No Common War

by Salisbury, Luke;

  41

  We traveled all night, stopping to rest and water the horses. Sometimes we were halted by other carriages with requests for directions or whiskey, or by a bad spot of road. As dawn broke, a teamster with a red beard asked aggressively for whiskey or “the wherewithal to buy it,” and found Lorenzo’s pistol in his face.

  By sundown of this day, I was another man. I had paid a debt.

  I have read Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.’s account of finding O.W., Jr. after Antietam. I don’t think the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” lied, but I know he left things out, like how you feel when you see a corpse, skull split open and maggots eating the brain. Or flies crawling on the spilled intestines of a horse. Or a man whose last breaths were taken through a hole in his chest. The flies.

  Holmes, Sr. is a doctor; maybe he wasn’t shocked. Doctors know what not to say.

  We didn’t see the battlefield, but we smelled it. Putrefaction on the wind. Ambulances went by full of screaming men. Four-wheelers drawn by mules, two-wheelers by a single horse. Both kind bounced, and the wounded screamed as if tortured.

  I saw horses and mules killed by artillery. I saw horses with maggot-covered brains. I saw a mule without a head, flies crawling down the ripped black throat. Nearby a gang of slaves dug a pit. Other slaves dragged a dead horse. Heads on stakes would be worse, I suppose.

  Oren hailed a captain on horseback, who told us, “Today may be bigger than yesterday. What’s left of the Army of Northern Virginia is sitting over there.” He pointed. “On this side of the Potomac.”

  “Any news of the Twenty-fourth New York?”

  “They went in early. The cornfield. Very fierce.”

  “Where are they now?” I asked.

  “Waiting to attack, or Keedysville.”

  “Keedysville?”

  “The wounded.”

  “Where’s Keedysville?”

  The captain pointed down the road. “Follow the ambulances.” He rode off.

  The road to Keedysville was filled with walking wounded, and men and women who weren’t wounded. Their pockets were full. Some carried baskets. Some argued.

  “Scavengers,” said Oren.

  “Don’t stop,” said Lorenzo. “I’ll kill one of ‘em.”

  At every group of soldiers, every officer on horseback, Oren, I, or Lorenzo asked, “Where’s the Twenty-fourth New York? Colonel Phelps’ men.”

  “Where’s the Twenty-first New York?” asked the doctor.

  “Where are the Second U.S. Sharp Shooters?” asked the lawyer.

  The carriage barely moved, but we asked, Oren politely, The doctor shrilly, Lorenzo briskly. The lawyer asked when his nose wasn’t in his bible. We were answered by enlisted men, stragglers, and stunned, pale officers who’d lost command of their men and themselves. Some were drunk. We heard:

  “The Twenty-fourth no longer exists.”

  “Search yonder cornfield.”

  “Heaven, Hell or Keedysville.”

  “Keedysville.”

  “Go a damn mile down this damned road.”

  The sun burnt off the heavy Maryland dew and chill of night. We were in a line of carts, ambulances, two-and four-wheeled, government vehicles that didn’t seem to have a purpose, men walking in either direction—stopping, sitting, asking for water. The mile was interminable.

  The smell. It came on the wind.

  Along the road were knapsacks, broken wheels, wreckage from caissons, crushed ammunition boxes. And men. Men sat under trees and looked indifferently at the parade. The smell didn’t go away. The men didn’t go away. We saw burned farmhouses and what looked like large anthills, but they weren’t anthills. They were haystacks, some flattened and black, others alive, moving, covered with men. Wounded men. And the ground. The ground, too, was littered, strewn not with bales or sacks or caissons, but with men.

  We had entered another world. Everything moved. Everything smelled. The fat doctor with little eyes and gold-rimmed glasses took out a cigar and broke it in two. He crushed a stub in his hand, then picked out scraps of tobacco and stuffed them in his nostrils. He offered tobacco to the others. Everyone took it but Lorenzo.

  We let an ambulance pass.

  “Keedysville?”

  The driver nodded.

  We followed.

  I packed my nostrils and watched. Flies hung like mist behind the ambulance. Its doors were closed. A voice cried, “O Lord! Lord! Lord! Lord!” Blood seeped through the floorboards onto the dust of the road.

  42

  Keedysville was the City of Dis. Lawns, porches, fields were covered with wounded men. They lay everywhere. Some were attended, most not. The doctor held his head in his hands and wept, saying, “Forgive me. Forgive me. I go to my son.” Keedysville’s streets were jammed with civilians, soldiers, ambulances, carriages, carts, stragglers. All converged at the Baptist church.

  The church was a hospital. The hospital was hell. War’s logic.

  When the carriage could no longer move for the traffic, we got out. The doctor and the lawyer went into the church. The Sandy Creekers asked for the 24th. Something hardened in our step

  We saw men—searching, wandering, wounded or nursing.

  We saw women—nursing, carrying bandages, water, bowls.

  We heard—screams, weeping, prayers, pleas for water, commands.

  We smelled—blood, shit, vomit, sweat.

  We saw blood—bloody men, bloody bandages, bloody stretchers, bloody limbs.

  We saw bandages—shirts, sheets, tablecloths, bedspreads, napkins.

  We saw litters, stretchers, crutches, carts. Such cargo. Men in wheelbarrows, lifted out of ambulances, laid on lawn where there was no lawn. And the dead. Brought out of the church, out of ambulances, off stretchers, laid in carts, stacked in wagons, taken away.

  The surgeons’ tents and tables were on the lawn of the Baptist church. The tables were doors or planks supported by flour barrels. I tried not to look. How do you look at a pile of arms and legs? A pile. Arms and legs. Like scraps. And blood. Pools. Puddles. Clotting.

  Men on the ground waited. Some prayed. Some cried. Some talked gibberish. When their turn came, they were anesthetized with chloroform. They thrashed, shouted, were held down, passed out, were lifted to the tables. Limbs held, tourniquets tied, incisions made. Then the saw. Needles. Thread. Men missing an arm or leg were taken off the tables, put on the ground. Some woke screaming. Some woke in shock. Some cried. Some never woke.

  “The Twenty-fourth New York Volunteers?” Oren asked again and again.

  I couldn’t speak. Lorenzo looked from side to side.

  We tried not to step on men on blankets, litters, sheets. I stepped on a hand. The hand didn’t move. The next man woke to a bandaged stump where a leg had been. He screamed.

  “Better among the wounded than the dead,” I whispered.

  Everywhere, cries. “Water!” “Mother!” “Let me die!”

  Everywhere, the smell of shit, the metallic smell of blood, the harsh odor of chloroform. We came to a table. You couldn’t move without coming to a table. We stopped. A private not more than eighteen, face blackened by powder, distorted by pain, was lifted from litter to table. Three men in short sleeves held him. “More chloroform!” A man in a slouch hat held a metal cone lined with a white napkin a half-inch over the private’s face. The private sat up and screamed, “The Angel! I see the Angel!” The man in the slouch and the two others held him down. The private’s eyes were wild. Crazed. Animal. The private went rigid and fell back. His neck muscles spasmed, his head rolled. “Remove the cone! He can’t breathe!” The cone was removed. The spasms stopped. After a few seconds, the cone was put over his nose and mouth again. The private was insensible.

  A big man in an apron caked with blood, thick, clotted, brown, came forward. He was the surgeon. He wiped his hands on his apron, took a sponge from a bowl of bloody water and wiped off a long single-sided blade.

  I had seen animals slaughtered. I had seen birth, with
its welter of blood and cries and joy. This I could not watch. I looked away and saw a woman with dark black hair, parted in the middle, dabbing water from a soaked cloth on the lips of a man who’d had both legs amputated. A woman. My God. A woman.

  “Double flap amputation,” said the surgeon. He pushed up his rolled sleeves. White bicep showed above blood caked to the elbow. The surgeon had a thick black beard, broad shoulders and blood-shot eyes. His collar was bloodstained. He looked at me. I saw a man aging before my eyes.

  The bandages on the private’s right leg were removed. The leg was mangled. No kneecap, no foot. Bone stuck out of blackened skin. The thigh was yellow. I hate yellow. The faces of the wounded were yellow. The arms and legs under the tables were yellow. Yellow remains in my dreams.

  “Tourniquet!” shouted the surgeon.

  A bloodstained canvas strap with a buckle at one end and a buckle in the middle appeared. Two men wrapped it around the private’s thigh.

  The surgeon grabbed the anterior thigh two inches below the tourniquet. He lifted the skin with his left hand and wiped the amputation knife across his smock. It looked like a carving knife and glistened in the sun like fire. The surgeon pushed the point into the leg. He cut down. The knife sliced until it struck bone, stopped, went up, sliced again, and came out, having cut a neat flap. The surgeon wiped the blade on his smock, inserted it in the initial cut, cut down through muscle and fat, reached the bone, went under, and cut the posterior flap.

  The man in the slouch and an assistant pulled back the flaps. I turned. Thought I’d be sick. Oren turned. Lorenzo watched.

  The surgeon sliced the opening between flaps and bone. He cut yellowish, red tissue—muscle, fascia—what holds a leg together. The bone was visible. The surgeon put down the knife, picked up a suturing needle and threaded it, wetting the silk with saliva. He sewed sutures into the flaps. I looked at my feet. The surgeon put down the curved needle and picked up the capital saw. The blade was thick, the handle beveled with a diamond pattern for grip. The surgeon leaned over the table. The muscles in his forearm tensed. The man in the slouch hat and the assistant pulled back the flaps.

  The sound. I almost screamed.

  The surgeon bent to his work like a carpenter cutting a plank. The noise was smooth. Steady, quicker through the marrow, smooth again.

  I wanted to run, but the operation wasn’t over. The bone was severed, the bloody hinge of leg dropped off the table onto the pile.

  The surgeon wiped the saw with the sponge, returned it to the amputation case and removed a hooked tenaculum, a slender instrument with a wooden handle. The point was curved like a fishhook, and the surgeon hooked the femoral artery, which looked like a big red worm. He pulled out a quarter inch. The man in the slouch tied the red worm with a silk ligature. They hooked and tied more arteries. The tourniquet was loosened and blood filled the tied-off arteries. The stump was beefy red. The tourniquet was retightened and the smaller veins were hooked and sewn. The surgeon examined the work, nodded, and said, “Arteries tied. Veins clotted. Rongeur, please.”

  A pair of forceps appeared and the surgeon removed spicules of bone from the stump. He trimmed the bone with a file. After wetting the thread again, he sewed the flaps of skin together with a curved needle.

  “Good work,” said the man in the slouch hat.

  43

  Which boy? How bad?

  Was Moreau chloroformed? Sawed?

  Was he dead?

  This was the altar onto which I bound my son.

  Forgive me.

  Moving away from the table, I stepped in vomit. Stepped on a bandage covered with excrement. Saw a pile of arms and legs, and turned away because they moved.

  God’s price for slavery. How could it be less? How could it be more?

  Lorenzo held me up.

  “Them doctors ain’t doctors,” he said. “Just butchers who learnt on hogs.”

  “We are judged,” I whispered.

  “It ain’t medicine.”

  Lorenzo was angry at the surgeons. Angry at the men who held down the arms and legs. Furious at the piles of limbs.

  “They put them on boards,” I said softly. “Saw, sew, and lay them on the ground.” I said this as if I’d just described the universe. I squeezed my brother’s arm. We looked at each other. Not our boys. Not this. Never.

  Oren put his hand on my shoulder. “They must amputate to stop infection. Otherwise men die.”

  “They die anyway,” said Lorenzo.

  “It’s all they can do,” said Oren.

  “Judgment,” I said.

  “We must find the boys,” said Lorenzo.

  We went from tent to tent, stepped over litters, avoided the tables, avoided men on the ground. Oren was pale. I shook. Lorenzo touched the pistol under his vest.

  “They’re not here,” I said.

  Oren grabbed the sleeve of a sergeant carrying a bowl of bloody water and bloody sponges.

  “Yorker?”

  “Ninety-fifth New York.”

  “Where’s the Twenty-fourth?”

  “In the cornfield.”

  “Cornfield?” I said.

  “The cornfield,” said the sergeant. “The Twenty-fourth went early. No one left. Not standing. Not men nor corn.”

  “Cornfield,” said Lorenzo.

  “You could walk over after and not touch the earth,” the sergeant said.

  “Cornfield,” I said.

  “Bullets cut every stalk. They fought five hours.”

  “Have you heard of Sandy Creekers?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Salisburys?” said Lorenzo.

  The sergeant shook his head.

  “Where are the Twenty-fourth wounded?” said Oren.

  “In the church.”

  I knew we had to go in the church. We had looked in the yard. We had looked at everything, even an amputation. I didn’t want to go in the church.

  The church was dark and the darkness moaned. Planks had been placed over pews, and litters and stretchers put on the planks. How could a house of pain be God’s house? I saw the altar. The church was like the church at home. Rough beams, plain pews, whitewash in and out. A place people who work the earth come to God.

  God wasn’t here.

  I leaned against a wall and said, “Deliver us from evil.”

  Men cried. Men screamed. Some just boys. A fat man without legs below the knees shrieked for morphine. I smelled urine and vomit and that other smell. Gangrene. And a metallic smell under the other smells. The metallic smell got in my throat. A few nurses, male and female, went up and down the pews, dispensing water, wiping faces, comforting.

  So few. Here in the house of pain.

  “There!” Lorenzo pointed, his face white.

  “My God!” I whispered.

  By the side door. Only a father or mother could have recognized them. Felt their presence. They lay on stretchers over pews. Next to each other. Moreau and Merrick had been in pain, shock, pain again, at first unbearable, then shut down by the body, then stinging back, for twenty-eight hours. Their faces had been touched with a wet cloth, but streaks of black powder ran around their mouths and down their chins. Both were bathed in sweat. Moreau’s right ankle was bandaged. Merrick’s right leg was covered. His fists were white.

  It wasn’t one Salisbury. It was both.

  We went to them.

  “You came,” said Moreau.

  Tears were on my face. “I came.”

  “Said I’d see you in church.” Moreau took my hand. “Helen? Mother? Gib?”

  “Helen’s fine. Mother too. I know nothing of Gib.”

  Moreau closed his eyes.

  Merrick looked disbelievingly at Lorenzo. The boy was so wracked with pain, he must have thought he was hallucinating. Lorenzo touched his hand and said, “I’m here.”

  “Don’t let them cut,” said Merrick.

  Lorenzo took his hand. “I won’t.”

  44

  Lorenzo and I and a bloodstained
man with rolled-up sleeves carried Ro and Merrick to the Regimental surgeon. It was noon. The sun was bright. I saw the open box and glistening blades. The surgeon was stocky, with big shoulders, a bald head. Blood was spattered on his temples, on the fringe of hair by his ears and stylish whiskers. The surgeon wasn’t drunk. If he had been, Lorenzo would have hit him with the butt of his pistol. I was ready to plead, Lorenzo to explode. We stood close. Oren Earl shook hands with the surgeon. They knew each other.

  Outside a church, my son on a stretcher, part of me died. Stopped believing in words. I vowed not to give another speech. I would not stand for reelection. A deal with God, absent or not.

  Let him live. Punish me. It is my fault.

  The stretcher bearer wiped blood off the planks with a sponge he rinsed in a bowl. Lorenzo and I lifted Moreau off his stretcher and put him on the wet planks. The surgeon acknowledged us with a nod, and removed the bandage from Moreau’s ankle. Moreau winced. The surgeon wiped the black, blood-encrusted wound with the sponge he used to wipe the planks. Sweat ran down Moreau’s face. I squeezed his hand. Lorenzo watched, hand on vest. The surgeon probed the wound with his index finger. Moreau gave a small cry, then managed a smile.

  “I must amputate,” said the surgeon.

  “Are bones broken?” It was my voice. I surprised myself.

  “No, but this wound will become infected.”

  “Can it be kept clean?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said the surgeon. “If a piece of cloth is passed through it every day for a year. Assuming he lives.”

  “You are sure no bones are broken?” asked Oren.

  “Yes.”

  “Then he could live and clean his wound?” said Oren.

  “He has one chance in ten.” The surgeon nodded wearily to Oren. “Let’s see the other boy.”

  Lorenzo and I lifted Moreau off the planks and put him on his stretcher. “Father, letter,” he murmured, delirious. He pawed at his chest. I saw a flash of white. A crumpled envelope with my name on it was pinned under his shirt. I put it in my pocket, and Moreau slumped back on the stretcher.

  The assistants picked Merrick up and put him on the planks.