My Name Is Mary Sutter (31 page)

Chapter Forty

18th May, 1862

Near the Chickahominy River

Dear James,

I’ve managed to scrounge ink and paper, a small miracle in this mess. The Peninsula is a bog of freezing mud and malaria at the best of times; so many men are sick from measles and mumps that we send them away on hospital ships never to return, to say nothing of the malingerers who study symptoms more than they study war.

How are your hands? You are a damned lucky beast that your burns prevented your coming here, though God knows we need you. Thirty contract surgeons from New York and Philadelphia have replaced the hundred regimental doctors who’ve fallen ill, but I have no faith in these new arrivals. Most haven’t seen a scalpel since medical school, if they ever saw one there.

The battles are sharp and furious. We march on Richmond, but it is a folly of an advance; the other day we had to detour twenty miles around a river that no one knew was there. When the wounded finally reach me, they have been dragged over mud and through swamps. It is butchery, every bit of it.

Stipp lifted his pen. He wished he were writing to Mary, if only for solace. God, he was tired. He was so tired. All these men, dying, acres upon acres of them, and there were maybe six, seven surgeons who could do the work. What was he expected to do?

He dipped his pen again into the ink and continued writing.

Neither are there sufficient numbers of ambulances; your friend Tripler daily complains that the four-wheeled ambulances he so loves have not arrived. We use the bone-jarring two-wheeled ambulances, and the injured are near dead by the time I see them, if they ever get to me, for the roads are a sea of mud. We have great difficulty getting supplies. Scurvy is rampant. We beg for potatoes; they send us cartridges. The hospital tents are circuses of rope and rigging; it takes days to put up just one, and then we must take them down and move again. The trains, when they do come, are nothing but cattle cars; we have no means to fit them up to transport the injured.

But this is nothing compared to the injuries I have seen. I seem to be able to save only those who sustain gunshot wounds to their limbs, while the rest die. I attempted to remove a bullet from a liver. Shocking how much blood. We are making it all up as we go. Who has seen such infernal violence before? Napoleon, perhaps. How the men suffer.

On a less important note, I am curious to know if you have found Mary. Have you tried searching the hospitals? When you came to see me the night Willie Lincoln died, I was certain that Mary wouldn’t stay away long, but now I worry that something has happened. You must reassure me that you have found her and that she is fine. I’d hoped she would return to her mother, but I’ve no way of knowing if she has.

Write me when you have found her.

Take care, Blevens. You will find a use yet for those hands.

Yours most sincerely,

William Stipp

When you have found her.
He was giving himself away. On the night of Willie Lincoln’s death, when he had told Blevens that Mary had disappeared, he had barely been able to contain himself. He hesitated another moment before scratching out the line entirely, holding the letter up to the air to let the ink blot dry in the spring evening.

Folding the letter into its envelope, Stipp wrote out Blevens’s address on Pennsylvania Avenue, both envying and pitying his protégé, who in his handicap wished to be here, but to his great fortune was not. He struggled into his mud-covered boots before embarking on the fool’s errand of trying to find a way to post the letter, finally collaring a lieutenant who promised to send it with Tripler’s latest complaint to the new surgeon general, William Hammond, about the disaster that was McClellan’s campaign.

Two weeks later, Blevens opened the letter in his rooms on Pennsylvania Avenue. They resembled his rooms in the Staats House so closely that some days he awoke and thought he was back in Albany. These he had furnished mostly with tables, across which he had accumulated a dozen specimens of tissue and bone. He was studying maceration technique on bone structure, using a rating system to determine the best method and its effect on ensuing bone quality. So far, a combination of bleach, hydrogen peroxide, hydrochloric acid, boiling water, and soap followed by degreasing proved least injurious to the anatomical integrity of the larger bones, which were the main subject of his inquiry. Thankfully, the cats and dogs of Swampdoodle were forever dying in the alleys, his old mainstay supply; he had discarded the failures into the City Canal so as to not alarm his landlord, whose suspicion had run high when he inspected Blevens’s rooms on short notice in early April and discovered his jugs of chemicals. Blevens recalled Stipp, the cat slung across his desk:
Yes, that’s it, but for God’s sake, don’t saw.

Also on his desk was a list of all the hospitals in the city, from the permanent to the temporary, the Ladies’ Seminary to the Insane Asylum. He had searched each one twice, running his eyes over the wards in search of Mary, though he claimed to the nosy hospital matrons to be searching only for tissue samples.

In his reply, Blevens was brief:

Dear William,

I was of little use at the Patent Office. The army has furloughed me for the time, until my hands declare themselves. They remain stiff and clumsy; I content myself with research, but I am ashamed when I hear of the conditions under which you labor. I would be of no use to you; I can barely grip a scalpel.

I have not yet found Mary, and I am loath to write her mother, whose fears I do not wish to arouse; Amelia has lost more than all of us in this war. I will, however, if my diligence does not yield results soon, but I cannot think that Mary would go home.

I am, ashamedly, your ineffective servant,

James Blevens

Chapter Forty-one

In 1864, George McClellan, in his run as Democratic candidate opposite Abraham Lincoln, would complain that the failure of the Peninsular Campaign was due to many factors out of his control, including Lincoln’s great meddling in his plans, his failure to provide crucial reinforcements, the teeming hordes of Confederate troops, the inclement weather, the failure of the navy to properly defend the York River, the idiot mapmakers who mistook a river’s location that forced him to march miles out of his way, his recurring bouts of malarial fever due to the criminal lack of quinine, the abysmal roads which were nothing but a morass of mud, the swampy, nearly oceanic terrain, and finally, the wily Robert E. Lee, who decimated the Union troops in the last hopeless battle of Seven Days as they retreated down the Peninsula after the Union’s failure to seize Richmond. Nor were the legion of wounded his fault. Charles Tripler had stood at his side at every turn. He could not have helped his inept surgeons or the ambulance corps, even though he and Tripler set up office in a boat on the James River miles away. Worse, Lincoln had denied him troops and even the benefit of the doubt.

McClellan would also conveniently fail to mention the tolerant letters from Lincoln (at which John Hay merely shook his head) as the war on the Peninsula unraveled.

At the end of June, surgeon Jonathan Letterman was sent to Harrison’s Landing on the James River to relieve Tripler of his post as medical director.

In the wake of Tripler’s departure, Letterman found it impossible to determine the exact number of sick and wounded over the three-month period of battles on the Peninsula, but he guessed the number fell somewhere about eighteen thousand.

Chapter Forty-two

All across Washington in July of 1862, women rose in droves with the dawn, washed away the muggy heat of the night, pinned up their long hair, donned calico and lawn dresses, scrubbed yesterday’s dirt and blood from their boots, brewed tea, fried eggs, assembled handkerchiefs, bonnets, coins, hung lavender sachets from their necks, tied aprons around their waists, censored once again the futile urge to weep, and waded into the day to nurse the wounded who poured into the city from the Peninsula.

Churches, offices, homes, and old hospitals flung open their doors. An officer breached the padlocked doors of the shuttered Union Hotel, and Miss Dix appointed a woman named Hannah Ropes there as matron when she couldn’t find Mary Sutter. Miss Dix couldn’t find her anywhere, even though hospital matrons, in an effort at organization, were keeping lists of nurses in marbled paper notebooks they bought at the corner stationers, inscribing names they would dig out years hence from their trunks in an effort to win the women war pensions. In the notebooks, the matrons’ penmanship and spelling would show the toll of haste, the ink splotching as if the pen had been hurriedly set down when its user had been called away to some more urgent task than listing the exhausted, charitable women who tried to help that beastly summer. The barriers had fallen. Miss Dix could no longer dictate who was able to work where, but even she was grateful for the women who arrived at the hospital doors bearing only persistence as their gift. Later in the war, someone in the Surgeon General’s office would develop a form to send in each month for listing the contract nurses. But that would be after the summer of 1862, the summer that everyone would remember as the Great Scramble, the summer when it was impossible to keep track of anything.

Not all the eighteen thousand wounded came to Washington. Some had to stay behind, scattered across the Virginia Peninsula in the regimental hospitals that Tripler so loved, others were guarded at Fort Monroe, still held by Federal troops, and a portion were shipped directly from the Peninsula to New York, where, at Bellevue Hospital on the East River, the doctors had just ten minutes’ notice that they were about to receive one hundred injured men. In Philadelphia—easier to reach than distant New York—the hospitals overflowed.

But in Washington, the deluge inundated the city.

In a single rented room located in an alley behind Maryland Avenue near the Capitol, Mary Sutter also rose and dressed with the dawn. Her thin-walled room was furnished only with a narrow bed, a small window, a dresser and a chair, an armoire, and a coal stove that coughed soot. The boarding house was not unlike the Union Hotel; perhaps it was its resemblance to her former workplace that had drawn her to the tenement, but she could not say for certain. She would walk from the Capitol past the iron foundry, the gas storage tank, and the many hospitals, her boots negotiating the refuse in the gutters as her hems grew dusty or muddy, depending on the weather.

At her clerk’s job in the War Department—won by virtue of her precise handwriting—she copied out circulars and passed them to Secretary Stanton, who never looked up from his desk. In the evenings, she walked more than a mile back through the city along a different route, across the City Canal and diagonally along the mall, toward the great undomed Capitol building under which her boarding house squatted. The absence of the bulk of the Army of the Potomac made the once bustling city seem like the township it had been before the country had gone to war. Fewer trundling caissons, rarely a parade. In the distance, Armory Square Hospital was rising. Already, Mary could see the shells of the pavilions, the outlines where, at President Lincoln’s suggestion, gardens would one day be planted between the long buildings.

On Sundays, Mary went to church and sat alone in a pew. Afterwards, she walked for exercise to the Long Bridge to peer across the river at Virginia. At night, she shunned the communal dining room of the boarding house to cook herself a modest dinner on the coal stove. When she dreamed of Jenny, as she often did, it was of them as toddlers, when they still had not grasped their separateness. A few times she dreamed of the time they had been caged together in the crib for the entire day, their weeping mother finally reaching in to console them. Once, she dreamed she had cut Jenny’s umbilical cord, the knife clutched in her fetal hand, as, intertwined, the two of them floated inside their mother, Jenny slowly dying.

In the fourth week of July, the perspiring pastor of Mary’s church opined from his pulpit that “if one of us is dying, we are all dying. No one is special. No one is set apart. Even if all you can do is pick up a mop.”

After the service, Mary sat alone in her room and ate a small meal of bread and salted beef. Five months had passed since she’d last set foot inside a hospital. Through the papered walls of the boarding house, she had heard all the dreadful things of life, though she had tried in coming here to banish them. Sometimes, walking to work, she had nearly leapt into the ambulances carrying the wounded from the hospital ships at the Sixth Street wharves to the hospitals. Instinct was a bastard thing, always insisting.

She changed into one of the dresses she had worn to work at the Union Hotel, crossed the mall, and headed toward the Patent Office, the nearest hospital to where she lived. There, an army of women lifted heads to place pillows, offered brandy punch, wine, whiskey, washed shattered arms, broken legs, gunshot jaws, and worried over abbreviated, festering stumps.

Mary passed them all by, hurried to the alley, filled a bucket, returned to the marble hallways, and began to mop.

In the next few weeks, she scrubbed walls, stripped beds, boiled toweling, discarded dressings, scoured bedpans, hauled water, served meals, and scraped human filth from soiled water closets. A Union Hotel redux. Her shoulders cramped and her feet blistered: a fine punishment. She refused to allow herself to be drawn in, even as her eyes roved over the bandaged legs and arms. Except once, she did kneel down to retie a sling the proper way, positioning the man’s elbow lower than his wrist. And another time, she removed a saturated dressing and rebandaged it herself.

But she wasn’t a nurse. She did not call herself that. When the surgeons made their morning rounds, neither James Blevens nor William Stipp was ever among them.

“You there, mopping the floors. What is your name?” The matron was not a rude woman, but the arduous days of July, with the hospital overflowing, had taken their toll on her, to say nothing of the humidity and the odors of the men entrusted to her care.

“Mary.”

“One of the men told me that you changed his dressing.”

“He was mistaken.”

“Another said you fixed up a little sling for him.”

“He must have been thinking of someone else.”

The matron hesitated, then gathered her skirts and headed downstairs, where the surgeon in charge was changing a dressing. Robert Smith was not to be trusted. He drank far too much and eroded the general morale of the hospital.

A few days later, Mary was skirting her mop around the legs of a cot, upon which a boy gripped its spindly sides, his eyes glassy with fever. Earlier that morning, a surgeon had performed a second amputation on the boy’s leg to cut away some festering tissue. The boy had survived the surgery, the rigors of the chloroform, the vomiting afterwards, but now his face had gone white.

“I’m thirsty,” he said.

“I’ll get a nurse.”

“Wait.” He grabbed her wrist. “Don’t leave me.”

Mary hesitated, and then set down her mop. She poured him a glass of water from a nearby pitcher and helped him to drink.

He began to talk. “I was at Malvern Hill. That’s wet land. Scrubby where it isn’t just a swamp. Trees slung low, dragging in the water. Cypress, they said. You see my feet? My one foot, I mean. Nothing but a mess after my boots filled up with water.”

The boy’s remaining foot was not what concerned Mary. He was restless, fidgety, keyed up.

“You should rest,” she said.

“I was up on that hill firing away on the Rebs stuck down there around the bottom of the hill.” He edged up onto his elbow, talking fast. “I was hunched up behind a rock, you see, getting off a shot now and then, when a bullet ricocheted off a tree and smashed into my knee. It was like a swarm of hornets took up housekeeping right there in my kneecap. But they couldn’t drag me off till night. That was pain, I tell you.” His skin was pale and clammy, and little beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. “Down on the flats it was a bog and they dropped me into the mud with all them mosquitoes and the night coming on. Someone stuck a rock under my head so I wouldn’t drown. The rain was cold, too, and by the time they hauled me up on that table and the sawbones slapped a cone over my face, I couldn’t even talk, couldn’t even ask him to try to save my leg. That chloroform smelled sick but I breathed it in. When I came to I was throwing up real bad. They didn’t have any bandages so the maggots got in pretty quick, but there’s no picking them out. They didn’t have any whiskey or tents, so I was outside there maybe, I don’t know, ten days or so before they could get me onto one of them ships. And then I thought I was in heaven. They poured kerosene into the maggots. That seared, but at least the maggots were gone.”

Mary drew back his sheet. Blood was pooling under his abbreviated, bandaged right leg.

“Will someone call the surgeon?” she cried. There was a rustle in the periphery, skirts swishing, heads raised, but all she could see was the fresh blood, and the boy’s mouth, which had fallen open in surprise.

He is like that boy,
Mary thought.
The boy who watched himself die
. Mary felt with her fingertips for the femoral artery, pressed hard.

“Tell me about your home, tell me where you’re from.” She wanted to keep him talking, to keep him conscious. The boy needed a looping stitch, needed someone to tie up the artery. Mary pressed harder on the artery, and the flow seemed to slacken.

“Herkimer Falls.”

“New York?” Mary asked.

He did not answer.

“Tell me,” Mary said.

“Yes, New York.”

“Tell me about your mother.”

But the boy wasn’t talking. He was looking at his leg.

“Your mother?” Mary prodded. “Tell me about her.”

Women were hovering, saying something about the surgeon being tied up.

“Then bring me a surgery kit,” she said.

“Who will use the kit?” someone asked her.

“I will,” Mary snapped.

“My mother didn’t want me to enlist.” The boy had become confessional. Mary didn’t like it, didn’t like what it meant.

“I left my mother too,” she said.

“You did? You left your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sorry for it?” the boy asked.

Mary almost lost focus.
Do you want me to go, Mother? As you like.

“The way she looked at me when I was leaving?” the boy said. “Like she’d never forgive me. Now I won’t ever get to see her again.”

“I need a surgery kit,” Mary cried. “Does no one have a surgery kit?”

The women shook their heads. Not one of them possessed such an exotic thing. The boy’s eyes were beginning to flutter
.

Mary was losing him. She was pressing hard, but the artery was still bleeding. This was why she hadn’t wanted to come back. She was easing her agitated sister back down on the bed. Renouncing the hapless doctor and his forceps. Centering the knife just so. Separating the cartilage to save Thomas and Jenny’s child. She could almost recall the heft of the scalpel in her hands, the deep pleasure of locating that notch in Jenny’s pelvis, the release of the bone at the tip of her fingers. The soaring, triumphant feeling that she had done something miraculous. Laudable. Singular.

The matron rushed up and thrust a kit at Mary.

“Here, press hard,” Mary said, and when the matron slipped her fingers next to hers, Mary lifted her hand away, and then tore off the boy’s dressing and searched for the failed stitch. She used the long tenaculum to separate the ravaged tissue, found the unraveled stitches, the bleeding artery, inserted the needle, looped the stitch, once, twice, again, and then again, finally formed a knot. She was acting out of memory. She heard someone call her name, but she ignored the call, told the woman to ease the pressure on the artery. Waited, as Stipp had once waited. Waited, until she was certain the suture held.

Reflexively, she put her hand to the boy’s wrist. The pulse, though faint, beat.

Mary stared at her hands, at her skirts glistening with the boy’s blood, a smell and sight as familiar to her as her lost family.

The matron bent low and said, “Well done. Now, come with me.” She wrapped an arm around Mary, steered her away to an office, where she helped her out of her stained dress, and for a moment Mary was almost naked, shivering in the August heat. Then the matron swaddled Mary in a blanket.

“Mary, you said your name was?”

“Yes.”

The matron pursed her lips. “You are not by any chance the Mary Sutter who worked at the Union Hotel? Miss Dix told me to look out for a nurse who was interested in being a doctor. That isn’t you, is it?”