“Both of us,” he said. “Maybe we should leave each other to go our ways, then?”
He wasn’t begging. He preferred not to die, but he was brave enough. His leg collapsed, and after he’d hit the floor, he slid his sound leg out from under him and sat against the wall as if he’d chosen to.
I took the knife from my belt and I stooped as I stepped forward, thinking to do it quickly for him, and I stabbed him in the throat. The worst part was pulling it out as he gurgled and squealed with the pain of the blade coming back at a slightly different angle from its entrance. Blood geysered, for I had struck an artery, and I hated for him to have to watch it pulse out and up. He made a face of defiance, of disgust for me, and then he grew paler and more fatigued and closed his eyes. He would die in a minute or more.
I called down, as if he might take the words with him, “You were good. You were a stubborn soldier, do you hear? You were good.”
He shook, as if with an ague, as if in the cold of an arctic night and not this moonless, windless summer dusk. His face was the dreamy, lost face of a boy deep asleep. The metallic smell of his blood was on my arms and hands and trouser legs. Then his bowel gave out the last that we leave in the world when we go: our embarrassment, our shame, the least of all of our aspects. He shook and his unwounded leg bounced upon the floor and then was still, and so was he.
“Plenty damned good,” I said. I collected what papers I could find on the table and the floor. Outside, I grabbed for the horses’ reins, but the stink of blood on me must have spooked them. They danced a dozen yards away and then, because they were trained and their reins were trailing, they stopped to wait. The only way I could keep them still so I might search the saddlebags for the silver I’d been told to retrieve was to reload my pistol and kill each one of the four. I searched with my hand for the cartridge pouch, and I found it; I had enough to load five cylinders with two more left.
But, you must think, I surely had to have been exhausted. I was. Might not I have been shaken by the battle? Absolutely. And, within it, the slaughter? Of course. And the death of the brave young man? And that without doubt. So that I rebelled at the killing of the mild, obedient horses?
I shot them down by holding the pistol in both hands and squeezing off as I saw those gentle, obedient eyes find me and look head-on; the sound was crunchy and slamming at once. I killed two with my first two shots; one ran off, then turned, as if in disbelief, and I shot him, too. The other I missed. He ran on, past the farrier’s, and I found I hadn’t the kidney any longer for a crippling shot and then the one with which to dispatch him. Only one seemed alive as I came up. He shuddered and looked to me as if — it was his training, after all — I brought reason and procedure and relief. I reloaded, standing above him while he watched, and I put the coup de grâce into the bony head of the sweet, betrayed creature. I went to the next one, and then to the farthest, and did all, at that moment, that I could: squeezed a shot away. The first one I’d taken had the bag I sought, a small canvas valise such as an artisan carries his tools in. I wondered what I would have done if the horse had pinned the bag beneath him. I thought of my knife. I thought of me in the geysering blood as I butchered the horse, hacked at him with axes from the woodworker’s shop, sawed at his ribs, fell to above and within him with a mallet and chisel, until I had torn him apart and had fetched the bloody bag on which he’d lain. Instead, I cut the pigging string away from the handle of the valise, put away my revolver, stopped at a watering trough to rinse off the blade of my knife, and carried the valise toward the Sharps I’d left at the water tower.
Grafton was on watch as I came in. He didn’t waste time with paroles. He came running clumsily through the high timothy weed and he got himself alongside, as if we both were ships on a rough channel, and he slipped his arm around me, grasping my belt, and tugged me along. He was soaked in blood, mine and the brave young soldier’s, by the time we reached our bivouac. And I thought, near home in the Points, thinking still of the smell from the joss house, the odor of a people’s obligation to an ancient ordering of life, I could feel obliged in my own way. I could feel a kind of loyalty to men like Grafton, and the men and horses and the single dog I had dispatched: my fang. And to the currency of the United States of America, to the growth of whose fortunes I had given straight lips, sound cheeks, most of a nose, much of a chin, and, no doubt, a goodly portion of my mind.
Sam Mordecai came to see me in Washington. He told the terse, wise, merciful woman at my bedside that we had served together in the fray. He said that: “Comrades in the fray.”
“Poor fellow,” she said.
“Oh, Samuel, you rabbi from consternation,” I hissed up at him through the bandages, which seemed, on that particular moist, hot Washington afternoon, to be made of clay or rock and to have just come from the furnace in which they had baked all day. My words, I knew, were difficult to decipher, not nearly so clear, say, as Chun Ho’s or Adam’s to me.
“Billy,” he said, “your eyes. Why are they covered?”
“He does not wish to see,” she told him, “until he can be seen.”
“Will that occur?”
She said, “I have told him probably not.”
“It was their idea to bandage me, on the way here. Their thought was that my eyes were affected.”
She said, “It was yours to keep them bandaged.”
“She lies,” I whispered, “this demimondaine of the casualty ward.”
Young Sam said, “Surely, you do not wish to address her so. You always had the best of manners. Burton and I sought to emulate you.”
“He wishes to drive me to fizz and sizzle,” she said with, I thought, some pleasure. “But he cannot. This forenoon I assisted, in the absence of nurses, who were elsewhere at work, when the surgeons had off a poor fellow’s leg. Knee and below,” she said. “I was not driven away by that ghastly brutality, and I surely will not be offended by his attempts to woo my worst attentions.”
“Sam, she’s right. I am trying to get her into my narrow iron bed.”
“You would not, if you could see my face,” she said, “because I am the plainest of women. Let us cut holes in the bandage. Have a look.”
“Billy,” Sam said, “let’s do it.”
I said, “What brings you here, Sam?” I heard her release her breath, and then I heard the sound of her skirts against a neighboring bed as she moved away.
“You should let her, Billy. What a fine woman that is!”
“Sam. What?”
“Oh, Billy,” he said, and I could hear him start to weep, then stop.
“Who?”
“Sergeant Grafton.”
“How?”
“A cannonade. His poor horse went mad with the suddenness of it. His fright—”
“He threw him off?”
“He crushed his head. He danced on him in his fear. It was a jelly, his skull — white jelly and red jelly, bits of bone all through it.…”
I found no words. I breathed out against the hot, heavy bandages and then I breathed in. We’re coming, I heard him say, as gently as if to a boy.
“Billy, I shot the horse.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You think I was right?”
“It’s as good a deed as any other I can think of. Punishment for disobedience by an animal we’ve raised to serve us. Mercy, if horses are capable of pronouncing guilt upon themselves. Corrective, if another horse observed and could fathom it as retribution. Sam, my skin hurts, Jesus, it feels like they’re boiling it and poor Grafton. He was a decent man. He should have been an officer. Though maybe he was decent because he was one of us. Oh, Sam: Take up your pistol, pretend I’m a horse.”