The Deserter Read online

  Mary sighed and climbed in beside him. Then, while Homer lunged back down the highway in the direction of Gettysburg, she picked up the stereoscope, plucked another card out of the box of stereographs, tucked it into the wire holder and adjusted the gadget in and out until the two pictures became one and jumped into three dimensions.

  At once the cluster of men in the foregound stood away from the tent in the background. What was going on? Then she saw the bare leg hanging from a table. One of the soldiers was holding a white cloth over the face of a prostrate patient. In the center, caught forever in the moment before amputating one of the patient’s legs, stood a man with a saw.

  PART X

  IDA

  There stood the surgeons, their sleeves rolled up to the elbows, their bare arms as well as their linen aprons smeared with blood, their knives not seldom held between their teeth.… Around them pools of blood and amputated arms and legs in heaps sometimes more than a man high.

  —GENERAL CARL SCHURZ

  THE SURGEON

  In the vestibule of the courthouse the surgeon could not spare a hand to mop away the sweat on his face or the tears that kept running down his cheeks. The tears were partly from exhaustion and partly from the perpetual anguish of caring for an endless succession of mangled men.

  Now his left hand held the forceps clamped on the severed end of an artery, and with his right he was trying to tie the ligature. His steward reached out to help, but his clumsy fingers grazed the forceps and the artery slipped back out of sight.

  The woman was the last straw. When a shadow eclipsed the sunlight from the open door, the surgeon glanced around and saw her, then looked back angrily at the mess on the table, the wreck of a boy no older than fifteen.

  He pitied these women, but he was sick of them, sick to death of their doleful questions, their weeping, their habit of swooning at the sight of a gangrenous leg. And then, of course, he had to stop whatever he was doing and take care of them first.

  This one was obviously in a family way. She’d be more trouble than all the rest. In a minute she’d keel over when she caught sight of the basket under the stairs, or faint away from the smell of ether and chloroform and the reek of suppurating wounds combined with the general town stench of the dead horses that hadn’t been buried yet.

  Or maybe the wretched mother-to-be would venture past him into the courtroom, where hundreds of men lay naked on the bare floor with nothing but newspapers to keep off the flies. Even out here with the door shut, she could hear their whimpering cries.

  The surgeon did not turn around again. He checked the tourniquet, tightened it a little, made another attempt to tie the ligature, succeeded, picked up his instrument, judged the line his saw would take—it was a single-flap amputation—and got to work.

  But his strength was draining away, the nervous energy that had kept him going day after day when he had hardly paused for food, only sipping a little whiskey now and then, managing only a few hours of sleep, falling like a dead man on a horsehair settee in the judge’s private chamber, now cluttered with waiting coffins.

  He did not look at the woman, but knowing that she was there, he edged sideways to hide the back-and-forth movement of the tool in his hand. No doubt she could guess what was going on. She could see his right elbow driving back and forth and hear the brittle rasp of the saw. Any moment now she’d crumple to the floor and give birth.

  Still she uttered no sound. When the last shred of skin was cut through and the severed leg tossed into the basket, he left the task of dressing the stump to his steward and turned around to glower at the woman.

  She was deathly pale, but still standing. “Sir,” she said quickly, seizing the moment, “I’ve come to Gettysburg to find my husband. His name’s Seth Morgan. He’s a first lieutenant in the Second Massachusetts. No one seems to know where he is. I tried to find Colonel Mudge, but they told me he was killed at a place called Culp’s Hill.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the doctor, who had received some of the wounded from that criminally stupid attack. His grim look softened. “There must have been a muster after the battle,” he said kindly. “Do you know who took Colonel Mudge’s place? Surely someone will have a list.”

  The boy on the table whimpered, and the surgeon spoke testily to the steward, “Keep it up, keep it up.” Obediently the young man dripped more ether on the cloth over the soldier’s face.

  “Oh, yes, there was a list in the paper, the Philadelphia paper. I saw it, the casualties for the Twelfth Corps, and my husband was listed as missing. And I met a corporal in his company just now, but he hadn’t seen Seth since the fighting. I’m not sure, but I think that’s what he said. I believe the corporal wasn’t very well.”

  Drunk, guessed the surgeon. “Well, of course the roster of the wounded isn’t complete yet.” He looked at her doubtfully. “If your husband was wounded, you might find him in the hospital for the Twelfth Corps. You see, they sort them out by corps.”

  “Where?” she said quickly. “Tell me where to go.”

  For a moment he considered, looking at her silently. “Are you sure? Perhaps it would not be wise for a woman in your—”

  “Where is it? Tell me.” Then she had to stand aside because the next case was coming in, slung in a blanket between two young women.

  Carefully they rolled the new patient onto the table. It was a head wound this time. The boy’s face was flushed with fever. He was thrashing from side to side.

  With relief the surgeon dismissed the woman. “I believe the Twelfth Corps hospital is in a barn somewhere south of town.”

  She said something, probably “Thank you,” and he heard the swish of her skirt against the frame of the door.

  The poor woman is in for a shock, thought the surgeon, handing the can of ether to the steward. If her husband’s name was not on the muster roll of dead and wounded after the fracas at Culp’s Hill, and if he hadn’t been seen since the battle, most likely he was a deserter.

  The surgeon grimaced at Sally and Sarah. “Go on home, you two. William and I’ll get along first-rate.”

  Sally folded the blanket and shook her head. Sarah said softly, “Sir, I’m afraid there’s two more have died.”

  A TIDY LITTLE

  VILLAGE

  My, but the white went quickly. None of us had any white petticoats as it was all cut up for bandages.

  —NELLIE AUGINBAUGH, GETTYSBURG

  Second Massachusetts?” The officer was in a hurry. His tent was being dismantled. There was a thump, and one of the canvas walls collapsed. “Here, ma’am, we’d better step outside.” He took Ida by the elbow and led her out into the hay field, where the flattened grass was wet and and the harvest spoiled.

  “The hospital for the Twelfth Corps, it’s way south.” He pointed. “It’s Mr. Bushman’s property, a big barn, way down the Taneytown Road, and then you go east.” He gave Ida a sidelong glance. “In the morning maybe somebody’ll be going that way.”

  “I can walk,” said Ida. “Which way is the Taneytown Road?”

  “Well, this here’s Baltimore Street. You go south a little way and you come to a fork and you take the right fork, and then pretty soon there’s another fork and you go left. Then you go on about three-quarter mile, and there’s a track to the right. You turn there and pass the schoolhouse. It was a hospital, but not the one you want, missus, so you keep on and pretty soon there’s a turnoff and you go right again. From there it’s another mile or so, and after a while you’ll see Mr. George Bushman’s barn. That’s the one for the Twelfth Corps.”

  “The right fork,” repeated Ida. “Then left, then right and right again. Thank you.”

  “You’ll wait till morning, won’t you, missus? It’ll be dark soon and you shouldn’t be out there, not now, not all by yourself.” When Ida merely smiled and turned away, his conscience must have bothered him because he said, “You’re staying someplace, missus?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Ida.

  “Well, good night the
n, ma’am.”

  The Taneytown Road was just where he had said it would be. Ida walked quickly. There was still plenty of light, but she must hurry because by the time she reached the hospital the sky would be dark.

  She had no question about what she should do. Turning onto the Taneytown Road and tramping along in her sturdy boots, she felt no doubt at all. Ida was a tall, big-boned woman, and carrying the child seemed to have made her stronger. She felt well, rather than sickly like poor cousin Cornelia, back there in Philadelphia.

  But Ida blessed Cornelia’s lying-in. It was providential that Ida had taken the cars from Boston to be at her cousin’s side just at this time, because no sooner had Cornelia been brought to bed than the Philadelphia paper had come out with the terrifying news of the battle. If Ida had been at home in Concord when she saw Seth’s name among the missing, she might have despaired of making the long journey south to look for him. And her mother would never have let her go.

  But in Philadelphia she was her own woman. Ida had dropped the newspaper, pinned on her money belt, packed her valise, embraced Cornelia, kissed the baby and set off. Now, by hook or by crook, by horsecar and railroad and a coach from the town of Westminster, she had found her way to Gettysburg. She was here, calmly purposeful, serenely resolved to search anywhere and everywhere. She would find him, she knew she would, she was certain sure, because it was just a matter of not giving up.

  Stepping down from the coach and walking along the main street of Gettysburg, Ida had perceived at once that the entire town was a hospital. She had seen litters carried into the Express Office and a dead man carted off from the Eagle Hotel. Ambulances swayed along the main street, their horses pulling up at house doors. Ida had felt the urgency all around her. Men and women were hurrying up and down the street and in and out of dwellings—on desperate errands, guessed Ida. Even a boy driving a cow along the street looked careworn and harassed.

  Surely a missing man might be overlooked in this confusion, wounded perhaps and not yet recorded, his name not written down.

  Ida asked the first person she met, a woman in a blood-spattered apron, where she should begin to look, but the woman merely shook her head and walked rapidly away with her tray of rolled-up lint. When Ida saw the open door of a store with all its merchandise painted on the side—DRY GOODS, NOTIONS, CARPETS, OILCLOTHS, HARDWARE, IRON NAILS—she walked in. No dry goods or carpets were visible anywhere, only boxes and barrels stamped SANITARY COMISSION.

  From somewhere in the back came the shriek of nails being clawed up from the lids of boxes. Ida sought out the man with the crowbar and found him opening crates of clothing. She wondered if any of the shirts in the crates had been made by Concord women.

  “Please, sir,” said Ida, “I’m trying to find my husband. Can you tell me where I should look?”

  The man put down his crowbar and wiped his forehead. “Good heavens, ma’am, you look in a fair way to need a chair.” He swung one out from behind the counter and Ida politely sat down. “Well, there’s all these people’s houses you could look into, but my advice is, try the churches or maybe the courthouse first. Big places like that, they got a lot more.”

  “Thank you,” said Ida, smiling at him and rising from the chair. And so, following his pointing hand, she had begun with the courthouse.

  Now, walking south as she had been told to do, she looked left and right, curious about a village that only ten days ago must have been very much like her own. The town of Gettysburg was now a desperate resource in a time of crisis, a refuge for thousands of battle-wounded men. It was clear to Ida that all its citizens had dropped whatever they had been doing last June. Now in this terrible month of July they were helping out however they could with the wreckage left behind by a war that had moved on someplace else.

  She hurried on in the direction of the Taneytown Road, passing a flower bed that was now a butcher’s refuse dump of sawed-off arms and legs, and a tannery that was shut up tight and a newspaper office from which no cheerful clatter of presses rattled out into the road. Only at an open shed belonging to J. H. GARLACH, CARPENTER, was normal business going on, if the making of coffins could be called normal.

  Next door to Mr. Garlach, a wheelwright was hard at work mending the smashed wheel of a gun carriage. Down the road from his shop Ida could hear the clanging ring of a hammer, and soon she was walking past the dark cavern of a smithy, where the blacksmith was pounding a glowing iron tire on his forge.

  She walked on, looking for the fork in the road, then stood aside for a girl in a floury apron who was running into town with a basket of new-made bread. Ida couldn’t help exclaiming, “Oh, how good it smells!”

  “It’s my brick oven,” said the girl proudly. She stopped running, eager to talk. “I’ve been baking all day for a week, all the loaves I can pack in my oven at once. There were twenty-five barrels of flour in the shed when I started that first day. Now there’s only five, so Father cut the rest of the field today with his new reaping machine.”

  “Oh my,” said Ida, wanting to praise her. “A reaping machine! Think of that!”

  IDA ON THE

  BATTLEFIELD

  A crude sign was nailed to a tree:

  15REBS

  BURIED HERE

  But the worst thing were the dead horses. Ida was surprised by the length of their swollen carcasses stretched out like that on the ground. The smell was very bad. She took out a handkerchief—it was of her own making—and held it over her nose. A little way off, a boy was robbing an animal of its saddle. He seemed undaunted by the overpowering stench, but he was having a hard time with the girth because it had been strained to the breaking point by the bloating of the horse’s belly.

  Ida tramped on over the deeply rutted road, imagining the traffic that had come this way last week, the trains of ambulances going and coming, the ammunition wagons, the horse-drawn artillery and the marching men. She had to pick her way carefully among the ruts and ridges to avoid the litter of battle—a dead mule, a caisson on a smashed limber, rags of clothing, blankets sopping from the recent rain, rotting pieces of salt pork and spongy masses of hardtack.

  Her boots sank in where the mud was soft. But they were old and comfortable and her burdens were light, both the baby inside her and the valise in her hand. Ida strode along briskly, leaning a little backward. On the journey from Philadelphia her good dress had lost its crispness, but it swayed easily as she walked. Under the bulging skirt her money belt was comfortable, riding high under her bosom, keeping her banknotes safe.

  She began passing clusters of men in uniform, mostly in their shirtsleeves because the day had been warm. Some of them stared open-mouthed at the strange sight of a woman in a family way walking alone on the battlefield. One of them spoke to her kindly. “Missus, do you need help?”

  “No, but thank you,” said Ida. Sturdily she walked on and on. Beside the road at one place was a half-ruined farmhouse where more dead horses lay, strung up by their bridles to the fence rail. In the field below the farmhouse stood a magnificent Pennsylvania barn, and she couldn’t help wondering about the poor farmer whose crops had been trampled by the heedless ferocity of the two opposing armies. War, thought Ida, pitying him, was a cruel law unto itself, trumping the pitiful documents of righteous ownership, like the deed to their own Concord farm locked safely away in the bank on the Milldam.

  It occurred to her that she was walking over property lines, although she didn’t know the names of the owners. She didn’t know that one of the hills on the left side of the road belonged to a farmer named Culp, where the Twelfth Corps had been heavily engaged in a bloody two-day battle, where her husband Seth had survived the carnage of the attack across the swale on the morning of the third day. She was not aware that the ruined cottage with the dead horses had been the home of a widow Leister until it was preempted by General Meade himself, nor that the great barn below it lay in the middle of the battlefield. Turning into the lane that led past the schoolhouse, she saw a weathered
sign pointing to the outbuildings of another farm. Where was that poor farmer now?

  When the schoolhouse came in sight, Ida was surprised to see that it was not like the small wooden schools scattered around the town of Concord. This one was made of stone, and instead of boys and girls, a few men and women were carrying cots and bedding to a wagon drawn up on the road.

  One of the women had a basket of bloodstained sheets. As she set it down in the wagon, she looked up sharply.

  Ida nodded at her politely, thinking, Sanitary Commission. But she hurried her footsteps, not wanting to be stopped, quelling an impulse to tell the woman that she had helped raise money for the Sanitary at a First Parish fair. She had knitted countless mittens for the Concord Soldiers Aid Society. She had made fifteen pairs of drawers.

  “Pretty soon there’s a turnoff,” the officer had said. Yes, there it was, another narrow lane. But at once Ida had to move out of the way of a team pulling a heavily loaded wagon. Piled high on the wagon bed were crates of ducks and chickens, mounds of household things and a dozen pieces of furniture, including a chest of drawers with a mirror that gleamed with the last of the daylight. High above everything else, three children huddled on a mattress. A skep of bees wobbled in the back.

  The two plodding horses were driven by a woman hunched forward on the seat. Ida smiled at her, but the woman in the sunbonnet was too caught up in her own misery to smile in return. She did not glance at Ida as the wagon lumbered to the corner of the schoolhouse road, its wheels creaking, the children swaying left and right.

  Ida did not blame her. She knew how she would feel if their own farm had been blown to pieces, if their own peach and apple trees had been shattered by shot and shell, if she and Seth had been turned out to make way for a battle, along with their mothers, her younger brothers Eben and Josh and her little sisters Sally and Alice. Where on earth would they go with their high-piled wagon?