“What is it?”
“Laudanum, Lieutenant. Best-quality laudanum. I've had excellent results with it in Memphis, and it should help you, too.” The surgeon beamed. “Not all drugs in the pharmacopoeia work as advertised-I've seen that too many times to doubt it. But laudanum, by thunder, will shift pain.”
Leaming needed no more convincing. He raised the bottle to his lips and drank from it. The taste was strong, and not particularly pleasant: cheap brandy with a heavy infusion of poppy seeds. He had to force himself to swallow. It burned all the way down to his stomach. “It seems-strong.” He had to cast about for a polite word.
The physician smiled. “I know it's nasty, but it will turn the trick. This is no humbug. I'll come round again in half an hour. If I have told you a falsehood, call me a liar.” He picked up his case and went over to the next wounded man. “Where are you hit?”
Half an hour. Usually, that didn't seem very long. Half an hour walking with a pretty girl went by in the blink of an eye. Half an hour with a gunshot wound… was a different story. Leaming couldn't even look at his watch to see how the time passed by. That thieving Confederate had lifted it.
He hardly noticed when his head first began to spin. When he did notice, he blinked in bemusement. He hadn't had much brandy, not very much at all. But it wasn't the brandy that left him floating away from himself: it was the opium dissolved in it. “Well, well,” he murmured, and then again: “Well, well.” Laudanum really did banish pain, in the most literal sense of the word. The torment didn't disappear, but it went off to a distant province where it didn't seem to matter nearly so much. If that wasn't a miracle, it would do for one till something better came along.
“How are you, Lieutenant?” the surgeon asked. “Sorry to be a bit longer than I said I would-I had to take a poor devil's leg off. God willing, the wound won't go bad now.”
“I hope it doesn't. How am I?” Leaming felt… untethered, almost as if he were floating above his own body like one of the hydrogen-filled balloons the Federals used in Virginia to peer behind Confederate lines. “I am… much improved, thank you.” Finding words took a distinct effort.
“I'm glad to hear it.” The surgeon smiled. “I'll give you another dose when this one wears off.”
“Another dose.” Echoing the surgeon was easier. And those two wonderful words held more promise than Mack Leaming had ever imagined.
Matt Ward tripped over a chunk of driftwood on the riverbank. He almost dropped his end of the plank that had a wounded Federal on it. The bluebelly groaned. The Confederate trooper at the other end of the plank said, “Watch what you're doing, dammit! What the hell's wrong with you, anyways?”
“Too much rotgut yesterday,” Ward admitted. His stomach was sour, his head pounded, and his eyes felt as sensitive to the light as those of a man long poxed.
“Well, be careful, for God's sake,” the other trooper said. “That's right,” the wounded Federal added.
“Shut up, you son of a bitch,” Ward said furiously. “I'll take it from him — he's on my side. But I don't have to put up with anything from a goddamn Tennessee Tory, you hear me? I'd sooner tie a rock to your leg and chuck you in the Mississippi than haul you to your damn boat, and that's the Lord's truth.”
The wounded man from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) looked to the other Confederate for support. He got none there. “I feel the same way he does,” the trooper said. “Just thank your lucky stars I know how to take orders.”
“I thank my lucky stars I ain't no nigger,” the Federal said. “That's what I thank my stars for. Otherwise, I reckon I'd just be buzzards' meat.”
“I thank my lucky stars I ain't no nigger, too,” the other Confederate trooper said. “But we weren't fussy yesterday. We got rid of plenty of homemade Yankees, too.”
If the wounded enemy soldier had any more clever comments after that, he kept them to himself. That was one of the smarter things he could have done. Nobody was paying a lot of attention to the troopers carrying wounded men. He might have had an accident, and wouldn't that have been too bad?
It certainly would-for him.
A couple of U.S. soldiers brought a wounded Negro to a boat waiting at the river's edge at the same time as Ward and his companion carried up the white man. Like most Confederates, they wanted nothing to do with toting colored soldiers. Blacks were supposed to work for whites, not the other way around.
Both parties of bearers got their men into the boat. “What's it like on your gunboat?” Ward asked one of the sailors.
“Want to see for yourself?” the man answered in a sharp New England accent.
“Can I?” Ward said.
“Why not? There's a truce on,” the Yankee said. “You and your friend know how to handle oars?”
“I do,” Ward said. The other trooper nodded and started filling his pipe.
“Well, then, why don't you row across? They'll let you up on deck to look around, I figure.” The sailor pointed toward the Silver Cloud. “Some Rebs on board already.”
“We'll do it,” Ward said. He'd almost reached the gunboat before he realized he was doing the Federal sailor's work for him. A good thing he didn't try to get my money, or he'd likely have that, too, he thought with a wry grin. But pulling a pair of oars seemed to sweat the whiskey out of him better than carrying casualties had.
Sailors on the Silver Cloud helped get the wounded men in the boat up onto the deck. They gave Ward and the other Confederate hard looks when they started to come aboard, too. “We don't aim to do any fighting,” Matt said. “Fellow back there said we could come and look around.” He pointed to the man on the riverbank.
“Cotton always did run his mouth too much,” a sailor on the gunboat said, but he stood aside and let the Confederates board. Cotton? Ward rubbed at his ear. Did he say that Yankee's name was Cotton?
A couple of C.S. officers came out of the chamber where they steered the gunboat-Ward had no better name for it than that-along with a US. officer with one gold band at the cuff of each sleeve. Ward couldn't have said what kind of rank that gave him, either. He knew U.S. Army emblems-who didn't? — but not their naval equivalents.
Whoever this fellow was, he and the Confederates were having a high old time. That was literally true, for they were drinking together as if they belonged to the same side. They talked and laughed like old friends. The Confederates told how the New Era had sailed away the day before.
“Doesn't surprise me a bit,” the Yankee answered. “Captain Marshall always was a little old lady in a blue uniform.”
The Confederates thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. One of them almost spilled his drink. “Careful, there,” the other one said. “Be a shame to waste it.”
“Reckon you're right,” the first officer in gray said. Had they really been shooting Federals the day before? All the wounded men in blue on the Silver Cloud's deck said they had.
XVII
Corporal Jack Jenkins rode east through the Hatchie bottom country in a perfectly foul temper. The other troopers wouldn't stop ragging on him for letting Bill Bradford slip through his fingers. “Jesus God,” one would-be wit said, “if you didn't want him yourself, you should've given him to the rest of us.” He might have been talking about somebody who'd thrown away a drumstick instead of putting it back on the platter with the rest of the chicken.
“I wanted him, dammit,” Jenkins said. “He fooled me, that's all.” That's all? he thought bitterly. That was plenty. He'd never live it down. If he got to be an old man with a long white beard, his neighbors would still think of him as the damn fool who let Bill Bradford get away.
“He makes it down to Memphis, he'll stir up all kinds of trouble,” another horseman said. “He's a serpent, Bradford is.”