The Deserter (26 page)

Recovering her breath, she climbed the rest of the way and pulled open a massive door. At once she was confronted by another grandiose set of stairs. Slowly Ida made her way to the second floor, hauling herself up by the banister.

Here the door to the hospital ward stood wide open. But she waited, breathing hard, recovering her strength. At last she crossed the marble floor and paused on the threshold to take in the enormous room.

It was a magnificent chamber with a high vaulted ceiling. Glass cases rose from the floor, filled, Ida knew, with models of inventions. There was a gallery, and it too was lined with glass cases. The Patent Office was proof of what people always said, that American boys liked to tinker. Even the president, they said, had invented something.

The ranks of glass cases were arranged in alcoves like chapels in a church, but instead of altars, they held hospital beds. More beds ran down the length of the central corridor, the head of one butting up against the foot of another.

Like most of the other hospitals in and around the city of Washington, this one seemed in good order. The marble floor shone, the bedding was clean and white. A surgeon was moving among the beds and a number of nurses hurried in and out of the alcoves. Some were middle-aged women, others were young men, convalescents themselves or medical cadets.

Ida walked into the room, but she was stopped at once by a bustling matron carrying a tray. The matron stared at the bulge in Ida's figure and paused long enough to say curtly, “What are you doing here, missus?”

“My husband,” said Ida patiently. “I'd like to see if he's here.”

“His name,” snapped the matron, hurrying away. “Give his name to Mr. Bannery.”

Ida stopped at the second alcove on the south side, where a man with a notebook stood over one of the beds. The patient in the bed wore a bandage around his head, covering one eye.

Ida waited for Mr. Bannery to notice her. Behind the shining glass of the tall case beside him, there were shelves of mechanical devices with cutting edges and wheels and gears. Ida glanced at them with interest, but the patients in the beds had more serious concerns and showed no curiosity.

“Your name?” said Mr. Bannery to the man with the bandaged eye.

“Irwin J. Skedaddle,” said the man craftily. He looked at Ida with his one mad eye and grinned. “That's
S-K-E
sump'n else.”

The man with the notebook grimaced and turned away.

Ida spoke up quickly. “Mr. Bannery?”

“Yes, ma'am?”

“I'm looking for my husband, First Lieutenant Seth Morgan.”

“Morgan.” Mr. Bannery flipped the pages of his notebook. “No Morgan here now. A month ago”—he turned another page—“there was a Lysander Morgan, but he was in Twenty-ninth Pennsylvania, and anyhow he passed away.”

Ida plucked up her courage and said, “My husband might be using another name. Please, may I look around for him?”

Mr. Bannery looked at her sharply, and she knew he understood what “another name” meant. So did the man in the bed. He gave a loud laugh and began jabbering. His wound seemed to have excited his brain. “Oh, dearie me, another skulker. Skedaddle W. Skulker. That's
S-K-U
, right, ma'am? Listen, missus, I hope your blessed event turns out female. You don't want no poor little boy got to go in the army.”

Mr. Bannery shook his head and moved into the aisle. His bureaucratic manner softened, and he said, “Some men come in without identification. Kinfolk, they're welcome to look. Just try to keep out of the way.”

“Oh, I will,” promised Ida. “Thank you.” Quickly she began moving along the beds in the center aisle, following a woman who was distributing pamphlets, thrusting them into the hands of men who were sitting up, placing them tenderly on the pillows of those who lay still. Ida saw her set down a leaflet on
The Sin of Swearing
beside the staring face of a man who had surely breathed his last.

There were eight beds in each alcove. Ida went in and out, inspecting every face. Some of the men looked back at her, some ignored her. She felt intrusive, but she had to look, she had to see.

Up and down both sides of the enormous room she went, pausing and moving on, then pausing again. At one of the beds in the center aisle two clerks were examining a patient whose left arm was in a sling. One of them said as she walked past, “Disability rated one-fourth,” and the other wrote it down.

Many were sadder cases. Ida ached with pity for a rag of a young man whose body under the sheet went only halfway down. An older man spat blood into a cup. In the next bed a gray-faced boy lay still, a tube from his side draining into a bucket.

Some of the patients were young and clean-shaven, some older and gray-bearded. A few were little more than children. One of them resembled her little brother Eben.

Ida moved on, then stopped and went back. The young boy in the last bed, lying beside a model of a patent reaping machine, not only looked like Eben, he was Eben.

CAMPED NEAR
A SLOUGH

6 Sept. '63

My dear Mother
,

You will understand why I can't come home now when I tell you that I have found Eben in the hospital in the Patent Office. He is suffering from a fever. He is very ill
.

One of the surgeons takes particular notice of Eben. He tells me he has seen cases as severe who recovered, so I have hope, but as I say, he is very sick. His illness was contracted when his regiment encamped near a slough
.

I have concluded to stay and help care for him, nothing preventing. The matron here is very strict, so I must try not to be any trouble
.

As for me—now, Mother, you are not to worry, because I am first-rate. I have engaged a woman to help with my lying-in and Mrs. Broad has assisted in getting everything ready. You will remember that I helped at the time Alice came into the world, so I am familiar with what is needful. As usual I feel extremely well, only a little breathless now and then
.

Y'r loving daughter Ida

There were seven other men suffering from high fever in the same alcove with Eben. Fearing contagion, the surgeons had isolated them by the width of the tall glass cases from the patients with ordinary battle wounds.

Ida was not the only family member in attendance. A mother from Georgia never left the bedside of her son until the afternoon he died. Worn and grief-stricken, she nodded a good-bye to Ida and followed the litter as it was carried down the long aisle. Sorrowfully Ida watched them go. The dead boy and Eben had belonged to opposing armies, but there was no quarrel between the mother of the one and the sister of the other.

The surgeon attending the patients in this part of the ward was the chief surgeon of the hospital. He was attentive to the men in his care and gentle with Ida, although it was clear that he didn't know what on earth to do with a woman on the brink of giving birth.

The nurses knew precisely what to do with her. They all said the same thing. Some said it kindly—“My dear, you really must go home to your mother”—some angrily—“Don't expect us to care for you, missus. Go on, get away from here, go home.” Ida felt unwanted, like a hen shooed away by a flapping apron.

But she did not leave the hospital. She stayed, because Eben was hovering between life and death. He lay unconscious, his fever rising and falling. Ida heard the awful panting and on his forehead her hand felt the terrible heat. She sat with him day and night, dozing in her chair, waking up in alarm and dozing off again, her head drooping on her breast.

Eben's fever was highest in the watches of the night. But in the morning it abated a little, and Ida could go out to breathe air untainted by the odors of the sickroom. Even with the prompt care of the nurses, there were smells that entered with every new batch of wounded men—the putrid reek of a gangrenous leg, the stink of urine-soaked trousers, the rank smells of vomit and diarrhea.

Once Ida jumped to the rescue of a man who was writhing so violently that he nearly threw himself out of bed. Another time she snatched up a urinal to catch a spout in midair. She helped with the washing of filthy bodies, she mopped up puddles of blood. She knew where to find the sink and where to empty chamber pots.

The antagonism of the nurses grew less, although the matron, Mrs. Thrum, never passed Ida without hissing at her, “You should not be here, girl, you should not be here.”

In her brief respites out-of-doors under the monumental portico, Ida looked up at the half-finished framework of the Capitol dome where work was going on or watched the traffic moving east and west on F Street. Sometimes a cheerful procession of contrabands tramped along the dusty road, colored men and women who had run away from their masters. Or their mistresses, guessed Ida, southern women struggling to carry on a farm. Sometimes a wagon carried an entire black family—grandparents, mother and father, barefoot children, a baby. One woman looked ready to give birth. She looked up and exchanged a dark glance with Ida.

And sometimes Ida nearly feel asleep, leaning against the cool stone. But whenever a long train of ambulances came creaking up the street, heading for one of the other hospitals—Finlay or Douglas or Armory Square—she woke up and wondered if Seth might be lying in one of them.

Perhaps he had rejoined his regiment. Perhaps he had been wounded in another battle!

“OH MY!”

Thus in silence in dreams' projections
,

Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals
,

The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand
,

I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young
,

Some suffer so much …

(Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested
,

Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN

T
here was a cold hand on Eben's forehead. He shook his head, and the hand went away.

Eben opened his eyes and saw the owner of the hand, sharply as if with a magnifying glass, or maybe he was on a ridge looking across a valley because he'd borrowed the captain's binoculars, so he could see one figure jump out bright and clear but not in any kind of uniform.

Through the glasses Eben could see the man's open collar, his light-colored eyes and gray beard. From across the valley the man reached out and touched Eben's shoulder. Eben closed his eyes and the valley faded, but somebody kissed him.

An hour later he woke up just long enough to see something surprising. He was staring at a toy. It was in a glass case with other toys. The toys had tiny wheels and gears and belts to carry the whiz of one wheel to another wheel, and some of the belts were twisted so the second wheel could whiz in another direction. There was another toy on a higher shelf, and Eben recognized it.

As he closed his eyes he could see Mr. Hosmer on the seat of his reaping machine, clattering across his field of barley. He could even hear the squeaking of the cutter bar.

“You got to grease them shoes,” said one of the stewards carrying a litter down the aisle, heading for the stairs and the long descent to the morgue. The man on the litter had lingered a long time after Chancellorsville, but his feeble strength had finally wasted away.

“Dangfool shoes, they're brand-new,” grumbled the other steward.

When Eben woke up again, there was another amazing sight. His sister Ida was sitting beside him, beaming at him. “Eben dear,” she said.

But then her face changed. “Oh,” said Ida. “Oh my.”

The chief surgeon was there. He looked at her in consternation and called Mrs. Thrum.

“Great God above,” said Mrs. Thrum. “I knew it, I knew it. I told her and I told her, but she wouldn't listen, and now, pshaw! just look what's happened.” Mrs. Thrum ran away to arrange for a cot.

The doctor sat down on the edge of Eben's bed and took Ida's hand. It was all he knew how to do.

THE SEWING MACHINE

I
da's bed was the only one in the last alcove at the far end of the room of glass cases. Even so, her pangs made the patients in the rest of the ward uneasy. She tried not to scream, but she couldn't help moaning when the spasms gripped her.

Her muffled cries gave Mrs. Thrum an excuse to scold. Peevishly she informed Ida that she was in the way, that she had no right whatever to that bed, that she was denying it to a brave soldier wounded in the service of his country. “If you think a single soul here is going to assist you,” said Mrs. Thrum, glowering down at Ida's suffering face, “you are very much mistaken.”

“I'm sorry,” whispered Ida. “I'm very sorry.”

But it wasn't true that she was denying a bed to a wounded soldier. The heavy influx after First and Second Bull Run and Ball's Bluff and Antietam had mostly been cleared out, and most of the Gettysburg cases had long since been transferred, or else they had recovered or died. A few had been rushed out of the Patent Office to the Kalorama Hospital for smallpox cases.