Fire by Night (24 page)
His labored breathing grew more erratic as his life slipped away. He no longer had enough strength to cough. Julia ached for him, prayed for him, promised him that he would wake up in paradise with Jesus, where there would be no more pain or tears.
Hours passed. Ellis Miller closed his eyes a final time. He exhaled a sigh—and he was gone.
Julia held her own breath as a holy silence filled the room, pouring into the space that had been filled with his painful breathing only seconds ago. She bowed her head, overwhelmed—not only by the perfect peace that had settled over Ellis in his final moments, but also by the peace that engulfed her. For the first time in her life, Julia felt God’s loving presence surrounding her. He was pleased with her.
“…Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren,”
He seemed to say,
“ye have done it unto me…”
Julia finally released Ellis’ limp hand. She gently pulled the sheet over his face and then fled the room.
Hiram stood waiting in the darkened hallway, a shadowy figure who opened his arms to her, offering comfort. She went to him and buried her face on his chest, weeping. She felt his arms encircling her. He held her tenderly, never saying a word, his hands warm against her back.
When her grief was exhausted, Julia slowly became aware that Hiram’s expensive shirt felt oddly coarse beneath her cheek. His arms felt different, too. His height and his scent were not as she remembered them when they’d danced earlier. She drew back and looked up. Dr. McGrath was holding her.
His arms fell to his sides as he released her. Then he moved past her without a word and went into the wardroom.
Julia found Hiram Stone outside on the front step, smoking a cigarette. The rain had finally stopped. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You needn’t have waited.”
He tossed the cigarette to the ground and crushed it with his shoe. “I’ll take you home.”
Tears continued to roll down Julia’s face as they drove, and she wiped them away with her fingers. Hiram pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into her hand.
“It’s wrong to put yourself through such a harrowing ordeal, Julia. You’re much too tenderhearted for this sort of work. I wish I could spare you …protect you. Please, promise me you’ll go home to Philadelphia with Congressman Rhodes. I’ll travel by steamer from Bridgeport to visit you.”
It sounded so tempting—to leave all this suffering behind, to go home and resume the life she’d always known. She’d promised her father she would take courting seriously when she returned, and Hiram Stone was a very tempting suitor.
But the afterglow of God’s peace and presence still warmed her, like the coals of a fading fire, and she longed to rekindle those flames, to feel God’s benediction once again, more than she longed for home.
“I can’t go home, Hiram.”
“But what you went through tonight—you should be sheltered from such ugliness.”
“It wasn’t ugly at all.” Yes, it had been difficult and heartrending, yet God’s presence had transformed the moment of death into something holy. He had been with her and with Ellis Miller.
For most of her life, Julia had sought to please people—her parents, her social peers, handsome suitors like Nathaniel Greene and Hiram Stone. But for the first time she understood that nothing was as important as pleasing God, feeling His blessing on her life.
“I don’t want to go home,” she said. “I don’t want to be sheltered, and I don’t want to quit nursing. Don’t you see, Hiram? Tonight, for the first time in my life, I did something that truly mattered.”
When Julia arrived at the hospital the following afternoon, Ellis Miller’s bed was empty. His knapsack and other meager belongings lay piled on the bare mattress. Mrs. Nichols came to Julia and put her arm around her shoulders.
“That was a lovely thing you did, coming back to stay with him that way until he passed on. Would you be able to write a little note to his mother so we could send it with his things?”
“Of course. Only …I promised Ellis that I would send her a lock of his hair.”
“I took care of it,” she said, pulling an envelope from her pocket. She looked up at Julia’s tears and said, “You’ll never get used to watching one of your boys die, my dear …but it does get easier in time.”
They sat down on the bed together and had just begun sorting through Ellis’ things when Mrs. Fowle came to the door and motioned them out into the hallway. “I have wonderful news, ladies,” she whispered. “We’re getting a new doctor.”
“It’s about time,” Mrs. Nichols said with a sigh. “Are they tossing that old drunkard back in jail?”
“No, someone from the Surgeon General’s office came this morning and told Dr. McGrath he was needed on the Peninsula as a field surgeon. He’s downstairs packing right now.”
“Good riddance to him.”
“The new doctor is supposed to be arriving later today.”
Julia was barely listening. Memories of the Battle of Bull Run flashed through her mind, and with them came an overpowering conviction that she was also needed at the field hospital, not here tending measles. It was no longer a matter of proving herself to Nathaniel Green or escaping the boredom of her high-society life. It was what God commanded in His Word: “…Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these…”
“I need to talk to Dr. McGrath before he leaves,” she said, excusing herself. She hurried downstairs to his office and found him packing all his medical instruments into a beautiful wooden case that was open on his desk, placing each item—knives, forceps, scissors, probes, scalpels—into its specially made compartment.
“Dr. McGrath, may I go to the field hospital with you?” she asked.
“What a perfectly ridiculous question,” he said without looking up. He packed a knife that he had been using for a letter opener, then picked up the odd trumpetlike instrument that Julia had learned was a stethoscope. “The answer is
no
.”
“Why not?”
“The army has no use for a nurse who will faint when the blood starts to flow.”
“I’m prepared.”
“No, you are
not
prepared, my nai
ve Mrs. Hoffman. Even I am not prepared for what’s about to happen. Treating measles is one thing. The battlefield is hell on earth. You’ve had your fun playing nurse. We’ll be sure to tell the brave Lieutenant Hoffman what a good little nurse his wife was. But now the game is going to get rough. You would not be able to cope.”
“How do you know that? What makes you so sure?” Julia had no sooner said the words than she remembered how she had fallen to pieces in the doctor’s arms last night. She was offering him the perfect opportunity to humiliate her. But to her enormous surprise and relief, the doctor never mentioned the incident.
“In your daily social rounds back home in Philadelphia,” he said, “did you have a lot of experience with blown-off limbs and spilled guts? Did you watch an amputation or two while you sipped your afternoon tea?” He opened a drawer in the wooden case while he spoke and lifted out a stainless steel saw, testing the jagged teeth with his thumb before fitting the instrument back into place.
Julia swallowed. “I witnessed the battle of Bull Run.”
“You did nursing work there?”
She didn’t answer.
“I thought not. Go home. You’ve had your fun. The real doctors and nurses will have work to do, and we won’t have time to pick you up off the ground every time you faint, or wipe the vomit off your face so you can get back to work.”
He fastened the latches and set the case on his chair, then began clearing his desk. As he stacked discharge papers and requisition forms into neat piles, Julia saw the top of his desk for the first time. Then he opened a leather satchel and packed the photograph of his wife and daughter without even glancing at it. He pulled a pile of letters tied with string from a desk drawer and tossed them in, then added another letter, written on identical stationery, which had arrived from New Haven in the morning mail. He hadn’t even opened it.
Julia wished she knew if he was the doctor Hiram Stone had described. If she had been certain, she would have said,
“I know what happened in New Haven. I know why you ran away,”
and he would have been forced to let her come with him. But Julia couldn’t take that chance. If he wasn’t the same doctor, she’d make a fool of herself.
“If you don’t think I’m ready for field work,” she finally said, “then let me help some other way.”
“Women do not belong anywhere near the battlefield, especially women of your social class. The army won’t allow it, and neither will I.” He stopped working to stare at the top of his desk for a long moment, then turned to Julia. “What I cannot comprehend is why you would even want to go.”
Julia didn’t know why herself, except that she longed for what she had experienced last night—the joy of being used by God, of doing something that truly mattered. Instead, she said the first lie she could think of.
“Robert …my h-husband …is in Richmond. When our troops liberate the city, I want to be there to help him and the other prisoners.”
Dr. McGrath came around from behind his desk. As he moved toward Julia she instinctively backed away until, without realizing it, she stood in the hallway outside his office.
“Nice try,” he told her. “The answer is still
no
.”
He closed the door in her face.
“Ain’t that the most peculiar thing you ever saw?” Phoebe asked. She stood beside Ted, shading her eyes against the morning sun, watching as Professor Thaddeus Lowe’s observation balloon, the
Intrepid,
filled with air.
“Hang on to those lines, boys!” the professor shouted. “Don’t let go!”
Phoebe and the other volunteers gripped the guide ropes as two horse-drawn hydrogen generators pumped warm air through the hoses and into the balloon. The giant air-filled bubble swelled into a globe, then lifted up, coming to life before Phoebe’s eyes.
“Do you really think it will fly?” she asked Ted.
“Sure. I heard they’ve been using observation balloons for some time now. They can look right into the Rebels’ camps and even count how many soldiers and cannons they have.”
“Get in, General. Quick,” Professor Lowe shouted, beckoning to General Fitz-John Porter. “It’s ready to go.” The general climbed into a large basket that was fastened to the balloon with ropes. He clung to the sides of the basket for dear life as it began to bounce along the ground, then finally lifted off. The guide ropes tugged against Phoebe’s hands.
“Would you go up in that thing?” she asked Ted as they watched the huge cloth bubble slowly carry the general into the sky.
“Hey, I think it would be fun—as long as I’d still be tied to the ground, like he is. Even after he gets too high for these guide ropes, he’s going to be tethered by that long rope over there. He can’t go far, and they can always pull him back.”
The professor signaled for Phoebe and the others to release their ropes, and the balloon climbed to treetop height, drifting north on the wind.
“Ain’t he afraid the Rebels will shoot at him?” Phoebe asked.
“I guess they’ve tried it a few times already. Good thing they’ve always missed.”
Phoebe tried to imagine what it would be like to soar high in the air like that and look down on the world from above. Her stomach made a little flip at the idea. Even so, she thought she’d like to try it once if she ever got the chance.
The odd contraption continued its slow rise into the sky, the anchoring rope swiftly unraveling like kite string. But when the balloon was about one hundred feet above the ground, the tethering rope suddenly snapped. Phoebe heard a collective gasp. Professor Lowe and all the others watched in horror as General Porter sailed gracefully north toward Richmond, unhindered.
For a long moment, everyone seemed too stunned to speak. Then Ted grabbed Phoebe’s arm and towed her toward Professor Lowe. “Hey, my friend Ike is a first-rate sharpshooter. Want him to shoot that thing down for you?”
“No!” One of the general’s aides blocked their path as if Ted had suggested she shoot at Porter himself, not at the balloon. “We can’t take a chance on him hitting the general.”