Merrick’s eyes were half open. His mouth soundlessly shaped the word no. Lorenzo stroked Merrick’s hair, slick with sweat. The surgeon removed the bandages. I looked, then knelt by Moreau’s stretcher and squeezed Moreau’s hand. Merrick’s knee had swelled into a large black ball. Streaks of dirt and dried blood ran down his leg. The surgeon looked at Lorenzo.
“Bullet probe,” said the surgeon.
An assistant reached into the wooden box and removed a Nélaton probe. It was a foot long. It had an ivory handle, a thin shaft and a porcelain ball at the tip of the shaft.
“Turn the patient.”
The assistant rolled Merrick onto his side. Merrick’s eyes went back in his head.
The surgeon inserted the probe in the wound. A hard, professional look crossed his face. He twisted the handle, then deftly removed the probe. A black mark was visible on the porcelain ball. The surgeon showed the mark to Lorenzo.
“The ball is embedded in the bone. The leg must come off.”
“One chance in ten?” said Lorenzo.
The surgeon shook his head. “If I don’t amputate, this boy will be die in ten days.”
“We’ll take our chances,” said Lorenzo.
Oren put his hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Lorenzo.
The surgeon pulled himself up to full height. The sun glinted off his spectacles. His smock, forearms and trousers were caked with blood. He wiped his hands on his smock and said, “One boy will survive if he has a constitution of iron. This boy will be dead in ten days.”
Neither of us spoke.
“Mr. Earl, these men are gambling with their sons’ lives.”
Lorenzo pulled back his vest and showed the pistol. “Mister, you’re gambling with yours.”
45
What would I have done, had the surgeon insisted? I didn’t know. What Lorenzo did, I knew. The surgeon didn’t argue. Oren sided with us. A minute later it made no difference. We had our sons and the surgeon was cutting on another wounded man.
“Get the boys out of here,” said Lorenzo.
With the help of a carter whose cart had lost a wheel, we carried our sons to a shady spot under a tree, vacated by men taken to the tables. I sat by Moreau, who said, “The letter. The letter.”
“I found no letter,” I said. I looked at Moreau’s face and wiped his brow. I didn’t want him worrying about a letter.
Lorenzo went to the surgeon’s tent and returned with water, bandages and morphine syrup. I didn’t ask what he paid. Oren went to find McClellan’s Chief Surgeon. It took two hours. He found Dr. Letterman eating lunch. They talked about the medical situation and Oren got a note securing places in an ambulance and beds at the General Hospital in Frederick City.
On the ride to Frederick, I saw, in the most brutal way, the advantage of rank. Our boys rode in a four-wheeled ambulance with two wounded colonels because their fathers and a powerful man came for them. I thought of men whose fathers couldn’t come.
Rank was life or death.
The ambulance worked its way out of Keedysville, then through the open hospital of the surrounding country. We saw operating tables, haystacks, lawns covered with wounded men. Doctors, if they were doctors, not “active men”—the stream of butchers, loggers, maniacs who appeared after battles to operate—were busy. Dr. Letterman told Oren that even if amputations were done correctly, “active men” didn’t stay to dress or tend the wounded. Amputees lay in barns, houses, haystacks, lawns with no one to care for them.
“Piss on it,” said Lorenzo.
Oren shook his head.
I didn’t speak and I didn’t shut my eyes. Watching a country of untended men made me as angry as at the stable where I received my scar. It mattered nothing who was brave, who a coward, who sacrificed himself. The privileged—officers, the connected, the men whose fathers came—got to hospital, got water, got the chance to survive. I swore again to give no speeches.
Washington City was a sewer. The day after battle, an abattoir. Truth didn’t march. It hid. Bravery? Men were butchered on the field and butchered after. Character? Survival was position. Rank. Money.
Maryland stank.
All the way to the nostrils of absent God.
We passed a cart of dead men. A stoic Negro drove the stinking cargo—flies, yellow faces, mangled legs turning black in the sun, bloated stomachs, bulging eyes.
I touched Moreau’s face and prayed.
Would Mary forgive me if she saw this?
46
The ambulance stopped at a farmhouse. The lead horse had picked up a stone and the driver wanted to remove it. “Take but a minute.” The lawn was covered with wounded. A surgeon and his tent were by the barn, which was white, like the McTavish barn back home in Woodville. Faded Masonic crests were emblazoned over doors that stood open. A stout woman came out. Lorenzo and I checked our sons and went to her. Her blue dress was bloodstained.
“Are you doctors?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“He ain’t either.” The woman pointed at a big man in a straw hat, brim smudged with blood, bending over a chloroformed corporal. “‘Active man’ he calls hisself.”
“We’re here for only a few minutes,” said Oren. “What can we do?”
“Give water.”
The woman directed us to a pump, buckets and ladles. We each filled a bucket and went in. The barn was dark. The smell was immediate. Rotting flesh. Dead flesh. Manure under scattered straw. My eyes adjusted and I saw rows of men lying on the straw. They lay in rows like harvested wheat. Lorenzo and I each started down a row. Men were covered with lice. I dipped my fingers in the bucket and put water on their lips. I used the dipper when more was requested. They were grateful beyond measure. Eyes. Yellow. Pleading. Desperate to get a message home. I heard moaning and crying. Cursing. Praying. I saw infected stumps. Maggots, worms of the grave, ate the living. My gorge rose.
The driver yelled, “We gotta go!”
As we left, a legless corporal grabbed my foot and said, “Mother.” It took all the man’s strength. “Tell her…” He couldn’t finish. When his grip fell away, I walked quickly so no one else could grab me. Outside, the sun was blinding.
47
The General Hospital in Frederick was crowded, but our boys received good care, some dispensed by Lorenzo and me, some from nurses, male and female, some from regular visits from doctors. It was a terrible struggle for Sergeant and Private Salisbury. Moreau fought infection. I watched a piece of cloth pulled through my son’s ankle to clean his wound. It was horrible, but the ankle had not become infected. Merrick ran terrible fevers. Lorenzo left his side only to eat and didn’t eat often. The knee remained a big, black ball. Amputation was out of the question. Merrick wouldn’t survive it now. If my brother had qualms, he kept them to himself. Lorenzo spent long hours by Merrick’s bedside, and if he prayed, he prayed to strange gods.
I nursed Moreau. He frequently asked if I had found the letter pinned inside his shirt, which was to be read only if he died. Each time, I said I found no letter and you aren’t going to die.
I watched Lorenzo and Merrick. There was something ungentle about them. It wasn’t hurtful or crude. I think Merrick wanted to die hard. That way it was bearable. Die fighting.
I had reason to hope, as long as Moreau’s wound wasn’t infected and the fevers weren’t too high. Moreau liked having his hand held and face wiped. He fought to stay in this world.
Merrick did not. Where was Merrick? What red hills or green fields had Merrick found? I heard snatches of delirium. Merrick talked to his mother, dead now fifteen years, as if she were there, and maybe she was, in the boy’s fever-wracked mind
The surgeon had been right, my brother wrong. Lorenzo had gambled and was losing Merrick. What good were words? What good was anything? The surgeon said Moreau needed a constitution of iron. Everyone in Sandy Creek knew Merrick was stronger. Harder. Indestructible.
Until the c
ornfield. Even now, men mean only one place, one time, when they say, “the cornfield.” They say it with awe, if they say it at all.
Lorenzo changed by the day. He didn’t get older, but stranger, though lines in his brow got deeper and his beard more grizzled. Maybe Lorenzo visited the world Merrick had found, a world of delirium filled with snatches of the past, glimpses of things unseen by the rest of us. Merrick repeated, mumbled, incanted words—field, woods, dog, green. I think he babbled about heads on stakes. Maybe the boy was tormented by the old story, maybe I misheard. Wherever Merrick was, Lorenzo understood. Lorenzo didn’t curse death. Death didn’t make him angry, which surprised me. At first he acted like it was a fight, and Merrick didn’t lose fights. Lorenzo staked his son’s life on toughness. If Merrick could breathe, he could lick anything. I sat in a ward of wounded soldiers visited by wives, sisters, mothers, fathers, little brothers who smelled of lavender water and soap, by a bed with fresh linen and a son who received fresh bandages, and watched my brother watch his son die. I tried to think of it as a prizefight. Merrick battling, jabbing, keeping Death at arm’s length, but the fight tiring him. If Merrick could go fifty rounds, as he did once with a carpenter from Orwell, his opponent could go a hundred. No matter how hard Merrick battled, how bravely he stood, the opponent drew him away.
Then father and son knew it was time to stop. Not quit—they’d never quit—but change tactics, retreat, stop whipping the nag. I watched. I tried to understand.
Lorenzo and Merrick didn’t talk to God or Jesus. Father and son shared some other mystery. What approaches when a man dies? What does his father see? Merrick’s words didn’t fit—green, fields, she, heads, green she-fields. A disappearing puzzle. I heard talk of a black, dancing dog and comrades and rogues and water. Fields. Woods. Merrick was hunting.
He whispered, “Dog. Crick. Dog.”
48
For five days Moreau lay in agony, tossing, sweating through the night, talking senselessly. Until now, I hadn’t believed Moreau could die. There hadn’t been time to confront his death. I hadn’t sat with the knowledge of death, but now, in the hospital, holding my son’s hand, getting water, talking to doctors, helping nurses, seeing his wound dressed, made me think.
I saw men die. I heard their death rattles, and prayers intoned over their corpses. I saw their bodies taken away, their beds stripped and remade and filled with other wounded men. I watched my brother stare at his dying son.
Ghosts were everywhere.
The nurses were good, medicine the best that could be had. I waited while Moreau tossed in the dark, and hoped his spirit would come back from the place it goes when the body has been broken. I waited, hoped, and prayed for his fever to go down. His letter was in my pocket. I agonized about opening it. I wondered what my son wanted his last words to be. I feared them.
Merrick lay nearby, responding only to his pain and Lorenzo’s hand. The room was big and close, two rows of beds, crowded with wounded and dying. Men moaned at night. Visitors tried not to cry. Heavy curtains kept out light. The quilts on Moreau’s and Merrick’s beds were stained with their blood.
The letter burned in my pocket. What had Moreau been thinking, going into the battle that might be his last? Had he paid his debt to Gib and the heads? Had only comrades mattered? Did he call me coward?
I stroked his face and remembered Mary rocking his cradle, taking him by the hand to church, the child doing chores, ice skating, chasing Rufus, the mill cat. I remembered hunting by the Creek, the boy asking me about God, asking his mother about Christ, the young man arguing. I saw him change from a thin, dutiful child to a questioning seminarian to a man going to war, and now—broken flesh.
Not knowing his last thoughts was unbearable.
Did he blame me as much as I blamed myself? I told myself I had lied to Moreau about the letter to keep him from worry. I lied because I wanted to know what it said.
At night, I listened to Moreau moan in his sleep. I squeezed the letter, torn between fervid curiosity and guilt. I fought myself.
I lost. It took five days.
49
South Mountain
Md
Sept 15, 1862
Dear Father,
If you read this, you will know I have seen God’s face. I don’t know if you will find me, or this letter. The battlefield takes so much.
I killed two men yesterday. At least two. The Rebs fight hard. They don’t seem human. We probably don’t to them. Once fighting has begun, no one is.
I don’t talk to God anymore, so I’ll talk to you. There’s a secret I’ve been carrying, too heavy to carry to the grave. A woman in Washington City had my child. She married a clerk in the Patent Office. He probably thinks the child is his. I haven’t tried to find her. What kind of father could I be now? I think about my child often. For some reason, I think Betsey had a son. It fills me with shame. I cannot bear to think how Helen would feel if she found out. I tell you because I want you to know the Salisbury line will continue without me, though not in Sandy Creek. And if a woman and child ever come looking for me, please be kind.
My death wasn’t your fault. A man must do right.
I know you will look after Helen and Mother.
Your son,
Moreau Salisbury
50
Moreau’s letter was what I believe religious people call an epiphany. He wanted me to know his secret. He thought telling me would help. I milled that. Moreau wanted me to know. This wasn’t a promise, a hope, or a prayer. It was an act. I was the person my son told in extremis. I was his father. Flawed as I am.
I was never so moved.
That there was a child out of wedlock was no great shock. I had seen enough of Washington City to imagine what transpired there. It also seemed the problem had taken care of itself. We were all lucky for that. Moreau was hurt and sad and guilty. Of course. He was a fine person. That he was not as fine as he had thought was another of life’s inevitable disappointments. The kind of disappointment most overcome. One more easily overcome in private conscience than in the glare of public opinion.
My son trusted me. Was this forgiveness? Love? I wouldn’t tell Mary the secret. I wouldn’t tell Moreau I knew. That would be love too.
For the first time since leaving Sandy Creek, my spirits rose.
51
Five days after the battle, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. More was to come.
Mary arrived at the B & O station in Frederick City the next day. I walked from the private home where Moreau and Merrick had been moved to either recover or die. I didn’t want to leave Moreau, but Lorenzo was with the boys. I waited in the crowd at the station, watching the rustling elm and maple leaves across the tracks. For a minute I didn’t think about the war. What is finer than wind in leaves? A ripe, warm, fall Maryland day—autumn roses, blue hydrangeas, purple asters, yellow black-eyed susan, red cardinal flowers—mocked or comforted those coming to this city of the dead and wounded. It was good to be out of a house of mortality. How quickly does a home become a hospital. Who can domesticate pain or daily break bread with the King of Terrors? In Sandy Creek, our homes were not yet hospitals. Sorrow had not seen broken flesh. Leaves would fall, new frost kill weeds and decorate fields, and the harvest come in.
People lined the tracks and gathered and talked, or, like me, stared at flowers, whispering trees, or down the tracks. Frederick City was busy. Every train brought those who came to comfort and those who needed comfort. And supplies. Wagons waited. Drivers smoked, spat, ready for another load of bandages, morphine and chloroform, and all the sharp accouterments of the medical profession needed in a city staggered by blood. Slaves waited too, not freed by the Proclamation, but heartened by it. You saw it in their faces.
Coffins came. Coffins went. Many still lay unburied in Sharpsburg.
I thought of people coming to help, and took comfort, but I needed Mary, and Mary was needed here. I didn’t look at people. I wasn’t yet used to suffering faces.<
br />
The train came in, hissing and grinding to a stop. People were hanging out its windows. Some yelled for news, others pointed. Some looked lost. Most looked apprehensive. Mary spotted me immediately. I was in front of the stone station tower, waving my hat. Mary almost flew off the train. She pulled up her long skirts, stepped down, and forded the crowd of parents, slaves, soldiers, and porters getting off or rushing to the cars. We pushed toward each other, surrounded by happy greetings, cries of anguish. Tears. A stout lady followed by a Negro yelled, “Am I too late?” and got only a sigh from a stout man. It was a press of the desperate—shouts, sobs, tears, and tears held back.I seized Mary. We held each other as if clutching Moreau’s life. For a moment we were one breathing animal, unable to move or let go.
Mary squeezed my hands. “Will Moreau be all right?”
“Yes.” I held her. I looked in her eyes. I kissed her.
“I feel strength in you, Mason. Hope.”
“You are my hope, Mary.”
“You are mine,” she said.
“Moreau will be all right,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
Mary was here. Two of us now to look death in the face. We were lucky and Moreau was lucky. Many were alone with the angel.
Moreau and Merrick were in a long blue room. Mary crossed the threshold like a creature in flight. She looked at Moreau, kissed him, hugged him carefully, and stroked his hair. Her tears wet his beard. I almost couldn’t watch.
Finally she said, “This one will be all right, praise God.”
“I shall be, Mother.” Moreau’s voice was hoarse. Full of pain. And infinitely grateful.
Mary went to Merrick, who got a strange look on his face, then returned to that other place. His other place. Mary said nothing. Merrick’s fevered eyes and the smell of his leg unnerved her, but after a hurried glance at me, she hugged Lorenzo, who acknowledged her with a nod and a shrug, as if what might be said were better unsaid. Lorenzo thanked her and took Merrick’s hand.
No Common War Page 15
