The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (65 page)

There was a soft
tap-tap-tap.
“Come in,” I said. Ulysses’s head poked around the bedroom door. “Hey. What’s up?”

“Nancy’s crying at the door to go out,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you let her out at night.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Put her out and get back to sleep.” But instead of closing the door, he just stood there. “You all right?”

He nodded. “Fisher cats have made a comeback around here, you know. They been gone for a while, but now they’re back…. They’re weasels.”

“I know what fishers are.”

“They eat cats, you know. Maybe she ought to stay inside.”

“She’s a farm cat, Ulysses. She knows how to take care of herself.”

“Oh. Okay. Let her out then?”

“Let her out.”

“A farm cat, and there ain’t even a farm here anymore,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. Jesus H. Christ, what did he expect me to do? Start milking Holsteins again?

“See you in the morning,” I said.

“Yup. See you in the morning.”

The door closed. I heard the kitchen door open and close. Heard the toilet flush. Then things were quiet again.

Discussion of the Poppers’ errant son would have surely come up during their visit together in Washington, but, curiously, Lizzy’s letter makes no mention of Willie. Willie also goes unmentioned in letters his mother wrote to Martha Weeks during this period. It remains unclear whether or not Elizabeth Popper, like her husband, had estranged herself from her son, now a rising star of the minstrel stage. As for the Poppers’ marital estrangement, Charles’s trip to Washington began a thawing that would result in his eventual return to the family home in New Haven in February of 1864, even as his affair with Vera Daneghy continued. Lizzy, too, would return to New Haven during the winter of 1864, following her abrupt dismissal from service at Shipley Hospital. Popper’s conversion from “Mother Bountiful” to persona non grata at Shipley would come in the wake of the war’s bloodiest battle and the strain it put on the caretakers of its thousands of wounded and sick.

The scope of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg was profound, the loss of life staggering. By the time the last shots had been fired and Lee’s army had retreated, the Confederacy had suffered twenty thousand casualties, the Union seventeen thousand five hundred. The most severely injured were treated at emergency tents erected at the battlefields’ perimeters. Many thousands more traveled on foot and by train, carriage, wagon, and ship, and over others’ shoulders to existing hospitals and makeshift facilities from Boston to the Carolinas. These overwhelming numbers of sick and wounded resulted in neglect, haphazard care, and death for the many who had survived the battlefield only to lose their lives to infection and disease. Shipley Hospital was no exception to this phenomenon. The facility had beds for one hundred and twenty patients, but in the days following the
Gettysburg conflict, over four hundred sick and wounded arrived. The attendants’ village behind the hospital was disbanded, trees were felled, and shrubbery was uprooted to make room for seven emergency medical tents. These were badly understaffed. In a letter to Charles, written six days after the battle’s end, Lizzy Popper wrote

Husband,

There is no time to write thee at length. I am sad tonight because I have just said goodbye to my friend and fellow nurse, Louisa. I shall miss her terribly, as she was a beacon of light in this terrible darkness, but her ill health necessitates that she be sent home.
*
The needs here at Shipley are overwelming
[sic],
the sorrows manyfold. Each day more of the Gettysburg warriors arrive. Most are in pitiful condition. One group had been left inside a deserted schoolhouse for days without food or water. After their canteens were emptied, they were forced to drink and wet their wounds with their urine. We lost twenty-two men yesterday, seventeen the day before. Ten more were carried to the morgue by noon today. Some of these might have been saved, but we are far too few serving far too many. From dawn to dark, I move through a maze of suffering soldiers. At night, I close my eyes but cannot sleep, for I see their hands reaching for me, their frightened faces. I have seen the Devil’s den now, I think, where the wretched doomed cry out in vain. Pray for my sick, Charlie, and for the end of this hellish war, and for the forebearance of

Thy aggrieved wife,
Elizabeth

Lizzy Popper’s forbearance held, but her tolerance of incompetence and deceit did not. Her dismissal from service at Shipley Hospital came as the result of several skirmishes with male authority and a showdown with Directress Dix.

In the midst of the post-Gettysburg chaos, Shipley Hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. Reuben Luce, suffered a heart attack and was retired from active duty. Lizzy Popper had enjoyed a cordial relationship with Dr. Luce, and the departing physician recommended her to his successor, Dr. Palmer Pettigrew. Pettigrew, a thirty-three-year-old Missourian, assigned Lizzy to assist him with his surgeries. The two disliked each other from the start, but the acrimony escalated when Pettigrew altered existing hospital policy, directing that sand, instead of linens, be spread on operating tables between surgeries for the purpose of better absorbing patients’ blood. Lizzy objected, arguing that pebbles were a further discomfort to supine patients already in misery. To placate her, Pettigrew ordered that surgical sand be sifted, but Lizzy’s protest continued. Sand clung to the men’s
wounds and stumps, she argued, causing in them the urge to scratch and poke at that which needed to be left alone to heal. Joseph Lister’s breakthrough discovery of carbolic acid as an antiseptic agent and Louis Pasteur’s founding of modern microbiology were still years into the future; during the Civil War era, the causes of infection were not yet understood. Yet Elizabeth Popper seemed to understand on some intuitive level that sand-covered surgery tables further compromised vulnerable patients. She wrote to Superintendent Dix about her concern. Dix wrote back, advising Popper that sand was not a problem as long as wounds were “properly, thoroughly, and frequently wetted.” Dissatisfied with her superior’s response, Lizzy wrote two more letters, one to Eugenia Trickett, a Sanitation Commission executive, the other to surgeon General William Hammond. In her letter to Hammond, Popper added the further complaint that, of the dozens of amputations Pettigrew performed daily, a fair number were, in her opinion, unnecessary—that Pettigrew was “more butcher than surgeon.” The charge was investigated by Hammond’s office and found to be unwarranted. During the inquiry, Pettigrew was shown Lizzy’s letter. In response, he wrote Hammond a letter of his own, charging that his surgeon’s assistant was “an overweening hag who assumes, quite preposterously, that her knowledge of medicine is superior to my own—indeed, that all of Eve’s descendants enjoy a natural superiority to any of Adam’s.” Lizzy’s letter to Hammond also incurred the wrath of Dorothea Dix; one of her Dixies had flouted the chain of command, going not through her but over her head with the serious charge that surgeries were being performed capriciously. Dix reprimanded Popper and demoted her to the position of stewardess of medical supplies. But in this capacity, also, Lizzy drew fire. The issue this time was whiskey.

Lizzy Popper was a firm believer in temperance, but she was also a realist who understood whiskey’s value as an anesthetic in the lessening of patients’ suffering. Each month,
Shipley Hospital received from the federal government a barrel of “spirituous liquor” to be used for medicinal purposes. The whiskey was kept locked in the supply room and drawn in pints and quarts as ordered by staff physicians. Hospital policy required that withdrawals be made only by the house apothecary or the provisions steward, and that each withdrawal be recorded in the log that sat atop the whiskey barrel. Not long into her new position, Popper became aware of a discrepancy between the amount of alcohol recorded withdrawn and the greater amount missing. In a letter to her sister Martha, she wrote of her dilemma, and also of a disturbing rumor she’d heard: that a certain Dr. Peacock had been intoxicated while performing surgery on a young soldier shot in the cheek, and that he had botched the stitching of the boy’s face and given him a permanent smile. Popper wrote, “My suspicion is that some of my doctors are drinking spirits meant for my sick. I shall have to set a trap.” When she did, hiding in the dark recesses of the supply room after hours beneath a canvas covering, she caught her thief, the apothecary, who confessed he had been providing four of Shipley’s doctors with whiskey at a modest profit. Lizzy complained once again to Dorothea Dix. An investigation was launched. Three of the guilty physicians, including Dr. Peacock, were reprimanded, and the apothecary was dismissed. Popper had secured the patients’ monthly allotment of anesthetic, but, in the process, had made more enemies. One was Abner Winkle, the Kentucky physician and Southern sympathizer whose political opinions were antithetical to Popper’s.

Lizzy Popper enjoyed many friendships with the free blacks and contrabands who worked at Shipley Hospital. She had become particularly fond of two runaway slaves from Kentucky, George Ruggles and his common-law wife, Mazie Spinks. Spinks was one of the hospital’s washerwomen, and Ruggles served as an attendant in the upstairs wards. Affable and efficient, George Ruggles was popular with both the staff and the sick of Shipley Hospital. Because
he exhibited an aptitude for medical procedures, the doctors under whom he served had begun giving him responsibilities beyond the scope of most attendants. Lizzy Popper recognized Ruggles’s potential, too, and began teaching him to read and write. In a letter to her husband Charles, she pronounced Ruggles “an apt and eager pupil who will thrive as a free man if the forces of good prevail and the war is won.”

Ruggles and Spinks had escaped from the estate of Quentin J. Cheeks, a wealthy shipping merchant from Covington, Kentucky, who, by the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, retained legal claim to the couple. Acting on a tip he had received, Cheeks took out an advertisement in the
Washington Observer,
a Southern-leaning weekly. The ad carried drawings of both Ruggles and “his wench Mazie” and offered a twenty-five-dollar reward for information leading to the couple’s recapture. At Shipley, news traveled quickly that Dr. Winkle had seen the plea and contacted his fellow Kentuckian. Cheeks subsequently telegraphed the hospital’s administrators that he would arrive in a fortnight to claim his property. Shipley’s executive officer was reluctant to surrender Ruggles and Spinks to the police, but the law was the law. Lizzy Popper, however, would have none of blind obedience to a federal dictate she deemed unjust. In collusion with Sister Agnes O’Hara, one of Shipley’s Daughters of Charity, she hatched a plan.

Earlier that same week, a prostitute who had been haunting the hospital environs had been apprehended and arrested. Sister Agnes had taken pity on the woman and accompanied her to court. Through the nun’s advocacy, the judge had allowed the streetwalker an alternative to prison: she could surrender herself to the Daughters of Charity’s convent in Philadelphia. The woman accepted, and Father Joseph Cassidy, a Philadelphia priest, was dispatched to accompany and deliver her to her destination. Father Cassidy had traveled to Wasington alone, but when he and the to-be-reformed prostitute boarded the return
train to Philadelphia, they did so in the company of two dark-skinned Daughters of Charity. On the evening of the escape, a gleeful Lizzy wrote to Martha Weeks:

Lizzy’s glee ended soon enough. When an outraged Cheeks learned of her part in the escape of his slaves, he moved to have her arrested. A letter signed by seven of Shipley Hospital’s twelve physicians, stating that she was indispensable to the sick there, saved her from the jailhouse. Abner Winkle wrote a letter of complaint to the Union’s Secretary of War, charging Popper—a paid employee of the United States government—with the flouting of federal law. The letter also accused Nursing Superintendent Dorothea Dix of an inability to control her subordinates. The already embattled Dix was furious at having been unfairly implicated, and she excoriated Popper. In a letter to Anna Livermore, Lizzy gave a colorful account of the exchange between the two:

Dix dismissed Popper on the spot. Lizzy surrendered her keys, signed her dismissal papers, and left on the evening train “with neither protest nor teary farewells.” Her service as a Civil War nurse had come to an end.

Although Lizzy Popper continued to support the Union cause through her work with the Ladies’ Soldiers Relief Society, her efforts were greatly reduced during the final year of the war. Charles had returned to their New Haven home, and the couple seemed to have entered a period of domestic calm. For Lizzy, it was a time of reflection rather than active engagement with the world. On April 11, 1865, two days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, she wrote in the diary she had begun to keep:

Lizzy Popper’s diary entries and letters, so forthright and soul-baring, tempt the twenty-first-century reader to assign modern diagnoses to her psychological state. What to make of her descriptions of the horrific things she saw, heard, and touched when her mind involuntarily transported her back to Shipley Hospital? Was she merely processing difficult memories or, perhaps, suffering the flashbacks associated with posttraumatic stress disorder? Did her earlier swings between heightened productivity and immobilizing depression indicate that she was responding to the needs of a nation and to difficult personal losses, or that she suffered from bipolar disease? There is no way to know. What can be concluded from Popper’s postwar life, however, is that in her later years she arrived at a state of emotional stability. Lizzy was sixty-one years old when she returned home from the war, and would live another twenty-seven years. Further personal hardships and professional obstacles awaited her, but she would confront these with a newfound equanimity.