by J. R. Ayers
When they returned to the hospital the Union sympathizer barber was there to shave the wounded men and Jack asked if he would shave him. He said no and suggested Jack do something repugnant with his hat that involved dropping his trousers and bending over. Jack wished him a blessed day and after a curt nod of goodbye to Marie Hayes went up to the ward and took a seat by a window.
In the street below an old man was whittling wooden dolls out of Pecan wood and hanging them on a wire rope to dance in the portly breeze like marionettes. A pair of young girls accompanied by their mother pointed and giggled at the dolls and squealed with delight when their mother purchased a doll each for them. Jack began to wonder what it would feel like to be a father and he found he wasn’t particularly fond of the notion. He hoped Marie was wrong about being pregnant, though he would sooner die than tell her how he felt.
An orderly came in the ward and presented Jack with a thick envelope with an official military heading. He knew what it was, but he opened it anyway and held it up to the window where he could better see the type informing him that he would depart for Brownsville in two days time. The envelope also contained a form from the doctor pronouncing him to be hail and hearty and a letter from the priest back in Brownsville wishing him good health and God’s speed on his return trip. He put the papers in his pocket and wished he had a stout drink of rum; maybe two stout drinks.
Having no rum and no way to acquire any, he sat in bed reading old newspapers until it got too dark to see. The papers were poorly written and filled with local stories and stale articles and the war news especially was progressively depressing. Though numerous in page, content, and editorial conjecture, the papers were next to impossible to read with any real degree of interest.
Marie wasn’t due to come on duty until eleven o’clock but Jack heard her walking along the hallway an hour before she started her shift and when she finally arrived on the ward he asked her where she’d been.
“Working. There’s a lot to do.”
“I see. Thought there for a minute you were avoiding me.”
“That’s silly.”
Some of the other men were looking at them pretending not to listen. “Meet me in the closet in an hour,” Jack whispered.
He told her about the documents and she began to cry and he took her in his arms and she pulled away and said, “What am I supposed to do?”
“You’ll follow me. When you can.”
“No.”
“But why?”
“I want to stay here until. . .”
“Until what?”
“Until I decide something about the baby.”
“What do you mean decide? If you are pregnant, then of course you’ll have the baby.” She was silent, her eyes unreadable in the anemic light inside the closet.
“Marie?”
“Look, I asked you once before not to rush me,” she finally said. “I need time to think, Jack.”
“How will you decide something like that?”
“I don’t know. But I will. Life isn’t that hard to manage when you don’t have many choices.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I was only thinking how small things can suddenly become so big. Life is supposed to be hard when you do bad things. But I don’t understand why something as natural as two people loving each other has to turn out bad. What can be so bad about love?”
“I won’t be in the Army forever, Marie.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll be in there until the war is over. Or until you’re killed. Either way I’ll be alone with this child in my womb.”
“How can you be so sure you’re pregnant?”
“A woman knows.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I like the way you say, what are you going to do?” she said sarcastically.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know. But it doesn’t change anything.”
“Marie, I. . .I don’t know what to say.”
“There is nothing to say. Goodbye, Jack. I love you.” She ran out of the closet before Jack could stop her.
Later when Jack was struggling to sleep, Marie approached Nurse Lisette and said she was ready to proceed.
“Are you absolutely sure?” the nurse asked. “Because there’s no going back once you’ve drank the treatment.” Marie took a deep breath and nodded.
“I’m ready,” she said. “The sooner the better.”
Chapter 19
It turned cooler over night and the next day it was pouring rain. Up in his room the rain was coming down outside and Jack was sitting by the window watching droplets of rain wet the window glass much like the tears wetting his cheeks.
He hadn’t slept well and the little breakfast he’d picked over made him sick to his stomach and he got the attention of the doctor who’d stopped by to check on the leg wound across the ward.
“Sour stomach,” the doctor said. “Must have eaten something bad.”
“Everything they serve here is bad, doc.”
“Just drink plenty of water, and stay away from alcohol.”
He was sick the rest of the day and when evening came he passed on the grits and gravy they were serving for supper.
Nurse Brewster came in around seven p.m. and stopped by Jack’s bed. “Heard you weren’t feeling well,” she said.
“I’ll survive, I guess.”
“I figure you to be smart enough not to fake an illness so you don’t have to go back to your regiment.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have travel orders, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s not uncommon for men to not want to go back to where the fighting is. You wouldn’t be the first to fake an illness.”
“So, you’ve faked an illness before, Nurse Brewster?”
“No, but I have seen plenty of other people do it.”
“Did these people seem to enjoy being fakes?”
“I suppose it’s better than going back into battle.”
“Well, the way I see it, I’d pick a much worse affliction to fake other than a stomach ache,” Jack said calmly.
“Such as?”
“Such as a terrible headache. Or maybe a particularly grievous hernia in my gonads. Do you think you could examine me for a hernia, Nurse Brewster?”
Jack figured she had two choices, leave the room and report him to Mrs. Styles, or change the subject and go about her assigned duties. It was no secret she had disliked him since the day nurse Marie Hayes had appeared on the scene.
“It’s just that I’ve seen men fake injuries, that’s all,” she said hurriedly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other patients to tend to.”
Nurse Brewster left the ward and Nurse Lisette came in right behind her. “What did you do to her?” she asked.
“Not a thing. We were discussing possible maladies a man might incur and she suddenly lost interest in the conversation.”
“Did you say something offensive?”
“No indeed. We used appropriate medical terms the whole time.”
“You’re foolish to get on her bad side. She’s tight with Mrs. Styles. And the hospital administrator is fond of her as well. Why does she dislike you so much?”
“She thinks I’m faking an illness so I won’t have to go back to Brownsville.”
“Are you?
“Would you like to take a peek in my chamber pot?”
She didn’t.
“Look, Corporal Saylor, I—”
“Jack.”
“Uh, yes, Jack. Look, I heard you have to leave for Brownsville tomorrow and I just wanted to say it’s been a pleasure being your nurse for a time.”
“Why, Nurse Lisette, you’re apt to make me weep.”
“You’ve already been weeping. I know about you and Nurse Hayes. She talks to me sometimes when we have night duty. Of course I keep the details of our conversations strictly confidential.”
“How much as she t
old you?”
“Everything. But as I said, her secrets are safe with me.” She grew very quiet and looked down at her hands. It was clear to Jack that she wanted to say more, but as the moments passed she appeared to be finished talking. She turned and moved toward the door stopping only briefly to wave goodbye.
Corporal Campbell stirred on the bed next to Jack’s and rose up on an elbow. “It’s not fair you going back before me,” he said attempting to smile. It was a grotesque effort, more a skewed grimace than anything resembling a smile.
“You’re the lucky one,” Jack said. “You get to stay behind with all these pretty nurses and all that delicious food they serve us. You didn’t by chance get the trots off of that bacon this morning did you?”
“Don’t know, I’ve had the trots since the day I got here. You make sure you say goodbye before you leave in the morning. You hear me?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Jack said smiling.
Chapter 20
Jack did say goodbye to Corporal Campbell before he left for the train yard, as well as Nurse Lisette and Mrs. Styles. Nurse Brewster made her self scarce barely coming within twenty feet of the ward and Marie Hayes was nowhere to be seen anywhere in the hospital.
Jack climbed up in the carriage that was to take him to catch his train with a heavy heart and barely contained tears. The driver dropped him off with his haversack and a small cloth bag containing a powder to help settle his stomach and wished him good luck. While he waited for the train to arrive Jack looked at the people gathered on the platform waving goodbye to someone they knew or loved or at the very least cared something about. He was about to lose himself in a newspaper he found on a bench outside the rail master’s office when he saw Marie Hayes walking toward him. She was wearing a pale blue dress and a shawl made of red macramé. She looked very small in the crowd and the redness of her eyes indicated that she had been crying for some time.
She said hello and he said hello and took her hand and led her away from the rail office. They walked side by side along the sidewalk to a street that led toward the middle of town where the shops and vendor stands were about to open for another business day.
“Your train,” she said softly. “You’ll miss your train.”
“They have whistles.”
“I don’t want you to go, Jack.”
“I know.”
“I did a bad thing last night.”
“You can’t do anything bad, Marie. You’re perfect.”
“I destroyed our child.”
“What!”
“I drank something. Nurse Lisette. . .she gave me a powder. . .”
“You killed the baby?”
“I didn’t know what else to do.” She began to sob and Jack led her to a shop overhang and pressed her hard against a brick wall.
“Why did you do that, Marie?” he seethed. “I was going to marry you. We were going to be a family.”
“I couldn’t be sure of that. You might be killed. You might not want me anymore if I was fat and bloated and ugly.”
“Oh, Marie I would never think of you that way. I love you, I want us to be together.”
“Even now? Now that I’ve murdered your child!”
Jack felt cold and small and strange, as if he was seeing Marie through someone else’s eyes. He released his grip on her shoulders and stepped out into the street where a man with a long wooden pole was turning on the kerosene street lamps. He glared at Marie trying to see her eyes in the semi-darkness. “I don’t know you anymore,” he said slowly. Then he turned and walked quickly back to the train platform.
Beyond the train tracks across a small brook was a white church with its spire enshrouded in mist. There was fog above the water in the brook and all along the grassy bed of the railroad tracks as far as the eye could see. Jack looked at the church and his heart ached with a pain he’d never felt before. It was an empty wrenching flood of emotion that took away his breath and made him want to scream out in desperation. He walked across the tracks and stopped by the bank of the stream looking up at the cathedral with eyes full of tears. He stood that way for some time his mind racing with convoluted thoughts that made no sense.
Then a train whistle sounded in the distance.
He returned to the platform and waited for the train to arrive. He checked the platform and the street several times for any sign of Marie, but all he saw were people waiting on the train and shop owners opening their shops for business. Crestfallen, he boarded the train and found a seat in one of the passenger cars.
There were several other men already on the train, some coming back from furlough, others, like Jack, returning to duty in the south of Texas. One civilian sat in a seat next to one of the soldiers cradling a thick brown valise on his lap. He was a short, dumpy, sad-faced man with red hair and an even redder face. He had the look of a lawyer about him, Jack thought. Or perhaps a banker or some business man who no doubt made his living off the Confederate government selling cheap boots and shoes to the local provost marshals. Confederate boots were notorious for falling apart at the least drizzle of rain.
As the train pulled out of the rail yard Jack looked out the window hoping to see Marie standing there waving but she was nowhere in sight. She’s gone, he said to himself. I’ve lost her. I’ve lost her and our baby. I’ve lost everything.
It seemed a very long ride through the town to the country side rising steadily upward from the gulf. It was still raining and Jack could smell the wet coats and damp hair of the men crowded around him. A soldier had taken a seat next to him and was leaning toward the window watching the rain spattering on the steamy glass. “It sure is foggy outside,” he said in a friendly manner. Jack looked out the window and thought of nothing except Marie Hayes and their ill-fated child.
An hour into the trip the train stopped at Elizabethtown to take on more passengers. Men filled the empty seats and then stood in the aisle with their haversacks and luggage. There were not enough seats in the forward passenger car so the men had to be herded rearward toward the stable compartment and the mail car. A few of the men complained about the lack of seating but someone in the rear of the car told them to shut up and keep moving. Jack looked around and saw a tall thin sergeant with a long pale scar across his forehead. He was taller than Jack and his face was very ruddy under the shadow of his hat.
“You need to get up, Corporal, and let me have your seat,” the sergeant said rather snootily.
“I found this seat first,” Jack said. “Maybe there’s room in the mail car.” The sergeant’s ruddy face tightened around small hazel eyes and he said,
“You have no right to that seat. I’m a sergeant, you’re not. Now please surrender that seat.” Jack was still feeling the effects of his earlier food poisoning and was in no mood for a row. He stood to his feet and tugged his haversack out into the aisle.
“Please, dear sergeant, take the seat. You are of a higher rank after all.”
The sergeant sat down and looked at Jack with an unwarranted amount of hostility. “You have the seat,” Jack said. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes, there is. You can get your smart mouth and ugly face far away from me.”
Shrugging, Jack shuffled down the crowded aisle dragging his belongings behind him. The train was packed and he knew there was no chance of a seat in the passenger car so he pressed on toward the mail car. He was standing in the aisle behind three other men when the train started and he watched the lights of the Elizabethtown station fade in the distance. It was still raining and soon the windows were fogged over by men’s breath and he could see nothing but a rectangle of streaked silver where the window used to be.
Trapped in the rear of the car, Jack wriggled and jostled until he was able to find a spot on the floor to sit on his luggage. Later, he fell asleep and slept until the train began to slow and he heard someone say they were pulling into the Laredo station.
It took twenty minutes for the passenger car to empty
sufficiently for Jack to disembark and another thirty minutes to hire a wagon to take him on to Brownsville.
It rained the entire trip and by the time they were above the bluffs overlooking Brownsville, Jack’s mood was as sodden as his hat and coat.
Chapter 21
It was still raining when Jack arrived back in Brownsville. Contrasted to Corpus Christi, the trees were all bare and splintered and the roads muddy and pocked with the boots of men and the hooves of horses and the wheels of wagons carrying supplies and ammunition and the bodies of the wounded and the dead and others stuck somewhere in between. Jack rode into San Ruisas passing the Juniper trees along the road and the bare fields once green but now brown and barren and the damp gray leaves piled up on the side of the road like miniature graves. Workers from the engineering corps were busy working on the road, tamping flat stones in the larger ruts and pouring piles of crushed rock into the furrows along the side of the road between the trees. There was a cool mist over the town that cut off the view of the bluffs above the river. It had been raining in the south of Texas for many days now and the Big River was running high and the lanes between the houses and villas on the southwest side of the town lay under a foot of water.
Jack got down from the wagon in front of the barracks and the driver handed down his haversack and Jack walked into the barracks feeling as if he was walking into a prison. The windows were all shut up to keep out the rain and Jack saw his captain sitting by the door looking at maps and drinking brandy.
“Hello, Corporal,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m good, sir. How is everything here?”
“It’s quiet right now because of the rain. Put down your gear and have a seat.”
Jack took a chair from the opposite wall and sat down facing the captain’s table.
“It’s been a terrible month,” the captain said. “Has your wound healed well?”
