After dinner, Maci and her father pointed out constellations for Miss Suter’s edification. Boötes and Draco, Hercules and Cepheus, each was very bright in the sky over the black ocean. “That star is Arcturus,” Maci said.
“Where?” asked Miss Suter. “Where?” She waddled over to line up her eye with Maci’s pointing finger. “Ah!” she said. The great swell of her belly was nuzzled against Maci’s shoulder. Miss Suter gave another cry, and Maci thought this time she did feel something, a little kick.
Maci excused herself and took a walk along the cliff. The moon came up, washing out the stars. Low clouds rushed by, little floating islands that looked about the size of a big wagon. She could not help imagining riding one south to Maryland. If there were just room for one other on the cloud, would she take Rob or Private Vanderbilt flying? She was not sure. She wondered if that was the form her madness would take — fascination with a stranger. She had begun to rearrange Vanderbilt’s portrait — switching his hands or arms from side to side, balancing the lemonade on his head, setting his face in the middle of his chest. Rob had kindly sent enough faces to vary his mood — some angry, some sad, but most happy and peaceful-looking. Sometimes she put a peaceful-looking face on her pillow and woke in the morning with smudges on her cheek, and thought that he might have kissed her during the night. Standing by the cliff, she considered a future with him. They would live in Manhattan and manipulate railroad stock.
After a while, she returned to the house and went into the shed to look at the Infant. “Little Brother,” she said. “I ought to love you better.” She could think of nothing else to add, so she just stared at him for a long while. She could see her own face thrown back at her, twisted up along a silver tube, or shattered by the facets of a crystal panel. Then, she saw her father’s reflection. He had entered the shed and was walking towards her, but it looked like his image was rising from the crystalline depths of his machine. He stood next to her and put his arm around her. She closed her eyes, and put her face in his shoulder.
“It’s impossible, what you want to do,” she said.
“Difficult,” her father replied, “but not impossible. And is it any reason not to try a thing, because it is difficult? To the small mind, ending slavery seems as difficult and unlikely as changing the color of the sky. Yet that endeavor proceeds apace.”
“I hate him,” Maci said vehemently, pressing her face harder into her father’s shirt. “I hate all of this so much.”
“Oh Maci,” he said, stroking her hair. “Don’t be envious of him. It will make you ugly, inside and out. And anyhow, don’t you know that you are still my favorite?”
I know I risk your displeasure sending you these soldiers. It is not that I wish you to look at them and be saddened, but rather that I must send them away from me. Fold them into squares and sail them over the cliff — maybe they will find peace in the cold water. On the fifteenth, our regiment was ordered down from the westward slope of South Mountain, where we came upon the scene of the previous day’s heaviest fighting. The enemy’s dead were so numerous that a regiment who passed here before us had to remove them from the road to make way for the troops. They were piled up head high on either side, and made a gauntlet. Private Vanderbilt saw my distress — he is intimate with my moods — and offered to lead me through as I closed my eyes. I declined his kind offer. It seemed a fitting passageway from the land of the living to the land of the dead. I fear it is not the happy place where dwells our mad Poppy’s weakened mind. I thought as I walked of living hands grabbing up the bodies of the dead and stacking them like cordwood upon the road. In ten years, the wall might be made of bones, with only a blowing scrap of gray wool still attached to a wrist or a neck.
Sister, this wall is the work of men’s hands, and the whole war is the work of men’s hands — fingers tear cartridges and pull triggers. I would now that I had not sent you the Private’s hands, but here are his feet. I place them just beneath this letter, and the wall beneath that — all the work of my hand. Do not look at the wall.
Go to Boston. Pray for me.
She did look at the picture of the wall. It was an illustration of Hell. There were boys stacked high, their legs and arms intertwined in gross familiarity. Dead staring faces rested against each other, brow to brow. Motes of light danced in eyes that saw nothing, unless it was the moment of their death frozen before them. Try as she might, she could not imagine her brother’s face as he walked that gauntlet. But she could see Private Vanderbilt. His face was somehow both tender and stern as he put his hand on Rob’s shoulder, and tried to keep his wide back between Rob’s eyes and the wall. Maybe later Private Vanderbilt held him like a brother while he wept, trying to wash out the dead faces from his eyes.
She attached his feet, and at last he stood complete before her. She sat on her bed, watching him and listening to the noise of the surf. “Thank you,” she said to him.
I did look at the wall, she wrote. Such horror! Of course I prefer the Private’s feet to such atrocity, but whatever you must send I will gladly receive. How could it be any other way? Are you not my own Zu-Zu? Am I not your sister? You are in my prayers. I think Poppy and Miss Suter pray for you, too, in their way. Two apostles and an incipient spinster are pleading on your behalf — is this not cause for happiness?
The Infant is complete. Though I am not fond of him, I must admit that he is beautiful. You are not any longer the handsomest Trufant. Nor am I pretty, next to him. He has silver teeth and spun-glass hair and a golden face. He is jewelry, a brooch for a giant. We are waiting now only for Miss Suter to vomit a spirit from her womb. I fear the pall that will settle over this house when their bright hopes are dashed, when only a mundane babe comes into the world. Here is my prediction, I have it from my spirit guide, an Indian girl who inhabits the abandoned shell of a whelk. The baby will come and Miss Suter will flee from it, because it is not a spirit essence, because it reminds her of shame. She will be gone from our lives, and I will have a baby to raise. I shall have to learn to cook properly. We shall sell off the Infant in bits and pieces, and use the money to improve the house, to steady the porch and buy new stoves. Poppy’s folly will recede from him when his machine is a failure. We will wait for you here. This war will end. You will come and visit us with the Private in tow. It is a pleasure to dig for quahogs — I will show you. Do you see, then, how happy futures are born from the gray, despairing present? Brother, you have all my love.
* * *
“It’s a lazy baby that won’t be born,” said Miss Suter. She had an urge to go boating, so Maci had taken her out on the pond. Maci worried that the baby would come there in the middle of the water. She had been feeling anxious around Miss Suter because she seemed capable of giving birth quite at any moment. “I so wish it would come. These late battles might not have been, if only she had come last week.” She bent her neck forward to stare at her belly. “Why do you wait?” she asked it. It was September 25. News of the battle in Maryland had reached even here. Maci had checked casualty lists in a Providence paper and found Rob’s name absent from them.