Wedded to War (39 page)

No sooner had Charlotte and Alice reached the belly of the rusty ship in search of anything useful then they heard footsteps above them, and the low drone of men on board. The officers had, in fact, given way, and now a tide of sick and starving men crashed down upon the two women, before a single nail had been removed from a single box of supplies.

Lord, help us feed them!
It was the only prayer Charlotte had time to utter in her heart, but it was enough. Within minutes, she had found a barrel of Indian meal from a dark corner of a bilge, and Alice had found two large spoons.

“It will do!” said Charlotte. “The disciples fed the five thousand with their two fish and five loaves of bread. We can feed a few hundred with ten pounds of gruel.”

“The disciples had Jesus with them,” Alice reminded her.

“And so do we.”

By the time Mr. Olmsted arrived with a civilian surgeon, Charlotte and Alice were ladling hot gruel out of the ship’s deck buckets and into the tin dippers of the pale, emaciated, shivering wretches covering the cabin floors. Trembling voices cried, “God bless you, miss! God bless you!”

Within two hours, Frederick Knapp and Dr. Robert Ware came from Cheeseman’s Creek on the
Elizabeth
, the Sanitary Commission’s supply boat. Soon bed sacks were filled with straw, and hoisted, along with bales of blankets and stores of medicines, into the
Ocean Queen.
Mr. Knapp went on shore, found and shot a rebel cow at pasture, and
quickly brought the beef along with another surgeon.

By ten o’clock that night, every sick man—nearly six hundred in number—was in a warm bed, and had received medical treatment. Beef tea and milk punch had been served to all who required it. All but three of them survived the night.

Ruby had come because she had known no other option. But now that she was here, she could not imagine a better situation for her. It was impractical and nearly impossible to do laundry on the ship, so they nailed it up and sent it north to be washed, for now. Ruby was put to use making beef tea in the kitchen with some other women, mostly contrabands. Every day, for every hundred patients on board, they were to make two and a half gallons of beef tea, four gallons of gruel, and half a gallon of milk porridge. Every day was the same, and though the work was not difficult, it did require attention—a mercy to have less energy to dwell on her past and wonder about her future.

The haggard countryside of Ireland, the slums of New York City, the pestilential steam of the Washington hospitals—all that had happened there, seemed irretrievably far away now. Until one day, Charlotte came to find her.

“A letter for you, Ruby,” she had said, with a question in her eyes.

The envelope was stamped in New York City and addressed to Ruby O’Flannery in care of the Sanitary Commission, Hospital Transports, Cheeseman’s Creek, Virginia. She opened it slowly, pulled out a single sheet of paper, and gasped.

He had figured it out. She was not free. She would never escape her past, not ever.

Rain dimpled the river as a butter yellow sun tucked itself into folds of grey flannel clouds. Charlotte wanted nothing more than to sink right down with it, but a stack of neglected correspondence called out pitifully to her from her carpetbag.

Mother wanted her to come home. So did Phineas. Edward Goodrich wrote from Fortress Monroe to tell her he had a military commission now and was close enough for a visit if time permitted. Caleb wrote with more tales of the hurdles in the medical care in South Carolina, and with more snippets of poetry, as always.

Her eyelids were heavy, and she longed more for sleep than anything else. But Mother’s letters, at least, would have to be answered.

Dear Mother
, she began.
Time escapes me. I am told it is Tuesday, but I certainly thought it was Thursday. Alice and I keep well.
She stopped. It was such a subjective statement. She was fine, actually, satisfied and fulfilled, but her mother would never call it “well.” Charlotte and the rest of the women never knew where they would lay their heads at night, or when, or for how long.

The hospital transport system had grown since that first day in April. The tugboat
Wilson Small
was the headquarters boat, where Olmsted kept his office. Several smaller coast-steamers, had been acquired to deliver patients to Fortress Monroe, Washington, and Baltimore, but could not make the trip beyond Philadelphia. As for large transports capable of sailing to New York City and back, the
Daniel Webster
was joined by the
S. R. Spaulding
, whose stable odor still lingered from the cargo of horses it formerly carried. On any given night, Charlotte never knew until the moment for sleep arrived on which ship
she would lay her head. She had no bed, but curled up wherever a corner presented itself. The only thing she could be sure of was that she and Alice stayed on the peninsula while other doctors and nurses traveled north to the hospitals with the patients. They were too valuable at the front for Mr. Olmsted to part with them, he said.

The women’s time was divided into three- and six-hour shifts, but emergencies sprang up requiring all hands on a regular basis. After all the patients had been fed and cleaned, wounds packed with lint, bandages soaked or changed, order enforced in the pantry and kitchen, she may get a bite to eat. Pieces of bread served as plates and her fingers as forks and knives. The top of an old stove was the dinner table, lumpy carpetbags the chairs. No, these were not details she could share with her mother.

I am happy in my work
, she wrote, and paused. This much was true. But as soon as her hands stopped working and she had any moments off duty, the sounds of fever patients moaning, amputation patients screaming, was almost too much for her.

We do not order our days according to the sun and moon anymore,
she continued.
Instead, we sleep between shiploads of sick coming up to us. The idea you suggest of the possibility of infection here is perfectly ridiculous. The ships are well ventilated and we each take our daily quinine dose religiously
—

“Miss Waverly.” Mr. Knapp stood before her now, lit up by flashes of lightning cutting jagged holes in the sky behind him. “A telegram. A hundred men left on the ground at Bigelow’s Landing. Ambulance train just left them there. No food or drink all day. ‘Dying in the rain,’ it says. One other nurse is coming but I need more help. Will you come?”

Before he had finished speaking, Charlotte had swept her letter back into the carpetbag and was now pulling a shawl around her shoulders, her feet carrying her toward the door. What was a letter, when there were lives to be saved? Who needed sleep, when the rush of emergency propelled her?

I
n a rare moment of calm, Ruby rubbed her aching back and eased herself into a chair on deck as the last hour of daylight washed over her. The baby in her belly was almost out of room, and Ruby felt every stretch and somersault as tiny hands and heels pressed her from the inside out. She knew she was running out of time, but for now, just for this moment, she pushed the thought aside and relished the enchanting scenery and the song of the whippoorwill instead.

The shore was so close to the steamer the trees leaned over and brushed its smokestacks with their branches. Trees and shrubs of every shade of green lined the river, broken up every now and then by creeks, running up through meadowlands into the distance. The river was narrow, and it doubled back on itself so many times Ruby felt as though she were floating in a watery maze.

Like her life. So many twists and turns, some of them taking her
backward, some propelling her forward into an unknown wilderness. Was she really getting farther away from the life she once knew, or was she truly just in a tangle of unnavigable, rock-bottomed creeks and streams that would only dump her on the same barren shoal from which she had begun?

The sun set as the
Spaulding
rounded another bend, and the sky and water gleamed golden alike in the sunset, dazzling Ruby’s eyes until all the trees suddenly looked black.

Suddenly, sharp pain clutched Ruby’s belly and tightened like a vice. She held her breath until it released its grip.

Night was hastening on.

Army tents and wagons dotted the sloping fields at White House Landing, the Army of the Potomac’s new supply depot on the Pamunkey River. The White House plantation overlooking the water had once belonged to Martha Washington and was named for the manor house they called “White House.” The original house was no longer there, however, and the home that replaced it was much darker, and not nearly as big as its name implied. The current owners had fled before the Yankees arrived.
How shocked they would be to see the place now
, Charlotte thought.

Grass that was lush and green just days ago had been trampled to dust by horses, caissons, and soldiers. Pie peddlers threaded their way through the men waiting for action, selling six pies to a man.
Eat while you can
, they cried,
you won’t find these on the battlefield!
The Pamunkey River was crowded with schooners, gunboats, and steamboats, including the
Spaulding
, where the women waited, as directed, for Mr. Olmsted to return from his meeting with the Medical Director, Charles Tripler.

By the time Mr. Olmsted appeared on the gangway, Charlotte could tell he was angry.

“God forbid,” he muttered, “that there should be a battle tomorrow.” He forcefully wiped the sweat from his forehead with a damp, balled-up handkerchief.

“What happened?” Charlotte ventured, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“What
didn’t
happen, is the more suitable question, Miss Waverly It’s what
didn’t
happen that boggles the mind.”

Not again
, thought Charlotte. She glanced at Alice to see if she were listening. She was.

“For the life of me, I can’t understand why the government insists on keeping that Tripler fellow as the army’s Medical Director! No—” He paused to correct himself. “I know why—he’s of the old guard. He’s been in the service longer than most, so they let him have the position. Thank heavens the Sanitary Commission doesn’t get a dime from the government. At least our independence from the bureaucracy means we can do things our own way. A far better way than the path they’re taking, that’s for sure.”