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372 The Kentucky Anthology Pat Carr “Bringing Travis Home” Pat Carr taught at Western Kentucky University for only about seven years. She was born in Wyoming in 1932, educated at Rice and Tulane, from which she received a Ph.D., and taught at Rice, Texas Southern, Dillard, the University of New Orleans, the University of Texas at El Paso, and, from 1988 through the mid-1990s, at Western Kentucky; she is now at rest in Arkansas. In her years of moving about the country she learned a lot about writing. She is a superb poet and a master of the short story. Her several collections, including The Women in the Mirror (1977), Beneath the Hill of the Three Crosses (1993), and Our Brothers’ War (1993, with Maureen Morehead), offer proof of her wondrous talent, which also shines clearly in this poignant story of the Civil War. h As soon as the clear air in my nostrils was overpowered by the odors of blood and rotting meat I knew they had sent me to the right place. I swallowed hard a couple of times. A man, leaning in a chair just inside the door, was looking at me. “They told me this was the hospital,” I said and pulled the letter from my dress pocket. “I came for my brother, Travis Woods.” I started unfolding the paper. “We got this letter from a Doctor Simpson that said we could bring Travis home.” The man waved an arm toward the far end of the building which I could tell by then was a church. “That’s Doc Talbot up there. I don’t know no Doc Simpson.” I looked where he was pointing. Rows of soldiers lined the floor, so close together that it didn’t seem as if anyone could step between them without coming down on somebody. They were crowded in from both sides of the room with only a narrow passage between, and I’d have to walk the whole length of them to get up to the baldheaded doctor. I felt self-conscious standing there folding up the letter, so I kept it in my hand as I started up the narrow aisle. I looked at the face of each soldier, trying not to see the brown seepage on the bandages, trying not to see the empty spaces where legs and arms 372 Pat Carr 373 should have been. A few of the eyes gazed back at me, but most of the soldiers lay with their faces clamped shut with pain. There was a constant rustling , gurgling, sort of panted moaning, and I didn’t feel I was disturbing anyone as I clumped along the bare wood floor in my town shoes. Autumn sunlight glared through the windows, and I found that the faces were all starting to look alike. What if I passed right by Travis and didn’t know him? And he had been gone so long I probably couldn’t recognize him from just a mouth and chin. But then I saw that the soldier with the head bandage was in a Yankee uniform. He couldn’t be Travis. And I noticed for the first time that Yankee and Confederate uniforms were side by side, mingled on the rickety cots. After I started separating out the blue and the gray uniforms, I calculated that maybe there were more blue ones on the cots, but then it was a Union hospital. I got to the end of the church where the doctor was standing at what was probably the altar. He was scribbling in a ledger and didn’t glance up but said in an irritated voice, “What do you want?” I extended the letter. “I came for my brother. Doctor Simpson wrote that we could bringTravis Home.” He looked up then, and his eyes were so blue, caught between his tanned cheeks and his tanned baldness, that it was as if they were in the wrong face. “Doctor Simpson was killed in a field hospital a month ago. You took your sweet time coming,” he said, the blue eyes narrowing. “Pa had to get the harvest in before he could spare the wagon,” I said, to let him know I wasn’t one who did the deciding. “It’s always the same. If some of these boys could get home in time, they might stand a chance. But there’s never enough money to come get them while they could save a limb, is there...

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