The uniformed officer fretted in place, looming beside Jensen. He said, “There’s nothing to be done for him, is there?”
She said, “Maybe if I clean him up, I’ll get an idea of how bad it is.” But she meant, No.
“He’s going to die, isn’t he?”
Jensen clapped the other man in the side and said, “Don’t you put it like that! Don’t talk about him like that, he’s right here and he can hear you. He’s going to be all right. Just damn fine, is how he’s going to be.”
Mercy very seriously doubted that the colonel could hear anything, much less any studied critique of his likely survival. But when the requested items arrived, she dived into exploratory cleansing, peeling away the layers of clotted fabric and gore as gently as possible to get at the meat underneath. She soaked the rags and dabbed them against the colonel’s filthy skin, and he moaned.
It startled her. She’d honestly thought he was too far gone for pain or response.
Inside the doctor’s bag, she found some ether in a bottle, as well as needles and thread, some poorly marked vials, tweezers, scissors, syringes, and other things of varying usefulness, including another fat roll of bandages. She whipped these out and unrolled them, saying, “The first thing is, you’ve got to stop his bleeding. The rest of this . . . goddamn, boys. There’s not enough skin to stitch through here, or here-” She indicated the massive patches where his flesh had been blasted away. “You need to get him out of this field. Ship him up to Robertson, if you think you can get him that far. But right here, right now . . .”
She did not say that she did not think he’d ever survive long enough to make it to the nearest hospital, or that any further effort was damn near futile. She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t do that to them.
Instead she sighed, shook her head, and said, “Mr. Chase, I’m going to need you to hold this lantern for me. Hold it up so I can see.”
She retrieved the dead doctor’s tweezers.
“What are you going to do?”
“The poor bastard’s got so much scrap and shot in him, it’s probably added ten pounds. I’m going to pick out what I can, before he wakes up and objects. I need you to help me out with this water.”
“What do I do?”
“Take this rag with your free hand, here. Dunk it and get it good and wet. Now. Wherever I point, that’s where I want you to squeeze the water out to clear the blood away, so I can see. You understand?”
“I understand,” he said without sounding one bit happy about it.
Outside, somewhere beyond the small dark tent, two enormous things collided with a crash that outdid all the artillery. Mercy could picture them, two great automatons made for war, waging war against each other because nothing else on earth could stop either one of them.
She forced herself to focus on the shrapnel that came out of the colonel in shards, chunks, and flecks. There was no tin pan handy, so she dropped the bloody scraps down to the dirt beside her feet, directing George Chase to aim the light over here, please, or no-farther that way. Occasionally the colonel would whimper in his sleep, even as numb with unconsciousness as he was. Mercy had kept the ether bottle handy just in case, but he never awakened enough to require it. Still she tweezed, pricked, pulled, and tugged the metal from his neck and shoulder. Nothing short of a miracle held his major arteries intact.
An explosion shook the tent, illuminating it from outside, as if the sun were high instead of the moon. Mercy cringed and waited for the percussion to pass, waited for her ears to pop and her hands to stop shaking.
Down, then. Down his shoulder, to his chest and his ribs.
Never mind what’s happening outside, on the other side of a cotton tent that wouldn’t stop a good thunderstorm, much less a hail of bullets-and the bullets were raining sideways, from every direction. Men were yelling and orders were flying. Perhaps a quarter of a mile away, two monstrous machines grappled with each other for their lives, and for the lives of their nations. Mercy could hear it-and it was amazing, and horrifying, and a million other things that she could not process, not while she had this piece of bleeding meat soaking through his cot. Somehow over the din she detected a soft, rhythmic splashing, and realized that his blood had finally pooled straight through the spot where he slept, and it was dribbling down on her shoes.
She did not say, He’ll never make it. All of this is for show. He’ll be dead by morning. But the longer she kept herself from saying it, the less inclined she was to think it-and the more focused she became on the task at hand, and her borrowed tweezers, and the quivering raw steak beneath her fingers.
When she’d removed everything that could reasonably be removed (which probably left half as much again buried down in the muscles, somewhere), she dried him and wrapped him from head to torso in the doctor’s last clean bandages, and showed George Chase how to use the opium powders and tinctures that the good doctor had left behind.
As far as Mercy could tell, the colonel had stopped bleeding-either because he’d run out of blood, or because he was beginning to stabilize. Either way, there wasn’t much else she could do, and she told George so. Then she said, “Now, you’ve got to keep him clean and comfortable, and make him take as much water as he’ll swallow. He’s going to need all the water you can get inside him.”
George nodded intensely, with such earnest vigor that Mercy figured he’d be taking notes if he’d had a pencil present.
Finally, she said, “I wish him and you the very best, but I can’t stay here. I was on my way to Fort Chattanooga when my dirigible . . . well, it didn’t precisely crash.”
“How does a dirigible not precisely crash?” he asked.
“Let’s just say that it landed unwillingly, and well ahead of schedule.”
“Ah. Hmm.” He pulled his small wire-rimmed glasses off his nose and wiped at them with the tail of his shirt, which probably didn’t clean them any. But when he replaced them, he said, “You’ll need to catch the rails, over in Cleveland. We’re not far. Probably not a mile.”
“Can you point me that way? I’ve got a pretty good sense of direction; I can walk a straight line, even in the middle of the night, if I can trouble you for one of your lanterns.”
George Case looked aghast. “Ma’am, we certainly can’t allow anything like that! I wish you could stay and lend us a hand, but we’ve already sent for another surgeon and he’ll be here within the night. I’ll call back Jensen, or somebody else. We’ll get you a horse, and a guard.”
“I don’t need a guard. I’m not entirely sure I need a horse.”
He waved his hand; it flapped like a bird’s wing as he rose and went to the tent’s panel, pushing it open. “We’ll see you to the rail yards, ma’am. We’ll send you there with our thanks for your time and ministrations.”
She was too tired to argue, so she just pushed her camp stool back away from the cot and cracked her fingers. “As you like,” she said.
As he liked, two horses were swiftly saddled. Jensen rode one while Mercy rode the other, away from the camp and into the trees once more, between the trunks, between the bullets that sometimes whipped loosely past, having flown too far to do much but plunk against the wood. The roar of battle was still loud, but fading into the background. She could see, in hints and flashes, the two giant monsters wrestling, falling, and swinging.
She drew her cloak up over her head and gripped the reins with hands that still had dried blood smeared into the creases. Her luggage was long gone-lost with the cart, and the people who were lost with it-and she could mourn for it later, but her professional bag with its crimson cross stitched boldly on the side banged against her rib cage, where it was firmly slung across her chest.
The rail yard was not the same as a station; there was no major interchange, but several smaller buildings planted amid the maze of tracks. One of them had a little platform, and on this platform huddled a dozen people, milling about together and tapping their feet.
Jensen led her over a walkway that
crossed four rows of tracks and went around three giant engines with boilers clacking themselves cool. He paused to dismount at the platform’s edge. By the time he’d reached the reins of Mercy’s horse, she’d already climbed down without assistance.
Someone on the platform called her name, and she recognized Gordon Rand, who looked delighted to see her. The other known survivors of the Zephyr were there also, having waited the better part of the night for the train that presently pulled in with a raucous halt, spraying steam in all directions, covering the stragglers on the platform in a warm cloud of it. The horses stamped unhappily, but Jensen held their reins firmly and said to Mercy, “Ma’am. George said you were headed for Fort Chattanooga, and it looks like you’re traveling alone.” The horse took half a step forward and backward, shuffling to keep from stepping off the walkway and onto a narrow metal rail.
“Both of them things are true,” she admitted.
“You’re all by yourself, headed west from Richmond?”
“My husband died. In the war. I just learned a week ago, and now I’m going home to my daddy’s.” She did not add that her trip was going to take her another couple thousand miles west of Fort Chattanooga, because she had a feeling she knew where this conversation was going.
She wasn’t perfectly correct. Jensen-and whether that was his first name or last, she’d never asked and would never know-pulled a small cotton satchel off his chest and handed it to her. “George thought maybe you ought to take these with you. They belonged to the doctor, who was a Texan by birth, and he traveled like it.”
She took the satchel and peered inside. The light from the platform’s lamps cast a yellow white square down into the khaki bag, revealing a gunbelt loaded with a pair of six-shooters, and several boxes of bullets. Mercy said, “I don’t know what to say.”
“You ever fire a gun before?”
“Course I have. I grew up on a farm. But these are awful nice.” She looked up at him, and back at the guns. “These must be worth a lot of money.”
Jensen ran a hand through his hair, shifted, and shrugged. “I reckon they probably are. He was a good doctor, and he’d made good money before joining us out in the fronts. But our colonel is a good man, too, and he’s worth more to us than these guns. The doc won’t be needing them anymore, anyway. George just thought . . . and I thought so, too . . . that you ought to take them.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“You didn’t have to stop and pick all that iron out of poor Colonel Durant. So you take these, and we’ll call it even. So long as you take care of yourself, and have a safe trip to Fort Chattanooga.” He touched the front of his hat with a polite little bow and swung himself back up over his horse’s back. Still holding the reins of the one who’d toted Mercy, he gave his beast a tap with his heel and rode back over the tracks, back to the trees, and back to the front.
A large, nervous man in an engineer’s uniform and cap ushered everyone on board the train-a lean vehicle for all its size, identified by gold-painted script that said Birmingham Belle. It towed only two cars. One was heaped with coal, and the other was a passenger car that had seen better days, and had clearly been scared up for the occasion at the very last moment.
“Everyone on board, please. Quickly-we need to leave the yards. Let’s get all of you to town before we’re closed off for good.”
Mercy didn’t know what he meant by that, so when she finally hauled herself up the steps-the very last of the passengers being evacuated-she asked. “What could close off the yard?”
“Ma’am, please move along,” he said stiffly.
But she didn’t move from the top step.
He looked her up and down, this woman covered with someone’s blood, smudged with gunpowder from hair to gore-flecked boots, and thought it might be less trouble to tell her than to fight with her. So he said, “Ma’am, the rail junction was sewed up tight till the Dreadnought came through, carrying that mechanized walker up to the line. And they didn’t recall that miserable machine back to Washington-it’s still here, crawling the tracks. Prowling around, tearing up everything it meets. So we’ve got to get out of its way.”
“It’s coming here? Now? For us?”
“We don’t know!” He sounded almost frantic. “Please, ma’am. Just get aboard so we can fire up the engine and take you someplace safe.”
She allowed herself to be ushered into the car and down to a seat that was really just a bench bolted into the floor. Her head fell slowly against the window. She didn’t sleep, but she breathed deeply and crushed her eyes shut when someplace, far too close, a train whistle pierced the coming dawn.
Six
The Birmingham Belle rolled into Fort Chattanooga as the sun rose over the green-covered Appalachian ridges that welled up around the Tennessee River. The motion of the train must’ve lulled Mercy more than she’d imagined, because she didn’t remember much of the getting there-only the rollicking lurch of the vehicle’s progress, clipping along the rails.
There was a station there-a proper station, with rows of platforms and a café, and porters and patrons and clocks-out on the south side of the city, in the shadow of Lookout Mountain. Mercy lowered her window and leaned her head out to catch the morning air and refresh herself, inasmuch as possible. She smelled soot, and more diesel fuel. She whiffed coal dust, ash, and manure; and over the clatter of the arriving train, she heard the lowing of cattle and the natterings of goats, sheep, and the people who ushered them along.
The Birmingham Belle stopped with an exhausted sigh, seeming to settle on its rails. A few minutes later, the engineer himself drew out the passenger steps and opened the doors to release them.
All of them, from the Zephyr folks to the strangers who’d likewise required evacuation from Cleveland or the railyards, stumbled into the light and blinked against the steam that clouded the platform like battlefield smoke.
The Fort Chattanooga Metropolitan Transit Station looked unaccountably normal.
Laborers moved luggage, supplies, and coal in every direction-some carried right along the platforms, and some pumped by hand-moved carts that clung to the rails, darting between the trains at every switch and junction. Scores of dark-skinned men in red uniforms did most of the toting and directing, guiding the flow of everything that must come and go from a train, including people.
None of them were slaves anymore, and most hadn’t been for years. Like Virginia and North Carolina, Tennessee had ratified an amendment abolishing the practice back in the late 1860s, over the grumbles and general disapproval from the deeper Confederacy. But preaching states’ rights was only talk if a nation wouldn’t uphold its own principles, so these three upper states got their way. Over the next ten years, most of the others followed suit, and now only Mississippi and Alabama held out . . . though there were rumors that even these two bastions of the Peculiar Institution might crack within the next year or two. After all, even South Carolina had caved to English abolitionist pressure in 1872.
Like so many things, in the end it had come down not to a matter of principle, but a matter of practicality. The Union had more warm bodies to throw at a war, and the Confederacy needed to harness a few of its own or, at the very least, quit using them to police its vast legions of imported labor.
It was Florida that first got the idea to offer land grants as added incentive to settle or sign up and fight. Texas caught on shortly thereafter, inviting the former slave population to homestead for almost precisely the same reason as Florida-an enormous Spanish population that had never quite come to terms with its territory loss. Besides, Texas was its own republic, with plenty of farmland available, and its informal allies in the Confederacy had an army to feed. In 1869, the governor of Texas said to a local newspaper, “Looks like easy math to me: We need people to grow food, and we’ve got nothing but room to farm it, so bring in the free blacks and let them break their backs on their own land for a change.”
Florida was already sitting on a large free colored
population, mostly courted from the Carolinas by the Catholic missions in the previous century; and besides, Texas was nursing a war on two fronts: against the Union to the northeast (though not, of course, officially) and with growing ranks of dissatisfied Mexican separatists from the south and west. These two states had the most to gain from claiming the ex-slaves as their own, inviting them to make themselves comfortable, and calling them citizens. This was not to say that things were egalitarian and easy for the free blacks, but at least they were employees rather than property throughout much of the CSA these days.
There in Tennessee, a great number of freed slaves had found themselves welcoming their brethren from Alabama (only a few short miles to the south) to a place with few occupations that did not feed the wartime economy. Competition for employment was fierce, even when many jobs were available. So they worked at the train station, and in the factories; they worked on the river, in the shipping districts. There was even one school teaching young negro and mixed men to become mechanics and engineers. The school was rumored to be one of the best in the nation, and there were rumors that once in a blue moon, a white boy would try to sneak in.
One man, a tall colored porter with high cheeks and a crisp Pullman uniform, asked if he could take Mercy’s bag or direct her to a train. His words trailed off when she looked up at him; he saw her smudged skin, filthy hair, and blood-covered clothes.
“I beg your pardon?” she said. Tired, and not even certain what she ought to ask him.
“Do you need any help? Assistance?”
She looked back at the train, a gesture that turned her shoulder and showed her bag.
He noted the cross, and in an effort to gently prompt her, he said, “Back from the front, are you?”
“As it turns out,” she muttered, meeting his eyes again. “I’m . . . I need to . . . I’m on my way to Memphis,” she finally spit out.
“Memphis,” he repeated. “Yes, there are trains going that way-one this evening, departing at seven fifteen, and one much later, at eleven twenty,” he said from memory. “And there’s another at ten seventeen tomorrow morning. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think you ought to consider the morning train.”
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