The weather had turned cold. Last night when he lay down to sleep, the mud cracked under him with ice. His pants and shirt froze onto it and someone stole his shoe. He would have got the other one, but Clyde woke up and kicked him good. After that, he could not sleep because his shoeless foot was hurting with the cold. He bent his leg and twisted up his toes and sucked on them. It did no good. Once he would have thought one shoe was not much good to anyone, but now he felt right glad for it and wished he had a pair. Maybe if he went about very early in the morning, he could steal one from a corpse. But everyone was hunting for a pair of shoes, an extra coat, a blanket, and he got shoved out of the way by bigger men.
He did not intend to die, he would not do it, he would stay alive. He had eaten mice, he ate a cat leg once, stole it from another prisoner’s boiling can, and he had eaten roaches, and picked greybacks from his hair and eaten them.
One day he turned in some prisoners who were digging a tunnel underneath the palisade. They were muggers anyways, bad types, they were no good for anything. The guards shot them for it and Clyde got half a loaf of bread. He ate it all at once in case someone snatched it off him, and it made him sick, being only half baked with the corn inside raw and hard and sour. They had put lime in it to make it rise, but it did not rise and the lime brought on his diarrhea again. There was no outhouse he could go to, not even a slop bucket he could use, the men just crouched down where they stood. The pit along one fence was full of it, washed there by the rain since you could not use the pit directly. It was part of the dead zone and if you went too close, the sentry up above would shoot you. The best you could do was not shit too close to anybody’s hole if you did not want to be beat up again.
He went and crouched under an oak tree, groaning and looking up the trunk for a piece of bark low enough to reach. If he could get a piece of bark and a little bit of firewood, he could boil the bark and make some tea, which would help to keep his bowels from griping and flooding all the time. But the trees had been peeled as high up as a man could reach standing on another’s shoulders, and so he crouched there dolefully, thinking about the tunnel diggers he had given up. He wished he hadn’t done it now. He wished he’d asked if they would let him help them, he could do it, he was good at digging, and maybe they’d have got away, the lot of them. He wondered where they came from. One was from the South, like him, Clyde could tell it from his accent. He had fallen on his knees and called out for his mother just before they shot him. Ma, he had called out, Oh, save me, Ma.
Thinking on it, Clyde felt his bowels twist again. Maybe that boy came from some farm hereabouts, which would mean he was a kind of neighbor. He was nothing but a Rebel, one of them deserters, he was no good for anything. They’d said Pa was a deserter, though, before they shot him. Maybe that boy’s pa had been shot too, maybe his ma was all alone with just a nigra to take care of her.
For the first time since Clyde left home, a thought occurred to him. What if Amos had run off? Slaves were running off all over, everyone knew that. What if Ma had no one to chop wood or tend the farm or go out hunting in the woods? He wanted to get up to his feet and hike his pants up, but every time he thought that he was done, his gut wrenched and he had to crouch back down. Pa’s friends would take care of Ma. They would not let her starve. But what if them Home Guard fellers had found their cave and shot them too?
He was sweating and felt hot all over. He thought any second he would fall down on his face. He set one hand on the ground and leaned on it. His head felt dizzy and his tongue felt like a swollen dead thing in his mouth. His insides were coming out again. He felt himself slip forward and heard a voice say, Ma, oh Ma, I need a drink of water.
And there was Ma, sitting in her slat chair on the porch, staring at her cradle full of flowers. And here came Old Mary with a wooden bucket from the pump. She set it on the step and went inside and came back out. In her hand she had a ladle made out of a gourd. She dipped it in the bucket and turned and smiled at him and poured the water on the ground.
When he came to, it was snowing and somebody had stole his pants, stole them right off his body. His last shoe gone too. No, here it was, he had it in his hand, he must have clung onto it hard. He twisted down and pulled it on, looking at himself. A sad and sorry sight. Nothing on him but one shoe and a shirt, and his own shit frozen onto him. When he raised his head and looked about, he realized he’d been lying there a good long while because the snow was thick enough to hide the mud. Everyone who could had vanished underground. Others were huddled together under the old factory building, others under leafless trees, others marching, marching, back and forth, trying to keep from freezing, others holding out their hands to catch the snow and eat it. Still others, those who had gone mad, just went on wandering and talking to themselves the way they always did.
His pants had not been much protection from the cold, but without them the north wind cut right through him. He pushed himself into a sitting position, his head shrugged back into his neck and his knees drawn up to his body, and rubbed his legs ferociously. But his skin was too sensitive and painful to be warmed by friction, so lowering his chin between his knees, he wrapped his arms around his legs, looking bleakly at the red spots across the insides of his thighs. He had not noticed these before, and after a while shifted his rattling numb jaw to examine his calves and the outsides of his thighs. They were the same, the sparse stiff hair, the tiny rings of inflammation at each base. Goddam! he said, Goddam! He stood up unsteadily, favoring his painful toes, but then he realized he could not feel them any more. He could not feel that leg at all, the left one. He gave in then, and went to stand in line outside the hospital.
The wind was banking snow against the wall, and around the feet of the men in line. Clyde stood with one hand on the wall for balance, and tilting back his numb leg, held onto the ankle with his other hand. This kept it out of the snow but the wind was just as cold so after a while he let it drop. He tried to keep his teeth still, what was left of them. He’d lost three more the last few days, and figured pretty soon he’d have none left at all. He had the scurvy, he was sure of it, he could tell it from the red spots on his legs.
The line moved sluggishly, the men behind him and in front coughing in their hands but silent otherwise, some with pus-weeping rashes on their chests and arms from having burned themselves with heated nails or bits of wire to make it look as though they had the smallpox. This would get them from the main compound to the smallpox camp outside, where they figured it was easier to make a getaway. Clyde did not believe this. Once you started to the hospital, it was the beginning of the end, everybody knew it. But he tried not to think of that. He tried to think about a plan for getting out of here. He would die, he knew that now, if he did not get out.
The orderly stuck his head out of the door and jerked his head, frost puffing from his mouth. You next, he said, and Clyde went in.
The doctor looked at him. He hardly bothered with Clyde’s toes, although he gave him a piece of torn-up bandage he could wrap them in. He looked at the red spots on his legs and said, Pull up your shirt, and when he saw the way his ribs showed through, he shrugged.
It was that shrug that did it. Clyde knew it meant the end, there was no hope for him. He hobbled from the hospital, past the dead house where a pile of bodies waited to be hauled away, then stopped and came back and stood staring at them staring back at him with frozen, pallid eyes. This one had been eaten from the ankle to the hip by greybacks, his legs so rotten with the sores the bones were coming through. This one had died of scurvy. He lay with his mouth open, not one tooth left in his head. This one had the swollen knees and feet of breaky-bone disease, the legs up to the knees dark blue as indigo. Several had no hands or feet. They had rotted off with gangrene. Others had the sinews showing through where rotten flesh had fallen off.
Once Clyde would have vomited at such a sight, but he’d lived with it for so long he’d built a wall behind his eyes so that he saw it without seeing. Now it was as though a window opened in the wall and he saw himself as he would be soon, lying right here in this pile, frozen with his flesh half rotted off.
He looked across the prison yard, at the still expanse of snow where no smoke crept up from the prisoners’ holes and makeshift chimneys like it used to do when firewood could be had. There was little of it now, what there was fought over and carried off by the strongest and most violent men. Those left without froze one after the other. Curled inside their holes, they were pried out by the first to get to them, intent on ripping off their clothes, the rags of the dead added to the rags of the barely living, grayback infestations added to the infestations they already wore. Then they would take over the dead man’s hole and, in their turn, freeze.
Clyde looked behind him and to either side. No one paid attention. No one would miss him when he was dead and gone. He wished he’d gone with Caesar. Before he’d finished thinking it, he’d pulled his shirt across his head, twisted off his shoe, and tossed them both in through the window of the dead house out of sight. Then he stretched out on the pile of bodies.
Being on top of the pile meant he was the first to be slung onto the cart. He willed himself not to grunt and was absurdly pleased when he did not. What he had not counted on was the weight of the bodies slung on top of him, pressing his face down onto slats oozing with putrescence. By the time the cart was fully loaded and the team of horses strained forward and began to move, he was sure he’d suffocate. He felt his gorge rise and swallowed hard. If he vomited he’d surely drown in it. He struggled with his head and neck and managed to turn his face into a pocket of foul air.
He heard the driver speaking to the sentry on the gate, heard the gate swing back, and then clack shut behind. At once he started on a harder struggle, one less likely to succeed. Between now and when they turned into the cemetery, he must somehow slither backwards out of here. He had fallen with his right arm flung out and his hand against the wagon’s side. This gave him purchase, and he pushed out and back with all the strength left in his body. The bottom of the wagon was slick with dead men’s fluids and before long he moved an inch, another inch, another, the cart rattling below him at what seemed a breakneck pace. Another inch.
And now his feet were paddling in air. Now his left hand found the back edge of the wagon. Pulled. And pulled again. And pulled. Slick and slithering, like a new foal falling from a mare, he fell onto the ground. He lay a moment stunned, then eased his head up, waiting to be shot, and watched the cart go creaking off ahead.
No one shot him, no one called. He looked up at the walkway on the palisade, but was so close he could only see the underside. He listened for a footstep up there. Nothing.
He turned the other way and looked across the railroad. No one was about, just pure clear snow and an open field overgrown with frozen weeds. Do it now, he whispered, run. And he hauled up off the ground and ran, stumbling and picking himself up and running on, listening for the baying of the hounds, waiting every second for the shot, and ran, and no shot still, perhaps the sentries were huddled up against the cold and paying no attention, and ran on still, his chest hurting and his ears hurting and his good toes hurting with the cold, and he thought that any minute he would freeze stock still, and ran and ran, his naked bottom twinkling white across the whiteness of the snow.