The Better Angels of Our Nature (28 page)

“Old Bob?” Cartwright said.

“The colonel’s horse.”

The surgeon laughed shortly, brutally. “Well, I guess that makes it all right, then, doesn’t it? That makes it even, a man’s life for a goddamn horse.”

“Those men were running away from the battle,” Jesse pointed out.

“I don’t blame them. I also wanted to run away.”

“
But you didn’t,
” Jesse reminded him forcefully, “you stayed and you did what had to be done. You stood on your poor swollen ankles for over forty-eight hours and saved countless lives. Colonel Ransom attacked those men because they were deserting their comrades in the heat of battle.”

“By slicing them through with a saber? Damn him and damn you if you can sit there and find excuses for an officer who kills his own men. I should have let him rot on that steamer.”

“Perhaps injured as he was, the shock made him behave in a way he would not normally have done,” Jacob said after a little reflection. “I am trying to understand what he did,” the Dutchman added because Cartwright was looking at him, “as I try to understand you.” Jacob raised both bushy eyebrows.

“Don’t try and understand me. I don’t need understanding.”

“As you don’t need friends,” Jesse said.

“You got that damn right.”

“I’ve talked with him,” Jacob continued. “He’s a good man. A Christian of deep moral sensibility. He talks of making his family financially independent, of making their lives pleasant. His character is built squarely upon determination, iron will, and devotion to responsibility. He is the sole support of a widowed mother, a young sister, and before the boy joined the army, his brother, Eugene. Also since the death of his uncle he has willingly taken on the responsibility of that man’s family, a wife and four children, none above school age. He is paying for their education. He comes from a family of soldiers, men who have always stepped forward to serve their country in time of war and revolution. In his dedication to his family and his duty, is the colonel not very like you, Doctor?”

When Cartwright snorted, Jacob struggled to his feet. “I am going to turn in. I have a sore rear from that wagon seat. If I lie down it redistributes the weight.” He laughed, Jesse laughed, and he kissed her on the top of the head.

“How about me?” the surgeon asked with a grin. “Don’t I get a kiss?”

“Jesse—”

She stopped by the colonel’s cot. Beyond the tent flaps, night was lying across the glittering waters of the Tennessee, and the river looked aflame with the lights of myriad campfires. As always, music, voices, and a harmonica drifted through the still spring air.

“Did you mail my letters?”

“Yes sir.”

He lowered his gaze. “Of course you did. Forgive me; I just wanted an excuse to…to talk with you—”

“You don’t need an excuse. I would enjoy talking with you.”

“You’re busy. The wounded need you.”

She smoothed out his blanket, stroked his hand. He moved it self-consciously out of her reach. Their gazes clashed and he lowered his again, his hollow cheeks coloring. “Sergeant De Groot…said—” He halted, feeling foolish. What had the Dutchman said? That God must have his mysteries. Yes, impenetrable to man. Nevertheless, it did not stop men from trying to penetrate them. “I’ve been wondering—why do you show me such dedication?” His clear, innocent, suffering gaze rested upon the girl’s face.

“Friends look out for each other. Would you like some tea, Thomas?”

He shook his head and turned his face away. The boy seemed to enjoy saying his name. It tripped so naturally from those full lips, and he, he felt no desire to tell the boy not to use it.

“Thomas?” She touched his shoulder. “What would you like to talk about?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I’m…I’m more tired than I thought.” He was trembling as she said, “I understand. Good night, sir. God bless you.”

“Yes—” he murmured, shamefaced. “And you also—”

In the commander’s tent at midnight, Sherman told the girl about his close shave with death that morning in the guise of a Rebel colonel called Nathan Bedford Forrest.

“I am sure,” he said, as Jesse, with the minimum of fuss, went about changing the dressing on his hand, “had his pistols not jammed it would have been the end of my career, the end of old Sherman.” He looked at her. “Yes, you missed a spectacular show this morning, my boy; Sherman was at the mercy of a Rebel colonel. God alone knows how he did not shoot old Sherman out of his saddle.”

“God alone—” agreed the girl, with a self-satisfied smile, fastening the buckle on her haversack.

He showed her the contents of an old segar box, holding it under her pug nose so she could see the musket balls, bits of shot and shell, a single spur. “For my sons,” he announced proudly. “Willy will examine them, wide-eyed and wondrous and show all his friends. The spur came from the boot of a dead Rebel captain. Their mother will paste them on a little paper and write of how they were picked up near my tent on the battlefield of Shiloh, souvenirs of their father’s honorable redemption. Mrs. Sherman will cut paragraphs from the paper with my name for Willy’s future study.” He closed the box with a snap, narrowly missing her nose, obviously thinking it highly amusing, since he laughed that hoarse hiccuping laughter, and even more vigorously when she looked indignant. “At last Sherman stands redeemed from the accusations of insanity in Kentucky.” His wild eyes glistened in the shadowy interior. “Did you know that poor Holliday was the first man killed in the battle? The shot that killed him was meant for me. What do you think of that? I’m told I avoided death so many times on that first day they lost account. Four horses shot from under me and more holes in my uniform than your grandmother’s sieve.” He started to laugh again.

Jesse looked at him. He was in a highly agitated state, and had been since the close of battle on Monday afternoon. It was not the agitation of sickness, but of a man whose explosive nerves lie close to the surface and whose senses are attuned to an almost unbearable pitch. It was not the agitation of insanity, but joy. He was pleased with himself and his performance in battle, to a degree where he could conceivably be accused of vanity. He was in what he liked to term “high feather.”

“Have you heard what they’re saying about Albert Sidney Johnston? That he purposely put himself in situations of the greatest danger.” She was turning back his blanket, placing a cup of whiskey on the tiny stool by his cot, along with two cigars and some matches, should he wake in the night and want a drink or a smoke, to calm those restless nerves. “Perhaps he felt that dying in battle was preferable to living under a cloud of uncertainty? Better to die a fallen hero than live under those alleged inadequacies as a commander.”

Sherman was staring at her, his glittering eyes darting all over her freckled face. He was still staring at her as she eased the right sleeve carefully over the bruised shoulder and bandaged hand.

“I thought I told you to grow a beard?” he said finally. “It will make you look older and less like a milksop.”

“Do I look like a milksop?”

“No, you look like a street rough. Are you wearing the drawers I gave you?”

She turned down the top of her overlarge pants and showed him the edge of the graying cotton cloth. “They don’t make my skin itch like the red woolen army drawers,” she told him and he nodded his approval.

He sat down on his rickety old cot, all that could be found for him on the morning of the seventh. Though all things considered, it was far superior to the wet blanket he’d slept on during Sunday night. “Where were you this afternoon?” He grabbed her collar and his cigar breath seared her face. “I’ll tell you where you were. In the hospital helping the wounded.”

“If you know where I was, why do you ask?”

Sherman stared at her, his mouth working, but no sound came. She started to massage his shoulders. “God in heaven, you should have seen the desolation and misery in that Rebel hospital camp this morning, Jesse. That poor man, Surgeon Lyle, the medical director, not knowing which way to turn. Wagons hauling in dead men and dumping them on the ground as cordwood, for burial in long trenches, like sardines in a box. Wounded men with mangled legs and arms, and heads half shot away horrible to behold, and still more of them appealing for water and for any help they could get.” He ran his bony hand over his spiky red hair, picked and plucked at his short-cropped beard. Without available wagons to transport the wounded back to the Federal hospitals Sherman had ordered Colonel Dickey to accept a surrender and a pledge by Surgeon Lyle and his staff to report themselves to General Grant in due time, as prisoners of war, and give up the Federal wounded as soon as wagons could be sent out for them. Sherman in return pledged medical supplies and help for the enemy wounded.

“You’ve done a fine job on my hand, there’s hardly any soreness even though I was in the saddle most of the day. What do you think of war now, Corporal? Have you had enough?”

“Enough of the fighting, yes, sir,” she confessed.

“Fighting? That’s the exception in a soldier’s life. The easiest thing. Marching, countermarching, dust, thirst, short rations, sickness, wagon mules, and all the complications—fighting is a small part of a soldier’s life. Do you know if I had not been a soldier I’d have been a farmer. If I had resigned my commission earlier than I did to make my fortune in civilian life”—he puffed up his chest comically, perhaps parodying himself at an earlier age—“it would have been to raise enough money to buy a good farm in Iowa.” Jesse lit his fresh cigar. “I’ll miss you when you go north to the Academy, to be sure, my boy, I’ll miss you.”

She closed her eyes and let the vigor and vitality of this strange, contradictory, ambivalent man enter her soul as his hiccuping laughter filled the tent. He smelled of tobacco, gunpowder, and sweat mixed with a little whiskey and warm horseflesh, to give it extra pungency. He smelled of
life.
The aroma could not have been more welcome in her nostrils after three days of chloroform, stale urine, fear, fresh blood, and death.

13

The fire-eyed maid of smoky war

At the hospital the next morning Jacob handed Jesse a small package. It was from Thomas Ransom. Cartwright burst into disdainful laughter as she unwrapped an eight-inch Bowie knife with carved bone handle in a brown leather sheaf. He read Ransom’s accompanying note over her shoulder.

Corporal Davis, I am sorry to have missed the opportunity to thank you in person for all that you have done to facilitate my swift recovery. But I know you will understand when I say I have just heard from Lieutenant Dickey that General Wallace, after showing signs of recovery, has become delirious and that if I hurry I may, as a convalescent, claim passage on the
Mound City
which is about to depart for Savannah and see my nearest friend. I leave you this token of my gratitude, taken from a Rebel at Charleston, Missouri, not the same who deposited the ball in my shoulder, but another whose aim was not so accurate, and assure you of my friendship at all times.

Kind regards,
Lieutenant Colonel T.E.G. Ransom,
commanding 11
^th
Illinois.

“Personally I would have given you a red velvet dress to match your red velvet hair, but then, despite what
I
know, maybe
he
knows you better. Jacob told him to rest up a couple more days, but he wouldn’t listen. He had rebellions to put down, cowards to saber, duty, honor, patriotism.” The surgeon wielded an imaginary sword above his disheveled head.

So magnificent a gift surely deserved a sturdy leather belt, but she had none, so she threaded the length of string that held up her baggy pants through the slit in the leather sheaf and tied it around her narrow waist. She gave the note to Jacob to read and his gaze turned introspective as he stroked down his beard.

“The
Mound City
does not leave the Landing until midday,” he said. “The colonel had plenty of time to thank you in person. I am disappointed. But he is afraid, afraid and confused, so he runs away, and who can blame him.”

Jesse was about to ask why the young colonel should be afraid and run away when he had faced the enemy so courageously, but Jacob had already gone back to his work.

Surgeon Fitzjohn gathered together the motley crew that made up the lower echelons of his “medical department” and informed them in his clanging funereal tones that, “The division commander himself has asked every regimental hospital to provide volunteers to help at the Confederate hospital camps of Surgeon Lyle on the Corinth Road, to nurse the wounded until they can be shipped out to a prison in the North, and to bury the dead. So you might look upon this as a mission of mercy.”

The volunteers stepped forward, among them Jesse, Jacob, and Olly, the boy fifer. Fitzjohn looked at them and nodded somberly. “You will have your commander’s gratitude.”

Jesse jumped from the back of the slowly moving wagon as it rolled into a clearing dotted about with small stunted trees whose branches had been broken during the shelling. Beyond the hospital tents, she recognized the vast area of fallen timber where the previous day a slave-owning traitor had failed in his bid to kill a United States general.

Outside the camps of Confederate surgeon Lyle a Rebel private, shot in the leg during Sherman’s pursuit of Rebels on the Corinth Road, had come slowly to himself. He had sat up, thrown off his dead, gray-clad comrades under whom he lay half-buried, and stared glassy-eyed at the small redheaded figure in blue, kneeling over his sergeant, a man worshipped by his entire company.

“Ho!” the Rebel boy called, watching the corporal open the buttons on the sergeant’s coat and slip a hand inside. “Ho, what yer doin’ there, Lincoln boy? You git ’way from Sergeant Toomey now, yer hear me?” This Rebel boy was weak from loss of blood and had never felt thirstier in his life, never known such an all-consuming, maddening thirst, but no one, least of all a Lincoln boy, was going to manhandle Sergeant Toomey or rob him blind, not while there was breath in his body.

“He’s still alive,” Jesse said without looking up. “I’m trying to find the wound.”

“Did yer hear me, Yankee boy…leave him be…leave him be, I tell yer—take your filthy Yankee hands offa him.” The Rebel soldier was crying now, wiping tears and dried blood off his freckled face with one sweep of his hand. “Leave him be, I tell yer, dear Lord, don’t yer speak English—you son-of-a-bitch thieving Lincoln boy!”

“I’m trying to help him,” Jesse said, her sensitive fingers making contact at last with a hole in the man’s back. “It’s a miracle he’s still alive.”

“I said leave him be…now do it…do it…yer hear me…yer son-of-a-bitch Yankee? I ain’t messin’, Lincoln boy—I swear I ain’t messin’.” The boy’s voice rose hysterically as he produced a pistol from beneath his thigh, which he cocked and aimed with shaking hands. “I mean it…Yankee boy…I mean it, so help me…I ain’t kiddin’…I swear to the Lord I ain’t kiddin’…I can’t have no Yankee boy messin’ with Sergeant Toomey…I jest can’t allow it…no sir…I can’t—” Tears were streaming down his bloodied cheeks, his hands were trembling, and the gun shook. Suddenly there was a crack.

To Jesse, searching in her haversack, it seemed as though something snapped inside her head, a kind of smacking sound against her ear, a twig snapping or breaking close to her ear, a momentary pain, followed by a strange liquid warmth, and then a falling sensation.

It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that even though Jacob, searching for wounded among the dead, heard the unmistakable report of the pistol, saw the Rebel boy with the smoking gun in his trembling hands, and saw Jesse lying across the prostrate sergeant, still required a second to understand, to grasp the reality of what had happened.

Then he bellowed his rage to heaven.
“Noooo!”
He dropped his haversack, grabbed up a musket lying nearby and came at the dazed private with the inexorable momentum of an enraged bull, making the very ground shake beneath his feet. He plunged the bayonet into the boy’s skinny chest with all the power behind his three-hundred-pound body, driving it clear through to the other side, pinning him, as though on the end of a stake.

The Rebel boy, his freckles fading into the waxiness of his face, sat there, profound shock making his light blue eyes start from their sockets. He remained sitting, his surprised expression deepening to utter confusion, as he stared at the giant standing over him. Then he dropped his gaze and stared down at the blade buried in his chest up to the hilt, and his mouth dropped open. He seemed about to speak, to ask a most profound question, but Jacob had withdrawn the instrument of death and the boy fell immediately backward with a light thudding sound. His sightless eyes now stared at eternity, while blood spurted up through the slit in his chest, running freely, to stain his gray tunic.

Fitzjohn was standing in front of a blanket that had been thrown over a roped-off area to the rear of a recovery tent, blocking it off from public view.

“You wanted to see me?” Cartwright said. “Let me guess, there’s a bedpan missing and I’m chief suspect?”

Without a word, the older surgeon drew Cartwright behind the curtain.

In the cot lay a slender form, the blanket slowly rising and falling, so there was no need to ask the obvious question, which was just as well since Cartwright’s mouth had gone dry and the bottom had fallen out of his stomach. It was Jesse. On the side of her head, just above her ear, was a dressing, from which still seeped a trickle of blood. Fitzjohn turned back the blanket. Her blouse was soaked with blood. A noise of shock came from Cartwright’s throat and one single word, as close to a prayer as he had got since his father’s death. “
No—
” Fitzjohn’s undertaker voice said without emotion, “I made the same mistake, but the blood on the blouse belongs to a Rebel soldier. I didn’t know that when your steward came in here. During my examination, I made a startling discovery. But, then, you already know what I found?”

Cartwright was no longer listening. As his fingers gently began to examine the head wound, a low moan escaped the girl’s full lips. Her eyes opened, dazed and confused.

“Hey.” He stroked her brow. “It’s me, ole Cartwright—rest easy. I’ll take good care of you.”

“I think you’ve answered my question,” Fitzjohn said, turning to leave.

Cartwright grabbed his arm. “What are you going to do?” he asked desperately.

“What do you think? I’ve given instructions that only you are to attend this patient.” He walked out.

As Cartwright followed, he stopped one of the orderlies to demand, “Where’s Sergeant De Groot?”

“Ain’t seen him, Doc, not since he brung in the boy.”

Fitzjohn’s horse was gone from the corral. Cartwright tried to calm himself. His satanic majesty was going home tomorrow; surely, he had better things to do with his time than report the girl? Maybe he could intercept him on the way to Sherman’s headquarters and persuade him to stay silent. And if he couldn’t, did he offer him a bribe? If he refused, should he kill him?

He couldn’t find Fitzjohn but Jacob was lying on his cot in his tent, his Bible clutched to his chest.

“Jacob,” the surgeon said harshly from the entrance, “get up. I need you. Jesse’s alive. That’s the important thing. The ball broke the skin, there was blood, that’s all. You’ve seen enough superficial head wounds to know if you keep them clean, change the dressing regularly, they’re not dangerous. Are you going to lie there for the rest of this goddamn war? We’ve gotta think of some way to stop Sherman sending her away. That’s the important thing now. Damn it, if you did
anything
wrong it was letting Fitzjohn get his hands on her. That was just plain stupid.” He lunged forward and gripped the man’s enormous shoulder and shook him. “Did you hear me, Jacob, stop blaming yourself—we haven’t got time for self-pity. I need you.”

Jacob turned his suffering gaze on the surgeon’s angry face. It was obvious he had been crying for some time, his eyelids were swollen, his eyes bloodshot. “I killed a man.” He pronounced the words slowly, wonderingly, his beard and cheeks still wet with tears.

“What? What man? What are you talking about?”

“The young soldier—who shot Jesse—I killed him. I took another man’s life. I have prayed to God over and over, to take me. I no longer deserve to live.”

Sherman was in the midst of dictating a report of the battle.

“Shortly after seven in the morning with my entire staff, I rode along a portion of our front, and in the open field before Appler’s regiment, the enemy’s pickets opened a brisk fire upon my party killing my orderly, Thomas D. Holliday, of Company H, Second Illinois Cavalry.”

“Sir,” the assistant adjutant general interrupted the commander’s bullet-fast delivery as he marched up and down before the hardtack box the captain was using as a desk.

The Ohioan halted, turned, rammed the cigar butt into the corner of his mouth, and demanded irritably, “What is it, Hammond? Am I going too fast for you, sir?”

“Frankly, sir, yes.” Sherman only had two speeds—fast and
very
fast.

“My damn hand, I dislike having to dictate these reports. Where is the boy, have you found him yet?” he demanded of Captain Van Allen.

“He’s probably at the hospital with Surgeon Cartwright, sir. You gave him permission to go over there to help with the wounded when he wasn’t needed at division.”

“Well, he
is
needed, his
commander
needs him. I want my dressing changed. This one is too bulky. If I had a smaller dressing I could hold a damn pen.”

“Shall I ask Surgeon Hartshorn to pay you a call, sir?” asked Hammond hopefully. After two hours of rapid-fire dictation and choking on cigar smoke, he needed to escape.

“Certainly not. Do you think those overworked surgeons have nothing better to do than make house calls?”

“Tent calls,” Hammond muttered under his breath.

If Sherman’s eyesight was excellent, his hearing was batlike. “Hammond, I think your stomach is affecting your brain, sir.”

“Gen’al?” Captain Jackson came into the tent.

“Have you found the boy yet?” was all Sherman wanted to know at that moment, flexing his fingers uncomfortably.

“No, Gen’al, can’t say I’ve been lookin’, but Surgeon Fitzjohn’s outside askin’ a word with you. He says it’s urgent.”

“He probably wants to say good-bye. Everything is urgent with these people. Show him in. Hammond?”

“Sir?”

“Let’s continue: Fire came from the bushes which lined a small stream that rises in the field in front of Appler’s camp, and flows to the north along my whole front.”

It never failed to amaze anyone listening how Sherman could simply pick up the thread of a conversation or an idea that had been dangling there for some time past while he pursued another thought or another conversation. He could manage it while a regimental band played a noisy selection of patriotic quicksteps outside his tent, as now, or while excitable couriers were garbling out their messages in unison, and during a thunderstorm, or in the middle of a raging battle, or when all these were happening at once. His powers of concentration and his energy were awe-inspiring, whereas poor old Hammond, sick with diarrhea and fever, was losing the struggle to keep up.