Widow of Gettysburg (26 page)

“He needs an amputation,” Liberty heard herself say. “Please, Dr. O’Leary, as quickly as possible. I’ll help.”

Color drained from the doctor’s face. “Where do the operations take place?”

“Outside on the barn door.” She cringed, aware of how ridiculous it all seemed. But the rains, at least, had washed the improvised table fairly clean.

“Do you have your own kit? Or shall I fetch Dr. Stephens’s supplies?”

Dr. O’Leary shook his head. It looked more like a twitch. “I have my own. Let’s bring him to the table. Have you a stretcher?”

“All the stretchers retreated along with Lee’s army.”

“Now, before we do anything else, I hope you don’t mind if we get rid of those maggots. They are distracting me.” He reached into his large leather bag and pulled out a tin of turpentine.

Once Johnny was centered on the barn door, Dr. O’Leary pulled from his bag a rectangular mahogany box about fifteen inches long and only five inches wide. An oval brass plate clearly read
G. Tiemann & Co. Manufacturer of Surgical Instruments, 63 Chatham St., NY.
When he opened the case with the sliding brass latch, sunlight bounced off the perfectly polished silver saw blade.

“Please, tell me you’ve done this before.”

“Fortunately for my patients … no.” His lips slanted, but his eyes were serious. “But you have an immediate need, do you not? And I
have—a book.” He produced a book labeled
The Practice of Surgery
and slapped it upon the door.

“Did they not teach you this in medical school?” Liberty was stunned. Terrified.

“In my six months of lectures, not one person volunteered for us to practice our amputation skills upon them. Can you imagine that?”

She closed her eyes and remembered the speed at which Dr. Stephens had cut through his patients with a dull blade. On a good day, he could amputate a limb in five minutes, have the man stitched and bandaged by the end of eight.

Liberty expelled a breath of air. “You don’t know what you can do until it’s required of you.”

He nodded. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

“Yes, you can. Now let’s get to work.”

Since there was no brandy, Liberty did not tell him the stimulating drink should be poured into Johnny’s mouth. Since she did not see a flask of chloroform, she did not mention it was too late to use anesthesia.

“Would you please turn to the section called ‘Amputation of the Thigh’?” He picked up each tool from his kit, hefted the weight of it in his hand.

“Secure the tourniquet.” She did not need to open the book to know the first step by now. “Place the pad directly on the femoral artery and tighten.”

“Of course. I know that.”

As he did, she flipped through the book until she landed on the page Dr. O’Leary requested.

“Read please.”

She read down, turned the page, went to the next. On and on, the author droned about the benefits and dangers of various methods and philosophies of incision. Aha. There in the last paragraph of this section. “It says do it as quickly as you can, with one sweep of the knife—yes, that’s right the long knife, not the saw—with one sweep of the knife
or two, but for heaven’s sake get it done quickly for it is the most painful part of the operation.”

His mouth twitched. “So that’s what it says.”

“Yes.”

Perspiration glittered on Dr. O’Leary’s forehead as he grasped the knife’s handle and nodded at the injured leg. “I’d be much obliged if …”

She laid the book on the table and her hands on Johnny’s leg. “Like this?”

“I believe so.”

“Just say yes.”

“Yes.”

Liberty closed her eyes and turned her head, praying with all her might that God would help her forget whose leg she gripped, and that he would allow Johnny to remain unconscious to protect him from the pain.
It is only a leg under my hands. It is only another patient.

Finally, a puff of air from the doctor’s mouth. Then, “What next?”

Releasing the thigh, she picked up the book and once again scanned dense blocks of text.
Exposed bone … create a groove … backward sweep of the saw … They are mere letters on the page, a spelling list
, she told herself, and heard herself read with unshaking voice.

Dr. O’Leary nodded, and with steady hand, followed her every direction. Her recitation complete, Liberty kept an even pressure on Johnny’s leg and lifted her gaze to the vanilla clouds drifting above Seminary Ridge like sails through the deep blue sea.
I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. Psalm 121 sprang to her mind, a blessed relief. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

By the end of the sixth verse in the chapter, Dr. O’Leary had accomplished his task. “Thank God,” he breathed, then delicately tied up the ligatures. Johnny stirred. He was waking up. Liberty’s heart lurched as a faint moan rumbled up through his chest.

They were nearly through. There was no bone file in Dr. O’Leary’s field amputation kit, but with such a clean slice, maybe all was well without it. The edges of Dr. Stephens’s patients’ bones were surely serrated and jagged from the dull blade.

“Cover the stump,” she urged, and told him to let the ends of the ligature threads hang out the seam. “Do you have adhesive bandages?”

“In my bag.” He did not look up as he tugged the skin back in place.

Before he had to ask for them, Liberty placed the adhesive strips over the stump until Dr. O’Leary’s hands were free to help as well. Once secured, he asked for lint and unguent.

Lint she had, but, “Unguent?” Dr. Stephens had never asked for this. Perhaps he did not have it.

“Yes of course, the ointment to place between the lint and the stump. Otherwise, when it comes time to change the dressing, the lint will stick to the skin between the adhesive strips. This much I
do
know. Very unpleasant for the patient, which in turn, is quite unpleasant for you.”

Oh no. Hundreds of amputee patients had been dressed without any unguent. Many of them were still here, waiting for their dressings to be changed for the first time. The dressings should all be changed by the fourth or fifth day. That meant today or tomorrow. She kept reading.

The favorable healing of a stump will depend very much upon the skill and tenderness with which the dressings are changed, more especially the first dressings.

Her heart rate double-timed. The favorable healing of a stump depended on—her. Unless … “Dr. O’Leary, will you stay?”

“My dear,” said he, upon finishing, “I would like nothing better in this world. To be right where one is needed most, at precisely the time one is needed—” He flung a glance around her desolated property. “And to be able to relieve the suffering of mankind … What could possibly be better than that?”

Liberty looked at Johnny’s body on the barn door and was filled not with sadness for his losing a limb, but with joy that he may yet still live.
What could be better than that, indeed?

From somewhere on the other side of the barn, the distinct, twangy voice of Fitz drifted on the breeze to her, followed by a chorus of masculine laughter. All was not darkness and gloom here. There was healing, and life. And though she could not deny the presence of suffering, neither could she deny the presence of God as the last two verses of Psalm 121 rang out clearly in her heart.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

O
utside the office of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, South Third Street teemed with life. Carriages trundled over cobblestones taking stockbrokers to the Merchant Exchange and ladies to do their shopping, while newsboys hawked papers between the gaslights that lined the street. The U.S. flag flying just outside the
Inquirer’s
sixth-story window snapped and shuddered in the wind, a blur of red, white, and blue.

Harrison Caldwell felt like a blur himself. Hands quivering from too much caffeine, he held his breath as his editor, Boris Trent, read the story he had just submitted on the battle of Gettysburg. No, on the people of Gettysburg and how they were affected. He was done writing about shot and shell.

Boris slammed the paper down on his mahogany desk, and Harrison jolted.

“OK, Caldwell.” Boris folded his arms across his paper-strewn,
coffee-stained desk, jutting his head forward like a bulldog, bottom lip protruding. “I’m waiting.”

Harrison coughed as cloying scents of musk and vanilla from the nearby perfumery floated in through the window. “Sir?”

“For your story. Because surely, this is just a joke.” His small black eyes sparked over the top of his spectacles.

Shifting in his chair, Harrison braced himself for the coming tirade.

“Hang it all, Caldwell!” Boris slammed a beefy fist on his desk. “Gettysburg was the greatest battle in the history of the war! Wouldn’t it be logical, then, for my war correspondent to produce the greatest story of his career from it? Why on earth would you be talking about the people of Gettysburg?”

“There’s a story there, Mr. Trent. If you’ll give me time to revise, I’ll do it, but—”

“No Caldwell, there’s a story in the wounded! The maimed! The dead!” Harrison knew. The twenty-five wagonloads of medical supplies he’d seen at Fredericksburg had been ordered to the rear, in favor of ammunition. They only reached the field on July 4—days after they were needed. Yes, there was a story here. But not the one Harrison had the stomach to write.

“This—” he rattled Harrison’s paper in front of his face. “This is drivel. If you’re going to tell me about the people of Gettysburg, then tell me something shocking! Make me mad!” He rifled through a stack and shoved a copy of the
New York Times
at him. “Read it!”

Harrison picked it up and cleared his throat. “‘Let me make it a matter of undeniable history that the actions of the people of Gettysburg are so sordidly mean and unpatriotic as to engender the belief that they were indifferent as to which party was whipped.’” He stopped. “Mr. Trent, this is shoddy reporting, absolute balderdash. Mean and unpatriotic? Indifferent as to which party was whipped? How dare he call this undeniable history. He does not get to rewrite what happened!” Heat prickled his skin.

“Careful, Caldwell. Your Irish is showing.”

He did not care if his cheeks flamed red with anger. “The people there went hungry for days. They gave all their food, their farms were destroyed, and a twenty-year-old girl was killed by sniper fire while she baked bread for the soldiers.”

“Killed you say?”

“Yes, Jennie Wade. It’s in the story. And there is a Union widow, quite young, who was forced to let her farm be used for a Confederate field hospital. Completely ruined the place. Another woman with three children and currently with child is running the local cemetery in her husband’s place while he guards Washington. The cemetery was virtually destroyed, and she is left to pick up the pieces.”

Boris grunted. “Keep reading.” He pointed his cigar at the
Times
, sprinkling ash on the newsprint.

Harrison raked a hand through his hair and tugged at the cravat at his neck. Then he read:

Harrison tossed the paper back on the desk. “I’ve read enough.”

“Well? What have you to say to these charges?”

“I never saw any such profiteering from the citizens. It could be that this writer, Lorenzo J. Ellis, found a few people demanding compensation, but this is not the norm. On the whole, everyone I came in contact with sacrificed everything they could for the emergency. I suspect many of them will never recover from it.”

Boris lit a cigar, inhaled, sent tangy blue smoke curling into the air. “That’s not a story.”

“Perhaps not a story that will sell, but it’s a story, all right.”

“Well, in this business, Mr. Caldwell, we print stories that make money. I sent you to a battle. I want a battle story. Samuel Wilkeson’s report is the talk of the nation.”