Robin Oliveira

by My Name Is Mary Sutter (v5)

  “The only man in the army who can write a clear dispatch,” Lincoln said when he was finished reading. Satisfied, he left for the Mansion, though throughout the morning Haupt’s updates were messaged over to him: No firing of any importance, bridges are being repaired, provisions sent. It appears that the firing reported before had merely been Pope running Jackson out of the area toward a gap in the mountains, where his army can no longer threaten Washington.

  Lincoln and Hay and Secretary of War Stanton went out to noon dinner. The discussion ranged around McClellan; Stanton wanted the imbecile court-martialed, and thought that Pope deserved commendation for the rout of the Rebel forces. Hay held his tongue yet again. He had learned that Lincoln listened to every suggestion made to him, but judged men on their ability to discern.

  After dinner, Hay and Lincoln went to army headquarters to see if they had better information. The War Department was separate from the Department of the Army, and the two were sometimes at war with one another. Each department received different updates; Lincoln had learned to wander between the two. Now it seemed that during dinner, events had changed dramatically. A great battle had begun. Pope had not chased Jackson south; instead, they were facing off on the same battlefield where Irvin McDowell had failed the year before. McClellan was frantically telegraphing from his protected spot on the Potomac, asking what was going on; he could hear the guns from his position on Aquia Creek.

  Lincoln and Hay went back to tell the secretary of war. Stanton was agitated, pacing back and forth, flinging open his door to speak to his telegraph operator, then shuttling back again to his desk. Thousands of wounded were being brought off the lines and laid at Fairfax Railroad Station, and there was no one to care for them.

  “Letterman is still on the Peninsula, with most of our ambulances, all of our tents, and a good number of our surgeons. My men are posting notices as we speak around town for any able-bodied men willing to work as nurses to report to the Long Bridge for transportation to the front. I sent an order to the guards at the Long Bridge to let volunteers across without a pass.”

  “Men with no experience? As nurses? At the front? Don’t you think they’ll be in the way?” Lincoln asked.

  “I’m trying to save lives, Mr. Lincoln,” Stanton said. “Until Letterman gets here, we are without medical direction. It is essential that someone take charge.” He glared at Hay, as if to insinuate that he should have taken charge, because he, Stanton, already had plenty to do.

  Walking back toward the Mansion, Lincoln said, “Haupt will have his head.”

  Hay agreed. “It will just be a bunch of idiots, showing up out of curiosity.”

  Lincoln regarded his young secretary, whose keen intelligence he cherished. “Keep your ears open. If Haupt wants a meeting with Stanton, I want to be there. I get so little entertainment of late.”

  “Entertainment? Fireworks, more likely.”

  “Just what I expect, yes,” Lincoln said, as a slow smile worked its way across his face.

  Fatigue had hewn Lincoln’s craggy face into a visage that appeared a decade older than even the year before. Hay worried about him, but now he marveled again that the president could find the humor in anything, even in the midst of disaster.

  Across town at the Patent Office, the evening sun was slanting in through the windows, shining above the ever-darkening cloudbank brewing in the west. Even with the windows flung open, the air in the hospital sweltered. Mary wiped the perspiration from the back of her neck and said, “But I don’t understand.”

  The matron had run up the stairs with a copy of the Evening Star and had read Stanton’s notice aloud.

  “Stanton wants men?” Mary said. “Why men?”

  The matron grew alarmed as Mary’s eyes flickered; Mary had stolen the paper away and was earnestly reading the notice. It was like holding back the tide with her. She had convinced Mary to help and now she couldn’t stop her. Though the young woman said she kept a room somewhere, she stayed overnight many nights of the week, rarely sleeping, instead haunting the long rows of beds, as if she were trying to make up for all those months away.

  “You cannot go. It will be dangerous. And besides, try to convince a general that you should be on the field. They will dismiss you as a camp follower.” It was worth the shock, the matron thought, because she knew that argument to Mary was a challenge rather than an obstacle, but Mary met her gaze with a familiar steely look. Her resolve had rebuilt itself in a very short time.

  “No one would ever think me a prostitute.”

  The matron nearly gasped. Measure for measure, Mary could certainly hold her own. “Surely, you understand that to go is madness. They will ship the men back here. I will need you here. The men will need you here.”

  “The last time I waited to do something, my sister died,” Mary said. She stuffed a bag with supplies—lint and bandages and a bottle of whiskey—and then a surgery kit that she slipped into her bag too.

  “Wait,” the matron said, grasping her hand. “Take a candle and matches. It will be dark out there.”

  “You there! You! You can’t go!”

  Mary had just been hoisted into a freight car by two men, whose precarious hold on her tightened as the lieutenant screamed at her from the platform.

  “Are you mad?” Lieutenant Watson’s face was puffy with heat and fury. Around him surged hundreds of inebriated men, who had already imbibed most of the whiskey they had ostensibly brought as medication for the wounded they were intended to nurse. Earlier in the evening, a hard rain had begun to fall, but that had done nothing to deter the hordes now clambering into the freight cars. The lieutenant, in charge of sending cars on to Alexandria from the Long Bridge, had telegraphed Colonel Haupt, questioning the unbelievable order to waive the requirement for a pass. Haupt replied that orders were orders and to send them on, though to make certain that surgeons got on first. But there was no telling who was who, and no surgeon had made himself known to Watson. The rest of the men were not so much nurses as rabble. Watson estimated there must be a thousand men at least demanding to go across, every one of them drunk. Months and months of security abandoned in one night. And now a woman was forcing her way on. He shuddered to think what might happen to her.

  He made one last glance up and down the platform as stragglers scrambled into the cars. At his signal, workers methodically moved down the train, slamming the doors shut. Then he dropped his hand, and the engine hauling the rabble spit steam and ash into the rainy night and lurched from the Long Bridge terminal toward Alexandria.

  “We are concerned for your safety.” Colonel Haupt, a trim, tall man with a full beard, was shouting through a megaphone at the occupants of the cars he had waylaid at the Alexandria station. The volunteer nurses, all men, milled about the platform, stumbling and shouting, utterly drunk. It was ten o’clock at night, and he had so few tracks. He still needed to send troops and ammunition forward, to say nothing of commissary stores and fodder. No doubt these revelers would all skedaddle as soon as they saw what destruction awaited them at the end of the line. It had been stupid of Stanton to authorize a lark for a bunch of curious idiots. And of course, they would have to be transported back, taking up precious space once again. Haupt shook his head. The inefficiency appalled.

  “Listen,” he shouted again. “You will be in grave danger once you leave this station. We are going to send a train ahead of you with ammunition, and only then will we send you on. An armed regiment will travel atop your cars. Be patient; the delay is for your safety. But do not provoke me. If I see anyone consuming any more alcohol, you will be removed from these premises by armed guard.”

  Haupt stalked off with his assistant, hoping that his warning would subdue them. In the yard, lanterns were flaring as his men feverishly directed cars onto tracks, hitching them onto engines, the racket and thuds ringing out into the clammy night. The scene would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so panicked, for more than anything Haupt loved a rail-yard at work. At the b
eginning of the war, he had left his job building the Hoosac Tunnel in Massachusetts to renew his commission. But now he was remembering why he had left the military. There was nothing so exasperating as a confused chain of command. For days now, he had gotten only a few hours of sleep, and the long night was still before him. He cast his gaze over the riot that was the trainyard, forcing himself to think on what required his attention next.

  “When you send that train on,” he said to his assistant, “telegraph ahead to McCrickett to arrest them all.”

  When the train finally jerked to a stop at Fairfax Station, Mary had been standing for thirty-odd miles, clutching her bag to her chest, praying for the ceaseless rocking of the train to end. The men in her car had grown restive; some had been sick. Above the loud hiss of the engine releasing steam, she could hear the railcars’ doors being thrown open one after the other, the sound growing louder and louder until finally the doors of her car were unlatched and heaved apart. The car had been stifling, but now, as her companions scrambled out the door and fanned onto the platform waving their flasks and shouting that they had come to nurse, by God, and no one could stop them, a chill flooded the emptied boxcar. Mary peered into a shadowy fog of locomotive steam and mist. Blazing torches illuminated a small station house, around which hundreds of men were milling.

  All was chaos. A soldier climbed onto a bench near the station house and fired into the air, then began to shout, trying to be heard in the confusion. In the torchlight, the cold rain made the darting shadows grotesque. Mary hugged her bag to her chest, felt the hard ridges of the wooden case of the surgery kit digging into her ribs. She could hardly make out what was happening; men were lurching and hollering and the soldier was shooting again above their heads and there were no wounded in sight. She dropped from the car to the platform and shuttled along the train, not knowing exactly where she was going, but desperate to leave the drunken crowd behind. Beyond the train, she crept away from the lights of Fairfax Station. A few drunks had spilled onto the rocks and slippery grass surrounding the depot, but no one followed her into the darkness. The night was as inky black as the matron had said it would be. Underfoot, the slippery ground rose and fell away. She could see only a few feet ahead of her. In the distance, a few pinpricks of candlelight glimmered.

  “Don’t step on me,” a voice said, as a hand grabbed her ankle.

  The voice was choked, hoarse. She dug in her bag among the whiskey bottle, surgery kit, and dressings for the candle she then lit and thrust high above her head. In every direction, men were sprawled on the ground, packed so tightly together that she would not have been able to have taken another step without stumbling across their arms or legs. Directly beneath her was the soldier who had taken hold of her ankle. His pants had been torn away. A shattered thighbone jutted through the broken skin of each leg. His wounds were raw, mere hours old. Gunpowder blackened his face; tears were tracing gritty rivulets down his temples.

  “Are you a ghost?” he rasped.

  “No,” Mary said.

  “You got any water?”

  “I have whiskey,” she said, and again opened her bag and pulled out the whiskey bottle. With one hand, she pinned the bottle between her knees and uncorked it.

  She held the bottle to his lips and he choked the liquor down.

  At the train station, soldiers were shoving the men who had come to nurse back onto the trains. A locomotive was being turned and the racket was fantastic. She imagined that it must be what birth was like to infant ears. The great amniotic buffer finally removed.

  She turned to the next man, an arm’s reach away. He wanted whiskey, too. And the next man after that. The men latched on to her as she bent over them, a sob or a thank-you breaking from their lips. They threw their arms around her neck. Some were sixteen, fourteen. She bent over them and flooded whiskey into their mouths and pried their hands off her wrists and moved on. Someone had lain hay underneath them as a bed, and with every move she worried that she would drop her candle and set them all afire. Amid the general din and the trains screaming and hissing and the mules braying and the men crying out, it was nearly impossible to hear what a single man said to her. She smelled the sour battle scent, the gunpowder and the sweat and the fear. It mingled with the musk of sap and loam and leaves stewing in the rainfall. By habit, she surveyed their wounds, running the candle up and down their bodies, but not even the Union Hotel had prepared her for this. From time to time, her hand settled into a pool of clotted blood or vomit and she would wipe her hands on her skirt and scramble on. There were so many men, and she hadn’t even yet gone fifty feet from the station.

  In the trees, the birds began to chatter. The night was beginning to fade, but even the morning star, flickering on the gray horizon, seemed to outshine the pale scatter of the miserable dawn. Mary extinguished her candle.

  Her whiskey bottle was empty.

  She scrambled back to the station, pushing through the unruly crowd. From a small office, a remarkably tidily dressed man emerged, followed by a red-faced colonel who was screaming that no more civilians should be sent, what were they thinking back in Washington? When the two men saw Mary, the colonel abruptly stopped shouting to stare at her. Next to the depot door, chained to the bench, a dozen men were growing miserably sober. The depot clock read four-thirty in the morning.

  Mary said, “Do you have any whiskey?”

  The men continued to stare.

  “Water? What about water? Surely somewhere there is a tank for the trains. We could tap it or fish the water out of it or—”

  The two men were staring at her skirts. She looked down. The hem of her dress was sodden with blood to her knees. She leaned over and wrung it out.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” the colonel sputtered.

  “Just tell me if you have any water.”

  “There is a well behind the station,” the other man said.

  A train screamed into the depot. Doors were hurled open. Men surged from the cars and swarmed onto the platform. The colonel roared, “I told those idiots in Washington not to send any more drunks!”

  A telegraph operator waded toward them shouting, brandishing a telegram above his head. “We are evacuating Centreville. The Rebels are fast behind our troops. Haupt says they will send no more supplies and we are to send the wounded back to Washington on the trains.”

  The colonel stalked toward the telegraph operator, shouting, “Let me see that, McCrickett.”

  Along the railroad line, in the opposite direction from which the trains had been arriving, a long line of ambulances was materializing out of the gray mist, plodding toward the station through the dew and drizzle of the dawn. In between them and the station, a continuous, unbroken multitude of men lay on the rocky ground. She could not see the end of them. She had guessed before that there were perhaps five hundred wounded, but now she saw that there were thousands. The drivers had to stop two, three hundred yards away, for they could get no closer, climb out of their wagon seats, and wrestle their human cargo out of the wagon beds onto the ground. A forest grew on a sloping hill above the station, and Mary could see more men laid under the protective canopy of the maples and oaks.

  A phalanx of newly arrived volunteers were brushing past her, bumping her shoulders, stumbling toward the fields. In the door of one of the railcars, though, appeared a young woman, and behind her two more women and two men, who were swiftly unloading boxes onto the platform. Astonished, Mary elbowed through the crowd to reach them.

  “What is in those boxes?” Mary asked.

  “Socks. Jellies.” The young woman reached into the car and pulled down a crate and lifted its lid. Mary gasped. Inside were bottles and bottles of whiskey.

  She felt the color drain from her face. She lifted her arm and made a sweeping gesture, which was all she could accomplish by way of explanation. It seemed as if she were mired in seconds and minutes, wading in a slough of impossibility. Behind them, the colonel was standing on a bench, shouting order
s for the civilians to line up and be counted into a burial party or as stretcher bearers, for they were going to help load the trains, by God, and they weren’t to ride back to Washington until every wounded man was put on a car under pain of shooting.

  “May I have two bottles?” Mary asked. She couldn’t tell if the woman heard, because there was a great jangle as the locomotive was uncoupled from the train, but then the young woman waved her hand in the air and said, “Yes, yes.”

  The volunteers were surging into two lines, soldiers jostling them into place. Mary seized the bottles and threaded through the crowd toward the well, where she filled her one empty whiskey bottle after securing the others in her pockets. In the distance, she could see people going from wounded man to wounded man, teamsters and other soldiers and maybe even surgeons. Soon they would all get on the trains. She pushed back through the crowd to where she had left off. A man came up beside her, breathless, an open crate of jelly jars in his arms.

  “Miss Barton said to give you these.”

  “Miss Barton?” she said, turning. The young woman who had given her the whiskey lifted her hand and nodded.

  Now Mary was armed. She had jelly and whiskey and water, a bounty, though now she needed to be three, four, a hundred people at once. But thankfully it was only a matter of time until all the wounded were on a train.

  She dropped to a boy at her feet. A small branch was embedded in his arm where a bullet had pierced the flesh. She fed him sweet plum preserves with her fingers. His dry tongue lapped at the edges of his mouth.