Chapter Ten ~ Touchstone

The dog was barking at something outside, but that was nothing new. The black terrier always barked, mostly at its own shadow. The thought made Elizabeth smile. As a guard dog, Dickens was second best only to the donkey. She sighed, Zephyr Fields was getting filled to the brim with a menagerie of animals. But she wouldn't have it any other way.

The society class in Boston proper may have labelled her as eccentric—Harlan was appalled—but, she noted, they always took her money. Pushing away her coffee cup, she folded Scott's letter back into its envelope and got up when the yips turned insistent. Really, she thought, Boone took too many liberties with that dog.

"Missus! We have company!"

At Boone's shout, she drew aside the curtains and gasped.

Scott stood in the courtyard, leading a poor-looking horse. His face was angled to the ground, all his weight on one foot, and a hand came up to rub his head like he'd been hit. After a moment, he turned towards Boone, and for once Elizabeth couldn't read what was in his eyes.

Guarded, as he never was before.

#~#~#~#~#

Mortimer stood swaybacked and droopy from nose to tail. Eyes shut, his head hung almost to his knees. Utterly still for the last pair of hours. The dog barked at some unknown entity outside the barn and the horse's eyes fluttered open briefly, but he didn't turn his head to look.

It took Scott a while before he could get to his feet from his cramped space in the corner of the large stall, but when he did it was worth it. His back didn't hurt as much. A giddy, nauseating sensation rolled through him: he needed his medicine but it had been so long since the last episode he'd taken to not carrying it. Hand shaking, he grabbed a bucket and headed to the pump and trough.

He looked back at the open stall. He couldn't save Mortimer, not with good grain, water or medicine. Not even by being near him. Couldn't save himself, either, from feeling singularly angry and helpless.

He made it as far as the bale of hay near the open door when the next rack of shivers caught him and a small groan escaped before he could stop it. Fine beads of sweat formed on his brow. The bucket fell from his lax hand.

"Scott?"

He didn't answer, just breathed—fast and rumbly.

"Scott, say something, please!" Elizabeth grabbed his shoulder and shook him.

He squinted at the hazy figure clutching at him. He tried to listen to her, but his ears were ringing like crystal goblets.

#~#~#~#~#

Boone waved the pistol back and forth. Grey eyes earnest. "The horse is bad off, Missus. You can see it as well I can. It's a quick way to go."

The flinch Scott gave when he saw the weapon said it all.

Elizabeth continued, had to make herself perfectly clear. "It's for the best." Scott wasn't looking at her anymore, which somehow made it easier. "The horse is suffering, surely you know that. There's a time for letting go, Scott, letting things take their natural course."

For a long moment, she didn't know what her nephew would do. In the terrible aftermath of the war, Elizabeth felt herself slipping, sometimes felt the hold she had on everything—Zephyr Fields, family, the nature of being—was tenuous and brief.

Then Scott straightened his shoulders, gestured to the gun with a tremulous hand. "Take it away. No one is going to shoot my horse. And I'm not leaving him."

Elizabeth opened her mouth but nothing came out, nothing at all, and she realized why. It was the look on Scott's face. She shook her head at Boone, and sent him to fetch a few blankets, then helped her nephew back to the stall. Watched him slide down the wall into a wan heap.

Her eyes roamed over Scott as she took a steadying breath. He looked terrible. She remembered the strength and power that had emanated from him when he left Boston with his regiment. The pure boyishness that punctuated his sly smiles. He was so thin now, muscles still defined but much less than what they'd been. The smiles replaced by a grim slash.

She wanted to tell him that he'd been missed, dreadfully so, but she couldn't find the words. It seemed almost cruel to burden him with her worries from the past. Not when he had so many of his own now.

Boone brought the blankets and she knelt, drawing them high on Scott's chest, tucking in the loose ends. She spoke in his ear. "Don't you dare think of leaving us with this horse to tend, young man" she said. "Boone and I are not in the business of taking in charity." Minuet, the donkey who'd been starved and beaten before she found him, brayed loudly over his feed, punctuating her lie.

Scott's eyes remained closed, but a corner of his mouth curled up in droll amusement. "My horse is not charity. And this…will pass."

She could feel the heat roll off him as his teeth clacked together. "Your medicine?"

Scott's hand rubbed through his hair. It needed a cut, and he had a day's growth on his face, dirty nails, Elizabeth could see. A man in need of some attention. Wild.

"Didn't bring."

"I'll send Boone…"

"Auntie."

She surveyed the dusty barn as the tang of tears pulled behind her eyes at the diminutive he hadn't used in many, many years.

"Will need Boone here to help…with Mortimer. Tell him to put away his pistol. And keep it away." His hand slipped down and he grasped hers with damp, cold fingers. "Have done this before…much worse place. I'll get through."

Her voice hitched. "You'd be more comfortable in the house, in bed, not this drafty stall." She turned away and let the silent tears fall. After a moment she looked at Scott, having found an inner strength. "But you need to stay here, of course." She snuffled, felt her jaw set in that peculiar trait she and Harlan had inherited from their own father. The same one her nephew now bore: defiance to the current situation. She covered Scott's arm with the blanket and patted it, murmuring, "You'll be fine. I know you will." The reassurance was more for her sake than his.

She studied the thin horse and shook her head. Somehow the two of them were tied together, beyond mount and master.

She rose and went to the pump where she fumbled with the bucket, trying in vain to get it under the stream of water, until it was gently taken from her and filled.

"What else do you need Missus?"

"Boone," Elizabeth halted, her throat closing up suddenly, too much all at once. She clutched at the handyman's cotton sleeve. "That horse has to live."

#~#~#~#~#

After shivering for what seemed like years, Scott kicked off the blanket. It was too warm, too stifling, too annoying. He rubbed his aching head and opened his eyes, testing them, taking care to focus. Everything braided and bled together like melted wax, then cleared.

He watched three or four horseflies flitting about, darting above him in perfect squares and triangles as they flew aimlessly over the stall. When he moved his head, a trail of disorienting, dust mote-like lights stretched away from everything, so he closed his eyes, giving them a rest. He growled in pain and frustration.

As he sat there, calming his lungs one breath at a time, he sorted through his memories of the last day, separating the nightmare images from reality and finding there'd been moments when the two overlapped.

It was as though Mortimer and his time in prison had merged into the same thing: loss. In a strange way, Mortimer had taken care of him ever since they'd been assigned together, whether galloping toward battle, taking him to relative safety, or merely lipping at pieces of Grandfather's letters as Scott read from them. He was a touchstone, had given Scott a sense of purpose, of security and responsibility. They had come together at Camp Meigs under auspicious circumstances and a miracle had occurred: they fit. Mortimer was his and he was Mortimer's.

Scott put his hand to his chest and sat up straight, breathing with controlled, steady breaths. He drew his knees up and rested his elbows on them as he cradled his head in his hands. He felt old and tired, hungry and weak. Despite all of that, he needed to get up, no matter how much his body protested. The pain in his head shifted and pulled as he pivoted and brought his legs underneath him, feet against the floor.

He glanced over and saw that at some point, Mortimer had laid down. His front legs were bent at the knee and tucked under his chest, head drifting to the straw bedding at an awkward angle.

Scott lurched upwards, the barn dipping and pitching around him as he bobbed like a dinghy in a hurricane. Collapsing beside his horse, he lifted the shaggy head to his knees. The horse was warm where the sun shone in through the window. He stroked Mortimer's once glossy neck and listened to his soft breaths and sighs. Scott said his name and told him it would be all right.

A part of him felt like the worst kind of traitor. What was he to do? Scott looked away, sweat beading on his temples, but it wasn't from any fever. His eye caught a glint of silver from the tack shelf—Boone's pistol. Bright and shiny.

Stomach flipping, he got up and found it carelessly placed among among the brushes and picks. He turned the heavy weight over and over in his hand. This was part of not facing death—he had no plan for the obvious.

It was odd, he and his regiment had faced death every time they went into battle. Later, facing death meant getting up every day in their dank, foul-smelling room at Danville. It meant soldiering on despite the lack of food and water, the heat of summer, the utter cold of winter without fire. It meant gathering the men and singing songs at Christmas, celebrating birthdays by pooling their ration of bread. Carrying on when sixteen comrades had died. Facing death meant facing life.

He knelt back down and took the head on his knees again. He ran his hand over Mortimer's shoulder, patted his neck, traced his sunken cheek and nose. Felt the soft tufts of ears. And raised the pistol. He thought it would be simple. A thing you do without thinking while you think instead about something else entirely. His hand was slippery with sweat, he grasped the pistol tighter.

None of it felt right.

Mortimer's one visible eye opened to a mere slit. Scott held the horse's gaze for a long, long while.

#~#~#~#~#

The August breeze was balmy, and it seemed to carry every memory, every scent from the last year of hardship: memories and days that Scott labored to forget as if working them into garden compost, cloaking them in cards and drink, and in the almost diligent way he defied Grandfather's wishes.

The breeze blew open the half door, sent it banging against its hinges and knocked his empty cup from the upturned hay bale. It seemed that all those memories had not been riven to soil and worm food, nor caught in a flood of good brandy but had been stored away somewhere—perhaps in some cabinet of his brain—ever bright and unharmed ready to return at a moment's notice. And they did return, spilling and sliding from the empty shelves, or perhaps they made up the breeze itself. He was afraid, as he was in his first battle at Vicksburg smelling the cannon fire, then filled with overwhelming sadness. He found himself weeping.

He went outside, his face damp, frightened and lonely as if all he had strived for in the last few months, all he had labored to bury and convert to good was for naught. It had returned on the single whim of the wind.

He looked to the west.

Elizabeth's fields were harvested and tilled. The rows of furrows stretched comfortingly before him. The rows were perfect, evenly spaced, and yet seemed to converge across the field's great distance to a single point, quite hidden, down by the stream. There was a wild elegance to the land, an ominousness to that hidden point.

He started to walk towards it, but was stayed by a rustling coming from the stall.

For one moment he stood very still, the shade of the barn door barring the ground between them. Mortimer rocked unsteadily to his feet and moved with choppy, stiff-kneed steps to nose a forgotten bowl of mash.

The dog barked sharply in greeting, and he heard footfalls behind him.

Elizabeth came up beside him, concern furrowing her brow. She reached up to touch the side his face. When no fever was found, her eyes softened. She looked past him to see what he was looking at, and he could hear her breath catch.

"Well, honestly…he's standing. That's something." Her voice was filled with the wonder and delight that Scott couldn't quite express.

The sun had fully come up, and the barn with its donkey and a pair a sheep was just the same, like some framed pastoral painting on Aunt Elizabeth's wall, all beams of light and cobwebby corners. Scott felt like a big hand might descend from the sky, perhaps God creating something, but he had no idea what God might want to point out to him. Mortimer was alive, and maybe He had something to say about that, but Scott doubted it. The God he believed in seemed to be missing these past few years.

Outside the doorway, the breeze whistled through the tall grass, turned the metal wheel atop the barn, squeaking out a song. A mad argument broke out between the chickens as they scuffled in the yard.

Scott felt a weight lift, a door opening in him that had been nailed shut for some time, and everything felt like it might be all right.

Mortimer, chasing the last bit of mash around teeth and tongue, looked at him with a weary gaze as if to say: Where have you been?

It made him smile.

tbc