The March (16 page)

Morrison led his horse by the reins. Even where the road had been corduroyed, the weight of the wagons pressed the logs into the muck and another layer of rails had to be put down. And more than once he passed teams, one of whose mules had a hoof stuck between the logs, a poor braying creature ready to pull his own leg off. Where a wagon foundered, the entire train was halted and dozens of men were rallied to unhitch the team and empty the wagon of its cargo before they could lift the wheels out of the muck. Morrison found it preferable to wade off-road through the swamp and enjoy the cold mud seeping into his boots. He had letters from Sherman and General Howard to General Joe Mower, who commanded the vanguard division of the wing. But he couldn’t find Mower’s headquarters.

Bearing right, Morrison moved laterally in hopes of reaching another, possibly more navigable road. But swamp turned to stream and stream to brush-clogged marsh, and in the darkness he could not be sure he was moving in a straight line. He could feel brambles tearing at his legs as he waded on through the slop, his horse balking behind him. The brush gave way to cypresses, a thick stand of them, whose snaking roots he could feel, slippery and treacherous, under his feet. I will drown now, he said, but stumbled forward eventually to find footing on the narrow bank of a high-running stream, a flood channel of the Salkehatchie, where he pulled himself up and then his mount after him, the creature shivering and shaking, its legs bleeding from the scratches on its shanks.

Following the bank for some hundred yards, he came upon a company of engineers laying a pontoon bridge across the channel. The engineers had anchored their platform boats and were bridging the boats with cut lumber, and at the near end were laying planks crosswise for footing that still had the house paint on them. This would be another road for the corps when the river was taken. The engineers’ hammering and shouting were lost in the clamor of the rainfall and the unmistakable sound in the distance not of thunder but of field cannon, nighttime in this fourth year of the war no longer an agreed upon intermission between engagements. Morrison looked beyond the stream and saw only more swamp. So up ahead, how far?—a half mile, a mile?—the skirmishers were advanced to the Salkehatchie proper, where on the far shore Reb brigades were lodged behind their earthworks.

Not many more minutes of his search had to pass before Morrison was as weary and miserable as he had ever been. He wondered with some bitterness why he, a major, had been made to serve as courier, except that Sherman had it out for him. When, back in Savannah, he had told the General that Secretary Stanton had arrived, Sherman had said, You’re better at sending than receiving, Morrison, and gave a kind of laugh to go with it. But Morrison had not liked it that even in jest he was being blamed for the news he had brought. He had served honorably and well, and was now paid for it with this wet, cold hell that could kill a man only more slowly than a bullet.

Someone was calling him, but as he looked around he saw no one. Then a chunk of tree limb landed at his feet with a splash and bounced as if it had not fallen but been thrown. He looked up and there, in the branches of a giant elm, he was able gradually to discern several men, some wrapped in blankets. One of them was smoking a pipe with the bowl inverted and the embers, as they glowed, brought the boughs and trunk into dim illumination. Morrison identified himself, shouting up through the rain, and understood that he had found the headquarters staff he had been searching for. In the highest crotch of the tree, standing like a sailor on the prow of a ship, and looking through the night toward the sound of battle, was General Mower, the man whom Sherman’s letters were urging to turn the Salkehatchie resistance without delay. Sherman had planned for a smooth juncture with Slocum’s wing on the high ground at the South Carolina Railroad, near the town of Blackville, and time was of the essence.

Morrison handed the dispatches up to the officer on the lowest limb and was invited to climb up and find a perch. Overweight and not terribly agile, Morrison didn’t even want to try. He slumped down with his back against the tree, his rear end going numb with the cold.

II

R
AIN HAVING MADE THE ROAD IMPASSABLE, THE EN
tire train was halted. Wrede lit a lamp and, setting his instrument case across his knees, used the time to write letters. To whom? He had mentioned a brother, also a doctor, back in Germany. Emily was uneasy. The rain against the tarpaulin was a loud roar. Through the open flap she could see the mules standing heads bowed in dumb submission. The wagon was atilt to the right, where the wheels had sunk in the wet sand. She could not get comfortable except by lying down on the pile of quilts and duvets accumulated for the use of the wounded. She lay on her side, her legs drawn up, her hands beneath her head so as not to actually have her face touching the rank quilts, some of which were stiff with dried blood.

The time was past when she felt the exhilaration of her adventure. She watched Wrede, who was hunched over his letter oblivious of the world, of the war, and of her. His powers of concentration were unnatural. At such times as this he was established in her mind as a total stranger to whom she was enslaved. How desolate, how lonely she felt. In the excitements of her boldly chosen vagrancy she had not thought about the future. Now it loomed ahead of her as a darkness, as a night of unceasing rain. Dr. Wrede Sartorius was not a normal man. She could not imagine him domiciled. He lived in the present as if there were no future, or in such a state of resolution that when the future came it would find him as he was now, as finished in his soul as he was at this very moment. Nothing fazed him—he had a preternatural calm. He was constantly sending to the Army Department of Medicine papers on surgical procedures he had devised, or improved courses of postoperative treatment he had discovered. He regarded the thick manuals of army medicine as virtually useless, and had a regal disregard of any and all advisories that came down from Corps. He was, finally, a man who needed no one other than himself, either professionally or, God help her, in his personal life. She could not imagine his becoming melancholic or nostalgic or unhappy, or giddy or foolish or anything temporary like that. He was an isolated, self-sufficient being who lived in his own mind, unneedful of anyone else. And, while he had shown her affection and had brought her like a teacher into his interests, she seriously wondered if she were to die in some attack, would he gaze upon her lifeless body as a bereaved lover or would he do an autopsy to see the effect on her tissues and organs of the grape or minié balls that had killed her?

Why am I so resentful? she wondered. But she knew the answer. It came to her as a moment’s internal cringing sensation that made her press her thighs together. It was not as if in her girlhood she’d been a fantasy-ridden romantic destined to be shocked by the reality. She was an educated woman and had read enough to know of the reality that there was a bodily mechanics to love. But she had given herself in devotion. And she had felt only that she had been inhabited.

Yet beforehand he had not been without concern for her. As she lay there undressed, her eyes closed, she felt the weight gone from beside her on the bed. He had made a determination. She heard him open his instrument case. To spare you pain, he said, standing above her, I will do this small procedure. You will feel only a slight sting. And she felt his fingers dilating her, and then it was just as he said and there was no blood to speak of. And of course it was a solicitous and commonsense thing to do, but so of his medical mind as to make her feel more like a patient than a loved one. But then the inhabitation. And at the moment of his crisis she made the mistake of opening her eyes, and in the light of the hearth fire his face was hideous, contorted by a stunned and mindless expression, the eyes frozen in a blind stare that seemed to her an agony of perception as if into a godless universe. And when he made his guttural, choking groan she held him to her, feeling him shudder into her, and holding him not in passion but in concern for him, that he should suffer so, though of course it was not suffering, was it, but only something in contrast to what she felt, which was . . . inhabited.

And since then—was it just a few nights ago?—he had been somewhat remote, seemingly glad to be occupied with preparations for the renewed march, giving his quiet instructions to everyone, including her. And now she felt surely there was no future with this man. She was an encumbrance, a Southern refugee whose only justification was as fill-in nurse for the absent staff he would have preferred. And she had never felt so desolate, not even when her father had died, for it was in her own home, with familiar things around her, and she had not yet realized that the life she had known was over and that in no time at all she would find herself a ruined woman in an army wagon, with the rain like gunfire against the canvas, somewhere in the God-soaked floodplains of South Carolina.

IN THE NEXT
wagon back, Pearl studied the sealed letter she had removed from Lieutenant Clarke’s dead hand in Sandersonville. Making up her mind that the letter was addressed to his family with the same last name, she was then able to work out the sound of the letters, except that the “C” at the beginning and the “k” seemed to have the same sound and she didn’t know why there would be two different letters for it. The “e” at the end gave her trouble, too, she couldn’t imagine what that was for. But anyways, she thought, I can read most of the letters in this name, so I can read them if I sees them elsewheres. But even though she held the letter at several different angles in the light of the kerosene lamp, try as she would she could not will herself to understand the rest of the words, there were three more lines of them, and she could not work out what they meant to say.

Mattie Jameson was asleep on the stack of folded stretchers. She was all curled up, with her hands under her chin, she was like a child in the womb. More than once Pearl had seen miscarried children, and that is the posture they all had, the way she was lying now, the wife ma’m. And in all the hard traveling with this army it was as if she was riding on a cloud, sleeping her life away most of the time, even now with the rain making a roar so that you could hardly hear yourself think. And when she was awake and Pearl tried to give her something to eat she wouldn’t do more than bite into a biscuit or take a sip of coffee. And she did not talk, not a word, and looked at Pearl sometimes as if trying to remember her name.

It seemed to Pearl, though she wasn’t sure, not having the opportunity to study the wife ma’m’s face that closely at the plantation, that her hair was grayed at the temples where it was all wheat before. She had it pulled back and string-tied behind the neck, and it made her look like an older woman, though Pearl knew for a fact that she was years younger than the pap. But her face was weary and soft, and there was no light in the skin. The pap was an old man when he passed on, sixty years on him if a day, and the wife ma’m couldn’t be anywheres near that, though she was trying, wordless and grieving as she was, like she had died too and was sleeping all the time to prove it.

When, after he died, Pearl had told her in case she was thinking of going home that Fieldstone was burnt to the ground, that’s when the wife ma’m had gone so quiet, staring into her own self.

Pearl looked around—it seemed too close in the wagon in this moment. She pulled off her tunic and immediately felt the wet wind coming in under the tarpaulin. She thought of the plantation where she had been born and had lived all her life till now, and thought of the sun on her head and the fields she loved. And then she was angry at herself. Thinkin that is not bein wholly free, girl. Not that I be free tendin to this wife ma’m who never paid me no mind, like I am her slave still. Hey, Miz Jameson wife ma’m, she shouted, wake up, wake up! And she leaned over and shook Mattie by the shoulder.

Awake, Mattie blinked, sat up slowly, and held her hands over her throat. She heard the drumming of the rain and felt the chill of her awakening. She pulled her shawl about her shoulders and only then was aware of the child Pearl staring at her.

You up now? Pearl said.

She nodded.

All right then, put you in mind of where you are. You see the cases here, these bottles an such? You are in this medicine wagon here with Porhl, your massah’s natural chile. An if you can’t speak, tell me you know that with a nod of your pore head.

Mattie nodded.

Thas right. An we are with Gen’ral Sherman, an his army gonna do in what’s left of slavholdin. Say you know that.

Mattie nodded.

An it the goodness of some people that they took you along just as you ast ’em. You ’member?

Mattie nodded.

Right. An I know why. You lookin for brudder one and brudder two. Ain’t it so you follow this army to hope it comes on these boys a yourn? Speak up, lady. Ain’t it so?

Yes, Mattie whispered.

Yes. An you will run wif your arms in the sky ’tween the armies an stop the shootin an pluck those boys away an save their skins, ain’t that right?

Yes. Mattie squared her shoulders and folded her hands on her lap. Yes.

Well, you a crazy woman to think so, but you are a mother an thas de way mothers think. It a mother’s craziness, an I s’pose there is worse kinds. But now you must stay awake and be goin to sleep only when it is the time for sleepin. You know why?

Mattie shook her head.

You see my uniform tunic? I am doin nursin for the Colonel-surgeon who tried to save Massah’s life. I can roll bandage, I can give ’em water when they thirsty, the mens, and so on. I am useful to this army that feeds me and takes me along ’cause I got no other home in this world right now. You hear me?

Mattie nodded.

Well, so in the same way you see, wife ma’m, you will make yourself useful to them, it bein a matter of your duty since you are taggin along, ’cause they need every kind woman they can find to tend to these broken mens.

What can I do? Mattie asked, almost in a whisper.