The March (12 page)

Grabbing Will by the elbow, Arly hurried them through the streets till they found the church. It was a First Baptist, towering in lordly granite over a town square. The front doors were open and the hymn poured forth so as to seem to fill the live oaks abounding in the park. They climbed the steps and found themselves in the overflow of soldiers standing just inside. Pardon me, Arly said, pushing his way forward. Pardon, ’scuse me, pardon. I hope we’re not too late, he said to Will, who was pushing along right behind him, though not knowing why. Maybe halfway down the aisle, Arly saw some small space in the middle of a pew. Pardon us, brother, ’scuse us, I do beg pardon, he murmured, flashing hallowed smiles at the men whose toes he was stepping on with his new shoes.

And then they were standing in place like everyone else, and with hymnals in their hands. The congregation was in color a uniform blue, though some civilians could be seen here and there. But the rich chorale was of soldierly voices, strong and not entirely on key but powerfully fervent in calling upon one another to go down to the river to pray.

Churches had always made Will nervous, perhaps beginning when he was just a tad and saw his mama and papa become completely different people in church from the drunk and the shrew they were the rest of the week. He didn’t know what churchgoing was for except for people to pretend to be better than they were, and it was that pretense that frightened him. From this his idea grew along with him and now, looking around, he saw the same open mouths and glazed eyes of singers but knew they not only pretended but wanted to be better people than they were. But this was a no more comforting insight, given the war that was going on which meant no matter what people wanted, or thought they wanted, they would still go and do what they had always done, finding different ways to sin against their Lord and then going to church to buy some repentance that would clear them for a while and then building up the sin again and coming back for another installment of repentance, and so on. By that measure, Will thought, there ought to be their own church for this Yankee army to take along on their backs, for how does anyone know when they’re supposed to burn one to the ground or pray in it? God help me, Will thought, with no sense of the contradiction in him, because I can’t give myself to the nigger-keeping side I was born to neither. I don’t know nothing or no one to give myself to with my whole heart except maybe Miss Emily Thompson.

When the hymn singing was done a pipe organ murmured softly as the basket was sent around. Will worried that he hadn’t even a penny to offer so as not to look bad. But glancing over to where the usher was handing the basket to the first man on the aisle, and then watching as the coins and even Federal dollars dropped into it, and the basket advanced toward him, he turned his mind to the fact that not he but Arly had put them in the middle of this pew, and in the very moment the basket was placed on his fingertips he knew it would happen that Arly would punch it up from the bottom and it and the money would fly into the air, and they would be on their hands and knees, banging their heads on the back of the pew in front of them while picking up the coins and bills and putting almost all the money back where it belonged and then risen to their feet—the usher glowering down at the end of the aisle, the soldiers on either side shaking their heads—the bumbling oafs smiling sheepishly, which was true in his case, and plain cunning in Arly’s, and with the sacrament of giving now running smoothly again, and the organ playing softly its deferential piping to the hallowed name, their standing and facing forward, just two red faced with embarrassment worshipers hardly able to wait on the end of the service before taking themselves with someone else’s pay in their pockets back to the whores on Charleston Street.

WREDE SARTORIUS WAS
given the ground-floor ward and operating room of the Military Hospital, a luxury that he relished after all this time in the field. But Emily couldn’t see it that way. Of the twenty beds on the ward, half were filled with soldiers of the Confederate army. They were men dying of their wounds or wasting away with disease. The smell was awful even after she had the windows opened to air the place out. And because of the Union blockade, the hospital lacked even such things as rolled bandages. There was no calomel, no chloroform. There were no emetics, rubefacients, or narcotics. So it was a matter of supplying the hospital from the surgical field cases. Besides that, the army at rest in Savannah hardly meant a falling off of patients. Men were reporting with fevers and bronchial congestions acquired during the siege of the city: sitting out in the swampy terrain around Savannah, living in wet clothes, hungry and unable to light fires, they were coming in sick and hardly able to stand. And now that there was a general relaxation of military discipline the enlisted men were on the town drinking and fighting and knocking one another about and showing up, the worse for wear, in the early hours of the morning. This hospital in the genteel city of Savannah was more like a madhouse. To make matters worse, they were understaffed. Sartorius was without an assistant surgeon. Three of the regimental nurses were down—two with pneumonia, the other with a recurrence of swamp fever. So not only Emily and the pair from Millen were doing hospital duty but also little Pearl, who was stationed in the supply room folding towels and rolling bandages.

But where were those two men now? They had a way of not being there when you needed them.

Wrede had told her that the moment he examined them back at Millen he knew they were not what they said they were. They could not have spent any time at all in that mud hole. They were not starved. Their eyes were clear. Their skin was healthy, their fingernails were pink, and their beards were not long.

I suspect they are spies, Wrede had said.

Spies? She was shocked. She thought one of them, Will, was rather a sweet boy. How could someone like that be a spy?

Such scoundrels abound in the chaos of war. I don’t know if the regimental affiliations they professed are real or not, and I don’t care. If they decided to attach themselves to my medical company because it was less apt to follow military protocol, they reasoned correctly. Whatever they might be after—perhaps my procedures for resections?—they are welcome to. He laughed. In the meantime, they will scrub the floors and clean up after the dysentery patients.

Wrede Sartorius didn’t usually speak of his past, so she was surprised when he said that as a boy he’d been sent by his father to a military academy in Göttingen. The experience had taught him to detest drilling and saluting and all the other hierarchical warrior nonsense. That was the phrase he used—she smiled—
hierarchical warrior nonsense.

A CIVILIAN WAS
brought in, a man with a depressed skull fracture. He arrived in the arms of a Negro. He did not belong in a military hospital, as one of the guards had insisted, but the victim’s wife said, The likes of you did this to him, and we are not leaving. On Wrede’s orders the man was brought to the surgery. His head was shaved. Emily came in with a cloth moistened with bromine and washed the bare skull. Gently, she patted the skin dry. The patient was perhaps sixty. He was muscular and deep-chested, but his chest hairs were gray. The face was ashen. The eyes were closed. The jaw was slack and the breathing barely perceptible. The skull was caved in an ellipse on the right side just above the forehead. She stepped back, her eyes fixed on the operating table. She would not flinch.

Wrede made an incision front to back through the length of the injury and two lateral incisions at either end of that, and folded the flaps back to reveal the damaged skull. A male nurse sponged the area. The loose fragments and splinters Wrede removed one by one with a forceps. The depressed bone was four centimeters in length. Taking up a trephine, he locked its perforator pin into the fracture line. This is to prevent cutting into the membrane under the bone, the dura mater, he said to Emily. He had lately found himself instructing her as if she were a medical student. Emily was no less aware of this. She’d discovered that his medical terminology, and the Apollonian calm with which he attended to the most awful matters, enabled her to find her courage. She looked on and learned.

He tightened the pin with a screw positioned halfway up the shaft of the trephine. Like that, he said. Emily nodded, though Wrede, bent over the patient, could not see her. Now he rotated the handle of the trephine and the circular cutting head ground into the bony plate until the disk of bone was all but cut through. He loosened the perforator pin, retracted it, and locked it and passed the trephine off. Then he inserted a flattened blade under the bone and slowly levered the disk away from the skull.

Under the cerebral membrane was an enormous blood blister purple in color. To Emily, it looked like the head of a toadstool. Hematoma, Wrede said. He chose a small scalpel with a curved blade and incised the membrane to set the hematoma draining. Linen dressings were applied to take up the blood. There should be no pressure now, he said. Until the discharge ended, the wound would be lightly covered with linen dressings and lint. If he survives, Wrede said, he will wear a lead plaster until eventually something like bone will grow back.

The patient was moved to the ward. They had not yet taken the trouble to know his name. Emily was prepared to sit by the bed and attend to the dressings. No, Wrede said, we will have the widow sit by him. You will come out with me and comfort her.

Emily said, The widow?

Wrede washed his hands in a basin of water. He looked at her and smiled. It was a sorrowful smile, with those ice-blue eyes of his suggesting the pain of his own limitations. We will find out how much time passed before I attended him. You cannot remove the pressure too soon. He is not a young man. The concussive shock is severe. He may never awaken. Even if he does, there is almost always infection. There is not much to be done with an infected brain. Come, Wrede said, you will help me not to leave the woman hopeless.

As they walked to the anteroom, Wrede asked Emily if she’d remembered that tonight was Christmas Eve. She hadn’t. It surprised her that the holidays of life were still applicable. He took her arm. We will dine this evening with the officers at the Pulaski Hotel. And then would you like to see the Negroes dancing?

When they came into the anteroom, Mattie Jameson stood and, seeing Emily, blurted out the first thought that flashed through her mind. Aren’t you Judge Thompson’s daughter from over in Milledgeville? she said.

FROM THE DAY
they arrived in Savannah, Mattie did not recall a moment in which John was not enraged, shouting at everybody, cursing the powers that be. In the first place the army would not have him. They enlisted the boys readily enough, and now where were they? Gone to God knows where, to South Carolina, her sons, her babies, fifteen and fourteen years old, gone for soldiers. But not their father. John had actually accosted General Hardee, who had looked at him and said he was too old to march as an enlisted man and could not be commissioned an officer unless he brought in a regiment of his own. I’ll do that then, by God, Hardee, John had said, and reported that the General had smiled, as of course he would, the entire state having been scraped bare of able-bodied men and his so-called army a hapless assemblage of militias and cadets.

And then John had found it intolerable that, there being no decent houses available in Savannah, they had to board on Green Street with her older sister Cissie, whom he had never liked for her officiousness. And it was true that Cissie had a way about her of knowing better than anyone else, in any given situation, what must be done and how it should be done and giving orders accordingly. That was surely the reason she never found a husband. She had been that way even as a child, as Mattie well knew—the games they played always Cissie’s games, with Cissie’s rules—and even though there was but a year and a half separating them, she seemed to have been born knowing everything and pronouncing errorless judgments so that Mattie had always to give in, to revise her opinions, to gainsay her own judgments, just as she did living with John Jameson who had not a little of the same overbearing nature, which is why he probably found his sister-in-law so intolerable. They were two peas in a pod. Cissie wore a perpetual frown—it had been grooved into her face from so many years of it and now, with her lips pressed together and her eyes narrowed, her simplest remark, however well meant, had a knife edge to it. The meals in her dining room were cold and silent. Her menus reflected the wartime shortages and the darkies were somewhat slower in serving than they should have been, as if, in anticipation of Sherman’s advancing armies, they were practicing their independence. And she, Mattie, was strung taut between her sister and her husband, deferential to one and placatory of the other. Cissie had inherited the family manse, and above all, without her saying a thing, like a miasma in the house, was the fact of their imposition. It had been not even a month, but it seemed like forever.

Of course John was out of the house as much as possible, God knows what he was doing all day in the streets of Savannah, with the army stationed behind entrenchments everywhere you looked. But removed from his land he was a lost soul. And one day, without her knowledge, he went out with our Roscoe and when he came back he was alone and dear Roscoe was gone, as if he’d never existed after all those years with them and never a bit of trouble. But all John would say was he’d got the best out of Roscoe and what was left wasn’t worth providing for.

Mattie didn’t know how, when they got back to Fieldstone, the place would get up and running again, John having sold off all the working hands. She knew, of course, that there might never again be slaves but she couldn’t quite see how anything could be done without them. And so when she imagined the war over and a return to their home, as often as not in her imagination the slaves would still be there. She would read in the papers the bad tidings for the Confederacy but somehow she couldn’t connect it to a whole change of Southern life. She would, for a moment, and then the connection would dissolve and the war would seem to her, however horrible, a temporary thing, an interruption only, without any great consequences. She worried about her sons going off to battle, but at the same time she couldn’t imagine them not coming back or, when they did come back, being any older or different from when they went away.