Robin Oliveira Read online

  Your most loving wife,

  Jenny

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The war around Washington, except for Ball’s Bluff, had turned quiet after the battle at Bull Run, and had remained so, though in the West battles raged in Missouri, and in the South a Union naval force of seventy-seven ships steaming from Fort Monroe southwards to invade Port Royal, South Carolina, was savaged by a hurricane. But the biggest news came on November first. Abraham Lincoln accepted Winfield Scott’s offer to resign, and George McClellan succeeded Scott as commander of Union forces. Congress especially was hopeful that the energetic, optimistic McClellan would seize the opportunity to implement his dashing intelligence toward swift victory. McClellan was already widely beloved; now, with this newest crown of power, he was worshipped. George McClellan will save us, the Northern papers said, as Winfield Scott boarded a train for West Point, where he was going to write his memoirs and observe the young general from afar.

  Four days after George McClellan replaced Winfield Scott, James Blevens, asleep in his small cell in the center wing of the E Street Infirmary, thought he was dreaming again about Bull Run. The frightful cries, the inability to catch his breath, the crackle of battle were now his nightly portion, and he awoke choking, as he often did, but this November night the curls of smoke did not disappear with consciousness. He sat straight up, confused, and stumbled to the window. In the square outside, the sisters were screaming for help, their shorn, uncovered heads gleaming in the firelight. About a hundred patients—one hundred four, the mother superior would later state—occupied the beds, and nearly forty of them could not walk. It was this fact, which the nun had reported to him the previous evening, that shook Blevens from his stupor. He thrust himself into his shirt and pants, sweat already slathering his skin. He took a swift but longing look at his microscope before leaving it behind to dash into the hallway, where a dense black cloud billowed along the ceiling, its tentacles reaching into the open doors of rooms where the bedridden and convalescent alike were shrieking for help. Through the smoke, he could make out the hunched shapes of the Metropolitan police darting here and there, evacuating the invalids. Blevens dropped to his knees and crawled along the floor, counting doorways carefully, trying to remember which patient was where. He veered into a room. Two of his patients were huddled in bed, coughing. One had a broken leg. The other was a young man who reminded him of Christian. It was the boy’s eyes, he thought. He was missing a portion of his left jaw, a section of his bottom and upper lip, and the whole of his left nostril, compliments of his tentmate, whose musket had discharged when he’d been cleaning it. The boy was eighteen and he was named Peter Markeli. Blevens seized a sheet and spread it on the floor. He tore away a strip of sheet and gave it to each of them to hold over their noses. Then he lowered each man onto the sheet and yelled, “I’m going to pull you.”

  He covered them with their blankets. Through the window, he could see flames shooting through the infirmary roof. The heat made his hands slippery, but he wrapped each sheet end around his wrists and then anchored them in his palms. He dropped to his knees and gasped for air and then plunged forward, dragging the men behind him to the door, through it, down the hallway, toward the front door. It was a mile away. Ten miles. People were yelling. He could hear timbers falling. He stooped to stay below the smoke, but it swirled down as if to ensnare him. The weight of the men wrenched his shoulders, his elbows; his hands burned. He wondered if he would lose his way; he could hardly see. He could hear artillery shells screaming, the horse yelping as it galloped away. He had done nothing at Centreville, nothing at Manassas. Christian had died. Blevens could see the doorway more clearly now, could see the river of smoke spilling out of it. Blue flames rippled along the ceiling. Men were crying. He stumbled toward the door. He was Charon escaping across the river Styx, hauling the damned behind him.

  He burst through the doorway, fell to the ground, wheezed. Men rushed forward to carry his patients away in their slings of blanket and sheet.

  Blevens put his palms down to push himself up, but fell again to his knees. He held up his hands. Skin was peeling away from his palms and wrists.

  A pump wagon appeared. A stream of water shot from a long snake of hose and drops fell around him like bullets. Buckets of water crashed into the inferno. He started up and forward into the square, then collapsed under a single oak tree, while the blaze consumed the night.

  No one died. A miracle. Everyone got out. Every single person, bedridden or no. In the early morning chill, the patients were divvied up between the city’s hospitals. Some were carried to the City Hall, some to the schoolhouse on Judiciary Square (a hospital for some time past), some to the former quarters of Griffin’s Battery, some to the Old Trinity Church on Fifth Street, and many to private residences in the neighborhood.

  James demanded to be taken to the Union Hotel.

  A week after the fire, Mary gently peeled away the protective cover of his bandages. Blevens’s agony had erased between them even the memory of debt; in its place had sprung mutual tenderness. His was the kind of exhausting pain that rendered a man’s belief in God pitiable. On a continual dose of whiskey since arriving, he had learned that alcohol was a blunt tool that numbed little but the tongue and brain. Even the slightest graze of wind seared. Only Mary’s presence kept him from weeping. After she unwound the last of the gauze, the poultice of slippery elm in simple cerate had to be removed next. As Mary delicately wiped away the waxy substance with a rag, Blevens broke into a cold sweat. Even so, he flexed his fingers to break the beginnings of scars that would seal his fingers together if he did not.

  Stipp, watching, leaned over and said, “You’ll grasp a scalpel yet.”

  Next she was to apply a new preparation of the slippery elm, Stipp’s contribution to Blevens’s well-being, a product of his Texan exile. The Indians had taught him how to make it, and then how to apply it to skin after sunburn. It was easy enough to get a hold of at the corner apothecary; he had gone there himself to purchase it for his former student. He showed Mary how to mix the gummy secretion of the bark with boiling water and then allow it to cool. Stipp felt some pride that he could come up with a solution to ease James’s pain, whom he distracted with medical cases while Mary worked. Stipp had initiated this practice as a diversion from Mary’s ministering fingers the morning after the fire, when Blevens, carried in on a litter, had told Stipp that he had directed his bearers to bring him here over anywhere else. Blevens was suffering from exhaustion in addition to his burns, a temporary effect from inhaling the smoke, Stipp thought. More than his exhaustion, though, he seemed to be mourning the loss of his microscope, its beautiful brass incinerated in the flames. Blevens had pleaded with the firemen to please try to find if it had survived, but they delivered a lumpen mass to him instead, which he kept under his bed.

  Though Mary had said that he would, Blevens had not come to see either Stipp or Mary in the days after her visit to the E Street Infirmary. Nor had Stipp gone in search of him. They could each plead the tidal wave of sick from the forts. Though McClellan assured the nation that he would soon attack, and that his attack would be quick, sharp, and decisive, there had been no more fighting. And though the autumn weather had been mild, the prolonged exposure had flooded the Washington hospitals with sick. The diseases of the damp—rheumatism, pneumonia, diphtheria, paroxysmal fevers—were making their ugly way through the poorly housed troops.

  But now, watching Mary lean over his former protégé, Stipp could not help but wonder for whom Blevens had asked to come to the Union Hotel: him or Mary.

  Mary took up her cup of salve and was spreading it now on Blevens’s hands as Stipp gave quiet instructions: apply it thickly enough so that your fingers do not touch the unprotected burn; rewrap the salved hands with the gauze; give Blevens a pillow to rest his hands on; dose the poor man with another jigger of whiskey.

  He was acutely aware of the quiet trust Mary’s ministrations engendered in James Blevens, who
did not take his eyes from her face; if she was aware of his studied regard, Stipp could not tell. A brief stab of jealousy made him shut his eyes. What an insipid fool he was being. Of course the man was in love with her. Pain was pain, and there was nothing like the agony of a burn, and Mary wielded the magic salve. The young man was a hero, and he might never be able to be a surgeon again, no matter how optimistically he had suggested that he would. Besides, he was drunk most of the time, and in addition he was married, though a marriage of which nothing definitive could be said. Stipp remembered Blevens’s youthful adoration of the suffering Sarah. He wondered whether Mary knew of the indiscreet and impulsive marriage. He was given to love, that boy.

  As was he. Don’t be an idiot, he thought. They are far better matched, if only for their age.

  Stipp inspected Mary’s handiwork and nodded. “Well done.” Then he forced himself to turn away, toward Peter Markeli, asleep in the next bed, over whom Blevens still kept vigilant though slightly drunken watch.

  Because of Blevens’s efforts, Peter had not been burned in the fire, though the blow from the musket ball had been devastating enough. Blevens had not been able to close the wound, because not enough skin had remained behind. It was nearly certain that Peter would starve, and soon; while his tongue had survived intact, swallowing proved nearly impossible, and he already looked like a skeleton. He had weakened since coming to them, able to take in only small amounts of liquid, choking and sputtering when he did. Stipp had noticed that Mary had developed a special affinity for Peter. She spent much of her time trying to get him to eat. To illustrate to herself Peter’s suffering, Mary had pressed her jaws together but kept her lips open to try to approximate swallowing without a closed mouth. It was a feat that exhausted. At night, Mary prowled the halls and reported that Peter’s breathing had seemed to coarsen, even though the restless boy was able by day to walk those same halls in a twisted posture, his body favoring his left side as if forever recoiling, a circus sideshow for the tourists who roamed the hall seeking the thrill they had not been able to obtain at Centreville.

  (Privacy, after tenderness, the second casualty of war.)

  “He will live just to make you happy, I think,” Stipp had said to her one night.

  Now Stipp watched as the boy lay back on the bed and obligingly turned his head from side to side as Mary, finished with James, wound a long strip of bandage about his face, his eyes intent, not with fear, but instead with an outright glimmer of trusting adoration.

  Blevens, drunk from the whiskey Mary had dosed as anesthetic, blurted, “He looks so much like Christian. Like he’s come to life, don’t you think?”

  Mary’s gaze darted to Peter, who met her clear gaze with his own newly feverish one. She gasped, the sharp intake of her broken voice mingling with the sweet smell of the salve.

  Stipp, hovering behind, cursed under his breath. Death was a formidable enough foe without making the mistake of figuring love into it.

  But wasn’t he guilty of the same? Just to make you happy. You’ll wield a scalpel yet.

  Stipp put his hand on Mary’s shoulder and said, “Let me do that.”

  She yielded and fled the room.

  Later, when Stipp knocked on her door, he found Mary sitting stiffly upright on her bed, a small fire lit in the fireplace. She was staring straight ahead, at the dark November cold flooding in through the small porthole window. The scene was as unlike Lilianna and the bright golden air of southern Texas as possible.

  “His hair is the same—such beautiful dark curls. And the eyelashes. Black curtains. And he trusts me. He believes I will never hurt him.”

  Stipp’s hand felt cold on the doorknob; he had not been invited to cross the threshold. “If I may say, even if you had been with Christian, I doubt very much you could have saved him.”

  She turned to him, looked him right in the eye. “Will we save Blevens? Will we save Peter?”

  Just to make you happy.

  When he did not answer, she turned away and looked into the fire.

  A hand in the air, a turn, and a walk up an arid hill.

  Stipp shut the door.

  Chapter Thirty

  12th November, 1861

  Dear Mary,

  Are you receiving my letters or are you not answering me? I have heard nothing from you; sometimes I fear you are not even alive. Acknowledge me that at least. I will do what I can with Jenny, but I am uneasy. I see her still as my child, and you as my esteemed friend. It is not fair, I know, but you must come and help me. I know you are grieving Christian, as am I. Let us find solace together.

  Amelia

  25th November, 1861

  Dear Mother,

  I have received your letters. Please forgive my unforgivable reticence. I plead an excess of work, which is true, but I also have not written because I cannot face coming home. (You know why I cannot; do not make me say it.) And I grieve Christian every day; you cannot imagine how my heart has broken.

  Please do not be frightened about Jenny. You fear too much your own emotions. Did you not teach me everything about midwifery? By anyone’s estimation you are more than capable of bringing Jenny on your own safely to the other side of her confinement. You must trust yourself, though you may believe that it is unfair of me to disregard your distress. But it is not purely self-protection that compels me to encourage you. I have learned that it is possible to endure anything. And I have duty to render here; hundreds of men who need me. In light of such need, I cannot abandon them or Dr. Stipp, who relies on me. (Dr. Stipp is the man who runs the hospital here; he has agreed to apprentice me.)

  Mary lifted her pen from the paper and glanced out the window onto Bridge Street, dark except for a swinging lantern, its owner on subterfuge of his own. How easy it was to justify. Wasn’t need the same excuse she had given to Thomas?

  In light of your distress, I beg you to consider my forbearance. I never told Jenny how sad their marriage made me. This at least, must count for something in your estimation. I hate to ask you to be generous to me after all you have taught me, but I entreat you to understand. Jenny has you, which is more than enough; does she also need me? Two midwives in attendance, when men here are dying for lack of food?

  Please do not think me heartless. Obligation calls me both places, and, trusting you, I choose the greater need. I do not love you or Jenny any less—

  Was that a lie? Did she love Jenny less?

  —but you must understand that either way, I will think poorly of myself, for there is betrayal in both decisions. And perhaps, if I am truthful, I have chosen to protect myself. There, I have said it. Think as ill of me as you like now. But you will do well by Jenny, or else I would come in an instant.

  Do not worry, Mother, for you know everything there is to know in order to bring your grandchild safely home. I truly believe that my presence would make no difference in the end for Jenny. I ask one last thing: Please keep my distress from Jenny and do not show her this letter. Perhaps it is cowardly of me, but I fear knowledge of my weakness can do her no good.

  Your loving daughter,

  Mary

  Mary put down the pen on the little desk she had fashioned from wooden crates. The candle was nearly burned out. There were times at night when despair showed no mercy. Why couldn’t she go home and offer her mother this one thing? I have learned that it is possible to endure anything. What was she so afraid of? Would it really hurt her to shepherd Thomas’s child safely into the world? Or was she, like her mother, too much afraid of her own emotions?

  In the womb, she and Jenny had shared everything, their arms and legs entwined in a seeming eternal embrace, a grasp she feared now had spawned more competition than cooperation. But what was fair when selfishness collided with heartbreak? Mary buried her head in her hands. What was required of a sister?

  Cold knifed into the window cracks and up through the floorboards as Mary studied the letter she had written, thinking that it was possible that she knew nothing at all of kindness
.

  She set aside her letter to Amelia, chose a new sheet of paper, and dipped her pen again in the ink.

  Dear Jenny,

  I am writing to apologize that I am unable to come home for your confinement. The work here is necessary and demanding and there are so few of us to do it. Do not be afraid, my sister, for you know that Mother will protect you and keep you through the storm. Please endure the best you can; it is best not to fret too much, but to accept what labor brings. Let your body do the work, and then you will have Thomas’s child, and your happiness will be complete.

  My love,

  Mary

  Mary let the ink dry, then folded and stuffed the letters into their separate envelopes, sealing them with wax so that she wouldn’t be tempted to read them again in the morning, when a less fraught perspective might change her mind. But her refusal was not abandonment. Her mother was only afraid, out of love. And when Jenny’s time came, that same love would render her mother more competent, not less. She was tempted to tear open her mother’s letter to tell her that fierceness in a mother was what every laboring daughter needed, when a knock came on the door. It was Monique Philipateaux, carrying a candle, saying that two men had died of their fevers, and would Mary please come, for their roommates were ill as well, and no one knew what to do.

  Without a glance at the envelopes, Mary snuffed her candle, threw a shawl over her nightgown, and hurried out the door.