AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A shadow seemed to slide across Jamison's brow.
"On the first day we were supposed to be on their flank. There was a great deal of confusion. They went up the slope on their own."
"Do you know of Willie?" she asked again.
"No, I know no one by that name. I was wounded the following day. If I live through th
is war, I'll always be associated with the destruction of the 18th Louisiana. I hope the balls they dug out of my flesh somehow atone for my failure."
She studied his face and could not decide if what she saw there was remorse or self-pity. His fingers touched hers.
"I apologize for my behavior in your home, Miss Abigail. I'm an aging widower and sometimes give in to romantic inclinations that are the product of my years," he said.
His eyes tried to hold hers, but she turned from him and picked up a partially covered wooden bucket filled with encrusted bandages. An odor rose into her nostrils that made the skin of her face stretch against the bone.
"The surgeon says my intestines were probably damaged. There's a term for it," he said.
"Peritonitis?"
"Yes."
She pressed down the lid on the wooden bucket and let her face show no expression. When she returned from the lime pit he was looking out the window at a sunshower falling on the live oaks and floral gardens between the hospital and the street.
"Flower is attending me. She'll be here this evening," he said.
"Pardon?" Abigail said.
"I had her brought from New Iberia. She's a good girl, isn't she?"
He turned his head on the pollow and smiled. For the first time she looked upon him with pity and wondered if indeed, as her religion taught, there were those who found genuine erdempion in their last days.
HER thoughts were still on the colonel and his illegitimate daughter, the slave girl Flower, when she took a public carriage downtown that evening and walked to the room provided her by the Sanitary Commission. She stopped at the open-air market and bought a fried catfish sandwich and sat on a bench by the river, watching the paddle-wheelers in the sunset and the children playing in the street. The wind smelled of wet trees and rain falling on warm stone in a different part of the city, and when she closed her eyes she felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life.
She had dedicated herself to the plight of the infirm and the abandoned and the oppressed who had no voice, hadn't she? Why this unrelieved sense of loneliness, of always feeling that the comforting notion of safe harbor would never be hers?
Because there was no one solidly defined world she belonged to, no one family, no one person, she thought. She saw herself in an accurate way only twice during any given twenty-four-hour period, at twilight and at false dawn, when the world was neither night nor day, when shadows gave ambiguity a legitimacy that sunlight did not.
Amid the cries of children wheeling barrel hoops down the street and a band playing in front of a saloon, she heard another sound, a guttural shout, like a visceral cheer from a single individual who spoke for many. Then she heard collective laughter and yelling, a crowd moving up the street toward the U.S. Mint, a mixture of soldiers trying to maintain the appearance of discipline, loafers from the saloons, drunk prostitutes, a dancing barefoot Negro in green felt pants and a red-and-white-striped hat, a man with a peg leg stumping his way along the edge of things, a dwarf carrying a parasol over his head, grinning with a mouthful of tombstone teeth.
In the center of the crowd was a disheveled and terrified white man, his hands shackled behind him with a chain and heavy metal cuffs. He wore a thin mustache that looked grease-penciled on his upper lip, like an actor playing a villain in a cheap melodrama. He twisted his
head back and forth, pleading to anyone who would listen. But his words were lost in their jeers.
"What did he do?" Abigail asked an elderly man with a goatee sitting next to her, his hands folded on the crook of a cane.
"He was wearing a piece of the ripped flag in his buttonhole," the man replied.
Then she remembered the account given her by the sentry, something about a man who had torn down the Stars and Stripes from the front of the U.S. Mint.
"The army knows it was he?" she asked.
"I don't think they care. He's a cardsharp by trade," the elderly man replied.
She set down her sandwich on the piece of newspaper it had come wrapped in and stood up from the bench.
"My God, what are they going to do?" she said. When the man on the bench didn't reply, she tried again. "Who's in charge of this?"
His eyes looked at her casually, as though he were considering the implications of her accent before he answered.
