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that ran from the North Gate to the other end of the stockade was called Broadway, whereas the southernmost was called Market, as it housed the sutler’s shack just inside the South Gate and also bore a gamut of entrepreneurial tumbledown prisoner-run businesses. Such men as had entered into the service from some useful trade, such as a cobbler or a barber, set themselves up along Market, plying their old trade. A man named Ransom and his Indian partner Battese ran a laundry service with a ridged washboard they had carved from scrap lumber. They cleaned and deloused clothing at the price of a pound of bread per day’s work. He made a note of that.
    Baked bread could be bought from a man who had fashioned a small clay oven from the mud. A woodcarver whittled chess pieces from pine roots, blackening half of them with soot. Another man sold well-worn books, presumably taken from the effects of dead prisoners. Barclay saw a copy of
Grey’s Anatomy
there, displaying the nude female sketches and priced at five dollars. A man calling himself Captain Jack offered tattoos. There was even a gambling den where men played with homemade cards and minié balls hammered into lead cubes for uncooked peas and beans.
    The sutler was a local named Selman who apparently acted as agent for the surrounding farms. He operated out of a slant-roofed scrap lumber shed under which had been dug a kind of cellar to keep produce cool. He sold onions and potatoes and fresh eggs at five dollars apiece without batting an eye. There were pints of black beans at forty cents per, and Barclay saw the very same blackberries he had seen growing wild just beyond the walls during his work detail going for sixty cents a pint.
    It was early evening by the time he made it back to Charlie. On the way he saw a few prisoners gathered near the wall, taking turns with an old cane pole, trying to swat chimney swallows out of the air. The little birds apparently wove their mud nests into the cracks in the walls and came out at twilight to hunt insects. He saw a man strike one down to the ground, where it bounced feebly around. Three of the bystanders leaped at it, and a general brawl ensued.
    The more fortunate men were settling down to cook their rations or eat them raw, and Barclay found Charlie out front of their shebang sitting around a small root fire with Limber, Romeo, Red Cap, and several other men from the neighborhood, singing “Rally Round the Flag.” Red Cap’s high voice rose incongruously above the others.
    As he stepped into the firelight, a hulking man in nothing but a dirty union suit got to his feet and balled his fists, but Limber waved him down.
    “It’s all right, Big Pete. This is Earl Stevens. He’s Charlie’s bunk mate.”
    Big Pete sat back down but kept glaring at Barclay as he took his seat.
    “You get your cornmeal?” Charlie asked. “Go on and add it to the blanket. We’re makin’ johnnycakes.”
    Barclay saw that Romeo was frying the pints of cornmeal into flat cakes with a bit of water in a pan over the fire.
    “I didn’t draw no ration, sir,” Barclay said, slipping back into the affect he had adopted with Charlie.
    “Didn’t draw no ration?” Charlie repeated, and the other men looked at him askance as well. “Why not?”
    He had a flash of the strange man in the creek warning him against the cornmeal.
    “Not hungry today,” Barclay muttered.
    “Maybe you ain’t today, but you could be tomorrow,” Limber said. “And there ain’t no telling if there’ll even be rations tomorrow. The Rebs can hardly feed themselves, let alone us. They’ll look for every excuse not to give you anything. And don’t rely on charity, either, or you’ll find yourself starving.”
    “I won’t.”
    “Here, have a worm castle anyway,” Limber said, passing him a piece of hardtack cracker.
    It was stale to the taste.
    “You go see Major Bruegel?”
    Barclay nodded.
    “That is a piss-poor way to treat an officer,” Limber