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"You be careful," she said.
"I ain't afraid."
"I know you're not," she said.
He pulled a cigar box from under his chair and shook it.
"You want to play checkers?" he asked.
"You ain't s'pposed to be sitting down."
"The lieutenant's a good fellow. Bet you don't know how."
She went to the kitchen and began washing Colonel Jamison's supper dishes. His food and drink were never served on the same dishware or in the same glasses or cups used by the other patients. His own china, along with his reading matter, personal stationery, nightgown, underwear and socks, even a tailored gray Confederate uniform, had all been brought to him by an Angola Plantation overseer, with permission, through Union lines. Flower dried each dish and cup and fork and knife with a soft cloth and placed them inside a big tin breadbox painted with flowers and set the breadbox inside a cabinet. She glanced outside and saw a closed carriage roll by under the trees, a driver in a black slouch hat and slicker backlit against the flicker of lightning through the canopy.
She looked in on Colonel Jamison, who was sleeping with a pillow over his head, perhaps to muffle the boom of thunder outside. She wondered if he dreamed of the boys who had died under his command or if in his sleep he relived only his own fear and wounding on the battlefield. She glanced at the three pistol balls lying in a saucer on his nightstand and knew the answer to her own question.
When she walked back to the foyer the sentry was looking out the window at the leaves blowing against the glass and the white flicker of electricity through the tops of the trees.
He had left his rifle at his post, the bayonet-tipped barrel propped tautly against the wall.
"I was kidding you about not knowing how to play checkers. I saw you reading a book back there in the foyer. That puts you one up on me," he said.
"You cain't read?"
"Folks in my family is still working on making their X." He grinned and looked at his feet.
"I can teach you how," she said.
He grinned again. His eyes went away from her, then came back. "You gonna play checkers with me?" he asked.
"I wouldn't mind," she replied.
He placed two chairs at a small table by the window and removed a folded cloth painted with checker squares from his cigar box and flattened the cloth on the table. The checker pieces were carved from wood and looked like big buttons, domed on the top and painted green or red. He lined them up on the cloth squares and glanced out the window just as lightning popped in a yard on the opposite side of the street.
"Wonder what that carriage is doing out there?" he said.
"It's the hearse. They take the bodies out the back door," she replied.
There was a disjointed expression in his face. "A hearse?" he said.
"They don't want the other patients to see the bodies. There's a room behind the kitchen where they take the ones who are gonna die."
He looked emptily down the long rows of beds in the ward and at the rectangular shadows they cast.
"I bet most of the dead is probably Rebs who got gangrene 'cause their people didn't look out for them," he said. "Probably," she said, avoiding his eyes.
He glanced out the window again, then shook a thought out of his face and pushed a checker piece forward with his index finger. "Your move. I ain't showing no mercy, either," he said. Later, after she had looked in on the colonel for the final time that evening, she pulled the blanket across the length of clothesline she had strung by her cot and lay down and closed her eyes. In her sleep she heard the rain hitting hard on the window glass and she dreamed of birds flying from their cages, flapping their wings loudly in their newfound freedom.
Sometime after midnight she heard a door open and felt a draft course through the corridors and swell against the walls and ceiling. Then in the coldness of the moment she heard the heavy sound of men's boots on the floor and smelled rainwater and horsed and an odor like old clothes moldy with damp.
She pulled the sheet over her head and drew her knees up toward her chest and fell deeper into the dream of birds thropping through the sky, high above the hunters whose guns fired impotently into the air.
But the dream would not hold. A scorched odor, like dry oak pitched on a flame, made her open her eyes. The thunder had stopped and in its vacuum she heard wind and leaves scraping on stone and a door fluttering on its hinges, then the wet, crunching sound of horses' hooves and iron-rimmed carriage wheels sinking in pea gravel.
She rose from her cot and drew aside the blanket that hung from the clothesline stretched across her nook. It was still dark outside and clouds of ground fog rolled and puffed between the palms and live oak trunks. She stepped into the hallway that fed into the ward and saw her friend, the sentry, still seated in his chair, his back to her, his chin on his chest. His rifle was propped against the table they had played checkers on. A brass lamp was knocked askew on the wall above his head, oil oozing from the slit through which the wick extended, igniting in the flame, dripping to the floor like a string of melted gold coins.
The sentry's kepi lay crown-down on the table.
