Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Although he did not know it, he was beyond saving. Louisa was sent to tell him so because the surgeon in charge of his case did not have the heart to deliver the message himself. John impressed her with his quiet courage and simple morality. She later wrote, “The army needed men like John, earnest, brave, and faithful; fighting for liberty and justice with both heart and hand, true soldiers of the Lord.”59 For all his pain, John gave almost no outward sign of distress, and Louisa was surprised when the surgeon told her that, of all the patients in the ward, he suffered the most. Even the blacksmith had a limit, though. Her news still undelivered, Louisa noticed that great silent tears were rolling from his eyes. Louisa described what followed:

  [S]traightway my fear vanished, my heart opened wide and took him in, as, gathering the bent head in my arms, as freely as if he had been a little child, I said, “Let me help you bear it, John.”

  Never, on any human countenance, have I seen so swift and beautiful a look of gratitude, surprise and comfort, as that which answered me more eloquently then the whispered—

  “Thank you, ma’am, this is right good! this is what I wanted!”60

  Of all the moments that influenced Louisa’s thinking about human relationships, none was more important than this. It exemplified what she came to see as the greatest good in life: the sweetness of sharing another’s adversity. In much of her best fiction, emotional climaxes occur when central female characters offer to share the burdens of those they love. Alcott heroines tend to interpret times of challenge as opportunities to transcend selfishness. These opportunities are almost always accepted.

  John Suhre died only two days after Louisa offered to share his suffering. To the end, he remained a model of quiet fortitude, crying out only once in bitter agony, “For God’s sake, give me air.” Louisa held his hand as the end came. He grasped her hand so tightly that his fingers left four white marks on the back of it.61 As when she had lost her sister Lizzie, Louisa reflected on the idea of death as a welcome friend and healer. In Hospital Sketches, she was to write of death as the “diviner brother” of sleep and as “a better nurse than [I, who] healed…with a touch.”62 Observing Suhre’s peaceful expression, Louisa imagined that his half-hour’s acquaintance with death had made friends of the two. Many sentimental writers of Louisa’s time sought to ease the pain of loss by making death sound sweet and good. In Louisa’s hands, however, this device never sounds false or maudlin. She had, it seems, a strength of mind and an inner stoicism that truly shielded her from a fear of dying. To her, the idea of death as a holy healer was entirely plausible.

  In this atmosphere of suffering and death, Louisa’s reflections turned to the memory of another lost hero, the recently departed Thoreau. In Concord, at the actual time of his passing, she had borne the event more or less silently. Now, with the benefit of a little time and distance, she found a voice for her feelings. One night, as she kept watch over a dying soldier, Louisa reached for a piece of paper. By the end of her watch, she had finished her best-remembered poem, “Thoreau’s Flute.” The poem begins with a somber lament of her mentor’s death, but the mood changes as, miraculously, the wind blows through the dead man’s flute, playing a song of hope:

  Then from the flute, untouched by hands,

  There came a low, harmonious breath:

  “For such as he there is no death;—

  His life the eternal life commands;

  Above man’s aims his nature rose.

  The wisdom of a just content

  Made one small spot a continent,

  And turned to poetry life’s prose.63

  Louisa spun her lyric around the interweaving of two spirits: the soul of her departed friend and the wind that wafted through the flute he had left behind. The flute becomes a humble medium between this world and the next, translating the wind with which Thoreau’s soul has now merged into the words that glorify his memory. Once a voice on behalf of nature, Thoreau’s voice is now one with nature; the breath that no longer fills his consumptive lungs still carries its message of peace to those sensitive enough to hear. Hardly thinking she had written the finest poem she would ever write, Louisa put it away and did not remember it until months later. More urgent matters now filled her mind.

  Subjected to overwork, rewarded with an inadequate diet, and constantly exposed to life-threatening disease, a nurse in a Civil War hospital could wear out quickly. With some exaggeration, Louisa claimed never to have had a sick day in her life before starting her nursing career. Nevertheless, she began coughing as soon as she arrived at the hospital, a symptom that the matron initially dismissed as a sympathetic reaction to the maladies of her patients.64 However, Louisa was in danger of becoming one of those nurses who, to use her own description, “sometimes, in their sympathy, forget that they are mortal, and run the risk of being made immortal, sooner than is agreeable to their partial friends.”65 Less than three weeks after her arrival, Louisa was already beginning to lose her strength. Perhaps irritated by her perceived weakness, she refused to slacken her pace. She persisted in starting each day with a brisk run. Her colleagues warned that she was driving herself too hard and predicted that she would soon develop pneumonia. She ignored them.

  On New Year’s Eve, Louisa’s spirits received a welcome boost, for at midnight the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. She lay awake in her plain, drafty room until midnight, when church bells throughout the city rang in the New Year, as well as the other more portentous beginning. Much to the annoyance of her more politically detached roommate, she “danced” from her bed and threw open the window. With a voice already weakened by disease, she cheered feebly and waved her handkerchief at a group of black men who were celebrating in the street below. Throughout the night, Louisa recalled, the black population of Georgetown “tooted and tramped, fired crackers, sang ‘Glory Hallelujah,’ and took comfort, poor souls! in their own way.”66 During her brief stint at the hospital, nothing gave Louisa more satisfaction than the sights and sounds of that night of freedom.

  On the home front, Bronson, too, celebrated Lincoln’s proclamation. He pasted a copy of the document in his journal, and on New Year’s Day he attended an emancipation meeting at the Tremont Temple in Boston, where, he observed, “the black men have the eloquence, and carry the meeting as they ought.”67 A week later, the Alcotts received a letter from Louisa giving lively descriptions of her work at the hospital. Bronson’s reaction to her words mingled pride with concern. He wrote, “She seems active [and] interested, and, if her strength is adequate to the task, could not better serve herself or the country. But I fear this will end in her breaking down presently.”68

  Not realizing how accurately he had judged the case, Bronson agreed to give a series of four conversations, arranged by Emerson and Dudley Bradford, to commence at Temperance Hall on January 19. The titles dealt in broad generalities: Nature, Politics, Letters, and Religion. However, the brief parenthetical descriptions he added in his journal suggest an interesting approach to the material. Beside each of the first three subjects, Bronson listed a series of names. “Nature” was to be typified by Thoreau, Agassiz, and Goethe; “Politics” would be a discussion of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and John Brown; and “Letters” would treat Emerson and Hawthorne. Alcott had borrowed the idea of using particular men to personify concepts from Carlyle and Emerson. What was significant, however, was that, with the sole exception of Goethe, Bronson was confining himself to people he had personally known. At the age of sixty-two, Bronson was becoming more connected with lived experience, coming to see that personality and biography might not only embody larger ideas, but might matter as much as the ideas themselves. Just as importantly, he was starting to understand how greatly his life had been shaped by his friendships. This realization would yield finer fruit as the years passed.

  The breakdown that Bronson feared for Louisa was not long in coming. There was a sudden lapse in the steady stream of letters she sent home. Disturbed by the silence, J
ulian Hawthorne began stopping by Orchard House regularly in hopes of news. Pale and sad, Abba could only shake her head.69 Louisa herself had been the last to admit that she was on the verge of collapse, and she had struggled on as long as she could. On January 9, the hospital matron wrote that both she and Louisa were ill and suffering terribly but that, despite their condition, they had worked together on three dying men and saved all of them. She called Louisa “a splendid young woman.”70 But she was not invincible. One morning, Louisa’s head felt like a cannonball, and her feet seemed glued to the floor.71 Half-aware of the anxious voices and expressions around her, she staggered upstairs to bed. For some days afterward, she was still able to walk downstairs to take meals. Eventually, even this exertion became too much for her.

  Louisa’s fellow nurses, too busy for politeness and pleasantries, had previously struck her as remote and unfriendly. Now that she was ill, however, she found herself surrounded by care and kindness; a healthy colleague was taken for granted, but an ailing one received all the respect and attention that was due a stricken comrade-in-arms. The attendants from Louisa’s ward regularly climbed the stairs to fill her woodbox and to bring progress reports and hand-fashioned presents from her patients below. Dr. Winslow now came to her room not as a potential beau but as a worried physician. He haunted her room, she said, bringing the things she needed and acting in general “like a motherly little man as he is.”72 Several of the nurses visited each evening with food and conversation. Louisa found herself “so beteaed and betoasted, petted and served, that [she] was quite ‘in the lap of luxury.’”73 However, she still preferred doing to having things done for her, and even after she was confined to her room, she continued to do sewing for the men. She still had two months to go before her orders expired, and she was determined not only to serve the time but to fill it with as much usefulness as her condition would allow.

  But that condition was worsening each day. The doctors now had a firm diagnosis: typhoid pneumonia. Her cough became more persistent, and her body no longer seemed to belong to her. Her perceptions became jumbled, and fact and hallucination began to mingle. Louisa remembered, “Hours began to get confused, people looked odd; queer faces haunted the room, and the nights were one long fight with weariness and pain.”74 On the morning of January 14, the Alcotts received a wire from the hospital matron. Mrs. Ropes, her own health failing as fast as Louisa’s, wrote that Louisa’s service as a nurse could no longer continue. Someone must come for her, and come quickly.

  Bronson wasted no time. He cancelled his conversation engagement and caught the noon train, traveling on the same tracks that Louisa had ridden only six weeks before. The passage to Jersey City was slowed by fog, and he spent helpless hours waiting for the weather to clear. From Jersey City, he took the evening train and rode all night to reach Georgetown. On the morning of the sixteenth, when he was led to Louisa’s room, his eyes fell on a shocking tableau. The wind whistled in through five broken windowpanes that no one in the hospital had had time to repair. Rats could be heard scuttling in the walls. A virtually opaque mirror, a blue pitcher, a tin basin, and a pair of yellow mugs comprised the toilet accessories. There, on a thin mattress laid on a stark iron bed, lay Louisa. She was able to recognize the “grey-headed gentleman [who] rose like a ghost” above her, but she was barely recognizable herself. She was thin and weak. The normally robust color of her cheeks had given way to a wraithlike pallor. Bronson’s ability to suppress his emotions had often annoyed and frustrated people, Louisa included, but now it was for the best. Whatever anguish he felt, he tried not to show. All that Louisa recalled his saying at that moment was, “Come home.”75

  Louisa had resisted every other voice that had told her to quit. But now, the simple summons of her father signaled to her that the fight was over. “At the sight of him,” she wrote, “my resolution melted away, [and] my heart turned traitor to my boys…. I answered, ‘Yes, father.’”76 With his two simple words, Bronson released Louisa from much more than her obligations to the hospital. All her life, she had hoped to please her father. Sometimes she had clearly disappointed him. On other occasions, he had given approval, but seldom as she had hoped he would. Almost always, it had seemed, more was expected. Now, however, she finally knew that it was all right. She had done enough.

  Five days passed before Louisa could be taken home. Her doctors believed that she was too weak to be moved.77 Although he did not see how his daughter could grow stronger by staying where she was, Bronson reluctantly agreed to wait. Having already heard about some of Louisa’s patients in her letters, he satisfied his curiosity by walking around the ward and seeing them. The experience left him with few words. “Horrid war,” he wrote. “And one sees its horrors in hospitals if anywhere.”78

  As a matter of hospital policy, parents of the sick and wounded were discouraged from spending too much time with their children, so despite his concern, Bronson was not permitted to stay with Louisa. Leaving her to the care of her fellow nurses, Bronson took a few hours to have a look around Washington. Like his daughter a few weeks earlier, he went to the Senate chamber where, by a wonderful coincidence, President Lincoln was in attendance. Alcott sat near him. In recording his brief encounter with the chief executive, Alcott remarked on his honest bearings and strong face, “more comely than the papers and portraits have shown him.” He added tersely that Lincoln’s “behavior was good.” In those days, personal access even to the highest elected officials was freer than one can easily imagine today; it was by no means out of the question for Bronson to obtain a meeting with the great man. Bronson mused for a while on this chance of a lifetime, but he wisely rejected it. He wrote, “I wished to have had an interview but am too anxious about Louisa and without time to seek it.”79

  Any disagreements about whether Louisa should be promptly taken home were settled in tragic fashion on January 20, when the matron, Mrs. Ropes, died. The doctors consented at once to Louisa’s departure, but heavy rains prevented any movement until the following day. Dorothea Dix herself appeared at the train station to see Louisa off and present her with gifts. Bronson, who had more pressing matters on his mind, vaguely described them as “good things for Louisa’s comfort.”80

  They traveled all day and through the night. On the evening of January 22 they arrived in Boston too late to catch the train for Concord. They spent the night with relatives of Abba. By the time they reached Orchard House the next day, Louisa was not in her right mind. She had the impression that the house had lost its roof and that no one there wanted to see her. The exhaustion and illness of the previous six weeks had changed her so profoundly that Sophia Hawthorne said she would not have recognized her. For his part, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher that the fever looked very threatening and that he feared she would not pull through. Lying in her great mahogany sleigh bed, barely conscious of the anxious stir around her, Louisa spent the next two days adrift between sleep and delirium.

  In a journal entry describing her journey to Georgetown, Louisa had called the moment “a solemn time, but I’m glad to live in it; and am sure it will do me good whether I come out alive or dead.”81 She very nearly had come out dead, but she also had lived more intensely and with more visible purpose than she ever had before. But as Dr. Bartlett made his daily visits and her family hoped for the best, it was not clear that she would live to turn her experiences and her purpose to account.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SHADOWS AND SUNLIGHT

  “All my dreams [are] getting fulfilled in a most amazing way.”

  —LOUISA MAY ALCOTT,

  Journals, October 1863

  THREE WEEKS PASSED BEFORE LOUISA CAME FULLY OUT OF her delirium. Well into February she struggled through “the crisis of typhoid,” as Abba described it to her brother Samuel. She added, “Poor Louy…left us a brave handsome woman…and is returned to us almost a wreck of body and mind.”1 Abba also shared her worst fears with Sophia Hawthorne. Sophia wrote that, during those anxious weeks, her
only activity was finding ways to help Louisa and the other Alcotts through the ordeal.2 Emerson, as always, lent support, this time by placing in Abba’s kitchen “a nice strong woman” to do the housework. However, Abba wrote, “While I am able to move I will not have a nurse. It would not relieve my anxiety, and might hinder my own action.”3 As Abba observed, Louisa’s condition demanded great care and judgment. Whatever aid the neighbors might give, there was much that the family dared not entrust to outsiders.

  Bronson, Abba, and May looked after Louisa in shifts around the clock, trying to soothe her distracted mind and searching her discolored face for any promising change. Only Anna, living some twenty miles away in Chelsea and now in the advanced stages of her pregnancy, did not take part in looking after Louisa. From a distance, however, Anna, too, followed the patient’s progress; during the first week of Louisa’s convalescence, Bronson sent Anna continual updates on Louisa’s condition. His letters relayed the facts in a direct manner, but they also emphasized the optimistic reports of the doctors and the hope of a speedy recovery. It is reasonable to suppose that he wished to avoid disturbing his pregnant daughter’s tranquility by painting too grim a picture. Even so, Bronson admitted that the trip home had been almost all Louisa could withstand. She had, he told Anna, “required all her strength and courage to come through.” She would still need all her patience to recover from her illness and fatigue.4 Bronson’s journal entries, so frequently full of metaphysical musings, were now terse and factual: “Wait on L.” “Watch and wait on our patient” “Sit with Louisa into the night, reading from Gospels and Herder.” A week went by before he mentioned getting any rest.5