My Name Is Mary Sutter Part 26

"I've interrupted," Mary said. "I do beg your pardon for not having made an appointment, but I did not know until just this moment that I would need one."

At this p.r.o.nouncement, Hay smiled. She had become well versed, he saw, in the ways of getting things done in Washington.

Mary said to Hay, "You remembered my name."

"As Mr. Lincoln will attest, I have an affinity for names."

Stanton said under his breath, "Females, especially."

"And this is Mr. Stanton."

Mary said, "I am acquainted with you as well, Mr. Stanton. I was your employee until recently."

Stanton peered at her, finally recognizing her as the young woman who had disappeared a month before, leaving them with extra work.

"Are you nursing under Miss Dix now?" Hay asked.

"Not really, no."

The president and Hay exchanged glances. Just that morning they'd had another letter from Miss Dix, complaining that the surgeons and matrons at the Armory Square Hospital had been hiring nurses themselves and that her authority was being summarily usurped. Something had to be done, or she would not be responsible for the chaos that would ensue.

"I came this morning to ask Mr. Hay for help. I wish to follow the army with supplies. I was at Fairfax. Mr. Hay helped me once before. I was hoping he could help me again."

Stanton, Lincoln, and Hay stood in silence, awed that the young woman before them had braved Fairfax. A regimental surgeon named William Stipp had come to tell them of the abject neglect the wounded had suffered. Ten thousand dead or wounded was the provisional count. But the number was impossible to reconcile, and Lincoln especially had felt helpless. At times, it seemed he could not control anything, least of all the help the wounded needed.

Mary said, "I wish to go today, if possible."

Lincoln thought, If only once George McClellan had said that to me.

Stanton sputtered, "But this is ridiculous. Lee could tour Maryland without firing a single shot. It is nonsensical to send a woman chasing after the army when we don't even know where, or if, there will be a battle."

But Lincoln held Mary's gaze as he said, "You understand that you are risking yourself, Miss Sutter. For an uncertain future." His eyes were sharp, quizzical, but alight, too, as if he already knew what she would say.

"None of us knows the future, do we, sir?"

"Write her a pa.s.s, Hay," Lincoln said. "And one for the quartermaster for any supplies."

"You can't be serious," Stanton said. "After what just happened at Fairfax?" He rose in a huff and went to the window, his back turned on all of them as Hay bent over the president's desk.

"Thank you, Mr. Lincoln," Mary said.

At the window, watching Hay accompany the young woman down the walkway toward Pennsylvania Avenue, Stanton shook his head. "You have just written that young woman's death warrant."

"I was not the one who sent a thousand drunken men thirty miles on a train, Stanton. Besides, I have more faith in that young woman than I do in most of my generals."

Stanton pursed his lips and said, "She left the War Department in the lurch, you know."

James Blevens cinched the copper banding around the ten kegs of alcohol he had packed into the long wagon bed standing in the lot next to the Surgeon General's office. The stills had been boiling for three days to make enough alcohol to fill them. He had allowed no one to label them, though, for a siphon could easily drain the casks and he feared losing the preservative before he even got to a field hospital. Even the teamster a.s.signed to drive the wagon was eyeing them with sly greed.

James tossed his bag under the wagon seat. On Sat.u.r.day, he had awakened aching and uncomfortable in the armchair in Mary's room, and had watched Mary sleep for a long while before writing her a note and going to Armory Square to begin the job of persuading surgeons to take histories and to save the amputated limbs. He was met with quizzical exasperation and the forceful suggestion that if he wanted the limbs so badly, he was welcome to go root around in the pile himself and take the limbs back into the wards, where he could try to match them to their previous owners. And he was welcome to take his own d.a.m.n histories, too, because they were a little busy, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, and whose shining f.u.c.king idea was this, as if they didn't have enough to do, and if he had so much time on his hands, why didn't he pick up a scalpel and give them a hand instead of yammering on and on about specimens and research when men were dying? James managed to catch only one soldier just as he was taken into surgery to ask him some questions, but the surgeons tossed out the leg before James could claim it.

And now, Monday, he was going to follow the army to try to persuade field surgeons of the benefits of research, and he would have to do it under conditions far less favorable than the ones at Armory Square. This morning, Brinton had taken in the reported disinterest of the Armory Square surgeons, sniffed, written out a circular to distribute, and then ordered James to follow the army with barrels of preservative and to make certain he obtained specimens.

James had no time to go back and check on Mary. He had written her a letter and posted it, saying he would be gone for a while, but that he would return as soon as possible and that she was not to disappear again under any circ.u.mstances. He had little faith that she would follow his command. It was entirely possible that she would vanish again. She had her own mind, exhibited by her choice of those shabby rooms.

What absolute trust she had placed in him.

The same trust Sarah had once placed in him.

Why he should be thinking of Sarah now was not a mystery to him. He supposed it was seeing Mary asleep. Perhaps it was that in the face of so much death, he wanted to understand his life before it was taken from him. Or perhaps it was that he didn't want to ever lose anyone else again, as he had almost lost Mary, as Mary had lost Jenny.

Everyone was precious now, even the mistaken love of his youth.

Chapter Forty-eight.

It was late afternoon on Sunday, the fourteenth of September, and the sun was angled low over the swell of South Mountain to the west. It had taken Mary and her driver four days to travel the forty miles north from Washington to Frederick, only to get caught now behind the army's long, snaking supply line and its soaring plume of yellow dust as it headed west. All day, Mary and her driver had been trapped behind the procession. The soldiers had marched on ahead, following Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned Frederick two days ago. A corporal had found a copy of Lee's secret orders in a field there, and for once, George McClellan acted. He gave chase, leaving the supply line to follow at its own tortoise pace. Mary estimated that the line was at least ten miles long. Artillery, then food, then hospital supplies at the rear, and behind the ambulances a herd of steer prodded forward by listless soldiers. Food on the hoof, tearing up the macadam, clogging the road.

In the distance, black smoke hovered over the mountain pa.s.s. All day, the booms and hiss of cannon and musketry had rolled down the National Road from the northern tip of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but now, late in the afternoon, the pa.s.s had grown eerily quiet. The line ground to a halt. The steer headed out into the farmland to graze, but the teamsters sharpened their ears, listening, the silence far less comforting than it would seem.

Mary removed the handkerchief she used as a screen for the dust, welcoming the respite from the jolts and jarring of the last few days. In Washington, the quartermaster sergeant had taken one look at the signature on her letter and had given her trunk after trunk of bleached muslin rolls, papers of pins, scissors, lint, sponges, silk suture, syringes, needles, towels, leg splints, fracture boxes, thermometers, tourniquets, bone saws, forceps, ichthyocolla plaster, and no end of medicines, including a treasure trove of quinine, morphine powder, and chloroform. There were mercury pills, tannic acid, ferric chloride, lead acetate, and numerous flasks of nitrous ether stoppered by lamb's intestine. There was zinc sulfate and spirits of ammonia. Compared to the one bottle of whiskey she had taken with her to Fairfax, she was now the wealthiest woman in the world.

Her driver was a laconic, sober man, unruffled by his a.s.signment to ferry Mary wherever she wished to go. At night he rolled up in a blanket next to the wagon while she slept under it, and in the morning he rose and made her coffee, turning aside when she traipsed into a nearby gully or wood to take care of herself.

James's note was tucked in her pocket. It is not all spoiled, he had written. Have hope. Her driver hopped down from the seat and sauntered forward to see how long the wait would be. Within minutes, he was back. "Road's blocked. Ambulances are coming, heading toward Frederick."

There were twenty of them-the two-wheeled type-jouncing over the hard road, filled with wounded. The entire army train pulled off the road after it pa.s.sed.

"Now is our chance," Mary said.

Night fell quickly, evidence of autumn. She and her driver trundled past restless horses and the dark ghosts of covered wagons, lanterns flickering like forgotten summer fireflies, teamsters' snores already sawing into the chilly night. When they reached the end of the supply line, stars emerged to light their way, but darkness closed in as they climbed the wooded slope of South Mountain. When they reached the top, the whole night had pa.s.sed and dawn was pinking the eastern sky behind them.

The first bodies appeared around a rocky outcrop. They lay sprawled across the road in postures of death next to the detritus of war: broken caissons, splintered wheels, discarded muskets, the carca.s.ses of horses swelling in the morning sun. The driver let out a long, low whistle and stopped the wagon. He hopped down and turned in a circle. "h.e.l.lo? Does anyone need help? h.e.l.lo?"

A hollow breeze rustled the leaves.

Mary armed herself with a canteen of whiskey and another of water. Her driver armed himself with a shotgun, and together they trudged from body to body, searching for someone who might still be alive. They counted hundreds of dead, Rebel and Federal alike, hidden behind trees and curled behind boulders.

Even this early in the morning, fatted carrion birds waddled among the dead.

h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo?

They climbed back into the wagon. At the summit, an inn built of stone housed a doctor presiding over a dozen wounded. He wept when he accepted Mary's supplies of suture, morphia, and dressings.

Mary and her driver crept down the switchback on the westward side through a heavy mist, detouring around more bodies. Ascending wagons carried volunteers from Boonsboro. Mary told them about the doctor at the inn.

About noon, they reached Boonsboro and found the town crowded with the mountain's wounded. Along the main street, Union flags flew from houses and Union soldiers on horseback raced up and down the streets. Confederate troops had pa.s.sed through the day before; the town's inhabitants had cheered when the Union army arrived.

They pushed southward toward Keedysville and the sound of artillery. Wagons br.i.m.m.i.n.g with families and Saratoga trunks flew past them on the road. The sharp whine of occasional artillery fire was whistling ahead. Companies of Union soldiers were lying at rest in the warming afternoon. The air pulsed with excitement. The going was slow now. They were following cavalry regiments, marching soldiers, clattering wagons. The soldiers were cheering and hollering when the sh.e.l.lfire hissed and burst in the distance. There was the sense of energy drawing everyone in. At any point, Mary and her driver could turn around, but they didn't, choosing to head into the vortex. They had come so far. And for Mary, even knowing what was ahead, she set aside fear and apprehension. Or rather, fear and apprehension had become pleasurable, a turn of perception that she did not want to consider, because it was terrible to think that she was attracted to devastation. She didn't quite know what would happen, or what she would do when she arrived. But this time was different. This time she had supplies. And she had already seen the worst, hadn't she?

A marker for Sharpsburg said to turn right, but the wagons went on, following the winding road under sheltering maples and oaks, past well-tended German houses, along a stream burbling over rocks and widening into still, sheltered pools. The road then swung out through fields dotted with harvested grain, the wagons rising and falling with the undulations of the land, green and verdant and formerly wholly peaceful, a place br.i.m.m.i.n.g with orchards and prosperity and beauty, but now invaded by an army. They reached a checkpoint beyond which a peach-fuzzed guard would not allow Mary to travel, even with her pa.s.s from John Hay.

"But I've brought supplies," she said and ordered her driver to push past, but the guard prevented her and sent a courier to find someone to help him.

A young, hollow-eyed colonel galloped up on a horse.

"Jonathan Letterman, medical director," he said, his eyes devouring Mary's medicine wagon. He had been galloping all over the hills, checking on the regimental surgeons and their preparations, directing them to select barns over houses as hospitals for their better access to hay and water, and for their capacity to house more men at once. Most of the surgeons had no supplies; the ambulances and supply wagons were at least a day away. The Rebels had destroyed a railroad bridge over the Monocacy Creek between Frederick and Baltimore, and all the provisions had had to be removed from the railcars and put onto wagons. He was terrified of the carnage to come. From what he had seen on the Peninsula, even if only in the aftermath, the lack of stores would doom hundreds, if not thousands, to die.

"How did you accomplish this?" Letterman asked, nodding at the wagon.

"I was at Fairfax." Mary handed him her pa.s.s and his eyes widened as he read it.

"What did you do there?" he asked, returning her papers.

"I sorted men."

He was about to speak, but stopped as her meaning sank in. After a moment, he said, "And how did you know to do that?"

"I was working with William Stipp."

At the mention of Stipp's name, Letterman drew himself up. Stipp was here with his regiment on the Hagerstown Pike, and though he was loath to let the woman through, she had supplies. There were seventy-five thousand Union men gathered on the hills behind him and uncountable Rebels entrenched under the white spires of Sharpsburg. They might all be wounded or dead tomorrow, every one of them. "All right. I will allow you to enter if you take your supplies directly to Stipp." He nodded to the guard. "Escort her to the Hagerstown Pike and stay there with her until Stipp accepts her."

Upon Mary's arrival, Stipp stood staring, an inscrutable expression on his face.

He said, "Did you bring morphine?

"Yes. Morphine, dressings, whiskey, everything."

Chapter Forty-nine.

Thomas Fall was marching toward Sharpsburg with the Sixth Corps along a southerly route, different than the one the main army was taking over the two northernmost gaps of South Mountain. The Sixth Corps was to travel over the most southerly, Crampton's Gap, in order to engage the Confederate general A. P. Hill, who had taken Harper's Ferry to the southwest, on the Potomac River. Now it was Sunday afternoon, the fifteenth of September, and the Sixth Corps were stopped at Burkittsville on the eastern base of South Mountain, pinned down in clover and cornfields, while four Union Parrott guns and two Napoleons answered Confederate guns on the mountain above them.

Thomas was exhausted. Since April, he had marched two hundred miles up and down the swampy, waterlogged Virginia Peninsula, and another thirty into the latest melee at Bull Run, and now, in the last few days, sixty miles double-quick from Washington. He had fought at the Chickahominy, Malvern Hill, the Seven Days, as well as the debacle at Chantilly, where the wounded men drowned in the deluge afterwards. At White Oak Swamp, the muck had sucked at his boots and he had thought he might drown too. In the last months, the imperative to stay alive had obliterated any desire but the most primitive. He had lost whole sections of time. In battle, the upsurge of panic rent his mind in two and he became a shadow, another being who crammed minie b.a.l.l.s into his rifled musket and shot into the smoke and confusion and then rose running over corpse and log to fall to the ground before doing it all over again. The bitter tang of gunpowder had stolen taste, smell, happiness from him.

His memories of Jenny had slipped away. She shimmered just out of reach, an indistinct sadness that haunted his days and nights. He wanted to understand how love had wrought disaster, but with each pa.s.sing day he understood less and less.

He tried to conjure desire, a reason to live, tried to imagine tiny toes, fingers. Jenny's and his, in miniature. He tried to believe that the daughter he had never seen existed at all.

The clover smelled fresh and sweet. After the rain of the last weeks, the ground was wet, but nothing like the mud of the Peninsula. Thomas regretted nearly everything, but one thing he was certain of. He had slayed Mary Sutter with his grief. If he ever saw her again, he would tell her that he knew now that keeping someone alive was more difficult than he had ever imagined.

There was a lull in the artillery barrage, and in its ringing aftermath the order came to rise up from the field and run toward the mountain. Thomas was always stunned when his feet responded, but he flew through the tall gra.s.s as the Rebels emerged from behind a stone fence and fired. Still, Thomas and his regiment ran, up the mountainside now, bayonets fixed, hurling themselves at the Rebels, slashing and stabbing until the Rebels turned and ran up the hill. The Federals fired after them, killing them by the dozens, dashing up the mountain, past the abandoned big guns. Thomas hid behind trees and boulders as b.a.l.l.s whistled past, until his legs pushed him higher. He had fired perhaps twenty shots. He was aware that around him, in the trees and on the slope, men were falling. But he was not falling. He was pushing ahead, up the mountain. He was a shade, a shadow. He pa.s.sed wounded Rebels, kicked their muskets from them. He flew over another stone wall. The Rebels were running away, retreating. He fired at their backs. He let out a yell, echoed by men to his left and right. An orange moon rose, highlighting the black branches of trees. An owl hooted. There was no more firing. Thomas could no longer stay awake. He lay down in the underbrush and slept.

In Mary's dream, Jenny was dying again, only this time, Mary withheld the knife. She made no cuts, no intervention. Did not presume to think that she could save her sister. Instead, she pressed herself against the lying-in room's walls, letting the doctor work the forceps in and out, crushing the baby's head between the curved blades in an effort to save Jenny. Her mother was pleading with her to intervene, but she did not trust herself. She was too stymied by the shame of having stayed in Washington until it was too late, too busy condemning herself so that she was unable to act. When the doctor failed, when both the baby and Jenny died, Bonnie cried and her mother waged battle with Mary while the doctor crept out of the house, unaccustomed to the grief of women, though he would have to become so if he ever dared again to dabble in women's lives.

"Mary. Wake up."

"I'm awake," she said, though she wasn't. She was suspended in time, hovering in that s.p.a.ce between dream and reality wherein the sleeping mind recasts the past. Not merely dwelling in memory, but changing it utterly, irrevocably.

"Get up, Mary. It's nearly dawn, and it's raining."

Mary's eyes flickered open.

Under a deeply gray sky, William Stipp was standing above her.

"We have to get ready," he said.

The barn Stipp had chosen was located at the far right of McClellan's line, in a swale suffused with cool morning fog. Seven people huddled inside: Mary, her driver, Stipp, and four soldiers a.s.signed to a.s.sist him at the makeshift hospital he had crafted amid the hay and cow stalls. In the night, while they had been sleeping, the Union general Joseph Hooker and his division had tramped past them toward a cornfield, where now the stalks were rustling like silk, giving the Union soldiers the misimpression of safety, which allowed them to fling themselves into the corn and disappear by the hundreds, their muskets upright against their chests, a parade of bobbing bayonets glinting above the stalks in the feeble morning sun. For one moment, the scene was beautiful. For one moment, the hills and woods around held their collective breath. For one last, beautiful second, the silvery light on the slender leaves made everyone believe that despite the roar of artillery falling nearby, restraint was still possible.

In that second, the Confederates considered the beauty from their perch on a slight rise on the opposite side of the cornfield and thought of home, where their own fields lay fallow and their children were hungry. They wanted to go home to cradle their starving children and then shoot a hog and scavenge apples and stray oats down by the edge of the river and take the bounty home and feed the family they loved so that their children wouldn't die.

For immortality, they raced into the corn.

By the time that last beautiful second had pa.s.sed, the field enveloped both armies, the Federals and the Rebels alike, the silky corn thread brushing their weathered cheeks, the light sifting between the stalks, the cool, wet dirt cushioning their bare feet. What boots they had had rotted away on the Peninsula and so it was possible to think that they were at home, barefoot, safe on their own land.

Reveling in the familiar, some of the men forgot what was coming. Or imagined somehow, something different. Some silken reprieve.

But in each row of corn, the enemy appeared as if from nowhere. Face to face, at intimate range, each man was alone with his opponent. Each knelt, fired, charged with his bayonet, stabbed with his knife, and wielded the b.u.t.t of his musket. Each stepped over and on the fallen, friend or enemy, wounded or dead, groaning or silent, to get to the next man and the next, until few were left alive.

There was nothing beautiful about it.

It took four hours for the men to finish, and when they were done, not a single man who entered the cornfield emerged untouched.

By the thousands, the wounded lay on the ground and thought, This thirst is not thirst. This pain is not pain. This world is not being rent in two.

That howling is only a whisper. That screech is just a murmur. That explosion nothing but a sigh. That musket fire is but a rustle.

I am not here. We are not here. Armies are not here. The country is not depending on this moment.

Battles are conversations. An exchange. A dialogue.

None of this is true.

After the cornfield, there were woods and bridges and the holy grail of a sunken road to take. The battle swelled southward along Antietam Creek.

From his vantage point at the Pry farmhouse, George McClellan directed his army, though the rolling hills and his own caution prevented clarity. The attacks had to be scrupulously managed or his army might be depleted and he would have no one and nothing left to command. Across the way, Robert E. Lee, stranded and stationary and blinded by the burning houses of Sharpsburg, regretted invading Maryland, for McClellan's troops were defending this land like his had defended Virginia.

Weariness swept over them both.