He stuck his finger through one of the bullet holes. The jacket was riddled with them, as if moths had been at it, and stained with dark patches of blood that had failed to come out, even with the washing Bobby had given the thing.
Jonathan shook his head. All those bullets. How had he lived through it? Why?
“Here, let me help you on wid dis,” Bobby said, gently taking the coat from Jonathan’s hands, as if he did not want Jonathan to further contemplate his melancholy.
“Miss Tompkins, she say we kin take da buckboard. It ain’t too far, but I don’t hardly credit you wid da strength to walk to da carriage house.”
Jonathan pulled on the jacket, buttoned the brass buttons. It was like stepping into a past life, experiencing something from another place and time. Something that seemed utterly alien to the conscious mind but still completely familiar.
Bobby held out a hand and Jonathan took it and allowed Bobby to pull him to a standing position. Bobby stepped beside him and Jonathan put an arm around his shoulder and they stood there while Jonathan’s head settled down.
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said at last. “Crutches…”
Bobby tentatively let him go, stepped away to grab Jonathan’s crutches. Jonathan tested his weight on the stump, tried to get a feel for his balance. Not too bad. His shell jacket, cut to fit snug, now hung like a sack coat.
“Here you are, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said, handing Jonathan the crutches. Jonathan tucked the armrests under his arms, set the tips on the floor, eased his weight onto them. Took a step, then another. “Good, good…” he gasped. “Good…show me the way, Bobby.”
They walked, slowly, out of the big room, into a foyer of sorts. Miss Tompkins’s was an elegant house, at least as well appointed as the Paine plantation house, if not quite as big. Now it was entirely given over to the wounded.
Bobby led Jonathan across the carpeted floor—worn and dirty now with the traffic coming and going—and opened the big front door.
Jonathan hesitated. He was breathing hard, in part from the exertion, in part from the panic that seized him. He had not been outside in months, had never really intended to go outside again. It was not a conscious thought—if he had thought about it at all he would have realized that it was absurd—it was just a feeling, understood, never expressed.
But there was the outside, right through the door. A front porch, the roof of which was supported by columns, a Confederate flag flogging in the breeze. Stairs down to the walk, a white picket fence around a narrow yard, sidewalk, cobbled street, people walking by, carriages, the whole world carrying on, waging war, and it did not know or care about Jonathan Paine and what he suffered.
Jonathan breathed deep, hobbled on, out the door. Bobby closed it behind him, helped him down the stairs and around the back of the white clapboard house to where the carriage house stood. In the open area in front of the carriage house stood the buckboard and two black, restless horses in traces. Their breath made gray clouds around their muzzles on that cold day.
Jonathan stopped and leaned on his crutches while Bobby arranged a crate for him to step up on and onto the buckboard’s seat. He gulped breath, felt his limbs trembling from the effort of getting out to the carriage house. His stump throbbed and he was covered in sweat, despite the cold wind that whipped around the courtyard, tumbling leaves and torn papers.
Bobby helped him up onto the buckboard’s seat, and with great relief Jonathan sat.
“You don’t have ta do dis, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said. “You let me know what you wants to find out, I kin go find it out.”
“No,” Jonathan said, gasping the word. “No. I have to do it.” He did not know why. Some kind of penance. Perhaps he would not be satisfied with an answer he did not see himself. Whatever the reason, he had to go.
Bobby flicked the reins, made a clicking noise with his tongue, and the horses stepped out. The buckboard seat bounced and swayed on its springs and Jonathan held on, tried not to think about throwing up.
Richmond was crowded, packed with people, the roads crammed with vehicles. It reminded Jonathan of the docks in New Orleans, that kind of traffic, that kind of bustle. There was nothing else to which he could compare it, he had never seen anything like it.
There were soldiers everywhere, companies and regiments marching past, loitering around, waiting, just as Jonathan remembered, the eternal waiting of military life. Gray-clad privates and privates clad in whatever their home states provided, or whatever they wore off the farm, officers on horses with gold braid swirling around gray sleeves and running wild over the tops and sides of kepis, gold rope twined around slouch hats. Like schools of various species of fish, they moved through the streets.
There were wounded men as well. Men with legs missing, arms missing, men with bandannas tied over their faces to hide whatever horror was left behind when the iron had done its work. In his total self-absorption Jonathan had come to believe that he was somehow unique. Despite the wounded men around him in the hospital, men who had also lost legs, or arms, or their lives, Jonathan had come to believe that he was the worst off, that he had suffered in a way that no one else had.
He sat silent, hanging on as the buckboard jounced, looked around, realized that he had been very wrong in thinking that. He saw a soldier, legs gone, bandanna over one blinded eye, leaning against a building, begging with tin cup extended. I am not so hard off as that fellow, Jonathan thought. When I join him in begging, then I’ll feel sorry for myself. The sight of the man, the thought of himself there on that street corner, rattled him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the tattered sleeve of his jacket.
Bobby drove the buckboard with aplomb and a hint of aggression, and soon the big capitol building, with its massive columns at the top of wide granite stairs, loomed up in front, and Jonathan was glad because just riding in that swaying seat was taxing his strength to its limits.
They turned right at the capitol, skirted the small park called Capitol Square, pulled up in front of an uninspired four-story brick building set in a block of buildings that fronted 9th Street. Bobby swung the buckboard in against the curb with a deft tug and flick of the reins, swapped curses with another black man who was angling his ice wagon for that spot.
“We here. Let me help you down.”
Bobby climbed out, walked around the heads of the horses, and lifted his arms up to Jonathan, and Jonathan allowed himself to be lifted down like a toddler from a high seat. There was a time, he knew, when he would have been ashamed of that, but he was too tired, too hurt, too afraid to care.
They worked their way through the crowd on the sidewalk, like crossing a fast-moving stream, and into the lobby of the Mechanics’ Institute. It was bedlam there, with civilians and soldiers rushing about, and each with an attitude of utmost importance. For a moment Jonathan just stood, leaning on his crutches, feeling the sweat move under his shirt, and stared. After the months of peace in the makeshift hospital it was all very overwhelming.
“Why don’t you sit, I’ll find out where we gots to go,” Bobby suggested, but Jonathan shook his head.
“No. Let’s press on.”
They forced their way through the crowds, Bobby trying to fend the hurrying crowds away from Jonathan. But he was a black man, and he could be only so pushy, and more than once he had to grab Jonathan before Jonathan was knocked to the marble floor.
They came at last to the Office of Records, which seemed a likely place to start, so they opened the wood door with its opaque window and stepped in. Jonathan crossed to the high counter, leaned his crutches against it, put his weight on his elbows. His forehead felt as if it was burning up. He shivered from a chill, looked around for an open window. His hands were slick with sweat on the polished wood counter.