The March (7 page)

What’s taking so long! Old Thompson stood up from his chair and addressed the wagons in front of theirs: What is your business here? He could not bear the wait. He had things to say to Horace before the Devil took him.

You best not tire yourself with all this frettin, Sophie said.

She was right. He sat back down, closed his eyes, and said a prayer to calm himself. With his eyes closed, he smelled a dead country.

Sophie, he said, am I the Pharaoh?

She shook her head. She never knew what would come out of that mouth. You jes yerself, she said.

Because if I’m the Pharaoh I’m convinced. I don’t need no frogs, nor no locusts, I’m letting you go. You want your freedom, I grant it to you. And this, he said, waving his hand about, is what goes along with it. This is what you get with your nigger freedom.

Tears came to his eyes. The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self-regard. What a scant, foolish pretense was a family, a culture, a place in history, when it was all so easily defamed. And God was behind this. It was God who did this, with the Union as his instrument.

In fact, he loved and admired his brother as much as he hated him. He saw them together as young men in their competition and he dreaded how old and suffering he might find Horace now at the end of life. And as long as he dreaded what he might find, there was resistance in that, resistance to the God who had taken every presumption from them. Even love aghast was love, and God could not destroy that.

VII

W
REDE’S SURGERY WAGONS WERE WITH THE DIVISION
sent up the road to Waynesboro to rescue the embattled cavalry of General Kilpatrick. Sherman had deployed the cavalry as a feint, and the Rebels, thinking he was preparing to move on Augusta, put up a stiff resistance. The strategy worked, but the losses were heavy. With Waynesboro finally secured, Wrede established his field hospital in the railroad depot. There were so many wounded in the hand-to-hand fighting that orderlies had to leave them on canvas stretchers outside on the station platform. They lay there moaning, calling for water. Emily Thompson moved among them with soft words to ease their suffering if she could. She’d discovered, and Wrede had concurred, that a woman’s nursing meant something more to the men in the way of reassurance. His army nurses, too, had noticed the quieting balm of her presence. And she had learned quickly. You did not give men with stomach or chest wounds more than a sip of water. For those whose pain was unendurable, she gently held her hand under their heads and put tincture of opium to their lips. To others she dispensed cups of brandy. The men made weak self-deprecating jokes, or thanked her for her ministrations with tears in their eyes. For some, she wrote their letters as they lay dying.

Emily was astonished at herself. That she had like a brazen hussy found Wrede Sartorius on the march and joined him. That she had proved able to look upon hideous sights. That she could live in the open as men did, with none of the soft fluff and appurtenances of grooming that women were supposed to find essential to living.

She felt no pangs of guilt for betraying her Southern loyalties. It all had to do with this Union doctor. She was absolved by his transcendent attentions to the war wounded. North or South, military or civilian—he made no distinctions. Even now, some gray uniforms were among the bluecoats lying on their pallets. He seemed above the warring factions, Wrede Sartorius. He was like some god trying to staunch the flow of human disaster. She had lost her entire family in this war, yet she felt that his comprehension of its tragedy was beyond her own. It was characteristic of him to have come to her home to see about her poor father. She felt privileged when he talked to her or inquired after her comfort. He spoke with something not quite like a foreign accent, it was more an intonation that might have come of his formal way of talking. She did not detect in him any of the signs she had been getting from men since she was a child. Of course his responsibilities were enormous but she felt that even in ordinary social circumstances he would not be given to social stratagems. There would be none of the practiced gallantry of Southern boys who at the same time, she knew, would not think twice if given the opportunity to take advantage of her.

Yet she received from him a manly acknowledgment of her person, some subtle acceptance of her presence that was not entirely official.

It was late into the night by the time the work was done. Emily stood in the door of the railroad station watching as, by torchlight, nurses loaded the amputees into ambulances. A few yards into the woods, men dug the pit for the severed limbs. A burial squad arrived with their wagon of coffins to remove the dead to a graveyard. Corpses were searched for personal items—the letters, rings, diaries, and enlistment papers that would identify them. Company commanders were required to write official condolences to the families of the dead men.

Emily was exhausted. She had as yet no indication of where she was supposed to sleep this night. Inside the depot, nurses were scrubbing the floor and operating tables with sand. Sartorius sat at the stationmaster’s desk writing his notes in the light of a kerosene lamp. For this task he wore wire-rim spectacles that she found charming. He was rendered boyish by them, a student at his studies. And he had the most beautiful hands, squared and strong but with long, slender white fingers. How skillful those hands were. One of the nurses told her, because she still couldn’t manage to watch the surgical procedures, that the doctor was renowned in the corps for removing a leg in twelve seconds. An arm took only nine. The field hospitals always ran short of soporifics. There was never enough chloroform to go around, and so given only a slug of brandy a soldier would have reason to bless the doctor who did the job as quickly as possible.

WREDE’S MEN FOUND
billets for them—a house on the main street that was still reasonably intact, though windows were shattered and grapeshot had pocked and splintered the siding. The owner, an elderly widow woman, met them at the door weeping. I’ve nothing left, she cried, I’m plumb cleaned out. What more do you want of me? She was a wailing supplicant, clasping her hands over her heart. But when she saw Emily she squared her shoulders, threw her head back, and assumed an imperious expression. You run my slaves off, stole my provisions. I thought there was no more you could do to befoul this house, she said to Wrede. Emily looked away, too embarrassed to say anything. But Wrede didn’t seem to be listening. He ordered a private to bring the woman some rations and escorted Emily upstairs.

They stood for a moment on the landing.

We return-march to the corps before dawn, Wrede said. He looked at his pocket watch. I’m sorry, I should have released you hours ago.

I’ve done nothing to compare with what has been required of you this day.

He smiled and shook his head. We know so little. Our medical service is no less barbarous than the war that requires it. Someday we will have other means. We will have found botanical molds to reverse infection. We will replace lost blood. We will photograph through the body to the bones. And so on.

Wrede chose a room, nodded, and closed the door behind him.

Emily stood thinking of what he had said. She didn’t know if she had heard him correctly.

She went to her room, closed the door, undressed, and lay down in a soft bed for the first time in many nights. Yet she was far from sleep. She had never before known a man whose thoughts could startle her so. She was an educated woman. She had taken first prizes in Essays and French at St. Mary’s Junior College for Episcopal Young Women. After her mother’s death she sat as hostess at her father’s dinners. Distinguished jurists dined at their table. She’d always acquitted herself well in the conversation which was often philosophical. Yet it was as if this doctor put into her mind images of another world, one she could see only from afar, appearing and disappearing as through drifting clouds.

She lay staring into the darkness. The bed was cold. She shivered under the blankets. She did not like their smell. In time of war men in uniform could occupy a home with impunity. She herself had suffered such an invasion, had she not? But for a woman it was different. The old lady had simply assumed I was a trollop, Emily thought. I would have made the same assumption in her place. I have compromised myself. Never before in my life have I given anyone reason to question my respectability.

She sat up in bed. What would Father say? A wave of cold fear, like nausea, passed through her. What could have been in her mind, what had possessed her? To have chosen this vagabondage! She was truly frightened now, shaking and on the verge of tears. She lay back down and pulled the covers to her chin. In the morning, she must somehow find a way to get back home. Yes, that is exactly what she must do. She belonged nowhere else but home.

Her resolution had the effect of calming her. She thought of the man in the next room. She listened for any sound that might have suggested Wrede Sartorius was awake. She could believe of him that he did not require sleep. But she heard nothing. Nor was any light coming from his room or she would have seen it through her window, where she saw only the shadow of a large tree.

WREDE HAD PROCURED
a mount for her, and on the march she rode beside him. The sun rose as they were passing through a forest of towering pines, straight as a rule and greened out only at the tops. Emily felt herself in a hallowed place, the footfalls of the horses and mules and even the creak of the rolling wagons hushed by the thick bed of brown pine needles covering the forest floor. As the day came on she could see, on either side of them off in the woods, the covering infantry drifting among the trees, disappearing and reappearing as if with discretion.

She found in the steady peaceful march through the pine forest a reason to admire men. As Northerners these soldiers were far from their homes and families. Yet they persisted and walked the earth as if the earth were their home. She became aware that Wrede was speaking and didn’t know if she had transferred his words into her own thoughts or if he had been reading her mind.

I confess I no longer find it strange to have no habitation, to wake up each morning in a different place, he said. To march and camp and march again. To meet resistance at a river or a hamlet and engage in combat. And then to bury our dead and resume the march.

You carry your world with you, Emily said.

Yes, we have everything that defines a civilization, Wrede said. We have engineers, quartermaster, commissary, cooks, musicians, doctors, carpenters, servants, and guns. You are impressed?

I don’t know what to think. I’ve lost everything to this war. And I see steadfastness not in the rooted mansions of a city but in what has no roots, what is itinerant. A floating world.

It dominates, Wrede said.

Yes.

And in its midst you are secure.

Yes, Emily whispered, feeling at this moment that she had revealed something terribly intimate about herself.

But supposing we are more a nonhuman form of life. Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.

I am not sure the General would be pleased to hear himself described so, Emily said in all solemnity. And then she laughed.

But Wrede clearly liked this train of thought. All the orders for our vast movements issue forth from that brain, he said. They are carried via the generals and colonels and field officers for distribution to the body of us. This is the creature’s nervous system. And any one of the sixty thousand of us has no identity but as a cell in the body of this giant creature’s function, which is to move forward and consume all before it.

Then how do you explain the surgeons, whose job it is to heal and to save lives?

That the creature is self-healing. And where the healing fails, the deaths are of no more consequence than the death of cells in any organism, always to be replaced by new cells.

Again that word
cells.
She looked over at him, her expression an inquiry.

Wrede guided his mount alongside hers. That is what our bodies are composed of, he said. Cells. They are the elemental composition, to be seen only under a microscope. Different cells with different functions comprise tissues, or organs, or bone, or skin. When one cell dies, a new cell grows in its place. He took her hand in his and studied it. Even the integument of Miss Thompson’s hand has a cellular structure, he said.

He glanced at her with those alarmingly ice-blue eyes, as if to see that she understood. Emily blushed and, after a moment, withdrew her hand.

They rode on. She was extraordinarily happy.

VIII

T
HEY STOOD IN THE STOCKADE TOWER, WET AND MIS
erable as the cold rain pelted their shoulders and dripped off their caps and down their necks.

Will said, I was ready to tell them who I was.

Yes, Arly said, that we was hiding out in disguise just waitin for ’em. Sure, that would’ve been the thing, all right.

Well, look where you have got us? Can you say we are more better off than these poor Yankees here we are supposed to be guarding? We eat the same slop they get. We stand without a roof over our heads in this damn rain just like them. So where is anything different?

Will, son, you just don’t think.

And then to have a pistol put to my head till I swear an oath of allegiance to my own side! Like I wasn’t who I am! No wonder they couldn’t trust us no more than to send us up here to this miserable duty. What would you do in their place? Because you can’t ever trust no man who swears the oath because you put a pistol to his head.