Beauty From Ashes (74 page)

She waited impatiently while David wiped blood from his hands and liberally sprinkled powdered charcoal into the freshly cut muscle, raw and gory, that formed the hideous empty socket where the soldier’s arm had been.

“Pete!” David called to her. “Forgive me for calling you Pete, Miss Fraser, but your mother always refers to you that way and—was

“That’s my name, Captain, and my mother needs you desperately! She begged me not to drag you away from some badly wounded soldier, but I’m scared. She has a dreadful pain in her stomach. Can you come upstairs and look at her, please, sir?

Now?” 1007

“Yes, I’ll come, of course. But I should bring a senior surgeon with me for another opinion.”

“Whatever you say. Only it’s you she trusts. Just hurry, please hurry!”

Pete rushed back upstairs to her mother’s room ahead of Captain David Porter, who was searching for an older surgeon to examine the patient with him. And when she burst into the room, she found her mother writhing in pain, almost falling out of her little rocker.

“He’s coming, Mama. Captain Porter is coming, along with another surgeon so that he can have the benefit of his advice too.” She couldn’t understand a word her mother was trying to say but was relieved to see her still alive and trying to form words over the agony of the intense pain. Moaning, even whimpering now, Mama kept reaching into the air, as though seeking help or trying to find another hand to hold. Pete knelt beside her, grasping one of her hands—squeezed into a fist against the agony—and

tried hard to understand even one word. Finally, she realized that Mama was trying to call for Fanny, who hadn’t written in weeks, even to Mama. In a brief exchange last week when Pete had run into Georgia Cole at the post office, Pete learned that the Rebel hospitals in Atlanta had begun to close at the end of July, since Sherman’s men had headed that way.

“They allowed them something like ten days of grace,” Georgia had said, “to move the more seriously wounded Rebel soldiers to other places. My husband wrote that he imagined some of the nurses were staying on duty during the difficult move for as long as any suffering young man needed care.”

Fanny would stay, there was no doubt about that. Even if the long estrangement from her own family and the disappearance of Buster Matthews hadn’t yet begun to make Fanny see that Pete and Mama had been right all along to support the Unionist Cause, Fanny would stay to care for the sick and wounded. However silent her sister had been, Pete knew Fanny’s tender heart, knew that she felt as called to nursing as any man of the

cloth had been called to the ministry. 1009

Pete realized that since August, when the Yankee soldiers had stripped the garden and taken their chickens, they had grown accustomed to being hungry. It was not just the gnawing pangs of having skipped a few meals, but the hunger that comes from inadequate food over a period of time, conditions that may have led to Mama’s terrifying illness. If the captain and his two English friends, both privates in Sherman’s Army, had not deprived themselves and sneaked portions of their own rations upstairs to the Frasers, Mama might even be worse than she was.

The light, quick knock at the bedroom door was like a blessing. Pete rushed to open the door to Captain David Porter and an older, stern-looking medical officer David introduced hurriedly as Major Jones.

Mama had grown a bit quieter and was bravely trying to sit up straight in her rocker, but her white face—still so pretty despite the severe suffering—let Pete know that she was having to work at not moaning.

“Mrs. Fraser,” Captain David said gently, “it’s David. This is a most

experienced, fine surgeon, Major Jones. He’s my friend and I wanted him to see you too.” As he spoke, David’s slender, sensitive hand lightly touched the painful abdomen and Mama cried out.

“You’ve found the right place, Captain,” Major Jones said in his dry, professional manner. A man shrieked in pain from the operating tables in the yard below. Major Jones acted as though he’d heard nothing, and although Mama’s warning hand was raised in protest, he gave the same spot another, firmer test. She screamed.

“Stop him,” Pete ordered. “Why go on punching her right where it hurts the most, David?”

“We just have to be sure, Pete. If I may, Major, I’d like to volunteer my opinion.”

Major Jones only nodded assent.

“It appears to me that the deprivation she’s had to endure, the lack of wholesome food, has caused a severe concretion. What has she been eating, Pete, that might cause knots of fibrous material to form in her intestines?”

“Since she’s a human being and not a cow, I’d guess it’s caused by Mina’s food

stretcher. We tried to make a game 1011 of it, but because your men stripped our garden of vegetables, our Mina has been cooking the few turnip greens we’ve found with ordinary grass from the lawn.”

“Concretions,” Major Jones said. “The grass and God knows what else has formed into a hard ball inside her.” He looked up at Pete and almost smiled. “You’re right, Miss. Your mother isn’t a cow, so her system doesn’t know how to handle a diet of mainly grass and other fibrous materials. I’d say there could well be more than one concretion, Captain Porter. How old is your mother, Miss Fraser?”

“She’ll be sixty-eight next January.”

“In my opinion,” Major Jones said as though he and David were alone in the room, “only an operation could save her life, and she’s too old for that. Without surgery, I give her no longer than ten days to live.”

Pete gasped, “David!”

“Steady, Pete. I thank you for your opinion, Major.”

“My duty, Captain. And don’t get any wild ideas. No man in his right mind would even

attempt such an operation.”

“Both of you stop discussing her as though she wasn’t hearing every word you say!”

Major Jones, who hadn’t even removed his cap, touched it in Pete’s direction. “Of course, Miss Fraser. And I must get back down to the yard. The last time I was informed, there were five men with severe shrapnel wounds in their extremities, all necessitating immediate amputation. Time is of the essence.”

“Thank you, Major,” David said as the older man hurried to the door to leave.

“You’re most welcome, Captain. But don’t think of trying anything foolish.”

“Yes, sir.”

When Major Jones had stomped down the stairs, banging the front door behind him, David said, careful to include his friend Anne Fraser, “I don’t intend to try anything foolhardy, ladies. But I do mean to do the very best I can, heaven helping me, to—was He looked straight into Anne’s eyes. “I do intend to do my level best to make you well again, Mrs. Fraser. You see, I’ve grown to need you, too. I wouldn’t be able to get through some of my

harder days if I didn’t know you were 1013 here, praying for God to guide my hands and my head. I’ll be counting on your prayers again now. With your permission, I intend to operate on you this very afternoon, as risky as it will be at your age. Just as soon as Pete can get your giant Negro to carry a kitchen table up here.”

Dumbfounded, Pete watched as her mother forced herself to sit up in her favorite little chair. Looking straight at David, she said in a hoarse whisper, “You can count on my prayers— again, dear David. God will hear, and even in the midst of these burned-out ashes that are my life now, He will find a way to—to bring beauty from them. You’ll see.”

“Mama! Sweet, brave Mama!”

“If I’m brave, Pete, it’s because God has never failed to help me find that beauty too. I’m afraid, but He’ll bring beauty out of—even this.”

“Pete, can you assist me during the operation?” David asked.

“Me?”

“I’ll need someone, you know. I dare not take a man away from the emergencies they’re having

down in your yard.”

Pete looked wildly at her mother, then back at David. “My sister Fanny would be perfect to help you. I want to, but I’m not as strong as I sometimes seem to be. This is my mother!”

“Then think of someone else, please! I have to have assistance.”

“When you go for Big Boy to carry up a table, get Eve,” Anne whispered in a hoarse, tight voice that told Pete the pain was twisting at her again. “Eve will come. Just tell her—I need her—to be with me.”

When Eve appeared on the small porch of her brick cabin, almost as soon as Pete knocked, her eyes were reddened and the lids swollen. It was her eyelids, Pete thought, that always gave Eve’s face that oddly patrician look. She was sure Eve had been crying, but this was no time to ask what was wrong. Pete gave silent thanks when Eve agreed to come to Miss Anne’s room immediately.

“I done finish wif what I’m doin’. If Miss Anne need me, Eve be there.”

Too frightened to take the time to ask questions,

Pete ran, long skirt flying, 1015 back to the house and was relieved when Captain David met her in the downstairs hall.

“I know your sister Selina has been worried because she hasn’t heard from her husband up in Illinois, so I thought you might be better off going to the post office while Eve helps me with the operation.”

“Can’t someone among the medical staff help you? Eve loves my mother in her way as much as I do!”

“Someone else could help, but I’d feel a lot better about your wonderful mother’s chances if I had Eve beside me,” he said, his gentle voice solemn. “Eve’s so quick and intelligent. Your giant black man has carried a kitchen table upstairs. I have the chloroform right here in this bag—and everything else I’ll need. I may even have found enough fine silk thread for sutures. Go, Pete. I promise to do my very best to save her, and I also promise to pray you’ll find the letter for Miss Selina.”

As though she were nine instead of almost thirty-nine, Pete was so relieved at being told exactly what to do, she ran down the

stairs toward the front door without looking back.

Until David called to her: “You’ll pray for me, won’t you, Pete?”

“Yes,” she called up to him. “Oh, yes, David, I’ll pray hard! Selina’s praying, too. And our cook, Mina …”

When David quietly entered Anne’s room, she was still alone. Eve hadn’t gotten there. As he knelt beside Anne’s little chair, he heard her whisper as if to a third person in the room: “God’s grace is never late in coming, John. If I don’t wake up here in my white-light house, I’ll be waking up with you again. Oh, my darling—with you again!”

In the remaining few minutes while he waited for Eve, David studied Anne’s still-beautiful features and prayed silently that when his dreaded work was finished and she opened her eyes, he would once more be blessed to look at their lovely, odd, pale, pale blue. Then he would feel free to tell her that one of the reasons he had come to love her so much in such a short time was that he’d never seen eyes like Anne’s except those of his own,

dear mother, dead since David’s tenth 1017 birthday.

The door opened almost soundlessly, and Eve stepped into the room. “Miss Anne, she won’t leave me, too, will she, sir?” she whispered.

David drew her aside, beyond Anne’s hearing, and spoke in a soft voice. “Not if you and I do our work well, Eve. She’s told me about her friendship with you. I know she wants you here now. We have no more sponges left,” he went on in his professional voice, “but I’ve brought some clean, soft cloth. Please just follow my instructions. Lift this cloth when I say, place it back over her nose when I tell you to and I’ll drop on the chloroform. Just the right amount will put her into a deep sleep, and she will feel little or no pain. Be brave, Eve. Follow my instructions exactly, and pray for us all three.”

Before Pete left for the post office, she stopped in Selina’s room to give her a brief report on their mother’s condition, taking care to minimize the dangers so that her sister would not be unduly alarmed. We all still try to protect

Selina as the baby of the family, Pete thought.

Captain David had told Pete it would take a while to finish the operation. Still trembling with the unaccustomed terror she felt because she had heard, with her own ears, Major Jones declare that Mama’s chances were slim, she tried to walk slowly away from the house toward the Square and to the post office. Once inside the building, she forced herself, to use up some of the painful waiting time, to walk the length of the room thirty, then forty times before she even approached the iron-barred window to ask if there might be a letter for her mother or for Selina. Long ago Pete had given up on hearing from Dr. Sam, the man she had pushed out of her life because his drinking would surely have brought still more grief, not only to her but to Mama. Only Mama and Selina were likely to have mail from anyone, now that John Couper was gone, along with sweet Fraser and Mama’s childhood best friend, Anna Matilda King. Uncle James Hamilton Couper wrote only now and then, describing the ever-present danger of attack on St. Simons. The chaos there seemed strange indeed, because the very name St. Simons, to Pete, still defined the word peace.

And although her heart raced some when she 1019 found that yes, there was a letter from Captain George Stubinger and, even more surprising, one from her long-silent sister Fanny—both addressed to Selina—she still would not permit herself to start walking home. Only an hour and fifteen minutes had elapsed since she’d promised Captain David to pray for him, for Mama, and for Eve. At least, she’d prayed and prayed that Captain David and Eve had administered the chloroform correctly. He couldn’t possibly be finished yet. There wouldn’t be any definite word about Mama, whether she would live to walk again through her beloved white-light house, blessing them all with her soft laughter and her beauty.

Pete, alone on a wooden bench in a spot clear of bird droppings, longed to see a familiar face—even in her state of nervous anxiety and fear over her mother, lying there on her own old kitchen table, bleeding and unconscious.

Suddenly, she was seized with an impulse to go home. At least to see Selina—to share her fright and to give her the letter from George for which she’d waited so expectantly.

From long custom, Big Boy and even Eve

used the back door when they entered the house, but today as Pete came in sight of the front porch and yard strewn and stinking with still-unburied bodies of the dead and bloody from the amputations performed on the living, she saw Big Boy, his huge frame hunched in a kind of knot, sitting on the top front step waiting, she supposed, for some word of his beloved lady, Miss Anne.