Unholy Fire (4 page)

Tears were streaming silently down his face as he finished the job. Before moving on, the great hairy beast knelt on the ground next to me, just staring into my face and mouthing what might have been a prayer. Then his face drew closer and closer to my own until I felt the pressure of his lips on mine. It was only for a second, and then he was gone.

God knows what possessed him to do it. Perhaps, he was overcome with emotion. I'll never know. It was certainly not the kiss I had been longing for. As the pain grew to raw torture, I concluded it was God's way of mocking my lustful prayer before the battle.

I raised my head high enough to see that I was lying in one of the pastures around the old farmhouse on Harrison's Island. Hundreds of wounded men were scattered along the ground in every direction. One day earlier we had all been full of confidence, standing proud with our shiny muskets and handsome uniforms, part of a seemingly unstoppable force. God help the Rebels I had thought then. Now we were just individual mounds of filthy rags, stinking from sweat and urine, and dying in agony.

An elderly surgeon came along as night descended. He briefly examined each man, after which he pinned a colored card on the man's chest. The cards were red and blue. When he came to me, he leaned over, raised the edge of the now blood-soaked cheesecloth from my stomach, and without any expression in his face pinned a red card on my chest. Then he poured some amber liquid into a tin cup and helped me to swallow it.

“This is laudanum,” he said, “it will ease the pain.”

It did. When I next awoke it was to darkness. A sliver of moon had risen in the east, and I was very cold. Closing my eyes, I prayed that I would survive. When I opened them again, two men were kneeling on the ground beside me. One of them held a lantern over my face.

“Another for the dead pile,” he said, reaching down to grab my legs.

My mouth was so dry I could not speak.

“Aww, he's shit hisself. I can see his guts, too,” said the other one.

They picked up the man next to me, placed him on a litter, and left.

A harsh wind came up that made the suffering doubly hard for the men still lying in the fields with no blankets. A few well-intentioned soldiers cut up raw pine boughs and lit several small bonfires. Unfortunately, the swirling wind whipped the burning embers and smoke in every direction, just adding to the misery.

A few yards away from me, an officer babbled on endlessly about the plans he wanted his wife to make for their five children. He must have been very wealthy because the dispositions kept coming for more than an hour until he died.

As the balm of laudanum began to wear off, we all began to groan and wail in an unholy chorus, our torn bodies each moving to an individual ballet dictated by the spasms of pain. The wailing was punctuated by howling shrieks, as tortured nerve endings came back to life. My own screams lasted as long as my strength held out. Eventually, they subsided down to pathetic moans, and I rolled back and forth from side to side, clutching the purplish bloody mass inside me as if there was something I could do to put things back together the way they had been.

It was after I had already given up against the enormity of the pain and was praying for God to take me that I felt a sharp, painful sensation under my neck. Reaching up, I discovered that the locket my mother had given me the day I left our island was gone, ripped free by someone who thought he was robbing the dead. I felt him go through my pockets, but could do nothing to stop him.

Finding it impossible even to die, I cursed God and cursed my fate. By the time I regained my senses again, the bonfires had gone out and there was no longer any movement around me. Then I thought I heard someone calling my name. Another cruel illusion, I decided.

“John McKittredge,” I heard someone shout again, and knew it could not be a dream. I could see the glare of a torch moving slowly through the darkness forty or fifty feet away from me.

“Call out if you can,” came back the same voice, which I now recognized as that of Harlan Colfax.

“Here, Sergeant,” I shouted, but the words came out like the bark of a small dog.

The light came closer as he went from body to body.

“Here,” I called out once more, and then he was at my side, his rough, homely face reflected in the torchlight like a treasured heirloom.

“I only got across an hour ago, Lieutenant. I've been looking for you ever since.”

His eyes closed for several seconds after he pulled my bloody hands away from my stomach and saw what was there. It was his only visible reaction before he said, “I've seen worse today, believe me,” and ripped the red card away from my chest.

There were two men from the regiment with him. They placed me on a litter and carried me to the farmhouse, which had been turned into a surgical hospital. In the courtyard, corpses lay everywhere, covered with canvas shrouds. I was carried inside.

In the light of the oil lamps, I could see hideous shadows playing on the whitewashed walls as a surgeon cut and sawed away at a man lying on the kitchen table. It reminded me of paintings I had seen of the Spanish inquisition.

“Doctor, this officer is still alive,” said Sergeant Colfax to a surgeon who was standing in the hallway smoking a cigar.

The doctor stepped back into the kitchen and raised a lamp over me. I saw that his arms and hands were smeared with blood. With his soiled white apron, he looked like one of our island fishermen after they had finished gutting a day's catch.

“I do not mean to sound harsh,” he said, wearily shaking his head, “but this man may just as well be dead. In fact, it would be a blessing for him. His stomach was raked with buck and ball. The wound is mortal. I might add that he is also exsanguinated. Look at his skin.”

“He is what?” said Sergeant Colfax.

“Exsanguinated … drained of blood,” the surgeon said.

I felt another feeble wave of anger course through me. It gave me just enough strength to say, “I'm still alive, damn you, and if you would help me instead of talking and shaking your head, I might survive.”

A sardonic smile creased his weary face as he stared down at me on the litter. Glancing at the gore covering my stomach, he said, “You have more than one kind of grit inside you, I think.”

“That he does,” said Harlan Colfax, his voice husky.

“I will clean the wound and stitch it up. The rest is up to a higher power than mine.”

They placed me on one of the tables in the kitchen. It was the same one that Colonel Baker had pounded his fist on the night before when he had called on us to deliver our lightning blow for freedom.

As a surgeon's assistant began to cut my uniform away, I looked over at the soldier who was lying on the other table. A doctor had been sawing at his leg a few minutes earlier, but now they had left him in peace. He was no more than a boy, and he had a sweet, puzzled grin on his face. His eyes were fixed on something I could not see. Then the surgeon was standing over me again. He held a moist sponge close to my nose that was soaked in ether.

“I don't know whether you will thank me or curse me for what I am about to do,” he said.

A few moments later, I didn't care.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

I came back into the world to find myself on a wooden pallet in the back of a quartermaster's freight wagon. The teamsters would slap the reins, we would roll along for a minute or so, and then the wagon would come to a jolting stop. With each dip and furrow in the road surface, a new chorus of pitiful moans would issue from the wounded men crammed in alongside me. Our combined stench floated around me like a miasma.

I heard someone yell an order, and the canvas flap covering the back of the wagon was suddenly pulled away. My eyes recoiled at the blinding sunlight. Two men scrambled up onto the freight bed and gently lifted up the man on the pallet beside me. He was handed down to two more men standing at the rear of the wagon. Then the first two came back for me.

As they transferred me to a canvas litter, I could see a long stream of wagons stretching far down the road behind us, all waiting to deposit the same horrendous cargo. They carried me toward the double-door entrance of what appeared to be a massive livestock barn. A sign was stenciled above the doors. It read:
U.S. SANITARY COMMISSION
—
FIELD HOSPITAL TWELVE
.

One of the wounded men began screaming at the elderly doctor who was supervising the arrival of new patients. The doctor's face was weary and haggard, and he was clearly overwhelmed by the number of men arriving all at once. The wounded man was wearing lieutenant's bars just like mine. He was missing his right arm.

“This isn't a hospital!” he shouted. “Take me to a hospital!”

“I'm sorry,” the doctor kept repeating. “I'm very sorry.”

“I gave my arm for this country,” the lieutenant shouted back, his voice breaking into a sob.

The man on the gurney next to me had been shot through both legs. He gazed toward the surrounding buildings with a calm, appraising eye. “Poultry farm from the look of it,” he said, in a philosophical tone. “Big one, too.”

Mercifully, I faded out again.

“Lieutenant McKittredge?”

I was lying on a straw-filled canvas mattress in the lower bunk of a two-tiered bed constructed of rough pine boards. A spectacled man was standing over me. He was middle-aged and slender, with fine blond hair.

“Lieutenant McKittredge,” the man repeated. “I'm Dr. Bolger, and I will be providing your care. Please forgive the state of this … facility, but with all the casualties since Bull Run, there simply aren't enough hospitals. At least here you will enjoy the country air.”

The shed we were in was about one hundred feet long and fifteen feet wide, with a slanted tin roof. The walls consisted of overlapping pine boards nailed to support studs. At the far end of the shed, laborers were tearing out the remaining chicken roosts of the building's former occupants. Army carpenters came right behind them, erecting more bunk beds.

“I'm …”

“Yes?” Dr. Bolger's kindly face leant closer.

“… in pain … terrible pain,” I whispered.

“Yes, I know, and I have something for you right here. It is a strong opiate dissolved in alcohol.”

“Laudanum?”

“Yes, laudanum. It will deaden the pain considerably and help you sleep during these next difficult days.”

He removed the cork from a brown glass bottle and poured several drams into a small glass. He gently lifted my head and held the glass to my lips until it was finished. The alcohol seared my throat as it went down. He put the cork back in the bottle and laid it down on the blanket by my side.

“You are going to need this, Lieutenant,” he said. Behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, the doctor's eyes were filled with sadness. “And many more, I'm afraid, over the next few days.”

“Where am I?” I asked.

“In Maryland … a few miles out of Washington,” he said. “It is called Glen Echo.”

I watched as a wounded man was carried into the shed and placed in one of the bunks along the far wall. Dr. Bolger brought over a small camp stool and sat down at the edge of my bed.

“I deeply regret having to be the one to tell you this, Lieutenant McKittredge, but it is ordained by medical science that you will die from this … grievous injury. I have never seen a man with your type of wound survive.”

“Why must I die?” I asked. The laudanum was already deadening the fire in my belly.

“I have examined the stitches and the dressing. So far there appears to be no evidence of infection. However, I am far more worried about the perforation of your peritoneum … that is the serous membrane that lines the cavity of the abdomen. When that membrane is torn, it invariably leads to peritonitis. This condition is always fatal, particularly when the viscera have been … disturbed. I also fear that you will contract erysipelas, which is an acute febrile disease associated with intense edematous …”

“I think I understand,” I said. “How long do I have to live?”

“That is very hard to say. I would expect to see the onset of peritonitis fairly quickly, but it is impossible to predict exactly when. When it does happen, you will know it. The pain will be excruciating, I'm afraid.”

“What is your best guess?” I said, feeling a sudden sensation of euphoria from the opiate. My voice sounded strange to me, foreign and spectral.

“As quickly as a few days from now, although you may survive a week or more. You appear to have a sound constitution.”

As he spoke, I felt as if I was being carried away on a pink cloud. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

“I have implanted a drain in your wound to carry away the by-product of infection,” Dr. Bolger went on. “It is connected by a copper tube to the receptacle beneath your bed.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Is there anyone you wish us to notify that you are here?”

I thought of my parents on their remote island off the coast of Maine but concluded that the news would only cause them greater anguish. There was the headmaster of my boarding school, but I had not corresponded with him in over four years. I had made one good friend in college, Frank Bartlett. He was in the army. I knew of no one else who cared whether I lived or died.

“No, Doctor,” I said, soaring toward the pink clouds.

I awoke to the putrid smell of rotting flesh. The blistered, suppurating feet of the soldier in the bunk ahead of mine were squirming back and forth two inches from my nose.

I was very thirsty and called out for water. An orderly filled a mug from the barrel next to the door and brought it to me. It had the odor of spoiled eggs, and the smell of it made me so nauseous I couldn't finish it. Instead, I took several more swallows from the bottle of laudanum that Dr. Bolger had given me.