Flashback (37 page)

I laughed then, and she knew she'd won me over for the time being. "I like cats too," I told her. "Let's get you home." With spit and spanking I managed to get enough of the dust and the mud her tears had made of it off of her face and clothes that we would not invite comments when we crossed the parade ground.

Back in our rooms I put Luanne in a foul humor by ordering a tub filled though it was Wednesday. The bath was partly because I do love our troublesome sibling and partly because I wished to search her dress. I did not let her out of my sight between leaving the powder room and seeing her naked in the bath. I did search her pockets but, by the willingness with which she turned the garments over to me, I knew I would find nothing.

Because she'd lied to me and because she had something she didn't want me to find, she watched me as closely as I watched her. I'd hoped to leave her alone in the tub so I might slip back to the powder room and see if I could find this spurious "proof" she'd been given.

Tilly kept me at her side, first washing her back then brushing her hair dry. She insisted we have tea. I don't think she knew what was in my mind and hoped to keep me away from the powder room where I'm convinced she hid this "proof." (Why else would her hands be scraped raw? I believe she shoved whatever it was beneath the scrap lumber when she heard me calling.) No, for all her practicing at deceit, I believe she kept me beside her because she is young and afraid and her older sisters are the only parents she has known.

It was bedtime and full dark before she would let me out of her sight.

Before she awoke the following morning I was up and dressed and wending my way back to the middle of the northern rampart on the second tier. With me I had fish scraps to reward the pussycats that had brought down Sergeant Sinapp. The kittens are so adorable, one nearly all white but for a gray mark in the shape of a thumbprint on its head. I was tempted to bring it home, but I know Joseph would fly into a rage. I don't think I told you, but I tried it once before with a little gray-and-white tabby I'd named Pandora. Joseph raged and I let him and kept my cat for two days. She was gone on the third morning. Joseph had drowned her.

Joseph's hatred of cats stems, he says, from the fact that they are secretive beasts. Personally I cannot conceive of a creature with a brain the size of a walnut being that much cleverer than I, but to each his own. Perhaps it is a territorial thing. If cats are secretive then Joseph is the greatest torn of them all. He has never been forthcoming but of late he has been hiding things, I know it. Though never open with me, he's not deemed his activities-or my feelings-worthy of keeping things hidden before. This has changed. The other day, after a ship from the mainland came with mail, the fort went quiet while we all ran to pore over news from outside. I was sequestered in the bedroom, delighting in all your news from home, when I remembered I'd not given Luanne instructions for dinner. Lest I forget completely I decided to do it at once so I might enjoy my afternoon with you in clear conscience.

Joseph was at his desk in a widening of the hallway between our room and Tilly's, reading the letters he had received. When I came out of the bedroom-burst out, rather, as I was keen to execute my duty and get back to you-he shoved the letter he was holding inside his vest and snatched up another which he then pretended (rather badly) to be engrossed in.

Knowing it would avail me nothing but cold stares and colder silences, I did not confront him about it. I cannot but think he has taken a lover. Why else would he hide a letter from me? If she is from Key West, or the mainland proper, he must have met her some time ago, yet this is the first evidence of it I've had.

Though you most kindly pretend otherwise, I know you think little of my husband. This is my fault. I've used your shoulder to cry on when we had the usual peccadilloes of the professional soldier. Still, I have deep feelings for him, and the thought that one of these dalliances has survived, grown into a true relationship, hurt me. Probably it was something else entirely. Orders that cannot be shared or some such. Regardless, with Joseph hiding letters and Tilly secreting "proofs," I am beginning to feel I live in a house of secrets. That there is another life than the one I know flowing silently below the surface and, at any time, the barrier between the two could weaken and I could suddenly find myself plunged into events for which I am not prepared frightens me.

Other than a lovely few minutes watching the kittens devour my offerings, the journey was a disappointment. The previous evening the powder room had been filled with cannon barrels, wheels, pins and other pieces of ordnance. A worker, one of the colored boys used by the builder, said they'd no use for them now and the powder room was the only place they wouldn't be eaten up by rust right off. The lumber pile had not been moved. The iron parts had been dumped atop of it higgledy-piggledy. Without enlisting the help of half a dozen strong men I could not shift it to look beneath the pile.

My curiosity was not fated to be satisfied. It is my hope that this will be the end of the matter. If I cannot move the pieces of machinery then Tilly surely cannot. Should the mysterious "proof" be buried beneath it she will either have to tell Joseph so he can have it exhumed or she will have to leave it alone. Either would be acceptable to me.

As I was returning from this fruitless visit, picking my way through the lumber and unused brick where the kittens make their home, I heard a disturbance from the direction of Joel and the conspirators' cells. Curious, I hurried through the bastion to see what was causing the noise. With the powder room, Joseph's letter and the cats, I could not but think of the old saw about curiosity killing, but it didn't slow my steps.

The door to Joel's casemate cell stood open, moving slightly as if it had just been passed through in haste. From within came the sound of men fighting in close quarters. It occurs to me as I write this that over the years I have grown able to tell the different sorts of altercations by their sounds. This did not sound lethal, merely the thumps and grunts expected at the tail end of a fight between unequal adversaries.

Unbecoming as I'm sure it was, I went to the door and looked in. Joel leaned against the windowless wooden wall covering the arch overlooking the parade ground. The door in the small arch to his left, the one leading into the cell of Sam Arnold and Dr. Mudd, was open. Two soldiers pushed Mr. Arnold against the brick of the archway surrounding the communicating door. From the blood pouring out of his nose and the split in his lower lip it appeared they had been none too gentle.

"If it were up to me I'd just as soon let you bastards kill each other," said the soldier, whom I recognized as my overweight secret smoker of the other day. He was no longer the amiable lifer but was taut and alive with a fierceness I never would have expected. He had his forearm across Mr. Arnold's throat and held the man's right wrist pinned against the wall. A young soldier, smaller in stature-not much taller than I-struggled to hold Mr. Arnold's left arm.

Dr. Mudd was in the far corner beneath the three high, narrow slits on the harbor side, one hand held over his left ear as though it was injured. With the other he held the wrist of the ear-clutching hand. Very melodramatic. I thought that of his pose and expression as well: a picture of wounded innocence.

"You bunch are a goddamn fu-" the old soldier began.

"Mrs. Coleman," Mr. Arnold said quickly and loudly, saving the soldier from committing an offense-or imagined offense. I have heard the rough language of army men for so many years I have to remember to look appalled in order they not lose respect for their captain's wife.

The fight, what little of it remained, went out of soldiers and conspirator alike-and to think I once scoffed at the much-touted civilizing powers of the gentler sex. "Mrs. Coleman." My old fat friend acknowledged me with a nod of the head.

Not for a moment did he loose his hold on Mr. Arnold. The younger soldier dropped Mr. Arnold's arm to pay his respects. A difference in experience, I expect. Fortunately for the young man, Mr. Arnold did not intend him harm.

"You gonna behave now?" the older soldier asked. Mr. Arnold nodded and, still watching and alert, the soldier lowered his arm from his throat, let loose his wrist, and backed away.

For the oddest moment we all simply looked at one another. What behavior we expected in that stuffy cell in the midst of the sea I cannot say. Dr. Mudd ended our peculiar paralysis.

"I request you take me to your surgeon. I fear my ear has been seriously injured," he said in his formal and overblown way.

My old smoking soldier jumped. I believe until that moment he had completely forgotten about Mudd, he had kept himself so still and deep in the shadows of a shadowy room.

"It would serve you right if you got hydrophobia and died," he growled at Dr. Mudd. "Next time you two decide to kill each other, unless you go an' do it quiet like, I'll personally kill you both for making me come up here."

"Death would be preferable to serving a life sentence with a whiner and a thief," Sam Arnold snarled.

You might laugh at me, Peggy, for using "snarled" and "growled" and "snapped" when describing the conversations of men, but being in that cell was so like being in a pen with dogs standing one another off over a bone that I cannot think of another way to describe how they spoke to one another.

After the brief exchange, the old soldier blew out a prodigious sigh. The hackles he'd raised in his role as vicious fighting man fell away, age and humanity took their place.

"And what was it was took from you?" he asked of Mr. Arnold. I had the sense it was not the first time the question had been put.

Mr. Arnold said nothing for a moment. The first time in my memory of him he stood straight and strong, shoulders back, not slouching or leaning. Just when I thought he was not going to answer, he said:

"He stole a personal item of mine."

"And just what might that 'personal item' be?" the soldier asked.

Mr. Arnold ground his teeth. Not only could I see the muscles of his jaw working, I could hear the awful grating sound. Perhaps this is what is meant by "gnashing." "He took it from my mail," Mr. Arnold said. "Tampering with the mails is a serious offense."

Mudd laughed. The humor was bitter but his laughter wasn't unkind so much as sad. "What would you have them do, Sam? Add twenty years to my life sentence? Were that true you would have discovered the secret to eternal life."

"We'll search him," the old soldier said wearily. "Will that keep you from cuttin' up and throwing the furniture, such as it is?"

"Search him," Mr. Arnold said.

"We got to search him for something. We ain't gonna just turn out his pockets so's you can pick and choose. What're we looking for? A ring, a pork chop, eyeglasses-what?"

Mr. Arnold refused to speak.

"Suit yourself. Come on, doctor, we'll get your ear looked at though I'm of half a mind to rip it clear off just to work off the irritation you two caused me."

On impulse I asked if I might stay a minute to look after Joel. The slight young private was left to see to me, and the others left, closing the door behind them.

"What did he take from you, Mr. Arnold?" Why I thought he would tell me what he had withheld from the soldiers I do not know, but I did. In this I was wrong.

"Please excuse me, Mrs. Coleman," he said and retired to his own cell, shutting the communicating door.

I turned to where Private Lane cowered against the wall. "Cower" is too strong a word and sounds as if I think of him unkindly. That is not the case. Since his terrible beating he is a very different boy. Before Sinapp nearly killed him, he was a joyous boy on his way to becoming a strong man. Now he seems only and always a boy, and the joyousness is replaced by watchfulness and too great a dependence on those he feels to be his friends: Dr. Mudd, Tilly and me. "Joel?" I said. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, ma'am. It was nothing to do with me."

"Come over here; sit in the light where I can look at you," I said. Obediently he came to where I waited in the dull light from high openings. I'd spoken before I'd thought. The cell contained but a single stool made of scrap lumber. A gift from one of the guards.

He fetched it for me then knelt so I needn't look up at him.

"What was this about?"

"I don't really know. Sam and the doctor been at odds since I got here. Lately the doctor's been hectoring Sam about him being innocent. You'd think Sam would know whether he was or not, wouldn't you?"

I nodded to keep him talking.

"Today Sam went wild over something. I heard him screaming and breaking the little bits of furniture, calling the doctor a thief and the doctor calling him names and saying, 'You would have me die with scum like you' and other things. Then the guards came."

"You don't know what was stolen?" I asked.

He shifted uncomfortably. The brick was beginning to hurt his knees. I wanted to keep his attention for a while longer so I didn't give him leave to rise. "I don't even know that a thing was stolen," he told me.

"You mean Mr. Arnold lied? To what end?" I did not believe for a minute Mr. Arnold lied. His face was too full of emotion for that.

"No. Not lied," Joel said. "Dr. Mudd took something but maybe not a thing. Maybe information or an idea or a secret. I say that because Sam tore the room up and pretty much handled Dr. Mudd till the soldiers came. I think he'd have found a thing. Where could anybody hide anything here?" He shrugged at the unforgiving brick and hoard around, above and below us.