The Better Angels of Our Nature (24 page)

“Now get to work, you lousy sons of bitches, before I put you both on a charge.” It was evidently Dr. Cartwright’s day for putting everyone on a charge. “You!
In here.
I need you.” He meant her.

No time to speak, except to give instructions through gritted teeth, and the smell. The smell and the grating of the saw. You get accustomed to it, like the smell, said Jacob, and the feeling of plunging away into hell.
Into hell’s hell.

Around the room, swinging lanterns streamed their fitful light upon the half-naked figures of the wounded writhing on the makeshift operating tables, before going under. It illuminated the bare arms of the steadfast surgeons, soaked in blood, and gave a yellowish hue to their bloodshot eyes, from which all vestige of human emotion seemed to have drained. Even exhaustion. Was this why they accused army surgeons of being inhuman? Oh, so unjust—so unjust.

A soldier, bloodied and battered, caked in mud, but apparently uninjured, had followed his littered comrade into the crowded cabin. He wanted to know,
must know,
would his friend live? Tell me, Doc, he demanded of Fitzjohn, is he gonna make it? Let me die, screams his friend, because both legs are shattered above the knee and one arm is gone. He knows he cannot live, so why not let him die now and spare him the suffering?
Let me die!
Oh no, Charlie, wails his friend, at least ten years his junior, no, don’t say it, Charlie, don’t even think it. Why can’t those bastards have got me instead? Orderly! Orderly! Get this man out of here! The friend is removed, shouting that Charlie must live.

Others have the same object in mind; wander in, faces ashen, arm in a sling, to support a fallen comrade. They often come in pairs for moral support. Their brother, not so lucky, is under the knife. Oh God, oh God—he sure looks dead—what will I tell our ma—they ask each other and Fitzjohn. He has them removed. There is little room for the wounded and for the surgeons, never mind visitors, he declares, and who can blame him?

Is this why the surgeons are branded destitute of feeling?

Oh so unjust.
So dreadfully unjust.

A wounded man was heaved onto the table, handled so roughly he shrieked with pain. Shrieks that penetrate the eardrum. Cartwright, linen apron smeared with blood and human liquid. How many types of sticky liquid does a human body hold? But the smell—you get accustomed to it? Is that possible? The smell of death? Takes a moment to examine and decide. Amputation? Hands always busy, always occupied, beloved hands. Yes. She can say that without fear of being misunderstood. Pools of blood on the floor. Bring more straw! Wake up, you useless bastards! Orderlies scatter the straw. Slipping and sliding, their shirts soaked with blood from carrying the injured. A dead soldier is removed. His broken body has barely cleared the table when another is thudding down in its place. Between littering and straw scattering, and washing the bloodstained tables with blood-soaked sponges, the orderlies take away piles of amputated limbs. Armfuls of arms. Hands and feet in buckets. Legs wrapped in blankets. Is there one whole and healthy soldier left out there?

God knows, can’t leave them around to pile up here, so they pile up outside. Shoulder high.

As Cartwright violently sponged off his table, awash with blood, the blood spattered Jesse’s face and apron.

“See him?” Cartwright inquired, pointing at the young assistant surgeon who had replaced the exhausted Lowefels, a loyal Union man who could not bear to remain comfortably home with his grandchildren when his countrymen are dying, standing frozen to the spot, staring at the patient stretched out on his table. “Go poke a scalpel up his backside!”

Jesse touched the young surgeon’s arm. An expression of repugnance, even horror, was contorting his pleasant features. He was sobbing silently. The moment of truth had knocked on his door, and he wasn’t home.

“I can’t—” was all he said before dropping the forceps he’d been holding and bolting from the cabin, sobs of pity for self and mankind accompanying his flight toward the bluff.

Jesse saw what he had seen and could not look at. She glanced around for a surgeon, there was just Dr. Fitzjohn and Dr. Cartwright now, and both were occupied. She picked up the wad of lint and started to blot the liquid that was oozing from what remained of the boy’s cheeks, nose, eyes, beneath a head of thick, black, curly hair, grasping his twitching hand as she worked, speaking to him in a reassuring whisper. His fingers tried to tighten around hers, as though grateful to feel the touch of another human being. An otherworldly moan, like an animal that sees the reflection of its own terrible wounds, emerged from the gaping hole that had once been his mouth.

Jesse dropped the lint on the floor and instead lifted the boy by the shoulders. She held him to her, embracing him as tightly as she could, resting his poor destroyed face upon her chest, feeling convulsions ripple through his body. The final death throes, the agony that would soon become the ecstasy of nonexistence, when all pain and memory would be wiped clean.

She held him until that moment, that moment of release, of letting go, and then she kissed his head.

“Orderly!” she heard Cartwright shout and the boy was taken roughly from her embrace. They needed the table. They needed her.

What time was it? Who could say? Was this still the night of the same day that started out as Sunday morning? It was still raining. Torrents that fell on the injured and those who sought to comfort them.

In the cabin, the boards at which the surgeons worked were covered with layers of dry blood under the fresh, bright red variety, and the floor had become so slippery and wet that the straw squelched underfoot. Around the room flies hovered and congregated in black clouds of anticipation over every brutal, festering, rancid pan filled with bloody water, every bloodied rag, every stained bandage and soiled dressing. It was, Jesse found, a hopeless task to swat them away.

Occasionally Cartwright or Fitzjohn would holler for an orderly to change the water in their pan so the amputating knives and saws could be rinsed of blood, but this took a second, and a second was too long to wait between the man hauled away and the man hauled in, and in the last few hours a new torment.

The Federal wooden gunboats
Tyler
and
Lexington,
the same “wooden buckets” that had escorted Buell’s army in its advance up the Tennessee, had been throwing shells into the Rebel lines, pounding the camps that had once been occupied by the Yankees, and in which this night neither Rebels nor their tormentors would get a moment’s peace.

The pounding of the shells shook the tables, deafening everyone and drowning out the rasping sound as knives and saws cut through bone. This and the screams of the men before they went under the anesthetic, was all too much for some orderlies; scared, disgusted, shocked, several ran away, but not Jesse. She held fast to the board at which Cartwright was working, feeling it shudder and buck every time artillery burst on its target, more than two miles away.

“Damn them all to hell, I can hardly hear myself think,” Cartwright said bitterly, cutting through a man’s flesh. As shells found their target, a dull, heavy, monotonous boom-boom could be heard.

“They’re ours,” said the orderly with patriotic pride as he cheerfully sponged fresh blood off the table into his wooden bucket.

“I don’t give a goddamn if they’re the Queen of Sheba’s, they’re driving me mad.”

Bang! Bang! Boom! Boom! went the guns.

“I don’t reckon the Queen a Sheb got anythin’ like
that,
” said the orderly with a serious but uncertain frown.

The surgeon paused to stare at Jesse, who was wiping the sweat from the victim’s youthful features. “Tell me,” he said, “am I really the only sane person left on earth or are
you
all sane and
I’m the mad one
?” Then, “Damn your eyes!” he bellowed at an orderly who all but dropped a soldier onto the board. “Why the hell don’t you throw him on the floor and be done with it?”

“You make them clumsy when you shout at them,” Jesse told him as he waited with his bone saw for her to administer the chloroform. “They’re doing their best, but you make them nervous.”

“Their best stinks. They’re clumsy, dirty, and lazy.”

“Not all. Be kinder. Results might surprise you.” She was learning to speak, like everyone else working here, in monosyllables, wasting no breath. She placed the precious can on the side table. The supplies of morphine, chloroform, and especially bandages were rapidly disappearing. The boy was under.

“You be kinder, got no time—” Cartwright was sawing through what remained of the boy’s upper arm. “I’m a surgeon, not a chaplain—”

Next.

As this boy began to stir, he was littered away and another took his place. Again, the routine was repeated, and again Cartwright bellowed at the orderly.

“I’m sorry, Doc—ma hands slipped—” The boy showed his palms, slippery with blood. “I would’na done it otherwise. I know these boys is in pain. I know it.” He was about to cry.

Cartwright glanced at Jesse, who was positioning the injured man’s head more comfortably on the board, prior to administering the chloroform, and pointedly ignoring this exchange.

“Well—” Cartwright muttered inconclusively, wiping the blade of his bone saw on his apron.

The boy hesitated. “Twertn’t ma fault, Doc, honest, ma hands sure are slippery.”

“You already said that. Wipe your goddamn nose and go rinse off your hands.” The doctor looked at the boy’s earnest little face and at the blood which had soaked into his private’s blouse from the patient’s chest. His eyes were mournful and tired and he was really crying now. “How long you been on duty?”

“Same as you, Doc, though can’t rightly recall how long that might be. I never learned to tell time.”

“Don’t cry, damn it—you’re doing a good job.” This came out grudgingly as he worked on the patient’s chest.

The boy looked startled, his features worked, wet eyes blinked, lips twitched. “Why thank yer, Doc, I sure do ’ppreciate those kind words.” He walked off with a new spring in his step, wiping away his tears. The next wounded man this boy helped to carry was deposited on the table with extra care, and he showed Cartwright his dry hands.

“Don’t
say a damn word,
” Cartwright warned Jesse through clenched teeth, “if you say a damn word
you’ll
be stretched out on this table.”

More pairs of hands were needed. Two boys from the regimental band found themselves assigned as litter bearers. One was so small, perhaps eleven years old, he could barely have lifted an empty bucket, never mind a full-grown man on a stretcher. The other looked older, but not much so, perhaps fourteen.

“They’re useless to us,” Fitzjohn announced sorrowfully. “What are they thinking about up at brigade to send such youngsters to help out?” It was a rhetorical question, since no one, least of all Cartwright, could furnish an answer. “They only get in the way.”

“They stay,” said Cartwright, “or I go.” His last patient had died on the table. A twelve-year-old with abdominal wounds. Useless, his skills, with abdominal wounds. Experience and precocious talent counted for shit with abdominal wounds.

“The doctor wants them detailed to hospital duties,” whispered Jacob in Jesse’s ear, “otherwise they will march with the infantrymen into battle. At least here they are safe.”

“Very well,” agreed Fitzjohn, who was not a hard man, despite his reputation and demeanor, “then you sir, must be responsible for their conduct.”

“Come back here—” Cartwright called out after the departing chief surgeon. “I don’t want them.” He stared at the two boys, the smaller, who was dragging a snare drum, had very obviously been crying. His child’s eyes were puffy and red where he had rubbed at them, and was rubbing at them now with balled fist. The other boy appeared more philosophical about his fate and clutched tightly to his fife, apparently ready and willing to face anything the war and this glowering doctor could throw at him. Cartwright swallowed. “You heard the officer, don’t get under our feet else I’ll shoot you myself, and make no mistake I’m the man for it. This corporal will show you what to do. Okay? Good. You’re safe here.” He spoke gruffly and negligently patted the younger boy on the head.

The boy looked as if he would rather take his chances with the Rebs and indeed said, “I don’t wanna be safe.” He then burst into tears and stamped his feet. “I
wanna kill Rebs.
”

Cartwright stared at him a moment, blinked, then ran both trembling hands through his untidy thatch of hair. “Get him out of my sight,” he said softly.

Between patients Jesse tried to clean and lay out Cartwright’s amputation set, Liston’s small amputation knife, sharp along one side, the Catling, which cut in either direction, Wood’s circular amputation knife, the scalpels and curved knives. All of which had started the morning in a neat row but were now in a heap on the windowsill, their edges dulled by use. It was an impossible task, no sooner had she started than they were needed. This time an officer was carried in shrieking and cursing God, the army, and the government that brought him to this place. Jesse took the chloroform off the windowsill, instructing the still-cursing captain to take slow, deep breaths as she gradually brought the cone closer to his mouth and nose.

When it was only a half inch from his face his one good arm shot up and smashed against her mouth as he shouted, “They’re going to cut off my arm, Mother! Help, help me!”

Almost instantly a trickle of blood appeared at the corner of Jesse’s lower lip. She licked it away.

“Get him under!” Cartwright said through gritted teeth.

Jesse poured a little more fluid into the cone and in a few seconds the struggling man on the table was only able to whimper.

“Do just as I say,” the surgeon commanded, as he had commanded all night.

She did as he said, as she had done all night, applying the tourniquet as high up the arm as possible and tightening it. She held the upper arm with one hand and the forearm with the other and no sooner did she get into position, as commanded, then Cartwright had plunged the Catling knife through the center of the arm midway between the elbow and the shoulder. He cut a flap of tissue from inside out on the front of the upper arm. The wounded captain’s fingers quivered as the sharp knife stimulated and divided the nerves in the arm. Just as quickly, Cartwright cut the back flap and told the girl to grab the bloody flaps with her fingers and pull them up the arm. The humerus was then widely exposed. Jesse watched as the surgeon expertly scraped the remaining soft tissue from the bone. With a half-turn behind him, a half-turn he had made dozens and dozens of times that night, and through the previous day, he grabbed the capital bone saw. He gave her one rapid look, just a second’s eye contact as though he were checking to see if she was watching, and then with rapid strokes he cut the humerus. As soon as the bone was severed from the body, the limb came free. “Out the window,” Cartwright instructed without glancing up. How many times did he need to say it?