Childress, I decided, was never far outside the scrutiny of his subordinates. No sooner had the soldier lifted him from the ground than Captain McCready appeared, straddling his fine sorrel, and swung down from the saddle in one fluid movement. He took the fallen man by the shoulders, the other by the ankles, and together they carried him to the next barracks over. I followed, leaving Childress’ straw hat where it had landed.
The room they took him to was small and separated from the rest of the building with a pine partition, scoured white and stinking of carbolic. A hospital bed erected on a system of cranks and wheels stood in the center of the room, made up in fresh linen, with two down pillows and a thick cotton blanket rolled up at the foot in a topsheet. In seconds they had the patient laid out with the covers drawn to his chin. Dismissed, the soldier evaporated; there’s no better way to describe how quickly he made himself absent.
There was an evil smell about the place I knew all too well, apart from the carbolic: the thick air of ether, old blood, rotting flesh, and alcohol; gallons of the last, splashed about like water on a raging fire, and over it all the gaseous residue of human organs exposed to the air. It brought me back to a place and a time I’d hoped was long behind me; of a mildewed tent in a farmer’s decimated field packed with sweating, cursing orderlies, frantic surgeons, and grown men screaming for their mothers. The farther you got away from a thing the closer you came back to it.
“Lift his head.”
There being no one else present, I slid a hand behind Childress’ head and raised it while the captain opened a shallow drawer in a cabinet with a zinc top and took out a red morocco case the thickness of a deck of cards but twice as long. Tipping back the lid, he drew a steel syringe from its form-fitted depression, a squat brown bottle from another, shook the bottle, drew the cork, and filled the syringe with a sucking sound. He restopped and replaced the bottle, tapped the barrel of the syringe, depressed the plunger, squirting an arc of liquid from the end of the hollow needle, and in a series of deft motions wetted a wad of cotton from another container he’d taken from the drawer, tipped something from another bottle into the wad, and cocked an elbow, pointing at his superior’s near arm with an unmistakable gesture.
Unmistakable for only a few.
How he knew I’d filled in for a stricken orderly at Cold Harbor I never learned; either he’d studied my record or expected me to understand what must have been an automatic action. Whichever was the case, he’d judged correctly. I rolled back Childress’ sleeve and watched as he daubed the inside of the major’s elbow with the cotton swab, filling the room with the sharp stench of alcohol, cast the swab to the floor, pierced the vein he knew was there, and made the injection.
“Opium?” I asked.
“Highly distilled,” he said. “One of the major’s discoveries. I don’t pretend to know how it works, only that it does.”
I watched Childress’ face, gray as dead clay. He’d been breathing shallowly, in short bursts. As the medicine took hold, his lungs filled, then emptied, and fell afterward into the rhythm of a man in deep slumber.
All the paraphernalia was returned to its place in the same measured order as it had been brought into play. McCready cocked his head to bring his one eye to the operation. I saw then that the dead socket wasn’t empty after all: Worm-shaped muscles pulsed as if they were still in charge of a working orb.
“I know a glass-blower in Helena who could fit you with an eye no one would notice,” I said. “A U.S. senator came all the way from Washington on his reputation.”
“I tried that. A fellow from someplace called Vienna had one painted from a chip he matched to the eye God gave me. Beautiful thing. I keep it in the case it came with.” He shook his head. “Too much time had passed. The skin had shriveled too far to support it. It kept popping out at inopportune times. Better the truth up front than to have the lie exposed over a plate of oysters in champagne sauce.”
He smiled then; anyway the wide, thin-lipped mouth in the piebald face twitched at the corners. I felt a twinge of respect, for the soldier if not for the executioner. We might have faced each other across a battlefield strewn with men we’d both murdered for no reason I could remember, but loyalty is rare even in civilization.
“What’s his complaint?”
“He’s being eaten from inside; it’s this blasted climate, and his own genius consuming itself in the company of idiots. It hasn’t gotten to his brain, that much is certain. That’s the hell of it. Those brutes next door, dying of their own sinful birth, don’t know what’s happening to them, and are all the better for it.”
As if in response, a guttural cry arose from one of the adjacent rooms. If it had been at least half-animal I could have put it aside; that it was more than half-human was impossible to ignore.
McCready was an educated man, that much was certain. The southern universities had it all over the ivy leagues of the North. Their founders had come straight from Oxford and Cambridge.
“How long does he have?” I asked.
“He went to see a specialist in El Paso. Crossing the border could have meant his life, but I suppose he found that preferable to this. The doctor could have practiced in Chicago or Denver, maybe even New York City, but he was loyal to the War for Southern Independence, and couldn’t countenance treating Yankees. He estimated six months. That was a year and a half ago. The major rebels against everything.” He stuck out his hand. “Eustace McCready, Captain of the Confederacy.”
I gripped the hand as firmly as I could. It was like taking hold of a train coupling. “Page Murdock, Corporal of the Union.”
The mouth parted, exposing a fine set of coral-colored teeth: He seemed to know his wine. “I started as a corporal with the Chesterfield Volunteers.”
A division I was unfamiliar with; but then Childress had assembled his own regiment from among the oldest families in Virginia. “My mistake,” I said. “I wasn’t aware you’d worked for a living.”
He made a sound I took for amusement. We were close comrades, for that moment at least; and in silence agreed how sorry we’d be when one of us killed the other.
* * *
He pried apart Childress’ eyelids, striking a match off a thumbnail to study the pupils. “He’ll rest for a day. With God’s good grace he’ll come out of it roaring for someone’s head. I don’t envy the first of these brutes who fall beneath his expectations.”
“Well, you need the bones.”
McCready straightened to his full height, easily a head above mine, and fixed me with his eye, blue-green and as clear as egg-whites around the irises.
“He doesn’t need the excuse. This country is as rich in game as the one you came from, before the blasted federals raped it of buffalo to bring the Indians to their knees. That grizzly the brutes slew and dragged across the tracks will be harvested and put to good use. What does it serve to set aside the bones of these creatures—or you, or me, comes to that—to waste in graves? If we truly believed in life hereafter, there would be no reason to visit a cemetery. I’d rather my remains be put to use than moldering six feet under. The uncivilized peoples of the East believe that death is not final, only rebirth. Who is to say I won’t someday sweeten the tea of a saint?”
“Or of a St. Louis whore; you don’t have a vote. You’re just coughing up something your worshipful master said over a dinner table.”
“And who do you serve, that fat New York Yankee in the White House?”
“Is that who’s in? I haven’t voted since Abe Lincoln.”
“That carpetbagger?”
I looked around the room. Apart from another finely woven rug, it was undecorated except for a small painting in a heavy frame: Another murky representation of coarsely dressed peasants, this time gouging the eyes out of another captive in the rags of a fine uniform. I made some comment about his commander’s taste in art.
McCready’s eyes jerked toward the painting. “He buys those at auction, by wire. I don’t see much difference between them and Antietam.”
“He wants to bring it all back,” I said. “If you really want to know who I’m serving, it’s anyone who stands in front of that.”
Just then the soldier he’d dismissed entered. I saw from his unlined face, the chin pale of any trace of shaved whiskers, that he was too young to have served Childress in combat. The generation that had come up since the war had been all too ready to offer its services to the glamour of a lost cause.
McCready returned his salute. “What?”
“Sir. The men are wondering.”
“Wondering?” He pronounced the word as if it belonged to a foreign language.
The young man cleared his throat; if anyone had ever wanted to be somewhere else, this was him. “In the absence of the major, are the maneuvers to proceed as always?”
The captain inhaled and exhaled, a mighty gust. “Look you, private. Who is the man in this bed?”
To his credit, the private didn’t look. “Major Childress, sir.”
“Is he absent?”
“No, sir!” Had the young man straightened further, his spine would have cracked.
“Then go to the devil with you, and look smart during the maneuvers.”
“Yes, sir!”
McCready deflated a little after the man’s exit. “If this is what we have to work with, so be it. The major will whip them into shape.”
Just then the major drew a mighty breath. His eyes opened, exposing the bright orbs, blazing now, like dying suns: the same fierce fire that had come through at Cold Harbor and Bull Run. We both leaned in to hear his gasp:
“God forgive me.”
He’d taken in too much breath for the purpose; the rest went out in a gush of air. It was his last.