It seemed that Canning, who had regained consciousness, also was listening to the conversation. “You’ve made a big mistake, gentlemen,” he rasped. The others hushed each other and fell quiet, struggling to hear what he had to say. “You think I’d be down here in this filthy swamp, risking my life and working like a serf if I came from money? All I’ve got up north are creditors. Nobody there gives a good goddamn about my life.”
I wished I were close enough to Canning to clap a hand over his mouth. He might as well be confessing to a capital crime, so effectively was he making out his death warrant.
“What if he’s telling the truth?” one of the men asked the major. “Why’re we troubling to drag him along with us? Seems we should shoot him now and be done with it, then when we get done selling the niggers we can have us a little furlough.”
The major stood and stepped toward Canning. He ran a hand over his stubble. “Are you speaking the truth? Or is this just another Yankee lie?” He took out his pistol. “Speak, or I’m going to commence auctioning off the pleasure of shooting you.”
Canning’s head, caked with dried blood, was turned away from the firelight. I couldn’t read his expression.
“I don’t lie.”
“Then I’m afraid that good soldier over there is right; we’re just too pressed by events to be carrying you along with us.” He cocked his pistol.
And that was when I leapt up, this time evading Jesse’s grip and ignoring his hissed curse. I dropped the saber in the leaf litter and crashed out of the scrub.
“Wait!” I cried, stumbling into the clearing. “He is lying! He has a fiancée! She’ll pay for his life.”
“March!” cried Canning, his voice carrying a mixture of pain and astonishment. The guerrillas, who’d survived for months in the woods by dint of their swift reaction, were on their feet, rifles ready, even in their inebriated state. Two of them had me in a firm lock before I finished speaking.
“So, Mr. March, you decided to join our party after all,” the major said. “What an unexpected surprise!” He gestured, and the men who held me thrust me forward.
“Tell them, Ethan! Tell them the name of the girl in the ambrotype. Tell them, for pity’s sake, and live!”
“Pity?” he laughed, and it turned into a cough. “I doubt they know what that means.” He shifted painfully to relieve the pressure on his shattered knees. “But I can tell them her name. It is Marguerite Jamison, and you’ll find it on a headstone in the Elgin cemetery. She died a year ago last May. Consumption. Just six weeks before we were to be married.” He turned his head and looked at the major. “Shoot me, damn you, and get done with it. You’ve made me a cripple and a bankrupt and not a soul on God’s good earth gives a damn if I live or die.” He started sobbing.
The major scratched his head with the pistol butt and turned to the men holding me. “Tie this one up,” he said. “I believe I’ll consider what to do with the pair of them in the morning.”
They lashed me tightly to a tree near Canning, at a little distance from the Negroes. One of these, I did not see who, flung me a heel of cornbread, and I used my bound wrists to push it into my mouth. I hadn’t eaten all day, and the scrap of bread just served to awaken my raging appetite. Across the clearing, Jimse was crying out for his mother. May crooned to him in a soothing voice, and told him to hush now; she’d be back directly. The child fretted for a while, but he was exhausted, and soon whimpered himself to sleep in May’s lap.
Ethan moaned. One of the guards kicked dirt in his direction and said, “Shut up.”
“Ethan,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
The night insects thrummed.
“I know.”
Through my torn smock I felt the roughness of the tree bark scraping against my back. I ached all over and was hot, and wished they had not tied me up so close to the fire. I could feel sweat dribbling down my neck, soaking what was left of my blouse. Another man, doubled up with cramp, headed for the woods, muttering that “the black bitch must’ve spit in the stew.”
I thought it could be only a brief time before someone noted the growing number of missing faces around the camp and set up a general alarm. I hoped Jesse had a plan for that moment. I surely did not.
Presently, a chorus of snoring-ragged, hoglike-commenced from those of the guerrillas who weren’t standing watch. Cato’s brother remained on guard duty, along with three others. He was slumped against a tree on the other side of the fire, and I watched him through the smoke. Once, he caught my eyes on him and glared back at me.
There was a white fog rising up from the moist ground. I was hot now, but when the fire waned, my sweat-soaked shirt would chill me through. I suppose I must have fallen into a kind of fretful doze-I was exhausted, and I could feel the familiar fever ache beginning in my joints. Whether I drifted for a minute or an hour I couldn’t rightly say. A branch cracked and fell in the fire, and I jerked back awake with a start. The fog had thickened. It moved above the ground like cold smoke. When it parted a little, I saw that a thin shard of red moon had risen and that Cato had taken his brother’s place on picket. I wrenched myself round as much as I could in my tight bindings, to see who remained awake, and the effort set up an aching in my head. The trees that edged the clearing seemed to be undulating. I closed my eyes, but then the whole world spun. I opened them and tried to fix on one still point. I could not concentrate. But I had to; there was something important I needed to do, to see... if only I could just remember what it was. That was it: count the men. I waited for the fog to shift and reveal more of the campsite. If only the trees would stop that nauseating movement ... One sentry had slumped down into a squat by his tree. His head rested on his knees and he might have been sleeping. I wanted to sleep. My head throbbed. I started to do an accounting, but the numbers jumbled. I tried to shut out the pain in my head and closed my eyes, struggling to string my thoughts together. Twenty of them at the setting out, two dead at Jesse’s hand for certain, maybe three or four. Dully, I began to wonder; if Jesse had somehow managed to waylay so many, picking them off singly, then that left only sixteen... and Cato’s brother also unaccounted for ...
Just then I felt the bonds around me go suddenly tighter and then slack. I did not move my head but from the comer of my eye I saw Zannah, a saber in her hand, moving to cut the ropes of the other captives. Addled as I was, I realized that the odds were still poor, even if Jesse had somehow managed to deal with all of the missing men. Fifteen armed and hardened soldiers remained. But if Jesse could get arms into the hands of our people...
The crack of a branch, breaking underfoot, reported like a gunshot. Cato swung round in the direction of the noise, but a ball found him first. A piece of his skull opened and flew out, and he pitched forward. What followed was a blur of noise and bodies, shots and screaming. I leapt up. My limbs felt like lead bars. I lurched toward the fire and grabbed up a burning branch. I spun around with it and a shower of sparks flung a swirl of brightness all around me. I couldn’t tell who was who in the thickening fog. I made for where Jimse had been tied, but he was gone. Zannah, of course, already had him. I saw her, crashing through the scrub, the boy clinging to her back, and May lumbering and panting in their wake. Then, through the mist, I saw a guerrilla drawing a bead on them: I tried to run, to put myself in between them, but before I had moved a step the soldier fired and May fell, face forward, her arms moving like a swimmer. The guerrilla was already biting the paper off another charge. I cannoned into him sideways, cracking the brand against skull. The weapon fell from his hand and he lunged at me. The two of us tumbled onto the ground. He twisted over on top of me. He raised a fist and landed a blow into my face. The cartilage in my nose ground against itself I tasted blood in the back of my throat. He snatched up a rock from the leaf litter. I saw it poised over my face and jerked my head to the side. Then his grip on the rock loosened and it fell from his hand, bouncing harmlessly off my chest. He was scrabbling at his neck. The point of a saber spiked through his
clutching fingers. Cilla stood behind him, her mouth open in a thin howl. She had driven the sword through his neck. He slumped forward, kicking. I pushed him off and scrambled to my feet, grasping Cilla’s trembling hand and trying to drag her back toward the shelter of the trees. But she pulled hard against me, like a petulant child resisting a parent. She reached down and laid her small hand on the hilt of the saber. When it wouldn’t come free, she put a bare foot on the man’s shoulder and tugged. There was a scrape of metal on bone, and then a spurt of blood, and then another, and then an uninterrupted flow. I picked her up then, although my arms felt limp as string, and tried to run for the trees.
But I was running the wrong way, right into the sights of the major, who stepped out of the smoke just a few yards from us, his rifle raised and aimed. I flinched, anticipating the blast, and turned my body to shield the child. But he uttered a curse, and staggered, and the shot went wide. In the swirling fog I saw Canning, prone at the major’s feet. He had dragged himself the few yards to where the major stood and, with his last strength, struck at the man’s ankle with a jagged rock. The major kicked out at him. His boot thudded into Canning’s blood-encrusted head. Then he reached for his pistol, bent down, and shot Canning in the face at point-blank range.
“Ethan!” I screamed, and the major raised his pistol at me. I tossed Cilia away from me and felt a thump, like a hard punch, in my side. Then the sound of the blast. Funny, I thought, as I dropped to my knees. The sound was so late... I pitched forward, facedown, inches from a burning coal. I stared at the red-orange heart of it, watching it throb inside the blackened wood. I thought: this is the last thing I’ll ever see. The shouting and screams seemed to oscillate with the pulse of the fire in the coal: loud, then soft, then loud, and then silence.
It was daylight, and I lay prone in the clearing. There was a buzzing. I could not raise my head. I smelled acrid smoke. Through a blur, I saw bodies. Cato’s, and another of the irregulars. Ethan’s corpse. May, prone in her own blood. Little Cilla, lying on her side with her knees pulled up, as if she were sleeping. Except that her gut had been laid open with a bayonet and her entrails lay in a glossy pile beside her. And on every corpse, a seething, humming mass of blue-green flies. A deep gray wave rolled slowly across the clearing. I did not fight it. I had no wish to wake to this. The wave rolled over me and I let go, into its deeps.
Darkness. Moving. Rocking, back and forth. The ground came up at me and receded. Leaf litter. My hand touched coarse hide. Pain wracked every part of me. I let go again into unconsciousness.
Night. No more movement. Flickering firelight. I tried to raise my head. The world spun. Darkness.
Rocking again. A grassy track. Tree shadows. The rich, muddy scent of the river.
Daylight. Still, at last. Underneath me, leaves. Above, a blur of branches. My eyes focused on a single leaf, turned before its time. Scarlet and gold. The color throbbed against a sky of brilliant blue. All that beauty. That immensity. And it will exist, even when I am not here to look at it. Marmee will see it, still. And my little women. That, I suppose, is the meaning of grace. Grace.
Night. A fire. Shivering.
“Cold.”
The word came out of me in a voice I couldn’t recognize as my own. My nose was congested with dried blood. Zannah turned from paring at some fresh-dug root and hurried to my side, laying a coarse hand on my brow Her face was wan and streaked with dirt. She stood and pulled the saddle cloth off the tethered mule. She wrapped the stiffened fabric round me. It smelled of sweat and stables.
Another night, or the same one. A scent of roasting grain. Zannah turned from the fire holding a small, battered pan. She fingered the mush into my mouth. I tried to swallow, but the stuff burned my raging throat and lodged there. She gave me water. It might as well have been lava.
“Where are the others?” My voice was a rasp.
She looked down and shook her head.
“Jimse?”
Tears sprang to her eyes and cut shiny rivulets down her dirt-smeared cheeks. She undid the button that held her soiled shirt tight at her wrist and drew out a cluster of tight-curled ringlets. She held them against her face and began keening. I reached for her but my body was wracked with tremors and my arms seemed too heavy to lift. She dropped her head into my lap. I laid a trembling hand on the turquoise scarf that covered her hair. I remembered the merry laughter of her little boy, the day she had first put it on. I touched the locks of hair she grasped so tightly in her hand. He had been as much a part of her as her own skin. How could she bear this loss, on top of so many others? I closed my eyes, and when I opened them it was morning. She had cried herself to sleep in my lap. When I stirred, she woke, sat up, drove her fists into her eyes, and got to her feet, heavily. Jimse’s ringlets were still clasped in her hand. She was about to put them back into her sleeve when she paused, separated out a small ringlet, and pressed it into my palm. I raised it to my lips and kissed it.
Much later, I asked about Jesse. She held out her two hands, locked at the wrists, mimicking manacles.
“The others?”
Manacles again.
“You are the only one who got away?”
She nodded, her eyes filling.
“And you came back, and found me? Zannah, I ...”
She shook her head sharply, placed a hand on my mouth, and turned to load the mule. I was watching her through the heat haze of the waning fire when the fever rose and took me away.
When I woke again I was flat on my back. The rocking movement now was gentle, like a cradle. A strong smell of lye bit at my nostrils. There was a rough gray blanket tucked tight around me. As my eyes focused, I saw a billow of gauze. There was a curtained window, and beyond, bright sky. Black embers leapt upward against the blue. Something-an engine?-throbbed. The light hurt my eyes and I closed them. When I opened them again, it was to a swirl of black fabric and a gentle noise, click-clack, like marbles hitting each other.
And then, that most unexpected thing, a woman’s face-a white woman’s face, encircled by a pale wimple-peering at me.
“There, now, rest easy,” she said. I tried to raise my head but she pushed me gently back against-of all things-a pillow. “Don’t try to talk. You’ve been very ill-you still are.”
“I was shot.”
“A bullet grazed you. But that’s healed. It’s the fever that’s troubling you now.”
“How ... how did I get here? And where am I? And who are you?”
She smiled. She was not a young woman. Her narrow face was heavily lined, plain almost to the point of repulsion. But to me she looked like an angel.
“You’re aboard the hospital ship, the Red Rover. I’m Sister Mary Adela. We are a nursing order, the nuns of the Holy Cross. We are taking you north. You’re safe now.”
Safe? I thought. I will never be safe. But what I said was, “How?”
“Shhh. Too many questions,” she said, but kindly. She took my wrist in a gentle hand, feeling for my pulse. The dull brown beads of her rosary hung from the waist of her voluminous black habit. They rattled gently as she moved to fix my pillow.
“A colored girl—a mute, the men said she was-brought you into the federal lines. The pickets took you for her master-called you a secesh and wanted to drive you away, but she wouldn’t have it. Stood her ground, even when they aimed their guns at her. She was determined to make them understand. They said she pulled off her scarf in the end and picked a bit of burned stick from their fire and wrote this upon it. We saved it for you.”
My vision was blurry, and the charcoal marks on the blue-green fabric blurrier still. But etched on the filthy piece of turquoise satin I could make out the quavering letters:
capn March
yoonyin preechr
he cum from plase cal concrd
he a gud kin man
I wept then, stinging sobs that gave way to violent coughing. The sister bent over me and reached past the long rosary into a deep pocket of her habit. She held a white clot
h under my chin. I raised speckles of bloody phlegm all over it. The last thing I saw was the nun’s face, frowning with concern, turning to call for the surgeon.
PART TWO
Jo read aloud, in a frightened voice,
MRS. MARCH:
Your husband is very ill. Come at once.
S. Hale,
Blank Hospital, Washington.
-Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Blank Hospital
I told him to go. I didn’t cry at our parting. I said that I was giving my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone, and shed them in private. I told the girls we had no right to complain, when we each of us had merely done our duty and will surely be happier for it in the end. They were hollow words then and all the more so now. For what happiness will there be if he dies in this wretched place? What happiness, even if he recovers?
It is quieter here, now that the bustle of the day’s routines has begun to ebb. The seconds tick by, marked by the drip of the drenching water cooling the dressings of the wounded. In the sickly yellow glare of the gaslight, I gaze at his face-for what else have I to do here? I study him, and I wonder where the face has gone that I loved so much: the face that belied his age when I first saw him, all on fire in my brother’s pulpit. I thought then that it was rare to hear such ferocious words issuing from such a benign visage. He looked like an angel such as the Italians sometimes paint-all golden hair and gold-bronze skin, youthful and venerable at one and the same time, his expression informed by a passionate nature that spoke of both innocence and experience.
March: a novel Page 21