The hospital was two stories,
constructed of brick that was webbed with ivy, set far back under live
oak trees, with a scrolled-iron veranda on the second story. Two wings
extended out toward the street, creating a garden-like area in the
center that was planted with pink and gray caladium, banks of
philodendrons and elephant ears, climbing roses, banana trees, bamboo,
crepe myrtle and azaleas, whose blooms puffed in the wind and tumbled
on the grass.
She walked with a white-clad
nun down a long wood hallway that
glowed from hours of
polishing done by women who prayed inside sweltering habits while they
scrubbed floors on their hands and
knees. The intermittent statues
of the saints, daily dusted from the crowns of their heads to the soles
of their feet, could have been the votive patrons of cleanliness and
order. Then Abigail passed a Union sentry and entered the ward for
Confederate prisoners who had survived surgery in field hospitals and
had been shipped south from Shiloh on commandeered riverboats.
Abigail fought to keep her
face empty of expression when she looked upon the men in the rows of
beds, the covered ceramic slop jars set neatly in front of each bed.
Field surgeons had often sawed the limb right at the trunk, offering no
chance for a prosthesis. Some men had only sockets for eyes, a
scooped-out hole for a nose, a mouth without a jaw, a tube of useless
flesh for an arm or leg after the bone had been removed.
The lucky ones had stumps that
ended in puckered scar tissue that was still pink with circulation. But
some had been condemned to die the death of the damned twice, their
limbs cut without benefit of ether or laudanum by a field surgeon using
a saw he cleaned on an old shirt soaked in whiskey. Then, when they
thought their ordeal was over, they discovered that gangrene had taken
hold under their bandages and their swollen flesh had turned the color
of an eggplant.
"Some of the nuns put
rosewater on a handkerchief and pretend they have a cold," the sentry
at the door told her. His accent was a distorted echo of her own,
Boston or New York or Rhode Island, a man who had probably operated a
dray or worked in a fish market or at the firehouse.
"I'm not bothered by it," she
replied.
"Come back at night. When we
have to close the windows because of the mosquitoes and they start
pitching around in their sleep, knocking over slop jars and yelling out
and such," he said.
The sentry was thin and
nice-looking, with startling blue eyes, a fresh haircut and a trimmed
mustache. A bayonet was fixed on the rifle that was popped butt-down
between his feet.
"Yesterday, when I got off the
boat, I heard a great commotion by the Mint," she said.
"The Rebs tore down our flag
and ripped it up in the street. They're not gracious losers."
"I
see," she
said.
"One of them is about to get a
taste of General Butler today. You know what the general said? 'They
don't respect our stars, they'll feel our stripes.' Pretty clever, if
you ask me," the sentry said.
"I don't quite follow you,"
she said.
"Go down to the Mint this
evening and get an eyeful."
She started to walk away.
"Don't feel sorry for these
Rebs, ma'am. They've lorded it over the darkies all their lives and
never had to work like the rest of us. Now, they're going to get their
comeuppance. If you want to see an example of His Southern Highness,
check behind the screens at the end of the room," the sentry said.
Later, as she was carrying out
slop jars to the lime pit in back, she glanced through an opening
between two mobile partitions fashioned from mosquito netting. Propped
up on pillows by the window was a bare-chested and handsome man wrapped
with bandages across his rib cage and lower back and shoulder. The
bandages on the rib cage were spotted with two dark red circles the
size of quarters.
The shutters on the window
were open, and the dappled light that filtered through the philodendron
shifted across his face like gold leaves floating on water. His eyelids
looked as thin as paper, traced with tiny blue veins. His breath was so
shallow he seemed barely alive.
"Colonel Jamison?" she said.
He turned his head on the
pillow and opened his eyes, his brow furrowed, like a man waking from
an angry dream. His lips were dry and gray, and he seemed to rethink a
troubling idea in his head, then correct the expression in his face, as
though by choice he could manifest the personae he wanted to present to
the world.
"Miss Abigail? You have a way
of showing up in the most unexpected fashion," he said.
"You were taken prisoner at
Shiloh?" she said.
"Truth be known, I don't
remember it very well. For sure, they planted three balls in me. Would
you mind putting a teaspoon of lemon water in my mouth?"
When she picked up the bowl
from the nightstand his mouth opened and waited like a communicant's.
She placed the teaspoon of
crushed ice and mint
leaves and l
emon on his tongue.
His throat made
a dry, clicking sound
when he swallowed and for just a moment color seemed to bloom in his
cheeks. On the nightstand were a gilded leather-bound Bible and a
saucer with three conically shaped .36 caliber pistol rounds on it.
She tried to remember the name
of his regiment. Was it the Orleans Guards?
"Do you have news of a soldier
named Willie Burke? He was with the 18th," she said.
A shadow seemed to slide
across Jamison's brow.
"On the first day we were
supposed to be on their flank. There was a great deal of confusion.
They went up the slope on their own."
"Do you know of Willie?" she
asked again.
"No, I know no one by that
name. I was wounded the following day. If I live through this war, I'll
always be associated with the destruction of the 18th Louisiana. I hope
the balls they dug out of my flesh somehow atone for my failure."
She studied his face and could
not decide if what she saw there was remorse or self-pity. His fingers
touched hers.
"I apologize for my behavior
in your home, Miss Abigail. I'm an aging widower and sometimes give in
to romantic inclinations that are the product of my years," he said.
His eyes tried to hold hers,
but she turned from him and picked up a partially covered wooden bucket
filled with encrusted bandages. An odor rose into her nostrils that
made the skin of her face stretch against the bone.
"The surgeon says my
intestines were probably damaged. There's a term for it," he said.
"Peritonitis?"
"Yes."
She pressed down the lid on
the wooden bucket and let her face show no expression. When she
returned from the lime pit he was looking out the window at a sunshower
falling on the live oaks and floral gardens between the hospital and
the street.
"Flower is attending me.
She'll be here this evening," he said.
"Pardon?" Abigail said.
"I had her brought from New
Iberia. She's a good girl, isn't she?"
He turned his head on the pollow and smiled. For the first time she
looked upon him with pity and wondered if indeed, as her religion
taught, there were those who found genuine erdempion in their last days.
HER thoughts were still on the
colonel and his illegitimate daughter, the slave girl Flower, when she
took a public carriage downtown that evening and walked to the room
provided her by the Sanitary Commission. She stopped at the open-air
market and bought a fried catfish sandwich and sat on a bench by the
river, watching the paddle-wheelers in the sunset and the children
playing in the street. The wind smelled of wet trees and rain falling
on warm stone in a different part of the city, and when she closed her
eyes she felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life.
She had dedicated herself to
the plight of the infirm and the abandoned and the oppressed who had no
voice, hadn't she? Why this unrelieved sense of loneliness, of always
feeling that the comforting notion of safe harbor would never be hers?
Because there was no one
solidly defined world she belonged to, no one family, no one person,
she thought. She saw herself in an accurate way only twice during any
given twenty-four-hour period, at twilight and at false dawn, when the
world was neither night nor day, when shadows gave ambiguity a
legitimacy that sunlight did not.
Amid the cries of children
wheeling barrel hoops down the street and a band playing in front of a
saloon, she heard another sound, a guttural shout, like a visceral
cheer from a single individual who spoke for many. Then she heard
collective laughter and yelling, a crowd moving up the street toward
the U.S. Mint, a mixture of soldiers trying to maintain the appearance
of discipline, loafers from the saloons, drunk prostitutes, a dancing
barefoot Negro in green felt pants and a red-and-white-striped hat, a
man with a peg leg stumping his way along the edge of things, a dwarf
carrying a parasol over his head, grinning with a mouthful of tombstone
teeth.
In the center of the crowd was
a disheveled and terrified white man, his hands shackled behind him
with a chain and heavy metal cuffs. He wore a thin mustache that looked
grease-penciled on his upper lip, like an actor playing a villain in a
cheap melodrama. He twisted his
head back and forth,
pleading
to anyone who would listen.
But his words were lost in their jeers.
"What did he do?" Abigail
asked an elderly man with a goatee sitting next to her, his hands
folded on the crook of a cane.
"He was wearing a piece of the
ripped flag in his buttonhole," the man replied.
Then she remembered the
account given her by the sentry, something about a man who had torn
down the Stars and Stripes from the front of the U.S. Mint.
"The army knows it was he?"
she asked.
"I don't think they care. He's
a cardsharp by trade," the elderly man replied.
She set down her sandwich on
the piece of newspaper it had come wrapped in and stood up from the
bench.
"My God, what are they going
to do?" she said. When the man on the bench didn't reply, she tried
again. "Who's in charge of this?"
His eyes looked at her
casually, as though he were considering the implications of her accent
before he answered.
"General Butler. 'Spoons'
Butler to some. He has a way of ending up with people's silverware.
Where you from, anyway?" the man said.
She walked hurriedly toward
the balloon of people who surrounded the man in manacles, her shoes
splashing in water. She jerked on a soldier's arm.
"What are you going to do to
this man?" she asked.
"Whatever it is, it's none of
your business. Go back to the edge of the street," the soldier replied.
"You take me to your
commanding officer," she said.
"Maybe you should kiss my
smelly bum, too," he said.
"What
did you say?"
she said.
He shifted his rifle to his
left hand and spun her in the opposite direction, then pushed her hard
between the shoulder blades, snapping her head back. When she turned
around again, the other soldiers had already worked their captive
inside the building.
Someone on the second story
pulled aside the curtains above the empty flag staff that protruded
from the bricks. She could see the man in manacles fighting now,
butting the soldiers with his head, spitting at their faces.
She tried to push her way
inside the door and was shoved back by a sentry. She heard he crowd
roar behind her and looked up, just as the manacled man was hoisted
onto the windowsill, a narrow-gauge greased length of rope looped
around his throat. He fell three feet ingo space before the rope came
taut.
But his neck did not snap.
Brick mortar shaled from his shoes and fell on her head and shoulders
as he twisted on the rope and his feet kicked against the wall.
She fought her way back
through the crowd and suddenly found herself inside the collective odor
of its members, the dried sweat under the perfume and caked body
powder, the dirty hair, the wine breath and decayed meat impacted
between their teeth, all of it washing over her in a fetid wave as they
shouted out their ridicule of the man whose eyes bulged like walnuts
above them, some twisting their own heads and sticking their tongues
out the sides of their mouths in mockery.
She pushed her way to the edge
of the crowd into the open. She dropped her purse in a mud puddle and
almost fell down when she tried to pick it up. The whistle of a
steamboat screamed on the river and one of the ironclads fired off a
cannon in celebration of the hanging. Then a black woman took her
around the waist and walked with her toward the open-air market and the
empty bench where a cat was eating the sandwich Abigail had left behind.
"You gonna be all right, Miss
Abigail. No, no, don't watch what them people are doing no more. You
and me are just gonna keep putting one foot after the other and not
worry about them folks back yonder," the black woman said.