The Cellar Read online

  The Cellar

  A Civil War Novella by

  C. G. Richardson

  8/6/2013

  Text copyright © 2013 Curtis G. Richardson

  All Rights Reserved

  Dedicated to David “Shorty” Rawls,

  Though long gone your memory keeps me company.

  Foreward

  This is a work of historic fiction. The characters and specific events are purely from my imagination, but the background events are as close to what was going on in the 1860s as I can make them. Sherman’s army was indeed foraging in Northern Mississippi in 1863, well before the march to the sea. Some minor incidents related were from memoirs written by men in my Great Grandfather’s unit, the 40th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. The clumsy butchering of the cow by the roadside, the improvised rolls, and the slave children bringing water to the troops all came from a couple of fellows I feel like I know personally from having read their recollections again and again. I became acquainted with E. J. Hart and John T. Hunt while I was doing research for my previous Novel, “Sergeant Tom’s War”. I feel I owe them a debt for leaving some intimation of what life was like for my Great Granddad and Great Uncles as they made their way through the conflagration.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – The Sins of the Father

  Chapter 2 – The Babylonian Captivity

  Chapter 3 – The Epistle

  Chapter 4 – Deuteronomy

  Chapter 5 – Exodus

  Chapter 1 – The Sins of the Father

  Ike woke up to darkness and silence. Blinking a couple of times didn’t seem to make any difference, there was as much light visible with his eyelids closed as with them open. Turning his head from side to side only revealed that he was stiff from having lain in the same position for too long. For a few moments he imagined that he might be dead. An inventory of his numerous hurts erased all doubt and convinced him that he was still among the living.

  An indistinct sound, like someone calling his name, startled Ike. His reflexive jerking brought more pain. The voice sounded as if it came from the bottom of a well. He strained to try to identify where the voice and the snatch of laughter that followed it might have come from but heard nothing save the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears and the ringing noises that had been near constant since the night of the artillery barrage back at Pittsburgh landing.

  Ike’s leg ached in a way that convinced him that it was broken. It had been immobilized with a pair of wooden splints. He felt light headed and weak as if he had been suffering from a long illness. There was a cloth tied snugly around the top of his head. A two fingered exploration of the area covered by the cloth was rewarded with a stabbing pain just above his left eye. The spot seemed moist and there was a small indentation which stung when pressure was applied.

  Where ever he was felt cool but not uncomfortably so. He didn’t feel as sick to his stomach as he had been back, back where? He tried unsuccessfully to remember where he had been the last time he was conscious. How long ago had it been? He was laying on something soft but not too soft. He carefully patted his surroundings with hands that he couldn’t see. The soft blanket underneath him was spread over a pile of straw strewn on a hard floor. He raised his right arm slowly over his head and moved it about to see if there was anything above him. His left arm encountered the cool surface of a stone wall about a foot from his shoulder. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he might be in a coffin or at least a tomb. Finding no lid above his head to stop him, he attempted to sit up.

  Everything seemed to spin and float when Ike tried raising himself up. As dark as it was, colors bloomed before his eyes and he felt like he was floating. A couple of seconds after his attempt to sit up he was flat on his back again. He heard the laughter again just before he lost consciousness. He slept and dreamed of home.

  Emma was sitting on the porch, mending a pair of his old trousers. She shook her head at how hard he was on his clothes, but she smiled and made her careful stitches count as she extended the life of Ike’s pants. Their bulldog Freddy was lying at Emma’s feet with his massive head on his paws. Ike wanted to take his beautiful wife in his arms and kiss her passionately but he couldn’t move in that direction. Freddy looked up as if he had spotted an intruder but then the whole scene floated backwards and disappeared.

  A wall of flame appeared, searing his exposed skin and making his clothing smoke. He could barely keep his eyes open against the glare, but he was looking for something or someone in the conflagration. Ike thought once more that he was dead and that the sermons on Hell were more than just allegory to frighten the guilty to repentance. He could feel his skin blister but he couldn’t seem to back away from the fire as he desperately searched. He was confused about what or who he was looking for. Just when he thought he would explode from the heat oblivion took him once more. Dreamless sleep overcame him for a while, giving his mind a rest from its inventory of a jumble of tangled memories.

  A more recent and somehow more important scene swam before him and solidified. Ike was with his squad on a foraging detail. They had come upon an unusually prosperous looking farmhouse with a chicken coop and a pen that held the first hogs they had seen in weeks. Johnny O’Donnell joked about pork chops for supper as a middle aged woman came out on the porch and glared at the blue coated men standing in her yard. The woman was attractive and would have been more so had it not been for the look of disdain as she swept the men with her gaze. The sun beat down on them fiercely and the look from her eyes seemed to add to the waves of heat that were making Ike feel queasy already. Ike had been feverish all morning and the heat was adding to his woes. If he hadn’t been so hungry he probably would have went on sick call and stayed back in camp, but the possibility of finding something to eat enticed him to go on this little adventure. He had seen the water pump and trough by the barn and quietly made his way toward it in hopes of quenching his thirst and cooling his throbbing head. The weary soldier had leaned his rifle against the watering trough and scooped water into his hands and began to splash his face.

  Sarge had tipped his hat to the woman who stood with her arms crossed studying them as if they were something that had been accidentally tracked into her parlor on the sole of someone’s shoe. He had informed her that the Union army was in need of supplies and would be confiscating some of the hogs and chickens. Sarge sounded like a defeated man as the woman ignored his speech and turned to go back into her house.

  Sarge often said that he hated “Jay hawking” detail worse than facing artillery. He had told Ike that it made him feel like the lowest kind of thief to take food from civilians, even the rabid secessionists of northern Mississippi. Sarge had stood there speechless, with his head down and his hat in his hand as the woman walked back through her door, glancing over her shoulder at the woods. That was when all hell broke loose in the yard.

  Rifles popped in the trees that edged the clearing. Ike heard the too familiar buzzing of the minie’ balls as they flew and the splatting noise of the big lead slugs burrowing into the flesh of men he had shared so much with over the last two years. A bullet grazed his forehead and set it on fire as he dove over the watering trough for cover. He seemed to be hanging in mid air when the bullet hit him. When the impact came his suspension ceased and he felt like he was plummeting from a great height. He felt the bone in his left leg crack as he went down hard and hit it on a rock. He could hear screaming and moaning from the other side of the yard as another round bored all the way through the trough just at the water level letting loose a brief stream of cool water that jetted to the dusty ground just in front of Ike’s face. He felt dust and then thin mud splattering in his face and then once again there was nothing.

  The wounded soldier’s brain had been traumat
ized by the blow that had hammered in a small portion of its protective skull. Ike neared the threshold of death and fought back several times as his brain fired millions of messages here and there. Instructions went out to vital organs, memories were processed, and some were lost or misplaced as parts of his mind shut down in order to maintain his vital functions. His subconscious dealt with the approach of possible death by replaying images of his life. For a few moments it was taken somewhere beyond the barnyard where his physical body lay fighting for its continued existence.

  For a short interval peace reigned as Ike stood on the bank of a creek. The creek crossed a meadow that was in full bloom of a perfect spring. The clearest water he had ever seen babbled across rocks in the creek and made a chuckling noise. Ike wanted to take off his shoes and feel the coolness of the water as he waded across. In the distance a figure stood on the edge of a green wood. Ike wanted to go to this figure and was about to step off into the water when he was drawn back into darkness.

  After a brief interlude of near consciousness and searing pain Ike’s mind went back to Pittsburg landing and the bloody April morning that had taken his brother and so many of his friends from Company D. They had finally “seen the elephant” and the beast’s rampage had stomped them flat as they made their first contact with the enemy. Ike seemed to be marching endlessly across overgrown fields littered with corpses in blue and gray uniforms. As he strode through the carnage young voices in his head were repeating Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”

  Half a league, half a league,

  Half a league onward.

  All in the valley of death

  Rode the six hundred.

  Came the sound of school children repeating the poem they had memorized as Ike marched across what looked to be the valley of death. The voices sounded young and innocent and Ike smiled with pride at how well they repeated the lines.

  Storm'd at with shot and shell,

  Boldly they rode and well,

  Into the jaws of Death,

  Into the mouth of Hell…

  A small boy’s voice was heard giggling at the word “hell” and the children all broke into embarrassed laughter. Ike continued marching, unhappy with the interruption.

  Scenes from the two days of wholesale killing of fellow human beings, losing friends, and living in terror beyond anything he could have imagined floated in front of him. He found himself standing in line among those who were left in his squad after the first day’s carnage and who had spent the miserable night in a pouring rain as they waited to do it all over again the next day.

  He could see the rain running in a steady stream off Sarge’s hat when one of the big artillery shells from the gunboats arced overhead and lit up the sky for a few moments before it began to descend and wreak havoc with the enemy scattered to their front. It might have been a funny sight under other circumstances than these, but the look on the face of the man under the streaming hat was so full of anguish that he wanted to reach out to him. Ike had lost a brother in the fight and his Sergeant had lost a son. He tried to put his hands out toward the man but the image floated away into darkness.

  They were digging, digging in mud while they scraped out the long trench for the Rebels. The dead men laying there seemed like an embarrassment to him; their presence was an accusation against him and his comrades and he wanted to get them under the ground as quick as he could so he wouldn’t have to look at them anymore. It felt like sweeping dirt under a rug to hide it, when you were supposed to be cleaning the house. He dug frantically until the blisters on his hands bled. The irrational idea had come to Ike that if they could just get the hole filled and covered before God looked this direction and noticed about 700 dead men lying about things would be alright and he worked feverishly to that end. In his dream a bloated corpse that he and Johnny O’Donnell dragged to the edge of the hole opened its gummy eyes and leered at Ike. “You killed me, blue belly and now you’ll pay!”

  Ike woke up screaming at the sound of the corpse’s voice as it grated its accusation at him and blew the stench of its decay into his face. The sound of his scream was swallowed by the darkness that still surrounded him. He laid panting and sweating in the dark. His body was drenched in sweat and in a way that felt like he might have had a fever and it had just broken. He lay there for a while trying to discern where he was but it was still a mystery.

  “You must have had a terrible dream young man.” a female voice droned from the gloom. Ike almost screamed again. He tensed and his breath caught in his throat until he nearly passed out. Finally his body relaxed and he regained enough lucidity to respond.

  “Who…… Who’s there?”

  There was a scratching, then a snap and a hiss as the smell of sulphur assaulted his nose. A face appeared above him, painted yellow by the light of a match. Ike recognized the face of the woman on the porch that had turned her back on Sarge before………. “Oh God!” Ike thought, “Sarge and my squad…..are they all dead?”

  The woman used the match to light an oil lamp that had been sitting on a small table next to a kitchen chair. He surmised that she must have been sitting there in the dark, just waiting for him to wake up. How long had she been there? How long had he been here?

  Ike began to take in his surroundings as the woman sat back in her chair. They were in what looked like a cellar although there were no foodstuffs to be seen. Only the clean earthy smell of potatoes hinted at the small room’s previous occupation. The smell reminded Ike of how hungry he was. Ike had been hungry for days before he found himself in this place, whatever this place was, and he didn’t know how long he had been here.

  They had been looking for food, a commodity that was becoming scarce in northern Mississippi as two armies chased each other back and forth across the landscape. His regiment’s supply lines had been cut by Chalmers’ cavalry and they had been forced to live off a land that had already been “lived off” by their enemies.

  The last semblance of a meal Ike recalled was when they had combined all the food they had, which had been some flour and cornmeal, and made crude rolls. Someone had come up with the idea of mixing the ground grain with water on a poncho and forming a sticky dough. They improvised ways of cooking it over the fire, some used green sticks, but the prevailing method became to impale it on their steel ramrods or bayonets and hold it above the coals until it was brown. Compared to hardtack it wasn’t too awful as long as it was still warm. Johnny had them laughing as usual when he teased Sarge. “Hey Sarge, your roll looks like a horse turd. How do you like it?”

  “Johnny, if I was any hungrier I’d probably eat a horse turd.” Sarge replied, keeping the laughter going. Before long everyone was chuckling and joking about “horse turds” and making their rolls into more bizarre and obscene shapes, producing even more gales of laughter. Schoolboys playing hooky couldn’t have had a much better time than Company D when they laughed together. Remembering better days with his friends brought back his fear for them. How many had died in the ambush?

  “I suppose you must be hungry now.” The woman said, staring at Ike in a way that he couldn’t decipher.

  “Yes Ma’am…..I don’t know how long it’s been.” He said, trying to sound apologetic. For a brief moment something inside of him made him want to say “I’m hungry enough to eat a horse turd.” He was appalled that such a thought would come to his mind. It was just the kind of thing Johnny O’Donnell would have said.

  Ike had caught his Sergeant’s distaste for foraging and wished he had the words to convey how reluctant he had been to pilfer food from civilians. “Military necessity,” the Colonel had called it when he first assigned them the duty.

  The old Colonel had been mortified when he had returned to his regiment from sick leave to find Company “G” clumsily butchering a stolen cow at the side of the road. He had wanted the men punished for their thievery but the Brigadier had looked at the cow and the men standing around it with their heads bowed in shame from the Colonel’s outb
urst. The Colonel’s superior cleared his throat to bring silence to the crowd and said “If I ever hear of any of my men doing such a piss-poor job of butchering again, I’ll have the whole lot of you flogged. The officer climbed down off his horse, grabbed a knife from one of the soldiers and began dissecting the hind quarter of the animal with obvious skill. “Now this is how you carve a flank steak!”

  The Colonel had not been able to look his men in the eye for a couple of days without betraying his sadness and dismay. A couple of more weeks of living on short rations or none at all and the Colonel overcame some of his qualms about “Jayhawking.”

  Of course there were those who saw “Military Necessity” as a license to take anything that wasn’t nailed down and a good number of items that were. The only time Ike had ever seen Sarge really mad at one of his men was when he found out that Dan Clark had stolen a valise full of women’s clothing. Sarge was a big man and normally easy going, but when he found Clark stowing the bag in the supply wagon and determined what was in it he lost his temper. Sarge punched and pummeled the soldier until he had to be pulled off of him by a couple of the other men. As soon as the Sergeant had calmed down a bit he had Clark marched back to the house where he had purloined the clothes.

  The detail assigned to accompany Clark had great fun at the expense of their comrade who was carrying the valise and wearing a bonnet that had been found inside. As if this weren’t enough Sarge had insisted that the soldier also carry the dainty parasol that had been found tucked away amidst the other clothes. Johnny O’Donnell had rolled on the ground and laughed his distinctive donkey bray as the small squad left the camp. Clark was in the lead and Sarge walked behind him delivering a kick or a prod if he lowered the parasol.