In the few hours of sleep that Mary stole curled up in the corner of the barn, the dead began to speak to her. They called to her from the fields. Work faster, work faster! Legs are not enough. There are hands and feet and arms that must be removed. My head, my head, take off my head. She was more tired than tired, more mad than sane. In her dream, she wandered outside and followed a trail of blood to a stream, where a hundred men lay in the thickets and scrub along the banks. No one had cared for them. Why had no one looked here? Why had no one discovered them? She tore her skirts as she searched among the blackberries and in the elder bushes, flinging unfound soldiers over her shoulder. She must rescue them all. But they were all dead, so she laid them down and descended to the stream bank where the brook flowed red. She wanted only to get clean, to wash the blood from her fingernails. But it was no use, for the water had turned into blood. She sank to the damp earth. On the opposite bank, the dead rose and formed a single file walking up a rise. Follow us, the dead said. They were all missing a leg, hundreds of men disappearing into the woods. She wanted to follow them, but something kept her back.
“Mary.”
She was logy with sleep, unable to find a way to leave the nightmare behind.
“Wake up, Mary.”
Stipp handed his instruments over to his relief, and drunkenly took Mary by the elbow as James Blevens watched from the head of a surgery table, where he was administering chloroform. The two stumbled outside to dip their hands into the horse trough. Then they sank under a poplar tree. The Medical Department was lumbering to life; Jonathan Letterman’s organization, formulated on the Peninsula, coming to fruition. He had formed wagon trains of ambulances and one was assembling on the road. In and among the wounded, fifty men were calling to one another, making decisions about who to send and who to leave behind. Mary watched them perform and envied their camaraderie. At Fairfax, she had been alone.
She said to Stipp, “They will make mistakes.”
“Yes,” he said.
Mules pawed and brayed in a pen nearby. Steam rose from the laundry cauldrons; a crone from a nearby farm was bent over her task. From somewhere nearby came the smell of a hog roasting. For half an hour, Mary and Stipp stared at the milling crowd with their backs pressed into the corrugated bark of the tree, its little barbs and rivulets reminding them that to be alive was to know pain. Unconsciously, they clenched and unclenched their fists, working the strain out of their burning finger joints.
“Are you hungry?” Stipp asked.
“Yes,” Mary said.
Still, they did not move. Mary had an idea that she was thirsty, too, but to rise and obtain something to drink seemed an enormous task. The act of locating a cup, impossible. Finding a pump or a well, unmanageable. As if her own legs had been amputated.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” Mary said.
That Stipp knew she meant the work, they both understood. This is the way of love and catastrophe. Everything is evident.
“You can,” he said.
Mary turned to him and touched his face, as he had once touched hers, a long time ago. She traced the coarse outline of his beard, ending at his lips, which opened under her fingertips, as if to joy.
He helped her to her feet. It was difficult going. He led her by the hand to the well, from which he drew a bucket of water. He gave her some to drink and then carried a bucket to a scrub of bushes that lent privacy. Stipp guarded at a discreet distance, looking away from her. On the Peninsula, there had been other women to watch: camp followers, laundresses, the coarse and the pretty, whose relative rarity among the masculine had heightened their femininity. The light over the fields was taking on the golden edge of evening. When Mary finished washing her hands and face and had poured the scarlet water onto the ground, she walked toward him, her hands scrubbed clean, her dress weighty with her futile attempts to clean it.
Far past the years of the war, when even specific memories of which battles Stipp had worked in had faded and all the faces of the wounded had coalesced into one, he would remember this moment, and the way the sun set behind Mary as she came toward him.
Chapter Fifty-two
Five days after the battle of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln read the perfected draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet, who, after arguing for four hours, heartily endorsed it.
On November 5, Lincoln gave orders to General Halleck to fire George McClellan, who would not follow the retreating Lee into Virginia despite direct orders.
McClellan replied that he would step down immediately, then wrote to his wife and said, “They have made a great mistake! Alas for my poor country!”
Chapter Fifty-three
On a day in early October, James Blevens was preparing to leave Sharpsburg. He said to Mary, “May I kiss you good-bye?”
They were standing not far from the barn, which they were evacuating for a hospital down the road that the Medical Department was fashioning out of Sibley tents. It was for the injured who could not tolerate the trip over the mountains to the hospitals of Frederick. Thomas was among them; Mary and James had doted on him, but now James was leaving.
“Must you go? What if Thomas falls ill?”
Two weeks had passed since the battle, and the men were suddenly hemorrhaging or sinking into fever. Soldiers whose flesh wounds had at first appeared to be healing would begin to complain of burning, and their wounds, previously thought inconsequential after being thoroughly probed by the hand of a surgeon, would, for mysterious reasons, suddenly begin to suppurate and require amputation. Or a primary amputation would require a second operation to ligate arteries that gushed when traction was applied to the sutures. Erysipelas—reddened tissue that then turned black and ulcerated—spread among the men, and they were languishing, falling ill with pneumonia, developing fevers. James was taking skin samples back to Washington. He promised to write if he learned anything that might help. But the mystery was driving Mary mad. She had wanted to be a surgeon, had become one, but now, after the surgeries were successful, men were dying anyway.
“Always Thomas,” James said, worried for her. She was at risk, and the condition of her heart mattered more to him than almost anything else in the world.
“He is my sister’s husband.”
“He is your sister’s widower.”
Mary looked away, not wanting to think about that. She had been unable to save her sister, but she had saved her sister’s husband, for whom she now felt an overwhelming panic. Thomas’s demeanor worried her. He followed her every movement as if she had hung the moon, but something was not quite right. Day by day, she kept close watch on him, changing his dressing herself, but he displayed more vulnerability than strength. He was not the Thomas she remembered, but then she wasn’t even certain she was remembering him correctly. What did she know of him, really, except that he had lost his parents, loved her sister, and foolishly reenlisted when he could have gone home?
Once, when the whiskey she had given him had not yet dulled his deep pain, he said through his teeth, “You would not have tolerated domesticity.”
Mary let her hands fall into her lap. She was seated on the edge of his cot. “But you loved her, didn’t you?”
His gaze did not stray from her face. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
And she had gone on with her dressing change, the intimate ministrations that proffered no difficulty for her with other men, making her move more deliberately and carefully than with anyone else. He was her twin sister’s husband.
Now Mary said to James, “You want to kiss me?” She was bone-tired, stripped bare. She thought it was possible that she might kiss every man at Sharpsburg. What was life for when death was so greedy and spiteful? She remembered James’s hands gently washing her back and arms, his burned fingers in her hair, the generous restraint, when she might have turned to him, if he had asked.
He touched her face. “I will never have the chance again.”
“Are you going to disappear into Washingt
on forever?”
“No. I’m going to try to find my wife to tell her that I want her to come to Washington to live with me.”
Mary fell silent. She thought then that she knew nothing of men, would never know anything of them. Dead wives, hidden wives. All she knew of men was what their damaged muscles and bones revealed: that they would sacrifice their fragile skeletons to violence, but would keep their feelings about women secret forever.
James went on, as if at confession. After the carnage, real love had suddenly seemed to be not so much likeness of mind as responsibility met, and a promise, however foolishly entered, kept. “It was a marriage from when I was very young. I don’t even know her very well. But she was a lot like you. Very brave.”
“Will she come?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even certain of where she is or what she is doing.”
“Then why kiss me?”
“To apologize for what might have been.”
It came back to her now, that faraway beginning in his surgery, when she had begged him to teach her things she hadn’t yet understood, things that she now understood too well: the human body’s complexities, resiliencies, secrets, and hidden places. Its vulnerability. She had even seen the tight pack of organs, the bowels, the liver, the stomach, and even once a heart, nestled deep inside a destroyed chest. She did not need James’s microscope anymore to understand that life existed or did not exist based, at least in part, on the goodwill of man. Really, in the end, everything had turned out to be as simple as that.
She took James’s face in her hands and drew him to her and kissed his cheek.
“Has the war given you what you wanted, James? Have you learned enough?” Her taunt, from their first dinner together. But now she was rueful, weary. “How little the two of us understood, sparring over death.”
Of what would transpire, whether James would ever see his wife again, the further seductive barbarity of his research, the exhaustion of an inveterate desire fulfilled, James and Mary knew nothing that morning, standing opposite while the country was still at war. But Mary and James were not at war.
“Good-bye,” James said.
Mary raised her hand and then stood watching on the road until he disappeared around a bend on the road to Keedysville.
Chapter Fifty-four
In November, the cold weather hit Sharpsburg like a sledgehammer. The tent hospital, full to the brim with convalescents, burned everything it could find: frozen cow pies, bad coal, wilted swamp grass. The hospital was dubbed Smoketown for the way the smoke caught in the fir tree canopy of the grove where the tents had been pitched for extra shelter from the elements. Mary begged for more blankets from the quartermaster and tucked them around the shivering men, kept the stoves going with the help of stewards and soldiers whose convalescence allowed them to get up and about, but the nights were mostly freezing affairs to be endured. Mary slept in a coat and gloves and two pairs of socks. She would have slept in her boots if she could. Mary and the nurses—mostly women from Sharpsburg whom she had trained—kept the tents ventilated during the day to keep out the bad air, but the men kept falling ill nonetheless.
One day in mid-November, she and Stipp stood over Thomas, who had developed a fever. Mary surrendered for a moment, stopping her whirl of activity, her curls frizzing around her face. Stipp believed that in the last weeks she had regained some of her health, though perhaps it was only his pride speaking. Mary had laid poultices of willowbark to draw out the inflammation, and made Thomas drink willowbark tea around the clock. Her entire tent of charges grew sick of it, but they were also faring better than some of the other tents, where men were developing gangrene. James Blevens had written that the disease was traveling from patient to patient in the hospitals in Frederick, infecting their wounds. Most of the men were dying.
Stipp said, “You’re going to take him home, aren’t you?”
They were outside the tent now, having slipped away to the field beyond to talk, as they usually did, the nurses and other doctors given to gossip about the surgeon and his woman protégée. It just isn’t right. This was the women speaking out of jealousy, for they had seen the devotion in Stipp’s eye and envied her the love. They also said, He is so old. But he looked old only to the villagers, who would themselves age a decade when the winter and disease worked its pitiless scythe on their patients. Stipp was not yet fifty, but he had seen as much as God. This much Mary knew.
“I have to. If I don’t take him home, Amelia will never forgive me.” Mary had written Amelia to tell her where she was and that she was with Thomas.
“It is a fool’s errand, Mary. Impossible. How will you get him there? The gap is snowed in.”
“I’ll take him north to Hagerstown and take a train from there.” From there to Philadelphia, through New York, on to Albany. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Albany still existed. Or anywhere else, for that matter. There were only these tents, these men, this life. The world was a cluster of Sibley tents, campfires, duty. She had grown to love the scent of the pine needles crunching underfoot, even the smell of the boric acid they had begun to scald the incisions with, and always, the ever-present woodsmoke hovering in the trees.
“You love him. You’re going to marry him, aren’t you?” Every day, Stipp awoke, unable to believe his luck. Here was Mary, swathed in blankets and hat, trudging beside him, their breath frosting in the morning air, discussing incisions and pneumonia, the conversation ranging between the fitting of wooden legs and the treatment for wasting, and all the time he was afraid that one day she would exhaust his knowledge and be done with him. He had seen Thomas grow more dependent on her day after day, though the affection he could not say was unequal to any of the others’. They all loved her. Gentleness combined with competence seduced beyond measure. Now he said it again: “You’ll take him home and marry him.” And knew himself to be a fool as soon as he uttered the words.
Not wanting cruelty, he evoked it with his own fear. The world over, the besotted write their own demise, unable to escape love.
Mary lifted her head, the pale sunlight circling her like a crown. Underneath, the hay was stubble, sharp and broken.
“I’m not yours,” Mary said. The words were out before she had even practiced them in her mind, but they were the right words, the ones she intended to say.
“I didn’t mean to be so hard on you. Back at Fairfax—you didn’t need to see any of those things. I should have helped you.”
The two of them were linked by that experience, would be for all of time. Moments of those days had crystallized and fixed in her mind. Choose who you are, he had said.
“That is not why I’m going.”
“You’re leaving me.”
“He’ll die if he stays. Don’t you see?”
She put her hand to Stipp’s face, and that simple action nearly undid him. He had brought this on himself. How he had thought of her all his lonely months on the Peninsula, the bitterness and horror, the counting of the dead upon the fields, measuring one man’s vitality against another’s. And now she was doing the same. Measuring Thomas’s need against his.
He could not hear Antietam Creek bubbling in the distance (though Mary could; she had stood on a wooded shore near water before, contemplating love), could not even hear the clatter of the hospital tents, the nickering of the horses in the corral, or even his own breathing. Men were dying and autumn leaves were falling, and the northern world was turning away from the sun.
“Are you certain, Mary Sutter? Because my heart will break if you leave me again.”
“But I have already broken my mother’s heart,” Mary said, and then, in the measure of a breath, rested her hand on his shoulder, kissed his cheek, and turned.
At the train station in Hagerstown, Stipp gazed at Thomas, who was watching them intently from the train car in which they had secured him, his crutches tucked beside him. Stipp said, “Are you coming back?”
Mary shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Just for now.”
“For your own good, don’t come back, Mary. Stay at home.”
As the train pulled away, Stipp raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, and conjured a view of a funeral cortege leaving an East River dock, a lithe Mexican girl climbing to an adobe hut, a young woman going to her bed in the dark.
As the platform grew smaller, Mary raised her hand to shield her tears from Thomas, and conjured a view of a curly-headed brother slumped in a train, an exhausted sister dying in her bed, a man handing her a ledger, as if it were his heart.
The train’s cars rocked Mary as the Hudson River, steely gray in the late November afternoon, formed tiny ice crystals that would slowly transform the river to glass. On the seat next to Mary, Thomas dozed, his fever ebbing for now, his stump wound dry and cool. Inside the railcar, the lamps were lit, but the setting sun had brightened to such a blaze that the candles flickering in the lamps seemed only a mirage. At Sharpsburg, the light had failed in just this way, slipping from the autumn sky behind the low hills, the last rays illuminating the rows of tents earlier and earlier each day, the slanted roofs shining like pearls.
Robin Oliveira Page 37
