Lost Cause (7 page)

“Bah, you’re burbee if you’re a bay.”

“The girls don’t like beards,” Jack said.

“You mean Miss Hayes?”

“I mean any woman.”

“So, how many women have you kissed?”

Campbell was beginning to drool and Jack
could tell by the pain in his eyes he was becoming increasingly
uncomfortable moving his jaw. Jack figured talking was good for
him, though. Conversing made him feel normal, almost as if the
terrible wound had never happened.

“More than I can count,” Jack said. “So, tell
me more about this kin folk up in Corsicana.”

They chatted for a while then Campbell
stretched out on the bench and drifted off to sleep and Jack looked
out the window and thought about Marie Hayes.

Two days later they arrived in Laredo late in
the morning and went directly to the Texas Central rail yard. It
was a bad trip most of the way with a two hour layover in Edinburg
due to a broken wagon spoke. Collins paid for the repair declaring
that someone in power had, “damn sure better reimburse me, post
haste.” Campbell got sick at one point and threw up on the floor
but it hardly mattered because Baker had been sick on the floor on
several earlier occasions.

They unloaded at the rail office and sat on
benches in front of the office and the escort said goodbye and
headed back to Brownsville and Collins drove off in search of a
provost officer in hopes of collecting twenty-three dollars and
twelve cents for the wagon wheel he’d purchased in Edinburg.

A young boy and his even younger sister
walked by with their mother and stopped to gawk at the bandaged
soldiers for a while. The little girl wore blonde ringlets and a
cotton dress that made her look like the doll Jack had seen in a
curio shop in San Antonio in the Spring of sixty-one. The mother
was young and quite stout with pale eyes that regarded the soldiers
with mild amusement.

“Mornin’ ma’am,” Campbell said. Jack doffed
his cap and said,

“Don’t mind his garbled speech, ma’am, he
received a wound the other day fighting to defend our glorious
State.” The woman drew her children closer to her skirts and smiled
politely and moved out across the ramp toward the rail office.

“Guess she has trouble speaking too,” Jack
said. Campbell adjusted his bandages and said,

“She might have spoken if you hadn’t scared
her off.”

“How’s that?”

“That, fighting to defend the State,
nonsense.”

“Just trying to make you look good.” Campbell
spat out a wad of bloody drool.

“Good luck with that,” he said.

A soldier walked by with a canteen on his
belt and Jack asked if Campbell might have a drink and the soldier
stood patiently by while Campbell slurped down the water spilling
most of it on his blood stained shirt. They thanked the man and
Campbell offered him a dime and the soldier said it wasn’t
necessary and went on his way.

The day grew hot and the men began to wonder
if they were to sit in the heat all day waiting for someone to
collect them. Finally a squat fat man accompanied by a rail thin
nurse carrying a large satchel approached the men and introduced
themselves. “I’m Jenks,” the fat man said. “This is Nurse Lisette
Babeneaux. She’ll be attending to your wounds during the journey to
Corpus Christi.”

Nurse Lisette was a gaunt woman with brown
hair and mismatched eyes. The left iris was amber colored with
black striations and the right was as blue as the sky above her
head. Her nurse uniform was of a dark gray with a white collar that
was loose fitting and her black shoes were a maze of silver buttons
extending up her ankles to disappear under the dusty hem of her
dress. She had a tiny nose and large pale lips and virtually no
breasts. Jack thought her generally an unfortunate looking woman
but she had a confident air about her that was somehow vaguely
appealing.

She nodded curtly to the men and Jenks said,
“Our transport will be here directly. In the meantime I suggest
Nurse Lisette replace your bandages.”

Campbell wasn’t keen on the idea so the other
men went first then finally Campbell who ooohed and awwwed when she
pushed the new bandages in place. “You’re not going to be a baby
are you?” she asked. She had a strange accent that Jack couldn’t
identify. She wore an alabaster carving around her neck depicting
some obscure French big shot. “Louis Pasteur,” she explained when
she saw Jack looking.

“So you’re French?” he asked.

“French Creole. I hail from Beauregard
Parish, not far from the Texas border.”

“Interesting. You wouldn’t happen to know a
nurse called Marie Hayes would you?”

“No, sorry, I have not heard of her.”

“Charlotte Mason?”

“Oh yes, Charlotte and I went to university
together. Do you know her?”

“I know of her. Pity you never met Miss
Hayes. I know her much better.”

“She is your wife, no?”

“No.”

“Your sweetheart then?”

Campbell spoke up and said, “It’s a one way
thing. He’s sweet on her and she’s just sweet.”

“I’ll handle my own conversations, thank
you,” Jack said curtly.

Nurse Lisette went about packing up her
medical supplies and the men ate a lunch of collard greens and salt
pork and cornbread and the afternoon advanced into early evening
and finally the troop train bound for Corpus Christi pulled into
the station. The men found seats near the mail car and Jenks filled
out government forms and the nurse sat calmly reading a worn copy
of the King James Bible. Campbell sat across from her and clutched
his coat in his lap and leaned forward in his seat and said, “I
hope you like train rides, Miss Lisette.”

Chapter 11

They rolled into Corpus Christi early on the
third day and unloaded in the rail yard. An ambulance took them
through town to a hospital on Morgan Street. The ambulance was much
more comfortable than the Brownsville model and Jack found himself
actually enjoying the short ride.

As they drove along Jack saw a fruit and
vegetable market and an open air meat market and dress shops and
mercantile stores and open lots stacked with bales of cotton and
stacks of tobacco on wooden pallets marked with shipping banners
bound for the nearby sea port. The hospital loomed in the distance,
a four story brown brick structure with a dozen chimneys extending
from the top floor and all along the front facade myriad of windows
of chamfered glass reflecting the sun like a giant prism. Someone
had watered the streets to combat the dust and the air smelled
clean and fresh and free of the sulfur-like stench of gun powder so
prevalent back in Brownsville.

They pulled up to the front of the hospital
and an orderly came out and helped Nurse Lisette step down from the
ambulance. He was a dark man with gray sideburns and strong arms
and a calming smile. “I’ll get a stretcher for the leg wound,” he
said referring to Baker who was missing a kneecap.

He retuned with a companion and a stretcher
and lifted Baker from the ambulance and placed him on the stretcher
and Baker yelled, “easy!” and the orderly smiled his calming smile
and they took the grumbling soldier inside.

A tall officer with mutton chop whisker came
out and he and Jenks shook hands. Jenks handed the man the forms
he’d filled out and introduced Nurse Lisette. “Lisette Babeneaux,”
he said. “She’ll be staying on to augment your staff.”

“Splendid,” the man said. He was Major Henry
Ballard, hospital administrator. “The rest of you please come in
and we’ll get you registered.

An elderly woman with loose red hair
fashioned in a bun parted in the middle met them at a counter
painted white and stenciled with black letters that read,
REGISTRATION. Major Ballard handed them off to the woman and he and
Jenks departed down a long hallway presumably to his office.

“Help you?” the red headed woman asked.

“The major said we need to register,”
Campbell said answering for the group. The woman looked confused
and opened and closed her mouth a couple of times.

“I can’t understand you,” she said. “I didn’t
get that.”

“He said we need to register,” Jack said. “He
was wounded in the jaw a few days ago defending our glorious State
on the field of battle.” Campbell rolled his eyes and Nurse Lisette
said,

“These men are from Brownsville. I’m the
nurse responsible for their care. Can we please register and find
them rooms?” The woman shook her head.

“None of the rooms are ready. We aren’t
expecting any new patients. No one told me.”

“What about the man they just brought in? The
one with the injured leg?”

“They took him upstairs to surgery. He got
the last operating room.” Lisette looked around the lobby her eyes
narrowed in thought.

“Any space will do,” she said. “These men are
tired and injured, we need to get them off their feet.”

“Just a moment.”

The woman opened a door to a room behind the
counter and went inside. She returned a moment later with a black
man dressed in a brown shirt and white pants and told him to take
the group up to the fourth floor to an open air ward. “Foll’er me,
he said.

They walked down a long hallway and up a wide
set of steps and entered a large room with a row of shuttered
windows. The ward was unoccupied and smelled strongly of chloroform
and wet cotton. A faint trace of urine hung in the cloistered air
making it uncomfortable to breathe. There were eight empty beds
lined up in a row against the south wall and six more on the north
wall. The center lane was clear of obstructions but tables
containing water pitchers and basins and chamber pots with
porcelain lids stood between each set of beds.

“I kin open da windas’,” the black man said.
“And I kin git somebody to put sheets on some of dem bed mattresses
fer you.”

Nurse Lisette said that was a fine idea and
the man went to the windows and opened the shutters and threw open
the sashes and warm, fresh air flooded the room bringing with it
the smell of honeysuckles and roasting pork.

The man left the room and presently the red
headed women appeared with an arm load of bed clothing and towels.
She placed them on a long table by the door and when a young black
girl entered the room directed her to make up the beds on the north
wall. “Will these quarters be adequate?” the red haired woman asked
Nurse Lisette.

“For now. Where’s the rest of your
staff?”

“On the third floor. It’s meal time, ma’am.
Some of the wounded can not feed themselves.”

“You’re German, aren’t you?”

“And you are French.”

“Ah, but we’re both Americans now.”

“Are we? There’s a rebellion going on. We do
not know what we will be when this conflict ends.”

“If it ever does end,” Jack interjected. “You
think we can sit down somewhere until that girl gets done making
the beds?”

The German woman left to find a staff nurse
and the girl went about making the beds. She had a nice face, dark
and shiny, and she moved with a graceful swiftness that reminded
Jack of a young hart frolicking in the fields above his cabin back
home. She soon had fresh bedding on all the beds and then placed
towels and cotton shirts on each pillow. As she was leaving the
room with the soiled laundry Jack slipped a nickel into her hand
and she smiled broadly displaying impeccably white teeth and Jack
thought she was an absolutely beautiful young woman.

“You just wasted your money,” Campbell said
when she’d gone. “Whoever her master or overseer is will just take
it from her.” As of late Jack was getting better at understanding
Campbell’s garbled speech.

“Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe she’ll hide it
somewhere.”

“Even if she did, she could never spend it.
When’s the last time you saw a slave buying something on their
own?”

“Guess you’re right. Damn, now I want my
nickel back.”

The red headed woman whose name turned out to
be Ana Steckel returned a few minutes later and Nurse Lisette went
with her to meet the head nurse and to arrange for some food for
the men.

Jack made himself comfortable on the bed he’d
selected and kicked off his boots. The mattress was firm and quite
comfortable, a fact he deeply appreciated. He lay very still barely
breathing, savoring the scented breeze wafting through the open
windows happy to be in less pain now that he was off his feet.
After a while he was thirsty and he sat up and helped himself to
the water pitcher beside his bed. Campbell stirred on the bed next
to him. “Pour me one will you.”

“Can you drink it, or will you drown yourself
trying?”

“Your humor kills me, Saylor. Just pour the
water.”

Jack poured and Campbell drank and as Jack
had predicted, he spilled most of it down his fresh cotton
shirt.”

“They’re going to have to get you a straw,”
Jack said. Campbell threw the tin cup across the floor and jumped
to his feet.

“Can some one please come in here and change
this bloody damn bandage!” he shouted. Startled, Jack put a hand on
Campbell’s shoulder but the man pushed it away and went to the door
leading out to the hallway. “Nurse! Someone! Anyone!” he
shouted.

Jack saw a woman in a nurse’s uniform walk
into the room completely ignoring Campbell and walked over to
Jack’s bed. The woman was young and pretty. Her eyes were so blue
they appeared black in the natural light of the spacious room. She
carried a large leather bag with zippered pockets on the sides.

“Hello,” Jack said.

“Hello,” the nurse said. “A doctor will be in
directly. In the mean time, I’m to clean your wounds and check your
bandages. What happened to you anyway?”

“I was shot. I’m a soldier. I went into
battle and someone shot me.”