Chapter 1
HOLLIS
The smell of death hit her before she even came in sight of the camp. She’d been warned, but somehow, she hadn’t really understood what Captain Scott had meant by you’ll smell it before you see it.
Well, he’d sure been right.
Hollis did her best to ignore the stench, which was even now, in the early spring, nearly unbearable. She couldn’t imagine what this would be like by high summer.
Maybe she’d have another job by then. It wasn’t like she was really interested in working at Camp Pinewood. But jobs were scarce. The port of Mobile was almost completely inactive now, and that meant people who’d previously been employed as sailors or dockhands or any of a hundred other port jobs were out of work and looking. An eighteen-year-old farm girl from Tensaw wasn’t going to be able to compete with someone who had a good working background and lots of experience.
Except no one really wanted to work at the camp. Heck, no one even wanted to talk about the camp. It was the sort of thing everyone knew about, but no one could quite recall how they’d found out it was there. Like a blight, the presence of the camp squatted on the surrounding landscapel it was impossible to be ignorant of it, but no one wanted to discuss it except in whispers.
All that Aunt Vinita had been willing to say was that the camp was taking care of a problem that no one wanted to deal with. The camp was cleansing the Confederacy; when the cleansing was done, the Confederacy would be strong again. It was like pulling a tooth: something wretchedly painful, agonizing even, and yet necessary. After it was over, you’d be glad it had been done, even if you’d cussed out the person extracting your tooth while it was happening.
Hollis could see that. The Confederacy had been too soft on the coloreds for far too long, as her father and grandfather liked to say. Her father liked to pontificate that they couldn’t be trusted, bred like rabbits, and would plot the deaths of every white person in the state if you didn’t keep them in their place. Pastor Acuff often said the same, with the added fact that coloreds were the cursed descendants of Ham. God himself had declared them sub-human way back in the days of the Flood, and had destined Ham’s wretched descendants to be under the control of the white man. And what God had decided, no man might oppose.
Everyone Hollis knew was clear: the camp was the Lord’s work, and it was good in His eyes.
The stench coming from it indicated otherwise.
Hollis steeled herself. She’d never been near an odor this vile, but if the guards at the camp could stand it, so could she. This was her one chance to get off the farm. Her one shot of seeing something of the world besides Tensaw, even if it was just Mobile or Montgomery. Even Birmingham seemed too exotic and far away to dream of, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other places, closer to Tensaw, she might go, if she could just save a bit of money.
If she remained on the farm, she’d either stay forever and be a spinster like Aunt Vinita, spending her life obsessed with canning, chickens, and farming peanuts, or she’d marry Everett Dobson, who’d been asking for her hand since they were both ten, and live on a farm no more than three miles from the farm where she’d grown up.
Everett was handsome enough, but his ambition was to stay on his family’s farm, marry a woman of Tensaw, breed a passel of kids, and die on the land on which he’d been born, never having even been as far as Mobile. The world outside the farm, outside Tensaw, did not interest him in the slightest. Even the tales of the camp Hollis could now smell, didn’t mean a thing to Everett. It was miles away, and had nothing to do with decent people like his family.
Hollis knew that, if she left, Charity Lange would be more than willing to take Hollis’ place in Everett’s heart. Charity wanted exactly what Everett wanted, which was, in Hollis’ mind, nothing at all. What good was staying on the same tiny farm holding for the entirety of one’s life? Cooking, taking care of children, canning the vegetables, feeding the chickens . . . nothing was wrong with those things in and of themselves. But doing nothing else for life? Hollis’ soul balked at the thought. The world was huge; even the Confederacy, tucked away on a tiny bit of the North American continent, was still much larger than any of her relatives could imagine. The world itself was beyond them entirely.
But not Hollis. She’d found some maps in a disused schoolroom and had spent hours poring over them until Mrs. Gammon had caught her and made her write I will not go where I am not supposed to be three hundred times on the chalkboard after school.
The next time Hollis had sneaked into that room, the maps were gone. But she still remembered the smell of the brittle paper, and the enticing lines that showed entire continents, and country borders, and rivers, and mountain ranges, and even Alabama. Which had been no bigger than the end of her thumb on the large curled-up sheet of yellowed paper.
Alabama, it turned out, was tiny. The world was huge. And Hollis had to see it somehow, or at least some piece of it. Which meant leaving the farm.
Which meant getting a job. Thus, the camp.
Hollis did her best to ignore the pungent scraping at the insides of her sinuses and trudged down the gravel lane. The morning was chilly and she could see her breath, but the day would be pleasantly warm by noon. She’d worn her good sweater, the one Granny Fairfield had knitted her the last winter of her life, but now she regretted that. The sweater would no doubt reek of the camp by nightfall. Hollis should have been prepared to be cold for a few hours. But she hadn’t considered the power of the odor Captain Scott had referred to in his interview with her.
Hollis soldiered on and wondered how long it would take to get the odor out of her sweater after today. Maybe Aunt Vinita would have a solution to the problem.
In the meantime, Hollis had to be sharp for her first day of work. She was to be at the camp by nine a.m. and would be on shift until six. Captain Scott had warned her that her hours might be expanded if they got a fresh influx of guests.
The way he’d said guests made Hollis very uncomfortable, as if cold water had infiltrated her bones. A shiver had gone down her spine, the way it did every harvest when father brought out his best ghost stories to tell by the fire. As if the dark, which, in her father’s stories, was full of vengeful spirits and demons, was in Captain Scott’s very voice, even on a bright sunny day in late March.
Hollis had ignored the gooseflesh and the shiver. She needed a job, and Captain Scott was the only one interested in hiring a farm girl with no work experience outside the family home. He’d wanted to know if she could wash, scrub, and cook. She could certainly do all those things, and now, she’d be paid to do them. That was one step up from chores at home.
She shouldn’t have to worry about extra hours at work for now, though. Captain Scott seemed to think that there wouldn’t be more people brought to the camp any time soon. Which was good; if she had to work extra hours, Hollis wouldn’t have time to walk between work and home before it got dark.
She rounded a slight curve in the gravel road and stopped as she got her first glimpse of the camp.
Weathered lumber formed the framework of a fence, set in the soggy soil several feet apart and strung together with barbed wire. Ahead of her was the gate, which was, like the rest of the fencing, just a framework of warped lumber supporting rusty metal wire. The entire contraption looked as though it could be pushed over with a decent shove. Yet behind it were gray-clad guards and a solid guard tower squatting over the shorter buildings like some kind of mutant hen overseeing her clutch.
What grabbed her attention after the first moment was something she’d never thought to see in her life. At first, her brain refused to take it in. Captain Scott’s vague warnings about it looks more alarming than it is, and it can be upsetting when you first see it, but it’s necessary slid away in the face a scaffold and a gallows, from which dangled a body, for goodness sake. The head was covered in a black cloth, the feet still twitched. The execution must have just happened recently. Public executions had been outlawed in her grandparents’ time, back when hanging coloreds from trees and having a picnic beneath their slowly strangling bodies had been a Sunday afternoon’s entertainment. Hollis had never known such a thing in her own life but she’d heard the stories. Her grandmother had decried the lack of proper picnics and opined that making them illegal had made the coloreds “too big for their britches.” Her father had snorted in derision. “If you can’t hang ‘em, how you gonna keep ‘em in line?”
Hollis had never had a reason to doubt her family and pastor in the matter, but now, watching the twitching body at the end of the rope, she wondered how anyone had ever deemed this a good thing to watch while eating. To make a spectacle of.
Hollis swallowed back the bile that threatened to rise in her throat and she thought she might vomit her breakfast right here in the road. She swayed slightly and wrenched her eyes away from the sight.
Now that she had stopped looking at the camp, Hollis noticed the cleared field around the fence was full of low mounds of earth. The one nearest her sported yellowed bones sticking out at odd angles around the base. Most of them seem to have been gnawed on by forest creatures.
Hollis felt faint. For an instant, she wondered how her father and grandfather and Aunt Vinita and Pastor Acuff could be wrong about the camp. How could anyone support the deaths of enough people, even if they were the Sons of Ham, that it would take to fill all these mounds? Even if the person at the end of the rope hadn’t, technically, been executed in public, wasn’t executing them at all still illegal? And then tossing the dead in graves without any kind of marker or care?
Common sense reasserted itself and her knees stopped shaking, at least somewhat. The sight of the camp and the graves was shocking, certainly, but if everyone said this was necessary, then it was necessary. The Confederacy had put up with too many coloreds for too long. Something had to be done. Everyone agreed, from her father to the sheriff to the pastor to the governor to the president. Who was she to doubt any of these God-fearing men?
She opened her eyes and continued walking. The guards at the fence spotted her and one of them gestured her forward. Hollis kept her eyes from the dangling body. She could do this. She could walk forward, go through the gate, and simply not look at the body or the graves, or . . . and now she could see other guests of the camp sitting dispiritedly on the ground, covered in sores and dried blood. She could remember Pastor Acuff’s last sermon about the sin of Sodom and remember that God had a purpose for everything. Eventually, someone would show her the job she was to do, and she would do it, and go home. And at the end of the week, she’d have her first paycheck.
The ugly timber-and-wire gate swung open. It was stained with the yellow-red of the Alabama soil and stuck through with dried needles from the surrounding pines. Hollis’ heart raced as she neared it. The threshold of this place was closer to the entrance of hell than anything she’d ever imagined, even after Pastor Acuff’s most fiery sermon.
“Hollis Fairfield?” asked the guard.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice broke in fear; she hoped the guard hadn’t noticed. But the smirk he gave her assured her he was well aware of the effect of the camp on visitors and that he relished it. Hollis’ heart wilted at his leering gaze.
The guard pointed toward a squat white building opposite the gallows. “Captain Scott’s waiting. His office is in there.”
Hollis nodded and hurried on her way. Now that she was inside the gate, she noticed eyes watching her from slits in the walls of the multitude of barracks that marched down each side of the camp like soldiers in formation. Hollis could see four rows of barracks, each at least ten or twelve buildings deep. So . . . probably forty barracks. Was she to do laundry for all of them? How many others like her worked in the camp? And where were the buildings where the washing tubs and drying lines were? They had to be somewhere.
Maybe, possibly, such facilities were outside the camp gates. Hollis desperately hoped so. She crossed the bare dirt of the compound as quickly as she could without looking to either side
Hollis climbed the three shallow steps to the wide veranda that wrapped around the administrative building. The door, which was warped out of shape so that she doubted it could even be fully closed, was ajar, but Hollis knocked, anyway.
“Miss Fairfield?” asked the deep voice of Captain Scott.
Hollis pushed the door open slowly and stepped inside. The interior of the building was neat but dark stains on the floor attracted her attention. They were reddish and looked suspiciously as though blood had pooled and soaked into the wood on multiple occasions.
Maybe it wasn’t really blood. But the thought of the gallows outside made Hollis doubt the stains were anything benign.
“Yes, sir?” she said as confidently as she could.
“I’m glad to see you came and didn’t walk away as soon as you smelled the place.” Captain Scott sat at a large desk on the left side of the room. Two chairs sat in front of his desk but he did not gesture for her to take one, so she remained standing near the door. “Sometimes, we hire girls from town, and they turn around before they get to the gate. It’s hard to stay fully staffed here.”
Hollis could believe that.
Captain Scott regarded her evenly. Hollis stood still under the gaze of his dim blue eyes. The Captain appeared to be a man who had seen too much, and had done his best to forget most of it. Though his sandy hair was only touched with frost, his face was deeply lined, and his hands, which he had on the desk in front of him, shook slightly.
A stab of pity struck at Hollis. She could work here as long as she wanted, or turn around and walk out right now, but the Captain had to stay. Whatever horrors were in this camp, he was bound to them by his orders. If the vision of bodies swinging from the gallows by their ropes got to be too much, or the bloodstains too upsetting, a civilian could just quit. Captain Scott would take those visions home with him day after day without recourse.
“Am I to do the laundry today, sir?” she asked. “I didn’t see any lines put up.”
“You won’t work in the camp itself,” said Captain Scott. “The water’s too far away to be convenient, and the stench here seeps into everything. If we want anything even halfway clean, it can’t be hung on a line here.”
Hollis nearly wilted in relief. She wouldn’t actually have to be in the camp to do laundry? She hoped the washing house was far enough away that she wouldn’t have to smell the camp, but even if it weren’t, as long as it was far enough away that she couldn’t see the gallows and know she was being watched through the cracks in the barracks walls, that would be enough.
Captain Scott gestured toward the door. “Go back to the gate and tell them you need to see Miss Maisie. Someone will take you to her and she can show you what you need to know.”
Hollis said, “Yes, sir.” She turned to go back out the door.
“Miss Fairfield?”
Hollis froze at the coldness in the voice. Any pity she’d had for the Captain had disappeared.
“Don’t talk to the guests. Don’t even look at them if you can help it. They’re liars and traitors, the scum of our society that we’re weeding out. You mind your business and leave the rest to us.”
Hollis’ hands trembled and she hoped the Captain didn’t see. “Yes . . . yes, sir,” she said with a catch in her voice. Did he think she wanted to see what went on here?
“Trouble is, sometimes, people think they know how to fix things when really, they don’t know what the true situation is,” he said evenly. “I don’t have to tell you what that is, now, do I? You’ll do your job, go home, and won’t mess around with things here. My men will keep you safe, and Miss Maisie will let me know how well you mind your duties. Do your job, don’t stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong, and you’ll get on here just fine. Are we clear?”
Hollis didn’t trust herself to speak. She nodded sharply, then walked out the open doorway. She pulled the door behind her, but it didn’t close all the way. As soon as the door jammed in its warped frame, she let it go and quickly walked back to the gate, looking neither to the left nor the right.
Looking down wasn’t much better. That kept her eyes on the pine needles that had blown in overnight, but it didn’t keep her from hearing moans from the barracks, or the creak of the rope as it supported its dead weight.
Hollis hurried her steps until she was almost running, as if the goblins of her father’s ghost stories were at her heels. At the gate, she glanced up into the dark eyes of a brown-haired man who barely looked old enough to shave. His eyes weren’t haunted like the Captain’s; in them, Hollis saw nothing at all. No joy, no hate, no satisfaction, not even the lechery of the other guard. The emptiness was even more frightening than the leer, as if this place had drained the guard’s soul away, to be replaced with an abyss Hollis was not interested in looking into. But she had to speak to him. She steeled herself to address those dead eyes.
“I’m to see Miss Maisie,” said Hollis. “Captain said I’ll learn my job from her.”
The man snorted, but even that evidence of derisive humor did not reach his eyes. “Guess you will.” He gestured for someone to open the gate.
Hollis stepped outside as soon as it was open wide enough to admit her back into the outside world. “Are you coming?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “You take that trail to your right, go into the woods, and walk a couple hundred yards. You’ll see it next to the creek.”
By herself? Hollis normally had no fear of walking alone, but the proximity of hundreds of prisoners living and dying in this haunted place made her suddenly aware of the shadows of the trees, the curve in the path that kept her from seeing very far ahead. Every snap of twigs under her feet made her skin jump slightly, and her heart beat hard in her chest.
She shook herself slightly. Nothing had changed from ten minutes ago, after she’d spent an hour walking here from the farm. She’d been alone then, and hadn’t thought a thing about it.
But that was different now. Hollis took a deep breath and plunged into the pine forest. The wind in the branches above her sighed as if bowed down with despair.