TransAtlantic (19 page)

LILY HAD LEFT
St. Louis in the same week as her son. To be near his regiment. He was seventeen years old. A head of chestnut-colored hair. A shy boy once, he had left, swollen with the prospect of war.

She had walked for days, found the hospital among a series of small buildings not far from the battlefields. At first she was given the laundry room to work in. They had set up a little makeshift hut out back. The hut was a collection of logs with a sloping tarpaulin roof. Under the snapping tarp sat a row of six wooden barrels, four to be filled with hot water, two with cold. She wore long gloves and thick
boots. Mud splashed up on the back of her dress. Her hem was dark and thick with blood. She washed bed sheets, towels, bandages, medical uniforms, torn blouses, forage caps. She stirred the clothes around a wooden drum. Another barrel rolled two drums together to squeeze the dirt from the fibers. The handle circled endlessly. Her hands blistered.

When the water was finished, she sprinkled lime in the barrels. It was said to kill the smell of blood. She hung the clothes high on a washing line. At night coyotes trotted out high-legged from the nearby forest. Sometimes they leaped and ripped the clothes from the line. She could see strips of white scattered through the trees.

After eighty-six days a Negro woman had taken over the washing. Lily was brought inside to help the nurses. She donned a black Zouave jacket and a thin cotton dress. Her hair was tied in a bun at the nape of her neck and kept in place with a bonnet. A Union badge was pinned to the front of the bonnet.

She cleaned the bedpans, changed the sheets, stuffed the mattresses with clean straw, soaked cotton balls with camphor. Scrubbed the bloody operating tables clean with sand. Still, the smell was intolerable. The reek of excrement and blood. She longed to be outside with the filthy clothing once more, but she proved to be a good aide and the surgeons liked her. She did basic stitching and fever-soothing. She refilled their bedside basins and slopped out their chamber pots. Put her arms under their shoulders and shifted their weight. Patted their backs while they hacked up lungfuls of dark phlegm. Slopped up the mess from their terrible diarrhea. Held cups of cool water to their lips. Fed them oats, beans, thin soup, yellow horse fat. Gave them rhubarb for the fever. Ignored their desires, their catcalls. Ice baths were prepared for the soldiers who had gone mad. They were plunged down deep into a freezing tub until they were unconscious. She held their heads underwater and felt the freeze move up her wrists.

Some of the soldiers whispered obscenities when she approached. Their language was vile. Their erections were angry. To quiet the men, she told them that she was a Quaker, though she was nothing of the sort. They begged forgiveness from her. She touched their foreheads, moved on. They called her Sister. She did not turn.

Lily helped the surgeons with emergency operations: she had to sharpen the edges of saws to hack off limbs. The saws had to be sharpened twice a day. The men were given rubber clamps to put in their mouths. She held down their shoulders. They spat the rubber clamp out and she shoved it back in. She held bags of chloroform over their noses and mouths. Still, they screamed. Huge wooden tubs were kept under the tables to collect the blood that leaked down. Limbs sat in the buckets: arms next to thighbones, sawed-off fingers next to ankles. She mopped the floor and scrubbed it with carbolic soap and water. Rinsed the mop out in the grass. Watched the ground turn red. At the end of the evening she walked to the rear of the building to vomit.

Few of the soldiers stayed around for more than a day or two. They were sent to another hospital in the rear, or back to the battlefield. She had no idea how the men could fight again, but off they trudged. Once they had been engineers, quartermasters, butlers, cooks, carpenters, blacksmiths. Now they went off wearing the boots of the already dead.

Sometimes they returned just days later and were dumped into the long burial trench in the forest floor. She put camphor in her nose to temper the stench.

Lily inquired after her son, but tentatively, as if probing the flesh of a wound. She knew that if she saw him, she would, most likely, not see him for very long. Thaddeus Fitzpatrick. His short stocky body. His freckled face. His very blue eyes. She described him this way to strangers: it was as if his whole body had been built around his eyes. His father, John Fitzpatrick, had long ago disappeared. She had been
forced to take his name. New names didn’t mean all that much anyway. They belonged to the namers. In St. Louis, where she had worked as a maid, she was known as Bridie.
Change the sheets, Bridie. Sweep the ashes, Bridie. Comb my hair, Bridie, dear
. A woman’s name could swerve. She was Lily Fitzpatrick now. At times, Bridie Fitzpatrick. But she thought of herself, still, as Lily Duggan: if she carried anything, she carried that. The sound of Dublin in it. A name that belonged to the Liberties. The grayness, the cobbles. In America you could lose everything except the memory of your original name.

Thaddeus was named after her own father, Tad. She had raised him by herself, first in New York and then St. Louis. A small handsome boy. He had learned to read and write in school. He showed an interest in numbers. At twelve, he began an apprenticeship as a fence-builder. Her very own son, sinking fence posts. She had a dream of him moving out on the prairies. Going west. Deep snowfalls. High cedar trees. The broad meadows. But the war kept him rooted. He was going to fight tyranny, he said. Four times he had lied about his age in order to join up. Four times he had been returned in his hand-sewn uniform. Each time a little more cocksure than before. A vitriol to his gallantry. As if he didn’t understand it himself. Once, he had hit her. With a closed fist. He turned on her and opened a deep cut above her eye. His father’s son. He sat brooding at the kitchen table. Never said sorry, but quieted down for a week or two, until the anger pushed him out the door again. His shoulders tightened out the uniform. The trousers were so long that he dragged them in the mud.

There was music in the streets of St. Louis. Trumpets. Mandolins. Tubas. Fifes. Men in bow ties along the Mississippi, beckoning boys to war. Other men decked out in ceremonial swords and sashes. Glory. Manhood. Duty.
Break this stranglehold. Awaken this nation to its proper Destiny. Out to Benton Barracks with the Boys!
They offered seventy-five dollars for enlisting. He somehow thought that it would be a fortnight’s
war, a young man’s lark. He put on his haversack and thrust himself amongst the Union soldiers. Right face. Left wheel. Right, oblique, march.

Drummer boys beat a pace. Regimental pennants flew. The First Minnesota. The Twenty-Ninth Iowa Volunteer Infantry. The Tenth Minnesota Volunteers. Snatches of a song were heard on the air.
The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena, it matters little now, Lorena, life’s tide is ebbing out so fast
.

She had never put much faith in God, but Lily prayed for her son’s safety and so prayed never to see him in the wagons. And in praying never to see him, she wondered if she was dooming him to the battlefield forever. And in praying to bring him home, she sometimes dwelt on whatever terrors he would carry back with him, if he came back at all. Circles within circles. Patterns on a cross.

She stepped out from the ward, down the staircase, into the night. She disliked the immensity of the dark. It reminded her too much of the sea. She listened to the call of the katydids. Their repetition seemed a better form of prayer.

SHE HAD COME
, in the early days of 1846, all the way from Cove. Seventeen years old. Eight weeks on the water. The sea wallowed and heaved. Lily stayed in her bunk most of the time. With the women and children. Their beds were stacked close together. At night she heard the water rats scuttling in the hold. The food was rationed, but she was able to eat courtesy of Isabel Jennings, the twenty pounds sterling she had been given. Rice, sugar, molasses, tea. Cornbread and dry fish. She kept the money elaborately stitched in the heel edge of a bonnet. She carried a shawl, a calico dress, one pair of shoes, several handkerchiefs and thread, thimble, needles. Also the blue amethyst brooch that Isabel had slipped into her hands that late afternoon of
rain. Pinned beneath her waistband so that it could not be seen. She huddled in her bunk.

The wind was demented. Gales battered the ship. She was terrified by the pitch of wave. Her head was bruised from the bunk frame. Fever and hunger. She wandered up on deck. A coffin was being slid from the side of the boat. It landed and broke in the water. A leg disappeared. Her stomach heaved. She went down below again into the stinking dark. Days piled into nights, nights into days. She heard a shout. A sighting of land. A heave of joy. A false alarm.

New York appeared like a cough of blood. The sun was going down behind the warehouses and tall buildings. She saw men on the wharfside in the ruin of themselves. A man barked questions. Name. Age. Birthplace. Speak up, he said. Speak up, goddamnit. She was sprayed with lice powder and allowed entry. Lily jostled her way along the waterfront among the stevedores, police officers, beggars. A stench rose up from the oily harbor. The brokenness. The rawness. The filth. She had met only a few Americans in her life—all of them in Webb’s house in Dublin, specimens of great dignity, men like Frederick Douglass—but in New York the men were adherent to shadows. The sloping Negroes were bent and huddled. What freedom, that? Some still wore the branding marks. Scars. Crutches. Slings. She passed by. The women along the docks—white women, black women, mulattos—were rude with lip paint. Their dresses rose above their ankles. It was not at all what Lily had wanted the city to be. No fancy carriages pulled by drays. No men in bow ties. No thumping speeches along the waterfront. Just the filthy Irish calling out to her in all manner of disdain. And the silent Germans. The skulking Italians. She wandered amongst them in a haze. Children in rags of unbleached cotton. Dogs on the corner. A mob of pigeons descended from the sky. She moved away from the cries of teamsters and the cadenced call of peddlers. Pulled her shawl around her shoulders. Her heart shuddered
in her thin dress. She walked the streets, terrified of thieves. Her shoes were filthy with human waste. She clutched her bonnet tight. Rain fell. Her feet blistered. The streets were a fever. Brick upon brick. Voice upon voice. She passed dimly lit lofts where women sat sewing. Men in top hats stood in the doorways of dry-goods stores. Boys on their knees set cobblestones. A fat man wound a music box. A young girl made paper cutouts. She hurried on. A rat brazened past her on the pavement. She slept in a hotel on Fourth Avenue where the bedbugs concealed themselves beneath a flap of wallpaper. She woke, her first morning in America, to the scream of a horse being beaten with a truncheon outside her window.

THERE WERE STILL
sheets of glass in the basement downstairs, made of the finest, clearest sand. She caught sight of herself in the reflection: thirty-six years old now, slight, still fair-haired but an edge of gray at the temple. Her eyes were lined and her neck deeply striated.

ONE EVENING SHE
spied a dark-haired soldier in the basement: he had broken the lock on the door and rearranged the sheets of glass into a standing box around him. He sat inside the glass coffin, a sharp laughter rolling from him. He was, she knew, full of laudanum.

In the morning, the sheets of glass were perfectly rearranged, neatly stacked in the corner, and the soldier was in line to go back to the battle. He was one of the ones, she thought, who would survive.

—Look out for my son, she said to him.

The soldier stared beyond her.

—His name is Fitzpatrick. Thaddeus. Goes by Tad. He wears a harp on the lapel of his uniform.

The soldier finally nodded, but his gaze settled behind her. She
was quite sure he hadn’t heard a word of what she said. A shout rang out and he moved away, among the harrowed. They rolled their ponchos, scrubbed their tin cups, muttered their prayers, went off again.

It had become for her a very ordinary sight, the way these soldiers disappeared beyond the trees, as if they had become mute assistants to their muskets.

SHE REACHED FOR
a hanging lamp, struck a match, lit the wick. It guttered blue and yellow. She placed the pier glass around it, went out of the ward, lighting all before her. She waited on the stairs outside. Open to the night. A small breeze in the enormous heat. The trees darker than the darkness itself. Owls screeched their way through the canopy and bats moved from under the eaves of the factory. Distantly she could hear the yips of coyotes. An occasional sound from the hospital behind her: a scream, the rattle of a trolley along the upper floor.

Lily removed a pipe from the pocket of her Zouave, used a small twig to tamp down the tobacco. Hauled the smoke down deep into her lungs. The small comforts. She clamped the pipe between her teeth, draped her arms over her knees, waited.

She recognized the clack of Jon Ehrlich’s wagon. He pulled the horses up outside the hospital. He hailed her, pitched her the harness rope so she could tie the horses to an iron ring near the basement door. It had become routine. Jon Ehrlich had fifty years on him, maybe more. He wore a forage cap with a leather visor, a logging shirt, a lumber jacket, even in the middle of summer. The ends of his hair were graying where it had once been blond. His back was stooped by work, but still there was a stealth to him. He was taciturn, but when he spoke he had a soft Scandinavian lilt.

On the back of the wagon he had stacked eight crates of ice. He
had made a contract with a doctor in the hospital and floated the ice down from storage sheds far north. The ice was carefully packed.

—Ma’am, he said, tipping his cap. Well, then?

—What’s that?

—News? Your boy?

—Oh, she said, no.

He nodded and moved to the back of the wagon, unhitched the ropes and flung them across where they struck the dirt. Underneath the floorboards, there was a small pool of melt.