The March (21 page)

AT THE MAIN
building of South Carolina College, three regimental surgeons had set up their dispensaries. Had they been ten they could not have met the demand. It was difficult keeping order in the entrance hall as civilians pushed against one another and cried out for help. These were whites from the city, people with burns or sprained or broken limbs. But several Union soldiers had been killed, and many more wounded, in an explosion. Sherman had ordered Columbia’s store of powder and shells to be thrown into the river, and something had gone wrong. The wounds of these men were horrible and occupied the surgeons for much of the afternoon.

Two nurses, army sergeants from the Medical Department, were newly assigned to Wrede Sartorius and they had taken over in the surgery, leaving Emily Thompson and Pearl to mop the bloodied floors, sack and remove the medical detritus, wash the towels, and carry in the bandages and splints and dispense the medicines. Emily thought it better that Mattie Jameson be stationed in the supply room where she could be spared the worst.

After the emergency had been dealt with, civilian patients were led into Wrede Sartorius’s examining room. The injuries he tended were of no great interest to him. For the most part the townsfolk were in states of shock and confusion. He prescribed cups of brandy, or laudanum in weak solution. He was made irritable by this seemingly endless procession of frightened people. It was left to Pearl and Emily to wrap them in army blankets, administer their dosages, and escort them to an upstairs floor where they could rest on cots set up in the classrooms.

AS THE FIRES
raged through the evening, more and more people arrived at the gates. Blacks and whites were at first put in separate rooms to await a doctor. But the college was refuge, and by midnight both blacks and whites were camping out in the hallways.

Additional buildings had to be commandeered for the emergency, and more medical units set up there. Stephen Walsh could see from a hall window that two of the college buildings had caught fire. There were figures on the roofs beating at the flames with blankets. He saw them silhouetted against the red sky. What hell was this? Surely not the composed Hell of the priests and nuns. Their Hell was comforting. It meant there was a Heaven. This hell, my hell, is without ascription. It is life when it can no longer tolerate itself.

WALSH’S LEFT HAND
was swathed in bandages. He felt that it was appended to a cocoon. Or perhaps a wasp nest. The dressing on his right hand left the fingers free. Only the palm was burned, though the hand stung as badly as the other. He felt defenseless in these bindings. He wanted to tear them off with his teeth. In the morning, no matter what, he would rid himself of them and return to his company.

He hadn’t heard what she had said, that nurse, such was the bedlam of wailing and crying. But very fine-looking she was, and he had dipped his head and squinted to indicate that he was looking at her lips for no other reason than to read them.

In this gymnasium turned into a waiting area, there were more patients than there were litters for them, and people lay on the hardwood floor with folded blankets for pillows or sat, like himself, with their backs to the wall.

But she had been so gentle, leading him off to a side room as if he were her special charge. She had held his hands by the wrists in a pail of cold water and then applied the unguent. Bending to her task she invoked the power of the private act. Her light brown hair fell in ringlets on either side of her face and somehow the war was a very distant thing. Her effect on him was stunning. Marching with Sherman he had thought nothing approaching human intimacy would ever again be possible.

You got a name? she had said.

Stephen Walsh.

She looked at him. Her eyes were hazel, with lights of green. In their gaze he felt his soul was being studied. I am Nurse Jameson, she said, as if daring him to deny it.

How do you do.

Fine. But you ought to know better’n to play wiv fire, Stephen, she said. And then she had laughed.

HE WAS STILL
thinking about her. The elisions of her speech, the unschooled and unselfconscious way she moved and held herself, suggested the racial truth that Nurse Jameson was a black girl, freed, and enlisted for the Union.

He was not shocked. He’d been months on the march and the fact of fair-skinned Negroes no longer surprised him. In this strange country down here, after generations of its hideous ways, slaves were no longer simply black, they were degrees of white. Yes, he thought, if the South were to prevail, theoretically there could be a time when whiteness alone would not guarantee the identity of a free man. Anyone might be indentured and shackled and sold on an auction block, the color black having been a temporary expedient, the idea of a slave class itself being the underlying premise.

But there was something more elusive about this Miss Jameson. She had been talking to him in her soft lilt of a voice, teasing him a bit, but glancing at him with eyes that for just an instant would glaze over in bewilderment. And the seriousness with which she had gone about treating his burned hands, her concentration—the slow, careful attention she brought to the problem—suggested to him a person who had only recently been given independent responsibilities.

Now he was shocked as he found himself considering if, despite her nurse’s rank, this dazzling girl was not that far removed from childhood.

He wandered down the crowded hallway, hoping he might catch sight of her again.

IN THE EARLY
hours of the morning, Emily Thompson was called to assist when a black woman was brought in unconscious on a stretcher. The woman’s garments were half torn off and she had bruises on her chest and arms. One eye was swollen shut. Her face was battered. She was lifted to the table and what remained of her clothing was removed. After examination, Wrede decided first to repair a vesico-vaginal fistula, and directed the nurses to position her on her knees with her head and shoulders lowered.

Emily had to both hold up a lantern and pass to Sartorius the instruments he called for. She was made queasy by the awful procedure. Wrede’s hands were bloody, his eyes unblinking in their concentration. She looked for some recognizable emotion from him. Was it to be expressed only in the work of his hands? Must it be deduced? God knows what horrors this girl has endured. Emily could not bear to look. But not even the most private regions of the human body were beyond this doctor’s blunt investigation. Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this poor woman, but in her mind, too, was a sense of Wrede’s science as adding to the abuse committed by his fellow soldiers. He said not a word. It was as if the girl were no more than the surgical challenge she offered.

The operation concluded, one of the sergeants said, Uh-oh. The woman was expiring. Terrible sounds came from her throat. They held her, and she stiffened and slumped in their arms.

Wrede shook his head and, with a gesture indicating that they should remove the body, threw off his apron and, with barely a glance at Emily, left the room. His departure, having given her the clear impression that death was a state that did not interest him, left her openmouthed with shock.

Emily fled to an unoccupied alcove window on the top floor. She sat there to regain her composure. She told herself the man was overburdened, a brilliant doctor working week after week in the field. His nerves were strained—how could they not be? The responsibilities of every day on the march were bound to affect anyone. But another thought occurred to her that she would attribute to her own exhaustion, to the hours of unremitting work and the horror of a city burning. It was that Wrede Sartorius, the man to whom she had given herself, was not a doctor. He was a magus bent on tampering with the created universe.

Outside, lit by the red night sky, a crowd of the newly homeless filled the front yard. Army ambulances couldn’t get through. Emily saw women in the throng who were so familiar in appearance and deportment as to make her think she knew them. The way they carried themselves, their carriage, bespoke family. They held their children pressed to their sides and stood quietly waiting amid the restiveness around them. They were women of her class, the same whom she had lived among all her life. And they had lost everything.

My God, she whispered. Why am I not out there with them?

THE STATE ASYLUM
had caught fire and now some of the inmates were here in the college. They were frightened. They wandered through the halls, with their long hair and filthy clothes. They didn’t know where they were. They moaned and screamed. The surgeons sedated those whom the keepers could hold down. Troops were brought in to restore order.

After the maniacs were herded into the basement, their cries could be heard on the floors above. Patients waiting for treatment looked to the army doctors and nurses for some assurance that there were still civilized controls in the world, that all was not fire and madness and death.

Mattie Jameson was folding towels in the supply room where it was relatively quiet behind a door at the end of a short corridor. In the way of someone performing a simple and repetitious task, she was thinking of something else. With her head at a slight tilt and a smile on her face, she was at Fieldstone on a winter evening early in her marriage when John had no urgent matters to keep him away and they sat in the coziness of her sewing room with the drapes pulled against the chilly night, a fire in the hearth, and each of them in a chair reading. And they didn’t even have to speak, so natural was their intimacy. All at once she was still a young woman with a firmness of flesh and a secret pride in John’s hunger for her body. Though she had borne the two boys, she was still almost as lissome as she had been as a bride. She wanted nothing more from life than to please this forceful man, whom she imagined in her giddier states of mind to have descended from lions.

Mattie’s grief for her lost life and fears for her boys’ fate had devolved into a blessed state of dreaminess, so that when, finally, the agitation in the building caught her attention, it seemed to her something she could tend to as she had tended to her babies when they cried out in their sleep.

EMILY THOMPSON, RETURNING
to the main floor with her mind made up, and rehearsing what she must say to Wrede Sartorius, was immediately diverted by the sight of Mattie walking among the patients and crouching before them and touching their foreheads and speaking to them softly in a manner to soothe them. Emily stood back in some astonishment.

She had heard from Pearl something of the life on the Jameson plantation and, like Pearl, she had become accustomed to looking out for this woman, who invariably said, every time she saw Emily, Are you not Judge Thompson’s daughter from over in Milledgeville? What was clear at this moment was that Mattie Jameson’s mental state befitted the situation in which she found herself. The world at war had risen to her affliction and made it indistinguishable.

How fascinating this was. At one camp, Emily had asked Wrede to examine Mattie. He did, and discussed the condition afterward. This is a dementia, he had said. Yet if you were to see into her brain I am sure you would find no pathology. Some mental diseases, you do the autopsy and diagram the lesions. There are crystallized growths. Suppurating tumors. You see changes of color, soft yellow deposits, narrow canyons of eaten-away matter. But with some diseases there is no sign at all—the brain is in physical health.

Emily said, Then it’s not the brain but her mind that’s afflicted?

The mind is the work of the brain. It is not something in itself.

Then an affliction of the soul, perhaps.

Wrede had looked at her, regretting her remark. The soul? A poetic fancy, it has no basis in fact, he said, as if he shouldn’t have had to tell her.

As Emily watched her, Mattie, having talked and smiled her way down a corridor lined with patients, veered into a room and disappeared from sight. What was she doing? Emily, in pursuit, found her in a classroom fitted out as a studio. The gaslights here were dimmed. Patients sat disconsolately in the few chairs, their heads bowed. One wall was mirrored. An upright piano stood in a corner and that was what had caught Mattie’s eye. An elderly man, seated on the piano stool and reading his Bible, sensed her standing behind him. He swiveled on the stool and found her gazing at the piano with a rapturous expression on her face. And so he rose.

Mattie sat down and stared at the keyboard in that way of pianists who see it as a universe. Then she placed her fingers on the keys and began to play. It was a Chopin waltz, and though she played it hesitantly, shyly, she did so secure in the illusion that she was home at her own Bösendorfer grand.

Emily didn’t know who the composer was, but what she heard was a lilting theme of great refinement. The music evoked in her breast intimations of a civil life. It was almost a shock. Then, as Mattie Jameson grew more confident and the music became bolder and more expansive, Emily was brought back to her own resolve. She was looking at her reflection as lit in the soft light of the gas lamps. Do we have no souls? What is this I hear if not a soul given as music? I am hearing a soul, she said to herself. And immediately she ran off to gather her belongings.

OTHERS WERE DRAWN
to the music as well, and when Pearl came to the door she had to stand on tiptoe to see who was playing. She said to Walsh, What do you call it when the woman wedded to your papa is not your mama?

She would be your stepmother.

So I am my pap’s chile, but my step—

Mother’s—

My stepmother’s—

Stepchild.

Stepchild. Is that a natural thing? A step chile with a step mother?

It happens, Walsh said. It’s better than nothing.

Well, that poor crazy woman in there playing her music? Can you see her? Come here to where I am. You see? Thas her, Miz Jameson, and she is my step mother, Pearl said, nodding, to affirm the relationship. My step mother, who still know to play the piano. Used to hear her all the time. It made me angry. Black folks dying back in the quarters and she playing the piano like it didn’t mean nothin. Wouldn see me, look right through me, my step mother, the wife ma’m Miz Jameson.