Wilderness Run (35 page)

Chapter Forty-four

At the same time Bel rushed up the stairs, Louis descended to the busy street to smoke and watch the coaches of Washington pass in an endless procession. Situated down an alley off Ninth Street, the three-story inn had been converted a year into the war to accommodate the casualties streaming into the capital. The traffic surging past the hospital had the same cheerful speed as in all big cities, as if everyone had somewhere to get to soon. Louis was surprised by the distances in Washington, for he had expected tight, packed streets and found instead that the capital designers had planned for a future not yet realized, when more residences and offices would fill in the gaps between the Grecian government buildings. Undeterred by their expanding city, the residents of the capital bumped past in their many conveyances—wagons and coaches and even peddlers' carts, pushed by barefoot boys whose voices were hoarse from shouting.

That afternoon, Louis unrolled the brown plug of tobacco a hemorrhaging soldier had given him before he died. His pard, the soldier explained, was a North Carolinian who had fought with the Yanks because his father and mother had both come from Massachusetts and he didn't want to make war on his own blood. The finest tobacco in the world grew in the fields outside the North Carolinian's house. The precious plug had been taken from the body of the fallen Southerner at Spotsylvania, had traveled to Cold Harbor, where its new owner was wounded, and then ridden back to the Washington hospital in his coat. When he died, he thrust it into the nurse's hand, saying in a trembling voice that a fine smoke could keep a man alive in a bad time. The plug had two deep red blotches on it, the blood of the two friends held apart by a short, ropy distance. Louis tore the tobacco carefully around these marks, each day getting closer and closer.

He had seen so much blood since his enlistment, this was not squeamishness, but respect for those who had passed on. The dead were a strange lot, always coming back to a man when he thought he'd left them behind. If Louis had not heard that Laurence Lindsey was missing in the burning Wilderness, if he had not abandoned his own regiment to find the soldier's body blistered in the shallow run, he might have joined the dead, for their way seemed easier than that of the living. They never had to fight again. They never had to hear a young man cry for mercy when a surgeon sawed off his leg.

Old Sawbones told Louis he was the best assistant he'd ever had, steady and quiet, but also gifted with an ability to make men want to live. He protected Louis from his captain, who had ordered him back, by saying that the injured arm was infected and needed more time to heal. He also taught Louis the names of the instruments: finger knife, scalpel, bistoury, and sharp-pointed tenotomb, the metal of each glistening in a small wooden case. The surgeon even let Louis help with the joint resections, a complicated surgery performed on soldiers who might heal without an amputation.
You're a quick study, Jean
, Sawbones had said in his brisk way after they'd made an excision in a soldier's knee. The soldier was weeping silently, staring away from their work. Louis had gripped his own healing arm and didn't answer.

His lungs burned around the sweet smoke. An ebony carriage skimmed by, skirting a hog that had wandered into the street. People always emptied their slops into the gutters in Washington, and a whole community of swine supplied itself daily from the refuse. No one seemed to mind. The pair of girls in the carriage looked at him and giggled expectantly. Louis gave them a taut smile. He loved Isabel with the simplicity of a man who knows there is only one profession he is good at and cannot imagine a reason to steer away from that path. It was her imperfections that drew him to her—the red mark above her lip where the pigment extended like the paint dribble of a careless artist, her gawky feet, the weight of her wide jaw when he cupped her face in his hands. Even her grief drove him to a senseless passion, for in it he saw the woman she would become, the steady, intelligent wife and mother.

In contrast, the frivolity of the passersby irritated him. He didn't understand how there could be people in this city, in any city of the world, not mourning for what he had seen. During three days of fighting outside Chancellorsville, he had nearly forgotten his own name, stumbling along with his company until his arm was nearly shot off and he joined the casualties in a bloodied clearing, waiting for the overtaxed ambulances to come. Only when he heard that Isabel's cousin was missing did he feel like his life had a purpose again. The sergeant had been shot through the head, and his captain, sick with grief, lay against a pine tree, waiting for his wounded leg to be bandaged, telling the stories of his lost men over and over to anyone who would listen.

Leaving him, Louis had charged into the scorched wasteland, searching through men burned past recognition, rolling them back from the sooty earth. The tall, straight Laurence he had known for a brief half year was no longer alive, but in his place, a nearly lifeless figure with half a face curled in the ashy stream. Shadrach, survivor of the fire. On the bank just beyond him had lain another human form, so badly burned, it could have been a stone or a tree trunk softened by flame. Had someone saved Laurence Lindsey? Had someone died for him? Maybe. Or maybe it was just a story a father wanted to tell about his lost son, so he could keep believing that death was an injustice, especially for the young.

Louis tamped out his pipe on the brick wall of the hospital and turned to go back inside. He could hear the shouts of men upstairs clamoring for mealtime, their loud voices reaching the street. In one of the open windows, sparrows jostled for a place on the sill. It was Shadrach's window. He was awake and asking his cousin for a mirror. He wanted to see himself.

*   *   *

She pretended she didn't know what he was saying. “Your mother is fine,” she said. “Getting better every day.”

“Mirror,” he repeated.

“Are you hungry? I can get you some bread.”

“No.” He beat the sheet with his stumpy thumb.

“The window, then,” she said, and pulled it down, scaring the sparrows away. She rubbed the dirty streaks with her sleeve. “You can see your reflection there.”

She helped him twist his face toward the glass. It was late afternoon, clouds crossing the summer sun, intermittent and gray. His face shone ghostlike, a man on a passing train, the features blurred by shadow and speed. He leaned back, satisfied.

“Open again,” he commanded. The train lifted him through the gap between beds, rearing like an insect over a stone, but with a motion all its own, mechanical, clicking. The girl obeyed, struggling as the pane stuck. After a minute, a few sparrows returned, pecking at the sill.

As she bent back over him, a locket fell out from beneath her dress. The bird shape jogged an old memory, vague and incomplete. He recalled stealing it from deep in his father's bureau as a young man, trying to give it to a runaway slave, a man wearing the face of fear and bravery. How many times had he seen that expression since? With the ignorance of boyhood, he taken out the note inside the locket, which said in his father's script simply
my heart
and replaced it with one that said
freedom
. Something valuable to sell, he had thought then. Now it seemed cheap and ordinary.

Chapter Forty-five

Later that day, his cousin tried to feed him, bread, potatoes, a thin soup with carrots floating in it. He let three spoonfuls of the warm liquid fill his mouth before swallowing, and refused the rest silently. She perched a crust of bread on his chest and carried the tray away. When she came back, it was gone, and she smiled with secret triumph, for the soldier was asleep again, his bandaged head toward the open window.

At dusk, she retired to her shared basement bedroom, down the hall from her aunt's, where she sketched every evening until she fell asleep. The surgeon had seen the sketchbook and encouraged Bel to continue, claiming her pictures might have medical merit, if nothing else. Her aunt's Sanitary Commission report abandoned, the idea of real usefulness thrilled Bel, and she diligently drew the puffy, healing limbs that had been resected, excised, and amputated in the ward. The surgeon collected the pictures for a book he was writing on war medicine, and he promised to credit Bel when he found a publisher. His encouragement pleased Bel so much, she grew fearless in asking the soldiers to expose their thighs and stomachs so that she might see them properly. When a fellow would tease her for her unladylike interest, she simply sighed and stamped her foot until he obligingly peeled back the sheet.

At night, Bel drew for pleasure, learning from her own mistakes how to suggest perspective with shadows, how to start a face with the shape of the head first. The spinster nurse, who took the other bed, stayed up late gossiping with the cooks, and evening remained Bel's precious piece of solitude, interrupted only by the visits of one intrepid Lucy, the little colored girl whose mother worked at the hospital. Bel would draw everything, mostly the soldiers in the ward, and the small dramas she saw from the window above the street: a free Negro tacking up a picture of Abraham Lincoln above his blacksmith shop, the sutlers loading their carts, the prostitutes with their painted faces. Washington was much richer and messier than Allenton, with thugs everywhere and a big smelly canal in the middle of the city, where people threw their sewage and anything else they wanted to get rid of. Once, on the way to a hospital with her aunt, Bel had seen a dead dog floating in the water, its white hair peeling off in clumps.

She placed her sketchbook across her lap and began to move the charcoal, this time making a portrait of the Negro girl who came to take the chamber pots. Lucy would sometimes stop to watch her draw, twisting her head from side to side as the charcoal moved across the page, and Bel decided to surprise her that evening with a portrait of herself. She sketched the girl's splayed legs first, the pink crescent scar on the back of her bare ankle, and then her faded cotton dress, her straight shoulders and frowzy hair. She wrote
Lucy
in the bottom corner, and drew a doorway to the invisible room where the girl stood, as if waiting for someone to come in.

“Ma'am…”

Bel looked up and saw Lucy in the threshold. She nodded approvingly at her sketch, for the posture was just right, the expectant gaze.

“Come here, Lucy,” Bel said. Her own Yankee accent sounded grating compared to the soft, sighing voice of the little girl. “I have something for you.”

Lucy bounded in, her mouth half-open in anticipation of the sweets Bel sometimes handed her when her mother, Ruth, was not looking. Ruth was a cool, indifferent woman who did not seem to trust or talk to anyone, allowing Lucy to be her interface with the world. “Ma'am?” she asked, the sigh lengthening.

“It's you.” Bel showed her the white paper. Lucy stopped in midbound, letting her arms clap to her sides. Her eyes went big. “See,” Bel said, pleased. “I wrote your name in the corner. L-U-C-Y.”

The girl began to shake her head, slowly at first and then with a wild, whipping frenzy. She slapped her hands against her thighs, driving the head faster on its axis.

“What's the matter? Did I spell it wrong?” Bel turned back to the sketch, frowning. Rats started scratching in the wardrobe where Bel kept her dresses. Their torturous scraping would go on for hours.

“It ain't me.
It ain't me,
” Lucy shrieked, and ran from the room, her thick legs suddenly clumsy, unable to keep up with the speed of the rest of her body.

Bel stared, stunned, at the sketch, wondering what about it could elicit such an adverse reaction. There was Lucy, outlined with her back to the viewer, her curly head twisted toward the door. Bel had used discreet shadows to reveal the color of her skin, leaving the rest to the imagination. Her eyes smarted from the rejection. She already missed the girl's fuzzy hair tickling her arm as she leaned on it. The rats scratched again. Vaulting from her bed to the wardrobe, she pounded on the loose pine door to scare the rodents away. “Damn rats,” she said under her breath, relishing the curse because it made her feel better about Lucy. “Goddamn dirty rats.”

The wardrobe sank into insolent silence. Bel marched back to the bed and stared dully at it. “Goddamn scourge of the earth,” she uttered with victorious baseness, and hunched over her sketchbook, unable to draw. After a few minutes, Ruth appeared in the doorway, dragging the girl behind her. In Ruth, Lucy's sturdy build had already realized itself in trunklike legs and a generous belly. “Ma'am,” she said in her flat way. “I don't suppose you knowed what made my Lucy bust up cryin'.”

“I was trying to give her a gift,” Bel stuttered. “A portrait.”

“A potrate,” repeated Ruth, coming no farther into the room. Her right hand wagged as the captive Lucy squirmed at the end of it, the girl's face still streaming with tears. “Let me see.”

Bel stood up and showed her the sketch. Ruth narrowed her eyes, her wide head growing even wider. “I'm sorry, ma'am,” she said softly. “I know you tried to make something pretty for her.” She paused and leaned in, refusing to unplant her feet. Lucy now hung like a limp coat from Ruth's hand, curiosity halting her tears in midstream. “But my baby scared you trying to make her look that way and she don't want to look that way.”

“But—” Bel began.

“I speck if you don't know why, you ain't never gonna know,” Ruth said with an air of finality, and ushered her daughter back into the hall. Bel heard their feet scrape into the distance as she stared down at her neat little sketch. It isn't fair, she said to herself, tears squeezing through her eyes. It wasn't fair that they make her feel like that for trying to be nice. She let the tears fall onto the sketchbook, blurring it, and sobbed for herself and Laurence and her mother and everyone who could not change his fate or the fate of others.