When the War Is Over (12 page)

The boy lay in a long room among other patients. Jacob hovered. Catto nodded once at the others, carefully overlooking the details of their misery, and carried a wooden chair to the boy's bedside. “Phelan tells me you'll be fine.”

“It's scary. They shaved me.” Thomas blushed.

“It's always scary, I suppose. You scared hell out of me once.”

Thomas smiled weakly.

“You're a fine boy,” Catto said. “You'll do. What were you before all this anyway? Farmer? Schoolboy?”

“Farmer. Never went to school. But the farm was no use without pa and he was mostly drunk. When he was sober he hunted.”

“With that rifle.”

“With that rifle.”

“A better shot than you.”

“He was, when he was sober.”

“How'd you come to have the rifle?”

Thomas hesitated for the space of several breaths. With the rough sheet Catto sponged sweat from the boy's face. Gently Jacob stayed him, and with a moist towel supplanted him. “Well, I ran off,” Thomas said. “He was laying somewhere, I reckon, not too far from a barrel of whiskey. I wanted to be a soldier. And I heard they had no guns. No nothing. Colonel Jessee was my hero and he was passing through so I grabbed the rifle and …” He panted briefly. “Oh it hurts. Oh Lieutenant.”

“You hang on,” Catto said softly. “I'll go tell them to hurry.”

“Yeh. Yeh. Hurry.”

With a quick nod to Jacob, Catto returned to the operating room. It was empty but shortly Phelan came bustling in to find him. “We're almost ready. In or out?”

“In,” said Catto. “The boy hurts. Hurry it up.” Again he saw blood, swelling veins like pink worms, shiny white bone. He swallowed vigorously. A man had followed Phelan into the small room. “Surgeon Shadbolt,” Phelan said, “Lieutenant Catto.” Catto and the surgeon shook hands; Shadbolt was older, near fifty, and Catto was unaccountably comforted. Shadbolt had white hair and the look of a saint: light blue eyes, weary, and a sad smile. “Don't worry,” the saint said. “I've done this before.”

“I'm glad to hear it, sir,” Catto said most courteously. “I hope you'll tell the boy. It would cheer him up.”

“I will, then.” Shadbolt excused himself and inspected his ranked instruments. Catto craned to see: this was like the shelves and bins of a hardware shop, and he felt some of the excitement he had always felt before boxes of bits and barrels of nails, sheaves of rasps, trays and jars and pigeon-holes full of clamps, screws, nuts, bolts, cotterpins; balls of twine and lead weights, hide-scrapers and penknives, wicks and candles and oil-lamps, hammers and awls. The memory of a general store in Illinois came to him, and of his first penknife, quickly stolen by parties unknown. But he was roused by the step of a third medical person, an orderly, a young man sallow and gloomy, a mulatto perhaps, not smocked like the doctors but dressed for sweeping and scrubbing, like the caretaker of a town hall. No name; he and Catto nodded. The young man then lit several small lamps and turned them high, and set them on shelves and tables. The room was suddenly bright, the windows pale. Phelan pointed to one: “We'd better have that open a bit.” The orderly complied. With soft swearing and the shrieks of tortured wood two more orderlies pushed an awkward wheeled bed into the room: upon it lay Thomas, frail beneath a sheet. He saw Catto and tried to smile. “Lieutenant.”

“Thomas. How is it now?”

“The same. I'm scared.”

“Well don't be,” Catto and Phelan said in chorus.

“Nothing will go wrong,” Phelan said. “You're a strong healthy boy and you'll be fine.”

“My father.”

“What about him?”

“If—”

“If,” Catto said. “Thomas, don't you worry.”

The boy's face crumpled but he said, “All right. If you say so.”

“My name is Shadbolt.” The old man smiled down; Thomas grinned, a ghastly rictus. “I've done this before. It isn't hard, and we're not going to lose you. I want you to know that.”

“Oh, I know that,” Thomas said, “I know that, I'll be all right,” and sobbed hopelessly, gushing sudden tears. Catto froze.

“Lie still and breathe easy,” Shadbolt said. The mask covered Thomas' face; watching him Catto gasped and suffocated slightly. Chloroform dripped. The patient's lungs pumped properly. His eyes closed. “He's out,” said Shadbolt, and blew his nose, trumpeting into a red bandanna. “I'll give him a bit longer,” said Phelan. They waited. “Now,” Phelan decided. “The sideways incision, as you said.”

“Yes. I don't know yet which is best. But it's doubtless better to cut with the grain.”

With the grain. Like a roast. Most of Thomas was beneath the sheet; Phelan worked on an anonymous patch of living skin. Catto made no effort to watch closely. He sniffed at the chloroform and was the worse for it. Shadbolt and Phelan muttered like witches. “Yes. There. Swab it. Now a little wider. Good.” Catto withdrew, and drowsed. Thomas had said, “Thanks for coming, Lieutenant.” His last words, perhaps. Catto wondered what his own last words would be. An angry oath, he hoped. And where was Jacob? The surgeons muttered more. Catto drifted, sweating slightly. Garesche. The headless horseman. That was a story. Mrs. McIntyre read that story. The boys shivered and giggled. That night Catto woke weeping. “Clamp now.” Catto blinked and stirred. He thought, as if it were his duty, of Thomas Martin. God let him live to be a man. A cheerful boy set down by fate among hazards and lightnings. A hard worker, and that streak of assurance. If he lived the world would lie open to him, this abundance, this Union preserved; he could go west, make a life, land, buffalo, travel, campfires, some day a wife and a house and the war forgotten, only a few memories of the time of trouble, and he would tell the story—Shot an officer, I did, fellow name of Catto and where is he now.

The surgeons seemed purposeful, unflurried; they were men of courage and experience, were they not. The school of war. War! Catto's school too. Better battle than surgery. No more battles, though. Not now. Like Thomas he was free. This vast land. Months to cross. Alone. The boy would live. The boy must live. In all the world he owed only Catto, and that a small debt, nothing like a life, and anyway Catto had forgiven him. Debt discharged. And the war over and the farewells, and Catto on his way. Alone. The Rocky Mountains. Catto contracted invisibly, in a wrenching spasm of misanthropy: his vision cleared and he saw himself on horseback, alone, in a pine forest fringing the flank of a tall mountain; he proposed to make camp beside a clear, dancing mountain stream. There was no human being for a hundred miles; he was inordinately happy, and groaned aloud.

“Are you all right?” The voice was Phelan's.

“All right,” Catto said. He saw Phelan, and nodded.

Phelan grinned, turned swiftly, and with a quick gesture tossed something at Catto. Catto made the catch by instinct, but revulsion had already boiled through his blood and into his belly. He looked down, knowing, full of horror. Phelan said, “You see why we call it vermiform.”

“I don't know what that means,” Catto started to say; the words were cut off by a babyish moment of pure and absolute helplessness, in turn cut off by the sudden and unaccountable levitatdon of the floor itself, which inspired Catto to clutch in panic at the arms of his chair; but his arms would not flex, and his hands would not seize, because he was fainting dead away.

Jacob found him next day, surprised him shaving after the morning roll call, sidled into the cabin and said, “Thomas going to be all right. So they say.”

“You saw him?”

“Yes I did. And Cap'n Phelan too, up and about at sunrise, and Thomas weak like a baby but the Cap'n say everything look fine.”

“Well thank God for that. Thank God for that.”

“I did,” Jacob said, and then slyly, “I hear you not so fine.”

“Now don't make fun of me. You wouldn't have been so fine either.”

“No, that's true. I didn't mean nothin by it.”

Catto grinned. “I have enough trouble with the boy making fun of me.”

Jacob laughed. “A great one for fun, that boy. You know what he ask me to tell you? He and you all even now, that's what.”

Catto shared the chuckle, wide awake with relief. “I can tell you now, I was scared.”

Jacob shook his head. “No need to fear. Everbody say Cap'n Phelan the best. The best.”

“Haw. You had breakfast?”

“Just hot coffee.”

“Come on. Sit with me and Silliman and tell us all about it.” He paused, and squinted. “I bet you were at the hospital all night.”

“That's right. But I slept in a bed. I like that.” Jacob smiled faintly. “You know, sometimes I get tired. I'm not a boy no more. You working me too hard.”

By golly, Catto started to say, give a man his freedom and next thing he wants to be president; but something in him bit back the remark.

It was another Catto, the Catto of old, who trotted into Cincinnati on Saturday a week later. The boy was well and walking about, and Catto, in thanks and praise, had reformed somewhat. He rode erect and feared no man, dreaming now of Charlotte, now of pot roast. He seemed today to take for granted his horse, his bar, the occasional salute, the grudging envy of a wagoneer. The cold air conduced to pride, to a mysterious sort of good health, as if he were finally an officer not by virtue of trappings, of insignia, but by his own true virtue, by an inner transformation, so that he was now fully commissioned in his bath also, or in the bedchamber. He was on a street now, not a road, a city street hemmed by signs,
FRESH MEATS DAILY BUTCHERING CIGARS AND SNUFF THE BANE OF SOUTHERN OHIO EBLING
'
S DRY GOODS THE RHEINGARTEN
, and his charger slowed from a jog. They made their stately way along the slippery cobblestones. Third Street. East Third Street. One hundred and nineteen East Third Street. Civilized. Catto approved. An elegant address, with a number and a knocker. Not even a sentry outside. He hitched his horse and promised to be quick, and let himself into one hundred and nineteen East Third Street.

“You won't say no to schnapps.”

“No, I won't, thank you, sir. That is, I won't say no.”

With his teeth Willich removed the cork; with his left hand he poured two ponies full. “Drink up.” Catto stepped to the desk and took one glass, Willich raised the other and said something foreign; they sipped. “Ah. It takes me back. I rarely touch it now but it takes me back.” The general smiled almost dreamily. He stood like a general, he did, with that ramrod back; Catto vowed to practice.

He sucked in fumes. “What is it, sir? It tastes like, like—”

“Like little cakes, or bread. Am I correct?”

“That's right.”

Willich told him what it was and Catto forgot immediately. Willich corked the bottle and set it aside. “Sit down now. How is life?”

“Very dull, sir. Not like the good old days.”

“The good old days. For me the good old days is revolution, which is a different thing. With secret meetings and secret presses, and not so much guns.”

“Yes sir. It's been some time since we had that here.”

“Ach, God,” Willich said, his voice weary and yearning, “a new country like this.” He flapped a hand like a scornful haggler; the other hung limp. “We had centuries of kings, emperors, princes, barons. Impossible to describe the damage. So all we had to work with was frightened farmers and a few professors. We were our own slaves, you see.”

Catto almost saw, and so nodded.

Willich breathed guttural disgust, dismay, nostalgia, “Ach, ja, ach, ja,” and then cheered up: “well, well, a bit at a time, hey?”

“Yes sir.”

“Yes. Now. This man of yours. This Routledge.”

Catto waited, incredulous.

“Over forty and not much good.”

“That's right, sir. We haven't much use for him.”

“Yes, yes. You see most of the soldiers in Cincinnati are Veterans Reserve Corps, so they all have something wrong with them—they are crippled like me or half blind. I have some from the Thirty-seventh Iowa and some from the Hundred Ninety-second Pennsylvania. They all want to go home. They all deserve to.”

Catto said something agreeable.

“And if Morgan wants to come up again and raid as he did in sixty-three, I must have troops nearby to chase him down. My boys here in the city could hardly do it. You see: to be ready. However. Just the same. I understood what you were telling me about this man, this Routledge. A Jonah, attracting the lightning of the gods to those around him.”

“Did I say that?”

“No.” Willich laughed lightly, a clear German spring, laughed with an accent. That's crazy, Catto thought. He remembered Phelan shouting “Och, och” something like this German general. “No, you did not say that. But I suppose it is true.”

“It is,” Catto said, and told him about the mule.

Willich roared. “Impossible. Impossible.”

“I saw it.”

“After the war you must write it for my newspaper,” the general said. “So. You see why we must offer him to the gods.”

“What does that mean?”

“That we will find a way to send him home. It is possible that the gods are jealous of him, and want him for themselves. Once out of the army, he is theirs. Fair enough?”

Catto stammered.

“I have a certain discretion,” Willich went on. “First I must attach him directly to my command here, to my legion of the deformed and mutilated. It is my private opinion that we ought to be sending men home now anyway. Otherwise the war will end and they will all have to go home at once, and there will be no transportation and then no jobs and half of them will go home sick and spread diseases and so on.” Willich rose. “You may tell him. He will be transferred from your unit as soon as I can arrange it. Now I want you to come with me.”