The Storm Before Atlanta (22 page)

T
HEY HADN
’
T BEEN EXPECTING A BATTLE
. D
ULCIE HAD
been dozing on top of a stack of canvas in the medical wagon as it clopped along. She still hadn’t completely recovered from the sleepless nights at Resaca. The shots ahead woke her up, but she went right back to sleep again, though she felt the wagon turning around and heading back the other way. The cannon fire that had frightened her back on the farm long ago was too common a noise to worry her anymore.

When the wagon jolted to a stop Dulcie stirred and opened her eyes. It was late afternoon, she could tell by the sun. Now she heard guns firing up ahead. Someone was in battle, or skirmishing, or something. A fly landed on her mouth, its tiny feet crawling over her lips. Revolted, Dulcie swatted it away and then lay rubbing her lip furiously. There was no more disgusting sensation in the world than having a fly land on your mouth.

“Get out of there! We need to set up!” Dulcie recognized
Bill’s hectoring voice. He was a soldier who’d never fully recovered from a bout of camp fever, and so had been put on medical detail.

“Look at her, asleep in the afternoon!” Bill stuck his head into the wagon and his voice echoed louder. “Blacks are lazy.”

Dulcie sat up, crawled out over the crates and rolls of canvas, and jumped down onto the ground. She turned to face him. She was really angry. “You shut up!”

“Ooh,” said Bill, putting his hands to his face and pretending to be scared. A couple of men laughed.

“You don’t know all black people. You know
me
!
I’m
lazy!” Dulcie pointed at her chest. “Me, Dulcie,
I’m
lazy! Don’t say black people are lazy! Say I’m lazy!”

“We don’t have time for this,” said Seth. “Dulcie’s not lazy, Bill, you saw her at Resaca. Let’s get this set up.” He turned to Dulcie and explained briefly, “The fun’s started and we’re in it.”

Dulcie gulped. The sound of guns wasn’t just some anonymous soldiers skirmishing—the 107th was in battle.
Her
regiment. At Resaca they had known days ahead of time. At Cassville they’d known a day or two in advance, and then the battle hadn’t happened. Now there was a battle going on with no time to set up a field hospital, no time to set yellow flags to guide the wounded soldiers in. She helped drag the canvas and the crates out of the wagon. They assembled stretchers. The day darkened overhead. There was a roll of thunder. Dulcie took the buckets and
went to look for water. They would need lots of it soon—to clean wounds, to wipe down instruments, to drink. The sound of guns ahead of them, she now knew, was the sound of work being made for the medical corps.

After she had filled all the buckets Dulcie dug out the pile of yellow flags. She needed to find where the soldiers would be coming from. She started walking toward the battle field. Somewhere behind her she could hear the drums and the march of approaching troops—reinforcements. The sky had grown dark, and the trees whipped around wildly in a sudden wind. A bullet whined over Dulcie’s head. She was going in the right direction, anyway. Toward the bullets. Then it began to rain.

The shooting stopped, but the groans and cries of the wounded echoed from the broken forest. Dulcie moved forward cautiously, her bare feet slipping in the wet Georgia clay. She felt a wave of dread. The agonized moans from the woods reminded her of Anne being whipped. Two hundred lashes. Dulcie cringed, and each new groan felt like a lash against her own flesh.

It was raining harder, and she could see people all around her, people moving and talking in the twilight, but she couldn’t tell who they were.

“Where are the stretcher bearers?”

“Are the Rebs letting us collect our wounded?”

“Who cares what the Rebs are allowing? Let’s get ’em.”

“Where’s the dressing station?”

“Where are the surgeons?”

“John! John! John, you old cauliflower, where are you?” The panicked voice broke off at the end in a sob.

“It’s darker than a stack of black cats out there.”

“I don’t care, I’m going in.”

There was confusion, chaos, men stumbling everywhere, calling out for each other in voices that were fear-filled or mournful but not loud. The moans of the wounded came from somewhere up ahead—somewhere to the east. The rain pounded down. A long, pained howl rose above all the rest, for a while, and then it stopped and did not start again.

Dulcie saw that the men around her were moving toward the woods, and with a gulp she went too. She had to. She was the surgeon’s servant. No, she
chose
to. She was a free woman.

She tripped over something soft, and fell. A body. She crept close to it. She touched it gingerly. The body’s owner shrugged her hand off and snored. He was wrapped in a rubber blanket and asleep. In the rain, amid the groans and calls, asleep! How could anyone sleep in this?

As Dulcie’s eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw that many men were asleep, just like this one. Some were wrapped in rubber blankets, others in rain-soaked woolen blankets, others in nothing but their sodden clothes.

“Dulcie, is that you?”

Dulcie recognized Jeremy’s voice and turned. She
could make out a boy-sized figure through the driving rain. “Yes, it’s me.”

“Where are the others? Where’s Nicholas and Dave and them?”

“I just got here. Come on. I’m going in.”

To her surprise she felt Jeremy’s hand grip hers. They moved forward together.

“There’s a creek here,” said Jeremy.

Dulcie hitched her skirt up with one hand, and together they stepped into it. The cold water rushed around her ankles and reminded her of the night she ran away.

They came to a ravine. They let go of each other’s hands as they climbed down into it. Dulcie’s bare foot groped for the bottom and met unresisting flesh. Hastily she stepped off of the body and onto the floor of the ravine.

“Do youse have rattlesnakes in Georgia?” asked Jeremy.

“Yes,” said Dulcie. “There’s a body here.”

“I know.” She heard Jeremy kneel beside it. “Can’t tell who it is. Can’t see anything.”

They climbed up out of the ravine again. The woods beyond were full of men’s voices calling over the groans.

“Algie!”

“Hiram! Hi, where you at, you old fool?”

“Possum! Anybody seen Possum?”

In the darkness a cluster of tiny lights seemed to float along toward them. Dulcie blinked. The lights stopped before them and spoke.

“Do you need a lantern?”

“Thank you,” said Dulcie, accepting the tin lantern. Candlelight shone through the nail holes poked in the side.

The tower of lanterns moved away.

“We can’t see as good now we have the lantern,” said Jeremy.

It was true. The light drew their eyes and made the darkness around them darker. Dulcie slid the door over the light holes, and they were in darkness again.

“The lantern will come in handy when we find someone,” she said.

“We’re looking for Dave and Nicholas,” said Jeremy. “And No-Joke.”

Dulcie mentally counted the members of Jeremy’s mess. “Lars and Jack are all right, then?”

“Oh, and Lars and Jack,” Jeremy admitted.

The next man they found was lying facedown on the ground. Dulcie knelt beside him and opened the lantern door. Yellow dots of light flickered on a face with a gingery mustache. The man had a tintype photograph of a little girl clutched in his hand.

“He’s dead,” said Jeremy.

They moved on. Other lanterns were flickering among the trees. Voices called out, and men groaned in pain. A man stumbled past carrying another man over his shoulder. Where were the stretcher crews? Dulcie wondered.

They came to another body and shone a light on it.

“This one’s still breathing,” said Dulcie.

“Who is he?”

“It doesn’t matter who he is, Jeremy! Look, his leg’s shot up.” Dulcie hadn’t brought a tourniquet. “Jeremy, take his belt off.”

With an impatient huff, Jeremy knelt and undid the belt buckle. He wanted to be looking for his messmates, not helping men he didn’t know, Dulcie thought. But she was in the medical corps, and any wounded soldier was her problem. Even a Secesh would have been her problem. She took the belt from him and cinched it around the man’s leg. “Help me pull it tight, Jeremy. No, tighter.”

“His leg will come off!”

“It has to be really, really tight.” Dulcie didn’t tell him that the man’s leg would have to come off anyway. The man appeared to be unconscious, but he might still be able to hear, Dulcie knew.

“Good,” she told Jeremy, putting the lantern close to the tourniquet. He had made it so tight that it bit deep into the flesh. The bleeding from the wound had stopped. “Now we have to find a way to get him out of here.”

“We have to go look for Dave and Nicholas and them!” said Jeremy.

Dulcie hesitated. They couldn’t carry this soldier between them. He was a big man.

“He’s not bleeding anymore!” Jeremy said. “Dave and them could be dying and no one’s helped them!”

Dulcie looked around her. There were hundreds of lanterns, hundreds of voices calling, but the calls of the injured seemed to outnumber them. The rain had slowed.

“All right,” she said. “But remember where he is.”

As soon as they moved on she knew that that was impossible. The moon came out briefly through an opening in the clouds. They could see a little bit. What Dulcie saw was a horror of broken trees, shell craters, and slumped bodies everywhere.

“We’re not even in the worst of it, I don’t think,” Jeremy said. “There was a place, like a line, didn’t nobody get past it. Only it wasn’t a real line, only it turned into a line of bodies.”

“Jeremy?”

A lantern shone in their faces suddenly, and Dulcie blinked her eyes shut against the sudden light.

“Is that you, Jeremy?”

“Dave?”

“I can’t find Nicholas!”

Dulcie’s eyes adjusted to the light. Dave’s face was pale and frantic in the yellow light from his lantern.

“I can’t find him!” Dave repeated.

“If you can’t find him maybe he ain’t here.” Jeremy was trying to comfort Dave, but Dave looked even more panicked.

Dulcie reached out and put a hand on Dave’s trembling arm. “Come with us,” she said. “We’ll look for him together.”

Shots stuttered in the woods up ahead. They looked up and saw the answering fire—orange blazes cutting through the darkness.

“Is the battle starting again?” said Dulcie.

“Skirmish, probably,” said Jeremy.

A bullet smacked into a tree above Dulcie’s head.

“Nicholas is still out there!” Dave cried.

Dulcie’s knees felt weak. She hadn’t come under fire before except for that business in the rowboat. But there was a job to do. She gripped the lantern. Ducking low as the bullets flew overhead, they moved toward another body.

Dulcie opened the lantern.

“Dead,” said Jeremy. “Wait, I know him! His name is John Decker—he’s in our regiment.”

There was nothing to be done for John Decker, and they moved on.

A shape lurched toward them.

“Nicholas!” Dave cried gladly.

Dulcie wondered how he could tell the moving dark shadow was Nicholas. But a moment later the man stepped into the lamplight and she saw it was—Nicholas, his face black with powder, his wet hair plastered down on his head. He staggered under the weight of a body on his shoulder.

“ ’S No-Joke,” he said. “I think he’s still alive. Where’s the dressing station?”

“I don’t know,” Dulcie admitted. Someone must have set one up by now, surely?

“Need to get him out of here.”

A bullet burrowed into the ground beside Nicholas, emphasizing his point.

Together they moved back toward the creek, Dulcie and Dave lighting the way with their lanterns. There were still wounded men calling out around them. Dulcie knew she should be back helping Dr. Flood, if she could find him.

When they got to the ravine, Dave and Jeremy slid down first to take No-Joke from Nicholas. Dulcie followed with the light. Then they clambered up the other side and Nicholas handed No-Joke up to them. No-Joke let out a groan as he was lifted. Dulcie couldn’t tell if he was conscious. The specks of light shone on a black line of blood trickling down from the corner of his mouth.

A silver-white mist hung over the creek, glowing weirdly in the moonlight. They splashed across the creek, struggling to keep No-Joke out of the water, and made their way in the dark toward the light of campfires that the soldiers had managed to start despite the wet ground and soggy firewood. Dulcie saw the house shape of a wall tent, glowing with candlelight from inside.

“There. That’ll be the dressing station,” she said.

They stumbled up to it. It wasn’t the 107th’s tent, and it wasn’t Dr. Flood inside. Instead they saw a doctor Dulcie didn’t know, a bearded young man with his sleeves rolled up and his arms spattered with blood.

The man didn’t turn around. “Set him down there.”

“But he’s our pardner!” said Dave.

“Everybody’s somebody’s pardner.” The doctor was surrounded by candles. He knelt on the ground. A soldier
who looked about sixteen lay on a sheet, staring up at the doctor in terror. The soldier’s leg had a tight tourniquet around it, done with a belt just like the one Dulcie and Jeremy had used.

The doctor frowned at Dulcie. “Didn’t I see you around the field hospital in Resaca?”

“Yes, sir,” said Dulcie. Nicholas had laid No-Joke down inside the tent. Dulcie helped the men try to arrange him comfortably.

“I need you to anesthetize this patient,” said the doctor.

Dulcie stared at him. “Me? I don’t know how, sir!”

“I’ll show you how.” The doctor held up a tin canister. “It’s not difficult. I had a drummer boy doing it for me at Resaca.”

Dulcie was horrified. She knew that people could die under anesthetic. She didn’t say this, though, because she could see that the soldier whose leg was about to be amputated was frightened enough. But she didn’t want any part of anesthetizing him. And she needed to go find Dr. Flood—he would need her help. Except that she had no idea where he was, in the dark chaos outside the tent.

“What’s your name, girl?” said the doctor. His face was gray with weariness already.