Savage Love by Douglas Glover Page B

once-great indigenous civilizations now gone to dust.
    Geography reminds us that each fevered and urgent moment of meaning will pass and that the wind of time is a cancer that destroys us all.
    Four American deserters in dress uniforms, bottle -green coats with black facings and shakos trimmed with braid, standing at attention like tall green candles (explosions of light) with their backs to the lazy river and their coffins, painted black, open before them.
    One man harangues his executioners, another sags at the knees then recovers, a chest heaves, puffs of smoke spit ragged down the line, the musket reports drift over the broken ground to the curious prisoners, the speaking man jerks, his shako topples neatly into the coffin. One man jumps up shrieking. The reserve squad steps forward smartly and shoots him again, yet he lies there still living, his body twitching and heaving till the blood is all out. The others rest quiet. Steam rises from their wounds. It is a chill morning. Mist rises from the river.
    Next spring the freshets will drag the coffins out of their graves along the riverbank, necessitating reburial.
    At this stage, we have not begun to go off in great numbers. Our guards die as often as we do. Yet death is always an event of note, a mass execution being a dramatic occasion, a theatre of fatality, death as entertainment and diversion.
    The camp hospital was at first chock full of the detritus of two lost battles, Erie and Moraviantown, the wounds of the lake fight being the worst: bodies smashed under falling spars or loose cannons rolling along the deck, wounds filthy with shreds of sail or wood splinters, lads waiting patiently to get their bits cut off and then turning themselves out, like candles snuffing, equally patient, quiet as lambs.
    It gives you vertigo to think. Everyone’s life is a centre of a universe that evaporates at the moment of death.
    But I do love a neat amputation.
    And we bury our dead in the Indian mounds, mixing their bones with the bones of ancient men.
    S gt. Collins stumbles into Surgeon Kennedy, both reeking of spirits. Kennedy has stripped to his shirt in the rain to operate, every gesture spare and perfect and strong. His body a furnace, the damp steams off his shoulders. He pokes lint stoppers soaked in gin up his nostrils to combat the stink, steeps laudanum in a teapot, tipping the spout to his lips from time to time.
    Collins wears his pantomime frock, burst at the waist, grey with filth.
    Kennedy: “S gt. , why are you dressed like that?”
    Collins, reeling: “With permission, sir. Not my colour, I know, sir. There was a want of blue taffeta in the camps. Cruel treatment for a poor industrial wheezer like me, sir.”
    Kennedy: “Yer a bold squireen, S gt. Collins.”
    Collins: “Nought can touch me now, yer honour, sir.”
    They are old friends from fights on the Ohio shore and at Moraviantown, when things went south for us, but Kennedy orders Field Punishment for the sake of form. Five strokes with his wrists bound to a medical wagon. Cut down, Collins drops on his knees, shakes himself like a dog, then staggers back to the sick looking refreshed, the flame inside burning fierce and hot.
    At the Battle of the Raisin, Collins was on detached duty with C apt. Crawford’s command, Shawnee savages dressed in scraps of stolen American uniforms, with Springfield and Kentucky rifles, hatchets and knives made of stone, sharper than razors. He conversed with Tenskwatawa and drank home-brew whiskey with the Potawatomi skin-changer Crippled Hand, men whose style of bravery was mystical and unearthly cruel.
    He was like Saul dancing among the prophets, and when he returned, he was not the same.
    â€œI am not afraid,” the girl says.
    â€œ You should be,” says Collins, more strange than human, more alive than the rest of us. “I am conjoint with Death,” he says.
    The brown girl’s soldier boy dies at her breast. For an