Settling Accounts_ Drive To The East Part 43

Potter had thought so when the barrels charged from the Ohio up to Lake Erie. He hadn't believed he was guilty of the old Confederate error of underestimating how tough the d.a.m.nyankees were. He hadn't believed it, but evidently he was, because the United States refused to fold up. Would even the fall of Pittsburgh knock them out of the fight? Again, he just didn't know.

And did Nathan Bedford Forrest III know what he was talking about? Was the President of the Confederate States of America nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake? Potter shook his head. That was the wrong question. If Featherston was was nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake, what about it? Being out of your tree didn't necessarily disqualify you from holding office. Some people said only a crazy man would want to be President of the CSA. Potter wasn't one of them, but he could see their point. nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake, what about it? Being out of your tree didn't necessarily disqualify you from holding office. Some people said only a crazy man would want to be President of the CSA. Potter wasn't one of them, but he could see their point.

Was Featherston crazy enough to be unfit to lead during wartime? That was what it came down to. Potter would have loved to believe it. He wouldn't have been sorry for an excuse to throw Jake Featherston out on his ear-no, to kill him, because he wouldn't go without a fight, and he'd fight hard. He always did. Forrest said he'd seemed crazy when he refused to pull back from Pittsburgh.

Maybe the chief of the General Staff was right. But Potter wasn't ready to upset the Confederate applecart on a maybe. Featherston was at least as likely to be crazy like a fox. He'd proved that time and again. Taking Pittsburgh might prove it once more.

"Better to wait," Potter murmured. Acting was irrevocable, and he didn't think the time ripe. If going into Pittsburgh proved a fiasco . . . Well, so what? Did that mean Featherston had gone around the bend, or just that he'd made a mistake?

Did it matter? If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, the Confederate States were in trouble either way. Somebody would have to take the blame. Who else but Jake Featherston then?

Nodding to himself, Potter got to his feet with one more thing to worry about. If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, who took the blame might not matter, either.

To say Jefferson Pinkard was not a happy man failed to use the full power of language. Somebody in Richmond got a brainstorm. Who got to make that brainstorm real? Pinkard did. Some d.a.m.nfool Negro in Jackson blew himself up, and a bunch of white women with him? Yeah, all right, he was a dirty, stinking son of a b.i.t.c.h. But get rid of all the Negroes in Jackson on account of him? At once? That was lunacy. That was also what Jeff had orders to do.

When the telegram came in, he telephoned Ferdinand Koenig and asked, "How many n.i.g.g.e.rs are we talking about here?"

"h.e.l.l, I don't know off the top of my head," the Attorney General answered, which did not fill Jeff with confidence. Koenig said, "I'll get back to you this afternoon. You want to know what you're getting into, do you?"

"You might say so," Pinkard said tightly. "Yeah, you just might."

Ferdinand Koenig was as good as his word. Just after Jeff's lunch, he got another telegram. TWENTY-FIVE OR THIRTY THOUSAND. F.K TWENTY-FIVE OR THIRTY THOUSAND. F.K., it said. What Pinkard said when he saw that had an f f and a and a k k in it, too, with a couple of other letters in between. He said several other things right afterwards, most of them even hotter than what he'd started with. in it, too, with a couple of other letters in between. He said several other things right afterwards, most of them even hotter than what he'd started with.

Once his spleen was well and truly vented-once it had blown off about three counties' worth of steam-he called Vern Green into his office and gave the guard chief the news. "Well, Jesus Christ!" Green said. "We got to get rid o' these n.i.g.g.e.rs? We don't just try and stuff 'em on in here?"

"That's what the orders are," Jeff said grimly.

"How soon they gonna start coming?" Green asked.

"I don't exactly know-not exactly," Pinkard answered. "But it won't be long-I sure as h.e.l.l know that. Fast as they can throw 'em on trains and ship 'em out here. A few days-a week, tops."

"You figuring on using the bathhouses and and the trucks?" the trucks?"

Jeff nodded. "Don't see how we've got even a prayer of doing it if we don't. You get the 'dozer crews out to the other place, too, and have 'em dig lots of new trenches. If we're doing all of Jackson, that'll take up some room." He didn't talk about ma.s.s graves, not in so many words.

The guard chief followed him even so. "I'll see to it," he promised. "We're gonna be busy as s.h.i.t, ain't we?"

"No," Jeff answered. Green looked at him in surprise. He condescended to explain: "We'll be a h.e.l.l of a lot busier than that."

"Oh. Yeah," Green said. "Wish to G.o.d I could tell you you were wrong, but that's how it's gonna be, all right." He scowled. "We'll have a f.u.c.k of a time keeping the rest of the n.i.g.g.e.rs from figuring out what's goin' on, too."

"Uh-huh. That already crossed my mind," Pinkard said. "Don't know what we can do about it. We got orders on this-orders right from the top." Ferdinand Koenig wasn't the the top, of course, but he was only one short step down. And he'd made it real clear the President of the CSA wanted every black from Jackson wiped off the face of the earth. What Jake Featherston wanted, Jake Featherston got. top, of course, but he was only one short step down. And he'd made it real clear the President of the CSA wanted every black from Jackson wiped off the face of the earth. What Jake Featherston wanted, Jake Featherston got.

Green sighed. "Well, we'll just have to take care of that when it turns into a problem, that's all. In the meantime . . . In the meantime, I'll let the boys know a big pile of s.h.i.t's rolling down the hill, and we're on the bottom." He got to his feet. "Freedom!"

"Freedom!" Jeff echoed. The guard chief left his office. Jeff pulled his copy of Over Open Sights Over Open Sights off the shelf by his desk. He knew just the pa.s.sage he was looking for: the one where Featherston talked about how killing off a few thousand Negroes before the Great War would have saved a lot of trouble during and after. Jeff nodded to himself. That was true, every word of it. When he read the words, he could hear Jake Featherston's hot, angry voice. off the shelf by his desk. He knew just the pa.s.sage he was looking for: the one where Featherston talked about how killing off a few thousand Negroes before the Great War would have saved a lot of trouble during and after. Jeff nodded to himself. That was true, every word of it. When he read the words, he could hear Jake Featherston's hot, angry voice.

Even so, after a while he scratched his head and put down the book. This didn't seem the same as that. People on the outside would know Jackson's blacks had been sent away to camps, but that was all they would know. Even the Negroes already in the camps weren't supposed to know they'd never come out alive. So what, exactly, was the point?

But that did have an answer. The point was to get rid of as many spooks as the Freedom Party and the Confederate government could arrange to get rid of. Jeff didn't see anything wrong with what the Party wanted-just the opposite. But doing it in such a big lump made things work less smoothly than they might have, less smoothly than they should. Camp Determination's profile was going to look like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a big old pig. You'd be able to see the lump the pig made as it worked its way from one end of the snake to the other.

Both sides of the camp, men's and women's, were on edge even before the first trains rolled in out of the east. The Negroes knew something was going on, even if they didn't know what. They must have got that from the guards. Pinkard thought about reaming Vern Green out about it, but he didn't. The guards wouldn't have been human if they didn't pa.s.s on the feeling that something was cooking. They hadn't said what, for which Jeff was duly grateful.

He went out to watch his crews at work when the first train from Jackson came in. He was proud of them. They had a routine, and they stuck to it as much as they could. They hauled the luckless blacks off the train and separated them, men to the left, women and children off to the right. Then they went through the train and pulled out any Negroes who'd tried to get cute and hide. Then more blacks-men as close to trusties as Camp Determination held-removed the bodies of those who'd died on the way.

There were more of those than usual. The survivors moaned about how they'd been packed like sardines, about how they hadn't had anything to eat or drink. Most of them moaned about how they hadn't even been able to pack a carpetbag.

The guards did their best to soothe them. "Don't y'all worry 'bout a thing," a troop leader called rea.s.suringly, smooth and confident as a preacher in the pulpit. "We're gonna ship some of you out to other camps right away, and we're gonna let the rest of you get cleaned up before we move you. You do what people tell you, and you'll be just fine."

"This way!" guards yelled. "This way!" The Negroes obeyed. They were too dazed and battered not to-and the guards had automatic weapons to make sure they didn't get out of line. Most of them didn't even try.

One man did ask, "How come we gonna git shipped somewheres else when we only just got here?" n.o.body answered him, and he didn't ask twice.

"Listen up, y'all!" an officer shouted. "You're gonna be in two groups. One group goes on to a camp by Lubbock, the other one goes down by El Paso." There were camps in both places, small ones. They were there mainly to keep Negroes from panicking when they heard something like that. The officer went on, "Those of you bound for the Lubbock camp, we're gonna bathe and delouse y'all right here, on account of we got bigger bathhouses than they do at that camp. Y'all goin' to El Paso, they'll take care of that when you get there."

Pinkard and his top officers had hammered out the story in the time before the trains started coming in. He didn't like it; it had holes you could throw a dog through. But it gave some kind of explanation, anyway, and the Negroes wouldn't have much time to wonder and worry.

Guards started going along the lines of Negroes. They would say, "Lubbock," to some and, "El Paso," to others. Every so often, they would add, "Remember where you're supposed to go, or you'll catch h.e.l.l!"

When everybody had an a.s.signment, officers yelled, "El Paso, this way!" and, "Lubbock, this this way!" Two columns of men and two of women and children formed. "Now get moving!" the officers shouted. way!" Two columns of men and two of women and children formed. "Now get moving!" the officers shouted.

A fat black woman let out a screech: "My husband goin' to de one place, an' I is goin' to de other one!" The baby she held in her arms wailed.

"Can't do anything about it now," a troop leader told her. "When you get where you're goin', you talk to the people there. They'll do the paperwork and transfer you."

She still grumbled, but she seemed happier. Pinkard craned his neck to see who that troop leader was. Hobart Martin, that was his name. He'd won himself a commendation letter, sure as h.e.l.l. That kind of complaint could have caused real trouble, maybe even a riot. It was something the guards hadn't thought of, and they should have. Of course separating families made people jump and shout. But Martin had calmed the woman down, and his words kept other men and women from raising a stink. As long as they thought everything would be taken care of . . .

Pinkard nodded to himself. Everything would be taken care of, all right.

He went with the men who believed they were bound for El Paso. They had to march-or rather, shamble-all the way through the camp to get to the bathhouse that wasn't. He'd posted guards with automatic rifles on both sides of their route. He didn't think they would try to break away, but he worried that the present inmates might try to rescue them. A show of force ahead of time was the best thing he could think of to keep that from happening.

"Move along! Move along!" guards shouted. "Don't hold up the line, or you're in trouble!" They were already in the worst trouble they could find, but they didn't know it. This whole charade was to keep them-and the present inmates-from finding out.

Hipolito Rodriguez stood there with a rifle at the ready. Like most men from the Confederate Veterans' Brigades, Hip liked a submachine gun better because it was lighter and smaller. But Jeff wanted the guards to have weapons with real stopping power today. He nodded to Rodriguez. The Sonoran nodded back. Then he looked away, scanning the inmates for any sign of trouble. He knew how things worked. The more you showed that you were ready for anything, the less likely you were to run into trouble.

Jeff nodded to himself when the last black man pa.s.sed through the gateway separating the main camp from the bathhouse. Getting the line through the camp was the hardest, most worrisome part. Already, trucks were taking away the first Negroes who thought they were heading for El Paso. Their true journey would be a lot shorter-and a good thing, too, because Jeff would need those trucks again pretty d.a.m.n quick to handle more blacks.

He nodded again when the door to the bathhouse closed behind the last Negro man in the queue. Wasn't there some poem that went, All hope abandon, ye who enter here? All hope abandon, ye who enter here? Once that door closed, those Negroes lost their last hope. They'd get herded into the big room that wasn't a delousing chamber, and that would be that. Once that door closed, those Negroes lost their last hope. They'd get herded into the big room that wasn't a delousing chamber, and that would be that.

When was the next train coming? Would the camp be able to handle it? Could the crew get the corpses out of the alleged bathhouse, could the trucks get back from the ma.s.s grave, fast enough? They could. They did. By the time the next trainload of Negroes from Jackson stopped on the spur between the men's and women's camps, the guards were ready.

The next week was the busiest time Jeff remembered. He and his crew ran on sleep s.n.a.t.c.hed in the intervals between trains and on endless cigarettes and cups of coffee. Every storage facility in the camp overflowed, even if relatively few of the Negroes had brought baggage with them. Where those Negroes went, they didn't need baggage.

And at the end of it, Jefferson Pinkard looked at Vern Green and said, "By G.o.d, we reduced that population."

"Sure as h.e.l.l did," the guard chief agreed. Jeff pulled a pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer. He took a snort, then pa.s.sed the pint to Green. The number two man at Camp Determination also drank. After what they'd just been through, they'd d.a.m.n well earned the booze.

Black clouds boiled up over Andersonville, Georgia. Where the sky wasn't black, it was an ugly yellow, the color of a fading bruise. The rising wind blew a lock of Jonathan Moss' hair into his eyes. He tossed his head. The wind got stronger. A raindrop hit him in the nose.

He looked around the prison-camp grounds. POWs were heading into the barracks as fast as they could. That looked like a h.e.l.l of a good idea. The wind tugged at his clothes as he hurried toward shelter.

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned," one of the other prisoners said when he walked in. "Moss does does have the sense to come in out of the rain." have the sense to come in out of the rain."

POWs laughed. h.e.l.l, Moss laughed himself. In Andersonville, fun was where you found it, and you didn't have a lot of places to look. But Captain Nick Cantarella, who'd come in just ahead of Moss, said, "Noah would find someplace to hide from this. It looks like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d and a half out there."

"Worse than that storm this summer?" somebody said.

"I think maybe," Cantarella answered, and Moss found himself nodding. That had been a cloudburst to end all cloudbursts, yeah. It had also been a cloudburst to end all escape plans, at least for the time being. But whatever was building out there now looked downright vicious. The light was weird, almost flickering; it might have come from the trick-photography department of a bad horror film.

Somebody sitting close by a window said, "Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" Several people asked him what was going on. He pointed. "The guards are coming down from their towers and running like h.e.l.l!"

"Jesus!" Moss said, which was one of the milder comments in the barracks. The gray-uniformed guards never left the towers unmanned. Never. They always wanted to be able to rake the camp with machine-gun fire. If they were bailing out now . . .

"Oh, f.u.c.k!" said the man by the window. Then he said something even worse: "Tornado!"

Somebody with a flat Indiana accent said, "Open the doors, quick! It'll try and suck all the air out of any building it comes close to. If the air can't get out, the buildings'll blow up." Moss, who'd shut the door behind him, quickly opened it again. The Midwesterner sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about.

POWs crowded toward windows to watch the twister. Moss didn't. He didn't want to be anywhere near gla.s.s that was liable to splinter and fly as if a bomb went off close by. "G.o.dalmightyd.a.m.n, will you look at that motherf.u.c.ker!" somebody said, more reverently than otherwise.

"Wish to h.e.l.l we had a storm cellar," somebody else put in. That made good sense. Moss wished for one, too. What they had were barracks built as flimsily as the Geneva Convention allowed, or maybe a little cheaper than that. If the tornado plowed into them, it wouldn't even notice. Everybody unlucky enough to be inside sure would, though.

He could hear it now, and feel it, too. It sounded like the world's biggest freight train heading straight for him. That wasn't really fair to the tornado. If it ran into a train, it would scatter railroad cars like jackstraws. "The Lord is my shepherd-" somebody began.

The Twenty-third Psalm seemed right. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" might have fit even better, because the Lord was doing some serious trampling out there. Wind tugged at Moss, trying to pull him out the open door. The officer who'd suggested opening it knew what was what. That air would have escaped anyway. With the doors open, it could get out without forcing itself out.

Moss stepped away from the door. The flow wasn't strong enough to keep him from doing that. He looked over his shoulder and got a glimpse of the onrushing funnel cloud. That made him do a little praying of his own. He'd known one or two tornadoes when he lived near Chicago, but only one or two. They visited downstate Illinois more often.

And they visited the CSA.

"Looks like it's not gonna hit us," somebody said-shouted, actually, because that was the only way anyone could make himself heard through the roar and scream of the wind.

Maybe the man who'd yelled was a bombardier. Whoever he was, he seemed able to gauge what that horrid funnel would do. Instead of blowing the barracks to h.e.l.l and gone, it walked along a couple of hundred yards away. A few windows blew out, but that was all the damage they took. The twister snarled away toward the east.

"Lord!" a POW said, which summed things up pretty d.a.m.n well.

Nick Cantarella looked outside. He said, "My G.o.d," too, but in an altogether different tone of voice. The captain from New York City pointed. "That f.u.c.ker just blew half the wire around the camp all the way to the moon."

Prisoners rushed to the windows, those that still had gla.s.s and those that didn't. Cantarella wasn't wrong. The tornado cared no more about barbed wire and guard towers than it did about anything else in its path. Three men had the same thought at the same time: "Let's get out of here!"

That sounded good to Jonathan Moss. He even had some brown Confederate bills-no, they called them banknotes down here-in his pocket. The CSA played by the rules of war, and paid captive officers at the same rate as their own men of equivalent grade. Why not? In camp, the notes were only paper, good for poker games but not much else.

"If they catch you, they can punish you," Colonel Summers warned. The senior U.S. officer went on, "We're a long way from the border. Odds of making it back to the USA aren't good. You might be smarter just sitting this one out."

Summers had to say something like that. Moss understood as much. Someone needed to be careful and responsible and adult. Captain Cantarella put the other side of things in perspective: "Anybody who's gonna go better get his a.s.s in gear right now. Those Confederate b.a.s.t.a.r.ds won't waste a h.e.l.l of a lot of time hunkered down wherever they're at. They'll come out, and they'll have guns."

That made up Moss' mind for him. He wasn't the first one out the door, but he was only a couple of steps behind the guy who was. Cantarella was hard on his heels. "How did the escape committee sign up a tornado?" Moss asked him.

Cantarella's grin was swarthy and stubbly and full of exhilaration. "Hey, Mother Nature owed us one after the way that thunderstorm f.u.c.ked us over. Every once in a while, I think maybe there's a G.o.d."

Moss had thought so, too, till that Canuck's bomb robbed him of Laura and Dorothy. Believing in anything but revenge came hard after that. He said, "You want to stick together? Two heads may be better than one."

"Long as we can, anyway," Cantarella answered. "We may have to split up somewhere down the line, but I'm with you till then." He stuck out his hand. Moss shook it.

Out past the wire they went, out past the wreckage of the guard towers. A machine gun stuck up from a clump of bushes. "Wish it was a rifle," Moss said. "Piece like that, though, it's too heavy to lug."

"Yeah," Cantarella said. "What we gotta do now is, we gotta make tracks. Somethin' tells me we don't have a whole lotta time." His clotted accent was about as far from a C.S. drawl as it could be.

The something that told him was no doubt common sense. "You think we have a better chance heading north, or east toward the ocean?" Moss asked.

"Depends," the other U.S. officer said. "If you figure our Navy's got boats or ships or whatever the h.e.l.l out in the Atlantic, we haul a.s.s that way. G.o.d knows it's closer. But if we gotta sail up the coast, fuhgeddabout.i.t, unless you're a h.e.l.l of a lot better sailor than I am."

"John Paul Jones I'm not," Moss answered, and Cantarella laughed. What the Italian said made an unfortunate amount of sense. Moss faced the general direction of Atlanta. "North, then."

"Right. Maybe we can steal some clothes so we look like a coupla ordinary Confederate a.s.sholes, buy train tickets, and get up to Richmond or somewheres in style," Cantarella said.

They carried no papers. They wore elderly U.S. uniforms (Cantarella did remember that). They had the wrong accent. They probably didn't have enough money for train tickets. But for those minor details, it struck Moss as a terrific plan. He didn't criticize, not out loud. He liked the idea of hoofing it across Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia no better than Cantarella did.

They hadn't got very far into the pine woods north of Andersonville before gunshots rang out behind them. "Ahhh, s.h.i.t," Cantarella said, which summed up Moss' feelings, too. The guards had noticed prisoners escaping, then.

Without Nick Cantarella, Moss figured he would have been recaptured in short order. The younger man was an infantry officer, and actually knew what he was doing as he clumped along on the ground. He and Moss splashed along creeks to throw hounds off the scent. "Didn't they do this in Uncle Tom's Cabin Uncle Tom's Cabin?" Moss said.

"Beats me," Cantarella answered. "All I know is, this s.h.i.t works."

Maybe it did. Moss heard several more bursts of gunfire, but he didn't see any C.S. prison guards or soldiers. He did get tired. His feet got sore. He knew he was slowing Cantarella down. "If you want to go on without me, it's all right," he said.

"Nah." Cantarella shook his head. "Like you said, two heads are better than one. 'Sides, you can come closer to talking like these a.s.sholes than I can."

"I wonder," Moss said. Midwest overlain by Canadian didn't sound much more Confederate than strong New York City. He figured he'd worry about that when he had to, not before. He had other things to worry about now: not only his feet but also the growing emptiness in his belly. If this were a planned escape, he would have brought food along. Now, he and Cantarella would be raiding henhouses before long. That would leave a trail a blind idiot, or even a Confederate guard, could follow.

They came out of the woods into cotton country. Moss had always pictured swarms of darkies in the fields with hoes. It wasn't like that. Except for a cultivator chugging along in the distance, the countryside was eerily empty. Cantarella had the same thought. "Where'd all the smokes go?" he said.

"Beats me." Moss had trouble believing the atrocity stories he'd heard. Seeing that landscape without people, though, he had less trouble than before.

He and Nick went on up a poorly paved road till nightfall. Then they lay down by the roadside. All they had to cover themselves with were cotton plants. That would help give them away, too. But it got chilly after the sun went down. The plants weren't good blankets, but they were better than nothing. Moss wasn't sure he could fall asleep on bare ground. Five minutes later, he was snoring.

Morning twilight turned the eastern sky gray when he woke. But the growing light wasn't what roused him. Those voices weren't just part of his dreams. He saw three men silhouetted against the sky. They all carried rifles.

He nudged Nick, who'd stayed asleep. "Wake up!" he hissed. "We're caught!"

One of the armed men came up to them. In a low voice, he asked, "You some o' the Yankees what got outa Andersonville?"

"That's right." Suddenly hope flared in Moss. "Are you . . . fighting against the Confederate government?"

"Bet your a.s.s, ofay," the rifle-toting Negro answered. "How you like to he'p us?"