The World Made Straight (19 page)

Leonard couldn't tell if Carlton was being ironic. Toomey half turned, put his foot on the first step.

“I sung once at a big tent revival in Hot Springs. Sang ‘Just as I Am' and had them that was never saved and them that was backsliders all crying and getting right with the Lord. Even the preacherman claimed it was my singing more than his sermon brought them up front. The way I figure it I've done enough good for the Lord that he will cut me some slack in other areas. Just like he done Old King David.”

Carlton turned and walked out to the truck. The high beams scouring the window veered away and were gone. Their appearance and departure had been so sudden Leonard could almost believe it had been a hallucination.

The trailer seemed to expand in the big man's absence. Travis sat down on the couch but didn't pick up a book or turn on the TV. He merely stared out the window where darkness had regathered. The only sound in the trailer was the heat pump's steady hum.

“What's bothering you?” Leonard finally asked.

Travis looked up but said nothing.

“She's thirty-four years old,” Leonard said. “She has to look after herself.”

“I don't think she knows how,” Travis said.

Leonard walked over and locked the door.

“If that's true it's too late to teach her,” Leonard said.

DENA DID NOT RETURN UNTIL MONDAY MORNING. LEONARD
was in the kitchen when the truck came quickly out of the woods and swerved to a stop in front of the trailer. Dena gingerly got out of the cab. Hubert Toomey was already turning around as Dena lifted her suitcase from the truck bed. The handle slipped free from her hand and the suitcase flung open when it hit the ground. The truck did not pause as it bumped down the drive. Dena stood there a few moments, arms at her sides, shoulders hunched, the gaping suitcase and its contents littering the ground around her. Leonard was reminded of jerky black-and-white newsreels in which European war refugees stared blankly at the camera. Dena stooped to gather up her cosmetics, the hairbrush and toothbrush. She picked up her nightgown last, brushing off the dirt before folding it delicately in a precise rectangle. This gesture, more than the blank stare, made Leonard leave the window and go outside to help her.

Dena looked worse up close, bloodshot eyes, lower lip split and swollen. She smelled, a dank cloying smell, like newspapers rotted by water. Leonard was glad the boy had already left for work. Dena walked stiffly and winced when she sat down on the bed's edge.

“I'll run you a bath,” Leonard said.

When the water reached the right temperature, he went back to the bedroom. Dena lay on the bed, her eyes open but glazed. He helped her to the bathroom and got her clothes off. Dena let the warm water cover her body, almost to her chin, the back of her head pillowed by the bathtub's porcelain rim. Leonard rubbed some soap on a wet washcloth and handed it to her.

“You really are my sweetheart,” she said, her voice slurred, “taking care of a bad girl like me.”

She lifted the washcloth and tentatively dabbed her lip.

“I'd have stayed with them if they'd let me,” Dena mumbled. “They're rough but at least they think I'm sexy. They don't have to pretend I'm somebody else.”

She let the cloth slide from her hand, closed her eyes.

“Call if you need help getting out,” Leonard said, and went into the front room. If she passed out, her head might slide underwater. Probably would be a blessing, he thought, but soon he checked on her. Dena's eyes were closed but she smiled faintly.

“I'm just resting,” she said. “I'll get out in a minute.”

Leonard sat down in the armchair. On the coffee table was a book he'd checked out from the library, but he did not pick it up. The volume was a study of conflicts between the Cherokee and rival tribes, conflicts not always settled by negotiation. Like Keith's Confederate troops at Shelton Laurel, the Cherokee sometimes killed their prisoners, larding captives with fat before burning them at the stake.

Others.

That was the word at the bottom of the January 17 ledger entry, placed after the names of the regiment's sick and injured. A word far enough down the page it could be easily missed. Leonard believed he knew who those others were. He imagined Doctor Candler applying salves and plasters to the streaked backs of the women, maybe ministering to some of the men taken prisoner as well. Perhaps one of those he treated had been David Shelton. Leonard imagined the doctor tending
to the boy, noting how much he had grown since that long winter evening four years earlier and telling David Shelton's father as much, for the father would be locked in the cabin as well. The two men reminiscing about the night David almost died. One father talking to another, forgetting for a few minutes the two sentries posted outside, the war itself beyond the cabin door as they recalled other shared moments—a hunting party they'd both been part of, a horse auction or lazy hour passed one Saturday outside Tom Whitley's General Store. The other men huddled in the cabin's one room would surely join the conversation. Dr. Candler had probably ministered to every man there at one time or another. They would have their own memories of arms set, stitches sewn, fevers cooled, memories not of just when Doctor Candler had ministered to them but to their families as well.

Perhaps they had talked into the night, late enough that David Shelton would grow sleepy and lie down on a tick mattress in the corner, his glasses folded and placed on the fire-board. Perhaps the boy's father placed a quilt or coat over him as he lay there, and all the other men, including Doctor Candler, thought of the beds and homes their own children slept in and then not just thinking but speaking aloud of them, their number and ages, speaking their children's names like incantations. Each recollection bringing more of the old world back inside those hand-hewn logs as if that world might yet be recovered. It could have occurred that way, Leonard believed. Only Lieutenant Keith knew the men would be executed in the morning. Doctor Candler, like the prisoners, believed they would be marched to the stockade in Knoxville.

But two days of being shot at from outcrops and ridges might have caused the doctor to be less amiable. The prisoners would have known what had happened to their women. The two gold stars on his coat collar marked Doctor Candler as a healer, but the butternut uniform itself was the same as those worn by the torturers of their mothers and wives and daughters. Perhaps all that passed between the doctor and each of the men was a tense, cloaking silence, glances that never met the other's eyes.

Nevertheless, whatever else had or had not occurred, Doctor Candler had ministered to them. The obliqueness of
Others
implied he'd done so at the displeasure of Keith and Allen and probably other men of the 64th. He had noted again, in an entry only two weeks earlier, his low supply of chloroform and laudanum. Medicine used on the enemy might not be available when needed for men in the 64th. But Doctor Candler had followed an oath he'd made before the one given to Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy.

January
17, 1863,
Shelton Laurel

Dewy Morton. Dead at roll call. At least laid to rest in his home
county. Many in this war will not have even that.

Boyce Alexander. Left arm amputation due to minié ball.
Improved. Laudable pus. Gangrene unlikely since no black
spotting on wound. Gave one-half dram of laudanum.

Isaac Ponder. Flux lessened. Continue to drink tea of dogwood
bark every four hours.

James Jackson, frostbite. Immersed limbs in cold water before
intense movement of affected region. Tincture of iodine
applied. No blackened skin.

Billy Revis. Amputated two toes left foot.

Chloroform—five drops. Capital saw. Cauterized with flat blade
of Keith's Bowie knife.

Note: Address Allen about need for more chloroform and
laudanum.

Recommended Revis, Ponder, Alexander relieved of duty.

Recommended Ross, Johnson returned to duty.

Others

Dena returned late New Year's Day in a white pickup driven by a man who'd introduced himself as Gerald the night before. He'd actually knocked on the trailer door and made small talk with Leonard as Dena dried her hair. Well mannered, Leonard thought, at least compared to her other two recent suitors, who'd merely blown their car horns until Dena appeared. Nevertheless, when Leonard heard the pickup turn off the blacktop, it occurred to him that the truck might belong not to Gerald but to Carlton Toomey. Not coming for Dena—one weekend had evidently been enough for her and the Toomeys both—but to find out why Leonard hadn't picked up his January quota of pills. Tomorrow morning I'll go see him, Leonard told himself, get it over with.

“You need to get rid of that thing,” Dena said as she came in. “It's bad luck to keep it up past New Year's.”

The scraggly fir beside the stereo balanced precariously on a stand made of crossed planks and ten-penny nails. The colored lights Leonard had strung around the trailer for the potheads' amusement draped its branches, the fir so puny and thin-needled it sagged under their weight. Red and white fishing bobbers served as ornaments, strips of tinfoil covering the tree's slumping shoulders like a ragged, gaudy coat. The tree had been Travis's doing, cut and set up early Christmas morning. Gifts for Leonard and Dena had been set under it as well, some Hoppe's gun oil for Leonard and a Whitman's Sampler for Dena. When Leonard had taken a five-dollar bill from his pocket, Travis had refused the attempt at a return gift. I wasn't expecting presents from you all, he'd said.

“I'll take it out soon as we finish studying,” Travis said now. “I don't need any bad luck with the GED coming up.”

Dena sat down on the couch and picked up a
Redbook
from the pile of out-of-date magazines Travis had brought from the grocery store. Travis turned back to the math workbook on the coffee table. The dogs began barking and Leonard peered out the window, thinking it might be another of Dena's boyfriends, come to have his turn. A battered silver Mustang pulled up to the trailer, a carload of teenagers inside. Leonard went outside and saw one of them was Shank.

“What you boys want?” Leonard asked. He wore a sweatshirt but the cold went straight through it. If he'd had a thermometer nailed to the trailer, he knew the mercury would be stalled near zero.

“What we want is some pills and a couple of six-packs,” Shank said, “but since you won't sell them to us anymore we
just come to wish our buddy a happy new year.” He nodded toward the trailer. “I don't reckon you'd let Travis come out and play, would you?”

“He's studying for his GED.”

“Damn,” Shank said. “Between you and Lori he never gets out.”

Shank followed Leonard into the trailer, the other boys staying in the car. Leonard sat back down in the recliner.

“Why don't you come with us,” Shank said to Travis. “We'll get higher than the moon.”

Travis nodded at the book.

“Can't tonight.”

“Just for a hour,” Shank said.

“Can't,” Travis repeated.

Shank raised open palms in front of his chest as if to ward Travis off, stepped back. “Fine. Sorry to bother you.”

“We'll get together soon,” Travis said.

“Sure,” Shank muttered, let his eyes settle on the textbook in Travis's hands.

“Lori's been telling it around town that you're going to A-B Tech come fall.”

“What if he does go,” Dena said, closing her magazine. “What problem you got with that?”

“Who says I got a problem with it?” Shank said. “I'd just like to know what's going on with my best buddy since first grade.”

“Real friends support each other,” Dena said, mouthing some advice-column wisdom Leonard knew she'd read in a magazine.

“How can I support him unless I know what he's doing?”

“I'll tell you when I decide,” Travis said, frustration in his voice. “But I ain't decided nothing yet. Nobody else will decide for me neither.”

“Why don't you finish the math tomorrow?” Leonard said after Shank and his friends had headed back to Marshall.

“No,” Travis said. “I want to do it now.”

Travis sat down and spread the workbook open on the coffee table. He hunched forward and peered at the page as he would a pool he was about to cast into. The boy's eyes did not shift as he reached for the pencil and wrote an answer in the workbook. Dena came out from the back room, a clear plastic baggie in her hand.

“This all we got left?” she asked, nodding at the half-dozen pills in the bag.

“Yes,” Leonard said.

“And you're not getting more from Carlton?”

“I've been telling you that for weeks now.”

“Is this some kind of stupid New Year's resolution?”