Adele Griffin: Picture the Dead

“Quinn is settled?” I ask.

She smothers a yawn and nods. “Doctor Perkins sent him to bed with a grain of morphine. Everyone says it’s rest he needs most, but oh, Miss Jennie, he’s got so thin, hasn’t he? Just the bones of his old self.”

“I think Will is gone forever.”

“Now, why would you say such a thing?” Mavis genuflects, then points the same finger on me, accusing. “Like you know something.”

I hadn’t meant to say such a thing. I hadn’t meant to speak at all.

“But you’re awful cold, Miss.” She catches my hand and squeezes, as though it’s she who frightened me, and not the other way around. “I’ll build up a fire.” She drops to kneel before the grate, steepling nubs of kindling. “And I’ll fetch you the rest of your clothing come morning,” she murmurs, “though you ought to be downstairs in the yellow room.” She strikes the match and sits back on her heels as the flame catches.

“Aunt Clara’d have given me the yellow room if I’d asked for it.” The hour is late, and I’m drained, but Mavis is a delicate soul, led often to fears and tears. “It’ll be pleasant roosting up here near you. Nobody to pester us.”

She attempts a smile. “Not Missus Sullivan, anyways. She sleeps like the dead, specially if she’d nipped into the cooking sherry. You’ll hear the mice, too. They get ornery when they’re hungry.” She waves off the phosphorus and steps back to watch the fire crackle. “I’m awful sorry, Miss. It pains me. This room’s not fit for the lady of the house.”

“I’m not the lady of this house.”

“Soon you will be, and everyone knows it. He’ll come back to you. By the New Year, I’ll predict.” She’s predicting a miracle.

I look down, and my fingers find my ring, which twinkles in the firelight like an extravagant and sentimental hope.

My tears will come later, I’m sure. Right now, I don’t want to believe it. I want to wake up from it.

I wake with a pit in my stomach. I wish I could yank up my quilts and hide from the day, but the morning doesn’t know to mourn. The winter sun smiles over my view of the kitchen garden. Hannibal struts the fence, sounding his imperious crow. Aunt Clara’s clipped holly bushes are interspersed with hellebores, all blooming in obedient array.

I’ll bring Quinn some flowers. An innocent excuse to pay him a not-so-innocent visit, but I need to hear him say it out loud. Of the two brothers, Quinn was more often the subject of Toby’s and my whispered confidences. We were cowed by his coolly impeccable demeanor and hurt by his ice-pick wit. Will was easier either warmly, sweetly happy or in a hot temper. Nothing in between, nothing to hide.

“Even if Quinn thinks we’re low and unschooled,” Toby once declared, “I wish he’d do a better job of pretending he didn’t.” As we got older, we avoided our cousin rather than shrivel under his scorn.

Quinn’s bedroom door is shut. I hesitate as my eyes land on a photograph hanging in the corridor. It had been commissioned of the brothers last spring, and in their summer suits they make quite a pair. Aunt enjoyed celebrating her handsome sons, both of whom she swore had the Emory chin, the Emory nose if pressed, she would avow that Quinn and Will possessed the Emory everything, with Uncle Henry offering scant more than his surname.

I tap. And then again. Even when I creak open the door, Quinn doesn’t turn. He lies in bed like a prince on his tomb. His bandages are an unwieldy crown. But he’s awake. I jump to hear him speak my name.

“Yes,” I tell him. “I’m here.”

“You hate me, don’t you?” he says without looking at me.

I am startled that my cousin would care what I think. “Don’t be ridiculous.” I place the vase so he can see it. The morning light is stark. I can barely recognize my returned cousin. Mavis was right he is a living skeleton.

“Mrs. Sullivan says it might snow later today. But it appears that Mavis has already stocked enough firewood to keep you warm.” I add another birch log to the fire, but the chill has seeped inside my bones.

“You wished I were Will. Last night I could see it in your face. You wished he’d come home instead of me.” He scowls. “Mother’s joy doesn’t make up for your devastation.”

“No, you can’t ”

“And why wouldn’t you mourn? My brother was your beloved, and now I’m your enemy even if you’ll never admit it. I convinced him to sign up with the Twenty-eighth, and I failed my most important duty, to bring him back alive.”

“He’s gone, then.” I force him to confirm it. “He’s been killed.”

“Yes.”

I’d been braced for this truth, but I’m not sure I ever would have been prepared for it. The air leaves my lungs. It takes all my resilience to walk across the room and slip my hand into Quinn’s. He is suffering, too, after all.

His palms are calloused, chapped. Gentleman’s hands no more. “Quinn, tell me. How did it happen? I’m strong enough to stand it.”

“If I’m strong enough to tell it.” He swallows. “Undo my bandage first. And bring me a mirror. I want to see my eye.”

“But Doctor Perkins ”

His head jerks up from the pillow. “If it were your eye, you’d snap your fingers for a mirror and command me not to bully you.”

Quinn hasn’t lost his uncanny ability to pin me to my own logic, but I’m too weak to spar with him. I retrieve the hand mirror from the bureau. Then I sit close and begin the odious task of unwinding his bandages. My attention is grave and utter, and for a few minutes there’s no other sound than our breathing.

I thought I’d been ready, but a scream fills the cavity of my body as I peel back the last blood-crusted layer and let the cloth fall from my fingers.

In the flinted symmetry of his face, Quinn’s wound is monstrous. Bruise-blackened, his eyelid raw as bitten plum, the whites of his eye filled with blood. He takes the mirror and stares at himself, then puts it down and looks at me, his head tilted like a hawk. Quinn was so beautiful. How he must suffer this mutilation. I pinch my thigh through my skirts as I return his gaze.

“It must have been terrifying to be shot,” I say. The tremble in my voice betrays me. I sense his dare for me to keep looking.

“It was, but this wound’s not from gunfire. It was Will who took the bullet.” Quinn’s words are hammered flat, though there’s density of emotion behind them. “That’s all you want to hear about anyway. On May sixth. It pierced his lung. We’d been fighting in Virginia, southeast of where we lost Toby. A special pocket of hell called the Wilderness.” His hand slips under his pillow and pulls out an envelope, thin as a moth wing.

I open it. The paper of the telegram is creased and blotchy, but the writing is legible enough to see what matters. The message is signed by a Captain James Fleming.

I refold it and return it to Quinn, vowing to come back for it later. I’m not stealing; I need it for my scrapbook. It’s evidence, a dossier fit for the spy that Toby had so desperately wanted to become. In the months since his death, I’ve been honing my skills. Toby was an astute observer. He never got lost; he could see like a hawk. Now it is up to me to adapt these habits. If I’d been his brother instead of his sister, I’d have stepped firm into Toby’s boots and charged out the door in a heartbeat to join the infantry, becoming the Union scout he wanted to be.