The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 101

Symonds was a good commander and had attracted decent officers. The regiment's commissary officer was a captain named Mason, and Rob J. didn't find it difficult to explain the dietary causes of scurvy, because he could point out examples of the disease's effects among the troops. The two of them took a buckboard into Cairo and bought barrels of cabbages and carrots, which were made part of the ration. Scurvy was even more prevalent among some of the other units in the encampment, but when Rob J. tried to confer with the physicians of the other regiments, he met with little success. They seemed more conscious of their roles as army officers than as doctors. All were uniformed, two sported swords like line officers, and the surgeon of the Ohio regiment wore custom fringed epaulets like those in a picture Rob J. once had seen of a pompous French general.

In contrast, he embraced his civilian self. When a supply sergeant, grateful for banished stomach cramps, issued him a blue woolen overcoat, he welcomed it but took it to town and had it dyed black and given plain bone b.u.t.tons. He liked to pretend he was still a country doctor who had moved temporarily to another town.

In many respects, the camp was like a small town, albeit exclusively male. The regiment had its own post office, with a corporal named Amasa Decker as postmaster and mailman. On Wednesday evenings the band gave concerts on the drill field, and sometimes, when they played a popular song like "Listen to the Mockingbird," or "Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming," or "The Girl I Left Behind Me," the men sang along. Sutlers brought a variety of goods into the camp. Out of thirteen dollars per month, the average soldier couldn't afford much cheese at fifty cents a pound, or condensed milk at seventy-five cents a can, but they bought the sutlers' liquor. Rob J. indulged himself several times a week in mola.s.ses cookies, six for a quarter. A photographer had set up shop in a large wall tent, in which one day Rob paid a dollar for a ferrotype photograph of himself, stiff and unsmiling, that he sent off to Sarah at once as proof that her husband was still alive and well and loved her dearly.

Having taken raw troops into disputed territory once, Colonel Symonds was determined that they would never be unprepared for combat again. Through the winter, he worked his soldiers hard. There were training hikes of thirty miles that produced new patients for Rob J., because some of the men suffered strained muscles from carrying a full field pack and heavy rifled musket. Others developed hernias from wearing belts hung with heavy cartridge boxes. Squads constantly trained in bayonet warfare, and Symonds forced them to practice the laborious loading of their muskets again and again: "Bite off the end of the paper-wrapped cartridge like you're mad at it. Pour the powder down the barrel, insert the minie bullet and then the paper wrapping for a wad, and ram the whole d.a.m.n mess home. Take a percussion cap from your pouch, place it on the nipple in the breech. Aim that beautiful thing and fire!"

They did it again and again, repeatedly, unendingly. Symonds told Rob J. he wanted them to be able to load and fire when awakened from a sound sleep, when numb with panic, when their hands were shaking with excitement or fright.

In the same way, so they would learn to take orders without hesitation instead of cussing out or challenging their officers, the colonel marched them incessantly in close-order drill. Several mornings when the landscape was covered with snow, Symonds borrowed huge wooden rollers from the Cairo road department, and teams of army horses pulled them around the parade ground until it was flat and hard enough for the companies to drill some more, while the regimental band played marches and quicksteps.

It was on a bright winter's day, while pa.s.sing the perimeter of the parade ground filled with squads of drilling men, that Rob J. glanced at the seated band and noted that one of the horn players had a port-wine stain on his face. The man's heavy bra.s.s instrument rested on his left shoulder, the long throat and the bell flashing golden behind him in the winter sun, while as he blew into the mouthpiece-they were playing "Hail, Columbia"-his cheeks ballooned enormously and then relaxed, again and again. Each time the man's cheeks filled with air, the purple mark under his right eye darkened, like a signal.

For nine long years Rob J. had tensed whenever he met a man with a stain mark on his face, but now he simply proceeded to sick call, automatically walking to the beat of the insistent music all the way to the dispensary tent.

The next morning, when he saw the band marching on the parade ground to play for a First Battalion review, he looked for the horn player with the marked face, but the man wasn't there.

Rob J. walked to the row of huts where the band lived, and at once he came upon the man taking frozen garments off the washline. "Stiffer than a dead man's d.i.c.k," the man said to him in disgust. "It don't make sense to have inspections in dead of winter."

Hypocritically, Rob J. agreed, although the inspections had been his suggestion, to force the men to wash at least some of their clothing. "Got the day off, have you?"

The man gave him a surly look. "I don't march. I'm spavined."

As he walked away with his armload of frozen clothes, Rob J. saw he was. The horn player would destroy the symmetry of a military-band formation. His right leg seemed slightly shorter than the left, and he walked with a decided limp.

Rob J. went into his own hut and sat on his poncho in the cold gloom with his blanket around his shoulders.

Eleven years. He remembered the day precisely. He recalled each of the individual house calls he had made while Makwa-ikwa was being violated and murdered.

He thought of the three men who had come to Holden's Crossing just prior to the murder and then had disappeared. In eleven years he'd managed to learn nothing about them, save that they were "bad drunks."

A spurious preacher, the Reverend Ellwood Patterson, whom he had treated for syphilis.

A burly, physically powerful fat man named Hank Cough.

A skinny young man they'd called Len. Sometimes Lenny. With a port-wine stain on his face under his right eye. And a limp.

Not so skinny anymore, if this was the man. But then, not so young anymore either.

This probably wasn't the one he was looking for, he told himself. It was probable that there was more than one man in America with a facial stain and a gimpy leg.

He didn't want this to be the man, he realized. He faced the fact that he no longer really wanted to find them. What would he do if the horn player was Lenny? Slit his throat?

Helplessness gripped him.

Makwa's death was something he had managed to put away in a separate compartment of his mind. Now that compartment had been reopened, Pandora's box, and he felt an almost-forgotten iciness begin to grow deep inside him, a coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature in the small hut.

He went outside and walked to the tent that served as the regimental office. The sergeant major's name was Stephen Dougla.s.s, spelled with one more S than the senator's. He'd grown accustomed to the doctor's working with personnel files. He had told Rob J. he'd never seen an army surgeon so driven to keep complete medical records. "More paperwork, Doc?"

"A little."

"Help yourself. The orderly's gone out for a pitcher of hot coffee. Welcome to some of it when it comes. Just don't drip any on my d.a.m.n records, please."

Rob J. promised he wouldn't.

The band was attached to Headquarters Company. Sergeant Dougla.s.s kept each company's records neatly in a separate gray box. Rob J. found Headquarters Company's box, and inside it was a group of records tied with cord as a discrete bundle marked "Indiana 131st Regimental Band."

He leafed through the records, one by one. There was n.o.body in the band whose first name was Leonard, but when Rob J. found the card, he knew at once and without uncertainty that this was the right man, the way he sometimes knew if somebody would live or die.

ORDWAY, LANNING A., private. Residence, Vincennes,

Indiana. One-year enlistment, July 28, 1862.

Enlistment credit, Fort Wayne. Born, Vincennes,

Indiana, November 11, 1836. Height, 5'8".

Complexion, fair. Eyes, gray. Hair, brown.

Enlisted for limited duty as musician (E-flat ba.s.s

cornet) and general laborer, due to disability.

52.

TROOP MOVEMENTS.

It was weeks after Rob's contract ran out before Colonel Symonds came to him to discuss its renewal. By that time the spring fevers had begun to rage through the other regiments, but not in the Indiana 131st. The men of the 131st had colds from the damp ground and runny bowels from the ration, but Rob J.'s sick-call lines were the shortest he'd seen since he'd begun working for the army. Colonel Symonds knew that three regiments were tormented with fever and ague, and his own was relatively sound. Some of the oldest men, who shouldn't have been there in the first place, had been sent home. Most of the others had lice, and filthy feet and necks, and itchy loins, and they drank too much whiskey. But they were lean and hard from the long marches, keen from the constant drilling, and bright-eyed and eager because somehow Acting a.s.sistant Surgeon Cole had gotten them through the winter fit for duty, as he had promised. Out of six hundred men in the regiment, seven had died during the winter, a mortality rate of twelve per thousand. In comparison, fifty-eight men per thousand had died in the other three regiments, and now that the fevers had come, that percentage was certain to rise.

So the colonel came to his doctor ready to be reasonable, and Rob J. signed the contract for another three months of employment with no hesitation. He could tell when he was in a good position.

What they had to do now, he told Symonds, was set up an ambulance to serve the regiment in battle.

The civilian Sanitary Commission had lobbied the secretary of war until finally ambulances and stretcher-bearers were part of the Army of the Potomac, but the reform movement had stopped there, without providing similar care for the wounded of the units in the Western sector. "We're going to have to take care of ourselves," Rob J. said.

He and Symonds sat cozily in front of the dispensary tent and smoked cigars, the smoke drifting into the warming spring air as he told the colonel of his trip to Cincinnati on the War Hawk. "I talked to men who just lay there on the battlefield for two days after they were hit. It was a mercy it rained because they were without water. One man told me that during the night, pigs came close to where he lay and began to eat the bodies. Some of them weren't dead yet."

Symonds nodded. He was familiar with all the terrible details. "What do you need?"

"Four men from each company."

"You want an entire platoon to carry stretchers," Symonds said, shocked. "This regiment is markedly under strength. To win battles I need fighters, not stretcher-bearers." He considered the tip of his cigar. "Too many still are old and disabled, shouldn't have been enlisted. Take some of those."

"No. We need men strong enough to get to others under fire and bring them to safety. It isn't a job that can be done by sickly old men." Rob J. studied the troubled face of this young man he'd come to admire and pity. Symonds loved his troops and wanted to protect them, yet the colonel owned the unenviable job of having to expend human lives as if they were bullets or rations or chunks of firewood. "Suppose I use men from the regimental band," Rob J. said. "They can tootle most of the time, and after a fight they can carry stretchers."

Colonel Symonds nodded, relieved. "Very good. See if the bandmaster can give you some men."

Bandmaster Warren Fitts had been a shoemaker for sixteen years when he was recruited in Fort Wayne. He had had rigorous musical training and as a young man had tried for several years to establish a music school in South Bend. When he left that town owing money, he'd turned with bitter relief to shoemaking, his father's trade. His father had taught him well, and he was a good shoemaker. He'd earned a modest but comfortable living, and on the side gave music lessons, teaching both piano and the bra.s.s instruments. The war had refurbished dreams for him that he had thought worn out and discarded. At the age of forty he had been given a chance to recruit a military band and mold it as he wished. He had had to scour the musical talent of the Fort Wayne area to find enough musicians for the band, and now he listened with astonishment as the surgeon proposed to take some of his men for stretcher-bearers.

"Never!"

"They'd only have to be with me part of the time," Rob J. said. "The rest of the time they would be with you."

Fitts tried to hide his contempt. "Each musician has to give the band his undivided attention. When he's not playing, he must practice and rehea.r.s.e."

From his own experience with the viola da gamba, Rob J. knew this was true. "Are there instruments in the band for which you have extra players?" he asked patiently.

The question struck a responsive chord in Fitts. His position as bandmaster was the closest he would ever come to being a conductor, and he was careful to see that his own appearance, and that of the band, was worthy of their roles as artists. Fitts had a full head of graying hair. His face was cleanshaven save for mustaches that he kept clipped; he dressed the ends with wax and twirled them into points. His uniform was carefully maintained, and the musicians knew they had to keep their bra.s.ses polished, their uniforms clean, and their boots blacked and buffed. And they had to march smartly, because when the bandmaster strutted out, wielding his baton, he wanted to be followed by a band that reflected his standards. But there were a few who marred this image ...

"Wilc.o.x, Abner," he said. "Bugler." Wilc.o.x was decidedly walleyed. Fitts liked musicians to have physical beauty as well as talent. He couldn't bear to see any sort of defect spoiling the crisp perfection of his ensemble, and he had a.s.signed Wilc.o.x to spare duties as a regimental bugler.

"Lawrence, Oscar. A drummer." A clumsy sixteen-year-old boy whose lack of coordination not only made him a poor drummer but too often caused him to lose step when the band marched, so that his head sometimes bobbed out of rhythm with the heads of the other marchers.

"Ordway, Lanning," Fitts said, and the surgeon gave a funny little nod. "E-flat ba.s.s cornet." A mediocre musician and driver of one of the band's wagons, who sometimes worked as a laborer. Adequate to play ba.s.s horn when they were providing music for the troops on Wednesday evenings or when they were practicing while seated in chairs on the drill field, but his limp made it impossible for him to march without destroying the military effect.

"Perry, Addison. Piccolo and fife." A bad musician, and slovenly of person and dress. Fitts was happy to get rid of such dead wood.

"Robinson, Lewis. E-flat sopranino cornet." A capable musician, Fitts had to admit to himself. But a source of extreme irritation, a smarta.s.s with aspirations. On several occasions Robinson had shown Fitts pieces he had said were original compositions, and had asked if perhaps the band could play them. He claimed to have had experience conducting a community philharmonic in Columbus, Ohio. Fitts didn't need anyone looking over his shoulder or breathing down his neck.

"... And?" the surgeon asked him.

"And n.o.body else," the bandmaster said with satisfaction.

All through the winter, Rob J. had watched Ordway from afar. He was nervous, because although Ordway's enlistment had a long way to run, it wasn't hard for a man to desert and disappear. But whatever kept the majority of them in the army also worked on Ordway, and he was one of the five privates who reported to Rob J., not an unpleasant-looking man for a suspected murderer, except for watery, anxious eyes.

None of the five was pleased to hear of his new a.s.signment. Lewis Robinson reacted with panic. "I must play my music! I'm a musician, not a doctor."

Rob J. corrected him. "Stretcher-bearer. For the time being, you're a stretcher-bearer," he said, and the others knew he was speaking to each of them.

He made the best of a bad bargain by asking the bandmaster to give up any demands on their time, and won that concession with suspicious ease. To train them, he began at the beginning, teaching them to roll bandages and form dressings, and then simulating various types of wounds and teaching them to apply the dressings needed. He taught them how to move and carry the wounded, and furnished each man with a small rucksack that contained dressings, bandages, a container of fresh water, and opium and morphine in powder and pills.

Several splints came with the army's medical pannier, but Rob J. didn't like them, and he requisitioned lumber that allowed the stretcher-bearers to make their own splints under his fussy direction. Abner Wilc.o.x turned out to be an adequate carpenter, and innovative. He fashioned a number of excellent lightweight litters by stretching canvas between two poles. The supply officer offered a two-wheeled trap to be designated as an ambulance, but Rob J. had had years of answering house calls over bad roads, and knew that for evacuating wounded men over rough terrain he needed the security of four wheels. He found a sound buckboard and Wilc.o.x built sides and a roof to enclose it. They painted it black, and Ordway very cleverly duplicated the medical caduceus that was printed on the pannier, painting one in silver on each side of the ambulance. From the remount officer Rob J. wheedled a pair of ugly but strong workhorses, castoffs like the rest of the rescue corps.

The five men were beginning to feel an unwilling group pride, but Robinson worried openly about the increased risks of their new a.s.signment. "Of course there will be danger," Rob J. said. "The infantry on the line faces danger too, and there's danger in a cavalry charge, or there wouldn't be need for litter-bearers."

He'd always known that war corrupted, but he saw now that it had corrupted him as much as everyone else. He'd arranged the lives of these five young men so that now they were expected to go after the wounded again and again, as if they could shed musket rounds and shake off artillery, and he was trying to avert their enraged awareness by pointing out to them that they were members of the death generation. His specious words and att.i.tude sought to disclaim his responsibility, as he tried desperately to believe with them that they were no worse off now than when their lives were complicated only by Fitts's foolish temperament, and by how much expression they achieved in the playing of their waltzes and schottisches and quickstep marches.

He split them into litter teams: Perry and Lawrence. Wilc.o.x and Robinson.

"What about me?" Ordway said.

"You will stick close to me," Rob J. said.

Corporal Amasa Decker, the mailman, had come to know Rob J. because he delivered a steady stream of mail from Sarah, who wrote long and pa.s.sionate letters. The fact that his wife was so physical had always been one of her charms for Rob J., and sometimes he lay in his hut and read letter after letter, transported so by desire that he imagined he could smell her scent. Though there were females in abundance in Cairo, ranging from the hired to the patriotic, he had made no attempt to approach a woman. He was afflicted with the curse of faithfulness.

He spent much of his free time writing tender, supportive letters as counterpoint to Sarah's anguished heat. Sometimes he wrote to Shaman, and he wrote constantly in his journal. Other times he lay on his poncho and pondered how he could learn from Ordway what happened the day Makwa-ikwa was killed. He knew that somehow he had to gain Ordway's confidence.

He thought of the report Ferocious Miriam had given him on the Know Nothings and their Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. Whoever had written that report-he'd always fancied it had been a spying priest-had pa.s.sed himself off as a Protestant anti-Catholic. Could the same tactic be successful again? The report was in Holden's Crossing with the rest of his papers. But he had read it so often and so intently that he found he remembered the signs and signals, the code words and the pa.s.swords-an entire panoply of secret communication that could have been invented by a dramatic boy with an overactive imagination.

Rob J. ran exercises with the stretcher-bearers, one of them playing wounded victim, and discovered that while two men could put a man into a litter and lift him into an ambulance, those same two men would quickly tire, and might collapse, if they had to carry the litter an appreciable distance. "We need a bearer on each corner," Perry said, and Rob J. knew he was right. But that left him with only one manned litter, which clearly wasn't adequate if the regiment ran into any sort of trouble at all.

He took his problem to the colonel. "What do you want to do about it?" Symonds asked.

"Use the entire band. Make my five trained stretcher-bearers corporals. Each of them can captain a litter in situations where we have lots of wounded, with three other musicians a.s.signed to each corporal. If the soldiers have to choose between musicians who play wonderfully during a fight and musicians who will save their lives if they're shot, I know how they'll vote."

"They won't vote," Symonds said dryly. "I do all the voting around here." But he voted correctly. The five bearers sewed stripes on their sleeves, and whenever Fitts happened to pa.s.s Rob J., the bandmaster didn't say h.e.l.lo.

In mid-May the weather turned hot. The encampment was located between the conjoining Ohio and Mississippi rivers, both befouled by runoff from the camp. But Rob J. issued half a bar of brown soap to each man in the regiment and the companies were marched, one at a time, to a clean place upstream on the Ohio, where the men were ordered to disrobe and bathe. At first they entered the water with curses and groans, but most of them were country-raised and couldn't resist a swimming hole, and the bath deteriorated into splashing and horseplay. When they emerged they were inspected by their sergeants, with special emphasis on their heads and their feet, and to the jeers of their comrades, some were sent back for rewashing.

Some of the uniforms were ragged and motley, woven of inferior cloth. But Colonel Symonds had acquired a number of new uniforms, and when they were distributed the men correctly a.s.sumed they were to ship out. Both of the Kansas regiments had been taken down the Mississippi by steamboat. The conventional wisdom was that they'd gone to help Grant's army take Vicksburg, and that the Indiana 131st would follow.

But on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of May, with Warren Fitts's band making a number of discernible nervous errors but playing l.u.s.tily, the regiment was marched to the railroad yard instead of to the river. The men and the animals were loaded into boxcars, and there was a two-hour wait while wagons were lashed to flatcars, and then at dusk the 31st said good-bye to Cairo, Illinois.

The doctor and the stretcher-bearers rode in a hospital car. It was otherwise empty when they left Cairo, but within an hour a young private had fainted in one of the boxcars, and when he was brought to the hospital car, Rob J. found that he was burning with fever, and incoherent. He gave the boy alcohol sponge baths and made up his mind to offload him to a civilian hospital at the earliest opportunity.

Rob J. admired the hospital car, which would have been invaluable if they had been returning from battle instead of riding toward it. On each side of the aisle a triple tier of litters ran the length of the car. Each litter was cleverly suspended by means of India-rubber loops connecting its four corners to hooks set in the walls and posts, so that the stretching and contracting of the rubber absorbed much of the train's jostle and sway. In the absence of patients, the five new corporals each had chosen a litter and agreed they couldn't ride in greater comfort if they were generals. Addison Perry, who had proved he could doze anywhere, day or night, already was asleep, and so was the youngster, Lawrence. Lewis Robinson had taken a litter apart from the others, under the lantern, and was making little black pencil marks on a piece of paper, composing music.