No wonder Ann Marie had thought him uninterested.
Could men really be that petty?
James wheezed. “Most of the men in here think you did. That’s the trouble with being a saint.”
“Why don’t you rest now?”
“Because I got a funny feeling, Doc.” He coughed, shivered, and sucked for a breath that just didn’t seem to come. Doc could hear the rattling in the man’s lungs from where he sat.
“What feeling is that?”
“That I ought to say what I need to say.”
“Nothing need be said.”
“My sister…” He looked away, wincing with shame.
“She thought I’d forgotten her, James.”
“I should have wrote her on my own. Told her how much you loved her.”
“It wasn’t your place. We could only send a single page. That was the provost’s order. The goddamned provost … Well, it needn’t matter. Can’t change the past.”
“She always was flighty.” James closed his eyes, his skin so pale and delicate it looked like it might tear at the faintest touch. “I wish that … Well, I wish you really were my brother.”
“I am, James. We’ve shared more than brothers.” He thought back to Butler and Billy, wondering where they were. If they’d ever all be home together again.
James swallowed hard, coughed. “Afterward,” he whispered, “just send Mother a letter. Don’t go … Don’t go telling them in person. You’ve suffered too much already at Ann Marie’s hands.”
“She didn’t know.” Doc reached out, laid his hand on James’s and tightened it. “You just get a good night’s sleep, and you can tell them yourself when your papers come through.”
James broke into a fit of coughing, then spit blood into his rag. “Why’d you get into medicine?”
“Because my dog died when I was a lad. Called him Sandy. Went everywhere with me. Loved to play fetch with a stick. One day he chewed one up. Did that all the time, but this time he swallowed a sliver.”
Doc glanced off to the side so James wouldn’t see the hurt. “Took him a week to die, and it was agony the whole time. Paw and I cut him open to see what went wrong. And there was that sliver, poking through his stomach wall and into the intestines.”
“They’ll have a place for you in heaven, Doc. Saint Hancock … got a ring to it.”
Sure. And where is God in all this horror, sickness, and death?
“Don’t grieve for me, Doc. You gotta promise.”
Doc sat with James until he dropped into an uneasy slumber.
After a time he rose, walked over to the window, and stared out at the slanting winter sun. Crystals of ice glinted in the air like tiny diamonds. Light gleamed on the snow-covered roofs, cast shadows in the track-dimpled and hard-frozen mud in the yard.
A group of shivering men, hugging their sleeves to their breasts for warmth, were harassing a scarecrow of a madman. Bending down, teasing him, asking him questions. The lunatic looked pathetic—a considerable achievement when compared to the rest of the vermin-ridden ragamuffins in Camp Douglas.
“A real saint would go out there and put a stop to that.” He sighed unhappily and walked back to the bed. James was …
Doc’s heart dropped.
When had he gotten so good at recognizing death? James should have had days. Weeks. Maybe, if his parole papers had come through, even months before consumption took him.
Or perhaps it was a complication from the old chest wound from Shiloh. Or maybe James had just finally given up.
Doc stared woodenly at the empty green eyes, the chestnut hair … the dusting of freckles on the pale bridge of the young man’s nose.
He should grieve, feel the aching loss. But inside lay only a dark emptiness. Like that of a worn-out boiler abandoned in the desert, which, when rapped with the knuckles, echoed hollowly of rust.
“Thomas? Corporal Willy? Do you want to give me a hand here? James needs to go to the deadhouse, and here’s another bunk we can free up for whoever’s next in line.”
The men went suddenly quiet, turning owlish eyes on Doc.
“You sure, Doc?” Corporal Willy asked. “He was just talking to you not fifteen…”
At Doc’s look, Corporal Willy looked away. “All right. Come on. All of you. Burial detail. Form up!”
“What for? It’s colder ’an hell and a bat’s ass out there! Five men died in here in the last week. Didn’t do no burial detail for none of them,” one of the Fresh Fish protested—a newcomer from Chickamauga.
Brady Duncan leaned down, practically nose to nose with the Fresh Fish, his eyes thin. “Because James is Doc’s friend. Now get your chapped ass off that floor and form up, or they’ll find you under the barracks in the morning, froze solid in the mud with a broke neck. You get my point?”
They carried James across the frozen yard on a blanket stretcher supported by planks. The guards watched from the high fence, stamping, blowing into their hands as the wicked wind off the lake blew their breath away in frosty streamers.
The guard outside the deadhouse looked worried at first, raising his rifle, uneasy gaze flicking this way and that.
“Private Nelson,” Doc told him, stepping forward. “James Morton passed. We’re just showing our respect. Come to lay him out for burial.”
To his surprise, Nelson saluted. “I see, sir. Uh, Doc. My sympathies.” He stepped aside, allowed them to carry James into the dark interior. The stack of frozen corpses, piled like macabre lengths of firewood, looked ghastly. A work detail would dig a trench for them as soon as the ground thawed.
With great care, James was placed high atop the pile in a position where he wouldn’t be covered by other dead: the only respect they could show him.
Doc climbed down, now used to the unyielding, frozen corpses. Not even their expressions, the half-lidded and frost-filled eyes, or the partially gaping mouths bothered him.
“Attenshun!” Corporal Willy cried. Feet, some only clad in socks, shuffled.
“Salute!”
Arms flashed.
“Troooop … dismissed!”
One by one they filed out. Doc, the last, turned in the doorway to whisper, “Go with God, my friend. Hope they got steamboats in
