Crawling Between Heaven And Earth (3 page)

"A nightmare," I told him. "You've been grievously wounded."

"Yes," he said, and looked in some distaste around him, at the wounded lying all about, as though he himself weren't as filthy and meagerly fed and hard-driven as them. "And will I live?"

I couldn't tell him it was passing marvelous that he was alive with half his brain destroyed. Though it was. So I told him . . ..

 . . .(water damage renders a few lines illegible) . . .and with that he had to be contented.

The rest of the day and through the night I was kept busy with more wounded brought in, half of them at least Federal prisoners that we treated as we did our own, though some of the doctors refused to treat anyone not of their regiment, a crime and offense against divine law for which I often wished they would be incinerated on the spot. Alas, divine mercy and divine justice both being in short supply in this war we had to make do with the human variety that required sweat and blood and sleepless nights for your humble servant.

At daybreak on the second of July, I searched for and found my head-injury case. He walked about the yard, as though in a daze, tracing an erratic path around the fires that warmed those not so seriously wounded. He looked at everything with a strange, detached expression, as though not sure who he was, nor why he walked.

Judging him to be prey to a fever, I found him and took him by the arm and started guiding him back inside.

But he pulled his arm from mine and regarded me, his eyes open wide and his nostrils flaring, the look of a man scared, a man under mortal threat.

"The Yankees won't win, son," I said, addressing him thus because of his youth, though I was not by any means old enough to have sired him. "I know what you dreamed, but it won't come true."

But he only opened his eyes further and hissed breath through his clenched teeth. "No. No, the Yankees won't win. But neither will we . . .I saw it all." He blinked. "Perhaps it was a dream, too, but I swear it was so vivid . . .I stepped through the opening again, and found myself in a strange land . . .a strange land though it was our own. I listened to the people and I talked and I almost got killed for saying the wrong thing." His lips trembled. His ligature had become even dirtier, as though a good many days had passed and he'd wandered far and wide. "I understand that even now Napoleon III of France dreams to establish a monarchy in Mexico. If we win" He swallowed. "With us winning this battle, France and England will recognize us. They'll also subsidize our fighting and prop our treasury." He swallowed again. "When the war is over, in another year, they will own us, lock, stock and barrel. And from here they'll take over the Federal territory too. America will be no more." His eyes filled with tears. "Nor will democracy nor the dream that men of wisdom can govern themselves. Kings will own the land. Forever."

I could tell from his words that he was a man of some learning, and I had to admit the scenario he painted might be likely. Nothing for it but to calm him down and tell him that all would be well, as I took him back to his spot on the floor and lay him down upon the soiled straw and gave him more of my hoarded spirits to help him rest.

However, when I checked on him later, I found his eyes wide open, filled with understanding. Looking up at me he said, "Of the two, I'd rather sacrifice our cause than sacrifice the whole land and have foreigners split us like preying wolves split a wounded lamb."

(Water damage) . . .. some beef tea, that I brought to him and made him drink. He sipped willingly enough. He didn't feel hot to the touch, and didn't rave, but when he finished his drink, he looked at me and said, "It should not be allowed. If I'm given this vision it's for a reason. There must be a reason."

That night I found some time to lay down amid the wounded and get well-earned rest. But though I was tired and hadn't slept in well over twenty four hours, I couldn't settle. I kept wondering about the strange dreams that kept my patient worried. Dreams? Or was it possible, just possible that the human brain, like the rudder on a ship, kept men to one time and place at a time and that a man with his brain injured might move through time and space without direction like a rudderless vessel? And if that were the case, well, then, wouldn't it explain most madness that follows an injury to the head? And most prophesying for that matter?

I remembered from my grammar school days that many philosophers in ancient times thought that what men perceived and reality were not necessarily the same. Like Plato, with his idea that what we saw were no more than reflections of the truth. What if all of God's creation unfolded at once, with his one word, but parts of our brain allowed us to perceive it a little at a time, lest we got mad?

And if so, was my poor patient a true prophet? Did God allow him to suffer this injury and survive it so that he might transmit to me the dangers of our cause? And if so, what could I do?

A heavy wind blew around the building, shaking the trees, but inside it heat collected, suffocating, and every smell of disease, every hint of rot and decay assailed my nose.

I turned and weighed things in my mind. If the Yankees won they would have full revenge on our land. The emancipation proclamation their president had made would wreck the southern plantations and Dixie might never recover from its death blow.

If we won this battle, France and England would recognize us. But would they recognize us without intending to get their own back? Or was their support for us as much interest in our cause as a wish to see democracy as a form of government fail? Since the ancient world, only America had lived in a successful republic. France had tried the rule of the people, only to take it to extremes and retreat shrieking into the arms of monarchy, once more. Was that what they wished on us? Would England, still smarting from the blow given it by our grandfathers, ever let us go once it had a chance to put its feet on our neck again?

I turned and tossed on the filthy straw. I could imagine a land ruled and divided by European powers. I thought that the English, as keen on abolishing slavery as the Yankees, would ruin the south just as certainly, only they might as well muzzle the free southerners to the work in the plantations, making us something between slave and free. Not full citizens. A colonized people.

And yet, certainly my poor sufferer was delusional and I was but following him on the road to madness. A fit destination for someone as short on sleep as I was.

Besides, what could I do about it? And why would the Almighty send me, me of all people, a vision of the future and a choice about it? What was the choice? What could I do?

I tossed and turned. Through the windows, I saw the reflection of fires in the courtyard, heard the rough voices of the men, some of them little more than boys, who sat there, in the warm night outside, discussing the battle, the comrades lost, the charges that had succeeded and those that had failed.

If what I heard was true, the turning point at Gettysburg had come when Stonewall Jackson took Cemetery Hill. What if that hadn't happened? What if Stonewall Jackson had died at Chancellorsville when some of the N.C. volunteers had mistakenly fired upon him?

I'd been there and I remembered General A. P. Hill frantically crying for the troops to stop firing.

They had stopped and no damage done. But what if they hadn't?

If they hadn't, Stonewall Jackson might well be dead and this day lost and . . .and a good man dead to prevent what? The dreams of a man whose brain had been shattered by a bullet?

But if these were dreams, dreams and nothing else, wouldn't my giving him a way to relieve his anxiety within his fantasy be an act of mercy?

And if they were dreams, dreams and nothing else, dreams as yet as vivid as waking and no more, what difference could it make?

That morning, the morning of the third of July 1863, when I found my patient walking around in a daze, I told him what I'd thought. I told him that if one of his doors to other times and places should open to that night of May second 1863 and he could find a way to ensure the friendly fire continued, Stonewall Jackson might well die and the cause of the Confederacy with it.

After I talked to him, he sank into sleep, seemingly relieved by my suggestion.

Wounded arrived in such great numbers that all that day I was kept busy, unable to see my patient.

The next morning we got orders to return to Virginia. The orders from General Lee were that we should take as many of our poor wounded as possible back home.

We loaded all vehicles we could find with wounded and in the commotion I lost track of my particular patient.

After noon the rain started and puddled in the already poor roads. Horses and mules lost direction and became unmanageable. In the wagons the wounded and mutilated men cried out for death as the ultimate reliever.

I went from wagon to wagon, attempting to somehow mitigate the suffering, though there was precious little I could do, absent morphine or the other physics that mitigate pain and those had long been lacking in the Confederacy due to the Yankee blockade.

In the pouring rain, I finally came across the man who was wounded on the head. He sat bolt upright in a wagon, looking into the pouring rain, the eyes of man who sees something else, far away. "We lost at Gettysburg, doctor. We lost. Stonewall Jackson died at Chancellorsville, shot down by his own men."

I thought then, at that moment, that he hallucinated and said whatever was needed to soothe him, paying no more heed to my words than to the sounds a mother makes to gentle a babe to sleep.

Later, walking behind the wagon, with all the other men who could walk, it came to me, as a dream, the awful memory of that sleepless night and the thoughts that had haunted me in those days in Gettysburg.

They were clear, like dreams of being awake, but they made no sense, because of course I knew that Stonewall Jackson had died at Chancellorsville, and that Gettysburg had been a disaster for the Confederacy. We'd never taken Cemetery Hill. My thought that we had, had to be the product of sleepless nights and the shock of working with so many wounded.

The man who'd been wounded on the head died that night, on the wagon, and was buried by the side of the road, like so many other anonymous heroes, who died to defend our land.

(Water damage) . . .these many years later. And yet, sometimes I wake in the dark of night and think of that scene in the woods, East of Orange Plank Road and I remember the circumstances of the North Carolina detachment of Pender's brigade shooting at General Jackson. I remember Hill's frantic pleas for them to stop, screaming "Cease firing," and then the sound of a voice with a thick Piedmont accent calling out, "It's a lie; pour it into them, boys!" and a full volley striking the group, giving General Jackson his fatal injury.

Then I sit in my bed, all in a sweat, and wonder. I wonder if it was me who caused the death of that hero, Stonewall Jackson. I wonder if it was me who put the knife through the heart of the Confederacy. If it was me who made it possible for the North to feed on the South like a jackal on sickened prey.

Of course, if that blame rests on me, then my patient's injured brain allowed him to go through the different paths of time and place and visit the possible futures. And if that was true, then it must be the design of the Almighty that I could save the American lands from being divided between France and England.

And yet, the man had half his brain missing. What if he could truly wander amid time and place, but could not see clearly?

What if I caused the defeat of the South in vain? Did I betray my land for nothing?

I think and I turn and I toss. From outside my window come the sounds of bustling London where I sought refuge after defeat, and where I've lived for forty years now.

As my days draw to a close, rarely a night goes by that I don't hear that voice shouting in my dreams, "Pour it into them, boys."

And that fatal phrase on which the entire war pivoted, on which my sanity hangs, is pronounced in the voice of the wounded man that we left buried by the roadside on the way back from Gettysburg.

I've always been fascinated with Borges' poem and the idea of a circular time—the idea that the myths and legends of humanity might reflect the time ahead, not the time before them. This story was born of this.

"When Rome is dust Again shall wail in the endless Night of his rank palace"

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Minotaur"

We clambered onto the white deck of a Blue Gryphon 56 sea-to-air and sat on deck chairs disposed in two rows. There were fourteen of us, jet-lagged tourists from pan America and the guide who'd show us the manufactured wonders of Mythos.

Sunlight showed as no more than a hint of silver on the deep blue waves of the Mediterranean.

The man across from me reclined on his chair, stretched his long legs, threw his head back and half-closed his eyes. He wore only a scrap of shorts and looked no more than twenty. Tanned and sporting fashionably long black curls, he showed better defined muscles that any one man should have been born with.

Instinctively, I glanced at the middle-finger of his right hand.

In the place where an artifact
had
to display the red ring of his slavery or the black ring of his freedom either permanently embedded in the flesh this man wore a thin gold band. Matching ones adorned every finger of his right hand, even his thumb.

So, this exquisite creature had been naturally born, not test-tube assembled. Would wonders never cease?

He looked at me from beneath his artfully lowered eyelids. The corners of his lips lifted in a tentative smile.

"Living, breathing things to see at last." The fidgety older blonde who sat next to him dug a skinny elbow into his supple muscles. She wore a long yellow silk party dress, singularly out of place. "It will be a relief, after all those dried-up stones at Knossos and all the dreadful bits of pottery in museums."

He opened startling green-blue eyes and looked at her with the bewilderment of an innocent.