by Robert Hicks
“Some men told me this here’s a hospital.”
I nodded my head.
The boy stayed where he was, shifting his friend’s weight around to get a better grip. He shouted in the high-pitched singsong of a boy who knows he’s in trouble.
“My friend got himself whumped on the head after a big explosion when we was just watching and not doing nothing wrong. Wham, just like that, and he flying through the air and the dirt was in my eyes, and he’s sometimes awake and sometimes asleep, and I had to carry him some of the way, and, ma’am, I think he’s hurt.”
Not a child. Not another child. General Forrest had said soldiers, hadn’t he? Soldiers were men. Not children.
I would have run. I thought to run. I saw before me another child waiting to die in my arms, waiting for me to take him up and nurse him so that he could be forsaken and abandoned by a distant God who had not once—not once—interceded in consideration of what I couldn’t endure. What did it say in Deuteronomy? As thy days, so shall thy strength be. I had believed this! We had all believed this! Every widow and mother, every one of the foggy-headed wraiths wandering through their houses in town, every black-shrouded figure casting her eyes upward while Negro men throw dirt into the graves—we had all believed! And our reward had been more than anyone could endure. I did not forget God’s anointed earthly intermediaries—the men. Carrying on their holy, hellish war as if there were an unlimited supply of bodies and strength to draw on, as if there weren’t enough despair. What did God want from me? I could witness no more. My heart had become flinty and cold, concealing nothing. It was a rock, and He could have it. But another child?
Get away, little boy, I thought. You will die here. I am a killer: it’s what God has revealed to me, His great plan for me.
I shuddered. I loved God. No, I didn’t. I feared Him, I was in awe of His strength, and I had always obeyed Him. Here was a boy, now. Right in front of me, standing at the end of my walkway, his friend crying little tears and staring at me for a sign. What was unbearable was not the dying, but the idea that the dying was part of His plan and that we had trusted Him to deliver us from evil. I hoped the little boy in front of me would wait while I sorted it out, looking for a way to help. The little plump boy, so steady for so long, had begun to sink under the weight of his friend, and as his knees buckled, he brought his cheek to the top of his friend’s head and pulled mightily under his arms to keep him upright. The blood, when he pulled away, stained his wide, pale cheek.
As thy days, so shall thy strength be. Thy strength. Thy strength. My strength. Mine. Not His, but mine. He was not responsible for this. He was not responsible for Martha or for John Randal or for Mary Elizabeth. He was weak. The sudden realization of this brought spots before my eyes and made it hard to breathe. He was weak? My children had not been taken, they had just died. Just died, no special significance to it, no betrayal. He had not been there, there had been no purpose to their deaths, no purpose to the intervening years of my mourning.
I passed from fear to love in that instant, while I stared down at the little boy and his dying friend. I no longer feared God, I loved Him. I loved that He did not even save His own Son. He had not taken His Son, He had lost Him because of the sin of this world.
I would not blame Him anymore, but neither would I ever again pray, Thy will be done. His will was never that His own Son die or that my children die any more than He had willed sin into this world. I would not pray to God that His will be done, as if He could make it so. I would make it so, as far as I understood it. He was not the author of children’s deaths.
I would serve Him because I could. It was men who hurt that boy. Powerful men all around me. I heard them in the distance and smelled their fires.
Run.
Run.
Run.
I took my hands out of my front pocket and ran toward the boys down the walkway. The boy wiped at the tears on his cheeks and almost dropped his friend. He lifted him up again and started toward me.
And so it began.
I took the injured boy around the other shoulder, and between the two of us we got him up the front steps, through the portico, and into the house. As he passed under the portico, his head lolling back on his skinny neck, the wounded one awoke and saw the blue ceiling.
“The sky is damn beautiful, ain’t it?”
His friend looked embarrassed and apologized to me as we sat him down in a chair.
“He’s been talking funny like that all the way back here. He doesn’t normally swear. Much.”
He continued on, telling me all about how he’d lost his spyglass, which was a crying shame, and how he was named Ab and his friend was named Eli, and how the Confederates had flags and guns that could shoot a man at a hundred miles, and how they were spies but not really, and how he wished that rock hadn’t been there.
I wasn’t listening. I wanted to tell the boy to go inside, to bring out one of the surgeons or orderlies. I ran my fingers through the back of Eli’s brown sticky hair, looking for the wound. I started when I found it—a three-inch gash at the base of his head, wet and warm. I looked at the back of his shirt and saw how it had been stained brown by the blood. My heart began to beat in my ears, but I kept focused by gently caressing the boy’s head and face. He looked like a good boy.
I called out for help, and then again, until I heard Mariah and one of the doctors clatter down the steps behind me. Mariah grabbed Ab without a word and pulled him toward her and away from the wounded one. Ab didn’t struggle. The short, sour doctor picked at his mustache and snorted.
“What’s this?”
I told him the boy had been hit on the head and was cut. The doctor laid his delicate hand on top of the boy’s head, shoved it forward, and roughly poked at the back of his head.
“He’s just bumped his damned head, he’s got a little cut. Where the hell did he come from? He needs to be out of the way right now. Wrap his head and send him out of here. Right now.”
He spoke to me as someone who didn’t know me, for whom my house was just a hospital, one of probably hundreds he’d haunted over the years. He knew nothing of me, not even my name. I could be anyone. He stood waiting for me to reply to him, twiddling his thin mustache and rolling his eyes, but I only nodded. He stomped back up the stairs and into his operating chamber. I looked after him briefly and then turned back to the boy.
Mariah, who had been conferring with Ab in the corner, sent the boy off to tell Eli’s family about what had happened. Ab ran out the door and disappeared down the walkway.
The injured boy was unconscious again. I pulled his chair sideways and pushed it against the wall so that he wouldn’t fall over. Without being asked, Mariah found a basin of water, a clean towel, and one long, narrow bandage.
I knelt down behind the boy and felt the hard wood on my knees. I took the towel, wetted it, and began to dab at the boy’s wound. The pain and the cold woke him, and he groaned and cursed, but then he relaxed and let his hand rest in the palm of my free hand. I dabbed some more, lightly, and rinsed the towel out in the basin. Slowly the water turned a light shade of pink. I worked at the long, thin line of the cut, drawing out the dirt and exposing the healthy pink flesh. Soon I had forgotten that Mariah was standing there, watching me crouched on the floor like a washerwoman.
I remained kneeling behind the boy as the second wounded man arrived. And then the third and the fourth. I was there when the fiftieth man came in with his ragged pant leg dangling half-empty off the side of the stretcher and a belt tied around his thigh. They all brushed past me in a blur—the orderlies, the wounded, the dying, the members of the burial detail. They were only a tapestry of muted colors and muffled sounds so long as I dabbed at Eli’s head. My knees went numb, and my house filled quickly. I continued to kneel and wash the wound of the little boy.
Men filled up the rooms on the first floor, and soon orderlies began hauling their burden up the stairs. In the parlor the men were lined up in rows, most unconscious, som
e groaning, but I didn’t go to them. As I rubbed the last piece of dirt from Eli’s head, I was deaf to the sound of the doctor’s saw upstairs. I slowly wrapped his head with the bandage, three times, and the only thing I noticed was how precise Mariah had been while cutting up my old cotton sheets. I did not respond to the redheaded North Carolinian lying a few feet from me, holding his hands over the hole in his stomach. Please, ma’am, if it ain’t any trouble, I would very much like some water.
“. . . please, ma’am, please. I’m fine, please. That man, that man . . . he needs you.”
The boy—Eli—had awoken a few minutes before, and he had not failed to notice the men passing by him. He did not know me, the woman with her arm around him. He just saw that man, the man who needed the water. He could see only the blood seeping between his tightly clenched fingers and soaking into the floor. I saw this in his face.
“That man.”
“You’re all right.”
“That man.”
“You didn’t die. You’re going to be fine.”
“Please, ma’am, please. I’m fine, please. That man, that man . . . he needs you.”
The man’s eyes rolled up in his head, and his throat convulsed, and he screamed until he had no air left.
I nodded my head and ran my hand through my hair, loosening it. I had somehow, inside me, indeed heard the sound of men filling every corner. I had seen the unimaginable and understood what helping the Lord would really mean. But I had saved a child; a child had not died in my arms. The Lord had made good.
Calling to Mariah to follow me, I stood up, turned on my heel without a word to Eli. I stepped over the screaming man and mounted the stairs, climbing quickly. When I burst into the room containing the operating table, the little surgeon was smoking a cigarette and staring out the window while the older doctor cleaned the table of blood. I crossed the room so quickly the little man almost swallowed his burning tobacco when I came upon him.
“This is my house. Do you understand?”
“I never doubted it, ma’am.”
“I mean to say, this is my house, and I won’t be talked to like I don’t have anything to say about what goes on here.”
“Well, I’m afraid, ma’am, that we’ve requisitioned this house for a hospital, as you can see. You will be well compensated by the quartermaster, who will—”
I looked down at the operating table and put my hand over a small, sharp knife. I looked down at my hand intently while I spoke.
“I will cut your tongue out if you talk back to me again.”
Behind me the old doctor laughed out loud, with wide and amused eyes. He made no effort to stop me.
“There is a young man downstairs screaming that his belly has been exploded, and then I come up here and you’re enjoying a little break. I want to see him on this table right now.”
The little surgeon backed away and leaned against the wall while trying to puff out his chest.
“We are in the process of triaging these men, ma’am, and we have everything under—”
I clenched my hand, taking the knife into my fist, which I left resting on the table.
“I swear.”
The old doctor spoke.
“Winston, we ain’t triaging a damn thing, and you know it. One dying boy is the same as another. That college has spoiled you. Let’s go. I’ll cut on that stomach if you won’t.”
I looked up and began to back out of the room, all the while staring at the little surgeon.
“I want to know if you’re having any problems keeping this surgery operating. I want to know immediately.”
The little surgeon wouldn’t look at me, but he had begun to wash his hands. The old doctor spoke.
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you. Would you mind having that young man sent up here?”
I stopped in the doorway, crossed my arms, and nodded my head.
“And there will be many more.”
“I expect so, ma’am.”
Outside the room, I turned to Mariah and began breathing hard. Mariah put her arm around me for a moment, and then I shrugged her off. I told her to start tearing up more linen for bandages, and then I went back down the stairs.
Now hundreds of men lay about me, maybe thousands. Millions. I saw them clearly, the twisting limbs and the trembling chests, the rolling eyes in every head in every direction. I saw the letters peeking out of their pockets, waiting to be delivered to Lord knows where. And every one of them seemed to beg me for water. Please, ma’am. Please. This was the price of my redemption.
“I’m coming.”
Outside, the orderlies began lining the wounded up in the yard. The red sky of dusk was disintegrating into black. There was no more room in the house. There would be no room for days.
17
NOVEMBER 30, 1864: TWILIGHT
It was said you could walk across the battlefield upon the bodies of the fallen and not once touch the ground. Others have described the dead as being stacked like cordwood or like sheaves of corn or like sacks of meal. By different accounts the ground ran with rivers of blood, or it was stained with blood, or it was blood. The wounded moaned, their teeth chattered, they screamed, they howled. Again, it all depended on who was talking. For many years afterward the survivors wrote beautiful letters and memoirs that always, always stumbled when they came to the task of describing the dead. On the morning after the battle, in a town of nearly 2,500 living, there were almost 9,200 casualties. There were no words to describe such a sight, and within a month the dead had either been buried on the battlefield in shallow graves or been hauled off to the new Union cemeteries in Nashville and Murfreesboro: in other words, they quickly disappeared out of sight.
There were thousands of dead men lying on the Confederate side of that battlefield and perhaps a thousand Union dead on the other side. To that add a few thousand horribly wounded men on both sides, and then there were a few hundred men that were missing—that were never again found. Then add to them the men who were so disfigured and broken that they were of no use to their armies anymore, who went home bearing the physical and mental scars of that battle for the rest of their days—lives often cut short because of what had happened at Franklin. The dimensions of the violence begin to emerge, its measurements a tidy table of dead and wounded. But it is impossible to see it all fully. It would drive a man mad to apprehend the whole tragedy, to know every effect and consequence, to know the names of every good man and woman, every genius and every saint, who was never born because their lineage petered out there on that rise at Franklin. It would be like looking into the face of the Gorgon, or for that matter, the face of God.
The thing to remember about the dead (stacked up like wood or like sheaves of corn, whichever you prefer) is that they’re just flesh, and rapidly mortifying flesh at that. The mind reels, it refuses to look closer. The dead are objects, they are litter to be removed. And yet, if one did look closer, as a few rare and intrepid young men did, there was more to see: more than the flesh, the blood, the numbers. Such facts disappear from memory, but the memory of certain faces can be eloquent even in death if one looks closely enough.
“I saw scores of wounded men who had put their thumbs into their mouths and had chewed them into shreds to keep from crying,” wrote a young Mississippian to his girl, “coward-like, as they lay exposed to the merciless fire. Franklin was the only battleground I ever saw where the faces of the majority of the dead expressed supreme fear and terror. Their eyes were wide open and fear staring. Their very attitude as they lay prone upon the ground, with extended, earth-clutching fingers, and with their faces partially buried in the soil, told the tale of mental agony they had endured before death released them.”
The Confederate dead lay on one side of the entrenchments, the Union dead on the other, and, in the night, the living Union troops quietly left town. They left town even as the Confederate commander planned his morning attack. A number of Confederates wandered the field looking futilely for their friends, taking in t
he full extent of the horror that lay at their feet. It was only then, later in the cold night, that they noticed the silence. It was not a total silence; there were still the moans and pleading of the dying in the air. But the aggressive sort of noise that had throttled their ears for near five hours—from the hour before twilight into the moonless night, the gunshots, the report of cannons—that noise had dissipated to nothing.
The Confederate general heard of this, and he wept. The next day he marched toward Nashville to complete what he had begun. Within months the Confederacy would surrender.
Yet the Battle of Franklin was not over. Though the cannons and the wagons had rolled out of town, for some the fighting had just begun. Some fought for their lives in the cold rooms of makeshift hospitals. Others fought to remember what Franklin had been like before November 30, 1864. Still others fought to hang on to whatever vain hope or benighted purpose had brought the war into the town, on the theory that to abandon that hope and purpose would be to render the killing meaningless and the whole affair a cosmic joke. And some fought to quash everything that remained of such sentimental notions.
B o o k II
18
NOVEMBER 30, 1864: NIGHT
In the center of town an old man named Baylor, gray-haired and dressed in black, watched a procession approach his porch: his son, delirious from the pain of his mortal wounds, carried upon a stretcher borne by his slaves.
“Take him into the quarantine room,” he said when they tried to enter the main house. As his son passed him, he resisted the urge to touch the long locks of blond hair which swung freely over the edge of the stretcher. His son began to cry from the pain.
“Keep him quiet, for God’s sake. Make him comfortable, but make him quiet.”
He would not go to see his son, not until the boy was dead. The old man knew he would die, as surely as he knew he’d failed to raise the child with any sense. He didn’t need to watch it happen, to feel the rebuke of his son’s last breath. If only he’d had more time to teach him before the goddamn war began, he thought. Who had taught him to throw away life for a cause? Or for a girl? Did his son really believe he hadn’t known of his little country whore or his trips to see her?