Edward Lee - The Black Train

“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.