The motorcycles were right behind them, menacing.
Henry said, “These boys still don’t get who they fuckin’ with.”
Suddenly, as he came into the roundabout, Henry leaned on the horn, to warn everyone pulling in or out. Then he accelerated and Peter thought that the SUV would tip and send them all tumbling down into the creek. But Henry whipped those four wheels around the rotary and went right back down the hill, right at the motorcycles.
One bike flew off into the bushes, another swerved, went off the road, and went banging down onto the footpath that led to the bridge. Henry grazed the third bike, and the fourth lay down on the side of the road.
“Now, that is the way to get away.”
“Lucky there were no NPS cops up there,” said Evangeline.
“Wait till the tenure committee hears about this,” said Diana.
* * *
They took the main road south toward Virginia instead of north to I-70. As they passed out of town and went by Lee’s headquarters, Peter’s iPhone vibrated: an e-mail from Antoine.
Boss, The Descriptive Roll says that Jeremiah Murphy has a black beard. He’s five-ten, one-seventy, same as HH. He enlists four days after that news story about the shooting on the bridge, when McNealy fingers HH. Murphy’s brought back to Washington in the spring of 1865, ends up in Armory Square Hospital. I think HH and Murphy are the same guy. If you read the books you sold, you’d agree.
What the hell was he talking about?
Directly below was a link to an online version of Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War and the note, “Read entry for March 1865.” Peter clicked the link.…
TWELVE
February 1865
Halsey Hutchinson looked up at the gray sky and felt the sleet splattering his face. It told him that he still survived.…
Then two black faces appeared above him, and their bodies blocked the sleet.
Smoke blew through the sky behind them. Battle smoke? No. The smoke of the boilers that had driven the side-wheeler up the Potomac to the City Wharf.
“His name’s Murphy. Gut shot,” said a medical officer holding a sheaf of papers.
“Harewood Hospital or Armory Square, sir?” said one of the black men.
Halsey tried to speak. He got out the words, “No … take me to the Union…”
The officer said, “Yes, Corporal, you’re back in the Union. You’re among friends.”
And one of the black men sang, “The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!”
“No … no,” said Halsey, “I mean … Union Ho … Hotel Hos … Hosp…”
The other black man joined in, “Down with the traitor, and up with the star.”
The officer waved his hand, as if annoyed at singing stretcher-bearers. “Get movin’, you boys. Put him on an ambulance for Armory Square.”
The two black men carried Halsey down the gangplank while they sang, “So we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again, shoutin’ the battle cry of freeee-dum.”
Someone on the dock cried out, “Number Three. Ambulance Number Three is bound for Armory Square. Put him in Three.”
The stretcher-bearers carried, lifted, and slid Halsey into the wagon. Every movement felt like a thorny stick driven into his gut and twisted. He tried to clench his teeth and hold his cry, but he had been stoical long enough, and he just let it out. No one heard him because the man in the rack below was screaming.
Then, as the ambulance rolled up Seventh Street, the opium coursed through him. He put his head back, listened to the sleet splatter on the canvas roof, and dreamed again the opium dream that brought everything back in broad scenes and tiny details.…
… the smell of bacon grease and sweat and a dead body on top of him at Antietam … a Confederate sharpshooter firing from a curtained window on a Fredericksburg Street in the fading December light … diarrhea and typhoid and death in the winter camp … and still he survived.
… the reviving warmth of May … more fighting in Fredericksburg … the brutal June march, when the Army of the Potomac chased Lee into Pennsylvania, and the Twentieth covered thirty miles in a day, and feet turned to blister, and blood caked on thighs scraped raw by wool trousers in the heat … Confederate cannon tearing at the sky and Pickett’s Division coming out of the woods … the Twentieth behind their stone wall, waiting, watching, waiting, rising, firing, and firing so fiercely that they wrecked the whole rebel regiment in front of them … then the cry “They’ve breached! To the Angle!” … and the Twentieth turning right to charge into the rebel flank, into the belly-shooting, face-punching, balls-kicking, eyes-gouging, nose-biting blood-brawl that ended the great battle of Gettysburg … and still he survived.
… Bristoe Station and Mine Run and another camp winter, then the news of early spring, that Grant had come east to win the war with one strategy: attack, forward or by the flank, attack and flank left, attack and flank left, until Lee had stretched his line so thin around Richmond that it pulled apart like taffy.…
Six battles in six weeks … and still he survived.
… though he hoped never again to utter the words cold and harbor together. Hellish, hideous, horrible Cold Harbor … a seven-mile front, a fog at dawn, a death march into impregnable works, scythes of orange fire cutting down thousands in minutes, fire so ferocious that the men of the Twentieth simply lay down on the field and dug in like bugs … then the cries of the wounded, who lay dying for days on the field while Grant and Lee dickered over a truce … the burial details gathering up the blackened, flyblown corpses of all the fine young men.…
He had survived it all, until …
… a skirmish line outside Petersburg, another push by Grant to stretch Lee’s line, another move to the left, ever to the left, even in winter, even in sleet … a fierce blow, striking him in the belly and exploding out his back.
* * *
He thanked God now for opium pills and big needles of morphine.…
Until the drugs wore off, he floated. He floated in the ambulance. He floated above the bed in the hospital. He felt warmth, saw light, heard voices:
“A conical ball entered the right side at the external edge of the rectus muscle, about four inches from the umbilicus. Its exit was in the back, about three inches from the spine. It wounded the ascending colon to a fearful extent. The patient is now passing the whole contents of his bowels through the anterior and posterior openings—”
Halsey raised his head and looked down, expecting to see shit covering his belly.
But a voice, deep and gentle, said, “Rest easy, friend. Rest your head.”
“But, my bowels. The doctor said—”
“He’s talking about the lad in the next bed. His assistant is taking notes.”
The accent was familiar. It reminded Halsey of the way they talked in the New York Tammany Regiment.
“Am I dying?”
“You have a bit of a fever, so lie back.”
Halsey dropped again onto the pillow. “Am I going to die?”
“The bullet hit you on the left side. It missed the vitals going in and clipped your kidney coming out.” The man brought a cooling cloth to Halsey’s forehead.
Halsey saw long hair and a full beard, graying fast. The man’s upper body was beefy, his face wide and warm. He reminded Halsey of an uncle. He said the word.
“Uncle, yes. Uncle Walt. Call me Uncle Walt.”
Halsey formed the word “Walt” with his lips.
“Do I remind you of an uncle, Jeremiah?”
Halsey’s eyes opened wide. “Jeremiah? My name’s not Jeremiah—”
“Soothe yourself, son. It’s the fever talking. We’ll cool the fever, then talk.”
* * *
But the fever went on for days.
And the pain burned ever hotter. It throbbed. It pulsed. It grew like a living thing inside him. Even when they gave him morphine that flowed through his veins and stung his eyeballs and lifted him up off the bed, even then, he wanted to die.
He did not know that they expected him to.
But Uncle Walt came every day, or every other day, or every five days. Halsey did not know, because time lost meaning. Walt talked and soothed and said that he would come more often, but he had so many young men to visit.…
Sometimes Halsey remembered their talk, sometimes not.
Then one morning, he awoke to the surgeon’s drone: “Corporal Murphy was admitted febrile and semi-conscious, with blood in the urine indicating kidney damage. A conical bullet had entered the left side and traveled diagonally, exiting five inches from the spine. There was constant discharge of fine yellow pus from both wounds. Under chloroform, on February 22—two days ago—a piece of his overcoat was excised from the posterior opening. Redness somewhat less today. Prognosis, guarded.”
Halsey drifted again. He did not know how long he slept. Hours? Days? But when he awoke, he felt two things: His face was cool and his head was clear.
A soldier in a bed nearby was moaning. Halsey realized that he had been moaning for days, moaning rhythmically, almost musically with the pain of his perforated bowel.
Then Halsey turned his head on the pillow and felt its coolness. He realized that someone had shaved him. His thick beard was gone. Not even a mustache remained. If he’d had the strength, he might have panicked. Instead, he stared at the rafters and thought, fine. If this was the first step in reclaiming his identity, fine. Then he slept.
He awakened to a touch on his cheek and the New York accent: “My, but that is a handsome face under that beard. A bit gaunt, perhaps, but handsome.”
“I … I didn’t give permission. I—”
“We’ll blame some ignorant orderly. But—” Uncle Walt smiled. “—it flatters you.”
Halsey asked if Walt would help him to sit up.
“Lean on your right. We don’t want you dragging on that wound and popping the clot. I’ve seen many a wounded boy pop a clot and bleed out, right in this ward.” And Uncle Walt gently lifted him until he was in a sitting position.
Then Halsey pulled up his nightshirt and looked at the wound in his abdomen. It was covered with a bandage, stained yellow and red in the middle.
Walt said, “You’re pale. I’m thinking this is the first time you’ve sat up.”
“It is. It hurts like a … like a gunshot.”
“I’ll get you a little relief.”
As Walt went off, Halsey took in the world around him, the hospital that he had watched them putting up three years earlier.
The ward was one of ten buildings on the Mall, each about 150 feet long and 25 wide, side-by-side, like barracks, with twenty-five beds on each wall, windows at regular intervals for good airflow, woodstoves every thirty feet, a desk and wardmaster’s office near the front door, which opened onto Seventh Street, an indoor privy at the back, and a rear door that opened onto the Mall. Every bed was assigned, and every form of battlefield wound, amputation, and illness was present and accounted for.
To his right lay the moaner. To his left lay a man who had not made a sound or raised his head in all the time that Halsey had been there. From across the aisle, a man was frowning at him. The man had no reason to frown at him, unless Halsey’s feverish ravings had taken the man’s sleep. Then Halsey realized that the man had no legs, and he was probably frowning at whatever fate lay ahead of him.
Walt soon returned with opium pills, ministered them, chattered on a bit about his job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, then asked if Halsey wished to write a letter to anyone.
Halsey shook his head.
“You have no one, then?”
Halsey shook his head again. Then he let Walt talk. He talked back, but he did not remember what he said because the opium worked quickly.
* * *
Over the next week, Halsey came to appreciate the morning routine of the ward. The rumble of the ambulances on Seventh Street began around six. Coffee and soft-boiled eggs arrived by seven. Men bound for the knife were carried to the central building by eight. The surgeon visited his cases by nine.
One morning, Dr. Porter, a small man with a brusque manner, a black mustache, and a blood-splattered white coat, removed Halsey’s bandages and dictated to his assistant: “Signs of cicatrices at edges, granulation in center of each wound. Redness diminished. Draining reduced. Healing slow. Patient seems alert.”
“I’m, alert, sir. Alert for certain.” Halsey even remembered his brogue.
The surgeon did not seem to notice. “Order a regular diet and two ounces of whiskey a day for pain. Reduce his opium to morning and evening only.”
“Will that be enough?” asked Halsey.
“We stopped the morphine when it looked as if you might survive. You’ll get opium tablets for a time, then just whiskey.” The surgeon patted him on the shoulder. “Too much opium is no good. Binds you up. Makes you jumpy. Don’t want to be jumpy when you’re discharged.”
“When can I walk?”
“Give it time, son. A bullet the size of your fingertip went in your belly and out your back. It’s a miracle you’re alive. So just lie here and be patient—that’s why we call you patients—and plan the rest of your life. What’s your trade?”
Halsey had to think a moment. What was his trade? “I’m a soldier.”
“Until your papers come through.”
* * *
Some time later, Halsey awoke to the sound of a female voice, a woman reading to a soldier nearby.
He raised his head, looked toward her, and heard Walt whisper. “You like the ladies, do you?”
“I like them. I’ve missed them.”
“Well, there’s a number of young lady volunteers in the hospitals. They’re a great help. But the best lady nurses are middle-aged or healthy older women, especially those who’ve been mothers, because you wounded boys must be handled. A hundred things must be done that a modest young lady shouldn’t have to do. You boys need mothers, women who’ve birthed children and know how to give care.”
Halsey nodded. He was still drowsy.
Walt kept talking. “There’s an illiterate old red-faced Irish woman in the next ward who takes her poor naked boys so tenderly in her arms … I think an Irish boy like you could use an Irish mother. Perhaps I’ll send her over.”
“I’d like that.”
“It’ll be good to hear the voice of the old country, then?”
Halsey nodded.
Then Walt brought his lips close to Halsey’s ear. He smelled … good. He smelled of soap and clean clothes, and his skin was warm and pink, as if he had bathed before visiting. He whispered, “Do you remember what I asked you the other day?”
“I can’t even remember this morning, or how this afternoon got here so soon.”
“Then I’ll ask again: How is it a man from Ireland sometimes speaks with no brogue at all?”
“But I do.” Halsey raised his voice. “Don’t I?”
“Today you do. But sometimes, you sound like a Boston Yankee, which makes me think, ‘There’s a lad who’s truly off his head.’” Walt studied him a moment. “Do you remember what you said when I asked you about your accent?”
“What?” asked Halsey. If his wits had been sharper, he would have thought of something, but he felt no panic because with Walt, he felt safe.
“You said, ‘Time and tide are strongly changed. Men and women much deranged.’ You pulled it from deep in your brain. And it’s a true description of what we’re living through. You said the poet was a family friend. And I thought, a man from Galway? How does a man from Galway come by friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson?”
Halsey dropped deep into his brogue. “I wouldn’t know the answer, Walt, me darlin’, but if you give me a few minutes, and a glass of poteen, I’ll t’ink of a good lie.”
“I think you already have.” Walt stood. “I know Emerson, too, personally. If I write to him, should I mention your name? Your real name?”
Halsey shook his head.
“I’ll be back soon.” Wal
t leaned down and kissed him on the cheek and whispered, “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.”
Halsey thought, Uncle Walt … a friend of Emerson? Walt Whitman? The poet?
* * *
The days grew longer. The doses of opium grew lighter. And as the pain grew less, so did his cravings. The doctor told him that he was fortunate in that at least.
So Halsey decided to stand, because the sooner he could stand, the sooner he could walk, and the sooner he could walk, the sooner he could leave, and the sooner he could leave, the sooner he could get to the business of rescuing his name and future.
He waited for Walt to come again before he asked for help. He liked Walt’s bulk. He knew that Walt would not let him fall.
Walt borrowed a wheelchair from one of the amputees. Then he helped Halsey swing his legs out of the bed.
Halsey wobbled to his feet and stood for thirty seconds or so, until his upper thighs turned to jelly and he dropped into the wheelchair.
Walt congratulated him, then tucked a blanket around him and pushed him through the ward to the back door. It felt good to be moving. It felt good to be rolling into the sunlight, so generous and warm that late winter morning. And it felt good to look up at the Capitol dome, gleaming white against the blue sky.
Halsey said, in his brogue, “The last time I seen that, ’twas mostly a giant cast-iron skeleton.”
“Well, it’s done now,” said Walt, “and done well.”
The symbol had become reality. The Union would go on, and as Lincoln had said at Gettysburg, the nation would know “a new birth of freedom.”
In the brutal summer of ’64, however, when the bodies of Yankee boys were rotting in a wide arc from Spotsylvania to Petersburg, it had looked for all the world as if Lincoln would lose the presidential election. McClellan had challenged him after all. Though deposed, the general had remained the favorite of Union Democrats and the only choice for the Peace Democrats and Copperheads.
By then, Lincoln had traveled far in his feelings toward the Negroes. Colored regiments comprised more than 10 percent of the Union Army. Colored men were fighting and dying on every front. And even though he knew it might seal his political doom, Lincoln had insisted that the Republican platform call for a Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery in all states forever, not simply as a military measure but as a moral truth institutionalized in law. He called it “a King’s cure for all the evils.”
The Lincoln Letter Page 36
