Less than a year earlier, Wilky and Cabot had lived in a state of complacent expectation, as if the stretch of earth they inhabited had been created and cleared especially for their freedom and happiness. In Boston and Newport and in the villages of New England, they were everywhere welcomed, their accents understood, their manners appreciated. In time their boyish openness would be tempered by experience, just as their handsomeness would ripen and their beliefs solidify. No one told them and no one warned their parents that they would be shot down before they were twenty. The New England which their grandparents and great-grandparents had created was not a place of violent death or battle roar or infected wounds, but of settlement, propriety, peace, righteousness. Henry knew, as he sat on a bench in the hallway close to Mr Russell, that their visitor’s shock came not only from the brutal disappearance from the earth of his golden son, but from the idea that a public pact, a version of the civic order as ordained by history, had been cruelly broken.
Wilky came home with no belongings. Even his uniform was rotting and had to be carefully removed. The blanket that covered him was thrown aside and left in a corner of the hallway. It was a few days before Henry, doing vigil over his brother, noticed it and carried it to the kitchen. As he unfolded it there, the smell was overwhelming,but so fiercely redolent of what Wilky’s suffering in the battlefield must have been like that he could not easily cast it aside. It smelled of tobacco, and it smelled of the strange mixture of rot and human sweat which Wilky’s uniform had reeked of. But more than anything, it smelled of the earth itself, the earth of mud and muck and of war, the earth which had been stormed by regiments and disturbed by grave diggers, the foetid earth. He found a place for the blanket in a shed behind the kitchen and went back to the hallway, but the smell remained with him. It was the most vivid testament to what his brother had been through.
THE HOUSE lived on the ebb and flow of Wilky’s pain. Henry realized that he had paid such close attention to Mr Russell on that first day because he would have done anything to avoid having to look at his brother and contemplate his future. Once Mr Russell had left, he had no choice but to take in the scene in all its horror. Wilky’s hair was matted and his body limp and sweaty. Wilky did not seem to sleep; he lay on his side, constantly moaning and as the pain intensified crying out suddenly. Sometimes the cries turned into shrieks and they filled the house. Henry believed that his brother was going to die.
Over breakfast on the third morning, his mother said that all of them, in whatever way they could, should try to share Wilky’s pain, take some of it from him and live with it themselves. Everyone in this house, she said, as her husband nodded, should dedicate themselves to taking the pain from Wilky and suffering a small part of it in their own bodies. When Henry looked at William, he discovered that his brother was nodding too, as though something eminently wise and practical had been said. When Henry went back to his room, he lay on the bed and concentrated on the infected wound in Wilky’s side which the doctors had cut open but which had not been cleared of infection. No amount of wishing, he thought, could do anything to alleviate his brother’s suffering. He went down to the hallway and sat close to Wilky who was groaning softly. He moved closer to him – as his Aunt Kate, who was already there, smiled at him – and held Wilky’s hand for a moment, but since this seemed to cause him pain he withdrew it. He wished that his brother could smile as he had always smiled, but his drawn face now appeared as though it would never smile again. It would wince and wrinkle up in distress rather than open in warm recognition. Henry and his Aunt Kate sat there with Wilky silently until his mother came and without speaking took her sister’s place on the bench beside the stretcher.
The family kept the gravity of Wilky’s state from Bob,and only when the patient began to improve did they tell Bob the truth about him. Bob managed to send them a private letter expressing his opinion and that of many others about the assault on Fort Wagner – that large matters of strategy were overlooked. The slain, he said, were monuments to folly. Bob’s letter did not please his parents; it lacked idealism and optimism. Bob, it became clear from other letters, was bored. He had suffered from sunstroke and dysentery and lack of respect for his superiors. His letters were read only by the immediate family, his mother expressing her disapproval by leaving some of the letters unread, allowing her husband to read her the more uplifting extracts, if he could find them.
As Wilky’s wounds began to heal, his nightmares started. He cried out as though the heat of battle or the mayhem of retreat were upon him. Each one of the family took turns to stay with him at night once he was well enough to be moved to his room, but no one knew how to restore order to his sleep, make him believe that he was not being attacked and shot at and his friends and comrades killed all around him. His nightmares stopped only when all the thrashing and frantic movement in the dreams caused him to wake. It was the pain that brought him back to his senses.
Often the day was no better as the memory of what he had seen and felt became a waking nightmare for Wilky. His father remained optimistic, certain of his recovery, and certain also that the dead of the war would now experience an eternal morning, an unimagined happiness. Even Wilky’s pain, he said, had united the family and could only lead Wilky to great spiritual distinction in the future.
Henry sat in the bedroom one day as Wilky, now able haltingly to speak, asked their father to preach a sermon. Wilky’s voice was weak, but his eyes were eager and he watched his father with an innocent hunger as Henry senior began, explaining that each mortal, the healthy and the rich, as much as the sick and the wounded, was equally dependent on the Divine hand, and our best interest lay in becoming as innocently ready to follow him as sheep. He continued until Wilky, at first falteringly, but then louder and with tears in his eyes, interrupted.
‘Ah Father, it is easy preaching faith in God’s care,’ he said, ‘but it was hard, where I have been, to practise it.’
Henry senior was silent. They watched Wilky gasping for breath, trying to speak more. His father turned to Henry as though to ask if his second son would know whether he should go on with the sermon or wait to see if Wilky had more to say. Henry did not respond, but soon Wilky’s voice found the strength to continue and he left them in no doubt that he did not wish to be preached to any more, even if it was he who had originally requested it.
‘I woke up lying in the sand under my tent, and slowly recalled much that had happened, my wounds, my fall, the two men that tried to drag me to the hospital tent, the fall of one of them, my feeble crawling to the ambulance. I woke up to find myself forgotten, and sick and faint for loss of blood. As I lay wondering whether I should ever see home again, I saw a poor Ohio man with his jaw shot away who found, I suppose, that I was near to him and unable to stand, he crept over and deluged me with his blood. At that I felt…’