The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  The 131st and a lot of other units of the Army of the Potomac followed the trail of the Confederates along the Rappahannock River to its chief tributary, the Rapidan, moving along water that reflected the gray of the skies, day after day. Lee was outnumbered and outsupplied and kept ahead of the federals. Things didn’t heat up in Virginia until the war in the western theater turned very sour for the Union. General Braxton Bragg’s Confederates struck a terrible blow against General William S. Rosecrans’ Union forces on Chicamauga Creek, outside of Chattanooga, with more than sixteen thousand federal casualties. Lincoln and his cabinet held an emergency meeting and decided to detach Hooker’s two corps from the Army of the Potomac in Virginia and send them to Alabama by rail, to support Rosecrans.

  With Meade’s army deprived of two corps, Lee stopped running. He split his army in two and tried to flank Meade, moving west and north, toward Manassas and Washington. So skirmishing began.

  Meade was careful to keep between Lee and Washington, and the Union Army fell back a mile or two at a time, until they had given up forty miles to the Southern assault, with sporadic fighting.

  Rob J. observed that each of the litter-bearers approached his task differently. Wilcox went after a wounded man with dogged determination, while Ordway showed an uncaring bravery, scuttling out like a great fast crab with his uneven gait, and carrying the victim back carefully, holding his end of the stretcher high and steady, taking the strain on his muscular arms to compensate for his limp. Rob J. had several weeks to think about his first pickup before it occurred. His trouble was, he had as much imagination as Robinson, and maybe more. He could think about getting hit in any number of ways and circumstances. In his tent and by lamplight he did a series of drawings for his journal, showing Wilcox’s team running out, three men bent against a possible headwind of lead, the fourth carrying the stretcher in front of him as he ran, a flimsy shield. He showed Ordway coming back, carrying the right-rear corner of the stretcher, the other three bearers with tight, scared faces, and Ordway’s thin lips bent into a rictus that was half-smile, half-snarl, a largely no-account man who had finally found something he was very good at. What would Ordway do, Rob J. wondered, when the war ended and he couldn’t go after wounded men under fire?

  Rob J. drew no pictures of his own team. They hadn’t gone out yet.

  Their first time was on November 7. The Indiana 131st was sent across the Rappahannock near a place called Kelly’s Ford. The regiment crossed the river at midmorning but soon was bogged down by intense enemy fire, and within ten minutes word came to the ambulance corps that somebody had been hit. Rob J. and his three bearers went forward to a riverside hay field where half a dozen men huddled behind an ivy-covered stone wall, firing into the woods. All the way up to the wall, Rob J. expected the bite of a projectile into his flesh. The air felt too thick to suck up into his nostrils. It was as if he had to force his way through it by brute strength, and his limbs seemed to work slowly.

  The soldier had been hit in the shoulder. The ball was in the flesh and needed to be probed for, but not under fire. Rob J. took a dressing from his Mee-shome and bandaged the wound, making certain the bleeding was controlled. Then they put the soldier on the litter and started back at a good pace. Rob J. was aware of the broad target his exposed back presented at the rear of the litter. He could hear every shot that was fired, and the sounds of bullets passing, tearing through the tall grass, thunking solidly into the earth near them.

  Amasa Decker grunted on the other side of the litter.

  “You hit?” Rob J. gasped.

  “Naw.”

  Feet thudding, they half-ran with their burden, sliding after an eternity into the shallow defilade in which Major Coppersmith had set up his medical station.

  When they had given over the patient to the surgeon, the four bearers lay on the soft grass like fresh-caught trout.

  “They sounded like bees, those miniés,” Lucius Wagner said.

  “I thought we was shit dead,” Amasa Decker said. “Didn’t you, Doc?”

  “I was scared, but I figured I had some protection.” Rob J. showed them the Mee-shome, and told them its strap of cords, the Izze cloths, would protect him from being hurt by bullets, according to the Sauk promise. Decker and Wagner listened seriously, Wagner with a small smile.

  That afternoon, firing almost ceased. The sides were at stalemate until around dusk, when two entire Union brigades crossed the river and swept past the 131st’s position in the only bayonet charge Rob J. would see in the war. The 131st infantry fixed its own bayonets and joined the attack, whose surprise and ferocity allowed the Union to overrun the enemy, killing or capturing several thousand Confederates. Union losses were light, but Rob J. and his bearers went out half a dozen more times for wounded men as evening fell. The three soldiers had become convinced that Doc Cole and his Injun medicine bag made them a lucky crew, and by the time they had come back safely for the seventh time, Rob J. believed in the power of his Mee-shome as strongly as any of them.

  That night in their tent, after the wounded had been tended to, Gardner Coppersmith looked at him with shining eyes. “Glorious bayonet charge, wasn’t it, Cole?”

  He treated the question seriously. “More butchery,” he said, very tired.

  The regimental surgeon regarded him with disgust. “If you feel that way, why the hell are you here?”

  “Because this is where the patients are,” Rob J. said.

  Still, by the end of the year he had decided he would leave the Indiana 131st. It was where the patients were; he’d come to the army to give good medical care to soldiers, and Major Coppersmith wouldn’t allow him to do that. He saw that it was a waste of an experienced physician for him to do little more than carry a stretcher, and it made no sense for an atheist to live as if he were seeking martyrdom or sainthood. It was in his mind to go back home when his contract ran out, the first week of 1864.

  Christmas Eve was a strange affair, sorry and touching at the same time. There were services of worship before the tents. On one side of the Rappahannock the musicians of the 131st Indiana played “Adeste Fidelis.” When they were done, a Confederate band on the far bank played “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” the music floating eerily over the dark waters, and then started right in on “Silent Night.” Bandmaster Fitts raised his baton and the Union band and the Confederate musicians played together, the soldiers of both sides singing along. They could see each other’s fires.

  As it turned out, it was a silent night, no gunfire. For supper there had been no festive birds, but the army had provided a very acceptable soup with something in it that may have been beef, and each soldier of the regiment was given a tot of holiday whiskey. That may have been a mistake, for it

  whetted thirsts for more of the same. After the concert, Rob J. met Wilcox and Ordway, weaving in from where they had killed a jug of sutler’s rotgut at the edge of the river. Wilcox was supporting Ordway, but he was unsteady himself.

  “You go on to sleep, Abner,” Rob J. told him. “I’ll see this one into his tent.” Wilcox nodded and walked away, but Rob J. didn’t do as he had promised. Instead, he helped Ordway away from the tents and sat him against a boulder.

  “Lanny,” he said. “Lan, boy. Let us talk, you and I.”

  Ordway considered him with half-closed drunkard’s eyes. “… Merry Christmas, Doc.”

  “Merry Christmas, Lanny. Let’s talk about the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner,” Rob J. said.

  So he decided that whiskey was a key that would unlock everything Lanning Ordway knew.

  On January 3, when Colonel Symonds came to him with another contract, he was watching Ordway carefully filling his knapsack with fresh dressings and morphia pills. Rob J. hesitated only a moment, never taking his eyes off Ordway. Then he scribbled his signature and signed on for another three months.

  55

  “WHEN DID YOU MEET ELLWOOD R. PATTERSON?”

  Rob J. thought he’d been very subtle, very circumspect, i
n the way he had questioned the drunken Ordway on Christmas Eve. The interrogation had confirmed his picture of the man, and of the OSSB.

  Sitting against the tent post, with his journal against his drawn-up knees, he wrote the following:

  Lanning Ordway began going to meetings of the American party in Vincennes, Indiana, “five years before I was old enough to vote.”

  (He asked me where I had joined, and I said, “Boston.”)

  He was taken to the meetings by his father, “because he wanted me to be a good American.” His father was Nathanael Ordway, an employed broom maker. The meetings were on the second floor over a tavern. They would go through the tavern, out the back door, up a flight of stairs. His father rapped the signal on the door. He remembers that his father was always proud when “the Guardian of the Gate” (!) looked out at them through a peekhole and let them come in “because we were good people.”

  Within a year or so, when his father was drunk or sick, Lanning sometimes went to the meetings alone. When Nathanael Ordway died (“of drink and pleurisy”), Lanning went to Chicago to work in a saloon off the railroad yards on Galena Street, where a cousin of his father dispensed whiskey. He cleaned up after sick drunkards, spread fresh sawdust every morning, washed the long mirrors, polished the brass rail—whatever had to be done.

  It was natural for him to search out a Know Nothing chapter in Chicago, like making contact with family, because he had more in common with the American party regulars than with his father’s cousin. The party worked to elect only public officials who would hire American-born workers in preference to immigrants. Despite his lameness (from talking to him and observing him, I believe he was born with a hip socket that is too shallow), the regulars learned to call on him when they needed somebody young enough to do important errands and old enough to keep his mouth closed.

  It was a source of pride to him when, after only a couple of years, at the age of seventeen, he was brought into the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. He intimated it was a source of hope too, because he felt that a poor and crippled American-born youth needed the connections of a powerful organization if he was going to amount to anything, “with foreign Roman Catholics willing to work every American job for almost no money at all.”

  The order “did things the party couldn’t do.” When I asked Ordway what he did for the order, he said, “This and that. Traveled about, here and there.”

  I asked if he had ever run across a man named Hank Cough, and he blinked. “Of course I know him. And you know that man too? Imagine that. Yes. Hank!”

  I asked where Cough was, and he looked at me strangely. “Why, he’s in the army.”

  But when I asked what work they had done together, he put his fore-finger under his eye and ran it down his nose. And he staggered to his feet, and the interview was over.

  Next morning, Ordway gave no sign that he recalled the questioning. Rob J. was careful to stay away from him for a few days. In fact several weeks passed before another such opportunity presented itself, because the sutler’s supplies of whiskey had been bought out by the troops during the holiday season, and the Northern merchants who traveled with the Union forces were afraid to replenish their whiskey in Virginia, for fear that the product might be poisoned.

  But an acting assistant surgeon had a supply of government-issued whiskey for medicinal purposes. Rob J. gave the jug to Wilcox, knowing he would share it with Ordway. That night he waited and watched for them, and when finally they arrived, Wilcox merry, Ordway morose, he said good night to Wilcox and took charge of Ordway as he had done before. They went to the same boulders, away from the tents.

  “Well, Lanny,” Rob J. said. “Let us have another talk.”

  “About what, Doc?”

  “When did you meet Ellwood R. Patterson?”

  The man’s eyes were like icy pins. “Who are you?” Ordway said, and his voice was completely sober.

  Rob J. was ready for hard truth. He had waited a long time. “Who do you think I am?”

  “I think you’re a goddamned Catholic spy, askin all those questions.”

  “I have more questions. I have questions about the Indian woman you killed.”

  “What Indian woman?” Ordway asked in genuine horror.

  “How many Indian women have you killed? Do you know where I’m from, Lanny?”

  “You said Boston,” Ordway said sullenly.

  “That was before. I’ve lived in Illinois for years. A little town called Holden’s Crossing.”

  Ordway looked at him and said nothing.

  “The Indian woman who was killed, Lanny. She was my friend, she worked for me. Her name was Makwa-ikwa, in case you never knew. She was raped and murdered in my woods, on my farm.”

  “The Indian woman? My God. Get away from me, you crazy misery, I don’t know what you’re talkin about. I warn you. If you’re a smart person—if you know what’s good for your welfare at all, you son of a prickbastard spy—you’ll forget anythin and everythin you may think you know about Ellwood R. Patterson,” Ordway said. Lurching past Rob J., he walked unevenly into the darkness, moving as fast as if he were being fired upon.

  Rob J. kept one eye on him all the next day without seeming to watch him. He saw him drill his team of bearers, saw him inspect their knapsacks, listened to him warn them they must be very chary of using morphine pills, because the regiment was just about out, until the army came up with more. Lanning Ordway, he had to acknowledge, had turned into a good and efficient sergeant of the Ambulance Corps.

  In the afternoon he saw Ordway in his tent laboring over a paper, pencil in hand. It took him long hours.

  After retreat, Ordway brought an envelope to the postal tent.

  Rob J. made a stop and then went to the post office himself. “I found a sutler this morning with some real cheese,” he told Amasa Decker. “I left a hunk of it in your tent.”

  “Why, Doc, that was kind,” Decker said, very pleased.

  “I have to take care of my litter-bearers, don’t I? You’d best go and eat it before someone else finds it. I’ll be happy to play postmaster while you’re gone.”

  That was all it took. Directly after Decker hurried off, Rob J. went to the box of outgoing mail. It took him only a few minutes to find the envelope and slip it into his Mee-shome.

  It wasn’t until he was alone in the privacy of his own tent that he took out the letter and opened it. It was addressed to: Rev David Goodnow, 237 Bridgeton Street, Chicago, Illinois.

  Dere Mr Goodnow, Lanning Ordway. Im in the Indiana 131, you recawl. Ther is a man here, askin kwestians. Doctur, name of Robit Col. He wants to no abowt Henry. He talks funny, I bin wachin him. He wants to no abowt L. wood Padson. Tole me we rapt and kilt that injun gurl, that time in Illnois. I kin tak kare a him, lots a ways. But I yuse my head an let you no so you kin fine owt how he fine owt abowt us. Im a sgt. Wen the war ends Ile werk for the Odder agin. Lanning Ordway.

  56

  ACROSS THE RAPPAHANNOCK

  Rob J. was painfully aware that in the midst of a war, with weapons at every hand and on every person, and with wholesale murder unremarkable, there would be many ways and many opportunities available for an experienced killer who was determined to “tak kare” of him.

  For four days he tried to be aware of what was behind his back, and for five nights he slept lightly or not at all.

  He lay awake wondering how Ordway would attempt it. He decided that in Ordway’s place and temperament, he would wait until both of them were participants in a noisy skirmish, with lots of firing. On the other hand, he had no idea whether Ordway might be a knife fighter. If Rob J. were found stabbed, or with his throat cut, after a long dark night when every jittery picket had speculated that each moon-shadow was a Confederate infiltrator, there would be little surprise or investigation of his death.

  This situation was changed on January 19, when Company B of the Second Brigade was sent across the Rappahannock on what was supposed to be a quick intelligence prob
e and then a swift withdrawal, but didn’t work out that way. Instead, the light company of infantry found Confederate positions in strength where they hadn’t expected Confederates to be, and they were pinned down by enemy fire in an exposed place.

  It was a repeat of the situation in which the entire regiment had found itself some weeks earlier, but instead of some seven hundred men with fixed bayonets charging across the river to mend the situation, there was no support from the Army of the Potomac. The 107 men stayed where they were and took the fire all day, returning it as best they could. When darkness fell, they fled back across the river, bringing along four dead bodies and seven wounded men.

  The first person they carried into the hospital tent was Lanning Ordway.

  Ordway’s crewmen said he’d been hit just before nightfall. He had reached into his jacket pocket for the paper-wrapped hard biscuit and piece of fried pork he had placed there that morning, when two minié balls struck him in swift succession. One of the balls had taken a chunk from his abdomen wall, and a loop of grayish abdomen now protruded. Rob J. started to push it back inside, thinking to close the wound, but he saw several other things quickly, and he recognized that he couldn’t do anything to save Ordway.

  The second wound was perforating, and too much damage had been done internally, to the bowel or stomach, or perhaps both. He knew if he opened the belly he’d find the body’s hemorrhaged blood pooled in the abdominal cavity. Ordway’s drained face was white as milk.