Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

All this means I am very careful not to initiate pressingly upon people I like for no good reason. So I was happy when Joan sprang out and pinched me, and I am happier still when she asks me to dinner.

“I’m making coffee and beef stew,” she says. “Want to mess with me?”

“Are you going to pinch me again?”

“Are you going to make me angry again?”

“I hope not.”

“Well, that’s fine, then.” She takes a few steps and I follow after, but we haven’t gone ten feet before she stops. “One more thing, though. I need you to tell me something. You’re not from around here , are you?” She sweeps out her arms, as if indicating this little parcel of Georgia, but something about her expression tells me she is indicating the whole of the depraved, sore-losing South.

“No,” I say.

“I mean, you’re a Yankee, aren’t you?”

I point at the brass infantry horn on my kepi. “Looks that way.”

“No,” she says, reaching toward me, so I think she’s about to pinch again, but she only puts her arm flat against my chest, over my heart. No one has ever put their hand there, just like that, and it feels very pleasant. “I mean, are you a real Yankee?”

“Sure,” I say. And because it seems like I ought to, I say, “Of course. Absolutely. I’m no Reb, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s fine, then,” she says. “That’s fine.” As we are walking we pass near the place where my family has pitched its tents. My oldest brother is polishing our father’s saddle. He looks up and sees me. I put my finger to my lips, but he shouts anyway. “Where are you going?” I don’t answer.

“Who’s that?” asks Joan.

“I have no idea,” I say.

“Have you seen the pictures?” she asks me while we’re waiting for the stew to cook. “Nobody smiles in them.” She has an old stereopticon and a collection of stereographs. She puts pictures in the viewer and I put my eyes to the lenses. The pictures are fuzzy at first, but then the boys jump out at me in startling 3-D. A grimfaced Yankee sitting for a portrait: Maybe it’s for his mama, or his sweetheart. His shoulders are round and small, but his neck is so thick I doubt I could get my two hands around it.

“I was a View-Master junkie when I was little,” I tell her. I would flip through the pictures with such wild abandon that I tore out the advancing lever. Then I would steal Clay’s and break it, too. He was pretty forgiving as a child, reacting to slights with sadness instead of anger.

Joan switches pictures, and shows me a Rebel cavalryman with immensely serious eyes. His saber is held in salute.

“What are they looking at?” she asks me. “What do you suppose?”

“The camera,” I say. But really I think they were looking at the future, suddenly made quite real to them by the prospect of their death. There was something about that in Clay’s diary, of which I became the secret keeper after he died. It was under his mattress, an obvious place, but, then, he was very trusting. I was cleaning up the room on the night he died, because that seemed like something bearable, something I could do. But I didn’t clean. I sat on his bed, on the sheets and old unwashed blanket that absolutely reeked of him, and read. The future is shapeless and unreal , he wrote on the first page, except when I am there, when I am close, and then it has the shape of death, and the reality of death. Why is that comforting?

“I think it was more than that,” she says and switches pictures again. This time the blurry image resolves itself into something gruesome: dead Rebs strewn along the fence on Hagerstown Pike. She shows me dead Rebels with their silent guns in front of the battered Dunker Church. She shows me the bodies of dead Rebels packed in a sunken road. I know all the pictures. My father showed them to us, projected on a big screen in our living room, as if recounting a vacation into the past.

“They lie as they fell,” I say, rubbing my eyes and looking at her. A dreaming look passes from her face and she says, “They got what they fucking deserved.”

Joan is at the dance that night, looking very smart in her dress uniform. My brothers are there, and my parents, my mother in a stylish oval hoopskirt and a purple velvet Zouave jacket and a hat piled high with fresh flowers. She kept the hat in the refrigerator at home and brought it to Chickamauga in a cooler. By day she plays a nurse because in real life she is a nurse. Some overeager ambulance types took me off the field last year and brought me to the hospital tent, where I lay on a stretcher and watched my mother exulting in all the fake blood. She saw me and came over to where I lay. I thought it was to say hello, but when she leaned her bloodstained face over me she only said, “Scream.” I didn’t scream. I just lay and watched, listening to all the enthusiastic shrieking the other boys were doing. It seemed to me that they were not a damned thing like the screams of men who were bleeding from the belly or getting their legs sawed off. I remembered how my father had screamed when he got the news that Clay was dead. He always claimed to have seen it coming, but I know he was screaming because he couldn’t believe that his son was gone. Probably that was a pretty close approximation of the sort of scream you make when someone saws off your leg, a scream not just of pain but of disbelief.

“I hate them,” Joan confesses to me as we are dancing. She tosses her head to indicate the Rebel officers. People are hissing at us, “Farb! Farb!” I don’t care. I think we make a dashing couple. If I am a failure at everything else in life, I am at least a success at a polka, and Joan is no slouch. “Have you ever even thought about how they got away with it? How they got away clean. How they are still getting away with it.”

“What do you mean?” I ask her, not caring what she means, because I am holding her and dancing with her, and the pressure of her against my chest is a little like when she put her hand there.

“Hundreds of years of abomination, is what I mean. I mean people owning other people and then pretending like they never did .”

“That was a long time ago.”

“That’s what they say! That’s exactly what they say. But it was yesterday .”

I don’t like kissing , Clay wrote. All the sucking gives me an ache in the back of my head . Joan and I pitch our dog-tent together. You need two people to make a whole tent — each private carries half of one rolled up on his back. You button them together and they make a pretty sorry sort of shelter, sure to leak in the rain, and not proof at all against the cold. She has got a wool blanket and some mattress ticking that we stuffed with hay and corn husks provided by the hosts of the battle. We strip down to our red flannel long johns and crawl between the blanket and the hay. We lie there, her belly to my back. She sings in a low voice:

Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,

Wishing for the war to cease,

Many are the hearts looking for the right

To see the dawn of peace,

Dying tonight,

Dying tonight,

Dying on the old campground .

Then she is silent, and I think she must be sleeping, but suddenly she cries out, “Spoon!” and we flip over, so now it’s my belly in her back. I am shivering, and not from the cold. She calls spoon a few more times, until one time I turn and find that she hasn’t. Her face is right before mine, and she kisses me. I get an aching in my head, but I like it.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she asks me later.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“There must be one thing.”