Andersonville by Edward M. Erdelac

barbed, forked tongues, and chittered perverse entreaties and vile promises in words only the damned could understand.
    He had closed his eyes against them and murmured old prayers and incantations taught to him by his parents to drive their speech from his mind, for he knew that once he began to understand it, he would be lost.
    When the human hand touched his chin, he flinched and was afraid. His chains clinked.
    “Sa’k
rive kodenn nan, ka rive kòk la,”
he mumbled, part of him still sharing a cup of coffee with his late father on a rainy veranda in New Orleans.
    He dared to open his eyes and saw not some satanic monstrosity but the broad face of a man peering up at him from the shadows.
    It was the Indian he had saved from a beating at the hands of Sarsfield and his fellow Raiders, Chester and Watt.
    The man said nothing but looked at him with his shining dark eyes and tilted something in his hands to his lips.
    It was water.
    Not some murky warm foulness taken from that filthy creek that bisected the stockade but cool, clean water.
    It wet his cracked lips, soaked his thick, parched tongue, trickled at last down his raw throat.
    He drank as much as he dared, then turned his head from the offered receptacle.
    The Indian put his hand to the back of Barclay’s head and drew his forehead to Barclay’s. It was a simple gesture that spoke more than any words the man might have said. It was gratitude and a promise and hope.
    It, even more than the clean water, sustained him till morning after the Indian slunk off into the darkness undetected by the dozing boy sentry up in his pigeon roost on the wooden wall.
    The torment of the spirit world lessened to a tremulous dread at the back of his mind.
    The shrieking voices became the buzzing of flies on his back, the chirp of crickets in the pines, and finally the bugle call in the distance as the Confederates woke.
    He was alive.
    The men in the stockade stirred. Cooking fires cracked and popped. Yesterday’s rations. Barclay’s belly grumbled. He hadn’t eaten anything for two days. The infirm stumbled to the South Gate near where he hung among the stocks and collapsed, moaning and waiting for the sergeants to mark them ill.
    At first light, the wicket in the North Gate opened and Captain Wirz rode in with Turner and the other wardens to oversee the arduous roll call.
    It was another two hours before the black soldiers assembled nearby, awaiting Sergeant Turner and the work detail chaperones. He blinked at them, strained to find Clemis Varrow among their number, but couldn’t focus.
    He heard Wirz’s horse clop over.
    A Confederate soldier appeared and unlocked his manacles.
    He collapsed at the base of the post and lay there, too weak to stand, surprised at the betrayal by his own body. It was as though his legs and arms had been amputated.
    “Anyone who wants him,” Wirz announced to the stockade, “come and get him.”
    Then he heard the horse riding away.
    He lay there, staring up at the pole, at the black chains and the open manacles, silhouetted against the bright sky, feeling the tiny legs of the flies skittering over his skin but being too weak even to swat them away. They crawled in and out of his nostrils. He didn’t care.
    Then a thin form blocked the light of the sun and bent over him.
    “Barclay? You alive?”
    Barclay blinked.
    It was Charlie Trevors.
    “Shit and pumpernickel, you
are
alive. Let’s get you back to the shebang.”
    The walk back was agony. Most of the way he leaned heavily on the smaller man. Charlie dragged him home. No one offered to help him. He slipped from Charlie’s grasp and crashed to the ground twice. Twice more Charlie fell with him.
    The third time, he tumbled through the flap of the shebang and fell to the ground.
    And there he’d lie, for there was no way he would ever rise again. He’d die here and be on the pile at the South Gate, in the ration wagon, in the death house, in a shallow grave somewhere outside the