My Name Is Mary Sutter (25 page)

“How are you? Some of the men I take care of relive the battle.”

She would not tell him about the saw that still sang in her head, the boy clutching his leg, the blood arcing. All she had seen, and yet he had seen more, and worse.

Blevens wasn’t sure how he was. But he was glad to see her, felt even as if the world were a better place because she was here, though something about her had changed since he had seen her last. It was not just her alarming thinness, or her faded dress, or the patina of grief. She was more grave, if possible, than before, but also less angry. And her inquiry about his well-being seemed conciliatory, approaching even forgiveness. He supposed it was because she was no longer at the end of her choices; in the face of chaos, she had found a way. He knew how that felt, knew the pleasure of possibility.

He nodded at the microscope and said, “Trying to find an answer helps.”

“Answers. Yes.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for Christian. And I apologize again for not helping you in Albany.”

“We would know less, you and I, if we had stayed.”

Forgiveness yet. They lingered over the slide, reluctant to say good-bye, and for a moment Mary thought that she wanted nothing else but to stay here, with James Blevens’s arm inches from hers, but finally she gathered her skirts around her and asked him to hail her a hack.

Outside, he took her hand and helped her into the carriage.

“You must come to the Union Hotel,” Mary said.

He looked at her inquiringly.

“To see Dr. Stipp.”

“Yes,” he said. “To see Dr. Stipp.”

That evening, Mary said, “Blevens has a microscope. Here.”

“Are you certain it was he? The James Blevens I knew?”

“Yes. He said so.”

William Stipp set his glasses on his desk and sighed. He had sent Mary Sutter off for a day of rest and diversion and she had ended up in another hospital, peering though a lens with James Blevens, that precocious, bubbling cauldron of questions who had once dumped a cat on his desk. Of course those two would have found one another; they were each other’s echoes.

“You say he knows your family?”

“Yes. He knows everyone.”

Sadness had been lifted from her; Stipp tried to be glad. He said, “We missed you.”

She lingered at the doorjamb for a moment, wanting to tell him more, about how James Blevens had turned her down, about how grateful she was to Stipp for teaching her, even about how much she had seen today, looking through that microscope, but she did not. Something about the wistful look in his eyes stopped her. She wondered if she should ask about his wife, but decided she would not, not today. Grief of that sort should not be roused indiscriminately; discretion was the gift he had given her in her sadness, she would give him the same.

“I’m here now,” she said.

Stipp nodded, but was not at all certain that she was. And then she was gone.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Fort Marcy 25th September, 1861

Dear Jenny,

I am without words and heartsick. They will not give me leave. You must do all you can to take care of yourself. I blame myself. If I hadn’t left Christian, then perhaps he would still be alive—but Amelia wanted Mary. Oh, how I grieve.

Amelia will look after you. Do not be afraid, but strong.

Did Mary know in July that you were with child? I only ask because she did not mention it, which I find not in keeping with her general good nature.

All we do is drill and train, which is necessary since we are not a professional lot, but General McClellan is a fine soldier who is pushing us to be fit for the fight. I hope that very soon the war will be finished. I will come back to you unashamed, proud that I have given what I could, but sore of heart that I am not with you now. I have seen all of Virginia that I care to. We are chopping down every tree in a twenty-mile radius to keep warm at night and to cook our food. The army is a ravenous thing. We may eat up Virginia.

I cannot believe that Mary knew and said nothing.

Beyond words, I grieve for Christian.

Your husband,
Thomas Fall

11th October, 1861

Dear Mary,

Your sister’s confinement looms; I fear for her as you would fear for her if you were to see her; she grows pale and has the most tremendous headaches. I suspect eclampsia or worse. The baby is large, perhaps too large for her to deliver. I am unequal to the task. Can you come home to help me?

I forgive you for not coming home when Christian died. You say you have a hospital full of Christians. Perhaps this is true. But now you must think of your family. I have lost both my son and my husband in the last year; I need you.

Thomas writes to tell us that he is at Fort Marcy, near the Arlington Heights. Is that near you? Perhaps you could convince his superior officer of the need to send Thomas home. You could travel together.

Amelia

21st October, 1861

Dear Mary,

You must understand how much I love you. There are days when I think of nothing else. Before me, your sister grows ever larger, closer and closer to her time. You know the dangers women like her fall prey to. She is the size of a faerie, a child, a shadow. I am immensely proud of you for finding your own way in the world. I ask only this one thing of you: Please come home, Mary. Please come home and help me.

Amelia

27th October, 1861

Dear Thomas,

Please tell me that you were not in the fight at Ball’s Bluff. I am in great fear; the papers are so full of rumor that it is difficult to get an accurate account of anything. I worry all the time. The baby grows. I am tired and headachey and no help to Mother at all. She tries to hide her worry, but I know her, and her tricks with other mothers do not work with me. She has written Mary to ask her to come home.

Mary did know in July. Perhaps she did not feel right telling you. She did not know you were going to enlist. My heart aches, Thomas. I miss you all the time. Are you pleased with the news of the baby? You didn’t say.

Your Jenny

27th October, 1861

Dear Jenny,

I am writing to tell you that I was not in the fight at Ball’s Bluff. It was a regiment of the state of Massachusetts, and poor fellows. Their bodies are washing down the Potomac and getting stuck against the Long Bridge. We are having a devil of a time fishing them out. We are charged with sitting on the banks and trying to catch them as they flow by, but we cannot grapple them with just rope. The city is gravely depressed, the war at their doorstep, the barbarity of it. But it heartens me, in an odd way. We are all of a mind that we are fighting a fight that must be won. The importance of our quest helps me bear being apart from you.

It is growing to be your time. Please do all that Amelia asks of you. Be very brave.

Thomas Fall,

Your husband

2nd November, 1861

My dearest Thomas,

Have you written? I have not heard from you in over five weeks. Each day, I wait for the mail. Maybe one of your letters has gone astray. If I do not hear from you soon, I will worry. Please write to me. I sent you a letter only a few days ago; I am eager, you see, to hear from you.

I am heavy with child. I am glad you cannot see me this way. The baby kicks and turns. I rejoice, for I take this to mean that he is eager and robust. I have decided it is a boy. I try not to be afraid, but I have heard mother and Mary tell such stories. So many things can go wrong. But perhaps Mary will be coming soon. My savior, my sister. Do you mind if I show her our letters? No, perhaps not. How I wish you were able to come home to me.

Your most loving wife,

Jenny

Chapter Twenty-nine

The war around Washington, except for Ball’s Bluff, had turned quiet after the battle at Bull Run, and had remained so, though in the West battles raged in Missouri, and in the South a Union naval force of seventy-seven ships steaming from Fort Monroe southwards to invade Port Royal, South Carolina, was savaged by a hurricane. But the biggest news came on November first. Abraham Lincoln accepted Winfield Scott’s offer to resign, and George McClellan succeeded Scott as commander of Union forces. Congress especially was hopeful that the energetic, optimistic McClellan would seize the opportunity to implement his dashing intelligence toward swift victory. McClellan was already widely beloved; now, with this newest crown of power, he was worshipped.
George McClellan will save us
, the Northern papers said, as Winfield Scott boarded a train for West Point, where he was going to write his memoirs and observe the young general from afar.

Four days after George McClellan replaced Winfield Scott, James Blevens, asleep in his small cell in the center wing of the E Street Infirmary, thought he was dreaming again about Bull Run. The frightful cries, the inability to catch his breath, the crackle of battle were now his nightly portion, and he awoke choking, as he often did, but this November night the curls of smoke did not disappear with consciousness. He sat straight up, confused, and stumbled to the window. In the square outside, the sisters were screaming for help, their shorn, uncovered heads gleaming in the firelight. About a hundred patients—one hundred four, the mother superior would later state—occupied the beds, and nearly forty of them could not walk. It was this fact, which the nun had reported to him the previous evening, that shook Blevens from his stupor. He thrust himself into his shirt and pants, sweat already slathering his skin. He took a swift but longing look at his microscope before leaving it behind to dash into the hallway, where a dense black cloud billowed along the ceiling, its tentacles reaching into the open doors of rooms where the bedridden and convalescent alike were shrieking for help. Through the smoke, he could make out the hunched shapes of the Metropolitan police darting here and there, evacuating the invalids. Blevens dropped to his knees and crawled along the floor, counting doorways carefully, trying to remember which patient was where. He veered into a room. Two of his patients were huddled in bed, coughing. One had a broken leg. The other was a young man who reminded him of Christian. It was the boy’s eyes, he thought. He was missing a portion of his left jaw, a section of his bottom and upper lip, and the whole of his left nostril, compliments of his tentmate, whose musket had discharged when he’d been cleaning it. The boy was eighteen and he was named Peter Markeli. Blevens seized a sheet and spread it on the floor. He tore away a strip of sheet and gave it to each of them to hold over their noses. Then he lowered each man onto the sheet and yelled, “I’m going to pull you.”

He covered them with their blankets. Through the window, he could see flames shooting through the infirmary roof. The heat made his hands slippery, but he wrapped each sheet end around his wrists and then anchored them in his palms. He dropped to his knees and gasped for air and then plunged forward, dragging the men behind him to the door, through it, down the hallway, toward the front door. It was a mile away. Ten miles. People were yelling. He could hear timbers falling. He stooped to stay below the smoke, but it swirled down as if to ensnare him. The weight of the men wrenched his shoulders, his elbows; his hands burned. He wondered if he would lose his way; he could hardly see. He could hear artillery shells screaming, the horse yelping as it galloped away. He had done nothing at Centreville, nothing at Manassas. Christian had died. Blevens could see the doorway more clearly now, could see the river of smoke spilling out of it. Blue flames rippled along the ceiling. Men were crying. He stumbled toward the door. He was Charon escaping across the river Styx, hauling the damned behind him.

He burst through the doorway, fell to the ground, wheezed. Men rushed forward to carry his patients away in their slings of blanket and sheet.

Blevens put his palms down to push himself up, but fell again to his knees. He held up his hands. Skin was peeling away from his palms and wrists.

A pump wagon appeared. A stream of water shot from a long snake of hose and drops fell around him like bullets. Buckets of water crashed into the inferno. He started up and forward into the square, then collapsed under a single oak tree, while the blaze consumed the night.

No one died. A miracle. Everyone got out. Every single person, bedridden or no. In the early morning chill, the patients were divvied up between the city’s hospitals. Some were carried to the City Hall, some to the schoolhouse on Judiciary Square (a hospital for some time past), some to the former quarters of Griffin’s Battery, some to the Old Trinity Church on Fifth Street, and many to private residences in the neighborhood.

James demanded to be taken to the Union Hotel.

A week after the fire, Mary gently peeled away the protective cover of his bandages. Blevens’s agony had erased between them even the memory of debt; in its place had sprung mutual tenderness. His was the kind of exhausting pain that rendered a man’s belief in God pitiable. On a continual dose of whiskey since arriving, he had learned that alcohol was a blunt tool that numbed little but the tongue and brain. Even the slightest graze of wind seared. Only Mary’s presence kept him from weeping. After she unwound the last of the gauze, the poultice of slippery elm in simple cerate had to be removed next. As Mary delicately wiped away the waxy substance with a rag, Blevens broke into a cold sweat. Even so, he flexed his fingers to break the beginnings of scars that would seal his fingers together if he did not.

Stipp, watching, leaned over and said, “You’ll grasp a scalpel yet.”

Next she was to apply a new preparation of the slippery elm, Stipp’s contribution to Blevens’s well-being, a product of his Texan exile. The Indians had taught him how to make it, and then how to apply it to skin after sunburn. It was easy enough to get a hold of at the corner apothecary; he had gone there himself to purchase it for his former student. He showed Mary how to mix the gummy secretion of the bark with boiling water and then allow it to cool. Stipp felt some pride that he could come up with a solution to ease James’s pain, whom he distracted with medical cases while Mary worked. Stipp had initiated this practice as a diversion from Mary’s ministering fingers the morning after the fire, when Blevens, carried in on a litter, had told Stipp that he had directed his bearers to bring him here over anywhere else. Blevens was suffering from exhaustion in addition to his burns, a temporary effect from inhaling the smoke, Stipp thought. More than his exhaustion, though, he seemed to be mourning the loss of his microscope, its beautiful brass incinerated in the flames. Blevens had pleaded with the firemen to please try to find if it had survived, but they delivered a lumpen mass to him instead, which he kept under his bed.

Though Mary had said that he would, Blevens had not come to see either Stipp or Mary in the days after her visit to the E Street Infirmary. Nor had Stipp gone in search of him. They could each plead the tidal wave of sick from the forts. Though McClellan assured the nation that he would soon attack, and that his attack would be
quick, sharp, and decisive
, there had been no more fighting. And though the autumn weather had been mild, the prolonged exposure had flooded the Washington hospitals with sick. The diseases of the damp—rheumatism, pneumonia, diphtheria, paroxysmal fevers—were making their ugly way through the poorly housed troops.

But now, watching Mary lean over his former protégé, Stipp could not help but wonder for whom Blevens had asked to come to the Union Hotel: him or Mary.

Mary took up her cup of salve and was spreading it now on Blevens’s hands as Stipp gave quiet instructions: apply it thickly enough so that your fingers do not touch the unprotected burn; rewrap the salved hands with the gauze; give Blevens a pillow to rest his hands on; dose the poor man with another jigger of whiskey.

He was acutely aware of the quiet trust Mary’s ministrations engendered in James Blevens, who did not take his eyes from her face; if she was aware of his studied regard, Stipp could not tell. A brief stab of jealousy made him shut his eyes. What an insipid fool he was being. Of course the man was in love with her. Pain was pain, and there was nothing like the agony of a burn, and Mary wielded the magic salve. The young man was a hero, and he might never be able to be a surgeon again, no matter how optimistically he had suggested that he would. Besides, he was drunk most of the time, and in addition he was married, though a marriage of which nothing definitive could be said. Stipp remembered Blevens’s youthful adoration of the suffering Sarah. He wondered whether Mary knew of the indiscreet and impulsive marriage. He was given to love, that boy.

As was he.
Don’t be an idiot
, he thought.
They are far better matched, if only for their age
.

Stipp inspected Mary’s handiwork and nodded. “Well done.” Then he forced himself to turn away, toward Peter Markeli, asleep in the next bed, over whom Blevens still kept vigilant though slightly drunken watch.

Because of Blevens’s efforts, Peter had not been burned in the fire, though the blow from the musket ball had been devastating enough. Blevens had not been able to close the wound, because not enough skin had remained behind. It was nearly certain that Peter would starve, and soon; while his tongue had survived intact, swallowing proved nearly impossible, and he already looked like a skeleton. He had weakened since coming to them, able to take in only small amounts of liquid, choking and sputtering when he did. Stipp had noticed that Mary had developed a special affinity for Peter. She spent much of her time trying to get him to eat. To illustrate to herself Peter’s suffering, Mary had pressed her jaws together but kept her lips open to try to approximate swallowing without a closed mouth. It was a feat that exhausted. At night, Mary prowled the halls and reported that Peter’s breathing had seemed to coarsen, even though the restless boy was able by day to walk those same halls in a twisted posture, his body favoring his left side as if forever recoiling, a circus sideshow for the tourists who roamed the hall seeking the thrill they had not been able to obtain at Centreville.

(Privacy, after tenderness, the second casualty of war.)

“He will live just to make you happy, I think,” Stipp had said to her one night.

Now Stipp watched as the boy lay back on the bed and obligingly turned his head from side to side as Mary, finished with James, wound a long strip of bandage about his face, his eyes intent, not with fear, but instead with an outright glimmer of trusting adoration.

Blevens, drunk from the whiskey Mary had dosed as anesthetic, blurted, “He looks so much like Christian. Like he’s come to life, don’t you think?”

Mary’s gaze darted to Peter, who met her clear gaze with his own newly feverish one. She gasped, the sharp intake of her broken voice mingling with the sweet smell of the salve.

Stipp, hovering behind, cursed under his breath. Death was a formidable enough foe without making the mistake of figuring love into it.

But wasn’t he guilty of the same?
Just to make you happy. You’ll wield a scalpel yet.

Stipp put his hand on Mary’s shoulder and said, “Let me do that.”

She yielded and fled the room.

Later, when Stipp knocked on her door, he found Mary sitting stiffly upright on her bed, a small fire lit in the fireplace. She was staring straight ahead, at the dark November cold flooding in through the small porthole window. The scene was as unlike Lilianna and the bright golden air of southern Texas as possible.

“His hair is the same—such beautiful dark curls. And the eyelashes. Black curtains. And he trusts me. He believes I will never hurt him.”

Stipp’s hand felt cold on the doorknob; he had not been invited to cross the threshold. “If I may say, even if you had been with Christian, I doubt very much you could have saved him.”

She turned to him, looked him right in the eye. “Will we save Blevens? Will we save Peter?”

Just to make you happy.

When he did not answer, she turned away and looked into the fire.

A hand in the air, a turn, and a walk up an arid hill.

Stipp shut the door.