The Better Angels of Our Nature (14 page)

“I
would
so like to go to Quincy—” Jesse said plaintively into the tense silence.

“Drop me a line when you get there.”

“Tell me some more about the town.”

“Ask a Quincy boy. There are plenty camped around Shiloh Church. They’re all homesick, they all want to talk about their homes. We’ve all got the same story and they’re all boring as hell.” He elevated and then lowered his eyebrows with dramatic significance and propped himself once more on his elbow. “There’s gonna be a battle, you’d have to be stupid not to know that. What do you propose to do then?”

“The same as I do now, remain close to General Sherman.”

He removed his spectacles and started to clean the lenses. As usual, the left lens came away. “Goddamn it—” After this man, whose sensitive, lifesaving hands worked miracles every day, had made three abortive attempts to force the lens back into the frail wire frame, the girl took the lens and carefully eased it home.

“You really ought to get these spectacles repaired, sir.”

“You don’t have a sweetheart or a brother, you didn’t come here to nurse the men, because if you did you wouldn’t be up at division scribbling into a ledger and I
know
you’re not a camp follower, so why in hell
are
you here? The tragedy is you’ll end up as a laundress, and the last thing on a soldier’s mind is his soiled clothes if you catch my drift.” He snatched the spectacles and eased the wire over his ears. He was like an absentminded professor searching among the tangle of blanket and clothing on his cot muttering to himself. “Sir Ransom thinks you a fine and brave little fellow.” He started to laugh. “Don’t you think that’s funny?”

“Sir Ransom?”

“You called him a knight, so I knighted him. Sir Ransom of Illinois.” His too disdainful laughter had a tinge of green and he seemed to realize it. He stretched out on the bed again and stared up at the ceiling. “I reckon Sir Ransom could win this war single-handed. The rest of us can just go home.”

“Why do you dislike the colonel so?”

“If you don’t know, you’re more stupid than you look.” He didn’t bother to stifle a yawn.

“I’d better go,” Jesse said, “I’m obviously overstimulating you with my conversation.” She stood up and the surgeon’s eyes traveled from her red curls to her feet in the army-issue brogues. Normally he went for more shapely females, and he liked long hair, the way it flowed over a girl’s shoulders, held back off a plump face by a ribbon, and he liked them sweet and gentle, not sassy. But there was no denying the appeal of this girl’s freckled face and boyish body, not to mention her steadfast character. That she was so appealing to him made him angry. “I’ll tell you one thing, when Sherman finds out you’re a girl he’ll show you a little glimpse of hell you won’t forget in a hurry.”

“I’ve seen a little glimpse of hell many times, sir, the prospect of seeing it again doesn’t frighten me.” She watched him scoop the black graying hair off his brow. “Can I ask you what do you write in all these notebooks of yours?”

“They’re histories, medical histories.” He looked at her earnest face, and the facetious tone vanished from his voice. “I make notes from the bed cards of the patients, name, age, company, date of admission, date of injury, date of operation, if any, and then a closing date according to whether they were discharged cured, sent north to a general hospital, or died. I write down my observations and when I have a moment, I try to figure out why one man dies while his comrade survives when they both have the same wound and get the same treatment.” He bit on his pipe stem. He was off now on the single most involving passion of his life, medicine. “I study a patient’s reaction to shock, loss of blood, how much blood, inflammations, fevers, types of fever, why some wounds bleed more than others. I can’t go much further because after the patients are sent back north I lose track of them. I also have a column for comments like ‘no visit today from his messmates,’ ‘wife ran off with a traveling preacher,’ ‘homesickness,’ ‘maybe he’s worried that his cows aren’t giving enough milk.’ You’d be surprised at how often a patient’s state of mind can affect his ability to recover from physical injury.”

“What will you do with the notes?”

“Who knows, maybe I’ll publish my findings, write a textbook that will revolutionize medical science into the next century, get rich and famous.” He was mocking himself. “Find a nice wealthy widow for old Jacob, have a hospital named after me in Chicago or New York, marry a beautiful socialite, and spend the rest of my life lecturing to audiences of surgeons who will nod their venerable heads and worship me from afar. On the other hand maybe no one gives a damn and I’ll have a bonfire and burn the lot and sink into a drunken stupor from which, with luck, I will never awake.”

“Do you ever have to note ‘makes too many jokes,’” the girl said, “or ‘uses anger to conceal his true feelings, afraid someone will guess he really cares about people’?”

“No, but sometimes I have to write ‘should mind her own business because she’s still wet behind the ears.’”

Jesse laughed.

“There are women nurses down the river at Savannah,” Cartwright mentioned casually. “There’s a woman called Bickersley, they say she takes good care of the men. You could stay with her until I can figure something out.”

“Mother Bickerdyke,” Jesse corrected. This dedicated Ohioan woman and her companion “the Cairo Angel” were in the newspapers every day now since they nursed the soldiers brought in after Fort Donelson. They had followed Grant’s army in anticipation of their services being needed for another battle. “Thank you for your concern, but I’ll be fine.”

“It’s no trouble. When Sherman catches on, and you can bet he will, I’ll talk up for you, it’s the least I can do.” He felt obliged to say this, and he meant it, though he knew no power on earth would stop Sherman sending her back where she came from. “I’ll tell him about your work in the hospital, that should count for something. If he won’t budge I’ll go to Grant, maybe I could appeal to him as one drunk to another.” To his disappointment the girl didn’t throw herself into his arms and swoon with gratitude. Instead, she held back the tent flap, paused to frown at the soiled clothing, and said,

“Don’t you think it about time you had a visit from a laundress?”

“What…eh…yes…I’ll…eh…” Cartwright felt his cheeks catch fire. By the time he had managed to control his sudden stammer, the girl was gone.

Jesse had been to collect that morning’s mail. Perhaps the most exciting time in camp for soldiers, who lived for two words: “
mail call.
” Only arrival of the paymaster came close to arousing such ecstasy. One glance at a man’s face told the whole story—whether or not he had a letter from home. An expression of unrestrained joy, a loud hootin’ and a hollerin’, a jumping into the air, a clutching of a letter and kissing it until it was too wet to read, meant only one thing, a missive from sweetheart or wife. Just a few words, no more was needed, written testament that family and friends had not forgotten them. Those without mail, on the other hand, seemed like the loneliest creatures on earth, unloved and unwanted, except by the duty sergeant.

“Sweet Lord in Heaven, if I ain’t got me three in one go!” Captain Jackson announced as he held up the envelopes for all to see. “Two from Gracie, and one from the girls.” His great gray mustache was literally bristling with joy.

“Captain Van Allen has
eight
letters, sir,” Jesse told him proudly as though this profusion of correspondence in some way reflected upon her personally.

“Let me see those—” Captain Jackson stared over Van Allen’s shoulder. The New Englander was placing one behind the other as he studied the handwriting and sniffed the envelopes. “—Darn it, Marcus, I swear to the Lord you got one a those hair-ims like those sull-tans in Arabia.” He snatched a letter and breathed in the aroma. “Par-fumed and the paper matches the envelopes. I’ll be gall-darned. I can just imagine what Gracie would say ’bout such foolishness.” Mrs. Jackson reused envelopes of a tobacco brown color, and urged her husband to do likewise.

“May I, sir?” asked Jesse. Marcus held the envelopes under her nose and she drew her full lips back in a grin. “The paper smells sweet,” she announced.

“Sweet as gardenias,” agreed Marcus, placing them carefully into his pocket, with a self-satisfied smile. “As do the gentle doves who write them.”

The urbane captain with the romantic looks of a Byron, only son of a Boston property tycoon, could have stayed home in comfort and safety. Instead, he had joined the cavalry. At Bull Run, nursing a wounded shoulder, he had found himself drafted as an aide to a beleaguered Sherman, who was so impressed with the uncomplaining officer he taken him to Kentucky as a member of his permanent staff despite his being on convalescent leave. Andrew Jackson had come to his commander via a different route. When war broke out, at forty-two the Hoosier was considered too old for a three-month enlistment. To compound his unsuitability to serve his country in its direst hour, he suffered from chronic back pain that worsened at the slightest sign of rain. He’d been turned away from the recruitment office on
four
separate occasions. Not that he wanted to go to war. He was a farmer, he had crops to plant and a wife and four daughters to take care of, but no self-respecting Northerner could stay home while the country was biting off its own tail and let others do the fighting. So he took himself directly to Washington and there he’d literally bumped into Sherman on the street, drunk and complaining bitterly about stubborn recruitment officers. Something about the Hoosier had impressed the Ohioan, who felt that such loyal, determined men should not go begging. Jackson became the oldest courier at Sherman’s headquarters, the average age being eighteen. But it was a way into the war. Now he was Sherman’s oldest, most trusted aide.

“My
mail,
Corporal?” General Sherman demanded hoarsely. He stood at the entrance of the headquarters tent, cigar in place, long thin legs apart, hand extended in anticipation, eyebrows raised.

“Ten.” Jesse saluted briskly, and gave him his letters. “Two from
Mrs.
Sherman.” Sherman’s narrow-eyed gaze marched all over her face with big, muddy boots.

“I recognized the handwriting,” she explained with a wry, apologetic smile.

“Where’s
your
mail, boy?” Andy asked her. “Don’t you get no letters?”

“No sir.”

“Ain’t you got no kin folk?” This seemed inconceivable to a man with an extended family spread over five counties of Brown Township, Indiana.

“No family at all, Jesse?” Van Allen asked.

“Everyone’s got someone, ain’t that so?” Andy appealed to Marcus and to the division commander, who now had his sharp nose buried in a letter. “Here, take a look at this—” Jackson placed a dog-eared photograph in Jesse’s hands, announcing proudly, “Four girls, beautiful, ain’t they? Amy, twelve; Sadie, eleven; Sophie, ten; little Grace, named for ma wife, she’s nine, and Gracie.” They were indeed beautiful young women, with thick braids wrapped around their heads and sturdy bodies, standing beside their mother, a tall, statuesque woman with strong features, wearing a plain dress and a very serious expression. An expression which seemed to disdain the very idea of posing for a photo as nothing short of ridiculous when there were cows to milk and butter to churn.

Jesse returned the photo. “You’re very fortunate, sir.”

“Darn right I am. Gracie’s not only handsome, she’s smart too, and not the kind of smart that comes from book learnin’ neither. She’s got practical sense. She ain’t one a those frivolous types. I never known a week go by that she didn’t save a little something for a rainy day.” Jackson’s manly voice was brimful with pride, the small gray eyes nothing but points of light amid the crinkled skin surrounding them. “And any farmer will tell yer, those rainy days have a bad habit a turnin’ up when you least expect them.”

Jesse looked at Sherman’s scowling face as he managed to read his letter, listen to the conversation, smoke his cigar, and fiddle with the buttons on his coat, all at the same time. He cleared his throat and stuffed this missive and the others, unopened, into his pants pocket with a great display of irritation.

“Letters from home are overrated, my boy, they invariably mean one thing, family squabbles that I, hundreds of miles away, must settle, as if I had nothing more important on my mind. I’m sure Captain Jackson will confirm what I say?” Sherman fixed Andy with a meaningful stare.

Marcus was less subtle; he gave the Hoosier a dig in the ribs with his elbow.

“Huh—? Oh yer, Lord knows—letters from home, nuthin’ but trouble.”

“There,” Sherman said, before disappearing back into the tent. He had presented irrefutable proof to back his pronouncement, despite the fact that Jesse had only ten minutes before witnessed grown men behaving like complete fools at the approach of the United States mail wagon.

In his tent that evening, Sherman stood before the near empty pigeonholes of the portable bureau balanced precariously on the empty cracker box, and threw Jesse an interrogative glance as she cleaned away his uneaten supper things.