by Jon Walter
I grip the other end and we lift the coffin off the cart. It’s heavy. Takes both my hands and a shoulder to get it round the back of the shop where there’s a barn. When we go inside the place is dark and full of coffins and we rest ours on a stack near the door as the doctor hurries in after us. He pushes past, tying a label to the handle and without thinking, I take hold of it to read the name. Colonel Barnaby Jones, 1st Delaware Infantry. That’s what it says.
‘So you can read, can you?’ The doctor watches me closely. ‘Can you write too?’
I don’t see why I should lie anymore and I ain’t got much to be proud of. ‘I can do the both as good as anyone else I’ve met.’
‘See, Jermaine?’ The doctor turns to the boy. ‘He’s already more useful than you. How do you like that?’
Jermaine looks like he hates me.
The doctor takes hold of my shoulder. ‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Samuel.’
He bristles very slightly. ‘No “sir” when you speak to me? Well, never mind. No “please” or “thank you” either, I bet, but that’s OK, that’s just as it should be. You’re a free man, Samuel. You can bestow your honours as you choose. But congratulations are due.’ He shakes my shoulder, smiling. ‘You’ve just been promoted. Not bad on your first day, eh? There’s no more money in it, mind, but it might mean your work is a little less arduous than it was only a moment ago.’
‘Can I have some food?’
The doctor offers his bag of sweets again and I take one. He don’t offer one to Jermaine, putting ’em back in his pocket as the driver comes in out of the rain. The doctor rubs his hands together, chuckling. ‘I picked out a scholar. Do you see, Drudge? The boy can read.’ He wags a finger in the man’s face. ‘I still have an instinct for good character, Drudge, whatever you might think of me.’
He turns back to me, shaking me by the hand. ‘Welcome, welcome! I’m Doctor Klinghopper. You’ve already met Jermaine. This is Drudge. You won’t find either of ’em have much in the way of conversation, but they’re survivors – oh, I’ll give ’em that – and it’s not a bad gift to have at this particular moment in American history. Wouldn’t you agree, Samuel?’
I don’t know about that. I still don’t know what it is he wants me to do. I look back in the direction of the shop and move the sweet to the side of my mouth before I ask, ‘Who’s the man asleep in the window? Does he work here too?’
The doctor laughs at that. ‘We don’t actually know who he is, Samuel, but that shouldn’t stop you from making his acquaintance. Come along. Come with us and say hello.’
He leads the way outside, all of us in a line as we walk around to the front of the shack and go in through the shop door. The room is cold and smells of turpentine. We line up along the window and the doctor spreads his hands wide, taking in the man asleep on the sill. ‘Behold, Samuel – the unknown soldier. Miraculously preserved and restored to us in the form of a working companion.’ He bows and brings his lips closer to my ear. ‘We call him Lucky because he brings in the customers – those that have had the foresight to plan for their likely demise.’
Drudge sneers and Jermaine sniggers like a dog with a cold.
The doctor walks across to a side table, picks up a decanter and pours himself a drink. He holds the glass in the air like he’s going to make a toast. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Samuel. We shan’t wake him with our loud talk, will we, Drudge? Do you want to tell our new friend why we won’t wake Lucky up?’
‘He’s dead,’ says Drudge.
I look again, but the sleeping soldier appears to be in better health than all of us. He’s got good colour in his skin and his cheeks are fresh and plump. But he ain’t breathing. Now that I look properly, I can see he ain’t breathing.
‘Go closer,’ the doctor prompts me with a hand in my back and I step closer to the corpse. ‘You could almost kiss him, couldn’t you?’ The doctor puts an arm around my shoulder. He’s close enough I can smell the whiskey in his glass. ‘That’s the beauty of your new position, Samuel. We’re in the business of bringing the dead back to life. And very rewarding it is too.’
I swallow the last of the sweet. ‘Like Lazarus?’
‘Exactly. We’re raising the dead. Just like Lazarus.’ He takes his arm away, produces a card from his top pocket and hands it to me. ‘Go on and read it out loud. Impress me some more, why don’t you?’
I clear my throat. ‘It says, “Doctor Klinghopper, Medical Practitioner and Embalmer”.’
‘Yes, yes. Oh, you’re really very good. Quite exceptional.’ He takes back the card, nodding enthusiastically. ‘What’s your handwriting like? Are you neat?’ He waves the other two away. ‘Drudge, Jermaine, haven’t you got something to be getting along with? Food perhaps? Samuel looks hungry to me. Why don’t you make us all some food?’
They disappear out the door and the doctor pulls aside a curtain at the back of the shop and shows me in behind. A naked man is spread across the top of a long wooden table and this one’s dead for sure, all pale and shrunken on the bone. His uniform lies across the back of a chair. I spot a wound in his arm and another in his chest, and although they’ve been stitched, they look bad enough to have done for him.
The doctor puts down his glass, unties the label from the man’s toe and hands it to me. ‘Sit down at the desk and take hold of the pen.’ He settles me down, gives me ink and paper, then takes a letter from the desk drawer. ‘I want you to transcribe this letter but change the name and address to this man’s details. Do you think you can do that?’
I begin to copy it word for word and it says this:
Dear Sir or Madam,
It is with regret that I must confirm the death of your son.
I have managed to reclaim his body from the battlefield, at much risk to myself, and by using the latest techniques in embalming have preserved him as you will have known and loved him before these troubled times. He surely is a handsome young man.
It is entirely possible for him to be shipped home and be with you in less than a week. You will find him delivered in a fit condition to allow for an open coffin, should you wish him to lie in state prior to his funeral. I believe you will find the results of my embalming procedure truly miraculous and fit for the hero your son most surely is.
Please could you write to me by return of post, providing for the sum of $100 so that I may release his body and make the necessary arrangements for his return.
Yours in sincerity,
Dr Martin Klinghopper, Medical Practitioner and Embalmer
As I write out the letter, I see that the doctor has inserted a needle and tube into the armpit of the naked man and is pumping a liquid into him from a tub placed on the floor beneath the table. After a short while he puts the pump down and comes across to check on my work. ‘You have a neat hand, Samuel. A very neat hand.’ He points to the bottom of the page. ‘But raise that figure to two hundred dollars, would you? Believe it or not, this boy had already risen to the rank of brigadier before his untimely demise. I imagine his family will be very keen for his return.’
*
There’s no table or chair in the barn. There’s no furniture at all except for the coffins, some of em empty, some of em not. They’re stacked up against the walls or left on the floor so we can sit on ’em. I reckon I’ll have to sleep in one tonight.
The doctor lives alone in the shop and he has oil lamps to see by but Jermaine, Drudge and I have only a single grease lamp and we eat our supper off our knees without being properly able to see our food, though I ain’t complaining cos it’s hot food – rice and pork – and I can feel the good it does me as I chew upon the gristle.
Jermaine and Drudge don’t like me. They think I’m too clever by half and they’re only interested in making me look small.
‘You seen the killing fields yet?’ Drudge asks me, sneering. I don’t know if it’s worse when he speaks to me or when he don’t and I shake my head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think so.’
> ‘I been in a battle,’ I tell him quickly. ‘I floated down a river on a log and got caught in the crossfire.’
‘You seen dead men?’
I nod.
Drudge puts his face up next to mine. ‘Bet you’ve never been up close though. Have you?’ I think of Gerald and Hubbard. I couldn’t have been any closer. But I won’t tell him that. I don’t want to.
Drudge smiles, satisfied that I’m only half the man he is, even if I can read and write.
Outside the barn the rain starts up again, tapping impatiently at the wooden slats above our heads.
‘Ever seen a white man turn black?’ Now he’s teasing me. ‘You’ll see it tomorrow. You’ll see plenty, cos there’s boys out there been dead for weeks.’ He shows me a full set of teeth like there ain’t a thing could make him happier. ‘Their skin’ll be the same colour as ours.’
‘You don’t know how some of ’em look.’ Jermaine shouts out excitedly from the darkness near my feet where he lies in a coffin. ‘You’ll see it for yourself tomorrow. I saw one yesterday had a mouthful of maggots. Can you believe that?’
I’ve already seen things I wouldn’t have believed, and none of ’em were good. Neither are Drudge or Jermaine. I try to impress em by bragging. ‘When I was at the river, I heard Whistling Dick.’
Jermaine lifts himself from the floor, enough that I get a glimpse of his face in the dim light. ‘You reckon you heard that gun?’
I nod.
‘Nah. You’re lying. If you’d heard Whistling Dick, you’d be dead. Everybody says so.’
‘And you ain’t dead, are you?’ Drudge says, looking at me like I’m nothing.
‘No.’ I say quietly, feeling like I want to be. ‘I ain’t dead.’
*
In the morning we take the cart up to the camp. Drudge is driving, sat next to the doctor, and I’m in the back with Jermaine. We’ve been told to smile as we go through the camp and we do. Sometimes we wave at the soldiers and the doctor lifts his hat and shouts out, ‘Good day to you, sir,’ to anyone who meets his eye. He says it’s all part of the service.
The first tents we come to are full of contraband. Women are cleaning pots and pans or cooking outside makeshift shelters, and their kids walk alongside our cart with empty buckets, on their way to fetch water. We pass a line of men stood waiting for work, though it’s too late in the day for ’em to get anything that’ll pay well.
Ahead of us, a hillside of white tents stands out of range of the guns and we take the cart through the middle till we’re out the other side and closer to the front. We set up a table and chair for the doctor where he’ll spend the day canvassing for trade by handing his cards out to soldiers who’ll pin ’em to the front of their jackets, so that whoever finds their bodies will return ’em directly to us.
It ain’t raining like it was yesterday. There’s even a bit of sun now and then to cheer the place up. ‘Take the litter, Samuel,’ the doctor tells me. ‘Take it and go with Drudge and Jermaine. Watch them work and see what they do. They are highly skilled operatives in the field, so take good notice of them and they will teach you well.’
Drudge thrusts two long poles at my chest. ‘Carry this.’ I take one end and Jermaine takes the other. Drudge leads us through the camp, keeping out the way of horses or carts that come our way. Between the straight white lines of tents I glimpse soldiers doing drills, and elsewhere they’re sitting on stools, sometimes cleaning rifles or washing their faces from small tin bowls. No one seems to be doing much fighting, though every now and then there’s still an explosion, a crack and boom that shakes the air, then comes back to us off the hillside before rumbling away into the distance. The first one makes me flinch but then I know better than to show it.
Past the last tent, the ground opens out into a wash of mud that rises more steeply to the ridge. We pass a picket line of horses. At the first outpost Drudge nods to a sentry as we walk through a defence that’s been made by piling cotton bales two deep and two high, then driving stakes down into the ground behind ’em. The next line of defence has a row of mortars dug into a bank and the guns look like little black pigs with their heads in a trough.
We move out into open ground and I know we’ve reached the battlefield when we quicken our pace across the wet mud. ‘Hurry,’ orders Drudge and Jermaine thrusts the poles forward. I got to skip along to keep up. There ain’t no trees here, and the only cover comes from rocks too big to move. I see the first dead soldier after we’ve gone a hundred yards, but then a cloud moves aside and the sunlight picks ’em out for me, a whole field of scattered bodies, each one a patch of blue against the black-brown earth.
Drudge takes in all of ’em with a quick eye as he leads us forward, moving lightly over the broken ground. Sometimes he changes direction and we follow him, turning the litter sharply to the right or left, getting close enough to see whether a man’s got stripes and is worth our while.
‘This one could be all right.’ We stop at a fella lying face down and Drudge turns him over with a foot. It gives me the shivers, thinking it might be Hubbard or Gerald and that’s stupid, but it’s what I think.
Drudge kneels quickly. He undoes a button on the man’s tunic, puts his hand inside and pulls out a pencilled sketch of a girl – a sweetheart. He turns it over and I see her name, Louise Caburn, and a date, 1860. Drudge thrusts it under my nose. ‘Is that an address?’ I shake my head. ‘Thought not,’ he says then drops the letter and pushes past me.
Another fifty yards on and the bodies are more frequent. Drudge thinks we could cover more ground by splitting up and he directs me away to his left. ‘Take that side over there. Look for officers. Check for an address; otherwise they ain’t no good to us. Pick the clean ones too. Understand? They can’t have no damage to their face unless it looks heroic.’
I leave the litter with Jermaine and start out on my own, making for three corpses that lie close to one another until I see they ain’t right. There’s not enough of em left. I can tell before I get too close. So I change direction, watching where I tread as I try and pick my way through the blood and bones of battle. I look back across my shoulder, unsure how far I should wander away from the others. Jermaine drags the litter over the stretch of wet earth between the two of us. He’s turning clods of mud with his foot, looking bored while he waits for one of us to find a customer.
And then I see another possibility. This one’s lying spread across a low flat stone with open arms, like he’s inviting me over. I go closer. His clean-shaved chin looks promising and he’s still got his rifle, it’s right there by his side, and I reckon that’s a good sign too, so I hurry across to him. He’s got a young face but I can’t see a wound on it. He’s just perfect. I step slowly toward him, coming close enough that I could reach out and touch the glinting buttons on his tunic. He’s got a cutlass too, still hanging from his belt, with a twist of gold braid falling across it like a ponytail.
I edge closer, too scared to touch him, hoping a letter will just drop at my feet from the pocket of his tunic.
Jermaine shouts out, ‘You got one?’ and I turn and shout back, ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
I step up onto the rock, putting my boot near the man’s shoulder. There’s no need to be afraid of him. There’s no way that he can hurt me. But I don’t like looking him in the face and I turn my head aside as I reach out a hand and slip it inside his breast pocket. I feel a wallet and remove it, stepping quickly back off the rock and turning my back on the man before I open it up. First thing I see is a five-dollar bill. I fold it quickly, twice over, and kneel to put it down the inside of my shoe. Now, that’s stealing, I know it is, and it don’t matter if the fella’s dead, it’s still not right – but if I don’t do it, someone else will. Probably Drudge or Jermaine. The doctor for sure. And five dollars is a lot of money.
I make the sign of the cross, whispering, ‘Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned,’ then look round to see if anyone saw me do it. Jermaine ain’t even watching me. He’s
looking the other way, out towards the enemy line.
I open the wallet back up, searching for a letter and I find one, not in an envelope like Drudge said, but that don’t matter because there’s an address across the top. I read the start of it, ‘To my darling mother, if you are reading this then I fear the worst …’
I don’t want to read more but I’m suddenly excited. ‘I got one, Jermaine.’ I wave at him across the battlefield. ‘Over here. I think I got a good one.’
All the fear I had is gone as I walk back to the soldier, stepping up onto the rock as though we’ve just become friends. It’s then I hear a faint, faraway wheeze. It’s so quiet I can hardly hear it, but it turns my blood cold. I got a strange sense he’s whistling at me. I look at his lips as my own mouth turns dry. And the whistling gets louder. I step back off the rock, stumbling down onto a knee as I turn, cos he’s alive for sure – I know he is. He’s alive and whistling at me. He’s whistling like a steam train and I turn in terror to Jermaine, but Jermaine ain’t where he was; he’s lying flat on the ground with his hands over his head. He’s screaming, ‘It’s Whistling Dick! It’s Whistling Dick!’
And then the breath of God blows through me to my bones.
Chapter 22
I am not alone.
They touch me.
They pick me up and put me down.
They put their hands upon my head.
*
The Devil took me for himself. He must have. Found me right there, under the sole of his boot, and dug me up again.
Now he’s in my head with needles and he’s stabbing at the good bits so it hurts like hell.
Sometimes the Devil smells of grass, but mostly he smells of whiskey.
*
Hell is full of people. Talking. I don’t know why.