The Titans Page 14

  “I’d like permission to take a turn outside,” Gideon said in a voice hoarse from the cold.

  Tillotson appeared bemused. “Outside, sir? But it’s wintry—”

  “It’s no better in the barracks.”

  “You Rebs,” Tillotson sighed. He laid Leslie’s aside. Picked up the walnut stick. Pointed at the family portrait. “When I go home weekends, I tell Ethel how you complain. You never seem happy you’re alive rather than dead. My, it’s puzzling.”

  “Is it, now?” Gideon breathed. “I’m certainly sorry you’re puzzled. Would it help if I asked whether you eat a decent meal now and then? Or go to bed under enough blankets so you can sleep eight hours without waking?”

  With his left hand, Tillotson stroked the end of the stick. “Careful, please, Captain,” he said with a broad smile.

  “Major. Major Kent, and you know it.”

  “No, you all look alike to me.” Tillotson shrugged, his blue eyes maliciously merry. “Just like the niggers you people have penned up and maltreated for over two hundred years. Kent. Kent—oh, yes. Now I remember. Our dedicated reader. Preparing himself for better things when the war’s over. You received a book from your Copperhead papa in New York.”

  Gideon almost swore, fought the oath back. Tillotson clucked his tongue, shook his head.

  “I glanced at that material before I delivered it. Nonsensical stuff. Filthy! Ethel and her circle of women at church have discussed that poet. He should be prohibited. He should be arrested. You’ll never qualify yourself for anything, reading such swill.”

  Tillotson was leaning forward, as if offering advice to a nephew of whom he was fond. All at once, sarcasm crept in. “I suppose such material is all right for Rebs, though. Appropriate to your humbled station. Sweets to the sweet, but dregs to the dregs, mightn’t we say?”

  A vein beat in Gideon’s temple. “I asked for permission to go out, not for a lecture.”

  “Oh, but you Rebs need lecturing.” Tillotson smiled.

  “You must be taught not to complain so much. I can’t fathom why you don’t like it here.”

  “Well, it isn’t exactly a vacation resort, is it?”

  A hostile look on the Christmas face. “And I suppose you fancy our Northern boys are enjoying a holiday in those sinkholes down South? Libby? Andersonville? I suppose you think they’re resorts compared to this? You don’t know when you’re well off, Captain!”

  Gideon was seething. “Major.”

  Tillotson slashed the stick in a swift arc and struck the desk, thwack,

  “Captain, you’re vexing me with your disrespect. I have a position of authority to maintain.”

  “The only one you’ve ever had, I expect.”

  Three rapid blinks and Tillotson’s mouth shaped into a surprised O told Gideon he’d scored an accidental hit. The prison was full of incompetents; men worthless elsewhere. He’d seen a fair number of the same kind in the Confederate army. In all ranks.

  But even incompetents would strike out if someone wounded them.

  “Hold your tongue! Remember you’re speaking to the Government! In this barracks, sir, I am just as important as Mr. Lincoln. More! You’ll never set your traitorous eyes on our President. You deal with him through me.”

  Another whack of the stick emphasized the last word. Then a smile crept back on Tillotson’s jowly face. But there was spleen in it. The spleen of a man thrust into a position in which a whim, a change of mind, a word or two could preserve or ruin other men’s lives.

  “Am I clear to you, sir?” Tillotson asked. “When you walk in here, you are dealing with the only legal government of this nation.”

  Gideon’s forehead slicked with sudden sweat. The fat, arrogant turd! He’d like to take him by the throat and—

  No! Remember Margaret. Remember the baby. You’ve got to come through this whole. If you love them it’s your duty to survive.

  He blessed the memory of his wife and child. Without ‘ its sustaining power in that moment when he looked at Oliver Tillotson basking in the warmth of his private stove, he might have tried to kill the man.

  “I say, sir, am I clear?”

  Gideon answered very softly, “Clear.”

  “Then ask again. Briefly and respectfully.”

  A deep breath. “I am requesting permission to take a turn outside.”

  Tillotson waved the walnut stick. “Much better, sir. Much better. Go freeze if you wish. But please close the door. I neglected to do it, and I wouldn’t want too much heat escaping into the shed. Brisk temperatures are healthy for you and your comrades.”

  “Certainly,” Gideon answered. “Everyone out there is reveling in the healthful cold.”

  Another venomous glance. “I’m delighted.” A jab of the stick. “Close the door.”

  With a hand tingling one moment and going numb the next, Gideon obeyed. Tillotson had already returned to his reading.

  ii

  He walked out of the shed, passing between two boys in blue capes. Each sentry’s rifle was equipped with a bayonet.

  The clouds blowing by seemed only a few hundred feet overhead. Snowflakes swirled down from them. The bite of the wind made Gideon feel even worse than before. Almost immediately, his teeth started to chatter again. He regretted his decision to venture into the open. The sights outside the barracks were even more depressing than those within.

  Fort Delaware had been built on a treeless slab of ground several feet below water level. Stone dikes blocked out the river, obstructing the view of the Jersey and Delaware shores. The frozen mud was crisscrossed with ditches that oozed subterranean water on warm days. And the other sheds and fenced enclosures stretching around him were packed with gray men. Gray-garbed, gray-faced, gray-spirited.

  Ghosts.

  He saw the pale oval of a motionless and sorrowing face framed in the window of one of the barracks. Several young boys were tramping up and down in front of the privates’ pen, hugging themselves, stamping their bare feet. When shoes wore out, no replacements were issued.

  Over near the Delaware side, the chain gang labored. Sullen, murderous-looking men. The men hauled large carts full of stones used to repair the dikes. Teams of two men were roped to each cart like human beasts of burden. The work of each team was directed by a guard who sat atop the stones piled in the cart, unconcerned about adding his extra weight. Most of the guards were alternately swearing at their charges and shouting at them to pull harder.

  Gideon weaved toward a group of officers crouched beside a breathing hole dug out of the mud. There were similar holes everywhere; he threaded his way between.

  One of the officers turned to acknowledge his arrival. “Hallo, Kent. Care to join the hunting party?”

  Gideon’s stomach flip-flopped. “Thank you, no.”

  “Fresh meat and rat soup if we’re lucky.”

  “Jesus, stop,” Gideon said, covering his mouth. He was feeling more nauseated by the moment.

  There was a sudden flurry of activity around the hole. Exclamations of glee. Men hunching forward. The crunch of rocks on bone, then pulping sounds. One of the officers laughed, the snow-flecked wind whipping the sound away quickly.

  Another officer, no older than Gideon but with a beard already pure white, held up the bloody and still-twitching prize—a plump, hairy water rat. One of the hundreds that infested the island and dug their runs under the hard surface.

  “Shouldn’t be so persnickety, Gideon,” said the officer who’d spoken first. “Doesn’t taste half bad once you’re accustomed to it.”

  The white-bearded officer agreed. “Like young squirrel, in fact.”

  But he’d seen cooked rat meat. White, sickeningly white. He turned away. “Thanks kindly for the invitation. Another time.”

  “You’ll get hungry enough one of these days.”

  The devil! Gideon thought, staggering on. Tillotson had been right. It was too blasted cold out here.

  He noticed a subtle change in the air. Stuck out his to
ngue. Caught a droplet of water.

  The wind had shifted. A mist was blowing upriver from the Atlantic. The snowflakes were turning to freezing rain.

  Gideon wiggled his toes inside his cracked boots. Little sensation. None in one big toe. He was better off inside.

  He hurried, but all it amounted to was an awkward limp not much faster than his normal walk. As he approached the shed, a man came shooting around the corner, leaning into the wind and holding his flat-crowned black hat on his head.

  The man’s long gray beard danced on his shoulder, whipped like the ends of the green and black plaid scarf wound round and round his throat and the collar of his shabby, loose-sleeved raglan.

  Gideon stepped aside, but tardily. The leather medical bag in the man’s right hand gave his leg a sound whack.

  The man jerked to a halt, squinted.

  “Kent! Very sorry. Can’t see too well without my spectacles.”

  “Morning, Dr. Lemon,” Gideon replied, without annoyance. Dr. Cincinnatus Lemon of Delaware City was the man who’d listened to his plea for books, circumvented General Schoepf’s strict regulations about the frequency of outgoing and incoming prisoner mail, and posted the letter to Jephtha.

  “Been meaning to come by and look in on you,” Dr. Lemon said in a voice louder than normal. He was past sixty. His hearing was failing along with his sight. “Something I wanted to ask.”

  A sharp look at the barracks sentries. “But not here.” He risked letting go of his hat to seize Gideon’s arm. “Come along to my office.”

  Relieved to have an excuse to stay out of the barracks a while longer, Gideon nodded. When the two started away, one of the sentries called, “Just a minute, Reb.”

  Dr. Lemon spun. “Just a minute, nothing! I’ll take this prisoner anywhere I please!”

  “But, Doctor, he’s not allowed out of sight of—”

  “He is if I say so. Shut your mouth and go dry your ears.”

  The sentry reddened. “Where are you taking him?”

  “Why, I plan to spirit him into my office, squeeze him into an empty chloroform bottle, and float him down to the ocean and home to Dixie. Come along, Kent!”

  While they crossed the yard, Lemon complained, “Damned cheeky farm boys. Farm boys and doddering old farts, that’s all we have on this island. Sorry to say those categories include me. Kent, will you hurry up? I’m freezing what freely translates from the Latin as my arse.”

  iii

  A crowded little room in one wing of the infirmary building served as a communal office for several full- and spare-time physicians attached to the fort. The office was nearly as untidy as Dr. Lemon himself. But it had a stove with plenty of fuel. Gideon sank onto a stool two feet from the open door and raised his hands to the blessed warmth.

  Lemon flung off his hat, scarf, and raglan and dumped his satchel on top of them in a corner. While he fished for his glasses in his patched frock coat, someone screamed in one of the wards. Lemon winced.

  “Your commander—Stuart—he used to sing a lot, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did. Why?”

  Lemon’s spectacles sparkled with the flames from the stove as he seated himself at a desk strewn with supply requisitions and patient reports. “I doubt he’d have been so cheerful about this cursed war if he’d heard the music I listen to all day.”

  Gideon massaged his hands. Some of the numbness was leaving. “I’m afraid I sang right along with him.”

  “Damn fools, both of you. Americans killing Americans. It hardly calls for a cheery serenade.”

  “You’re right. I decided the same thing after First Manassas—with a little prodding from the young woman I married. We should have stopped the war long before it began. I guess no one knew how.”

  “They knew. Old men like me—they knew. Some of ’em, anyway. But they didn’t have to march off to war and die. All they had to do was stay home, pound podiums, and spew slogans. No matter which side you’re on, that’s inevitably more popular than trying to stop the waste of human life. The filthy, immoral waste of God’s gift—”

  Veined hands brushed aimlessly over the accumulated papers, as though Lemon couldn’t bear to pick them up. The doctor’s shoulders were permanently stooped, his face weather-darkened and creased by deep folds and shallow wrinkles. “I’ll tell you what I wanted—”

  He stopped in midsentence, studying Gideon. The younger man thought there was rheum in the doctor’s eyes. Lemon whispered, “Uncanny.”

  “Pardon?”

  Lemon jabbed an index finger between his glasses and his nose, ridding his right eye of the glistening water.

  “I said uncanny. I can never get accustomed to your appearance.”

  Gideon tried to smile. “Pretty disreputable, I admit.”

  “Not what I meant. Mrs. Lemon and myself, we have seven daughters and one son. Had one son. You could be his younger brother. We lost him at Antietam.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “You’d be even sorrier if you knew who shot him.”

  “Who?”

  “One of the men in his own damn company. Mistook him for a Reb.”

  “Just about what happened to Stonewall Jackson.”

  “Just about,” Lemon agreed glumly. “My boy took a wound in the chest from a round ball. It damaged too large an area of lung tissue. A round ball always does. A conical ball from a rifled piece would have given him a chance. Cleaner wound. Less tissue destroyed. Conical balls are worse in the abdomen, though. Usually perforate the bowel. The round ball travels more slowly. Often pushes the bowel aside without harming it. It had to be a round ball in the lung—from one of his own!”

  He closed his right hand into a fist and stared at the desk. In a few moments he composed himself sufficiently to eye Gideon again. “I must say you do look hideous. Not surprised, though. Here—”

  He shot out of the chair, opened one of the glass doors of a cabinet cluttered with bottles of pills and tinctures, fished behind them and brought out an amber flask filled with a dark fluid.

  “This’ll warm you up. Take a fast swig in case someone comes in.”

  Gideon unstoppered the bottle. Inhaled the almost-forgotten aroma of whiskey. He tilted the bottle and swallowed, twice.

  “Thank you, Dr. Lemon.” He handed it back.

  “Hippocrates is no doubt applauding me from the beyond,” Lemon said, ramming the bottle into its hiding place and slamming the cabinet door. The glass vibrated.

  “I seldom get his congratulations any more. I’m a disgrace to the profession—because this place is a disgrace. Oafs like your Sergeant Tillotson keep sending me patients I don’t want, lack the room to care for, and can seldom save after they’re ministered to by our tender staff of keepers. I’ve protested to that damn Hungarian who runs the island. Think he pays any attention? Pfaugh!”

  Lemon hurled himself back into his chair, the anger darkening his leathery cheeks. “Mad, this whole business. Mad! There had to be a more sensible way to set the nigras free!”

  Gideon licked the inside of his upper lip, still tasting the whiskey. His stomach felt warmer. “I wish we’d found it,” he told the doctor.

  “At least some men such as yourself have a chance of pulling through. You’re determined to get out of this infernal place with your bones and your sanity intact, and start over.”

  Gideon smiled wanly. Lemon had no idea how close he’d come to losing that determination.

  “Which brings me to what I wanted to ask. Did Tillotson—”

  A knock. Annoyed, Lemon snapped, “Yes?”

  An orderly in a blood-spotted smock looked in.

  “Oh—Dr. Lemon. I didn’t know whether you were here.” He cast a suspicious eye at Gideon.

  “What do you want?” Lemon demanded.

  “It’s about Dunning. In the privates’ pen—?”

  Lemon sat very still. “The question in your voice is a damned insult. I remember every one of my patients. What about Dunning?”
>
  The orderly fidgeted because Lemon’s stare was so intimidating. “I—I found him this morning. Still huddled in his usual corner. But—”

  “Gone?”

  White-faced, the orderly nodded.

  “Goddamn it!” Lemon roared, hurling the whole pile of papers from the desk with one sweep of his hand. The orderly backed toward the doorway.

  “Get out. Get out! I’ll sign the certificate!” Lemon shouted. The door closed quickly.

  Lemon slumped. Presently he faced Gideon again. “And do you know what I’ll be forced to write down for cause of death? Nostalgia.”

  When Gideon frowned, puzzled, Lemon burst out, “Homesickness. Nostalgia! The boy was seventeen years old. For the past five weeks he’s spent every waking hour sitting in a corner. No speech. Hardly any movement. When I speak—when I spoke to him, he behaved as if he didn’t hear me, or even knew I was present. I paid one of those greedy incompetents in charge of his pen—paid him from my own pocket!—to force food down him. Wasted effort. Wasted!”

  For a moment, Gideon thought Lemon might burst into tears—or destroy every paper and piece of furniture in the office.

  He did neither, managing to calm himself again. He removed his glasses to polish them on a clean, worn pocket kerchief. .

  “You have your own problems. No need to share mine. But God Almighty! If only there’d been enough men of sense to shout down the fire-eaters and the worst of the abolitionist crowd. Well, what’s the use of speculating? There weren’t.”

  He resettled his spectacles on his nose. “It’s the reading material I wanted to inquire about. I delivered the parcel to Tillotson. I’ve been derelict in asking whether that exquisite specimen of humanity gave you the books.”

  Gideon’s ears were buzzing slightly from the warmth of the office and the sudden effect of liquor on his nearly empty belly. The last word brought his head jerking up. With difficulty, he focused his eyes on the hunched, shabby man at the desk.