By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  The quartermasters had already started to crate up their stores and they took what they could but the packing seemed crazed and fearful and made no sense. There were shelves of tinned beans and boxes of cigars left unsealed but a crate of soap had been nailed and cross-nailed shut. Some stared at William and some shook their heads and some did not bother to reply. The sutlers were rougher. Laughing and pushing each other drunkenly aside. One lashed out with a boot but lost his footing as he did so and William turned away.

  As he was leaving a boy his own age took him by the sleeve and drew him aside out of the light and said, I know where you can get quinine.

  William looked at him. There was a hunger to the boy, a viciousness, that made him uneasy. He wore a filthy Union infantry shirt.

  Goin to cost you though.

  How much?

  A pale tip of a tongue. Crooked brown teeth. He cocked his head and said, Five dollars.

  The boy’s small eyes were wet in the darkness.

  Show me, William said.

  The boy set off through the grass behind the tents and he did not look back to see that William followed. There were fires in the night, wearied soldiers sitting around them. As they walked William slid his fingers down his shirt and took out five bills from his father’s wallet and slipped them into his trouser pocket. The boy led him to a small fire where a man sat turning strips of bacon over in a pan with a knife and he raised his eyes and watched them approach but he did not stop at his labours.

  Orville, the boy said. This here’s lookin for the quinine.

  The man frowned. A long line of stubble along his jaw. Thick black moustaches and heavy eyebrows and greasy grey hair clotted down his back. He punched out his cap and set it on his head and grunted. He don’t look sick.

  It’s not for me, William said foolishly.

  It’s six dollars, the man said.

  He said five.

  Seven.

  William looked at the boy and the boy spat and shrugged and no one said anything.

  All at once the man smiled. All right, all right, all right, all right, he said. Let’s just take it easy now. You hungry?

  He held out a leaf of rasher on his knife but William did not move to take it and instead put his hand in his pocket.

  Says he’s got money, Orville, the boy said. He sidled over and sat on a log near the fire and reached into a satchel and withdrew a tall green bottle. It was whiskey.

  I said quinine, William said.

  There’s quinine in it, the boy said.

  You put that away, the man said. And you. You seat yourself down.

  He bit the bacon from the blade and chewed it slowly. The boy was dragging a stick through the dirt with the bottle clamped between his knees and William frowned and turned his face into the darkness. He could hear enlisted men stamping through the muck, muttering.

  The man grunted. Interesting uniform you got on there.

  William glanced uneasily around.

  Where you say you were fightin today? the man said.

  William blinked. He took his hand from his pocket and in it was his father’s Colt and his hand was very steady.

  I’ll take the bottle, he said. Five dollars. If it’s really quinine.

  The man rested the blade of his knife on his thigh and he stared up at the Colt. He smiled a disappointed smile. It’s quinine, he said.

  The boy did not smile. His two hands still clutching the bottle by the neck.

  William held out the five dollars to the boy and the man nodded and the boy took it and William took the bottle. It was not heavy. He took two deliberate steps backward away from the fire without turning around and the boy watched with glittering eyes. Then he turned and went.

  At the hospital they had taken his father from the tent and dumped him outside in the cold among those suffering dysentery and other hopeless cases and it took William several minutes to find him. He was on the far side of those dying boys and he kneeled beside him and put a hand on his wrist and his father opened his burning eyes.

  Willie, he whispered. Your mother was here.

  He did not know if there was quinine in that whiskey but he uncorked the bottle and cradled his father’s skull in his hand and drew the bottle to his lips. A flare of light from a passing torch burned through the buckled green glass, passed and was gone.

  Go on, drink, he whispered. Good. Like that.

  His father drank off a third of the whiskey then started to cough and twisted onto his side and coughed and coughed. William tucked the bottle in his shirt, the glass cool against his skin. Then his father lay back on the rugged husks and William watched him and after a while he lay down next to him, feeling the heat pour from his father’s flesh, and he pulled the coat up over them, and closed his eyes, and together they slept.

  The next morning dawned muggy and hot. There was mist in the long yellow grass. Bodies lay around them tangled on the corn husks and all looked grey and still and he could see in the nearest the white staring eyes of the dead. He lifted his face and looked at his father and then tucked his coat more tightly against his father’s sleeping form and rubbed at his neck and he rose.

  The sentries were gone. The low mist crept over the ground and there were no fires burning in the camp. The mud underfoot had thickened. Tangles of rope, broken crates, clothing and dry goods strewn over the field. During the night most of the tents had been struck, Porter’s V Corps had moved out with the waggons, there were only the dying and the stragglers left. He reached for the whiskey in his shirt but it was gone.

  He did not know what to do. He went out in search of something to eat but could find only a box of salt crackers and these he tore into with his teeth bared and the crumbs exploding. A weak sunlight was coming in through the grey trees. On a low rise he found the sutlers’ tents slumped and pulled off their stakes and their goods turned out in the mud. On his way back he lifted the flap of the hospital tent and saw the beds evacuated. He did not go into the surgery.

  There was a man standing over his father when he returned and he felt something cold go through him. The man’s back was to him and he was rubbing one hand slowly on his pant leg and the sound of it seemed all at once eerie and awful and menacing.

  William came up on the other side of his sleeping father. The Colt still in his pocket.

  What do you want, he said.

  The man was wearing a forage cap with a small brass balloon insignia on it. He lifted his face.

  He had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. His eyes were very blue. He had been burned once and the skin had scarred over and the man’s cheeks and mouth and nose looked soft and pitted and shiny like poured wax.

  William took the Colt from his pocket. What happened to you?

  The man grunted. Slept through the muster, he said. Look at these poor bastards.

  William watched him.

  The man looked up and saw the Colt. Jesus, lad. I got left behind. It happens.

  William said nothing.

  I ain’t a deserter.

  I meant what happened to your face.

  The man’s eyes fixed on William and then his mouth twisted into a smile. A hydrogen balloon ignited it, he said. I was an aeronaut before all this. A balloonist. The man gestured at William’s father with a gnarled hand. I reckon you’re going to want some help with him. What is it? Malaria?

  I think so.

  The burned man nodded. I’d say so.

  If I can just get him to headquarters.

  The burned man stepped closer in the warming mud and leaned over his father and stared at his face and after a moment said softly, I’ll be damned. When he looked up the expression in his eyes had darkened. You know who this is?

  Major Allen. Of McClellan’s staff. William lowered the Colt. You know him?

  I’m an aeronaut, kid. We’re in intelligence ourselves.

  William took a step forward. Will you help me with him? he said in a low urgent voice.

  The man peered around as if thinking better of
it. At last he nodded. I guess we’re going the same way, he said.

  They took little. Someone had been through William’s things in the night but he still had his bedroll and a pair of dry socks and a waterskin and he took these along with whatever food he could scrounge up. All this he slung over one shoulder and with his father slumping wearily between them the three began the slow walk southward to the James River. The road was rutted and the mud two feet deep in places and everywhere they saw evidence of the Union army’s retreat. Rifles discarded in the mud. Sacks of food. Thick officers’ coats with fur collars and the arms stitched in relief. They touched none of it.

  There was no sign of Confederate scouts though they knew the rebels would be coming. They talked little. William’s father drifted and muttered and shook his head and coughed. His skin was hot and bloodless. By mid-morning they had come upon the army’s rearguard and began to pass the soldiers on the side of the road, some turned out with boots pulled off and rubbing at their feet, others sitting with their rifles between their knees and faces bent earthward. All were weighed down with ransacked stores from the fleeing sutlers, cigars stuffed in their mouths, pockets packed down with bars of soap, crates of cigars on their shoulders, some crazed few were rolling enormous slow barrels of whiskey over the ruts in the road. There was a terrible carnival aspect to it all. One soldier lay spread-eagled in the road, drunk. Another shifted boxes of foot powder from a broken tin trunk into a wheelbarrow.

  They walked shuffling past. A burned man, a sick man, a boy. No one challenged them.

  They slept in a clearing with their backs to the trees, listening for the sound of an army on the road. The cold grass sticking to their legs. That night the temperature dropped and they folded hands into their armpits for warmth. They did not risk a fire and in the morning when they rose William’s father was worse.

  He’s going to die, the burned man said.

  No he won’t.

  You’ve got to get him to a doctor. He won’t make it out of here.

  He’s my father.

  The burned man squinted up at the grey sky. I know it, he said.

  The day grew hot again. There were waggons on the road when they set out and the drivers told them to head for Savage’s Station. All were heavily laden, none could spare a space for William’s father. William cursed them and they kicked out their boots but it was halfhearted and pointless and no one drew a gun. The great wheels banging and creaking over the ruts. The starved horses with their drooping heads, their breath pluming out before them. It started to rain a warm mist-like rain and William wiped his hair back from his face and they went on.

  They reached Savage’s Station along the railroad by noon. Rows of high grey tents in the rain. A confusion of men. A fenced perimeter stood in place around the hospital and they passed pockets of infantry huddled in the trees and then they were in the chaos of the evacuating camp. The hospital was a clapboard shack with wounded figures huddled outside it and there was a big tent with the flaps tied back and a dark smell in the beyond. A big waggon train stood sealed and under guard without the horses to haul it away. They pushed through the crowds and at the entrance to the hospital William set his father down on a broken ladder that served as a bench and the burned man stared fiercely out at the figures in the rain.

  You’ll have to manage him now, he said. I need to find Colonel Lowe. Runs the Balloon Corps. I need to report in.

  William looked at him and he shrugged.

  What, the burned man said. You thought I was army? Aviators are civilians, kid. The uniform doesn’t mean anything. He twisted his ravaged face, nodded at William’s father. Get him to the infirmary, he said, and turned to go.

  William looked around at the whirl of men and the grey blanketed wounded in the muck and something in it all made him uneasy. Wait, he called.

  The burned man turned.

  I don’t think we should stop.

  He needs medical attention, kid.

  Not here.

  He needs quinine. Look at him.

  William got to his feet.

  The burned man had taken two steps out of the yard and paused and now he came back. I know who your father is, he said quietly. I mean before the war. I know what he used to do. I know about the Agency.

  William had been assured only two men in the ranks knew his father’s real identity: Benjamin Porter, and General McClellan himself. If you know who he is, he said cautiously, then help me get him out of here. The Confederates are coming, this place will be overrun.

  It won’t be.

  Please.

  I’m not getting myself killed over this, kid.

  So come with us.

  The burned man took off his cap and raised his face and closed his eyes and the rain was coming down over him and into his open mouth. Your father, he said, was investigating graft in Philadelphia when my brother was working for the post office. Started working in the office with him, got friendly. Turned on him. My brother got seven years.

  William stood quiet in the rain.

  He’s still in jail.

  He was guilty.

  Maybe.

  William met the burned man’s gaze. He was guilty and got put away, he said coldly. I wish I could say I was sorry for him. Maybe he’s lucky. If he’s in jail then he’s not down here.

  The burned man scowled, nodded. Well he was a bastard.

  William looked at his father.

  Not him. My brother. You really are his kid? Pinkerton’s?

  He nodded. William.

  The burned man studied him. Ignatius Spaar, he said.

  I can’t carry him myself, Mr. Spaar.

  Spaar scowled at the Federal soldiers leaving through the gates with their packs clanking and rifles slung. My brother always was a bastard, he muttered. He always was that.

  Against his better instincts he waited but he did not approach Sumner’s staff and the hour came and went while Spaar hunted for some word of his fellow aeronauts. William sat with his father, he stood with his father, he dragged his father through the mud to the southerly road. Then out of the shifting crowd a figure stepped forward and set a hand on William’s arm and when he turned he found himself staring into the wide powerful face of a black man, the rain running from his chin. He reached up and wiped a hat shapeless as a feed bag from his head and his nostrils flared.

  Look like you ready to drop, the man said in a soft rich voice. A flash of gold teeth.

  Mr. Porter? William said, confused.

  Aw, now. Take it easy. He reached down and hefted William’s father with one massive arm and crossed to a narrow shelter beside the fence and propped the feverish man against a barrel and murmured, Now what you so poorly with, Major? and lifted his face and felt for his heartbeat.

  It’s the fever, William said. We’re trying to get him somewhere safe.

  Shoot. That ain’t here.

  I know it.

  Sally’s back at Harrison’s Landing. She goin to know what to do.

  Benjamin Porter and his wife had been working with William’s father in service to the Union since the outbreak of the war, running spies across the lines under the guise of slaves. They had been friends of the Pinkertons since fleeing the South three years before when they had hidden under the floorboards of the Pinkerton kitchen. William trusted the man the way he trusted his own brother. He could not stop himself now from reaching up and holding the man’s arm and he felt a sudden upwelling of relief but then they heard the sound of firing from behind them and men were running.

  Spaar materialized out of the chaos and looked at Ben with a curious expression. A grizzled old sergeant was with him.

  Mr. Spaar, Ben said. You a long way from the balloonists.

  Spaar tilted his cap back from his eyes, the rain swishing from the leather brim. I’m looking for them now, he said. Are they all up at Harrison’s Landing already?

  The sergeant who had returned with him ran a hand over his face to wipe away the rain. You all should get ou
t now if you’re going, he said. Magruder’s units are coming out of the west. Jackson’s in the north. It’ll get hot here.

  Get out to where? William asked.

  Malvern Hill. The companies are regrouping. They’ll make a stand there.

  Ben shifted William’s father on his shoulder. This here is Major Allen. Of McClellan’s staff. Ain’t there some waggon he can ride out on?

  The sergeant squinted. If there was a waggon I’d be on it myself, boy. You get him over to headquarters at Malvern House.

  Malvern House.

  Yes.

  Spaar grimaced. How do we get there?

  A Spencer repeater started shooting from the lines its quick sharp crack and then several others started up and the sergeant was already turning away. Follow the goddamn army, he called. You’ll know it’s ours by the backs of their damn trousers.

  And trudged through the thick mud with his shoulders hunched and his long hair matted down his back and his Colt slapping at his leg.

  It was late afternoon when they set out and still raining in a long slow languid rain and the water was warm on their necks and soon they were soaked through. Discarded packs and greatcoats and rifles littered the ditches but they did not stop to pick through them. The soldiers escorting them had been drinking and would stumble to their knees and shoot at every shadow in the fog. No one helped them carry his father and the mud on the road was deep, the going slow. Behind them the big guns started to sound but they walked on without a word and by dusk the guns had fallen silent and they understood Savage’s Station had been overrun.

  A lifetime later William would watch the columnist slide one long thigh up over the other, adjust the hem of her dress in the quiet of that cabin. The ocean light fading, the brass portholes burning bright and cold high up in the walls. He reached for the pitcher of water, an orchid of light.