Coffins

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Coffins

Rodman Philbrick

For the Friday night transcendental billiard boys:

Dennis, Julian, Ronan, Steve, Sol, and Tim,

whose conversations helped steer this book to port—

and a fine smooth port it was, too!

E
DITOR
'
S
N
OTE

The following manuscript was assembled from the contents of four notebooks and a ship's log recovered from the effects of Davis A. Bentwood, a battlefield surgeon with the 20th Maine, under the command of Joshua Chamberlain at Gettysburg. The personal notebooks were bound in calfskin and imprinted with the author's name and rank, and are generally in a good state of preservation. The ship's log is partially water-damaged, and bears stains of what was recently determined to be human blood. Although not authored by Dr. Bentwood, the ship's log was firmly bound to his own notebooks with a stout black ribbon, of the type used for armband mourning displays in the nineteenth century. The material was found among the thousands of other objects of Civil War memorabilia collected by Mr. Denton Wattle, late of York, Maine.

It was Mr. Wattle's heir, Miriam Coffin Wattle, who first brought the Bentwood material to my attention. Indeed she may have been the first person to actually read Dr. Bentwood's strange narrative, after locating the notebooks and the attached ship's log in the false bottom of the surgeon's monogrammed medical valise, which had been part of the immense and impressive Wattle Collection for at least fifty years.

I have been able to determine that a Davis A. Bentwood did indeed enlist with Chamberlain's famous fighting corps, at the rank of captain, which was typical for a medical officer. An examination of the archives of Harvard Medical School prove beyond a doubt the narrative was written in Bentwood's very distinctive hand. Other than that, I cannot vouch for the veracity of what he wrote, as the events he describes in such chilling detail were never mentioned in any contemporary newspaper or journal.

Read it and judge for yourself.

Rodman Philbrick

Kittery, Maine

I

MANIFESTATIONS

The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fear
.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

March 4, 1861
White Harbor, Maine

We were playing pinochle in the parlor, cousin Lucy and I, when the screaming began.

The parlor was the darkest of the many rooms in the Coffin mansion, and my right hand was wrapped protectively around a glass of whiskey, not my first. You should know that I am not a drinking man, not usually, but this was an unusual evening, all things considered, and the draught of fine Kentucky sour mash had a calming affect upon my shattered nerves. It enabled me to deal the cards without trembling much, and if beautiful dark-haired Lucy—Lucy of the startlingly pale, icicle-blue eyes—if Lucy noticed my discomfort she did not comment upon it. She was aware of what had happened in the tower earlier that day, and since the Coffins did not speak of madness in the family, and in particular of the Captain's white-eyed, pistol-waving madness, we spoke instead of trifling things. The scandalous price of the sperm oil that barely illuminated the gloomy room. The fair weather that seemed to promise a mild winter. Jeb's new hat. Barky's remarkable cooking.

Meanwhile I concentrated on the turn of the cards, and Lucy's trill of laughter when she won, which was most of the time.

“Does your friend Emerson play at cards?” she wanted to know as she lay down yet another triumphant hand.

“I assume he does,” I said. “Though as you know Mr. Emerson is not exactly my friend.”

“Not exactly?” said Lucy with a teasing smile. “What is he to you then, the great man?”

“More a mentor than a friend. His writing guides me, and his sermons.”

“Then you're what, a transcendentalist? Do I say the word correctly?”

“Exactly so,” I said, shuffling the cards together.

“So tell me, Dr. Bentwood, does a transcendentalist believe in God?”

The question was not unfamiliar, and I answered it as I usually do, with the reasoned equanimity of a modern man of science. “What is God? If God is an eye hovering over the wilderness, an eye whose light gives us life, and meaning, then yes, I believe in God.”

My companion smirked prettily. “God as a floating eyeball? How very strange, Dr. Bentwood.”

“Please,” I asked, “call me Davis.”

“Davis,” Lucy said, as if savoring the word, or tasting the name, which put a delicious shiver through me. “Tell me, Davis, does this floating God of yours believe in you?”

I was searching for a witty remark, something wise and amusing, something to impress this ravishing young woman, whose dark beauty seemed strangely suited to her modest, and very plain, black mourning attire, when the first scream came echoing through the empty rooms of the great house.

Lucy stood at once, as did I.

“No,” she whispered, as if to herself. “Not again.”

Not again
. And yet this was, so far as I knew, the first such scream, although not, as it happened, the last. Far from the last.

“The nursery,” cried Lucy. “Sarah!”

Sarah was her cousin Nathaniel's wife, and mother of a newly christened infant. Sarah had impressed me as a quiet, sober, intelligent sort of woman, and the thought of her crying out from the nursery made my blood run as cold as the currents in the harbor that lay a thousand yards from us, full of ships snug at their winter moorings.

I held the lamp but let my companion guide us, for in the last few days I'd more than once gotten lost in the maze of rooms and intersecting hallways. Lucy, however, was surefooted, and rushed ahead, a rustle of black crinoline vanishing into the darkness. I followed the sound of her running feet as much as the vague shape of her, but she was soon lost in the shadows. Leaving me alone with the house all around me.

The first spate of screaming had settled into an awful keening, and it was that mournful quality that cleared my head of whiskey. Something terrible had happened, and the thrill of that now familiar fear—an unspeakable fear that had first manifested itself that morning in a visit to the family crypt, and continued unabated through my terrifying experience in the tower—made me want to race for the front porch and down the steps, and away from this awful house.

I did no such thing, of course, being a gentleman and a friend of the family. Instead I steeled myself against the keening and attempted to follow that wretched, heartrending sound through the dark hallways.

“Are you there?” I called out, affecting a calmness I did not feel. “Am I near?”

Another scream echoed. Not Sarah, this time, but cousin Lucy. A scream distinct and vibrant, and yet for the life of me I could not place the direction. Something about the way sound carried within the cavernous house was strangely disorienting. The keening echoed weirdly, and at times seemed to emanate from the very walls, as if the house itself gave voice to a terrifying despair.

Finally I stopped and set the lamp upon the floor, and attempted to somehow get my bearings. There. The sound was definitely coming from behind. I picked up the lamp, retraced my steps, and with my empty hand found a break in the wall, an intersection with yet another hallway. In the distance—how far I could not tell—a light glowed faintly. Making my way toward the light, I came upon the nursery at last, and the source of the horrible keening.

Inside the nursery an oak fire blazed in the hearth. My first impression upon stumbling into the small, low-ceilinged room was that the place was stifling, the air close and fragrant with the mingled scents of perfumed powder and something that might have been milk. Baby smells, and something else—the sweat of fear.

Two women were embraced near the hearth, as if poised for a sentimental silhouette. Lucy, her arms enfolded around the sobbing, keening Sarah, whose face was buried in her cousin's shoulder. Lucy looked at me beseechingly, willing me to take charge of the situation, as custom and friendship demanded.

Nathaniel Coffin, Sarah's husband, stood by the crib, his broad-shouldered, six-foot frame stooped with grief. I went to him, still holding the lamp, but he was at first oblivious to my presence.

“Casey,” his broken voice whispered. “Poor little Casey.”

“Let me see,” I said gently. “Maybe I can be of help.”

But the baby lay unmoving in the center of the crib, with an utter stillness that meant there was nothing to be done. Tangled around his tiny feet was the soft lamb's-wool blanket he'd evidently kicked away; and no wonder, for the room was as warm as a summer day. Then, holding the lamp aloft, I noticed that the infant's skin had taken on a strange blue hue. Blue and glistening.

“He's froze up hard,” Nathaniel murmured, his big hands gripping the sides of the crib so firmly that his knuckles had gone as white as his face.

Froze up hard
. Was this some local expression for the death that so frequently came to newborn babies, snuffing them in their cradles? I reached out to touch little Casey, and my hand encountered not the soft, lifeless flesh I'd expected, but a hard and icy coldness. A cold so intense it instantly numbed my fingers.

“My God!”

The baby was not simply dead, it was frozen solid.

1. A Stern Angel

It all began, I suppose, the day I first saw the abolitionist dwarf waddling across Harvard Yard. This was in the year 1857, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was completing medical school and contemplating a life of well-disciplined leisure. I'd recently inherited a small but tidy fortune that would enable me to live quite comfortably without having to enter practice, or apprentice with a surgeon, options that lately had begun to seem more and more unsuitable to my nature. My ambition, if you can call it that, was to be an amateur scientist, in the tradition of America's great lightning bug, Benjamin Franklin, save that I would trap transcendentalism in a jar, and make it charge the battery of the mind.