by Noah Gordon
After dinner, he and his father went to Pike’s Opera House to hear Adelina Patti in concert, and I went back to the Polyclinic. I knew precisely what I wanted to do. There is a brick-lined tunnel that runs under Ninth Street between the medical school and the main hospital building. It is for the use of physicians only. In order that it is clear during emergencies, it is off-limits to medical students, who must cross the street aboveground, no matter how inclement the weather. I went into the basement of the medical school, very much still the student, and entered the lamplit tunnel. Somehow, when I walked through on the other side into the hospital, for the first time I felt like a doctor!
Pa, I’ve accepted a two-year appointment as a house officer of the Southwestern Ohio Hospital. It pays only three hundred dollars per annum, but Dr. Berwyn said it will lead to a good income as a surgeon. “Never downplay the importance of income,” he told me. “You must remember that the person who complains bitterly about a doctor’s earnings usually is not a doctor.”
Embarrassingly, and to my wonderful fortune, both Berwyn and McGowan squabble about which of them shall take me under his wing. The other day, Barney McGowan outlined this plan for my future: I shall work with him for a few years as a junior associate, then he will arrange an appointment for me as associate professor of anatomy. Thus, he said, when he retires, I’ll be ready to take over the mantle as professor of pathology.
It was too much, they both set my head to spinning, because my own dream always has been simply to become a doctor. In the end, they worked out a program that is advantageous to me. Just as I did during my summer employment, I’ll spend mornings in the operating theater with Berwyn and afternoons on pathology with McGowan, only instead of doing dirty work as a student, I’ll function as a doctor. Despite their kindness, I don’t know whether I’ll ever want to settle in Cincinnati. I miss living in a small place where I know the people.
Cincinnati is more Southern in feeling and sentiment than Holden’s Crossing. Billy Henried confided to a few trusted friends that he would join the Confederate Army as a surgeon after graduation. Two nights ago I went to a farewell dinner with Henried and Cooke. It was strange and sad, each of them aware of where the other was going.
News that President Lincoln has signed a proclamation granting liberty to the slaves has caused lots of anger. I know you don’t care for the president because of his part in destroying the Sauks, but I admire him for freeing the slaves, whatever his political reasons. Northerners hereabouts seem able to make any sacrifice when they tell themselves it is to save the Union, but they don’t want the goal of the war to become the abolition of slavery. Most seem unprepared to pay this terrible blood-price if the purpose of the fighting is to free the Negroes. The losses have been terrifying at battles like Second Bull Run and Antietam. Now there is news of slaughter at Fredericksburg, where almost thirteen thousand Union soldiers were mowed down while trying to take high ground from the South. It has produced despair in many of the people with whom I have talked.
I worry constantly about you and Alex. It may irk you to know I’ve begun to pray, although I don’t know to whom or what, and I ask regularly only that both of you will come home.
Please do your best to care for your own health as well as that of others, and remember that there are those who anchor their lives on your strength and goodness.
Your loving son,
Shaman
(Dr.! Robert Jefferson Cole)
51
THE HORN PLAYER
It wasn’t as hard as Rob J. had feared to live in a tent, to sleep on the ground again. What was more difficult was dealing with questions that haunted him: why in the world he was there, and what the outcome of this terrible civil war would be. Events continued to go badly for the cause of the North. “We can’t seem to win for losing,” Major G. H. Woffenden observed in one of his less-drunken moments.
Most of the troops Rob J. lived among drank hard when off-duty, especially following payday. They drank to forget, to remember, to celebrate, to commiserate with one another. The dirty and often drunken young men were like pit dogs on a leash, apparently oblivious of impending mortality, straining to get at their natural enemy, other Americans who doubtless were just as dirty and just as often drunken.
Why were they so eager to kill Confederates? Very few of them really knew. Rob J. saw that the war had taken on substance and meaning for them that went far beyond reasons and causes. They thirsted to fight because the war existed, and because it had been officially declared admirable and patriotic to kill. That was enough.
He wanted to howl and scream at them, to lock the generals and politicians in a dark room like errant, foolish children, to take them by the scruff of their collective necks and shake them and demand: What is the matter with you? What is the matter with you?
But instead, he went to sick call every day and doled out the ipecac and the quinine and the paregoric, and he was careful to look at the ground wherever he walked, like a man who made his home in a giant kennel.
On his final day with the 106th Kansas, Rob J. sought out the paymaster and collected his eighty dollars and then went to the conical tent and slung his Mee-shome over his shoulder and picked up his suitcase. Major G. H. Woffenden, curled up in his rubber poncho, didn’t open his eyes or mutter good-bye.
Five days before, the men of the 176th Pennsylvania had marched raggedly onto steamboats and were carried southward toward combat in Mississippi, according to rumor. Now other boats had disgorged the 131st Indiana, which was raising its tents where the Pennsylvanians lately had lived. When Rob J. sought out the commanding officer, he found a baby-faced colonel still in his twenties, Alonzo Symonds. Colonel Symonds said he had his eye out for a doctor. His surgeon had concluded a three-month enlistment and had gone back to Indiana, and he never had had an assistant surgeon. He questioned Dr. Cole closely and seemed impressed by what he learned, but when Rob J. began to indicate that certain conditions had to be met before he could sign on, Colonel Symonds’ face showed doubt.
Rob J. had kept careful records of his sick calls for the 106th. “On almost any given day, thirty-six percent of the men were on their backs or in my sick line. Some days the percentage was higher. How does that compare with your daily sick list?”
“We’ve had a lot of them sick,” Symonds conceded.
“I can give you more healthy men, Colonel, if you will help me.”
Symonds had been a colonel only four months. His family owned a factory in Fort Wayne where glass lamp chimneys were made, and he knew how ruinous sick workers could be. The 131st Indiana had been formed four months before, raw troops, and within days had been thrown into picket duty in Tennessee. He considered himself fortunate that they’d had only two skirmishes serious enough to be called contact with the enemy. He had lost two killed and one wounded, but on any given day he had had so many down with fever that the Confederates could have waltzed through his regiment without trouble, had they known.
“What do I have to do?”
“Your troops are raising their tents on the shitpiles of the Pennsylvania 176th. And the water’s bad here, they drink river water that’s spoiled by their own runoff. There’s an unused site less than a mile on the other side of the encampment, with clean springs that should give good water through the winter, if you drive pipes into them.”
“God Almighty. A mile’s a long way to go to confer with the other regiments. Or to expect their officers to come if they want to see me.”
They studied one another, and Colonel Symonds made up his mind. He went to his sergeant major. “Order the tents to be struck, Douglass. The regiment’s going to move.”
Then he came back and talked business with this difficult doctor.
Again Rob J. turned down a chance to be commissioned. He asked to be hired as acting assistant surgeon, on a three-month contract.
“That way, you don’t get what you want, you can leave,” the young colonel observed astutely. The middle-aged doctor didn
’t deny it, and Colonel Symonds considered him. “What else do you want?”
“Latrines,” Rob J. said.
The ground was firm but not yet frozen. In a single morning the sinks were dug and logs were fixed on one-foot posts at the edge of the trenches. When the order was read to all companies that defecating or urinating anyplace but in designated sinks would result in swift and severe punishment, there was resentment. The men needed something to hate and ridicule, and Rob J. realized he had filled that need. When he passed among them, they nudged one another, their eyes raked him, they grinned cruelly at the ridiculous figure he made in his ever-shabbier civilian suit.
Colonel Symonds didn’t give them a chance to spend much time thinking about grievances. He invested four days in labor details that built a series of spare, half-excavated huts of logs and sod. They were damp and poorly ventilated, but they gave considerably more shelter than tents, and a small fire made it possible for the men to sleep through a winter’s night.
Symonds was a good commander and had attracted decent officers. The regiment’s commissary officer was a captain named Mason, and Rob J. didn’t find it difficult to explain the dietary causes of scurvy, because he could point out examples of the disease’s effects among the troops. The two of them took a buckboard into Cairo and bought barrels of cabbages and carrots, which were made part of the ration. Scurvy was even more prevalent among some of the other units in the encampment, but when Rob J. tried to confer with the physicians of the other regiments, he met with little success. They seemed more conscious of their roles as army officers than as doctors. All were uniformed, two sported swords like line officers, and the surgeon of the Ohio regiment wore custom fringed epaulets like those in a picture Rob J. once had seen of a pompous French general.
In contrast, he embraced his civilian self. When a supply sergeant, grateful for banished stomach cramps, issued him a blue woolen overcoat, he welcomed it but took it to town and had it dyed black and given plain bone buttons. He liked to pretend he was still a country doctor who had moved temporarily to another town.
In many respects, the camp was like a small town, albeit exclusively male. The regiment had its own post office, with a corporal named Amasa Decker as postmaster and mailman. On Wednesday evenings the band gave concerts on the drill field, and sometimes, when they played a popular song like “Listen to the Mockingbird,” or “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming,” or “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” the men sang along. Sutlers brought a variety of goods into the camp. Out of thirteen dollars per month, the average soldier couldn’t afford much cheese at fifty cents a pound, or condensed milk at seventy-five cents a can, but they bought the sutlers’ liquor. Rob J. indulged himself several times a week in molasses cookies, six for a quarter. A photographer had set up shop in a large wall tent, in which one day Rob paid a dollar for a ferrotype photograph of himself, stiff and unsmiling, that he sent off to Sarah at once as proof that her husband was still alive and well and loved her dearly.
Having taken raw troops into disputed territory once, Colonel Symonds was determined that they would never be unprepared for combat again. Through the winter, he worked his soldiers hard. There were training hikes of thirty miles that produced new patients for Rob J., because some of the men suffered strained muscles from carrying a full field pack and heavy rifled musket. Others developed hernias from wearing belts hung with heavy cartridge boxes. Squads constantly trained in bayonet warfare, and Symonds forced them to practice the laborious loading of their muskets again and again: “Bite off the end of the paper-wrapped cartridge like you’re mad at it. Pour the powder down the barrel, insert the minié bullet and then the paper wrapping for a wad, and ram the whole damn mess home. Take a percussion cap from your pouch, place it on the nipple in the breech. Aim that beautiful thing and fire!”
They did it again and again, repeatedly, unendingly. Symonds told Rob J. he wanted them to be able to load and fire when awakened from a sound sleep, when numb with panic, when their hands were shaking with excitement or fright.
In the same way, so they would learn to take orders without hesitation instead of cussing out or challenging their officers, the colonel marched them incessantly in close-order drill. Several mornings when the landscape was covered with snow, Symonds borrowed huge wooden rollers from the Cairo road department, and teams of army horses pulled them around the parade ground until it was flat and hard enough for the companies to drill some more, while the regimental band played marches and quicksteps.
It was on a bright winter’s day, while passing the perimeter of the parade ground filled with squads of drilling men, that Rob J. glanced at the seated band and noted that one of the horn players had a port-wine stain on his face. The man’s heavy brass instrument rested on his left shoulder, the long throat and the bell flashing golden behind him in the winter sun, while as he blew into the mouthpiece—they were playing “Hail, Columbia”—his cheeks ballooned enormously and then relaxed, again and again. Each time the man’s cheeks filled with air, the purple mark under his right eye darkened, like a signal.
For nine long years Rob J. had tensed whenever he met a man with a stain mark on his face, but now he simply proceeded to sick call, automatically walking to the beat of the insistent music all the way to the dispensary tent.
The next morning, when he saw the band marching on the parade ground to play for a First Battalion review, he looked for the horn player with the marked face, but the man wasn’t there.
Rob J. walked to the row of huts where the band lived, and at once he came upon the man taking frozen garments off the washline. “Stiffer than a dead man’s dick,” the man said to him in disgust. “It don’t make sense to have inspections in dead of winter.”
Hypocritically, Rob J. agreed, although the inspections had been his suggestion, to force the men to wash at least some of their clothing. “Got the day off, have you?”
The man gave him a surly look. “I don’t march. I’m spavined.”
As he walked away with his armload of frozen clothes, Rob J. saw he was. The horn player would destroy the symmetry of a military-band formation. His right leg seemed slightly shorter than the left, and he walked with a decided limp.
Rob J. went into his own hut and sat on his poncho in the cold gloom with his blanket around his shoulders.
Eleven years. He remembered the day precisely. He recalled each of the individual house calls he had made while Makwa-ikwa was being violated and murdered.
He thought of the three men who had come to Holden’s Crossing just prior to the murder and then had disappeared. In eleven years he’d managed to learn nothing about them, save that they were “bad drunks.”
A spurious preacher, the Reverend Ellwood Patterson, whom he had treated for syphilis.
A burly, physically powerful fat man named Hank Cough.
A skinny young man they’d called Len. Sometimes Lenny. With a port-wine stain on his face under his right eye. And a limp.
Not so skinny anymore, if this was the man. But then, not so young anymore either.
This probably wasn’t the one he was looking for, he told himself. It was probable that there was more than one man in America with a facial stain and a gimpy leg.
He didn’t want this to be the man, he realized. He faced the fact that he no longer really wanted to find them. What would he do if the horn player was Lenny? Slit his throat?
Helplessness gripped him.
Makwa’s death was something he had managed to put away in a separate compartment of his mind. Now that compartment had been reopened, Pandora’s box, and he felt an almost-forgotten iciness begin to grow deep inside him, a coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature in the small hut.
He went outside and walked to the tent that served as the regimental office. The sergeant major’s name was Stephen Douglass, spelled with one more S than the senator’s. He’d grown accustomed to the doctor’s working with personnel files. He had told Rob J. he’d never seen an army surgeon
so driven to keep complete medical records. “More paperwork, Doc?”
“A little.”
“Help yourself. The orderly’s gone out for a pitcher of hot coffee. Welcome to some of it when it comes. Just don’t drip any on my damn records, please.”
Rob J. promised he wouldn’t.
The band was attached to Headquarters Company. Sergeant Douglass kept each company’s records neatly in a separate gray box. Rob J. found Headquarters Company’s box, and inside it was a group of records tied with cord as a discrete bundle marked “Indiana 131st Regimental Band.”
He leafed through the records, one by one. There was nobody in the band whose first name was Leonard, but when Rob J. found the card, he knew at once and without uncertainty that this was the right man, the way he sometimes knew if somebody would live or die.
ORDWAY, LANNING A., private. Residence, Vincennes,
Indiana. One-year enlistment, July 28, 1862.
Enlistment credit, Fort Wayne. Born, Vincennes,
Indiana, November 11, 1836. Height, 5’8”.
Complexion, fair. Eyes, gray. Hair, brown.
Enlisted for limited duty as musician (E-flat bass
cornet) and general laborer, due to disability.
52
TROOP MOVEMENTS
It was weeks after Rob’s contract ran out before Colonel Symonds came to him to discuss its renewal. By that time the spring fevers had begun to rage through the other regiments, but not in the Indiana 131st. The men of the 131st had colds from the damp ground and runny bowels from the ration, but Rob J.’s sick-call lines were the shortest he’d seen since he’d begun working for the army. Colonel Symonds knew that three regiments were tormented with fever and ague, and his own was relatively sound. Some of the oldest men, who shouldn’t have been there in the first place, had been sent home. Most of the others had lice, and filthy feet and necks, and itchy loins, and they drank too much whiskey. But they were lean and hard from the long marches, keen from the constant drilling, and bright-eyed and eager because somehow Acting Assistant Surgeon Cole had gotten them through the winter fit for duty, as he had promised. Out of six hundred men in the regiment, seven had died during the winter, a mortality rate of twelve per thousand. In comparison, fifty-eight men per thousand had died in the other three regiments, and now that the fevers had come, that percentage was certain to rise.