Blue Asylum (28 page)

Night had fallen. Loud laughter poured from the saloons, but the town was quieter at its edges and corners, the homeless settling down for the night; predators moving through the shadows, their intentions unknown; penniless gamblers leaning against walls; whores not yet in their element, waiting for the men to grow ardently drunk. Ambrose staggered down the street bareheaded, his slouch hat forgotten somewhere. His feet didn’t work. The laudanum had run out earlier in the day, before he’d returned to find Iris, wild-eyed and short-haired, in their hotel room. Now the flask of whiskey in his hand was empty, too, and suddenly he fell and stayed face-down, his nose in the dirt, which was ripe with the organic smell at the center of things. Blood and shit and rot and smoke and something sweet that might have run down a child’s arm and dripped off his elbow.

Rain began to fall. Still he lay there, resting. Pushed himself up, finally, brushing away the gravel that clung to one side of his cheek. He was unsure of direction. Hotel and shore and east and ground and sky. Just an empty space in which consciousness was dull and yet memory so acute. He could not escape it.
Dig his grave,
the sergeant said, and handed him the shovel.
Dig it deep unless you want it glowing.
Ambrose stumbled away from the memory, in the direction of a saloon, leaving the flask lying in the dirt. He entered the swinging doors, tried to walk straight, found a stool at the bar, and climbed on it. The bartender finished wiping a glass and held it to the light. The glass was beveled; through it the bartender’s eye looked gray and enormous.

“Whiskey,” said Ambrose by way of greeting, and watched the man pour him out the brown liquid. It looked hot, as though steam might rise from the glass. It reminded him of laudanum and his sudden wistfulness made him drink the glass in one gulp.

“Another,” said Ambrose. As the bartender poured, Ambrose looked around the room, his eyes coming to rest upon a big man with long, red hair and a handlebar mustache. The man wasn’t just a man. He belonged in a hazy aspic of history that held something evil. Some kind of atrocity. Some terrible offense. What was it?

The bartender put the glass in front of him but Ambrose didn’t notice. He was staring at the red-haired man. Then suddenly, there it was in his mind—the clarity of the answer. Ambrose slid off the bar stool and approached him. His feet weren’t working. If he remembered correctly, the soles belonged flat against the wooden boards. He stumbled against tables, grabbed onto chairs. He was aware of a turn in the bar din around him, a path of silence stamped out by his route to the table. Finally the red-haired man was right in front of him; if he had been speaking he had stopped. His face came into full clarity. Some sober part of Ambrose’s brain, too good for this foolishness, now focused on his face and it all came clear again: stones falling, the smell of the street, the hole in the Indian’s head, and the black stream of dried blood leading into his hairline.

“You killed him,” Ambrose said.

The red-haired man might have said something but he didn’t have to speak; his expression said everything. Fury, indignation. And the pure joy of sudden trouble.

“You bastard,” Ambrose said, deliberately, as though naming a species of rodent, and the red-haired man stood up; this meant war, North and South, two sides who disdained synthesis and conversation in favor of murder.

A large, strong hand came into the story from the side and took Ambrose by the arm, and suddenly Ambrose found himself pulled away from the table, so that the red-haired man’s face slipped out of focus and became part of the tableau of color and noise and confusion and smoke, just a blurry cloud of tension in an otherwise drunk’s-eye view of a saloon at night, and Ambrose tried to say something defensive or appeasing or righteous, but no one wanted to hear it, least of all whoever now pushed him through the swinging doors with brute force and a warning baritone in his ear,
Don’t come back,
and he was alone again, reeling down the street, pausing, attempting to balance himself, the sudden memory as crisp as something newly ironed, the sound of the shovel in Pennsylvania’s dirt.

Seth lay to the side, in the same position he had fallen, one arm thrown around the other in a position taken only by the dead and children in deepest tide of sleep. Ambrose couldn’t look at the boy he’d killed. The muzzle of the sergeant’s gun could still be felt as a hard knot below his left ear. He lifted one heavy shovelful of dirt after another, his back aching from the effort.

Not a cloud in the sky, not a dash of color. The utilitarian sky of early October, stripped of all but its purpose.

He was three feet down when the sergeant came back again, scuttling up to him with one last order.

Take his clothes.

His clothes, sir?

His uniform. We need it.

But it’s bloody.

Wash it in the river.

And the sergeant was gone, that officer who didn’t care about the story of friendship and loss, could not give a rat’s ass on this dull afternoon with the war being lost a little more each day, farmland stripped and cattle shot, slaves run off; the South was dying and he did not, repeat, did not give a shit about one coward burying another.

When the grave was deep enough and the mound of dark earth high enough, bristling with the weeds of early fall, jimson and thistle, he knelt next to Seth’s body. The blood had half dried in the wound in his sternum. A clot of black blood twitched and proved to be a trio of horseflies. He waved them away and straightened out Seth’s arms. Rigor mortis had not set in but was showing around the jaw line. In an hour or two his arms and legs would freeze, then relax again sometime before dawn. Ambrose was infinitely careful as he moved the body, trying to show the only respect available to the boy, now that he’d been shot like a dog and was about to be stripped naked and buried without even his name scratched on an ammunition box, for the final punishment of a deserter was anonymity.

Ambrose untied Seth’s shoes and took them off. Privation was evident on his bare feet. They were scaly, covered with sores and insect bites, toenails yellow and flesh white and loose from days of marching in wet shoes. Ambrose unbuttoned the shell jacket and took it off the body. He couldn’t look at Seth’s face. He pulled off his shirt and the undershirt beneath it and was puzzled to see not a bare torso but a cotton cloth, tightly bound around the chest. Ambrose frowned, sat the dead boy up, and began to unwind the cloth, white in some places, bloody in others, unwinding around and around until the cloth fell away.

Ambrose gasped.

This final outrage could not be true. He let go of Seth and the body fell backward against the ground, eyes turned to the unremarkable sky, and the breasts of a young woman bare in the light.

He could no longer see the reality of the moment, that he was a drunk man under bright stars, on his knees in the dusty street. He saw Seth in that clarity of detail whose invocation he had always dreaded. He saw the outrage of it, the atrocity, and that is the horror of war, that somewhere inside it for every unlucky man is the moment that undoes him, perhaps something simple, perhaps a metaphor that wandered into the line of fire. Something restless inside, never resolved, some quirk of fate and chance, or just those men who fought without hate, handicapped by the fact that they had no quarrel—it was always something, and that’s what Ambrose could never figure out, how to extract that something from the body, but there it was, and Ambrose turned around and staggered back in the direction of the bar, his shoulders hitting things, voices in his ears.

He remembered a little long-eared dog that ran out in front of the line before the battle, wagging his tail, not understanding that this was not a game; with a dog’s heart he loved both sides; he was shot in the second volley and licked the captain’s hand before he died, and later the captain made the entire battalion stand at attention as he was buried, because he was the best man on the battlefield, and Ambrose couldn’t take it anymore, the depth of feeling in a war, the steepness of right and wrong, the way deeds echoed, the way that campfires and laughter were undone by musket and diphtheria, and as he approached the bar his drunk’s stumble went away, then the soldier’s stride took its place as his heart steadied and his shoulders squared; he was Ambrose, a man a man a man, and it was wrong of his sergeant to make him kill that boy, that girl, even in the context of war, it was wrong that gentleness of soul was a punishable offense, and he burst through the double doors back into the bar, heading straight for that table where the sergeant who made him shoot Seth was enjoying a whiskey with all his friends, and the sergeant, who no longer had long, red hair and a handlebar mustache, but was wiry and small, had just enough time to look up before Ambrose was upon him, grabbing him by the collar,
You killed him you killed him you killed him.

Ambrose didn’t see the gun at all, just heard the shot as the bullet entered his chest just below the sternum. In the heat of battle men can’t feel their wounds; it is God’s way of apologizing for the fact that they never heal. Ambrose’s knees buckled and he felt a great warmth spouting from him, running down his shirt, filling his clothes, streaming off his hands, and he thought how Iris, his love, would have to bathe him, but it didn’t hurt, it was fine.

He sank to the floor and crawled through the bar, his head bumping the swinging doors as he made his way out into the street. He turned over on his back to look up at the stars, as the air around him flooded with blue light, and a blue sky appeared overhead, and a long-eared dog appeared by his side and licked his hand with a blue tongue, and he did not so much hear Seth’s voice as see it. The voice was blue.

His body was already bathed by the time they let Iris in the room, but she had asked for permission to shave him for burial. They provided her a towel, some shaving soap, a straight razor, and a basin of water and left her alone with him. She pulled back the sheet that covered his body, staring at the dark hole in his chest just below the sternum. It was bloodless, the skin slightly blue around it. She dragged her eyes away and looked into his face, finding there the Ambrose she knew, not from the war or the asylum, but from a time when he belonged to himself.

She wet the shaving soap and worked up the lather between her hands, spreading it across his face, over the jaw line, up to the ears, down to the hard knot of cartilage at the bottom of his throat. She had closed his eyes with the tips of her fingers. The purple hue of his lids stood out in contrast to the white lather, his long lashes coated with it. She dipped the razor into the water and used one hand to angle his face to the light from the window as she worked, pausing to dip the razor in the water, leaving floating rafts of lather and suspended whiskers. So black, so white.

Her hands were cold. Lips shivering. Forehead wrinkled in concentration. She finished his face and started on his neck. She pressed too hard with the blade, and a tiny slit in the skin appeared but did not fill with blood. She scraped his throat smooth, dipped a corner of the towel in the water, and wiped his face clean of lather.

She combed his hair and was finished, able to study his body one more time, touching the clusters of freckles, the stray moles, scars from unfelt wounds in the heat of battle, shadows around the eyes, smooth line of the brow, narrowing of cartilage at the center of the nose, flesh of the earlobes. Ridges of the throat, shoulders, arms, chest. (Ignoring the bullet hole. Ignoring it.) Bones of the rib cage, the dark, flat nipples. Yielding chill of the belly.

The penis, stretched flat and cool on the palm of her hand. Bare, smooth skin on his upper thighs. Downy hair beginning midway to the knees. Hard muscle on the calves, knots of the ankles, cords along the top of the foot, arch of the sole, the way each tiny fifth toe was tucked toward the others.

On a quiet Sunday morning, Iris followed the wagon bearing Ambrose’s body through the town. She had found someone who agreed to bury him out by the creek with the last of the money left over from the sale of the bag of sugar. A dog crept out of a yard and barked at the horses or the wheels or the scent of death. The bark sounded strange to Iris. Muted. And the rising sun. Its borders were fuzzy and it seemed to be in the wrong place in the sky. Weeds and treetops moved, and the sheet covering Ambrose flapped, but she felt no breeze against her face.

She had failed him utterly. Stolen him from an institution that had, at the very least, kept him alive. Taken him for herself and killed him in less than two weeks. She was the strangler fig. She did not deserve the feel of the breeze, or the colors of morning. She had condemned the doctor for his hubris without noticing the monstrous pride of her own.

The wagon wheels creaked. A hawk flew overhead. A distant church murmured a hymn.

Iris looked back and noticed a motley group of children following the wagon. Wondered why they weren’t in that church. Wondered where their parents were. The wagon wheel hit a pothole; the sheet moved and exposed Ambrose’s bare feet. A small exclamation came from the children and Iris stumbled forward, catching up with the cart and pulling the sheet down. The effort exhausted her, and she breathed heavily as the wagon rolled past familiar crape myrtle bushes. Weeds broke through the dirt road. The children followed them. The tableau of the woman with the man’s haircut and the dead man and the wagon was just another toy the war had made for them.

The man she hired wouldn’t dig the grave by the creek. “Too many roots,” he said, and finally they agreed that he would dig at the edge of the meadow. He was knee-deep in the grave now, and some of the children had wandered away. Others sat in the grass and watched pensively, as though something more exciting would happen any minute. The wagon horse waited patiently in its traces, flicking its ear against the tickle of a blue fly and bending over to nibble at the goldenrod. Iris stood, arms folded, watching the dirt fly out of the grave.