The Deserter (13 page)

“What list?”

“The muster roll. Every regiment had a roll call. You mean you haven't looked at the muster roll?”

“No,” said Ida. “But the Philadelphia paper said he was missing.”

The orderly was carrying a malodorous vessel. “Well, I'm sorry, ma'am,” he said crossly. “We're busy here, I should think you could see that.”

Ida persisted. “I only want to look for him. I just want to walk along here and see.”

The orderly was almost weeping with exasperation. He gestured to the wide blue square of the door with his utensil. “Go and find yourself a midwife.”

“It's all right, Sergeant.” Another man appeared out of the dark. “I'm making my rounds. She can come with me.”

MR. BUSHMAN'S BARN

T
here was a note of home in the doctor's voice. He introduced himself as Dr. Chapel. Gratefully Ida followed him from bed to bed, looking eagerly as he lifted his lantern over each face in turn. Soon she put out her hand for the lantern and he gave it to her, leaving his own hands free to remove a dressing or examine the stump of a leg.

He did not tell Ida to look away, nor did she wish to, although the suffering of one man was almost more than she could bear.

“Sam?” whispered the doctor, bending over the bundled shape on the last bed in the first row of cots.

The man called Sam stirred. Ida lifted her lamp and saw him blink and try to lift himself. When he was unable to sit up, he dropped back and rolled his head from side to side, staring at his shoulders, his face a mask of horror. “Not both,” he cried. “It's not both.”

“It's all right, Sam,” murmured the doctor, laying a hand on his chest.

“One arm, they said it was just the right. Oh, Christ, it's not both.” He was bellowing now, lifting up his two wrapped stumps. The bellow became a scream.

The doctor spoke softly to Ida and took the lantern. “Get Harry.”

She ran to the man who was making a bed near the open door, the one who had told her to get a midwife. At once Harry snatched up a can and a wad of cheesecloth. Ida hurried after him as he lumbered back to the bed where Sam was shouting, “Kill me. Oh God, please kill me.”

There were groans and curses from the other beds. Ida took the lantern again and held it high while the doctor loosened Sam's shirt and Harry folded the cloth into the right shape. Then the doctor took it, held the can of chloroform up to the light and poured out a few drops. He had to shout at Harry to be heard over Sam's screams. “Hold his head.”

It was easier said than done because Sam was rearing up and throwing himself from side to side. At last Harry managed to get him by the ears and thrust his head down.

At once the doctor held the wad over his face, and soon, to Ida's intense relief, Sam's body softened and lay still, and they moved on to the next bed. There were four rows of cots in the great hollow volume of the barn. Ida carried the lantern from cot to cot. Mingled with the medicinal smells was another smell, nearly overpowered by the sickening odor of rotting flesh—the familiar wholesome fragrance of the hay that was piled above the beds in the shadowy loft. Farmer Bushman had cut his fields before the battle. He had stored away his harvest in good time.

Soon they had made a complete circuit of the beds on both sides. There were only a few more wounded men in the last row. Ida's hope faded. The third man from the end was not Seth, nor was the second man. The sleeping soldier in the last bed was a stranger.

Disappointed, she watched the doctor pull back the last sheet, lean down to smell an open shoulder wound then stand back, satisfied.

He turned to her and said, “Thank you, ma'am.” Then with a smile on his worn face, he added, “We could certainly use you here. I don't suppose, just for a few days …”

In spite of her disappointment, Ida was pleased. She smiled and shook her head. “I'm sorry, but I've got to look for Seth.”

“Well, too bad.” The doctor stretched and arched his back.

“Perhaps you know where I might look?”

Instead of answering, he led her to a bench and they sat down. “I'm sorry, ma'am. I shouldn't have asked you to stay. Shouldn't you be at home? May I ask where you live?”

Ida did not want to seem stubborn, but she was calmly determined. “I'm fine. I'm really just fine. And I've got to find Seth. He was in the Second Massachusetts. Do you think—”

The doctor stood up and began walking away, because there was only one other place for her to look.

He murmured it over his shoulder. “Speak to Sergeant Woody outside.”

“Thank you,” said Ida. She rose from the bench and walked firmly to the door.

Harry was there, a bulky shape against the sky, his teeth showing white in a mocking grin. He said, “Good luck, missus.”

Someone else appeared in the doorway, an officer, his coat hanging loose over his shoulders. He spoke to Harry, asking for a friend in the artillery reserve.

Ida stepped past him and walked carefully down the grassy slope. Then she had to walk three-quarters of the way around the barn before she found Sergeant Woody.

He was keeping watch over the bodies of the dead.

THE DEAD OF THE
TWELFTH CORPS

Alas! how many thousand mothers have been bereft at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, refusing to be comforted, because their children are not
!

—M
ARY
L
IVERMORE

S
ergeant Woody looked at Ida's shape and said, “Oh, ma'am, this ain't no place for a lady.”

I'm not a lady
, Ida wanted to say.
Pray God my husband isn't here
.

This time, the smell was like the gaseous stench from the dead horses, but it rose from the motionless forms lying on the bare ground, the bodies of men from the thirty-three regiments of the Twelfth Corps who had been killed in the recent battle. This time Ida did not take out her handkerchief. She stood still, trying to control her trembling.

“Looking for somebody, ma'am?” The other man stood up. “What name?”

Her voice shook as she told him.

“All right, missus, I'll show you around.”

The chimney of his lantern was black with smoke. Ida followed it, steeling herself to look down, trying not to recoil from the sight of wrecked faces with staring eyes or skeletal faces with empty sockets where the eyes had once been. Some of the faces belonged to men who had been dead a day or two longer, and from them the skin itself had deliquesced away, revealing the bone.

Of course Ida did not know that in the first three rows lay the bodies of men of the 123d New York who had been killed on the second day in the battle for the peach orchard and men of the Twentieth Connecticut who had died at the angle in the stone wall on the afternoon of July third. Nor did Sergeant Woody explain that the remains in the fourth and fifth rows were from her husband's own regiment, the Second Massachusetts, and also from the Twenty-seventh Indiana, casualties of the garbled order at Culp's Hill on the morning of the third day.

The drenching rains of July fourth had plastered the dead men's uniforms to their bodies and washed away the bloodstains as though a regiment of laundresses had scrubbed them on a thousand wooden washboards. The creased and rumpled clothing was still damp from the rain. Damp too were the scraps of paper pinned to their blouses or to the fronts of their coats, the writing half-washed away.

To Ida it was horrible the way they had been laid out in perfect rows as if ordered to fall in. They were not toy soldiers, they were individual men, lying here so helplessly on their backs, side by side, row upon row. They had been fair and dark-skinned, tall and short, middle-aged and young, bearded and clean-shaven. More terrible still were the looks of suffering on some of the faces.

Shaken, Ida picked her way among them, afraid of what she might see, fearful of stepping on an outflung arm or a shattered leg with her big feet.

Sergeant Woody led her along, passing his lantern over each face, looking back at her with shiny inquisitive eyes, not wanting to miss the moment of recognition, the shriek, the swoon. But even in his coarse curiosity the man had enough sense to pause beside one body and drop a rag over what had once been a face.

But the body was wearing Seth's boots. Ida uttered a cry and fell to her knees. The boots were unmistakable. They had been specially made for Seth with elastic inserts on the sides by the cobbler on the Milldam. Seth's coat was gone. His shirt was wet, but some of the blood remained in a cloudy stain, brown like the stains on the apron of the amputating doctor in the town, like the bloody sheets carried out of the schoolhouse, like the apron of Dr. Chapel in the barn.

Weeping and whispering Seth's name, Ida stretched out her hand to lift the rag.

Enjoying this moment of melodrama, the ghoulish sergeant grinned, but then he said quickly, “No, no, missus.” Pushing past her, he reached down and unpinned the paper attached to the cloth of the coat. “This ain't no Seth,” he told her. “This here's an Otis.” He showed it to Ida, who closed her eyes and whispered, “Thank God.”

Gratefully she stood up and finished her tour of the fallen soldiers of the Twelfth Corps. Seth was nowhere among them.

“He's not here,” she said eagerly to the guard. “And he's not on the muster roll. Where can he be?”

Sergeant Woody made a cruel suggestion. He pointed to a lighted tent across the lane and said, “Why don't you ask over there, missus?”

Ida set off at once. Having endured so much, she could endure a little more.

“You know what really happened to him,” said the other guard, who had witnessed the woman's pitiful search.

Sergeant Woody laughed. “Naturally I do. He skedaddled.”

THE EMBALMING
SURGEON

B
etween the place where the dead men lay and the glowing tent across the way, the smell suffusing the air changed character. From the sickening stench of decaying flesh it became a chemical reek.

Ready for any horror, Ida walked sturdily forward. Heading for the line of light at the edge of the curtained opening, she stopped when she saw a burning ember among the trees at one side. It was a lighted cigar.

The cheroot made a bright arc as it was thrown away. A big man with an apron over his coat stepped forward into the light.

“Name?” he said to Ida.

She guessed at once that he didn't mean her own. “Seth Morgan,” she said at once, struggling to speak above a whisper. “First Lieutenant, Second Massachusetts.”

“I'll get my list,” he said. “Excuse me.” He lifted the tent flap and went inside.

For a moment Ida caught a glimpse of a naked man stretched on a plank. A rubber tube arched obscenely out of his chest and descended into a bucket.

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” he said, emerging from the tent with a paper in his hand. “That name isn't here. When was the order sent?”

“The order?”

“By telegraph. Didn't someone send an order?”

Ida shook her head. Was it something she should have done? She was confused and ashamed.

The surgeon pitied the young woman. She should never have come. She looked far gone with child. “Forgive me,” he said. “You mean you want to order it now? He was an officer? That'll be eighty dollars.” He waved his hand in the direction of the rows of the dead. “I guess your husband's over there?”

“No, no, he's not. I can't find him.”

“Well,” said the embalming surgeon, embarrassed, “a lot of the deceased have already been interred.” He pointed another way. “If you make out a requisition, Dr. Chapel will have your husband exhumed and sent home. You say he was Second Massachusetts? Good, because there's no list for the buried rebs.” He chuckled. “Their kinfolk are out of luck.”

Ida thanked him and turned away, heading vaguely in the direction of his pointing finger. But her courage and strength had given out. She reached out a hand to the dark ground and sank down.

LIEUTENANT
GOBRIGHT

N
OAH
G
OBRIGHT
Class of 1860