The surgeon, whose patience was long since hammered into a thin blade, took Bushrod roughly by the shoulders. “Look at me!” he said. “Look me in the face, boy!”
Bushrod ceased his struggling. His jaw was slack, and his empty eyes were held by the surgeon’s. Then he closed his eyes, and the surgeon let him go. A strand of drool dropped from Bushrod’s open mouth. Anna knelt beside him and wiped it away with her hand.
Bushrod’s body was white, hairless, frail, etched with grime—it might have been Winder sitting there, waiting for his bath. Anna wondered dully how such a slight frame could be a soldier’s.
The surgeon offered only a glance at Bushrod’s arm. “It has to come off,” he said.
“No!” said Anna.
The surgeon shrugged. “Then he will die. You can see that for yourself.”
Anna could, indeed, see that for herself. The arm was beginning to turn the color of blackberries. It was swelling too, and the red streaks coursed through the puffy flesh from the hand to the elbow. It was already beginning to smell.
“It came so fast,” said Anna. “It was just. …so fast!”
“It is how it happens,” said the surgeon, gentler now. “These boys—they live on parched corn and bacon and coffee, they never sleep, never quit, and when somethin happens to em they got nothin to prop em up. It is a wonder any of em can still put one foot in front of another.” The surgeon snorted in disgust. “And now I understand they are goin to Nashville.”
“Not this one,” said Anna.
“No, not this one,” agreed the surgeon. He knelt beside Anna. “This boy is in trouble. There ain’t any time left.”
“Yesterday I didn’t even know him,” said Anna. “Now I must choose for him.”
“There ain’t any choosin,” said the surgeon.
“Then let it be done quick, if you can,” said Anna.
Anna wanted to go with him, but the surgeon wouldn’t hear of it. “Trust me,” he said. “You do not want to.”
“But I have seen—”
“No,” said the surgeon.
Anna watched the surgeon lead Bushrod away. She watched the pale shape of Bushrod Carter stagger across the yard on the surgeon’s arm, watched them cross the porch and disappear into the back door of the house, stood staring at the empty rectangle of the door until Nebo came up beside her.
“What they gone do with old Bushrod?” Nebo asked.
Anna shivered. “What they do to all of em,” she said.
“Yes’m said Nebo.
So it was that Bushrod Carter, twenty-six years old and a veteran of all the Army’s campaigns, lost his left arm at Franklin.
In the parlor of the great brick house, they held Bushrod down while a rag soaked in chloroform was pressed to his face. The operation was supposed to be performed by a contract surgeon of Featherston’s Brigade, Necaise by name, with the old surgeon assisting. Mister Necaise had been working without relief for twelve hours now, and was so far beyond exhaustion, and so drunk on chloroform fumes, that time and the logical progression of events no longer owned any meaning for him. However, he had kept track of the amputations he’d performed by carving a notch for each one in the door he was using as an operating table. He explained this to the old surgeon, remarking that the current subject would be represented by the eighty-seventh notch. “It is simply amazin,” said Mister Necaise, “how rapidly these things accumulate. Please notice that each notch is cut at a precise angle of—”
“Orderly!” the old surgeon shouted.
A burly private, detailed from an Alabama regiment, led Mister Necaise away. “Eighty-seven,” said the man, who seemed to have forgotten how to walk. “Eighty-seven! Astonishin. Simply amazin.”
“There, there,” said the Alabama private.
The old surgeon rubbed his eyes and contemplated the patient before him. Number eighty-seven was a handsome boy, and the surgeon wondered vaguely what his connection was to the girl outside. But there was no more time for wondering than there had been for choosing, and the old surgeon selected a knife from the tray beside him. He tested the edge with his thumb; it was dull, of course, and the handle was sticky with blood. For a moment, he considered forgetting the whole thing. A little more chloroform, a few too many grains of morphine, and the soldier and the girl both would be spared a lot of trouble. But, no—once you started doing that. …
The old surgeon sighed. “I am sorry,” he said. “I truly am, boy.” Then he began to cut.
Now it was evening, and Anna had returned from the search for Winder. Caroline had wanted to come down to the yard, but Anna stopped her.
“You know I want you to come,” said Anna. “But—”
“I know,” said Caroline. In the lamplight her face was ghostly and drawn, full of shadow. “But what you need I cannot give you, little one. Not now.”
“Oh, cousin—”
“No, no,” said Caroline smiling. “I am too tired to be of use anyway. I mean to go up and rest awhile, and while I am restin I will think on you, and on that boy—” She stopped and looked away.
“What, cousin?” said Anna softly.
“Huh. Nothin. It’s just that. …I never met him. I will always regret—” She stopped again, turned, took Anna’s hands. “Never mind. Go to your vigil, and I will think on you, and think how, out of all this madness, you have wrought something good and decent and honorable, and when the time comes. …well, you will know where to find me.”
“Yes,” said Anna. “I will know.”
The two women embraced in the drafty, lamplit hall while men moved and toiled and suffered around them, all traveling into another night, toward another dawn. At last Anna turned to go, and her cousin touched her arm.
“Don’t be afraid to grieve,” she said. “There is no shame in it.”
“I have learned that,” said Anna.
“All right. Then I won’t worry—not too much, anyhow. Go now, little one.”
So Anna went, passed down the hall and through the door and out into the hall. She asked a soldier to bring one of the porch rockers to put beside Bushrod’s pallet; there she sat, wrapped in a shawl that Jeanne had made for her long ago, and watched the sullen dusk pass into night.
The soldiers had made a camp of the yard—a haphazard collection of gum blankets and greasy shelter halves and scraps of canvas strung up on bayonetted muskets thrust into the ground. Smoke from dozens of fires threaded its way through the trees. Bushrod would find this all so familiar, Anna thought, and yet to her it was so very strange. Nothing seemed real—the shelters, the smoke, the strewn accoutrements and jackets, even the men themselves seemed afloat in time as if Anna was not seeing them at all but remembering them. She felt that if she closed her eyes for a minute it would all dissolve, and when she looked again there would be nothing but the empty, muddy yard, the sleeping house, the dark loom of the trees beyond. These things, and perhaps some fleeting shadow that Jeanne would point to and say, “Look, Cherie—do you see them? Do you see the soldiers from the war?”
But, no—Jeanne is gone, run off with the Yankees. You won’t see Jeanne any more—
Full dark came, and the bivouac fires winked and glimmered in the woods. From somewhere in the Army’s vast encampment, drums began to beat—a signal of some kind, Anna supposed. Bushrod could have told her what the drums meant. Now, Miss Anna, he would say, and then he would tell her. She could hear his voice saying it.
A sentry passed like a shadow, his face invisible under the low brim of his hat. He paused and adjusted the musket on his shoulder. “Is everything all right, Missy?” he asked quietly.
“Oh, yes,” said Anna. “Thank you kindly.”
“You need somethin, you jes call. Say ‘Officer of the Guard,’ and he will come a-runnin. I promise.”
“I am sure of it. Thank you kindly.”
The sentry went on. These boys, thought Anna—what will become of them?
A horse whickered, and a voice rose to quiet him. Somebody was coo
king supper; Anna smelled the fatback, heard it sizzling in the pan. Somebody laughed. Nebo Gloster came out of the dark, dragging a limb to put on the fire. Anna remembered an outing on Elk River, on a big gravel bar in low water time. The boys had come out of the woods just like that, dragging limbs, laughing—
So it came then, as it had come to these boys so many times across the crowded years: the night, the end, falling like dark snow over the shapes they had made by day—softening the edges, hiding the dead, turning the blood to water. Soon even the voices would cease, Anna thought, and for a little season there would be some quiet about the earth. Not for long, and not even very quiet—but something saved from death just the same.
Anna leaned forward in the rocker and looked down at Bushrod. For an instant, she thought he was awake, watching her, but it was only his half-open eyes gleaming in the firelight. His lips were moving. He is talking to somebody, somewhere, Anna thought, but who it was only Bushrod knew. Perhaps it is me, she thought, and wished she knew what to answer.
When they brought Bushrod back from the house that afternoon, Anna was shocked at the sight of him. During all the time she had waited (Nebo sat beside her, watching, telling something about his father and brothers, about tall corn and the moon), she had tried to prepare herself, tried to tell herself that she’d seen enough over the long night before to be ready for anything. But when she saw Bushrod Carter, she found she was not ready at all. His face was pale, almost translucent like beeswax candles, except where the purple and sickly-yellow bruise painted it. His lips were thin and dry, he labored to breathe, his eyes were sunken above cheekbones so sharp they seemed about to break through the fragile flesh. He appeared actually to have shrunk in the little time since she’d seen him last—in truth, she could hardly recognize him as the boy she had followed up the stairs at dawn, who’d faced Simon Rope only hours before. So quick it all came, like a horseman galloping—but how could she have missed the signs? She remembered the cigar-smoking surgeon: You might want to wrap up that finger, and put some whiskey on it if you got some. Good God, that was the best they could do, and now finger and hand and arm were lying in the slippery pile growing outside the parlor window.
The old surgeon had accompanied the litter party. “Well, there he is, Missy,” he said as the orderlies lay Bushrod on the pallet. “Whatever he is to you, you got him back now.”
“Will he live?” asked Anna.
The surgeon looked at her a moment, then shook his head. “Probably not.”
Anna met this news with an icy calm. “I see. Then all this was for nothin?”
“Young lady, I—”
“Never mind,” said Anna. “He said you were butchers. He said—”
The old surgeon cut her off. “Now, you listen to me. I have had enough of this—I am tired and old, and I do not mean to be insulted, not by you, not by anybody. I have done the best for him I can—what happens now is up to him and God. You do not care for my advice, but I will give it anyway: look to yourself, and pray, and be ready to accept what comes. And if you want somebody to blame, go find John Bell Hood. Maybe he can explain about this boy.”
“Are you quite finished now?” said Anna.
“With you? Yes, I am finished.”
“Then good day to you, sir.”
The surgeon shook his head, was about to leave when Anna touched his arm. “Wait.”
“What is it?”
“I find that I am not quite finished,” said Anna. “I have been rude to you, on. …on purpose. I do not want that to be what you take away from here.”
The surgeon almost smiled. He lifted his finger, touched it to her lip. “Come see me when you can,” he said. “I got some salve for that.” Then he was gone, moving head-bent through the men in the yard.
Now Anna leaned back in the rocker and thought about what the old surgeon had said, about how whatever happened was up to Bushrod and God. She didn’t know what Bushrod would think of that, but if he knew his arm was gone, he might not think much of it at all, and then God would be on His own. As for Anna, she couldn’t be any help there.
“Nebo?” she said suddenly.
“Yes, Miss Anna?” said Nebo. He was sitting by Bushrod’s head with a canteen and a rag. Anna wondered if the man had ever slept in his life.
“Nebo, can you pray?”
Nebo thought a moment. “I don’t know, Miss Anna.”
“Well, one of us is goin to have to.”
“Well, I will take a run at it, if you will tell me how.”
“Oh, me,” Anna sighed. “Another time, perhaps.”
Anna gathered her shawl around her and rocked a while. Somewhere in the camp a man cried out—not in pain, but as one who has wakened from a bad dream. There would be plenty of bad dreams tonight, asleep or awake, no matter. Anna was not sure she could tell the difference between sleep and waking anymore.
Nebo’s fire crackled, Bushrod murmured in his fever, the soldiers’ quiet voices drifted over the yard. There were many who could not sleep, who walked restlessly through the yard or gathered by their fires and talked incessantly about nothing at all, waiting for tomorrow.
The cane bottom rocker creaked and creaked, a comforting sound. Anna wondered if it would be one of the sounds she carried with her—if on some distant, solitary porch, latticed with the shadows of a moon-vine, she would hear a rocker creak and think of this night, of the starless sky, the soldiers, the boy dying under her cousin’s quilts. That morning on the gallery, she had thought of all the things she would keep, but somehow she had not expected this. I will live to be very old, she thought—very old indeed.
Creak, creak, creak the rocker said. Out of its rhythm rose a song to Anna’s mind, the song and the rocker’s creak drawing her back to an image she couldn’t place at first. When she found it at last, it lay in a quiet place in her heart: Caroline, rocking in firelight, singing Winder to sleep with “Annie Laurie.” But that was not all; some other place she’d heard it, and not long before. Then she remembered the army band playing it the afternoon before, in the yard of the house where Bushrod himself had stood waiting to go into the battle, and he was quick and whole then, and she hadn’t known him at all, and now here he was—
Oh, my, she thought. Of all the songs in the world—
She shook the song out of her mind, tilting her face up to blink away the sudden tears. The fire lit the branches overhead; up there were the sleeping birds, and far beyond was the place where God lived, and He was up there right now making up His mind about Bushrod Carter without so much as a word from her.
What does it take? she asked the high darkness. Why don’t You let me talk to You? Something good and decent and honorable, her cousin had said—but not enough. “Pay attention!” she said aloud, but there was no answer.
A tree limb creaked above her. She leaned forward and looked at Bushrod again; he lay so still that for an instant she thought he was gone, and her heart nearly left her. But he moved then, just a little, and spoke a single word: “Rain.”
Anna sat back and closed her eyes.
Nebo heard the girl snoring softly. It surprised him—he had never considered that a girl might snore. But this was a pleasant sound, not like the braying of sleeping men in camp. Nebo put some more branches on the fire, and when they were going good, he looked at Bushrod.
“Hey, old Bushrod,” Nebo said.
There was no answer.
“Whyn’t you wake up, Bushrod?”
A wet log sizzled and a jet of blue flame hissed out of it, lighting up Bushrod’s face.
He is not goin to wake up, Nebo said to himself.
That thought had been nagging him since nightfall. It was like something already decided, an order come down from the ones (Nebo had never known who they were) who told the soldiers what to do. But it was not like any thought he’d ever had. For one thing, it was not in his head but somewhere under his breastbone. For another, it had a solemn weight to it—no thought had ever weighed on him before.
It was as if somebody had set an anvil on his chest.
Yet there was plenty going on in his head, too. Thoughts were blundering around in there like a coon in a tow sack, blind and urgent. These had come with the dark as well, and Nebo believed they had something to do with remembering.
He was not much good at remembering. One day, not long after they’d crossed the big river, the man Jack Bishop had shown Nebo his watch. It was the first one he’d ever seen up close. Jack Bishop explained that time moved in a straight line, and that by looking at the watch you could tell where you were on the line. Thinking about it later, Nebo understood for the first time that his life was not, as he had always supposed, spread out behind him like the Homochitto in high water. Rather, it was like the Homochitto in low water, snaking along between banks, and if you stood on a high place—like on the top of a pine tree as a hawk might do—you could see the river stretching back and back toward that mysterious place where it was born. That was remembering.
Now, in the dark of the winter night, Nebo looked back down the river and tried to remember. He could pick out a few things: the vicious old nurse, his pappy, burying his brother in the corn patch (He had tried to tell the girl about that while they were waiting for Bushrod to lose his arm—he only wanted to tell her a story, but he got it all mixed up with burying the two soldiers and pretty soon he didn’t know which story he was telling—not that it mattered, for Miss Anna wasn’t listening anyway.), the cavalry chasing him through the cane, strangers laughing at him—he could even pick out Bushrod Carter telling him something about his musket. But after that there was a long red space, full of smoke and flame and voices in which something had happened, and then he was digging the wide grave in the woods to put the two dead boys in.
He wanted to ask Bushrod what had happened. Bushrod would tell him, maybe even draw it in the dirt for him, like he did one time about something else—but Bushrod was not listening, and ever since dark Nebo had known that he never would.
The Black Flower Page 31