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?