A fat man in a broadcloth coat got up painfully; he had been on his knees beside a patient on the floor. He cleared his throat and addressed the gaunt woman who bent beside him. “It’s a sloughing ulcer,” he told her. “I’d use free applications of bromine, and hope for the best. There is a mighty discharge of sero-purulent matter from the wound.” His marbles of eyes turned toward Dan: the only life in his drooping, unshaven face. There was the smell of liquor discernible, even in this stench. “Daniel,” he said, abstractedly.

Bale told the doctor, “I’m looking for Hud.”

“Hud,” Duffey repeated. And after a long pause, “I would have found him if he was here. Indeed.”

“Doc. How—are you—?”

Duffey put his spongy hand on Bale’s arm. “Now that is a strange one. Over there with the tartan shawl. He got hit on his bottom with a cannon-ball.” The woman turned and hurried away with a pan in her hands. “It was an exploding shell, I mean to say. Took off the integuments of the gluteal and lumbar regions, and a large portion of the gluteal muscles on the right side. You should see it, Daniel. Come over here and I’ll—”

“God,” Bale exclaimed. He seized the old doctor’s coat and halted him. “Elijah’s mother is going crazy with anxiety. We’ve got to find him. I feel that he may have been with the army, all along.”

Duffey chuckled; the laugh hung deep in his chest; his eyes were very dry—it seemed to Dan that they had been peeled, as fruit, peeled with a sharp knife and all the color gone out of them. Just the pulp underneath. “Elijah? Sure, he’s a cadaver long before this. You’re wasting your time.” He went away down the aisle, lurching, and bent over the man under the tartan shawl.

Clearly, a phantom church audience began to lift up its hymn books and sing: When I read my title clear, to mansions in the skies. Dan could hear them; he did not believe in ghosts, he did not know what to think of this song, but still he heard it droning through the invisible forest of gurglings and spoken words. He started along the opposite aisle … the peach-fuzz woman met him and said, So your man ain’t anywhere about, and went whisking on before he could answer her. He watched the faces—brown, bearded, baby-face, yellow (that is the shadow of death, and there seems no end to them). The choir began, By Life’s fair stream, fast by the throne of God— He stopped, and then went back to look at a man who lay turned on his side, drooling a puddle from his half-open mouth. He had a bandage wrapped tightly around the upper part of his head, covering the eyes and forehead. There was something about the mouth and chin.