Sarat nodded. She had seen it before, seen the tentacles of marsh and swamp and the boot-shaped expanse of land they’d once formed. But she wanted him to show her. She followed him to the map. He pointed to the place where Louisiana’s shattered hourglass figure brushed against the western edge of Mississippi.
“You see here, where the river meets the Gulf? That used to be land. Beautiful land. And here, near where the eastern shore is now, there used to be the loveliest city in all of America.”
The girl observed the map. On the newer one on the wall beside it, the place where the man pointed was a uniform blue.
“Where were you born?” she asked him.
“I was born in a place called Rome,” Gaines said.
“Where’s that?”
“Well, the famous one was in a place called Italy, but the one I came from is in New York.”
Sarat watched the man’s eyes for signs of a lie, but there were none. She realized then that, save for the dwindling number of journalists who showed up at the camp every now and then and who always made great effort to appear geographically neutral, she’d never met a Northerner before.
“You’re a Blue,” she said.
“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “You asked me where I was born, and I told you. Had you asked me where I call home, I would have told you something different.”
“What are you, then?” she asked.
Gaines sat at the table. “Well,” he said, “when I was young, I was a soldier. This was back when there was no Red and no Blue, just the one military of the United States of America. Then when I was through being a soldier, I studied to become a doctor, and for a while I worked as a plastic surgeon. Do you know what plastic surgery is?”
“You made people look pretty.”
Gaines laughed. “I suppose I did, in a way. I spent most of my time helping people who had been very badly burned. I specialized in repairing damaged skin.”
“You still do that now?”
“I still practice medicine, you could say. I volunteer at the field hospitals along the Tennessee line; I worked for a while near your old home in Louisiana, out by the oil fields.”
“You help rebels.”
“I help Southerners.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Sarat said. “My brother’s just about set to join the Virginia Cavaliers. He thinks he’s keeping it a big secret, but I know all about it.”
“Then for his safety you shouldn’t go around telling everyone, should you?”
“I didn’t tell everyone. I told you.”
Gaines smiled. “You know, before I practiced medicine, I wanted to become a mathematician. I was obsessed with very large numbers, and the way you can use them to tell secrets. But my father was a doctor, and he wanted me to study medicine. He used to say the only truly stable profession is blood work—the work of the surgeon, the soldier, the butcher. He said all industries rise and fall but as long as there’s even a single man still alive, there will always be use for blood work. And I suppose he was right.”
“So what are you doing in Patience, then?” asked Sarat. “I’ve seen the man they bring here once a week to hand out pills; you ain’t the camp doctor.”
“No, I don’t come here to hand out pills. What I come here to do—what you could say these days is my chief occupation—is something I don’t talk about with most people. But since I’ve taken a liking to you, Sarat, and since you were so kind to make that delivery on my behalf, and since you shared the secret of your brother’s affiliation with me, I think it’s only fair that I, in turn, share a secret with you. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s right,” Sarat said instinctively.
“What I do is travel around the Southern State—sometimes to camps like this, or towns along the border where the Blues and their Birds have caused terrible carnage, and I look for special people.”
“Special how?” asked Sarat.
“Well, courageous, I suppose,” said Gaines. “But courage isn’t enough. How do I say it? Let me ask you something. Do you ever see people in this camp who’ve been hurt by the Northerners, who’ve lost their limbs or their sight or a family member?”
“Hell, most people here are like that,” said Sarat.
“That’s right. And doesn’t it make you angry to know that the ones who did that to your people got away with it?”
“I guess.”
“And don’t you wish you could do something about it?”
Sarat paused, silent.
“I suspect right now you’re thinking, What can I do? I’m stuck here in this camp that may as well be a prison. What can I do against a whole army full of grown men with guns? Maybe there’s nothing I can do, nothing at all.”
“I didn’t say that,” Sarat replied.
Gaines laughed. “Of course you didn’t, of course you didn’t! And that’s my first inkling, Sarat, that maybe you’re one of the special ones. So let me tell you what it is I do. I seek out special people—people who, if given the chance and the necessary tools, would stand up and face the enemy on behalf of those who can’t. I seek out people who would do this even if they knew for certain that it would cost them dearly, maybe even cost them their lives. And then I do everything in my power to give them the tools, to give them their chance.”
Sarat waited for him to say more, but he sat quietly watching her. She struggled to think of a reply, some means of convincing him she understood exactly what he had said, even though she did not, even though she was mystified by almost all of it. The silence grew leaden around her; she blushed.
“Ah! Never mind all that,” Gaines said suddenly. “We’ll have plenty of time for that sort of talk later. For now, what say you we listen to some music?”
“All right,” Sarat said.
Gaines stood and walked to a set of bookshelves on the other side of the room. The shelves were full of old paper books. Some were impossibly thick, others bound in leather and inscribed with delicate golden script. While his back was turned Sarat ate another spoonful of honey.
At the bottom of the middle shelf there was a small, flat contraption Sarat had never seen before, and two small speakers connected to it. Gaines ran his finger along a row of thin plastic cases lining one of the shelves. He pulled one case out and opened it. Inside was a round disk whose underside turned the light to rainbows. He pushed a button on the contraption and its top sprang open. He set the disk inside, closed the lid, and pushed a button. A faint whirring sound followed.
“Does your family still have many old things?” he asked Sarat. “Things from before the war?”
“Not really,” Sarat said. “We used to have a few of my grandparents’ things back home, photos and a wristwatch and a couple of letters, but we left most of them behind when we came here.”
“That’s a shame, isn’t it? The first thing they try to take from you is your history.”
A soft stringed lament silenced their conversation. The room filled with music.
At its heart was an instrument Sarat had only heard once or twice before. Low, earthen strings, dampened as though filtered through the bones of deathbed oaks.
“This was my grandmother’s favorite song,” Gaines said. “Listen.”
A woman’s voice emerged from behind the waning strings. It was a voice unlike anything Sarat had ever heard before, full and deep and ciphered in a language she did not understand.
“?‘Son qual stanco pellegrino,’?” Gaines said. The words meant nothing to Sarat but their phonetic echoes clung to the walls of her mind.
She listened, enchanted. And afterward, when Gaines said he would like her and him to become friends, and that he would like to teach her about music and art and many other things from the vast and varied world beyond the gates of Patience, she nodded without thinking. Gaines smiled.
“I think you’ll find a place for yourself in this world, Sarat,” he said. “I think you’ll make a place for yourself in this world.”
Excerpted from:
A NORTHERN SOLDIER’S EDUCATION IN WAR AND PEACE: THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL JOSEPH WEILAND JR.