by Kathy Otten
The enamelware basin hit the wooden floor with a clang that echoed through the ward as the basin wobbled in circles for several seconds like a spinning top about to fall on its side.
“By the saints, can ye not look where yer going?” Pinching the bib of her apron, she held it away from the bodice of her dress as she quickly pulled free the pins that secured it. Looking up she could only sigh, wondering why she was even surprised to find him there.
“I was not going,” Doctor Ellard pointed out. “I was standing.”
“Well, ye should not have been standing.” Reaching behind, she tugged free the ties of her apron. “Ye should’ve stepped aside for me to pass.” Rolling the garment into a ball, she used the dry end to blot at the wet spots on her dress.
“I assumed you saw me.”
“How could I be doing that with me head down, making certain I’d not spill the water?”
She glared at him, expecting him to at least pick up the basin. Then with a frustrated sigh, she dropped to her knees and using her apron, mopped the puddle. As she rose she snatched up the basin and slapped the wet apron inside. When he didn’t move, she side stepped around him.
“Mrs. McBride, wait.”
She swung around and narrowed her gaze on his face. He drew a breath as if he were about to speak then said nothing.
She waited.
“A king was asked,” Doctor Ellard began. “Why in some kingdoms he could be crowned at the age of fourteen, yet not be allowed to marry until he was eighteen.”
Baffled, Gracie stared at him. Had the man gone daft? He looked perfectly serious however, as though he were carefully repeating the memorized passage of a book.
“‘Because, answered the king, it is easier to govern a kingdom than a woman.’”
Every muscle in her body stilled. She wasn’t even sure she remembered to breathe as she stared at him. A joke? Was that a joke?
She drew a deep breath. “Ye’d best thank the Heavenly Father that he made you a brilliant surgeon, Doctor Ellard. For if ye had to make yer way in this world as the writer of comedies, ye’d starve.”
Then taking the basin and apron, she upended them against his chest and marched straight down the center of the wide aisle.
As she passed her work table, she saw Robbie watching her with a crooked grin on his face.
“Are ye happy now, Robbie Reid?” she asked, then continued to her room at the end of the ward.
****
Charles stared after her for several seconds. He’d made a fool of himself again.
Across the ward he noticed Major Carlton and a man who looked like his brother, laughing together while stealing glances his way.
His ears burned, but he glared at them as though being humiliated didn’t matter. They quickly returned to their packing.
The man with the major picked up a book, and when he transferred it to the major’s knapsack, a piece of paper dropped to the floor near the end of the bed. A moment later the man pushed Major Carlton up the aisle.
Casually, Charles crossed the distance, retrieved the paper, and returned to bed twelve. Setting the basin Gracie had shoved at him on the small table, he tucked the note underneath.
He then positioned the chair so that as he checked the patient’s wounds he could watch the major at the nurse’s table. Gracie joined them tying a fresh apron on over her dress. Though this dress was black it was one that had once been plaid for there were several shades of black lines in varying widths woven through the cloth.
The major said something, and she laughed.
Regret swelled inside him, pressing heavily against his chest, filling his stomach and hurting his heart. He thought he’d outgrown the pain of being the outcast, of not being included with his classmates at school, or even later at medical college. The pretty girls he’d met at parties and gatherings had never been interested in him. He’d been awkward and clumsy in their presence. He couldn’t sing or play an instrument. His long legs tangled like a gangly colt, which added dancing to a long list of social skills he could never master, so that even the wallflowers refused to talk with him.
A minute later, the brother returned to the major’s area and searched beneath the cot, the table, and the empty beds on either side. He even looked under the pillow and behind the table. With a shake of his head and an exaggerated shrug, he rejoined his brother and Gracie.
Charles knew he should feel guilty. When he was a boy, his grandfather would have taken the belt to him for stealing. Maybe he’d put it back later, where she could find it. Maybe.
She walked with them up the length of the aisle and continued out the door. Once they’d gone, he glanced around to see if anyone watched him, then he pulled the paper from beneath the basin and unfolded it.
You are a single candle in the dark of night,
The sound of your laughter makes my sad days bright.
Your eyes are as soft as a little brown wren,
And your hair like autumn, takes me home again.
~*~
With a voice like an angel that carries on high,
I’m drawn from despair, and given hope to try.
You’re a woman, a nurse, an angel of mercy
You’re all that I need, you’re my sweet girl Gracie.
Charles swallowed the lump in his throat and blinked. Nothing but poorly written sentimental drivel that belonged in the trash. Refolding it, he slipped it into his pocket instead. He hadn’t thought Gracie McBride to be a flowers and poetry sort of woman.
Shifting his attention to his patient, he unwrapped the bandages and checked both wounds.
As expected they were red and swollen, oozing the predictable laudable pus. Abdominal wounds were nearly always fatal. He’d just hoped the slower velocity round balls had done less internal damage. Rising, he strode to the closest linen cupboard.
His joke hadn’t made her laugh. Maybe he should try a poem. Distaste twisted the muscles of his face into a grimace. A dose of castor oil would be more palatable.
He grabbed a few rolls of bandage and returned to twelve. The book of jokes held one hundred, twenty-eight pages of humorous anecdotes and jests. Perhaps he should choose another.
Working quickly, he applied the new dressing and tossed the soiled bandages into the basin. Finished, he carried it up the aisle until he spotted one of the attendants.
“Here,” he said as he strode past, and thrust the basin at the startled soldier who instinctively grabbed it before it fell to the floor.
Gracie entered the ward and started down the wide aisle. She had nearly reached her table when he stopped and blocked her way.
She dropped her hands to her hips and raised her chin to meet his gaze.
Reaching into his pocket he pulled out the poem. “I found this by the major’s bed.”
The fiery challenge in her eyes dimmed to a sparkle. She gave him a quick smile and took the paper from his outstretched fingers. “I thank ye, Doctor. Major Carlton was upset when he could not find it.”
Charles half hoped she would read it now so he could see her reaction, but she tucked it away in her skirt pocket. She would probably take it to her room to read in private then slip it under her pillow so she could lie in bed and dream about the man. Tomorrow she’d show the poem to her lady nurse friends, and they’d giggle and swoon over how romantic the fellow was.
“Was there something else ye be needing, Doctor?” She stared up at him with a puzzled frown.
“Mercy doesn’t rhyme with Gracie,” he blurted out—then with his ears burning he strode to the end of the ward and into the cold.
Chapter Six
You’re behaving worse than a foolish school boy, he told himself as he checked his patients in the next ward.
He should have just kissed Gracie McBride and been done with it. Except, that hadn’t worked too well either.
Aside from the few kisses he’d stolen from the young women his grandfather had arranged for Charles to court, he hadn’t had much practice.
He could have visited a whore, but while he had no qualms about treating one, the idea of lying intimately with a woman who had been with so many men and transmitted diseases that could kill a man was horrifyingly repellent.
Once more, he asked himself why it mattered so much what Gracie thought of him. He was leaving in three days.
Of course he hadn’t told her yet. He hadn’t told anyone, not that there was anyone to tell. On Monday morning he would be on his way to Falmouth and Doctor Bliss would assign the responsibility of wards E and F to someone else.
Maybe he should let her know. Would she fear for his safety? Would she be as upset as she’d been when she learned young Reid was going back? Would she run to Doctor Bliss demanding that he stay? He had no idea. Her reaction was as uncertain as this March weather.
And what if all she said in response was, Goodbye and take care? He would much rather spend the rest of the war imagining what might have been. He could always write to her. Then again, what if she never wrote back?
Finished with his duties in F, he walked to his quarters. He didn’t have time to moon over Gracie McBride. Good Lord, he was worse than Major Carlton. Forcing himself to focus on the requisition list Doctor Bliss had asked for, Charles spent the rest of his afternoon hunched over the quartermaster’s ledgers from the fall campaign.
Taking the numbers in the book, Charles simply increased all the surgical supplies, bandages, and bed linens by twenty-five percent and the rest by twenty. This war was going to get worse before it got better.
A chill rippled through him. He couldn’t conceive of anything worse than the fighting along Antietam Creek, or worse than Fredericksburg. Enemy shells bombarding the hospital, wounded lying on pine boughs, ten men to a tent with nothing but blankets for warmth. Days standing in the cold, the blood freezing his clothes stiff as he stood beside the surgical table, his numb finger barely able to wrap around the end of his long amputation knife. Feet, hands, arms, legs, cut, toss, sew—
He shoved away from the tiny desk and paced the confines of his room. He jammed his hands into his pockets and clenched them into fists. What if it happened again like it had at Fredericksburg? The night before last had been frightening enough, and only Gracie had seen him lose control. He’d be committed to an asylum for certain this time, instead of being transferred to Washington to rest. His grandfather wouldn’t be able to save him a second time.
God damn, how was he going to do this?
Turning to his trunk, he threw back the lid and dug to the bottom for his bottle of whiskey. Popping the cork, he slammed back a healthy swallow. He raised the bottle to eye level. He should probably pick up another one before he left, maybe two. Three would be better. God, at this rate he’d be a drunken sot by the end of the war.
He recorked the bottle and returned it to his trunk. As he drew the lid closed his gaze fell upon the red book covered with laughing faces, like an audience at a crowded theater. His fingers quavered as he reached for the slim volume. Then, lowering himself to his bed, he stretched out and began to read.
****
“A farmer who lives on a hill called ‘Hard Scrabble,’ said that owing to poor land and the drought last summer, the grass was so short he had to lather it before he could mow it.”
Gracie stared at Doctor Ellard as he stood looking down at her from across the table after his morning rounds.
Another joke? This one might have been humorous if he hadn’t delivered it in such a clinical manner as though he were presenting a lecture from the podium at a medical college.
“Are you amused?” he asked, the tone of his voice lightened with hope. His earnest expression touched her more than his joke.
Nodding, she clamped her bottom lip between her teeth. “Ummm hmmm.” To burst out laughing now would hurt his feelings.
His brow furrowed skeptically then he passed her the patient cards.
She searched his face as she accepted them, trying to understand why he suddenly felt the need to tell her jokes.
For a moment she thought he might say more, but he closed his parted lips and abruptly swung on his heels.
Staring at the cards, she listened to him go. His long stride lengthened, each thud of his heels against the floor like a child taking giant steps.
She took out a sheet of paper to create the list of food for the special diets and suddenly recalled what she’d wanted to ask him.
Paper in hand, she shoved back her chair and hurried down the aisle, catching up to him on the covered walkway just outside the ward.
“Doctor Ellard,” she called.
He turned. Expectation raised his brow.
“I wanted to ask ye again about moving Sergeant Baker from the side door.”
He sighed. “Did you give him an extra blanket?”
“Yes, but the draft cannot be—”
“Has he complained?”
“Nay, but the man cannot speak.”
“He stays where he is.”
As though the matter were settled, he inclined his head in a slight bow and started to turn.
“Then I wonder if ye might do me a wee favor?”
He heaved a heavy sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the world. That implacable mask was back in place, and Gracie suddenly wished she had laughed at his joke. “Tomorrow be Sunday and ’tis Robbie’s last day with us before he must return to his unit.” She held out the blank paper and a pencil.
“Could ye send a note to the cook in the kitchen allowing me to bake a cake later today.”
“No.” He ignored the paper and pencil.
She raised her gaze to meet his. “But the cook would not have to bake it. ’Tis I’d be doing all the work.”
“No.” Ice rimmed his hard blue stare.
“But Robbie be doing so much around the hospital—”
“He draws pay from the army.”
She crossed her arms refusing to take back the paper. “Payment be not the issue. ’Tis a gesture of appreciation, a way to wish him well and—”
“Do other men get cakes?”
“I’ll be making it large enough, so all who might want a piece—”
“Do other men get cakes before they leave here and go back to their regiments?”
“No, but Robbie is—”
“Corporal Reid is no different than any other soldier doing his duty. There are no parades, no parties, and no cakes. You go where the army commands and pray to God a Confederate twelve-pounder doesn’t take off your head.” He shuddered at the image he’d conjured.
“Ye are a cold and heartless man. I do not need your per—”
“If you think to take this to Doctor Bliss—”
“Sweet Mary Jesus, will ye let me finish a sentence?”
She shoved the paper and pencil into her pocket. “Fine. I’m letting ye know I’ve the sudden need for an afternoon off. And if the Sisters from Our Lady of Charity be coming round tomorrow with a cake for the poor wounded boys in our care, I’ll thank ye not to stop Robbie from having a piece.”
He narrowed his gaze and took a step toward her. “I have come to believe that there is much truth in jest, and that a country truly is easier to govern than a woman.”
The paper crumpled inside her fist. Her breast heaved with each angry breath as she fought to keep herself from taking a swing at the egotistical, bigheaded ass.
“May all the goats in Gorey chase ye to hell, Charles Ellard. If ye ever think to leave this place, do not expect me to bake ye a cake. And I hope ye choke on the piece I cut for ye on Sunday.”
“It will not be a problem, Mrs. McBride, for I will not be here. I have better things to do with my free time than to waste it singing and eating cake. Good day.”
He swung around and strode off.
Frustrated, she stamped her foot against the plank walk. “And next time,” she yelled at his back, “I’ll thank ye not to be reading poetry meant for another!”
She watched him until he turned out of sight between two buildings. Then
mortified by the realization she’d been screaming like a fishwife on hospital grounds, she went in search of Sister Mary.
****
Back in his quarters, Charles removed his coat and vest and rolled up his sleeves. A cake. He flopped backward onto his bed and stacked his hands beneath his head. Cause for cakes and celebration would be when this war ended, for those who made it out alive. Not now.
Despite how fond she was of the young corporal, Reid was no more special than any one of them.
He wondered again what she would say if he told her he was leaving. She wouldn’t bake him a cake, but would she say goodbye?
Reaching for the book on his bedside table, he propped it open on his stomach and began to read. Out of all the jokes and amusing anecdotes in this book, there must be one that could make her laugh, just one that would endear him, just a little bit, to her heart.
Someone knocked on his door.
“Come.”
Slowly the knob turned, and the door creaked inward.
“Sir, you have a visitor.” The sergeant spoke through the ten-inch opening between the door and its jamb.
“Get in here, Sergeant,” he ordered. “Stop that goddamn lurking.” From the way people tiptoed around him, one might believe he was more intimidating than a rebel cavalry charge. He closed the book and rolled to his feet.
The sergeant stepped half-way into the room. “You have a visitor, sir.”
“Who?”
“He didn’t say, sir, but it’s an older gentleman. Finely dressed.”
“Very well.” He slipped on his waistcoat and grabbed his coat from the hook on the back of his door, leaving the sergeant to close it behind him as they left the room.
Charles’ long legs took him quickly to the front office.
A short man stood before the window, just a silhouette in the beam of sunlight, until he stepped forward.
Charles froze, his coat half way up his arm. The sergeant bumped against him. Startled from his daze, Charles drew a deep breath. “Hello, Grandfather.”
The old man walked closer. Each gray hair lay neatly in place, his black trousers and frock coat, dust free and finely creased. Even his shoes gleamed—the mud and slush not daring to mar their pristine perfection.
