When the War Is Over (14 page)

“It's more than that. Here, pour for yourself. So he is doing something like that here, putting together various services, and his boldest decision, daring and imaginative, was to place Surgeon Phelan in charge. Now I am a major and nobody will ever die again.”

“Oh that's sweet,” Catto said. “That's good to hear. I wonder they didn't think of it earlier. How does that make me a captain?”

“Well, when he told me about this, and said I would be a major, I asked myself, what would give me the greatest pleasure? And the answer was, to give orders to Catto, and cuff him and kick him, and put official reprimands in his record. So I asked the general if I could bring in a company of the line to be my headquarters company, for guard duty and transportation and quartermastering, and he thought it was a good idea, and I overcame his objections to you by offering him half your wages. For reasons beyond me he thought you a wise choice. Also he laughed somewhat boisterously—I am not sure why. You'll bring both platoons into town and move them into the barracks on Broadway. Silliman is all the lieutenant you'll need so don't bother the general about another.”

“The big town at last.” A citified eternity yawned. “And I thought I was rid of you.” The birds would soon be flying north, and the little furry fellows popping out of their holes, chipmunks and groundhogs and muskrats, and the dogwood flowering. He would miss that.

“Yes. And the work won't hurt you. You know, if you want to stay in and be a general you will someday have to learn to read and write and add simple figgers. Just for signing orders and reckoning your pay. A little administrative work will do you good. It's a clerk's world.”

They haggled for a moment, clerk-clark-clerk-clark.

“The war is really over now,” Catto said. “You won't have any wounded. This is like a civilian hospital.”

“Well, yes. They'll all be in uniform, but survivors, not soldiers. We wanted to live through it and we did. Now we must set about improving the world.”

Catto was scandalized.

“Yes, yes,” Phelan said with a cock of the head and a minatory jab. “Bind up the wounds. We've been doing the devil's work for years. Now we do God's work for a while. Listen, this is going to be some world. Believe me. We've all been killing each other for so long that the chance to do something else will bring the whole country to its knees in thanks. It's begun already. Convalescent camps. Who ever heard of such a thing?”

“They never sent me to one.”

“Ah, but you had Phelan in attendance. Anyway, some good will come out of this war. Much good. We're learning about gangrene and using needles more”—Catto shuddered—“and not just pouring saleratus down every gullet. Even more.” He folded himself into meditation; his pits and wrinkles deepened, darkened. “This war of brothers has made men sad, and taught them to stay their hand. You know Forrest and Morgan will not attack hospital trains. Some kind of madness is being worked away forever.”

“You believe that.”

“I see no other way,” Phelan said. “We have reached the farthest insanity, brother killing brother or father son or son father. Either we go on through that and burst out the other side into some sort of righteousness, or the whole human race is doomed and Christ died for nothing.”

Catto grunted. “You'll have me out of a job. You and Willich. He talks that way too. Well, we have nothing to do now but talk.”

Phelan smirked: “There is always redskins to worry about. And we need fellows like you in trouble for further progress in the medical arts. What shall we do about pyemia? Septicemia? Amputations clean or flap? I favor the flap myself but we must learn to do better with abscesses. Doctor Moses Israel was very good with abscesses.”

“Doctor Moses Israel? You can do better than that.”

“He was with you and Rosecrans at Chickamauga and a famous good man.”

“A good man, was he.”

“Yes, he was, no worse than any other heathen. Don't be so bloody proud of your own piggish state. You are merely a Protestant with not much brow. I don't know which is worse, not to see the truth at all, or to see it and then turn away from it.” Phelan shook his head savagely and slapped a flat hand hard on the tabletop. “This country! You love your little prides and your silly hates. The war is over, man! You've got to quit it now! I never saw such haters, not even in the old country where they know how. All day long I hear it. To hell with the Irish. To hell with the Germans. Everybody hates the French and the Italians, and God save the Poles and the Jews and the poor bloody niggers. All day long! You're all mad. North and South is the least of your troubles.”

“Well just look at the rolls and stop shouting at me,” Catto flared. “The army is all Routledges and Franklins and Godwinsons, Ross and Pierce and Morgan and Scott and Blake. All the old names. And where the hell are all those others you love so much? Home getting rich.”

“You're an ass,” Phelan said calmly. “The whole country is ninety per cent old stock, so of course the army is too. You talk like we were still a colony and the king should keep those others out. Bloody Scottish bigot is what you are.”

“Bigot!” Catto half rose, fell back. “Well, by Jesus. Maybe so. All right,” he said mildly, “I'll think about that. And I'll allow as how Surgeon Moses Israel is a fine fellow. Just don't preach any more. Don't spoil this fine day. This fine week—the boy is well and walking, and at least nobody hates
him.
”

“That's true, that's true,” said Phelan with a cocky smile. “So let us cheer up. And as I promised you, in fifty years the whole world will be Catholic anyway. Now let me show you my hospital, and you can wash up afterward. I'll sell you my old bars.”

“By heaven, I just got a raise, too, didn't I.” For one bitter instant Catto wished that there were someone somewhere who might care about it, someone who might open a letter and say, “Well, well. Marius is raised in pay.” There was always Charlotte. And Saturday night upon him. “A raise,” he repeated. “We must celebrate.”

Phelan grinned. “It is all prepared. And no more wild rides through a cold countryside. We have a table for four at the Opera House Hotel, and two separate rooms.”

Catto stretched languidly, and moaned gentle mirth. “Ah, Major. Ah, Major. Friend of my heart.”

“Roast pigeons, corn bread and beer,” Phelan promised.

“You have made me the happiest man in the world,” Catto said. “Sell me those bars right now, and lend me a needle and thread.”

Monday morning Godwinson met him at the Color line and took hold of the bridle. Catto was pleasantly saddle-sore, and dreamy, and self-satisfied, in the manner of lovers on Monday since the proclamation of Sunday. “Godwinson,” he said lazily. “Sergeant Godwinson. How goes it, man?”

“It's that fool Routledge,” Godwinson said, peevish.

“Never mind. We're about to make Routledge laugh out loud.” Catto swung out of the saddle.

But before his foot hit the ground Godwinson had said, “No we aren't. He deserted Saturday. Went home. Left a note. Hey, you picked up the wrong coat somewhere.”

VI

One trouble with young Catto was an absence of history. “Nothing. No family Bible, no papers. Just the name, and the one fact: he was a smith. A poor man, settled at a crossroads outside of town and bothered nobody. There was one old fellow who seemed to recollect, maybe, that they arrived sometime around eighteen thirty. So they were married for some time before I came along. Maybe there were others. Brothers. Sisters. Nobody knew. Here I am, then. Like a weed.”

“But a thinking weed,” Phelan said.

Catto frowned blankly. “Don't know what that means. Point is I do wonder, I honest to God wonder. I used to make up histories. How we came over in sixteen twenty, or seventeen fifty, with some old Catto about seven feet high marching in front, and his good-looking wife right with him. And they settled down for a while and fought Indians and raised a crop and a family. I put them in Connecticut usually, what Jacob calls Connetic. Sometimes in Massachusetts, but I favored Connecticut. They had some fierce battles in the early days.”

When the past failed he had the future, and lately his mind had embarked on some prodigious journeys. In moments of idleness or sleeplessness, many such now, and even when lying spent and dreamy beside, under, over or around his lady-love, he was persecuted by visitations, glimpses beyond the veil, episodes from the future life of His Worship General Lord Marius Catto, banal but exciting, like a series of boys' books: Marius Catto the Foxy Trapper (in the Oregon fur trade), Marius Catto the Lone Wolf (California Scout), Marius Catto the Corn God (Homesteader), the Leathery Cattle Baron, the Intrepid Indian Fighter, the Prospector and his Mother Lode. He knew that all those lives had to be lived, all those deeds done, all those fights fought; he knew that it was young men like him who would live, do, fight, die, and he knew that he was the best of them and wondered often which life would be his. His mind tried to live those lives for him, to select the path most fitting, most right, most Catto.

In Cincinnati he saw Charlotte every weekend (a contempt, bred of familiarity, politely ignored, opening between them) and found himself living out an astonishing reversal, a perversion of nature: he made love to a live, warm, commercially enthusiastic woman almost at will, and in moments of private reverie he yielded to an upright, industrious, adventurous but womanless fantasy. He felt that he stood for the country as a whole; the United States of America—God's country, this field of honor, this land of plenty—had stood still for four years, achieving a crucial, inevitable, insane massacre, lancing a vast and bloody boil, and its people too had stood still, survived an agonized, frustrating travail; but soon this foolishness would be ended, and then God alone knew what the limits might be. Gold, land, game, fur, grain, meat, machines—room enough and goods enough and grass enough and sky enough for centuries to come; and soon they would all be free to jangle off and make their fortunes.

These journeys of the mind left him weary. They were indeed prodigious, and he returned from remote triumphs exhausted, buffeted, having encountered red-eyed beasts and carnivorous plants, eaten buffalo and snake, chaffered and haggled with Sioux, Mexicans, Russians. “I have too much freedom,” he said to Silliman, “so many things to do in life,” and that made him think of Jacob, and reflect that Jacob might be the only man he knew to whom freedom was worth tears of joy, who would never in life complain of too much freedom. Good enough, he thought. Maybe I did some good in this war. I have not lived in vain. By golly.

And where was Marius Catto, the savior and prop of the beloved republic, when the War Between the States came to an end? Sad to tell he was standing buck naked at a third-floor window of the Opera House rubbernecking out at the Fifth Street Market, the Burnet House, the river, where the big bridge would soon go up at the foot of Vine Street; standing there safe from the prying eyes of the vulgar, rubbing his belly in raccoon content, airing his woebegone adjutant, letting the blood resurge and blinking moronically at the metropolis that all unknowing harbored himself, this preposterous creature, half sphinx half chimera. He did not long pursue this sightseeing. It was unnatural. Catto believed that tall buildings were about to fall down when he was in them, and often from a third-floor window he saw the earth—flower beds, cobblestones, packets of manure, pedestrians, wagons, stray cats, lampposts, barrels of rainwater and baskets of garbage—rush explosively to meet him; then he would grip the sill and close his eyes, or totter backward to recover at full length on a rocking bed.

He turned away, but frowned in the act, his eyes traveling over the warm bed, the cradle of his joys and sorrows, and the dark sleeping woman, from here merely tumbled hair, a coarse cotton sheet. Shouts in the street drew him back, and he realized that he had been watching, half seeing, an agitated, flowing crowd; listening to, half hearing, a clamor not of the Lord's day. He leaned out; a breeze tickled his broad chest; the street was full. Men and women scurried, shouted, waved; coats flapped, dogs barked, wagons and gigs came to a standstill. A bottle smashed, a cry rose. Catto woke up and stared about Three men boosted a barrel to the back of a wagon and pounded it open; liquid gushed—beer, he guessed—and insane revelers danced close, bearing mugs, steins, cups, a bucket; a boy took the stream full in his face, twitched and flopped, revolved grinning, flung up his arms, caroled a rebel yell. “What the hell,” Catto said. “Sunday?” He stood at the window fumbling with shirt buttons, confused, excitement rising.

He saw Thomas Martin. And Jacob. He was not surprised. The noontime air was heavy with portent. The two were standing together, jabbering, in the doorway of a shuttered shop. “Martin!” No use. “Thomas!” No use. He loosed the buttons, doffed the shirt, waved it wildly.

He began to suspect, and choked out “Good God!”

Slipping into the shirt again he turned to the bed. “Charlotte! Charlotte!” He rooted for his clothes, swept his shoes from beneath the bed. “Charlotte!” A muffled babble. He slapped her behind. She groaned peevishly. He shook her; the faint odors of sleep rose. The room was close and abruptly alien. She rolled over and struggled up, blinking and drawn, the nightgown bunched at her waist. “What are you doing?” she wailed sleepily, and he did not know this tired, squarish woman with gummy eyes.

“Look at me,” he said. “Something's happened. You hear? I think maybe the war's over.”

She blinked more vigorously, gulped, and sat, eyes vacant, lower lip pendulous. “The war?”

“The war,” he said. “You remember. I've got to go back.”

“Nooo,” she whimpered. “You come here. The war's over. Time to celebrate.”

He stared down upon her in vexation. “No, my sweet friend. Not now. If it's true I've got to be with my men.” He buttoned his flies, buckled his belt. “Damn that Routledge.”