Savage Love by Douglas Glover Page A

Netherby, sir!” I say. “Of the 41st. I am a little altered in condition, not up to scratch. I tried to save as many as I could —”
    â€œGood lord,” says Surgeon Kennedy, a gleam of recognition under his scrutinizing brow.
    â€œAnd brandy,” I say. “I could do with a stiff toddy. Or something mulled, all hot with raw brown sugar, cloves and cinnamon. Have ye any cinnamon in the apothecary stores?”
    â€œGo and lie down in the wagons,” says Surgeon Kennedy.
    The brown girl dashes from one only slightly animate bundle to another, dodging the skeletal perambulants who importune her with fatalistic courtesy.
    â€œA mite to sup, Miss? — Have ye a hankee or a bit of rag for a blanket? — Hasty bint, ain’ t she? Always rushing about. — She’s very clean. Never seen anything like it. Fancy she’s just been to a wedding?”
    Soldiers shake out blanket tents, anchoring them with bayonets, and one of the new-style canvas round tents, snapping the cloth like cannon shots, strumming the guy ropes with their fingers. Fires blaze, fierce with snapping pitch, roofed with spits and sides of beef, night falling and the fires like the hecatombs of Greece glaring on the cliff face. Everything quiet and efficient. Quickly, quickly, for the dead are anxious along the shoreline where the Lake Erie waves slap indifferently.
    The fiddle music has stopped. A line of villagers troops down the S-curve of the wagon track where rainwater dashes in rivulets. Smell of meat roasting. The dragoon’s wife lies in the sand wrapped in an officer’s wool coat, her husband’s busby, much trod upon and muddy, clasped in one thin, languorous hand. But for S gt. Collins, who attends her microscopically, she would be dead already, has wanted to die.
    Death has become an image of release from suffering. It beckons us all like a sultry lover, a whore in a basement cot, promising forgetfulness and release.
    Her name is Edith, pronounced in the French way, Eh-deet . Her husband was a magistrate’s son at York who enlisted in the dragoons because he could afford a horse and liked being above everyone else. But his death was violent, gross and humiliating. He was so full of bright life (a flame, an explosion). She loved the youth of him.
    â€œI shall go to him,” she said, quoting King David, “but he shall not return to me.”
    The brown girl falls to her knees in the wet sand next to a dying soldier boy and begins to pray. Her bumpkin husband, the tailcoat boy who followed her down the track, dabs at her hair with his red kerchief.
    S gt. Collins, heady with fever, leans down, his voice resolved to a hoarse croak. “Ye won’t do him any good with that,” he says.
    â€œI am not afraid,” she says to the tall, gaunt, black Irishman hanging over her.
    â€œ Ye should be,” he says.
    Then he says, “This one was from Cork, with a sweetheart named Red Brigid Delaney. He won’t know the difference. Can ye be Red Brigid Delaney, or are ye a useless whore?”
    You can see her mull this over. On the one hand, prayer and everything she’s ever been taught; on the other, the murderous transvestite Irishman, with his body courage and practical pity. No one has ever seemed as alive to her in that moment as S gt. Collins.
    â€œI can,” she says with a steady look.
    She has suddenly changed from the wild child skipping down the track in the rain, the near horizons of house yard and stump fence obliterated. Always the mystery of the boundless mercury-coloured lake and the local stories of witchery, seer stones and underwater monsters attracted her.
    I remember the firing squads at Camp Bull along the Scioto where the river runs in reptilian loops by ancient mounds the provenance of which even the Indians have forgotten. Camp theories are divided as to their being raised by Egyptian or Phoenician travellers or whether they were remnants of