Free The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page A

ten wagons, jennies straining to turn the wheels in the gumbo, ears standing up like bayonets. A street arab, one of the whores’ catch-colts, runs along beside a wagon, him all speckled with mud spitting off the rim, trying to jam a stick into the blur of wheel spokes. Some mongrel dog, patched with hairless skin, keeps darting at the pasterns of the swing mule, making it kick and bray like a cracked trumpet as the teamster tries to whip the dog off.
    The kid, the dog, the mule train pass, leave the street empty except for the rain and the younger of the two Englishmen splashing through the mud. I’ve heard someone speak his name. Gant? Gantry? Whatever the name, he’s been the talk of the town for weeks, the lodestone for a tribe of fortune hunters pouring into the Overland Hotel, in the hopes of selling lies about the fate and whereabouts of his brother.
    I wished I had my Bible to occupy me. Laying down on my plank bed, closing my eyes, I try to blank my mind. But it won’t do as I wish. Death lying near keeps crowding in. The jail starts to feel like that army hospital in Washington D.C., where they carted me off to after my last engagement in the war, the Battle of the Wilderness. Plenty of dead youngsters there. Every morning the beds were full of another night’s harvest of them. It came to me there in that hospital that thirty-eight was too old for foot-soldiering. And if I was too damn old, every boy on those rows of straw ticks was too damn young.
    Living with a pillow wrapped around my head to shut out the whimpering, the pounding of mattresses, the begging to be given back the arms and legs that were carried away in buckets. I heard these sounds through those long, suffocatingly hot summer days and nights. I heardthe soul-savers trooping up and down the aisles, mumbling prayers over dying boys, reading them their letters, leading the hymn singing, holding hands and preaching resignation to the blind, the shattered.
    One of these handed me a Bible. Strange to think I’d never dipped into the Good Book before then. Two years of schooling and I could read well enough, even as a boy I chewed every word in any newspaper came my way, even studied Mr. Daniel Webster’s Dictionary, had a taste for politicians’ stump oratory, loved large words, high-flown phrases. You’d have thought the Bible would have been right up my alley, but I had no interest in it.
    Now, lying in this army hospital, miles from home in a swelter of gall and despair I pored over that book, every passage speaking to me of the war and nothing but the war. “And he said unto him, My lord knoweth that the children
are
tender, and the flocks and herds with young
are
with me: and if men should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die.” It ran around in my head for days, a prophecy of all those suffering boys around me. I’d study on the Bible continual, think strange thoughts that seemed true to me then.
If man is created in the image of God, then all these men are a picture of the wounded, crucified Jesus. God laid on cots, line after line, each holding up to God a picture of His suffering Self. God staring up at God, and God staring down at God
.
    I recall lying in my bed one day, holding the Good Book pressed to my chest. The sun had flinched below the windowsill, the shadows of the trees outside were swaying crazily on the plaster wall when the parson arrived.
    I reckon it was a heartening Christian sight for him to see a man with a Bible clasped tight to his breast. Bending down over me, he murmured, “God bless you, sir. Would you like me to pray with you? Is there anything you want?”
    I told him plain what I wanted. I pointed that Bible down the row of pallets and said, “I want all these Jesuses to pick up their beds and walk. Matthew 9, verse 6. Jesus said to a suffering man, ‘Arise, take up thine bed, and go unto thine house.’ And the man did. Well, Jesusis looking down and telling all these poor boys just the same.