Chapter Forty-four

At the same time Bel rushed up the stairs, Louis descended to the busy street to smoke and watch the coaches of Washington pass in an endless procession. Situated down an alley off Ninth Street, the three-story inn had been converted a year into the war to accommodate the casualties streaming into the capital. The traffic surging past the hospital had the same cheerful speed as in all big cities, as if everyone had somewhere to get to soon. Louis was surprised by the distances in Washington, for he had expected tight, packed streets and found instead that the capital designers had planned for a future not yet realized, when more residences and offices would fill in the gaps between the Grecian government buildings. Undeterred by their expanding city, the residents of the capital bumped past in their many conveyances—wagons and coaches and even peddlers’ carts, pushed by barefoot boys whose voices were hoarse from shouting.

That afternoon, Louis unrolled the brown plug of tobacco a hemorrhaging soldier had given him before he died. His pard, the soldier explained, was a North Carolinian who had fought with the Yanks because his father and mother had both come from Massachusetts and he didn’t want to make war on his own blood. The finest tobacco in the world grew in the fields outside the North Carolinian’s house. The precious plug had been taken from the body of the fallen Southerner at Spotsylvania, had traveled to Cold Harbor, where its new owner was wounded, and then ridden back to the Washington hospital in his coat. When he died, he thrust it into the nurse’s hand, saying in a trembling voice that a fine smoke could keep a man alive in a bad time. The plug had two deep red blotches on it, the blood of the two friends held apart by a short, ropy distance. Louis tore the tobacco carefully around these marks, each day getting closer and closer.

He had seen so much blood since his enlistment, this was not squeamishness, but respect for those who had passed on. The dead were a strange lot, always coming back to a man when he thought he’d left them behind. If Louis had not heard that Laurence Lindsey was missing in the burning Wilderness, if he had not abandoned his own regiment to find the soldier’s body blistered in the shallow run, he might have joined the dead, for their way seemed easier than that of the living. They never had to fight again. They never had to hear a young man cry for mercy when a surgeon sawed off his leg.

Old Sawbones told Louis he was the best assistant he’d ever had, steady and quiet, but also gifted with an ability to make men want to live. He protected Louis from his captain, who had ordered him back, by saying that the injured arm was infected and needed more time to heal. He also taught Louis the names of the instruments: finger knife, scalpel, bistoury, and sharp-pointed tenotomb, the metal of each glistening in a small wooden case. The surgeon even let Louis help with the joint resections, a complicated surgery performed on soldiers who might heal without an amputation. You’re a quick study, Jean, Sawbones had said in his brisk way after they’d made an excision in a soldier’s knee. The soldier was weeping silently, staring away from their work. Louis had gripped his own healing arm and didn’t answer.

His lungs burned around the sweet smoke. An ebony carriage skimmed by, skirting a hog that had wandered into the street. People always emptied their slops into the gutters in Washington, and a whole community of swine supplied itself daily from the refuse. No one seemed to mind. The pair of girls in the carriage looked at him and giggled expectantly. Louis gave them a taut smile. He loved Isabel with the simplicity of a man who knows there is only one profession he is good at and cannot imagine a reason to steer away from that path. It was her imperfections that drew him to her—the red mark above her lip where the pigment extended like the paint dribble of a careless artist, her gawky feet, the weight of her wide jaw when he cupped her face in his hands. Even her grief drove him to a senseless passion, for in it he saw the woman she would become, the steady, intelligent wife and mother.

In contrast, the frivolity of the passersby irritated him. He didn’t understand how there could be people in this city, in any city of the world, not mourning for what he had seen. During three days of fighting outside Chancellorsville, he had nearly forgotten his own name, stumbling along with his company until his arm was nearly shot off and he joined the casualties in a bloodied clearing, waiting for the overtaxed ambulances to come. Only when he heard that Isabel’s cousin was missing did he feel like his life had a purpose again. The sergeant had been shot through the head, and his captain, sick with grief, lay against a pine tree, waiting for his wounded leg to be bandaged, telling the stories of his lost men over and over to anyone who would listen.

Leaving him, Louis had charged into the scorched wasteland, searching through men burned past recognition, rolling them back from the sooty earth. The tall, straight Laurence he had known for a brief half year was no longer alive, but in his place, a nearly lifeless figure with half a face curled in the ashy stream. Shadrach, survivor of the fire. On the bank just beyond him had lain another human form, so badly burned, it could have been a stone or a tree trunk softened by flame. Had someone saved Laurence Lindsey? Had someone died for him? Maybe. Or maybe it was just a story a father wanted to tell about his lost son, so he could keep believing that death was an injustice, especially for the young.

Louis tamped out his pipe on the brick wall of the hospital and turned to go back inside. He could hear the shouts of men upstairs clamoring for mealtime, their loud voices reaching the street. In one of the open windows, sparrows jostled for a place on the sill. It was Shadrach’s window. He was awake and asking his cousin for a mirror. He wanted to see himself.

*   *   *

She pretended she didn’t know what he was saying. “Your mother is fine,” she said. “Getting better every day.”

“Mirror,” he repeated.

“Are you hungry? I can get you some bread.”

“No.” He beat the sheet with his stumpy thumb.

“The window, then,” she said, and pulled it down, scaring the sparrows away. She rubbed the dirty streaks with her sleeve. “You can see your reflection there.”

She helped him twist his face toward the glass. It was late afternoon, clouds crossing the summer sun, intermittent and gray. His face shone ghostlike, a man on a passing train, the features blurred by shadow and speed. He leaned back, satisfied.

“Open again,” he commanded. The train lifted him through the gap between beds, rearing like an insect over a stone, but with a motion all its own, mechanical, clicking. The girl obeyed, struggling as the pane stuck. After a minute, a few sparrows returned, pecking at the sill.

As she bent back over him, a locket fell out from beneath her dress. The bird shape jogged an old memory, vague and incomplete. He recalled stealing it from deep in his father’s bureau as a young man, trying to give it to a runaway slave, a man wearing the face of fear and bravery. How many times had he seen that expression since? With the ignorance of boyhood, he taken out the note inside the locket, which said in his father’s script simply my heart and replaced it with one that said freedom. Something valuable to sell, he had thought then. Now it seemed cheap and ordinary.