“Because of what I dreamed.”
He slid down into his blanket and tarp and he rolled over. He murmured, “Which was?”
I slid down in my own blanket roll and pretended not to hear. I did hear his voice again, but I ignored it. He was snoring soon enough, as all soldiers learn to do, in rain or snow or landslide of mud or manure: Stop, do the necessaries, close your eyes, and sleep.
I tried to keep my eyes open in the cold and soak and darkness, for I did not want to live inside that dream again. I blinked myself awake a few times, but then I could not help but fall — as if down a cliff face or into a mining pit, for thousands of yards, and at great speed — into sleep. I was not invaded by the dream again, although I thought of it at once on waking, and left the camp, as if to relieve myself, because I did not wish to speak of it in any particulars. Fortunately, Sergeant Grafton was too uncomfortable and moody to demand an accounting of my nighttime vagaries.
I had dreamed of a tall woman in a dress the color of trilliums, that clean whiteness, who wore a gauzy cloth in her hair that matched the dress. Her arms were long, and I could see, as the light cloth was pressed against her by a wind, that her thighs were long as well. She had a long face, a long, straight nose, and a very wide mouth. Her throat was long, too, and it was arched, strained, as if she tried to hear. It was me, I thought in the dream. She was trying to listen for me, for she knew that I was on my way. She hadn’t the face of anyone I knew, but it was a face to which I was powerfully attracted, and I coveted her body, thinking that I would spare her if she would lie down with me.
How wrong, I said in the dream, to kill her if she doesn’t.
I was drenched, then, in someone’s dark saliva. I smelled a stink, as of manure. But it was tobacco, of course, and Sergeant Grafton was passing along the lieutenant’s instructions, handed down from the brigadier to the colonel to our lieutenant to Grafton, and then, in their vileness, to me. I choked at the smell. She turned, as if she’d heard me gasp.
I stared at her, stared into her dark, intense eyes. I ran my eyes like fingers along the frown marks at her mouth, etched beneath her tan. She nipped at my fingers, as if to promise pleasure. I closed my eyes, then opened them, and I stared at her lips. I felt charged, and full, and then I tingled with release, and I stared and I surged, and I cried aloud, and her face exploded as if I had caught it in my sight and fired.
So I waited for a week, and then for weeks, to learn that I’d been ordered to kill a woman.
What I wish to depose here is that I never had such a presentiment about Malcolm. Learning as I did, and learning what I did, I was as staggered as his parents must have been. But that cannot be, of course. But I was, indeed, staggered. And I did feel somehow responsible. And I did say “somehow” as a cowardly begging off. You see, my mind or nighttime soul or whatever aspect of us is involved in dreaming is a part of this recollection. That is what I mean to say. For, while the articles in the New York papers were either unsigned, or not by him, the editorial piece in the Advertiser, printed in Boston and left behind at my office by a Massachusetts traveler in French writing machines (for which he wanted much and promised little), was signed by one S. Mordecai. I read it two weeks after I had read the story in The New York Times.
But it had not happened yet on the afternoon of which I speak, and it had not happened that night. “He was the same boy,” his father told me days afterward, as we sat in his office on the barge, he as inspector for the night and I as the comforting friend. The fire was high although it had been a sweltering September day, and he drank too much gin. He ran with sweat, and his tears ran with it; he was all a-glisten, and his broad workingman’s hands trembled more than I had ever seen. “He was the same boy during the day before we found him. I have been assured. He skylarked with the other clerks at the Atlantic and Great Western. He was merry. Although I must report to you, shipmate, that he sported with the pistol. You told him it was a serious weapon. You repeatedly passed the warning along, and I somberly echoed it. But he listened to neither. He was careless with it, bringing it to work, apparently, although I didn’t know, of course. I would otherwise have taken a hand.”
He sighed. “I already did — had I told you? There had been too much coming home in the late watches of the night. We had given warning. I took his key away that opened the night latch, and I told him he must be in and quiet in his room by a decent hour, nine bells. We rise early, after all, and he had work as well. For two nights, he stayed in. His uniform, you see, had just arrived, and he must try it on in the evenings, and parade for his sisters. But, then, no: out into the night, and away until dawn, and we, rising and falling like a young man’s feelings, staggering, then, through the long days’ exhaustion. So it would not do.”
“Of course not,” I said, but he did not hear me.
“I came downstairs for my breakfast. Lizzie spoke of the night before. I had been asleep, having worked at something about the Holy Land after supper, but Lizzie, often a lighter sleeper, had gone downstairs at one or two of the morning, summoned by Malcolm’s rapping at the door. She did remonstrate, she says, but in a motherly and gentle way. Can you not hear it? ‘Dear fellow, this is simply too late. Can you not try harder for us?’ So she says it was, and so it was. In and up goes Malcolm and up he remains in the morning, late for work. Lizzie sends one of the girls — I had left for work by now, and was at the river and plying what must forever be my trade. And she goes up and calls at his door, and he says, ‘Yes.’
“That is his last word. And that it should be ‘Yes,’ in affirmation of his sister, or of home and domestic love, or of his own fault in jeopardizing his job, I find nearly intolerable in the weight of emotion with which it lands upon me, shipmate. ‘Yes.’ ”
“Yes,” I said.
“I told Lizzie to leave him be. His reception at work would be his own worst punishment, and he would learn, if from nothing else, then from that. A man must take the consequences, I told her, and off I went.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see. It was then that you went, and not earlier.”
“Earlier? What was — earlier. Yes. Lizzie tried during the day, at odd hours, to rouse him. It was not unusual for him to sleep so hard, so deep, that he could not be wakened. He loved to sleep, that fellow, and so dearly he sleeps now at Woodlawn. Sleeps he and sleeps he, down at the bottom, where the oozy weeds about him twist.
“That was a day, you might recall, when we ate a chop and drank some ale and spoke of the War, and the need for compassion for those who surrendered. I did have difficulty in persuading you! But of course, you were there, and they tried to shoot you down, and you, in turn, them. So much more simple for the unwounded man to be compassionate. I admired so your willingness to turn — ah, you see.…”
“The other cheek. Indeed. What’s left of it. So I am given to understand that you were late returning.”
“Returning?”
“Home. The night you found—”
“Tardy and tied to the masthead and lashed for it, I can promise you. She lit into me with the Cat that night. But paused to tell me of his long sleeping, his silence all the day, and the door locked from within. I had it down, I can tell you. I sent it off the hinges and down.”
He poured gin and missed the glass with a good deal of it. I rose to take the bottle from his hands and pour again. He nodded his gratitude. He could not speak. His eyes looked painted on, not pained; his eyes looked dead in his gleaming face.
“In bed,” he whispered. “In his nightclothes. Pistol on the pillow. Head at the far corner of the bedclothing. Eyes unclosed. A terrible wound in his temple. Bits of skull and skin, skeins of drying blood. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, my Malcolm dead. His eyes not shut, and looking at me”—his head came up, his own eyes rested upon me, giving little light forth—“and Lizzie atop him, pulling at his shoulders, demanding that her son wake up.”