Her things remained as she’d left them, though Sarah had insisted on putting the kitchen in order and cleaning it. So, too, had she insisted on throwing open the curtains. Curtains that hadn’t been touched since Bridget closed them before bed that last night.
Why are you sitting here?
The faceless reflection in his coffee cup had no answers.
You don’t have to be so pathetic.
It was a choice. One he could change. He didn’t have to do this, live like this. If living was indeed what he was doing.
“God, I’m tired,” he whispered to himself.
Then stop it. Stop it all.
Chuckling hollowly at himself, he set the coffee cup to the side and reached into the drawer. Bridget had kept a store of hard candy for the children, handing out the sweets as the child was leaving.
Doc took a peppermint. Setting it on the desk, he began carving with his penknife, hollowing out the center. The only sound in the room came from faint scraping. Fine white powder floated down to coat his black trousers like dust.
He glanced at the gray beyond the window, realizing that dusk was closing in. Rain pelted the glass and rattled on the tin roof. It would be a cold and miserable walk back to his empty house. And, to be honest, he was tired. As tired as he’d ever been.
And as hopeless.
Doc forced himself to stand and walked back to his pharmacy kit. He found the vial with its garish label. Using the small measuring spoon, he scooped out more than enough of the powder and dropped it into the white ceramic mixing cup. With care he made a paste and used the spoon to press it into the hole he’d carved in the peppermint. As a final measure, he sealed it with a plug of damp flour.
Then, knowing his pharmacy would surely wind up in another’s hands, he carefully washed the mixing cup, and returned everything to its proper place.
Taking the candy, he returned to the front room and resettled himself at his desk. The room was gloomy now, cold, the fading light of day feeble beyond the rain-streaked window.
Doc stared at his deadly candy, resting so innocently on the battered wooden surface of the desk.
“Don’t torture yourself because of me, Philip.” He heard Bridget’s voice in his memory. “Dying is part of life.”
She had kept repeating that over and over as her life seeped away. Whispered how much she’d loved him. Pleaded that he not mourn.
“Dying is part of life.” He nodded, thinking back to his training, to the lectures he’d first listened to about losing patients. And then working with Benjamin Morton in Memphis, how the old man had given Philip that gleeful wink when they’d pulled off the impossible and saved a life.
And Ben Morton—a picture of health—had died in his sleep.
Then had come the Fourth Tennessee, and boys wasting away right and left from dysentery, cholera, typhus, pneumonia. And nothing he could do about it. Clear up to Shiloh.
Dear God, Shiloh!
How many of his nightmares were filled with the terrified eyes, the pain-glazed disbelief sculpted into the faces of those dying boys. It was as if Doc could feel the blood caked on his fatigued hands, the exhaustion and horror in his soul as they died on the table. He’d never forget the limp and sodden weight of their amputated feet, legs, hands, and arms.
The Federals had marched him across the battlefield to Pittsburg Landing. He’d seen with his own eyes. Impossible things: the bloated bodies rotting in the sun; the broken guns and dead horses; the splintered trees; and blasted soil.
One Shiloh should have been enough. How did a reasonable man get his brain around twenty of them, from Manassas to Shiloh, and on to Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Cold Harbor, and Franklin?
And then James was staring up at him, his eyes fever-bright in the barracks at Camp Douglas. “Don’t grieve for me, Doc. You’ve suffered enough.”
“Saint Hancock?” He rubbed his weary face, the deadly candy but a shadow on his desk. “You were like a brother to me, James. Unlike Butler, I didn’t betray your trust.”
Butler.
He closed his eyes, wondering where he was, if he even were alive. What happened to a lunatic in the wilderness? Had he been killed by the rampaging Sioux and Cheyenne, frozen in a blizzard while out in the open? Murdered, shot down by someone too frightened to share the world with a crazy man? Beaten to death because he couldn’t stop babbling?
If so, he should have found his final rest behind the farmhouse next to Fly, Maw, and that unknown bushwhacker who’d stood up for Sarah.
God, how much would have been different if he’d just told Ann Marie no when she’d suggested enlisting. As a physician in Memphis, could he have convinced Maw and Sarah to come join him for safety’s sake? They’d had no place to go as northwest Arkansas descended into madness, murder, and butchery.
“If I could have saved them, I would have lost Butler,” he told himself. He wouldn’t have been at Camp Douglas to keep the ragamuffin from freezing to death in the snow that day.
And God alone knew what had happened to Billy.
“I wouldn’t have known you, Bridget. Wouldn’t have loved you until I’d given you all of me that there was to give,” he told her ghost where it lurked in the darkest of the shadows. As he closed his eyes, the extent of his loss came hammering home.
A man can only bear so much.
But tonight, it would be over. God could chide him for being a coward, or slap him down as a fool.
“Let the Christians be right,” he whispered. “Let me see Bridget again.”
He turned the candy in his fingers, feeling the round essence of it. He’d want to wash it down with the last of his cold coffee, ensure it was deep in his gut when the cyanide began
