Raintree County (140 page)

He knew the pitiful conversations of the sick and wounded, memories of the past or aspirations for the future, fabrics of sheer hope built in the house of despair. He knew the nostalgic words of the wounded, which were mostly the names of things, places, and people in America.

He knew the sympathies and fierce loyalties of the sick. He found that it was possible to know another person so well in three or four days that his death was like the loss of a lifelong friend. He knew the awful void caused when one of the veteran comrades died.

He knew the unhappy little pleasantries of the hospital, grins carved on the mask of suffering. One of the most cheerful patients was a man who had a leg gone, a chest wound, and dysentery with complications.

He saw boys of eighteen age visibly in a few days and act and talk like old men. He wondered at the courage of the dying. In all the time he was in the hospital, he heard hardly a word of bitterness or disillusionment about the Cause for which these men had suffered.

He saw at least a dozen Rebel wounded brought in during this time. He noticed the lack of bitterness between the wounded of both sides and their dispassionate reference to battles and places. Their wounds had made them historians instead of rivals.

He noticed that Rebel wounded looked like Union wounded, their wounds smelled the same, they died pitifully in the same way. In
death they were the same debris of a human being that had to be hurried away and buried.

He knew over and over again the prosaic horror of the orderlies coming with the death-stretcher, the lifting of the shattered hulk, the laying of it on the stretcher, the bearing of it off out of light and time forever.

And he knew that the greatest anguish of all was the thought of dying far from home, of going down into the void without a single face from home to watch the descent, without a single hand to touch the lost hand—except the equally lost hands and lonely faces of the other soldiers who were there.

There were few visitors to the hospital. Now and then some ladies would go through the ward, bravely unembarrassed by the smell and look of the wounded. They would leave gifts of fruit or Bibles. One day a very pretty girl prominent in Washington society walked through the ward. She smiled sweetly and looked radiantly healthy and talked cheerfully with several of the patients. After she had left, the men talked for hours about her face, her dress, her eyes, speculated on whether or not she was married, and agreed that she was a damn good scout.

Another visitor was a big grayhaired, graybearded man with ruddy face and light blue eyes. He came three or four times to Johnny's ward, left oranges and tobacco, wrote letters home for those who wished it, brought books and read aloud whatever the patients requested, listened to boys talk about home hours without interrupting, and sat hours at the bedsides of dying men, lest they should lack company. The boys knew him as Walt. After a while, the word got about that he was a poet named Walt Whitman, but Johnny, who was the literary authority of the ward, had never heard of him before.

One day, the orderlies worked especially hard to clean up the ward and make the patients presentable. Around noon the chief surgeon came in and told the men that they were to have a distinguished visitor, who had asked that his name not be disclosed. Shortly after, a tall, gaunt, ugly man appeared at the door holding a tall black hat in his hand. His face was dark, coarsegrained, and graven with deep lines. His hair and beard were coarse and black, with a beginning of gray. He had a wart beside his nose. His clothes were illfitting.
His gaunt neck stuck far out of his collar. His knees had made bags in his pants. He was so tall he had to stoop to get through the doorway. He seemed to be the most awkward, sorrowful figure in a room of awkward, sorrowful men. He stepped to the bedside of the man nearest the door and held out his hand.

—I'm Mister Lincoln, he said.

His voice was highpitched, clear, and kindly. He got the boy's name and regiment and asked him what battle he had been wounded in. He seemed to become completely at ease as he went down the line of cots. The men found their tongues, saying,

—Howdy do, Mister Lincoln.

—Glad to meet yuh, Mister Lincoln.

—Very happy to make your acquaintance, Mister Lincoln.

Approaching Johnny's bedside, the President held out his hand.

—Where are you from, my boy?

—Indiana, Johnny said. Freehaven.

—Well, it's good to see a fellow Hoosier, the President said.

Where did you get your wound?

—Near Columbia, Johnny said.

The President looked surprised.

—You were with Sherman then? On the Great March?

—Yes.

The President spoke with unusual warmth.

—It was a bold move—and boldly executed. I congratulate you.

Johnny blushed and looked down. The President looked as though he wanted to linger and ask more questions about the March, but some of his attendants whispered to him, and it was evident that the President was expected somewhere and was far off schedule.

—I'd a lot rather talk with this boy than with the Secretary of War, the President said.

One of the aides raised his hands in a gesture of good-natured acquiescence. But the President nodded pleasantly to Johnny and went on slowly down the line. He shook hands with every man in the ward and exchanged a few words with each. At the end of the row, he must have said something funny to the man who had the leg gone, the chest wound, and all the complications, for the soldier laughed heartily and so did all the men within hearing.

At the far door, the President turned, stood a moment, a scarred, gaunt figure, lifted his hand, and said in a clear voice,

—Get well, boys, and go back to your homes. There's good reason to hope that the War will soon be over.

When he was gone, the men talked for a long time about the visit.

—He's just like your own folks, they all agreed.

It turned out that the President had told a joke. The man with all the complications had remarked that he had so many ailments he had given up trying to count them. The President's joke involved an old coon dog that had so many fleas ‘he'd give up scratchin' 'em ‘cause it only stirred 'em up wuss.' The men told the joke up and down the ward. It didn't sound very funny in the retelling, but it must have had a remarkable fitness because the man with all the complications kept laughing about it for hours afterwards.

—Where does he git all them jokes? a man asked.

—I reckon he makes 'em up.

—But didn't he look sad!

—Yes, sir, the man with all the complications said. This war's really been hard on 'im.

And so the days went by, and Corporal Johnny Shawnessy lingered on while that impersonal thing, his body, tried to make up its mind whether to live or die. As for himself, he had never had a more terrible passion to live, to stand up, to walk, to move about in sunlight, to touch human hands, to laugh, to smoke a cigar, to mosey downtown. It seemed absurd that the affair was going to be decided for him by a hundred some-odd pounds of sweating clay.

These were the days of his most violent dualism. He had never before been so passionately addicted to the belief that the spirit is everything, that there is some kind of God, that the Cause was just, that the Republic was a worthwhile institution, that all men are brothers, that love is forever, and that there is no death. On the other hand, he had never been so utterly absorbed by the phenomenon of his body, of which he had once been very proud and which he had enjoyed with the naïve pleasure of a young pagan.

Those days, he clung to his belief in human souls with unreasoning fervor—during the very time when it seemed to him that life was a process in which human beings were carefully endowed with a
feeling of importance only that they might be wantonly tortured and destroyed.

The men in Johnny's hospital were intensely religious, and though they swore all the time, they never really took God's name in vain.

These men were the most miserable, unhappy, and wretched men he had ever seen. At the same time they had none of the vanities and pomps of healthy people. They were completely humble. They had no aspirations for wealth, revenge, or guilty pleasures. They only wanted to live and let live, to love and be loved. They were the simplest people in the world. The sicker they were, the more saintly they were. Going on the cross seemed to make them all like Christ.

Johnny never afterward saw so much misery and so much nobility in human beings as he did in the Soldiers' Hospital. He knew that sick people in general showed all the baseness and cowardice in them. Why it wasn't true of the wounded soldiers of the Republic, he couldn't exactly say. When he and the rest of them left the hospital, he felt sure they would all slip back into their old vices and vanities, but as long as they were in the hospital they seemed to rise collectively to a code of behavior that they had always understood, even if they had never practiced it before.

Johnny was conscious of the paradox of the wounded soldier. Out of the most passionate selfishness of his life—the desire to live, to be well, to be whole, no matter what happened to the rest of the world—came also a wonderful unselfishness. For when one of the veteran comrades died, every man went down into death, and all felt miserable for days. By clinging to others, they clung to themselves. Several men in the ward wept bitterly when the cheerful man with all the complications died a few days after the President's visit.

During this time Corporal Johnny Shawnessy dreamed the dreams of the wounded soldier. He dreamed of home. And over and over again in the dream, he wanted to make the ones there understand how desperately he needed them, how much he had longed to see them, how much it meant to him that they were still there. Some of the dreams had a frustrate sweetness as when it seemed to him that he was back in the old Academy Building and he saw the cool, pale form of Nell Gaither standing in the ivied yard and looking at him from eyes alive with love and tenderness. Sometimes too he dreamed
that he lay sick in his bed at home. He hoped that now he would be really healed, that she who had given life to him once could give it again. The irregular, vivid face of his mother Ellen Shawnessy bent over him in his dream, a lock of loose hair hung from under her cap, her eyes were full of belief in his recovery. He felt that here was a great strength from which he could draw inexhaustibly. Then he was happy to tears that he was home again.

His worst dreams were those in which it seemed to him that he had come back to Raintree County, sick, lonely, perhaps dying, and no one paid any attention to him.

In the darkest period of his fight to live, when it seemed that he got no better and was perhaps not even holding his own, his strength gone, his shoulder swollen with corruption, his insides weak and sore, his fever climbing to the danger zone, he had sunk one night into a half-delirious sleep. It seemed that he had been on some kind of excursion with a great many people to Lake Paradise in the center of the County. Somehow, he had got separated from the others and had become lost in the Great Swamp. The ancient muds and pools heaved yellow in hideous sunlight. He saw what seemed to be a tree standing cool on an island of firm ground. Sinking in slime, he made his way painfully to the tree and reaching up caught a golden branch. Instantly, the tree changed, the branch became a scaly arm, a little dragon wallowed lustfully down and sprang on his mudded form. Its clawed hands closed around his chest, squeezing the breath from his body. He began to cry out in horror. He was going down in the warm mud of the Swamp. The reptile body sat implacably on his arms and shoulders, dragging him down to death. He shut his eyes, choking, trying to shake the thing loose. He could hear his own cries, feebly, as from a great distance. He was being violently shaken. He heard voices, footsteps. People were perhaps coming to rescue him after all. He went on holding his breath. Something cold was dashed into his face.

He was standing between the bedrows of the Soldiers' Hospital. Three orderlies were fighting with him, trying to hold him. One of his soldier comrades had got out of bed and was yelling over and over,

—Johnny! Johnny! For Christ's sake, wake up!

Most of the soldiers were sitting up. A man was standing with a
white pitcher in his hand. Johnny was dripping with cold water. They got him back into bed. He was panting as if he had run a race. He was shivering all over. His teeth chattered violently.

—Get some blankets on him, the orderly said. My God, boy, it took three men to hold you! What was the matter anyway?

—I don't know—I'm sorry, Johnny muttered between clenched teeth.

He was still horrified by the dream. A tired surgeon came in, looked him over, and dressed his wound again.

—I guess you're all right, he said. Everybody go back to sleep.

—Jesus, Johnny! the man next to him said, you really had a bad one.

It had happened often before to others, of course. Every night or so, some boy tried to get out of bed in a delirium.

As Corporal Johnny Shawnessy lay there chattering, sore, weak, soaked in a cold sweat, there came to him with more than usual vividness the memory of the younger Johnny of before the War, the boy who had believed that he would one day be a greater poet than Shakespeare, a faster runner than Flash Perkins, a lover for whom waited the most passionate of women, a hero for whom the Republic reserved her wildest applause. He remembered this Johnny—his strong young arms and legs, his inexhaustible vitality, his happy smile, his strong competitive heart; and then he thought of the miserable shrunken creature who lay in a makeshift building a thousand miles from home, perhaps dying. Hot tears came to his eyes. He buried his face in the pillow to stifle his sobs. He was afraid some of the other boys would hear him—as he had often heard them. He wept—the terrible tears of the soldier sick and far from home. He fought with himself and finally managed to stop. He was amazed and a little heartened by the violence of his fit. The sobbing had been like part of the dream. Then he felt very still and calm. An orderly went by and put a hand on his forehead.