The March Read online

  Clumping along in their unaccustomed footwear they had reason to feel sorry for themselves. Every bluecoat but them, it seemed like, had a day pass and money in his pocket. And then there was that great to-do about the mail. Tons of it came off the ships, and for one whole day everyone sat around reading letters from home. Arly said it was a pathetic sight to see grown men carrying on so. But Will thought he wouldn’t mind a letter from someone. That he and Arly had no letters was because who they were, or where they were, was now a matter of total indifference to the universe.

  They were almost swept off the sidewalk by a throng of grizzled troops, some of them happily drunk, chattering away and half running, half walking, in a great hurry to get where they were going. Hey! Will shouted. But Arly was curious. He motioned to Will and they tagged along. They followed the soldiers to the waterfront, where, on Charleston Street, in a row of connected two-story redbrick houses, a woman stood smiling in each window.

  Armed soldiers stood guard at the doors. But the men ignored them and they had the good sense to stand aside as the troops poured through the several doors. Looking at one another, and then carefully up and down the street, the guards themselves stepped inside and the doors closed behind them.

  As Arly and Will watched, the women, one by one, disappeared from the windows. This is cruelty beyond name, Arly said. A particularly fair maid in a second-floor window looked down into his eyes and motioned invitingly with her head before she, too, disappeared. And, sadly for that poor girl, she’s fallen in love with me, Arly said.

  The two men stood in the empty street as the sounds of revelry rose in volume through the brickwork.

  Will was secretly relieved to have no money. Seeing the women in the windows he had felt uneasy, as if just standing there and thinking what he was thinking was to sully the shining image in his mind of Nurse Thompson. It didn’t matter that she had no idea who he was, let alone what his feelings were, he felt that just looking at those whores was to betray her. Well, that’s that, he said. Let’s go.

  Arly took a stogy out of his pocket and lit it. God gave me something else beside my natural abilities, Will my boy. He gave me spirit. He gave me the juices of a man. He made me someone who rises to a challenge, be it a firing squad or a army that divests me of my natural rights of personal expression.

  They walked back through the city. I am a champion of survival, Arly said. It won’t take but a drop of my talent for surviving an entire war to come up with a Federal dollar or two.

  It’s just a damn whore, Will said.

  No, sir, you are wrong. When I was in the field with the grapeshot whizzing past my head I thought of nothing but staying alive. I was consumed, I had a survival compunction and it brought me through. And now I am consumed with this. You put me in a trench, that’s one thing, you put me in a city with women everywhere you look and that’s another. But the powerful need to satisfy a life instinct is the same. They are both a matter of survival.

  With a whore it’s less likely, Will said. I seen in the ward just today some of what a whore can do. You seen it, too, where the mercury has ate away half that poor man’s face.

  You ain’t never been with a woman, have you?

  Will was silent.

  Come on, it ain’t no shame—you’re but a boy yet, though I have to admit I was not thirteen years when a kind lady took me out to the barn. And how old are you now? But that’s all right, I don’t need to ask where you was raised or how you live. It is clear enough you was overprotected and pro’ly some preacher messed with your mind and it’s because you been held back and ain’t been with a woman that you speak in ignorance of the soft, sacred vessel they carry ’tween their legs. My God, just thinking of it—let us sit down on this bench a moment.

  Will watched the setting sun glimmer through the moss hanging off an oak tree. Arly said: If there is any good reason for war, it ain’t to save Unions, and it certainly ain’t to free niggers, it ain’t to do anything but to have you a woman of your own, or even of another’s, in a bed with you at your behest. You are talking the highest kind of survival, young Will, the survival you achieve after you are gone to your God that by the issue of your loins has created them that look like you and sound like you and think like you and are you through the generations of descendants. And you know how He fixed it: so that we turn our swords into plowshares and at the end of a day go into our houses and after a good, hot dinner we take them upstairs, these blessed creatures of God who are given to us, and pull off their dresses and their shifts and their corsets and whatever damn else they use to cover themselves till just the legs and breasts and bellies and behinds of them are in presentation to our wonderment . . . oh Lord. And when we go inside them, plum into their beings, and they cry out in our ear and we feel there is nothing softer, warmer, or more honeyed up in God’s world than what embraces our stiff tool, and we are made by God to shiver into them the issue of our loins, well, boy, don’t talk to me about what you don’t know. And if the bordello ladies you slander are not half of what I am telling you, please to remember they are as much our glorious Southern womanhood as whatever you been dreaming about that Miz Nurse Thompson, who, I can promise you, would taste no sweeter when put to the test than the uglymost whore in those houses by the waterfront.

  AS HE SAT there in contemplation of his slander of Southern womanhood, Will became aware of the unmistakable sound of hymn singing. Arly heard it, too. He leapt up: God said it would come to me. It has!

  Grabbing Will by the elbow, Arly hurried them through the streets till they found the church. It was a First Baptist, towering in lordly granite over a town square. The front doors were open and the hymn poured forth so as to seem to fill the live oaks abounding in the park. They climbed the steps and found themselves in the overflow of soldiers standing just inside. Pardon me, Arly said, pushing his way forward. Pardon, ’scuse me, pardon. I hope we’re not too late, he said to Will, who was pushing along right behind him, though not knowing why. Maybe halfway down the aisle, Arly saw some small space in the middle of a pew. Pardon us, brother, ’scuse us, I do beg pardon, he murmured, flashing hallowed smiles at the men whose toes he was stepping on with his new shoes.

  And then they were standing in place like everyone else, and with hymnals in their hands. The congregation was in color a uniform blue, though some civilians could be seen here and there. But the rich chorale was of soldierly voices, strong and not entirely on key but powerfully fervent in calling upon one another to go down to the river to pray.

  Churches had always made Will nervous, perhaps beginning when he was just a tad and saw his mama and papa become completely different people in church from the drunk and the shrew they were the rest of the week. He didn’t know what churchgoing was for except for people to pretend to be better than they were, and it was that pretense that frightened him. From this his idea grew along with him and now, looking around, he saw the same open mouths and glazed eyes of singers but knew they not only pretended but wanted to be better people than they were. But this was a no more comforting insight, given the war that was going on which meant no matter what people wanted, or thought they wanted, they would still go and do what they had always done, finding different ways to sin against their Lord and then going to church to buy some repentance that would clear them for a while and then building up the sin again and coming back for another installment of repentance, and so on. By that measure, Will thought, there ought to be their own church for this Yankee army to take along on their backs, for how does anyone know when they’re supposed to burn one to the ground or pray in it? God help me, Will thought, with no sense of the contradiction in him, because I can’t give myself to the nigger-keeping side I was born to neither. I don’t know nothing or no one to give myself to with my whole heart except maybe Miss Emily Thompson.

  When the hymn singing was done a pipe organ murmured softly as the basket was sent around. Will worried that he hadn’t even a penny to offer so as not to look bad. But glancing over
to where the usher was handing the basket to the first man on the aisle, and then watching as the coins and even Federal dollars dropped into it, and the basket advanced toward him, he turned his mind to the fact that not he but Arly had put them in the middle of this pew, and in the very moment the basket was placed on his fingertips he knew it would happen that Arly would punch it up from the bottom and it and the money would fly into the air, and they would be on their hands and knees, banging their heads on the back of the pew in front of them while picking up the coins and bills and putting almost all the money back where it belonged and then risen to their feet—the usher glowering down at the end of the aisle, the soldiers on either side shaking their heads—the bumbling oafs smiling sheepishly, which was true in his case, and plain cunning in Arly’s, and with the sacrament of giving now running smoothly again, and the organ playing softly its deferential piping to the hallowed name, their standing and facing forward, just two red faced with embarrassment worshipers hardly able to wait on the end of the service before taking themselves with someone else’s pay in their pockets back to the whores on Charleston Street.

  WREDE SARTORIUS WAS given the ground-floor ward and operating room of the Military Hospital, a luxury that he relished after all this time in the field. But Emily couldn’t see it that way. Of the twenty beds on the ward, half were filled with soldiers of the Confederate army. They were men dying of their wounds or wasting away with disease. The smell was awful even after she had the windows opened to air the place out. And because of the Union blockade, the hospital lacked even such things as rolled bandages. There was no calomel, no chloroform. There were no emetics, rubefacients, or narcotics. So it was a matter of supplying the hospital from the surgical field cases. Besides that, the army at rest in Savannah hardly meant a falling off of patients. Men were reporting with fevers and bronchial congestions acquired during the siege of the city: sitting out in the swampy terrain around Savannah, living in wet clothes, hungry and unable to light fires, they were coming in sick and hardly able to stand. And now that there was a general relaxation of military discipline the enlisted men were on the town drinking and fighting and knocking one another about and showing up, the worse for wear, in the early hours of the morning. This hospital in the genteel city of Savannah was more like a madhouse. To make matters worse, they were understaffed. Sartorius was without an assistant surgeon. Three of the regimental nurses were down—two with pneumonia, the other with a recurrence of swamp fever. So not only Emily and the pair from Millen were doing hospital duty but also little Pearl, who was stationed in the supply room folding towels and rolling bandages.

  But where were those two men now? They had a way of not being there when you needed them.

  Wrede had told her that the moment he examined them back at Millen he knew they were not what they said they were. They could not have spent any time at all in that mud hole. They were not starved. Their eyes were clear. Their skin was healthy, their fingernails were pink, and their beards were not long.

  I suspect they are spies, Wrede had said.

  Spies? She was shocked. She thought one of them, Will, was rather a sweet boy. How could someone like that be a spy?

  Such scoundrels abound in the chaos of war. I don’t know if the regimental affiliations they professed are real or not, and I don’t care. If they decided to attach themselves to my medical company because it was less apt to follow military protocol, they reasoned correctly. Whatever they might be after—perhaps my procedures for resections?—they are welcome to. He laughed. In the meantime, they will scrub the floors and clean up after the dysentery patients.

  Wrede Sartorius didn’t usually speak of his past, so she was surprised when he said that as a boy he’d been sent by his father to a military academy in Göttingen. The experience had taught him to detest drilling and saluting and all the other hierarchical warrior nonsense. That was the phrase he used—she smiled—hierarchical warrior nonsense.

  A CIVILIAN WAS brought in, a man with a depressed skull fracture. He arrived in the arms of a Negro. He did not belong in a military hospital, as one of the guards had insisted, but the victim’s wife said, The likes of you did this to him, and we are not leaving. On Wrede’s orders the man was brought to the surgery. His head was shaved. Emily came in with a cloth moistened with bromine and washed the bare skull. Gently, she patted the skin dry. The patient was perhaps sixty. He was muscular and deep-chested, but his chest hairs were gray. The face was ashen. The eyes were closed. The jaw was slack and the breathing barely perceptible. The skull was caved in an ellipse on the right side just above the forehead. She stepped back, her eyes fixed on the operating table. She would not flinch.

  Wrede made an incision front to back through the length of the injury and two lateral incisions at either end of that, and folded the flaps back to reveal the damaged skull. A male nurse sponged the area. The loose fragments and splinters Wrede removed one by one with a forceps. The depressed bone was four centimeters in length. Taking up a trephine, he locked its perforator pin into the fracture line. This is to prevent cutting into the membrane under the bone, the dura mater, he said to Emily. He had lately found himself instructing her as if she were a medical student. Emily was no less aware of this. She’d discovered that his medical terminology, and the Apollonian calm with which he attended to the most awful matters, enabled her to find her courage. She looked on and learned.

  He tightened the pin with a screw positioned halfway up the shaft of the trephine. Like that, he said. Emily nodded, though Wrede, bent over the patient, could not see her. Now he rotated the handle of the trephine and the circular cutting head ground into the bony plate until the disk of bone was all but cut through. He loosened the perforator pin, retracted it, and locked it and passed the trephine off. Then he inserted a flattened blade under the bone and slowly levered the disk away from the skull.

  Under the cerebral membrane was an enormous blood blister purple in color. To Emily, it looked like the head of a toadstool. Hematoma, Wrede said. He chose a small scalpel with a curved blade and incised the membrane to set the hematoma draining. Linen dressings were applied to take up the blood. There should be no pressure now, he said. Until the discharge ended, the wound would be lightly covered with linen dressings and lint. If he survives, Wrede said, he will wear a lead plaster until eventually something like bone will grow back.

  The patient was moved to the ward. They had not yet taken the trouble to know his name. Emily was prepared to sit by the bed and attend to the dressings. No, Wrede said, we will have the widow sit by him. You will come out with me and comfort her.

  Emily said, The widow?

  Wrede washed his hands in a basin of water. He looked at her and smiled. It was a sorrowful smile, with those ice-blue eyes of his suggesting the pain of his own limitations. We will find out how much time passed before I attended him. You cannot remove the pressure too soon. He is not a young man. The concussive shock is severe. He may never awaken. Even if he does, there is almost always infection. There is not much to be done with an infected brain. Come, Wrede said, you will help me not to leave the woman hopeless.

  As they walked to the anteroom, Wrede asked Emily if she’d remembered that tonight was Christmas Eve. She hadn’t. It surprised her that the holidays of life were still applicable. He took her arm. We will dine this evening with the officers at the Pulaski Hotel. And then would you like to see the Negroes dancing?

  When they came into the anteroom, Mattie Jameson stood and, seeing Emily, blurted out the first thought that flashed through her mind. Aren’t you Judge Thompson’s daughter from over in Milledgeville? she said.

  FROM THE DAY they arrived in Savannah, Mattie did not recall a moment in which John was not enraged, shouting at everybody, cursing the powers that be. In the first place the army would not have him. They enlisted the boys readily enough, and now where were they? Gone to God knows where, to South Carolina, her sons, her babies, fifteen and fourteen years old, gone for soldiers. But not thei
r father. John had actually accosted General Hardee, who had looked at him and said he was too old to march as an enlisted man and could not be commissioned an officer unless he brought in a regiment of his own. I’ll do that then, by God, Hardee, John had said, and reported that the General had smiled, as of course he would, the entire state having been scraped bare of able-bodied men and his so-called army a hapless assemblage of militias and cadets.

  And then John had found it intolerable that, there being no decent houses available in Savannah, they had to board on Green Street with her older sister Cissie, whom he had never liked for her officiousness. And it was true that Cissie had a way about her of knowing better than anyone else, in any given situation, what must be done and how it should be done and giving orders accordingly. That was surely the reason she never found a husband. She had been that way even as a child, as Mattie well knew—the games they played always Cissie’s games, with Cissie’s rules—and even though there was but a year and a half separating them, she seemed to have been born knowing everything and pronouncing errorless judgments so that Mattie had always to give in, to revise her opinions, to gainsay her own judgments, just as she did living with John Jameson who had not a little of the same overbearing nature, which is why he probably found his sister-in-law so intolerable. They were two peas in a pod. Cissie wore a perpetual frown—it had been grooved into her face from so many years of it and now, with her lips pressed together and her eyes narrowed, her simplest remark, however well meant, had a knife edge to it. The meals in her dining room were cold and silent. Her menus reflected the wartime shortages and the darkies were somewhat slower in serving than they should have been, as if, in anticipation of Sherman’s advancing armies, they were practicing their independence. And she, Mattie, was strung taut between her sister and her husband, deferential to one and placatory of the other. Cissie had inherited the family manse, and above all, without her saying a thing, like a miasma in the house, was the fact of their imposition. It had been not even a month, but it seemed like forever.