March: a novel

by Geraldine Brooks

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  State of Grace

  I kept my eyes closed till I thought she had gone. I lay there, listening, as the click of her heels on the wooden floorboards receded into silence. But I made a mistake and opened them too soon. She had paused, merely; turned in the doorway to look back at me. So she saw I was awake. I felt the power of her troubled gaze, but I did not turn my head. I could not bear to talk of it anymore; there was no way to make her understand.

  I lay there, sleepless, and let the ghosts come. I offered myself up to the torment of their visions and their accusing whispers. And when exhaustion finally claimed me, just before dawn, I let them inhabit my dreams. It was the least I could do.

  I had grown used to waking and finding her beside me, ready with warm cloths and a bowl of oats or grits which she coaxes me to eat. But she wasn’t there that morning, and I was glad of it. How could I explain to her that all her kindly ministries were a torment? That her warm cloths seared me and her oatmeal caught in my throat like ground glass? For I did not wish to be clean and fed when others lay cold and hungry in their filth.

  The morning wore on, and except for some perfunctory attentions from the nurses, I was left mercifully alone. I dozed fitfully for a time, and when I opened my eyes, the young man, John Brooke, was sitting in her accustomed place, and still I was glad, for he at least would not presume to tell me that I had done enough.

  He wished me a civil good morning, and asked if I wanted anything. I shook my head. Only then did I notice that he had a rather gray cast to his features, and his dark eyes, always grave, were sunken and somber. He had a paper scrolled up in his hand. He kept twisting it nervously.

  “Is there something you must tell me, John?”

  “Sir, I-I do not wish to lay a burden upon you, but I’m afraid I have some grim news. Laurie-my pupil-sent a telegraph yesterday evening. It-it appears that young Beth has had scarlet fever for some days, and Mrs. Mullet bade the girls conceal it from Mrs. March, knowing she was bound here with you. But Teddy-young Mr. Laurie, I should say—became increasingly alarmed, and convinced his grandfather that the little girl’s illness was such that Mrs. March must know of it. The short of it is, she left last night, and should be there by the early hours of tomorrow morning. She left a note for you. She said it is but a line. She did not have time to write more.”

  Brooke handed me the scrap of twisted paper. I could barely read it through the blur. Now you must see the need to be together. Remember that we are a family. Hope with me, and come to me as soon as you can.

  I fell back on my pillow. “Pray God she arrives in time!” I barely heard Brooke as he recounted what he had learned from quizzing the nurses on the course the fever takes. I knew enough: we had sat up, fretting, when Meg and Jo had contracted it, but they were strong girls, tough in the fiber and robust. Beth was delicate. Her whole short life had been marked by illnesses whose journeys took her out to the very edge of existence. Sometimes it seemed to me that her hold on this world was no firmer than the petal’s to the blown rose. And yet she was the best of all of us. Was I to have another ghost to join the reproachful throng at my bedside? Already, I heard the reedy whisper that would haunt my dreams: “Papa, why did you leave your little Mouse? If you had only stayed with us...”

  I felt my chest tighten, and then the spasm, and I surrendered to it. I let the coughs wrack me, thinking that my heart might burst. Indeed, I hoped for it. At that moment, the idea of oblivion seemed to me no more than the promise of a sweet release.

  When I had surrendered all belief in mercy, so mercy was granted me at last.

  I will not say I woke to the good news, for I kept vigil with my distant child that night, and did not sleep. But in the first gray stir-rings of morning, I turned to see Mr. Brooke enter the ward, his face stamped with manifest relief and joy so complete it did not need the elaboration of the telegraph’s few words. Marmee had arrived to find our Beth recovering: the fever had turned as she traveled northward, so that our little daughter awoke from her long struggle to the sight of her beloved mother’s face.

  The letter that followed in due course stated the simple obvious: that she would remain with our small recovering invalid and not return to Washington. She wrote that she proposed to entrust my recuperation to the capable supervision of Mr. Brooke, and that all at home awaited the easing of the weather in the confident expectation of our speedy reunion.

  But what she expected was not possible. I did not know how to judge her letter; whether it was calculated, in that she reasoned if she pretended to assume a certain course of events, I would become more pliable to her vision, or whether her obtuseness was unfeigned, and nothing I had said to her had pierced the carapace of her obstinacy.

  The fact was this: I could not go home. I had not earned the right. My service was not completed. If I struggled now to speed my convalescence, it was because I was anxious to set my feet on the path of atonement, and find some niche in which a diminished man could be of modest use. Mr. Brooke, of course, misconstrued my new willingness to accept food and take exercise. He naturally assumed that my redoubled efforts were born of a desire for reunion with my family. Since disabusing him would be too complicated, I let him think what he would.

  Slowly, I regained the strength of my limbs and was able to take my place for a few hours each day with the other convalescents, the corps of the feeble, who tried our best to sweep and scour, fetch and carry for those sicker than ourselves, and so relieve the nurses of such routine burdens. And if these duties more often took me downstairs, to the surgical ward, than to any other place, then I will not apologize for that. For I took satisfaction from any small effort I could make that lessened the tasks of Grace Clement, whose skills at nursing were become as prodigious as those of many who claimed the higher titles of healing.

  Grace herself was not in favor of using convalescents as attendants, or so she told me one day as she taught me how to drench the stump of a boy named Cephas White. “He should have walked out of here on two legs, had they not overburdened him with heavy tasks before his injury was fully mended,” she said. The boy was still unconscious following his surgery, which was fortunate, for the poison had spread so far from his wound that, as well as taking off the leg, the surgeon had been forced to debride the flesh of his thigh and groin so that it looked raw and disgusting as beef on a butcher’s block. He would wake to certain agony.

  As Grace directed me, I slowly poured the cold water on his dressings until they saturated, and then adjusted the oilcloth beneath his bed to catch the falling drips. He had developed a fever, so she laid a cold compress upon his brow. “It will be remarkable now if he leaves this place alive,” she said. She looked at me across his ruined body. “You would do well to consider your own strength, and not exceed it, or you, too, may be here longer than you need to be.”

  “And what would that matter? I must find some way to be of use. Here, at least, I can be a little help to you.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Maybe, but not for many weeks more. They are forming a medical corps to serve the planned colored regiments, and Dr. Hale has agreed that I should join it.”

  The jug handle slipped in my hand as she said this, and water splashed onto the oilcoth. I had not realized how much store I set in being of service to her. To be deprived of her company, so soon after our unlikely reunion-this seemed a cruel prospect.

  “I had planned, that is, I had hoped, that we might work together, that I might learn some basic skills that would be of use to you, as you are of use and learn from Dr. Hale...”

  “You should think instead about going home, and growing strong again,” she said. “There is no way you can make a full recovery here. Most likely in your weakened state you will succumb to some hospital malady. And even if you do not pick up any new affliction, you know the nature of your fever. It is bound to recur.”

  “But I do not look for hearth and healing! How can I seek comfort when others—like this boy here�
��suffer still? My conscience will not let me rest idle at home.” I dropped my voice then. “You know there are grave matters-mistakes, failings-for which I need to make amends.”

  “You are not the only one who has to live with a troubled conscience,” she said. “There are many of us who bear guilt for what we have done-what the circumstances of our lives have led us to do.”

  I grew impatient with her. “You!” I said. “You can know nothing of this. You are the noblest person I ever met. Your choice, to care for that man, your so-called father, when you could have abandoned him and no one to blame it-”

  “This is no place to speak of such things,” she said sharply. She dropped her voice. “But you are quite mistaken. Walk with me if you will, this afternoon. It is milder today. If it remains so, I believe a short walk in the full air might be beneficial to you. I will wait for you, a little after three o’clock, by the ruins of the French minister’s house. There was a fire there; the building was quite gutted. Anyone will be able to direct you. It is not far.”

  She turned away then, and instead of going on to the next bed, whose occupant also was unconscious, crossed the ward to change the dressings of a man who was quite alert. There was no way to continue our conversation, as she had clearly purposed.

  So I swept the floor and then went to lie down so that I would have the strength to walk. At three o’clock I borrowed a greatcoat and some gloves from an orderly. Just before I set out, I thought to look in on the poor boy, White, and see if he had regained consciousness, and if so, to ensure that he had been given something to ease his suffering.

  When I got to his bedside, it was evident that suffering, for him, was over. I went looking for an orderly to take the body to the dead house, but everyone was occupied just then, transporting wounded from newly arrived ambulances. So I returned to White’s bedside, thinking to remove the pillow beneath his head before the rigor set in. As I did so, a paper fluttered to the floor. I bent to retrieve it. Upon it was a verse, scrawled in an uncertain hand.

  I am no longer eager, bold & strong.

  All that is past;

  I am ready not to do

  At last, at last,

  My half day’s work is done,

  And this is all my part.

  I give a patient God

  My patient heart.

  The boy had written this before the amputation. I expect he had seen enough by then to know his likely fate. I am ready not to do. The line burned me. How could an unlearned youth such as White write with such wisdom and resignation, while I, brimful of philosophy and book learning, was unable to still my heart into patience?

  I set the paper carefully with White’s few effects and left the hospital. The cold air hit my face like a welcome slap, breaking me out of morbid reverie. I stretched my legs, feeling pleasure as the muscles once again answered to my will, and allowed myself the luxury of anticipation. There was so much I wished to say to Grace; all of it impossible in the close confines of the hospital.

  It was, as she had said, easy to find the blackened shell of a mansion that she had appointed for our meeting. The ruined house abutted a little wilderness of cedars bisected by a narrow, silvery brook where Georgetown’s black washerwomen gathered to do their clients’ laundry. Since my pace was slow, Grace had reached the place before me. I told her about White, but did not mention the poem. She nodded gravely. She had not expected him to survive; that he had passed without further suffering was, she said, a mercy of a kind.

  When we had passed into the trees and away from eyes that might be scandalized, she took my arm as any nurse might do, to support my still-unsure steps over the uneven pathway. When we had gone a little distance, she turned to me and addressed me with an abrupt severity.

  “You have to stop wallowing in this notion that you are somehow at fault in all the ill things that have happened this past year. War is full of misfortune. Cannot you see? It is folly to let this self-flagellation shape your future.”

  I was angered by her tone and by her obtuseness-she, who had never seemed the least obtuse. “You do not know what you are speaking about,” I said, abrupt in my turn. “You have always done the highest and best thing; the self-sacrificing thing. What can you possibly know of a conscience ablaze with guilt? What can you know of sin?”

  Her reply came like a whisper, or a hiss.

  “Is not incest a sin? Is not murder?”

  “What?”

  I stopped still on the path. The cedars sighed above us.

  She let go of my elbow. She held herself stiffly, as if some struggle were under way within. Her lips were drawn tight and her hands were balled into fists. She pressed them together, and pushed them against the underside of her jaw. She breathed in deeply then and rubbed her hands over her face, flexed her shoulders, and began to speak, her voice low and measured.

  “I told you Mr. Clement’s son died when his fowling piece discharged in his face. I told you he tangled his boot in a thicket of honeysuckle. I did not tell you—I have not told anyone—the full account of that accident, and I do not propose to tell it now.” She gave me that assessing look that I remembered from years earlier. “But you are not the innocent who arrived at the Clement house that long-ago spring. I think you have seen enough of evil now to understand very well how things stood. All I will say is this: that he, knowing the truth of my parentage, knowing he was my brother, committed a sin whose magnitude has ever been understood, even by savages. And do you know what the worst violation was? That I realized my father had intended just such a thing. That I had been kept, perchance, for just such a purpose, to be used in my turn as my mother had been used. What happened to him was, in part, an accident. But only in part. I don’t believe I meant to kill him, but I rejoiced in his death, Mr. March.”

  For a moment, there was a blaze in her eyes that looked like exaltation. The images came to my mind, unbidden. I cannot know, I will never know, if I saw aright. An unexpected encounter in an autumnal field. A youth giving way to a moment’s base lust or a year’s corrupt longing. A scuffle amid the yellowing honeysuckle, a fall, a gun discharging, a face exploding like a shattered watermelon. And another face, lovely and pitiless, hurrying silently away.

  Grace had dropped her head, and her voice, when she spoke again, was even lower than before. “The remorse-that came later. When I saw the loss in my father’s eyes, and in the eyes of Mr. Harris. When Mr. Harris left, because of my brother’s death, and I watched the plantation come slowly undone, and saw everyone suffer on account of it. Prudence and Justice sold, Annie drowned. All of it, all of it, because of my actions.

  “So, do not presume that I have no experience with a conscience that flays me alive, every waking day.”

  “Whatever it was that you did-” I stumbled, and began again. “Whatever misadventure happened as you sought to defend yourself-” But there she cut me off, waving her hands impatiently as if to clear a noxious mist.

  “I do not ask your absolution. I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try to do the good of which our hands are capable for the people who come in our way. That, at least, has been my path.”

  “Well, then,” I said, a little querulous, “that, too, is what I purpose. When I am a little stronger I could work with you: there will be needs, great needs, when colored troops are enlisted at last-”

  She cut me off again, angrily this time.

  “We have had enough of white people ordering our existence! There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language of our souls. A free people must learn to manage its own destiny.”

  She had raised her voice and her eyes glared. I looked away, astonished by the vehemence of her rejection. “Go home, Mr. March,” she said. Then her voice softened. “If you sincerely want to help us, go back to Concord and work with your own people.
Write sermons that will prepare your neighbors to accept a world where black and white may one day stand as equals.”

  “But I don’t know if I can preach at all anymore ...” My voice broke into a high whine, like a boy on the cusp of manhood. I imagined it would break, just so, if I ever again mounted the steps of a pulpit. For me, silence had become more eloquent than any sermon.

  She moved toward me and laid a hand on my arm. “Go home. Be a father to your daughters. That, at least, you can do. They are the ones who need you.”

  She didn’t say it, but the unspoken words hung in the air between us. They might need me: she, most definitely, did not.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Concord

  You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.

  But some steps require more effort than others. As I set my foot upon the path leading to that little brown house, I felt like an impostor. Surely, I had no business here. This was the house of another man. A man I remembered. A person of moral certainty, and some measure of wisdom, whom many called courageous. How could I masquerade as such a one? For I was a fool, a coward, uncertain of everything.

  Had I been alone, I might have turned back then, melted away like the snow on that bright, mild morning, become a particle lost in the vast spate flowing through the landscape of war, so that my daughters could live with the unsullied memory of that other man, and not be obliged to know this inferior replacement.

  But I was not alone. John Brooke had a firm grip upon my arm and the young Laurence boy pranced brightly ahead of us, barely able to contain his excitement. He was carrying on as if he brought some bright-wrapped, welcome Christmas gift. If only he knew for what shoddy goods he was the forerunner. I pulled my muffler up high around my face, so as to hide the trembling at the corners of my mouth. Truly, walking up that path was an act of courage greater than any asked of me at war.