Elroy had cleared a space for her in the back by piling the teddy bears in unholy confusion on one side of the back seat. He sat her down with unusual solicitude, then opened the door for me.
Once I was in and we’d started the drive back to the store, he said, “I hope I never catch you taking sleeping pills again, young one. I don’t want you taking any of that trash. That stuff can kill you.”
I almost told Elroy that we’d all seen the this-is-your-brain-on-drugs commercial, but it struck me that Jonni, whose full name was Jonnitan and whose parents had met in a hippie commune, might never have heard any anti-drug speech from someone she respected. So I let Elroy ramble on in his odd, chewed-up speech.
He sounds just like Elvis, I thought. And his gestures, his hip-positioning, his lower-lip pouting, his disapproving sneer. All of them are just like Elvis. “So, you were an Elvis impersonator, when you were young?” I asked him, when I thought that Jonni had enough sermonizing. Besides, he’d started quoting the gospels mixed up with vintage New Age sayings and stuff about a higher plane.
My question brought him up short. He turned to stare at me. “A what?”
“An Elvis impersonator,” I said, just as the weird thought ran through my mind that there had been no impersonation involved. Looking down, I saw that he wasn’t wearing any belt buckle, certainly not a huge, gold-and-jewels one. Had I dreamed that, too?
I was so shocked that when I paid mind to Elroy again, he had launched off in another sermon of some sort, this one apparently directed at me, “besides, young lady, unlike some people I don’t go through life playing no phony role. It’s just that sometimes you’re required to be what people need, what people think you should be, and in a way to expiate and to cleanse the sins of who you were or they think you were. For instance, all those ice creams you eat”
“I pay for them,” I protested.
“Damn right you do. You can die of overweight, you know. And besides, as my mama used to say”
He had parked in front of the store by the time he finished his sermon. I almost ran out of the car, confused, baffled, feeling like I was having a weird dream and definitely very tired of Elroy’s sermon.
Mark was at the counter, on the phone, with a pile of books in front of him and a pricing gun in his hand. He looked up and mouthed at me, “Jonni?”
“She’s fine. She’s coming in,” I said. I wanted to tell him she’d been dead and Elroy had taken on Elvis’ form and resurrected her, but then Mark would just tell me I’d been working for Eternal Life too long. And maybe I had.
“Well, ma’am, if you are possessed by a malevolent entity, I’d say you definitely should quit your job with the nuclear power plant,” Mark said, into the phone.
I moved in beside him, took the price gun from his hand, determined to start work and forget what must have been a dream, had to have been a dream.
Looking down at the cover on the first book on the pile, I gasped.
Mark covered the mouthpiece on the phone. “Elroy had them vanity published. Isn’t it a hoot?”
I looked at the cover again, speechless.
It showed a figure in a white jumpsuit, surrounded by light. On the top it said Elroy Peters. And on the bottom, in black letters, was the title: Elvis Died For Your Sins.
Like Dreams of Waking
I have a Southern friend who talks endlessly of civil war minutia. He happened to mention that Stonewall Jackson was killed by friendly fire. With one thing and another, next thing I knew I found myself writing this story.
(preceding pages rendered illegible through water damage and age) …possible that he had been wounded early in the day, more than twelve hours beforehand, and just as possible that all those hours he had lain for dead, in that great butcher-shop that Gettysburg had become.
I’m not sure when he was brought to the hospital we’d established at Plank Farm.
Situated three miles west of Gettysburg, the farm consisted of a good sized building on the west bank of Willoughby’s Run. A few of us, medical men, had claimed it early in the morning of Wednesday, the first of July 1863, and since then we’d been disposing sick and wounded where we best could. Beds and mattresses, as well as anything that could be pressed into service as such, had long since been occupied by wretched sufferers.
We had the orderlies bring straw from the barns and spread it on the floor, so that more room might be made to care for afflicted men.
The man I wish to tell you about lay on the floor of the front parlor, upon the already blood-soaked straw, amid scores of wounded, moaning, crying men.
I thought he was dead. Surveying him from the narrow corridor about six feet away, I thought he couldn’t be anything but dead and must have died the moment he received his wound. I couldn’t imagine why anyone had dragged his corpse in.
His head was all a mass of gore, from which nothing human emerged.
Yet, the gore appeared to move.
Curious, I stepped amid the wounded, careful to avoid touching the infection-swollen limbs and extricating myself from hands that grasped my ankles.
To be honest, I no longer noticed the grabbing hands, nor the piteous moaning of the poor sufferers, nor could I any longer smell the miasma of putrefaction and illness that pervaded the room. I’d smelled its like or much worse after other campaigns and in other hospitals, worse provisioned than this.
In those other necessity-engendered hospitals, the wounded had lain in tents that could not keep the water fully away from their tortured bodies, and had been crowded so tightly together that there had been no room to step between them.
At least here there was plenty of room around this man for me get close to him. Close enough to realize that what moved amid the gore and blood on his face was no human muscle but a mass of maggots that writhed and danced like children at a feast, all the while making a sound like hogs feeding on mash.
Revolted, my stomach reacting to this sight with a violence I hadn’t experienced since the early days of the war, I attempted to find an orderly that would take the corpse away, before its corruption contaminated the living bodies lying beside it.
But just then the assumed corpse spoke, a whisper barely audible above the sound the maggots made while feasting his still-living flesh. “France,” he said, with startling clarity. “And the English, too.” His voice subsided into a low sound that might not have been more than labored breathing.
His uniform might be a mishmash of Confederate and Federal issue, but his voice held the slow accent of the South.
I rushed out to the yard of the farmhouse, where I found a pail and filled it with water from the pump, displacing the walking wounded who had been taking turns pumping cold water over their afflicted limbs.
Though his words held no meaning for me, they were words, the words of a fellow human being suffering the tortures of hell while in this world. And his accent was the accent of a compatriot. To assist him and others such as him, I’d left my studies in England to come to the succor of my homeland, when it first seceded from the Union.
I’d come back, against my mother’s besieging and my father’s instructing, and through two years of hard, bitter campaigning, I’d lived to endure the full pain of my decision. But I’d never regretted it, because what use is man if he doesn’t do something for his fellow?
I took the pail with water and a discarded rag that I found in a corner of the yard.
Kneeling by the wounded man, I did my best to clear away the blood and gore, and the vermin that infested it. As I cleared the gore, I found his injury was less than I’d at first suspected.