Toasting Fallen Brothers
A Short Story
“A toast! To Fido!” Nathaniel raised his glass, shouting toward the entrance of Fannie’s Tavern in Rochester, where his friend Elijah had just arrived for their reunion.
It wasn’t the usual way to greet someone you hadn’t seen in a year — by toasting a dog — but Nathaniel hadn’t waited for his late-arriving friend to get there before he started drinking, and he wasn’t going to interrupt the toast he was making to follow formalities. With slurred speech, he then directed Elijah toward the table he had staked out for the pair and shouted to him to grab a glass from the bartender on the way. It was surprising the two recognized each other across the smoke-filled room. Each weighed sixty or seventy pounds more than they had the last time they were together. But when you spend every minute packed together in close quarters for months, as they had, you don’t forget faces, no matter how much they may have filled out.
Elijah approached the table, imagining all the men, critters, and ideals Nathaniel had toasted before he got there. No doubt, there was a salute “to survival” and a tribute “to fallen brothers” on the list. The reunion that day would be attended only by the two men. None of the other soldiers the pair knew from Company H of the 44th New York Regiment had survived the war to share drinks with them.
These other soldiers actually had made it through all the battles and skirmishes. What they hadn’t survived were the wretched and inhumane conditions of Andersonville Prison, where they were taken as POWs during the last several months of the Civil War.
Elijah had arrived at the tavern more than an hour and a half late. Judging by the amount of whiskey remaining in the bottle atop the table, he figured that Nathaniel had a seven or eight drink head start on him. He had a somewhat embarrassing excuse for his tardiness. He had gotten into town by train from Albany the night before but had misread the map of Rochester earlier that afternoon, making a left on Main Street instead of a right. He walked a good two and a half miles the wrong way before realizing he was reading the map upside down.
You’d think an experienced Union soldier would have known the difference between North and South. By the time he had been captured, Elijah had been fighting Johnnie Reb for more than two years, in places like Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and Chickamauga. Thankfully, being able to read a map hadn’t been important in Elijah’s wartime duty. He served as a “teamster,” where he worked with horses and mules used to transport supplies, ammunition, and equipment for the army. His specific responsibilities included the care and feeding of them. He may have been clueless with maps and directions, but he could get horses to do anything he wanted, mostly just by pointing and speaking to them in the right tone.
“A toast! To Fido!” Elijah shouted back, pulling up a chair to the table. “Another bottle!” he yelled to the burly bartender, who was wiping down glasses with a stained rag.
Fido had been a guard dog at Andersonville. He was a mean-looking bull terrier, scarred across his face and neck from more than a few fights. Confederate guards used canines like him to corral and keep peace among the 30,000 Union prisoners crowded into the 26-acre open-air prison. Fido flashed his vicious teeth at soldiers like Elijah and Nathaniel, packing them each atop tiny 4-foot by 3-foot plots of hardpan, barely able to move.
After the toast, the two men agreed they owed their lives to the mean dog. “We wouldn’t have survived without him.” They also toasted the relationship the dog had with Elijah. In another life, Elijah would have been born an animal and not a human, considering the way he could communicate with them. He could get a dog like Fido to do anything he wanted, in the same way he could with horses and mules.
With a commanding voice, Elijah had directed Fido to the Confederate officers’ mess tent at the edge of camp, demanding that the dog get whatever food he could steal for them. Fido went wherever Elijah pointed, captivated by the man’s demeanor, and forgetting the fact that they served on different sides of the war.
The two former soldiers talked more about Fido, as they drank their whiskeys and shared memories. “It usually wasn’t much food, what the dog brought back. The meat was gristly and stringy, and it didn’t taste particularly fresh,” Nathaniel remembered. But they agreed it was a feast compared to the three ounces of dried rice and one tablespoon of salt per day that were the official prisoner rations. “And there was a lot of work required to get the tiniest amount of meat from the bones the dog carried back to us in his mouth,” Elijah recalled.
But what Fido stole for them was undeniably the difference between life and death. On average about 100 Union soldiers died each day in the abominable conditions of the camp, most from dysentery or starvation. Elijah and Nathaniel clung to life until set free in April of 1865.
They decided their canine friend was worthy of a second salute.
“A toast! To Fido! Who somehow found the Confederate officers’ mess tent on the south end of the prison simply by me pointing that way,” Elijah raised his glass, slurring his own speech by then.
Nathaniel began to throw back his shot of whiskey when he was suddenly shaken from his drunkenness, spitting out the liquor on the tavern’s planked floorboards.
“The Confederate officers’ mess wasn’t on the south side of Andersonville. It was on the north side,” Nathaniel shouted. “On the south side was the cemetery where they buried our fallen brothers,” he said. “That’s where you pointed when you told Fido to bring back meat!”
Elijah sobered up quickly, with the gruesome realization of why the meat Fido had brought them was so gristly, stringy, and strange tasting. And why the ribs were so big compared to the amount of meat on them.
“A toast! To our fallen brothers,” the men clinked glasses with a newfound somberness. “We wouldn’t have survived without them.”
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