Savage Love (9 page)

“Whose baby was it?” I cried, my heart awash with dread.

“You didn't always come on her toes, Lennart,” he sneered. “You two thought you were untouchable in your scorn. Hatred was your form of grace. It made you irresponsible.”

I clapped my hands over my ears and began to hum Del Shannon's “Runaway,” music from my youth, or perhaps my father's youth. It was as if a vast trap door had opened at my feet; beneath me was nothing but sky, the constellations oddly reversed as in a mirror; I felt myself dropping through. I felt more pain than I thought was possible for a human to bear, and suddenly I realized the truth of the Immaculate Buddha's teaching that all life is suffering. Human beings were made for suffering; that was our purpose on earth. We were superbly designed suffering machines built to withstand all manner of guilt, loss, failure and betrayal. I even felt a twinge of pride at our incontestable capacity for self-inflicted catastrophe. At least we are good at something, I thought.

And then I ceased to think. No doubt the circuits were overloaded. Even my purely human talent for suffering was deficient. Just to stop Nedlinger from talking, I picked up the nearest object from the floor.

“
What's this?” I asked. “Where did you find it?”

Nedlinger's face softened then fused with clarity. He patted the bedclothes for his reading glasses then peered at the object in my palm. “That's a freshwater clam half-shell,
Elliptio dilatata
. The Neutral used them to smooth the insides of clay pots. See how the side is flattened, almost worn through.”

“And this?” I demanded.

“Side-notched projectile point,” said Nedlinger, seeming to find pleasure in the terse scientific descriptions. “Carved from opaque chalcedony, Early Woodland period. It's very beautiful, beautiful and functional, and almost eternal.”

But I was relentless. I shook a polished axe head before his face. “
This?” I breathed. “Tell me about this one?”

“They were a beautiful people,” Nedlinger said, dreamily, all at once ignoring me. “They painted themselves with yellow and red ochre, colours of the sun, their bodies made of light. They thought they were descended from the sun. They tattooed themselves from head to foot with charcoal pricked into the flesh, figures of myth came to life as they moved in the firelight. The warriors shaved their heads except for topknots braided with shells and porcupine quills that flashed like horses' tails when they danced. The world was a holy place to them and they themselves were holy beings, full of drama and prayer. Their lives were prayers.”

Nedlinger turned to me, his expression a mask of doubt and resignation. “Lennart,” he said, “all that's left for us is to try to remember them. Was I wrong to devote myself to that?”

I shook my head numbly. I held a shoebox full of tagged items. I knew what they were; I didn't need to ask. Like Nedlinger, I had been digging them up and studying them for years. Polished bear eye-teeth with holes drilled into them for stringing, fragments of slate gorgets, stone net sinkers, bone needles, awls, bifacial
chert blades, decorated potsherds. The minds that had made them long gone to dust, along with the noble Sun Lord, my innocent brother, my sad parents and the fair, web-toed Melusina, object of lust, never known for her true self.

All the passion, self-torture and emotional drama suddenly dropped away like flesh itself, leaving me nothing but the adamant, insistent fragments of memory that now seemed true and full of mystery. I remembered a sunny June day, the three of us digging beneath an awning inside the Southwold Earthworks, wriggling along on our bellies, sweaty and filthy, using trowels, dental picks and watercolour brushes to dislodge the tiny immaculate remnants of the past, carefully cleaning, cataloguing and photographing each precious discovery. Were we ever happier? I asked myself.

True, Melusina and I were flirting outrageously, but Nedlinger, already famous and beginning to resemble Nick Nolte, was cheerfully oblivious, or even acquiescent. And the misidentified Royal Child still grinned unbearably in its glass case on the cherry table in the Wolven dining room. But the camaraderie of the work flowed through us like an electric current, lost as we were, I see now, in curiosity and wonder instead of our own grubby needs.

“No,
” I said to my friend Nedlinger, “you weren't wrong.” And then, “About that, I mean. But doesn't it bother you that you were wrong about the Royal Child? That you'll be a laughingstock? Nothing but celebrity gossip and innuendo? A week's worth of jokes on the nightly talk shows? Then a nonentity, zip, zero?”

“Something to look forward to, isn't it?” he said. “We could just get on with the digging.” He sighed and heaved himself up from the bed and reached for the old canvas rucksack he had always carried to excavation sites packed with plastic specimen bags, notebooks, extra batteries for his camera, a dental kit for fine excavation, a magnifying glass, a Swiss Army compass and a pocket GPS unit, twine for pegging out site grids, and sandwiches wrapped in foil.

He said, “Lennart, there's still light. We can walk the fields the way we used to with Melusina. There are places we haven't looked.
”

I delayed momentarily, stunned by the sudden turn of events, the reversal of all my judgments, and the mysterious vectors of grace.

I said, “Wait a minute.” Inured to my own darkness, I wanted to resist, object, find fault (just like my mother and father).

I remembered one luminous moment: Melusina chirping happily in triumph, holding up between her thumb and forefinger a fragment of clay pipe with two faces incised around the bowl, sombre, thoughtful faces, intricately lined with tattoos, her own face smudged with sand and ash from the pit she was excavating, her blouse charmingly misbuttoned and soiled, her eyes bright with excitement.

In the distance, I seemed to hear the earthy thud of hide drums.

Then I heard the slap of the outer door as Nedlinger burst through.

Suddenly stirring, I called out, “Yes, yes, Armand, I'm coming.”

Through the bedroom window, I could see sunlight shimmering on the pocked fields.

I shouted, “Wait for me.”

A Flame, a Burst
of Light

Of the reasons for our lengthy and fatal sojourn inthe swamps of Sandusky, there are several theories. 1) The Americans wished to exact vengeance for atrocities committed by
C
apt.
Crawford's Indios on the Raisin River. 2) The Americans wished to prevent the men from rejoining their regiments before the close of the summer campaigns. 3) To supply the want of souls in the afterlife.

We were seven hundred dreamers starving and shivering to death in this gateway to the City of Dis.

Of the reasons for our deaths, there are no theories. Ague, fever (quartan, intermittent and acute), and the bloody flux carried us away. Old wounds, opened from damp and lack of common nutriment; pneumonia, dropsy, phthisis, galloping consumption, gangrene and suicide accounted
for the rest. An alarming number of walking corpses attended the fallen like Swiss automatons in a magic show, then tottered off to expire face down in the bulrushes.

In the swamps of Sandusky, there were more corpses than souls. We had a surfeit of bodies. They were difficult to bury in the washing ooze.

Kingsland and Thompson, wraiths and daredevils, murderous on the day with Springfields we borrowed from the Americans at Detroit, mounted amateur theatricals though much bothered at delivering their lines on a stage of sucking mud. S
gt.
Collins, of Limerick and the 41st, took the female roles, warbling a sweet falsetto. I mind he scalped Kentuckians with his razor at the Battle of the Raisin, along with Tenskwatawa's unspeakable Shawnee.

At Long Point in October, when we land, whaleboats and cutters rowed ashore by Negro slaves with superior airs, a barefoot girl in a wedding dress skips down the cliff path after regimental medical wagons and surgeons on horseback. Overnight, mist froze on the sails and sheets and shattered down on us like broken glass. We skate on the slick decks as the ships slide by the dunes and ponds along the point, mysterious and blood-red from rotting sedge and fallen leaves.

The cliffs are dun-coloured clay banks undermined by the fall storms with great half-dead pines like ships' masts toppling down and thin cows and hobbled, multicoloured horses grazing on narrow zigzag paths, low roofs and chimney smoke from a cluster of mean log and slab board houses above. We watch the girl, brown as a monkey, with ankles flashing beneath her dress, eyes wide at the sight of us. Preceding her, the medical wagons are like mastless ships with their iron kettles, great stirring spoons, and boxes of spirits and medicaments clanking listlessly. Clouds of geese and ducks, their wings flashing, lift and swirl over the point and settle again behind us.

I think of rhumb lines and wind roses and portolan charts. I imagine a map that indicates the vast populations of the dead, the departed souls like smoke spiralling up from the cemeteries, cities of corpses, suburbs of despair. The bodies of the newly dead make mournful humps of the sailcloth shroud spread over the deck. The boats roll and creak dolefully in the cold rain.

There are women among us, taken with the baggage at Moraviantown, who have lost all delicacy and shame due to the general deliquescence of bodies but yet display a pathetic dignity while voiding with the men or caring for their loved ones.

Except for a lucky few, we are all languid and ethereal, almost fleshless, pure soul, distilled by the elements and long steeping first in the Camp Bull prison and then the Sandusky swamps by Lake Erie (shoreline of ill fate). We all suffer
tormina and tenesmus associated with the flux. We gripe and strain and evacuate little balls or blood or pus and then evacuate again, thinking what a way to die.

Or we suffer the shivering chills, sweats and hallucinations of the ague.

Those who can lift their eyes to the grey cliffs and the medical wagons and mutter encouragement out of habit to the others. Some weep at the sight of the medical officers on exhausted horses plashing along the beach, other ranks in scarlet coats at the double, without arms, hardbitten veterans of long campaigns in France and Spain and Canada. Music on top of the cliffs, dried-up wild grapevines like nets or veins against the clay, exploding milkweed pods, and a spruced-up boy in an oversized homespun tailcoat with clodhopper boots, a red rag tied round his throat, loping down the track and jabbering to the brown girl in the wedding dress.

There is a girl in my boat dying, left behind by a husband in the Provincial Dragoons who went down at Sandusky before our fatally delayed departure, went down in the water, shaking himself to death and weeping in his girl'
s arms, terrified to die, cheeping for his mam, the girl overcome with adoration and embarrassment for him and running away to shit when her guts cramped so that she was away when he died and in despair — half dead herself from despair — when she returned to find the camp gravediggers already wrapping him in a canvas shroud they used over and over to preserve the dignities.

She is beside herself, shaking with the ague or shock, no pulse, almost a ghost, not a tear in her egg-like eyes, sunk in the dark socket of bone and lash.

As we are all beside ourselves, stumbling trinities of I and not-I and the world beyond that presents only a curtain of sensation, all fluffs and billows like a linen sheet next to an open window in a gale.

We have the Americans to thank for enlisting us in the army of saints, yes, to thank for our education in asceticism and otherworldliness, for helping us to disentangle ourselves from the flesh as the desert hermits of old, our immediate state of dis-ease being a sign of something invisible that beckons.

In Sandusky, the energetic and the mad used their hands to dredge the swamp and construct islands for sleeping and standing, and there was some attempt to keep up drilling in a shallow pond otherwise a home to bustards and ducks.

S
gt.
Collins, always the wit, said, “I don't wish to die and go to Heaven. I have a fear of heights.”

I report to Surgeon Kennedy of the 41st, whose dun stallion, name of Clarify, knocks me over in its prancing. Kennedy leaps down, striding along the sand, chewing a clay pipe with a goat and horns on the bowl, ordering fires built, the kettles on, stooping to speak to the prisoners, making signs to his aides.

Already soldiers walk up and down with fresh apples and knives, offering slices to suck, rain falling the whole time, cold and dismal.

“Peruvian bark is wanted,”
I say, breathless at keeping up, teetering on my pins. “Charcoal and laudanum to bind the bowels and for pain. And blankets, man, blankets. Dry clothing. Clear soup with blood and plenty of water and salt, shreds of meat, not diced, pulped vegetables.”

Surgeon Kennedy, saturnine, gloomy, sees the body as a flame, life as an explosion. He nods and nods and quietly gives orders to his aides. He has a year at Edinburgh. I have no teaching at all but cut off a man's leg with a hatchet after the Raisin and sewed the flap with binder twine and, by God, he was strong enough to survive, which is as good as a medical degree. The rest is bedside manner and prayer, I believe.

“Not five in fifty will see active service again,”
says Kennedy, measuring the ruined men.

“For God's sake, don't try to bleed anyone,” I say. “They'll go off in a nonce.”

“And who might you be?
” he asks.

“Surgeon's Mate Netherby, sir!” I say. “Of the 41st. I am a little altered in condition, not up to scratch. I tried to save as many as I could
—”

“Good lord,” says Surgeon Kennedy, a gleam of recognition under his scrutinizing brow.

“And brandy,” I say. “I could do with a stiff toddy. Or something mulled, all hot with raw brown sugar, cloves and cinnamon. Have ye any cinnamon in the apothecary stores?”

“Go and lie down in the wagons,” says Surgeon Kennedy.

The brown girl dashes from one only slightly animate bundle to another, dodging the skeletal perambulants who importune her with fatalistic courtesy.

“A mite to sup, Miss? — Have ye a hankee or a bit of rag for a blanket? — Hasty bint, ain'
t she? Always rushing about. — She's very clean. Never seen anything like it. Fancy she's just been to a wedding?”

Soldiers shake out blanket tents, anchoring them with bayonets, and one of the new-style canvas round tents, snapping the cloth like cannon shots, strumming the guy ropes with their fingers. Fires blaze, fierce with snapping pitch, roofed with spits and sides of beef, night falling and the fires like the hecatombs of Greece glaring on the cliff face. Everything quiet and efficient. Quickly, quickly, for the dead are anxious along the shoreline where the Lake Erie waves slap indifferently.

The fiddle music has stopped. A line of villagers troops down the S-curve of the wagon track where rainwater dashes in rivulets. Smell of meat roasting. The dragoon's wife lies in the sand wrapped in an
officer's wool coat, her husband's busby, much trod upon and muddy, clasped in one thin, languorous hand. But for S
gt.
Collins, who attends her microscopically, she would be dead already, has wanted to die.

Death has become an image of release from suffering. It beckons us all like a sultry lover, a whore in a basement cot, promising forgetfulness and release.

Her name is Edith, pronounced in the French way,
Eh-deet
. Her husband was a magistrate's son at York who enlisted in the dragoons because he could afford a horse and liked being above everyone else. But his death was violent, gross and humiliating. He was so full of bright life (a flame, an explosion). She loved the youth of him.

“I shall go to him,” she said, quoting King David, “but he shall not return to me.”

The brown girl falls to her knees in the wet sand next to a dying soldier boy and begins to pray. Her bumpkin husband, the tailcoat boy who followed her down the track, dabs at her hair with his red kerchief.

S
gt.
Collins, heady with fever, leans down, his voice resolved to a hoarse croak. “Ye won't do him any good with that,” he says.

“I am not afraid,” she says to the tall, gaunt, black Irishman hanging over her.

“
Ye should be,” he says.

Then he says, “This one was from Cork, with a sweetheart named Red Brigid Delaney. He won't know the difference. Can ye be Red Brigid Delaney, or are ye a useless whore?”

You can see her mull this over. On the one hand, prayer and everything she's ever been taught; on the other, the murderous transvestite Irishman, with his body courage and practical pity. No one has ever seemed as alive to her in that moment as
S
gt.
Collins.

“I can,” she says with a steady look.

She has suddenly changed from the wild child skipping down the track in the rain, the near horizons of house yard and stump fence obliterated. Always the mystery of the boundless mercury-coloured lake and the local stories of witchery, seer stones and underwater monsters attracted her.

I remember the firing squads at Camp Bull along the Scioto where the river runs in reptilian loops by ancient mounds the provenance of which even the Indians have forgotten. Camp theories are divided as to their being raised by Egyptian or Phoenician travellers or whether they were remnants of once-great indigenous civilizations now gone to dust.

Geography reminds us that each fevered and urgent moment of meaning will pass and that the wind of time is a cancer that destroys us all.

Four American deserters in dress uniforms, bottle
-green coats with black facings and shakos trimmed with braid, standing at attention like tall green candles (explosions of light) with their backs to the lazy river and their coffins, painted black, open before them.

One man harangues his executioners, another sags at the knees then recovers, a chest heaves, puffs of smoke spit ragged down the line, the musket reports drift over the broken ground to the curious prisoners, the speaking man jerks, his shako topples neatly into the coffin. One man jumps up shrieking. The reserve squad steps forward smartly and shoots him again, yet he lies there still living, his body twitching and heaving till the blood is all out. The others rest quiet. Steam rises from their wounds. It is a chill morning. Mist rises from the river.

Next spring the freshets will drag the coffins out of their graves along the riverbank, necessitating reburial.

At this stage, we have not begun to go off in great numbers. Our guards die as often as we do. Yet death is always an event of note, a mass execution being a dramatic occasion, a theatre of fatality, death as entertainment and diversion.

The camp hospital was at first chock full of the detritus of two lost battles, Erie and Moraviantown, the wounds of the lake fight being the worst: bodies smashed under falling spars or loose cannons rolling along the deck, wounds filthy with shreds of sail or wood splinters, lads waiting patiently to get their bits cut off and then turning themselves out, like candles snuffing, equally patient, quiet as lambs.

It gives you vertigo to think. Everyone's life is a centre of a universe that evaporates at the moment of death.

But I do love a neat amputation.

And we bury our dead in the Indian mounds, mixing their bones with the bones of ancient men.