The Dixie Widow (16 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHIMBORAZO

A veil of snow floated out of a leaden December sky as Belle approached Chimborazo. She had driven through the streets of Richmond early on her way to the hospital, and the thick blanket of snow that had fallen during the night muffled the sounds of travel so much that she seemed to have gone deaf. Instead of the clatter of iron wheels over the rough cobblestones and the clip-clop of horses, there was only a faint sibilance as she guided the buggy along.

Richmond itself on that Sunday morning had a strange mystic quality, due to the robe of pure white that clothed its grimy buildings and dirty streets. The sight of shops, factories, hotels, and the many buildings hiding their dark war-stained exteriors under a mantle of pure white, like a bride’s mantle, caused Belle to think,
How often a beautiful outside covers ugliness and wrong!
She had been reading Shakespeare the night before, and the line flashed into her mind: “O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”

She shook off the thought, stopped the buggy and got out, picking up the large bucket of soup she had made at home. She entered the hospital by a side door, and was immediately pulled out of a world that seemed pure and spotless into the world of sickness and pain.

Chimborazo was the largest military hospital complex in the world, with over 76,000 patients passing through it during the course of the war. Each of the five buildings had its dozens of wards. Belle was matron of Hospital Number 3, and her
patients were from Virginia, Maryland, Arkansas, and South Carolina. They all had been mixed together when she first took charge, but she separated them into wards according to states because of the intense jealousy between them. If an Arkansan saw a Virginian receiving more attention, he would complain.

As she entered ward 17, the Arkansan ward, she was greeted cheerily. “Whatcha brung us, Miss Belle?” an emaciated boy no more than seventeen asked. He had yellow hair and gray-blue eyes that smiled when she looked at him.

“Home-made chicken soup, Lonnie,” she replied. “And
you
get the first bowl.” A protest went up from a long-haired man across the room, but she gave him a stern look. “When you let me cut that hair of yours, Coy, you’ll get some attention.”

Coy Willing was a tall lanky man from the Ozarks with a bandaged stump for a right arm. He shook his head stubbornly. “I promised my sweetheart I wasn’t going to cut my hair till we won the war. You wouldn’t want me to break my vow, would you, Miz Belle?”

She ignored him, went to the cupboard, took out a pile of dishes, and examined them to see if the orderly had washed them as she had ordered. For once he seemed to have done his job, and she ladled out some of the rich soup into one of them, and took it to Lonnie. He was lying flat on his back, and when she lifted him to a sitting position, she was shocked at how light he was. He had been brought in with critical abdominal wounds, his viscera bulging, and such patients usually didn’t live long. Lonnie had become a challenge to her, and she worked long hours over the boy, keeping him from slipping away.

“Here, you’ve got to eat every bit of this, or I’ll cut a switch to you.”

“I’ll try, Miss Belle,” he said and began to swallow the soup as she fed him. Though his wounds had been terrible when he was brought from Gettysburg, he never complained. Now he was nothing but skin and bones, she saw.

The ward was quiet. Many of the men were still asleep. Lamps burned softly on ledges over their beds. As she fed Lonnie, Belle glanced at the clean floor. She thought back to that first week and the filthy conditions of the wards. She had soon learned that the assistant surgeons would drink the men’s whiskey supply, then lock themselves in their offices all day while the wounded died on their cots and the chamber pots overflowed.

She smiled, remembering the showdown she’d had with the ringleader. It had been in the middle of the afternoon, and a young Marylander had died in his own filth. She had stormed into the office of the assistant director of the hospital and in a voice that every patient, orderly, and assistant surgeon could hear clearly, she had scalded him verbally. He had blustered and threatened to have her removed, but she’d smiled coldly at him, saying, “We’ll see who’s removed, you sorry excuse for a human being! When I tell the President what sort of trash is in charge, you’ll be out of this hospital—and I’ll do all I can to see that you get drafted and sent to the front!”

He had sneered at her, but when President Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina marched into the Chimborazo the next day for a surprise inspection, the careless doctor turned pale. He turned even paler when after the inspection he was sent for by Dr. Keller Stevens and dismissed for incompetence. Later, word came back to the hospital that he had been assigned to Hood’s division as a private. An older man named Elmer Gibbs had taken his place, and under Belle’s direction the wards had been transformed.

Suddenly as she inserted the spoon into Lonnie’s mouth, a spasm of pain seized him and he bit down hard, his body arching upward. She threw her arm around him and held him as he writhed in agony, his eyes closed, his lips a pale line. Finally he relaxed, and she took the spoon out of his mouth, saying, “That was a bad one, Lonnie.”

“Not too bad, ma’am,” he whispered. “I can’t complain.”

“You never do, Lonnie,” she said, laying him down gently
and smoothing his brow. “I’ll bring you something for the pain if it becomes unbearable.”

She went around the room dispensing the soup, giving a word of encouragement, and filing information about patients’ conditions in her mind. The doctors were amazed at her ability to remember not only every patient but the fine details of their condition. Most of them didn’t realize that in addition to the long hours she spent in the wards, she kept a written record of each man. She also wrote letters for many of them. In this way she felt as if she had come to know their families and their problems.

After all the men were fed, she walked over to Coy Willing with a basin of water and fresh bandages. He stared up at her with a stubborn frown. “I ain’t gonna let nobody cut my hair,” he stormed.

“If you want to look like a ridiculous fool,” she shrugged, “that’s fine with me.” She sat down and removed the bandages, dropping them into a sack at her feet. As she dressed the stump, she remembered how she had reacted the first time she had seen a bad wound. She had become nauseated and run to the bathroom to recover. She had fought against the overwhelming desire to flee from the hospital. Instead, she had washed her face and gone back to the man, who had looked at her in surprise and muttered, “Ma’am, you don’t have to do nothing for me.”

“Yes, I do,” she had said, and had proceeded to dress his wound. “If you can take a wound for our Cause, I can dress it.”

The stump of Willing’s arm had been infected when he first arrived, and she had feared gangrene, but it had healed nicely. She studied the knob of muscle, nodded and said, “The doctor did a good job on you. He left a nice pad of flesh over the bone.”

“I reckon so,” he growled in a lifeless voice.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

He picked at the cover with his remaining hand for a long
moment before raising his eyes. “Miz Belle,” he asked. “Do you reckon . . . ?”

She saw him struggle, and asked quietly, “What is it, Coy?”

“Oh, I jest git to thinking—about my sweetheart. You know? And the thing is—well, they’s lots of fellers with two arms.”

Belle stared at him. He had been in the ward for over a month, and had given her more trouble than any other patient. Now his arrogance was gone, and she saw the fear and doubt that had lain beneath his blustery behavior.

“A man is more than an arm, Coy,” she said evenly, impulsively pushing the stringy hair back from his brow. “You’re the same man you were before you lost that arm—no, better! Because you gave it for your country. If your girl loved you before, she’ll love you more now.” She saw the doubt flicker in his eyes, and said pertly, “If you’d get a haircut and clean up, we could get your picture made in your uniform and send it to her.”

His eyes flared with hope. “Really?”

“Of course!” A humorous thought struck her. “In fact, we’ll go down together, and you can have one made with me, if you like. That way you can make her a little jealous.”

He stared at her, and his voice was husky as he whispered, “Really, Miz Belle? Would you really do that?”

Gone was the hard-talking exterior. She saw for the first time that for weeks he had been lying there covering up his fear with tough talk. Her eyes stung with tears as she took his hand. “Yes, I will—” A twinkle lit her eyes. “I will if I can cut that hair!”

He nodded, unable to speak, and she rose. “I’ll be back with a pair of scissors a little later. And I’ll find out about the pictures, too.”

She moved from ward to ward, stopping at almost every bed, and finally went to the small office squeezed in between two wards. For two hours she worked on the paperwork accumulated during her absence. Several times she was interrupted
by orderlies. She answered their questions and went back to the papers, working until she had gone through all of them. She had just sat back to enjoy a cup of tea when the door opened and her sister Pet burst into the room, pulling a Confederate officer with her.

“Belle!” Pet exclaimed. “Beau is back!”

Belle rose and walked around the desk to greet them. “It’s good to see you, Beau,” she smiled and put out her hand.

Beau Beauchamp held it in his own. “You’re looking very well, Belle,” he commented. “Your brothers send their love.”

“They didn’t come?”

“Not this time. But they’ll be in Richmond in a few days, I guess. Nothing much happening now.”

Pet jumped in. “Thad came with Beau, Belle. We’re all invited to a party at the Chesnuts’ tonight, and you’ve got to come.” She lifted a sack, saying, “I’ve got to give these tracts out to the men. Beau—you make her come, you hear!”

Belle smiled as she dashed out, saying, “I wish I had her energy, Beau. But she’s young.”

He laughed lightly, “What are you, an old woman?”

“I feel like one,” she replied evenly. “But what brings you to Richmond?”

“Oh, nothing much is going on, Belle.” He stretched and said thoughtfully, “It’s almost like the Yankees and us wore ourselves out at Gettysburg. We’ve been moving back and forth from the Rapidan almost to the Potomac, just sparring all the time, but nothing big in Virginia. I came back for supplies, and to try to pick up a few recruits.”

Belle poured him a cup of tea, and sat down, saying thoughtfully, “We’ve taken some hard losses this year, haven’t we, Beau?”

He nodded. “Gettysburg was bad. We lost twenty thousand, killed and wounded. And the same day we retreated, July fourth, Vicksburg fell, then Port Allen down in Louisiana. That means that the Yankees control the Mississippi River now, and the Confederacy is cut right in two.” His thoughts
caused his brow to wrinkle, and he said, “Bragg lost a lot of men in Tennessee in September, so we’re in bad shape in the West.”

“It’s going to take a miracle, Beau, for us to win.”

“I guess that’s so—but we can’t quit.” He put his cup down. “I hear about you, Belle. Everywhere we go they talk about the Dixie Widow.”

“I wish they wouldn’t call me that!” she exclaimed. “It sounds so—so much like something in a bad novel or a play.”

He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Too late. You became a heroine when you outfoxed those Yankees.” He gave her a look that was half admiration and half reproach. “Belle, you sure fooled us all—and it wasn’t really fair. You put on such a good act that I thought you’d really turned against the South. Wish you’d trusted me.”

“Oh, Beau, I couldn’t tell anybody. We’ve gone over that. Anyway, it’s over.”

“Not really,” he argued. “The papers won’t let it die down—and I hear there’s going to be a play about it.”

“Oh no!” she cried in vexation. “They
can’t!
”

Agitated, she got up and paced the floor. She was more mature than she had been when he had courted her, Beau saw, for time had given her an air of calm assurance. He half listened as she railed against the newspapers, thinking,
Why, she’s more beautiful than she was the first time I saw her at Belle Maison!

She must have seen something of his thought in his expression, for she abruptly turned and said, “Beau, I’ve got work that must be done.”

“I understand,” he replied, getting to his feet. “But let me take you to the Chesnuts’ dinner tonight.”

She hesitated for a moment. “All right, Beau. I’ll be ready.”

His face flushed with pleasure. “It’ll be like old times,” he smiled, and left to find Pet.

She stared after him, wishing that she had said no, but he was a hard man to discourage. She was afraid he still fancied
himself in love with her. She shook her head, thinking,
I’ve got to avoid that.

****

Richmond society, the rarefied segment of it, centered around the home of Colonel John Chesnut and his wife Mary. They had been among the wealthiest South Carolina planters at the beginning of the war and had moved to Richmond when Chesnut was elected to the legislature. The colonel was dominated by his impeccable Old World manners. His wife once told Rebekah Winslow: “My husband could see me—and everything that he loved—hung, drawn and quartered without moving a muscle. And he’d have the same gentle operation performed on himself and be just as stoic.”

Mary Chesnut often exploded with disgust and impatience at the incompetence, stupidity, and inertia she witnessed in high places, but had such a beautiful and witty spirit that she was loved and admired by President Davis’s wife, Varina. She had become a fast friend of Rebekah’s, since their husbands were both close advisors of Jefferson Davis.

When Belle and Beau entered the large dining room at the Chesnut home, Beau exclaimed, “Would you look at that, Belle! There’s General Lee—and General Hood!”

Belle smiled and drew him into the room. “They’re at the Chesnuts’ often,” she told him. “Hood is in love with a relative of Mrs. Chesnut’s—over there with General Hood. Her name’s Sally Campbell, but her close friends call her ‘Buck.’ ”