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Legends

Martin, drained, went quiet. For some while the only sound in the small airless room came from the whir of the tape recorder and the nib of Dr. Treffler’s pen etching long lines of runty letters onto the loose-leaf page. When she finally looked up from her notebook, she asked, very softly, “How does Martin Odum know all this? The fact that the Confederates didn’t give medals, the flats of sabres driving the Federals away from the shelter of brick houses, the Chatham Mansion, the band playing waltzes on Marye’s Hill while Longstreet, with a shawl over his shoulders, watched the Georgians in homespun dyed with plant pigments fight off fourteen attacks on the sunken road—it’s almost as if you’d been there!”

Martin’s mouth had gone dry and the words that emerged from his lips rang tinny and hollow, the second half of an echo that had lost some of its shrillness on the way back. “Lincoln Dittmann was there,” he said. “He told me the details.”

Dr. Treffler leaned forward. “You heard Lincoln Dittmann’s voice describing the battle?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did he tell you he’d been there during the battle? Did he tell you he’d seen the fighting with his own eyes?”

“Not in so many words …”

“But you—you being Martin Odum—you assumed he’d been an eyewitness at Fredericksburg.”

“He must have been there,” Martin insisted plaintively. “How else could he have known all the things he knew? Lincoln told me lots more that isn’t in any books.” The words spilled out of Martin now. “The night of the battle temperatures plunged to below freezing … even in the cold of winter there were horseflies drawn to the blood oozing from wounds … the maimed Federals who were still alive dragged the dead into heaps and burrowed under the corpses to keep warm … riderless horses pawed at the frozen ground looking for fodder, but the only fodder at Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862 was cannon fodder.” Martin took a deep breath. “That was the last line of Lincoln’s book. The title came from the line. The book was called Cannon Fodder.”

Dr. Treffler waited for Martin’s breathing to settle down before she spoke. “Listen to me, Martin. Lincoln Dittmann is your contemporary. He wasn’t alive in 1862, which means he couldn’t have been at the battle of Fredericksburg.”

Martin didn’t respond. Dr. Treffler caught herself staring at him and turned away quickly, then laughed out loud and looked back. “Wow! This is stunning. You heard Lincoln Dittmann’s voice at our first session—he gave you the lines of that Walt Whitman poem you recited.”

“I remember. ‘Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence, soon unlimber’d to begin the red business.’ That wasn’t the first time I heard Lincoln’s voice—he’s been whispering in my ear for years. By the way, it’s Walter Whitman, not Walt. Lincoln told me he’d come across Whitman in a Federal field hospital after Burnside retreated from Fredericksburg—the poet was worried sick about his brother who’d taken part in the battle and was looking everywhere for him. Lincoln recalled that the soldiers who knew Whitman called him Walter.”

“Lincoln told you about Whitman being in the field hospital? About the soldiers calling him Walter?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did he recall it from having been there or from having read about it somewhere?”

Martin seemed not to want to deal with the question.

Dr. Treffler decided Martin had had enough stress for one session. “Your headache starting in again?” she asked.

“It’s blinding me.”

“What do you see when your eyes are shut tight like that?”

Martin thought about that. “A long blur of headlights, as if a camera has been set up on an overpass and the lens has been locked open to capture the streak of the cars speeding past underneath. Or the cosmos, yes, the entire cosmos in its big-bang mode, expanding, inflating like a balloon with small black spots painted on it, and each spot on the balloon receding from every other spot.”

“And how will this big bang end?”

“With me, marooned on one of the spots, alone in the universe.”