The Small Man

What follows is an unrequested testimony that I, Cartwell Gettig, formerly a private enlisted in Company A of the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteers, am sharing for reasons not understood. Something compels me to record what I saw happen with my own eyes. I suppose that’s what history is, after all. Such is my account. Believe it or do not.

Cartwell Gettig

Wolfs Store, Penna. October 24, 1867.

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I'll say this first.

We were sad men for the most part, which could have something to do with everything I’m about to tell you.

The war was past her prime by then and the intoxicating glory we had all felt in the first months had slipped away, replaced by some kind of lingering longing which seemed to me at least to refuse to be defined. So I call us sad because that word seems appropriate when it all comes down to it. We were rather young, mostly, and we were far from home, lonesome to the core, surrounded by sickness. And perhaps worst of all, we had witnessed the total destruction of our fellow man. We had seen what was possible, the ways a fellow could be ripped apart. I had questions for the Lord. Many questions I cling to even now, unanswered as they remain.

Our winter quarters at the end of 1863 was near Stevensburg in Virginia. The entire 2nd Corps was amassed at the place. It was countryside mostly, with small villages populated by old families. There were, as one might expect, few sympathizers with our side of things. Four of us had constructed a crude but usable cabin out of rotten fence posts and whatever sickly wild timber was left standing in the direct region. That was myself and Joe Musser, from Aaronsburg, and both Lanich brothers, Henry and Perciva, who both still lived and worked their family land outside of Coburn. Each of us had been faintly acquainted with the other before the war had come, but now that we were all in it there seemed to be a natural current that swept us together like four trout in a rough spring brook. Our place had a wood-burning chimney attached and two bunks constructed by Henry, who seemed to know just how to utilize even a discarded cigar button for good use.

It was mid-December of that harsh winter, just after the third or fourth hard frost had come, when we first encountered the Small Man. It is the distinct sound of the crackling I recall best from the first time I saw him. I awoke to the heated chill I had grown accustomed to, the queerest combination of feeling two things at once. I was freezing yet I was burning as well. The outside slipped in through the weak chinking we’d shoved into the cracks of our walls and the inside skedaddled the same way, just in the other direction, so that our house, our humble home if you will, it was always both sweltering and bitter cold at the same time. I often wonder if that was what, perhaps, stirred the Small Man awake. I won’t ever know, I’m sure now. But I will always ponder it just the same.

To be clear, it was that comforting crackle one hears from tired old fires that woke me that early morning. My eyes opened and then closed again as is often the case when I am stirred out of a good slumber. But something made me open them again a moment later. And this time, as I squinted into the faint light leaking from the stove, I saw the back of a figure facing Joe Musser as he slept. The person was short, like a child, and from the looks of it I figured it might be just that. A local boy, I thought, come to take his chances by way of thieving from Yanks. There was a great urging from within me then to open my mouth and make myself known, a sincere and strong desire to speak firm as I rose up with a rush, grabbed the scoundrel by the scruff of his coat, and spooked him in such a way that he would flee in tears, spoiling his trousers as he rushed back across the frozen fields, back to whichever rank rebel cave he’d crawled out from.

However, when I attempted to speak, I was unable to do so. My muscles were stiffened and my heart was thunderous as I tried with all of my might to make it known to the lad that he’d been caught in the act, but all to no avail. I was useless in the face of what I can only attest to sheer terror. I found myself choking on my own screams so that the only voice I projected was that of a small creature in a wall somewhere, squeaking alone and unheard in the darkness.

That was when the Small Man turned to me the first time. He was not a child, I was shocked to discover. His skin was dark, Negro, and his eyes were bright and clear, skimmed with the same sickly sheen of an old deer just killed. There was a long beard on his chin, strange whiskers flowing from the sides of his face, white at first and then grey perhaps, then clear and then a faint green and then a faint yellow as if he were stood in some theater as the show lights shifted. His focus locked into my awakened face and although I do not recall how much time went by or whether or not I managed to say a word at all to him, I do recollect that he moved closer to me in the most peculiar way. He neither walked nor shuffled. He neither skated nor stumbled. His approach was without effort. Absent of bodily motion, I swear it on my heart, the figure rolled as hog smoke rolls across some grey pasture on some slate morning, the burning skin of the beast melting into ether.

I wanted to strike at the man or at least warn him off with my hand but it was all pointless. He appeared unafraid and unbothered. In fact, his entire countenance was relaxed as if he were simply strolling in a park with a book of poems under his arm. He offered no smile, no frown, and not a trace of disappointment or satisfaction in having discovered me alive and watching him. He merely moved across the room, an expanse of perhaps two apple crates, and then lifted off of our plank floor as in a dream one lifts, ending up in a still position, his squat figure only a few inches from mine, but he was in the air like a long eerie cloud, me on my side still, my head turned up now so that his crackled face and his drooping whiskers and his long thin strings of golden hair now violet hair now moon blue hair now cherry blossom hair, it skimmed the surface of my upturned face, of my brow and my cheeks with its delicate tips in such a way that I was at once filled with a double-headed certainty that I would always be guided by my powerful unseen God and yet also be kept by something stronger, someone harder to know, something more impossible to fathom, as a subject, a pet even. Like a dog. Or a newborn squirrel in a bucket for a time.

Then it was me trying to load my own body into the stove, the uncomfortable sense of my own freezing heat, the low embers disintegrating under the weight of my foot as I was caught in the arms of both Lanich brothers at once. Perciva, the youngest, his eyes agape and afraid. And Joe, my closest friend, struggling to hold me up and away from the danger I seemed insistent upon inflicting on myself. I recall his face now even all of this time later. It was the face of a man who had watched what I had watched, but from further away. It was the face of a man that fear had taken over. A fear that would remain forever, I’m afraid.

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It would be my preference to leave this tale where it lies now but that is not possible. I have embarked down a road headed towards necessity and as such I must tell the whole thing, even if it damns me, I know. The next morning I tried to explain to the others what I had experienced but none of them knew quite how to accept my open invitation to embrace such lunacy. It was perfectly understandable then, as it remains today, that my fellow soldiers, my friends and comrades, might not be able to understand me telling them I had born witness to… what?

A ghost?

A spirit?

A vision from the old times or maybe a visit from the Lord himself?

It would be blasphemy to force my own insistence into their fearful looks, I knew and I know still. Truth is a very peculiar avenue to walk along, especially in times of war. Each soldier had seen his own version of what he referred to as true. Each hacked up face, each severed arm or splintered torso opened wide with the glistening of sunshine on the steaming innards of a fellow who had only yesterday been singing a simple song he’d created to make the boys laugh, each crimson ribbon of blacksmith muscle laid carefully out in the green summer grass as if it were a snake showing up in some premium hallucination, all of that was simply too true to the beholder to ever be wholly true at all. My words are sly and partial to interpretation, I know that as well. But upon all the Bibles in the land I swear that I only wish to fill you in, as any reader of this account deserves to be notified, in regards to what I felt I had seen. And what I was sure Henry had seen.

And what the other two had not seen.

Yet.

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That winter was oafish, scattered, unconcerned with the impending madness that had landed down upon our cabin like a feather from a bird unseen. Night after night now we four lay in our bunks, afraid and enraptured by the knowledge that soon the Small Man would appear. For once he had appeared that first night, he appeared across all the nights to come. Never did he waver, not a single night did he shirk the routine of his own making. By mid-February most of the regiment had crammed into our drafty cabin to set on the edges of our respected bunks and await what we promised would come.

Some men fainted as soon as the Small Man appeared. Others insisted on trying to test him with knives or firewood. But he ignored their advances as if they weren’t even there. One corporal, upon hearing the rumors that had been spreading through camp, decided to pay a photographer to set up his camera at no small expense so that he might capture an image for posterity, for proof, that the Small Man was now a regular occurrence. But the attempt failed miserably as the photographer took ill just moments after the guest of honor had arrived that evening. It was an entertaining sight, I must admit, watching that New York city slicker keel over into his camera, knocking it down as he vomited all over the fellows near him. Chaos broke out, as you might expect, and the whole time, I watched the Small Man hovering like bushel sized wasp above the poor sick man’s head. Everyone settled down in time, the absurd sight, the miraculous insanity unfolding before our eyes as if we were each joined together in the exact same fantastical nightmare.