March Toward the Thunder

by Joseph Bruchac

  The sky. There, up through gaps in the trees where exploding shells knocked out the tops of the forest. Clouds in the sky, white cotton on blue cloth.

  Not dark yet.

  “Nigawes,” he whispered.

  Then his voice would no longer work. So, in his mind he called, called with all his heart.

  Nigawes, my mother. Come help me!

  Then it was dark. Very dark.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  DEPOT HOSPITAL

  Why am I stuck in this fog?

  The deep darkness was receding. But it was not being banished by daylight. A grayness thick as cotton circled his aching head. Blurry shapes came and went each time he managed to briefly open his eyes. The voices he heard were distant—like those from boats passing on an unseen river, coming close, drifting away again.

  “No, wait. These two are alive . . .”

  “Can’t get him to let go of his rifle . . .”

  “. . . almost there now, just . . .”

  Those words almost made sense. Hard to pay attention to them, though. Feeling in his arms and legs was returning.

  With it a pain so bone deep, it made him clench his teeth and moan.

  “. . . you’re hurting him, be . . .”

  He tried to make sense of those broken pieces of sight and sound. Making sense helped him get hold of the pain and push it down.

  I’m alive.

  That made sense. Everything shaking around him. Sounds he knew. Clopping. Rattling. A horse’s hooves. A wagon.

  I’m on a battlefield ambulance.

  Black seeped back, ink tipped from a bottle. Heavy black, threatening to drown him in endless dark.

  Wait. There’s a light.

  A wigwam. A fire burning inside. He was kneeling by the door, looking in, recognizing the man on the other side of the fire.

  “Mitongwes,” Louis said, “my father.”

  His vision was blurred, but he saw the glad smile on his father’s face. Louis could crawl in from the darkness and pain and be with him.

  Jean Nolette held up his hand, palm out.

  “Nda,” he said, his voice strong. “Not yet, my son.”

  Louis opened his eyes. A face not his father’s was so close that he could smell the man’s whiskey breath.

  “Still with us, soldier? Good. I’m a doctor. You’re in Second Corps Hospital at City Point.”

  Someone tugging at his clothes, a ripping sound. He tried to sit up, lifted his shoulders off the cot.

  “Hold him down!” the doctor yelled.

  Dark again. Not as much as before. As if he were in a room where everything connected to light and life was on the other side of a thin wall.

  Someone was screaming.

  “Don’t cut off my leg. Don’t cut off my leg.”

  Then a terrible sound like wood being sawed—except it wasn’t wood.

  Another voice.

  “Tie it off tighter. Stop the blood.”

  Louis recognized that voice. The doctor who’d just been talking to him.

  Whose voice was screaming? Mine?

  Quieter. Darker. No thinking or dreaming.

  The next time Louis knew he was awake. Knew where he was. On a cot in Depot Hospital. He looked up at the ceiling of the big tent. He remembered it all. The battle, his friends falling, the shell that burst overhead, the darkness that came and went, the dream of his father that was more than a dream.

  The bone saw and that voice screaming.

  His leg ached. He didn’t dare look down.

  “Hey, Chief.”

  Louis weakly turned his head to the right. A man whose worn face was familiar, though it looked twenty years older, was smiling weakly at him.

  “Bull,” Louis whispered

  “Yup,” Belaney replied. “’Tis me, or what’s left of me.” He gestured down. Bull Belaney’s left leg was gone below the knee.

  Louis raised his head. It took much of his strength and hurt like blue blazes, but he had to see. He let out the breath he had been holding.

  Merci, mon Dieu.

  His own two legs were there, wrapped in bandages, but entire.

  “That ether is something,” Bull said. “’Tis like floating up on a cloud into heaven. The nurse said I was bellowing like a bull when they took it off, but I dunna remember a blessed thing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Louis rasped.

  Bull shook his head. “It’s all right, bucko. The war is done for me. I’ll have me pension and that’ll be money enough to bring me sainted mother over to live with me. I’ll get me one of them cork legs and dance a jig afore the year’s out.”

  Louis looked at the man who’d seemed mean and selfish, but proved true as any man in their company. He managed to reach his hand over to grasp Belaney’s.

  “Proud to have served with you, Bull.”

  Belaney grinned. “For you to make a speech as long as that, Chief, you must be proud indeed. The doctor told me you have more holes in you than a leaky rowboat.”

  “Just you and me?” Louis asked. Had others of their small company survived?

  “Now there’s a tale t’ tell,” Belaney said. Was he smiling? "We . . .”

  Bull’s voice was getting fainter. His mouth was moving. No words seemed to be coming out of it. The bright light of day that had been streaming in through the tent a moment ago was failing.

  When he opened his eyes again, a man in a blood-spattered tunic was bending over his leg. The bandages had been removed, cut free by the scalpel the man held in his left hand. The man probed a dirty finger into the great gash in his left thigh.

  “Feel that, do you?” The doctor pressed harder. “Pain?”

  Louis gritted his teeth and nodded.

  “Excellent,” the doctor said, his voice brisk. “Your other wounds are inconsequential next to this one. Deep to the bone. But no arteries cut. Not as much blood lost as some. Now we must hope for the appearance of laudable pus.” He straightened up and wiped his hands on his soiled shirt. “Nurse, new dressings on this one. Remember to keep them moist.” The doctor’s face blurred. A woman dressed in brown floated toward Louis, indistinct as a figure at the edge of a dream.

  He wasn’t sure how long he slept this time, but when he woke he was weak as a day-old pup. Belaney was no longer in the cot next to him. No one he knew anywhere in sight, though there were hundreds of men all around him—not just in this tent but in others he could see through the open flap. What had he been told about Depot Hospital?

  Two hundred acres. Beds for ten thousand men.

  He tried to speak. All that came out of his mouth was a croak like that of a frog. Hands helped him sit up. A cup was placed in his hands.

  “Toast water,” a gravelly voice said from behind him. “Slow now.”

  Louis sipped until his thirst was gone and the cup half empty.

  “Hungry?” a softer voice asked.

  He nodded. The cup was replaced with a bowl of porridge. He lifted the warm gruel to his mouth, one slow spoonful at a time. He’d never felt so hungry before. He looked back to see who had been helping him. Two nurses stood there. One was a bald-headed gray-beard who looked to be in his sixties and the other a big raw-boned woman with a hooked nose.

  “Thank you,” he croaked. Suddenly his stomach cramped as if it were caught in a vise. “Have to . . .” he said, grabbing his belly.

  The two understood. They helped him from his smelly cot. His nose was working again. It was hard to endure his own stench. The cot was badly soiled. He hoped it would get cleaned while he was out of it.

  The old male nurse was half the size of the hook-nosed woman, but he was the one who helped Louis limp out of the tent. Louis was glad of that. Despite all the awful things they must see every day, they were trying to help him keep a little dignity.

  Had he been on his own and whole, not stumbling and almost falling with each step, it would have been easy enough to find the latrine pit by himself. The stench that rose from the sink was complemented by swa
rms of flies that circled him like a cloud. He crouched over the pole, the man holding him under both arms.

  “Appears you ain’t got the trots,” the gray-bearded nurse said, nodding in approval. “Thank God for that, son. Once you get the dysentery, there’s only two ways to go. One is that they start giving you laudanum. Though it stems the flow, you end up wanting more and more of that opium till it’s all you live for. The other is that it just empties your whole insides out till there’s nothing left. For every man jack dies of wounds, two more that perishes from the Virginia quick-step. Now let’s get you back in. You need any help, jes’ call fer Jake.”

  Another day passed before the doctor came back again to probe at Louis’s wounds with that dirty finger.

  That bothered Louis. Not just the pain of it. His mother had told him that dirt must always be kept out of even the smallest cuts. Louis remembered the times his mother had taken him with her to carry her bag and sit outside the door. She always washed her hands clean with water and herbs before binding someone’s wounds or going in to a woman at her birthing time.

  The doctor shook his head. “No pus. Bad sign.” He cleared his throat and spat on the ground. Then he was gone again.

  I should have asked him about my company. I should have asked someone.

  Jake was back that afternoon.

  “I need to ask you something,” Louis said. “I was at Reams Station, Company E of the Sixty-ninth.”

  “Oh my,” Jake said. “I heered about that. You wants to know of your buddies, don’t you?”

  Louis nodded.

  “Well, you boys took an awful mauling there. Gimme their names. I’ll jes’ ask and see if any you might know is hereabouts.”

  Yet another day. No word of his friends, but his strength returning.

  Merci, Bon Dieu. I get to the latrine on my own now.

  Jake was pleased at that.

  “You don’t go regular,” Jake said, “our doctors’ll start you on the calomel. That’s their favorite dose here. But you don’t want that, boy.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “I’m no doctor—haven’t kilt enough men to be one—but I’ve seen enough to know that jes’ as sure as the day is long you do not want the calomel. It’s made of mercury and sugar of lead. Your teeth start coming out after a week and your jawbone falls in on itself. Bad medicine, that.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE ANGEL

  I should be getting well faster.

  That thought ate at him like a worm in an apple.

  How long has it been?

  Hard to keep track of the passage of time. The first part of his stay had been a fog. Though he was eating solid food now, most days all he could do was lie on his cot with his eyes closed, his hand to his forehead. Had a week passed?

  He’d had special visitors twice. The first was a new lieutenant of the 69th. No one he’d ever met before and he forgot the name. The officer had complimented him on his bravery. He was getting some sort of medal for bravery. Maybe two medals. He didn’t much care about that. All he cared about was how the others made out.

  The answer had given him some satisfaction.

  “Let me check,” the new lieutenant replied, looking through the papers he carried, running a finger down a column. “Appears you and a Private Belaney—poor lad lost a leg—are the only two who stayed at Depot Hospital for any time.”

  “Sergeant Flynn?” Louis asked.

  The lieutenant smiled. “Ah. I’ve made his acquaintance. He’s the one put you in for the ribbons. Sends his greetings. Minor flesh wound. Bullet grazed his head. He’s been given a three-week leave to convalesce at home.”

  “Cook? Devlin? Kirk?”

  “Not in my list of casualties.”

  “Corporal Hayes?”

  The new lieutenant’s face darkened. “Missing, I’m afraid. Assumed dead or captured. Sorry about that.”

  The second visit, a day or so later, had been from The Angel.

  That was what they called her—not just the sick and wounded, but the nurses as well. A ripple of excited voices marked her approach.

  “The Angel’s here!”

  “She’s come down to visit!”

  It was one of his bad days. He didn’t sit up or open his eyes, just kept pressing his hand to his forehead to try and make the aching stop. Then he felt a warm presence. Someone was kneeling by his cot. A smell as sweet as spring flowers was replacing the awful odors of illness and death that were never gone, even from an open-air tent.

  “Young soldier,” a strong, clear voice spoke.

  A small, firm hand slid in to replace Louis’s own on his forehead. He opened his eyes to look up into the round, handsome face of a small woman. Her expression was as caring as a mother looking at her own sick child. She had a bottle in her other hand and was sprinkling it around her and his cot.

  “Lavender water,” the woman explained. “My name is Clara Barton.”

  Clara Barton.

  Louis knew her name. So did everyone in the army.

  The Angel of the Battlefield herself.

  Louis had read about her. She’d left a good job in the U.S. Patent Office to tend the wounded at Second Bull Run. So few doctors and so little planning for casualties in those early days of the war that Clara with her wagonload of food and her own medical supplies had been the first to arrive. Cooking, comforting the injured, caring for their wounds herself, that was what Clara Barton did then and was still doing.

  “What is your name, young man?”

  “Louis.”

  “Louis,” Clara Barton repeated. “A fine name for a brave young soldier.” Her hand was still on his forehead. For the first time in days Louis felt his headache diminishing. He started to smile—his lips trembling as he did so. It was the first time he’d really smiled since the battle at the railroad.

  “Where were you wounded?”

  Louis wondered for a moment why she couldn’t see the bandages on his legs and arms, then realized she was asking about the place.

  “Reams Station,” he said.

  Clara Barton nodded. “A very bad one. But you came through.”

  She moved her hand across his forehead and as she did so Louis saw a hole in the long sleeve of her black dress.

  “Ah,” she said, noticing where his gaze had strayed. She put down her bottle of lavender water to touch the hole in her garment with her other hand. “I have never mended this and I never shall. A bullet passed through there, killing the man I was tending.”

  She smiled, but it didn’t go beyond her lips.

  Mon Dieu, she is sad.

  Clara Barton shook her sleeve back down. “Of course, I do not need it as a reminder of what war is about. I have seen too often that it is not conquering armies, but boys like yourself toiling in the rain and darkness with no thought of pride or glory or reward, their faces bathed in tears and their hands in blood.” Clara Barton sighed. “There is no need for me to make a speech to you. I only pray that you shall grow well and strong again.”

  She pressed his forehead again with her hand, rose, and was gone.

  But I haven’t grown well and strong again.

  Louis shook his head in near despair. He’d been getting weaker every day since The Angel’s visit. He slid his hand, which was too heavy to lift, down toward his leg.

  No doubt about it. Hot to the touch.

  Plus his nose had begun picking up a smell from his wound.

  The doctor looked graver than usual as he did his customary painful poking and prodding.

  Louis heard the words he spoke to one of the nurses as he walked away.

  “I haven’t the time now to do it, but that leg will have to come off this afternoon. It won’t take long. Fifteen minutes at the most.”

  I’d rather die.

  A wry smile twisted his face.

  With this doctor’s care I probably will.

  He began to think about his death.

  What will it be like? Will I walk the road of stars that leads u
p into the skyland? Will I see my father again? Will one of those angels that Father Andre spoke to me about come down and open its great white wings to embrace me? I wish . . .

  But Louis never finished that thought. The sound of a commotion reached his ears.

  “You cannot . . .”

  “You’re not allowed . . .”

  “Madame!”

  “Nda! Allez! You will not stop me.”

  “Hands off the lady,” a second voice said.

  Louis knew that second voice. It was Artis. It made his heart leap, but what filled him with even more joy was that he had also recognized the woman’s voice he heard first.

  Only one person in the world could sound as fierce and loving as that or speak such a mix of Indian and French and English. Another sort of angel had just arrived for him.

  “M’mere,” Louis sobbed as Artis helped him to sit up. Then he was in Marie Nolette’s strong arms.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  HEALING

  There was no logical way—as far as white man’s logic went— for his mother to have known he needed her. No one had written her a letter about his injuries. No one sent a telegram to the Indian mother of one insignificant private.

  Yet her long journey south began on the day Louis fell at Reams Station.

  When I called for her to come and help me.

  “The trees,” M’mere said. “They tell me you need me. So I come.”

  Things have to be done according to the rules in the army. Regulations have to be followed. Louis had learned that in the months he’d been a soldier. But even the army found it hard to resist Marie Nolette. After marching across four states carrying a bag nearly as big as herself on her back, she was not about to be deterred by rules, regulations, or those who thought they could enforce them when faced by one small French Canadian Indian mother.

  The first one she confounded was the doctor. As M’mere held Louis, he returned with his saw and two attendants to carry Louis to the operating table.

  M’mere snatched the saw from him and threw it on the ground!

  “You man with dirty hands! Nda! You will take my head before you touch his leg.”

  As the doctor and his two helpers backed off from his mother, who looked more like a female wolverine than a human, Louis caught a glimpse of Jake, the male nurse. Jake grinned like a jack-o’-lantern and held up both thumbs.