks could offer. But he’d had no notion of how bad the worst could be.
His normal weight was a hundred and sixty pounds. He guessed he’d lost at least thirty of those pounds by now. Flesh had been steadily stripped from his tall frame by the inadequate rations: three hardtacks at nine a.m., and three more in midafternoon, plus an occasional piece of moldy bacon or a gill of watery slop Tillotson, with a straight face, called rice soup.
And water. God above, what water!
During the baking summer, the prison tanks had nearly gone dry due to a lack of rain. A water boat had run up nearby creeks to resupply them. But the unspeakable stuff that came gushing out of the boat’s hoses was tainted with brine; the boat hadn’t gone upstream far enough to escape the salty tidewater.
And whenever the hoses refilled the tanks, the influx stirred a hideous sediment in their bottoms. Once Gideon had tried a cup from a new supply and vomited when he saw bits of leaves in it, along with the eye of a fish and several white wormlike creatures writhing in the murky fluid.
Now he drank water only when absolutely necessary. He also avoided the stomach-turning delicacies to which some of the other officers had resorted in desperation.
This morning all the circumstances of life in the prison seemed to come down on him with a ferocious pressure.
The shed was so frigid he could barely move. His hunger, his physical weakness, the roughness of his unwashed skin—and the bitterness he felt because his father had only been able to send him one book of incomprehensible poetry—stirred a rage in him that was almost overpowering.
He yearned to strike out. But at what? At whom?
His captors? Old Tillotson?
Futile.
But trying to survive in this pestilential place was proving futile too. All through August he’d watched men sicken and die as the sun broiled the alluvial mud of the Pea Patch. Overloaded boats had carried corpses stacked like cordwood to the Jersey pits.
He’d seen hysterical men turn on their guards, only to be beaten half to death, then carried away, to the infirmary. Those men disappeared too. The infirmary was said to be run on a reasonably humane basis. But the injuries dealt out to those who rebelled were usually too severe for repair; punishment for guards who defended themselves was nonexistent.
Margaret, he thought, the water in his half-closed eyes turning to tears. Margaret, I’ve been trying to pull through this. Believe me I have. But you don’t know how hard it is.
His right hand fumbled beneath his filthy coat. Pressed the pocket of his uniform blouse almost unconsciously. His fingers probed until he found the reassuring contours of the scrap of cloth in which he carried the little memento of his daughter. A lock of her hair; it had been with him since a few days after she was born. Some prisoners kept Bibles or Testaments. The precious curl from Eleanor’s head was his religious token.
Touching it through the dirty cloth of his uniform, he wished for the impossible—a less hostile war. One in which the hatreds hadn’t built so steadily, until they affected every phase of the struggle.
Mounting hostility between the warring sides was responsible for so many men being imprisoned in this wretched condition. When the North had begun organizing army units of runaway blacks, Jefferson Davis had decreed that any such soldiers captured, as well as their white officers, were not to be treated as prisoners of war, entitled to exchange. They were to be returned to the states from which the slaves had escaped, there to be punished under local laws. In May of ’63, General Halleck had responded by ordering exchanges halted altogether. When Grant had assumed command, he’d made certain Halleck’s policy was strictly enforced.
And after the war—what then? Tillotson bragged that he was a “hard peace” Republican, as opposed to the reelected Lincoln, who favored more compassionate terms as soon as the conflict ended, as it surely would, with the South defeated. When that happened, wouldn’t the hostilities linger?
Hell, what did he care? He just wanted to get through it, survive this time and this place by reading, learning, filling his head with words and ideas that might help him start again when—if—he were ever shipped home to Richmond.
If there was still a Richmond
The Yankees wanted that city worst of all, wanted it captured, even destroyed.
And Margaret was there.
The shed and all it represented had become unbearable to Gideon. Painfully conscious of his lack of strength, he staggered to his feet, then apologized to another cavalryman, Colonel Basil Duk
e, for bumping into him. Red, exhausted eyes turned his way when he broke through the ring of men huddled around the stove and lurched away. No one spoke.
He stumbled down the dark aisle between the pine bunks, pausing beside his own to slip the book of poems under the folded blanket. Then he moved on toward the end of the building, to an open doorway, Tillotson’s lamp-lit cubicle.
With a hand that felt like granite, he gripped the jamb of the door, gulping less poisonous air, and savoring the heat from Tillotson’s stove. Because it was enclosed by thin walls, the stove concentrated a fair degree of heat in the tiny room. Oilcloth had been tacked over two drafty windows.
Oliver Tillotson glanced up from a copy of Leslie’s. He was about sixty, overweight, but no weakling even though he was far too old for combat. He wore a holstered Colt on his hip. In front of him on the desk sat a small, cheaply framed photograph of a dour woman and five adolescent boys in stiff paper collars and ill-fitting suits. Next to the group portrait lay the symbol of authority Tillotson affected—a stick cut from a walnut limb; a stick darkened and worn smooth by the pressure of Tillotson’s pudgy fingers.
The stick was two feet long, perhaps three inches in diameter. Gideon had seen it used on two officers in the barracks. One had complained to Tillotson about his arrogance and refused to be quiet when Tillotson ordered it. The other had found maggots in a piece of bacon and turned on the guard, screaming, berserk. Both men had been beaten, sent to the infirmary, and never seen again.
As Gideon leaned in the doorway soaking up the soothing heat, Tillotson frowned. The sergeant had a red Saint Nicholas face, the effect enhanced by a neatly trimmed white goatee, white brows, and white hair. There was a deceptively benign look about him even when he was annoyed, as he was now.
“You wanted something, Captain?”
Tillotson played games. He knew most of his charges by name and rank. But he pretended they were indistinguishable one from another. As, indeed, they usually were: unwashed, like Gideon; emaciated, like Gideon; their beards down to midchest, like Gideon’s; their eyes half wild and half cowed, like Gideon’s.