Part 28 (1/2)

”Yes, to study them. There is going to be research.”

”Research?” But she said it as if he had offered her gold, or an end to the havoc. ”You know what to do with them?”

”Yes. Don't you see? Something good has to come out of all of this.”

And yet even as she seemed to welcome the notion, she seemed even more distracted. She pointed to the soldier on her table.

It took a moment for Blevens to understand. He took a step closer and said, ”What is it?”

”This is Thomas.”

Stipp, who had begun his next surgery, listening as he worked, now jerked up his head. ”What the h.e.l.l is the matter with you, Mary? Why didn't you call me?”

”Because I didn't need to.”

Stipp and James stared at her and thought, Sarah, giving the whiskey and opium to her little brother when she had to. What women were capable of.

”Will you study Thomas's leg?” Mary asked Blevens. ”Please. I can't think of it here-” And she nodded at her pile.

James said, ”Of course.”

The soldier on Stipp's table reared up and Stipp barked for his a.s.sistant to give him more chloroform. ”James,” he said, tossing his instruments to the hay at his feet in order to help hold down the boy, ”take her outside. Find her something to eat and then make her sleep.” And he watched as James Blevens took Mary's arm and led her away to the barn door, and she disappeared from his sight.

Day after day, night after night, Mary worked beside Stipp, stopping only to rest a few hours before rousing again. She had needed only a few hours of sleep that morning; not even James could persuade her to rest any longer. He arranged for a teamster to take his wagon and specimens, including Thomas's leg, back to Was.h.i.+ngton, while he stayed to help with the chloroform. They worked for a week; Mary cut off thirty-five legs a day. Exhaustion obliterated sensation. Her back ached. Her knees swelled. She took no notice of the tangle of her hair or the blood on her skirts. By the fifth day, she knew nothing but legs and more legs. In the exhaustion and confusion, she nevertheless checked on Thomas every morning and every night, appraising his sutures, worriedly laying her hand on his forehead, looking for fever. The day after the surgery, he had clung to her and begged for water. She studied him, looking for signs of decline before he fell back to the ground. Day after day, she changed his dressing, tugging on the suture threads to see whether or not they were ready to come out. She had only moments to spare for him. He and his neighbors cared for one another, crawling for better shelter under a sycamore tree behind the barn. They were all sunburned, their faces sunken from thirst and fever.

In the few hours of sleep that Mary stole curled up in the corner of the barn, the dead began to speak to her. They called to her from the fields. Work faster, work faster! Legs are not enough. There are hands and feet and arms that must be removed. My head, my head, take off my head. She was more tired than tired, more mad than sane. In her dream, she wandered outside and followed a trail of blood to a stream, where a hundred men lay in the thickets and scrub along the banks. No one had cared for them. Why had no one looked here? Why had no one discovered them? She tore her skirts as she searched among the blackberries and in the elder bushes, flinging unfound soldiers over her shoulder. She must rescue them all. But they were all dead, so she laid them down and descended to the stream bank where the brook flowed red. She wanted only to get clean, to wash the blood from her fingernails. But it was no use, for the water had turned into blood. She sank to the damp earth. On the opposite bank, the dead rose and formed a single file walking up a rise. Follow us, the dead said. They were all missing a leg, hundreds of men disappearing into the woods. She wanted to follow them, but something kept her back.

”Mary.”

She was logy with sleep, unable to find a way to leave the nightmare behind.

”Wake up, Mary.”

Stipp handed his instruments over to his relief, and drunkenly took Mary by the elbow as James Blevens watched from the head of a surgery table, where he was administering chloroform. The two stumbled outside to dip their hands into the horse trough. Then they sank under a poplar tree. The Medical Department was lumbering to life; Jonathan Letterman's organization, formulated on the Peninsula, coming to fruition. He had formed wagon trains of ambulances and one was a.s.sembling on the road. In and among the wounded, fifty men were calling to one another, making decisions about who to send and who to leave behind. Mary watched them perform and envied their camaraderie. At Fairfax, she had been alone.

She said to Stipp, ”They will make mistakes.”

”Yes,” he said.

Mules pawed and brayed in a pen nearby. Steam rose from the laundry cauldrons; a crone from a nearby farm was bent over her task. From somewhere nearby came the smell of a hog roasting. For half an hour, Mary and Stipp stared at the milling crowd with their backs pressed into the corrugated bark of the tree, its little barbs and rivulets reminding them that to be alive was to know pain. Unconsciously, they clenched and unclenched their fists, working the strain out of their burning finger joints.

”Are you hungry?” Stipp asked.

”Yes,” Mary said.

Still, they did not move. Mary had an idea that she was thirsty, too, but to rise and obtain something to drink seemed an enormous task. The act of locating a cup, impossible. Finding a pump or a well, unmanageable. As if her own legs had been amputated.

”I don't know if I can do this anymore,” Mary said.

That Stipp knew she meant the work, they both understood. This is the way of love and catastrophe. Everything is evident.

”You can,” he said.

Mary turned to him and touched his face, as he had once touched hers, a long time ago. She traced the coa.r.s.e outline of his beard, ending at his lips, which opened under her fingertips, as if to joy.

He helped her to her feet. It was difficult going. He led her by the hand to the well, from which he drew a bucket of water. He gave her some to drink and then carried a bucket to a scrub of bushes that lent privacy. Stipp guarded at a discreet distance, looking away from her. On the Peninsula, there had been other women to watch: camp followers, laundresses, the coa.r.s.e and the pretty, whose relative rarity among the masculine had heightened their femininity. The light over the fields was taking on the golden edge of evening. When Mary finished was.h.i.+ng her hands and face and had poured the scarlet water onto the ground, she walked toward him, her hands scrubbed clean, her dress weighty with her futile attempts to clean it.

Far past the years of the war, when even specific memories of which battles Stipp had worked in had faded and all the faces of the wounded had coalesced into one, he would remember this moment, and the way the sun set behind Mary as she came toward him.

Chapter Fifty-two.

Five days after the battle of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln read the perfected draft of the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation to his cabinet, who, after arguing for four hours, heartily endorsed it.

On November 5, Lincoln gave orders to General Halleck to fire George McClellan, who would not follow the retreating Lee into Virginia despite direct orders.

McClellan replied that he would step down immediately, then wrote to his wife and said, ”They have made a great mistake! Alas for my poor country!”

Chapter Fifty-three.

On a day in early October, James Blevens was preparing to leave Sharpsburg. He said to Mary, ”May I kiss you good-bye?”

They were standing not far from the barn, which they were evacuating for a hospital down the road that the Medical Department was fas.h.i.+oning out of Sibley tents. It was for the injured who could not tolerate the trip over the mountains to the hospitals of Frederick. Thomas was among them; Mary and James had doted on him, but now James was leaving.

”Must you go? What if Thomas falls ill?”

Two weeks had pa.s.sed since the battle, and the men were suddenly hemorrhaging or sinking into fever. Soldiers whose flesh wounds had at first appeared to be healing would begin to complain of burning, and their wounds, previously thought inconsequential after being thoroughly probed by the hand of a surgeon, would, for mysterious reasons, suddenly begin to suppurate and require amputation. Or a primary amputation would require a second operation to ligate arteries that gushed when traction was applied to the sutures. Erysipelas-reddened tissue that then turned black and ulcerated-spread among the men, and they were languis.h.i.+ng, falling ill with pneumonia, developing fevers. James was taking skin samples back to Was.h.i.+ngton. He promised to write if he learned anything that might help. But the mystery was driving Mary mad. She had wanted to be a surgeon, had become one, but now, after the surgeries were successful, men were dying anyway.

”Always Thomas,” James said, worried for her. She was at risk, and the condition of her heart mattered more to him than almost anything else in the world.

”He is my sister's husband.”

”He is your sister's widower.”

Mary looked away, not wanting to think about that. She had been unable to save her sister, but she had saved her sister's husband, for whom she now felt an overwhelming panic. Thomas's demeanor worried her. He followed her every movement as if she had hung the moon, but something was not quite right. Day by day, she kept close watch on him, changing his dressing herself, but he displayed more vulnerability than strength. He was not the Thomas she remembered, but then she wasn't even certain she was remembering him correctly. What did she know of him, really, except that he had lost his parents, loved her sister, and foolishly reenlisted when he could have gone home?

Once, when the whiskey she had given him had not yet dulled his deep pain, he said through his teeth, ”You would not have tolerated domesticity.”

Mary let her hands fall into her lap. She was seated on the edge of his cot. ”But you loved her, didn't you?”

His gaze did not stray from her face. ”Yes,” he said. ”Yes.”