Robin Oliveira Read online

  They began to walk.

  On that early morning, he told Mary, there was a calm before the artillerymen had even untoggled the prolonges from their guns. The day throbbed with beauty. It was easy to imagine that they were all on a lark. Redolent with fragrance, the summer morning shimmered with that clarity of light peculiar to midsummer, that glassy serenity, when everyone, human and animal alike, lets down his guard and is seduced by tranquillity. He turned his back on the unseemly hubbub of troops invading the countryside and surveyed the unsuspecting hills to the east where, undisturbed, monarch butterflies dipped their noses into lakes of goldenrod, where in a tangle of vines a nest of newly hatched cardinals appealed for breakfast, and toward the sky, where a red-winged blackbird soared above the cattails of a shallow pond. It was possible at that moment to believe that such an idyll was eternal.

  With the first crack of artillery, black smoke voided the landscape and wiped the sky of birdsong. James ducked and scrambled toward the back of the line to his assigned aid station, but the stretcher bearers refused to go into the field. Blevens, tortured by the cries of the wounded, seized the portable surgery kit he’d made from the instruments he’d brought from home, commandeered an ambulance, and drove himself into the fray. At the first impassable gully, he abandoned the wagon and slapped the hindquarters of the horse, who galloped headlong out of the maelstrom. Blevens smelled smoke, sweat. Musket balls whizzed past his head. A soldier fell, and then another and another. Why were they standing to fire? Why didn’t they lie down and take cover? James fell to the ground and crawled toward them thinking of all he lacked: opiates, scalpel, lint, bandages, adhesive plasters, syringes. Shells exploded and bullets spit, but he heard only his breath issuing in uneven gasps. Water? the boys asked, but he lacked even that. There were moments when he was certain he was dreaming.

  In the din and racket, James found an oak tree splattered scarlet and rested his head against it. Shattered men carpeted the field beside him, men that James did not think of as soldiers, for they had not yet hardened. They were still, like him, only half a moment past innocence. One soldier was dead, but unmarked. Not a speck of blood, not a perceptible chink in his body anywhere. Perhaps he had died of fright, or of the percussion waves of the artillery invading his body. Time grew elastic. How many wounded per second, per minute, per hour? The lines of battle moved. They ranged forward and backward over the hilly ground obscured by dust and smoke. Every dip, ditch, hillock, boulder, and tree was a surprise. James stumbled over them with the unsteadiness and unwieldiness of a body dizzy with confusion. His tongue swelled from thirst. At one point, he wiped his face and found that he was crying. Riderless horses winged past, only to sink and complain, their haunches or shoulders or legs destroyed.

  The head wounds were hopeless, the abdominal wounds impossible. By then, the thirst and humidity, gunsmoke and cannon powder had rendered everyone slightly mad. It seemed to affect even the air. That’s what would be said for years afterward. Conjured our own weather that night. You remember? It was the last beautiful day for a long while. Maybe for the whole war. We turned even the skies, we did.

  “I did what I could, but it was too little,” Blevens said. He was trying not to weep. “And then it seemed as if the entire Union army decided in one moment to run. They just changed direction like a flock of birds.”

  The retreating troops jammed the roads. After a few dusty, confused miles, carried along by the river of men, Blevens reached the town of Centreville, where thousands had hoped to find water, but the town well had run dry. A church was being used as a hospital, and Blevens pushed his way inside. Pews had been pried from the floor and blankets and hay laid down in their place. A hundred wounded men sprawled on the main floor, and another twenty-five lay upstairs in the gallery. Squeezed in among them were perhaps another fifty healthy men taking refuge in the safety of the building. Outside were two hundred more wounded, laid out in four buildings and beneath the trees in a surrounding grove of timber, all of whom needed dressings, whiskey, morphia, lint. Blevens elbowed his way through to where a door torn from its hinges was suspended between two pew ends.

  An amputation of a forearm was under way.

  Blevens identified himself to the three surgeons working together on the arm, puzzling their way through the operation.

  “Have you any supplies?” he asked.

  They stared at him.

  More troops kept arriving, and one by one, regimental surgeons, attracted by the wounded, pushed into the church, also looking for supplies, but soon cries that the Rebels were coming sent the onlookers spilling back again out of the church and onto the road toward Washington and safety. But without ambulances, it was impossible to carry off the wounded. The surgeons huddled together to consider who should stay, the oily smell of burning kerosene tainting the air. They kicked the ground and calculated the post-victory stance of the Rebel soldier with regard to surgeons. In the end, five surgeons gave themselves up to be captured with the wounded, and the remainder, all volunteers, including James, joined the thousands of men and wagons jolting over the Warrenton Turnpike toward Washington. Dust fogged the air at the passage of wagon, cart, horse, and foot. Had not the rutted road provided direction, James would have been lost. Here and there, overturned wagons blocked the way, and the whole train had to plunge into fields to pass by. The night passed in painful slowness, until at last, footsore, James reached Fairfax, where he lay down without a blanket on the ground under a sky that opened to a downpour.

  James was proud of what he held back from Mary. The horses squealing from their shell wounds, soldiers lying on the ground, impaled by fallen tree limbs. How he had vomited twice in the field.

  Now he and Mary reached the square where the E Street Infirmary stood in silent, serious judgment. He had brought Mary here without thinking. They had walked ten blocks, past the post office where army wagons by the dozens lined up to procure food from the commissary in its basement, past the reporters hurrying from the Evening Star’s offices, past even Mrs. Surratt’s Boarding House, where James had stayed one night and found the company treacherous.

  Mary surveyed the dark façade of the infirmary. The September sun was no less fierce than June’s had been.

  “The infirmary wouldn’t have me,” Mary said.

  “The sisters make good nurses.”

  “None of Miss Dix’s charges for you?”

  “It is an all-Catholic hospital. I shall be excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church on my return to Albany. I feign religiosity.”

  A wagon rattled by.

  “May I show you something?” James asked.

  They entered the building to which the sister had denied Mary access in June. On the first floor, in a closet of a room, was a desk, a stool, a table, and a microscope sitting uncovered on it.

  “How?” Mary said.

  “It is mine. I had my landlady send it to me from Albany, via Adams Express.”

  Mary pulled off her bonnet, her ribbons trailing like discarded apron strings.

  He touched his hand to the table. “I’m looking at stool samples.” He hesitated, but what was embarrassment now? He had seen a man blown to pieces. She had helped to amputate a leg. “I’m trying to solve the problem of dysentery. I’ve tried everything, but whether I dose the men with Dover’s powder or blue mass, nothing seems to work. Rice does, when I can get any.”

  “Dr. Stipp has tried to purge the men with ipecac. And quinine has worked in a few cases,” Mary said.

  “Dr. Stipp? William Stipp?”

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  “He taught me at Bellevue. I thought he went to Texas after his wife died.”

  A wife, Mary thought. Texas. How much Stipp hadn’t told her. “I know very little of his life.”

  “I would like to see him.”

  “He would like that, I think.”

  Blevens pulled out a slide and made a preparation, after surreptitiously taking a sample from a covered bucket. He adjusted
the lens so that it came into focus.

  “You are taking the time to teach me something?” A spark of the old Mary.

  “It was only the onset of the war that prevented me. I am sorry,” he said.

  An apology, albeit a late one. She wouldn’t call it pride, but instead gratitude, that made her say, “The penitent doctor.”

  Each held the other’s gaze for a moment, and then Mary turned to the lens and tried to make out something in the shadows of the flickering light.

  “Look for small, cylinder-like shapes,” Blevens said. “Those are rods. And the others, the circular ones, do you see them? Do you see how they propel themselves?”

  “I don’t see—oh! Yes!” She wasn’t conscious of the intensity of her exclamation, but James was. He remembered a cat lying on a table in Dr. Stipp’s dining room, the moment when everything had first started to come together for him.

  “What are these?” she asked, unable to make out the meaning of a spiral-shaped body floating past.

  Mary shifted away from the long neck of the lens to allow him to look. Peering in, James said, “I don’t know what is normal and what isn’t normal. I’ve identified albumin—that’s a protein, of course. And red and white blood corpuscles. These have to do with the inflammation of the mucosal lining of the bowel, I think. And the rodlike bodies. Spherical elements, all in motion. These are like those described by Billroth, who calls them Coccobacteria septica. Once I put a ring of varnish around the cover plate and the movement went on forever.”

  Outside, the soft murmur of the sisters’ patrolling shoes betrayed no hint of the chaos that ruled at the Union Hotel.

  “You want something you think you cannot have,” Mary said, when the whisper of their footsteps died away. “That’s what you once said to me.”

  Their shoulders were nearly touching. The debt respoken, or at least remembered, perhaps not yet forgiven, as he had hoped. She would punish him for knowing about Thomas. Blevens gazed at Mary, who was regarding him with naked challenge.

  When he did not respond, she said, “Silence is not the answer to everything.”

  “I never said yours was an unworthy cause. Merely that it was what you wanted and that I could not provide it.” He meant for both desires.

  She studied him then, her gaze as serious as a scholar’s, or a minister’s, or a physician’s. He looked tired, older, as if the battle had removed the last bit of his youth.

  “How are you? Some of the men I take care of relive the battle.”

  She would not tell him about the saw that still sang in her head, the boy clutching his leg, the blood arcing. All she had seen, and yet he had seen more, and worse.

  Blevens wasn’t sure how he was. But he was glad to see her, felt even as if the world were a better place because she was here, though something about her had changed since he had seen her last. It was not just her alarming thinness, or her faded dress, or the patina of grief. She was more grave, if possible, than before, but also less angry. And her inquiry about his well-being seemed conciliatory, approaching even forgiveness. He supposed it was because she was no longer at the end of her choices; in the face of chaos, she had found a way. He knew how that felt, knew the pleasure of possibility.

  He nodded at the microscope and said, “Trying to find an answer helps.”

  “Answers. Yes.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for Christian. And I apologize again for not helping you in Albany.”

  “We would know less, you and I, if we had stayed.”

  Forgiveness yet. They lingered over the slide, reluctant to say good-bye, and for a moment Mary thought that she wanted nothing else but to stay here, with James Blevens’s arm inches from hers, but finally she gathered her skirts around her and asked him to hail her a hack.

  Outside, he took her hand and helped her into the carriage.

  “You must come to the Union Hotel,” Mary said.

  He looked at her inquiringly.

  “To see Dr. Stipp.”

  “Yes,” he said. “To see Dr. Stipp.”

  That evening, Mary said, “Blevens has a microscope. Here.”

  “Are you certain it was he? The James Blevens I knew?”

  “Yes. He said so.”

  William Stipp set his glasses on his desk and sighed. He had sent Mary Sutter off for a day of rest and diversion and she had ended up in another hospital, peering though a lens with James Blevens, that precocious, bubbling cauldron of questions who had once dumped a cat on his desk. Of course those two would have found one another; they were each other’s echoes.

  “You say he knows your family?”

  “Yes. He knows everyone.”

  Sadness had been lifted from her; Stipp tried to be glad. He said, “We missed you.”

  She lingered at the doorjamb for a moment, wanting to tell him more, about how James Blevens had turned her down, about how grateful she was to Stipp for teaching her, even about how much she had seen today, looking through that microscope, but she did not. Something about the wistful look in his eyes stopped her. She wondered if she should ask about his wife, but decided she would not, not today. Grief of that sort should not be roused indiscriminately; discretion was the gift he had given her in her sadness, she would give him the same.

  “I’m here now,” she said.

  Stipp nodded, but was not at all certain that she was. And then she was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Fort Marcy 25th September, 1861

  Dear Jenny,

  I am without words and heartsick. They will not give me leave. You must do all you can to take care of yourself. I blame myself. If I hadn’t left Christian, then perhaps he would still be alive—but Amelia wanted Mary. Oh, how I grieve.

  Amelia will look after you. Do not be afraid, but strong.

  Did Mary know in July that you were with child? I only ask because she did not mention it, which I find not in keeping with her general good nature.

  All we do is drill and train, which is necessary since we are not a professional lot, but General McClellan is a fine soldier who is pushing us to be fit for the fight. I hope that very soon the war will be finished. I will come back to you unashamed, proud that I have given what I could, but sore of heart that I am not with you now. I have seen all of Virginia that I care to. We are chopping down every tree in a twenty-mile radius to keep warm at night and to cook our food. The army is a ravenous thing. We may eat up Virginia.

  I cannot believe that Mary knew and said nothing.

  Beyond words, I grieve for Christian.

  Your husband, Thomas Fall

  11th October, 1861

  Dear Mary,

  Your sister’s confinement looms; I fear for her as you would fear for her if you were to see her; she grows pale and has the most tremendous headaches. I suspect eclampsia or worse. The baby is large, perhaps too large for her to deliver. I am unequal to the task. Can you come home to help me?

  I forgive you for not coming home when Christian died. You say you have a hospital full of Christians. Perhaps this is true. But now you must think of your family. I have lost both my son and my husband in the last year; I need you.

  Thomas writes to tell us that he is at Fort Marcy, near the Arlington Heights. Is that near you? Perhaps you could convince his superior officer of the need to send Thomas home. You could travel together.

  Amelia

  21st October, 1861

  Dear Mary,

  You must understand how much I love you. There are days when I think of nothing else. Before me, your sister grows ever larger, closer and closer to her time. You know the dangers women like her fall prey to. She is the size of a faerie, a child, a shadow. I am immensely proud of you for finding your own way in the world. I ask only this one thing of you: Please come home, Mary. Please come home and help me.

  Amelia

  27th October, 1861

  Dear Thomas,

  Please tell me that you were not in the fight at Ball’s Bluff. I am i
n great fear; the papers are so full of rumor that it is difficult to get an accurate account of anything. I worry all the time. The baby grows. I am tired and headachey and no help to Mother at all. She tries to hide her worry, but I know her, and her tricks with other mothers do not work with me. She has written Mary to ask her to come home.

  Mary did know in July. Perhaps she did not feel right telling you. She did not know you were going to enlist. My heart aches, Thomas. I miss you all the time. Are you pleased with the news of the baby? You didn’t say.

  Your Jenny

  27th October, 1861

  Dear Jenny,

  I am writing to tell you that I was not in the fight at Ball’s Bluff. It was a regiment of the state of Massachusetts, and poor fellows. Their bodies are washing down the Potomac and getting stuck against the Long Bridge. We are having a devil of a time fishing them out. We are charged with sitting on the banks and trying to catch them as they flow by, but we cannot grapple them with just rope. The city is gravely depressed, the war at their doorstep, the barbarity of it. But it heartens me, in an odd way. We are all of a mind that we are fighting a fight that must be won. The importance of our quest helps me bear being apart from you.

  It is growing to be your time. Please do all that Amelia asks of you. Be very brave.

  Thomas Fall,

  Your husband

  2nd November, 1861

  My dearest Thomas,

  Have you written? I have not heard from you in over five weeks. Each day, I wait for the mail. Maybe one of your letters has gone astray. If I do not hear from you soon, I will worry. Please write to me. I sent you a letter only a few days ago; I am eager, you see, to hear from you.

  I am heavy with child. I am glad you cannot see me this way. The baby kicks and turns. I rejoice, for I take this to mean that he is eager and robust. I have decided it is a boy. I try not to be afraid, but I have heard mother and Mary tell such stories. So many things can go wrong. But perhaps Mary will be coming soon. My savior, my sister. Do you mind if I show her our letters? No, perhaps not. How I wish you were able to come home to me.