March: a novel

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Do not fret yourself,” he said kindly. “I stayed till ‘lights out’ and that very capable Negro nurse spooned him some of the rice water with lemon that you had left with him, and also a little beef broth.”

  I colored a little at the mention of Grace, troubled again by the thought of her attentions. But I knew my husband well enough to understand that he would not thank her if he knew she was feeding him animal fare. I smiled, thinking that such an abomination might very well be enough to rouse him into a conscious rage, he who had insisted on being a vegetable product almost his entire life. Yet I would not raise any objection. He needed strengthening, and if meat “medicine” might help to make him well, he would have to take that bitter pill along with all the others.

  Kindly Mr. Brooke had bought me a pie, which he had kept warmed by the fire, and I ate it gratefully, although he had to stand so that I could use the kindling box to sit down upon. Mrs. Jamison had brought a kitchen stool for her own use, and was darning a sock. Mr. Bolland had turned his attention to a book. They shared the light of a single candle.

  Mr. Brooke had two letters for me, a slender envelope inscribed in a small, precise, and unfamiliar hand, and a fat packet from home. This I opened eagerly. It contained cheering dispatches from each of my girls, and reassuring notes from Hannah and the two Laurences. I was obliged to hold these almost over the fire to get light to decipher the words—especially Jo’s chaotic, ink-blotted scrawls. I read them through once quickly, and then again, savoring each reassuring word, and sharing some of the contents with Mr. Brooke, who seemed especially attentive to what Meg had written. I turned then to the other envelope, and drew from it a lavender-scented note.

  Dear Mrs. March,

  Miss Clement has made known to us the details of your situation. Dr. Hale and I would be pleased if you would accept the hospitality of our home for whatever period is necessary.

  Assuming the offer is acceptable to you, I will send a carriage to fetch you and your effects at eight in the morning.

  Awaiting your arrival,

  Very cordially yours,

  Emily A. Hale.

  This unlooked-for kindness-and from a perfect stranger!-brought a blush to my face. It was yet another testimony to the goodness of Grace Clement, that she had sought this invitation for me. Mr. Brooke looked questioningly, but was too polite to interrogate me. How I longed to accept the offer of a quiet and dignified retreat, away from this squalid, unprivate cottage. But how could I, and leave Mr. Brooke behind?

  “I did not know you had any acquaintance in the city,” he said at last.

  “Very recent; acquaintances made today only.” I could not bring myself to elaborate in the crowded confines of that room. “I-I am afraid I must beg another kindness, Mr. Brooke-”

  “I think it is time you called me John,” he interrupted softly.

  “John, may I ask you to accompany me to the post? I must reply to this note, and I am afraid it requires an answer tonight.”

  “Of course I will,” he said, immediately fetching his coat and helping me into my cloak.

  As soon as we stepped out into the cold air, he said: “I would have carried the letter for you willingly, but I wanted a private word. I, too, had a letter today, from Mr. Laurence. He is appalled at what I told him of our accommodations. He admires your scruples but insists that we relocate at once to Willard’s Hotel. He says that since I am representing his interests, I must be able to present myself properly to his associates, and that you do him no kindness by, as he put it, ‘insisting on fetching up like a pair of beggars’- Well, forgive me, but you know how very direct he can be. I do not see how I can flout his will in this. Please, what answer shall I make him?”

  I felt gratitude toward the generous old man, and relief that I would be able to gracefully decline his charity without inflicting hardship on John Brooke. “Tell him thank you, but that it will not be necessary for him to extend himself any further on my account. I have unexpectedly received an offer of a room at a most comfortable and convenient Georgetown home. If you go to the Willard’s, then I shall be perfectly free to accept it and I need not post this letter after all.”

  “You were going to decline, for my sake? You are too good.”

  “Not at all.”

  He shook my hand and then walked on alone. I turned back and went, for the last time, to my meager bed.

  In the morning, the carriage arrived as promised, and waited for me at the bottom of the steep hill where road met towpath. Mr. Brooke carried my trunk for me as I paid Mrs. Jamison and wished her well. The woman’s face looked pinched and pale in the early morning light. I saw her carefully finger the bills I handed her, and felt a pang that our departure was depriving her of income she so clearly needed. I reached into the small pouch where I kept my money, and pressed several more notes into her hand, without counting them.

  The carriage ride was so brief as made it barely worth harnessing the horses, but as the way was all uphill I was glad of the conveyance. The Negro servant, Markham, was waiting for me at the gate and handed me down most civilly. Mrs. Hale met me at the door. She was attired to go out, plain but elegant in a camel-colored cloak, calfskin boots, and a becoming, feather-trimmed bonnet.

  “I am so sorry, Mrs. March, that I cannot stay to see you properly settled, but it is my day to assist at the contraband home in Alexandria, and I do not want to keep the driver waiting. You must use the house as your own. If you can dine with me, that would be delightful: I should like to hear more of your work with the Underground Railroad—Miss Clement mentioned your family’s long involvement-but I will not expect you, and do not feel obliged. If you need to remain at the hospital I quite understand, and cook will send you up something on a tray. The household keeps ‘doctors’ hours,’ which always are irregular, so feel free to call for something at any time. I have asked Markham to put you in the Chinese room; do not hesitate to let him or Hester know if you need anything-anything at all—to make you more comfortable.”

  She laid a gloved hand on my arm and gave me a kindly look. “I do hope you find Mr. March improved today.”

  I started to convey my thanks for all her kindness, but she cut me off. “Not at all, my dear. From what I hear from Miss Clement, he is a most remarkable man and the two of you deserve every consideration. And you would do the same for me, I daresay.”

  Well, Mrs. Hale, I thought, when Markham closed the door and left me alone in the Chinese room, perhaps I might have done the same for you at one time, but it was long since such grand hospitality was in my gift. The room was beautiful. Light poured from two tall windows onto a red lacquered bed hung with heavily embroidered silk. Fresh-cut flowers in a T’ang vase spilled a jasmine scent that spoke of a distant springtime. There was an armoire inlaid with mother-of-pearl and a writing desk with ornately carved legs. On the back of a matching chair lay the warm, quilted robe I had borrowed on my previous visit. I felt like falling onto that soft bed, cocooning myself in its silkworm luxury, and sleeping for a week. Instead, I set my few things in the armoire and hurried off for the hospital.

  Miss Clement had clearly mobilized all the resources of the Hale family. I had dreaded finding Nurse Flynn on duty and when I reached the top of the stairs and saw her just leaving the ward, my impulse was to shrink out of sight until she passed. But her pebble eyes missed very little. She recognized me at once, drew in her brows, and strode purposefully to where I stood. She nodded curtly. “Surgeon Hale asked to be told when you arrived,” she said, in a voice that was surly but also a little awed. “I shall let him know you are here.”

  She had evidently just seen to my husband, for his bed was freshly made and there was greenish salve on the ulcers around his mouth. His color seemed better. I lay a hand on his brow and found his fever only slightly elevated.

  Presently, Surgeon Hale arrived. He made me a most civil greeting and apologized for his brusqueness at our earlier meeting. “I am not as young as I was, Mrs. March, and I have a deal
of trouble keeping the medical cases straight in my mind. The surgical cases-now, that’s another matter. Plunge a knife in a man, you remember it; but one fever or flux is much like another, wouldn’t you say?”

  I did not know what to say, so I held my peace. Surgeon Hale was a small, delicate man, in his middle sixties, with a soft cadence to his voice that spoke of Southern origins. This need not have surprised me, for until the outbreak of war, and indeed even after, Washington had been more of a Southern town than a Northern one. But Mrs. Hale had a crisp Yankee diction, and I wondered how the two of them had come together.

  I have no idea if the doctor had troubled himself much with examining my husband when he had first been admitted. I could not think so, given the demands of the surgical wards. But now he made a most thorough investigation: sounding every inch of the chest, laying hands on the abdomen, raising eyelids, and probing in the mouth. It was difficult to watch; impossible to turn away. When the surgeon had done, I hastened to adjust the gown over my husband’s withered nakedness and return him to the privacy of his coverlid. Surgeon Hale had turned his attention to some notes that Grace Clement had given him. He shook his head. “According to this, your husband’s bowels have moved eighteen times in the last thirty hours. This is incompatible with any hope for recovery. The calomel-that is mercurous chloride—targets his fever, and has reduced it, but it is a strong laxative, and the opiate tincture is not binding him sufficiently. I propose that we make a trial of discontinuing both drugs, and see how he does on quinine alone. If you will see to it that he gets fluids-barley water, rice water, broths-every hour, without fail, we will watch his condition and see if we can turn the tide here.”

  “Will he-will he recover?”

  He shook his head. “I cannot say. His age is against him. The bodies of the young are more resilient and can bear more insult. Hope, Mrs. March. That is all we can do.”

  Hope, he said. So I hoped. I hoped so hard that Hope seemed to take corporeal form, my thoughts and wishes reaching out to him and wrapping themselves around him, as avidly as my body had wrapped around him when we both were young. I wanted to transplant my vivid spirit within his depleted one, to root out the memories that troubled his sleep and sow in their place a vision of every good moment we had spent together. So I sat by his bed, all day and into the evening, whispering reminiscences of sunlit days and crisp fall apples, of girlish laughter and great minds brilliant with new ideas.

  It took two days for the change of regimen to show a result. On the third morning, Hope triumphed. He awoke to the world, took my hand and held it, and would not surrender it, even when I required it of him so that I could help him eat a little custard-the first solid food he had taken in weeks. By the end of that day, he was able to sit, supported, and the next to stand for a few moments. By the end of a week, he could make his way, on an orderly’s arm, to the privy. We talked then, of all that had befallen him, and I tried to make him turn his face from the ashes of his endeavors, and to look at the sparks of hope that still flickered, here and there, for the greater cause he had served. Sometimes, it seemed he listened. Other times he became weary and I let be, thinking that there would be time to mend his spirits as his body continued to heal.

  By then, the weather, too, had changed, and on Sunday morning I walked to church with the Hales and Miss Clement through falling flakes and a city suddenly made lovely to me. On the mornings that followed, I would wake in my warm chamber and look out on a clean, sparkling world. It seemed that everything in my life was being made fresh and restored to me.

  I was able at last to write good news to the girls, and they replied with merry mock dispatches and songs to cheer the invalid.

  I sat by his bed, reading from the latest parcel of missives. Jo had included a “pome,” a “silly little thing” that she had entitled “Song of the Suds,” about her struggles to master domestic arts, which I read to him:

  And I cheerfully learn to. say,

  “Head, you may think, Heart, you may feel,

  But, Hand, you shall work away!”

  “And see? She signs it ‘Topsy Turvey Jo’.”

  “How I miss them!” he sighed.

  “You will see them, soon enough,” I said brightly. Now that his needs were less pressing, I had taken to bringing a basket of needlework to his bedside, mending clothes for the convalescents. I bent down to put the letters away and took up a shirt with a torn seam. I was examining it to see the extent of the rend and did not look up until I heard his breath catch in a sob.

  “Why, whatever is it?” I said, laying the shirt aside and reaching over to stroke his cheek.

  “I can’t go home to them,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “Well, of course,” I said, soothingly. “Dr. Hale says we must not think of moving you while the snowstorms persist. But he says there is every good chance that if the weather eases, we may have you home in time for Christmas.”

  He shook his head. “No. I cannot go home. I am not discharged from the army.”

  “But that’s only a formality-Dr. Hale says it can be effected in a matter of a day or two ...”

  “I am not prepared to seek a discharge.”

  “What are you saying? Are you still delirious?”

  As soon as the words were out I wished them unsaid, for I did not wish to recall to him the cruel torments of those hours.

  “My work,” he said in a whisper, “is not finished. The efforts of the past year, all of them bore rotten fruit. Innocents have died because of me. People have been dragged back into bondage. I cannot go home—to comfort and peace—until I have redeemed the losses I have caused.”

  “And how,” I said, my voice grown cold, “do you propose to do that? When you set out a year ago, you were merely too old for the venture. Now you are both too old and a ruin. Who, precisely, do you think you can help? You, who cannot make his water without assistance?”

  He winced, and I bit my tongue. He needed my understanding, not my anger.

  “Not all you did went for naught,” I said gently. “The education you gave to so many, that cannot be taken away. Why, the letters you taught that girl—you said her name was Zannah—saved your life. Had you not taught so well, you would in all probability be dead now. How can you doubt the value of that?”

  He waved a hand weakly, as if to dismiss the hard effort of so many months. “What good are letters to a woman who has lost her only child? Or to a man who has lost his liberty?”

  “You did not kill that child, a Confederate did. As for the captive Negroes, the war does go on without you, you know. There are others whose efforts might have something to do with liberating those people—all of them—your friends included. It is pride that makes you think like this, that makes you feel as though you are indispensable.”

  “Pride?” he said, smiling weakly. “How could you accuse me of pride? I have no pride left to me. I despise myself. I-I did not always act bravely. I left wounded men behind at the battle of the bluff I let go of Silas Stone in the river...”

  I cut him off, for once his mind turned to these matters it began a cascade: weeping led to coughing, which gave him pain, which caused him to lose his appetite, which arrested the essential daily increase in his strength.

  “You must stop this. Think of your girls and how their hearts lift at the thought of having you home ...”

  “How may I revel in thoughts of my own homecoming, without reflecting on those who will never get home? Those wounded I left, crying; young Stone, drowning? They will never go home, because I was not brave enough.”

  “Brave enough! How brave do you need to be to satisfy yourself? I said pride, and pride it is, when you speak so. For it is not enough for you to be accounted commonly courageous. Oh no: you must be a Titan. You must carry all the wounded off the field. You must not only try to save a man, you must succeed at it, and when you can’t, you heap ashes on your head as if all the blame were yours-none to spare for the generals who blundered you into that battle,
or the stretcher bearers, who also fled for their lives; or for Stone’s own panic, or for the fact that he never troubled to learn to swim, not even a modicum of blame for the man who shot him ... You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah’s child. The war killed both of them. You must accept that.”

  “But I might have saved them. There was a man, Jesse, he handed me a gun, and I handed it back to him. I valued my principles more than I valued their lives. And the outcome is, they are slaves again, or dead.”

  “You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point.”

  “Then what, pray, is the point?” His voice was a dry, soft rattle, like a breeze through a bough of dead leaves.

  “The point is the effort. That you, believing what you believed-what you sincerely believed, including the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’-acted upon it. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you-I grant you, that is hard,to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong-how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible.” And even as I said this, I knew that if I stood again in the cattle show ground, and heard him promise to go to war, I would hold my piece, again, even knowing what terrible days were to follow. For to have asked him to do otherwise would have been to wish him a different man. And I knew then that I loved this man. This inconstant, ruined dreamer.

  He closed his eyes, his brows drawn. His breathing had become labored from the strain of our exchange. I fetched a cloth and made to bathe his forehead, which was beaded with sweat. He submitted for a moment or two, and then he pushed my hand away.

  “Leave me now,” he said. “I need to sleep.”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to school my voice so as not to reveal my hurt and confusion. “Yes, that would be best.”

  I leaned down and kissed his brow. He did not open his eyes or respond in any way.

  I gathered my things and walked toward the exit of the ward. Before I passed through the door, I turned back. His eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling. He did not see me go.