part 2 chapter

30

i nmates had dropped all habits of soldiering with the exception of marching around

the pen during the guard-ordered drills. half-baked imitations of leisure activities at home

brought more comfort. frank armstrong and a number of fellows from his company organized

relay races against men in our division, or at least those with two fit legs. after morning drill on

cooler mornings, the boys formed one long line parallel to a line of fellows from the other

division and passed off a button, competing to see which division had the swiftest runners. even

a week after my time in isolation, my gait wasn’t back to normal. i could only watch, but at my

best, i had never been as fast as a fishersville man in our division who regularly won.

in august, my great uncle in philadelphia had mailed a copy of milton’s paradise lost,

which passed muster with the prison censors, along with another precious five-dollar gold coin

and his usual brief note regretting my choices. i bought more lemons and bread to share with

john bibb but had no use for the book. from the little i knew, it seemed a wildly embroidered

version of the old testament’s account of man’s fall from grace. in my home, there was already

too much discussion and reading of the old testament. the book made a loud thud as i pitched

it to the rear of our sleeping shelf and gave it no more thought. i spent most of the scorching

days leaning against the pen wall next to bibb, limp from the heat but comforted by his

presence.

in early september, schoepf decided that allowing men access to the sutler’s goods made

him appear too soft. once again, this was ahl’s doing, i was certain. he had found another way

to torture us by playing on schoepf’s insecurities. the sutler was banned and didn’t return for

three months—not until too many men died from scurvy and starvation.

when the prison’s meat supply spoiled, we were forced to eat john bibb’s diet, for which he

teased and fretted us. breakfast was nothing but crumbling cornbread, and at supper there was

more cornbread and a cup of paltry soup. when we grumbled, zeke reminded us, “what are you

whining about? the meat for the past two weeks was crawling with worms, and you had to hold

your nose to eat it!” zeke, with his usual irony, also described our drinking water as “a turgid,

salty, jellied mass of waggle tails. it’s got dead fish, leaves, worms, and other putrescence that

show up in my cup and then get cast out by my gut.”

one day in late september when the days had cooled slightly, frank armstrong joined me at

the wall’s edge where i watched boys play catch with a bound rag. he whistled for a few

minutes, glancing warily around with his hands crammed in his pockets. when it seemed safe,

he leaned toward my ear and said in a low voice, “zeke and i are scheming to get out of here.

we’ve got some other boys you know on board too. why don’t you join us?”

i kept my gaze forward, but my jaw dropped. “have you lost your minds? you’ll never get

past these idiots with rifles.”

“come on now. it isn’t such a bad idea. last year, two hundred escaped by slipping into the

river one night. we’re talking about only a handful this time.”

zeke leaned on the wall in the shade several feet away and overheard a few words of our

conversation. he moved closer. “come on, tom. this is a solid chance. frankly, i’ll go mad if

i’m here for another month. i’d risk everything to get out, and this plan is as good as any. “

“and what is this plan?” i asked.

zeke ignored my skeptical tone. “the guards go on leave just before next week’s waning

moon and will be back when visibility is poorest, loaded down with bottles of fresh liquor.

we’re waiting until then. frank has already loosened a board on the division’s back wall, just

where the canal emerges from the barracks. we’ll use the building as cover to gain the river

gates.”

“even with no moonlight, the guards will notice,” i said.

“not a chance. you saw how much liquor they hauled back from their last leave ashore. once

they start sousing it up at night, they’re oblivious.” frank explained how the conspirators were

trading pans, penknives, and other sutler goods for federally issued canteens. they would

become floatation devices, attached by ropes around their waists. quite a few boys had agreed to

sacrifice theirs to help their bolder friends. but the owners were hanging on to them until the

chosen night so suspicions wouldn’t be aroused by any one man having too many.

“i could get you some, easy,” zeke said.

because i only knew the shallow creek below the house, i was ignorant about swimming.

“no thanks, zeke. i’ll take my chances here. but i wish you fellows the best of luck.” zeke and

frank exchanged disappointed glances and then strolled away.

our bunk gang impatiently watched for the waning harvest moon. when the guards returned

from furlough with bottles clinking in their haversacks, the group gathered that night in our

barrack. we wordlessly watched zeke while he tied his canteens around his torso. he was lucky

to have found some unclaimed rope in the pen and had hidden a coil under a floorboard. usually

hoarded to prevent pants from drifting below shrunken waistlines, it was now cut with the

whittling knife and divided among the twelve “swimmers.”

“we’ll send you poor wretches leftovers of the delicious vittles we’ll be eating every day.

what shall it be? cake? roast pork? apple pie?” zeke joked. frank added, “or maybe we’ll

write you a line or two saying how many times we’ve been kissed by our sweethearts—if we

have energy left over for the task.” there was much guffawing and pounding fellows roughly on

the shoulder.

i threw my arm around zeke, feeling his shoulders’ broad sharpness and the rough texture of

his worn shirt. i wondered if i might ever see him again. during the past three years, his wry

humor and quirky perspective on the world had meant a lot. he always made me see the hidden

side of things that were, in fact, the most important. i’d miss him mightily. but i wouldn’t

begrudge anyone a chance to get out of that place. john bibb couldn’t conceal his sorrow. he’d

known zeke for only a brief time, but zeke had understood him when he was most

downhearted. “i’ll be thinking about you, hoping you are living on the high side,” bibb told

him. “maybe someday, when this madness is over, we’ll meet again.” zeke looked away

without speaking.

frank and his fellow escapees slipped through the loose board and eased into the canal. the

night swallowed them, and we returned to our sleeping boards, each of us vaguely regretting our

decision to stay. blue and beards were alert on their backs as rigidly as i was, dreading any

sound of trouble. after about ten minutes, a cry erupted from the river, followed by a guard’s

shouts of, “escape! prisoners are escaping!” i held my breath as boots thudded in the direction

of the water, and rifle blasts sliced the air. one guard screamed, “they got no weapons—shoot

to kill!” after a few minutes, all fell quiet.

“holy lord god,” beards said. we strained to hear what might come next. but there was

nothing.

“maybe they got away. maybe that’s what the silence means,” i said, rising up on my

elbows.

but then footsteps sounded near the barrack, and a guard gloated, “by hounds’ teeth, i finally

got to shoot at the dummkopfs! i hope i sank at least one.” my blood boiled. i fervently prayed

that liquor had destroyed his aim.

i heard bibb whisper after a while. “do you think they made it? i can’t sleep for worrying

about zeke.”

“sure they did. that zeke is strong as a horse,” i assured him. “he can handle anything.”

then i lay awake, counting the hours to dawn.

racing to the sinks at sunrise, i spied a body face down in the murky shallows of the beach.

its arms and legs loosely bobbed to their own secret tune in the tide’s flow. three guards had

also spotted the floater, and they waded into the foaming brown water. they grasped the corpse

by the collar and seat of its pants and tugged it, face down and dripping, to shore. when they

pitched the body up on the mud, i could hardly breathe, fearing the worst. they flipped over the

limp form, now gray-faced and bloated but still identifiable. it was zeke. i gasped, and my legs

gave out from under me. then, through my own darkness i watched the wheelbarrow man

collect zeke’s body. i couldn’t imagine how i’d break the news to bibb and the others.

days later the rumor spread that someone at the sinks had heard a man cry out in the water.

the waves surged over zeke’s head before the guards’ bullets could find their mark. he must

have gotten a crippling cramp.

the weather was chilly by early october and provided a foretaste of winter in our drafty,

oversized shack. many of us were captured in the late spring and early summer after the last

prison distribution of socks and underwear had been made. most had no coats, other cold-

weather clothes, or boots. we had only what we wore when we were taken, and was so

threadbare now that it offered only modest cover in warmer months.

by november, we shivered all day in bed, shrouded in thin prison blankets. or we hovered

near the wood stove in the center of the division aisle. boys formed double and triple lines to

take their turn standing near the heat for a few minutes, then would move so that another could

take his place. the rotation would go on until we wearied of standing and crawled back to our

shelves to cocoon under thin, scratchy cover. when the barracks emptied for trips to the dining

hall, we were an exodus of army-issue bats, blankets pulled around our heads and flapping at our

sides as we trudged across the yard to the dining barrack.

one chilly morning, an idea about how to help john bibb surfaced in my head. he now was thin

as a reed. when there was meat in the dining hall or good rat hunting, i gave him my morning

and evening cornbread, but it wasn’t enough to put flesh on his bones. his spirit was

diminishing as quickly as his body. intent on keeping my mind active and thinking it might

distract him from morbid musings, i suggested that we memorize paradise lost. the book was

still where i’d thrown it at the back of my bunk. if the poem was merely a form of mental

exercise, i might overcome my disdain for it. i didn’t anticipate how seductive the tales would

become.

every day after drill and breakfast, when light was brightest in the barrack, john and i took

turns reading aloud a verse, and then we’d see how many words we could remember, reciting

lines until they were firmly fixed in mind. gradually, the others, wound in their blankets,

huddled around on the tiers to listen. jim blue, beards, and the boys in nearby bunks became

regular spectators, memorized the lines too, and then called out the correct phrase when john

bibb or i faltered. the exercise became a competition. boys took sides, betting shirt buttons on

which of the two of us could recite the most lines without a slip. cheering erupted whenever one

of us was able to recount first a line and then an entire verse flawlessly. there was plenty of

material to keep us occupied—the longest was book iv with 1,189 lines! these were first-rate

stories. when john and i recited book i, which describes satan’s legions of fallen angel warriors

and the horrors of the hell world where god banished them, listeners were spellbound. the two

of us spent a week repeating the monstrous descriptions all day and chiseled the words in our

brains until we could declaim them without consulting the text.

the first section told of a monumental three-day war between good and evil. all had been

perfect between god and his favorite archangel, with whom he shared the benefits of his

power. but then he created a son. jealous, the archangel vowed to overthrow the kingdom and

duped a multitude of angels into waging a violent rebellion. some fellows joked that it reminded

them of the battle at spotsylvania courthouse. in the story, both sides abandoned weapons and

wrenched vast mountaintops out of the ground and hurled entire forests—as well as streams and

giant boulders—at the enemy, flattening them beneath otherworldly weight.

witnessing heaven perilously close to annihilation, god charged his son with dominion

over the realm. the son righted the mountains and steered his chariot over the enemy, crushing

their skulls beneath. he then pitched their shattered bodies through heaven’s crystal gates into

the eternal void of hell.

at this point, bibb addressed the group. “don’t you fellows see how the men who got us into

this are like milton’s satan? and aren’t we like his deceived angels? how could secession be

worth the cost? we’ve thumbed our noses at the federal government, a force mighty as god.”

“oh, for chrissake, john, spare us the sermon,” one fellow said.

“but can’t you see? union troops have stolen, burned, chopped, and trampled their way

across our homeland. worse than anything in this tale. and the confederacy hasn’t a chance in

hell of stopping this business we began.”

“come on, bibb. it isn’t as bad as you make it to be. let’s get on with the game,” another

said.

“you’ll see,” bibb said. “we southerners will pay the whole price. after this conflict is

settled, we’ll be the ones with broken lives and ruined landscapes. not the yankees. and for

what gain to us?” he looked at me for a response and then glanced around the room, but no one

wanted to answer him. in my heart, i heard the whisper of a more important question, “and at

what cost to our souls?” i couldn’t give voice to the dark thought that constantly tormented me:

why so much death and destruction to preserve an evil? was there any good reason? i hadn’t

found one.

each day, the listeners multiplied, crowded into the bunk shelves and squatted on the floor

until no one could budge. when satan’s serpent lured eve into feasting from the tree of

knowledge, the crowd loudly hissed and booed. milton had painted her as an adoring and

compliant companion to adam, sensual and loving in every way. eve was such a glorious

creature that adam couldn’t tear his eyes away. the poem’s eve set many to recalling and

longing for a soft female hand on the arm, a head gently leaned into a shoulder or chest. we too

would have been lured to take a bite of the apple and wouldn’t have given a second thought to

breaking god’s rule. we understood why adam couldn’t deny the stirring in his loins.

memorization of paradise lost was finished in early december. i had etched every word in

my mind, without a single lapse of recall. as the story wound down, more than the everlasting

fate of a flawed mankind saddened the barrack. what would we do now that the weather was too

frigid to stir beyond our bunks? there was still singing at night, but less of it now. sometimes a

lone voice would croon “aura lee” into the dark, and then one man after another would take up

the lyrics, as we bunched together for warmth. but many fellows by this time were too down at

heart to pay any mind. singing sparked feelings of longing for home that ambushed me with

their intensity, so i refrained from joining in.