Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Read online

  “Damn right you do. You can die of overweight, you know. And besides, as my mama used to say”

  He had parked in front of the store by the time he finished his sermon. I almost ran out of the car, confused, baffled, feeling like I was having a weird dream and definitely very tired of Elroy’s sermon.

  Mark was at the counter, on the phone, with a pile of books in front of him and a pricing gun in his hand. He looked up and mouthed at me, “Jonni?”

  “She’s fine. She’s coming in,” I said. I wanted to tell him she’d been dead and Elroy had taken on Elvis’ form and resurrected her, but then Mark would just tell me I’d been working for Eternal Life too long. And maybe I had.

  “Well, ma’am, if you are possessed by a malevolent entity, I’d say you definitely should quit your job with the nuclear power plant,” Mark said, into the phone.

  I moved in beside him, took the price gun from his hand, determined to start work and forget what must have been a dream, had to have been a dream.

  Looking down at the cover on the first book on the pile, I gasped.

  Mark covered the mouthpiece on the phone. “Elroy had them vanity published. Isn’t it a hoot?”

  I looked at the cover again, speechless.

  It showed a figure in a white jumpsuit, surrounded by light. On the top it said Elroy Peters. And on the bottom, in black letters, was the title: Elvis Died For Your Sins.

  Like Dreams of Waking

  I have a Southern friend who talks endlessly of civil war minutia. He happened to mention that Stonewall Jackson was killed by friendly fire. With one thing and another, next thing I knew I found myself writing this story.

  (preceding pages rendered illegible through water damage and age) …possible that he had been wounded early in the day, more than twelve hours beforehand, and just as possible that all those hours he had lain for dead, in that great butcher-shop that Gettysburg had become.

  I’m not sure when he was brought to the hospital we’d established at Plank Farm.

  Situated three miles west of Gettysburg, the farm consisted of a good sized building on the west bank of Willoughby’s Run. A few of us, medical men, had claimed it early in the morning of Wednesday, the first of July 1863, and since then we’d been disposing sick and wounded where we best could. Beds and mattresses, as well as anything that could be pressed into service as such, had long since been occupied by wretched sufferers.

  We had the orderlies bring straw from the barns and spread it on the floor, so that more room might be made to care for afflicted men.

  The man I wish to tell you about lay on the floor of the front parlor, upon the already blood-soaked straw, amid scores of wounded, moaning, crying men.

  I thought he was dead. Surveying him from the narrow corridor about six feet away, I thought he couldn’t be anything but dead and must have died the moment he received his wound. I couldn’t imagine why anyone had dragged his corpse in.

  His head was all a mass of gore, from which nothing human emerged.

  Yet, the gore appeared to move.

  Curious, I stepped amid the wounded, careful to avoid touching the infection-swollen limbs and extricating myself from hands that grasped my ankles.

  To be honest, I no longer noticed the grabbing hands, nor the piteous moaning of the poor sufferers, nor could I any longer smell the miasma of putrefaction and illness that pervaded the room. I’d smelled its like or much worse after other campaigns and in other hospitals, worse provisioned than this.

  In those other necessity-engendered hospitals, the wounded had lain in tents that could not keep the water fully away from their tortured bodies, and had been crowded so tightly together that there had been no room to step between them.

  At least here there was plenty of room around this man for me get close to him. Close enough to realize that what moved amid the gore and blood on his face was no human muscle but a mass of maggots that writhed and danced like children at a feast, all the while making a sound like hogs feeding on mash.

  Revolted, my stomach reacting to this sight with a violence I hadn’t experienced since the early days of the war, I attempted to find an orderly that would take the corpse away, before its corruption contaminated the living bodies lying beside it.

  But just then the assumed corpse spoke, a whisper barely audible above the sound the maggots made while feasting his still-living flesh. “France,” he said, with startling clarity. “And the English, too.” His voice subsided into a low sound that might not have been more than labored breathing.

  His uniform might be a mishmash of Confederate and Federal issue, but his voice held the slow accent of the South.

  I rushed out to the yard of the farmhouse, where I found a pail and filled it with water from the pump, displacing the walking wounded who had been taking turns pumping cold water over their afflicted limbs.

  Though his words held no meaning for me, they were words, the words of a fellow human being suffering the tortures of hell while in this world. And his accent was the accent of a compatriot. To assist him and others such as him, I’d left my studies in England to come to the succor of my homeland, when it first seceded from the Union.

  I’d come back, against my mother’s besieging and my father’s instructing, and through two years of hard, bitter campaigning, I’d lived to endure the full pain of my decision. But I’d never regretted it, because what use is man if he doesn’t do something for his fellow?

  I took the pail with water and a discarded rag that I found in a corner of the yard.

  Kneeling by the wounded man, I did my best to clear away the blood and gore, and the vermin that infested it. As I cleared the gore, I found his injury was less than I’d at first suspected.

  The right half of his head was intact, his elongated dolichocephalic cranium covered in pale blond hair. But the left half couldn’t be cleaned. It remained a mass of gore and hair, with bits of bone and metal sticking to it. I could do no more than clear away the vermin and wrap his head in the cleanest ligature to be found.

  He would be very young, perhaps twenty at most, and at one time might have been thought handsome, with clean-cut squarish features, somewhat obscured by a puffy swelling of his face.

  As a man who’d long been interested in the human brain and the science of phrenology, I marveled at his being still alive despite his wound and wondered what faculties he would find missing, should he survive.

  …(pages missing, where a rat gnawed at manuscript)… as well as procuring food from the vegetable gardens and pens of the farm, besides keeping those wounded who could and would move about for their own purposes from eating all of it, leaving nothing for the worst sufferers.

  While at these labors, I found a bottle of spirits in an unused cupboard and I thought it might be used to comfort some of those in worst extremities. I have to confess I thought foremost of my head-wound case, the nameless man who, as I’ve written earlier, had made wondrous progress in the last five hours, so that he sat up and looked about with remarkably clear green-brown eyes.

  However, upon reaching the front parlor, where he had lain, I saw that his space had emptied, though all about it the wounded lay crowded as before. He must have died.

  Yet, as I walked to the door, I looked at his spot once more and saw him standing where he’d once lain.

  He looked startled, scared, his eyes wide and unreasoning, like the eyes of a horse about to rear.

  I hastened to his side. He showed some hint of recognizing me and allowed me to sit him down.

  I proffered the whiskey, and he took a healthy swig, capping the flask and handing it back to me, all as sane as you please. He might have been a fellow drinker on a social visit.

  And then he spoke.

  “How goes… the fighting?” he asked. His voice, scarcely louder than wind rustling through trees, sounded alarmed.

  I shrugged. I knew little enough of it, being here, away from the action, and heard close to nothing from the mouths of those I treated. �
�I hear Stonewall Jackson’s command took Cemetery hill,” I said. “And it seems as though we’ll carry the day, though we get so many dead and wounded, one way and another”

  He nodded, as though he understood. The ligature on his head, brown with soot and seeping blood, had remained vermin-free. “So the Yankees won’t win?” He spoke in the familiar accent of the Piedmont.

  I shrugged again. “It looks like we’ll carry this. And in a month the Yankees might well have capitulated and we all be home.”

  He raised a dirt-encrusted hand to his forehead, bringing it down again before touching that portion of it where the ligature hid broken bone and said, “I had dreams. Dreams like when one dreams of being awakened and in the dream walks and talks and does all the normal things of life. I dreamed I rose and walked as through an open door, and found myself back home, but the Union had won and scavengers from the North descended upon Dixie like vultures on an ill-dead carcass.” He looked away. “My wife had died of dysentery. My farm was ruined. I had to sell the house.”

  “A nightmare,” I told him. “You’ve been grievously wounded.”

  “Yes,” he said, and looked in some distaste around him, at the wounded lying all about, as though he himself weren’t as filthy and meagerly fed and hard-driven as them. “And will I live?”

  I couldn’t tell him it was passing marvelous that he was alive with half his brain destroyed. Though it was. So I told him….

  …(water damage renders a few lines illegible) …and with that he had to be contented.

  The rest of the day and through the night I was kept busy with more wounded brought in, half of them at least Federal prisoners that we treated as we did our own, though some of the doctors refused to treat anyone not of their regiment, a crime and offense against divine law for which I often wished they would be incinerated on the spot. Alas, divine mercy and divine justice both being in short supply in this war we had to make do with the human variety that required sweat and blood and sleepless nights for your humble servant.

  At daybreak on the second of July, I searched for and found my head-injury case. He walked about the yard, as though in a daze, tracing an erratic path around the fires that warmed those not so seriously wounded. He looked at everything with a strange, detached expression, as though not sure who he was, nor why he walked.

  Judging him to be prey to a fever, I found him and took him by the arm and started guiding him back inside.

  But he pulled his arm from mine and regarded me, his eyes open wide and his nostrils flaring, the look of a man scared, a man under mortal threat.

  “The Yankees won’t win, son,” I said, addressing him thus because of his youth, though I was not by any means old enough to have sired him. “I know what you dreamed, but it won’t come true.”

  But he only opened his eyes further and hissed breath through his clenched teeth. “No. No, the Yankees won’t win. But neither will we… I saw it all.” He blinked. “Perhaps it was a dream, too, but I swear it was so vivid… I stepped through the opening again, and found myself in a strange land… a strange land though it was our own. I listened to the people and I talked and I almost got killed for saying the wrong thing.” His lips trembled. His ligature had become even dirtier, as though a good many days had passed and he’d wandered far and wide. “I understand that even now Napoleon III of France dreams to establish a monarchy in Mexico. If we win” He swallowed. “With us winning this battle, France and England will recognize us. They’ll also subsidize our fighting and prop our treasury.” He swallowed again. “When the war is over, in another year, they will own us, lock, stock and barrel. And from here they’ll take over the Federal territory too. America will be no more.” His eyes filled with tears. “Nor will democracy nor the dream that men of wisdom can govern themselves. Kings will own the land. Forever.”

  I could tell from his words that he was a man of some learning, and I had to admit the scenario he painted might be likely. Nothing for it but to calm him down and tell him that all would be well, as I took him back to his spot on the floor and lay him down upon the soiled straw and gave him more of my hoarded spirits to help him rest.

  However, when I checked on him later, I found his eyes wide open, filled with understanding. Looking up at me he said, “Of the two, I’d rather sacrifice our cause than sacrifice the whole land and have foreigners split us like preying wolves split a wounded lamb.”

  (Water damage) …some beef tea, that I brought to him and made him drink. He sipped willingly enough. He didn’t feel hot to the touch, and didn’t rave, but when he finished his drink, he looked at me and said, “It should not be allowed. If I’m given this vision it’s for a reason. There must be a reason.”

  That night I found some time to lay down amid the wounded and get well-earned rest. But though I was tired and hadn’t slept in well over twenty four hours, I couldn’t settle. I kept wondering about the strange dreams that kept my patient worried. Dreams? Or was it possible, just possible that the human brain, like the rudder on a ship, kept men to one time and place at a time and that a man with his brain injured might move through time and space without direction like a rudderless vessel? And if that were the case, well, then, wouldn’t it explain most madness that follows an injury to the head? And most prophesying for that matter?

  I remembered from my grammar school days that many philosophers in ancient times thought that what men perceived and reality were not necessarily the same. Like Plato, with his idea that what we saw were no more than reflections of the truth. What if all of God’s creation unfolded at once, with his one word, but parts of our brain allowed us to perceive it a little at a time, lest we got mad?

  And if so, was my poor patient a true prophet? Did God allow him to suffer this injury and survive it so that he might transmit to me the dangers of our cause? And if so, what could I do?

  A heavy wind blew around the building, shaking the trees, but inside it heat collected, suffocating, and every smell of disease, every hint of rot and decay assailed my nose.

  I turned and weighed things in my mind. If the Yankees won they would have full revenge on our land. The emancipation proclamation their president had made would wreck the southern plantations and Dixie might never recover from its death blow.

  If we won this battle, France and England would recognize us. But would they recognize us without intending to get their own back? Or was their support for us as much interest in our cause as a wish to see democracy as a form of government fail? Since the ancient world, only America had lived in a successful republic. France had tried the rule of the people, only to take it to extremes and retreat shrieking into the arms of monarchy, once more. Was that what they wished on us? Would England, still smarting from the blow given it by our grandfathers, ever let us go once it had a chance to put its feet on our neck again?

  I turned and tossed on the filthy straw. I could imagine a land ruled and divided by European powers. I thought that the English, as keen on abolishing slavery as the Yankees, would ruin the south just as certainly, only they might as well muzzle the free southerners to the work in the plantations, making us something between slave and free. Not full citizens. A colonized people.

  And yet, certainly my poor sufferer was delusional and I was but following him on the road to madness. A fit destination for someone as short on sleep as I was.

  Besides, what could I do about it? And why would the Almighty send me, me of all people, a vision of the future and a choice about it? What was the choice? What could I do?

  I tossed and turned. Through the windows, I saw the reflection of fires in the courtyard, heard the rough voices of the men, some of them little more than boys, who sat there, in the warm night outside, discussing the battle, the comrades lost, the charges that had succeeded and those that had failed.

  If what I heard was true, the turning point at Gettysburg had come when Stonewall Jackson took Cemetery Hill. What if that hadn’t happened? What if Stonewall Jackson had died at Chancellorsville
when some of the N.C. volunteers had mistakenly fired upon him?

  I’d been there and I remembered General A. P. Hill frantically crying for the troops to stop firing.

  They had stopped and no damage done. But what if they hadn’t?

  If they hadn’t, Stonewall Jackson might well be dead and this day lost and… and a good man dead to prevent what? The dreams of a man whose brain had been shattered by a bullet?

  But if these were dreams, dreams and nothing else, wouldn’t my giving him a way to relieve his anxiety within his fantasy be an act of mercy?

  And if they were dreams, dreams and nothing else, dreams as yet as vivid as waking and no more, what difference could it make?

  That morning, the morning of the third of July 1863, when I found my patient walking around in a daze, I told him what I’d thought. I told him that if one of his doors to other times and places should open to that night of May second 1863 and he could find a way to ensure the friendly fire continued, Stonewall Jackson might well die and the cause of the Confederacy with it.

  After I talked to him, he sank into sleep, seemingly relieved by my suggestion.

  Wounded arrived in such great numbers that all that day I was kept busy, unable to see my patient.

  The next morning we got orders to return to Virginia. The orders from General Lee were that we should take as many of our poor wounded as possible back home.

  We loaded all vehicles we could find with wounded and in the commotion I lost track of my particular patient.

  After noon the rain started and puddled in the already poor roads. Horses and mules lost direction and became unmanageable. In the wagons the wounded and mutilated men cried out for death as the ultimate reliever.

  I went from wagon to wagon, attempting to somehow mitigate the suffering, though there was precious little I could do, absent morphine or the other physics that mitigate pain and those had long been lacking in the Confederacy due to the Yankee blockade.

  In the pouring rain, I finally came across the man who was wounded on the head. He sat bolt upright in a wagon, looking into the pouring rain, the eyes of man who sees something else, far away. “We lost at Gettysburg, doctor. We lost. Stonewall Jackson died at Chancellorsville, shot down by his own men.”