Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  “You shouldn’t fret,” said George. “I couldn’t be any healthier than I am. And I’ve been promoted. Now you may call me Captain Whitman.” But Walt could not help fretting, even now that he knew his brother was alive and well. A great, fretting buzz had started up in his head, inspired by the pile of limbs, and the smell of blood in the air, and by ruined Fredericksburg, all broken chimneys and crumbling walls across the river. Walt stayed in George’s tent and, watching him sleep, felt a deep thrilling worry. He wandered around the camp, and as he passed by a fire in an enclosure of evergreen branches piled head high against the wind, he met a soldier. They sat down together by the fire, and the soldier told Walt hideous stories about the death of friends. “He put his head in my lap and whispered goodbye to his mama,” the soldier said. “And then he turned his eyes away from me and he was dead.” Walt put his face in the evergreen wall, smearing his beard with fresh sap, and thought how it smelled like Christmas.

  Ten days later, Walt still couldn’t leave. He stood by and watched as George moved out with the healthy troops on Christmas Day, then idled in the deserted campground, watching the interminable caravans of army wagons passing and passing into the distance. Near at hand, some stragglers crossed his line of sight—a large young man leading a mule that pulled a wagon, on top of which perched a fat man cursing in French. When all were gone, and the campground empty, Walt went up to the brick mansion and made himself useful, changing dressings, fetching for the nurses, and just sitting with the wounded boys, with the same excited worry on him as when he watched George sleep. Back in Brooklyn a deep and sinister melancholy had settled over him. For the past six months Walt had wandered the streets with a terrible feeling in him—Hell under his skull bones, death under his breast bones, and a feeling that he would like most of all to lie down under the river and sleep forever. But in the hospital that melancholy was gone, scared off, perhaps, by all the shocking misery around him, and it had been replaced by a different sort of sadness, one that was vital, not still; a feeling that did not diminish his soul, but thrilled it.

  When Walt finally left Falmouth, it was to watch over a cargo of wounded as they traveled through the early-morning darkness back to Aquia Creek, where they would be loaded on a steamer bound for Washington. With every jolt and shake of the train, a chorus of horrible groans wafted through the cars. Walt thought it would drive him insane. What saved him was the singing of a boy with a leg wound. The boy’s name was Hank Smith. He’d come all the way from divided Missouri, and said he had a gaggle of cousins fighting under General Beauregard. He sang “Oh, Susannah” over and over again, and no one told him to be quiet.

  All the worst cases went to a hospital called Armory Square, because it was closest to the boat landing at the foot of Sixth Street. Walt accompanied them, and kept up the service he’d begun at Fal-mouth—visiting, talking, reading, fetching, and helping.

  And he went to other hospitals. There were certainly enough of them to keep him busy. Their names were published in the papers like a list of churches—Finley, Campbell, Carver, Harewood, Mount Pleasant, Judiciary. And then there were the public buildings, also stuffed with wounded. Even the Patent Office held them; boys on cots set up on the marble floor of the Model Room. He brought horehound candy to an eighteen-year-old from Iowa, who lay with a missing arm and a sore throat in front of the glass case which held Ben Franklin’s printing press. Two boys from Brooklyn had cots in front of General Washington’s camp equipment. Walt read to them from Brooklyn papers his mother sent down, every now and then looking up at the General’s tents rolled neatly around their posts, his folded chairs and mess kit, his sword and cane, his washstand, his surveyor’s compass, and a few feet down in a special case all to itself, the Declaration of Independence. Other wounded boys lay in front of pieces of the Atlantic Cable, beside ingenious toys, in sight of rattraps, next to the razor of Captain Cook.

  Walt could not visit every place all in a day, though he tried at first. Eventually, he picked a few and stuck with those. But mostly he was at Armory Square, where Hank Smith was.

  “I had my daddy’s pistol with me,” said Hank Smith, sprawling in his slender iron-framed bed. “That’s why I got my leg still.” It wasn’t the first time Walt had been told how Hank had saved his own leg from the “chopping butchers” in the field hospital, but he didn’t mind hearing the story again. It was spring. The leg was still bad, though not as bad as it had been. At least that was the impression that Hank gave. He never complained about his wound. He’d come down with typhoid, too, a gift from the hospital. “I want my pistol back,” he said.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Walt always said that, but they both knew no one was going to give Hank back the pistol with which he’d threatened to blow out the brains of the surgeon who tried to take his leg. They had left him alone, then, and later another doctor had said there wasn’t any need to amputate.

  “Meanwhile, here’s an orange,” said Walt. He pulled the fruit out of his coat pocket and peeled it. Soldiers’ heads began to turn in their beds as the smell drifted over the ward. Some asked if he had any for them.

  “’Course he does,” said Hank. In fact, Walt had a coatful of them. He had bought them at Center Market, then walked through the misty, wet morning, over the brackish canal and across the filthy Mall. The lowing of cattle drifted towards him from the unfinished monument to General Washington as he walked along, wanting an orange for himself but afraid to eat one lest he be short when he got to the hospital. He had money for oranges, sweets, books, tobacco, and other good things from sponsors in Brooklyn and New York and elsewhere. And he had a little money for himself from a job, three hours a day as a copyist in the paymaster’s office—he’d given up, for the present, on seeking a fancier appointment, put away in a drawer the letters of introduction to powerful personages from Mr. Emerson. From his desk in the paymaster’s office, he had a spectacular view of Georgetown and the river, and the stones that were said to mark the watery graves of three Indian sisters. The sisters had cursed the spot: anyone who tried to cross there must drown. Walt would sit and stare at the rocks, imagining himself shedding his shirt and shoes by the riverside, trying to swim across. He imagined drowning, too, the great weight of water pressing down on him. (When he was a child, he’d nearly drowned in the sea.) Inevitably, his reverie was broken by the clump-clump of one-legged soldiers on their crutches, coming up the stairs to the office located, perversely, on the fourth floor.

  After he’d distributed the oranges, Walt wrote letters on behalf of various boys until his hand ached. Dear Sister, he wrote for Hank, I have been brave but wicked. Pray for me.

  * * *

  Armory Square was under the command of a brilliant drunk named Canning Woodhull. Over whiskey, he explained to Walt his radical policies, which included washing hands and instruments, throwing out used sponges, and swabbing everything in sight with bitter-smelling Labarraque’s solution. He had an absolute lack of faith in laudable pus.

  “Nothing laudable about it,” he said. “White or green, pus is pus, and either way it’s bad for the boys. There are creatures in the wounds—elements of evil. They are the emissaries of Hell, sent earthward to increase our suffering, to increase death and increase grief. You can’t see them except by their actions.” The two men knocked glasses and drank, and Walt made a face because the whiskey was medicinal, laced with quinine. It did not seem to bother Woodhull.

  “I have the information from my wife,” Woodhull said, “who has great and secret knowledge. She talks to spirits. Much of what she hears is nonsense—do not tell her I said so. But this bit about the creatures in the pus—that’s true.”

  Maybe it was. Woodhull’s hospital got the worst cases and kept them alive better than any other hospital in the city, even ones that got casualties only half as severe. The doctor stayed in charge despite a reputation as a wastrel and a drunk and a nascent lunatic. A year earlier he had been removed by a coalition of his colleagues, only to be reins
tated by Dr. Letterman, the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, who had been personally impressed by many visits to Armory Square. “They say General Grant is a drunk, too,” Letterman said in response to the charges against Dr. Woodhull.

  “The creatures are vulnerable to prayer and bromine, and whiskey and Labarraque’s. Lucky for us.” Woodhull downed another glass. “Ah, sir—there is the matter of the nurses. Some of them are complaining. Just last Tuesday I was in Ward E with the redoubtable Mrs. Hawley. We saw you come in at the end of the aisle and she said, ‘Here comes that odious Walt Whitman to talk evil and unbelief to my boys. I think I would rather see the evil one himself—at least if he had horns and hoofs—in my ward. I shall get him out as soon as possible!’ And she rushed off to do just that. And you know how she failed to eject you, how she always fails to eject you.” He poured again.

  “Shall I stop coming, then?”

  “Heavens no. As long as old Hawley is complaining, I’ll know you’re doing good. God bless her pointy little head.”

  Two surgeons came into Woodhull’s makeshift office, a corner of Ward F sectioned off by three regimental flags.

  “Assistant Surgeon Walker is determined to kill Captain Carter,” said Dr. Bliss, a dour black-eyed man from Baltimore. “She has given him opium for his diarrhea, and, very foolishly, in my opinion, withheld ipecac and calomel.” Dr. Mary Walker stood next to him, looking calm, her arms folded across her chest. Her blue uniform was immaculate, a studied contrast to Woodhull’s stained and threadbare greatcoat, which he wore in winter and summer alike.

  “Dr. Walker is doing as I have asked her,” said Woodhull. “Ipecac and calomel are to be withheld in all cases of flux and diarrhea.”

  “For God’s sake, why?” asked Dr. Bliss, his face reddening. He was new in Armory Square. Earlier that same day Woodhull had castigated him for not cleaning a suppurating chest wound.

  “Because it is for the best,” said Woodhull. “Because if you do it that way, a boy will not die. Because if you do it that way, some mother’s heart will not be broken.”

  Dr. Bliss turned redder, then paled, as if his rage had broken and ebbed. He scowled at Dr. Walker, turned sharply on his heel, and left. Dr. Walker sat down.

  “Buffoon,” she said. Woodhull poured whiskey for her, handed her the glass, then took a rag and began to knock the lint from her second lieutenant’s shoulder straps. It was an open secret in the hospital that they were married in all but name.

  “Dr. Walker,” said Woodhull, “why don’t you tell Mr. Whitman about your recent arrest?”

  The woman sipped her whiskey and told how she’d been arrested outside of her boardinghouse for masquerading as a man. Walt only half listened to her talk. He was thinking about diarrhea. It was just about the worst thing, he had decided. He’d seen it kill more boys than all the minié balls and shrapnel, and typhoid and pneumonia, than all the other afflictions combined. He’d written to his mother: War is nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory. Those who like wars ought to be made to fight in them. And sometimes, up to his neck in sickness and death, he did believe that the war was an insufferable evil, but other times it seemed to be gloriously necessary, and all the blood and carnage and misery a terrible new beginning that was somehow a relief to him.

  “I did my best to resist them,” said Dr. Walker, “and I shouted out, ‘Congress has bestowed on me the right to wear trousers!’” She held out her cup for more whiskey, and shook her head sadly at Walt. “But it was to no avail.”

  In the summer, Walt saw the President almost every day. He lived on the route Mr. Lincoln took to and from his summer residence north of the city, and walking down the street, soon after leaving his rooms in the morning, he’d hear the approach of the party. Always Walt stopped and waited for them to pass. Mr. Lincoln dressed in plain black and rode a gray horse. He was surrounded by twenty-five or thirty cavalry with their sabers drawn and held up over their shoulders. They got so they would exchange bows, he and the President, Walt tipping his broad, floppy gray felt hat, Lincoln tipping his high stiff black one, and bending a little in the saddle. And every time they did this Walt had the same thought: A sad man.

  With the coming of the hot weather Dr. Woodhull redoubled his efforts to eradicate noxious effluvia. He ordered the windows thrown open, and burned eucalyptus leaves in small bronze censers set in the four corners of each ward. The eucalyptus, combined with the omnipresent acrid reek of Labarraque’s solution, gave some of the boys aching heads, for which Dr. Woodhull prescribed whiskey.

  “I want a bird,” Hank Smith said one day in July. Walt had brought several bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup, mixed them with ice and water, and delivered the delicious concoctions to the boys, along with the news from Gettysburg. Hank was uninspired by Meade’s victory. He was in a bad mood.

  “I’ve been here forever,” he said. “And I am going to be here forever.” He had been fighting a bad fever for a week. “Nonsense,” Walt said, and helped him change out of his soaked shirt, then wiped him down with a cool wet towel. The shirt he took to the window, where he wrung out the sweat, watching it fall and dapple the bare ground. He laid the shirt to dry on the sill, and considered his damp, salty hands. In the distance Walt could see the Capitol, magnificent even under scaffolding.

  “I want a bird,” Hank said again. “When I was small, my sister got me a bird. I called it after her—Olivia. Would you help me get one?” Walt left the window and sat on a stool by the bed. The sun lit up the hair on Hank’s chest, and called to Walt’s mind shining fields of wheat.

  “Did you read my book?” Walt asked him, because he’d finally given Hank a copy, inscribed to my dear dear dear dear boy. Walt had had a dream, a happy one at last. Hank, transformed by Walt’s words, had leaped out of bed, wound gone, typhoid gone, had shaken Walt by his shoulders, and had shouted “Camerado!” so loud the Capitol dome rang like a bell, and all the boys all over the country had put down their guns and embraced each other in celebration of that beautiful word.

  “I fingered it a little. But a bird, wouldn’t that be fine?”

  “I could get you a bird,” Walt said after a moment. “Though I don’t know where from.”

  “I know where,” said Hank, as Walt helped him into a new shirt. With a jerk of his head Hank indicated the window. “There’s plenty of birds out in the yard. You just get a rock and some string.”

  Walt came back the next day with rock and string, and they set a trap of breadcrumbs on the windowsill. Crouching beneath the window, Walt grabbed at whatever came for the crumbs. He missed two jays and a blackbird, but caught a beautiful cardinal by its leg. It chirped frantically and pecked at his hand. The fluttering of its wings against his wrists made him think of the odd buzz that still thrilled his soul when he was on the wards. He brought the bird to Hank, who tied the string to its leg, and the rock to the string, then set the rock down by his bed. The cardinal tried to fly for the window, but only stuck in midair, its desperate wings striking up a small breeze that Walt, kneeling near it, could feel against his face. Hank clapped and laughed.

  Hank called the bird Olivia, though Walt pointed out that it was not a female bird. The female of the species was dun and dull, he said, but Hank seemed not to hear. Olivia became the ward’s pet. Other boys would insist on having him near their beds. It did not take the bird long to become domesticated. Soon he was eating from Hank’s hand, and sleeping at night beneath his cot. They kept him secret from the nurses and doctors, until one morning Hank was careless and fell asleep with him out in the middle of the aisle while Dr. Woodhull was making his rounds. Walt had just walked on the ward, his arms full of candy and fruit and novels.

  “Who let this dirty bird into my hospital?” Woodhull asked. He very swiftly bent down and picked up the stone, then tossed it out the window. Olivia trailed helplessly behind it. Walt dropped his packages and rushed outside, where he found the bird in the dirt, struggling with a broken wing. He put
him in his shirt and took him back to his room, where he died three days later, murdered by the landlady’s cat. Walt told Hank that Olivia had flown away. “A person can’t have anything,” Hank said. He called Olivia a bad bird, and growled for a week about his faithlessness.

  * * *

  At Christmas, Mrs. Hawley and her cronies trimmed the wards, hanging evergreen wreaths on every pillar, and stringing garlands across the hall. At the foot of every bed, they hung a tiny stocking, hand-knitted by Washington society ladies. Walt went around stuffing them with walnuts and lemons and licorice.

  Hank’s leg got better and worse, better and worse. Walt cornered Dr. Woodhull and said he had a bad feeling about Hank’s health. Woodhull insisted he was going to be fine; Walt’s fretting was pointless.

  Hank’s fevers waxed and waned, too. One night, Walt came in from a blustery snowstorm, his beard full of snow. Hank insisted on pressing his face into it, saying it made him feel so much better than any medicine had, except maybe paregoric, which he found delicious, and which made him feel he was flying in his bed.

  Walt read to him from the New Testament, all the portions having to do with the first Christmas. “Are you a religious man?” Hank asked him.

  “Probably not, my dear, in the way that you mean.” Though he did make a point of visiting the Armory Square chapel, whenever he was there. It was a little building, with a quaint, onion-shaped steeple. Walt would sit in the back and listen to the services for boys whom he’d been seeing almost every day. He wrote their names down in a small leather-bound notebook that he kept in one of his pockets. By Christmas, he had pages and pages of them. Sometimes at night he would sit in his room and read the names softly aloud by the light of a single candle.