City of Glory

by Beverly Swerling

  Still no answer, and he had no idea how much of Perry’s allotted ten minutes remained. The men below had a right to take the offer if they could.

  He staggered over to the hatch and started down the ladderway. His left foot reached for the quarterdeck and made contact with Jesse’s body. The boy had been hurled backward by the blast.

  Joyful was weak and dizzy, but he made himself crouch beside the crumpled figure. “Jesse? Can you hear me?” One quarterdeck lantern remained lit; still, it was nearly impossible to see in the gloom. “Jesse. C’mon boy, answer me.” The powder monkey didn’t move. Joyful pressed his ear to the boy’s chest. Thready and very rapid, but the heart was beating. His eyes finally adjusted to the half light, and he saw that the boy’s right arm had been shot off virtually at the shoulder. “Got us both, the poxed English bastards,” he muttered. Jesse didn’t move.

  The blood coming from the boy’s shoulder was oozing, not pumping. A blessing. There was no way to make a tourniquet effective in such a position. The powder monkey’s kersey shirt had been shredded by the shot. Joyful was able to grip a piece of the fabric with his single hand and rip it free. He wadded the kersey into the wound, then got his one good arm underneath Jesse. He couldn’t heave him up the first time he tried, but he succeeded the second. Joyful slung the youngster over his right shoulder and staggered down to the hospital quarters deep in the hold.

  There had been three lanterns lit when he left the sick bay, strung on a pulley stretched abaft the long, narrow cabin. Now there was only one. “Grubbers! Where in hell are you? How come you let the damned lights go out?”

  “Right here, Dr. Turner. I was just goin’ to trim those wicks and get some—”

  Useless, like most of the surgeon’s mates he’d been assigned over the eight years he’d been at sea. “Forget it. Clear the way for another operation. No, wait. I’ll do it. You go above. The commodore’s waiting for any as can leave the ship with him.” Joyful leaned forward and let Jesse’s body drop onto the operating table, ignoring the pulpy remains of the previous surgery that still dotted the canvas covering. The effort jarred his own wound and a wave of pain caught him unawares. Joyful sucked air into his lungs and waited for it to pass, then held his bandaged wrist up to the light. No fresh blood. The tourniquet was holding.

  “You’re wounded, Doctor. You want me to—”

  “I don’t want you to do anything.” He’d never had much patience with Grubbers’s whining. “Just go topside so you can get away.”

  “We’re surrendering, sir?”

  “No, Commodore Perry and any of the crew as can join him are transferring to Niagara.” He raised his voice. “Do you lot hear me? If you can drag yourselves topside, you can get off this floating charnel house. But you’d best be quick.”

  There, he’d done his duty. Joyful didn’t bother to see if any of the men were managing to turn themselves out of their hammocks, or rise off the pallets spread side by side on the floor. He bent over the operating table and carefully removed the wadding of shredded kersey he’d stuffed into Jesse’s wound.

  Grubbers looked down at the unconscious boy. “Shot up real bad, ain’t he, sir?”

  “Yes, he is. I’ll deal with it. You get above while you can.”

  Grubbers hesitated another moment, then dashed for the ladderway. Joyful was vaguely conscious of one other seaman following behind him. The rest were too ill to move. Probably too ill to have heard him, come to that.

  He put his good hand on Jesse Edwards’s forehead. Cool and clammy. The boy was in shock, but his breathing was steadier than it might have been. And when Joyful moved his hand to the lad’s chest, he still felt that regular if too-rapid beat. “All right, Jesse. We’re going to do this, you and I. And if I can operate with one hand, you can bloody well live to tell the tale. You hear me, Jesse Edwards?” He knew the boy was unconscious, but no matter. It made him feel better. “You are going to survive this operation and this day, my reluctant young powder monkey, because you are a tough little Yankee bastard from Boston, despite creaming your britches in every battle. And I…well, I am the best goddamned surgeon in the goddamned United States Navy. Hell, no. I’m better than that. I’m the best goddamned surgeon in the world.”

  Actually, his cousin Andrew Turner back in New York was. But he’d once done just this sort of surgery with Andrew. Joyful was studying medicine at Columbia in those days, and living in Andrew’s house. A woman had been run over by a horse and carriage and brought to his cousin’s Ann Street surgery. The wheel had ripped her arm off practically at the shoulder, same as the bloody English guns had done to Jesse Edwards. Joyful had to act as his cousin’s assistant, and he remembered every step of the operation. He could hear Andrew’s voice as clearly as if the older man stood beside him in Lawrence’s fetid hospital quarters.

  The wound requires amputation just below the scapula. Thing is, Joyful, there are many surgeons afraid of the procedure. Terrific danger of hemorrhage, of course. But she’s going to die if we don’t operate. And if we are very careful, very skilled, and a little bit lucky, she may survive.

  Andrew had picked up the longest of his knives. Joyful turned to the instrument case on the table beside him and did the same. The scalpel he chose had a bone handle and a flexible blade six inches long and an inch wide. It was one of his favorites and stained with the blood of the many surgeries of this day. His was not a profession for the overly fastidious, he reminded himself, and clamped the instrument between his teeth while he reached overhead and pulled the single working lantern into position above the operating table.

  Now, Joyful, hold what’s left of that arm horizontal.

  Given the quality of tars assigned as surgeon’s mates, Joyful had long since installed a wall-mounted heavy hook fitted with a leather strap that he called the Assistant-as-Doesn’t-Talk-Back. He moved the lad’s inert body as close to the table’s edge as he dared and fixed what was left of the shot-off arm in position with his contraption. Clumsy work done one-handed, and getting the boy’s body strapped to the table was almost as difficult, but eventually it was done.

  We make an incision like this, through the adipose membrane, from the upper part of the shoulder across the pectoral muscle down to the armpit.

  That first swift cut brought the powder monkey around, and his scream reverberated off the cabin’s walls. There was a spate of murmured protests as the few wounded men still conscious registered the boy’s agony. “Quiet, all of you! Squealed like stuck pigs yourselves when it was your turn. But the only reason some of you are still breathing is me and my knife.” There were a few whispered assents, even a blessing or two, but Joyful ignored them. All his attention remained with the patient on the table.

  The lad’s shout was actually a cause for celebration. A faint deep enough not to be ended by surgery might indicate a coma that would never give way. Joyful set down the scalpel, fetched another of the dowels from his apron pocket, and placed it in the boy’s mouth. Jesse’s eyes were wide open now, and staring into his. “Bite down, as hard as you can, lad. You are going to get through this. So am I. Because if we don’t, you’re dead.” He pinned the youngster with his gaze. “Do you understand me, young Edwards? This time there’s nowhere to hide. You muster every scrap of courage you have and withstand this, or you die. Now make a choice—do I go ahead?”

  Tears rolled down Jesse’s cheeks, but he nodded. “Good,” Joyful said. “Bite as hard as you can on that stick. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  Now, we turn the knife with its edge upwards and divide the muscle.

  Joyful concentrated on the muffled boom of the guns and ignored the strangled screams of the boy under the knife as well as the moans of the sick and the dying that surrounded him. Pray God they were American guns. What would the British do with the wounded if they boarded Lawrence? Probably return those who could live through the transfer to the Americans. As for him—most likely they’d impress him into the godrotting Royal Navy. Be a real pleasure to ge
t some of those English bastards under his knife.

  He put down the scalpel and turned to get ligatures to tie off the large artery. Oh, Christ Jesus. How was he going to thread the needles with one hand? Maybe that useless bastard Grubbers had prepared some in advance. He pawed through the things on the instrument table searching for a threaded needle. Nothing. He hadn’t really thought there would be.

  Joyful found a largish needle and put the pointed end between his teeth, then teased out a length of catgut from the tangle Grubbers had left behind. He craned his head back, stretching his neck as far as he could, trying to get as much light as possible on the task. Bloody impossible to make the catgut go where he wanted it to. Might as well try to sprout wings and fly. But if that bit of arm were left attached, Jesse Edwards was guaranteed a slow and agonizing death from blood poisoning. God damn him to hell if he let a boy die because he couldn’t thread a—

  “Here, Doc. Let me do that.” A pair of hands reached up and took the needle and the length of catgut.

  Joyful peered into the gloom beyond the pool of light cast by the single lantern. “Tompkins, isn’t it?”

  “Tammy Tompkins. That’s right, Doc.”

  The tar had been one of those in the sick bay before the battle began. “Your fever’s broken.”

  “Looks like it, don’t it? Still some shaky on my pins, but I can do this. No harder than a bit of scrimshaw, this is.”

  Tompkins was one of the most adept whalebone carvers among the sailors. “You’ll make a fine surgeon’s mate, Tammy. You’ve got the hands for it.”

  “Not the stomach though, Doc. In the ordinary way o’ things, I can’t stand the sight o’ blood.”

  “Well, control yourself. And prepare three more of those needles.”

  Joyful took up the scalpel and turned for one quick glance at his patient. The boy was staring at the knife. “Bite down, Jesse. This is the worst of it, but it will soon be over. I was raised in Canton, that’s in China, and the Chinese would say it’s not your joss to die this day. Not your fate. Otherwise you’d be dead already.”

  This time the steady stream of talk was for the boy’s sake, not his own. Joyful made a swift, sure cut through the deltoid muscle; the artery began pumping blood. He dropped the scalpel and took hold of the artery, pinching it tight, issuing orders without turning his head. “Put your fingers where mine are, Tompkins. Grab this tubelike thing I’m holding and squeeze. C’mon, damn it, do it! The boy’s a corpse otherwise.” A tentative hand stretched above the bloody mess that was Jesse Edwards’s shoulder. Finally, Tompkins’s fingers were in position next to his own and Joyful could let go. He grabbed the threaded needle and tied off first the large artery, then the veins. Not as hard to do one-handed as he’d have expected.

  The scalpel again. And Andrew’s voice calm and clear in his head: We pursue the incision through the joint, and carefully divide the vessels, then stop them with ligatures as we did the others.

  Thank God Tompkins had done as he was told. The additional needles were ready. Joyful bent over his task, taking another quick look at his patient. Passed out again. He scooped the dowel out of the boy’s mouth for fear he’d swallow it, then retrieved his scalpel. He was in total control now: each step of the process as clear to him as if it were written out and held before his eyes, transported to that special place where he and the scalpel were one perfect instrument.

  Minutes later the shredded stump of arm fell free. Still attached to the strap on the wall, it hung above the pile of severed limbs Joyful had been kicking below the table throughout this long day. “Tompkins, watch what I’m doing. Damn it, man, I need you. Stop retching and pay attention.” He carefully rolled down over the wound the skin he’d painstakingly preserved.

  In any amputation the amount of skin you’re able to save is a gauge of your success, Joyful. Without enough you’ll leave an ugly lumpy scar that will fester and suppurate at worst, or be a constant irritation to the patient at best.

  “Hold the skin together while I stitch, Tompkins. Yes, like that. Good, you’re doing fine.”

  So was he. The wound was closed. Done and well done. Andrew might have given him a word of praise if he’d been there.

  “Jesse’s going to be all right, ain’t he, Doc?”

  “Yes, Tompkins, he is. At least I think it’s likely. And without your help, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  Joyful put his hand on the powder monkey’s forehead. Not even a hint of fever, by Almighty God. You’ve good joss, Jesse Edwards. As for me, I’m a bloody genius, I am.

  “What about that, then?” The sailor nodded toward the tourniquet still tied around Joyful’s left wrist.

  “Ah, yes. This.” A bloody one-handed genius. “I think you’d best thread me another few needles, Tammy Tompkins. Time I cleaned this up as well. You’ll have to—Listen.” What he’d heard was silence.

  “No more guns, Doc.”

  “Exactly. Not ours and not theirs.”

  “What do you think, Dr. Turner? Have we surrendered or have they?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve no idea. But, if we’re going to be boarded, I’d prefer to get this done first. Let’s have a tune, Mr. Tompkins.” Tammy Tompkins was the ship’s champion whistler as well as a master of scrimshaw. “Not ‘Old Zip Coon’ as usual. Something different. Something to put heart into us.”

  Tompkins pursed his lips and complied, doing a little in-place jig to help things along. Joyful meanwhile bit down on one of his own dowels, then used his right hand to cut the jagged bits of bone and flesh from his shattered left wrist and stitch the remaining skin in place. All to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

  At 4 P.M. on that September Friday, the British fleet on Lake Erie—two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop—struck their colors. Commodore Oliver Perry, USN, now flying his blue and white battle flag aboard the Niagara, accepted the Royal Navy’s surrender and scribbled on the back of a letter a hasty message for General William Henry Harrison: “We have met the enemy and he is ours.”

  Chapter Two

  New York City

  Monday, November 15, 4 P.M.

  THE SNOW FELL in large flakes that lasted a moment then melted to nothingness, but the air was cold and getting colder. Early for it, but there was a real storm brewing. Joyful smelled the tang of it on the afternoon air.

  The smells of good cooking as well. Most folks had their dinner about now, not at three the way it was in the old days. An extra sixty minutes to work. That was always the way of things in New York. Do more, do it faster, get richer. But even here a man had to quit at some point to fill his belly. Ann Street—a jumble of shops and residences like most thoroughfares in the oldest parts of the city—was closed up tight, so silent Joyful could hear the ring of his boots on the cobbles.

  The house he was headed for was at the end of the road, built of wood like most of its neighbors, and like them it was four windows wide and three stories tall, with a dormered roof and two chimneys. There was a sign beside the front door: ANDREW TURNER, M.D., PHYSICIAN. Below, in smaller letters, SURGERY ALSO PERFORMED. Joyful hesitated a moment, then lifted the knocker.

  The servant who opened the door was the same woman who had let him in sixteen years before, when he was barely seventeen and newly sent home to New York from China. She had been an indenture back then, but ten years was the usual span to work off a passage; she must be earning a wage by now. “Afternoon, Bridey. How are you?”

  “All the better for seeing you, Dr. Turner.”

  Like most servants, Bridey knew everything. She was bound to have heard the fierce argument Joyful had with Andrew the month before when he returned from Lake Erie to the hero’s welcome New York gave the veterans of the September battle, but neither of them acknowledged it. “I’m glad to see you as well, Bridey. Is he in?”

  “Indeed, and expecting you.” She held out her hands and Joyful slipped out of his greatcoat and handed it to her, along with his stovepipe hat and his right glove. Bri
dey waited. “Will you not be after leaving the other glove as well, Dr. Turner?”

  “No, Bridey.” Joyful held up his left arm. The week before he’d had a blacksmith make him a shoulder harness attached to a black leather glove stuffed with sand. Stupid vanity. He should simply let the stump hang out and be damned.

  Bridey flushed. “I forgot, Dr. Turner. It’s that sorry I am.”

  “Not to worry, sometimes I forget as well.” Maybe if he said it often enough, it would be true.

  The maid knocked lightly on the door to her right and opened it immediately. “Dr. Joyful Turner, Dr. Turner.”

  Joyful stepped inside. “Cousin Andrew,” he said formally.

  “Cousin Joyful.” The men nodded warily at each other. “I appreciate your coming on such short notice,” Andrew said. “Had your dinner?”

  He hadn’t, but he’d eat later. Just now he was too curious to be hungry. The note that summoned him to this visit had arrived at his lodgings on Greenwich Street an hour earlier. It spoke of a matter of urgency. “I’m well enough fed, sir, thank you.”

  “Good. Leave us then, Bridey. We won’t need anything for a time.”

  The room they were in served as both Andrew’s study and his consulting chamber. Sometimes—spread with oiled cloths to protect the furnishings from spurting blood—it was where he performed his surgeries. Square, paneled in oak that had mellowed gold over the years, it had one wall lined with cupboards and drawers that held the medicaments, bandages, and instruments for blistering, bleeding, and cupping that were the arsenal of a physician, as well as the flutes and probes and straight and curved knives and big and small saws of the cutting trade. Andrew Turner was the only medical practitioner in the city to also advertise a surgeon’s skills, much less sometimes encourage his patients to submit to the knife. Joyful had never believed there was room for two such hybrids in the city. That’s why he went to sea.

  Andrew had not quarreled with that choice. It was Joyful’s recent decision to stop doctoring altogether—God’s truth, Joyful, what will you live on?—and take a room in a boardinghouse on Greenwich Street rather than continue to lodge with his cousin as he had in the past, that caused the trouble between them.