The Better Angels of Our Nature (35 page)

“Dr. Cartwright’s father retired from the army and went into general practice back in Quincy,” Jesse said now. “I think you both lost your father around the same age.”

Cartwright rounded on her. “You know your trouble, don’t you, you read too many damn newspapers, you’re beginning to sound like one and my father didn’t retire, I told you, he was
kicked out.
”

“He took early retirement,” Jesse persisted. “He was wounded by a renegade Indian he was trying to treat.”

“He was my damn father, not yours, so who knows best, me or you?”

Ransom looked from the girl to the surgeon and back again. They argued the way they did everything, with commitment and energy. “Well, either way,” he said, “I’m sorry to have interrupted your game. I came to let Jesse know I’ll be leaving in the morning.”

“In the morning?” Jesse exclaimed in surprise. Then she noticed the silver eagles on his shoulder straps. The lieutenant colonel was now a full colonel. “Congratulations, sir,” she said, saluting again.

“Thank you. I decided to accept General McClernand’s offer.” Since the Battle of Shiloh the Illinoisan political general had been after Ransom to become his chief of staff. “I’ll still be the official commander of the Eleventh Illinois. McClernand’s division departs in the morning.” He turned to the doctor. “Perhaps you and I could play chess when next we meet?”

“Yes.” Jesse looked eagerly from the Vermonter to the surgeon. “That’s a wonderful idea.”

Cartwright made an indecipherable noise.

“Can you stay for a cup of coffee, sir?” Jesse asked the colonel. “It’s fresh.”

The surgeon scowled at the girl, got to his feet, grabbed his battered kepi off the floor, swept back his thatch of untidy hair and slapped the cap over it, yanking it low over his brow. Damned if he would have a shave for her, or any other female.

“Please, Doctor, don’t go on my account,” Ransom said, holding his arm.

“It ain’t on your account.” He jerked his arm free and walked away.

Jesse looked at Ransom. “Well, sir, I’m surprised you agreed to join General McClernand,” she said.

“He has the president’s ear, Jesse, and he’s given me his word that I’ll be a brigadier general before June is out.”

“You could join General Sherman’s staff?” she suggested half-jokingly.

“I don’t believe that would work, for several reasons. Perhaps when next we meet I’ll have my first star. Would that please you, Jesse?”

“I’d be very happy for you,” she said with a noncommittal tone that made the young officer say, as if he’d been churning it over in his head for some time, “At Pittsburg Landing, although I thought you a boy, when you nursed me you behaved toward me as if you were”—he turned his hat over on his hand—“well, as if you were a female—who liked me.”

“I do like you, sir.” Jesse laughed; again, it was disengaged, with that matter-of-fact quality, and she even shrugged, as if her liking of him was natural and not in any way special.

After a moment’s silence Ransom said, “Has Sherman said anything more about sending you home?”

“Perhaps you could write to me whenever you have a moment?” She was taking her hat off the log where she and Cartwright had been seated. “I don’t have anyone to write to me, all my other friends are here with me. The men get so excited when they receive a letter. I always wondered how it would feel. To get a letter.”

“I’ll write to you every day,” the Vermonter said enthusiastically, touching her arm.

“Oh, there’s no need for that, sir. You’ll be far too busy with your extra duties, and I’ll be too busy serving the general. Just write to me when you remember.”

“You still believe he’ll have you back at his headquarters?” he said, watching the way the freckles danced across her pug nose when she smiled. “Will you send me a likeness of you in a letter?”

“A likeness?”

“A photograph.”

“Why?”

Ransom placed his hat on his head and grasped his gauntlets. He blinked at her and then seemed to give himself a mental shake. “I have to go,” he said.

“I thought you were staying for coffee?”

“Another time.”

“Another time, sir,” she agreed with that easy smile, saluting. “I’ll miss you.”

“Will you?” he asked hopefully. “Will you really miss me, Jesse?”

“Of course I will, sir. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes, yes, of course, we’re friends.”

On the night of the twenty-ninth, blue-clad soldiers were so close to Corinth they could hear the unmistakable whistle of the locomotives, strangely eerie and disconnected in the darkness, as though a procession of ghost trains were passing in and out of the town. Bringing, it was reported by their scouts, not ghosts, but thousands of Rebel soldiers to boost Beauregard’s army.

At dawn the following day, Federal soldiers were woken by a series of explosions and a pall of dense smoke rising high over the town. Sherman dispatched six of his regiments to find out what the enemy was up to.

When they moved in to investigate, they found the Rebel parapets abandoned. On May 3 Beauregard had been urging soldiers of the Confederacy to defend Corinth from the “invading despoilers of our homes,” now he’d evacuated the town without so much as a skirmish. The loud explosion was discovered to be the magazine going up as the last troops had withdrawn at daybreak. It had all been an elaborate hoax to fool the Federals into believing that the army in Corinth was being reinforced, and it had worked.

Instead of moving on Mobile or directly to Vicksburg, a plan Sherman personally favored, Halleck now announced his intention to break up the magnificent forces under his command and scatter it to the four winds.

By the beginning of June, General John Pope was summoned east to command a new Federal Army of Virginia. General George Thomas was returned to the Army of the Ohio, that army being turned east along the Memphis and Charleston Road, to march for Chattanooga under General Buell.

“This army is the best we have on the continent, and it could go anywhere it pleases,” Sherman bewailed when he heard. “I hold General Halleck in high esteem but by one move, he could have solved the whole Mississippi problem.”

Alas, Washington had other ideas.

17

The first fluttering of its silken wings

The quiet period enjoyed by the medical departments after the last of the wounded and sick had been sent home was over. Jesse, along with most of the medical staff, now spent her days bathing fevered brows, quieting fevered dreams, and carefully administering the rapidly depleting supply of quinine.

Commanding generals were not immune to the curse of the Southern swamplands.

By the time Sherman had moved his division together with General Hurlburt’s Fourth northward fourteen miles to Chewalla, he too was displaying symptoms of the malarial fevers that had affected so many of his men. Halleck had ordered him to rescue anything of value from the trains burned and partially destroyed by the Rebels during their evacuation from Corinth. The rolling stock and flat cars, six of them in all, with about sixty carriages, had been inside Corinth during the night of the evacuation, loaded up with commissary stores. At daylight, the Rebels had started the trains west to find the Tuscumbia Bridge already destroyed, by their own picket guards, either in panic or mistakenly. Unable to go back to Corinth or forward to their own lines, engineers and guards had dumped the precious contents of their cars into the surrounding swamps, then hastily disabled the cars and locomotives, set them alight, and pushed them off the track before making good their escape. The result presented a strange scene.

Fermenting sugar, molasses, and flour had sunk to the bottom, and these together with a half-dozen other sundry perishables floating on the putrefying surface caused the swamp to stink to high heaven under the hot, merciless sun. Add to this the stench coming from the fetid, insect-infested marshland, and comparison was possible only with the indescribable smells of the operating tent after battle.

The sun, however, was not the only thing being called merciless. Sherman pushed the work forward relentlessly, some days in a ninety-degree heat, a heat that felled even the most robust men born and bred in the “cold-blooded” Northern climes. They took to their blankets with sunstroke, chills, and fevers and of course malaria, now turning into a full-blown epidemic.

For days, Sherman had been riding up and down the railroad lines supervising the repair of the track, no job too insignificant for him to oversee personally, no soldier too lowly in rank for him to advise and encourage, and no officer too exalted to escape his criticism. Way past dusk and sometimes into the night his unmistakable voice could be heard, giving orders.

“You there, you boys will tear your backs out before you ever move that damn thing! Get rope, men, tie rope to both ends and lash it around that tree to give you leverage!” The general was mounted on a horse before the vast area of swamplands from which sweating men were dragging a burned platform car covered with all manner of swamp life. He waved his riding crop. “Use your brains as well as your brawn. Captain Peters, why are you using men to drag those rails over the embankment when you could use ropes, sir, use ropes and swing them over! Are you an engineering officer, sir, or a wet nurse? Bring more rope!” he would shout above the din of crunching metal and creaking muscles. “You men, come around the other side, that’s right, heave with all your might, put your backs into it, don’t leave it for the others. Wake up there, Captain!” He would dismount, tear off his frock coat and roll up the sleeves of his blouse. “Here, here, I’ll show you how! Heave! One, two, three, heave!” Sweat streamed down his red face, the palms of his hands turned raw, and his hat fell off. But he stuck it out until the locomotive was halfway up the bank, then he would remount and ride off, leaving his coat behind, to dismount again near the charred and twisted wreckage of the Tuscumbia Bridge, to push forward another hapless officer.

He would make up details of men, led by locomotive engineers, to supervise the repairs before riding off to reconnoiter the country westward for about fifty miles in order to estimate the amount of damage to the railroad as far as Grand Junction. Repeatedly Captain Jackson pleaded with him to rest, to seek shelter and a drink. The Ohioan knew only one way to lead, by example. When the men took a break and a drink
he
would take a break and a drink and not before.

While his Fifty-second Indiana, what he called his “railroad regiment,” were engaged in repairing these locomotives
he
would remain in the saddle, working alongside them.

“What are you doing sneaking around outside my tent in the middle of the night like an Indian? Did you hope to take advantage of my good humor?”

“Sir, you need help,” Jesse Davis told him.

“What are you talking about? I’m fine—I’ve never felt better in my life. I have—a note here from General Grant. You were right.” One morning Jesse had waylaid him as he was on his way to visit Halleck at his headquarters tents outside Corinth and told him that Grant had asked for a thirty-day leave of absence, but actually had no intention of returning. “God knows how—but you were right,” he said and knocked over the lighted candle in an effort to extract the said note from the pile of papers on his table.

Jesse ran forward, grabbed up the candle, and replaced it securely in the holder. By its flickering light she could see the sweat that trickled down his wrinkled neck and glistened in the creases around his throat. His broad forehead and upper lip were all wet with perspiration, running into his beard. There was a look of wildness and fatigue in his eyes and they were red and unfocused, as if he were drunk, and he blinked as the sweat ran into them.

He rubbed the moisture away with a trembling hand. “Why are you staring at me?” he demanded.

Jesse was staring not at him exactly as much as at the small red bumps ranged on his neck.

“Do you wish to know what General Grant said or don’t you! When I went to see General Halleck he told me, quite casually in fact, that Grant had asked for a furlough. I rode over to his camp off the Monterey Road and there he was,
packing.
I asked him where he was going. Saint Louis was his reply. He admitted that he had no reason to return. He had requested a transfer and the request was denied. Even his staff tried to get him sent to the Atlantic coast without”—he was glancing around the tent distractedly—“I must have some water—I’m thirsty,” he said, licking his lips, running a shaky hand over his thatch of red hair. “Thirsty and cold—the temperature has dropped.”

Jesse took the canteen from the table and watched as he greedily gulped the contents. He got unsteadily to his feet, gripped the table, and then righted himself.

“I, of course, begged him to stay. I illustrated his case by my own.” He picked up the canteen and had so much trouble unfastening the stopper again that Jesse did it for him, receiving a push in the shoulder for her trouble. He took two large drinks and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Mrs. Sherman thinks I’m sick, Major Sanger wrote to her that I’m sick. The lady wishes to come here and nurse me—she’ll take me away again, pat me on the head like some naughty schoolboy and take me home in disgrace just as she did in Kentucky and Missouri. God help me—will I ever recover from the shame I feel from those days.” He rubbed and massaged the bony knuckles of his hands and then the wrists and then rubbed the back of his neck. “My head aches—what was I saying?”

“General Grant, sir,” she reminded him, “you were saying that he’d decided to stay.”

“Yes, that’s right. I told him that before Shiloh I’d been cast down by a mere assertion of ‘crazy,’ but that single battle had given me new life.” His hand slipped on the table and he almost fell forward, just grabbing onto the back of his chair for support. “That single battle had given me new life—and I am in high feather…high feather—I argued with him that if he went away events would go right along and he would be left out, whereas if he remained, some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place. He said he would wait awhile, promised not to leave without seeing me—now I have a note…from him—he’s decided to remain.”

“That’s wonderful news, sir.”

“Wonderful,” he agreed, again distracted. “I wrote to him—it’s wonderful news—for the country as well as for all who serve under him—” He reached out for the canteen, drained it to the last drop, the residue falling down his beard into the collar of his shirt. Jesse raised the back of her hand to his brow, and felt the burning heat before he pushed her away from him.

“You will kindly observe the proprieties between an unmarried female and a married male and remove yourself from my tent.”

As he sat on the edge of his cot gripped by a paroxysm of shaking, she knelt before him, put a blanket around his shoulders, and drew it close. He stared at her from out of fever-racked eyes as she tried to quieten the involuntary movements of his body.

The tent flap was thrown back and Captain Jackson entered. “Who’s there? Jesse?” His alert gaze pierced the patchy darkness. “That you, gal?”

“Yes sir.”

He glanced around the tent. “There’s a darn bird or sumpthin’ trapped in here. Did yer hear it and there was a strange shape against the canvas, like a flappin’ wing.”

“It was probably my coat, sir.” She showed him how the open sides hung forward, and silhouetted against the canvas wall might well be mistaken for a wing. “Would you stay with the general while I fetch Dr. Cartwright and get some more blankets?”

For the first time the aide saw Sherman lying, motionless, in the cot.

“Lord above,” he exclaimed. “What in hell’s going on?” He glanced at the general’s uniform folded with uncharacteristic neatness on the camp stool. “Damn it, what are you doing in here?”

“The general is sick, sir.”

“Hell, I know that, he’s
been
sick for days. Damn it.”

Seth Cartwright, trusty bag in hand, came muttering through the night, his breath bearing witness to a last-minute swallow of bust-skull, if not his rolling gait. He wasn’t drunk, however, just happy. Sherman was sick. There
was
justice in the world.

“Yup, it’s malaria, all right,” he announced with undisguised relish, after examining the unconscious commander. “He’s burning up.” He laid the back of his hand across the wrinkled brow. “Throbbing headache, nausea and vomiting, cold, then sweating. Restless, the rigors, tongue like mule droppings, cramps, weakness, and lassitude. Look there.” He pointed to the red bumps on the commander’s neck. “He can’t say I didn’t warn him. He’s worked those men through the hottest part of the day, then gets struck down himself. You have to admit there is a nice little irony to it. The next forty-eight hours will tell.” He placed several premeasured doses of quinine powder on the small table beside the cot and closed his bag.

Jesse had nursed enough cases of malarial fever to know the routine. She could hear Jacob’s instructions: “Once the timing of the patient’s paroxysm is known quinine has to be given every two hours before the paroxysm, normally in five-grain doses, but in severe cases the dose may be increased to ten grains.”

The surgeon spoke to Marcus Van Allen. “He’s in good hands, better than he deserves. If you need a surgeon wake up his own surgeon or one of the brigade men. Me, I’m just an assistant. I shouldn’t even be
touching
a major general.” He grinned mischievously. “Yes indeed, you have to admit there is a nice irony to it. I might even take a drink or two to celebrate.”

Jackson followed Cartwright out of the tent. “Will this quinine cure what ails him?”

“No, but it will control the symptoms. Half the army’s down with it. Have you ever had malarial fever, Captain?”

“To tell the truth, Doc, I ain’t had nary a chill since I joined up. I got this bad back, hurts like hell when it rains, but otherwise I’m strong as a ox. My old ma used to say all the Jackson men were strong as a ox.”

“Well, Captain Jackson, it’s early days yet.” Cartwright wasn’t going to let anything spoil his good mood.

Andy joined Marcus at the foot of Sherman’s cot. Jesse was sitting on a camp stool, a bowl of water in her lap as she bathed the commander’s sweating face. Both men watched for a moment as the girl turned down the blanket and began to wash his naked shoulders and chest.

“Oh Lord,” Jackson said, narrowing his eyes and scratching the back of his neck. “This ain’t good, Marcus, this ain’t good a’tall. Come on, girl, you can’t stay here, you know that.”

“Why can’t she stay?” Marcus wanted to know. “The general needs a nurse, and you heard what Dr. Cartwright said, he couldn’t be in better hands.”

“Sure he needs a nurse, so let’s get one of those boys from the hospital, or one of our own orderlies, not a darn female.”

Jesse stroked the wet matted hair off the general’s brow, all the while speaking to him in a soft, soothing voice. She washed his arms, his hands, his wrinkled throat where the sweat ran in rivulets, and then covered him with a cool sheet and several blankets. She soaked the flannel in the cold water, squeezed out the excess, and placed it across his brow. Then she brought her Jacob-made fan from her haversack and sat there moving it back and forth a couple of inches from his face and shoulders. The two captains stood silent witnesses to these acts of devotion.