The Deserter (27 page)

Ida's brother Eben was one of half a dozen men stricken with typhoid in a swampy camp only a few miles from Culpepper.

So now only a couple of hundred were left, including the long-term cases—gunshot wounds in the lungs, gangrenous compound fractures, resections after amputations, chronic diarrhea or simple debility.

There were many empty beds. The chief surgeon now had time to write up his more interesting cases.

CASE STUDY OF PATIENT 276

Gunshot wound of tibia and fibula, un-united comminuted fracture, leg swollen, offensive, filled with pus. Flap amputation at upper third of leg, stump closed with three stitches and wet strips of muslin … hemorrhage … tourniquet … hemorrhage … quinine and iron prescribed, cod-liver oil, egg-nog … hemorrhage, tightening of tourniquet, diarrhoea, administration of rhubarb powder, ipecacuanha and opium. Patient rallying, ten ounces of pus removed from thigh, injection of hydrochloric acid and laudanum … patient going about on crutches, discharged, paroled, sent south.

CASE STUDY OF PATIENT 1057

Gunshot wound of abdomen. Patient reports that much of the liquid food and drink he took after the injury continued to appear at the orifice of the wound.… An incision was made perpendicular to the walls of the belly, the bullet secured and removed.… Convalescent patient discharged and sent South, his wound improving, though still fistulous.

CASE STUDY OF PATIENT 1185

Diffuse Traumatic Aneurism; Wound of the Spinal Cord … Ligation of the Carotid … Death … Autopsy.

CASE STUDY OF PATIENT 2070

Sixteen-year-old with typhoid fever. Delousing called for on admission. Symptoms developed rapidly, chills and fever, abdominal rash, delirium.…

The surgeon had treated Patient 2070 since his admission to the hospital. When the boy's sister appeared, he had given her the task of sponging her brother with cool water to reduce the fever.

Happily the boy now seemed to have passed the crisis, but his sister was in extremis. The surgeon felt utterly helpless. He was used to the groans and screams of wounded men, but Ida's whimpering unmanned him. He knew all there was to know about battle wounds and the dangerous diseases contracted in crowded campgrounds and airless prisons, but he was unacquainted with female problems. About childbirth he knew nothing at all.

Of course Ida herself knew a good deal more than the surgeon, having assisted the midwife when her mother had been brought to bed with Alice. But now she was too humble and in too much anguish to make suggestions to Chief Surgeon Alexander Clock.

Gritting her teeth, she stared at the object in the glass case beside her bed, trying to understand how it worked. The little contraption was a model of Elias Howe's sewing machine. As her pangs grew worse she forced herself to concentrate on the in-and-out trajectory of the thread. Gasping, she asked the doctor, “Oh, sir, how does it make a loop?”

But willy-nilly, babies always manage to be born. Shortly after five o'clock that afternoon, Mary Morgan Kelly's great-grandfather emerged, howling, into the world.

But not before a tall woman wearing a rusty black bonnet and carrying a large canvas umbrella came storming up the aisle. It was Ida's mother.

PART XIX

THE LAST
SKEDADDLE OF
OTIS PIKE?

THE NEEDLE'S EYE

I
t was Gwen on the phone. “You'll never guess what's happened. Ebenezer's back.”

“Who?” It took Homer a minute to remember. “You mean that crazy cousin of yours? He's back? Whatever for?”

“I can't explain. You'll have to see for yourself. And hurry up, because he's about to set out.”

“Set out? What do you mean, set out?”

“You'll see.”

They went at once. The family homestead, occupied now by Tom Hand and Mary's sister Gwen, was only three miles away as the crow flies, but Mary and Homer were not crows. For their two-thousand-pound Toyota there was no airy flight from Fair Haven Bay over Adams Woods—sacred to wood thrushes, red-tailed hawks and Henry Thoreau—and over the six lanes of Route 2 and the Concord prison and the Assabet River, and no gentle descent to the grass in front of the old house on Barrett's Mill Road.

No, instead of flying they had to bump along the dirt road from Fair Haven Bay to Route 2 and then go
right
instead of left on the highway in order to make a U-turn at the intersection with Route 126 and head back all the way to the traffic circle where they could at last make the turn onto Barrett's Mill Road and pull up beside the old family farm.

Gwen was there on the lawn, and so was Ebenezer. He was, indeed, setting out.

“Ebenezer, wait,” cried Gwen, running after him, dodging around the U-Haul truck parked in the driveway.

Homer and Mary leaped out of their car and ran too.

Ebenezer was a hundred yards ahead of them, striding along the road with a staff in his hand, a bewhiskered pilgrim in shorts and Birkenstocks. When they caught up with him he continued to march steadfastly, staring straight ahead. They had to hurry along beside him like fellow wayfarers to a distant shrine.

“But listen, Ebenezer,” panted Gwen, “how are you going to live? You can't abandon everything, not absolutely everything. No, no, wait, I know what you're going to say about the lilies, how they toil not, neither do they spin, but really, Ebenezer, you're not a lily.”

Ebenezer bowled along, his face radiant, his eyes glittering with a saintly light. The jab of his staff in the weedy shoulder of the road was the proclamation of a new life. “Verily I say unto you,” he began, beaming at Homer.

“Oh no you don't,” interrupted Homer. ‘You don't verily say anything to me. For God's sake, Ebenezer, what are you up to?”

Ebenezer wasn't listening. He had been programmed by the little old lady in Gettysburg to obey the parable of the rich young man (Matthew XIX: 1630), and everything else had vanished from his mind. “Oh, my friend,” he babbled to Homer, “why wouldest thou not be perfect?”

“Because I'm perfect already,” gasped Homer, but he was falling behind.

“He's penniless,” said Gwen to Mary as they galloped along together. “They'll arrest him as a vagrant.” She called back, “Homer, have you got any money?”

Homer pawed in his pocket and produced a ten-dollar bill. Mary grabbed it and tried to thrust it into Ebenezer's hand, but he tossed it in the air, bawling something about the needle's eye and the elephant.

The ten-dollar bill rose like a butterfly and fluttered back into Homer's hand. “Elephant?” he said to Mary. “Did he say elephant?”

“Oh, you know about the elephant, Homer,” said Mary. “It's easier for an elephant to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.”

Gwen dropped back too. “Everybody knows that, Homer. Elephants are even bigger than camels. They simply will not get through that skinny little hole in the needle, no matter how hard they try.”

The three of them slowed to a stop and watched Ebenezer's white legs twinkle away in the direction of the traffic circle.

“They'll pick him up,” prophesied Gwen. “And then they'll call us and we'll have to bring him home and it will be a colossal pain. But first”—Gwen turned briskly and began jogging back along the road—“quick, quick, before he zigzags in some other crazy direction. When he drove up just now, he had all our stuff packed in his U-Haul truck. If we hurry we can get it all back in the attic before he turns up.”

THE QUESTION MARKS

N
othing more was heard from Ebenezer. Perhaps on his strange pilgrimage, he had actually stumbled upon the kingdom of Heaven.

In any case, he did not come back to claim the trash in the back of his U-Haul truck. So that same afternoon the four of them—Gwen and Tom, Mary and Homer—carried every one of Ebenezer's plastic bags up the two flights of stairs to the attic.

Here they were soon organized into a threefold system of containers. Mary taped labels on all of them. The first was a set of plastic trash barrels labeled
OUT
, and the second,
SORT
. The cardboard boxes for the third category were labeled simply?

Gwen devoted herself to the
SORT
trash cans, trying to put back in order the memorabilia of two centuries of family life. Before the original appearance of Cousin Ebenezer everything had been neatly arranged in separate boxes. Now it was a jumble.

Tom dumped out the contents of Ebenezer's first bag on the floor. It was a wild miscellany from ages past—an album of scratchy 78s, including Beethoven's Fifth, a packet of letters from Great-Uncle Bob and Great-Aunt Bea on their trip to Alaska in 1887, a photograph of Grandmother and Grandfather Morgan on camels in front of the Pyramids, ninety-five color slides of Old Faithful and Yellowstone Park, a crumbling wad of newsprint from November 1918—
GREAT WAR ENDS
—a moldy collection of science fiction paperbacks, a tangle of failed Christmas lights and a plastic Santa.

While Gwen began her sorting, Tom contributed to the organizational procedure by carrying all the cans marked OUT down to the road to be picked up by the town collection service. When that was done, he was smitten by an unhappy thought about Ebenezer's U-Haul truck. The cost of its rental must be increasing every day. Since the fool had so devoutly rejected all treasure upon earth, perhaps he had also rejected the bill for the truck.

Grumpily, Tom drove it to the nearest U-Haul place and learned to his horror that there was no record of any original payment by Ebenezer Flint to the outlet in Washington. He had to pay the whole thing himself with a large check.

In the meantime, Mary and Homer winnowed and sifted, selected and rejected.

“All we care about,” said Mary, “is stuff from the 1850s and '60s.” She held up a shiny pink shell inscribed
Saint Louis Exposition, 1895
, and handed it to Gwen.

In the end they brought all the question marks downstairs in a couple of cardboard boxes. Compared with the amount of stuff going out and all the miscellaneous things to be sorted, the question-mark collection was small.

But it was crucial.

THREE STITCHES OF
DOUBLE CROCHET

H
omer had given his all. He helped Mary bring the question-mark boxes into the house, and then he left for a faculty meeting in Cambridge, complaining as he ran down the porch steps, “I approve of genealogical research on the whole, but ye gods.”

Mary was happy to carry on by herself. She took out the bundles of papers and letters and spread them on the table. As she noted them down she told herself firmly,
These came from the attic. They have nothing to do with Bart and his bloodstained coat and all the rest of his so-called Otis Pike collection
.

She loved making lists. She began with the letters. Some of them looked more interesting than others:

1. Two letters in lavender envelopes addressed to
Mrs. Seth Morgan
.

2. An official-looking letter also addressed to
Mrs. Seth Morgan
.

3. Another letter without an envelope—a tender missive beginning
My dearest husband
and ending
Your loving Ida
.

4. A bundle of letters postmarked Washington, D.C., from
A. Clock, USA, Asst. Surgeon
, addressed to
Mrs. Seth Morgan
.

5. Miscellaneous letters from
Mrs. Seth Morgan to Mrs. Eudocia Flint
and from
Mrs. Eudocia Flint to Mrs. Seth Morgan
.

6. Other letters to and from various Flints and Morgans.

So much for the letters. But there were other papers, as well. Mary began another list:

1. A printed sheet:

Order of Exercises for Commencement
August 30, 1860

(NOTE Item 8!
Literary Disquisition
by Seth Morgan)