Wait Softly Brother

Chapter 3: 1864

1864

Virginia. How stupid of me to come here. A city boy. I was recruited to this war in Toronto, at the university. A war with such atrocities piling up – we saw the images in the newspapers – that most thinking men refused to go. And so the US government created a tantalizing loophole. If you were a man of means, you could simply hire a substitute. They even called it substitution. And so we came – from all over the world – to fight for the cause of the freedom of all men in the stead of rich men who would rather get richer than die ignobly in a filthy farmer’s field. I know better now.

But in 1864, I was naïve enough to think that the war might be my ticket out of the middling hell my father was concocting for me: a white picket fence, a suitable wife, a life of desperation – or so, at the time, I imagined it. It seemed like a horrible prospect until I threw it away. Then, on the train to my new life, regrets came quickly. Money was one issue. Pay was inconsistently meted out and the initial three hundred dollars was spent a thousand times in my mind before it was even to hand. An adventure, I’d thought. Mother had used the term fool, and Father would not even look at me by the end. He did not believe in the equality of all men. He had stocks in cotton.

The industrialist who hired me to fight in his place was named Ebenezer Wilkes. He came to Toronto to fetch me. It was a twenty-hour journey by trains to Washington, and we made it together. During that time, Eb outlined precisely how he anticipated I would deploy certain military skills he himself did not have (nor did I, but he did not know this). He had lofty ideas of our identities merging, something I resisted not least because I doubted the existence of any pre-existing identity in me. Father believed me to be a milquetoast.

Eb and I disembarked in Washington. Eb wanted to show me the industry his father founded. His father (God rest his soul), as a young man, had lost his left leg below the knee to a thresher and by necessity and discomfort had become a limb-maker – an innovator of body parts first for himself and then for other broken men. His father contested the position of first American limb-maker against a Mister Palmer but had been quiet about it. He was a man who hardly talked if he could avoid it, sending instructions to the factory floor on little scraps of paper. Achingly shy, he had been known to duck under the office door window if he saw someone coming.

I thought how Eb must be the very opposite of his shy father in temperament. Then he said, “I know what you’re thinking. My mother – and rest her soul, too – used to say I came out babbling. And that I never did or never will stop.” I relaxed then, wondering how on earth such meekness and joviality could coexist. My own father shrank into a nasty wee raging homunculus and nestled in my chest cavity.

In the factory, Eb grabbed me by the shoulder, gestured to the eaves from which hung countless articulated legs and some mechanical arms and hands. There was a prototype hand stuck to a piece of elm on a workbench. Eb made me try the lever that got the opposable thumb working – the entire hand was a tight coiled spring.

“Imagine you had an operating hand like that,” said Eb. I shuddered. I had a vivid imagination and did not want to exercise it on this. I was far too sensitive to fight in a war. My father referred to my personality as unstable. Some of the other limbs had gears and were a marvel to see if I didn’t think too long and hard on why a person might want one.

Eb said, “The technology is astonishing.”

I wonder now if it was then that my body took on the ways of prosthesis, that I shifted from the fleshly anatomy of a human subject to something mechanical, a kind of machine-fellow. The legs hung like sides of curing lamb. Eb reached up to caress one. “When the war is won, you’ll come and work for us,” I recall him saying.

The pong of joint grease and metal fighting corrosion, resin and maple wood shaving wafted through me.

“There is always a mutilation to resection, and our work is never done. Even a half-trained anatomist would be useful to us.” He called me his twin soldier then.

I smiled and thanked him. I thought how I would rather finish my medical training and salve minor wounds and marry back in Toronto, but it was too late for such thinking. On the train, I mentally tallied that I would need exactly seven hundred Canadian dollars for the final duration of my schooling, and I would rather kill myself than borrow money from Father.

It’s true that I had the steadiest hand of any of the interns in my year, but that didn’t amount to much as I also had the flutteriest head. The sight of blood and the flurry of any sort of emotion worried me. Lumbricals. Hypothenar. Did the roots of trees worry their trunks so?

“It’s a good set-up,” I said to Eb by way of stopping the recursive thoughts.

Eb smiled. His gums shone pink and edged each pearly tooth like bunting. His face lit up at the smallest provocation. “Fight like a tiger in my place, will you?”

I smiled back at Eb’s teeth. “Sure, I will.”

And now, months into this substitution, I was in the thick of a very bad story. My comrades and I had taken to riffling through the uniforms of the dead. I first read Henry Muldon’s letter after peeling it out of his pocket. A private named Bellair goaded me to do it. I began to make up the man’s story right away. In my imagination, I pictured him tugging at the left cuff of his uniform. It was dark out, and he was using the murky candlelight to look at himself in the window bought with the bounty he’d received.

Now he was dead and rotting on a farmer’s field in Virginia. A substitute soldier of a Colored Brigade. In death we are not all equal – I’m ashamed to admit that I recall thinking as such. The uniform jacket he wore was woollen, already too hot for the end of May and, to my mind, probably the finest thing he’d ever had on his body. I was ever making up lives for people I met. It was a harmless way to be in the world, or so I then thought.

With this letter, he had packed three other items into the interior pocket of his uniform jacket: (1) a 24K gold locket, engraved with flowering vines; (2) a bundle of lined paper sliced carefully from the household accounting book, one of only two books likely kept at the house; and (3) a fountain pen and pottery inkwell filled with ink and stoppered with a bit of cork. We all kept such letter kits in these times. We wanted our bodies to speak for us if they were found. Those of us who knew how to write, that is. Whether we were sentimental was debatable; we faced death and boredom, and both prospects allowed for a slippage in manliness.

I imagined Henry taking himself in at the mica windowpane, a renegade hair looping out of his eyebrow. He was already mentally composing his first letter home: Dearest Cristiana, the men here are made of courage. I do my best to mimic them in the hope I attain something like what they seem naturally to have. The war is nearly won, and many lie dead. I thank God – and here he faltered a little, having brought himself near to crying. What was he doing? He slammed his fist into his pocket and felt the first tearing of the fabric’s seams (like mine, it was a cheap replica of a standard military-issue uniform, we substitute soldiers not deemed worthy of the real thing) and also a wad of single-dollar bills I forgot to mention, seven of them, the first monthly payout he had received as compensation for this substitution upon which he was embarking.

All of this I stole from his bloodied corpse.

My parents thought me mad. And if I was not then mad, I would soon become so. This war was one to which I was ill-suited. I was at odds with the rules set out in it.

When Henry actually got a chance to write a first note, it was the morning after his first “battle” – more a skirmish in fact, but it was enough to make things real. I imagine he took out his writing kit, propped himself up – his uniform already smeared and frayed with experience – on the most symbolic tree he could find, a spindly burr oak that knobbed acutely into his trapezius, and wrote: Dear Soldier, if you should find me dead, please carry this letter to Cristiana Muldon, my beloved. Dear Cristiana, you are strong and now you must be stronger still. Know I fought with you in my heart, and with our child in my every waking thought. Let it not trouble you that I shall not wake again. The cause is a just one and for our future, too. It went on like this for some time, Henry imagining a future that did not hold him, luxuriating in the ache that travelled down his shoulder.

It was this very epistle that I brought to the Muldon cabin.

What Christiana Muldon must have thought of me – a young, pasty-white substitute soldier from Upper Canada – is unclear. She might very well have hated me. I would not blame her. It was shortly after the First Battle of Petersburg, June 9, 1864. I had taken French leave out of guilt, exacerbated by Bellair, who had scavenged Henry Muldon’s body with me, but had had a change of heart when he realized how close Muldon’s widow resided. We drew straws as to who would take the risk to go. Unsurprisingly, I lost.

She was a scowling beauty at the door to their cabin.

“It was strange to see a whole troop of coloured men in uniform raging forward,” I admitted to Cristiana. “I had never before touched a coloured person.” I recall I was worried she might ask for what few items I had taken, and I did not fancy giving them up. I could not have said why.

When the widow invited me in, I could see she was scared. Her fright triggered bad feelings all throughout me. I was ill-suited to my own body. I admit that I liked her right away, the bold way she had, and I knew my attraction was not a good thing. I knew this would lead down the wrong path. I was a stupid boy then, and I am a stupid man now. Nothing much has changed.

I skirted a wooden crate full of cur puppies to get inside – what looked like bulldog and beagle and bloodhound intermingled. They mewled up at me. I could feel the eyes of any number of neighbour folk peeping from nearby porches and windows. It made me antsy to be scrutinized, but then everything made me feel like that in those days.

“Don’t mind the mess,” she said, though the cabin was beyond reproach. Her little baby, Charles, slept like a perfect saint. He was tucked in a blanket, and I could not see him.

I was then twenty-two years old, soft-spoken and unshaven. I told her I was substituting for the son of a wealthy inventor who had hired me up north, sorely misjudging my fitness.

“He fell nobly,” I said, because I thought that was the right way to go about breaking the news to her. Cristiana gestured for me to tell her no more. She said that she did not have the stomach for grim detail. She did not want her husband’s body-slosh and woundings in her mind.

“I have wee Charles to consider,” she said.

I leant toward her and confided in low tones how I had buried him. I handed her a swatch of Henry’s uniform, and I began to cry.

I unfolded the letter and pointed. The letter read: You will know something something hid something something to never forget me. The pertinent information was an inky berm. “My salty tears,” I explained, and I looked directly into Cristiana’s eyes for the first time. “I cry easily these days. I am a messy soldier in that regard.” Did she note a wavering along my mouth? She must have thought me a poor act. I wondered whether she knew that I had kept Henry’s gold locket and his writing kit. If she did, she must have thought me despicable.

In fact, I was desperate.

She scanned her nail along the melted sentence. “This one line. It seems it was of some import. What did it say?”

Of course I knew. It was the whereabouts of some treasure her husband had buried. But I hung my head and claimed ignorance. Now I can say with utmost assurance that some things are better left in the ground. But have I mentioned that I was young and very stupid? I thought at the time that if there was even the smallest chance that that treasure could buy my freedom, it was worth keeping the information to myself. Along my sinews when first I read it, even as the rust settled in, a plan was forming. I could rid myself of this plague-y war and my dependence on my father. If only I had the means. It was like a wish being fulfilled – this dead man with his mysterious letter, his strange locket, which I had now around my neck and tucked secretly into my uniform.

And then, as if she could read my thoughts, she said, “He certainly had a locket on his person.”

My brow furrowed unwittingly before I caught myself. “My unit expects me back within the day,” I said.

“Oh?” she said.

I doffed my cap. “My sincerest condolences, Missus Muldon.” I handed her a crumpled dollar bill. It was Muldon’s meted pay, or one-tenth of it, for I had also stolen that. Which she must have known for she replied, “Well, you devil!” in such a way it surely made my eyes pop.

“I found it on his person,” I muttered.

Cristiana pressed the bit of uniform to her nose. “It smells of lanolin and dirt. I cannot detect his odour.”

She did not cry at that moment, though I thought she might. I got walking and only heard her shriek when I was a quarter mile away, just past the settlement outskirts. I was not heartless, I guess, for that shriek awoke in me some feelings. I turned back toward her shack, a small pulse of agony moving through me for what I had done. I had not felt quite myself for weeks and weeks.