Читать книгу The Book of Duels - Michael Garriga - Страница 25

Dr. David Hosack, 34,

Noted Physician & Chronicler

In predawn darkness, a knock on my front door pulls me from a dream in which I am staring at myself in the mirror—stark white surgeon’s gown and a head enwrapped with thick layers of gauze—my eyes the lone feature—I begin to unwrap the dressing layer upon layer and it grows pink and red and redder yet, bunching up in the wash basin before me like an aborted foetus—what will my face be beneath, will it even be there—the blood is thick on my hands and tacky as sap and on my gown as well—and now: the blank face behind the lit lamp of the man who beat upon my door and we are off in a skiff across the Hudson, bobbing about, the wind splishing water over my boots, a young boy bailing with a molasses bucket, until we ground ashore beneath the sheer wall of the Palisades, and the world is violently come into focus—two gunshots at dawn and I am already halfway up the path when I spy a man hidden by umbrella scuttling by me like a cat chased from a rubbish bin—am I to feign ignorance the reason I’ve been summoned; am I not to recognize my friend when he passes four feet from me; am I not to recall that this same stretch of land is where I doctored General Hamilton’s son when he lost his life three years before in a duel with pistols; or that this is where I bandaged that Canadian’s arm when the Stewart boy cut it during a sword fight last year—Burr too has fought here before, with old Church, from whom he walked away with a mere hole in his topcoat, and he fought another with Senator Jackson, they say, but I’d wager that’s apocryphal—still Jackson did kill the lieutenant governor of Georgia, so it is possible—last year, the editor Coleman killed the New York harbormaster, who was dropped to die on my doorstoop: all this killing in the name of Honor and yet they scurry and hide and lie like rats afterward.

I crest the path, heaving, sleep still crusted in my eye, to see General Hamilton himself—of course it’s him—I kneel by his bloody side and see where the bullet has entered and clipped his spine and liver and my lips tremble, Your Honor, it is mortal, and his eyes roll back and he mutters, Death to this disease, Democracy, and his man says, You did not hear him, doctor, and I nod, holding the hand of this man who might have been king in any other country, in any other time, but here is just become one corpse more, and as we carry him to the boat, I recall how Hamilton tirelessly endeavored to undo Burr’s career—and now, with the cost of his own life, perhaps he has succeeded at last.