by John Jakes
Sudden cannon fire shook the pavilion. All the lanterns swayed. Two more ambulances arrived outside, the horses snorting, the wheels slopping in mud. The rain had diminished to a drizzle. Virgilia decided it must be close to dawn—they had gone to work immediately upon leaving the car—but she felt energetic, renewed. She could hardly keep from glancing at the unconscious reb while she helped with the new cases coming in.
During the next twenty minutes, the chief surgeon didn’t have time to return to Lieutenant O’Grady. But Virgilia found time, walking to the cot with fresh gauzes draped over her arm.
Carefully, she raised the blankets. Bright red arterial blood stained the gauzes applied earlier. The soldier’s breathing was louder, labored—as expected. She laid the dressings on the cot and felt for his pulse. Stronger, faster—also as expected. The blankets had raised his temperature, and secondary hemorrhaging had begun. As expected.
Drawing the blankets down, she laid two new dressings on top of the first. It would take some time for the pumping blood to soak through all those layers. Should someone raise the blanket, it was doubtful that a problem would be apparent. Once more Virgilia brought the blanket up and tucked it neatly beneath the boy’s chin. She felt not the slightest prick of conscience. This was the enemy. She was a soldier. Grady had long cried out to be avenged.
“Miss Hazard!”
The shout of the chief surgeon drew her back to the center of the pavilion. A captain with a serious chest wound was rushed in on a litter. The only vacant cot was that next to O’Grady, back in the poorly lit corner.
Heart racing, she maneuvered herself into the space between O’Grady’s bed and that of the new patient, partially blocking the surgeon’s view of the reb. Pressed with so many urgent cases, the surgeon did nothing except nod toward O’Grady and ask, “How’s that one?”
“Satisfactory the last time I checked, sir.”
“Seems to be breathing hard. Have a look.”
“Yes, sir.” Terrified, she started to turn.
“I mean after you help me here.”
Virgilia’s tension melted. They worked over the captain for six minutes, until the exhausted surgeon staggered off to answer another appeal from Miss Kisco, who was receiving a new ambulance-load at the entrance. Virgilia snatched fresh gauzes from the storage box and rushed back to O’Grady. She lifted the blanket and saw the small, bright red stars—just two—on the field of white. Her smile was almost sensual.
She applied an additional dressing and once more drew up the blankets. He was bleeding to death unnoticed. Unmourned. Her best estimate was that he would be gone within a half hour. She returned the other dressings to the box and went about her work with a sense of warmth and happiness.
In three-quarters of an hour, carrying a waste pail, she went back to the corner and disposed of the thoroughly soaked dressings, replacing them with a new one, the last that would be needed. She replaced the blankets on the body, put the pail among others with similar contents, and resumed her other work. Despite the clamor and foulness of the pavilion, she floated in a near-euphoric state for twenty minutes. Then she got a jolt.
Unnoticed by Virgilia, Mrs. Neal had returned to inspect various patients. It was her sharp outcry that drew Virgilia’s attention. She saw the supervisor back in the dim corner, her squat body silhouetted against the canvas brightened by the light of the new day.
With her right hand, Mrs. Neal held up the blankets that had covered Lieutenant O’Grady. The startled O of her mouth broke.
“Doctor—Doctor! This boy is dead. Who was charged with watching him?”
105
“NAME AND RANK OF the prisoner?”
“Private Stephen McNaughton.”
“Caught where?”
“Approximately three miles north of here, sir. He was identified by those.” The frog-voiced three-striper hooked his thumb at the prisoner’s soiled tartan pantaloons.
The hanging lantern glared in the eyes of the regimental adjutant, a major half the prisoner’s age, slight and sandy-haired, with ginger-colored Dundreary whiskers. “Step forward,” he ordered, rolling the r slightly. Cap in hand, Salem Jones advanced two paces to the field desk.
“Scum of the streets—that’s all we get anymore.” The major’s complaint drew a nod from one of the two corporals who, together with the sergeant, had brought Jones to regimental headquarters. “Such a depraved, vice-hardened, desperate set of human beings never before fouled any army on the face of God’s earth.”
Worried as he was, Jones had no fundamental disagreement with the major’s opinion. When he had signed on as a replacement in his last regiment, a Pennsylvania reserve unit, he had been held in a Philadelphia stockade for three and a half days, constantly watched by armed guards. The other recruits similarly confined terrified him; they were clearly criminals, men who would have knifed or strangled him and looted his pockets if he hadn’t already lost his bounty in a high-stakes poker game.
“What was your original occupation, Private McNaughton? Cardsharp? Thief? Murderer?” The major’s next words sounded like pistol shots. “Never mind, I know the real answers. Opportunist. Coward. You’re a disgrace to this regiment, the United States Army, the state of New York, America, and your ancestral homeland.”
Pious little prick, Jones thought, envisioning several painful ways he would murder the major, given the chance. Ah, but he mustn’t waste time on fantasies. He had to concentrate on saving himself. His was the misfortune of having chosen a Scottish alias, and the adjutant was a Scot. Jones had the feeling this officer wouldn’t let him off so lightly as others had.
The major seemed incapable of curbing his temper—understandable, given the great numbers of misfits and jailbirds being shoveled up throughout the North to fuel Grant’s war engine. The officer came around the desk and planted himself intimidatingly close to Jones.
“On how many other occasions have you claimed the enlistment bounty, then jumped? Several, I’ll wager. Well, McNaughton, if that is your name, which I doubt, it will not be so easy henceforth.”
Salem Jones’s legs wobbled. His stomach began to slosh as the major said to the sergeant, “Fetch the barber and have him heat the iron. And get this piece of garbage out of my sight.”
First the shears, then a razor, the latter applied with little soap and no gentleness. The noncom who functioned as the regiment’s unofficial barber twice drew blood as he scraped Jones’s skull. Jones didn’t dare cry out for fear of provoking him.
He sat on a stool while the barber removed the last of the hair that ringed his bald head. About thirty soldiers had turned out to watch the punishment. He was infuriated by some of the smirking faces. They belonged to men who had enlisted for the bounty under false names, just as he had, with every intention of deserting. Jones had joined up and run away four times during the year since he had conceived the idea at the height of the New York rioting. He knew men who had pulled it off seven or eight times, with never a capture. That kind of luck had eluded him, as luck had eluded him most of his life.
The May night was warm. An owl hooted somewhere. From the great sparking fire, the shirtless three-striper called, “Ready.”
The ring of observers opened. Corporals pushed Jones through to the fire as the sergeant reached into it with a right hand protected by a thick gauntlet. The sergeant seized the handle of the branding iron and pulled. The end that slid from the coals was white.
While others held him, someone shoved a bottle of popskull at Jones. They forced him to drink several mouthfuls of the fiery swill. With liquor running down his chin and blood trickling around his left ear from one of the scalp nicks, he was thrust to the fire. The boisterous witnesses closed in behind.
The sweating three-striper lifted the iron. Bastards, Jones screamed in silence. I’ll kill you. To those grasping him by the arms and shoulders, the sergeant said, “Hold him steady.”
Rising toward his eyes, the white iron grew larger and larger. Jones writhed, began
begging. “No—no, don’t.” A familiar face floated to one side of the intense light. The major had come out to watch.
“I said hold him,” the sergeant snarled. Hands clamped Salem Jones’s head. He began screaming several seconds before the sergeant pushed the iron against his face.
He flung the firebrand on the tent and ran.
Down a grassy embankment, up the far side, into an apple orchard. There he finally whirled around, clutching an overhanging branch and watching flames ignite the tent. Shouts, oaths came from within. He didn’t really suppose he could burn the major to death, but at least he had given him a fright. He turned and ran on.
Three days after the punishment, Jones had been returned to duty, because the army was preparing to march—by night, which seemed to be the rule now—and the fools believed that head shaving and branding had broken him. Besides, they needed bodies to throw into the war machine. His was good enough. Those of immigrants, thugs, physical cripples were good enough. The Union Army was full of splendid specimens these days.
Brimming with rage and a pain that would last far longer than that in his face, Jones met the order to march by stealing some nondescript trousers from another regiment, encamped nearby. He threw away his tartan pantaloons, donned the plain ones, and ripped all the military buttons from his rancid jacket. He had no cash; more gambling had disposed of that. He had no weapon, and he had no identification except the one burned on him. He was preparing for his last desertion.
Even if he could manage to reenlist for another bounty, he wouldn’t do it. The war had grown too savage. Lee had withstood Butcher Grant in the Wilderness and bloodied him at Spotsylvania—during the latter action, Jones kept busy straggling or dodging to the safest sectors—but Grant wouldn’t quit. The major who had ordered the punishment had once told his assembled regiment about Grant sending a telegraphic dispatch to Washington to express his determination to win in Virginia. The heart of Grant’s message was printed in papers all over the North to improve civilian morale, the major said. He could even quote the essence of the message: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
Well, he would do it without Salem Jones, by God. Jones had enjoyed the benefits of the bounty system for a while, but recapture and the ordeal at the fire had put an end to that. He was bound south, as fast and as far as he could travel. He might go as far as South Carolina. He would love to be there when the Confederacy fell, as it surely would now that Grant’s bloody engine was rolling; It amused Jones to imagine what he could do to Mont Royal and the people who had discharged him when Carolina became a conquered province—
As he fled through the orchard, the scene behind him—shadowmen running, shouting—convinced him the major had escaped from the burning tent. Too bad, but he had done his best. Now he must worry about slipping through the Union lines and the Confederate ones farther south.
At the adjoining regimental bivouac, he dashed through a gap between picket posts. A few moments later, the May moon sailed from behind a cloud, drenching him with light. Two inches high, the D stood out black and clear beneath his right eye.
Within twenty-four hours of the arrival of the nurses, conditions at the field hospital improved. Sanitary Commission wagons with flocks of black youngsters merrily chasing them brought bottled morphine, tinctured opium, chloride of lime. And food. In the first hours, while the hurt, dying, and dead had been shuttled in and out at dizzying speed, only hardtack and coffee had been available.
Amidst the constant activity and occasional confusion, Virgilia managed to marshal her wits and courage for the confrontation that had become inevitable the moment Mrs. Neal raised the dead boy’s blanket. She suspected the supervisor would approach her first, rather than go to the surgeon in charge; she would want that satisfaction.
At the end of Virgilia’s first full day on duty, there came a lull. No new patients, and nothing more to be done for those already there. Virgilia wiped a tin cup on her apron and ladled hot coffee into it. She was spent, having slept less than an hour in one of the commission wagons that afternoon.
She wandered outside. It was dusk. Fire-blackened stumps and tree trunks surrounding the hospital still gave off the smell of charred wood. Dull pain reached from Virgilia’s feet to her lower back, the result of standing for so long. She wandered past the corner of her pavilion, tensing when she heard a rustle of skirts behind her. Without turning, she sat on a stump and brushed away a fly.
“Miss Hazard?”
Her face composed, Virgilia shifted her position to acknowledge the presence of the older woman.
“I have an extremely serious matter to discuss. I fear we both know what it is.”
You fear? she thought, wrathful. You revel in it. She detected a sparkle of malice in Mrs. Neal’s eyes. The supervisor walked to another stump and stopped behind it, facing her subordinate like a presiding judge.
“You allowed that young Southerner to bleed to death, didn’t you? In other words, you killed him.”
“Of all the ridiculous, insulting—”
“Taking the offensive with protests and bluster will do you no good,” Mrs. Neal interrupted. “You told me on the train, very explicitly and before witnesses, that you would not minister to enemy wounded. Your extreme hatred of the South is well known. You covered that young soldier with blankets when you knew full well that warming him would start the damaged vessel bleeding again.”
“Yes, I did cover him. I admit to that mistake. In the confusion—so many needing help—the surgeons all yelling at once—”
“Nonsense. You are one of the best nurses I have ever met. I have always disliked you, but I don’t minimize your ability. You would not make that sort of mistake unless it was deliberate.”
Feeling dampness under her arms and a series of tight little convulsions in her middle, Virgilia rose. She had gambled that admission of one mistake might lend credibility to a denial of greater guilt. Mrs. Neal was not taken in. Without looking at the supervisor, Virgilia bluffed. “If I confess to the error in judgment, you’ll have a hard time proving it was anything more.”
“I can certainly try. I shall report that you put the blankets on the patient, fully understanding the consequences, and you then concealed the hemorrhaging by covering one bloodied bandage with another and another—several, in fact—so that inevitably—”
“Damn you, I didn’t!”
Whirling to cry at her tormentor, Virgilia saw two huge black birds perched on the one surviving branch of a scorched tree. She imagined the birds had been drawn by the smell of wounds. Including hers.
Mrs. Neal lifted her several chins, her glare challenging. “If not you, then who?”
“I don’t know. One of the orderlies—”
“Again—patent nonsense.”
“I admit to the blanket, nothing else.”
“In the face of that, further discussion is fruitless. But I know what you did, and I shall take the evidence to Miss Dix. I shall see you punished. I suggest you spend the evening rehearsing your defense. You’ll want to have all your lies in order when the investigation begins.”
And she swept by with a sideways look of pleasure.
Virgilia stayed outside among the ruined trees as it grew dark. The black birds remained on the charred limb. She took a sip from the cup. Cold. She threw the coffee on the ground. Inside the pavilion, a wounded man began to weep.
She scarcely heard. Given Mrs. Neal’s politics and personal animosity, the supervisor would certainly press for an investigation. And it would probably take place. Who besides Miss Dix would be involved? The surgeon general’s staff? The civil police in Washington? Exhausted, disheveled, Virgilia saw fantasies in the lowering dark. A barred cell. A man in judicial robes high above her, passing sentence—
“God,” she cried softly as something flapped past and brushed her face.
When she recovered, she saw one of the roosting birds sailing above the pavilion. A train whistled. She knuckled her eye
s to rid them of tears of fright. Keep your nerve. Think clearly. What you did isn’t a crime. It was for Grady. There are millions who would call it patriotic. He was the enemy.
All that rationalization did nothing to cancel the other fact. Mrs. Neal would report her. There must be no investigation. It was up to her to prevent it and the possible consequences: prosecution, prison—
How, though? How?
“There you are, Virgilia.”
The woman’s voice startled her. She saw Miss Kisco at the pavilion entrance. Belatedly, she heard something new in the tone of the other nurse: hostility.
“What is it?”
“The chief surgeon wishes to speak to you.”
“Tell him I’ll be there in a moment. I’m a bit dizzy from all the fumes inside.”
“Very well.” Miss Kisco vanished.
Virgilia turned and walked the other way into the dark.
Her pass was in order; she had no trouble boarding the first train leaving for Aquia Landing. By sunrise she was on a steamer chugging up the Potomac.
She would never go back to the field hospital, or any other. But neither would she hide. It had come to her outside the pavilion that she had but one hope of aborting an investigation, and that was through the intervention of some person of influence. A person powerful enough to thwart Mrs. Neal and even Miss Dix.
Virgilia sat on deck bundled in her cloak, her valises between her feet. Despite her situation, she had no regrets. The Southerners had been responsible for Grady’s death, and she had taken a life in reprisal, as the Confederates themselves did. As the biblical kings did.
She was sorry she could no longer continue as a nurse. The work had given her life a direction it had lacked since the debacle at Harpers Ferry. But at least she had closed out her field career as any good soldier should. By destroying an enemy.
Now she must deal with another. In the cool of the early morning, she debarked at the city pier, her face calm, her course determined. As soon as she found a room and cleaned up, she would set about contacting Congressman Sam Stout.