by Chris Adrian
Hank dropped off to sleep as Walt read, but Walt kept on with the story, because he could tell that Hank’s new neighbor was listening attentively. His name was Oliver Barley. He had been tortured by Mosby’s Rangers, staked spread-eagled to the ground with bayonets through his hands and feet. Whenever Walt came near to try and speak with him, Barley would glare at him and say, “Shush!” And sometimes if Walt and Hank were speaking too loud, he’d pelt them with bandages sopped with the exudate from his hands. It was Walt’s ambition to be Barley’s friend, but the boy rejected all his friendly advances. Yet now he was listening.
“Do you like this story?” Walt ventured, stopping briefly in his reading.
“Hush up,” said Oliver Barley, and he turned away on his side. Walt might have gone on reading, but just then Dr. Walker came by and asked to borrow his Bible. She said she had news from the War Department.
“What’s the news?” he asked her.
“Nothing good,” she said. “It is dark, dark everywhere.” She wanted to read some Job, she said, to cheer herself. She took Walt’s Bible and walked off down the ward, putting her hand out now and then to touch a boy’s leg or foot as she passed. When she opened the door to leave, some music slipped in. It seemed to be borne along to Walt’s ears by a gust of frigid air. Voices were singing: “For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over.” Walt kissed Hank’s sweaty head, then followed Dr. Walker off the ward. He followed the song to an invalid chorus in Ward K, led by a young nurse who accompanied herself on a melodeon. The gas was turned down low, as if to heighten the effect of the candles held by all the singers. There were deep shadows all up and down the ward. Walt retreated into one of these, and put his head down and sang along.
Sometimes when he could not sleep, which was often, Walt would walk around the city, past the serene mansions on Lafayette Square, past the President’s house, where he would stop and wonder if a light in the window implied that Mr. Lincoln was awake and agonizing. One night he saw a figure in a long, trailing black veil move, lamp in hand, past a series of windows, and he imagined it must be Mrs. Lincoln, searching forlornly for her little boy, who had died two winters previous. Walt walked past the empty market stalls, along the ever-stinking canal, where he would pause, look down into the dirty water, and see all manner of things float by: boots and bonnets, half-eaten vegetables, animals. Once there was a dead cat drifting on a little floe of ice.
Walking on, he would pass into Murder Bay, where whores uttered long, pensive hoots at him, but generally left him alone. He would peek into alleys that housed whole families of “contraband.” On one occasion, a stout young girl had come out of the dark, pushing a wheelbarrow in which another girl was cuddled up with a small white dog in her lap. The little dog was yipping fearfully, but the girls were laughing. Walt traded them candy from his pocket for a gleeful ride in their wheelbarrow, the two of them pushing him along for a few yards until he fell out into the filthy road, laughing hysterically, the little dog jumping on him and catching its paws in his beard.
Walt would cut back along the canal, then across, sometimes watching the moon shine on the towers of the Smithsonian castle, and on the white roofs and white fence of Armory Square—the whole scene so expressively silent in the pale weak light. He would walk among the shrubs and trees of the Mall, sometimes getting lost on a footpath that went nowhere, but eventually he would cross the canal again and walk up to the Capitol. There was the great statue of General Washington, the one that everyone ridiculed because he was dressed in a toga. (It was said that his sword was raised in a threat to do harm to the country if his clothes were not returned.)
Walt liked the statue. He would crawl up into its lap and sprawl out, Pietà-like, or else put his arms around the thick marble neck and have a good wrenching cry. At dawn, Walt would stand outside the Capitol, writing his name in the snow with his urine, and he could smell the bread baking in the basement. He had a friend in the bakery who loaded him down with countless hot loaves. Walt would walk back to Armory Square, warmed by the bread in his coat, and sometimes he’d have enough so that every full-diet boy in a ward would wake with a still-warm loaf on his chest.
* * *
“They want to take my leg,” Hank told him. It was early May, and still cold. “I ain’t going to let them. You’ve got to get me a gun.”
“Hush,” said Walt. “They won’t take your leg.” In fact, it looked like they would have to. Just when Hank had seemed on the verge of good health, just when he had beaten the typhoid, the leg had flared up again and deteriorated rapidly. Dr. Woodhull cleaned the wound, prayed over it, swabbed it with whiskey, all to no avail. A hideous, stinking infection had taken root, and was spreading.
“I saw my brother last week,” Walt told Hank. “Marching with Burnside’s army. It was on Fourteenth Street. I watched for three hours before the Fifty-first came along. I joined him just before they came to where the President and General Burnside were standing on a balcony, and the interest of seeing me made George forget to notice the President and salute him!”
“Hush up!” said Oliver Barley.
Hank raised his voice a little. “They’ll take his leg, too. Or both his legs. He had better keep a good watch on them.”
“Yes,” said Walt. “The Ninth Corps made a very fine show indeed.” Hank gave a harrumph, and turned over on his side, clearly not wanting to talk anymore. Walt went looking for Dr. Woodhull, to discuss Hank’s condition, but couldn’t find him in his office. There was a pall of silence and gloom over all the wards. News of the horrible casualties accrued by General Grant in his Wilderness campaign had reached the hospital. Dr. Bliss and Mrs. Hawley were having a loud discussion as she changed dressings.
“Trust a drunk not to give a fig for our boys’ lives,” said Mrs. Hawley.
“He spends them like pennies,” said Dr. Bliss. “This war is an enterprise dominated by inebriates, charlatans, and fools.” Bliss gave Walt a mean look.
Walt asked if either of them had seen Dr. Woodhull. Neither of them replied, but the young man whose dressings were being changed told Walt that Dr. Woodhull had gone out to the dead house.
Walt found him there, among the bodies. There were only a few, just the dead from the last week. Dr. Woodhull was weeping over a shrouded form, Dr. Walker standing next to him, her hand on his shoulder. Even from across the room, even with decay thick in the air, the smell of whiskey that emanated from Woodhull’s body was overpowering.
“I knew him not,” Woodhull was saying, “but I knew him well!”
“Canning,” said Dr. Walker. “They’ll be sending us more boys. You need to come back, now.”
“Oh, Vicky,” he said, dropping tears on the head of the shroud, so that the features of the dead boy became slowly visible beneath the wet cloth. The boy had a thick mustache, and a mole on his cheek. “There’s such an awful lot of blood. You’d think they could do something with all that blood. A great work. Oughtn’t something great to be coming?”
Dr. Walker noticed Walt standing by the door. “Mr. Whitman,” she said. “If you would assist me?” Walt put his arm around Dr. Woodhull and bore him up, away from the body and out of the dead house. They put the doctor in an empty cot, in a half-empty ward.
“Oh, darling,” said Woodhull, “I don’t even want to think about it.” He turned over on his side and began to breathe deeply and evenly.
Dr. Walker took a watch from her pocket and looked at it. “A wire has come,” she said. “They’re moving a thousand boys from the field hospitals.” Then she leaned down close to Woodhull’s snoring face and said, “You had better be well and awake in five hours, sir.” She straightened up, adjusted her hat on her head, and uttered an explosive sigh. “General Stuart has died,” she said to Walt. “Did you know that? Shot by a lowly infantryman. I had a dream once that Stuart came for me on his horse, with garish feathers in his hat. ‘Come along with me, Mary,’ he said. ‘Not by your red beard, General Satan,’ said I. ‘G
et thee behind me.’” She paused a moment, and they stood together looking down at the serene Dr. Woodhull. “Do you suppose I did the right thing? Would you have gone with him?”
“No,” Walt said, “of course not.” But really he thought that he might have. He pictured himself riding west with General Stuart, to a place where the war could not touch them. He imagined the tickly feeling the General’s feathers would make in his nose as they rode to the extreme edge of the continent. And he thought of the two of them riding shirtless through sunny California, of reaching out their hands as they passed through vineyards, and of picking fat grapes from heavy vines.
“I got to get out,” said Hank. A week had passed, and the wounded from Spotsylvania had stuffed Armory Square to the gills. Hank’s leg was scheduled to come off in two days. In the dead house, a pile of limbs edged towards the ceiling.
“Settle down,” said Walt. “There’s no cause for alarm.”
“I won’t let them have it. You got to help me get out. I won’t make it if they take my leg. I know I won’t.” Hank had a raging fever, and tended to sink into delirium with the sunset.
“Dr. Walker is said to wield the fastest knife in the army. You’ll be asleep. You won’t feel it.”
“Ha!” said Hank. He gave Walt a long, wild look. “Ha!” He put his face in his pillow and wouldn’t talk anymore. Walt walked around the wards, meeting the new boys, then went to the chapel, where there were many services.
That night, unable to sleep, Walt made his usual tour of the city, stopping for a long time outside of Armory Square. He found himself outside of Hank’s window, and then inside, next to his bed. Hank was sleeping, his arm thrown up above his head, his sheet thrown off and his shirt riding up his hairy belly. Walt reached out and touched his shoulder.
“All right,” Walt said. “Let’s go.”
It was not a difficult escape. The hardest part was getting Hank’s trousers on. It was very painful for Hank to bend his knee, and he was feverish and disoriented. The night attendants were in another ward; they saw no one on their way out except Oliver Barley, who glared at them and then rolled over in his bed, but raised no alarm. They stole a crutch for Hank, but he fell on the Mall, and the crutch broke under him. He wept softly with his mouth in the grass. Walt picked him up and carried him on his back, towards the canal and over it, then into Murder Bay, where Hank cried to be put down. They rested on a trash heap teeming with small, crawling things.
“I think I want to sleep,” said Hank. “I’m so tired.”
“Go ahead, my dear,” said Walt. “I shall take care of you.”
“I would like to go home,” Hank said as he put his head against Walt’s shoulder. “Take me back to Hollow Vale. I want to see my sister.” Hank slowly fell asleep, still mumbling under his breath. They sat there for a little while.
If this heap were a horse, thought Walt, we could ride to California. “Never mind General Stuart,” Walt said aloud, taking Hank’s wet hand in his own. “In California there is no sickness. Neither is there death. On their fifth birthday, every child is made a gift of a pony.” He looked at Hank’s drawn face glowing eerily in the moonlight—he looked dead and returned from the dead. “In California, if you plant a dead boy under an oak tree, in just five days’ time a living hand will emerge from the soil. If you grasp that hand and pull with the heart of a true friend, a living body will come out of the earth. Thus in California death never separates true friends.” Walt looked awhile longer into Hank’s face. His eyes were darting wildly under the lids. Walt said, “Well, if we are going to get to California soon, we had best leave now.” But when eventually Walt picked him up he brought Hank back to the hospital.
“You will wash that beard before you come into my surgery,” said Dr. Woodhull. Walt stank of garbage. He went to a basin and Dr. Walker helped him scrub his beard with creosote, potassium permanganate, and Labarraque’s solution. Walt held a sponge soaked with chloroform under Hank’s nose, even though he hadn’t woken since falling asleep on the heap. He kept his hand on Hank’s head the whole time, but he could not watch as Dr. Walker cut in and Dr. Woodhull tied off the arteries. He looked down and saw blood seeping across the floor, into mounds of sawdust.
“That is America’s choicest blood on the floor,” Walt said to Dr. Woodhull, but he and Dr. Walker were too intent on their task to hear him. Walt fixed his attention on a lithograph on the far wall. It was torn from some book of antiquities, a depiction of reclining sick under the care of the priests of Aesclepius, whose statue dominated the temple. There was a snake-entwined staff in his hand, and a large friendly-looking stone dog at his feet. Every night for a thousand years, it said, the sick and despairing sought healing and dreams at the temples of Aesclepius. Walt closed his eyes and listened to the saw squeaking against Hank’s bones. He put his hand on Hank’s head and thought, Live, live, live.
Hank woke briefly.
“They got my leg,” he said. “You let them take it.”
“No,” said Walt. “I’ve got it right here.” The limb was in his lap, bundled in two clean white sheets. He would not let the nurses take it to the dead room. Walt passed it to Hank, who hugged it tight against his chest.
“I don’t want to die,” Hank said.
Walt packed his bag and sat on it, waiting at the station for the train that would take him back to Brooklyn. When it finally arrived, Walt stayed sitting on his bag, not even looking up at the train when it sat waiting noisily by the platform, and when the conductor asked him if he would board, he said nothing. When the train was gone again, he got up and went back to Armory Square. It was night. Hank’s bed was still empty. He sat down on it and rummaged in his coat for a pen and paper. He wrote in the dark:
Dear Friends,
I thought it would be soothing to you to have a few lines about the last days of your son, Henry Smith, of Company E of the 14th Missouri Volunteers. I write in haste, but I have no doubt anything about Hank will be welcome.
From the time he came into Armory Square Hospital until he died there was hardly a day but I was with him a portion of the time—if not in the day then at night—(I am merely a friend visiting the wounded and sick soldiers). From almost the first I feared somehow that Hank was in danger, or at least he was much worse than they supposed in the hospital. He had a grievous wound in his leg, and the typhoid, but as he made no complaint they thought him nothing so bad. He was a brave boy. I told the doctor of the ward over and over again he was a very sick boy, but he took it lightly and said he would certainly recover; he said, “I know more about these cases than you do—he looks very sick to you, but I shall bring him out all right.” Probably the doctor did his best—at any rate about a week before Hank died he got really alarmed, and after that all the doctors tried to help him but it was too late. Very possibly it would not have made any difference.
I believe he came here about January of ’63—I took to him. He was a quiet young man, behaved always so correct and decent. I used to sit on the side of his bed. We talked together. When he was bad with the typhoid I used to sit by the side of his bed generally silent, he was oppressed for breath and with the heat, and I would fan him—occasionally he would want a drink—some days he dozed a great deal—sometimes when I would come in he would reach out his hand and pat my hair and beard as I sat on the bed and leaned over him—it was painful to see the working of his throat to breathe.
Some nights I sat by his cot far into the night, the lights would be put out and I sat there silently hour after hour—he seemed to like to have me sit there. I shall never forget those nights in the dark hospital, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and the wounded lying around and this dear young man close by me, lying on what proved to be his death bed. I did not know his past life so much, but what I saw and know of he behaved like a noble boy—Farewell, deary boy, it was my opportunity to be with you in your last days, I had no chance to do much for you, nothing could be done, only you did not lie there among strangers wit
hout having one near who loved you dearly, and to whom you gave your dying kiss.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I have thus written rapidly whatever came up about Hank, and must now close. Though we are strangers and shall probably never see each other, I send you all Hank’s brothers and sister Olivia my love. I live when at home in Brooklyn, New York, in Portland Avenue, fourth floor, north of Myrtle.
Walt folded up the letter and put it in his shirt, then lay down on his side on the bed. In a while, a nurse came by with fresh sheets. He thought she might scold him and tell him to leave, but when she looked in his face she turned and hurried off. He watched the moon come up in the window, listening to the wounded and sick stirring in the beds around him. It seemed to him, as he watched the moon shine down on the Capitol, that the war would never end. He thought, In the morning I will rise and leave this place. And then he thought, I will never leave this place. He slept briefly and had a dream of reaching into Hank’s dark grave, hoping and fearing that somebody would take his groping hand.
He woke with the moon still shining in his face, and started to weep, deep racking sobs which he tried to muffle in the pillow that still smelled powerfully of Hank’s shining hair. Someone touched his shoulder, and when he looked up he saw Oliver Barley kneeling by the bed, haloed in moonlight from the window, with his hands, still wrapped in bandages, raised before him. He reached out again to touch Walt’s shoulder, but this time he struck him hard, a shove that must have made his wounds ache wildly. “Be quiet, you,” he said. “Just hush up.”
2
EVERY YEAR AFTER THE WAR ENDED, DREAMS OF THE LATE PRESident would arrive with the spring. Just before the weather changed, Mr. Lincoln would visit Walt in his sleep, stepping out of a bright mist, with lilacs clutched in his hands and the odor of lilacs on his person. That was always the first dream—the groundhog dream, Walt called it, the harbinger of winter’s end. Others followed: a dream of wrestling with a Lincoln graced with enormous black wings; a dream of building a bed for him and Mr. Lincoln to sleep in, a very long bed indeed; and a dream where Walt stood with the late President on a wooden platform overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and watched a grand review.