My Name Is Mary Sutter (33 page)

“Don’t step on me,” a voice said, as a hand grabbed her ankle.

The voice was choked, hoarse. She dug in her bag among the whiskey bottle, surgery kit, and dressings for the candle she then lit and thrust high above her head. In every direction, men were sprawled on the ground, packed so tightly together that she would not have been able to have taken another step without stumbling across their arms or legs. Directly beneath her was the soldier who had taken hold of her ankle. His pants had been torn away. A shattered thighbone jutted through the broken skin of each leg. His wounds were raw, mere hours old. Gunpowder blackened his face; tears were tracing gritty rivulets down his temples.

“Are you a ghost?” he rasped.

“No,” Mary said.

“You got any water?”

“I have whiskey,” she said, and again opened her bag and pulled out the whiskey bottle. With one hand, she pinned the bottle between her knees and uncorked it.

She held the bottle to his lips and he choked the liquor down.

At the train station, soldiers were shoving the men who had come to nurse back onto the trains. A locomotive was being turned and the racket was fantastic. She imagined that it must be what birth was like to infant ears. The great amniotic buffer finally removed.

She turned to the next man, an arm’s reach away. He wanted whiskey, too. And the next man after that. The men latched on to her as she bent over them, a sob or a thank-you breaking from their lips. They threw their arms around her neck. Some were sixteen, fourteen. She bent over them and flooded whiskey into their mouths and pried their hands off her wrists and moved on. Someone had lain hay underneath them as a bed, and with every move she worried that she would drop her candle and set them all afire. Amid the general din and the trains screaming and hissing and the mules braying and the men crying out, it was nearly impossible to hear what a single man said to her. She smelled the sour battle scent, the gunpowder and the sweat and the fear. It mingled with the musk of sap and loam and leaves stewing in the rainfall. By habit, she surveyed their wounds, running the candle up and down their bodies, but not even the Union Hotel had prepared her for this. From time to time, her hand settled into a pool of clotted blood or vomit and she would wipe her hands on her skirt and scramble on. There were so many men, and she hadn’t even yet gone fifty feet from the station.

In the trees, the birds began to chatter. The night was beginning to fade, but even the morning star, flickering on the gray horizon, seemed to outshine the pale scatter of the miserable dawn. Mary extinguished her candle.

Her whiskey bottle was empty.

She scrambled back to the station, pushing through the unruly crowd. From a small office, a remarkably tidily dressed man emerged, followed by a red-faced colonel who was screaming that no more civilians should be sent, what were they thinking back in Washington? When the two men saw Mary, the colonel abruptly stopped shouting to stare at her. Next to the depot door, chained to the bench, a dozen men were growing miserably sober. The depot clock read four-thirty in the morning.

Mary said, “Do you have any whiskey?”

The men continued to stare.

“Water? What about water? Surely somewhere there is a tank for the trains. We could tap it or fish the water out of it or—”

The two men were staring at her skirts. She looked down. The hem of her dress was sodden with blood to her knees. She leaned over and wrung it out.

“What the hell are you doing here?” the colonel sputtered.

“Just tell me if you have any water.”

“There is a well behind the station,” the other man said.

A train screamed into the depot. Doors were hurled open. Men surged from the cars and swarmed onto the platform. The colonel roared, “I told those idiots in Washington not to send any more drunks!”

A telegraph operator waded toward them shouting, brandishing a telegram above his head. “We are evacuating Centreville. The Rebels are fast behind our troops. Haupt says they will send no more supplies and we are to send the wounded back to Washington on the trains.”

The colonel stalked toward the telegraph operator, shouting, “Let me see that, McCrickett.”

Along the railroad line, in the opposite direction from which the trains had been arriving, a long line of ambulances was materializing out of the gray mist, plodding toward the station through the dew and drizzle of the dawn. In between them and the station, a continuous, unbroken multitude of men lay on the rocky ground. She could not see the end of them. She had guessed before that there were perhaps five hundred wounded, but now she saw that there were thousands. The drivers had to stop two, three hundred yards away, for they could get no closer, climb out of their wagon seats, and wrestle their human cargo out of the wagon beds onto the ground. A forest grew on a sloping hill above the station, and Mary could see more men laid under the protective canopy of the maples and oaks.

A phalanx of newly arrived volunteers were brushing past her, bumping her shoulders, stumbling toward the fields. In the door of one of the railcars, though, appeared a young woman, and behind her two more women and two men, who were swiftly unloading boxes onto the platform. Astonished, Mary elbowed through the crowd to reach them.

“What is in those boxes?” Mary asked.

“Socks. Jellies.” The young woman reached into the car and pulled down a crate and lifted its lid. Mary gasped. Inside were bottles and bottles of whiskey.

She felt the color drain from her face. She lifted her arm and made a sweeping gesture, which was all she could accomplish by way of explanation. It seemed as if she were mired in seconds and minutes, wading in a slough of impossibility. Behind them, the colonel was standing on a bench, shouting orders for the civilians to line up and be counted into a burial party or as stretcher bearers, for they were going to help load the trains, by God, and they weren’t to ride back to Washington until every wounded man was put on a car under pain of shooting.

“May I have two bottles?” Mary asked. She couldn’t tell if the woman heard, because there was a great jangle as the locomotive was uncoupled from the train, but then the young woman waved her hand in the air and said, “Yes, yes.”

The volunteers were surging into two lines, soldiers jostling them into place. Mary seized the bottles and threaded through the crowd toward the well, where she filled her one empty whiskey bottle after securing the others in her pockets. In the distance, she could see people going from wounded man to wounded man, teamsters and other soldiers and maybe even surgeons. Soon they would all get on the trains. She pushed back through the crowd to where she had left off. A man came up beside her, breathless, an open crate of jelly jars in his arms.

“Miss Barton said to give you these.”

“Miss Barton?” she said, turning. The young woman who had given her the whiskey lifted her hand and nodded.

Now Mary was armed. She had jelly and whiskey and water, a bounty, though now she needed to be three, four, a hundred people at once. But thankfully it was only a matter of time until all the wounded were on a train.

She dropped to a boy at her feet. A small branch was embedded in his arm where a bullet had pierced the flesh. She fed him sweet plum preserves with her fingers. His dry tongue lapped at the edges of his mouth.

“You’ll be at a hospital soon,” she said. “They’re beginning to load the trains.”

The next man was shivering, his injury not readily apparent until he opened his jacket.

“How is it?” he asked.

Blood blacked his stomach, and the edges of the wound were swollen and beginning to suppurate.

Stifling a gasp, she said, “You’ll be on a train soon.”

The train, the train. The train was all. The train was hope. They were all going to Washington, where the brand-new Armory Square Hospital was waiting for them. For many months she had seen it rise, the many pavilions, the modern conveniences, the open wards, bed after bed at the ready. She couldn’t remember where she had left her bag, with its depleted dressings and lint and the surgery kit, but all that was unnecessary now, for the trains were coming. “Drink this,” she said, filling a mouth with whiskey. “They’re sending trains.” The emptied jam jars became cups for water mixed with whiskey. A swallow, two, three, and then she moved on. Some of the men were barely covered, their shirts and pants torn away by the artillery. She tore strips of clothing and wound them around legs and arms, but the dirty cloth fell apart in her hands. No matter, they were sending trains. She was a purveyor of hope, the assurance of help to come. Mary began to imagine the sound of thousands of railcar doors sliding open at once. The trains are coming. The trains.

From time to time she discovered that she was crying.

Later, the sun emerged from the dark clouds and the ground began to steam. But now the flies began to nestle in the edges of the wounds. She beat them away. Just one of these men needed all of her attention, but there were thousands. A sudden thought came to her that one of them might be Thomas, and she leapt to her feet, off balance, searching for him, but every one of them looked the same: blackened by gunpowder, undernourished, exhausted, torn to shreds, suffering. She wanted to find him and she didn’t. She had to put him from her mind. By midafternoon, only a few more trains had rumbled into the station. Men were loaded on and taken away, but it was making no difference, because more wounded were arriving with every moment. From time to time, she ran back to the well to fill her emptied whiskey bottles with water. She worked her way up a steep, rocky incline toward the woods, crawling on her knees, past teamsters searching for lost whips and gravediggers digging shallow troughs. Here, on the hillside, away from the station, it was quieter. She could hear snatches of conversations and individual cries for mercy, which somehow made everything worse.

She was tying a tourniquet of torn cloth around the calf of a soldier when a familiar voice floated above the din.

“It’s not bad, you’ll do just fine.”

She was certain she must be hearing things. Ghosts appearing, because of desire.

“Your tibia, I think. A man can live with just a broken leg.”

That voice, with its distinctive, deep growl, the measured words, the innate intelligence. Where was it coming from? She was hearing things. Hearing hope.

She stood and turned in a circle as Dr. Stipp stepped from behind a tree, raised a hand to shield his eyes, and looked her way.

His hair had turned completely gray. Deep furrows creased his sunburned cheeks and forehead. He was gaunt, lean and rawboned, his face a coil of worry and strain, though his eyes were still that fine china blue, but clouded now with fatigue and agitation.

For a full minute, William Stipp could not speak, and then in an instant breached the gap between them, seized her hand, and, ignoring the men who were pulling at her skirts, dragged her past them all and climbed to a rocky outcrop. From this vantage point, Mary could see legions of maimed lying side by side under the trees.

“What are you doing here?” Stipp asked.

Mary fumbled in her pocket to produce Stanton’s notice that she had torn from the newspaper, as if that would explain everything, but she was exhausted and her hands shook. Sunlight dappled the ground beneath them. At some point, the sun had emerged from behind the clouds.

Stipp stared at the newspaper cutting and then threw it away. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said.

“I had to,” she said. “I stayed away before.”

Jenny
, Stipp thought. Of course. Mary’s skirts and hands were scarlet, her lips chapped, her hair a nest of twigs and locomotive soot. How he had thought of her, all those months on the Peninsula.

“Do you have any morphine? I don’t have any morphine,” she said.

“There is no morphine. There is nothing. No dressings. No more whiskey. Nothing. We left behind all our medicine wagons on the Peninsula. All we have are the trains.”

The trains. Yes, the trains.

“I looked for you after you left. Where did you go?” he asked, grasping her by the elbow, but then he let go again and shouted, “God damn it.”

Behind them, in the ever-filling valley, another line of ambulances was arriving, while at the station a single locomotive idled, its few cars being loaded by figures moving at the pace of a truculent child. An eternity was passing in the time it was taking to lift a man onto a stretcher and shove him into a boxcar. “God, they’re moving so slowly. Don’t they know there isn’t any time? The Rebels could be upon us at any moment. You’d think they’d have learned. It’s the Peninsula all over again.” He began to pace back and forth, raking his hands over the dome of his head, which glistened in the suddenly brilliant sunshine. Stipp stopped and shut his eyes for a moment, as if he couldn’t stand to see the unraveling scene before him. Then he said, “We don’t have a choice. We’ll have to transport the ones we can save first. That’s what we’ll do. Otherwise, we are all doomed. Afterwards, we’ll load the rest.” He turned toward Mary, relieved he’d found the answer. “I need you to help, Mary. I need you to go down to the depot and sort them.”

“Sort them?”

“Organize the wounded into groups.”

It took a moment for what Stipp was saying to her to penetrate, and then its meaning entered her like a knife. “You want me to choose?”

“Yes.”

“But I cannot choose.” She twisted away, stumbling backward on the rocks.

He lunged toward her and grabbed her by the elbow, thrusting her before him to witness the scene from which he had turned away. “Listen to me, Mary. You see all those men? Most of them will die. If not here, then back in Washington. On the Peninsula, no one shot in the belly or chest or head survived, not one, no matter how fast we got to them. Do you understand? We have to save the most men. If we let one on the train who will die anyway, it will doom two.”

Mary wrenched free of his grasp. “But what if we treat them here, what if we set up a hospital?”

“There isn’t time. I need you to go down to the station and make certain that no one gets on that train who can’t be saved.”