Robin Oliveira

by My Name Is Mary Sutter (v5)

  The saw teeth bounced over the shiny, hard surface. The sound of the saw sang in her head. She pushed the memory away.

  “You will be able to do this one day without even thinking about it,” Stipp said.

  But it did not feel that way now. It felt awkward and wrong. After another ineffective swipe, Mary shut her eyes, pushing away the press of time, trying to understand what was needed. Maybe it was something like breech babies, how they required both force and finesse, a two-handed maneuver that felt cumbersome and artificial. You had to hold the baby’s torso up in a towel with one hand, and with the other slip a finger into the birth canal, locate the baby’s mouth, and draw the chin down to the chest so the neck wouldn’t hyperextend and make the presenting diameter too large.

  Force and finesse.

  She slipped into that place deep inside her that was more prayer than thought. Again, she drew the saw over the bone.

  “Yes. Exactly. Pressure and not pressure. You feel it. It’s a breath.” Stipp knew how to talk to her, went on talking in rhythm as she sawed. “Strength, yes. But intention more than force. Yes. That’s it. That’s right.”

  And then, suddenly, the bone separated and the weight of the leg fell away.

  No baby to manage, Mary was stunned, uncertain what to do next.

  Stipp said, “Release the tourniquet.”

  She unscrewed the tamps, waited for any sign of bleeding from the tied-off arteries, and when they held, Stipp eased behind her and talked her through folding the flap of skin over the cut, securing it in back, lifting the thigh so that she could stitch the skin back together.

  When she was done, and the boy had been carried away to recover outside in the damp, Mary looked up. Lanterns blazed on the floor. Her driver and the four assistants were gathered in a half circle a few feet away, watching her. She had no idea how much time Stipp had taken to teach her. She had lost track of time, had lost track even of where she was, the sounds of the war having disappeared as she concentrated, but now the dirty sound of anguish came roaring back. She was afraid that she had wasted hours and hours, that she had been selfish and covetous, knowledge an uncharitable luxury when men had been dying. The driver and the assistants came toward her, and they grasped her by her elbows, murmured words she recognized as admiration. Their faces looked like fathers’ faces when she emerged from a birthing room to hand them their infant sons or daughters.

  Imagine that, she thought she heard one of the assistants say.

  “Can you do the surgery without me now?” Stipp asked.

  Mary nodded.

  “Good,” he said, and gave her his set of knives, while he retrieved another from his case. His assistant was setting up another table, quickly fashioning one from the barn stalls. “You’ll do only above-the-knee amputations. No others. I’ll do everything else. But you’ll have enough work as it is. Do it the same each time. You’ll get fast, believe me. The assistants will administer the chloroform and manage the induction seizure for you. I want you to think only of doing the surgeries.” He had become brusque again, William Stipp at work, but for the first time in a long time, everything seemed right to Mary.

  “Your hands will get tired. Don’t hunch your shoulders. Take deep breaths.” He was going to add, Don’t be afraid, but stopped himself just in time.

  Chapter Fifty

  “Not you, too?” The soldier wiped his sweating face with a grimy square of handkerchief and turned to the rest of a small group of soldiers leaning on their shovels beside a half-dug shallow trench. Hundreds of dead, looted of their shoes and other valuables, waited to be buried. Farther down, the work of the early morning appeared indifferent; heads and toes peeked out from the loose dirt shoveled on top.

  James had stopped his wagon at the base of a hillock where an embalmer had set up a table outside a tent and was taking payment from families who’d streamed into the area searching out their dead, hoping to find their loved ones before they were buried. Everyone held handkerchiefs to their faces as the stench of death curled like a virulent fog over the once fragrant hills. Nearby, townspeople were fashioning coffins out of a splintered sycamore. A bonfire of horse carcasses rained ash.

  “Someone else wants specimens? Who?” James asked.

  “What’d he say his name was?” The gravedigger was hoping to keep the conversation going so he didn’t have to turn back to his unspeakable task. His clothing reeked of death; he would never get it out. Never.

  “A fellow by the name of Brinton,” someone offered. “He went yonder,” he said, and then watched the inquirer jounce his wagon and its odd cargo over the burned field, winding around bodies still lying in the sun.

  James discovered Brinton nearby, at a bridge where the living were dragging the dead from the water onto the stream’s shores. But it was not the human dead that interested Brinton. The surgeon was circling a horse that was standing perfectly balanced on two legs. But when James swung down from his wagon seat, he saw that the beast was dead.

  “The muscles remain fixed and rigid, you see?” Brinton said, not evincing any surprise at seeing James. He pointed out the stiffening curve of the horse’s neck, its open mouth, the remnants of froth bubbling at its lips. “I’ve seen this same peculiarity in a number of the dead as well. Curious what a violent death can do to the body, don’t you think?”

  After the teamster jumped ship in Frederick, it had taken James ten days to trundle over the Maryland countryside with his casks of alcohol. Every pothole, rut, rock, gulley, and pebble had registered in his bones, and yet here was Brinton, as fleet as a messenger.

  To Blevens’s astonished inquiry, Brinton said, “I traveled by horse. Much quicker. And I bought this wagon in Keedysville, though I had to pay a great price for it. But I’ve done fairly well for myself. I’ve already managed a few specimens.” He showed James the back of the wagon, where burlap bags filled with limbs were pinned with notes. “Don’t forget to describe whatever circumstance you can about the death. I’m sending these up to Hagerstown with a teamster today to get them on a train and save them from spoiling in the heat. What are your plans?”

  James was furious. Brinton hadn’t had to lug kegs of alcohol over mountain passes. “To visit the hospitals. Obtain what I can, as you suggested I do.”

  “You won’t have to visit the hospitals, I don’t think. They’re behind on the burials.”

  James paled. “You don’t mean for me to hack bodies apart in the field?”

  “No. But if something interests you. Not just as a curiosity, of course, but to be of real use. Why not?”

  James opened his mouth to speak, but he could not form words. Nor could he tear his gaze from Brinton’s tranquil face. Smoke lingered in the crisp fall air, as the detritus of the battle burned in perpetual bonfire.

  Brinton lowered his handkerchief. “Dear God, man, what is the difference between this and searching out an arm or a leg in a pile of cut limbs?”

  James didn’t know, but there was a difference, some sacred distinction that he could not describe. Despite all the specimens he’d collected over the years, he had always been able to separate the person from the object. True, most of what he had purchased was from medical supply houses, and he supposed they had come from cadavers, but they had come already prepared, floating in glass jars or already skeletonized. His scientist mind had been able to distinguish science and the death that had provided it. The specimens he had obtained in Washington had come from surgery, mostly pieces of diseased tissue to examine under the microscope. Now the wind picked up, bringing with it the memory of life before brutality had wiped the beauty from the hills. The land was utterly defaced. He couldn’t deface the dead, too.

  “I’ll visit the hospitals, thank you,” James said.

  “Think again. The most interesting specimens might be from the ones who died of their wounds. Ask around. Despite the look of things, the burial parties might be far too efficient for our task. See if you can rustle up some information from them. Head inj
uries, for one. Those all died quickly. Of great interest would be a skull with a fatal projectile in place, for instance. Or a penetration of the vertebrae. Arms and legs will be a dime a dozen soon. We need information on how to treat the ones who die, so that in the future they might not die. Those amputees”—Brinton nodded into the distance—“they’ll all live. What’s the greater good there?” He tucked his handkerchief in his pocket. “Also, you might want to pick up a shovel for yourself.” With that, he strode away and mounted his horse, a sorrel spooked by the lifeless field, and galloped off across the wasteland.

  James climbed into his wagon, put his head in his hands, and waited until his nausea passed.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  The day after the battle, the sight of the crowded yard nearly knocked Mary off her feet. Men lay next to one another without room for anyone to walk in between them. She staggered and caught herself on the doorframe, and a splinter jabbed into her palm, but she did not feel it. Cries for water and for mothers and sweethearts mingled with sobs of pain. It was a great rabble of suffering, and now it was her great rabble.

  She covered her mouth with her hand and her eyes traveled over the endless numbers for whom her responsibility was now far greater than it had ever been. She wished William had told her not to be afraid, because she was terrified now.

  Only ten amputations since last evening? The end might never come.

  She turned in the doorway and tried to catch her breath. What had Lincoln said? Are you willing to risk yourself? She did not know he had meant her sanity.

  They brought in another soldier and laid him on her table. Mary looked over at Stipp, absorbed in his surgery. He had done all he could for her, had given her exactly what she’d asked for. What had she done? She returned to her table just as her assistant put the chloroform cone over the boy’s face. They were all in tatters: dirt crusted underneath their fingernails, gunpowder blackening their faces.

  There was a crater in the boy’s left shin. His eyes were shut tight against the pain, though the chloroform was already beginning to take hold. Mary blinked, once, twice, then put a hand to the boy’s wrist and said, “Thomas.”

  He opened his eyes, fearing death, and instead saw Mary Sutter, aproned and bloodied and staring at him as if he were dead.

  After being shot, Thomas had lain in that ditch all night, watching the stars flicker on and off, not knowing if it was the clouds or his dying that obscured them. The pain in his shin had bored like a worm, and then it went completely numb, followed by his hip and his back, and then they all flared up suddenly together and he couldn’t move without causing more pain. All night, he’d waited for death, lanterns bobbing in the distance, the drizzle pooling in his ears and eyes. But looking at Mary now, he remembered that he had something to say to her. Something important to say before he died. He racked his brain, searching back through time, back to before the Peninsula, where he had fought at White Oak Swamp and Seven Pines and Yorktown, his feet sinking to his shins in the mud, but before that, to the time when he had last seen her at Fort Marcy. Oh, yes! It was that he was sorry. Sorry that he had once believed her to be perfect. He wanted to say something else, too. He wanted to tell Mary that love was a mystery he had been unable to solve in his life, but he found that he could not speak. He was leaving her, and he could not get the words out. Mary was bending close to him, but her face was blurring and a sweet, thick perfume was falling through the air, filling him with such fatigue. She whispered, and the words were strung out, stretched on a bed of sleep.

  “I promise I’ll make it right,” she said, but he had no idea what needed to be made right. He was falling, but he understood very clearly that Mary had always loved him; had loved him from the moment they had met. Why this had not been apparent to him earlier, he did not know. But now he was falling asleep, falling into an imitation of death, and before he lost his last dizzying hold on time, he thought of Jenny dying and that Mary had been with her, and how comforting it must have been to Jenny that the last vision she had had of the world was her sister, bending over her, trying to save her.

  It did not occur to Mary to call for Stipp to take care of Thomas. Instead, she thought of Jenny. A knife goes into a body and something is either repaired or it isn’t. Perhaps it really was that simple.

  It was strange that redemption, when it finally came, felt like discipline. Mary’s movements were certain, her thinking methodical, stemming no longer from fear or love—the same emotion, when love is unrequited—but instead from determination. She was not even bartering with death anymore. She was defying it. At home there was a baby named Elizabeth who was Thomas and Jenny’s child and Mary was going to make certain that Thomas lived to know her. She would do this by paying meticulous attention to tying off the arteries, to the precise severing of the tendons, to a vigorous but careful application of pressure to the saw, and finally to the looping of perfect, painstaking stitches. Time, suspended, did not matter. Thomas was Christian and Jenny both, and Amelia too.

  When she had tied her final knot and snipped the black catgut, Mary stepped back and saw James Blevens standing not five feet from her, his hat covering his heart. Dust motes were twisting in the sunlight piercing the gaps in the barn walls. Behind her, stretcher bearers were slinging a groaning man onto Stipp’s table. Other surgeons, men Blevens did not recognize, swayed at the tables in the late afternoon light. Save the rigors of the patients succumbing to chloroform or an occasional muttered epithet, the barn was a sanctuary of quiet compared to the clamor outside. Mary’s eyes were bloodshot, her apron scarlet.

  Stipp looked up, saw Blevens, and said, “Holy hell, what are you doing here?”

  “Looking at our Mary.”

  The two men acknowledged one another with a nod—our Mary—and then James Blevens said to Mary, “I thought I told you not to disappear.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I’ve been with William the whole time.”

  William. James flexed and unflexed his fingers, glanced charily at Stipp, and then let his gaze run again over the broken barn stalls, the heaps of hay, the sawdust scattered on the dirt floor to absorb the blood, and Mary, surgical instruments in hand, a patient at rest on a wooden slab balanced on doubled sawhorses, a pile of legs beside her table. You will have no lectures, no dissecting lab. What you want is impossible. But what was impossible was Mary; the last time he had seen her, she’d been safely asleep in her bed.

  “Dear God, Mary.”

  Mary lifted her bloodied hand to her face. Her eyes were hooded with fatigue, and a vague haziness had come over her, as if she were out of focus. He could see the nicks and scars on her knuckles and wrists, the new strength in her forearms. She gazed at him, and when she spoke it seemed to James as if she were speaking through glass, her reply delayed a second or two.

  “I’m so glad you’re here. Can you help us?” she asked.

  Her request was oddly formal, out of keeping with the surroundings, hospitable in this hovel in a way she had not been that first night at Dove Street, when she had desperately wanted him to leave. It was as if she were displaced, out of time, as if everything were reversed. Except that now he was going to disappoint her again. He raised his hands, turning them over to show her his palms with their still-shiny surfaces, capable of holding a washcloth, of separating twigs from strands of hair, but not the delicate work of tying off arteries.

  “My hands won’t do the work. They may never do the work again.”

  The same hands that had bathed her. She hadn’t asked him about his hands in Washington. She’d been too exhausted to wonder about his health; she, who had slathered his palms with slippery elm, had forgotten, when he had been so kind to her.

  “But you’re here?” Her assistant was wrapping the leg in cornhusks and making a mess of it.

  Blevens nodded at the limbs at her feet. “For another purpose. I’ve come to take away the legs.”

  Mary was peering at him as if he were now a subject of study. He could almos
t picture her refocusing the lens of the microscope, trying to comprehend what she was seeing.

  “You’ve come to take the legs?” she asked.

  “Yes, to study them. There is going to be research.”

  “Research?” But she said it as if he had offered her gold, or an end to the havoc. “You know what to do with them?”

  “Yes. Don’t you see? Something good has to come out of all of this.”

  And yet even as she seemed to welcome the notion, she seemed even more distracted. She pointed to the soldier on her table.

  It took a moment for Blevens to understand. He took a step closer and said, “What is it?”

  “This is Thomas.”

  Stipp, who had begun his next surgery, listening as he worked, now jerked up his head. “What the hell is the matter with you, Mary? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because I didn’t need to.”

  Stipp and James stared at her and thought, Sarah, giving the whiskey and opium to her little brother when she had to. What women were capable of.

  “Will you study Thomas’s leg?” Mary asked Blevens. “Please. I can’t think of it here—” And she nodded at her pile.

  James said, “Of course.”

  The soldier on Stipp’s table reared up and Stipp barked for his assistant to give him more chloroform. “James,” he said, tossing his instruments to the hay at his feet in order to help hold down the boy, “take her outside. Find her something to eat and then make her sleep.” And he watched as James Blevens took Mary’s arm and led her away to the barn door, and she disappeared from his sight.

  Day after day, night after night, Mary worked beside Stipp, stopping only to rest a few hours before rousing again. She had needed only a few hours of sleep that morning; not even James could persuade her to rest any longer. He arranged for a teamster to take his wagon and specimens, including Thomas’s leg, back to Washington, while he stayed to help with the chloroform. They worked for a week; Mary cut off thirty-five legs a day. Exhaustion obliterated sensation. Her back ached. Her knees swelled. She took no notice of the tangle of her hair or the blood on her skirts. By the fifth day, she knew nothing but legs and more legs. In the exhaustion and confusion, she nevertheless checked on Thomas every morning and every night, appraising his sutures, worriedly laying her hand on his forehead, looking for fever. The day after the surgery, he had clung to her and begged for water. She studied him, looking for signs of decline before he fell back to the ground. Day after day, she changed his dressing, tugging on the suture threads to see whether or not they were ready to come out. She had only moments to spare for him. He and his neighbors cared for one another, crawling for better shelter under a sycamore tree behind the barn. They were all sunburned, their faces sunken from thirst and fever.