I couldn’t watch the surgery too closely without experiencing a degree of nausea; and whenever possible I looked away, though the room was full of beds occupied by men just as badly injured as Sam, if not worse, and the sight of them offered little relief. Amputation was the chief cure being applied by the medics. The grating sound of the bone saws never altogether ceased. A blood-drenched orderly came through the room at intervals to collect severed limbs for disposal. When he took what remained of Sam’s left hand from the floor where Dr. Linch had dropped it, this unusual act brought home the horror of the occasion in a way the surgery itself had not. I wanted to retrieve the hand—carrying it off so casually seemed disrespectful, and I couldn’t silence the thought that Sam might want it again in the future. I had to clench my teeth to steady my nerves.
During one of these unsuccessful attempts to distract myself I caught sight of a face I recognized, in a novel context. A tall, gaunt individual wearing a Dominion hat moved among the wounded and the dying, offering solace and words from the Bible. He recognized me, too, and tried but failed to keep his face averted—this individual was none other than Private Langers!
I was outraged, but said nothing until Sam’s stump had had its skin-flaps sewn together, for fear of distracting Dr. Linch from that important work. As soon as he had wrapped the last bandage, however, I said, “Dr. Linch, there’s an impostor here,” and pointed out Langers to him. “That man is no Dominion officer.”
“I know all about it,” Dr. Linch said indifferently.
“You do! Why don’t you throw him out, then?”
“Because he serves a purpose. There are no genuine Dominion officers to be had. Julian Conqueror barred them from the expedition, and for the most part that’s not a bad thing, since we haven’t had to endure their Sunday scoldings. But a dying soldier generally wants a godly man beside him, and seldom inquires into the Pastor’s pedigree. When I asked for a volunteer among the troops—someone, anyone, even if his only religious office was passing the plate at church—this man Langers raised his hand. The rest were afraid of missing the action, or of appearing cowardly.”
“I’m sure those concerns weren’t foremost in Private Langers’s mind. What religious experience does he claim to have?”
“He says he used to be a colporteur, distributing pamphlets on sacred subjects.”
I explained that Langers’s pamphlets had been little more than pornographic guides to behavior not approved of by Biblical authorities, and that Langers himself was a fraud and a habitual liar.
“Has a Dominion officer ever been disqualified on those grounds? Don’t bother about him, Colonel Hazzard—he may be a cracked vessel, but we don’t own a better one just now.”
I took Dr. Linch’s advice. Perhaps it wasn’t as cynical as it sounded. As I left the surgical ward I overheard Langers giving solace to a man who had suffered a ghastly head injury. The victim’s one good eye was fixed on Langers, while the larcenous Private misquoted what were perhaps the only Bible verses he had ever learned verbatim, from the Song of Solomon, mingled with passages from the banned poet Whitman.
How much better is love than wine! he intoned in a soothing voice, one hand poised in a benediction and a sly, sweet smile on his lips.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from. In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass. Awake, oh north wind, and come thou south, and blow through this garden so that the spice of it might flow out! Deep waters cannot quench love, nor a flood drown it. Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is as strong as death, and jealousy is as cruel as the grave.
These words were not the standard consolation, but they were pleasant to hear at any time; and in the privacy of my thoughts I forgave Private Langers for uttering them under false pretenses, for the tear that formed in the single whole eye of the dying man was unquestionably a grateful and authentic one.
3
Sam was awake the next day, although the doses of watered opium that kept his pain at bay also interfered with his clarity of thought.
Julian didn’t visit him, for he was too busy securing Striver to withstand what might be a long siege. We were well protected—our defensive perimeter was anchored against Lake Melville and the Northwest River, so we could not easily be outflanked; and it would have been outrageously costly for the Dutch to mount a frontal attack. But they could starve us out, given time; and that was probably what they intended to do. This meant that food and medical supplies had to be itemized, guarded, and rationed—and that was some of the business Julian was about.
I sat by Sam’s bed in his place. For the most part Sam was silent, when he was not sleeping; but occasionally he spoke, and I tried to be an encouraging audience. He mentioned his father once or twice—his Judaic rather than his adopted father—and I attempted to draw him out on the subject when he seemed to need distraction.
“What work did your father do?” I asked him.
Sam was very gaunt beneath the blankets that covered him. It was a cold day outside, and a small snow was falling. We had to be chary with coal because of the siege, and the stoves in the hospital did little to dispel the chill. Whenever Sam spoke his words became visible as mist, as if he were emitting his immortal spirit directly from his mortal lungs. “He was a scrapper,” Sam said.
“He fought for a living?”
“No, Adam—a scrap-collector. He prospected in the Houston Ship Canal , down in Texas. That’s the territory where I was born.”
“Is it a good place, Sam?”
“The Canal? The Canal is hell on earth. It’s a poisonous trench as large as a city, rich in copper and aluminum, made not for human beings but for Oil and Machines back in the days of the Secular Ancients. In the Canal a prospector can make good money in a short time, if he’s smart and lucky. But the risks are terrible. The waters are vile and breed disease. When I was very small I saw scrappers come back from the Canal with blood running freely from their noses, or with their skin turned black and shriveled by contamination. My father was always careful to protect himself with boots and gloves and leather aprons. There were days when he carted out copper or aluminum very nearly by the ton, or soil that could be treated to recover arsenic, cobalt, lead, and other valuable elements, which sell for a premium at the Galveston Exchange. By the time he was thirty he had saved enough money to take his family east. But the Canal killed him the way it killed so many others, only more slowly. He died a year later, in Philadelphia , choked on tumors that filled his chest and neck. My mother was already frail and consumptive—she survived him by less than a month.”
“And you were adopted by a Christian family?”
“By a kind but aloof man who was a friend of my father. He and his wife provided for me until I was old enough to be sent for military training, on the stipend my father left for my education.”
“But you had to renounce your religion.”
“Rather to pretend it had never existed. Which had been my father’s strategy all along. In my family, Adam, all we had of piety was the lighting of candles on certain winter days and the pronunciation of a few incomprehensible prayers. The family that adopted me knew nothing of it, nor ever would.”
That was a melancholy confession, and I blushed at the memory of how I had mistaken his prayers for sorcery back in Williams Ford, when I was younger and less worldly. “Would you like me to pray for you, Sam? I can say a Jewish prayer, if you teach me the words.”