When the War Is Over (16 page)

He himself had tried to live a lean life, free of the claims and bonds of possessions, but he had lately become a fearful magpie, what with half a dozen bright kerchiefs to wear with an open shirt when the weather turned hot, and a box of cigars, and extra underwear, fine linen, and a small leather box containing written statements of commission, a jeweller's receipt, a photograph of Charlotte and himself, a memorandum of names and addresses. He also had a housewife, scissors, needles and thread, comb and brush, all rolled in a square of white canvas, and a writing set, a tablet of paper and a pen with several nibs, and a bit of dry ink and some envelopes. With his issue of uniforms and arms and bedding, his mess kit, his manual of tactics, his soap and razors and toothbrush and paste, with Phelan's little book on medical supplies, and some spare insignia and a spare tassel for the hilt of his sword—good God! He stared about his cubicle in amazed distaste. Time to move on!

But while waiting upon the pleasure of history and politicians, glowering and mooning, sacked by circumstance, he was flung for comfort to professionals like Colonel Bardsley, and disturbed to find so few. “Hell no,” the colonel said on the Tuesday. “There won't be ten of us left, and none whatsoever of the rank of private soldier.” He and Catto sat alone in the visitors' saloon of the hospital and puffed wearily at cheroots. “You're beginning to feel it now, hey? I feel it too.” Colonel Bardsley was a widower. “We'd be better off in the field, in camp somewhere. It isn't only the sense of being left alone, all those civilians swarming home and leaving you in sole and permanent possession of all the army's goods and chattels including cannon, horses, pediculi vestimenti, New Testaments and useless chaplains. That's an odd feeling right there, like being left a general store or two, but that's not all of it. The worst in Cincinnati. Or New York or Chicago, any city, because there you are among the heathen, the money-changers like that fellow Groesbeck or those shipping people who've already raised their riverboat fares in high expectation of a fancy business the next few months, and you look at Cincinnati, and listen to it, and smell it, and it comes over you that there never
was
a war, that a great fraud has been perpetrated. I think this has been happening since long before Jesus Christ.”

The colonel was pale of face now, a stark edge of brightness to his blue eyes, his skin taut as if he would soon sweat, and he seemed less a colonel, much less the feed-and-grain magnate that Catto had at first fancied him, and more a peasant too long from home. “They have been taking men by the crotch and lining them up and forging chains onto them since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. They have been marching them up and down the field of honor and sticking swords and arrows into them and blowing holes through them. And the men breathe hard and smile foolish smiles and sometimes laugh—like when it is the next fellow has his balls blown off or his belly blown open. Then they close ranks and march on, and the enemy kills them from in front and their officers—not to say their mothers and the politicians and whatever other speechmakers can glorify themselves by instigating young men to rush off and commit suicide—kill them from behind, and they smile their foolish smiles and spin about once and drop dead. For good. And then the war ends, like right now, and the survivors, all your men there, they're all saying ‘You see? I came through! I came through!' and they'll come and have a drink with the officer who was telling them yesterday to charge. They were fools before this week but now they are bigger fools because they think it is over and they won and right has triumphed and virtue reigns and all such.” The colonel was crying. He was leaning forward in his chair with his forearms on his knees and his hands drooping, and the cigar smoke spiraled straight up into his pouched eyes, and he was crying, shedding tears steadily and swallowing sobs. “I lost two sons, Catto. I lost two sons. I don't care that it's over. You understand that? I wouldn't care if it went on forever.”

And the poor man had to make a speech on the Wednesday. Catto listened to it in burgeoning pain. Moment of victory. Great joy to all soldiers. George Washington. Many of you soon home. Bind up wounds. Swords ploughshares. However. Paper work. Still fighting. Soon. Soon. Congratulations. Thank you men.

And then some damn fool called for three cheers for the colonel. Catto fled. In the corridor a dead patient was being trundled to his last-but-one resting place. Bad week to die. Senseless. Catto went to the visitors' saloon and sat in the gathering dusk. On or about the eleventh day of May he would re-enlist. Perhaps he would feel better then. He might do it sooner. He felt bad now, enduring the sweats and incipient nausea. That evening there was comic relief: the announcement of a victory celebration. “Ah, you see,” said the colonel. Friday Night 14 April 14 Public Landing. City of Cincinnati. Martial Music. Pyrotechnical Wonders. Our Heroic Boys. Catto sulked heroically and boyishly, and dispatched an invitation to Charlotte, fat frowzy companion of his revels, big-bubbed bargain, thief of his youth, innocence and small gold.

Ah, but she would not reply. “She noticed your cloven hoofs,” Phelan said, “and is terrified.” Catto answered appropriately but in distraction, saddened. Phelan and Nell were still friends, so on Friday Night 14 April 14 Catto found himself approaching the Public Landing at the corner of Broadway and Front with a fresh cockade on his campaign hat, a burning thirst in his throat, and gallant Neddy Silliman on his arm. “I will not spend the evening with you. I am not accustomed to companions of your station in society.”

“My mother's father was Portuguese,” Silliman said.

“A
Portagee?”

“Yes sir.”

“For God's sake. All this time. If I'd known you were a dago.”

“Besides,” Silliman said, “your own family may have been clan chiefs. You may be related to somebody like James One.”

“James One,” Catto mused. “Marius Catto, heir to thrones.”

The two stood among a gathering press, Catto uneasy, foolish as always among a crowd of civilians, Silliman calm and curious, contriving with no effort to make it plain that this festival was in his honor. In a special area for high dignitaries milled small men with round heads, and their wives in complicated hats. It was the number of children that disquieted and ultimately daunted Captain Catto. Whines arose, snarls, snuffles, sobs; here the orphan boy retained absolute pitch, and he foresaw an evening of misery, leavened only by petty thievery, an unplanned and possibly fatal explosion, half a drowning.

Silliman cocked a knowing eye. “You're unhappy.”

“I could commit murder,” Catto said, “I am that unhappy. This is madness, Ned. A Sunday school. Mark my words. There will be hymns sung. Some of these little bastards are wearing white shoes.”

“This is America,” Silliman protested gently. “All the good people.”

“All the good people,” Catto murmured. In the torchlight, furling and leaping, he saw few faces: only mouths, caps. In the enclosure silk hats and mild bustle. Dogs yelped. A faint odor of fish, of bilge. How strong, he wondered, was the public landing? Hundreds might die in Cincinnati this night, like a thank offering to the insatiable gods of war. He stepped aside, was thanked by a pretty face, and swept his hat low, making a leg in the small space allowed him. As he straightened, a preparatory rocket fired the night, from the landing or from a barge he could not tell. The rocket burst red. “I think my moment has come, Lieutenant.”

“Now, now. The fun has just begun. Look at that!” A rocket blossomed white and Silliman stared up, eyes full of delight, mouth full of fine teeth.

“No, Ned. You stay. I'll see you in the morning.” Somewhere a band struck up. Catto groaned and slipped away. In a moment he looked back, and saw hundreds gaping like baby birds at the blue glow, and wondered why he had come at all. Two trulls caroled in chorus, and he ached for California.

But settled for less, touching his hat politely and walking briskly westward on Water Street, which resembled a good many Water Streets. Stragglers panted to him and past. “It's the other way, Captain.” Catto saluted, waved, smiled aimlessly, dodged a rattling trap. In a patch of black he paused and listened to distant cries, to river birds, to the twist and creak of his own leather, to his own breast, his own inner beast, his own sad sigh. He stood still. This was better, he thought Alone and invisible. I imagine it will be much like this from now on. Several decades of honorable service, a pension then, a good deal alone and the less visible the better.

There it is. The life of Marius Catto. Messages from on high tonight. Catto: you will not be a trapper. Catto: you will not be an explorer. Catto: you will not be a homesteader. Catto: you are a killer by trade and a fornicator by inclination, and that is all you are.

And after a moment: better than being a fornicator by trade and a killer by inclination.

He laughed, and wondered if he could remember that for Phelan. Then he moved along, out into the dim and shifting lights, making his way west with no plan or purpose but a grand, triumphal drunk. What else? Perhaps a bit later he would make a speech. After all, this night should be marked.

It was marked chiefly by its end, though bits and pieces of it remained memorable. The door he pushed open admitted him to a scene of great evil, namely villainous drinkers of Irish aspect and, like a portent, the most deformed, hostile, raveled cat he had ever seen. He was a step inside before he knew he should not stay, but by then he was a captain of infantry in a position to demonstrate courage and insouciance, so there was no turning back. His mind had already linked a chain—Irish-Democrat-Copperhead-Kentucky-Confederate—and even in that brief moment the lamplight seemed to dim, the heat to rise, as if each of these momentarily motionless men would show him a face of one eye, the other horribly gouged, and a scar from lip to ear, and no teeth whatsoever. All he could do was walk the five steps to the wooden bar, nod to the barkeep and say, “Whiskey. You haven't seen a major called Phelan?”

“Phelan?” The barkeep, while stocky and low of brow, had pleasant brown eyes and no scars beyond the nick of a razor on his right cheek. “Phelan? Any of you fellows know an officer name of Phelan?”

“He's a surgeon,” Catto plunged on, “at the hospital, and he likes a drink from time to time. Told me he knew of a nice place not far from the gas works.”

The barkeep served him. “There's about a thousand places not far from the gas works. But Phelan is a good name. Have a drink.”

Laughter. Catto raised his glass to the half-dozen, all old men, and drank. The taven might once have been a stable; it gave off that implacably wooden air, odor: heavy, bare, shredding posts and ancient, rough pine planks. Four or five tables and the bar, huge jugs of water and no taps. And the old-timers, bowed, grizzled, hairy. We are now in the year nineteen hundred, Catto thought, and you are looking at six Cattos. Calm now but curious, he made an effort to shrink. Your buttocks are withering and stringy. Your belly bellies. You have pale flat paps. You have not shaved for a week and your eyes lie deep in powdery leather pouches. Between your legs hangs another, smaller, pap, surmounted by a noodle. Breathing is a work of serious proportions, and every morning is a surprise.

He drank again. Nonsense. You are the flower of the age. “The war is over,” he said.

The barkeep nodded. “It is that. And a good thing. Though when I was your age I liked a bit of a fight. And what will you do now?” In the half-light of two lamps the brown eyes welcomed Catto.

“Get drunk.”

“That too I liked.”

“Then join me. One for everybody.”

A murmur answered, and a shuffle; two of the old men joined him at the bar, and one gestured back to a third with an old man's slow urgency. The third grinned and rose, nodding toward them. What a place to die, Catto mused. The air was warm. He set his hat on the bar and smoothed his mustache.

“My name is John,” the barkeep said, “and this is old Robert and Brendan, and the gaffer next to you is only Fitz. They drink beer but I'll join you in a bit of the real.”

“What about those others?”

“They don't drink,” John said. “Not after a certain hour. They are now saturated and will sit there like kegs until thrown out.”

Catto laughed and said, “This is a fine place.”

“I wish more thought so. Well, welcome to you, Captain …”

“Trout. Isaac M. Trout Your health.”

“And yours, Captain Trout. I hope you drink like one.”

“I will tonight. Let's just set a bottle here and see what becomes of it.”

“The only way,” said stocky black-haired John. Catto thought of stocky black-haired Charlotte and dismissed her with annoyance. John went on: “Did you have a bad war?”

“Show me a good war,” Catto said. “Either people are shooting at you or you are sitting about staring at a wall.” He remembered his manners and dug for a dollar. John remembered his own manners and ignored it. “But I suppose it's enough to have lived through it.”

In an hour he was heartily bored but had drunk enough to be telling them about Stones River. Old Fitz nodded, beady-eyed, and soon the others drifted away, and a customer came in, astonishing Catto, who had begun to understand that this place, this scene, had a certain permanence to it, that at any hour of the day or night it would comprise John and the same five ancients, and that his own intrusion might be remembered eternally, sung from father to son. Och. It was the night of the great celebration, it was, and this buckeen Trout marches in, he does, all shined up with a feather in his hat, and he says, Drink up all. And then he goes on and on about a place called Stones River where he caught a ball in the behind. Now I ask you, how does a man catch a ball in the behind? Running away, that's how. But he was free with his silver.