Robin Oliveira

by My Name Is Mary Sutter (v5)

  A marker for Sharpsburg said to turn right, but the wagons went on, following the winding road under sheltering maples and oaks, past well-tended German houses, along a stream burbling over rocks and widening into still, sheltered pools. The road then swung out through fields dotted with harvested grain, the wagons rising and falling with the undulations of the land, green and verdant and formerly wholly peaceful, a place brimming with orchards and prosperity and beauty, but now invaded by an army. They reached a checkpoint beyond which a peach-fuzzed guard would not allow Mary to travel, even with her pass from John Hay.

  “But I’ve brought supplies,” she said and ordered her driver to push past, but the guard prevented her and sent a courier to find someone to help him.

  A young, hollow-eyed colonel galloped up on a horse.

  “Jonathan Letterman, medical director,” he said, his eyes devouring Mary’s medicine wagon. He had been galloping all over the hills, checking on the regimental surgeons and their preparations, directing them to select barns over houses as hospitals for their better access to hay and water, and for their capacity to house more men at once. Most of the surgeons had no supplies; the ambulances and supply wagons were at least a day away. The Rebels had destroyed a railroad bridge over the Monocacy Creek between Frederick and Baltimore, and all the provisions had had to be removed from the railcars and put onto wagons. He was terrified of the carnage to come. From what he had seen on the Peninsula, even if only in the aftermath, the lack of stores would doom hundreds, if not thousands, to die.

  “How did you accomplish this?” Letterman asked, nodding at the wagon.

  “I was at Fairfax.” Mary handed him her pass and his eyes widened as he read it.

  “What did you do there?” he asked, returning her papers.

  “I sorted men.”

  He was about to speak, but stopped as her meaning sank in. After a moment, he said, “And how did you know to do that?”

  “I was working with William Stipp.”

  At the mention of Stipp’s name, Letterman drew himself up. Stipp was here with his regiment on the Hagerstown Pike, and though he was loath to let the woman through, she had supplies. There were seventy-five thousand Union men gathered on the hills behind him and uncountable Rebels entrenched under the white spires of Sharpsburg. They might all be wounded or dead tomorrow, every one of them. “All right. I will allow you to enter if you take your supplies directly to Stipp.” He nodded to the guard. “Escort her to the Hagerstown Pike and stay there with her until Stipp accepts her.”

  Upon Mary’s arrival, Stipp stood staring, an inscrutable expression on his face.

  He said, “Did you bring morphine?

  “Yes. Morphine, dressings, whiskey, everything.”

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Thomas Fall was marching toward Sharpsburg with the Sixth Corps along a southerly route, different than the one the main army was taking over the two northernmost gaps of South Mountain. The Sixth Corps was to travel over the most southerly, Crampton’s Gap, in order to engage the Confederate general A. P. Hill, who had taken Harper’s Ferry to the southwest, on the Potomac River. Now it was Sunday afternoon, the fifteenth of September, and the Sixth Corps were stopped at Burkittsville on the eastern base of South Mountain, pinned down in clover and cornfields, while four Union Parrott guns and two Napoleons answered Confederate guns on the mountain above them.

  Thomas was exhausted. Since April, he had marched two hundred miles up and down the swampy, waterlogged Virginia Peninsula, and another thirty into the latest melee at Bull Run, and now, in the last few days, sixty miles double-quick from Washington. He had fought at the Chickahominy, Malvern Hill, the Seven Days, as well as the debacle at Chantilly, where the wounded men drowned in the deluge afterwards. At White Oak Swamp, the muck had sucked at his boots and he had thought he might drown too. In the last months, the imperative to stay alive had obliterated any desire but the most primitive. He had lost whole sections of time. In battle, the upsurge of panic rent his mind in two and he became a shadow, another being who crammed minié balls into his rifled musket and shot into the smoke and confusion and then rose running over corpse and log to fall to the ground before doing it all over again. The bitter tang of gunpowder had stolen taste, smell, happiness from him.

  His memories of Jenny had slipped away. She shimmered just out of reach, an indistinct sadness that haunted his days and nights. He wanted to understand how love had wrought disaster, but with each passing day he understood less and less.

  He tried to conjure desire, a reason to live, tried to imagine tiny toes, fingers. Jenny’s and his, in miniature. He tried to believe that the daughter he had never seen existed at all.

  The clover smelled fresh and sweet. After the rain of the last weeks, the ground was wet, but nothing like the mud of the Peninsula. Thomas regretted nearly everything, but one thing he was certain of. He had slayed Mary Sutter with his grief. If he ever saw her again, he would tell her that he knew now that keeping someone alive was more difficult than he had ever imagined.

  There was a lull in the artillery barrage, and in its ringing aftermath the order came to rise up from the field and run toward the mountain. Thomas was always stunned when his feet responded, but he flew through the tall grass as the Rebels emerged from behind a stone fence and fired. Still, Thomas and his regiment ran, up the mountainside now, bayonets fixed, hurling themselves at the Rebels, slashing and stabbing until the Rebels turned and ran up the hill. The Federals fired after them, killing them by the dozens, dashing up the mountain, past the abandoned big guns. Thomas hid behind trees and boulders as balls whistled past, until his legs pushed him higher. He had fired perhaps twenty shots. He was aware that around him, in the trees and on the slope, men were falling. But he was not falling. He was pushing ahead, up the mountain. He was a shade, a shadow. He passed wounded Rebels, kicked their muskets from them. He flew over another stone wall. The Rebels were running away, retreating. He fired at their backs. He let out a yell, echoed by men to his left and right. An orange moon rose, highlighting the black branches of trees. An owl hooted. There was no more firing. Thomas could no longer stay awake. He lay down in the underbrush and slept.

  In Mary’s dream, Jenny was dying again, only this time, Mary withheld the knife. She made no cuts, no intervention. Did not presume to think that she could save her sister. Instead, she pressed herself against the lying-in room’s walls, letting the doctor work the forceps in and out, crushing the baby’s head between the curved blades in an effort to save Jenny. Her mother was pleading with her to intervene, but she did not trust herself. She was too stymied by the shame of having stayed in Washington until it was too late, too busy condemning herself so that she was unable to act. When the doctor failed, when both the baby and Jenny died, Bonnie cried and her mother waged battle with Mary while the doctor crept out of the house, unaccustomed to the grief of women, though he would have to become so if he ever dared again to dabble in women’s lives.

  “Mary. Wake up.”

  “I’m awake,” she said, though she wasn’t. She was suspended in time, hovering in that space between dream and reality wherein the sleeping mind recasts the past. Not merely dwelling in memory, but changing it utterly, irrevocably.

  “Get up, Mary. It’s nearly dawn, and it’s raining.”

  Mary’s eyes flickered open.

  Under a deeply gray sky, William Stipp was standing above her.

  “We have to get ready,” he said.

  The barn Stipp had chosen was located at the far right of McClellan’s line, in a swale suffused with cool morning fog. Seven people huddled inside: Mary, her driver, Stipp, and four soldiers assigned to assist him at the makeshift hospital he had crafted amid the hay and cow stalls. In the night, while they had been sleeping, the Union general Joseph Hooker and his division had tramped past them toward a cornfield, where now the stalks were rustling like silk, giving the Union soldiers the misimpression of safety, which allowed them to fling themselves
into the corn and disappear by the hundreds, their muskets upright against their chests, a parade of bobbing bayonets glinting above the stalks in the feeble morning sun. For one moment, the scene was beautiful. For one moment, the hills and woods around held their collective breath. For one last, beautiful second, the silvery light on the slender leaves made everyone believe that despite the roar of artillery falling nearby, restraint was still possible.

  In that second, the Confederates considered the beauty from their perch on a slight rise on the opposite side of the cornfield and thought of home, where their own fields lay fallow and their children were hungry. They wanted to go home to cradle their starving children and then shoot a hog and scavenge apples and stray oats down by the edge of the river and take the bounty home and feed the family they loved so that their children wouldn’t die.

  For immortality, they raced into the corn.

  By the time that last beautiful second had passed, the field enveloped both armies, the Federals and the Rebels alike, the silky corn thread brushing their weathered cheeks, the light sifting between the stalks, the cool, wet dirt cushioning their bare feet. What boots they had had rotted away on the Peninsula and so it was possible to think that they were at home, barefoot, safe on their own land.

  Reveling in the familiar, some of the men forgot what was coming. Or imagined somehow, something different. Some silken reprieve.

  But in each row of corn, the enemy appeared as if from nowhere. Face to face, at intimate range, each man was alone with his opponent. Each knelt, fired, charged with his bayonet, stabbed with his knife, and wielded the butt of his musket. Each stepped over and on the fallen, friend or enemy, wounded or dead, groaning or silent, to get to the next man and the next, until few were left alive.

  There was nothing beautiful about it.

  It took four hours for the men to finish, and when they were done, not a single man who entered the cornfield emerged untouched.

  By the thousands, the wounded lay on the ground and thought, This thirst is not thirst. This pain is not pain. This world is not being rent in two.

  That howling is only a whisper. That screech is just a murmur. That explosion nothing but a sigh. That musket fire is but a rustle.

  I am not here. We are not here. Armies are not here. The country is not depending on this moment.

  Battles are conversations. An exchange. A dialogue.

  None of this is true.

  After the cornfield, there were woods and bridges and the holy grail of a sunken road to take. The battle swelled southward along Antietam Creek.

  From his vantage point at the Pry farmhouse, George McClellan directed his army, though the rolling hills and his own caution prevented clarity. The attacks had to be scrupulously managed or his army might be depleted and he would have no one and nothing left to command. Across the way, Robert E. Lee, stranded and stationary and blinded by the burning houses of Sharpsburg, regretted invading Maryland, for McClellan’s troops were defending this land like his had defended Virginia.

  Weariness swept over them both.

  Thomas and the Sixth Corps were pouring up the hill from the Boonsboro Road, expecting to be sent immediately into the fray. But George McClellan worried that all his men might die, and he loved them so much that he told the Sixth Corps to take up a position to the extreme right of the line, and to do nothing. Shot and shell burst above their heads. Thomas clung to the earth, the musty smell of bloody dirt invading his lungs.

  Then Thomas Fall thought he heard a call to go forward. This is what he heard in the bedlam. Go forward. In all, he took ten steps before a solid shot struck him in his left shin. He cartwheeled in the air and landed on his back. When he came to, the fight was a symphony of smoke that blinked out the sun.

  The Confederate general A. P. Hill, having heard the rumble of guns, abandoned Harper’s Ferry and double-quicked north in an all-out marathon that endeared him to Lee for the remainder of their lives. Sometime around two, he presented himself to his friend, who flung Hill’s men into the maelstrom as if he didn’t love them.

  Jonathan Letterman was sending an army of stretcher bearers into the woods and fields to search for wounded. The numbers were staggering. Carnage was everywhere. Even he had to turn his head and vomit.

  Blood fogged the landscape, obscured the sun, infiltrated even the waters of the creek, which flowed smoky red southward in the direction of Harper’s Ferry and the Potomac River. Days later, the citizens of Washington would remark that the Potomac had turned the color of rust, but would not make the connection until news of the enormous numbers of casualties came pouring in.

  It was exhaustion that ended things.

  The cornfield, rustling so beautifully at dawn, was at evening a sea of stubble and bodies. Down the way, a contested bridge still stood, but the dying festooned its arcing roadbed and graceful footings. In the woods and thickets and sunken road turned bloody lane, so many men had died that the surviving could not count them, though later, when Jonathan Letterman painstakingly pursued the tally, the dead and wounded on this one day would exceed the number accumulated over the three and a half months on the Peninsula.

  The cornhusks would not absorb much blood, but Mary laid them on wounds anyway, tossing them aside when the stringy fibers swelled and burst open. Underfoot, the barnyard was a lake of sanguinous mud. The night had seemed to fall very fast. The wounded had started to flood in at midafternoon, and the stores of dressings had been depleted within a half hour. All her supplies, used up already. The fracture boxes, the morphia, the whiskey. She had already torn up her petticoats. It was Fairfax all over again, though this time there were no trains. But it was the noise that bludgeoned. Sighs and sorrows and heartrending cries resounded through the starless atmosphere. Dante, Mary thought. But which circle of hell was reserved for the hopelessly useless?

  “Mary.”

  Stipp stood silhouetted in the barn door, a yellow lantern flickering behind him, his amputation saw a black sword at this side. Since morning his face had aged a thousand years. His forearms were scarlet to the elbow and his hands had already swelled from just the few hours of gripping the bone saw. With the back of his arm, he wiped his forehead.

  Mary swayed to her feet. They had been up for hours and hours. The dawn was an eon away. She went toward him.

  “I need you to do something,” he said.

  “I can’t choose. There isn’t enough light, and besides it would be useless. There aren’t any trains on which to put the men.”

  He swallowed hard, resisting the urge to kiss her, to fall again into that well. Instead, he forced himself to look her in the eye. “No. That’s not what I mean. You wanted to be a surgeon. Do you still?”

  Mary felt her whole body protest, thought suddenly that she was an arrogant, presumptuous person who had chased hope into the Maryland countryside, and would now be punished for every ambitious thought she had ever harbored in her life.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  Stipp led her to his makeshift surgery table. Already, his ankles and feet were swelling in his boots. He remembered this from the Peninsula, knew what pain lay ahead. The hours and hours of amputations. He would have saved Mary the horror, if he could.

  He positioned her at the side of a wounded man he had already chloroformed. His left lower leg was lacerated, and the shattered bone exposed. A shame to teach her here, where time was an ever-ticking bomb, but he was not in charge of hell, he was only its perpetual resident.

  “Do you remember?” Stipp asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, though for a moment her mind had gone completely blank. She could not even remember how to cut an umbilical cord.

  He made her hold the bone saw and the scalpel to feel their heft. Then he said, “What’s first?”

  “Set the tourniquet.”

  “That’s right.” He helped her to do it, showing her how to tamp the canvas strap with the screws. When it was in place and the skin was beginning to pale, he said, “The
skin will be tough. Make as precise a cut as you can.”

  Instinct, desire, how far these had gotten her, but courage was an entirely other matter. Courage was triumph over desire. When her hand hesitated above the pallid skin, Stipp turned courtly, as if she were already in great pain. “We have only so much time.”

  She made the cut, tracing a circular line only an inch above the knee, enough to save enough skin to make a flap.

  “Deeper,” Stipp said.

  She complied, slicing through the skin until she reached the striated red of the muscles. Her hands felt awkward, as if they were not hers, or attached to her. The muscles exposed, Stipp showed her how to locate the blood vessels, though when she slipped a perfect loop through each before he could tell her how, he only nodded, as if he understood already that she would know how to do everything.

  “I have to dissect the muscles next.” Mary was talking to herself now, not to Stipp, remembering, summoning the drawing from Gray’s, the steps from the surgery manual. The taut ribbon of the quadriceps tendon was pink and stretched over the patella. It snapped back when she cut it, and the suddenness of the movement made her jump.

  “That’s right,” Stipp murmured, and he picked up the thigh so that she could detach the hamstring tendons. Her assistant now, he nonetheless said, “The ligaments will go with the leg. No need to worry about them.” Each of them was remembering when the situation had been reversed, when Mary had taught him how to do this, reading instructions to him from the book.

  When the bone was revealed, she grasped the handle of the bone saw and Stipp pulled back on the skin and muscle. “Now, take the saw in one hand and anchor the other on the knee. Press down, but when you pull back, pull up, as if you are caressing, and not cutting the bone.”