“You didn’t see anything or you can’t remember, Mr. Burndy?”

Burndy chewed at his lip. He said reluctantly, “There is one thing. He was one of you.”

Rey waited. “A Negro?”

Burndy’s pink eyes flamed and he seemed about to have a fit. “No! A Billy Yank. A veteran!” He tried to calm himself. “A soldier sitting right there in full uniform, like he was at Gettysburg swinging the flag!”

The soldiers’-aid homes in Boston were locally run, unofficial, and unadvertised, except through the word of mouth of the veterans who used them. Most homes stocked baskets of food two or three times a week to be dispersed to the soldiers. With six months passing since the war, City Hall was less and less willing to continue funding the homes. The better ones, usually aligned with a church, ambitiously strove to edify the former soldiers. In addition to food and clothing, sermons and instructional talks were offered.

Holmes and Lowell covered the southern quadrant of the city. They had engaged Pike, the cabman. Waiting outside the soldiers’-aid facilities, Pike would take a bite of a carrot, then give one to his old mares, then take another bite himself, keeping track of how many horse and human bites together would complete the average carrot. The boredom was not worth the fares paid. Besides, when Pike asked why they were traveling from one home to the next, the cabman—who had that shrewdness that came from living among horses—found that their false answers made him ill at ease. So Holmes and Lowell hired a one-horse coach, whose horse and driver would fall asleep every time the coach came to a stop.

The latest soldiers’ home to receive their visit seemed to be one of the better-organized ones. It was housed in an empty Unitarian church that had been a casualty of the long battles with the Congregationalists. At this particular home, local soldiers were given tables to sit at and a warm meal to sup on at least four evenings a week. The supper having concluded shortly after Lowell and Holmes arrived, the soldiers were making their way into the church proper.

“Crowded,” Lowell commented, leaning into the chapel, where the pews were being clogged with blue uniforms. “Let us sit in. Get off our feet at least.”

“Upon my word, Jamey, I can’t see how it can help us anymore. Perhaps we should head to the next one on the list.”

“This was the next one. Ropes’s list says the other is open only Wednesdays and Sundays.”

Holmes watched as one soldier with only a stump for a leg was pushed in a wheelchair across the courtyard by a comrade. The latter was little more than a lad, with a mouth caved inward, his teeth having fallen out from scurvy. This was the side of the war that people could not learn from the reports of the officers or the letters of reporters. “What’s the use of spurring an already beaten out horse, my dear Lowell? We are not Gideon watching his soldiers drink from the well. We can tell nothing by looking. We do not find Hamlet and Faust, right and wrong, the valor of men, by testing for albumin or examining fibers in a microscope. I cannot help feeling we must find a new course of action.”

“You and Pike both,” Lowell said, and shook his head sadly. “But together we will find our way. At the moment, Holmes, let us just decide whether we should remain or have the driver take us to another soldiers’ home.”

“You men are new today,” interrupted a one-eyed soldier with tightly drawn, heavily pocked skin and a black clay pipe protruding from his mouth. Not having expected a conversation with a third party the astonished Holmes and Lowell were both at a loss for words and politely waited for each other to answer the speaker. The man was garbed in a full-dress uniform that had not seen a launderer since before the war, it appeared.

The soldier started making his way into the church and looked back only briefly to say, with some offense, “Beg your pardon. I just thought perhaps you fellows came in to see ‘bout Dante.”

For a moment, neither Lowell nor Holmes reacted. They both thought they had imagined the word he had uttered.

“Hold there, you!” Lowell cried, barely coherent in his excitement.

The two poets sprinted into the chapel, where they found little light. Facing a sea of uniforms, they could not pinpoint the unidentified Dantean.

“Down!” someone yelled angrily through cupped hands.

Holmes and Lowell groped for seats and positioned themselves on the aisles of separate pews and contorted themselves desperately to search the faces in the crowd. Holmes turned to the entrance in the event that the soldier tried to escape. Lowell’s eyes scanned the dark stares and hollow expressions that filled the chapel and finally landed on the pocked skin and the single, shimmering eye of their interlocutor.

“I’ve found him,” Lowell whispered. “Oh, I’ve done it, Wendell. I’ve found him! I’ve found our Lucifer!”

Holmes twisted, wheezing with anticipation. “I can’t see him, Jamey!”

Several soldiers violently shushed the two intruders.

“There!” Lowell whispered, frustrated. “One, two… fourth row from the front!”

“Where?”

“There!”

“I thank you, my dear friends, for inviting me once again,” a shaky voice interrupted them, floating down from the pulpit. “And now the punishments of Dante’s Hell shall continue…”

Lowell and Holmes immediately turned their attention to the front of the stuffy, dark chapel. They looked on as their friend, old George Washington Greene, coughed feebly, adjusted his stance, and settled his arms to his sides at his lectern. His congregation was spellbound with expectation and loyalty, greedily waiting to reenter the gates of their inferno.

Canticle Three

XV

“O pilgrims: Come now to the final circle of this blind prison that Dante must explore on his sinuous journey downward, on his fated journey to relieve mankind of all suffering!” George Washington Greene raised his arms wide above the compact lectern that stopped at his narrow bosom. “For Dante seeks nothing less than that; his personal fate is secondhand to the poem. It is humankind he shall lift up through his journey, and so we follow suit, arm in arm, from the fiery gates to the heavenly spheres as we cleanse this our nineteenth century of sin!”

“Oh what a formidable task lay ahead of him in his unhappy tower in Verona, with the bitter salt of exile on his palate. Thinks he: How shall I sketch the bottom of the universe with this frail tongue? Thinks he: How shall I sing out my miraculous song? Yet Dante knows he must: to redeem his city, to redeem his nation, to redeem the future—and us, we who sit here in this reawakened chapel to revive the spirit of his majestic voice in a New World, we too are redeemable! He knows that in each generation there shall be those fortunate few who understand and see truly. His is a pen of fire with heart’s blood as his only ink. 0 Dante, bringer of light! Happy are the voices of the mountains and the pines that shall forever repeat thy songs!”

Greene gulped down a deep lungful of air before narrating Dante’s descent into the final round of Hell: a frozen lake of ice, Cocytus, slick as glass, with a thickness found not even on the river Charles in the dead of winter. Dante hears an angry voice flare up to him from this icy tundra. “Look how thou steppest!” cries the voice. “Take heed thou do not trample with thy feet the heads of us tired, miserable brothers!”

“Oh wherefore came these accusatory words to sting the ears of well-intentioned Dante? Looking down, the Poet sees, embedded in the frozen lake, heads sticking out from the ice, a congregation of dead shades—a thousand purple heads; sinners of the very basest nature known by the sons of Adam. What wrong is reserved for this frozen plain of Hell? Treachery, of course! And what is their punishment, their contrapasso, for the cold in their hearts? To be entombed wholly in ice: from the neck down—so that their eyes may forever view the miserable penalty called up by their wrongs.”