House Divided (89 page)

“He's at the hospital in Armory Square,” she said.

“Julian?”

“No, no. Dr. Hammond. He's operating there. Come.”

So they set off again, and on the way Cinda, suddenly guileful, stopped to buy a basket and stuff it with good things; fruit, a bottle of sherry, a cold roast fowl.

“This will get us into the hospital,” she promised Anne.

There was a sentry at the door who tried to bar their way, demanding passes. “I'm taking these to my son,” Cinda explained.

“Gotta have a pass all the same.”

“The leg my boy left at the Antietam is my pass,” Cinda retorted. “Where were you that day?”

“It's no use, ma'am,” the man said sullenly; and when Cinda would have entered he laid his bayoneted gun across the door. She faced him with high head.

“If you touch me, I'll have you shot!” she cried.

“I can't let you pass, or I'd be shot anyway, ma'am.”

“Oh—go wash your face,” Cinda said curtly. “You're in no fit condition to talk to ladies!” She thrust his musket aside so briskly that in his surprise, caught off balance, he stumbled down the steps and their way was clear. Anne, scurrying after Cinda into the hospital, saw him start after them and then stop and come to attention as an officer approached. Then Cinda whipped aside from the main hall into the first corridor, and they were not pursued.

The corridor they entered was short. Around the first corner an open door revealed benches where capes and bonnets were laid, and there were mops and brooms leaning in a corner. Cinda uttered an exclamation of satisfaction. “Ladies working in the hospital leave their things here,” she told Anne. “Quick. Take off your bonnet. Take a broom or something.” She set the example, and Anne in helpless mirth that was near hysteria obeyed. “Stop laughing,” Cinda told her crisply. “Now we look as though we belonged here. Come on.”

Anne followed her; and thereafter, asking directions in an authoritative tone—“I've a message for Dr. Hammond. Where is he, please?”
—Cinda presently reached her goal. A nurse, a hoarse man with whiskey on his breath, pointed to the door from which he had just emerged.

“He's in there. I've been helping him. But don't bother him now,” he advised, and grinned in a terrifying way at Anne. “Or he'll cut your gizzard out!” His arms to the elbow were spotted and streaked with half-dried blood.

The door he indicated was screened with semi-transparent gauze; but since the hall where they stood was dark, while a skylight illuminated the operating room, they could see clearly enough the group inside. There were three men in black frock coats and two others in shirt sleeves with stained hands; and on an oilcloth table lay another man whose face was hidden by a white cloth. Anne caught a sick-sweet smell in the air.

But even in that first glance she was sure of Dr. Hammond, he towered above the others so commandingly. Tall and broad shouldered, with a huge dark beard that rested on his chest, he stood facing them across the table where the hurt man lay.

“Get that bandage off,” he said; and something strong and sure in his voice warmed Anne through and through. The bandage, darkly hideous, came away with little sticking sounds, and Dr. Hammond shifted a cigar from his hand to his mouth and turned back his cuffs over his coat sleeves and bent to inspect the swollen and discolored arm thus exposed. He took from a basin a wet cloth and mopped at the arm and the cloth slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. He picked it up and wetted it and squeezed it dry and scrubbed at the dried blood and pus around the wound and tossed the cloth into the basin again, and muttered something. He removed the cigar from his mouth and said curtly to the other men:

“This should have been taken off on the battlefield. Wiseman is right: ‘Cut off the limb quickly, while the patient is heated and in mettle.' If we did, we'd save half the men who die. Too late for this lad, I'm afraid. We'll see.”

The two men in frock coats nodded respectfully. Dr. Hammond replaced his cigar, opened a mahogany box on the table beside him, took out a slender knife, tried its edge on his thumb and then stropped it lightly on his palm. “Ready?” he asked.

One of the other doctors said hurriedly: “Oh, just a minute.” He took needle and thread from the box in which instruments were kept, touched thumb and finger to his tongue, twisted the thread to a point, threaded the needle and thrust it in his lapel to be in readiness. Then he picked up a hooked steel instrument and a length of string. Dr. Hammond nodded and lifted that dark arm that no longer looked like an arm at all and with a keen blade drew a circle clear around it, near the shoulder.

Anne saw the quick oozing blood, and then a spurt, and then the doctor was busy with that length of string, tying knots. She tried to look away and could not. The grate of the saw seemed to rip through her spine. When one of the men in shirt sleeves threw the severed arm aside, she saw it fall upon a heap of other arms and legs in a corner of the room, a heap out of which drained an almost colorless liquid streaked with pink, spreading across the floor.

A moment later Dr. Hammond wiped his hands on a towel already soiled and turned away. “You gentlemen can stitch the flap,” he said, and relighted his half-smoked cigar and came toward the door where Anne and Cinda stood. He saw them and stopped in surprise.

“Well, ladies, what is it?” His voice was crisp, impatient.

Through the now open door, Anne could see more clearly; and she felt her knees give way . . . and then she was lying on the floor, and Aunt Cinda was fanning her, and Dr. Hammond's voice was fading into distance, to the beat of his departing footsteps. She tried to sit up, and with Aunt Cinda's help she managed it, and asked a question, and Aunt Cinda said wearily:

“Well—we may as well go home.”

Anne, once on her feet, was able to walk. Aunt Cinda found the room where they had discarded their bonnets. In the open air Anne's senses returned, and she began to shiver, and she whispered: “Oh Aunt Cinda, wasn't it terrible?”

“I shouldn't have taken you. Yes, it's terrible.” Cinda's voice was remote and calm.

“I should think they could at least keep things clean!”

“Clean?” Cinda looked at her in honest surprise. “Why—I've never seen an operating room as clean as that, Honey. Compared with that, our hospitals are—pig pens! They didn't even have any flies there!”
Anne felt ridiculously young and ignorant; and Cinda said gravely: “Cutting people to bits isn't clean work, you know, Anne.”

“But all those horrible—arms and legs—on the floor!”

Cinda said drily: “They had chloroform. I've seen surgeons doing amputations on men who screamed and fought and had to be tied down—and other hurt men lying in the same room, listening and watching while they waited their turn.”

Anne shivered piteously. “Did you find out where Julian is?”

Cinda shook her head. “No. Mr. Gilby had already seen Doctor Hammond. The doctor is too busy now, with so many men here from the last battle. He can't even try to help us.”

“So we have to wait?”

“Yes, wait,” Cinda wearily agreed.

 

They had reached Washington on the twenty-sixth of August. It was a month lacking only five days before their waiting ended. To receive the terrible flood of wounded from the second battle at Manassas—Second Bull Run, Mr. Gilby called it—and then from the battle on the hill between Antietam Creek and the Potomac, the Washington hospitals had been cleared. Convalescents were sent north to other cities, and patients who could be moved were shifted to make room for those in greater need. Under the pressure of the times, registrations were neglected, records vanished; and it was only after days of tireless inquiry that Mr. Gilby traced Julian. He heard, late one Saturday night, that some Confederate wounded had been put into a warehouse in Georgetown. Since other such hopes had proved groundless, he said nothing to Cinda, but drove to Georgetown to see if Julian were there. Before he came home, the household had retired; but at breakfast he told Cinda that Julian was found, and at once they went off to Georgetown together.

Anne would have gone, but Mr. Gilby said there were sights she should not see, and Mrs. Gilby stayed at home with her. At dinner time Mr. Gilby returned alone; and he was in a flurry of exhaustion, flinging up his hands in despair. To Anne's eager questions he said wearily: “Julian? Oh yes, he's right enough, glad to see his Mama. He'd begun to think she was never coming. She stayed with him, wouldn't leave him, says she won't leave him there. It's a filthy place,
damp, full of stinks, full of vermin, food miserable; and it seems I'm to get him out of there.” He laughed helplessly. “Mrs. Dewain knows her mind, Miss Anne; but untangling Washington red tape is hard enough on week days, let alone Sundays.” He was under Cinda's orders to take back clean sheets, blankets, a mattress, a hamper of food. “And she swears she'll stay with Julian till she can bring him here.”

“Well, why not?” Mrs. Gilby cried. “I think that's sensible.”

“Why not?” He laughed helplessly. “Oh, Dr. Hammond's willing enough. He gave me permission as soon as I finally found him. But after all, Julian's a prisoner.” He looked at Anne. “It seems your Government has been pretty severe with some of General Pope's officers, in retaliation for one of Pope's proclamations. The windbag! I'm glad Lee whipped him! But at any rate, Provost Marshal Doster says Stanton's orders are to accept no parole, and Julian can't be released without one. I'm going to find Dr. Hammond again as soon as I've had a bite, and see if he can do anything.”

Mrs. Gilby packed the things Cinda wanted and he loaded them into the carriage and set off. At dusk they heard the carriage at the door, and Anne ran to the window to look out; and she cried: “Oh, Mrs. Gilby, they've brought him! They've brought him!” She hurried to fling wide the door, and saw Cinda and Mr. Gilby and the strapping Negro coachman supporting between them—someone Anne was sure she had never seen before. This was not Julian! This was a tall, thin, pale man with a thin beard of a straw-red color. He had only one leg, and that hung as limp as a rope; and his garments were rags and he was hatless, his hair hanging to his shoulders.

But when they carried him up the steps, the light from the gas chandelier fell on his face and she saw his lips part in a smile and he said in a hoarse, weak voice: “Howdy, Miss Anne. Mama said you were here.”

So this was Julian after all! Anne's eyes flooded, and she could see no more; but Julian seemed to sag, and the big Negro picked him up in tender arms and asked Mrs. Gilby: “Where you gwine put him, ma'am?”

Julian was borne away upstairs, and Cinda and Mrs. Gilby and all the household for an hour were busy in his service; but Anne stayed
with Mr. Gilby. He told her in a chuckling triumph: “I found Doctor Hammond. He soon settled it, ordered Julian moved here in my custody. I thought Stanton might find out he was here and have him arrested; but Dr. Hammond said Stanton would never learn where Julian was from him, and if I let the cat out of the bag I'd be responsible! So! Now we'll soon have the youngster well again.”

 

Julian in the days that followed came quickly back to some measure of strength. Before Anne saw him a second time, that absurd thin beard was shaved off and his hair cut to a proper length; and clean, in a clean bed, he seemed to gain by the hour. Cinda smilingly declared she would never have known him. “I declare, Anne, he's grown at least three inches since May!” she cried proudly. “Isn't that wonderful?”

Julian laughed and said: “Why, I had to do something to kill time, Mama. There was nothing to do but lie abed. Besides, with only one leg I'm going to need a long one!”

Anne saw Cinda's lips white. “Of course. That's sensible,” she agreed; but her voice shook, and he said in sternly tender warning:

“Don't cry over me, Mama.”

“No, darling.”

“I'll be as good with one leg as with two, as soon as I learn how to use crutches.”

“Of course! I'll get you some.”

He laughed. “We had a song in the hospital, to keep us from feeling sorry for ourselves.” And he sang a lively jig:

Then, seeing his mother's eyes fill, he said apologetically: “I guess it wasn't much of a song, but it cheered us up. You know, right at first.”

Anne cried: “I think it's a beautiful song! Teach me all of it, will you, Julian?”

“I certainly will. Come on!” He began to sing again, repeating that
verse. Cinda rose, her face convulsed; but they looked at her with pleading in their eyes, and sang in defiant chorus:

Cinda stamped her foot, her tears suddenly streaming. “Oh you idiots!” Then, smiling through tears: “Darlings!” She almost ran from the room. Anne wished to follow her, but Julian caught Anne's hand.

“No! Second verse! She'll be all right. Sing!”

So they sang till they laughed till they cried, and when Cinda returned they taught her that song together.

 

Julian was eager to be out of doors. Fine days, he and Anne spent together in the garden behind the house; and as he became used to his crutches they went farther afield. They saw the unfinished Capitol, and the shabby mansion set in unkempt grounds where the President lived and where the air was hideous with a sickening odor that came from decaying refuse in a near-by ditch; and they saw the Monument that looked in its uncompleted state like a factory chimney with the top broken off. No one challenged them. Legless men were not rare in Washington. This tall boy and the lovely girl beside him attracted many glances, not because he was crippled, but because there was the bright beauty of youth upon them both. Mr. Gilby somehow acquired for Julian a faded Confederate uniform, and Julian wore it without insignia; and there were so many paroled Confederates in Washington that he went unhindered. One day they had their daguerreotypes taken by Mr. Whitehurst; once Julian bought Anne a little flower pin at Mr. Hood's jewelry store.