by Noah Gordon
“Have you taken note of Alden’s palsy?” his mother said to Shaman one morning.
As a matter of fact, he had been watching Alden for some time. “He has Parkinson’s disease, Ma.”
“What on earth is that?”
“I don’t know what causes the trembling, but the disease affects the way he controls his muscles.”
“Is it going to kill him?”
“Sometimes it causes death, but not often. Most likely, it will slowly keep getting worse. Maybe cripple him.”
Sarah nodded. “Well, poor soul’s getting too old and sick to run this farm. We’ll have to think about putting Doug Penfield in charge, and hire someone to help him. Can we afford it?”
They were paying Alden twenty-two dollars a month and Doug Penfield ten. Shaman did some rapid calculations and finally nodded.
“And then what will become of Alden?”
“Well, he’ll stay on in his cabin and we’ll take good care of him, of course. But it’s going to be hard to convince him to stop doing the hard work.”
“The best thing might be to ask him to do a lot of jobs that don’t require great exertion,” she said shrewdly, and Shaman nodded.
“I think I’ve got one of those for him right now,” he said.
That evening he brought “Rob J.’s scalpel” up to Alden’s cabin.
“Needs sharpenin, does it?” Alden said, taking it from him.
Shaman smiled. “No, Alden, I keep it sharp myself. It’s a surgical knife that’s been in my family for hundreds of years. My father told me that in his mother’s house it was kept in a glass-enclosed frame and hung on the wall. I wondered if you could make a frame for me.”
“I don’t know why not.” Alden turned the scalpel in his fingers. “Good piece of steel, here.”
“It is. It takes a wonderful edge.”
“I could make you a knife like this, should you want another.”
Shaman was intrigued. “Would you try? Could you make one with a blade longer than this one, and narrower?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Alden said, and Shaman tried not to notice how his hand shook as he handed back the scalpel.
It was very hard, being so close to Rachel and yet so far from her. There was no place where they could make love. They trudged in deep snow into the woods, where they bundled into each other’s arms like bears and exchanged icy kisses and well-padded caresses. Shaman grew short-tempered and morose, and he noticed that Rachel was developing dark circles beneath her eyes.
When he left her, Shaman took vigorous walks. One day he trudged down the Short Path and noticed that the portion of Makwa-ikwa’s wooden grave marker that stood above the snow was cracked. The weather had almost obliterated the runelike markings that his father had had Alden carve into the wood.
He felt Makwa’s furious will rise through the earth, through the snow. How much of it was his imagination, how much his conscience?
I’ve done what I can. What more can I do? There’s more to my life than the fact that you can’t rest, he told her crankily, and he turned around and clumped through the snow, back to the house.
That afternoon he went to the home of Betty Cummings, who had severe rheumatism in both shoulders. He tied up his horse and was going to the back door when he saw, just beyond the barn, a double track and a series of curious markings.
He waded through a drift and knelt to examine them.
The marks in the snow were triangular in shape. They sank into the surface six inches or so, and they varied slightly in size, according to their depth.
These triangular wounds in the white were bloodless, and there were many more than eleven of them.
He remained kneeling, staring at them.
“Dr. Cole?”
Mrs. Cummings had come out and leaned over him, her face concerned.
She said the holes were made by her son’s ski poles. He had fashioned the skis and the poles from hickory, whittling the ends into points.
They were too large.
“Is everything all right, Dr. Cole?” She shivered and clutched her shawl closer, and he was suddenly ashamed for keeping a rheumatic old woman out in the cold.
“Everything’s perfectly all right, Mrs. Cummings,” he said, and he stood and followed her into her warm kitchen.
Alden had done a beautiful job on the frame for Rob J.’s scalpel. He had made it of quartered oak and had gotten a small remnant of light blue velvet from Sarah to mount the scalpel on. “Couldn’t find a piece of used glass, though. Had to buy the glass new from Haskins’. Hope that’s all right.”
“It’s more than all right.” Shaman was very pleased. “I’ll hang it in the front hall of the house,” he said.
He was even more pleased to see the scalpel Alden had made to his specifications.
“I forged it from an old brandin iron. There’s enough good steel left over for two or three more of these knives, should you want them.”
Shaman sat down with pencil and paper and drew a probing knife and an amputation fork. “Do you think you could make these?”
“Don’t doubt that I can.”
Shaman regarded him thoughtfully. “We’re going to have a hospital here soon, Alden. That means we’re going to need instruments, beds, chairs—all sorts of things. How would it be if you got somebody to help you make some of those things for us?”
“Well, it would be pleasant, but … Don’t believe I can spare the time for all that.”
“Yes, I can see that. But suppose we hired somebody to work the farm with Doug Penfield, and they just met with you a couple of times a week so you could tell them what to do.”
Alden considered, then nodded. “That might be fine.”
Shaman hesitated. “Alden … how’s your memory?”
“Good as the next person’s, I suppose.”
“Near as you can remember, tell me where everybody was the day Makwa-ikwa was killed.”
Alden sighed heavily and lifted his eyes heavenward. “Still at it, I see.” But with a little persuasion he cooperated. “Well, to begin with you. You was asleep in the woods, I’m told. Your pa was out callin on his patients. I was over to Hans Grueber’s, helpin him butcher in exchange for your pa’s gettin the use of his bullocks to pull the manure spreader in our pastures…. Let’s see, who’s left?”
“Alex. My mother. Moon and Comes Singing.”
“Well, Alex was off someplace, fishin, playin, I dunno. Your mother and Moon … I remember, they was cleanin out the springhouse, gettin it ready to hang meat in when we done our own butcherin. The big Indian was workin with the stock, and then later, workin in the woods.” He beamed at Shaman. “How’s that for memory?”
“It was Jason who found Makwa. How had Jay spent his day?”
Alden was indignant. “Now, how the hell am I supposed to know? You want to know about Geiger, talk to his wife.”
Shaman nodded. “I think I’ll do that,” he said.
But when he returned to the house, all other thoughts were driven from his mind, because his mother told him that Carroll Wilkenson had ridden over with a message for him. It had come to the telegraph office in Rock Island.
His fingers trembled as badly as Alden’s while he tore at the envelope.
The message was concise and businesslike:
Corporal Alexander Bledsoe, 38th Louisiana Mounted Rifles, presently incarcerated as prisoner of war, Elmira Prison Camp, Elmira, New York. Please call upon me if any other way I can be of service. Good luck. Nicholas Holden, U.S. Cmsr., Indian Affairs.
66
THE ELMIRA CAMP
In the president’s office at the bank, Charlie Andreson looked at the amount on the withdrawal form and pursed his lips.
Although it was Shaman’s money to withdraw, without hesitation he told Andreson the reason he was taking it, because he knew the banker could be trusted with confidential business. “I’ve no idea what Alex’s needs will be. Whatever they are, I’ll need funds to help him.”
“No.”
“Well, you should buy one. You’re going a distance, and there are dangerous men out there who would kill without thought to get hold of this much money.”
Shaman thanked the banker and placed the currency and the belt into a small tapestry bag he’d brought with him. He was riding down Main Street when he realized he did have a gun, the Colt .44 his father had taken from a dead Confederate in order to kill a horse, and had brought back from the war. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have occurred to Shaman to travel armed, but he couldn’t afford to let anything get in the way of his finding and helping Alex, and he turned the horse and rode back to Haskins’ store, where he bought a box of ammunition for the .44. The bullets and the revolver were heavy and took up room in the single valise that he carried, along with his medical bag, when he left Holden’s Crossing the next morning.
He took a steamer downriver to Cairo and then rode east by rail. Three times there were long delays as his trains were held up in order to allow troop trains to go through. It was four days and nights of hard travel. The snow disappeared when he left Illinois, but not the winter, and the hard cold that dominated the rocking railroad cars crept into Shaman’s bones. When finally he reached Elmira he was travel-weary, but he made no attempt to bathe or change his clothing before trying to see Alex, because he had an irresistible urge to make certain his brother was alive.
Outside the station, he walked past a hansom cab and took a buggy instead so he could sit next to the driver and see what he was saying. The driver said proudly that the town’s population had reached fifteen thousand. They traveled through a pleasant town of small homes to a neighborhood on the outskirts of Elmira, and down Water Street, along what the man said was the Chemung River. Soon a wooden fence delineated the prison.
The driver was proud of the local embellishment and practiced in his delivery of facts. He told Shaman the fence was built twelve feet high of “native boards,” and enclosed twenty-eight acres on which more than ten thousand captured Confederates lived. “Been up to twelve thousand rebels in there, at times,” he said.
He pointed out that four feet from the top of the fence and on the outside was a catwalk on which armed sentries patrolled.
They drove down West Water Street, where entrepreneurs had made the camp a human zoo. A three-story-high wooden tower, complete with stairs that led to a railed platform, allowed anyone with fifteen cents to look down on the milling men within the walls.
“Used to be two towers here. And a whole bunch of refreshment stands. Sold cakes, crackers, peanuts, lemonade, and beer to them watchin the prisoners. But the damn army closed em down.”
“Pity.”
“Yeah. You wanna stop and go up, have yourself a look?”
Shaman shook his head. “Just let me out at the main gate to the camp, please.”
There was a very military colored sentry at the gate. It appeared that most of the sentries were Negroes. Shaman followed a private to a headquarters orderly room, where he identified himself to a sergeant and requested permission to see the prisoner called Alexander Bledsoe.
The sergeant conferred with a lieutenant who sat behind a desk in a tiny office, and then emerged to mutter that there’d been a message from Washington in Dr. Cole’s behalf, which made Shaman think more kindly of Nicholas Holden.
“Visits are no more than ninety minutes.” He was told that the private would take him to his brother at tent Eight-C, and he followed the Negro over frozen ruts, deep into the camp. Everywhere he looked, there were prisoners, listless, miserable, ill-clothed. He understood at once that they were half-starved. He saw two men standing at an overturned barrel on which they were skinning a rat.
They bypassed a number of low wooden barracks. Beyond the barracks were rows of tents, and beyond the tents a long narrow pond that obviously was used as an open sewer, because the closer Shaman drew to it, the stronger its stink became.
Finally the Negro soldier stopped in front of one of the tents. “This is Eight-C, suh,” he said, and Shaman thanked him.
Inside, he found four men whose faces were pinched with cold. He didn’t know them, and his first thought was that one of them was a man who shared Alex’s name, and he had come all this way because of a case of mistaken identity.
“I’m looking for Corporal Alexander Bledsoe.”
One of the prisoners, a man-boy whose dark mustaches were far too large for his bony face, motioned at what had seemed to be a pile of rags. Shaman approached it cautiously, as if a feral animal waited beneath the dirty cloths—two feed bags, a piece of carpeting, something that may once have been a coat. “We keep his face covered against the cold,” the dark mustaches said, and reached down and removed a feed sack.
It was his brother, yet not so much his brother. Shaman might have passed him in the street without recognition, because Alex was vastly changed. He was very thin, and age had been etched into him by experiences Shaman didn’t want to consider. Shaman took his hand. Eventually Alex opened his eyes and stared up at him without recognition.
“Bigger,” Shaman said, but couldn’t go on.
Alex blinked up at him in bewilderment. Then realization crept into his mind like a tide slowly taking possession of a battered shore, and he began to cry.
“Ma and Pa?”
They were the first words Alex spoke to him, and Shaman lied instantly and instinctively. “They’re both well.”
The brothers sat and held each other’s hands. There was so much to say, so much to ask and to tell, that they were at first struck dumb. Soon the words began to come to Shaman, but Alex wasn’t up to it. Despite his excitement, he began to drift back into sleep, and it told Shaman how sick he was.
He introduced himself to the other four men, and learned their names. Berry Womack of Spartanburg, South Carolina, short and intense, with long dirty blond hair. Fox J. Byrd of Charlottesville, Virginia, who had a sleepy face and slack skin, as if once he’d been fat. James Joseph Waldron of Van Buren, Arkansas, stocky, swarthy, and the youngest there, no more than seventeen, Shaman guessed. And Barton O. Westmoreland of Richmond, Virginia, the boy with the large mustaches, who shook hands fiercely and told Shaman to call him Buttons.
While Alex slept, Shaman examined him.
His left foot was gone.
“… Was he shot?”
“No, sir,” Buttons said. “I was with him. A whole bunch of us were bein transferred here by train from the prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland, last July 16…. Well, there was a terrible train wreck in Pennsylvania … Sholola, Pennsylvania. Forty-eight prisoners of war and seventeen federal guards, killed. They just buried em in a field close to the tracks, like after a battle.
“Eighty-five of us were hurt. Alex’s foot was crushed so bad, they just cut it off. I was real lucky, only had a sprained shoulder.”
“Your brother did right well for a while,” Berry Womack said. “Jimmie-Joe made him a crutch and he was right nimble with it. He was the sick-sergeant in this tent and took care of us all. Said he learned a little doctorin from watchin your daddy.”
“We call him Doc,” Jimmie-Joe Waldron said.
When Shaman lifted Alex’s leg, he saw it was the source of his brother’s troubles. The amputation had been done badly. The leg wasn’t yet gangrenous, but half the ragged stump was unhealed, and beneath the scar tissue in the healed portion there was pus.
“You a sure-enough doctor?” Waldron said when he saw the stethoscope. Shaman said he was. He positioned the bell on Alex’s chest for Jimmie-Joe, and he was elated to conclude from Waldron’s report that the lungs were blessedly clear. But Alex was fev
erish, and his pulse was light and thready.
“There is pestilence, sir, all through the camp,” Buttons said. “Smallpox. Any number of fevers. Malaria, many varieties of agues. What do you reckon is wrong with him?”
“His leg is mortified,” Shaman said heavily. It was obvious that Alex also suffered from malnutrition and exposure to the cold, as did the other men in the tent. They told Shaman that some tents had tin stoves and some had a few blankets, but most had neither.
“What do you eat?”
“In the morning each man gets a piece of bread and a small piece of bad meat. In the evening each man gets a piece of bread and a cup of what they call soup, the water the bad meat was boiled in,” Buttons Westmoreland said.
“No vegetables?”
They shook their heads, but he already knew the answer. Signs of scurvy had greeted him as soon as he’d entered the camp.
“When we came here, there were ten thousand of us,” Buttons said. “They keep adding new prisoners, but only five thousand of the original ten thousand are left. They have a busy dead house, and a big cemetery just beyond the camp. About twenty-five men die here every day.”
Shaman sat on the cold ground and held Alex’s hands, watching his face. Alex slumbered on, too deeply.
Presently the guard stuck his head through the flap and told him it was time.
In the headquarters orderly room, the sergeant listened impassively as Shaman identified himself as a physician and described his brother’s symptoms. “I’d like to be allowed to take him home. I know if he remains imprisoned, he’ll die.”
The sergeant rummaged in a file and came up with a card, which he studied. “Your brother isn’t eligible for parole. He’s been an engineer here. That’s what we call a prisoner who’s tried to tunnel out.”
“Tunnel!” Shaman said wonderingly. “How could he dig? He has only one foot.”
“He has two hands. And before he came here, he escaped from another camp and was recaptured.”