The Better Angels of Our Nature (13 page)

“Damn you, boy—
yes,
when you receive your first commission you may take the horse. You have my word. Now go away or you will not live to earn that commission.”

“Thank you, sir.” The boy saluted smartly as befitted a soldier who had just extracted a promise from the commander of the Fifth Division of the Army of the Tennessee.

Sherman mounted up, and from atop his sorrel, the cigar-coarsened voice said, “
This
is the kind of mount an experienced officer would choose, my boy, fleet as a deer, very easy in her movements, and sweet-natured.” He urged his beautiful race mare directly into a canter.

“Gen’al’s right, boy,” Jackson told Jesse as he swung up onto his own large gray mare. “This here’s Sally, steady as a rock and even-tempered as yer maiden aunt.” He looked at Cartwright from under his large hat. “See, Doc, all that hollerin’ was fer nuthin’, the boy’s still in one piece,
just
!” He burst into laughter and cantered off after his commander.

“You’ve had a busy few days, Private Davis, first Reb cavalry, now a crazy horse. What’s next, I wonder, a trip to a whorehouse? How are your bowels?” The surgeon poked and prodded at the boy’s cuts and bruises. My God, he had not felt this inspired since trapping a fly under one of his mother’s empty preservative jars in the dark basement of their house and cutting it open to see how it worked. “Have you had any of the usual childhood diseases, measles, mumps, scarlet fever? Remember, Private, when you take a chill, it can turn overnight into bronchitis or pneumonia in young recruits unaccustomed to sleeping in the wet. How about intestinal and digestive ailments? Badly prepared food can make life very miserable, at best you’ll be disabled for life, at worst, given the medicines prescribed by most of my colleagues, you’ll be dead. You’ll have a scar but I would say it serves you damn right and you’re damn lucky not to have broken your damn neck. Open wide.” The boy obeyed. “Ever had whooping cough, strep throat, or croup?”

“Aaarrr—”

“Remove your shirt and pants. I want to give you a thorough examination.” As Cartwright gave this order, he narrowed his eyes to scrutinize the bruised face for signs of panic. There was none, in fact the boy started quite calmly to ease his slim arms out of the shreds of his shirt. “What
the hell
are you doing? Are you crazy?” Cartwright attacked him with a blanket as he glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching.

“You told me to remove my clothes, sir.”

“Well…well…I know…but…” Suddenly he straightened up, pushed the errant hair out of his eyes, and said, “Okay, okay, if that’s the way you want it, we’ll stop playing games. What you did out there today was irresponsible in the extreme. What you did yesterday was downright suicidal. Next time you might find yourself going home in a damn box, or worse. Do you know what could happen to you if the Rebs get ahold of you?”

“You said you wished to God you could give the sick men some fresh fruit,” he reminded him and Cartwright stared at him, blinking rapidly behind his small lenses. “I
wanted
you to be able to give the men fresh fruit.”

“So it’s
my
fault you nearly got your head blown off?”

“No sir, of course not.”

“Goddamn it—” He turned around and turned back again, pushing a hand through his hair, exhaling loudly. “Here was I thinking, you and that pompous—well, never mind what I was thinking—you sure had me fooled, about that, anyway.” He leaned over and thrust his half-shaved face close to the bloodied one, then he said in an insistent whisper, “Just tell me
one
thing, will you? Just one goddamn thing—what the
hell
are you going to do when Sherman finds out you’re a girl?”

6

“Let us pause in life’s pleasures…”

The carved wooden sign hanging over the entrance to Seth Cartwright’s tent read, “Gone fishing, back after the war.”

Jesse took the leather pouch from her pocket and slipped it under the canvas. As she turned, the flap flew up and the surgeon stood there, barefoot in his red woolen long johns, his voice demanding angrily, “Where the hell are you sneaking off to?”

“I wasn’t sneaking off to anywhere, sir. I assumed you’d gone fishing.”

“Do you know anyone who goes fishing at night?” With a contemptuous snort, he disappeared back into the tent and let the flap drop on her head. After a moment, his irritated voice inquired from within, “Well, are you coming in or ain’t you?”

Jesse gazed around the claustrophobic interior of the small “A” tent which gave off a vague and not unpleasant aroma of whiskey and tobacco and, despite the mess, a cozy warmth. The surgeon stretched out on his cot; an empty whiskey bottle was just visible amid a tangle of blanket and soiled clothing.

Because none of the other officers would share with him, Seth Cartwright bivouacked alone, which suited him fine. Now Jesse could see why. Not merely was he unsociable and bad-tempered, but he was plainly a man who could not keep house. The tent was a mess of clothing, empty whiskey bottles, and medical journals, and everywhere, like a recent snowstorm, were scraps of paper and envelopes covered by notations in his illegible hand.

“You’ll excuse my not being dressed. I wasn’t expecting company.” There was a letter on the cot.

“News from home?” Jesse asked conversationally, with a gentle smile.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry into your private business.”

“No one has private business here. You might as well have your damn life story printed up and circulated around the camps. My sister wants to get married.” He looked at her and held up the tobacco pouch. “What’s this, a bribe to keep my mouth shut? You should have saved your money. I won’t tell, I’d be cutting off my nose to spite my face.” He leaned forward and curled his lip as he gave the two pristine-looking stripes on her sleeve a desultory flick with his finger. “So, they made you a corporal, huh, if that ain’t the meat in the gravy. What’s the story, you here to fight beside your sweetheart? Or maybe you lost your brother at Bull Run and you signed up looking for vengeance?” He made the motion of a bayonet thrust.

“I have no brother and no sweetheart,” Jesse told him quietly.

Cartwright wondered why his mouth felt the urge to jerk at the corners, as if with satisfaction. Indeed the right side of his firm mouth did jerk. “No sweetheart, huh? Not for lack of trying, I’d say, not from the way you eyed up that pompous colonel. What they got you doing up at division?”

“I’m working as a copy clerk, making copies of orders for distribution to brigade commanders. Captain Van Allen says as the youngest member of staff I shall be division headquarters mascot.”

“Wise choice. You’re marginally better-looking than a goat, and you eat less. Have you made out your last will and testament, by the way? Damn you,” he said suddenly very angry, “I could have taught you to be a good nurse, a
great
nurse, instead you’re gonna throw it all away to do what? Spend your days scribbling in a ledger.” His gaze went to the cut above her left eyebrow and he relented, but only a little. “You’re crazy, you know that, don’t you? Crazy—you’ll never get away with it. Sit down.”

“I can’t stay long, sir.”

“I didn’t ask you to stay long. I didn’t ask you to stay at all. I didn’t ask you to come here. We ain’t friends or anything. Friends are something you don’t need in a war.”

“Surely war makes friendship even more precious?”

“Barely out of your mama’s womb and you know everything. Wait until you start seeing those
precious
friends laid out in a burial trench, you’ll learn. Read this, I cut it from a newspaper for you.”

While she read, he awaited a reaction. It was a story about a young female spy found in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac, a Southern sympathizer masquerading as a Yankee soldier. She was to be confined through the war’s duration at hard labor, a ball weighing twenty-four pounds attached to her left leg by a log chain. The letters
F S
for “female spy” were to be marked with indelible ink on her left hip. Jesse folded the paper and placed it on the cot without comment.

“How’d you like that to happen to you?” the surgeon asked.

“I’m not a Rebel spy,” Jesse said, “I noticed your tobacco pouch had a hole in it. The sutler recommended the leather variety because of the saddle stitching, they use leather throngs instead of thread, that way it lasts longer. It’s good tobacco, too.”

“Good or bad. I smoke what I can get.” Cartwright drew open the throngs, found the pouch brim-full of leaf and held it up to his nose, drinking in the aroma. Then he set about filling his pipe. He puffed, holding the bowl in the cup of his hand with an intimacy born of solitary use. A more relaxed expression came over his features.

“You must be very happy about your sister’s marriage?”

“Yer, I would be if we weren’t in the middle of a goddamn war. Jack Coopersmith has been my closest friend since medical school.”

“You just said you don’t have any friends.”

“I said I don’t need any. I didn’t say I ain’t got any. Don’t stick that ugly nose into matters you don’t understand and that don’t concern you.”

Self-consciously, with a frown, Jesse touched her nose.

Despite it not being her business, Cartwright told her anyway. “Helen’s best friend lost her fiancé to typhoid. It spooked her. Now she wants to get married. Right now Jack’s on his way to Richmond with McClellan and I’m stuck here in Tennessee. Neither of us knows when we can get a furlough but Helen wants to get married. I don’t wanna talk about it.” He held up the tobacco pouch. “Where did you get the money for this? When I asked you for a loan you said you didn’t have a cent.”

“Poker winnings.”

“Poker winnings? You play poker?”

“I didn’t until Thursday night. I appear to have picked up the rudimentary points. It seems to be all about fooling the other players into believing you have a bad hand when you have a good one and a good hand when you don’t.” She shrugged. “It’s called bluffing.”

Cartwright looked at her. With a face like hers, she could outbluff the devil himself, “ugly nose” notwithstanding. “How much did you win?”

“Ten dollars and some change.”

“God Almighty—” he exclaimed excitedly, “that’s a goddamn fortune. You can buy me a bottle of whiskey.” He showed her the empty one he’d been nursing under his thigh.

“I’ve spent it all. I bought your leather pouch and tobacco, a pair of socks for Jakob, the rest went on jellies, lemonade, ginger cookies, and fruitcake for the sick men.”

“Damn you, and damn the sick men. How about the sick surgeons? Hasn’t anyone taught you that charity begins at home and stop calling me
sir.
” He tossed a pair of rolled-up socks at her head. They were hard with caked dirt. “I’ve got a name, use it or get out, and sit down, you’re giving me a pain in the neck.” The surgeon leapt off the bed, tipped the medical journals off the camp chair, and placed it near his cot. “Sit,” he commanded. When she was seated, he said, “
Chess,
now there’s a game. Nothing like it. I’d have taken the trouble to teach you chess, but it’s a well-established fact, females can’t learn such an intricate, subtle game. You need a very logical mind.” He tapped his temple. “You have to think ahead, plan your moves in advance, anticipate your opponents’ moves. The game requires vast powers of concentration. That’s why females can’t play. They’ve always got their minds someplace else.”

“You make it sound very like war. You have to think ahead, plan your moves, and anticipate your opponents’ moves. General Sherman plays chess. A good commander must be like a good chess player.”

“God, no.” Cartwright was horrified. “That’s sacrilege, comparing the greatest game in the world to the greatest scourge of mankind.”

“I’d like to learn to play chess, if you’ll teach me?”

“Forget it, I’d be wasting my time.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

After a moment’s silence, she said, “You like to fish?”

He looked confused, then he said, “The sign is a joke. Jacob carved it for me. You know what a joke is, don’t you? Fishin’s good. But I prefer to lie on the riverbank under the shade of a tree and doze, with the reflection of the sun on the water just tickling under my eyelids, that’s what Helen and me used to do when we were kids. That’s what I dream about—that’s
all
I dream about, my shady old tree by the riverbank.” He placed his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. An otherworldly smile turned up the corners of his mouth, as though even now in this low-ceiling canvas bolt hole miles from home and loved ones, surrounded by hostile forces, worn down by the sight of death, destruction, disease, and on the verge of what everyone agreed would be a great battle, he could imagine this
utterly
perfect scene.

“What is Quincy like?”

He opened his eyes, lifted his head slightly, and looked at her. “Well, for one thing, it sits on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. If you go north of town on a good day, you can stand on that bluff and get a view of the river and its wide valley that will just take your breath away. It’s a great spot to watch the migrating ducks and geese fly south for the winter. Helen and me used to watch them heading out for the Gulf states, you know”—he propped himself on one elbow—“where it’s warm. We’d try and count them, guess how many would return, try and think up ways to recognize them when they got back.” He laughed. “But they all looked the same and we used to wonder how they could tell each other apart. Do you know
why
I like Quincy?” Since this was a rhetorical question, Jesse was silent. “Because there are a hundred places along the riverbank where a boy can sit, all alone, surrounded by nothing but trees. Hidden by those trees, watch the muddy water flow by and
think,
with no one to disturb him, no one to pull his ear or pinch his cheek, no one to say, ‘
Why don’t you speak up, boy? Are you sick, boy?
’ A boy needs somewhere to go to when his home is filled with strangers.” He rested on his pillow. “You don’t really wanna know about me. You’re good at making men feel as though you care. I’ve seen you in the hospital. You ask all the right questions; give all the right responses. How do I know you’re not humoring me? You’d like Quincy. It’s considered, by those that know, a very exciting place, especially now with the war on. My mother wrote me they have five general hospitals and a cannon factory supplying guns to this very army. Now
there’s
a thought, taking pieces of lead out of a Rebel soldier that might have come from a cannon made in my own hometown. Makes you feel kinda warm all over, kinda proud. Quincy, where there’s always something happening, ships steaming in and steaming out again, carrying Illinois’s finest to death or destruction, leaving behind future widows, orphans—”

“Tell me more about your childhood,” Jesse interrupted, trying to steer him away from the subject that occupied his mind twenty-four hours a day.

“Let me think, it’s been so long since I was a child.” He was staring up at the canvas apex, his hands behind his head again. “Okay—across from the town, across Quincy Bay, about a hundred yards or so out, we have Bay Island. In the summer folks can take a canoe or rowboat out there and spend the day picnicking. There’s always music, and the kids play around near the water’s edge, the girls look pretty in their best store-bought summer dresses, their hair all teased up, shining in the sun, flirting too much with the boys, making their parents mad. Do you like to picnic?”

“I’ve never tried it, sir.”

“You don’t
try it,
it ain’t like whiskey or ice cream. You don’t
try
a picnic, you
go on
one.” He sat up suddenly and stared at her. “Okay, Tom Thumb, I’ll take you on a picnic first chance we get. That’s a promise. Maybe I’ll take you back to Quincy and we’ll have a picnic on Bay Island or along the riverbank. I’ll give you the grand tour. We’ll skip the general hospitals and the cannon factory. I’ll show you my favorite fishing hole, where Helen and me used to dangle our feet while we fished. Sometimes we would tie the string to our big toes and just lie back on the grass—”

“—And doze, with the reflection of the sun on the water just tickling under your eyelids,” Jesse interrupted laughingly.

“Hey, now you’re gettin’ the idea—other times we would get a sturdy rod with a hook and find us some fat juicy worms and really fish. Would you like to see my favorite fishing hole?” When she hesitated a second he said coldly, “Forget it,” and lay down again, covering his eyes with his arm.