A woman screamed. Two soldiers laughed. Ethan took off running.
His boots clambered over the porch. At the front door, he shouted, “Ma’am, my name is Sergeant Ethan Howard, and I’m coming in to fetch the two scoundrels who just broke into your home.”
With the toe of his boot, he nudged the door open farther, his hands firmly on his rifle. Not wanting to alarm the woman more than necessary, he kept it lowered as he entered.
“Don’t hurt me, please! Oh Lord, have mercy!” an old woman gasped from a rocking chair in the corner.
“I’m not here to hurt you.” He lifted his gaze to the creaking ceiling. “They went up there?”
She pointed straight up. “Ain’t we poor enough already? You gotta tear up the railroad, too? It’s not just soldiers you’re keepin’ away. It’s food. It’s medicine. It’s anything worth havin’.”
Drunken laughter tumbled down the stairs.
“They can have my money. I got wheelbarrows full of Confederate dollars out back. But if they steal the only things that mean somethin’ to me…”
“They won’t.” Ethan bounded up the stairs.
At the top, he caught a glimpse of a round black barrel and felt his heartbeat suspend in his chest. Time slowed then skipped a beat. There was no chance to shout, or to duck, or to raise his own weapon and fire a shot in self-defense. All he could do was watch the spark and smoke spew from the rifle’s mouth.
Fire combusted below his right elbow. His rifle clattered down the stairs, though Ethan didn’t feel his hand dropping it. Stunned, he stumbled backward, lost his balance. He felt himself falling, but his arm refused to catch himself. His body crashed against the hard edges of the steps, his head slammed on the side of the wall. His right hand useless, he pushed himself up with his left. Leaning against the wall in the stairwell, he looked from the blood soaking his sleeve to the white faces staring down at him from above.
“You idiot!” Weston hissed.
“I thought he was a Reb coming up to kill us!”
The pain was a hatchet to his flesh, a torch to his nerves. A hammer to his bone. Clamping his hand over the hole in his arm, Ethan watched his fingers grow crimson with blood. The sickly sweet metallic smell filled his nostrils and turned his stomach. “Get. Out.”
Their rifles slung over their shoulders, Weston and Riley squeezed around him on the stairs. The last thing Ethan heard was the slam of the door behind them, and the woman weeping from her chair.
Chapter Seven
Marietta
In the Methodist church turned hospital, Cora Mae walked down the aisle between wounded men held aloft by planks resting atop the pews. It was a gruesome distortion, she thought, of the stained-glass window depicting Moses walking through the Red Sea. But in the three days she had been nursing here, while June helped in the cooking tent west of the square, the helpless condition of these patients had made it easier to ignore that they were Yankees. They didn’t mock her. They needed her.
The men were placed side by side across the pews, with a narrow width between each row. Beginning her rounds with the patients closest to the altar, she climbed onto the front pew, dipped her sponge in her pail, and then squeezed it over each patient’s wound to keep moist the lint the doctor had packed inside. When she was done with one row, she hopped to the floor, walked five pews up the aisle, and climbed on that one to repeat the process. Other nurses worked here, too, but most of them were soldiers recovering from illness or injury. They needed frequent breaks, still being weak themselves.
“You’re doing well, Cora Mae.” The soft voice of Anne Littleton, the chaplain’s wife, drifted from the side aisle, where she paused with a tray, recently emptied of its corn bread. “We’re most grateful for your help. I hope you know that if they were Southern boys, I’d still work alongside you to care for them just the same.”
“Thank you.” Cora Mae finished wetting one more patient’s wound then climbed down from the pew and walked up to the next. She smoothed her apron over the calico dress Anne had insisted on giving her.
Anne walked with her, peering over her shoulder to confirm the patients in earshot were sleeping. “I suppose you have relations in the war yourself?” she whispered.
Cora Mae paused before climbing back up onto a pew. “My pa and older brother, Wade, were killed at First Manassas, way back at the start.” And she was not done grieving them.
“Merciful heavens.” Anne rested her blue-veined hands on top of Cora Mae’s. “And now here you are.” She shook her head. “What a fine Christian woman you are to nurse our men.”
Cora Mae bit her lip. “I do aim to be. But truth is, I just didn’t want to go north.”
Anne fanned the flies off the patient closest to her. “I don’t blame you one bit. This is your home. You want to be near where your mother is, just like I want to be wherever my husband is.”
“That’s a fact.” Cora Mae mopped her brow with her apron hem and stepped onto the pew, plunged her sponge into the tepid water, and squeezed it out over the next wound. “Is June doing all right in the cooking tent?”
“She’s doing real fine.” Anne smiled. “I best get back there now.” Tray in hand, she glided out of the church.
Moments later, the church doors burst open again. “Miss Stewart!” The tone in the doctor’s voice lassoed her.
“Coming!” Leaving her pail and sponge aside, she jumped into the center aisle and hastened to assist. The table that once held the sacraments held a bleeding patient instead, another sacrifice on war’s altar. Some of the patients looked over at the injured man, while others groaned and turned their heads away.
Dr. Wilcox held a napkin folded into a cone over the man’s nose and mouth. His lips were moving silently, and she guessed he was counting. He touched the patient’s eyelids with his fingertip and, apparently satisfied at the reaction, took the cone away.
She sucked in her breath. Her mind whirred. Ethan. “What happened? What do we do?” Blood dripped from a balled-up uniform jacket and rolled off the table to the straw below.
“He was shot in the forearm at close range. Bones shattered.” He handed her a pair of scissors. “We need his shirt and jacket off, straightaway. You can do this. Consider it practice; there will be more than you can count once the battles begin.”
She took the scissors from the doctor and slipped a blade under the fabric at his right wrist. It’s just another uniform I’m cutting out, she told herself. Just a pair of blades on wool, but blue instead of gray. Quickly, she cut from the wrist to the place where the sleeve had already been blown away. Bits of bone could be seen in the gaping, ragged hole above his wrist. Clamping down on the urge to gag, she began cutting again, from above the wound all the way up to his shoulder until they could peel the material completely away from his arm.
“If there was no battle, how did this happen?” she whispered.
“Keep cutting. We need his entire chest bare so we can monitor his breathing through his chest wall.”
Her own pulse hammered. Swallowing, she pulled his shirttails up from his waistband and cut up through the chest, and over to both shoulders. The sight of his bare chest squeezed her heart as she remembered melting against it in his strong embrace not ten days earlier. Laying down the scissors, she stripped the fabric down and away from his body. His right forearm was destroyed. The hand that had cradled her head as he kissed her was bloodied and useless. Above it, shards of bone thrust out from shredded muscle and skin, a wretched contrast to his healthy, chiseled torso.
“Watch his face.” He pulled Ethan’s arm out until it was at a right angle to his body. “His tongue could slip back into his throat and choke him before we realize he’s in danger. If he turns gray, you must reach in and pull the tongue forward.”
Obediently, Cora Mae watched his face, fighting to master her emotions. In the corner of her vision, Dr. Wilcox threaded a tourniquet strap around Ethan’s arm then turned a screw to tighten it, and she felt her own chest constrict
ing. “Must you really?”
“There’s no repairing it. He’d die of infection in days.”
The air left her lungs. “I can’t do this to him!” she gasped.
“Young lady, you will help me save this man’s life.” His gaze arrested her for a fraction of a second. Then, “We begin.”
Oh God! Tears glazed her eyes, filled her throat. She stared hard at Ethan’s face, watching for a change in color, and thought she saw a twinge across his features. “Can he feel it? Is he aware?” Horror spiraled through her.
“Not if I hurry. Hold these.”
She grasped two linen straps and pulled them snugly with one hand, retracting the muscle tissue away from the bone.
The sound of metal teeth rasping on bone clawed at her ears and turned her knees to jelly. She leaned against the table with one hand, while the other still held the retractor strips, watching Ethan’s face. A grimace stole across his countenance, and she nearly came undone. The possibility that he could hear, could feel, that he knew what was happening, was too terrible to accept.
Back and forth, the saw ground away, shaking the table. Then, almost as quickly as it began, it stopped.
Ethan’s right hand was no longer a part of him. The operation was over. Cora Mae dropped the retractor strips, and the doctor pulled them away.
After working needle and thread for what seemed an eternity, Dr. Wilcox asked for a wad of lint, then for adhesive strips from his kit to be dunked in a pail of water. She scrambled to fetch her bucket from the pew. At last, he wiped his hands on his apron and pulled a pocket watch from his vest. “Eight minutes.”
“Pardon me?” She dashed the tears from her face with the back of her hand.
“From start to finish, that took eight minutes. We’ll need to get it down to five.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Once the battles begin, we’ll have more amputation cases than you can imagine. Minutes shaved are lives saved.” He wiped the flat of his saw and knife blades against his apron and put them back in the case.
Ethan’s neck tightened in his sleep. With the danger of suffocation over, Cora Mae’s fingernails dug into her palms and straw crunched beneath her steps as she hastened out of the church and down the steps, where she collapsed on the ground and wept.
Chapter Eight
The burning in Ethan’s right hand pulled him back to consciousness. Even before he could lift his leaden eyelids, he groaned through gritted teeth and reached instinctively for the pain.
He couldn’t find it.
Heart lurching, he opened his eyes. A bandaged stump ended just below his elbow. His hand wasn’t even there, though he could feel it as vividly as he felt his left. Revulsion twisted his gut. Breath rattling in his chest, he fought to control his spiraling pulse. He’d known the moment he saw his mangled forearm that he’d already lost it, but there was no way to prepare for this.
With his left hand, he pushed himself to sit up on the straw-covered door beneath his back. The blood rushed to the end of his severed limb with such force, he cried out in pain then collapsed. Sweat coated his bare chest. There were other patients in the sanctuary, but he could scarcely hear their own groans of agony over the throbbing in his nerves. Throwing his left arm over his eyes, he tried to bear up under it, but he feared the moaning in his ears was his own.
Then, relief trickled over the scorching pain. Breath suspended, he lowered his arm to see someone’s hands squeezing water from a sponge over his dressings. Remarkably, it cooled his right, no-longer-there hand.
“Does it help?” the doctor asked.
Ethan exhaled. “Yes, some.”
“I’m Dr. Wilcox. The first few days are critical. You must lie still and not exert pressure or you’ll disrupt the healing. Understood?”
“The healing,” he repeated, dully.
“The operation was a success, no matter how it feels to you now. You will heal, a little lighter in the arm, but no less a man than you ever were.”
But the only words Ethan grasped were less a man. They clung to him like leeches, sucking away his pride.
The doctor’s retreating footsteps shook the pew beneath Ethan’s wooden bed. Closing his eyes, he prayed for sleep to take him.
Cora Mae’s face filtered through his semiconscious state. It was well indeed that she’d refused his proposal. She deserved more of a man than he. It was this train of thought that carried him into slumber.
Vivid images scrolled across his tormented mind, terrible pictures of war and death, until he fought to swim back to wakefulness. The drone of cavalry faded, until he realized it was only the buzzing of flies he heard.
Then it stopped. A miraculous coolness covered his brow, and his eyelids fluttered open. At the sight of Cora Mae leaning over him, he wondered if he was still dreaming.
“You’re awake.” Her smile unfurling, dimples starred her cheeks as she wrung out a rag over a pail and began wiping the sweat from his skin.
Her velvet voice yanked all his senses to attention. “Are you—really here?” With his left hand, he touched her wrist as she passed her cloth over the depression in his chest. Watched a tendril of her hair sway near her cheek.
“I really am.” Her hazel eyes glistened.
Inwardly, he reeled, rebelling against the pity he read there. He hadn’t dreamed he would see her again. Certainly not like this. Never like this. “I thought you got on the train.” His voice was hoarse. Weak. He hated himself for that.
“You persuaded me otherwise.” She swiped the rag from his neck over his left shoulder and down his arm. The cool cloth moved to his cheek, so soothing he couldn’t help but close his eyes. “Can you tell me what happened?”
Ethan licked his dry lips and turned his head to cough. “Two soldiers disobeyed orders and entered a private home with obvious intent to plunder. I went after them to stop them, and one of them shot me. Said he thought I was a Rebel coming to kill them both.” Anger and pain rippled his brow.
“You were shot by your own man?”
He coughed again, his flat position making his lungs work harder for breath. When he opened his eyes, he caught her looking at his bandages. Humiliation seared him. “You can go, Miss Stewart. I don’t need you here.”
She flinched. “But I—”
His nostrils flared. “Nothing you can do will fix me up so I can go out again and fight. A relief to you, yes? So please go. I don’t want you here.”
Cora Mae’s face reddened; her lips grew thin and tight. Good. Let her be angry. Maybe then she’d leave him in peace.
“Did you see him?” June fairly pounced on Cora Mae as soon as she entered the small tent where the few female nurses slept. “Does the sergeant know his arm’s cut short?”
“He knows.” A knot formed in her chest as she eased herself onto her cot and pulled her shoes—another gift from Anne—from her swollen feet.
“Well, what did he say?”
Anne sat on June’s cot, rubbing her back. In a secondhand nightdress bleached white, the little girl looked pure and fresh and altogether too young for a war.
“I reckon he’s doing all right.” She sighed.
June’s forehead furrowed, but she closed her eyes.
When she had drifted off to sleep, Anne rose and wrapped her arm around Cora Mae’s shoulders. “Do you know how long the spirit takes to heal?” the older woman asked.
“Much longer than skin and bone.”
“Give him time, dear.” She paused. “I didn’t realize you were friends.”
Cora Mae sniffed, chuckling. “He brought me and June out of Roswell and kept us prisoner at the courthouse.” Inexplicably, she confided in Anne about the rail yard proposal, and Mr. Ferguson, and jumping off the train. She did not, however, tell her about his kiss. That, she kept hidden in her heart for her memory alone.
“Merciful heavens!” Anne fanned herself when the tale was told. “Little wonder that you care!”
“But I shouldn’t, you see. Not
any more than I care about the other patients. My future is in Georgia, wherever Mr. Ferguson finds us another mill, and Sergeant Howard’s is in the North. There’s a river between us, and I’m not just talking about the Ohio.”
“That may be so. But the wonderful thing about rivers, Cora Mae, is that they can be crossed. Even after the bridges have been burned.” She kissed her forehead and bade her good night.
The next day, there was no time to think of Ethan or rivers or trains. On the twentieth day of July, there was a battle at Peachtree Creek, outside Atlanta, and the wounded poured into Marietta like rain down a waterspout in a storm.
The church filled with broken, battered men bleeding into the straw so quickly that the freedmen and women who were tasked with changing it could not keep up with the work.
The tents bordering the square nearly burst with patients, too. Ambulance drivers crammed wounded men together under patches of shade that couldn’t stretch to cover them all. The screams that rent the air seemed loud enough to be heard in Roswell.
“You stay away from the square, June, do you hear me?” Cora Mae knelt and grasped June’s shoulders, staring her in the eyes something fierce. “Do not go near them, no matter what. I don’t want you in any of the hospitals, either.” No little girl should see or hear what was going on inside.
Nodding, June agreed to help Anne in the cooking tent.
Convalescent nurses labored to keep up with the mere forty-five Union doctors wearing blood-smeared aprons and sun-bronzed brows. Dr. Wilcox pulled Cora Mae from the Methodist church to assist his operations beneath a tent at the edge of the town square. While he amputated, she stood with him, her apron spotting scarlet as she held mangled limbs in her hands. The amputations took seven minutes now. Then six. Now five. They could not be done any quicker without unspeakable barbarity.
The Message in a Bottle Romance Collection Page 37