by Noah Gordon
“Is there anything you want, Lanny?” he asked gently.
Ordway’s lips worked. His eyes locked with Rob J.’s, and a certain calmness Rob J. had seen before in the dying revealed that he was aware. “Water.”
It was the worst thing to give a man who was gut-shot, but Rob J. knew it didn’t matter. He took two opium pills from his Mee-shome and gave them to Ordway with a long drink. Almost at once Ordway vomited redly.
“Do you want a minister?” Rob J. asked as he worked to make things right. But Ordway made no reply, only kept looking at him.
“Maybe you want to tell me exactly what happened to Makwa-ikwa that day in my woods. Or tell me about anything else, anything at all.”
“You … hell,” Ordway managed.
Rob J. didn’t believe that he ever would go to hell. He didn’t believe Ordway or anyone else would go there, either, but it wasn’t a time for debate. “I thought it might help you to talk just now. If you have anything to get off your mind.”
Ordway closed his eyes and Rob J. knew he had to leave him in peace.
He always hated to lose somebody to death, but he especially hated the loss of this man who’d been prepared to kill him, because locked in Ordway’s brain was information he had yearned after for years, and when the man’s brain died like a turned-off lamp, the information would be gone.
He knew, too, that in spite of everything, something within him had responded to the strange, complicated young man who had been caught in the grinder. What would it have been like to have known an Ordway who had been delivered of his mother without injury, who had had some schooling instead of illiteracy, some care instead of hunger, and a different birthright from his drinking father?
He knew the futility of such speculation, and when he glanced at the still figure he saw that Ordway was beyond any consideration.
For a time he handled the ether cone while Gardner Coppersmith removed a minié ball, not unskillfully, from the meaty part of a boy’s left buttock. Then he returned to Ordway and tied up his jaw and weighted his eyelids with pennies, and they laid him on the ground next to the four others Company B had brought back.
57
THE FULL CIRCLE
On February 12, 1864, Rob J. wrote in his journal:
Two rivers back home, the great Mississippi and the modest Rock, have placed their mark on my life, and now in Virginia I’ve come to know another mismatched pair of rivers too well, witnessing repeated slaughter along the Rappahannock and the Rapidan. Both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia have sent small groups of infantry and cavalry across the Rapidan to have at one another all through the late winter and into early spring. As casually as I crossed the Rock in former times to visit an ailing neighbor or catch an emerging child, now I accompany troops across the Rapidan in dozens of places, seated on Pretty Boy or splashing on foot over shallow fords, or riding over deep water in boats or on rafts. This winter there was no big battle that killed thousands, but I’ve become accustomed to seeing a dozen bodies, or one. There’s something infinitely more tragic about a single dead man than there is about a field full of corpses. I’ve learned somehow not to see the hale and the dead, but to focus on the wounded, going out and fetching young damned fools, more often than not under fire from other young damned fools….
The soldiers on both sides had taken to pinning to their clothing slips of paper bearing their names and addresses, in the hope that their loved ones would be notified if they became casualties. Neither Rob J. nor the three stretcher-bearers on his team bothered with the identification labels. They went out now without thought or fear, because Amasa Decker, Alan Johnson, and Lucius Wagner had become convinced that Makwa-ikwa’s medicine truly was protecting them, and Rob J. had allowed himself to be infected by their conviction. It was as if the Mee-shome somehow generated a force that deflected all bullets, making their bodies inviolable.
Sometimes it seemed there had always been the war, and that it would exist forever. Yet Rob J. could see changes. One day he read in a tattered copy of the Baltimore American that all white Southern males between seventeen and fifty had been conscripted for service in the Confederate Army. It meant that from then on, whenever a Confederate became a casualty he would be irreplaceable, and his army would grow smaller. Rob J. saw with his own eyes that the Confederate soldiers who were taken or killed all wore ragged uniforms and sorry shoes. He wondered desperately whether Alex was alive, and fed, and clothed, and shod. Colonel Symonds announced that soon the 131st Indiana would receive a quantity of Sharps carbines equipped with priming magazines that would allow rapid fire. And that summed up where the war seemed to be heading, with the North manufacturing better guns, ammunition, and ships, and the South struggling with dwindling manpower and a dearth of anything that had to be made in a factory.
The problem was, the Confederates didn’t seem to realize that they labored under a terrible industrial disadvantage, and they fought with a fierceness that promised the war wouldn’t soon end.
One day late in February the four litter-bearers were summoned to where a captain named Taney, the commander of Company A of the First Brigade, lay stoically smoking a cigar after a ball had chopped through his shin. Rob J. saw there was no point in applying a splint because several inches of the tibia and the fibula had been carried away, and the leg would have to be amputated halfway between the ankle and the knee. When he reached to take a dressing out of the Mee-shome, the medicine bag wasn’t there.
With a sick lurch of his stomach, he knew exactly where he had left it, on the grass outside the hospital tent.
The others knew too.
He took the leather belt from around Alan Johnson’s waist and used it as a tourniquet; then they loaded the captain onto the litter and carried him away almost drunkenly.
“Dear God,” Lucius Wagner said. He always said that, in an accusing tone, when he was very scared. Now he whispered it over and over until it was an annoyance, but nobody complained or told him to shut up, being too busy anticipating the painful impact of the bullets into their bodies, which were so cruelly and suddenly naked of magic.
The carry was slower and more agonized than their very first. There were bursts of shooting, but nothing happened to the bearers. Finally they were back at the hospital tent, and when they had turned the patient over to Coppersmith, Amasa Decker picked the Mee-shome from the grass and thrust it into Rob J.’s hands. “Put it on. Quick,” he said, and Rob J. did so.
The three bearers consulted somberly, weak with relief, and agreed to share the responsibility of seeing that Acting Assistant Surgeon Cole put on the medicine bag first thing every morning.
Rob J. was glad he was wearing the Mee-shome two mornings later when the 131st Indiana, half a mile from the point where the Rapidan met the larger river, came around a curve in the road and literally stared into the startled faces of a brigade of men in gray uniforms.
Men on both sides began to fire at once, some of them at very close range. The air was filled with curses and shouts, the reports of muskets, the screaming of those who were struck, and then the front ranks closed with one another, officers hacking with swords or firing small arms, soldiers swinging their rifles as clubs or using fists and fingernails and teeth, there being no time to reload.
On one side of the road was an oak wood, and on the other was a manured field that looked soft as velvet, plowed and ready for seed. A few men in each force took shelter behind roadside trees, but the main strength of both forces spread out to mar the perfection of the dirt field. They fired at each other from a rough, ragged skirmish line.
Ordinarily Rob J. would be in the rear during a skirmish, waiting to be sent for as needed, but in the confusion of the melee he found himself struggling with his terrified horse in the very midst of the savagery. The gelding shied and half-reared, and then seemed to fold beneath him. Rob J. managed to leap clear as the horse crashed to the ground and lay twitching and thrashing. There was a bloodless hole the size
of a nickel in Pretty Boy’s mud-colored throat, but a double rivulet of red already coursed from the horse’s nostrils as he struggled to breathe, kicking spasmodically in his agony.
The medicine bag contained a hypodermic syringe with a brass needle, and morphine, but opiates still were in short supply and couldn’t be used for a horse. Thirty feet away a young Confederate lieutenant lay dead, and Rob J. went to him and slid a heavy black revolver from the boy’s holster. Then he went back to the ugly horse and placed the muzzle of the gun under Pretty Boy’s ear and pulled the trigger.
He’d taken no more than half a dozen steps away when there was a fiery pain in the upper part of his left arm, as though he’d been stung by a foot-long bee. He took three more steps; then the manure-sweet umber earth seemed to rise in order to receive him. He was thinking clearly. He knew he had fainted and presently would regain his strength, and he lay and looked up with a painter’s appreciation at the raw ocher sun in a madder-blue sky, the sounds around him diminishing as if someone had thrown a blanket over the rest of the world. How long he lay like that, he didn’t know. He became aware he was losing blood from the injury in his arm, and he fumbled to take a wad of dressings from the medicine bag and press it hard into the wound to stop the bleeding. Looking down, he saw blood on the Mee-shome and found the irony irresistible, so that soon he was laughing at the notion of the atheist who had tried to create a god out of an old quill bag and a couple of straps of cured leather.
Eventually, here came Wilcox’s crew to pick him up. The sergeant—as ugly as Pretty Boy, his wall eyes full of love and concern—said the kinds of bluff meaningless things Rob J. had said a thousand times to patients in vain attempts to comfort. The Southerners, seeing they were vastly out-numbered, had already pulled back. There was a litter of dead men and horses and broken wagons and strewn equipment, and Wilcox remarked to Rob J. mournfully that the farmer was going to have a hell of a time getting that good-looking field replowed.
He knew he was fortunate the wound wasn’t worse, but it was more than a scratch. The ball had missed the bone but had taken flesh and muscle. Coppersmith had sewn the wound partially and dressed it with care, seeming to gain a good deal of satisfaction from the task.
Rob J. was taken with thirty-six other wounded to a sector hospital in Fredericksburg, where he stayed for ten days. It was a former warehouse and wasn’t as clean as it might have been, but the medical officer in charge, a major named Sparrow who had practiced in Hartford, Connecticut, before the war, was a decent sort. Rob J. remembered Dr. Milton Akerson’s experiments with hydrochloric acid in Illinois, and Dr. Sparrow agreed to allow him to wash his own wound with a mild hydrochloric-acid solution from time to time. It stung, but the wound began to crystallize beautifully and without infection, and they agreed that probably it would be fruitful to try it on other patients. Rob J. was able to flex the fingers and move his left hand, though it hurt to do so. He agreed with Dr. Sparrow that it was too soon to tell how much strength and usefulness would return to the wounded arm.
Colonel Symonds came to see him when he’d been there a week. “Go home, Dr. Cole. When you’ve recovered, if you want to return to us, you’ll be welcome,” he said, although they both knew he wouldn’t be back. Symonds thanked him clumsily. “If I survive, and someday you may find yourself in Fort Wayne, Indiana, you must come to me at the Symonds Lamp Chimney Factory, and we will eat too much wonderful food and drink too well and talk too long of bad old times,” he said, and they shook hands hard before the young colonel walked away.
It took him three and one-half days to get home, over five different railroad systems, starting with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. All of the trains were behind schedule, dirty, and crammed with out-of-sorts travelers. His arm was in a sling but he was just another middle-aged civilian and on several occasions he stood in a swaying car for fifty miles or more. In Canton, Ohio, he waited half a day to change trains, and then he shared a double seat with a drummer named Harrison who worked for a large firm of sutlers that sold ink powders to the army. The man had been within hearing distance of firing several times, he confided. He was full of improbable war stories, peppered with the names of important military and political figures, but Rob J. didn’t mind, for the stories made the miles go faster.
The hot, crowded cars ran out of water. Like others, Rob J. drank what was in his canteen and then thirsted. Finally the train stopped at a way station next to an army encampment outside of Marion, Ohio, to renew its fuel and take on water from a small stream, and the passengers boiled out of the cars to fill their containers.
Rob J. was among them, but as he knelt with his canteen, something caught his eye on the other side of the stream, and with disgust he recognized at once what it was. He went up close to confirm that somebody had dumped used dressings, bloody bandages, and other hospital offal into the stream, and when a short walk revealed other nearby dumping sites, he replaced the lid on his canteen and advised the other passengers to do the same.
The conductor said there would be good water in Lima, down the line a bit, and he returned to his seat; by the time the train had resumed its way, he had fallen asleep despite the rocking of the car.
When he awoke, he learned the train had just left Lima behind. “I had wanted to get water,” he said, irritated.
“Not to worry,” Harrison said. “I have plenty now,” and passed over his flask, from which Rob J. drank deeply and gratefully.
“Was there a large crowd waiting for water in Lima?” he asked, returning the flask.
“Oh, I didn’t get it in Lima. I filled my container back at Marion, when we stopped for fuel,” the salesman said.
The man paled when Rob J. told him what he had seen in the stream at Marion. “Shall we get sick, then?”
“Can’t tell.” After Gettysburg Rob J. had seen an entire company drink four days out of a well that turned out to contain two dead Confederates, without much subsequent discomfort. He shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we both get some real diarrhea in a few days.”
“Can’t we take something?”
“Whiskey might help, had we any.”
“You leave that to me,” Harrison said, and hurried off in search of the conductor. When he returned, doubtless with a lighter purse, it was with a large bottle, two-thirds full. The whiskey was raw enough to do the job, Rob J. said upon sampling it. By the time they parted woozily in South Bend, Indiana, each was convinced the other was a fine fellow, and they shook hands with great warmth. Rob was in Gary before he realized he hadn’t learned Harrison’s first name.
He came to Rock Island in the freshness of early morning, the wind blowing in from the river. He left the train gratefully and walked through the town carrying his suitcase in his good hand. He intended to rent a horse and trap, but straightaway he met George Cliburne on the street, and the feed merchant pumped his hand and clapped him on the back and insisted on driving him to Holden’s Crossing himself, in his buggy.
When Rob J. walked through the farmhouse door, Sarah was just sitting down to her breakfast egg and yesterday’s biscuit, and she looked at him without saying a word and started to cry. They just held each other.
“Are you bad hurt?”
He assured her he wasn’t.
“You turned skinny.” She said she’d make him some breakfast, but he said he’d eat afterward. He started kissing her and he was urgent as a boy, he wanted her on the table or on the floor, but she told him it was about time he came back to his own bed, and he followed close behind her up the stairs. In the bedroom she made him wait until everything was all off. “I need a good bath,” he said nervously, but she whispered he could bathe afterward too. All the years, and his heavy fatigue, and the pain of his wound, fell away with their clothing. They kissed and explored one another more eagerly than they had in the farmer’s barn after they were married at the Great Awakening, because now they knew what they’d been missing. His good hand found her and his fingers spoke. After a while h
er legs wouldn’t support her, and he winced in pain when she sagged against him. She looked at the wound without blanching, but helped him return his arm to the sling and made him lie back on the bed while she took charge of everything, and when they made love Rob J. cried out loud several times, once because his arm hurt.
There was joy, not only in returning to his wife but also in going to the barn to feed dried apples to the horses and noting that they remembered him; and in coming up to Alden, who was mending fences, and seeing terrible gladness in the old man’s face; and in walking the Short Path through the woods to the river and stopping to pull weeds from Makwa’s grave; and in just sitting with his back against a tree near where the hedonoso-te had been, and watching the peaceable water gliding by, with nobody coming from the other bank to scream like animals and shoot at him.
Late that afternoon he and Sarah walked the Long Path between their house and the Geigers’. Lillian, too, wept to see him, and kissed him on the mouth. Jason was alive and well when last she had heard, she said, and was steward of a large hospital on the James River.
“I was very near to him,” Rob J. said. “Only a couple of hours away.”
Lillian nodded. “God willing, he’ll be home soon too,” she said dryly, and couldn’t keep from looking at Rob J.’s arm.
Sarah wouldn’t stay there for supper, wanting him all to herself.
She was able to keep him alone with her for only two days, because by the third morning word had spread that he was back and people began to come, a few just to welcome him home, but several more to turn the conversation casually to a boil on the leg, or a heavy cough, or a pain in the stomach that wouldn’t go away. On the third day Sarah capitulated. Alden saddled Boss for him and Rob J. rode half a dozen places, dropping in on old patients.