The Notorious Dr. August by Christopher Bram

Author:Christopher Bram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

The soldiers had eaten nothing but blackberries and river clams for three days, so they feasted that night like beggars at a banquet. The chickens were cooked up with onions in a stew called cush, and there was cornbread gritty with sand, roasted ears of green corn, and baked apples. A plate was carried to the captain in his shack. Everyone else gorged around the fire, all except Isaac, who took a portion of the food he’d cooked and ate it alone, sitting under the wagon as if eating were a private bodily function.

While they ate, they told stories about raids and close calls and ones-that-got-away, shared experiences they didn’t need to tell each other, but I was a stranger, a new audience. They even spoke of their escapade that morning, Wyatt regretting that he hadn’t potted the tall galoot in black. “Beg your pardon, Billy,” he quickly added. “Forgot he’s your friend.” But I was sorry he hadn’t shot the son of a bitch who’d abandoned me to the wolves, even now when the wolves turned out to be friendly.

When they argued over who would get me as a bedmate, I wondered if I’d been captured by a squad of Secessionist Uncle Jacks. But no, they only wanted to be good hosts and get a change from each other’s snores and dirty feet.

“I’ll settle it,” said Kemp. “He bunks with me.”

He spread out his blankets in the wagon beside the house, safely above the dirt and crawling insects. He took off only his boots, so I kept my trousers on. I’d slept in some strange beds that summer, but a wagon bed under the stars was the strangest yet. I lay back and saw the pink flicker of firelight on the fan of leaves overhead. I expected to fall asleep immediately, although the entire day had been like a sleep, a sleep full of dreams too unbelievable to frighten me anymore, a concussion of dreams. You might have thought that I’d landed on my head and not my butt when I fell from my horse.

Kemp remained sitting up, smoking a pipe before he turned in. “Where’re your people from?” he asked, but only to prime the pump so that he could talk about his people, his and Isaac’s.

He actually spoke of his family as their family, as if he and Isaac were blood. He missed them badly. Unbuttoning his mind for a boy, his soldierly stoicism gave way to homesick melancholy. Their farm was outside Norfolk, he said, a small farm, not a plantation. The town had been under Yankee occupation since the start of the war. Kemp had hated the bluecoats, insolent, trashy soldiers who were rude to ladies and mean to slaves. When Kemp beat up a soldier who spoke lewdly to a young girl—he refused to repeat what the soldier said—and the Yankee provosts were looking for him, his father finally gave in to his desire to join his schoolmates in the army. Better that his son risk his hide on a battlefield than rot in a Yankee jail.

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