Robin Oliveira

by My Name Is Mary Sutter (v5)

  All across Washington in July of 1862, women rose in droves with the dawn, washed away the muggy heat of the night, pinned up their long hair, donned calico and lawn dresses, scrubbed yesterday’s dirt and blood from their boots, brewed tea, fried eggs, assembled handkerchiefs, bonnets, coins, hung lavender sachets from their necks, tied aprons around their waists, censored once again the futile urge to weep, and waded into the day to nurse the wounded who poured into the city from the Peninsula.

  Churches, offices, homes, and old hospitals flung open their doors. An officer breached the padlocked doors of the shuttered Union Hotel, and Miss Dix appointed a woman named Hannah Ropes there as matron when she couldn’t find Mary Sutter. Miss Dix couldn’t find her anywhere, even though hospital matrons, in an effort at organization, were keeping lists of nurses in marbled paper notebooks they bought at the corner stationers, inscribing names they would dig out years hence from their trunks in an effort to win the women war pensions. In the notebooks, the matrons’ penmanship and spelling would show the toll of haste, the ink splotching as if the pen had been hurriedly set down when its user had been called away to some more urgent task than listing the exhausted, charitable women who tried to help that beastly summer. The barriers had fallen. Miss Dix could no longer dictate who was able to work where, but even she was grateful for the women who arrived at the hospital doors bearing only persistence as their gift. Later in the war, someone in the Surgeon General’s office would develop a form to send in each month for listing the contract nurses. But that would be after the summer of 1862, the summer that everyone would remember as the Great Scramble, the summer when it was impossible to keep track of anything.

  Not all the eighteen thousand wounded came to Washington. Some had to stay behind, scattered across the Virginia Peninsula in the regimental hospitals that Tripler so loved, others were guarded at Fort Monroe, still held by Federal troops, and a portion were shipped directly from the Peninsula to New York, where, at Bellevue Hospital on the East River, the doctors had just ten minutes’ notice that they were about to receive one hundred injured men. In Philadelphia—easier to reach than distant New York—the hospitals overflowed.

  But in Washington, the deluge inundated the city.

  In a single rented room located in an alley behind Maryland Avenue near the Capitol, Mary Sutter also rose and dressed with the dawn. Her thin-walled room was furnished only with a narrow bed, a small window, a dresser and a chair, an armoire, and a coal stove that coughed soot. The boarding house was not unlike the Union Hotel; perhaps it was its resemblance to her former workplace that had drawn her to the tenement, but she could not say for certain. She would walk from the Capitol past the iron foundry, the gas storage tank, and the many hospitals, her boots negotiating the refuse in the gutters as her hems grew dusty or muddy, depending on the weather.

  At her clerk’s job in the War Department—won by virtue of her precise handwriting—she copied out circulars and passed them to Secretary Stanton, who never looked up from his desk. In the evenings, she walked more than a mile back through the city along a different route, across the City Canal and diagonally along the mall, toward the great undomed Capitol building under which her boarding house squatted. The absence of the bulk of the Army of the Potomac made the once bustling city seem like the township it had been before the country had gone to war. Fewer trundling caissons, rarely a parade. In the distance, Armory Square Hospital was rising. Already, Mary could see the shells of the pavilions, the outlines where, at President Lincoln’s suggestion, gardens would one day be planted between the long buildings.

  On Sundays, Mary went to church and sat alone in a pew. Afterwards, she walked for exercise to the Long Bridge to peer across the river at Virginia. At night, she shunned the communal dining room of the boarding house to cook herself a modest dinner on the coal stove. When she dreamed of Jenny, as she often did, it was of them as toddlers, when they still had not grasped their separateness. A few times she dreamed of the time they had been caged together in the crib for the entire day, their weeping mother finally reaching in to console them. Once, she dreamed she had cut Jenny’s umbilical cord, the knife clutched in her fetal hand, as, intertwined, the two of them floated inside their mother, Jenny slowly dying.

  In the fourth week of July, the perspiring pastor of Mary’s church opined from his pulpit that “if one of us is dying, we are all dying. No one is special. No one is set apart. Even if all you can do is pick up a mop.”

  After the service, Mary sat alone in her room and ate a small meal of bread and salted beef. Five months had passed since she’d last set foot inside a hospital. Through the papered walls of the boarding house, she had heard all the dreadful things of life, though she had tried in coming here to banish them. Sometimes, walking to work, she had nearly leapt into the ambulances carrying the wounded from the hospital ships at the Sixth Street wharves to the hospitals. Instinct was a bastard thing, always insisting.

  She changed into one of the dresses she had worn to work at the Union Hotel, crossed the mall, and headed toward the Patent Office, the nearest hospital to where she lived. There, an army of women lifted heads to place pillows, offered brandy punch, wine, whiskey, washed shattered arms, broken legs, gunshot jaws, and worried over abbreviated, festering stumps.

  Mary passed them all by, hurried to the alley, filled a bucket, returned to the marble hallways, and began to mop.

  In the next few weeks, she scrubbed walls, stripped beds, boiled toweling, discarded dressings, scoured bedpans, hauled water, served meals, and scraped human filth from soiled water closets. A Union Hotel redux. Her shoulders cramped and her feet blistered: a fine punishment. She refused to allow herself to be drawn in, even as her eyes roved over the bandaged legs and arms. Except once, she did kneel down to retie a sling the proper way, positioning the man’s elbow lower than his wrist. And another time, she removed a saturated dressing and rebandaged it herself.

  But she wasn’t a nurse. She did not call herself that. When the surgeons made their morning rounds, neither James Blevens nor William Stipp was ever among them.

  “You there, mopping the floors. What is your name?” The matron was not a rude woman, but the arduous days of July, with the hospital overflowing, had taken their toll on her, to say nothing of the humidity and the odors of the men entrusted to her care.

  “Mary.”

  “One of the men told me that you changed his dressing.”

  “He was mistaken.”

  “Another said you fixed up a little sling for him.”

  “He must have been thinking of someone else.”

  The matron hesitated, then gathered her skirts and headed downstairs, where the surgeon in charge was changing a dressing. Robert Smith was not to be trusted. He drank far too much and eroded the general morale of the hospital.

  A few days later, Mary was skirting her mop around the legs of a cot, upon which a boy gripped its spindly sides, his eyes glassy with fever. Earlier that morning, a surgeon had performed a second amputation on the boy’s leg to cut away some festering tissue. The boy had survived the surgery, the rigors of the chloroform, the vomiting afterwards, but now his face had gone white.

  “I’m thirsty,” he said.

  “I’ll get a nurse.”

  “Wait.” He grabbed her wrist. “Don’t leave me.”

  Mary hesitated, and then set down her mop. She poured him a glass of water from a nearby pitcher and helped him to drink.

  He began to talk. “I was at Malvern Hill. That’s wet land. Scrubby where it isn’t just a swamp. Trees slung low, dragging in the water. Cypress, they said. You see my feet? My one foot, I mean. Nothing but a mess after my boots filled up with water.”

  The boy’s remaining foot was not what concerned Mary. He was restless, fidgety, keyed up.

  “You should rest,” she said.

  “I was up on that hill firing away on the Rebs stuck down there around the bottom of the hill.” He edged up onto his elbow, talking fast. “
I was hunched up behind a rock, you see, getting off a shot now and then, when a bullet ricocheted off a tree and smashed into my knee. It was like a swarm of hornets took up housekeeping right there in my kneecap. But they couldn’t drag me off till night. That was pain, I tell you.” His skin was pale and clammy, and little beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. “Down on the flats it was a bog and they dropped me into the mud with all them mosquitoes and the night coming on. Someone stuck a rock under my head so I wouldn’t drown. The rain was cold, too, and by the time they hauled me up on that table and the sawbones slapped a cone over my face, I couldn’t even talk, couldn’t even ask him to try to save my leg. That chloroform smelled sick but I breathed it in. When I came to I was throwing up real bad. They didn’t have any bandages so the maggots got in pretty quick, but there’s no picking them out. They didn’t have any whiskey or tents, so I was outside there maybe, I don’t know, ten days or so before they could get me onto one of them ships. And then I thought I was in heaven. They poured kerosene into the maggots. That seared, but at least the maggots were gone.”

  Mary drew back his sheet. Blood was pooling under his abbreviated, bandaged right leg.

  “Will someone call the surgeon?” she cried. There was a rustle in the periphery, skirts swishing, heads raised, but all she could see was the fresh blood, and the boy’s mouth, which had fallen open in surprise.

  He is like that boy, Mary thought. The boy who watched himself die. Mary felt with her fingertips for the femoral artery, pressed hard.

  “Tell me about your home, tell me where you’re from.” She wanted to keep him talking, to keep him conscious. The boy needed a looping stitch, needed someone to tie up the artery. Mary pressed harder on the artery, and the flow seemed to slacken.

  “Herkimer Falls.”

  “New York?” Mary asked.

  He did not answer.

  “Tell me,” Mary said.

  “Yes, New York.”

  “Tell me about your mother.”

  But the boy wasn’t talking. He was looking at his leg.

  “Your mother?” Mary prodded. “Tell me about her.”

  Women were hovering, saying something about the surgeon being tied up.

  “Then bring me a surgery kit,” she said.

  “Who will use the kit?” someone asked her.

  “I will,” Mary snapped.

  “My mother didn’t want me to enlist.” The boy had become confessional. Mary didn’t like it, didn’t like what it meant.

  “I left my mother too,” she said.

  “You did? You left your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sorry for it?” the boy asked.

  Mary almost lost focus. Do you want me to go, Mother? As you like.

  “The way she looked at me when I was leaving?” the boy said. “Like she’d never forgive me. Now I won’t ever get to see her again.”

  “I need a surgery kit,” Mary cried. “Does no one have a surgery kit?”

  The women shook their heads. Not one of them possessed such an exotic thing. The boy’s eyes were beginning to flutter.

  Mary was losing him. She was pressing hard, but the artery was still bleeding. This was why she hadn’t wanted to come back. She was easing her agitated sister back down on the bed. Renouncing the hapless doctor and his forceps. Centering the knife just so. Separating the cartilage to save Thomas and Jenny’s child. She could almost recall the heft of the scalpel in her hands, the deep pleasure of locating that notch in Jenny’s pelvis, the release of the bone at the tip of her fingers. The soaring, triumphant feeling that she had done something miraculous. Laudable. Singular.

  The matron rushed up and thrust a kit at Mary.

  “Here, press hard,” Mary said, and when the matron slipped her fingers next to hers, Mary lifted her hand away, and then tore off the boy’s dressing and searched for the failed stitch. She used the long tenaculum to separate the ravaged tissue, found the unraveled stitches, the bleeding artery, inserted the needle, looped the stitch, once, twice, again, and then again, finally formed a knot. She was acting out of memory. She heard someone call her name, but she ignored the call, told the woman to ease the pressure on the artery. Waited, as Stipp had once waited. Waited, until she was certain the suture held.

  Reflexively, she put her hand to the boy’s wrist. The pulse, though faint, beat.

  Mary stared at her hands, at her skirts glistening with the boy’s blood, a smell and sight as familiar to her as her lost family.

  The matron bent low and said, “Well done. Now, come with me.” She wrapped an arm around Mary, steered her away to an office, where she helped her out of her stained dress, and for a moment Mary was almost naked, shivering in the August heat. Then the matron swaddled Mary in a blanket.

  “Mary, you said your name was?”

  “Yes.”

  The matron pursed her lips. “You are not by any chance the Mary Sutter who worked at the Union Hotel? Miss Dix told me to look out for a nurse who was interested in being a doctor. That isn’t you, is it?”

  Identity as a question. Mary wondered if her mother would even know her now.

  The matron pressed. “I hear she was quite good. Extraordinary, even. That she had a gift.”

  “No. She wasn’t good at all. She made a lot of mistakes.”

  “What kind of mistakes?”

  “Unforgivable mistakes.”

  “Mistakes are rarely unforgivable.”

  “These were.” Mary shut her eyes.

  “I need you to come back here tomorrow and work,” the matron said. “Will you?”

  Come home. I need you. Mary looked up. If only, if only. Time the terrible trick. Find your way through the black shadow of the past. And if you failed to snatch life from death for Jenny, you must still do it for yourself. You must still try. The impossible dictum. You will not last.

  The matron pressed again. “You will make more mistakes, my dear. We all will, I’m afraid. But you must help us. Can you help us?”

  Come home. I need you. There had been a moment when Jenny had bolted upright, as if to stop her, and Amelia had thrown Mary a gasping, despairing glance. But Mary had cut anyway. She remembered trying to stanch the flow of blood, remembered seeing Amelia paralyzed at the bedside, taking in Jenny’s last moments.

  Mother, Jenny had cried.

  Perhaps it wasn’t her fault that Jenny had died, Mary thought now, but she knew that she would never know, and that not knowing would be her punishment, her own little circle of hell.

  She could almost see Albany, could almost imagine Amelia at the door, holding Jenny’s baby, could even envision Thomas cradling his infant daughter.

  “Will you help us?” the matron asked.

  Mary made a noise, not quite yes, but a cri de coeur, soft, like the splash of Charon’s oar, or the sound of a train whistle, going home.

  Chapter Forty-three

  The morning of August 30, 1862, dawned sticky and oppressive in Washington. A gathering storm had stalled in the Virginia hills far to the west and was making the ordinarily pleasant ride in from the Soldiers’ Home, where Lincoln and his family had again retreated for the summer, miserable for Hay and Lincoln. All was confusion because the Union general John Pope had been out of communication for days. All summer, the relentless Pope had chased Stonewall Jackson’s Confederate troops west from Richmond, but now no one knew exactly where anyone was, even though, Hay told Lincoln now, the telegraph operators on the rail lines near Manassas had been reporting sounds of firing nearby the site of the former battlefield. McClellan was being no help. Ordered by Lincoln to return from the Peninsula, he had reluctantly boarded a steamer a few days ago at Fort Monroe and had sailed up the Potomac, but only as far as Aquia Creek south of Washington, where he was holed up at the naval base sending telegraphs to the War Department every few hours or so asking for updates, and then when updated making excuses as to why he wouldn’t send troops to help Pope, asserting that Pope needed to get out of w
hatever scrape he had gotten into on his own.

  “Petulant man,” Lincoln said, removing his hat and wiping his forehead of sweat, though it was only six in the morning and the sun had not risen completely above the horizon. “I do believe McClellan wants Pope to fail.”

  Hay could not understand why Lincoln did not call McClellan to Washington to have him court-martialed.

  “I’m beginning to think McClellan might actually be crazy,” Lincoln said. “Do you know he had the temerity to recall General Franklin’s men after General Halleck thrice ordered them forward to help Pope? And last night, McClellan wanted to blow up the Chain Bridge to keep the Rebels from using it. The man is a coward.”

  In July, after McClellan had failed so magnificently on the Peninsula, General Henry Halleck had been made commander in chief above him, in an effort to goad the golden boy turned truculent imp into action, but even that had not persuaded McClellan. Coward indeed, or traitor, Hay thought now, but held his tongue. He rode with the president in the mornings not as judge, but as listener. Usually by the time they reached the Mansion the president had talked himself around whatever problem he was mulling.

  Now, when they arrived at the Mansion, Lincoln went straight to the War Department, as was his habit, to read the latest dispatches. Edwin Stanton, the new secretary of war and onetime rival of Lincoln’s, whom Lincoln had installed back in January to replace the ineffective Simon Cameron, was pacing, his coat jacket slung across his desk.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” he said.

  They telegraphed Colonel Herman Haupt for news. Haupt was the superintendent of railroads, stationed most mornings at the central railroad station in Alexandria, where he could direct the military trains full of troops and supplies where they were most needed. Haupt was a reliable source, because he heard everything first, owing to the fact that the telegraph operators were under the guardianship of the railroad.

  Haupt replied quickly that the railroad bridge across Bull Run had been burned sometime in the last day. He confirmed that firing had indeed been heard that morning near Centreville and Manassas. At this very moment, he was sending forward five railcars containing a wrecking car, a construction car, two containing fodder for the animals, and another loaded with meat and bread to Fairfax Station. He had also sent forward a telegraph operator with wire and instrument.