The March

by E. L. Doctorow

  That’s nonsense. I’ll give you money.

  What money? She frowned.

  Federal greenbacks.

  My, my. She wrapped her hand in a cloth, lifted the frying pan off the fire, and slid a fritter onto a folded sheet of newspaper. Still hot, she said to David. Leave it cool a minute.

  Well?

  The woman with effort raised herself from the ground, pushing off on one knee with a groan. She brushed her skirt and put one hand to her brow and peered in several directions. I need a Union soldier, she said. I got to get someone to come an arrest you.

  Arrest me?

  The slave trade over and done, din’t you hear? Can’t buy nor sell people no more.

  I’m not selling anyone. I’m giving you money to take care of this boy.

  Oh, sure. He older, you would ast me to pay for ’im. He too little to be much use, so you payin. Either way is outside the law of e-mancipation, ifn you ain’t heard.

  I merely mean to provide means for his keep. I see you already have two of your own and I understand the responsibility this entails.

  Here, David, the woman said. She bent down and made a cone out of the paper holding the fritter and handed it to the child. Take this now, and get along with your daddy before I puts him in jail. An I ain’t sayin nothin ’bout a man meanin to sell off his own chile, she said to Pryce.

  She folded her hands and looked up into the night sky. Dear Lord, she said, fill this white man’s heart with shame. Fill him with your glory. Let him repent and give thanks to you, God, for the blessin of this fine boy David. I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

  WHY DID YOU lie, Pryce said some minutes later, don’t you know lying is wrong? Don’t you know that? He was practically shouting. But David, having finished his fritter, held Pryce’s hand and chose not to answer. He marched along in calm anticipation of what lay ahead. It was as if Pryce were the child and David the adult who forbore to indulge his childish outbursts. Good God, Pryce thought, whomever I approach, what’s to prevent his doing it again? He’ll say I’m his father and that’ll be the end of it.

  With the realization that he’d been outwitted, Pryce felt his face turn hot. The child had a slave’s cunning. And his instinctive dash to freedom—was it really that? How foolish to think so. More likely the wretched boy was merely running from the whip. In my arms he would avoid a beating. Yes, of course, that was all it was. He probably deserved what he was about to get.

  Pryce felt the child’s hand in his as something glued to him. The imposition had become intolerable. But I’m bigger and older and stronger and smarter than you, my good man. Your father elect won’t make the same mistake twice.

  The child who is taken up, Pryce thought, is the child found alone.

  AND SO IT was that later that night Pearl, wandering in her distressed state through the encampment, came upon the crowd around the boy, who had torn his clothes off. Nobody could touch him. He sat there cross-legged in the mud, beating his fists against his thighs and sobbing. If someone approached him the sobs became screeches. People, seeing Pearl in her nurse’s uniform, stepped aside. She knelt in front of the child. The moonlight washed the warmth out of his color and made him a beautiful blue-black. And in the brief moment he stopped crying to study her, his expression was calm enough for her to see that he was a handsome little boy. She thought he might be six or seven years old. Pearl nodded as if to say she understood that he had every right to cry, and she smiled sympathetically. She put her hand out, and though he jerked his head back, she did touch his forehead, and he let her. She thought he felt hot. His eyes, swollen from crying, looked like sick eyes to her. How long had he been sitting here? Her own bare feet had long since gone numb from the cold, and she thought his sitting there on the wet ground for no matter how long couldn’t be doing him much good. She picked up his clothing—all of it was wet and muddy.

  Whose child is this? she called out. Don’t nobody claim this child?

  Several voices assured her that he belonged to no one that they could see.

  You all standin around lookin on—this ain’t a raree show, Pearl said. Somebody fetch me somethin to cover him.

  Are you lost, boy? Pearl said.

  He shook his head no.

  You got a mama somewhere lookin for you?

  He shook his head no.

  Pearl accepted a blanket, and when she turned back to David he was staring at her, his sobs having gone into spasmic snuffings, and with the back of his hand he wiped his nose.

  Moments later she was carrying him, all wrapped in a blanket, back through the encampment the way she had come. He was heavier than he looked, and shivering now and knuckling his teeth. Pearl was feeling defiant. I will keep this one with us on the march, she said to herself. And if Stephen Walsh means to marry me, he will understan that, white as she is, Pearl could someday bear him a tar baby for his trouble.

  IV

  THEY WERE UP ON THE ARSENAL PLATEAU IN FRONT of the one building still standing amid all the rubble. It had been used as a temporary headquarters. Some of the remaining troops were loading crates and files into army wagons. Others were rolling barrels of powder up a ramp they had laid over the front steps.

  If you didn’t drag your feet, Arly said, I would be riding behind General Sherman, wherever he is. Now how am I to know with the columns separating down there across the river? Look from here like one blue snake breeding into two.

  I needed chemicals, Calvin said. And Mr. Culp provides a list of photo salons in each city. Besides, I have the picture of General Sherman from down in Georgia, with all his lesser generals standing there.

  Never you mind, we’re gonna take a better one if we ever find him again.

  Why?

  Why? Why? You ask too many questions, Calvin. But the answer is he will have aged some. Like me, just from trying to get you a move on.

  Calvin dropped the reins over Bert and they started down the winding road to the center of town.

  We were talking trade, Calvin said. The people in this profession talk to one another, even if one of them is a Negro. This photographer, Swank of Fayetteville, he takes mostly women and their chiddren and young ladies in their coming-out.

  Debutantees? Didn’t he never hear there was a war?

  Wasn’t a war here until four days ago. That’s why he had a good store of materials—collodion and chemical bath, and even plates fixed and ready to use in their holders, though Mr. Culp always likes to prepare his own plates. Not everybody does it right, he told me. Best if you do the work yourself.

  IN TOWN THERE was a terrible smell. People in the streets had handkerchiefs wrapped around their faces. Troops were marching at the double to get to the river and across the bridge as soon as possible.

  Phewee! Arly said.

  They found some space in the lag of the march, and even Bert clopped along a bit faster than usual. The closer they got to the river, the worse the stench. And then finally they had to stop to accommodate the sight because horses and mules were everywhere lying dead on the grassy banks of the river. And some of them were floating in the river. It was a slow broad course, the Cape Fear, and the carcasses rolled over and stuck their legs in the air and rolled back and eddied and bumped one another in a state of hapless confusion, though they were clearly dead.

  Calvin shook his head. What’d they have to do that for to all these animals?

  Well, Calvin, you are clearly not a military man or you would know this is an army’s night soil. An army works its animals near to death so on a re’glar basis it rids itself of its consumed-up animals and gets new ones, though I venture not a few of these dead creatures were in better shape than your Bert is. If we was more about our business, we could have made a trade and he would be one of these creatures farting their dead air into the skies of Fayetteville instead of standing here looking so pleased with himself.

  Best not let him hear you when you talk like that. See him turn his head and flick his ears?

  Well, if yo
u’re listening, Bert, Arly said, better get a move on lest you find yourself bumping downriver with all of them.

  When Bert didn’t move, Arly looked at Calvin. You dumb as he is to think he can understand me. Whop him on the ass is all he understands. Trouble with black folks, you got your stories. You got mule stories, you got whistle-pig stories, you got Yankee stories—

  Yankee stories getting us freedom.

  Getting you air makes you sick to breathe it. Phew! A good, brisk wind might have shown God’s mercy in this situation. ’Course, no Southern gentleman general would leave a thousand dead carcasses to stink up a city. Nosir. He would put down his stock away in the country where nobody would suffer it. Old Sherman giving the people something to remember him by. Such manners is why we insurrected in the first place. This Yankee freedom you tell of, that’s as much a tale as a mule knows the English language.

  Well, we’ll see, we’ll see, Calvin said. He flipped the reins and Bert got them into the line of traffic to go across the river. I notice it’s no Southern gentleman general we chasing after to take his picture, Calvin said.

  ONCE WREDE SARTORIUS’S regiment was across the Cape Fear and on the march east, he hitched his mount to the wagon in which his patient rode and got up inside to ride with him. The patient was Corporal Albion Simms of the Eighty-first Ohio, the man with the spike in his skull.

  It was in that freakish accident, when the powder being dumped in the Saluda River back in Columbia somehow exploded, and many men were killed, that Albion Simms, finding himself sitting on the ground, and somewhat breathless, touched the side of his head because he felt as if something had stung him.

  In the aftermath, his awestruck mates had taken him to the South Carolina College hospital and there, coming under Wrede’s care, he was immediately placed in restraints so as not to further injure himself. Wrede had shaved the man’s head as he questioned him. Albion Simms’s memory was gone. His reflexes were sound, he could see and hear normally, he could respond to questions, but he remembered nothing previous to the feeling that he had been stung. When he was told his name and the regiment of which he was a part, he heard this news with no sense of recognition.

  Naturally, the appearance of this man, physically unimpaired but for an iron spike in his skull, brought the regimental surgeons running. Bored by routine amputations, and their mostly futile treatments for the miasmatic diseases, the doctors found in the case something to enliven their professional spirits. The consensus was for surgery, but Wrede, who had their jealous regard as being the best of them, said he himself would not risk such an operation.

  The spike, of the common variety used in the construction of army wagons, had penetrated the cranium above the ear at an angle of 180 degrees. It was firmly lodged. It may complicate with scar tissue or inflammation, Wrede said, but surgery would without question enhance the trauma. If you look closely, you will see no impact fracture. It is a clean four-sided penetration. Some six millimeters protrude, which means seven millimeters of iron have traversed the parietal-occipital areas. And there is bone in front of it. A trepan is not possible, nor can you expect to extract the spike as you would a splinter from your finger. The damage is indisputable, but as it now stands the wound is not fatal.

  During this consultation, the eyes of the unfortunate Albion, who was strapped to an examining table, darted back and forth from one doctor’s face to another. The bearded and studious officers hovering over him were blocking out the world. He became agitated and began struggling against his restraining straps. Wrede Sartorius looked into his eyes and smiled, and laid a hand on his chest. Corporal Albion Simms, he said, you will not have surgery. Your survival is something of a miracle. And that miracle is precisely what invites our examination.

  WREDE SARTORIUS HAD to acknowledge to himself that taking the man on the march rather than having him sent to a Northern hospital was, from a strictly medical point of view, without justification. The first ethical commandment for doctors was to do no harm. Clearly, a rough passage on weathered and rutted roads was not prescribed. Yet the possibility of learning something about the brain from the affliction of this soldier was an opportunity he was not willing to forgo. He expected the man was doomed. It was just a matter of time: more and more of the brain would respond to its insult, and the mind would recede in the manner of an outgoing tide. But that would be a process. Albion Simms would deteriorate under study.

  Wrede commandeered a soft riding ambulance for Albion Simms’s exclusive use, and had him strapped down for travel. In this way they rode with the army out of Columbia.

  At the end of each day’s march, whatever surgeries had to be tended to—the skirmishes with enemy soldiers were a daily occurrence—Wrede would find time to interview the patient and make note of the responses. After some days Albion’s functional memory no longer included the moment of his injury. He saw colors when he heard sounds. He did not recognize written numbers. He sometimes complained of pain and dizziness. Through all of this his appetite was good. Though he remembered nothing of his past life, one day he suddenly remembered the words and tune of a song, which he sang for his doctor:

  Oh the coo coo

  Is a pretty bird

  And she wobbles as she flies

  But she never sings her coo coo

  ’Til the fourth day of July

  He sang in a high, reedy voice, his eyes lifted upward as if he were seeing the bird he sang about. Wrede used the song as a measure of stability, asking Albion Simms to sing it every interview thereafter. Within a week, Albion couldn’t remember the words or understand that he had once sung them, and when asked what the Fourth of July meant he didn’t respond. Then one day he sang the song again, and the next day it was again gone from his mind.

  In the meantime, one of Wrede’s colleagues—he didn’t know or care who—had sent word to the Surgeon General in the capital, and he in turn had telegraphed Sherman’s headquarters: a courier came down the ranks with the order that Colonel Sartorius was to have Corporal Simms transported to the Federal hospital in Washington immediately once the army reached Fayetteville. This had been delivered in the town of Cheraw.

  Wrede’s response was to have Stephen Walsh carpenter the box frame that now held Simms and the odd protrusion that was an integral part of him. You will not be lying down during the day, Albion, Wrede said. You will see what’s going on in the world around you.

  Always contemptuous of the army mind, Sartorius knew that once they were out of Fayetteville no further official thought would be given to the matter, especially if, as he believed, there was more combat in the coming days than the forces had seen in some time. But at this point his emotional estrangement from the medical community of the Army of the West was complete. Of the procedures he had invented, the treatments he had recommended to supersede the standard therapies, none had been adopted. Some were still under study. They would be under study long after the war was over. He was not looking for personal recognition. He did not need or want a higher rank. But he had become intolerant, passionately intolerant, of traditional medical thinking. It did not change, it did not advance but looked dumbly upon the disasters it devised for the poor broken and mutilated boys that were its responsibility.

  Sartorius was sensitive to the issue of slavery, or he wouldn’t have accepted a commission in the Union army. But as a European, with a medical degree from the University of Göttingen, he had from the beginning found himself apart. If there was any compensation for the barbarity of war, it was an enriched practice. The plethora of casualties accelerated the rate of learning. Apparently he was alone in considering this American civil war a practicum.

  Though Sartorius believed himself to be fervently human, he recognized that people had not always found him so. There seemed to be a natural divide in the way he and Americans conducted themselves in social intercourse. He was a bit formal, certainly not demonstrative, by which they decided he was arrogant. He did not smile easily, by which they understood his pale-
eyed attentions were something like a naturalist’s looking at an insect. He was a neatly composed, self-assured man who had left a European civilization whose constraints he did not want to be part of. He had come to America, as everyone else did, to be free. But Americans lacked something—perhaps the sense of human consciousness as tragedy. It was this sense that had governed his desire to do science since he’d been a schoolboy. For if not science, then despair. But here, on this morning, as the rain began to fall, and spatter and snap against the wagon canvas, he wondered as he regarded Albion Simms, if there was a possible equivalence of their two minds, as if something had been severed as well in the Sartorian brain that impelled him now to seek knowledge with no regard for the consequences.

  And what else was severed? These days he thought less often of Emily Thompson. He found that his recollection of their conversations, her quality of mind, the honest intelligence, the prim gallantry of her work for him, the soft Southern lilt of her voice, how she moved, how it felt to hold her in his arms—all of it was becoming less distinct. And his anger had diminished. Gradually, he supposed, the memory of her would fade entirely, or at least until it would no longer be painful.

  THEY ARE SHOOTING at me, Albion Simms said. His eyes were wide with alarm.

  No, Albion, that is the rain falling.

  The rain?

  Yes, it is raining very hard against our little roof. Also the canvas flaps in the wind. But it is a fearsome sound, I grant you that.

  What did you call me?

  Albion. That is your name.

  That is my name?

  Yes.

  What is my name?

  Albion Simms. Have you forgotten?

  Yes. I have forgotten. What have I forgotten?

  You knew your name yesterday.

  Is this yesterday?

  No.

  I have forgotten yesterday. My head hurts. What is this that hurts?