The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (154 page)

“What do I have to do?”

“Your troops are raising their tents on the shitpiles of the Pennsylvania 176th. And the water’s bad here, they drink river water that’s spoiled by their own runoff. There’s an unused site less than a mile on the other side of the encampment, with clean springs that should give good water through the winter, if you drive pipes into them.”

“God Almighty. A mile’s a long way to go to confer with the other regiments. Or to expect their officers to come if they want to see me.”

They studied one another, and Colonel Symonds made up his mind. He went to his sergeant major. “Order the tents to be struck, Douglass. The regiment’s going to move.”

Then he came back and talked business with this difficult doctor.

Again Rob J. turned down a chance to be commissioned. He asked to be hired as acting assistant surgeon, on a three-month contract.

“That way, you don’t get what you want, you can leave,” the young colonel observed astutely. The middle-aged doctor didn’t deny it, and Colonel Symonds considered him. “What else do you want?”

“Latrines,” Rob J. said.

The ground was firm but not yet frozen. In a single morning the sinks were dug and logs were fixed on one-foot posts at the edge of the trenches. When the order was read to all companies that defecating or urinating anyplace but in designated sinks would result in swift and severe punishment, there was
resentment. The men needed something to hate and ridicule, and Rob J. realized he had filled that need. When he passed among them, they nudged one another, their eyes raked him, they grinned cruelly at the ridiculous figure he made in his ever-shabbier civilian suit.

Colonel Symonds didn’t give them a chance to spend much time thinking about grievances. He invested four days in labor details that built a series of spare, half-excavated huts of logs and sod. They were damp and poorly ventilated, but they gave considerably more shelter than tents, and a small fire made it possible for the men to sleep through a winter’s night.

Symonds was a good commander and had attracted decent officers. The regiment’s commissary officer was a captain named Mason, and Rob J. didn’t find it difficult to explain the dietary causes of scurvy, because he could point out examples of the disease’s effects among the troops. The two of them took a buckboard into Cairo and bought barrels of cabbages and carrots, which were made part of the ration. Scurvy was even more prevalent among some of the other units in the encampment, but when Rob J. tried to confer with the physicians of the other regiments, he met with little success. They seemed more conscious of their roles as army officers than as doctors. All were uniformed, two sported swords like line officers, and the surgeon of the Ohio regiment wore custom fringed epaulets like those in a picture Rob J. once had seen of a pompous French general.

In contrast, he embraced his civilian self. When a supply sergeant, grateful for banished stomach cramps, issued him a blue woolen overcoat, he welcomed it but took it to town and had it dyed black and given plain bone buttons. He liked to pretend he was still a country doctor who had moved temporarily to another town.

In many respects, the camp
was
like a small town, albeit exclusively male. The regiment had its own post office, with a corporal named Amasa Decker as postmaster and mailman. On Wednesday evenings the band gave concerts on the drill field, and sometimes, when they played a popular song like “Listen to the Mockingbird,” or “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming,” or “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” the men sang along. Sutlers brought a variety of goods into the camp. Out of thirteen dollars per month, the average soldier couldn’t afford much cheese at fifty cents a pound, or condensed milk at seventy-five cents a can, but they bought the sutlers’ liquor. Rob J. indulged himself several times a week in molasses cookies, six for a quarter. A photographer had set up shop in a large wall tent, in which one day Rob
paid a dollar for a ferrotype photograph of himself, stiff and unsmiling, that he sent off to Sarah at once as proof that her husband was still alive and well and loved her dearly.

Having taken raw troops into disputed territory once, Colonel Symonds was determined that they would never be unprepared for combat again. Through the winter, he worked his soldiers hard. There were training hikes of thirty miles that produced new patients for Rob J., because some of the men suffered strained muscles from carrying a full field pack and heavy rifled musket. Others developed hernias from wearing belts hung with heavy cartridge boxes. Squads constantly trained in bayonet warfare, and Symonds forced them to practice the laborious loading of their muskets again and again: “Bite off the end of the paper-wrapped cartridge like you’re mad at it. Pour the powder down the barrel, insert the minié bullet and then the paper wrapping for a wad, and ram the whole damn mess home. Take a percussion cap from your pouch, place it on the nipple in the breech. Aim that beautiful thing and
fire!”

They did it again and again, repeatedly, unendingly. Symonds told Rob J. he wanted them to be able to load and fire when awakened from a sound sleep, when numb with panic, when their hands were shaking with excitement or fright.

In the same way, so they would learn to take orders without hesitation instead of cussing out or challenging their officers, the colonel marched them incessantly in close-order drill. Several mornings when the landscape was covered with snow, Symonds borrowed huge wooden rollers from the Cairo road department, and teams of army horses pulled them around the parade ground until it was flat and hard enough for the companies to drill some more, while the regimental band played marches and quicksteps.

It was on a bright winter’s day, while passing the perimeter of the parade ground filled with squads of drilling men, that Rob J. glanced at the seated band and noted that one of the horn players had a port-wine stain on his face. The man’s heavy brass instrument rested on his left shoulder, the long throat and the bell flashing golden behind him in the winter sun, while as he blew into the mouthpiece—they were playing “Hail, Columbia”—his cheeks ballooned enormously and then relaxed, again and again. Each time the man’s cheeks filled with air, the purple mark under his right eye darkened, like a signal.

For nine long years Rob J. had tensed whenever he met a man with a stain mark on his face, but now he simply proceeded to sick call, automatically walking to the beat of the insistent music all the way to the dispensary tent.

The next morning, when he saw the band marching on the parade ground to play for a First Battalion review, he looked for the horn player with the marked face, but the man wasn’t there.

Rob J. walked to the row of huts where the band lived, and at once he came upon the man taking frozen garments off the washline. “Stiffer than a dead man’s dick,” the man said to him in disgust. “It don’t make sense to have inspections in dead of winter.”

Hypocritically, Rob J. agreed, although the inspections had been his suggestion, to force the men to wash at least some of their clothing. “Got the day off, have you?”

The man gave him a surly look. “I don’t march. I’m spavined.”

As he walked away with his armload of frozen clothes, Rob J. saw he was. The horn player would destroy the symmetry of a military-band formation. His right leg seemed slightly shorter than the left, and he walked with a decided limp.

Rob J. went into his own hut and sat on his poncho in the cold gloom with his blanket around his shoulders.

Eleven years. He remembered the day precisely. He recalled each of the individual house calls he had made while Makwa-ikwa was being violated and murdered.

He thought of the three men who had come to Holden’s Crossing just prior to the murder and then had disappeared. In eleven years he’d managed to learn nothing about them, save that they were “bad drunks.”

A spurious preacher, the Reverend Ellwood Patterson, whom he had treated for syphilis.

A burly, physically powerful fat man named Hank Cough.

A skinny young man they’d called Len. Sometimes Lenny. With a port-wine stain on his face under his right eye. And a limp.

Not so skinny anymore, if this was the man. But then, not so young anymore either.

This probably wasn’t the one he was looking for, he told himself. It was probable that there was more than one man in America with a facial stain and a gimpy leg.

He didn’t want this to be the man, he realized. He faced the fact that he no longer really wanted to find them. What would he do if the horn player was Lenny? Slit his throat?

Helplessness gripped him.

Makwa’s death was something he had managed to put away in a separate compartment of his mind. Now that compartment had been reopened, Pandora’s box, and he felt an almost-forgotten iciness begin to grow deep inside him, a coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature in the small hut.

He went outside and walked to the tent that served as the regimental office. The sergeant major’s name was Stephen Douglass, spelled with one more S than the senator’s. He’d grown accustomed to the doctor’s working with personnel files. He had told Rob J. he’d never seen an army surgeon so driven to keep complete medical records. “More paperwork, Doc?”

“A little.”

“Help yourself. The orderly’s gone out for a pitcher of hot coffee. Welcome to some of it when it comes. Just don’t drip any on my damn records, please.”

Rob J. promised he wouldn’t.

The band was attached to Headquarters Company. Sergeant Douglass kept each company’s records neatly in a separate gray box. Rob J. found Headquarters Company’s box, and inside it was a group of records tied with cord as a discrete bundle marked “Indiana 131st Regimental Band.”

He leafed through the records, one by one. There was nobody in the band whose first name was Leonard, but when Rob J. found the card, he knew at once and without uncertainty that this was the right man, the way he sometimes knew if somebody would live or die.

ORDWAY, LANNING A
., private. Residence, Vincennes,
Indiana. One-year enlistment, July 28, 1862.
Enlistment credit, Fort Wayne. Born, Vincennes,
Indiana, November 11, 1836. Height, 5’8”.
Complexion, fair. Eyes, gray. Hair, brown.
Enlisted for limited duty as musician (E-flat bass
cornet) and general laborer, due to disability.

52

TROOP MOVEMENTS

It was weeks after Rob’s contract ran out before Colonel Symonds came to him to discuss its renewal. By that time the spring fevers had begun to rage through the other regiments, but not in the Indiana 131st. The men of the 131st had colds from the damp ground and runny bowels from the ration, but Rob J.’s sick-call lines were the shortest he’d seen since he’d begun working for the army. Colonel Symonds knew that three regiments were tormented with fever and ague, and his own was relatively sound. Some of the oldest men, who shouldn’t have been there in the first place, had been sent home. Most of the others had lice, and filthy feet and necks, and itchy loins, and they drank too much whiskey. But they were lean and hard from the long marches, keen from the constant drilling, and bright-eyed and eager because somehow Acting Assistant Surgeon Cole had gotten them through the winter fit for duty, as he had promised. Out of six hundred men in the regiment, seven had died during the winter, a mortality rate of twelve per thousand. In comparison, fifty-eight men per thousand had died in the other three regiments, and now that the fevers had come, that percentage was certain to rise.

So the colonel came to his doctor ready to be reasonable, and Rob J. signed the contract for another three months of employment with no hesitation. He could tell when he was in a good position.

What they had to do now, he told Symonds, was set up an ambulance to serve the regiment in battle.

The civilian Sanitary Commission had lobbied the secretary of war until finally ambulances and stretcher-bearers were part of the Army of the Potomac, but the reform movement had stopped there, without providing similar care for the wounded of the units in the Western sector. “We’re going to have to take care of ourselves,” Rob J. said.

He and Symonds sat cozily in front of the dispensary tent and smoked cigars, the smoke drifting into the warming spring air as he told the colonel of his trip to Cincinnati on the
War Hawk
. “I talked to men who just lay there on the battlefield for two days after they were hit. It was a mercy it rained because they were without water. One man told me that during the
night, pigs came close to where he lay and began to eat the bodies. Some of them weren’t dead yet.”

Symonds nodded. He was familiar with all the terrible details. “What do you need?”

“Four men from each company.”

“You want an entire platoon to carry stretchers,” Symonds said, shocked. “This regiment is markedly under strength. To win battles I need fighters, not stretcher-bearers.” He considered the tip of his cigar. “Too many still are old and disabled, shouldn’t have been enlisted. Take some of those.”

“No. We need men strong enough to get to others under fire and bring them to safety. It isn’t a job that can be done by sickly old men.” Rob J. studied the troubled face of this young man he’d come to admire and pity. Symonds loved his troops and wanted to protect them, yet the colonel owned the unenviable job of having to expend human lives as if they were bullets or rations or chunks of firewood. “Suppose I use men from the regimental band,” Rob J. said. “They can tootle most of the time, and after a fight they can carry stretchers.”