Cape Hell

by Loren D. Estleman

  His hand lost its grip and he folded slowly to the ground, like a barn collapsing. The soldier lunged forward and stooped to help him up, but he was as limp as the dead creature the others had slung onto the bonepile, his face even grayer than before. Major Oscar Childress, the southern gentleman who owned slaves, sold poison, ran whores, and conspired in treason, was close to death.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Childress, I decided, was never far outside the scrutiny of his subordinates. No sooner had the soldier lifted him from the ground than Captain McCready appeared, straddling his fine sorrel, and swung down from the saddle in one fluid movement. He took the fallen man by the shoulders, the other by the ankles, and together they carried him to the next barracks over. I followed, leaving Childress’ straw hat where it had landed.

  The room they took him to was small and separated from the rest of the building with a pine partition, scoured white and stinking of carbolic. A hospital bed erected on a system of cranks and wheels stood in the center of the room, made up in fresh linen, with two down pillows and a thick cotton blanket rolled up at the foot in a topsheet. In seconds they had the patient laid out with the covers drawn to his chin. Dismissed, the soldier evaporated; there’s no better way to describe how quickly he made himself absent.

  There was an evil smell about the place I knew all too well, apart from the carbolic: the thick air of ether, old blood, rotting flesh, and alcohol; gallons of the last, splashed about like water on a raging fire, and over it all the gaseous residue of human organs exposed to the air. It brought me back to a place and a time I’d hoped was long behind me; of a mildewed tent in a farmer’s decimated field packed with sweating, cursing orderlies, frantic surgeons, and grown men screaming for their mothers. The farther you got away from a thing the closer you came back to it.

  “Lift his head.”

  There being no one else present, I slid a hand behind Childress’ head and raised it while the captain opened a shallow drawer in a cabinet with a zinc top and took out a red morocco case the thickness of a deck of cards but twice as long. Tipping back the lid, he drew a steel syringe from its form-fitted depression, a squat brown bottle from another, shook the bottle, drew the cork, and filled the syringe with a sucking sound. He restopped and replaced the bottle, tapped the barrel of the syringe, depressed the plunger, squirting an arc of liquid from the end of the hollow needle, and in a series of deft motions wetted a wad of cotton from another container he’d taken from the drawer, tipped something from another bottle into the wad, and cocked an elbow, pointing at his superior’s near arm with an unmistakable gesture.

  Unmistakable for only a few.

  How he knew I’d filled in for a stricken orderly at Cold Harbor I never learned; either he’d studied my record or expected me to understand what must have been an automatic action. Whichever was the case, he’d judged correctly. I rolled back Childress’ sleeve and watched as he daubed the inside of the major’s elbow with the cotton swab, filling the room with the sharp stench of alcohol, cast the swab to the floor, pierced the vein he knew was there, and made the injection.

  “Opium?” I asked.

  “Highly distilled,” he said. “One of the major’s discoveries. I don’t pretend to know how it works, only that it does.”

  I watched Childress’ face, gray as dead clay. He’d been breathing shallowly, in short bursts. As the medicine took hold, his lungs filled, then emptied, and fell afterward into the rhythm of a man in deep slumber.

  All the paraphernalia was returned to its place in the same measured order as it had been brought into play. McCready cocked his head to bring his one eye to the operation. I saw then that the dead socket wasn’t empty after all: Worm-shaped muscles pulsed as if they were still in charge of a working orb.

  “I know a glass-blower in Helena who could fit you with an eye no one would notice,” I said. “A U.S. senator came all the way from Washington on his reputation.”

  “I tried that. A fellow from someplace called Vienna had one painted from a chip he matched to the eye God gave me. Beautiful thing. I keep it in the case it came with.” He shook his head. “Too much time had passed. The skin had shriveled too far to support it. It kept popping out at inopportune times. Better the truth up front than to have the lie exposed over a plate of oysters in champagne sauce.”

  He smiled then; anyway the wide, thin-lipped mouth in the piebald face twitched at the corners. I felt a twinge of respect, for the soldier if not for the executioner. We might have faced each other across a battlefield strewn with men we’d both murdered for no reason I could remember, but loyalty is rare even in civilization.

  “What’s his complaint?”

  “He’s being eaten from inside; it’s this blasted climate, and his own genius consuming itself in the company of idiots. It hasn’t gotten to his brain, that much is certain. That’s the hell of it. Those brutes next door, dying of their own sinful birth, don’t know what’s happening to them, and are all the better for it.”

  As if in response, a guttural cry arose from one of the adjacent rooms. If it had been at least half-animal I could have put it aside; that it was more than half-human was impossible to ignore.

  McCready was an educated man, that much was certain. The southern universities had it all over the ivy leagues of the North. Their founders had come straight from Oxford and Cambridge.

  “How long does he have?” I asked.

  “He went to see a specialist in El Paso. Crossing the border could have meant his life, but I suppose he found that preferable to this. The doctor could have practiced in Chicago or Denver, maybe even New York City, but he was loyal to the War for Southern Independence, and couldn’t countenance treating Yankees. He estimated six months. That was a year and a half ago. The major rebels against everything.” He stuck out his hand. “Eustace McCready, Captain of the Confederacy.”

  I gripped the hand as firmly as I could. It was like taking hold of a train coupling. “Page Murdock, Corporal of the Union.”

  The mouth parted, exposing a fine set of coral-colored teeth: He seemed to know his wine. “I started as a corporal with the Chesterfield Volunteers.”

  A division I was unfamiliar with; but then Childress had assembled his own regiment from among the oldest families in Virginia. “My mistake,” I said. “I wasn’t aware you’d worked for a living.”

  He made a sound I took for amusement. We were close comrades, for that moment at least; and in silence agreed how sorry we’d be when one of us killed the other.

  * * *

  He pried apart Childress’ eyelids, striking a match off a thumbnail to study the pupils. “He’ll rest for a day. With God’s good grace he’ll come out of it roaring for someone’s head. I don’t envy the first of these brutes who fall beneath his expectations.”

  “Well, you need the bones.”

  McCready straightened to his full height, easily a head above mine, and fixed me with his eye, blue-green and as clear as egg-whites around the irises.

  “He doesn’t need the excuse. This country is as rich in game as the one you came from, before the blasted federals raped it of buffalo to bring the Indians to their knees. That grizzly the brutes slew and dragged across the tracks will be harvested and put to good use. What does it serve to set aside the bones of these creatures—or you, or me, comes to that—to waste in graves? If we truly believed in life hereafter, there would be no reason to visit a cemetery. I’d rather my remains be put to use than moldering six feet under. The uncivilized peoples of the East believe that death is not final, only rebirth. Who is to say I won’t someday sweeten the tea of a saint?”

  “Or of a St. Louis whore; you don’t have a vote. You’re just coughing up something your worshipful master said over a dinner table.”

  “And who do you serve, that fat New York Yankee in the White House?”

  “Is that who’s in? I haven’t voted since Abe Lincoln.”

  “That carpetbagger?”

  I looked around the room.
Apart from another finely woven rug, it was undecorated except for a small painting in a heavy frame: Another murky representation of coarsely dressed peasants, this time gouging the eyes out of another captive in the rags of a fine uniform. I made some comment about his commander’s taste in art.

  McCready’s eyes jerked toward the painting. “He buys those at auction, by wire. I don’t see much difference between them and Antietam.”

  “He wants to bring it all back,” I said. “If you really want to know who I’m serving, it’s anyone who stands in front of that.”

  Just then the soldier he’d dismissed entered. I saw from his unlined face, the chin pale of any trace of shaved whiskers, that he was too young to have served Childress in combat. The generation that had come up since the war had been all too ready to offer its services to the glamour of a lost cause.

  McCready returned his salute. “What?”

  “Sir. The men are wondering.”

  “Wondering?” He pronounced the word as if it belonged to a foreign language.

  The young man cleared his throat; if anyone had ever wanted to be somewhere else, this was him. “In the absence of the major, are the maneuvers to proceed as always?”

  The captain inhaled and exhaled, a mighty gust. “Look you, private. Who is the man in this bed?”

  To his credit, the private didn’t look. “Major Childress, sir.”

  “Is he absent?”

  “No, sir!” Had the young man straightened further, his spine would have cracked.

  “Then go to the devil with you, and look smart during the maneuvers.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  McCready deflated a little after the man’s exit. “If this is what we have to work with, so be it. The major will whip them into shape.”

  Just then the major drew a mighty breath. His eyes opened, exposing the bright orbs, blazing now, like dying suns: the same fierce fire that had come through at Cold Harbor and Bull Run. We both leaned in to hear his gasp:

  “God forgive me.”

  He’d taken in too much breath for the purpose; the rest went out in a gush of air. It was his last.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When great men die, they say, the room in which they expired always seems larger; as if the soul that had passed from it had filled it to the walls.

  Oscar Childress’ death-room didn’t look or feel any different from when he’d been brought there, his heart still beating, feeding that singular brain. The man himself seemed smaller; but even dolts shrivel a bit when the life-force has departed.

  He lay with his eyes open—less bright by the moment—and his lips still parted just enough to let his last three words escape. He’d have hated them, I was sure. He had to have known his time was near, and thought to draft a valedictory worthy of a giant; but even a gifted actor can forget his lines in a role more challenging than the rest. God forgive me: a plea so banal as to be worthy of any of his brainless creatures.

  McCready—inspired, perhaps, by his commander’s triteness at the finish—performed the conventional duties, kneading shut his eyes and tipping the jaw closed. Comically, it dropped back open, forcing him to repeat the operation and hold it for a moment like a cabinetmaker clamping two pieces of wood together until the glue set. From Moses to Alexander to Washington, and all the saints and generals who had come before and between and after, the epilogue would have proceeded similarly, with a lesser light sweeping up the ashes of the extinguished blaze. I left then. He’d forgotten about me, and would hold that position until the dead muscles went rigid, if that was what it took.

  The infirmary was built on the shotgun plan, with the rooms connected end-to-end like railroad cars. I went through a door, crossed a vacant room with the mattress rolled up against a plain iron headboard, and entered the next. There lay Joseph, on his back with a thin blanket drawn to his bare chest and his hands folded on top of it. I stood watching for several seconds before I confirmed his chest was rising and falling. His eyes didn’t open and I chose not to wake him. There was a forest of brown bottles on a plain table beside the bed, some with rubber droppers. The air was strong with a sharp smell I’d grown accustomed to lately: the fumes from the juice distilled from cinchona bark, Mexico’s answer to malaria. I took myself back out.

  The captain was still standing beside Childress’ bed, with his chin on his chest and his hands crossed at his waist. Whether he was praying silently or waiting for his master to rise from the dead I couldn’t say; more likely for a military man he was considering the next move. I left, making as little noise as possible. He seemed to have forgotten I existed, which was how I would have had it.

  There was no sign of my saddle or bridle in the stables. Likely it had been left aboard the Ghost when my bay was hitched to one of the wagons. I outfitted it with the tack available and picked my way back down the trail, dismounting and leading it when the way narrowed and an attack of malaria might throw off my balance at any minute. The creatures clearing away fallen debris went on working as I passed; without Childress along, I might have been a bird pecking for grubs in cracks for all I was visible to them.

  Nearing the house I passed the cannon I’d heard earlier, a blue-black six-pounder Napoleon mounted on wheels as tall as a man, stinking, like the dead grizzly, of rancid fat greasing the barrel and also the sulphur stench of burnt cordite, and here and there a soldier on foot or on horseback, their uniforms tidy but as patched and darned as ancient quilts. Once again, I attracted little attention. I could have pranced around in the arrogant scarlet of a Yankee Zouave and drawn no more than a sneer. In an armed camp, much is taken for granted.

  * * *

  “Major Childress is dead.”

  The captain’s drill-trained voice rang without emotion; he must have finished tidying up just after I left and ridden straight back to the barn. A contingent of men wearing uniforms in varying degrees of repair would be gathered in formation before the house, with their immediate commander standing at parade rest on the front porch. There would be a general removal of hats.

  Apart from the announcement itself, which reached me in Childress’ study, I assumed the scene had played out as described; I’d only heard the bugle call to Assembly and the jingling of raiments and sabers.

  The key was missing from the lock, but I rolled the desk chair across the room and tilted it, jamming the back under the knob. I wished it hadn’t had casters; a strong shove would clear the path inside, but it would slow an intruder down for a second or two.

  The room was as the major had left it, with the enormous book he’d been reading still flayed open on the desk; a thing of stiff heavy leaves unevenly cut and decorated with pen-and-ink illustrations tinted by a hand that had been skeletal for at least two centuries, lettered elaborately in a language I will never know; from the charted coastlines and studies of animals I recognized as pumas and buffalo despite their exaggerated features, it seemed to be a tract on the New World based on early French explorations; in all likelihood his talk of monsters on the map had prompted him to crack it. The pipe he’d smoked while reading, carved from ivory (or what I hoped was ivory) into the likeness of a horned creature with an amber stem, lay still warm in an onyx bowl, permeating the room further with its rich fragrance.

  Another smell, coarser and acidic, drew my attention to the parlor stove and to its door, which was slightly ajar. I took it by its dangling coiled handle, tipped it open, drew a short poker from the brass rack beside the stove, and separated the ashes, which had gone out but for a few sparks that erupted into vertical threads of flame when I disturbed them. A bit of charred cloth came apart from a thick sheaf of burned paper, which itself separated in two sections, exposing under it an image impressed on stiff cardboard curved at the corners. A hole had burned through the center, obliterating the face, but the flames had cast a rose hue on what was left of a high-collared dress—bombazine, beyond doubt. I felt no need to go into the room where I’d slept to confirm that he’d taken the photograph from the si
lver frame on the nightstand and burned it along with the letters the woman had written to him. He hadn’t even bothered to untie the ribbon, much less read them. I’d fretted for nothing over whether they’d reached him and what might happen to his creatures if they’d failed to deliver them.

  I remembered Childress’ notes on his report to the American authorities, and the possibly mistranslated suggestion to “plant seeds” (matea) among the unsophisticated natives of Mexico to foster their awestruck regard for their neighbors to the North America: What he’d actually written was mata: “kill.” The error had not been his. A man who would exterminate the creatures, as he had been doing piecemeal on the pretext of setting an example to the others, would destroy every link to the civilized life he’d known in Virginia.

  For months or years, he’d slept beside that likeness, until it occupied his thoughts no more (or not as much) as his paintings of fierce peasants torturing prisoners of war to death, until the letters came to remind him. Then he’d thrown the photograph in the fire with the lot.

  I went back to the desk. The belly drawer was unlocked, but there was nothing of interest in it. The same was true of five of the six deeper drawers that flanked the kneehole. The last I tried was locked. I’d seen nothing resembling a key, but took a silver-plated paper knife from the blotter and poked it this way and that inside the keyhole, tugging on the bronze lion’s-head knob, until something snapped and the drawer came open.

  The first thing that greeted me was my old Deane-Adams in its gun belt. I inspected the cylinder, found all the chambers loaded, and buckled the rig around my waist. I looked for the Bulldog revolver, without success; but I hadn’t had it nearly as long and was less familiar with it, so I didn’t spend much time regretting the loss.

  On the bottom of the drawer lay a black iron strong box edged with gilded oak leaves. It, too, was locked, but I inserted the scratched paper knife under the lid and forced it open.