City of God (2 page)

July 4, 1863,
The Temporary Field Hospital at Cemetery Ridge,
Gettysburg in Pennsylvania

“So you’re here, Dr. Turner.”

“I am here, Mr. Whitman. No, don’t touch that.”

Walter Whitman withdrew his hand from a table that held an array of scalpels and needles threaded with catgut. “I apologize. It looked as if you were ready for the next ligature.”

“You have a good eye for surgery. I am.” Turner leaned forward, procured the needle himself, and began carefully stitching the final flap of skin covering the soldier’s elbow. There was no longer a forearm. “But I doubt, Mr. Whitman, that you washed your hands before you came to find me.”

“Ah, yes. Your little…What do you call them?”

“Germs.”

“Ah, yes. Germs.”

The tent was pitched on a high ridge covered in silent dead, in one
section of what had been the sprawling killing fields of a three-day battle engaging almost two hundred thousand fighting men. Inside the tent, among the living, it was hot and humid and stank of blood and feces and swiftly putrefying flesh. Bodies—most missing one or other appendage, all with some part of their person bandaged, some in blue uniforms, more in gray—were everywhere. A few lay on pallets; most lay on the ground. Two black-clad women moved among them.

“It hardly seems I could add anything more distasteful to this atmosphere,” Whitman said.

“Indeed, in a general way you could not. But germs are particular, not general. Those ligatures were dipped in a solution of carbolic acid, a disinfectant. Your hands were not.”

“The surgeons in Washington don’t believe in your germs. They say you’re a darned fool.”

“Just as well,” Turner said, “otherwise you’d probably be soliciting money on their behalf, not mine. Not so good for their patients, however. What have you brought me, Mr. Whitman?”

Whitman held out the small leather satchel in his left hand. “Soap. More of your carbolic acid. More of your sulfuric ether as well. Though it looks as though you’ve enough of that.” He nodded towards the man on the table. No part of him twitched as Turner finished stitching his flesh.

“Wrong for once, Mr. Whitman. I used the last of my ether for this one.”

“The Washington surgeons say chloroform and sulfuric ether are immoral. They say it’s against the law of God to interfere with man’s ability to feel pain.”

Turner stopped stitching and raised his head. “Do they, now? And what do you say to that, Mr. Whitman? All these preachers telling us what to think, are they always right?”
Leaves of Grass
his book was called. Poems about people, bodies, sex. Biblically inspired the poet claimed, but his critics, many of them clergy, loudly disagreed. Even banned his book sometimes.

“Folks talk a lot about the law of God,” Whitman said. “Doesn’t mean they know much about it.”

“Yes, that’s my opinion as well.” Turner again bent his head to his task. “As for the ether you brought me, I am enormously grateful. We’ve made an excellent job of killing vast numbers here in Pennsylvania these last few days, but I expect we are not done with maiming and murdering each other.”

Back in Fredericksburg the year before, the first time Walt Whitman was ever in a field hospital, he watched men who called themselves doctors sawing screaming soldiers into pieces with nothing to deaden the pain at all—and no thought for Dr. Nicholas Turner’s germs. He couldn’t stand that there should be so much suffering and nothing he could do about it. It’s why he took a government job, so he could be in Washington, closer to the war, and start visiting as many of the wounded as he could manage. And raise money to buy supplies for the doctors working on the battlefields. Most of that went to Dr. Turner these days. Turner’s patients moaned as they came round, they didn’t scream. And he treated them all, Yankees and Southerners alike. In the huge and lumbering Confederate retreat of the previous day, Lee had taken as many of his wounded with him as he could manage to cart away, but it was inevitable with a battle so enormous and so devastating that many were left behind. Turner’s unconscious patient wore a gray uniform.

“There are some as give,” Whitman said, “who wouldn’t be pleased to think their contributions used to ease the enemy’s pain.”

“Then we will refrain from telling them.” The surgeon looked up again, meeting the other man’s gaze full on. “That’s correct, isn’t it, Mr. Whitman?”

“It’s entirely correct, Dr. Turner.”

Whitman figured Nicholas Turner was some fifteen years older than himself. Call it late fifties. He looked older still. Exhaustion had hollowed his cheeks and made dark circles around his gray eyes. Even his considerable height seemed diminished by the necessity to stoop beneath the low-slung canvas ceiling. His red hair was plastered to his scalp with sweat.

“Truth to tell, sir,” he said, “I don’t tell them exactly what the money’s
for either. Not about the carbolic or the ether.” Help save the lives of our boys, Whitman told them, never said whose boys exactly. And as soon as he made his little speech about how their contributions would help the war, he switched to reading his poems. Even if they hated them, it was a distraction.

One of the black-clad women slipped out of the tent. Another arrived to replace her and came at once to stand beside Turner’s operating table. “Are you finished, Doctor?”

“Yes. You can take him away now and…” Turner looked up, paused. “Oh…you are indeed a surprise. I didn’t know…we should speak, my dear. I was—”

“You are busy. There is no need.”

She sounded calm, Whitman thought, cool even. Turner on the other hand seemed unnerved. The woman wore one of those black bonnets that mostly shaded her face and like those he’d seen on the battlefield, a black frock. Black crows roaming among the dead, following behind the soldiers on burial detail, pecking at the earth and occasionally pulling up a prize, a body with some life left in it.

The other female in the tent came over, and the pair of them hoisted the soldier off the table and carried him away.

“Strange place for ladies,” Whitman said.

“Perhaps. But more and more of them are nursing these days. Ever since that Nightingale woman over in England.”

Whitman said he’d be going. Turner walked with him as far as the flap serving as the tent’s door.

A carriage was parked a few feet away. Any number of gawkers and thrill-seekers had come by to observe the aftermath of carnage, but this was a brougham of the better sort, with all the windows tightly curtained, and a driver who sat up front staring straight ahead and keeping a loose grip on the reins.

While they watched, one of the curtains was pushed aside and a woman peered out. She looked as if she had stepped off one of the ceramic plates or vases or bowls that were so much a part of the China trade. Her black hair was upswept and threaded with ribbons and her
face was painted and utterly unlike anything to be seen on Broadway or Fifth Avenue, much less on this blood-soaked battlefield.

“Sweet Christ,” Turner murmured, “what is she thinking of coming here?” He turned as if to summon someone, but there was no need. One of the black-clad women—Whitman thought it to be the one Turner had spoken to and called his dear—pushed past them and climbed into the rig.

Her black dress was filthy and covered with blood and bits of flesh and bone. She had never, she thought, been quite so tired. Sitting, even for a moment, was a relief.

Outside, clusters of blue-clad soldiers were digging an endless succession of graves. How could they bury so many? Talk was of twenty, thirty, even fifty thousand dead. More gray uniforms than blue this time.

“This-place-red-hair
yi
is here. I saw him.” That’s how her mother had always referred to Nicholas Turner. This-place-red-hair
yi,
which was the Chinese word for “doctor.” Mostly, however, he wasn’t the one she talked about. “He said I would be princess,” the older woman said. Her daughter knew who she meant and that it was not Dr. Turner.

“He said many things, Mamee. Most were not true.”

They spoke in the formal Mandarin that was the daughter’s first language until at the age of four she was released from the three rooms that had been her entire world and discovered that outside, on the streets of New York, people did not look as she looked or speak as she spoke.

“He lied almost always. This-place-red-hair
yi
sometimes also. That is correct,” her mother agreed. “But here you will find truth. I wrote it for you to know.” The book—rice paper pages bound in silk—was offered by a hand deformed by rheumatism, the joints swollen, the fingers bent into claws.

The daughter grasped her mother’s wrist. “Have you been soaking your hands and feet every day the way I told you?” Her mother’s feet had been bound at age three. She was forty-seven now and her feet
were three inches in length. The beautiful and elaborate silk wrappings covered horned and calloused flesh and deeply ingrown nails, a source of constant pain. “The powder I gave you will help, Mamee, but you must use it regularly.”

The older woman was called Mei-hua, plum blossom, a delicate and exquisite flower. Once it had suited her. “There is no reason. Nothing will change. I will not be young again.”

The daughter’s given name was Mei Lin, a Chinese phrase meaning beautiful grove. For a time she had taken another and then a third. None were what she was called today. “The soaking powder is to ease the pain, Mamee. Not to make you young.”

Beyond the window of the carriage two of the women walking the battlefield pulled a body free of a stack of corpses and carried it towards the hospital tent. The daughter drew in a short, sharp breath. Dear God, they couldn’t possibly find them all. The ones with a spark of life left in them but not the strength to crawl from beneath the piles of dead would be buried alive. “I must leave now, Mamee. I must return to my work.”

Mei-hua leaned back against the red velvet upholstery and smoothed the silk of her long, slim skirt and her short jacket, both green silk shot with gold. Old, yes, but she looked better than her daughter. Ugly black bonnet. Ugly black dress. Ugly work to be picking and prying among the bloody dead. There was a rising stink about the place. About Mei Lin too if she stayed here. If those around you have fleas, soon you will itch. She had told her daughter that many times. Too late now to say words into deaf ears. “I am tired. Take me home.”

“I will tell the driver, Mamee. I cannot go with you now. You know that.”

“This-place-red-hair
yi
will not permit it?”

“He has nothing to do with it. I really must leave, Mamee.”

“Very well. Go,” Mei-hua said, waving a dismissive hand. “Tell the
yang gwei zih
to take me home.”

The driver had been with Mei-hua for half a dozen years, but he was not Chinese and so was a
yang gwei zih,
a foreign devil. “I will tell him, Mamee.”

The daughter leaned forward and kissed her mother’s cheek, then she opened the door and climbed down to the world of dead bodies and suffering flesh. She paused just long enough to tuck Mei-hua’s book beneath the short cape of the black habit of Mother Elizabeth Seton’s Sisters of Charity. In moments it was safe and hidden. Just like her.

Except that Nicholas Turner still stood outside the hospital tent, watching both mother and daughter. And Nicholas Turner, the this-place-red-hair
yi
, knew everything.