The Root Cellar (21 page)

“That’s so,” said Susan, and they sat down on the grass and waited.

In a very few minutes, John and Sally came out of the house carrying a huge boiler between them.

“Y’all come along here with us.” John nodded in the direction of a little wooden hut at the back of the yard. Inside was a large wooden tub
in the middle of the floor, and a bench along one side. After Sally and John had poured the steaming water into the tub and enough cold water from the well out in the yard so that they would not scald themselves, Sally gave them a large chunk of soap.

“There, now,” she said with a big smile. “Y’all take off them filthy clothes and give ’em to me. I’ll scrub ’em up for you, and Mrs. Fiske ain’t never gonna know who done it.”

They thanked her, and after Sally and John had gone outside they peeled off their clothes. “Black people is nice,” said Susan, and they got into the tub, gasping at the shock of the hot water. It smelled of steam and wet cedar wood and strong lye. When they were both sitting down, all squinched up together, their weight pushed the water so high only their heads stuck up above it.

Rose sighed. “I think this is the most blissful thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” she murmured. “If I die right here in this old tub full of hot water, I won’t care.”

They washed their bodies and their hair and emerged from the blackened water like two new pink babies. They dried themselves on the large cloth Sally had left and put on the clean clothes they found in a pile outside the door.

For Rose there was a pair of worn, slightly too-small britches very like the ones she had
taken off, only made of washed-out gray cotton, and a white shirt, much patched, a little big and still smelling of the iron. For Susan there was a dress, made of the same dull gray cotton, but neat with a small round white collar, and underdrawers. They found no stockings, so they put on their shoes without. There was no comb or brush, so they smoothed out their hair as best they could with their hands and went to look for Mrs. Fiske.

The kitchen smelled of roasting chicken. In the center there was a large table covered with vegetables in various stages of preparation. Mrs. Fiske looked the girls over briefly, praised God for their new-found cleanliness, and handed them each a pile of plates with instructions to put them at either end of the big table in the dining room—and be smart about it. For half an hour they carried plates of food to the twelve non-charity boarders, while Mrs. Fiske carved meager portions from two chickens.

When the boarders had finished, Mrs. Fiske sat Rose and Susan down at the kitchen table, handed them each a small plate of vegetables, and recited a long blessing over them. “Now you be quick about eating as there’s washing up to do.” She left the kitchen.

As soon as she had gone, Rose jumped up and went over to where the remains of the roast chickens stood on a small side table and,
without saying a word, picked over them until she had a handful of bits and pieces for the two of them.

After supper they washed the dishes for the twelve boarders. (Mrs. Fiske came in once to put away the remains of the chicken, looked at them very suspiciously, and put it in a cupboard with a lock on it.)

It was after midnight when they finally got to bed in a little hot dark room over the kitchen. But they were up before the first sunlight and out of the house. They could hear humming from the kitchen and found Sally there getting the day started. She and John, it turned out, did not live there. They came every morning at five to start work.

“Where y’all goin’, honey?” she asked, and they told her about Will. Sally got out two extra large chunks of corn bread and found some cheese. “Now you hush up about this,” she warned. Then she told them as much as she knew about the hospitals in Washington and set them on their way with good wishes and prayers for their success.

They tramped the length and breadth of Washington that day. First they went out to Eighth Street to the hospital that Mrs. Heilbrunner on the Oswego train had told Rose about. They talked to the adjutant there. No, he didn’t know of any boys from the 81st regiment.

“Not too many leave here except to go to the cemetery,” he told them, echoing the train conductor’s words. “I’m sorry to have to say that, but it wouldn’t do you any good for me to lie. Perhaps you’d better check at Arlington before you wear yourselves out looking in hospitals.”

“I ain’t going to.” Susan was adamant. “I ain’t looking first in no graveyard.”

The adjutant passed them on to the matron who told them they could search through the hospital because there were soldiers there whose memories had gone, whose names no one knew.

They walked up and down the rows of cots looking into suffering, sick, and dying faces, bearing the smell of medicine, rotting flesh, and bad food as long as they could. Will was not there. When they left, Rose vomited behind the building.

At the hospital they had learned the addresses of others. They went to all of them. No one knew Will or Steve, though they asked wherever they could, walked through long hospital wards, forcing themselves to look into each face. No Will, no Steve. By the time they had been through the third hospital, Rose longed to stop, longed never to look again into those faces, never to set foot inside one of those places of misery. Nothing that had happened to her, nothing she had ever imagined was like this
kind of suffering. She was on the verge of telling Susan that she could not bear it anymore, but one look at Susan’s white face, the grim determination in her jaw, and Rose swallowed back the words, took Susan’s hand, and went on.

The heat was overpowering. Outside, the flies and mosquitoes were thick as the dust. Away from the stench of the hospitals, the air stank of sewage and catalpa trees. The heat shimmered on the roads. They stopped once to buy “ice-cold water” from a street vendor—but it was not, it was warm as bath water. Rose developed a large blister on the heel of one foot but she said nothing—about that or anything else. They were silent and resolute the whole day.

They took a horse car to go out to the tent hospitals, four in a row, and no word of Will or Steve there either. One man from upstate New York was delirious and raving about mayflowers. Susan leaned over him and brushed the hair back from his forehead. “It might be Will,” she said quietly.

“It isn’t Will.”

“It’s someone’s Will.”

They took the car back into town. When they reached Mrs. Fiske’s, she already had dinner on the table. She fed them bread and thin soup in the kitchen.

“The Lord’s great bounty has to be worked for,” she told them severely and prayed over
them for half an hour while the soup got cold, that they might be forgiven their selfishness when the Lord’s work was waiting to be done. They said nothing to her, washed the dishes, and went to bed. Early the next morning they found that Sally had left their own clothes on a bench in their room. They changed, crept down to the kitchen, helped themselves to two large corn muffins, and sneaked out the front door.

“I don’t mind the work,” said Susan grimly, “but I can’t abide a cold Christian. That ain’t what the good Lord meant us to be.”

That day was very like the one before. Each hospital they went to, someone knew of at least one more they might try. Many nurses were sympathetic, and many convalescent soldiers wanted them to stop and talk, but all of them, some gently, some rudely, told them they ought to look in the Arlington cemetery before they wasted any more time looking in hospitals.

Worn out and discouraged, they slept that night in the front room of a little hospital in a building that had been a bank. Susan would not go back to Mrs. Fiske’s. In the morning she helped the nurses. Rose could not face dressing wounds. She went into the kitchen. “I’m very good at washing dishes,” she said.

“How are you at carrying trays?” asked one bright-eyed girl, thrusting a tray of porridge and toast and coffee into Rose’s surprised
hands. She carried the trays to the soldiers in their beds until the job was done, then started collecting them again.

“You reminds me of a young soldier we had here a while back,” said a gray-haired man leaning back against his pillow, smiling wanly at Rose. “You walks with the same do-or-die attitude what he had—you and your sister there.” He inclined his head toward the next bed where Susan was dressing a bandage. “Come to think of it, he talked like her, not like you. He come here with a comrade and he nursed that boy as loving as a mother until the boy died and the poor feller was so struck by his dying he never went home. He never said much to no one. He just stayed on helping out and growing more and more miserable and thin, till it looked like he’d die too.”

Susan looked up. “Where’s that feller now, mister?” she asked in a quiet, tense voice.

“I dunno, miss. Seems t’me I heard tell he’d gone on to another hospital. There was a nurse here was powerful good to them boys and she left here. I believe he went with her.”

“Where would that be?” Susan persisted.

“I dunno, miss. Maybe Matron knows.”

When she had finished her work, Susan went into the little front room that served as an office for the matron and asked her what she knew about the young soldier who had stayed
to work and gone on to another hospital. Rose stood in the doorway, listening.

“I did hear something about that,” said the matron. “It was before I came here. A young fellow, just a boy, so shattered by the death of his friend that he lost his memory or something.”

“Where might he be now, ma’am?”

“You think he might be the boy you’re looking for?”

“Might be.”

“I see. Well, girl, you might go over to Georgetown and try there. There are a couple of small hospitals there, and I think one of the nurses from here went to Georgetown.” The matron gave Susan directions and they left quickly. They said nothing to each other during the half-hour trip to Georgetown in the horse car, or walking the short distance to the hospital.

At the hospital, they found a tired-looking elderly woman. In a low voice, Susan asked about Will and Steve and told her the story that had been told them that morning.

“Just a minute,” the woman said, “wait here.” And she went off inside the hospital.

When she came back moments later, she said, “I’m not sure. I’m not a regular nurse at this hospital. I’m here only because my niece came down with typhoid fever. I’ve just come
this morning. I don’t have the names of any of the patients, and I can’t even ask as the men here are all in a very bad state. There’s only one other nurse here now and she’s sleeping. But there’s certainly no boy like the one you describe. I really can’t tell you any more than that.”

Susan turned away from the door and said, staring straight in front of her, “I guess we got to go out to the graveyard.” Her face was expressionless.

Mutely Rose nodded. She asked directions and within a few minutes they were on the road to Arlington.

It was only a mile and a half across the Potomac River and up a long hill. They did not speak and they did not look at each other. They stopped for a moment at the foot of the hill. They could see the Arlington cemetery above them. A solitary figure was coming through the gate. They walked slowly, quietly, up the hill, watching him come toward them. As he drew level, they saw he was a soldier. Suddenly Susan stopped. She drew in her breath sharply.

“Hello, Susan,” said the soldier.

“Oh, Will,” said Susan, “you got so thin.”

Richmond Is a
Hard Road to Travel

S
usan and Will stood staring at each other stupidly. Will moved forward a step. “Steve’s dead,” he said.

“I know.”

The next moment Susan had her arms around Will and he was sobbing.

Rose stood back watching, not knowing what else to do. She was bewildered by finding Will like this and by the strangeness of him. Although she had seen him the day he had gone off to war, her memory of him was as he had been that day they had spent together in the boat and the orchard, a day that now seemed like three years past, not only in Will and Susan’s lives but in hers. This Will was not only tall, over six feet, but his ruddy face had become pale as parchment and he was thin and
he looked so old. An old man, and Susan had her arms around him and he was sobbing.

After a time, Susan took Will by the hand as though he were a small child and led him to the bench by the cemetery gate where they sat down. He sat very still, holding tightly to Susan’s hand. He looked up.

“Hello, Rose,” he said. “There you are.”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“What you said was true about where you come from.”

“Yes.”

“You ain’t got any older.”

“No.”

“I guess it don’t matter none.”

Will turned back to Susan. “You was right,” he said. “You was right, it wasn’t no good.” He began talking in a low, tired voice. “I never once took sick, but Steve, he got shot up at Cold Harbor right soon after we joined up and then, when he took sick after Petersburg, he was weakened and he never got shut of the sickness.” Will paused and looked down at the ground. “He was a year younger than me.”