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Disclaimer: All characters and events in this story are fictitious, and any similarity to a real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintended by the author. "The Pretender" is a protected trademark of MTM Television and NBC and the characters of that series are used herein with no mean intent or desire for remuneration. It is, instead, a tribute to innovative television, that rare and welcome phenomenon.
The Third Highway Series Part 19:
Brother in Arms
Chapter 1
Witch1
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
July 2, 4:46 A.M.
Jarod woke to the smell of strong coffee and the sound of even stronger language--the designated breakfast cook had evidently scalded himself on the cast iron kettle hung over the open fire outside the tent.
He stretched his lanky frame in the narrow, too-short cot: it had been made to the tolerances of 1863, when men did not regularly come in his height, and had made for an uncomfortable night of restless, feet-hanging-over-the-end tossing and turning. He remembered the dream then, all in a flash, a vivid, breath-taking flash.
More cursing emanated from outside the thin canvas walls of the tent he was sharing with the three other men. He listened closely for a moment, gauging if his medical knowledge would be needed, but the expletives drifted into vague complaint, then finally subsided.
The dream had been great, actually. He'd been in bed with both Laura and Miss Parker--who it turned out were actually twin sisters--and the sex had been so over-the-top he suspected that--and not the cook's string of obscenities--had actually awakened him. He'd certainly waken up with the clear evidence of his nocturnal adventures: a huge and demanding erection. He sighed, looking over at the lumps beneath the thin blankets in the other cots that were his roommates for the next four days: there was nothing to be done but--as Laura would characterize it--'waste it'.
He recalled, then, a line from the journal he carried with him--a leather-bound, dog-eared volume that he kept with the red notebook he'd begun weeks before--referring to similar moments, one-hundred and thirty-six years before:
"Many these mornings, I blush to relate," it began in the fine, even, scrolling script Jarod very much admired, "we have laughed amongst ourselves--as men together will, My Dearest--that we had sprouted, the four of us, four new tent poles during the night. Forgive me if my crudeness offends, but we are, you and I, so perfectly As One that I trust you will appreciate this jest in the spirit it was intended and take no harm in it, as none was intended."
Jarod smiled to himself at the constancy of some things, at the universal needs that bound all humanity together. The realization that he had to empty his bladder made him aware that his penis had relaxed itself, as his libido relaxed its grip on his thoughts.
He stretched again and then got rather awkwardly to his feet, remembering as well that the tent's height had been determined by the standards of a distant time and that he could only stand upright in its very center. He reached behind and around himself, trying to get at a persistent and annoying itch located right between his shoulder blades in the middle of his back.
It was the wool undershirt he was wearing, he knew: he never could comfortably wear wool next to his skin, and wondered for the millionth time if the people a hundred years distant had less-sensitive skin or simply a different definition of 'comfort'. Certainly the concept of wool clothing in the humid daze of July in Pennsylvania made little sense to him, and the way he had woken up smelling was proof enough that his body disliked the idea just as much.
He yawned and scratched first the stubble on his chin and then--contentedly--his crotch, pleased, never-the-less, by the simplicity of male companions, who could have cared less what he scratched or how he smelled as long as he left them equally alone in their sweaty, itchy bliss.
He thought of the century-old journal, again, and another passage that made more sense now that he was living out--in the flesh--the events it chronicled:
"You would scarce credit, my dear, what passes for Hygiene amongst us now, or the utter delight--as a remnant of careless Boyhood resurrected, no doubt--some certain soldiers take in this lack of cleanliness! Who would think a grown man in his prime of life would extol the virtues of an unshaven, unwashed state for the better part of an hour, and yet only yesterday eve I overheard Sergeant O'Collins and Private McConnaught vie back and forth with each other over which was the filthiest between them--with no clear conclusion drawn. Such is what passes for civilized discourse too often, as well, My Dear, and these contests of slovenliness are nothing rare. You, who have told me more than once that you see 'the Little Boy' inside me, would recognize all this bravura and bluster quite instantly, I believe. Entrusted with a Grand Undertaking, and distinctly in the hands of Fate though they may be, these grown males are still little boys at play making mud pies!"
He smiled to himself, pulled on wool trousers with red suspenders--still amused by buttons instead of a zipper fly--wool socks and heavy leather boots, and walked out into the dew and dawn--a surprisingly hot and hazy dawn, he was surprised to discover.
He thought of the journal again, and the entree for this very date, but in 1863:
"Dawn found us nicely dug in behind the comforting stone wall after we had excavated through the night to insure a slightly safer position on this battlefield-to-be. 'Safe' being a relative term, of course. Smoke from the hundreds of campfires this low-slung valley was suddenly, unwillingly host to hung in the air like shrouds in tatters, so thick at times I found myself wondering what I was mostly chewing: cook's dry biscuits, or the smoke itself?"
Odd, he thought, that the air should be so saturated with smoke--as far as he could see theirs was the first campfire lit this morning, and there was a slight breeze out of the east which should have kept the air clear.
Tom Wisenzenski, hunched over the fire, pointed behind the line of tents: "Porta Potties over there," he said.
Jarod half-laughed at the juxtaposition: nineteenth century clothing and gear, and portable plastic bathrooms.
But when he turned to look at where Tom pointed, he did a double-take: suddenly, inexplicably, the air was clear and bright, smoke-free and limpid.
He turned, a bit shocked, and looked to all points of the compass, finding clean air all around him where moments before he could have sworn there had been the haze the journal so vividly invoked.
It made no logical sense, but he could no longer ignore the pressing needs of his body and shrugged, heading for the relief behind the tent line, puzzled but distracted.
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Suquamish Island
Washington State
Laura's dreams were not so pleasant, although her awakening a continent away from Jarod was no less abrupt.
The hallway at the Centre, Jarod simply standing there until he was hidden from her view by flames: it was the same persistent nightmare she had been having with depressing regularity for weeks.
What was different was that Jarod seemed to have suddenly dropped off the face of the earth. In spite of her literally begging him to remain in email-touch, her messages to him had gone unanswered for the past three weeks. She understood what that most likely implied--that he'd begun a new sting and was completely enthralled by it, as he always was--but the other possibilities weighed heavily on her.
She sighed and looked at the bedside clock: 7:46, A.M. She was normally up by this time, anyway, but she'd slept so little, awakening to that same nightmare too many times to count, that she rolled over and tried to doze off again.
Her life had suddenly gotten a great deal more complicated, an--in spite of her concern-- Jarod wasn't the only thing on her mind. Plus, he'd done this so often--disappearing without warning or reason--that it no longer upset her as much as it once had. Depressingly, she realized she'd gotten used to and learned to accept that as one part of the price of having what passed for a relationship with him.
Being alone, missing him, nightmares, worry: it had all started to seem familiar and normal, somehow.
Besides, whatever he was doing, where ever he was, there was nothing she could do to warn Jarod that she hadn't already done.
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Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Jarod pondered the heavy steel instrument Tom had thrust into his hand with growing distrust.
"I swear it's sharp enough--honed it myself on a stone and then a leather strap just now," Tom reassured him. "There's no great art to it, Jarod: you just suck it in and put the blade against your cheek --"
But Jarod interrupted the other man, handing the straight razor back--safely closed into its ivory handle--with a look that spoke volumes. "A beard would be in character for 1863, wouldn't it?" he asked.
"Never took you for a wimp, man," Tom laughed. "But--yeah--beards were, like, really big back then. It was sort of the Golden Age of Facial Hair, actually. Still, can't believe you'd wimp out like that!"
Jarod sighed. He'd been a surgeon and knew all too well what harm that wicked blade could do, and had not been impressed by the tiny mirror Tom had offered: another genuine period piece, half its silvering worn off the back, and made with the thick, slightly bubbled glass of the time.
"That's not how I intend to die," he told Tom, and tentatively tried a sip of coffee out of the chipped enamel-over-tin cup he'd been given. "You do realize that people also died from heavy metal poisoning as a result of utensils just like this one?" he added.
Their Colonel, Barry Weisner, emerged from his private tent just then, scratching and yawning and carrying his boots in one hand.
"Jarod's dumping on the cups, now," Tom complained with a laugh.
"Ya gotta lighten up, Jarod," Barry told him with another yawn. "If anyone has a right to be horrified by the hygienic habits of the 1860's it's me. To a dentist, it's one pretty damned terrifying period of history--I collect old dental implements, you know. I'll have to show you some of the stuff I have: you'll have nightmares for weeks. Imagining no viable anesthetic, as well, of course. But we're only here for a long weekend, Jarod, then it's right back to good old 1998. I think you'll survive. A far as I know, nobody's been trapped in the 1860's yet."
"Speaking of 1998: I never thought I'd say I missed my freaking email!" Tom admitted. "There's a guy over in the 71st Pennsylvania that has a laptop hooked up to a cell phone--"
"What a load of crap!" Barry responded. "You mean you can't shut it off for four fucking days?"
"It was just a thought," Tom answered meekly, clearly cowed. "I was sort of curious if it would really work--"
"What degree of historical purity do you consider personally sufficient, Barry?" Jarod asked.
"That's 'sufficient, sir', private!" Weisner responded instantly, with a distinct snap in his voice.
But Jarod only nodded in answer: he was staring at the rising fog--or smoke, perhaps--that was suddenly billowing in from the East across the open wheat field below their bivouac. Once again he thought back to the tattered leather notebook he'd brought with him:
"There is an odd phenomenon caused by distance, which of course allows the sound of the big artillery to reach us before the first smoke from those guns drifts toward us, that has a disconcerting effect, My Dearest, arriving in billows that appear at first to be stage sets from some overwrought amateur Shakespearean production. One rather expects some corpulent, red-nosed Lear to stumble out of them, the Bard's interpretation of Lunacy all too seemingly apt. But when the smoke finally finds us it insists on it's reality, cloaking the battlefield in such constant haze as to make sight over any distance quite impossible. Here at this angle of the stone wall we have been ordered to defend, I gaze down across the open plain before us toward the Rebel lines--occasionally we can make out their movements in the trees there on what I've discovered is referred to by locals as 'Seminary Ridge'--and try to envision how we would perceive their assault, should it come. No doubt there would first be a profusion of artillery fire directed at our positions, and then the drift of the guns' smoke and the acid stench of powder. I imagine the enemy lines will be quite obscured by that thick billow of smoke. And out of it we will see first just the vague churn of movement, an undulating pulse of advancing mystery. Something quite unknown, perhaps unknowable. Which we will slowly recognize for what it is, so that first one and then another of the men will yell out--as they do--"It's the Rebs!" And a shimmer of fear will pass down the line, and I will remind myself--as I need do, My Love--that I am here to lead these men, and my example may stiffen them with resolve, so that they may fight and live, or fill them with trepidation, so that they may relinquish Logic to Fear and, perhaps, die here at this low stone wall because of it. And I will hear my own voice--unexpectedly, quite without plan or thought--yelling out, as well, some simplistic platitude of Bravery: "Come on men--we can hold them!", even if in my heart I doubt that might be the case, or suspect that the dead we have already made will surely rise up and join those misguided boys marching toward us. Perhaps that is how this awful war will finally end: with a battle between the living and the vengeful dead, returned to triumphantly herald us back with them into the graves we have forced them too early into."
Jarod shuddered slightly, recalling the words about the dead returning to claim the living. He almost felt as if something similar was happening, here in this camp, where men too accustomed to living a soft, comfortable life came together to pretend to be in another world, another time.
He had several times asked the others in the re-enactment group why exactly they only came together this way, to go through the motions of re-fighting a war. Why not stage re-enactments of such full complexity to celebrate other, less ghastly past events? None had really understood what he was trying to get at. It was clear to him the men enjoyed their vicarious participation in the Civil War in a way they would never enjoy less wholly masculine events. They got a real thrill out of the guns, the uniforms, the relics of the war they all collected and discussed endlessly among themselves. All that he had so far met had at least one item of particular importance--often a vintage gun or authentic personal item they carried with them to re-enactments and showed off to others--that did seem to take on the status of a true relic, inspiring a kind of quasi-religious devotion. Tom Wisenzenski had an entire collection of antique cookware and barber equipment, but his prize possession was a brass spittoon stamped with "69th PA". Barry Weisner proudly wore a saber that had belonged to the 69th's real Colonel at Gettysburg, James O'Shea.
And Jarod had the book he had so far shown no-one, although he knew it would have incited instant envy among the others. It was the journal of that same James O'Shea--owner of a respectable public house on the outskirts of Philadelphia, devoted son and husband, sometimes reluctant officer and unexpected philosopher. And Jarod had shown it to no one for a very good reason: he'd 'borrowed' it--without permission--from a museum in Philadelphia where it had rested--unread--in a large glass case with other Civil War memorabilia for generations.
Actually, he'd fully intended to use it merely to research the war and specifically the 69th Pennsylvania Regiment, and then return it before joining the re-enactors in Gettysburg. But something about the journal's utterly unwitting charm and O'Shea's always thoughtful, often blunt and sometimes off-color writing had completely seduced him. So he'd kept it, re-reading it often, by turns amused or saddened by passages, but always intrigued. In fact, he'd become quite obsessed with it, not the least of all by it's very reason for existence.
Because O'Shea had also found time to write letters directly to his wife--along with large correspondences with both his sister and mother. But the letters written directly to his wife lacked the simple honesty of his journal entrees, as well as their at times bluntly sexual tone. This puzzled Jarod.
At first he assumed that the letters he'd read from O'Shea to his wife had been edited by Mrs. O'Shea, and those of a more personal nature had been destroyed by her to prevent their acquisition by others. And yet that seemed increasingly unlikely as he'd delved further: the letters followed each other in close chronological order, one written each evening, and no dates were unaccounted for. Also, their general tone was simply different: they seemed stilted, emotionally cool compared to the journal. Even in a highly emotional age, when even the most rough-hewn of men unabashedly wrote flowery, hugely romanticized prose, O'Shea's letters to his wife had a perfunctory, by-rote quality totally at odds with the journal's pithiness and direct observation. Plus, events described by O'Shea in his letters were often re-iterated in the journal in much rawer form. When two deserters were tried by court-martial and hung, for example, the letter to his wife for that date described the scene in spare, trite language, with minimal detail, and followed with a string of patriotic maxims that Jarod sensed bordered on parody, they seemed so clearly mouthed without devotion to their banal, sanctimonious blather.
But the passage in the journal describing the very same event went on at great length, bitterly, about the need for the military to demand complete, unquestioned loyalty being predicated by it's need to offer up as many sacrificial victims to artillery fire as possible. Parts of those pages positively rang with O'Shea's passionate disillusionment with all things military, as well as his deep disgust at the files of men marched to stand in ranks to witness the executions: his keen observation of the looks of fascination and delight on their faces--faces which, as he pointed out, had been recently present at unimaginable scenes of carnage, which seemed to have un-dimmed their savage appetite for yet more suffering, fear and death--was hauntingly poignant.
Also, it made no sense that if Mrs. O'Shea had edited the letters for future generations, she hadn't destroyed the journal. It had been donated by her shortly before her death--along with parts of O'Shea's uniform--to the museum in which Jarod had found it.
Jarod had then decided that the journal was kept secret--and the letters kept bland--to cover the tenure of O'Shea's comments, perhaps from war-time censors. Except that had been no censors--the Civil War was the last war fought by a major world power in which citizen-soldiers were free to write whatever they wanted, to whoever they wanted. So that theory dissolved, as well.
It had finally, slowly, begun to occur to him that O'Shea's journal wasn't intended for his wife, at all. He had at first theorized a fantasy wife/mistress that O'Shea had created, a fictional woman able to appreciate the subtle nuances of O'Shea's sensitivity and the twists and turns of his agile mind.
But the sexually-charged passages seemed to argue against that theory, as well. There were too many telling details--O'Shea filled one entire page with closely-spaced writing enthusing about the woman-he-wrote-to's body, phrased in such vivid, mouth-watering detail that it had caused Jarod to have equally vivid dreams, and to wake up longing for exactly what O'Shea explained that HE was longing for:
"Your thighs, sweetly parted, the almost impossibly smooth, glowing skin on their inside surfaces like silk against my own body as I move myself forward, entering that which is pure bliss, even more silken still, and warm--so warm!--and enveloping. Taking me, taking that which is the very essence of myself, so radiantly deep, so that I lose all thought of that which is 'I' and 'me' and 'mine' and become part, only, of that which is 'us' and 'we' and 'ours'."
It finally seemed obvious to Jarod that the woman of the journal--never called by name--was a very real person, and O'Shea's mistress. Why that was difficult for him to accept was another matter: perhaps it was the seeming unlikelihood that people of that distant time, with their stiff, wool clothes and stiffer expressions--frozen forever by primitive cameras--had hot, passionate, illicit sex lives. Perhaps it was just that it seemed unlikely that O'Shea had such a hidden life: the man was widely considered one of the war's most noble--if relatively minor--heroes. After all, the 69th Pennsylvania had, by luck of the draw, found themselves stationed exactly at the spot chosen by General Pickett to focus the attack of his Confederate troops on the Federal line. And they held that position, in spite of losing half their number in the hand-to-hand combat that resulted when Pickett's remaining infantry reached the legendary Bloody Angle of the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge. It wasn't known as the High-Water Mark of the Confederacy for nothing: Gettysburg was a pivotal battle in the war, and the 69th was poised at the center of that pivot.
Jarod understood that human nature was human nature, and that otherwise moral people could give in to indiscretions. Hell, he saw so much of that--and of much worse indiscretions than O'Shea's--that he should have found O'Shea's journal not even slightly surprising. But he did. And he thought he knew why.
It was because it was so obvious that O'Shea had loved the woman he wrote his journal for passionately, totally, entirely, and his wife, not at all. But that never once, in all the journal's pages, even when O'Shea was at his most wistful, romantic--or lustful--did he say to her what Jarod imagined she most wanted to hear: that once the war was over, and he returned home, he would end the sham marriage he was trapped in and be with her full-time, as they should be, to live truly together.
It was never addressed, or even implied that this was a consideration. No matter how much he wrote of their special intimacy, no matter how clear that intimacy was in every sentence of his writing, O'Shea seemed oblivious to the possibility that they were meant to be together, and should be.
Jarod found that both odd and disturbing. It cut against his own awareness of romantic love. It upset him.
And that wasn't all he found disturbing about the journal. It had been returned to O'Shea's wife in July of 1863, along with other personal items, including the bundle of her letters to him. And she had turned it over to the museum. which meant that the woman O'Shea had written the journal FOR had never read it, nor even known it existed.
Colonel James Michael O'Shea had died on July 3, 1863 at the spot known afterwards as the Bloody Angle on the battlefield at Gettysburg. And the great love of his life--to whom he wrote passionately each and every day--never read those words of love and desire.
To Jarod, it all seemed unutterably sad. All of it, really: that distant war, the horrendous toll of death and agony, and this one, very personal, tragedy.
People who loved each other that much should not only tell each other, they should be together. It seemed almost sinful not to have that happen. Several times O'Shea wrote about how, the first time they'd met, he'd known he and his un-named lover would "be together". Jarod understood the concept--love at first sight--both as an abstract phenomenon and as reality: he'd felt much that way about Laura, after all, although he'd been too innocent about sexual attraction and romantic potential at the time to be aware of it. He'd simply assumed that men and women routinely had a spark pass between them when their hands touched, or could look into each other's eyes and see some vision of completeness. Increasingly, partly because of the journal, he felt incredibly sad that he'd not been more aware of and in tune with his own instincts then. Laura had advised him to 'trust his body', but he hadn't understood the full implications of that seemingly simple statement, that she meant not just allowing sex to guide him toward her body, but love to guide him toward her being.
He hadn't, in Laura's words, "gotten it", and neither had O'Shea. The woman of his journal had been his soulmate, but he'd fully intended, had he survived the war, on returning to his wife and living in complete denial of that fact.
Uncomfortably, Jarod pondered his increasingly tangled relationships with Laura--and the little girl he'd loved, who had grown into the complex woman called Miss Parker. He wondered if O'Shea--with the perspective of death to guide him--might make of all that, and what he would advise Jarod to do about it. And half-wished the dead did still walk on those battlefields--as O'Shea had postulated--so he could ask him what he thought.
Brother in Arms
Chapter 1
Witch1
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
July 2, 4:46 A.M.
Jarod woke to the smell of strong coffee and the sound of even stronger language--the designated breakfast cook had evidently scalded himself on the cast iron kettle hung over the open fire outside the tent.
He stretched his lanky frame in the narrow, too-short cot: it had been made to the tolerances of 1863, when men did not regularly come in his height, and had made for an uncomfortable night of restless, feet-hanging-over-the-end tossing and turning. He remembered the dream then, all in a flash, a vivid, breath-taking flash.
More cursing emanated from outside the thin canvas walls of the tent he was sharing with the three other men. He listened closely for a moment, gauging if his medical knowledge would be needed, but the expletives drifted into vague complaint, then finally subsided.
The dream had been great, actually. He'd been in bed with both Laura and Miss Parker--who it turned out were actually twin sisters--and the sex had been so over-the-top he suspected that--and not the cook's string of obscenities--had actually awakened him. He'd certainly waken up with the clear evidence of his nocturnal adventures: a huge and demanding erection. He sighed, looking over at the lumps beneath the thin blankets in the other cots that were his roommates for the next four days: there was nothing to be done but--as Laura would characterize it--'waste it'.
He recalled, then, a line from the journal he carried with him--a leather-bound, dog-eared volume that he kept with the red notebook he'd begun weeks before--referring to similar moments, one-hundred and thirty-six years before:
"Many these mornings, I blush to relate," it began in the fine, even, scrolling script Jarod very much admired, "we have laughed amongst ourselves--as men together will, My Dearest--that we had sprouted, the four of us, four new tent poles during the night. Forgive me if my crudeness offends, but we are, you and I, so perfectly As One that I trust you will appreciate this jest in the spirit it was intended and take no harm in it, as none was intended."
Jarod smiled to himself at the constancy of some things, at the universal needs that bound all humanity together. The realization that he had to empty his bladder made him aware that his penis had relaxed itself, as his libido relaxed its grip on his thoughts.
He stretched again and then got rather awkwardly to his feet, remembering as well that the tent's height had been determined by the standards of a distant time and that he could only stand upright in its very center. He reached behind and around himself, trying to get at a persistent and annoying itch located right between his shoulder blades in the middle of his back.
It was the wool undershirt he was wearing, he knew: he never could comfortably wear wool next to his skin, and wondered for the millionth time if the people a hundred years distant had less-sensitive skin or simply a different definition of 'comfort'. Certainly the concept of wool clothing in the humid daze of July in Pennsylvania made little sense to him, and the way he had woken up smelling was proof enough that his body disliked the idea just as much.
He yawned and scratched first the stubble on his chin and then--contentedly--his crotch, pleased, never-the-less, by the simplicity of male companions, who could have cared less what he scratched or how he smelled as long as he left them equally alone in their sweaty, itchy bliss.
He thought of the century-old journal, again, and another passage that made more sense now that he was living out--in the flesh--the events it chronicled:
"You would scarce credit, my dear, what passes for Hygiene amongst us now, or the utter delight--as a remnant of careless Boyhood resurrected, no doubt--some certain soldiers take in this lack of cleanliness! Who would think a grown man in his prime of life would extol the virtues of an unshaven, unwashed state for the better part of an hour, and yet only yesterday eve I overheard Sergeant O'Collins and Private McConnaught vie back and forth with each other over which was the filthiest between them--with no clear conclusion drawn. Such is what passes for civilized discourse too often, as well, My Dear, and these contests of slovenliness are nothing rare. You, who have told me more than once that you see 'the Little Boy' inside me, would recognize all this bravura and bluster quite instantly, I believe. Entrusted with a Grand Undertaking, and distinctly in the hands of Fate though they may be, these grown males are still little boys at play making mud pies!"
He smiled to himself, pulled on wool trousers with red suspenders--still amused by buttons instead of a zipper fly--wool socks and heavy leather boots, and walked out into the dew and dawn--a surprisingly hot and hazy dawn, he was surprised to discover.
He thought of the journal again, and the entree for this very date, but in 1863:
"Dawn found us nicely dug in behind the comforting stone wall after we had excavated through the night to insure a slightly safer position on this battlefield-to-be. 'Safe' being a relative term, of course. Smoke from the hundreds of campfires this low-slung valley was suddenly, unwillingly host to hung in the air like shrouds in tatters, so thick at times I found myself wondering what I was mostly chewing: cook's dry biscuits, or the smoke itself?"
Odd, he thought, that the air should be so saturated with smoke--as far as he could see theirs was the first campfire lit this morning, and there was a slight breeze out of the east which should have kept the air clear.
Tom Wisenzenski, hunched over the fire, pointed behind the line of tents: "Porta Potties over there," he said.
Jarod half-laughed at the juxtaposition: nineteenth century clothing and gear, and portable plastic bathrooms.
But when he turned to look at where Tom pointed, he did a double-take: suddenly, inexplicably, the air was clear and bright, smoke-free and limpid.
He turned, a bit shocked, and looked to all points of the compass, finding clean air all around him where moments before he could have sworn there had been the haze the journal so vividly invoked.
It made no logical sense, but he could no longer ignore the pressing needs of his body and shrugged, heading for the relief behind the tent line, puzzled but distracted.
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Suquamish Island
Washington State
Laura's dreams were not so pleasant, although her awakening a continent away from Jarod was no less abrupt.
The hallway at the Centre, Jarod simply standing there until he was hidden from her view by flames: it was the same persistent nightmare she had been having with depressing regularity for weeks.
What was different was that Jarod seemed to have suddenly dropped off the face of the earth. In spite of her literally begging him to remain in email-touch, her messages to him had gone unanswered for the past three weeks. She understood what that most likely implied--that he'd begun a new sting and was completely enthralled by it, as he always was--but the other possibilities weighed heavily on her.
She sighed and looked at the bedside clock: 7:46, A.M. She was normally up by this time, anyway, but she'd slept so little, awakening to that same nightmare too many times to count, that she rolled over and tried to doze off again.
Her life had suddenly gotten a great deal more complicated, an--in spite of her concern-- Jarod wasn't the only thing on her mind. Plus, he'd done this so often--disappearing without warning or reason--that it no longer upset her as much as it once had. Depressingly, she realized she'd gotten used to and learned to accept that as one part of the price of having what passed for a relationship with him.
Being alone, missing him, nightmares, worry: it had all started to seem familiar and normal, somehow.
Besides, whatever he was doing, where ever he was, there was nothing she could do to warn Jarod that she hadn't already done.
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Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Jarod pondered the heavy steel instrument Tom had thrust into his hand with growing distrust.
"I swear it's sharp enough--honed it myself on a stone and then a leather strap just now," Tom reassured him. "There's no great art to it, Jarod: you just suck it in and put the blade against your cheek --"
But Jarod interrupted the other man, handing the straight razor back--safely closed into its ivory handle--with a look that spoke volumes. "A beard would be in character for 1863, wouldn't it?" he asked.
"Never took you for a wimp, man," Tom laughed. "But--yeah--beards were, like, really big back then. It was sort of the Golden Age of Facial Hair, actually. Still, can't believe you'd wimp out like that!"
Jarod sighed. He'd been a surgeon and knew all too well what harm that wicked blade could do, and had not been impressed by the tiny mirror Tom had offered: another genuine period piece, half its silvering worn off the back, and made with the thick, slightly bubbled glass of the time.
"That's not how I intend to die," he told Tom, and tentatively tried a sip of coffee out of the chipped enamel-over-tin cup he'd been given. "You do realize that people also died from heavy metal poisoning as a result of utensils just like this one?" he added.
Their Colonel, Barry Weisner, emerged from his private tent just then, scratching and yawning and carrying his boots in one hand.
"Jarod's dumping on the cups, now," Tom complained with a laugh.
"Ya gotta lighten up, Jarod," Barry told him with another yawn. "If anyone has a right to be horrified by the hygienic habits of the 1860's it's me. To a dentist, it's one pretty damned terrifying period of history--I collect old dental implements, you know. I'll have to show you some of the stuff I have: you'll have nightmares for weeks. Imagining no viable anesthetic, as well, of course. But we're only here for a long weekend, Jarod, then it's right back to good old 1998. I think you'll survive. A far as I know, nobody's been trapped in the 1860's yet."
"Speaking of 1998: I never thought I'd say I missed my freaking email!" Tom admitted. "There's a guy over in the 71st Pennsylvania that has a laptop hooked up to a cell phone--"
"What a load of crap!" Barry responded. "You mean you can't shut it off for four fucking days?"
"It was just a thought," Tom answered meekly, clearly cowed. "I was sort of curious if it would really work--"
"What degree of historical purity do you consider personally sufficient, Barry?" Jarod asked.
"That's 'sufficient, sir', private!" Weisner responded instantly, with a distinct snap in his voice.
But Jarod only nodded in answer: he was staring at the rising fog--or smoke, perhaps--that was suddenly billowing in from the East across the open wheat field below their bivouac. Once again he thought back to the tattered leather notebook he'd brought with him:
"There is an odd phenomenon caused by distance, which of course allows the sound of the big artillery to reach us before the first smoke from those guns drifts toward us, that has a disconcerting effect, My Dearest, arriving in billows that appear at first to be stage sets from some overwrought amateur Shakespearean production. One rather expects some corpulent, red-nosed Lear to stumble out of them, the Bard's interpretation of Lunacy all too seemingly apt. But when the smoke finally finds us it insists on it's reality, cloaking the battlefield in such constant haze as to make sight over any distance quite impossible. Here at this angle of the stone wall we have been ordered to defend, I gaze down across the open plain before us toward the Rebel lines--occasionally we can make out their movements in the trees there on what I've discovered is referred to by locals as 'Seminary Ridge'--and try to envision how we would perceive their assault, should it come. No doubt there would first be a profusion of artillery fire directed at our positions, and then the drift of the guns' smoke and the acid stench of powder. I imagine the enemy lines will be quite obscured by that thick billow of smoke. And out of it we will see first just the vague churn of movement, an undulating pulse of advancing mystery. Something quite unknown, perhaps unknowable. Which we will slowly recognize for what it is, so that first one and then another of the men will yell out--as they do--"It's the Rebs!" And a shimmer of fear will pass down the line, and I will remind myself--as I need do, My Love--that I am here to lead these men, and my example may stiffen them with resolve, so that they may fight and live, or fill them with trepidation, so that they may relinquish Logic to Fear and, perhaps, die here at this low stone wall because of it. And I will hear my own voice--unexpectedly, quite without plan or thought--yelling out, as well, some simplistic platitude of Bravery: "Come on men--we can hold them!", even if in my heart I doubt that might be the case, or suspect that the dead we have already made will surely rise up and join those misguided boys marching toward us. Perhaps that is how this awful war will finally end: with a battle between the living and the vengeful dead, returned to triumphantly herald us back with them into the graves we have forced them too early into."
Jarod shuddered slightly, recalling the words about the dead returning to claim the living. He almost felt as if something similar was happening, here in this camp, where men too accustomed to living a soft, comfortable life came together to pretend to be in another world, another time.
He had several times asked the others in the re-enactment group why exactly they only came together this way, to go through the motions of re-fighting a war. Why not stage re-enactments of such full complexity to celebrate other, less ghastly past events? None had really understood what he was trying to get at. It was clear to him the men enjoyed their vicarious participation in the Civil War in a way they would never enjoy less wholly masculine events. They got a real thrill out of the guns, the uniforms, the relics of the war they all collected and discussed endlessly among themselves. All that he had so far met had at least one item of particular importance--often a vintage gun or authentic personal item they carried with them to re-enactments and showed off to others--that did seem to take on the status of a true relic, inspiring a kind of quasi-religious devotion. Tom Wisenzenski had an entire collection of antique cookware and barber equipment, but his prize possession was a brass spittoon stamped with "69th PA". Barry Weisner proudly wore a saber that had belonged to the 69th's real Colonel at Gettysburg, James O'Shea.
And Jarod had the book he had so far shown no-one, although he knew it would have incited instant envy among the others. It was the journal of that same James O'Shea--owner of a respectable public house on the outskirts of Philadelphia, devoted son and husband, sometimes reluctant officer and unexpected philosopher. And Jarod had shown it to no one for a very good reason: he'd 'borrowed' it--without permission--from a museum in Philadelphia where it had rested--unread--in a large glass case with other Civil War memorabilia for generations.
Actually, he'd fully intended to use it merely to research the war and specifically the 69th Pennsylvania Regiment, and then return it before joining the re-enactors in Gettysburg. But something about the journal's utterly unwitting charm and O'Shea's always thoughtful, often blunt and sometimes off-color writing had completely seduced him. So he'd kept it, re-reading it often, by turns amused or saddened by passages, but always intrigued. In fact, he'd become quite obsessed with it, not the least of all by it's very reason for existence.
Because O'Shea had also found time to write letters directly to his wife--along with large correspondences with both his sister and mother. But the letters written directly to his wife lacked the simple honesty of his journal entrees, as well as their at times bluntly sexual tone. This puzzled Jarod.
At first he assumed that the letters he'd read from O'Shea to his wife had been edited by Mrs. O'Shea, and those of a more personal nature had been destroyed by her to prevent their acquisition by others. And yet that seemed increasingly unlikely as he'd delved further: the letters followed each other in close chronological order, one written each evening, and no dates were unaccounted for. Also, their general tone was simply different: they seemed stilted, emotionally cool compared to the journal. Even in a highly emotional age, when even the most rough-hewn of men unabashedly wrote flowery, hugely romanticized prose, O'Shea's letters to his wife had a perfunctory, by-rote quality totally at odds with the journal's pithiness and direct observation. Plus, events described by O'Shea in his letters were often re-iterated in the journal in much rawer form. When two deserters were tried by court-martial and hung, for example, the letter to his wife for that date described the scene in spare, trite language, with minimal detail, and followed with a string of patriotic maxims that Jarod sensed bordered on parody, they seemed so clearly mouthed without devotion to their banal, sanctimonious blather.
But the passage in the journal describing the very same event went on at great length, bitterly, about the need for the military to demand complete, unquestioned loyalty being predicated by it's need to offer up as many sacrificial victims to artillery fire as possible. Parts of those pages positively rang with O'Shea's passionate disillusionment with all things military, as well as his deep disgust at the files of men marched to stand in ranks to witness the executions: his keen observation of the looks of fascination and delight on their faces--faces which, as he pointed out, had been recently present at unimaginable scenes of carnage, which seemed to have un-dimmed their savage appetite for yet more suffering, fear and death--was hauntingly poignant.
Also, it made no sense that if Mrs. O'Shea had edited the letters for future generations, she hadn't destroyed the journal. It had been donated by her shortly before her death--along with parts of O'Shea's uniform--to the museum in which Jarod had found it.
Jarod had then decided that the journal was kept secret--and the letters kept bland--to cover the tenure of O'Shea's comments, perhaps from war-time censors. Except that had been no censors--the Civil War was the last war fought by a major world power in which citizen-soldiers were free to write whatever they wanted, to whoever they wanted. So that theory dissolved, as well.
It had finally, slowly, begun to occur to him that O'Shea's journal wasn't intended for his wife, at all. He had at first theorized a fantasy wife/mistress that O'Shea had created, a fictional woman able to appreciate the subtle nuances of O'Shea's sensitivity and the twists and turns of his agile mind.
But the sexually-charged passages seemed to argue against that theory, as well. There were too many telling details--O'Shea filled one entire page with closely-spaced writing enthusing about the woman-he-wrote-to's body, phrased in such vivid, mouth-watering detail that it had caused Jarod to have equally vivid dreams, and to wake up longing for exactly what O'Shea explained that HE was longing for:
"Your thighs, sweetly parted, the almost impossibly smooth, glowing skin on their inside surfaces like silk against my own body as I move myself forward, entering that which is pure bliss, even more silken still, and warm--so warm!--and enveloping. Taking me, taking that which is the very essence of myself, so radiantly deep, so that I lose all thought of that which is 'I' and 'me' and 'mine' and become part, only, of that which is 'us' and 'we' and 'ours'."
It finally seemed obvious to Jarod that the woman of the journal--never called by name--was a very real person, and O'Shea's mistress. Why that was difficult for him to accept was another matter: perhaps it was the seeming unlikelihood that people of that distant time, with their stiff, wool clothes and stiffer expressions--frozen forever by primitive cameras--had hot, passionate, illicit sex lives. Perhaps it was just that it seemed unlikely that O'Shea had such a hidden life: the man was widely considered one of the war's most noble--if relatively minor--heroes. After all, the 69th Pennsylvania had, by luck of the draw, found themselves stationed exactly at the spot chosen by General Pickett to focus the attack of his Confederate troops on the Federal line. And they held that position, in spite of losing half their number in the hand-to-hand combat that resulted when Pickett's remaining infantry reached the legendary Bloody Angle of the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge. It wasn't known as the High-Water Mark of the Confederacy for nothing: Gettysburg was a pivotal battle in the war, and the 69th was poised at the center of that pivot.
Jarod understood that human nature was human nature, and that otherwise moral people could give in to indiscretions. Hell, he saw so much of that--and of much worse indiscretions than O'Shea's--that he should have found O'Shea's journal not even slightly surprising. But he did. And he thought he knew why.
It was because it was so obvious that O'Shea had loved the woman he wrote his journal for passionately, totally, entirely, and his wife, not at all. But that never once, in all the journal's pages, even when O'Shea was at his most wistful, romantic--or lustful--did he say to her what Jarod imagined she most wanted to hear: that once the war was over, and he returned home, he would end the sham marriage he was trapped in and be with her full-time, as they should be, to live truly together.
It was never addressed, or even implied that this was a consideration. No matter how much he wrote of their special intimacy, no matter how clear that intimacy was in every sentence of his writing, O'Shea seemed oblivious to the possibility that they were meant to be together, and should be.
Jarod found that both odd and disturbing. It cut against his own awareness of romantic love. It upset him.
And that wasn't all he found disturbing about the journal. It had been returned to O'Shea's wife in July of 1863, along with other personal items, including the bundle of her letters to him. And she had turned it over to the museum. which meant that the woman O'Shea had written the journal FOR had never read it, nor even known it existed.
Colonel James Michael O'Shea had died on July 3, 1863 at the spot known afterwards as the Bloody Angle on the battlefield at Gettysburg. And the great love of his life--to whom he wrote passionately each and every day--never read those words of love and desire.
To Jarod, it all seemed unutterably sad. All of it, really: that distant war, the horrendous toll of death and agony, and this one, very personal, tragedy.
People who loved each other that much should not only tell each other, they should be together. It seemed almost sinful not to have that happen. Several times O'Shea wrote about how, the first time they'd met, he'd known he and his un-named lover would "be together". Jarod understood the concept--love at first sight--both as an abstract phenomenon and as reality: he'd felt much that way about Laura, after all, although he'd been too innocent about sexual attraction and romantic potential at the time to be aware of it. He'd simply assumed that men and women routinely had a spark pass between them when their hands touched, or could look into each other's eyes and see some vision of completeness. Increasingly, partly because of the journal, he felt incredibly sad that he'd not been more aware of and in tune with his own instincts then. Laura had advised him to 'trust his body', but he hadn't understood the full implications of that seemingly simple statement, that she meant not just allowing sex to guide him toward her body, but love to guide him toward her being.
He hadn't, in Laura's words, "gotten it", and neither had O'Shea. The woman of his journal had been his soulmate, but he'd fully intended, had he survived the war, on returning to his wife and living in complete denial of that fact.
Uncomfortably, Jarod pondered his increasingly tangled relationships with Laura--and the little girl he'd loved, who had grown into the complex woman called Miss Parker. He wondered if O'Shea--with the perspective of death to guide him--might make of all that, and what he would advise Jarod to do about it. And half-wished the dead did still walk on those battlefields--as O'Shea had postulated--so he could ask him what he thought.
