TransAtlantic

by Colum McCann

  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.

  He took a pin from a hinge, folded down the wooden gate. He used a long iron hook to guide the top crate down. He positioned himself at the back of the wagon, turned, hitched the crate of ice onto his back. Bent his knees and grunted. The weight of the ice deepened his limp.

  She lit the way in front of him, a lake of yellow. Down the stairs, past the sheets of glass. They moved through the basement, their shadows multiplying around them. He struggled with the weight of the crate. The size of a sailing trunk. She could hear his breathing, heavy and rapid. She pushed open the ice cellar door. Inside, slabs of meat hung from hooks. Rows of medical supplies lined the shelves. Jars of fruit. The cool blue hit her in a wave. He stepped into the ice-room and stacked the old blocks of ice in the corner. They had melted out of their straight lines. Hard to prop on top of one another. Soon they would disappear.

  He pushed the new crate against the wall. Eight times it happened. A silence between them. His lumber jacket wet with ice and sweat.

  Jon Ehrlich removed a pair of small pliers from his pocket, carefully opened the crates one by one. Sawdust and straw fell to the floor. He reached in and removed each huge cake of ice, one after the other, wiped them clean with his gloved hands. The new cakes were perfectly planed and straight. A tinge of blue to the edges and then a hard white in the middle. He stacked them in formation. The closer they were, he said, the longer they would last. She sat in the corner and watched him work, then went upstairs to the ward kitchen to fetch him a drink. By the time she returned, he was already sitting on the outside steps, waiting. He had opened a well-worn book. A hard waft of sweat drifted from him. She glanced at the book. The letters meant nothing at all to her.

  —That the Bible?

  —Yes, ma’am.

  She had formed a distrust of men who carried Bibles. It seemed to her that they believed their own voices were somehow embedded there. She had seen them in the churches of New York and St. Louis, raining down their loudness upon the world.

  —I’m not saying I’m aligned with every word, said Jon Ehrlich, but some of it makes sense.

  He folded the book shut, touched his hat, moved to the wagon, and roweled the horses around. The cart was noisy with its emptiness.

  —Good night, ma’am.

  —Lily, she said.

  —Yes, ma’am.

  She slipped back into the cellar and lifted one of the older blocks, three quarters melted. The width of a tea tray now, slippery to the touch. She brought it upstairs to the ward where the two night nurses waited. They placed the old ice in the center of the table and sliced at it with a sharp knife, little edges and slivers that they could place in the mouths of the injured men.

  THERE WERE AFTERNOONS she watched the old Negro woman outside at the hut, washing the blood from the uniforms. The tarpaulin roof flapped as she worked, silently, no cane song, no spirituals, only the slap of the tarp punctuating the heat, the woman looking up every now and then at the rows of men still journeying back and forth, carting their corpses.

  SHE RECOGNIZED HIM by his feet. He came in a mass of other men. They lay supine on the wagons, their arms and legs entwined, a hideous needlework. He was near the top of the pile, but his face was obscured. She had no need to turn him over. She knew straightaway. He had broken his ankle as a child. The gnarl of the toenails. The curve of the instep. She had massaged that foot. Cleaned the dirt from it. Salved its cuts.

  Broderick, the orderly, carried him out of the wagon and laid Thaddeus on the grass. A handkerchief was placed over his face. Flies were already beginning to gather.

  —We’ll bury him now, nurse.

  Instead she shook her head and turned to carry a soldier upstairs. Broderick lifted his cap, joined her. They shouldered another and then another. Lily arranged them in their beds, scissored through their uniforms. Asked them their names. Tended to the awful mess of flesh. They talked to her of the battle, how they had been pinched on either side by the ranks of gray. How horses had come in upon them. The fog that had opened. The thump of hooves. A casual trumpet silenced in midnote. The thud of bullets into tree trunks.

  She attended their every need. Her hand dipped in and out of the washbasin.

  It was much later, when all the living had been attended to, that she glanced out the window at the row of bodies still waiting in the grass. Mounds of flesh. Only the clothing would march off again. The jackets, the boots, the buttons. She stood a long while in the silence of the stairway, then set her face hard. She walked outside into the grass and knelt beside him and took the handkerchief from his face and touched his cheek and stroked his bare chin and felt her stomach wrench with the cool against her hand. She undressed him. I expect your risen spirit is listening to me now. When you get up to sit with God or the devil you can curse them both for me. This god-awful manufacture of blood and bone. This fool-soaked war that makes a loneliness of mothers. She undid the buttons on his shirt. Put her hand on his heart. He had been shot just shy of his armpit. As if his own hands had been raised in surrender but the bullet managed to sneak in anyway. A small wound. Hardly big enough to take him away.

  Lily cleaned the wound with hard soap and a basin of cold water. She dressed it like she would have for the living, and then dragged his body across the grass.

  NO MOON. A great darkness. The hoofclop of the horses. Jon Ehrlich descended the wagon in a narrowbrim hat and boots. She waited for him as always on the lower stairs. When she saw him approach she lit the lamp. The weather was beginning to turn, the hint of a snap in the air.

  —Lily, he said, tipping his hat.

  She turned to help him take the first crate from the wagon. She pushed the crate forward and steadied it against his back. He locked his knees and shouldered the burden. Bent into the familiar pose. She walked in front of him, into the basement, the light pooling, a swinging semicircle through the old glass factory. Some rats scurried in the corner, slinking past
sheets of glass. Lily halted in front of the ice-room door. She turned her face away.

  When he yanked on the cold metal handle and pushed open the door, he saw the boy laid out full-length on the remaining cubes. His uniform neat and washed and mended, his shoelaces tied, the harp badge on his chest. His hair washed and combed.

  —Lord, said Jon Ehrlich.

  He placed the block on the floor, touched his palm against the book in his jacket pocket. Lily let out the sound of an animal: something cut, arrowed, gutted. She came towards him with her head bent savagely low. He sidestepped her. She turned. She drew her arm back and she thumped him on the chest, powerfully, a push of grief. Jon Ehrlich stepped backwards. A shot of breath moved through him. He planted his feet. Didn’t move. She punched him once more. The full force of her fist. She cried out and kept on punching until she was exhausted against him, her head against his shoulder.

  Later, almost morning, they buried Thaddeus two hundred yards from the hospital. A chaplain came. There was a drunkenness to his prayers. Some men had gathered at the hospital windows to look down upon them. A faint reef of light climbed up over the east.

  She knew she was going with Jon Ehrlich. He didn’t even question her when she sat up on the wagon and straightened out the folds in her dress. She looked straight ahead. She could hear the soft rip of grass in the mouths of the horses: the way it moved and crushed.

  LILY ACCOMPANIED JON Ehrlich to his home north of the Grand River. She was baptized into the Protestant faith: it didn’t seem too different from what she had already chosen not to believe in. Not since Dublin had she been in any manner of church. Even then it had only been through obligation. She sat in the second pew from the front. She was given a Bible and a commemorative piece of lace. The service was short and brusque, some words in Norwegian, most in English. The preacher asked if there was anybody present who was ready to renounce evil and accept the Lord as his or her divine savior. Jon Ehrlich tapped her on the elbow. Yes, she said, and went to the front of the church. Bowed her head. Waited. One or two scattered hallelujahs rose around the church. She was taken out the back door, towards a small trout stream, where the congregation gathered. A song erupted from them. Take me from this darkened valley, wreath me in sheaves of peace. She was carried through the reeds into the shallows of the river. A heron took off in the air, flapped wildly across the water, its wingtips touching the surface, rippling it. The pastor told her to hold her nose. He put his hand at the small of her back. When she was dunked, she felt little but the chill.