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

breeze that Walt, kneeling near it, could feel against his face. Hank clapped and laughed.
    Hank called the bird Olivia, though Walt pointed out that it was not a female bird. The female of the species was dun and dull, he said, but Hank seemed not to hear. Olivia became the ward’s pet. Other boys would insist on having him near their beds. It did not take the bird long to become domesticated. Soon he was eating from Hank’s hand, and sleeping at night beneath his cot. They kept him secret from the nurses and doctors, until one morning Hank was careless and fell asleep with him out in the middle of the aisle while Dr. Woodhull was making his rounds. Walt had just walked on the ward, his arms full of candy and fruit and novels.
    “Who let this dirty bird into my hospital?” Woodhull asked. He very swiftly bent down and picked up the stone, then tossed it out the window. Olivia trailed helplessly behind it. Walt dropped his packages and rushed outside, where he found the bird in the dirt, struggling with a broken wing. He put him in his shirt and took him back to his room, where he died three days later, murdered by the landlady’s cat. Walt told Hank that Olivia had flown away. “A person can’t have anything,” Hank said. He called Olivia a bad bird, and growled for a week about his faithlessness.
    *     *     *
    At Christmas, Mrs. Hawley and her cronies trimmed the wards, hanging evergreen wreaths on every pillar, and stringing garlands across the hall. At the foot of every bed, they hung a tiny stocking, hand-knitted by Washington society ladies. Walt went around stuffing them with walnuts and lemons and licorice.
    Hank’s leg got better and worse, better and worse. Walt cornered Dr. Woodhull and said he had a bad feeling about Hank’s health. Woodhull insisted he was going to be fine; Walt’s fretting was pointless.
    Hank’s fevers waxed and waned, too. One night, Walt came in from a blustery snowstorm, his beard full of snow. Hank insisted on pressing his face into it, saying it made him feel so much better than any medicine had, except maybe paregoric, which he found delicious, and which made him feel he was flying in his bed.
    Walt read to him from the New Testament, all the portions having to do with the first Christmas. “Are you a religious man?” Hank asked him.
    “Probably not, my dear, in the way that you mean.” Though he did make a point of visiting the Armory Square chapel, whenever he was there. It was a little building, with a quaint, onion-shaped steeple. Walt would sit in the back and listen to the services for boys whom he’d been seeing almost every day. He wrote their names down in a small leather-bound notebook that he kept in one of his pockets. By Christmas, he had pages and pages of them. Sometimes at night he would sit in his room and read the names softly aloud by the light of a single candle.
    Hank dropped off to sleep as Walt read, but Walt kept on with the story, because he could tell that Hank’s new neighbor was listening attentively. His name was Oliver Barley. He had been tortured by Mosby’s Rangers, staked spread-eagled to the ground with bayonets through his hands and feet. Whenever Walt came near to try and speak with him, Barley would glare at him and say, “Shush!” And sometimes if Walt and Hank were speaking too loud, he’d pelt them with bandages sopped with the exudate from his hands. It was Walt’s ambition to be Barley’s friend, but the boy rejected all his friendly advances. Yet now he was listening.
    “Do you like this story?” Walt ventured, stopping briefly in his reading.
    “Hush up,” said Oliver Barley, and he turned away on his side. Walt might have gone on reading, but just then Dr. Walker came by and asked to borrow his Bible. She said she had news from the War Department.
    “What’s the news?” he asked her.
    “Nothing good,” she said. “It is dark, dark everywhere.” She wanted to read some Job, she said, to cheer