CHAPTER SIX I
The eye of the dream, like the eye of a camera…
Pitchforks flop piles of steaming brown matter to the ground. Female slaves rake the matter until it lays carpet-like. The bright, high sun beats down on it.
Why?
And what is it?
You look out farther and see that this odd brown layer of stuff covers roughly a quarter acre of land…
Slaves roll wheelbarrows of more of the stuff out from an old barn behind you. It’s a constant process. The wheelbarrows come out, slaves with pitchforks empty the barrows, and then the barrows are wheeled back in.
“Rake it out nice and thin!” a Confederate soldier barks.
Then you know. Whatever this brown stuff is, they’re raking it out under the sun, so that it will dry.
You follow the wheelbarrow trail back to the barn. More soldiers in drab gray guard the entrances, rifles—mostly Model 1842 Harpers Ferry muskets—shouldered. You hear some shouts, and the clop of hooves. Around the other side of the barn is a dirt road, which winds down the hill to a train depot. Soldiers surround the depot, and a whitewashed sign reads GAST TERMINAL, MAXON, GEORGIA—C.S.A. From the depot, wagons are departing.
It looks like a lot of wagons.
You assume that some raw material for the war effort is being transferred from the train cars to the wagons—the mysterious steaming brown stuff.
It is peat? You scarcely know what peat is, just a crude fuel source that comes from bog marshes. Did they use it during the Civil War?
It occurs to you then that you don’t really know much about anything. Nevertheless, you decide that the stuff drying out in the field must be peat, and that it is being delivered here by train.
Your eyes widen as you watch. Lines of horse-drawn wagons approach the barn.
You expect to see peat piled high in the wagons, but as they get closer you know you’re wrong. The wagons are full of people.
Women, children, and old men.
They are naked, their wrists bound in front of them. They stand shoulder to shoulder in caged wagons that look medieval. Eventually the line of wagons stops at a barn entrance. You watch, appalled yet intensely curious. Soldiers wield bayoneted muskets and off-load the prisoners from the first wagon and file them into the barn. “Move it, Yankee bitches and grandpas!” one solider yells. “Single file!” another shouts. “Any of yous don’t do as yer tolt, you’re dead!”
When the wagon is empty, it turns and wheels over to an exit door at the other end of the building.
So where’s the peat? you wonder.
There is no peat.
A Confederate major and two enlisted men on horseback approach the barn. They look weary and blanched by dust, but as they slow their horses, they stare at the barn.
“Halt and state your business, sir!” a sentry calls out.
The major dismounts and salutes. “I am Major Tuckton, First North Carolina Infantry, Sergeant. You may stand at ease as I present my orders.” He produces a roll of paper and shows it to the sentry, continuing in an enthused accent. “I am passin’ through to the town of Millen to deliver important intelligence to General Martin.”
The sentry examines the orders and returns them. “Yes, sir!”
“And I need water for my men and horses, as Millen is still quite a trek and I must be there as soon as possible.”
“Yes, sir, we’ll take care of ya right away, sir!”
“And let me ask you something, Sergeant. Are you ready for some good news?”
“Yes, sir, you can surely believe that I am…We been hearin’ rumors that the Yankees are fixin’ to take Chattanooga…”
“Yeah, well that ain’t gonna happen, and you can spread the word because our proud General Braxton Bragg just destroyed the Union division at Chickamauga Creek. Those goddamn bastards are fleein’ north, Sergeant, ’cos they know they can’t take the rail junctions in Chattanooga now, not with ten thousand of their men dead. We’re gonna win this war now, Sergeant. Spread the word…”
The sergeant shouts in glee. He drops his rifle and runs toward the other sentries. “Get water for the major and his men, and tell everybody that we just crushed the Yankees at Chickamauga!”
The news spreads like a virus. Whistles, hoots, and shouts of celebration rock the air.
When the sergeant returns with a watering detail, the major’s brow rises. “Sergeant, what is goin’ on here?” and he points to the wagons and the naked crowd being filed into the barn.
The sergeant pauses. “Prisoner processin’, sir.”
The major removes his hat and brushes his hair back. “But I thought we was sendin’ all Yankee prisoners to that new place just south’a here, Andersonville.”
“These here are civilian prisoners, sir.”
“But…I don’t see no prison here, Sergeant. Just that big barn.” The major starts to walk toward the barn. “I’d like to know what’s goin’ on here—”
“I-I beg your indulgence, sir,” the sergeant interrupts and offers another roll of paper. “But here are my orders for you to examine. See, sir, this area is a restricted perimeter by order of the provisional deputy of engineering operations, a Mr. Harwood Gast.”
“Who? A civilian issuin’ military orders? I don’t recognize civilian decrees—”
“Oh, no, sir, it’s a military order, which is countersigned by General Caudill.”
“Hmm…” The major reads the order, perplexed. “I see…”
“But thank you for the glorious news about General Bragg, sir! Lincoln’ll surely sign an armistice now, won’t he?”
The major seems distracted, looking quizzically at the barn. “Oh, yeah, Sergeant, he likely will, now that he knows he can’t get his hands on the Tennessee railheads. Once Europe hears of this great victory, they will surely recognize the C.S.A. They’ll threaten to stop trade with the North if they don’t call a truce and recognize us as an independent nation now…” But he shakes his head, at the barn. “You may carry on, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir!” and the sergeant runs back to the sentry post.
Now the major is looking—
At you.
He walks up and you snap to attention. You do not salute because you are under arms.
“Good afternoon, sir!”
“At ease, Private.” Behind him, the major’s men are watering the horses. “Can you tell me what the hell’s goin’ on in that barn?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know.”
“Strangest thing…” The major squints up. The prisoners previously filed into the barn are now coming out at the farther entrance, and getting back in the wagon. The wagon departs up a hill.
“And who is this man Harwood Gast? I ain’t never heard of him.”
“He’s a civilian appointee, I believe, sir,” you say but have no idea where that information came from. “A private financier I’ve heard him called. He built the alternate railroad that comes here from eastern Tennessee.”
“Oh, yeah, the one out’a that junction in Branch Landing, right?”
“I believe so, sir. What I heard is he paid for it with his own money, laid five hundred miles’a track, sir.”
“Hmm, yeah, okay. Just another rich guy in cahoots with the new government. Probably tryin’ to buy his way onto President Davis’s cabinet or somethin’.”
“Yes, sir, I guess that’s the case.”
The major seems aggravated, fists on hips as he continues to stare at the barn, where the next wagonload of naked civilians is being off-loaded.
“Oh, well, orders are orders. Carry on, Private.”
“Yes, sir!” you snap.
The major gets back on his horse. One of his men points behind him, to the field…
“Now what the hell is goin’ on there I wonder?” the major mumbles.
“Looks like they’re sun-dryin’ peat,” the other rider says.
“They use peat to make coal easier to light,” says the third rider, “and the barrel works is just up the way.”
“Yeah, peat,” the major concludes, though without much conviction. “I guess that’s what it is…Come on, men, let’s get out’a here…”
They ride off.
You resume your post around the barn. Yes, the wagon is heading up a hill, and behind the hill you see smoke. You look back out to the field and notice slaves raking up some of the dark stuff off the ground and putting it in more wagons…
On your rounds you overhear other soldiers talking…
“Seems a waste’a time to me…And where do they go after this?”
“Other side of the hill it looks like.”
“The old rifle works?”
“Ain’t old no more. Been completely rebuilt by that Gast fella. You seen him. I heard it’s now the hottest blast furnace in the country. He was around a lot last month when they was finishin’ the train depot down yonder.”
“Oh, the guy with muttonchops…”
“Yeah, and the white horse.”
“And there must be a big stockade somewhere beyond the works. As for what we’re doin’ here—shee-it, armies been doin’ that for a thousand years. The spoils’a war is what it’s called. Usin’ the enemy’s resources ’cos they sure as hell’d do the same to us. Shit, now that Lincoln won’t exchange prisoners no more, what else can we do? I been hearin’ some ungodly stories ’bout that Yankee prison in Annapolis. Starvin’ our men, beatin’ ’em.”
“Goddamn Union can go to hell, and we’ll send ’em there. A’course what we’re doin’ here is all right. You heard that, Major. We just kicked the Yankees out of Tennessee. General Lee’s army’ll surely be capturin’ Washington by December.”
“Yeah, and they got cold winters up there. Our boys need good sleepin’ bags…”
You still don’t understand yet you march your post via some order beyond your consciousness. They’re drying something in that field, you realize. And it’s NOT peat. It’s something coming from the barn…
Your perimeter march takes you around the other side. No doorways on this wall but there is a half door, with the top half open.
Go look inside…
As you approach, a stench rises. It’s an appalling smell and also an incomprehensible one. These civilian prisoners probably hadn’t washed in months but only part of the stench was body odor. Their clothes had all been stripped, obviously, to reuse the fabric for the war effort, but now that you thought of it, why go to all this trouble to confine and feed women, children, and old men? They were of no military value…
Then you look into the barn—
Large wood fires burn in each corner, and over each fire sits a kettle six feet wide. The kettles are boiling, gushing the foul-smelling steam, and each is being stirred by a male slave with a long wooden paddle.
“Boil it good, boys,” a pistol-bearing officer barks.
But what are they boiling in the kettles?
“Gotta kill all that dirty Yankee lice ’fore it’s fit for our men…”
You still don’t understand…until you look to the center of the barn where there is an incessant snick—snick—snick sound…
The mostly nude prisoners are standing in a silent line. They’re all very skinny, ribs showing, knees knobby. Some of the women show signs of pregnancy; in fact, so do some of the female children just entering puberty.
“Next ten! Come on, hurry it up!”
Ten at a time the prisoners are called to the center of the barn where ten grim-faced Negro women wait, each holding a pair of shears.
Their duty now is clear. They quickly clip all of the hair off the prisoners’ heads.
“Arms up!”
Next, tufts of underarm hair are shorn off to fall to the ground.
“Feet apart! Hurry!”
Now each Negro kneels, shears poised. All pubic hair is similarly snipped off. Children too young to have any are merely shorn of their head hair and sent to the second door where they reboard the wagon…
They’re boiling hair, you realize, wide-eyed. Then it’s dried in the sun and used to stuff mattresses and sleeping bags…
After several cycles the hair sits in veritable piles. The cutters take a few minutes to scoop up the hair and drop it in the kettles after the previous batch is skimmed out and dropped steaming into a waiting wheelbarrow.
Hence, the process.
A farm for human mattress filling.
On several occasions, you see soldiers throw some women into the kettles, who are left to churn for a minute and are then pulled out. The soldiers stand round guffawing as they watch these unfortunates shriek and shudder, red-skinned, on the floor, their eyes boiled and their faces steaming. You have the distinct impression that the soldiers are doing this simply for amusement.
You step back gagging, a monstrous taste in your mouth. You stagger backward to see out of the corner of your eye the wagon heading up the hill, only now the forlorn captives are all bald.
The wave of nausea threatens to keel you over, and from a distance you hear some shouting.
“Get her!”
You look out but only see through a shifting vertigo of sickness…
“Private! Shoot that escaping prisoner right now!”
You’re still staggering. When your vision clears, you see a bald and very naked little girl running away from the barn.
“SHOULDER YOUR WEAPON AND FIRE!” a red-faced lieutenant is screaming as he approaches. You raise your weapon and sight the target in the V-notch. Your finger touches the trigger…
“What are you waitin’ for!”
“But-but, sir,” you stammer, “it’s just a-a little girl…”
A pistol barrel touches your temple. “Private, if you do not shoot that escaping prisoner, I will kill you right now and put your hair in with the next batch!”
I’m not going to do it, you think but nevertheless you take a breath, let half of it out, and squeeze the trigger. The hammer snaps, striking the brass primer cap, and after a split-second delay, the musket tries to leap out of your hand. Black powder blows the .69-caliber smoothbore minié ball out of the muzzle with a deafening boom and a belch of smoke.
Your eyes were closed when you squeezed the trigger but you hear a faint thwack! and a child’s shriek.
The lieutenant is fanning gun smoke with his hat. “Fine shot, Private! You hit that kid right in the back even as she was turnin’!”
Your eyes sting like fire. You see the small nude body quivering in the grass. For a few seconds she hacks out some sobs—“Mommy! Daddy!”—then:
Silence.
“What’s your name, Private?”
The answer grinds out, “Collier, Justin. Third Corp, sir.”
Did the lieutenant’s eyes seem tinged yellow? “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
Your throat is nearly squeezed shut, and in the back of your head a voice whispers, You killed a child, you killed a child…and the words come out of your mouth with no awareness, “Fredericksburg and both Bull Runs, sir.” But you only wish you could reload and kill yourself right there.
“Damn fine shooting, Private.” A slap on the back. “Now get some nigrahs to recover the body and resume your post.”
You stare into the field and drone, “Yes…” II
“…sir…”
Collier lay atop the sheets in a trembling rigor, eyes peeled in dread. A cold sweat thick as honey seemed to sheen him. Confusion came first; then his stomach tightened when images from the dream illuminated in his head. Holy SHIT, that was the most disgusting nightmare of my life…
He tried to swallow but couldn’t; then he found he couldn’t move, either, the dream having crushed him like a collapsed ceiling. The image snapped brighter in his brain: a gut-sucked nude woman with parchment white flesh shuddering and in tears as a pair of iron shears identical to those he’d seen in the display intricately snip-snip-snipped off all of her hair. Like the Nazis, he thought.
Did the Confederates really do such things? Had he read that somewhere?
Or had his mind generated the entire atrocity?
I must really be fucked up to have a dream like that…
Indeed.
He still couldn’t move; he felt half suffocated. His chest rose and fell as he heaved in air—
Holy shit!
—and immediately noticed a figure standing next to the bed.
Collier’s heart quaked. His brain told him to roll off the bed and turn on the lamp but—
The dream paralysis only hardened around him.
Who are you! he tried to shout but his throat was just as paralyzed. Grainy darkness filled the room like smoke. The figure’s head seemed bowed. It seemed to stand there looking down at him for full minutes, and then suddenly its pose snapped. The figure’s head was leaning toward his face.
Collier’s body clenched when a mouth locked to his and a fervent, hot tongue began to churn over his lips. His own lips parted against his will, to allow his tongue to be sucked. The action was fastidious, almost machinelike, and then petite yet insistent fingers toggled his nipples. The forced kiss sent wet smacking sounds about the dim room.
The clash of opposites couldn’t have been more profound: terror and arousal. The shapely shadow figure manipulated itself above him; then eager, deft hands pulled his shorts down and dabbled with his genitals. I’ve got to get up! Collier thought. I’ve got to find out who this is…
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t budge.
Now the figure slid over his hips; he could tell—thank God—that the intruder was a woman, and a rather insistent one. Collier’s arousal strained; then the figure adjusted itself and suddenly he was engaged in intercourse with someone he couldn’t identify.
The figure’s hips began to stroke up and down over Collier’s helpless member. He remained lain out on his back as this person took him in the dark. He heard the faintest moans as his own climax impinged. Bedsprings creaked as the rhythm rose…
The dream rigor released just moments before he’d orgasm; his hand shot out and turned on the light.
It was Lottie, grinning down at him.
Reason of the most unpleasant sort flooded his awareness once the paralysis was gone—
Lottie continued riding him, her grinning face bearing down, and he was pretty sure she mouthed these words: Knock me up!
More terror, then, as more awareness returned. Collier heaved her hips off him, severing the coitus. “Damn it, Lottie! You don’t just sneak into a guy’s room and start…doing him!”
She giggled silently.
He snapped his shorts back up over the straining erection. Knock me up, he thought in the worst dread. At least he’d interrupted the intercourse before he’d climaxed but still, he knew that was no guarantee. Errant sperms in preejaculatory fluid could indeed make women pregnant—couldn’t they?—and making Lottie pregnant was a prospect he shuddered to contemplate.
“You have to get out of here, Lottie!”
She shook her head. Collier had to snatch her hand away when she reached for his groin.
“Get out, get out, get out!” he half shouted, but only now did he take full note of her trim, toned naked body. Christ…She leaned over him, still tipsy, and began to rub his chest.
“Just—stop. No more of this, okay? I’m not in the mood; I just had an awful nightmare.” But even as he said it, the ghastly nightmare’s pall took a backseat to more primal impulses. “Go back to your room, just—” But his lust kept tipping. He stared slack-jawed at her bonbonsize nipples atop the ripe-fruit breasts. The tight stomach curved down…
Finish the job! that other voice said. What’s WRONG with you!
His hand began to rise to a breast, but then retracted…
Have some common sense for once! he berated himself. “Lottie, no. We can’t do this, it’s not right. You’re still drunk, and your mother’s already mad enough at you, so just go back to your room!” He pushed her back with some urgency.
I love you! her silent lips told him.
Collier groaned. There’s always something, isn’t there? “Lottie, look, you can’t possibly love me.”
She wagged her head up and down.
“We’ve only known each other a few hours, and besides, I live in California, and I’m married.”
She shrugged energetically, still drunk but enlivened by him. She got on her knees at the bedside and began to rub the inside of his thighs.
Collier grabbed her hands again. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen, he knew. And—shit!—what if she really DOES get pregnant? I’d be ruined. He wanted her out of here so he could simply go back to bed. But he didn’t want to be caustic, and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. What a pain in the ass. “Lottie, you’re a beautiful girl but this can’t happen again. You understand that, right?”
Now she frowned, and the frown turned sad.
Collier got up, put on his robe, and wrapped her up in a clean bedsheet from the dresser. “Come on, you have to go.” He opened the door and stepped out with her. It was his very best luck that no one else stood in the hall to see them.
“Just go to bed now,” he began. “You had too much to drink tonight, and that’s why this happened. You’ll feel better tomorrow…”
But then he paused as the words left his lips because he heard something.
From the bedroom, he felt sure.
A voice from the bedroom. Very light.
A woman’s voice. A drifting accent…
“Come on, sweetie, there’s one more thing ya gotta do for me.”
Then a rougher voice, a man’s. “I’m done, now I gotta get out’a here.”
“No, no, not yet. Do it—you know.”
Collier’s hands froze on Lottie’s shoulders.
Who the hell is in my bedroom!
His eyes beseeched Lottie’s. “Did you hear that?”
But all Lottie could offer was the familiar drunken grin.
Collier pulled himself back into the room. Looked around.
There was no one there.
But what did he expect? I know I heard voices, he told himself. It sounded like they were coming from here but…
Had someone come into the room, then left just as quickly, all in the few seconds he’d been standing outside the door with Lottie? Was there some alternate entrance?
All right. I’m just tired. I heard some voices through the air duct, from another room is all.
The stair hall remained clear. “Go to bed, Lottie,” he whispered. “And hurry. Someone could see us out here.”
Lottie, ever grinning, headed drunkenly down the stair hall.
“Do it! You know! Like last time…”
The drifting female voice again.
“Who the hell’s here?” Collier barged back into his room.
The bedroom remained empty.
He brought his hands to his face, rubbed his eyes.
Jesus, I’m cracking up.
But now, now, he heard something else. A panting sound?
Like a dog panting.
Collier’s hands slowly lowered.
By the baseboard, a small, ugly dog snuffled. Was it eating? Now came licking sounds…
Collier stared in disbelief.
How the hell did a dog get in here!
It was lean, mud colored, a mongrel. It didn’t seem aware of Collier as it snuffled around the baseboard.
Collier, unmindful of how this might look, loped after Lottie and caught up with her just before she’d start downstairs. He grabbed her arm and looked right into her eyes.
“Lottie. Do you have a dog?”
She shook her head no.
“Do any guests have pets with them?”
Another shake.
He scratched his head. “There’s a dog in my room, Lottie. First I heard it, then I saw it.”
Lottie’s grin disappeared. Very slowly, she shook her head no.
“Just…come and see so I know I’m not going nuts.” And then he guided her sheet-draped form back to his bedroom door, opened it, and took her in.
No dog was present.
“That’s…crazy,” Collier mumbled. “First I heard voices, then—I swear—I heard and saw a dog.”
Lottie tightened the sheets around her body, slipped back out of the room, and scurried away.
It was now that Collier’s drunkenness crept up on him. Don’t think about it, he begged himself. He relocked the door, checked the closet, checked every corner as well as under the bed to make certain there was no dog in the room.
When he went to bed, he left the light on.
Shapeless dreams haunted the murk of his sleep. Sounds:
Children laughing?
A dog barking?
And, later, the voices.
The woman: “Just do it!”
The man: “Good God, you are one dirty broad to want me to do somethin’ like that.”
“Just…do it…”