The Union Quilters (19 page)

“I’ve brought bread and candles and liquor,” the young woman said, taking a brave step nearer, her eyes darting around the room and lingering on bandaged stumps and blood-soaked wrappings. Involuntarily she raised the back of her hand to her mouth and nose, not yet aware that such gestures were futile, that nothing could block out the stench. “I—I’m not a nurse, but I’ve come to help if I can be useful.”

“Yes, of course,” said Jonathan. “I will gladly accept the liquor. These men need water—here, and upstairs, in every room and hallway. There’s a pump outside, and some pails may still remain. You’ll find sponges on the table there—we were able to salvage a few.”

The woman nodded, but then hesitated, glancing to the window and the open doorway. “I have something more.” She turned her back, set her basket on the floor, reached beneath her voluminous skirts, and when she turned back around she carried a small, worn leather case, the side split and one handle missing. “My father had a practice in town. This is his old set of instruments. He packed it away out of fondness when he replaced them with new. I thought you might have use for them.”

Hardly daring to trust his good fortune, Jonathan quickly accepted the case. “Your father—he doesn’t need this?”

She shook her head. “He was killed at Antietam. An assistant surgeon with the II Corps has his new case now. Or so I believe.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, miss.” Jonathan set the case on the floor and opened it out of sight of the Confederate soldiers who from time to time passed the windows. The instruments were older and well used, but the scalpel still carried a sharp edge, a pack of needles seemed like new, and a nearly full spool of silk thread remained wound without a single snarl. He could do much with this. Voice shaking, he thanked the young woman, who nodded, forced a quick smile, and hurried off to fetch water.

Immediately the medical personnel resumed their work, the bounty of the cracked leather case invigorating them. An orderly administered liquor to those in the greatest pain, but the bottle was soon emptied. Just as the last dropped was drained, a shadow crossed the doorway, and three armed soldiers entered the room. “Every sound or slightly wounded soldier, rise and come with us,” one commanded.

A murmur of confusion went up from the staff and wounded alike. “Why?” asked Jonathan. “Where are you taking them?”

“We have orders to parole all able-bodied prisoners.” The soldier motioned toward the doorway with his rifle. “Don’t argue or you can join them.”

Choking back his protests, Jonathan smoldered in fury as the Confederates culled the less seriously wounded soldiers from those who could not walk. From time to time the medical personnel argued the case of a particular soldier who should not and must not be moved, but more often than not, the Confederates ignored their pleas. Some of the wounded pretended to be worse off than they were rather than be dragged from the relative safety of the hospital, but their captors soon lost patience with “shirkers and shammers.”

Men who swooned and collapsed on the way to the door could remain behind only if spirits of ammonia failed to revive them. Seething as he helped one such man, pale from blood loss, back into bed, Jonathan imagined the scene enacted throughout the seminary and in all the buildings that had been appropriated as field hospitals. How many hundreds of men desperately needing rest and recovery were being taken away? Their only hope was to be swiftly paroled and returned to Union field hospitals. Many of them, he feared, would not endure the transport.

Evening fell, and despite the culling of prisoners, hundreds of seriously wounded men filled the seminary. Jonathan and his colleagues used the smuggled tools surreptitiously, improvising bandages and tourniquets from bedsheets and linens that were becoming ever more scarce. Confederate stretcher-bearers continued to bring wounded into the building, blue and gray in equal numbers. In the flickering light of the candles the young Gettysburg woman had brought, Jonathan worked until Dr. Haines of the 19th Indiana urged him to get a few hours’ sleep, promising to wake him at first light.

Jonathan retired to the office where he had slept the previous night, but it seemed only minutes had passed before Dr. Haines shook him awake. They traded places, and as Jonathan made his way back to the staging room, he heard more explosions in the distance. He had no idea where the Rebel and Union lines were, but the battle apparently still carried on.

As Jonathan took stock of the room, an assistant surgeon informed him that only a few new patients had arrived overnight, all Confederate, but they were expecting a surge when the battle resumed in earnest that morning, which it surely would. Jonathan thanked him and began his rounds. He was scanning the room for the whereabouts of the smuggled instruments when a patch of dulled colors on the opposite side of the room caught his eye and tugged at his memory. It was a quilt draped over a sleeping patient whose head and eyes were bandaged, and as dread drew him closer, understanding swelled until it struck him with a force almost tangible.

He ran the last few paces to the man’s bedside and seized the quilt. “How did you come by this?” There could be no mistaking it. The triangles of Prussian blue, Turkey red, unbleached muslin—he had seen this Dove in the Window quilt in his sisterʹs home countless times, not merely that pattern but that same quilt, and had seen it in Thomas’s bedroll a hundred times more. “Where did you get this quilt?” The wounded soldier stirred drowsily and mumbled a reply. Furious, Jonathan seized him by the shoulders, insensible to the man’s injuries. “What became of the Union soldier you stole this quilt from, you Rebel bastard?”

He was barely aware of someone seizing him from behind and dragging him away as the wounded Rebel struggled to prop himself up on his elbows. The sight of the wounded man groping blindly at his bandages brought Jonathan to his senses. He shook himself free of the Rebel guard who restrained him and forced himself to take a deep breath before returning to the man’s bedside. “How did you come by this quilt?” he asked roughly. “Did you find it on the battlefield? Did you take it off a dead man?”

The Rebel shook his head but winced in pain and sank back upon the bed. “It was given to me.”

His voice betrayed his youth; he was scarcely past boyhood. “Given to you,” Jonathan echoed. “That’s a fine story, and perhaps you don’t want to admit to disturbing the remains of the dead, but we all know it happens. I urge you to speak the truth. I know this quilt was not made for you.”

An assistant surgeon studied him uncertainly. “You recognize this quilt?”

“I know it well.”

“That ain’t reason enough to assault this boy.” The Confederate guard spat on the floor. “One quilt looks much like another.”

“It was my brother-in-law’s,” Jonathan retorted, stricken with sudden grief. “He fought with the Forty-ninth Pennsylvania. My sister sewed this quilt with her own hands.” Thomas never would have parted with the quilt his beloved wife had given him on their sixth anniversary. Thomas must surely be dead. “Did you kill the man who carried this quilt?” he asked the wounded Rebel. “If so, you must remember where it happened, and you must tell me where he lies.” How could he tell Dorothea? How could he break her heart and tell her that the man she loved had died? He could not bring himself to do it. He would write to Gerda; Gerda would find the words to soften the blow. Nor could he leave Thomas’s body to rot on the battlefield. “I appeal to you as one man to another to tell me what you know.”

“I don’t know where he is but I didn’t kill him.” The young soldierʹs voice shook from exhaustion and emotion. “As far as I know, he lives yet. He found me where I lay wounded on the smaller of the two round hills south of the town. He gave me water to drink, he wrapped this quilt around me, and he carried me here on his back.”

“Not here,” a Union patient spoke up weakly. Blood had soaked through the bandages around the stumps of his knees and had dried to a rust-brown crust. “Two Rebs brought him in on a stretcher last night. He was unconscious.”

Hardly daring to hope, Jonathan asked, “Do you think you would recognize the stretcher-bearers if you saw them again?”

The amputee shrugged and shook his head. “I might. It was dark, what with all the lanterns stolen.”

The last was a jab at the Rebel guard, who muttered a retort under his breath but refused to take the bait. Another soldier appeared in the doorway then and called him away. He shot Jonathan a sharp look of warning as he left; Jonathan held up a hand and nodded to indicate that his fit of rage had subsided.

“Even if your brother-in-law didn’t bring me all the way here, he did carry me two, maybe three miles on his back before I blacked out.” The blinded Rebel let out a bitter laugh. “From the sound of it, he was hale and hearty until then, but I didn’t get a good look at him and couldn’t tell you what he looked like.”

Jonathan inhaled deeply and raked a hand through his hair. Such an act of mercy identified Thomas more accurately than any description of his physiognomy. The young soldier’s story rang true, but Jonathan’s mind would not rest easy until the stretcher-bearers who had carried him to the seminary confirmed their part of it. And if it was true, what had become of Thomas after he had brought the wounded Rebel off the granite hill? Had he crossed enemy lines on a mission of mercy only to be shot or taken prisoner? Out of respect for his compassionate gesture, had he been allowed to return to his company unharmed? Had he even made it that far, or had he been killed while carrying the unconscious Rebel to safety? An ambulance crew could have found the Rebel soldier on the battlefield and brought him to the seminary, leaving Thomas to lie where he had fallen. Until Jonathan found them and asked, he could only speculate—and hope and pray for the best.

He thanked the blinded boy and offered to examine his wounds, thoughts racing as he tended his patients. The morning waned, and just as he had finished his rounds and was preparing to convince the guards to let him search for the stretcher-bearers, a party of three Confederate soldiers entered and informed them that, in light of the flood of new wounded that had come to the seminary, they would again round up all those soldiers well enough to be paroled. This time, the medical personnel would be included.

“You must be mistaken,” said Jonathan, stunned. “Check with your superiors. There must have been some misunderstanding.”

“There’s no mistaking these orders.” With the butt of his rifle, the Rebel soldier nudged Jonathan none too gently toward the door.

“We can’t leave these men,” protested Dr. New. “Who will care for them in our absence? Most of them can’t even walk.”

“After your parole, you can return as hospital nurses,” a second Rebel said. He seized a private from the Iron Brigade by the shoulder and shoved him toward the door. “Step lively now.”

“How long until we can return?” Jonathan demanded, but the soldiers made no reply. Reluctantly he allowed himself to be herded outside with his colleagues, where the walking wounded and other medical personnel from the professors’ houses and student dormitories soon joined them. As they were escorted away from Seminary Ridge, Jonathan caught glimpses of the battle, which had resumed in earnest with the break of day. He could not tell how either side fared, but their captors’ confident ease suggested that they expected another victory. As the distance between the prisoners and the seminary grew, Jonathan’s apprehensions soared. How long would they march until they reached their destination? How many of the more than three hundred suffering men in the seminary alone would perish in the meantime? How many more languished in the hot sun on the battlefield? And what of Thomas? Each passing moment made it less likely that he would find the stretcher-bearers before their memories of one soldier out of thousands faded.

They marched deeper behind Confederate lines until they reached a fenced corral that had been converted to a holding camp of sorts for the prisoners. Their numbers staggered Jonathan; he estimated as many as five thousand Union men, some wounded, all fatigued, hungry, and thirsty. They were offered water and instructed to wait. Before long, soldiers set up a white tent just beyond the gate to their open-air prison. Shielding his eyes from the sun, Jonathan glimpsed a table and chair within. The breeze stirred the tent flaps, and Jonathan saw a Rebel lieutenant seating himself behind the table, while an aide prepared pen and ink and straightened a stack of white papers upon it. Soon the aide emerged from the tent, tied back the tent flaps, and announced in a loud, clear voice that the prisoners must form an orderly line and their parole would be arranged presently.

Determined to return to the seminary as quickly as possible, Jonathan wove through the throng to claim a spot near the front of the line, but he was still several hundred from the beginning. Many soldiers sat down on the ground, their backs against the fence, too tired to stand and willing to wait for their turns. Others bantered with their guards, demanding food and water. As time passed, word began to spread that the conditions of their parole were not unreasonable; after signing a paper acknowledging their release, they would be provided with provisions and marched to Carlisle, and from there, on to Harrisburg, where they would be exchanged for Rebel prisoners held by the Union. “What good will that do my patients back at the seminary?” Jonathan asked the Michigan private who told him the rumors. “They could all die in the meantime.”

The private shrugged. “Maybe the Rebs will make an exception for surgeons.”

Jonathan was counting on it. As the line moved forward and he approached the tent, he noticed that while most men emerging from the back were led under guard to the right, about one in three was instead directed to the left. Other men around him noticed the same, but none could offer any explanation. There seemed no pattern to the sorting, no separation of men by regiment or state or rank that they could discern.