A Better Angel Read online

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “There must be one thing.”

  “Not really,” I say, except there is. It springs easily to mind, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask just this question. Once, during a big, hysterical, pan-family blowout, I held Clay’s arms at his sides while he struggled to get away. I was trying to keep him from running out the door, because when he did that we never knew when we would see him again. But my mother took that opportunity to slap him hard across the face, while I was holding him, and I felt like I’d hit him myself, like I’d punished him for the crime of being miserable.

  “Then what’s the best thing you’ve ever done?”

  “I don’t know. I probably haven’t done much good. How about you?”

  “I know it but I haven’t done it yet. I have something planned. It’s something really fine.”

  At the regimental inspection the next morning, I am bleary-eyed and wrinkled. The Ninth Ohio has fallen in, then opened ranks so Colonel Kammerling and his aides, my father among them, can walk down the lines to check us over and see if anyone is guilty of anachronism or harboring unsafe equipment. I pull out my ramrod and drop it down my musket barrel, then undo the flap on my cartridge box. My father pulls the ramrod up an inch or two, then lets it drop. When it makes the requisite bright ringing noise, he nods gruffly. A dirty gun will give a dull thud, or no noise at all. He flips open my cartridge box, checking unnecessarily for penny wrappers or stapled cartridges—these are hazardous. They can put out someone’s eye, or even do them in. But my father rolls all my cartridges because I make such a mess of them when I try to do it for myself.

  “Fine cartridges, son,” he says, and moves on to scold a poor farby next to me whose gun is dirty, whose buttons are sewn upside down. “You’re a disgrace!” he tells him, and it sounds for a moment like he is talking to Clay.

  Joan is behind me. I can hear the colonel praising her. Her musket barrel has rung so purely it has moved him practically to tears.

  “It’s obvious, soldier,” he says, “that you care deeply for that weapon. I think it must be the best-cared-for gun in the whole Army of the Cumberland.”

  “I love it, sir,” she says. “I love it like it was my own baby.”

  After drill I help my father give an informative talk for the civilian spectators, “What Was in a Typical Haversack?” I am his dodo, or translator. He is in character as great-great-grandpa, and I am there so he does not have to come out of it, to answer questions whose answers are beyond the ken of his nineteenth-century persona.

  “You had your eating implements,” he says, pointing at the little table upon which he’d emptied out his sack. “Knife and fork, a real big spoon, a tin plate, and a dipper.”

  “Wouldn’t a spork have been more economical?” asks a man. He leans forward from the ring of people surrounding us and points at the big spoon. “Wouldn’t a spork have been better? Why didn’t you use a spork?”

  My father gives a me a confused look. “Spork?”

  “A combination spoon and fork,” I say, hating that he is pretending not to know what a spork is. “Sir,” I say to the pale, fat man, “they didn’t have sporks back then. Thomas Alva Edison invented the spork in 1878, thirteen years after the war’s end.” My father glares at me. There are few offenses graver, in his book, than giving out misinformation at a haversack talk. But I like to remind myself how lying and pretending are different. He moves on to the food you ate with your implements.

  “Hardtack, beans, desiccated vegetables, fatback, and salt pork.” He has me pass around some hardtack. We always have a big hardtack bake-off before we leave for a reenactment.

  “They ate this stuff ?” asks Sporky.

  “Yes, we did,” says my father. “But we did not like it.” He sings a few verses of “Hard Crackers Come Again No More.” A child bites into the hardtack—one always does—and says it tastes like cardboard. My father points out some personal items, letters and a Bible and a jacknife. A lady is concerned that letters from home would get greasy if you put them in with the fatback. The fatback is being passed around, too, and she is holding it at arm’s length like it’s a dead rat. My father admits that greasy letters were a problem.

  “How long did the war last?” asks the child who tried the hardtack.

  “Four years,” says my father.

  “Like high school,” says the fatback lady.

  “Very much,” I say. “Brutal and hellish, and when you were in it, it seemed like it would never, ever end.”

  “You had your armaments,” my father says. “You could maybe put your bayonet in your haversack, if it was properly sheathed.” People clamor for him to talk about his gun. Nobody ever had to ask him twice to do that.

  “This is a U.S. Springfield Model 1861 rifle-musket. Named after the armory where she was manufactured, but I call her Sally.” Sporky raises his hand with another question. “Yes, sir?” my father says.

  “Did they hide behind those when they were shooting?” he asks, pointing at the stacks of cannonballs that spring up everywhere on the field, commemorating the fall of this or that general, and the tall obelisks commemorating the brave stand of this or that regiment.

  “In fact they did,” I say. “Whoever reached the monuments first enjoyed a distinct advantage.”

  My father throws me out of his talk. He gets my mother to be his dodo, which is fine with me. I go looking for Joan and find her in her tent with a one-pound can of powder open between her legs, rolling cartridges. I crawl in and sit down next to her. When I lean over for a kiss, she pushes me away.

  “Don’t!” she says. “You’ll mess it up.”

  “I thought you had a full box already.”

  “I need a special one,” she says, folding up the tail of the cartridge she is working on. She tosses it to me. It has an unfamiliar weight, and it takes me a long stupid moment to realize it’s because she’s put a real minié ball in there.

  “What’s this for?” I ask her.

  “What do you think?” she says. And then she does kiss me. I sit and smooch with her, her not-blank clutched in my hand, when I should be running to my father or the colonel to report. I’m going to leave now, I tell myself. This is somebody’s life in my hands. But I don’t leave.

  I am buddied up with Joan for the big event, the reenactment of Thomas’s Stand on Snodgrass Hill. It seems strange to me, sometimes, how the historians talk. Time after time, they say, Thomas was assaulted by furious Confederate attacks, but somehow he managed to hold on. As if he did all the fighting himself. As if he died again and again and again over the course of the day. As if this was a battle between two giants—handsome, noble Thomas, and drunken, contrary Bragg—and not a thing fought by little men who come to know as they duck and kill how their lives are infinitely precious and cheap.

  I have a plan to stay near Joan and steal her cartridge when she tries to use it. “Coming over!” I shout, and then fire past her shoulder at the Rebs climbing the hill between the thin oaks. We are lined up in regiment, just two deep, and I am in a position to see her every move. The live cartridge is wrapped in funny papers, not ordinary newsprint. I will know it when I see it. I am ready to stop her.

  Who is guilty? Clay wrote. I am guilty. I am guilty. I look back on my life and it is all shame. I have his journal with me at the battle. I carry it around always. At first I carried it everywhere (it’s small and fits in any pocket) for fear that someone would discover it if I left it alone, and then because I got in the habit of consulting it, like some people consult their Bible. Who is guilty? I read that passage before we went up to the hill.

  The Rebs keep charging and falling back, ululating as they come. Their peculiar cry makes them sound like reckless, hooting drunks. It was supposed to be formidable, 135 years ago. It unnerved the Union soldiers greatly, and they struggled unsuccessfully to come up with a cry of their own, an answer, a great hurrah to raise their spirits as they rushed forward to die, but contemporary
accounts tell that they mostly sounded like they were about to vomit. The Rebel charges must fail. They won’t take the field until Thomas makes an orderly retreat to Chattanooga.

  Where does it go? That’s what I want to know. That’s the question I’d like to write in Clay’s book. Where does it disappear to, all the pain of an anguished life, after that life has ended? My parents and my brothers, I think they believed it got sucked into Clay’s coffin, in a sort of reverse Pandora’s box effect. So after he died they were always sighing, as if at the sadness of everything, but really I think they were sighing with relief, because they would no longer be tortured with his torturedness.

  Joan turns and smiles at me as she loads the funny-paper cartridge. I point my gun at the ground, put my hand out to touch her shoulder. “Don’t,” I say weakly. All around us people are conducting the ordinary business of battle, cocking, firing, charging, taking their hits and offering up their dying groans. I don’t watch her do it. I take a hit and cover my eyes while she raises her rifle and picks out her Reb. I imagine her searching, looking for a nice, juicy, backward-thinking one. “Don’t,” I say again, but I feel a thrill inside when I hear her fire, and I imagine Clay taking a shot at the world that heaped him. The sky is an obscene belly. It smothers me. I see my brother stab back at the world, not consenting to be ruined and killed by it.

  I uncover my eyes. Joan is standing just in front of me, looking very calm, peering through the smoke. She raises her rifle, and I think she’ll shoot again, that she has more bullets, that even if I had taken away her cartridge she still would have shot somebody. But she drops her rifle, takes a hit with a moan more of pleasure than of pain, and falls down with a peaceful look on her face.

  “Crybaby,” she says to me.

  A CHILD’S BOOK OF

  SICKNESS AND DEATH

  My room, 616, is always waiting for me when I get back, unless it is the dead of winter, rotavirus season, when the floor is crowded with gray-faced toddlers rocketing down the halls on fantails of liquid shit. They are only transiently ill, and not distinguished. You earn something in a lifetime of hospitalizations that the rotavirus babies, the RSV wheezers, the accidental ingestions, the rare tonsillectomy, that these sub-sub-sickees could never touch or have. The least of it is the sign that the nurses have hung on my door, silver glitter on yellow posterboard: Chez Cindy.

  My father settles me in before he leaves. He likes to turn down the bed, to tear off the paper strap from across the toilet, and to unpack my clothes and put them in the little dresser. “You only brought halter tops and hot pants,” he tells me.

  “And pajamas,” I say. “Halter tops make for good access. To my veins.” He says he’ll bring me a robe when he comes back, though he’ll likely not be back. If you are the sort of child who only comes into the hospital once every ten years, then the whole world comes to visit, and your room is filled with flowers and chocolates and aluminum balloons. After the tenth or fifteenth admission, the people and the flowers stop coming. Now I get flowers only if I’m septic, but my uncle Ned makes a donation to the Short Gut Foundation of America every time I come in.

  “Sorry I can’t stay for the H and P,” my father says. He would usually stay to answer all the questions the intern du jour will ask, but during this admission we are moving. The new house is only two miles from the old house, but is bigger, and has views. I don’t care much for views. This side of Moffitt Hospital looks out over the park and beyond that to the Golden Gate. On the nights my father stays, he’ll sit for an hour watching the bridge lights blinking while I watch television. Now he opens the curtains and puts his face to the glass, taking a single deep look, before turning away, kissing me goodbye, and walking out.

  After he’s gone, I change into a lime-green top and bright-white pants, then head down the hall. I like to peep into the other rooms as I walk. Most of the doors are open, but I see no one I know. There are some orthopedic-looking kids in traction; a couple of wheezers smoking their albuterol bongs, a tall, thin, blond girl sitting up very straight in bed and reading one of those fucking Narnia books. She has CF written all over her. She notices me looking and says hello. I walk on, past two big-headed syndromes and a nasty rash. Then I’m at the nurses’ station, and the welcoming cry goes up, “Cindy! Cindy! Cindy!” Welcome back, they say, and where have you been, and Nancy, who always took care of me when I was little, makes a booby-squeezing motion at me and says, “My little baby is becoming a woman!”

  “Hi, everybody,” I say.

  See the cat? The cat has feline leukemic indecisiveness. He is losing his fur, and his cheeks are hurting him terribly, and he bleeds from out of his nose and his ears. His eyes are bad. He can hardly see you. He has put his face in his litter box because sometimes that makes his cheeks feel better, but now his paws are hurting and his bladder is getting nervous and there is the feeling at the tip of his tail that comes every day at noon. It’s like someone’s put it in their mouth and they’re chewing and chewing.

  Suffer, cat, suffer!

  I am an ex-twenty-six-week miracle preemie. These days you have to be a twenty-four-weeker to be a miracle preemie, but when I was born you were still pretty much dead if you emerged at twenty-six weeks. I did well except for a belly infection that took about a foot of my gut—nothing a big person would miss but it was a lot to one-kilo me. So I’ve got difficult bowels. I don’t absorb well, and get this hideous pain, and barf like mad, and need tube feeds, and beyond that sometimes have to go on the sauce, TPN—total parenteral nutrition—where they skip my wimpy little gut and feed me through my veins. And I’ve never gotten a pony, despite asking for one every birthday for the last eight years.

  I am waiting for my PICC—you must have central access to go back on the sauce—when a Child Life person comes rapping at my door. You can always tell when it’s them because they knock so politely, and because they call out so politely, “May I come in?” I am watching the meditation channel (twenty-four hours a day of string ensembles and trippy footage of waving flowers or shaking leaves, except late, late at night, when between two and three a.m. they show a bright field of stars and play a howling theremin) when she simpers into the room. Her name is Margaret. When I was much younger I thought the Child Life people were great because they brought me toys, and took me to the playroom to sniff Play-Doh, but time has sapped their glamour and their fun. Now they are mostly annoying, but I am never cruel to them, because I know that being mean to a Child Life specialist is like kicking a puppy.

  “We are collaborating with the children,” she says, “in a collaboration of color, and shapes, and words! A collaboration of poetry and prose!” I want to say, People like you wear me out, honey. If you don’t go away soon I know my heart will stop beating from weariness, but I let her go on. When she asks if I will make a submission to their hospital literary magazine I say, “Sure!” I won’t, though. I am working on my own project, a child’s book of sickness and death, and cannot spare thoughts or words for The Moffitteer.

  Ava, the IV nurse, comes while Margaret is paraphrasing a submission—the story of a talking IV pump written by a seven-year-old with only half a brain—and bringing herself nearly to tears at the recollection of it.

  “And if he can do that with half a brain,” I say, “imagine what I could do with my whole one!”

  “Sweetie, you can do anything you want,” she says, so kind and so encouraging. She offers to stay while I get my PICC but it would be more comforting to have my three-hundred-pound Aunt Mary sit on my face during the procedure than to have this lady at my side, so I say no thank you, and she finally leaves. “I will return for your submission,” she says. It sounds much darker than she means it.

  The PICC is the smoothest sailing. I get my morphine and a little Versed, and I float through the fields of the meditation channel while Ava threads the catheter into the crook of my arm. I am in the flowers but also riding the tip of the catheter, à la Fantastic Voyage, as it snakes up into my heart. I don
’t like views, but I like looking down through the cataract of blood into the first chamber. The great valve opens. I fall through and land in daisies.

  I am still happy-groggy from Ava’s sedatives when I think I hear the cat, moaning and suffering, calling out my name. But it’s the intern calling me. I wake in a darkening room with a tickle in my arm and look at Ava’s handiwork before I look at him. A slim PICC disappears into me just below the antecubital fossa, and my whole lower arm is wrapped in a white mesh glove that looks almost like lace, and would have been cool back in 1983, when I was negative two.

  “Sorry to wake you,” he says. “Do you have a moment to talk?” He is a tired-looking fellow. At first I think he must be fifty, but when he steps closer to the bed I can see he’s just an ill-preserved younger man. He is thin, with strange hair that is not so much wild as just wrong somehow, beady eyes and big ears, and a little beard, the sort you scrawl on a face, along with devil horns, for purposes of denigration.

  “Well, I’m late for cotillion,” I say. He blinks at me and rubs at his throat.

  “I’m Dr. Chandra,” he says. I peer at his name tag: Sirius Chandra, M.D.

  “You don’t look like a Chandra,” I say, because he is as white as me.

  “I’m adopted,” he says simply.

  “Me, too,” I say, lying. I sit up and pat the bed next to me, but he leans against the wall and takes out a notepad and pen from his pocket. He proceeds to flip the pen in the air with one hand, launching it off the tips of his fingers and catching it again with finger and thumb, but he never writes down a single thing that I say.

  See the pony? She has dreadful hoof dismay. She gets a terrible pain every time she tries to walk, and yet she is very restless and can hardly stand to sit still. Late at night her hooves whisper to her, asking “Please, please, just make us into glue,” or they strike at her as cruelly as anyone who ever hated her. She hardly knows how she feels about them anymore, her hooves, because they hurt her so much, yet they are still so very pretty—her best feature, everyone says—and biting them very hard is the only thing that makes her feel any better at all. There she is, walking over the hill, on her way to the horse fair, where she’ll not get to ride on the Prairie Wind, or play in the Haunted Barn, or eat hot buttered morsels of cowboy from a stand, because wise carnival horses know better than to let in somebody with highly contagious dismay. She stands at the gate, watching the fun, and she looks like she is dancing but she is not dancing.