The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

vision gazing into a devotee’s future (the wardrobe door shaken by his father’s hand hidden behind, the curtains blowing on cue by his own paper fan waving from where he crouched beneath the sill outdoors) led to retirement from the hands-on trade, but the relief of human suffering remained her focus. Once bedridden, she put her talents to the page, producing a guidebook for those who would follow in her footsteps.

      The book was all he had left of her, and if he tried, he could hear her voice when he read the words. From expression comes splendor, she’d written. Hardly, he answered back. What splendor is there in abandoning the house in town, or a father dried up and useless without his wife, or sitting out here, day in and day out with nothing to do and nothing waiting at home?

      She excluded the idea of defeat from the book. Will had never seen the acolyte spurned by a lover and come to his mother to heal her heart. He only heard the rumors afterward: how his father had cleaned the bloodstains from their parlor floor, how his mother buried the knife the woman used to try and excise her own heart.

      “All people will ultimately reveal themselves as fools,” his mother said.

      Will crouched and warmed the dice in his palm, calming his thoughts. Sunlight was warm on his back. Sounds of the world around him vanished: no bird songs, no throat clearing from Bill Lee or Harmony. He slipped inside himself, at one with the rhythm of his own breathing and his heartbeat. An image of two double-spotted dice floated into his vision, a stereopticon card overlaying the real view of the planed pine board neatly placed in the black dirt.

      A planet’s brightness or its position in the night sky told his father when to plant and when to harvest, if a winter would be cold or mild. Electricity was an experiment in Europe, a factor in the telegraph, but not a magnetic liquid surging through a body. Will made no plan. He exhaled the word “four” in a whisper that he didn’t hear but knew he had said aloud. Then he threw, and his dice came up three and one. He rolled again with more precision than he had the day before. Two and two. Bill Lee whistled approvingly. Harmony nodded.

      Maybe his mother applauded him from somewhere in the ether. Maybe she waggled her fingers, and the Mesmerism she claimed moved his dice into a winning figure. Will rocked back on his heels, and the outside world opened up to him again. A catbird chirped a series of quick sounds, and somewhere distant, a horse whinnied. Will stood.

      “Gentlemen, you finally owe me.”

      Harmony clapped Will on the shoulder.

      “Congratulations, my friend, and welcome. Welcome to a new world, where poverty and the life of the lesser man is no more, where money is yours for the taking.”

      INTELLIGENCE HAD COME IN saying that Union troops were headed in from the West. Within a day, the cannon fire was audible. Will, Bill Lee, Harmony, and their fellow infantrymen waited for the order to charge. Bill Lee treated the pending skirmish like a bad joke. The big man dug trenches like a thresher, working his own and more than thirty feet of others’ until, without warning, he pitched his spade toward the horizon. The implement flew like a spear, raining dirt as it went, and Bill Lee stormed off to his tent.

      “Fuck it,” he said. “When they come, I’ll be in here. I’ve been waiting so long I’ll kill a dozen of them with my bare hands. I don’t need a damn gopher hole.”

      Harmony worked a trench crew, untroubled, cleared roadways through the brush for wagons, caissons, and, he told Will, ambulances. “We’ll see plenty of meat wagons, Mr. Force of Will,” he said. “Look around you at the regiments coming in. We’re going to see the elephant, alright, and it’s about damn time.”

      The elephant was battle; a huge, lumbering thing you couldn’t see around once it was in front of you. Will fully intended to see battle and emerge unscathed but for some romantic, painless scar, and vigorous tales unsuitable for mixed company. Months of relentless busywork, waiting, moving camp, and more of the same had worn the fight out of him. Add to that the weeks of playing craps, and he was nothing more than a homeless man weighted with debt.

      A trickle of sweat at the back of his neck rolled into his collar, taunting him to wipe it away. A cannon boomed, and the stink of gunpowder clung to the morning dew. When the cry to “charge” came from down the line, he wanted to vomit, but like a machine, like Harmony, Bill Lee, and a sea of men, Will ran forward. As if choreographed to a musical score, men fell ahead of him and behind. A man tumbled from his squealing horse and landed on Will, knocking him into the dirt. Will struggled to rise, pushing the man’s weight away just enough to get to his knees. The man’s face had been blown off: only a dark beard sticky with blood and an eyeball loose as a toy on a string marked it as a face. Will retched and ran, struggling to hold his rifle.

      He tried to spot Harmony in the churning mass of men around him, but everyone had become the same man. The earth had opened into a pit filled with writhing bodies. Men and horses raced into the vortex. The air itself was blue with smoke, and blood caked Will’s arms and hands, and he could do nothing but run and shoot wildly, aiming his rifle at the fragments of sky that appeared through rafts of smoke.

      Running blindly, Will somehow doubled back toward a road. There, away from the line of artillery, he saw the ambulances Harmony had teased him about. Will was soaked with blood. He could certainly pass for someone critically wounded. An ambulance could carry him to a field hospital, to a town, to somewhere not here.

      Running toward salvation, he tripped over a root, wrenching his ankle and tumbling face-first into a wet burlap sack. Pushing himself up on his elbows, Will saw he had fallen into an artilleryman’s jacket, the grey humped and torn over the body of a young man, dead but still warm. Will collapsed across the newly dead stranger, the man who would save his life.

      When the attendants came for the dead soldier and the scattered wounded and dying around him, the blood that Will had smeared on his own flesh had gone tacky and dry. The late afternoon air smelled like iron filings and buzzed with sated flies. The attendants hurried in their work, although the fighting had moved on. With one man holding arms and another legs they hoisted corpses into the ambulance. Like relay racers, they tended to the wounded, wrapping tourniquets where they could, applying clean rags to the oozing caves that had been stomachs or thighs, then carrying the moaning men on litters to a second wagon. Grown men sobbed and called for their mothers and wives. Will called for no one. An ambulance attendant crouched over him and told him he’d be all right. They were taking him to a field hospital. Will assessed the medic through one eye; about his age, and earnest. Even in a sea of blood, the fellow shone with the bright light of doing good works. Will laid it on thick, biting his lip nearly through and wincing as he nodded thanks. When the attendant moved to lift him onto a litter, Will’s deficit of injury nearly gave him away. He’d forgotten to cry out. The suspicion in the attendant’s eyes brought Will back to the gamble, and he put all his weight on his twisted ankle, screaming in pain as he allowed himself to fall again in the dirt.

      Will slumped into the ambulance as the attendants loaded two, three, and a fourth moaning, blood-soaked comrades around him like so many cobs in a corn-crib. When the ambulance jolted and began its rattle down the road, overtaking the dead-wagon, Will unwound a relatively clean bandage from a man who looked dead. He held the cloth over his mouth and nose, filtering the stench. Rolling along the path that Harmony had helped cut, Will closed his eyes and dreamed of a city’s streets, and of debt’s dead weight shed from his back.

CHAPTER THREE

       Cedartown, Georgia: October 1883

      OUR HOME WAS A SUNK-IN PLACE, WHERE GREEN hills rolled like lumps in a blanket under a sparkling blue sky. From our porch, I studied the road to Cedartown, which either was born or died at our property, depending on how a person considered it.

      The Cedartown Appeal was my atlas. In that newspaper I saw glimpses of the world beyond our dead-end road: cotton prices, train schedules, advertisements for Cheney’s lung expectorant, and closeouts on knit underwear. I read the train timetables more closely than any school book. Cedartown to Palestine,