SPECIAL FEATURE: THE ARMY DISEASE by Cary Holladay

I. To Hear Him Tell It

Culpeper, Virginia

June 29, 1913

       He was buried alive: Tucker Haines. Pronounced dead by Dr. Satterfield, bathed and dressed by the undertaker, coffined and laid in the grave. A minister preached and mourners prayed. Tucker Haines woke up, gasped the black air, and fought.

Not that way at all, Sophie Floyd says, never mind that Tucker Haines was brevetted on the battlefield at Antietam and she’s just an Assistant Matron of the Confederate Veterans Home. He woke up before the undertaker ever touched him. Him and Lemuel Nighten cooked up this buried alive business. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Sophie says, but her audience consists only of senile, almost mute, Mrs. Mack, Matron of the Veterans Home, whereas Tucker Haines and Lemuel Nighten have gone to the press.

In the hot, empty parlor of the Veterans Home, Sophie implores Mrs. Mack, “Doesn’t anybody care about the truth? Tucker Haines played possum. Dr. Satterfield made one mistake, is all.” Sophie feels she shares the blame. If she hadn’t been fooled, she wouldn’t have called the doctor. Guilt clutches her stomach like a bad meal.

Mrs. Mack’s eyes are vacant. A fly lands on her cheek. Sophie waves it away and says, “To hear Tucker Haines tell it, he had a funeral and was in the ground!”

Despair fills Sophie’s heart. She knows Tucker Haines is blabbing to the newspaper right this minute. And because of her, the fascinating Dr. Satterfield is a ruined man.

       At the Culpeper Exponent office, Lemuel Nighten tells a reporter, “After the funeral, I stayed to pray for my buddy, and I saw clods of earth moving. I jumped down in the grave and tore the lid away, and he busted out.”

Tucker Haines says, “He couldn’t stop yelling. His throat was stuck on yell.”

The reporter, an ambitious young man named Chick Parker, writes fast.

“I grabbed Lem’s shoulders and shook him,” Tucker says, “until he shut up.”

Chick Parker writes: Then the silence was sweet and pure. The brave veterans kenned the breeze in the oaks and the song of the larks. They laughed at Death.

Chick Parker makes a risky decision.

“I’ll type while you talk.” He rolls a sheet of paper into the Underwood and imagines telling a woman, in bed, I’d never done that before. But I was feeling lucky.

Mere hours ago, Chick survived a debacle. Miss Cynthia Hornsby had promised to meet him at the Eclipse Theatre, elude her chaperone, and sit with him in the dark. Located beneath a pool hall and bowling alley, the theatre is new and sensational. Chick had waited outside, feeling self-conscious. Finally, Cynthia’s younger brother appeared with a gang of other boys and shouted, “Cindy ain’t coming,” at which all the urchins chortled. At him – Chick Parker, a grownup, who should be far beyond brats’ ridicule. His face burns even as the old men gabble.

“You with us, sonny?”

“Sure,” Chick says and sets his mind on the story. Even as the veterans jabber – he can’t tell them apart, both bearded and gimpy – he adds drama and detail. Haines and Nighten raise their voices above the staccato typing, and with Chick Parker’s assistance, give birth to a legend.

General (Chick promotes him, snickering) Haines’s burying clothes had the trousers pinned in the back. The pin saved his life, the General announced. “It unsnapped and stuck me.” He held it up, and light gleamed on the point. Lemuel thought the whole thing was a bad dream. He would leave off morphine for good.

Chick Parker interrupts. “You sure you want to say that?” then says, “Keep talking.” It’s his story now. He will be The Man Who Wrote The Resurrection. He’ll decide what to put in. Anyways, don’t readers want to be shocked? He has never heard anybody admit using dope.

Lemuel picked up the coffin lid and said, “Here, a souvenir.”

“Get the flag, too,” Tucker said.

As they strolled out of the cemetery, a picnicking family saw them and waved.

Lemuel explained everything, and the family – man and wife, four children, and grandmother – offered sandwiches and devilled eggs.

“Did you get their name?” Chick Parker asks.

The old men exchange glances, and Chick divines that the family is made up. Crafty Lemuel could be a lawyer. Or a writer.

Lemuel says, “Name was Ball.”

The children’s mother, Mrs. Ball, said to her husband, “Promise me. Let me stay out in the air till I’m good and rotten.”

Lemuel saw this talk was too much for one of the children, a fainty-looking little girl. Mr. Ball said to Tucker, “They must not have embalmed you.”

Tucker asked Lemuel, “Was the Vets Home too cheap to get me embalmed? Who decided? I bet it was Sophie Floyd.”

Chick Parker’s ears twitch. An antagonist. Readers will hate this Sophie Floyd. Tucker Haines is Jesse James, and Sophie Floyd is railroad barons, Pinkertons, and Yankees rolled into one. Didn’t a newspaperman make Jesse James into Robin Hood? Yes, and that genius is Chick’s hero: John Newman Edwards, editor of the Kansas City Times of Kansas City, Missouri. The very word Missouri makes lightning in Chick’s blood. Already he is dreaming his way out of Culpeper, nostalgic for this ratty, gaslit office, Where It All Began.

Lemuel said, “You weren’t embalmed, but you did get the livery service.”

“May I have your autograph, Mr. Haines?” Mr. Ball said. He held out paper and pencil, and Tucker wrote, “Tucker Haines Back From the Dead.”

“Put the date,” Mr. Ball said.

“It’s Sunday, June the twenty-ninth,” the faint-looking child said. A smart child, like her grandmother. The grandmother was pretty. Lemuel was surprised he’d never met her before.

Tucker asked Lemuel, “When exactly did I die?”

“Yesterday,” Lemuel said, “of pneumonia. According to Dr. Satterfield.”

“Well, we won’t go to Dr. Satterfield!” the Ball family chorused.

Chick Parker is way beyond journalism now. This is Literature, but he needs to pee. He hunches over the Underwood.

“Wait till that doctor sees you!” Grandmother Ball cried.

The Balls make the story. Chick types, She said, Come visit me in Stevensburg, but reconsiders. The Balls oughta be from farther away, so nobody can check. Chick flexes his fingers and says, “How about a Coca-Cola, gentlemen?”

Yessirree. Chick keeps Cokes in a drawer. He uncaps two bottles, never mind they’re warm. Foam gushes as the old guys reach for them. “Be right back,” Chick says and runs for the back door. The toilet’s too far away.

       The old men talk till dawn. Chick tears page after page out of the typewriter. From the veterans’ yarn, he extracts a story too racy for general consumption but worth a fortune if expanded and offered For Men Only. For now, all he has to do is get the gist. Then he can take his time writing a full-length account. A book.

Next, the two brave dandies went to Sissy Handiboes Sporting House. They could read each other’s minds. That was part of their long rivalry and friendship. If roast beef was served at the Veterans Home, they hankered for the same slice. When Lemuel caught a raccoon and made a pet of it, Tucker got it coming to his room for grapes instead of stale bread.

At Sissy Handiboes, they burst through the door. The girls screamed at the sight of Tucker Haines. He bawled out, “I’m alive!” Sissy Handiboe came out in her best black bombazine. To Lemuel, she whispered suspicions: Had Tucker planned it that way? Arranged to be buried, with Lemuel pledged aforehand to dig him up?

“No, no,” Lemuel said, his heart going solid-gold loyal to Tucker, the heart that a moment ago felt the familiar stab of envy, because Irene, the redhead he’d picked out for himself, was sidling up to Tucker. “It happened just like he says.”

Tucker stripped off his muddy coat and shirt. He lifted his arms so muscles mounded up along his shoulders. No thin man ever looked so powerful. He asked Lemuel, “Who was it that found me dead?”

“Sophie Floyd,” Lemuel said, “and she sent for Satterfield.”

“Sophie,” Tucker said in disgust. “Well, I’ve always said, if anything happens to Josephine Mack, the next Matron ought not to be Sophie Floyd. Oughta be my niece, Henrietta Haines.”

“I’ll kill that Sophie!” Irene cried.

“Sophie was mad I had Myrtle in my room,” Tucker said.

“His raccoon,” Lemuel explained to the women.

“What about a mirror? Didn’t Satterfield check if I was breathing?” Tucker demanded.

Lemuel said, “He just said you were dead, and things went from there. You didn’t have a good suit, so Undertaker Fletcher brought all the long, tall clothes he had. Nothing worked, so he sent to the colored funeral home. That’s a colored man’s suit you’re wearing.”

“Best I’ve ever had,” Tucker said.

Sissy Handiboe’s fiddler, Orion, raised his bow and launched into a polka. Sissy squashed against Lemuel, and he tugged her around the parlor, knocking into other couples. Through the bombazine, Sissy’s corset felt like steel. Lemuel was sweating, and it wasn’t the dancing. It was needing dope. He’d given Tucker his last pill, the day Tucker died. Or rather, “died.” Lemuel’s pension had run out, it being the end of the month, so he’d had to make do with whiskey, which was not the same.

“Ain’t it everybody’s worst fear, Sissy?” Lemuel said, meaning buried alive, and Sissy Handiboe said, “Oh, Lord, yes!”

Orion squeezed off a tremolo, and the room went quiet.

“I’m going upstairs for a while,” Tucker announced, holding his red-haired prize by the hand, “and then,” he said and found Lemuel with his eyes, “we’re going to tell the world.”

We, not I. Lemuel could have hugged him for that.

Sissy Handiboe yelled, “Be careful with him, Irene,” and everybody laughed. Irene snapped Tucker’s suspenders, and he scooped her up.

To Lemuel, Sissy said, “Wouldn’t it be awful if . . .” and he put a finger to her lips. More than one man had died upstairs, but none just arisen from the grave.

“He’ll be fine,” he said. “Listen, Sissy, I’d like to stay, but I need a pill.”

“Come on,” she said.

She was generous, and her not even a drinking woman. He followed her to her office, which was dim and cool, with filing cabinets and fountain pens. The telephone rang.

“Handiboe’s,” Sissy drawled. “Tucker Haines? Well, he is not available to talk to you, but his friend Mr. Nighten is here,” and she handed him the receiver.

By then, Lemuel was shaking. He pointed to the drawer where she kept the pills, and she popped one between his lips. He swallowed hard, his spit dry.

“Mr. Nighten?” said a voice – Sophie Floyd was on the line. She said, “If you’re going to Gettysburg, say so. Bynum’s heading to the depot to reserve the train tickets.”

The Gettysburg reunion. In the excitement, Lemuel had forgotten.

”I’m going,” he said.

Sophie said, “What about Mr. Haines? Is he there? Is he going to Gettysburg?”

Lemuel grinned into the phone and said, “He’s here all right, but he’s busy. I’ll ask him in about a half an hour.”

Sissy Handiboe gave her trademark bark of amusement. She brought a cigarette holder to her mouth: the richest woman in Culpeper, fingers full of diamonds.

“Whew,” says Chick Parker.

He looks up from the Underwood. His informers are asleep at the end of his desk, heads pillowed on crossed arms. Chick lost track hours ago of what they said and what he wrote. Never mind. He leans back and stretches. First, breakfast at the Waverly Hotel. Then celebrity.

II. The Kiss

June 30

       Dr. Satterfield says to Sophie, “I understand we’ve got a revenant.”

And he kisses her. It’s seven o’clock, the day after Tucker Haines’s adventure, twilight coming along. Somebody’s bound to see them, but Sophie can’t think. She’s in the arms of quicksilver Dr. Satterfield, and hardly a word between them in the year she has worked here. She has distrusted him because Doc Minor does, Doc Minor being who the men call when they’re really sick, never mind that Dr. Satterfield has the contract for the Home.

Now he’ll probably get fired.

And what is a revenant? She can’t ask as long as he’s kissing her.

Dr. Satterfield. Thomas Satterfield. He could be Tom, to her. His arms clasp her, his mouth is on hers, his heart makes footsteps against her chest. He tastes like lemonade, and that must be the essence of the man – lemons like Stonewall Jackson ate, peel and all, Stonewall on horseback holding one arm high above his head, his arm a banner, a guidon, a lemon the same as an apple to him, finding the sweet in the sour of it.

She must get back to Mrs. Mack, frail old Mrs. Mack who relies on her for everything. But there’s no room in her mind for anything but Dr. Satterfield. He’s a shadow, a voice on the stairs, a door closing so softly she only knows he has been and gone; isn’t that a good doctor? This kiss goes on. She tastes revenant, tastes his Tidewater drawl. She’s aware of the men up and down the hall in their rooms like chambers in a honeycomb, packing for Gettysburg, stowing moth-eaten uniforms and best boots, sabers and guns, false teeth and extra socks.

The kiss changes because Dr. Satterfield’s quicksilver jaw is moving. Sophie feels air between them. He stepped away and spoke, but she does not know what he said.

Up and down the hall, trunks slam shut and valises are buckled. A shape trundles across a beam of light: Tucker Haines’s pet raccoon, recently and falsely bereaved, traveling toward the cone of darkness that is the eastern end of the hallway, where nighttime comes first. Mask and eyes are part of this instant; as the raccoon passes Sophie, it disappears.

She cups her ear, meaning I didn’t hear you, but that is Mrs. Mack’s gesture, the motion of a woman deaf and elderly. Dr. Satterfield says, “Here,” and tucks Sophie’s hair behind her ear as if he believes that’s what she was trying to do, as if she’s a young girl always thinking about her hair. Once when she was a child, a doctor bled her. It hurt, and she vowed never again the lancet, no to the hot glass cup. Her arm bears scars above a vein. Why remember that now? And why does she think of the flower she planted today, the obedient plant it is called? You bend new shoots over and stick the tips in the ground, and they’ll take root. As Sophie tamped the earth, she thought of herself, taking root in this house. Surrounded by men, yet she sleeps alone. The veterans are far too old. She has swatted away groping hands and cut short unwelcome talk.

Everything is changed now, because a man came back from the dead. She corrects herself: claims he came back.

“How did he do it?” she asks.

Dr. Satterfield bends to pick up his black bag. “He seemed as dead as any cadaver I worked on in medical school. People can go into a comatose state. Obviously I made a mistake.”

Maybe something summoned Tucker Haines back to this world, something he must yet do. Is that what a preacher would say? Sophie’s father, dead now, a preacher no church wanted, with his sole sermon, a rambling monologue about the time Elijah was fed by ravens – what would her father say? The ravens brought him food, and then the angels did, but Sophie can’t remember why.

She says, “He played possum, didn’t he?”

Dr. Satterfield doesn’t answer, and she wonders if she has blundered.

She asks, “What about the death certificate? Will you tear it up?”

“I’ll give it to him, and he can decide what he wants to do with it.”

This conversation is the longest she’s ever had with him. He turns to begin the rounds he has made so many times. There is around him that curtain of glass she has always felt.

“Want to go with us, Sophie?” a voice says, startling her: it’s Mr. Kilgore, pawing through the linen closet. “Ever been to Gettysburg?” he asks.

She shakes her head. How can she act normal? Mr. Kilgore balances a stack of towels under his chin. Sophie does not think he saw the kiss, but still she can’t speak. She reaches out, and he hands her a towel. It feels thin. She’ll ask the Veterans Assistance Committee for more, but they’ll offer worn-out sour ones no better than these.

“How many you want?” Mr. Kilgore asks.

“Three,” she says, her voice a surprise to herself. Tomorrow, she must bathe Mrs. Mack. She came upstairs for towels, and her world turned upside down.

Down the hall, a shadow moves: Dr. Satterfield. Mr. Kilgore whispers, “Won’t a soul believe him now, not a thing he says.”

Sophie blazes at him: “Tucker Haines was never dead. He faked it.”

“Don’t say that, Sophie,” Mr. Kilgore says, looking spooked on her behalf.

He fears fire, Mr. Kilgore does. He keeps a dozen pitchers of water in his room; his keen nose has saved the house more than once, detecting burning sheets and scorching mattresses. His housemates like to bust into his room with torches of rolled‑up newspaper. Dr. Satterfield could tell them all a thing or two; his house burned down a few years ago. Now he keeps a small office on Davis Street and lives at the Waverly Hotel, eating in the dining room and leading, for all Sophie can tell, the quietest of lives.

A bugle blares, and Sophie and Mr. Kilgore both jump.

A voice cries, “I was there at Appomattox, boys! I heard the Yankee band play Auld Lang Syne.” A breeze through the hall bears the scent of roses. The men have their windows open to catch the evening air. Roses, pink and red, yellow and white, bloom in the garden outside. Sophie can smell their very colors. The scent could carry her off as the kiss did, if it weren’t for a worry in her mind, a new worry.

It will be a problem, having Tucker Haines alive. In the event of Mrs. Mack’s death, he will oppose Sophie’s becoming Matron. He has often said so. His power, his opinions will hold greater sway than before, and he will champion his niece, Henrietta Haines. The Veterans Assistance Committee will decide, and Sophie is nothing to them. She does not have prestige like Mrs. Mack, who is related by marriage to Culpeper’s own late, great General A.P. Hill. But now Sophie has Dr. Satterfield’s kiss, and she believes that means Dr. Satterfield will take her side, except he’s probably about to lose his contract, and maybe even his medical license.

Arms full of towels, a dozen tasks ahead of her before this day will end, yet she is happier than she has ever been. She was not in love when she came up the stairs, and now she is.

July 1

       Sophie lets Doc Minor in at the front door just as Dr. Satterfield passes by on the sidewalk. Dr. Satterfield nods to her, but he and Doc Minor exchange only a chilly greeting, and Dr. Satterfield moves on down the street.

Her Tom? She can’t let herself think of him that way.

Before Doc Minor can say anything, Sophie says, “Tucker Haines made up that whole business about being dead.”

“You ought not to let Satterfield in this house,” Doc Minor says, waving his hand dismissively, “and I don’t mean just because of this new sensation he helped create.”

“The men keep calling him,” Sophie says, feeling the kiss must be visible on her face.

“I know which ones, and I know why,” says Doc Minor, taking out his handkerchief and wiping his forehead. “He’s making money off their weakness.”

“I can’t just bar him at the door,” Sophie says.

“I can’t just bar him at the door,” mocks Doc Minor in a falsetto.

Sophie stares at him.

“Oh, never mind,” Doc Minor says. “Maybe their old wounds really ache, but this is different. It’s got ahold of them.”

“They seem right healthy, if you ask me,” Sophie says.

Doc Minor stuffs his handkerchief in his pocket. “Don’t we all have addictions? Mine was hunting. Every spare hour, I was out in the woods. Now, where is our Josephine?”

Sophie leads him to Mrs. Mack’s quarters. She summoned him by phone, half an hour ago, because she is so worried.

“She won’t get out of bed today,” Sophie says. “All week, she’s hardly said a word. I asked her what her husband’s name was, and she didn’t remember.” Sophie has seen these symptoms in old men, after an illness or a fall, but never all at once, developing so fast.

“She didn’t recall Wesley Peyton Mack? Widows can be fickle,” says Doc.

The floorboards creak under his weight. Doc Minor is a noisy, burly man in his late forties, always disheveled. Sophie can’t help comparing him to Dr. Satterfield, who is handsome and well-groomed, a tense, swift mystery, probably ten years younger. She is waiting for some word from Dr. Satterfield. All night she replayed the kiss in her mind. Where was he heading, a moment ago? On what errand, toward what patient? She would like to think he wanted to see her, and if it weren’t for Doc Minor, he’d have lingered.

Doc says, “Mighty quiet. Did the fellas make that train to Gettysburg?”

“They got up early and took off,” Sophie says.

“Did Kilgore take one of Frye’s birds?” asks Doc.

“He did,” Sophie says. John Frye is the landlord. He owns this brick mansion and rents it out to the veterans, and he and his wife live in the backyard in a tiny house. He keeps racing pigeons, and Mr. Kilgore is toting one of them to Gettysburg to let loose for the fun of it. Mr. Frye’s cotes take up much of the backyard. Doc Minor shares this hobby.

So different from other birds, the pigeons are, down to the sounds they make, soft coos instead of songs. She has often passed Doc’s big clapboard house on Church Street. His wife is dead, and his son attends medical school in Richmond. If she married Doc, she would take good care of his birds. She pictures herself opening a coop, with a straw hat on her head, a basket of feed over her arm, and sunlight following her inside.

Where did that thought come from – marriage to Doc Minor?

Doc Minor sometimes speaks of an old doctor who lives out in the country, whose remaining patients keep one of the man’s birds on hand to send him when they need him. Sophie imagines herself sending a bird to Doc Minor, with a message wired to its leg: Come to me.

“If Kilgore lets that bird out at sunrise tomorrow, it’ll be back by noon,” Doc says. “I looked at the map.”

“How do they do it?” Sophie says.

“We’ll never know.”

The birds enthrall her, the way they appear in the sky as dots and grow to their fluttering, familiar selves. Mr. Frye and Doc Minor belong to a racing club. For a race, birds are taken somewhere and set loose at a particular time, and when they get home, the owners slap a special clock. She has seen Mr. Frye slap the clock. How do the birds know where home is? How can they fly through darkness and storms? She can’t imagine, but she knows how they must feel, nerved with purpose, keeping on when exhausted. It’s how she feels, these days.

They reach Mrs. Mack’s door. Sophie raps, steps inside, and asks, “Will you let Doc Minor check on you?”

Mrs. Mack looks up but doesn’t answer. It’s a relief to Sophie that Doc takes charge, saying, “Josephine, you’re still the prettiest woman in Culpeper County.”

She smiles faintly. Doc Minor shakes a thermometer and inserts it in her mouth. After a few minutes, he says, “Temperature’s fine.” He nestles a stethoscope inside her nightgown and says, “Take some deep breaths.”

She obeys. He moves the disk to her back.

“Heart and lungs just fine.” He takes her wrist in his hands and checks her pulse, timing the beats against his pocket watch.

“You were a cute little boy,” says Mrs. Mack, and Sophie lets out her breath. She didn’t know she’d been holding it. Only a few weeks ago, Mrs. Mack was merely forgetful. Now she goes quiet for hours. When she walks, it’s with great effort, holding two canes or gripping furniture. Sophie must shadow her every move.

“I’m still cute, Josephine,” the doctor says, “in the opinion of a few.” He lays her arm down on the bedclothes. “Do you think you can stand up?”

He holds out his hands. Mrs. Mack takes them. Sophie is reminded of an obedient, sleepy child. As Mrs. Mack gets to her feet, an odor rises, of urine and unwashed skin. Sophie feels she might cry with pity. Mrs. Mack is generations older, and Sophie’s social superior, but Sophie feels bound to her by ties she can’t explain. She has to run the house without making it obvious that Mrs. Mack can’t anymore. Every day, Mrs. Mack goes back farther. Sophie knows now what her mother used to mean by “gone back;” it’s the absence in Mrs. Mack’s eyes.

“That’s good, Josephine,” Doc Minor says and hands her the canes. “Take a few steps.”

Mrs. Mack hobbles across the room and returns to the bed.

“I’ve got some silly questions, Josephine,” Doc Minor says. “What day of the week is it?”

Sophie says, “I’ll be out in the hall,” and he nods. She lingers outside the door.

“I don’t know,” says Mrs. Mack.

“Who is President, Josephine?” Doc Minor asks.

“I can’t remember, but I don’t like him,” says Mrs. Mack.

The doctor chuckles. “Do you know what month it is?”

Mrs. Mack pauses for a long time. “January.”

“What year is it?”

In the hallway, Sophie twists her hands. She has waited too long to call Doc. Oh, he’s here a lot, to see one man or another, but apparently he didn’t notice that Mrs. Mack was changing right before his eyes. Or maybe all along, he did see.

“1895,” Mrs. Mack says. “No, it’s 1902.”

Sophie glances into the room. For a moment, Doc Minor looks almost as old as Mrs. Mack, as he stands beside her bed with his shoulders slumped.

Mrs. Mack says, “Is it the future? If it’s too far in the future, I won’t be here anymore.”

“It’s July 1913,” Doc Minor says. “You and Sophie have the house to yourselves. The men have hied off to Gettysburg to relive their youth.” He takes off his glasses and rubs them with a handkerchief. “Remember that hunting dog your husband had, that redbone hound?”

A long pause, and Mrs. Mack says, “I remember.”

“What was the dog’s name?”

Mrs. Mack is quiet for so long that Sophie thinks she’s gone off on one of her spells.

Five minutes pass, the pink clock on the night table ticking. Sophie shifts her weight from one leg to the other. It’s hot in the hallway. When Mrs. Mack stopped going upstairs, Sophie moved her things to the first floor and fixed up, for herself, a small room next to Mrs. Mack’s. Sophie misses her third-floor room and the view from the high windows. The third floor is empty; all the men live on the second story. Sometimes she unlocks Mrs. Mack’s old room and peeks in. On the wall hangs a tintype of Mrs. Mack’s only child Cecil in uniform, and beside it an ill-formed doily and a blue ribbon that says “Best Crocheting by a Boy.” Cecil won that ribbon at a county fair when he was nine. Mrs. Mack used to be proud of that. She’d made him crochet one day when he complained of boredom. He died in the war, age seventeen.

Sophie must remember to get the picture and blue ribbon and hang them in this room.

“What was the dog’s name, Josephine?” Doc Minor repeats.

Sophie can’t ever remember the house being this quiet. She wishes the Gettysburg reunion would last a month.

“Cricket,” says Mrs. Mack.

Sophie is amazed. She thought she knew about every pet that Mrs. Mack and her long-dead husband ever had, but she has never heard of this dog.

“Cricket,” says Doc Minor. “I wanted to buy her, but Wesley wouldn’t sell her at any price. I was just a boy, but I could spot a champion. Now how about something to drink?”

“Buttermilk,” says Mrs. Mack.

“I’ll get it,” Sophie says and hurries to the kitchen. She pours a glass of buttermilk and puts toast on a plate, with jam.

When she returns, Doc Minor says, “Try to eat, Josephine, and then have a nap.”

Mrs. Mack sits up, and Sophie places the tray in front of her. Doc Minor and Sophie step into the hallway. He closes the door and says, “You’ll find she can remember things from long ago, but not what happened this morning. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

Sophie says, “Sometimes she stares, like she’s looking right through me, and shakes.”

“Seizures,” he says. “At those times, she doesn’t know you’re even there. Lets hope her decline will be gentle. A person’s brain gets elderly. It doesn’t get enough blood, and it shrinks.”

“Is there anything good about old age?”

“Oh, you get to concentrate on the important things, like earwax and regularity,” Doc says. “There’s the matter of accumulated wisdom, but there’s memory loss, too.”

“I have to help her do everything.” Anxiety fills Sophie, the sense of Mrs. Mack dying even as they stand outside her room, with the summer morning going on beyond the windows.

“Get Tessa to help you.”

“Tessa’s scared she’ll fall. And she does fall, even with Tessa and me right there.”

Doc Minor says, “That’s going to happen. Just do your best. She won’t be able to feed herself forever, either, and she’ll need help going to the toilet.”

“She already does. How old is she? I’ve never known.”

“By my reckoning, eighty-five.”

Until recently, Mrs. Mack retained her radiant skin and proud carriage, yet Sophie knew she must be a contemporary of many of the veterans, or even older. After all, her son fought.

Doc Minor says, “She doesn’t have any close relatives left. You’ll have to hire somebody to look after her. Ask the Assistance Committee to set some funds aside.”

“They hate to spend money.”

“They revere the memory of General Hill, and she’s kin to him by marriage.”

“I know how they are,” Sophie insists. “They’ll send her to the poorhouse.”

“I’ll have a word with them.” Doc Minor starts down the hallway toward the door.

Sophie follows. “Doc?”

He turns around. She would know him anywhere, this lumbering man.

“I’m scared.” She could never admit this to Dr. Satterfield, in spite of the kiss.

Doc Minor stands fully still. This is the first time she hasn’t seen him in motion.

“Few people are truly mourned,” he says. “You’ll mourn Josephine, and that’s a way to honor her, that and the good care you’re giving her. She could die any time. She might live a couple more years, but she’ll never be the way she used to be.”

“I can’t bear to lose her,” she says. “I want her to be all right, and I want to stay in this house forever, even though it’s a lot of work.”

“That’s a lot to ask for.”

“I know.”

“It’s a grand old house,” he says, “and there’ll be some fellows here for a while. How many is it now?”

“Eight. Mr. Apperson is the youngest. Sixty-six. Mr. Portis is the oldest – eighty-seven. In between, Kilgore, Dunaway, Nighten, Haines, Fowler, and Carruthers.” She ticks them off on her fingers. For one day, of course, there were only seven. She’s still reeling from that.

“Aren’t they happy most of the time?” Doc says. “Old age isn’t so bad when all you have to decide is how much ice cream you want on your pie. Once they’re all gone, I can see you opening a restaurant. Or you could marry some nice man.”

She could say, “I don’t want to,” and that had seemed true until Dr. Satterfield kissed her, and until moments ago, when she pictured herself taking care of Doc Minor’s birds. She is twenty-seven.

“You grew up on a dairy farm, didn’t you?” Doc asks.

“My sister still lives there,” Sophie says. “Her and her husband have seven children. What she does is harder than what I do.”

Doc chuckles. “Are you afraid of becoming an old woman living in a room somewhere, with a bunch of cats?”

“Yes.” She has absolutely thought of that.

He blinks, and she wonders if the thoughts passing behind his eyes are the same as hers.

He says, “Have you seen Tucker Haines since he came back from the dead?”

“Yes. The undertaker and I had left him in his room upstairs to cool, and then he came walking into the parlor. I’ve never been so scared. How on earth?”

“Means he wasn’t dead to begin with.”

It’s as if Dr. Satterfield is a shadow between them, massively at fault. Sophie says, “I didn’t know that could happen.”

“It ought not to,” Doc says.

Sophie believes Doc Minor would have known Tucker Haines wasn’t dead. She had discovered him cold, stiff, and still, and had summoned Dr. Satterfield, who pronounced him dead. Then Satterfield called the undertaker, who just glanced at Haines and nodded to long-faced Lemuel Nighten who was sitting with the “corpse.” The undertaker marched Sophie down to the parlor for a sales talk.

She says, “He’s mad he wasn’t embalmed. Mad I wasn’t going to spend the money.”

Doc smiles. “Was that your decision?”

“Yes. It’s so expensive.” She’d heard about Egyptians making mummies with myrrh and frankincense, and now there is formaldehyde, a word the undertaker relished. “For-mal-de-hyde,” Sophie says in the undertaker’s deep voice, “fends off pu-tre-fac-tion.”

Doc laughs and slaps his knee.

“Sophie!” comes Mrs. Mack’s voice, sounding alarmed.

Sophie hastens to open the door. “Yes?”

“Where is the baby?” asks Mrs. Mack.

Sophie looks to Doc Minor, and his face is full of understanding. She swallows and says, “The baby is upstairs.”

Mrs. Mack says, “What is he doing?”

“Sleeping,” Sophie says, her eyes on Doc Minor’s face. “Sleeping in his bed.” Mrs. Mack has spoken of babies before, as if a mother’s worry is still with her, never mind how long ago her son died. Sophie waits until the old lady picks up her toast.

For a moment, Sophie and Doc Minor stand in silence, and then Doc says, “She’ll be all right for a while. How about you fix some iced tea and bring it outside? I want to see John Frye’s new tumblers.” He opens the door to the backyard. “Once I’m retired, I’m getting rid of my telephone. If people need me, they’ll have to send a bird.”

Delighted, Sophie says, “Yes, I’ll bring you some iced tea.” She’ll make sure it’s the best he’s ever had.

       There was a time, a few months ago, when Sophie enjoyed a new sense of power. Mrs. Mack was just beginning to withdraw. She relied on Sophie to engage with the world. Sophie made comments to merchants and attributed them to Mrs. Mack. Praise for the butcher, criticism for the laundress. Sophie told herself she knew Mrs. Mack well enough to speak on her behalf.

Then Mrs. Mack got worse, and Sophie got too tired to fib. Mrs. Mack was agitated. Up and down she went from chair to sofa, sofa to bed, with Sophie and Tessa helping. “Take me out on the porch,” Mrs. Mack would say, and a moment later, “I want to go in.” Tessa rolled her eyes and mumbled she had a chance at a job at the Waverly Hotel and just might take it.

Sophie has gotten all too good at forging Mrs. Mack’s signature on checks. She cashes them at the bank, using only what she has to. It’s been months since Mrs. Mack could order supplies or even write her name. Sophie has seen old men gutter out like candles, be hauled off raving, foaming in fits, or more often found cold and pale – as she thought she’d found Tucker Haines. Senility is an old familiar within this house. The men whose minds are intact avoid the dotty ones, like healthy critters drawing back from sick.

Sophie thinks of a raccoon that preceded Tucker Haines’s current pet. It belonged to Colonel Dunaway, until Mrs. Mack ordered him to put it out. Colonel Dunaway sadly obeyed, releasing it in a patch of daylilies. It looked back with its eyes so hard, and only then did Sophie see how beautiful it was, glossy and pampered. Though Colonel Dunaway searched the bushes and crawled under the house, he never found it. He put out cantaloupe at night, hoping. “I should’ve taken him and moved out,” he said, but not so Mrs. Mack could hear him.

Well, Doc wants iced tea. Sophie fills the kettle and sets it on the stove. Through the kitchen window, she sees Doc with John Frye. Mrs. Frye is outside in a chair with her sewing.

What would it be like to have a husband, to know he belonged to you?

She goes to Mrs. Mack’s room and eases open the door. Mrs. Mack is asleep, the breakfast tray pushed aside. Good: she ate everything. Sophie tiptoes in and removes the tray.

It’s a beautiful day with a breeze. After she bathes and shampoos Mrs. Mack, she will take her out in the yard. Clean and groomed, her hair a silver cumulus around her head, the old lady will once again be Josephine Marshall Mack, queenly and serene.

Beyond Culpeper, the world is going on: war in Mexico, war in the Philippines; thousands dead in Ohio and Indiana from springtime floods; the Panama Canal forever under construction; a Pasha, whatever that is, assassinated in Constantinople, wherever that is. For Sophie, with the men gone, surely there will be time to read newspapers. She’ll read at last the article headlined Concrete Hut in Place of Igloo will Hasten Extinction of Eskimos, by An Arctic Explorer. She’ll read ads for pellegra cures, Pall Mall cigarettes, and county fair categories: Cheese Straws, Grape Marmalade, Mature Sows, and Old Boars. Any reports of people come back from the dead, she’ll throw away.

If she didn’t have to take care of Mrs. Mack, she could go to the Eclipse. She has heard of the theatre’s wonders, and she can imagine it. If she went, she would need to avoid the manager, one Mr. R. Tredway, having spent time in his bed.

And him a married man. Those were pre-Eclipse days, though Tredway was already king of the pool hall and bowling alley where Sophie worked as a cashier. In his arms, she felt beautiful, despite her undershot jaw and old dresses. His wife burst in on them when they were together in the basement – horrible, the memory. It was the day the Titanic went down. The catastrophe felt like part of her shame, as if the public frenzy had to do with her visits to Tredway’s cot, with its thin musty mattress on wicked springs.

She can live without plays and picture shows.

She looks around the familiar kitchen. It opens into a dining room. Mrs. Mack used to speak of the days when forty men lived here and ate in shifts. Now, things are different. Sophie cooks, and Tessa serves and cleans up. The food has to be soft. The veterans want batterbread and Jell-O, yet they can manage potato chips. They’ll eat anything with chips on top. They’re always hungry, as if still fighting and famished.

And they get on each other’s nerves. You’d never know they fought on the same side.

“Your voice is a scuttle raked through coal,” one might say to another. “It raises the hair on my head.”

“You ain’t got no hair to raise,” the other might reply.

“Ain’t neither of you-uns got nothing that raises,” a third will say, and they’ll look over at Sophie, who ignores this sort of talk.

And their women. Once Sophie stumbled upon somebody wrapped in sheets on the floor, and out popped a head of hair and a lined, painted face. “Oh, hey,” the woman said. “I thought you wuz the General. Whar is the General?”

“They’re all generals,” Sophie answered.

The woman guffawed, showing gaps in her teeth.

Sophie wanders through the other rooms. The second and third stories are chopped up, with rooms partitioned, but this first floor, even with carpets stained by tobacco juice, is still beautiful. The parlor windows reach from floor to ceiling, draped in blue silk curtains.

The kettle boils. Sophie pours the water into Mason jars. She measures tea into strainers, nicks ice from blocks, and scoops the ice into a pitcher. She hears Doc and John Frye out in the yard. In the world of racing pigeons, John Frye is important, the club president. When there’s a race, you don’t know who won until all the bird owners telegraph John Frye with the times. What if an owner lies? Mr. Frye says he doesn’t worry about that.

The old men at the reunion are like the birds, Sophie thinks as the tea brews. They rode off on the greatest trip of their lives. She was up early to pack their lunch. “I was too excited to sleep,” Colonel Dunaway said, throwing his valise in the wagon. Bynum drove them to the depot.

By now, the train must be close to Gettysburg. Word is, it’s hot in Pennsylvania. This is the biggest reunion ever, with fifty thousand vets from North and South. Fried chicken and roast pork sandwiches will be served on long tables. President Wilson is to give a speech, Boy Scouts run errands, and the National Guard show off new weapons. Men will re-enact Pickett’s Charge with furled umbrellas for bayonets. The camp offers electricity, streets, and cold, bubbling water fountains. The men will bring back commemorative programs, and Sophie will read ads for automobiles, cameras, and sporting houses: “Fine Liquor, Beautiful Girls.” No matter how deaf and whiskery men get, they never seem to stop wanting that.

You’re afraid of winding up in a room with cats, Doc said. Sophie stirs sugar into the tea. One-armed veterans remind her of cats, bathing their faces on one side and then the other, one-legged cats using a single paw. They’ll bathe their faces in Gettysburg, talking under the trees. They’re cats and birds too, transported like pigeons so they can come on home.

Mrs. Mack loves race days. So often, she and Sophie have sat in the yard and watched specks in the sky materialize into birds. Until recently, Mrs. Mack could hold a conversation, and together, she and Sophie marveled. Pigeons have served mankind forever, Sophie has learned, flying despite mangled bodies and torn legs. They were valued by emperors in Carthage, Rome, and Egypt. They were used in the Civil War. They’re probably being used right now in the Philippines. This time tomorrow, John Frye’s bird, released by Mr. Kilgore, will be hurtling toward Culpeper. Sophie and Mrs. Mack will observe the return, but only Sophie will make conversation. Mrs. Mack will be quiet, thinking who knows what thoughts?

“Watch for him!” cried Mr. Kilgore as he scrambled onto the wagon this morning, gripping the cage. The pigeon’s wings shone purple, and its toes were red as blood.

We all have our addictions, Doc Minor said, but she does not condemn the men who use morphine. She understands you can last a long time if you don’t take too much at once. The white pills Dr. Satterfield brings are a familiar sight. It’s part of having fought in that war. The pills are as commonplace in a man’s room as a jar of boot polish. As far as she knows, three of the residents use it: Haines, Nighten, and Fowler.

What is terrible is that she will lose Mrs. Mack, and she will lose this house, though it was never hers. In the meantime, old men will stride through the door with stories; Dr. Satterfield will pass Doc Minor on the stairs with a curt word between them; Bynum will drive the wagon up to the carriage block while the mule shakes fleas from his ears, days and hours melting away like ice when Sophie pours warm tea over it.

When Doc said she could get married, surely he thought, as she did, they could marry each other. But he is of Mrs. Mack’s class, high-born, way above Sophie. Gruff and sloppy, but a gentleman. His voice and manners, the deep self of him, speak of Woodberry Forest School and the University of Virginia, sterling silver and family trees. His father was a prominent surgeon in the war. If Doc marries again, he’ll choose an elegant widow or some athletic woman half his age who will teach him the new dances: Fox Trot, Bunny Hug, Kangaroo Dip, and Chicken Scratch, and like Doc, the widow or athlete will be an aristocrat.

Sophie sets the pitcher and glasses on a tray. She remembers mint growing beside the back door. She picks a handful and rinses it. Maybe there will be time this afternoon to pick flowers, to make an arrangement for Mrs. Mack’s bedside table. Sophie can gather roses and daylilies – as she will do for Mrs. Mack’s funeral, if Mrs. Mack dies in some future July. The harder she tries not to think of death, the more the thoughts prey on her.

Will anyone care enough to pay for a big wreath for Mrs. Mack’s funeral, or make one? Sophie pictures the parlor with its blue curtains and a cake of her own design – chocolate, topped with powdered sugar. She will have to work hard that day to make things right. “Best Crocheting by a Boy” can’t rise up from the cemetery where Mrs. Mack and Sophie used to go with paper flags for his grave. Mrs. Mack revealed the facts of Cecil’s death: on picket duty, he discovered an abandoned house and drank from a bottle he found. It must have contained poison. He staggered back to camp with the bottle in his hand and was dead in an hour.

“He’d drink anything,” Mrs. Mack said, and Sophie saw how the admission wrenched her. “I found out what happened when I went to claim his body.” Only then did Mrs. Mack weep, saying, “It hurts. You wouldn’t know, Sophie.”

“Oh, but I do,” Sophie says aloud now to the empty kitchen. Wasn’t she born with grief in her heart? But now there is something else. She woke this morning with one thought only: wanting to kiss Dr. Satterfield again.

Or Doc Minor.

She loves them both. She has no hope of winning either of their sophisticated hearts, yet she can’t imagine living the rest of her life without them.

Doc Minor must be wondering where she is. No, he probably isn’t. Unless thirst reminds him, he’ll forget he asked for tea, and she doubts he ever thinks about her unless she’s right in front of him. She lifts the tray, shoulders the screen door open, and steps outside.

“Well, there you are,” Doc Minor calls, and her heart soars.

From within the house, she hears a cry. She hands the tray to Doc and hurries back inside.

III. The Bath

       Sophie can’t decide which smells worse, raccoon pee or Mrs. Mack’s breath. It’s terrible to think that, but she doesn’t want to be in the kitchen. She wants to be outside.

Mercifully, the cry was only Mrs. Mack calling her name. There was no fall, no misfortune; Sophie is glad Mrs. Mack remembers to call her at all. It seemed a good time to suggest a shampoo, since Mrs. Mack has had breakfast and a nap, and the hot breeze outside is holding steady. So she got Mrs. Mack into her robe and laid a towel across her shoulders. Here they are, Mrs. Mack seated on a chair at the kitchen sink, her head leaned back into the water. There are bathtubs and showers in the house, but the old lady fell the last time she attempted to bathe, even with Sophie and Tessa helping. Sophie has an idea: after the shampoo, she’ll put a chair in the shower and have Mrs. Mack sit on that. It will be complicated, but everything is now.

The day is flying, a beauteous day, but Doc is still outside with John Frye. Sophie would like to think that he is prolonging his visit because of her.

Mrs. Mack’s head lolls. Strands of hair come out in Sophie’s hands and snake down the drain. Sophie fishes the hair out and throws it away. At the last meeting of the Assistance Committee, she settled Mrs. Mack in a chair with knitting in her hands, hoping nobody would notice she’d been working on the same sock for months. Henrietta Haines caught Sophie’s eye, pointed at Mrs. Mack, and fanned her nose. And Sophie’s heart broke.

She has got to keep the old lady clean, presentable, and alive.

She lathers Mrs. Mack’s head. Stiff, curly hairs sprout from within her ears. Sophie ought to clip those hairs, but there is already too much to keep up with. When the shampoo is finished, she will lead the old lady upstairs and into the shower.

“Is it race day?” says Mrs. Mack, struggling to sit up.

“No, but there’ll be a bird coming from Gettysburg tomorrow,” Sophie says.

Does Gettysburg mean anything to Mrs. Mack now? She may not even realize the hands soaping her head are Sophie’s. Formerly, Mrs. Mack would go to a beauty parlor. Sophie should ask if the hairdresser could come here. That would lift a bit of this burden.

Oh, when Mrs. Mack dies, Sophie will either be promoted or get fired. The committee will choose nose-fanning Henrietta Haines, bossy niece of the revenant, a word Sophie has said over and over to herself since the kiss. It must mean either a revived person or a liar, or both.

She pours another dollop of shampoo onto Mrs. Mack’s head and works it into her scalp.

“Oh,” says the old lady with a sigh of pleasure. Her legs splay out. Sophie turns on both taps. What if Sophie cut this hair? She considers. Shorn, Mrs. Mack might look destitute and crazy. And her hair is part of her person. Sophie will not take that much authority upon herself.

She washes Mrs. Mack’s face with a warm cloth, cleaning well around eyes and mouth.

Mrs. Mack has performed her job admirably for two decades; Sophie has seen only the past year. To the veterans, a Matron must be gracious but stern, and to the Assistance Committee, she must state urgent needs, but also know when to keep her mouth shut. That way, the Committee can feel glad about good deeds, and the Matron, though poor as a church mouse, gets to keep her job and afford an occasional magazine and box of chocolates.

Mrs. Mack peers out the window with sudden attention and says, “Those are their children.” She means the Frye’s pigeons and rabbits. She laughs, the cave of her mouth sending a blast right up into Sophie’s face.

“Mrs. Mack, you need to brush your teeth,” Sophie says, adding another item to the list. “Do you think you can do that next?”

Not many teeth are left except a few in front. Mrs. Mack’s gums must be hard, since she can still chew. Sophie will hold a basin under her chin and guide her hand with the toothbrush. They have managed before.

Sophie pulls the plug in the sink and reaches for a towel. She will have to be careful about lifting Mrs. Mack’s head up. She is scared of hurting her neck.

“Aw-aw,” Mrs. Mack says and moves her legs.

Aw-aw means only one thing. Sophie can forget about tooth-brushing. Liquid is running down the chair and onto the floor. Mrs. Mack is bad as an untrained dog. Oh, the thoughts Sophie has when she is tired. Disloyal, mean thoughts, but she has already stepped in it. She’ll have to mop the floor. No, that’s Tessa’s job. She calls Tessa’s name, then remembers she gave Tessa and Bynum time off. She’ll have to get Mrs. Mack up the stairs and showered, then settled outside. Then she can come back in and wash the floor.

She lifts Mrs. Mack’s head from the sink and wraps her hair in a towel. She helps her to stand up, but Mrs. Mack loses her balance, hitting her elbow against the sink. Sophie’s heart leaps to her throat. She places ice in a towel and holds it against the old lady’s arm. The steps to the second floor are just too dangerous, a cliff to climb; showering Mrs. Mack without Tessa’s help, impossible. For now, she has to get Mrs. Mack’s hair dry; later, she’ll make do with a sponge bath. Carefully, she leads her out into the yard.

Doc Minor is gone, and Sophie feels sharp disappointment.

She guides Mrs. Mack to a wicker chair beneath an elm and hands her a tortoiseshell comb. Mrs. Mack snarls her hair in the comb, looks up with frightened eyes, and says, “It hurts.”

Sophie takes the comb and tries to untangle the hair. “You can’t start high up,” she says, making her voice gentle. “Start with the ends.”

Coos reach her, that feathery sound of the coop. She can see the birds, sleek and pretty, moving behind screens. The rabbits are sleeping, pressed against the sides of the hutches.

Abruptly Mrs. Mack points at Mrs. Frye. “She hated her parents. Everybody knew it.”

“Shh,” Sophie says. It’s startling when Mrs. Mack recalls information from her vast store of social knowledge. From the herb garden, Sophie grabs a handful of lemon thyme. She can’t have Mrs. Mack broadcasting in the Fryes’ hearing. “Here, smell this.”

Mrs. Mack bats away the thyme, suddenly vocal. “That girl,” and she points again at middle-aged Mrs. Frye, “she used to pick out which horses were winners. Then she couldn’t do it anymore. Every time she got close to one, it bit her.” Mrs. Mack chuckles. “I never did see what the fuss was about horses. They’re just . . .” Her face splits in uproarious mirth. “. . . shit machines.”

“Hush,” Sophie cries.

Mrs. Mack has never used such language before. What is happening to this regal, abiding creature? Yet isn’t someone Mrs. Mack’s age entitled to talk however she wants? And if Sophie weren’t so tired, wouldn’t she be laughing too?

As the old woman stirs, Sophie detects a rich, evil odor. “Aw-aw,” says Mrs. Mack.

This has not happened before. Sophie has expected it, though, and dreaded it. This is too much. She has lain awake, engineering a wheelchair with an open seat and a bucket strapped beneath it. She has asked Bynum to make this chair, and he offered suggestions: a belt for safety. “Cover it with her shawl, and nobody will know she’s strapped in,” he said, and their eyes met in terrible complicity. Bynum knows how far Josephine Marshall Mack has sunk, how desperately Sophie props her up. “I’ll rig up a fly-swatter-type fan,” he said, inspired, “one she can do her own self.” He means the kind that is installed over the dining room table, a system of fans once operated by ancestors of his who had no say in the matter. With pencil and paper, Bynum drew a diagram and wrote a list of materials he’ll need.

Yes, Mrs. Mack has required Sophie’s help more and more, first to get to the flush toilet, then to struggle to any chamber pot Sophie can grab in a hurry. There have been puddles on the floor. This week, it has gotten worse. Sophie has had to wipe her. Very soon, Mrs. Mack will need that bottomless wheelchair, will ride her own pot into the charade that her life and Sophie’s have become. Sophie will be the one to unstrap that bucket and clean it, for Tessa will refuse; Sophie’s whole life will become that bucket. Yet the chair is her only hope, and even if Bynum works fast, the reality is still days away.

“Aw-aw,” says Mrs. Mack, picking at her nightgown and robe.

Sophie bursts into tears and sinks to the base of the elm. She could go back to the dairy farm; she would have to make peace with her sister and help with the children. Seven children could not be more trouble than Mrs. Mack, but she’d hated farming. She didn’t want to weed gardens and can vegetables the rest of her life. She taught school for five years, cashiered for Tredway for four years, then providentially spotted an ad in the paper: Assistant Matron needed at Culpeper Veterans Home. Must be able to cook. She went immediately to the big brick house. “Would you like to work here, dear?” Mrs. Mack asked, choosing her from other applicants in the parlor. Of all those faces, eager or tentative, Sophie’s somehow stood out.

Now, perched on the wicker chair, Mrs. Mack reminds Sophie of a large animal. Like an aged cat, she has developed shiny black spots on the irises of her eyes. She will move unexpectedly and then freeze. Months ago, she ceased clipping her nails, so Sophie does that for her. Fingernails are easy, but toenails are awful.

It’ll be dark before Sophie gets the kitchen floor washed. Weary, overwhelmed, she cries into her hands.

Something rustles close by. She opens her eyes to find Mr. Frye draping lengths of canvas over the clothesline and securing it to the tree.

“Let us help, Sophie,” says Mr. Frye. “We’ll make a private place so she can have an outdoor bath.”

Sophie is too surprised to speak.

Mr. Frye drags a metal wash tub from his little house and unwinds a garden hose. For a moment, Sophie believes he intends to spray Mrs. Mack. His wife appears with a steaming kettle. With hose and kettle, the Fryes fill the tub. Mrs. Frye adds a chunk of soap.

“Look, it floats,” says Mrs. Mack, delighted.

Mr. Frye fastens the makeshift tent with clothespins and says, “Holler if you need me.”

So it’s three women enclosed, with sunlight pouring down on them. Mrs. Frye helps Sophie undress Mrs. Mack. They drop the filthy nightgown and robe on the grass.

“Now here you go,” says Mrs. Frye. She and Sophie steady the naked woman as she steps into the tub and eases down into the water, squealing.

The top of the tent is open to sky. If the men were here, they could look out the windows at sagging breasts, dowager’s hump, and mounds of stomach. Sophie is glad only birds can see.

There’s nothing that can be done, Doc Minor said. Would Dr. Satterfield say anything different? Would he have some means of restoring Mrs. Mack?

Dr. Satterfield can’t be bad. He is a doctor, and he doesn’t merely sell dope. He treats rheumatism and catarrh, diagnoses cataracts, and helps the men get spectacles. If the dentist is unavailable, he’ll pull a bad tooth. Well, a doctor should be able to tell a live man from a dead one. She blames herself, though. If she hadn’t thought Haines was dead, if she hadn’t called Dr. Satterfield, none of this would have happened.

Sophie doubts Mrs. Mack understands any of what has taken place.

Mrs. Frye says, “I heard about Tucker Haines. It’s the most amazing thing.”

“He faked it,” Sophie says. “Ought to be ashamed of himself.”

Mrs. Frye rubs Mrs. Mack with a soapy washcloth, and the old lady makes purring sounds. “Those things are too dirty to put on her again,” Mrs. Frye says.

“I’ll get fresh clothes,” Sophie says. She goes into the house and runs up to Mrs. Mack’s old room. Why run? Mrs. Mack is in good hands. There is the bed, irresistible. She lies down and stretches out –for just a moment. The sheets and pillowcase smell clean, like sleep itself.

“Best Crocheting by a Boy.” Sophie regards the miserable doily and its faded blue ribbon. She once asked, did any other boys enter the contest? And Mrs. Mack said yes, “two little sissies,” who cried when Cecil won first place. Later, the competitors likewise went off to war, “those crochet hooks their ploughshares,” said Mrs. Mack with a wild grin, and they too were killed, a part of the story where Mrs. Mack paused to give them due dignity.

Now that she has forgotten so much, does she even remember her son?

Sophie closes her eyes. She ought not to squander this time. There is the kitchen floor and breakfast dishes to wash. She sees herself doing these things, and her legs jerk, for she has fallen asleep. She sits up, startled.

Well, she can’t leave Mrs. Frye out there forever.

At the wardrobe, she chooses a summer dress of gray voile. Mrs. Mack has gained weight. If it doesn’t fit, Sophie can rip the seams at the waist and stitch them up on the outside. She finds clean underclothes and a pair of house slippers and returns to the yard, where a rinse is in progress. The old lady says, “Ahh” as water pours down her back. Mrs. Frye doesn’t seem to mind swabbing the ancient buttocks.

Sophie realizes Mrs. Mack has not remarked upon any aspect of this outdoor bath, as if it’s not unusual. If not for Sophie and Mrs. Frye, what would be happening to her? What becomes of a woman without survivors? If Cecil were still alive, he would be sixty-five, Sophie calculates. It doesn’t seem fair that his short life was bracketed by a doily and then war. He hardly got a chance to live at all.

But nobody comes back from the dead. Tucker Haines’s tale will outshine all the war stories told at Gettysburg.

“Pretending to be dead is a far cry from being buried alive,” Sophie says. “It’s not fair to Dr. Satterfield.” The name brings blood to her cheeks.

“People will forget all about this, Sophie,” says Mrs. Frye, as if nothing more, ever, need be said about Tucker Haines, and Sophie feels comforted.

Mrs. Mack’s face is blissful. She might be a docile child.

Sophie wishes the rinse would go on forever, so she could stand within this canvas tent, dreaminess overtaking her now that she has cried and been rescued, now that she has admitted to herself that she is in love with Doc Minor and Dr. Satterfield too. If Doc Minor is morning, then Dr. Satterfield is some other angle of the sun. If Doc Minor is bustle and noise, then Dr. Satterfield is silver silence, his step so light, she doesn’t know he’s in the house unless she meets him coming down the stairs, and neither of them the kind of man to have anything to do with a woman as plain as she is. Her ma used to warn, Don’t take the last biscuit from the plate. A girl who did would be an old maid. Sophie’s sister, hungry but determined on wifehood, balled up her hands in her lap while Sophie grabbed the biscuit. What other advice did their ma give? Don’t scratch your bubbies in public. Well, that was more useful than Pa’s talk of ravens bringing food to Elijah. Ma kept them going, milking the cows with Sophie and her sister. Sophie had vowed to steer clear of marriage.

And yet, Dr. Satterfield’s lips on hers, his arms around her, a kiss that made Tredway’s kisses – Tredway of the bowling alley and pool hall – his kisses, by comparison, were wet, mumbling dismissals. With Dr. Satterfield, there is a distance she yearns to close.

Mrs. Mack announces, “I’m cold.”

Sophie and Mrs. Frye each take one of her arms, and Mrs. Mack steps out of the tub. Together, Sophie and Mrs. Frye dry her off and dress her. Mrs. Frye rolls up the canvas, and they’re out in the open again.

“Don’t step on any bees,” warns Mrs. Frye, and Mrs. Mack gingerly lifts one bare foot. To Sophie, grass has never looked so brilliantly green, and bees have never buzzed so richly.

Mrs. Frye seats Mrs. Mack on the chair and produces sharp little scissors that Sophie guesses are for talons and claws. Mrs. Frye clips Mrs. Mack’s toenails, then sweeps her hair into a becoming arrangement. Mrs. Mack wiggles her toes, and Mrs. Frye eases her feet into slippers.

Mrs. Mack stands up tall, squaring her shoulders. Sophie hands her the canes. The bath washed years away. Mrs. Mack’s eyes, meeting Sophie’s, are calm and intelligent. Her high cheekbones are those of Ambrose Powell Hill; why, she could lead the Light Brigade at Cold Harbor and Spotsylvania. “Little Powell” to his men, Hill donned a red shirt before battle; at Chancellorsville, he tied a tourniquet on Stonewall’s wound; Sophie knows the stories. Had Hill not been killed at Petersburg mere days before war’s end, he might have become Governor or President. In Mrs. Mack’s face, his bravery lives on. You would think she is perfectly fine.

Sophie hears the front gate click. Is it Dr. Satterfield? Has he thought continually of the kiss these last seventeen hours, as she has done? The kiss may mean he loves her, that he has loved her for a long time. Tucker Haines’s return from the dead was the shock he needed to take her in his arms. Her youth is gone, but in its place is this sense of waking up and having a chance at something new. She hopes Dr. Satterfield has come looking for her.

Her war is not yet over, her war with time, with the infirmities that will claim this beloved gray-voile-clad person from another era. Sophie has encountered citizens who are surprised to hear Mrs. Mack is still alive. Her heart still beats, eyes still blink. She’s a doll with a clock in her chest and a calendar in her mind, its pages erasing.

“Well, ta-dah,” Mrs. Mack calls to John Frye. He smiles, and she makes her way toward him. That is natural to her – walking over to a man, sure of herself in a way Sophie will never be. Mr. Frye lifts a rabbit from the hutch. Shifting her canes, Mrs. Mack achieves a perilous stance and with a free hand, pets the animal.

Mrs. Frye dumps the soiled clothing into the tub. “I’ll wash these, Sophie,” she says.

This is the most help Sophie has ever received, and she has never needed it more.

“I didn’t know she was this way,” Mrs. Frye says. With a stick, she stirs the clothes. “She’s more than you can manage.”

Above them, orioles argue in treetops. The clock on the town square chimes noon, tolling the hours right into Sophie’s heart.

“Would you help me with her, from now on?” Sophie asks. “You’ll be paid.” After all, Doc Minor offered to get money from the Assistance Committee. They won’t dare refuse him.

Mrs. Frye says, “Yes, I’ll help you.”

Sophie tries to hold on to this peacefulness. She tries to hold onto the sound of Mrs. Mack’s laughter, familiar and easy, as if decline and death are years off. Yet even as Sophie and Mrs. Frye wring out the nightgown and hang it on the line, everything is changing. Orioles’ chatter rises in pitch, suds sink into the grass at Sophie’s feet, and clouds stretch apart.

Mrs. Frye takes a clothespin out of her mouth and says, “I can watch her, Sophie. Would you like a day to yourself?”

“Yes,” says Sophie, “I would.” She smoothes her hair back, smelling lemon thyme on her fingertips. “Thank you,” and that fast, she’s free.

She runs to the house. Catching her breath, she’s aware of silence. Listening for Dr. Satterfield, calling out for him, she hunts from room to room, but the house is empty.

Remembering the click of the gate, she opens the front door. A paper flutters to the ground: a handbill for the Eclipse Theatre. She hears whistling and sees a boy toting a sack, making his way from porch to porch, door to door. Now and then, he nails a poster to a telegraph pole. The flyer lists upcoming plays: “The Sunshine Girl,” “The Honeymoon Express,” “Oh! Oh! Delphine.”

In her mind, she holds them side by side, Dr. Satterfield and Doc Minor, and says out loud, “Choose,” as if it’s that easy. One quicksilver, ruined and mysterious; the other all brawn and bluster, running to fat, honest as daylight. She feels the pull of one, then the other. Quicksilver and ruination win. Dr. Satterfield’s kiss is everything.

It’s been a long time since infatuation led to folly. Her eyes on the boy with his sack of posters, she thinks back to R. Tredway. The Eclipse Theatre was only a plan, a dream Tredway described to Sophie when they lay together in his basement. Above them, bowling balls spun toward pins; how loud and long that sound, like an approaching locomotive. Tredway said, “Make all the noise you want.” He could control his body so he crested to the sound of a strike. He did it every time, and she was learning how. He’d say, “Right down the middle. Get ready. Here it comes.” Earthquake: she was shaken head to foot, inside and out, while the world roared. When it was over, a mustache came into focus, a face hung over hers, and she slid into stillness.

In this moment, on the porch of the Veterans Home, while the delivery boy diminishes down the street, Sophie sees her younger self in Tredway’s arms. “Another one!” screamed Agnes Tredway, wife of R., flying at them with her umbrella. Sophie leaped out of bed, grabbed her dress, and fled into the rainy alley. She shimmied into the dress and felt lucky nobody saw except a cat, flattening its ears and ducking under a garbage can. Beneath the dress, she was naked. Her underwear was back there on the floor. The Tredways’ shouts reached her through drizzle. Then came voices of newsboys with word of the Titanic, and people surged into the streets. The huge headlines made her throat go dry. All those people dead.

Thus ended her affair with, and employment by, R. Tredway, with the Titanic disaster providing an anniversary. If their paths cross, he murmurs, “How do,” as if they never arced together to bowling thunder. She has heard of women storming the saloon while he crouches behind whiskey barrels, abetted by a bartender wiping glasses. One girl, daughter of rich parents, fought back at Agnes while Tredway clasped his hands behind his head and cheered for his wife.

Now the basement has become the cool, glamorous pit of the Eclipse Theatre, seating three hundred in chairs comfortable enough to sleep in. Sophie pictures her discarded drawers among peanut shells and banana peels. She remembers damp concrete, the smell of leaky pipes, and a name scratched on the rough brick wall beside the cot, H. Jones pvt Green’s Federal Battery. Yawning, Tredway once told her, “Some Yankee wrote that. Town kept changing hands, getting taken by one side, then the other.”

The flyer flutters in her hand.

       “He’s not here,” says the desk clerk at the Waverly Hotel.

Sophie realizes she should have expected this. She stopped by the Davis Street office but didn’t find him. “Do you know when he’ll be back? Is he in the dining room or . . .”

“He’s gone,” the clerk says. “He went to Mexico.”

This clerk is not one Sophie knows. He must be confused, and the lobby is noisy. She repeats, “Dr. Satterfield. Thomas Satterfield. He’s been staying here a long time.”

“That’s him, all right. Packed up and paid his bill,” the clerk says.

Sophie gasps. “When?”

“This morning. Is somebody sick? We have a telephone. Want to call another doctor?”

“No. I just need to – to speak to him. How long ago this morning?”

“A few hours. He went to the train station,” he says.

Sophie opens her mouth, but words don’t come. She stares at the clerk.

He makes a gesture. “It’s two blocks that way. You can’t miss it.”

“I know where the train station is,” she says. “I saw him this morning. Walking down the street. Past the Veterans Home. Are you sure he said . . .”

“Mexico.”

“Isn’t there a war going on down there? Fighting?” Her lips feel strange and stiff.

“A revolution, yes ma’am, civil war. There’s Pancho Villa in the north, Zapata in the south, and the federals in between. A whole bunch of different groups . . .”

From the kitchen comes the smell of boiled kale, and Sophie’s stomach flips. “But why?”

“Well, Porfirio Diaz was president a long time, then Madero, who turned out to be worse, so Taft sent some of our men down to the border. Madero was arrested and got shot on his way to jail, and now Huerta’s in charge. Another dictator. People got riled up when . . .”

“Why did he go?” Sophie cries.

“Oh. Don’t know. Wars can always use doctors.” Looking beyond her, he nods to someone. “He said to hold his mail, and he’ll let us know where to send it. You could leave a letter for him, but no telling when . . .”

A man steps up beside her and interrupts. “So our man’s on the run. Gimme the scoop.” He flips open a notebook.

“Okay, Chick, just a second,” the clerk says, glancing at Sophie.

Sophie moves aside, but the new arrival grabs her arm. “Hey, don’t you work at the Veterans Home? I’m with the Exponent. Tell me about this Dr. Satterfield.”

Sophie recoils and dashes outside. A train rolls into town, and she sprints toward it. Maybe he’s still there. Please let him be there. Faster, faster, go her pumping legs. The whistle blows so close, her ears buzz. But this train’s northbound. Mexico’s the other way.

IV. Silent Screen

       Of the fifty thousand men at the encampment, some experience great changes. A certain percentage succumb to heat strokes, heart attacks, accidents, and aneurysms. Several bring or summon their sweethearts and get married in Pennsylvania chapels. For others, telegrams arrive with word that a man has become, perhaps unexpectedly, a father, a grandfather, or a widower.

Two dozen homing pigeons, including a native of Culpeper, rise above Gettysburg’s monuments and hospitality booths, gain altitude, and wing over rivers, forests, and farmland toward Illinois, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Tennessee.

When Sophie realized the train was headed the wrong way, she stopped in her tracks. It was too late. He was undoubtedly gone on an earlier, southbound train. Even if he hadn’t mistaken a live man for dead, he might have gone to Mexico anyway. Impossible to understand the choices such a mysterious man would make, although one thing was clear: the kiss meant goodbye.

With no reason to go to the train station, she floated down the hot street in the shock of it all. She smelled fresh bread and coconut cake from a bakery, sidestepped piles of manure, and paused at a taxidermist’s window.

The proprietor came out, cigar in hand. He struck a match and inhaled until the tobacco glowed red. “Which one do you think is the best?” he asked her.

She examined the display of preserved wildlife. In reality, the animals would never be so close to each other. It was jarring to see a stuffed bear, fox, and hawk posed like a family for a photograph. A lesser creature caught her eye. She pointed and said, “That one.”

The proprietor nodded. “I like him too. My wife had the idea of putting him on that branch. We’ve got a persimmon tree, so I sawed off a piece.”

Sophie studied the varmint’s shape, its nose made for rooting, its clever paws and whiptail.

“How much is it?”

He exhaled smoke and named a price.

“I think I have that much.” She reached in her pocket and found a few bills and coins.

While the man wrapped it up, she was struck by a thought. Maybe people didn’t take trains the whole way to Mexico. It was so far. Might be easier to get on a ship and reach it by water. The starting point would be a port: Norfolk maybe, or Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York.

She took off running again.

       By the time the encampment empties out, with only groundskeepers picking up litter and dismantling structures, a medical doctor arrives in New Orleans and books passage on a steamer to cross the Gulf. After a week-long voyage that renders him too seasick to eat, he lands at Veracruz. He has followed the conflict for a long time, studying maps and writing letters to officials of Mexico and the United States, occasionally receiving answers. His loyalties grew toward the man known as the Tiger of Morelos, Emiliano Zapata, whose land reform policy the doctor believes to be brilliant and fair. Ironic that the fiery, uneducated peasant is attracting an intellectual element among his supporters; in Mexico they’re called city boys. The doctor plans to locate Zapata and offer his services as an army physician for the cause of revolution. “Land and Liberty.” He repeats the Zapatista slogan to the mirror in his Veracruz hotel room. A crack in the glass runs across his cheek like a scar. He is severely dehydrated, and his clothes hang off him, but during the long overland trip and the voyage across the pitching Gulf, he succeeded not only in breaking his addiction but also in learning rudimentary Spanish, at least a Mexican dialect reasonably close to it, with the help of a cabin boy from Juarez.

The trunk that contained his extra clothing was empty, its lock broken, when he claimed it at quayside. All he has is a pair of well-made pistols and his medical bag, which holds essential equipment, supplies, and drugs. He is wealthy, having inherited the fortunes of his long-deceased parents, a much older brother, and an uncle; the money is safe in a bank in Washington, D.C.

He has never been happier than at this moment, accepting a pitcher of water and a dish of sugared limes from a chambermaid. He pours drops of iodine into the water and a shot of rum. If the chambermaid weren’t so old, she could enlist for Zapata herself; the general encourages women to fight and promotes the best ones to commanders.

How is it he never felt at home in Virginia, though his family lived there for three hundred years? The house he burned himself. All those gloomy rooms of furniture. All those albums of photographs, covered in coal dust, up in the attic. No one alive was in the house; his parents were long dead, and there’d been no pets since his mother’s poodle. If spiders and silverfish counted as sentient beings, he was a guilty man. Spill a little lamp oil on a sofa and leave the room. The smell of smoke must be some neighbor’s burn pile. He’d strolled to his office.

By the time the clumsy fire truck pulled up with its winded Clydesdales, it was too late. Fire cleansed. When the embers cooled, he hired men to bury the rubble and put straw and grass seed on the site, and then he deeded the land to the local CSA camp with the stipulation that there be no publicity. Old fighters, revolutionaries, he understands.

The only loss he regrets is his books, which were in his steamer trunk. What thief on that boat wanted books? He imagines a sailor reading about anatomy and germ theory in the weak light of the ship’s hold. Maybe it will do some good, the lantern of knowledge in a dark place, but more likely the pages were ripped out and fed to the goats and pigs that made the crossing.

A knock at the door: it’s the chambermaid returned, with a young girl, a child really. They are both short, with dark skin and the features of indigenous people – blueblack hair, square faces, thick lips. He wonders if they sleep in hammocks. The woman says, “Senor, this is Veronica.”

“Your daughter?” he says.

The woman nods. The girl looks down at her feet. She might be eleven or twelve. He comprehends the offer, feeling sick at heart.

“No,” he says. Then he thinks of a local commander he needs to find. He speaks the name and the address he gained from correspondence and asks the woman’s help.

She talks too fast. He gives her a pencil and paper, and she draws a map. It reminds him of sketches he made with boyhood friends, playing pirates, hunting backyard treasure.

“Gracias,” he says and hands her a coin. The child scampers away. The woman takes a broom and begins sweeping the hallway.

He closes the door and lies down on the bed, his legs rubbery from the voyage. The ship’s purser was astonished when he didn’t file a claim for the stolen things. The empty trunk gaped on the dock while the purser handled the broken lock as if it were a puzzle he could solve. Children scrambled toward debarking passengers, slipped between the ropes, and ran forward, begging. American women in ruffled dresses and enormous hats handed out candy, but when the brown children clutched their skirts, the women swatted at them, and the purser drove them away. What did those women think they would do here? They were white flowers in a dry garden.

All during the journey, while the train chugged through the wasted, struggling South, and on shipboard, while he fought nausea, gave in to it, and forced foreign phrases into his brain and onto his lips, he tried to work out what had happened with the man Haines. He’s still trying.

Did he make such a grievous error, the stuff of jokes and wrecked careers? He has no faith of the Biblical kind. His faith is in men and science. Again, he ponders the course of events – the summons from Sophie Floyd, who reached him at his office at suppertime; his examination of Haines, a pneumonia patient. Sophie was present in the room, as was Lemuel Nighten, friend of Haines. Late afternoon it was, getting on to evening, with cicadas and katydids making praise songs. He used a stethoscope on Haines’s heart but did not hold a mirror to the slack, liver-colored lips. Bony, gristly Haines was a doper. Was he hasty in the examination because of fear that Haines ingested too many of the white pills, once and for all? Yet for someone old, the stuff is benign. Nearly. If you eat a good diet that includes roughage, you’ll be all right, but withdrawal is first-degree hell. He served his patients the best he could. He wrote a prescription for every bottle he sold.

It’s just hard to be your own physician. He’s proud he’s off it. He’ll stay off it.

His thoughts go back to Tucker Haines.

He searches his memory for any sign of collusion among Haines, Sophie Floyd, and Lemuel Nighten. There was only that absence, Tucker’s body on the bed.

In medical school, he and his classmates played dead. One of them would be discovered collapsed and a frantic call issued – “He drank till he passed out. I think he’s gone” – until the demised gave vent to helpless laughter. Once he held his breath five minutes. They loved it.

“I’ll call the undertaker,” Satterfield had told Sophie.

“I’ll stay with him,” said Lemuel Nighten, face drooping like a basset hound’s.

With Sophie, Satterfield went downstairs. In the dining room, men were at their meal, Tessa the maid refilling water glasses. He smelled beans, onions, and fruit pie. He used the telephone in the hallway to contact Undertaker Fletcher. He’d been absolutely certain Haines was dead. No question in his mind as he cranked the phone, with the suppertime din in his ears.

Now he’s too tired to sleep, and the Mexican sunlight on the walls is harsh. Nobody of his acquaintance knows where he is, unless he counts the desk clerk at the Waverly Hotel. He has run off to war. He has never felt such excitement. Being in love must be like this. The Mexicans will be ecstatic to have him join their cause. Has he ever made anybody happy before?

Why did he kiss Sophie? Maybe because of the guilt on her face; he has always found culpability seductive. She felt bad because she got him into trouble. The guilt softened her features and pulped her mouth. Her lips had a pretty shape.

Seagulls scream outside the hotel. The house, his ancestral home, had burned so fast. Once it caught, how rapidly it spread, consuming everything. The fire truck, the Clydesdales. He feels again the incredible heat, as if his organs are roasting. He licks the sugar from the limes, squeezes juice into the pitcher of water, and drinks deeply. A cramp twinges a warning in his abdomen, but he is so thirsty. Water and sleep, and then he’ll seek out the commander. He had his best suit cleaned and pressed on board the ship. Then he remembers he put it in the trunk. No matter. Less to carry. What thief will wear his white linen suit and the good shoes he bought in New Orleans? He might spot some dandy in his own finery on the beach in Veracruz, hawking langoustines, or a ghost of himself riding muleback in the countryside, dust staining the silk-lined jacket.

The limes are too acidic. His belly revolts in a sour heave. Liquid spills out of his mouth onto the thin pillow. His neck aches, and he’s sweating through the sheets. Tomorrow he’ll find the commander. Someday he’ll meet Zapata himself. When the conflict is over, and Zapata installed as president, something else will begin for him. An ambassadorship, a disease eradication program. What Walter Reed did for yellow fever, he can do for some other malady. He feels his temperature climb. Seasickness is supposed to stop once you land. He’s been on dry land for hours now. Suppose the revolution is only crude rogues as leaders, worse men as followers, dusty villages with nothing going on but stupidity and disorganization, idle killing, gutshot men and suffering horses, noble ideals trampled by drunken laughter and greedy pleasure? He curls around a belly-stabbing pain. Land and Liberty. It has to mean something. He can’t have come all this way and have body and spirit fail. He is American and a doctor. The Mexicans will be so glad to see him.

He is Tomás, and he brought a man back from the dead.

Had Dr. Satterfield been at the depot, Sophie would have asked him to marry her, but since he wasn’t, she went to the movies. She hardly registered the flickering figures on the screen and the accompanying piano music, off-key and ill-paced, so intent was she on the story unspooling in her head. Very soon, she knew, Mrs. Mack would die, and Henrietta Haines become Matron; Sophie pictured a coronation. She herself would bid farewell to the veterans, to Bynum, Tessa, and the Fryes, and depart the Home with a suitcase in each hand.

She blinked, and a man and a woman in the film swayed toward each other, their lips black. The woman’s mouth moved, and on the screen appeared the word “Forever.” That was how long Sophie could search in Mexico without finding Dr. Satterfield.

Yet the real story turns out differently. Long before Mrs. Mack speaks her last words – I’ve been thinking about taking a trip – Sophie’s sister, mother of nine, will die while lifting a pail of milk, with only a mild-eyed cow to witness the woman clutching at her heart and barn cats lapping at the puddle. Sophie’s brother-in-law, frantic, sends for her, and Sophie steps into her sister’s place as easily as she might stir a pudding. She tells her brother-in-law, “Ma said don’t take the last biscuit from the plate, or you’ll be an old maid. I did, and she didn’t.” He sobs, and Sophie’s heart expands like rising dough. For two months, he spends nights in the barn while Sophie sleeps in the bed he shared with her sister. Then they wed. The following year, Sophie gives birth to a daughter, delivered by Doc Minor. She names the baby Josephine.

On a chilly evening in September 1914, it is Tessa to whom Mrs. Mack announces, “I’ve been thinking about taking a trip.” Tessa, peeling the last peaches of the season, says, “Mmm-hmm. Where to?” and lifts her head to see Mrs. Mack take her final breath, a moment as swift and certain as a light going out. One minute, the old lady was looking at her, Tessa reports to Bynum, and the next, her eyes were still open, but she was gone away. Tessa was so shocked to hear her speak that it was hardly more surprising when she died. “Hadn’t said nothing for the longest time, and then to talk about a trip, like she knew,” Tessa muses.

Sophie will learn to make creamed corn that wins prizes at the county fair. Her children will clamor for the story of how Tucker Haines got back from Gettysburg and found a stuffed possum she’d put in his room, its whiptail laid across his pillow. He hollered loud as Lee’s whole army. “I got him!” she’ll say, and the children applaud, enthralled.

Tucker Haines will outlive not only Dr. Satterfield, who perishes of a burst appendix without ever meeting the Tiger of Morelos, but also Chick Parker, Haines’s amanuensis, whose mawkish book, Confederate Lazarus: A Hero’s Escape From the Grave prefigures fleeting fame, a wealthy if indifferent wife, competent service as a correspondent during the Great War, and finally, death at the hands of his wife’s lover. Even as Chick dies – of gunshots delivered clumsily but at close range – he registers the fact that this passion is the only one he ever inspired.

Sophie knows none of this as she relaxes in the darkened Eclipse Theatre, lifting popcorn to her mouth, savoring salt and butter. Sighing, she toes off her shoes, rests her feet on the cool floor, and surrenders to the show: a man breaks out of jail, steals a bicycle, and pedals – jerkily, the timing’s off – toward a cornfield where a woman is dressing a scarecrow. Soon, Sophie expects, they’ll be in love, but the law is after him. Here come the cops in a funny little car.

The piano stutters. How will it end? Sophie blinks, swept away. Those rows of corn: black and white and gray, but green in her mind. She smells tasseled ears and hot dry stalks. She fastens the shirt over grassy arms that fall apart in her fingers.

---

Cary Holladay is the author of five books of fiction: A Fight in the Doctor’s Office (Miami University Press, 2008); The Quick-Change Artist: Stories (Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 2006); Mercury (Shaye Areheart Books / Crown, 2002); The Palace of Wasted Footsteps (University of Missouri Press, 1998); and The People Down South (University of Illinois PreThe Sewanee Review, Tin House, The Southern ss, 1989). Her work has appeared in Review, The Great River Review, and Oxford American. Her story “Merry-Go-Sorry,” based on the West Memphis Three trials and convictions, first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and subsequently won an O. Henry Prize.