The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (160 page)

Rob J. was painfully aware that in the midst of a war, with weapons at every hand and on every person, and with wholesale murder unremarkable, there would be many ways and many opportunities available for an experienced killer who was determined to “tak kare” of him.

For four days he tried to be aware of what was behind his back, and for five nights he slept lightly or not at all.

He lay awake wondering how Ordway would attempt it. He decided that in Ordway’s place and temperament, he would wait until both of them were participants in a noisy skirmish, with lots of firing. On the other hand, he had no idea whether Ordway might be a knife fighter. If Rob J. were found stabbed, or with his throat cut, after a long dark night when every jittery picket had speculated that each moon-shadow was a Confederate infiltrator, there would be little surprise or investigation of his death.

This situation was changed on January 19, when Company B of the Second Brigade was sent across the Rappahannock on what was supposed to be a quick intelligence probe and then a swift withdrawal, but didn’t work out that way. Instead, the light company of infantry found Confederate positions in strength where they hadn’t expected Confederates to be, and they were pinned down by enemy fire in an exposed place.

It was a repeat of the situation in which the entire regiment had found itself some weeks earlier, but instead of some seven hundred men with fixed bayonets charging across the river to mend the situation, there was no support from the Army of the Potomac. The 107 men stayed where they were and took the fire all day, returning it as best they could. When darkness fell, they fled back across the river, bringing along four dead bodies and seven wounded men.

The first person they carried into the hospital tent was Lanning Ordway.

Ordway’s crewmen said he’d been hit just before nightfall. He had reached into his jacket pocket for the paper-wrapped hard biscuit and piece of fried pork he had placed there that morning, when two minié balls struck him in swift succession. One of the balls had taken a chunk from his abdomen wall, and a loop of grayish abdomen now protruded. Rob J. started to push it
back inside, thinking to close the wound, but he saw several other things quickly, and he recognized that he couldn’t do anything to save Ordway.

The second wound was perforating, and too much damage had been done internally, to the bowel or stomach, or perhaps both. He knew if he opened the belly he’d find the body’s hemorrhaged blood pooled in the abdominal cavity. Ordway’s drained face was white as milk.

“Is there anything you want, Lanny?” he asked gently.

Ordway’s lips worked. His eyes locked with Rob J.’s, and a certain calmness Rob J. had seen before in the dying revealed that he was aware. “Water.”

It was the worst thing to give a man who was gut-shot, but Rob J. knew it didn’t matter. He took two opium pills from his
Mee-shome
and gave them to Ordway with a long drink. Almost at once Ordway vomited redly.

“Do you want a minister?” Rob J. asked as he worked to make things right. But Ordway made no reply, only kept looking at him.

“Maybe you want to tell me exactly what happened to Makwa-ikwa that day in my woods. Or tell me about anything else, anything at all.”

“You … hell,” Ordway managed.

Rob J. didn’t believe that he ever would go to hell. He didn’t believe Ordway or anyone else would go there, either, but it wasn’t a time for debate. “I thought it might help you to talk just now. If you have anything to get off your mind.”

Ordway closed his eyes and Rob J. knew he had to leave him in peace.

He always hated to lose somebody to death, but he especially hated the loss of this man who’d been prepared to kill him, because locked in Ordway’s brain was information he had yearned after for years, and when the man’s brain died like a turned-off lamp, the information would be gone.

He knew, too, that in spite of everything, something within him had responded to the strange, complicated young man who had been caught in the grinder. What would it have been like to have known an Ordway who had been delivered of his mother without injury, who had had some schooling instead of illiteracy, some care instead of hunger, and a different birthright from his drinking father?

He knew the futility of such speculation, and when he glanced at the still figure he saw that Ordway was beyond any consideration.

For a time he handled the ether cone while Gardner Coppersmith removed a minié ball, not unskillfully, from the meaty part of a boy’s left buttock. Then he returned to Ordway and tied up his jaw and weighted his
eyelids with pennies, and they laid him on the ground next to the four others Company B had brought back.

57

THE FULL CIRCLE

On February 12, 1864, Rob J. wrote in his journal:

Two rivers back home, the great Mississippi and the modest Rock, have placed their mark on my life, and now in Virginia I’ve come to know another mismatched pair of rivers too well, witnessing repeated slaughter along the Rappahannock and the Rapidan. Both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia have sent small groups of infantry and cavalry across the Rapidan to have at one another all through the late winter and into early spring. As casually as I crossed the Rock in former times to visit an ailing neighbor or catch an emerging child, now I accompany troops across the Rapidan in dozens of places, seated on Pretty Boy or splashing on foot over shallow fords, or riding over deep water in boats or on rafts. This winter there was no big battle that killed thousands, but I’ve become accustomed to seeing a dozen bodies, or one. There’s something infinitely more tragic about a single dead man than there is about a field full of corpses. I’ve learned somehow not to see the hale and the dead, but to focus on the wounded, going out and fetching young damned fools, more often than not under fire from other young damned fools….

The soldiers on both sides had taken to pinning to their clothing slips of paper bearing their names and addresses, in the hope that their loved ones would be notified if they became casualties. Neither Rob J. nor the three stretcher-bearers on his team bothered with the identification labels. They went out now without thought or fear, because Amasa Decker, Alan Johnson, and Lucius Wagner had become convinced that Makwa-ikwa’s medicine truly was protecting them, and Rob J. had allowed himself to be infected by their conviction. It was as if the
Mee-shome
somehow generated a force that deflected all bullets, making their bodies inviolable.

Sometimes it seemed there had always been the war, and that it would exist forever. Yet Rob J. could see changes. One day he read in a tattered copy of the Baltimore
American
that all white Southern males between seventeen and fifty had been conscripted for service in the Confederate Army. It meant that from then on, whenever a Confederate became a casualty he would be irreplaceable, and his army would grow smaller. Rob J. saw with his own eyes that the Confederate soldiers who were taken or killed all wore ragged uniforms and sorry shoes. He wondered desperately whether Alex was alive, and fed, and clothed, and shod. Colonel Symonds announced that soon the 131st Indiana would receive a quantity of Sharps carbines equipped with priming magazines that would allow rapid fire. And that summed up where the war seemed to be heading, with the North manufacturing better guns, ammunition, and ships, and the South struggling with dwindling manpower and a dearth of anything that had to be made in a factory.

The problem was, the Confederates didn’t seem to realize that they labored under a terrible industrial disadvantage, and they fought with a fierceness that promised the war wouldn’t soon end.

One day late in February the four litter-bearers were summoned to where a captain named Taney, the commander of Company A of the First Brigade, lay stoically smoking a cigar after a ball had chopped through his shin. Rob J. saw there was no point in applying a splint because several inches of the tibia and the fibula had been carried away, and the leg would have to be amputated halfway between the ankle and the knee. When he reached to take a dressing out of the
Mee-shome
, the medicine bag wasn’t there.

With a sick lurch of his stomach, he knew exactly where he had left it, on the grass outside the hospital tent.

The others knew too.

He took the leather belt from around Alan Johnson’s waist and used it as a tourniquet; then they loaded the captain onto the litter and carried him away almost drunkenly.

“Dear God,” Lucius Wagner said. He always said that, in an accusing tone, when he was very scared. Now he whispered it over and over until it was an annoyance, but nobody complained or told him to shut up, being too busy anticipating the painful impact of the bullets into their bodies, which were so cruelly and suddenly naked of magic.

The carry was slower and more agonized than their very first. There were bursts of shooting, but nothing happened to the bearers. Finally they
were back at the hospital tent, and when they had turned the patient over to Coppersmith, Amasa Decker picked the
Mee-shome
from the grass and thrust it into Rob J.’s hands. “Put it on. Quick,” he said, and Rob J. did so.

The three bearers consulted somberly, weak with relief, and agreed to share the responsibility of seeing that Acting Assistant Surgeon Cole put on the medicine bag first thing every morning.

Rob J. was glad he was wearing the
Mee-shome
two mornings later when the 131st Indiana, half a mile from the point where the Rapidan met the larger river, came around a curve in the road and literally stared into the startled faces of a brigade of men in gray uniforms.

Men on both sides began to fire at once, some of them at very close range. The air was filled with curses and shouts, the reports of muskets, the screaming of those who were struck, and then the front ranks closed with one another, officers hacking with swords or firing small arms, soldiers swinging their rifles as clubs or using fists and fingernails and teeth, there being no time to reload.

On one side of the road was an oak wood, and on the other was a manured field that looked soft as velvet, plowed and ready for seed. A few men in each force took shelter behind roadside trees, but the main strength of both forces spread out to mar the perfection of the dirt field. They fired at each other from a rough, ragged skirmish line.

Ordinarily Rob J. would be in the rear during a skirmish, waiting to be sent for as needed, but in the confusion of the melee he found himself struggling with his terrified horse in the very midst of the savagery. The gelding shied and half-reared, and then seemed to fold beneath him. Rob J. managed to leap clear as the horse crashed to the ground and lay twitching and thrashing. There was a bloodless hole the size of a nickel in Pretty Boy’s mud-colored throat, but a double rivulet of red already coursed from the horse’s nostrils as he struggled to breathe, kicking spasmodically in his agony.

The medicine bag contained a hypodermic syringe with a brass needle, and morphine, but opiates still were in short supply and couldn’t be used for a horse. Thirty feet away a young Confederate lieutenant lay dead, and Rob J. went to him and slid a heavy black revolver from the boy’s holster. Then he went back to the ugly horse and placed the muzzle of the gun under Pretty Boy’s ear and pulled the trigger.

He’d taken no more than half a dozen steps away when there was a fiery pain in the upper part of his left arm, as though he’d been stung by a foot-long
bee. He took three more steps; then the manure-sweet umber earth seemed to rise in order to receive him. He was thinking clearly. He knew he had fainted and presently would regain his strength, and he lay and looked up with a painter’s appreciation at the raw ocher sun in a madder-blue sky, the sounds around him diminishing as if someone had thrown a blanket over the rest of the world. How long he lay like that, he didn’t know. He became aware he was losing blood from the injury in his arm, and he fumbled to take a wad of dressings from the medicine bag and press it hard into the wound to stop the bleeding. Looking down, he saw blood on the
Mee-shome
and found the irony irresistible, so that soon he was laughing at the notion of the atheist who had tried to create a god out of an old quill bag and a couple of straps of cured leather.

Eventually, here came Wilcox’s crew to pick him up. The sergeant—as ugly as Pretty Boy, his wall eyes full of love and concern—said the kinds of bluff meaningless things Rob J. had said a thousand times to patients in vain attempts to comfort. The Southerners, seeing they were vastly out-numbered, had already pulled back. There was a litter of dead men and horses and broken wagons and strewn equipment, and Wilcox remarked to Rob J. mournfully that the farmer was going to have a hell of a time getting that good-looking field replowed.

He knew he was fortunate the wound wasn’t worse, but it was more than a scratch. The ball had missed the bone but had taken flesh and muscle. Coppersmith had sewn the wound partially and dressed it with care, seeming to gain a good deal of satisfaction from the task.