by Clive Barker
The photographs were not as graphic as the letters, by any means, but they were still notably perverse. Danny was obviously proud of his endowment, and quite happy to have it recorded for posterity, while Margie’s sense of humor was evident in the way she toyed with him. In one photograph she had drawn on his lower belly and upper thighs with lipstick; flames perhaps, as though his groin was on fire. In another, he was coupling with her while wearing her pantyhose, through which his dick stuck, ripe cherry red. All good old-fashioned fun.
Rachel called Danny at home and told him the good news. He was just about to go down to the bar to start his shift, but he was happy to call in sick and come and pick the letters and photographs up immediately if that suited Rachel best. She told him not to do anything that would make people even faintly suspicious. The stuff was quite safe in her possession, she said. They could meet when Danny’s shift was over, at midnight or so, and she could give everything to him then. They agreed on a meeting place, two blocks north of the bar where Danny worked.
That duty done, she turned her attention to the contents of the other envelope. She was expecting to find further evidence of Margie’s philanderings; but what she found was something else entirely. It was a journal, clothbound and in an advanced state of disrepair, its cover stained and torn, its spine cracked, its pages loosened from their stitching. A thin brown leather strap had been tied around it to keep its contents together: when she untied it she discovered that several separate sheets of paper had been interleaved with the journal’s pages. Their condition varied wildly. There were a few neatly folded, and well preserved, there were others that were little more than scraps. What was written on the sheets similarly ran the gamut: from perfect copperplate to a chaotic scrawl. Some were letters, some seemed to be fragments of a sermon (at least there was much talk of God and redemption there); some were crudely illustrated, their subjects always the same: soldiers, in what looked to be Civil War garb. There was no form of identification at the beginning of the book—indeed it seemed to start in midsentence—but when she flipped on through it she found that the first four or five pages had come loose at some point, and the owner had slipped them into the middle of the book. On the first page was an inscription written in an elegant, feminine hand.
This is for your thoughts, my darling Charles.
Bring it back to me when this horrid war is over, and we’ll put it away, and put all the suffering away with it.
I love you more than life, and will show my love a thousand ways when you are here again.
Your adoring wife,
Adina
Below this, the date:
September the Second, 1863
So they were Civil War soldiers in the sketches, Rachel thought. This journal had belonged to some military man who’d used it to record experiences as he went to battle. She knew little about the war between the states; history had never been a subject she’d warmed to. Especially when it was brutal; and what little she did remember of her lessons about the period concerned the cruelties that had brought the war about and the cruelties that had ended it. There had been nothing to engage her sympathies, so whatever dates and names she’d learned had quickly fled from her head.
But a history book and a journal such as this were very different things. One was filled with facts, to be learned parrot-fashion. The other had a voice, a drama, a sense of the specific. In a short time, she found herself entranced, not by the details of what was being described—much of it was a forlorn catalog of woes and privations: inedible food, dying animals, long, exhausting marches, foot rot and gut rot and lice—but the tangible presence of the man who was doing the describing, his self-portrait becoming more detailed, line by line. He loved his wife, he had faith in God and in the cause of the South, he hated Lincoln (a “damned hypocrite”) and almost all Northerners (“they pretend righteousness because it suits them”); he liked his horse better than most of the men he commanded, and yet seemed to feel their hardship more than his own.
Isn’t there a better way to settle our differences, he wrote, than to put before the bullet and the bayonet common men such as these, who have no true comprehension of what is at issue here, nor in truth care to, but only want to have this bloody business done so that they can return to doing what the Lord made them to do: to plow and drink and die surrounded by their children and their children’s children.
When I hear them talking among themselves they don’t talk of politics and the greatness of our cause: they talk about clean water and strawberry pie. What is the use of putting such simple souls to death? Better that we chose ten princes of the South, and ten gentlemen of the North, if they could find that number, and set them in a field with swords, to fight until there was only one remaining. Let the victory go to that side then, and spill only the blood of nineteen men, instead of this wholesale slaughter, which so grievously wounds the body of the nation.
Just a few pages later, in a passage dated August 22nd, 1864 (“a filthy, clammy night”) he returned to the subject of how the men suffer, but from a different point of view.
I find myself losing patience with the idea that this war is the Lord’s work. We were given free will; and we have chosen what? To make one another suffer.
Yesterday we came upon a hill which had apparently been, for a week or a month, who knows now, a place of some strategic importance. There were dead men, or what the foul heat of this season makes of dead men, everywhere. Blue and gray, in what seemed to me equal numbers. Why had they not been given Christian burials? I can only assume because there were not enough infantrymen of either side left alive to perform that duty, nor enough compassion left in their commanders to bring in a brigade and put the dead in the ground. The battle moves on to another hill—which will for a week or a month seem of vital strategic importance—and these hundreds of men, all somebody’s sons, left for fiies to breed in.
I’m ashamed of myself tonight. I wish I were not a man, if this is what men are.
The more Rachel read, the more questions she had. Who was this fellow, who had poured his feelings onto the page so eloquently she felt as though she could hear him, speaking to her? How had he learned to express himself so powerfully, and what purpose had he turned that power to when the fighting was finished? A preacher? A pacifist politician? Or had he done as his wife intended, and taken the book, with all its rage and its disappointment, back home to be sealed up and never spoken of again?
Then there was another series of questions, that were nothing to do with Charles and Adina. How had Margie come by the book? And why had she wrapped it up and hidden it alongside the letters from Danny? This was scarcely scandalous material. Perhaps at the time Charles’s views would have been thought radical, but almost a century and a half later, what did it matter what he’d written?
She read on. Every now and then she’d unfold one of the loose notes tucked between the pages, some of which had nothing to do with anything she’d so far read, some of which looked to be thoughts he’d jotted down when he couldn’t get to his journal, some of which were letters. There were two, side by side, from Adina, both sad and curiously abrupt. The first said:
Dearest husband,
I write with the worst of news, and know of no way to sweeten it. Two days ago the Lord took our darling Nathaniel from us, in a fever which came so suddenly that he was gone before Henrietta could bring Dr. Sarris to the house.
He would be four the first Tuesday of next month, and I had promised him you would take him up on your horse as a birthday treat when you came home. He spoke of this at the last.
I do not think he much suffered.
The second was shorter still.
I must go to Georgia, if I can, Adina wrote. I have word from Hamilton that the plantation has been brought to ruin, and that our father is in such despair he has twice attempted to end his own life. I will bring him back to Charleston with me, and tend to him there.
The hand that had written these letters was still just reco
gnizably the same that had penned the inscription, but it had deteriorated into a spiky scrawl. Rachel could scarcely imagine what state the woman must have been reduced to: her husband gone, one of her children dead, her family fortune lost; it was a wonder she’d kept her sanity. But then, perhaps she hadn’t.
Again, Rachel moved on. In an hour or so she’d have to set out for her meeting with Danny, but she didn’t want to leave the journal. It fascinated her; these tragic lives, unraveling before her, like the lives of people in a novel. Except that this book gave her none of the familiar comforts of fiction. No authorial voice to put these events in a larger context; no certainty, even, that she would be shown how their troubles were resolved.
A few pages on, however, about halfway through the journal, she chanced upon a page which would significantly change the direction of all that followed.
Tonight I do not know if I am a sane man, Charles wrote. I have had such a strange experience today, and want to write it down before I go to sleep so that I do not dismiss it tomorrow as something my exhausted mind invented. it was not. I’m certain, it was not. I know how the visions that arise from fatigue appear—I’ve seen some of them—and this was of a different order.
We are marching southeast, through North Carolina. It rains constantly, and the ground has turned to mud; the men are so tired they neither sing nor complain, barely having the energy left to put one boot in front of another. I wonder how long it will be before I have to join them; my horse is sick and I believe he only continues to walk out of love of me. Poor thing! I’ve seen the cook, Nickelberry, eyeing him now and then, wondering if there’s any way in the world he can turn such a carcass into edible fare.
So, that was what the day brought, and it was horrible enough. But then, as dusk came, and it was that hour when nothing in the world seems solid and certain, I looked down and saw—oh God in Heaven, my pen does not want to make these words—I saw my boy, my golden haired Nathaniel, sitting on the saddle in front of me.
I thought of Adina’s letter: of how she had promised that ride upon the horse, and my heart quickened, for today was Nathaniel’s birthday.
I expected the presence to disappear after a time, but it did not. As the night drew on he stayed there, as though to comfort me. Once, in the darkness, I sensed him look round and back at me, and saw his pale face and his dark eyes there before me.
I spoke then. I said: I love you, my son.
He replied to me! As if all this weren’t extraordinary enough, he replied. Papa, he said, the horse is tired, and wants me to ride her away.
It was unbearable, to hear that little voice in the darkness telling me that my horse was not long for this world.
I told him: then you must take her. And I had no sooner spoken than I felt my horse shudder beneath me, and the life went out of her, and she fell to the ground. I fell with her, of course, into the mud. There were lamps brought, and some fuss made of me, but I had fallen, I think in a kind of swoon, which had perhaps kept me from any serious harm.
Of Nathaniel, of course, there was no sign. He had gone, riding the spirit of my horse away, wherever the souls of the loyal and the loving go.
There was a small space on the page now. When Charles took up his account again, he was plainly in an even more agitated state.
I cannot sleep. I wonder if I will ever sleep again. I think of the child all the time. Why did he come to me? What was he telling me?
Nickelberry is a better man than I took him to be. Most cooks are vile men in my experience. He is not. The men call him Nub. He saw me writing in this book earlier, and came to me and asked me if I would write a letter for him, to send back to his mother. I told him I would. Then he said he was sorry my horse had died but I should take comfort that it had nourished many men who were so sick if they had not eaten tonight they would have perished. I thanked him for the thought, but I could see that he wanted to say more, and couldn’t find a way to begin. So I told him simply to spit it out. And out it came. He said he’d heard that there was now no hope that we could win this war. I told him that was probably true. To which he said, plain as day: then why are we still fighting?
Such a simple question. And I listened to the rain beating on the tent, and heard the wounded sobbing somewhere near, and thought of Nathaniel, come to ride with me, and I wanted to weep, but I did not dare. Not because I was ashamed. I like this man Nickelberry; I wouldn’t care that I wept in front of him. I didn’t dare begin to weep because I was afraid I would never stop.
I told him truthfully: “Once I would have said we should fight to the death to prove the righteousness of our cause. But now I think nothing is pure in this world, nor ever was, and we will die uselessly, as we have lived.”
Did I say that he was a little drunk? I think he was. But he seemed quickly sobered by this, and said he would visit me again tomorrow, so that l could write the letter to his mother. Then he left me to sleep.
But I cannot. I think of what he said, and what I replied, and I wonder if tomorrow I should not forsake my uniform, and the cause I was ready to die for, and act as a man not as a soldier; and go my own way.
I can scarcely believe I wrote those words. But I believe that’s why Nathaniel came to take the horse: it was his way of shaking me out of my stupor; of stopping me marching to my death. What would I have died for? For nothing. All of this for nothing.
Rachel looked at the clock. It was time to go, but she didn’t want to stop reading, so she slipped the letters and the photographs back into one envelope, and the book back into the other, and took them both with her. As so often happened in this city the weather had changed suddenly: a warm wind had blown the rain clouds upstate, and for once the streets smelled sweet. As the cab bounced and rattled its way toward Soho she took out the journal again, and began to read.
IX
i
The battle of Bentonville began on Monday, the twenty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five. It was not, by the standards of the war between the states, a great, decisive or even particularly bloody battle: but it has this distinction: it is the last hurrah of the Southern Confederacy. Thirty-six days later General Joseph E. Johnston would meet William T. Sherman at the Bennett farmhouse and surrender his men. The war would be over.
Captain Charles Rainwill Holt did not desert on the night before the battle, as he had intended to; he thought better of it. The weather, which had been inclement during the march, became fouler still, and he judged his chances of getting away in the darkness without some harm or other coming to him less than good.
On the following day the battle began, and from the beginning it was a mess. The terrain was in places forested with pine, and in others swamp and briar. The men on both sides were exhausted, and there was scarcely an encounter through that first day and night that did not end chaotically. Men lost in smoke and rain and darkness firing back upon their own comrades. Charges led upon lines that did not exist. Earthworks abandoned before they were half dug. The wounded left in the woods (which had been set alight by cannon fire despite the rain) and burned alive within earshot of their fellows.
There was worse to come, and the captain knew it, but as the hours passed that stupor from which his son had come to stir him fell upon him again. More than once he saw an opportunity, and could not bring himself to take it. It was not fear of a stray bullet that kept him from moving. There was something leaden in him, like a weight that war had poured into his bowels, and it kept him from his escape.
It was Nickelberry the cook who finally persuaded him to leave. Not with words, but with his own departure.
It was just after dusk on the second day, and Charles had gone out from the encampment a little way, to try and put his thoughts in order. Behind him the men gathered round their cautious fires, trying by whatever means they could to keep their spirits up. Somebody was plucking a banjo; one or two exhausted voices were raised to sing along. The sound came strangely between the trees, like th
e sound of phantoms. Charles tried to bring to mind the garden in Charleston where he’d proposed to Adina; he’d calmed his troubled spirits many times thinking of that spot. Of the fragrance of its air; of the nightbirds that made such melody in the trees. But tonight he could not remember to perfume of that place, or its music. It was as if that Eden had never existed.
As he stared off into the darkness, lost in these melancholy thoughts, he saw a figure moving between the trees not ten yards from him. He was about to challenge the man, when he realized who it was.
“Nickelberry . . . ?” he whispered.
The figure froze, so still the captain could barely distinguish him from the trees amongst which he stood.
“Is that you, Nickelberry?”
There was no reply, but he was certain that it was indeed the cook, so he began to walk in the man’s direction. “Nickelberry? It’s Captain Holt.”
Nickelberry responded by moving off again, away from the camp.
“Where are you going?” the captain demanded, picking up his pace to catch up with the cook. The briars slowed the advance of both men, but Nickelberry in particular. He had walked into a very thorny patch, and flailed at them, cursing in his frustration.
The captain was almost upon him now.
“Don’t get any closer!” Nickelberry said. “I don’t want to hurt you none, but I ain’t staying and you ain’t gonna make me stay. No sir.,,
“It’s all right, Nub. Calm down.”
“I’m done with this damn war.”
“Keep your voice down, will you? They’ll hear us.”
“You ain’t gonna try and turn me in?”
“No I’m not.”
“If you try—” The captain saw one of Nub’s meat carving knives, pale silver, between them. “I’ll kill you before they take me.”
