Robin Oliveira Read online

  The sound of the saw had been akin to nothing in Mary’s experience. Not the cries of mothers in labor, nor the cries of mothers bereft. Clutching not one but three thighs between her cheek and arm last night, she had closed her eyes and tried to close her ears, but she had discovered that there was no barrier between a person and sound. No way to shut ears as you can shut eyes. The other two attempts to sever legs had been a disaster. In the first, the chloroform had worn off mid-surgery. The boy had flailed, ended up on the floor. Mary’s hold on his artery gone, he had watched himself die, uncomprehending and stuporous. The second—she would not think of the second. She could not. A whole success, easier than the two others. Bone cut. Ties holding. Skin flapped. They’d been congratulating one another, she and Dr. Stipp. And then they had turned, only to discover that the boy was dead. Dead, Mary thought now, because of an excess of chloroform, given in an effort to overcome what had happened before. Dr. Stipp had been sawing away on a corpse and neither of them had noticed.

  Stipp emerged now from the dining room, and a look of intimacy, of conjugal remembrance, passed between them. Their shared failure—two deaths coming upon the heels of their first success—conferred on them the self-conscious shame of failed lovers. It was difficult to look one another in the eye, but they did, reviving that moment when they’d first realized that the boy was dead.

  “What do we do about the legs?” Mary asked. The hallway walls were cool; later in the day the heat would render the lathe and plaster unbearable.

  Stipp looked down at his own legs. What delicate, sturdy things they were, he thought, wholly irreplaceable. He wondered what it would be like to awake and find one gone.

  “I thought to carry them out,” Mary continued, her voice wavering.

  “But I didn’t know where to take them. The trash heap seems wrong. I don’t want anyone else to see them. Or to find them.” And if by chance someone did stumble on the legs, at least that unlucky soul would be able to shut his eyes, she thought. At least he would have that, while over and over, she was hearing the saw doing its work, scraping and grating. She thought of Thomas and Christian. Where were they? Was someone thinking of the best way to dispose of their limbs? She was proud of how she had acted during the surgeries. But if it had been Thomas or her brother on the table, could she have been so detached?

  “Who were those boys? I don’t even know their names. I don’t even know where they came from. How will I tell their mothers? What will we do with the legs?”

  “I haven’t any idea,” Stipp said.

  “Do we bury them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who should I tell to come get them?”

  “I don’t know, damn it.” Stipp slammed his hand against the wall. He had not wanted Mary by his side, and then he couldn’t have asked for anyone better. She had stayed calm. The only requisite that really mattered, but she had given more: intelligence and charity. When that boy had died, flailing, disoriented, shouting, reliving the battle, the blood arcing everywhere, Mary had thought to kneel by the boy’s side and to sing. To sing! The boy had died to the unsteady voice of a tone-deaf, blood-covered angel. And the next one? Stipp couldn’t even think of how long that boy had been dead. A colossal error on his part. What was basic? Breathing. The boy had done none of that for who knew how long. Eight hours together in a room, and he and Mary had accomplished two terrible mistakes and only one good outcome. The army had thought of nothing. They needed coffins, a dead house, a way to let headquarters know who had died and who had not died. But none of this was in place. How do you forget coffins? How do you forget to supply tourniquets? How do you forget that people might die?

  “I’ll tell you again. Go home, Mary Sutter. You don’t need to be here. You don’t need to witness any of this.”

  Mary could go home. She could go home and watch Jenny have Thomas’s baby. Perhaps even she, and not Amelia, would deliver the child. She could go home and midwife Jenny through what was certain to be a difficult labor. She would hand Thomas his progeny, the beginning of a Fall-Sutter line of which she would have no part but midwife. Her brother would be home, too, if he had survived the battle. The Sutters and the Falls would be rid of the war, having acquitted themselves with bravery. No one, not even Mr. Lincoln, could ask anything more of them. Albany would think well of her, too. The woman who had gone to war. And she would go on delivering babies. She would apply to medical schools and wait for their letters of rejection. Her life would be certain. Safe. And with time, the noise of the saw might diminish, and she would no longer hear boys crying for water, for their mothers, for release.

  “I can’t go home,” Mary said.

  Stipp seized her by the shoulders. She smelled of last night, their joined efforts. “Why are you here? Tell me.”

  Mary’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

  “Oh sweet Jesus,” Stipp said. “I can’t scare you off. I can’t fight you off. I can’t even reason you off. What the hell is the matter with you? What do you want with being in a place like this?”

  Mary pulled away. Her skirts had stiffened with the splatters and stains of the blood of three men. The saw sang in her head. She hated Stipp now. Hated his brutal persistence, his fumbling, his ignorance, his lack of preparation. Was this what medicine was? Barbarity? By comparison, even at its worst, childbirth was artful. Even when women bled or seized, there remained at least the elegance of hope. The flickering promise of life.

  Stipp watched her, read her fury and hate, and wanted to slap her. What did she want from him? There wasn’t a surgeon in all the army who could have done better; they were all a bunch of sorry fools, every one of them, given manuals and instruments and nothing else. If the army had been smart, they would have sent for surgeons from England, all those doctors from the Crimean War who had already treated these injuries and would have known what to do. But that would have meant that someone would have had to have foreseen this night, have known that politics would shatter into massacre. My God. What was going to happen now?

  “How long will this go on?” Mary asked, whispering.

  Stipp stepped backward, irritated suddenly, with Mary and the labyrinthine turns of her curious mind.

  “They’re done? This is the last of it? We’re two countries now?” She turned, lifting a bloody hand in the direction of the dining-room door and the legs behind them, then began to twist her apron in her hands, as if to wash them of men’s foolhardiness. “No one will allow this to happen again. No one wants this.”

  Stipp gaped at her. “What do you want me to say? That men are reasonable?”

  A rectangular patch of early sun trembled several feet away, thrown onto the floor from the unseen panes of a high window hidden around a turn in the hallway. Mary yearned to hear the wail of a newborn, a sound as unlike the scrape of the saw as a symphony was from cannon fire. Women labored until there was life. If that wasn’t reason, then what was? But women waged war, too, and it took little between women to make one another miserable; sisterhood sacrificed when desire scalded the veins. Jenny’s belly would be starting to show now. But it was not just that, Mary told herself. Neither was it a crime to be uncertain, to be fearful of what she had wrought. She had left the world of women, and now all she had was tomorrow, and men, and their unreason.

  Stipp was staring at her as if she had lost her mind, as if she were the one who was unreasonable.

  “Well, what is it that you want?” Mary said. “Why are you always asking me? Are we so different?”

  Stipp rocked back on his heels, as if she had slapped him. “You’re deranged.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But no less than you.”

  Afterwards, Stipp would acknowledge that the urge had been irresistible, but he entertained, in that moment, the lie that what he did next was a choice. He reached out his hand and caressed the sharp angle of Mary Sutter’s chin. Mary closed her eyes and let him. He was not particularly gentle, not being a particu
larly gentle man, but his fingers traveled from her chin, around the edges of her lips, across the prominent expanse of her cheekbones to her temple and then, feather light, into her matted hair. When his hand left her—she couldn’t be quite sure when, for his fingers lingered in her curls—she cried out and opened her eyes.

  But he had not left her, as she had not left him.

  “We are fools, you and I,” Stipp said. He felt enormously fatigued, but he suspected it was not the surgeries that had exhausted him. “Go. I will take care of the legs.”

  “I am not afraid,” Mary said.

  Stipp smiled. Then he broke into a chuckle and turned to the dining room, wondering how Mary Sutter could believe that anyone would ever think that she would ever be afraid of anything.

  Chapter Nineteen

  On Tuesday, July the twenty-third, two days after the battle, Irvin McDowell, his riding boots covered with mud, his collar sticky with sweat, verified to the president that the Rebels were indeed entrenched at Manassas Junction and there inexplicably remained, even though in the hours after the battle he had telegraphed that twenty thousand Confederates were fast behind him. But the Rebels had not pursued them. Extraordinary, that decision. Inexplicable, though attributable, perhaps, to the rain that fell the day after the battle. Meteorological mercy. An entire divided nation was learning the vagaries of combat.

  Lincoln, however, was shaking his head, unable to comprehend a victorious army that did not follow up its victory. This morning he had ridden out to Fort Corcoran on the Arlington Heights with William Henry Seward, the secretary of state. On their way they encountered straggling soldiers still separated from their units, ambulances filled with the groaning wounded jouncing over still-wet roads, and knots of alarmed citizenry who, astonished to see the president crossing the drained Aqueduct Bridge into enemy territory, followed his retreating form with shouts of worry. Lincoln acknowledged these queries, but did not speak except to the wounded, his expression growing more grave as their number increased—ten by the time they had reached the timbered palisade of Fort Corcoran and the New York 69th, who vowed to reenlist—so that when McDowell had suggested that they repair to his headquarters a mere half mile away, far from the excitement of the milling troops, Lincoln had acquiesced, unable to shake from his mind the vision of the last of the men, sprawled in the bed of a farm wagon, his face the color of chalk, his hands encircling his ruined leg, which in the sun-blasted heat had grown blistered and flyblown.

  Lincoln, McDowell, and Seward were seated in one of the parlors at Arlington House, the plantation home that Robert E. Lee’s family had evacuated just after Virginia had seceded. McDowell had been careful to explain to the president as they rode through the now trammeled gardens that he lived in a tent behind the great house out of respect for Lee’s property, though the Union army had gladly seized the house, for it occupied a good portion of the land across the river from the capital and commanded a view not only of the entire heights but also of the citadel of Washington glinting across the brown moat of the Potomac.

  Lincoln, ill at ease in a spindled armchair of red velvet, surveyed the elegant paintings that had belonged to his preferred but traitorous general, and sighed. Would that Lee and not McDowell were seated in the twin armchair opposite; then perhaps they would be about to discuss a victory and not a humiliating defeat. No matter that Robert E. Lee hadn’t commanded the troops that had decimated the Federal army at Bull Run, something told Lincoln that perhaps, had Lee acquiesced to Scott’s request to take command of the Union troops, they might even now be planning the swift reannexation of a chastened South, eager to return after its resounding defeat. But no, only this sad little meeting in Lee’s former home.

  Between the three men, a delft china teapot steamed on a marble table, a swirling tendril of white vapor rising from the graceful arc of spout; there was even sugar, and milk, and delicate teacups arranged with care by one of McDowell’s aides. The wounded soldier’s face floated before Lincoln. The edges of the man’s wound had been blue. He’d been blue and white, like the teapot. Lincoln shook his head. He was exhausted. Since the night of the twenty-first, he had slept only a few hours, having spent the intervening hours designing a new war strategy after hearing witnesses describe the pell-mell retreat. He had it in his coat pocket now.

  Memoranda of Military Policy Suggested by the Bull Run Defeat

  July 23, 1861.

  1. Let the plan for making the Blockade effective be pushed forward with all possible despatch.

  2. Let the volunteer forces at Fort-Monroe & vicinity—under Genl. Butler—be constantly drilled, disciplined, and instructed without more for the present.

  3. Let Baltimore be held, as now, with a gentle, but firm, and certain hand.

  4. Let the force now under Patterson, or Banks, be strengthened, and made secure in its position.

  5. Let the forces in Western Virginia act, till further orders, according to instructions, or orders from Gen. McClellan.

  6. Gen. Fremont must push forward his organization, and operations in the West as rapidly as possible, giving rather special attention to Missouri.

  7. Let the forces late before Manassas, except the three months’ men, be reorganized as rapidly as possible, in their camps here and about Arlington.

  8. Let the three months’ forces, who decline to enter the longer service, be discharged as rapidly as circumstances will permit.

  9. Let the new volunteer forces be brought forward as fast as possible; and especially into the camps on the two sides of the river here.

  Lincoln’s head swam with still more ideas, so many that he longed for a pen and paper, but he had no real idea what he was doing. He had relied, he thought now, too heavily on the men who were supposed to know how to conduct wars. He looked in shock at McDowell, in whom he had placed such trust, and recalled the man’s dispatch of yesterday: “I have reached Arlington after turning stragglers and parties of regiments upon this place and Alexandria and am trying to get matters a little settled over here.”

  Get matters a little settled? How did you win a war by getting matters a little settled?

  McDowell, too, had not slept in the previous week more than four hours a night, if that, and his trembling hand was barely able to guide the delicate teacup safely back to its saucer. Only the bellicose Seward, uncharacteristically silent, impatiently slurping his tea as he waited for one of the two to speak, had slept well the previous night, aided by two glasses of fine brandy at Willard’s.

  When Lincoln finally arched an eyebrow, McDowell, his voice hoarse from days of exhorting the troops, began.

  “If I may respectfully say, sir, I was forced to attack before the troops were ready.”

  Seward’s face began to bloom purple, and McDowell stopped short of saying, Including you, Mr. President. He was ragged with exhaustion. It was true that he’d been forced, though he disliked excuses, disliked even more having to point out that he’d been right. Three months’ men. What would it have been to have issued an order for them to stay on another month? Nothing, evidenced this morning by the 69th’s ready offer to reenlist. It had been absurd to expect that a raw army of volunteers could not only fell a forest to build a ring of forts but also become an army capable of winning an easy victory. Still, excuses were shameful. Unmilitary. Yet even as he thought this, out came another torrent, his own retreat from accountability, even in the face of Lincoln’s tolerant impassivity.

  “They had fresh troops, sir. Reinforcements. While mine were thirsty, ill-supplied, exhausted.”

  Lincoln had already heard that McDowell had known that the Confederates were able to ferry in fresh troops via the infamous trains he had warned him about. Commanding an army was like managing recalcitrant children. Or his wife, whose recent expenditure for four chandeliers defied understanding. What had she said in defense? But we must be able to see, Father. Now Lincoln wanted to say, George McClellan knows the value of trains. But he held his tongue, as he had with his wife; l
osing his temper wouldn’t help a thing.

  “I maintain that the arrival of the train cars during the night preceding the battle was not certain evidence of the arrival of Johnston’s forces or of their ability to refresh their army. That information was mere rumor, and could have easily been passed our way by Confederate spies. I wanted to turn their position and force them from the Warrenton Turnpike. I wanted to destroy that railroad, as you wanted me to. Before their troops were reinforced, we were winning. We were.” McDowell fell silent, and his left hand floated into the air of its own accord, as if its peripatetic wanderings could illustrate the frustrating nature of the panicky army of which he was in charge.

  “Nonsense.” Seward pushed his drained teacup into the center of the table in a fit of impatience. “General Scott says it was you who failed. You alone. You ought to take the blame for this.”

  The aide stationed outside the door whipped his head around to look in and McDowell shot him an icy glance before holding himself rigid before the pugnacious Seward. They had pushed him against his better judgment.

  “I was ordered to attack, Mr. Seward. So I attacked. I’ve explained my impediments. Three months was hardly time enough to turn farmers into soldiers. Why some men fight when others do not—”

  “Is a matter of discipline.”

  “With respect, Mr. Seward, you are not a military man. Neither were you there.”

  “But you were there, and therefore hold the responsibility for the failure.”

  In the heavy boil of midday, a frosty silence descended. McDowell touched his teacup, marveling at its fragility.

  “What is it you wish me to do now?” he asked, addressing Lincoln alone. Seward wasn’t even the secretary of war. Why had he accompanied the president and not Cameron?

  Lincoln’s chair scraped against the oak plank floors as he rose to his full height, and as he did, his coat swept the table and a teacup tumbled slowly to the floor, the blue-and-white flowers blurring as it spun, irretrievable, even by the fumbling McDowell, who reached in vain for the falling china and then knelt to pick up the two imperfect halves, holding them in his hands for a moment before handing them over to Lincoln.