by Steven Price
How is it in that world? the brother asked.
It shook its head. I was in a river, it said. A black river. Then I was on the shore.
How is it in that world?
It sat slumped with its sightless gaze fixed outward and said nothing for a long moment. Then murmured, as if by rote, Other than the world as it was.
Yes. Good. And what did you take with you to that shore?
My skull opened like a flower, it said. The night smelled of dust, someone was crying. O someone was crying—
And what did you take with you to that shore?
I took a darkness with me to that shore.
And in the darkness?
In the darkness another darkness.
The man’s eyes were fixed on his sister and there were twin pricks of light deep in the sockets there and William stared at them feeling a kind of horror.
And were you young in this world?
I felt old. My legs wouldn’t hold me.
You were. You were young, as are we all. And were you forgiven?
It had lowered its face and with its arms outstretched it looked to William like a figure crucified and sorrowing. At last it murmured: She is here, Edward.
Foole gave a low groan, his eyes staring.
Who is with us now? the brother pressed. What is her name?
She is here, it said again, face lowered and lost to sight. She is at peace. She says do you remember the flavoured ices in Port Elizabeth, long ago. She says it is that warm and peaceful here. She knows what is in your heart. She wants you to know she does not blame—
All at once William felt his right wrist twist, his grip give way. Foole was staggering upright, his chair falling away in a clatter, his face very white. And then the medium was staring with her eyes glassy and dazed and her brother was shouting and Foole had pushed past all of them and the circle, whatever it was, whatever it had been, was broken.
Later that night he saw. He sat in his underclothes at his hotel window and through the leaded glass saw. Night, coalescing in the cobblestones below. A lamplighter in a cloak appeared like a messenger out of the shadows and he watched the hooded figure lift a long hooked stick from one shoulder to reach the street lamp above. Everything felt so far away. The ordinary world in all its wonder and strangeness. He heard again the medium’s dreadful voice as she spoke the name Ignatius. He thought of the balloonist Ignatius Spaar, whom he had fought with at Malvern Hill, thought of the man’s soft Virginian accent, the crackle in his voice. Spaar had died in that battle. I see a war, the medium had murmured, I see betrayal. Down in the street the lamplighter unhooked the wrought iron casing, the small pane of glass creaking open. Something inside William was clicking through its chambers, at the edge of violence, like a revolver seeking its bullet. The lamplighter turned a cog with the sharp point of his hook until a hiss of gas from the fishtail jet leaked out. It was not the war that killed that boy, Foole had told him in the tunnel. The man you want to talk to, Martin Reckitt had said, is Adam Foole. The figure swung down the staff, reached hand over hand for the end, adjusted the wick, hefted all of it smoothly back up to pass through the gas. The man, the boy. Adam Foole, Edward Shade. A bloom of flame, a spill of light across cobblestones.
She is here, Edward, the spirit had said.
William crushed his eyes shut. Something stilled inside him. He was thinking of the seance, the clatter of the overturned chair, the alarmed shine in Foole’s eye, and all at once he opened his eyes.
His hands were shaking.
For he knew who Adam Foole was.
The Balloonist
*
1862
VIRGINIA
Thirty-two years later in the shadow of a new kind of war William Pinkerton would sit across from a lady columnist from a New York daily and try to describe the horror that had been Malvern Hill. The great ocean-going turbines shuddering up through the floor, the sound of violins drifting past the portholes. This would be in the first-class viewing lounge of an Atlantic passenger liner, William smothering the palsy in his hands, returning from a police conference in Glasgow. Somewhere in the Europe behind them aeroplanes were dropping bombs on boys cowering in trenches and he could only shake his head helplessly at that, and frown, and in his frown was the bitter squint of a man who could no longer see as he was accustomed to seeing.
It would mean so much to hear the truth of it, Mr. Pinkerton, she was saying. Especially now.
He ran a weary claw over the blanket in his lap. The truth of Malvern Hill.
Oh, yes. My readers would be so fascinated.
He peered out of the porthole at the passing grey of the ocean, of the sky. Somewhere out there German warships slid like smoke over the waters.
Your father was the head of the Union army’s Secret Service at that time. Did you join him out of a sense of patriotic duty? Or was it because you’d heard he had fallen ill?
William crushed his eyes shut. He had been sixteen then, he had been immortal.
Oh, don’t look so abashed, she laughed. You were very young, Mr. Pinkerton. I understand he was sick with malaria at the time. You were still a boy but you stayed by his side. You must have been awfully brave.
I didn’t know what brave was, William said. If I’d had any idea I’d never have gone to the war. He looked at her with a watery gaze, his eyes searching her face. He said, Pull your chair closer, young lady. My ears don’t work so well as they once did.
Her smile. Like lightning in a cornfield. Something about her made him think of his wife.
I was asking you, sir, if you were afraid. Your father was very ill.
William grunted. In Virginia everyone was ill. The mosquitoes were feasting on all those poor New England boys. I dropped out of Notre Dame to go down there, that was in April of eighteeen sixty-two. Just in time for the march on Richmond. I don’t know what my father thought of it. He knew McClellan from before the war, when the general was with the Illinois Central. They were close. He resigned when the general lost his command. William looked at the columnist and smiled. You know Lincoln was the legal consultant for the railroad at the time? Small world.
She raised her eyebrows, said nothing.
I don’t know what I was thinking, he went on. I stayed because I guess my father figured it was safer for me to serve under him, where he could keep an eye on me. Rather than charging through the fields with the infantry. He was probably right. He never expected he’d get sick. He wasn’t sick when I first got down there. William paused and blinked and stared at his hands. Do you really want to know all this?
She smiled her dazzling smile. My readers will be fascinated.
You said that already.
Mr. Pinkerton, she said, and he could smell the perfume rising from her. Whatever else, he thought, Margaret never wore perfume like that. She said, My readers are the proud mothers and sisters and wives of our boys in France. What they’ll want to hear is the story of a patriot who served his country and returned home a hero.
He could feel the thrum of the big engines kicking down as the vessel began to shift its course and he remembered the weird dappled light in the wet trees outside Gaines’s Mill all those years ago. The beauty of the blue fields at dusk. The eerie crawling figures of the dying in the dawn mists after battle. The spray of men ripped to pieces and the sounds of horses screaming, the clatter and boom of the artillery.
What they’ll want to hear, he said, is the story of a boy who returned home. That’s all.
She leaned forward and set a cool hand on his wrist. He dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief. Her hair was cut in a bob and black and her skin very pale, her lips very red. In an earlier decade he might have found her a wonder. Now seeing her he felt only tired, and alone, and he was not surprised by the lack of fire in him, and this lack of surprise is how he knew he was old.
She said, Is it true, Mr. Pinkerton, that you went down to see your father because he had stopped writing letters to your mother?
Where
did you hear that?
Oh, we journalists have our ways. She winked. Your mother was worried because she could not reach him and sent you down to make sure he was okay. You found him already weak.
William was quiet.
And you stayed with him in the battlefields. Despite the danger. You carried him on your back during the retreat. It is a beautiful story, Mr. Pinkerton. Especially during wartime. So many of my readers have husbands and fathers serving in France. It will be such a comfort to them, to be reminded that love can be stronger than war.
It isn’t.
Her smile faltered.
It isn’t stronger. And I didn’t carry him on my back. I’ve heard that story. It isn’t true. It didn’t happen like that.
How did it happen?
The only thing my father ever let carry him was a sorrel that he loved more than his own two boys. And when that was shot out from under him he got up and walked home from the war and he never looked back at it.
I know this is a difficult topic.
It’s not difficult. Ask me something else.
She cleared her throat.
Ask me something else.
You left your fiancée in Boston to go to your father.
Margaret. Yes.
But she waited for you.
He shook his head. She was one of the Ashling daughters, he said. There were three of them, famous beauties. I knew I was going to marry her from the moment I saw her, at the winter dance in Boston. She was with me in the field hospital at Antietam after I was injured. I woke up and she was there. My father was already back in Chicago by then.
It’s such a beautiful story, Mr. Pinkerton.
It felt odd, speaking about this to a stranger after so many years. He still kept his wife’s framed photograph on his bedside table each night. Still spoke to her under his breath in the mornings. He frowned suddenly. You wanted to ask me about the war, he said.
That’s what I’m doing, sir.
No it isn’t.
She gave him a long appraising look and then closed her little notebook and curled her fingers over the top of it and smiled gently. Can I get you something to drink, Mr. Pinkerton?
No.
Soda water? Some tea?
Ask me something else, he said.
When his father collapsed in the storehouse headquarters at Gaines’s Mill it was two days before the Confederate offensive at Malvern Hill, and already dusk, and the slaughter had slowed to a groan. The door to the storehouse had been torn off and taken someplace away and the flies were thick in the doorway. Though the great batteries had fallen silent in the trees the hollering of boys clutching rifles and of men screaming in fear was still clattering and echoing in the fields. There was a gutter of the lantern and William had looked up to see his father step back from the map and stand very still and then all at once he fell. William lunged forward. Caught him under the arms and staggered under the man’s bulk and then fell with him, ungainly and awkward as a calf. His father had been in a fever for days and not sleeping, skin blistering with sweat, shirt sleeves drenched in the heat, a greyness in his face. He had conceded nothing to it.
A runner was sent. The litter bearers took their time but came at last and rolled him moaning into the sling and William walked alongside them in the mud off the boardwalks with a hand slick on his father’s boiling skin. Loaded waggons were being dragged across the camp and there were men with their haversacks rolled standing in groups near the southerly road. Someone was shouting. Someone was always shouting.
In the hospital tent they set his father shuddering down among the rows of the dying and his eyes rolled whitely back in his skull. William had never seen his father sick and the sight of it made him afraid. That tent was a large tent, along the walls hung lanterns creaking on their iron rings. The sick and the mutilated were dumped on rough beds of piled corn shucks, the smell was staggering. He saw boys with their bowels shot out doubled over and seething with the pain and they made no sound. Others blinded with stained bandages wrapped over their faces, others with arms in slings, with wrists dangling wrong. He saw orderlies digging with calipers for bullets or grapeshot in the legs of half-naked men, their colleagues holding them down as they writhed. The ground was wet with muck and William’s boots slucked quietly where he stood and he realized in disgust that it was blood that had soaked the earth and when he looked behind him he saw a slow foaming gutter of blood running through the mouth of the tent. He was all of sixteen years old.
Pa, he said. I’ll go fetch a doctor. You just stay here.
A hot thorny hand grabbing at his wrist. Willie?
I’m here Pa. It’s me.
Willie what is it Willie what.
But then his father closed his eyes and began to shake violently and his teeth were clenched.
He went out. There were wounded in the aisles trying to walk through their pain and William pressed gingerly past them and lifted the flap of the tent. There was an ancient sentry posted at the door in the twilight, he held out a grimy hand. In his eye something unhinged and terrible.
I’m looking for a doctor, sir, William said. There’s a man needs quinine in there.
Don’t everyone. The sentry’s weathered face stared him down. As if gauging the boy’s age in a baffled stupor. A jerk of his bearded jaw. Go on through there, son.
The slick mud of the boardwalk. A small tent standing open just beyond.
It was the field surgery. When William stepped in through the open flap he was struck at once by the stink. The ripe wet smell of shit and burned flesh. No one took any notice of him. A trestle table had been rigged up using an old door and two sawhorses and there was a man writhing upon it. His wrists were gripped hard, his head was held in place, there was an orderly with his bare arms wrapped around the man’s leg at the knee as if he were a colt to be branded. A doctor in his shirt sleeves was bent over the wounded with his back to William and his arms were working furiously. Blood pouring down the table into the mud. A steady wet rasping. The muffled groans of the sufferer. When the doctor turned his face William saw he had his teeth clenched down around a lit cigar and sweat dripping from his nose and all at once William understood he was sawing off the man’s leg.
He did not speak. Left the tent in a daze. His hands clutching at his thighs, doubled up and retching. The air was hot, the flies thick. He staggered through them. He could hear horses nearby, the creak of waggons loading. He stared out at the fires in the field beyond. There was a small pile of grey firewood in the long grass behind the tent and as he turned to go he caught the glint of eyes staring back at him. A dog, standing very quiet, very still. Then an orderly came out of the darkness with something in his arms and he dumped it onto the pile and gave William a strange look as he went back inside and William saw it was a man’s leg, and that the sticks were not sticks, but feet and arms and hands.
When he got back his father had twisted onto one side and his legs were hot to the touch and spraddled the bedding like a bad saddle and William did not know what to do but wrestle him back into place. He felt sick and frightened and young. There was a man wearing a stained apron over a vest and shirt sleeves walking down the far aisle with two orderlies at his side and William waved to him in a panic and he came angrily over. Thick-necked, thick-wristed, like a pugilist at a country fair. Sleeves tied off into knots and blood in his knuckles. He was a doctor.
He’s sick, sir, said William. Despite his youth he was tall and the doctor had to raise his eyes to meet his own. It’s the fever, sir. The malaria.
What’s a goddamn civilian doing in my tent? the doctor said.
He’s sick with the fever, sir, said an orderly. He’s not a civilian. This is Major Allen.
I’m not talking about the patient.
William flushed.
The second orderly had already turned away and William saw this with a rising sense of terror. The doctor was wiping his hands up and down his apron, back to front, like a butcher. His pale whiskers bristl
ing, bruises under his eyes.
Please, sir. He’s on General McClellan’s staff, sir. He’s the head of the Secret Service.
He’s a spy?
William felt the heat rise to his cheeks. He’s the spy, sir, he said angrily. If you want to call it that. Don’t let him die, sir. Please.
The doctor turned his face aside and spat into the mud and wiped his mouth with an open hand and stared hard at William. He said nothing. Then he reached for his notepad and scrawled out a ticket for quinine and stuffed it with distaste into William’s hand as if it were a soiled handkerchief and turned and without so much as a glance at William’s father walked away.
It had been that way for weeks. After a month of hot rain and foul vapours the mosquitoes had bred in the millions. Malaria had boiled up out of the swamps and into the blood-streams of the Federal army and for weeks already men had been shivering in the ranks, collapsing in the pickets. Some too weak to sight their rifles, some too weak to lift a hand. Even when the Confederates rushed in waves of grey from the treeline, screaming. Even when the bayonets slid between their ribcages. There were men in the field tents who had been carved to pieces by enemy fire and men who had been gutted by disease and the wounded would die bravely, the sick would suffer in cowardice. That was how it was. Ask any surgeon. No soldier worth his brass fell out for shitting his pants. The quartermasters ran out of quinine by the third week of June and after that the doctors left the shivering masses to their fevers.
William ransacked his father’s pockets and turned out a riveted leather billfold and this he tucked down the front of his tunic. He took his father’s Colt and checked its chamber then slipped it into the pocket of his coat and he squeezed his father’s shoulder.
In the lantern light his father’s chin was a crescent of darkness. His flushed throat trembling, as if palsied. A boy across the tent started to scream.
He went out.
The Confederates had not overrun them but William could see the chaos of the camp and the exhaustion of the men as they kicked down their tents, slung up their packs in the firelight. There were soldiers standing in a daze around small fires and the air was already cooling though the ground felt hot still and the heat poured up off it like something pestilential and evil. William went quickly, standing aside in the mud when tired men crowded past on the boardwalks, and at last he shrugged up his shoulders and just waded through the muck. There were others hurrying through it also. He could not see what it was he sloshed through though he had some idea having watched the soldiers void themselves in it and the cooks dump their scraps and the sutlers kick aside their opened cans like razored shells into the stew of it.