Excerpt from Chenneville by Paulette Jiles, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He reached up to touch his head bandage, but the doctor gently pressed his hand down.

A bright morning came back to him where water-light reflected from a nearby river or canal in some city and in all that reflected light he and another person were loading saddles onto a wagon. He didn't know where that was. Then a dark night in which he flew into the night sky under a great balloon and saw a fire burning in the distance. A town under his feet, far below. But maybe he shouldn't mention this.

"I'm not sure," he said. "I remember loading saddles, but I don't know where that was."

The doctor nodded as if this were to be expected. He asked, "What is your name?"

He was caught in a frozen moment of mortification and not a little fear. Jesus God, what if I don't know my own name? I have to know my own name. Then the word lieutenant came to him.

"I am a first lieutenant," he said. "Company C, Eightieth New York Infantry."

The nurse said, "Doctor, he has just now come to himself."

"Very well, Lem, we'll wait a little." The doctor let out a long breath. "Luckily Sergeant Chaney came and identified him."

The man on the bed processed this word by word. "Identified me," he repeated in a low voice. After a moment he asked, "Do I have any other wounds?" His face was a drawn architecture of cheekbones and eyes deep in his head, his skin the color of biscuit dough.

The doctor patted his forearm. "No. An older bullet wound, well healed, is all. But you know about that."

Do I? He didn't. But the doctor was talking.

"What you have here is a diastetic linear skull fracture. A fracture that passes through parietal lines. We had to stitch a V-shaped flap of your scalp back on, but it has all knitted well and you are on your way to health, I assure you."

"Good." His hand went up to the bandage and once again the doctor gently pressed it down.

"Do you know what happened?"

"I expect you should probably tell me."

He listened with a grave, intent expression as the doctor described the explosion, the great number of wounded, the dead. Five thousand pounds of gunpowder in that barge, and the rebels had hit it with hot shot. That was his entire life, those things sailing into the air. Knives and forks, blankets in streaming rags, personal diaries blasted to confetti, stables, cavalry tack and gear. Also a telegraph clearinghouse and all the telegraphy supplies—combination instruments, many miles of wire, five hundred cups of battery, all the new Clark relays blown to fragments. Men at the center of the explosion were atomized and remain forever unaccounted for. Farther from the center were those who were grievously wounded, those who died within days and those like him who lost all identity, lost their clothes, were struck by enormous boat chains and door hinges, by tools, by broken china, in an instantaneous event where anything and everything became a deadly missile.

"What did I get hit with?"

"A piece of anchor chain. It was a glancing blow, luckily."

"How did they know?"

"The piece of chain was embedded in a tree along with your cap."

"I see." A moment's reflection; then he thought about his clothes. He said, "I must have bled all over everything." He wanted to get dressed as soon as possible, but if his clothes were all stained and bloody he needed to find different ones.

"You absolutely cannot get up for another two days." The doctor rose. "Absolutely."

He lay awake all the long night as candles or lanterns passed up and down the aisle, doctors and male nurses attending to some crisis. He lay awake, and after a while he felt a great surging of happiness because it was very good to be awake and alive. To look around and see things and to know what it was he was seeing. And then

it came to him that his name was Jean-Louis Chenneville. It was as if something had fallen into its proper slot with a click. Dit John for les Américains.

Excerpted from Chenneville by Paulette Jiles. Copyright © 2023 by Paulette Jiles. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.