by Ed Gorman
When he stood up this time, Carlson looked more formidable than he ever had. He walked over to the phone, lifted the receiver and said, “Yes, connect me with the police department. Thank you.” He voice was steady, somber. He nodded to Delancy’s gun. “You won’t be needing that, Mr. Delancy. I’m turning myself in.”
Which is just what he did over the course of the next few minutes. Talked to Detective Gibson, told him who he was, what he’d done, and where he could now be found.
When he put the phone down, Delancy said, “Mrs. Hewitt, I’d like you to put on a robe and go downstairs and get us some coffee. And I’d like you to do it right away.”
She leaned over and kissed Carlson on the cheek. There was a white silk robe on the bed. She went to it, slid it on. “You need cigarettes, too, Ted.”
“Thank you,” he said.
When the door was closed, and the flap of her slippers could be heard going down the hall, Delancy said, “I’m pretty sure that Sarah died just the way you said. With one exception. She wasn’t fighting with you, she was fighting with Mrs. Hewitt.”
“That’s your opinion.
You can’t prove it.”
“You won’t let me prove it.”
“That’s right. So don’t waste your time. Beth has been in and out of mental hospitals for most of her life. Prison would kill her. I’ll probably draw five-to-eight and only serve four. I’ll have my health and still be in my forties. It’s not much of a price to pay for what I’ve done. Sarah was right; I seduced her mother, she didn’t seduce me. And then I went for Sarah.”
He walked over to where Delancy was sitting. “I’ve been a selfish bastard all my life. Let me do something good for once. All right?”
He put forth his hand. Delancy put out his own hand and they shook.
Then there was a knock on the door. Carlson went over and opened it. A pudgy young uniformed cop came in, one of the ill-trained tribe that had been forced upon the police department.
“I got a call from Detective Gibson of homicide,” he said. “He told me to come up to this room and stay with a Mr. Carlson till he got here. Are you Carlson?”
By now, Delancy stood with the other two at the doorway. Carlson said, “Yes, I am.”
“Well, Detective Gibson, he said, I should cuff you.” He reached around to the back of his belt and began wrestling his cuffs free. “I haven’t had a lot of experience with cuffs, so bear with me, all right?”
Delancy couldn’t help it. He laughed out loud and then said, “Let me cuff him, kid. Then we’ll all sit down and have a drink and wait for Gibson to get here.”
The young cop was obviously embarrassed but after hesitating a long moment, he handed them over and then watched, impressed, as Delancy cuffed Carlson in seconds.
“Hey, you musta been a cop sometime,” the pudgy man said.
“Yeah, that’s what I used to be, all right.”
Then he limped over and poured himself one hell of a drink of bourbon.
THE FACE
The war was going badly. In the past month more than sixty men had disgraced the Confederacy by deserting, and now the order was to shoot deserters on sight. This was in other camps and other regiments. Fortunately, none of our men had deserted at all.
As a young doctor, I knew even better than our leaders just how hopeless our war had become. The public knew General Lee had been forced to cross the Potomac with ten thousand men who lacked shoes, hats, and who at night had to sleep on the ground without blankets. But I knew—in the first six months in this post—that our men suffered from influenza, diphtheria, smallpox, yellow fever and even cholera; ravages from which they would never recover; ravages more costly than bullets and the advancing armies of the Yankees. Worse, because toilet and bathing facilities were practically nil, virtually every man suffered from ticks and mites, and many suffered from scurvy, their bodies on fire. Occasionally, you would see a man go mad, do crazed dances in the moonlight trying to get the bugs off him. Soon enough he would be dead.
This was the war in the spring and while I have here referred to our troops as “men,” in fact they were mostly boys, some as young as thirteen. In the night, freezing and sometimes wounded, they cried out for their mothers, and it was not uncommon to hear one or two of them sob while they prayed aloud.
I tell you this so you will have some idea of how horrible things had become for our beloved Confederacy. But even given the suffering and madness and despair I’d seen for the past two years as a military doctor, nothing had prepared me for the appearance of the Virginia man in our midst.
On the day he was brought in on a buckboard, I was working with some troops, teaching them how to garden. If we did not get vegetables and fruit into our diets soon, all of us would have scurvy. I also appreciated the respite that working in the warm sun gave me from surgery. In the past week alone, I’d amputated three legs, two arms, and numerous hands and fingers. None had gone well, conditions were so filthy.
Every amputation had ended in death except one and this man— boy; he was fourteen—pleaded with me to kill him every time I checked on him. He’d suffered a head wound and I’d had to relieve the pressure by trepanning into his skull. Beneath the blood and pus in the hole I’d dug, I could see his brain squirming. There was no anesthetic, of course, except whiskey and that provided little comfort against the violence of my bone saw. It was one of those periods when I could not get the tart odor of blood from my nostrils, or its feel from my skin. Sometimes, standing at the surgery table, my boots would become soaked with it and I would squish around in them all day.
The buckboard was parked in front of the General’s tent. The driver jumped down, ground-tied the horses, and went quickly inside.
He returned a few moments later with General Sullivan, the commander. Three men in familiar gray uniforms followed the General.
The entourage walked around to the rear of the wagon. The driver, an enlisted man, pointed to something in the buckboard. The General, a fleshy, bald man of fifty-some years, leaned over the wagon and peered downward.
Quickly, the General’s head snapped back and then his whole body followed. It was as if he’d been stung by something coiled and waiting for him in the buckboard.
The General shook his head and said, “I want this man’s entire body covered. Especially his face.”
“But, General,” the driver said. “He’s not dead. We shouldn’t cover his face.”
“You heard what I said!” General Sullivan snapped. And with that, he strutted back into his tent, his men following.
I was curious, of course, about the man in the back of the wagon. I wondered what could have made the General start the way he had. He’d looked almost frightened.
I wasn’t to know till later that night.
My rounds made me late for dinner in the vast tent used for the officers’ mess. I always felt badly about the inequity of officers having beef stew while the men had, at best, hardtack and salt pork. Not so bad that I refused to eat it, of course, which made me feel hypocritical on top of being sorry for the enlisted men.
Not once in my time here had I ever dined with General Sullivan. I was told on my first day here that the General, an extremely superstitious man, considered doctors bad luck. Many people feel this way. Befriend a doctor and you’ll soon enough find need of his services.
So I was surprised when General Sullivan, carrying a cup of steaming coffee in a huge, battered tin cup, sat down across the table from where I ate alone, my usual companions long ago gone back to their duties.
“Good evening, Doctor.”
“Good evening, General.”
“A little warmer tonight.”
“Yes.”
He smiled dourly. “Something’s got to go our way, I suppose.”
I returned his smile. “I suppose.” I felt like a child trying to act properly for the sake of an adult. The General frightened me.
The General took out a stogie, clipped off the end, sniffed it, l
icked it, then put it between his lips and fired it. He did all this with a ritualistic satisfaction that made me think of better times in my home city of Charleston, of my father and uncles handling their smoking in just the same way.
“A man was brought into camp this afternoon,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “In a buckboard.”
He eyes me suspiciously. “You’ve seen him up close?”
“No. I just saw him delivered to your tent.” I had to be careful of how I put my next statement. I did not want the General to think I was challenging his reasoning. “I’m told he was not taken to any of the hospital tents.”
“No, he wasn’t.” The General wasn’t going to help me.
“I’m told he was put under quarantine in a tent of his own.”
“Yes.”
“May I ask why?”
He blew two plump white perfect rings of smoke toward the ceiling. “Go have a look at him, then join me in my tent.”
“You’re afraid he may have some contagious disease?”
The General considered the length of his cigar. “Just go have a look at him, Doctor. Then we’ll talk.”
With that, the General stood up, his familiar brusque self once again, and was gone.
The guard set down his rifle when he saw me. “Good evenin’, Doctor.”
“Good evening.”
He nodded to the tent behind him. “You seen him yet?”
“No; not yet.”
He was young. He shook his head. “Never seen anything like it. Neither has the priest. He’s in there with him now.” In the chill, crimson dusk I tried to get a look at the guard’s face. I couldn’t. My only clue to his mood was the tone of his voice—one of great sorrow.
I lifted the tent flap and went in.
A lamp guttered in the far corner of the small tent, casting huge and playful shadows across the walls. A hospital cot took up most of the space. A man’s body lay beneath the covers. A sheer cloth had been draped across his face. You could see it billowing with the man’s faint breath. Next to the cot stood Father Lynott. He was silver-haired and chunky. His black cassock showed months of dust and grime. Like most of us, he was rarely able to get hot water for necessities.
At first, he didn’t seem to hear me. He stood over the cot torturing black rosary beads through his fingers. He stared directly down at the cloth draped on the man’s face.
Only when I stood next to him did Father Lynott look up. “Good evening, Father.”
“Good evening, Doctor.”
“The General wanted me to look at this man.”
He stared at me. “You haven’t seen him, then?”
“No.”
“Nothing can prepare you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
He looked at me out of his tired cleric’s face. “You’ll see soon enough. Why don’t you come over to the officers’ tent afterwards? I’ll be there drinking my nightly coffee.”
He nodded, glanced down once more at the man on the cot, and then left, dropping the tent flap behind him.
I don’t know how long I stood there before I could bring myself to remove the cloth from the man’s face. By now, enough people had warned me of what I would see that I was both curious and apprehensive. There is a myth about doctors not being shocked by certain terrible wounds and injuries. Of course we are but we must get past that shock—or, more honestly, put it aside for a time—so that we can help the patient.
Close by, I could hear the feet of the guard in the damp grass, pacing back and forth in front of the tent. A barn owl and then a distant dog joined the sounds the guard made. Even more distant, there was cannon fire, the war never ceasing. The sky would flare silver like summer lightning. Men would suffer and die.
I reached down and took the cloth from the man’s face.
“What do you suppose could have done that to his face, Father?” I asked the priest twenty minutes later.
We were having coffee. I smoked a cigar. The guttering candles smelled sweet and waxy.
“I’m not sure,” the priest said.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Never.”
I knew what I was about to say would surprise the priest. “He has no wounds.”
“What?”
“I examined him thoroughly. There are no wounds anywhere on his body.”
“But his face—”
I drew on my cigar, watched the expelled smoke move like a storm cloud across the flickering candle flame. “That’s why I asked you if you’d ever seen anything like it.”
“My God,” the priest said, as if speaking to himself. “No wounds.”
In the dream I was back on the battlefield on that frosty March morning two years ago when all my medical training had deserted me. Hundreds of corpses covered the ground where the battle had gone on for two days and two nights. You could see cannons mired in mud, the horses unable to pull them out. You could see the grass littered with dishes and pans and kettles, and a blizzard of playing cards—all exploded across the battlefield when the Union army had made its final advance. But mostly there were the bodies—so young and so many—and many of them with mutilated faces. During this time of the war, both sides had begun to commit atrocities. The Yankees favored disfiguring Confederate dead and so they moved across the battlefield with Bowie knives that had been fashioned by sharpening with large files. They put deep gashes in the faces of the young men, tearing out eyes sometimes, even sawing off noses. In the woods that day we’d found a group of our soldiers who’d been mortally wounded but who’d lived for a time after the Yankees had left. Each corpse held in its hand some memento of the loved ones they’d left behind—a photograph, a letter, a lock of blonde hair. Their last sight had been of some homely yet profound endearment from the people they’d loved most.
This was the dream—nightmare, really—and I’d suffered it ever since I’d searched for survivors on that battlefield two years previous.
I was still in this dream-state when I heard the bugle announce the morning. I stumbled from my cot and went down to the creek to wash and shave. The day had begun.
Casualties were many that morning. I stood in the hospital tent watching as one stretcher after another bore man after man to the operating table. Most suffered from wounds inflicted by minié balls, fired from guns that could kill a man nearly a mile away.
By noon, my boots were again soaked with blood dripping from the table.
During the long day, I heard whispers of the man General Sullivan had quarantined from others. Apparently, the man had assumed the celebrity and fascination of a carnival sideshow. From the whispers, I gathered the guards were letting men in for quick looks at him, and then lookers came away shaken and frightened. These stories had the same impact as tales of specters told around midnight campfires. Except this was daylight and the men—even the youngest of them— hardened soldiers. They should not have been so afraid but they were.
I couldn’t get the sight of the man out of my mind, either. It haunted me no less than the battlefield I’d seen two years earlier.
During the afternoon, I went down to the creek and washed. I then went to the officers’ tent and had stew and coffee. My arms were weary from surgery but I knew I would be working long into the night.
The General surprised me once again by joining me. “You’ve seen the soldier from Virginia?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you make of him?”
I shrugged. “Shock, I suppose.”
“But his face—”
“This is a war, General, and a damned bloody one. Not all men are like you. Not all men have iron constitutions.”
He took my words as flattery, of course, as a military man would. I hadn’t necessarily meant them that way. Military men could also be grossly vain and egotistical and insensitive beyond belief.
“Meaning what, exactly, Doctor?”
“Meaning that the soldier from Virginia may have b
ecome so horrified by what he saw that his face—” I shook my head. “You can see too much, too much death, General, and it can make you go insane.”
“Are you saying he’s insane?”
I shook my head. “I’m trying to find some explanation for his expression, General.”
“You say there’s no injury?”
“None that I can find.”
“Yet he’s not conscious.”
“That’s why I think of shock.”
I was about to explain how shock works on the body—and how it could feasibly effect an expression like the one on the Virginia soldier’s face—when a lieutenant rushed up to the General and breathlessly said, “You’d best come, sir. The tent where the soldier’s quarantined— There’s trouble!”
When we reached there, we found half the camp’s soldiers surrounding the tent. Three and four deep, they were, and milling around idly. Not the sort of thing you wanted to see your men doing when there was a war going on. There were duties to perform and none of them were getting done.
A young soldier—thirteen or fourteen at most—stepped from the line and hurled his rifle at the General. The young soldier had tears running down his cheeks. “I don’t want to fight any more, General.”
The General slammed the butt of the rifle into the soldier’s stomach. “Get hold of yourself, young man. You seem to forget we’re fighting to save the Confederacy.”
We went on down the line of glowering faces, to where two armed guards struggled to keep soldiers from looking into the tent. I was reminded again of a sideshow—some irresistible spectacle everybody wanted to see.
The soldiers knew enough to open an avenue for the General. He strode inside the tent. The priest sat on a stool next to the cot. He had removed the cloth from the Virginia soldier’s face and was staring fixedly at it.
The General pushed the priest aside, took up the cloth used as a covering, and started to drop it across the soldier’s face—then stopped abruptly. Even General Sullivan, in his rage, was moved by what he saw. He jerked back momentarily, his eyes unable to lift from the soldier’s face. He handed the cloth to the priest. “You cover his face now, Father. And you keep it covered. I hereby forbid any man in this camp to look at this soldier’s face ever again. Do you understand?”
