by William Gear
The original owners of the stout table were undoubtedly raising hell, trying to discover where their valued centerpiece had vanished to. Since they had most of General Beauregard’s army to regard as likely culprits, their task was no doubt proving to be a daunting one.
Built like a slab, the table was heavy enough that Doc figured he could trust his medicine shelf to it, and had placed it against the hospital tent’s back wall. Getting his varied-sized bottles organized, however, was another matter.
Taking an alphabetical approach, he was down to Q for quinine when a shout from beyond the tent’s confines caused him to pause.
“Yo! Doc? You ’round?” a voice called.
Doc crossed his hospital tent and stepped out into the late evening. Against the backdrop of the Fourth Tennessee’s tents, messes, and cook fires, a sergeant marched ahead of an obvious prisoner flanked by two privates.
Doc glanced up at the evening light where it filtered through clouds above the hilly country to the west. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
“Colonel’s orders, Doc. He wants an evaluation of Private Shumaker, here. Wonders if he’s fit for duty.” The sergeant gave the cringing Shumaker a disgusted look.
As the small squad drew to a halt before the tent, Doc rolled up his sleeves and stepped close. The private stared back with a somewhat cowed but clear-eyed expression. Shumaker might have been eighteen, thin, medium height, with a narrow face and a razor-thin beak of a nose. Like so many, his unwashed black hair hung to his collar. He watched Doc with wary black eyes that reeked of worry.
Doc checked the man’s pulse, poked and prodded, finding the usual slightly malnourished Confederate volunteer in his ragged but serviceable homespun uniform.
“Any complaints, soldier?”
“No, suh.”
“Are your bowels fit? No runs, squirts, or pains?”
“No, suh.”
“What about his head?” the sergeant asked. “Anything wrong with his head?”
Doc shot a wary glance at the sergeant. The two guards had a strained expression—as if they were struggling to keep amusement firmly throttled in the presence of their irritated sergeant.
Doc turned his attention back to Shumaker. “What’s this about, Private?”
“It’s about the prisoner, suh.”
“What prisoner?”
“The Yankee, suh.”
“What Yankee?”
“The one the sergeant, here, caught just outside our lines day afore yestiddy.”
Doc glanced at the sergeant, seeing the man’s hot blue eyes narrow to an angry squint. His knuckles turned white where they gripped the stock on his Enfield musket, as if he wanted to wring the wood.
“Go on, Private,” Doc coaxed, seeing nothing about the man’s cognition or wits that seemed amiss.
“Well, Doc … er, suh, I’s given the guard duty. You know, to hold the prisoner till he could be sent back East on a train. Right pleasant feller this Yank was. Said he’s from Ioway. Some little town called—”
“Git ter the point, Willy!” the sergeant barked.
“Yes, suh.” Shumaker flinched. Then he glanced at Doc. “Well, suh, I’d been a-watchin’ him all day. Finally, he looks me right in the eye and says, ‘Hey, Reb. You know y’all is gonna be whipped.’”
“‘How’s that?’ I says.”
“‘Why, us Yankees, we’s better so’jers than you Rebs. Better dressed, better fed, better led, and we sure is a heap better at so’jering.’
“‘How’s that?’ I asks.” Shumaker fixed Doc with serious eyes. “I’s gittin’ a mite perturbed, ya see.”
Doc crossed his arms and arched an inquisitive eyebrow.
“So next, the Yank says, ‘Take that rifle yer a-holdin. Any Yank in the army knows the manual of arms better’n even the best Johnny y’all gots in yer army. Fer instance, y’all couldn’t come close to matching me, move fer move, at rifle drill.’”
Shumaker’s face puckered with a frown. “So I tells him, ‘Count her out, Yank.’ And he does. And I do the drill, calling, ‘Load in the nines!’ He calls one, and I pass my rifle left and drop the butt. As he calls out the numbers, I play like I’m reaching for my c’tridge box. Pull a round on the number, play like I rip it with my teeth, and act like I’m pouring the powder. I shucks out the ramrod, drops it down, pulls it out. And he’s still a-counting. I fix the ramrod and bring the gun up right, cocking. Then I play like I’m reaching for a cap a’for I tap my thumb on the nipple like I’s capping, and bring her up, ready to fire.”
Doc noticed that the sergeant was almost vibrating with rage. The two privates on either side looked like they had something stuck in their throats.
Shumaker, warming to his story, added, “So the Yankee says, ‘I kin beat that all holler. Hand me that rifle.’ So I does. And I start the count, and he’s right fast, dropping the butt, playing like he’s reaching for a ca’tridge. Then he whips out the ramrod and drops it clear down the barrel where it goes tink.”
Doc understood. It was regulation that guns were unloaded inside the Corinth works and around the tents.
“So he finishes the drill,” Shumaker continued. “And but for dropping the ramrod down the barrel, he’da beat me.”
“Then what happened, you damn idiot?” the sergeant demanded, his face blacker than a midsummer thunderstorm.
Shumaker shrugged nervously. “That Yank, he done tossed me the rifle and declares, ‘See y’all in Richmond, Reb!’ And he takes off running like lickety-split!”
Doc took a breath, seeing it all in his mind.
“I whipped my rifle t’ my shoulder, took aim, and hollered, ‘Stop, Yank! Or I’ll shoot!’ And over his shoulder, he shouts back, ‘Give ’er hell, Reb! Ye ain’t loaded!’ So I takes out after, but he’s passed the rest of the camps, and he’s rabbit-gone inter the trees. And we search and cain’t none of us find hide ner hair of him.”
Doc nodded to himself. Glanced at the sergeant. “And what, exactly, does the colonel want me to determine here?”
“Well, Doc, my orders from the colonel, and I quote, were ‘Before I decide if I’m gonna shoot him, or have him diggin’ latrines for the next twenty years, take this moron to the regimental surgeon and see if he’s got so much as a single brain in his head!’”
Doc smiled, fighting a chuckle. “Well, Sergeant, tell the colonel, with my compliments, that given Private Shumaker’s apparent mental capacity, the Army of Mississippi might be best served if the private were given the opportunity to enlist in the Federal Army.”
19
March 13, 1862
The wagon stopped short as it hit the half-rotted log. The horses strained in their traces as they leaned into their collars. Muscles bunched in their hindquarters, the trace chains taught.
“Gee!” Sarah yelled, using her long-handled whip to touch the black’s offside flank. The horses leaned right, hooves shredding the leaf mat and twigs underfoot.
“Haw!” she cried and touched the brown’s onside flank. This time the team staggered left, pulling the wagon’s right front wheel over the decaying log where it lay almost buried in the leaf mat.
The wagon lurched up, dropped down, and rocked Sarah back and forth on the seat as she called, “Git up, there!” The horses gained enough momentum to bounce the back wheels over the log with a bump.
Sarah turned, keeping an eye on the corpses piled in the wagon bed as they bounced and flopped, but none shifted enough to be in danger of falling out—limp weight in their torn uniforms. Lifeless. Ruined. Decomposing, and leaking.
But for the stench, she could almost believe the bloated corpses were anything but dead men.
Men didn’t look like that. Or shouldn’t. Not blackened, swollen, and gurgling, eyes dried out and sunken into skulls. Men had lips that covered their teeth, not these gaping rictus grins that exposed blood-blackened and filth-stained teeth.
And the stench. It never let a person forget. Even through the layers of cloth she’d wo
und around her mouth and nose, even though she tried to parse her breathing to little sniffs, it was enough to leave her on the perpetual verge of throwing up.
She turned her attention back to guiding her wagon through the tangle of gun-shattered forest, and back to the path where it wound through the thick confusion of oak, maple, and hickory timber. Through trial and error, a circuitous path had been hacked out of the thick woods, signs of ax work visible where saplings and vines had been cut. Piles of branches and deadfall had been dragged off to the side. But wagons could reach most of the battlefield now.
“By God, Miss Hancock,” one of the privates behind her called, “that was a fine bit of driving!”
She looked back where the four Yankee privates stood among the trees, and waved. Then they were bending to lift the remains of a Confederate private. They’d carry his body to the dead pile and sling it on top. When all the Rebs in the area had been picked up, they’d be buried in a single trench close to where they’d fallen.
The Union dead got individual graves.
The horses knew the way now, following the trace as it wound around the tree trunks in Morgan’s Wood like a drunken snake. Here and there she could see bullet scars in the bark. One old oak had taken a direct hit and been blown into splinters. Dark patches on the fall-pale leaves marked bloody spots were men had died.
This was ground that Hébert’s Divison had fought over for most of a day before Davis’s Federals had finally driven them from the dense tangle of forest. It was literally crawling with soldiers now, their job to search the brush and forest litter for bodies, weapons, and abandoned equipment.
She broke out onto the Leetown Road where Captain Stengel waited with his clerk. He was dressed in his blue overcoat, gloves on his hands, and a black felt hat pulled low over his ears. His breath fogged in the cold evening air. The sun was setting in the west across the field at Foster’s farm.
“Got fifteen, Captain. All Federal.”
As the clerk scribbled in his bound book, Captain Stengel called, “Thank you, Miss Hancock.” Then he stepped close, waving at her to wait. His brown eyes were filled with concern. “Are you all right?” His German accent tainted the English.
“Fine, Captain.” She fought a smile beneath her cloth mask. “Well … as fine as could be, given the kind of work this is.”
“We appreciate, ja. None of the men have been untoward?”
“No, sir.”
“You let me know, ja?” He shook his head. “You are no older than my daughter Ilsa. I cannot imagine her doing this.”
“Just a job, Captain. A dollar a day.”
His nose wrinkled as an eddy in the breeze carried the full stench to his nose. “And you get to keep your wagon, ja.”
That had been the deal when he had come in command of the small wagon train sent to finally evacuate the Rebel wounded and dead from the Hancock farm.
Sarah had been watching from the porch as the last of the wounded were being loaded. That was when one of the Yankee corporals had pointed to the Hancock’s wagon, saying, “If we had the horses, there’s another wagon for us, Captain.”
Sarah had walked out, placing herself firmly before Captain Stengel. “That’s ours. Maw’s and mine. You wouldn’t steal a woman’s wagon, would you?”
Stengel had studied her appreciatively, aware that the corporal was watching her the way a young man did when in the company of a most attractive young woman. He had looked around, taking in the empty barn and outbuildings.
“Where are the horses?”
“Taken by the Rebels. Captain Stengel, come next fall, we can borrow horses, but that wagon is the only way we can take our crops to market.”
“Miss Hancock,” he had said gently, “I am in need of wagons, ja? I have men to collect all over the battlefield.”
It had hit Sarah like a thrown stone. “I’ll rent it to you. And better yet, you find me the horses, I’ll drive it. Dollar a day.”
“Sarah!” Maw had protested, but desisted at Sarah’s lifted hand.
She’d thought the figure outrageous. A dollar? He could have hired all the wagons he wanted at two bits.
Something had warmed behind Captain Stengel’s eyes. “Ja, you have a deal, Miss Hancock. Corporal Steinmetz, you will send for two horses.” To Sarah he’d asked, “You start today?”
“Yes, sir!” Sarah had cried, somewhat stunned by the rapidity of it. “I’ll have the harness laid out by the time you get me a team.”
“It will not be pleasant work, Miss Hancock.”
She’d looked over to where four Yankee soldiers were loading the last of the Rebel corpses into a field ambulance. “Captain, after the last few days, I can handle anything.”
Now, two days into the work, she wondered. Down deep inside it was as if some part of her soul had gone eternally numb and unfeeling. Given the things she’d seen, a distant part of her wondered if she’d ever believe in God again.
What she’d give to be home with Maw, sitting in the chair, watching the flames in the hearth and wishing she could forget. This time of night, Maw would have tea made. Maybe Billy would have dropped by with a squirrel or opossum.
“Is almost sunset, ja?” Stengel waved her forward. “You deliver these to burial detail, and to the camp you proceed. Tomorrow, we start again.”
She nodded, slapping the reins, and tried to breathe through her nose as the breeze blew from behind. As she bounced down the road, she glanced back at her gruesome load. The ones on the bottom were just dead. Shot through the body or head mostly. Still human looking.
And then there were the others. The things of nightmares. Had she not seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed it. The boy couldn’t have been more than fifteen, slight, thin faced. Some bursting shell had splintered a high branch over his head. He had tried to duck, only to have the falling branch drive through his back and pin him to the forest floor like a speared rabbit. She’d watched the amazed burial detail pull the wood back through the boy’s body and gone queasy as his guts came with it.
God, he was younger looking than Billy.
It still sent a shiver down her back.
Oddly, the pieces, the severed arms, legs, and heads no longer gave her the willies. She averted her eyes, however, when they loaded the bayoneted ones with their gaping holes, or the ones who’d been hit in the guts by the occasional cannon shot.
She wasn’t even sure who she was anymore.
Little Rock and the future she’d dreamed about might have been like a golden haze of memory.
After delivering her load to the burial detail, she drove her wagon to the camp set aside for the civilians who’d been drafted into the Union cause. Twilight was fading into the cold March night as she cared for the horses and led them to their picket.
The tent Captain Stengel had provided was pitched in a row just down from the fire where a couple of soldiers dispensed plates of stew. Even though she’d removed the cloth mask, the stench of death seemed to linger in her nostrils, as if it permeated her dress, skin, and hair.
“Here you go, miss,” the burly private from Iowa told her as he handed her a tin bowl of the stew. He glanced around, lowered his voice. “Supposed to get cold tonight.”
“I reckon,” she agreed, reaching for a handful of squares of hardtack to soak in her stew. “It’s still March.”
His dark gaze fixed on her. “If you need a body to keep you warm in that bed of yours tonight, it’d be worth five dollars to me.”
It took a couple of seconds for his meaning to sink in. “What?”
He gestured around. “Well, some of these other gals doing the mending and all. They come down from Springfield. They been making a little extra on the side. Didn’t know if’n you was interested, but pretty as you is? I’d raise that to ten dollars for the whole night.”
Sarah’s heart was pounding. “I am not a … a … One of them women!”
He ducked his head, looking appalled, and winced. “I’m most sorry, ma�
��am. So very, very sorry. I didn’t…” He swallowed hard. “Oh, damn. Please forget I said anything.”
But Sarah was already headed back to her tent, almost at a run, the hot soup slopping in her plate.
How dare he?
In her tent, she pulled the flaps tight and tied them, sitting in the darkness on her blanket. Ten dollars?
Thoughts roiled in her mind. What kind of madness had she fallen into? Memories of the dead as they bounced in her wagon, the sights, smells, and horrors. And then to be taken for a common whore? They were giving her a dollar a day to endure this? But was even that outrageous sum worth the horror and now the humiliation?
She shook her head. “So, this is what the real world is like?” Who would have believed that a soldier would give his entire month’s pay … for that?
More than anything, she just wanted it to be over so that Paw would come and get her, take her to Little Rock where she could begin the task of building the life she’d always dreamed of. A life far from battlefields and death, where she could marry a decent husband, bear his children, and forget the soldiers, the battlefield, and the kind of men who’d offer her ten dollars for the use of her body.
20
March 30, 1862
A gentle rain fell just beyond the flap of Doc’s surgery. On the pole, his yellow hospital flag hung limp and dripping, each drop reminiscent of urine as the dye leached out of the fabric.
Doc had just lanced a boil on an Obion County volunteer’s neck, and John Mays was collecting the rags he’d used to absorb the effluvium. These, his young surgical assistant now tossed into the small stove for disposal.
Doc turned to the wash pan and cleaned both his hands and the trocar before drying them neatly. Next he inserted the trocar into its pouch. He was bent over, replacing it in his surgical bag, when a smooth Mississippi drawl stopped him short.
“Aw do declare, that must indeed be the regimental surgeon, identifiable to all the world by his wide and prepossessing ass.”
Doc turned to find a nattily dressed first lieutenant standing beneath the protection of his awning. The man’s slouch hat hung low over a shadowed face and dripped water onto a slicker. A large black leather case hung from his right hand. The new arrival sported long sandy hair, a dark blond mustache and goatee. Devilish blue eyes were sparkling on either side of a familiar nose.