My Name Is Mary Sutter Part 27

Thomas and the Sixth Corps were pouring up the hill from the Boonsboro Road, expecting to be sent immediately into the fray. But George McClellan worried that all his men might die, and he loved them so much that he told the Sixth Corps to take up a position to the extreme right of the line, and to do nothing. Shot and sh.e.l.l burst above their heads. Thomas clung to the earth, the musty smell of b.l.o.o.d.y dirt invading his lungs.

Then Thomas Fall thought he heard a call to go forward. This is what he heard in the bedlam. Go forward. In all, he took ten steps before a solid shot struck him in his left shin. He cartwheeled in the air and landed on his back. When he came to, the fight was a symphony of smoke that blinked out the sun.

The Confederate general A. P. Hill, having heard the rumble of guns, abandoned Harper's Ferry and double-quicked north in an all-out marathon that endeared him to Lee for the remainder of their lives. Sometime around two, he presented himself to his friend, who flung Hill's men into the maelstrom as if he didn't love them.

Jonathan Letterman was sending an army of stretcher bearers into the woods and fields to search for wounded. The numbers were staggering. Carnage was everywhere. Even he had to turn his head and vomit.

Blood fogged the landscape, obscured the sun, infiltrated even the waters of the creek, which flowed smoky red southward in the direction of Harper's Ferry and the Potomac River. Days later, the citizens of Washington would remark that the Potomac had turned the color of rust, but would not make the connection until news of the enormous numbers of casualties came pouring in.

It was exhaustion that ended things.

The cornfield, rustling so beautifully at dawn, was at evening a sea of stubble and bodies. Down the way, a contested bridge still stood, but the dying festooned its arcing roadbed and graceful footings. In the woods and thickets and sunken road turned b.l.o.o.d.y lane, so many men had died that the surviving could not count them, though later, when Jonathan Letterman painstakingly pursued the tally, the dead and wounded on this one day would exceed the number acc.u.mulated over the three and a half months on the Peninsula.

The cornhusks would not absorb much blood, but Mary laid them on wounds anyway, tossing them aside when the stringy fibers swelled and burst open. Underfoot, the barnyard was a lake of sanguinous mud. The night had seemed to fall very fast. The wounded had started to flood in at midafternoon, and the stores of dressings had been depleted within a half hour. All her supplies, used up already. The fracture boxes, the morphia, the whiskey. She had already torn up her petticoats. It was Fairfax all over again, though this time there were no trains. But it was the noise that bludgeoned. Sighs and sorrows and heartrending cries resounded through the starless atmosphere. Dante, Mary thought. But which circle of h.e.l.l was reserved for the hopelessly useless?

"Mary."

Stipp stood silhouetted in the barn door, a yellow lantern flickering behind him, his amputation saw a black sword at this side. Since morning his face had aged a thousand years. His forearms were scarlet to the elbow and his hands had already swelled from just the few hours of gripping the bone saw. With the back of his arm, he wiped his forehead.

Mary swayed to her feet. They had been up for hours and hours. The dawn was an eon away. She went toward him.

"I need you to do something," he said.

"I can't choose. There isn't enough light, and besides it would be useless. There aren't any trains on which to put the men."

He swallowed hard, resisting the urge to kiss her, to fall again into that well. Instead, he forced himself to look her in the eye. "No. That's not what I mean. You wanted to be a surgeon. Do you still?"

Mary felt her whole body protest, thought suddenly that she was an arrogant, presumptuous person who had chased hope into the Maryland countryside, and would now be punished for every ambitious thought she had ever harbored in her life.

"Yes," she said. "I do."

Stipp led her to his makeshift surgery table. Already, his ankles and feet were swelling in his boots. He remembered this from the Peninsula, knew what pain lay ahead. The hours and hours of amputations. He would have saved Mary the horror, if he could.

He positioned her at the side of a wounded man he had already chloroformed. His left lower leg was lacerated, and the shattered bone exposed. A shame to teach her here, where time was an ever-ticking bomb, but he was not in charge of h.e.l.l, he was only its perpetual resident.

"Do you remember?" Stipp asked her.

"Yes," she said, though for a moment her mind had gone completely blank. She could not even remember how to cut an umbilical cord.

He made her hold the bone saw and the scalpel to feel their heft. Then he said, "What's first?"

"Set the tourniquet."

"That's right." He helped her to do it, showing her how to tamp the canvas strap with the screws. When it was in place and the skin was beginning to pale, he said, "The skin will be tough. Make as precise a cut as you can."

Instinct, desire, how far these had gotten her, but courage was an entirely other matter. Courage was triumph over desire. When her hand hesitated above the pallid skin, Stipp turned courtly, as if she were already in great pain. "We have only so much time."

She made the cut, tracing a circular line only an inch above the knee, enough to save enough skin to make a flap.

"Deeper," Stipp said.

She complied, slicing through the skin until she reached the striated red of the muscles. Her hands felt awkward, as if they were not hers, or attached to her. The muscles exposed, Stipp showed her how to locate the blood vessels, though when she slipped a perfect loop through each before he could tell her how, he only nodded, as if he understood already that she would know how to do everything.

"I have to dissect the muscles next." Mary was talking to herself now, not to Stipp, remembering, summoning the drawing from Gray's, the steps from the surgery manual. The taut ribbon of the quadriceps tendon was pink and stretched over the patella. It snapped back when she cut it, and the suddenness of the movement made her jump.

"That's right," Stipp murmured, and he picked up the thigh so that she could detach the hamstring tendons. Her a.s.sistant now, he nonetheless said, "The ligaments will go with the leg. No need to worry about them." Each of them was remembering when the situation had been reversed, when Mary had taught him how to do this, reading instructions to him from the book.

When the bone was revealed, she grasped the handle of the bone saw and Stipp pulled back on the skin and muscle. "Now, take the saw in one hand and anchor the other on the knee. Press down, but when you pull back, pull up, as if you are caressing, and not cutting the bone."

The saw teeth bounced over the shiny, hard surface. The sound of the saw sang in her head. She pushed the memory away.

"You will be able to do this one day without even thinking about it," Stipp said.

But it did not feel that way now. It felt awkward and wrong. After another ineffective swipe, Mary shut her eyes, pushing away the press of time, trying to understand what was needed. Maybe it was something like breech babies, how they required both force and finesse, a two-handed maneuver that felt c.u.mbersome and artificial. You had to hold the baby's torso up in a towel with one hand, and with the other slip a finger into the birth ca.n.a.l, locate the baby's mouth, and draw the chin down to the chest so the neck wouldn't hyperextend and make the presenting diameter too large.

Force and finesse.

She slipped into that place deep inside her that was more prayer than thought. Again, she drew the saw over the bone.

"Yes. Exactly. Pressure and not pressure. You feel it. It's a breath." Stipp knew how to talk to her, went on talking in rhythm as she sawed. "Strength, yes. But intention more than force. Yes. That's it. That's right."

And then, suddenly, the bone separated and the weight of the leg fell away.

No baby to manage, Mary was stunned, uncertain what to do next.

Stipp said, "Release the tourniquet."

She unscrewed the tamps, waited for any sign of bleeding from the tied-off arteries, and when they held, Stipp eased behind her and talked her through folding the flap of skin over the cut, securing it in back, lifting the thigh so that she could st.i.tch the skin back together.

When she was done, and the boy had been carried away to recover outside in the damp, Mary looked up. Lanterns blazed on the floor. Her driver and the four a.s.sistants were gathered in a half circle a few feet away, watching her. She had no idea how much time Stipp had taken to teach her. She had lost track of time, had lost track even of where she was, the sounds of the war having disappeared as she concentrated, but now the dirty sound of anguish came roaring back. She was afraid that she had wasted hours and hours, that she had been selfish and covetous, knowledge an uncharitable luxury when men had been dying. The driver and the a.s.sistants came toward her, and they grasped her by her elbows, murmured words she recognized as admiration. Their faces looked like fathers' faces when she emerged from a birthing room to hand them their infant sons or daughters.

Imagine that, she thought she heard one of the a.s.sistants say.

"Can you do the surgery without me now?" Stipp asked.

Mary nodded.

"Good," he said, and gave her his set of knives, while he retrieved another from his case. His a.s.sistant was setting up another table, quickly fashioning one from the barn stalls. "You'll do only above-the-knee amputations. No others. I'll do everything else. But you'll have enough work as it is. Do it the same each time. You'll get fast, believe me. The a.s.sistants will administer the chloroform and manage the induction seizure for you. I want you to think only of doing the surgeries." He had become brusque again, William Stipp at work, but for the first time in a long time, everything seemed right to Mary.

"Your hands will get tired. Don't hunch your shoulders. Take deep breaths." He was going to add, Don't be afraid, but stopped himself just in time.

Chapter Fifty.

"Not you, too?" The soldier wiped his sweating face with a grimy square of handkerchief and turned to the rest of a small group of soldiers leaning on their shovels beside a half-dug shallow trench. Hundreds of dead, looted of their shoes and other valuables, waited to be buried. Farther down, the work of the early morning appeared indifferent; heads and toes peeked out from the loose dirt shoveled on top.

James had stopped his wagon at the base of a hillock where an embalmer had set up a table outside a tent and was taking payment from families who'd streamed into the area searching out their dead, hoping to find their loved ones before they were buried. Everyone held handkerchiefs to their faces as the stench of death curled like a virulent fog over the once fragrant hills. Nearby, townspeople were fashioning coffins out of a splintered sycamore. A bonfire of horse carca.s.ses rained ash.

"Someone else wants specimens? Who?" James asked.

"What'd he say his name was?" The gravedigger was hoping to keep the conversation going so he didn't have to turn back to his unspeakable task. His clothing reeked of death; he would never get it out. Never.

"A fellow by the name of Brinton," someone offered. "He went yonder," he said, and then watched the inquirer jounce his wagon and its odd cargo over the burned field, winding around bodies still lying in the sun.

James discovered Brinton nearby, at a bridge where the living were dragging the dead from the water onto the stream's sh.o.r.es. But it was not the human dead that interested Brinton. The surgeon was circling a horse that was standing perfectly balanced on two legs. But when James swung down from his wagon seat, he saw that the beast was dead.

"The muscles remain fixed and rigid, you see?" Brinton said, not evincing any surprise at seeing James. He pointed out the stiffening curve of the horse's neck, its open mouth, the remnants of froth bubbling at its lips. "I've seen this same peculiarity in a number of the dead as well. Curious what a violent death can do to the body, don't you think?"

After the teamster jumped ship in Frederick, it had taken James ten days to trundle over the Maryland countryside with his casks of alcohol. Every pothole, rut, rock, gulley, and pebble had registered in his bones, and yet here was Brinton, as fleet as a messenger.

To Blevens's astonished inquiry, Brinton said, "I traveled by horse. Much quicker. And I bought this wagon in Keedysville, though I had to pay a great price for it. But I've done fairly well for myself. I've already managed a few specimens." He showed James the back of the wagon, where burlap bags filled with limbs were pinned with notes. "Don't forget to describe whatever circ.u.mstance you can about the death. I'm sending these up to Hagerstown with a teamster today to get them on a train and save them from spoiling in the heat. What are your plans?"

James was furious. Brinton hadn't had to lug kegs of alcohol over mountain pa.s.ses. "To visit the hospitals. Obtain what I can, as you suggested I do."

"You won't have to visit the hospitals, I don't think. They're behind on the burials."

James paled. "You don't mean for me to hack bodies apart in the field?"

"No. But if something interests you. Not just as a curiosity, of course, but to be of real use. Why not?"

James opened his mouth to speak, but he could not form words. Nor could he tear his gaze from Brinton's tranquil face. Smoke lingered in the crisp fall air, as the detritus of the battle burned in perpetual bonfire.

Brinton lowered his handkerchief. "Dear G.o.d, man, what is the difference between this and searching out an arm or a leg in a pile of cut limbs?"

James didn't know, but there was a difference, some sacred distinction that he could not describe. Despite all the specimens he'd collected over the years, he had always been able to separate the person from the object. True, most of what he had purchased was from medical supply houses, and he supposed they had come from cadavers, but they had come already prepared, floating in gla.s.s jars or already skeletonized. His scientist mind had been able to distinguish science and the death that had provided it. The specimens he had obtained in Washington had come from surgery, mostly pieces of diseased tissue to examine under the microscope. Now the wind picked up, bringing with it the memory of life before brutality had wiped the beauty from the hills. The land was utterly defaced. He couldn't deface the dead, too.

"I'll visit the hospitals, thank you," James said.

"Think again. The most interesting specimens might be from the ones who died of their wounds. Ask around. Despite the look of things, the burial parties might be far too efficient for our task. See if you can rustle up some information from them. Head injuries, for one. Those all died quickly. Of great interest would be a skull with a fatal projectile in place, for instance. Or a penetration of the vertebrae. Arms and legs will be a dime a dozen soon. We need information on how to treat the ones who die, so that in the future they might not die. Those amputees"-Brinton nodded into the distance-"they'll all live. What's the greater good there?" He tucked his handkerchief in his pocket. "Also, you might want to pick up a shovel for yourself." With that, he strode away and mounted his horse, a sorrel spooked by the lifeless field, and galloped off across the wasteland.

James climbed into his wagon, put his head in his hands, and waited until his nausea pa.s.sed.

Chapter Fifty-one.

The day after the battle, the sight of the crowded yard nearly knocked Mary off her feet. Men lay next to one another without room for anyone to walk in between them. She staggered and caught herself on the doorframe, and a splinter jabbed into her palm, but she did not feel it. Cries for water and for mothers and sweethearts mingled with sobs of pain. It was a great rabble of suffering, and now it was her great rabble.

She covered her mouth with her hand and her eyes traveled over the endless numbers for whom her responsibility was now far greater than it had ever been. She wished William had told her not to be afraid, because she was terrified now.

Only ten amputations since last evening? The end might never come.

She turned in the doorway and tried to catch her breath. What had Lincoln said? Are you willing to risk yourself? She did not know he had meant her sanity.

They brought in another soldier and laid him on her table. Mary looked over at Stipp, absorbed in his surgery. He had done all he could for her, had given her exactly what she'd asked for. What had she done? She returned to her table just as her a.s.sistant put the chloroform cone over the boy's face. They were all in tatters: dirt crusted underneath their fingernails, gunpowder blackening their faces.

There was a crater in the boy's left shin. His eyes were shut tight against the pain, though the chloroform was already beginning to take hold. Mary blinked, once, twice, then put a hand to the boy's wrist and said, "Thomas."

He opened his eyes, fearing death, and instead saw Mary Sutter, ap.r.o.ned and bloodied and staring at him as if he were dead.

After being shot, Thomas had lain in that ditch all night, watching the stars flicker on and off, not knowing if it was the clouds or his dying that obscured them. The pain in his shin had bored like a worm, and then it went completely numb, followed by his hip and his back, and then they all flared up suddenly together and he couldn't move without causing more pain. All night, he'd waited for death, lanterns bobbing in the distance, the drizzle pooling in his ears and eyes. But looking at Mary now, he remembered that he had something to say to her. Something important to say before he died. He racked his brain, searching back through time, back to before the Peninsula, where he had fought at White Oak Swamp and Seven Pines and Yorktown, his feet sinking to his shins in the mud, but before that, to the time when he had last seen her at Fort Marcy. Oh, yes! It was that he was sorry. Sorry that he had once believed her to be perfect. He wanted to say something else, too. He wanted to tell Mary that love was a mystery he had been unable to solve in his life, but he found that he could not speak. He was leaving her, and he could not get the words out. Mary was bending close to him, but her face was blurring and a sweet, thick perfume was falling through the air, filling him with such fatigue. She whispered, and the words were strung out, stretched on a bed of sleep.

"I promise I'll make it right," she said, but he had no idea what needed to be made right. He was falling, but he understood very clearly that Mary had always loved him; had loved him from the moment they had met. Why this had not been apparent to him earlier, he did not know. But now he was falling asleep, falling into an imitation of death, and before he lost his last dizzying hold on time, he thought of Jenny dying and that Mary had been with her, and how comforting it must have been to Jenny that the last vision she had had of the world was her sister, bending over her, trying to save her.

It did not occur to Mary to call for Stipp to take care of Thomas. Instead, she thought of Jenny. A knife goes into a body and something is either repaired or it isn't. Perhaps it really was that simple.

It was strange that redemption, when it finally came, felt like discipline. Mary's movements were certain, her thinking methodical, stemming no longer from fear or love-the same emotion, when love is unrequited-but instead from determination. She was not even bartering with death anymore. She was defying it. At home there was a baby named Elizabeth who was Thomas and Jenny's child and Mary was going to make certain that Thomas lived to know her. She would do this by paying meticulous attention to tying off the arteries, to the precise severing of the tendons, to a vigorous but careful application of pressure to the saw, and finally to the looping of perfect, painstaking st.i.tches. Time, suspended, did not matter. Thomas was Christian and Jenny both, and Amelia too.

When she had tied her final knot and snipped the black catgut, Mary stepped back and saw James Blevens standing not five feet from her, his hat covering his heart. Dust motes were twisting in the sunlight piercing the gaps in the barn walls. Behind her, stretcher bearers were slinging a groaning man onto Stipp's table. Other surgeons, men Blevens did not recognize, swayed at the tables in the late afternoon light. Save the rigors of the patients succ.u.mbing to chloroform or an occasional muttered epithet, the barn was a sanctuary of quiet compared to the clamor outside. Mary's eyes were bloodshot, her ap.r.o.n scarlet.

Stipp looked up, saw Blevens, and said, "Holy h.e.l.l, what are you doing here?"

"Looking at our Mary."

The two men acknowledged one another with a nod-our Mary-and then James Blevens said to Mary, "I thought I told you not to disappear."

"I didn't," she said. "I've been with William the whole time."

William. James flexed and unflexed his fingers, glanced charily at Stipp, and then let his gaze run again over the broken barn stalls, the heaps of hay, the sawdust scattered on the dirt floor to absorb the blood, and Mary, surgical instruments in hand, a patient at rest on a wooden slab balanced on doubled sawhorses, a pile of legs beside her table. You will have no lectures, no dissecting lab. What you want is impossible. But what was impossible was Mary; the last time he had seen her, she'd been safely asleep in her bed.

"Dear G.o.d, Mary."

Mary lifted her bloodied hand to her face. Her eyes were hooded with fatigue, and a vague haziness had come over her, as if she were out of focus. He could see the nicks and scars on her knuckles and wrists, the new strength in her forearms. She gazed at him, and when she spoke it seemed to James as if she were speaking through gla.s.s, her reply delayed a second or two.

"I'm so glad you're here. Can you help us?" she asked.

Her request was oddly formal, out of keeping with the surroundings, hospitable in this hovel in a way she had not been that first night at Dove Street, when she had desperately wanted him to leave. It was as if she were displaced, out of time, as if everything were reversed. Except that now he was going to disappoint her again. He raised his hands, turning them over to show her his palms with their still-shiny surfaces, capable of holding a washcloth, of separating twigs from strands of hair, but not the delicate work of tying off arteries.

"My hands won't do the work. They may never do the work again."

The same hands that had bathed her. She hadn't asked him about his hands in Washington. She'd been too exhausted to wonder about his health; she, who had slathered his palms with slippery elm, had forgotten, when he had been so kind to her.

"But you're here?" Her a.s.sistant was wrapping the leg in cornhusks and making a mess of it.

Blevens nodded at the limbs at her feet. "For another purpose. I've come to take away the legs."

Mary was peering at him as if he were now a subject of study. He could almost picture her refocusing the lens of the microscope, trying to comprehend what she was seeing.

"You've come to take the legs?" she asked.