TY
I
C
FICTION
the
of
D
EA
D
ran
BY B
May, 1865
(This is a fictional account of life in the real
Confederate POW camp at Andersonville, GA. It
was liberated in May, after the end of the war.)
Mud and tents stretched into the distance. In Camp Sumter, called Andersonville for the nearby town, there extended
more than five hundred acres of dank hell
sprawling from one stockade fence to
the other. Between them, a brutal world
percolated with violence and death. Everything rotten about humans filled the
humid Confederate air. Men beat others
to death for scraps while others yet retaliated brutality for brutality. Northerners
were mouths for which Dixie could spare
no food, even as Grant had taken Lee’s
sword three weeks prior. The grinding war
machine of the Yankees had eaten up the
entire force of their rebellion, though not
without a flood of loss for the ruinous belligerents. The victory was no doubt bitter;
the mount of triumph was composed of
the corpses.
In the midst of the horror and chaos,
Lieutenant Francis Perriman Cold of the
106th Pennsylvania Regiment scrawled
on a piece of cloth with a narrow shard
of blackened wood. He was a poet. He
did not belong in this damnable war. Let
brothers kill brothers. What’s more, he
did not belong in this wretched camp. He
wished to be out west, penning pithy verse
about the glory of a Coloradan sky, a geyser erupting in Dakota. He scratched at his
pallid, blotchy skin. It folded and wrinkled
5 | FICTION
Tom
don
lins
on
under the pressure, loose and dry from the
conditions of Andersonville. Dust and dirt
formed his grimy existence, along with
rations of bread laced with maggots and
hazy water. The crimson Georgia sky met
the horizon, blanketed in trees dark with
the shadow of twilight.
He resented the horizon. It taunted
him with its unbridled infinity. He could
scarcely recall the sensation of such liberty; all he tasted anymore was hunger and
the morbid flavor of blood and sputum he
hacked vigorously every now and again. If
this camp did not kill him, the consumption likely would. He shifted on the hard
ground under the tent allotted him and
one other. Groaning, the dull nag of sores
clattered in his emaciated mind. His bones
seemed to stick through him and grind
against the ground. Any padding of muscle or sinew had ebbed away months ago
as he starved.
He scarcely had the strength to wield
his own body, but he put the burned utensil against the cloth with the all the fury
a malnourished writer could muster. He
surveyed his script, and scribbled it out
in disgust. Francis hated this; the agony
of life here had clouded his prized possession: his mind. It blotted his thoughts
with a damp pal