Authors: Patricia Hagan
“Five minutes,” she begged. “All I ask is five minutes with him.”
“I’m sorry. He probably wouldn’t know you. It’s a miracle he’s lived this long.”
Mrs. Palmer stood, smoothing her long white skirt with an impatient flutter. “I do have work to do, Miss Jennings, and there is really no point in our discussing the situation any further. I wish there were some way I could help you, but there simply isn’t. Come along, and I will show you out.”
“I can find my own way out, thank you.” She rose and walked from the room, head held high. Only when the door closed behind her did she slump against the wall and allow the dry sobs to rack her body.
How can I go home without seeing him, she cried silently. If he’s going to die, then I must see him one last time and try to make him understand what happened.
She did not want him to think she had jilted him.
She glanced about furtively. No one was paying any attention to her. There seemed to be an air of greater urgency than when she had first arrived. Nurses scurried about, carrying trays of instruments, supplies, lint for bandages. Doctors looked weary, haggard, walking with their heads bent low, shoulders slumped.
Hurrying quickly down the hall, she slipped out a side entrance and onto the hospital grounds. Looking about, she saw the rest of the complex, sprawled out before her, a miniature city of hastily constructed plank and log buildings and an endless sea of tents. In the distance, she could hear the periodic screams now and then of the suffering and dying, and wondered if Alton were making any of those sounds. She prayed not.
Where would he be? There were so many buildings, and if she wandered around on her own, guards would become suspicious and escort her from the hospital grounds. Security all around Richmond was extremely tight. Word had it that General Lee’s army was wheeling eastward, and there was speculation that he might be trying to invade Washington once again. When she arrived she had been questioned endlessly by the sentries at the front gate.
A sprawling oak stood nearby, and she moved beneath it. If anyone saw her, they would think she was on her way to or from somewhere, and merely catching her breath in the shade.
She thought about Lucky and just hoped she had him tied securely in the old deserted barn back in the field. It had not been easy to find food for herself, much less the large, shaggy white dog that she had come to love so deeply. In fact, it made her want to cry to think about the night he had run into the woods and stayed gone for hours, only to return and lay a dead rabbit proudly at her feet. She had managed to start a fire and roast him to a turn, and Lucky would not eat a bite until she had had her fill, even though she kept offering him a nibble every so often. It was as though he were silently trying to let her know that it was his intent to look after her, even if it meant his own starvation. The soldiers who had brought her along in their wagon had helped her search for a place. She’d been lucky to find the barn. And the men had left some food with her, enough for herself and Lucky, for a little while. How kind they had been!
Their little wagon had been caught in the woods while a battle went on nearby, only a few hundred yards from where they were hidden, behind a clump of trees. It was, she reflected, going through that battle together that had forged the friendship.
An explosion of artillery guns, belching furiously, had first signaled to them that a battle was going on. They hid their wagon and scrambled for cover, April holding on to Lucky. The smell of sulfur stung their nostrils, and through the veil of trees hiding them they could see smoke begin to cover the earth in a gray, darkening cloud. The roars and bellows of ten-pound Parrott guns and twelve-pound Napoleons swelled until there were no other sounds at all, and the little party hiding an impossibly short distance from annihilation felt it was being sucked into the very vortex of the sound, consumed, carried away to be evaporated, later, into thin air.
“Hey, miss! You all right?”
She jerked her head up and saw a soldier staring at her from the footpath.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she forced a smile and called back to him. “I was on my way out and the heat became a bit too much. I couldn’t resist this shade.”
He did not return her smile. “Visiting hours are over for today. You move along now, you hear? I’ve got orders that nobody is to be wandering around.”
“Of course. Of course.” She hurried from beneath the tree, glancing over her shoulder until he disappeared inside a building.
Spotting a wooden building sitting off to itself, she turned in that direction. No one was about, and there were no windows. It had to be a supply shack of some sort, and she decided it would be a safe place to hide while planning her next move. If the soldier came back and saw that she had not obeyed his instructions to leave, he would, no doubt, escort her to the gate himself.
Just as she reached the door of the building, she heard voices from around the corner. Someone was approaching. She gave the door a hard yank, but it held tight. Frantically, she tugged. It jerked open just as their voices seemed to be upon her.
She slipped inside, desperation moving her with amazing speed. A putrid, rotting odor slapped her full in the face. Stuffing her fist into her mouth as bile rose from her stomach, she found herself shrouded in darkness. What was that horrible odor? Never had she smelled anything like it.
Behind her, the door began to creak open. She leaped to the side, felt something strike her leg. There was a stab of pain as a splinter tore through her dress. Something brushed her arm. Quickly she stooped down, out of sight as a shaft of light from the open door cut into the darkness. The two men entered, quickly closing the door behind them.
“This is a hell of a place to have to hide,” a man complained. “As big as Chimborazo is, it looks like we could find a better spot to slip off to than this.”
Another man’s voice replied roughly, “Hell, Carter, don’t gripe. I reckon we’ve tried just about ever’ place there is, and they always find us. We’ve got to get a little rest. You know I ain’t slept in almost thirty-six hours? Can’t hold up much longer. Where’d you hide that bottle?”
“Same place. That little hole I dug in the floor about three steps to your left.” His laughter was slightly strained. “We don’t have to worry about nobody lookin’ for us in here. Nobody wants to come in here lessen they have to, and I sure don’t blame ’em.”
“Who’s idea was it to stack up bodies, anyhow?”
April’s eyes widened in the dark. The hair on the back of her neck stood on edge.
“Dunno. I heard the government wants to give the families a chance to claim their dead kin before they’re just dumped in the ground someplace. I hear only half is claimed, anyway. They keep ’em four or five days after they die. That’s about as long as they can stand it before folks start complaining about the smell.”
“Well, it’s powerful rank in here now.”
“You get used to it after a few minutes. I had the work detail in here a coupla weeks ago. You know, shifting bodies around, takin’ out what ain’t been claimed and buryin’ ’em. Here. Take a drink. It’ll make you feel easier.”
April silently commanded her pounding heart to slow down, but it did not obey. It was foolish to be so frightened. These poor souls stacked all about her like sacks of flour could not harm her. She had to keep calm or be discovered. She squeezed her hands together tightly, clamped her teeth to keep them from clicking. Her body began to shake.
The man had been right. The smell could be gotten used to. It was not so noticeable any longer, for now the air was fetid with earth, mustiness, dust. The smell of decay merely blended in.
“How come everything has to happen round Richmond in this blamed war?” one of the men was saying. “We no sooner got the wounded in from that battle at Champion’s Hill on the sixteenth of May when the cavalry skirmishes started. Every bit of the dadburn fighting seems to go on right around here, and we get all the results of it.”
“Be glad you aren’t out there in it,” his companion pointed out. “We’re lucky we got assigned to hospital duty. It ain’t so bad. Sure, we dig ditches for all the arms and legs they cut off. And we haul bodies in here. It might not be the most pleasant job in the world, but if we weren’t doin’ it, we might be one of them poor fools stacked up over there waitin’ to feed the worms.”
April heard the sound of someone gulping liquid, then a worried voice say, “Grant got his butt beat twice tryin’ to take Vicksburg, I hear. Then he got that long entrenchment line set up. I hear it’s fifteen miles long, and he’s plannin’ on starvin’ Joe Johnston and his men into surrenderin’.”
“Yeah, but Lee’s on the move, invadin’ the North again.”
“Yep. And you know what’s gonna happen? I’ll tell you, Carter. There’s gonna be plenty more men brought in here. Ripped all to pieces. And that means more ditches for us to dig for arms and legs, and more bodies to come stack in here. I tell you, I’m sick of all of it. They brought in over two hundred wounded this mornin’ in just one hour.”
April then understood the reason for all the activity here. Everyone was too busy to pay her any mind.
Suddenly she snapped back to alertness as she heard Carter say, “The place where they put the ones they think is gonna die is full up. Usually they don’t have but about a hundred in there, ’cause they mostly just go on and die when they’re hurt that bad. Most don’t take much time. They die or they don’t. We’re clearing out another building right, next to it, ’cause forty-seven out of that bunch this mornin’ is just waitin’ to die. Can’t do nothin’ for ’em, ’cept make ’em as comfortable as possible. If it was up to me, I think I’d go ahead and put ’em out of their misery.”
The other man gave a disgusted snort “Naw, you wouldn’t. You’re just flappin’ your jaws. And gimme that bottle. I’m the one what needs it. I got surgery detail this afternoon. I get to slosh a bucket of water over the operating table to wash the blood off every time they move somebody off it. Makes me sick.”
April was no longer listening. The place for the dying was full. And one of these men was going to help prepare a building right next to it! He could be followed there…followed to the place next to where Alton was.
Oh, would they never leave? She winced with pain as she realized she was squeezing her hands so tightly together that her nails were digging into her own flesh. It had been half an hour, at least. The foul air was becoming overwhelming.
Finally, one of the men said, “Well, we best be gettin’ back to work. I’ve stood it in here about as long as I can.
The other agreed. “It’s the best hidin’ place we’ve found yet.”
She heard the sounds of them moving toward the door, then a shaft of light plunged inside. She rose, fighting the horror of seeing, for the first time, all the shrouded bodies on either side of her.
“If you get sick of sloshin’ blood, you can always come help me,” the taller of the two called to his companion.
She hesitated just long enough that they would not notice the door opening. Slowly, she edged it open to step outside into the bright midday sun. Glancing to her right, she saw the man she wanted to follow walking slowly up a rutted, barren hill. Slowly, she started after him, keeping a leisurely pace so that anyone would think she was a hospital worker.
The soldier disappeared over a rise. She felt a wave of panic. If she lost sight of him, there was no way of finding Alton. She quickened her step, lifting her skirt above her ankles so she could run. Just then, a fat man in a checkered umber coat appeared and headed straight for her.
“Lady!” He waved. “I want to talk to you.”
She froze. Ahead, up the rise, there was no sight of the soldier. With each passing second, he was getting farther and farther away. But she could not break into a run and follow. Not now. Not with this strange man striding toward her.
In what she hoped was a believable voice she said, “I do not have time to tarry, sir. My brother has taken a turn for the worse, and I must get to him at once.”
“You’re heading for a restricted area.” He spoke around a fat cigar. “What’s your name, and who said you could come up here without an escort?” He was a small, squat man, with narrow eyes hooded by thick folds of fat. He looked her up and down suspiciously as she frantically tried to think of a way out. Swallowing hard, pretending indignation and anger, she cried, “I just told you. My brother has taken a turn for the worse. My goodness, he could die.”
She gave him a contemptuous look. “He did his part for the proud Southland, and why, might I ask, are you not in uniform doing your part?” She hoped the challenge would throw him.
The fat hoods above his eyes raised only slightly as a mocking expression took over his face. “I
am
in uniform, lady. Sort of. It’s my job to see that people don’t go where they aren’t supposed to. It’s not allowed for anyone to wander anywhere around here, no matter for what reason. Especially over that ridge there. See, we put wounded officers in a special section back there, and we want to make sure no Yankee spies slip in here to finish their job.”
This time she did not have to pretend anger. “I will forgive your insinuations, sir, but surely it is not forbidden for a sister to visit her brother.”
“No,” he replied quietly, his gaze still inquiring and suspicious “but you haven’t told me just whose sister you are. What’s your brother’s name?”
“Lieutenant Alton Moseley,” she snapped. Now it was going to be impossible to get away in time to find the soldier.