The Better Angels of Our Nature (4 page)

The large hospital wall tent at the rear of the regiment was bursting with incapacitated soldiers fighting off the effects of the severe diarrhea and dysentery decimating the ranks of the Tennessee Army. In one cot a young infantryman called Davy Hubble lay stretched out, pale and thin, without, it seemed, the strength to raise himself and greet his own brother when he visited. He laid aside the dime novel he was reading to sink under his blanket, moaning loudly.

“You look a whole lot better, Davy,” said Amos Hubble.

“We was jest sayin’ he looks real peek-ed,” piped up Cornelius, appearing from nowhere to take Davy’s last jelly off the sheet and pop it in his own mouth. He glanced around him. “I wouldn’t wont none a these surgeons working on me, leastways not if I was alive. The hospital ain’t no place for sick folks, not ’less they plan on gettin’ sicker.”

“I’m dyin’,” Davy said.

“Well, yer sure don’t look like yer dyin’,” Amos insisted.

“I’m dyin’, I tell yer, I got me an awful pain right ’bout here.” He gingerly touched his abdomen. “I reckon I won’t last out the night, Amos.”

“Have you told Doc Cartwright?”

“Won’t do no good,” said Cornelius, shaking his knotty head.

“Ohhwha…ohhwhaaa…” groaned Davy, but rallied long enough, as the boy approached, to tell his brother, “That there’s Jess Davis, bin real karn’d ter me, Brother, gettin’ things and such like.”

“Good morning, sir,” said the boy, who had been running errands in exchange for the kindness shown him by the sergeant.

“Boy’s waitin’ fer hiss pre-motion. He’s gonna be Gen. Billy Sherman’s aide-
dee
-camp,” Cornelius told them with all the gravity he felt this announcement warranted and much of the contempt.

“That
right
?” asked Davy, so impressed he forgot to moan or hold his stomach.

But the boy wasn’t listening. Cornelius had kept him so busy this was the first time he’d actually stopped to gaze around the twenty-three cots with barely a space to pass between them, and a narrow aisle down the center, where men lay motionless, staring up with glazed eyes at the canvas ceiling or tossing fitfully under stained, sweat-soaked blankets. Even though the tent flaps were tied back and a fresh breeze stirred the leaves on the trees outside, the unmistakable, overpowering smell of excrement and stale urine pervaded the air.

The boy watched as an orderly sauntered past with a full, uncovered bedpan, the contents already attracting a whole company of eager, buzzing flies. Across the aisle, a soldier was hanging out of his cot and retching into a bucket held for him by the sergeant.

“Ain’t a preety sight,” Amos said. “Ole Cornelius there, he ain’t far short a the mark. Yer might suspect some a these doctors was sent here by Jeff Davis hisself jest to make us Yankees suffer. The men line up for sick call every morning and Doc Fitzjohn, he’s the regimental surgeon, hands out these pills, big as hazelnuts they are, called blue mass. If’in yer clever, boy, you’ll just toss ’em in the bushes.”

“Is that Dr. Fitzjohn?” the boy asked, pointing to a young man in a soiled white apron, bending over a cot, examining a patient.

“Nah, that’s Doc Cartwright, regimental
assistant
surgeon. He takes his orders from Fitzjohn. Doc Cartwright is o-kay. He cures more ’an he kills, which ain’t no mean task in this army. Got a real bad bark, though it’s a deal worse than his bite. He takes a might gettin’ used ter, he ain’t got what city folks call ‘bedside manner.’”

The boy watched as Dr. Cartwright carefully checked the patient’s pulse and then gently palpated his abdomen. The poor soldier let out a soft moan, as though he lacked even the energy to articulate his pain. He was pale, almost ghostly in appearance, hollow-eyed, his wasted body sunken into the shallow mattress on which he lay. If not for a brief movement of his skeletal hand, it might have seemed that he was already dead. Cartwright snatched up the record card from the foot of the patient’s cot and made a few quick notes. He administered a dose of medication and helped the mortally sick soldier take a sip of water. As the doctor turned away, the soldier lifted his hand a few inches off the cot, reaching out to touch his savior. The doctor merely nodded. The soldier’s need to touch him seemed to make the doctor angry. Though perhaps it wasn’t so much the touch as the unspoken question in the patient’s eyes.

The doctor pushed the small, round eyeglasses up his manly nose, and expelled his breath in a rasping sigh, his anger restrained. It was hardly the poor soldier’s fault that he would soon be another statistic; he smiled, gave him a more reassuring nod and moved on to the soldier who had been vomiting. He sat on the edge of the cot and wiped the boy’s mouth, placed a cold cloth on his forehead, spoke joshingly to him.

“You been sneaking out to the sutler’s wagon again, Guthrie? I thought I told you to lay off the oysters and champagne?”

The boy shifted his gaze to the three strong-looking orderlies standing leisurely at the entrance with apparently nothing more urgent to do than smoke their evil-smelling stogies.

“That
there’s
Doc Fitzjohn now.” Amos nodded toward the entrance and the change in his manner, from admiration to dread, spoke volumes.

Fitzjohn was certainly a hard-looking man, tall and very thin, clean-shaven, with high, sharp cheekbones and colorless eyes that would have unnerved the bravest of veterans in his care. His uniform was spotless, brushed, pressed, like a store-window dummy, his black hair slicked back. He had a straight slit of a mouth that remained frozen in a kind of arrogant sorrow. He might have been a very prosperous undertaker who had prepared too many corpses, breathed too much embalming fluid, and attended too many interments.

“If’in yer ever find yerself occupyin’ one er these cots, get yerself fixed by Doc Cartwright, not Doc Fitzjohn.”

Cornelius returned at that moment and Amos said, “I was just tellin’ the boy here that if’in he gets sick or wounded he oughta get hisself fixed by Doc Cartwright.”

“That’s a fact. Fitzjohn jest don’t listen,” agreed the older man. “Afore yer can say what ails yer hiss handin’ out them big blue pills like they was bits a candy on the Fourth a July. I seen him a hundred times since I been here.”

“And I ain’t seen him smile a once,” said Amos. “Not a once.” His expression changed to amiable as the younger surgeon came toward them. “Howdy, Doc.”

“There’s not a damn thing wrong with your brother. Take him back to camp with you. The diarrhea’s cleared up.”

“I know that, Doc. But Davy’s homesick. He misses his ma; she always took good care a him. He’s the baby. This is the first time he’s ever been ’way from home. Why, he even got scared when Ma sent him ter town ter get Pa outa the saloon on a Seterdy night.” He laughed and Cornelius laughed. Cartwright was unmoved. He’d heard it all before. It didn’t make it less true, of course, just less effective on a surgeon who’d served since Bull Run.

“I don’t want him lying here like a sack of rotting vegetables.” He turned to the subject of the discussion, who, since the surgeon’s sudden appearance, was lying prostrate again, holding his stomach and issuing forth a low, monotonous moan. “We need the cot.” In order to demonstrate this truth, Cartwright tried to pull back the blanket, but Davy held on to it for dear life. “You gotta take some nourishment, and I ain’t got the time or the inclination to spoon-feed you. If you need a good excuse to get out of doing your duty, I can give you a dose of strychnine, painful but effective. In two minutes you’ll be laid out stiffer than a—”

“Whoa—” interrupted Davy, his sly gaze moving from Cartwright to his brother and back again.

The boy studied the doctor as he spoke. His uniform looked as if it had been on his back since old Edmund Ruffin fired the first shot on Fort Sumter. He wore no shoulder straps, his boots were caked in mud, and his pants were shapeless. He was dark-skinned, which exaggerated the four-day stubble on his firm chin. His thick, untidy hair was quite black, Irish black, and grew way past the collar of his grubby shirt, while a straight, impervious fringe hung rakishly over his brow.

He was younger than one might first suppose; in his late twenties, despite the gray in his hair and the premature lines about his brow and mouth, bitter lines, and dark shadows beneath the eyes. Those eyes, brown in color, gazed out from behind small round spectacles with a sardonic amusement, as if he’d known for years something the rest of the world was only just beginning to find out. All this gave the surgeon’s face more character than mere handsomeness would have done; in fact, his very youthfulness was tarnished and worn, like the single remaining button on his shabby frock coat.

“A fresh sacrificial lamb, huh?” he said to the boy in his usual mocking tone. “What cradle did our benevolent government pluck
you
from?”

“Good morning, sir,” the boy said respectfully, and saluted. “I’m older than I look.”

“And, I hope,
wiser,
” was the surgeon’s wry observation.

“Boy’s slow-witted,” explained Cornelius.

The surgeon pushed his spectacles negligently up his nose. “Ain’t we all, Corporal, ain’t we all. Why else would we be here slaughtering each other, if our wits weren’t slow?” He turned back to Davy Hubble. “Well, what’s it gonna be, strychnine or beef broth? Decide now, damn it, I’m not wasting any more time on malingerers.” He reached down and made a sudden grab at the blanket, which came away to reveal the bottle of whiskey Davy had been concealing. The boy moaned, but this time it was genuine. Cartwright turned to Amos and said with more sympathy, perhaps recognizing a fellow imbiber, “Get him to eat something. I
know
he doesn’t want to go back to his regiment. He’s been listening to rumors. He’s scared to death and I don’t blame him. I’m also scared and I also want to go home to my mama but the army insists I stay here. If he doesn’t want the Prince of Darkness to fill him full of blue mass he’d better stop drinking that stuff and start eating. We’ve got a tent full of genuinely sick men. If he ain’t sitting up and taking nourishment by supper I’ll have him marched out of here and shot, then all his worries will be over,
permanently.
Understood?” He thrust the bottle at Amos’s chest and walked away.

The strange patch on Sergeant De Groot’s sleeve was called a caduceus, and meant that the Dutchman was permanently attached to the medical department as Dr. Cartwright’s personal steward.

“Steward’s the next best thing to a doc,” the talkative Cornelius told him, as they wound cloth for bandages and dressings. “If’in they kain’t find a doc they git a steward. Steward gits the key to the medicine chest. They got alcohol in there.” He grinned and a black hole appeared in the lower half of his face. “That don’t make no never mind, not to the Dutchman. I never seen him take a drop, nor look at no woman neither, not that we seen any decent ones ’round here. He jest reads that Barble. Ain’t that a caution? Works all the hours the Lord sends an’ when he gits time he reads that Barble an’ keeps hisself ter hisself.”

“Sir.” The boy spoke to Sergeant De Groot as he came out of the operating tent. “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, will you give me some more work to do?”

The steward’s sad brown eyes focused on the boy’s freckled face. With his powerful body, black hair falling in a mane around what could be seen of his ruddy cheeks under the thick black beard, it was impossible to guess the Dutchman’s age.

“Your company sergeant will be looking for you. He will think you have deserted.”

The boy said nothing, just held the Dutchman’s steady gaze. Then the Dutchman nodded his gigantic head slowly, as if he understood something the boy had silently imparted to him. “You will need somewhere to sleep, the nights are cold. You will share my tent for now; Cornelius has habits bad for a young boy to see. I will take care of you.”

“Thank you, sir,” the boy said in the steward’s own tongue.

“You speak
Dutch
?” The steward’s eyes filled with tears. “How is that possible?”

“Anything is possible, sir,” said the boy, “if you believe.”

Alone in his tent, the tall, thin, slightly hunched figure removed his frock coat and turned in time to see a movement in the shadows. “Who’s there?”

“Me, sir. Private Jesse Davis. I turned back your blanket, sir.”

Sherman glanced at his cot. He had never seen it look so neat, so inviting. Irritably he said, “We are not at Willard’s and I dislike fawning sycophants.” The Ohioan suddenly narrowed his eyes. “I’ve seen you before,” he said slowly, reflectively.

“The other evening, sir, when you—”

“No, no, no! I mean before that. I know I’ve seen you before.”

“Eight years ago. Early April, in the year 1853, sir, you were on voyage for what is now San Francisco, to take up your position as director of the banking establishment of Turner, Lucas.” Sherman drew his slender red brows into a quizzical frown. “You were shipwrecked,
twice,
” continued the boy. “The first ship ran aground north of San Francisco, then the schooner which rescued you capsized in the bay.”

“How in damnation do you know
that
?” Sherman was staring at him. “I asked you a question, Private, now
answer
me.”

“After the first shipwreck you had a companion, a boy—”

“Yes, yes, about sixteen, your
brother
?”

“No, sir, not my brother.”

“Then?”

The boy’s smile was sudden and rueful.

“That’s impossible,” Sherman said, wiping the boy and the thought out of existence with one gesture of his arm. “He would have been in his twenties now, if he had lived, but he drowned—I was becoming entangled in the ship’s rigging—the boy jumped in and assisted me. I didn’t see what happened to him. I assumed he had lost his own life in trying to help me.” Sherman drew the back of his hand across his brow, which had grown beads of sweat. “I tried to find out who he was, I wanted to tell his family, perhaps he was the sole support of a widowed mother. I did not want my continued misfortune to be the cause of her poverty, but the ship’s passenger manifest listed no such person. I questioned the master, as many of his crew as I could, none remembered seeing him, either working his passage or as a passenger. I concluded that he had been a stowaway.” He stared harder at the boy. “Unless you are a ghost, and I warn you now, I do not believe in spectral visions, unearthly phantoms, or any such nonsense, you will get back to your company where you belong.”