Flashback

by Nevada Barr

  Below on the beach all eyes were turned toward the southern moat wall, Donna, Mrs. Meyers. The Cubans were rapt, the religious seeing a vision but not sure whether it was sent by God or Lucifer. Mack and Paulo looked as men look when reality ceases to have meaning anymore, rivers run uphill, the sun sets at midday and the animals of the field speak.

  Butch had turned toward Donna, but he was too close under the wall to get a good shot. Perry ran past his growing garden of dead and wounded, raised his .44 and took aim.

  "Now," Anna said. She and Patrice launched themselves at Butch. As Anna left the ground she was aware of two things: the sound of a gunshot and the crash of metal on concrete. Then she slammed into Butch's back.

  32

  My Dearest Peg--

  I am sorry for the long silence. Things here have been sadder than you could possibly imagine or than I could write about at the time. Now that the worst has passed I will do my best. I may be telling you in person before you receive this letter. I am coming home and I will be coming alone.

  I suppose I should begin where I left off more than a month ago.

  If I remember, at that time I had decided that I must find what, if anything, Joseph had to do with Tilly's going missing. Because of the strange and sudden ascendancy of Sergeant Sinapp I knew there was something amiss between them. Because none but Sergeant Sinapp and the men under his thrall had the necessary power and brutality--along with any reason--to remove Tilly from me, I needed to know if Joseph had been a party to it.

  I had it in my mind to confront Joseph and cry, whine, threaten or shame him into telling me why he had withdrawn his protection from Tilly and me; why he had, by inaction, allowed the inhabitants of Fort Jefferson to come under the de facto control of Cobb Sinapp, a man with the moral code of a shark--and this being said, I know I have insulted the entire species of fish.

  I managed to keep myself in the narrow bed in Tilly's room till the coming sunrise turned the window from black to gray. It was my intention to wake Joseph and have it out with him before anyone was astir to distract or interrupt us.

  Given the nature of my visit to the connubial bed was not such that a thin cotton gown felt adequate, I dressed in the clothing I had cast off the day before--not the britches and blouse of Joseph's I'd borrowed, but my own dress and petticoat.

  As I was working the skirt down over my shoulders--the waist of this dress is narrow and the buttons down the back don't open far enough to make donning and doffing it a simple matter--I felt the letters. They were the same letters I had stuffed into my pocket when Joseph came home as I was searching his desk, reading his correspondence, and wondering if he was being adulterous.

  Having worked the dress into place, I took these letters and sat in the old rocker we'd given Tilly for her use. It sits near the window where what little light available would help me to make out the writing. I lit a candle to assist the dawn and looked at my booty.

  Two of the letters were military matters; notification of death in one case and a discussion of new supply ships and routes in the other. The third was of great interest. It was from Colonel Battersea of the late Confederate Army. The letter had been sent from New Brunswick, Georgia, which, if I remember correctly, is Colonel Battersea's home.

  I believe I may have mentioned the colonel's situation. He and Joseph were thrust into that untenable situation so common in the late and tragic events of the war.

  The colonel had been one of Joseph's instructors at West Point. He was not a good deal older than his students, being only twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time of his employment there. The colonel (a lieutenant then) took an interest in Joseph. He had him to dine with he and his wife on more than one occasion and assisted him in many small ways while Joseph was a cadet under his care.

  After Joseph graduated the friendship continued though, of necessity, only by way of letters. Joseph would write him often with problems or questions concerning military matters, and Colonel Battersea would always respond with sound advice.

  Once he and his wife and their eldest daughter paid us a visit as they were passing through the garrison in Pennsylvania at which we were posted.

  As fate would have it, this same Colonel Battersea ended up at Fort Jefferson, a prisoner of war under Joseph's wardship. The colonel never asked for preferential treatment and, though I knew Joseph ached to give him at least better rations and some small services to make him more comfortable, he never did. His own brand of military honor would not allow him nor would so doing earn him the colonel's respect.

  They did talk quite often and played chess in the evenings on occasion. In this war of brothers and neighbors such interaction is not unusual. The colonel had been here half a year or more when he began getting letters of his wife's declining health. By war's end she had wasted away till, according to the daughter that wrote in the wife's stead, she weighed no more than a child. It seemed clear she would soon die.

  Joseph attempted to secure the colonel's early release (by this time it was known the prisoners of war were to go home in peace) but for reasons I'm not privy to--perhaps nothing more than the organizational disarray the army was thrown into by the long and bloody war--permission to release Colonel Battersea was not forthcoming.

  Shortly thereafter the colonel took matters into his own hands and escaped, stowed away it was surmised on one of the ships that stopped for recoaling. In his own way, I know Joseph celebrated his old mentor's escape, but he said little about it.

  Anyway, that said, I read the letter from Colonel Battersea--the one I had stolen from my husband's desk--with great interest.

  I shan't recopy the entire letter here. After reading it I returned the letters to Joseph's desk--an act facilitated by my breaking the latch earlier. Colonel Battersea wrote Joseph of his wife's death and of how grateful he was to have been with her at the end. Though the language was careful, for one acquainted with his story, it was clear he thanked Joseph for his escape from Fort Jefferson. It did my heart good to know my husband had been party to such a kind deceit.

  Yet I believe this good and Christian act has been turned against Joseph. Should it be made known that he, a Union Army captain, aided and abetted the escape of a prisoner of war, his career would be over. He would be court-martialed and, if not imprisoned, then drummed out of the service.

  For Joseph this would be tantamount to excommunication. The army is his life, his religion. I don't think I overstep when I say it embodies his very self. As Sergeant Sinapp has long been Joseph's henchman, I don't doubt Joseph enlisted his aid in the colonel's escape. It is my belief Joseph underestimated how tamed Sinapp was and that, having been complicitous in this escape, the sergeant turned on the master. Sinapp is using this knowledge to blackmail Joseph. Joseph, an honorable man, mightn't know how those of Sinapp's ilk hate him; the more servile they are the more hatred they possess.

  No wonder Joseph has lost himself. He has sacrificed his honor to hang on to the trappings of all he believes to be honorable. It's made of him a paper man, one with no core, no semblance of faith upon which to draw.

  For an hour or more I sat in Tilly's room thinking on the ramifications of the letter. At length I came to believe it in no way indicated that Joseph had been party to Tilly's disappearance. I do believe that it indicates something almost as damning: that regardless of Joseph's suspicions of Sinapp, he allowed the sergeant to blackmail him into silence--inaction. If he suspected--and he must have done--Joseph looked the other way, refused to know.

  Joseph became and continues to act the role of a coward. It's killing him. His spirit is crippled and even his body is wasting. He's lost weight and his uniforms, once fitting splendidly, now hang on him as if they belonged to a bigger and better man.

  Whether or not I would have confronted Joseph with my suppositions--become in the supposing as real to me as proven fact--I don't know. My brown (or, given the circumstance, perhaps I should say black) study was interrupted shortly after sunrise by Luanne. She came t
o Tilly's room, announced beforehand by her wailing and sighing, and flung open the door.

  "God has passed judgment on this evil world," she announced. "You got to come. One dead and folks fixing to die."

  Luanne, for all her colorful language and even more colorful version of the Christian faith, is not given to panic or exaggeration. Without hesitation I leapt from my place and followed her.

  Yellow Fever had come to Garden Key. This awful burning disease is always with us but it had descended in a way that seemed to validate Luanne's belief in scourges sent by God.

  The fever lasted three weeks, Peggy. You cannot believe the devastation. Hardest hit were the officers, though I cannot say why. Within days fully two-thirds of the commissioned men were dead. One of the first to die of the fever was Captain Caulley, the fort's surgeon. The lighthouse keeper and his wife died; Charley Munson, Dr. Mudd's errand boy succumbed. I cannot begin to name them all. Should I try my tears would blotch the ink on this page till you could no longer read the words.

  Dr. Mudd was loosed from his cell and, as our only doctor, I must say he conducted himself well, valiantly, even.

  The officers' quarters and the casemates behind the barracks construction were converted into hospital wards. We quickly ran out of medicines. There is little that is efficacious against Yellow Fever. It is as if the disease ignites the center of the body and burns outward until life is consumed. The effects are hideous to observe and suffer. The body is tortured and disfigured as if the disease would not merely kill but would savage. Those of us who could still stand worked to alleviate the suffering of the stricken. Dr. Mudd toiled night and day taking his sleep in minutes rather than hours. What lives were saved must be laid on his doorstep. The only man who worked harder was Joseph. No task was too menial or too vile for him to undertake. He carried slops, washed the soldiers, and spooned water into their parched mouths with the gentleness of a mother feeding a child. He held them as they died. In the quiet moments when he might have slept, he wrote of their courage to their wives and mothers.

  Joseph (as well as Dr. Mudd) won the respect and admiration of all here. Well, not all. I saw not a selfless hero, not even a man trying desperately to buy back his soul. When I looked at Joseph, thin and haggard and going without sleep to minister to the sick, I saw a man who wanted to die. I believe Joseph clung to the sick, wallowed in the disease, not in hopes of conquering it that others might live but of embracing it that it might see fit to take him as well. Death refused him as it thankfully refused me. We are among the one in three who survived the epidemic.

  The second week of the disease Sergeant Sinapp was taken ill and carried into the downstairs parlor of the officers' quarters there, with nine others on cots and couches, to be cared for.

  I can only attribute my actions thereafter to fatigue and the mental strain of losing our dear sister Tilly. Should I not pen these excuses for my behavior I would have to admit that I had succumbed to an evil as cowardly as my husband's and as cold as that of Sergeant Sinapp.

  For three days I stayed at Sinapp's side. When he cried for water, I asked him where Tilly was. When he begged to be cooled from his raging fever, I asked what he had done with our sister. I felt nothing, Peggy, nothing good. My insides were as still and cold and dark as a well. I watched without sympathy, without humanity. I gave him the water he called for after each interrogation, but I did it without thought of succor but only that he might live long enough to provide the answers I so desperately needed.

  Rage burned in him as hot as the fever. Hatred for me scalded his eyes till they were suffused with blood. Had he the strength, I believe he would have risen from his sickbed and choked the life from me. He exhausted himself cursing me, screaming at me to leave. I stayed. When he went to sleep I was watching him. When he awoke I was watching.

  Never once did he repent, confess or ask my forgiveness or God's.

  Evening of the third day he went into the delirium that precedes death in those affected with Yellow Fever. Even then I did not allow him what peace might have been left for him. Into his delirium dreams I whispered our sister's name, questions, threats. I whispered until I was hoarse with it and he was wild, trying to fight the dream demon that was I.

  It was after three in the morning, the fort by no means still or dark with the sick crying and the caretakers making their weary rounds with lantern or candle. Sinapp began to relive the night our sister disappeared. He mumbled snatches of orders, guttural grunts of pleasure, names, fragments of conversations, aborted howls that might pass for laughter in hell. I goaded and guided and finally pieced together the remnants of his ravings.

  Sinapp had lured Tilly out with a note (probably delivered by Charley Munson) purportedly from Dr. Mudd. He'd then taken Tilly and, with two of his men, taken Joel as well. These children had been carried to the dungeon and slain.

  The joy in the killing and the hatred of the Lincoln conspirators and Tilly's supposed proof of Dr. Samuel Mudd's innocence was not tempered by remorse even in this last madness. Before Tilly was murdered Sinapp defiled her. As he relived this, all that kept me from killing him was the sure knowledge he would die soon. I did not want to cheat him of a moment's pain and suffering.

  Just before dawn he died, his soul unshriven and mine blackened by our time together and my inability to forgive him.

  I suppose he was taken away and buried or burned with the other dead. I suppose I continued to fetch and carry and nurse. Nothing remains in my memory of the interval between Sinapp's death and Luanne tucking sheets around me and saying: "Sleep now or you be sick too. Sleep. Sleep."

  I slept for thirty-six hours.

  When I awoke there were no new cases of the fever. Those who would die had died. Those destined to live were convalescing. Yellow Fever had run its course at Fort Jefferson.

  I never learned what became of Tilly and Private Lane's bodies. I was past caring. It is enough to know their souls are in heaven and Sinapp's is in hell.

  Joseph received the transfer he requested. Within the month he will journey to his new post in the Nevada Territory. I will not go with him. Tomorrow I board the Radcliff and sail for Boston.

  More than anything, Peggy, I want to come home.

  Your loving sister,

  Raffia

  33

  The jump from the top of the moat wall to Butch's back was seven feet vertically and that many or more horizontally. Wanting to inflict as much damage as possible at the onset, Anna led with elbows and knees. Patrice was at her side, shoulders touching when they left terra firma. In midair the bigger woman turned slightly to strike the smuggler with the edge of her shoulder and upper arm.

  The assault was sudden and complete. The two women hit like a ton of brick. Butch went down. One Uzi flew from his hand to land a dozen feet away. The second was ripped out of his fingers and turned on him by the strong, sure hands of Patrice.

  With the fall of Butch and the Uzis, Anna feared Perry would cut loose with the .44. He'd only spent one bullet she knew of. There could be five people dead or dying before he emptied the gun. This grim scenario never played out. Galvanized, refugees surged forward. Paulo, Mack and Rick were carried up to where Patrice sat astride Butch with gun to his head and Anna racked her brain in search of something to bind him with. Butch began to struggle. Patrice quieted him with a meaty fist slammed into the back of his neck. Anna's cuffs were in the office.

  The crowd's roar changed tenor, and Anna decided to let Patrice worry about detaining Butch. Though Mack, Rick and Paulo had been the "good guys" to the extent of the Cuban smuggling operation, in the minds of many of the refugees they were tarred with the same brush as Butch and Perry. Along with Butch and Perry, they could be dispatched by a Latin version of vigilante justice.

  Floodlights began winking out. Engines roared as the fishing boats powered up to flee. Everyone yelled, shrieked or screamed. Of Perry, there was no sign in the milling clot of Cuban refugees.

  Anna ran for the Uzi lying
on the sand, snatched it up, pointed it in the air and pulled the trigger. Once before, in training, she'd fired an Uzi. It bucked like a live thing, seeming to have a will of its own, a thirst for killing. "Please, por favor, por favor, silencio," she shouted. The crowd fell quiet. The lights were gone. Blinded by the recent floods, she yelled "Paulo, Mack," trying to locate them before they were murdered.

  "Here," she heard Paulo reply like a schoolboy at roll call.

  She turned toward his voice. Her eyes were adjusting. Enough of dawn pushed at night and storm clouds that she could make him out, held captive by half a dozen men.

  "Let him go," she said. No one moved. She fired another burst from the evil weapon she carried.

  "Let him go," Mack repeated in Spanish. Reluctantly the Cubans loosed their captive.

  "Paulo, there's a woman in the moat. Maybe shot. See to her now. Don't even think about running. I disabled your boat." Behind her, Anna heard Patrice whisper, "Dear God . . ." then a thump and a grunt as she hit Butch once more for good measure.

  Paulo scrambled past and up onto the moat wall.

  "Mack, come to me," Anna ordered.

  The Cubans parted and allowed a newly freed Mack to walk to where she stood. He limped, and black showed at nostrils and mouth where he'd taken blows.

  "Perry," she said. "Where is he? He's armed. I want him."

  "Shot," Mack said succinctly. He turned and rattled off a few sentences in Spanish. The Cubans moved aside, opening a pathway from Anna to the sea. Halfway down lay a body.

  "See to him," Anna said.

  "He's dead," Mack replied. "A bullet tore his throat out. I saw him go down just as all this began."

  Unless one of the Cubans had brought a gun with them, it made no sense. "Ask them who shot him," Anna said.

  Mack did so. There was an exchange too rapid for Anna to understand, and a woman pointed up toward the battlements. Two men pointed out to sea.

  "This woman swears she saw a muzzle flash from the fort. Two guys swear the shot came from the boats and the kid insists it was Butch. Sorry."