I Shall Be Near to You (15 page)

Anyone could see Carrie didn’t care one bit about nettle, but the way Jeremiah smiled it was easy to see he’d forgot all about the time at the creek when he said a girl like Carrie weren’t practical for a farm wife and anyway you never could tell where the truth of her feelings lay.

It ain’t fair the way some girls always get what they want with those smiles of theirs or how when a woman does the asking, I am always getting tasks I don’t want.

I make my face stone and walk fast toward the tents. Mrs. Chalmers struggles to keep my pace. When we are far enough from Captain, I whirl on her, keeping my voice quiet and steady in case anybody takes notice.

‘I’ve got to stop by my camp. Tell my people I’m coming back. I thought I was in trouble for sure.’ Her hand flies to cover her mouth, her face even more pale beneath the brim of her hat. I turn away and keep marching.

‘I’m sorry. I was only thinking of those poor soldiers—and it isn’t possible to go on my own—’ She scurries to keep pace alongside me.

Maybe I oughtn’t be talking to the Captain’s wife like she ain’t nothing different than me, but the hot words and all my mad and worry just spit from my mouth.

‘You don’t need an escort! If you were of a mind, you could go and help them any time you please.’

From the set of her mouth and the tears coming, she ain’t used to being spoke to like that, and I think to apologize but we are close enough that Jeremiah sees me from the stump he is sitting on, my stump.

‘Ross!’ He yells for me and runs down the aisle. The relief on his face is clear as a full moon. ‘What happened?’ He comes as if to hug me, but I put my arms straight out to his shoulders and stop him from knocking clean into me.

‘I’ve got orders to escort Mrs. Chalmers to Judiciary Square Hospital and help the wounded. We aim to be back after supper.’

Jeremiah stands a bit straighter when he sees Mrs. Chalmers in the aisle behind me.

‘Thank the Lord,’ Jeremiah breathes, and he looks at Ambrose sitting at the fire next to where we’ve stopped before taking my arm and leading me back to the boys at our tent, Mrs. Chalmers hanging back.

‘I thought—we all thought—’ Jeremiah says.

‘Well, it ain’t that, not yet if I can help it.’

I give Jeremiah’s shoulder a pat and he says, ‘You had me worried,’ so low I almost think the words slipped out of his mouth without his knowing.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I say, letting my fingers trail for a moment along his arm and my eyes pull after his like they are on a string. As I turn away, Sully pokes Henry in the ribs and holds out his hand, making Henry’s face go sour. That is when I know those two have taken bets on me staying or going.

CHAPTER
14

JUDICIARY SQUARE HOSPITAL, WASHINGTON, D.C.: APRIL 1862

Walking with Mrs. Chalmers puts me in mind of the day Betsy came giggling out the schoolyard gate, all bound up in a knot of girls.

‘We’re walking home the long way,’ Betsy announced.

‘I got chores waiting at home, I ain’t got time—’ I didn’t even finish when I heard Carrie’s voice calling.

‘Betsy! Only proper girls can promenade down Carlisle Street. If you want to come, you better not let Rosetta rub off on you!’

‘I’m coming!’ Betsy called over her shoulder. ‘See you at home, Rosetta. Tell Mama I won’t be long,’ and then she was running after the girls who were already parading down the street, every girl but me, Harmony, and Ida, who were long gone and wouldn’t put me in good company anyway.

I wheeled away from the schoolhouse and started walking on the road, my thoughts blacker than the shine on a beetle.

At the turn for home, I heard giggling again and when I rounded the corner there was Betsy and Tillie and Kitty.

‘What are you doing here? I thought you were promenading through town,’ I said, making my voice sweet.

Betsy didn’t answer. She was too busy looking off at the trees lining Cadagan’s fence.

I heard giggling holding itself in when Tillie said, ‘We didn’t think it’d be right letting you walk home alone.’

The three of them had their skirts tucked up like when I do chores, even Betsy, who was still watching the trees. There was a flash of white, and Carrie and Myra came stepping out of them trees with their skirts up too.

I put my chin up and marched past those girls, right on past Carrie, my only thought on getting home to the barn, to the cows, to Papa laughing at me making one trip with all the buckets. They fell in behind me. The line of five girls snorting, Carrie at the head, Betsy at the tail, swinging their arms wide and taking big steps in their splitting skirts. Every nice feeling I almost had for Betsy up and went clean out of my head.

I moved so fast, crashing into Carrie and knocking her flat out in the road, but she weren’t the one I wanted to push down. There was roaring in my ears like underwater and I grabbed Betsy’s arm and shoved her to the ground, pinning her shoulders under my knees. There was shrieking and crying and someone pulling at me but I didn’t pay that any mind.

A voice yelled, ‘Don’t you never speak to me again, you Benedict Arnold!’ and it was my voice saying, ‘It’s a shame you’re so ugly, Betsy, when you’re the only girl in the family, ain’t it?’

Then I was down the road marching for home with those girls’ screaming in my ears and the only thought in my head was how even Papa’s belt couldn’t hurt so bad.

B
UT NOW
I
am walking a graveled path between white clapboard buildings laid out all neat behind the big main building, looking more like a courthouse than a hospital. My old hurts don’t seem so bad when there’s a row of horse carts waiting out front, every one of them lined with bloodstained canvas.

‘Where you taking me?’ I ask Mrs. Chalmers, saying the first words since we left camp. I ain’t as mad as I was, but she is right to move careful around me like I might get rattled any second.

She stops in the middle of the path and takes my arm before I can pull away from her.

‘Judiciary Hospital takes the worst of the wounded,’ she says. ‘The ones who can’t make the journey any farther than this.’

Nurses and two butcher-aproned men gather round a just-drove-in horse cart and there’s moaning as the men heave a boy in blue onto a waiting stretcher like he ain’t nothing but a sack of feed.

‘That’s the surgeon’s ward,’ Mrs. Chalmers says. ‘The ambulances drive straight there if they’ve got a particularly bad case.’

We walk past. Right outside the door the nurses carry that boy through there’s a garbage pile big enough to fill one of them waiting carts, covered with swarming flies. The nearest horse swishes its tail, sending the flies buzzing just above, and I see it’s a mound of bloody rags and parts. The parts are the worst, looking like hands I’ve held or arms that’ve wrapped around me, and that is what might happen if we ever get called to battle. I blink and something rises from my cursed weak stomach so I’ve got to stop and bend over, my hands on my knees.

‘I don’t know what foolishness you told Captain, but I had stitches once when I was twelve,’ I say. ‘Ain’t never liked doctors and such since then.’

The sights call up Doc taking the fish-hook-looking needle out of a drawer and saying, ‘Now hold still, Rosetta,’ like I could stop from shaking. Jeremiah squeezed my hand, the first time he ever held it, talking like he would to a scared horse, saying ‘Easy,’ and ‘It’ll be over soon,’ and ‘You’re doing fine, there’s a brave one,’ nothing but nice things. I wanted to listen, but the needle poking my skin and the thread pulling made me carry on and feel sick like throwing up.

I keep my head between my knees like Doc made me do back then, remembering how Jeremiah helped me from the table, how I wanted him to stay even after he led me to the cot.

Mrs. Chalmers’ hand on my arm startles me.

‘Let’s keep walking,’ Mrs. Chalmers says. ‘Keep walking and we’ll be right past. We won’t go in this way.’

She pulls on me, saying I’ll get used to these sights or some such nonsense. It can’t look right, a soldier being sick and a lady in skirts herding him along. I swallow and straighten up, wishing Mrs. Chalmers ain’t got me in this bind.

‘Oh, look,’ she says, and points off in the distance. ‘Isn’t it something?’

The Capitol rises like the sun from the trees, its unfinished dome jabbing at the sky.

It’s a sight I never thought to see, but I tell Mrs. Chalmers, ‘That dome don’t mean a thing to me.’

Her mouth drops open, and she says, ‘Oh, you can’t mean that. Without the Union, what do any of us even have?’

She is trying to get my mind on something different or maybe remind me of what we soldiers are supposed to be fighting for, but I ain’t having none of it.

‘I don’t see how it would change my farm one bit if the Confederacy is its own country or not,’ I say as we make our way down the long row of buildings, gravel crunching under our feet.

‘But don’t you see? We’re all tied up together in this. It is for the betterment of each of us if this war earns the slaves’ freedom, if the evil of slavery is wiped clean from this country. And then surely no one can say women ought to be property as well and we will have our freedom next.’

‘That may be,’ I say, thinking how I ain’t pegged her for a Quaker, ‘but I don’t hold with slavery either, and I can’t see how freeing the slaves will change things for women one bit. I ain’t waiting for anyone else to give me anything. You don’t have to either.’

I am too peevish to tell Mrs. Chalmers how it ain’t so easy as all that, how sometimes getting what you aimed don’t feel like freedom.

I
NSIDE THE WARD
is just as white as outside. Rows of cots with the whitest sheets since Mama’s clothesline fill each side of the long hall. Most every cot has a soldier in it, only a few of them sitting up.

I stay on the strip of brown carpeting down the middle of the hall, keeping my dirty boots off the whitewashed floor. Mrs. Chalmers talks in a low voice to a man in a white uniform. He has full side whiskers standing out from his face and he nods, pointing down the ward, and she steps off, carrying her basket.

Sidewhiskers comes alongside me. ‘Mrs. Chalmers tells me this is your first hospital visit?’

I nod, watching Mrs. Chalmers take the hand of a soldier before sitting on the stool next to his bed and wringing out the cloth from the metal bowl on his bedside stand. She swabs his forehead, her lips moving and his weak smile coming in return.

‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ Sidewhiskers says, sticking his hand out for me to grab. ‘I’m Ward-Master Levi Coventry.’

I get my mind in order and take his hand and shake firm. ‘Private Ross Stone,’ I say. ‘Ninety-seventh New York, at your service.’

There is a long silence before I think to fill it. ‘Where are all the wounded outside coming from?’ I ask.

‘Shiloh, I expect. There were so many casualties. But tell me, are you able to write?’ the Ward-Master asks.

‘Course,’ I say. ‘I ain’t got a lady’s penmanship but I write plain enough.’

‘Down there in bed twenty-seven is a soldier, he won’t be living more than a few more days and he doesn’t have use of his hands. He’s been saying this morning there’s folks he’d like to send word to.’ The Ward-Master brings a box stamped
Sanitary Commission
down from a shelf near the door and shows how it’s full of patriotic covers and papers.

I nod and take a sheaf as he presses a pen into my hand, saying, ‘His name’s Joseph Brown.’

Walking down that carpet, it’s like I’m in church and angels are all around. Only in church the coughs and noises ain’t like the ones in this ward. Here there’s ragged breathing, groaning, rustling of sheets, and somewhere someone is weeping quietly, nothing but hurt and sickness and tiredness in these boys.

The face on the pillow of bed twenty-seven is moon-pale with brown strands of hair stuck to it. The coverlet is pulled right up to the chin, where
there’s a hint of whiskers, and I’m checking if his chest is rising and falling when a voice rasps, ‘I’m awake. Just resting.’

He turns his head to the left, his eyes still closed, his lips barely moving. ‘There’s a stool there. You can sit.’

I do as he says, the stool’s legs scraping too loud across the floor. Before I even get a chance to open my mouth or settle my papers in my lap, he’s back to talking.

‘Ward-Master send you to keep watch over me?’

‘I suppose you could see it like that. He said maybe I could be some service to you.’

As soon as he hears my voice, his eyes fly open and they are a dull green.

‘I thought—’ he starts. ‘But no. You ain’t her. Sound like her, though. You got a name?’ he asks.

‘Stone, Private Ross Stone,’ I say, working to keep my voice low, my heart pounding.

‘It’s funny, you dressing like a soldier,’ he says.

‘That’s what I am.’

The soldier lying in bed twenty-six looks at me from underneath the bandage across his forehead and says, ‘It’s the laudanum. Makes him see things. Makes him confused.’

I say, ‘Oh, I see,’ and try to smile before turning back to Joseph and saying, ‘The Ward-Master told me you’ve got a letter needs writing.’

‘Yes,’ Joseph says. ‘I’ve been feeling—I can’t be long for this world. There’s a terrible burning coming,’ he says.

And then he shifts his shoulders to throw his covers back and he’s got nothing but bandaged stumps for arms, stopping halfway to where his hands should be. Where the bandages ought to be white they are rust-brown and yellow.

I talk so I won’t stare. ‘Did you fight at Shiloh?’

‘So many burning,’ Joseph says. ‘My arms—’

I don’t know what he means. Maybe he is seeing things again. But then that other soldier in bed twenty-six speaks up. ‘Joseph there, he’s one of the lucky ones. Weren’t so wounded he couldn’t get away. You seen battle yet?’

I shake my head.

‘I was a fool to have such an itch to fight,’ Bed Twenty-six says. ‘It ain’t how I thought, having Rebel artillerymen laying their shells down in front of us. Canister. It tears right through the lines, cuts down whole Companies of men. And if it don’t get you, you got to keep moving forward into it. That’s bad enough. But at Shiloh the trees caught fire.’