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Excerpt
Walt
dreamed his brother's death at Fredericksburg. General Burnside,
appearing as an angel at the foot of his bed, announced the tragedy:
"The army regrets to inform you that your brother, George Washington
Whitman, was shot in the head by a lewd fellow from Charleston."
The general alit on the bedpost and drew his dark wings close about
him, as if to console himself. Moonlight limned his strange whiskers
and his hair. Burnside's voice shook as he went on. "Such a
beautiful boy. I held him in my arms while his life bled out. See?
His blood made this spot." He pointed at his breast, where
a dark stain in the shape of a bird lay on the blue wool. "I
am so very sorry," the General said, choking and weeping. Tears
fell in streams from his eyes, ran over the bed and out the window,
where they joined the Rappahannock, which had somehow come north
to flow through Brooklyn, bearing the bodies of all the late battle's
dead.
In the morning Walt read the wounded list in the Tribune.
There it was: "First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore." He knew
from George's letters that there was nobody named Whitmore in his
company. He walked through the snow to his mother's house. "I'll
go and find him," he told her.
Washington, Walt quickly discovered, had become a city of hospitals.
He looked in half of them before a cadaverous-looking clerk told
him he'd be better off looking at Falmouth, where most of the Fredericksburg
wounded still lay in the field hospitals. He got himself on a government
boat that ran down to the landing at Aquia Creek, and went by railroad
to the neighborhood of Falmouth, seeking Ferrero's Brigade and the
Fifty-first New York, George's regiment. Walt stood outside a large
brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, somebody's splendid
residence converted to a hospital, afraid to go in and find his
mangled brother. He took a walk around the building, gathering his
courage, and found a pile of amputated limbs, arms and legs of varying
lengths, all black and blue and rotten in the chill. A thin layer
of snow covered some of them. He circled the heap, thinking he must
recognize his brother's hand if he saw it. He closed his eyes and
considered the amputation; his brother screaming when he woke from
the ether, his brother's future contracting to something bitter
and small.
But George had only gotten a hole in his cheek. A piece of shell
pierced his wispy beard and chipped a tooth. He had spit blood and
hot metal into his hand, put the shrapnel in his pocket, and later
showed it to his worried brother, who burst into tears and clutched
him in a bear hug when they were reunited in Captain Francis's tent,
where George sat with his feet propped on a trunk and a cigar stuck
in his bandaged face.
"You shouldn't fret," said George. "I couldn't be
any healthier than I am. And I've been promoted. Now you may call
me Captain Whitman." But Walt could not help fretting,
even now that he knew his brother was alive and well. A great, fretting
buzz had started up in his head, inspired by the pile of limbs,
and the smell of blood in the air, and by ruined Fredericksburg,
all broken chimneys and crumbling walls across the river. Walt stayed
in George's tent and, watching him sleep, felt a deep thrilling
worry. He wandered around the camp, and as he passed by a fire in
an enclosure of evergreen branches piled head high against the wind,
he met a soldier. They sat down together by the fire, and the soldier
told Walt hideous stories about the death of his friends. "He
put his head in my lap and whispered goodbye to his mama,"
the soldier said. "And then he turned his eyes away from me
and he was dead." Walt put his face in the evergreen wall,
smearing his beard with fresh sap, and thought how it smelled like
Christmas.
Ten days later, Walt still couldn't leave. He stood by and watched
as George moved out with the healthy troops on Christmas Day, then
idled in the deserted campground, watching the interminable caravans
of army wagons passing and passing into the distance. Near at hand,
some stragglers crossed his line of sight — a large young
man leading a mule that pulled a wagon, on top of which perched
a fat man cursing in French. When all were gone, and the campground
empty, Walt went up to the brick mansion and made himself useful,
changing dressings, fetching for the nurses, and just sitting with
the wounded boys, with the same excited worry on him as when he
watched George sleep. Back in Brooklyn a deep and sinister melancholy
had settled over him. For the past six months Walt had wandered
the streets with a terrible feeling in him — Hell under his
skull bones, death under his breast bones, and a feeling that he
would like most of all to life down under the river and sleep forever.
But in the hospital that melancholy was gone, scared off, perhaps,
by all the shocking misery around him, and it had been replaced
by a different sort of sadness, one that was vital, not still; a
feeling that did not diminish his soul, but thrilled it.
When Walt finally left Falmouth, it was to watch over a cargo of
wounded as they traveled through the early-morning darkness back
to Aquia Creek, where they were loaded on a steamer bound for Washington.
With every jolt and shake of the train, a chorus of horrible groans
wafted through the cars. Walt thought it would drive him insane.
What saved him was the singing of a boy with a leg wound. The boy's
name was Hank Smith. He'd come all the way from divided Missouri,
and said he had a gaggle of cousins fighting under General Beauregard.
He sang, "Oh, Susannah" over and over again, and no one
told him to be quiet.
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Excerpted from GOB'S GRIEF © Copyright 2002 by Chris Adrian. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All rights reserved.
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