For weeks on end, Waddell lay delirious under the white shade of the hospital tent. Through tears in the rotten fabric, shards of blue shone through. He suffered nightmares of black, shapeless beasts feeding on his flesh—shadowy animals, rangy as wolves, gnawing the bones of his legs, sucking their marrow. In lucid moments between deliriums, he had come to think of them as the Dark Ones. Minions of the devil come to claim his soul by eating away his body.

Somewhere below his window, a horse and gig clattered along Fifth Street. He stroked his goatee and finger-combed his thinning hair.

It was hard to know who he was anymore. A man was defined by his place in the order of things. By his standing in the community. Alfred Moore Waddell was a minor lawyer in a city full of better ones. Like that Rountree—there was a man heading for a judge’s seat. Waddell was a first-rate mind with a third-rate clientele. A voice men would follow, if he only had a podium. An ex-officer who had missed glory. A former congressman who could not pay the note on his own house without help from his wife.

He let his fingers knead the ridges of his skull.

He’d had his colonel’s commission exactly a year to the day when he gave it up.

When it looked as if he might survive after all, he had been discharged from the makeshift hospital. The surgeon said, “I don’t know what ails your legs—there’s no medical name for it.”

“But surely, in other cases of this kind—”

“There are no other cases of this kind—not in four years. You are a special piece of work.”

“And yet you cured me.”

The surgeon said, “Colonel, there are mysteries.”

With his legs bound in bandages stripped from ladies’ petticoats, Waddell took the train to Wilmington to wait out the rest of the war or die. The autumn of’64, he rode a carriage to a fishing shack on the ocean and bathed in salt water every day, taking the pain of the salt on raw flesh as a penance from the Almighty. If the legs killed him, at least he would die with the evil burned out of his soul.

The legs turned white and then red and then scabbed over nearly black. When the scabs shed, the flesh underneath was white as marble, with hairline scars and thin blue veins. It was beautiful. Then the legs had healed.

He groaned and stretched his left leg, then his right. He wiggled his toes. What would it feel like to have a good horse under him again, to be forging into battle? Just imagining it quickened his heart.