My Name Is Mary Sutter (24 page)

Blevens offered her his handkerchief. He had a hundred questions to ask her, chiefly what she was doing here, but they would have to wait. And he did not want to ask about Thomas. He did not want to cause her further grief. “You couldn’t have known. There were a hundred men with fever when I left to go to the battle. How would you have known what to do?”

But he could tell she was not absorbing his stabs at comfort.

They ate in silence, Mary spooning the pudding into her mouth, Blevens sawing away at the boiled mutton, doctoring its toughness with dollops of applesauce.

Mary smoothed her skirts. Blevens and his kindness were good company, a surprise gift she did not want to return. “This is practically the first time I’ve been out of the Union Hotel since I arrived—”

“The Union? That hellhole? What are you doing there?”

“I am a ma—a nurse. Rather, I am apprenticed to a surgeon.”

Blevens leaned forward and took her hand again, this time an unconscious gesture that he would later remember with pleasure. Her hand was calloused and the nails ragged and broken; it felt heavy in his, like responsibility.

Onlookers breathed more deeply.
They will go next door to the hotel and take a room
, they thought.
The war is bringing out the worst in people
. At the door, those waiting for a table had grown surly, but this unruly behavior was not met with as much judgment as Mary and Blevens leaning in toward one another.

Mary did not fight his offer to pay her bill; Blevens left no tip, which the waiter believed confirmed his prior assessment that the two had been undeserving of his regard.

“Can you walk with me?” Blevens asked.

It was only past noon. Time through a different lens. How slowly it was passing today.

F Street was an artery of quietude compared to Pennsylvania Avenue, but it nonetheless pulsed with dust and heat, and as they walked along they hugged closely to the buildings for shade. On a similar day in Albany, they would have strolled along the towpath of the Erie Canal, finding relief from the heat under the trailing willows, but here there was only an occasional overhang to protect them.

At a corner, James looked down the street at a theater where he’d gone the other night to see a musical performance. The novelty of it had delighted him at the time, but the appearance of Mary Sutter had far surpassed it.

“What was it like at Manassas? Will you tell me?” Mary asked.

“I was quite in the rear, well protected.”

“But you saw the battle?”

“I was kept well back. I treated the men as they were brought back on stretchers.”

This was not completely true, but Blevens did not like to relive the details of that day. Who would have thought that hell would be so
immediate
? High-pitched screams, astonished, brittle gasps.

Mary stopped walking and put her hand to his forearm. “I have assisted in amputations. I have seen men die. I have scrubbed and laundered and witnessed the most vile things. There is no reason to withhold anything from me.”

Forgiven his debt. Blevens hadn’t realized that he still carried the measure of that obligation with him. After all he had seen, after all the discomfort of the last three months, the debt he owed had burrowed itself into his soul. And no one had asked him for his story, not in the way that Mary was now. He had told parts of it in bars, had even told the clerk at the Surgeon General’s office that the failure of the Medical Department was why he was staying, but no one had touched him and said,
Tell me.

They began to walk.

On that early morning, he told Mary, there was a calm before the artillerymen had even untoggled the prolonges from their guns. The day throbbed with beauty. It was easy to imagine that they were all on a lark. Redolent with fragrance, the summer morning shimmered with that clarity of light peculiar to midsummer, that glassy serenity, when everyone, human and animal alike, lets down his guard and is seduced by tranquillity. He turned his back on the unseemly hubbub of troops invading the countryside and surveyed the unsuspecting hills to the east where, undisturbed, monarch butterflies dipped their noses into lakes of goldenrod, where in a tangle of vines a nest of newly hatched cardinals appealed for breakfast, and toward the sky, where a red-winged blackbird soared above the cattails of a shallow pond. It was possible at that moment to believe that such an idyll was eternal.

With the first crack of artillery, black smoke voided the landscape and wiped the sky of birdsong. James ducked and scrambled toward the back of the line to his assigned aid station, but the stretcher bearers refused to go into the field. Blevens, tortured by the cries of the wounded, seized the portable surgery kit he’d made from the instruments he’d brought from home, commandeered an ambulance, and drove himself into the fray. At the first impassable gully, he abandoned the wagon and slapped the hindquarters of the horse, who galloped headlong out of the maelstrom. Blevens smelled smoke, sweat. Musket balls whizzed past his head. A soldier fell, and then another and another. Why were they standing to fire? Why didn’t they lie down and take cover? James fell to the ground and crawled toward them thinking of all he lacked: opiates, scalpel, lint, bandages, adhesive plasters, syringes. Shells exploded and bullets spit, but he heard only his breath issuing in uneven gasps.
Water?
the boys asked, but he lacked even that. There were moments when he was certain he was dreaming.

In the din and racket, James found an oak tree splattered scarlet and rested his head against it. Shattered men carpeted the field beside him, men that James did not think of as soldiers, for they had not yet hardened. They were still, like him, only half a moment past innocence. One soldier was dead, but unmarked. Not a speck of blood, not a perceptible chink in his body anywhere. Perhaps he had died of fright, or of the percussion waves of the artillery invading his body. Time grew elastic. How many wounded per second, per minute, per hour? The lines of battle moved. They ranged forward and backward over the hilly ground obscured by dust and smoke. Every dip, ditch, hillock, boulder, and tree was a surprise. James stumbled over them with the unsteadiness and unwieldiness of a body dizzy with confusion. His tongue swelled from thirst. At one point, he wiped his face and found that he was crying. Riderless horses winged past, only to sink and complain, their haunches or shoulders or legs destroyed.

The head wounds were hopeless, the abdominal wounds impossible. By then, the thirst and humidity, gunsmoke and cannon powder had rendered everyone slightly mad. It seemed to affect even the air. That’s what would be said for years afterward.
Conjured our own weather that night. You remember? It was the last beautiful day for a long while. Maybe for the whole war. We turned even the skies, we did.

“I did what I could, but it was too little,” Blevens said. He was trying not to weep. “And then it seemed as if the entire Union army decided in one moment to run. They just changed direction like a flock of birds.”

The retreating troops jammed the roads. After a few dusty, confused miles, carried along by the river of men, Blevens reached the town of Centreville, where thousands had hoped to find water, but the town well had run dry. A church was being used as a hospital, and Blevens pushed his way inside. Pews had been pried from the floor and blankets and hay laid down in their place. A hundred wounded men sprawled on the main floor, and another twenty-five lay upstairs in the gallery. Squeezed in among them were perhaps another fifty healthy men taking refuge in the safety of the building. Outside were two hundred more wounded, laid out in four buildings and beneath the trees in a surrounding grove of timber, all of whom needed dressings, whiskey, morphia, lint. Blevens elbowed his way through to where a door torn from its hinges was suspended between two pew ends.

An amputation of a forearm was under way.

Blevens identified himself to the three surgeons working together on the arm, puzzling their way through the operation.

“Have you any supplies?” he asked.

They stared at him.

More troops kept arriving, and one by one, regimental surgeons, attracted by the wounded, pushed into the church, also looking for supplies, but soon cries that the Rebels were coming sent the onlookers spilling back again out of the church and onto the road toward Washington and safety. But without ambulances, it was impossible to carry off the wounded. The surgeons huddled together to consider who should stay, the oily smell of burning kerosene tainting the air. They kicked the ground and calculated the post-victory stance of the Rebel soldier with regard to surgeons. In the end, five surgeons gave themselves up to be captured with the wounded, and the remainder, all volunteers, including James, joined the thousands of men and wagons jolting over the Warrenton Turnpike toward Washington. Dust fogged the air at the passage of wagon, cart, horse, and foot. Had not the rutted road provided direction, James would have been lost. Here and there, overturned wagons blocked the way, and the whole train had to plunge into fields to pass by. The night passed in painful slowness, until at last, footsore, James reached Fairfax, where he lay down without a blanket on the ground under a sky that opened to a downpour.

James was proud of what he held back from Mary. The horses squealing from their shell wounds, soldiers lying on the ground, impaled by fallen tree limbs. How he had vomited twice in the field.

Now he and Mary reached the square where the E Street Infirmary stood in silent, serious judgment. He had brought Mary here without thinking. They had walked ten blocks, past the post office where army wagons by the dozens lined up to procure food from the commissary in its basement, past the reporters hurrying from the
Evening Star
’s offices, past even Mrs. Surratt’s Boarding House, where James had stayed one night and found the company treacherous.

Mary surveyed the dark façade of the infirmary. The September sun was no less fierce than June’s had been.

“The infirmary wouldn’t have me,” Mary said.

“The sisters make good nurses.”

“None of Miss Dix’s charges for you?”

“It is an all-Catholic hospital. I shall be excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church on my return to Albany. I feign religiosity.”

A wagon rattled by.

“May I show you something?” James asked.

They entered the building to which the sister had denied Mary access in June. On the first floor, in a closet of a room, was a desk, a stool, a table, and a microscope sitting uncovered on it.

“How?” Mary said.

“It is mine. I had my landlady send it to me from Albany, via Adams Express.”

Mary pulled off her bonnet, her ribbons trailing like discarded apron strings.

He touched his hand to the table. “I’m looking at stool samples.” He hesitated, but what was embarrassment now? He had seen a man blown to pieces. She had helped to amputate a leg. “I’m trying to solve the problem of dysentery. I’ve tried everything, but whether I dose the men with Dover’s powder or blue mass, nothing seems to work. Rice does, when I can get any.”

“Dr. Stipp has tried to purge the men with ipecac. And quinine has worked in a few cases,” Mary said.

“Dr. Stipp? William Stipp?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“He taught me at Bellevue. I thought he went to Texas after his wife died.”

A wife, Mary thought. Texas. How much Stipp hadn’t told her. “I know very little of his life.”

“I would like to see him.”

“He would like that, I think.”

Blevens pulled out a slide and made a preparation, after surreptitiously taking a sample from a covered bucket. He adjusted the lens so that it came into focus.

“You are taking the time to teach me something?” A spark of the old Mary.

“It was only the onset of the war that prevented me. I am sorry,” he said.

An apology, albeit a late one. She wouldn’t call it pride, but instead gratitude, that made her say, “The penitent doctor.”

Each held the other’s gaze for a moment, and then Mary turned to the lens and tried to make out something in the shadows of the flickering light.

“Look for small, cylinder-like shapes,” Blevens said. “Those are rods. And the others, the circular ones, do you see them? Do you see how they propel themselves?”

“I don’t see—oh! Yes!” She wasn’t conscious of the intensity of her exclamation, but James was. He remembered a cat lying on a table in Dr. Stipp’s dining room, the moment when everything had first started to come together for him.

“What are these?” she asked, unable to make out the meaning of a spiral-shaped body floating past.

Mary shifted away from the long neck of the lens to allow him to look. Peering in, James said, “I don’t know what is normal and what isn’t normal. I’ve identified albumin—that’s a protein, of course. And red and white blood corpuscles. These have to do with the inflammation of the mucosal lining of the bowel, I think. And the rodlike bodies. Spherical elements, all in motion. These are like those described by Billroth, who calls them
Coccobacteria septica
. Once I put a ring of varnish around the cover plate and the movement went on forever.”

Outside, the soft murmur of the sisters’ patrolling shoes betrayed no hint of the chaos that ruled at the Union Hotel.

“You want something you think you cannot have,” Mary said, when the whisper of their footsteps died away. “That’s what you once said to me.”

Their shoulders were nearly touching. The debt respoken, or at least remembered, perhaps not yet forgiven, as he had hoped. She would punish him for knowing about Thomas. Blevens gazed at Mary, who was regarding him with naked challenge.

When he did not respond, she said, “Silence is not the answer to everything.”

“I never said yours was an unworthy cause. Merely that it was what you wanted and that I could not provide it.” He meant for both desires.

She studied him then, her gaze as serious as a scholar’s, or a minister’s, or a physician’s. He looked tired, older, as if the battle had removed the last bit of his youth.