The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  Each day, great mounds of soiled and bloody bed linens must be made clean again. The Sanitary Commission insists on this, and rightfully so. Laundering is done outside the back door. The fires beneath the washerwomen’s kettles burn all day and into the night. Behind the laundry, what had been a courtyard is now the darkies’ tent village. Behind that is a pest house for those afflicted with smallpox. The nuns minister to the sick there, and I am thankful for that.

  The stench is the first thing to which a new nurse must accustom herself here at Shipley. Death, decay, and human waste hang in the air, but the windows are nailed shut per the orders of Dr. Luce, the chief of surgery, who fears fresh air will bring smallpox inside. Louisa Alcott, a pleasant and clever nurse from Massachusetts, gave me a vial of lavender water and told me to sprinkle it liberally and often. I did, and it saved me from swooning during my first hours. Each day brings new challenges, but there is the comfort of routine here, too. We eat breakfast first, seated at long tables just off the kitchen. There is one table for the doctors, another for the nuns, a third for us “Dixies.” (The nick-name is meant to mock us. D.D. is resented by the medical men, and so there is disdain for those of us who serve at her will or, as Louisa puts it, “at her mercy.”) Breakfast is cornmeal porridge, bread, jam, and tea, warm rather than hot, drunk from tin mugs. On Sundays, we each have an egg. The darkies pass among us carrying trays and we pluck our morning victuals from these. Sister, forgive my longing for worldly things, but how I yearn for good, hot tea with sugar sipped from one of thy delicate bone china cups!

  My mornings are taken up with the wetting of wounds, the changing of dressings, the bathing of bodies, and the cooling of fevers with soothing cloths and soothing words. I spoon medicine, soup, and tonic into open mouths as once upon a time I did with my own babes. In the afternoons, if there is time, I write to wives, mothers, and sweethearts. I read to those who wish to listen—Scripture, for the most part, but also poetry and tales of frontiersmen and savages. I do what I can to make a hospital a home for these poor, damaged boys and men because I have quickly come to think of them as my children. No doubt the surgeons would shudder to hear me say it. They see only the bullet that needs removing or the leg that needs severing, and so they pick up their pliers or their saw and do the job. I see the boy to whom the wounded thigh or the dying limb is attached. Still, I do whatever the doctors tell me. Charlie would be shocked to find me so obedient!

  Martha, most of the damaged and dying are so young. Most suffer bravely in silence, or ask only for small favors. “Would you write a few words to my gal, Ma’am?” “Missus, could I trouble you for a cup of water?” A drummer not more than fourteen years of age, shot in the stomach, died yesterday with nary a sigh. Oh, but there are groaners and moaners, too, and from some angry mouths come words no decent woman should hear, and no wicked woman either. Fever sometimes scrambles their senses. One young soldier from Delaware had had his foot so badly burned and mangled by cannonfire that it turned black as a plum and had to be removed. That night he became agitated and insisted he could wiggle the toes on his missing foot. “I’m going to get up and go home to my Ma and my Josie!” he announced, and promptly fell from his bed with a resounding crash. When I rushed to him and knelt, he struck me twice across the face. The blows caused my nose to bleed and my eye to swell and later blacken. The sight of my blood brought him back to his senses. “I’m sorry, Missus! I was thinkin’ you was Johnny Reb! I’m scared! I want my Ma!” I pulled him against my breast, cradling him and whispering not to be afraid. He was clenched at first, and it was as if I held one of my own small boys when, on a winter’s night, they suffered so from colic or croup. Then, like a small boy, this soldier—Erasmus, his name was—relaxed his limbs, and I could feel that merciful sleep had come to him. One of the nuns, Sister Claire, came to help me, but I waved her away. What a sight we must have been, one-footed Erasmus and me, sprawled on the hospital floor together, one asleep, the other looking as if she had been brawling! Still, for those moments, I was his Ma and he was my Eddie, or my Levi, safe in my arms. He (Erasmus) died from infection two days later. I wrote to his Ma and his Josie and have received a grateful letter from the mother. She says I am welcome in their home whenever I should wish to visit Delaware.

  Sister, I hope this missive finds thee well, and thy beloved Nathanael, too. I do hope his gout is improved. I have had a letter from Charlie, and he writes that he is proud of the sacrifice I am making to the Holy Cause of Liberty. He says he may travel by train to visit me here. We shall see about that. Charlie makes promises more easily than he keeps them. Write soon and know that thy letters are always treasured and that thee are as ever dear to

  Thy sister,

  Elizabeth

  There was a soft tap-tap-tap. “Come in,” I said. Ulysses’s head poked around the bedroom door. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Nancy’s crying at the door to go out,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you let her out at night.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Put her out and get back to sleep.” But instead of closing the door, he just stood there. “You all right?”

  He nodded. “Fisher cats have made a comeback around here, you know. They been gone for a while, but now they’re back…. They’re weasels.”

  “I know what fishers are.”

  “They eat cats, you know. Maybe she ought to stay inside.”

  “She’s a farm cat, Ulysses. She knows how to take care of herself.”

  “Oh. Okay. Let her out then?”

  “Let her out.”

  “A farm cat, and there ain’t even a farm here anymore,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. Jesus H. Christ, what did he expect me to do? Start milking Holsteins again?

  “See you in the morning,” I said.

  “Yup. See you in the morning.”

  The door closed. I heard the kitchen door open and close. Heard the toilet flush. Then things were quiet again.

  Charles Popper did, in fact, visit his wife in Washington that summer. A letter from Lizzy to Charles dated June 27, 1863 refers to a Congregationalist service they attended together and to a Sunday supper they shared at Charles’s hotel dining room. Lizzy thanked her husband for having managed the latest unspecified “unpleasantness” concerning her brother, Roswell, and for the donation of Bibles and Century Publishing Company “seconds” to the convalescents of Shipley Hospital.

  The tomes have been well used, by those who can read and those who take comfort in being read to. Yesterday,

  Thomas Simmons, a sergeant from Vermont, lost his battle against typhus and the Holy Book thee provided was a comfort to him during his final hours. We buried him and two others today in the post cemetery, preceded by sober words from the chaplain and a dirge played by the hospital band. As he had asked, Sergeant Simmons’ Bible went with him into the ground.

  Discussion of the Poppers’ errant son would have surely come up during their visit together in Washington, but, curiously, Lizzy’s letter makes no mention of Willie. Willie also goes unmentioned in letters his mother wrote to Martha Weeks during this period. It remains unclear whether or not Elizabeth Popper, like her husband, had estranged herself from her son, now a rising star of the minstrel stage. As for the Poppers’ marital estrangement, Charles’s trip to Washington began a thawing that would result in his eventual return to the family home in New Haven in February of 1864, even as his affair with Vera Daneghy continued. Lizzy, too, would return to New Haven during the winter of 1864, following her abrupt dismissal from service at Shipley Hospital. Popper’s conversion from “Mother Bountiful” to persona non grata at Shipley would come in the wake of the war’s bloodiest battle and the strain it put on the caretakers of its thousands of wounded and sick.

  The scope of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg was profound, the loss of life staggering. By the time the last shots had been fired and Lee’s army had retreated, the Confederacy had suffered twenty thousand casualties, the Union seventeen thousand five hundred. T
he most severely injured were treated at emergency tents erected at the battlefields’ perimeters. Many thousands more traveled on foot and by train, carriage, wagon, and ship, and over others’ shoulders to existing hospitals and makeshift facilities from Boston to the Carolinas. These overwhelming numbers of sick and wounded resulted in neglect, haphazard care, and death for the many who had survived the battlefield only to lose their lives to infection and disease. Shipley Hospital was no exception to this phenomenon. The facility had beds for one hundred and twenty patients, but in the days following the Gettysburg conflict, over four hundred sick and wounded arrived. The attendants’ village behind the hospital was disbanded, trees were felled, and shrubbery was uprooted to make room for seven emergency medical tents. These were badly understaffed. In a letter to Charles, written six days after the battle’s end, Lizzy Popper wrote

  Oh, shit. Another knock. I knew this was a bad idea. At least he didn’t open the door this time. “Yup?”

  “I just wanted you to know I let her back in.”

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

  “Did her business and then she wanted to come right back in.”

  “Uh-huh. Good night.”

  “Night.”

  No footsteps. “Anything else?”

  “Nah, I guess not. Thanks again for letting me stay here.”

  “No problem.”

  In a letter to Charles, written six days after the battle’s end, Lizzy Popper wrote:

  Husband,

  There is no time to write thee at length. I am sad tonight because I have just said goodbye to my friend and fellow nurse, Louisa. I shall miss her terribly, as she was a beacon of light in this terrible darkness, but her ill health necessitates that she be sent home.*The needs here at Shipley are overwelming [sic], the sorrows manyfold. Each day more of the Gettysburg warriors arrive. Most are in pitiful condition. One group had been left inside a deserted schoolhouse for days without food or water. After their canteens were emptied, they were forced to drink and wet their wounds with their urine. We lost twenty-two men yesterday, seventeen the day before. Ten more were carried to the morgue by noon today. Some of these might have been saved, but we are far too few serving far too many. From dawn to dark, I move through a maze of suffering soldiers. At night, I close my eyes but cannot sleep, for I see their hands reaching for me, their frightened faces. I have seen the Devil’s den now, I think, where the wretched doomed cry out in vain. Pray for my sick, Charlie, and for the end of this hellish war, and for the forebearance of

  Thy aggrieved wife,

  Elizabeth

  Lizzy Popper’s forbearance held, but her tolerance of incompetence and deceit did not. Her dismissal from service at Shipley Hospital came as the result of several skirmishes with male authority and a showdown with Directress Dix.

  In the midst of the post-Gettysburg chaos, Shipley Hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. Reuben Luce, suffered a heart attack and was retired from active duty. Lizzy Popper had enjoyed a cordial relationship with Dr. Luce, and the departing physician recommended her to his successor, Dr. Palmer Pettigrew. Pettigrew, a thirty-three-year-old Missourian, assigned Lizzy to assist him with his surgeries. The two disliked each other from the start, but the acrimony escalated when Pettigrew altered existing hospital policy, directing that sand, instead of linens, be spread on operating tables between surgeries for the purpose of better absorbing patients’ blood. Lizzy objected, arguing that pebbles were a further discomfort to supine patients already in misery. To placate her, Pettigrew ordered that surgical sand be sifted, but Lizzy’s protest continued. Sand clung to the men’s wounds and stumps, she argued, causing in them the urge to scratch and poke at that which needed to be left alone to heal. Joseph Lister’s breakthrough discovery of carbolic acid as an antiseptic agent and Louis Pasteur’s founding of modern microbiology were still years into the future; during the Civil War era, the causes of infection were not yet understood. Yet Elizabeth Popper seemed to understand on some intuitive level that sand-covered surgery tables further compromised vulnerable patients. She wrote to Superintendent Dix about her concern. Dix wrote back, advising Popper that sand was not a problem as long as wounds were “properly, thoroughly, and frequently wetted.” Dissatisfied with her superior’s response, Lizzy wrote two more letters, one to Eugenia Trickett, a Sanitation Commission executive, the other to surgeon General William Hammond. In her letter to Hammond, Popper added the further complaint that, of the dozens of amputations Pettigrew performed daily, a fair number were, in her opinion, unnecessary—that Pettigrew was “more butcher than surgeon.” The charge was investigated by Hammond’s office and found to be unwarranted. During the inquiry, Pettigrew was shown Lizzy’s letter. In response, he wrote Hammond a letter of his own, charging that his surgeon’s assistant was “an overweening hag who assumes, quite preposterously, that her knowledge of medicine is superior to my own—indeed, that all of Eve’s descendants enjoy a natural superiority to any of Adam’s.” Lizzy’s letter to Hammond also incurred the wrath of Dorothea Dix; one of her Dixies had flouted the chain of command, going not through her but over her head with the serious charge that surgeries were being performed capriciously. Dix reprimanded Popper and demoted her to the position of stewardess of medical supplies. But in this capacity, also, Lizzy drew fire. The issue this time was whiskey.

  Lizzy Popper was a firm believer in temperance, but she was also a realist who understood whiskey’s value as an anesthetic in the lessening of patients’ suffering. Each month, Shipley Hospital received from the federal government a barrel of “spirituous liquor” to be used for medicinal purposes. The whiskey was kept locked in the supply room and drawn in pints and quarts as ordered by staff physicians. Hospital policy required that withdrawals be made only by the house apothecary or the provisions steward, and that each withdrawal be recorded in the log that sat atop the whiskey barrel. Not long into her new position, Popper became aware of a discrepancy between the amount of alcohol recorded withdrawn and the greater amount missing. In a letter to her sister Martha, she wrote of her dilemma, and also of a disturbing rumor she’d heard: that a certain Dr. Peacock had been intoxicated while performing surgery on a young soldier shot in the cheek, and that he had botched the stitching of the boy’s face and given him a permanent smile. Popper wrote, “My suspicion is that some of my doctors are drinking spirits meant for my sick. I shall have to set a trap.” When she did, hiding in the dark recesses of the supply room after hours beneath a canvas covering, she caught her thief, the apothecary, who confessed he had been providing four of Shipley’s doctors with whiskey at a modest profit. Lizzy complained once again to Dorothea Dix. An investigation was launched. Three of the guilty physicians, including Dr. Peacock, were reprimanded, and the apothecary was dismissed. Popper had secured the patients’ monthly allotment of anesthetic, but, in the process, had made more enemies. One was Abner Winkle, the Kentucky physician and Southern sympathizer whose political opinions were antithetical to Popper’s.

  Lizzy Popper enjoyed many friendships with the free blacks and contrabands who worked at Shipley Hospital. She had become particularly fond of two runaway slaves from Kentucky, George Ruggles and his common-law wife, Mazie Spinks. Spinks was one of the hospital’s washerwomen, and Ruggles served as an attendant in the upstairs wards. Affable and efficient, George Ruggles was popular with both the staff and the sick of Shipley Hospital. Because he exhibited an aptitude for medical procedures, the doctors under whom he served had begun giving him responsibilities beyond the scope of most attendants. Lizzy Popper recognized Ruggles’s potential, too, and began teaching him to read and write. In a letter to her husband Charles, she pronounced Ruggles “an apt and eager pupil who will thrive as a free man if the forces of good prevail and the war is won.”

  Ruggles and Spinks had escaped from the estate of Quentin J. Cheeks, a wealthy shipping merchant from Covington, Kentucky, who, by the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, retained legal claim to the couple. Acting on a tip he had
received, Cheeks took out an advertisement in the Washington Observer, a Southern-leaning weekly. The ad carried drawings of both Ruggles and “his wench Mazie” and offered a twenty-five-dollar reward for information leading to the couple’s recapture. At Shipley, news traveled quickly that Dr. Winkle had seen the plea and contacted his fellow Kentuckian. Cheeks subsequently telegraphed the hospital’s administrators that he would arrive in a fortnight to claim his property. Shipley’s executive officer was reluctant to surrender Ruggles and Spinks to the police, but the law was the law. Lizzy Popper, however, would have none of blind obedience to a federal dictate she deemed unjust. In collusion with Sister Agnes O’Hara, one of Shipley’s Daughters of Charity, she hatched a plan.

  Earlier that same week, a prostitute who had been haunting the hospital environs had been apprehended and arrested. Sister Agnes had taken pity on the woman and accompanied her to court. Through the nun’s advocacy, the judge had allowed the streetwalker an alternative to prison: she could surrender herself to the Daughters of Charity’s convent in Philadelphia. The woman accepted, and Father Joseph Cassidy, a Philadelphia priest, was dispatched to accompany and deliver her to her destination. Father Cassidy had traveled to Wasington alone, but when he and the to-be-reformed prostitute boarded the return train to Philadelphia, they did so in the company of two dark-skinned Daughters of Charity. On the evening of the escape, a gleeful Lizzy wrote to Martha Weeks: