March

by Geraldine Brooks

  And all those years later, as I watched him going off to war at the ridiculous age of thirty-nine, he looked young to me, still. When I caught glimpses of him, smiling and waving among the press at the windows of the departing troop car, I thought that there were boy-soldiers all around him who wore their age more heavily than he.

  It was folly to let him go. Unfair of him to ask it of me. And yet one is not permitted to say such a thing; it is just one more in the long list of things that a woman must not say. A sacrifice such as his is called noble by the world. But the world will not help me put back together what war has broken apart.

  Aunt March was the only one of all of us who dared to utter the truth. When I got her note, wrapped around the money I was obliged to beg of her to pay for this journey, I read it and burned it. I saw Hannah’s eyes on me as I balled up the paper and cast it into the grate. She thought I was angry with Aunt March. The truth: I was angry at myself, for not having had the courage to stand aside from the crying up of this war and say, No. Not this way. You cannot right injustice by injustice. You must not defame God by preaching that he wills young men to kill one another. For what manner of God could possibly will what I see here? There are Confederates lying in this hospital, they say; so there is union at last, a united states of pain. Did God will the mill-town lad in the next ward to be shot, or to run a steel blade through the bowels of the farmhand who now lies next to him?-a poor youth, maybe, who never kept a slave?

  But I said none of this a year ago, when it might have mattered. It was easy then to convince one’s conscience that the war would be over in ninety days, as the president said; to reason that the price paid in blood would justify the great good we were so sure we would obtain. To lift the heel of cruel oppression from the necks of the suffering! Ninety days of war seemed a fair payment. What a corrupt accounting it was. I still believe that removing the stain of slavery is worth some suffering-but whose? If our forefathers make the world awry, must our children be the ones who pay to right it?

  When I saw him stand up on that tree stump in the cattle ground, surrounded by the avid faces of the young, I knew that as he spoke to them, he was thinking that it was unfair to lay the burden so fully on that innocent generation. I could see the look of love for those boys in his eyes, and I saw also that the moment was carrying him away. I raised my arms to him, imploring him not to say the words that I knew were forming in his mind. He looked me full in the face, he saw my tears, and he ignored them and did as he pleased. And then I in my turn had to pretend to be pleased by my hero of a husband. When he stepped down, and came to me, I could not speak. I took his hand and dug my nails into the flesh of it, wanting to hurt him for the hurt he was inflicting upon me.

  I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.

  The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother—“Come back with your shield or on it,” she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat.

  Thank God that I have daughters only, and no sons. How would I bear it if Meg were now a soldier at sixteen, and the prospect of this war stretching into years, so that Jo, too, might come of age while it yet rages? As it is, I have had to hide my mental reservations from them, to show a strong and certain face, to spare them my despair and never let them see that I doubted their father and his choices.

  What is left of him? What remains, now that war and disease have worked their dreadful alchemy? I could see the change in him, even before I heard the mutterings of his delirium. When they directed me to him this afternoon, I thought they had sent me to the wrong bedside. Truly, I did not know him.

  All our years together, even the difficult ones, had succeeded in drawing only pleasant lines upon his face: the marks of laughter that webbed the corners of his eyes and etched a deep parenthesis as brackets for his smile. But the months we have spent apart have carved for him a different face entirely.

  Will I ever see him smile again?

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and realized that I must have murmured this last thought aloud.

  “Do not torment yourself with these bleak questions, Mrs. March. It is fatigue that raises them. You are very tired; shall we not go and seek out your lodging?”

  I turned, and he was there at my side, where he has been almost every hour since the arrival of that dreadful telegraph. I see that he, too, is pale and drawn from the exhaustions of our hasty journey and his efforts since our arrival, and his brown eyes are full of concern.

  “I do not like to leave him...”

  “There is nothing more you can do for him here, and the night nurse seems capable. I have spoken with her. In any case, she says, they require all visitors to leave at nine o’clock, when they turn down the gaslights.”

  “Well,” I said, my tone plaintive, “let us stay at least until then, for it is not so very long.” I lifted the hand that lay limp on the coverlet and pressed it to my cheek. I heard the thump of crutches on bare floorboards as the ambulatory patients made their way to their beds and the night nurse readied her charges for sleep.

  Mr. Brooke took a deep breath, like a sigh. Poor Mr. Brooke. I am afraid my good neighbor Mr. Laurence has laid a difficult commission upon him, and he feels his responsibilities too keenly. On our journey, he confided that he intends to join the army directly his duties as tutor end next fall, when Laurie goes to college. I wanted to say, No! Serve your country as you are now, by molding young minds, not by shattering young bodies. But once again, I did not speak. I lacked the courage. It cannot be easy for him to see what he sees here, the broken boys writhing in their beds. How can he not imagine himself among them? And yet, at twenty-eight, he has had a long experience of making his own way in the world, and is a grave and silent man who thinks a good deal more than he speaks.

  “Mrs. March, we would be wise to set out now. The capital and its surrounds are notorious for a lack of policing, and I am afraid that Georgetown in particular has an unfortunate reputation. I have been informed that drinking places, are ordered closed at a half past nine, and they say there can be, well, a good deal of unseemly behavior on the streets at that hour. I should like to see you safely to your room.”

  What could I say? The young man seemed so tired and anxious. So I took a last long look at my husband and laid my hand against his hot forehead, hoping that it was tenderness I transmitted, and not this smoldering anger.

  As I stood, a wave of weakness swept over me, so that I was glad for the steadying hand of Mr. Brooke. In truth, I hope never again to undertake a journey such as the one that brought us here. Meg is always saying that November is the most disagreeable month of the year, and I believe that ever after this I will be obliged to concur with her. Such a bitter, frostbitten morning, when Mr. Brooke came for me and we set out-was it two days since, or three?-after a night of sleepless anxiety. I could find no rest, but paced the house, looking at my little women as they slept-Jo’s fresh-cropped head upon the pillow made her look like a boy, as she lay next to Meg, who is become so suddenly womanly. For a moment, I gasped, and realized that it might not be so very long before Meg takes her place in the bed of some young man. I wondered if, when that time came, she would still have a father at her wedding to give her away.

  In the adjoining room, little Beth and Amy looked like sleeping babes, too young to be abandoned by their mother, even with sensible Hannah and our kind neighbor to watch over them. All these thoughts jostled with each other and with the overwhelming fear of what news would greet me here, and so even when I lay down I could not close my eyes. Instead, I sat up, relit the lamp, and mended hose till I
heard Hannah, dear soul, long before dawn, readying a hot breakfast which I could barely eat.

  My eyes ached and stung as I tried to make a composed farewell. The girls were uncommonly brave: none of them cried and all of them sent loving messages to their father, knowing very well that I might arrive at his bedside too late to deliver them. I barely knew where I stepped as we made our way from the carriage to the car, passing among children, fretting and crying, the wan-faced women and the men, smoking and spitting. I was glad to reach the boat at New London where, behind the curtain of my berth, I was able at last to give way to some private tears.

  In the morning, red-eyed and unrested, we made our way to the filthy depot in New Jersey, and found our car amid the racket of truck horses and swearing porters. We rattled past the crape-decked homes of Philadelphia and on through the coal-blackened expanse of Baltimore. As we left that city, there were pickets along the rail lines and one felt the war approaching like an oncoming storm. Everywhere, troops and wagons; caissons; and tents, tents, and more tents-pale cities of them-the cold and cheerless cloth houses of our army, whitening the countryside like drifts of snow.

  It was raining at noon, when we finally arrived in Washington. A cold drizzle fell from heavily swagged clouds that seemed to lower on the unfinished Capitol like the lid of an upholstered box. I asked that we go directly to the hospital, for if the news was the worst I wished to hear it soonest. Mr. Brooke had obtained directions to the place, which had been a hotel before the multiple disasters at Manassas and on the Peninsula. The wreckage of our army has claimed the city’s colleges and churches; even, so they say, the space between the curiosity cabinets of the Patent Office. It was fortunate that Mr. Brooke had thought to inquire in particular detail, for the first hackman was an overbearing rogue who insisted that he went our way, and I should have believed him, had not Mr. Brooke intelligently interrogated the man and learned that his destination was the other side of the city altogether. When Mr. Brooke chided him for an attempted swindle, the hackman swore, and said how should he be expected to know, since every day a hospital seemed to spring up in some new place, and his confusion was honestly come by.

  When at last we found a hackman who was bound in our direction, Mr. Brooke could not forbear from pointing out to me the president’s house, from which carriages rolled forth into an avenue that was become a river of mud. All I could notice was the blight of this place: the pigs wandering the streets and dead horses bloating by the roadside. Even the live horses look half-dead, so careless are the teamsters who have charge of them. And there are so many Negroes everywhere. In Concord we are used to see but one or two colored citizens, carefully dressed and decorous in manner. But Washington is flooded by the ragged remnants of slavery, contraband cast up here to eke what existence they may. I felt a pang for the little bootblacks, crying out for trade and going without, for what profligate person would spend half a nickel to tend to his boots in this world of mud?

  And all that rises from the slough is ramshackle or unfinished, so that it looks already ruined. We passed the obelisk meant to honor the father of the nation. It rises like a broken pencil, not one-third built, and beneath it the dressed stones piled here and there, grass grown up all around. The few finished buildings face each other, visions of lost grandeur, a Leptis Magna without the blue backdrop of a Mediterranean sky.

  It came to me that if the fortunes of this war do not turn, then maybe the city is destined to be no more than this: ruins, merely, sinking back into the swamp; the shards of an optimistic moment when a few dreamers believed you could build a nation upon ideas such as liberty and equality.

  These despairing thoughts turned to dread at the moment the hackman cried out “Blank Hotel!” and Mr. Brooke handed me down before a great pile of a building, a flag fluttering before it and a number of uniformed men milling at the door. Leaving Mr. Brooke to grapple with my heavy old black trunk, I forced my feet to mount the steps. The sentinel touched his cap with grave formality. He must see many such as I, wives soon to hear that they are widows, walking up this stair toward their news.

  A Negro boy-are there no end to these people?-opened the door. The interior stank-boiled cabbage and chamber pots, rot and sweat and unwashed bodies-a hideous brew made worse by a heat like Bombay. I saw that they had nailed shut the tall windows, so not a breath of crisp air stirred the miasma. A slender Negro woman, tidy, at least, reassuringly unlike the slatterns I had noticed in the street, passed me carrying a tray of instruments.

  “If you please,” I said. She turned and looked at me with an intelligent attention. “Where may I find Surgeon Hale?”

  “If you would care to follow me, I am on my way to him.” Her voice was remarkable—low and silvery, the cadence clearly Southern, but as educated as an aristocrat. I followed her quick steps, avoiding the hallway bustle of coal hods and coal black laundresses with armfuls of soiled linens; limping convalescents bearing steaming pots of tea; and haggard civilians, like me, looking for their loved ones. We passed a ward filled with serried rows of army cots and waxy faces. One man stared at me with glassy, feverish eyes. “Charlotte? Are you come to me at last?” he said. I tried to control my trembles and shook my head, returning his frowning scrutiny a weak smile.

  At the end of the hall two vast double doors gave on to an ornately corniced room, hung with chandeliers. A gilded sign above the entrance said BALL ROOM, and the name seemed a bleak joke, for inside, arrayed on the polished dance floor, lay the victims of the Minié ball, many of whom would not dance again. There were forty beds within, all handsome hotel beds with turned posts rather than humble hospital cots. Some beds were tenanted, some vacant. A muddy, bloodied group of gaunt new arrivals, slumped against the wall, awaited the surgeon’s attention. Their faces proclaimed defeat as plainly as any banner headline reporting wartime’s latest blunder. The black nurse approached a green-sashed, silver-haired gentleman and set down the instruments, taking up a metal bowl to receive the bloody shrapnel piece he plucked from his patient’s shoulder. She inclined her head to where I stood, hesitating, by the wide doorway, and said something to the surgeon in a low voice. Then she beckoned me forward. I came reluctantly, feeling I intruded on the injured man with his shoulder bared to the probe and his pain patent upon his face.

  “Surgeon Hale?” I said, my lip trembling. “I have your cable. I came as soon as I could. My husband, Captain March... I hope I am come in time?”

  The nurse’s white-wrapped head came up sharply. She looked at me with a grave regard. The surgeon did not raise his eyes from the wound. “March?” he murmured. “March?”

  “The chaplain,” prompted the nurse. “He arrived last week on the Red Rover.” Surgeon Hale worried away at the wound, drawing forth another shard, which dropped with a clang into the bowl. “He has bilious fever and pneumonia,” the nurse prompted further.

  “Oh yes... March. He lives, or he lived still when I made my rounds this morning. But his condition, as I telegraphed, is very grave. Nurse Clement will bring you to him, directly we finish with this man.”

  “Please,” I said. “Do not trouble. If you tell me where he is I am sure I can find my way. These men have needs greater than mine ...”

  The nurse continued to regard me. I read sympathy in her face, and something more that I was too tired to fathom. “You will find him in the fever ward on the second floor, to the right of the staircase,” she said. “His is the fourth bed from the door on the left.” She paused, as if she wanted to add something. “Is there no one with you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have an escort, he is seeing to my trunk.”

  “I advise you to wait for him,” she said. “I fear you will find your husband very much changed.”

  If I had been more myself, I should have wondered at that remark. But at that moment all I wanted was to hold her directions in my addled mind long enough to bring me to my husband’s side.

  “Thank you,” I said, and withdrew. I found Mr. Brooke almost immed
iately. He was in the hallway, looking lost amid the bustle, moving almost at a run from ward to ward, searching for me. I raised my hand to him and he was at my side at once. He gave me his arm and we climbed the stairs.

  Had the nurse not given me explicit directions to his bed, I would not have recognized the ruined occupant as my husband. His cheeks were sunken as a death’s head, his fine nose flattened and crooked, and his arm, on the coverlet, was fleshless—just bone with skin draped over it He must have lost half his body weight. There were oozing ulcers at the comers of his mouth.

  When he set out, his hair had been gold, lightened here and there by the silver streaks of his maturity. Now, what hair he had was entirely gray, and scalp showed where hanks had fallen out entirely. When I smoothed it back from his hot face, a tuft came away in my hand. His skin burned, but its normal sun-bronzed sheen was replaced by a yellow pallor, save for two hectic patches beneath the eyes. His breathing was irregular, and with each breath his chest rattled. I grasped his hand and felt the bones, fragile as a bird’s, give under the pressure of my grip. I could not control myself then, but surrendered to violent weeping.

  Mr. Brooke stayed by me through the storm, but when I had composed myself he asked if he might leave me to dispatch a brief telegraph home of our safe arrival, to reassure the girls that their father yet lived; and to attend to the matter of our lodging. And so I was alone when the delirious raving started. He was fretful, his hand working the coverlet, his head beating from side to side against the pillow. At one point, he cried out to someone named Silas, saying over and over that he was sorry. His voice was raw; speech clearly pained him. But later, it was other names, a whole litany of them, such as the Catholics recite. I heard him say Ptolemy, then something that sounded like Jimmy, and then perhaps Susannah. All the time anxious, all the time asking forgiveness.