Robin Oliveira

by My Name Is Mary Sutter (v5)

Lincoln was pacing. Stanton doubted that the president had slept since the news of the defeat at Bull Run had come through. He’d been a whirl-wind of activity, taking charge of the collapsing army, even calling his friend Pope into his office yesterday to have him read directly to him his account of the failure at Bull Run. It had been clear that Pope lacked insight into what had happened. He had blamed everyone but himself. Where, Stanton thought now, was a Union general who did not blame someone other than himself for his own failures?

  Lincoln said, “Tell Halleck to have McClellan gather every man, gun, wagon, and mule within his reach and get them back out there.”

  Lincoln knew the state of the men, knew how exhausted and demoralized they were, because he had visited the hospitals and seen the havoc that had ripped through the troops.

  “I’ve already issued a directive,” Stanton said.

  “Will McClellan move? It is imperative.”

  “I believe so.” Stanton didn’t believe so, but Lincoln was in a mood.

  Lincoln exhaled and gazed up distractedly. “Do you know, if we pursue them now, this could be it: we could annihilate the entire Rebel army in the next few days. Surround them, cut them off.”

  “Or they could take Philadelphia.”

  For a moment, equal visions of victory and defeat competed, each one as real a possibility as the other.

  Stanton heaved himself to his feet. A quagmire, with the best general stuck in a mansion, and the Union’s hopes pinned on a man whose record terrified him.

  Amelia Sutter laid aside the Albany Argus with its news of the Rebel incursion northward and reached for little Elizabeth lying on a blanket at her feet. In the parlor, the evening air still carried the pungent whiff of the last of Albany’s summer heat, but Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice the noxious smell. Eight months old and thriving, she gurgled and stuffed her little fists into her mouth against the teething pain she didn’t seem to mind, either. The darling child was Amelia’s only evidence that she had ever had daughters.

  Do as you like.

  And what would she say to Mary now, months later? It was impossible to govern her grief. She’d not had a single letter since Mary had left last February. Now she feared she would never know whether or not Mary was even still alive.

  A hundred times over, she’d relived Elizabeth’s birth. A choice changed here, a detail there. It was impossible not to despise herself. What mother chastises one twin for the death of another? Insatiable, a mother’s need to save her children. Any means possible, including, it would seem, betrayal.

  Elizabeth would be dead now, but for Mary.

  Thank you, is what she would say now. For trying. For coming back when you didn’t want to. And I am sorry your heart was broken.

  “Amelia?” Bonnie was standing at the door with a bottle of milk.

  Amelia handed her granddaughter to Bonnie and watched Elizabeth hungrily take the rubber nipple into her mouth.

  Bonnie looked up from Elizabeth, as the child, newly dexterous, balanced the bottle in one hand and grasped Bonnie’s pinky with her other. “She looks like Mary, doesn’t she?” Bonnie asked.

  The cry of a thrush escalated in the evening air. Bonnie set the child in Amelia’s lap. Amelia supported Elizabeth with her hand to her back as the child fought to sit up, already exhibiting her aunt Mary’s predilection for independence.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  The day after General McClellan left Washington with his exhausted army in search of Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was looking out onto Pennsylvania Avenue from his second-floor office at a young woman poised at the Mansion gate. By the set of her shoulders and the deliberate manner of her posture, she appeared to be on an errand of some importance. He watched as she opened the gate and strode down the slate walkway, her fingers entwined in the trailing ribbons of a bonnet that dangled from her hand.

  He turned his attention to the men in the room. John Hay was standing in his usual corner, observing with that perspicacious gaze of his, unnatural in so young a man. Seated in one of the chairs that ringed the president’s desk, Secretary Stanton was about to argue that it was clear that what Lee wanted was not New York, but the entire state of Maryland, when the butler interrupted at the door.

  “Sir? Do excuse me. There is a young woman who wishes to speak with Mr. Hay. She claims to know him. I informed her that he was in conference, but she refuses to leave until she has an audience.”

  All three men, including the butler, aimed a mocking expression at John Hay, who had been in and out of love at least a dozen times since arriving in the capital. Now it seemed the women were following him to work, though to hear Hay tell it, he’d had little success in his amorous pursuits and was at pains to find any female company that would oblige him with even the smallest of attentions.

  Amused, the president said, “Oh, do bring her in. We’d love to meet the young woman.”

  Hay began to sputter. This was beyond tolerance. Lincoln was exercising his fondness for diversion at his expense. And in front of Stanton. He could hear Stanton now. Oh, that Hay is such a dilettante.

  The butler ushered in the young woman Lincoln had observed from his window. Tall, square-jawed, she seemed familiar to Hay, but her tattered appearance silenced both Stanton and Lincoln, ever eager to mock his weakness for the feminine. She was not like Hay’s usual women, pampered girls obsessed with the latest fashions in hats and sleeves. Neither would anyone mistake her for any of the more serious daughters of the senators. Hay peered at her: she was not any of the women he’d recently met. The men rose as she looked directly at Hay and said hello.

  The president said, “You know this young woman, Mr. Hay?”

  Hay took a moment and, finally remembering, said, “Mr. Lincoln, do you recall that I once told you I had met a remarkable young woman on the street?”

  “How can I keep track?”

  “This one didn’t like Miss Dix.” Hay turned to Mary and said, “Allow me to introduce you. Miss Mary Sutter, President Lincoln.”

  The men bowed.

  “I’ve interrupted,” Mary said. “I do beg your pardon for not having made an appointment, but I did not know until just this moment that I would need one.”

  At this pronouncement, Hay smiled. She had become well versed, he saw, in the ways of getting things done in Washington.

  Mary said to Hay, “You remembered my name.”

  “As Mr. Lincoln will attest, I have an affinity for names.”

  Stanton said under his breath, “Females, especially.”

  “And this is Mr. Stanton.”

  Mary said, “I am acquainted with you as well, Mr. Stanton. I was your employee until recently.”

  Stanton peered at her, finally recognizing her as the young woman who had disappeared a month before, leaving them with extra work.

  “Are you nursing under Miss Dix now?” Hay asked.

  “Not really, no.”

  The president and Hay exchanged glances. Just that morning they’d had another letter from Miss Dix, complaining that the surgeons and matrons at the Armory Square Hospital had been hiring nurses themselves and that her authority was being summarily usurped. Something had to be done, or she would not be responsible for the chaos that would ensue.

  “I came this morning to ask Mr. Hay for help. I wish to follow the army with supplies. I was at Fairfax. Mr. Hay helped me once before. I was hoping he could help me again.”

  Stanton, Lincoln, and Hay stood in silence, awed that the young woman before them had braved Fairfax. A regimental surgeon named William Stipp had come to tell them of the abject neglect the wounded had suffered. Ten thousand dead or wounded was the provisional count. But the number was impossible to reconcile, and Lincoln especially had felt helpless. At times, it seemed he could not control anything, least of all the help the wounded needed.

  Mary said, “I wish to go today, if possible.”

  Lincoln thought, If only once George McClellan had said that to me.

  Stanton sputt
ered, “But this is ridiculous. Lee could tour Maryland without firing a single shot. It is nonsensical to send a woman chasing after the army when we don’t even know where, or if, there will be a battle.”

  But Lincoln held Mary’s gaze as he said, “You understand that you are risking yourself, Miss Sutter. For an uncertain future.” His eyes were sharp, quizzical, but alight, too, as if he already knew what she would say.

  “None of us knows the future, do we, sir?”

  “Write her a pass, Hay,” Lincoln said. “And one for the quartermaster for any supplies.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Stanton said. “After what just happened at Fairfax?” He rose in a huff and went to the window, his back turned on all of them as Hay bent over the president’s desk.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lincoln,” Mary said.

  At the window, watching Hay accompany the young woman down the walkway toward Pennsylvania Avenue, Stanton shook his head. “You have just written that young woman’s death warrant.”

  “I was not the one who sent a thousand drunken men thirty miles on a train, Stanton. Besides, I have more faith in that young woman than I do in most of my generals.”

  Stanton pursed his lips and said, “She left the War Department in the lurch, you know.”

  James Blevens cinched the copper banding around the ten kegs of alcohol he had packed into the long wagon bed standing in the lot next to the Surgeon General’s office. The stills had been boiling for three days to make enough alcohol to fill them. He had allowed no one to label them, though, for a siphon could easily drain the casks and he feared losing the preservative before he even got to a field hospital. Even the teamster assigned to drive the wagon was eyeing them with sly greed.

  James tossed his bag under the wagon seat. On Saturday, he had awakened aching and uncomfortable in the armchair in Mary’s room, and had watched Mary sleep for a long while before writing her a note and going to Armory Square to begin the job of persuading surgeons to take histories and to save the amputated limbs. He was met with quizzical exasperation and the forceful suggestion that if he wanted the limbs so badly, he was welcome to go root around in the pile himself and take the limbs back into the wards, where he could try to match them to their previous owners. And he was welcome to take his own damn histories, too, because they were a little busy, goddamn it, and whose shining fucking idea was this, as if they didn’t have enough to do, and if he had so much time on his hands, why didn’t he pick up a scalpel and give them a hand instead of yammering on and on about specimens and research when men were dying? James managed to catch only one soldier just as he was taken into surgery to ask him some questions, but the surgeons tossed out the leg before James could claim it.

  And now, Monday, he was going to follow the army to try to persuade field surgeons of the benefits of research, and he would have to do it under conditions far less favorable than the ones at Armory Square. This morning, Brinton had taken in the reported disinterest of the Armory Square surgeons, sniffed, written out a circular to distribute, and then ordered James to follow the army with barrels of preservative and to make certain he obtained specimens.

  James had no time to go back and check on Mary. He had written her a letter and posted it, saying he would be gone for a while, but that he would return as soon as possible and that she was not to disappear again under any circumstances. He had little faith that she would follow his command. It was entirely possible that she would vanish again. She had her own mind, exhibited by her choice of those shabby rooms.

  What absolute trust she had placed in him.

  The same trust Sarah had once placed in him.

  Why he should be thinking of Sarah now was not a mystery to him. He supposed it was seeing Mary asleep. Perhaps it was that in the face of so much death, he wanted to understand his life before it was taken from him. Or perhaps it was that he didn’t want to ever lose anyone else again, as he had almost lost Mary, as Mary had lost Jenny.

  Everyone was precious now, even the mistaken love of his youth.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  It was late afternoon on Sunday, the fourteenth of September, and the sun was angled low over the swell of South Mountain to the west. It had taken Mary and her driver four days to travel the forty miles north from Washington to Frederick, only to get caught now behind the army’s long, snaking supply line and its soaring plume of yellow dust as it headed west. All day, Mary and her driver had been trapped behind the procession. The soldiers had marched on ahead, following Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned Frederick two days ago. A corporal had found a copy of Lee’s secret orders in a field there, and for once, George McClellan acted. He gave chase, leaving the supply line to follow at its own tortoise pace. Mary estimated that the line was at least ten miles long. Artillery, then food, then hospital supplies at the rear, and behind the ambulances a herd of steer prodded forward by listless soldiers. Food on the hoof, tearing up the macadam, clogging the road.

  In the distance, black smoke hovered over the mountain pass. All day, the booms and hiss of cannon and musketry had rolled down the National Road from the northern tip of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but now, late in the afternoon, the pass had grown eerily quiet. The line ground to a halt. The steer headed out into the farmland to graze, but the teamsters sharpened their ears, listening, the silence far less comforting than it would seem.

  Mary removed the handkerchief she used as a screen for the dust, welcoming the respite from the jolts and jarring of the last few days. In Washington, the quartermaster sergeant had taken one look at the signature on her letter and had given her trunk after trunk of bleached muslin rolls, papers of pins, scissors, lint, sponges, silk suture, syringes, needles, towels, leg splints, fracture boxes, thermometers, tourniquets, bone saws, forceps, ichthyocolla plaster, and no end of medicines, including a treasure trove of quinine, morphine powder, and chloroform. There were mercury pills, tannic acid, ferric chloride, lead acetate, and numerous flasks of nitrous ether stoppered by lamb’s intestine. There was zinc sulfate and spirits of ammonia. Compared to the one bottle of whiskey she had taken with her to Fairfax, she was now the wealthiest woman in the world.

  Her driver was a laconic, sober man, unruffled by his assignment to ferry Mary wherever she wished to go. At night he rolled up in a blanket next to the wagon while she slept under it, and in the morning he rose and made her coffee, turning aside when she traipsed into a nearby gully or wood to take care of herself.

  James’s note was tucked in her pocket. It is not all spoiled, he had written. Have hope. Her driver hopped down from the seat and sauntered forward to see how long the wait would be. Within minutes, he was back. “Road’s blocked. Ambulances are coming, heading toward Frederick.”

  There were twenty of them—the two-wheeled type—jouncing over the hard road, filled with wounded. The entire army train pulled off the road after it passed.

  “Now is our chance,” Mary said.

  Night fell quickly, evidence of autumn. She and her driver trundled past restless horses and the dark ghosts of covered wagons, lanterns flickering like forgotten summer fireflies, teamsters’ snores already sawing into the chilly night. When they reached the end of the supply line, stars emerged to light their way, but darkness closed in as they climbed the wooded slope of South Mountain. When they reached the top, the whole night had passed and dawn was pinking the eastern sky behind them.

  The first bodies appeared around a rocky outcrop. They lay sprawled across the road in postures of death next to the detritus of war: broken caissons, splintered wheels, discarded muskets, the carcasses of horses swelling in the morning sun. The driver let out a long, low whistle and stopped the wagon. He hopped down and turned in a circle. “Hello? Does anyone need help? Hello?”

  A hollow breeze rustled the leaves.

  Mary armed herself with a canteen of whiskey and another of water. Her driver armed himself with a shotgun, and together they trudged from body to body, searching for someone who might still be alive. The
y counted hundreds of dead, Rebel and Federal alike, hidden behind trees and curled behind boulders.

  Even this early in the morning, fatted carrion birds waddled among the dead.

  Hello? Hello?

  They climbed back into the wagon. At the summit, an inn built of stone housed a doctor presiding over a dozen wounded. He wept when he accepted Mary’s supplies of suture, morphia, and dressings.

  Mary and her driver crept down the switchback on the westward side through a heavy mist, detouring around more bodies. Ascending wagons carried volunteers from Boonsboro. Mary told them about the doctor at the inn.

  About noon, they reached Boonsboro and found the town crowded with the mountain’s wounded. Along the main street, Union flags flew from houses and Union soldiers on horseback raced up and down the streets. Confederate troops had passed through the day before; the town’s inhabitants had cheered when the Union army arrived.

  They pushed southward toward Keedysville and the sound of artillery. Wagons brimming with families and Saratoga trunks flew past them on the road. The sharp whine of occasional artillery fire was whistling ahead. Companies of Union soldiers were lying at rest in the warming afternoon. The air pulsed with excitement. The going was slow now. They were following cavalry regiments, marching soldiers, clattering wagons. The soldiers were cheering and hollering when the shellfire hissed and burst in the distance. There was the sense of energy drawing everyone in. At any point, Mary and her driver could turn around, but they didn’t, choosing to head into the vortex. They had come so far. And for Mary, even knowing what was ahead, she set aside fear and apprehension. Or rather, fear and apprehension had become pleasurable, a turn of perception that she did not want to consider, because it was terrible to think that she was attracted to devastation. She didn’t quite know what would happen, or what she would do when she arrived. But this time was different. This time she had supplies. And she had already seen the worst, hadn’t she?