The Storm Before Atlanta (23 page)

“Dulcie, sir.”

“Well, Dulcie, if I can do these amputations tonight, most of my patients will live. If I have to wait till tomorrow, most of them will die. It’s up to you.”

When it was put like that Dulcie saw there was only
one choice to be made. She left No-Joke and reached for the tin canister. “Show me what to do.”

“That’s the spirit.” The doctor looked at Jeremy. “You, drummer boy. Bring me some water, please.” He nodded at a pair of buckets beside the tent opening.

Nicholas and Dave went back to search for Lars and Jack. Dulcie wished she didn’t have to be the one giving the anesthetic. It was a frightening responsibility. But she did her best not to show her fear to the patient, because she knew he needed her calm.

“It’s all right, soldier,” she said. She knelt by his head and took the canister as the doctor showed her. She lowered it gently over the soldier’s face. She trickled chloroform into it as she had seen Seth do at Resaca, and gradually the soldier’s stiff body relaxed. He was asleep.

Through the hours that followed Dulcie just concentrated on the tin canister and the brown bottles of chloroform. When one was empty she laid it aside and grabbed another. Soldiers were brought in and out. Legs and arms piled up near the tent door, and after a while Jeremy was given the unenviable task of taking them out and burying them. Birds sang, and the new day dawned. Firing began again in the distance, and that was the first time Dulcie noticed that it had ever stopped. Once, Jeremy put a dipper to her mouth, as if she had been a patient, and she drank the cool water gratefully. Her legs under her were asleep from kneeling so long. The supply of patients never seemed to let up. Dulcie never looked at the surgery, but
the sound of the knives and saws and the smell of blood filled her head.

Long after daylight she felt someone taking the chloroform canister from her hands. It was the doctor. She still didn’t know his name.

“We’ve done all we can, Dulcie. The rest is up to God,” said the doctor.

Dulcie tried to get to her feet but couldn’t. Her legs were too stiff. She stretched them out in front of her and endured the painful tickle of pins and needles as they slowly woke up.

She turned to the tent door. No-Joke was still there.

She looked accusingly at the doctor. The doctor looked sad.

Dulcie got up on her hands and knees and crawled over to No-Joke. “He’s still alive!” she said.

“Yes, but …,” said the doctor wearily.

No-Joke’s eyelids fluttered but didn’t open. “Dulcie?”

“You’re all right, No-Joke.” She wished she knew his real name. She knew it helped patients to hear their names spoken.

“No, I’m not.” The ghost of a smile flickered across No-Joke’s face. “Take—”

Dulcie could see he was struggling to move his arm. She reached out and took his hand. It was cold. “Take what, No-Joke?”

“Picture … pocket …”

With her free hand Dulcie unbuttoned the pocket of
No-Joke’s Union blouse. The metal-backed photograph he had shown her was in there. Dulcie drew it out and held it up for No-Joke to see. His eyes were still closed.

“Here’s the picture, No-Joke.”

Dulcie watched him. His hollow cheeks were pale; even his lips were almost white.

She looked at the family in the picture, their black eyes like No-Joke’s, the mother and the older sister with their hollowed-out cheeks like No-Joke’s.

Then No-Joke’s eyes flew open, and he looked at the picture of his family for a moment. And suddenly, looking at the picture, Dulcie knew No-Joke’s real name. But she didn’t say it.… It seemed too impossibly strange to disturb him with in his very last moment of life.

“Hattie won’t know …”

The little sister in the picture. “I’ll make sure she finds out,” said Dulcie.

“But you don’t know …” He trailed off again.

“I do. And I will,” said Dulcie. “Don’t worry. I will.”

No-Joke closed his eyes, and Dulcie squeezed his hand. But his hand was limp in hers, and Dulcie knew that he was gone.

When the burial detail came for No-Joke, Dulcie had already cleaned out his pockets. She would make sure that everything in them got to Hattie, the little sister in the tintype photograph that she took from his pocket. She had no idea how she’d accomplish this. Perhaps she could get his last name from the company roster—if he’d enlisted under
his real last name. It was hard to see how she could keep this promise without telling No-Joke’s secret to at least one person. Maybe Jeremy. She also took a handkerchief, a little book that she assumed was a Bible, a pocketknife, a bone-handled toothbrush, and a folding spoon. Somehow she would have to give these things to No-Joke’s family. She’d promised.

Suddenly there was a tin bowl of soup being held in front of her face, and Dulcie looked up and saw the doctor.

“Eat this, Dulcie.”

Dulcie took the bowl and spoon from him.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” said the doctor. “There was nothing I could have done. He was—”

“Bleeding internally,” said Dulcie. She had interrupted him. That was practically sassing and would have gotten her the cowhide before she was free. Too tired to apologize, she spooned up the soup that he had given her instead.

“Are you working for someone?” said the doctor.

“Dr. Flood.”

“You’re a good little medic. You have the knack. If you ever get tired of working for him, come work for me.”

Dulcie was too tired to answer. She ate her soup. It was warm and comforting, with lumps of potato and shreds of salt beef in it. She mulled over the thought that she could leave Dr. Flood if she got tired of working for him, and that nobody would send dogs to hunt her down—nobody would even think it was particularly strange. She was at home with this thought now. Freedom was easy to get used to.

After she ate she went to find the burial detail. On the way she picked up a stave from an empty barrel that had been broken open.

They hadn’t filled in the long trench yet. Dulcie found No-Joke in the middle of the long row of white-faced soldiers, each laid down carefully, feet together, hands crossed.

She knelt beside the trench and picked up a sharp rock. Pressing as hard as she could, she scratched a cross into the gray barrel stave. Then she stood and drove it into the ground, working it through the red clay until it stood up on its own.

It wouldn’t stand long, she knew. Dulcie still had her promise to keep, even if she didn’t know
how
she was going to find No-Joke’s family. But No-Joke would probably stay in this mass grave forever, unmarked and unidentified.

And only Dulcie knew that his name was probably Eliza.

TWENTY

I
T HAD BEEN THREE DAYS SINCE THAT HOUR ABOVE
Pumpkin Vine Creek, and the First Division had not moved. The battle was still going on, and it didn’t have a name yet, but the men were calling what had happened on May 25 the Hell-Hole. The two armies were entrenched in the woods, and the firing went on all day long. The weather had been unrelievedly hot since the storm the night of the Hell-Hole, and the stench of the still-unrecovered dead hung heavy over the lines. Everyone was jittery. People didn’t laugh all the time anymore, and when they did laugh there was a ragged, desperate edge to it. Jeremy expected the firing to break out into another slaughter at any moment. Whatever he was doing, whatever he was thinking about, he always had one ear on the gunfire, ready to notice any change in intensity.

His stomach hurt.

The frayed edges of the 107th had gradually joined together again. Half the men were gone, although not all of
these were dead. There were a lot of injured who had been sent back in ambulances to Cartersville, Georgia, where hospitals had been set up in some houses.

The battlefield had spread, Jeremy heard. The rest of Sherman’s army was engaged—such an innocent-sounding word that was,
engaged
—just to the north, and the cannon fire pounding in the distance told Jeremy that the fighting up there was much hotter. The area around and behind the battlefield was such a maze of trenches and pathways that it was easy to get lost in it, and there were rumors already of men wandering into the wrong camp and being captured.

“There are no more to bury right now,” said Dulcie.

“That’s good,” said Jeremy wearily. One of his many duties since he lost his drum had been burying arms and legs.

“Come and eat something.”

He followed her to the fire. A cauldron hung over it on a tripod—the medical corps had been allowed to bring heavy equipment like this. She scooped up a tin bowl of soup for him and one for herself. They sat down on the ground.

“Did they find Lars yet?” he asked, more out of a feeling of obligation than any real worry. It was honestly hard to like Lars any better now that he was among the missing. (Jack had turned up a few hours after the battle, and Jeremy wasn’t altogether sure he’d been in it.)

“No.”

Jeremy took his spoon out of his pocket and ate the soup. “This ain’t as bad as what we usually get,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Oh, you made it?”

She nodded.

“Oh, well, it’s good, then. Where did you get potatoes from?”

“They sent them from Nashville for the hospitals. To prevent scurvy.”

Jeremy savored the potatoes. He held a chunk of one between his teeth and bit it slowly, enjoying the mealiness of it. Potatoes were something the soldiers were supposed to get in their rations, but never did.

“At least you’ve seen the elephant now.”

Jeremy managed to smile. He could tell she was trying to cheer him up, but he really didn’t care about the elephant anymore.

“I want you to help me find No-Joke’s people,” she said. “I promised to let them know he was dead.”

“I’m sure the colonel or somebody has them in the muster book. He’s probably written them already.”

“I don’t think No-Joke enlisted under his real name. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t.”

She sounded very serious. Jeremy looked at her.

“No-Joke was a woman,” said Dulcie.

“You’ve no right to say that about him!” Jeremy set his empty bowl down with an angry clatter. He thought of No-Joke, the only one of them who had joined up to free
the slaves and for no other reason. “He was a good soldier!”

“Who ever said he wasn’t? Here.”

Jeremy took the tintype Dulcie handed him. He looked at the hollow-cheeked, unsmiling young woman with No-Joke’s serious eyes. “That’s his sister Eliza.”

“Then how come you knew right away what I meant?”

Jeremy looked at the picture again. The dark-clad family of four stared somberly back at him, posed and frozen, their heads held stiff for the photographer. When No-Joke showed him the picture, Jeremy had assumed that his family had just sent it to him in the mail. But come to think of it, No-Joke never got any mail. At least Jeremy had never seen him get any. He was like Jeremy in that.

“He wasn’t one of the old 107th,” he said aloud. “He was one of the 145th, from New York City. They were broken up and put into different regiments.”

“So nobody knew him,” said Dulcie.

“Someone had to know him,” said Jeremy. “There are lots of men from the 145th in the 107th.”

“New York City has 800,000 people,” said Dulcie, who had learned this from Miss Lottie’s attempts to memorize geography lessons. “I bet no one knew him. And he made sure his pardners were men who weren’t from the city.”

Jeremy hardly listened to her. He was staring at Eliza, who stared back at him with No-Joke’s burning black eyes.
Take away the long hair—Jeremy blinked. Now he was having trouble seeing the woman
not
as No-Joke.

“Besides, look at his pocketknife.”

Jeremy took the open knife she handed him but didn’t look at it. He was in shock. He didn’t have anything against females. It wasn’t that. It was just that they were supposed to do female things, darning and tatting and … and whatever it was they did. They weren’t supposed to be marching through Georgia with General Sherman. Well, there was Dulcie, of course, but she was contraband. That was different.

And if No-Joke was a woman, he realized with growing horror, then
anybody
could be a woman. Well, not Lars, maybe—he had that big golden beard.
Had
had.