Flashback (14 page)

"Maybe Hospital Key," he told us. Hospital Key is nearly a mile away. There is a makeshift building there-little more than walls and roof hastily knocked together-where contagious patients are housed. Behind the dreary structure is where we bury our dead. "Being sent to Hospital Key" is our euphemism for dying. Perhaps it was because of this association that I felt so hopeless.

As good fortune would have it, while we were at the docks a skiff from the hospital landed with two of the "nurses"-unskilled prisoners willing to work with the sick. Even after a quarter of an hour at sea the men stank of sickness and rot. It caught in my throat, threatening to dislodge my lunch of beans and salted pork. Both Tilly and I clutched our handkerchiefs over our noses to the amusement of the men. One "nurse," a confederate lieutenant, told us Joel had not been in hospital as far as he knew, and he served there twelve out of every twenty-four hours.

Tilly was despondent over the news and became convinced that her pet Johnny Reb was dead. I admit I was at a loss myself. From the extent of the injuries Joel sustained, neither of us could believe he would be on any of the work crews. Having no other options, we walked along the moat back toward the sally port. There are always magnificent frigate birds soaring there, immense black-winged creatures which, rather than flap, seem able to soar indefinitely. Tilly, engrossed in a world built partly of her love of drama and partly of real fear for Joel Lane, called them "dark angels." I pooh-poohed her as befits the role of the older, wiser sister, but I cannot say the description was not apt.

To further dampen spirits already near to drowning, a smirking Sergeant Sinapp met us at the drawbridge. His uniform, heavy wool like those of all the soldiers, was dark from armpit to waist with sweat, and his dun-colored hair stuck to his forehead beneath the brim of his cap in a parody of a little Caesar.

"Mornin', ladies," he drawled. I find it particularly offensive when men from the north affect a southern drawl. It always sounds cruel to my ears. Coming from Sinapp I suspected it was meant to be.

I chose not to reply. Tilly, absorbed in her own thoughts, scarcely seemed to notice him.

Not wishing for the indignity of trying to dodge around him, I hooked my arm through Tilly's to keep her from wandering into the moat in her preoccupation, stopped in front of the sergeant and waited. It was clear I was doomed to endure whatever he chose to consider witty repartee.

"Looking for the boyfriend?" he asked and gave Tilly an encore performance of his leer two nights before. Fortunately she didn't seem to notice.

"Sergeant," I said. "Please excuse us, we wish to pass." I was terribly polite. Molly would be pleased to know I do occasionally use the good manners she was at such pains to instill in us.

The foul man didn't budge. The peculiar fatigue that had descended upon me so abruptly kept me from saying more.

"You been to the hospital?"

I said nothing. My focus had slid from Joel, Tilly and even the odious and odiferous sergeant to a single and greatly desired goal: I wanted to sit down, preferably in the shade.

"You have. I seen you." That was a lie but I left it unchallenged.

Sweat rolled down both sides of his face and into his collar. I was pleased to note he was nursing a particularly nasty boil below his left ear where the wool chafed his neck.

"Your boyfriend ain't in the hospital," Sinapp had to say. "We put him where traitor's deserve to be. Teach him to talk more respectful. Too bad there won't be anybody to hear it where he is."

Too tired to think of a reply, I stood holding up Tilly for a while longer. Either Sinapp grew bored with baiting us or he had exhausted his vocabulary. Finally he stepped aside and let us walk in out of the sun.

The shade beneath the sally port is complete unto darkness-or so it seemed after the glare of the sun-and a breeze off the harbor blows through. I led Tilly to a wooden bench the officers of the guard keep there and collapsed and let the unnerving assault of Sergeant Sinapp and two nights without proper sleep wash over me. Tilly came out of her stupor, which should have been a comfort-I had begun to worry-but it was only to embark on an emotional storm of a different kind. Tears leaked from her eyes. "He's dead. They killed him," she said in a tiny voice. "'There's no one to talk to where he is.'" She repeated the sergeant's words.

What with one thing and another, Tilly was working herself into a state of hysterics. I know I should have slapped her, but I doubt Tilly has ever been struck in her life and I couldn't bring myself to be the first. I like to think it is because I am too good-hearted, but it may have been that I was simply too tired to raise my arm.

Instead, I held her and rocked her and murmured, "Shh, shh, he's not dead," over and over until I convinced myself.

Sinapp's words might have meant the boy had been murdered, but his tone was that of a man enjoying not the memory of an evil done but an ongoing cruelty. There was such relish in his voice when he spoke of there being no one to hear Joel's imagined repentance. In the unfinished confines of Fort Jefferson there was only one place I could think of where one would be truly alone, unheard.

"He's not dead," I told Tilly.

She rebounded from despair as only the young can: in the time it takes for a tear to be wiped away.

"I must go to him"

I must go to him. What on earth has Molly been letting that girl read? She was such the tragic heroine I was tempted to administer the slap my inherent saintliness had resisted just moments before. All that saved her from at the very least the acid of my tongue was the look of genuine anguish on her face.

The young man on sentry duty at the guardhouse moved, and we realized our teapot tempest had been observed. Eyes blinded by shade after glare and minds blinded by our own thoughts, neither of us had noticed him against the stone in his stone-dark uniform.

"Now then don't you go thinking on that, Mrs. Coleman. It won't do, you know."

He moved out from the wall to stand before us.

"You knew," I said. I wasn't so much accusing him as amazed that this callow youth was such a practiced dissembler.

"I apologize, ma'am. But we have orders, and not talking about the Lane boy is one of them."

"You are talking about him now," Tilly said with the inexorable logic of a sixteen-year-old. The guard couldn't have been much older and seemed struck by Tilly's words.

"I am," he said, appalled at his dereliction of duty. A moment was all he needed to justify things in his mind. "But it's different."

I began to suspect this sweet-faced liar was not one of the Lord's brighter creations.

"We'll see him now," Tilly announced and stood up, brushing her skirts straight in a no-nonsense sort of way. "Now."

The soldier shuffled his feet but otherwise stood his ground. "I can't let you do that, Miss. The captain would have my hide."

Tilly began to tremble the way she used to just before she threw one of her terrible tantrums. I decided to step in before she humiliated us both and frightened the guard half silly. "We do need to see Private Lane," I told him, trying to make it sound as if we had orders from on high.

He grew more uncomfortable. His feet stilled, but his eyes fixed on some place of courage on the wall between Tilly and me.

"Come on, Tilly," I said with what I hoped was the voice of age and authority.

"I can't let you do that," he said again and stepped in front of me. I admired him for his courage and attention to duty, but my patience was at an end.

"How will you stop us?" I asked. "Will you throw us to the ground? Lock us in the guardhouse? Both of us?"

Regardless of orders, he was unwilling to lay hands on a woman, particularly not his captain's wife.

"I'll inform the captain," he said finally.

"And abandon your post? If you do that you will end up keeping Private Lane company. Or worse." With that, I took Tilly's arm and we left him standing in his personal quandary. Of course he would hail the first soldier who came within range and send him to fetch Joseph, but I hoped Tilly and I had gained enough time.

Tilly and I scuttled hastily down the row of casemates to the left of the sally port, walking through the narrow arches. In the shadows to our left was a rubble of new brick and gleaming cannon, oiled and ready but so new they'd not been fired. On our right was the brilliant light of the parade ground. I had been to our destination only once before and had not had the cause nor desire to see it a second time. Tilly was not even aware of its existence, and I couldn't really think of any words that might soften what was bound to be a blow.

At last we came to the largest room yet, windowless as were the others with no firing slits or gun ports to let in the day. A wooden door set in the heavy planks that sealed off one of the arches.

"What's that?" Tilly asked, again five years old.

I told her: "It's called the dungeon. It's the only truly secure place in the fort. Joseph puts the most dangerous men here sometimes."

"Oh, look," Tilly whispered and pointed.

I had forgotten, but just above the door were the words, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." Tilly is not the only person on this earth with a love of melodrama.

I crossed the brick floor to peer in the tiny barred window in the door.

Light, leeched of its living gold by passage through the single narrow slit in the outer wall, provided just enough illumination I could see a pile of clothing on the floor of the dungeon. All that marked it as a man was a hand flung out and up, turned as gray and devoid of warmth as the light caught in its palm, A heavy shackle weighed down the wrist. From it ran a chain to a ring set in the wall. In this age of steam engines, universities and travel across the oceans, a sight so medieval didn't seem real. It was as if I peeked through a portal into a barbaric past.

One my husband had created.

Reality came back to me on the terrible odor wafting through the bars. A bucket for waste stood beside the crumpled form, and next to it, much too close for decency, a bucket with the handle of a water dipper protruding over the rim.

Private Lane-and who else could this have been?-could not even move out of his own waste. I do apologize for talking of such a distasteful thing, but the truth of it underscored how like an animal it made the boy seem, and how like mindless beasts the men who had put him there.

"Is it Joel? Is he alive?"

Tilly had crept up in her slippered feet. Her voice so close and sudden nearly stopped my heart.

"I don't know," I said truthfully. "If he is he won't be for long."

She began tugging at the door, but its lock was forged to withstand the strength of even first love.

The ringing of boots on brick in a rhythm I've listened for over half my life stopped us both-her tugging at the lock, me tugging at her.

"Joseph," I said.

7

Anna put Raffia's letter down and sat for a moment staring sightlessly across the narrow sitting room toward the kitchen sink. A grilled cheese sandwich with a single bite out of it lay congealed to the plate beside her on the sofa. On the coffee table, near the box of letters, was yet another glass of flat, unsparkly sparkling water. Her throat had been dry for days, and the water only seemed to make it worse.

The window over the sink had gone dark. An idle part of Anna's brain pondered that for a moment before logic told her night must have long since replaced the subtropical dusk. Even with this scrap of knowledge to cling to she couldn't shake the creepy sensation that, should she look out of that window, she would see soldiers from the Civil War hanging from trees.

It was the battering she'd taken, she told herself: heat, lack of sleep, blunt trauma, contusions, severed fingers, dead Cubans and live heroes.

And that made her see a ghost.

She shook her head as if negating an invisible accuser. She'd endured worse and never once had emanations from the ether plagued her. Though she didn't want to admit it, because to do so was as frightening as the ghost, the woman in white she knew was Raffia had not been a beginning but merely a next step. For a while now, maybe a day, maybe longer-Anna couldn't be sure, memories of sanity being tricky things-the world had started shifting occasionally, reality slipping just a little, just enough that Anna's entire being was suffused with the wrongness of things. It was as if she'd been cursed with the ability to see into another dimension or another time, and she didn't like it.

"Evils sufficient unto the day." She repeated the aphorism to the cat. Piedmont meowed politely but, not being much of a philosopher, chose to lick his hindquarters rather than continue the discussion. He assumed the position that always reminded Anna of a turkey ready for roasting and commenced his bath. Rubbing her eyes hard enough to chase red and black stars across her vision, Anna knew she was desperately in need of something. Sleep maybe. Her mind, the one thing she could count on to consistently work properly, was on the fritz. Molly. She needed Molly, and not as a sister this time but as a mental health professional. She looked at the clock on the front of the stove. The hands indicated one o'clock. Knowing that couldn't be right, she forced her stiff and creaking frame from the couch and went into the bedroom. The clock on the night table suffered the same time warp: one A.M. The sofa, Aunt Raffia, the other dimension she'd been slipping into, had swallowed three hours, and Anna couldn't readily account for them. By the number of pages beneath Piedmont's furry butt she knew she could not have been reading the whole time. Dreaming? Sleeping with her eyes open?