Gob's Grief by Chris Adrian Read Free Book Online Page A

my best to resist them,” said Dr. Walker, “and I shouted out, ‘Congress has bestowed on me the right to wear trousers!’” She held out her cup for more whiskey, and shook her head sadly at Walt. “But it was to no avail.”
    In the summer, Walt saw the President almost every day. He lived on the route Mr. Lincoln took to and from his summer residence north of the city, and walking down the street, soon after leaving his rooms in the morning, he’d hear the approach of the party. Always Walt stopped and waited for them to pass. Mr. Lincoln dressed in plain black and rode a gray horse. He was surrounded by twenty-five or thirty cavalry with their sabers drawn and held up over their shoulders. They got so they would exchange bows, he and the President, Walt tipping his broad, floppy gray felt hat, Lincoln tipping his high stiff black one, and bending a little in the saddle. And every time they did this Walt had the same thought: A sad man.
    With the coming of the hot weather Dr. Woodhull redoubled his efforts to eradicate noxious effluvia. He ordered the windows thrown open, and burned eucalyptus leaves in small bronze censers set in the four corners of each ward. The eucalyptus, combined with the omnipresent acrid reek of Labarraque’s solution, gave some of the boys aching heads, for which Dr. Woodhull prescribed whiskey.
    “I want a bird,” Hank Smith said one day in July. Walt had brought several bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup, mixed them with ice and water, and delivered the delicious concoctions to the boys, along with the news from Gettysburg. Hank was uninspired by Meade’s victory. He was in a bad mood.
    “I’ve been here forever,” he said. “And I am going to be here forever.” He had been fighting a bad fever for a week. “Nonsense,” Walt said, and helped him change out of his soaked shirt, then wiped him down with a cool wet towel. The shirt he took to the window, where he wrung out the sweat, watching it fall and dapple the bare ground. He laid the shirt to dry on the sill, and considered his damp, salty hands. In the distance Walt could see the Capitol, magnificent even under scaffolding.
    “I want a bird,” Hank said again. “When I was small, my sister got me a bird. I called it after her—Olivia. Would you help me get one?” Walt left the window and sat on a stool by the bed. The sun lit up the hair on Hank’s chest, and called to Walt’s mind shining fields of wheat.
    “Did you read my book?” Walt asked him, because he’d finally given Hank a copy, inscribed to my dear dear dear dear boy. Walt had had a dream, a happy one at last. Hank, transformed by Walt’s words, had leaped out of bed, wound gone, typhoid gone, had shaken Walt by his shoulders, and had shouted “Camerado!” so loud the Capitol dome rang like a bell, and all the boys all over the country had put down their guns and embraced each other in celebration of that beautiful word.
    “I fingered it a little. But a bird, wouldn’t that be fine?”
    “I could get you a bird,” Walt said after a moment. “Though I don’t know where from.”
    “I know where,” said Hank, as Walt helped him into a new shirt. With a jerk of his head Hank indicated the window. “There’s plenty of birds out in the yard. You just get a rock and some string.”
    Walt came back the next day with rock and string, and they set a trap of breadcrumbs on the windowsill. Crouching beneath the window, Walt grabbed at whatever came for the crumbs. He missed two jays and a blackbird, but caught a beautiful cardinal by its leg. It chirped frantically and pecked at his hand. The fluttering of its wings against his wrists made him think of the odd buzz that still thrilled his soul when he was on the wards. He brought the bird to Hank, who tied the string to its leg, and the rock to the string, then set the rock down by his bed. The cardinal tried to fly for the window, but only stuck in midair, its desperate wings striking up a small