Her eyes were empty sockets lined with torn tissue, the eyes having been pecked away by the magpies. The flesh on her left cheek was ripped where some critter had worried her. At the sight, a cry died in his throat, a spear of pain lanced his heart.
He was living a nightmare.
Sarah, as though aroused from her lethargy, bent. Her fingers shook as she tugged the old red blanket back over the ruins of Maw’s face.
“Let’s…” Billy blinked at the tears. “Let’s get her in the ground, Sis.”
He tried not to think of how they’d found Maw when they’d arrived at dusk last night. How she’d been dragged from the porch where he’d so thoughtlessly left her. How her gut had been torn open and her insides savaged by some hog gone wild. He tried not to remember the mewling sounds that had risen from his throat, or the horror glittering behind Sarah’s half-mad eyes as they’d lifted Maw’s remains back into the blanket.
Or the smell, God forbid.
If only I had been here that day …
Sarah met his gaze, nodded, and together they lifted and carried Maw to the side of the grave. They swung her out and tried to lower her into the depths. Even as they did, the old blanket tore with a rip, and Maw’s scavenged corpse fell to land with a thump in the bottom.
“No!” Billy cried out, his stomach flipping. “Oh, God, Maw! I’m sorry! So … sorry!”
“It’s all right, Billy,” Sarah said woodenly.
Before he could move, she’d crawled down into the narrow grave and set herself to the task of straightening Maw’s flopped body. But he’d never forget the way Maw seemed to stare up at him out of those empty sockets, as if her ghost were glaring in disgust. It was in the set of her half-open mouth, the dried lips pulled back from the brown, peglike teeth.
“God in hell,” he whispered, falling back, his legs no longer able to hold him. A banshee scream sounded inside his head. Something burst apart in his chest. Dropping his head into his hands, he wept.
44
February 7, 1864
On his twenty-third birthday James Morton looked up from his bunk with glassy eyes. When he coughed his entire body convulsed—the sound of it racking and deep. His flesh had sunk into his bones, leaving his face cadaverous. The eyes appeared slightly bugged and bloodshot. A sort of living skull beneath thin waxy skin.
“It’s bad, ain’t it, Doc?” Just that short statement brought on another fit of coughing that left blood and bits of tissue on James’s lips.
Doc exhaled, watching his breath rise in a feathery mist where it was illuminated by the shaft of light slanting through the barracks window. He wondered if life were nothing more tenuous and fleeting. Appearing warm and animated, only to dissipate into nothingness within moments.
For more than a month now, he and James had watched the shaft of sunlight shift from the solstice maximum in December. Some wit had marked the farthest the sun had shone into the barracks on the solstice noon by scratching a bunk post. Now at midday, it only reached to a spot lower on the floor.
The slow crawling of light might have encapsulated all of existence.
Around him men huddled in blankets and old campaign jackets, many coughing, others muttering among themselves. All of them were scratching, pinching at their hair and beards in an attempt to catch a louse and crush it between their finger and thumbnails.
Outside, the wind off frozen Lake Michigan was agonizingly bitter. In the Camp Douglas barracks—as snug and windproof as a rusted-out colander in a blizzard—the temperature was just ordinary bitter.
Doc stared helplessly up at the ceiling tresses where thin strips of daylight could be seen between the shrunken planks in the roof. “I don’t suppose a lie would do any good, James. You’ve seen too much of tuberculosis.”
James nodded and wiped his lips with a bloody rag. “You taught me too much medicine.” He averted his eyes. “I guess that steamboat just gets farther and farther away, don’t it?”
“I wouldn’t give up. Not yet. Your sister’s husband said that the paperwork should be coming through any day now. Sometimes, getting a sick man out of an environment like this, back into his home, can work wonders.”
“I think I’m going to become a Catholic.”
Doc craned his neck, squinting. “Where did that come from?”
James waved his bloody rag to take in the rest of the barracks and the ragged, half-starved, vermin-infested prisoners. “Them Catholics, they’re the only ones that recognize saints, don’t they?”
“You Baptists are depressing. What about the Episcopalians?”
James chuckled, which precipitated another fit of coughing. When he finished, he whispered, “Dear God, each time it feels like I’m ripping the insides of my throat and lungs out.” A tear squeezed past his eye. “But I meant what I said, Doc. All of us in here, we think you’re a saint. We know what you’ve done for us. Your volunteering in the hospital? How many of them green Yankee surgeons have you trained? That man Jenkins hadn’t even held a scalpel before he was sent here. You’re the one what taught him how to amputate a limb. You’re the one as got that General Meigs to order a sewer system put in last summer.”
“No I didn’t. They wouldn’t even let me talk to him.” That had been Henry Bellows of the Unitarian Church of New York. Bellows had candidly told the whole world that the only way to clean Camp Douglas was to burn it to the ground. Right down to the last stick of wood.
Doc looked down at his hands, still so thin and grime-encrusted. Word had finally filtered through the guards that because of Doc’s complaining, starting with Higbee, all of his letters to Ann Marie had been confiscated by the provost and burned. It was said that the provost had feared Doc was using some code to expose abuses within the prison that would be
