Near the stove he found a chess game in process. No less than ten men crowded around to watch as Baker and Halloway moved their hand-carved pieces. The board with its squares had been engraved into the floor using a piece of broken glass as a chisel.
Sylvester Moulton sat hunched beneath one of the windows reading aloud from the tattered remains of a Chicago newspaper. As Doc passed, he hid a smile. Moulton was nearing the paper’s end, reading ads for employment, a piano for sale, and the incredible claims for various patent medicines. His audience sat enrapt.
Doc took a seat on the lower bunk where James Morton lay propped, his thin body wrapped in a series of blankets. He had arranged them so that the holes in one were covered by intact portions of another.
“What news?” James asked, his deep-sunk green eyes meeting Doc’s.
“We’re down to seven,” Doc told him. “Levi Harvath died this morning. I accompanied his body when it was carried to the deadhouse. Then I went to the chief surgeon’s office and made sure the paperwork was filled out. Like so many, it was typhoid.”
“The paperwork? Do they do anything with that? Or does it just go into a drawer somewhere in the War Department? How many times have we heard that anyone back home was ever informed? Twice? Three times?”
“The post is unreliable. You know I don’t put much stock in rumors, but I’ve heard on good authority that someone is fighting a war somewhere or other.”
James fished inside his blankets, extracting a stained and worn envelope. “Mother manages to write.”
“Wish your sister would. Four letters I’ve sent. If I could get the money, I’d write her every day.”
The camp provost allowed a prisoner one page. It would be carefully read before being placed in the post, and it cost a relative fortune without any guarantee that it would be delivered behind the lines. To Memphis, in Union control as it was, the letters should have gone through fine.
So why hasn’t Ann Marie written?
James broke into a coughing fit. At least it didn’t leave him in agony anymore. His convalescence had taken much too long, and truth be told, had James been asked to walk all the way across the compound, he’d have collapsed at the halfway point.
Seven of us left.
Of those captured with Doc at Shiloh, only John Mays and Augustus Clyde had been paroled and exchanged. Paperwork had come through that they were surgeon’s assistants, and noncombatants. Doc had stood by the main gate, watched as they were searched, and then led out to begin the march to the railroad station. That had finally happened in September.
“I think it’s my fault,” Doc said, looking down at his dirt-encrusted hands.
“That Ann Marie hasn’t written? What did you tell her in that last letter?”
“No. I mean I think it’s my fault that we haven’t all been paroled.”
“How?” James asked.
“When I talked to the provost, he protested that he had no paperwork for the release of any Dr. Philip Hancock. That surely it was a paperwork error, and eventually it would be straightened out.”
The man had smiled as he’d said it.
“Can’t blame yourself for a paperwork error.”
“James, it was after I made that first big fuss. When I bearded Higbee about conditions. That’s when the records for our group of Shiloh prisoners disappeared. The miracle is that Clyde and Mays made it out.”
When Doc had asked, an arrogant, fresh-faced lieutenant had told him: “I’m sorry, sir. While we have records of your interment here, we have no records of when or where you were originally processed. Therefore, we cannot give you preference for parole and exchange.”
It’s my fault! These men are dying because of me.
He’d gone after Higbee. Raised too much hell. Complained to the Sanitary Commission.
“I know that look,” James told him. “You’re punishing yourself again.”
“Since that first time I’ve tried to make amends, James. Kept my silence. Hoped that the occasional hint, the dropped suggestion, might get our Shiloh prisoners finally placed onto the list.”
And then there was James. And his promise to Ann Marie.
Who never wrote.
Only seven of them left.
Camp Douglas was better at killing Confederates than the entire Federal army. In any given month, roughly ten percent of the camp’s prisoners died from pneumonia, typhoid, diarrhea, influenza, the periodic outbreak of measles or mumps, catarrh, and, God forbid, the occasional smallpox case.
Since no one else cared—except for the occasional inspector from the Sanitary Commission—Doc had taken it on himself to look after the pesthouse where the worst of the cases were taken.
She should have at least received one of those letters.
“I see that look,” James said softly. He waved the missive from Felicia again. “There have just been two of Mother’s letters that have been delivered. And in this last one from October Mother states that she’d written at least four before this. We don’t know how many get lost.”
“I know.” He closed his eyes, imagining Ann Marie’s face, the freckles on her nose. How her eyes … Dear God, they were green, weren’t they? And her hair. Chestnut, yes? Auburn?
A sense of panic sent a shiver through his nerves.
The freckles. Hold on to the freckles. They were a constant.
“Are you all right, Doc?”
He took a deep breath of the cold air, wondering when he’d stopped smelling the stench. “It’s the damnedest thing, James. For an instant … I couldn’t remember what Ann Marie looked like.”
“Philip, for the love of God, take yourself down from this impossible meat hook you’ve hung yourself on. You’ve done everything you could to save each and every one of us. You’re using up so much of yourself for the rest of us that there is nothing left for you.”
But it is my fault.
“Besides,” James told him with a smile. “I know Ann Marie. She’s my sister. Writing just isn’t one of her talents. Drawing, singing, sewing,
