The Beguiled

by Thomas Cullinan

  “She has brought back edible mushrooms several times, Martha,” Miss Harriet put in, “and also nuts and crabapples and wild berries. You know that yourself.”

  “I know that she has been warned repeatedly to stay out of those woods during these perilous times. Does it occur to you, Harriet, that you and I are responsible in this situation? These young ladies have been entrusted to our care—their parents have put them in our charge in the expectation that we will look out for them and protect them from all moral and physical harm.”

  “There really didn’t seem to be any danger on our own property, Martha.”

  “No danger? There are thousands of young men passing on the roads outside . . . young men for whom most personal moral laws have been suspended. They are going forth to violate the Sixth Commandment with the blessings of their leaders. Do you think very many of them would hesitate to violate the Seventh on their own initiative?”

  “In the Roman Catholic religion that would be the Fifth and Sixth Commandments,” bratty little Marie Devereaux interjected.

  “Be quiet, if you please, Miss,” Miss Martha told her. “I realize that most of you girls have family connections in the military service and I do not necessarily refer to that kind of young man or any others well bred like them. However they are not the kind who make up the bulk of the Confederate armies now. Nowadays our banners are being carried by the moppings of the Richmond streets, by hill boys and illiterate tenant farmers and parolees from Atlanta jails.”

  I felt I had to speak up then. “Does that mean, Miss Martha, that you think our boys are any less courageous or dedicated to their cause than Yankee conscripts like the one on our settee?”

  “He may not be a conscript,” said Amelia, determined to defend her treasure. “Possibly he volunteered for his army.”

  “I think you have made yourself enough trouble for one day, young lady, without adding more,” Miss Martha told her, and then added quite unnecessarily, “I’d be obliged if you’d keep quiet too, Miss Emily. I am not defending the Yankees. Individually, I’m sure they’re as bad as any of ours, and collectively, of course, they’re supposed to be our enemies.”

  Supposed to be! Good Lord, I thought, what kind of talk is this from a teacher in front of young children like Amelia and Marie to say nothing of impressionable people like Alice. If the Northern invaders are not the most dastard foe that any civilized nation has had to face then all our training and upbringing has been for naught.

  “What do you think we should do with him, Martha,” asked Miss Harriet cautiously as Miss Martha went over to look at him for the first time.

  “My first thought,” said Miss Martha, “is to load him into the cart and take him down to the main road and let the troops deal with him. This is a military matter and none of our business.”

  Now even though Miss Martha had spoken rather nastily to me, I was inclined to agree with her in this. I tried to imagine what my father, Brigadier General John Wade Stevenson, would have advised under these circumstances and I had to admit that he, too, would have declared it a matter for soldiers and nothing at all suitable for the attention of young ladies. I was about to mention this and in fact some later events made me wish I had when Miss Harriet spoke up in a way unusual for her.

  “I think it is a humanitarian matter,” she said. “Would you turn a grievously injured boy over to the rough care of soldiers on the march?”

  “They very likely wouldn’t take him anyway, Miss Martha,” said Alice Simms who has already considering the benefits of having a young man in the house. “What could they do with a wounded boy like this? There aren’t any prison camps near here they could put him in. Very likely they would just order us to take care of him, at least until the battle is over.”

  “Also,” said little Marie Deveraux who welcomed the sort of excitement this guest of ours promised to bring, “also, if our boys find this Yankee by the roadside, they may just be curious as to where he came from and they may wonder if there are any more like him around. That may cause great hordes of them to come poking around here to see if we have any more wounded Yankees and, Miss Martha, I believe that is just exactly the situation you are trying to avoid.”

  “We could wait ’til after dark,” said old Mattie, “and maybe take him further down the road where this place wouldn’t be connected with him.”

  “How can you be so heartless, Mattie,” Marie said, “and here this poor boy has been fighting to set you people free.”

  “I ain’t heartless,” Mattie said. “I’m just afraid.”

  Mattie very likely had been seeing strange signs in her herb tea again or listening to the wild dogs baying at the moon, either one of which would have been to her a sure sign of impending doom. I was accustomed to old Negro women like Mattie at home on our place and I knew there was often a lot of truth in the terrible things they predicted. These people are so used to living with trouble, it seems they have a special eye and ear for its coming.

  “He could be taken back to the woods,” said Edwina Morrow, “like Mattie suggested awhile ago and we could just forget we ever found him.”

  “You didn’t find him—I did!” Amelia shouted. “And I will not take him back even if I am absolutely ordered to do so!”

  “You will go without your dinner tonight, young lady,” said Miss Martha, “for that remark and for your conduct this afternoon. This creature’s leg is still bleeding. You’ve got this tourniquet all wrong.”

  “You fix it, Martha,” Miss Harriet told her. “You know all about such things.”

  “I know you have seen fit to ruin a damask cloth—the lace border alone of which was worth at least twenty-five dollars one hundred years ago—and would cost ten times that amount today, if obtainable at all.”

  “It was worn and old, Martha, and the lace was torn.”

  “If that is an excuse for destroying it, then the Yankees must be right. They say that all our customs are old and worn down here, don’t they, and they propose to teach us new ones.”

  Miss Martha unloosened the bandage on his leg and began to unwrap it gently. As she had said, the blood was still seeping from the wound though perhaps not as rapidly as before. In any case, there was probably very little blood left in him now. Miss Martha ripped the remainder of his trouser leg away without ceremony and then proceeded to wrap the cloth around again, only this time higher up on his thigh.

  “I think the main leg artery divides somewhere close to the knee and it’s best to pinch it off before that point. One of you hand me that baton.”

  Miss Martha took the baton, which is used in our music lessons, and, inserting it between the cloth and the Yankee’s leg, began twisting the stick until the bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Then she tied the stick in place with another bit of the cloth and leaned over to examine the wound, prodding it and probing it with her finger as professional as some old army surgeon. In spite of my anger at her, I really had to admire her. The Yankee, mercifully, was still quite unconscious.

  “There’s enough metal in there to shoe a horse,” she said. “I doubt whether it’s possible to get it all out, even if we had the instruments. And it’s quite possible it would not be worth the effort anyway.”

  She felt his pulse as we had and could detect no tremor. Then she put her ear to his chest and listened. “He’s still breathing, but not much more than that,” she said finally.

  “Then you’re not going to turn him over to our troops?” Miss Harriet asked.

  “Unless he lives, which seems very doubtful at the moment, the question is only academic. If by some miracle he lasts the night through, we’ll decide what to do with him in the morning. Now all of you, pay attention. Get me some needles—several sizes—and some silk thread. Mattie, fetch me as much water as you can. Boil it quickly. I’ll also need some soap and towels . . . and more cloth for bandages. There is some white muslin in that bundle
in the hall. Bring it to me and also a pair of scissors. I had intended some of you to have new shifts this summer but if you must bring wounded Yankees in here, you can do without new undergarments. I’ll also need some sharp instrument for probing his leg. Find something in the kitchen, Mattie.”

  “How about that little pickle fork?” old Mattie asked her.

  “That may do—we’ll try it anyway. And also maybe a small paring knife. More swiftly all of you, if you want your Yankee to be alive at bedtime.”

  Mattie went off to fetch the kitchen implements and Miss Harriet set about supplying the needles, thread and scissors from her sewing basket, which was already on hand. I brought the muslin in from the hall and Marie went to get the towels and the pot of tallow soap which we are forced to use nowadays, and very sparingly at that. However, before Marie could complete her errand, Edwina, as unpredictable as ever, rushed off to her room and returned with a sliver of scented toilet soap.

  “It’s boudoir soap,” she said offhandedly. “My father brought it back from one of his journeys to Paris.”

  “It’s French soap all right,” Alice said, examining it. “My mother uses it all the time.”

  Well, I thought, I suppose she’d have to, in her reputed business, but I made no comment. Edwina could not refrain, however, from crowning her act of charity with an unkind remark.

  “You mean your mother used this kind of soap when you saw her last.”

  “If you like,” Alice retorted. “If you must be so exact about it, I think that was probably some months or maybe even years after the time you last set eyes on your father.”

  “Enough of that,” Miss Martha told them. She had completed examining her patient and was ready to set to work. “Get behind this settee all of you and shove it to a place of better light.”

  We shoved the settee and its uncomplaining occupant over to where the last rays of the sun were coming through the garden door, or at least as much of the setting sunlight that was not obliterated by the smoke from the woods.

  Mattie returned then with a bucket of steaming water and the kitchen implements. Miss Martha threw the knife and fork into the water along with the needles and thread and, while they steeped, she took the scissors and began cutting up the muslin and the remaining piece of her valuable tablecloth. Then she threw a bit of the cloth into the water, let it soak a while, withdrew it on the point of the scissors, grasped it in her bare hand and after dipping it into the tallow soap began scrubbing the Yankee’s leg.

  “You may save your scented soap, Edwina,” she said. “We may need it another time. At any rate, it’s thoughtful of you to offer it. Now this may become more unpleasant as we continue, girls. Anyone present who thinks she may faint or do anything else nonsensical will please leave the room now. That includes you, Miss Harriet.”

  No one left. Miss Martha smiled grimly and continued her work. That hot cloth must have burned her hand terribly but she gave no sign of any pain. I thought then as I have thought before, if Miss Martha had only been born a man, she would have made a great contribution to the Southern cause.

  When the leg was thoroughly cleansed of its mud and gunpowder and dried blood, Miss Martha straightened up. “I’ll need more light now. Bring the lamp.”

  Mattie went out to fetch the living room lamp which is kept in the kitchen nowadays to prevent its being unnecessarily lighted. Like everyone else, we are reduced to using cotton seed oil instead of kerosene in our lamps these evenings and even that is in very short supply. Meanwhile, Miss Martha was fishing the pickle fork and paring knife from the hot water with the point of her scissors.

  “Here,” she said, dropping the knife and fork on a towel and handing the towel to Marie. “Hold these until I ask for them. Now I’d like the assistance of two more people. One to lift this gentleman’s leg and hold it steady and the other to stand over him and watch him closely, and in the event he regains consciousness, to hold him down.”

  I volunteered to be the leg holder and Miss Harriet, who was quite pale by this time, said that she would stand by and guard against his sudden movement. Mattie returned with the lamp then and held it over the settee where Miss Martha directed. Then Miss Martha took the knife and pickle fork and began picking the bits of shrapnel out of the Yankee’s leg.

  As she had said, there was a great deal of metal embedded there and it took a long time. Miss Martha was quite colorless herself before she finished. A wisp of her usually carefully pinned dark hair was hanging on her forehead and trickles of perspiration were running down her cheeks. “She is not a beautiful woman,” I thought as I watched her with great admiration, “but she is attractive in her own determined kind of way.” I thought she was probably the most determined looking person I had ever seen.

  When the metal was all out, or as much of it as Miss Harriet could find with her crude instruments, she applied more hot cloths to the leg, reshaped the splintered bone as well as she could and then, taking a needle and a length of black silk thread from Marie, she began to sew up the wound. Before two stitches were taken, Edwina Morrow had crumpled to the floor.

  “Alice . . . Amelia . . . take her out,” Miss Martha said without so much as looking up. “Help them please, Mattie. Miss Harriet will take the lamp. Lift the leg a bit higher, Emily. There’s nothing to this part you know. It’s just like sewing up a Thanksgiving turkey.”

  Well, it was certainly more complicated than that. Although it wasn’t the neatest job of sewing I had ever seen, considering the circumstances under which she was working and the condition of that leg, Miss Martha would have won the gold thimble in any seamstress competition in the world. That boy’s leg was not only torn, it was mangled, and the excavation work Miss Martha had done for the imbedded metal certainly didn’t make the repair work any easier.

  It must have taken nearly an hour and almost all the thread in the spool before she tied the final knot. Then she sent Marie up to her room to fetch an old hoop skirt which she or Miss Harriet or someone in their family must have worn in far bygone days. It was of fine lavendar taffeta with embroidered pink roses on it, altogether a very handsome piece of goods, old as it was. However, Miss Martha didn’t hesitate one moment, but ripped the skirt apart and removed the stays and used them as splints for the Yankee’s leg. Then she bound the whole with strips of the new muslin and the remaining piece of damask table cloth.

  “There . . .” she said, “there you are, young ladies.” She sighed and stepped back and mopped her dripping brow in most unladylike fashion.

  Little Marie was so overwhelmed she applauded and Alice and I joined in. “That old Yankee had really better live now,” Marie cried. “After all the hard work we’ve put in here.”

  “Very good, Martha, very good,” Miss Harriet said, quite overwhelmed herself.

  “It’s not very good at all,” Miss Martha said, although I’m sure she was pleased at our approval. “I really wouldn’t have attempted it, if I hadn’t felt I couldn’t do him any harm. Well, now we must wait and see what the next few hours will do to him. At least we’ve stopped the flow of blood. If the spark of life is strong enough in him, a good night’s rest may help it glow a bit. Now then, young ladies, back to your separate duties. Those with lessons, attend to them. The others, set yourselves some worthwhile tasks. Has Miss Edwina recovered yet? Get a small onion from the kitchen, one of you, cut it and hold it underneath her nose. Mattie, Harriet . . . let’s clean up here and see to dinner.”

  “Miss Martha,” Amelia Dabney said shyly. “I would like to thank you for your kindness to this Yankee. Incidentally, his name, in case you’ve wondered, is John McBurney.”

  “I didn’t wonder about it at all, Miss Amelia,” our headmistress told her. “And I’m afraid he won’t be here long enough—dead or alive—for his name to make any difference to us. Now, Miss Amelia, since you won’t be dining with us, you are free to go to your room.”

 
Marie had started for the kitchen to get the onion for Edwina, who at this point was still lying unconscious or close to it, on the settee in the entrance hallway. Obviously there is nothing most of us in this school would like better than the chance to shove an onion in Edwina Morrow’s face, but of course only the more childish students can afford to be so eager about it. However, Marie was willing to risk losing even this golden opportunity for a chance to cause a bit more disturbance for Miss Martha.

  “Miss Martha,” she said, “I think it is unfair of you to punish my roommate, Amelia Dabney, for going into the woods today, since she has explained to you that she had good educational reasons for doing so. Even if we all do not share her queer interests, I don’t think she ought to be punished for them, especially since it was not her fault she was caught today. Now I myself went into that very same woods one day about a week ago, and I had no particular reason for going except that I wanted to be alone, and I was not caught or even suspected.”

  “You’re caught now,” said Miss Martha, “and you may join Amelia in her punishment.”

  “But, Miss Martha, for pity’s sake . . . I am admitting it!”

  “Then your conscience will be at ease, for which you should be grateful. Go to your room, the two of you. Miss Alice, get the onion and attend to Miss Edwina.”

  Alice went off with great alacrity and the little imp, muttering and making terrible faces at us all, followed her roommate up the stairs. She certainly is the strangest child and I believe her Papist upbringing is to a great degree responsible for it. She is frequently guilty of the most stubborn and outrageous conduct—very often, apparently, for no other reason than sheer deviltry—and then is willing to confess all quite cheerfully as though that will wipe the deed away. Oh, Marie and Miss Martha are old adversaries at this game. Fortunately, Miss Martha is on to Miss Deveraux’s strange little system of morality and Miss Martha doesn’t hesitate to rule her with an iron hand.