March (22 page)

But I was running the wrong way, right into the sights of the major, who stepped out of the smoke just a few yards from us, his rifle raised and aimed. I flinched, anticipating the blast, and turned my body to shield the child. But he uttered a curse, and staggered, and the shot went wide. In the swirling fog I saw Canning, prone at the major’s feet. He had dragged himself the few yards to where the major stood and, with his last strength, struck at the man’s ankle with a jagged rock. The major kicked out at him. His boot thudded into Canning’s blood-encrusted head. Then he reached for his pistol, bent down, and shot Canning in the face at point-blank range.

“Ethan!” I screamed, and the major raised his pistol at me. I tossed Cilia away from me and felt a thump, like a hard punch, in my side. Then the sound of the blast. Funny, I thought, as I dropped to my knees. The sound was so late... I pitched forward, facedown, inches from a burning coal. I stared at the red-orange heart of it, watching it throb inside the blackened wood. I thought: this is the last thing I’ll ever see. The shouting and screams seemed to oscillate with the pulse of the fire in the coal: loud, then soft, then loud, and then silence.

 

 

It was daylight, and I lay prone in the clearing. There was a buzzing. I could not raise my head. I smelled acrid smoke. Through a blur, I saw bodies. Cato’s, and another of the irregulars. Ethan’s corpse. May, prone in her own blood. Little Cilla, lying on her side with her knees pulled up, as if she were sleeping. Except that her gut had been laid open with a bayonet and her entrails lay in a glossy pile beside her. And on every corpse, a seething, humming mass of blue-green flies. A deep gray wave rolled slowly across the clearing. I did not fight it. I had no wish to wake to this. The wave rolled over me and I let go, into its deeps.

 

Darkness. Moving. Rocking, back and forth. The ground came up at me and receded. Leaf litter. My hand touched coarse hide. Pain wracked every part of me. I let go again into unconsciousness.

 

Night. No more movement. Flickering firelight. I tried to raise my head. The world spun. Darkness.

 

Rocking again. A grassy track. Tree shadows. The rich, muddy scent of the river.

 

 

 

Daylight. Still, at last. Underneath me, leaves. Above, a blur of branches. My eyes focused on a single leaf, turned before its time. Scarlet and gold. The color throbbed against a sky of brilliant blue. All that beauty. That immensity. And it will exist, even when I am not here to look at it. Marmee will see it, still. And my little women. That, I suppose, is the meaning of grace. Grace.

 

Night. A fire. Shivering.

“Cold.”

The word came out of me in a voice I couldn’t recognize as my own. My nose was congested with dried blood. Zannah turned from paring at some fresh-dug root and hurried to my side, laying a coarse hand on my brow Her face was wan and streaked with dirt. She stood and pulled the saddle cloth off the tethered mule. She wrapped the stiffened fabric round me. It smelled of sweat and stables.

Another night, or the same one. A scent of roasting grain. Zannah turned from the fire holding a small, battered pan. She fingered the mush into my mouth. I tried to swallow, but the stuff burned my raging throat and lodged there. She gave me water. It might as well have been lava.

“Where are the others?” My voice was a rasp.

She looked down and shook her head.

“Jimse?”

Tears sprang to her eyes and cut shiny rivulets down her dirt-smeared cheeks. She undid the button that held her soiled shirt tight at her wrist and drew out a cluster of tight-curled ringlets. She held them against her face and began keening. I reached for her but my body was wracked with tremors and my arms seemed too heavy to lift. She dropped her head into my lap. I laid a trembling hand on the turquoise scarf that covered her hair. I remembered the merry laughter of her little boy, the day she had first put it on. I touched the locks of hair she grasped so tightly in her hand. He had been as much a part of her as her own skin. How could she bear this loss, on top of so many others? I closed my eyes, and when I opened them it was morning. She had cried herself to sleep in my lap. When I stirred, she woke, sat up, drove her fists into her eyes, and got to her feet, heavily. Jimse’s ringlets were still clasped in her hand. She was about to put them back into her sleeve when she paused, separated out a small ringlet, and pressed it into my palm. I raised it to my lips and kissed it.

Much later, I asked about Jesse. She held out her two hands, locked at the wrists, mimicking manacles.

“The others?”

Manacles again.

“You are the only one who got away?”

She nodded, her eyes filling.

“And you came back, and found me? Zannah, I ...”

She shook her head sharply, placed a hand on my mouth, and turned to load the mule. I was watching her through the heat haze of the waning fire when the fever rose and took me away.

 

When I woke again I was flat on my back. The rocking movement now was gentle, like a cradle. A strong smell of lye bit at my nostrils. There was a rough gray blanket tucked tight around me. As my eyes focused, I saw a billow of gauze. There was a curtained window, and beyond, bright sky. Black embers leapt upward against the blue. Something-an engine?-throbbed. The light hurt my eyes and I closed them. When I opened them again, it was to a swirl of black fabric and a gentle noise,
click-clack,
like marbles hitting each other.

And then, that most unexpected thing, a woman’s face-a white woman’s face, encircled by a pale wimple-peering at me.

“There, now, rest easy,” she said. I tried to raise my head but she pushed me gently back against-of all things-a pillow. “Don’t try to talk. You’ve been very ill-you still are.”

“I was shot.”

“A bullet grazed you. But that’s healed. It’s the fever that’s troubling you now.”

“How ... how did I get here? And where am I? And who are you?”

She smiled. She was not a young woman. Her narrow face was heavily lined, plain almost to the point of repulsion. But to me she looked like an angel.

“You’re aboard the hospital ship, the Red
Rover.
I’m Sister Mary Adela. We are a nursing order, the nuns of the Holy Cross. We are taking you north. You’re safe now.”

Safe? I thought. I will never be safe. But what I said was, “How?”

“Shhh. Too many questions,” she said, but kindly. She took my wrist in a gentle hand, feeling for my pulse. The dull brown beads of her rosary hung from the waist of her voluminous black habit. They rattled gently as she moved to fix my pillow.

“A colored girl—a mute, the men said she was-brought you into the federal lines. The pickets took you for her master-called you a secesh and wanted to drive you away, but she wouldn’t have it. Stood her ground, even when they aimed their guns at her. She was determined to make them understand. They said she pulled off her scarf in the end and picked a bit of burned stick from their fire and wrote this upon it. We saved it for you.”

My vision was blurry, and the charcoal marks on the blue-green fabric blurrier still. But etched on the filthy piece of turquoise satin I could make out the quavering letters:

I wept then, stinging sobs that gave way to violent coughing. The sister bent over me and reached past the long rosary into a deep pocket of her habit. She held a white cloth under my chin. I raised speckles of bloody phlegm all over it. The last thing I saw was the nun’s face, frowning with concern, turning to call for the surgeon.

PART TWO

Jo read aloud, in a frightened voice,

 

MRS. MARCH:

 

 

 

Your husband is very ill. Come at once.

 

S. Hale,

Blank Hospital, Washington.

 

-Louisa May Alcott,
Little Women

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Blank Hospital

I told him to go. I didn’t cry at our parting. I said that I was giving my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone, and shed them in private. I told the girls we had no right to complain, when we each of us had merely done our duty and will surely be happier for it in the end. They were hollow words then and all the more so now. For what happiness will there be if he dies in this wretched place? What happiness, even if he recovers?

It is quieter here, now that the bustle of the day’s routines has begun to ebb. The seconds tick by, marked by the drip of the drenching water cooling the dressings of the wounded. In the sickly yellow glare of the gaslight, I gaze at his face-for what else have I to do here? I study him, and I wonder where the face has gone that I loved so much: the face that belied his age when I first saw him, all on fire in my brother’s pulpit. I thought then that it was rare to hear such ferocious words issuing from such a benign visage. He looked like an angel such as the Italians sometimes paint-all golden hair and gold-bronze skin, youthful and venerable at one and the same time, his expression informed by a passionate nature that spoke of both innocence and experience.

And all those years later, as I watched him going off to war at the ridiculous age of thirty-nine, he looked young to me, still. When I caught glimpses of him, smiling and waving among the press at the windows of the departing troop car, I thought that there were boy-soldiers all around him who wore their age more heavily than he.

It was folly to let him go. Unfair of him to ask it of me. And yet one is not permitted to say such a thing; it is just one more in the long list of things that a woman must not say. A sacrifice such as his is called noble by the world. But the world will not help me put back together what war has broken apart.

Aunt March was the only one of all of us who dared to utter the truth. When I got her note, wrapped around the money I was obliged to beg of her to pay for this journey, I read it and burned it. I saw Hannah’s eyes on me as I balled up the paper and cast it into the grate. She thought I was angry with Aunt March. The truth: I was angry at myself, for not having had the courage to stand aside from the crying up of this war and say, No. Not this way. You cannot right injustice by injustice. You must not defame God by preaching that he wills young men to kill one another. For what manner of God could possibly will what I see here? There are Confederates lying in this hospital, they say; so there is union at last, a united states of pain. Did God will the mill-town lad in the next ward to be shot, or to run a steel blade through the bowels of the farmhand who now lies next to him?-a poor youth, maybe, who never kept a slave?

But I said none of this a year ago, when it might have mattered. It was easy then to convince one’s conscience that the war would be over in ninety days, as the president said; to reason that the price paid in blood would justify the great good we were so sure we would obtain. To lift the heel of cruel oppression from the necks of the suffering! Ninety days of war seemed a fair payment. What a corrupt accounting it was. I still believe that removing the stain of slavery is worth some suffering-but whose? If our forefathers make the world awry, must our children be the ones who pay to right it?

When I saw him stand up on that tree stump in the cattle ground, surrounded by the avid faces of the young, I knew that as he spoke to them, he was thinking that it was unfair to lay the burden so fully on that innocent generation. I could see the look of love for those boys in his eyes, and I saw also that the moment was carrying him away. I raised my arms to him, imploring him not to say the words that I knew were forming in his mind. He looked me full in the face, he saw my tears, and he ignored them and did as he pleased. And then I in my turn had to pretend to be pleased by my hero of a husband. When he stepped down, and came to me, I could not speak. I took his hand and dug my nails into the flesh of it, wanting to hurt him for the hurt he was inflicting upon me.

I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.

The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother—“Come back with your shield or on it,” she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat.

Thank God that I have daughters only, and no sons. How would I bear it if Meg were now a soldier at sixteen, and the prospect of this war stretching into years, so that Jo, too, might come of age while it yet rages? As it is, I have had to hide my mental reservations from them, to show a strong and certain face, to spare them my despair and never let them see that I doubted their father and his choices.

What is left of him? What remains, now that war and disease have worked their dreadful alchemy? I could see the change in him, even before I heard the mutterings of his delirium. When they directed me to him this afternoon, I thought they had sent me to the wrong bedside. Truly, I did not know him.

All our years together, even the difficult ones, had succeeded in drawing only pleasant lines upon his face: the marks of laughter that webbed the corners of his eyes and etched a deep parenthesis as brackets for his smile. But the months we have spent apart have carved for him a different face entirely.

Will I ever see him smile again?

I felt a hand on my shoulder and realized that I must have murmured this last thought aloud.

“Do not torment yourself with these bleak questions, Mrs. March. It is fatigue that raises them. You are very tired; shall we not go and seek out your lodging?”

I turned, and he was there at my side, where he has been almost every hour since the arrival of that dreadful telegraph. I see that he, too, is pale and drawn from the exhaustions of our hasty journey and his efforts since our arrival, and his brown eyes are full of concern.

“I do not like to leave him...”

“There is nothing more you can do for him here, and the night nurse seems capable. I have spoken with her. In any case, she says, they require all visitors to leave at nine o’clock, when they turn down the gaslights.”

“Well,” I said, my tone plaintive, “let us stay at least until then, for it is not so very long.” I lifted the hand that lay limp on the coverlet and pressed it to my cheek. I heard the thump of crutches on bare floorboards as the ambulatory patients made their way to their beds and the night nurse readied her charges for sleep.

Mr. Brooke took a deep breath, like a sigh. Poor Mr. Brooke. I am afraid my good neighbor Mr. Laurence has laid a difficult commission upon him, and he feels his responsibilities too keenly. On our journey, he confided that he intends to join the army directly his duties as tutor end next fall, when Laurie goes to college. I wanted to say, No! Serve your country as you are now, by molding young minds, not by shattering young bodies. But once again, I did not speak. I lacked the courage. It cannot be easy for him to see what he sees here, the broken boys writhing in their beds. How can he not imagine himself among them? And yet, at twenty-eight, he has had a long experience of making his own way in the world, and is a grave and silent man who thinks a good deal more than he speaks.

“Mrs. March, we would be wise to set out now. The capital and its surrounds are notorious for a lack of policing, and I am afraid that Georgetown in particular has an unfortunate reputation. I have been informed that drinking places, are ordered closed at a half past nine, and they say there can be, well, a good deal of unseemly behavior on the streets at that hour. I should like to see you safely to your room.”

What could I say? The young man seemed so tired and anxious. So I took a last long look at my husband and laid my hand against his hot forehead, hoping that it was tenderness I transmitted, and not this smoldering anger.

As I stood, a wave of weakness swept over me, so that I was glad for the steadying hand of Mr. Brooke. In truth, I hope never again to undertake a journey such as the one that brought us here. Meg is always saying that November is the most disagreeable month of the year, and I believe that ever after this I will be obliged to concur with her. Such a bitter, frostbitten morning, when Mr. Brooke came for me and we set out-was it two days since, or three?-after a night of sleepless anxiety. I could find no rest, but paced the house, looking at my little women as they slept-Jo’s fresh-cropped head upon the pillow made her look like a boy, as she lay next to Meg, who is become so suddenly womanly. For a moment, I gasped, and realized that it might not be so very long before Meg takes her place in the bed of some young man. I wondered if, when that time came, she would still have a father at her wedding to give her away.

In the adjoining room, little Beth and Amy looked like sleeping babes, too young to be abandoned by their mother, even with sensible Hannah and our kind neighbor to watch over them. All these thoughts jostled with each other and with the overwhelming fear of what news would greet me here, and so even when I lay down I could not close my eyes. Instead, I sat up, relit the lamp, and mended hose till I heard Hannah, dear soul, long before dawn, readying a hot breakfast which I could barely eat.

My eyes ached and stung as I tried to make a composed farewell. The girls were uncommonly brave: none of them cried and all of them sent loving messages to their father, knowing very well that I might arrive at his bedside too late to deliver them. I barely knew where I stepped as we made our way from the carriage to the car, passing among children, fretting and crying, the wan-faced women and the men, smoking and spitting. I was glad to reach the boat at New London where, behind the curtain of my berth, I was able at last to give way to some private tears.

In the morning, red-eyed and unrested, we made our way to the filthy depot in New Jersey, and found our car amid the racket of truck horses and swearing porters. We rattled past the crape-decked homes of Philadelphia and on through the coal-blackened expanse of Baltimore. As we left that city, there were pickets along the rail lines and one felt the war approaching like an oncoming storm. Everywhere, troops and wagons; caissons; and tents, tents, and more tents-pale cities of them-the cold and cheerless cloth houses of our army, whitening the countryside like drifts of snow.

It was raining at noon, when we finally arrived in Washington. A cold drizzle fell from heavily swagged clouds that seemed to lower on the unfinished Capitol like the lid of an upholstered box. I asked that we go directly to the hospital, for if the news was the worst I wished to hear it soonest. Mr. Brooke had obtained directions to the place, which had been a hotel before the multiple disasters at Manassas and on the Peninsula. The wreckage of our army has claimed the city’s colleges and churches; even, so they say, the space between the curiosity cabinets of the Patent Office. It was fortunate that Mr. Brooke had thought to inquire in particular detail, for the first hackman was an overbearing rogue who insisted that he went our way, and I should have believed him, had not Mr. Brooke intelligently interrogated the man and learned that his destination was the other side of the city altogether. When Mr. Brooke chided him for an attempted swindle, the hackman swore, and said how should he be expected to know, since every day a hospital seemed to spring up in some new place, and his confusion was honestly come by.

When at last we found a hackman who was bound in our direction, Mr. Brooke could not forbear from pointing out to me the president’s house, from which carriages rolled forth into an avenue that was become a river of mud. All I could notice was the blight of this place: the pigs wandering the streets and dead horses bloating by the roadside. Even the live horses look half-dead, so careless are the teamsters who have charge of them. And there are so many Negroes everywhere. In Concord we are used to see but one or two colored citizens, carefully dressed and decorous in manner. But Washington is flooded by the ragged remnants of slavery, contraband cast up here to eke what existence they may. I felt a pang for the little bootblacks, crying out for trade and going without, for what profligate person would spend half a nickel to tend to his boots in this world of mud?

And all that rises from the slough is ramshackle or unfinished, so that it looks already ruined. We passed the obelisk meant to honor the father of the nation. It rises like a broken pencil, not one-third built, and beneath it the dressed stones piled here and there, grass grown up all around. The few finished buildings face each other, visions of lost grandeur, a Leptis Magna without the blue backdrop of a Mediterranean sky.

It came to me that if the fortunes of this war do not turn, then maybe the city is destined to be no more than this: ruins, merely, sinking back into the swamp; the shards of an optimistic moment when a few dreamers believed you could build a nation upon ideas such as liberty and equality.

These despairing thoughts turned to dread at the moment the hackman cried out “Blank Hotel!” and Mr. Brooke handed me down before a great pile of a building, a flag fluttering before it and a number of uniformed men milling at the door. Leaving Mr. Brooke to grapple with my heavy old black trunk, I forced my feet to mount the steps. The sentinel touched his cap with grave formality. He must see many such as I, wives soon to hear that they are widows, walking up this stair toward their news.

A Negro boy-are there no end to these people?-opened the door. The interior stank-boiled cabbage and chamber pots, rot and sweat and unwashed bodies-a hideous brew made worse by a heat like Bombay. I saw that they had nailed shut the tall windows, so not a breath of crisp air stirred the miasma. A slender Negro woman, tidy, at least, reassuringly unlike the slatterns I had noticed in the street, passed me carrying a tray of instruments.