by William Gear
They carried James across the frozen yard on a blanket stretcher supported by planks. The guards watched from the high fence, stamping, blowing into their hands as the wicked wind off the lake blew their breath away in frosty streamers.
The guard outside the deadhouse looked worried at first, raising his rifle, uneasy gaze flicking this way and that.
“Private Nelson,” Doc told him, stepping forward. “James Morton passed. We’re just showing our respect. Come to lay him out for burial.”
To his surprise, Nelson saluted. “I see, sir. Uh, Doc. My sympathies.” He stepped aside, allowed them to carry James into the dark interior. The stack of frozen corpses, piled like macabre lengths of firewood, looked ghastly. A work detail would dig a trench for them as soon as the ground thawed.
With great care, James was placed high atop the pile in a position where he wouldn’t be covered by other dead: the only respect they could show him.
Doc climbed down, now used to the unyielding, frozen corpses. Not even their expressions, the half-lidded and frost-filled eyes, or the partially gaping mouths bothered him.
“Attenshun!” Corporal Willy cried. Feet, some only clad in socks, shuffled.
“Salute!”
Arms flashed.
“Troooop … dismissed!”
One by one they filed out. Doc, the last, turned in the doorway to whisper, “Go with God, my friend. Hope they got steamboats in heaven.”
Then Doc stepped out into the bitter cold.
The others had gone, waddling off across the uneven frozen ground, already chilled to the core in their threadbare uniforms.
Nelson glanced inside to make sure no one had stayed behind in an attempt to escape, and then closed the door. “Again, so sorry, Doc.”
“How’s the foot doing?”
“Healed up fine, Doc. Can’t believe that surgeon wanted to cut it off. I’da been a cripple but for you.”
“Dr. Sullivan just hadn’t seen an abscess like that before. Erysipelas presents differently than gangrene. Just don’t step on rusty nails anymore.”
“No, sir.”
Doc gave him a nod and began the slow walk toward the barracks. It hadn’t hit him yet. But it would. James had been like an anchor, a reason to live. He’d promised Ann Marie and Felicia that he’d take care of the boy.
Oh, God. When this finally sinks in, it’s going to break my heart.
He’d made it halfway when the lunatic cried out hoarsely, “Private Baker, back in the ranks. I’m your captain, and you’ll not tarry. This is hostile territory, and we’ve got to stay close.”
The cold had become so intense that even the lunatic’s tormenters—delighted to have any distraction from the boredom—had retreated to the relative protection of their barracks.
Doc shivered, actually happy to suffer in the frigid wind. It proved he could still feel something—even if it were misery. He marched past the lunatic.
Can’t save the whole world. Couldn’t even save James.
“Vail, I know you’re not an Indian, but you will be today. Can’t let the Yanks know you’re scouting their flanks.”
Doc stopped short, shivering. He closed his eyes, asking God what more could possibly lie in store for him today.
Left alone, the lunatic would be dead by morning. Curled into a stiffly frozen ball, he’d make a mess of the stack in the deadhouse. Maybe even cause Nelson to reshuffle the corpses.
Doc turned back, walking over. “Hey, you! Come on. Get up.”
The man didn’t so much as look up, but whispered, “You’re not real.” He shivered hard, asking, “Corporal Pettigrew, do you see him?”
Doc reached down, gripped the man by his torn coat, and lifted. The scarecrow barely tottered to his feet, swaying, leaning against Doc. Jesus, he stank of urine and shit.
“Walk with me … uh, Captain.”
“I’ll need to send Private Templeton to report.”
“You do that. I’m sure the private is an exemplary soldier.”
The lunatic sounded hoarse, as if he’d been yelling and had strained his voice. He barely kept one foot ahead of the other, shivering uncontrollably, like a rack of bones in a buckboard.
Doc barely made it to the hospital yard, just feet from the hospital door, before the ragamuffin collapsed in a limp heap, his face in the snow.
“I see.” Doc shivered and hugged himself. “Maybe Private Templeton didn’t manage to report.”
Doc stepped inside, made his way down between the rows of beds filled with the dying. Typhoid was epidemic again. He found Surgeon’s Assistant Percy Anthony boiling water. Probably because that was a good excuse to stand by the single stove.
“Percy, could you give me a hand? I’ve got a sick call outside.”
Anthony looked up, glanced longingly at the stove, and said, “Sure, Doc.”
Outside the lunatic was muttering into the snow, still facedown.
“Oh, him.”
“Been here before?”
“He’s the worst case of fatigue we’ve ever seen, Doc. Can’t do a thing with him.”
“At least let me get him inside. Leaving him out here? It’s a death sentence.”
Percy Anthony crossed his arms, eyes fixed meaningfully on Doc’s. “Sometimes, Doc, leaving someone out is the kindest thing you can do. You’ve told me that yourself. More than a couple of times over the last six months that I been here. So, let me ask you the question you asked me just last week: do you really want to prolong this man’s suffering?”
Doc pursed his lips, a memory of James’s ever so fragile skin, his green eyes softly imploring.
“I guess you’re right. What’s another…”
In a rasping whisper the lunatic said, “I think it’s Philip, Sergeant. At least, it sounds like his voice.”
Doc whirled, staring down at the filthy, snow-encrusted form. “You know me?”
The man laughed into the snow, his fingers opening and closing, water melting on his dirt-encrusted skin.
“Let’s get him in,” Doc said. “Do me this one favor, will you?”
Together—well, mostly it was Percy Anthony—they lifted the bone rack and muscled him through the door, down the aisle, and propped him in the cabinet corner closest to the stove.
“Got something I can clean his face with?” From the looks of it, the lunatic had been kicked or punched. One side of his face was swollen; dried blood had clotted in his once amber beard. One eye was puffed shut.
Anthony handed him a damp cloth and watched over Doc’s shoulder as he sponged the grime from the lunatic’s sunken features.
Even as he did, Doc swallowed hard, his hand beginning to shake. “Butler?” he whispered in disbelief.
“Yes, yes,” the lunatic cried, “but it doesn’t matter anymore.” His voice changed, as if explaining something to someone. “Of course he does. He’s my older brother. He and Paw don’t get along. Hear he’s a fine surgeon, however. Any of you need sick call? You go straight to Philip.”
“Who are you talking to?” Doc demanded, grasping Butler by his snow-caked jacket.
“He talks to people all the time,” Anthony said as he straightened. “They shipped him in with the Chickamauga prisoners. Said his whole command was wiped out, and he went raving insane.”
Butler cocked his head. “Chickamauga. Now that was a fight, wasn’t it, Sergeant? Company A wouldn’t have charged that hill for anyone but Tom Hindman.” He paused. “You think?” Another pause. “Maybe. I’ll ask.”
“Ask what?” Doc demanded.
Butler’s open eye seemed to clear, and he looked straight at Doc. “The men want to know if there’s any food. It’s been weeks without rations. We know commissary is bad, but they’d give anything for even some hardtack.”
“The men?” Doc felt his insides go runny. “What men?”
Butler pointed a bony finger at the space next to the stove with its boiling pot. “There’s Corporal Pettigrew.” The finger moved. “And sitting on that
closest bunk, that’s Phil Vail. Jimmy Peterson, he’s the private looking over your friend’s shoulder.”
Philip and Anthony followed Butler’s finger as it pointed here and there. Anthony actually shivered and backed away.
“We don’t see anyone,” Doc told him gently, unsure what to make of it.
“You don’t?” Butler seemed genuinely distraught. “Most people don’t. We’re used to that. But you, Philip, you’re my brother.”
“Butler, there’s no one there.”
“They’re not phantoms. They are my men. I’m taking them home. My responsibility. I promised them.” Butler tried to smile, only to have it flicker and vanish. “I think it was Caesar, perhaps Napoleon, who said an army marches on its stomach. Can we see about rations?”
“Doc?” Percy Anthony asked. “You really know him?”
Doc felt the world reel, as if the ether that the scientists talked about had just spun around him. “He’s my brother,” Doc said hoarsely. “Butler Hancock.”
And his mind is broken. Something I can’t fix any more than I could cure James of his consumption.
45
March 21, 1864
Sarah tended the pit fire before the trapper’s cabin. The day was blustery, rain having fallen earlier. The log structure, not ten by ten feet, sat back under the trees. The branches, so stark against the bruised gray clouds, were budded, about to flower. The first blades of spring grass had come up on the hillsides and in the flat before the cabin.
She tossed another broken branch—collected from forest litter an hour’s walk up the small canyon—onto the fire. They’d scrounged most of the easily available wood from the little valley, and between the bucksaw and ax had cut up most of the smaller dead stuff.
She’d become adept at pit roasting, having dug a hip-deep hole, dropped in stones, and built a snapping fire. When a thick bed of coals had covered the glowing rocks, she’d shoveled in four inches of dirt, laid a venison quarter wrapped in burlap atop the steaming dirt, and shoveled another four inches atop the meat. Finally, she had built a fire on top, sandwiching the meat between layers of fire to slow-roast through the day.
Beyond that their diet consisted of leached acorns, cattail roots, and processed countie root, sassafrass tea, occasional corn or wheat that Billy procured. When he did manage such a treat, Sarah pounded the kernels with a homemade wooden pestle to make coarse flour. And finally, just about anything that walked, crawled, flew, or scampered in the forest was fodder for the stew pot.
Such bounty—after a full winter of scavenging and hunting—had become scarce enough that her belly had shrunk. Hard muscles contoured her thin arms and legs. She hated being hungry all the time, but knew that with spring greenup, a passel of new foods would grow.
Could that old life before the war have ever been possible? Had it all been a dream, or did those days of full bellies, roasting breads, bacon, pork, chicken, and hot buttered corn bread really exist? Were her memories of family, a warm hearth, sugar, molasses, and salt and pepper real? Had Butler once reclined in the rocker, his eyes alight as he read aloud from Xenophon or Shakespeare? Had Paw presided at the head of the table, pulling on his pipe, a smile on his bearded lips? Were Maw’s looks of idle amusement as she kneaded bread dough but a figment of imagination?
Had Sarah once dreamed of a prominent husband, a fancy house in Little Rock, and gas streetlights? Were the velvet and silk dresses she had once imagined but flights of a spoiled little girl’s fancy?
God, I was a fool.
Life consisted of before the rape, and after.
Sarah took a deep breath, stretching her ribs; she pressed a hand into the hollow of her abdomen. She had lived on the precipice of terror after the rape. Dewley’s burning blue eyes still pierced her dreams—and sometimes her waking moments as well. She’d hear the ripping of her clothes, feel his body on hers. Her insides would curl at the memory of his penis probing inside her.
At odd times, just popping into her head, she would relive the moment when different men had thrown themselves onto her. She would hear the distinctive sounds each man made as he cooed endearments.
Endearments, for God’s sake!
Then her skin would crawl at the memory of how differently each had reacted as he shot his seed into her. How odd that her damaged soul insisted on remembering their individual peculiarities. And then there had been Tucker, the virgin who had come the moment he’d entered, and then lay atop her crying.
The images, the sensations, possessed her with such clarity. How could that be? The actual event was months past. If God were truly merciful, shouldn’t they be fading?
She laid her hands against the sides of her head, pressing, as if she could pop the memories from her skull. In the following weeks she had had the horrible certainty that they’d impregnated her. Night after night she’d lain awake, a hand pressed above her womb as if she could expel their seed.
Desperately she’d counted the days to her next flux, the fear rising as day after day her loins remained passive and the certainty, fear, and disgust grew.
Until the morning she’d been savagely chopping wood; a terrible cramp had doubled her over. She had sat down in the snow, grabbed her belly, and felt the hot wet rush between her thighs.
Unable to even stand, she had lain there until a final cramp—like something tearing inside—triggered a gasp from her heaving lungs. She felt when it finally passed. Weak and shivering, she’d pulled off her bloody pants and stared at the little blob of tissue—a thing that reminded her of a naked and bloody mouse.
Sobbing, trembling, she’d stumbled down to the trickle of a stream and washed herself in the cold water. Then she’d scrubbed out Tucker’s pants with sand and wrung them out. Shivering in the cold, breath puffing, she pulled them on and staggered back to the trapper’s cabin where she’d lain in bed for three days, much to Billy’s chagrin.
She’d never told him. She never would.
But for a month afterward, she had savaged herself. Hated herself for ever having been born.
“What’s the matter with you?” Billy had asked over a steaming cup of chicory root. “Get over it. Or are you just doing this to keep reminding me?”
“Reminding you?” she’d cried in disbelief, then, bursting into tears, she’d run out into the night to stumble up the slippery, snow-covered slope until she could stare up at the winter-white moon and pray to God to kill her.
But He hadn’t.
She still lived. Hungry. Desperate. And loathing herself.
Not that Billy, with his dreams, was any better. She’d never seen her brother scared. But when the dream came upon him in the middle of the night, he’d cry. Whispering, “No, Maw! Please don’t! I’m sorry! Don’t hurt me!”
Once she’d shaken him awake, asking, “Billy, what is it?”
And before he could come to his senses, he’d hoarsely admitted, “Maw. She’s climbing out of the grave. Her eyes are like fire, and she’s pointing at me.”
And then he’d taken to shaking as if his soul were frozen.
The crack of a hoof on rock carried up the canyon.
Sarah froze, head turning as she listened. Rider coming. Then she scrambled for the cabin door, reached inside, and wrapped her fingers around the revolver’s polished grip. Tossing a brown blanket—stained green with grass—over her shoulders, she hurried to the currant thicket and crouched down behind the stems. Covered so, she was as near to invisible as a whippoorwill on the forest floor.
One hand on the grip, the other around the cold cylinder, she cradled the Colt she’d taken from Dewley’s body. The gun that he’d shot Maw with. Capped, and all six loaded, she need only cock, aim, and fire.
Dewley. Her jaw clamped, the eerie memory of his demon-blue eyes stared out from inside her. Billy had been right. She had slaughtered enough pigs in her time. Killing a man wasn’t that much different.
That she’d done so should have given her peace. Instead she wondered if she hadn’t just rele
ased his dastardly soul—freed it from his body to possess a previously unknown corner of her own.
Along with everything else in her shattered world, her relationship with Billy was just as wounded. They barely talked—each locked sullenly in his or her head. The looks he gave her were bitter, filled with guilt. As if, by whatever fool reasoning, he considered her abduction and rape to be his fault.
As if it all went back to Paw saying, “You take care of your mother and sister.”
Worst of all, however, were the nightmares that brought Billy screaming upright in his blanket. Several times, she’d seen him reflexively grab his privates. Seen the shame in his eyes the next morning when he wouldn’t even so much as look at her.
She’d heard that men sometimes ejaculated in the night. Did he blame himself for that, too? As if his dream emission condemned him to the likes of Dewley and his rapists?
“And how, Sarah, do you go about discussing that with your brother?”
Her entire world was in shambles, and she could see no way out.
A hint of movement down the creek trail.
Her heart began to hammer.
A horse and rider appeared; another followed down in the trees.
Should have run!
Too late now. She’d have to let them get …
“Sis? We’re coming in!”
She puffed out a relieved breath as Billy’s voice carried on the cold air. But who had he brought? And why here? This was to be their secret. Their refuge.
Inviolate.
She stood—pistol still at the ready—as Danny Goodman led the way, his bone-rack of a blood-bay horse looking exhausted and sweaty. Danny—a worn butternut cape about his shoulders, a misshapen felt hat on his head—wore high boots in need of polish; a Burnside carbine rested in a saddle scabbard made from old boot tops. A ground cloth and lumpy blanket were tied to his cantle.
“Miss Sarah,” Danny greeted, touching a gloved finger to the brim of his hat. Then he wearily stepped out of the saddle, bracing himself on the horse as if unwilling to trust his legs.
Billy, on a gray—another walking pile of bones—swung easily off, patting the horse. Both animals had immediately and greedily started cropping the spring grass in the small clearing.
