Hot Valley (28 page)

For much of the summer of 1864, I worked at the field hospital near Winchester. Our own position was dangerous enough to begin with, as Early's forces were still running amok in the valley, ambushing our men and coming perilously close to the hospital; I often wondered who had given the order for the medical corps to be established in such a vulnerable position. All this changed, however, when General Grant sent us General Sheridan. News spread fast that this was the man who would end the war, at whatever cost. In the hospital, we braced ourselves for hard work, and in private I prayed that both sides would somehow manage to lose each other in the labyrinth of hills and gullies that characterized the area. It was a beautiful country—as beautiful in its own way as the landscape of my childhood. But as time went by it was increasingly marked by war, by fire, by death. Sheridan arrived with one mission in mind: to beat Early into submission, and to turn the Shenandoah Valley into a barren waste.

Wounded men came into the hospital in considerable numbers every day, although they assured us that they had inflicted far greater damage than they'd sustained. Early's men, they said, were cowards who would run rather than fight, but by the look of the wounded there were enough of Early's men who would stand their ground rather than let the Yankees pass unchallenged. I did all that I could to help them, but with the massive numbers of sick and dying still unmoved after the Battle of Kernstown, it was all we could do to prevent disease from wiping out all of us.

With each intake we heard new tales from the front line, some of it obviously bragging, as soldiers' tales are apt to be—I learned to sift the truth from the fact—and some of it very strange. There's a superstitious streak in your average fighting man, always ready to see some supernatural influence at work in the battlefield, and we heard many tales of angels coming through the smoke to carry the dying off to heaven, much as in the myths of the ancient races. And again and again I heard news of a “black devil” who fought harder and more fiercely than any other Rebel, who “rose from hell” to inflict terrible injuries before disappearing with a whiff of sulfur. I gave these tales little credence, but they became the currency of the sickroom and troubled the fever dreams of many an injured man. The Black Devil became as real a figure of the times as General Lee or Jefferson Davis.

Work, and the horrors I witnessed, made me into an automaton, which was a blessing in disguise. When I slept, I slept like a dead man, absolutely unconscious until I awoke—suddenly, totally awake—and started working again. When I saw my face in the shaving mirror I was skinny and pale. I had always looked younger than my years; now I looked older. Perhaps all the depravity of the last few years was catching up with me at last—which would be ironic, as I was now to all intents and purposes celibate. My only intimate contact was on the wards. I cleaned and cared for the men in my charge—all colors and ages and shapes and sizes—with as much fortitude as I could muster. Sometimes, they wanted comfort of a more carnal nature and would force my hand down onto a stiff cock. Once, I would have taken advantage of the situation; now I just took a leaf out of Nurse Jenny's book and rapped any upstanding member with a cold metal spatula which I carried in my belt for just such occasions. That soon took the pep out of them.

For all my good intentions, I could not prevent myself from becoming fond of some of the men—I realized that
mine was essentially a sentimental nature, looking to give and receive love, which is what had led me into so many ridiculous situations in the past. I had mistaken fucking for love, and had given too much of myself, to the wrong people, as a result. Most of the men I processed as a butcher would process meat, but there were a few who touched me in a different way.

One I will never forget came to us from one of the Zouave regiments that had fought their way down the Potomac and were now dispersed among other units. He was a dark, handsome New Yorker, with a typical gruff East Coast accent, dark thinning hair, and a thick moustache—he reminded me a great deal of the railroad workers who used to fuck me at the White Horse. He had been badly injured by flying shrapnel and came to us delirious with fever, his Zouave uniform in tatters. He had lost the fez that characterized those most elegant of soldiers, but retained the tight-fitting jacket, the baggy pantaloons, the white leggings with their leather cuffs, and of course the wide, long sash that is the pride of the Zouave soldier. It was all filthy and badly torn, revealing large expanses of tanned, hairy thigh, chest, and stomach. His injuries were mostly concentrated on the right arm, which had taken a bullet in the elbow, smashing the bones to splinters. Before he recovered from his delirium, he was hurried into the operating theater, and his arm was amputated just below the shoulder. He hardly seemed to feel the pain, but tossed on his bed in terrible nightmares, occasionally screaming out. I did all I could to make him comfortable, and prayed that gangrene had not already set in.

For two weeks I nursed him through fever, dripping water into his mouth on a sponge, feeding him when possible with soup, providing him with the means to urinate and defecate, washing him, and even trimming his hair and moustache. I tried shaving him, but it was too painful for him, and soon he had grown a beard that almost matched the moustache in thickness and splendor. It had been my job, when he first came into my care, to cut away the remnants of his splendid Zouave uniform, and to clean up the lesser cuts and lacerations. What was revealed, as the tatters came away, was a body of immense strength and elegance, the skin brown, the hair jet black. I washed him in clean water, and allowed myself to delight in the beauty of his form, which seemed like a light in all that darkness.

His name was Michael Kardashian—he was of Armenian extraction. All this he told me when, one grim day like any other, he suddenly awoke from his fever, sat up in bed, and asked for food. By some miracle, he had survived the amputation, the fever, and the malnutrition of the last weeks, and apart from a certain haggardness, he looked as healthy as anyone in the hospital. I brought him water, and he caught me by the arm. “You're the one, aren't you? The one who took care of me?”

I said that I was.

“I owe you my life.”

“I'm sorry about your…”

“My arm? Well, I'm alive, no? There's nothing that my right hand could do that my left hand can't.”

I helped him eat, shave, and wash, but he was impatient to learn to be self-sufficient. He was clumsy, slopping water into his bed as he attempted to clean himself, and I had to scold him, but we always ended up laughing. I was able to give him a little privacy by hanging sheets around his bed, while he struggled to perform the most basic functions “without an audience,” as he put it. He never minded me being there.

I knew that Michael was well on the road to recovery when, during one of these washing sessions, he developed an erection. I'd had ample opportunity to see his cock when he was ill, and I had tried not to be too interested in its size and girth, even when (as frequently happened with fever
patients) it became spontaneously, rigidly erect. Now, however, as I was washing his back, I noticed that he was trying to keep his knees together. He was sitting up in bed, and it looked like a most uncomfortable position.

“You can lie back now, Michael.”

“No, I can't.”

“Why not?”

He grinned. “I'm embarrassed.”

“You've never been embarrassed before—oh. I see.” He lay back, and his dick bounced up to lie against his hairy stomach. It reached up to his belly button.

“I guess you've seen it all before.” With his left hand, he was idly rubbing the hair on his chest.

“Yes, I sure have.”

“Don't suppose you could…give me a helping hand? I know I said that my left hand could do as well as my right, but—”

“You know I can't do that, Michael.”

“Aw, come on. Help a man out. Just let me feel alive for a while. Let me feel like someone cares for me.”

It was hard to resist, and he was very, very hard. With every beat of his heart, his dick pulsed on its mat of hair.

“Please?” His eyes were wet, his lips slightly parted. I put down the wet cloth and rested a hand on his groin. The heat that came off him was tremendous, and I worried that he was becoming feverish again. But the moment I touched him he sighed, closed his eyes, and looked immediately ten years younger. I let my fingers encircle his cock—they barely met around it, it was so thick—and started to jack him off. I did not want to overexcite him, as he was still a sick man, but I could see from the look on his face that this was doing him nothing but good. Or was I once again deluding myself?

With his remaining hand, he caressed my arm, reaching up to my shoulder, catching me by the collar, and pulling me toward him. When we kissed, his beard and moustache felt rough on my face—but his lips were soft, and his tongue even softer. He moaned slightly, the sound muffled by our joined mouths, and started spurting all over his hairy belly. When he had finished, I cleaned him up, held him for a while, dressed him, and changed the sheets. This happened many more times, and Michael told me frequently that he loved me and would never forget me. It went no further, but it was enough. After a month, he was well enough to leave the hospital and return to New York. He was no longer fit for active service, and I hope that he saw out the rest of the war in safety, surrounded by people who cared for him as much as I did.

 

I lived in a continuous present, untroubled by memories of the past or hopes and fears for the future, until one night I was visited by an unwelcome dream. I was back home in Vermont—how long ago and far away that seemed!—surrounded by the trees in their summer finery, the stream babbling along through our garden, my sisters and my parents sitting around me, smiling and laughing. I smelled the honeysuckle that grew wild in the hedge, and the savory smell of a roast chicken that my father was about to carve. I felt myself loved and embraced, as I had once been, but now it was so painful I almost cried out, as if someone had touched me on a wound.

And then the scene darkened; the stream ran cloudy, and black with blood. The leaves withered from the trees, my family faded away with their hands over their faces, and all was silent but for the throb of a heartbeat—mine, I suppose. Smoke filled the air, made my eyes water, made me choke and retch. The garden disappeared, and I was no longer at home, no longer in any place that I knew. The red glow of fire illuminated the scene, one figure looming from the confusion, growing nearer and larger, a dark silhouette that was part of the smoke, part of the fire. It came nearer to
me, smelling of blood and decay, and just as I was about to scream I recognized the face of Aaron Johnson.

I awoke with a start, convinced that the ward was on fire. But all was well; the only noises were the groans of the fever patients, the sobbing of the dying men, the occasional scream from the operating theater—noises that were so common I no longer heard them, as one does not hear birdsong in the woods.

I rose, even though I was not on duty, washed my face in cold water, and went to see if I could be of assistance anywhere. There was always too much to do, and never enough people to do it, so my offer was not refused, even though Nurse Jenny looked at me as if she'd seen a ghost.

However busy I made myself, I could not stop thinking about Aaron. I had been so proud, so sure of getting him, so angry when he avoided me. For a long time it had rankled with me like unfinished business, and I actually resented the high tone he'd taken with me, the pompous pronouncements on the right way to live our lives. Oh, how I'd tried to undermine him, to bring him down to my level! I thought, back then and for a long time afterward, that being queer excused me from the need to live a decent life. I thought that we were by our very nature outsiders, that we had been condemned by society to live beyond the pale and that our revenge would be to live exactly as we pleased. But life had taught me a few hard lessons—there was no sphere of existence into which questions of good and bad did not come. A man is not judged by his preferences, or the names he calls himself, but by his actions to others. Aaron had told me this a hundred times, and he tried to make me live right. I laughed at him, and when he turned away I found consolation with the first dick I could get my hands on.

Well, he was right, and I was wrong. And if I had utterly forfeited the right to call myself his friend, not only by the way I treated him back in Vermont but in the damnably foolish way I'd chosen to live since, I was well rewarded for it now. Perhaps, by hard work and self-sacrifice, I could one day purge myself of the shame that, I felt, had driven us apart. He would never know, of course; wherever Aaron Johnson was, he sure as hell wasn't thinking of me, and he would never need a fool like Jack Edgerton in his life.

I knew that it was a foolish dream, my dream of Aaron Johnson and how things might have been, but it gave me comfort and enabled me to be a better nurse. I allowed myself to think of him as my lover—my distant, absent, wholly ideal lover. And by thinking of myself as his, I kept away from others. So this was how my life would end, I thought, and I was not distressed.

 

What I had feared finally came about: the hospital was swept by dysentery, and the patients started dying by the dozen. I was no longer afraid of death or dead bodies, but the scale of the epidemic alarmed me. I was carrying out one or two a day, then four, then ten. We could not dispose of the bodies except in mass graves over which we were obliged to shovel quicklime in order to speed the process of decay and to contain the infection. I assumed that I would come down with the symptoms at any minute, as the level of hygiene was rudimentary at best, but every day I awoke with nothing worse than a headache and a dry mouth. I did not even develop diarrhea. I remained, to my dull astonishment, in relatively rude health.