Robin Oliveira Read online

  Lincoln examined the broken pieces in his hands, the soldier’s white face and blue lips and devastated leg and shattered cries sharpening in his memory, all the beautiful hope of the last three months retreating.

  Lincoln set the pieces on the table. “I think we ought to repair this, don’t you?”

  As Lincoln turned his horse in the muddy grounds of the plantation and set off for Washington shimmering across the river, McDowell did not hear the president remark to Seward that he was very glad that he had already sent for George McClellan. Nor did McDowell hear that his title as the commander of the Army of Northeastern Virginia would be subordinate to the newly promoted Major General McClellan, who would be named commander of the Division of the Potomac by Lincoln himself. Nor did he know that later, in the fall, he would have to defend himself before the halved Congress, who, pressed by a restive public and enraged by the defeat, would investigate his command at Bull Run, intent on finding a national scapegoat.

  McDowell gathered the pieces of the teacup and set out across the central hall in search of glue, while in Wheeling, Virginia, a gleeful George McClellan was writing a note to his wife before he boarded a train for Washington.

  In it, he was bragging that his star was ascending, that a nation waited on him, that he was the savior of the world.

  Chapter Twenty

  “We can’t go home to Amelia and say we didn’t try. She’ll be furious.”

  Thomas was holding Amelia’s letter in his hand. That morning, July the twenty-eighth, the 25th Regiment had marched from Fort Albany back into Washington over the Long Bridge, retracing the steps of their invasion two months before. But no amount of remembering that they had been ordered to stay behind could shield the members of the regiment from the shame that engulfed them when the army began to trickle back into the Union camps that lined the Virginia banks of the Potomac. Thomas and Christian felt the defeat double on their shoulders. They had come to war and done nothing and now it was time to go home. After months living outside, the city seemed strange and foreign, and even the dirty waters of Tiber Creek appeared exotic. The Capitol grounds teemed with the three months’ men, all waiting to board a train for home. The crush and noise were tremendous. Seventy-five thousand men were all trying to get out of Washington at the same time as the hundred thousand more coming to replace them were trying to get in. Lincoln had put out the call immediately after the defeat, but this time he had specified that any man who signed on would sign on for three years. No more volunteer army. If McDowell had been right about anything, it was that a volunteer army was never going to beat anyone. That the victorious Rebel army was a volunteer army no one wanted to contemplate.

  The march back had been hard on Christian. He was lying on the ground at Thomas’s feet, using his haversack as a pillow. Since standing guard in the rain with his carbine trained on the Columbia Turnpike the day of the retreat, Christian had been having trouble breathing, and though he wanted to get up now, he couldn’t. The world had begun to spin that last bit of the march, but it had slowed down again. The uncompleted Capitol dome seemed to look down on him benevolently. Oh, good and faithful soldier. It was almost pleasant. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine himself already at home between clean sheets, his mother bringing him tea.

  Thomas kneeled beside his brother-in-law. Even in the swirl of shout and fury, he thought he could hear a tight whistle in Christian’s chest.

  “Have you seen Blevens?” Thomas asked, and craned his neck, looking for the physician, not remembering if he’d seen the man since he’d gone off to the battle, not remembering hearing if he’d returned.

  Christian shook his head. He had hunted for the doctor when he started to feel bad, but he hadn’t been able to find him.

  “If you hurry, maybe you can find Mary before our train leaves,” Christian said.

  They had already asked directions to Georgetown, had plotted to go together to persuade Mary to come home with them, but that was before the march, before Christian had had such a hard time catching his breath.

  Allegiance to Amelia pulled Thomas both ways. He didn’t know what to do. He could either return without Mary and keep Christian company, or do as Amelia wished and persuade Mary to return but leave Christian to fend for himself. Three months’ proximity had knitted the two men as close as real brothers, and he didn’t like the looks of Christian. He thought maybe Christian might need a doctor, but it was nearly impossible to find anyone, and it seemed that no one knew where Blevens was. All the regiments were mixed together, milling around on the Capitol grounds. It would take days to sort everyone out and get them on a train. He had time, he thought, to find Mary and get her back here before the 25th left.

  Just then, Jake Miles sauntered by, a bottle of whiskey tucked under his arm.

  Thomas snagged him by the shoulder. “You think you can put off your toot for a while and come sit here with Christian? He doesn’t feel all that good.”

  Jake plunked down on a square patch of dust next to Christian. “You bet.”

  Never had either of them seen him so obliging.

  Thomas knelt beside Christian. “If I miss the train, I’ll get the next one. Tell Jenny I’ll be home soon.”

  Christian punched Thomas’s shoulder. “Don’t make a liar out of me.”

  Thomas hoisted his haversack. “Take care of him,” he said to Jake. Of all the people to leave Thomas with, Jake was the worst, but what choice did he have? After a last glance at Christian, he strode through the crowd in search of transportation to Georgetown.

  Christian shut his eyes. It was getting harder to breathe, harder even than on the march. He wished he were home. He could almost see home, could almost see Amelia’s face. It would have been nice to have seen Mary. But he would, soon. And Bonnie, too. Christian was a little ashamed of coveting Jake’s wife, but he decided there wasn’t really any harm in it. He would never let on. Not to anyone. Especially not Bonnie. And poor Jake, he’d lost that baby, too. Jake wasn’t really so bad. Quiet, maybe, and a little rough, but he was here. They’d slept beside one another for two months, and that was a kind of brotherhood, wasn’t it?

  “Hey, you need a little something?” Jake asked, uncorking the bottle he’d bought down on the Tiber Creek. It was moonshine, not real whiskey, but something to make the heat tolerable.

  The liquor bit and choked, but after a few swigs, Christian found that he didn’t have to work so hard at breathing. He closed his eyes and began to drift. This was better. Yes, this was so much better. Jake kept the whiskey coming, and when the call came to board the train three hours later, he helped Christian rise and limp to the depot, where he dosed him with another good swallow before tucking him into a corner of a train car to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Across town, at the Union Hotel, the steward, Mr. Mack, said, “You have someone asking.”

  Mary was in a room on the second floor, giving a spit bath to a soldier with a broken arm.

  “Who is it?”

  “He wouldn’t say.” Mr. Mack turned on his heel to leave and said, “I know you made a copy of the supply closet key.” Embarrassment did not sit well on the steward’s frame. Since fleeing the surgery that first night, Mr. Mack had become even more parsimonious and officious.

  At the bed next to Mary, a woman named Fannie Warren was changing the linens. In the last five days, four women—good, strong women—had shown up, papers in hand, sent by Dorothea Dix: Mary Abbot, Fannie Warren, Helen Steveson, Monique Philipateaux—all married, all serious, all over the age of thirty. Miss Dix’s darlings, but they were more help than Mary had had since she’d arrived. Still, she was exhausted. Sleep came in two-hour naps, stolen whenever someone forced her to lie down.

  Someone asking. Most likely it was the milkman. Mary had written down a daily order, had explained to the stout farmer that they would always need twenty gallons of milk, but he liked to double-check, fearful of not being paid, a suspicion Mary did not begrudge him, since th
e only cheques she had written were promissory notes.

  Downstairs, in the dim lobby, a bony figure was leaning up against the reception desk, the last trace, along with the brass room numbers, of the old hotel. Mary thought the figure might be another soldier, sick and weak and in search of a bed. She was suddenly furious with Mr. Mack, for he could have easily found space for him somewhere without having called her away from her work. The man was as ungenerous as a goat.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  “Mary.”

  Why is it that voices break hearts?

  “Thomas,” she said, as he stepped into the light, his name an exhalation, as if she had been expecting him. Thomas Fall. Thomas, I did not dream of you. I never wanted you. We never danced in a palace. He was too thin, and his face had lost all vestige of youth, but here he was, and relief surged through her. He was alive, safe, well.

  Mary slipped into his arms and laid her head on his chest, marking the surprise of tenderness, which had been the first, and most mourned, casualty of war.

  She could hear Thomas’s heart, could feel the river of blood surging inside him. Mary knew things now about men that she hadn’t known before: how in illness and infirmity their vulnerability shocked them; how they needed reassurance, even more than did women in labor; how they feared their mortality.

  To Thomas, Mary looked shockingly undone, though her famously wild hair was safely tethered in a tight bun. Her cheeks were thin, as if she too had not been eating, just like the entire Union army had not, but she carried herself with that same odd grace that he had always admired. He saw something in her, too, of Jenny, a kind of hidden beauty, revealed in the way she tilted her head, and in the rush of concern as she pulled now from his embrace and said, suddenly fearful, “But why have you come? Is Christian all right?”

  “Christian wanted to come, but—”

  “He’s not wounded?” Mary said, her hand flying to her throat.

  “No. It’s just a little fever.” It was possible that Christian was ill with more than just a little fever, but Thomas didn’t want to upset Mary, though he was ashamed to be holding back information. But he was almost certain that Christian would be all right. All Christian had to do was get home to Amelia and everything would be fine. “He is back at the depot, waiting for a train home. The 25th is departing.”

  “Is Dr. Blevens with him?”

  “Blevens disappeared. He never came back. We don’t know if—”

  “You don’t know where Blevens is?” Mary asked. “He wasn’t with your regiment?”

  “No, he was, but the day of the battle he went off with another troop. They were short of doctors.”

  “The 25th was in the fight?”

  “No. We sat at Fort Albany and watched it all unfold on the road.”

  “On the road?” She looked at him quizzically, and he waved his hand. There would be time later to tell their ignoble story.

  “I’ve come to get you. Amelia asked us to find you. She wants you to come home.”

  Amelia asked. She searched Thomas’s face for any sign of their former intimacy, when his gaze had communicated more than friendship, even, once, interest. But the starkness of his fatigued expression was absent anything but exhaustion.

  “I am not going home,” Mary said.

  “You don’t look well, Mary, and this place . . .” His voice trailed off and Mary saw her surroundings as if for the first time. The ugliness of the building had fallen away for her long ago, but now she felt slightly ashamed of the rotting floors, the dingy light, the smells emanating from every doorway. She thought Thomas must think how odd she had grown to prefer this hellish place to home.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  “If Amelia were to see—”

  “Don’t tell her what it’s like.”

  Always the surprise of Mary, the quick turn, the sharp word. He’d forgotten how easily she could be angered. All the Sutter women had melded together in his mind, though somehow in the last few months he’d forgotten even what Jenny looked like. He remembered beauty, certainly, and affection, and most vividly the intoxicating caresses of their wedding night, but not the whole of her.

  “Jenny wants you home, too,” he said, invoking his marriage of a single night, making it up as he went. He had to get Mary to come home with him. It seemed more essential now than anything he had ever done.

  “Tell Amelia not to worry. She’ll be fine when it comes to Jenny.”

  “When it comes to Jenny? What do you mean?”

  The knowledge came to her in a second. He didn’t know. Thomas stood there, gaunt, fatigued, having come all this way to find her, and he didn’t even know. What to do? Where did her obligation lie? To tell, or not to tell? She saw Jenny, disappointed, her smile falling away. Mary already told me. No. It wasn’t right. It was not her news. She felt a slight release then, a shift toward happiness.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “You’ll be home soon.”

  “I’m not leaving without you.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving. I want to be a surgeon.” It wasn’t exactly the Albany Medical College, but she’d assisted in amputations, hadn’t she? She pushed away the memories of the two failed surgeries, though she still dreamt nightly of the sawing noise, always relieved when she woke up that she didn’t have to hear it anymore.

  “Let me show you,” she said. She led Thomas upstairs, eager to tell him about her months here, leaving out the worst parts, painting a picture for him that was better than the one he saw. She pictured him telling Jenny and Amelia, She can’t leave. She is learning so much. She didn’t tell Thomas that she was still more maid than anything else. Instead, she told him about the operation, about how in the last few days the amputee’s stump had been discharging a large amount of pus that Dr. Stipp deemed healthy. To support him through the process, Stipp had dosed the boy with quinine, beet essence, and milk punch. It was her responsibility to come by to see him in the mornings and in the evenings, no matter how busy she was. She was watching to see how he healed, she explained to Thomas, how the diet and suppuration were working to make him well. Lately, with the increased suppuration, the boy’s pulse had risen from 80 to 96 to 124, his lips had paled, and the stump had swelled and reddened. Dr. Stipp was applying water dressings. To draw the pus out, Mary said. Mary reported all this to Thomas as they navigated the dim hallway’s abrupt turns and low ceilings. She was thinking, You see how well I have survived without you, how I have no need of you? They turned a final corner to the small room where Dr. Stipp had sequestered the boy.

  But the boy was not lying in the bed, but on the carpeted floor; it looked as if he had fallen trying to get out of bed by himself. His bloodied dressings had unraveled or been pulled away, and his stump lay exposed. His skin was hot to the touch, and he was staring at the ceiling, his parted mouth roped with white bands of saliva.

  Mary gripped Thomas’s forearm. “Don’t let him move.”

  “What do I do?” Thomas asked, but Mary had already gone. Thomas knelt down, trying not to look at the limb or grow faint from its vinegary smell. He wondered if the boy was dying.

  Mary rushed through the halls, hurrying from door to door. “Dr. Stipp?” She didn’t know if she was yelling or whispering. She wasn’t even certain she was breathing.

  “Mary?” Fannie Warren asked, slipping into the hallway as Mary flew by, but Mary had already rounded a corner.

  “It’s the boy,” she said, breathless, when she found Dr. Stipp downstairs in the ballroom. They’d developed a shorthand: How is the boy? The boy is well. It had bolstered them: their first success.

  Stipp rushed to the boy’s room. “Damn it,” he said. He glanced at Thomas, who had risen from the boy’s side. “Who the hell are you?”

  “A friend of Mary’s,” Thomas said, forgetting to claim himself as brother-in-law.

  “Everyone is a friend of Mary’s,” Stipp said.

  Mary straightened, and in her post
ure Thomas read satisfaction at Stipp’s compliment, recalling that night when James Blevens had come to dinner and she had been railing against him. She likes the needy best, I think, Thomas had said. She did, he thought now.

  “Help me,” Stipp said, and he and Thomas wrestled the large boy back into bed, his weight leaden, even his good limbs falling slack and awkward at his sides. After positioning him on the bed, Stipp immediately put his fingers to the boy’s wrist as, unnoticed, Thomas backed out the doorway into the hall. He peered into the rooms at the men who had fought at Bull Run. Heat pulsed from their rooms, as if they, and not the men inside them, were bandaged and battered. All of them appeared to be slowly dying, though Thomas couldn’t say for sure.

  Later, Mary found Thomas sitting on the front stoop. The summer heat had leached any color from the sky, and he had long ago emptied his canteen of water. Mary sat down beside him.

  “How is he?” Thomas asked.

  “He died,” Mary said.

  Her voice was flat, but Thomas knew she would not weep. This was why everybody loved her. She balanced pain with anger and so was able to survive. Everyone is a friend of Mary’s. She had slipped away from them. He noted the pride and the sadness, how they worked together to make her beautiful. She held her hand to her chest, and her long, exquisite neck rose above the ruin of her dress. In her dishevelment, in her intelligence, Mary was something to admire. He looked away, down the cobbled street toward the bridge and the creek, where trees arced over a deep culvert. If there had been no Jenny, maybe. But he would not betray. A choice was a choice. He let out a long sigh, as if he were very tired, and he was tired, though mostly he was ashamed.

  He said, “Compared to you, I’ve done nothing. All I did was build a fort. I haven’t done anything else. I haven’t even seen a Rebel; I haven’t seen anything, except when the ambulances went by, and then I couldn’t even look at them. You have done more in this war than I have.”