The Face of Heaven (35 page)

“As soon as the Rebels spot them they’ll come under fire. It’s only two hundred yards from one side of the river to the other. You need to stay put and help us get set up.” She gave Lyndel a quick hug. “You’ve got me believing now. While you were napping I was praying for you and your husband. It’s my hope that casualties will be light.”

Lyndel went back and forth from the wagon to the tent carrying medical supplies—bundles of cotton for bandages, slings, and tourniquets. At one point she gathered a number of surgical saws with various blades, all scrubbed clean after Fredericksburg. She bundled them in canvas and gave them to one of the doctors at the tent.

“Ah, good, I was wondering where those were. We’re going to need them in a few minutes.”

As soon as he said this Lyndel imagined Nathaniel unconscious on the table getting his left arm sawed off. The blood drained from her face and she put her hand against one of the tent poles. No one noticed. In a moment she felt strong enough to return to the wagon and collect bottles of chloroform. But the fear fastened itself into her head and heart like sharp teeth.

It had been four months since she had treated combat casualties. The patients she had nursed at Belle Plain had mostly been sick from flu or dysentery. Memories of wounded and dead, bent and twisted among the cornstalks at Antietam or sprawled on the slopes at Fredericksburg and begging for water, tumbled into her head. Her heart began to pound in her chest and she had difficulty catching her breath. She leaned against a wagon wheel while everything around her churned.

Once the attack begins, once I’m dealing with the wounded soldiers and I’m busy, I’ll be all right.

But after the field hospital was completely ready, there were still no sounds of battle. The two nurses sat on stools near each other, exchanged a few words, and waited. Lyndel’s heart sped up and slowed down as her anxieties mounted and subsided and mounted again.

“Are you all right?” Morganne asked, her eyes large in the early morning blackness.

Lyndel had her hands clasped rigidly in her lap. “I…I guess not. It’s
been so long since I’ve treated combat wounds, and I wasn’t married before and now Nathaniel is my husband and I worry about the saws and the amputations—”

Morganne grabbed her by the hand. “Shh. Shh. Once you start working you’ll be all right. And Nathaniel will be all right too.” She glanced up at one of the doctors. “What’s going on? What’s the delay?”

“The boats. The boats they need to cross the river haven’t come.” He sat by them for a few minutes. “The idea was to take out the Confederate positions on the opposite bank. Then the engineers would build a pontoon bridge for the rest of the First Corps to cross. Hooker has one part of the army coming in on Fredericksburg from behind. What we’re doing here is meant to confuse Lee so that he’s not sure where the main attack is coming from. Eventually we’re supposed to join the other part of the army and come at Fredericksburg from the front.”

“From the front?” Lyndel jerked straight up on her stool. “Attack Fredericksburg from the front? It will be another slaughter.”

“Lee will be attacked from two directions at once. That will be very different from Burnside’s approach last December.” The doctor suddenly noticed the lack of color in Lyndel’s face. “Are you ill, Mrs. King?”

“I just need…I just need to be doing something…”

“I understand. It can’t be much longer. We’ll have sunrise in half an hour. The men can’t cross the water in broad daylight. They’d be cut to pieces.”

The sky lightened minute by minute. Suddenly mule teams appeared pulling wagons with the boats. They moved past the Fitzhugh House and through the thin scattering of brush to the river. The doctor shook his head as the wagons rattled past.

“Too late,” he muttered, “far too late. I don’t know what the army is going to do now. They can’t use the boats at this hour.”

The sudden pop of musket fire from the Rappahannock made the three of them jump.

“They’re crazy to attack!” the doctor shouted.

He shot to his feet and rushed to his table. Ambulance crews ran toward the sound of the firing with their stretchers. Lyndel and
Morganne stood and looked toward the thick fog that was rising from the river and slowly breaking up. The gunfire increased until it became a steady roar. Then it faded as the stretcher bearers staggered back with the wounded. Those with shattered bones were immediately placed onto one of the three tables while others were lowered onto the grass. Lyndel began cutting away uniforms and washing wounds and applying tourniquets. She quickly noticed that none of the casualties were from the Iron Brigade but that all of them were engineers.

“What’s going on?” she asked an older man with a brown beard whose foot she was bandaging.

“They got us to try setting up the pontoon bridge,” he told her, wincing as she tightened the cloth. “Of course the secesh were on the other side and opened up. We were fish in a barrel.”

“Who was doing all the firing that was so close to us?”

“The 6th Wisconsin and 24th Michigan. Trying to get the secesh off our backs. The 14th Brooklyn got mixed up in the melee too. But it was no good. We got chopped up pretty bad. Can’t get that bridge across while Johnny Reb has his guns on us.”

Lyndel had scarcely moved on to another soldier when the crash of musket fire shattered the morning quiet again and silenced the songbirds. It went on and on. The gun smoke began drifting through the trees and into the field hospital. The scent of rotten eggs made Lyndel cringe under her navy blue dress. When she ran to get a bucket of water from a nearby stream a physician called Little Falls Run she saw boats being rowed across the Rappahannock to the Rebel side. Black-powder smoke covered both banks as the Confederate troops fired on the boats and the Federal troops near her fired back. The colors of the 24th Michigan and the 6th Wisconsin were in the boats.

Black hats began showing up at the hospital, either walking in or prone on a stretcher. The first one she recognized was Private Plesko, who came slowly up to her, Springfield in one hand, a bloody rag in the other he kept putting to his left cheek. Lyndel sat him down in the grass.

“Let me look at that,” she said. “What happened?”

“We’re shooting at the Rebels from our side of the river to keep
them from shooting at our Wisconsin and Michigan boys. But sometimes those Rebels are shooting at us instead of the boats. And they have thick undergrowth to hide in on their side while we’re right out in the open but for a little stone wall.” He smiled, a large hole in his cheek widening as he did so. “A ball came in one side of my mouth. It must have been spent or it would have kept on going out the other side. It tasted worse than Captain Hanson’s coffee so I spat it up. Got it here in my pocket for a souvenir. Do you want to see it?”

Lyndel almost laughed. “I’ve seen plenty of bullets, Private, but thank you anyway. I’m going to clean the wound and I need you to rinse out your mouth. Here’s a canteen.”

“The water will leak out the hole.”

“Put your hand over it.”

“Then what?”

“Then you wait until the serious injuries are seen to and a doctor will suture your wound.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know, Private. An hour? Maybe longer.”

Plesko stared at her, his normally soft blue eyes suddenly vivid and bright. “No, no, Mrs. King. Some of the platoon snuck over in the first wave and your husband was one of them. I intend to be in on the second wave. I can’t be sitting here while they’re over there. Just clean it out and stuff in some gauze and wrap a bandage over it. Please.”

Lyndel wiped at the blood on his face. “I will do nothing of the sort. You can’t run around all day with another hole in your head. It needs to be sutured.”

“You suture it.”

“I can’t.”

“Mrs. King. The Lord knows I admire and respect you. All the men in the regiment do. But it’s either a ball of gauze or an Amish suturing or I’m gone as soon as your back is turned. Mrs. King, they need me.”

A thought darted into her mind:
He could lose his life out there, face wound or no face wound. On the other hand, he might save a life out there too.

“Very well, Private. Sit still while I get some morphine. That will
deaden the pain at the edges of the hole. I expect I have seen enough suturing to do it in my sleep. Let me see to the horsehair. You know there will be a scar once the sutures come out.”

“Most wounds we get back home mean nothing. This scar will mean something, Mrs. King.”

“I see.” On an impulse she leaned over and kissed him on the wounded cheek. “I’ll do the best I can, soldier.”

His face had darkened with blood at her kiss. “Thank you, ma’am.”

She was surprised at how steady her hand was. The young man didn’t murmur. He stared straight ahead, only closing his eyes now and then if the pain was sharp. In twenty minutes he was on his way, running through the bushes to the steep riverbank, calling back his thanks as he disappeared. The gunfire had lessened considerably once the first wave landed on the far bank and charged the Rebel forces. So Lyndel had no trouble hearing what she knew was a Hoosier yell and went to Little Falls Run to fetch more water and look at the Rappahannock. Indiana colors were in the boats shooting across the current and Plesko was in the first one, bayonet fixed, jumping out into water that went to his chest before the boat had even touched the other shore, clambering up the bank, and disappearing toward the sound of musket shots and loud yelling.

It’s almost like a sport to you men. But, God have mercy on you all, it is no sport.

Morganne, face streaked with grime, also came for water and put her arms on Lyndel’s shoulder. “You look much better than you did three hours ago, sister.”

“Thank you, Davey. I confess I haven’t even thought about all those things that troubled me in the dark.”

“Did I see you suturing that young private?”

“One of the physicians gave me permission. He glanced at it afterward and said I had done a creditable job.”

They both laughed.

“That old grump,” smiled Morganne. “You could have raised the dead and he would have said the same thing—
creditable, Mrs. King, creditable.
”

The Rebels were routed, the pontoon bridge constructed, and the Union troops crossed the river without further hazard. The two nurses tended the wounds of a couple of corporals from the 6th Louisiana, Hayden and Rhodus, who talked up a storm as their bayonet cuts were being dressed—their farms, their families, their churches, and their horses all came into the conversation with the two Pennsylvania nurses. Then the ambulances and medical wagons followed the soldiers in blue to a new bivouac.

For days the wagons rolled behind the First Corps and the Iron Brigade but there was never another fight. What happened with General Hooker’s plan came to them in bits and pieces as April ended and the first week of May began. Hooker took up a defensive position west of Fredericksburg at Chancellorsville and watched Stonewall Jackson march his troops right past the front of his line and did nothing, thinking Stonewall was retreating.

Stonewall then slammed into Hooker’s right flank and demolished the Eleventh Corps, which was dug in there. In the hours and days of vicious fighting that followed, Hooker, never recovering from Stonewall’s assault, allowed himself to be beaten back north toward Washington. The Union leader never called upon the second part of his army, led by General Sedgwick, to attack Lee from the rear, he never called upon the First Corps, he never called upon the Iron Brigade—except when the battle was lost and he was adrift in a concussion from the debris of a Rebel artillery round and the brigade was called upon to be the rear guard for the Army of the Potomac.

It was the same task they had undertaken when the army retreated from the second battle at Manassas the summer before. The rain falling and turning the roads to mud and pools of water, the First Corps and the Iron Brigade returned to the Fitzhugh House on May 7th and made camp. Union forces had been defeated once again and the 19th Indiana and her sister regiments had fought their way across the Rappahannock in April to make absolutely no difference in the outcome of the contest between North and South.

Lyndel’s wagon splashed along behind the troops, whose backs bent
under the rain and their packs and their loss. She knew Nathaniel was alive because she had seen him only hours before, leading his men on foot, his new sword dangling from his hip, covered in mud, the holster for his new revolver soaked black with water. His head was up and she saw his lips moving as he spoke to his platoon. But she knew his heart would be lower than the ruts the wagon wheels made in the muck.