Legends

Dr. Treffler, caught in the web of Lincoln’s tale, leaned toward him when he stopped talking. “Admit it,” he said with a sneer, “it’s beginning to dawn on you that I am recounting the truth.” When she nodded carefully, he went on. “I was expecting execution by hanging but the old officer with the silver hair and crutches had something more dreadful in store. At first light my wrists and elbows were bound behind my back with a length of telegraph wire. I was taken from the hospital wagon by two men wearing the striped shirts of penitentiary guards and paraded to the other side of Marye’s Hill and the turnpike known as Plank Road, called so because the craters gouged by several dozen exploding Federal mortar rounds had been too deep to fill with earth and had been covered over with planking to make the road passable. Standing at the lip of one such crater, which was roughly the size of a large wagon wheel, with the planks intended to patch it stacked at the side of the turnpike, it struck me what my interrogator intended when he spoke of execution. One of the penitentiary guards produced a square of strawboard with the words “The spy Dittmann” lettered on it in India ink and attached the sign with cotter pins to the back of my shoddy jacket. I divined who the author of my unusual execution was when I caught sight of Stonewall Jackson, known to be a religious fanatic, sitting his horse on a rise above me, a look of unadulterated malevolence on his face. He removed the cigar from his mouth and studied me for a long while, as if he were committing me and the moment to memory. He angrily flicked cigar ashes as he issued instructions to an aide. I was too far away to make out more than a few words. Buried, that’s what I want, but alive … Hundreds of Confederates on the side of the hill had stopped what they were doing to watch the execution. My interrogator plucked a cigarette from the mouth of one of the penitentiary guards and, making his way to me on his crutches, wedged it between my parched lips. It is a matter of tradition, he said. A man condemned to death is entitled to a last cigarette. Trembling, I puffed on the cigarette. The act of smoking, and the smoke cauterizing my throat, distracted me. My interrogator stared at the ash, waiting for it to buckle under its own weight and fall so they could get on with the execution. Sucking on the cigarette, I became aware of the ash, too. Life itself seemed to ride on it. Defying gravity, defying sense, it grew longer than the unsmoked part of the cigarette.”

“And then?”