Christmas Bells

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “I hope it signifies nothing but the usual inefficiencies of the military,” Henry replied, reluctant to confess what more dire occurrence it could portend.

  Back in their suite, Ernest wrote to Alice to let her know they had arrived but had not yet seen Charley. Exhausted, they then retired for the night, determined to resume the search at daybreak.

  At midnight, a brisk rapping upon the door woke Henry from unsettling dreams. Groggy, he drew on his dressing gown and opened the door to a messenger carrying a telegram from Colonel Devereux. “Lt Longfellow is in Hospital at Brandy Station and doing well,” the colonel had wired. “He will be sent to Washn tomorrow so says Capt Beckwith A.D.C. to Gen Patrick you can meet him at Alexa without difficulty as it will probably be late in the day before your son arrives.”

  Greatly relieved, Henry was tempted to wake Ernest and share the encouraging news, but good sense and parental concern won out, and he let his steadfast boy sleep. Instead he sat on the edge of the bed, buried his head in his hands, and silently wept. Charley was doing well, the colonel had said. He might be disfigured and enduring great pain, but it seemed that he would live. Surely Colonel Devereux would not have encouraged Henry’s hopes if it were not so.

  Henry returned to bed and claimed a few more hours of troubled sleep, his dreams haunted by scenes of Charley, his face swathed in bloody bandages, crying out in pain with every jolt of the railcar as it rumbled through Virginia.

  In the morning, Ernest agreed that the news from Brandy Station was promising, and they were just going down to breakfast when another telegram from Colonel Devereux arrived: “Lt Longfellow shot in chest not in face. If the wounded are embarked at the time proposed they will arrive at Washington about six o’clock this p.m.”

  Henry and Ernest exchanged startled looks. “Not shot in the face, but in the chest?” said Ernest. “This sounds like good news, don’t you think, Papa?”

  “Many a soldier has perished from a chest wound,” said Henry, uncertain, “but yes, it does seem somehow less dire, as wounds go.”

  “I wish we could see him and judge for ourselves.” Frustration sharpened Ernest’s voice. “I half expect to receive another telegram before we sit down at the breakfast table, informing us that Charley has been wounded not in the chest but in the backside, and he’ll arrive in Washington a week from Tuesday.”

  Henry almost laughed. “Patience is a virtue, son.”

  “Even the most virtuous of saints would agree that after our haste to get here, this interminable waiting is unbearable.”

  “All the more so because somewhere Charley is waiting too,” said Henry, “aboard a train or detained at a station, surely in great discomfort, and with his wounds unattended.”

  He had very little patience left for the military’s inconsistencies and inefficiencies, but he was powerless to speed Charley’s journey. He and Ernest had no choice but to wait, but they found some consolation in knowing the specific hour Charley was expected to reach the capital—and that perhaps he had not been as badly hurt as they had feared.

  With a long stretch of empty hours to fill, after breakfast Henry wrote cheery, optimistic letters home to Edith and Annie, as Ernest had written to Alice the night before. Then Henry sent a brief note down the block to Sumner. His steadfast friend promptly replied by offering to escort Henry and Ernest to the Capitol to view Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, a magnificent fresco the German artist Emanuel Leutze had painted on the wall of the landing in the west stairway the year before.

  Sumner’s company provided a welcome distraction, but Henry was ever mindful of the time, and by six o’clock he and Ernest had parted company with the senator and were anxiously waiting at the railway station. For hours they sat or paced on the platform, rushing to meet every train, frantically scanning the disembarking passengers for Charley—and soon, for any wounded soldier at all, for although numerous men in uniform were riding the trains, it was evident from their dress and manner that they had not come from the front.

  “They will put all the wounded on one train,” Henry speculated, dismayed and increasingly restless. “Surely it will come soon.”

  Ernest made no reply, but strode to the edge of the platform and gazed off down the tracks to the south, as if he could draw his brother’s train to them by sheer force of longing.

  They waited at the station until the last train arrived at ten o’clock, but Charley was not on it. Discouraged and disbelieving, they returned to Ebbitt House, where they contemplated all the possible reasons for the delay over a late supper. Then, after reassuring each other that someone would have telegraphed them if Charley had taken a turn for the worse, they retired for the night.

  Again a brisk rapping upon the door woke Henry shortly after midnight. “Charley,” he murmured, swiftly rising and snatching up his dressing gown. When he tore open the door, his heart plummeted to discover not his missing son, but the now familiar messenger, bearing yet another telegram.

  “Have just seen your son,” Colonel Devereux had written not twenty minutes before. “He is bright & feeling well. Has a slight wound in shoulder ball glancing upward and no bones broken. He remains here tonight & will leave on train for Washington at 12.50 PM tomorrow I have informed him of your Hotel in case anything should cause you to pass each other accidentally in trying to meet.”

  “The colonel writes as if Charley is up and walking around,” said Ernest, who had woken at the knock and had read the telegram over his father’s shoulder.

  “That may simply be an imprecise turn of phrase,” Henry cautioned him, “and yet I feel immeasurable relief knowing where he is, and that Colonel Devereux has seen him, and has spoken to him.”

  Ernest concurred, and with an enormous yawn, he hugged Henry and returned to bed. Henry, his head buzzing with questions and plans, lay awake in bed long after a church bell struck one o’clock, but eventually fatigue overcame him and he drifted off to sleep.

  In the morning, Henry and Ernest made sure the suite was ready to receive their injured soldier, and Henry wrote to Alice to share the good news of Charley’s condition and imminent arrival, concluding with what he hoped was a note of reassuring levity. “Think of the mischief done by leaving out the little word ‘not’ in the first telegram!” he wrote. “‘Not severely injured,’ it should have been.”

  At breakfast Henry and Ernest resolved that if Charley were not aboard the anticipated train, they would travel to Alexandria and transport him to Washington themselves. At noon they returned to the station, where they joined dozens of other anxious civilians waiting on the platform, gazing worriedly down the tracks, straining their ears for the rumble of iron wheels and the shriek of the whistle.

  At long last they heard it—the chugging of the engine, the squealing of brakes. Henry took Ernest by the arm and steered his son alongside the train, weaving their way through the crowd, craning their necks to peer in through the windows.

  “Papa, look there,” said Ernest, gesturing to a baggage car near the end of the train. The doors had been flung wide, and haggard, bloodied, limping soldiers were disembarking, their soiled uniforms littered with pieces of the yellow straw strewn about to absorb bodily fluids and perhaps offer a modicum of comfort. As Henry and Ernst hurried toward it, they observed other soldiers carried off on stretchers, their bandages soiled and soaked through with blood.

  Ernst glimpsed him first. “Charley,” he shouted, waving his hand in the air. Henry spotted him then, and felt a chill when the huddled figure on the stretcher beneath the blue wool blanket did not stir at his brother’s cry. Seized by a sudden panic that Charley would be swallowed up by the throng and lost within the vast system of military hospitals and converted public buildings, Henry pushed his way through the crowd, all politeness and dignity forgotten, until he reached his stricken boy’s side.

  “Charley,” he gasped, taking hold of one pale hand folded acr
oss Charley’s chest. “Charley, it’s Papa. We’re here, Ernest and I. We’re here.”

  Charley’s blue eyes fluttered open, bleary and bloodshot. “Hello, Papa,” he said faintly, managing a wan smile before his eyes drifted shut again. He looked utterly bedraggled, his face gaunt and whiskered, his hair disheveled and flecked with straw.

  “Come with me,” Henry commanded the two soldiers carrying the stretcher, fixing them with a look that precluded dissent. With Ernest following behind, Henry led them to the ambulance Sumner had arranged, but just as they were loading Charley on board, he roused himself enough to explain that his friend Captain Henry Pickering Bowditch was among the wounded, and to ask if they could see to him as well. At Henry’s nod, Ernest raced back to the luggage car, found the injured captain, and arranged for him to be carried onto the ambulance beside Charley.

  They sped off to Ebbitt House, and before long the two wounded officers were resting in comfortable beds in a large, airy suite, where cheerful sunlight streamed in through three tall windows. Bowditch had been shot in the right arm just below the elbow, but he said it was only a slight injury, and he seemed otherwise well and in good spirits. Charley’s bandages had not been changed in three days, and when Henry unwrapped the soiled cloths, it was immediately evident that his injury was far more serious than his companion’s. As Henry washed and dressed the wounds, Charley explained that he had been shot in the back while on patrol near New Hope Church. The bullet had struck him beneath one shoulder blade and had plunged through his torso, nicking his spine and exiting on the other side. Another officer had dragged him back through the Union lines, where he was briefly examined and given up for dead. But inexplicably, the ball had missed his lungs and heart and arteries and had not severed his spinal cord, so although he had endured great pain as he had languished in a church converted into a battlefield dressing station, he had not perished.

  Charley’s long, halting, agonizing journey to Washington was an ordeal best forgotten.

  Henry ordered beef tea and custard brought up to the room, and was gratified to observe his two patients digging in with hearty appetites. Afterward, Bowditch immediately sank into a deep sleep, but Charley had only just begun to doze when they heard the tramping of boots in the hallway and the bang of a fist upon the door—the army surgeon come to check on his patients. Charley sat up obligingly as the physician examined him, but sank back against his pillow gratefully as soon as it was over and closed his eyes. “Keep him quiet,” the army surgeon instructed Henry, who nodded. Next the physician approached Bowditch’s bed, peered intently at his bandaged right arm, and then turned, nodded, and departed, all without a word.

  “I suppose we should keep the other fellow quiet too,” remarked Ernest, and Henry was so overcome with sudden relief and thankfulness that he was obliged to smother a laugh, lest he dissolve into tears.

  • • •

  Charley and Bowditch slept well that night, and in the morning, Dr. Hoskins, who had accompanied the wounded soldiers on the train, came by to examine them. Bowditch he declared quite well indeed, but after announcing that Charley was much improved, he took Henry aside. “Mr. Longfellow,” he said, lowering his voice so no one else would overhear, “my duty to myself and to you requires me to say that your son’s wound is very serious.”

  “Yes,” Henry replied. “So I have seen.”

  “You should know that although he seems to be on the mend, the injury to his vertebrae may yet result in paralysis.”

  Henry’s heart plummeted, but he steeled himself and asked, “When might he be stricken? At what point in his convalescence will we know he has escaped that fate?”

  “As to your first question, paralysis might ensue next week, next year, or never. As to your second—” Dr. Hoskins frowned and shook his head. “I regret that because of the damage to the bone, the chance of paralysis will persist for the rest of his life.”

  “I see,” said Henry faintly, sickened by the picture of his vibrant, active, athletic boy confined for the rest of his life to bed, to inaction, to misery.

  “I will, of course, leave to your discretion what you tell him of this, and when.”

  “Thank you, doctor.” Henry took a deep, shaky breath. “I’ll say nothing at present. We must say nothing to alarm him, nothing to bring on melancholy. What good would it do to warn him of a tragedy that may never come to pass?” He shook his head vigorously. “No. No. We must encourage optimism, keep his spirits up. That will speed his healing.”

  The doctor bowed assent.

  With Ernest’s help, Henry kept the young officers comfortable, well fed, and rested throughout the day, tempting them with rich custards and nourishing broths, taking dictation when they wished to write letters home, reading aloud from novels and newspapers. Two physicians and a medical inspector came by in the evening, and when the latter, a Dr. George M. McGill, gave Charley a more optimistic appraisal than Dr. Hoskins had done, Henry waited until the doctors left the suite, then hurried after Dr. McGill and asked to speak to him alone. “You believe Charley will continue to improve?” he asked.

  “As long as he rests properly and does not overexert himself too soon, I do indeed,” the doctor replied. “However, the wound will be long in healing. Your son will not be fit for service for more than six months.”

  This too was good news, of a sort, for Henry was in no hurry to have Charley rejoin his regiment. “Then you don’t expect that he will suffer any latent effects—sudden paralysis, for example?”

  Dr. McGill regarded him kindly. “There is a very small chance, so small that I didn’t bother to mention it. I do hope you won’t trouble your son—or yourself—with worries about such an unlikely occurrence.”

  Greatly relieved, Henry shook the doctor’s hand and thanked him profusely, but he could not entirely dismiss Dr. Hoskins’s warning. Nothing would do but to see Charley safely home to Craigie House, where he could convalesce properly.

  On December 7, district surgeon Dr. Bates—a modest, deft little man, kind and obliging—took charge of Charley’s case, and Henry soon persuaded him to issue a certificate for a leave of absence so Charley could recover from his wounds at home. While Charley rested at Ebbitt House, gaining strength for the journey, friends called to wish him well, and he was heartily grateful for the distraction, never having been the sort to enjoy lounging about in bed with a good book or his own thoughts. Bowditch’s parents had arrived from Boston earlier that day, much alarmed despite Henry’s telegrams attesting to his good condition. “We lost our eldest son earlier this year, in March,” Bowditch’s father quietly confided to Henry while his wife fussed with her son’s blankets. “He was wounded in the abdomen in the first charge at Kelly’s Ford.”

  “My dear Mr. Bowditch, I’m so sorry.”

  “He might have survived, except the two surgeons who discovered him lying on the ground beside his horse had no means to carry him from the battlefield, and the ambulance corps never approached him there.” He gestured toward his younger son, who was lying in bed, smiling up at his doting mother. “So you understand, Mr. Longfellow, why neither of us could have a moment’s peace until we saw our boy safe and sound.”

  Henry understood perfectly.

  Once assured that Charley and Bowditch were in good hands and good company, Henry accompanied Sumner to the Capitol for the opening of the Thirty-Eighth Congress. Outside the Senate chamber, he chanced upon several old friends—Senators William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, James Dixon of Connecticut, and John P. Hale of New Hampshire—and while they were chatting, others recognized him and joined the growing circle of admiring onlookers. When Henry mentioned that he would be leaving Washington shortly, Congressman Caleb Lyon blurted, “Mr. Longfellow, you must sit for a photograph before you go.” When Henry demurred, the congressman insisted, “Yes, sir, you and Senator Sumner together. What a fine memento of your visit such a portrait would be!”

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sp; Henry and Sumner exchanged a look; Sumner shrugged, and Henry decided it would be easier to acquiesce than to explain that the only memento of that visit he wanted to take home was his two sons, both hale and hearty. Thus the following morning, Henry, his sons, and Sumner visited the studio of Alexander Gardner at Seventh and S Streets to have their portraits made. The renowned photographist took images of Charley and Ernest separately, but he sat Henry and Sumner together. “I shall call this portrait The Politics and Poetry of New England,” he declared in a proud Scottish brogue.

  At eight thirty that evening, Henry, his sons, Bowditch, and his parents left Washington on the late train to Boston. Henry organized berths for the two wounded soldiers, but the rest of the party were obliged to make do with regular seats, ill suited for a comfortable night’s rest. They arrived in New York at half past seven the next morning, stiff and weary, and with several hours before their connection to Boston, Henry took rooms for them at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. When they were comfortably settled, he sent word to Dr. William H. Van Buren, the distinguished surgeon and founder of the Sanitary Commission, asking him to send an associate to examine the young soldiers. Instead, Dr. Van Buren attended them himself, and after he dressed their wounds and proclaimed them none the worse for their railway journey, he refused to accept any fee. “I am not often sentimental,” he said, “but I feel disposed to be so this morning.”

  Before they boarded the noon train to Boston, Henry telegraphed Alice to let her know that they expected to reach home at ten o’clock, and that he wanted Dr. Morrill Wyman to meet them there. Many hours and more than two hundred miles later, the Longfellows and Bowditches parted company at the station in Boston, and a hired carriage took Henry and his sons the last few miles of the journey home.

  Alice, Edith, and Anne greeted them at the door, overflowing with sisterly devotion and concern for their wounded brother. A hot supper awaited them, and Charley’s expression as he gazed around the table at the affectionate company, felt the warmth of the hearth, and tasted the nourishing food told Henry that his runaway soldier had never appreciated his home and family more than at that moment.